Kant did not drink enough

Doom: I am here.

Mu: Good. I tell you something. Last night I read that Kant believed that there is a thing-in-itself which includes the ‘I’ that could not be known because reason could not reach it. I felt that something was really wrong with Kant. It does not make sense to me.

Doom: Oh, really.

Mu: You bet. Think about this. If the ‘I’ is a point of reference, then there is actually nothing to be reached by reason. Points of references are not knowable but experienced. Do you understand?

Doom: No

Mu: Let me give you an example. Imaging that I am walking on the woods on a beautiful afternoon. Tell me, where is the walking happening? Of course in the woods. Where is the woods happening? Of course, in the country. Now, where is the ‘I’ that experience the walking happening? In the mind? Where is the mind happening? In the brain. If so, then the mind depends of a physical vehicle; it is an action of the brain and -oh terrible- Kant was totally wrong- it is not in another unreachable world. The ‘I’, a transcendental subject, is no more than one of the many behaviors of the brain in the world.

Doom: So what?

Mu: Then there is no really a phenomena and noumena world. It is just a darn language game. It means that after Kant’s ‘critique of pure reason’ he had nothing else to say. Kant was swimming on his own culture damnation and we are left facing a life of faith.

Doom: Why do you care?

Mu: I think Kant’s major contribution is the view that experience gives content to knowledge and reason completes knowledge with its form. The rest is junk.

Doom: Do you mean no ethics, no esthetics?

Mu: I mean it. Ethics must be junk because we live always considering the consequences of our acts –not duty or sin. There is not duty but the one that we imposed on ourselves, there is no sin but the one what we allow Religions to impose on us. Likewise, Kant’s esthetics is lost because beauty seems to be culturally determined. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Doom: Are you laughing now?

Mu: No. It is just that I have the thought that Kant was already too old when he moved into ethics and esthetics. I think that because he did not have a wife and was going alzhemic his later philosophy was too loose and probably wrong. Pure junk after ‘pure reason.’

Doom: A life without a wife is tough in the frontier with Russia, specially when vodka is not available. Give another drink.