Translated with DeepL from original article
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| Kants image of man was diametrically different from Schillers view |
Today it is easy to see where the convergence of legally sanctioned invasion of privacy and the massive expansion of surveillance technologies will lead! But what is the driving force behind this frightening, seemingly unstoppable development? It is ultimately the negative image of man that paradoxically represented the same Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, who also demanded the "exit from self-inflicted immaturity".
The Chinese social credit system
Each individual should ask himself which image of man he represents: good or bad from the ground up? The state forms itself accordingly! The Kantsche scenario is currently being "cemented": What is technically feasible is implemented today: In the future, all behaviour of individuals in their homes or outside can be recorded fully automatically by so-called "smart meters". The 5G technology already underway will dramatically reduce the size of radio cells so that RFID monitoring will also be possible, and the Internet of Things will really capture all immobile and moving objects. In this technocratic scenario, the human being is only a "resource", or rather a "disruptive factor", that has to be managed and optimized.
"So what?" asks the modern sleeping sheep, "I don't have anything to hide, do I? We live in a democracy with human rights, don't we?" Dream on! The "great dictator" is not a man! We are talking about the fully automatic Social Credit System (SC), as it was introduced in China last year. Anyone who behaves inappropriately (e.g. goes shopping by car instead of by bicycle or otherwise produces CO² unnecessarily) gets points deducted; anyone who obeys (visits his parents regularly, jets less often on holiday) is rewarded with points by the system. As a result, the Chinese are said to have been denied 17 million flights. Mobility is becoming more and more restricted. Quote Angela Merkel: "In 20 years you will only be allowed to drive independently with a special permit." In addition, of course, there is the cashless payment transaction, which logs all purchased and sold items, including place, time and transaction partner.
Between intelligent city management and total surveillance, it's just a click away.
"Anyone who dares to constantly complain about the grievances in the country in the social media gets points deducted. Wang speaks of the 'communist model citizen' that the Chinese leadership wants to create in this way. At the same time, it means 'total control'."Everything converges in a fully automated, seamless monitoring system of unprecedented global dimensions. Against this historically unique type of total surveillance à la Orwell 2.0, the Stasi state of the GDR was a children's birthday party. And in order to make this nightmare even more "competitive" and "dynamic", the planners have come up with further niceties, such as point deduction for contact or proximity to people with low scoring. That would even divide families and push the atomization of society to the extreme: everyone against everyone!
- Felix Lee: The AAA citizens
This development, however, is not a law of nature, but is based on a very specific image of man and state, as the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant sketched with frightening prophecy. For Kant, man is a beast "with an evil disposition", as he has put it in his draft of "Eternal Peace".
"01... Now the republican constitution 02 is the only one which is completely appropriate to the right of men to endow, 03 but also the most difficult one to endow, rather to preserve, so 04 that many claim that it must be a state of angels, because 05 men with their selfish inclinations would not be capable of a constitution of such 06 sublime form. But now nature comes to the revered, but 07 powerless general will, founded in reason, in practice, and that precisely through those selfish inclinations to 09 help, so that it is only a matter of a good organization of the state 10 (which, however, is in the capacity of men) to direct that state's forces against each other in such a way that one stops the others in their destructive effect 12, or cancels them: so that the success for reason turns out as if both were not there at all, and so man, if not immediately 14 a moral=good man, is forced to be nevertheless a good citizen 15. The problem of establishing a state, as hard as it sounds, is solvable even for a people of devils (if they only have reason) 17 and so it is: "A multitude of rational beings, who in total demand 18 general laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exclude themselves from them, to arrange and establish their constitution in such a way that, although they strive in their private minds against each other, 20 they still hold each other back in such a way that in their public conduct 22 success is the same as if they had no such evil minds 23."
- Kant: AA VIII, To eternal peace. a... page 366
Kant thus dreamed of a "hard" solution with an iron fist, by skillfully "playing off the forces against each other". In his wildest dreams, he would probably not have imagined how perfectly his vision is realized today. But does this image of man do justice to reality? Crime is a matter of definition, as is illness. The main cause of crime is not innate malice, but poverty. Poverty is one of the worst forms of violence. If inequality and poverty increase, crime will automatically increase.
The environment is quite simply defined as sick, as are people. In reality, there is neither a man-made climate change nor a resource problem. The availability of resources is solely a question of energy prices - and that is precisely what is artificially driven up, because in a monopolised economy profit is not generated by increased production and lower prices, but by artificial scarcity, which is hidden behind bans (see also the ban on hemp, the fastest growing, chemical-free fibre resource ever) and deliberate undesirable developments (wind power). A healthy, dynamic society, which cannot always develop new, more basic, cheaper resources, is doomed to stagnation and thus doom. In addition to quantitative-limited growth, there is qualitative-unlimited growth, which is revealed in a universal principle of higher development: Increased efficiency through compression. This includes all high technologies, such as micronisation and energy compression, but also efficient transport and accommodation technologies. The most comprehensive parameter that summarises all this, according to the universal scholar Lyndon LaRouche, is population density, or population density potential. Only a healthy, developing society has great potential. In its bestseller "The Limits to Growth" of 1972, which was translated many times and sold for millions at the time, the NATO think tank "Club of Rome" simply ignored this distinction between horizontal and vertical growth and on this basis drew up a horror scenario which at the same time was the starting shot for the "green movement" of high finance (no, the first Greens were not housewives who were worried about their children, on the contrary: at that time they were still proud if their son wanted to become a pilot or a rocket designer!)
No, man is not a "parasite" or "useless eater" (quote HRH Prince Philip), but good from the ground up, as the great German Friedrich von Schiller explained. On his way to becoming a mature, sovereign citizen, he naturally makes minor and major mistakes, but these can be overcome and corrected. Schiller taught the exact opposite of Kant, even though he is often lumped together with Kant as a "Enlightenment philosopher". He jokingly described narrow-minded formalists like Kant as "bread scholars" (cf. his Jeaner inaugural speech as a history professor, for which he earned standing ovations in a completely overcrowded lecture hall).
"Schiller's way of thinking always allows us to recognize the "philosophical head" who endeavors to "expand the field under study", who knows that "only the abstract mind ... has "made those limits" in science and its "noble impatience ... cannot rest until all his concepts have arranged themselves into a harmonious whole"; yes, he "smashes himself" his once erected building of ideas in order to "restore it more perfectly". At Schiller we always experience a thought process and are encouraged to think ahead ourselves.
Through a complicated and dry lecture, Kant gives the impression of a deep, all-embracing contemplation that always self-critically illuminates one's own knowledge. If you take a closer look, the deep judgments unfortunately all too often turn out to be untenable prejudices, and many of the profoundly complicated-sounding sentences become poor trifles when you finally realize what they are meant to be. A formalistic, sometimes pedantic move is typical of Kant's way of thinking. I must admit that when I read Kant I often feel uncomfortable, because my thinking is not stimulated, as it is with Schiller, but on the contrary is pressed, restricted and manipulated in thought patterns. The famous "Kant's antinomies" are an example of such manipulation, a chain of arguments that contradicts real truth-finding."
- Ralf Schauerhammer, New Solidarity 27/2003
According to Kant egoism is the driving force behind society, according to Schiller selfless parental love. Pessimism (ingratitude) or optimism (gratitude)? Half empty or half full? Every person feels - according to his own traumatisation by the parental home - involuntarily drawn to one of these diametrically opposed views.
Schiller's image of man
(Excerpt from "Something about the first human society after the guide of the Mosaic Document / Transition of People to Freedom and Humanity")
"At the leading band of instinct, to which the unreasonable animal still now leads it, Providence had to introduce man into life and, since his reason was still undeveloped, stand behind him like a watchful nurse. Hunger and thirst showed him the need for food, which he needed to satisfy, had put it in abundant supply around him, and by smell and taste it guided him in his choice. Through a gentle climate she had spared his nakedness and through a general peace around him she had secured his defenceless life. The genus was preserved by the sexual instinct. As a plant and an animal, man was therefore perfect. Even his reason had begun to unfold from afar. Because nature still thought, cared and acted for him, his powers could focus more easily and unhindered on the calm view, his reason, not yet distracted by any worry, could build undisturbed on its tool, language, and tune the delicate thought game. With the eye of a fortunate man he saw now still around in creation; his joyful mind grasped all appearances unselfishly and purely and laid them down pure and louder in a lively memory. So the beginning of man was gentle and laughing, and this had to be if he was to strengthen himself for the fight that was ahead of him.
If, then, we assume that Providence had stood still with him at this stage, man would have become the happiest and most witty animal - but he would never have stepped out of the guardianship of the natural instinct, his actions would never have become free and thus moral, he would never have gone beyond the limits of animality. In a voluptuous rest he would have lived an eternal childhood - and the circle in which he would have moved would have been the smallest possible, from desire to pleasure, from pleasure to rest and from rest to desire again.
But man was destined for something completely different, and the powers that lay within him called him to a completely different bliss. What nature had taken over for him during his cradle years, he was now to take over for himself as soon as he was of age. He himself should become the creator of his bliss, and only the share he would have in it should determine the degree of this bliss. He was to learn to seek out the state of innocence that he had now lost through his reason and return as a free rational spirit to what he had started out from as a plant and as a creature of instinct; From a paradise of ignorance and bondage he should, if it were also after late millennia, work his way up to a paradise of knowledge and freedom, one where he would obey the moral law in his chest just as unchangeably, when he had served instinct in the beginning, when plants and animals still serve it today. So what was inevitable? What would have to happen if he had to move towards this ambitious goal? As soon as his reason had only tested its first forces, nature expelled him from its caring arms, or more correctly said, he himself, irritated by an impulse which he himself did not yet know, and ignorant of what he was doing great at that moment, he himself tore off from the guiding bond, and with his still weak reason, accompanied only by instincts from afar, he threw himself into the wild game of life, he set off on the dangerous way to moral freedom. So if we transform that voice of God in Eden, which forbade him the tree of knowledge, into a voice of his instinct, which withdrew him from that tree, then his supposed disobedience against that divine commandment is nothing other than - a falling away from his instinct - thus the first expression of his self-activity, the first daring piece of his reason, the first beginning of his moral existence. This apostasy of man from instinct, which indeed brought moral evil into creation, but only in order to make moral good possible in it, is without contradiction the happiest and greatest event in human history, from this moment on his freedom is written, here the first distant foundation stone was laid for his morality..." (1)
Kant's image of man
Ralf Schauerhammer describes in his brilliant article the Kantian view of man as it is also represented by today's politicians 1:1, especially by the Green women: Man as an "animal too intelligent":
Kant divides the development into four steps, which man's reason makes, and assigns biblical passages to these steps. Why just four steps, and why these, he does not explain. In the first step, which reason goes beyond instinct, it extends the limits of food intake beyond instinct. For Kant this is not a liberation and qualitative change of man, but a thoroughly problematic thing, and immediately the abuse arises from this first use of reason.
"As long as the inexperienced man obeyed nature's call, he was good at it. Soon reason alone began to move and search. ... to extend his knowledge of food beyond the limits of instinct... But it is a characteristic of reason that it can artificialize desires with the aid of the power of imagination, not only without a natural instinct directed toward them, but even against them, which in the beginning receive the name of lechery, but through which, little by little, a whole swarm of dispensable, even unnatural inclinations, and the naming of opulence, is concocted.
If one sees it that way, one does not want to rejoice at all about the new freedom of reason, for it lies in the "quality of reason" that it immediately produces all possible "nature-adverse inclinations" from which the animal being is spared.
And so Kant, in his "Comment" on the Scriptures, explains the Fall of Man as well as Schiller as "the transition from the guardianship of nature to the state of freedom", but this "first step" was for Kant a "fall" and "a multitude of unknown evils of life the consequence of this fall". That's the just punishment for this case. Kant's reasoning: "So the history of nature begins with the good, because it is the work of God; the history of freedom from evil, because it is the work of man." Schiller alludes in his writing to this point of view in obvious irony, when he says that probably a "people's teacher" could speak of a "case" at this step, "but the philosopher" must "wish happiness to human nature for this important step to perfection".
"We meet a fundamental contradiction here. The one who wants a state in which a small oligarchy dominates the majority must assume that man is bad to justify oppressing the majority by laws and coercion (however subtle and "modern" he may be), while the representatives of a free state always proceed from the good man who can be improved and see their main task in educating as many fellow human beings as possible to responsible citizens.... The difference between Kant's and Schiller's way of thinking and conception of man [is] not a theoretical question, but a question of practical politics".
- R. Schauerhammer
"Man is evil by nature. He does good not out of inclination, but out of sympathy and honour."
- I. Kant: Reflections on Anthropology, 1425. AA XV, page 622, 9f
"Man is an animal that, when it lives among others of its kind, needs a Lord. For he certainly abuses his freedom in the sight of others like him; and whether he, as a rational creature, desires a law that limits the freedom of all, yet his selfish animal inclination, where he is allowed to exclude himself, seduces him.
- I. Kant: Idea for a general history in cosmopolitan intention, 1784. Sixth sentence
Kant's strength was not compassion or humanity, but categorization, which also did not stop at human races:
"Mankind is in its greatest perfection in the race of whites. The yellow Indians already have a lesser talent. The Negroes are far deeper, and the deepest are some of the American peoples. [...] The Negroes of Africa have no sense of nature that would rise above foolishness."
- Kant AA IX, Of the different breeds
The perfide strategy of the oligarchy is to deliberately allow the environment to deteriorate and prevent real solutions, in order to morally wear people down, to persuade them of their wickedness and inability! Ingenious solutions for plastic disposal in all the oceans of the world simply do not receive the support that they should logically receive in view of the anti-plastic campaign, although they are already mature and in use on a small scale. It would create an atmosphere of optimism and question the increasingly massive restrictions. The Green Movement is an art movement, recognizable by the fact that it ignores such initiatives and always demands only new conditions and restrictions. Right from the start, it was the spearhead of the shortage industry. Environmental protection tires in the eco dictatorship:
"We have recognized that a detachment of man from nature, from the whole of life to its destruction... leads. Only by reintegrating man into the natural whole can [man] be made to strengthen. This is the deepest meaning of the biological task of the present. It is no longer man alone that is at the centre of thought, but life as a whole, as it is revealed in all living beings on earth. No reasonable biologist will overlook the importance of everything that elevates man above other organisms. This striving for connection with life as a whole, indeed with nature in general, into which we were born, but that, as far as I can see, is the deepest meaning and the very essence of National Socialist thought.""Oh, pardon me! In the diary of the "green movement" we apparently turned back a few pages too far. The quote comes from the book "Biologischer Wille, Wege und Ziele biologischer Arbeit im neuen Reich" (Biological Will, Paths and Goals of Biological Work in the New Reich, 1934) by Ernst Lehmann, who saw the "task of biology" at that time as "forging new weapons for the elimination of the dangers of racial mixing". Representatives of the "green movement" of today could not have said it better. Rather, they would have omitted the reference to "what elevates man above other organisms"." (Taken from: "Sackgasse Ökostaat" / dead end eco-state)
The following quotation also gets an oppressive ambiguity in this context:
"A good development is only possible if we reduce the differences not only between the peoples, but also between man and nature. A peaceful future for mankind will only be secured if we also find peace with nature." (Helmut Kohl)Then - last but not least - there is also the "libertarian model" of a social order that thinks it can get by without a state. Irrespective of the fact that a state structure is in principle only an expression of a more highly developed "social organism", this model must also be measured by its image of man, because this was the basis of the form of government at all times (Kant/Schiller's opposition was also reflected, for example, in the rivalry between Sparta and Athens).
Ultimately, there is no way around the spiritual development of man!
"The political-ecological crisis of our time is a psycho-cosmological crisis. We are in truth cosmic beings and 'meant' by the cosmos."
- Jochen Kirchhoff
The negative image of man is getting in the way - who's surprised? - also in a negative cosmology! Already Oswald Spengler, in his monumental critique "The Decline of the West", explained the gradual emergence of the oppressive idea of the emptiness of the universe, which was still completely foreign to ancient peoples. The externally perceived emptiness, the "world as a peep-box" is an expression of a "Faustian feeling of emptiness" according to the correspondence world paradigm = image of man = image of God!
Hans Sedlmayr describes in his monumental work "The Lost Center" the steady decline of culture since the French Revolution, which is most evident in art and in painting. The middle stands for the sacred. According to the Christian shaman Black Elk (Black Deer), a simply locatable "center of the world" would at the same time be the origin, i.e. the seat of the Creator.
“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of usAlbert Einstein, who today - after 100 years - is still presented to the growing generation (completely wrongly!) as the "greatest genius of modern times", was asked about the most important philosophical question a human being could ask himself. His answer was: "Is the universe a friendly place?" He thus confirmed the above-mentioned connection between the conception of man and the conception of the world. And yes, even the ruling, dystopian cosmology - like the human image - is not "without alternative" either! There is a fully-fledged, physically perfectly logical model that is even compatible with ancient ideas of the "cosmic egg": the cellular cosmology.
- Black Elk, "The Sacred Pipe"
Beide Zeitgenossen waren große Geister. So what?
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