In the early summer of 1798 Emmanuel Kant decided to publish his lecture notes on metaphysics so that future scholars might use them. The Enlightenment was not without transparency—a matter easily forgotten in late post-modernity. It’s also often forgotten that Kant’s primary research topic was human nature.
For Kant, “virtue” was the point at which morality makes contact with human nature. Lately I’ve been (in my mind’s eye) viewing (daily) the Kantometer—like the barometer it measures pressures unseeable. Its point of departure is virtue as recognized above. There are other indices of course. They’re tiny gradients etched at the margins.
Morality meets the Aristotelian idea of the good, virtue index 12. A good score. Now a certain greasy American senator announces black people should go back where they came from and the Kantometer, measuring the virtue contact drops like the barometer in the Caine Mutiny.
Kant believed virtue and the pursuit of moral life are the duty of humankind.
The Kantometer is busy and mostly sinking.
**
I have tried to be a good man, though I fail, much as anyone must. The clouds come close, deer nest under the apple trees. I fancy vengeance as I want so much to consign all the meretricious bureaucrats to Hell. I ask Jesus to forgive me my lambent distress. I want to be good. I wish the love my animals show me to be merited. I want to be the kind of poet who builds houses for people.
**
I agree with Jurgen Habermas: “each murder is one too many.” I wander around grieving. There is so much death and its industries are fed by good and bad citizens alike. This is why terrorists hate the nation states. Try and locate the moral centers of the United States or France. Refugees stream across uncivil borders desperate for food and medicine and they’re met with realpolitik. Neither Vladimir Putin or Trump wants to save the children of this thirty years war. As I write, the half starved deer are nosing among the daffodils in my yard. I see them as children.
**
How to be good? “Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself” (Ludwig Wittgenstein) I think, “even Jesus went to Hell, and he came back, stronger.” We’re here to endeavor for strength. Such proud words. I fail and often. Old Ludwig Wittgenstein often sounded like my Finnish grandmother: “we’re not put here to have a good time.”
I’m the electrolysis of good—you too. That’s how we’re wired. God grant me more volts.
Planet of the Blind 