Kantian duty

I'm teaching a course on Kant this semester, so I have been thinking about him more than I usually do. Kant never spoke to me. In college, my brilliant friend Anne Richardson wrote a seminar paper on Kant, embodying in it all of the grace and elegance of her own intellect. But I didn't get it. I'm too romantic. Also not Christian enough. Plus, no doubt, too immature, too impatient. Still, my own significant shortcomings not withstanding, I think there is something that even a better version of me could reject, in Kant. There's beauty there, at least, which there really isn't with the utilitarians. In Mill, the son I mean, there is kindness, I think, and a certain sort of forbearance that I associate with wisdom. But not beauty, not really. So Kant gets points for that. And it's not that I mind that the beauty is austere -- it is a little with Plato, too, and I like Plato a lot. But even so it rubs me the wrong way. I think I dislike the whole idea of duty. I don't mind the idea of an experienced moral compulsion. But the Kantian stance seems to just be about enforced control, all the way down. Plato's all about moderation, to be sure, but moderation isn't about following rules. Let alone following rules as a way of escaping the many and well-known limitations of ego. Moderation is about actually *being* well-ordered. I admit that I'm not. But still, Plato's image of it appeals. Kant's just seems like undertaking, as an adult, to have been raised by repressed Protestants. No offense. I think that what I dislike most about duty as an organizing principle is that, for me, it makes the actions one takes in its name seem false. I don't like it when people act out of duty toward me. It makes me think that they don't mean it. I don't know why it feels different than someone acting just ... as the Good requires -- why that doesn't feel so fake. Anyway I am trying to put my finger on it, why Kant doesn't appeal.

Immortality again

Crowley and I had an exchange about eternity and infinity, which then made it on to *his* blog. I told him that for me the sense of infinity, when I have it, doesn't open out onto immortality. No defeat of death; only a kind of undistilled eros in the present. When I think of the times that I have felt it, a sentence from Simone Weil always comes to mind: "If we apply to the present that point of desire within us which corresponds to finality, it pierces right through to the eternal."

Immortality

Back after a 6-month hiatus.

For Christmas, I took a long, long train ride. Even though I haven't cared for him in the past, I bought and read on the ride Immortality, by Milan Kundera. I was surprised to find that I liked it, much more than I thought I would.

It reminds me of that drawing thing we had when we were kids - a "Spirograph" - you made the thing into which you inserted your pen go around and around, and it ended up making a whole intact pattern in the end. I thought that this was kind of like that. It should have been all self-conscious and affected, but for some reason it wasn't. I thought he managed to write a "post-modern" novel that still felt like a novel. You stay in the same place, but somehow it gets all filled in.

I can't get over it, as I have always in the past been vaguely irritated by M.K. Apparently my tastes have changed. I'm not sure if it's a good thing. Thus I will say only that I liked it, not that it was good. I'm curious to hear what others think.