Finished the Kant bio.
I'm not even sure that I understand half of what I've just read about Kant. But it sounds like he was an amazing man, and according to Ross, he was the watershed of modern philosophy.
To be honest, I was never studious enough at university to come to understand Kant much better than the way other people discussed him. I never really had anything against him, except that his morals seemed to possess a fair amount of rigidity and inflexibility. Yet I didn't like utilitarianism any better. The only thing that made me 'hostile' to Kant during my Masters thesis was that it seemed to me that he typified something that I was desperately rebelling against. His dualism between the empirical and the transcendental created a hopeless dualism between principle and practice. It made principle irrational and practice cynical, and ultimately had no firm foundation for its base that was not simply circular. But my only meta-theoretical motive had been that I didn't want to be a hypocrite, and now on this website I have finally found the ethics that I can support with integrity, which properly reconciles both egoism and altruism. During my Masters thesis, I thought this ethics might have existed in Ayn Rand. But upon completing her book The Virtue of Selfishness, it had become obvious why she could not represent the end of my journey--my reasons for rejecting Objectivism are, in that respect, probably no better than those of anyone else. I continued to struggle by myself. During my Masters thesis, this involved challenging any sharp distinction between sociological and anthropological studies and abstract theorising about ethics.
When I left philosophy, I was content in the knowledge that I could integrally practise the social mores that really did exist outside the ivory tower. Back then, I called it "commonsense viable morality". This led me to believe that any further philosophical investigations were just so much rubbish, and if I were no longer to get academic kudos for them, then they simply served no purpose, and I stayed away happily for eight years.
Indeed, the only reason that I have returned to philosophy now is purely something that I was told in my last performance review at work. On the one hand, they congratulated me on the tremendous job that I had done in the past six months. On the other hand, they said that from what they had observed of my skillset, I was a good programmer, but that I would never be a brilliant programmer. On the other hand again, they had identified analysis as an area where I really shine, and that was what they wanted to hone in on for my future career direction.
That changed everything. Before this, I had been studying Linux in my spare time, in the interests of working more with Linux over time, because as a programmer, Linux gave me much greater control over what I did. Now to be told that I could never really shine as a programmer negated the very ambition of which my very pursuit of Linux had been an expression. But at the same time, it opened another door, for what was I doing all those years studying philosophy if it was not analysis? If so, then surely those were the most encouraging words to pursue this subject that I could have had. I am not convinced that anything would be different for me if I were to return to academia now, because at that time I simply did not have the mentality to survive happily in academic culture. But nothing can stop me from conducting philosophy as a hobby in my spare time, especially now that I live so close to the library of my old university and there are so many philosophical resources online.
The first thing that I decided to develop once I came back online was my theory of commensurability. That was what had been recognised as a contribution in my Masters thesis, so it seemed like the logical point of departure. Anyway, it didn't take me long before I gravitated back towards the original work that I had been conducting at university, towards an empirical theory of ethics. I didn't have any intrinsic interest in creating an empirical theory of ethics beyond simpy avoiding being a hypocrite. And now that I have found this Friesian ethics, it seems that I don't need my empirical ethical project anymore--my meta-theoretical expectations have been satisfied by the Friesian ethics as it is stated on this website. My goal now is to learn as much as I can about the Friesian school, ultimately with an eye to contributing to it. If I should happen to decide that it actually has solved all the relevant problems of philosophy to my satisfaction, however, then I can give up philosophy a second time. Perhaps then I shall finally turn to literature, as a vehicle for the philosophy that this website will have been teaching me.
To be honest, I was never studious enough at university to come to understand Kant much better than the way other people discussed him. I never really had anything against him, except that his morals seemed to possess a fair amount of rigidity and inflexibility. Yet I didn't like utilitarianism any better. The only thing that made me 'hostile' to Kant during my Masters thesis was that it seemed to me that he typified something that I was desperately rebelling against. His dualism between the empirical and the transcendental created a hopeless dualism between principle and practice. It made principle irrational and practice cynical, and ultimately had no firm foundation for its base that was not simply circular. But my only meta-theoretical motive had been that I didn't want to be a hypocrite, and now on this website I have finally found the ethics that I can support with integrity, which properly reconciles both egoism and altruism. During my Masters thesis, I thought this ethics might have existed in Ayn Rand. But upon completing her book The Virtue of Selfishness, it had become obvious why she could not represent the end of my journey--my reasons for rejecting Objectivism are, in that respect, probably no better than those of anyone else. I continued to struggle by myself. During my Masters thesis, this involved challenging any sharp distinction between sociological and anthropological studies and abstract theorising about ethics.
When I left philosophy, I was content in the knowledge that I could integrally practise the social mores that really did exist outside the ivory tower. Back then, I called it "commonsense viable morality". This led me to believe that any further philosophical investigations were just so much rubbish, and if I were no longer to get academic kudos for them, then they simply served no purpose, and I stayed away happily for eight years.
Indeed, the only reason that I have returned to philosophy now is purely something that I was told in my last performance review at work. On the one hand, they congratulated me on the tremendous job that I had done in the past six months. On the other hand, they said that from what they had observed of my skillset, I was a good programmer, but that I would never be a brilliant programmer. On the other hand again, they had identified analysis as an area where I really shine, and that was what they wanted to hone in on for my future career direction.
That changed everything. Before this, I had been studying Linux in my spare time, in the interests of working more with Linux over time, because as a programmer, Linux gave me much greater control over what I did. Now to be told that I could never really shine as a programmer negated the very ambition of which my very pursuit of Linux had been an expression. But at the same time, it opened another door, for what was I doing all those years studying philosophy if it was not analysis? If so, then surely those were the most encouraging words to pursue this subject that I could have had. I am not convinced that anything would be different for me if I were to return to academia now, because at that time I simply did not have the mentality to survive happily in academic culture. But nothing can stop me from conducting philosophy as a hobby in my spare time, especially now that I live so close to the library of my old university and there are so many philosophical resources online.
The first thing that I decided to develop once I came back online was my theory of commensurability. That was what had been recognised as a contribution in my Masters thesis, so it seemed like the logical point of departure. Anyway, it didn't take me long before I gravitated back towards the original work that I had been conducting at university, towards an empirical theory of ethics. I didn't have any intrinsic interest in creating an empirical theory of ethics beyond simpy avoiding being a hypocrite. And now that I have found this Friesian ethics, it seems that I don't need my empirical ethical project anymore--my meta-theoretical expectations have been satisfied by the Friesian ethics as it is stated on this website. My goal now is to learn as much as I can about the Friesian school, ultimately with an eye to contributing to it. If I should happen to decide that it actually has solved all the relevant problems of philosophy to my satisfaction, however, then I can give up philosophy a second time. Perhaps then I shall finally turn to literature, as a vehicle for the philosophy that this website will have been teaching me.
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