Kant Licker!
On Aug 7, 4:27=A0am, Just Me <jpd...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Aug 6, 4:41 pm, "Don Phillipson" <e...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > "The Other" <ot...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
>
> >news:lytzdyme9h.fsf@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> > > Nuremberg was a classic case of victor's justice. =A0. . .
>
> Nothing like a good ol' pedagogical hairball like that to be brought
> up again for a vote, as another of those unquestioned truisms that
> come to be regarded, around academe, or in the dark, smoky haunts of
> wi-fi hotspots nearby, with all the honor, authority, and pedantic
> patina of a Euclidean theorem.
>
> > > I don't know the details, but as I understand it, many of the
"crimes=
"
> > > were no such thing. =A0There was no treaty specifying "crimes
against
> > > humanity," whatever that means. =A0The principle of "nullum crimen,
> > > nulla poena sine lege" was totally thrown out.
>
> As well it should have been, for very good and just reasons which, in
> view of the increasing vapidity of this thread will hardly be intuited
> in a million years.
>
> And why? Why, oh, why, but WHY should this be?
>
> Heh. Because intellectual/epistemological realism is like SIN to a
> liberal idealist or "progressive", and besides which, the last half-
> ass decent Spencerian social Darwinist is dead (or so they say) a long
> time ago, of some Call of the Wild, like a morphine overdose in the
> Valley of the Moon.
>
> > Nuremburg officlals went to great lengths to explain themselves,
> > foreseeing criticism later. =A0 I doubt if they foresaw our
generation'=
s
> > readiness to dismiss their reasoning without reading it first.
>
> But, as anyone who's ever read, and half-ass understood the 'moral
> rationalism' derived of Kant's second critique, DAMNED WELL knows, you
> can't get at anything like a fully justifiable moral law by arguing,
> legislating or ruling from merely contingent empirical (historical,
> political) anecdotal content of precedents, dictates and decrees as
> from the common law; not when for the case in point, there is no
> precedent, no known form of law to contain such a content.
>
> So the second poster is correct (but for the wrong reason) to say that
> no such "crimes" existed, which, in his terms IS to say there was no
> "crime"--as if the mere word "crime" were adequate to describe the
> offence, not just of "genocide", as if the Holocaust could be
> relegated to some such sub-class of horrors in world events,
> but =A0. . .
>
> No! There are no other like *contents* of empirical precedent or
> rulings that would serve to fill such a form of that which had leapt,
> fully formed from the grinning maw of a silver Death's Head on the
> brow of Hitler's Third Reich. This was unlike anything to have come
> from ancient savage societies of the earth, because it did not come
> out of anything so primitive, but from one of the most civilized
> societies known to the history of mankind..
>
> It is therefore understood a priori without reference to any empirical
> data of this crime or the other, that what Hitler did went far beyond
> "crime" to WAR: to war, which is the absence of crime because it is
> the absence of law, of order, of morality or justice. The very term
> "war crime" is for this reason an oxymoron. Crime can occur only in a
> context of law; and war can occur only when all law being trampled,
> run over, right on past its worldly, national borders. Crime? What's
> that? This is WAR . . .
>
> Thus it would seem that once again, the second poster (actually the
> third, not counting "Just Me" who never counts, as only stands to
> reason, else why would he be called "Just Me"?) is not far off the
> beam to cough up said hairball about "victor's justice"--if only, once
> again, for entirely the wrong reasons . . .
>
> War is a condition which falls entirely under that category defined by
> Kant (whether he would like it or not) as FREEDOM. And freedom as he
> defines it is that 'faculty' as formerly translated, but 'power' more
> recently, in the latest Werner Pluhar translation; freedom is that
> POWER which is never contingent or dependent (as the Buddhist puts it)
> upon 'phenomenal' (karmic) laws of cause-effect.
>
> Simply put, war is not just anti-legal, it is extra-legal, it
> transcends all law. And war is the evil brother of Kant's Moral Law
> which according to the philosopher is not just law as man in his
> miserable, object oriented, pleasure/pain motivated, self-interested,
> merely contingent way can write it--rather! It is law that is revealed
> by its form, and totally not its petty content. And once its form is
> understood, in all the grand universality of its categorical majesty,
> only then may all the various contents be recognized the more surely,
> and perfectly for either good or evil.
>
> Surprisingly, if not counter-intuitively, for Kant, it is not because
> man is essentially free that he is able to intuit the Moral Law, but
> quite to the reverse: the Moral Law, like the laws of Nature existed
> before there was a human content to fill it with every virtue and
> abomination--but how the Hell is that?
>
> Simple. =A0Because the moral law and the natural law both have a common
> mother namely, Reason or which is the same, rationality, sense, order,
> hierarchy of category, species/genus/family/class,the Law of
> Noncontradiction--then, as the first born daughter of the moral law IS
> Freedom, this must be case, he argues, because (now dig it very
> closely) if freedom were not predicated of the Moral Law, there would
> be no necessity in a Moral Law, for wouldn't it seem that it is man's
> freedom which makes the moral law necessary?
>
> No. That's the cart before the horse. Since man is free to break the
> moral law, this can only be the case, says Kant, because it is in the
> nature of the Moral Law, to leave that option open to man--it would be
> immoral of the law to do otherwise; it would be petty, weak, tyranny.
> That terrible fruit in the Garden of Paradise, will have its tree
> growing there.
>
> Kant holds that it is a mistake to think that freedom stands in the
> order of things prior to the moral law, because if this were so, the
> Moral Law being merely contingent upon man's freedom to invent it,
> could never be moral or lawful in any perfectly just sense of the
> term. Man, in all his ingenuity and elegance of civility invents the
> Nuremberg Laws of 1935, not the Moral Law of which Kant metaphysically
> dreams.
>
> To say that freedom exists within the moral law as part of its essence
> is correct: freedom may be and is deduced from the Moral Law--that IS
> the correct conception. =A0Freedom is predicated of the Moral Law,
> engendered of it, meaning that it is not born of the Natural
> "phenomenal" order of things (which in many cases is disorder,
> entropy, chaos, anarchy) but of the pure, noumenal, unknowable reality
> behind nature.
>
> The truth of what stands behind reality, the reality which provides
> that a universe shall exist, is a rationality that is prior to all
> experience, all sense perception, all empirical data and method.
> There is reason behind reality, a perfectly ordered power of logic, of
> law which is reflected in the faculty of reason, as to a far lesser
> degree, in the laws of nature.
>
> What is good and evil is not relative, not contingent, but absolute,
> rational and lawful no different than E=3DMC*2; no different than it
> might be said that the universe could not have come into being by the
> wrong, by the defective, by the badly ordered, by the negligent, by
> the insufficient, by the lawless working of reality. We can only know
> nature by her laws. And we can only marvel at so much as we don't
> know, not knowing the laws.
>
> All the things that man's conscience prods him to know for what's
> right versus wrong, in slavish desires, greed, self-love, sloth,
> infidelity, abuse of freedom; all these things are shown for what they
> are in light of what reality really is, as what we do is done under
> illumination of reality, the Laws of Reason. Thus, all our actions are
> played out as shadows on the wall of Plato's allegorical cave, as that
> is the form of what we do projected there by the light of what is
> right, what is real and not unreasonable, thence we see our actions as
> of either grace or absurdity; simply, clearly by the cast of Reason's
> light.
>
> And this is that which both Aristotle and St. John called the *logos*.
>
> Of course justice falls to the victor! The third poster is right, or
> i.e., the pedagogical hairball is right. And what stands to be derived
> from it is also right, that there really had been no need of any
> Nuremberg Trials, because the Victor was free to be victorious,
> entirely at liberty he was, being freed by the dogs of war, by Hitler
> and Goering, to take Goering, Hess, Speer and all the rest, directly
> out to the gallows and hang them without trial, as the final coup de
> grace of the War; this they should have been perfectly free to do in
> full expression of their freedom, their victory.
>
> However, it was also within the discretion of the Victor's freedom to
> decide for holding a trial, that these monstrous fools might be put
> properly on display, might be brow-beaten, held to scorn, and by the
> way, given a properly just op****tunity to defend themselves, or repent
> of the evil they had done, to repent all the more of the freedom their
> choice for evil had granted also as freedom to the victor. =A0And that
> was done, even to the extent that some cases were dismissed, some
> delivered to a punishment less severe than was meted out to others--
> that was all within the power of freedom, indeed of Justice, that
> their defeat had conferred upon their victors.
>
> The laws that derive of the Judgments at Nuremberg are so imperfect as
> any other law that is drafted under the highly flawed instrument of
> the human hand. But in the end, it doesn't really matter a damn,
> because law has nothing to do with war, as war has nothing to do with
> law; and war crimes trials have nothing to do with crimes or trials,
> but only with war and nothing more; ceremonials celebrated at the end
> of war, as the last battles of the war . . . Victor's Justice.
>
> And Hoo-****ing-A-Ray!
> --
> JMhttp://whosenose.blogspot.comhttp://jesu***egesis.blogspot.com
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