"The moral law is in me." The moral law is within us
“Two things always fill the soul with new and stronger surprise and reverence, the more often and longer we think about them - this is the starry sky above me and the moral law in me” (Kant I. Soch. in 6 vols. Ch. 1 M ., 1965. S. 439-500). Explain what I. Kant meant? In what way, according to I. Kant, is the abyss between man and the world manifested? Formulate the moral imperative of Kant.
In this well-known, rather poetic-sounding statement: “Two things always fill the soul with new and stronger surprise and reverence, the more often and longer we think about them, this is the starry sky above me and the moral law in me” (Kant I. Soch In 6 vols. V. 4. 4.1. M., 1965. S. 439-500), I. Kant expressed the gap between man, the human world and nature, which cannot be overcome with the help of philosophy.
Kant abandoned the naive identity of being and thinking, he saw the abyss that lies between man and the world, he realized the tragedy of attempts to overcome it. Confidence in the ability of philosophy to find the general laws of nature and thinking for Kant and his later followers is only a manifestation of the incomprehensible ability of a person to wishful thinking, to mythologize his life world.
In Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, these words reveal the essence and purpose of his entire philosophy. “Both that and the other, (the starry sky above me and the moral law in me), I do not need to look for, and only assume as something shrouded in darkness or lying outside my horizons; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence.
The first begins with the place that I occupy in the external sensible world, and extends to the boundless distance the connection in which I am with worlds above worlds and systems of systems, in the boundless time of their periodic movement, their beginning and duration.
The second begins with my invisible self, with my personality, and represents me in a world that is truly infinite ... ".
Understanding the foundations and essence, moral rules, Kant considered one of the most important tasks of philosophy. According to Kant, a person acts necessarily in one respect and freely in another: as a phenomenon among other phenomena of nature, a person is subject to necessity, and as a moral being, he belongs to the world of intelligible things - noumena. And as such, he is free. As a moral being, man is subject only to moral duty.
Kant formulates moral duty in the form of a moral law, or a moral categorical imperative. This law requires that each person act in such a way that the rule of his personal conduct may become the rule of conduct for all.
If a person is attracted to actions that coincide with the dictates of the moral law by a sensual inclination, then such behavior, Kant believes, cannot be called moral. An action will be moral only if it is done out of respect for the moral law. The core of morality is "good will", which expresses actions performed only in the name of moral duty, and not for some other purposes (for example, because of fear or to look good in the eyes of other people, for selfish purposes, for example, profit etc.). Therefore, the Kantian ethics of moral duty opposed utilitarian ethical concepts, as well as religious and theological ethical teachings.
The amount of suffering that falls to us directly depends on how moral we are. Morality is the formula for happiness and survival. The less morality, the more disgusting life. People have come up with many rules to help draw the line between good and evil. But no one has managed to do this better than Kant in his famous imperative, which allows you to accurately weigh any actions on the scales of morality. It sounds like this: "A person is an end in himself and should not be a means."
To put it more clearly, this means: a person is above any concepts, ideologies, states; its purpose is unknown to anyone; no one has the right to use it; only that to which he voluntarily consents is moral; all coercion is immoral; retribution - suffering, destruction, enmity. And nowhere is this more evident than in love and intimacy. We can only ask and offer. Allowing ourselves to be manipulated, blackmailed, pressured, we become immoral. Which means they are doomed to pay. But the saddest thing is that with the help of immoral methods, we never get to that bright tomorrow, for the sake of which we go to all serious troubles. As Kant said: “Means deform the end.” That's the way the world works. Proximity, love, harmony, the bliss of mutual understanding... - all the highest and cherished things in life are given only in pure hands.
In the Kantian doctrine of morality, one should distinguish between "maxims" and "law". The first mean the subjective principles of the will of a given individual, and the law is an expression of universal validity, the principle of will, which is valid for each individual. Therefore, Kant calls such a law an imperative, that is, a rule that is characterized by an obligation, expressing the obligation of an action. Kant divides imperatives into hypothetical ones, the fulfillment of which is associated with the presence of certain conditions, and categorical ones, which are obligatory under all conditions. As for morality, it should have only one categorical imperative as its highest law.
Kant considered it necessary to study in detail the totality of man's moral duties. In the first place, he puts the duty of a person to take care of the preservation of his life and, accordingly, health. To vices he refers suicide, drunkenness, gluttony. Further, he names the virtues of truthfulness, honesty, sincerity, conscientiousness, self-esteem, which he contrasted with the vices of lies and servility. Kant attached great importance to conscience as a "moral judgment seat". Kant considered the two main duties of people in relation to each other to be love and respect. He interpreted love as goodwill, defining "as pleasure from the happiness of others." He understood sympathy as compassion for other people in their misfortunes and as sharing their joys. Kant condemned all the vices in which misanthropy is expressed: malevolence, ingratitude, malevolence. He considered philanthropy to be the main virtue.
Quite recently, but for me - it was at the end of the last century - I often met
with school teachers, our, still Sverdlovsk region. But not like a schoolboy
but in the unusual status of a teacher of teachers. In those days, as well as now,
university teachers lectured to teachers - but in this impulse there was no
no system, no deep content.
The teachers were more frightened by their learning than helped in the decisions of his daily
and therefore eternal thoughts.
The first thing I want to talk about is the impression of the first meetings with teachers.
And that first impression has always stayed with me forever.
I remembered the faces of the teachers, tired, thoughtful, beautiful.
But the most important thing, which I remember, was the striking difference in the appearance, character of faces,
teachers, for example, from our regional metropolis and from distant provinces
- settlements lost in the taiga and in the snows on the northwestern outskirts of our
huge area.
City teachers, or rather, teachers, were no different from others.
tired women of the many-sided metropolis: employees, clerks, managers, etc.
And the teachers from distant schools were bright-faced. In their form and speech
another tradition was guessed, the roots of which were lost in the families of the exiles
raznochintsev, students, Decembrists, nobles from the northwestern regions of Russia.
The second event, which belongs to the same time and also remains
in my memory and even somehow changed my life.
If you go north from Yekaterinburg along the Serov road,
then you will pass the city of Verkhnyaya Pyshma, and leave it to the right of the road
local school, which at that time was "German",
that is, with persistent study of the German language.
And this circumstance explained the appearance on the wall in the central
hall of the school of sayings of the famous Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant;
“Two things blow my mind:
starry sky above and
the moral law is within us."
These words were written in large Gothic type in German,
but I recognized them because the efforts of my school teacher
Seraphim Grigorievna Poddiapolskaya did not pass without a trace.
It so happened that the German participation in the life, work and life of such distant
from the front line, a city like ours became more noticeable in the post-war years:
prisoners of war built houses and roads, and later even showed up
distant (and what else could we have?!) relatives of Immanuel Kant.
Finally, after the creation of the Kaliningrad region, the philosopher, although one and a half
centuries after his death, he ended up in the same country with us.
"... the starry sky above your head ..."
Residents of big cities do not see either the stars or the starry sky and
this is nevand day and night It didn't start yesterday and it won't end tomorrow.
We are deprived of the starry sky, we have lost the desire and opportunity
navigate by the stars throughout your life, an era has passed
great geographical discoveries, the character and psychology of
inhabitants of maritime empires - Spain and Portugal, and Great Britain
lost its greatness and the Sun, which never set over the great Empire,
now hiding after a modest flight through the sky.
Above us, the "starry sky above our heads" no longer extends,
the heavenly essence of human life disappeared, and we on earth became completely earthly.
But this is only an appearance. Another profound truth of our connection with the stars has been revealed.
It turns out that we are all living and animated stellar matter,
we consist of substance, substance, of atoms born in the depths of stars.
Such a high origin obliges us to a lot.
".. the starry sky above your head" ...
and stellar matter within us...
But the philosopher was not talking about physical-chemical, material relationship
man and stars, but oh
.... "the moral law within us"...
The essence of the problem lies in the fact that our Earth is “beautiful and maybe
lonely among the shining stars and planets .. to realize that neither in the solar system,
nor, perhaps, in the Galaxy there are no habitable celestial systems,
and life on Earth is a unique event in the Universe.
And this "loneliness of the inhabited Earth" gives extraordinary significance
and the responsibility of the life and thought of each individual.
And the engine of thought and feeling in the universe is the moral law within us.
Amazing sense of uniqueness and universal scale of life
on Earth it exists in the poems and destinies of Russian poets - Mikhail Lomonosov,
Gabriel Derzhavin, Velimir Khlebnikov, Ksenia Nekrasova.
And in the words and thoughts of Immanuel Kant, our "countryman" from Kaliningrad.
P.S. Still, it's good to go to school from time to time...
“Nothing captivates me so much as the starry sky above my head and the moral law in me,” said the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
At the same time, he not only admired the starry sky, but also made such a great contribution to his research that only the well-known hypothesis of Copernicus can be compared with him. This refers to Kant's development of the so-called nebular hypothesis about the formation of the planets of the solar system from a gas-dust nebula. In many ways, this hypothesis even surpassed the Copernican idea in significance, since it introduced the idea of development into cosmogony, while Copernicus did not go beyond the old mechanistic view of the universe.
After the nebular hypothesis, it would seem that nothing prevented the spread of this idea - the idea of development, formation, transformation of one form into another - to all other natural phenomena. After all, even if such, at first glance, "eternal" things as the Earth and planets are the product of evolution, that is, a gradual formation from some other forms, then what can we say about everything that is on Earth - living and inanimate.
But, oddly enough, the idea of development, not only, if in this case one can afford a pun, was not developed in other sciences, but Kant himself lost interest in the "starry sky" and concentrated on the study, if not of the "moral law", then such a subtle thing as the ability of human thinking to adequately reflect the external world. Moreover, as a result of these studies, he comes to very disappointing conclusions, based on which he denies the human mind the ability to know the world as it is - not only the “starry sky”, but, in fact, the “moral law”.
What is the reason for such a shameful finale of the path of knowledge, which began so triumphantly? Why does Kant become an agnostic? This question is all the more important because modern science very often adopts Kant's agnostic tendencies, and not his ability to formulate brilliant hypotheses and set promising tasks for science.
What is common between modern science and Kant?
As for the achievements of both modern science and Kant, there is nothing in common between them. On the contrary, in their achievements they demonstrate the exact opposite: just as science was poor in knowledge of facts in Kant's time, modern science is just as poor in terms of "judgment ability", i.e. critical thinking, the master of which was the great philosopher.
And it is precisely this contrast in achievements that easily explains their coincidence in shortcomings. If even the great master of critical thinking, Kant, could not overcome the empirical approach to understanding nature, characteristic of materialism of the 18th century, is it worth expecting this from the incredibly gullible and very naive in matters of thinking modern science?
It is unlikely that you will find a modern scientist who would express even the slightest doubt that the individual is the subject of knowledge, and thinking is a function of the brain that secretes thought, if not like the liver secretes bile, then certainly so, how a computer produces processed information. As for the object of knowledge, if there are scientists who doubt that they are eternal and unchanging nature, the laws of which must be known by generalizing observational data, then only in favor of the fact that the question of the existence of nature outside our sensations remains open, which means that the object of scientific knowledge is the sensations themselves, or theories that scientists have come up with on the basis of these sensations.
The modern scientist, who considers it simply a matter of honor to look down on philosophy, cannot understand that the subject of science is not nature in itself, but, as Marx would put it, humanized nature, that is, nature to the extent that it is included in human activity. This idea allows us to formulate the requirement to include practice in the theory of knowledge. Not a category of practice, but a living social object-transforming practice, moreover, taken each time not abstractly-individually, but concretely-historically.
But in order for this inclusion to benefit science, it was also necessary to understand that the subject of practice is not a separate individual, and the essence of a person is "not an abstract inherent in a separate individual, but the totality of all social relations."
After that, it becomes clear that by knowing nature, we thereby know ourselves. Or, on the contrary, we can cognize nature only by examining it through the prism of the production of human essence. In other words, the starry sky is indeed much closer to us than Kant believed. It is also "within us", like the moral law. And just like the moral law, it must be sought not inside the human body, but "inside" human society, which, by changing the nature around it, changes itself.
Looking at the starry sky, a person thereby peers into his own soul. Of course, not into the mystical soul of Christianity or Eastern religions (modern scientists are very fond of mysticism), but into the very real soul of a real person, our contemporary, who, despite all the efforts of the current dominant ideology, in every possible way to “ground” him, turn him into a dull soulless instrument of the process turnover of capital, into a simple professional function, into an "economic man", has not yet completely lost the ability to "stretch for the stars" and break through to them "through thorns". After all, distant stars have long served people not only for orientation in space and time, but also as a guide for choosing their life path and the path of development of society as a whole.
The transition program checks each of you for maturity, for the presence of that “Rod”, which is the basis of a harmonious personality and at the same time part of an inextricable network that links together all people on earth and all intelligent beings in the universe.
What is this "Rod"? You know that in the etheric body of a person there is a main energy channel - Sushumna, which connects the main chakras with each other. But this channel does not end in the etheric body of a person, it has a continuation in his Light body, it is a kind of “axis” connecting a person with the Cosmic Light Network (CSS), in which every rational being has its own sovereign “cell”. And through this Network all sentient beings are connected together! It is through this "Axis", this "Rod" that each of you is connected both with each other, and with the Cosmos, and with Heaven!
Universe is one where everyone has their own place in the material worlds (physical, ethereal, astral, mental). This Perfect Creation is harmonious and balanced. But, at the same time, every reasonable individual has freedom of choice, karma, a level of knowledge. And many intelligent beings do not feel the connection of their personality with its higher aspects, with the Higher "I", because the flow, conductivity of this "Rod" is broken.
Such a person does not feel a connection with the cosmos, with other people. Xenophobia, racism is the result of a violation of the free flow of energy along this golden Axis. Restoring connection with the Unified Network makes it possible to realize oneself as a Man of the Universe, to feel one's unity, both with other intelligent beings, and with the Creator of All That Is! Everyone has moments when this connection arises, but is again broken as a result of our imperfection.
How to restore this connection? There are many ways to do this. It can be both energy practices that improve the etheric body, and the comprehension of new knowledge, the improvement of the moral aspects of the personality. You are familiar with the expression "Moral Core" - this is the mental structure of the very "Axis". Immanuel Kant said: "Two things in the world fill my soul with sacred awe: the starry sky above my head and the Moral Law within us." In fact, the "Moral Law" connects us with Heaven, with the cosmos, and a moral person is able to comprehend the Laws of the Universe and become a person of the New World.
He who has ears, let him hear. Amen. Imhotep.
March 09, 2011
I am Imhotep, architect of the pharaohs and priest of Isis.
Moral there is a path that can return a person to the Path to the Throne of the Creator. An immoral man is doomed to regress and involution, he is just a rational animal, guided in his primitive life only by instincts. It is morality that is what distinguishes the Spiritual Man from Homo sapiens - "reasonable man."
Intelligence- not everything that a person needs for evolution. Reasonable and even highly intelligent can be people who with great difficulty can be attributed to the tribe of the Sons of God, rather they are the children of the Devil. And that Moral Law, which a person accepts for himself without analysis and comments, simply because it should be so, directs a person along the True Path.
The Moral Law, written in the Commandments of Moses, is the basis of three world religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but in other religions of the "right hand" there are the same basic postulates of the Moral Law - you can not kill, steal, offend the weak. It is necessary at least to respect, and even better to love every person, near or far. It is necessary to honor the older generation and educate the younger generation in love and tenderness.
The Moral Law organizes the primitive herd into a tribe of comrades-in-arms and allies, creates a community and community of brothers in mind. In difficult times, the Moral Law helps to survive as many of the tribesmen as possible, while the immoral crowd can destroy itself.
Morality is brought up in early childhood, and not just by edification and teachings, it is "absorbed with mother's milk", it is an example for a child in a family, if, of course, it is present there.
To educate morality in adulthood is possible only on your own. In adulthood, morality can only be the result of a person's free choice. A person accepts obligations to his own soul and to the Creator, and is responsible to himself. He decides to live "not for fear, but for conscience" - an expression that you have known for a long time. Fear is an ineffective guardian of the moral way of life, and only conscience helps a person to rise from the Kingdom of “reasonable people” to the Kingdom of “spiritual people”.
Happy are those in whom the Moral Law is brought up from childhood. Happy is he who is able to make a conscious choice - to accept the Moral Law as the basis of his life. An immoral person is doomed.
He who has ears, let him hear. Amen. Imhotep.
