kitsch and vinegar

since I last blogged, I've been through and to atlanta, respectively. on the latter trip, I went to deliver a paper at my alma mater, and I visited with my family, my college mentor, and my best friend from high school. since I returned, I've been processing those events, along with some new ones, and reading freud and kant. okay, so I've been trying to read kant, convinced that I absolutely need to master his writings if I'm ever going to pass my qualifying exams. my college mentor observed me with my copy of "religion within the limits of reason alone" and told me that he liked that book, and that he'd done his dissertation on kant. I shared with him a little ditty I had written:

Immanuel
Kant is with us
Relentless logician
Dead philosopher.

he looked vaguely amused, but like my own father, was probably mildly dismayed that I'd borrowed such a sacred tune. he conceded that there's not much approaching common sense in kant, and that was probably my reason for my difficulty in wading through him. I concurred. I'm still trying to read the book, but on a tip from a friend, I started over with greene's introduction, which is helpful. it's making me wonder how true piety is instilled, because I think one has to be habituated to piety in some sense, but if piety is sheerly commanded, as it was in kant's childhood, an honest soul will soon enough detect its own hypocrisy.

greene notes the equanimity that characterizes the pious. it's true: those who can accept God's will in the face of any tragedy are objectively happier than those who question. ditto for the patriotic americans who can quietly accept that their son or daughter is coming home in a box because their president told them that he or she was fighting for freedom, and likewise for the anthropologist who accepts that female genital mutilation is culturally justified and that it would be imperialistic of me to take too strong a position against it. is it not more pious to be enraged, and to try to do something about it?

I met an angry young man last wednesday. he is about to graduate from the college, and he obviously empathizes with the virginia tech shooter. his mannerisms are brusque and his conversational style combative--I suspect he feels alienated, and I am not at all surprised. he corrected my colleague and I in order to make clear that he knows all the answers, and will, in a year or two, enter a graduate program so that he can prove it. When I was his age, I thought I had all the answers, too, but I wasn't so angry. now I'm angry, but I know I don't have all the answers. I do know that I'm tired of the consequentialist logic of assuming you know all the answers in advance, and that you just have to go through the motions of filling in the blanks to get there. this, according to milan kundera, is the definition of kitsch, "the absolute denial of shit" that functions

by excluding from view everything that humans find difficult to come to terms with, offering instead a sanitised view of the world in which "all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. (the unbearable lightness of being).

it's a totalitarian impulse that excludes the ambiguity of the world in which we live, that tries to create a false unity, when we're not even at one with our selves, and for all his unfalsifiability and fabrications, we owe quite a bit to freud for pointing that out.

stay tuned for my next installment:
the mo' meta, the mo-betta: funfetti cupcakes and why bureaucracy must be resisted.