Narcissism, 4

Yesterday I ended my post by mentioning the word introject. Like all other cultures, the West is in a very primitive state as far as self-knowledge is concerned. If we take ancient Delphi as a paragon of Aryan wisdom, even the most prominent western thinkers and philosophers of the Christian Era have been but slaves to what I have metaphorically called ‘Semitic malware’ (Judeo-Christianity): the introjects of their parents and educators. I only discovered this in my own mind when, well into my sixties, writing a passage in my third autobiographical book, I was astonished to discover that my mind had, literally, been programmed with Christian introjects since childhood. The details I explain there but suffice it to say here that, before that passage in my last book, I was under the impression that I had been a relatively free and moral agent—precisely the Christian belief in free will—, and that my father’s influence wasn’t as absolute as, now, I am astonished to acknowledge.

But in this entry, I don’t want to talk about autobiography but about biographies. In my 2021 post, ‘On Shelob’s Lair’, I had said that Francis Bacon regarded metaphysical philosophers as weavers of cobwebs. Now I would like to delve a little deeper into Immanuel Kant’s biography.

This German was born in 1724 in Königsberg, which was East Prussia: territories Germany lost after WW2. If the so-called philosophers were lovers of wisdom, as the etymology of the word philosophy says, Prussia would still be part of a German Reich. We can already imagine a world where, instead of metaphysical cobwebs, the great philosophers of German idealism, starting with Kant, would have devoted themselves to what Gobineau (1816-1882) would eventually devote himself to: the study of the races. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Kant was educated in the stern spirit of Protestant pietism: first by his mother, a pious woman, and then at the Collegium Fridericianum, famous as a pietistic school. During 1740-1746 the lad Kant continued to be brainwashed with theology at the University of Königsberg, where he was greatly influenced by Christian Wolff. If we keep in mind what was said about the role played by the mother in the previous entry, it becomes clear that from an early age the introjects are a kind of building blocks that form a psychic edifice: the structure of a mind in the making. There is no point in giving the details of Kant’s life as a young man because it is clear that his mind was already Christianly structured from an earlier age.

In his late thirties, it is important to mention that Kant wrote Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God). Since the young philosopher lived during the Age of Enlightenment, although he never wanted to destroy metaphysics, he did want to put it on new critical foundations. This reminds me that a well-known proponent of the American racial right once called himself a ‘neo-normie’. Kant’s metaphysics was actually a ‘neo-theology’, as we are about to see.

Kant worked for many years on his major work, Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781 (he died in his hometown in 1804). But what is ‘metaphysics’ according to Kant? Kant simply starts from the conceptions of his time, when philosophy had been trying to become independent of theology as an infant tries to individuate himself before a schizogenic mother. This is so true that Kant himself declares that the contents of metaphysics are no more and no less than the contents of Christian theology. He writes that the ‘inevitable tasks of pure reason are God, freedom and immortality’ (B7). And later he reiterates: ‘Metaphysics has as the specific aim of its investigation only three ideas: God, freedom and immortality’ (B 395).

It couldn’t be clearer: due to the introjects of his early age, the mature philosopher remains the servant of the Christian theologian. (A philosopher of a true age of enlightenment would use the plural to refer to providence, as he would be a man who has already transvalued the monotheistic values of Judeo-Christianity to the Gods of the Delphic inscription.) It doesn’t matter that in his first Critique Kant concludes that metaphysics, as a science, is not possible. The fact that he even returns to the same triad—God, the immortality of the human soul and freedom—when he already writes about ‘practical reason’ speaks for itself. Kant even states: ‘I had therefore to do away with knowledge to make room for faith’ (B XXX).

As I said in ‘Shelob’s Liar’, Kant’s prose is abominable. This major spider was a creature who never successfully rebelled against maternal and scholastic introjects. Even his so-called pure, a priori knowledge was a conception of metaphysics that was rooted in the Cartesian approach and Leibniz’s analytical judgements: a type of metaphysics already removed from the Aristotelian tradition. Let us not forget that, among Christian Wolff’s disciples, there were several 18th-century philosophers, including Kant.

Quite apart from the fact that the obscurantist prose of the exponents of German idealism is intolerable to any sane reader, my point is obvious. The human mind is a structure. Our parents and guardians lay the bricks of the structure that will become our egos, against which it’s very difficult to rebel successfully. Recall the quote from Margaret Mahler in the previous entry, who in analysing the psychology of toddlers discovered that interpersonal relationships are internalised within the ego or what we call the Self. Once internalised, we are slaves to what we have been calling ‘parental introjects’, even the so-called great philosophers.
 

The first cousin

If Kant, the greatest German philosopher of the so-called Age of Reason, was a creature of mom’s introjects, what could a little Mexican do in the face of the introjects of an even more engulfing mother than a pietistic one raising her child with Prussian ethics?

I invited Marco’s cousin again, who came to my house this very day that I’m writing, whom I won’t mention by name and surname because, given that the name ‘Marco’ I have used is real, and that the only person who visits him in his cobwebbed house is his cousin, I don’t want some Spanish-speaking person in the curious country where I live to find out, through Google, that I’ve been writing about them.

Anyway, I hope tomorrow to continue unravelling this bizarre psychodrama with another entry.