Page 52 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
immanence in a world without guilt, he seeks a world where people are not “a means,” but “an ends” in themselves, and are hence, free. In this sense, Kant and Milton do not collide; there is always a divine element in legislation in Kant that reconciles Milton and Kant.
To Kant, it is practical that mankind is not obligated to actions because God commands them, but actions are God’s commands because mankind is obligated to them.294 When Kant argues that our self-legislated liberties are an imperative that must be obeyed as if they were God’s command, he asserts that we are nonetheless bound to the divine. There is sanctity in abiding by our own laws. In this form of Kantianism, Milton’s Positive Laws possess and share the same form of divine sanctity. If there is sanctity in Christianity, it is because it dares to challenge the muddy waters of custom in the Old Testament.
If Kant’s Copernican Revolution in morals is only possible if collectively willed, what occurs in Kafkabel? No one willed it. Used to oppression, no one willed a Kingdom of Ends. What if they had all seen what Job and K really saw? If Kant and Milton’s subtleties in the relationship of the divine and legislation ground Josef K’s enlightened morality, Locke remains in the dark by favoring Job’s morality. To Locke, the ground of morality “can only be the will and law of a god, who sees men in the dark, has in his hand rewards and punishments, and power enough to call to accounttheproudestoffender.”295 InMiltonandKantthisisano.Itseducesallnottoacommonwealth,buttoa common ill. As such, it is unworthy of legislation and of obedience because it promotes oppression and not liberty.
But no, they opted for Locke at Kafkabel. There was mass blindness, blindness as contagion, as disease (a la Saramago), as if Lady Justice’s blindness had polluted all. Injustice proliferated infinitely as if a creeping vine rapidly entwining and chocking justice’s scales, until the dream of Kant’s Kingdom of Ends could not, will not and Kan’t296 sustain Kafkabel. It suffocated it. Strangled, Kafkabel delivered instead a Kingdom of Means, the antithesis of Aristotle’s Eudaimonia and Golden Mean, but of the Mighty Mean. There 3⁄4 no one had stood for Justice and genuine Liberty as the ideal of non-domination and non-arbitrary interference. No one had willed them. No one. In injustice’s black blaze, The Trial’s magistrates believed themselves superior to citizens. The King and Magistrate, says Milton, are inferiors and not equal to the people, and their role is to serve citizens.297 Amidst collective fear, cowardice and complacency, accustomed to being canines, defendants could no longer see the Court for what it really was (T51, 78, 182-3, 223). They could no longer discern the true from the false (T192, 223). All they knew was superstition, submission, cowardice, and lack of collective effort (T175). No, they saw it, but they gave it a blind eye 3⁄4 no one had cared to revolt, neither here nor there, not anywhere... not at their homes, not at the Court of Inquiry, not at their offices. Only poets and metaphysicians 3⁄4 sincere philosophers in the spirit of Job and Josef K, Kant and Milton, had genuinely revolted by believing in the reality of their poems298 as sublime dreams.
What if all had collectively rejected the Court’s corruption, absolutism, and its apparent, veiled liberties and had sought genuine liberty? Primordial principle Milton zealously defends, “no man ... ought to deny that all men naturally are born free... being the image and resemblance of God himself, and are by privilege, above all creatures,
294 Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A819.
295 Locke. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. I.iii.6
296 The notion of ‘can’t’ plays on the inability for Kafkabel to become Kant’s Kingdom of Ends; hence, the neologism “K’ant.”
297 Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. By Merritt Y. Hughes. The Tenure ofKings and Magistrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957.
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298 To Machado, “Poets are failed metaphysicians and Philosophers are poets that believe in the reality of their poems.” Machado, Antonio. Obras Completas.
Mexico: Seneca, 1940. 554
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