Kultur 4

The most interesting thing to me in the Kultur texts was the irony of the conflict between articles 2, 3, and 4. Articles 2 and 4 carry the implication that you are ‘free to choose’ whether or not to cross the street or pay for your ticket. Yet, this freedom is an illusion: social conventions run so deep that it is immediately assumed what your choice will be. Where has this assumption gone in article 3? It has disappeared, relegated as the inferior motive to personal profit. This is even more revealing when considering the case of the tickets on ‘honor’, a seemingly similar opportunity for personal profit; the same could be drawn from crossing the street on the red light. Not so, because it must be considered what the consequences would be if that “principle upon which you acted were to be the universal maxim”. In America we lack this sense of community. Americans do not have this interest and concern for the interests of those around us. Rather than trying to foster a communal sense of principles, we have a mixing-pot of the various principles each person has independently derived. Yet, we do have an unusually strong sense of ‘negative liberty’ as contrasted with ‘illogical logic’ where the principle accepted is deriving a profit from careless people of inferior intelligence. In Germany, fragments of Kant and Nietzsche survive today…