Britt....
Because I think it is just as valuable to have the access to trace the origins and associations of the thoughts that produce an individual's certain conclusions, I guess I do tend to have an unfinished style with "multiple intersections of ideas." My education is "incomplete," concerning this topic especially-- As education, in general, is not a goal to be reached but a constant journey. So yes, thanks for the feedback there.
. . . Some commonality with Kant . . . oh my . . .
In the sense where I conceive of the individual's selfish interest becoming synonymous with that of the whole, yes I see that there are some Kantian parallels. Though I don't see him holding any value of a precondition of vulnerability (for accessing the self and others) for establishing his moral society. Kant will say that "we are ends in ourselves" when he declares us as having free wills (sovereign autonomy) to be lawgivers. Kant, it seems, only wants to call us "ends unto ourselves"-- and to appear to treat others as such-- to satisfy his underlying assumption that we need, and should want, a law that we could simultaneously want for ourselves and for others. Kant assumes that lawmaking/morality-making is our nature, and to this end we should be treated as we can extrapolate our own will into a conception of what would be good for everyone.
I assume nothing of this nature of the human being-- I do not claim to know this much about our nature-- except to say that when we access each other completely, personally and transparently, whatever community precipitates from this experience will reflect the healthiest relationship of individuals I can imagine. I see treating another as an end unto themselves as only being achieved by accessing them personally, vulnerably and transparently, and not by making maxims for them as an abstraction of this access/knowledge of them.
I am responding without exhausting all the arguments I feel compel this social arrangement, but briefly onto vulnerability in truth-seeking as it relates to “media de-sensitivity, homelessness, poverty, social stratification, and all those problems that also make me uncomfortable in my own skin.”
Uncomfortable why? Because there is some sort of an emotional barrier present to prohibit access to these individuals and phenomena?
I see media sensitivity and de-sensitivity as just the pulse of a particular culture. What scares you in movies, what is funny, what pictures cause within you an emotional response to cringe or to be repulsed . . . what can be emotionally represented, or counter-designed, in the news/media to evoke emotion, a numb response or a rational attachment . . . the sum of all these things should not be measured in comparison to some fabricated moral sentiment, but should be seen as they are. On the micro level, an individual’s emotional responses are just warnings from their internal psychology that they are entering into territory for which they have limited resources—or none at all-- to reason out. In the case where the emotions are dead, maybe it is because the surrogate of copied images (supplied by the culture) has given the individual cause to attach Reason to the phenomenon. Though Reason can be attached through surrogate (shadows on the walls of caves), it is only through vulnerability that I claim that reason can be suspended so that it can be made to experientially inform itself. The sum of a culture's emotional response to particular ideas (Ideas which I will use here to loosely refer to all the information, images, arguments, etc produced within a society) only serve to tell us something of the temperament and strength of that society (relative to its own purpose for existing, not to be compared with whatever extant sentiment of morality it also possesses).
If the best definition of the emotion fear is that it is always in response to some manifestation, or embodiment, of “the unknown,” then emotional responses to these social conditions only tell us where we have yet to let our vulnerability lead us in order to bridge into an experiential, authentic and transparent relationship with the truth of the phenomenon or a particular person. A relationship with truth does not equate to having truth, but it may be the best we can do in certain situations.
