Section| Moral Collapse and the Question of Cogito
What if the values we hold; love, sin, restraint etc., aren’t universal truths, but artifacts of how the Cogito was wired to think itself into order? Kant’s model of mind declared certain truths “a priori”—as if reason could legislate reality, bypassing experience. Eroticism, however, exposes the fracture: desire arrives where law cannot reach, and the body resists being theorized.
I was laughing recently at a Hindi song: “प्यार करने वाले कभी डरते नहीं , जो डरते हैं वोह प्यार करते नहीं ”. Lovers never die; only the fearful fail to love. But this too, is Kantian in disguise: declaring its own value structure as necessary and universal. The song mistakes feeling for proof—just like Kant did. This is not to insult lovers or Kant, but to take a sassy shot at the Kantian poet who has no fucking clue, but must rub the pen in the groins— “It is so, because so it is”; finding Reason in an act of pure transgression. Fear can accompany any other emotion and more so, if what is held against it and also held high must fall with a greater thud. Must not such thinking cause self-injury? To bite your own tale and pity thy miserable life? What caused what? Point a finger at such Reason, other four point back at you. What convoluted reason and its bastard child, new-found Morals? Why blame only Kant, Schopenhauer offers a quiet death, much like his eastern counterparts who advise not to strangulate but die slowly— by sitting under the tree you could have hanged yourself from? Kant isn’t the first to test those waters after all. Is Love a matter of habits, or is it an external force that makes matter coagulate in certain manner, manifest itself as love? Long story short, neither love nor fear define each other, but become prisoners of Kantian categorization (Reza Negarestani’sSpeculation On Anonymous Material is a good listen, though he ends up eating his own tail around the midway). A value system sold as a guiding map, yet works like a trap.
If one imagine a total moral collapse with such cognition, what emerges is not clarity but recursion. In this blurted out thinking about thinking, one can only defeat old values to rediscover them, dressed in new justifications, posing as revelations.
Erotic thought becomes that irrational force that demands an autopsy—where we don’t just examine what we desire, but how desire itself is formed, filtered, and disguised by the thinking subject. If the Cogito is the instrument by which we imagine freedom, we must also admit it is the very thing that invents restraint. Ironically, Kant made a declaration of freedom of soul by erecting a personal reason to guard the values which make such emancipation possible. A prisoner guarding another prisoner?
To move beyond the moral loop, we need to ask: can the Cogito un-think itself? Can thought suspend its own recursive stupidity and allow for something else to arise; something that doesn’t aim to define love, fear, or ethics, but dares to live them in the collapse of the old? This section begins where philosophy often ends: with an erection and cognitive failure.
