ON THE MORALITY OF ACHTUNG

(This preliminary entry is supposed to go to the root of ethics, centering on the morality of Achtung. It is by no means a comment on the Nietzschean passage quoted below, although Nietzsche deserves my gratitude for creating a wonderful click, which, indeed, prompted me to write this entry in the first place. Please, nota bene the penultimate paragraph of this entry, which contains the gist of my message.)

The celebrated Kantian phrase Categorical Imperative has a very special ring to it, and in so far as its moral strength and didactic value are concerned, it ranks among the sublime, albeit otherwise questionable, dicta, alongside Dèscartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum.” But, unlike Dèscartes’ brilliant, but self-defeating, rigidly logical format, which immediately invites a critical examination of its formal sustainability, Kant’s term is far less exacting on the surface (despite its use of the word categorical), and, therefore, does not immediately lend itself to a similar skepticism, even though what Kant must have had in mind is no less implicitly assertive, and rationally questionable, than what is so explicit in the Cartesian formula.

My reflection on the Kantian concept of Achtung starts, as many of my reflections often do, with a passage from Nietzsche’s Menschliches (84), where he says:

“Men are not ashamed to think something dirty, but they are ashamed when they imagine that others might believe them capable of these dirty thoughts.” This is, of course, precisely what Shakespeare’s sonnet says: “‘Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed…” but there is a difference between these two in their effect.

With Shakespeare, my first natural reaction to this sonnet was the sense of his light-hearted reproof of human hypocrisy, Tartuffery, to be precise. But the first question that came to my mind on reading Nietzsche was this: Is God included among “others”?

The philosophically important question is whether our fear of God is also included in the number of others, or else it is our love of God, which, in this case, means that, to use Kantian language, our Achtung is moral (that is, not a product of our fear, which latter would have placed it outside morality at once), and therefore we are ever capable of being ashamed of our dirty thinking, just because it is offensive to our sense of morality? I may, thus, suggest, that the best definition of moral behavior is acting out of love for God and humanity, in which case we are aided in our actions by what Kant calls Achtung. This makes his Achtung our most indispensable vademecum of morality in our journey through life.

In so far as Nietzsche’s passage is concerned, I am happy with the click it has provided for me, but I should note, tongue-in-cheek, of course, that, rather than making it so harshly personal, making a stronger case for the depravity of humanity as a whole, his skepticism could have been somewhat less hurtful to our sense of moral self-righteousness. Even in our depravity, there is a pleasant “moral” complacency in numbers, you know. Remember Yom Kippur of the Jews!