bad passions
“Unless a wish for the general welfare exists, no amount of knowledge will inspire action calculated to promote the happiness of mankind. But many men, owing to confused thinking, can act under the direction of bad passions, without any realization that they are doing so, and when, by purely intellectual means, this realization is brought home to them, they can often be induced to act in a manner which is less harsh and less apt to promote strife.
“I am firmly persuaded that if schools throughout the world were under a single international authority, and if this authority devoted itself to clarify the use of words calculated to promote passion, the existing hatred between nations, creeds, and political parties would vary rapidly diminished, and the preservation of peace throughout the world would become an easy matter.
Meanwhile, those who stand for clear thinking and against mutual disastrous enmities have to work, not only against the passions to which human nature is all too prone, but also against great organized forces of intolerance and insane self-assertion.
To clarify the use of words calculated to promote passion […] the preservation of peace throughout the world would become an easy matter.
In this struggle, clear logical thinking, the only one of the actors, has a definite part to play.”1
bad faith
“[Kant] was after freedom from tyranny—from uninformed, bad faith interference. Scholars were entitled to tell their emperor to take a hike not because of some reductive notion of freedom as an unchecked intellectual id but precisely because their thinking was subject to strict standards of inquiry that conferred their own kind of authority.”2
Scholars were entitled to tell their emperor to take a hike.
what fires do
These fires, like
stories, lay waste to
the forest, they ready
the Earth for the new
Burning, they’ll get us all
into or out of
this forest, this notion
of this Me, this You
Keep your heart still and strong. Be smart and skillful: think clearly.
~d
Bertrand Russell, ‘A Plea for Clear Thinking’
John Semley, ‘Speaking Out: A new generation of university students reignites an old debate about free speech on campus.’ (June 2019)
As much as Kant’s Moral Theory is strict, he really wanted freedom. Interesting.