Friday, February 17, 2012

Treat A Woman As An End Not As A Means To An End

I have taken the liberty to re-formulate one of the several versions of Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative by substituting the word woman for man. I think this will have profound implications in relations not only between Men and Women but also in the way Women treat other Women.

And of course a woman must apply this to her life and see herself as an end and not as a means to an end either for herself or for others.

My revised formulation is this:

Act always to treat a woman as an end and never as a means to an end.

Boring Philosophical Stuff: There were later and earlier formulations of the Categorical Imperative. There first was: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. The final formulation was more like this: Therefore, every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends. I revised Kant’s second formulation which actually was my favorite. All three are found in his Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals. Yes. I confess to being a neo-Kantian. Reading the Critique of Pure Reason was one of the most electrifying intellectual moments of my life.

Not being a woman I decided not to write concerning the implications of our new maxim for the way a woman must treat herself as an end and never as a means to an end. Nor do I feel inclined to write about the implications for the ways in which one woman should treat another woman as an end and not as a means.

I am a romantic and a spiritually oriented person so not everyone will appreciate the following interpretations which reflect my personal views. I should explain that the practice of my religion requires the willingness to think. One day when I was a child, I read I John Chapter 3 in the Bible ‘When we see hum (Jesus), we will be like him. I instantly knew the logically equivalent statement ‘You will not see him until you are like him’ was also true. I had proven that religion was about transformation and not waiting around for some magical belief to work itself out at the end of the age. My teacher later told me that some friends of hers who studied logic told her what I had done was to independently find a contrapositive.

What I want to do is to give advice to men as to why a man would want to always act as if the love of his life were an end and not a means to an end. This will benefit men as much as it does women because relationship failure and divorce are very expensive and to be avoided.

I would like to begin with a romantic’s argument that I would always want to pay a higher price for a woman than a lower price. In economics Value Theory says we place a value on every transaction by how much we are willing to surrender for the transaction to occur. In romance a man must surrender time and effort to have a relationship with a woman. I should also say that as an economist and a romantic I have previously defined a kiss as a fundamental unit of social exchange or a kind of currency in which we measure interactions between men and women. I occasionally give advice to boys and girls not quite old enough to date. I begin by saying that I started studying the Transmission of Love when I was 11 years-old. To the young boys I say you will need to transmit as much love as possible in both the first kiss and in any subsequent kisses. To the girls I say they must spend their lives avoiding men who cannot transmit love. In the vernacular I would say this: ‘Two kisses and a bottle of beer ain’t going to make it.’

My study of the Transmission of Love began due to my inherent orientation towards Romance, Love and Spirit. What had happened was that earlier that day I felt compelled to arrest a 13 year-old girl for the crime of unhappiness. The word arrest I later learned in French class meant stop. She was miserable and told me her life was over at age 13 because she was not pretty enough to ever be loved. I instinctively touched her and kissed her telling her that I was the one who determined whether or not she was pretty enough for me to love her. I told her that she did not have the right to tell me I could not love her. Her only right was to tell me she either wanted someone else to love her or to be left alone.

I remember reading Socrates in high school. In the Banquet he said that the Beautiful is that which we adore or love. Women need to understand that Love creates Beauty. One of a man’s functions is to use Romance to induce feelings of Love and Beauty in his woman. Women function on feeling and do not do their best until they make contact with Love. Of course this fact also applies to men as well.

I remember a study from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in which academics had files on students from the toughest schools who had been determined would fail. 25 years later college students were told to see what happened to these men.

Surprisingly, these men were still alive so the students were sent out to interview them. The second surprise was that these men who had been close to either getting killed or doing ten or twenty years in prison were all relatively successful. When the students asked these men what happened to change their lives, they all said the same thing: ‘Things were looking bad for me until I met a teacher named Hannah. She looked into my eyes and said she loved me and expected more from me. I could tell when I looked into her eyes that she did love me.’

Returning back to the study of the Transmission of Love: As I said, later that night after having arrested a girl for the crime of unhappiness, I began my study of the Transmission of Love. When I was older, I defined Love as the Realization of Oneness. At that time, I relied upon a definition of God which I had made a couple of years earlier. I had defined God as my Mind at its deepest level. I had asked my teacher to define the word consciousness. But instantly I remembered a line from an old movie my mother had watched on TV ‘Not that I am consciously aware.’ I answered my own question and said consciousness was an ability to be aware. What had upset me enough to talk to my teacher in class was an argument I had read from an atheist who had said he had never seen God.

My answer was that God could never be seen because He was Consciousness or what we saw with. I went on to say that God as Spirit was a level of Consciousness where there was no ego and no illusion of a subject object split. God as Consciousness was both Object or what we saw and Subject or what we saw with. I concluded that God was my mind at its deepest level and that through His Consciousness I was connected to every other being in the world though at the time I said person and animal.

This previous insight served me well in the study of the Transmission of Love. I decided that I needed to Transmit as much Love as possible as Love was about all that ever would persuade a woman to accept my logical arguments. Love is easy to manifest because God is my mind at it s deepest level. I reasoned correctly I had an Infinite amount of Love to Transmit. I also concluded that I was not a separate person from the woman I wanted to love.

Even after a man understands the basic Principles of the Transmission of Love, he will still need some practical advice in its application. It is for practical reasons that I want to pay a higher price for a woman than a lower one.

Upon starting a new relationship the first thing a man must do is to discover what a woman thinks of herself. Does she value her Self? Does she think she is pretty? I have rarely loved a woman who thought she was as pretty as I did.

What I would recommend that you propose to her is that she be loved by you until she feels as pretty as you think she is. This is filed under the principle that she always ought to be as happy as the man who loves her thinks she should be and not as miserable as she thinks she ought to be.

The complete argument as to why a woman ought to spend every day being as happy as she can possibly be must rely upon an understanding of my definition of God. God is her mind at its deepest level. Women ought to manifest the Feminine aspects of the Mind of God better than a man would. These Feminine Qualities are Love, Joy, Peace and Beauty.

I always tell women and young girls that it is an honor and a privilege to be born in a female body. I have always tried to look at the world from God’s point of view rather than man’s. For example, I believe time and space are ideas and not real things outside of us. Ideas exist solely inside the minds that think them. In the case at hand I would tell a woman that she was created for the same purpose as all women which is to make this world a better place by radiating the Feminine Qualities of God. Women are here to radiate Love, Beauty, Joy and Peace. If a woman is the first female to work at a particular company, her presence ought to make it a better place to be.

A woman will gladly accept any help her man gives her to fulfill her destiny. I would not hesitate to tell a woman that it is unlawful for her to be unkissed, untouched, unloved, unhappy or unappreciated. If she is in a good mood and receptive to the romantic spirit, you might try this: Tell her that is unlawful for a woman to walk when there is a man who loves her and wants to carry her. Though this does not exactly follow from the maxim that we ought to treat a woman an an end and not a means.

It should be made perfectly clear that setting a material goal does not apply to treating a woman as an end and not a means. Materialists would reduce men and women to a lessor lessee relationship. I would prefer to regard it as a kiss-or kiss-e relationship.

I added that part about it being unlawful for a woman to lead an unappreciated life specifically because as a romantic I want increase a woman’s value. To depreciate a woman’s worth would be the opposite of a proper appreciation of her value. Who would want a woman who has no value and requires little romantic effort from her man?

By setting the goals of a relationship at the outset, I have determined what I want to happen. By persuading her that I have a higher opinion of her than she does of herself, I have nearly guaranteed that she will accept my plans for her which is that she lives the best possible life she can. She is never to be unkissed, untouched, unloved, unhappy or unappreciated.

To Sum Up: Men and women are spiritual as well as social beings. The fundamental unit of exchange between a man and a woman is a kiss. The man must maximize the value of the kisses he gives a woman by understanding the Transmission of Love.

God is his mind at its deepest level. God is Spirit and is beyond the level of the ego. This means that if a man is in ego he is not functioning at his best. The same could be said for a woman. Men at that lower ego level will not transmit much love and will likely fail to use a kiss to logically convince a woman of anything at all. The other point that must be understood in the Transmission of Love is that God does not see Himself as separate from what He sees so in His Mind there is no separation between Subject and Object. Neither should there be any separation between the spiritual goals of a man and a woman. A man should always be acting for the fulfillment of his woman’s goal which is to manifest the Feminine Qualities of Love, Joy, Beauty and Peace.

The goal of a romantic relationship is that a man and woman merge their souls by achieving what I have called the Shared Level of Being. This is a state where neither the man nor woman is thinking with an ego. They have joined together through a Shared Experience of Life. This is possible because there is but One Life. Ideally, this state should be achieved prior to an earthly marriage. Usually women can more easily be induced into experiencing this Shared Level of Being through romance than can a man.

As a practical matter, a man ought to tell a woman that if she does marry a man after experiencing this previously unknown level of Reality with him, she is not allowed to leave or to die.

I would hope this essay begins a discussion of what we can do to elevate the relationships of men and women as well as the relationships women have with each other. Perhaps some women could write on what a women could do to treat herself as an end and not as a means to an end. Other women might want to write about applying this maxim of treating a woman as an end from a woman’s point of view.

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