Contemporary commentators still are enamored with the yogic aspiration for equanimity of mind, one that maintains a distance from ground supports considered necessary to the exercise of practical authority.

This is what Kant’s lengthy treatise on taste could be reduced to, if by taste he meant chiefly the ability to discern why this content and not that in matters of practical authority, while calling for the continued observation of those same limiting constraints as a matter of moral obligation, even as he advanced the idea of taste that would render them transparent.

With Kant, it seems as though a watershed moment confronted Western ethics, that is to say: if there are certain social injustices used to structure practical authority we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking God would have it that way. A central tenet in Kantian thought is that God isn’t in need of such supports, while at the same time he acknowledged that man is.

Even today, aesthetes and media analysts seem content with Kant’s dismissal as barbaric any dependency on a certain representation of the object. One ought rather to strive for “immediate satisfaction in the object of beauty,” i.e. to be oneself without supports as to a certain kind of content in contemplative activity.

However, as early as 1964, if not earlier, an elision of sorts seems to have been effected with respect to the above position, a subtle extension of the reach of Kant’s counsel, such that no longer was it merely the fixedness of content open to critique as a spiritual support. Now the critique extended to Western civilization’s reliance on technological media regardless of content.

It was with his essay “The Medium is the Message” that Marshall McLuhan posited a decline in the quality of humanity as a deleterious consequence attending the use of technological supports in the service of acquiring practical authority.

The first line of his essay:

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and        dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message (1).

The passage prepares the argument that, because we are “conquered and enslaved” by our own technology and are not merely aloof or unstained in spirit from practical matters, the maintenance of an independently originated equanimity of mind becomes problematic. At best, individual thought is even more beholden to church and state as intermediaries whose content bleeds into thought while, at worst, private contemplation and reflection is devalued as toothless consolation.

McLuhan’s declaration of knowledge so derived as worthless and fraudulent was in anticipation of this mode of coming into knowing as vulnerable to ideological control, and as an attractive incentive to get people to detach from value laden content he supplied the example of the “highly literate aristocrat” who has mastered the art of “prediction and control.” This theme is repeated with McLuhan’s tracing of cultural development, or rather its lack, throughout the Hellenic and Roman periods of decline. He cites Arnold Toynbee’s argument that the reliance on practical supports to improve chances of winning in war and so increase practical authority was accompanied by cultural, spiritual, and/or communal decline; in short, a destabilization in the quality of everyday ordinary life and experience (18).

With McLuhan the question became not merely whether it’s possible to separate practical supports from contemplative activity in one’s own immediate satisfaction in the object of beauty, as Kant held, but whether this is or ever was a legitimate ethical position. What are the limits of Kant’s position? What may one not do and find refuge for its justification in man’s shared weakness? And what is the consensus today in contemplative activity that takes place in the midst of unjust practices, even if the two are held separate?