One must wonder what good Kant’s solution to the free will problem is when it steals from us our sense of empirical identity, dismissing such caused desires as mere appearances and then taking that which we can’t see and subjugating it to a rational prison of our own construction.

The Groundwork seems laced throughout with the faulty notion that once individuals understand every desire, inclination or need they have is determined; that they might somehow no longer find such attachments palatable in the face of free moral law. When the laws of freedom are only those laws that we would follow when we act from reason, and when more often than not we seem to understand ourselves as existing apart from such freedom, perhaps there is more to be said for what brings value to the human experience than what is merely free or rational.

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The true spectacle of Mozart’s Don Giovanni exists not in the anti-hero’s sexual transgressions, but in the audience’s delight and subsequent moralizing therein. Da Ponte’s libretto was billed as dramma giocoso—a genre of opera that mixes elements of comedy and drama; but Mozart catalogued it as opera buffa—possibly with the understanding that its moral lesson fails to teach. Instead, the opera strikes at the very core of what it means to be what Kierkegaard called an aesthete.

The aesthete is one who holds aesthetic considerations above all others in his moral decisions, and it is the only other choice available to human beings who think themselves unfulfilled by the ethical life. Don Giovanni, for Kierkegaard, is the idealized, exaggerated aesthete, an archetype whose life is directed not by God or moral consideration, but by what is interesting.

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There’s something about things walking into bars that’s usually cause for raucous hysterics. Whoever it is — a priest, a black guy, a blonde, etc. — the moment that mnemonic quip sounds, face muscles relax in ready anticipation for the punch line. But nobody laughs when a transvestite walks into a bar — not really, anyway. Tense patrons shift troubled in their stools, unsure of what to say or where to look. The punch line could never follow a transvestite; they violate the joke by wearing the punch line. The shock of the façade leaves little room for wit and we sit around the table in silence, smiling uncomfortably at one another under the pretense of tolerance.

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The eristic problem in Plato’s Meno argues that the search for knowledge is precluded before it can even start; either because one does not know what they’re looking for, or because they already know that thing they would look for (80e.2-5). In other words, I cannot search for some knowledge I don’t already know, because I don’t know what that knowledge looks like and if I came across it, I would not understand that it is the thing I sought. Further, if I already had this knowledge then I would have no reason to even begin searching for it.

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