Why was Gurdjieff worried about Kant?
It is interesting to realize the concealed theme of Kant in the Gurdjieff legacy, a point that is obvious from Ouspensky’s Tertium Organon, a fairly typical effort in the line of works attempting to ‘beat the rap’ against metaphysics.
But with Gurdjieff there is a suspicious strain (as in his incoherent discussion of ‘conscience’) of ‘Kant avoidance’.
One of the great tools of self-defense is to consider, then, the austere points of Kantian ethics ( a very difficult subject, find some introductory work), and to see how Gurdjieff, and for that matter many other New Age figures, is trying to bypass the issues of the categorical imperative. Lucky for him, the general public is too ignorant to realize how they are being manipulated, and simply gape at the wonders of the magicians as these steal attention from the blatant lie that fronts the whole game.
No ‘consciousness’ doesn’t override ethics.
