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Volume 32:

Literary and Philosophical Essays (full text)

Leaving aside the novelists, dramatists and poets -- that is, taking only the non-fiction writers -- I've probably spent more time reading Immanuel Kant than I have any other author in the Shelf. For the past decade, I've returned to him every few months as a kind of guilty pleasure. Have I read most of his work? Well, no. Actually, I've mostly read about the first hundred pages of his Critique of Pure Reason. If this doesn't seem like a lot, I should explain that I've read those pages about two dozen times. Why do I keep reading the same pages over again? Because I still don't understand them.

Every time I read Kant, I have a familiar experience. For pages at a time I feel the unique rush that comes with encountering difficult and exciting ideas. Kant and I walk along together on fairly solid ground. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, that ground turns a little shaky beneath me; now I'm only grasping the gist of his ideas. This still offers a heady excitement. But with Kant, the gist is never enough. All at once, I take what seems like a safe enough step and find that I've walked off the cliff. I'm completely lost now. On page 10. So I turn back a few pages, to the last sentence I'm sure I understood, and I start the process over again. In this way, I struggle along until my stamina runs out. Then I put the book back on the shelf for a few months.

Kant's Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, which is included in this volume, didn't cause me quite so much trouble, but it caused me enough. Here is how the essay begins:

Ancient Greek philosophy was divided into three sciences: Physics, Ethics, and Logic. This division is perfectly suitable to the nature of the thing, and the only improvement that can be made in it is to add the principle on which it is based, so that we may both satisfy ourselves of its completeness, and also be able to determine correctly the necessary subdivisions.

All rational knowledge is either material or formal: the former considers some object, the latter is concerned only with the form of the understanding and of the reason itself, and with the universal laws of thought in general without distinction of its objects. Formal philosophy is called Logic. Material philosophy, however, which has to do with determinate objects and the laws to which they are subject, is again two-fold; for these laws are either laws of nature or of freedom. The science of the former is Physics, that of the latter, Ethics; they are also called natural philosophy and moral philosophy respectively.

This is all fairly straightforward. A reader unfamiliar with Kant may puzzle a moment over this distinction between nature and freedom, but all the rest makes perfect sense, and it's reasonable to assume that he'll explain his use of these terms. In the mean time, we're grateful that he's started at the very beginning and given us a few definitions to work with. Now here he is towards the end of the essay:

The will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings in so far as they are rational, and freedom would be this property of such causality that it can be efficient, independently on foreign causes determining it; just as physical necessity is the property that the causality of all irrational beings has of being determined to activity by the influence of foreign causes.

It takes one -- at least, it takes me -- a little while to figure out what the hell we're talking about here. After a few readings, I understood that we were being given the distinction between freedom and nature that we'd been hoping for earlier. Roughly speaking, freedom is the ability to act according to one's rational will without the determining influence of irrational forces like instinct and the physical limits of nature. Notice how the terms break down at the hands of paraphrasis. Kant never speaks roughly, and his sentences can't be simplified without losing part of his meaning. But it's important to try to simplify them, because eventually you're going to wind up face to face with something like, Every rational being reckons himself qua intelligence as belonging to the world of understanding, and it is simply as an efficient cause belonging to that world that he calls his causality a will. At which point, good luck.

I'm belaboring all of this because reading Kant last week brought me for the first time this year to the question of difficulty. Do I really mean to say that it was the first difficult reading I've encountered in the entire Shelf? Well, sort of. There have been a few works -- John Woolman's Journals come to mind -- that I found tedious. Others -- like much of the out-dated science writing -- felt irrelevant and therefore uninteresting. Lastly, some works that would easily interest a different reader -- say, Darwin talking about rocks -- simply didn't do a lot for me personally.

But with Kant I'm talking about something else. I don't find him irrelevant or boring. The questions with which he centrally concerned himself -- What is the proper basis for morality? What are the limits of human knowledge? -- are deeply important to me. And I find his treatment of these questions exhilarating, which is why I keep trying to read him. But his answers are difficult. And even if they could be simplified, Kant wouldn't be the one to do it.

All of which interests me because I've never been a fan of the Take your medicine school of the literary canon. I don't like to think of any book as a monument to be scaled. If you'd rather watch House than read Homer, then you should watch it and not worry about it. Even as I've given myself this year of assigned reading, it's been nice to occassionally remind myself which of these books I could just as easily throw across the room without being any worse off. But when I talk about Kant, I start to sound like a culture warrior. These ideas are important, I hear myself squealing, and they won't fit between the commercial breaks!

Recently, the stakes have been raised a bit in this old argument about the easy pleasures of mass media. It's no longer just that the classics are better for us. Television is the opiate of the people. Al Gore, for one, seems to think that it's Britney's fault that we're in Iraq. You might not like turning off American Idol, he says, but you owe it the world. It's an especially tempting argument to fall into when reading Kant, because he stressed that truly moral acts are committed not out of interest or preference but purely out of duty. Still, for my part, I know that I keep going back to Kant because I enjoy reading him, and that the difficulty is part of what I enjoy, and that -- in any other year -- this book would have gone back on the shelf the moment that enjoyment stopped.


--CRB, September 25, 2007

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