Better call Kant
For reason in revolt now thunders At last ends the age of Kant. – The Internationale (overheard)
What Checkers was to Nixon, Immanuel Kant is to the bourgeoisie: the ace-in-the-hole, the Saul Goodman of Philosophy.
With Kant around there’s no problem that can be solved. Problem solved.
Today is Kant’s 300th birthday, but it’s been Kant’s birthday since the closing days of the French Revolution, when a band of academic influencers called on the philosophical fixer from Königsberg:
“Hoping to lower the political temperature of an overheated country, the Directory revived… the officially sponsored academic culture. […] Introducing Kantian philosophy, with its appropriate tone of sober rationality, was part of this project. […] Pacific universal republicanism seemed to the leaders of the Directory to furnish just the philosophical ideal that could end the seemingly interminable radicalization of the Revolution.”1
To those itching to seem a little bit enlightened but not beyond the bounds of the respectable, Kant was the answer. The cosplay was the Abbé Sieyès, one of those enlightened liberals put into positions of influence by the Revolution, and who spent much of their energy working behind the scenes to damn the democratic torrent they themselves had helped unleash. Sieyès would eventually bring in Bonaparte on Eighteenth Brumaire to put an end to revolutionary “anarchy.”
German revolutionaries thought of Sieyès as a Kantian who didn’t know he was a Kantian but the same could be said of Kant, who thought his life ambition was to reconcile two irreconciliables, the workings of pure mind (inexplicably confined to reason) and the workings of pure perception, unaccountably associated with affect, and affect alone. Ferdinand Alquié, Kant’s French editor and a man who understood Kant better than Kant understood himself, singles out an early passage in which Kant argues that you should ignore the needs and pains of individuals because it’s unfair to all the other individuals who suffer, and whose suffering hasn’t yet been properly figured out, either: if I gave you sympathy then I’d have to give everybody sympathy, and then where would we be? And besides: focusing on one suffering individual only makes you wanna cry, and what’s the use of that? “Kant is well on his way to the discovery of Practical Reason” [« Kant est donc bien sur la voie de la découverte de la raison pratique. » ]2
As Goethe said in another context,
“You can see once you separate the two and ask this way, you can argue back and forth a hundred years.”
„Du siehst daß wenn man die beiden trennt und so fragt, man hundert Jahre hinüber und herüber reden kann.“3
That’s why Kant’s a hit with politicians and academics: you can postpone solutions ‘til the chickens come home to roost.
In the end, none of this worked out for Kant himself, whose last words, were: “The feeling [Gefühl] for being human hasn’t left me yet.”
Was it a boast, or a regret? To illustrate, a story out of Sholem Aleichem: The poor man goes to the rich man’s house to beg for help. He’s brought into the rich man’s study and starts on his tale of woe. Tears roll down the rich man’s cheeks; the rich man calls his butler and says, “Throw this man out before he breaks my heart!”
Problem solved.
WOID XXIII-50
April 22, 2024
Jan Ellen Goldstein, The Post-revolutionary Self. Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850 (Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 126.
Introduction, Observations sur le sentiment du beau et du sublime, in Emmanuel Kant, Oeuvres philosophiques. I. Des premiers écrits à la Critique de la raison pure, Ferdinand Alquié, ed. (Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1980), p. 441.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, „22 September 1786,“ Tagebuch der Italienischen Reise, in Sämtliche Werke Vol. 3.1, ed. Norbert Miller and Hartmut Reinhardt (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1985), p. 76.