By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Kant Get Enough
I can’t “get” Kant. The German Immanuel Kant is considered one of the central figures of the Enlightenment. But I wish he’d enlighten me.
In his 1781 “Critique of Pure Reason” Kant contends space and time are mere “forms of intuition” that structure all experience, while the objects of experience are just “appearances.” The nature of things as they are in themselves can’t be known to us.
It’s a rare genius who needs more than 800 pages to tell us what we know.
Wait, there’s more. Since Kant contends man can never know things we most want to know — about God, free will, the true nature of reality, who shot J.R. … — he was dubbed the All-Crushing Kant, leaving no standard dogma standing.
Still, his “categorical imperative” posits people are naturally endowed with the ability and obligation towards right reason and right acting. Doing so isn’t moral, just rational.
To understand anything — science, justice, freedom, God — we first have to understand ourselves. Which must be why so few do.
As for himself, Kant, the son of a poor saddle-maker, had to scramble. He made his living lecturing at the University of Königsberg on logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, physical geography, mineralogy, mechanics, general and practical philosophy, ethics, anthropology, natural law, natural theology and pedagogy. Not that he was an authority on any of them; what mattered was the school paid.
Kant was boring in other ways too. Neighbors set their watches by his daily walks. He rarely left Königsberg, never married, had a love affair or even sexual encounter. What an influence.
As I sipped my Blatz at the Pullman Tavern disturbed by all of this, Zeke the Bartender asked, “Can you tell me what’s troubling you?”
“I. Kant,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Immanuel Kant.”
“Why can’t he? Wasn’t he a genius?”
“Listen,” I said, “ever try living as though your every act were to become a universal law?”
“Why should I?”
“Because reason and freedom, Kant said, offer a better foundation for human life than authority and tradition. They can supply us with a sterner morality, a more just politics and even a more peaceful international order.”
“Look how well that’s working,” Zeke said, looking out on his clientele.
“Putting the human at the center of our thought is an act of faith in our ability to live according to reason,” I went on, ignoring him. “All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”
“What about that guy at the next table?”
“Pete!” I cried. Sure enough, Pete Hegseth was mulling wine with crushed ICE in it.
“People don’t understand,” the War Secretary lamented. “Just because we killed two survivors of a boat we bombed in the Caribbean Sea doesn’t mean it was a war crime.”
“They were narcos and foreigners,” ICE head Todd Lyons added. “Beasts! Animals!”
“He who is cruel to animals,” I went on quoting Kant, “becomes hard also in his dealings with men.”
“You’re nuts,” Pete said. “My wife and I love and rescue animals. Men I’m less sure of.”
“We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals,” I went on.
In walked a group of PETA protestors. “There he is!” shouted Zoe Rosenberg, pointing not at Pete nor Todd, but me. “The octopus thrower! I say ice him!”
Lyons arrested me. “On what grounds?” I asked. “I never said I threw octopi at Red Wings games, only wrote other people do it.”
“On grounds you’re an idiot,” he answered.
“Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage,” I countered.
“That does it!” Pete said. “None of you get Kant. You’re as dumb as that racoon who the day after Thanksgiving broke into a Virginia ABC liquor store, left a trail of broken spirit bottle and was found passed out drunk on the bathroom floor.”
“Doesn’t sound like a bad idea,” Pete said.
“I hope the raccoon is OK,” said Zoe.
“How about the poor store owner?” Zeke asked.
“To be is to do. That’s what Kant would have said,” I said.
