A Revolution in Thinking

I laughed early on in Marcus Willaschek’s Kant: A Revolution in Thinking, that the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was known for his highly readable texts. It brought me back to being and young and eager philosophy major at Michigan State University, Existentialism class, where one of the books assigned was Kant’s A Critique of Pure Reason. I attempted to read it, and though the words were (translated) in English, and the sentences were grammatically correct, I couldn’t understand what was going on. I soon changed to being a dumb English major, so I could just read novels.

I only felt smart enough to read books about Kant after that. Or, maybe just one book, the Kant For Beginners graphic novel. Somehow Peter Lewis’ translation of Willaschek’s Kant caught my eye high up on the new nonfiction shelf at Barnes & Nobles and I pulled it down to test my intelligence after all these years. Result: I understand a lot more about Kant, thanks to Willaschek’s (and Lewis’) accessible style. Mostly one major idea of Kant’s is dealt with per chapter, with biographical details about what was going on in Kant’s life at the time he developed them.

One of those ideas, which I had no idea about, and even sounds “frou-frou” peace-loving hippie-ish, is Kant’s concern/desire/proposal for world peace, in one of his later books, Toward a Perpetual Peace. Kant lays out a system for countries to live with each other, and stop having wars, which is to have economic treaties, including among groups of countries. Willaschek does a great job here, making the argument that while United Nations and European Union weren’t originally Kant’s, that his thinking was crucial in their development.

Note: I’m not sure whether Kant would be happy with what the EU’s become, in which Germany seems to control the money and economies of all the smaller member states. To him, it seems, any members of such treaties would and should be equals. He wouldn’t have agreed with an organization like NATO, which is a military alliance, not economic, and intended to exclude certain countries.

And if world peace sounds pie-in-the-sky, another of Kant’s ideas Willaschek brings up is that an idea shouldn’t be abandoned if it seems unrealistic. For Kant, this was the “primacy of practice over theory.” That is, acting is more important than thinking of ideal results. And if there was even a trace of possibility, if one could at least inch towards the ideal, it’s worth the effort. If one can make the world just a little better, do it. Always towards. Willaschek summarizes:

“Even though it is theoretically impossible to predict with any certainty that perpetual peace will be realized, and even if that outcome seems improbable, it is the task of politics to continually work toward this goal. Perhaps we will never fully attain it, but at least we can always get closer to it.”

If only we had politicians who thought this way. But, according to Willaschek, Kant didn’t have much good to say about politicians:

According to a famous dictum of Kant’s, humankind is fashioned from ‘crooked wood,’ from which ‘nothing entirely straight can be fabricated.’ Kant’s observations about people, their motives and aims, the honesty of their pronouncements, and the reliability of their self-evaluation are characterized by a deep skepticism. Humans are by nature morally corrupt egotists, who are adept at fooling themselves and others about their own selfish motives. They are inclined to misuse political institutions to their own advantage. States and politicians are primarily interested in expanding their power and not in the welfare of their citizens or peaceful cooperation. The human tendency to break treaties and commit acts of violence stands in opposition to the rule of law and peace. Kant is therefore a political realist who has no illusions about humankind’s moral and social qualities.

The one main idea Kant’s known for is his Categorical Imperative, his attempt, through Reason, to come up with an ethical guideline for everyone. Those previous sources translated and/or interpreted the Categorical Imperative as a double negative of the Golden Rule (which I’m paraphrasing here): “Don’t do anything to anybody which you wouldn’t want anyone else to do to you.” Which is fine. But Willaschek (and, again, translator Peter Lewis) offers a different  more workable translation, without any ‘don’t’s’:

Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.

Note that Kant’s not saying to obey the law. Laws can be wrong. Laws are written by the people in power. If you want to drink alcohol, do so if you think it should be something everyone (or, at least adults) could do. And not just rich people. I like this translation because it makes me think about what positive acts I could make, acts that if everyone did them, the world might be a better place. It makes me feel responsible for deciding what’s right. It also makes me think that those other translations of the Categorical Imperative weren’t really accurate. Translations matters a lot. Maybe Peter Lewis would consider a new translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason! That’s the only book by Kant that’s available, if at all, in the philosophy sections of regular bookstores. I understand the general idea—more so after reading Kant: A Revolution in Thinking— that Kant thought that an explanation of the physical and mental (and spiritual) worlds could be figured through logic, through the human capacity for reason. No God needed. Also, that this book was the prelude to a Critique of Practical Reason, in which Kant used reason to develop a moral (as in society) and ethical (as in the individual) way of living life.

That’s the idea that originally made me and many others want to be a philosophy majors: how to live our lives, in a good, ethical manner. And that we want to figure it out for ourselves, not be told by a religion how to behave (though that may be enough for some). Again, no God needed. Though to be clear: Kant didn’t rule out God, though he wasn’t ever a churchgoer.

Recommending a half-explanation/half-biography about an old white man from Germany might be a hard sell. But Willaschek makes a good case for why Kant’s still relevant today, both on personal practical level, and political level.

Kant was writing during the Enlightenment, the great revolution of Reason in western thinking and culture. But the Enlightenment was also the peak of our most modern slave trade. And, for most of his life, Kant seems to have thought, like most everyone, that whites were the superior race. But—importantly—Willaschek shows how Kant based all this philosophy on the idea that all humans should be treated with dignity. At first Kant took his own idea to mean just to Europeans, but later Kant came out in in favor of all human beings being worthy of dignity, and against slavery. Kant was convinced of the humanity of all, through his own philosophical system. Reason led him to compassion.