I’m really not sure what Kant was up to as a philosopher, but as an aphorist I find him very useful. Allow me to paraphrase one of Kant’s aphorisms and lay no further claim to knowledge of his philosophy:
You should act in such a way that if your actions were to become universal laws for the actions of all people, you would be satisfied.
It’s true that a good idea transcends history; good ideas will be thought again. But to transcend history is to court irrelevance, and a good idea is meaningful insofar as it enters history right down to the blood and bone. I’m not enough of a historian to know where the categorical imperative fit in Kant’s time, and I’m not enough of a philosopher to blame my own inferences on his discourse. But I will say that now, right here in the marrow of history, it’s time to consider whether we can live with ourselves or not.
It’s hard to even think about what it would be like if our actions established the rules that other people had to obey. For my part, I can barely get through the Ten Commandments before I want to reserve some inalienable right for myself alone. Stare long enough at the categorical imperative and you will have to admit that you can dish it out, but you can’t take it. I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but the imperative is a powerful one: it confronts your soul upon consideration, and it does not even need to be real.
Just as the Ten Commandments remind us that God’s laws cannot be kept by human beings, so the categorical imperative makes us realize that we can’t make our own universal laws, either. Unlike the commandments, however, the imperative does not offer a savior—unless it begs one. In any event, perhaps it is time, again, to look at whether we would ever want to live in a world where the privileges we reserve for ourselves became the inalienable rights of everyone else. Think about it for a while and history does indeed get in the way of a good idea. Because it’s in history where we find that there just isn’t enough privilege to go around, which means that it’s impossible to live up to our own good ideas.
Go a day in such a way that your ways are worthy of universal law. At the end of the day, whether you make it or fail, you will have only scratched the surface of your new imperative. Now, begin to imagine the world where other people make the laws for you. This is when it starts to get funky. These people, they don’t know the real you—your hopes, your dreams, your reasons and excuses. All they know is what they see, and most of them don’t even see you. They see the spot on the map where you are, and you will be granted no more depth of observation than that spot.
If you’re fortunate, all those people will already see things your way: When your actions become universal laws, your best bet is to be nice. But what if some of those people are willing to rumble, regardless, meaning that they’re not afraid of what gets done unto them? All it would take is one person who feels she’s been robbed and doesn’t mind a fight.
The world, of course, has billions of people who feel they’ve been robbed. Of those billions, there are millions who are not afraid of a fight. Obviously, therefore, Kant’s categorical imperative is categorically impossible. What makes universal human law impossible is actual human law. It is actual human law that holds millions of people at bay. And these people will not be satisfied just to play nice, because they have nothing nice to play with and nothing to lose. So if the categorical imperative is impossible to realize, it’s still worth wondering if that means you’re lucky. I know I am.
2 comments:
Regarding universal approaches of any kind, this reminds me of a study I was reading that attempted to profile differences between conservatives and liberals. Without going into what their bias was, or whether this was an accurate snapshot of political differences, I did see some points raised that certainly apply to people I've known. The study suggested that conservatives are, for lack of a better word, "bothered" by shades of gray and attempt to classify life in absolutes. Liberals of course state the shades of gray as they see it. This leads the former to think the latter is wishy-washy, and the latter to think the former is simplistic.
Now I wouldn't exactly call this a novel idea, but it did get me thinking along the lines of how people deal with absolutes, and the effect that has on their lives.
The people I have seen that have the most trouble with technical problems, (my own area of familiarity), are people that only seek specific answers to specific questions, and eschew study of non-specific patterns as being, at best, a luxury they don't have time for. I have often wondered if these same people struggled with algebra, and if there is some critical pearl of wisdom about the notion of a variable that they missed, and continue to pay for. When given a machine designed to reduce labor by adhering to patterns, they struggle perpetually to give it direct commands for each situation, re-inventing wheel after wheel.
On the other end of the spectrum, most of us have been in situations where we only cared about one specific result, above all else, and efficiency be damned. The "if I live through this I'll worry about it then" approach.
In a calm moment I find absolutes to be an imaginary tool, a means to an end. I will attempt to solve this problem using this set of rules, but I keep failing, I'm going to assume the rules are a bad match and make some changes. Logically there is no way I can balance the whole equation of life and unify my understanding of physics, music, my childhood, and the restrooms at the mall. There are a few gaps, I'm afraid, and because of that I can't promise that I won't move some of the jigsaw puzzle pieces around later if they seem to be in the wrong place.
Now, something like what I just said might enrage even myself on a bad day. A little bit of roadrage is quick to remind me that clearly I still DO think in absolutes at times, as evidenced by any situation where I feel it is my inalienable right to bludgeon another human being with a tire iron.
I think to be fair to us as humans, we're damned if we do, and damned if we don't with universal absolutes. Clearly there is no way a person can empirically possess all the knowledge that is knowable about anything, and thus eliminate that last kernel of doubt from any statement. (Quarks and string theory, anyone?) On the other hand, the very definition of being alive requires us to react to our environment, which in turn forces us somehow choose one decision over another. We have to guess, we have to have opinions of some kind about everything, because even inaction is a course of action. And yet, it is impossible to have complete information by which to evaluate even the smallest of our decisions.
I am left really only with my own nebulous desire to love and be loved, although every aspect of how to actually do that seems to be in a constant state of review.
And speaking of absolutes, Mr. Gollum, the desire to love and be loved may be as close as we get. In any event, it's among the best rules of thumb that many, many human actions can be measured on the LABL scale.
Also, it's interesting to consider, as you imply, that one of the functions of political discourse is to provide a home for human temperaments. Temperaments that may be as common and limited as the grayscale, but whose irreconcilable volatility must be contained in order to sustain society. How do our politics pacify our animal natures?
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