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.
