I kant do it

I begin this with the caveat that what I write may be an easy dig. As I said in class last week, I am trying to suspend my disbelief and place myself with a sense of historical grounding the project these Enlightenment thinkers are undertaking. Unfortunately it’s just getting harder and harder. Hopefully in class we can illuminate it (yeah, I skipped over it the “enlighten it” joke).

It’s true. I can’t take off my contemporary lenses of the postcolonial and critical race ideas that are totally anachronistic to Kant’s time. Still. I cannot help but notice how these formulations seem to be in the fabric of many of these contemporary atrocities.

For example, Kant on valorizing the warrior, demanding that he demonstrate that “his mind cannot be subdued by danger…Even war has something sublime about it if it is carried on in an orderly way and with respect for the sanctity of the citizens’ rights. At the same time it makes the way of thinking of a people that carries it on in this way all the more sublime about it if it is carried on in this way all the more sublime in proportion to the number of dangers in the face of which it courageously stood its ground. A prolonged peace, on the other hand, tends to make prevalent a mere[ly] commercial spirit, and along with it base selfishness, cowardice, and softness, and to debase the way of thinking of that people.”

Perhaps it is because this is where my brain is, but I can’t help reading this and thinking of the logic embedded in the U.S. rhetoric around the War on Terror – that war makes us great, leads us to our greatest selves, our highest achievement as humans – that when we are not warlike we are soft, we are cowardly, we are not thinking at our highest capacity. This may sound like a completely unfair parallel, but that kind of thinking is the logical conclusion of the roots Kant is laying out here.

Another moment here:

“It is a fact that what is called sublime by us, having been prepared through culture, comes across as merely repellent to a person who is uncultured and lacking the development of moral ideas.”

This is a formulation for an logic of linear progression of the development of culture, that the characteristics of such a linearly – developed culture are natural and inherent to humanity, and that all people and communities must necessarily be measured to this stringent scale.

My point is simply this this: what is the ethical value of framing such contingencies, unchecked?

The position from which such statements could possibly be made seems to be encapsulated in Kant’s description of the perfect position from which to conceive of the sublime (while beholding the beauty of a terrible storm over the ocean): “Compared to the might of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place.” The terrible is better conceived when you are safely removed from it.  It may be enough to remember that Kant himself never left East Prussia. But the way in which Kant formulates this description is, for me, perfectly emblematic of the worst ideas pervading about the nature of academics and academia.  We can sit safely aside, bracketed out from how our ideas enter the world, we can more easily consider the grandeur and terror from afar, abstractly, objectively. But down what road does such a removed position leave us?

Someone please redirect me. I recognize that I am reacting to this out of particular historical moment, just as Kant was writing it. I am trying not to be myopic about this…but it is difficult for me to see anything but the fallout of the logical conclusions instigated by Kant’s formulations here.