II KonigsbergI ConfidentialCD

C 5wSiMON BLACKBURN

Kant: A Biographyby Manfred Kuehn(Cambridge University Press, 544 pp., $34.95)

TI HERE IS A scene in the film' Superman III in which LoreleiAmbrosia, the blonde bomb-shell, is secretly reading theCritique of Pure Reason. "But

how can he say that pure categories haveno objective meaning in transcendentallogic? What about synthetic unity?" shesqueaks, before hurriedly hiding the bookand picking up a trashy magazine as hergangster boss enters. The director's choiceof book was perfect: no other single workcould be so improbable, and so easily rec-ognizable as such by the audience. Youmight just take Bertrand Russell on abeach holiday, as I once did; but Kant,never. (Incidentally, although she has notquite mastered the jargon, Lorelei's ques-tion is a good one.)

Kant is notorious not only for opacityand difficult̂ ', but also for having livedabout the most unpromising life imagin-able for a biographer. He spent it entirelywithin a few miles of the desolate coastaltown of Konigsberg, or Kaliningrad, innortheast Prussia. He never travelled. Inall his life he never saw a mountain andnever heard a decent orchestra. He nevermarried. Once he met a "beautiful andwell brought up widow from somewhereelse," but by the time he had calculatedincome and expenses, she had marriedsomeone else. Another girl, from West-phalia, also struck his fancy, but he wasstill thinking about making an offer whenshe crossed the border out of Prussia.Kant almost certainly never had any sex-ual relations, and one hopes for his ownpeace of mind that this was so, since heheld that sex outside marriage dishonorshuman nature, and "exposes mankind tothe danger of equalit\- with the beasts."

Kant's life, like that of a monk, was reg-ular to the point of caricature. The famil-iar stor>' that the townspeople could set

SIMON BLACKBURN is professor ofphilosophy at the University of Cam-bridge. His most recent book is BeingGood (Oxford University Press).

their clocks by the time at wbich he tookhis afternoon walk had at least some truthin it. The University of Konigsberg washis monastery. There were no heroics:when, in 1794, he fell afoul of the theolog-ical censors appointed by the Rosicrucianbigot Frederick William II, he gave in andpromised not to do it again. He lectured,wrote, declined, and died a safe universityman.

Not only are the externals unpromising,but they seem perfectly to express theinner man. Kant was small, and self-controlled, and unhealthy. He was pre-occupied with the state of his bowels, andhe seems to have devoted a lot of quitepublic attention to what Hamann calledhis "evacuations a posteriori." He found itdifficult to laugh. The Prussian virtues ofdiscipline, efficiency, thrift, hard work,and obedience are all canonized in his lifeand in his writings. Surprisingly, it seemsto have been not a Prussian but an Eng-lishman, a man called Green, who led theyoung Kant into these rigorous pathways.It was Green, a merchant and a closefriend, who impressed Kant with thevirtues of living according to uncompro-mising rules or maxims, and before Kantit was Green by whose doings the towns-people set their clocks.

YET IN THIS exhaustive andfascinating biography, the distin-guished German scholar Manfred

Kuehn struggles to convince us that thebloodless, legalistic Kant is mainly a m\th.For Kuehn, neither Kant nor his frontiertown is half as bleak as the conventionalpicture has portrayed them. Konigsberg,after all, was the tirst capital of Prussia,where Frederick the Great's grandfatherhad proclaimed himself king in 1701.(Prussia's third centenar}' is a matter ofsomewhat controversial celebration inGermany this year.) It was a proud cos-mopolitan city in which Russian and Eng-lish businessmen rubbed shoulders withPrussian academics and nobles.

Kuehn introduces us to a long list of

more or less forgotten academics anddivines, merchants and minor landown-ers, whose lives revolved around the uni-versity. In his account, Kant was in thethick of a rich social and intellectual life.Anthony Quinton once wrote that thetrouble with Kant is that "he is a wildand intellectually irresponsible arguer.Any innate leaning that way must havebeen enhanced by the intellectual isola-tion of Konigsberg, which preserved himfrom serious criticism." But Kuehn willhave none of this, and the long list ofKant's academic wrangles certainly rebutsthe charge that he was insulated from seri-ous criticism.

Not only was Konigsberg a kind ofAthens of the Baltic, but this Kant, too, ishardly the cold automaton of legend. Inhis youth he played billiards well enoughto be something of a hustler; and whentargets refused to play with him, he turnedto cards as a supplementary' source ofincome. With his increasing respectabilitythese adventures had to cease, but Kantwas not immune to temptation, even afterhe had adopted one of his own iron-cladrules or maxims of conduct. So, emulatingGreen, he gave himself the rule of just onepipe of tobacco a day, but friends noticedthat as the years went by the pipe got big-ger. He seems to have been an enthusiasticguest and host, seldom dining alone,prone to talk about gossip and politicsrather than matters intellectual, and not atall averse to a moderate quantity of wine.

Inevitably, for someone of a dour Pietistbackground, all this rioting gave rise tosome serious soul-searching. In the earlyLectures on Ethics gluttony comes in forspecial criticism—bestial, again; and inthe more humanistic late work The Meta-physics of Morals Kant still tells us thatstuffing oneself with food incapacitates aperson "for actions that would require himto use his powers with skill and determi-nation." It is obvious that putting oneselfin such a state violates one's duty to one-self. Fortunately all is not quite lost:

Although a banquet is a formal invitationto excess in both food and drink, there isstill something in it that aims at a moralend, beyond mere physical well-being: itbrings a number of people together for along time to converse with one another.And yet tbe very number of guests (if, asChesterfield says, it exceeds tbe numberof the muses) allows for only a little con-versation ... and so tbe arrangement is atvariance with tbat end, wbile tbe banquetremains a temptation to sometbingimmoral How far does one's moralautborization to accept tbese invitationsto intemperance e.xtend?

With such a question buzzing in his

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mind, one would hardly expect Kant tohave been the life of the party. Yet "jest,wit and caprice were in his command,"raves (the verb is Kuehn's) the youngerJohann Gottfried Herder, hastening toadd, "but always at the right time, so thateveryone laughed," slightly spoiling theeffect. Kant apparently thought ver>'highly of Fielding's romp Tom Jones. Onecannot imagine that he thought as highlyof Joseph Andrews, whose ParsonAdams illustrates Fielding's unswerv-ing devotion to simple good nature,contrasted with the cold qualities ofrectitude and "abstract contemplationon the beauty of virtue."

Kant would have remained a fairlyminor figure in the history ofphilosophy had it not been for onedecade of thought and one decadeof publication. In 1770, upon be-coming professor of logic and meta-physics, he delivered his InauguralDissertation, O71 the Form, and Princi-ples of the Sensible World. Here, forthe first time, some famous doctrinesof the "critical philosophy" come intoview. Kant insists on a number ofsharp divisions. He separates con-cepts and intuitions, or intellect andsensation. He separates "things inthemselves" from "things as they arefor us," or, in other words, he distin-guishes the noumenal from thephenomenal. He sees space and timeas the forms of our sensibility, im-posed on the noumenal world asa condition of our experience of it. Buthe also leaves room for a genuine"metaphysics," or science of the worldas it is in itself, knowable through thcpure principles of the understanding.

There was a fatal flaw lurking inall of this. The key to metaphysicswould need to be causation: it isbecause the noumenal causes theworld as we apprehend it that it is apossible object of knowledge. Thirtyyears previously, however, Hume hadalready blocked the road to any purelyrational knowledge of what causeswhat In Prussia, Hertz and Hamannsoon brought Hume's criticism ofspeculative reasoning about causationto Kants attention: it now seemedthat causation itself had to be seen asthe work of the mind, or as a form of sen-sibility. Kant was later to say that it wasHume who "first interrupted my dogmaticslumbers." It took a decade for him tocome to tenns with the problem thatHume had left him.

The result was the eight hundred andfifty-six pages of the Critique of Pure Rea-.Hon, published in 1781, when Kant wasfifty-seven years old. The central doctrineof this extraordinary work is the interde-

pendence of intellectual cognition andexperience: "Thoughts without contentare empt>, intuitions without concepts areblind." It takes both conceptual ability andits application in experience to generateintelligible thought. It follows that thepure metaphysics that Kant had previ-ously imagined, his reasoning beyond thelimits of experience, could have beennothing but an illusion.

Richard Lindner," Two things fill the mind withever new and increasing admiration and awe, theoftener and more steadily we refiect on them: thestarry heavens above and the moral law within.'

Immanuel Kant, Critigue of PracticalReason, 1788," 1951

'I

To be sure, armchair or a priori reason-ing is possible—but not about tbe world asit is in itself. Such reasoning concems onlythe world as it appears to us. When weattempt to reason beyond this, wanting toknow about the nature of the soul, or theworld as a whole, or the existence of God,reason falls into contradiction, and itsexercise is doomed to failure. As its nameimplies, the Ciitique of Pure Reason isfundamentally a skeptical work, and this

is how it was seen by its contemporaries.Kant became famous as the Alleszer-mabner, or all-crushing skeptic and eriticof rational theology and metaphysics.Indeed, contemporar>' opinion tended toassimilate Kant not only to Hume, buteven to the notorious idealist Berkeley—a charge with some justice to it, but onethat particularly outraged Kant himself.

In the contemporary world, as Kuehnobserves, Kant is more commonlyseen as an opponent of skepticism,more interested in the scope of ourknowledge than in its limits. Suchare the revolutions of philosophicalinterpretation. This positive side iscertainly there, but it is only part ofthe picture, since for Kant himselfthe point of the critical philosophylay elsewhere entirely. It lay in itsreligious and moral implications.Throughout the 1780s, Kant wrotethe works on moral and religiousthemes that stand alongside the Cri-tique as his great legacy to philosophy.Groundwork of the Metaphysics ofMorals appeared in 1784; and by1790 there were two more critiques,as well as one book expounding hissystem in a more accessible form{Prolegomena to Any Future Meta-physics) and the strange Metaphysi-cal Foundations of Natural Science,which sought to place Newtonianphysics on a pure, a priori footing.

Even if Kant's life was speckledwith outbreaks of conviviality, it isdifficult to say the same for his un-compromising, law-intoxicated moral

_, philosophy. Kant's moral psychologyp is one in which duty is forever at war^ with blind and slavish inclination,^ which itself is always a species of self-I love. Emotions and desires are the?• enemy. You score moral points only5 when duty wins over them, and just£ because it is duty. In most of Kant's§ moral writings, in fact, the less you"- care about other things and other

people, the better.Bliss, for Kant, is equated with com-

plete independence from any incli-nations or needs, including feelingsof compassion and sympathy withothers. But since as human beings weare unlucky enough not to have this

freedom, we must be on the alert to slapour feelings down. We gain moral creditonly when we do so. Hence Schiller'sfamous jibe: "I must try to hate my friendsso that my doing them good, which nowI gladly do, will acquire moral worth."Kant's ideal, more accurately, is tbat youshould try to be apathetic about yourfriends, and about everything else. Onlythen does real freedom, or real "auton-omy," hold sway. Kant would not have

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been a happy reader of books extollingemotional intelligence.

Norisalifeofdutyabedof roses. As allstudents of philosophy learn, the duty oftruthfiilness extends for Kant to tellingthe mad axman where your children aresleeping (if he asks, that is, and makes youanswer). There is no room to wTiggle. Youcannot argue that the axman has no rightto the tmth. That just means that you dohim no injustice by lying. But you stillinflict a wrong upon humanity, and violatea sacred command of reason. In Kant'saccount of morality, it is quite easy towrong humanity. Not only the bestialitiesof gluttony and misdirected sex, but alsomore principled stands such as rebellionagainst a government, wrong humanity,no matter how unjust, arbitrary, usurping,or plain evil the government may be. It canbe so grim doing your duty that we areforced to postulate a life after death wherehappiness and righteousness get back intoalignment. The critical philosophy com-pletely destroys any project of rationaltheology, but then our needs are supposedto step in and fill the gap. We may not bepermitted to lie, but we are permitted thewishful thinking of eschatology.

I N SPITE OF such unpromising doc-trines, Kant is undoubtedly the mostinfluential moral and political phil-

osopher of modem times. At present heprobably has more, and more crusading,defenders among professional moral andpolitical philosophers than ever before.He is a foil to "utilitarianism," which isequated in many minds with a fearsomesocial engineering that puts the individualfiniily at the service ofthe collective. Bet-ter still, he directs attention away fVomany very demanding educational needs.According to the Greek tradition, virtue israre and requires the most carefi.il cultiva-tion and practice; and democracy requiresvirtuous citizens. For Kant, by contrast,people have the possibility of autonomy,or freedom, and above all they deserverespect, just like that. They do not have towork to earn respect. And however dim ordumb they may be, democratic republi-canism is the right form of government.

Kuehn shows in detail how theseviews developed. Just as vvith the criti-cal philosophy, there was a revolution inKant's thinking. As well as having a tastefor Henry Fielding, Kant grew up accept-ing the ethical views of Frances Hutch-eson, the great eighteenth-century Scot-tish moral philosopher. Hutcheson, whocoined the phrase "the greatest happinessof the greatest number," founded moral-ity on a "moral sense" or sentiment of im-partial benevolence toward humanity.Kant was apparently disabused of thisapproach by reading Rousseau. He tells

us about it:

1 ani an inquirer by inclination. I feela consuming thirst for knowledge, theunrest which goes with the desire toprogress in it, and satisfaction at everyadvance in it. There was a time when Ibelieved this constituted the honor ofhumanity, and I despised the people,who know nothing, Rousseau set meright about this. This binding prejudicedisappeared. 1 learned to honor human-ity, and I would find myself more uselessthan the common laborer if I did notbelieve that tbis attitude of mine cangive worth to all others in establishingthe rights of humanity.

The trouble with benevolence, Kantcame to feel, is that it appeals to our feel-ings. But Kant wants a moral order inwhich we do not just happen to concernourselves for others. We are under a dutyto each other: our equal dignity demandstheir respect, and "what properly belongsto me must not be accorded me as some-thing I beg for." The problem with privatebenevolence, as with public charity, is thatit treats its objects as pitiable, as beggars,and this is a way of refusing to recognizetheir rights. It conceals our own injustice.The beggar is to be submissive and grate-fiil; the benefactor is to be gracious andgenerous. But a person with rights shouldnot have to be either submissive or grate-ful; and the person who heeds those rightsis doing no more than listen to a demand,and so listening is neither gracious norgenerous. It is a matter of obligation.

Tbere is something sublime here, andsomething that will appeal to anyonelooking to legitimate a liberal order. Theclaim is that there is indeed such a thingas a rational way of living, and that thereis a duty to respect it and to aim for it.This duty is not something that we create,or happen to find burdening us, like achore imposed on us either by our ownwill or by that of someone else. It is, rather,rationally mandated; reason makes itcompulsory. Its authority is visible to anyrational agent. And, unlike our inclina-tions, it is categorical and inescapable.Maxims of behavior that appeal to ourwell-being ("honesty is the best policy")merely advise us, but the law of moralitycommands us.

Thus Kant promises to provide thetemplate or the form for a universal, lib-eral. Enlightenment politics. If the systemworks, there are no problems of skepti-cism, nihilism, or relativism. If our princi-ples measure up, we need not fear that ourfavorite view is arbitrary or parochial, orthat we are imposing our opinions with-out rational warrant on others over whomwe have power. No wonder, then, that

moral and political philosophers want thesystem to work. In this construction ofthe place of philosophy in the humanworld, philosophers are not mere bour-geois, selfish, and timid creatures of aparticular time and place, vainly hoping toimpose their liberal standards on othersunlike themselves. They are in the van-guard, articulating the demands that, be-cause ofthe very structure of reason itself,must be heard by everyone.

I T MAY BE that Kant, because of hispietistic Protestant background, gotthose demands slightly wrong. But

that leaves the hope of being able to soft-pedal some of his absolutism while retain-ing the essence of his approach. Thisinvolves crying up the passages in whichKant seems a little less severe than usual.It means a little bit of pick 'n' mix, try-ing to tow Ktinigsberg some way toEdinburgh, or to Athens. This is a majorindustry in philosophy departments fromCambridge to Los Angeles. There are Aris-totelian Kants, and Humean Kants, andeven postwar Parisian existentialist Kants.One surprising feature of Kuehn's bookin this context is that while Kant himselfis painted as a bit of a lad, the late Meta-physics of Morals, which is the mainresource of humanizing movements, isput down as disappointing: "it reads justlike the compilation of old lecture notesthat it is."

Contemporary manifestations of Kant-ianism tend to work through ideas of whatreasonable people could demand of eachother, of "contractarian" and "procedural"approaches to the foundations of societyand morality. The fountainhead, of course,was John Rawls's^ Theory of.Justice, andRawlss Harvard has been the main pow-erhouse of the "back to Kant" movementin liberal political philosophy. But intruth there is a serious question abouthow far the Kantian trappings of Rawls'sworks, and those of his followers, are notnecessary to the argument, and thereforedispensable.

A Theory of Justice cracks up a socialand fiscal order somewhat resembling thesocial democracies of Western Europe,vvith their substantial freedoms and theirsubstantial welfare floors. The book givesthe impression that this is a Kantian exer-cise of pure practical reason, describingthe necessary goal of rational politics. Butover the years this appearance has eroded.Perhaps a nice liberal welfare state is nomore (or less) than the kind of place inwhich some of us would choose to live. Itappeals to us not because of our auton-omy, or because of our especially cleargaze into the crystal ball of pure practicalreason, but only because we are prudent,and mildly benevolent, and not obsessive

36 ; APRIL 23, 2001

about the powers ofthe state or the beau-ties ofthe market.

Even if we do not all want to go back toKant, none of us can escape him. Heinvented the guiding metaphor of con-temporary thought, of all thought sincehis time. This is his Copernican revolu-tion: that the world as we know it is atleast partly a creation of the conceptualand linguistic resources that we bring toit. He articulated the guiding principles of

liberal political thought He may neverhave seen a decent painting, but he wrotethe most interesting work on aesthetics inWestern philosophy after Aristotle. Rus-sell thought that Leibniz was the greatestexample of pure intellect that the worldhad ever known. Russell, who could writewell, was naturally prejudiced againstKant, who could not v r̂ite well; but surelyKant is the only other contender for theWestern mind's laurels. •

Inauthentic FabricsFRANKLIN

The Biographer's Taleby A. S. Byatt(Alfred A. Knopf, 305 pp., $24)

On Histories and Stories: Selected Essaysby A.S. Byatt(Harvard University Press, 196 pp., $22.95)

SOME CHILDREN DREAM of be-coming astronauts when theygrow up; others dream of be-coming librarians. A.S. Byatt'scharacters fall into the second

categorv'. Among them are: an impover-ished, confiised graduate student; a liter-ary critic fiercely marking her intellectualterritory; a reedy naturalist chasing downrare insects in the Amazon; an intenselyrepressed governess who authors booksabout ant colonies on the side; a beauti-fiil radiologist who regards a bowl of mar-bles as an intellectual puzzle. Reclusiveand introspective, they devote their mindsto arranging, to categorizing, to develop-ing an organizing principle for the world:this is life as a card catalogue. As Byattwrote about her first novel. The Shadoxvofthe Sun, which was published in 1964,"I found myself writing into my text'taxonomies'—from one girl's study of allyoung men in Cambridge to a formicaryand an essay in field grasses, from chil-dren's pictures representing alphabets to along discursus on child's pre-speech."

As interested as Byatt is in compart-mentalization in all its forms, she isequally obsessed with recovering anduncovering the past, recent and not sorecent. Possession, as is well known, de-picts the literary sleuthing of two youngscholars who are forced to reconsider theVictorian poets they study after finding atrove of their love letters. Byatt's other

novels—they include The Virgin in theCarden, Still Life, and Babel Tower, thefirst three of a planned tetralogy, as well asThe Game—?a-e all set in the twentiethcentury, but they incorporate allusions toeverything from Elizabethan drama toArthurian romance. And in the linkednovellas "Morpho Eugenia" and "The Con-jugial Angel" (which appeared together asAngeh and Insects) she returned to theVictorians, meditating on concepts suchas the conflict of Dai'winism and theology,and Swedenborg's views on love afterdeath.

Byatt's dual obsessions come to a headin both of her new books. The plot ofThe Biographer's Tale revolves around agraduate student who sets out to writea biography of a biographer, a doubleimmersion in history and literary analy-sis. And ofthe seven essays in On Histo-ries and Stories, Byatt devotes four tothe investigation of various aspects ofhistorical fiction, including her ownmethods of writing. The ideas exploredhere are ones that Byatt has already ex-amined at great length, and this mayaccount for the staleness of both books.Or perhaps it is that Byatt's techniques—the inclusion of fictitious "original texts"in the narrative, the lengthy digressionson some topic or another—no longer feelas fresh as they did ten years ago. What-ever the reason, both books are disap-pointments.

T HE BIOGRAPHER'S TALE beginswith an epiphany. Phineas Nanson,a doctoral student in English lit-

erature, is sitting in a seminar discussingLacan's theorj- of morcellement when hedecides, .seemingly apropos of nothing,that he cannot go on. He has had it withthe world of academia, with seminars on"not-too-long texts written by women,"with the professor himself, who "read hisFoucault and his Lacan in translation, likehis Heraciitus and his Empedocles." Andhe has had it with the redundancies andthe superficialities of contemporary criti-cal theory: "We found the same clefts andcrevices, transgressions and disintegra-tions, lures and deceptions beneath, nomatter what surface we were scrying."Though neither as acid nor as fiinny asthe satire in Possession, Byatts depictionof life in the postmodern academy stillwickedly hits the mark. At one pointPhineas comments, "I had avoided thetrap of talking about 'reality' and "unreal-ity' for I knew very well that postmod-ernist literary theory could be described asa reality. People lived in it."

What Phineas wants is "a life full of

things Full offacts."A kindly professorof Anglo-Saxon—quite the other end ofthe spectrum froui postmodern theory—to whom Phineas proudly declares hischange of beart directs the young scholarto what he calls "the greatest work ofscholarship in my time": a three-volumebiography of Sir Elmer Bole, a fictitiousVictorian seemingly modeled, at leastin part, on Richard Burton, the swash-buckling explorer and orientalist. Phineasconfesses that he has always tbought biog-raphy a "bastard form." But he is surprisedto find that he becomes absorbed in thebiography, which describes in impossibledetail Bole's adventures as a writer, dip-lomat, naturalist, traveler, and scholar ofeverything from British military hygieneto pornographic Roman jars.

As Phineas reads and re-reads the vol-umes, his interest in Bole slowly meta-morphoses into an interest in Bole'sbiographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes. Forhe knows even more about even morevarieties of arcana than even Bole himself(though perhaps not more than Byatt):"the morpholog)' of Mediterranean soli-tary- bees, the recurring motifs of Turk-ish fair>- tales, the deficiencies of thesupply-lines of the British army." Phineasbecomes fascinated by Destry-Scholes'sconstruction of the biography, "his re-sourceful marshalling and arranging offacts." And he determines, inevitably, thathe will write a biography of the biogra-pher: "Only a biography seemed an appro-priate form for the great biographer."

Phineas throws himself into the pro-ject with gusto, WTiting to Destry-Scholes's

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