...aus so krummen Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden.Out of timber so crooked, as from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be built.
Immanuel Kant, "Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht," "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent" [1784, Was ist Aufklärung, Felix Meiner Verlag, 1999, p.10; Perpetual Peace and other essays on Politics, History, and Morals, translated by Ted Humphrey, Hackett Publishing, 1983, p.34; translation based on Isaiah Berlin,The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Princeton, 1990, p.v].
But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 51
The great liberal political philosopher Isaiah Berlin has popularized Immanuel Kant's "crooked timber of humanity" phrase. It is a telling phrase, most appropriately coupled with the quote by James Madison that I have provided. These are among the most important statements that can be made in political philosophy, and that is because they forestall utopian visions in human affairs. The 20th century was full of ideologies that promised "heaven on earth." But they did a much better job of providing hells on earth, with mass murder, poverty, terror, starvation, vast prison systems, "reeducation" camps, slave labor camps, and extermination camps. Yet the utopian appeal remains, and even much of the same ideology, with vicious dinosaurs like Fidel Castro still celebrated by trendy leftists. We find public intellectuals such as Garry Wills arguing that distrust of government, as we see in Madison's statement, is "a tradition that belittles America" [cf. A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, 1999].
Wills, indeed, represents a Hegelian movement in American political thought, going back to John Dewey ("Things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action") and earlier, that exalts the collective and the state and sees the imperfections of man as something that can be overcome with the perfection of the government.
▷ Never-ending legacy of Plato: "Perfection of imperfect men" through something or by somebody...
Kant and Madison, aware that a government is something "which is to be administered by men over men," would find this movement perfectly senseless and dangerous. The idea that politicians and bureaucrats are disinterested servants, to whose wisdom and goodness absolute power can safely be entrusted, is a notion so preposterous that most persons of adult perspicacity see through it easily -- even if they do not know about rent seeking and Public Choice economics. Why an intellectual like Garry Wills is deceived may be due to an effect familiar since Plato: the tempting answer to all politics that the only real problem is that the wrong people are in charge, while the right people, of course, would be someone like themselves (e.g. Plato, Wills, etc.). This has tempted many of the naive and self-deceived, not only into folly, but into evil.
▷ Hopeless imperfection of the humanity in THIS FALLEN World: Reading Kant's cautions on any utopian political thoughts
The statement by Madison is so appropriately coupled with Kant because Kant believed that moral perfection was only possible with an "angelic will," a will in which the imperative of rational morality is not obstructed or compromised by irrational influences. Where these irrational influences come from is clear enough. As sensation contributes the material for synthesis, perception, and empirical knowledge, it also contributes the sensual and self-interested temptations that conflict with rational duty. In short, the phenomenal world is the place of the Fall, where our nature is so compromised that the moral perfection of God or the angels is impossible. This seems to me the most Christian feature of Kant's thought, or perhaps the only Christian feature. However, were Kant a Christian, he would know that Fallen human nature can be redeemed through Jesus Christ. But we see no such thing allowed. Instead, it is an important part of Kant's argument for immortality as a Postulate of Practical Reason that the absolute command of the Categorical Imperative, to be perfect, can only be met if we are given infinite time, i.e. immortality, to meet it. Come to think of it, the requirement of perfection has a Biblical basis also: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" [Matthew 5:48]. My understanding is that eternal life in Christian thought is a reward for faith and for repentance. For Kant, however, eternal life is simply the way to deal with our hopeless imperfection. Repentance and redeption don't seem to figure in at all, though Kant is not unaware of what he formulates as his own question, "What can we hope?" An eternity of futile moral improvement sounds more Sisyphean than hopeful.
The imperfection of the world contradicts a principle that is the opposite of the Kantian, namely moral heteronomy, that the standard, the paradigm, and the authority of the right and the good stand outside of us in the world. Where the world can contain no such thing, then our knowledge of the standard of the good comes from within, a matter of Kantian autonomy. Heteronomy is what we see in Aristotle and Hegel, with the former because virtue is a matter of achieving good habits by imitation, with the latter because, where the "real is rational," the state embodies that rationality. For Kant, the rationality of the world is evident in science, but the rationality of morality tends to be contradicted, not affirmed, by the world. We are thus in the world, but not of it, as Plato might have been the first to say. Autonomy is then a principle of conscience and of political freedom. There is nothing in the world that can claim absolute obedience, because there can be nothing in the world that, by its perfection, can be worthy of such obedience. Knowing how government and the law often actually work, no one could be deceived that any blind obedience is owed to it. As Madison said, "No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable" [Federalist Paper No. 62].
[here to return]
An imperfect government in an imperfect world of autonomous individuals means that the aims of life are not going to be the business of government. The government is thus not, in Michael Oakeshott's terms, a teleocracy, rule that has some end (telos) in view. It will only be a nomocracy, a government of abstract laws (nomoi) that limit the means of action, regardless of the ends. That is then conformable to a Lockean and Jeffersonian view of government as existing to secure the natural rights, the negative rights as Berlin said, that protect individuals from others. The Kantian moral respect for the will and rational nature of others contrasts with the Hegelian sentiment that "All worth which the human being possesses -- all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." To find meaning in something larger than oneself is noble, but this becomes poisonous when the "something larger" is interpreted as only meaning government and the state, to the point where a particular kind of political activism becomes viewed by educators (following Dewey?) as the only moral and enlightened thing. Mussolini's conception of "totalitarianism," after all, was simply that all meaning is found in the "totality," the collective. It is ironic that a favorite leftist accusation against those suspicious of government action is that they don't "care" about other persons -- when their own idea of "care" is the action of something, the government, that always has the sanction of force behind it. The individual uncooperative with the "care" of government is liable to find men with guns breaking into his home. This has happened to people like Peter McWilliams who after becoming gravely ill have discovered that marijuana has medicinal value. The state disapproves; and Peter is dead.
Where Kant goes very wrong is with the notion that the imperfection of the world is simply due to sensation and the sensible nature of our experience. This is pregnant, not just with the moralism that otherwise troubles Kant's ethics, but with the anaesthesia and anhedonia, the denial of the value of art, beauty, and pleasure, to which moralism tends. It is not surprising then that Kant should have moved from the aesthetic realism of his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime to the doctrine of the Critique of Judgment that aesthetic feeling is subjective and simply a result of a "harmony of the faculties" between perception and morality. We might see this as another Christian characteristic of Kant if we agree with Nietzsche's thesis to any extent that Christianity is anaesthetic. Indeed, an ascetic impulse in any religion or politics will tend to anaesthesia and anhedonia.
Kant's error can be partially corrected by returning to Plato, or advancing to Schopenhauer. With both of them, beauty is the clue, the reflection, or even the "participation" of a different order of reality. It is the very direct presence of something which stands in stark contrast to all other imperfection in the world. Certainly, the world is not perfected thereby, and Schopenhauer would not think of beauty as indicating a separate reality to which we could go. However, all we need is Kant's own famous quote, "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." This combines moral autonomy with "starry heavens" (der bestirnte Himmel, "the bestarred heaven") that are, to be sure, objects of scientific knowledge, but also fascinating images of beauty -- that only thing that would draw, indeed, such enthusiasm ("admiration and awe") as we see in the quote. Even a more realistic appreciation of beauty, however, does not quite do the job. Pleasure has never quite recovered from Mediaeval anhedonia. Nevertheless, the smug attitude happy to blame religion for this faces the difficulty that modern political moralism is fully as anhedonic as any religion. The leftists (and conservatives) who fulminate against "consumerism" really mean the pleasures that are fostered by -- in Plato's phrase and theirs -- the "unnecessary desires" created by advertising and modern production. At least Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was willing to give up modern technology (except in the interests of his Terrorism, when he was ready to use airplanes, the postal system, etc.), while I doubt that most critics of "consumerism" are.
So, unfortunately, the bottom line on pleasure may still be Aristotle:
Men erring on the side of deficiency as regards pleasures (hêdonás), and taking less than a proper amount of enjoyment (khaírontes, "enjoying") in them, scarcely occur; such insensibility (anaisthêsía) is not human (anthrôpiké) [Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, xi, 7, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard U. Press, 1926-1982, pp.180-183].
Both religion and political anhedonia are, especially when forcefully imposed on others, "not human." With Kant's "crooked timber," it is hard not to see the crookedness contributed in great measure by the existence of pleasure. Yet pleasure is a good. Like all goods, it may or may not become a moral issue. Nor is moral evil always the result of self-interest, sensuality, or pleasure. The path to hell is paved with good intentions, and in both religion and politics some of the most dangerous and vicious people are the ascetic and the disinterested. Doing good for others sometimes can visit the greatest evils upon them.
Kant's principle thus gives us one way to forestall political utopianism and totalitarianism, but it is also not quite the right idea, and its further implications must be examined carefully.
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