I find most philosophy sufficiently difficult and insufficiently relevant to my own life that I rarely have any great desire to read it for pleasure. Naturally, there are exceptions. Schopenhauer suits my temperament and is important for demystifying much of the 19th century’s literature – that he actually is a talented writer too is yet another reason to read him. Nietzsche is inspirational in his own way, though I find him less entertaining than I once did. And all the existentialists are interested in questions about how to live one’s life. This is something that I find rather useful as I am trying to live too.
Then there’s Kant. Kant is a proper philosopher. He never left the area around Königsberg where he lived in East Prussia. And yet he created the most magnificent works through sheer force of will and mind. I can appreciate that. I can also appreciate his influence, which is not just limited to the likes of Kleist, who I dealt with here recently, but also to other people who built upon him, like the aforementioned Schopenhauer, and people like Fichte and Marx and Hegel. Modern philosophy started, probably, with Descartes, but Kant is another contender for the title. He is certainly one of the most influential philosophers of all time. It made sense to read him.
Rather than starting with the Critique of Pure Reason, I decided to read a much smaller work instead – the Prolegomena. Or to give it its full and catchy title, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic that Could Be Considered a Science. The Prolegomena is a work Kant wrote to make his Critique of Pure Reason more accessible to the masses, (a group to which in this instance I most definitely belong). He was unhappy that people didn’t understand it, especially because he was convinced that what he had written was so absolutely ground-breaking that all previous attempts at metaphysics might as well be thrown away as a result. The Critique have the desired effect – he needed to descend from his ivory tower. And so he wrote this. And I read it.
In German! Yes, I read it. I learned all of those idiotic words like “derive” and “inertia” which spice its pages. And I can confidently say that I understood next to nothing. But I have read it, and that’s an achievement. I had no real intention of understanding the work when I set out. I dutifully noted key points in the margins and did my underlinings, but I was not following Kant’s argument and was not trying to. I am still trying to work out whether or not this was a waste of time.
With any philosophy I am much more interested in its spirit than its contents. By “spirit” I mean the character of the writer lying behind the words. I wanted to receive a vision of the world to add to my collection. I know that Schopenhauer’s philosophy is ridiculous, but I find his pessimistic vision powerful. I know that Nietzsche’s philosophy is likewise brutal and silly, but I sense the force behind his words. As long as I get a feel for the author’s worldview, and one or two of the consequences of it, I do not mind the quality of its foundations. Unfortunately, a casual chat with anybody, including the person that stares at us in the mirror, will reveal that few of us live according to worldviews that are philosophically sound. But still we live.
With Kant I had a sense of extreme rigour. There was no imagination here, but a kind of terrifying devotion to organisation and clarity. He built a philosophy like one builds a machine – Schopenhauer built one like one paints a landscape. Kant’s overwhelming concern for truth, for duty, and for an absence of any form of “Schwärmerei” or muddle-headed dreaming, was inspirational. There was something almost Victorian in his devotion to reject playfulness. His long sentences were designed to evidence the pedigree of his thought, whose ancestry like that of a good dog could be traced back deep into the past. As I have mentioned, I understood nothing here; I only felt. And yet I felt Kant’s mechanical striving to be supremely relevant to the modern world. I do not mean this in a good way. As many commentators (e.g. Theodor Adorno) have discovered, in all this purity and conclusiveness there is something that tolerates no human frailty.
I have never been one to keep myself at night, wondering whether synthetic a priori judgements are possible. I am content to avoid overturning too many philosophical stones. But I appreciate that Kant does. Inspired by Kleist’s Kant Crisis, I often lowered the Prolegomena and stared out in front of myself and told myself that the things I saw I saw not as themselves, but only as they were transformed by my perception, and that I would never be able to know what this or that table or chair really was. Such tasks were sometimes successful, and I would be left with a disorientating sense of the uncanniness of the world we take to be stable. But more usually I was left puzzled and could not quite work out what I should do with the information. I could not understand why I should care.
It is strange to think that Kleist had a breakdown upon learning that we could not know things as themselves. It seems almost funny now. And yet, I wonder what it means, that philosophy could reach the heart of a man with such force as to shake him. This is not the quest for meaning that attacks most of us from time to time. I feel like a doubt in the foundations of the world requires a much more sensitive sensibility, one that I myself probably lack. It is impressive really, to care that much. I feel like these days we are all so jaded that the news that the world is not what it seems wouldn’t mean anything much to us.
Conspiracies, late-capitalist pressures, mass-surveillance, the internet. Whether or not one agrees with them, their growing presence within our world seems to prepare us for Kant’s sceptical, boundary-setting truth – that our knowledge is limited, that some things cannot be known. We already live in a state of conscious ignorance of the foundations of our lives, only this time these foundations are not related to perception of metaphysics or natural law or whatever Kant is actually taking about, but to everything around us that makes being alive possible in this world. (I appreciate that for philosophers, the two are the same thing. Indeed, I also appreciate that if I bothered understanding Kant, I would find more insights than just a scepticism about metaphysics. All this will take time.)
And so, although I have not been convinced of anything to do with metaphysics, I haven’t come away from the Prolegomena empty-handed. I have a sense of Kant’s spirit, and a sense of how that spirit might manifest itself in our modern world. Does that justify trudging through a hundred and fifty pages of dense German? Alas, the answer lies beyond the limits of pure reason.