What I Learned Wrestling With Kant

My basic takeaway from reading some of Immanuel Kant’s political essays a few years ago, including the one posing the question of enlightenment, is that the latter consists of a combination of private obedience and public disobedience. By private obedience, Kant means showing up at work, doing your job, and following the law, among other things. By public disobedience, he means critiquing these things as written above. Critiquing, yet obeying, is enlightenment. Moreover, this kind of obedience is justified because you can’t be certain what would be a better social arrangement, and disobedience, as critique, is justified because neither can the authorities be certain that ours is the best or good possible social arrangement. Enlightenment is grounded in uncertainty, and it is in an idiosyncratic understanding of privacy and publicity.

When you go about your business in the world, more or less keeping your opinions to yourself, it is privacy. But even should you venture to make your opinions known, that is still privacy, since publicity proper has to do with a concern for truth as opposed to an uninhibited expression of opinion. The term “private disobedience” would perhaps cover this terrain where we might shout our opinions at each other on social media, or indeed in the real world. I would like to propose “solitude” as an intermediary term that makes the transition from private obedience to public disobedience possible. Kant replied to the question, “What is Enlightenment?” Having thought through the question on his own in “private,” you could say, but I would suggest saying in “solitude” to preserve greater fidelity to Kantian terminology.

I am proposing that the condition for the possibility of thoughtful writing is solitude. We disobey publicity in order to transform private obedience—to make it better, more just, and so on—but we can do so only on condition of having meditated on the issue— at length— in solitude. The question of enlightenment is really the question of philosophy, especially the public function of philosophy such that Bernard Stiegler can describe the practice of philosophy as “reconstituting language as that which does not allow itself to be understood except through the trial of a cloistered asceticism and an absolute solitude, language that is rarely produced in the dialectic of a dialogue between two, in the social dialectic, which has almost always become, unfortunately for us, pure chatter, if not a system of cretinization.”

I broach the topic of criticizing or alienating chatter in relation to Kantian enlightenment partly to broaden the scope of private obedience. I believe, in light of Stiegler’s description of laws and rules, but also customs and mores more generally, as “non-noetic orientations” that we legitimately, though more or less thoughtlessly, however provisionally, follow, suggests a version of private obedience that encompasses and justifies a general agreeableness and cordiality, if not quite conviviality, as a default mode of interacting with others in the world. This perhaps falls in with what Kant called “unsocial sociability:” it is unsocial, as opposed to anti-social, to publicly disobey in thoughtful writing, and to do so on the basis on an ongoing project of private obedience, securing  the very possibility of solitude, which later requires a modicum of law and order. Solitude, in turn, enables public disobedience, which critiques law and order.

The kind of sociability I have in mind may be grounded in the twin principles of humility and charity. This could mean something as basic as humbly considering the possibility that I have misunderstood my interlocutor, or charitably attributing to them a different, better thought than their formulation appears to me to suggest (sort of like the practice of “steel manning”). But I will offer a fuller account of these principles in relation to Hannah Arendt below.

A brief interlude before I do so: I was reminded recently of a remark Voegelin made regarding his relation to the field of archeology and its influence upon his thinking—something to the effect that he took an active interest in the field and attempted as far as possible to stay up to date with the latest discoveries, but he did not rely dogmatically on any one piece of archeological evidence to solidify his interpretive work. There is a pragmatic reason for this: there always, in principle, remains the possibility that new, contradictory evidence will come to light and pull the rug out from under prior dogmatic interpretations (and there is, of course, the more essential point that philosophy is irreducible to dogma).

This came to mind during a recent dispute on social media when I was taken to task for my interpretation of the work of the late Elliott Smith, a prolific indie-rock singer-songwriter during the 1990s and tragically died at the age of 34 in 2003. His lyrics were often deeply philosophical (and Smith himself studied political philosophy in college), and I wrote an essay attempting to elucidate this philosophical depth, centering the analysis around the question of authenticity, or, in more everyday parlance, the question of “being oneself.” This latter phrase is something of a cliche, but I contended that Elliott Smith’s usage of it has philosophical relevance. It occurs, I thought, toward the end of the song called “Needle in the Hay,” but from recent handwritten evidence from Smith himself, we know that the lyric is “I can’t beat myself,” not “I can’t be myself.”

I initially wrote that my interpretation of Smith’s oeuvre doesn’t depend on this lyric being what I thought it was, but its being so would be further justification for my interpretation which depends more crucially on lyrics from other songs. I clarified that I could imagine an alternate version coming to light that would support my interpretation, but the latter was already, I thought, sufficiently supported by other songs. My interlocutors read this as a disregard for the evidence of what Smith in fact wrote, an attempt to alter the text to fit my own ideological framework. Admittedly, my initial formulation led itself to this interpretation, but it was not the only possible interpretation. More charitable, and indeed more realistic readings of my contention, as initially expressed, were possible. Moreover, I clarified my intention a few times in what I thought were reasonable and satisfying ways. My interlocutors doubled down, in response, on their initial interpretation and caricatured my efforts at clarification. When this “social dialectic” devolved further into an ad hominem, I disengaged from the conversation by blocking their profiles. This was an anti-social withdrawal on my part, to be sure, but was committed in response to anti-social chatter that I had lost hope in withstanding.

The notion of ad hominem, where the person is attacked, as opposed to their argument being questioned, brings me to my concluding remarks on Hannah Arendt. In The Human Condition, she contends that who a person essentially is, is “implicit in everything they say and do,” but is visible and accessible only to others and not to oneself. This “daimonic” reading of human selfhood is what I take to be central to her theory. She thinks it’s possible to read back from actions and speech into the essence or nature of the actor or speaker. Or perhaps her point is precisely that we can never really know each other, and because all we have to go on to get a sense of who each other are is our words and deeds, we should not act or speak carelessly. That much is clear, but if she makes the further suggestion that it is legitimate to read off a person’s essence from their actions, then she is mistaken. I think it’s important to separate the act from the actor when passing judgment, and that this holds for good behavior, the agent of which should be humble, and bad behavior the spectator of which should be charitable. Humility, here, implies the belief that doing good isn’t tantamount to being good, and charity, that doing bad isn’t tantamount to being bad.

These principles, like those in which Kantian enlightenment consists, are grounded in uncertainty. This uncertainty, moreover, is in both cases the facilitating condition of desirable change. For Kant, thoughtful, public disobedience aims to transform what Stiegler calls the “non-noetic orientations” that we privately (and legitimately, but provisionally) obey. And for me, a charitable approach to what Stiegler calls “social dialectic” is one that separates the actor or speaker out from their words and deeds, freeing them up to become and behave differently. I mentioned briefly, above, a recent case study partly in order to suggest what can happen to the social dialectic when the foundational affirmation of uncertainty is replaced with a posture of certainty. Ultimately it is the social fabric itself that is torn by this disavowal of uncertainty. Moreover, the ad hominem attack meant that not only was my writing held up as stupid, but I myself was so held up as well.

Michel Foucault has written regarding ancient Cynicism that “The insult gives the Cynic the opportunity to establish a relationship of affection with the very people who do him harm and, through them, with the whole of humankind.” Traces of this ambitious project remain scattered across our relatively unenlightened and uncharitable age. We find some of them in Elliott Smith, for instance, who writes in the extraordinary ballad, “Happiness,” that “What I used to be will pass away and then you’ll see that all I want now is happiness for you and me.” One of my contentions in the essay on Smith and authenticity was that this utterance might plausibly be seen as addressed to an interlocuter who had “insulted” or “harmed” the narrator in something like Foucault’s sense. An “affectionate” response to insult or harm is, I think, a worthy ideal, and one that could preserve and enhance the social bond, but it is one that I personally failed to live up to in this particular case.

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