Tag: Sartre

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The Feminist Critique of Pure Immanuel Kant

There is an ad in the latest New York Times Review of Books (November 20, 1997) that really shook me up. It is for a book called “The Feminist Interpretation of Immanuel Kant”. It is edited by Robin May Schott, in case you want to order it.

Now, hey, I’d be the first person to say that it’s about time someone over-hauled the old transcendental critique of pure reason, I mean, after all, it’s only been out of date since about fifteen minutes after it was printed, but even I would never have guessed that the feminists would be the ones to put the last nail in the coffin. I’m not sure Immanuel would be pleased. I think he said something like “feminism is destroying our society” or something like that at one point in his career, probably just after his wife left him.

But you know, the next time some dark-minded pundit goes on and on about how our society is just falling apart and things have never been so bad and our youth have really lousy manners, and Hollywood sucks, and so on, I’m going to think about those feminists out there reinterpreting Immanuel Kant and breathe a quiet little sigh of relief. If there is one thing more amazing than any other about our society, its our ability to chew up and regurgitate almost any idea, any image, any concept, and spit it out again as lively and ripe as if it were new.

Like Immanuel Kant. It would have been audacious enough if the feminists had taken on Wittgenstein or Popper, but Kant? So what do the feminists have to say? I don’t know. I haven’t read the book yet. But I’ll bet they accuse Kant of building his entire rigid, rational system of thought on some misdirected patriarchal impulse to rule reality with an iron fist. And I’ll bet the feminists believe that a view of reality more harmonious with natural, empathetic impulses would have worked better. If I remember my college philosophy correctly, Kant was trying to rescue Reason with a capital “R” from Descartes’ radical critique, which consisted of declaring that the only thing you could know for sure was that you existed. Both of them sound a little anal retentive to me. The women probably point out that doing the laundry, cooking, and cleaning, require some pretty fundamental ontological conclusions about cause and effect that can’t be justified by going for a walk every day trying to think up new categories of existence.

Then along comes Sartre who believed we don’t exist in a static sense at all. We are constantly in the state of becoming, and that’s why we are free, unless, of course, your wife expects you home for supper. I’ll bet Simone De Beauvoir had a few precious thoughts about this herself.

Wittgenstein thought we basically constructed a reality in our language, and so our society is really nothing more than a construct of the words we imagine to describe it with. I think the feminists might find a home there. You know how they love to get together and talk. Then there was Martin Heidegger. He believed that mankind had forgotten something very, very important about existence, but what it was we had forgotten he couldn’t seem to remember either, so he joined the Nazi party and continued to teach at a university in Germany throughout World War II. Nothing like a philosophy that stimulates you into positive action! I think the feminists wouldn’t like him. They would think that it’s not that hard to remember the important things, as long as you care about people.

Microsoft Philosophy 1.01

You can tell what philosophy Bill Gates believes in by running a spell check on little known recent philosophers in Microsoft Word and then analyzing the results. Watch:

Philosopher Result Meaning
(Martin) Heidegger headgear groovy
(Imre) Lakatos lactose milk for the mind
(Paul) Feyerabend no suggestions vacant
(Albert) Camus cameos we only see reality in hazy profile
(Dan) Quayle quarrel don’t go into politics
(Hannah) Arendt aren’t we don’t exist, unless we’re banal and evil

Hannah Arendt is the only woman on the list, and I don’t think most philosophers would place her next to Heidegger or even Imre Lakatos in terms of importance, but she did come up with one great idea. While in Jerusalem covering the Eichmann trial (Jewish agents had kidnapped Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal, from Argentina and spirited him away to Jerusalem for a show trial), she found herself at a loss for words to describe the utter mediocrity of this minor functionary who was partly responsible for the deaths of six million Jews, so she coined the phrase “banality of evil”*. Later on, she was sorry that she became so well known for that phrase alone. I have to admit, that’s about the only thing I know about Hannah Arendt myself, but I like the phrase, because it captures the idea that incredibly evil things can result from the actions or inactions of people who perceive themselves as being only minor cogs in a big machine. Raul Wallenberg was a minor functionary, but he saved hundreds of lives. Eichmann claimed that he was only following orders. The crew of the Enola Gay were only following orders when they dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima (victors get to write history so we don’t seem to regard them as villains the way we regard the Germans, Italians, or Japanese). The crew of the Titanic sent lifeboats away half-filled because their orders were “women and children first” and the third-class women and children were still below decks, and the only other people present were men.

That’s the way most people behave– just following orders–and that may be the tragedy of the human race.

So if the feminists find a new way of thinking about reality that can convince most people that they should always do the right thing, even when it goes against orders or policy or whatever, then, hey, I’m all in favour of it.

* It appears that Hannah Arendt was wrong.  The discover of more information about Adolf Eichmann revealed that he was, in fact, virulently anti-Semitic, and fully on board with the plans to exterminate the Jews.

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The Tears of a Clone

You may have heard that a Richard Seed, a scientist in Chicago, has announced that he is going to proceed with human cloning experiments, in spite of President Clinton’s request for a voluntary ban on such experiments for five years. Then it was announced that two labs, one in the U.S. and one in Bath, England, have succeeded in cloning headless mice and tadpoles.

Charles Krauthammer, in Time Magazine, reacts with horror. Please, oh please don’t create headless humans. He feels it should be a capital crime. “Cloning is the technology of narcissism”.

Well, I didn’t know narcissism was a crime. But I do know we don’t have room in all the prisons in the world for the guilty. And I know that Krauthammer is a raving hypocrite. We have spent 200 years building the culture of narcissism and Time Magazine has been it’s biggest cheerleader. Suddenly Frankenstein gets up and walks, and Time goes “eek”. Where was Time Magazine’s righteous indignation when we dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

There is one major problem with stopping scientific experiments on human clones. We don’t have the intellectual, moral, or cultural framework left to support the idea. Our boldest thinkers have killed God, the thoughtless middle class has locked him into a charming little box in a tiny little corner of Sunday, and most of our religious “leaders” are too busy building crystal cathedrals and erecting statues of themselves to do anything more than rant about high school sex education and pornography on the Internet. And now science has gone pornographic and nobody is ready to grapple with the complex scientific and moral issues that arise from it.

The problem is that the idea of free enterprise, or allowing the “market” to determine the success, failure, or acceptability of different technological inventions or ideas, has come to dominate not only our society’s economics and corporate management and even government, but our culture as well. And the fundamental philosophical belief that makes free enterprise possible is individualism. If you ask yourself, who should have ultimate authority to determine whether or not you can buy something, read a book, listen to music, watch a video, or wear your seatbelt—the answer is always “me”. We don’t want the government, the church, the union, or the corporation to have that authority. We want it all for ourselves. And if we want to make brain-less clones to provide us with an unlimited future supply of transplantable organs, who has the right to stop us?

Let’s say the government does pass a law—as seems likely—banning the creation of human clones. First of all, some big corporation (or maybe a bold, little corporation) is going to go ahead and do it anyway and then challenge the law in court. Try to imagine the Supreme Court’s ruling on the issue. What are the grounds they will give for supporting the law? As long as the clones don’t have a brain, they won’t be human, because our courts and legislatures have steadily shrunk the definition of “human” in order to accommodate all the other scientific developments of this century, including artificial respirators that can keep brain-dead humans “alive” indefinitely, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and, of course, abortion. Would you want to argue that cloning violates some universal concept of human dignity? The courts have ruled over and over again that such concepts are religious in nature and thus discriminatory.

Even if the Supreme Court in the U.S. supported the law, scientists would simply move off-shore to some obliging little island nation and proceed with impunity. Does anyone doubt that there’s money to be made in this business, regardless of any national laws?

So there will be no law. We will clone humans because we can clone humans. We have a new Pandora’s box before us and we will open it because we have already opened every other Pandora’s box and nobody knows any more how to even conceive of an idea of a rationale for keeping it closed.

What are we going to do with all these new powers? We’re going to live longer. We’re going to automate everything. We’re going to have all the information in the world at our finger-tips. We’re going to become more and more self-sufficient and self-contained. We’re going to be completely selective about what we do, who we see, what we know about, where we go, what we believe. Can government survive these developments? Can the church? Can the family? In Sweden, already, almost half the population lives alone. In the future, all of us may have two, three, or four different families in our lifetimes, and then, for the last decades of our lives, we will live alone, because the ultimate convenience is to be completely self-sufficient.

No civilization in history has been faced with so many issues that confront the question of what being human really means. The Middle Ages believed that man was a worm riding on the waves of a colossal tempest, whose only dignity was the possibility of redemption by an all-powerful god. The Renaissance gave man faith in himself, as “the measure of all things”. The late 19th Century gave rise to a prevailing belief in human progress—both moral and material. The sinking of the Titanic was a little blip on the radar screen of the horizon of human potential; the two World Wars—including the holocaust and Hiroshima—were major blips. But we continued our race to the future. To the average citizen, the 1949 World’s fair, with its displays on the wonders of technology, had more impact than the ruminations of Jean-Paul Sartre on absurdity. Now, with the collapse of communism and world peace, for the first time, within our grasp, we seem to stand on the brink of unimaginable wealth and progress. The computer and the Internet have become the poster boys of this brave new world, and DNA manipulation may be the crown jewel. But all of these developments have created a profound spiritual unease.

What if we are soon able to live to 100? 120? 150? Can a marriage last 100 years? I don’t think so. Think about it: our notions of fidelity and commitment were forged in an era in which the average life-span was less than 40 years. People married young, so the average marriage lasted about 25 years. Is the rise in the divorce rate merely a reflection of the fact that people can live together for only so long? The Bible is emphatic about divorce—it is wrong. But life expectancy in 30 A.D. was even shorter than it was in the 19th century, and the status of women was equal to livestock. Can such an imperative survive today’s social climate?

And what will we think about as we replace our burned out organs and continue to grow older? Will we grow wise and begin to understand that there are moral satisfactions that can’t be bought or manufactured? Or will we grow foolish and increasingly desperate, and resort to drugs and cosmetic surgeries and ever greater obscenities in order to recapture the shallow illusions about the satisfactions of youth and vigor and sexual appeal?