is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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A Piece of the World of Sense.
A Piece of the World of Sense.
In the Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes that a “rational being counts himself [sic], as intelligence, as belonging to the intellectual world, and solely as an efficient cause belonging to this world does he call this causality a will. From the other side, however, he is conscious of himself also as a piece of the world of sense...” What? Well, it means that I can abstract myself (according to Kant) from the world of passions, inclinations, natural instincts (the world of sense), into a world that is governed only by reason, and, using reason, come to know what a universal moral law would be if I were freed from the conflict caused in me by the coexistence of reason with passions, inclinations, instincts. It’s not that Kant thinks I can really do this, perfectly and all the time. But the point is that I ought to make the attempt. If we as human beings were capable of acting on reason only, we wouldn’t need rules of morality, because we would always already follow them, given as they are by reason (according to Kant). But we aren’t capable of acting on reason only, only of approximating such action, and even then we can’t always be certain that our motives are good, since often our motives are mixed, and not entirely clear even to ourselves. (And, whatever Kant might think, sometimes reason is cold and calculating and, well, universalizing.) So we do (according to Kant) need rules of morality that we find by abstracting ourselves from the sensuous world of passions, inclinations, instincts, because then we can find maxims by which we guide our behavior when the answers to the “what should I do?” questions are not so clear.
It might seem crazy (or at least very Christian) that Kant would think to divide the human being into two parts, one partaking only of reason, the other slave to its impulses. However one can’t really find the human subject anywhere in the history of philosophy without some sort of division forced into its very interior. We are always at odds with ourselves. But that’s because we are not formed only by ourselves (no matter what Kant says). Other people, other things, make us what we are, in no small measure, and regardless of what we might have willed. We are all pieces of the world of sense.
One time when I was having a meeting with a famous philosopher who was on my dissertation committee, I said that I wasn’t very ambitious. She said, “YES YOU ARE. YOU ARE VERY AMBITIOUS.” That struck me as odd. But I think she meant that my work is ambitious, and that I’ll grant her. I would like it if my work could speak for itself. But of course it does not have vocal chords. It is na�ve of me to hope that people will judge me for my work and not for other things that have very little to do with my work. It is idealist of me to wish for such a world. And I don’t want to be an idealist, because ideas can’t be separated altogether from the material conditions in which they must come to life. My brain resides in this head resting on this body walking through this imperfect world. So I left the philosopher’s office taking her point but also thinking, “yes, I am very ambitious. But not how you think.”
But what do I know? She’s not the type of philosopher to take much stock in Kant, nor in an idealist mind/body split. It is entirely possible that I still don’t really know what she meant by her exclamation. AM I VERY AMBITIOUS? Yes, I suppose I am. But only if the definition of the word is left to me. Is it possible anyone has such a power?
11:22 p.m. - September 28, 2005
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