Thoughts on Kant
By Eugene Sheely
“…in his contemptuous catalogue of the useless dreamers and impostors of the world he [Napoleon Bonaparte] placed with confidence the name of Kant.” Napoleon, by H.A.L Fisher
If we were to summarize Kant’s work at the risk of oversimplifying it we could say that overall Kant searched for universal principles to guide us. One of these examples was to state that we should only consider something moral if we were to make it a general truth everyone else could follow, “universal conformity” he called it. He also believed that a good action depended on the moral intention of the person, and the actual results were irrelevant. That there’s also mistrust for reason and that happiness is wrongly assumed to be achieved by acting through instinct and not reason. And that a promise should always be kept and it’s immoral to break it. I’ll address the issues mentioned above and others in the following sections.
Universal Moral Principles
His concept of universal principles are absurd, people of different ages, sex and ability have different roles to play in this world. Are we to expect that a 75 year old grandmother to perform the same roles of a 30 year old man and be bound by the same moral code? The morality that comes surrounding these two characters is a direct correlation from who they are. Suicide is used by Kant as an extreme example to justify this moral universality. The thing is it might be a noble option (think of Lycurgus the founder of Spartan laws whose suicide was a lesson to his citizens, for it thought them that a citizen should be useful to his his community even in death, so he starved himself to make a point), or a relief to an unbearable pain, the context of each person differs. Kant turns a specific (a man committing suicide) into a general (everyone committing suicide) to argue that it doesn’t work as a general it shouldn’t be applied as a specific, which is a serious logical fallacy. Nietzsches Master and Slave morality is also an antidote to this, but I won’t go into detail there.
Morality based on good intentions, not results
The belief that the good is based on the intention of the person and not the consequences is absurd. The consequences should be the first thing to conceder, then the intention. Even animals possess a theory of mind and can determine motivations and humans aren’t naturally devoid of this consideration of intention, but the real world results are always a priority. If an error was caused that wasn’t intended, that will be a consideration, but what if a moronic error causes a catastrophe? Are we to pardon negligence due to “good intentions”? Some mistakes require a firing squad as retribution, the Romans would place the engineer working on a building below it as they removed the scaffolding since they believed if anyone should die from a bad building it should be its constructor and his good intentions could be damned along with him. Machiavelli’s notion of “effectual truth” is a much better mode of operation than Kants love affair with intentions, and it coincides with Roman and pre-Socratic Greeks focus on delivering results above all, good intentions be damned if it leads to disaster.
Reason being the source of happiness
His notion that reason leads to happiness and not instinct is absurd. The ecstasy of victory, the look in a defeated does face, the embrace of a woman, a completed project, a large sum of money won… These are the stuff that produces dopamine and androgen receptors to explode in the brain. One can theorize if Goethe snubbed his views in Faust, but it’s only speculation. The problem with Kant and many other philosophers is the denial of tacit knowledge, which is the foundation of how our brain operates, including our explicit knowledge.
“While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted on tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable.” -Knowing and Being, Michael Polanyi
While Kant does write the book Critique of Pure Reason which influenced one of my favorite books The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche, Kant doesn’t escape the fallacy of denying tacit knowledge it’s due place and lives in a false universe of Explicit knowledge ruled by logic. He also claims that morality isn’t a casual linear problem which is true, but then goes on claiming that this means morality isn’t a natural phenomenon because science is linear. We now understand complex systems and know Kants belief to be false, ecosystems are Complex Adaptive Systems, just like the whole of biology. Complex systems are also dispositional, not causal. His premise was wrong, and thus his conclusion of discarding morality a natural origin is wrong.
The point made above also rises another ontological fallacy of Kant concerning duty. Kant assumes we do not operate by instinct because we don’t operate by a simple mechanism of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, such as an animal. This is a laughable statement with what we know today with epigenetic influences on our behavior and RNA memory along with other instinctual foundations for our behavior steaming from conflict for sex, the individuals sex, hierarchical and territorial struggles, which are found in both man and the animal kingdom and had it’s origins in our biology and is an inheritance from our animal ancestors. And neither do animals operate from these simplistic mechanisms as Kant falsely claims, and many species have shown tremendous foresight despite lacking reason that act on instinct alone and not a simply gain pleasure avoid pain algorithm. Birds don’t migrate out of a sense of seek pleasure and avoid pain, sea turtles don’t dig holes and bury their eggs from this algorithm, nor beavers build their dams.
Kants Case for Never Lying
And the notion of avoiding lying is just plain absurdity and a disaster for our species. Deception is found in the animal kingdoms (whole books are dedicated on Machiavellian intelligence in the animal kingdom) and from there originates a race for understanding the minds of your peers in order to deceive them while understanding the mind of your peers in order not to be deceived. We find here a concept originates from this called Theory of Mind, which is a theory of what another peer is thinking. One theory on the origin of human intelligence suggests it was this dynamic that catapulted human intelligence, and it certainly was a heroic trait as we see from Odysseus or the Plataeans deception against the Spartans during the Peloponnesian war which created renown in the Greek world for the deception that rivaled the gods or heroes (Spartans attempted to build a mud wall next to Plataeans stone wall and use it to climb over it to their city, but Plataeans made a tunnel and started removing the dirt below the Spartan wall as the Spartans mounted more and more dirt without seeing it rise among other tricks), or the Agoge training that starved the Spartan boy so he could learn to steal food without being caught.
But Machiavelli said it best in The Prince: “The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.”
Our cunning is one of our most human traits, a trait that was celebrated by the Hellenics who founded Western Civilization as a gift possessed by the gods and heroes. And in fact, if we are to believe some of the theories of the rise of human intelligence, we might was well owe deception and cunning as the catalyst that drove us above the animal kingdom.
Kant’s Autonomy of the Will
Kantian autonomy describes that morality is ruled by reason without outside influences is complete absurdity. Not only have we proven that our decisions originate from unconscious areas of our brain and not the cerebral cortex (even though our cortex can serve to decide which idea/impulse to carry out, it has also been shown to justify a decision after it was made, not be the agent), but we now know that our cognition is also directly a result from our environment, as the works of Robert D. Rupert and Tim van Gelder show on extended cognition. Ontologically, Kant is wrong once again.
Nietzsche also highlights the absurdity that our decisions making can be made through reason without other influences such as our ancestors or society:
“The desire for “freedom of will” in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui, and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness.” –Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Now, this is not to say that we don’t have agency or will, but it’s constrained. Our minds are a complex adaptive system, it isn’t free to become something new just by wishing it, and what we are is a result of a combination of genetics, environment and habits. We have a level of agency within these constraints. A point Nietzsche also makes:
“The “non-free will” is mythology; in real life it is only a question of strong and weak will.” –Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil
The idea of the adjacent possible, that all future decisions, ideas or technologies depend on a past that emerges to create future options, but the future options aren’t an endless sea of free will and possibilities but depend on the conditions of the past. Imagine a chess game: You have options to make decisions, but these options available are constrained by the rules of the game and the emergent game that has arranged the pieces. While there is a level of choice (our will/agency), it isn’t free, there is no free will, but there is will. The system constraints the agents, but the decisions of the agents changes the system.
Not only the above mentioned should be considered, but there’s also the Duel Inheritance Theory that states that genes and culture coevolve. This also includes notions of morality having a mix of genetic and cultural origins which are mutually affecting each other. Biologist David Sloan Wilson is a proponent of this theory, and has written in his books such as Darwin’s Cathedral that morality is a biological manifestation that evolved for group cohesions out of intergroup conflict. Robert Audrey also argues for morality appearing as an evolutionary emergence with a biological foundation in his books African Genesis and Territorial Imperative. The book Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal manifests complex social and moral behavior in the chimpanzee (example: if two adults are fighting and physically attacking each other, and one picks a child, the other will not attack the one holding the child). Waal also attributes these complex behaviors, which he attributes to be as complicated as humans in his concept of “Machiavellian intelligence” (the term originated with that Waal and was picked up by psychology but doesn’t do a justice to Machiavelli).
Even political ideology is now being predicted through genetics and brain structures. The paper by John T Jost and David M. Amodio titled “Political ideology as motivated social cognition: Behavioral and neuroscientific evidence” is one example.
Point being: we have too much evidence for outside factors beyond reason affecting our decisions and morality. The will exists but it’s not free, it has agency within constraints. Philosopher Daniel Dennett rebukes the neuroscientists claims that our decisions are all deterministic, since we do get to choose options brought to us, but the impulses and thoughts we get in the first place which our will/agency sorts out doesn’t come from our reason alone, and it’s control might be rather minimal. Our higher faculties came late in our evolutionary history, and they are here to serve the more primeval parts of our brain, not command them. We are still in the same struggle for survival, and morality evolved as part of this struggle as explained above through the various works on biology mentioned.
Conclusion: Necessity Determines Morality
Machiavelli and Baltasar Gracian stated that seeking to always be a good person would lead to misfortune, and since not everyone is good, we must learn how not to be good to defend outselves from those who seek to do us harm. This advice should have been nailed to the head of Kant, and anyone foolish enough to disregard it does it at his own peril. Ontologically speaking, Kant is wrong. We don’t live in fairyland, and the world is ruled by passions, irrationality and in occasions, evil:
“However, unlike Hobbes, Machiavelli, Thucydides, and Sun-Tzu, Kant provides little practical advice for dealing with a world governed by passion, irrationality, and periodic evil” -Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos by Robert D. Kaplan
Morality originated as an emergent property from evolution to regulate behavior and it’s found in the animal kingdom, and it’s mostly asocial cohesion mechanism to organize against other groups (this is the case with primates, and why a great enemy can unite a whole nation with us humans), which includes aspects such as protecting your children. Therefore it evolved from necessity and that must be its chief objective in satisfying a moral theory. The “effectual truth” as Machiavelli would say. The search of Arete in the Homeric sense, a quest for seeing results above all. An embrace of Machiavellian Virtù and Roman Republican virtue (the equivalent of virility or manliness). This focus on necessity as a criticism of Kant has been addressed by others, including Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield:
“Although necessity is what makes men virtuous, Machiavelli does not want us either to lose heart for politics in the manner of Lucretius or to try to transcend necessity a la Kant. Nature must be considered harsh, but also must be recognized as the source of virtue.” Machiavelli’s Virtue , by Mansfield, Harvey C. Mansfield
The good in itself is an oxymoron; it depends entirely on the context of satisfying necessity. And what primitive man did to scratch an existence from nature modern man must do to stay ahead of his rivals. Philosophers like Kant and Plato are a menace to the species, they argue against tradition itself as a general concept, not at a specific tradition. Tradition is a set of practices that emerged through the interaction with the real world, and are thus far more valuable than rationalizations from philosophers imagining nonexistent causalities and ontologies.
Anthropologists state of two basic types of cultures that operate either through tacit knowledge imparted by social interaction and stories (such as was the case of the Hellenic world and Rome) called Ideation based cultures and cultures ruled by explicit knowledge, called rule-based cultures. Ideation based cultures are more successful than rule-based. And if they’re rank based as was the case of the Homeric heroes, then we see an added pressure for hierarchy and status that are achieved through real world deeds (which used to be called heroic) that depend in real world results, and morality becomes the accompanied psychological traits to achieve heroism. This is what the likes of Kant and Plato seek to take away from this world and Machiavelli and Nietzsche restore.
Nietzsche claims in the beginning of The Anti-Christ that he is not in favor of virtue (in the Christian or that of Socrates and Plato) but in Virtù the renaissance sense, and since Machiavelli is the ONLY author on the Renaissance to use the phrase Virtù and Nietzsche has praised Machiavelli explicitly elsewhere, he can only be advocating Machiavelli:
“What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, Virtù, virtue free of moral acid).”
While Kant was right in arguing against a world of pure reason, he was wrong in the specifics causing further erroneous conclusions. In the end I have to agree with Nietzsche when he says that Kant became an idiot, which still acknowledges it’s previously obvious point:
“A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention; it must spring out of our personal need and defense. In every other case it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of “virtue,” as Kant would have it, is pernicious. “Virtue,” “duty,” “good for its own sake,” goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal validity — these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an expression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit of Konigsberg. Quite the contrary is demanded by the most profound laws of self-preservation and of growth: to wit, that every man find his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every “impersonal” duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction. — To think that no one has thought of Kant’s categorical imperative as dangerous to life! …”
“‘Duty’… impersonal and universal – phantom expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of life… each one of us should devise his own virtue, his own categorical imperative… Kant’s categorical imperative should have been felt as mortally dangerous… What destroys more quickly that to work, to think, to feel without inner necessity, without a deep personal choice… as an automaton of duty? It is a recipe for decadence, even for idiocy… Kant became an idiot.“
Work citation:
Jost, John T., and David M. Amodio. “Political Ideology as Motivated Social Cognition: Behavioral and Neuroscientific Evidence.” Motivation and Emotion, vol. 36, no. 1, 2011, pp. 55–64., doi:10.1007/s11031-011-9260-7.
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