2. Infancy, Childhood, Adolescence
What is so gripping about babies? They grip us in different degrees, of course, and even the most devoted of new parents may admit that babies are not endlessly fascinating; there is a certain amount of boredom involved in accompanying an infant through its very limited repertoire. Yet most of us are vulnerable to the tug of amazement that babies themselves express, and exert on us. What earlier ages attributed to Providence is likely to be chalked up to evolutionary advantage today. Given that they would die without adult attention, it’s a good thing babies are born with the ability to capture it.
For the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, nothing about our fascination is contingent. In The Human Condition she argued that birth is a miracle:
The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ultimately rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. (p. 247)
Arendt coined the term ‘natality’ – the fact that we are born – as a counterpoint to the familiar ‘mortality’, the fact that we die, which was so central to the ancient Greeks that their definition of human was simply ‘mortal’. Traces of that centrality remain in the first syllogism most students of philosophy ever learn:
All men are mortal
Socrates was a man
Therefore, Socrates was mortal
They also appear in the Greek-centred view of her teacher, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who held that consciousness of death is fundamental to being human. Against this tradition, Arendt’s focus on birth is revolutionary; she held it to be the central category of political thought. (Much of her enthusiasm for the United States rested on the fact that it was a nation of immigrants: newly born into the state they could constantly renew it. It’s a thought worth considering by European nations currently struggling with what they regard as the problem of immigration.) For Arendt, the origin of life from inorganic matter is so infinitely improbable that it prefigures every action:
The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected of him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. (Human Condition, p. 178)
For de Beauvoir, this newness is preserved beyond birth:
If, in all oppressed countries, a child’s face is so moving, it is not that the child is more moving or that he has more of a right to happiness than the others; it is that he is the living affirmation of human transcendence: he is on the watch, he is an eager hand held out to the world, he is a hope, a project. (The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 102)
Our gaze at the baby is thus not, or not only, a function of evolutionarily programmed survival strategies or plain parental silliness. Babies are miraculous. Such tiny fingers (that will one day build or weave or shoot or caress), even tinier toes (that will dance or kick or swim or trudge). And all of it open. Arendt’s turn from mortality to natality shifts our focus. Cicero wrote that the task of philosophy is learning how to die; Arendt’s emphasis on the improbable uniqueness of every human being, on the potential openness of each moment of our lives, makes growing up central, though she did not address it directly herself. ‘Whenever we act, even in a small way, we are changing the course of history, nudging the world down one path rather than another,’ writes psychologist Alison Gopnik in The Philosophical Baby (p. 23). This sentence was as true in Cicero’s day as it is in ours, yet the consciousness of our capacity to change the world through our actions is one that the Enlightenment brought to the fore. For Arendt, that consciousness is what allows us to maintain faith and hope, features of experience the ancient Greeks – who counted hope as the last of the evils in Pandora’s box – discounted, but that are celebrated in the glad tidings signalled by the birth of Jesus. For a non-Christian like Arendt, the miracle is not that particular birth. In the Christian celebration of the divine become human she sees a symbol of the wonder we glimpse every time a child is born: the miracle of a completely new being that might just redeem the world.
For the baby, the miracle is the world itself, in all its bits and pieces. Watch a baby investigate a set of keys or a crinkly bit of paper, and you will not only see an inseparable mixture of play and science but a touch of awe and wonder that would be called religious, if the baby had concepts to mark the sacred and profane. We envy that wonder, and we cannot get it back, for every experience of wonder contains an element of surprise. Gopnik suggests that when we travel we experience the world as babies do, the newness of our surroundings creating more vivid awareness and attention. Under very particular conditions this may be true in moments, but it cannot last for long. More than once I’ve had the good fortune to live in jaw-droppingly beautiful surroundings. My jaw did drop, the first few mornings, waking up overlooking Lake Como or Dingle Bay, till the surprise of it ceased and turned into pleasure, but the wonder was gone.
Once babies discover what we know – it’s just a set of keys with a function, produced rather often from pockets and handbags, not a mystery of jingling whatsits – their own wonder fades. If they are lucky they’ll go on to the next adventure, examining another bit of the world and moving from awe to understanding. The very fact that they can progress from viewing an object with awe to tasting it, turning it and taking it apart on occasion, should itself be a matter for wonder. For Kant, the fact that our cognitive capacities are fitted to comprehend something so utterly distinct from them – the rest of the world – was almost enough to make an argument for the existence of God. What else could ensure that the two fit together, allowing us to pick out laws of gravity or motion from the infinite amount of data that surrounds us? But since Kant put God’s existence squarely outside the realm of knowledge, the baby’s continued experience of the world yielding to her cognitive capacities produces not gratitude or humility, but an attitude some psychologists call confidence, and others simply trust. The baby who learns that pulling on a string makes the toy bird over her crib flap its wings has learned both to count on herself and the world to work in reliable ways, and together. In favourable circumstances, she will experience this so often that she has some reason to infer that the reliability of that relationship is infinite. Psychologists estimate that we learn more in the first three years of life than in all the rest of it. That some things are wet and others sticky, some are hard enough to hurt and others soft enough to be shaped with our hands, that animals are not stones or vegetables, that night follows day and then back again, that children become adults but not trees or lions. The discoveries we make are too many to remember, let alone count, and they do indeed hold up, these truths about the world. Why shouldn’t they go on forever?
It makes little sense to speak of trust in the world where the practices of distrust are dormant, the possibilities of comparison nil. The baby has no choice but to go on in the world as if it were trustworthy. What other chance does she have? With good fortune in the form of a reasonably sane and responsive parent, the baby learns to trust. Along with basic categories of understanding like substance and causality, and laws of nature like gravity, the main thing babies learn is how other people work. If you cry at the pain in your belly they will give you something warm and sweet that soothes it. Rousseau was aware that infant feeding had an impact on adult development, which later psychologists corroborated while softening his views. Arguing against the practice of feeding infants according to schedule, the American psychoanalyst Haskell Bernstein wrote that the infant fed on schedule
will have to endure the discomfort of hunger for longer periods of time, but equally important, for him there is no consistent correlation of hunger, crying, and being fed. The feeding, when it occurs, has no connection with his own activity – the restoration of equilibrium is arbitrary and the infant feels helpless to influence the course of events. (Being Human, p. 160)
Of course the baby has no concept of action or influence, any more than she has the concept of mother or self. It is through these processes that those concepts are formed, and much depends on the luck of the draw. Helpless as we are when thrown into the world, other people are crucial. The baby’s hunger needs stilling as its exploration needs response. A depressed or abusive caregiver is unable to meet the baby’s wonder. Where the baby seeks method, the inadequate caregiver sees nothing but mess. When we fail to marvel, for a moment, at the fact that the mush spills downward every single time it’s splattered, we fail to respond to the buoyant aliveness that nearly every baby brings to the world – and we strangle it, just a little. Since we’ve long forgotten how we learned about gravity, and since we are the ones responsible for mopping the floor before someone slips on it, we will inevitably strangle, or choke off something. Still if we meet the baby’s need for response often enough, we are part of the world that encourages her to develop trust in it.
Erik Erikson, the psychologist who argued that the baby’s first task is to develop social trust, maintained that this trust cannot be complete. Erikson pointed to a trauma that the happiest of infants cannot avoid, and named teething as the point where good and evil enter her world. The baby’s teeth begin to bore from within, from the same mouth that had been her main source of pleasure. Even worse, the pain caused by teething can only be assuaged by biting – which can only cause the mother to withdraw.
This earliest catastrophe in the individual’s relation to himself and to the world is probably the ontogenetic contribution to the biblical saga of paradise, where the first people on earth forfeited forever the right to pluck without effort what had been put at their disposal; they bit into the forbidden apple and made God angry. (Childhood and Society, p. 79)
Erikson argues that teething has prototypical significance, preparing us for a lifetime in which our most legitimate needs cannot be met by the world we are given. Like Peter Pan, we forget it, and under the right conditions we learn to suck without biting, to elicit the responses that will be crucial to developing basic trust in the world and our own ability to navigate it. ‘But even under the most favorable circumstances, this stage leaves a residue of a primary sense of evil and doom and a universal nostalgia for a lost paradise’ (Ibid, p. 80). Erikson concludes that it is against this sense of loss and division that basic trust must maintain itself, throughout our whole lives.
Watch a baby who has achieved it. Long before she has a language she can act on the world in myriad ways. Smile, they smile back. Push, and it moves. There are a thousand ways to get it wrong – I have seen babies coo in answer to the sound of wind in the trees – but with time, and adults who can mirror, fairly often, their own thrill at getting things right, babies learn what it means to act in and on the world. Every discovery is a triumph that affirms two things: the baby’s own growing powers, and the transparency of the world. Off she goes, driven by the inborn propensity of human reason to seek what Kant called the Unconditioned.
Using Kant’s imposing term to understand the normal development of curiosity may seem rather stretched, but the process he describes is as natural as it is straightforward. Reason involves the capacity to ask why, which itself presupposes a concept of possibility: things could have been otherwise, why are they just like that? The actual is given to us, without any conscious effort on our part; it takes reason to conceive the possible. Kant says reason was born when we left the Garden of Eden. Where everything is as it should be, what could induce us to imagine another state of affairs?
Contemporary psychologists believe the ability to imagine counterfactuals occurs early in the second year of life. Experiments show babies mentally anticipating the possibilities that a new tool will allow, rather than using trial and error strategies as chimpanzees do. What’s clear is that not long after the child has learned language, her ability to imagine other states of affairs is enough to keep her asking, all day long, why something is this way rather than that. Once you start asking why, there’s no natural place to stop. Why does it rain? Because the clouds are heavy and full of water. But that’s not an answer until you know why water condenses and clouds become heavy. Perhaps you can give your child a clear account of rain and wind and thunder, but the better your explanations, the more likely your child is to ask for more. Even a meteorologist will reach a point where she must fall back on the rather helpless exclamation: because that’s the way the world is! A child whose desire to explore has not been stifled will be inclined to reply: why is the world that way? The question need not be triggered by the weather; most anything will do. But once she starts asking for conditions – the grounds for something being the way it is, since she is now able to imagine its being otherwise – everything short of an explanation of the world as a whole is frustratingly partial. An explanation of the world as a whole must include an answer to why the world as a whole is just that way. And the only truly satisfying answer would be: because it’s the best of all possible ones.
To reach this point would be to reach the Unconditioned – a point at which the world as a whole would make such perfect sense that no more questions can be asked at all. It is not a point in space/time, for it is never actually reachable. For Leibniz, its unattainability is contingent: if we could but live long enough to follow up every question, as God does, we would understand everything, as He does. That understanding must have a normative component, for if this world were not the best of all possible ones there would still be questions to ask (e.g., Why not?). For Kant, the fact that none of us is God – though we are continually tempted to long for the two most important divine attributes, omniscience and omnipotence – cannot be contingent; it’s the most important fact about us. And whether or not we long for it, the best of all possible worlds is not a world we could live in and still be recognizably human.
Without a notion of the possible as well as the actual, babies cannot be said to believe they live in the best of all possible worlds, but they have no choice but to presume it. If Erikson is right, we lost this presumption when we gained our first tooth. Still the Unconditioned, if imaginable, would be remarkably like ‘the harmless and safe condition of infant care, out of a garden, as it were, which cared for him without any effort on his part’.10 It is no surprise that we yearn for this state of ‘tranquil inactivity and constant peace’11 – for much the same reason that we idealize early childhood. It may be more surprising that the first steps of reason, which are the steps of freedom away from infancy, should be focused on an imaginary object that would, if attained, bring us back to that immaturity and guardianship from which we have just emerged. Yet from the perspective of the small child as well as the dogmatic metaphysician, the process makes sense. If, as Kant says, the infancy of reason is dogmatic, it is characterized by children’s unreflective self-confidence in their own powers, as well as the intelligibility of the world around them. The source of that self-confidence, he continues, is reason’s initial success. The child experiences her increasing abilities together with the increasing coherence of the world around her with a growing sense that things make sense. The world is my world: see how the two of us fit together! A child, and perhaps a philosopher, who did not proceed down this path would be severely disturbed; calling Leibniz’s metaphysics childish is not an insult. (Hegel was more tendentious in calling them a fairy tale.)
The idea of a world that ought to make sense is just what leads us to make what sense of it we can. The idea is so natural to human reason – and our partial successes in making sense so confirmed by experience – that we can hardly be blamed for expecting to reach it. Leibniz never actually thought mortals could get there, but he thought that a matter of time: nothing about the Unconditioned was for him in principle unreachable if our lives were only longer. It is the idea of a world that makes perfect sense which drives all our approximations to it: the understanding we seek when we engage in science and art as well as the transformations we seek when we pursue social justice. Could we ever achieve it, we’d have nothing more to seek at all; thus we’d be thrust back into a state resembling earliest infancy.
Kant offers these metaphors as consolation, for the Unconditioned is not an object but an idea that he likens to the horizon: it’s a point you can move towards forever, but only children think it’s a place you can actually reach. Dogmatism and trouble start when the Unconditioned is reified, that is, viewed as an object of absolute truth. The claim that there is no alternative but perdition to a worldview that shows how everything fits together and makes perfect sense is a mark of fundamentalism, whether of religious or market variety. In a child, such moments are appealing, necessary and usually harmless.
But you and the world only fit together so far. Young children create imaginary playmates and fantasy worlds; adults encourage them by filling books for young children with talking pigs or chickens, and books for older children with magic. Even very young children can distinguish such play from reality, however they may wish that the door to their own wardrobe might open to another world. This kind of mis-fit between yourself and the world is benign; better, it’s creative. It’s the result of the fact that we learn very early that more is possible than is actual, and it’s the beginning of science and art. Experiments have shown that even those children whose imaginary companions are so vivid they may insist on their being fed or bathed alongside them know perfectly well that they’re playing, and do so with relish.
There comes a moment, however, when you must recognize a gap; not merely between the world as it is and your own childish wishes (was it time travel? unicorns?) but between the world as it is and the world as it should be. You have witnessed some piece of injustice, however privileged you may be, or not. It can be as small as the playground bully or as big as all the suffering Buddha’s royal father could not hide. Apparently even some animals perceive it. Primatologists Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan conducted a series of experiments in which pairs of Capuchin monkeys were rewarded for performing a small task with pieces of cucumber, food they normally enjoyed. Both willingly performed the task – returning a rock to the experimenters – until the experimenters rewarded one of the monkeys with a grape, food they enjoyed even more. At that, the monkey who got stuck with the cucumber revolted: throwing it back at the experimenter, refusing to participate any further. Interestingly enough, the monkeys restricted their outrage to the experimenter who was clearly the source of the injustice, not the other monkey who was the beneficiary of it. The experiment, repeated with different monkeys as well as other animals, suggests that a rough sense of fairness begins considerably further back on the phylogenetic tree than Homo sapiens. (Interesting as the experiment is to read about, it’s astonishing to watch. Just google monkey+cucumber+grape to see an unforgettable expression of what is hard to call anything but moral outrage.) Parents of more than one child will find it very familiar.
Whether it’s unequal reward for equal behaviour or outright violence, you have witnessed the gap between is and ought. One perfectly normal reaction – as the monkeys suggest – is rage. You may rage in all the wrong directions, but your indignation is perfectly justified. You have discovered what Nietzsche called the metaphysical wound at the heart of the universe. Things are not as they should be, and you can neither get the should or the things out of your heart. One of the silliest suggestions in the history of philosophy is the idea that heart and head are necessarily divided, and one must trump the other. For David Hume, reason is ‘impotent’, and merely ‘a slave to the passions’. Is it reason or passion that moves us? Most of us use both of them, in dialogue, most of the time, and never so much as when we witness unfairness. I’ll return to Hume very shortly, after turning to Plato, whose Republic portrays a form of outrage so natural that it has repeated itself with somewhat tedious regularity for several millennia.
Not much is known about the ancient Greek Sophist Thrasymachus. Only a few fragments of his own writings survive. His name means ‘fierce fighter’, and Plato describes him entering a room like a wild beast about to spring. He has gone down in history as the anti-hero of the first great book of Western philosophy, who bursts into the house where Socrates and his friends are passing the time before dinner by talking about justice. In his sly old way, Socrates has asked his companions to define it, and proceeds to demolish all their definitions. Their attempts are shallow, conventional, in need of demolition: telling the truth and giving back what you’ve borrowed? Helping your friends and hurting your enemies? Socrates needs no more than a counter-example to dispense with each one.
Enter Thrasymachus. He is as young as he is wild, and his contribution to the discussion is, roughly: bullshit. Not his elders’ definitions but the very fact that they are spending their time talking about justice and morality at all is what rouses his ire. Can they really be so naïve as to talk about morals? Don’t they know that what we call morality is merely the invention of men holding power who construct a lot of rules to fool us into helping them maintain it? And what’s wrong, by the way, with that? We are all of us out to serve our own interests, and it usually suits our interest to be immoral. No wonder the company has trouble defining justice: it’s a fiction invented by strong men to keep weaker men down. Anyone who takes moral language seriously is not just a fool but a baby. In a striking piece of rhetoric Thrasymachus asks Socrates if perhaps he needs a nurse. It’s the ultimate insult of a young man to his elder. For only a baby needing a nursemaid could fail to see the difference between sheep and shepherd: the sheep may believe the shepherd’s care is devoted to the sheep’s welfare, and it may continue to believe that all the way to the slaughterhouse.
Part of Thrasymachus’ anger, and all of his insults, stem from his conviction of discovery. He is not, or not only, pleased to have seen through the deception his elders have swallowed. His rage is fuelled by disappointment. These are the men who ought to know better; they’re his elders, after all. It is telling that the longest extant fragment of Thrasymachus’ own writing speaks of the need for younger men to replace the old:
I could wish, men of Athens, to have belonged to that long-past time when the young were content to remain silent unless events compelled them to speak, and while the older men were correctly supervising affairs of State. But since Fate has so far advanced us in time that we must obey others as rulers but must suffer the consequences ourselves … then it is necessary to speak.12
The regret in the words is rhetorical, but it also rings sincere. The youth’s discovery leaves him ambivalent. There is no way to know how old Thrasymachus was when writing this fragment or conversing with Socrates, no way even to know if the encounter with Socrates was real. Yet in quite a different way than he intended, Plato captured a near-eternal truth in describing the adolescent indignation that the certainties he was raised on are shakier than they seemed, and the resolution to doubt absolutely everything thereafter. Kant could have been describing Thrasymachus in the following passage from the Critique of Pure Reason:
He sees sophistical arguments, which have the attraction of novelty, set in opposition to sophistical arguments which no longer have that attraction, but on the contrary tend to arouse the suspicion that advantage has been taken of his youthful credulity. And accordingly he comes to believe that there can be no better way of showing that he has outgrown childish discipline than by casting aside those well-meant warnings; and accustomed as he is to dogmatism, he drinks deep draughts of the poison, which destroys his principles by a counter-dogmatism. (A755/B783)
The other interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues are little more than foils for Socrates. Unlike them, Thrasymachus makes Socrates feel fear. And no wonder: the problem with Thrasymachus’ critique is not that it’s false. He has put his finger on some of the lies on which conventional authority depends. If you cannot think of a statesman who has trumpeted a moral principle that he does not practise, with which he hopes to lull his public into silence, you haven’t been paying attention to the news. Having seen through several such instances, Thrasymachus is determined to reject everything that smacks of moral principle at all. What was advertised as just policy turned out to be self-aggrandizement; Thrasymachus henceforth will deny that anyone can act justly for any reason other than self-aggrandizement. Let us call him the first postmodern nihilist. He’s the first to offer the argument that claims of morality are the product of somebody seeking power trying to deceive us combined with a portion of self-deception – an argument that has reappeared, with varying degrees of sophistication, from Machiavelli to Hobbes to Foucault. One thing common to all these thinkers – as well as to your neighbour or teenager – is a sense of revelation. This sense can’t be simply the product of the familiar desire to say something new. Embarrassed by his earlier readiness to believe his pious, dogmatic elders, Thrasymachus is resolved: he won’t be fooled again. For he is convinced that he’s seen through everything. It takes a grown-up to know that this doesn’t mean he’s seen it.
If Thrasymachus was the first recorded thinker to suggest that morality is nothing but self-interested, deceptive rhetoric, Plato was the first to think the right response was to provide morality with foundations. It cannot work, as Hume would so elegantly show: you cannot derive an ought from an is. Plato’s attempt to answer Thrasymachus by providing a metaphysics to undergird the reality of morals produced great philosophy – all ten books of The Republic – but not even Plato’s student Aristotle thought it worked. No wonder every age produces a crop of Thrasymachuses, each one defiantly unmasking ideas of virtue as the triumph of a stronger faction that has managed to trick a weaker one into believing it. And each act of unmasking is presented as tough, and radically truthful: you may be fooled by all that noble-sounding rhetoric, but I’m bold and honest enough to see through the manipulations behind it.
Those who forget that this sort of argument goes back to Plato’s day usually imagine that earlier ages were as naïve as they were golden. (Or gilt, as it were.) Religion, they believe, was the rock on which morality was grounded, and the truths which people based their lives on were secure and unquestioned; only now can we see through the apparent religious and moral certainties to their true, manipulative basis. Just a little history – or a glance at bloody contemporary battles between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, for example – should give the lie to the suggestion that religiously dominated societies are more secure than we are. God may have reigned in His heaven (though atheists doubted His existence fairly early on), but His nature was the subject of debates more complex and passionate than any we have today. Armies of men slaughtered one another regularly to prove one conception or another, and Socrates was put to death for offending religion in the birthplace of Western thought. Small wonder that sceptical challenges to all established doctrines are almost as old as those doctrines themselves. If you’ve witnessed much of this sort of unmasking, you may agree with the English philosopher Bernard Williams that it soon becomes immensely boring, and explains very little: claims that knowledge is reducible to power cannot even ‘explain the difference between listening to someone and being hit by them’.13
For Kant, however, the movement from dogmatic certainty to radical scepticism was crucial to the process of growing up:
The first step in matters of pure reason, marking its infancy, is dogmatic. The second step is skeptical and indicates that experience has rendered our judgment wiser and more circumspect … Skepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings and make survey of the region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it may be able to choose its path with more certainty. (A761/B789)
Unsurprisingly, Kant holds that while scepticism may be a necessary resting-place, it is not a permanent dwelling. Still he is adamant in opposing every attempt to censor sceptical positions, for ‘The skeptic is the taskmaster who constrains the dogmatic reasoner to develop a sound critique of the understanding and reason’ (A769/B797).
Kant is surely speaking autobiographically; if it was Rousseau who changed his life and gave it direction, it was Hume, he wrote, who awoke him from dogmatic slumber. Both men presented sceptical objections to long-entrenched views. Earlier we saw how Rousseau’s rage at the established order not only produced a critique more detailed and incisive than that of Thrasymachus; it also left room for action that was something other than Thrasymachus’ cynical acquiescence to whatever power happens to rule. This kind of scepticism is harmless, for its unmasking is potentially endless. If every moral claim is a mask for a claim to power, why not help yourself to a portion of whiskey or weed or similar anaesthetic, and settle in with the powers that be? The impulse to demystify may have to precede the will to change, but it is far from being all that is needed for it. Rousseau’s critique of the power relations masked by ideology is certainly as trenchant as that of Thrasymachus, whose rhetorical skills never sufficed to produce images like the garlands woven by artists and intellectuals to mask the chains that bind us all. Yet both proceed from that indignation, so natural in adolescents, at the disjunct between the way the world is, and the way, something tells them, it ought to be.
That indignation may be directed at the false promise of natality itself. Every birth may hold the promise of a completely new beginning, but every experience reveals, soon enough, that we are born into webs of relations that constrain as they sustain us. As soon as we’re old enough to have gathered much experience, we must acknowledge that the world into which we were born is already given, and rarely yields to our will. Much of the time we do not even fit together with it. In offering programmes for radically restructuring the given world, Rousseau took one path that many adolescents forge. Incensed by the discovery that the world is not what it should be, many a youth has taken up the sort of idealism for which youth is known, and often dismissed. (The expression ‘Anyone who isn’t a socialist at twenty has no heart, anyone who is still a socialist at forty has no head’ is an expression of several misconceptions, not least about the relations between heart and head, but it is also an expression of contempt.) To be sure, the youthful outrage at the gap between is and ought can be exhausting. This kind of sceptic is always posing questions we cannot answer, and rarely stays long enough to listen to our attempts at reply. Is life really long enough to be subjected to this sort of thing – over and over and over? ‘I never want to see that man again,’ said Denis Diderot of his erstwhile good friend Rousseau. ‘He makes me believe in devils and hell.’ It’s not hard to understand how a constant, lifelong battle to undo the is could drive the man crazy, and most of the people around him as well. And we have seen how Rousseau’s insistence on creating a world that makes sense ultimately vitiates his attempt to educate a child for a world that does not. It is nevertheless a more fruitful consequence of indignation than the sputtering put-downs of Thrasymachus. Instead of resting with critique in the space between is and ought, Rousseau proposes a way forward; it’s up to us to decide how far we want to go.
Whether accompanied by the sort of idealism Rousseau embodied, or the disdain we saw in Thrasymachus, rage is not the only reaction to the gap between is and ought. More common in our time is the sort of urbane knowingness so present in David Hume. Born in 1711 in comfortable circumstances in Scotland, the man who would become the most important philosopher in the English language never succeeded in obtaining an academic position, nor in gaining the recognition as the Newton of the mind for which he longed. After what he called ‘a very feeble trial’ at business as the clerk for a Bristol sugar merchant, he was chiefly employed in a series of diplomatic posts that took him to Vienna, Turin and, most significantly, Paris, where he met the major figures of the Enlightenment salons. One of these was Rousseau, who was in danger of arrest for Emile’s attack on established religion. Sympathetic to the latter (one wonders what he would have made of the rest of the book), Hume arranged refuge in England for the Swiss fugitive, but dislike of conventional religion was the only thing the two men had in common, and the relationship soon soured. Accounts of their falling-out usually blame Rousseau, who accused Hume of fomenting a conspiracy against him, but whatever the immediate cause of their quarrel, it is hard to imagine two more different souls. Where Rousseau was suspicious of irony, Hume was suspicious of earnestness; where Rousseau took the gap between is and ought to demand a reshaping of the world, Hume preferred to give up the ought. Had he not written that any text that concerned neither mathematical reasoning nor matters of fact should be committed to the flames, ‘for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion’?14 Mathematics and matters of fact: the ought was clearly neither. In a famous passage of his Treatise of Human Nature (1739) Hume formulated the problem more clearly than anyone before him:
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning … when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulation of propositions, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or ought not. This change is imperceptible but is, however, of the last consequence. For … this ought or ought not expresses some new relation or affirmation.15
The ought is no part of the world, and cannot be inferred from anything in it. You can find out the fact that 8 million children in the world are working as slave labourers, on best current estimates, but nothing about the fact itself can tell you that it ought not to be so. The fact describes the way the world is; to get to the judgement that it ought to be different you need to make a leap. For Hume, the leap could not be made with reason, which he considered impotent; he held every such judgement to be a matter of passion. If the contemplation of child labour makes you feel bad, you will condemn it; if it does not, you will yawn. Reason, in any case, has nothing to say about the matter at all.
I find the coolness with which Hume surveys the split between ourselves and the world to be chilling, though I can’t but acknowledge his achievement. He writes as if he were merely pointing out a small matter of logic his predecessors had overlooked, but his argument goes straight to the heart of most questions ever raised about the human condition. We cannot derive what we should do in the world from any fact about it. So why not just leave it to humankind to make it up as we go along? The making up isn’t arbitrary; Hume thought that general psychological mechanisms explain why some habits and customs take hold and others do not. But mechanisms, however general, are not reasons, nor can they even be causes, on Hume’s account of the latter. They are just the way things are.
Expressed in the calmest of terms, Hume’s critique is far more devastating than Thrasymachus’. For Thrasymachus, morality was in fact all made up to mask existing power relations. This is, he rants, the way of the world, but he offers no reasons for believing it must be that way. Hume is far deeper, for he means to leave us without a conceptual leg to stand on. It’s a matter of logical structure: what is, just is, and any claim about what ought to be is a claim about our own wishes and desires. Why ever should we imagine that the two would be related? Children, even as metaphors, being largely absent from his writing, Hume never actually describes the desire to connect is and ought as childish, but the placidly withering tone in which he writes suggests that anyone who baulks at his conclusions is hopelessly naïve.
For Hume’s intentions are anything but revolutionary. His sceptical reflections have so little consequence that he doesn’t even take them seriously enough to let his life be disturbed by them. Within his study, he can prove that we have no real knowledge of any of the propositions our lives are based on: that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, that killing your father is an unspeakable crime, even that any one event ever caused another.
Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return?… I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.16
Fortunately, he continues, all it takes is a good meal, a game of backgammon and a couple of merry friends to dispel ‘this philosophical melancholy and delirium’, which is bound to look ridiculous after a few glasses of sherry. Lest this all reek too strongly of the unflappability of a British clubhouse, it must be remembered that Hume’s doubts on one subject did have real personal consequences. Rumours of his atheism prevented him from attaining a university position, and his most brilliant book, the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), could only be published posthumously. On every other matter, however, Hume was prepared not only to defer to custom and habit, but to make them the foundation of our lives. It is custom and habit that lead us to believe the sun will rise tomorrow morning, and that when it does we will continue to shoot billiards in the belief that a perfect shot at the red will cause the others to roll in our favour. Custom and habit, without considerable reflection, have always been the grounds for what we do, for observation tells us too little, and reason is too weak a guide. We’ve no better option than to let custom and habit carry us on.
Reliance on custom and habit is reasonable enough if we’re contemplating the planet’s turning, or even ordinary moral questions. The consequences of Hume’s views become problematic, however, when applied to the political world. You may find the fact that children are forced to labour in mines or kitchens or brothels to be appalling. But since justice is not a matter of fact or mathematics, the fact that you are appalled is just that: a fact about you and your emotions – what sorts of things you happen to loathe or like. In Hume’s day, it happened to be a matter of custom and habit that thousands of children in the cities where he lived passed their lives in service hardly better than slavery. It was indeed such a matter of custom and habit that hardly a man of letters thought it worth comment. David Hume certainly didn’t. It would take more than a century and a powerful labour movement, fuelled by ideas of justice that cannot arise from experience (that did not yet contain them), to bring about the end of child labour in Britain. Meanwhile, Hume’s primary passion, ‘love of literary fame’, was finally satisfied when his six-volume History of England became a bestseller. None of his philosophical treatises received much notice in his lifetime, and the British Library still lists him as ‘David Hume, historian’.
The History was less popular in the New World. Thomas Jefferson had it banned from the University of Virginia for fear it ‘will spread universal Toryism across the land’. Samuel Johnson demurred, arguing that Hume wasn’t really a Tory, for he ‘has no principle; if anything he is a Hobbist’. This is not the place to trace the Tory relation to Hobbes, but Hume was considered the father of modern British Conservatism, and Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revolution drew heavily on Hume’s views. What is certain is that Hume’s metaphysics leave no room for reflective challenge to established orders. The space between is and ought is the space where questions arise. If you drop the ought as unfounded, where are you to begin?
Hume’s voice can sound like the voice of a grown-up, with strong echoes of Peter Pan’s Mr Darling. British philosopher Isaiah Berlin praised it as ‘calm, reasonable, placid, moderate, ironical, with a firm sense of reality, and lucid and disciplined prose’.17 In praising Hume as opposed to the anti-rationalists, Berlin suggests that the absence of passion is enough to make something rational. Hume’s tone can be soothing, unfailingly calm, comfortably obliging. Have another glass of sherry and your doubts will disappear. The French didn’t call him ‘Le Bon David’ for nothing. The sun will go up and then down as it ever has, with or without ideas of causation or justice or law. It’s a voice of the sort of resignation that is meant to comfort, and many a reader has been comforted. If ideas and ideals are chimerical, there’s no point in deploring the gap between ought and is, much less in doing anything to reduce it. Your desire for a standpoint that makes your condemnation of slave labour something weightier than your distaste for codfish is a relic of childish wishes, your desire to be part of a better world of a piece with your earlier fantasies of opening a door into Narnia.
If such sentiments sound grown-up, it’s because we’ve been fooled by a false idea of maturity. Rousseau and Hume represent two reactions to the discovery of the mismatch between is and ought. While it’s too simple to say that Rousseau disdained the former as Hume disdained the latter, neither was inclined to give each his due. It would take Kant to appreciate the fact that we must take both seriously – if we are ever to arrive at an adulthood we need not merely acquiesce in but can actively claim as our own.
By the time you are old enough to pick up a book like this one, you have already learned it: the world is not your world, and you don’t have another. The wonder you felt as a very small child may be echoed in moments; a great work of music, a glorious landscape, a new love story, giving birth yourself can all bring it on. (If it turns out to be the latter you’ll be forced to remind yourself that not all of the infant’s encounters with the world produce wonder. There’s a great deal of fear and frustration as well. It’s consolation, of a sort.) But those moments are echoes, and few. They can provide occasion for gratitude but also for melancholy, insofar as they recall, however dimly, a time when they were so many they seemed to fill the world. Once all it took to produce awe and wonder was a bunch of keys; now you have to travel to Yosemite, or the west coast of Ireland. Some claim that the right sort of mindfulness training can lead you to find it in a leaf or a cup of coffee. I never got the hang of it, though that may be a personal failing, but even those who claim to achieve a sense of wonder at the ordinary acknowledge that it takes a lot of work.
You’ve accepted the dimming of sparkle. (What looked opalescent was just dew on the grass.) Further: your shock at the fact that the world is not only less sparkly, but downright hideous in places, has begun to wear off. Some bits of injustice still pull you up short – the long prison sentence for a hapless whistleblower, say, when men who ordered torture remain not just at large but in demand. Perhaps it’s something as simple and immediate as the promotion your flashy co-worker got at the office while your quieter efforts went unacknowledged. However wrenching any such experiences can be, they no longer have you feeling on the edge of abyss, watching the void between is and ought open before your eyes. You have seen it before, which means you’ve begun to get used to it. Some of us get cucumbers while others get grapes, and most days your indignation is as hard to access as the wonder that preceded it.
This can sound like growing up, which is one reason so many people are afraid of it. With the passing of time and the accumulation of experience, things get repeated, and the more the repetition the less the surprise. As surprise recedes, so does passion. The facts are the same, but you no longer feel them as acutely. And isn’t that a boon? Life is dimmer and duller, but it doesn’t hurt so much, either. Those of us who once thrilled to dance and dream until dawn are now content to retire rather earlier to a good bed and pillow. The edge is missing, but so is the hangover. You have learned not to count much on the things outside you: friends and fortune can disappear, and you’ve seen lives upended by floods, famine or war. The solution, you conclude, can only be found inside you. You cannot control much else, but with determination and practice you can learn to control your own emotions, at least enough to ensure that what goes on outside affects you less. You’ve already accepted the gap between you and the world in principle; what remains is the task of embracing it in practice. The world is unstable, sometimes treacherous, and immeasurably vast; your soul, by contrast, is sufficiently limited and malleable to be the sort of thing you might transform. You will sleep better, and hurt less, if you turn your sights inward, for a good soul is in reach when nothing else is.
The pot-bellied uncle who offers this sort of advice has been reading the Stoics, or the bastardized bits of them that can be found in many a modern self-help manual, but he hasn’t studied Kant. To be fair, Kant’s worldview is easily confused with a Stoic one. Like every educated man of his day he grew up reading the Roman philosophers, and some of their tropes can be found in his work. The beginning of his Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) could pass for an excerpt from Cicero or Marcus Aurelius, and was presumably influenced by them. Kant begins his best-known work of ethics with a quick reminder that gifts of fortune – power and riches, health and happiness – are worth nothing at all without virtue. The only good, therefore, which is good in itself, is a good will.
Even if it should happen that, owing to special disfavour of fortune, or the niggardly provision of a step-motherly nature, this will should wholly lack power to accomplish its purpose, if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing, and there should remain only the good will (not, to be sure, a mere wish, but the summoning of all means in our power), then, like a jewel, it would still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its whole value in itself. (Metaphysics of Morals, p. 1)
This may sound like the sort of thing you could find in Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy was the most widely copied work of European secular literature throughout the early modern period. Its translators included King Alfred, Elizabeth I and Chaucer. Written in 524 while its author was in prison awaiting a particularly horrible form of execution, the book takes the form of a dialogue between Boethius and a vision of wisdom he calls Lady Philosophy. Poor Boethius laments that he did nothing but follow Plato’s maxim that states would be better if ruled by philosophers. Now his turn from private study to public life has been rewarded with an accusation of treason. What solace, then, can philosophy offer? Lady Philosophy responds with disquisitions on the jewel-like nature of virtue, outshining any of fortune’s gifts, but she goes considerably further: ill fortune, she claims, is positively preferable.
For when good Fortune seems to fawn on us, she invariably deceives us with the appearance of happiness, adverse Fortune is always truthful, and shows by her mutability that she is inconstant. The first deceives, the second instructs; the first, with her manifestation of deceitful blessings, shackles the minds of those who enjoy them, whereas the second frees them through making them realize the frailty of happiness.18
Nor does she shirk from specifics. With her aid, says Lady Philosophy, ‘Socrates won the victory of an unjust death.’
If you are facing execution, any form of bad faith that serves to console you is probably forgivable. And in a time when only half of children born survived to adulthood, it’s easier to make allowances for the frequent Stoic suggestion that you should remind yourself that your children could be dead tomorrow whenever you kiss them. Calling Socrates’ death fortunate, and your child’s death probable, is meant to steel you against such events by reducing the pain and rage they produce. Can the events themselves harm you, if you train your emotions properly? For ‘Outward things cannot touch the soul, not in the least degree … Get rid of the judgement, get rid of the “I am hurt”, you are rid of the hurt itself’ (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, v.19; viii.40).
Just try it sometime. Even for small hurts like sprained ankles it is hard to pull off, though I recently found myself sprawled on a Berlin sidewalk repeating ‘It’s just pain, it will pass’. But even this, of course, was not an attempt to deny the hurt, as Marcus Aurelius suggested, just to remind myself that it was finite. For real pain – the loss of a love or a life – such mantras will be futile. Kant thought the Stoic advice was made for gods, not for humans, though gods, presumably, get on perfectly well without it. The Stoics imagine we can remedy our dissatisfaction with the world by working on the dissatisfaction. By whittling down our passions to the point where nothing in the world can provoke them, we can gain both independence and contentment. A mind satisfied in the consciousness of its own virtue is, for the Stoics, not only the highest but the only true good, for nothing can destroy it.
Contrary to many a rumour, Kant had nothing against passion. He explicitly denies that passions are the source of evil, and believes we should work on cultivating the right ones. Like anyone else with a shred of common sense, Kant knew that the happier people are when they do what they ought to, the likelier they are to do it. And like any good Enlightenment pedagogue, Kant sought ways to do so without false advertising – like promising that doing what you ought to do will automatically make you happy. Earlier philosophers operated with a sleight of hand, identifying happiness and virtue through one foul compromise or another. Epicureans insisted that happiness is virtue: following your (enlightened) self-interest creates more good than harm. If this view, for Kant, is self-serving and lazy, that of the nobler-seeming Stoics is positively deluded. You can tell yourself that all the goods of the world are but vanity, that true happiness consists in virtue, and if it helps you hold your head high while facing execution then not much can be said against it. You are nonetheless denying a basic truth of existence: virtue is one thing, and happiness another, and though they may meet on many an occasion they are as fundamentally separate as you and the world. It’s this truth that honesty and maturity demand you accept.
Nietzsche called Stoicism a slave morality, consolation designed for the powerless by the powerless. It’s a nasty dig at Epictetus, who was in fact born in slavery, though other major Stoics included emperors like Marcus Aurelius, whose observation of the fickleness of fortune led him to focus on the one thing he thought we can control: the content of our souls. For Kant this means the Stoic is doubly guilty of bad faith. While he called himself a transcendental psychologist, he was also a remarkable ordinary one. Kant’s awareness of our inclinations to self-deception is clear and profound. We never can be certain of what goes on in our souls, and though more recent developments like psychoanalysis can uncover pieces of self-deception, not even Freud thought we could get rid of it altogether. If we’re honest, we know we’re liable to exalt our better tendencies and to deny our baser ones – not only to others but first and foremost to ourselves. We may try to live honourably, but we can never know if we’re successful, and the more certain we feel of our virtue, the less likely we are to possess it. The Stoic’s attempt to control something by controlling his soul is thus ultimately impossible, and likely to lead to smugness or self-righteousness to boot.
Double bad faith: for the claim that virtue is all there is to happiness is an eloquent variation on the fox’s sour grapes. Had he been able to secure happiness, he would savour its sweetness. Human desire for happiness is not something trivial. Nor is it a matter of passions that might be cooled or fanned. The key to Kant’s view can be found in the very opening of the Metaphysics of Morals, which seems to echo the Stoics. Good will shines like a jewel, all right, but it is also the indispensable condition of being worthy of happiness. By introducing the notion of being worthy of happiness Kant introduces a notion of reason. If you have lived – as much as you can try, as far as you can tell – so as to be worthy of happiness and consistently fail to obtain it, not your passion but your reason will rebel.
It is reason that leads you to hold that the world should make sense. Not that it does; that’s the error of children, Leibniz, Hegel and other dogmatic thinkers. Reason is the source of what Kant called regulative principles, ideas that do not tell us what the world is like but that orient our actions within it. Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world. A world in which those who are worthy of happiness are subject to misery and oppression is a world out of joint, and reason must find that intolerable. Go ahead, try to think it: children should be tortured, and those who torment them should be rewarded with fortune and fame. The Marquis de Sade asserted it, but his own transgressions never approached those of his fictional characters, and one suspects that even he couldn’t really maintain the claim. We know, of course, that we live in a world where the righteous suffer as often as the wicked flourish, but to think that it ought to be that way is beyond our ken. The mind reels.
But wait, you may ask. Didn’t Hume teach us that the ought – unlike the is – cannot be found in experience?
Indeed he did. That’s part of what awoke Kant from dogmatic slumber. What Kant called the Copernican turn in philosophy, his entire metaphysics, was spurred by Hume’s scepticism, which led him to map the components of experience. ‘The celebrated David Hume was one of those geographers of human reason who have imagined that they have sufficiently disposed of all such questions by setting them outside the horizon of human reason – a horizon which yet he was not able to determine’ (Critique of Pure Reason, A760/B788). Kant’s own geography would make different use of the horizon, as a point to which reason’s efforts are all directed and, like any horizon, can never reach. A traveller in a desert or a sailor on the sea may go a very long way by keeping it in sight; similarly, reason’s attempt to find the Unconditioned cannot be successful, but reason will be spurred ever further by fixing on it. First, however, reason must survey its own powers, the task of the Critique of Pure Reason.
This book cannot attempt to do justice to that one. For our present purposes it’s enough to say that the Critique proved Hume’s conception of experience to be so austere that it could not resemble human experience at all. Scepticism is not a new phenomenon, a fact Kant noted in calling it a natural part of reason’s coming of age. Pointing out reason’s weakness and folly is a sport that goes back to the early Greek Sophists, at the very least. What made Hume’s scepticism more powerful than theirs was not only the rhetorical brilliance of his exposition. Even more important was his reliance on the model of Newtonian physics, which had set a new standard for intellectual achievement. Newton seemed to present a model of knowledge that was absolutely certain, in contrast to all that had gone before it; henceforth there was the hard data of science, and everything else. The young Hume thought the latter should be committed to the flames, for if it contained anything but mathematical formulae and the direct observation of experience, it contained nothing but illusion. And this includes not only dogmatic metaphysics, but most of the assumptions on which we base our lives.
Kant’s strategy was to argue that Hume’s account of experience was too limited to account for it at all. If our minds worked as Hume said they do, Newtonian science, as well as far more pedestrian sorts of intellectual activity, would be impossible. On Kant’s model, we are both more and less a part of the world than Hume thought. Data do not come to us without mediation, but are shaped and moulded by categories our minds contribute to make up experience. To view this as a problem is to imagine the sort of unmediated experience that is presumably only possible for God. Hume was right to point out that we don’t perceive causes the way we perceive balls and billiard cues, for cause is a concept that we bring to the world. Far from making our experience of one thing’s causing another a subjective habit, Kant’s Transcendental Deduction showed that causality is a necessary condition of having any coherent experience at all. Without it, and other categories like substance and unity, we wouldn’t perceive objects, much less relations between them. Perhaps we would experience a chaotic barrage of sensory data, but we can’t even be certain of that.
Kant’s map of our minds divides them into faculties, which we may think of as functions, and it’s important to keep them straight. If the forms of space and time through which we perceive any data are provided by what Kant called sensibility, and if the concepts that allow us to perceive objects are provided by the understanding, what is the role of reason, which he called the highest faculty? Reason, we saw earlier, is what allows us to ask why. It is through sensibility and understanding that the world as it is – the totality of nature – is experienced. Through its idea of the Unconditioned – a world that makes sense as a whole – reason takes a step back.
It’s the step back that allows us to ask questions and make judgements about experience. Unlike the forms provided by sensibility and understanding, reason isn’t a necessary part of experience. Experience is conceivable without it, but just barely. Very young babies, caught up in the business of taking in the world they are given, may do without it. As soon as they begin to imagine that a state of affairs could be otherwise, and wonder why it isn’t, they are using the same reason that will allow them to wonder why apples fall, how the moon and the tides are connected, and whether there might be general laws that explain them. Without the faculty of reason that Hume so disparaged, his revered Newton would be stuck in the orchard, gazing up at a tree.
Kant’s answer to Hume is at the same time his reply to the Stoics. For the very same reason that is necessary for science is also the source of moral law. A world that makes sense – the overriding idea of reason – must make sense as a whole. The same drive that allows us to imagine that things could be different than they are given to us functions in science and social justice alike. It isn’t a matter of likes or dislikes, a wish or a passion, but a need of our reason that cannot be extirpated. It can be denied, in rage or resignation, but never entirely destroyed. For the Stoic, the refusal to accept the world as it’s given is a matter of human weakness that may be cured by changing your emotions. For Kant that refusal is precisely human strength. Later writers held that our inability to accept reality stems from infantile wishes that we ought to grow out of. For Kant it stems from the voice of critical reason, and it’s a voice that needs to be heard.
On this account, philosophy itself is a crucial part of growing up. Unsurprisingly enough, many philosophers tend to think so, but they think so in very different ways. Hegel, for example, thought that ‘the aim of philosophy is to defend reality against its detractors’ (Introduction to the Lectures on World History, p. 67). In showing us that reality is reasonable, Hegel aimed to make us content. Heine called him the German Pangloss, and in fact the mighty professor acknowledged his debt to Leibniz:
Our investigation can be seen as a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God (such as Leibniz attempted in his own metaphysical manner, but using categories that were as yet abstract and indeterminate). It should enable us to comprehend all the ills of the world, including the existence of evil, so that the thinking spirit may yet be reconciled with the negative aspects of existence. (Ibid, p. 43)
Arguing that the real is rational, against appearances that suggest the opposite, has always been a daunting task involving extremely complicated intellectual exercise. Leibniz thought only God was in a position to carry it out. There is considerable indication that Hegel identified with God, which may have tempted him to try demonstrating what Leibniz merely asserted. Suppose someone showed you that what Hegel himself called the slaughterbank of history was part of a necessary and inevitable plan for moving humankind forward, and your indignation at the slaughter was just as short-sighted as the infant’s distress when she cuts her first teeth. As the baby might be consoled could she know that teething is part of a process that makes her distinctively human, so you should be reassured that the appearances of unfairness that provoke your outrage are an absolutely necessary part of history’s plan. Philosophy as lullaby? Hegel, like Leibniz, has the curious effect of bringing us back to the place where we accept the given as given, not because we have followed the Stoic’s advice to detach ourselves from it, but because we have understood something about the nature and necessity of the given itself.
For Kant, by contrast, philosophy’s role in helping us grow up is precisely the opposite. It will not console or soothe you; it is practically guaranteed to make your life harder. For the real is not rational, and reason’s task is to make sure we never forget it. In leading us through the dialectic between dogmatism and scepticism, philosophy leads us to honour the wonder and the indignation that are present in both. It demands that we learn the difference between is and ought without ever giving up on either one. Hegel thought this process results in an unhappy consciousness, and the young Nietzsche called Kant’s philosophy tragic. Neither of them is entirely wrong. Keeping one eye on the way the world ought to be, while never losing sight of the way it is, requires permanent, precarious balance. It requires facing squarely the fact that you will never get the world you want, while refusing to talk yourself out of wanting it.
This is what Kant meant when he wrote that growing up is less a matter of knowledge than of courage. The gulf between is and ought can turn into an abyss, sometimes, all the more if you understand that it isn’t an accidental occurrence but a feature of most of the experiences you will ever have. Many people around you are inclined to deny this. These days, most of them do so not by trying to convince you that the world is reasonable – the evidence against that claim is overwhelming, and growing daily – but by denying the force of the ought. ‘It is what it is’ has become a common American expression, said with a touch of Stoic sigh to comment on some state of affairs that looks particularly hopeless. Insisting that it ought to be different will often earn you the kind of bemused condescension reserved for the child who kicks the chair that caused her to stumble.
It takes courage to insist that a regime that may kill, torture or jail you ought to be different, and we rightly honour those who are able to find it. That kind of courage is never easy, but it is usually straightforward. It is often easier to muster than the courage to withstand the various forms of ridicule with which more democratic cultures undermine their critics. It’s an embarrassing fact that we are often more afraid of embarrassment than a host of other discomforts, but it isn’t less true for all that. How often have you refrained from voicing hope or indignation for fear of being dismissed as childish? Oddly enough, that fear is adolescent, born of a time when few things feel worse than being regarded as less grown-up than your peers. Here Kant can help, not by providing consolation, but by assuring you that your failure to be consoled by one or another version of Stoicism is not your failure. You are right to be outraged. A satisfied mind is no substitute for a world in which behaviour is appropriately rewarded – by a grape instead of a cucumber, if that’s the going rate. Where the balance between behaviour and reward is out of kilter it needs to be repaired, not by working on your own demands for reparation but by working on the world.
If the idea of a right to happiness is not an idle piece of wishful thinking but a demand of reason, the consequences can be revolutionary. This is part of what German philosopher Walter Benjamin meant in calling post-Kantian attempts like Hegel’s to unify reason and nature, ought and is, ‘eleventh-hour reactionary flights from the honesty of Kant’s dualism’.19 This kind of honesty takes courage, because the impossibility of bringing reason and nature together is not a truth we really want to know.