By Susan Neiman (2002)
If I described this as an serious academic work of philosophy arguing how the Problem of Evil (is suffering deserved?) did not disappear into theology in the 18th century – you might not think it’s a exactly a page-turner. But it’s gripping!
A brilliant explanation of Kant’s intention, or an even more brilliant novelty. The tragedy of contingency, and the comedy of there being no limits to the number of things that can go wrong.
The argument – that modern philosophy is less concerned with dry matters of epistemology and more haunted by the ghosts of theodicy, than it may seem is used as a new lens to really tell the story of a the swathe of modern western philosophy, from Leibniz and Kant to Hannah Arendt. The central point: that those early modern attempts to explain the problem of evil are an attempt to make the world comprehensible – and so are as core a part of the project of the Enlightenment as was trying to understand the laws of nature – is pretty compelling.
Ironically, and counter to their intentions, both approaches simultaneously squeezed out religious answers fairly early. To me, at least “How do we live a worthwhile life?” – or more pessimistically, “how can we bear the ocean of suffering?” – sure seem a more pressing and practical question than (say) how we justify induction.
The result is a philosophical education in itself. Thinkers I’ve not really had much time for, like Rousseau and Hegel, are drawn out to make sense in this arc – Rousseau (who has a fairly terrible modern reputation) was described by Kant (probably the highest regarded) as being a “Newton of the mind”, and in the context it makes sense. Even without much background in philosophy this is a lively and vital way of getting to know the figures and the currents of thought in a way that is easy to follow.
A lovely example is Kant himself, who in an almost parody of himself in his last work On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives considers the following case:
Your innocent friend took refuge in your cellar from a murderer pursuing him. When the murderer arrives … should you lie? Kant says you should not. It is possible that if you lie and tell the murderer your friend is elsewhere, he will leave the house to continue his pursuit, thereby running straight into your friend who just managed to slip out the basement window to what he thought was safety.
As Neiman explains:
This argument is so awful it’s been used to maintain that the elderly Kant suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. If other passages in Kant seem blindly rule-bound, none seems to give better reason for rejecting … than one suggesting that betraying your friend is preferable to telling a lie.
At first glance the essay does seem ridiculous: its central argument looks less appropriate to philosophy than to slapstick. The vision of the murderer and victim crashing into one another is enough to raise guffaws or eyebrows – if it weren’t also a vision of the tragic. For just as surely as comedy, tragedy lives on wrong identifications, opportunities missed and grabbed in the split of a second … intentions that hit marks their agent never aimed at. It is, in short, about the power of the contingent, and the importance of the fact that we don’t control the natural world.
Kant’s point was not that it’s better to betray your friend than lie about his whereabouts, still less that telling lies is a fate worse than death. Kant was willing to consider lying… His point was rather one we have no wish to hear: our power over the consequences of our actions is really very small. The absurdity in this example underscores both the depth and the scope of contingency. Maybe … not even maturity is an option, for there seem to be no limits to the limits on our power. We can give up dreams of revolution, settle down to plant a garden with our friends … there is no limit to the number of things than can go wrong. Meditating on them can be a recipe for comedy … living successfully requires us to forget them.
Either this is a brilliant explanation of Kant’s intention, or it’s an even more brilliant novelty. The tragedy of contingency, and the comedy of there being no limits to the number of things that can go wrong … just about sums it all up.