Z Is as Far as the Alphabet Goes!
If modernity is marked by the existence of “any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse . . . making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative,”3 then Kant is an exemplar of modernity; a systematizer who sought nothing less than to categorize all areas of human knowledge, evaluation, and judgment in order to provide a coherent, orderly, and exhaustive view of the world.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is most famous as the author of his three critiques of the various faculties of reason: Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment. Each of these critiques dissects a particular faculty of reason in order to discover its limits and thereby the bounds of human knowledge and experience. As Kant succinctly puts it, “All the interests of my reason . . . combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?”4
Kant’s goal is laudable. He wants to clearly set the limits of human understanding so we don’t persist in error and make unjustified claims so that we can better grasp and thereby navigate the world around us. Each of these areas is fundamental to our lives. Knowledge, ethics, religion, and art are essential to the human experience. One can’t do without any of these areas of study, so Kant wishes to clearly delineate their limits so that we conduct our inquiries well, within the natural and inescapable limits of the human mind.
Kant’s first critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, is about knowledge—what can we know. This critique aims to explain the very conditions under which we can know anything. Kant seeks what he terms the transcendental preconditions for knowledge. That is, what conditions are necessary in order for us to know anything, or in a more simplistic even if anachronistic fashion, how is our brain wired and how does its wiring determine what we can know. According to Kant, the human mind is built in such a way, hardwired so to speak, as to categorize our experiences in certain ways under various concepts such as time, space, and causality within a singular consciousness, or “I.” All knowledge comes from our experiences, but all of our experiences come to us through our mind. So our world and everything we can know about it is filtered through our mind first. The basic structure of our mind, therefore, determines the nature of perceived reality or the phenomenal world as Kant denotes it. This process categorizes and connects our experiences according to innate concepts of the understanding, making sure our experiences are coherent, but also by determining that only certain kinds of thoughts will be thinkable. The long and the short of it is, we can only know things we can experience and our experiences are a result of how our brain works. So our brain determines what we can know through determined concepts and categories. Only certain things are knowable because only certain things are thinkable. Anything beyond the limits of the human mind, beyond its concepts and categories, beyond possible experiences, is unknowable.
Consider Conrad. His world is only comprised of twenty-six letters because that is as far as his alphabet goes. It can’t go further, and anything beyond Z is pure nonsense, and will remain so as long as he remains within his limited alphabet. This means that Conrad’s world is limited to only those twenty-six letters and what he can say with them. His experiences must fit within that framework in order to be coherent, and so knowable. Anything beyond them is unable to be said, unthinkable, and so unknowable. Kant claims to have done nothing short of having defined the alphabet of the human mind and thus the limits of all possible knowledge. Thus he has claimed to have found the limits of our world, our experiences, and basically our lives.
The consequence of Kant’s theory of knowledge is significant. If we can only know things of which we could have a possible experience, then the majority of our lives occur on the margins of knowledge. Consider that most of your life is not simply about facts and observations but evaluations built on things like God, souls, free will, dignity, or beauty; things we can’t experience and so can’t know. For Kant you can’t know any of this stuff, not like you can know the sky is blue. For some this isn’t problematic. They will just do as they always have done without any worries. But Kant, and philosophy, isn’t for these people. Philosophy is for thinkers and people who care about why they believe what they believe and wonder whether they should believe it. For them, this result is devastating. The issues that determine the meaning of our lives are according to Kant unknowable, and this poses a problem—can we speak about right and wrong or religion and beauty with any authority if it’s the kind of thing that can’t be known? Kant answers with his second and third critiques, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment. Beyond Z there may be certain letters that we are permitted to utter, but they are few and far between and still regulated by laws.
List of Ideas for People Who Don’t Stop at the First Critique
We’ve done plenty of Kant for a Dr. Seuss book, so I’ll only worry you with the second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason. In the second critique, Kant seeks to ground ethics. This is problematic for Kant since ethics implies free will, and the freedom of our will is not provable. But without free will we can’t be held accountable for our actions, and ethics is all about praise and blame. So we need to be able to make claims about our freedom at some level. According to Kant’s framework we can’t know that we are free. In fact, the more we learn about ourselves the more it seems we’re determined by material processes and are in no way free. We’re constantly finding new laws of behavior, chemical processes that determine brain states, moods, and so forth. It seems the more we learn the more we appear to be nothing more than complex machines, and machines run on programs over which they have no control. You can’t blame a computer, so if we’re computers you can’t blame us. As we learn more about how we are determined by our material circumstances, do ethics go out the window? Not for Kant.
Kant famously claimed, “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”5 Some things can’t be known, but that doesn’t mean they are pointless or meaningless. There are certain concepts, certain ideas we are warranted in believing because a holistic, comprehensive, and coherent worldview demands and depends on them. According to Kant these ideas include things like free will and God.
Free will is the idea of an activity that is spontaneous, that has no cause, that isn’t guided by the laws of physics, chemistry, or biology, operating within you. If it were rule or law bound you’d be determined by those laws, the mere end result of a series of physical processes determined by the laws of nature. But for ethics we demand freedom; namely, that you can spontaneously do whatever you choose. When we think about ourselves we think about ourselves as law governed, as material beings made up of synapses and serotonin that operate according to the laws of nature. But we also think of ourselves as free; that is, as beyond any laws or determinism. So how can we make these views compatible? Does it make sense to think of ourselves as simultaneously determined material organisms and free? Let’s hope so, because without freedom there is no ethics—in fact, there would be no value in the world whatsoever.
Free will, as a concept, seems obvious to all of us. In fact, we may think we experience our free will whenever we choose. We believe that for any action we could’ve done otherwise. And we feel this quite strongly. But prove it. Prove you could have done otherwise in any circumstance. Prove you could’ve not read these words. You can claim you could’ve done otherwise, but there’s no way to prove it, and there’s no way to experience or verify free will since we only experience the effects but never the spontaneous cause. All we have is the hollow claim, “I could’ve done differently.” But it’s impossible to experience our freedom, and so it’s impossible for us to know we are free. But yet we believe it to be so, and for Kant this belief is warranted. Why? Welcome to the noumenal world, a world populated with things that not even Dr. Seuss could’ve imagined, literally.
Since our minds create our experiences by processing data according to its inherent schematic, that
means there is a world behind our perceptions that is unknowable, the noumenal world. There is the world we see, that we know, the phenomenal world, and there is the world behind that one. A world we can’t see because our minds aren’t set up that way. Just as we can’t see things in the infrared spectrum even though things exist in it, so does noumenal reality exist even though we can’t experience it. This world is unlike anything you can imagine, since all of your imaginings are governed by the laws of your mind, laws like causality. But these laws are just mental constructs our mind places on perceptible reality to give it coherence; they don’t really exist. The noumenal world is unlike anything you can imagine or comprehend. Even Dr. Seuss’s world looks tame in comparison. All his creatures, kings, and lands, all his oddity and silliness is still law bound. If it weren’t it wouldn’t make any sense and no one would buy his books. Even beyond Zebra, the Spazzim, Itch-a-pods, and Yekko still exist in space and time, are bound by the laws of causality and possess determinate qualities. They have to. If we are going to have an experience of them, then these experiences will be structured according to the format of our brain. So we can know what the Yekko’s howl sounds like, or whether the Itch-a-pods are currently here or there. But noumenal reality is the term given to describe that which lies beyond possible experience, a reality that must exist but which we can’t know or even conceive. Whatever noumenal reality is—whatever really lies behind our perceptions—it needn’t be law governed, it needn’t be bound by cause and effect, it could be spontaneous, it could be free. Free will could exist in the noumenal realm. And just like the rest of reality, at root we, too, are noumenal. We may perceive our bodies as physical and law governed, but that is just the phenomenal reality of our selves; behind that is the noumenal reality we can’t experience or know, and that self, our noumenal self, is free. We are free and culpable for our actions, whatever psychologists want to say. And thank goodness, for if freedom goes so does the value of human existence.
Once we get ethics by means of freedom, all sorts of other stuff follows for Kant. The soul allows us to envision our eventual moral perfection, and God and heaven allow us to believe not only that perfection is possible but also that our rewards in the afterlife will be consistent with our deservingness. Thus our ultimate good, happiness in accordance with virtue, toward which we are all naturally driven, is achievable and we can be motivated to be good, even if this life currently is full of pain and suffering. So in addition to freedom we are allowed to believe in God, rewards in heaven, and our ability to earn them as free and infinitely perfectible souls.6
Kant doesn’t maintain we have to believe this stuff; we’re not compelled to since it’s not knowledge. But we are warranted to believe it, and if we are going to believe any of it, our beliefs must fit within this framework. He has thus clearly delineated and strictly limited the discussion of ethics and religion according to his epistemology. This is Kant’s modernity. This is a metanarrative. What we can know, what we ought to do, and for what we may hope is outlined, restricted, and clearly defined. No one can go beyond. As soon as they do they are speaking nonsense or unjustified and unjustifiable claptrap. This is the modern mind-set that Lyotard and Postmodernity so vehemently oppose. Some wish to go beyond Zebra, beyond Kant to find what lies beneath, behind, or beyond.
Yet for all Kant accomplished, his discourses on the true, the good, and the beautiful were incommensurable. The language you use when talking about knowledge doesn’t translate into talk about ethics, and the same goes for beauty and art. So each area, each game, gets its own language and follows its own rules. But what rules you pick for each game and how you interrelate them is a matter of choice. Kant chooses to view humanity as free. He is allowed to and warranted in doing so, but he isn’t compelled to. He needn’t believe we are free. Rather, if he wants our lives to look a certain way and contain certain values, then he will presume freedom. But that is a choice. That is one way to view the world. It is not the only way.
Lyotard wants greater choices, more diverse perspectives. He wants what he terms the justice of multiplicity and a multiplicity of justices. One finds justice or fairness or respect for all peoples when one opens up possibilities and recognizes the diversity of choices that lead to alternative evaluations of life—new games—and thus alternative meanings for human existence. Such a notion of justice is rooted in incredulity toward the metanarrative offered up by modernity.
For Postmodernity, Kant’s values and rules aren’t laws of nature beyond which we are incapable of going, they are a chosen way to view the world, one perspective among many. These rules are also limiting. They limit our choices and determine our social reality in a way that can make those on the outside or at the fringes constrained in ways detrimental to them. The Zax are forever stuck because the southgoing Zax can’t get past what he was taught in southgoing school, and the same goes for the northgoing Zax. Each is stuck in a worldview about which path is best and how one ought to travel, and because of this their lives are mundane, to say the least. The Yooks and Zooks likewise are caught up in a system of values, bread-buttering values, that cause them to devalue their neighbors and leave them on the brink of annihilation. The Star-Belly Sneetches are caught up in a classist, materialistic worldview that excludes their fellow Sneetches and ultimately leads to poverty and exploitation. Gertrude McFuzz bought into the vanity propounded by her culture and suffered for it. Horton and the Whos, the pale green pants, and countless other Seussical creations suffer similar fates. These creatures must either acquiesce to the values handed them or suffer a great deal when transgressing or going beyond the status quo. If they could go beyond they’d find it was a much wider and richer world than they could’ve ever imagined.
What Do You Think We Should Call This One?
Up to this point we have stuck with Lyotard as our postmodern representative. And Lyotard is really good at pointing out the issue of modernity and the goal of Postmodernity. But there are others who illustrate the value of transgression, of going beyond, quite well. Michel Foucault, taking his lead from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), does so by placing ideas and narratives within their historical contexts. In so doing he is able to demonstrate that these ideas, taken as eternal truths by their proponents, are just blips on the radar of human culture, contingent aberrations that can and ought to be gone beyond.
A great deal of Nietzsche’s work is about discrediting the arrogant claims of philosophers, claims to absolute knowledge. He does so by laying bear the conditions under which this knowledge was generated, accepted as truth, and maintained supremacy. The gist: most of the time claims to truth are nothing short of cloaked assertions of power and mechanisms of control. He uses this method to proffer accounts of Christianity, morality, political values, and other normative, evaluative schemas that have historically been used to ground and value human existence. Nietzsche referred to his methodology as genealogy. He sought to show the lineage of modern ideas so that we could contextualize them in order, ultimately that we might cast them off as antiquated notions of bygone days. It’s this project that Foucault continues in his postmodern critique of modern narratives on normalcy from sanity and mental health to criminality and sexuality.
The crux of the genealogical method is the idea that by tracing out the historical foundations and roots of certain truths one is able to show their contingent origins. Our systems of knowledge and understanding as well as our systems of evaluations and standards are shown to be accidental, things could’ve been otherwise. If things could’ve been different, then they still can be, and this is important. This is the insight of the narrator in On Beyond Zebra! Although his buddy Conrad is a master of the twenty-six-letter alphabet, there could be more letters, there could be new letters, and these new letters could express new ideas, truths, and perspectives on the world. “You just can’t spell Humpf-Humpf-a-Dumpfer” (Zebra) without HUMPF. And once one realizes this one realizes there is so much they don’t and can’t know when they refuse to
go beyond Z. To stay within the given twenty-six-letter alphabet is to stay within somebody else’s view of reality, a limiting and narrow view at that, one without the Wumbus and Umbus, one without Quandary and Thnadners. For Foucault, as for Nietzsche before him, life is about experimentation and ought to be lived dangerously, on the borders. Now we can’t find Wumbuses, but we can go beyond Kant to perceive our world outside of or beyond his system, beyond modernity and its truths and values.
Consider one of Foucault’s favorite topics: the medicalization of our lives. As Foucault points out, all we do and all we are is defined and redefined by various medical professions until we become nothing more than a list of disorders, dysfunctions, and prescriptions. One need only read You’re Only Old Once! to get the gist of the problem. We’re continually poked and prodded and told what is wrong with us; we’re all given our “solvency” tests. Then we’re prescribed a regimen of “pill drills” in order to get us in line with the current standard of health. And this is our permanent state until “at last [they] are sure [we’ve] been properly pilled” (Old). But we’re never properly pilled because they always seem to find new disorders and develop new pills for these new problems. Now, clearly, for some things like cancer this is true. Cancer is bad. But what about other areas of our life, areas with no obvious standard or clear better or best? What about mental health or sexuality? How sad is too sad? How happy is too happy? What spectrum do you fall under and where? Is your place on this new scale a disorder that needs to be fixed? Are we “fixing” you merely so you can function in a society you’ve been thrown into, a society that itself might be sick? Are you too creative, too hyper, too independent, or simply too spirited to be able to sit still for eight hours a day doing mundane tasks for no clear purpose? If so, it’s not your environment that’s out of whack, you’re the problem. But don’t fret. They’ll fix you right up. Dr. McMonkey McBean will diagnose your “disorder” and then he’ll throw handfuls of pills at you, pills produced by an industry that oddly enough had a hand in discovering, defining, and describing the very “disorder” you now seem to have. And this procedure will continue until you’re an adequately functional member of society, even if that means a dull and listless human being.
Dr. Seuss and Philosophy Page 13
