The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll: Unexpected Essays on Philosophy, Art, Life, and Death

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INTRODUCTION

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll

What do I think there is to like in this book of essays? Well, as you can see, I don’t pretend to be simply objective, and I want to talk with you like one person to another. And I want this book to encapsulate my nature as a thinker and, by its variety, reasoning, humor, and persistence, entice you to participate in my not easily satiable desire to understand. To understand, to begin with, for myself, and, to end with, for you.

By profession, I’m a philosopher, and I want to solve the great philosophical problems, not for everyone forever—a recurrent but futile ambition—but subjectively, to ease my feeling of incomprehension. Since I want to know so much, I erase the lines between the different disciplines. And since curiosity and imagination are twins, my imagination has to be very active. I enjoy joking, and my humor can be odd. You’ll see this in the very first essay, in which I invite that extremely serious philosopher, Immanuel Kant, to drop down the rabbit hole of Alice’s adventures in wonderland, while I, and you with me, imagine—guided by what Kant wrote—how he will react.

All I’ve said and the way I’ve said it show that I love the craft of writing, that is, of communication with anyone I can reach with my words. Like artists and true teachers, I want to live in others so I can live more fully in myself. But in this book, we are necessarily unequal. I don’t know and can’t really imagine who you are. With myself, in contrast, I’ve had a long acquaintance—ninety-four years. Like everyone, I find myself in my memories. I’m also in my essays and books, which are far more reliably fixed and far easier to share than memories. But I find myself best in the act of writing to the unknown you, whose only trait is to serve as a receptive mind. The spontaneous act of communicating takes over, and though the basic subject of the writing has been decided in advance, there are many surprises in the way the writing works itself out and reveals something of myself I did not notice before. I create a structure made of word-borne ideas that, as they come alive, teach me what I am experiencing. I feel that I create the written object by imagining its structure and finding the words or ideas—how can I separate the two?—that coalesce to make up the structure. Every time I do this, I discover, as Montaigne did long ago, that the writing creates me no less than I create both the writing and you, the reader.

I use the words me, I, and you, but they are misleading because in the course of writing I vanish from myself and remain consciously nothing but the activity of writing. To be nothing but writing alone is not to be solitary; the consciousness of the activity is the self in its own full company. Loneliness can begin only when the writing ends. Or I and you are so much within me that I need not think of any of us because we two are too much the same to distinguish ourselves from one another. In this state the difficulty we ordinarily have in capturing sights, emotions, and experiences in fitting words is not at all bothersome.

All I’ve said on the superiority of process over its fixed result and on self-forgetfulness in writing applies, of course, to every intensive effort to create. But I hope to say enough about these essays to make clear the ways in which they are individual and yet coherent with one another, that is, in which they are mine rather than those of anyone else. Like a smile, they show my pleasure in writing them and sharing them with you. They may refer to you, their reader, directly. If the words in an essay were first spoken to actual listeners, I may quote them here. For instance, I say to the audience, At this point I raise my eyes from my text . . . to make out if you are smiling or frowning, or, in another instance, My wife—she’s here, and you can identify her by her green shoes—said to me that she likes the speech, but I said, ‘No, it’s the audience,’ you, ‘that has to decide.’

Except on the rarest occasions, I refuse to be obscure. And if relevant, I use psychology, anthropology, or any other subject, as if it were one with philosophy. Everything I write is at least tinged with my interest in psychology and art. Often I write what is called metaphilosophy, philosophy on philosophy, or I write on what one philosophical tradition says as compared with another. And except in a few of my books, such as The Philosophers and A Comparative History of Philosophy, I rarely expound or argue with other philosophers in intensive technical detail. I just say what I want to and leave it to you, the reader, to take it or leave it.

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I begin to introduce my individual essays with The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll, a title I’ve adopted for this book as a whole. I like this essay especially because its seriousness and its humor go hand in hand. It is remarkable how nonsensical humor can arouse the imagination and the imagination, the intellect. How do they influence one another? Suppose I ask a nonsensical question now, one I do not ask in the essay, "How would my story develop if I, its teller, would imagine that Alice fell not into the rabbit hole but onto Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason? Can this question be turned into an imaginable condition or situation? Suppose she fell, to her great surprise, on the title Transcendental Doctrine of Elements, and a resident Form of Appearance dressed in crow’s feathers explained to her that transcendental meant up in the sky and elements meant something, that’s a part of something else and quite sweet. Would Alice then be inspired to say, Oh, you mean pie in the sky? Give me some." And then, when she ate it, would she turn into a young unreal Phenomenon or into a gloriously invisible Thing in Itself? I don’t know what Carroll thought of Kant, but Carroll is too dead to continue the story, and I have to go on to the other essays, so I ask you, if you want, to finish the story and draw the moral, if there is one, for yourself.

The most serious point that this essay makes is that nonsense, the willful departure from verbal or logical conventions, has creative potential not only in literary narrative and poetry but also, if my example of Kant is plausible, in philosophy, and, beyond my examples, in mathematics. The full- or deminonsense poetry that appears in Alice and Alice’s fun with fantastic transformations of ordinary reality and with translogical use of logic may seem merely amusing or refreshing, but they are psychologically involved in all our creative uses of thought. I think that Kant’s absolute distinction between ordinary thought and perception and reality-in-itself is empirically empty or nonsensical, but just because it is nonsense pursued with masterful meticulousness, it has generated a great deal of insightful thought. I think, too, that the ability to create new forms of mathematics turns very odd or impossible-seeming mathematical ideas into new, fantastic, self-sufficient worlds of thought. My ability in math being limited, the only example of these worlds I’m familiar with is the math of the infinite and its hierarchies (given visible form in the perspective illustrations of M. C. Escher). Maybe like me, you will find most of the philosophy of math much easier to understand than the math that is its subject (I like the anthology Philosophy of Mathematics, edited by P. Benacerraf and H. Putnam, 2nd ed., 1983).

I’ve gone well beyond what the essay actually says, but it does hint strongly at what I take to be the truth: words that are put together in ways that depart from their ordinary usage and become close to indeterminate exert strong creative pressure on the imagination. Briefly, you can’t discover new sense without knowingly or unknowingly invoking nonsense.

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The Nonsense essay is followed by an autobiographical one, A Comparatist’s Risks and Rewards, which explains how and why, after a fateful discussion with a teacher for whom I had great respect. I fell, so to speak, into the barely existent profession of comparatism. What justifies the phrase barely existent? My discovery that the fullest English dictionary I have (the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 5th ed.) does not recognize it at all, as it does not recognize the possibility of comparativism or comparatism in the sense in which I use it. But as I write in the essay, my comparatism . . . reflects my nature, and, for better or worse, it’s my nature because I think that way.

A Comparatist’s Risks and Rewards contains a few indignant pages on the failure of a great majority of English-speaking philosophers to believe that China or India ever developed philosophy worthy of their consideration. This failure is the result of nothing but a so-far-indomitable ignorance. Even if one limits the condition for philosophical interest to acuity of reasoning, Indian philosophy has often surpassed that of the West. Maybe the growing influence of India and, above all, China will weaken the denial, or, given time, will show how hollow it has always been.

However, my indignation is only a sub-theme of the essay. The main theme is the at least apparent disparity between my ambitions and my ability and the fear that I cannot know enough to to fulfill the goals I set for myself. So in the essay I ask myself what, apart from my desire, can justify my audacity, which the Greek word hubris best expresses. My answer here first elaborates the common-sense calculation I make in the essay on the length of time it might take to read the works of a given philosopher. How many pages, I ask myself, can I read in English, the language I know best, at a normal speed—three minutes a page for ordinary writing but ten to fifteen for often difficult philosophers such as Kant—for 5 hours a day. Unless I have miscalculated, the answer (for Kant) is 20 per day or, for a year (300 reading days), 6,000 pages. My copy of Kant’s works, in the standard Akademie edition, has 9 volumes of about 500 pages each, making a total of 4,500. So it is possible that I or anyone might read through the whole of Kant’s works in the course of a single year. But this is a deceptive calculation. Kant’s correspondence fills volumes 10 through 13; 14 through 23 contain the (handwritten) manuscripts unpublished during his lifetime; and 24 through 29 contain his lectures.

But reading the whole of Kant’s published and unpublished works is not enough for a scholarly understanding of Kant. As a Kant scholar, you have to grasp the philosophical context in which he wrote, taught, and polemicized. You should certainly read Kant’s older, very influential contemporary, Christian Wolff, who wrote copiously, in Latin and German, on philosophy, mathematics, and physics, all subjects that interested Kant.

I won’t continue to enumerate everything that a complete Kant scholar is obliged to know, because it quickly becomes clear that the complete Kant scholar has to spend his lifetime studying Kant and his contemporaries—it would help ambitious Kant scholars if, their memory remaining intact, they could undergo a reincarnation or two. I won’t make the Kant scholar’s life grotesquely difficult by requiring that he or she also study Newton, whose kind of proof Kant preferred for himself as well, or study mathematics and physics in order to assess Kant’s thought competently. But I conclude that to know any productive philosopher really well, you need a whole scholarly lifetime.

If so, what happens to my hope to compare Western, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese philosophy, each with its own list of eminent philosophers or, if the term is inapt, thinkers? The crux of the answer is that because I cannot know even Kant really well, I have no choice except to depend upon someone who does, or, to generalize the solution, to depend on the multitude of scholars I need for my project. Instead of a primal scholar, I have to be a secondary one, a scholar of scholars, a reader more of translations and reference books than of originals in their original languages. For me that’s not much change, because it’s what I’ve always been doing, writing on large subjects to make them clear to myself—the need to believe, mystical experience, the mind of China, philosophers’ lives in relation to their thought; the dilemma of context; ineffability (on the failure of words in philosophy and religion); amoral politics everywhere; a comparative history of world philosophy; the openness and intermingling of the world’s art; and the art of birds (singing), of elephants (playing musical instruments and painting), and apes (painting)—all in relation to human art. All this and more, accompanied by the reading of what is, in retrospect, a bewildering number and variety of books. I live by wondering, asking, reading, teaching, and writing.

In the last paragraph I seem to have written myself into a hole. While I mean to emphasize how much less I know than I need for my purposes, the list above makes me sound as if I were wholly composed of a mass of information. My way out of the hole is to report that my memory often fails me, and what I may recall of the past is not enough or not relevant enough for comparative philosophy that depends directly on its original sources. In relation to my hopes, I am far too limited, and my limitations are inevitable. Luckily, however, I can make constructive use of them.

What do I mean? Both my Kant expert and my Dignaga expert accept that their respective philosophers argue that because human reason imposes its structure on the Real, the Real as such is inaccessible to it. Another expert tells me to count Dharmakirti among those who accept the same conclusion. Given this information, I can write a chapter in a unique history of comparative philosophy titled Fideistic Neo-skepticism (see A Comparative History of World Philosophy: From the Upanishads to Kant, 1998).

The answer to the question of whether I am not too ignorant to write comparative philosophy is this: I am modest and secondary so that I can be bold and original. Bold? Bold enough to undertake what might seem to be beyond my powers, that is, bold enough to compare the salient traits I choose of all the great cultures—Western, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese—together with a choice among the peoples called or miscalled primitive. Original? Enough to deal with problems missed or misconceived by others. Of course, the proof is in the doing. I’m sure I show here, too, that it is possible to write accurate, original, and responsible comparative philosophy. It takes some nerve, but it can be done. These essays should give you the proof.

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A Handful of Rules against Philosophical Self-Isolation, which follows, is my credo of philosophical openness. It is a polemic that dramatizes the need, as I see it, for philosophy now to preserve its relation to all forms of knowledge, a relation obvious to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and many others, but much less evident now. It is only by preserving this relationship that philosophy can remain relevant to life as a whole and the world at large.

The essay’s five categorical rules are these: 1. Do not cut off philosophical problems from their historical context, their contemporary context, or their context in your own life. 2. Do not be taken in by the claim of any tradition that its philosophical or theological thought is generally superior to that of all other traditions. 3. Reject the conviction that any particular person or school has arrived at the one true philosophy. 4. Avoid a harshly exclusive sense of what is relevant to philosophy. Do not isolate philosophy from other disciplines or sciences. 5. Suspect words. Remain aware of the danger of thinking in abstractions and antitheses. Keep actual persons and inconvenient examples in mind.

Except for the last rule, which is the least observed, I do not argue much—the rules seem self-evident to me—but give only a suggestive example or two. Yet to dramatize each of them, I’d be happy if it were read aloud accompanied by a clash of cymbals or the beat of a drum. If I could be a god for the moment, a peal of thunder would seem to be an aptly dramatic awakener.

The first rule Do not cut off philosophical problems from their historical context, their contemporary context, or their context in your own life. The unusual part of the rule is the last, which I’m observing in this book and wish were widely observed. The second and third rules, which outlaw belief, personal or social, supposed to be final and infallible clash directly with most prevailing religions, with belief in gurus or other supposedly inspired teachers, and with extreme forms of nationalism. The third rule also clashes with the not infrequent belief of a philosopher in his own doctrine or method—for Wittgenstein for example, who did not believe in any philosophy, the belief is in his method. The clash between the second rule and most religions means not only that it cannot be widely accepted but will also be attacked as pernicious. Yet, along with the second rule, it is supported by much more than enough historical evidence. It’s excruciatingly wonderful to see how easily, in the name of faith, we can deceive ourselves. The fourth rule, not to narrow the conception of philosophy harshly, may conflict with local fashion, but it’s important to remember that reality, truth, and experience do not fit neatly into any predetermined categories. Science is always suggesting new ways of pursuing the truth—I choose neurobiology and and its extension into neuroaesthetics as enlightening examples.

The fifth and last rule, Suspect words. Remain aware of the danger of thinking in abstractions and antitheses. Keep actual persons and inconvenient examples in mind is, to my mind, the most interesting. The indispensable antitheses true-false, right-wrong, good-bad, and relative-absolute can be devastating to the attempt to grasp anything complex or subtle. And who, in or out of science, is not tempted to forget inconvenient examples? My own not necessarily clear conclusion, buttressed by the example of different persons describing the same perspective from different angles is that the truth as a . . . humanly accessible ideal can be neither relative nor absolute alone, but only both at once.

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What Death Makes of Philosophy recalls the effect on philosophers of the fear of death, which they of course share with other humans. Among the fearful philosophers it mentions there are, to start with, myself and my father-in-law. Then come the examples of Descartes, William James, Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell. But the essay deals in detail sufficient to convince only with the contrasting pair of Hume and Kant. It describes the reasons for the early fears and late-life miseries of Kant, as compared with the early depression but later tranquility of Hume. Hume is this essay’s hero.

This essay shows or, more modestly, contends that Kant’s fatal error—the near total detachment of human perception and reason from reality, the thing in itself—was, at least in large part, a response to his relations with his parents and to his fears. It shows, too, I think beyond question, that Hume’s philosophical doubts about causality, which later abated, were caused by a long depressive illness. Considering that Kant and Hume are great, greatly influential philosophers, and that many philosophers must regard my account of the basic origins of their thought as insufferably reductive, the essay is quite provoking. It has the emotional implication that life punished Kant for his disbelief in the reality of natural causation and rewarded Hume for his acceptance of at least psychological causation. Taken in full seriousness, such an approach would require the rethinking of the history of modern philosophy, the only period for which there is good enough biographical evidence. Whoever wants more of the same will find it in my book The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought, from which the factual evidence for the essay is taken.

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In the succession of this book’s essays, the subject of death is followed by that of art, in the essay Keeping the World Together. What do I mean by a world? I define it as a bounded complex whole the elements of which are related to one another. In answer to the question What’s a world? the essay answers, Just now, the most direct example is ourselves, me and you, you in the singular and the plural, all together in this book. We are a world because as writer and readers we’re related to one another by a common immediate interest and are either present in or reading the pages of the same book.

The most abstract problem the essay deals with, always in relation to art, is the effect on us of our conception of the whole that we have in mind. If we are thinking small, the world we have in mind may be a particular picture or a particular artist. If we are thinking larger, the world may be an art movement or style, maybe Impressionism, or twentieth-century American art. When our subject is larger still, our world may be modern art as a whole. How large can our art-world be? I’ll stop at art through the ages. In this book, the art under consideration would be visual, mostly painting, the time would be historic times (not prehistory), and the place would be the world, defined as the sum of the art of the West, India, China, Japan, and the primitives.

Does the choice of the art-world we prefer to think about make any difference to the nature of the thought? Yes, because the conception of the world leads us to concentrate on the relationships of its main visible contents and neglect or deemphasize whatever is less immediately relevant. There is no right or wrong in the choice of an art-world and no necessary implication of the superiority of one such world over another. Certainly, if I speak of the traits of the large world of Chinese art as a whole, I am not entitled to deny the uniqueness of any individual Chinese artist, who is a whole world unto himself, or even possibly, though rarely, herself.

The subject of Keeping the World Together is the recognition of the mutual influence of the great art traditions on one another. Can this influence be measured in the large accurately? With reservations, the answer is yes. I measure the mutual relevance of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, African, and Western art by means of a subtractive technique—in my imagination I subtract the art whose influence I want to measure from the rest of the world of art I begin with. For example, I ask what European art would be like if it had never encountered Japanese art, and what Japanese art would be if it had never encountered European art. How can we tell or make a good, educated guess? The artists involved, the European Japanizers on the one side and the Japanese Europeanizers on the other, could tell us easily (in fact, they have told us—the details are given in the essay). If there had been no Kiyonaga or Hokusai prints in France, then there would have been no Degas women bathing, or drying or combing themselves and one another. If there had been no African masks or statues in France, Picasso would never have painted his revolutionary Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and might not have invented Cubism. So when we keep our great art-world together, we can perceive much to which we would otherwise be blind. And I know that there would be much for me to mourn if any of the great art traditions, having once entered my life, were to vanish from it.

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The Common Universe of Aesthetics is short for The Common Humanity Evident in European, African, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Aesthetic Theory. The title alone is formidable, and the reading to justify it, daunting.

This essay has a preliminary section that spells out in detail what common sense is likely to assume without argument: whatever the cultural variations among humans, all of them resemble one another in the ways they see, hear, feel, move, emote, remember, and socialize. These resemblances, I argue, lead to resemblances, open and hidden, in their art and aesthetic doctrines.

It is the doctrines, the different aesthetic theories, that are the essay’s basic subject. To compare theories of whole cultures with one another is a very different venture from comparing individual artists. You can buy an artist’s picture or get the artist to paint your portrait and even, when aroused by the artist’s intense interest in your appearance, sleep with him or her. But when you compare encompassing theories, you have no choice but to see the individual artists as parts of something intangible that contains them just as a cloud contains the drops of moisture that make it up. You can’t buy that cloud or sleep with it but only look at it and think about it, abstractly.

When it came to the description of the aesthetic theories of the different traditions, I assumed I would have most trouble with the European or Western and the African: the European or Western because of the variety and quantity of the evidence, and the African because of Africa’s colonial past, its complexity, and the absence of enough detailed, reliable evidence. To my surprise the European more or less solved itself, while for the African I made what seems to me a decent though inadequate compromise.

European or Western art might once have been described in terms of the standards of its art academies, but it is long since the West has had any general authoritative standards for art. But after considering the accounts I found and reading the opinions of many artists, especially of modern times, for which there is a good deal of detailed biographical evidence, I concluded that there was a prevailing mystical tendency. To be more exact, I felt that the prevailing aesthetic doctrines were mostly variants of Neoplatonism, a kind of thought that is deeply ingrained in Western theology, philosophy, and literature. These Neoplatonisms are not borrowed directly from Plato or Plotinus, but express belief in a transcendent spirituality that inspires the artist and can inhere, the artist believes, in his work. This description fits the history of Western art moderately well, better than any competing doctrine I am aware of.

Although in my writing I refer often to primitives (a term I use only for lack of a better one) of various kinds, they are much too numerous to deal with at once, and so I confined myself to indigenous black Africa, and for Africa to the Baule, of the Central Ivory Coast, and the Bamana (the erstwhile Bambara), of Mali, for both of which I found good sources. The heading by which I represent African aesthetics is Africa: Statue-like Beauty, and ‘Goodness’ and ‘Clarity.’ There is a full explanation of this wayward-seeming heading in the essay, along with anthropological generalizations about African art as a whole.

The headings for the accounts of the aesthetic thought of India, China, and Japan are