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Paul Cooley's avatar

That is a lovely post, and it reminded me so much of Chuang Tzu's story of the crooked tree that I was surprised you did not recount it. I found an online copy here - https://uselessoldtree.com/chuangtzu/.

I've been thinking about that tree quite a bit lately, when I'm feeling morose that I haven't really, you know, done something with my life. Crookedness is the natural path of life, of water, and of people who resist getting trained up to contribute to society, or who, for reasons unknown, blithely refuse to get led by the nose through the slaughterhouse of social media.

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Eric Dane Walker's avatar

Another wonderful essay.

Being a Kant scholar with anti-modernist sensibilities, I find myself almost uniformly unable to extricate myself from a maddening ambivalence. And, even after having studied him for over half my life, I also find myself almost uniformly unsure of what he's up to. I say all this as a preface to the following, modestly propounded points.

(1) Kant writes this in the same essay you cite: "Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped." If this snippet isn't that clear, the context in which it appears makes more so: our crookedness is the necessary condition for the actualization of our rational powers, those very same powers which let us engage in a critique of the technological matrix in which we find ourselves currently embedded and to which we find ourselves increasingly beholden. To overcome (certain aspects of) our crookedness would be to doom our mutual reasonability to atrophy.

(2) The categorical imperative, in one of its guises, can be seen as the gatekeeper rule for rules: no rule should be allowed that cannot be communicated to, understood by, and acceptable to those it is a rule for. (And yes, the same goes for the meta-rule that is the categorical imperative — though Kant thinks it is justified by being "nothing less than the rule for the self-preservation of reason." And yes, what counts in this and that circumstance as "communicable," "understandable," and "acceptable" must be subject to the same meta-rule as well.) In brief, the categorical imperative may be seen as an expression of Kant's anti-technocratic spirit.

None of this is meant to gainsay any of your points. It would be silly to fault your view for "not getting Kant right" or "not taking into account what Kant said over here" because Kant scholarship is not at all what you're up to. And I think we should all be free to be inspired by anything the greats say without our being worried about some small-minded pedant inserting an "Ackshewally . . ." into the proceedings.

I'm just offering a humble complication, a friendly suggestion that the greats contain multitudes. Or, maybe I just want someone else to share in the befuddlement I feel.

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