Some time ago I posted a post that, quite in passing, characterized Harvard ethical theorist and devout Kantian Christine Korsgaard as 'an implausible scold'. I hereby unconditionally repent - at length - of this wholly unjust mockery. Mea Culpa ... Tell the truth, I had sort of a bad feeling even at the time, because I knew I was relying on an unreliable informant: namely, me. I had last read her stuff in, oh, 1992. But 1992-me was even more immature than I am now. He was a leaping, yipping Nietzschean late-Wittgensteinian with the ad hominem goods (bads, mostly) on everyone, and every cloud of philosophy grammatically dropletted (or your money back!) I still keep the Nietzschean hounds chained behind the house, to set on burglars as necessary. (Sic, Zar! Sic, Freivogel!) And late Wittgenstein? Well, he's seeped so deep in you hardly notice, which is all to the good. Anyway, I'm more amenable to rationalism about the whole business these days - largely due to five years spent dissertating on Wittgenstein's Tractatus. I also think I'm more reasonable. Which gets us to Korsgaard. I've been flagellating myself for my verbal sin - calling her an 'implausible scold' - by reading carefully through her book, Creating the Kingdom of Ends. I really have no use for it. (I find it, as Goethe once said of geometry lessons, 'useless for the development of my personality.') What's more, I don't believe it. But it is rational and also reasonable. And so I have no business mocking. Why mock? It's disrespectful. When is it reasonable to mock? When the subject not only deserves it but seems blockishly insusceptible to reasonable treatment. The point - say, with Stanely Fish - is to shame the subject (and others) into not doing more of the same thing that led to the mockery. Probably it never does any good, but you never know. That's the condensed version of my pocket 'everieman's ethics of mockerie and sundrie fiskiania'. What is certain is that mocking the rational and/or reasonable, with whom one happens to disagree, is a foolish and discreditable pastime, sure to make matters worse not better. Also, 'implausible scold' isn't it anyway. The first half is useless without supplement. The second half is plain wrong. Orwell says: some writers have faces one sees through the page - Dickens, for example. Big, beaming, fat, shiny face. Personality shines through. Wittgenstein says the same somewhere. And personality may shine in unexpected places. A true (so far as we know) story: the young Wittgenstein went to meet the great professor Frege in Jena. He knocks. Frege answers. 'I wish to see professor Frege.' 'I am professor Frege.' Impossible!' (And this from reading mostly books and papers full of logical notation.) With Korsgaard, I have no impression whatsoever of what she looks like, or acts like, or anything. Short, tall, cheerful, melancholy? Haven't a clue. So I can't have any notion of her being a scold. So what the hell was I even feeling, let alone thinking? Well, I think I can actually turn this mea culpa penance I am doing into a positive lesson, like so. In my original post I paraphrased from memory a paragraph from Donald Barthelme's story, "At the Tolstoy Museum" (reprinted in Forty Stories). I now quote it properly: The Tolstoy Museum is made of stone - many stones, cunningly wrought. Viewed from the street, it has the aspect of three stacked boxes: the first, second, and third levels. These are of increasing size. The first level is, say, the size of a shoebox, the second level the size of a case of whiskey, the third level the size of a box that contained a new overcoat. The amazing cantilever of the third level has been much talked about. The glass floor there allows one to look straight down and provides a "floating" feeling. The entire building, viewed from the street, suggests that it is about to fall on you. This the architects related to Tolstoy's moral authority. The whole thing is extremely funny. The holdings of the Tolstoy Museum consist principally of some thirty thousand pictures of Count Leo Tolstoy. I could go on. And I will. But not about the story. Very probably the thing about all the faces of Tolstoy made me think, for a moment, that somehow I was seeing Korsgaard's face. Really, it was the inverted ziggurat of a museum that caught my mind's eye. I feel that Barthelme has hereby perfectly encapsulated the illicit architectonic effect that Kant's principal works have on the reader. And Korsgaard inherits this essential trait of her subject. What am I talking about? Kant is a remarkable philosopher. Let there be an hour long lecture on Kant's ethics - a good lecture, one that really gives a sense of the potency of the first line of his Groundwork (which I now paraphrase from memory): 'nothing in the world, or indeed out of it, can be conceived as unqualifiedly good, except for a good will.' And let there be an hour long lecture on Kant's metaphysics and epistemology - a good lecture, one that gives a sense of the potency of the line from the Critique: "Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects." To which Kant proposes the correction: "we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them." I think you would be hard pressed to plan two hours of philosophy more pregnant with promise of insight and depth than these lectures should be, if they are made worthy of their subject-matter. I'm not saying these Kantian thoughts are right, mind you. They may be. I'm saying: these will be lectures to make you feel, for an hour, that nothing but a BA in philosophy could be worthy of the human spirit. And yet: in Kant I am utterly unconvinced by almost everything that follows. I think you can study Kant for a 100 hours without coming close to matching again a tenth of the potential value of those first two hours. The categorical imperative; parsing of varieties of necessity and contradiction, insufficiently distinguished by Kant himself. The baroque, manneristic composition of the table of categories; the fussing and fidgeting with the schematism. I could go on. Kant does. It all seems ... incredible. It doesn't feel like the right sort of thing. The fact that, having written his first critique, he hammered out the next two from the same template. It seems like an utterly damning compositional conceit. This - one thinks - is not philosophy. This is 18th century landscape gardening escaped from the garden. And yet, somehow Kant manages to wield authority in large part thanks to the heftiness of his tomes, which - so I would say - is absolutely their worst feature. (There is the coffee-not-Hume theory, which I hereby amplify as follows. Coffee was introduced into Königsberg shortly before Kant awoke from his dogmatic slumbers. The theory, then, is that this new drug made it possible not to fall asleep in heretofore unimagined ways. This theory, so the theory goes, explains a lot.) So that's where the Barthelme comes in. There's the giant thing that threatens to fall on you, architectonically speaking. Nothing to recommend it but sheer, implausible massness. The really amazing thing - worthy of focus - is the little thing underneath it. The tiny shoebox of a thought that is actually capable of holding up such a large structure above. Damn this is strong stuff! (Never mind the large structure it's actually upholding: baroque stuff, of interest to the historian of archictural excess.) To put it another way, there are in Kant many stones, cunningly wrought, just as the Tolstoy Museum is composed of. But the thing to say of these stones is what Nietzsche says of the stone philosophers habitually work in: Philosophers' error. - The philosopher supposes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure; but posterity finds its value in the stone which he used for building, and which is used many more times after that for building - better. Thus it finds the value in the fact that the structure can be destroyed and nevertheless retains value as building material. Korsgaard, it seems to me, commits this philosophers' error. That's what I should have said. When I said 'scold', I was just expressing my Nietzschean temperament, my imperviousness to her approach and outlook. In my view, she is too attached to hopeless structural elements in Kant, which cannot be the thing - and a valauble thing it is. This isn't an argument against her, of course. It's a hint at a first step one might take towards one. It's a response to the fact that the thing to do with rational, reasonable people with whom one disagrees utterly, is isolate the point of temperamental difference that is causing you to stare blankly and incredulously at each other. I feel very strongly that the sorts of things Korsgaard finds very promising are utterly, manifestly the wrong sort of thing. (I think it's related to this post I made. I'm a romantic, despite my increased-with-age respect for rationalism generally. I'm still waiting for my head to explode, and frown frustratedly at ethical theories that don't have burning fuses.) Why don't rational and reasonable people manage to agree, despite temperamental differences? I dunno.