Authors: Aaron James
You’ll object that you do have sound reasons for being angry,
reasons that aren’t about your pleasure or happiness. You are defending your sovereign liberty. Madness, you might say, is a small price to pay for the freedom to have what is rightfully yours.
But have you counted the cost of such freedom? Horace will point out that you are deciding what is rightfully yours by constantly comparing yourself to others. “When your neighbor grows fat, you grow thin.”
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And life is such that there is always someone to best, if not your supposed peers, then the best of the best of yesteryear. However fast you run, or however rich you become, there will always be somebody just out in front, whom you’ll be anxious to get ahead of, or someone just behind, against whom you must keep your lead. Such is no doubt the way of the world. But that means, in effect, that you are following conventional wisdom, as Horace puts it:
“Fair means or foul, get money if you can;
No matter how you get it, be sure you get it”
—All for a seat down in front at some bad play?
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In which case, how can you truly be free? Are you not yourself a slave to the conventional status contest around which so much of society is run? As Horace says, anxiety owns the man who is owned by greed. He whom anxiety owns is therefore a slave.
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There’s a lesson here: anything rightly called “sovereign liberty” begins in self-discipline. Horace recommends virtue. Let’s start with yours. You pride yourself on your mental faculties
and fastidious habits, and you denounce the sloth and stupidity of the unemployed masses. But allow me to inform you of what any good friend would point out: most people find your very presence pretty unpleasant; your encounters leave a mental aftertaste much like an unpleasant aroma.
It would improve matters if you kept your inner disposition more hidden. You surely value modesty in others, because it creates a self-respecting public presence. So follow Horace’s example, as when he tells Augustus why his poetry “keeps itself so close to the level ground”:
I know that I myself wouldn’t relish being
Acclaimed in some wrongheaded panegyric
Or having my face, misshapen, portrayed in wax.
This fatuous praise would make me blush with shame,
As, with my praiser, the two of us together
Are carried off, stretched out in a closed casket,
Down to the street where cheap perfume is sold,
Incense, pepper, spices, and all sorts of other
Odoriferous things wrapped up in old waste paper.
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Fame and infamy are uncomfortably close. Modesty seems much the better strategy.
I suspect you are thinking that all of this reasoning is really not at the heart of the dispute between us, or at best is inconclusive. And you would have a point. There are deep philosophical reasons why you might take objection to the ancient marriage between morality and happiness that underlines my argument. Here Kant, who sharply divorced
morality from happiness in the name of reason’s own limits, oddly helps your position. When you say that you have your special entitlements and that I have special duties to you, you can maintain that it is simply a separate question entirely as to what makes either of us successful or shameful, happy or hated. First and foremost, our question is a moral one: Do you in fact have your assumed entitlements, from a purely moral perspective?
You will appreciate the irony in the idea that Kant, that great moral rigorist, would help the retrenchment in your position. No philosopher rejects your point of view more resolutely, and yet you can turn this to your dialectical advantage. Kant famously claims that we can, as rational creatures, appreciate the “fact of reason”: we learn that we can in fact keep the moral law, because we sense, perhaps despite our willful resistance, that we ought to. You will happily admit that. You find the moral law deeply convincing and merely apply it in a way that gives you special privilege. When you become angry, you say that the moral law, as you apply it, is the basis for your objection: you are squarely within your rights and merely exacting the respect you truly deserve from others.
As mentioned in
chapter 1
, Kant seemed aware of your particular condition. He called it “self-conceit.” The trouble is that you could easily regard this label as little more than name calling. Certainly the phrase itself does not explain why you are in error. Kant mainly insists that you are wrong. Following Rousseau, he writes that “we all have the right to demand of a man that he should not think himself superior.”
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But your
question is
why
one ought to avoid self-conceit, and Kant does not seem to have a plain answer to that question.
What Kant does offer, by way of reply, is his pious praise of the moral law’s purity, as though it will itself somehow lift you out of your condition: “The purity of the moral law should prevent him from falling into this pitfall, for no one who has the law explained to him in its absolute purity can be so foolish as to imagine that it is within his powers fully to comply with it.”
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But merely invoking the purity of the moral law will not move you, and you won’t find any impetus for change in realizing that you can fall short of it. In your interpretation, you will admit that you occasionally fail to give yourself your due and that you can learn what your superiority entitles you to from others. Your question is still why this should be so wrong. And what Kant does say, finally, as an answer really does seem to be name calling: you are “pettifogger,” who “grows deceitful and cheats about the facts,” as little more than a “twister.”
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Indeed, he goes so far as to call you evil:
There is nothing worse, nothing more abominable than the artifice that invents a false law to enable us, under the shelter of the true law, to do evil. A man who has transgressed against the moral law, but still recognizes it in its purity, can be improved because he still has a pure law before his eyes; but a man who has invented for himself a favorable and false law has a principle in his wickedness, and in his case we can hope for no improvement.
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In short, Kant treats you like a psychopath when you are in fact not one. You raise a serious moral question, which we have yet to answer.
I hope this shows you that I appreciate the force of your position. I take it seriously. And yet I do think you can be answered. You are, I suggest, caught in a dilemma, which might be put as follows:
On the assumption that you are not just a psychopath, you must be able to justify your claim to special moral privilege. And that means you’ll also have to accept a demand to offer basic, recognizable forms of moral justification. Otherwise, your claim of moral justifiability will be little more than a false pretext, a kind of sham. Our moral conversation is then over. You wouldn’t really be defending your special status. You’d merely be acting like a psychopath. That is, you would be refusing to engage your own moral concepts by putting yourself beyond the reach of moral discussion.
On the other hand, if you seriously engage the question of how your presumed special standing could be justified from a moral perspective, then you put yourself in a weak and finally unsustainable moral position. You can keep a pretext of moral justifiability only by refusing to follow the moral argument. You are stuck making bad moral arguments defensively.
Let me elaborate. You are not a psychopath, again because you engage in and are moved by moral reasoning and not just in defense of your prerogatives. You would recoil with indignation if your wife were betrayed by her business partner. That is plainly a moral reaction. And you have felt the same way about others whom you’ve seen wronged, even others with whom you have no special relationship, such as the abused child in the neighborhood or the innocents needlessly killed in war. In one
degree or another, you feel some basic moral concern for everyone. Your view is that such people are less deserving than you are but not that such people are owed nothing at all. Morality is in a basic way about what is owed to everyone.
But now, to press you further, we should ask about the nature of your own presumed special moral status. You are, you say, a special case. We must ask why that should be so, for reasons that do not wither under easy scrutiny. Here, I claim, you are left with plainly bad arguments, arguments you yourself would not accept unless you were resisting a line of thought for fear of where it would lead. Specifically, because you have moral notions of right and wrong, you must take the bare fact that
you
are at issue to be morally irrelevant. There must be reasons, which present your
situation
as different, that can be properly evaluated in terms we can all understand and accept. But this is precisely where your thinking gets shoddy.
Notice the way you sometimes use the pronoun “I” in a magical way. You used it so during our last lunch meeting, when you said to the maître d’, as regards our having to wait to be seated, “Do you know who I am?” You assumed that anyone would know that, somehow believing that a description of your station would bring a special privilege of expedited seating. The pronoun “I” won’t itself indicate that special situation. It means the same for anyone. It refers to the speaker who uses it, who need only speak the language. In that regard, even the masses are your equal. So, if there are reasons for the maître d’ to favor our being seated while others are waiting, there is, as I say, no magic in the word “I” to indicate them. You must have good reasons and be ready to produce them.
What would you say to justify this privilege? Perhaps you
might mention your important job. Yet the people waiting also have jobs and they no doubt think them important. So you’d have to explain what is special about your job in particular. Maybe you’d mention that you are very well paid. But that won’t explain why you should not be asked to be kept waiting. For that, what you would have to tell us is that you are
underpaid
, that you need the benefit of expedited seating in order to make up for inadequate wages or for your tough day at the office or some such generally acceptable reason. Otherwise, if we consider your precise reasoning, it is hard to find a recognizably moral argument in what you are saying; you are then just asking to gain on the grounds that you’ve gained already. To make this argument out in the open, with others waiting, would demonstrate your moral incompetence. While I’m sure you could silence objections by asserting your claim confidently and loudly, it would not make your claim any more acceptable from anyone’s perspective. It would not be morally justified.
This, I assert, is your awkward predicament for any and all of the various overstretched reasons you give for your distinct moral status. My first demurrals touched upon many of them with no attempt to settle the issue. But that was the start rather than the end of my argument. Presented systematically, they leave you only with shameful defenses. My guess is that you sense that your prospects are not especially good when the moral considerations are culled and carefully analyzed. Better, then, to stay on the defensive, to stop the argument before being exposed by it.
In at least one way, then, Horace and Kant may be kindred spirits after all. As I should have mentioned earlier, Kant likens self-conceit to a rock upon which “man is
wrecked.”
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Your awkward position makes things harder on yourself than they need to be. It is strenuous to hide from your own reason, to force your own mind away from the direction it would most intelligently lead. What is more, and worse, a person can be wrecked for being alienated from his or her own deepest longings for the most valuable relations we can have with others. We can see moral reasoning as a kind of self-transcendence. It flows beyond your own experience, bringing you out of your own perspective into the lives of others and to another side of reality. The reality has them and you in it. You see yourself from their standpoint. They see themselves in yours. You together make a real unity. This mutual perception grounds most human connection, and much of what we value in any human relationship depends on our suitability for such moral recognition.
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But you make yourself unsuitable for it.
If that is right, then you face grave risks. If I may say so, as you are, it is as though you sit, squatting, defiant, and starving, in a dark cave of your own making. You prefer to be feared, if not respected. In that way you strive for a pale copy of true moral recognition. There is an easier way. But ease is hardly the whole of it. I fear for you mortally. You will remember Dickens’s final premonition for Scrooge: that there would not be “a man, a woman, or a child to say that he was kind to me
in this or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him.”
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In their hearts even the most generous souls would be thankful for his demise. It pains me to tell you that, just so, many who know you will find your death relieving. There will be a quiet celebration. I imagine you do care about that. You would not like the epitaph that I would write for you, for example. Or maybe you aren’t bothered. Either way, please accept my honest concern for your health and safety. One could easily pity your condition, and so I hope you change it.
Sincerely yours,
A. J.
1
. From “To Maecenas,”
Works of Horace
, trans. C. Smart (London: Bell & Daldy, 1872), book 1, epistle 1.
2
. This is from a translation I like especially well, that of David Ferry,
The Epistles of Horace
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 11.
3
. “To Julius Florus,”
The Epistles of Horace
, 141.
4
. “To Maecenas,”
The Epistles of Horace
, 5.
5
. “To Lollius Maximus,”
The Epistles of Horace
, 17.
6
. To paraphrase from “To Lollius Maximus,”
The Epistles of Horace
, 17.
7
. “To Maecenas,”
The Epistles of Horace
, 7.
8
. “To Quinctius,”
The Epistles of Horace
, 79.
9
. “To Augustus,”
The Epistles of Horace
, 131.
10
. Immanuel Kant, “Proper Self-Respect,” in
Lectures on Ethics
, trans. Louis Infield, with foreword by Lewis White Beck, (1963; repr., Methuen: London, 1979), 127.
11
. Kant, “Proper Self-Respect,” in
Lectures on Ethics
, 128
12
. Kant, “Self-Love,” in
Lectures on Ethics
, 137.
13
. Kant, “Self-Love,” in
Lectures on Ethics
, 137.
14
. Kant, “Self-Love,” in
Lectures on Ethics
, 128. You might have come across Christine M. Korsgaard,
The Sources of Normativity
, ed. Onora O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), who develops the idea, on Kant’s behalf, as a way one’s agency and very person disintegrate.
15
. A nice explication of Sartre’s account of this mutual perception can be found in Thomas Nagel’s “Sexual Perversion,” in
Mortal Questions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 43–44.
16
. Charles Dickens,
A Christmas Carol
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1897). Available at the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library,
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng//files/22/81/71/f228171/public/DicChri.html
.