Matthew Mandel

Immanuel Kant gets a reputation for having an especially austere theory of the good life. Anyone who has taken an intro to philosophy class might point to his argument that one should never lie, even to a murderer at the door, as an example of the peculiarity of his moral thought. Perhaps more extremely, Kant writes of human desire

inclinations themselves, as sources of needs, are so far from having an absolute worth so as to make one wish to have them that it must instead be the universal wish of every rational creature to be altogether free from them

Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

My senior thesis in college was largely a response to the perspective that quote represents, which I think is an easy perspective to slip into when reasoning from broadly liberal/Enlightenment premises that prioritize our “higher” capacities above all else. In my thesis, I sought to redeem desire and the rest of the material and contingent features of human existence, while still operating within the liberal tradition. The thrust of my argument was that Kantian ethics’ emphasis on the importance of acting like a human, which is to say, in some sense, humanely, necessitates that one also act like a particular human, which is to say, for example, Matt-ly. And to act Matt-ly would be, roughly, to take the contingent facts of what it means to be me as normative for me. Basically, my view was that abstracting away from our contingent features and recognizing a shared humanity gets you a lot of morality, but it’s not enough to sustain a theory of how to live because lives are not lived in the abstract but in the particular.

Navigating this Scylla and Charybdis of empty formalistic liberalism on one side and nihilistic/relativistic/hedonistic existentialist individualism on the other still feels like an important direction in thinking about how we should act. I’m interested in reading Tamar Schapiro’s recent Feeling Like It: A Theory of Inclination and Will in that vein and continuing to think about the topic.