Last night, I got up to
urinate, a not uncommon urge working its sly way in my sixty-five year old mechanism. I have
travelled through our apartment all in the dark a million times. But this time
I kept overshooting and bumping into things. The bookshelf, the door. There was
no major pratfall – my footfalls to the bathroom and back were just off by the
merest stroke of the compass. But I was reminded, as so many of us are in the depths of our nightwatches, of Kant.
Kant’s little writings
are all too little known, except for the all too known What is Enlightenment.
One of his most entertaining papers is entitled “What does it mean to orient
oneself in thinking.” It was written to interfere in a dispute between
Mendelssohn and Jacobi over the limits of reason and the rights of genius.
Mendelssohn, in the course of this dispute, talks about being “oriented” by
common sense, or healthy reason, and opts for a religious purified of
enthusiasm, worshipping a rational God. Kant, with that driest of dry wits (the
wit of the praying mantis as she devours her mate) likes the word orientation
(and of course there is a little subdued play here with Mendelssohn as a man
from the orient – a Jew). This is, of course, a joke in historically poor taste
that Derrida references in his great essay, The White Mythology.
This is how Kant
explains it:
“To orient oneself
means, properly: out of a given world region (in the four of which we divide
the horizon) to find the other, namely, the place of rising (sunrise). If I
look at the sun in the heaven at this instant and know that it is noon, so I
know how to find the south, west, north and east. But I need in support of this
throughout the feeling of a difference in my own subject, namely, my right and
left hands. I name it a feeling; because these two side show externally to the
intuition [Anschauung – inner view] no marked difference. Without this capacity:
in the description of a circle, without requiring any distinction of objects in
it, to still distinguish the movement of the left to the right from the opposed
direction, and through this to determine a difference in the position of the
objects a priori, would not be something I knew how to do, if I did not set the
West to the right or the left of the south point of the horizon, and so thus
should complete the circle with the north and the east until I was again at the
south. Thus I orient myself geographically by all objective data on the
heavens, but only through a subjective base of difference
(Unterschiedungsgrund); and if, in a day through some miracle all the
constellations otherwise retaining the same shape and position relative to each
other only took a different direction, that is, instead of eastwardly, going
now westwardly, in the next starbright night no human eye would perceive the
least change, and even the astronomer, if he simply relied on what he saw and
not at the same time on what he felt, would be unavoidably disoriented.”
The disoriented
astronomer – a new troping of the philosopher!
Kant always had a deep
appreciation of the time reversable world of Newtonian physics. The notion of
the sky played backwards or the earth going backwards is a gorgeous mindfall –
one can go a long way down, thinking of that. Myself, last night, I merely bumped
into the door. I hit my nose. However, I read once – in Heinz Pagels wonderful
The Cosmic Code – an explanation of the Newtonian universe that has since
haunted me. Pagels imagines a film of
smoke coming off a pipe. He imagines zeroing in on the smoke.
“At first we see only
the microworld of the particles of air and smoke bouncing around and hitting
each other. The particles all obey Newton’s laws of motion. If I were to run
the projector backward, all the particles would reverse their motion on the
screen. But qualitatively this motion is the same as before – it is just a mess
of particles bouncing around. We cannot determine the direction of time from
this microscopic view because Newton’s laws don’t distinguish the past from the
future.”
Smoke smoke smoke.
Well, I took my momentarily flattened nose back to bed and fell asleep. But to
get back to Kant’s essay: Is there a bottom? That is, a godlike point, an
anaesthetic point, from which I would be able to distinguish one direction of
smoke from the other?
This is a subjective
claim indeed, but not one often raised in philosophy. Partly because
philosophers spend too little time marvelling over left and right. Kant, in
this essay, uses the term subjective to mean something oddly material –
inhabiting a body in space and time. But, as Kant knows, that body is built,
partly, of directions that seem to have nothing to do with space and time as we
commonly think of them, requiring an imaginary dimension in which we can
transfer from left to right and right to left. This is the issue at the heart
of the dispute between Leibniz and Newton about absolute vs. relative space.
Which I’m not going into, except to note how Kant is building his notions
His next move is to
expand this idea – and it is here that my nocturnal micturition, my bumped
nose, and Pagel’s film all bump into each other – like something in the Marx
Brothers. Because – wait for it! – Kant is about to try to exemplify a philosophical
point with a practical joke! A rare philosophical instance (if we put aside Descartes evil demon) in
philosophy (and all the praying mantises go doo, da doo da doot da doot doo da
doo da doo doot da doot):
“This geographic
concept of the process of orientation I can now expand, understanding it
thusly: in a given space in general, thus purely mathematically, to orient
oneself. In darkness I orient myself in a well known room when I get hold of
only a few objects, whose place I have registered in my memory. But here I am
obviously helped in nothing by the specific affordances (Bestimmungsvermogen)
of the place according to a subjective ground of distinction: then the objects,
whose places I should have to find, I don’t see at all; and if someone, playing
a joke on me, had put all the same objects in the same order one with another,
but to the left where all had previously been to the right, so I would in a
room where otherwise the walls were all the same, not be able to find myself.
But so I orient myself now through the simple feeling of a difference between
my two sides, the right and the left. Just that happens, when I in the
nighttime on street otherwise familiar to me, in which I can now not
distinguish between houses, go and appropriately wend my way.”
When I first read
this, I couldn’t help it, I kept thinking about another disorienting prank in a
story that begins:
“He lay on his
armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched
abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket,
just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His
numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference,
flickered helplessly before his eyes.”
Luckily, when I woke
up this morning, my nose was in its usual wonderful shape – as healthy as a
donkey’s muzzle.
And now to work.
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