Immanuel Kant's Guide to a Good Dinner Party

On Kant's view dining alone is bad for a philosopher: it encourages 'intellectual self-gnawing' that leads to a lack of vitality. Eating with at least one other companion, on the other hand, allows for a good interchange of ideas. New material for thought flows into the mind in a natural way, without any of the forced effort required in tracking down new topics on one's own. As Kant puts it in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, the life that harmonizes best with our humanity is the life that involves, on a regular basis, good meals with good conversation. In such a life our need for nourishment, without being harmed or curtailed in any way, becomes an instrument for social enjoyment and philosophical thought: rest and reflection united as one. In light of this Kant gives us some tips to hosting a good dinner party (you can find them all in Anthropology, if you think I'm joking):

(1) The number of guests should follow Chesterfield's rule: no fewer than the Graces (i.e., three), no more than the Muses (i.e., nine).

(2) The dinner party must exist not merely for physical satisfaction but also for social enjoyment. (This is the reason for the bounds on the number of guests.)

(3) Anything indiscreet that is said at the table stays at the table: there is a moral sanctity to the dinner party, and a duty of secrecy, because without the trust made possible by these it is impossible to have enjoyable culture. This is not a mere matter of taste; it is a matter of the fundamental preconditions that allows free exchange of ideas in social interaction.

(4) When the dinner party is a full one, and there is plenty of time, the conversation during the dinner party should go through three stages:

(a) Narration, i.e., exchange of news
(b) Ratiocination, i.e., lively discussion of the diversity in judgment at the table
(c) Jest, i.e., play of wit

Thus the conversation should always begin with raising pertinent and personal material then move into lively discussion until, tired from the hard work of arguing and reasoning, everyone settles down into lighter talk that leads to laughter. According to Kant, with his nineteenth-century German skepticism about how interested a woman could be in heavy intellectual conversation, when women are present the last stage is especially important, so that by being given a chance to respond to teasing they can show their own intellectual merits.

(5) No dinner music whatsoever. Kant regards it as one of the most absurd innovations in his time.

Obviously, liveliness is the key to a successful dinner party. Fortunately, Kant gives us guidelines for that as well:

(6) Choose topics of conversation in which everyone is interested, and always give people the opportunity to add their own topics, if they are appropriate.

(7) Never allow an extended silence. There can be momentary pauses in conversation, but no more.

(8) Do not change the topic unless necessary and especially do not keep jumping from one topic to another. The conversation should flow naturally and exhibit an organic unity of its own. The reason for this is that in a symposium, as in a drama, the mind occupies itself in part by reminiscing over what has previously occurred and tying the various phases together. A conversation that keeps changing topics is as disconcerting as a play that keeps changing topics and themes.

(9) Dogmatism is to be forbidden absolutely, whether it be on the part of the host or on the part of the guests. When people get too serious and insistent, start making jokes to divert them back to play rather than business.

(10) When serious conflicts arise that really and truly cannot be resolved, self-discipline is essential so that passions do not run too hot. Tone is absolutely essential; even if very serious topics are broached, every effort should be exerted to avoid any estrangement of the guests from each other.

Kant concedes that these laws of refinement are insignificant in comparison with serious moral laws, but he insists that anything that promotes reasonable sociability is conducive to virtue. In his eyes, the cynic's purism and the anchorite's mortification are both easily seen to be distorted forms of virtue because they make virtue ugly and uninviting. The real philosopher is at the dinner party.

The implications of this are, of course, somewhat larger than dinner parties; the point of talking about dinner parties at all was to make points about the role of sociability in the reasonable human life. Human beings cannot simply rest on their laurels but must to some degree make themselves rational animals by living a life suitable to rational animals. Restrained but lively sociability is precisely the sort of thing that contributes to this, and Kant in his own (very bachelor!) experience knows of no more perfect examples of reasonable sociability than his dinner parties -- for which, in fact, he was rather famous, and of which, one can tell, he was rather proud.

What is more, it sits well with Kant's very strong insistence that there are times when you should give hard philosophical thinking a rest. He sharply criticizes the practice of reading or trying to think through philosophical questions while dining alone; he thinks that, by forcing reason ever inward on itself, it creates pathological conditions of thought and a sort of hypochondria, whether literal or figurative. It creates disorder and pushes you toward insanity. Social eating, on the other hand, gives the intellect relaxation and room to recuperate while not letting it come to a standstill. Its benefits are not automatic, but it does allow one to find the middle way between the minimum healthy amount of thinking and the maximum healthy amount of thinking. And we have a moral duty to ourselves and others not to shut ourselves up in our own minds.

Kant, by the way, at one point gives an example of a joke he apparently thought very good and that he apparently heard told at a dinner party. Countess von Keyserling was visited by Count Sagramoso, who knew only broken German; at the time a schoolmaster came by who was putting together a natural history collection in Hamburg and therefore had birds on the brain. In order to make conversation, the Count said, "I have an aunt in Hamburg, but she is dead." To which the schoolmaster replied, "Why didn't you have her skinned and stuffed?" The Count had used an anglicism, Ant, for the German word for 'aunt', Tante and the schoolmaster had heard Ente (duck) instead of Ant (aunt). Life of the party; that's Kant.

The First Step in Philosophy

The first step in philosophy is not a step; the first step in philosophy is to open your eyes. Not until he has looked round him, and with more than a little astonishment, in the actual world, not until he has in some measure become ‘a spectator of all time and all existence’, has any man a standing in the realm of thought. The majority of us are rustics, whose daily perambulations round the village pump mark the limits of our travel. ‘The winds of the world’, in Walter Page’s phrase, ‘have not ventilated our brains.’ I do not except the learned doctors,

profoundly skilled in analytic,
Who can distinguish and divide
A hair ‘twixt south and south-west side—

who know, it may be, the language of the brain but not of the soul, who know what algebra is but not adversity, comfort, but not dismay, sobriety, but not savagery, what respectability is, but not fury, madness, despair, who are strangers to nature and the passions in the raw, in their wide, untamed expanses. There is another way of thinking than theirs, more fundamental than logic, and another language than it speaks, God’s thinking and God’s logic, the universal, invincible, terrible logic and language of facts.

W. M. Dixon, The Human Situation, Lexture XI. (Dixon was a last-minute Gifford lecturer; he stepped in when Emile Meyerson died before giving his course of lectures. Meyerson's a name you don't hear much these days, but he was an extraordinarily well-respected chemist and philosopher of science in his day.)

Links for Thinking

* Mike Liccione has a post that pretty much sums up my view of the current problems wracking much of the Catholic hierarchy. There are, of course, complete stupidities on the part of some critics, and there is room to be disturbed over people accepting news articles uncritically given that religion reporting is notorious even among journalists for its inaccuracy and sloppiness (due, e.g., to the fact that it is very often handled by people without much background acquaintance with the area in which they are reporting, and to uneven application of standards). But over all, it really is true, with regard to the increasing problems of the bishops, that the worse it gets the better off everyone will be.

* An excellent column by Martha Nussbaum discussing the burqa. A great many people seem to me to be missing the point about one of the arguments, which is not that features of our society are exactly like the burqa but that many of the purported reasons for banning the latter are ones that we obviously don't bother to apply consistently, as witnessed by features of our own society, and therefore are not themselves adequate reasons for such a ban.

* John Wilkins discusses names and nomenclature in classification.

* All-too-true parody of some sermons: the words mean things, but the sermon doesn't. (ht)

* An Egyptian court has overturned an earlier ruling that had involved some pretty serious meddling in the marriage law of Coptic Christians. It was not a black and white issue; the intent had originally been to allow Coptic Christians to remarry after divorces, but the way it was done involved a court telling the Coptic Church what its view of marriage had to be. This problem arises due to the fact that Egypt has no civil marriage. Kudos to Pope Shenouda, by the way, for standing up on the matter and insisting that the Coptic Church would not apply the original decision; this is not always an easy thing to do in Egypt, and shows a great deal of courage.

* A discussion of the Golden Section in architecture.

* Ed Feser has a post on intuitions in contemporary philosophy. As I've argued before you can see very clearly how unsophisticated even the more sophisticated discussions of intuitions in analytic philosophy are by contrasting them with similar discussions in Scottish Common Sense philosophy. The Common Sense philosophers appealed to 'evidence' (which at the time meant something more like 'evidentness' than our meaning) in much the same way analytic philosophers have often appealed to intuitions, but the Common Sense philosophers recognized that this was useless without a rigorous accounting of what they meant. And thus Beattie, for example, has eight different classes of evidence, each with its own account and rational justification, doing the work analytic philosophers over the past few decades have been trying to cram into the one class of 'intuitions'. The problem, of course, is not with talking about intuitions; the problem is with never asking questions about the way in which something is intuitive and what that actually means.

* Saint Nicholas Velimirović on Gandhi.

* Worries about government interference in scientific inquiry continue.

* On Plato's Philebus and desire.

* A philosophy joke. I've heard a similar story, except with the punchline, "Yeah, that's what you say," which is indeed irrefutable and always true.

ADDED LATER:

* Philosopher's Carnival CXI is up at "Parableman"

The Frog in the Casket

Today is the feast day for St. Birgitta Birgersdotter of Vadstena, also known as St. Bridget of Sweden. She founded the Bridgettine (or Brigittine) Order, which was once extraordinarily widespread, but was pretty severely disrupted by the Reformation. There still are a number of branches of the Bridgettines in existence, though. Prior to founding the Order she had several children, one of whom, Catherine of Vadstena, was also canonized. St. Bridget is the patron saint of Europe.

She had visions, and her Revelations are a spiritual classic. Here's an excerpt, not very typical, but certainly the sort of thing that could be made into a solid short story:

Once there was a sorcerer who had the most shining gold. A simple and mild man came to him and wanted to buy this gold from him. The sorcerer said to the simple man: ‘You will not receive this gold, unless you give me better gold and in larger quantity.’ The man said: ‘I have such a great desire for your gold that I will give you what you want rather than losing it.’ He then gave the sorcerer better gold and in larger quantity and received the shining gold from him and put it in a casket, thinking of making himself a ring from it for his finger.

After a short time, the sorcerer approached that simple man and said: ‘The gold you bought from me and laid in your casket is not gold, as you thought, but the most ugly frog. It has been fostered in my chest and fed with my food. And in order for you to test and know that this is true, you may open the casket and you will see how the frog will jump to my chest where it was fostered.’ When the man wanted to open it and find out if it was true, the frog appeared in the casket. The cover of the casket was hanging on four hinges that were about to break and fall off soon. Immediately when the cover of the casket was opened, the frog saw the sorcerer and jumped into his chest.

When the servants and friends of the simple man saw this, they said to him: ‘Lord, this most fine gold is in the frog, and if you want, you can easily get the gold.’ The man said: ‘How can I get it?’ They replied: ‘If someone took a sharp and heated spear and thrust it into the hollow part of the frog’s back, he would quickly get the gold out. But if he cannot find any hollow in the frog, he should then, with the greatest force and effort, thrust his spear into it, and this is how you will get back the gold you bought.’

Value

My own suggestion for the interpretation of Value may be set out in summary form as follows:

The essential condition for the actualisation of Value is the discovery by Mind of itself or its own principle in its object.

When Mind makes this discovery in the activity of contemplation, the form of Value actualised is Beauty.

When Mind makes this discovery in the activity of analysis and synthesis, the form of Value actualised is Truth.

When Mind makes this discovery in the activity of personal relationship the form of Value actualised is Goodness.

William Temple, Nature, Man, and God, Part I, Appendix A

Two Poem Re-Drafts

The Hunt

Sad moon shines on fields below --
soft and lunatic light!
But dark and cold themselves are chilled
with a darker shadow's fright.
Clip of hoof of herald-horse,
call of ram-theft horn:
terror rises in the hearts
of all from woman born.
Like famine, conquest, slaughter,
behind him endless hell,
pallid steed leads pallid hounds
in a hunt beyond all pale.

Black Lilies

Some lilies bloom in darkest hell,
black their petals, with twilight stripes.
Miswrought scions of Asphodel,
their seeds, borne by winds of fire,
spread out through realms of night,
send forth scent of death, of mire,
of rotting corpses on battle-plain
where rusted blood is washed by rain.
Beware! That scent which cloys the air
of realms that know no life or light
will catch the mind and hold it there,
in shade and endless sleep to lie.

Living, Logical, and Sufficient

On the contrary, my object, and my only object, is to bring reason and belief into the closest harmony that at present seems practicable. And if you thereupon reply that such a statement is by itself enough to prove that I am no ardent lover of reason; if you tell me that it implies, if not permanent contentment, at least temporary acquiescence in a creed imperfectly rationalised, I altogether deny the charge. So far as I am concerned, there is no acquiescence. Let him that thinks otherwise show me a better way. Let him produce a body of beliefs which shall be at once living, logical, and sufficient;—not forgetting that it cannot be sufficient unless it includes within the circuit of its doctrines some account of itself regarded as a product of natural causes, nor logical unless it provides a rational explanation of the good fortune which has made causes which are not reasons, mixed, it may be, with causes which are not good reasons, issue in what is, by hypothesis, a perfectly rational system. He who is fortunate enough to achieve all this may trample as he likes upon less successful inquirers.

Arthur Balfour, Theism and Humanism, Lecture V