Immanuel
Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche are like two rival futbol clubs in the world of philosophy. Their philosophies mostly hate each
other. But they come together,
surprisingly, on for me the singlemost important ethical principle there
is: if you can’t keep your word at all
costs you’re not even in the arena of the ethical (as Kant might put it). Nietzsche calls human beings the animals that
make promises. I might add that good human beings are the ones that keep
them.
If this
sounds pedestrian-yeah, of course, keep your word whenever possible—it’s
because that ‘whenever possible’ sneaks its way into our contemporary
understanding of the promise. Not for
Kant, and he gets a lot of shit for it.
It’s easy to write him off as dogmatic for arguing that a pledge to tell
the truth only means anything if you’d even tell the truth to a cop or killer
at your door asking if you’re the one he’s looking for. How could that possibly be good advice? How could it jive with our modern sense of
self-determination and agency. Well, it
couldn’t, but it certainly does jive with self-determination. Because for Kant, following a law ‘dogmatically’
and self-determination are not diametrically opposed. Indeed, allowing oneself space to alter or
update the promise is not self-determination—it’s opening yourself to
determination by any host of forces:
habit, dumb desire, fear, misperceived need, self-protection, the
dictates of your age and place, etc.
Nietzsche argues something similar:
if you can’t command yourself then you will be commanded. Most assume he means if you can’t keep your
promises to yourself you’ll just end up serving someone else’s will. No, he means something more common and
dangerous—you’ll be commanded by things you don’t even see commanding you. Namely, the one’s listed above.
Let’s
drop the two philosophers and put it my terms, concentrating for the purposes
of this blog to the promise between people. Wedding vows, friendship promises,
promises between members of a civic organization. The vital rule is that you can’t alter the
promise, no matter what new information comes, what new revelation you have, what you now get, unless everyone who agreed to it is in consensus. Why? Because the damage done in upholding bad
promises is overall less noxious to society than the damage done by opening the
door to unilateral revision. This is because, to put it simply, we are un
self-aware, rationalizing, arbitrary, needy, scared selfish and above all
infinitely sophistic animals. Most of us
have virtually no capacity to distinguish between when we’re arguing something
because in good faith, to the best of our knowledge it seems right and when
we’re doing so because we desperately need and want it to be right. We’re all whores. As someone argues in Richard LInklater’s
excellent Waking Life, the difference
between apes and humans is smaller than that between humans and the most
courageous minds like Nietzsche’s.
What’s so different about someone like Nietzsche? To put it in a nutshell—he’s one of the few
good at figuring out when his and others’ motives aren’t what they claim to be.
What
I’m saying is you must do something you now ‘know’ is wrong if you promised
someone to do so, because if you don’t, you will train yourself and others to
abandon their word when it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable. We’re crafty little fuckers. If we get away with an exception once, even
if it was a good exception that led to a better state of things, we will figure
out how to get away with it whenever we
want. And once that’s the case, why even
use promises? What’s to distinguish a
promise from whims, something you feel like doing at the time.
Let me
offer a few examples of the catastrophic consequences of not keeping your
word. Let’s say you promise your partner
never to lie, as Kant would have it. You
may think that lying about one petty thing that will hurt her needlessly is
‘worth’ it, but once you allow yourself that reasoning, you will use it also
when it is not worth it. You will use it
arbitrarily and compulsively, and if your loved ones intuit it they will do the
same. Perhaps your kid sees you lie once
about something tiny and later lies to you about heroin use, overdoses and
dies.
Of
course there are parallels at the level of government. The U.N. makes laws, which are kinds of
promises if they’re made democratically.
The U.S.A. ignores them and invades Afghanistan. It seems dogmatic not to allow them to do so
because they could save so many lives by stopping the terrorist, saving the
people from the tyrannous regime, etc.
But now they’ve opened the door for everyone watching, from Iran to
North Korea, to do whatever the fuck they want as well. Why not?
We’ve legitimized the ‘keep your agreements unless you come across an
exception in which it seems like more good will come of it to break them’ line
of reasoning. Once you go down that
route, the exceptions pop up in all shapes and colors, in the mouths of heroes
and monsters, for good and for catastrophic effect, and we have absolutely no
way to stop any of it.
We
forget the most sacred purpose of wedding vows.
They are not for imprisoning the will, further patriarchy, or a cheap
substitution for thought, they could be and are used that way. They are
designed to keep us honest. To keep us
working hard on our side of the compromise even though the dark times. Wedding vows are kind of like the rules the
wise Chinese shopkeeper gives to the young man who buys the adorable little
mogwai animals in the movie Gremlins. Whatever you do, don’t feed them after
midnight. They’ll try to cajole you into
doing so. They’re so innocent and adorable and loving, how could you resist
your instinct and break this one rule?
Just don’t. Morning will come and
you’ll still have your cute little mogwai friend. If you, don’t, he’ll turn into a monster, and
that’s the end of that relationship.
The
moral of the story is: don’t be like the
USA, and live in exceptionalism, no matter how practical, effective, healthy or
just it seems to you. Otherwise your
personal life will become like the world under USA hegemony…
