Guiding Question: Is Gawain unethical from a Kantian perspective?
Like the other characters in the Quest, Gawain receives
sage advice. He and Hector received a vision from God. But when the vision
was interpreted by one of the most saintly hermits, Gawain could not accept
the interpretation. The hermit advises Gawain that he must work on improving
himself, or his quest would never bring him honor; only shame. Yet Gawain
is so assured by his past successes that he ignores this advice and continues
on in his own way. This decision has disastrous results. Gawain kills and
wounds his friends and allies, including the great hero Owein the Bastard.
Through Immanuel Kant we may come to understand Gawain's tragedy as a failure
to attend and interpret the signs around him correctly due to a failure
of ethics, rather than merely a lack of faith.
Kant held that a certain kind of knowledge was "a-priori"
and a certain kind of knowledge was "a-posteriori," and that these
two polarities established a tension which constituted the relationship
of our consciousness of the phenomenal world. What was uniquely a-priori
was the manner by which consciousness understood and reasoned with the
world; which for Kant was through categorization.
The overwhelming phenomena of the world were reduced
by consciousness into categories which could be abstracted into rational
patterns and subjected to reason. For example, when one says the word "tree"
it stands for all the trees in the world. Of course, no one has seen, or
even come close to actually experiencing, all the trees in the world, and
indeed it is questionable whether what we think of as a tree abstractly
exists concretely in the world at all—yet we understand what is meant when
one says the word "tree" as categorically and symbolically standing for
all the trees in the world. Thus for consciousness the category "tree"
stands for all the trees in the world.
Having established this fact, we can then invent
sub-categories and more narrowly define the reference, such as trees that
are "evergreens" and trees that are "deciduous," and from there different
categories such as "Ponderosa Pine" or "Oak," etc. The inclination to reduce
the world into abstracted categories, however, is a property of the way
in which our consciousness abstracts the world and understands it in general.
The world that our consciousness places into categories
is a "phenomenon;" a word which has its origins in the Greek phenom
meaning "appearance." In other words, the phenomenon of the world merely
appears to our consciousness, which then processes what is perceived into
categories in order to grasp its true nature. Thus our inclination to abstract
the world into categories so that we can reason with it is what Kant terms
the "categorical imperative" and is a-priori; that is, it is an
aspect of our consciousness that is within the mind before we experience
the world at all. The world, as a phenomenon, is then understood and categorized
by our consciousness a-posteriori, or after we experience it. The
problem is, do the categories by which we abstract and understand the world
actually exist or are they merely properties of our own consciousness?
For example, when we say the world "mammal" we may
mean to imply "any of various warm-blooded vertebrate animals of the class
Mammalia, including human beings, characterized by a covering of hair on
the skin and, in the female, milk-producing mammary glands for nourishing
the young." We add to this other characteristics such as live birth, lungs,
etc. But does this category actually exist in nature, or are the shared
common features we select to describe through the category "mammal" a convenient
arbitrary set of features selected in order to reduce the overwhelming
phenomenon of organic life into a subset that we can reason with? Even
the category "mammal" became problematic with the discovery of the Platypus,
which seemed to be only partially mammal-like, and to partially share characteristics
with other classes of life. So, for Kant, consequently, every time we create
a category to describe the world we encounter, we are only partially describing
this phenomenal world, and partially describing our way of understanding
it. In fact, the phenomenal world, or what Kant calls "things in themselves"
cannot be truly known by our consciousness.
To illustrate this point one can do a simple experiment.
Touch a nearby desk or table with your hand. The desk will reveal its texture,
surface, resistance and constituency partially to the sense of touch. Now
take up a pencil, hold it, and touch the surface of the desk with the pencil.
The desk will reveal its surface in a different fashion. The surface may
feel harder, more resilient, even "colder." This simple experiment illustrates
that when one touches the desk with one’s hand one is not truly sensing
the desk itself, buts rather feeling one’s hand feeling the desk. With
the pencil, one is feeling one’s hand sensing the mediating object (the
pencil) sensing the desk. Neither means of sensing the desk is revealing
the desk itself however. In fact the desk as a "thing in itself" can never
be known by our consciousness or by perception. We can only know it in
the way we know it, and that unique way is a-priori, independent
of the desk as a phenomenon. What the desk "really" feels like simply can’t
be known.
In this fashion, Kant is implying the very limits
of reason and knowledge themselves, for there can never truly be what we
term "objective" knowledge. We can only know the phenomenon of the world
of appearances in the fashion that we can know and understand it; and the
way we understand the world, in its abstract dimension, is to reduce the
phenomenon of the world into hypothetical categories. Kant is not doubting
the accuracy of pure reason itself to describe the world in this analysis,
but merely pointing out that our capacity for reason should not be mistaken
for things themselves. In fact, he suggests that behind the appearance
(the phenomena) of the world there is a "noumenon" which is projecting
the phenomenon of the world, that can never be known, and which is as well
projecting us. In a sense, he is restoring consciousness as implicit to
the world, but accepting that our consciousness can only know the world
in its own unique way. Thus he is as well pointing out that we should not
mistake the way we know the world for the world itself, or the consequences
may be disastrous.
Interestingly enough, this disaster is implied as
an ethical one. The question becomes not one of what we know, but how
we should define and employ what we know when we are dealing with the phenomenal
world. Here he is pointing out the difference between knowledge and judgment,
for it can only be the two taken together which constitute "wisdom." The
former implies that one knows something, but the latter raises the question
of what one should do with this knowledge.
For Kant, the ethical dimension of human knowledge
can only be resolved through the use of pure reason, through the categorical
imperative. Ethical codes which direct our knowledge should be as consistent
and logical as mathematical equations. Kant’s ethics allow for few exceptions
to an ethical principle which has been determined as being correct "a-priori."
For Kant, this was not to treat anyone as a means, but always as an end
in itself. Thus we can arrive at ethical resolutions before we actually
encounter situations that may call for their application, and that we must
remain consistent with these principles, allowing for no degree of variance.
In this way the "rational" human is also, without exception, a moral one.
Gawain's real sin may not be in his focus on his "earthly" needs as opposed
to his spiritual one. He uses other people as only as the means for
attaining his own glory.
Many believe that at the outset of the advent of
scientific methodology Kant was precocious in envisioning that eventually
questions of human knowledge must finally become ethical problems. That
is, not just what we know, but what we should do with this knowledge and
the degree to which it may empower us to effect the world in which we live.
Thus the question of knowledge becomes partially a question of faith, or
having trust, in this knowledge. It is not just what we know, but whether
or not we trust what we know to resolve the deepest questions of our own
existence that is brought into question.
Required Reading: "Week 7" in the Study Guide; The Quest of the Holy Grail, pp. 162-175; Immanuel Kant: Selections from Critique of Pure Reason (1787).
Homework:
Write a brief summary of Kant's requirements for a universal system
of ethics and send this to the instructor's email address. Use your
summary to evaluate the business practices in your environment. Log
your observations in your online journal.
(Note: Sections of the Study Guide for Week 7 are paraphrases or excerpts from a manuscript by Laurence L. Murphy and Dominick A. Iorio, both of whom are amongst the Authors of the general MAPS Curriculum.)