Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [57]
Once we get ethics by means of freedom, all sorts of other stuff follows for Kant. The soul allows us to envision our eventual moral perfection, and God and heaven allow us to believe not only that perfection is possible but also that our rewards in the afterlife will be consistent with our deservingness. Thus our ultimate good, happiness in accordance with virtue, toward which we are all naturally driven, is achievable and we can be motivated to be good, even if this life currently is full of pain and suffering. So in addition to freedom we are allowed to believe in God, rewards in heaven, and our ability to earn them as free and infinitely perfectible souls.6
Kant doesn’t maintain we have to believe this stuff; we’re not compelled to since it’s not knowledge. But we are warranted to believe it, and if we are going to believe any of it, our beliefs must fit within this framework. He has thus clearly delineated and strictly limited the discussion of ethics and religion according to his epistemology. This is Kant’s modernity. This is a metanarrative. What we can know, what we ought to do, and for what we may hope is outlined, restricted, and clearly defined. No one can go beyond. As soon as they do they are speaking nonsense or unjustified and unjustifiable claptrap. This is the modern mind-set that Lyotard and Postmodernity so vehemently oppose. Some wish to go beyond Zebra, beyond Kant to find what lies beneath, behind, or beyond.
Yet for all Kant accomplished, his discourses on the true, the good, and the beautiful were incommensurable. The language you use when talking about knowledge doesn’t translate into talk about ethics, and the same goes for beauty and art. So each area, each game, gets its own language and follows its own rules. But what rules you pick for each game and how you interrelate them is a matter of choice. Kant chooses to view humanity as free. He is allowed to and warranted in doing so, but he isn’t compelled to. He needn’t believe we are free. Rather, if he wants our lives to look a certain way and contain certain values, then he will presume freedom. But that is a choice. That is one way to view the world. It is not the only way.
Lyotard wants greater choices, more diverse perspectives. He wants what he terms the justice of multiplicity and a multiplicity of justices. One finds justice or fairness or respect for all peoples when one opens up possibilities and recognizes the diversity of choices that lead to alternative evaluations of life—new games—and thus alternative meanings for human existence. Such a notion of justice is rooted in incredulity toward the metanarrative offered up by modernity.
For Postmodernity, Kant’s values and rules aren’t laws of nature beyond which we are incapable of going, they are a chosen way to view the world, one perspective among many. These rules are also limiting. They limit our choices and determine our social reality in a way that can make those on the outside or at the fringes constrained in ways detrimental to them. The Zax are forever stuck because the southgoing Zax can’t get past what he was taught in southgoing school, and the same goes for the northgoing Zax. Each is stuck in a worldview about which path is best and how one ought to travel, and because of this their lives are mundane, to say the least. The Yooks and Zooks likewise are caught up in a system of values, bread-buttering values, that cause them to devalue their neighbors and leave