A very well-known detail about the philosopher Immanuel Kant is that he was a true homebody, and that he was eminently strict with his unchanging daily routine. It wasn’t only the punctuality by which he followed each scheduled moment of his day, but the consistency of the route that he followed and the places that he spent his days in. He would spend most of the day at home and give his lectures there. Then, he would take a daily walk while adhering to roughly the same route along the walls of his Prussian town of Königsberg.
The legend of his strict dedication to his routine went so far that it is said that locals would set their clocks based on the time he passed by a given location during his walks. Of course, this is improbable and more of a colourful anecdote than a historical fact, but its existence serves as a testament to his discipline, regardless of whether it was unfailingly exact or not.
When I think of this unusual way of life, what strikes me the most is the period in which it unfolded. Kant’s life spanned a great part of the 18th century, he was born in 1724 and he died in 1804. Life was very different from today, especially in its pace. Everything took its time to get done: sending a message from one city to another, waiting for the news, transporting other goods, preparing a bath, manufacturing things.
Everything required a greater effort, it took more energy and time expenditure, and your options for finding entertainment and novelty in life were also severely limited compared to today. Life was slow and static and most of what we could conceive in our imaginations or dream up had to content itself by remaining in our minds, in an immaterial condition. And sometimes, with some dedication, it could find some perdurable support in our words and images.
Taking this into consideration, it is easy to imagine the frustration of a man whose exceptional mind could fly high and far. I was a mind that could conceive, by sheer force of reasoning, observation, curiosity, and inventiveness intricate systems of concepts and theories that not only had no precedent, but that much of it was perfectly useful in the real world during its time and even more so in the future.
But a mind that cannot help but fly to such lengths -or maybe he indeed could help it, but it simply brought him a joy incommensurable to anything else in his world?- loses the support of its physical surroundings and the possibilities that they can afford quite quickly. Once he reached a certain point in his thoughts, he could only keep on through speculations that he could not test in the static and slow life of 18th century Europe. rarerrors: difference between the one who applies a few templates and the one who has too many elements to interpret but no specific template
In that reality, achieving anything relatively complex, that is requiring the mobilisation of multiple resources in a sequence of steps from beginning the endeavour to its fulfilment, demanded a significantly higher expenditure at each step of the way. They didn’t have electric appliances, automated machinery, instant long-distance communication, fast transportation, analytical tools and the efficient infrastructure of the XXI century, so giving life to innovative ideas wasn’t a task for most people and even less so if you were expecting it to happen at a fast pace. And if each step of a larger project aiming manifest a series of innovative ideas would require a significantly higher expenditure, a person of a vivid intellectual and creative impulse couldn’t afford to think so far ahead beyond each step, as testing them in the real world would have been all too expensive for so much experimentation. Without empirical evidence born of the testing of one’s ideas, the imagination cannot be renewed by the empirical, unexpected details that only the clash between imagination and reality can uncover.
If testing the contents of one’s imagination and go against the norm was so expensive in all types of resources (time, energy, convincing others, etc.), few people would have even thought of doing it, which would have resulted in an overall less creatively stimulating society in, for example, Kant’s Königsberg.
Technology philosopher Bruno Latour1 observed in his writings that we delegate actions to artefacts, because they can make an action durable in time, more reproducible and more reliable in its performance of that specific action. In a time only at the doorstep of the industrial revolution and the great scientific advancements of the 19th century, Kant’s circumstances didn’t allow much of this delegation of actions into artefacts. In fact, to not let all the contents of his thoughts slip away, he relied chiefly upon the ancient artefacts of writing, of ink and paper and of books. At least he was able to put all the actions (or ideas if you will) that his imagination produced in a symbolic form: on words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, treatises, books. And we as humanity are all the richer because of it.
And this is where I begin to find a bittersweet, if not to say tragic condition of a mind like Kant’s in his time. His mind flew too high and far, and there was nothing in his outside world that could become a vessel for his ideas, a step in the action course that would lead to their realisation. He could not stimulate his imagination and broaden the empirical concrete content of his thought. Like Da Vinci, he could only glimpse what flying was like, but he would never see the world from a plane, a single experiential input that would have made a mind like his radiate into millions of new ideas. Not to mention digital media or the insights of neurobiology.
That world was too lethargic and too inflexible, few dared to change things given how resource-intensive, almost unimaginable it was for those who weren’t royalty. But his mind was almost infinitely fertile, and he preferred to let his physical existence become the most inflexible of all in Königsberg so that his mind could fly in peace in the realm of the symbolic exchange, either in thinking, writing, or in teaching others.
In our time we are luckier. Minds with similar inclinations and intellectual enthusiasm such as Kant’s don’t need to lock themselves up and flourish in privacy while abandoning all hope of manifesting anytime soon in the outside world. Now the physical and the digital world can keep up with our minds, we can rapidly communicate our ideas far and wide, we can give them life thanks to cheaper technology and machinery, to an astronomic rise in general skills in the population, in literacy, in the specialisation of skills. Each step in this ‘action course’ that complex projects need to go through to take shape are accessible to a level that not even royalty at that time could demand.
There’s still a lot of work to be done, I’m sure that many out of (to use a more modern term) alienation still isolate themselves because they think that their outside world is as inflexible as Kant’s, and they throw away many possibilities. At least in the symbolic, non-physical domain, they have the Internet and digital technologies to remove some of that solitude from the voyages of their imaginations.
In my opinion, Steve Jobs expressed very well the gratitude for the luck that we have today, for how accessible giving life to our imaginations has become: “The minute you understand that you can poke life, and that if you push something in, something will pop out the other side. That you can change it and you can mould it…that’s maybe the most important thing… Embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.“2
- Bruno Latour: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/70.html. A good introduction for his Actor-Network theory is the book “Reassembling the Social” (2005). ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw ↩︎
✵
Leave a Reply