Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built.

Name	Immanuel Kant
Life	1724 - 1804
Country	Germany
Category	Idealism
Wikipedia	>>

The struggle between idealism and realism, between Moses and Thales, continues until this day. Sometimes the struggle takes place within ourselves, tearing our non-existing souls into pieces. Immanuel Kant is an excellent example of such an internal struggle. He was the leading Enlightenment moral philosopher in that bunch of small principalities that now is Germany. Kant well knew human nature: no straight timber here! He said "crooked". He surely meant "wicked"! Kant knew that history and nature had an objective way of their own. By almost deterministic necessity, the logic of it often carried that timber to the fire and caused terrible wars, revolutions and untold human misfortunes. Kant's realistic view of mankind is well expressed in the quote above. Even more well-known, however, is Kant's idealistic "imperative" to the thinking individual: You should never act otherwise, he told them, "than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law". Sounds fine, doesn't it! Like Kant, I devote most of my day to reading, writing and walking. That, indeed, should become a "universal law", shouldn't it? All peasants should immediately stop doing the dirty work on the land. And bakers, leave your dough and grab a book instead! From where would Kant then get his daily bread? There are no universal laws for crooked

timber! They need crooked maxims! Why then does the ambivalent Kant suggest such a universal law? If moral philosophers have enough "juices", they too, I think, have a tendency to become adrenalinomaniac dictators. While they do not force people to obey them with outward violence, they want to bind the masses with inward moral chains, getting them to voluntary prostrate themselves in front of the great God-like thinker. The monotheistic urge for power can be found in professors as well as in politicians. It is a most tempting idea. But, do remember, the Greeks called it hubris! The monotheistic idea of power, One God whom everybody should worship, was originally proclaimed by an Egyptian pharaoh Aechnaton. There it had been copied by Jewish prophets. Later it was taken over by both Christians and Moslems. Now we find it everywhere. Petty academic quarrels about moral maxims, of for instance the utilitarian or Kantian sort, are, at bottom, closely related to globally threatening conflicts between the rich Christian part of the world and the poor, fundamentalist Moslems, both wishing all would worship their One God or Allah. Both sides - to almost any quarrel - are convinced that their moral maxim is the one that should be raised into the universal law. Given man's - and my own - crooked nature, the only maxim I might like to raise into a universal, but polytheistic, law is a proverb, said to be coined by the tolerant Dutch, protectors of much human folly: Live, and let live!