Kant imagined and advocated a world in which each person was considered and treated as an “end.” He called this the “Kingdom of Ends” (he was always a sucker for epic names, I mean it doesn’t get much more bold than Critique of Pure Reason). In this Kingdom of Ends, each and every life would be considered an end in itself, rather than a means to something else. Thus, none cane be used as slaves, none can be cheated; their lives must be respected as ultimate goals.
Herbert Marcuse also puts this nicely in his famous New Left text One-Dimensional Man: “Life as a means is qualitatively different from life as an end.” And I’ve been thinking about this. Are our lives carried out for the sake of something else? Should they be? What does it mean to live your life as a life? Or to treat others’ lives as lives?
It seems to me that this requires contextualization, a stressing of process over product. The Hegelian idea of the seed never realizing its reality until it grows into a tree and dies, the idea that the world is not “what is?” but “what has been and what is happening?” still holds its magical quality. But I think Kant was too tied up in his enlightenment rationality, his political liberalism, to understand what he was saying. Sure, nobody should be the means to another, nobody should be a sacrifice, but for what reason does “means” imply this sadistic individualism, a relation of one to another only?
To me, a life should be a means: a means to the creation of the human world. What would our lives be like in the Kingdom of Ends? Who would we love? What language would we speak? No, that is not the human world. The human world is an infinitely changing aggregate of potentiality. Each human life is simultaneously a past and a future. This does not end. We cannot treat lives as ends, because lives do not end.
What does this world look like? Quito buses have two employees, in East Lansing there is one. The human world looks like the former. The latter lives his life, is treated as an end in himself. “We don’t want to exploit you. We will give you a job, pay you, we want you to live your own life, and live it well.” The East Lansing bus driver is limited to an existence as an end. It’s not bad, he does live his own life, and lives it well, but he can never be a means to the creation of the human world. He does not realize that any of the day’s events he might go home to tell necessarily involved the lives of others.
–“Big accident today on Grand River.”
–“Anyone hurt?
–“Don’t think so.”
–“Lucky then.”
–“Yeah, guess so.”
But the questioning stops at the end. “Anyone hurt?” Anyone sad? Why weren’t they focusing on the road? Were they drunk? In a hurry? Just stupid? Did they just realize they actually loved the person they just broke up with? Were they convinced that if they drove fast enough and with enough conviction, the car would fly? What is our world without these stories?
The Quito bus driver knows this world, and knows it well. He has a partner. The money-taking, destination-shouting, sign-changing auxiliary bus maverick. The two talk constantly The bus driver goes home with a much different story to tell.
–“Andrés estuvo diciéndome que tu madre está enferma.”
–“Ay, ¿que pasó?”
–“Creen que cáncer pulmonar. Ella fuma montón. Él me dijo que ella nunca fumaba hasta su esposo murió hace veinte años, y desde entonces, siempre tiene un tobaco.”
–“Pobrecita. ¿Que dijiste a él?”
–“No mucho, no sabía que decir. Solo le escuchaba.”
–“Pobrecita.”
–“Pobrecita, si.”
(Translation)
–“Andrés was telling me that his mother is sick.”
–“Oh no, what happened?”
–“They think it’s lung cancer. She smokes a ton. He told me she never smoked until her husband died twenty years ago, and since then, she always has a cigarette.”
–“Poor thing. What did you say to him?”
–“Nothing much, I didn’t know what to say. I just listened to him.”
–“Poor thing.”
–“Yeah, poor thing.”
And that is our world. An interaction between potentialities rather than a collection of realities. When we treat people’s lives as ends, as real rather than potential, product rather than process, this world is lost. There are no new stories to tell. Only old memories with weird changes over time and an alienation from the events they describe.
I want to live in the human world, where my life story is important to strangers and theirs to me. A world where feelings are valuable and exposed and described, not hidden. There is no physical thing in the way of that goal. Let me tell you a story about myself. Tell me a story about yourself. Welcome to the world.
2 Comments
In the silly movie “Shall We Dance” Susan Sarandon, who is never silly, states that humans want a partner “to be a witness to their lives.” That we all need someone to say, “yes, I saw that.” For when we go back over what we have or have not done days, weeks months earlier, there is someone to say it is true.
Or perhaps, if I shout in the woods and there is no one to hear, have I felt the pain? Of course I have, but isn’t it nice to have someone listen and say, “poor thing.”
Insightful.
hubert and herbert