…tended by Immanuel Kant. They ask him: “So, tell us, Kant, according
to your philosophy, what the hell are we and life all about?” To
understand Kant’s answer, as I believe it could have been, we must first
know a little more about each of Kant’s patrons and his philosophy.
Nick Cave recently explained that it was not until he experienced the
worst of losses—the death of his two children—that he understood love of
humanity, kindness, and deep joy in the fact of life. He
also said that music has an amazing capacity to bring
us—humanity—together, and that because of this immense power, we need to
learn to use it well. Cave is not the first musician to realize their
best self both in the face of the world’s cruelties and in the power of
music for experiencing and creating good, deep love of humanity, and
profound joy in the world.
Jad Abumrad and Shima Oliaee’s Dolly Parton’s America
recounts two stories in particular that speak not only to Parton’s
musical genius but also to how she became herself. In
the first, Parton recalls a woman in her town whom adult men whistled at
when she walked down the street; they both desired and denigrated her
for her perceived promiscuity. Parton remembers her child self simply
finding this woman utterly gorgeous and deciding that she wanted to be
just like this woman when she grew up.
Parton was raised in a strict evangelical Christian community she did
not experience as deeply committed to anything recognizable as good.
Instead, in the name of goodness and God, the community was prejudicial,
life-denying, and hypocritical. Parton, according to the second story,
found refuge singing in an old, abandoned church with a partially
functioning piano and walls scrawled with sexual graffiti, some of which
she authored. One day, after singing in the dilapidated church for
hours, Parton felt the presence of deep goodness, of bottomless,
all-encompassing love, which for her is spirituality. And as she walked
out of the church that day, she had found herself, Dolly Parton: a
life-affirming (including sexuality-affirming) musician whose creative
work is aimed at a better world; whose embodied, social appearance is
deeply inspired by the woman who was loved and hated in her town; and
who experiences herself as grounded in a good, loving spirituality. When
Parton feels she is losing her way a little, she returns, emotionally,
to that spiritual room where she first found herself to let herself be
filled with deep love of life.
For me, Cave and Parton call to mind Sojourner Truth, who found
herself—including her name—in 1843 when she experienced God as having
called on her to go into the world to give hope. Truth became famous
for, among other things, being able to move people toward goodness
through song. For many, she was able to create spiritual spaces in the
way that not only Black churches but also many Black women musicians and
singers after her, such as Mahaila Jackson and Aretha Franklin, are so
well known for.
It is near impossible, in my view, to imagine the best of America and
the world without bringing to heart and mind these incredible
musicians—and others like them. Through their music and songs, they move
people across political, religious, and cultural boundaries anywhere on
the planet. For example, as we also learn in Dolly Parton’s
America, toward the end of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment at Robben
Island, the prisoners were permitted to occasionally play music over the
speakers. A favorite of Mandela’s was Parton’s “Jolene.” And on the
other side of the world, one of my best musical childhood memories, also
set on an island— Osterøy, in Norway—is of listening to Dolly Parton and
Kenny Rogers sing “Islands in the Stream” on our TV in 1983. This song
still has the power to call to my mind one of my brothers, who without
exception had my back when things got rough and life appeared
overwhelmingly difficult.
I experience the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in the same way many
people, myself included, experience music. Each time I come to
understand something brilliant in his theory or see how something in it
can help make better sense of the world we live in, my mind becomes wide
open: I am thrilled and amazed and then feel a meaningful, grounding
peace. A recent one of these realizations helped me understand why
holding a spiritual, existential commitment to amazement and awe of the
world can be experienced as necessary to holding on to oneself and to
goodness—and maybe especially so if one is as incredibly, creatively
talented as Cave, Parton, and Truth are—and why this might only become
evident to us when the world shows us its horrific side.
Kant thinks that the highest good—that is, the best, most meaningful
kind of life we can live—is to pursue happiness within the bounds of
morality: We should treat others and ourselves as having dignity—as ends
in ourselves. We should also try to improve ourselves when life allows.
And we should assist others in their pursuit of happiness. Living in
this way is the only one that makes deep sense; it is the one we can
morally and emotionally own all the way, including when facing death.
This is why, Kant thinks, that sometimes we must act in ways that will
not make us happy and yet we must so act because it is the right thing
to do. To illustrate, consider Nelson Mandela, who stood up against the
South African apartheid regime and he did so not because it would make
him happy but because it was the right thing to do. This is why, on this
approach, he is a moral ideal for us, for humankind. Also, when, toward
the end of his life, Mandela was happier again— after prison, after
being reunited with his family, after having found affectionate love
again, and after being able to engage with politics in productive
ways—we responded by being deeply happy for him; he deserved to be
happy. And, so, he could face death peacefully too; he could own what he
was all about.
There is a puzzle, however, that arises with this conception of the
highest good. To get it more starkly into view, imagine that there was
no good, last phase of Mandela’s life, that he died on Robben Island.
Alternatively, think about all those who do bad, even horrific things
and who seem to live happily ever after. Or think about the many good
people who live deeply unhappy lives or innocent children who suffer or
die meaninglessly. In other words, we might worry that Kant’s proposed
idea of the highest good is suitable to a world in which people are
actually happy in proportion to their virtue, but this is not our world.
In our world, bad people often appear to get away with the worst of
things, including abusing, assaulting, killing, or starting wars while
good people become their victims and die without justice, and accidents
and bad health appear to strike indiscriminately. Maybe, in other words,
it is foolish or naive to conceive of the highest good as pursuing
happiness within the constraints of morality.
Kant proposes that the only way to solve this puzzle philosophically
is to postulate, first, the existence of a good intelligent maker of the
world and that will even the score eventually – ultimately happiness
will be proportionate with morality – and, second, that our souls are
not limited to our time on planet earth. This perhaps strikes us as even
more puzzling than Kant’s conception of the highest good. At least at
first. So, what is his point and how does it relate to Nick Cave, Dolly
Parton, and Sojourner Truth?
What I have realized lately is that Kant’s proposal is that we cannot
know or prove that a good, intelligent creator exists—we simply do not
have the cognitive powers this requires—but we do know that we cannot
create the universe, including ourselves and all the things we deem
good, wonderful, and even amazing. And yet, of course, in our best
moments, that is exactly what we experience in life: deep love, joy,
playfulness, laughter, admiration, beauty, and awe. Hence, Kant thinks,
if we give up on linking the awe of all things amazing to the postulate
of a good intelligent maker—if we stop assuming that the world is good
despite all evidence to the contrary, that being creates and badness
destroys—we make it harder for ourselves, for no good reason, to stay
committed to what we undeniably do experience as deeply good about our
lives, ourselves, our loved ones, humanity, life on planet Earth, and
the universe.
Returning to the stories of Cave, Parton, and Truth, it may, in other
words, not be accidental that they needed to constitute themselves at
some point through the assumption of goodness—spirituality, so
understood— and create their very best music on that assumption. Whether
it was the moral badness (Parton) or even moral horror (Truth) of the
situations they grew up in or the devastation life’s accidents brought
them (Cave), letting themselves be constituted spiritually on goodness
and awe of what is good was how they were able to hold onto themselves
and use their creative powers (again) for good. And because or insofar
as they have been able to do that, we are moved to connect to our shared
humanity through their music and songs.
Cave emphasizes another important thing that all knew
first-personally—that being able to move others through music or song is
a tremendously powerful tool. In fact, I understand him to be saying
that it is temptingly easy to want that glory for oneself, to be adored
as a god or goddess. But if we give into that temptation, as musicians
or as anyone doing creative work can, we are apt to lose our way and
fail, not only in life (by doing damage to ourselves and others) but in
creating something beautiful that can reach and move humanity together
in and toward goodness.
None of the above requires any specific conception of what the
intelligent maker is, and it doesn’t presuppose or entail that our
moments of goodness should be understood as giving us hope of being
saved. Also, there are many religions on the planet and, unlike Truth
and Cave and like Parton, many of us find in none of them our good,
spiritual home. Indeed, it is not impossible that Truth found her
spiritual home in the Black Church because it was created as such for
Black people who lived subjected to the horrific wronging involved in or
following European colonialization, including Black slavery in the US.
It is also not impossible the Cave finds his in the Anglican church
because he finds there a structure to the musical and textual
experiences that is deeply in tune with what he needs. And
it is most certainly the case that others of us find our spiritual homes
in the mountains, on the high seas, in art, in small communities’ caring
ways, and even in dilapidated churches. There is no one answer to where
we can find a spiritual home; thinking that there is is one of the
mistakes we are liable to make precisely because the one we find best
feels so deeply good to us. That’s what a home is. Regardless of where
it is, however, art, including music and song, made from those spiritual
places can reach, unify, and move us in ways that make it easier for us
to hold onto ourselves and goodness with hope for a better world.
One might think that going through such moments of constitutive
goodness that Cave, Parton, and Truth report or what we with Kant could
call moral character moments—would make one easy to be around. I don’t
think this is the case. For the person going through it, it is
existentially necessary—it is experienced as constitutive of becoming
oneself in a morally reliable way—and it does make one morally reliable
also for others. This also does not mean that one never makes mistakes,
of course; rather, one no longer finds doing bad things quite so
tempting and one wants to own those mistakes, including by changing
one’s ways and apologizing when appropriate. But it doesn’t make one
easy to be around; indeed, it does tend to make one unwilling to
compromise what is good with what is pleasant, convenient, or likeable
by others.
Cave, for example, simply rejects any flattering suggestion that his
earlier (also famous) self was simply an OK guy; he thinks he was an
arsehole a lot of the time and a frustrated, immature youngster at
others. Parton, Truth, and Mandela were or are all quite tough on anyone
who did wrong and who do not want to own it. Always truthful, and also
caring, loving, forgiving, generous, etc.—and yet with a distinctive
moral toughness. And, as I hear them, they each need or needed persons
close to them who would hold them with deep kindness. That’s the water
they need(ed) reliably to be able to lean back, rest, and float in so as
to be able to go out there again and do what they can do for all of us,
namely help us hold on to goodness and hope for a better future.
Kant-the-bartender, then, I imagine, might have answered his patrons’
query by saying: “According to my philosophical theories, the character
moments in which you became yourself were moments you integrated into
yourself not only your distinctive creativity in an authentic way but
also your deep commitment to morality. And like all incredible art, your
music and song can communicate universally to human beings because it
can make our minds flow in seemingly purposeful ways, ways that are
deeply pleasant and that can allow us to emotionally experience the
amazingness of the fact of earthly life itself, or help us when life is
not good, or let us feel life and our existence more fully, or do better
than we currently are. Importantly too, however, what your stories help
me realize is that my version of my theory isn’t good at explaining why
it is so important for you to have (had) reliable kindness surrounding
you; your loved ones were or are distinctly kind. Indeed, once I realize
that from your stories, I realize that that was true also true in my own
life. I just never recognized that truth when I was still alive; I wish
I had—I think it would have made me a better, more vulnerable—and, so,
stronger—person, live more fully, and be a better philosopher. So, thank
you!”
