Of Tyrants & Wisdom

~by David Aiken~

Periander of Corinth

Ancient ‘How to’s’ for Commencements and Recommencements. Every day brings new chances for us, just as it brings along chances to be new. An ancient king of the Greek city of Corinth, Periander (Περίανδρος; 625-585 BC), left behind two bits of pearly wisdom useful to this idea, and which have served Greek posterity well: “Practice everything”; and "Be farsighted with everything." Now at first blush, this might not seem like much as far as pithy philosophical advice and wise witticisms go from a one-time sagacious king of ancient Corinth. But then, that is precisely our story.

§ On Tyranny, Tyrants, and Pearls of Wisdom. Periander of Corinth was a tyrant. In the Greece of high antiquity, however, tyrants were not necessarily ‘tyrannical’ or oppressive in our modern sense of the word. Rather, throughout much of Greek history the ‘tyrant’ was simply a title given to rulers such as Gyges of Lydia, Oedipus (of Sophocles’ fame) and Periander; it referenced an authoritarian structure for the government of the polis, as opposed to oligarchies or aristocracies. Nonetheless, it is quite evident that a change occurred at some point in the perception of the tyrant and tyrannical governance in ancient Greece, because by the 4^th century the term is clearly become pejorative, particularly in Plato.

Now although Periander was a tyrant, this did not keep him from also being named one of the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece by, among others, Diogenes Laertius (3^rd century AD). The Seven Sages was a select cast of characters from the 6^th century BC, which was to become for all Greeks the go-to fountainhead of Abbreviated Wisdom, which took the form of witty and sagacious proverbs—the Seven Sages for the Greeks was an early predecessor of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac for revolutionary America. This Greek list of seven included Thales, Solon the lawmaker, Periander, Cleobulus, Chilon, Bias, and Pittacus; the list is not always exactly the same, however—in Plato’s Protagoras, for example, Socrates does not include Periander among the Seven Sages.

In his historical incarnation, Periander was the second tyrant of Corinth (following his father, Cypselus, who was the first of that familial dynasty), and was by all accounts an extremely effective ruler, bringing much prosperity and wealth to Corinth through both trade and conquest. It is worth remembering about Corinth that much later in its history, in the early Christian period, the city had already long gone into decline; the letters of the Apostle Paul attest to Corinth as a center of Aphrodite worship and libertine conduct, which apparently caused problems in the Corinthian Christian churches.

During the rule of the tyrant Periander, however, some 5 centuries earlier, Corinth had enjoyed a period of exceptional stability. The historical consensus seems to be that his rule was both just and fair, and that he was interested in the evenhanded distribution of wealth in his polis. In addition to being himself both a philosopher and poet, he also encouraged the arts though a regular fare of art festivals, and had a sustained building program. That said, according to Herodotus (Histories V 91-93) there is one little anecdotal skeleton in this wise and skillful tyrant’s closet, which is his rather erratic attachment to his wife; but perhaps this was only to be expected from a polis devoted to things of the goddess Aphrodite. To wit: first, Periander killed his wife in a fit of rage while she was pregnant, although the exact means of and motive for killing her is in dispute, but then he apparently, writes Herodotus, “baked his bread in a cold oven” –a euphemism suggestive enough to put anyone off their morning brioche.

Diogenes (Ch. 7) records for History the commemorative inscription that was placed by the Corinthians in memory of Periander the tyrant:

[97] In mother earth here Periander lies,

The prince of sea-girt Corinth rich and wise.

My own epitaph on him is:

Grieve not because thou hast not gained thine end,

But take with gladness all the gods may send;

Be warned by Periander's fate, who died

Of grief that one desire should be denied.

§ Greek Proverbial Wisdom #1: “Rehearse (repeatedly) everything.” So, Periander the philosopher and poet left behind proverbial pearls of wisdom, among which one of the aphorisms that interest us, which is commonly translated as, “Practice everything” (μελέτη τὸ πᾶν; meleth to pan-TLG, Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum, Bk 1, section 99, ln. 5). The ‘practice’ bit of Periander’s adage, which is μελέτη [meleth; feminine noun], generally means care or attention; and the everything bob is τὸ πᾶν [to pan; an accusative of respect], which means with respect to everything. Assembled, this gives us: Give care with respect to everything. Now the bob, everything, is straight-forward enough to pass over quickly; but it is actually the practice bit that gives us some food for wise thinking.

Life as a martial art. The noun μελέτη [meleth] is generally rendered by translators as an imperative: practice. Be that as it may, this noun comes from the verb mello [μέλω], whose first sense is to have care for, attention to action. But this fuses into a second denotative meaning, which is practice or exercise, such as the kinds of exercises one might do consistent with Spartan discipline. This second sense is reinforced even more strongly, again drawing upon Thucydides, by its use in a military context as a training exercise or practice or drill.

            In the most radical sense of this wise saying, then, in addition to the idea of simply practicing everything, as the majority of translators render it, μελέτη τὸ πᾶν has more the sense of training or drilling with respect to everything. The difference may seem pedantic, but there is a world of color and intensity in the military connotation that is lacking with just practice. With this martial coloration, μελέτη τὸ πᾶν describes the frame of mind of someone who accomplishes the days of his life with attention to detail and precision in execution—perhaps much like the world-class athlete who trains unceasingly for the day he will have to compete for the prize, with only this difference: that for the Wise Man each day is its own competition. In this sense, Periander’s adage is better translated: Train for everything.

Life as staged performance. A second denotative coloring of this proverb (μελέτη τὸ πᾶν; meleth to pan), is based on μελέτη [meleth] as a theatrical or speechifying term. It is used frequently of orators who practice their speeches (cf. Demosthenes), or of actors (per Aristotle) who study and rehearse their lines and gestures and movements for a performance. Rendered with this coloring in mind, Train (repeatedly) for everything begins to look more like, Rehearse (repeatedly) everything.

Finally, with the addition of (repeatedly) in Periander’s adage, Rehearse (repeatedly) everything, the Phrontisterion translator is able to provide an additional bit of color that is also the proper of μελέτη [meleth]—the idea that we should study and rehearse everything we do until all of the articulations and intonations and gestures of our Live Performances should become habit, until we become so accustomed to the dramatic ‘show’ of living out our lives, that the enactment of each hour of each day is the equivalent of Opening Night in the Theatre of Life.

§ Greek Proverbial Wisdom #2: “Always look ahead.” A second piece of wisdom attributed to Periander the tyrant is, "Be farsighted with everything" (Greek: Ὅρα τὸ μέλλον, hora to mellon). Quite briefly, Be farsighted, which is the common rendering, is an effective translation for the entire expression; with everything is an addition that is neither in the Greek proverb, nor necessary to the sense. Now the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae does not formally attribute this second precept specifically to Periander; but it is certainly attributed to the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece. Other sources do indeed link it specifically to our one-time tyrant of Corinth.        
            Ὅρα [hora] is the present imperative of the verb ‘to see’, thus giving us: watch, look, observe, or the older, behold. The sense is clearly banal enough: to keep something before the eyes; keep in sight; keeping an eye on it. The second denotation, however, is perhaps even more interesting to the astute insight on offer here, because the imperative, Ὅρα [hora], invites us, with some sense of urgency, to look out for, or to make provision for the future (pro-vision (Latin) whence the notion of fore-sight). Tὸ μέλλον [to mellon], which is an accusative single neutral participle being used as the direct object of the phrase, means something like: whatever is about to come about. In mind, of course, is simply future time—we should not be neglectful of the future [the unknown?].

So, this tidbit of wise insight invites us, individually, to take into consideration, to keep an eye on, not just the today of our life, but to keep in mind as well the Unknown Tomorrow that constantly attends us. The admonition is not just preventative, as in la Fontaine’s fable of the cicada and the ant (La cigale et la fourmi), where one tries to forestall ‘grim Necessity’, as Homer might have said, but it encourages us, also, to look forward in optimism to that which attends us, and with a spirit of adventure, to see what Tomorrow holds in store for us.

Similarly, but using bugs to carry along his message, in his moral fable with the same wise punchline as the ancient Greek sage-King, Periander, the French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine’s (1621-1695) encourages us to prepare today for all our tomorrows (link).

The cicada (cricket) having sung
All summer long,
Found herself most destitute
When the north wind blew:
Not even one little morsel
Of fly or worm.

[La Cigale, ayant chanté
                  Tout l'été,
Se trouva fort dépourvue
Quand la bise fut venue.
Pas un seul petit morceau
De mouche ou de vermisseau .]

§ On Periander, the Etymological Man. We have already seen that Periander of Corinth was a wise and philosophically shrewd tyrant in ancient Greece, although he may have had a rather odd conception of baked bread. But there is also another interpretative possibility for reading Periander; and that is to read his all-too human wisdom as truly peri-andros— as brief but perceptive insights for and about all men, which is the lexical meaning of peri-andros. In this sense, the wise king Periander provides for us our daily bread of peri-andros wisdom, of reminders about how to live well and perceptively as men in the world—and peri-andros thus becomes finally a metaphor for each of us.

The wiki-universe tells us that, according to tradition, each of the seven sages of Greek antiquity supposedly represents some specific aspect of worldly wisdom, which was then reduced to its aphoristic quintessence. The list tends to go something like this:

·       "Moderation is best in all things" -- Cleobulus of Lindos (πάν μέτρον άριστον, pan metron ariston).

·       "Nothing in excess" -- Solon of Athens (μηδὲν ἄγαν, meden agan).

·       "Do not desire the impossible" -- Chilon of Sparta (μὴ ἐπιθυμεῖν ἀδυνάτων, mei epithumein adunaton).

·       "Most men are bad" -- Bias of Priene (πλεῖστοι ἄνθρωποι κακοί, pleistoi anthropoi kakoi).

·       "Know thyself" -- Thales of Miletus (γνῶθι σεαυτόν, gnothi seauton).

·       "Know thy opportunity" -- Pittacus of Mytilene: (γνῶθι καιρὸν, gnothi kairon).

·       "Be farsighted with everything" -- Periander of Corinth: (Ὅρα τὸ μέλλον, hora to mellon).

“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear…”

Further reading:

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/01/januarys-blogpostredemptions-memories.html

·      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sages_of_Greece--The Seven Sages

The Space of a Man

Borders & Edges.

            Every-thing is just so frustratingly approximative — so imprecise and squishy. This is true of all things, of those things of a physis sort (re: nature & the natural) as with things of a kosmos sort (re: intellect & the interpretative).  For a refresher course on this distinction, have a look at the Phrontisterion essay on Anti-conversion in “An Existential Moment” (February 2013).

            Trying to determine the exact boundaries or edges of physical things, for example, which seem so very clear and so very observably present to our senses, is notoriously difficult in an imprecise and squishy kind of world. The classical illustration of this idea for students of philosophy is the good old-fashioned table (or chair): my body tells me that the table is one sort of a thing—it is solid, ponderously weighty, and does not seem to be going anywhere at any given speed; it seems to just want to hang out in the space that it presently occupies. In contrast, however, my mind tells me that the table is also a constituted kind of a thing—it is made up of an unimaginable number of invisible, itsy-bity teeny-weeny other-things that are all zinging around at warp-speed, and which are not at all concrete and stationary like the table-thing of which they are the composing elements. Now which of these two tables, the one that is speaking to my body or the one that is comprehended by my mind, is the most nearly-true definition of this particular table at which I sit and write? It seems obvious that both ‘truths’ are somehow implicated in the thing that is this table, but only one of the truths is actually experienced by me. From one point of view—the body’s—the edges of the table seem quite distinct from the edges of me the writer, but from a second point of view both the table and I seem inseparably implicated in the dance of sub-physical, invisible other-realities that frame the symphonic composition of things that are the visible world.

            Language, in contrast to our table, is obviously a very cosmetic sort of thing. And although it is the primary means by which humans speak out their recognition of the world, it is also perhaps one of the most disturbingly approximative forms of identifying and articulating objects. One has only to look at the idea of denotations and connotations, which sets the boundaries for words. The denotative world of a word is actually quite straightjacketed and narrow, and has therefore at least some degree of precision because it is more exclusive, while a word’s connotative world is infinitely richer and inclusive, brimming with associative images and suggestions, and overflowing with emotional and figurative relationships. The word ‘invitation’, for example, is denotatively a “written or verbal request inviting someone to go somewhere or to do something,” as in a wedding or birthday party invitation. Connotatively, however, an ‘invitation’ lives in an entirely different space –it is an incitement to venture out into strange new corridors of the world, a bidding to try new things, a giving of permission to go through doors that stand open but which may, at first blush, seem to us forbidding and ominous.

Toward Enlightenment.

            In the historical intervals that have followed upon the heels of enlightenment in the West, we are offered rare glimpses into an interpretative world, a kosmos, that is almost entirely illuminated and articulated by purely human categories of thinking. Enlightenment creates The Individual. This was obviously the case in the first period of Western enlightenment in ancient Greece, which gave rise to philosophy as the very first human scientia of things natural, and also in the second period of enlightenment in 18^th century Europe, which superintended the fairly radical dethronement of the Religious Mind and the gradual enthronement of the rational and thoroughly human Mind as the measure and interpreter of man in his world.

            In the first period of Western enlightenment, the “Space” where The Individual “happens” (—for many philosophers make the case that Socrates was in fact the West’s first individual and that he taught a philosophy where the individual mattered as individuum—) can be measured on a gradation that separates two influential Greek thinkers from the classical period: on the extreme rationalist end of our Scale of Individuality there is the Greek architect-philosopher, Hippodamus (498-408 BC), who originally hailed from Miletus in Asia Minor, and on the spiritualizing end of that scale there is the famous Athenian philosopher, Plato (ca. 428-347 BC).

            According to the Wiki-world on Hippodamus, we discover how, through this first urban planner, Man presumed to impose upon the real topography of the real physical world of hills & valleys and streams & rivers, the rationalizing and abstracted geographical grid-frames of strictly human and cosmetic thought. This was the birthright of rationalism, at its worst.

“Hippodamus… was an ancient Greek architect, urban planner, physician, mathematician, meteorologist and philosopher and is considered to be the “father” of urban planning, the namesake of Hippodamian plan of city layouts (grid plan). […] According to Aristotle, Hippodamus was the first author who wrote upon the theory of government, without any knowledge of practical affairs. His plans of Greek cities were characterised by order and regularity in contrast to the intricacy and confusion common to cities of that period, even Athens. He is seen as the originator of the idea that a town plan might formally embody and clarify a rational social order.”

On the other hand, although his dialogue The Republic has been almost entirely co-opted by political philosophers and re-constructed as some kind of feeble humbuggery disguised as a rational ‘theory of state’, Plato in fact allegorizes for us in The Republic, through the analogy of the State, the interior structures—the types of Souls—that can be found among Individual Men. In an aside, however, neither this idea nor this metaphor originates with Plato, because we find already a first incarnation of both in the nature poem of the Pre-Socratic philosopher-poet, Parmenides.

            If we follow out the broad strokes of the narrative in Plato’s Republic, Plato’s initiatory intent throughout his mythic “republican” allegory becomes obvious, an idea that can be said to be confirmed through later usage not only by the Christian apostle, Paul, who appropriated and employed the structure of that allegory to good effect in his New Testament letter to the Church in Corinth (I Corinthians 15:45ff), but also through usage by Neo-Platonic philosophers, such as the late 5^th century Boethius, who, in Book IV of the Consolation of Philosophy, divides man’s life journey into either a descent toward the embodiment of the life of the beasts (evil) or an ascent toward becoming gods (good).

            At a very basic level, in the Republic Plato means to portray for us in the Gyges myth (Book II) the ‘earthy’ man (Paul’s psychikon or soulish man, i.e., a man like the First Adam/Man; v 46-47) who burrows into the earth and discovers, but does not grasp the importance of, the limitations of earthly dreams and aspirations. Allegorically speaking, as an alternative to the life of burrowing and tunneling into the bowels of the earth, Plato tells us in Book VII a second story/allegory, the well-known allegory of the Cave, where we learn about the man who seeks enlightenment (Paul’s pneumatikon or heavenly/spiritual man, a man like the Second Adam/Man; v 46-47), who struggles to free himself from the earthly Cave, and who discovers, during his ascent out of the earth-womb, the higher, and indeed the highest truths in, about, and behind the World. In Plato’s final myth in the Republic (Book X), we discover a character whose name is Er. In this last myth Plato hopes for the Reader to understand that the choice is given to each of us as to how to live, either as the earthy man or the sky-bound man—the only choice that necessity imposes upon us is that we necessarily must choose the direction of our journey: either our lives will be as diggers and burrowers in the darkness, or as climbers toward the sunlight and the stars. Choose—we must; which direction–there is the rub!

            The one constant in the enlightened Greece of antiquity is the shift of philosophers and poets away from the gods. And in that shifting away from the Religious Mind, it is possible for us to cherry-pick illustrations of those thinkers who leaned toward the rationalizing interpretative framework of Hippodamus just as easily as one can those who tended to spiritualize Man after the way of Plato and his followers.

In the second period of Western enlightenment, the “Space” of The Individual is measurable by the progression of the democratic ideal from its small Western cradle to its pervasively global nesting grounds; and the cornerstone for this enlightenment vision is the idea of The Individual. As an idea, The Individual replaced the idea of the Divine Right of Kings (Phrontisterion essay, February 2015).

“The model for the democratic vision, of course, is European enlightenment, and flows organically from the beheading of the idea of the divine right of kings. When the one king is dead, then ‘We the People’ is assigned the burden of kingship – each one his own little bit. Upon reflection, though, in the democratic model how does one so tie the power of state to the individual, both philosophically and functionally, that the state is ensured a long, even if complex life? Historically speaking, the model of democracy in the west, inspired by the ideas of enlightenment, began life moored to several fundamental principles: participation in the vote; freedom of expression; separation of religious interference from the function and power of the state; and a press that badgers those holding office in order to inhibit the easy spread of corruption.”

At some point in our reflection there must arise an ambiguity, or perhaps it is only a tension, between The Individual conceived as physis or as kosmos. Until now, we have been considering The Individual primarily as a cosmetic entity, as an historical idea whose boundaries have been greatly expanded around the periods of enlightenment in the West. This conclusion is generally confirmed among historians of ideas working in just about every field. In his book Escape From Freedom, for example, the social psychologist Erik Fromm (Ch. II) agrees that as an idea, The Individual emerges as a post-enlightenment phenomenon (although he only refers to one period of Western enlightenment), maintaining that what he calls the ‘process of individuation’ or the ‘emergence of the individual’ “seems to have reached its peak in modern history in the centuries between the Reformation and the present.”

            However, there is also a more denotative aspect to the idea of The Individual, and that becomes clear when one begins to wonder what it means to be, essentially, “an” individual, beyond the more connotative elements that accrue to individuals as a result of their particular historical circumstances. Is there some essential quantity, or quality, that all men share as humans? Is there such a thing as an essential and therefore irreducible human nature? There have been two general philosophical theories on this question, which Phrontisterion has examined in “The Existentialist ‘Project’ & the Ostensible ‘Problem’ of Existence” (November 2013), which might be characterized as the Camusian position and the Sartrian position. Camus, following Nietzsche and others, thinks there is an essentialness to men, which, when considered as a collective, makes it meaningful to speak of men as Man. Sartre, in contrast, thinks that a man is, essentially, an empty set = {  }, that he is a bundle of possible choices linked to a specific space in time for a while, then not. In this respect, Fromm (op cit, 13) is Sartrian in his thinking about The Individual, for he writes:

“It is not as if we had on the one hand an individual equipped by nature with certain drives and on the other, society as something apart from him, either satisfying or frustrating these innate propensities. […] The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. […] Man’s nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history.”

So, we have gained up to this point the idea that the history of Western enlightenments has been consistently marked by a shift in the boundaries of men’s view of both themselves as specific objects, as individuum, and of themselves as role-players in their world. Both historical shifts toward enlightenment have been characterized by an otherworldly vision of reality yielding the right-of-way to a this-worldly interpretation and expression of Man’s world, a progression from the Religious Mind to the Rational Mind.

           

Away from Enlightenment.

            However, History pauses for neither man nor idea, but turns itself over and over forever in response to “another shake of the kaleidoscope,” to borrow on Maurice Gee’s felicitous expression [Plumb, p. 142]—which only goes to show, once again, the prescience of old Heraclitus the Obscure, that rJei√n ta» o¢la potamouv di÷khn: “It is the way of things […] that, like the currents of the river, the whole [thing] just streams along” (D/K 12, vol. 1, p. 141; cf B12, 91). And as if in response to a free-wheeling period of Free-Thinking that followed hard on the heels of the first period of enlightenment, and which has come to be celebrated as the birth of Greek philosophy, came the onslaught of the Christian Church. And enlightenment gave way before it. Consequently, the Religious Mind would hold intellectual sway in Western History until the rise of the second period of enlightenment in Europe. And in the period following the second period of enlightenment, which is the swinging door to our contemporary world, it would seem that, once again, the Religious Mind is seeking to subjugate or vanquish entirely the free-thinking enlightenment ways of Western Nations and Men. The children of the first enlightenment yielded the floor to the Religious Mind and its belief. The children of the second enlightenment are not obliged to make the same choices as their intellectual forefathers.

            The Western notion of freedom, which is rooted in the rationalistic notions of The Enlightenment Individual, is not an absolute or eternal value, identical for all men at all times. Not all cultures articulate or value freedoms in the same way; and while the desire to be free may be arguably innate, as Fromm [op cit] thinks, he also suggests that “the human aspect of freedom” coexists within a coterie of deadly rivals, which include the longing for submission, and the lust for power. So when all is said and done it would seem that far from being static and fixed, the idea of freedom for the individual remains a negotiable quantity—philosophically & politically.

Our natural world (physis) spins out on a long thread of heat-releasing entropy… an ongoing give-and-take between order and disorder—and we must make our peace with that. But this principle must also then hold for the kosmos created by the human mind: the Age of Religion yields to the Age of Reason, which then yields again to the Religious Mind, which then yields again to whatever paradigmatic frame arises that can impose itself in the mix and jostle. And the whole of human history, like the currents of the river with all of its nooks & crannies and ebbs & flows, just keeps streaming along, sometimes quickly sometimes slowly; for human history also plays in the streams of entropy where order (The Age of Religion) submits to disorder (The Age of Reason), and then disorder to order, in a constant dance of ideas.  What is disorder, after all, but the intrinsic nature that frames the essential idea of “freedom”?

So what does it mean to live in the West, inside the Western mindset, governed by Reason and the principles of the Rights of Men? And what happens when there is no longer even a general consensus about the value of the enlightenment mindset (kosmos-disorder), but where the children of enlightenment begin to imagine alternative mindsets other than living in an environment of reasonable enlightenment? Where it becomes possible to imagine cohabitation between the Religious Mind and the Rational Mind?

            The Sophists of Plato’s day believed they could improve other men through their wise teaching, but Socrates whole-heartedly disagreed with them (Apology 20B). But if we are to believe Socrates, who is after all Plato’s great ethical hero, and if we really cannot improve one another through wise teaching, then at the end of the day we are left, truly, with only The Individual, who must discover and practice his own virtue—which, for Socrates, was following Justice. If, then, we side with Socrates on this idea that the individual is alone to unveil himself through his practice of virtue (i.e., rightness or justice), then it becomes important for the rest of us, as both spectators and players on the theatrical stages of life, and to whatever degree we wish to exemplify virtue, to take our cues from other fine actors. One man can make the difference. But the cost of making the difference can be exacting, as the pacifist journalist, Jean Jarres, discovered, who was practically the only man in the whole of France to publically stand against France and her imperious desire—at all costs, to enter the first war with Germany. The cost to Jarres was his life, assassinated in a restaurant.

Have the democratic nations of the West really reached the effective and unsuccessful end of Enlightenment Reason as the framework for self-governance? Is a society governed principally by Reason really just a dystopia patiently awaiting the inevitable return of halcyon days of innocence and goodness dripping like manna from the hand of one god or another? This seems to be Western history’s prophetic narrative.

            In an article entitled “kant’s depression, the author suggests that Immanuel Kant anticipated precisely this very unsatisfactory end-point of human reason:

“… What Kant doesn’t consider is that reason might actually be connected to depression, rather than stand as its opposite. What if depression – reason’s failure to achieve self-mastery – is not the failure of reason but instead the result of reason? What if human reason works “too well,” and brings us to conclusions that are anathema to the existence of human beings? What we would have is a “cold rationalism,” shoring up the anthropocentric conceits of the philosophical endeavor, showing us an anonymous, faceless world impervious to our hopes and desires. And, in spite of Kant’s life-long dedication to philosophy and the Enlightenment project, in several of his writings he allows himself to give voice to this cold rationalism. In his essay on Leibniz’s optimism he questions the rationale of an all-knowing God that is at once beneficent towards humanity but also allows human beings to destroy each other. And in his essay “The End of All Things” Kant not only questions humanity’s dominion over the world, but he also questions our presumption to know that – and if – the world will end at all: “But why do human beings expect an end to the world at all? And if this is conceded to them, why must it be a terrible end?”

                  The implication in these and other comments by Kant is that reason and the “rational estimation of life’s value” may not have our own best interests in mind, and the self-mastery of reason may not coincide with the self-mastery of us as human beings (or, indeed, of the species as a whole). Philosophical reason taken to these lengths would not only make philosophy improbable (for how could one have philosophy without philosophers?), but also impractical (and what would be the use of such a “depressive reason”?). What Kant refers to as depression is simply this stark realization: that thought is only incidentally human. It would take a later generation of philosophers to derive the conclusion of this: that thought thinks us, not the reverse.”