Positive Liberty

It’s an old trick, but a good one, to blog occasionally on the search results that have brought people to your site. I’ve got some recent favorites to share.

The first reads American values life liberty and try pursuing a bit of tolerance too. He’s clearly on a rant, but at least his heart is in the right place.

Second, I’ve gotten a remarkable number of hits because of my tiny little article on Strippercize several weeks ago. It’s an article that I’m ashamed to say has gotten far more attention than most of the more serious things I’ve written. A typical search hit from this post reads “Carmen Electra aerobic striptease complaints.” I’m still not sure what’s to complain about.

The last notable search hit came from someone seeking “Kant’s perspective on gay marriage.”

To be perfectly clear, Kant probably never even once considered the possibility of two men getting hitched. Granted, I’m not an expert on Kant, and I have to admit that I’m not even much of a fan. But what possessed anyone to search for something so completely anachronistic? They might as well have asked for Kant’s opinions on nuclear warfare while they were at it.

Oh wait, I get it… This must have been a school assignment, and the searcher was looking for someone who had already done all his work for him. I imagine the assignment prompt went something like this:

Imagine that you are Immanuel Kant. What do you have to say about today’s gay marriage debate?

Perhaps there was an addenda, stating that the response isn’t allowed to consider the obvious, namely that gay marriage has only recently become an issue, and that to form an opinion, one must be aware that an issue exists in the first place. So we must imagine, then, that Kant lived for two hundred additional years, that he managed to stay abreast of current events, and that his political beliefs changed consistently with the times. Where on our present political spectum would he be right now, on this particular issue? That would depend entirely on the (essentially arbitrary) trajectory we used to haul the now undead 18th-century philosopher out of his grave and into the present.

Ok, so you want something you can plagiarize and take back to your philosophy prof? Here goes:

Kant had no opinion on gay marriage. Nor, for that matter, did Jesus, Socrates, Buddha, or any other philosopher–until the late twentieth century. Plenty of thinkers have had ideas about gay sex. Some of them, particularly the ancient Greeks, had quite favorable ideas about gay love. But until just recently, virtually no one has committed the act of intellectual audacity that would see modern, companionate romantic love as fundamentally equal–whether it involves two persons of different genders or of the same.

The idea that two men or two women can live in a permanent, stable, healthy, mutually supportive relationship, one precisely equal in worth and dignity to a heterosexual union, is fundamentally a new idea. There have arguably been gay marriages of a kind in the past, and John Boswell has made the case for their existence as well as anyone can. Whether his scholarship convinces you–and many people are not convinced–still, modern gay marriage is an innovation, much like votes for women were once an innovation, too.

For the record, Kant opposed votes for women, on the grounds that men and women had naturally separate spheres in society, and allowing women to vote would lead to the breakdown of the natural difference between men and women. If Kant was supposed to be a paragon of Enlightenment–and many people aren’t convinced of this either–still, he came up very short of our modern standards. Measuring him by the political issues of the present day therefore isn’t just silly, it’s also false and ultimately harmful to our thinking, both about gay marriage and about Kant.

It’s harmful to our thinking about gay marriage because it obscures the fact that we gay marriage advocates really are claiming something quite remarkable: We are claiming that our relationships, whether blessed by the state or not, are every bit as fulfilling as straight ones. We are also claiming that very, very few people in all of history have grasped this fact, just as very few had previously understood that women should also be allowed the vote. Such a remarkable claim can’t be easily evaluated by recourse to the past, but only by examining the present state of affairs–and thus Kant does not apply.

This sort of assignment is harmful to our thinking about Kant as well, because it invites us to imagine a Kant that we would like, one that is altogether more modern and enlightened than the real one. In all probability this pseudo-Kant just happens to agree with us, too–whatever our views might happen to be. Such a philosophy assignment may be great for encouraging fanciful thinking, but it doesn’t do very much at all to encourage critical thought about Kant or his ideas.

Gosh, I hope that guy searches again…

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