Most times when I hear some­one on a tear about the dan­gers of “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness” I roll  my eyes and move on. So many such com­plaints involve ire at being held to stan­dards of basic human decen­cy, say, or hav­ing to share resources, oppor­tu­ni­ties, or pub­lic spaces. But there are many excep­tions, when the so-called “PC” impulse to broad­en inclu­siv­i­ty and soft­en offense pro­duces mon­sters of con­de­scend­ing pater­nal­ism. Take the above omnibus edi­tion of “Kant’s Cri­tiques” print­ed by Wilder Pub­li­ca­tions in 2008. The pub­lish­er, with either kind but painful­ly obtuse motives, or with an eye toward pre-empt­ing some kind of legal blow­back, has seen fit to include a dis­claimer at the bot­tom of the title page:

This book is a prod­uct of its time and does not reflect the same val­ues as it would if it were writ­ten today. Par­ents might wish to dis­cuss with their chil­dren how views on race, gen­der, sex­u­al­i­ty, eth­nic­i­ty, and inter­per­son­al rela­tions have changed since this book was writ­ten before allow­ing them to read this clas­sic work.

Where to begin? First, we must point out Wilder Pub­li­ca­tions’ strange cer­tain­ty that a hypo­thet­i­cal Kant of today would express his ideas in tol­er­ant and lib­er­al lan­guage. The sup­po­si­tion has the effect of patron­iz­ing the dead philoso­pher and of absolv­ing him of any respon­si­bil­i­ty for his blind spots and prej­u­dices, assum­ing that he meant well but was sim­ply a blink­ered and unfor­tu­nate “prod­uct” of his time.

But who’s to say that Kant didn’t damn well mean his com­ments that offend our sen­si­bil­i­ties today, and wouldn’t still mean them now were he some­how res­ur­rect­ed and forced to update his major works? More­over, why assume that all cur­rent read­ers of Kant do not share his more repug­nant views? Sec­ond­ly, who is this edi­tion for? Philoso­pher Bri­an Leit­er, who brought this to our atten­tion, humor­ous­ly titles it “Kant’s 3 Critiques—rated PG-13.” One would hope that any young per­son pre­co­cious enough to read Kant would have the abil­i­ty to rec­og­nize his­tor­i­cal con­text and to approach crit­i­cal­ly state­ments that sound uneth­i­cal, big­ot­ed, or sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly dat­ed to her mod­ern ears. One would hope par­ents buy­ing Kant for their kids could do the same with­out chid­ing from pub­lish­ers.

None of this is to say that there aren’t sub­stan­tive rea­sons to exam­ine and cri­tique the prej­u­di­cial assump­tions and bias­es of clas­si­cal philoso­phers. A great many recent schol­ars have done exact­ly that. In her Phi­los­o­phy of Sci­ence and Race, for exam­ple, Nao­mi Zack observes that “accord­ing to con­tem­po­rary stan­dards, both [Hume and Kant] were vir­u­lent white suprema­cists.” Yet she also ana­lyzes the prob­lems with apply­ing “con­tem­po­rary stan­dards” to their sys­tems of thought, which were not nec­es­sar­i­ly racist in the sense we mean so much as “racial­ist,” depen­dent on an “ontol­ogy of human races, which under­lay Hume and Kant’s val­ue judg­ments about what they thought were racial dif­fer­ences” (an ontol­ogy, it’s worth not­ing, that pro­duced sys­temic and insti­tu­tion­al racism). Zack respects the vast gulf that sep­a­rates our judg­ments from those of the past while still hold­ing the philoso­phers account­able for con­tra­dic­tions and incon­sis­ten­cies in their thought that are clear­ly the prod­ucts of will­ful igno­rance, chau­vin­ism, and unex­am­ined bias. An informed his­tor­i­cal approach allows us to see how books are not sim­ply “prod­ucts of their time” but are sit­u­at­ed in net­works of knowl­edge and ide­ol­o­gy that shaped their authors’ assump­tions and con­tin­ue to shape our own—ideologies that per­sist into the present and can­not and should not be papered over or eas­i­ly explained away with skit­tish warn­ing labels and didac­tic lec­tures about how much things have changed. In a great many ways of course, they have. And in some sig­nif­i­cant oth­ers, they sim­ply haven’t. To pre­tend oth­er­wise for the sake of the chil­dren is disin­gen­u­ous and does a grave dis­ser­vice to both author and read­er.

via Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Man Shot in Fight Over Immanuel Kant’s Phi­los­o­phy in Rus­sia

100 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The ever-flick­er­ing lights, the ever-present screen, the stu­pe­fied spec­ta­tors immune to a larg­er real­i­ty and in need of sud­den enlightenment—Plato’s alle­go­ry of the cave from Book VII of The Repub­lic is a mar­ket­ing department’s dream: it sums up an entire brand in a stock-sim­ple para­ble that almost any­one can fol­low, one that lends itself to com­pelling­ly brief visu­al inter­pre­ta­tions like those above and below. In the top video, Orson Welles nar­rates while the cam­era pans over some col­or­ful­ly styl­ized illus­tra­tions of the fable by artist Dick Oden. This pre­serves the didac­tic tone of the text, but it is a lit­tle dry. In con­trast, the award-win­ning three-dimen­sion­al ren­der­ings of the pris­on­ers and their non­stop nick­elodeon in the Clay­ma­tion Cave Alle­go­ry below offers dra­mat­ic close-ups of the chained prisoner’s faces and the hyp­not­ic move­ment of fire­light over the cave’s rock walls.

Plato’s “brand” is a doc­trine of ide­al­ism that posits a realm of ide­al forms, of which every­thing we know by our sens­es is but an infe­ri­or copy. The iron­i­cal­ly poet­ic Socrates relates the sto­ry to illus­trate “the effect of edu­ca­tion and the lack of it on our nature.”

And yet it does much more than this—Plato illus­trates an epis­te­mol­o­gy that sup­ports notions of the soul and immor­tal­i­ty, and hence his ideas sur­vived in the­ol­o­gy long after they was sup­pos­ed­ly van­quished by ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy.

Plato’s idea of rea­son as a per­fect, unchang­ing realm of which we’re only dim­ly aware is intu­itive­ly com­pelling. Most of us are at some time con­scious of how lim­it­ed our per­cep­tions tru­ly are. But just because the alle­go­ry of the cave is fair­ly easy to com­mu­ni­cate to phi­los­o­phy 101 stu­dents doesn’t mean it’s easy to adapt to the screen like the two exam­ples above. Mark Lin­sen­may­er of The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life points us toward these 20 YouTube takes on Plato’s cave, “many of them,” he writes, “fright­ful­ly ama­teur­ish and some of them pre­sent­ing a warped and/or incom­pre­hen­si­ble ver­sion of the sto­ry.” I am par­tic­u­lar­ly intrigued by the silent film ver­sion below. As always, your com­ments on the sound­ness of these var­i­ous inter­pre­ta­tions are most wel­come.

Cours­es on Pla­to can be found on our list of 100 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er Free Online Course col­lec­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Drink­ing Par­ty, 1965 Film Adapts Plato’s Sym­po­sium to Mod­ern Times

Phi­los­o­phy Bites: Pod­cast­ing Ideas From Pla­to to Sin­gu­lar­i­ty Since 2007

Famous Philoso­phers Imag­ined as Action Fig­ures: Plun­der­ous Pla­to, Dan­ger­ous Descartes & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness