What do Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics and David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College (known as the “This Is Water” speech) have in common?

Both of these famous philosophies, according to Matthew B. Crawford in his book The World Beyond Your Head, are faulty—and for the same reason.

It’s a bold claim. Crawford attempts to topple two towering figures of Western culture and thought in one fell swoop! So let’s back up a sec and analyze what Kant’s and Wallace’s philosophies, in these instances, are. Then we can delve into why Crawford thinks they are wrong.

Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics of Freedom

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a German philosopher famous for a philosophy called the categorical imperative. He states that morality exists beyond the realm of the everyday world, and can be derived through reason alone. The moral law, he says, is categorically (“unconditionally”) imperative (“crucial and essential”).

Crawford points out that Kant held a mind thinking rationally, in an ideal state, in far higher esteem than a mind grappling with the way things are in the messy, real world:

“Kant builds a high wall between the empirical world and the purely intellectual, where we discover a priori moral laws. Reasons to act must come only from the latter if we are to be free, and the will is to remain pure, ‘unconditioned’ by anything external to it. . . . To be rational is, for Kant, precisely not to be situated in the world.”

David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” Commencement Speech

As those who know me well know, I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace (1962–2008). Infinite Jest was well worth the struggle to read. I have also enjoyed and marveled at the brilliance of many of his other works, fictional and nonfictional. However, I was distinctly unimpressed by his work—for the only time ever—when encountering, ten years ago, the commencement speech he delivered on May 21, 2005: and for the same reasons Crawford cites.

Even ten years later—and I remember it very well: it was exactly ten years ago, give or take a few months, when my boss (at the time) printed the speech and gave it to me, as a benefactory gesture, an offering* of moral guidance from mentor to mentee, and which I duly read, but did not duly (oops) compliment, nor, however, criticize, because, after all, who criticizes David Foster Wallace?!!

But I seem to have gotten off track. As I was saying, even ten years later, I distinctly remember the bit in the speech about the annoyance of grocery shopping. Wallace opines that if you are engaged in one of the many frustrating activities of modern life—such as grocery shopping, after a long day at work, in an ugly and crowded supermarket, when all you want to do is go home and rest, but everything is annoying and taking too long, etc.—that you should remember that you can always control what you are thinking.

Here’s what Crawford has to say about this:

“Wallace’s core suggestion in the speech is that ‘you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.’ . . . His solution is thus emblematic of the problem we are addressing in this book: we have an uncertain grasp of the world as something with a reality of its own.”

In other words, Wallace, in this speech, held a mind thinking rationally, in an ideal state, in far higher esteem than a mind grappling with the way things are in the messy, real world.

Matthew B. Crawford’s Praise of the World Beyond Your Head

I believe in the power of the mind, thinking rationally; but I also concur with Crawford that thinking in an idealized bubble is not enough. There’s a real world to contend with out there! If the deep, rational thinkers aren’t up for working to make a difference . . . whom does that leave?

Crawford titled his book The World Beyond Your Head. His thesis is that we should work to apply our minds to real things, in the real world, despite the many powers that be and cultural conceptions guiding us in less grounded—and more illusory—directions. This quote of his is buried in a footnote, but it’s one of my favorites in the whole book:

“Wisdom is impossible without biography.”

The mind is not an empty shopping cart, hovering in an imaginary space. It has a history. It has been filled and emptied a bit, filled a lot more and emptied a bit more. It has traveled the aisles again and again and again. It has been knocked around quite a lot, but it keeps going. It keeps moving. It keeps engaging. And the more it moves and engages, the fuller it becomes.

With what real-world activities will you fill your cart today, this week, next year?

*I thought I'd throw a footnote in here, just for good measure. (RIP DFW.)

Despite the immense and unprecedented power of Google, there are some things it just can’t do. It can overwhelm one with information on a vast variety of topics, and yet it remains eerily silent on others.

The Internet can only tell us what we, collectively, already know. And we know much more about the present than we do about the past. When it comes to the past, all we can do is peep back into whatever scant historical documents and bits of evidence exist, make educated guesses, and imagine. Perhaps computaz don’t really rule over so much, after all.

When reading historical and anthropological books like Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston, I often feel a yearning to know more. What exactly did Cudjo/Kossula’s African village look like? Did it look anything like this photo of mud huts in Ghana? Barracoon doesn’t give as many details as I crave. And I know from experience that, no matter how many university libraries one visits, how many obscure texts one reads, and how many answers one delights in finding, there will always remain unanswered questions.

Do you, like me, feel the urge to know more when reading this passage?

“Dey got de women soldiers too and dey run wid de big knife and make noise. Dey ketch people and dey saw de neck lak dis wid de knife den dey twist de head so and it come off de neck. Oh Lor’, Lor’! . . . No man kin be so strong lak de woman soldiers from de Dahomey.”

Whoa, women warriors? Please tell me more. How did they train? What kinds of weapons did they use? What did they wear while fighting? Were most women from Dahomey trained as warriors, or just a select few of them? Were they anything like the Amazons, as described in Greek mythology? Were they anything like Katniss, from The Hunger Games? I’m sure I could learn a lot from Google about women warriors, were I to do a search. I’m sure I could learn even more, were I to scour through library stacks. And yet, I’m also sure that many mysteries would remain.

What secrets of the past would you uncover, if you could?

The author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston could not find a publisher for her book Barracoon that did not want her to make extensive changes to the manuscript (as I mentioned in my last blog post), and so her book was not released until 50+ years after her death, 80+ years after it was written.

The cause of the disagreement between Hurston and the publisher was that Hurston had written the story of Cudjo/Kossula in dialect. That is, she had transcribed his words as he spoke them (as an anthropologist concerned with preserving the speaker’s voice), instead of “translating” his words to “proper” English (as an author concerned with reaching a wide audience). The former style is more accurate; the latter style is easier to read.

I remember reading Huckleberry Finn for the first time—as a former high school English teacher, I have read it many times—and experiencing confusion and frustration when encountering Mark Twain’s rendering of the character Jim’s speech. I must have been halfway through the book before it finally dawned on me that chile meant “child” pronounced without the “d” sound. I kept reading it as “chili” (meat and beans in a bowl) or “chili” (a hot pepper) or “Chile” (the country) . . . none of which, needless to say, made any sense.

When I read Barracoon, I had no trouble with Hurston’s rendering of Cudjo/Kossula’s speech. I very much enjoyed reading the story in dialect, and I concur with her instincts to tell his story that way.* Then again, I am an experienced reader with two degrees in English. I wonder how well I would have been able to follow the story had I read it in my teens, or not pursued English degrees.

I am curious what you think about the following passage. Here Cudjo/Kossula describes his life as a 19-year-old, just before his town was raided and he was captured:

“I stand round de place where de chief talk wid de wise men. I hope dey see Cudjo and think he a grown man. Maybe dey call me to de council. De fathers doan never call me but I likee very much to be dere and lissen when dey talk. . . . I likee go in de market place too and see de pretty gals wid de gold bracelets on de arm from de hand to de elbow. Oh, dey look very fine to Cudjo when dey walkee dey sling de arm so and de bracelet ring. I lak hear dat—it sound so pretty.”

How easy or difficult did you think that passage was to read? What do you think about books that make extensive use of dialect?

*In full disclosure, I made a similar decision when writing my unpublished novel The Water-Creatures . . . and may well face the same consequences as Hurston . . . if not worse.

When I saw that the great Zora Neale Hurston had a new book out—her being deceased being not at all an impediment to this, and perhaps even, sadly, a furtherance—I rushed to buy it.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” is very different from the other work I have read by her, the superb literary novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Barracoon is an anthropological work of nonfiction, and the making and publishing of it is quite a story in itself, covering vast tracts of space and time.

The slave trade was officially abolished by the U.S. in 1808. Despite this, ships were still making their way to the West African coast to trade goods for people as late as 1860—more than 50 years after the slave trade had been outlawed, and only one year before the outbreak of the Civil War. During this time, Africans on the coast were still raiding interior villages, capturing people, and housing them in barracoons—the term means “stokade”—to be sold as the slave ships arrived.

The last known slave ship, the Clotilda, sailed in 1860. The hero of Barracoon, known as either Cudjo (his American name) or Kossula (his African name), was captured at age 19 and survived the middle passage on that last slave ship. He was enslaved in the U.S. until the end of the Civil War in 1865, which occurred only a few years later. When he was freed, he lacked the resources to sail to Africa, to which he very much wanted to return.

Fast forward more than 50 years to 1927: Zora Neale Hurston, having learned that the now 86-year-old was the last known living person who was born in Africa and sold into U.S. slavery, visited him at his home in Alabama and recorded his story.

Hurston completed her manuscript in 1931. However, she could not find a publisher that did not wish her to make drastic changes with which she did not agree. When she died in 1960, the manuscript was still unpublished. Fast forward more than 50 years (again!) to 2018: Her book is finally published, and the voice of Cudjo/Kossula—the voice of someone who experienced the middle passage as a person sold—is finally being heard. This is vitally important and amazing because, as Hurston explains in her introduction, there are countless texts about the slave trade written by people in power, but not by people they exploited:

“All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold.”

Now, this year, after so many 50+ year intervals, we finally have some words.

In what ways has society changed since the Stone Age, and in what ways is it exactly the same?

The protagonist of the novel Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata confronts this question upon meeting a dissatisfied young man. The young man believes that society is—and always has been—deeply flawed:

“Nothing’s changed since the Stone Age. It’s just that nobody realizes that. . . . If you ask me, this is a dysfunctional society. And since it’s defective, I’m treated unfairly.”

In this little rant, the young man argues against the common belief that it’s better to be living in modern times than prehistoric times. Nineteenth-century scholars divided human history into three ages. The Stone Age was followed by the Bronze Age, which was followed by the Iron Age. These ages roughly correspond to groups of humans using stone, bronze, and iron tools—but they also refer to a transformation from hunter-gatherer bands and tribes to the formation of city-states practicing agriculture, animal husbandry, and various trades, with accompanying changes in cultural and religious practices and beliefs. These ages occurred in different world localities at different historical times, and in different ways. Popularly, the idea of the three ages is associated with progress—and this implication is what the young man argues against.

An alternate view, one that the young man does not mention, is that the world has not progressed over the ages, but deteriorated. Many cultures and religions have a tradition of believing that the creation of the earth was ideal, and that a Golden Age lasted for a time thereafter, whereupon things got worse and worse, culminating in the banal depravity of today. The ancient Greek poet Hesiod wrote that the Golden Age regressed into the Silver Age, which progressively regressed into the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age, and the Iron Age. The metals in this worldview—which correspond not to tools but, metaphorically, to the quality of people’s lives—become less and less valuable as time passes. (Though, oddly, the name of one of these ages is not a metal at all!)

The young man’s view is negative and self-defeating; but in one way at least, I agree with him: I do not believe that the passage of time has resulted in a society that is better in every way. I also do not believe that it has resulted in a society that is worse in every way. Society has many facets, and that’s why it’s fun to ask (so I’ll ask it again!)—in what ways has it changed, and in what ways has it stayed the same, since the Stone Age?