KANT: Conscience (Kurtz: A Case Study)

In our last reading (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, GB1) we learned that “Kurtz was a remarkable man.  He had something to say.  He said it… He had summed up; he had judged. ‘The horror!’”  Kurtz was dying and “the horror” were the last words Marlow heard him say.  It’s up for debate what Kurtz was talking about.  Did the darkness of the world horrify him?  Or was “horror” a term used to describe the state of Kurtz’s own soul when he knew he was dying?  If it’s his own soul, was he sorry for what he had done?  Immanuel Kant would say no.  Even if Kurtz was sorry, it wouldn’t have done him any good because Kant thinks “repentance which manifests itself for the first time on the death-bed has no moral worth.  Its motive is the nearness of death.  If the approach of death were not feared there would probably be no repentance.” 

Marlow said Kurtz “had summed up; he had judged.”  This falls in line with Kant’s definition of conscience.  He says “conscience is an instinct to pass judgment upon ourselves in accordance with moral laws.”  Under Kant’s theory Kurtz had been overwhelmed in the end by the sheer weight of the judgment of his own conscience.  He had passed judgment upon himself.  Up to that point Kurtz had been dictator and even demigod of the whole region.  He did whatever he wanted to do and was able to justify killing his opponents and sticking their heads on poles because these men were rebels and this is what happens to rebels.  It was meant to serve as a warning to others and enforce obedience from the surrounding tribes.  But was it the right thing to do?  Was it “in accordance with moral laws” as Kant says?  Far away from civilization Kurtz didn’t have to answer that question.  He wasn’t answerable to anyone but himself.  Kurtz may have thought it necessary to set himself up as a terrible tyrant to support his claim as ruler and he may have believed what he was doing was proof of his strength of character as a leader.  But Kant says “the capacity to dismiss the accusation of a remorseful conscience is not evidence of strength of character, but rather of wickedness and religious impenitence.”

Kurtz dismissed the instinct of his conscience and followed another instinct instead, the instinct to power.  We learn more about this instinct to power in Freud (GB1) and Nietzsche (GB5).  In his soul Kurtz was wrestling with two powerful instincts, conscience and power.  This may have been what Marlow was talking about when he said, “Oh, he struggled!  He struggled!  The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images; images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression.”  One side of Kurtz wanted power, wealth and fame while his conscience wanted him to be noble and lofty.  This was his struggle, to choose between them.  There were no police stations around and no courtrooms to provide external checks on his lust for power. There was only the inner voice of his own conscience summoning him to stay within the boundaries of the universal moral law of humanity.  Kant says “This law, which is based on reason and not on sentiment, is incorruptible and incontestably just and pure; it is the moral law, established as the holy and inviolable law of humanity.”  Kurtz left police stations and courtrooms far behind him when he went deep down the Congo River.  But he couldn’t leave his conscience behind because, as Kant put it, “Conscience is the representative within us of the divine judgement-seat.  It weighs our dispositions and actions in the scales of a law which is holy and pure.  We cannot deceive it, and, lastly, we cannot escape it because, like the divine omnipresence it is always with us.”  Kurtz could neither deceive nor escape his conscience.  It followed him all the way to his grave.  He was a cultivated man but Kant warns that “a cultivated mind need not be followed by a cultivated conscience.”  Kurtz spent a great deal of time and effort cultivating power.  Kant thinks he should have been cultivating his conscience.    

Conrad's Heart of Darkness

What makes us the way we are? Is it society with all of its rules and customs, or is it DNA, something primeval in the blood? There is a tendency among civilized people to think that philosophy, religion, or education will provide  answers to all those troubling questions about justice, fate, or good and evil. On the contrary, Joseph Conrad seems to believe that we, ourselves, are nothing more than a product of nature, with all those animal instincts still dormant within our soul. Can education make us better? Perhaps. But the idea that moral progress is a steady climb upwards from the mud and filth and brutal indifference of nature is not very reassuring. For every good impulse we have needs to be ratified daily, and blessed with the knowledge that we are still just one small step from the darkness composing our primal birth. Wisdom is the recognition that no society can ever banish completely the origin of our species. We must live with the knowledge of that inner demon and do what we can to contain it. Otherwise, like Kurtz, we will surely succumb to that primeval call which ends only in darkness.

CONRAD 3: Heart of Darkness (Literature and Darkness)

Heart of Darkness is a story and it’s a good story.  Herodotus tells a good story too in his Persian Wars (GB2) but that’s history, not literature.  Nietzsche also tells a good story in Thus Spake Zarathustra (GB5) but that’s philosophy, not literature.  Conrad’s main goal is not to tell us about the past or to analyze ideas.  His goal is to create a work of art that moves the reader on a different level.  How well he succeeds depends entirely on his ability to create a world in the mind of the reader; how well he can conjure up images and form meaningful scenes made out of nothing but words.  How well did Conrad succeed in doing this in his story, Heart of Darkness?        

In Chapter 3 the scene has Kurtz on a riverboat heading back down the river, back to civilization.  He’s very sick, in more ways than one.  Marlow says “his intelligence was perfectly clear; concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear… But his soul was mad.  Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.”  Marlow thought Kurtz was insane.  The runaway Russian sailor-adventurer disagreed.  He told Marlow “You can’t judge Mr. Kurtz as you would an ordinary man.”  Why not?  The Declaration of Independence (IGB2) says “all men are created equal” and should be judged by the same laws.  Why use a different standard for Kurtz?  Conrad doesn’t say.  This isn’t a book about political philosophy and Conrad isn’t writing a treatise on equality.  He’s telling a story that focuses on one extraordinary man dying on a riverboat in a dark land far from home.

Death is the ultimate heart of darkness.  History chronicles plenty of deaths.  In Herodotus lots of people die in battle, by drowning, and by disease.  Philosophy also has a lot to say on the subject of death.  In Plato’s Apology (GB1) Socrates thinks death is one of two things: total oblivion or else a place where good people go to be rewarded and bad people go to be punished.  The German philosopher Schopenhauer (GB3) thinks death is a release from the burden of living.  In Rothschild’s Fiddle (GB1) Martha seems to agree.  She’s glad to be leaving her mean-spirited husband Jacob and her impoverished existence in their miserable Russian hut.  Toward the end of his own life Jacob reflects on how empty his life had been.  In that way he’s similar to Kurtz.  The result was a song of sadness that touched the hearts of everyone who heard it.  That’s what art can do.  Thousands upon thousands of people died in Herodotus’ history.  What were any of them thinking about in the last few minutes of life?  We don’t know.  Conrad doesn’t show us what death is like in abstract terms but how it confronts one individual person on an intensely personal level.  For Kurtz it was a dark confrontation.  Marlow heard him mumble “I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.”  Marlow didn’t see oblivion reflected on Kurtz’s face; or reward, or punishment either.  Just “an intense and hopeless despair.”  The last words Marlow heard him say were “The horror! The horror!”  Kurtz faced death the same way he faced life.  That’s what impressed Marlow.  “He had summed up; he had judged.  The horror!  He was a remarkable man.”  Kurtz was remarkable because he told the truth.  Death is horrible.  What was so horrible for Kurtz?  Leaving behind all his unfinished plans?  Facing darkness alone?  The knowledge that his life had been wasted on greed, lust and power?  We don’t know for sure but we all go down that same dark road eventually.  And we travel alone, like Kurtz.  Marlow says death “is the most unexciting contest you can imagine… without spectators, without clamour, without glory.”  All of Kurtz’s ambitious plans, all his ivory and power and glory, all his learning, his “intended” and everything else were of no help to him in the end.  Everyone goes down that same dark road and everyone ends up in the same dark place; in the grave, the real heart of darkness.  Conrad’s bleak vision is a remarkably dark literary achievement. 

CONRAD: Heart of Darkness 2 (History and Darkness)

Joseph Conrad had a dark vision of the human condition.  If civilization is the culmination of human achievement then fire is a good symbol of his vision of civilization.  Conrad thinks we’re little better than savage cavemen sitting around a fire, surrounded on every side by a vast forest of darkness.  There’s no other light for hundreds of miles and darkness threatens to overwhelm us at any moment. The only thing standing between us and some terrible fate is this one little fire.  Most people never have time to think about such things; nor do we want to. We’re too busy making a living so we just huddle up closer to the fire.  Fire means comfort; cities, law and order, culture and the pleasures of living among other human beings.  But here’s the thought that worried Conrad.  What if the fire goes out?  Or, even worse, what if we forget how to make fire? 

History is the way we pass knowledge down from one generation to the next.  If civilization is like fire then history is like a torch.  We receive the torch from others.  It’s our job to keep the flame going and pass it on.  Conrad put it this way: “Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing.”  At least that’s the theory.  But theory belongs to philosophy, not to history.  When Socrates says “the unexamined life is not worth living” he’s speaking to everyone at all times in all places.  Philosophy deals with universal values but history deals with specific people doing specific things at specific times and places.  In this story a man named Marlow is heading down the Congo River on a steamboat around the turn of the nineteenth century to bring back a man named Kurtz.  It would not have been the same story if it had happened on the Mississippi River. 

And it wouldn’t have been the same story without the man named Kurtz.  In many ways he represents the best that Western civilization has to offer.  “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” and no doubt he was well-read in literature, philosophy and history and his painting showed him to be a very good artist as well.  Kurtz was a very cultured man and “as he was good enough to say himself, his sympathies were in the right place.”  He was on the right side of history according to the fashionable views of his time.  He was a member of the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs and was commissioned to write a report “for its future guidance.”  Marlow read the report and it had started out all full of optimism.  Kurtz wrote that “by the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.”  But something went terribly wrong.  He ended his report by scrawling a handwritten note in the margin: “exterminate the brutes!”  What had gone wrong?  For months on end no one heard from Kurtz.  There were rumors he was sick and “had recovered imperfectly.”  There were rumors he was not operating according to the rules of civilized behavior.  That’s why Marlow was captain of a steamboat sent to bring him back, back to civilization and the warmth of domesticated fire.                     

Here’s the special insight that makes Conrad’s story so disturbing.  What if the darkness isn’t out there somewhere, but inside; within us?  Kurtz isn’t the worst among us; he’s among the best.  He went down that river to bring the light of civilization to a dark land.  He went to bring trade and commerce along with the benefits of civilization; art, literature, history and philosophy.  But Kurtz brought darkness in with him.  Removed from the restraining influence of civilization he yielded to the primeval temptation of darkness heard long ago in Genesis (GB1) “ye shall be as gods.”  One of the lessons of history is that no civilization and no individual is exempt from the lessons of history.  The fire is fragile and civilization is just a thin veneer covering up vast darkness.  Scratch that surface and history seems to confirm Conrad’s bleak view of humanity.

CONRAD: Heart of Darkness 1 (Philosophy and Darkness)

In our last reading Socrates says “I have no leisure worth mentioning either for the affairs of the City or for my own estate; I dwell in utter poverty because of my service to God.”  His “service to God” consisted mostly of talking about philosophy to any Athenian who would listen.  Athens was the place to be if you wanted to be on the cutting edge of culture and learning.  It was the London of the ancient world.  Like many folks who live in London today, Socrates couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.  He flatly refused the option of being exiled to some dull provincial Geek colony.  No thank you very much.  Socrates couldn’t see himself pursuing philosophy in a backwater town somewhere in Thessaly.  He wanted to be where the action was and for a Greek philosopher that meant Athens, the center of the ancient Greek world.  Marlow was, in his own way, a philosopher too; but of a different kind than Socrates.  Socrates wanted to stay put and bloom where he was planted.  Marlow had a childhood dream of putting out to sea and visiting “the dark places of the earth.”  So when he became a man that’s exactly what he did.  “He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seaman lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life.  Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them (the ship) and so is their country (the sea)… But Marlow was not typical.”       

Marlow was not a typical sailor and he’s not a typical philosopher either.  Sitting on the deck of their ship in London, waiting for the tide to come in, Marlow remarks to his shipmates, “This also has been one of the dark places of the earth.”  London has been described in many ways by many people but “one of the dark places of the earth” isn’t normally what comes to mind.  Marlow is talking about London before it became London; way back when it was nothing more than a wilderness to the civilized soldiers who manned the ranks of a Roman army led by Julius Caesar.  Marlow comments that “we live in the flicker… but darkness was here yesterday… imagine him here at the very end of the world… sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages; precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink…they must have been dying like flies here… but they were men enough to face the darkness… all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.  There’s no initiation either into such mysteries.  He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible.”

 
This is Joseph Conrad’s style of philosophy.  It doesn’t have the reasonableness of Aristotle or the polished prose of Plato.  But it’s philosophy.  Aristotle makes sense reading him in a nice comfortable library or in the security of our own homes.  And through Plato’s writings we can imagine Socrates talking about truth and justice in front of a crowd of well-educated Athenians.  Conrad wants to take philosophy out of that comfort zone.  Heart of Darkness has a simple question.  What good is philosophy “at the very end of the world… among sand-banks, marshes, forests, and savages?”  Conrad doesn’t expect us to answer that it’s no good at all.  Instead, he invites the reader to take a journey into darkness, to experience the darkness, to confront it for ourselves.  It not a pleasant journey and there’s no initiation into Conrad’s world; no Philosophy 101 course to prepare us beforehand.  We have to jump in feet first and, at least for a time, “live in the midst of the incomprehensible.”  We have to get a feel for the land and try to make sense of life on a brooding river surrounded by a dark forest.  It can be disorienting but it’s only by going into this darkness that we’re really prepared to ask the question.  What good is philosophy, here, in this dark place?  Well, how does a dark place like ancient London go on to produce a Shakespeare or a John Locke?  Aristotle and Plato shine like beacons of light in the darkness.  Once upon a time Athens was one of those dark places too.  That’s what philosophy is good for.

PLATO: The Apology (Politics)

Socrates was on trial for his life and served as his own lawyer.  Depending on the reader’s point of view Socrates was (a) a terrible lawyer or (b) a brilliant one.  The charges against Socrates fall into two categories: political and religious.  The political charges seem vague to modern readers.  “Socrates is guilty of needless curiosity and meddling interference, inquiring into things beneath Earth and in the Sky, making the weaker argument the stronger, and teaching others the same.”  Socrates went to trial for this?  Even though these charges may seem vague to us, they weren’t vague to the Athenian jurors.  His accusers thought Socrates was guilty of trying to sabotage the whole Athenian political order.  Far from being a hero, Socrates was, in their view, a dangerous traitor to his country.  If Socrates’ goal was to get off then he made a terrible defense.  He mocked his accusers and left no room for jurors who might have voted for his acquittal under certain conditions.  “Would it not be possible for you to live in exile, Socrates, if you were silent and kept quiet?”  Socrates will make no deals because, as he publicly proclaims, “to do so would be to disobey God, and therefore I cannot do it.”  He won’t go away and he won’t be quiet.  Socrates informs the jurors that “God has fastened me to this City.  I rouse you.  I persuade you.  I upbraid you.  I never stop lighting on each of you, everywhere, all day long.”  This is an inspiring speech but it’s a terrible legal defense if you’re trying to get off in a capital crime case.    

Now here’s the argument why The Apology of Socrates was a brilliant strategy.  Socrates may have concluded from the start that he was doomed.  This “trial” was just a showcase to go through the motions of a proper legal proceeding.  Nothing Socrates could do or say would get him off.  So he decides from the beginning to use his trial as a platform to teach philosophy.  Socrates tells a story about the oracle at Delphi.  He could have just gotten right to the point but first he mentions a man named Chaerephon.  Socrates addresses the jurors with these words.  “You surely knew Chaerephon.  He was my friend from youth, and a friend of your democratic majority.”  Note how Socrates says “your” democratic majority.  A good defense lawyer would reject using divisive language in persuading a jury to let a client go free.  But Socrates’ primary goal isn’t to be set free.  He wants to use this opportunity to teach the Athenians about justice.  He wants to expose their ignorance, knowing full well what the consequences will be. 

 
Aristotle believed happiness is “an activity of the soul in conformity with a rational principle.”  To achieve happiness we need “a target to aim at to hit the proper mark.”  The “proper mark” for Aristotle is the highest good and “this good, one should think, is politics… since all knowledge and every choice is directed toward some good, let us discuss the aim of politics, (i.e. the highest good attainable by action).”  This statement helps put Plato’s Apology in perspective.  Socrates describes the danger of going into politics when he says “be well assured, Gentlemen of Athens, that had I attempted long since to enter political affairs, I should long since have been destroyed; to the benefit of neither you nor myself.  Please do not be angry at me for telling the simple truth.  It is impossible for any man to be spared if he legitimately opposes you or any other democratic majority… He who intends to fight for justice, if he is to be spared even for a little while, must live a private rather than a public life… do you think I would have lived so long if I had been in public life and acted in a manner worthy of a good man, fighting injustice?”  Plato thought this was the reason why so many good people stay out of politics and Socrates made this prediction: “This is what will convict me, if I am convicted; not Meletus, not Anytus, but the grudging slander of the multitude.  It has convicted many another good and decent man; I think it will convict me; nor is there reason to fear that it will end with me.”  Socrates was right about that.