Javier A. Tabush
Javier Tabush
Carnet 20121042
September 26th 2012
MPC
Emmanuel Kant and Mark Twain
As I was reading both texts about Kant and Twain I thought of many connections through my mind, though they were hard to find. Both authors have their own different opinions about society but somehow they relate to each other in a way in which they describe the typical paradigms in an everyday society. Kant’s text talked about enlightenment and nonage, and how people throughout society follow these so called “guardians” instead of making a life of their own. For example, why go to the psychologist when you can sit, meditate and analyze yourself. This “nonage” we speak of is a very broad term covering a lot of definitions; immaturity, not educated, uncultured, and it’s the way Kant describes people in his text. On the other hand, Twain gives us another explanation about how people function in their society.
“Corne-Pone Opinions”, Twain’s text. The basic idea that surrounds this piece of writing is: tell me where you come from, how you were raised, and I’ll tell you how you think, a very self-centered type of thinking. The story that Twain portrays in his text helps a lot to understand the idea. He talks about a black preacher who tells him the following quote, “You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is”. In other words, tell me where you come from and I’ll tell you what think. This quote is being said by a black person living in a time of slavery which is why it is so classist. I interviewed a friend of mine, asking her opinion about this quote and this is the answer I got: “I think that is exactly what Karl Marx says, and that is what the Marxism is based on. For example if you form a part of the bourgeoisie you will be raised with that way of thinking and it is very determinist”.
Quoting Twain’s text, “We are creatures of outside influences; as a rule we do not think, we only imitate”. The text says that we are constantly changing because of outside influences, but it isn’t a noticeable change or fast change, it happens slowly and we conform to it without, in fact, noticing it. I would say that this is a problem in society because nobody actually cares for an opinion of their own, or placing their own standards and rules. An important thing to understand as well is that, one can escape from this routine, there is a way out of it. One really good example that Twain uses in his essay, “The Smiths like the new play; the Joneses go to see it, and they copy the Smith verdict”. That’s something that happens probably on a daily basis in society and I totally disagree with it, because if we want to do something we have to do it because we want to, because we find it interesting, not because “the Smiths” did it. Here’s where I can relate this text to Kant’s text with the whole guardian concept, doing things to please others or imitate them.
According to Kant, a nation will enlighten itself much more easily when it has liberty, and I totally agree with him because no one likes to be under pressure, without it, things probably will go slower, but better. Just like Kant mentions on the third paragraph, “Hence a nation can attain enlightening but slowly”. What does this have to do with Twain? I feel like he disagrees in this sense with Kant because in his text he says that everyone should find this enlightenment on their own by breaking paradigms and escaping the every-day society structure of imitating and absorbing the outside influence.
One question that I asked myself according to Twain’s text is that if there are no original opinions, how does innovation occur? How I said before, there is a chance to escape, so once this person does escape, innovation occurs and the ideal would be that he/she influences the rest, to provoke a much bigger and persistent innovation to break the paradigm.
In my personal opinion I believe that even though Kant’s and Twain’s texts are completely different even though they kind of agree with each other. They both think that people in society don’t act for themselves but to please others and also take responsibility for their own actions. I would like to compare this to the speech conference given by Freddy Kofman, which exactly addresses to the idea of “taking responsibility for what you do instead of blaming others”.
The only difference I find between these two is that in Kant’s essay he says we all follow these so called guardians and in Twain’s essay he talks about following society’s trends. So they both talk about following or idolizing other entities even tough two completely different ones.