Kant on character

 Several passages in Daily Rituals are worth the price of the book. This remark about the philosopher Immanuel Kant is wonderful:

Character, for Kant, is a rationally chosen way of organizing one’s life, based on years of varied experience — indeed, he believed that one does not really develop a character until age forty. And, at the core of one’s character, he thought, were maxims — a handful of essential rules for living that, once formulated, should be followed for the rest of one’s life.

 

I like the passage for several reasons. First, it seems to me that’s the way we make ethical decisions. Often, we must make a snap decision — to run toward or away from gunfire, for example. It would be nice if we had the time to go through elaborate calculations about the greater good before making those decisions. But the model suggested in Kant’s discussion of character seems truer to life, at least as I’ve experienced it.

I wish we had Kant’s own maxims. I would guess that a good Kant scholar could come close to recreating them.

It also seems to me that this remark would be useful to short-story writers: Could you deduce from your hero’s actions the handful of maxims she lived by? 

• Source: Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025, p. 78.