I’ve spent most of my life at my grandmother’s house. Once I asked her of those doctors that save people’s life, how they could do such a thing. “It’s not easy to save someone else’s life, isn’t it?” She told me that to be a good doctor one has to study for years, six even ten. “Anyway, that doesn’t make you a good doctor”, she said. “You have to learn by reading books, but you have to learn by doing as well.” Theory and practice go together. I didn’t become a doctor. The idea of saving other people’s lives seemed to me too demanding. I now read a bit of political philosophy. It was real fun to read Kant. To be honest, I didn’t really read Kant, just a few pages. That is what I have read: ‘there are doctors […] who did well during their schooling but who do not know how to act when asked to give advice’. Kant wrote this in 1793 in response to Professor Garve, who criticized him because he wasn’t paying enough attention to the practice,[1]. Kant was sure that there is always a gap between theory and practice, and so am I. But if one wants to be a good doctor he needs both, I guess. If you can’t distinguish between a heart and a nose, you could confuse a heart murmur for a sneeze. That’s not professional! It’d be a mess if you read that the heart is on the right side, but it turns out that it actually is on the other side of the chest. I guess it’s pretty much the same with political philosophy. I don’t want to say that Kant was wrong. I’d not dare! But I really think my granny was right.
[1] I. Kant, On the Common Saying: ‘This May be True in Theory, But it Does Not Apply in Practice’, tr. H. B. Nisbet, in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 61-92.
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