"To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs – but a tribute nevertheless." – George Steiner
The pronunciation of Immanuel Kant's surname often leads to hilarity among students, and I like to think that a (thankfully non-fatal) shooting in Rostov-on-Don, reportedly provoked by an argument over the German philosopher was simply the result of a misheard insult. But then that probably doesn't work in Russian, does it?
No one knows what the exact cause of the dispute was but it is hard to imagine murderous intent emerging from the categorical imperative, not least because it was designed precisely to prevent that happening. If human beings are "ends in themselves", as the saying goes, then the injunction to do unto others as one would have done unto oneself means that the shooter was pretty mixed up. Maybe the argument was about the Jacques Lacan's conjunction of Kant and Sade? In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant famously posits that an irresistible desire to do something can be countered by imagining a gallows in front of you on which you will be hung the moment the desire is gratified. As Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, Lacan asked whether it was more the case that some people only get gratification precisely when there was a gallows placed in front of them. An argument about Kant that ends in the shooting of one's interlocutor would therefore be the perfect argument against Kant.
Kant's idea that reason and self-preservation should always prevail over passion is undermined not only by Lacanian theory (and I make no apology for mentioning both Žižek and Lacan in the first paragraph – the situation would seem to demand it) but by our everyday experience of life. Risk to the point of disaster; the desire to transgress and to do violence in the name of that transgression is always with us. Often it is Nietzschean impulse to go beyond which governs, rather than the Kantian rationalist need to stay safe.
Maybe one man had designs on the wife of the other on the Kantian grounds that marriage is merely a "contract between two adults of the opposite sex about the mutual use of each other's sexual organs" which might be temporarily suspended for the duration of the short affair, and the other took this as not only an insult but also a base objectification of the concept of love between two people and unleashed a hail of bullets. Who knows?
Of course what Kant was doing was trying to create a morality without religion for a species which had, for him, a radically evil nature. One wonders whether, in the land of Dostoevsky, the argument was about what happens when religious constraint is removed – let alone the disciplining constraint of the party. I have the rather foppish image of one man saying to the other: "A good will is good not because of what it effects or accomplishes, nor because of its fitness to attain some proposed end; it is good only through its willing, ie, it is good in itself," and the other, in a moment of sub-fascist Nietzschean frenzy (they were only rubber bullets after all) reached for his Browning.
Or maybe they were just pissed.
