Crooked Timber

Kant wrote, Out of the crooked timber of mankind, nothing straight was ever made.

He may not have gotten that idea all by himself. He may have been inspired by a passage in the Bible, from the book of Ecclesiastes where it is written "That which is crooked cannot be made straight" [1:15]. On discovering that Kant probably applied it to his philosophy, to reconcile the perversion and absurdity he saw around him.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin interpreted the Crooked Timber of Humankind metaphor as an admonishment against dogma and perfection. He believed that if a system of human governance set itself up deliberately to straighten out human flaws it would inevitably amount to totalitarianism. This is what he saw the utopian vision of communism trying to do, as endeavoring to straighten out that crooked timber of humankind, which as we know ended in absolute failure.

Another interesting passage from Ecclesiastes is hedonistic, which its preacher, narrator shares with us, invoked, no doubt, by the meaningless and drudgery he saw in life: "Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun" [8:15]. That passage could have inspired the passage in the American Declaration of Independence that encourages the 'pursuit of happiness', as an elixir to the drudgery of life.

Nietzsche and other existentialist may have also been influence by Ecclesiastes and the absurdity and meaningless it attaches to live. Nietzsche, it was written, "is one of the first to recognize the absurdity of human existence as the necessary basis for creative life and to stress the importance of irrational and illusional factors in shaping human behavior". Perhaps he was thinking about religion when he observed that.

I was reading the autobiography by psychotherapist Viktor Frankl in which he mentioned another existentialist, Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard once said, to quote Frankl, " anyone who offered a corrective had to be biased, thoroughly biased". Frankl was thinking of his own bias, of the corrective in psychotherapy he offered his patients.

Frankl was a surviver of the Holocaust. It was probably his existentialism that afforded his survival. Had he not been one he may not have survived. His existentialism gave him a certain strength and outlook on live, which balanced life's absurdities against its more admirable ones, and reconciled humanity's crooked timbers with its straighter ones.