A HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER: REMARKS ON ENGSTROM'S THE FORM OF PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

In the opening frame of Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, heat waves rising from the high desert reduce the visual field to an indeterminate blur. Gradually out of this undifferentiation, a distant figure on a horse emerges. It is as though this stranger has willed himself into existence—as though the thought of his mission makes itself real though an understanding of its own efficacy, and constitutes the stranger as the subject of the film that follows. Moreover, since the efficacy of this thought originates in the consciousness of its own goodness—his mission is for good—this judgment constitutes an audience who can share the same volition and wish for its success. A morality tale follows in which the self-conceit of the people of Lago is humbled by a figure whose identity is at some level familiar, but obscured by their own misrepresentations of self-worth. In the closing frame, unhappiness now reapportioned to vice, the stranger recedes back into the same undifferentiation, his mission complete— brought to fruition but not to an end, since ‘true ends’, as it were, ‘never bring themselves to an end’ (48). In the Form of Practical Knowledge, Stephen Engstrom does not drift, but he does traverse the high plains of Kant’s practical philosophy by a path that lifts our understanding of Kant to a higher plane. He connects Kant’s Categorical Imperative with reason by showing how it can be unfolded out of the very idea of practical knowledge of objective good, where the idea of practical knowledge leads to the conditions of universal validity expressed in the Formula of Universal Law. He then traces its substantive implications for conduct through its application in the ‘primitive act’ of making happiness an end. The Form of Practical Knowledge is a remarkably rich, insightful and deep book, and many ideas in the book deserve attention. With some difficulty, I limit myself to two—his innovative interpretation of the Categorical Imperative, and a conception of certain cognitive acts that offers insight into Kantian spontaneity as norm-guided self-determination. I’ll begin with the latter.