Wild River State Park -- No Floods

For a casual weekday overnight, you can hardly do better than Wild River State Park, not much more than an hour north of the Twin Cities. Don't believe the Star Tribune reports of flooding. (News thrives on disaster.) Hilary and I spent a delightful 24 hours there yesterday, hiking the trails (almost entirely dry), listening to the birds (44 species) and sometimes spotting them through the leaves, and tending the evening fire made up  entirely of charred pieces of wood Hilary  gathered from neighboring fire-rings.

Yes, the St. Croix River is high, and the dock at the boat landing has been dragged up on shore for safe keeping. Good idea. Yes, the dumping station is closed due to a damaged pipe. But I think it's been that way for months. (And to be honest, I don't actually know what a dumping station is.)

On the park website I read:

Ponding water has provided excellent mosquito habitat. Screen tents are recommended for camping, and don't forget your bug spray!

Mosquitoes in Minnesota? Unheard of. What next? Killer bees? And has anyone manufactured tents without screens since the days of Nessmuk and the baker tent?

Nessmuk

It's gorgeous at Wild River, on the river and in the woods and across the prairie fields. Birds are singing everywhere, though at this time of year you don't often see them through the leaves: ovenbirds, wood thrushes, yellowthroats, bluebirds, orioles, catbirds, sapsuckers, peewees, kingbirds, vireos. Out in the fields we saw hoary alyssum, butterfly weed, hoary puccoon, false indigo, leadplant, and all kinds of unnamable grasses. Regardless of the names of individual plants, the patterns and textures are stunning.

We ate a fantastic dinner of Subway sandwiches we'd picked up in Stacy, accompanied by a kale salad-in-a-bag from CostCo and some Old Dutch Mexican Street Corn tortilla chips that I bought on sale at the grocery store, without bothering to read the fine print at the bottom of the bag: "flavored with a special blend of paprika, garlic, & lime."

As evening drew near, I noticed a fawn lurking in the grass ten feet from the edge of our site. A welcome guest. Mom showed up an hour later and lead her child away.

After "dinner" we tended the fire for an hour, adjusting the scraps of wood to take advantage of changes in the draft. This is a full-time activity, perfectly suited to a vacant and meditative evening.

A barred owl hooted several times. (The whippoorwill came later.)  Three cyclists—two adults and a teen—appeared out of the woods from the trail leading to the amphitheater and whizzed off into the gloaming.

The next morning we hit the trails again early. Cool air, dew in the grass.

The hop hornbeam are flowering. But are these hop-like growths flowers or fruits? In either case, magical times.

Three Shades of Blue:: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool

Jazz is a world unto itself, a world of oral traditions, insider knowledge, nightclubs, drugs, and the constant struggle to earn a living playing music that very few people like—but some people adore. The Golden Age of the art-form stretches from t  he Swing era, when Broadway musicals, movies, dance bands, and ballroom orchestras flooded the theaters and radio waves, to the small-group scene that followed, during which the most gifted of the musicians who had cut their teeth in the big bands formed small combos within which they could "stretch out" and "strut their stuff" in more intimate environments.

In 3 Shades of Blue James Kaplan has chosen the ideal form for exploring this world, drawing on established narratives, interviews, and previously unpublished oral histories to convey the uncertainties, inspirations, marketing challenges, personality clashes, and dumb luck, both good and bad, that fueled this remarkable burst of creativity. He defends his chosen point of focus in the introduction as follows:

Other categories would follow, but I confess that in the genres of bebop and hard bop, jazz created, in the quarter century between, roughly, 1942 and 1967, I find almost all of the jazz I want and need.

That's not a good sentence grammatically, but it conveys the author's personal enthusiasm, and that's what keeps the narrative rolling.

Kaplan relishes the gossip, the stories, and he knows how to milk the material. For example, he offers an extended quote by trumpeter Wallace Roney about how Miles got Coltrane to come back to his band. At the time, Miles had just returned to the States from Paris, and he wanted to form a new band. Coltrane was just finishing up a gig at the Five Spot with Thelonious Monk, and Miles wanted Coltrane back. Here is Roney's version:

One night he comes to Trane and says, 'Trane, come on back in the band, man.' Trane said, 'No, Miles—I like it here. I’m havin’ fun.' Miles said, 'You don’t want to play this shit—we playing some different shitl' Coltrane said, 'No, Miles, I’m enjoying this.'

Miles said, 'Come on. Come on back home.' He said, 'Philly’s back. Red’s back. And we got a little boy, Cannonball.' He said, “Just come on and play some with us.' 

In Roney's version, Miles hires Sonny Rollins on tenor and books a gig at Cafe Bohemia. Then one night Coltrane shows up, carrying his horn. Cutting a solo short, Miles goes off the bandstand to talk to him. Sonny takes the next solo, and then, as Miles later tells the story to Roney, “Wally—Trane got up there and played so much shit, took the championship belt away from Sonny. Made Sonny go to the bridge!”

It's a fine tale, the kind of insider scuttlebutt that those who love the music relish, Kaplan among them. But he prudently adds:

If the account is taken literally, it has a couple of chronological issues. For one thing, Sonny Rollins had left Miles’s band in September, while the Monk-Coltrane stand at the Five Spot was still in full bloom. For an­other, Rollins’s famous sabbatical from jazz, during which he practiced every day on the walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge, didn’t happen until the summer of 1959, and by his own account, a cutting contest with Coltrane had nothing to do with it. And Red Garland didn’t rejoin Miles until late December, at which point Rollins was long gone. 

But the spirit of the legend is intact in Roney’s telling. Coltrane’s play­ing had developed exponentially during his time with Monk: “Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order," lie told Down Beat editor Don DeMicheal in August 1960. “I felt I learned from him in every way—through the senses, theoretically, technically....

Kaplan not only loves the stories and the music, he also possesses the technical smarts to explain, in layman's terms, what was novel about the new paths these musicians were charting. For example, he makes an effort to explain what the shift from "playing the changes" to modal jazz was all about by a brief reference to Miles' tune "Milestones."

The tune was the first full example of the change in musical direction Coltrane referred to in that 1960 interview, Miles’s moving to the use of fewer and fewer chord changes in songs. “Milestones” is based on just two changes, focusing on modes rather than chords: the heart-racing opening section, with the three horns puffing its familiar staccato four-note figure, bop-bop-BOP-bop, is in G Dorian (you can find it yourself by playing a white-keys-only scale from G to G on a piano); the tune then shifts to A Aeolian (white keys from A to A), then back to Dorian before repeating the progression.

No one else in jazz was doing this then.

I'm not sure how interesting any of this would be to someone who isn't already familiar with the music, but Kaplan does the reader a favor by devoting a good deal of his time to a single LP, Kind of Blue, widely considered to be the greatest work of the post-bop era. That album is unquestionably great, and very easy to like, because all of the tracks are slow, quiet, moody, and brilliantly executed. But due to that very fact,  it doesn't really exemplify the era, which spanned from hard bop and bossa nova to dreamy West Coast cool. Then again, no single LP possibly could.

I had the good fortune to take to jazz at an early age, and I heard the second legendary Miles Davis Quintet--the one that included Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter--twice within the intimate confines of the old Guthrie Theater. But by this time, the late 60s, Miles and his band were well down the road into edgy modal compositions. Sure, I liked Kind of Blue. But I liked Sorcerer, Nefertiti, and Filles de Kilimanjaro better.

Which raises the question Kaplan presents in the subtitle of his book. "The Lost Empire of Cool." One of his themes is that jazz lost its audience because it got too far out, too cool, too something. You could no longer dance to it.    

Well, every book needs a one-line "hook," I guess, as a gift to reviewers and publishers' reps. Kaplan spends little time defending it. He toys in one chapter with the phrase "Jazz Died in 1959," but  neither he nor anyone else believes it. No one could listen to pianists Red Garland or Wynton Kelly today, for example, without being reminded of how much Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea brought to jazz in the 1960s. 

Kaplan himself obviously loves the music of the era he's describing and he wouldn't have it any other way. Maybe Jazz died in 1970, when Miles released Bitches Brew? 

Well, no one paints like Giotto these days, either.

Out of the Past

Minneapolis was recently ranked as the happiest city in the United States by the London-based Institute for the Quality of Life. It's hard for me, or anyone, to say for sure if that's true, but it brings to mind the slogan that was briefly popular when the eyes of all baseball fans were turned toward the Twin Cities during the 1991 World Series. "We Like It Here."

I prefer this slogan, anodyne though it is, to the more recent saying associated with the Timberwolves playoff run, "Bring y'ass," which was even embraced briefly by the people at Explore Minnesota. How times have changed.

But sometimes the days and weeks slip by, with remarkable events occurring so often that you hardly remember them. Here are three that I wouldn't want to forget:

A few weeks ago we paid a visit to the Ted Mann Concert Hall to hear the Oratorio Society, with some help from the University of Minnesota Chorus and Orchestra, perform a massive work called The Three Holy Children. I'd never heard of it, nor of the Anglo-Irish composer who wrote it, Charles Stanford. It was only performed once, in 1885, and considering its obscurity, I would have taken it to be a hobby-horse of the Oratorio Society's talented and energetic director, Matthew Mehaffey—appealing to archivists and fanatics but not the general public—except that a friend of ours who sings in that choir assured us it was worth a listen. She was right.

During a lengthy but informative spiel before the concert, Mehaffey explained that an archival discovery did underlie the performance, and went on to describe the painstaking work that was required to turn the score into serviceable singing parts. But if the piece is so great, why was The Three Holy Children performed only once before vanishing from view? Because oratorios were a dime a dozen in those days, and very costly to produce. There was little motivation to do the same one twice, and by the turn of the century the genre was dwindling in popularity.

Final question: Who the heck was Charles Stanford? Turns out he was an eminent composer, conductor, and educator in his day, and numbered Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams among his pupils. A dyed-in-the-wool Brahmsian, he found little to like in the modernist tendencies stirring at the time, and the younger generation, once fledged, seldom gave him a backward glance.

Though lengthy, the oratorio was, in my view, richly varied and uniformly splendid. It was like listening to a long-lost companion piece to Brahms' Requiem, gentler perhaps but hardly less rich in melodic and harmonic interest, and free of the weird and ghastly swoops and ostentatious harmonic clashes that mar so much modern liturgical music.

The three holy children mentioned in the title, in case you're interested, are Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who were tossed into the fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar during the Babylonian Captivity. It's one of the few Old Testament stories that kids like. Bing Crosby, Louis Prima, Sonny Rollins, and many others recorded a different version of the tale that ran to two minutes rather than two hours. That version was introduced in the 1930s. Here's a video of Louis Armstrong doing it in 1951. But with all due respect, the Oratorio Society does it better.

A few weeks later we stopped in at a photo exhibit called "Portraits: Past & Present," at a smallish gallery called Praxis in the Seward neighborhood. The pictures were taken by students of retired Star Tribune photographer Richard Sennott at a commercial photo studio of Gust Akerlund in Cokato, a small town roughly an hour west of Minneapolis on Highway 12. 

The studio first opened its doors in 1904, when people in London might still have been humming snatches of The Three Holy Children—though probably not. Gust Akerlund retired in 1950, but the studio is still open for business, still using natural light, and still equipped with some of the original backdrops. The Cokato Museum in now in the process of digitalizing many of the 14,000 negatives Gust took during his long career—workers, salesmen, carnival performers, funerals, weddings, family portraits.

In 2009 Sennott did a photo shoot at the studio for the Star Tribune. He recently took a group of students out to photograph some of the same people, fifteen years later, at the 74th Cokato Corn CarnivalIt struck me as a relaxed, warm, friendly, and good-natured show. I enjoyed chatting with the director of the Cokato museum, Johannah Ellison, sharing with her how much I enjoyed the exhibit of canned corn labels at her museum (it's true!), and also the stuffed bobwhite in the wildlife diorama. It was also fun to chat with Cokato's long-time professional story-teller Bob Gasch. Half a century ago I heard Bob recite "The Cremation of Sam McGee" at a training weekend when I was a canoe guide.

I eavesdropped on two old codgers—probably from Cokato—as they discussed the recent drought, the price of corn, and whether the gigantic ball of twine on display in Darwin, a few miles down the road from Cokato, is really the largest in the world, or only the largest one made by a single person.

And Hilary and I especially enjoyed running into her cousins Laura Sennott and Dan Olsen. Dan's wife and two daughters had flown south to a Caribbean meditation retreat. Dan wasn't in the mood, and decided to come west instead from his home in Boston to do some fishing with his sister and brother-in-law up on Cross Lake. Good idea.

A third event anchored in the past comes to mind: a performance by La Grande Bande at the Black Forest of cantatas by Bach and Handel and shorter pieces by Corelli and others. It was billed as "Summer and Songs" with a meal provided by the Black Forest. We went with friends, and also enjoyed talking with the two young university professors who joined us at our table, but the opening peroration read from a sheet of paper by harpsichordist Michael Thomas Asmus was somewhat boring, and one of the violinists—there were only two—was slightly out of tune for much of the performance. It didn't help that to get a beer you had to leave the room and walk through the courtyard to the bar, then wait for the bartender, who seemed to be new at the job,  to tend to your order.

But the voices of soprano Catherine Sandstedt and baritone Andrew Kane saved the day.

Le Grande Bande is based in Gaylord, an hour southwest of town, though many of the musicians in the troupe are from the Cities and elsewhere. The size of the group varies with the repertoire being performed. The pieces we heard were memorable--especially the one featuring a hunting horn--but I think we'd have better luck with a larger ensemble.

Twilight of the Idols

For the past two decades men's professional tennis has been dominated by the Big Three—though I should say the sport "had been" dominated. The rivalry between Nadal, Federer, and Djokovic, three athletes similar in talent but wildly different in style and temperament, had been an unavoidable centerpoint of tennis conversation. Who would end up with the most grans slam championships, which of the three was the greatest of all time, when would a new generation assert itself? Contenders would occasionally surface to nab an individual Grand Slam title—Murray, Cilic, Thiem, Wawrinka. Then Roger or Joker or Rafa would return to form and reassert control.

The quarter-finals of this year's French Open will be the first in twenty years not to include at least one of the Big Three. For most of those years, Rafa Nadal not only appeared in the quarters, but won the tournament.  

This year Rafa bowed out in straight sets in the first round to Sasha Zverev. That would have been a shocking result a few years ago, but no surprise this year, considering the injuries Nadal has sustained recently. It was more of a shock when Djokovic withdrew from the tournament a few days later with a torn medial meniscus in his right knee.

The remaining field is uniformly top-notch. Medyedev has been ranked number one and holds several grand slam titles, while Zverev has been hovering on the brink of a breakthrough for years. The Scandinavians Rune and Ruud put on a good show, and two young upstarts, the Italian Sinner (upon Djokovic's exit now ranked number 1) and the Spaniard Alcaraz, have both exhibited tremendous resilience and shot-making élan.

It's likely that Djokovic will be back later this year, but Federer is fully retired and Nadal probably ought to throw in the towel soon. We're now at a position of looking back at the two decades of the Big Three with a degree a nostalgia as an unparalleled Golden Age of stellar tennis, as we launch tiresome arguments about which of the three was the greatest and whether the new generation will ever be able to measure up. 

Tennis is about beautiful shot-making, and also about grit and personality. There have always been "bad boys" and machine-like perfectionists, hot heads and cool operators. For myself, I was a fan of neither MacEnroe nor Bjorg, preferring Edberg or Agassis, though my old tennis buddy Steve Herrig would be shocked to hear me say so. I don't care much for Tsitsipas--maybe it's the hair--and Zverev always seems to have a petulant scowl on his face. Djokovic is disliked by many. Sinner hits remarkable shots without indulging in the histrionic ape-like shouts that have become so popular. I also find Medyedev's droll and quirky personality appealing. 

But we all have our favorites, I guess.    

Gardening Day

We've been puttering off and on outside for a month, at least, but there comes a day when things really kick into gear. (Now there's an inappropriate metaphor!)

Any bona fine gardener who happens upon this blog will discern almost immediately that I'm not much of a gardener. But I would hope to make it clear that I have a profound affection for plants. And also for history. Call it "local history." The wild ginger, spotted trout lily, columbine, and wild geranium predate our arrival in this landscape thirty-five years ago. It's nice to see them return, sometimes year after year, at other times intermittently.

But I have an even greater affection for the plants we've been discovering, enjoying, and moving from place to place, year after year, as the light changes and other plants die off.

Most of the color we enjoy comes to us courtesy of various nurseries and the farmers market on the west side of downtown Minneapolis. Last weekend it was a madhouse. We drove by but didn't stop. Today there was almost no one there, neither vendors nor shoppers (see photo above).We picked up some herbs and some impatiens.

The real fun started later, when I discovered a three-foot  pagoda dogwood nestled within the lower branches of our spruce tree out front.  I dug it up moved it to a barren spot next to the yew hedge.

After a trip to Bachmans, Hilary planted some simple yellow marigolds in the back garden, along with some Victoria blue salvia, while I prepared the tomato beds alongside the driveway.

I was just digging up some mint that had wandered in when I saw my neighbor Sarah coming down the street.

"Hey Sarah," I shouted. "I've got something for you." I put some of the mint in a container. "Take a whiff," I said, handing her a leaf. (Then it occurred to me that phrase probably went out a style when I was in high school. More likely it was never in style.)

She had a few stalks of rhubarb in her hand.

"Lee and Joe make a great rhubarb margarita," she said. "I'm going to give this to my mother so she can make me a great dessert!"

"I bet Lee and Joe would like some of this mint for mojitos," I said. And I bedded some more in another plastic container and went down the street to give it to them. 

I wandered into the back yard, presuming they'd be out in their rhubarb patch. No one in sight. But I was struck by their white wooden tool shed, crooked door open to a shady interior. It wouldn't have been out of place in a painting by Pissarro.

The "garden" here alongside our garage is especially redolent of history. There are a few remnant raspberry bushes that were bearing fruit until recently. Another volunteer pagoda dogwood is doing fairly well nearby, and also a hydrangea that I moved from the back garden last year. Stalks of Solomon's seal are sprouting here and there—I don't know where they came from. And I also see a baby ash tree that I'll cut down when I get around to it.

Once I'd removed the mint I dumped a fifty-pound bag of compost onto the strip of exposed soil and worked it in with a shovel. It was ready for Hilary's newly purchased tomato plants anytime.

 I don't need to tell you about the little snips I took at the top of yew hedge, which is now filled with new growth, bright green. I felt a little like one of those short, balding, mustachioed men you see in England at Stourhead or Blenheim Palace, pruning away at a hedge paper-thin but thirty feet high—but not much.

Stepping around the garage to the back yard, I see a veritable field of Virginia waterleaf. It's widely considered to be a weed, but right now the airy blue-white blossoms looks nice. The plants aren't encroaching on anything important, and the bees seem to like it.

But I've failed, in this brief narrative, to touch on the most important elements of the day: the individual plants, and the harmonious way they naturally arrange themselves. I can spend a lot of time gazing at a clump of leaves, admiring its shape, its beauty, its history, its life and presence. This is Sartre's nausea, but in reverse: elation. Even the glare of the afternoon sun across the pathetic lawn, parts of which I've recently reseeded, highlights individual blades, all of which are shades of rich gorgeous green.

Hilary is meanwhile planting herbs or annuals, or up on a ladder cleaning out the gutters. We roam the yard, reconnecting from time to time, mutually lost in a heavenly spring day with plenty of things to do, but it no particular time or order.     

A Historic Evening with Norton

For many years our habit has been to take Norton out for dinner in the spring as a way of saying thanks for the opportunity of working so often and so closely with him on his books during the previous year. Some years we splurge—for example, Cafe Ena, Kâluna, Martina—in other years we take a shot at a wild and "fun" place such as the Beer Cave in Hopkins or the food truck outside Utipils brewery on Bassett Creek near Norton's house.

This year we settled on Maison Margaux in the warehouse district. Why? Because Norton wanted to go there. Why? Because a mutual friend's son works there, and besides, Norton's uncle used to own the place, back when it was better known as Ribneck Furs. He hadn't been inside since he was a kid.

Hilary and I also had good reason to enjoy the choice. We're Francophiles, of a sort. One of Hilary's ancestors was an early immigrant to Quebec, and we've spent at least four months over the decades touring the French provinces, though not recently, and Maison Marguax has established itself as a place to eat good old-fashioned provincial French cooking.

A glance at the menu confirms that it's true. Hilary and I ate aligot at a country inn in the Aubrac, a seldom visited region of south-central France. It consists of a gooey mass of mashed potatoes and gruyere cheese. I never thought I'd see that item on a menu here in the States.

I was more interested in the salade nicoise, which can be assembled in several ways. Most appealing of all, to my mind, was the cassoulet, a traditional dish of southwest France consisting of white beans, duck, sausage, herbs, and other unidentifiable elements. The residents of Carcassonne and Castelnaudary have had a centuries-old dispute as to where the dish originated and what the ingredients ought to be. Ford Madox Ford dilates at length on the issue in his book-length essay, Provence. Hil and I went to Castelnaudary years ago just to see how they made it.

One thing I can say about cassoulet is that it's always heavy, and oily, and tasty, and it gives you a stomach ache. I couldn't resist.

Norton went for the bouillabaisse, and Hilary ordered the cauliflower soufflé and the onion soup. I nursed a cocktail that seemed to be a combination of absinthe and grapefruit juice. It was good, but the cassoulet really called out for a robust red wine. I asked our personable waiter, Patrick, during one of his passes by our table, "I don't suppose you've got a rock-bottom glass of Chateaunuef du Pape on the wine list?" I was joking, and he knew it. He smiled and shook his head. "No. But I do have a cabernet franc that might be just the ticket."

As you may know, cabernet franc is most often a blending grape, dry and tending toward simplicity and harshness, but it turned out to be just the thing to cut through and complement the thick, oily, stew. Plouzeau Chinon.

It was a fine year at Nodin Press, with several stunning poetry collections and a top-flight memoir, but we didn't talk much about that. More  about a few upcoming projects, and how the tomato plants were coming along. 

It was a fabulous spring evening, there were lots of people out on the street and sitting on the terrace alongside the building. Big blue sky, and the passing years count for less than the passing minutes. 

   

What We Can Learn from Kant's Mistakes

Immanuel Kant was born on Earth Day, April 22, three-hundred years ago. The son of a saddle-maker, he eventually became one of Europe's most famous philosophers. A year-long string of conferences and celebrations have been scheduled in Germany to commemorate the event.
In the United States, not so much.

The director of the Einstein forum in Potsdam, German, Susan Neiman, recently wrote a piece for the New York Times about the abiding importance of Kant's thought. It carries the title "Why the World Still Needs Immanuel Kant."  Neiman is the author of a recent book called What We Can Learn from the Germans, so she ought to know what she's talking about.  But I could find very little in the article to convince me that Kant's ideas are worth examining in any great detail.

Her comments can be stated without much fuss: Kant "proved" that freedom, justice, and the world beyond our senses exist.  (Was there ever any doubt?)

"Kant [she writes] was driven by a question that still plagues us: Are ideas like freedom and justice utopian daydreams, or are they more substantial? Their reality can’t be proven like that of material objects, for those ideas make entirely different claims on us — and some people are completely impervious to their claims. Could philosophy show that acting morally, if not particularly common, is at least possible?"

A passage like this strikes me as borderline nonsense. Children begin to develop a notion of freedom the first time they're sent to their room for some foul deed, and they find that they've lost some of that freedom. The concept of justice follows soon after, as they begin to brood over the fact that their big sister "started it all" yet suffered no consequences. Acts of freedom and conscience are a commonplace in the lives of most adults.

In the eighteenth century the concepts of fellow-feeling and the "moral sense" developed in England, France, and elsewhere. Kant, to his discredit, rejected those concepts. He argued that a truly moral act could never be a pleasant one. If you helped an elderly man across the street and felt good about it, shame on you! In Kant's worldview, goodness was basically a synonym for duty. But who is to determine where our duty lies? And how can this devotion to duty be squared with the idea of personal freedom? And where does the genuinely moral element come in?  

But Kant is mostly known these days for his analyses of how the mind works.  Here, too, confusion reigns. Yet we can learn something from Kant's missteps. For example, the distinction he makes between analytic and synthetic judgments is worth looking into. In the former judgment, the predicate is contained in the subject. In the later, the predicate adds something to the subject. The distinction here is sound, but the words Kant uses to describe it are not. An analytic judgment isn't really a judgment at all, but simply an analysis. When we analyze something, we take it apart, separating and identifying its constituent parts. When we judge something, we assert that the thing, considered as a whole, has some sort of value.

Philosophers tend to love analysis yet are wary of judgment. Why? Because judgment is always personal. There is no way to "prove" that the Mona Lisa is beautiful (I don't care for it much myself) or that the Russian Revolution was a good thing. But the notion that 2 + 2 = 4 follows  of necessity once we've agreed to work in the decimal system of numbering. It's already part of the scheme. It's an "analytic judgment." However, it's equally "true" that 2 + 2 + 11 ... if you happen to be calculating in base three.

Kant went on the posit two realms of judgment, one of them "prior to" experience, the other following upon experience. He was eager to locate a domain of truths that weren't merely reiterations of  the presuppositions involved, but had transcended, somehow, the rough and tumble of experience. He referred to such truths as acts of a priori synthetic judgments, and many Kant enthusiasts today consider this transcendental realm as Kant's great gifr to the world.  

I find it amusing that neither of the examples of such thought given in the Encyclopedia Brittanica actually possess the required attributes of the form:

Synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject—i.e., synthetic—and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience—i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition “Some bodies are heavy” is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition “All husbands are male” is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband.

Some bodies are heavy? Well, a body would typically be described as something that has weight, so the remark is analytic. It doesn't meet the requirements.

All husbands are male? Here in the 21st century, we all know this to be factually untrue.

Kant himself considered mathematical processes as "synthetic," Heaven knows why.

 

The most glaring errors to be found in Kant's work are those that pertain to the differences between the world in which we live and our impressions of that world. It almost goes without saying that such impressions are always incomplete, provisional, and tinged with error. Kant make a great fuss about this fact, however, even going so far as to suggest that many elements of our experience derive not from the world we inhabit but from the architecture and tools supplied by our own brains.

The French intellectual and novelist Madame de Staël,  author of the first popular analysis of German culture to reach a wider Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, wrote:

The leading imperative forms of our understanding are space and time. Kant demonstrated that everything we per­ceive is subject to these two forms. He concludes that they are in ourselves and not in external objects, and that in this sense it is our understanding that imposes laws upon external nature rather than receiving them from it.

From this and other silly notions arose the idea that we can never actually form clear and adequate impressions of the things around us. The only things we can know "for sure" are the impressions themselves, locked within our heads. Kant referred to these impressions as "phenomena," and in the course of time a field of study has developed—phenomenology—devoted to exploring the ins and outs of these purely mental bits of data.

The entire field is illusionary.

Just a few years ago, MIT published a monograph titled Phenomenology in which we:

Sometimes there can be mere appearance; it looks like the turtle is dead but it turns out it was just playing dead ... But we are able to have mere appearance because experience is fundamen­tally reliable; we know the turtle is in fact alive, because we now see it swimming away, or we pick up what we think is a turtle only to discover the lifeless solidity of rock... Phenomenology does not study mere appearance; it studies the true appearance of things.

The author somehow fails to notice that "true" appearance differs here from "mere" appearance by further investigation, not of a phenomenological event inside our head, but of a real event out in a pond. We improve our understanding of the world by going out into it. 

The kernel of Kant's thought that needs to be explored and developed is the judgment, through which we assert the goodness, truth, or beauty of a thing. Or more strictly, of an event.

Value is of the essence of reality. We can defend our values, perhaps eloquently, but we can't "prove" them, because they apply to aspects of the world we share with others, rather than closed systems of our own devising. And others may react to the same things differently.

Kant describes his mission, near the start of his Critique of Pure Reason, as one of distinguishing a "pure" from an "empirical" cognition.  Underlying such an impulse is the desire for some sort of depth and transcendence, and these are things we can all aspire to. But such enlightenment cannot be gained through the pursuit of logical purity. Rather, the quest leads us through the muck of experience, guided by our conscience, taste, fellow feeling, curiosity, and judgment.

One of Kant's admirers wrote recently in the Times Literary Supplement that "it's easy to find Kant mystifying or off-putting unless you have the time, patience and sympathy to discover and properly reflect on his remarkably original work."

I have the time, patience, sympathy. I have reflected for years, on and off. Nothing good has come of it. I'm going birding.