Critique of Criminal Reason by Michael Gregorio
St. MartinŐs 2006 395 pp.
Copyright Š Steven E. Alford
In 1804, Napoleon
was threatening the citizens of Prussia with his violently megalomaniacal
vision. In February of that year,
Magistrate Hanno Stiffeniis was summoned from his
east Prussian village of Lotingen to Knigsberg to investigate a series of grisly murders
plaguing the quiet town.
Unbeknownst to him, the man summoning him was the most famous man in Knigsberg, indeed, one of the most famous men in German
history, the philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Thus begins an
intriguing historical murder mystery that pits reason against passion,
scientific investigation against spiritual revelation, and the reader against
the mystery-spinning powers of the author, Michael Gregorio.
Stiffeniis,
a bourgeois family man whose confidence in his own powers outstrips his true
abilities, plays Watson to KantŐs Holmes.
Kant, world-famous since the 1780s for his publication of his three
magisterial Critiques—of Reason, Understanding, and Judgment—has
settled into what seems to be an obscure dotage, waited on by his servant and
widows around town. Still, he
remains revered, owing to Ňhis precise way of thinking, the regularity of his
habits, the stern morality of his temperament, the impeccable elegance of his
dress. Not a hair out of place,
not a word out of turn, not a spot on his reputation.Ó
Kant,
whose vast intellectual edifice would find itself
attacked by the tides of Romanticism, followed by the tsunami of Hegel, rooted
his thought in the Ňfundamental thesis that the moral nature of duty makes
human behavior subject to universal laws which are based on precepts of
Rationality. All action should
strive, he averted, towards a common Good which represents true Freedom.Ó ManŐs very being, Kant asserted, is
constituted by his rationality.
Stiffeniis himself brings Reason into the investigation of four unexplained and
seemingly unrelated deaths, striving to piece together connections between the
murders, despite a credulous populace and inept police work.
Knigsberg was populated by Pietists, who Ňbelieved
that eternal salvation could only be achieved by personally wrestling with the
Devil and his temptations,Ó leading some of the more imaginative citizens to
consider the Devil himself responsible for the murderous spree.
The
more sober inhabitants, their ears attuned to contemporary events, speculated
that Revolutionary sympathizers, hoping to hasten NapoleonŐs victory over King
Friedrich Wilhelm III, killed their opponents to further their own mad
political plans.
As
the bodies begin to pile up, we learn that Stiffeniis
was brought into the investigation by Kant owing to a remark he had made to the
great man on the occasion of their first and only other meeting, seven years
before:
ŇThere is one human
experience equal to the unbridled power of Nature É the most diabolical of them
all. Cold-blooded murder. Murder without a motive.Ó Could the killer be preying on
people for no reason at all?
If
so, not only is the solution to the crimes made more difficult, KantŐs thought
itself could be brought into question by Ňthe bent wood of the human soul.Ó Stiffeniis realizes, perhaps too late, that his
investigation means more to Kant that the solution to any crime; the question
of whodunit addresses the bedrock of KantŐs Enlightenment philosophical
assumptions.
Like another popular
intellectual murder mystery, The Name of
the Rose, much of the drama rests on a seemingly missing text that may or
may not be apocryphal. The
absolute gold standard of the philosophical murder mystery is Philip KerrŐs
fabulous A Philosophical Investigation.
While Gregorio is no Umberto Eco or Philip Kerr, he has a solid knowledge of
the period, enlivened by ongoing touches of gothic horror. KantŐs formidable and austere
philosophical system is treated throughout with a light touch. Readers who seek substance along with
thrills in their mystery reading will enjoy The
Critique of Criminal Reason.