“Many things can be true and yet still harmful to man. Not all truth is useful.”–Immanuel Kant

“Some things that are true are not very useful”–Boyd K. Packer

I typed Boyd K. Packer’s (in)famous quip: “Some things that are true are not very useful” into Google–it brought up about 26,000 results, the vast majority of which ranged between well-thought-out critiques of this man of the Establishment and raging diatribes about Church efforts to silence its historians. The easy thing for us to do in response is to taxonomize it as one of many troubling realities about the Brethren, snarl a few remarks about Packer’s deeds, and then pray that our favorite apostle outlives the rest.

That Mormons have been a porous community from the beginning is beyond dispute; there are chinks in our cultural armor and always have been. That Packer had read Kant (and/or Benjamin Franklin, who probably borrowed his own aphorism from Kant) somewhere down the line is likely. But what does it mean for Mormonism and for our pursuit for truth?

The idea that truth could have harmful aspects had a long heritage in the Western world. Greek dramatist Menander quipped that “a lie is better than a hurtful truth.” Similarly, Greek philosopher Proclus observed that “good is better than truth.“ Nineteenth-century Bible commentator Adam Clarke juxtaposed such thought against Paul’s advice to “speak every man truth with his neighbor.”

The Enlightenment, for all its scientific advancements, also bequeathed us a spirit of judiciousness and selectivity in seeking out truth. As historian Gordon Wood demonstrates, as religious organizations of seventeenth century British America lost influence, people continued to look for explanations beyond the realm of the here-and-now (thus giving birth to a strengthened discourse on conspiracy theories and the like). Sir Francis Bacon urged students to focus on the study of this earth, this galaxy, as whatever stars lie beyond were “too remote from our sphere” and “afford us no light” (Letters Anglaises, xxiv). The linguist Samuel Johnson chastised the man who “employs himself upon remote and unnecessary subjects, and wastes his life upon questions which cannot be resolved, of which the solution would conduce very little to the advancement of happiness.”

But it is one thing to say that a piece of information is irrelevant; it is quite another to sweep a damaging fact under the rug. And herein is where we see the conversation between Packer and Kant come into stark relief. In his Lectures on Logic, Kant argues that a “wise teacher conceals much that he knows is beautiful, disclosing it when he knows that the minds of his listeners are so constituted that they want to become accustomed to speculations.” He urged the zealous truth-seekers to “leave aside much logical and aesthetic perfection without thereby harming man.” Packer cites the “responsible chemist” who would never “advise a beginning student to register for advanced chemistry without a knowledge of the fundamental principle of chemistry.” Indeed, “to let a student proceed without the knowledge of fundamentals would surely destroy his interest in, and his future with, the field of chemistry.” Packer’s fear, of course, was not that the truths would be too beautiful but that they would be too dangerous.

So if Kant and Packer sat down in a room, what would they say to each other? Kant insisted that “many things can be true and yet still harmful to man,” that “not all truth is useful.” But for Kant, harm came not from the information itself but from man’s inability to balance the drive for both logical exactness and aesthetics. Though there are “a great many useless prejudices,” it was neither “reasonable [n]or legitimate” to “generate, produce, maintain, and multiply” them when they happened to be “useful, beneficial, or just not harmful.” Both help and harm alike had to be discarded entirely. Getting at truth required the inquirer to “take it [the inquiry] completely alone separated from all foreign questions of use or harm,” particularly when the inquirer has “an interest in this use or harm,” for “otherwise partisanship at once states its judgment and deadens all cold reflections of the understanding” (of course, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt would throw a wet blanket on Kant’s hopes of divesting discourse from partisanship, but that’s another matter).

But for his hopes to understand the world independently of usefulness/harmfulness, Kant’s faith in people’s ability to understand the realityof things was limited. Sensory data proved a barrier rather than a facilitator. He maintained that the enterprise of contemporary Enlightenment scientists focused altogether too much on presuming to understand the absolute essence of the real world imperceptible by human senses, something Kant called the noumenon or “things-as-they-are” as opposed to the phenomenon, things as they are merely perceived to be (there is disagreement as to whether Kant meant the two terms to be loosely synonymous, but for the sake of this conversation, we will assume that they are, an assumption with sufficient evidence to make it worth our time). “Things that we intuit,” he concluded, “are not in themselves what we intuit them to be.” If there were things “abstracted from all this receptivity of our sensibility,” they are “entirely unknown to us.” Space, time, and the world we see, he argues, were not “things in themselves” but merely “appearances.” Did Kant see the relationship between appearances and “things in themselves” as a fundamental divide in quality or as a connective tissue that bound the perceived with the essential? Kant felt it necessary to dethrone the importance of empirical knowledge, if only to make room for faith as well. In Critique of Pure Reason, he acknowledges that he had “to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith“ [emphasis Kant’s]. Indeed, both Packer and Kant would have shared a skepticism of an excessive development of detached abstractions, especially at the expense of other pursuits. “Our theoretical capacities are in us much stronger than the practical ones,” Kant insisted. “We can improve the former more than the latter, and thus [arises] a disproportion, a monster in which the head is too large en regard to other parts of the body.” Indeed, the theoretical capacity was only useful because of the hope of a life-after-life: “if we did not have another life to expect, then learnedness would certainly be more harmful for us than useful.”

Both Packer and Kant feared the monster-head, but Packer considered the proper antidote to be the cultivation of spiritual confirmation of truths, faith that in fact is knowledge. Doctrine and Covenants 93:24 suggests that truth is “knowledge of things as they really are” and that such truth could be had by mortals. Packer warned his listeners that if they wrote Mormon history in a way that kept it “quite secular,” they would write it in a way in which “something is missing”–the essence of the thing, or in Packer’s mind, the spiritual truth of the Mormon message. One of the overarching themes of “The Mantle” is its focus, perhaps even obsession, with the prioritization of knowledge. For Packer, the higher truth and confirmation of Mormonism should come first and foremost, followed then and only then with the less flattering aspects of the fallen world in which Mormon history has developed. Those who reverse the process, placing the facts perceptible through ordinary thinking processes at the pinnacle of knowledge, become “destroyer[s] of faith,” one of the deadly sins in Packer’s schema.

Kant’s solution was to surrender our ability to ever acquire epistemological certainty of the noumenon. Packer’s? To celebrate it as the crown jewel in the pursuit of knowledge, worthy of our unyielding pursuit, worthy of the sacrifice of “harmful truths” that were irrelevant to absolute truth anyway. No, we cannot understand the noumenon with our natural senses, Packer would argue. When an attorney asked him to explain how he knew of God’s existence, Packer found himself to be “helpless to communicate” his knowledge. Certainly, he acknowledged, there is a certain ineffability to this knowledge–but it is accessible, regardless. “We cannot express spiritual knowledge in words alone,” he acknowledged. “We do not have the words (even the scriptures do not have words) which perfectly describe the Spirit.” As he told the lawyer, “I am no more able to convey to you in words how this knowledge has come than you are to tell me what salt tastes like.” Knowledge of the noumenon, Packer insisted, was in fact accessible–it just was not transferable. Kant would have found such optimism to be more than a little naive.

And on this point he would have parted ways with the Enlightenment-era philosopher. Kant probably would shake his head at Packer’s chutzpah. Setting aside knowledge for faith was one thing, but Packer’s belief that mankind could receive confirmation of transcendental truths flew in the face of Kant’s skepticism of man’s ability to understand anything at all. Whereas Kant saw an Enlightenment consensus on the verge of death (hence his desire to critique “pure reason”), Packer was seeing the dawn of the New Mormon History in which the old narratives he had cherished as a lad were being rent asunder before his very eyes.

So does this make Kant a kind of intellectual ancestor–or perhaps, more aptly, a kind of uncle–to the aging apostle? They both believed in the existence of “harmful truth” and in a kind of absolute essence. And both sought to place faith on a higher plane of understanding than what ordinary empirical knowledge could provide. But the similarities end there. For Packer, institution-building in defense of the noumenon–even at the cost of discarding “harmful” truth (provisional anyway)–was the solution to an epistemological world falling apart. Kant was more cynical, concluding that our inability to reach the noumenon prevented us from ever fully living a life of moral rightness. Our rationality is bounded, at best, so we can never know that our actions will in fact be right.

If there is an ancestral line connecting the Enlightenment philosopher and the Mormon apostle, it’s a twisted one imbued with a wide array of intellectual influences. Packer’s talk is of the sort that “we all know” what he was saying, trying (or by some people’s reckoning, conniving to do). But that’s ok. There perhaps is truth out there that isn’t useful to me. I’ve yet to find it.

Then again, maybe Kant is just as bad for Mormonism as he is for America.