Starry Heaven Phobia In Works Of Kurt Vonnegut And Martin Amis: A Kantian Perspective

The Enlightenment German philosopher Emanuel Kant proposed in his The Critique of Practical Reason that"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within."By this he meant that the starry heavens above reveals the infiniteness of the universe, making human beings realize how insignificant their own existence are, while the moral law within enables them to be aware of the dignity of humanity as intellectual and rational. However, because of the various disastrous consequences of modernity since the 20th century and earlier, the belief of the rationality of human nature began to be rejected, and the authority of reason since the Enlightenment has also been criticized. As a result, the Enlightenment doctrines of human dignity, progress, and morality, which rely on the supposition that men are born rational, were denied. Such rejection of traditional values and epistemology has had big impact on the human psyche, and the mood of loss, fear, and despair becomes a pervasive symptom. The term"starry heaven phobia"is therefore coined in this paper to describe such conditions in the postmodern context.This paper tries to examine works of Kurt Vonnegut and Martin Amis from a Kantian perspective, or from the perspective of Kant's moral philosophy. Vonnegut's two novels, Slaughterhouse-Five and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, as well as Amis'London Fields are analyzed in an effort to explore the presence and variations of the starry heaven phobia in postmodern literature. By approaching the underlying psychological and ontological crisis demonstrated in works of Vonnegut and Amis from an ethical perspective, this paper aims to find the fundamental cause of such crisis, and give a clear definition of the universal uneasiness found in postmodern literature from a philosophical perspective.