Paid In

On the afternoon the marriage settlements are signed, in the first chapter of Henry James's The Golden Bowl (1904), Prince Amerigo walks through London thinking about what he has just become. He is, he decides, like "some old embossed coin, of a purity of gold no longer used," worth a great deal in "sovereigns and half-crowns" but never to be broken into them. "What would this mean but that, practically, he was never to be tried or tested? What would it mean but that, if they didn't 'change' him, they really wouldn't know, he wouldn't know himself, how many pounds, shillings and pence he had to give?" Garth Greenwell, in his Rebind commentary on The Golden Bowl, reads the passage aloud and names the subject of the book: "this question, how do you know the worth of someone, is central to the whole novel."

Paul Guyer, in his Rebind commentary on Immanuel Kant, has a plain example for the same question, drawn from the formula of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) that we must treat humanity, in Guyer's rendering, "always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means":

"When you hire someone, let's say, to paint your house, you're using that person as a means to some end of your own, namely having your house painted and looking nice. But if you're proceeding in a moral way, you're not treating that person merely as a means. You're offering him payment, you're entering into a contract such that he can freely just make painting your house his own end because he feels he's getting adequate compensation, it allows him to realize his ends, sending his children to college and so on and so forth, right? Each party to such a transaction is being treated as an end and not merely as a means."

Guyer never mentions Henry James, and Greenwell never says the word Kant; the pairing is mine. But put the painter beside the Prince and something is immediately wrong. Kant's test for using a person is a test about payment and consent, and Adam Verver, who has bought the Prince for his daughter on a scale nobody in the novel can state, passes it with room to spare. Greenwell's reading is what shows the test to be too weak, because it has no column for a man paid in full to do nothing. And the novel's second half supplies its own Kantian, who is not Adam but Maggie Verver.