Tag: philosophy of history

Moral Action and Religious Ends in Kant

Aliosha Bielenberg1 Comment

In what sense are ends necessary for action, for Kant? This question might seem rather far from the problem of religion. Yet this is precisely how Kant presents his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in his preface to the first edition. On the one hand, as Kant showed in the Critique of Practical Reason, morality “is in need neither of the idea of another being above him in order that he recognize his duty, nor, that he observe it, of an incentive other than the law itself” (33; 6:3). Morality proceeds from rationality, not from divine authority. In this line of thought, we might draw a connection between Kant and, for instance, Nietzsche: good and bad are based not on divine legislation but ultimately on human beings. “Hence,” Kant continues, “on its own behalf morality in no way needs religion … but is rather self-sufficient by virtue of pure practical reason” (33; 6:3): moral laws bind “through the mere form of universal lawfulness,” not an end to which it is directed.

But “although on its own behalf morality does not need the representation of an end which would have to precede the determination of the will, it may well be that it has a necessary reference to such an end, not as the ground of its maxims but as a necessary consequence accepted in conformity to them” (34; 6:4). Although morality has “no need of an end for right conduct … an end proceeds from morality just the same; for it cannot possibly be a matter of indifference to reason how to answer the question, What is then the result of this right conduct of ours?” (34; 6:5). In a way, this argument parallels the place of God and Kant’s development of religious thought with respect to his critical thought: religion is in no way necessary for rational critique — in fact, the Critiques in some ways leave no place for God at all — but after all is said and done, after “clearing a ground completely overgrown” for metaphysics, Kant still find that he must turn to religion, at the end of his life. In this contemplation, Kant finds “the idea of a highest good in the world”: the summum bonum “for whose possibility we must assume a higher, moral, most holy, and omnipotent being who alone can unite the two elements of this good” (that is, happiness and duty).

So, this begins to answer our question. Do moral actions have an end? Not quite; pure practical reason suffices unto itself. God is not necessary as a legislator, yet God does have a place as the ultimate end of moral action. “What is most important here, however, is that this idea rises out of morality and is not its foundation; that it is an end which to make one’s own already presupposes ethical principles.” An end is not necessary for morality, but action and do come to the concept of an ultimate end of things. “Morality thus inevitably leads to religion” (35; 6:6). Moral actions are self-grounded, with no need for a separate further end. But the idea of God is an end to which we are inevitable led as human beings who honor the moral law, and allow themselves to think (35; 6:5).

Now, this insight is more useful than it might seem, especially when we come back to an essay like the “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim.” In a way, this essay distills some of the most knotty and debated elements of Kant’s thought: his changing thoughts on teleology, practical faith, divine providence, and how that whole complex of ideas relates to moral and political philosophy. This is because the essay is concerned in many ways with the same question that Kant addresses in the beginning of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: the relationship between free action and a final end. Kant says: “Whatever concept one may form of the freedom of the will with a metaphysical aim, its appearances, the human actions, are determined just as much as every other natural occurrence in accordance with universal laws of nature” (108; 8:17). It seems that Kant will then proceed to make an argument that an apparent end presents itself even in the “play of the freedom of the human will” such that “what meets the eye in individual subjects as confused and irregular yet in the whole species can be recognized as a steadily progressing though slow development of its original predispositions.” But Kant’s ultimate attitude towards this “idea of progress” is rather more complex and nuanced. For instance, Kant couches the adoption of this concept in starkly emotional, subjective language:

One cannot resist feeling a certain indignation when one sees their [human beings’ — as opposed to animals or aliens] doings and refrainings on the great stage of the world and finds that despite the wisdom appearing now and then in individual cases, everything in the large is woven together out of folly, childish vanity, often also out of childish malice and the rage to destruction; so that in the end one does not know what concept to make of our species, with its smug imaginings about its excellences. Here there is no other way out for the philosopher — who, regarding human beings and their play in the large, cannot at all presuppose any rational aim of theirs — than to try whether he can discover an aim of nature in this nonsensical course of things human; from which aim a history in accordance with a determinate plan of nature might nevertheless be possible even of creatures who do not behave in accordance with their own plan. (109; 8:18)

Kant from the beginning to the end of this essay recognizes that there is no progress, no real rational aim in the “nonsensical course of things human.” But that does not mean it is pointless to try and write a history in accordance with a plan — much like how it is not pointless to try and philosophize about God, even when one has fully laid out a system of morality in which God has no place.

Why? This is the subject of the ninth proposition of the “Idea” essay: “A philosophical attempt to work out universal world history according to a plan of nature that aims at the perfect civil union of the human species, must be regarded as possible and even as furthering this aim of nature” (118; 8:29). On the one hand, it is absurd to want to write a history of progress; “it appears that with such an aim only a novel could be brought about.” Yet “if, nevertheless, one may assume that nature does not proceed without a plan or final aim even in the play of human freedom, then this idea could become useful.” An idea that is useful? Yes, it seems like Kant’s ultimate justification for conceiving an idea of the end, here as in the Religion text, is that such an idea would be useful to progress in the present. The “guiding thread” of progress “can serve not merely for the explanation of such a confused play of things human, or for an art of political soothsaying about future changes in states”; rather, this idea of progress will open “a consoling prospect into the future (which without a plan of nature one cannot hope for with any ground).” This is the ultimate motivation for adopting an idea of progress: “such a justification of nature — or better, of providence — is no unimportant motive for choosing a particular viewpoint for considering the world” (119; 8:30). Although we could write history without progress, and we could develop morality without God, we have strong practical grounds for choosing viewpoints that contain precisely these ideas. To me, it is striking to find a sort of primacy of the practical at the heart of Kant’s philosophy. Kant is almost like a nihilist, who sees a world where, in fact, there is no God, no progress; yet he shies back from the abyss of meaninglessness, not through the construction of a new dogmatic metaphysics (Kant is too resolutely critical for that), but rather through the recognition that our representation of the past, like our prospects for the future, matter most of all for our actions in the present.

Notes on Stephen Best’s None Like Us

Aliosha BielenbergLeave a comment

I take the main thrust of Stephen Best’s None Like Us to be that the past cannot and should not in any straightforward be a source of “lessons” for the present. As Reinhart Koselleck put it in an essay he wrote in a Festschrift for Karl Löwith, today the old Ciceronian adage, historia magistra vitae, is dissolved “within the horizon of modern, dynamic history” (Sediments of Time, 264–65). Or as Löwith himself put it, “we find ourselves more or less at the end of the modern rope” (Meaning in History, 3) such that history cannot be a straightforward source of models for our political present (no more monumental history, to put it in Nietzche’s terms). For Löwith, Koselleck, and a whole host of other postwar German thinkers, it was the experience of the Third Reich that marked a “break in tradition” (Arendt) after which the idea of progress in history simply cannot be entertained any longer; for Best, that which “breaks the modern rope” is the transatlantic slave trade. But in both cases, the ways in which these historical events intertwine with the thinkability of history as a source for political action today is… complicated, to say the least.

Best critiques the idea that the past is ours to simply learn from, whether to redeem or to redress. He is particularly concerned with the relationship history has to politics of the present. As Best puts it:

The idea of continuity between the slave past and our present provides a framework for conceptions of black collectivity and community across time. This idea, a proxy for race, nests within it a significant thesis: the present most African Americans experience was forged at some historical nexus when slavery and race conjoined. … If we take slavery’s dispossessions to live on into the twenty-first century, divesting history of movement and change, then what form can effective political agency take? Why must our relation to the past be ethical in the first place — and is it possible to have a relation to the past that is not predicated on ethics? (64)

To rephrase: Best is concerned about the way in which a particular past, the “historical nexus when slavery and race conjoined,” becomes an ineluctable horizon for politics today. What Best wants to do is to clear a space for “effective political agency” that is not predicated on theses of continuity or organic ties to a collective past. To put it more simply: Best wants a kind of politics that deals with history outside the framework of “collective memory.” If we wanted to speak with Wittgenstein and Cavell (in a way that Best invites us to do elsewhere [None Like Us, 43]), we might talk about this as the task of knitting together a “thin net over the abyss,” those “very shaky foundations” upon which we feel “terrified that maybe language (and understanding, and knowledge) rests” (Claim of Reason, 178). Or, to put it in David Scott’s terms (another body of work that I read as foundational to None Like Us) Best is most basically concerned with “the conceptual problem of political presents and with how reconstructed pasts and anticipated futures are thought out in relation to them” (Conscripts of Modernity, 1).

So, what is Best’s distinctive proposal? His explicit aim is to “run against the grain of work advanced under the banners of ‘recovery’ and ‘melancholy'” by “specify[ing] some of the limits to these modes of critique and to propose other ways to think about loss” (65). I want to pick up one strand of this project, which I hope we can further unpack together: Best’s particular reading of Nietzsche’s “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” The passage Best focuses on goes as follows:

A historical phenomenon, known clearly and completely and resolved into a phenomenon of knowledge, is, for him who has perceived it, dead: for he has recognized in it the delusion, the injustice, the blind passion, and in general the whole earthly and darkening horizon of this phenomenon, and has thereby also understood its power in history. This power has now lost its hold over him insofar as he is a man of knowledge: but perhaps it has not done so insofar as he is a man involved in life. (Untimely Meditations, ed. Breazeale, 67)

Best’s summary of the “project” he finds in Nietzsche’s text is that he seeks to “unburden history writing of both presentism and teleology” (95). Trying to understand what it means to be “untimely” prompts Best to ask: “what specific orientation toward the past allows it to remain still alive to my critical senses? What orientation forestalls the moment in which a ‘historical phenomenon’ resolves into a ‘phenomenon of knowledge’?” (96)

Once again, to provide an answer Best turns to Stanley Cavell — this time his essay “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear.” Best writes:

There is non-appropriable or missed experience that will always evade our attempts to grasp it. … To try to articulate what I am thinking here, I find Stanley Cavell helpful. … When we insist that the past has to be made relevant to the present, or understand it as already so relevant, we fall into the typical error of parents and children — “taking difference from each other to threaten, or promise, severance from one another.” But we are severed. To confirm that is “neither a blessing nor a curse”; it is simply a fact. To deny that, however, is to give up not only knowledge of the position of others, but also “the means of locating one’s own.” Our charge in dealing with figures from the slave past, whatever our critical orientation, is to make their present theirs, and (if I might hijack Cavell’s language here) “it is only in this perception of them as separate from me that I make them present. That I make them other, and face them.” (98)

The “problem of other minds,” in the end, is just that: others are, irreducibly, there, and separate from me. To maintain this separateness forestalls the collapse of history into a “phenomenon of knowledge.” The challenge is to nonetheless maintain the power of the past insofar as “man is involved in life.”

At this point, I find myself agreeing with Best: “To be honest, I must admit to feeling a bit stuck” (100). If Best’s aim had been to “specify some of the limits to these modes of critique” in Black Studies, perhaps too we could say with Wittgenstein that “This running against the walls of our cage [of limits, of “the boundaries of language”] is perfectly, absolutely, hopeless. … But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” (Lecture on Ethics, 19) Perhaps it is best at this point, in closing, to once again quote Wittgenstein, who said: “The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.” (Philosophical Investigations, §133)