ethics vindicated kants transcendental legitimation of moral discourse nov 2006

Ethics Vindicated: Kant’s Transcendental Legitimation of Moral Discourse Ermanno Bencivenga OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Ethics Vindicated _ _ _ This page intentionally left blank Ethics Vindicated Kant’s Transcendental Legitimation of Moral Discourse Ermanno Bencivenga 1 2007 _ _ _ 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright # 2007 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bencivenga, Ermanno, 1950– Ethics vindicated : Kant’s transcendental legitimation of moral discourse / Ermanno Bencivenga. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-530735-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-19-530735-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804—Ethics. 2. Ethics, Modern—18th century. 3. Liberty—History—18th century. I. Title. B2799.E8B37 2006 170.92—dc22 2006040058 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper [T]he Critique of Pure Reason might well be the true apology for Leibniz, even against those of his disciples who heap praises upon him that do him no honor; as it may also be for sundry older philosophers, whom many an historian of philosophy—for all the praise he bestows on them—still has talking utter nonsense; whose intention he does not divine, in that he neglects the key to all accounts of what pure reason produces from mere concepts, the critique of reason itself (as the common source of all them), and in examining the words they spoke, cannot see w hat they had wanted to say. (TA336 VIII 250–51) _ _ _ This page intentionally left blank preface Decades ago, as a young man, I entered Kant’s conceptual territory. It was not easy, since there are no roads or pathways leading you there; you can only hope that somehow, magically, the duck will turn into a rabbit and everything will start looking different. I remember re- peating to myself, like a mantra, ‘‘This table is only a representation’’ and ‘‘This representation is of a table,’’ painfully trying to acquire a perspective from which both those statements would be true, and being frustrated when, as the perspective seemed to be at hand, any disturbing occurrence in the environment, however minimal, would immediately reconstitute, just because of its disturbing character, the point of view I was naturally familiar with. Nor were matters resolved when the Kantian point of view became itself more familiar, since at the end of the day I had to leave my transcendental ruminations and take care of ordinary objects and tasks in ordinary surroundings, in my ordinary empirical mode; thus my life became a perpetual shifting between incompatible views and, as strongly as I had come to believe that it was so much better that way, this belief did not make things any easier. Kant’s Copernican Revolution was my first report on what this life form is like—the revolutionary outlook and the constant oscillation between revolution and conformism. It could not be a report based on Kant only, of course: you do not face the most original, deep, and thorough mind of the Wes tern tradition alone, or you would be swallowed whole and then spat back as a pathetic clone of the great _ _ _ man, reduced to parroting his language without understanding any of it. You need formidable intellectual tools to resist Kant and struggle with him; so that earlier book needed a lot of logic and metaphys- ics and epistemology, of metamat hematics and set theory, of Plato and Aristotle and Descartes and Frege and Russell and Carnap—and Wittgenstein, naturally. Still, it was only a beginning; the real chal- lenge here is the ethics, because no word Kant ever wrote is irrel- evant to it, and because even the step from transcendental realism to transcendental idealism, epochal as it is, pales in comparison with the monstrous complications of thinking through freedom and responsi- bility, good and evil, respect and authority. This thinking through has required some twenty years: my dialogue on freedom and my article ‘‘The Metaphysical Structure of Kant’s Moral Philosophy,’’ which contained the essence of the story I wanted to tell, were both pub- lished in 1991, but then there would be passages in the corpus that would throw the project into disarray, and me into a condition of despair. Eventually, to make sense of them I had to address the very notion of making sense, and to bring out some of the most surpris- ing and exciting consequences of Kant’s revolution; but, again, that took time. And it took more and more tools: psychology and decision theory, history and politics, and more Plato and Aristotle as well as Bentham and Mill and Moore and Nietzsche and Rawls and Hei- degger and Arendt and Levinas and Sartre. And, foremost, Hegel, to develop a clear sense of how thing s could look instead: of how far they could go wrong. What I have come up with is a book of my maturity: a time of reflection and judgment, when one inevitably tries to appreciate the significance of one’s life—among other things: what it means to be human, to behave rational ly, to attempt to display goodness. Which brings me to the second point I want to make in this preface. Through most of my career, I have found myself writing two books at once, one in English and one in my native Italian; and it was intriguing to regularly find suggestive resonances between them, though their top- ics were often quite different. The present situation is a case in point, since at the time I was working on this book I was also writing in Italian about my conception and experience of America, and that amounted to a weighing and evaluating of a quarter century of con- fused and confusing occurrences, in both my own life and the life of this nation, and proved to be very much attuned to that other project of weighing and evaluating the towering figure of my in- tellectual life. viii preface In one sense the resonance is obvious, because in the Italian book I talk about the America I value and cherish as a Kantian idea of reason, one in which humans are autonomous originators of their own destinies, and responsible for them, as opposed to delegating such responsibility to tradition or family or society or whatever. In another, slightly less obvious, sense the resonance is, however, even more im- portant for me, since I have been arguing that the best representatives of the America I value and cherish are immigrants, people who have chosen this place, who have overcome a large part of their thrownness by taking their lives in their own hands, and of course America is a land of immigrants, and of course I am one of them. Ultimately, it is not essential that I was an immigrant here, because it is the very condition of being an immigrant that matters to me, in precisely the same way in which the Copernican revolution does: because an im- migrant is always a person of two worlds, who cannot sit comfortably in either, who develops a critical attitude on both of them because of how much she can see missing there that others, perfectly at home in it, are not in a position to see. Just as with Kant: ideas are unreal abstractions, and yet real objects, the only objects there are, are but appearances—there is no safe, reassuring place anywhere. I would not want to have it any other way; but, then, I must recognize that others will feel differently. Kant, and America, are not for everyone, wher- ever they might be born. This intricate nesting of personal and intellectual issues should make it clear, finally , that Kant, for me, is much more than a pro- fessional interest. He is, like any philosopher I ever cared about but more intensely than any other , a role model, a person of a kind I would like to be , an archetype of humanity. I have not met many of those. My wife and I spent a glorious afternoon with Konrad Lorenz, at his house in Altenberg; I have had a few times the privilege of ad- miring Noam Chomsky’s brilliance; I once had lunch, all too briefly, with Norman Brown (I kept telling him about contemporary Italian philosophy—what little there is of it—and he kept asking me ‘‘But what about the politics?’’). I have missed Marcuse and Sartre, and David Boh m. There isn’t much else out there, you know. So, would I have wanted to be a guest in Ko ¨ nigsberg once, maybe even be at dinner there? You bet: as everyone who is in this condition of awe, I feel very close to the object of my admiration; I feel (however delusively) as if I have a sense of the simplicity of his courage, the earnestness of his effort, the warmth of his humor, the supreme dig- nity of his conception of humans. So I would certainly have loved to _ _ _ preface ix [...]... Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant The following abbreviations are used for volumes of this edition and for individual works within some of those volumes: C: Correspondence J: Critique of the Power of Judgment LE: Lectures on Ethics LL: Lectures on Logic LM: Lectures on Metaphysics N: Notes and Fragments O: Opus Postumum P: Practical Philosophy G: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals PR: Critique of. .. outcome—this ‘‘antinomy of reason’’—is no reductio of TR, as has often been claimed, but rather an important articulation of TI.47 What it proves is that within TI the occurrence of knowledge necessarily depends on the act of choosing a context, and of holding on to it for as _ _ _ 18 ethics vindicated long as it is to be relevant48 (conservation is continuous creation); and this act of choice49 (of synthesis,... suggested above) is definition: how a concept is articulated in terms of other concepts, how an understanding of the former is provided in terms of (an understanding of) the latter So the logical space is like a dictionary, where the concept of an oak is defined in terms of that of a tree, and the concept of an acorn is defined in terms of those of an oak and a fruit.8 And the crucial demand to be put on this... individual work) and page number(s) of the translation and (when applicable) the volume and page number(s) of the Akademie edition Thus, a typical reference would be M548 VI 424, to be read: page 548 of the Cambridge translation of the Metaphysics of Morals, corresponding to page 424 of volume VI of the Akademie edition One reference includes only the volume and page number of the Akademie edition I have... _ _ _ 10 ethics vindicated possibility, period: what is more than an appearance of possibility), requires access to a real (singular) example of what we are talking about (to a corresponding intuition), and no such example is forthcoming within the transcendental (that is, conceptual) reflection where transcendental philosophy is developed.17 Talk of examples does; but this talk is incapable of establishing... Press, 1978 Strawson, P F The Bounds of Sense London: Methuen, 1966 Ethics Vindicated _ _ _ This page intentionally left blank C c one problems for ethics C c The alleged subject matter of ethics is human conduct Not human behavior; not everything humans do But, specifically, what they do of their own choice, because they want to do it; what they do freely And here ethics faces a first monumental problem:... thoughts—or concepts—are a kind of representations), we can still think of objects in the proper the framework 19 sense, objects that are what they are entirely of themselves, independently of any external contribution or choice51—unreal as these objects are bound to be, thinking of them here (we know) is not thinking of nothing—and we may even claim that such thinking (of objects of pure thought, noumena)... within the confines of such highly general statements as have most of a chance of remaining stable over time.24 And, insofar as the views he refers to are no longer current, he exposes himself to the risk of being ‘‘refuted’’ by later developments that have nothing specifically philosophical about them and are entirely irrelevant to whether his transcendental arguments for the possibility of the earlier... thoughts’’ or to be sharply critical of it, can certainly have nonphilosophical views many of his readers judge despicable, and can spend a large amount of his time and energy providing a justification for them—while still, perhaps, making philosophical moves that will benefit all future practitioners of philosophy In fact, I would add, the _ _ _ 12 ethics vindicated very conception of philosophy that creates... space of his time; he wanted to revolutionize it And such revolutions often have empirical consequences—which once again makes the neat separation between transcendental and ordinary concerns look too simple The first person who thought of equities as assets did not add a dime to anyone’s wealth; but eventually, because people thought of equities as assets, many of them had more money to spend Kant often . Ethics Vindicated: Kant’s Transcendental Legitimation of Moral Discourse Ermanno Bencivenga OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Ethics Vindicated _ _ _ This page intentionally left blank Ethics Vindicated Kant’s. permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bencivenga, Ermanno, 1950– Ethics vindicated : Kant’s transcendental legitimation of moral discourse /. Vindicated Kant’s Transcendental Legitimation of Moral Discourse Ermanno Bencivenga 1 2007 _ _ _ 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in