state university of new york press the social authority of reason kants critique radical evil and the destiny of humankind apr 2005

REASON REASON kant’s critique, radical evil, and the destiny of humankind the social authority of philip j. rossi, sj The Social Authority of Reason SUNY series in Philosophy George R. Lucas Jr., editor The Social Authority of Reason Kant’s Critique, Radical Evil, and the Destiny of Humankind Philip J. Rossi, SJ State University of New York Press Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2005 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rossi, Philip J. The social authority of reason : Kant’s critique, radical evil, and the destiny of humankind / Philip J. Rossi. p. cm. — (SUNY series in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-6429-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804—Ethics. 2. Social ethics. 3. Good and evil. I. Title. II. Series. B2799.E8R647 2005 170'.92—dc22 2004011172 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii List of Abbreviations and English Translations xi Chapter One: The Moral and Social Trajectories of Kant’s Critical Project 1 Chapter Two: The Human Place in the Cosmos I: Critique at the Juncture of Nature and Freedom 19 Chapter Three: The Human Place in the Cosmos II: Critique as the Social Self-Governance of Reason 41 Chapter Four: The Social Consequences of “Radical Evil” 67 Chapter Five: The Social Authority of Reason: The Ethical Commonwealth and the Project of Perpetual Peace 87 Chapter Six: The Social Authority of Reason and the Culture(s) of Post-modernity 113 Chapter Seven: The Unfinished Task of Critique: Social Respect and the Shaping of a Common World 139 Notes 173 Index 191 v This page intentionally left blank. vii Acknowledgments The first elements of the argument that this book frames on behalf of Kant’s understanding of the social authority of reason and its value for contemporary discussions in social philosophy emerged during my tenure as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in 1992. The first full draft of the manuscript was completed during a subsequent Visiting Research Fellowship in 1999. So my first and most extensive debt of gratitude is due to Dr. Peter Jones, then Director of the Insti- tute, and Mrs. Anthea Taylor, the Assistant to the Director, who both made the institute such a welcome place in which to pursue scholar- ship. I am also grateful to the many other fellows who worked at the institute each of those times; while only a few directly shared in my interest in Kant, conversation with all of them was always rich in substance and provided energy for returning to my own work with renewed interest and conviction. I hope that my mention of the names of just a few—Giancarlo Carabelli, Timothy Engström, Martin Fitzpatrick, Ferenc Hörcher, Andrés Lema-Hincapié, Iain McCalman, Robert Morrison, Andrei Pilgoun, Benjamin Vogel, Andrew Ward, Richard Yeo—will serve as a way to thank all. My thanks to those in Edinburgh would not be complete without a special word of gratitude to the members of the Jesuit community at Sacred Heart Parish for their hospitality during my two terms in residence, especially Fr. Damian Jackson SJ, Fr. Jack Mahoney SJ, and the late Fr. Charles Pridgeon SJ, who served as religious superiors of the community during those times. Fittingly enough, this acknowledgment has been drafted during a short stay in Edinburgh. In the interval between my two opportunities to work in Edinburgh, many other colleagues and their institutions in a variety of places— Chicago, Kaliningrad, Jakarta, Marburg, Manila, Memphis, Milwau- kee, Moscow, Seoul and South Bend—afforded me opportunities to test one or another fragment of this work in the form of a conference paper or lecture; there were also a number of patient editors who helped shepherd some of these fragments into print as journal articles or chapters in books. Thanks and acknowledgment are thus also due to the following: Dr. Sidney Axinn, Dr. Vladimir Bryushinkin, Fr. Luis David SJ, Dr. Rainer Ibana, Dr. Leonard Kalinnikov, Dr. Jane Kneller, Dr. V. Lektorski, Dr. G. Felicitas Munzel, Dr. Joseph Pickle, Dr. Hoke Robinson, Dr. Hans Schwartz, Dr. Galina Sorina, Fr. Christopher Spalatin SJ, Fr. Justin Sudarminto SJ, Dr. Burkhard Tuschling, and Dr. Robert Wood. Informal conversation with other colleagues provided much that has been useful in clarifying and correcting my thinking as this project moved ahead. Here, too, I mention just a few—Dr. Sharon Anderson-Gold, Dr. Gene Fendt, Dr. Chris Firestone, Dr. Pauline Kleingeld, the late Dr. Pierre Laberge, Dr. Curtis Peters, Dr. Ramon Reyes, Fr. Jack Treloar SJ, Dr. Howard Williams, Dr. Holly Wilson, and Dr. Allen Wood—to thank all. I owe special thanks to the students in the graduate class I taught in 1998 on Kant’s moral philosophy at the Ateneo de Manila, Philippines, since discussion in that course led to the idea I propose in Chapter Four that Kant considered war to be the social form of radical evil. I am also deeply in debt to colleagues in Russia—Dr. Leonard Kalinnikov and Dr. Vladimir Bryushinkin, President and Vice President, respectively of the Russian Kant Society, Dr. Boris Goubman, Dr. Irina Griftsova, and Dr. Galina Sorina—who provided warm hospitality and stimulating intellectual company during the meetings of the Russian Kant Society in Kaliningrad (Königsberg) in which I have been privileged to participate in 1993, 1995, and 1999. The home cities both of David Hume and Immanuel Kant thus have been important venues in the development of this work. My colleagues in the Department of Theology at Marquette Uni- versity have provided much intellectual encouragement to me during the long incubation period of this project and I am thankful for their support. The department, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School each provided some of the funding that made it possible for me to travel to conferences overseas to present portions of this work. My graduate assistants during these years—Dr. Mark viii Acknowledgments ix Ginter, Dr. John Meech, Mr. Aaron Smith, Dr. Wolfgang Vondey— performed a variety of tasks that helped in the research for this project and the preparation of the manuscript for publication. I am grateful to the editors and publishers who have given permis- sion to incorporate revised material that has appeared in the following previously published essays: “Autonomy: Towards the Social Self-Governance of Reason,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 75, 2001: 171–177. “War: The Social Form of Radical Evil,” Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, Band 4, ed. by Volker Gerhardt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, and Ralph Schumacher. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001: 248–256. (Russian translation of “The Social Au- thority of Reason: Critique, Radical Evil, and the Destiny of Human- kind”), Voprosi filosofii [Problems of Philosophy] 7 (Moscow), 2000: 43–52. “Kant’s Ethical Commonwealth: Moral Progress and the Human Role in History”: Part I: “The Ethical Commonwealth and the Human Place in the Cosmos”; Part II: “Kant’s ‘Cosmopolitan Perspective’: A View from the Sideline of History?” Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture 2/2 (Manila), 1998: 1–24. “Critical Persuasion: Argument and Coercion in Kant’s Account of Politics,” Recht, Staat und Völkerrecht bei Immanuel Kant, ed. Dieter Hüning and Burkhard Tuschling. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1998: 13–33. “Public Argument and Social Responsibility: The Moral Dimen- sions of Citizenship in Kant’s Ethical Commonwealth,” Autonomy and Community: Readings in Contemporary Kantian Social Philosophy, ed. Jane Kneller and Sidney Axinn. State University of New York Press, 1998: 63–85. (Russian translation of “A Commonwealth of Virtue: Guarantee of Perpetual Peace?”) Kantovskij Sbornik [Journal of the Russian Kant Society] 20 (Kaliningrad), 1997: 55–65. “The Social Authority of Reason: The ‘True Church’ as the Locus for Moral Progress,” Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress, II/2, ed. Hoke Robinson. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995: 679–685. Acknowledgments ix [...]... exercise the social authority of reason is noncoercively; 10 The Social Authority of Reason yet he left unfinished the task of concretely specifying the means of such noncoercive exercise of the social authority of reason Two centuries later, articulating the social authority of reason and establishing the proper manner of its exercise remains an urgent enterprise for us because the very possibility of reason. .. Enlightenment themes and theses.4 1 2 The Social Authority of Reason Not the least of these tensions can be found in the views that Kant expresses in the later stages of his career about the capacity that human beings have to wreak evil and about the extent to which and the manner in which that evil and its consequences might eventually be eradicated from the human condition For Kant, the evil of which... understanding of the scope of his critical project, albeit a development he leaves incomplete Radical evil plays a significant role in this development in that it lays bare the full social dimensions of the project of a critique of reason : Critique is the enterprise of completely socializing the exercise of human reason Although this social dimension of critique had been present from the very beginning of. .. gives of the nature 8 The Social Authority of Reason of humanity’s final destiny and of the prospects for humanity’s actually attaining it These consequences are far-reaching They bring Kant himself to see that, in order to deal with the consequences of radical evil, critique must be brought to bear upon the encompassing problem of the relationship between nature and freedom first and foremost in the arena... Only the exercise of a reason self-disciplined by critique will enable humanity to bring about those transformations of the social conditions of its existence that will most properly serve the attainment of human destiny The work of these two chapters will thus provide the context for then examining, in chapters 4 and 5, Kant’s introduction of the notion of radical evil and the impact it has upon the. .. to the establishment of an ethical commonwealth The Unfinished Tasks of Critique: Social Respect and the Social Authority of Reason Although the first part of my argument concludes that Kant is only partially successful in resolving the issues the introduction of the notion of radical evil raises, I do not take the points at which his account falters to be failures in principle As the second part of. .. account of what may appropriately be termed the social authority of reason —that is, an account of how the self-discipline of reason extends to its exercise within the dynamics of human social and civic interaction Critique: Self-Discipline for Social Transformation The first part of my argument will be developed in two stages The first stage situates Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6 The Social. .. ordered by and to the dynamics of marketplace choice also provides little space for the operation of the social authority of reason These dynamics do not seem to require that the authority of human reason be rooted in the social matrix of human existence; that is, that it be an authority that is both forged and ratified only in the self-discipline of an ever-widening circle of human dialogical and argumentative... successful to the extent that he recognizes—though sometimes only implicitly—that the extirpation of radical evil from the dynamics of human social interaction The Moral and Social Trajectories 9 must itself take a social form The social consequences of radical evil will not be eradicated as the result of a simple addition of the efforts of individual human moral agents to overcome radical evil as it... his account of radical evil has important consequences for the dynamics of human social interaction, he does not fully articulate the bearing of these consequences upon the forms of that interaction that he proposes as necessary for the complete concrete social embodiment of the self-discipline of reason and, thus, as morally necessary for the attainment of human destiny The first part of my argument . editor The Social Authority of Reason Kant’s Critique, Radical Evil, and the Destiny of Humankind Philip J. Rossi, SJ State University of New York Press Published by State University of New York Press, . REASON REASON kant’s critique, radical evil, and the destiny of humankind the social authority of philip j. rossi, sj The Social Authority of Reason SUNY series in Philosophy George. 67 Chapter Five: The Social Authority of Reason: The Ethical Commonwealth and the Project of Perpetual Peace 87 Chapter Six: The Social Authority of Reason and the Culture(s) of Post-modernity