Abstract
The main purpose of these introductory remarks is to give the reader a sense of Philip Rossi’s philosophical project and its importance (§§1-2). I will then advance an interpretation of what motivates Kant’s commitment to community (§3), and, on its basis, object to Rossi’s views on radical evil –a point which affects how one should conceive the moral vocation of humanity and the role that politics and religion play within it (§4). My reconstruction concludes with a sketch of how the five contributions to this Symposium fit together and deepen our understanding of Rossi’s overall project (§5).
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Notes
Rossi (2019). This book is part of the Elements series, which –in the words of the publisher’s website– aims at “combining the best features of books and journals” through “original, concise, authoritative, and peer-reviewed (…) research” by “leading scholars.”.
Citations to Kant will be from the Akademie Ausgabe by volume and page, except for the Critique of Pure Reason where citations will use the standard A/B edition pagination. English translations will be from the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, general editors Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge, 1992-).
In a footnote, Rossi names W. H. Walsh and J. Collins as representative figures, but one suspects the specter of P.F. Strawson is here to blame (ECH, p. 2 n.).
As is well known, Kantian antinomies posit side-by-side opposed, yet equally plausible arguments. This type of contradiction arises from reason’s lack of awareness of its own limits, yet it is a self-inflicted wound that works as an engine of philosophical progress. For, Kant tells us in Prolegomena, this type of impasse is a “remarkable phenomenon [which] works most strongly of all to awaken philosophy from its dogmatic slumber, and to prompt it toward the difficult business of the critique of reason itself” (4:338).
The extent of this justificatory debt of governments is a matter of dispute. For, Kant restricts political legitimacy to possible consent –not the kind of agreement (actual or tacit) we expect in contemporary liberal democracies. In What is Enlightenment, he makes the point this way: “what a people may never decide upon itself, a monarch may still less decide upon for a people” (8:399–40). But he is more explicit in Theory and Practice: “if a public law is so constituted that a whole people could not possibly give its consent to it […], it is unjust; but if it is only possible that a people could agree to it, it is a duty to consider the law just, even if the people is at present in such a situation or frame of mind that, if consulted about it, it would probably refuse its consent” (8:297). In any case, it is always the sovereign, not the people, who judges what counts as having met the standard of justification –a situation that casts a shadow of arbitrariness upon the role of popular “consent” in Kant’s conception of the “general will.” The finality of the sovereign’s judgment about what counts as a “legitimate” law, combined with his monopoly of coercive force, makes of Kant’s unconditional prohibition against revolution one of the most troubling aspects of his political philosophy.
For a more robust version of this argument, see my “Kant’s Religious Constructivism,” in The Critical Companion to Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Gordon Michalson (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2014, 193–213).
Rossi writes: “Put in traditional Christian vocabulary, the horizon regarding the way to ‘salvation’ is understood and imagined beyond exclusively individual terms. ‘Saving one’s soul’ requires a more encompassing social horizon in which each one’s salvation is implicated in the salvation of all; one is truly and freely saved if all are saved” (ECH, p. 46).
Pasternack makes a similar point. See Pasternack (2014). In the age of social media, we are no strangers to this problem.
See Locke (1975), Book IV, chap. 20, p.715.
Kant employs the same language in the first Critique to describe how transcendental illusions come about (see KrV A 294/B 351).
“Delusion” (Wahn) Kant tells us in Religion, “is the mistake of regarding the mere representation of a thing as equivalent to the thing itself.” When this mistake becomes habitual, it turns into “madness”: “Madness (Wahnsinn) too is so called because it is the habit of taking a mere representation (of the imagination) for the presence of the thing itself, and to value it as such” (6:168n.).
Kant uses this image to refer to “prejudices” in the Logic. It applies, however, to all forms of error.
See Scott-Kakures (2002).
In a passage Rossi often refers to, Susan Neiman puts it this way: “Of the many distinctions Kant took wisdom and sanity to depend on drawing, none was deeper than the difference between God and all the rest of us. Kant reminds us as often as possible of all that God can do and we cannot. Nobody in the history of philosophy was aware of the number of ways we can forget it … Kant’s relentless determination to trace the ways we forget our finitude was matched only by his awareness that such forgetting is natural.” See Neiman (2002).
The demands of morality cannot be rendered completely irrelevant, for they belong to our “personality,” the third of the human predispositions to the good (Anlage zum Guten) (6:27–8). Were we able to graft onto it all sorts of vices (as we can do with “animality” and “humanity”), moral regeneration would turn out to be impossible (6:46).
This is a problem Kant first articulated in the Concluding Remark of his 1791 essay, “On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy.” Religion extends that concern from a relatively local matter of sincerity in religious belief to a wholesale concern about the nature of human relations (including, of course, our own self-relation).
See Mill (1987).
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Muchnik, P. Healing the Wound: Rossi on Kantian Critique, Community, and the Remedies to the “Dear Self”. Philosophia 49, 1817–1835 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00357-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00357-z