Abstract
In response to the five essays commenting on The Ethical Commonwealth in History, I provide an exploration of three themes—the character of the highest good, the possibility of attainment of the highest good, and the agency for its attainment—as a basis for dealing with the concerns these essays raise about my interpretation of Kant’s critical project. On my interpretation, Kant’s project of “critique” is primarily an anthropological one, with its central focus on the moral vocation to which finite reason calls humanity as a species: To bring about a world of enduring peace as an essential element in the enactment of the highest good. These concerns bear upon: (1) my characterization of the social and religious dimensions both of the highest good and of the finite human reason for which it serves as the final end; (2) the historical dimensions that I claim for the community (“the ethical commonwealth”) that is the locus for the attainment of the highest good; and (3) the roles for human and for divine agency in such attainment.
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Notes
Muchnik (2021) also notes the consonance of Ertl’s discussion of Molinism with the interpretation of Kant that I have proposed.
Kant uses the expression the “dear self” in GMM 4: 407.
Taylor (2007 p. 171) describes a “social imaginary” as “the ways in which [people] imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” See also Chapter 4, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” 159-211.
Hobbes, of course, is neither the first nor the last influential thinker to characterize the human make-up and circumstances as irremediably conflictual. His readiness to characterize them in the blunt language of war, whose cessation can only come from the application of the coercive power of a “Leviathan” state presents a particularly apt contrast to the cosmopolitan hope that Kant envisions empowering human agents to freely engage one another in the task of establishing a public order for effecting world peace. Of relevance here also is Muchnik’s remark (2021) that The Ethical Commonwealth in History is “a sustained rejection of a fundamental premise in liberalism’s origin story, which is built upon the myth of an atomistic, self-sufficient individual.”
A difference that, following Susan Neiman (2002, “Divided Wisdom: Immanuel Kant” pp. 57-84), I take to be of fundamental importance to Kant.
At various times (Rossi, 2006, 2010, 2014a, b) I have attempted to probe the engagement of philosophy with theology (and vice versa) with an eye toward the location of such engagements in the conceptual and historical contexts that provide them with their concrete shape. The first two of these took inspiration from an insight I had, some years before writing either of them, that “Catholics read Kant differently from Protestants,” an insight that has subsequently been reinforced by readings in the work of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, such as James Collins (1967), Norbert Fischer (2005) Jacqueline Mariña (1997, 2001), Friedo Ricken (1992), and Aloysius Winter (2000). The third essay was written as an effort to discern reasons why what has come to be known as “analytic philosophy of religion” has been of relatively little interest to Catholic theologians. It proposed that one reason for this might be that a range of the issues of most concern to analytic philosophers of religion are peripheral for many Catholic theologians. Not surprisingly one issue of major interest to authors working from either theological context is “grace,” but, not surprisingly again, the aspect of grace of most interest often diverges along lines that follow the larger patterns of Catholic and Protestant theological differences.
For important discussions of both the historical and the systematic import of creation, explicated as creation ex nihilo, see David B. Burrell (1993) and Robert Sokolowski (1982). They each take “ex nihilo” to function as a key conceptual marker for the unique, radical distinction between God and creation, a distinction that Sokolowski terms “the Christian difference.”.
I have explored the role of a recognition of finitude in the shaping of Kant’s account of the relationship of the human to the divine in Rossi (2014b). One notable textual marker of the recognition of finitude and its significance for what I term Kant’s “apophaticism” is the well-known passage from the Critique of Practical Reason, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” (CPrR AA 5:161; Kant’s emphasis). Kant’s words here resonate with Grenberg’s remark above (2021, this issue) about the trajectory of the critical project telling a “story which answers the question of ‘What is the human being?’ in a way that insists upon but also simultaneously celebrates the centrality of finitude in human existence.”
For some previous efforts on my part to elucidate the dynamics of Kant’s understanding of autonomy within the context of the social character of finite human reason, see Rossi (1984a, b, 2001a, b). A later, more complete, and systematically ordered account can be found in Chapters 1-4 of The Social Authority of Reason: Kant’s Critique, Radical Evil, and the Destiny of Humankind (2005).
An observation by Jacqueline Mariña (2001, 181) is pertinent here: “For Kant the locus of self-transcendence is not speculative. It is grounded in the unconditioned demand that the moral law places on us. The nature of this unconditioned demand is that it immediately places the self in relation to other rational selves. This relation is, moreover, not one in which the other is valued in terms of the self’s pre-existing projects. Rather the other must be valued as an end in him or herself.”
One historically influential expression of this resistance was expressed (unsurprisingly) by Hobbes (2016, p.69) in his image of humanity’s “state of nature” as a “war…of every man against every man” [sic].
In the third part of his contribution to this symposium (2021), Muchnik provides a insightful account of the dynamics of the “dear self.”
Taylor (1989 pp. 159-176) takes Locke to be central in the articulation of this understanding of the self.
One long standing locus of such criticism with which I have long been familiar can be found in various forms of Roman Catholic neo-scholasticism and neo-Thomism that were articulated in the 19th and 20th centuries and saw Kant as a major “adversary.” It is not without some historical irony that resistance to such a thoroughly subjectivist reading of Kant’s account also developed from within neo-Thomism, a resistance articulated as “transcendental Thomism,” an approach that became and remains an important stream in contemporary Catholic theology and philosophy. For an account of its origin and significance, see Gerald A. McCool (1977, 1989). Germane to my claims here, both about the relationality that is fundamental to autonomy and about the roles of human and divine agency in the enactment of the highest good, is a remark of Karl Rahner (1966 p. 12), a Catholic theologian considered to be among the leading proponents of “transcendental Thomism: “For a really Christian doctrine of the relationship of the world to God, the autonomy of the creature does not grow in inverse but in direct proportion to the degree of the creature’s dependence on, and belonging to, God” (my emphasis). Note that a case could be made that the principle that Rahner enunciates here has some affinity to what Ertl calls “Molinism minimally defined.”
Framed as a piece of self-criticism, the question here might be put this way: Did Rossi provide any significant explicit discussion or examination of “history” as part of The Ethical Commonwealth in History? It is a question to which I would have to give “no” as the proper answer.
This could be construed as an extension of the crucial question Kant poses in the Preface to Religion “What is then the result of this right conduct of ours?” (Rel 6:5).
I.e., an account that, on Ertl’s reading, presents considerations that “license and demand the subscription to the postulates of pure practical reason [and] are clearly meant to salvage the quest for transcendent metaphysics.”
This reading of Kant as affirming a dynamism toward transcendence as part of the constitution of human subjectivity was a central element in the appropriation of Kant for both philosophical and theological purposes by the Catholic “transcendental Thomists” (see fn. 14). This is a reading that discerns an Augustinian trajectory within Kant’s account of the human, the trajectory of a finitude seeking completeness in transcendence—“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessions Bk 1)—but also a finitude with a “counter” capacity to turn inward upon itself—incurvatus in se, a phrase often attributed to Augustine—as it appropriates the dynamic of self-preference that Kant later will term “radical evil.”
And for transcendence that is personal; respect needs to be given to the fact the dictum quoted in the previous note is part of the extended prayer that gives Augustine’s Confessions its fundamental form.
All this underlies what turns out to be a quite robust account of the gratuity of “grace,” an account for which Mariña (1997, p. 400) makes a plausible case that Kant “strays far from the Reformation view that sought to comprehend justification in forensic terms. In his doctrine of grace he comes much closer to Rome.”
For a brief, pointed account the principle of sufficient reason as a demand of reason that we, human agents, bring to the world, see Neiman (2002) 320-328.
Onora O’Neill (1992, p. 308 n.17) observes “despite long traditions of reading Kant as presenting a ‘philosophy of the subject,’ his starting point is rather is that of plurality… Kant’s distinctiveness lies in the fact that his discursive grounding of reason presupposes plurality, and the possibility of community; it does not presuppose ‘atomistic subjects, actual communities or ideal communities’”
Also pertinent here is a point—to be discussed further in the next section—that Muchnik makes (2021) about an “alternative social imaginary” that human beings learn to develop under the “discipline of reason”: “No longer lonely meditators or egotistic actors, they come to conceive of themselves as primarily relational/communal creatures, subjects whose sense of self is embedded in bonds of mutual trust and recognition.”
Might appropriate Kantian terminology here be that of “(re)orientation”?
As stated in the Jaësche Logic, which elaborates them from the way they are posed in the Critique of Pure Reason (A805/B833), these questions are:
“The field of philosophy in this cosmopolitan sense can be brought down to the following questions:
1. What can I know?
2. What ought I to do?
3.What may I hope?
4.What is man?
Metaphysics answers the first question, morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth. Fundamentally, however, we could reckon all of this as anthropology, because the first three questions relate to the last one” (L 9:25).
For one important characterization of the “punctual self” see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 36: “Modern culture has developed conceptions of individualism which picture the human person as, at least potentially, finding his or her own bearings within, declaring independence from the web of interlocution which have originally formed him/her, or at least neutralizing them.”
Taylor’s description of a “social imaginary” has been noted above, footnote 3.
The identification of “the highest good”—simply and without qualification—with the achievement of a “cosmopolitan world order” of enduring peace is one that I believe I do not make, though I can understand why at least some of the claims I do make in The Ethical Commonwealth in History could be read as amounting to such an identification. What I do claim, instead, is that to the extent that an actual international human world order leaves open the prospect and the possibility of war, such possibility or prospect counts strongly against considering that order to be one that may legitimately claim to instance “the highest good.”
As well as in the final point of criticism he poses: “The civility, prosperity, and propriety the state brings about can disguise the menace posed by intelligent demons, but do not change who they are. This is the job Kant squarely falls unto religion. In spite of its valiant defense of community, ECH ultimately does not break loose from the secularizing tendencies that characterizes contemporary liberalism, replicating its inveterate misunderstanding of religion” (Muchnik, 2021).
Michael J. Sandel is among the many notable thinkers (including Michael Walzer, Jürgen Habermas, the sociologist José Casanova, and the theologian John Courtney Murray, SJ) whose work has articulated the scope and importance of “civil society.” Among Sandel’s more recent contributions to the discussion are: The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012); and Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
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With the exception of the Critique of Pure Reason references to Kant’s texts are given by indicating the volume and page number of the Akademie-Ausgabe (AA), i.e. Immanuel Kants gesammelte Schriften. Herausgegeben von der königlich preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften [und ihren Nachfolgern]. The pertinent volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press has been used for translations into English.Kant’s works have been abbreviated as follows: CPR A/B: Critique of Pure Reason 1st and 2nd edition resp., trans. Guyer/Wood, in Kant (1998); CPrR: Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Gregor, in Kant (1996a), 133-271; GMM: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Gregor, in Kant (1996a), 37-107; L: Jäsche Logic, in Lectures on Logic, trans. Michael J. Young, in Kant (1992), 521-638; PP: Toward Perpetual Peace, trans. Gregor, in Kant (1996a), 317-84; Rel: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. di Giovanni, in Kant (1996b), 39-215.
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Rossi, P.J. The Highest Good, The Social Character of Reason, and the Anthropological Enterprise of Kant’s “Critique”: A Response to the Symposium on The Ethical Commonwealth in History. Philosophia 49, 1917–1942 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00376-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00376-w