Fifteen Eighty Four

It is a commonplace too often taken for granted that the Enlightenment––in particular Kant’s grounding of morality in reason––was a failure. For some, the Enlightenment’s attempt to clear away all superstition left only an empty subjectivism and materialism culminating in atomistic nihilism. For others, the Enlightenment was just one more mask in the European will to power. Both views often shared a common root, namely skepticism and suspicion of reason.

            On the one hand, many on the left, driven by Nietzschean insights into the will to power, delivered forceful critiques of how institutional power structures, the generation of “knowledge,” and the creation of “truths” served those in power, as well as how moral claims could be instrumentalized in the service of ideology. This view was ultimately self-undermining, for their own claims could not be grounded on anything other than such a will to power. On the other hand, there were those offering a “faith” based solution to modern problems, recommending a return to traditional institutions grounded in Hegelian Sittlichkeit or Aristotelian natural law. Ideas of the freedom and autonomy of the individual were seen as dangers leading inevitably to a vapid, selfish, and atomized hyper-individualism threatening  human community and happiness. The solution was the elevation of the ethos of the existing groups–the church, the nation, and the family–each symbolizing rigid hierarchies prescribing fixed roles, social norms, and belief systems geared to preserving the cohesiveness of the group and thereby the “community” essential to human flourishing. Such views have been defended by figures such as Alasdair McIntyre, Patrick Deenan, and most recently, Adrien Vermeule, whose “common good constitutionalism” explicitly builds on this vision. Here the idea of the “common good,” serves as the telos in accord with which moral, legal and political principles are to be developed.

            Underlying both tendencies is a skepticism towards the capacity of reason to determine what is morally right. Once this skepticism was assumed, a false dichotomy ensued:  either the chaos of a licentious will to power and an atomistic individualism, or an imposed order of a “common good” rooted in “natural law,” tradition, and faith. Here reason–if allowed to be operative at all–merely serves ends independent of reason’s own practical demands.

            Taking for granted such skepticism all but guaranteed the overlooking of a third alternative: that reason could be the basis of both respect for individual autonomy and ground  the community of rational beings. This is Kant’s alternative. It shows that we do not have to choose between an “autonomy” synonymous with nihilism and a communitarianism founded on authoritarianism. Rather, through the use of their reason each individual is capable of insight into what reason demands. Since the demands of reason are valid for all rational beings and can be agreed upon by them, it is also the basis for true community. Kant called for a return to the “proper self:” the self that could think for itself and respect the demands of practical reason.

Even sympathetic reconstructive readings of Kant–such as Christine Korsgaard’s constructivism–assume that Kant’s original arguments need revision. Other prominent commentators such as Allison and Ameriks have argued that Kant’s argument in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals was so poor that he himself gave up on it, leading to a “great reversal” in the second Critique, where Kant settled on a “moral mysticism” lacking rational justification. Such was his “fact of reason,” which was taken to be a kind of Delphic oracle in human consciousness through which the moral law declared itself. Yet others such as Owen Ware have argued that Kant never provided a deduction for the moral law in the Groundwork, and that Kant did not reverse course in the second Critique. Many commentators take Kant to be providing a kind of phenomenology of common human reason. That we can find a valid rational argument grounding the moral law in a way that can withstand skeptical challenges in Kant’s two seminal works is not a position widely argued for.

            My book Kant’s Metaphysics of the Will is intended to show that––when properly understood––Kant’s arguments in the Groundwork are much more successful than his critics allow and withstand skeptical challenges to the deliverances of pure practical reason. Furthermore, I show that Kant never repudiated his arguments in Groundwork in the second Critique. I argue that the Groundwork provides an account of the conditions of the possibility of willing: any act of willing presupposes the use of practical reason, even when the end to which willing is directed is extra-moral. This means, however, that any time an individual takes themselves as acting, and as therefore having a will, they must take themselves as intelligences whose judgments are not determined through efficient causes. As such, they must take themselves as bound by the laws governing intelligences, and hence, as bound by universal law. Importantly, any time a skeptical claim is made, that individual acts, and so takes themselves as an intelligence, undermining the very skepticism they put forward. Skepticism about moral knowledge undermines itself: to doubt reason is already to act as a rational agent.

While the book provides a careful analysis of Kant’s arguments for the foundations of morality and an in-depth engagement with secondary literature, I have written it in such a way that many of the chapters should be accessible to a wider audience, demonstrating Kant’s relevance for today. The book reveals Kant’s work as a powerful antidote to popular skepticism towards practical reason, one capable of grounding robust social, political, and legal thought. In a cultural landscape polarized between Nietzschean relativism and authoritarian traditionalism, Kant’s moral philosophy remains the most powerful yet neglected alternative. My book argues that Kant’s account of self-legislation and moral insight, far from collapsing at the points critics have long declared failures, in fact provides the only coherent response to this false choice.

Kant’s Metaphysics of the Will by Jaqueline Mariña