Jacques
Maritain Center
1 A History of Modern Philosophy, London: Macmillan, 1924, Vol. 1, p. 264.
1 The Categorical Imperative, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948; London: Hutchinson, 1947. Cf. H. H. Schroeder, "Some Misinterpretations of the Kantian Ethics", The Philosophical Review , XLIX (1940), pp. 424-426.
2 It is enough to refer to what he wrote, in an unequivocal way, in the Critique of Practical Reason, Part One, Book I, chap. 3. Mr. Paton himself writes (op. cit., p. 56): "Pure practical reason does not demand that we should renounce all claims to happiness, but only that the moment the duty is in question we should not take it into account."
1 Cf. Paton, op. cit., p. 52. Good will is limitlessly good; but in us, finite beings, it is not sacred or all-perfect will as is that of God, because it is subject to the influences of the senses' passions and inclinations, and is good only in submitting itself to a law which constrains these inclinations of the senses and our empirical nature (the "corrupt nature" of Luther). Thus the moral law has for us, and can never lose, an essentially imperative and constraining character which it does not have in the noumenal world and in the infinite Being.
We were speaking (pp. 96-97) of the saintly and absolute value of good will as well as of moral obligation. This value is saintly, not because the good will of man is saintly, but because it must tend toward -- without ever being able to attain -- the state of saintly will, and because (once the ethical order has been completed by the postulate of the existence of God) it is fitting that our good will be conceived of as a reflection in us of the saintly will of the infinite Being, object of belief (with no proofs whatsoever) for the reason. -- Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, Part One, Book I, ch. 1, # 7, Remark on the Corollary.
For the same reasons (and without there being any question at all of the existence of God as first known by speculative reason) it was fitting, in Kant's view -- especially the Kant of the last years and the unfinished Notes (Opus posthumum) -- to regard the conscience laying down the law which emanated from Pure Reason as though it were transmitting to us a revelation of God. Cf. Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason, III, i, 4; IV, i and ii.
1 Cf. The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, Section I; Critique of Practical Reason, Part One, Book I, ch. 3.
2 See above, ch. III, pp. 31-32.
1 Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, Part One, Book II, ch. 2.
1 ". . . The will is nothing but practical reason." The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, trans. by Otto Manthey-Zom, New York: Appleton-Century, 1938, Section II, p. 29.
2 "Autonomy of the will is that property of the will by which it gives a law to itself (irrespective of any property of the object of volition). This then is the principle of autonomy: never to choose otherwise than so that the maxims of one's choice be also comprehended in the same volition as universal law." Ibid., Section II, p. 59. Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, Part One, Book I, ch. 1, 28, trans. by Lewis White Beck, New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956, p. 33.
Let us point out moreover these characteristic lines: "The dependence of a will not absolutely good on the principle of autonomy (the moral compulsion) is obligation. . . . The objective necessity of an action from obligation is called duty." The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, trans. by Otto Manthey-Zom, op. cit., Section II, p. 58.
Moral obligation in the practical order -- and, in the speculative order, the activity of the mind in knowledge -- were (though he promptly deformed them by an extremist conceptualization) the object of the two great philosophical intuitions which we believe must be considered as central to Kant. (That is why he considered moral obligation to be a "fact of pure reason"). What he authentically saw is that moral obligation, while being a constraint sui generis, does not violate the "autonomy" essential to the will, or, in other words, is connatural with the will (cf. our remarks on obligation, infra, ch. XIV, pp. 418-442). But his conceptualization radically warped this intuition, through two extremely serious errors: instead of regarding the "autonomy" essential to the will as the perfect spontaneity of a nature which dominates its own exercise, and, when necessitated to exert itself, is so necessitated by its own self, and not by its objects (cf. infra, ch. VIII, p. 167, note 1), Kant regarded it as a quasi-divine power of being to itself the law of its action; -- and at the same time he brought back into the very definition of moral obligation the fact of its imposing itself on a rebellious nature, as though the essence of moral obligation and of duty could not remain in a soul supposed free of all disordered inclinations (or indeed in a human soul effectively elevated to the peak of perfection, like that of Christ).
3 See above, ch. V, p. 91. -- Kant reduced every idea of founding moral law in God to this pure divine voluntarism (cf. The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics, trans. by Otto Manthey-Zom, op. cit., p. 62); this is one of the reasons why, like Hume, he wanted to cut ethics off completely from any divine foundation; the other reason was epistemological: the God of Kant is given us (as object of belief, not of knowledge) only by morality, and thus God could not found morality without involving a vicious circle.
1 Psalm 18, verse 10, in the Vulgate.
2 Kant calls it "the only fact of Pure Reason". Critique of Practical Reason, Part One, Book I, ch. 1, # 7, trans. by Lewis White Beck, op. cit., p. 31. (Cf. ibid., # 8.)
1 See the famous hymn to duty in the Critique of Practical Reason, Part One, Book I, ch. 3, trans. by Lewis White Beck, op. cit., p. 89: "Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuating but requirest submission and yet seekest not to move the will by threatening ought that would arouse natural aversion or terror, but only holdest forth a law which of itself finds entrance into the mind and yet gains reluctant reverence (though not always obedience) . . . what origin is there worthy of thee . . . ? It cannot be less than something which elevates man above himself as a part of the world of sense, something which connects him with an order of things which has under it the entire world of sense . . . . It is nothing else than personality, i.e. the freedom and independence from the mechanism of nature regarded as a capacity of a being which is subject to special laws (pure practical laws given by its own reason), so that the person as belonging to the world of sense is subject to his own personality so far as he belongs to the intelligible world."
A little before this Kant explains in all rationalistic candor that the Gospel commandment to love God above all else and to love one's neighbor as oneself means no more in reality than this duty to submit oneself to the authority of the moral law emanating from Reason, because on the one hand, since God is not an object of the senses, one could not love Him properly speaking, or experience passion for Him ("pathological" inclination in Kant's sense of the adjective); and because, on the other hand, this sort of inclination may well exist toward men, but could not be commanded.
2 There is much insistence to-day on the ethico-political works (brought together and translated into French by Piobetta -- Paris: Aubier, 1947 -- under the title: Kant: La philosophie de l'histoire) such as the Essay on the different races of men, the Idea of a universal history, etc., where many views relating to the intrinsic content of morality are put forth as a matter of course. But all this does not alter our analysis of the system in any way. One must say the same of certain works of the pre-critical period where Kant distinguishes between the logical opposition of simple contradiction (more wolfiano) and real opposition, and considers these two kinds of opposition as irreducible. Cf. Versuch den Begriff der negativen Grössen in der Weltweisheit einzuführen (1763), and Roger Kempf's introduction to his [109] French translation (Paris: Vrin, 1949). In Kant's ethical system the formal opposition by virtue of which it is impossible to will that the maxim of an act such as not to keep a trust or put to death an offender be erected into universal law without logical contradiction is itself a real opposition, preventing the will from erecting this maxim into a law of the conscience.
1 The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, trans. by Otto Manthey-Zorn, op. cit., Section II, p. 38.
The other formulae of the categorical imperative are:
So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle establishing universal law [or could consider itself as making and promulgating by its maxim of action a universal law] (Critique of Practical Reason, Part One, Book I, ch. 7, # 7, trans. by Lewis White Beck, op. cit., p. 30).
Act so that in your own person as well as in the person of every other you are treating mankind also as an end, never merely as a means. (The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, op. cit., p. 47.)
. . . Each rational being must act as though in his maxims he were at all times a legislating member in the universal realm of ends. (Ibid., p. 57.)
2 Concerning which Hegel was to observe: "If there were no more trusts at all, where would the contradiction be?" But the contradiction would be in the prescription which at the same time presupposes and destroys the existence of trusts.
1 On the bonum honestum, see above, ch. II, pp. 24-26; ch. III pp. 35-37; and below, ch. XIV, Section One, pp. 410-411; Section Two, pp. 432-433.
1 We noted above (ch. IV, pp. 67-68) that the expression "cosmic ethics" can designate a closed-cosmic ethics or an ethics without-the-beyond, like that of the Stoics and of the Epicureans. An authentic cosmic ethics -- of which we are thinking here -- is an open-cosmic or cosmic-trans-cosmic ethics, where man is considered in his relation to the world and to the transcendent principle of the world.