Kant: The Contest of Faculties

Kant, I. and H. S. Reiss (1991). Kant : political writings. Cambridge [England] ; New York, Cambridge University Press.

Kant begins by making a distinction between the higher faculties, i.e. Theology, Law and Medicine with the lower faculties, i.e. Philosophy.

He then goes on to make one of his most important interventions: bridging the rationalist and the empiricist divide that had haunted philosophical debates for years (think Hume/Descarte). He does this by asking if the human race is continually improving and beginning to think about where he should go about finding such information. He claims that it is not possible to have simple, a priori history, for that would require a profit (177)

Kant then goes on to posit that there are three possibilities for the development of society: that we are regressing, progressing or standing still. He concludes that we are not regressing, that we are not progressing, and that if we are standing still, it would be a farce.

He claims that the problem of progress can not be fully explained through experience, but that we do have to start from the empirical position. Kant begins to search for an event that would show the emancipation of the human, the individual. “We are here concerned only with the attitude of the onlookers as it reveals itself in public while the drama of great political changes is taking place: for they openly express universal yet disinterested sympathy for one set of protagonists against their adversaries, even at the risk that their partiality could be of great disadvantage to themselves. Their reactions (because of its universality) proves that mankind as a whole shares a certain character in common, and it also proves (because of its disinterestedness) that man has a moral character, or at least the makings of one” (182).

This morality is comprised of two distinct elements: the, “right of every people to give itself a civil constitution of the kind that it sees fit, without interference from other powers,” and, “once it is accepted that the only intrinsically rightful and morally good constitution which a people can have is by its very nature disposed to avoid wars of aggression…there is the aim, which is also a duty, of submitting to those conditio0ns by which war, the source of all evils and moral corruption, can be prevented” (182).

A legal framework that is derived from a constitution is what shall protect humans, and this will produce, “an increasing number of actions governed by duty” (187). How can this be achieved? By working from the top down: education is the key to making people more dutiful, and the authority of the state can provide this.