Genesis of Moral Freedom in Kant

In Kant’s writings, we can discover four key moments in the realization of moral freedom: i) The original possibility of being free, ii) The act described by Kant as radical evil, iii) The opposite act, that is, an inner conversion to good, and, finally, iv) The long process of the self-development of virtue extending to immortality. There are further issues such as the double concept of moral evil, and practical temporality. Moral freedom is originally located (and presupposed in Kant’s transcendental deduction) in the individual, her decisions, and the maxims or principles that guide her actions, even though a community (as both a „kingdom of ends” and social reality) provides the scope wherein all this takes place and its socially and historically-situated shapes. This paper tries to systematize these crucial stages of Kant’s moral philosophy with the focus on the concept of virtue.

“Metaphysics about Metaphysics.” Kant on Theoretical, Practical and Practico-Theoretical Metaphysics

The essay investigates the relation between metaphysics and practical philosophy in Kant by reconstructing Kant‘s systematic typology of metaphysics as developed in his critical writings. Section 1 deals with Kant’s rigorous reduction of philosophy to metaphysics. The focus here is on the epistemological turn effectuated by Kant with regard to metaphysics (theoretical metaphysics). Section 2 is concerned with Kant’s reconceptualization of (pure) practical philosophy as a metaphysics sui generis. At the center stands here Kant’s supplementation of the metaphysics of nature through a metaphysics of morals based on moral freedom (practical metaphysics). Section 3 addresses the merging of theoretical and practical metaphysics in Kant. The focus here lies on Kant’s introduction of a novel, practically validated form of (quasi-)theoretical metaphysics (practico-theoretical metaphysics). Throughout the essay combines an analytic interest in the forms and functions of metaphysics in Kant with a systematic interest in the practical and practico-theoretical transformation of previously theoretical metaphysics in Kant, which morphs from a doctrine of the objects of nature through a doctrine of the laws of freedom to a doctrine of wisdom regarding the supersensible.

Practical Necessity and History I

Rousseau’s idea of ‘moral’ freedom is shown to imply an element of contingency in history. Rousseau can be seen to identify three historical models, the first of which entails the possibility of stasis, whereas the other two presuppose and incorporate the idea of a subjection to practical necessity which explains the development of the capacity for moral freedom. Once this capacity has been sufficiently developed, history may result in significantly different, equally possible, outcomes depending on whether or not this capacity is exercised and how it is exercised. One of these outcomes is a genuine social contract. Rousseau appeals to practical necessity in order to explain how individuals would agree to enter into this contract. We here encounter a potential advantage of a mode of explanation that relies on the notion of practical necessity: it requires introducing fewer assumptions about how agents are disposed to act and what motivates them.

Lust, Spirit, and the Vice List in Shakespeare's Sonnet 129 and Galatians 5

Sonnet 129 ironically reinscribes Galatians 5:16–26, reconfiguring the relationship between spirit, lust, and will articulated in Paul's epistle. Paul counsels his audience not to “fulfil the lustes of the flesh,” which he enumerates in a format known to biblical scholars as a vice-list. If the lusts of the flesh dictate behaviors, the sinner, says Paul, lacks self-control: “ye can not do the same things that ye wolde.” Paul counters those lusts with “the spirit,” which signifies a moral freedom resulting from the regenerating effects of divine grace and produces in the “new man” a set of behaviors which Paul particularizes in the counterpart of the vice-list, a virtue list. The lusts of the flesh, says Paul, bar one from kingdom of God, while the actions of the spirit lead to salvation. In Sonnet 129, rhetorical features such as the opposition between lust and spirit, an extensive “vice list,” and a disquisition on the loss of self-control brought on by passion link the sonnet to Paul's epistle. Shakespeare handles the Pauline material with brutal irony, reducing spirit from a sign of God's regenerating influence to a synonym for semen and proceeding to a radically pessimistic conclusion on the inability of the individual “shun the heaven” of sexual pleasure “that leads men to [the] hell” of lust.

Schillers zwei Arten der Freiheit. Eine ästhetische Transformation von Reinholds Theorie der Willensfreiheit

In his treatment of a Kantian concept of moral freedom, Schiller argues for two kinds of freedom: freedom in the spirit of autonomous practical reason and freedom in which man is considered a mixed (sensual and rational) being. It is apparent that Schiller is on a Reinholdian path. He follows Reinhold’s theory of free will in conceiving of moral freedom primarily as the capacity to decide between the material drive as a sensible, self-interested drive and the formal drive as a rational, unselfish drive. But it is also obvious that Schiller modifies Reinhold’s results in order to obtain a concept of aesthetic freedom. This project is important in view of a deeper understanding of the concept of aesthetic consciousness but is of little use in achieving a better understanding of the concept of moral freedom.