The Morals of Metaphysics: Kant’s Groundwork as Intellectual Paideia
Author(s): Ian Hunter
Source:
Critical Inquiry,
Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer 2002), pp. 908-929
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Critical Inquiry 28 (Summer 2002)
䉷 2002 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/02/2804–0001$10.00. All rights reserved.
908
This first version of this paper was presented to the politics department of the University of
Victoria (B.C.) in October 2000. I would like to thank James Tully and Avigail Eisenberg for
making my visit possible and pleasurable.
1. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans.
Michael Chase, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford, 1995), p. 101.
2. See, for example, Paul Rabbow, Seelenfu¨hrung: Methodik der Exerzitien in der Antike
(Munich, 1954); Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 2 of The History of
The Morals of Metaphysics: Kant’s Groundwork
as Intellectual Paideia
Ian Hunter
In fact this satisfies a longing for the transcendent, because in so far as people believe
they can see the ‘limits of human understanding’, they believe of course that they can
see beyond these.
Work in philosophy ...isreally more work on oneself.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
To approach philosophy as a way of working on the self means to begin
not with the experience it clarifies and the subject it discovers, but with the
acts of self-transformation it requires and the subjectivity it seeks to fashion.
Commenting on the variety of spiritual exercises to be found in the ancient
schools, Pierre Hadot remarks that:
Some, like Plutarch’s ethismoi, designed to curb curiosity, anger or
gossip, were only practices intended to ensure good moral habits. Oth-
ers, particularly the meditations of the Platonic tradition, demanded a
high degree of mental concentration. Some, like the contemplation of
nature as practiced in all philosophical schools, turned the soul toward
the cosmos, while still others—rare and exceptional—led to a transfig-
uration of the personality, as in the experiences of Plotinus. We also
saw that the emotional tone and notional content of these exercises
varied widely from one philosophical school to another: from the mo-
bilization of energy and consent to destiny of the Stoics, to the relaxa-
tion and detachment of the Epicureans, to the mental concentration
and renunciation of the sensible world among the Platonists.
1
While successfully applied to ancient philosophy,
2
this approach has not
been widely exploited in the history of philosophy more broadly. There is,
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Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 909
Ian Hunter is Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the Centre
for History of European Discourses, University of Queensland. He is the author of
several works on early modern political and moral thought, including most
recently Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern
Germany (2001). With David Saunders he is coeditor of Natural Law and Civil
Sovereignty and of a new edition of Andrew Tooke’s first English translation of
Samuel Pufendorf’s De officio, the Whole Duty of Man, both of which are to be
published in 2002.
Sexuality (New York, 1985); and Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a
Christian Empire (Madison, 1992) and The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual
Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988).
3. See Beroald Thomassen, Metaphysik als Lebensform: Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der
Metaphysik im Metaphysikkommentar Alberts des Grossen (Mu¨nster, 1985).
4. See Dorothee Kimmich, Epikureische Aufkla¨rungen: Philosophische und poetische Konzepte der
Selbstsorge (Darmstadt, 1993); Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in
European Thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge, 1991); and Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism
and the Early Modern State, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge, 1982).
5. See Donald W. Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of
Philosophy (Chicago, 1998).
6. See Foucault, “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Oxford Literary
Review 4 (Autumn 1979): 5–28.
7. See John Rawls, “Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman
(Cambridge, Mass., 1999), pp. 497–528.
8. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.,
1984), and Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1998).
however, at least one study of medieval metaphysics in these terms,
3
and
there are some important discussions of early modern Stoicism and Epi-
cureanism.
4
And a recent study of Hume shows the fruitfulness of the ap-
proach for Enlightenment philosophy.
5
It is all the more surprising thenthat
there seems to have been no serious attempt to approach Kant’s moral phi-
losophy in this way.
Hadot and Foucault seem to have felt that the abstract and academic
character of modern philosophy meant that it was no longer cultivated as
a way of life—this despite Foucault’s treatment of Descartes’s Meditations
as a spiritual exercise designed to allow the mind to achieve certainty by
inducing, then overcoming, skepticism.
6
The greater obstacle to approach-
ing Kant’s moral philosophy as a way of life, however, comes from the fact
that both its friends and its enemies insist on its formal (or formalistic)
character. American Kantians thus take it for granted that Kant’s moralphi-
losophy represents, not the cultivation of a moral life, but the formal re-
covery of the rational grounds that make life moral.
7
As far as its Thomistic
and communitarian opponents are concerned, this formalism is the ruin
of Kantian ethics, uprooting its judgments from moral tradition and de-
taching them from the moral community whose substantive virtuesprovide
the ground and purpose of morality.
8
In either case, whether we view it as
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910 Ian Hunter / Intellectual Paideia
9. For a more detailed discussion, see my Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical
Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 2001).
the rational foundation or as the rationalist deracination of moral life, we
are prevented from approaching Kant’s formal philosophy as itself a moral
culture of a particular kind.
In order to break out of this weary standoff it is necessary to radically
reorient our approach to Kant’s moral philosophy. We must learn to see its
formal purity, not in terms of the pursuit of rational grounds, but as an
aspiration arising from the incitement to and cultivation of a certain kind
of moral purity. This viewpoint cannot be reached by asking the familiar
questions: What is Kant’s pure moral law and how is it known and validated?
Does Kant rely solely on the rational purity of the moral law in making
judgments, or does he also allow the feelings and inclinations to play a part?
Can morality be founded in formal insight into rational grounds or does it
require the cultivation of moral character and the acknowledgment of
moral community? Instead, if we are to acquire the level of detachment
needed to understand the manner in which Kant’s philosophy takes hold
of us, we must learn to ask a different kind of question: What is it that first
leads us to turn to ourselves in expectation of finding within the com-
manding presence of a pure moral law? How do we first come to think of
ourselves as beings divided between the freedom of a pure intellect and the
desires of a sensuous nature? What must we do to ourselves—performing
what inner exercises using what intellectual instruments—to acquire the
deportment of someone who hears and obeys the commands of a higher
rational self? And what is the source of the extraordinary spiritual prestige
surrounding this deportment? In what follows I show why these questions
are worth asking by providing indicative answers to them in a brief re-
description of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
9
The Way In
Despite the remarkable lack of commentary on it, the fundamental re-
lation between formal purity and a specific culture of moral purity finds
symptomatic expression at the beginning of the Groundwork in the preface.
Paradoxically, this occurs in the very formulation where Kant seeks to free
a pure moral philosophy—the metaphysics of morals—from all depen-
dency on man’s empirical moral nature and its discipline, moral anthro-
pology:
Since my aim here is directed properly to moral philosophy, I limit the
question proposed only to this: is it not thought to be of the utmost
necessity to work out for once a pure moral philosophy, completely
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Critical Inquiry / Summer 2002 911
10. Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, ed.
Royal Prussian (later German) Academy of Sciences, 29 vols. to date (Berlin, 1900– ), 4:389,
hereafter abbreviated AK; trans. Mary J. Gregor, under the title Practical Philosophy (Cambridge,
1996), pp. 44–45, hereafter abbreviated PP. I have adjusted the Cambridge translations wherever
necessary.
11. For discussions of Kant’s “pragmatic” anthropology—that is, for discussions that ignore the
role of his metaphysical anthropology in shaping the moral law itself—see Wood, “Unsociable
cleansed of everything that may be only empirical and that belongs to
anthropology? For, that there must be such a philosophy is clear of it-
self from the common idea of duty and of moral laws. Everyone must
grant that a law, if it is to hold morally, that is, as a ground of an obli-
gation, must carry with it absolute necessity; that, for example, the
command “thou shalt not lie” does not hold only for human beings
[Menschen], as if other rational beings [vernu¨nftige Wesen] did not
have to heed it, and similarly with all other genuine moral laws; that,
therefore, the ground of obligation must not be sought in the nature
of the human being or in the circumstances of the world in which he
is placed, but solely a priori in concepts of pure reason.
10
Quite unexpectedly—given the standard readings—Kant motivates the
need for a formal and universal moral philosophy via the idea that the uni-
verse of rational beings outstrips the world of humans. This means (“there-
fore”) that the grounds of moral obligation must be sought, not in a merely
human nature, but in the formal or a priori concepts of pure reason suited
to (transhuman) “beings of reason.”
Despite Kant’s attempt to distinguish “pure moral philosophy” from all
moral anthropology—that is, from the repository of human figurations
(Stoic, Platonic, Epicurean, Christological) used to configure personhood—
it seems clear that this distinction is itself dependent on one such anthro-
pology. We can discern this anthropology in the figuration of humans as a
particular species of rational being (Vernu¨nftwesen). This species is charac-
terized by the union of a rational (vernu¨nftige) nature—shared with God
and the angels—with a sensible (sinnliches) nature, consisting of man’s sen-
sory faculties and sensuous inclinations. It is just this Christian-Platonic
figuration of man as a rational being mired in the spatiotemporal world by
his senses, and in the prudential world by his sensuous inclinations, that
allows Kant to separate the metaphysics of morals from “empirical” an-
thropology. By tacitly invoking this metaphysical anthropology Kant can
identify metaphysics with pure (nonspatiotemporal) insight into a moral
law binding on a universe of pure intelligences only some of whom are hu-
man. This allows him to relegate all other anthropology to the “pragmatic”
task of refining man’s sensuous inclinations to render them capable of re-
ceiving the pure moral law in the impure empirical world.
11
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