The generation of Kantians to which I belong owes a debt of gratitude to the work of Robert Louden. Since his pioneering Kant's Impure Ethics (Louden 2000), Louden has helped us put a human face to the abstract a priori principles of Kant's pure practical philosophy. Through a continuous spate of publications, some of which are gathered in his latest book (Louden 2011), Louden has managed to show the importance of the empirical dimension of Kantian ethics – a dimension that had been ignored or dismissed for more than two hundred years by scholars obsessed with keeping ‘philosophy pure’.Footnote 1 In order to better appreciate Louden's contribution to the field of Kantian studies, let me begin by describing what motivates his project. I will then discuss some specific contentions he makes in the new book and conclude by raising a few critical remarks.
1
Louden has persuasively argued that the reduction of Kant's philosophy to its pure a priori part yields a picture that is seriously truncated and ripe for misconception –at least when it comes to Kant's ethics. The message of Louden's work reminds me of the dove of the first Critique: ‘The light dove’, Kant says, ‘in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space’ (Kant Reference Kant1998b: 140; CPR A5/B9).Footnote 2 Kant intended this metaphor as a warning against his rationalist predecessors – metaphysicians who ruled out any contribution from our sensibility to knowledge. In Louden's hands, the metaphor serves as a warning against moral philosophers, foes and friends of Kant alike, who rule out any contribution from anthropology to Kantian ethics. Such philosophers think that Kant's morality can be confined to its a priori, rational core, and thus fancy that Kant's practical philosophy can float ‘in airless space’, free from the contingencies of human nature, history and culture. This illusion is the source of grave misunderstandings. To correct them, Louden iterates, in a variety of contexts, a basic message:
[W]e have been laboring under a false picture of what Kant's practical philosophy is all about. Kant's ethics is about much, much more than the categorical imperative. Willing universalizable maxims definitely remains at the center of his pure ethics, but in the second part of his ethical theory this theme is explored not as an abstract principle by means of which all rational beings are to scrutinize their maxims, but rather as a fundamental attitude that human beings can only acquire slowly through extensive education and prolonged participation in requisite cultural practices that produce analogous states of mind (e.g., art and science). (Louden Reference Louden2000: 173)
For Louden, then, Kantian ethics begins, but does not end, with the task of discovering the categorical imperative. This task remains incomplete and risks becoming ineffectual if not accompanied by a second, usually ignored part of Kant's thought. This second part of ethics is key to understanding how the pure (i.e. a priori) principles of Kant's morality, valid for all rational beings as such, apply to the impure (i.e. empirically variable and contingent) conditions of human existence. Given the intellectual and psychological limitations of the human mind, the slow and arduous training the human animal must undergo in order to become a well-functioning social creature, and the radical propensity to evil that threatens to corrupt the very process of maxim-formation (even in the best of us), no human being is born into autonomy. On the contrary, autonomy is a task, the result of an uphill battle that requires commitment and perseverance in the life of virtue. The moral point of view must be learned slowly, if learned at all, by participating in contingent social practices that tell us when moral decisions are called for and how to go about them. Unconditional moral obligations, grounded and justified in terms of the categorical imperative, require, at the level of application, anthropological friction to get off the ground. For Louden, then, no matter the conceited opinion of the light dove, anthropology is what keeps Kantian ethics soaring in mid air.
One of the most famous references to this impure dimension of Kant's ethics appears in the Metaphysics of Morals:
The counterpart of a metaphysics of morals, the other member of the division of practical philosophy as a whole, would be moral anthropology, which, however, would deal only with the subjective conditions in human nature that hinder people or help them in fulfilling (die Ausführung) the laws of the metaphysics of morals. It would deal with the development, spreading, and strengthening of moral principles (in education in schools and in popular instruction), and with similar teachings and precepts based on experience. It cannot be dispensed with, but it must not precede the metaphysics of morals or be mixed with it; for one would then run the risk of bringing forth false or at least indulgent moral laws, which would misrepresent as unattainable what has only not been attained just because the law has not been seen and presented in its purity (in which its strength consists) or because spurious or impure incentives were used for what is itself in conformity with duty and good. This would leave no certain moral principles, either to guide or to discipline the mind in observance of duty, the precepts of which must be given a priori by pure reason alone. (Kant Reference Kant1996: 10–11; MS 6: 217)
As Kant describes it in this passage, the second part of ethics is neither concerned with grounding the supreme principle of morality (the task of the Groundwork) nor with deriving duties from the categorical imperative (the project of the Metaphysics of Morals). If moral anthropology were to extend its influence at this level, the first part of ethics would ‘run the risk of bringing forth false or at least indulgent moral laws’ (ibid.). The mature Kant is unequivocal on this score: only pure rational principles, cleansed of any admixture of anthropological content, can capture the necessity and universality (the two distinctive features of the a priori) that properly belong to moral laws. Yet, and this is key for Louden, Kant recognizes that reducing the whole of ethics to this rational inner circle would be a serious mistake. For, as he had noticed in the Groundwork, although morality is based on its pure part, it nonetheless needs ‘anthropology for its application (Anwendung) to human beings’ (Kant Reference Kant1997a: 23; G 4: 412).
The second ‘member of the division of practical philosophy as a whole’ is thus charged with investigating ‘precepts based on experience’ in order to answer the question of how to make pure moral principles efficacious in human life. These precepts are important because, given Kant's assumptions about the a priori nature of morality, it is by no means clear how the motive of duty, issued unremittingly by reason ‘without thereby promising anything to the inclinations’ (Kant Reference Kant1997a: 17; G 4: 405), can actually gain entrance in the human will. The problem Kant faces is that, without our actively endorsing rational principles, moral commands would remain heteronomous for us. Yet, the possibility of such an endorsement is put into question by the dualisms he introduces in ‘the search for and establishment of the supreme principle of morality’ (Kant Reference Kant1997a: 5; G 4: 392). Without a sharp distinction between reason and sensibility, the apriority of morality could not possibly be secured. The trouble is that with this distinction the ideal of autonomy runs the risk of being too removed and unattainable for us. For, according to this ideal, ‘every rational being, as an end in itself, must be able to regard himself as also giving universal laws with respect to any law whatsoever to which he may be subject’ (Kant Reference Kant1997a: 45; G 4: 438). However, when it comes to humans, this ability is compromised by the fact that their will is not purely rational. It has, in addition to reason, an ineliminable sensible component. The identification of purity with morality, therefore, seems to introduce a vexing split between what reason demands and what humans can do.
As I see the problem, the project Kant initiated in the Groundwork put him in a double bind. Since our will is partly sensible, the more morality identifies itself with pure reason, the more difficult autonomy becomes; conversely, the more autonomy is valued as the ground of human dignity, the more the first part of morality needs to make room for anthropology. The first possibility is troublesome, because sacrificing autonomy would deprive human existence of moral guidance; but so is the second, because introducing anthropological considerations would undermine the rational foundation of morality. Given these constraints, I think, one should read Kant's practical philosophy with two provisos in mind. First, in spite of Kant's insistence on purity, ‘moral anthropology’ is not a mere accretion, but a feature implicitly contained within the first part of ethics from the start. Proof of this contention is that talk of duty, which permeates almost every aspect of Kant's moral philosophy, makes no sense whatsoever for pure rational beings. Second, and following from this, Kant's talk of autonomy (for the individual) and of moral Bestimmung (for the human species) would be empty if human beings were not malleable creatures, capable of developing an interest in morality above their natural preoccupation with happiness. Even if respect is an a priori necessary feeling for finite creatures like us, humans must learn to be moral. They need to develop a culture that preserves them, civilizes them, and finally legislates cosmopolitan principles. Without a porous relation between sensibility and reason, neither individual autonomy nor the collective project of pursuing the highest good would have a chance to succeed.
So conceived, the two parts of ethics are designed to complement one another. Kant's arrangement must avoid two pitfalls. First, to make morality rest on anthropology, for this would undermine its foundational pretensions: the peculiarity of the human case would yield precepts lacking the universality and necessity characteristic of moral laws. Yet, second, if the first part of ethics dispensed with anthropology altogether, it would yield an empty moral ideal divorced from the human condition. As we saw above, Kant solves the problem of integration by organizing the two parts of his ethics in lexical order. The first, pure part is designed to locate and justify the fundamental a priori principle of morality. Once this foundational task is finished, the second, impure part indicates how, when and where to apply the categorical imperative. Such application requires empirical knowledge of human beings: for morality to be efficacious, one needs to understand human psychology, the general patterns of human behaviour, human capacities and predispositions, etc. Such information helps bring the a priori rational principles of Kant's morality to bear on the phenomenal world we inhabit. Thus, the two parts of ethics combine to create a moral theory that is empirically informed, albeit not empirically determined. Kant's approach provides thus the right kind of normative friction human beings need to flap their moral wings.
2
I have been discussing the motivations of Louden's philosophical project. I hope I have conveyed the reasons why I think it is important. To give impure ethics its due not only sets the scholarly record straight, but also forestalls the most egregious blunders Kant is charged with. To name just a few: Hegel's accusation of empty formalism, the communitarian indictment of detached individualism, and the long-standing prejudice that Kant considered anthropological research irrelevant for ethical theory, simply miss the mark.
Let me now turn to Louden's new book. Kant's Human Being contains 12 essays, neatly divided into three parts: ‘Human Virtues’, ‘Anthropology and Ethics’ and ‘Extensions of Anthropology’. With one exception, these essays are offshoots of Kant's Impure Ethics (2000). The exception in question is chapter 1, ‘Kant's Virtue Ethics’, a piece Louden wrote in 1986 but which contains the seeds of everything that follows.
I will focus on the main theses that organize the first two parts. My goal is to reconstruct threads of argument, not each chapter in isolation. Since the third part gathers papers that extend Kant's anthropology in different directions (radical evil, physical geography, education and national character), I will leave its discussion for another occasion.
(i) Human Virtues
The four essays contained here are variations on a single theme, namely, that anthropology plays a decisive role in shaping Kant's theory of virtue. ‘On Kant's view’, Louden writes,
‘all the moral perfection that a human being can attain is still only virtue’ (Kant, Reference Kant1997b: 107; KpV 5:128, 84; Kant, Reference Kant1996: 148; MS 6:383). In other words, Kant's particular theory of virtue is in effect a theory of morality designed to fit (what he believes are) the specific conditions of human beings (as opposed to the conditions of other types of rational beings). Kant arrives at his theory of virtue only after first settling on the parameters of his theory of human nature. (p. xxvii)
I take this to entail that there is an implicit moral anthropology even in the first part of ethics.
In Louden's view, what distinguishes Kant's brand of virtue ethics is the realization that human beings are by nature evil. As Kant puts it in Religion: ‘those valiant men [the Stoics] mistook the enemy, who is not to be sought in the natural inclinations, which merely lack discipline and openly display themselves unconcealed to everyone's consciousness, but is rather as it were an invisible enemy, one who hides behind reason and hence all the more dangerous’ (Kant Reference Kant1998a: 77; R 6: 57). Kant's pessimistic anthropology is important, for it leads him to give primacy to self-knowledge and self-constraint in the pursuit of virtue. ‘Morality’, Louden claims,
is a … precarious achievement for human beings, one that is always in danger of slipping away and concerning which we are constantly in danger of fooling ourselves. The real issue is not Kant's alleged hostility to the emotions … Nor is it that Kant's virtuous agents take no pleasure in acting virtuously, nor that they are stuck in a conflict-ridden, pre-virtuous condition of Aristotelian continence. (Louden Reference Louden2011: 24)
Rather, the problem is that human beings are evil by nature and hence must be in watchful alert against their ‘invisible enemy’.
This anthropological backdrop also explains why Kant believes that the promotion of one's own moral perfection, the cultivation of the ‘purest virtuous disposition’ (Kant Reference Kant1996: 151; MS 6: 387), is the most important of our moral obligations and the precondition of all our other duties. Our overriding practical goal, Louden argues, is to realize a state of virtue in our own character, for the way the individual determines her moral disposition conditions the way she is going to relate with other agents.
(ii) Anthropology and Ethics
Throughout this second part, Louden grapples with the problem that ‘there is often a formidable conceptual gap between Kant's anthropology lectures and his ethics texts, with the very idea of a moral anthropology hovering awkwardly between both fields, at home in neither’ (Louden Reference Louden2011: 51). As part of practical philosophy, moral anthropology stands under the legislation of freedom; but as a comprehensive empirical doctrine, it stands under the legislation of nature. To bridge the gap, Louden urges us to ‘to bring together, clarify, and (when possible) integrate’ the fundamental moral messages Kant interspersed in his lectures and writings (Louden Reference Louden2011: 52). The hunch here is that, contained in Kant's vast anthropological corpus, there is a distinctly moral core, irreducible to the prudential meanings that populate Kant's general disquisitions on human nature. This core is characterized by the following messages:
1. A chief task of moral anthropology is to account for the specific passions and inclinations that hinder or promote the adherence to moral principles. The knowledge thus garnered must be objective and empirically accurate. ‘But the motivation behind the desire to acquire such knowledge is clearly a moral one … In this basic respect, Kantian social science is not at all a value-free but deeply value-embedded, that is, morally guided.’ (Louden Reference Louden2011: 56)
2. Moral anthropology provides Weltkenntnis, i.e., knowledge of the world that is useful for life. This is not just a local knowledge of human behaviour, bound to place and time and providing no rules for successful social interaction. Rather, what is called for is ‘attentiveness to human dispositions, which often show themselves under many shapes’. The purpose is ‘to know the nature of humanity, not the condition of human beings’. Ultimately, this means ‘knowledge of the human being as a citizen of the world’ (Kant Reference Kant2006: 4; A 7: 120).
3. Anthropological reflection on the general patterns of human behaviour allows us to gain conscience of our moral destiny. As Louden puts it, ‘Here Kant is trying to provide his audience with a moral map, a conceptual orientation and delineation of where humanity as a species is headed, along with programmatic hints concerning what needs to be done in order to move us closer to our normative destination’ (Louden Reference Louden2011: 58). The strong teleological thrust of this project helps correct the impression that Kant's anthropology is simply empirical science: the vision is of a gradually emerging worldwide moral community, an organization of citizens of the earth united cosmopolitically (Louden Reference Louden2011: 59).
Although Kant considers both pragmatic and moral anthropology ‘practical’, the former is primarily concerned with the useful in social intercourse and brackets all moral considerations. That is, pragmatic anthropology yields knowledge of human nature that ‘enables us more effectively to use others for our own purposes (whatever these purposes may be)’ (Louden Reference Louden2011: 82). It is, therefore, a Klugheitslehre, a doctrine of prudence. Unlike its moral counterpart, there is nothing to prevent our turning this pragmatic knowledge of human beings to manipulative and immoral purposes.
Such different intent, however, should not obscure the fact that both pragmatic and moral anthropology are essentially empirical disciplines. Their a posteriori method is therefore opposed to the a priori approach Kant reserves for his pure ethics. That is, in all its forms, Kantian anthropology is a Beobachtungslehre, an empirical doctrine based on observation, concerned with the ‘phenomenal effects of human freedom in the empirical world, not with freedom's allegedly non-empirical origins’ (Louden Reference Louden2011: 81). There is, then, an important tension between the universal pretensions of Kant's anthropology and its deliberately empirical character. According to Louden, the tension diminishes once we understand that ‘the kind of empirical knowledge [Kant] is referring to in his anthropology is one that, while experienced-based, emphasizes reflection about the chief tendencies and characteristics of the human species as a whole’ (Louden Reference Louden2011: 86). This reflective character, Louden claims, yields a ‘teleological moral map’ (Louden Reference Louden2011: 86) to orientate the human species in its historical endeavours.
3
I want to conclude my comments by questioning the naturalistic tendencies of Louden's interpretation of Kant's moral anthropology. Although this approach suits contemporary sensibilities, for it fits our scientifically minded understanding of human beings, I find it misguided when it comes to Kant. In my view, if we are to reconcile the empirical and moral dimensions of Kant's anthropology, we cannot count on a Beobachtungslehre to do the job. The task requires a new, hybrid method, neither completely empirical nor completely a priori, which I elsewhere called ‘quasi-transcendental’ (Muchnik Reference Muchnik2009: ch. 4). To my mind, Louden's appeal to experience-based reflection shortchanges the noumenal aspect of Kant's thought, for it fails to capture its a priori, moral component. To do justice to this dimension one cannot adopt an exclusively empirically approach.
In an often-quoted passage, Kant says:
The field of philosophy in the cosmopolitan sense can be brought down to the following questions:
1. What can I know?
2. What ought I to do?
3. What may I hope?
4. What is the human being?
Metaphysics answers the first question, morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth. Fundamentally, however, we could reckon all of this to anthropology, because the first three questions refer to the last one. (Kant Reference Kant1992: 538; L 9: 25)
Louden is right to note the Humean undertones in Kant's fourth question (Louden Reference Louden2011: 165n), but looks in vain for an answer in Kant's anthropological writings. Here, the empirical limitations of Kant's method confine any available answer to the realm of appearances, i.e. to how human beings understand themselves through reflection on outer sense (via the observation of human behaviour) or through apprehension of impressions of inner sense (via introspection). In either case, the knowledge yielded by this approach concerns the phenomenal manifestations of our noumenal character, and is hence limited to the appearances of human freedom. Such a limitation, however, precludes insight as to what human beings are in themselves. Even if we could keep in check the cognitive distortions that dissemblance and dissimulation introduce when human beings are conscious of being observed (Kant Reference Kant2006: 5; A: 7: 121), their conduct provides empirical knowledge of their empirical character. It is incapable of yielding intelligence as to what they are in themselves. Introspection is of no help here – and this for two reasons. First, Kant believes that our noumenal character is inscrutable to us. Furthermore, barring intellectual intuition, there is no way of determining what makes people act the way they do. There is no way of knowing, Kant believes, whether self-love has not actually been the motive behind right action or the reason why people break the law. Knowledge on these matters is beyond our ken. Second, introspection presents the self as an ‘object of inner empirical intuition; that is, in so far as I am affected by experiences in time, simultaneous as well as successive, I nevertheless cognize myself only as I appear to myself, not as a thing in itself’ (Kant Reference Kant2006: 33; A 7: 142). Given Kant's commitment to noumenal ignorance, Louden's empirical approach to the question ‘What is the human being?’ is self-defeating, for observation is confined to the phenomenal manifestations of human behaviour.
A more promising path to a genuine moral anthropology, I believe, can be found in the first part of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Here Kant claims:
The human being must make himself into whatever he is or should become in a moral sense, good or evil. These two characters must be an effect of his power of choice, for otherwise they could not be imputed to him, and consequently, he could be neither morally good nor evil. (Kant Reference Kant1998a: 65; R 6: 44)
I take this to imply that a morally informed answer to the question ‘what is the human being?’ entails abandoning both the theocentric and scientific frames of reference with which humans generally try to explain themselves to themselves. Kant offers, instead, a complex system of predispositions and propensities. Although this system is designed to capture the basic anthropological tendencies at which Kant arrives empirically, its activation and shape is the result of a transcendental act of freedom for which human beings are fully responsible.
This line of thought raises the methodological stakes. To account for the moral self-constitution of the human species, a Beobachtungslehre falls inevitably short. Yet, since the moral character in question belongs to humanity, Kant cannot haphazardly resort to the pure apparatus of the foundational part of his ethics. A moral anthropology needs bits of both types of discourse, but cannot use them in their customary ways. My point is that this unique set of methodological pressures leads Kant to abandon the observational grounds of pragmatic anthropology, and develop instead a doctrine of human nature compatible with the demands of autonomy. Although he never made such a doctrine fully explicit, the logic of the enterprise would have forced him to expand his empirical approach to human nature in drastically new ways.
Although Louden has done a lot to overturn the picture that held Kantian purists captive, he introduced another picture from which I believe we have to escape: a naturalistic picture of Kant's impure ethics. In my estimation, the work ahead lies in developing, on behalf of Kant, a methodology capable of doing justice to moral anthropology – a method irreducible to traditional morality and the social sciences alike. If I am right on this issue, the seeds of the new method are buried in Kant's Religion, not in his anthropological writings, where Louden has tried to find it.
