by Robert Wicks
Key idea: The highest good
Kant envisions an idealized world where everyone acts rationally, purely from a sense of duty. Although everyone deserves to be happy in such a world, it could still be that many will remain unhappy, owing to the accidents of nature. Contrary to this imperfect situation, the highest good is a condition where everyone acts from a sense of duty and is awarded happiness in due proportion. To render the highest good possible, Kant postulates God’s existence as an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing being.
We have now come full circle. Maintaining a scepticism that denies metaphysical knowledge, the Critique of Pure Reason establishes that we cannot know through any logical, mathematical or scientific proofs that we are free, that the soul is immortal or that there is a God. The Critique of Practical Reason and Kant’s other moral works give these same questions a positive answer, arguing that the consciousness of our duty entails that we postulate freedom, immortality and God. Kant is a traditional theist who believes in God’s existence. His larger-scale argument across his first and second Critiques is that the pathway to God and the perfect society is through neither science nor the traditional metaphysical arguments for God’s existence, but through moral awareness.
2 Virtue
When Kant initially speaks of the good will in the Groundwork, he mentions that to have a good will is not merely to have virtues such as courage and perseverance. These are morally neutral, useable by good and bad alike. After having established that the good will acts exclusively from a feeling of respect for law itself, Kant defines virtue within the context of his own theory as the willpower to act exclusively from duty. This is the Kantian meaning of virtue, which defines human morality at its highest stage.
Since some people have a relatively stronger capacity than others to control their inclinations and resist temptation, virtue is a matter of degree. In the preface to his later work, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue (1797), Kant ascribes a ‘Herculean strength’ to our feeling of self-respect in its potentiality to overcome ‘vice-breeding inclinations’, and by implication, to virtue as the expression of that strength. Virtue is a kind of fortitude: it is the capacity to resist a strong and unjust opponent, which in this case, is our animal nature insofar as it distracts us from duty.
The third formulation of the categorical imperative states that each person is an end in itself. Each person, that is, has an intrinsic value that needs always to be respected, even though, of course, we inevitably use other people instrumentally in daily life. The ‘realm’ of ends is accordingly the system of mutually respecting people. Insofar as we act from duty, our aims always include respect towards other people and ourselves.
Kant accordingly has some observations that bear on realizing the highest good. Although happiness is independent of duty, virtue is nonetheless easily threatened under certain unhappy circumstances. This generates a duty to cultivate our capacities so that we are in the best worldly shape to act from duty. If we find ourselves without sufficient money, for instance, we might begin to lie and steal to survive. If we allow our health to deteriorate, then discouragement and mean-spiritedness could follow. Kant describes the duty to cultivate one’s capacities as a ‘duty of virtue’. It is not as steadfastly obligatory as the duties not to tell lies or to commit suicide, which are ‘perfect’ duties. Duties of virtue are imperfect duties that we should try to uphold as best as we can.
Another duty of virtue is to promote the happiness of others when this will sustain or enhance their virtue. The duty is also imperfect, since it does not signify that to increase the happiness of others, we should offer alcohol to an alcoholic, extra pillows to the sluggard, or weapons to the bully. The proper execution of imperfect duties is complicated, and the exercise of judgement that it requires renders the mechanically firm application of the categorical imperative less useful. We are left rather to manage our imperfect duties in view of the overall spirit of Kant’s moral theory – a war between rational intellect and fleshly inclination – through wisdom and balanced judgement.
The following excerpt effectively condenses the lifestyle and personal attitudes that Kant’s moral theory envisions. With respect to the excerpt’s concluding sentence, which distantly echoes the Biblical episode about the worship of the golden calf, we can once again recall the first of the Ten Commandments. The contemporary philosophical difference is that in the true spirit of the Enlightenment, our reason itself is considered to be divine:
Do not become the slaves of other men. Do not allow your rights to be trampled underfoot by others with impunity. Make no debts that you are unable to repay. Receive no favours you can dispense with, and be neither parasites nor flatterers nor – for they differ but in degree – beggars. Live, then, frugally, lest one day you become destitute… Kneeling or prostrating oneself on the ground, even to express adoration of celestial objects, is contrary to human dignity; as is also the worshipping of them by images. For then you humble yourself, not before an ideal, the handiwork of your reason, but beneath an idol…
(The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, Part One, Section 12).
3 The problem of evil
When Kant postulates God’s existence as a condition for achieving the perfect harmony of duty and happiness in the highest good, he conceives of God traditionally as an all-knowing (omniscient), all-powerful (omnipotent) and all-good (omnibenevolent) being, located beyond the spatio-temporal world as its commanding source. Upon postulating such a divinity, an independent and difficult question concerning the existence of evil in the spatio-temporal world quickly presents itself: ‘If there is such a God, then why is there any evil at all?’
This question defines the ‘the problem of evil’, an approach to which can be taken from either a philosophical or theological angle. The philosophical approach asks generally whether the existence of evil is compatible with God’s existence, allowing that evil’s very existence could constitute a prima facie argument against God’s existence. The theological approach assumes that God exists, and asks how God and evil could be compatible under that assumption. To the extent that Kant advocates the moral argument for God’s existence, he is committed to a theological approach to the problem.
The most testing aspect of the problem of evil does not concern the evil that people themselves bring into the world through their immorality, but the evil caused by natural phenomena such as disease, earthquakes, floods, droughts and tornadoes that exists independently of the human will. This is natural evil as opposed to moral evil, and it is presumably caused by God as the creator of the laws of nature. The perennially perplexing question is how an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good being could allow such natural evil to exist. If all-knowing, then God knows how to remove the natural evil; if all-powerful, then God can remove the natural evil; if all-good, then God would presumably want to remove the natural evil.
Near the end of his career, Kant devoted an essay to the problem of evil, entitled ‘On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy’ (1791). It appeared a year after the third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgement, in which Kant develops the related theme of how beauty and living things reinforce our belief in the compatibility between morality and mechanically driven nature.
The essay’s response to the problem of evil continues to express Kant’s critical philosophy, as he denies the possibility of any metaphysical solution. Following the example of the Antinomies in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason, he argues that we can prove neither the compatibility nor the incompatibility of God and evil. Proofs to either conclusion require metaphysical knowledge that is beyond our rational capacities. Kant consequently rejects the metaphysical justifications to humans of God’s ways – he rejects all ‘theodicies’ – that purport to tell us definitively about God’s ultimate purposes or reasons.
We can remember that in the first Critique, reason’s inability to obtain metaphysical knowledge redirects our attention from time-wasting m
etaphysical speculation, towards the more important practical application of reason in moral activity. Kant’s discussion of the problem of evil follows the same pattern: after arguing that the metaphysical attempts to resolve the problem are hopeless, he turns towards morality for some wisdom. In light of the problem of evil’s theoretical inscrutability, Kant defuses the problem by highlighting the implications of his moral theory.
Key idea: The three postulates of practical reason
Kant consistently asks of his main subject matters, How is it possible? With respect to the question of how moral awareness is possible, he maintains (1) that we must assume that people are free as a condition for moral praise and blame, (2) that they are immortal as a condition for completely fulfilling their duty, and (3) that God exists as a condition for realizing the highest good. Freedom, immortality and God are thereby the three postulates of practical reason.
Our moral awareness makes it our duty to aim for the highest good, which requires that we postulate freedom, God and the immortality of the soul. The spatio-temporal world within which we must achieve this goal, however, contains both spiritually enlivening beauty and debilitating horror. As beauty stimulates the confidence that God and evil are compatible, the outrageous suffering in the world introduces undermining doubts. To find a way through this ambivalent situation, where earthquakes and other natural disasters sometimes occur on the most beautiful, enlivening, sunny afternoons, Kant reflects upon the Biblical story of Job.
Spotlight: The Book of Job
The Book of Job (c. sixth century BCE) is part of the Old Testament and a classic of world literature which asks, ‘Why do the righteous suffer’? It touches the soul of every human being, as it portrays the plight of a good person who suffers tremendous loss at the hands of natural disasters and criminals while still retaining his faith. Insofar as everyone in the world suffers unexplainably upon occasion, and as a rule, not as intensely as did Job, the story encapsulates the human condition most disconcertingly. This enormously influential text has been the subject of commentaries from thinkers such as Pope Gregory I (540–604), Maimonides (1135–1204), Martin Luther (1483–1546), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Lev Shestov (1866–1938), and Martin Buber (1878–1965).
At the story’s outset, Job is happy. He is successful, powerful, healthy, and secure. He is also righteous and believes in God. To test whether Job is truly righteous, or righteous only because he is happy, God robs Job in the worst way of everything that is materially satisfying. He loses his thousands of animals, his ten children and is infected with disease. Despite his staggering misfortune, Job does not lose his sense of dignity, which God cannot rob.
We can see why the story of Job attracted Kant. Notice how the structure of Job’s experience coincides with our description of Kant’s philosophical method of taking some object, and abstracting away the sensory qualities to arrive at a non-sensory core, knowable a priori. Kant arrived at the empty forms of space and time in this manner, as we know from the arguments in the Transcendental Aesthetic. The story of Job proceeds in the same way: we have a person, originally richly filled with sensory pleasures and worldly satisfactions, who is stripped down materially to leave nothing but a moral core that remains intact and independent of worldly satisfactions. In this stripped-down condition, utterly devoid of happiness, Kant is intrigued by Job’s attitude towards God and the world’s evil.
Job retains his faith in God, as he stands empty-handed materially, with nothing left but a moral consciousness marked by personal dignity and autonomy. Job remains honest, sincere, aware of the limits of his knowledge, and steadfast in his righteousness throughout his terrible trials. He makes no effort to justify why God has brought disaster upon him – and indeed, the situation to him makes no sense – but humbly accepts God’s will. In the end, Job is rewarded.
Kant’s moral theory does well in explaining Job’s surprising intensity of faith. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder whether Kant’s moral theory touches upon a profound truth, precisely because it explains Job’s faith so well. If moral awareness requires generally that we postulate God’s existence, then a purified moral awareness, stripped down of worldly happiness, would produce a correspondingly intense belief in God. No one with a consciousness of this purified moral kind will be questioning whether God exists in the face of evil, for the unconditionally grounded moral awareness that stands alone in its purity, separated from worldly happiness, produces an unshakeable faith in God. Following directly is an unshakeable faith in the compatibility of God and natural evil. Insofar as one’s moral awareness is unquestionable, so is the conviction that God and evil are compatible.
Kant’s interpretation of the Book of Job leaves us with the following message: the best way to come to grips with evil is to cultivate one’s virtue in the face of the world’s horrors. The stronger one’s virtue and the more morally purified one’s consciousness becomes, the greater will be one’s belief in God. The resulting faith will act as a shield against debilitation and discouragement by the presence of the world’s natural evil. In sum, as virtue fills one’s character, the less the problem of evil presents itself as a problem.
Dig Deeper
Karl Ameriks and Otfried Hoeffe (eds.), Kant’s Moral and Legal Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Andreas Føllesdal and Reidar Maliks (eds.), Kantian Theory and Human Rights (Routledge, 2014)
Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Robert Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (Oxford University Press, 2000)
Allen Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion (Cornell University Press, 1970)
Study questions
1 One can act, for example, ‘as an individual person’ or ‘as a human being in general’. What is the difference between the two?
2 Why is the realm of ends not the same as the highest good?
3 Why is the kingdom of ends (the realm of ends) not structured like a monarchy?
4 What are the three postulates that our moral awareness requires?
5 What is Kant’s moral argument for God’s existence?
6 How does Kant define virtue?
7 Why is virtue a kind of fortitude? What kind of opponent are we resisting?
8 Why does Kant believe that we have duties to develop our talents and to help other people to be happy? Why are these duties ‘imperfect’?
9 How does the Biblical story of Job relate to the problem of evil?
10 Why does Kant believe that developing our virtue is an effective way to face the problem of evil?
Section Four:
What is the meaning of beauty?
13
Beauty in its formal purity
Kant’s theory of beauty is motivated by the idea that when we make a judgement of beauty, we always expect others to agree with us. This chapter will discuss how Kant’s analysis of judgements of beauty accounts for this ascription of universal validity. To explain the demand that others agree, Kant restricts our attention to the object’s spatio-temporal form, which everyone in all times and places can appreciate. He then locates the beauty of the object in the systematic structure of its spatio-temporal form, maintaining that when the object is judged aesthetically and disinterestedly, simply in terms of how its systematic form makes us feel, we experience a pleasurable harmony between our faculties of understanding and imagination. This harmony is a cognitive feeling that one can expect everyone to experience.
Dramatic sunsets, sexually alluring faces, well-toned bodies, idyllic landscapes, star-filled skies, flowers, and perhaps cuddly babies, puppies and kittens may come to mind when we think of beauty. If we were to teach the word ‘beautiful’ to a youngster, we might show the child a rose or a spiral seashell, or point to a setting sun on a painted horizon, or to a softly lit, full moon rising in the opposite distance soon thereafter.
Beauty remains difficult to comprehend nonetheless. In any theory of beauty, w
e expect to learn why we call these items, along with many others, ‘beautiful’. Kant’s peculiarity is that although he is rightly celebrated as the father of modern aesthetics, his driving philosophical interests are not fundamentally in aesthetic theory, which came to him later in life. His career is defined rather by the broader systematic concerns that surround the relationship between science and morality. Kant’s theory of human knowledge as well as his ethics – his perpetual awe of the starry skies above and the moral law within – underpin and inform the theories of beauty and fine art for which the third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790), is well known.
A good part of Kant’s philosophy of beauty is thus geared to explain how our experiences of beauty, both natural and artistic, reinforce our scientific and moral endeavours. An unexpected consequence is that only a handful of the features we ordinarily regard as constitutive of beauty become characteristic of what we may refer to within Kant’s aesthetics as ‘pure beauty’. The features that we ordinarily recognize as constitutive of beauty which he does not include, such as a rose’s pastel colours, soft textures and delicate perfume, have a place in his theory, but they are secondary to the rarefied conception of pure beauty upon which he grounds his aesthetics.
To appreciate Kant’s account of pure beauty, it helps again to revisit the abstractive philosophical method he employs to reveal space and time as forms within the human mind. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the section on the transcendental aesthetic begins with the consideration of any ordinary object, and proceeds to isolate the object’s fundamental constituents for separate philosophical treatment. In his philosophical analysis, Kant considers the object’s sensory qualities (e.g., its colours, odours, textures, tastes) apart from its geometrical shape or formal design, and sets the sensory qualities and the spatio-temporal design apart from the meaning-lending concepts that we project onto the object. These three layers – (1) the object’s sensory qualities, (2) its spatio-temporal structure and (3) its conceptual meanings – emerge from Kant’s analysis as separate subjects for philosophical treatment.
