The Aristotelian threefold moral scheme (potentiality, action, actuality) was taken over in the Middle Ages by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. These religions held too that there is a factual existence of the human being that exhibits the latter’s fallen nature.
However, through God’s commandments, man could rise to his ideal, God-wanted nature, a nature that continued to exist potentially within man even in his present corrupt condition. Man would reach his complete, true nature in the future afterlife.
In this context, God’s goal with the human being was both a religious and a rational topic because man could understand his true nature only by pursuing a mixture of theological and rational arguments.
We may add that these religions also adopted the ancient classical interpretation of the human intellect, according to which this intellect was able to know the essences of things, those essences that, in the religions mentioned above, were created by God.
This understanding of the human intellect collapsed in the late Middle Ages, in the course of the quarrel between nominalism and realism, which led to the conclusion that what traditionally was understood as a substance was nothing more than flatus vocis, a mere name that humans give to things.
Nominalism lies at the root of Protestantism, Calvinism, or Jansenism. They no longer believe that human reason can see the ends that God has put within things or the human being. Reason, limited to the world of senses, can only measure and calculate what these senses present to us, but not the essences that control teleological processes in reality.
This change of understanding also led to the idea that belief can no longer be grounded rationally, as previously was held, but is either a matter of grace or custom or habit.
Hume, Diderot, Kant, or Kierkegaard share this view of reason as a faculty that cannot go beyond what senses provide us toward the true inner nature. They keep the calculating character of reason, which consists in organizing sensations.
However, they lived in a society that still considered itself Christian. Thus, they were surrounded by a host of moral injunctions or demands that Christianity put on believers. Apart from having a religious meaning, these injunctions were also thought of as means to help the human being rise from its corrupt condition to its true nature, to its essence existing within itself.
But since for those thinkers there no longer existed any true nature of man, based on an essence, they faced an impossible task: to found moral demands derived from the ancient, traditional understanding of man, through the modern conceptualization of man and his reason, a reason which was thought of as no longer being able to see essences and finalities but which had to confine itself to the world of sensations.
Kant was the nearest to understanding this difficulty. In his moral project, he criticizes every endeavor of founding morality on the idea of human nature, requiring instead to ground it on ‘pure reason,’ i.e., on the same reason that was now reinterpreted as being the creative power active behind the universal mathematical laws of nature.
However, he still considers that morality needs a teleological framework, which he no longer thinks of as an objective setting in which divinity has put the human being, but only as an a priori logical presupposition of human reason for building its whole moral scaffold.
Kant’s concept of reason has a calculative character: he refutes the idea that moral imperatives derived from what was previously called ‘human nature.’ Rather they require the universalizing capacity of reason, i.e., its tendency to create laws specific to entire classes.
However, in contrast to ancient approaches of morality (which likewise demanded moral improvement from all humans, but as a consequence of such a supposed human nature), Kantian reason does not contain any pure moral criterion requiring some action directly.
Its criterion consists of a specific ‘calculus’ or ‘equation:’ one can assess if an action is moral or not by creating a rational model in which that action is no longer individual and accidental but universal and necessary. Such actions can be considered moral only if the model is consistent, i.e., only if one can think of a nature involving them as its operating laws.
Therefore you cannot know a priori what actions are moral or not; you must calculate their moral coefficient. In contrast, by attempting to ground morality in an ideal human nature that had to be realized, ancient morality could recommend adequate actions to actualize that nature.
Kant holds that the simplicity of the human I does not imply its immortality, or any other metaphysical attribute, as Descartes had thought. On the contrary, this simplicity was a source of dialectical errors.
The transcendental I was for him an empty faculty whose single trait was to produce logical operations in the form of judgments. The best developed knowledge of his age was Newtonian physics. And this knowledge consisted of a set of propositions (read judgments) about nature that involved a lot of mathematical calculus. It was indisputable knowledge and no longer speculation. What made it into such knowledge was precisely the use of mathematics.
This led Kant to maintain that one can evaluate the scientific character of a type of knowledge by assessing how much mathematics it involves: ‘I assert, however, that in any special doctrine of nature there can be only as much proper science as there is mathematics therein,’ said Kant. For Kant, if there existed a human nature at all, it consisted of formal operations and not latent content that morality had to actualize.
Kant started his moral inquiry by acknowledging the moral precepts of his age. This happened because Kant considered that those precepts belonged to healthy common sense, i.e., to a practical way of living. They were a result of historical evolution found by trial and error. In these moral precepts, one could discern the activity of reason. They are the empirical facts from which, as with Newtonian science, one had to start to discover the much more deeply located rational foundation.
Thus, Kant no longer assumed the fallen condition of man in the usual sense, from which morality had to save man. Neither is the history of humanity for Kant a history of salvation. It is rather a history of progress, in which the operations of reason become increasingly clearer and more accurate. This happened with mathematics, with logic and with the knowledge of nature, as he explains in the Prefaces to his first Critique of Pure Reason.
If different types of knowledge are to become exact sciences in the course of this history, the aim of ethics as such a future ‘science’ consists, in Kant’s view, in finding the rational moral principles that sustain the human community. In other words, it must give a necessary reason why such precepts are legitimate, in the same way in which his theoretical philosophy showed why Newtonian physics is possible as science.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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