This April 22 marks three hundred years since Kant’s birth and the Revista de Occident has dedicated its number 515 to this commemoration, reproducing the reflections that Ortega published in its pages a century ago and more than five hundred issues before that. There he says that he decides to live within Kantian thought for a decade and allows himself to doubt that modernity can be understood without doing something similar, because Kant knows how to condense the springs that move the European cultural machinery from the Renaissance onwards and Ortega wants to contemplate his own time. from such a privileged perspective. For this reason, without stopping to visit Berlin, Ortega settled in Marburg, to understand the ins and outs of Kantian Critiques by walking along the banks of the Lahn River.
After reading Rousseau, Kant considers him the Newton of the moral world, for having discovered a law of universal gravitation within the political sphere. Hume’s methodological skepticism helps him carry out his Copernican revolution in the theory of knowledge and give dogmatic pretensions a death blow. From Adam Smith he takes his idea about an invisible hand, only now it does not regulate the market, but his own philosophy of history. The mechanism of unsociable sociability makes us display our natural dispositions and allows us to trust in a hidden plan of nature, which can also use the names of providence or destiny, although in the end we ourselves must write the script of our own film.
Kant understands that ideas can play tricks on us when it comes to knowing with transcendent pretensions, but that they are a magnificent guide when it comes to directing our will, as long as we intend to exercise our freedom without harming others. A genuinely republican constitution would require angelic beings to function perfectly, but it is always possible to establish laws that are assumed even by a people made up of demons. Of course, they must apply to anyone under the principles of freedom, equality and independence or civil emancipation, as Kant points out for example in ‘The Metaphysics of Customs’ or ‘Theory and Practice’.
Enthralled by Spinoza’s ‘Ethics demonstrated according to geometric order’, Kant seeks a formula similar to that of mathematics that serves as a proof of nine for our moral criteria. That is why he proposes an ethical formalism, where each person must autonomously generate his own moral guidelines, asking his conscience if the chosen maxim of action would work for anyone, at any time and under any circumstances. The point is not to treat people, nor ourselves, as mere instrumental means. With this, our will would be good in itself and not based on its achievements or success.
As pointed out in paragraph 40 of the third ‘Criticism’, it would be about thinking for oneself without prejudice, putting ourselves in the shoes of others (to use Belén Altuna’s happy expression) and acting coherently. It is very comfortable for someone to decide for us and guide us in a paternalistic way, as Kant points out in ‘What is Enlightenment?’ He calls that option a guilty minority. We allow ourselves to be manipulated by the miracle workers on duty, as if we needed tutors to absolve us of our responsibilities. Being accountable for our actions is what makes us properly human and not assuming that burden means as much as morally resigning from our humanity. The role of philosophy would be to occupy the seats of the left wing in any area, to subject anything or opinion to criticism, starting with its own hypotheses, which are absolutely provisional until they are improved.
Kant understands that, when we assume any heteronomous code, ethics leaves the forum. If we abide by divine commandments as the basis of our ethics, we will act like puppets pulled by the strings of fear of punishment and hope for reward. That is why he defines God as the idea of ??an ethical-practical and self-legislating reason. His holy will is an ideal to be constantly pursued without ever achieving. God cannot be a moral agent because he lacks the tension between passions and virtuous action. In any case, even God would have to submit to the ethical principle of not instrumentalizing anyone, as indicated by a parenthesis added in the second edition of his ‘Critique of Practical Reason’.
The Kantian moral hero is actually a virtuous atheist like Spinoza, as another parenthesis points out, this time in the Critique of Discernment. Despite seeing how barbarism triumphs and the suffering that usually torments those who least deserve it, Spinoza remains faithful to his principles, as Diderot also points out to a marshal perplexed because an atheist can behave well without fear of punishment in life. eternal. Our moral conscience is the supreme instance of our ethical rulings and no supposedly heavenly voice can pretend to have greater authority. Consulting with his conscience, Abraham should have realized that Jehovah could not truly ask him to sacrifice his daughter without waiting for his hand to be stayed.
The due obedience that Eichmann alleges in his Jerusalem trial and gives rise to Hannah Ahrendt speaking to us about the trivialization of evil, because monsters are not needed to commit the greatest atrocities, has no place within the Kantian approach well updated by Javier Muguerza with his imperative of dissent. We can always resist supporting a chain of command that imposes atrocities and injustices on us, which of course entails assuming that responsibility and bearing the consequences. In view of the international panorama, Kantian cosmopolitanism deserves to be remembered. It is worth rereading the theses of his essay ‘Towards perpetual peace: A philosophical design’. They continue to propose horizons that require moral politicians and not political moralists. Certainly, Kant continues to be a good interlocutor when planning for the best conditions of possibility for a coexistence presided over by co-liberty and liberquality. Without the philosopher of Königsberg our cultural history and the Age of Enlightenment would have been very different.
Roberto R. Aramayo is a historian of moral ideas at the IFS-CSIC and author of ‘Kant: Between morality and politics’.
