Kant's consistency regarding the regime change in France

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 32, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 443-460

  Clewis, Robert R ^a  

^a Gwynedd Mercy University   (United States)

Author keywords

aesthetic judgment; enthusiasm; idea; Immanuel Kant; interest; republic; spectator

Indexed keywords

EID: 42149107207     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453706064019     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. References to Kant in this paper are to the volume and page of Kants gesammelte Schriften (KGS), edited by the Deutschen (formerly Koeniglichen Preussischen) Akademie der Wissenschaften, 29 vols (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902). Specific works cited are referred to by means of the following abbreviations:
2. ApH = Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (KGS 7). Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. V. Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).
3. KpV = Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (KGS 5). Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L. White Beck (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956).
4. KrV = Kritik der reinen Vernunft (KGS 3–4). Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin's Press, 1965).
5. KU = Kritik der Urteilskraft (KGS 5). The Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
6. MJ = Die Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre (KGS 6). The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, trans. J. Ladd (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).
7. MM = Die Metaphysik der Sitten (KGS 6). The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. Gregor, in Practical Philosophy, ed. M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
8. Obs = Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (KGS 2). Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. J. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960).
9. PP = Zum ewigen Frieden (KGS 8). Toward Perpetual Peace, trans. M. Gregor, in Practical Philosophy, ed. M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
10. SF = Der Streit der Fakultäten (KGS 7). The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. M. Gregor and R. Anchor, in Practical Philosophy, ed. M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
11. ‘An Old Question’ was apparently written in 1795, but it was published in 1798 in the Conflict. This means that Kant's interest in enthusiasm for the ends of the French Revolution must have carried on into 1798, even if a sober and even pessimistic assessment of the likely outcome of the revolution probably dates from 1795. See Conflict, editor's introduction, pp. 235–6.
12. Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. v.
13. H. S. Reiss, ‘Kant and the Right of Rebellion’, Journal of the History of Ideas 17, 2 (1956): 179–92 (179).
14. In a clever twist, Neiman rescues Kant by arguing that precisely because Kant bent to political pressure, we should not and need not take his inconsistency seriously. See Neiman, Unity of Reason, p. 121.
15. P. Riley, ‘On Kant as the Most Adequate of Social Contract Theorists’, Political Theory 1, 4 (1973): 450–71 (467).
16. Howard Williams, Kant's Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 209, 210.
17. For a discussion of affect in connection with sublimity, see Lara Denis, ‘Kant's Cold Sage and the Sublimity of Apathy’, Kantian Review 4 (2000): 48–73 (68).
18. Cf. ApH 7:252–65
19. and MM 6:407–8.
20. Enthusiasm inspired by the establishment of the republican form of government is not the only type of enthusiasm. Kant characterizes religious enthusiasm in the third Critique (KU 5:274).
21. See Henry E. Allison, Kant's Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 71, 248.
22. John Rawls, ‘Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy’, in Eckart Förster, Kant's Transcendental Deductions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 81–113 (p. 254).
23. See Neiman, Unity, pp. 121–2.
24. This maxim takes the form characterized by Henry Allison: ‘When in S-type situations, perform A-type actions.’
25. See Henry Allison, Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 89–90.
26. Williams, Kant's Political Philosophy, p. 204.
27. I translate Umwandlungen not as Mary Gregor's ‘revolutions’, but as (the less confusing) ‘rotations’, which Kant employs in the sense he did earlier in reference to planetary orbits around the sun (SF 7:83).
28. It is noteworthy that Kant writes the word ‘Enthusiasm’ in its anglicized form, reminiscent in general of the enthusiasm controversy in Protestant countries in the 17th and 18th centuries and of Locke and Shaftesbury in particular. See John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding, book IV, ch. XIX (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 697–706.
29. Cf. Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
30. ‘A Letter concerning Enthusiasm to my Lord —’, pp. 4–28.
31. For the opposing argument that the spectators will initiate similar revolutionary events, see Harry van der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1988), pp. 166–75.