Examples of perfectionism

Journal of Aesthetic Education

Volumn 48, Issue 3, 2014, Pages 5-27

  Guyer, Paul ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84907917066     PISSN: 00218510     EISSN: 15437809     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5406/jaesteduc.48.3.0005     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. As a recent volume has foregrounded; see Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups, ed. Naoko Saito and Paul Standish (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).
2. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3. All further references to this work will be cited in the text.
3. Paul Guyer, "Civic Responsibility and the Kantian Social Contract," in Recht - Geschichte - Religion: Die Bedeutung Kants für die Gegenwart, ed. Herta Nagl- Docerkal and Rudolf Langthaler (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004), 29.
4. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 113. All further references to this work will be cited in the text.
5. Here one cannot but think of Coleridge's definition of genius as the ability to recapture the innocence of perception and conception otherwise characteristic of childhood: "To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood"; see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, with his Aesthetical Essays, ed. by J. Shawcross, 2 vols., corrected. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 1:59.
6. Ted Cohen and I had the privilege of publishing Cavell's first piece about Emerson, "Thinking of Emerson," in our edited collection Essays in Kantian Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19892), 261-70;
7. it is reprinted in Stanley Cavell, Emerson's Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 10-19.
8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), general remark following §29, 5:267; 151.
9. See Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), especially chaps. 1-3.
10. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:41;
11. Practical Philosophy, 173.
12. Kant, Moral Philosophy: Collins's Lecture Notes, in Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 27:254; 49.
13. Kant, Moral Philosophy: Collins, 27:257;
14. Lectures on Ethics, 52.
15. Which probably do not reproduce the lectures that Kant actually gave in 1784- 85, which is the date that the Collins transcription carries, because, although Georg Ludwig Collins was a student at Königsberg that year, his notes do not match those transcribed by C. C. Mrongovius, who was also a student that year, but do match, virtually word for word, an earlier transcription by Johann Friedrich Kaehler from the summer of 1777 (see Immanuel Kant, Vorlesung zur Moralphilosophie, ed. Werner Stark [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004]), and were probably copied either from a set of notes similar to Kaehler's or a common source (similarly, Collins's transcription of Kant's lectures on anthropology was actually based on another set of notes that went back all the way to 1772-73).
16. Infact, Collins's transcription differs from Mrongovius's precisely on the issue of perfectionism, for, according to the latter notes, Kant repeated his usual criticism of perfectionism in 1784-85 rather than putting his own theory in that position (see Moral Philosophy Mrongovius, 29:626;
17. Lectures on Ethics, 244). But this does not affect the accuracy of Kant's classification of his own theory as a form of perfectionism in the Kaehler and Collins notes.
18. Kant, Moral Philosophy Collins, 27:344;
19. Lectures on Ethics, 125.
20. Kant, Moral Philosophy Collins, 27:346;
21. Lectures on Ethics, 126-27.
22. Kant, Naturrecht Feyerabend, 27:1321.
23. Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, §2, 4:428;
24. Practical Philosophy, 78.
25. Kant, Groundwork, §2, 4:437;
26. Practical Philosophy, 86.
27. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, Introduction, Section V.A, 6:387;
28. Practical Philosophy, 518.
29. Kant, Groundwork, §2, 4:429;
30. Practical Philosophy, 80.
31. Kant, Groundwork, §2, 4:433;
32. Practical Philosophy, 83.
33. Kant, Groundwork, §2, 4:436;
34. Practical Philosophy, 86.
35. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, "Doctrine of Virtue," §§14-15, 6:641;
36. Practical Philosophy, 562-63.
37. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, "Doctrine of Virtue," §13, 6:438;
38. Practical Philosophy, 560.
39. I say this in spite of Cavell's remark that "I anticipate here my sense that the featured four examples Kant presents after introducing the first formulation of the categorical imperative seem to me fantasies of essentially isolated, friendless people" (Cities of Words, 133). This may be, but Kant's examples in Section II of Groundwork, like his examples in Section I, have a strictly limited heuristic or argumentative function, in this case that of confirming the correctness of his formulations of the categorical imperative by showing that they give rise to the same four classes of duty - perfect and imperfect duties to self and others - that any common sense about morality recognizes (which is to say, the categories of duty, excluding what Kant regards as the nonsensical conception of duties to a creature without needs such as God, that Pufendorf and Baumgarten recognized).
40. Kant's more complete system of duties - I say "more complete" because a perfectionist cannot recognize the possibility of a complete system of duties - is presented in the Metaphysics of Morals, whose "Doctrine of Virtue" culminates with a lengthy discussion "On the Most Intimate Union of Love with Respect in Friendship" (§§46-47, 6:469-73;
41. Practical Philosophy, 584-88
42. and an appendix "On the Virtues of Social Intercourse" (§48, 6:473-74;
43. Practical Philosophy, 588. But I am going to focus here on Kant's treatment of marriage rather than friendship.
44. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, "Doctrine of Right," §25, 6:278;
45. Practical Philosophy, 427.
46. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, "Doctrine of Right," §26, 6:278;
47. Practical Philosophy, 428.
48. For further discussion of Kant on marriage, see Barbara Herman, "Could It Be Worth Thinking about Kant on Sex and Marriage?" in A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993), 49-67.
49. Kant, Groundwork, Section III, 4:452;
50. Practical Philosophy, 99.
51. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 808/B 836, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 678.
52. Kant, Groundwork, Section III, 4:446;
53. Practical Philosophy, 94.
54. See especially Critique of Practical Reason, 5:97-98;
55. Practical Philosophy, 218.
56. See Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, Versuch einer Moralphilosophie (1790)
57. Karl Leonhard Reinhold, "Erörterung des Begriffs von der Freiheit des Willens" (1792), in Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie, second series
58. both excerpted in Ma-terialen zu Kants "Kritik der praktischen Vernunft", ed. Rüdiger Bittner and Konrad Cramer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), 241-51 and 252-74;
59. Henry Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1906).
60. Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83.
61. Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Part One, 6:47;
62. Religion and Rational Theology, 91.
63. Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Part Two, 6:71;
64. Religion and Rational Theology, 111-12.
65. See Naoko Saito and Paul Standish, Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups, particularly Cavell's own contributions at 19-32 and 207-13
66. as well as that by Naoko Saito, "The Gleam of Light: Initiation, Prophesy, and Emersonian Moral Perfectionism," 170-85.
67. For an account of Kantian moral education as a lifelong (as well as social and cultural) enterprise, see Barbara Herman, "Training to Autonomy: Kant and the Question of Moral Education," in her Moral Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 130-53.
68. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part One, §109;
69. cited by Cavell and continued with Cavell's own remarks in "Philosophy as Education," in Saito and Standish, Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups, 207.
70. Cavell, "Philosophy as Education," in Saito and Standish, Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups, 209.
71. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 312.
72. To borrow a phrase from Onora O'Neill; see "The Power of Example," in her Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 165-86.
73. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:155-56;
74. Practical Philosophy, 263-65.
75. Published by Friedrich Theodor Rink in 1803, the year before Kant's death, edited by Rink from notes for a course on pedagogy that Kant had given four times, notes that are now lost. See "Translator's Introduction," in Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 434-36;
76. Robert Louden's translation of the Lectures on Pedagogy follows on 437-85.
77. Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy, 9:453-54;
78. Anthropology, History, and Education, 447-48.
79. Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy, 9:443;
80. Anthropology, History, and Education, 439.
81. Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy, 9:488;
82. Anthropology, History, and Education, 475.
83. Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy, 9:488-89;
84. Anthropology, History, and Pedagogy, 475-76.
85. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §28, 5:261; 145.
86. See, for example, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:402-3;
87. Practical Philosophy, 57.
88. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §59, 5:353-54; 227-28.