The Concept of Love in 17th and 18th Century Philosophy

Kant on: “Love God above all, and your neighbour as yourself

Kant on: “Love God above all, and your neighbour as yourself”1 Martin Moors, Catholic University of Leuven Hegel’s criticisms of Kant’s practical philosophy are based on, first, “the emptiness of the categorical imperative,”2 and, second, Kant’s doctrine of the postulates , especially the postulation of the existence of God.3 In the ‘Analytic’ of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant establishes the moral principle of the higher faculty of desire with regard to both its subjective and objective determination. There, Kant states in allegedly ‘empty’ terms the wellknown objective law of the universalizability of maxims and the subjective law of respect for this law. Furthermore, in the ‘Dialectic’ of the same work, Kant is puzzled, within his formal theory on morality, by the difficulty of reconciling the unconditioned object of all moral willing insofar as it must be formally subsumed under the categorical constraint of the moral law with the material conditions under which, for human beings, its completed (consummated) realization is possible in the actual world of nature. The antinomy between the pure will’s moral virtuousness and man’s natural desire for happiness is solved, by a transcendental deduction,4 on the basis of the idea that “there must be some onto245 1 Critique of Practical Reason (hereafter CrPrR) in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor, (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 207 (Ak. V, 83). Also in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, (hereafter referred to as Religion) translated and edited by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 158 (Ak. VI, 160–161). References to Kant’s works edited in the Akademie-Ausgabe (Ak.) are given parenthetically (volume number, pagination). 2 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, translated by Walter Cerf and H.S. Harris, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 81: “As freedom, Reason is supposed to be absolute, yet the essence of this freedom consists in being solely through an opposite. This contradiction, which remains insuperable in the system and destroys it, becomes a real inconsistency (reale Inconsequenz) when this absolute emptiness is supposed to give itself content as practical Reason and to expand itself in the form of duties.” 3 Id., p. 67: “[i]n the final stage of its development, Kant’s philosophy establishes the highest Idea as a postulate which is supposed to have a necessary subjectivity, but not that absolute objectivity which would get it recognized as the only starting point of philosophy and its sole content instead of being the point where philosophy terminates in faith.” 4 “[B]ecause the possibility of the highest good does not rest on any empirical principles, it follows that the deduction of this concept must be transcendental” (CrPrR, 231) (Ak. V, 113). 15_Boros_Moors.qxd 12/17/2007 2:55 PM Page 245 logical provision for such realization”.5 A mere empty formalism, on the one hand, and, a mere postulated ‘ontological provision’ as an object of faith, on the other hand, seem to Hegel to be major reasons for retreating from the standpoint of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Without entering into the philosophical details of Hegel’s arguments, or into the historical details of Fichte’s role in the development of Hegel’s understanding of Kant, I want to discuss in this paper two issues intrinsically related to the two objections raised by Hegel’s criticism. In the first part, I will criticize Hegel’s criticism of the so-called formalism and emptiness of the Kantian moral principle. The upshot of this criticism will provide the stimulant for my inquiry in the second part into the multi-faced, key-issue of love, both in its religious and ethical dimension, and to a critical assessment of Kant’s delineation of it. Finally, I will formulate some remarks concerning the metaphysical role of the ‘ontological (say theological) provision’ to which Kant appeals twice in his ethics of autonomy. 1. Love As The Content Of Kant’s Ethics Of Virtue The nervus demonstrationis that runs through the opening part of our investigation can most appropriately be brought to the fore by examining the important concept of love. In Kant’s moral philosophy the concept of love is a concept that does not, presumably, give an accidental content on a non-essential (merely anthropological) basis to the in-itself empty rational concept of duty.6 On...