Making Ourselves Intelligible—Rendering Ourselves Efficacious and Autonomous, without Fixed Ends

1. Introduction

Paul Guyer’s reading of the work by Stanley Cavell and Immanuel Kant on moral perfectionism is, I think, insightful, valuable and sympathetic, and his critique of Stanley Cavell is nuanced and considerate. He argues in “Examples of Perfectionism,” the previous article in this journal, that “Kant offers a fuller example of what Stanley Cavell calls Emersonian perfectionism, … than Cavell himself has recognized even in his most sympathetic account of Kant” (5). Guyer argues, moreover, “that there is a deep affinity between the views of moral education with which Kant and Cavell accompany their examples of moral perfectionism, in that each thinks that examples of the possibility of actually living a moral life in the face of the inexorable imperfection of the human condition play a central role in moral education” (5) and finally that “the process of moral education [in both Kantian and Cavellian/Emersonian terms] is never ending and never ended” (5), that is, “we can progress toward our ideal but never fully attain it” (7). It seems, however, that Cavell too recognizes that the views of Kant influence his thoughts perhaps more than he himself acknowledges. He has said, “I’m always amazed to find, to discover, how often Kant is in the background of my thoughts.”¹

I argue also that there are similarities between the thoughts of Cavell and Kant and that Kant offers a fuller version of moral perfectionism than perhaps Cavell himself has acknowledged. Further, the principles of practical reason are constitutive of human agency, and we cultivate our judgment and ourselves as moral persons through the use of examples.² Kant and Cavell both seem to agree that the use of examples is inevitable for the cultivation of our judgment and ourselves, even though they seem to think differently about the status and functions of principles for rendering ourselves autonomous. I argue with Christine Korsgaard³ and Andrews Reath⁴ that we exercise our freedom by complying with principles of practical reason, and with Korsgaard that their function is not merely to guide and describe but also to unify ourselves as agents.⁵ I argue too that the practical aspect of our reason functions not merely to render us efficacious and autonomous, capable of preserving and promoting the “human capacities to choose and realize particular ends,”⁶ but also to transcend the limitations of our understanding through the preservation and promotion of the free play between our imagination and understanding. Rendering ourselves autonomous, when we comply with the principle of autonomy—namely, “the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law”⁷—suggests that we allow ourselves to search for ourselves, without fixed ends or conclusive ways, to understand others and ourselves in terms of sex, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or any other identity, and this we do when we utilize our rational powers in practice to think for ourselves, in the position of everyone else and consistently.⁸ Hence, making ourselves intelligible in Kantian terms also suggests that we are, or can become, lost and that specific ways of understanding ourselves—as examples of how we represent ourselves—are, in principle, open for revision and transformation and require, in the words of Guyer in the previous essay, the exercise of our freedom—”the substantive goal of moral perfectionism” (“Examples of Perfectionism,” 9)—for the use of our reason in education and elsewhere.

2. Cavellian Emersonian Perfectionism: Being Lost and Finding One’s Way

Reading Cavell is an adventurous and challenging experience. From it we can learn that human beings seem to be thrown into the world without any clear or definite inheritance or direction in substantial terms, that we cannot avoid being lost and finding our way, and that the process of finding one’s way is open ended. We can also learn that we have mixed and different kinds of experience in our predicament, such as disdain, despair, aversion, and hope, and that we do not have to submit ourselves to some practice, tradition, culture, religion, and/or ethnicity and have them determine how we...