Professor Predrag Cicovacki (USA)
The Problem of Moral Authority in Kant and Post-Kantian Ethics

Session 3: Postmodernism as a Crisis of Moral Authority (Lecture)

Kant's approach to the problem of moral authority is based on two fundamental assumptions. The first is that we lack any direct insight into the ultimate nature of moral principles; despite all rational efforts, there is always something incomprehensible about the ultimate principles since with them we leave the territory of rational knowledge and, at least to a certain extent, have to make a leap of faith.

Kant's second assumption is that in our search for the ultimate principles of orientation we are driven by a powerful self-interest. Kant speaks mainly about speculative and practical interest, and by the latter he does not imply a personal, selfish interest. Indeed, he believes in the universality of human interest, and one of the crucial questions for the proper assessment of Kant's ethics deals with how to spell out the nature of such universal interest. The most tempting way would be to turn away from the ideal noumenal world and focus on its phenomenal counterpart, to direct our look not above but below.

If Kant's ambitious attempt to provide an adequate conception of moral authority turns out to be illusory, this may be because there is something unsatisfactory about his underlying assumptions. Perhaps we should retain only one of them and develop it in a more consistent, or more radical, way than Kant does. We will consider two such attempts. One of them will focus on the first assumption and radicalize it; it neglects the phenomenal world and redirects us toward the ideal and noumenal aspects of reality. Although we find variations of this approach in many nineteenth and twentieth century writers and intellectuals, such as Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schweitzer, Jung, or Berdyaev, it will be instructive to consider how Dostoevsky understands this assumption. Dostoevsky's central point is that a significantly larger leap of faith is needed than the one allowed by and recommended by Kant. He is firmly convinced that humanism has as its inevitable goal a self-deification of man, and that, as such, it is powerless to find a genuine solution to the ensuing tragedy of humankind. He never presented his views in any systematic order, but they are most decisively expressed in his last novel, perhaps the greatest novel ever written, The Brothers Karamazov .

The second and more common attempt will, by contrast, reject the first assumption and focus on the proper understanding of self-interest; it will focus on man as living in and belonging to the phenomenal aspect of reality. We will see how this attempt leads the further development of modernity into the now prevailing attitude of postmodernism.

Recommended Literature (in order of importance for this lecture)

• Predrag Cicovacki, Between Truth and Illusion: Kant at the Crossroads of Modernity (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), chs. 8-9, “Man as the Measure of All Things,” and “A Moment of Truth,” pp. 121-156.
• Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1968), ch. 1, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” pp. 17-40.
• Iakov E. Golosovker, Dostoevskii i Kant (Moscow, Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk, 1963).
• Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992).