Thursday, January 10, 2013

Happiness, Skill, Discipline, Morality

According to #83 of the Critique of Judgment, all of the following: the "ultimate purpose" of Nature is "culture"; "happiness", i. e. the sum total of satisfactions of all desires, is not the ultimate purpose of Nature; culture combines "skill" and "discipline"; and, discipline "consists in the liberation of the will from the despotism of the desires".  Systematized, these four yield the following structural relations: 1. Happiness is a means to Culture, i. e. because the latter is the ultimate purpose of the rest of Nature; 2. The fundamental natural psychological drive in an individual human is towards skilled activity; and 3. Pure Practical Reason, as the source of the discipline of skilled activity, is a natural principle.  However, none of these relations are entailed in the actual settled version of his Moral doctrine, especially insofar as in the latter, the liberation of the will from the despotism of desires is the effect of a non-natural principle, and Happiness is an end that is subordinate to Virtue only.  These discrepancies are further evidence of an ad hoc supervention in Kant's doctrine, on methodically generated structures of his system, by extrinsic Deontological and/or Theological influences.

No comments:

Post a Comment