Ethics Improper: The Embodied Ethics of Kant's Anthropology

Abstract

This essay examines a companion ethics to the rigorist ethics of Kant's ethical works “proper” by examining his “improper” ethics of the embodied, anthropological realm, and the central role for rhetoric and communication therein. Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View emphasizes social exchange and conversation in extended and striking ways. The importance of sociality does not merely concern cultivating taste, but additionally cultivates, in various ways, vitality of the body and the mind. Beyond mere entertainment or pleasant diversion, these interconnections between sociable exchange and the body and mind play a pivotal role for Kant's embodied ethics—reflecting a profound concern for the care of the self.

Keywords:

• Immanuel Kant
• Communication
• Rhetoric
• Ethics
• Anthropology

Notes

1. Several themes in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's (1958) New Rhetoric are unmistakably Kantian: the distinction between persuasion and conviction, the universal audience as a mental concept, the relation between the particular and the universal, and the eschewal of empirical methods as a basis for moral principles, among others. Cf. Ray, J. W. (1978). Perelman's Universal Audience. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 64(4), 361–375. Burke, although sui generis, highlights important readings of Kant at two key points. In Grammar of Motives (Burke, 1945), Burke shows how Kant works through the problems in the First Critique, namely “where the point arrived at transcended the point of departure,” towards the focus of the Second Critique (p. 70). Burke linguistically transforms the problems and contradictions in Kant towards the effort of moving from an account of motion to an ethics of freedom and action (the domain of dramatism). In Language as Symbolic Action (Burke, 1966), Burke's “Dramatistic Introduction to Kant” similarly focuses on the ground of action, this time by looking at the way in which Kant works through a negative to a positive conception of moral action, grounded in duty and respect for the moral law. Robert Wess (1996) identifies this particular reading “as Burke's point of departure for his reorientation of dramatism” (p. 232).

2. How much transcendentalism Habermas maintains, not to mention the distinctions often drawn between the earlier and later Habermas, certainly sustains continued discussion. Nevertheless, Habermas (1992, p. 98) substantially works and reworks Kant throughout his oeuvre featuring ethics and communication always of primary concern. In an interview, he declares “there is, if you will, just a bit of Kant in me”. Several commentators find more than a bit—for example, the significant other alluded to in Tracy Strong and Frank Sposito's “Habermas's Significant Other” (Strong & Sposito, 1995) is none other than Kant.

3. Adorno's (2000) reading of Kant in Problems in Moral Philosophy emphasizes how the insistence upon the pure principle of morality is underscored by the performance of its very impossibility. Adorno identifies this “peculiar Janus-face of Kantian philosophy” and how this, rather than some neat resolution, forms a rupture “at the very source of his practical philosophy” (p. 47). Kantian philosophy brings to the forefront the crucial problem of action, “the difficulty that our practical philosophy cannot really be separated from experience in any absolute way because it is related to our actual actions, which are inevitably concerned with the material of experience” (p. 69). As such, Adorno finds that the proper is always already infiltrated with the improper, to put this in terms of the ethical bifurcation at work here.

4. In his indispensable biography of Kant, Kuehn systematically shows how the humorless, stolid portrait of Kant is partly distortion, partly derived from the Romantics, and partly due to an overemphasis on his final decade. For example, Kuehn (2000, p. 155) explains that rigorous and unyielding punctuality was not really of Kant's nature, and was instead the character of one of his friends Joseph Green.

5. Note: The terminology of pragmatic does not exactly match up with the cut lines in GMM that lead us to APPoV. In the Groundwork Kant separates moral investigation into the two routes of metaphysical and practical. However, given that the realm of the empirical cannot be practical in the very technical sense of the Groundwork and Critique of Practical Reason (for practical within the critical project is the realm of action, only insofar as acting from duty, a notion divested of anything empirical), the practical anthropology mentioned in the Groundwork and the pragmatic anthropology of the Anthropology seem to overlay one another. My reasoning for this connection, despite seeming terminological difference, is that since anthropology is necessarily within the empirical realm, it cannot be practical in the critical sense.

6. This work was actually a public oration delivered in Latin at the close of his first term as Rector of the University of Königsberg.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

G. L. Ercolini

Gina Ercolini (Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University) is an Assistant Professor in the Program of Speech Communication and Rhetoric at the University of South Carolina