Referring to the last posting, I made the point that the
Protestant Reformation contributed to the strain in philosophic thinking that
places our ability to “see” reality as a personal, subjective endeavor. That is, our minds shape what we
perceive. I attempted to explain
Immanuel Kant’s contribution to this development, and this posting will add to
that explanation. But first, let me add
a few more thoughts to this Protestant thinking. With this turn toward subjectivism, we can better
understand those religions’ claims that the road to salvation was not via
outward behavior, a social component of life, but through faith, a mental
state. The former has a social context;
the latter has a solitary, internal context.
The Protestant way tends toward the lonely. I accept this, but with a great proviso; my
take of Protestant religions is their bias toward congregational structures,
while Catholic structure is hierarchical with a well-defined vertical
organization. While both are social, to
me the Protestant form is much more social.
Late in life, my mother took up membership in a Baptist
congregation. Most of her life she was a
Catholic. She sent me to Catholic school
and, from time to time, she attended Sunday mass. Those various Catholic churches never made
any effort to contact her or to make her feel part of a parish, much less a
community. This was true in churches in
New York City and in Miami, Florida.
Yet, in her old age – and I don’t know how it came about – she did join the
Baptist group and they were actively engaged in engaging her. She loved the minister and was involved with
several of the church’s activities. She became
an active reader of the Bible and was disposed to talk to me about religious
issues. I suppose I was a source of some
regret in that she was not able to convert me – oh well. So, this notion of religious belief being so
individually defined and such a lonely pursuit on the part of Protestants, I
find less than accurate. But its
theology does feature this emphasis on faith – by the way, my Catholic training
belittled this feature as a way to justify not meeting one’s social
responsibilities, especially when it comes to taking care of the disadvantaged;
it was seen as just one big rationalization.
Be that as it may, what else can we observe about Kant’s
thoughts on subjectivism? I pointed out
that Kant wrote about the mind’s function in forming the information our senses
observed. It did so, according to Philip
Selznick,[1] by
utilizing a priori concepts. Those
objects are perceived, and then they conform to these concepts. It was not Kant’s intention to initiate this
level of subjectivism we have today, but he did it in three ways. One, he argued that the mind provides the
elements of necessity (cause and effect) and order (space and time). These are the a priori concepts. Our ideas
are derived from these mental machinations and, therefore, they are derived
objects. This operates as follows: we perceive and then we translate according
to our past history and these wired-in concepts. This permits us to impose our own order on
any experience based on our unique past experiences and predispositions.
Two, we, through this history of perceptions and
“translations” form theories about reality, about things-in-themselves. The theories are postulates that take on a
metaphysical quality. They are not the
real, but a representation of the real. We
strive to represent the real; we just can’t totally, but in the effort, we are
tied to the real. According to Kant, a
compromise is formed between the real and our effort to see the real. This ties us to reality; we are not out and
about forming whatever view of the real our fancy happens to want. We all, in our view of what is out there,
have to accept unpleasant aspects.
Sometimes, we find out later that things aren’t as bad as we first
perceived them to be and a newer postulated theory can take the place of the
more distasteful image or belief.
Unfortunately, this can happen in reverse. But the point is that in either case, we are
dealing with our versions of the truth, not the truth itself. The good news is that whatever we perceive,
there is a real out there and that permits regularity in the course of our
lives.
And three, and I believe this to be his most important
argument, moral decision-making, due to the above mental functions, has to be
autonomous. By that I mean that it can’t
be coerced. We can’t be moral out of a
fear of punishment but because it is rational to be so. This rationality is based on a commitment to
life itself. Let me quote Selznick on
this point:
For humans, to choose life is to
choose rationality. It follows that
there can be no morality without the freedom to formulate rules and make
decisions in accordance with rational principles.
The logic of morality, as Kant
understood it, combines objective and subjective truth. Moral choices are objective because rational
judgment leads inexorably to conclusions that are independent of personal
dispositions or beliefs. On the other
hand, moral choices are subjective in that they are freely made by
duty-regarding persons who form their own judgments and make their own
commitments. Kant had no doubt about the
objective basis of moral rules, but his embrace of self-determination had the more
decisive effect on nineteenth-century thought (p. 65).
I would also add the twentieth-century as well. Questions, consequently, would revolve around
what it meant to be genuine, free, and able to make moral choices. Let me conclude by pointing out the
consequence of this contribution: A
result was a more vigorous concern with whether an individual is detached from
his social surroundings by being ensconced in some moral abstraction. Rationality would demand a level of
concreteness and how moral choices affect the human condition. We have the sense of moral dilemmas among
values of commitment and duty – good values, at times, conflict in real
life. One can expect a serious level of
commitment to do good – “good will” – even if dealing with reality, one might
be bound to offend a good value to pursue a more important one. Choices in such cases can be very
difficult. And, in this, the call is for
fidelity and commitment to the good as well as rationality.
[1] Selznick, P.
(1992). The moral commonwealth: Social
theory and the promise of community.
Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
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