[lit-ideas] Re: Kant: Ethnic Pride, Black Truck Style
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:52:28 -0230
A very interesting and important thread transpired over the weekend of August
3-4 between McCreery, Wager, Enns and "The Sage of the Rock." All this while I
was in the throes of grading final exams and papers. I now emerge free,
footloose and (relatively) unscathed.
The question was: What did Kant mean by "autonomy"?
And more importantly, what should WE mean by it if we posit it as an
educational and philosophical ideal for multiculturally pluralist democracies.
I would like to respond to that discussion and am wondering whether I have all
the relevant posts on this thread. Under the thread "Ethnic Pride, Black Truck
Style" I have:
1. Aug.3: Enns to Okshevsky
2. Aug.4: Enns to McCreery
3. Aug.4: Wager to Enns
4. Aug.4: Enns to Wager
Have there been other posts on this thread that I have missed?
The general issue seems to be whether "autonomy" (for Kant and/or for "us") is
primarily a predicate of an agent's will or motive, or essentially a feature of
action itself. If the latter, then the autonomous agent is one who acts in
accordance with a criterion of publicity (as per Kant's later political
writings.) The Wagerian view, in keeping with Kant's moral theory, understands
autonomy to comprise a property of an agent's will or motive rather than, as
per the Ennsian take, the action itself.
As Phil has nicely put it, "This is all pretty slippery." And indeed it is. But
so is the very idea of a multiculturally pluralist constitutional democracy
(with a dash of Nussbaumian/Arendtian cosmopolitanism sprinkled in.)
What is also intriguing about this thread is that no other contributions to it
have been made after Saturday, Aug.4. Is it that nobody else finds these issues
philosophically intriguing, pedagogically valuable, or at least politically
important for all of us today? This issue surely must be open to "discourse" in
Habermas's sense.
Returning to his wonderously sun-splashed deck in the east end,
Walter O.
MUN
Quoting Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> The Sage of The Rock wrote:
>
> "The claim that "one is committed apriori ...." is somewhat ambiguous.
> Only for a rationally autonomous agent is such a commitment understood
> to be apriori (i.e, necessary and universal across all
> discourse/justification). The heteronomous individual, open to
> persuasion by epistemically irrelevant grounds - i.e., religion,
> personal preference, self-interest, consensus and tradition - is
> unable to differentiate between, in Habermas's lexicon, being
> "convinced" on the basis of reasons and being "persuaded" on the basis
> of specifically agent-relative, non-generalizable considerations."
>
> At least in Kant, there are no purely autonomous agents. Following
> Heidegger, we are given a world and all experience is structured by
> that world. Back to Kant, there are autonomous activities and clearly
> the goal is to maximize the number of these activities but I think it
> is fairly obvious that for Kant no person can act only according to
> these activities. In fact, following Wittgenstein, perhaps the most
> interesting activities are those that require heteronomy. The claim
> that any perspective may contribute to the social good is banal but
> what is interesting is working out if or how John's black truck crew
> contribute.
>
> Watching for black helicopters,
> Following and followed,
>
> Phil Enns
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