Pli 1 (Special Volume: Self-Cultivation):55-69 (
2016)
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Abstract
In this paper I argue that we find in Kant a more plausible alternative to
his transcendental conception of freedom. In the Metaphysics of Morals
in particular, we find a naturalistic conception of freedom premised upon
a theory of rational self-cultivation. The motivation for a naturalising
reading of Kant is two-fold. On the one hand, a naturalistic conception of
freedom avoids the charges levelled against Kant’s 'panicky metaphysics',
which both forces us to accept an ontologically extravagant picture of the
world and the self, and also commits us to understanding freedom in nonspatiotemporal
terms, thus excluding the possibility that the process of
becoming free is progressive. And second, on a naturalistic reading we
can repackage normativity back into Kant’s account of freedom, which
has seemed to scholars unacceptably absent. I explain how the process of
becoming free, on the naturalistic view, involves cultivating certain
'aesthetic preconditions of the mind’s receptivity to concepts of duty'.1
Happily, these conditions incur no unpalatable ontological penalties;
rather, they constitute an achievement of the rational aspect of the self.
Pointedly, this is not a self who is free only in virtue of having membership
in the noumenal realm. Rather, effortful self-development entails a
battle to become practically free, and thereby moral. The primary attraction
to this reading of Kant is that it describes freedom as a naturalistic
achievement, rather than a metaphysical given. Thus I show that by jettisoning,
or at least naturalising, the picture of noumenal selfhood we not
only find a theory that is poorer in panicky metaphysics, but much richer
in normative force.