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ARISTOTLE AND KANT
This lecture is meant to provide you with
a little background to better understand
the ethical theories of Aristotle and Kant,
which turn out to be much closer to each
other than the differences in their
scientific and philosophic views might
lead you to believe.
KANT
Everything in nature is determined.
The body is part of nature.
Therefore, everything bodily is determined.
(I.e. physical movements, emotions, and
desires.)
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Thus, Kant can say that our emotions and
desires don’t have moral worth because they
are not free.
The will is NOT part of nature. It is the
ability of our reason to form “maxims” or
principles of action.
The will is free. Hence, it CAN have moral
worth precisely because it is free.
The will is not part of nature, according to
Kant, because it’s part of our rational
faculties, which impose order upon the
perceptions of the senses, and by “nature” he
means the world of the senses, the physical
world.
This may sound weird, but Kant’s way of
thinking is part of a philosophical tradition
stemming from Plato, according to which
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the physical world is NOT the ultimate
reality.
In the form in which it appeared in the
period in which modern science arose (i.e.
since the seventeenth century), Kant’s view
is more problematic than Plato’s. In this
view the physical world is a vast machine in
which everything that happens is determined
by the physical laws of nature. Our minds
exist, but we don’t know how to connect
them with our bodies. Hence, it is called
“the mind-body dualism.”
Yes, it sounds weird, but is it any weirder
than biology professors refusing to say what
life is? As Keeton, the author of the biology
text I cited might say, “Hey, lemme alone.
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I’m a biologist, not a philosopher. How
should I know what life is? I’m only a poor
biologist.”
Perhaps you can see from this example that
the mind-body dualism isn’t something that
a few obscure philosophers thought up. It
pervades our thinking. It pervades our
science.
Another consequence of this view is that,
strictly speaking, animals are just machines.
So we can do with them what we want.
Now of course, the average person doesn’t
believe that, but the average person as well
as modern scientists still doesn’t know how
to overcome this dualism, and this puts them
at a disadvantage when arguing with people
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who don’t have scruples about wiping out
and otherwise messing up the environment.
Hence, when biology came to the fore
among the sciences in the nineteenth century
with Darwin and others, it had a materialist
view of the world that contradicted a more
“normal” view of biological organisms in
which we tend to regard them as more than
just machines.
The conclusion you might draw from this is
that, despite the wonders of modern science,
a lot of modern thinking is confused and
self-contradictory. That is a correct
conclusion. And for the most part, the
“philosophers,” that is, the philosophy
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professors, or “professional philosophers” as
they often call themselves, share this
confusion.
ARISTOTLE
There is no mind-body dualism in Aristotle
and biological organisms are not machines.
To say they are “alive,” according to him,
means that they have a principle of
organization and self-movement called the
psyché or “soul.” I put the English word
“soul” in quotation marks because it has
religious connotations, which Aristotle’s
term does not, but it’s the closest word we
have in English to translate his term. All
Aristotle meant was that the various
functions of biological organisms are not
separate components of a machine, but that
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together they comprise an organic whole
that functions as a unity. That unity is very
dependent on the different organs of the
body that comprise it, so that when the
organism dies, in Aristotle’s view, this unity
doesn’t survive.
The “soul” is the functional unity of the
basic bodily functions, and the mind is its
highest power. The mind too forms a unity
within the overall unity of the soul. Again I
emphasize that the mind is a power of the
soul, so the two are very closely connected.
The mind is the power of the soul by which
we think. The brain is the physical organ
where the mind is located, but the brain is
obviously part of the body and the mind is
part of the soul. Hence, to say that we have
“free will” (to use the modern term) means
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that the mind has the power of thinking and
of moving the body.
In this brief lecture I won’t go into the
details of Aristotle’s explanation of just how
the mind thinks, how it moves the body,
how Aristotle explains the nature of
consciousness, how he avoids the mindbody dualism that has plagued modern
philosophy AND modern science, and so on.
I trust you will be so kind as to take my
word that whether or not his explanation is
correct, he does have such an explanation
and Kant and the other modern philosophers
do not. Hence, Kant has to POSIT free will
and the mind’s ability to move the body, but
he has no way of explaining it. Of course
not—he thinks biological organisms are
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really machines! But I don’t want to belabor
this point.
Aristotle’s Ethics and Kant’s Ethics
The bottom line (for our discussion of
ethics) is that for Aristotle, unlike Kant, it’s
not just the will that is good and moral.
Aristotle doesn’t have to define morality
strictly in terms of moral laws like the
categorical imperative. We can have good
emotions and pleasures, and good feelings
toward each other, something like the higher
pleasures of Mill and Epicurus.
Aristotle DOES have moral commands or
principles or laws, based on the overarching
virtue of justice, but they arise out of our
nature as beings possessing reason. In other
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words, when we fully realize our nature as
animals possessing reason, our emotions and
desires and our reason TEND to be in
harmony with teach other.
The Bottom Line
Despite these fundamental differences,
based on their underlying scientific and
philosophical theories, their ethical theories
turn out to have more in common than they
are commonly understood to have. For
example, consider Kant’s perfect and
imperfect duties, or to use his alternative
terms for them, strict and meritorious duties.
Aristotle’s virtue of justice roughly
corresponds to Kant’s perfect or strict
duties, and the list of virtues that Aristotle
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provides roughly corresponds to Kant’s
imperfect or meritorious duties.
Hence—here is the shattering conclusion—
the behavior or lifestyle that each
recommends is fairly similar.
That statement immediately has to be
qualified a little. For one thing, Kant did not
understand Aristotle’s concept of ethical
virtue—believe it or not, he never read
Aristotle, who was out of favor in the time
when Kant lived—but WE can see the
similarity, even if Kant himself didn’t. Even
brilliant minds like Kant aren’t perfect. On
the other hand, we can appreciate Kant’s
brilliance more when we see how much he
did philosophically with the limited tools he
had to work with.