THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Practical Reason and the Metaphysics of Human Dignity: A Dialogue between Christian Personalists and Kantian Liberalism A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of Politics School of Arts and Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy © Copyright All Rights Reserved By Gustavo Adolfo P. D. Santos Washington, D.C. 2013 Practical Reason and the Metaphysics of Human Dignity: A Dialogue between Christian Personalists and Kantian Liberalism Gustavo Adolfo P. D. Santos, Ph.D. Director: David J. Walsh, Ph.D. This dissertation aims to correct the critical interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics and ethics developed by Thomistic thinkers as part of their critique of liberal politics, an interpretation that was adopted by Christian personalists such as Karol Wojtyla. According to the Thomistic interpretation, Kant’s transcendental idealism negates traditional realistic metaphysics, and consequently the traditional ethics based on the guidance of the human will by the intellect’s grasp of the teleological structure of reality or the created order of ends. This implies the construction of a subjectivist, formalist, and proceduralist ethics based on a radical notion of individual autonomy that is at the basis of the modern liberal and secular state. In contrast to this view, which is shared by some influential Neo-Kantian thinkers, this dissertation will argue that Kant is more adequately understood as proposing a different kind of metaphysics, based on the primacy of the practical use of reason. Once cognition is understood to be restricted to objects of possible (theoretical) experience and traditional “dogmatic” metaphysics is rendered impossible, a new sort of metaphysics must be primarily moral and found through the participation of human beings in the moral law as pure practical reason. Thus, in Kant’s concept of the unconditionally good will (that grounds the categorical imperative) the idea of duty for duty’s sake translates for sensible beings the moral priority of the constitution of the good as an existential participation in the order of being. In this way, teleology is not negated but has its innermost moral ground disclosed. Kant also recovers the moral core of faith in God and in the immortality of the soul, whose characterization as postulates of practical reason points to their metaphysical status beyond the fixities of empirical being rather than to a doubtful claim about their existence. Finally, autonomy of reason, or the self-legislation of morality, is understood as the only proper instantiation in rational beings of an order that is primarily moral and thus not reducible to the attraction of the will by external objects. By choosing autonomously, i.e. morally, human beings display their dignity as participants in a rational, supersensible nature that can ground their political relations on more than mere isolated subjectivity or willfulness. This dissertation by Gustavo Adolfo P. D. Santos fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in political theory approved by David J. Walsh, Ph.D., as Director, and by Claes G. Ryn, Ph.D., and Stephen F. Schneck, Ph.D. as Readers. ___________________________________ David J. Walsh, Ph.D., Director __________________________________ Claes G. Ryn, Ph.D., Reader __________________________________ Stephen F. Schneck, Ph.D., Reader ii To Cristiane, João Pedro, Antônio, and Teresa. iii “Duty!... what origin is there worthy of you, and where is to be found the root of your noble descent which proudly rejects all kinship with the inclinations, descent from which is the indispensable condition of that worth which human beings alone can give themselves?”1 “Man as the person both lives and fulfills himself within the perspective of his transcendence. Is it not freedom, obligation, and responsibility which allows us to see that not only truthfulness but also the person’s surrender to truth in judging as well as in acting constitute the real and concrete fabric of the personal life of man?”2 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 73 (KpV, 5:86). 2 Karol Wojtyła, The Acting Person, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Boston: Reidel, 1979), p. 181. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Christians and liberal philosophy........................................................................................ 1 Liberalism and human dignity: a Kantian heritage ............................................................. 6 The Catholic case against Immanuel Kant.................................................................... 7 A different way to read Kant – a summary of this dissertation central objectives ........... 10 Outline of the dissertation ................................................................................................. 13 Chapter I: Thomistic Personalism and Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ ..................................... 16 Introduction: the Neo-Thomistic Critique of Modern Philosophy ................................... 16 A Caveat: the Neo-Thomistic revival’s pluralism ............................................................ 21 The traditional Thomistic interpretation of Kant: a survey .............................................. 24 Cardinal Désiré Mercier .............................................................................................. 24 Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange ................................................................................. 27 Jacques Maritain ......................................................................................................... 30 Karol Wojtyła.............................................................................................................. 35 The Thomistic view of ethics and the relationship between will and reason ................... 44 The personalist view ......................................................................................................... 45 The dilemmas of The Acting Person ................................................................................ 51 Consciousness as the space where the person is constituted ...................................... 52 The human person: personal by nature? ..................................................................... 55 Freedom and morality: truth and autonomy................................................................ 58 Romano Guardini .............................................................................................................. 64 W. Norris Clarke, S.J. ....................................................................................................... 69 Reading Kant in the existential key of the person ............................................................ 72 Chapter II: Kant’s new proposal of a moral metaphysics……………………………………… 75 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 75 The critical project: Kant’s attempt to rescue metaphysics from absolute idealism, skepticism, and the contradictions of dogmatism ............................................................. 77 Contra Hume, Descartes, and Berkeley: the distinctiveness of transcendental or formal idealism ........................................................................................................... 79 The critique of pure reason as a propaedeutic for a practical metaphysics ...................... 84 The Critique as Kant’s Defense of Morality against Instrumental Reason ................ 86 Metaphysics based on the primacy of the practical .......................................................... 91 Reason as unifying and regulative .............................................................................. 94 The meaning of the primacy of reason in its practical use ......................................... 97 The good will as pure practical reason: a key to understanding the ultimate ground of morality ........................................................................................................................... 101 A critique of some interpretations of the good will found in the literature .............. 102 v Kant’s critique of the teleological grounding of morality: an inverted order of priority .................................................................................................................. 107 Towards a metaphysics of morals: the ultimate source of morality in the will as pure practical reason. ............................................................................................ 110 Law as a symbol for participation in the order of Being ................................................ 118 Chapter III: The postulates of practical reason according to the priority of morality: reclaiming the moral sources of religious experience................................................................. 127 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 127 Kant’s methodological strictures on knowledge about