On Ladd's Review of Kant's Political PhilosophyAuthor(s): Patrick RileySource: Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Nov., 1984), pp. 597-600Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191501 .

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ON LADD'S REVIEW OF KANT'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

PA TRICK RILEY University of Wisconsin-Madison

_ I UCH AS I RESPECT John Ladd's Kant scholarship and appreciate his fine translation of the Rechtslehre, I see little hope

that we will agree on the interpretation of Kant's political thought. Because, however, he builds up his generally unfavorable review of my Kant's Political Philosophy by amassing particular faults, that general judgment may be softened if most of these particular defects turn out to be nonexistent.

Ladd begins, wholly correctly, by asserting that I have offered a "teleological reading" of Kant. I did so because I take Kant's central political claim to be the notion that "true politics cannot take a single step without first paying homage to morals"; but that claim is problematical because (external and coercive) "public legal justice" cannot "pay homage" to the (internal and uncoerced) "good will" that is the sole "unqualified" moral good. But if public legal justice could, through "legal" incentives such as self-love, slowly realize (by "infinite approximation") morally valuable "objective ends" such as eternal peace, even in the absence of motiva moralia, then Kantian politics could be seen as instrumental to moral ends. And one can (as I did) tie this notion of politics as the legal realization of moral ends to Kant's more general teleology in the Critique of Judgment, which attempts to link all Kantian "ends": the "persons" who are "objective ends, never to be acted against," in the Grundlegung, the reason-ordained "objective ends" that we "ought to have" in Religion, the "nature" that must be teleologically interpreted by finite human understanding in Judgment Part II, and the art that manifests "purposiveness without purpose" in Judgment Part I. The Critique of Judgment may, as I asserted, integrate all "ends" into a general teleology that provides Kant's much desired architectonic "unity of reason."

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 12 No. 4, November 1984 597-600 ? 1984 Sage Publications, Inc. 597

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The first particular fault with which I am taxed is that of introducing "a technical-sounding term, telos, in place of Kant's own word Zweck." "As far as I can recall," Ladd says, "the German word is never mentioned in the book." But I do not "introduce" a "technical" term foreign to Kant; the entire second half of the Third Critique is called "Critique of Teleological Judgment," and "teleological" is simply the adjectival form of telos. In Uber den Gebrauch Teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie, which I cited, Kant himself calls morality "eine reine praktische Teleologie" ("a pure practical teleology")-not surprisingly, in view of his notion that persons are objective "ends" who must never be treated as mere means to relative ends. (This also disposes of the charge that "no reference is ever made to the German texts themselves" because I cite not only Uber den Gebrauch in the original, but also German passages from Pure Reason, the Grundlegung, Judgment, and the Reflexionen on anthropology and law, using both the Cassirer and Prussian Academy editions.) As for the notion that the term Zweck "never" appears, a more careful look at pages 36, 46, 65, 144, 169, 170, and 175 will show that Kant's German term appears in a variety of forms: the person as Zweck in sich selbst (end in himself) on p. 46, the Reich der Zwecke (Kingdom of Ends) as Kant's moral ideal on p. 144, eternal peace as the Endzweck (final end) of politics on pp. 169-170, zweckmdssigkeit (purposiveness) as necessary to "finite" understanding in interpreting nature through "purposes" and "functions" on p. 65, und so weiter.

Had I mentioned Zwecke more than seven times-that is seven more than "never,"' after all-I would have run afoul of Ladd's second charge, that of "argument by quotation" ("over five per page," one is told). But I quoted extensively precisely to avoid a third charge: that of "attribut- ing" arguments groundlessly. Ladd urges that I "attribute" to Beck the notion that Kant's moral philosophy is "deepened Rousseau"; but that is a quotation from Beck's Commentary on Practical Reason, not an "attribution." And I do not "attribute" to Hegel the charge that Kantian ethics are "abstract," "formal" and "'contentless": I quote Glauben und Wissen and the Philosophie des Rechts to that effect. One way or the other, then, I can scarcely simultaneously do nothing but quote and also merely "attribute" views to various Kant interpreters.

The fourth particular fault is that of "simply denying" Kant's ethical formalism in favor of finding moral content (e.g., objective ends). A close reading of my Chapter 3 shows that precisely through the constant quoting that is complained of I cite all of the passages from Practical

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Reason and Religion in which Kant urges that moral laws must be "formal," that they must "abstract" from all ends, all "matter. But I also point out Kant's simultaneous insistence on "objective ends," his claim that all the versions of the categorical imperative are "the same," though one version argues that persons are to be respected as objective ends and never used merely as means; and one cannot derive the notion of objective ends as being worthy of respect from the bare notion of formal universality. I spent many pages asking how Kant's "formalism" can be reconciled with his teleological notion of objective ends that we "ought to have"; this has nothing to do with "simply denying" the problem. Certainly it is my view that without objective ends that "limit" the pursuit of relative ends, Kantianism would suffer from the "contentless- ness" that Hegel alleges. But this was argued at length, and Hegel's charges were turned back.

This leads to the fifth particular charge, that Kant's Political Philosophy "does not address" the questions "why Kant uses ...the term Zweck...and what he means by it." It would assuredly be extraordinary if a book built around Kantian Teleologie did not "address" these points; but the charge is simply false. Chapter 3 argues at length that Kant, despite his "formalism," insists in the Tugendlehre that "if there were no ends" that are "by their very concept duties," a "categorical imperative would be impossible" and "the doctrine of morals would be destroyed." Is this ignoring why Kant uses ends, and what he means by them? And the whole of Chapter 4 deals with Judgment's argument that finite human understanding cannot interpret nature purely "mechani- cally" without an appeal to "purposes" and "functions," then elaborately contrasts Aristotle's "dogmatic" teleology in the Metaphysics and Physics with Kant's "critical" teleology. Is that ignoring why Kant uses ends, and what he means by them?

The sixth particular fault is that of making Kant into a "consequen- tialist," of forgetting that for Kant the person as an end in himself is "a very peculiar kind of 'end' indeed, for it is not something to be 'effected' or 'brought into being.' as are most ordinary ends, such as happiness." But I myself used up half a page to quote the passage from the Grundlegung in which Kant says that a person is an "independently existing end," not at all an ordinary end "to be effected." Why quote, against me, a passage that I cited in extenso, and indeed insisted on? Certainly I never called Kant a "consequentialist," or ever took him to be such; and the suggestion that I make Kant search after "benefits" and "utilities" ignores all those passages in which I rehearse Kant's radical

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rejection of Hlumean and Benthamite consequentialism. What I said is that Kantian republicanism and eternal peace can help to preserve persons (viewed as independently existing objective ends) even in the absence of good will and motiva moralia, but that is not "consequen- tialism" in any known sense.

The final particular fault is that of taking literally Kant's insistence that "objective ends" ought to limit our willing of "relative" ends, rather than converting an objective end into "something like a 'good reason' as it is used in contemporary ethical theory." Such a conversion might be necessary, to be sure, if Kant's notion of ends were problematical; but is it not fully intelligible to say that murder (as an example) treats the "rational nature" that is an independently existing "end in itself" as a mere means to a "relative" end (such as the desire to see an enemy dead)? If Kant spoke the language of "ends" and "means," that is presumably because he meant to. One recalls his "Open Letter on Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre": "Since some reviewers maintain that the Critique is not to be takenliterally ... because Kant's precise words, like Aristotle's, will kill the mind, I therefore declare again that the Critique is to be understood by considering exactly what it says."

Patrick Riley is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He did his graduate work at the London School of Economics (with Michael Oakeshott) and at Harvard University (with Judith Shklar, John Rawls, and Louis Hartz). He has published The Political Writing of Leibniz (Cambridge University Press), Will and Political Legitimacy: A Critical Exposition of Social Contract Theory in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel (Harvard University Press) and Kant's Political Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield), as well as numerous articles. He has just completed a new book, The General Will Before Rousseau, which deals with the political and moral thought of Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle, Bossuet, Fenelon, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.

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