Arendt and Kant’s Categorical Imperative
William W. Clohesy
Hannah Arendt’s study of recent political movements and structures has a profoundly moral character. Totalitarianism, her premier topic of study, requires its subjects to reject all independent thought and responsible action concerning their state, its other members, and themselves—indeed, for human life on earth as a whole. Arendt persistently argued against uncritical, passive obedience toward regimes. She asserted instead that each human being upon entering the world offers a new beginning, for each person is unlike any other that has been or will be. The significance of placing moral responsibility for the world on each person is profound in its opposition to the indifference or opposition toward strong and thoughtful individuals typical of many recent and contemporary political forms such as totalitarianism, fascism, and what is today termed “neoliberalism.”
Two moral philosophers, Socrates and Immanuel Kant, stand out in Arendt’s writings above all others. Their closeness is seen in the place of public discourse in their thought on a full human life and in their approach to moral questions through the principle of noncontradiction. Both Socrates’ insistence that he must remain friends with himself and Kant’s categorical imperative rely upon this logical requirement. Arendt’s interchange with these two philosophers is by no means uncritical. Above all, Arendt rejects an ethics based upon noncontradiction alone. Although in early texts, Arendt appears occasionally dismissive of both thinkers’ ethics, she develops her thought on both philosophers so that she finds much that is worthwhile in them.1 Socrates’ arguments with others, with himself, and with fictional opponents are profoundly revealing about ethical reflection as dialogue. Even when arguments take place within one’s imagination, we learn, they require that one step beyond one’s own perspective so as to benefit from moral insights that hold true for all who confront moral problems. The same can be said of Kant. Kant attempts in his Critiques a thoroughgoing study of human reason that describes and relates the various tasks toward which we turn our reason: knowledge of the world and ourselves, the form and application of the moral law, and our judgments of objects’ beauty and the sublimity of persons’ moral probity. While Arendt criticizes much in Kant, she opens his work to a use for ethics that Kant did not recognize or pursue. My purpose in this chapter is to demonstrate the power of Kant’s ethics that appears through rereading Kant in light of Arendt’s subtle and suggestive criticism.
While this chapter addresses Arendt’s critique of Kant, especially his ethics, I must begin by asking briefly what Arendt finds valuable in Socrates, especially in his interaction with both real and imaginary interlocutors, so as to clarify the core of Kant’s ethics. Arendt hints at a powerful account of human interaction and coordination in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which was to be the topic of volume three of her final work, The Life of the Mind. I present an element of Kant’s theory of judgment—his notion of “enlarged thought” (“erweiterte Denkungsart”)—that clarifies and strengthens his ethics as represented by the categorical imperative. My intention, then, is to present a brief reflection on Kant’s ethics in light of Arendt’s critique and of her thought generally so as to clarify what is of use in Kant for comprehending moral persons.
Socrates urges his fellow Athenians that, as citizens, they are responsible to raise the level of discourse among themselves so that they seek the good for the city, not for themselves alone. Although he had limited success in improving the discourse of Athenian citizens, Socrates did succeed in exciting the interest of a number of thoughtful friends. Most importantly, Socrates profoundly transformed his own thinking. By questioning his fellow citizens so that they think what they are doing, he learned to question himself.
Arendt recounts that Socrates goes beyond his usual critical comments and expresses positive teachings in the Gorgias. The following is the chief teaching: “It would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I direct were out of tune and loud with discord, and that most men would not agree with me and contradict me, rather than that I, being one, should be out of tune with myself and contradict myself.”2 This statement has meaning only for thinking persons; it revolves around the phrase “being one.” As long as I think, I can be both the subject thinking and an object of my thought: I am a two-in-one. If I act in a way that is reprehensible in my own eyes, I am aware of what I am doing, and I am ashamed and oppose myself for acting as I do. A disruption arises within me, a contradiction between my deed and my thought about myself. Thinking persons resist doing wrong because such action brings an upheaval of shame and contempt into their minds. Although the Greeks were extraordinarily competitive, for one who thinks, it is better to be wronged and, therefore, to be free of such inner contradiction than to live with oneself as a wrongdoer. Thinking persons who do wrong must endure the shame that they bring upon themselves. Therefore, we can expect such persons to do what is right, if only to avoid the pain that follows from knowing they have done wrong.
Arendt ties this positive teaching to the self-awareness of the philosopher, thereby suggesting that it is preventative only for someone who thinks. She compares Socrates’ teaching to Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”3 A maxim is a personal rule for action critically considered as the appropriate instantiation of the universal law. This formulation of the categor ical imperative calls upon us always to act in a way we would be willing for everyone to do. If we act wrongly for our own selfish interests, we would not want others to follow our example and act likewise. Rather, we would insist that our conduct is only an exception we have allowed ourselves, but not the rule all—including ourselves—should follow. The moral conduct discussed by both Socrates and Kant rests upon the axiom of noncontradiction: we hold ourselves to do what we know is right for all of us, under pain of knowing that if we act otherwise, we are failing to live as we know we ought. Socrates and Kant offer ethical principles that will be convincing to thinkers, for contradiction is a disruptive force only for thinkers. An ethics of noncontradiction is problematic in that the moral agent is a single person whose moral decisions rest only upon that person’s interests, scope of knowledge, and perspective. How one person’s moral view relates to those of others is left largely unconsidered and unresolved except that contradiction among moral agents is to be avoided.
Socrates escapes the charge of indifference to others and the city because his decisions are made within a life that is thoroughly engaged in discussing the good with others in all of its forms. Also, Socrates is not alone when he reflects upon his actions. In his thought, he generates internal critics who confront him and demand thoughtful reflection on his proposed deeds. In the Hippias Maior, Socrates asserts that when he goes home, he is confronted by a grouchy, needling old man who cross-examines him on his day’s words and deeds.4 In the Crito, Socrates creates another, more ingenious interlocutor: Socrates must decide whether it is right for him to escape from Athens because the trial was unjust. First, Socrates argues with Crito toward a justified decision to go or stay. Crito, however, proves an inadequate interlocutor. Socrates does not talk with himself alone however. Instead, he conjures up the laws of Athens themselves to confront and pointedly to question him as a citizen, who has become who he is because of them, on whether he is willing to harm them by escaping and showing his contempt for them or whether he will show them their due respect and die as he has lived, within their protection and under them as an Athenian citizen in war and in peace.5 Thus, Socrates’ self-reflection is not an isolated exercise for his own benefit because he himself provides a formidable interlocutor who challenges him on what matters most for his decision on leaving Athens. Socrates is concerned to determine whether he can remain a friend to himself if he harms Athens by fleeing. The purpose of his dialogue with Crito, and especially with the laws, is a genuine concern for Athens and the harm he might do it. He decides that only by staying and dying can he be an upright citizen. The test of being at one with himself is a substantive challenge Socrates gives himself and bravely accepts because he has decided it is a civic act owed by him to his city.
While Arendt follows Kant in most of his reflections on reason, she departs from him on his neglect of “enlarged thought” in his work on ethics. Kant as a spokesman for the Enlightenment was as committed a proponent of reason as Socrates. Kant did not offer a system of moral laws for people to follow. He sought, rather, for “the public use of one’s reason at every point.”6 There is no fixed set of moral laws for us to obey. We ourselves introduce the moral law into the natural world by determining what we ought to do on each particular occasion that calls for a moral response, as opposed to a prudential or preferential one. As beings of both sensation and reason, we constantly organize our sensible experience into the project we call “nature.” Beyond nature, we find ourselves in relations with one another; among those relations are some we find to be obligatory, they relate us to others in ways that give us a duty we ought to fulfill. It is this fact of duty, indeed, that makes us aware of this capacity that takes us beyond the natural world of our understanding to a moral world we establish through reason.
We are able to act so as to realize a state of affairs that we find to our liking. Kant refers to such actions as directed by hypothetical imperatives we give ourselves: if we want some outcome, we must act in a certain determinate way—“if I want B, I ought to do A.” We can also recognize a state of affairs that calls forth from us a response we ought to do simply because of the matter at hand and our presence with an ability to act. If I see a child fall off a pier into the water, I know that I ought to save the child. Anyone else in the vicinity, seeing the child fall, will recognize a similar duty. The state of affairs gives me reason to formulate a duty because of its nature and my capacity. It is not something I want, but something I ought to do. This is a categorical imperative: “So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as universal law (for all rational beings).”7 It presents me with a moral obligation, an action I ought to undertake because of the objective situation explainable to anyone who inquires. This is the expression of my moral duty. It is a moral law because anyone in my position would formulate a similar duty because it is required by the circumstances and by my reading of my own capacity to respond to them: given a set of circumstances, one ought to respond in a way that addresses the moral problem at hand. Acting as I ought implies that I and other rational, moral beings would willingly account for the moral deed and for the moral world bringing persons together into a rational order of our own articulation; this overlays the world of nature with an “intelligible world” in which our moral duties connect us all together because they express obligations that we all could take up were we presented with the obligation.8 Our failure to act morally is not a denial of the categorical imperative, since we are only making an exception for ourselves when our self-interest overtakes our willingness to obey a universal rule we in fact respect. To be sure, we ourselves recognize our self-interested contradiction in a moment of honest reflection or embarrassment before others. For Kant, then, self-contradiction is the sign of moral failure as it was for Socrates. Kant’s categorical imperative, however, is too easily read as though it concerns only the moral agent alone. The interpolation of Kant’s notion of “enlarged thought,” stressed by Arendt, helps turn us toward others in our moral reflection. I will consider “enlarged thought” and then conclude with a brief discussion of the categorical imperative that brings out the plurality essential to Kant’s moral reflection.
Kant argues in several texts that mature thought should be “enlarged thought” (erweiterte Denkungsart), the capacity to place ourselves in the perspectives and thoughts of others:
However small may be the area or degree to which a man’s natural gifts reach, yet it indicates a man of enlarged thought if he disregards the subjective private conditions of his own judgment, by which so many others are confined, and reflects upon it [an object of interest] from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by placing himself at the standpoint of others).9
He never mentions this capacity of thought in the critical works prior to the Critique of Judgment, even when he is discussing the moral law and the thought that relates to it. Kant is interested in the first two critiques, in the Prolegomena, and in the Foundations in justifying categorical propositions concerning our knowledge of nature and the emergent moral world, so I suggest that to propose that “enlarged thought” is ruled out for understanding the critical works is an unjustified extension of his intent. The Logic and the Anthropology are based on lecture courses that he regularly taught. Elsewhere, his interest lies in the full panoply of reason’s capacities in carrying out various mental tasks including the recognition of beauty as opposed to pleasure, and on established moral practice as opposed to a critical justification of moral propositions.10
Arendt explains why it is important that Kant indicates “enlarged thought” as a component of ordinary thought and expression. For Kant, the work of reason cannot be carried on if the thinker is in isolation. Many of his near contemporaries, such as Descartes, considered a single mind at work quite adequate, and even thought of other minds as only reasonable conjectures. Kant, by contrast, was aware of the need for multiple minds in order for any of them to learn successfully about themselves, their fellows, and their world. Kant wrote in a notebook, “Company is indispensable for the thinker.”11 Solitude may be required for study and reflection, but solitude is not isolation. When we think, we are often present in thought with friends, opponents, teachers, authors, and collaborators in research. Kant was keenly aware that thought depends upon others—whether present physically or mentally—in order to correct, affirm, and enlarge our own individual experience and insights, and to articulate our thinking fully and artfully.
Modern science shows us how important others are for sound discovery and artful articulation of our thinking so that others can engage with us in performing simply that which is hard. Scientific research progresses because scientists publish the results of their work so that others can attempt to duplicate results to bolster trust in them and bring clarity and progress. The duplication of results is crucial for all modern science. If a result cannot be duplicated, it is thrown into doubt and becomes an object of suspicion rather than an advance in the field. Kant expressed this as follows: “Therefore objective validity and necessary universal validity (validity for everybody) are equivalent terms, and though we do not know the object in itself, yet when we consider a judgment as universally valid and hence as necessary, we thereby understand it to have objective validity.”12 No less than scientific research, ethics is a field of study that is open to criticism, agreement, and advancement by the work of others. Moral decisions for action are made within the mind of the moral agent, but they are the result of earlier conversations, teaching, and collaborative study. The decisions themselves are made by looking at the problem at hand from the perspective of all to be affected by moral action or inaction, and further determined by dialogue with the persons involved both in fact and in imagination.
We are least likely to make a good, defensible decision when such interchange in reality and in reflection is not done because we are content in the right as we see it and wish to waste no time in argumentation. The feeling that there is no need for deliberation because we already know what we are to do is too often a sign that we are set too firmly in our quotidian convictions. As in good science, so in ethics, there is always a need to share our thinking and enlarge it by exchanging perspectives, doubts, and insights with all those whose words we trust—and even with those whose words we don’t trust.
Allow me to conclude by commenting upon the categorical imperative in light of Arendt’s thought regarding Kant’s ethics. In dealing with the categorical imperative, I should begin by addressing the hypothetical and categorical imperatives with Arendt in mind. The opening of the Foundations is crucial: “Nothing in the world—indeed nothing even beyond the world—can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a GOOD WILL.”13 The key phrase in this statement is “without qualification.” There are many goods within a given context: food, for example, is good for someone who is hungry. But that good is qualified by someone’s hunger and by its nutrition. The good will, by contrast, does not need to be placed in a context. Rather, it establishes or articulates the context within which something becomes a qualified good. In our world, human beings alone have a will such that we can determine things and persons to be good. The wil l (Wille) for Kant has a double meaning: Wille is “practical reason,” the ability to establish purposes and programs to carry out for some worthwhile goods, activities, and relationships; Willkür is the capacity to take effective action toward realizing goals that the will has established. The will, for Kant, restructures the meaning of the world: rather than a complex of objects and organisms moving and acting in ways both meaningful and random, the world has in it human beings who give a purpose or meaning to the whole by structuring it through intelligible directions and purposes.
Arendt reasserts the importance of persons by asserting that human beings are beginnings, sources of purposiveness that give meaning to all that has preceded and to a future instead of a continual unfolding of the same. Arendt quotes Augustine on humans as beginnings: “[Initium] ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit.”14 Without human beings there would be nothing but a continuation of whatever is; only with humans can a reasoned break with the past and a new direction occur. For Kant, as well, there is the continued unfolding of the phenomenal world, broken only by something from outside of it—a moral deed that is a break with the past, not its continuation. This possibility makes the world more than a complex of phenomena that can be articulated verbally and experienced as the causal structure unfolding through time. Transformative events occur because someone says, “I ought,” and acts upon that duty. This, “in a nutshell,” as Arendt would say, is the profound meaning of what a human being is—the introduction of a change, a redirection that can transform the world and give hope in the form of a coherent new beginning for all who live there.
Earlier I provided statements of the hypothetical imperatives that tell us to do something if we want some outcome; categorical imperatives tell us that what we ought to do should be such that we would be willing for it to be a universal law—for anyone to effect a change as we are doing. Let us briefly consider these imperatives in terms of Arendt’s sketch of life rooted in the distinctions made in the Greek polis in the first chapter of The Human Condition. Human activity is divided into three parts: (1) labor (ponos), which is any effort we undertake for the attainment of what is necessary for life (including wages); (2) work (poiēsis), which is the construction of an object according to a design; and (3) action (praxis), which is an undertaking, an initiative, for the sake of ourselves and our community. Action always involves more than one agent: people communicate their insights and ideas with one another in order to articulate and agree upon a plan of action; they act in concert so that a complex undertaking can achieve an objective; and they must observe and revise their action over time so that they continue to achieve their agreed-upon goals. Usually, we might suppose that labor and work would be dictated by hypothetical imperatives and action by categorical imperatives. Of course, done in the right spirit and for a purpose that extends beyond simple self-interest, labor and work could result from categorical imperatives. And what is taken to be action done merely for self-interest, vanity, or greed results from hypothetical imperatives. What can the categorical imperative reveal about moral action?
The categorical imperative has largely been used as a “test” for determining whether one’s maxim, one’s personal decision for moral action, is to be taken as morally proper objectively. If I plan to perform an action, could I agree with the possibility of everyone acting in the same way under similar conditions? If my answer is no, then I am acting in a way I would not approve were others to do it—I am contradicting myself if I say this action is good for me to do. I am making an exception for myself. This can be an effective test if the conduct under consideration is an ordinary sort of action, the nature of which we all easily understand, and its use in this instance is not controversial or unusual. Such ordinary actions and circumstances are not always what is in question. We are questioning an action—praxis—in using the categorical imperative. Arendt frequently reminds us that praxis can never be something ordinary or routine. Each action is a break, an imposition of something new, that changes people and their world in some way.
If we are to make a full, rigorous use of the categorical imperative, we must go beyond the ordinary, toward the novel, the singular act. The problems we face are specific and personal. They cannot be adequately approached by treating them as particulars of a general kind expected from all others. Likewise, the people affected by my action are specific, real persons who will be affected in some concrete way. A substantive use of the categorical imperative will require that we employ our capacity for enlarged thought to step beyond our own view of things, so that we comprehend our full situation and that of the others involved in it with us. We must ask not only whether we would be willing to universalize a maxim, but also whether others affected by it would also be willing that we so act. We cannot be moral persons until we have learned to take the position of others. Arendt insists that “one cannot learn without publicity, without the testing that arises from contact with other people’s thinking.”15 So, we may say, the categorical imperative does not direct us only to think about our actions seeking self-consistency, but to think about both others and ourselves—all relevant people’s perspectives, needs, and vulnerabilities—so that the decision we make genuinely brings us all together around a proposal detailing what we ought to do. Socrates’s dialogue with the laws of Athens is a particularly imaginative case of doing just this: examination of the needs and vulnerabilities of the city as a whole and of its citizens. Arendt writes, “Critical thinking is possible only where the standpoints of all others are open to inspection. Hence, critical thinking, while still a solitary business, does not cut itself off from ‘all others.’”16 The moral problems we face are singular; they are not to be solved by repeating past actions or relying upon moral truisms: they present problems to the moral agent alone, but in so doing, they do not isolate the agent from others; rather they propose a purposeful engagement with a problem implicating a number of people together.
Moral agents are connected to others through enlarged thought as they tr y to act while giving due respect to the needs, the vulnerabilities, and the unqualified worth of each person touched by the problem they face. Arendt describes moral thought in a disarmingly sociable way: “To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.”17 Her thinking has led me to propose a novel reading of the core of Kant’s ethics: moral reason concerns ourselves with others, never ourselves alone.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 240–41.
2 Gorgias 482b-c, cited in Hannah Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 90.
3 Immanuel Kant, “Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Kant Selections, trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1988), 288 (4:421). The numbers in parentheses in this and all further references to Kant’s work give the volume and page number of the Academy Edition of Kant’s work.
4 Hippias Maior, 304f, cited in Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment, 185–86.
5 Plato, Crito, 30a–54d.
6 Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in On History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 5 (8:36–37).
7 Kant, Foundations, 280 (4:438).
8 Ibid.
9 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press; London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1951), § 40, 137 (5:295). Besides enlarged thought, Kant also states that sound thinking requires (1) thinking for oneself and (2) always to think consistently. See ibid.; Logik, §7 (9:95); and Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 59 (7:142–43).
10 For a fuller discussion of enlarged thought and its relevance for Kant’s moral thought see my article, “On Rereading the Categorical Imperative,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 10, no. 2 (1985): 57–74.
11 Immanuel Kant, Reflexionen zur Anthropologie, Nr. 763(15:333), cited in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 10.
12 Immanuel Kant, “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics,” in Kant Selections, 184 (4:298).
13 Kant, Foundations, 248 (4:393).
14 “In order that there be a beginning, humans were created, before whom there was no one,” quoted in Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 177.
15 Arendt, Lectures, 42.
16 Ibid., 43.
17 Ibid.