THE KANTIAN ETHICS: Metaphysics of Morals - Philosophy of Law & The Doctrine of Virtue, Perpetual Peace and The Critique of Practical Reason. Immanuel Kant

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      ' But next to a new History of Law, what we most require is a new Philosophy of Law.'—Sir Henry Sumner Maine.

      Translator's preface

       Table of Contents

Kant's Science of Right [Rechtslehre] is a complete exposition of the Philosophy of Law, viewed as a rational investigation of the fundamental Principles of Jurisprudence. It was published in 1796,^[1] as the First Part of his Metaphysic of Morals,^[2] the promised sequel and completion of the Foundation for a Metaphysic of Morals,^[3] published in 1785. The importance and value of the great thinker's exposition of the Science of Right, both as regards the fundamental Principles of his own Practical Philosophy and the general interest of the Philosophy of Law, were at once recognised. A second Edition, enlarged by an Appendix, containing Supplementary Explanations of the Principles of Right, appeared in 1798.^[4] The work has since then been several times reproduced by itself, as well as incorporated in all the complete editions of Kant's Works. It was immediately rendered into Latin by Born^[5] in 1798, and again by König^[6] in 1800. It was translated into French by Professor Tissot in 1837,^[7] of which translation a second revised Edition has appeared. It was again translated into French by M. Barni, preceded by an elaborate analytical introduction, in 1853.^[8] With the exception of the Preface and Introductions,^[9] the work now appears translated into English for the first time.

Kant's Science of Right was his last great work of an independent kind in the department of pure Philosophy, and with it he virtually brought his activity as a master of thought to a close.^[10] It fittingly crowned the rich practical period of his later philosophical teaching, and he shed into it the last effort of his energy of thought. Full of years and honours he was then deliberately engaged, in the calm of undisturbed and unwearied reflection, in gathering the finally matured fruit of all the meditation and learning of his life. His three immortal Critiques of the Pure Reason^[11] (1781), the Practical Reason^[12] (1788), and the Judgment^[13] (1790), had unfolded all the theoretical Principles of his Critical Philosophy, and established his claim to be recognised as at once the most profound and the most original thinker of the modern world. And as the experience of life deepened around and within him, towards the sunset, his interest had been more and more absorbed and concentrated in the Practical. For to him, as to all great and comprehensive thinkers, Philosophy has only its beginning in the theoretical explanation of things; its chief end is the rational organization and animation and guidance of the higher life in which all things culminate. Kant had carried with him through all his struggle and toil of thought, the cardinal faith in God, Freedom, and Immortality, as an inalienable possession of Reason, and he had beheld the human Personality transfigured and glorified in the Divine radiance of the primal Ideas. But he had further to contemplate the common life of Humanity in its varied ongoings and activities, rising with the innate right of mastery from the bosom of Nature and asserting its lordship in the arena of the mighty world that it incessantly struggles to appropriate and subdue to itself. In the natural chaos and conflict of the social life of man, as presented in the multitudinous and ever-changing mass of the historic organism, he had also to search out the Principles of order and form, to vindicate the rationality of the ineradicable belief in human Causation, and to quicken anew the lively hope of a higher issue of History. The age of the Revolution called and inspired him to his task. With keen vision he saw a new world suddenly born before him, as the blood-stained product of a motion long toiling in the gloom, and all old things thus passing away; and he knew that it was only the pure and the practical Reason, in that inmost union which constitutes the birthright of Freedom, that could regulate and harmonize the future order of this strongest offspring of time. And if it was not given to him to work out the whole cycle of the new rational ideas, he at least touched upon them all, and he has embodied the cardinal Principle of the System in his Science of Right as the philosophical Magna Charta of the age of political Reason and the permanent foundation of all true Philosophy of Law.

Thus produced, Kant's Science of Right constituted an epoch in jural speculation, and it has commanded the homage of the greatest thinkers since. Fichte, with characteristic ardour and with eagle vision, threw his whole energy of soul into the rational problem of Right, and if not without a glance of scorn at the sober limitations of the 'old Lectures' of the aged professor, he yet acknowledges in his own more aerial flight the initial safety of this more practical guidance.^[14] In those early days of eager search and high aspiration, Hegel, stirred to the depths by Kant, and Fichte, and Schelling, wrote his profound and powerful essay on the Philosophy of Right, laden with an Atlantean burden of thought and strained to intolerable rigidity and severity of form, but his own highest achievement only aimed at a completer integration of the Principles differentiated by Kant.^[15] It was impossible that the rational evangel of universal freedom and the seer-like vision of a world, hitherto groaning and travailing in pain but now struggling into the perfection of Eternal Peace and Good-will, should find a sympathetic response in Schopenhauer, notwithstanding all his admiration of Kant; but the racy cynicism of the great Pessimist rather subsides before him into mild lamentation than seeks the usual refuge from its own vacancy and despair in the wilful caustic of scorching invective and reproach.^[16] Schleiermacher, the greatest theologian and moralist of the Century, early discerned the limitations of the a priori formalism, and supplemented it by the comprehensive conceptions of the primal dominion and the new order of creation, but he owed his critical and dialectical ethicality mainly to Kant.^[17] Krause, the leader of the latest and largest thought in this sphere—at once intuitive, radical, and productive in his faculty, analytic, synthetic, and organic in his method, and real, ideal, and historic in his product—caught again the archetypal perfectibility of the human reflection of the Divine, and the living conditions of the true progress of humanity. The dawn of the thought of the new age in Kant rises above the horizon to the clear day, full-orbed and vital, in Krause.^[18] All the continental thinkers and schools of the century in this sphere of Jurisprudence, whatever be their distinctive characteristics or tendencies, have owned or manifested their obligations to the great master of the Critical Philosophy.

The influence of the Kantian Doctrine of Right has thus been vitally operative in all the subsequent progress of jural and political science.^[19] Kant, here as in СКАЧАТЬ