Kant and the Fate of Autonomy

Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy

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by Karl Ameriks

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published September 2000, 368 pages, paper

ISBN 0521786142

It has been argued that Kant's all-consuming efforts to place autonomy at the center of philosophy has had, in the long-run, the unintended effect of leading to the widespread discrediting of philosophy and of undermining the notion of autonomy itself. The result of this "Copernican revolution" has seemed to many commentators the de-centering, if not the self-destruction, of the autonomous self. Ameriks challenges the presumptions that dominate popular approaches to the concept of freedom, and to the interpretation of the relation among the Enlightenment, Kant and post-Kantian thought.

Contents

Introduction: Kant and the Fate of Autonomy
PART I: Kant
1. Kant's Modest System

PART II: Reinhold
2. Reinhold's Contribution

PART III: Fichte
3. Kant, Fichte and Short Arguments to Idealism
4. Kant, Fichte and the Radical Primacy of the Practical
5. Kant, Fichte and Appreciation

PART IV: HEGEL
6. Hegel's Critique of Kant's Theoretical Philosophy
7. the Hegelian Critique of Kantian Morality
8. Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Review

This book collects much of Karl Ameriks’s highly regarded work on the reception of Kant’s philosophy, together with a substantial amount of hitherto unpublished material. The book is organized around a single theme, focusing on the nature and early history of what Karl Ameriks sees as a pervasive misunderstanding of one of the central aspects of Kant’s philosophy, arguably the most central: his conception of autonomy. It is this misunderstanding that underlies contemporary arguments, "that Kant’s all-consuming effort to bring autonomy to the center of philosophy...has had, in the long run, the unintended effect of leading to the discrediting of philosophy... as such, and to undermining the notion of autonomy itself." In fact, properly understood, Kant’s critical philosophy is not so threatening, his notion of autonomy not absolute, but "moderate." The first, and briefest, part of the book outlines Kant’s "modest system," showing the central place of autonomy within it. The following section looks into the origins of the misunderstanding of Kantian autonomy. Ameriks finds it in the work of Karl Rheinhold, a figure whose historical importance has been significantly underestimated until recently. Rheinhold’s highly regarded expositions, tainted by his own philosophical concerns, seriously distorted central aspects of Kant’s philosophy. Above all, he attributes to Kant his own radical and ambitious conception of autonomy. It is through Rheinholdian spectacles that later German idealists and their heirs came to view Kant. Fichte and Hegel, the subjects of the third and fourth section, of the book, respectively, both inherit and radicalize, in distinct ways, Rheinhold’s version of Kantianism. This book is a solid history of philosophy, but, with the recent popularity of Kantian approaches in contemporary philosophy it is of much wider interest.