Kant and the concept of freedom.
Nevertheless, in Kant himself, in this thinker, so rich in contradictions and suggestions, was indicated the concept which, when elaborated, was to constitute the principle, not merely of tautological and formalistic, but of concrete and formal Ethic, the concept of freedom. By means of this concept Kant enters into the heart of the real and reaches that region of which mysticism and religion had from time to time caught a glimpse and had here and there attained. As the origin of the rigid Kantian ethical conception and of his abhorrence for the material and mundane is to be found in Christianity (and in Paganism), so the origin of the concrete moral idea is to be sought in St. Augustine, and also in St. Paul, in the mystics and in the great French Christians of the seventeenth century; in that virtue of which Pascal wrote as plus haute que celle des pharisiens et des plus sages du paganisme, and it operates with omnipotent hand, by means of which alone is it possible dégager l'âme de l'amour du monde, la retirer de ce quelle a de plus cher, la faire mourir à soi-même, la porter et l'attacher uniquement et invariablement à Dieu.[4] The successors of Kant, especially Fichte and Hegel, closed the circle which he had left open, and altogether excluding transcendency, they made of God freedom and of freedom reality. Fichte, who expelled the phantom of the thing in itself from theoretical philosophy, removed from the categoric imperative the appearance of qualitas occulta, which it had borne in the Philosophy of the practical, illuminating that tenebrous region, ready to receive any sort of phantasm or superstition, such as belief in a moral law arbitrarily imposed by the divinity.[5] Hegel does not recognize duty and the categoric imperative, but freedom only, and as he says, the free spirit is that in which subject and object coincide and freedom is freely willed.
Ethic in the nineteenth century.
II. After the classical epoch of modern philosophy, in the general regression of Ethic, the concept of the concreteness and universality of the practical principle was also lost. Omitting the utilitarians, who no longer have a place here, it must suffice to record how there was a return either to the formalistic principles, which Hegel criticized in Kant (for instance the principle of the Ethic of Rosmini, the respect for being, afterwards combated by Gioberti), or directly to those material principles which Kant had already excluded. Such are the compassion of Schopenhauer, the five practical ideas of Herbart, the love of Feuerbach, benevolence as the supreme ethical idea of Lotze, the theological morality of Baader, the life of Nietzsche, and the like.
The principles of the first were completed with a religious conception (here too Rosmini may afford an example), and those of the second, when they did not reveal themselves as utilitarian or tautological, showed an obscure tendency toward the Ethic of Freedom. This must not be overlooked in the Ethic of Nietzsche, which despite the rocks and mud that the thought of Nietzsche drags with it, is yet anti-hedonistic and anti-utilitarian and quite full of the sense of Life as activity and power. Positivistic evolutionism is also often unconscious idealism; and the moral actions, united to evolution, can be interpreted as those which correspond to the Spirit in universal. The concepts of the pessimists alone are altogether incapable of idealistic interpretation (for example, Schopenhauer), and those of the semi-pessimist and semi-idealist Hartmann are strangely contradictory. He makes morality to consist of the promotion of civilization, whence so lofty a condition of the spirit can be attained that it will be possible to decree universal suicide by means of the vote of all the world.
The question asked after Kant, whether Ethic should be formal or material, is one that we have made more precise in the other form, whether Ethic should be abstract or concrete, full or empty, tautological or expressive—that is (with even greater precision), whether Ethic can be established before and without a philosophical system and even be reconciled with agnosticism, has no longer been understood, even by its pretended followers, the Neocriticists or Neokantians. These have either believed they had solved it by means of moderate utilitarianism, or by going outside it and denying the most secure result of the Kantian critique of Ethic; or they have discussed it tiresomely, without making a step in advance. Progress indeed was possible on one condition alone: that a philosophical system should be constructed not inferior to that of the postkantian idealists. But this would have been tantamount to demanding the death of neokantianism or neocriticism, which has not only not attempted to surpass the idealistic systems, but has even maintained that we should philosophize without a system, declaring that a system is altogether inconceivable. The Neokantians can thus be recognized as the descendants of Kant; but in the same way as the last descendant of the Hapsburgs in Spain, who was neither emperor, king, soldier, nor man, could be recognized as the descendant of Charles the Fifth, who was man, soldier, king, and emperor: because, like his great predecessor, he possessed the deformed, hanging lip of the Hapsburgs.
[1] Krit. d. prakt. Vern. pp. 30-31.