The poetics of moral selfhood: On believing and hoping as-if

Abstract

The Kantian construal of the rational moral agency, in which the will is a reason that is practical of itself and to itself, in the sense of an immediately lawgiving autonomy (KpV, AA 05: 31), relies upon a special mode of rational meaning-making, that is to say, the Idea or fiction of transcendental freedom that entails the necessary capacity for an infinite moral development in another certain world whose metaphysical, practical, architecture requires that every personality exist in eternal progress and that happiness be enjoyed in harmonic relationship with virtue. Practical reason conceives, and almost hallucinates under the idea of freedom, a coherent, self-serving, mode of world-making or a rational belief in a sui generis, possible, supersensible, world that convokes the metaphorical, or rather fictional, regime of representation opened up by the creative freedom of reason and imagination that collaborate to constitute the objectivity of practical ideas as if they formed another world in the world. Now, the fact that practical reason requires a fundamental relationship to the entire world system as a possible world of human action and human development, beyond the scope of knowledge and understanding, becomes already self-evident in the conceptus cosmicus (Weltbegriff) of philosophy (KrV, A838-9/B866-7) that reinforces the primacy of practice over theory, and of belief in moral selfhood over all possible science. Indeed, according to Kant, philosophy cannot deal with action, and with the intelligibility of moral action, unless it considers, appraises, and relates to the full vocation, final destination, and complete dynamic self-development of rational beings. In this regard, man is not a pure subject of cognition and his life is not reducible to a cognitive endeavor; instead, man is the infinite process of practical self-creation, a laborious blend of praxis and poiesis, in which world and humanity are codetermined by reason, and reason alone. Therefore, a cosmic or cosmopolitan philosophy must be grounded in the “world”, insofar as it concerns “that which necessarily interests everyone” (KrV, A839/B867n), and orients reason to its highest, universal, final end, that is the fulfillment of its own self-spontaneity and self-lawgiving power.