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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 12 Jul 2022

Taken: 03 Jul 2022

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Kant on Evil, Selkf-deception, •
And Reform •
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Laura Papish •

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . Throughout the ‘Anthology’ and in other texts such as the ‘Metaphysics of Morals,’ Kant is extraordinarily cynical about the obsessive emphasis on introspection found in Haller, Lavater, Pascal, and other thinkers guilty of what Kant sees as an unseemly form of moral hypochondria. It should now be clear why they are mistaken in their accounts of what self-cognition requires. They overlook that in order for a human being to understand her life as a moral agent, she must do something other than merely try to uncover buried or lost facts about herself. Although those facts clearly matter, self-knowledge is not in its essence a kind of internal archaeological dig but an ongoing exercise in self-interpretation. The need to look toward others as we try to discern who we are in crucial, since without it we risk incurring what Kant sees as Haller’s fate. Those who rely only on introspection will likely succumb to an absorptive self-loathing opposed to respect for the law; such self-loathing is, perversely, incredibly attractive to human beings because our imaginations are most active and enlivened when faced with the obscurity of our own person, or when faced with darkness instead of “bright light” ~ Page 172

. . . . We have seen that, for Kant, human beings are intrinsically interested in attaining evidence for their beliefs. Our cognitive attention is inherently captured by what seems true, so much so that, to recall passage that was important to my initial discussion of self-deception, “in most cases….a procedure of giving our approval, or withdrawing it, or holding back, does not rest at all on our free choice, but rather is necessitated through and by the laws of our understanding and our reason.” ~ Page 236

KANT ON EVIL, SELF-DECEPTION AND MORAL REFORM
22 months ago. Edited 22 months ago.