Kant's Moral Aesthetic Catechism
Valerijs Vinogradovs (La Trobe University)

July 29, 2015, 12:00pm - 2:00pm
Philosophy program, La Trobe University

Humanities 2, Room 431
La Trobe University
Melbourne
Australia

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Kant's corpus, critical and post-critical, canvassed in the context of his Lectures on Pedagogy, suggests that a probability of moral agency in the civilised (rather than 'raw') state requires a system of education that has moral Bildung on radar. Strictly speaking, if this condition is ruled out, human beings are debarred from a possible realisation of themselves as free, moral beings, - and, accordingly, are likely to lapse into an obscure state, ranging from fanaticism (denoting an overestimation of one's capacity) to legalism (denoting compliance with external conventions). Insofar as the condition has been maintained (and Kant argues we have bitterly failed), a 'civilised' person can become a moral person in the phase of 'moralisation' that culminates in the pedagogical method of the Moral Catechism. A number of scholars (Munzel, 2012; Stroud, 2012; Surprenant, 2012) have discussed the two-stage process, in the course of which the 'apprentice' becomes conscious of reason's law and, consequently, their duty to fulfill it. In this talk, I will call attention to the peculiar aspect of the MC, namely a function of the aesthetic response that facilitates 'admittance' of the law. Then, in contrast with some attempts -- (Munzel, 1999; Guyer, 2014) -- to stipulate a coherent role of the aesthetic in Kant's education, I shall sketch out a technique of the Moral Aesthetic Catechism that, I will argue, divulges a more or less complete potential of the aesthetic element in his demanding thought.

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