Ricoeur and the Post-Structuralists by Davidson Scott Michel Johann

Author:Davidson, Scott, Michel, Johann
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
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Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

30. For Kant, respect is first considered from the angle of the first categorical imperative (it involves respect for the moral law). It will be reformulated in the second imperative in which it will take into account the “plurality” of persons (it involves respect for the other as an end in itself).

31. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 214.

32. Here it is necessary to insist on the fidelity of Ricoeur’s reading of Kant to the reading begun by Heidegger. See Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Main Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). From the point of view of the foundation of the subject, the hermeneutic problem raised by Heidegger bears on the reconciliation between The Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. In the “first critique,” Heidegger does not have any difficulty in finding the “finitude of the theoretical subject,” which is intrinsic to the activity of knowing. Whereas a “divine intuition” that would be able to grasp the being of things, according to Kant, human understanding can only know them in a derivative way, that is to say, on the basis of a prior “givenness” and through the intermediary of sensibility. Does this orientation also hold from the point of view of practical reason? One can rightly imagine that Kant, leaving the theoretical subject partly disarmed, devotes all his efforts to consolidating the self-positing of the practical subject. Moral autonomy, as Kant posits, does not have to follow from an empirical given. Heidegger, in his patient reading, refers to a radical finitude at work analogously within practical reason. Just as receptivity occurs on the theoretical level through the role played by the schematism, it occurs likewise on the practical level through the role played by the pure feeling of respect: “If finite reason is receptive in its own spontaneity and as such derives from the transcendental imagination, practical reason is necessarily based on the latter as well” (213). On the exegetical debates between Heidegger and the neo-Kantians, see Kant and the Main Problem of Metaphysics. A condensation of this debate can be found in Alain Renaut, The Era of the Individual, trans. M. B. Debevoise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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