Kant’s History of Ethics
Allen W. Wood
Stanford University
1. Did Kant approach ethical theory historically?
Kant was not a very knowledgeable historian of philosophy. He came to the study of philosophy from natural science, and later the fields of ethics, aesthetics, politics and religion came to occupy his central concerns, but his approach to philosophical issues never came by way of reflection on their history. He was well acquainted, of course, with the recent tradition of German philosophy: Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten and Crusius, and he seems also to have had knowledge of eighteenth century French philosophy, and of as much of Anglophone philosophy as had been translated into either French or German. But like many modern philosophers, he had an inadequate appreciation of the scholastic tradition, and his knowledge of classical Greek philosophy was mostly at second hand.
In his ethical works in particular Kant’s historical references seem at first glance only occasional, not systematic. He sometimes contrasts his position with that of the Wolffians, the Stoics or the Epicureans, but his most conspicuous historical references are in his systematic account, in the Groundwork and the second Critique, of the way in which previous moral philosophers had conceived of the supreme principle of morality as a principle of heteronomy, in contrast to the principle of rational autonomy through which he proposes to reform the foundations of practical philosophy. But this reference itself looks more like a repudiation of the entire history of ethics than like a historically self-conscious way of conceiving his own ethical theory.
At a deeper level, however, Kant’s philosophy is fundamentally historical, and historically self-conscious, in its self-conception and its aims. Both Prefaces to the Critique of Pure Reason introduce the project of criticism historically, as a project suited to the present “age of critique” and capable of transforming metaphysics from a...