Living wrong life rightly

Kant avec Marx

pp. 91-121

in: Ben Ware, Modernism, ethics and the political imagination, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

In this chapter, I sketch one possible answer to the question of how one might lead a right life in a wrong world; an answer which begins with the injunction Back to Kant. Such a move requires taking a new look at Kant's notion of the good which, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he says consists in the good will doing its duty for duty's sake. Kant's moral philosophy is often criticized for being overly "abstract" and for issuing "impossible" ethical demands. Here, however, I argue that it is precisely these perceived weaknesses that constitute its subversive core; indeed, it is Kant's rigorism which brings us face to face (albeit indirectly) with the ethico-political limits of capitalism as such. My aim, though, will not be to provide a wholesale endorsement of Kant's ethical position, and consequently the argument will move through a further stage. In the second part of the chapter, I contend that any true realization of the ethical point of Kant's philosophy – which I take to be exemplified by his Formula of Humanity – will require a rediscovery of Kant via Marx, and more specifically a transformation of Kantian "pure morals' into the practice of radical critique. The journey undertaken here will thus be one from moral law to the politics of language via modernist encounters with "destructive" thinking.