ABSTRACT
Kant’s critique of ethical or “pure practical” reasoning has overpowered that of Hume and others in the history of ethical philosophy in part because its main concept is dominance itself. For Kant, ethics centers on the idea of law, of an overriding imperative that cannot be denied. From the Kantian point of view, the heart (or brain) of ethics is a transcendent ought that emerges not from any consensus produced by the disorderly processes of history or culture, and not from what Hume called nature, but from within reason. For Kant, the essence of the right was reason, which human beings could comprehend and to which they are obligated because they are rational creatures. Such an ap-- proach would seem to lead away from language, the medium of social interac-- tion, and toward some more “inhuman” principle of law. In fact, however, language has proven to be immensely useful to thinkers who try to identify some worldly ground for the otherwise abstract and disembodied concept of the rational law. The task that now confronts us is, then, to try to articulate the implicit theory of language held by thinkers who have looked to language not for guidance on the law, but for the law itself-who have, that is, found in lan-- guage the social and psychological site of the ethical imperative.
