ABSTRACT
This, perhaps, is the question, the human problem. The problem of good and evil. Religions were born out of this question. Societies have risen and fallen as a result of disputes, struggles, wars, all revolving around the question of who and what are bad, wrong, vicious, cruel, immoral. God and Satan, saints and sinners. Philosophers have immersed themselves in the moral and ethical discourse with exceptional and matchless zeal. Indeed, one of the most comprehensive and thorough methods of thinking regarding the human mind and psyche, that of Immanuel Kant, is centred around three questions: What can I know? What ought I do? What may I hope? Though the first question, the discussion of what can we know, and the concept of pure reason that evolves from it, seems to be Kant’s supreme interest and achievement (also referred to as Kant’s “Copernican revolution”), the other two questions – which in Kant’s system are necessarily and logically entwined (since hope, ultimately, is the hope for a moral world) – seem to recruit Kant’s fervour and passion to such a degree, that it seems, at times, that the chief purpose of the first question,
and accordingly, the first Critique, is actually to create the building blocks on which logical, imperative and universal answers to the other two questions – the moral questions, the questions of good and evil – can stand. Towards the end of his Critique of Pure Reason Kant (1781 [1998]) relates to these three questions, and writes: “The first question is merely speculative. We have (as I flatter myself) exhausted all possible answers to this question, and have finally found the one answer with which reason must indeed content itself . . . From the two great purposes, however, to which this entire endeavour of pure reason was properly directed . . . at least this much is certain and established: that we shall never be able to partake of knowledge regarding those two problems” (p. 736, italics mine – B.Sh.).
