ABSTRACT
We have seen that there are deep connections between the form that personhood takes in a given social setting and the character of morality. By the seventeenth century the notion of the ‘individual’ was well established in Europe and its colonies, but the full ethical implications of individuality would only be worked out during the Enlightenment. Indeed, one could say that the central project of the Enlightenment was to construct a workable morality based around a form of reason that had been shorn of faith and tradition (MacIntyre 1981: 51). For such a morality to be workable, human nature must be understood as fixed, for the rules that it puts in place must be equally applicable to all persons. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the most thoroughly elaborated discussion of morality inspired by the Enlightenment was that proposed by Immanuel Kant. Kant, of course, had a conception of the human subject that was considerably more sophisticated than that of Descartes. Yet he echoed Descartes in arguing that the world is only ordered because the human mind had ordering capabilities. Rather than innate ideas, Kant suggested that the mind has categories of understanding, and these allow us to organise our sense impressions, thus rendering our perceptions of the world comprehensible. This means that we only ever apprehend the world from our own standpoint, and in a form that has already been ordered by our mental faculties (Falzon 1998: 22). This may not be the same as knowing things as they ‘really are’, but such a perspective is inaccessible: we cannot know the thing in itself. Kant rejected the Cartesian notion of a soul that has no physical extension, but nonetheless found himself arguing for a dualistic conception of the subject. This was because he accepted that all material things obeyed the laws of nature, and were subject to causality, yet he wanted to see human beings exempted from such laws. In turn, this arose from Kant’s identification of free will as being essential to morality: human actions could not simply be determined like physical or chemical processes. He therefore resorted to the humanist image of a person with a dual nature. On the one hand there was the phenomenal or empirical self which operated according to physical laws. But on the other there was the ‘noumenal self ’, which had the character of the ‘thing in itself ’, which is to say that it could not be apprehended by the human sense-making apparatus. The noumenal self was the moral agent, which exercised free will (Morris 1991: 56).
