Lee Kerckhove

I defend Kant’s moral psychology against John R. Silber’s argument that Kant cannot account for the radical evil of Hitler. Silber’s argument cannot be maintained, I argue, if Kant’s account of theological and moral fanaticism, and the personality of the moral fanatic, are taken into account. I contend that Kant’s writings support an analogy between the fanatical pursuit of religious and moral ideals and Hitler’s fanatical pursuit of an ideal of racial purity. I conclude that Kant’s account of moral fanaticism is adequate to account for the actions and moral psychology of Hitler.

The Crisis of Judgment in Kant's Three Critiques is intended as an analysis and reconstruction of the role of the faculty of judgment as it evolves through the course of Kant's critical philosophy. It offers an analysis of the mental power of judgment and systematically develops its links to feeling, cognition, and the will. In the introductory chapter, Scherer spells out the two guiding questions of her study: How does judgment relate systematically to understanding, reason, and the will? Is judgment constitutive or regulative? Scherer's study emphasizes the architectonic and antinomic nature of reason in Kant, thereby stressing the necessarily resolutive function of judgment.

The primary thesis that I argue for in this study is that the eternal recurrence represents Nietzsche's attempt to ground a conception of autonomy on a naturalistic basis. Nietzsche's eternal recurrence offers a transformation of human autonomy in light of the experience of modern physics. The eternal recurrence represents the lesson of modern physics that we can find no laws within nature and that, consequently, we must give ourselves laws in the face of the experience of total, recurring meaninglessness, if we want to have coherently organized and meaningful existence. With its emphasis on self-legislation over moral judgment, Nietzsche's conception of autonomy remains Kantian, in a broad sense, but Nietzsche rejects both the Kantian model of the moral subject and Kant's moral metaphysics as antinatural. Nietzsche creates a norm of autonomy in which value legislation is given priority over value judgment without the need of postulating a fixed, Cartesian self or a transcendent metaphysical realm. ;In support of my main thesis I will argue for the secondary thesis that the principle of Nietzsche's naturalism is located in the idea of the will to power. I read the will to power not as a metaphysical principle but rather as a methodological principle of interpretation. As an interpretive principle, the will to power provides the means to overcome the three basic antinatural positions that Nietzsche associates with traditionally conceived morality. It provides a non-dualistic conceptual framework that opposes the unconditional will to truth and eliminates the dualism of the faith in opposite values. At the same time, it provides the means to challenge the Kantian conception of universal moral norms by undermining the presumption of moral equality