Nithin Jacob Thomas

By considering the transcendentalism of Kant and Heidegger as primarily oriented towards the concerns of practical philosophy, this paper explores some of the similarities in their notions of political community and their relation to freedom. It argues that, despite the differences in their philosophical registers, these similarities lead both of them to hold that ‘the political’ is a deficient mode of community. Certain transcendence of experience allows them both to change how a human being relates to another. Heidegger follows Kant’s lead in separating the concern of freedom from goodness and distances it even further from the means-ends reasoning by exiting the subject-object paradigm. The alternatives to the deficient political community, the kingdom of ends in Kant and the authentic community in Heidegger, too have potentially comparable facets. The paper concludes that their arguments leave an account of freedom that ‘must’ remain elusive for political action.

Responses to the environmental crisis from traditional moral and political philosophy perspectives generally suffer from two shortcomings: anthropocentrism and presentism. A deep ecology perspective that decenters the rational subjects is inconceivable from the Kantian ethical premise. However, I argue that holding on to anthropocentrism may yet offer better prospects to overcome presentism. By emphasizing the gulf between contractarian politics and his deontological ethics in Kant, I will argue that presentism cannot be resolved politically because an interest-based, contractarian community with future generations is inconceivable. Kantian ethics offers a vantage point outside of such temporal constrictions to consider the ecological crisis.

By holding that the anthropological condition of unsociable sociability forms the sinew of Kant’s conception of political action, this essay distinguishes the relationship between experience and political agency from that between experience and moral agency. It argues that the former cannot be fully subsumed under the latter since political action, for Kant, is bound up with the mobilisation and manoeuvring of our cynical experiences. Kant maintains that the cunning of nature assists politics by channelling selfish interests into outcomes that ultimately advance a lawful civil order. The essay then turns to experiences that are, by contrast, symbols of the moral faculty by virtue of involving a ‘disinterested interest’, as most clearly articulated by Kant in his account of aesthetic experience. Given that political action primarily operates on prudential grounds, it may seem unlikely that it would also serve as a symbol of humanity’s moral predisposition. Yet, foregrounding disinterested interest as a general trait of morally significant experience opens an intriguing space to read Kant’s consideration of revolution as a historical sign of our moral vocation.