Randolph Wheeler

Kant's Imperatives -- Imperatives in Kant's metaphysics of morals -- Imperatives in the critique of judgment -- The role of reason and freedom in Kant's doctrine -- Contemporary phenomenology's response to Kant's Imperatives -- Imperatives in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of perception -- Merleau-Ponty and Kant's Imperatives -- Imperative style and levels -- Imperatives in Levinas's doctrines of sensibility and alterity -- Sensation and sensibility -- Alterity, infinity, exteriority, and asymmetry -- Alterity and language -- Privileged heteronomy versus autonomy -- Alphonso Lingis : between categorical and hypothetical imperatives -- Lingis as kantian phenomenologist : imperative necessity -- Force and form -- Kant's typology : illustrations of imperative force -- Lingis's critique of Kant -- Lingis's critique of phenomenology via the imperative -- Elemental and sublime imperatives -- Conclusion: Subjectivity and subjection.

By focusing on Sittlichkeit, or ethical life, in Hegels mature period, Alan Patten offers an extensive interpretation of Hegelian freedom as self-actualization rather than as the limited fulfillment of social and political roles. Patten admits that there are obvious difficulties in seeing freedom at work in the Sittlichkeit thesis. For instance, Hegel attributes the individuals morality to the duties imposed on him by his social station. Increasing the difficulty in Pattens case for individual freedom, Hegel argues at length in the Philosophy of Right that the ethical norms that guide practical reason consist in the duties and virtues of ethical life of three central institutions: the family, civil society, and the state.

In The Imperative, Lingis not only critiques Kant’s famous moral imperative but also attempts to rectify the imperatives of phenomenology’s “things themselves.” For Lingis, neither empiricism’s positivist physical determinist doctrines nor the existential assessments of perception as an exercise of freedom in the positing of perceptions are satisfying accounts. Lingis wants rather to show that such interactions of humans with their environment are best understood as responses to the directions emanating from the environment. These responses are thus neither the reactions of stimulus-response determinism nor only the intentional acts of the standard phenomenological doctrine of perception. Lingis insists on the pluralism given in experience. We do not perceive only figures against backgrounds, as with the phenomenological model; we also experience the night, the elements, sensory levels, and inhabited spaces. These are not things of a single order; each requires its own description. Lingis enumerates these examples and formulates general assertions about their specific natures, as when he describes things losing their separateness in twilight. After night has arrived, there is no longer anything to see. Yet we still hear cries, murmurs, and rumbles in the night. They, however, no longer locate separate beings signaling one another or colliding with one another on observable coordinates. In the night, we see and do not see nothingness; we see the darkness. The night is not a substance but an event; it pervades space freed from barriers and time.