Kant's Platonic revolution in moral and political philosophy

Abstract

For more than two centuries, Kant scholars have operated on the unquestioned premise that Kant's three Critiques offered a systematic exposition of his philosophy. But this unitary view, argues T. K. Seung, is gravely mistaken: each of the three works represents a major reformulation of the initial commitment to Platonism which Kant had made in his Inaugural Dissertation of 1770. Through close textual analysis of the three Critiques and other major works, Seung explains how Kant's acceptance of Platonism was the most important event in the development of his philosophy and how his successive revisions were continuous attempts to improve upon this Platonic legacy. Kant's formalist ethics, he contends, occupied only a brief, four-year period that temporarily interrupted a lifelong commitment to Platonic ethics. Furthermore, Kant's emphasis on the connection between ethics and philosophy of history can only be appreciated from a Platonic perspective. In the third Critique, Seung argues, Kant extends his Platonism from the human world to the world of nature, thereby preparing the metaphysical ground for the emergence of Romanticism. For Kant, Platonic forms are the basic ideas for constructing moral, aesthetic, and political norms and standards. This is the essence of Kant's Platonic constructivism, which Seung explicates with comparisons to other programmes of construction, such as Hobbesian conventionalism and Hegelian historicism. Finally, he clarifies the link between constructivism and deconstruction.