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Abstract

In Klas Roth’s essay in this issue of JAE, “Making ourselves Intelligible— Rendering ourselves Efficacious and Autonomous, without fixed Ends,” his invocation of Stanley Cavell’s remark that “we should avoid or resist becoming . . . the ‘slaves of our slavishness’” (31) makes clear why he and I are both so deeply attracted to Kant as well as to Cavell, for it was none other than Kant, not, for example, nietzsche, who introduced the term “slavish” for everything that is to be avoided in morality. (this was in his footnote to Part I in the second edition of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in which he was essentially arguing that Schiller’s conception of dignity in Grace and Dignity was too Kantian!) So there are no great disagreements between Roth and me, but his friendly as well as thoughtful paper raises two points that I can perhaps briefly amplify. first, Roth stresses that, in both Cavell and Kant, autonomy is a matter of being constantly open to self-criticism and self-transformation: in words that he uses in reference to Cavell, “engag[ing] in transforming society and ourselves continuously” (Roth, “Making ourselves Intelligible,” 29), and in words that he uses in reference to Kant, “we face the task of unifying ourselves in term of efficacy and autonomy . . . by attributing [to ourselves] the capacity of setting and pursuing . . . ends and by distancing ourselves from, reflecting on, and possibly also challenging and changing the particular ends we set to us . . . an open-ended endeavor, something to strive for ‘in terms of its degree, because of the frailty (fragilitas) of human nature’” (36). this may make it sound as if autonomy is simply self-development, something that seems very different from “the property of the will by which it is a law to itself”,1 “a causality in accordance with immutable laws but of a special kind.”2 that is, Kant’s description of autonomy may seem to stress lawfulness and immutability rather than or even at the cost of self-exploration and openness to change or mutability. And onora o’neill, for one, has often stressed the difference between a contemporary conception of autonomy as personal freedom and Kant’s conception of autonomy as obedience to a universally valid law.3