Nogovitsin O.N. Moral community, Jewish theocracy and the deduction of the concept of supreme Good in Kant’s social metaphysics. In: Byzantium, Europe, Russia: Social Practices and Interrelation of Spiritual Traditions. Issue 5: Collecon of Papers ...

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Abstract

According to the liberal model of social order backed by Kant, the form of existence of any association of people founded on voluntary submission to the principles of this association is moral community, which should be transformed into the form of institutions of universal moral religion. Their consolidation into a political community, in its turn, which is inevitably organized via external legal coercion, should take a republican form of governance coherent to moral religion. However, there is an aporia in the background of this model, for the formation of ethical community is impossible on the grounds of a legal principle of the suzerainty of the people as a legislator. The laws of such moral community cannot directly come from the will of the legislator, for in this case, submission to them would not be a consequence of free application of private will. Due to this, the legislator of the moral community, or the moral republic, can be meant only as God. In formulating the given principle in the third part of “Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason”, Kant radically reevaluates the Jewish faith: now it is a direct antithesis of morality for him, as the Old Testament falls apart from the general Christian Scriptures, while the theocracy of the United Kingdom of Israel is classified as the extreme at that time form of an empirically possible phenomenon of radical evil in the history of society, a mode of organization of the state in which moral community is completely replaced by legal order, and the image of faith related to it cannot even be called religious. The paper proves that the Kantian concept of the Jewish theocracy as a contradictory opposition to moral community to which all the forms of the religion of Revelation use to tend is a constructive pattern of representation of liberal ethics, an internal condition of its formulation and justification of the right to exist as a spiritual guide. Purposed to this, the Kantian discourse on the Jewish theocracy is studied in the context of the deduction of the concept of the supreme Good both in earlier, “Critique of Practical Reason” (1787), and later, in the first introduction to “Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason” (1793) its presentations.

Content (in russ)