Kantian Dignity and its Difficulties

Karl Ameriks defends Kant's doctrine that all human beings have a moral capacity that gives them unconditional dignity, and explains how the reception of this influential doctrine in European and American intellectual history has been marred by misunderstandings.

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Kantian Dignity and its Difficulties defends Kant's doctrine that all human beings have a moral capacity that gives them unconditional dignity. It explains how the reception of this influential doctrine was marred by serious misunderstandings, and how Kant himself fell prey to prejudices inconsistent with the doctrine. The works of J.G. Herder and Richard Price are discussed as providing an important supplement for, and parallel to, what is best in Kant. Thomas Mann's work is then discussed as a paradigmatic example of a transition from a chauvinist reading--influenced by the terrible but highly popular interpretation of Kant by Houston Stewart Chamberlain--to an enlightened understanding of Kant's philosophy, one heavily influenced by Walt Whitman and Novalis.

This book is a combination of philosophical argument and historical analysis. The first chapter critically discusses a number of contemporary interpretations. It defends Kant's concept of dignity as rooted in a basic capacity of reason for morality, and therefore as an unconditional, all-or-nothing, and inviolable feature of all human beings, one that deserves universal respect. A systematic analysis based on close textual study defends Kant's position from interpretations that misconstrue it by overemphasizing mere rationality, contingent talents, or achievements. The next four chapters build on this systematic account by explaining how Kant's notion of dignity was further clarified, or seriously misunderstood or neglected, in a variety of significant international contexts: the Baltics (Herder and Prussia's relation to the east), Berlin (the rise of Fascism), Philadelphia (the Declaration of Independence), London (Richard Price and reactions to the American and French Revolutions), and Washington (reactions to World War I and II, discussed in three chapters on Thomas Mann).

The book argues that Kant showed no interest in the "expanding blaze" of the American Revolution, and that, in addition to other prejudices, he had an elitist attitude that harmed his own cause. Tragically, it was the shock of German Fascism that forced Mann to emigrate and become the most influential public advocate of what is best in Kant's philosophy. Mann's "Democracy will win" campaign connected Kant's doctrine of dignity with the enlightened principles of American democracy.