Abstract
In this piece I assess the account of friendship Kant gives at the conclusion of the Metaphysics of Morals, indicating the importance of it in terms of his view of humanity. In the process the nature of Kantian friendship will be connected both to the discussion of attractive and repulsive forces and to the description of the sublime. The discussion of it will suggest ways of responding to the reading provided by Derrida in his Politics of Friendship.
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Notes
- 1.
The maxim of benevolence is equated with practical love and said to result in beneficence.
- 2.
“Sexual union (consummation) is the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another” (Ak. 6: 277).
- 3.
See also Stephen Darwall, “Two Kinds of Respect,” Ethics 88 (1977): 36–49.
- 4.
See Marcia Baron, Kantian Ethics (Almost) Without Apology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) passim. My point, however, is somewhat surprisingly missing from Baron’s extended and fascinating analysis, namely, that it is in the context of establishing the essential relativity of all objects of acquisition that Kant makes this remark about inclination. This is important in terms of his point that what has an end-in-itself is beyond all market price.
- 5.
J. David Velleman, “Love as A Moral Emotion,” Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 357–358.
- 6.
The most extensive use of this notion is in Religion within the Limits where the notion of a “schematism of analogy” is explicitly set forward, a notion which I argue elsewhere is determinative for this work’s decisive stages of argument. See G. Banham, Kant’s Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine (London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Chap. 5.
- 7.
When Kant states that one’s neighbour may be little worthy of respect he is, as suggested above, indicating a more specific sense of respect than is at work in the formal treatment of duties of respect. It would be the work of another piece to see the extent to which the recognition of this additional determination of respect relates to Kant’s standard sense but the suggestion that someone can be seen as not meriting respect is evidently connected to the attitudes they express to ourselves and others in such actions as arrogance.
- 8.
For a more political treatment of some of these themes that involves a discussion of the value placed on publicity in Kant’s treatment of right see G. Banham, “Publicity and Provisional Right,” Politics and Ethics Review 3, no. 1 (2007): 73–89.
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Banham, G. (2012). Kantian Friendship. In: Halsall, F., Jansen, J., Murphy, S. (eds) Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 64. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1509-7_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1509-7_15
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