Online research in philosophy

This essay presents a possible interpretation of the concept of beauty in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which was itself suggested by Kant in the two introductionsto the text and gained force among the Early German Romantics and Idealists, introducing an alternative point of view into the concept of beauty and the role it plays in the relationship between reason and sensibility, man and world. Through the analysis of the four moments of the Analytic of the Beautiful, beauty will manifest itself as the realm in which a special encounter between human freedom and nature takes place. Therefore, and as an alternative to some traditional interpretations of Kant’s aesthetic investigation, which understand Kant’s judgment of taste exclusively on the basis of its subjective conditions, the judgment of beauty will present itself also in the relationship it establishes with the objects of nature.

This article suggests that in the delicate balance between grace and freedom, the opposite of rejecting God’s grace is not acceptance of grace, but rather is non-rejection or the openness to God that is the human person’s obediential potency. Using the insights of Karl Rahner and David Coffey, this article goes on to explain efficacious grace and sufficient grace as the one self-communication of God in the modes of acceptance and rejection. To protect the human freedom, one must emphasize that human persons can reject God’s offer of self, but to protect the gratuity of grace, one must acknowledge that acceptance of God’s grace is always undergirded and empowered by that same grace. The mediating point between these two modes is human openness or obediential potency for grace. One does not have to accept God’s grace to be this openness, but rather one must simply not reject God’s offer of grace, hence the primary categories of human freedom are not rejection and acceptance, but rejection and non-rejection.

Does human enhancement threaten our dignity as some prominent commentators have asserted? Or could our dignity perhaps be technologically enhanced? After disentangling several different concepts of dignity, this essay focuses on the idea of dignity as a quality, a kind of excellence admitting of degrees and applicable to entities both within and without the human realm. I argue that dignity in this sense interacts with enhancement in complex ways which bring to light some fundamental issues in value theory, and that the effects of any given enhancement must be evaluated in its appropriate empirical context. Yet it is possible that through enhancement we could become better able to appreciate and secure many forms of dignity that are overlooked or missing under current conditions. I also suggest that in a posthuman world, dignity as a quality could grow in importance as an organizing moral/aesthetic idea.

This is the first English scholarly edition of this pivotal essay, accompanied by the first comprehensive commentary on it.