Abstract

I move throughout my essay, gradually, from descriptions of various kinds of conscious states towards the conception of moral life as the totalization of these states, and as the reflective ground in which the various episodes of life are unified. Kant's moral philosophy, I hope to have shown, is not merely theoretical. Indeed, it is, as Plato's was, a philosophy of life. ;My essay progresses through five chapters. In the first chapter I discuss Kant's notion of "common human reason," in order to capture an image of ordinary moral consciousness and the different ways in which it can be corrupted. In chapter two I consider Kant's ideas about how ordinary moral consciousness can be stabilized by a process of criticism. Chapter three is an intricate, even serpentine, exploration of Kant's conceptions of moral judgment and discipline. Chapter four is an investigation into Kant's notion of the "revolution" in the ground of a person's way of thinking. I connect this notion of revolution with concrete descriptions of different courses of life. Chapter five is an imaginative construction of a moral biography, the point of which is to show, biographically, the gradual "insinuation" of reason into a moral person's way of thinking. ;So my thesis in its most developed form is this: Kantian morality can be seen, when looked at from the perspective of its common-place applications and descriptions, as the discipline of maintaining a non-natural attitude toward oneself and others. This attitude is the product of the consciousness of the moral law and is maintained by the rational construction of the ideal of a moral world in which persons are radically free from the habits of nature, free to realize moral principles in a world which is naturally void of them. The maintenance of moral attitudes is an effort supplemented by incentives which appear in the life of a moral agent as rationally produced feelings, the most important of which Kant calls "respect." ;The main objective of this paper is to present an account of Kant's moral philosophy from the perspective of its most concrete and practical applications. To do this, I offer a study of different moral attitudes, typologies of human character, and corruptions of attitudes and character. My study is, therefore, a study of moral success and failure