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8 - Kantian perfectionism
- By Paul Guyer
Edited by Lawrence Jost, University of Cincinnati, Julian Wuerth, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
Book:

Perfecting Virtue

Published online:

04 February 2011

Print publication:

03 February 2011, pp 194-214
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Summary

This chapter comments briefly on Aristotle's perfectionism before turning to the Wolffian variety. We can understand Immauel Kant's own moral philosophy as a form of perfectionism, as long as we are clear about what it is that is supposed to be perfected. Before the chapter turns to Kant's response to Christian Wolff's form of perfectionism, it illustrates the prevalence of his doctrine in Kant's philosophical environment with a reference to its occurrence in an even closer contemporary, namely Moses Mendelssohn. What Kant really rejects is not the abstract concept of perfection as the goal of morality, but the specific conception of perfection that his contemporaries like Wolff and Mendelssohn had ultimately derived from Aristotle. Kant transforms Wolff's conception of reason as a capacity for insight into connections that exist independently of us into a conception of it as a power to create order that does not otherwise exist.