Session Information
13 SES 05, Long Paper Session
Long Paper Session
Contribution
Research question: What does evil primarily mean in educational, human developmental context, being confronted with the paradox between an absolute and a necessary evil?
Objective: Unlike in Locke’s conception, we are not in the condition of “tabula rasa” from a Kantian perspective; rather, we are accompanied by a predisposition to good and a propensity to evil, each brought by ourselves. This is also different from the position of Rousseau, who regards as human beings as good by nature. It is necessary, moreover, to recognize the distance between Kant’s understanding of evil and that of Christianity. He doesn’t undertake the Christian notion or transform it for the sake of forming his moral philosophy, as Goethe deplores Kant’s discussion of evil. There is a profound abyss between Kantian evil and Christian evil. The Kantian perspective is that we have the possibility to turn both to good and to evil, but we tend to fall into evil, egoistically giving our own happiness the top priority in maxim. This individualistic treatment against evil should also be considered in a social-historical context, because individual development is embedded in a social-historical process. The individual developmental stages Kant shows us in Lectures on Pedagogy as discipline, culture, civilization and moralization, correspond to the progress of human race in a social-historical context. According to Kant, we now live in the society of civilization but not in that of moralization. This correspondence of individual and social-historical development implies that they are each influenced by the other, in other words, they stand in interaction. Human beings strive to become better in a sense of morality through the progress of society and vice versa. And if we accept this kind of interaction and mutual influence between the two, then the evil which at the beginning only contributes to social-historical progress could unexpectedly prompt us to be better individually in a sense of moral progress. How could we deal with this fundamental paradox?
Theoretical framework: My research is mainly based on Kant’s Philosophy but tries to scrutinize it neither with liberalistic nor communitarianistic perspective.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Anderson-Gold, S. (2001) Unnecessary Evil, Albany, New York, State University of New York Press. Arendt, H. (1982) Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. Dörpinghaus, A. (2001) Das radikal Böse bei Immanuel Kant. Zu einem Problem der Grundlegung pädagogischer Anthropologie, in Dörpinghaus, A. und Herchert, G (Hrsg.) Denken und Sprechen in Vielfalt, Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, S. 9-23. Kant, I. (1996) Religion and Rational Theology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (2007) Anthropology, History, and Education, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Muchnik, P. (2009) Kant’s Theory of Evil, Maryland, Lexington Books. Papastephanou, M. (2002) Kant’s cosmopolitanism and human history, History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 17-34.
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