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The Links Between Self-Constitution and Kant's Ethical Community

Government
Political Theory
Constructivism
Irena Cronin
University of California, Los Angeles
Irena Cronin
University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract

In passages 6:97 and 6:98 of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, there is a leap made between a metaphysical notion of the human species’ self-constitution, which is internal, to the unity of the "whole" of the ethical community, which is external. To date, there has been very little scholarship devoted to explicating the rationale behind the seeming leap. This leap can be minimized by recognizing that Kant had a “constitutional” model of the human being that strongly correlates to Plato’s, which links directly to Kant’s idea of the ethical community. To show this, I discuss Plato’s model of a soul, in terms of its parts and unity, and direct correlation to the city-state, in terms of its parts and unity. I then return to the passages of Religion 6:97 and 6:98 to illuminate the relevance of Kant’s theory with relation to his vision of an ethical community.