Metaphysics of practical reason. Autonomy and heteronomy according to Kant and Lévinas

Abstract

Relations that define two different projects of ethics – autonomous ethics of Kant and heteronomous ethics of Lévinas – are complex and ambiguous. On one hand, Lévinas includes Kant in the set of transcendental thinkers, who defend strong cognitive subject with his authority to create representations. On the other hand, Lévinas finds in the Critique of practical reason important trace of transcendence, namely the possibility of transcending the finiteness of human existence in the dimension of moral reflection. Indication of the meaning, that is independent from being and goes beyond the boundaries drawn by the senses, is according to Lévinas the proper principle of Kant’s “Copernican revolution.” Kant’s greatest merit doesn’t consist in recognition of the subject as an active element of knowledge or in averting the dispute between empiricism and rationalism. The impact of Kant, that is interpreted by Lévinas, is based on the discovery of the road leading from the finite of scientific knowledge to the infinite of moral cognition. Although it might seem that we are irrevocably locked in the limited circle of theoretical reason, a chance to break the boundaries set by the sensuality appears in the practical reason. The truth about the finiteness of human knowledge is not the last word of Kant. The right message of his philosophy – both critical and positive part – could be formulated in the following way: where strictly scientific knowledge ends, begins moral cognition. Beyond the horizon of the world that we know by sight, vision and touch, opens a field of metaphysical speculation.
These are the threads, both similarities and differences, that differ the ethics of Kant and Lévinas. Kant claims that only “pure practical reason,” that is free from all sensuous experience, guarantees the universality of the moral law. Lévinas however argues, that it is the unique event, the “face to face” encounter with another human being, that sets the first impulse of moral action. According to Kant’s lecture, the relationship with another man is always mediated by the force of the moral imperative, that commands to treat him as an end in itself, never as a mean. The same issue is presented differently by Lévinas, who claims, that the direct experience of the otherness is the condition of an ethical relationship with another human being. In such a specific dispute two competing concepts of ethics are born.