EXC 212 A06 - Kantian and Post-Kantian Normativity in Intercultural Human Rights Discourse

Basic data for this project

Description

A conception of the cross-cultural philosophy of human rights in the form of a rational anthropology that can ground the incommensurability of humanity represents an inheritance of classical German philosophy that is still not sufficiently appreciated. Kant placed the question of God within practical philosophy, which alone could preserve a reasonable hope of the meaningfulness of personal and political action. The post-Kantians, in their own opinion the better theologians, carried forth the Kantian transformation programme with far-reaching moral- and religious-philosophical implications. This situation of debate leaves behind a vacuum, on the one hand, which makes possible the triumphal march of naturalism in the mid-nineteenth century, but its strengths, on the other hand, remain untapped. The grounding of universal normativity, i. e. normativity that is valid inter-culturally and inter-religiously, as the Kantian-idealistic discourse of natural justice seeks to achieve, is based on a Christendom understood in critical refraction. Thrown open to a profane semantic its normative resources are thus released from any tie to a particulate religious community. The conveying of religion and the grounding of norms is thus paradigmatic for the critical interplay of traditional religion and autonomous reason established at the beginning of the modern era. It will be shown that the synthesis of religion and reason in the form of a moral and subject philosophy with an unmistakably Christian impregnation is of unbroken relevance to contemporary human rights discourse as well as the possibility of grounding a universal normativity. In this, the necessary reconstruction of the previous discursive situation, especially the high phase from 1781 until 1831-32, opens up a retrospective look at the thematic situation in antiquity as much as a view of its religious-critical reception in the nineteenth century and its secular reformulations in the twentieth century. Linguistically-analytically purified and stripped of exaggerated speculative claims the Kantian-idealistic natural justice also makes possible a critical appraisal of the contribution that an enlightened Christendom, even under the auspice of secularity, can and will make to a universal philosophy of human rights. Finally a comparison to analogous grounding strategies of Jewish or Islamic provenance will be of great interest.