Allen W. Wood: Surely the world will be a better place, at least margi...

Descartes recommended that we distrust the senses and rely on the ... use of our intellect.

Allen W. Wood

intellect distrust use

It is sad to witness the persistence in our society of the racism and xenophobia that seems to be a permanent part of our political culture. It is shameful to see politicians exploiting these human weaknesses in order to gain political power. It is most depressing of all to contemplate a future in which politicians who do this will continue to have influence over people's lives.

Allen W. Wood

persistence xenophobia depressing

Popular religion since the time of Kant and Fichte has gone in a direction they tried to prevent and that has been disastrous for the humanity both of believers and of the rest of us. Look at the role of religion in Republican presidential primaries if you need any confirmation of this last statement.

Allen W. Wood

presidential lasts humanity

Kant considers belief in God and immortality to be items of "faith" because he relates faith to the pursuit of ends - in this case, the highest good.

Allen W. Wood

pursuit immortality belief

Kant does not regard freedom as an item of faith because it is too basic to our agency to be related to any end.

Allen W. Wood

agency ends doe

Freedom is an unprovable but unavoidable presupposition, not an article of faith.

Allen W. Wood

articles

Kant was a rational theologian. He did not pretend to be a biblical or revealed theologian.

Allen W. Wood

rational theologian biblical

Kant's aim was to develop a religion within the boundaries of mere reason (that is, reason unaided by special empirical revelation) and then to ask about existing ecclesiastical faith (especially about Christianity, and the Lutheran Christianity of his time and place) how this revealed faith must be interpreted if it is to be reconciled with reason, and even seen as a wider (though morally optional) extension of a religion of reason.

Allen W. Wood

special christianity reason

Fichte would identify all states of our minds with states of our body - perhaps not merely of our brain, but the whole body as an acting organism.

Allen W. Wood

acting mind brain

It seems to me self-evident that it is worthwhile to understand the best thoughts of the past, to appropriate them, to criticize them.

Allen W. Wood

worthwhile self past

I do not know how much my own work has achieved, and I must not pretend it has done more than it has.

Allen W. Wood

know-how my-own done

In my acquaintance with John Rawls, I found him to be a simple and honest man, who just by chance also happened to be the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century. I would like to think that I could emulate at least his modesty - his refusal to exaggerate his perception of himself and his place in the larger scheme of things - even if my work never compares with his in its importance.

Allen W. Wood

simple men thinking

We usually can't know how, and we probably should not even ask, how our lives contribute to a better world.

Allen W. Wood

know-how should world

It would be nice, wouldn't it? if we could get comfortable about the problem of freedom. Kant thinks that we can't.

Allen W. Wood

nice would-be thinking

As with many metaphysical and religious questions, Kant thinks they lie beyond our power to answer them. If you can't stand the frustration involved in accepting this, and insist on finding some more stable position which affords you peace of mind and intellectual self-complacency, then you will find Kant's position "problematic" in the sense that you can't bring yourself to accept it. You may try to kid yourself into accepting either some naturalistic deflationary answer to the problem or some dishonest supernaturalist answer.

Allen W. Wood

religious kids lying

Freedom is a permanent problem for us, both unavoidable and insoluble.

Allen W. Wood

permanent problem

Consequentialist theories pretend that we can set some great big ends (the general happiness, human flourishing), provide ourselves with definite enough conceptions of them to make them the objects of instrumental reasoning, and then obtain enough reliable information about what actions will best promote them that we could regulate our conduct by these considerations alone.

Allen W. Wood

information enough action

In fact people do not know enough about themselves and what is good for them to form a sufficiently definite conception of the general happiness (or whatever the end is) to establish definite rules for its pursuit.

Allen W. Wood

enough facts people

We cannot predict the effects of our actions, especially our collective actions over generations or centuries, to use instrumental reasoning toward these big final ends to tell us what we ought to do.

Allen W. Wood

generations finals use

It is rational to choose the right means to your ends to develop very elegant abstract formal theories of rational choice, and then turn these into what look like moral theories. Philosophers tend to be ravished by the formal beauty of such theories, and they don't pay much attention to the fact that our human limitations make them pretty useless in practice, while the simple point about instrumental reasoning is too shallow to be of much real moral interest.

Allen W. Wood

real simple mean

Surely the world will be a better place, at least marginally, if people have a better understanding of Kant and Hegel, if Marx's thought its studied and appreciated, if people gain a better understanding of Fichte, whose philosophy is far more important than people realize.