Ricerc@Sapienza

Both Kant and James’smoral philosophies challenged generations of scholars, proving to be much more complicated and multi-faced than even an attentive look might betray. Kant is in fact not the hard-nosed deontologist pictured by modern and contemporary commentators alike, as James is not a flamboyant consequentialist. Or, at least, not only. And this is not
because in both authors we can detect references to, and endorsements of, different—sometimes opposite—moral views and conceptions, but rather because in selected portions of their respectiveworks they pointed to a heterodox picture of what moral philosophy is about in the first place. One in which the nature and point of philosophical ethics are not best caught by moral theorizing (or not at all), but rather by a peculiar kind of moral practice: a cultivation and care of the self which in Kant takes the shape of self-constitution while in James takes the shape of self-experimentation.1 In what follows, rather than attempting a comprehensive reading of their moral thoughts, I intend to investigate selective aspects of this heterodox philosophical line. In particular, I shall focus on Kant and James’s rather original inquiries into the vexing issue of the relationship between ethics and anthropology/psychology,2 which, as I shall argue, they contributed to unraveling with some compelling insights yet to be fully appreciated. It will in fact be my contention that both Kant and James, in key moments of their intellectual biographies, addressed the issue of a pragmatic anthropology and psychology, offering a fruitful path along with rethinking the nature and shape of moral reflection altogether. By surveying some central lines of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and James’s Principles of Psychology, I argue for a picture of the entangl ement of ethics and anthropology/psychology along pragmatist lines standing in opposition—and hence representing an alternative—to the foundational
account of the entanglement offered by ethical theory. According to the picture offered by ethical theory, the clash between the purely descriptive register of anthropology/psychology and the utterly prescriptive one of ethics necessarily brings the former to yield to the demands of the latter. Pragmatism staunchly resists such foundational dynamics: by eyeing a conception of pragmatic anthropology and psychology which illuminates an important dimension and register of the moral life that moral philosophy should account for—that is, self-cultivation and experimentation— Kant and James envisioned a novel path along which they think of the relationship between ethics and anthropology/psychology as one of convergence and mutual reinforcement over the inquiry of what human beings might make of themselves by entering in a certain critical relationship with themselves.