Kant: Bentham's Evil Twin (was Re: Doing a Kant)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Jim Heartfield wrote:
>And what about the consequences of ditching Kant. Like this author:
>
>'Does not an ingenuous contact with Kantian thinking ... contain the
>risk of exposing a young consciousness to a violent and sudden ageing?'
>(xxxi) And who could it be who is so keen to keep young people away from
>Kant? Why, it's the neo-Nazi Peter Sloterdijk.
<snip>
>The Nazi philosopher Heidegger, of course, was hostile to Kant. In Being
>and Time he attacks Kant's idea of the subject (p204-6). In The lectures
>published as The History of the Concept of Time he attacks 'dogmatic
>Kantianism' as a backward step.

Rest assured that I do not recommend doing a Heidegger either.


>Those who criticise Kant (or Jefferson) for failing to live up to the
>principles of equality that they enunciated do not understand that their
>criticisms are wholly parasitic upon those very principles.

A Marxist critique of Kant, Jefferson, etc. isn't an immanent critique.
Marx said in _Capital_, Vol. 1:

*****   The sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale
and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate
rights of man.  There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.
Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power,
are constrained only by their own free will.  They contract as free agents,
and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal
expression to their common will.  Equality, because each enters into
relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they
exchange equivalent for equivalent.  Property, because each disposes only
of what is his own.  And Bentham, because each looks only to himself.  The
only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each
other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each.
Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and
just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the preestablished
harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work
together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest
of all.   *****

Kant is Bentham's evil twin.  Both theorized the moral principles of
commodity exchange; they are each other's mirror image.  And between the
two, one can make a case that Bentham is the lesser evil, especially for
feminists.  (I think Mary Wollstonecraft would agree with me.)  In the end,
though, they are the evil of two lessers.

Yoshie