Kant, Liberalism, and the Meaning of Life

This book is the first extended treatment of Kant's understanding of the meaning of life. It focuses on his largely neglected early lectures on anthropology from the 1760s and 1770s in the crucial years leading up to his Critique of Pure Reason. These lectures feature Kant at his least metaphysical, abstract, and legalistic. Instead, in these lectures, Kant adopts a naturalistic perspective, examining the purpose of the human being as an embodied, needy creature. In this book, Church argues that for theearly Kant, human nature has two conflicting ends-that of wholeness and perfection-a conflict that justifies humanity in giving itself its own moral purpose to bring harmony to our nature and meaning to our lives. Church then argues that Kant's early view of the meaning of life has important implications for understanding his political theory. Kantian liberalism has in recent years been virtually synonymous with John Rawls' liberalism, which has been criticized for abstracting from concerns about meaningin life and from debate and contestation in democratic politics. This book argues that Kant's liberalism involves a more dynamic and contestatory politics than Rawls' liberalism, because of the tensions in our nature as revealed by Kant's anthropology. In addition, Kant's anthropology points to a perfectionist dimension in Kantian liberalism, that politics on Kant's view is not only a framework for pursuing our own view of the good, but also a partnership that fosters a meaningful life--