Kant and the "True Shame Instinct": Notes on the Future of the Human Species
- Autores: Ana Cristina Falcato
- Localización: Kant on Emotions: Critical Essays in the Contemporary Context / coord. por Mariannina Failla, Nuria Sánchez Madrid, 2021, ISBN 9783110720716, págs. 55-68
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
Shame is usually taken to be an emotion far removed from Kant’s practical philosophy broadly understood. Mostly for good reasons, Kantianism has been charged with neglecting the role that emotions play in practical deliberation and action. Whenever such a claim is explicitly endorsed by contemporary moral philosophers, however, textual sources are largely ignored, and a stricture between pre-critical and critical writings is assumed. In this essay, I rely on some highly relevant remarks Kant wrote in the 1760s, all of which anticipate future developments in Critical Philosophy whilst speculating about the role played by the so-called “shame-instinct” on the improvement of the human species over time. I thus address a gross misjudgment of Kantian ethics by Anglo-American philosophy, while also pointing out some seemingly unsolvable paradoxes in Kant’s reasoning on the topic, which only become apparent once their premises have been made explicit.
