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A KANTIAN ‘FOUNDATION’ OF HUMAN RIGHTS THROUGH THE IMPOSSIBILITY...
If you conceive of a theory that aims at the understanding of something essential
— here, for our purpose, the humanity in human beings -, then we have before
us issues that only allow the generation of what I would call ‘soft’ truths. ‘Hard’
truths on such subjects are for Kant not possible because our senses, Kantian
guarantors of ‘hard’ truths, play no role in it. ‘Soft’ truths may nevertheless be
useful, for practical purposes. Kant denotes them as ‘regulative ideas’, as opposed
to ‘constitutive’ knowledge. Take for example freedom. We cannot positively
‘know’ that inner freedom exists. Neither, however, can we rightly assume its
non-existence. Freedom, as a consequence, “can never be subject of any possible
theoretical knowledge..., but just be taken as a regulative or merely negative
principle””’. For instance when we talk about responsibilities. It is this ‘negative’
concept of knowledge that is interesting for our purpose here.
In the second part of his Critique of Pure Reason (Transcendental Dialectics),
Kant mentions three mayor examples of regulative ideas: the self, the world, and
god, presenting for each of them examples what goes awry when confusing regula¬
tive ideas with positive, ‘hard’ realities. He calls such misconceptions paralogisms:
the misinterpretation of mental constructions as substantial beings-in-themselves.
Kant lists four paralogisms, the third one dealing with misconceptions regarding
identity and self of a person". A person is a reality that persists identically in time.
But how do I know that any given person remains the same, since ‘identity’ is
empirically not accessible? I only ‘know’ by transferring the awareness of me being
identically myself as enabled through what Kant calls the ‘inner self’ or the ‘inner
sense of time’ on objects of the outer world: “The identity of a person can only be
found in my own consciousness,...for in the apperception time is only represented
in me.” (A 362/363)?!. This is how we ‘know’ the identity of persons.
Kant concludes that no one can “have the least representation of a thinking
being through an external experience, but only through self-consciousness. Thus,
such objects are nothing further than the transference of this consciousness of
mine to other things...” (A 347), thusly underlining “the impossibility of settling
anything dogmatically about an object of experience beyond the bounds of
experience...” (B 424)
In other words: No one is epistemologically entitled in principle of colonizing the
indefinable Self (or Selves) of human beings with contents that pretend to function
as its ‘true’ foundation. Such would be the business of politics impregnated by
ideologies, but not by informed knowledge.
29 Kant, Metaphysik, 326-327.
30 I am aware of the marginality of the following theoretical considerations for common
everyday life. Emphasis is therefore put on ‘sensu stricto’.
3! Quotes from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason follow the pagination of the German Akademie¬
Ausgabe.
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