Institute of Sociology
of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology
of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Nogovitsin O.N. The Liberal Moral Community and the Ideal of Moral Perfection: The Figure of Christ in the Social Metaphysics of Kant. In: Byzantium, Europe, Russia: social practices and the interrelationship of spiritual traditions. Issue 4: Collection of Papers ...



Nogovitsin O.N. The Liberal Moral Community and the Ideal of Moral Perfection: The Figure of Christ in the Social Metaphysics of Kant. In: Byzantium, Europe, Russia: social practices and the interrelationship of spiritual traditions. Issue 4: Collection of Papers / Ed. by O.N., Nogovitsin; SI FCTAS RAS. St. Petersburg: Publishing House of the Russian Christian Academy for the Humanities. P. 145-167.
ISBN 978-5-907855-76-2
DOI 10.31119/berst.2024.4.10

Posted on site: 12.01.25

Текст статьи на сайте СИ РАН - филиала ФНИСЦ РАН URL: https://socinst.ru/publications/socpractices2024/article10/ (дата обращения 12.01.2025)


Abstract

The Kantian moral theory and its implications in the doctrines of law and religion mark the place of the transcendental upturn in philosophical thought, which resulted in addressing the human practice as a form of implementation of the historical process. On the grounds of his moral theory, Kant transformed the motives of the critique of religion and late feudal society by the Enlightenment having given it a theoretical justification. As by the logic of this justification, the proper form of being of any social union of people based on voluntary subordination to the principles of such union is a moral community, which has to be transformed into the form of the institutions of the universal moral religion. Their unification into a political community, in turn, should acquire the republican form of power coherent with the moral religion. In the basis of this model, however, an aporia lies, for the formation of the ethic commonality is not possible on the grounds of the legal principle of the sovereignty of the people as a legislator. The law of such a moral community can not directly stem from the will of the legislator, as the subordination to it, in this case, would not be a consequence of the free application of private will. It is because of this that the legislator of the moral commonality, or moral republic, can be reasoned only as God. This circumstance determines Kant’s interest in the figure of Christ, which denotes the sense of mediation between the divine legislation and the internal law of practical reason. Within the frames of the practical philosophy of Kant, Christ, being a personification of the concept of the “ideal of moral perfection” is thus a condition of reversal of the moral consciousness of an individual and the institutional provisions of his/her being as a member of the moral community of believers in the same God. In the presentation, the political-legal, religious-practical and aesthetical aspects of this idea are under consideration.

Content (in russ)


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