Myth and Truth about Kant’s “Formalism”, or This Obscure Form of a Maxim

The article attempts to problematize the grounds for Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s ethicsas “formalism”, which still remains a philosophical commonplace. For Hegel, Kant’s position is the point of view of abstract morality, on which the rational principle of the good is the prin­ciple of the formal accordance of reason with itself, the law of self-reliance of the good as conscience; an essential property of Kantian morality is the requirement to fulfill duty for its own sake, and at the same time the allegedimpossibility to deduce any specific definitions of this duty, a system of private moralobligations. Hegel, followed by his disciples and fol­lowers, concluded from this thatKantian ethics, as an ethics of the pure form of maxims, stopped at the ideal of goodwill, not proceeding – and not even having a logical possibility to proceed – to the actuality of the good. It turns out, however, that such criticism is based on a sort of a misunderstanding: on the identification of Kant’s universal legislative form of a maximwith the logical form of universality inherent in the law of nature. Although the letterof Kant’s definitions sometimes gives some cause for such an identification, upon the whole it distorts the view on Kant’s ethics, in which the legislation of reason is not a logi­cal, but a practical, i.e. freedom-mediated determination, and therefore the form of the princi­ple of will, which claims to participate in this legislation, is also a practicalform. If the mat­ter of the will is its object, the logical form of the maxim is the form of a system of means to achieve the object, the practical form of the maxim is a mode of self-determination to ac­tions that achieve the object. The practical form of the maximconcerns the entire use of free­dom, therefore there can be only one legitimate practicalform of the maxim; however, this becomes clear only at the level of Kant’s philosophyof moral religion. It is the practical form of the maxim of every action that can and must be legislative in Kant’s ethics, i.e. the legiti­mate determining ground for the acts of freedom; the logical form of the maxim is practically incapable to determine anything practically. Only with this understanding of the matter is it possible to overcome the myth of Kantian “formalism”, at the same time retaining the valid and philosophicallyfruitful meaning of the concept of the legislative form of maxims.