Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation: Reprinted from Green's Philosophical Works, vol. II., with Preface by Bernard BosanquetGreen, Thomas Hill
Philosophy
Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation: Reprinted from Green's Philosophical Works, vol. II., with Preface by Bernard Bosanquet
Green, Thomas Hill
Liberty; Natural law; Political obligation
3. But though there is a point of connection between St. Paul's
conception of freedom and bondage and that of Kant, which renders
the above phrase applicable in a certain sense to the 'spiritual
man' of St. Paul, yet the two conceptions are very different. Moral
bondage with Kant, as with Plato and the Stoics, is bondage to the
flesh. The heteronomy of the will is its submission to the impulse
of pleasure-seeking, as that of which man is not in respect of his
reason the author, but which belongs to him as a merely natural
being. A state of bondage to law, as such, he does not contemplate.
It might even be urged that Kant's 'freedom' or 'autonomy' of the
will, in the only sense in which he supposed it attainable by man, is
very much like the state described by St. Paul as that from which the
communication of the spirit brings deliverance,--the state in which
'I delight in the law of God after the inward man, but find another
law in my members warring with the law of my reason and bringing
me into captivity to the law of sin in my members.' For Kant seems
to hold that the will is actually 'autonomous,' i.e. determined by
pure consciousness of what should be, only in rare acts of the best
man. He argues rather for our being conscious of the possibility of
such determination, as evidence of an ideal of what the good will
is, than for the fact that anyone is actually so determined. And
every determination of the will that does not proceed from pure
consciousness of what should be he ascribes to the pleasure-seeking
which belongs to man merely as a 'Natur-wesen,' or as St. Paul might
say 'to the law of sin in his members.' What, it may be asked, is
such 'freedom,' or rather such consciousness of the possibility of
freedom, worth? May we not apply to it St. Paul's words, 'By the law
is the knowledge of sin'? The practical result to the individual of
that consciousness of the possibility of freedom which is all that
the autonomy of will, as really attainable by man, according to
Kant's view, amounts to, is to make him aware of the heteronomy of
his will, of its bondage to motives of which reason is not the author.
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