The Relationship between Kant’s Philosophy of Ethics and the Decline of Political Thought in His Philosophy

In this article, the author claims that Kant’s political thought is formed both in the break from his moral thought and in the continuation and decline of his moral thought in politics. Kant has previously struggled in the field of ethics to realize autonomy in external and internal nature, as well as in institutions, on the premise that man is evil and that the world of phenomena or experience lacks rationality. And to escape from this problem, he either seeks refuge in the unknown future or in God and theoretically never has a theory to establish a relationship between the world of phenomena and phenomena, or in other words, the subjective and objective. In such a state, the person stands outside nature with his free inside, and the experience or object appears to him as something threatening. Kant brings all these problems with him to his world of understanding of politics. And because it has already created a disconnect between the two realms of subject and object, this continues also in political thought, because it cannot use the capacity of its new understanding of human freedom to achieve the theory of public will and its embodiment outside. Instead, it seeks to establish the government of law and ensure it by forcing the state to achieve good citizenship for society. Thus Kant’s political thought separated from the freedom of autonomy and it falls into utilitarian thought.
In this article, the author not only believes that there is a gap between freedom and autonomy in Kant’s moral thought and his political philosophy but also believes that Kant’s theoretical decline in political thought is due to the weakness of his moral thought. That is, not establishing a relationship with the real world or phenomena or experience in Kant’s moral thought and not realizing his autonomy outside, whether on the basis of anthropology based on man’s evil or on the irrationality of the outside world and also not accepting its institutions which is the embodiment of human desires and wishes; all of these have had an inevitable impact on his political thought. in such a way that whenever Kant speaks of politics in the real world, he can never speak of the transcendental freedom embodied in it. Thus, that conflict between subject and object or morality and nature or human desires with social institutions in politics has been reproduced again. In such a situation, as Kant has not been able to bring that abstract moral man into the realm of politics and in concrete cases, explain the conditions of its realization in case of public will, inevitably, one must turn to the government for the realization of both private and public will in the field of politics which is not at all the embodiment of the public will of individuals, but a master who prepares man for social life by coercion and its metaphysical repression. Thus, autonomy is not realized in politics as in ethics in the external sphere, and empirical coercion in the form of government will impose itself on the abstraction of autonomy like God in Kant’s moral thought.