| The purpose of this dissertation is to explore in detail Kant's duty of self-knowledge, drawing on both his published works and his lectures. Kant presents the duty as a foundational one, fulfillment of which is critical to the agent concerned to lead a virtuous life. A problem presents itself, however, in trying to understand how fulfillment of such a duty is possible. Throughout his corpus, Kant claims that knowing ourselves is impossible; we are "inscrutable" to ourselves. However, he also says that we must be able to do whatever duty demands. So the question that arises for Kant is how we can have a duty of self-knowledge when knowing ourselves, by Kant's own lights, is impossible to do.;Because not much has been said in the secondary literature on Kant's duty of self-knowledge, part of the task of the dissertation will be to explicate the duty itself. The ultimate aim, however, is to save Kant from contradicting himself by providing a Kantian account of how the duty can be fulfilled. Doing so requires the development of a distinctively practical or moral conception of self-knowledge, to be distinguished from the technical sense of self-knowledge that Kant presents in his theoretical works. This is the key to solving the problem posed above: while our hearts are indeed inscrutable if the aim is taken to be self-knowledge in the theoretical sense, we are capable of a practical kind of self-knowledge made possible by the fact that as rational agents we have a direct awareness of our reasons for action. This practical self-knowledge is the proper aim of the duty (although our deep tendency to self-deception requires that we check it by employing third-personal methods of knowing ourselves as well). In the end, it is this distinctively practical conception of self-knowledge that allows Kant to explain how we can fulfill a duty that, at first glance, seems impossible to fulfill. |
