Kantian form and phenomenological force: Kant's imperatives and the directives of contemporary phenomenology

This dissertation concerns ethics, specifically how Immanuel Kant's ethical thought has been brought into contact with the French phenomenological school (in the persons of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas), in spite of the fact that these schools of thought are so very different. The work of the contemporary American phenomenologist, Alphonso Lingis, mediates between the two schools. Here the issue of vital historical philosophical importance is that Kantian ethics has become the object of historical study, or seen as a system into which some contemporary problems in ethics can be filed, and continental phenomenology has diffused itself into postmodernist "de-ethicality." What Lingis has seen in Kantian ethics can give phenomenology, the school for whom the "should" spoke only implicitly, is a doctrinal grounding in the imperative. What phenomenology offers Kant's imperative is the explication of the imperative's force, which makes the moral law binding and allows for its form and formulation.; Kant, in fact, acknowledges the form of law (Gesetz) to have some original force (Triebfeder), and although Kant's categorical imperative cannot be directly applied to contemporary phenomenology, phenomenology's forces of things, other persons, and situations can be described as imperative directives. Merleau-Ponty's "preconfigured essences" and "levels" take things to command perception like norms. In Levinas' imperative of alterity, subjectivity is commanded by and constituted in subjection to other persons. Finally, Lingis argues for an elemental imperative in a deepening of the elements themselves, as well as sublime imperatives to which we dedicate our lives and discover who we are in discerning what we must do. In these ways, for Kant and phenomenology, subjectivity begins in subjection to an imperative.; As an indication of the rapprochement between the two schools, contemporary phenomenology criticizes some aspects of Kant's imperatives but retains others. And all the phenomenologists maintain the Kantian conception of philosophy in which fundamental imperatives govern all human action and inquiry. It is hoped that this dissertation will contribute to the continuing conversation between Kant and phenomenology, by expanding the scope of the inquiry beyond the usual emphasis on epistemology. By concentrating on imperatives, this work will attempt a focused comparison not only of morals but of perception and aesthetics in the two schools.