Kingdom of Ends
| Part of a series on |
| Immanuel Kant |
|---|
 |
| People |
| Major works |
| Kantianism and Kantian ethics |
| Related topics |
|
The Kingdom of Ends is a thought experiment centered around the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Kant introduced the concept in his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (4:439). The thought experiment proposes a world in which all human beings are treated as ends, not as means to an end for other people.
Nature of the concept
The Kingdom of Ends is a hypothetical state of existence that is derived from Kant's categorical imperative. A Kingdom of Ends is composed entirely of rational beings, whom Kant defines as those capable of moral deliberation (though his definition expands in other areas). In order to be a part of the Kingdom of Ends, these rational beings must choose to act by maxims that imply an absolute necessity. It is from this point of view that they must judge themselves and their actions.
Kant uses the term "Kingdom" to mean the "union of different rational beings in a system by common laws."[citation needed] These common laws, established by the categorical imperative, are the gauge used to evaluate the worthiness of an individual's actions. When all the Kingdom's individuals live by the Kantian formulation of the categorical imperative, one will treat each of their fellow subjects as ends in themselves, instead of means to achieving one's own selfish goals. This systematic whole is the Kingdom of Ends. As underpinning of this conception, Kant postulates a meta-ethical teleology to buttress the notion of a causality operating according to higher, super-ordinate ordinances of non-Newtonian type related to the motions of the moral law: necessarily, naturalistic discursive reason is incapable of perceiving this "alter-verse"; accordingly, Kant here utilizes the faculty of noumenal intuition as key perceptual mode offering, in the very sensations of human morality itself, a "glimpse" or "foreshadowing" of this alter-verse of empyrean, egoistically-cleansed Ends. The interconnecting point between this naturalistic deterministic world and the theoretical "upper world" of the Kingdom of Ends, Kant argues, is the self-commanding "conscience".
For Kant, the conscience obeying higher ethical imperatives of its own accord, liberated from merely sensuous empirical motivation, acts as the "nexus" to this super-essential Kingdom of Ends, whose "King" as the supernatural Godhead is incapable of proving, only intuiting. The righteousness of will of a good conscience self-obedient to superior laws going beyond itself, and beyond naturalistic-deterministic mechanistic materialism, differentiates humankind from unthinking bestiality and the unthinking, heartless darkness inhering within materiality; the spontaneity of freedom as evidenced by the human will in its superiority over mere telluric nature, is the ennobling basis of human nature, the rationale of "human dignity" in the Kantian world-view. The intuitive conscience interconnects the human mind with super-ordinate causalities and planes or levels of higher ontological order, allowing indirect vision of the exoteric "Divine"; the deontologically purified free will is the gateway to the super-essential.
People can only belong to the Kingdom of Ends when they, in absolute self-mastery, give universal laws unto themselves and freely subordinate themselves to the teleological Higher Law; in such a state, all human wills internally subject themselves freely to the same laws and causality of higher lawfulness originating from the moral center. Such rational beings must regard themselves simultaneously as sovereign when making laws, and as subject when obeying them. Yet these "made" laws are merely discoveries of the preexisting Higher Law coordinated to super-ordinate causalities of a superior lawfulness the human mind metaphorically describes in "deific" terms. Morality, therefore, is the free will and conscience, acting out of reverence for all universal laws of transcendent morality which make the Kingdom of Ends possible. In a true Kingdom of Ends, acting virtuously will be rewarded with happiness; or phrased in a different way, pure action shall be both reward and merit of itself: selfishness of acquisitive consequence-based hedonist "reward" being banished.
In his writings on religion, Kant interprets the Kingdom of God as a religious symbol for the moral reality of the Kingdom of Ends; indeed, the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kantian Kingdom of Ends are dialectic twins of the self-same meta-logical scheme simply "translated" in different ways; one in allegorical parable for accessibility of the average human mind, and one in the purely philosophical, ontological-metaphysical language of non-linear logicality, the other "religious" form exists as its exoteric "popularization". As such, it is the ultimate goal of both religious and political organization of human society. (Stephen Palmquist, "'The Kingdom of God is at Hand!' (Did Kant really say that?)"], History of Philosophy Quarterly 11:4 (October 1994), pp.421-437.)
Modern Kantian scholars have now verifiably confirmed the influence of Emmanuel Swedenborg on the integral thought of Kant and most clearly perhaps perceptible in this concept of a morally-purified "heavenly society" constituting Kant's "kingdom of ends." Kant innovated a kind of mysticism of absolute apophasis and esoteric anti-naturalism. For Swedenborg here, see Lucas Thorpe, "The Realm of Ends as a Community of Spirits: Kant and Swedenborg on the Kingdom of Heaven an the Cleaning of the Doors of Perception" (The Heythrop Journal, 52: 52–75; 2011).