Abstract

This work, utilizing the philosophy of Max Scheler, provides a critique of Kantian freedom. For Kant, freedom resides in the capacity of reason to immediately determine the will prior to feelings of pleasure or pain. The first chapter explicates Kant's views on the relation between reason, feeling, and willing. The second chapter critiques Kant conception of willing and shows that reason alone cannot provide the basis for the realization of freedom. Having demonstrate the impossibility of grounding freedom in rationality, I next explore, in chapter 3, the possibility of grounding freedom in affective cognition. This is accomplished by disclosing an essential continuity between conation and willing. For Scheler, every kind of intellectual cognition of whatness of an object presupposes an emotional experience of value related to that object, an experience that is initially unreflective and occurring within feeling-states. The fourth chapter examines the nature of feeling-states and paves the way for the discussion of moral value and the realization of freedom. For Scheler, the recognition of moral value involves a dynamic developing process of identification through sympathetic relations with others. The fifth chapter gives a description of the evolution of moral consciousness, which ultimately culminates in the experience of moral freedom