Within the depth-psychology and philosophical-psychology corpus surveyed by this library, Kantian ethics functions less as a unified doctrine than as a persistent provocation — a framework both indispensable and contested. Ricoeur engages it most systematically in Oneself as Another, tracing the categorical imperative through its formulations to expose tensions between autonomy and solicitude, universality and plurality, self-positing and self-affection. His work reveals that Kantian formalism, far from being self-sufficient, requires supplementation by the teleological and narrative dimensions it claims to exclude. Nussbaum approaches Kantian ethics as a foil for Greek ethical thought, arguing that its sharp moral/non-moral distinction blinds contemporary readers to the legitimate Greek preoccupation with contingency, luck, and the fragility of the good. Williams similarly deploys Kantian categories — above all the categorical imperative and the centrality of duty — as a modern lens that distorts rather than illuminates Greek necessity and heroic resolve. Hillman represents the depth-psychological dissent most sharply: he rejects the Kantian ego as the locus of morality, arguing that imagination and the image provide a non-Kantian psychological ethics. Hannah’s passages on Arendt expose perhaps the most unsettling inversion — Eichmann’s notorious claim to have followed the Kantian imperative — framing obedience as the pathological double of autonomous moral judgment. Together these voices chart a field in which Kantian ethics is simultaneously structurally necessary and psychologically insufficient.
following the authorities’ orders blindly signifies realizing the Kantian categorical imperative? . . . I just placed my life, as far as I could, in the service of this Kantian demand.
This passage presents Eichmann’s own testimony inverting the categorical imperative into a justification for obedience, exposing the ethical catastrophe latent in rule-following divorced from judgment.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis
If Kantian rules and reasons could function as excuses, scapegoats onto which Eichmann placed responsibility for his actions, Arendt’s hope was that the Kantian faculty of judgment could not be so misused.
Arendt’s response to the moral danger of Kantian rule-following is to pivot toward Kant’s faculty of judgment as an irreducible locus of individual responsibility that cannot be delegated.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis
The philosophical background here is Kant’s ethics, the imperative of human relations. How in the world knit this Kantian ethical ideal with a Nietzschean Will to Power?
Hillman shows Adler drawing on Kantian ethics as the philosophical ground for Gemeinschaftsgefühl, then pressing toward the question of how Kantian morality can be reconciled with a Nietzschean drive psychology.
, Healing Fiction, 1983thesis
Psychological morality which derives from the imaginal is no longer a ‘new ethics’ of shadow integration by means of that same old Kantian ego and its heroic wrestlings with abstract dualisms.
Hillman explicitly rejects the Kantian ego as the seat of moral life, proposing instead that a morality grounded in the imaginal supersedes abstract Kantian dualism.
, Healing Fiction, 1983thesis
the respect owed to persons, posited in the second formulation of the Kantian imperative, is, on the moral plane, in the same relation to autonomy as solicitude was to the aim of the ‘good life’ on the ethical plane.
Ricoeur maps the second Kantian formulation — respect for persons — onto his own ethical structure, arguing that it stands to autonomy as solicitude stands to the aim of the good life.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
The opposition between autonomy and heteronomy has thus appeared as constitutive of moral selfhood. In the spirit of Kantianism, the positing of a legislating self must not be confused with an egological thesis.
Ricoeur argues that Kantian autonomy constitutes moral selfhood not through egological self-assertion but through the legislating self’s universal, non-monological structure.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
a fine dividing line tends to separate the universalist version of the imperative, represented by the idea of humanity, from what can be called the pluralist version, represented by the idea of persons as ends in themselves.
Ricoeur identifies an internal tension within the second Kantian imperative between a universalist idea of humanity and a pluralist recognition of persons as irreducible others.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
the most formidable problem posed by respect as a motive is the introduction of a factor of passivity at the very heart of the principle of autonomy.
Ricoeur exposes an internal aporia in Kantian ethics: respect, the central moral motive, introduces passivity and self-affection into the very principle of autonomous self-legislation.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the tie between the notion of good will — the access to the deontological problematic — and the notion of an action done out of duty is so close that the two expressions become substitutes for one another.
Ricoeur clarifies Kant’s foundational move: good will and action from duty are made interchangeable, establishing the strictly deontological character of Kantian ethics.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
When the truth of these Kantian beliefs, and the importance of the Kantian distinction between moral and non-moral value, are taken as the starting-point for inquiry into Greek views of these matters, the Greeks do not, then, fare well.
Nussbaum argues that importing Kantian assumptions about the moral/non-moral distinction into the study of Greek ethics systematically distorts and devalues what the Greeks were doing.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
The influence of modern morality and Kantian ideas encourages one to ask first whether this is the ‘must’ of duty, the categorical imperative of morality. The answer to that comes readily: the courses of action . . . are enough to show that this is not what is at issue.
Williams demonstrates that applying Kantian categories of duty and the categorical imperative to Greek tragic necessity produces a misreading, since the characters’ necessity operates in a different moral register entirely.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993supporting
in the Kantian spirit: if you admit that the rule of universalization is a necessary condition for the passage from the ethical aim to the moral norm . . . then you have to find for its second component the equivalent of the universal required for the first.
Ricoeur reconstructs Kant’s internal logic, showing that the rule of universalization drives a necessary transition from the ethical aim to the full moral norm inclusive of persons.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the rule of universalization appears . . . the imperative poses a specific problem: in addition to the conditions for success . . . speech acts are also subject to conditions on their satisfaction.
Ricoeur analyses the Kantian maxim through speech-act theory, revealing that universalization introduces a relation of commanding and obeying that marks a structural difference from the ethical aim.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
Without by any means denying the break made by Kantian formalism with respect to the great teleological and eudaemonic tradition, it is not inappropriate to indicate
Ricoeur acknowledges the genuine rupture that Kantian formalism constitutes with teleological and eudaemonist ethics while simultaneously seeking continuities between them.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
Arendt argued that obedience was never a virtue, at least not for anyone who lived in the modern, secular world free from religious obligation.
Arendt’s critique of obedience-as-virtue constitutes a direct counter to any reading of Kantian duty that makes compliance with rules or commands morally praiseworthy in itself.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
Adkins’s remark, ‘In this respect, at least, we are all Kantians now’; the respect in question is that of taking duty and responsibility to be the central concepts of ethics.
Williams cites Adkins’s observation that modern ethical culture is structurally Kantian in privileging duty and responsibility, even when it does not acknowledge Kant explicitly.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993aside
has Kant succeeded in distinguishing, on the ontological plane where he situates himself, the respect owed to persons from autonomy? Yes and no.
Ricoeur delivers a nuanced verdict on Kant’s second formulation, finding it partially successful in introducing plurality yet ultimately unable to fully disentangle respect for persons from the logic of autonomy.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
it is on the level of the third predisposition that the propensity for evil is exercised, a predisposition defined here as ‘the capacity for respect for the moral law as itself a sufficient incentive of the will.’
Ricoeur traces Kant’s account of radical evil to the level of predispositions, showing that the corruption of moral motivation occurs at the very site where respect for the moral law should function as the will’s sufficient incentive.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
in considering persons as ends in themselves, a new factor is introduced, one that is potentially discordant in relation to the idea of humanity, which is limited to extending universality in plurality to the detriment of otherness.
Ricoeur identifies the treatment of persons as ends in themselves as introducing genuine otherness into Kantian ethics, a factor potentially in tension with the universalising idea of humanity.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
Arendt’s ‘representative thinking’ therefore had to remain subjective, in the sense of ultimately grounding judgments within an individual in order to preserve the individual’s full responsibility for those judgments.
Arendt’s reworking of Kantian judgment insists on subjective grounding as the condition for genuine moral responsibility, distinguishing her position from intersubjective or rule-based alternatives.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981aside