Karl Ameriks’ Kantian Dignity and Its Difficulties is an exceptionally rich, multilayered book. It combines a careful defence of the fundamental Kantian idea of universal human dignity with a wide-ranging, highly nuanced investigation of the complex and uneven cultural impact of Kant’s practical thought, as it was often (mis)interpreted. Drawing on many philosophically revealing interconnections between Kant and some of his underappreciated contemporaries and successors, from Johann Gottfried Herder to Thomas Mann – the hero of the last three chapters of the book – it illuminates the significance, and great difficulties, of the uptake after Kant of Kant’s conception of dignity and related ideas. Ameriks is especially sensitive to the puzzling ease with which some highly influential right-wing writers and political figures at the break of the last century distorted Kant’s thought with disastrous consequences for twentieth-century Europe and beyond. While he stresses the continued importance, in our own difficult times, of defending Kant’s enlightened liberalism, he considers head-on the extent to which Kant’s prejudicial attitudes might have contributed to these problems. Hence, much of the book bears on matters of contemporary relevance, such as colonialism, racism, antisemitism, religion, and politics, as well as the role of philosophy, particularly of Kantian thought, in modern life. The resulting story is complicated, messy, and, at times, unsettling. Indeed, it is meant to unsettle. In a way, this book is a call to action. It enjoins philosophers to realize the vital importance of speaking effectively to the broader public and joining, as Mann once did, a public campaign of defending Kantian ideals of universal human dignity, freedom, and equality as fundamental to democracy. The last book of an eminent Kant scholar (one of the most important of his generation), Ameriks’ Kantian Dignity also reckons, poignantly, with the place of his own life’s work within broader political and cultural trends. I will briefly sketch the chapters of this impressive book and raise some questions along the way.Footnote ¹

Chapter One defends Ameriks’ version of the ‘mainline interpretation’ of Kant’s fundamental concept of dignity and provides a systematic background for the subsequent chapters by engaging with two recently discussed alternative approaches – constructivist views that ground dignity in agents’ basic capacity to deliberate and set ends (or their future potential for exhibiting this capacity) and views that define dignity in terms of actual moral commitment and achievement. Ameriks focuses, in particular, on Paul Formosa’s ‘not all the way down constructivism’ (Formosa Reference Formosa2017) and Richard Dean’s version of the ‘achievement dignity’ view (Dean Reference Dean2016). He sees these approaches as equally unsatisfactory interpretative extremes. On the one hand, he argues that constructivist understandings of dignity in terms of a minimal condition of practical rationality cannot do justice to Kant’s central idea that a basic distinctive capacity of persons is the power to appreciate unconditional ends of action. This leads them wrongly to deny dignity to a large class of human beings, including anencephalic newborns, people with advanced forms of dementia, those in permanent vegetative state, and apparent psychopaths. On the other hand, views that define dignity in terms of a maximal condition of actually realizing, to some degree, morality’s ideals, imply that an essential human power for free choice has no value independently of actualization, which ‘leaves no clear room for even saying that anything would be lost if persons were executed prior to having a chance to act’ (p. 43).Footnote ² Moreover, they cannot make sense of life as a moral project – a process in which we learn to respect and assist one another. For this moral learning is possible precisely because we all start out with a basic capacity for morality, deserving of respect, and need each other to overcome our early ignorance and selfish tendencies.

In contrast, Ameriks regards dignity as an unconditional, all-or-nothing, inviolable feature of human beings, grounded in the universal human capacity for morality, where the relevant notion of capacity is thick enough to accommodate Kant’s idea that anyone who possesses the faculty of free choice has, just in virtue of this, the status of dignity. Ameriks presents this view as a sensible form of moral realism that does not treat human dignity as independent of practical reason, but rather as ‘the matter of eternal and essential truth that is rooted in the faculty of reason common to all higher rational beings’ (p. 33).

This is mostly familiar. But Ameriks’ striking new point is that the inadequacies of the alternative approaches echo the ways in which Kantian dignity has been misinterpreted, particularly in some deeply troubling and highly consequential late-19^th to mid-20^th century German responses to Kant. Hence, we arrive at the aforementioned theoretical set-up for the subsequent chapters.

Before turning to these chapters, let me note a controversial feature of Ameriks’ account. While he agrees with Formosa that dignity requires a future potential for exhibiting moral capacity, his ‘charitable but concrete’ (p. 37) understanding of this potential has significant implications. Given our understanding of technological progress and existing techniques for reversing conditions involving seemingly irreversible loss of faculties, Ameriks argues, we should grant future potential for recovery, and hence dignity status, to all people in such conditions. Even if certain individuals seem to lack moral capacity entirely, we should not rush to deny them the protections of dignity. That we are tempted to do so, he warns, is a chilling reminder of the attitudes of numerous doctors, lawyers, politicians, and others who went along with brutal Nazi methods for dealing with people they found undesirable. This is a crucial reminder, yet one might worry that Ameriks’ notion of future potential is too unconstrained. He insists that the most distinctive characteristic of human beings is their ‘concrete and ever-present power of oriented free choice’ (p. 42). But in what sense is this power ever-present or concrete in an anencephalic infant, who, given our best medical knowledge, is incapable of developing a complete brain, let alone of exercising cognitive capacities? Clearly, such an infant is a human being and ought to be treated as such. What justifies this moral demand is still a controversial question, but Ameriks’ notion of future potential seems unlikely to settle it. Note that his argument would extend moral personhood and dignity to human embryos and, perhaps, to cryogenically preserved dead, since we cannot rule out extraordinary technological developments that might someday restore their faculties and personal identity. Whether one finds these implications problematic or not, they raise questions about how well Ameriks satisfies his dual aim of being both charitable and concrete. One also wishes the book would say more about what is involved in recognizing the dignity of another – and of an infant, in particular.

Chapter Two argues that a reassessment of Herder’s perspective and his relationship to Kant is important for understanding both thinkers. Their views have often been sharply contrasted based on misleading caricature of Kant’s philosophy as overly abstract, ahistorical, unfeeling rationalism, and of Herder’s as historicist and feeling-centric irrationalism. The chapter goes a long way towards dismantling these stereotypes, particularly about Herder. While noting genuine differences in their intellectual temperaments, interests, and methods, and their personal tensions, Ameriks examines the two thinkers’ ‘complex commonalities’ (p. 60). These include Kant’s ‘deep aesthetic side’ and Herder’s concern with nature, science, rational development, and especially his appeal for valuing local cultures combined with a form of cosmopolitanism that acknowledged, as Kant did, universal human dignity and capacity for morality. Kant’s late rapprochement with Herder in the little-known last publication – a Postscript for a German-Lithuanian dictionary (1800) – is especially interesting. Despite various prejudiced statements about other peoples, including vulnerable minorities, in earlier writings, in the Postscript, Kant argued for a special value of ‘friendly respect’ for and preservation of minority cultures, issuing a particular plea for supporting the Lithuanian language. If only Kant’s thought had been developed further along these lines and more widely appreciated, Ameriks regrets, ‘there might have been fewer misguided attempts to appropriate Kant as a chauvinist – or to completely dismiss him as one’ (p. 7).Footnote ³

Ultimately, the chapter aims to show that Kant’s universalism regarding human dignity can and should be supplemented with careful attention, exemplified in Herder’s work, to specific historical developments and to local (particularly, minority and marginalized) cultures, and highlights the special value of the Early Romantic version of such a ‘mixed and inclusive Kantian–Herderian approach’ (p. 63).

Chapter Three asks whether Kant’s philosophy can be linked to racism, anti-Judaism, and even fascism, given that some highly influential right-wing writers appealed to his authority in Germany to promote chauvinist and expansionist ideas. Ameriks considers two recent critiques of Kant on these matters – Michael Lackey’s contention (Lackey Reference Lackey2012) that Kant is implicated in the chilling philosophical influence on German fascism by British-born Aryan supremacist and self-avowed Kantian, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Paul Franks’ analysis of German Idealism’s connection to anti-Semitism (Franks Reference Franks, Stolzenberg and Rush2011).

While he commends Lackey for drawing attention to the profound impact of Chamberlain’s stridently anti-Semitic, ethnonationalist magnum opus, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), on Germany’s culture and politics, Ameriks offers a detailed refutation of Lackey’s central claims, including his suggestion that Kant’s ethics and race theory rule out respect for disadvantaged minorities. In addition to relying on Nazis’ own claims of adherence to Kantian and Christian ideals, Lackey remains blind to the crucial distinction, stressed in Chapter One, between Kant’s basic conception of universal human dignity and conceptions, including Chamberlain’s, that associate dignity with some achievement (moral or otherwise). The latter point, Ameriks argues, generalizes to similar accusations against Kant’s philosophy that are independent of claims about fascism.

Yet, Ameriks also emphasizes the importance of distinguishing ill-founded objections like Lackey’s from philosophically careful critiques, such as Franks’ analysis of intrenched prejudices and ignorance about Jewish traditions that imbued German Idealism with Christian anti-Judaism. Franks contends that these prejudices are latent in Kant’s own anti-Judaic comments, giving today’s philosophers a special obligation to emphasize the true nature of such statements. Ameriks agrees with much of Franks’ critique. Yet, his response is not entirely straightforward. On the one hand, he argues that Kant’s personal prejudices did not aim to deny the status of dignity to Jews and other minority groups (p. 92). On the other hand, he faults Kant for not recognizing that his critical remarks about marginalized minority cultures could both reinforce already existing bad social tendencies and encourage misrepresentations of the core of his theory. He concludes, strikingly, that Kant is not entirely blameless with regard to what later malicious actors made of his philosophy. One might wonder whether this conclusion is not closer to Lackey’s than Ameriks’ refutation allows.

Chapter Four puzzles over Kant’s lack of interest in the uniquely progressive political advancements in the United States, including the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence that proclaimed self-evidence of universal human equality, and in the American-inspired uprising in Amsterdam in the 1780s. Kant also seemed oblivious to the effects of German imperialist expansion eastward, into the Baltic area, which included his native Königsberg.

Ameriks diagnoses Kant’s bewildering lack of concern with these matters as indicative of the self-incurred narrow-mindedness – the general ‘Establishment Attitude’ - he shared with many Northern European intellectuals at the time. His further hypothesis is that this attitude, rather than specifically racism or German chauvinism, ultimately lies behind Kant’s insulting comments about various peoples and cultures – Poles, Russians, Blacks, Native Americans, ‘Oriental nations’, Jews, and even Americans with a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant background. This does not make Kant’s insulting remarks about outsiders, or his blindness towards colonial Prussian expansionism and privilege, any less morally problematic. Indeed, Ameriks claims that Kant’s failure to overcome his old-world elitism contributed to ‘severely retarding cosmopolitanism among many of his significant successors’ and was ‘indirectly instrumental in leading to the most horrendous of racial crimes’ (p. 113).

Now, this harsh assessment strikes me as both underrating the agency of Kant’s successors and overrating a philosopher’s ability to counteract powerful socio-economic forces and interests. Ameriks similarly speculates in the Introduction that without denying the shameful side of American history, including long-standing racist laws, slavery, and ruthless expansion on a continental scale, one can argue that ‘if only Kant had paid at least some direct attention to the uniquely progressive aspects of American developments, then – given his special stature – this might have helped to counter the kind of strictly chauvinist and unflattering picture of America that was developed by influential later writers and exploited by fascist leaders’ (p. 8). Yet, as he notes in Chapter Five, Kant’s condemnation of the treatment of the native peoples in North America and slave practices in the Caribbean suggests that these concerns might have contributed to his silence about American democratic ideals. And there are reasons to doubt that were Kant to praise American developments, this would have made much difference historically, since the likes of Chamberlain and the fascist leaders had no trouble twisting and exploiting anything whatsoever to suit their aims. After all, Chamberlain easily overlooked Kant’s admiration for the ideals of the French Revolution, insisted that Jesus was an Aryan, and claimed that Goethe, himself a towering intellectual figure, was a ‘courageous enemy of Jews’ (Field Reference Field1981: 180-3, 290).

Chapter Five compares Kant’s practical thought with that of his contemporary Richard Price, a renowned Welsh philosopher, well-connected liberal religious figure, and political thinker. Price was an enthusiastic champion of both French and American Revolutions, with significant influence on American leadership (including Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and Paine) and on key British and French political figures at the time. While Kant and Price, whom Ameriks describes as a Kantian avant la lettre, never engaged with, or even mentioned, each other’s work, they had much in common. Most of the chapter is devoted to examining illuminating parallels between Kant’s and Price’s moral philosophies, emphasizing the centrality each gave to free will as the ground of moral action and to universal human dignity and equality as self-evident, necessary values.

The chapter culminates with discussion of a fascinating question: how anyone who holds something like Kantian moral ideals of universal human dignity and equality (including the authors of the U.S. Declaration of Independence) can defend the idea of a principle that is both revolutionary and self-evident. Here, Ameriks engages with contemporary moral epistemology, including Sarah McGrath’s argument (McGrath Reference McGrath2019) that we can gain substantial moral knowledge pre-reflectively, from the immediate social settings in which we are raised. While sympathetic to McGrath’s approach, Ameriks observes that any such view will have to wrestle with what he calls ‘the problem of sick inheritance’. After all, ‘[t]he most advanced countries in the world have instituted horrible racial and eugenic practices, with huge public support, even from prize-winning scientists’ (p. 140), and millions were brought up to believe that these practices were obviously good, or at least acceptable. The worry deepens, considering that insistence on universal dignity, equality, and free will was largely absent from ‘revered ancient cultures’ and the present-day ‘anarchy’ of values and value theories. Without attempting to settle the issue, Ameriks offers two anti-skeptical ‘Enlightenment’ points. Firstly, the development and dissemination of science tends to lead to irreversible dismantling of superstitions and bad ‘scientific’ views that undergird pernicious moral and political beliefs and practices. Secondly – and this is one of Ameriks’ favorite ideas, which may remind some readers of Cassirer’s conception of constitutive a priori truths in science – a diversity of fundamental views in our moral history can be reconceived as a ‘complex ascending spiral’ rather than a disconnected plurality, so that looking back we can appreciate history as a ‘dialectical self-correcting process’, converging on a system of normative judgments that survive the test of time and of scientific and moral reflection and correction – ‘a realm of the eventually self-evident to all’ (p. 141).

The last three chapters – practically a book within a book – focus on Thomas Mann’s non-fictional work and political activism. They shed light on Mann both as a perceptive student of the post-Kantian philosophical tradition and a serious philosopher in his own right. It is impossible to do justice to Ameriks’ richly nuanced analysis of Mann’s intellectual trajectory and its lessons in this short review. I will mention only a few prominent themes.

Mann’s career was marked by a ‘dramatic reversal’. His early, World War I-era views were chauvinist and anti-West – echoing Wagner and Chamberlain, he extolled the superiority of the idealistic ‘culture’ of the German Reich over the materialistic, selfish ‘civilization’ of Western democracies. Notably, Mann profoundly misunderstood Kant’s moral philosophy as consistent with these anti-democratic ideas. Ameriks considers this ‘surprisingly crude’ confusion to be indirectly connected to Kant’s own lack of appreciation of American democracy, via the fact that ‘liberal political theory lacked prestigious proponents in nineteenth-century Germany’ (p. 148). Yet, in the early 1920s, under the influence of the work of Walt Whitman, Mann enthusiastically endorsed Germany’s first democratic government, ultimately becoming a leading intellectual voice for democratic freedoms and American engagement against the Fascists. Mann’s regard for American democratic ideals, as he came face to face with the tragic events in Germany, allowed him eventually to better understand the best elements of his own philosophical tradition, especially the Kantian aspects of the Early Romantic movement.

Ameriks argues that Mann’s intellectual trajectory exemplifies a general tendency in post-Kantian thought to grapple with the problem of ultimate human vocation – whether it should be defined as primarily aesthetic, secular ethical, or broadly religious individual life. Ameriks highlights Mann’s outstanding grasp of the path that leading German figures took in the search for the positive role of philosophy. While initially captivated by Nietzsche’s aestheticism, Mann was also impressed by Kierkegaard’s critique of the self-centeredness of primarily aesthetic life. Later in his career (especially when writing Doctor Faustus), he came to appreciate Kierkegaard’s worries about the connection between evil and excessively aesthetic orientation, particularly in the hands of totalitarian regimes. Mann recognized that ‘it was imperative for Germans finally to get beyond their aesthetic fascinations, and excess pride in their own culture, and accept, as fully essential, the humdrum ethical institutions of modern democracy and its core Kantian values’ (p. 167).

Ameriks sees Mann’s example as paradigmatic of ‘great difficulty … of properly responding to one’s own complex tradition’ (p. 155), given various psychological, cultural, and political forces that promote self-deception and susceptibility to ideological manipulation. Occasionally, he seems ambivalent about philosophy’s prospects in the current cultural moment of overcoming these forces. Yet, the Mann chapters are ultimately hopeful, if not unreservedly optimistic. Their key lesson is that Kantian ideals and liberal democratic beliefs are not undermined by the deep flaws of a corrupt tradition and cross-cultural differences, and that one of philosophy’s indispensable tasks is to bring to light, publicly, the central truths embodied in these beliefs, counteracting their distortion and manipulation. This kind of philosophical work, particularly if it also engages the public’s heart and aesthetic sense, while not overvaluing the aesthetic, can be a true catalyst for critical reflection on beliefs we inherit, and help us recover and retain what is most valuable in our liberal democratic tradition.

Ameriks’ ambitious hope is that this book – sadly, we now know, his last – ‘can begin to stir into action some members of the new generation and at least serve as a reminder of how much influence words and philosophical ideas have had – and of how important it is to develop them properly and keep them from being misunderstood and misused’ (p. 13). About a month before his passing, Professor Ameriks gave a talk at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, my home institution. Afterwards, I asked him if there was one key point that he would like readers to take from the book. ‘Yes’, he replied, ‘Change the world!’