Kants Freiheitsargument. Diskussion von Heiko Puls: Sittliches Bewusstsein und Kategorischer Imperativ in Kants Grundlegung: Ein Kommentar zum dritten Abschnitt. Berlin und Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. 318 S.

Heiko Puls’ work Sittliches Bewusstsein und Kategorischer Imperativ in Kants Grundlegung: Ein Kommentar zum dritten Abschnitt, presents an attempt to show that, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant’s argumentation for the objective value of the categorical imperative is almost based upon the same principle as the one presented in the second Critique. More precisely, Puls claims that, like in the Critique of Practical Reason, the Groundwork operates with some kind of fact of reason-theory, which means that our consciousness of the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of our freedom of will. Accordingly, there is no conclusion from a kind of non-moral consciousness of freedom to the freedom of will and from here to the objective value of the categorical imperative, as many interpreters assume. Due to the ambitiousness of his main thesis and his detailed and subtle way of arguing, Puls’ work represents an important and innovative contribution to recent research on Kant’s Groundwork. Nevertheless, his interpretations sometimes seem to favour analysis of loose philological relationships over closer looks on the contexts of passages. Or he focuses excessively on isolated textual evidences for his readings without appropriately recognising the various other evidences against it. In what follows, I give examples for this criticism.

29 Marx’s Theory of the Historical Path and its Commitment to Concretization

Many scholars tend to misunderstand Marx’s theory on the historical path by either taking it as a supra-historical principle or using it in the sense of a subjective external reflection. It is argued in this paper that we should start from the essential foundation of historical materialism to explain Marx’s theory of the historical path, so that its inherent commitment to concretization, which is of essential importance to the whole theory, can be seen clearly. Due to its being separated from Hegelian philosophy, the commitment to concretization within Marx’s theory cannot be actualized through speculative logic. It can only be actualized via the investigation of the life. Such commitment to concretization requires that we should take the changing structure of the mode of production as the axis, and carry out concrete research into all areas of essential difference. In this sense, concretization (investigating real life itself) becomes the “categorical imperative” (kategorischer Imperativ) of Marx’s theory of the historical path.