Imprisoned happiness: an essay in moral philosophy

Abstract

Most scholars of Eric Weil's work agree with the claim that his perspectives are Kantian. However, when Kant is understood in depth and confronted with Aristotle, Weil's Kantianism is charged with a weight of reality that transforms it. This statement provided the reason for the present research. If it is true that the perspective of Eric Weil's Moral Philosophy is clearly Kantian, it is equally true that his Kantianism is post-Hegelian and must be understood from the Weilian interpretation of the third Kantian Critique. The Kantian perspective of Weil's Moral Philosophy is particularly evident in statement 16 of the Moral Philosophy: "Every duty of the moral man is founded on the duty towards oneself, which is the duty to be happy. The duty towards oneself becomes concrete in the duty towards the other". The present research intends to investigate how the eudemonist (Aristotelian) perspective is coherently composed with the deontological (Kantian) perspective. It is therefore a matter of knowing how Aristotle gives Weil's Kantianism "a weight of reality that transforms it". My hypothesis is that the answer must be sought, first, in Aristotle's anthropology (= ethics), whose key to understanding is found in Metaphysics. To do so, I will look in Weil's texts dedicated to Aristotle for evidence of a post-Kantian Aristotelianism in his Moral Philosophy. As a support and expansion of this understanding of Aristotelianism present in Weil's Moral Philosophy, I intend to merge horizons with Alasdair McIntyre's interpretation of the Aristotelian theory of virtues as practices, which assimilates the cognitive dimensions of the moral virtues systematized in the treatise on moral virtue and in the conception of phrónesis of the Nicomachean Ethics, deeply anchored in the Aristotelian theory of voluntary action, already developed in the Eudemian Ethics, whose foundations must be sought in Physics and Metaphysics, as well as in the studies of physiology and psychology. Finally, this new eudemonist/deontological understanding of morality will be confronted with the requirement of a new imperative that, according to Hans Jonas, calls for another coherence, not that of the act with oneself, but that of its final effects for the continuity of human activity in the future of the world. This new imperative adds to the moral calculation the temporal horizon that is missing in the logical operation of the Kantian imperative: if the latter extends over an ever-present order of abstract compatibility, the new imperative proposed by Hans Jonas extends towards a predictable concrete future, which constitutes the unfinished dimension of our responsibility. (AU)