1 Whereas the three conflicts of the faculties are relatively easy to notice in the first two essays, scholars have typically found it

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1 My dissertation, The Conflict of the Faculties and Its Aftermath: Post-Kantian Political Ethics in Hegel, Arendt, and Habermas, is a political-theoretic inquiry into what I take to be the problem at the center of Kant s polemical work The Conflict of the Faculties (Der Streit der Fakultäten) and its effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) in the political-theoretic works of G.W. F. Hegel, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas. A rather marginal work, written quite late in Kant s life excluding the lectures on anthropology, this is the last work to be published by Kant and viewed even by its author as a rather peculiar treatise (he calls it a publicistic treatise ), this book has not enjoyed the privilege of being studied as a unitary and systematic text in its own right. In fact, most scholars have been rather dismissive of Kant s retrospective claim to its systematic unity. Philosophically inclined scholars interested in Kant s systematic political philosophy have typically focused on the political-juridical treatise constituting the first part of his Metaphysics of Morals, namely Doctrine of Right (Rechtslehre). Yet others, inclined toward an intellectual-historical line of inquiry, and interested to recover Kant s political thought against the complex historical background of his time, have preferred to focus on his so-called minor political writings ; incidentally, one of the most famous among the latter happens to be the second part of The Conflict of the Faculties. Accordingly, even though the latter type of studies have touched upon The Conflict of the Faculties, the typical tendency has been to focus on just the second part of it, preferring to extract it from the larger and more complicated context of the entire treatise. The reasons for this selective reading are quite understandable. The second essay is the one that speaks most directly to classical concerns of modern Western political thought, such as the moral progress of the human species, philosophy of history, republican constitutionalism, legal theory, and the meaning and significance of political revolutions. In addition, this piecemeal appropriation of The Conflict of the Faculties has only been helped by its rather curious composition and publication history. The book appeared in the autumn of 1798 and it consists of three notably distinct essays that were written at different times and for different purposes. By most accounts, Kant s idea of bringing them together as part of a single treatise and claiming a systematic connection between them seems to have been the result of a sudden inspiration. My dissertation seeks to unsettle these seemingly stubborn facts by a return to what I consider to be the doctrinal crux of this book s subject matter. Despite the text s complicated composition history, in the preface to the treatise Kant holds that the work exhibits a systematic unity that underlies its seeming heterogeneity, and this is the justification he gives for publishing the three constitutive essays together under one title. Although most commentators have either entirely dismissed it or been extremely doubtful of the success with which the text as it stands manages to vindicate such a claim, my dissertation begs to differ. The main hermeneutical thesis I put forth is that the central systematic preoccupation of the text namely, the conflict of the faculties is a complex multilayered conflict made up of three different albeit closely related conflicts of the faculties. The first conflict of the faculties is the methodologicalpolitical controversy between philosophy and the three other disciplines the so-called higher faculties of theology, law, and medicine over what it means to understand the meaning of the Bible (the first part of the book), the politically given law (the second part of the book), and the doctrine of healthy living (the third part of the book). The second conflict of the faculties is the intellectual-political controversy over the question of the Faculty of Philosophy s rights vis-à-vis the other three faculties and their businessmen of learning as state functionaries (i.e., members of government intelligentsia) to criticize statutes concerning public affairs that are drawn up by the higher faculties and sanctioned by the state; this second conflict in turn branches out into (1) a normative vision of the idea of the university, and (2) the ethical-political critique of religion. Finally, the third and most essential conflict of the faculties the one endowing the text with its sharp polemical tone and giving the other two conflicts of the faculties an emphatically political stake is the ethical-political controversy over the question of the moral ends of political life. 1 To paraphrase Marx, the ethical-political conflict of the faculties could be 1 Whereas the three conflicts of the faculties are relatively easy to notice in the first two essays, scholars have typically found it hard to locate them in the third essay the one addressing the conflict between philosophy and medicine. In the first chapter, I argue that all three can actually be located even in that peculiar third essay. The first one (i.e., the methodological-political conflict) appears where Kant talks about the conflict between two dominant ideas on what medicine should be all about. The philosophical idea of medicine says that medicine should be conceived as a preventive science based on character building: i.e., 1

2 said to be the general illumination that bathes the other two conflicts and in so doing modifies their particularity. In the first groundwork chapter of my dissertation ( The Conflict of the Faculties, the Political Rights of Philosophy, and Political Ethics ) I name the whole that is made of these three different albeit related conflicts of the faculties the problem of the metapolitical doctrine of a political philosopher. I use the term metapolitical treatise to describe Kant s The Conflict of the Faculties in order to suggest two things. First, this is his metapolitical treatise in the sense that it comes after his classical philosophical treatise dedicated to the subject matter of politics and law, namely Doctrine of Right (first part of The Metaphysics of Morals). Second, it is a metapolitical treatise in the sense that the problems that constitute its main concern transcend the scope of the rigorous philosophical treatise on politics; from the perspective of the latter, these are always leftover issues of a polemical and exoteric character that fall outside its strict topical and methodological scope. And yet at the same time, I argue that the metapolitical doctrine remains very much in the background of such a treatise, and in so doing it functions, albeit only tacitly, as its polemical horizon. What typically provokes a philosopher to bring it to the forefront of his critical reflection is either some significant political event of his day or some kind of personal encounter with disturbing practices of authoritarian institutions. 2 Viewed as constitutive parts of the metapolitical doctrine, the three conflicts of the faculties mentioned above are referred to as the methodologicalpolitical component (the first conflict of the faculties ), the intellectual-political component (the second conflict of the faculties ), and the ethical-political component (the third conflict of the faculties ). The task of a metapolitical doctrine is to give as definite a verdict to each of these three conflicts as the subject matter permits. After defending the systematic importance of the problem of the metapolitical doctrine and proposing a way to study it as a formal-historical object of both intellectual-historical and philosophical import, in the first chapter I also propose and defend an inquiry into I take to be the most significant effective history [Wirkungsgeschichte] of the problem at the center of The Conflict of the Faculties namely, its uptake in the political-theoretic works of G.W.F. Hegel, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas, each of whom I read as inheritors of the very same problematic that both perplexes and guarantees the systematic unity of Kant s publicistic treatise. In addition to having seriously grappled with problems formally homologous to those addressed by Kant s last treatise, the first chapter contends that what also makes these three otherwise rather divergent thinkers belong to one common post-kantian ethical-political tradition is their minimal albeit significant overlapping consensus on the substantive problem that the German constitutional theorist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde has aptly called the paradox of the liberal state ; as he formulates it, it is part of the structure of the liberal Rechtsstaat that it is nourished by presuppositions that it cannot itself guarantee without jeopardizing its own liberal nature. 3 Just like their precursor (Kant), Hegel, Arendt, and Habermas see this apparent paradox as a problem that is neither as intractable as the conservative-statist thinkers sometimes make it to be, which the encouragement of wise self-reflective choices in people s everyday routines. By contrast, the so-called mechanical idea of medicine says that medicine is all about intervention with drugs after a disease has been contracted. The second and third conflicts of the faculties show up where Kant is discussing the relationship between life expectancy and marriage. Philosophically and empirically, Kant argues, there does not seem to be a significant positively correlated relationship between one s civil status (married/unmarried) and one s life expectancy. Yet the state has an interest to make people believe that such a relationship obtains, so as to encourage them to get married. This controversy brings up the conflict between the philosopher as a free thinker and the medical doctor as a state functionary. And such a conflict has both an intellectual-political component (the second conflict of the faculties) and an ethical-political one (the third conflict of the faculties). What rights, if any, should philosophy enjoy to speak up its mind under such circumstances (the intellectual-political problem)? Secondly, and relatedly, for the sake of what kind of ethical vision of political life should it enjoy those rights (the ethical-political problem)? None of this is meant to be a denial of the fact, which Kant himself is careful to acknowledge, that medicine is nevertheless the least ideological discipline of the higher faculties. 2 In the particular case of Kant, both factors were at play: On the one hand, there was the French Revolution and its immediate aftermath; on the other hand, there was the reaction of the Biblical theologians vested with state power to his book Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, which they had tried to prevent from being published. 3 Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, State, Society, and Liberty: Studies in Political Theory and Constitutional Law, trans. J. A. Underwood (New York: Berg, 1991), p. 244; my emphasis. 2

3 makes them call for a return either to classical natural right (à la Leo Strauss) or to a decisionist account of political rule (à la Carl Schmitt); nor as the epitome of all that is ethically inferior and contradictory about liberal political ethics, as certain strands of both conservative-statist and revolutionary Marxist thought are inclined to view it. Quite the contrary, all three of them are committed albeit in their own and very different ways to a defense of the modern form of law and its ethical-political presuppositions. Having defined the object of study and justified its investigation in this particular framework, the dissertation continues in the second chapter ( Kant s Metapolitics: Philosophy s Prerogative, Rationalist Hermeneutics, and Libertarian Republicanism ) with a rational reconstruction of Kant s metapolitical doctrine as articulated in The Conflict of the Faculties. After completing the task of rational reconstruction, the chapter engages in a rational assessment of it as a whole, focusing on both its internal coherence and external plausibility. On the first question, the chapter contends that Kant s metapolitical doctrine, despite seemingly intractable paradoxical tensions pervading the entire text of The Conflict of the Faculties, is a more or less coherent defense of the normative core of the Enlightenment idea of libertarian republicanism. The question of its external plausibility, on the other hand, is gauged from the perspective of both factual sociological changes one has to concede as having taken place since the end of the eighteenth century and that of its capacity to nevertheless continue to serve as the basis of adequate normative criticism of our own ethical-political predicament, namely that of a highly unequal, technologically advanced state-capitalist global society. Departing from the first point of view, two significant intellectual-sociological changes are mentioned as being particularly significant: (1) lack of any corporate self-consciousness on the part of the faculties in today s universities; and (2) the dissolution of philosophy s status as an encyclopedic science due to the radical division and specialization of scientific labor that started taking place not long after Kant s death. While such changes may make impossible any straightforward application of Kant s metapolitical vision to our own world, I nevertheless contend that its normative core retains much of its critical force even today. Indeed, this chapter argues that, in some ways, the spirit of Kant s libertarian republicanism might be normatively and critically superior to certain strands of contemporary mainstream liberal-democratic theory that seek to evaluate its normative credentials by using historically contingent institutions such as universal suffrage, regular elections, and majority rule as their measuring rod. Departing from John Dewey s belief that there is nothing sacred about such political institutions of real existing state-capitalist liberal democracies, I engage in a reading of Kant s libertarian republicanism that seeks to enact what Walter Benjamin called a brushing of history against the grain. The third chapter ( Hegel s Metapolitics: Philosophy of Right, the Right of Philosophy, and Civic Patriotism ) turns to Hegel s metapolitical doctrine, focusing on Philosophy of Right especially the very polemical 1820 Preface to that text and other well- and not-so-well-known political and miscellaneous writings encompassing all the phases of his intellectual development. In a first step this chapter seeks to reconstruct Hegel s answers to the three questions constitutive of any metapolitical doctrine. Interestingly enough, Hegel also conceives of problems similar to those discussed in Kant s publicistic treatise as falling outside the scope of the philosophical treatise proper. In a significant footnote on page 292 of Philosophy of Right, he claims that such problems, due to their concrete and therefore highly empirically conditioned nature, can be adequately dealt with only in a comprehensively concrete treatise on the state. While Hegel never found the time to write such a treatise, his writings provide abundant evidence for a credible reconstruction of its basic outline, and that is what this chapter sets out to do in the first part. In a second part, the chapter raises questions about the relationship of the teaching of Hegel s comprehensively concrete treatise on the state to Kant s publicistic treatise, its internal coherence, and its plausibility. While Hegel follows Kant in preferring the model of philosophy speaking truth to power as opposed to the people, he is much more comfortable in his role as a state civil official than Kant would ever be. The generally skeptical attitude toward all loci of concentrated power of Kant s libertarian republicanism has been replaced in Hegel by the reconciliatory ethical-political attitude of patriotic trust in the state. Hence, there is in Hegel s idea of the university nothing equivalent to Kant s agonistic public encounter between philosophy, on the one hand, and the state and its professional ideologues of the higher 3

4 faculties on the other. This does not mean, however, that Hegel prefers to leave no critical distance between the state and philosophy. Rather, he is simply painfully aware that such a distance is quite small and increasingly threatened under the modern conditions of philosophy s practice namely, its public existence and its obligations toward the state in its capacity as ethical-political educator. In Hegel s view, such institutional conditions compel philosophy to enter into a radically interdependent relationship with state power. Yet Hegel is not so happy about such modern conditions; rather, he is very clear that he would have much more preferred the institutional conditions obtaining in the classical antiquity of great philosophical individualities or the middle ages of monkish philosophers to the modern conditions of an invasive interdependence between philosophy and the state. Nevertheless, being the hard-nosed, relentless realist that he was, he spends no time complaining about the modern institutional conditions of philosophy s practice. Instead, he prefers to call on philosophers to accommodate themselves to the new situation while not forgetting what is most important fidelity to their vocation. A key task of this chapter becomes, then, the comparative evaluation of the two visions i.e., Kant s institutionalized agonism versus Hegel s reconciliatory accomodationism on the relationship between philosophy and the state and their ethical-political ramifications. What may they teach each other? And may they teach us? In the fourth chapter ( Arendt s Metapolitics: Political Theory as Anti-Philosophy and Neoclassical Republican Happiness ) the dissertation travels fast-forward in time to address a political thinker of the twentieth century who, although much indebted to the German tradition of philosophical thought stretching from Kant to Heidegger, had to rethink much of it against the background of such terrible experiences as the totalitarian state of the twentieth century. Arendt s personal experiences put her in a unique and quite appropriate position for critically appraising such a tradition of ethical-political thought; and she does not hesitate to notice the pitfalls of what she calls the desperate romanticism of the German philosophical-political tradition. From the perspective of the inquiry pursued in this dissertation, her sympathy for Kant s political thought is best understood as an affinity for his libertarianrepublican metapolitics, especially the parts of it having to do with the defense of philosophy s right to freedom of expression (the intellectual-political component) and his uncompromising commitment to the principle of publicity (the ethical-political component). Yet Arendt s own answers to the three questions constitutive of any metapolitical doctrine are rarely brought to the forefront of systematic study, and that is precisely the gap this chapter seeks to fill. It proposes to do so by inquiring into the relationship between her polemical views on the rights of philosophical theory in politics, as articulated in her magnum opus The Human Condition, and her publicist practice in such works as Eichmann in Jerusalem and other shorter political writings such as On Civil Disobedience, What is Freedom, etc. I contend here that the biggest challenge to Arendt s metapolitical doctrine is the problem of reconciling what seems to be a clearly egalitarian sentiment motivating her radical criticism of philosophy as a special anti-political type of esoteric discoursing on politics with her rather elitist neoclassical understanding of republican public happiness. The fifth chapter ( Habermas s Metapolitics: Postmetaphysical Thinking and Constitutional Patriotism ) takes up Habermas s metapolitical doctrine, paying close attention to how he tries to theorize the relationship between philosophy in the mode of postmetaphysical thinking, its rights in the political public sphere, and the ethical-political attitude that he takes to be most appropriate in the context of a democratic constitutional state, namely, that of constitutional patriotism. Although sharing with her a critical attitude toward the transcendental and esoteric self-understanding of the German metaphysical tradition that precedes them, Habermas will not follow Arendt in her decision to take leave of philosophy altogether. Rather, he wants to defend a conception of philosophy that has successfully undergone a postmetaphysical conversion. The question this raises is that of the methodological-political component of a metapolitical doctrine: What is postmetaphysical philosophy and what are its methodologicalpolitical consequences? Although Habermas is a consistent critic of the mandarin and elitist self-image of the typical German university philosopher, he nevertheless wants to salvage the philosopher s right to engage in political critique. In order to avoid the trap of elitist mandarins, however, he will seek to do this by making a sharp and visible distinction between his philosophical work (published under the series Suhrkamp Wissenschaft), on the one hand, and his minor political writings (published under the series 4

5 Suhrkamp Kleine politische Schriften), on the other. Finally, although definitely critical of the emphatic notion of the political, especially as contemporary political theorists interested in political theology employ it, he offers a conception of constitutional patriotism as a minimal and rather modest ethicalpolitical attitude that can adequately respond to the so-called paradox of the liberal constitutional state. After laying out all the pieces that go into Habermas s metapolitical doctrine, the chapter seeks to offer a rational assessment of its internal coherence and overall plausibility. This dissertation contributes to a number of significant bodies of literature in contemporary political theory. Most directly, it contributes to political-theoretic commentary on Kant, Hegel, Arendt, and Habermas. It adds a new perspective to such commentaries, often times challenging some of the conventional views on those thinkers and the relationship between them. In ways that go beyond the immediate concern with these four thinkers, the dissertation also contributes to some prominent contemporary methodological debates in the fields of political philosophy and history of political thought. Last but not least, through undertaking a study of a problem such as that of metapolitics, my dissertation helps make explicit and worthy of systematic study issues typically discussed under the rubric of the political sensitivity of philosophers (George Kateb) or the politics of philosophers (Jacques Rancière), labels commonly invoked to suggest that the topic is not amenable to further cognitive appraisal. 5