Kant & Marriage Contract
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On one hand, the philosopher Immanuel Kant argued against the skepticism of Hume that pure reason was of no use in understanding the world. On the other hand, his philosophy is also a challenge to the Enlightenment proposition that reason is unlimited in scope. Thus, Kant would admit to some degree that reason is limited as a tool in understanding the world. Reason may be limited solely because of prejudices of the time, such as those who were unable to reason the world was round because of prevailing prejudices in their time that it was definitely flat. So too, in Kant’s time, there were prejudices of thought regarding the female gender. These prejudices are historical as well and are definitely still embedded on some level in modern thought and society. Thus, looking at Kantian philosophy, especially as regards the female person, may demand feminist critique to understand the limits of reason involved in Kant’s views of sexuality, the female person, and the marriage contract “Feminism and postmodernism are the only contemporary theories that present a truly radical critique of the Enlightenment legacy of modernism. No other approaches on the contemporary intellectual scene offer a means of displacing and transforming the masculinist epistemology of modernity. This fact alone creates a bond between the two approaches,” (Hutchings 174-175).Before addressing Carol Pateman’s critique of Kant’s views
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en, because they are giving something up to get something back. For women, because they do not possess citizenship in the first place and would be used by men in a degrading way anyway, but at least with the marriage contract they get something in return. This keeps either one from being degraded. Kant argues that individuals cannot hire out their sexual parts because property on a person cannot be separated from the whole person. Thus, in agreeing to provide for and take care of a wife, the husband is not trying to use her “sexual things” but her “whole person.” As Pateman expresses this aspect of Kant’s views on the use of property versus the use of person and sexuality “Kant argues that it is impossible to use only part of a person without having at the same time a right of disposal over the whole person, for each part of a person is integrally bound up with the whole. Kant concludes that the sole condition on which we are free to make use of our sexual desire depends upon the right to dispose over the person as a whole—over the welfare and happiness and generally over all the circumstances of that person” (Pateman 170).
However, Pateman finds Kant’s entire marriage contract argument to be a string of theoretical maneuv
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Approximate Word count = 2508
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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