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Kant himself described his system as formal idealism. He distinguished this type of idealism from material idealism — a philosophical position which "doubts or denies the existence of outer things in themselves' (A491n/B519n). This description does not afford us a clear insight into the meaning of formalism as it occurs in the ethical context, because of the difficulty inherent in the terms "form" and "formalism". This difficulty is due to an interesting transformation (i.e., the special use of the root "form" in this context), whereby forma as the Latin equivalent of the Greek morphē does not connote essence but, rather, something which is external and thus a mere framework. Thus, according to Kant, when we speak of the forms of knowledge, we refer only to logical forms which are "the formal ground of the objects' (A93/B 125). Form is a condition in the sense that only through it can appearances be present and thus empirically intuited or given. Even when we add the feature of condition to the framework, there remains a gap between that which belongs to the realm of form as condition, and that which is brought within the scope of awareness and is conditioned by the form. That is, the fact of its being a condition does not deprive form of its externality vis-à-vis that which appears within its framework. This aspect of form becomes prominent in the conjunction of form and law (KpV 5: 35/35), since law as such does not entail the presence of material or its direction. Form understood as law is the form of universality. Even as there is a gap between framework and material, so is there a gap between universality and the particular cases which can be subsumed under it but cannot be derived from it. Hence, when we try to decipher the meaning of form or formalism in the context of ethics, we must be more specific, so as to appreciate the impact of universality on the very direction of ethics. This will be the first step in our exploration.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2016-8_3

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