Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/50

 your own person as in the person of every other at all times look on man as an end and never simply as a means."

"In those words," says Cohen (pp. 303–4), "is the deepest and most far-reaching sense of the categoric imperative brought to expression; they contain the moral programme of the new time and the entire world history. The idea of the final (or end) advantage of humanity becomes thereby transformed into the idea of Socialism, by which every man is defined as a final end, as an end in itself."

The programme of the "entire future world history" is conceived in somewhat narrow fashion. The "timeless moral law, that man ought to be an end, and at no time simply a means," has itself only an "end" in a society where men are used by other men as simple means to their ends. In a communist society, this possibility will disappear, and with it the necessity of the Kantian programme for the "entire future world history." What then is to become of this? We have then in the future either no Socialism or no world history to expect.

The Kantian moral law was a protest against the very concrete feudal society with its personal relations of dependency. The so-called "Socialist" principle which fixes the personality and works of men is, accordingly just as consistent with Liberalism or Anarchism as with Socialism, and contains, in no greater degree any new idea than the one already quoted of the universal legislation. It amounts to the philosophical formula for the idea of "Freedom, Equality, and Fraternity" then already developed by Rousseau, and which was also to be found in primitive Christianity. Kant only imparted the form in which this principle is proved.

The dignity of personality is derived from the fact that it here forms part of a super-sensuous world, that as a moral being it stands outside nature and over nature. Personality is "freedom and independence from the mechanism of the entire natural world," so that "the person as belonging to the world of sense