Main Philosophical Directions

Ethical Directions

Transcendent Moral Systems

Transcendent morality regards ethical norms as laws inherent to human will. At the same time, it considers them as defining foundations of that will, which are not inherent due to its natural properties or its connection with other empirical processes of consciousness but arise from a relationship to the supersensory world characteristic of cognitive or volitional faculties. Through this lens, transcendent morality serves as a bridge from heteronomous systems to autonomous ones. It aligns with the latter by attempting to understand moral behavior from the essence of humanity, while it connects with the former by distinguishing between two forms of existence in human nature: sensory and supersensory, with the exclusive aim of deriving moral norms from the supersensory realm, thus rendering them once again heteronomous to human sensory nature.

According to prevailing views on will, the heteronomy of moral norms can manifest in two ways. If the will itself is derived from knowledge, as in ancient philosophy, where correct volition emerges from clear and accurate understanding, then moral norms are ultimately understood as cognitive norms and, indeed, as truths that humans derive from supersensory sources. From this standpoint, it is not difficult to take the next step and substantiate the opposition of morality and immorality based on the assumption of two modes of knowledge: supersensory and sensory. Conversely, if will is considered a specific mental power, essentially distinct from cognitive ability, then the origin of morality shifts to a specific domain inaccessible to knowledge, leading to a tendency to justify the opposition of morality and immorality based on the discord between cognition and will. By proclaiming the connection of knowledge with sensibility, one sees in sensibility and sensory inclinations an obstacle to the manifestation of moral will in its empirical activities.

Among these two forms of transcendent morality—intellectualist and voluntarist—the former is not only the older but also the one that predominantly prevailed until modern philosophy. For the first time, Kant introduced, in contrast to it, transcendent morality in a voluntarist form.

Platonic philosophy represents the first significant form of transcendent intellectualism. Following Socratic tenets that virtue and knowledge are identical, Plato posits that moral behavior is a necessary product of knowledge through concepts, namely the knowledge of ideas, as concepts are impressions of supersensory ideas, especially the highest among them, the idea of the good. As the concept of the good expresses the most perfect of ideas, the highest of virtues, wisdom, embodies knowledge of this idea and the capacity to embody it in life as much as possible. Thus, the other virtues, courage and temperance, are subordinate to it; in conjunction with the fourth virtue harmonizing with them, justice, they all result from the dominance of wisdom over the lower parts of the soul. This is more evident in Plato's politics than in his ethics, as in the former, virtues are associated with specific social classes, through which the internal dominance of wisdom over the other virtues transforms into external governance of the wise over other classes.

Since the transcendent-intellectualist moral system of Plato derives moral norms, like concepts in general, from the immediate intellectual contemplation of the objective idea of the good, it can be called a system of objective morality. It is a necessary complement to his objective idealism. Moreover, both objective morality and objective idealism, remaining rather naive in their aprioristic thought, are closely tied to Plato's concept of the soul. If the soul, as a mediating entity between the world of ideas and the sensory world, were incapable of contemplating ideas on one hand and acting upon the sensory world on the other, then the immediate relation of the good in objective form to its subjective manifestation would be unthinkable. Hence, the change in the concept of the soul in Christian worldview prompted a corresponding transformation in ethical foundational views. As ideas became subjective, first transforming into the thoughts of God, then into human ideas that represent the thoughts of God instigated in humans by sensory things, and finally into innate and especially supersensory truths, the ideas directly instilled by God into the human spirit, the moral law evolved into an innate truth that does not arise from the contemplation of a supersensory object but through its impartation by the divine spirit to humans, which therefore, ultimately, springs from the communion of spirits. Concurrently, conscience acquires religious and philosophical significance. "The voice of conscience" is the sole act through which moral truth is conveyed to humanity in particular circumstances. Alongside it stands the analogous world-historical act of revelation, that is, the communication of the moral law to humanity, traditionally believed to occur through Moses, the prophets, and Christ.

Thus, from the onset of modern philosophy, Plato's objective transcendent intellectualism has transformed into subjectivism at this point. This new perspective can be characterized as intuitionism: it centers on the notion that moral duty is a truth intuitively grasped, standing in opposition to empirical truths understood through various external means. In this form, moral intuitionism is integrated into all rationalist pre-Kantian systems, both realist and idealist. In both, it is closely linked to the concept of intuitive knowledge established by rationalism, analogous to the immediate certitude characteristic of mathematical objects. Therefore, the content of moral laws in these systems is often recognized as immediately evident, supported in part by the general empirical significance of these laws, and in part by their necessity for human life; through the latter, these systems intersect with empirical ethical movements. Moral intuitionism reached its full development in Spinoza's system, which deliberately distances itself from any connection to experience. Here, the concept of the good is evidently placed beyond the moral domain, as morality transformed into an intellectual love of God, directly connected with knowledge of Him, into a purely religious idea that excludes the notion of empirical moral activity. Thus, Spinoza describes compassion as "an affect of suffering," which, based on vague knowledge, represents an imperfect state of the soul. While other intuitionist movements generally attempted to align themselves with empirical morality, they all, to a greater or lesser extent, exhibit a violent treatment of moral facts—an aspect generally characteristic of intellectualism—reflected in their reduction of moral oppositions of good and evil, right and wrong, to intellectual oppositions of adequate and inadequate, clear and vague thought, oppositions that have played a significant role in corresponding theories of knowledge. However, this approach tends to obscure the specifically moral character of concepts, resulting in the complete disappearance of the notion of morality in these systems.

The volitional form of transcendental morality, established by Kant, can be referred to as "imperativism," in contrast to "intuitionism," for here the foundational principle of morality is not contemplation but an initial prescription—the moral imperative. This imperative, like the contemplation of the good, must, by its nature, be entirely transcendent. Imperativism differs from intuitionism in two respects. Firstly, it not only acknowledges the specific characteristics of will but also positions it in opposition to cognitive ability: as a transcendental faculty, the will is contrasted with the activity of knowledge, which is confined to the sensory world. Secondly, instead of the intellectual distinctions of clear and obscure knowledge, which in intuitionism replace the opposition of moral and immoral, imperativism presents the dichotomy of will and sensory desires. Through such modifications, imperativism has significantly aligned itself with empirical morality and immanent moral systems; it does not regard the will as merely an expression of reason or human actions as mere results of externally adopted ideas. Rather, it understands the will as an immanent capacity, the actual relationships of which to sensory desires serve as the initial motives for behavior.

On the other hand, imperativism encounters a dual contradiction with experience, particularly regarding the facts of moral experience. Firstly, although the will cannot be reduced to mere intellectual activity, it should not be isolated as a capacity that stands outside any relationship to intellectual functions and arises from an independent transcendent source. Secondly, the relationship that imperativism establishes between the will and sensory desires implies, strictly speaking, a dual nature of the will: the super-sensory, which must belong to a super-empirical nature of humanity, predating any sensory existence, and the empirical, which manifests in human needs and arises from one's empirical sensory nature. This understanding, ultimately, is mystical and even more so than the intuitionist doctrine: the latter, while seeing the source of morality in super-sensory contemplation, nonetheless conceives this contemplation analogously to actual sensory perception, allowing for the process of moral intuition to be at least conceivable. In contrast, imperativism does not allow even this; pure will, free from all elements presented in the form of ideas and feelings, is entirely inconceivable, as it constitutes a notion foreign to any genuinely experienced states.

A further necessary consequence arising from this is that the super-sensory will, insofar as it defines an individual's actions, becomes a sensory phenomenon, subject to natural causality from which it was previously free. This represents a mystical conception, to a certain degree, a particular application of Augustine's mystical doctrine regarding the loss of original freedom through the fall. This perspective, of course, necessarily follows from the initially mystical nature of the transcendental notion of will, which can only be connected to experiential facts through further supportive mystical ideas.