The Philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Aristotle - Essay Example

Aristotle, in his philosophy, maintains the importance of the soul in the acquisition of moral virtue. It is only by fulfilling the dictates of this soul, which is guided by reason that one would be able to achieve happiness. This happiness could be achieved by man, who was at the highest position in Aristotle’s teleological view of things. The man was at the highest position in his scala naturae, which means the Great Chain of Being, as a result of the possession of rationality and reason, unique to man, who maintains his superiority as a result of this rationality. The rational human person, the creature at the top of the biological ladder, would have a good character that arose out of the creation of moral virtue. To create this character, he would need the fortune to be tutored by somebody higher than him like a teacher, something that would be available only to the elite sections of the society. Aristotle himself was tutored by people like Plato and he was tutor to Alexander the Great. Contemporary Greek ideas and practices were thus, a great factor in the development of the theories of Aristotle. This theory, however, excludes a vast majority of the population, the commoners, from attaining the virtue that he talks about since they had no access to a tutor, let alone somebody like Aristotle.

Kant’s virtue is based on the fulfillment of one’s duty. The fulfillment of this duty would give a man his happiness and this was based on his actions and not on fortune. It was the fulfillment of this duty that gave rise to a man’s character which was based on justice rather than the achievement of an end. Man’s position in the world was based on this justice, which would be decided by his thought, rather than by any supernatural force. This also means that Kant’s theory gives more significance to the means that are employed to complete a particular action rather than the ends that are expected to be a result of that action. Here, Kant is different from the theories of colonialism that existed during his time, which were created to justify the end. Kant’s theory is thus, more egalitarian than that of Aristotle, who stressed the need for external influences to guide man to the achievement of virtue and happiness. This happiness and virtue could be attained through the fulfillment of one’s duty through the fulfillment of the categorical imperative, which refers to the demands of the moral law and the principles that constitute morality. It also refers to the moral duty of a person and it encompasses the actions that a man would have to take in order to fulfill them.

Both these thinkers stressed the role of knowledge, innate and acquired for the development of one’s character. While Kant focused on the innate knowledge of man that could be used to assess the empirical knowledge that man acquired, Aristotle focused on the reason of man and the guidance that would be provided by a teacher. Kant sought to remedy the traditional divorce that was effected between rationalist philosophy and empirical philosophy. They were therefore the forerunners of present-day thinkers who place a lot of emphasis on knowledge.

Arguing for the moral superiority of one thinker over the other is fraught with complications when they belong to totally different world orders and applying a contemporary yardstick to assess them would be unfair to them. However, if one were to do so, Kant’s philosophy, with the emphasis that it lays on the innate knowledge of man, without any difference between the masses and the elite classes of the society. Apart from this, while Aristotle exhorts one to follow the dictates of an abstract soul, Kant is able to provide man with a more stable framework that one may follow. However, the superiority of his tenets is something that is contingent on the time and place from where we choose to analyze his works.