It is often correctly pointed out that Kant saw himself as carrying out a grand Socratic mission inherited from Rousseau. However, as Kant himself makes clear in his Logic , this had less to do with the recognition of the aporetic character of philosophy and more to do with the distinction between the "mere theoritician" who only cares for speculative knowledge and the truly wise man who wants to connect all speculative knowledge with the "ultimate aims of human reason". Kant saw himself as improving upon Socrates’ mission insofar as finds a clearer, firmer theoretical foundation for human morality in the "critique of pure reason" and the "metaphysics of morals". Ultimately, the real foundation of morality is Kant’s discovery of its underlying "principles" and the universal form of lawfulness that remain once all exterior purposes are abstracted from their application. Kant’s insistence on the universal structure of the "categorical imperative" necessarily entails a dimunition of the exercise of prudence—he often speaks derisively of prudence as a kind of clever strategizing (klugheit) in the service of an egoistic happiness (gluckseligkeit). Likewise, Kant’s denial of the particularity necessarily involved in moral judgment creates a bizarre distance between virtue and happiness—-considerations of happiness pollute the apriori character of moral duty with pernicious empirical content. In fact, Kant explicitly opposes his conception of morality to ancient "eudaimonism", or the view that virtue and happiness are inextricably linked, either because the former produces the latter or because the latter is the legitimate intention of the former.
Much of the problem of modern morality is evidenced by the unstable status of prudence—our tendency is either to go the Kantian route that rescues the objectivity of morality from the circumstances of its exercise or to take the path of postmodern poetry which is to surrender all calcified objectivity to the greater nuance of purely subjective narrative. Either prudence is eliminated or it is saved only by detaching it from the purposive ends that confer dignity upon it. Either way we find ourselves in the peculiarly Kantian predicament of bifurcating natural, material man from his identity as moral agent—-Kant provides a technically impressive account of man’s various faculties without ever providing an adequate depiction of the whole human person. Question for discussion: how do Thomism and Aristotelianism combine the non-subjective character of morality with the importance of prudence and human particularity? Is one superior to the other for countering the specifically modern problems that have beleaguered prudence?
