At the beginning of the Critique of Practical Reason, in the first paragraph of the
Analytics, Kant makes a fundamental distinction between maxim and law. He calls the
subjective practical principles maxims, whereas the objective practical principles
are called laws. On closer inspection, however, this apparently easy-to-understand
juxtaposition hides an ambiguity that is fundamental to critical ethics and dates
back 25 years. In my study, I will briefly describe this ambiguity, and then return
to the first appearance of the distinction in texts written between 1763 and 1765.
By analysing the various occurrences of the differentiation, I will try to provide
an overview of this extremely dense period in Kant’s philosophical development, which
is usually called the anthropological turn, and in which Kant was deeply influenced
by the British moral philosophers and Rousseau.I hope that by exploring the development
of the Kantian distinction in the pre-critical moral philosophy, we will also gain
a deeper understanding of the root of the ambiguity in the critical ethics.
