Project Gutenberg
2025-08-01
Public domain in the USA.
459
Faguet, Émile
1847
1916
Faguet, Emile
Faguet, Auguste-Émile
La démission de la morale
$aParis :$bSociété française d'imprimerie et de librairie, $c1910.
Avant Kant -- La morale de Kant -- Le néo-kantisme -- La morale sans obligation ni sanction -- La morale de Nietzsche -- La moral science-des-mœurs -- La morale de l'honneur.
Laurent Vogel (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica))
"La démission de la morale" by Émile Faguet is a philosophical treatise written in the early 20th century. The work examines how moral thought moves from ancient, persuasive ethics to the Christian era’s commanding duties and, finally, to Kant’s autonomous morality of pure obligation. It asks whether modern ethics has let duty abdicate in favor of comfort, utility, or sentiment, turning morality into a mere art of living. Readers interested in ethics and intellectual history will find a rigorous, critical survey of moral foundations. The opening of the treatise states its aim: to trace the evolution of morality—especially in France—from pre-Kantian systems to the latest debates. Faguet distinguishes morality as science (normative, rule-giving) from morality as art (techniques for happiness), then surveys antiquity: Socratic and Stoic ethics as rational yet persuasive, Epicurean ethics as eudaimonistic and hypothetical, all lacking true imperative force, much like the mixed imperatives of Greek religion with its gods, Fate, and Nemesis. He shows Christianity instituting a genuinely imperative morality grounded in obedience to God, transformed by Jesus from justice to love, yet still supported by religious sanctions; later, as faith wanes, utilitarian and sentimental “independent” moralities remain merely persuasive and subjective. Turning to Kant, he presents the first fully independent, autonomous morality: the moral fact is self-evident and categorical; duty commands without conditions; freedom is affirmed by the experience of remorse; rewards or pleasure corrupt moral purity; virtue is a conquest against nature; and an enduring tension opposes individual happiness to species-level duty—so that morality becomes, from the start, a perpetual internal struggle of the self against itself. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2207336
20250625111738faguet
1910
FR
Reading ease score: 68.8 (8th & 9th grade). Neither easy nor difficult to read.
fr
Ethics
Conduct of life
Ethics -- History
BJ
Text
Category: Philosophy & Ethics
524209
2025-08-01T11:01:06.264590
text/html
499835
2025-08-01T10:03:17
text/html
322039
2025-08-01T11:01:21.822014
application/epub+zip
326088
2025-08-01T11:01:13.415560
application/epub+zip
281186
2025-08-01T11:01:08.864575
application/epub+zip
546778
2025-08-01T11:01:29.192976
application/x-mobipocket-ebook
519618
2025-08-01T11:01:21.426054
application/x-mobipocket-ebook
490662
2025-08-01T11:01:05.465636
text/plain; charset=us-ascii
470781
2025-08-01T10:03:17
text/plain; charset=us-ascii
4732
2025-08-01T11:01:29.339972
application/rdf+xml
10721
2025-08-01T11:01:13.062556
image/jpeg
2206
2025-08-01T11:01:12.967577
image/jpeg
278342
2025-08-01T11:01:06.314651
application/octet-stream
application/zip
Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at
https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog
fr.wikipedia
en.wikipedia