Freedom qua Spontaneity:
The Lacanian Subject in the Critique of Pure Reason
WILLIAM J. URBAN
NOTES
1 References to the Critique of Pure Reason are to the standard A and B pagination of the first and second editions. All quotes with bold and italic script represent the cited author’s original emphasis, unless otherwise stated.
2 The ultimate goal of such a demonstration is the establishment of the soul’s immortality. Kant’s thinking on the soul’s immortality informs his discussion surrounding one of his Postulates, which has great implications for his later practical philosophy on the freedom and ethicality of the subject. Other than making general and concluding remarks, we will consider these issues outside the scope of this paper.
3 ‘Rational’ here is to be taken in the sense of being abstracted from everything that could be learned about the I and its contents by empirical means. This is the approach of rational psychology and of the syllogisms.
4 The radical position Lacan maintains between the subject as such and its subsequent ‘subjectivization’ is more clearly brought out by considering a field within cognitive theory. What concerns those cognitive theorists such as Schechtman who argue for a ‘narrative self-constitution’ view of personal identity is with how the subject ‘subjectivizes’ his subjectivity into ‘personhood.’ She argues that a person ‘creates his identity by forming an autobiographical narrative – a story of his life’ and one must be in possession of a full and ‘explicit narrative to develop fully as a person.’ (Schechtman 1997: 93, 119) Likewise for Dennett, ‘we are all virtuoso novelists’ whose ‘chief fictional character at the centre of that autobiography is one’s self.’ (Dennett 1988:1029) Sacks puts it even more simply, stating that ‘each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”... this narrative is us, our identities.’ (Sacks 1985: 110) For Lacan, such self-narrating efforts are a secondary, retroactive attempt to fill in the gap constitutive of subjectivity, so we should of course reject such a theoretical approach as adequate in characterizing subjectivity. Strawson does exactly that in his article “Against Narrativity,” but only because he argues that ‘self-understanding does not have to take a narrative form, even implicitly.’ (Strawson 2004: 448) He presupposes (as do those narrativists he critiques), that there is a substantial and stable presence of self somewhere. Thus, the fundamental issue for cognitive scientists is simply what form a presence-of- self takes. Far closer to Lacan’s notion is Dennett’s ‘The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity’ where the self is metaphorically likened to gravity as a purely abstract object. (Dennett 1992) This ‘proximity’ of Dennett’s work to Lacan’s is no doubt the reason why he has been examined numerous times in Žižek’s texts. The result, however, has always been to underscore how the similarity is only apparent; rather, Žižek argues how Dennett’s theory has yet to come to proper terms with the notion of subjectivity we are endeavoring to articulate in this paper through an examination of key passages of Kant’s first Critique.
5 It is in this terms we can more clearly see the radical break achieved by Lacan from current thinking on the subject. With respect to the aforementioned cognitive theorists, the group of Schechtman, Sacks and Strawson all fall prey to both illusion and hypostatization, while Dennett fares slightly better by being able to reflectively suspend the metaphysical error of the latter. However, Dennett is critiqued by Žižek for not yet posing the crucial question: from ‘where does the subject’s capacity to organize its contingent experience into the form of narrative... come from? Everything can be explained this way except the narrative form itself, which, in a way, must already be here.’ (Žižek 1998:255) Žižek further argues that by taking a full (theoretical and practical) account of Kant’s notion of the transcendental subject, we can see how Dennett’s ‘center of narrative gravity’ is still too substantial. By failing to inquire into its form, Dennett overlooks how the true ‘subject is the void itself filled in by the ever-changing centers of narrative gravity.’ (ibid 261) Interestingly, Žižek lauds Schelling as the first to philosophically articulate the connection between primordially repressed antagonism and narrativization. It is the very form of narrative which bears witness to that repression: ‘the emergence of the narrative space with its logic of temporal succession involves the repression of the vortex of “eternal” drives into the primordial, “absolute” Past (i.e., the original gesture of differentiation between Past and Present).’ (Žižek 1998: 272n15; 1996: ch.1)
6 The etymological root seems to lie with the Etruscan ‘phersu’ (mask) and the Greek ‘prosōpon’ (face, mask).
7 Here is Zupančič’s concise summary of Kant’s critique of the Third Paralogism:
‘[T]he conclusion about our identity amounts to this: for the whole of the time in which I am conscious of myself, I am conscious of this time as belonging to the unity of myself; and “it comes to the same whether I say that this whole time is in me, as individual unity, or that I am to be found as numerically identical in all this time.” [A362] The point here is that I cannot think the one without the other.' (Zupančič 2000: 69)
We thus arrive, via Kant, to the Lacanian ‘subject of the unconscious’, the empty point of self-relating. (Žižek 1998: 265)
8 Given Allison’s great reliance on the transcendental idea and, more generally, on the regulative aspect of reason in his defense of Kant’s transcendental idealism, it may seem surprising that he makes no mention of how these ideas of reason are involved in explaining the transcendental illusion underlying the Paralogisms. One explanation that presents itself is that, as a dedicated Kantian, he falls into the same trap Kant himself can be seen continually falling into throughout all his writings: the ‘obsessive’ strategy of rigorously distinguishing formal structure from positive content. Such an attempt is the unfailing index of the violent repression of some traumatic content. Here, in contrast, we are utilizing psychoanalytic theory to bring out the reflective, dialectical relation between the two, hopefully illustrating how the last trace of content (‘person’) is the ‘frozen’ form (transcendental idea of ‘soul’) itself.
9 Allison reaches much the same conclusion in his own terms in a chapter well after the one in which he explicates Kant’s treatment of the Paralogisms. There, he highlights Kant’s metaphoric use of the focus imaginarius as an articulation of the transcendental illusion that is inseparable from this use. He likewise argues that Kant’s deduction of the transcendental ideas plays a regulative role in how objects (inclusive of the inner sense of self) are constituted and how they are thus indispensable as a focus imaginarius. More specifically, the deduction of transcendental ideas are dependent on the establishment of the necessity of a focus imaginarius, as well as showing that the transcendental ideas (and only these ideas) are capable of functioning as such. (Allison 2004: 423–448) However, as noted above, Allison fails to explicitly connect this framework as intimately involved with the production of the illusion of the ‘person.’
10 Interestingly, so-called ‘Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD),’ which was granted the status of an official clinical diagnosis with its 1980 entry into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III (DMS-III), is sometimes held out as ‘objective proof’ of the existence of multiple subjects/personalities within a single individual. But this is far from a contemporary phenomenon. An analysis of MPD can actually be found 90 years previous to this date, in a subsection of Chapter X of William James’ The Principles of Psychology (1983), entitled ‘The Mutations of the Self.’ Just prior to this discussion, James takes up the ‘mythological’ Kantian ‘Transcendentalist Theory,’ with its ‘pretentious’ Transcendental Unity of Apperception (TUA), which he at once reduces to a ‘Transcendental Ego.’ See also Humphrey and Dennett (1989) for a view of how MPD is a ‘diagnostic fad,’ the existence of which is merely generated by the therapeutic intervention itself, while Hacking (1986) takes the viewpoint of patients, who are found to mould themselves to fit the now ‘fashionable’ MPD category.
11 Cf. my (unpublished) paper "The Subject of Freedom in Kant’s Practical Philosophy” for an account of how the perplexing claims Kant makes regarding the relation between freedom and the unconditional practical law can be properly accounted for with reference to the structure of subjectivity, as well as an analysis of Kant’s discussion regarding the affect the moral Law has on the ethical subject in psychoanalytic terms.
12 For example, see Tarrying with the Negative, The Ticklish Subject, and For They Know Not What They Do.
13 The two versions also greatly vary in their respective form of argument. While the A-Deduction presents a single line of argument in two forms, one ‘from above’ (A116–19) and one ‘from below’ (A119–28), the B-Deduction presents a single argument in two steps, (§15–§21) and (§22–§27). (Allison 2004: 484 n75; 160)
14 A. C. Ewing expresses the conventional thinking that while the A-Deduction is divided into 2 parts, one ‘objective’ and the other ‘subjective,’ the B-Deduction is only ‘objective.’ (Ewing 1987: 69–70) While Ewing himself opts for the A-Deduction, there is much to suggest that Kant recast the Transcendental Deduction in the B-edition expressly to counter the negative reviews he initially received that the A-edition version was too ‘psychological’ and phenomenalistic and thereby succumbed to subjective idealism. (Allison 1996: 32)
15 This is true not only for ‘pure intuitions’ but also for ‘intuitions.’ (Allison 2004: 82)
16 Indeed, Allison opens his discussion of the Schematism by distancing himself from the line of commentators who have viewed this chapter as ‘superfluous’ due to their assumption of a complementarity between intuitions and concepts, with the unifying element placed with the understanding. (Allison 2004: 202–04) If such commentators place more importance with the understanding, it is reasonable that the Schematism chapter would be dismissed, as Kant there clearly places a higher emphasis on sensibility. As the last two lines of Kant’s chapter reads: ‘Without schemata, therefore, the categories are only functions of the understanding for concepts, but do not represent any object. This significance comes to them from sensibility, which realizes the understanding at the same time as it restricts it.’ [A147/B187] Moreover, it ‘would seem that such a schematic power of realization and restriction of the concept would confirm the vital independence of imagination. How else is apperception to have at least a theoretical distance from temporality?’ (Luchte 2007: 90, emphasis added) That Allison insists on the necessitation of this third mediating term, which itself is a product of the transcendental imagination [A140/B179], supports our suspicion that he lends more weight to the faculty of imagination than is explicit in his text.
17 As Heidegger notes, in his own copy of the A-Edition, Kant replaces the term ‘soul’ with ‘understanding.’ This gives an indication, in a very telling way, how Kant significantly reduced the status of imagination in the B-Edition. (Heidegger 1997: 113)
18 For the remainder of this and the following section, page citations will be from Heidegger (1997), unless otherwise noted.
19 This also has always been an important thesis of Allison’s reading of Kant’s first Critique. In general, cf. (2004:Ch 4,8; 1983: Ch 4) and specifically where Allison defines judgment as ‘simply the spontaneity of the understanding in action.’ (Allison 1990: 36–8)
20 Hence, nothing is actually taken away from Allison’s defense of Kant’s claim that the ‘principle of the necessary unity of apperception is, to be sure, itself identical, thus an analytic proposition.’ [B135] What Heidegger does is merely draw the proper inference from such a claim: there is a receptive aspect to even this (commonly thought) supreme spontaneous principle of the faculty of pure thinking. The fault we find with Allison’s analysis here is that it curiously appears to lack any substantial inference from Kant’s claim, despite expending much effort in its defense. Cf. Allison (2004: 163–78), (1996:41–52) and (1983:137–48).
21 It is statements such as these where we see Heidegger most clearly at odds with Kant’s practical philosophy which, beginning with the second Critique, repeatedly asserts, as ‘facts of reason,’ the primacy of practical over theoretical reason or how pure reason is already practical. Eg, see Kant (1996: 173, 213; 5: 42,91)
22 We should note that Heidegger does not expressly extend his metaphor of ‘root’ in these exact terms. However, there does not seem to be anything in his text that would prevent us from concisely summarizing his argument in this manner.
23 In terms of subject’s experience of its ‘objective’ world, it is ‘the pure schemata as transcendental determination of time [that] form[s] the horizon of transcendence.’ (139)
Heidegger offers up the fact that the Transcendental Schemata section of the Critique remained unchanged between the A and B Editions as secondary textual support for his own emphasis on temporality and for the argument that one should consider the B-Deduction as inferior to the A-Deduction. In fact, he hints that this critical section of Kant’s work would have received more than the ‘scant... and opaque’ analysis that Heidegger does give it had Kant presumably improved it by ‘prepar[ing] a worked-out interpretation of the original essence of time.’ (140) As we shall see, the little treatment Heidegger does give the Schemata is likely more than enough. At least according to Žižek, because this scant examination of the Schemata marks as far a point in the Critique that Heidegger’s examination of Kant’s transcendental power of imagination will take him, it equally indicates Heidegger’s theoretical limitation and provides the initial point with which to launch a critique of him.
24 Of course, the question of ethics is the proper focus of Kant’s practical, not theoretical, philosophy and accordingly, Žižek has argued how Kant’s moral philosophy anticipates Lacan’s ethical revolution across many of his texts. In fact, there are numerous essays by Žižek devoted to this issue. For a major Žižekian intervention on a Lacanian reading of Kant’s ethics, one should consider the work of Žižek’s former student Alenka Zupančič as definitive: her analysis in Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (2000) is highly praised by Žižek himself in the Foreword. (xiii) Thus, the fact that Žižek’s focus on Kant is weighted toward the latter’s practical rather than theoretical philosophy is readily understandable. Although we agree that a ‘complete’ account of Kantian subjectivity must be done from the vantage point of Kant’s practical texts, we nevertheless maintain that extending the examination of the first Critique along the lines suggested by Žižek will better prepare us for that complete account.
25 Nevertheless, this does not prevent one from expressing and further developing it in Kantian terms.
26 For the remainder of this section, page citations will be from Žižek (1999), unless otherwise noted.
27 The entire examination of imagination in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics could be seen as Heidegger’s corrective to the Critique of Pure Reason, reflecting his belief that there is a crucial need to analyze the Transcendental Power of Imagination independently of the categories of understanding and reason so as to better appreciate the deciding factor of the former faculty qua root. Had Kant fully and explicitly explored this, we could speculate (with Heidegger, and perhaps Allison) that the Critique may well have been organized with a tripartite structure to better reflect a quite different architectonic schema. Alternatively, as Žižek contends with his own reading, had Kant faced the true implications of his revolutionary thought, his entire philosophical edifice would have collapsed (into the Hegelian system). We hope to give some indication of this below.
28 Consider a typical passage whereby Žižek characterizes Hegel as ‘more Kantian than Kant himself’ or is that which is ‘in Kant more than Kant himself.’ (Žižek 1994: 187)
29 Žižek has made much use of this logic, one that finds an ultimate coincidence between the subject’s pure presupposition and its own transcendentally posited object. See, for instance, Žižek 1993: 241n.14.
30 Incidentally, this is an excellent example for those interested in tracing back to the intellectual and philosophical sources of Žižek’s own fundamental logical matrix that is actively used throughout his texts. Compare the above Heideggarian insight with the following typical characterization of Žižekian logic: ‘”Everything can be mediated,” sublated in its immediacy and posited as an ideal moment of rational totality – on condition that this very power of absolute mediation is embodied anew in the form of its opposite; of an inert, non-rational residue of natural immediacy.’ (Žižek 2002: 85) Both logics are similar in combining the highest power with the lowest in a Hegelian speculative identity, where the possibility of the former is nothing without the latter limitation.
31 Also see footnote 16 above.
32 As Allison notes, this is the favored definition out of the eight definitions or characterizations of a transcendental schema Kant provides in this difficult chapter. (Allison 2004: 214–5)
33 Žižek (1993: 250n.9)
34 We can perhaps see an illustration of Žižek’s claim here in the brief section in which Heidegger discusses practical reason in terms of Kant’s notion of respect for the moral Law. (Heidegger 1997: §30) In this section, he follows the second Critique treatment of respect as unique to all other affects, a feeling that indicates the close proximity of the moral Law to (in Heidegger’s terms) one’s Being. That is, Kant treats the moral Law as nothing but its relationship to autonomous, moral subjectivity and says the feeling of respect signals to the subject that the moral Law is nearby. However, consistent with his rejection of Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole, it is for this very reason that the moral Law is dismissed by Heidegger. For Heidegger, the importance of Kant’s notion of respect lies, rather, with the essential structure of respect in itself, which ‘allows the original constitution of the transcendental power of imagination to emerge.’ This is to be contrasted with Žižek’s reading, which links Kantian respect with Lacan’s notion of anxiety, signaling a traumatic experience of self-contraction constitutive of subjectivity – a situation closely linked to the death drive. (Zupančič 2000: 141) This is the reason for Žižek’s claim below that Lacan’s notion of anxiety takes precedence over Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
