The Subject of Freedom
in Kant’s Practical Philosophy
WILLIAM J. URBAN
NOTES
1 Specific works by Kant are cited by abbreviation, followed by the standard KGS volume and page number: Critique of Judgment, (CJ), Critique of Practical Reason (CPrR), Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (GMM), The Metaphysics of Morals (MM), Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Rel). References to the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) are to the standard A and B pagination of the first and second editions (of the Guyer and Wood translation, unless otherwise indicated). See the Bibliography below for the specific editions and translations used. All quotes with bold and italic script represent Kant’s original emphasis.
2 Consider the recent work of Charles Taylor (1976: 298). Even within his own career, one sees revived proposals of his argument that the modern subject maintain a ‘stance of openness’ and be ever vigilant against those elements which otherwise threaten to foreclose his constitutive horizon.
3 This further demonstrates the logic proper to a practical philosophy first to conceive ethics as only legitimately constituted on the very same territory which traditional ethics once considered excessive and outside its purview. It is in this way we should read the above quote, which continues: ‘for, every difficulty calls forth a remedy that cannot be found without science gaining either in extent or in determinateness, so that even obstacles become means for promoting the thoroughness of science.’ It is this same spirit of scientific innovation which cultivated Lacan’s equally revolutionary achievement in the field of ethics in our own lifetime.
4 See Žižek (1993:12–8). See also my unpublished paper “The Kantian Subject in the Paralogisms: A Lacanian Defense of its Continued Relevance,” where I argue that throughout his discussion of the Paralogisms, Kant must have had in mind a purely logical and necessary apperceptive I strictly analogous to Lacan’s non-substantial subject of the unconscious.
5 Following Lewis White Beck, we can distinguish at least five different conceptions of freedom: empirical freedom, moral freedom or autonomy, spontaneity, transcendental freedom and postulated freedom. (Allison 1996:129) There are other (mostly nominal) distinctions to be made; and with competing translations of terms, the resulting morass certainly makes navigating difficult. To simplify matters, we here focus on the key interrelation between just three: spontaneity, autonomy and transcendental freedom.
6 This is in contrast to the first part which, in Lacanian terms, endeavors to interrogate how the subject and the moral Law meet at the level of the signifier. In other words, we first try to show the role the subject plays in realizing the moral law, the fact that they encounter each other in a common space (re-marked by what Kant called ‘the categorical imperative’); while secondly we look at the way Kant also discusses the other level of their meeting, which concerns the level of affect. Of course, the structural level of the signifier and the more ‘meaningful’ phenomenological experience of the subject are closely related and again we stress that one must attempt to think these two levels together to properly appreciate the truth of Kant’s accomplishment in moral philosophy.
7 As well, there is considered opinion that the important contrast to be had between the Grounding and the second Critique is not a simple difference in strategy of composition (the former is analytic, while the latter is synthetic), but rather that such a change in expositional methodology is an acknowledgement on Kant’s part that his deduction of the moral Law and freedom at the end of the Grounding failed, necessitating a ‘great reversal’ in the later work where these are simply presented as statements of fact. (Allison 1990: Chs 11–3) While this paper concedes the change in method between the two texts, it considers them perfectly compatible theoretically, so much so as to effectively treat them as a single text.
8 Perhaps there has been nothing more damaging to his reputation than his very own examples where he seems to insist that the moral Law can be reduced to a set of pre-established commandments. The ‘inhuman’ stance he takes when responding to Constant regarding the ‘supposed right to lie from philanthrophy’ is only the most infamous. (Kant 1993a) We will have occasion to comment further on the problematic nature of Kant’s stance in that essay.
9 We must consider here textual evidence to the contrary. In his brief chapter entitled ‘The Immortality of the Soul as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason,’ Kant problematically claims we must presuppose such a postulate for an ‘endless progress toward... complete conformity’ of the will with the moral law. (CPrR 5: 122) However, the obvious logical difficulties in postulating the idea of a future life (ie, one outside the coordinates of time and space) involving endless progress have been well documented in the literature. (cf Allison 1990: 171–2; citations found therein). Psychoanalytically speaking, this postulate is a ‘fantasy of pure practical reason’ in the strict Lacanian sense of providing the subject a framework to deal with the particular structural impasse involved. (Zupančič 2000: 80) Because of space limitations, we will not have the opportunity to further examine these Postulates, but instead will extensively examine his much more logically sound answer to the inherent structural impasse, which concerns a ‘revolution’ in the subject’s disposition [Gesinnung], as we shall see.
10 It is precisely such conclusions we are driven to as a result of Kant’s insistence on the primacy of practical over theoretical reason which cause much of the difficulty in the literature. Thus we see Allison’s (1996) rejection of major aspects of Kant’s work after the Grounding, arguing that there is a significant change in the way Kant conceives freedom from 1788 onward, while Heidegger (1997) is much less generous, contending that starting with the B-Edition publication of the first Critique, Kant had ‘shrank back’ and was never to return to the radical abyss he first opened up in 1781 with the pure synthetic power of imagination.
11 Though not explicitly stated as such by Kant, the logic of his argumentation necessitates this conclusion. It is Lacan, of course, who first proposes we begin with this result so as to engage in a ‘critique of pure desire’ to further radicalize the ethical field.
12 As we shall see, this freedom to incorporate Triebfedern into maxims Kant calls ‘spontaneity’ and we argue against commentators like Allison who build a case against Kant’s supposed ‘incoherent’ logic which places the subject’s autonomy as logically prior to this spontaneous incorporation. My argument below extends the one made in my unpublished paper, “Commentary on Henry Allison’s ‘Autonomy and Spontaneity in Kant’s Conception of the Self,’” where I endeavored to uncover the actual topology Kant uses in his texts to articulate the subject’s paradoxical freedom, over-against those who would take to re-write Kant’s texts on practical philosophy and thereby eliminate its potentially subversive sting.
13 Zupančič further demonstrates the striking similarity between Kant’s conception of this volitional surplus and Lacan’s own similar conception captured with his objet petit a, or ‘surplus-enjoyment.’ Both theorists are driven to homologous conceptualizations due to the same conceptual necessity after having both reached the same structural deadlock.
14 This is no trivial matter for Kant’s exposition, for he makes appeal to these and other ‘facts of reason’ no less than eight times in the second Critique. The relevant passages are (5: 6), (5: 31), (5: 42), (5:43), (5: 47), (5: 55), (5: 91) and (5: 104).
15 We are here loosely following the framework which suggests itself in Zupančič (2000: ch.2), which is itself apparently derived from Jacques-Alain Miller’s own adoption of Lacan’s ‘logic of the signifier’ for an examination of Kantian practical philosophy.
16 The Norman Kemp Smith translation is used here to better bring out the fact that the freedom Kant is attributing to human agency in the first Critique is spontaneity, in contrast to his later introduction of the additional conception of freedom qua autonomy in the Grounding.
17 This thesis of the subject’s fundamental submission to the mechanism of nature is something he never abandoned. One need only consider the ‘First supplement’ in his late essay Toward Perpetual Peace to see that his strong conviction of the subject’s freedom in the practical realm is met with an equally strong and lasting insistence on the deterministic causality of nature. (8: 360–8)
18 Of course, Kant first introduces this ‘for the most part empirical’ freedom of a practical variety, which is the kind at issue in the traditional debate regarding freedom, in his discussion of the Third Antinomy. (A448/B476) In both his theoretical and practical philosophy, the transcendental idea of freedom proper to the ethical is contrasted with this merely psychological concept of freedom.
19 This is ‘unlawful’ in the sense of ‘failure to act ethically.’ Such an act may very well be legal in terms of the legal/ethical distinction we made above.
20 The common clinical experience of ‘irrational guilt’ or the feeling of guilt because of the very guilt one feels is the psychoanalytic equivalent to this philosophical account of how certain affects may be doubly inscribed, referencing two different levels of analysis. Again, to fully understand this, one must take into account the underlying structural considerations involved.
21 We follow Zupančič who suggests we conceive, in Kantian terms, the Other as the very site of heteronomy, or the collection of all ‘external’ and ‘internal’ heteronomous motivations of an action. (Zupančič 2000: 38)
22 We here follow the logic of Lacan’s notion of a ‘forced choice.’
23 Or, what amounts to the same thing, the subject is forced to choose the form of the division as such, which is the ‘pure form’ of the subject; ‘pure form’ should be taken here as involving an absence of any Triebfeder, exactly as we specified above.
24 Willkür; also translated as ‘will.’
25 The argument expressed in this passage has been christened the ‘Incorporation Thesis’ by Allison (1996: 130).
26 Žižek’s own thoughts on the ramification of Kant’s Incorporation Thesis are much the same:
‘[W]hen, in my acts, I succumb to a temptation, I am never justified in saying “What can I do, I am made like this, it’s my nature, I cannot resist it!” – “spontaneity” qua reflexivity means precisely that this very passive succumbing to a temptation already involves a previous active acceptance of such a passive position toward the temptation... [W]hen I follow my most brutal instincts and “behave as an animal,” I still remain the one who decided to behave in that way, however deeply repressed this decision may be.’ (Žižek 1998: 261)
The logic here concerns the very condition of possibility of ‘overcoming’ trauma. No matter how severe the atrocity, every victim must still find the point in that causal chain of which they played an active part, of which they can hold up and claim as their ‘own.’
27 We thus see how Kant’s gesture radically disallows the subject to hide behind natural, causal necessity, ultimately obliging him to take up responsibility for each of his actions. That is, he can never legitimately claim his actions were unavoidable because he simply could not resist the overwhelming temptations of his desires, since every passive succumbing to those desires already involves a previous active acceptance of such a passive subjective position toward them. It is interesting to note that this logic still fascinates contemporary philosophers who continually ‘rediscover’ such insight, usually without acknowledging Kant as the first to have explicitly formulated it. Illustrative of this fact is Charles Taylor (1976), whose entire philosophy can actually be seen as deeply indebted to the German idealist tradition initiated by Kant, insofar as Taylor’s project is an extended working through of the notion of double-reflexive desire as constitutive of modern (ethical) subjectivity.
28 For a sustained discussion of the first Critique conception of spontaneity, see my (unpublished) paper, “Transcendental Apperception, Transcendental Imagination: Locating the Subject’s ‘Spontaneity’ in the Critique of Pure Reason.” A detailed account is made of Allison’s location of epistemic spontaneity with the understanding, in contrast to both Heidegger and Žižek who locate it with the imagination (in its reproductive function within sensibility), in its synthetic and ‘pre-synthetic’ capacities, respectively.
29 We note with Zupančič the correlation with the psychoanalytic notion of Neurosenwahl, or the ‘choice of neurosis.’ (2000: 35) We are not only ‘subject to’ our unconscious, but are simultaneously the ‘subject of’ the unconscious since we, in the final analysis, have to be considered the one who chose it. This claim, first articulated philosophically by Kant, provides the very condition of possibility of psychoanalysis: once the analysand experiences how this primordial choice can be repeated, the possibility of choice is renewed and the analysis comes to a conclusion.
30 This seems to be Allison’s strategy. Since Gesinnung – a concept which was presumably introduced to ground the rationality of choice and account for action – is itself the result of a free choice, he writes that this leaves us with two equally undesirable possibilities. Either we have ‘an infinite regress or, equally unacceptable, a choice for which no ground or reason is available.’ (Allison 1990: 139) Allison rejects both and with it Kant’s text. A page later he offers his alternative solution, which amounts to substituting Kant’s insistence of the choice of Gesinnung with the former’s own invention of a regulative ‘fundamental maxim.’ However, this only seems to move the issue one degree further away, for are we not now compelled to repeat the same question: does this conception of ground of agency have some eternal permanence or is it free because of its capacity to self-constitute? For Allison, such questions are not directly answerable and this is because he, like most Kantian commentators, clings to a (rational) agency that is substantially grounded, which prevents him from moving onto a proper conception of Kantian transcendental subjectivity, a subjectivity that is not only intimately involved in Kant’s ethical philosophy, but is actually constituted in the process of its own (ethical) activity.
31 It is this conclusion which best accounts for a curious subchapter in the second Critique entitled ‘On the Wise Adaptation of the Human Being’s Cognitive Faculties to his Practical Vocation’ which, as a general rule, is never cited by those commentators who consign freedom to the noumenal realm. And for good reason, as Kant tells us what would happen if the subject gained access to the noumenal domain:
‘instead of the conflict that the moral disposition now has to carry on with the inclinations, in which, though after some defeats, moral strength of soul is to be gradually acquired, God and eternity with their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes... hence most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, only a few from hope, and none at all from duty, and the moral worth of actions, on which alone in the eyes of supreme wisdom the worth of the person and even that of the world depends, would not exist at all. As long as human nature remains as it is, human conduct would thus be changed into mere mechanism in which, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but here would be no life in the figures.’ (CPrR 5: 147)
In short, direct access to the noumenal domain deprives the subject of his freedom, which must therefore persist only in the very space between the phenomenal and the noumenal if we are to consider the subject free. If our horizon is limited to the causality of the phenomenal domain, this must mean we are free only insofar as the noumenal domain remains inaccessible to us. (Žižek 2006: 22–3)
32 The fact that Kant was well aware and readily used the Lacanian ‘feminine’ logic of the ‘not-all’ has been known to us since Joan Copjec first uncovered the structural homology between Lacan’s sexuation formulae and the Kantian opposition between the mathematical and dynamical sublime. (Žižek 1993: 250n.9)
33 This is Kant’s transcendental subject in its ‘impossible’ objectal correlate, having neither phenomenal nor noumenal status. It should be clear that we have thus arrived at what Lacan calls objet petit a, an object-cause of desire that escapes both the subject and the Other and hence serves as the ‘true’ Other of the Other.
34 In other words, we have here (re)produced the embodiment of the ‘pure desire’ we argued above is necessitated by Kant’s discussion of the formal determination of the will and the faculty of desire.
35 As noted by Zupančič, this is homologous to Lacan’s distinction between the truth situated at the level of a statement (where truths oppose themselves to falsehoods) and the truth at the level of that statement’s enunciation, serving as the ground of the former level, where one ‘always speaks the truth.’ (Zupančič 2000: 39)
36 Incidentally, this possibility of ‘freely choosing unfreedom’ concerns the Kantian conception of radical evil. (ibid)
37 See Zupančič (2000: 40) for a graphical representation.
38 That Kant’s logic leads us to such difficult paradoxes are well known in the literature. For Allison, it is ‘highly counter-intuitive’ and ‘quite implausible’ for Kant to essential claim that rational agency (with its spontaneity of the Incorporation Thesis) presupposes moral agency (with its autonomy). He suggests the reverse, that ‘it is only insofar as we first consider ourselves as agents engaged in a deliberative process that moral claims gain any real hold on us.’ (Allison 1996: 139–40) But rather than dismissing Kant’s text, we should endeavor to resolve its results and psychoanalysis here seems perfectly suited to aid us in understanding this paradox. For instance, we can adapt the logic of Freud’s ‘dream-work’ as follows: the mechanism of unconscious displacement by which something that is logically earlier (the ethical subject of the unconscious Gesinnung) is perceptible (or becomes so, or inscribes itself) only as a later, secondary ‘distortion’ of some allegedly original subject (the rational agent). The ethical subject is thus not a given but an ethical supposition; that is, there has to be an X to whom we can attribute the very choice of Gesinnung (the foundation from which all choices are made). In this way, they presuppose each other; in other words, we have here deduced what we might call the ‘ethical subject of the Gesinnung.’
39 Allison, in a summation of the existing literature on the Grounding III, tells us of that ‘although there is virtual unanimity that [Kant’s] attempt fails, there is little agreement concerning the actual structure of the argument that Kant advances. In fact, it is not clear whether the deduction is of the moral law, the categorical imperative, freedom, all three; or even whether it can be properly characterized as a “deduction” at all.’ (Allison 1990: 214) However, we should view this convoluted and obscure deduction as the very ‘distortion’ spoken of immediately above, whereby the ethical subject emerges precisely in or through this tension in the text. Again, this paper argues that grasping a proper notion of Kantian subjectivity eases such difficulties with Kant’s text at all levels considerably, from those involving methodological and structural issues, to the meaning of the concepts found therein.
40 A fascinating consequence of how the moral Law qua pure transcendence is nothing but its relationship to the ethical subject is that nothing can oppose itself to the moral law on principle without itself becoming a moral Law. Although we will not be able to examine Kant’s texts on evil and the light they cast on his practical philosophy, we can note here how this fact opens the possibility of reading Kant as having thoroughly misrecognized the structural identity of the highest Good with diabolical evil. (Zupančič 2000: 90–2)
41 We here follow Zupančič (2000: chapter 7) and her excellent account of the striking similarity between the Lacanian psychoanalytic notion of anxiety (with its link to objet a) and Kant’s notion of respect as an indication that the moral Law is nearby. She further argues that Kant often felt compelled to domesticate this traumatic dimension (as that which directly determines the will) into a respect for the moral Law, which grants the subject some relief from its unbearable nearness by adding a measure of distance via the act of representation. Psychoanalytically speaking, this latter version is a ‘superegoization of the moral Law,’ and through this domestication, the moral Law becomes a (comparatively welcomed) consciousness of free submission of the will to the law. It is this latter understanding of respect that most commentators exclusively focus their analysis, thereby overlooking how Kant was the first to correctly formulate the ethical imperative as a ‘must’ (that which ‘I cannot not do’). But Kant largely misreads this Real, impossible dimension and reinterprets it as the inaccessible symbolic Ideal of an ‘ought’ (that which ‘I can never fully accomplish.) [cf. GMM 4: 427] (Žižek 2006: 91–2)
42 Hence, Kant can conclude the second Critique with his famous words: ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence [or ‘wonder and awe’], the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’ (CPrR 5: 161)
43 From our foregoing discussion, we are compelled to answer in the negative and consider how it is that the conceptions of voice and gaze – two Lacanian objects par excellence – aim to fill in the lack of the Other (of the moral Law), the inconsistency of which we saw operates as the very kernel of Kant’s ethics. This ‘lapse’ of Kant’s is an accomplishment nothing short of transforming the correctly formulated ‘not-all’ of the Other into an Other rigorously prohibited in a strict reading of Kant’s practical philosophy: one which is absolute, complete and able to offer a guaranteed outcome to the subject’s action. (Zupančič 2000: 147) It is this Ideal conception of the moral Law which erroneously allows us to treat the categorical imperative as a test for our impending actions.
44 This should not be seen as a further development of Kant’s thought, but simply one direction it can take due to its inherent logic. The conception of the noumenal in the first Critique, for instance, is essentially an injunction prohibiting the exploration of the origins of the legitimate order; Kant reasons that any such exploration a priori puts us outside that order. In his Concluding Remark to the Grounding, we find the exact same ‘sublime’ logic: although reason cannot ‘grasp the practical unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative, we do nevertheless grasp its inconceivability. This is all that can be fairly asked of a philosophy which strives in its principles to reach the very limit of human reason.’ (GMM 4: 463) These very last two sentences of the Grounding convey one direction Kant’s philosophy can take us: although we can never grasp the noumenal, we can nevertheless grasp that we cannot grasp it. This provides a ‘certainty’ of its existence, a ‘negative representation’ of sorts. Our reason thus nevertheless takes a certain ‘pleasure’ in the ‘painful experience’ of failing to grasp this supreme law. This of course is precisely what Lacan calls ‘surplus jouissance’ – objet petit a – the sublime object par excellence.
45 Heidegger also highlights the uniqueness of the feeling of respect and its close proximity to one’s Being. However, consistent with his rejection of Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole, for Heidegger the importance of Kant’s notion lies with the essential structure of respect in itself, which ‘allows the original constitution of the transcendental power of imagination to emerge.’ (Heidegger 1997: §30)
46 Allison notes how many otherwise perspicacious commentators view Kant’s chapter on the Schematism as superfluous. (Allison 2004: 202) In general, we can account for this dismissal by their mistaken assumption of a complementarity or some other unifying solution for intuitions and concepts which does not necessitate a third mediating term.
47 In different terms, this is the same dilemma we examined closely above: how is freedom and natural necessity compatible?
48 Moreover, we see here (again) how the only ‘content’ of the categorical imperative is this empty form itself, so its very structure is tautological in the ‘sense of the repetition of the same that fills up and simultaneously announces an abyss that gives rise to unbearable anxiety [respect]: “Your duty is… (to do your duty)!”’ (Žižek 1996: 170) Here we see precisely why a strict reading of Kant’s categorical imperative rules out treating it as a formal mould or test whose application to a concrete case relieves the moral subject of responsibility for his decision. The lesson here is that a subject cannot hide behind the moral Law or use it to justify why he acted in a particular manner; and this is true even if his actions conformed to the Law. In a word, there is simply no excuse for accomplishing one’s duty.
This also indicates the true reason why we are so discomfited with Kant’s essay ‘On a Supposed Right to Lie.’ Kant’s insistence that one is not to lie even in such a situation is unbearable not because my duty, at times, does not necessarily coincide with the good of my fellow man, but rather because Kant takes duty (in this case, to tell the truth, even though it will cost my friend’s life) as a ready-made duty which has passed the test of the categorical imperative once and for all so that it can now be written down as a commandment valid for all future generations. It is precisely this gesture which allows the subject to take on the (psychoanalytically) perverse attitude which permits him to justify such actions because they were ‘imposed’ on him by the categorical imperative. The perversion lies in how he hides the enjoyment derived from his actions behind a supposed respect for the moral Law. The homology to hermeneutics should be clear: no interpreter can scapegoat the text for his reading of it; that is, he is not permitted to say: ‘I don’t quite like my interpretation, but the text imposed it on me. So if you don’t like it either, don’t bother me about it. Talk to the text. It’s to blame!’
49 In other words, if the ethical subject is fully responsible for translating the categorical imperative into a concrete moral obligation, this must mean that when he casts judgment, it is not a simple application of a universal category to a particular object-act, nor a subsumption of this object-act under an already-given universal, but rather an invention of the universal-necessary obligatory dimension which thereby elevates the particular-contingent object-act to the diginity of the ethical Thing. (Žižek 1996: 169)
50 The first official formulation of the internal division of the will, as that between Wille and Willkür, occurs in the Metaphysics of Morals. (6: 213–14, 226) But this is not to say that an operative distinction cannot be found as early as the Grounding, where Kant there defines the will as practical reason, but simultaneously speaks of reason as determining (or failing to determine) the will – which thus presupposes a certain duality of function internal to the will. (GMM 4: 412) Following Allison, we can most consistently account for this ‘duality within unity’ across all Kant’s texts by considering the Wille (in the broad sense) as having the property of autonomy (ie, a law to itself), while Wille (in the narrow sense) is the will in its ‘legislative function,’ equivalent with practical reason. This latter conception would be that which provides the norm (or giving or being the law) for Willkür. Willkür would then be the will in its ‘executive function’ which chooses in light of this norm. (Allison 1990: 129–36) Hence, Kant is working with at least three conceptions of will, since Wille is split between itself and Willkür. In a further analysis, we can link these concepts to what we discussed above. For instance, Willkür can be linked to the Incorporation Thesis (to which maxims and the spontaneity of choice of Triebfedern are thus attributed). The point here is that the complexity in Kant’s texts regarding the subject’s will could have been simplified had he clearly formulated the subjective act as intimately related to the very constitution of subjectivity and the realization of the moral Law. He would have then seen how the subject’s will is, by definition, split with regard to the act, as the subject can never fully assume the act.
51 The subject would thereby be radically objectified, passing over to the side of the object. This is homologous with what Lacan calls ‘headless subjectivization’ or a ‘subjectivization without subject.’ (cf Zupančič 2000: 101–4)
Lacanian-themed puzzles
