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The Subject of Freedom
in Kant’s Practical Philosophy

WILLIAM J. URBAN

Part I: Constitution (of Subject) & Formulation (of Moral Law)

The Pathological and the Ethical

As an important first step toward understanding his notion of the ethical, Kant distinguishes it from what he calls the ‘pathological,’ which is in no way to be considered the opposite of ‘normal’ as it does in today’s clinical sense. Rather, Kant uses the term as a conceptual knot of sorts which links all theoretical strands which are not of the ethical. Initially, such a negative definition is useless, but its conceptual strength in terms of delimiting the field of the ethical soon becomes apparent once we see what Kant includes under its term. For instance, he tells us that when we take an interest in something, this must be distinguished from taking interest in the object of the action of that interest. The latter ‘signifies pathological interest… in the object of the action (so far as this object is pleasant for me).’ (GMM 4: 413n) He goes on to tell us that duty must look not to the interest taken in the object, but merely to that interest in the action itself. Perhaps today we might likewise agree that sometimes doing the right thing involves unpleasantness and amounts to a self-sacrifice of personal satisfaction. But our modern sense of morality is certainly disrupted when we read that ‘pathological conditions’ include those ‘as merely regulating the inclinations by the sensible principle of happiness.’ (CPrR 5: 120) Even our own happiness or our consideration for the happiness of others is not a genuine ground for ethical action. In fact, from the very first page of the Grounding, Kant takes aim against much of what we usually consider legitimate incentives (Triebfedern) to moral actions. By doing so, Kant takes great strides into delimiting the field of ethics as involving strictly autonomous activity and the formal determination of the will. We will soon specifically discuss the latter, since Kant largely identifies the ethical subject with his will. Following that, we will take up autonomy and contrast that freedom with the spontaneity of the moral agent, as well as his possession of transcendental freedom. But we will first consider a widely held but inaccurate characterization of Kantian morality which is a direct consequence of his rigorous presentation of this distinction between the pathological and the ethical: it is often heard that his ethics is a superlative ethics of asceticism. Against this near universal accusation, we should take this opportunity to defend Kant, as this description of his ethics is quite mistaken.

Certainly it seems that Kant has well earned his reputation as an austere, cold-hearted moralist8 when we read that ethics requires a driving force which ‘is the effect of a respect for something quite different from life, something in comparison and contrast with which life with all its agreeableness has no worth at all. [Man] still lives only from duty, not because he has the least taste for living. This is how the genuine moral incentive [echte Triebfeder] of pure practical reason is constituted.’ (CPrR 5: 88) But it is simply wrong to conclude that Kant is here advocating a renunciation of all pleasure based on principle in order to reach the ethical. It is not the case that the ethical subject must demand discomfort and forego all pleasures. One of the specific aims of this paper is to draw out the structural paradox Kantian ethics seeks to address. When we experience how the entry into the realm of the ethical concerns the very constitution of the subject and that in so doing, the ethical subject is, strictly speaking, not the same as before, any worries over impending sacrifices of pleasure become quite secondary concerns. What this points to is a more complicated relationship between the pathological and the ethical than is initially read into Kant. What Kant has in mind is that any worry over the loss of one’s pathology is really groundless, since the ethical concerns the frame within which the subject experiences his pathology. Thus, as the subject transitions to the ethical, he achieves a new frame in which the old pathological motivations no longer pertain. In short, any fear he once had over a potential loss of, say, happiness, is itself lost. This is what Kant refers to above as incomparable with life’s agreeableness. ‘The majesty of duty has nothing to do with the enjoyment of life,’ he tells us and while one may be tempted to ‘shake both of them together thoroughly… they soon separate of themselves; if they do not, the former will effect nothing at all, and though physical life might gain some force, the moral life would fade away irrecoverably.’ (CPrR 5:89) Since duty does not involve sacrifice or loss in the way we usually conceive it, Kant’s moral theory cannot be labeled a brand of asceticism.

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