The Subject of Freedom
in Kant’s Practical Philosophy
WILLIAM J. URBAN
The Divided Subject of Freedom
After reading the Grounding, and especially his second Critique, one cannot but feel that Kant virtually identifies the subject with freedom. But if this is truly the case, it cannot be that Kant holds the agency of the subject as some substantial X which, along with other particular constitutive attributes, possesses something called ‘freedom.’ If the subject is free, the reason for this fact must be entirely of a different matter. From our foregoing discussion of Kant’s various distinctions (between the pathological and the ethical, the legal and the ethical, and heteronomy and autonomy), we might expect and in fact do find that Kant is operating with a conception of ethical subjectivity which is fundamentally divided with itself, and if it is true that the subject is free as Kant claims, this freedom must have something to do with his division. At times, Kant is quite clear about the radical division the subject faces. Consider the following passage:
‘But this distinction of the principle of happiness from that of morality is not, for this reason, at once an opposition between them, and pure practical reason does not require that one should renounce claims to happiness but only that as soon as duty is in question one should take no account of them. It can even in certain respects be a duty to attend to one’s happiness, partly because happiness… contains means for the fulfillment of one’s duty and partly because lack of it… contains temptations to transgress one’s duty. However, it can never be a direct duty to promote one’s happiness, still less can it be a principle of all duty.’ (CPrR 5: 93)
This passage provides a nice summary of our discussion thus far. First, we can note Kant’s response to his future critics who hold him as advocating asceticism. His position is clear: in no way does the ethical (pure practical reason) require of its subjects a renunciation of the pathological. Duty does not formally necessitate a miserable, parsimonious subjective existence. The second important point stressed here is that the actual relationship between the pathological and the ethical is one of indifference. As we have seen, in topological terms the fact that we are to take no account of happiness when confronted with our duty is not a recommendation to lead an ascetic life, but rather signals how we must experience the ethical as that which resides in an entirely different register. Third, the fact that the pathological and the ethical dwell in different registers means, as Kant quite rightly notes, that one’s duty does not need to necessarily conflict with our sensuously based needs like happiness. It may very well be that our duty at times necessitates an act which incidentally increases our happiness. Taken all together, these points lead us to conclude that Kant’s practical subject cannot be one that stands simply divided between the impure (pathological) and the pure (ethical). The logic of his text rather forces us to a much more radical and paradoxical conclusion: the division occurs between the subject’s pathos and this division itself. In other words, the alternative to pathological subjectivity is not a pure ethical subjectivity, but rather what Kant calls ‘autonomy,’ which is a particular conception of freedom having to do with the subject’s self-relation. With this initial topological structure thus introduced, we must now move forward to flesh it out with additional textual support, which at once will also further specify what must be disavowed for its theoretical support. Where exactly in his texts does Kant trace out and articulate this division of the subject of practical reason between the pathological subject and the divided subject?15
We first see an outline of a critical theory of free human agency when Kant takes up a discussion of the ‘causality in accordance with laws of nature’ in the case of the Third Antinomy in the first Critique. (A444/B472) At issue is its assumed validity within experience of such causality in the mode affirmed in the Second Analogy. (A189/B232) As Allison points out, this natural causal chain is conceived by Kant in his Reflexionen as a ‘mechanistic causality which governs the connection of events in time.’ (Allison 1983: 311) The question Kant addresses is whether it is also necessary, or even permissible, to appeal to freedom as an alternative conception to mechanistic causality. That is, can freedom disrupt the natural chain of causality? At this point for Kant, freedom is conceived in the ‘cosmological sense… [as] the power of beginning a state spontaneously [von selbst].’ (A533/B561)16 While we will not be able to more fully examine what Kant’s conception of freedom entails prior to his practical texts, we can note what Kant himself says about the radical gulf separating the cosmological context in which the problem of freedom is initially raised from the moral context in which its significance is fully realized. In his retrospective account of the first Critique, he effectively tells us that the first Critique established the possibility of transcendental freedom through the resolution of the Third Antinomy, while the second Critique establishes the reality of freedom since it is necessarily connected with the moral Law which has the status of a fact of reason. This is the significance of Kant’s famous Preface to that latter work in which he tells us that ‘the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom’ since it is through the consciousness of this law that the subject becomes aware of his freedom, ‘while freedom is indeed the ratio essendi of the moral law.’ (CPrR 5: 4) But with his turn to moral philosophy, the problem of natural causality does not disappear. Rather, it is only here that the tension between the mechanistic causal chain and the radical freedom of the subject is most clearly seen and the problem of their compatibility most readily formulated. For instance, he asks ‘how can… man be called quite free at the same point of time and in regard to the same action in which and in regard to which he is nevertheless subject to an unavoidable natural necessity?’ (CPrR 5: 95–6)
He deals directly with this problem from the Grounding onward. Consider the very first paragraph of its key third section, where freedom is contrasted with ‘natural necessity [which] is the property of the causality of all non-rational beings by which they are determined to activity through the influence of alien causes.’ (GMM 4: 446) In fact, throughout his entire practical philosophy, Kant considers human beings as (also) non-rational creatures who are part of Nature and must be entirely submitted to its causal laws.17 This means that we could logically establish the causes and motives of any act of the subject since ‘all necessity of events in time [are] in accordance with the natural law of causality [which] can be called the mechanism of nature, although it is not meant by this that the things which are subject to it must be really material machines.’ (CPrR 5: 97) Of course, such a logical possibility is still only a possibility, which always leaves room for doubt as to whether there may yet be something unaccounted for in terms of the subject’s freedom. But Kant would argue that this doubt concerning a full account of all the natural factors of our actions would not be sufficient to establish freedom. Nor, by the way, would such a doubt over a full accounting for our actions through a chain of natural causality be a materialist stance. On the contrary, it is thoroughly theological as it obviously implies the perspective one would have if it were possible to occupy a meta-position or a God’s eye view of the entire situation whereby a thoroughly mechanist human subject mistakenly imagines his actions are a result of his own motives. Rather, Kant is insistent that just as we are limited by the external, physical world, we are equally subject to that law of causality pertaining to our ‘internal’ world:
‘in the question about that freedom which must be put at the basis of all moral laws and the imputation appropriate to them, it does not matter whether the causality determined in accordance with a natural law is necessary through determining grounds lying within the subject or outside him, or in the first case whether these determining grounds are instinctive or thought by reason.’ (CPrR 5:96)
These determining grounds within the subject Kant labels ‘psychological freedom’18 and he absolutely insists is not where that freedom proper to ethicality is to be located. He says there are some people that ‘let themselves be put off by this subterfuge and so think they have solved, with a little quibbling about words, that difficult problem on the solution of which millennia have worked in vain,’ but any such retreat into one’s interior, to tap into one’s deepest, most authentic inclinations is simply another form of determinism. (ibid) In contemporary parlance, to look ‘inward’ to discover our so-called ‘true selves’ is not an ethical activity, nor would those ‘true convictions’ we discover ‘deep within ourselves’ be what properly motivates ethical activity. Such pursuits Kant would dismiss, involving as they do a mere ‘internal chain of representation in the soul;’ and in terms of our preceding discussion, any ‘authentic convictions’ we find there would be categorized as pathological and more properly belonging to the domain of heteronomy. (ibid 5: 96–7) Further, as if to drive the point home, he tells us ‘if the freedom of our will were none other than [psychological freedom and the like]..., then it would at bottom be nothing better than the freedom of a turnspit, which, when once it is wound up, also accomplishes its movements of itself.’ (ibid 5: 97)
Following these comments, Kant makes reference to the first Critique to begin removing ‘the apparent contradiction between the mechanism of nature and freedom in one and the same action’ by making reference to the fact that all such mechanistic causes, inclusive of psychological freedom, have their deterministic representations in time. We see here a similar result to the one we arrived at above in our discussion of the formal determination of the will. Again, we are dealing with the ethical as a surplus of sorts and this has to do with the freedom appropriate to the ethical. Kant is attempting to found that freedom on a peculiar excess which must stand outside time, in the sense that it is epistemologically impossible to prove that we are in fact free and that no empirical representation really affects our will. Again, we can discern a split or division in his conception of the subject. On the one hand, ‘the determining grounds of every action of the subject so far lie in what belongs to past time and is no longer within his control... [b]ut the very same subject... also views his existence insofar as it does not stand under conditions of time.’ (ibid) Kant’s own emphasis here shows how the subject seems to be radically alienated from himself as he looks onto both sides of his division. Taken together, even doubly so: this division is constitutive of subjectivity, implying a radical alienation such that we are forced to conclude that the foundation for the subject’s freedom resides in a foreign body that is not immediately accessible to the subject, even by ‘looking inward’ via psychology. This appearance to which Kant’s ethics is one of radical alienation is the underlying cause for much of the indignation we find in the secondary literature, even among those self-professed Kantians who consequently endeavor to domesticate this foundation by any means possible, including its pacification through the biblical tradition of love of neighbor. Zupančič summarizes the situation thus: ‘[f]or some critics, what is hardest to take in Kant’s move is precisely that Kant takes this “foreign body” as that which is “most truly ours”, and founds on it the autonomy and freedom of the subject.’ (Zupančič 2000: 23). In contrast, then, we must accept such a result as necessitated by the very logic of Kant’s own text and seek to further explicate Kant’s account of this disavowed foundation of the subject’s freedom.
This account is most directly addressed in the often overlooked final section of Book I entitled ‘Critical Elucidation of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason’ in which Kant links freedom with guilt [Schuld]. Of course, this is not the traditional focus of Kant’s secondary commentators who attempt to ferret out his conception of freedom from an earlier section, ‘On the Deduction of the Principles of Pure practical Reason.’ But by attending to the former passage, we are not going against Kant’s wishes in the least, as he takes a moment in the Preface to explicitly direct our attention to this important passage we will momentarily examine closely. In the Preface, Kant tells us that his second Critique is not intended to produce a deduction of freedom ‘which might serve only to fill up gaps in the critical system of speculative reason.’ (CPrR 5: 7) He continues that this should further serve as a reminder to those who hold otherwise and who mistakenly believe they have understood and explained the possibility of the concept of freedom, while only ever having considered it in its psychological context. Kant’s work, rather, is to addresses this error directly. For, as he says, this ‘concept of freedom is the stumbling block for all empiricists, but also the key to the most sublime practical principles for critical moralists, who thereby see that they must necessarily proceed rationally. For this reason I beg the reader not to pass lightly over what is said about this concept at the conclusion of the Analytic.’ (CPrR 5: 7–8) We will heed Kant’s admonishment and continue examining this passage for what he says about freedom and its relation to his particular notion of guilt.
Kant considers that ‘a rational being can… rightly say of every unlawful action19 he performed that he could have omitted it even though as appearance it is sufficiently determined in the past and, so far, is inevitably necessary.’ (CPrR 5: 98) This is because of the subject’s submission to natural and psychological determinism. Kant continues, telling us that a subject
‘may use what art he will to paint some unlawful conduct he remembers as an unintentional fault, – as a mere oversight which one can never avoid altogether, and so as something in which he was carried away by the stream of natural necessity – and to declare himself innocent of it; he nevertheless finds that the advocate who speaks in his favor can by no means reduce to silence the prosecutor within him, if only he is aware that at the time he did this wrong he was in his senses, that is, had the use of his freedom.’ (ibid)
The case of a ‘born villain’ is used as an illustration. Some people show such propensity for ‘wickedness’ from childhood (which only grows as they mature), that they are taken to be ‘quite incapable of improvement’ as far as their character is concerned. But despite this, they are nevertheless judged by their acts and ‘censured as guilty of their crimes.’ They remain as fully ‘accountable as any other human being’ regardless of their ‘hopeless natural constitution of mind.’ (ibid 5: 99–100) No matter how inevitable a certain action appears to be, no matter how fully determined it was such that we could not but agree that the subject could not help acting the way he did – these facts in no way absolve the subject from his guilt. Moreover, this logical argumentation, nicely demonstrated with this extreme example, points toward another, more crucial fact. For Kant, in considering such actual cases, ‘the point at issue was whether this can be changed into is, that is, whether one could show... as it were by a fact, that certain actions presuppose such... causality through freedom.’ (ibid 5: 104–5) This is one way Kant conceptualizes the nature of freedom when he makes his frequent claim that freedom is a ‘fact of reason’ throughout the second Critique.
Here, it is in the guise of guilt that Kant posits freedom as a fact, thereby ‘proving’ its reality. But we must be careful to distinguish his use of this notion of guilt from another notion which has more to do with what we usually call ‘moral conscience.’ In the extended citation immediately above, we quite naturally take that ‘prosecutor within’ who we have trouble silencing as a figuration or personification of moral conscience. This spontaneous reading would be consistent with ‘the reproach and censure [the subject] casts upon himself’ and the ‘painful feeling aroused by the moral disposition’ when he regards his misconduct surrounding deeds even long since passed, thereby clearing the ground for repentance. (ibid 5: 98) But a more careful reading and the logical demands of Kant’s text necessitate we rigorously distinguish this usual notion of guilt (which of course could simply arise from mere social constraints having little to do with duty) from the one utilized to index the fact that the subject ‘is aware that at the time he did this wrong he was in his senses, that is, had the use of his freedom.’ (ibid) Kant is telling us that this guilt signals the possibility of freedom, even if we were helplessly impelled forward by some natural mechanism. This is an experience of guilt linked to a possibility of freedom even in situations completely outside the subject’s control. Thus, it is thoroughly an experience of guilt at a structural level. That is, it is not a question of what we feel guilty of – say, of doing X or foregoing Y – but rather is guilt for the very frame which sustains a (psychological) causal chain.20 So, far from being a mere possibility having no influence or ‘weight,’ through such guilt the subject is actually affected, catching sight of another possibility. It is in this way that the subject primordially participates in freedom; in this way we can understand how a certain ‘can be’ can imply an ‘is.’ It is precisely at this point we can clearly see the division constitutive of ethical subjectivity: the subject could not have done anything else, but nevertheless he is guilty. The important thing to see is that freedom is not incompatibility with this determination, but rather manifests itself in this very division constitutive of subjectivity. Zupančič notes the paradox surrounding this result: ‘[I]t is at the very moment when the subject is conscious of being carried along by the stream of natural necessity that she also becomes aware of her freedom.’ (Zupančič 2000: 27)
Perhaps at this point we should pause and reassess our analysis, as Kant’s conception of freedom seems to lead to absurd consequences. If only autonomous actions are free, how could the subject be held responsible or found guilty for immoral acts since they are always heteronomous? Yet as we have see, Kant holds the exact opposite – even if things are completely out of the subject’s control, he is still guilty. His text testifies to a conception of a free subject split in two, apparently mutually exclusive, directions. In one line of argumentation, Kant seems intent to persuade us that none of the actions of the subject is really free. He tells us that we can never establish with certainty that no pathological incentives influenced an action taken and shows us how the ‘purity’ of inner worldly, psychological motivations are just another form of natural causality. Yet in another line of argument, he never tires of reminding us that we are responsible for all our actions, so we cannot justify our immoral acts with appeal to some natural, causal chain which reduced us to complete passivity. So how are we to resolve the fact that Kant holds both lines of argumentation at once: that for each of the subject’s actions, it is possible to find some cause or incentive which links it to a law of natural causality, yet at the same time actions are always enacted by free subjects? The usual method to resolve this difficulty, as is often the case when commentators encounter similar difficulties in Kant’s texts, is to make appeal to the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal realms, which Kant himself attempts to do here as well. But as we shall see below when we discuss the subject’s Gesinnung, Kant runs into logical difficulties and his argument bogs down in unnecessary complexity. For now, we can suggest a solution which does not make reference to a division between the subject qua phenomenon (where he is submitted to causality) and the subject qua noumenon (referring to a point from which it is revealed that the subject is actually free).
As an initial alternative to this appeal to the noumenal realm, we should rather be attentive to the quite different contexts in which Kant’s two lines of argumentation appear in his text. The first line appears in a context which concerns the subject’s belief: Kant’s warning here is to the subject who mistakenly believes himself free, which Kant speaks of in terms of psychological freedom. To this subject, he dashes all hopes, insisting that the realm of the pathological is irreducible; that for each action taken, no matter how spontaneous it appears to be, it is possible to find a link to a deterministic chain. In contemporary terms, Kant here takes on the role of the modern-day cognitive scientist who insists that all human actions could be completely accounted for by reference to some complex biological sequence of events, say, to the firing of synapses and the interplay of neurotransmitters in brain tissue. The actual capability for a complete account is not important to Kant. He stresses its possibility, in contrast to the subject’s belief in his freedom. The second line of argument he follows takes place within quite a different context, one concerning the subject’s knowledge. When Kant makes this argument, he is assuming that the subject has come to terms with his illusory belief in an immediate access to freedom, that he acknowledges his alienation from it and further concedes the fact that all his actions must have resulted from causal motivations. Here, the subject experiences himself as completely dependent on some Other field of a causal order beyond his control.21 But from our discussion above on Kant’s conception of guilt, we can see that Kant must nevertheless conceptualize a fissure in the Other within which he situates the freedom of the subject. Kant has effectively ground the subject’s freedom – this ‘causality through freedom’ – on a cause that does not properly exist in the Other qua field of heteronomous causes. This is why the subject can be guilty for actions which are nevertheless completely determined through natural laws. In fact, we saw that he insists on the laws of natural causality and paradoxically, this enables freedom to become manifest to us. Such an experience reveals how freedom is not due to some mysterious ‘noumenal beyond’ we theorists are so quick to resort to in order to conceptualize Kant’s difficult topological structure. As Zupančič explains, Kant has pointed out an excess in the very relation between cause and effect, a ‘stumbling block’ in which we encounter the ethical subject as such. This subject ‘is the effect of this something which only makes the relation between the cause and (its) effect possible.’ (Zupančič 2000: 29)
This result crucially impacts our engagement with Kant’s text. Of course, throughout this paper we have been stressing the importance of the underlying structure of Kant’s practical philosophy, but now we are faced with the fact that it is not enough to supplement the deficiencies of an interpretative, hermeneutic reading of Kant’s text with a structural analysis. If Kant is correct, he has essentially introduced the need to conceive of the subject as a correlation to the very lack in the structure (of the text), to that point in which the Other (of the text) fails to close in upon itself and account for it all. Let us approach this important result through a much more direct examination of Kant’s discussion of freedom – particularly in its three key guises of spontaneity, autonomy and transcendental freedom – as he takes them up in his texts.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
