The Subject of Freedom
in Kant’s Practical Philosophy
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Spontaneity, Transcendental Freedom and Autonomy
We have seen that Kant’s discussion of freedom involves a complex temporal element. As noted above, Kant tells us that ‘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.’ (CPrR 5: 97) But why do such discussions of time dominate much of the ‘Critical Elucidation’ section of the Analytic? What is the nature of freedom as a ‘fact of reason’ in the face of such strong insistence on the subject’s submission to all these mechanistic causal chains with their deterministic representations in time, including those of psychological freedom? The conclusion which presents itself is that we must theorize a ‘primordial choice’ concurrent with the very advent of subjectivity. Such a choice is none other than the very choice of freedom. Consider that, on the one hand, Kant is quite clear and adamant that the subject can never reference some moment in time and proclaim that, at that precise moment, he was acting freely: ‘I am never free at the point of time in which I act.’ (ibid 5: 94) To the subject who believes otherwise, we see Kant holding them in error, claiming that psychological freedom on a closer look cedes its place to causal determination and hidden pathological motives as the true incentives to actions. But on the other hand, this is not to deny that Kant acknowledges that the subject cannot but believe himself free and autonomous. Even from the first Critique, the transcendental idea of freedom plays a necessary regulative function with respect to the subject’s conception of himself as a rational agent. From the Grounding onward, this becomes a key component of his theory of moral agency, in fact forming the very first step in his formal deduction of freedom: ‘Now, I say that every being which cannot act in any way other than under the idea of freedom is for this very reason free from a practical point of view.’ (GMM 4: 448) So it is clear that while Kant ultimately dismisses psychological freedom as mechanistic, the freedom proper to the ethical first appears to the subject in its psychological guise. That the subject cannot but believe himself free and autonomous is essential to the constitution of his subjectivity.
But what exactly is involved in a ‘primordial choice’ of the subject?22 At the beginning of the last section we argued that the subject of practical reason is divided between a pathological subject and a divided subject. We can now elucidate this at a much deeper level. If it is true, as Kant insists, that the subject of practical reason is free by definition, this would mean such a subject must choose himself as divided and not as pathological. This is why the choice is ‘primordial:’ it is always, already made since the subject’s arm is forced, so to speak, to choose himself as subject.23 A moment’s reflection on the choice of pathological subjectivity reveals this choice to be obviously excluded and impossible: one cannot choose this choice without at once ceasing to be a free subject as a result. While not immediately as obvious, further reflection reveals that the subject cannot directly choose himself as divided either; that is, this choice cannot be made by the subject without having first experienced his own radical pathology. Here, we are dealing with the paradoxical temporal dimension specific to subjectivity, since we must account for the subject’s trajectory as it emerges as a free subject. The only way the subject can choose himself as a free subject is by travelling through the Other qua field of causality – but a field which is initially presupposed as complete, accounting for all heteronomous motivations. Thus the paradox: the status of free subjectivity cannot be chosen unless the subject travels through the impossible, excluded choice and thereby experiences a complete subordination to the pathological Other. It is through this trajectory that the excess or surplus element we spoke of earlier appears and can thus serve as the foundation for the constitution of the ethical subject. So how does Kant conceive and describe the freedom proper to the subject, one which is based on such an experience of radical alienation?
We have already alluded to the usual response of most commentators, who point to those passages in Kant’s texts where he seems to consign freedom to the untouchable noumenal realm. In this move, accounting for the alienation of the subject from his freedom is straightforward, since access to the noumenal is restricted to the phenomenal subject by definition. Now, the traditional critique of this usual view on the supposed noumenal status of freedom is two-fold. Either this conception of freedom qua noumenal empties out the concept of freedom entirely when it comes to understanding real human action in this world (which is what Kant’s practical reason is ostensibly all about), or a ‘causality through freedom’ does indeed effect real change in this world, in which case we would need to reject its non-temporal, noumenal aspect entirely. Either way, the phenomenal/noumenal distinction has its difficulties. But there is another way Kant approaches this problem of how to account for a moral agent’s actions as simultaneously necessary and free. We find the most succinct passage on what he theorizes as the subject’s capacity for spontaneity in the 1793 publication of his major text expounding his rationalistic religious views:
[F]reedom of the power of choice24 has the characteristic, entirely peculiar to it, that it cannot be determined to action through any incentive [Triebfeder] except so far as the human being has incorporated it into his maxim (has made it into a universal rule for himself, according to which he wills to conduct himself); only in this way can an incentive, whatever it may be, coexist with the absolute spontaneity of the power of choice (of freedom). (Rel 6: 23–24)
To offset the potential charge that this Incorporation Thesis25 of Kant’s is found only in his later work, we can detail its occurrence back to the Grounding II, where Kant indicates that only a rational agent has the power to act according to his conception of the law (or subjective principles or maxims). But since such maxims are not simply found but something (also) chosen as such, actions based on maxims are thus self-determined and an exercise of spontaneity. (GMM 4: 412)
To see what Kant is driving at with the Incorporation Thesis, we can point out that the ‘spontaneity’ proper to the subject is not in the sense of randomness or arbitrariness. Spontaneity does not imply unpredictability and if the subject believes that he acts in such a manner, Kant would be sure to point out how he has not followed the chain of causality which would reveal to him those pathological motivations which were perhaps initially hidden from his view. Freedom is not founded on the randomness of our actions, but is rather founded upon necessity and law itself. As per the citation above, the subject must discover the point where he plays an active part in those causal laws. Here is the point where the subject’s actions can be thought of as simultaneously necessary and free, and we must be careful not to miss the paradoxical temporal element. This point is ‘the point where the subject itself is already inscribed in advance in what appear to be laws of causality independent of the subject.’ (Zupančič 2000: 33) In other words, in order for Triebfedern to motivate a subject to act in such a way, they must have already been incorporated by the subject into the maxims that will guide the subject. This means that there is a presupposition or an a priori inclusion of an act by the subject between every relation of cause and effect. Only in this way can such Triebfedern be incorporated as sufficient causes, becoming actual incentives. We can provide a simple illustration of Kant’s conception of freedom qua spontaneity. Let us say the subject’s maxim is dictated by happiness. The point here is that it is the subject – and not nature – who gave it such an authority. But we must be careful to point out that Kant is not adopting the stance that maxims thus arrive to us ‘in some mysterious pre- or non-temporal manner or by means of a self-conscious, deliberative process. It is rather that through reflection we find that we have been committed all along to such a maxim, understood as fundamental orientation of the will toward moral requirements.’ (Allison 1990: 208)26
The temporal sequence appears as follows: the subject is propelled along by natural necessity, but in the end it is revealed that it was the subject all along who made that particular cause (or causal chain) the cause.27 We are compelled to conclude that because there is no cause behind the cause of the subject’s action, this is the same as saying that this ‘no cause’ is the subject himself. In other words, the Other of the Other qua field of causality is the subject himself, which is homologous to our findings above: the formal determination of the will and the conception of the will as free implies the will precedes all objects of the action of its interest, so that these objects cannot themselves be its cause.
We are thus dealing with a transcendental foundation of the will and we can note the parallel to be drawn from the cognitive to the practical domain regarding the spontaneity of this decision: just as any complete determination of an object needs an (epistemic) spontaneous act of the understanding onto sensible data, likewise in the practical domain a complete self-determination requires an analogous practical freedom.28 It has been suggested that Kant simultaneously believed there is nevertheless a certain kind of disanalogy between epistemic and practical spontaneity, where the former allows for a greater claim for self-certainty because of the necessity surrounding the transcendental unity of apperception, while the latter only allows for, at most, conditional clauses regarding actions taken under the notion of freedom. (Allison 1996: 133) However, such epistemological concerns mask the obvious ontological question regarding Kant’s Incorporation Thesis, which is crucial to answer when considering his overall practical philosophy: from where exactly does the subject incorporate the Triebfedern into maxims so that they become proper incentives? From our foregoing examination of Kant’s text, we know that this decision is not temporal and is consequently not a decision the subject consciously experiences. Consequently, the decision must be at the level of the unconscious, which Kant terms the subject’s Gesinnung, or the disposition of the subject. The Gesinnung is Kant’s representation for the subject’s ultimate foundation for the incorporation of incentives into maxims. In his own words,
‘to have the one [good] or the other [evil] disposition by nature as an innate characteristic does not mean here that the disposition has not been earned by the human being who harbors it, i.e. that he is not its author, but means rather that it has not been earned in time (that he has been the one way or the other, always, from his youth on). The disposition, i.e. the first [or ultimate] subjective ground of the adoption of the maxims, can only be a single one, and it applies to the entire use of freedom universally.’ (Rel 6: 25)
Although this is his first explicit articulation, as we have seen, Kant put to use this conception in the second Critique throughout his discussion of guilt and the criminal disposition with his conclusion that we must hold even the worst criminals accountable for their actions. As evident in the above quote, the context in which he raises the Gesinnung in both texts is similar, involving good, evil and criminality. However, we should note Kant’s complete failure to discuss this conception of the subject’s foundation for incorporation of Triebfedern into maxims in the Grounding. This gives us a vital and additional reason to venture outside that work, as its ‘moral psychology’ remains serious incomplete. Moreover, by not moving beyond the Grounding into his later texts, we seriously jeopardize a proper understanding of Kant’s moral philosophy. But what exactly does the conception of Gesinnung provide us?
It is not the conception of an ultimate foundation for the subject, as such, that is most important. In fact, it is quite misleading by itself, as it leaves us with an image of a ‘substantial’ subject who has a solid ‘base of operations’ from which to make choices concerning the incorporation of Triebfedern. Seemingly to dispel such potential misunderstanding, Kant immediately follows the quotation above with a sentence that provides us with the crucial thesis concerning the subject’s Gesinnung ‘[t]his disposition too, however, must be adopted through the free power of choice, for otherwise it could not be imputed.’ What Kant has thus effectively said is that the ultimate subjective ground of the adoption of maxims is a ground that is itself something chosen.29 But if the very ground from which a subject chooses is itself something chosen, here again is a further elucidation of the underlying temporal paradox. In fact, Kant goes on to speak about the infinite regress that this logic might entail, as we could adduce maxim after maxim in our attempt to derive the ultimate Gesinnung from an act of the will which does not occur in time. Perhaps it is in this text that we find Kant’s clearest expression of exactly how he conceives the primacy of practical over theoretical reason. Here, he is telling us that rational agency is somehow the result of the activity of moral agency and predictably, the literature for the most part ignores this passage, or when they do confront Kant’s actual text and the possibility that this may very well be his considered opinion – that the subject chooses the very foundation from which he makes choices – this is usually dismissed as ‘incoherent’ and an alternative is offered in its place in order to save Kant from himself.30 But if we take Kant seriously, how are we to make sense of the fact that the subject’s capacity for spontaneity is grounded in something that is itself freely chosen?
This ‘primordial’ free choice of Gesinnung has to do with transcendental freedom and concerns the Kantian version of creatio ex nihilo. Recall in our discussion above of how Kant rules out the gradual elevation of the will from ‘lower’ to ‘higher instincts’ in order to reach the ethical, which necessitates instead a sharp break or paradigm shift in relation to the pathological. The theorization of a choice of Gesinnung is precisely the manner Kant conceives of this sharp break. He, in fact, specifically links this primordial choice in terms of the legal/ethical distinction we made earlier as well: ‘that a human being should become not merely legally good, but morally good... [this] cannot be effected through gradual reform but must rather be effected through a revolution in the disposition of the human being… And so a “new man” can come about only through a kind of rebirth, as it were [through] a new creation.’ (Rel 6: 47) If we are to understand how such a rebirth of the subject is possible, it is absolutely critical to conceive Kant’s transcendental subject as an empty, purely logical form. Whereas the transcendental I of apperception is irreducible to either the phenomenal I of consciousness or to the noumenal ‘thing that thinks’ in the first Critique, this is even more crucially the case in Kant’s practical philosophy. On the one hand, we have the subject’s temporal acts which take place in the phenomenal realm according to nature’s enchainment of cause and effect and by a subject who is conscious with his belief in his immediate possession of freedom. On the other hand, there is the subject’s Gesinnung, the ‘thing-in-itself-in-him’ not directly accessible to the subject and therefore existing in the noumenal realm. So when Kant claims the subject, through a (transcendental) act, chooses his Gesinnung, we must conclude that the transcendental I is nothing but the empty place from which he makes this choice. It is on account of this ‘blind spot’ that the acting subject cannot be self-transparent and is radically alienated from the very foundation of his own freedom.31 (Zupančič 2000: 36–7)
We can express the division of the subject in terms of the distinction between freedom qua spontaneity and transcendental freedom. While the former involves the subject’s freedom at the level of Gesinnung to incorporate Triebfedern into maxims that will guide his actions, the latter involves preserving that place from which the subject chooses the Gesinnung as empty, thus revealing that behind the subject’s foundation for free choice, there is nothing to be had; there is no meta-foundation for freedom. Kant’s logic forces us to the same conclusion we reached above when we discussed how Kant grounds the subject’s freedom on a cause that does not properly exist in the Other qua field of heteronomous causes. Likewise here, the subject’s disposition can be thought of as the cause for a (spontaneous) incorporation of one incentive rather than another, a cause which Kant reveals as having no cause behind it. This is the troubling consequence of Kant’s claim that transcendental freedom exists. But at the same time this advantageously positions us to effectively answer those critics of Kant who point out how we can never completely eliminate pathological incentives. Instead of conceding this point and citing those passages where Kant seems to argue for the impossibility of ethical action by sensuously affected rational beings (such as ourselves) and reserving a holy will for such purity, we should rather answer in a manner more consistent with the truth of Kant’s text. Namely, we must show that it is precisely at this point that the question of the possibility of the subject’s freedom arises and is thereby constituted. We have seen that while we cannot know whether the subject has acted under the direction of the Other qua site of heteronomy, it is equally true that no one can claim the Other can account for all pathological elements. Simply put, the Other is not-all:32 there is no guarantee that this site ‘does not itself “contain” some heteronomous element which prevents it from closing upon itself as a complete system. In the relation between the subject and the Other there is something else, something that belongs neither to the subject nor to the Other, but is “extimate” to both.’33 (Zupančič 2000: 38) This is precisely the excess or surplus element we spoke of earlier, which serves as the foundation for the constitution of the ethical subject.34
We can now begin to summarize the logic which simultaneously underscores the constitution of the ethical subject and its intimate relation to the formulation and realization of the ethical. One could say that Kant’s ethical subject has three ‘aspects’ to it. The first is a psychological ego – the subject who believes himself free, but is actually swept along by phenomenal necessity – so is actually un-free. The second is the noumenal subject with a capacity for spontaneous freedom for incorporating incentives into maxims at the level of the noumenal Gesinnung. However, both these two aspects of the subject – unfreedom and freedom qua spontaneity – can only appear against the background of its third aspect: transcendental freedom. With this topological structure in mind35, it is relatively an easy matter to visualize how the subject is always free (‘as a matter of fact’ as Kant says), even in the case of his unfreedom (where he is but a pawn in the hands of natural necessity). This case demonstrates how a free choice of unfreedom36 is indeed feasible; but simultaneously, this also shows how it is genuinely impossible for the subject to negate his freedom, since he is always free at the transcendental level. The simple point to take away here is how there are two levels of freedom: one freedom which stands opposite unfreedom/necessity, while another freedom grounds that pairing. The exact relation between these two levels of freedom – how one serves as the grounding condition of the other – is precisely what Kant has in mind when dealing with freedom qua autonomy. We can express this in a number of ways.
For instance, we could say that the ethical subject arises when and where the psychological ego and its noumenal aspect ‘meet’. Or alternatively, the ethical dimension arises whenever the phenomenal subject (who is much more unfree than he believes) intersects with the noumenal subject (who is much freer than he knows). Whichever way we express it, the ethical dimension of subjectivity arises via a coincidence of two lacks. The lack of freedom the subject encounters (in being primordially forced to choose his freedom) overlaps with the lack of a cause of the Other qua field of natural causality. Schematically,37 we could say that we ‘begin’ with a primordial choice of freedom, but are excluded from participating immediately in that freedom as this choice is not temporal. However, at the same time the subject must submit to a ‘psychological causality’ such that he experiences himself as a mere object of the will of the Other. But because of Kant’s thesis that the Gesinnung is itself chosen, to say that the subject is the mere effect of the Other qua cause is at once to say that he is the effect of some cause which is absent or lacks in the Other. Hence, we have here the emergence of Kant’s transcendental I as an empty purely logical form, due to the coincidence of two lacks. The ethical subject emerges from a strictly autonomous, self-relating activity.
We can now readily make sense of Kant’s ‘negatively construed’ definition of autonomy as the freedom of the will ‘that makes it effective independent of any determination by alien causes’ as well as how ‘there arises [or springs] from it a positive concept, which as such is richer and more fruitful... What else, then, can freedom of the will be but autonomy, i.e., the property that the will has of being a law to itself?’ (GMM 4: 446–7) The connection of autonomy with the moral Law should be evident, as the very title of the appropriate section in the Grounding bears witness: ‘Autonomy of the Will as the Supreme Principle of Morality.’ (GMM 4: 440) We now arrive at another way to understand those paradoxical questions we posed above, namely, how can the incentive of the ethical serve as such, if it is at the same time only its result? How is it that freedom can stand as the condition of freedom? Our point here is that the extremely difficult reciprocal relationship which Kant sets out to establish in Grounding III between the moral Law and freedom can be precisely accounted for with reference to the structure of subjectivity. As Zupančič concisely states the paradox, ‘[t]here can be no freedom without a subject, yet the very emergence of the subject is already the result of a free act.’ (Zupančič 2000: 41) In other words, to possess the capacity to spontaneously choose from amongst a set of incentives and incorporate them into the maxim that will guide his actions, the subject must obviously possess a Gesinnung as the foundation from which to do so; but since this Gesinnung is itself chosen through this process, this can only mean the subject is constituted through this very process as a self-relating subject.38 The extraordinary difficulty in presenting, let alone deducing, this Supreme Principle of Morality39 is because the moral Law is nothing but its relationship to this autonomous, moral subject.40 But regardless of the theoretical obscurity involved in its ‘deduction,’ Kant is well aware that the close proximity between the emergence of the subject and the establishment of the moral Law leaves a visible trace on the subject at the level of affect. We now turn to a brief examination of how Kant articulates this phenomenon in his text. As well, we will look at what status he grants the moral Law and what it thus entails of the subject.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
