The Subject of Freedom
in Kant’s Practical Philosophy
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Part II: Affect (of Subject) & Type (of Moral Law)
Respect
We spoke earlier of the link Kant makes between his ‘structural’ notion of guilt with the existence of the subject’s freedom. But the subject’s feeling of respect [Achtung] for the moral Law is an entirely different matter. It is first introduced in the Grounding at the end of the discussion of the moral worth of actions done ‘for the sake of duty alone.’ Duty is here alternatively defined as ‘the necessity of an action done out of respect for the law.’ (GMM 4: 400) His conclusion is arrived at through a process of elimination. Since inclination, and with it every object of the will as a possible ground of obligation, is ruled out, ‘there is nothing left which can determine the will except objectively the law and subjectively pure respect for this practical law.’ (ibid) We see that respect for Kant is closely linked to the ethical dimension. Just prior to the section ‘Autonomy of the Will as the Supreme Principle of Morality,’ he tells us that such a ‘will, insofar as it were to act only under the condition of its being able to legislate universal law by means of its maxims – this will, ideally possible for us, is the proper object of respect.’ (ibid 4: 440) Kant further argues that the feeling of respect is unique to all other feelings and one which characterizes the subject’s close relation to the moral Law. In short, this feeling indicates that the moral Law is nearby. So when he presses the point of this affect being unlike any other affect, we need to read this as a description of a subjective experience which indexes the subject’s close encounter with the moral Law. In a dense footnote, he states that
‘even though respect is a feeling, it is not one received through any outside influence but is, rather, one that is self-produced by means of a rational concept; hence it is specifically different from all feelings of the first kind, which can all be reduced to inclination or fear. What I recognize immediately as a law for me, I recognize with respect... Hence respect is something that is regarded as an object of neither inclination nor fear… The object of respect is, therefore, nothing but the law – indeed that very law which we impose on ourselves and yet recognize as necessary in itself.’ (ibid 4: 401n)
Clearly, if we have difficulty in theoretically demonstrating how it is possible that the moral Law can act as the direct incentive of the will, due to this singular experience of respect on the subject we can at least prove that such a determination of the will actually happens. To get a better sense of what Kant is aiming at with his discussion of respect, we should turn to the second Critique, for there he greatly expands on this notion.
In fact, in that work an entire chapter is dedicated to respect. As the title suggests, in ‘On the incentives of pure practical reason’ (CPrR 5: 71–89), Kant seems to indicate that the uniqueness of respect lies in its functioning as an actual incentive to morality. He formulates the situation as follows:
‘how a law can be of itself and immediately a determining ground of the will (though this is what is essential in all morality) is for human reason an insoluble problem and identical with that of how a free will is possible. What we shall have to show a priori is, therefore, not the ground from whichthe moral law in itself supplies an incentive but rather what it effects (or, to put it better, must effect) in the mind insofar as it is an incentive.’ (CPrR 5: 72)
This problem is structurally homologous to the paradoxes we articulated above regarding how the genuine incentive of the ethical can act as such if it is simultaneously only the product of the ethical. What distinguishes this chapter from the others (and from the Grounding) is the lack of any attempt at a theoretical deduction. Instead, this ‘insoluble problem’ is taken up at a ‘subjective’ level. But it is crucial to note that it is not simply an account of the ‘subjective experience’ of the moral Law; rather, Kant argues how respect actually stands for the Law itself in its subjective existence, or in its actuality. This ‘singular feeling which cannot be compared to any pathological feeling’ he tells us is indeed unique: this ‘respect for the law is not the incentive to morality; instead it is morality itself subjectively considered as an incentive.’ (CPrR 5: 76) If respect is essentially morality itself, no wonder the feeling of respect takes hold of us in cases of ethical action, as they are virtually identical. Another way to see this is to consider our results above. As we saw, if there is an absence of a cause for an ethical action, this absence must nevertheless take on a certain ‘weight’ and become ‘positivized.’ Now, if the moral Law is to determine the subject’s will immediately, this must mean that this ‘object’ detaches itself from the chain of causality and serves as the echte Triebfeder. The crucial point is that as long as it stays detached, this absence becomes visible to the subject and thereby affects him with a profound discomfort. As Kant tells us, ‘[s]o little is respect a feeling of pleasure that we give way to it only reluctantly with regard to a human being. We try to discover something that could lighten the burden of it for us... to compensate us for the humiliation that comes upon us through such an example... Even the moral law itself in its solemn majesty is exposed to this striving to resist respect for it.’ (CPrR 5: 77) As Zupančič adds, it is as if this striving ‘aims at reattaching to the causal chain the thing that seems to be detached from it, wandering around without a cause (thus we seek, for example, to discover a pathological motive for an action which seems purely ethical).’ (Zupančič 2000: 144)
Although we will not be able to continue to examine the underlying logic of this important chapter, as it would necessitate an examination of concepts Kant most fully develops in his Critique of Judgment, we need to carefully note that Kant’s analysis has actually left us with two quite different formulations of the moral Law at the level of affect.41 With this striving to ‘lighten the burden of it for us,’ he thus formulates a representation of the subject’s defense against the traumatic dimension of respect which signals the subject’s close encounter with the moral Law. We are therefore forced to consider that alongside the ‘immediate determination of the will by the law’ stands ‘the consciousness thereof’ – the latter of which indexes an attempt by the subject to gain distance to the immediacy of the moral Law. In other words, this ‘consciousness of the subordination of [his] will to a law’ provides the subject with some measure of relief from its troubling proximity. (GMM 4: 401n) So no longer is respect the effect/affect which directly determines the will, producing the moral Law in the subject, but a representation which serves to mediate this effect. This idea that Kant is actually oscillating between two different feelings linked to two different conceptions of the moral law explains an expression he often uses that is not strictly compatible with a rigorous reading of his logic concerning the moral Law, that it is as if ‘something represented as a determining ground of our will humiliates us in our self-consciousness’ (CPrR 5: 74) The ‘singular feeling’ of respect seems to have vanished and now another feeling – humiliation – is the focus. We further read that the subject sees himself being humiliated by a moral Law that can both observe and speak: ‘There is something so singular in the boundless esteem for the pure moral law… whose voice makes even the boldest evildoer tremble and forces him to hide from its sight.’ (ibid 5: 79–80) Confronted with such statements, we are compelled to ask whether Kant has not moved away from the singularity of respect (an affect so radically unlike all other affects) and reduced it to a conceptualization which has much more to do with the pathological motivations of wonder, awe and fear (and even terror) at one’s humiliation at the hands of the moral Law.42 Indeed, he often has it that ‘the effect of this law on feeling is merely humiliation,’ but can this be his considered opinion on the matter given the other formulations of respect which directly conflict with this assertion?43 (ibid 5: 78) However, the contradictions discernable in this chapter between respect proper (as an a priori and non-pathological feeling) and humiliation are far superior to what we find in his later texts. In the meager paragraph (entitled ‘Respect’) set aside for a formal discussion in the Metaphysics of Morals, this affect is now defined as ‘something merely subjective’ (MM 6: 402); while in the third Critique, it becomes closely linked to the feeling of the sublime and their two respective logics remain compatible from that point on to the end of Kant’s life: ‘[T]he feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation. But by a certain subreption... this respect is accorded an object of nature that, as it were, makes intuitable for us the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers over the greatest power of sensibility.’ (CJ §27; 114) Published just two years after the second Critique, from this point forward the moral Law is simply that which inspires the subject’s respect, rather than affecting the subject with respect because it is nothing but its relation to the subject.44, 45
We may be tempted to correlate these two ways the moral Law can be formulated at the level of affect with the two corresponding figures of Kant which frequent the literature. As we just indicated, there is the ‘warm-hearted’ Kant who stands in the dead of night, admiring the starry skies above and the moral Law within; and as we saw, this image should be rejected as it involves a domesticated (re)formulation of the moral Law. However, as we argued much earlier, the competing image of a ‘cold-hearted’ Kant as the ascetic moralist is to be equally dismissed. But the objection which immediately comes to mind concerns Kant’s insistence on the unconditionality of the moral Law. Does it not demand of us rigorous, even irrational, adherence to formal principles? We will indicate a response to this question by concluding with a brief examination of the status of the moral Law as deduced in Kant’s second Critique. By enquiring into how he specifies the relation of the categorical imperative to the moral Law, we can more clearly understand what it commands of the subject.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
