The Subject of Freedom
in Kant’s Practical Philosophy
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Conclusion
The suggestion here concerns an important aspect of the disavowed truth we have been endeavoring to articulate of Kant: successful ethical acts may be possible even for sensuously affected rational beings; and further, this possibility may actually be consistent with the topology of Kant’s own practical philosophy. Support for this claim – which would be possible inclusive of textual evidence found throughout Kant’s problematic use of examples – would involve showing how there is no divided subject in an act. And since the division of the subject is the mark of freedom, this amounts to a radically alienated subjective figure arising in the act.51 A moment’s reflection will reveal how we have thus arrived at a result which seems contradictory to our initial starting point of a divided subject of freedom, yet seemingly without ever having left the same trajectory, as if the argument progressed along a Möbius strip. Yet on further reflection, this result is homologous to the paradoxes we have described above where an (ethical) trajectory can only properly be driven by its very own result.
Our approach in this paper has been to trace out how the various distinctions in Kant’s text (pathological/ethical, legal/ethical, and heteronomy/autonomy) should be viewed as his articulations of a divided ethical subjectivity in which freedom is inscribed precisely within that division. By thus focusing the discussion on the interrelated notions of subjectivity and freedom, we most clearly demonstrate Kant’s achievement of radically breaking away from traditional ethics, which is first announced in the Grounding and further expanded upon in the second Critique. This break is twofold. First, no longer are ethical obligations spelled out in terms of the possibility of fulfilling them. By introducing the faculty of desire into the analysis, the topology proper to ethics is revealed to us for the first time as radically founded on what traditional ethics could only dismiss as an impossible excess. In a word, morality as such now becomes a demand for the impossible. Second, as any cursory glance at Grounding I reveals, no longer is the Good conceived as some transcendent X to be distributed equitably among all subjects according to some pre-determined, Pareto-efficient method. It is simply not the case that the moral Law is always-already there, waiting for the subject to submit himself to its commands. On the contrary, we saw how it is that the subject participates in establishing the universal moral Law and how the self-referential logic of practical reason is to be accounted for with reference to the structure of subjectivity. Hence, in the relation between the subject and the moral Law, Kant is first and foremost interested in articulating ethical subjectivity as such, while the ‘subjectivization’ or interpretation of the moral Law is of a secondary concern. Kant’s radical break involves resisting the temptation to narrate yet another moral tale packed full of humanistic values and principles intended for our edification. But this certainly does not mean that the subject can do whatever he wants, as if the moral Law is only ‘activated’ if it is ‘subjectively mediated.’ Such a belief secretly re-introduces a transcendent moral Law which can be so mediated. Rather, it is the very submission of an ethical act which constitutes the moral Law as atemporal and trans-subjective. The ethical subject is not the agent of the universal moral Law, but its agens. As Zupančič explains, this
‘does not point towards a certain definition of the universal but, rather, towards a definition of the subject: it means that the subject is nothing other than this moment of universalization, of the constitution or determination of the Law. The ethical subject is not a subject who brings all his subjective baggage to a given (moral) situation and allows it to affect things (i.e. by formulating a maxim which corresponds to his personal inclinations), but a subject who is, strictly speaking, born of this situation, who only emerges from it. The ethical subject is the point where the universal comes to itself and achieves its determination.’ (Zupančič 2000: 61–2)
It is important to understand that we have been able to unmask this truth of Kant not by mere interpretation of particular concepts discovered within his text, nor even by considering them within their ‘proper context,’ inclusive of somehow taking into account our own presuppositions as readers of Kant’s work. While an engagement with Kantian notions at a structural level, in terms of considering how they are supported within his larger ‘architectonic system,’ is certainly an improvement over mere interpretative gestures and the fashioning of supplemental narratives, such a ‘structuralist’ strategy also misses the magnitude of his achievement. The alternative to both these strategies is one which seeks to unearth the excessive kernel in Kant’s practical philosophy which again embodies the very structure within which it is disclosed; and by so doing, Kant’s ethics is brought to its truth. This paper has ventured such an engagement with Kant’s texts. Precisely by focusing our analysis on the specification of Kant’s subject of freedom and how it is itself affected by its intimate involvement in the formulation of the moral Law, we are able to uncover how the very excess of freedom over natural causality can be mistakenly again ‘naturalized’ into a noumenal realm qua kingdom of ethical ends. That is, the truth of Kant here is how this second, noumenal notion of nature qua community of all rational ethical beings is itself a retreat, an attempt to avoid confrontation with the ultimate paradox of the subject’s position as one which concerns the traumatic abyss of freedom: an uncanny freedom without any ontological guarantees in the great chain of Being. This truth can only be revealed by confronting Kant’s moral texts with their own hidden presuppositions. But the incentive to do so and very space in which this is possible is, paradoxically, first opened up only after a successful reading of those texts. The truth, as they say, can only be where it makes itself its own result.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
