The Subject of Freedom
in Kant’s Practical Philosophy
WILLIAM J. URBAN
The Legal and the Ethical
Sensing this result, yet at the same time misunderstanding its true dimensions, many commentators additionally feel Kant’s ethics should be dismissed on grounds that it is ‘mere formalism.’ Their argument is the familiar one in which Kant appears to be essentially asking us to adhere to form over its content/matter/object. Certainly this seems to be true, even doubly so, in the case of the categorical imperative. Not only does the categorical imperative seem to point toward an abstraction from the content of duty, but from the very moment of Kant’s introduction of the concept of duty in Grounding I, we are dealing with another, more fundamental distinction which appears to further emphasize the importance of adhering to formal attributes of an action. Early in the text, he presents us with four different types of action with hypothetical examples designed to illustrate the crucial distinction between those actions that are ‘in conformity with duty’ [pflichtmäßig] and those that are done exclusively ‘for the sake of duty’ [aus Pflicht]. Only in the latter case is the action said to have moral worth. (GMM 4: 397–400) Kant more clearly explicates this in the second Critique (5: 81), but concisely does so only much later: ‘The mere conformity or nonconformity of an action with law, irrespective of the incentive to it, is called its legality (lawfulness); but that conformity in which the idea of duty arising from the law is also the incentive to the action is called its morality.’ (MM 6:219) Reflecting on this topology, we can clearly see that the ethical dimension is supernumerary with respect to the dyad legal/illegal. The latter pair belongs to the same register in the sense of either conforming or failing to conform with duty, while the ethical escapes this register. The point here is that while an ethical act conforms with duty just as does a legal act, in relation to legality, the ethical dimension must represent a surplus or excess. The ethical is simply not captured within the framework of the law and its violations. So what exactly is the nature of this excess? Does it have more to do with the form or the content of an action?
We can immediately rule out the obvious. Because Kant conceives of the legal and the ethical in two different registers, we are not dealing with two different perspectives on one and the same thing. This fact needs to be re-emphasized, since it is quite natural to simplify this difficult topology into a self-questioning of our true motivations: if what determines our will is content, our actions are pathological, but if what determines it is form, then they are ethical. If this were the case, Kant would be guilty of ‘mere formalism.’ But is not the true situation the exact reverse? Logically speaking, it is legality which deserves the accusation of ‘mere formalism,’ since it solely concerns itself with whether an action conforms or does not conform with duty. The content of the action, which appears to us as the real motivation for this conformity, is completely inconsequential. The ethical, on the other hand, must not only conform with duty, but insists that the only content or real motivating factor for this conformity is this conformity itself. That is, Kant’s exposition here shows us that not only must the ethical have its own incentive [Triebfeder], but that somehow we must conceive how it is that form itself takes on this function as Triebfeder. So again, Kant does not advocate that we eliminate all traces of materiality from the determining ground of the moral will in order to be left with a pure form, but rather forces us to conceive how it is that the very form of the moral Law can take on a material weight such that it can function as a motivating force of moral action.
Here we can readily see that negatively labeling Kant’s ethics ‘mere formalism’ or dismissing it as necessitating a monstrous, inhuman subject who must continuously purify himself of all pathological incentives misses the mark. Moreover, such dismissals of Kant actually serve to cover over the true dilemma forced upon us by Kant’s ethical project, which is a much more theoretically difficult problem to solve and which, at the subjective level of affect, may even be traumatically experienced: how exactly is it that something which is not in itself pathological, in that it has nothing to do with the representation of pleasure or pain, nevertheless becomes a Triebfeder? How is it that something which does not actually qualify as a cause within the subject’s horizon, suddenly becomes a materially efficacious incentive to moral action? In other words, we must invert the standard critique of Kant, so that the question ‘How is it possible to purify the will of all pathological elements so that only the pure form of duty remains?’ now becomes ‘How can this pure form of duty become capable of functioning as a pathological element such that it is thus able to assume the role of Triebfeder to our moral actions?’ We must be careful to note that this latter possibility would not produce a subject whose ethical actions would somehow become automatic and effortless, with no sacrifice or renunciation; a situation which produced such an automaton-like subject could legitimately be criticized as involving activity lacking any real moral value. That situation is the very one which Kant endeavors to articulate with his distinction between the finite will of man and the perfectly good or holy will. Kant tells us that for the latter, there is no possibility of a conflict between inclination and morality and thus no possibility of impure intentions because, by hypothesis, a holy will is not sensuously affected. (GMM 4: 414) While for the former, we sensuously affected rational beings are creatures of desire and inclination; and since these rest on natural causes, these are neither completely in our control nor necessarily in agreement with the dictates of morality. (CPrR 5: 84) Of course, this does not mean we are incapable of subordinating our sensuously based needs to moral considerations, but rather that we are never beyond the need for moral constraint due to the ever present possibility of temptation. For the holy will there is no such conflict. However, our point here is that the logic that underlies the distinction Kant makes between the legal and the ethical problematizes the nature of the ethical as excessive and does not represent an immediate collapse into holiness.
Let us take a closer look at the distinction Kant makes between the legal and the ethical to better bring out what is at stake with the surplus element the ethical introduces in relation to the legal. At the same time, we can begin to forge the link between the formal determination of the will and Kant’s different conceptions of freedom. The proper passages occur toward the end of Grounding II, where Kant first draws out the distinction between heteronomy and autonomy. Both of these conceptions directly concern the formal determination of the will, with the will being determined in a heteronomous fashion via an object in its relation to the will, while the autonomy of the will ‘is the property that the will has of being a law to itself (independently of any property of the objects of volition).’ (GMM 4: 440–1) While Kant continues in this section to rightly critique and classify all possible principles of morality as founded on the concept of heteronomy, for our purposes we again concern ourselves with the very structure of his argument. From our foregoing discussion and from these definitions, it should be clear that legality and the heteronomy of the will occupy the same realm, while ethicality and the autonomy of the will exist in a completely different realm. We will turn to a further examination of both sides of the heteronomy/autonomy distinction below, but for now we focus on the particular form the definition of autonomy takes in Kant’s text. An interesting point has been made that if one simply takes Kant’s definition of autonomy sans the parenthetical clause, we actually move no further than the freedom expressed when the subject self-imposes or self-legislates those maxims which will guide his actions.12 (Allison 1996: 134–5) So the key to the excess of ethics appears to lie with the addition of the parenthetical clause. What exactly does it add?
Again, we saw that the legal is defined as ‘in conformity with duty’ while the ethical is defined as ‘in conformity with duty and only because of duty.’ By concisely articulating the distinction in this manner, we can clearly see that the ethical is nothing but a supplement. As Zupančič reasons, at the level of the legal, both the ‘content’ or ‘matter’ of action, as well as the form of this content, are exhausted in the clause ‘in conformity with duty,’ so that even if the subject fulfils his duty exclusively for the sake of this duty, such an action would be indistinguishable from one done simply in conformity with duty. The two results would be exactly the same. The significance of acting for the sake of duty alone only comes out with the second level of analysis – the one concerning moral worth – which allows us to see that Kant is endeavoring to conceptualize a certain supplement, a ‘pure form’ of sorts ‘which is no longer the form of anything, of some content or other, yet it is not so much an empty form as a form “outside” content, a form that provides form only for itself... a surplus which at the same time seems to be “pure waste”, something that serves absolutely no purpose.’ (Zupančič 2000: 17)13 However, if an ethical act is distinguished as lacking any Triebfeder, Kant nevertheless does conceive the necessity of that very absence itself taking on a certain ‘material weight,’ thereby functioning as precisely the very echte Triebfeder of pure practical reason which allowed him to so radically contrast duty against life in his text cited above. This echte Triebfeder is precisely Kant’s term for pure form as an absence of any Triebfeder. His conceptualization of ethics necessitates that we uniquely conceive this genuine moral incentive: on the one hand, it is unlike any other pathological motivation; on the other, it is the very absence of all pathological incentives. And the crucial point here is, if this absence itself does not somehow become ‘positivized’ and quite literally ‘matter’ to the subject, it is inconceivable how an absence of incentive could exert any influence whatsoever on his action.
It is at this point we reach a (temporal) paradox. We have seen that Kant’s argumentation surrounding the formal determination of the will leads us to conceive the ethical as essentially a remainder of sorts, something which is produced through the subject’s separation from the pathological. Yet at the same time, it is this very remainder that constitutes the echte Triebfeder of the moral subject. So how could the subject’s process of separation produce the very thing which is the incentive to that very process? How can the remainder function as the genuine incentive of the ethical if it is simultaneously only the product of the ethical? In order to begin to more fully conceptualize a ‘solution’ to this seemingly unsolvable dilemma, we need to read Kant’s text in terms of what it says about freedom. That is to say, thus far we have been examining the ethical in terms of how Kant conceptualizes the formal determination of the will. But as per our discussion above surrounding his initial distinction between the pathological and the ethical, the other way Kant proposes to delimit the ethical field is through specifying the similar logic involved in the subject’s paradoxical relation to his own (transcendental) freedom. The paradoxes involving freedom are structurally identical to the ones involved with the formal determination of the will. At its most basic, the perplexing question he has in mind to solve is: how it is that freedom can serve as the very grounding condition of freedom? We see that he deals with this most directly in Grounding III with his so-called ‘deduction’ of freedom qua autonomy. In that text, he specifies that logic in terms of freedom’s reciprocal relation to the moral Law, but our discussion of the subject’s freedom will make much use of the second Critique as well (where freedom and the moral Law are largely presented to us ‘as it were by a fact’14) to better articulate how these paradoxes are accounted for by considering the structure of Kant’s (transcendental) subject. It is to Kant’s discussion of the subject of freedom we now turn.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
