Post on 03-Feb-2023
It would be difficult to overstate the overpowering
influence of Hume's challenge to the moral outlook of the modern
world. In response to Hume's arguments, one tidal wave, one
prodigious spasm of philosophizing after another, rose to restore
reason to its throne in the moral world. Partly this was done on
the basis of true belief. Related motivations would be the fear
that reason does not have much to do with morality, and that this
in itself is a cause for worry (and cause to come up with
something); but also that reason's enemies from the old world
would relish too greatly the idea that reason is 'amoral.'
And so there began a succession of philosophic cavaliere.
Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx . . . only with
him did the involuntary reflex begin to subside. The effort died
in an interesting way in the hands of Marx. His intent was to
provide a theory that united both elements, both moods, of the
ambiguous word, 'reason.' He would both analyze the world around
him in terms of the unconscious motivations that propelled
individuals into action and shaped their beliefs (thus linking
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him to Hume), while showing why, and how, and even perhaps when
the rule of reason as a normative power would come about (thus
taking up that strand from Kant). Engels, in his Socialism: Utopian
and Scientific, gives us a sense for the power of this union:
The possibility of securing for every member of
society, by means of socialized production, an
existence not only fully sufficient materially, and
becoming day by day more full, but an existence
guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise
of their physical and mental capacities – the
possibility is not for the first time here, but it is here.
(MER, 715)
But the full development of our powers is, in addition, joined by
the elimination of exploitation and the resulting strife and
alienation. And all of it due reason's path being cleared of
obstacles. We need to recapture the profound emotional cathexis
that "reason" came to contain. A similar sentiment is expressed
by Hegel when he speaks with almost religious fervor about the
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effect the French Revolution had on a generation. Clearly this
word (along with historical vehicles for it such as the French
Revolution) had an enormous emotional value.
Thought, the concept of law . . . (see footnote in
MER, 683-684)
As his comments make clear, the "French Revolution" did not refer
so much to the storming of the Bastille; much less to the Terror
of the mid-90s. Rather, the sense in which the Revolution
represented a "holy day" was that on it humans dared to take
responsibility for the social construction of their own world –
or, at least, their own political world. That both seemed like
and, by any objective measure, actually was, a decisive turning
point. Contra Hume, humans were now consciously constructing
morally sound environments rather than responding to
unacknowledged and indirect psychological forces.
This dream is still alive in Marx though it is shadowed by
Pauline deferrals. We cannot have our rational world yet – though
it is just up ahead, one or two economic crises away. Marx
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represents the final throes of humanity's love affair with
reason, which lasts about a hundred years, from 1780 to 1880. (Of
course, after that, they remain good friends and even fall into
each other's arms once in a while, though this is always
regretted in the morning.) As with the end of so many other
affairs, the cause was there all the time but – at least
publically – was unnoticed by all. For right next to his paean to
reason – and indeed in service to it – Marx has already begun
talking about how reason is subordinate to the political and
economic contexts it finds itself in. In this way we see an
example of Marx's own dialectical approach operating on a less
conscious level. Revolutions happen, according to Marx, when a
serious gap opens up between the changing productivity of
economic forces (such as machine over manual production of
commodities) and the regulatory and legal features of the
political world. The political world is conservative, while
productive forces (at least once capitalism gets going) are
constantly evolving. The more the gap – the more dysfunctional
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the misfit between evolving economic forces and outdated
distributional and regulatory schemes – the more the chance for
revolution. This is precisely the spectre that haunts Europe,
announced in the Communist Manifesto. Ironic enough, then, that
Marx's arguments points to a similar self-overcoming. Reason, we
know, was the cross behind which the modern world marched for its
battles with the old world. It acted as the legitimating ground
of critical thought. But critical thought itself evolved while
its supporting superstructure in reason remained essentially the
same. By the time the very young Marx started writing in the
early 1840s, the golden promise of reason had already been
knocked down a peg or two. By the time Marx is done with it, the
"reign of reason" had been spirited off to a room in the upper
attic so that more space could be freed up for the "a posteriori"
materials about how capitalism functions on the ground floor.
Just as burgeoning productive forces outgrow and ultimately cause
the destruction of the local and political environment of feudal
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Europe, so too the growing powers of critical thought overflow
the banks of what "reason" can be hoped to contain.
As the above comparison infers, there is a lesson to be
learned here about how all sorts of important cultural and mental
products are born, live, prosper, and die. A number of our
thinkers will employ and exemplify this pattern. It runs like
this: a structure (political or mental) is set up as the means of
operationalizing an activity or energy. Our examples from above
are, first, the feudal political structure that served the feudal
economic powers, and second, the use of critical thought (as an
activity) made of the normative ideal of reason. Both "reason"
and "feudal political arrangements" are the means, the ennablers
of more spontaneous and creative energies of humanity: economic
life and critical thought. For a long while the "playing field"
provided by feudal political and legal structures "fit" the
economic activity they were designed to accommodate. So too did
"reason" provide a great structure within which critical thinking
could do its work.
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The problem with this arrangement arises, first, in the near
universal valuation humans ascribe to such structures. Over and
over, they are not thought of as means but as self-sufficient
ends. The reason for this can be best understood comparatively,
with reference to activities that work with structures that do
not change. The rules of baseball, and the various regulatory
agencies that enforce them, are never for a moment taken by
anyone participating in or observing the game to have independent
value. They are purely a means for the one thing that does have
value: the application of physical talent and mental acuity in
the pursuit of victory. In baseball and all sports, the rules and
their guardians are not 'valorized,' not moved, that is, from the
'means' to the 'ends' category, and, as a consequence, these
rules and their human agents are not endowed with undue emotional
power. At the same time, the activity and the means for
operationalizing that activity do not, at some point in their
development, come into conflict – resulting in some new game with
new rules. (This, by the way, is why conservatives like baseball
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so much.) But this is exactly what does happen, time after time,
with so many other human pursuits, where institutional forms must
be changed if new, evolving energies are to be unleashed. To our
very short list thus far (economic activity, critical thought) we
can add art. In all three of these spheres, the game that people
are playing and the rules they use to play it get out of whack
with each other. Rules in a baseball or soccer game are as good
as the activity they are meant to extract. (Soccer, being a much
simpler game, has remained quite static; a veritable China of
sports.) But this has not been due to the kind of dialectic
between rules and energy that characterize other spheres. The
question, then, for the individual who wishes to understand the
dynamics of naturally occurring, internally produced impulses to
changes in the intellectual world and revolutions in the
political sphere, is this: How is it that structures designed to
enable economic or mental work, of all kinds (though not in
sports, unless we include professional wrestling under that
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heading) necessarily becomes dysfunctional? Why can't the rules of
politics be like the world of sports?
And the answer is quite simple. It has already been
indicated in particular cases, such as Marx's. The structures
containing cultural contents such as economic, artistic, and
philosophic activity tend to be undermined and challenged by new
creations in the field to be regulated. The old set of norms is
not prepared to accommodate, or absorb, all these new ways of
doing things. Outside of its horizon as they are, the "old
order," as it comes to be derisively called, these new forces are
repressed, delegitimated, and derided. This was exactly the Punch
and Judy show that replayed itself a number of times between the
French Academy of Arts, representing established and inevitably
out-of-date styles and ideas, and the artists who, from about
1870 on, repeatedly broke with the "accepted methods" of the
academies to produce art that interacted more intensely with the
newly unfolding powers of the day. First impressionists, then
Cubists, then Futurists found themselves in a more intimate
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relationship with the world around them, leaving the conservative
academies – each time – sputtering in outrage.
The same process is seen in economic history. At an early
point in its development, the economic powers of society in the
period of feudal Europe interfaced quite comfortably with the
legal and political structure of the time. The loose and
frequently variable federations of noble landlords, with monarchs
at their head, who in turn were owed and sometimes given loyalty
by the nobles, worked well with what Durkheim called segmented
societies – that is, societies in which each section was self-
sufficient, with its own production of food and other
necessities. (Which isn't to say, of course, that there wasn't
plenty of trade.)
The productive power of the feudal period was by no means
paltry. Beginning around 1200, a resurgence of populations,
cities, and more encompassing monarchies makes clear that the
potency of the feudal period seems weak only because of the great
changes that followed it. From the point of view of human
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history, the feudal period was a great resurgence of human
energies. But it was limited in scope. As a result, markets that
stretched across large geographic spaces were few. The head of a
guild in Lyons would look with a lot of favor on noble-
monarchical rules (such as tariffs) that kept his market secure.
Such rules fit the economic forces available at the time. The
guild master could not reasonably produce more (say) swords than
the size of his department anyway. Why bother trying to sell a few
extra items in another area of the country? But then inventions
make it possible to increase the number of swords produced at
(arguably) higher levels of quality. It doesn't take long for the
formerly reasonable-seeming tarriffs to lose their reasonableness
and appear instead as irrational and unjust restraints on the
freedom of trade. In Marx's terms, what's happening is that the
"forces of production" (for which read, "the tools we employ to
produce goods and services") are beginning to "rebel against"
(another word might be "outgrow") a set of legal constraints
enforced by "state" power. The fit between the rules designed to
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facilitate economic activity and the economic activity itself
begins to drift as improvements in productivity in the latter
"naturally" tend to outgrow the (previously enabling) legal and
administrative system. Marx's theory of revolution, then, follows
quite nicely.
We can see immediately the difference between this kind of
open -ended, shape-shifting, rule-bending and breaking game that
is "the economy" and baseball. Rules are no less seriously
proposed and enforced in this sphere than in baseball. But what
doesn't happen in baseball is that through repeated playings some
kind of new "force" is produced that somehow "exceeds the rules"
of that activity. It's also the case that rules in the economic
sphere are always to some extent "contested," as they can be seen
to advantage certain activities and classes over others. This is
not the case in baseball. No one ever claims that the rule, if
the ball gets past the catcher on a third strike, the batter gets
to try to run to first base, somehow favors someone or some group
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over others. It's just a rule for everyone playing the game of
baseball.
It is the contested nature of rules in so many human cultural
activities that results in rules that are themselves objects of
dispute. This combined with the naturally-occurring changes in
the contexts of the activity in question – we've been thinking
about the economic and art worlds, though there are many others –
guarantees conflicts between old and new. But how this conflict
will express itself depends very much on the sphere in question.
In the economic-political context, changes and transformations
are frequently quite wrenching, as the individuals who man the
positions of the legal and cultural hierarchies are not about to
write themselves out of history for the benefit of advancing
productive forces and those who champion them. The very material
benefits and costs of changes in this sphere – especially given
that society's coercive power is concentrated in this area and
can be brought to bear – dictate frequent recourse to violence.
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The same dynamic, if not with the same violence,
characterizes the philosophic and artistic spheres. One of the
best ways to understand change and new thinking is in terms of
the dynamic between increasingly antiquated forms (designed to
enable such-and-such pursuit) and the evolving energies produced
by the activity. This is the point that is famously made by Kuhn
in his Structures of Scientific Revolution. Complete ways of thinking and
of viewing the world are called by him "paradigms." Medieval
science had one paradigm, Aristotelian science another, modern
science its own, and so on. Within these ways of thinking,
practitioners pursued their studies or experiments. The "fit"
between the investigations of practitioners and the paradigms
they work within is, for a time, quite good. Kuhn dubs this
relationship a period of "normal science." But soon the
investigations, perhaps aided by new instruments not foreseen by
a somewhat aged paradigm) point to gaps, lapses, inconsistencies,
between what the ruling paradigm predicts and the investigations
discover. When enough such anomalies accrue, challenges to the
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reigning paradigm arise. In Marxist terms, the "forces" (tools,
equipment, intellectual insight based on them) of scientific
theory and observation outgrow the intellectual world view of the
aging scientific paradigm.
What is being suggested, then, is that a similar approach to
philosophic thought will give us a better insight into its
dynamics than competing approaches. The question, "who's right
and who's wrong?" will conspicuously fail to provide us with a
useful way to understand the philosophic-political wars of the
past several centuries. Instead, we should look at the dynamic of
form and content. Let's take as our example the one arising out
of Kant.
Kant makes it very clear that he is responding to Hume's
assault best represented by the early Treatise on Human Nature,
questioning the reliability of the knowledge we receive from
empirical sources. Hume's strategy is to point out that there is
quite a leap between what we actually observe and the explanatory
devices used to understand them. Thus, we see someone throw a
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lighted match onto a bunch of charcoal briquettes that have been
soaked with flammable liquid. A fire starts. Those are the two
observable moments in front of us. But then we ask, what's
happened? We wish to understand the two events, and their
relation to one another, their interaction. In response to this
wish, we say, "the lit match caused the fuel-soaked charcoal to
burn." But this notion of "cause" and then of "effect" is a
purely mental phenomenon. We can see the match, we can see and
sense the heat from the burning charcoal. But nothing has struck
our sensory array called "cause" or "effect." Match, burning
flammable fluid, red-hot charcoal briquettes, yes; "cause" and
"effect," no. The latter are rather interpretive, explanatory
terms that we have superimposed on events. Where, then, did the
notion of cause and effect come from? Hume's answer in this
epistemological sphere is, unsurprisingly, similar to the one
provided earlier concerning justice. The notions of cause and
effect are products of the same kind of psychological, behind-
the-scenes forces that we saw earlier leading us unconsciously in
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the direction of moral commitments. If we handle a particular
object, such as a match, we will observe the presence of wood, a
rounded tip of sulfur on one end, certain smells, length, and so
on. We will never find anything called cause. There is no
property or feature of objects called either "cause" or "effect."
And yet we assert that this match, when lit, will cause the
effect we are familiar with from backyard barbecues. We say that
the cause "is" here in the match. Our proof for the claim? The
fire in the barbecue. But there's no "effect" there in the
barbecue pit. All that's there is burning briquettes. Have we
observed nothing about the interaction of these two objects? Of
course we have, grants Hume, just not what we think. What we've
actually observed empirically – when we think about the matter
rigorously, as opposed to the lazy, unreflective, and self-
described "common sense" view – is the regular conjunction of two
events. (See Treatise, Book I, "Of the understanding," Section XI,
"Of the probability of chances.") After seeing a sufficient
quantity of such conjunctions, they are experienced in our minds
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no longer as merely 'regular' but rather necessary. (See Book I,
section V, "Of the impressions of the senses and memory.") But
this "necessity," Hume argues, is less a quality in the things
themselves and more a function of how deeply we want to see into
the causes and essences of things. This desire, in turn, is
rooted in a psychological quest for security and reliability. As
Aristotle says at the beginning of his Metaphysics, "All men by
nature desire to know." Very true, Hume would say; the question
is, where does that desire come from? And his answer is from our
need for security and reliability. We will the world into a
certain order as a means of taming it and deploying it in useful
ways.
When we infer effects from causes, we must establish the existence of these causes; which we have only two ways of doing, either by an immediate perception of ourmemory or senses, or by an inference from other causes;which causes again we must ascertain in the same manner, either by a present impression, or by an inference from their causes, and so on, till we arrive at some object, which we see or remember. 'Tis impossible for us to carry on our inferences in infinitum;and the only thing, that can stop them, is an impression of the memory or senses, beyond which there is no room for doubt or enquiry. (Treatise, Book I,
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Section IV, "Of the component parts of our reasonings concerning cause and effect.")
We get a certain feeling at some point in our researches, and
then translate that affect into the expression "no doubt," which,
Hume is suggesting, simply needs to be expanded to understand its
true significance, that is: "No doubt that as far as our material
and ideal interests are concerned, we've gone far enough in our
inquiries."
With observations such as these, we feel again the sharp,
debunking bite we are familiar with from Bayle. We tell ourselves
pretty, self-serving stories about our desire for truth, and as a
result rather arrogantly award the badge of truth to our own
interested and limited perspective on the world. One of our
interests is an environment characterized by regularly recurring
patterns in nature. Such a feature makes prediction possible – a
powerful advantage. We nail down the whole idea behind regular
recurrence of palters with the terms "cause" and "effect," and
call them together a law, the highest imprimatur of regularity
humanity can offer, and so a term of great respect.
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Hume's critique of reason here is scandalous. We will
remember here the kind of banner the word "reason" had become
throughout the eighteenth century; the emotional cathexis it had
been transformed into. All century long one thinker after another
– and increasingly one government after another – championed the
virtues of reason as the governing principle for assessing one's
life and environment. Kant is famous for the newspaper opinion
piece in which he told readers that the essence of the word
"Enlightenment" was found in daring to know; daring to use one's
understanding. In other words, Enlightenment is a decision – one
that requires "daring" – to transfer the grounds of one's beliefs
from things like God or nature, or the authority of those holding
political power, to one's own capacity to understand and decipher
without reliance on "outside" authorities. What is it about this
transfer that requires the specific motivational state of
"daring" and "courage"? First, the old forms of belief are
sanctified by time, faith, and long acquaintance – the very
things Hume tells us cement our relations with one another. No
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small amount of daring is needed to cast them aside and take up
new forms. Second, when Kant wrote, those old forms still had
some life in them as actual powers endowed with coercive
capacity, and so there's just a normal, Robin Hood-type daring
needed when promoting the cause of "reason." (This, we will
remember, is the polemical context within which "reason" starts
to appear as something more, that is, as a moral principle
itself, rather than as what it is: a tool that does not choose
its masters.) Third, courage is needed because this new sources
of authority is located in myself. Most people don't have a lot of
confidence in themselves, especially when, as Kant points out in
the same piece, generations have been trained to trust in God,
His agents, and other powerful authorities. Kant, however, is
optimistic: he blames the widespread preference for non-rational,
mythical, or power-based kinds of authority on the effect
produced by bad institutions, and predicts that once these are
removed and replaced by reason's own constructs, the turn to
reason will be much easier. People don't have confidence in
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themselves because they've been trained by institutions that
reinforce everyone's more slave-like tendencies. The way forward
for humans as individuals and as societies is the path of reason.
Governments will be based on consent of the governed. Taxes will
be reasonably assessed in accordance with publicly justified
needs of the community. Laws will not be a hotch-potch of a
thousand years of history's crooked paths, but the sane, fair
product of sober consideration. The rights of all rather than the
privileges of a few will be secured. It was in the direction of
this still-not-yet ideal polity that Kant thought we should dare.
But this call for a Fatwah on behalf of reason was going to
suffer a crisis of legitimacy if the arguments provided by Hume
and others like him were allowed to stand.
As we can see, Kant's commitment to reason is . . .
passionate. We should not be surprised or put off by a comparison
to Machiavelli. He tells us that "Fortune is a woman, and like a
woman, favors the young and daring." But of course, Kant is
directly discussing a concrete political situation – namely, one
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in which the claim of reason to primacy in politics is hotly
contested. The kind of daring Kant is encouraging is exactly the
same mental state that Machiavelli is referring to. The problem
in both cases is that daring – the only motivational state up to
the task of conquering Fortuna, requires love. Machiavelli says
that Fortune is like a woman, and so favors those capable of
daring. But where do her suitors get that? What is it they want
to conqeur, and what is it about the prospect of success that
inspires daring? For daring is only exercised where the chances
of success are, relatively speaking, poor. It's not thought to be
a very daring choice to pursue an action that carries few if any
risks. If I invest in low-interest but secure government bonds,
then my motivational state is described as prudent or cautious.
The one with government bonds pursues non-depreciation of
already-existing achievements. But what could impel someone to
choose quick but risky over slow and sure? Something other than
merely quantitative improvement of one's position is a necessary
part of the calculation, otherwise it makes no sense. And this is
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nothing other than a passion for the object desired, an overriding
emotion that makes purely utilitarian calculations seem profane.
If the object is a lover, we can certainly understand how such a
passion could develop. The combination of wide-open emotional
receptors on both sides, with sexual pleasure, both of which are
t hen so deliciously refused consummation by some institution or
person who does not understand or does not care how you feel –
this is more than enough repressed and frustrated psychic energy
to produce daring. What about Machiavelli's politician? She is in
love with something even more rare and thus more forbidden, and
thus more enticing: not power, which again is a means, but glory.
Again, her passion is no cause for surprise.
But reason? How could anyone love little "don't forget to
move the decimal point" reason? Falling in love with reason –
isn't that a little like falling in love with Google maps? And
yet without the daring, what can possibly act as the necessary
agent of reason's insertion into the contested fields of politics
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and morals? How does one get "enthusiastic" and "passionate"
about . . . assembly instructions?
At a minimum, however, what Peter Gay calls the "Party of
Humanity" could not suffer degradation in reason's generally
admitted strengths: its capacity for objectivity, its tendency to
exclude non-rational factors from consideration, its capacity to
understand matters and objects as they are, rather than as
filtered through the distorting lens of myth and prejudice –
these were among the principal gifts in reason's dowry. Hume,
however, threatened to denude reason even of these strengths.
Seen from a sufficient distance, the claim that "all men are
equal" is just as fanciful, just as rooted in prejudice – owing
just as much of its psychic energy from emotion – as the Divine
Right of Kings ever was. Hume's challenge is direct:
Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in commonlife, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason,to give the preference to reason, and to assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselvesto its dictates. Every rational creature, 'tis said, isobliged to regulate his actions by reason; and if any other motive or principle challenge the direction of his conduct, he ought to oppose it, 'till it be
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entirely subdued. (Treatise, Book II, Part III, Section III, "Of the influencing motives of the will . . . ".)
Perhaps Hume was thinking of Plato. But the challenge directly
applies to Kant as well. Hume's tone is almost dismissive: he
blandly announces that he will "show the fallacy of all their
philosophy."
When Hume and Kant meet, we are speaking of armies,
membership transcending time. Behind Kant stands Plato,
Enlightenment secularists, the French and American Revolutions,
and moralists of all kinds – camp counselors and mothers, loads
of popular media and popular thinking about morality. Next to
Hume stands Bayle and behind them the schools of skeptics that
have harassed and sabotaged reason throughout its career.
Callicles stands with Hume. He is strongly backed by important
factions of the American founders. He is embraced by the movement
– both intellectual and governmental – to treat the psyche as
manipulable and non-rational. Onto the field in support of him
arrives Nietzsche and Freud, and with them, a floodgate is opened
and into the field rushes Marxists, Jungians, structuralists, and
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postmodernism. Wars produce strange allies, and on Hume's side,
to the back and off by itself, but in its own way willing to
fight for "le bon David," is the army with the word "Faith" on
its banners. Here too we should remember that Hume's own primary
purpose in writing the Treatise was moral. This is the topic of the
third and concluding book of the Treatise.
The stakes are quite high. It is a conflict that has again
and again jarred and roiled, creating martyrs, traitors, and
Napoleons.
And it is a battle that has always focused primarily on
morality, not epistemology. As L.W. Beck points out in his
"Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason," Kant's first project was
to write about morals (5). When that had to be put off as a
separate work, Kant still insisted that a section of his CPR
would deal with the "ultimate grounds of morality." He even
speaks with some impatience of the way in which the CPR was
keeping him from the work he really looked forward to: the
metaphysics of morals. And this foregrounding of morality as the
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key true topic of concern is reconfirmed from another, relevant
source: when Kant's immediate (if temporary) successor as
brightest star, J.G. Fichte, first encountered Kant's writings,
it was the moral arguments that turned him into a lifelong,
passionate partisan of Kant's system (as explicated by him, that
is).
Are we moral beings, at least in part? Can we decide to act
in a way that is not in our interests, but is nevertheless moral?
Or are we self-interested types, overrun by self-interest, but
clever at coming up with moral facades? A key insight of
Enlightenment thinking is provided by the witty maxims of someone
like La Rochefoucuald, who writes that "Our virtues are most
frequently but vices in disguise." Instead of taking what people
say about themselves at face value, Enlightenment thinkers from
Bayle to Freud (and plenty before and after them) pointed to the
frequently unacknowledged interests that were served by thinking
in such-and-such a way. But the cost of exposing the self-
interested basis of moral claims is to denude moral claims of
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their legitimacy, thus opening up Enlightenment thought to the
charge of nihilism.
We know by now the ingenious ways Hume answered this
question. His explanatory principle was psychological in origin.
Self-interest rules the judgments of individuals. But, first,
self-interest is rescued from isolated egotism typical of Hobbes'
and even Locke's version of human nature. Surely our interest in
ourselves is active, but even our own notion of self-interest
includes others – such that it is actually possible to harm
oneself, say, financially, in the interest of another person.
Still, in everything the Humean individual pursues, the
motivation is some kind of self-interest, even when the notion of
'self' is expanded somewhat to include relations and friends. He
then goes on to provide a much more subtle and even enlarged
notion of self-interest. This by itself, the subtlety of thought,
observation, and abstraction that is involved in such a careful
judgement, are much to be admired. In this respect one might
compare Hume favorably to Bayle and others like La Rochefoucuald.
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With Bayle early on, and de Sade in a scandalous parody of the
same at the end of the eighteenth century, one feels still too
much the pleasure that practitioners of reason's scalpel seem to
enjoy. For its opponents, there's something of the Hannibel
Lector in reason, with its cool, mocking smile of inevitability.
But by Hume's day the actual appearance and steady ascendancy of
reason's domain, in field after field, from geography to
agriculture, economics, agronomy, trade, demographics, not to
mention advances in medicine and on and on had transformed reason
from the role of sneering adolescent that enjoys making
responsible adults squirm into a mature power with many successes
to its credit, and indeed with a reputation of its own to
protect. This explains why Hume is not content to let his readers
twist slowly in some ironic breeze.
But Hume's solution concerning the origins and grounds of
morality, despite its measured tones – its positive desire not to
shock but rather to patiently explain – was anathema to Kant.
And, again, not just to Kant the person but rather Kant as the
30
sign for all those who expect more from reason than the role of a
measuring cup with bells and whistles. Kant the author takes on
the task of providing an account of morality that is based on
reason. Somehow, the capacity to reason must be drafted to assume
a leading role in the defense of morality.
Hume's challenge is that reason is utterly incapable of
playing this role. Morality has to do with the substantive ends
individuals have chosen (in response to some interest). All
reason can do is help us adjust means to ends, and to inform us
of possible or likely outcomes of our actions. I want an ice
cream cone. The faculty of reason, if we may personify it, says
"Fine. It'll cost you $3.75, more if you do the waffle cone with
hot fudge and whipped cream. You're going to have to actually get
up and go to the ice cream store for it. Next you'll need to take
into account how many calories and grams of fat you are
consuming. But you'll also experience the pleasure usually
associated with such outings." And so on: always measuring,
always calculating.
31
How, Hume's position demands, can this kind of measuring
capacity for thinking about what kinds of means are needed for
the purposes agents choose act as a moral force? As reason's
career matured, its most famous and thoughtful commentators
(Bayle, Locke, Hume, Kant) strove to clarify the limits of
reason's capacities and uses. For instance we cannot, using
reason alone, come to the conclusion that God exists. That
doesn't mean God does not exist. It just means that the
intellectual tool reason is not competent to assert such a thing.
If all reason does is measure, then for it to join in the
discussion over God's existence, it would have to encounter God
in the same way that we encounter ice cream cones.
It was conclusions like these that made reason's partisans
nervous. Kant's response to Hume is one of the most inspired
efforts in the history of philosophy. Kant's effort in turn sets
in motion a series of massive efforts having the same end but
using different means. The importance of his response to Hume –
whom he barely mentions, by the way – cannot be overstated.
32
How does it work? The trick is to read or interpret the
formal mechanisms reason employs when measuring as themselves
having strictly necessary moral implications. What is the key
feature of every morality? Absoluteness. The Commandments in the
Hebrew Bible command absolutely. This is what gives them their
authority and their putative timelessness. This is what makes it
possible for them to stand against relativism and a sense of
moral drift. But isn't there a sense in which reason can be said
to do something quite similar? We can get a hint of how this
might work if we look back at reason's monologue about the ice
cream cone. Aren't there strong moral implications of the kinds
of calculations reason provides? Wouldn't it be legitimate to
read reason as saying – if not in so many words – that having the
ice cream cone is a bad idea? If yes, on what grounds?
A prime candidate for such a ground is the principle of
moderation. There's both a health and a moral benefit involved. A
truth known since the ancient Greeks, and present in plenty of
non-Western cultures as well, is that restraining excessive
33
enjoyment of this or that pleasure is 'good' for you, and even
provides for a more regular enjoyment of said pleasure, leading
to greater quantities of pleasure over the long term. One might
think, in an uneducated kind of way, that if three beers is a
good thing, ten beers is much more of a good thing. But not much
experience is needed (the last two years of high school and the
first few of college are often more than enough) before the
insight arrives that so much of one thing is a bad idea. One gets
sick, doesn't eat well, says things that shouldn't have been
said, and so on. But isn't there, in addition to the health
benefits, if not a moral, than an ethical element to this kind of
measuring? And isn't it reason talking when we're told, "Look,
this is just too much beer. You're getting fat. When you're not
drinking, you're urinating. In the name of your genuine welfare,
I say quit drinking so much!" Isn't this precisely the kind of
role for reason presented by Plato in his example of Leontion?
But reason (as surely Plato knew) can go further. It can
abstract from specific cases to form more general rules. Thus,
34
let's say that in addition to beer, an individual is a big fan of
chocolate covered donuts with cream inside. Reason has the
capacity to point out the similarities in patterns of behavior
across the individual's range of interests, and arrives at a rule
that will cover not just what happens when we drink beer and eat
chocolate, but when we consume pretty much any kind of food or
drink; but not just food and drink, but also all sorts of other
human activities, such as the competition for and exercise of
political power, can be engaged in obsessively, compulsively,
excessively, and so isn't it reason that gives us a covering
principle good for all our activities, namely, "Moderation in all
things"? Isn't it precisely the measuring, comparing,
contrasting, pattern-discerning power of reason that makes it not
just a guide, but a teacher as well?
Think of the above idea in relation to one of Hume's most
famous, least-measured claims: "Reason is, and ought only to be,
the slave of the passions." Could a mere fawning slave tell us we
should reduce our caloric intake or in general be moderate? The
35
great conflict in moral theory, from Plato on down, has been over
the restraint or the encouragement of the appetites. Well, isn't
reason acting as just such a restraint on nothing other than the
appetites when it urges us to knock down the drinking a peg or
two?
Kant will pursue an argument that is different in content
but similar in form to the one above. In both cases, the moral
capacity of reason will be located in the rules of reason's own
cognitive functioning. His argument will, however, be quite far
from the idea that we should be 'moderate.' For him, that is a
merely half-deployed, shame-faced use of reason. There are some
things that should be done, not moderately, but never.
And this last point takes us to another motivation Kant's
party had for erecting a reason-based morality. For there was not
only the challenge of Hume's competing skeptical and
psychological account. There was also the problem of a guilty
conscience. After all, reason's development had reached the point
where serious claims about God's existence either had to be
36
abandoned or seriously marginalized into a fairly toothless
guarantor of the continued workings of natural law – a long way
from the up-close and personal God Who walked with the Israelites
in the desert. God had also been the primary guarantor of
morality: with Him, no act goes unseen, and no act goes
unpunished. If He's gone, or reduced to making sure the carousel
keeps turning, what will keep the world safe from unrestrained
self-interest and moral anarchy? The Party of Humanity was both
embarrassed by this seeming weak spot in the planning for the
post-God universe, and a little worried themselves that religion
might have played a useful role and that something – something as
imposing as He, ideally – must replace it. God has to be
replaced; Hume's attack on reason's role for morality must be
repulsed. THE stakes could hardly be higher.
Kant's first move is designed to replicate one of the
essential features of our notion of God: His unyielding
absoluteness; His uncompromising demand that we conform to His
law, even when that law seems to take no heed of human wants and
37
capacities. This feature of God's law is well illustrated by
Paul's comment:
We know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. ForI do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind . . . . So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.
While Paul knows he cannot fulfill God's commands, he at least
has the profound desire to try. This "will-to-morality" expressed
so eloquently by Paul contains at least a strong yearning for a
moral life. How would the Enlightenment separate this will from
the legitimatory structure provided by God's absoluteness? This
is the key question for understanding the twists and turns of
Kant's ethical writings. And, as has been pointed out before, the
need to respond to hostile polemics, cover up or strengthen weak
points, restrain allies and play up strengths, is a frequently
under emphasized motive for philosophers and others saying what
they do.
38
Thus Kant must come up with a law that is absolute; another
good term for this would be 'uncompromising.' Only such a moral
law would succeed in avoiding the messy, inconclusive, and
pragmatic approach to morality that seems to follow if absolute
standards are put aside. The more practical kind of moralizing
that Kant wants to avoid is captured by his term, "hypothetical
imperative." Unpacked a bit, this term refers to a means-end, and
if-then kind of reasoning that looks like this: "If such-and-such
end is desired, here are the available means." Frankly, this kind
of reasoning has little if anything to do with morality. It is
purely utilitarian and simply hooks up desired ends with
necessary means. If I want to buy an ice cream cone, I can either
work long enough to earn the money needed, or I can take a bunch
of change from my friend's coin purse and buy it that way. Both
means produce the desired end. Of course, reason is capable of
further refinements: advising, for instance, that if the friend
finds out about the money stolen from the purse she is going to
be very cross, and that is almost surely going to be unpleasant.
39
But beyond an analysis that transcends the most immediate desires
to include collateral and medium-term consequences, thinking
guided by the 'hypothetical imperative' cannot go.
A 'categorical' imperative is one that applies in all cases
whatsoever, and is thus free of the self-interested, utilitarian,
and decidedly non-moral considerations that characterize the
hypothetical kind of imperative. Thus, imagine a young person who
has made the decision not to lie, ever. She attends an
institution of higher learning with an honor code in place. She
observes a sorority sister cheating on an exam. The demand – the
imperative – from the honor code is absolute: those who do not
report cheating, themselves cheat, and if caught, will be dealt
with as harshly. But it's not just the honor code that has the
injunction against cheating. Our imaginary student herself
affirms the law, agrees with it, and has solemnly promised to
obey it.
But now this law must be applied to a concrete circumstance,
and that means considering very specific consequences. Instead of
40
absolute obedience to the rule, conformity to it becomes one factor
among several. Conforming to the rule is still an important
consideration. But what if the parents of the student who
observed the cheating had just recently had a messy divorce,
resulting in intense emotional turmoil that she is just now
coming out of? Perhaps inserting herself into such another
"crisis" scenario would risk putting her whole emotional
framework once again at risk. Is it worth it? Where the first
'it' refers to obedience to the terms of the honor code, while
the second is the threat to the emotionally stable environment
needed to pursue studies. The word 'worth' expresses the
comparative valuation precisely: Is the pursuit of this end worth
the potential threats to this end? Note that both ends have
genuine value. It's not as if threats to emotionally secure
environments are unimportant or 'selfish.' The options here are
not "duty" on the one hand and "self-interest" on the other.
Instead, there are interests and ideals that are interests in both
options. When the student weighs her decision, values, ideals,
41
and interests are found on both sides. One might even be willing
to argue that there is just as much "morality" at stake in both
scenarios. How should the individual choose?
From Kant's point of view, the posing of the question this
way, with its tendency to place moral ends on the same level as
other, more practical purposes, is the just the sort of
concession that puts reason's credentials as a source of moral
authority in doubt. It would not be too much to say that the
prospect of failing to provide a moral "ground" as absolute as
God's own sovereignty frightened Kant.
Or we can think of this same point not from a biographical
viewpoint, but from a "history of concept reception" angle. Kant,
we must remember, is reacting to an apparent tendency – and here
Kant is observing the same process as Hume and the American
founders – reason has to undermine every belief, not just
putatively irrational ones such as belief in God, or credence
concerning the existence of witches. Here again we see the
problem of Bayle's powder. Hume's idea is to stop using the
42
powder beyond a certain point; the founder's solution an
ingenuous electoral system that allows un- and under-educated
passions to batter inefficaciously against the locks and channels
of the constitutional system. In both cases, reason's capacity to
act as an independent source of moral authority is simply given
up, and Bayle's description of reason as a corrosive power is
implicitly granted. But this act of resignation concerning reason
is utterly out of the question for Kant. Coming up with a reason-
based moral order will save reason from a fate as mere destroyer:
from the point of view of the concept, however, Kant's complex
and highly original contribution to moral theory is a temporary
expedient; a stop-gap justification that allows reason to
continue its work under cover of a plausible account of morality.
Over and over again in the history of intellectual advances, we
have observed the phenomenon of partisans defending new ideas
against the charge that the new idea in question will overthrow
all morality, mutual faith, belief in God – whatever the
environment and its inhabitants imagine to be a core group of
43
beliefs without which society will be cast adrift, a rudderless
ship in a sea of conflicting wills. Against this absurd picture,
originators and friends of the new thought will rush to her side,
swords out of their scabbards, denouncing and refuting those who
would dare to claim (for instance) that some new cosmogony will
somehow challenge the basis of all morality. The response of the
new cosmogony (or whatever) is never the intellectually
respectable one, namely that "if the consequence of this truth is
that butlers have no good reason not to steal their employers'
silverware, then our love of truth should motivate us to grant
the consequence." The dangerous social consequences of a new truth
should not count against its status as true. On the contrary, the
strategy is much more pragmatic. The most scandalous charges
against the new idea are refuted with great vigor. With the
rhetorical fire diverted to fringe elements or merely potential
dysfunctions of the new idea more important, substantive, but
less controversial elements of the new idea are affirmed and even
legitimated.
44
None of the above, however, should be taken to mean that
there isn't a great deal to be admired in Kant's moral theory.
The steps of his thinking – all designed show reason as a self-
sufficient source of moral authority – can be schematized in this
brief, but hopefully sufficient manner.
o Value formation. There is nothing good in the world (or
outside it) except the good will. By "good will" Kant does not
mean some vaguely benevolent attitude. What's good about Kant's
good will is obedience to a moral law. The good will is a moral
will, and only those entities who employ such a will can be
called 'good.' It is no accident that Kant includes the
parenthetical comment indicating that it is not just here on
earth that the moral will is the only kind of will one can have
that will allow the claim to goodness. The clear implication is
that God would also have to have the kind of will Kant is about
to discuss. Thus God Himself is subordinated to the rule of
morality; He is replaced as the lead figure in humanity's
striving for moral clarity.
45
o Creation of an ideal realm. Kant sees his task as providing us
with a description of the thinking process needed to produce
moral decisions. That thought process will not include
considerations such as our student's concern over the emotional
costs that would result from turning in her sorority sisters.
Kant's argument straddles somewhere in-between, saying "this is
how you should think" and "this is moral reasoning at its most
pure and ideal, utterly freed from considerations of morally
irrelevant contingency circumstances," such as our student's
emotional turmoil coming out of her parents' divorce.
o Argumentative strategy. Kant deploys a teleological argument
to make the case that human beings have an intrinsic moral
nature, one that is profound enough to do battle with instincts
and material wants. A teleological method of investigation is one
in which the most significant feature of a thing being studied is
the final form of its most developed state. Thus, if we see a sprig
of a spruce tree in the ground, and we want to study it, the
teleologist will chime in to suggest that we'll really know the
46
true essence, the true reality of the spruce tree when we observe
it in its full-blown, mature state. Only then will all the
potentialities present in the sprig be worked out and allowed to
reach their fullest height. Similarly, we'll certainly learn a
great deal if we study human children. But to really understand
humans we should wait until adulthood, when all their powers are
fully developed.
On the strength of this method, Kant makes a point that is
similar to one made in Aristotle's Politics. Aristotle's argument
is on behalf of the claim that humans are "political animals" who
naturally form political communities with constitutions,
subordinate laws, enforcement agencies, deliberative bodies, and
so on. What is it about us that makes us just this type of
animal? Aristotle's answer is our capacity for speech. Other
animals can shout out to each other to warn of an approaching
predator or to let everyone know about a new food source. Humans
have that ability as well. But what humans have that animals
don't is speech. We talk to each other a lot. A lot of that talk
47
is about what's right and what's wrong, what's false and what's
true. As a consequence, we then construct formal arenas where
discussions over right, wrong, true and false can take place and
be acted on. It is our capacity to talk that has us coming up
with institutions designed to produce and implement our
discussion-based conclusions in the form of laws and so on.
Kant's argument is similar but in place of "speech" Kant
puts "principles." The strict relation between the two uses is
also evident: with Aristotle, we use speech to create rules
(laws) using principles of justice, such as the principle, "no
one ought to benefit from immoral actions," which is the idea
(ideas are often principles) behind disallowing convicted felons
with a story to tell from receiving royalties or other payments
for any book or movie that details their crimes. Aristotle says
we're political animals; Kant says we are "principle producing"
animals. And these principles aren't just about morals. "I will
never walk under an open ladder" or "never more than two cups of
coffee a day for me" are much as much principles. The key thing
48
to note about this capacity for principle-formation is that we
humans are the only ones who do it. Inanimate matter is governed
by laws external to it, such as gravity. But even animate beings,
such as cats or cows, are ruled by instinct and cannot form
either moral or more "pragmatic" principles. They too are
governed by laws and procedures that they have no access to. The
truly unique feature of the human being, especially when fully
grown, is the ability to make laws for ourselves.
Here we can see that teleology and a claim about human
nature come together. Our "highest" capacity – highest in the
sense of "most sharply distinguishing feature relative to the
material and animal worlds" – is at the same time an account of
what our nature is. We share bodily desires for food and sex with
the rest of the animal kingdom. When we sate those desires we are
not acting humanly but rather animalistically – not that there's
anything wrong with that. It's just that, if you want to know
what makes us human, you're not going to point to examples of
human breeding.
49
We can gain a better sense of the argument Kant is making by
comparing it to another key moment from political philosophy –
Pericles' Funeral Oration to the Athenian people. This was
delivered at the funeral of some soldiers who died in Athens' war
with Sparta and its allies. Pericles led Athens both militarily
and politically at this point. He chooses not to praise the
specific individuals who have died, asking instead what it was
these soldiers had died for. They have died in defense of the
Athenian state. But why do that? What was it about Athens that
made "it worth it"? Pericles reviews a number of features of the
Athenian constitution and culture that justifies such a sacrifice
in its name. He speaks at one point about the laws of Athens. He
says the people of Athens are law-abiding, and are "especially
obedient to those laws that were made to help people who have
suffered an injustice." Now, why does Pericles point to this kind
of law in particular? What is it about laws that "help people who
have suffered an injustice" that should command our special
attention? How would this kind of law make Athens a city worth
50
dying for? What such laws in particular reveal to us is that
Athens is a city that has lifted itself up out of the so-called
law of nature, with its self-contradictory notion of "the right
of the stronger" and established an "unnatural" realm or island
where those who have suffered an injustice are defended rather
than trampled over. With such laws, Athens announces itself as a
place where the weak and the strong are (unnaturally) equal to
one another. Someone might be physically strong or command large
financial resources, but that doesn't mean – as it does in the
animal kingdom – that they are allowed to do anything they want.
There is no other species capable of this kind of restraint in
the name of principle. It is this side, this feature of human
conduct that Kant wants to emphasize and build on. Of course, the
mere fact that we are capable of coming up with laws that
separate us from the animal kingdom does not mean we will. And
one of Pericles' attacks concerning the enemies of Athens is that
their laws reinforce the rule of the strong over the weak –
institutionalizing their dominance and legitimating ('just'-
51
ifying) their injustice. When Spartan soldiers die, it will not
be in defense of a distinctively human way of life.
Humans, then, are an indeterminate mix of animality and
humanity. We can live according to a moral law – or at least,
there's something in us (namely, the 'will-to-principle') that
prompts us in this direction. But we're also quite capable of
violating our own rules – such as the one about walking under
ladders. There's something about the violation of even trivial
rules that would bother Kant. Once we've given ourselves a law,
such as the one about ladders, we've invested that decision with
a significance that transcends whatever the rule allows,
prohibits, or demands. The capacity to make rules is
simultaneously a claim about our ability to control future
behavior. We are making a claim about what we will do whenever
some choice or circumstance presents itself. To play fast and
loose with such a mix of unique powers – not only our capacity to
create laws for ourselves, but also our ability to make reliable
promises about future performance – is to betray our humanity by
52
failing to take it seriously; by trivializing it. Our ownmost,
truest, highest, noblest capacity is the creation of rules we give
to ourselves. It is precisely this ability that makes us free
according to Kant. A cat would never, could never, say to itself,
"I've decided never to step on a sidewalk crack." The cat's
cognitive function is always in the middle of things that
surround it. It can't step back from that direct and immediate
involvement, abstract from experience, draw conclusions, and then
form rules of prudence, much less moral commandments. Even a
judgment as silly as the one involving sidewalk cracks is a piece
of the most unimaginable abstraction for a cat. And the decision
to avoid all such cracks in the future – the decision to
determine one's own future behavior regarding all instances of
sidewalk cracks – is a way of thinking that simply cannot arise.
o Evaluative power. Thus, as we can see, Kant's new morality
has a way of evaluating and judging human conduct – just as the
Church did. Without God (and even, Kant would say, with Him), we
know that some behaviors are more worthy of us as humans, while
53
others degrade us to the level of animals. Once again we have an
agency within the mind of all those butlers that, if properly
cultivated (as it certainly had to be in the case of the Church
as well), will keep them from violating the property rights of
their owners. This time, though, it's not an omniscient God that
watches whatever you do, but rather you, who looks on at her
actions and assesses them from the point of view of an unbending
moral himself that she herself has made. Indeed, for as long as
we refrained from stealing giant Butterfinger candy bars on the
grounds that doing so violated one of God's commandments, we were
not really behaving morally. For an action to be moral, it must be
freely chosen. If someone forces me to do something against my
will, like my mother ordering me to return the Butterfinger and
apologize to the store manager – then I act "according to" the
moral law but not "from" it, that is, without the necessary moral
intention behind the restitutive act my mother compels me to
perform.
54
If we take seriously the idea that the highest, least
animalistic sphere humans occupy is our capacity to come up with
principles (rules, laws) that we then pledge our future conduct
to, several consequences follow. The first is that humans are
free. Freedom implies choice. Our capacity for choice – and thus
the ground of our freedom – is found in our mixed nature, part
animal, part human. These two elements are found in conflict
within every individual. We can pursue either path: animality or
reason. It's a choice.
Assuming we choose the human path and aspire to actualize
the highest capacities of our nature, what must we do? We must
construct a morality with absolutely binding force, but which is
the creation of the individual who then obeys it. Such a person
will be "auto-nomous" – a self law-giver. We have the capacity to
come up with rules that we commit our future actions to, but just
as our student who observed the cheating incident naturally tends
to think about what to do in terms of our own self-interest, so
too do the rest of us tend to mix up and confuse self-interest
55
and other considerations in with the principles we've formed.
Instead of keeping in mind the very distinct elements of our
nature and cultivating an appropriate respect for the unique
character of our principle-creating powers, we mix everything up
into a confusing mess, so that sometimes principles are used to
advance self-interest, while at others principles are tossed
aside as so many inconvenient or 'unrealistic' constraints. We
need, Kant thinks, to clarify what is and what isn't 'moral'
behavior; a clear idea of what morality is and isn't. And to do
this we must study morality in its pure state, when it is "freed
from everything empirical" – freed from the student's worries
over her emotional state, freed from the kid's anger over being
forced to apologize for stealing a Butterfinger – freed from all
the interests that motivate us to 'bargain' with and create
'exceptions' to the moral rules that we otherwise affirm.
Indeed, what's the most important thing going on when we
humans "act"? We certainly have a natural tendency to give first
place to "consequences following from it." If, for instance, we
56
attack a foreign country, what's the good of it? Access to deep-
sea ports? Control over natural resources? But for Kant these are
very much the wrong questions to ask. Such questions forget the
most important element of an action – namely, its conformity with
a principle we have previously decided upon. Either we have the
ability to give ourselves rules or we don't. If we grant that we
do, the next question is: is this capacity, or is it not, the
highest and outmost reach of our most developed abilities? If yes
again, then: Does this unique part of ours deserve to be valued?
Is Kant right when he says there's nothing really good in or
outside the world but a "good will"? If, finally, the answer is
again "yes," then we have no choice but to agree that the most
important "consequence" to be assessed arising out of any act is:
does the act in question conform to the rules I've given myself?
Have I avoided breaking my own rules? Did I not only invade a
country in accordance with my rules, but avoid stepping on
sidewalk cracks along the way, while at the same time refraining
57
from lying, and making sure that no open ladders were walked
under?
Failure to abide by the rules we have given ourselves means
nothing less than to betray that part of our make-up that is most
human. And thus, Kant believes, we have a motive similar in form
if not in content to the one we had when we took God more
seriously. Previously, God watched our actions even when others
were absent – there was no escaping His judgment and punishment.
Now his eye is replaced with our own. Every action, Kant thought,
ought to be understood in terms of some principle or another:
even actions linked to mere biological needs, like eating, should
be justified in terms of a principle along the lines of "maintain
health through the regular consumption of nutrients."
Kant's moral theory, then, does a brilliant job of setting
up reason as a complete replacement for God. Reproduced in Kant's
theory is the old commitment, familiar from both classical and
Christian ethics, to understanding humans in terms of a "higher"
and "lower," spiritual and animal-like features. This commitment
58
to forming unbreakable rules of conduct and morality mirrors the
absoluteness and uncompromising Word of God. The worry was that
too much rational thinking – too much focus on adapting means to
ends – would result in a utilitarian ethics. According to the
latter view, the purpose of human striving is "happiness," where
that is understood in terms of pleasure, which is in its turn to
be understood broadly. A truly rational outlook on life – it was
feared – would produce a world of cold, calculating individuals
who would decide on what laws to obey and which to violate solely
in terms of the prospect of getting away with it, thus freeing
unsupervised, atheistic butlers to steal as much silverware as
their circumstances permitted. It was precisely this fear that
prompted Hume to recommend that we rein in reason's operations
when it came to determining the legitimacy of governments. But
no, Kant implicitly responds. Nihilistic amoralism is not the
only possible result of reason's workings.
As we know, a significant and intellectually strong faction
of the Enlightenment saw reason as never anything more than a
59
solvent – Bayle's powder – that eats away at morality, myth, and
spirituality with an unstoppable force. We can think of this
problem from the perspective of one of the most important
questions raised over the course of a century of Enlightenment:
how should governments be formed? If one really sits down and
looks around at a Europe run by incompetent rulers from spent
blood lines, one is quite reasonably driven to such a question.
What is it we want from government in the first place?
Security, peace, punishment for criminals, protection from
foreign armies and civil war, attention to the general and long
term interests of the community. Given those ends, what means
should be deployed? No doubt certain powers must be granted to
the governors, and yet so that these powers will not be abused we
should include such-and-such safeguards, resulting in the whole
"social contract" tradition that runs from Glaucon in The Republic
to Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, the founders, Kant himself, up to
Rawls and Nozick. Here we see reason "on good behavior," doing
the kind of thing that partisans of this way of thinking praise
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it so much for. Here Bayle's powder not only seems to burn
through the dead wood of prevailing monarchic governmental forms,
but to provide a procedure for deciding what a proper government
should look like, with good solid rational reasons for obeying
its laws, as opposed to the hocus-pocus answers European pulpits
and princes had been hawking for so long. But at the very same
time that Kant was writing, reasons' less well behaved progeny
were using the exact same cognitive procedures to justify
transgressing more popular mores. As Dolmance in the Marquis de
Sade's Philosophy of the bedroom puts it to the young girl he sets out
to corrupt:
Ah, Eugénie, have done with the virtues! Among the
sacrifices that can be made to those counterfeit
divinities, is there one worth an instant of the
pleasures one tastes in outraging them? . . . . Does
Nature recommend what offends her? Eugénie, be not the
dupe of those women you hear called virtuous. Theirs
are not, if you wish, the same passions as ours; but
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they harken to others, and often more
contemptible . . . . There is ambition, there pride,
there you find self-seeking, and often, again, it is a
question of mere constitutional numbness, of torpor:
there are beings who have no urges. (208-209)
Saint-Ange, the co-corruptor of Eugénie, adds her advice:
One fucks, my lamb, the particular situation
notwithstanding, because we are born to fuck, because
by fucking we obey and fulfill Nature's ordinations,
and because all man-made laws which would contravene
Nature's are for naught but our contempt. (226)
"Continence," Saint-Ange concludes, "is an impossible virtue for
which Nature, her rights violated, instantly punishes us with a
thousand miseries" (221). Now, qua 'reason' there is no
difference between the intellectual process followed by Dolmance
and Saint-Ange, on the one hand, and Locke, Marx, and Kant, on
the other. In all these cases, once a certain end is chosen,
means are selected that get you there.
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Kant's task is perhaps too difficult, requiring as it does
so much of reason. For it is not enough for Kant to show that
reason can be construed in such a way as to produce a moral
order; he must also persuade us that the type of reasoning
presented by someone like Dolmance in service of the passions is
an illegitimate use of our rational powers. How, on the basis of
reason, do we say that the ends chosen by Dolmance are the wrong
ones? Kant could say, "Dolmance, by reducing yourself to this
exhausting obsession with merely bodily pleasures, you give short
shift to your humanity."
"That's a sweet thought," Dolmance could reply, "but please
tell me, why has pleasure, planted in me by nature, suddenly been
written out of my humanity? Isn't this too the morality of monks,
only without the God needed to give the affair mystery and
enchantment?" Between Sade and Kant we have the two primary faces
of the Enlightenment, French and German.
And there are other problems with Kant's argument. As we saw
earlier, Kant grounds the motivation of those who would develop
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and perfect their reason in a teleological argument. There is at
best a tenuous relation between teleological reasoning and
"reasoning" in its more straightforward, means-end sense.
Teleology, as we know, only works on the condition that we agree
to some debatable assumptions, including the rather large one
that we can agree on that feature or features of the human being
that should be valorized as the "highest," followed by agreement
over what it means for our highest capacities to be "fully
developed," and so on. What, indeed, is to keep others such as
Sade from reasonably choosing some other value on which to
exercise one's means as opposed to the teleologically derived
"endism" that Kant employs?
But Kant is not quite done telling us how all this reasoning
will play out.
Humans have a mixed nature, one part that is shared with
animals, another that is unique to them. Kant's argument for
getting us to prefer one over the other is based, as we saw, on a
teleological argument that may or may not secure our assent. But
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once it is granted, Kant provides instructions for how to employ
our reason in a way that fully elaborates our rational capacity.
Unlike every other entity in the universe that we know about,
humans can give themselves laws, or, more generally, rules that
will determine future behavior. We can indeed decide never to
walk under an open ladder, or to refrain forevermore from
imbibing the demon alcohol. These are examples from every day
life. What Kant recommends is that we formalize these rules we
give ourselves and free them from the shifting caprice of
subjective desires. A U.S. President might say, "I will never
negotiate with terrorists, but then breaks his own rule when
terrorists kidnap a busload of children and threaten to harm
them. The President meant it when he said he would never
negotiate, but then the real world situation makes conformity to
the world very difficult – indeed, makes it seem immoral. There
is a general positive value given to those who make and keep
promises. It is seen as noble, as a mark of high character. And
so Kant is quite confident that he is building on something that
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is already there in the human mix. What's needed is a process of
purification, formalization, that will free our law-making human
capacity from the inevitable empirical contaminations; especially
from the shifting desires that are the inevitable result of our
mixed, part-animal, part-rational nature.
What Kant argues for is a difficult turning. We must stop
assessing our actions from the point of view of the "real-world"
consequences of our actions. The so-called real world
consequences of our actions is how we sneak in our subjective
desires. Surely the President doesn't want to see so much as one
tear mark the cheek of even one of the innocent children on the
bus held hostage by terrorists. But if he refuses to negotiate,
many tears will fall, causing him, parents, and onlookers to
endure a heavy weight of guilt and grief. Surely the previously-
announced principle must suffer an exception? Indeed, if the
purpose of the principle is to act morally, then the principle
itself is subordinate to morality – a means to its end. If pursuing
the principle leads to a manifestly immoral result – harm to the
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children – then it would be a foolish pig-headedness to conform
to the principle while ignoring the deleterious consequences. It
would be a case of mistaking means for ends.
This is exactly the kind of thinking, Kant believes, that
dooms morality and principle-formation. If we grant that the
president should break his rule and negotiate with the terrorists
in light of the potential harm to children, what invalidates all
such "counting up" of immediate and near-term costs and benefits
in other cases? Why shouldn't the student observing the cheating
sorority sister engage in the same kind of reasoning concerning
the likely consequences of her actions, both to herself and to
those she would accuse? The only way to rescue morality from an
unending series of compromises that denude it of meaning is to
change focus away from the real world consequences of our acts to
something much more precious and much more secure. When we think
about what might happen when we act, we deal at best with
probabilities. Maybe turning in the sorority sister will lead to
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the emotionally difficult situation our student fears, but she
can't know this. Indeed, something very different might happen –
caught and punished, the cheating sister might eventually thank
the person who turned her in for giving her a wake-up call early
enough in life to avoid more serious infractions later. Lots of
things could happen. But of one thing there is no doubt: failing
to report the incident will seriously undermine the commitment to
honesty and the honor code that implements it. What Kant suggests
is that we stop thinking about our actions in terms of the
consequences they produce and instead worry about what our
actions say about our will. We can remember here Kant's opening
claim that the only true thing in the world is "the Good will."
To the extent we take this seriously, we will worry much more
about what our actions s ay out our will than how they affect the
world around us. In a sense, it isn't accurate to claim that Kant
says we shouldn't worry about the consequences of our actions. A
better way to put this point is that he thinks what counts as a
"consequence" should be rethought. If someone rushes into the
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ocean to save someone fighting against a rip tide, how should we
judge her? Saving someone from the watery deep is "good."
Abstracted from all other issues, we would agree that saving the
endangered swimmer is a good idea. But what is the rescuer is the
brilliant, lead scientist of a team that is working on an AIDS
breakthrough. If she drowns alone with the person already at
risk, not only will two people be dead instead of just one, but
the cure for AIDS will be dealt a significant setback. There she
stands, at the edge of the beach and sea, trying to add things
up. The person drowning senses the rescuer's dilemma, and even
knows something about it. He screams, "Forget about me! Pay it
forward to the victims of AIDS!" What to do?
For Kant, it was clear that we will never think about
morality clearly for as long as we insist on this kind of
calculation. We must free morality of everything "empirical" –
that is, free from the endless tacking and trimming that the
drowning story illustrates. The basic problem with that approach
is the fairly ludicrous attempt to predict the future and one's
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role in it. Too often, such thinking is merely a cover for one's
base desires, and not a genuine attempt to address moral matters.
What should the potential rescuer think about? She should be
asking: Does the rescue attempt accord with the moral laws I have
given myself? If one of those laws states, "Aid rational
creatures in distress," and another is "preserve yourself from
harm," then it's between these two principles that the debate
should rage. Assume that as a consequence of that debate, the
rescuer dives in and saves the drowner. Her action is moral. Why?
Because she acted in accordance with moral laws arrived at
autonomously. Say again she jumps in and saves the drowner, but
rather in the hope of being labeled a hero by the local media.
Then she has not acted morally, no matter how much praise she
receives for her bravery. There is a consequence flowing from our
actions in the Kantian scheme. But it points not out away from us
to the opinions of others, nor to our advantage or disadvantage
in the short- or mid-term. Rather, it points inwardly, in the
direction of a will that has freely chosen its own rules.
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This principle of non-contradiction – the very one we use to
accuse others of hypocrisy – is exactly what Kant and exactly
Fichte want to employ to persuade us to act morally. They both
see a broadly Kantian moral theory with its rational grounds as a
replacement for both the 'commandist' morality of old world
religions and the 'accommodations' more familiar from an
unreflective and poorly thought out utilitarianism. If we can get
people to view their moral ideas from the perspective of non-
contradiction, a resolute check on free-wheeling appetites will
be firmly established, but in a way that affirms the freedom,
rather than the servitude, of those who adopt it. To see how this
argument works, what its benefits and problems are, and what
dynamics it in turn released to be taken up by further
theoretical insights, we are well-advised to turn to Fichte,
Kant's most enthusiastic and radical disciple, especially as he
deals more fully and directly with political philosophy, the primary
concern of this argument.
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The key to avoid getting lost in Fichte is to remember his
strategy, the one discussed above out non-contradiction. His
whole argument is going to unfold in this way: if we admit 'x' we
cannot, without being inconsistent, fail to admit (or deny) 'y'.
The strength of this argument is going to rest on whatever power
our desire to avoid inconsistency grants us – or can be
inculcated in us, and, to this extent, Fichte and Kant's
arguments are similar. If we're unwilling, or think it
disreputable, perhaps morally immature or insincere about
morality itself to claim the principle of equal opportunity as
our own, while violating it on the "ground," we will be similarly
unwilling to grant such-and-such features of personhood without
also being "forced," as it were, to go along with to-be-specified
consequences – political, moral, and epistemological – that (so
the argument goes) necessarily follows from them.
In a certain sense, then, Fichte's argument is dialectical.
Socratic dialectic, by way of comparison, begins discussion of a
problem with someone's claim about the meaning of some primary
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theme, such as 'justice' or 'courage.' Socrates then explores
with others the fit, or lack of it, between the 'concept' being
discussed and the definition of it provided by interlocutors.
Non-contradiction is an important part of this process. For
instance, if we say (with Polemarchus in the Republic) that
"justice is benefitting your friends and harming your enemies,"
then that starting point can be explored: does the bit following
'justice is . . . ' a faithful expression of the most important
features of what we know justice must be? If not, the definition
needs improvement or must be rejected. The "dialectic" here acts
like a conversation where first ideas act as a jumping-off point
for deeper, more rigorous investigations of the primary idea at
hand. In Socrates' case, these starting points were always wrong,
and the goal of the conversation was to take these wrong or
inadequate starting points, explore their flaws, affirm their
truths, and arrive at a better understanding of a concept,
relative to the beginning of the conversation. (Not for nothing
is dialogue the format for "the dialectic.") Fichte's dialectic
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is quite different, but is also a familiar technique in every day
conversations.
Fichte will not start from an inaccurate account of an idea,
and then point out the flaws to bring us closer to the meaning of
an idea. Rather, Fichte, not unlike Descartes, will start from
something indubitably true and use the truths of that first
principle to infer necessary consequences. Thus Fichte's account
will move from truth to truth; or more accurately, from one
overarching principle that is incontrovertibly true to a
cascading set of consequences – both logical and "real" – whose
own truth is guaranteed by rigorous linkage to the first
principle.
Let's look at how this strategy works in Fichte's Foundations
of Natural Right – a work he was careful to produce after his more
hastily prepared, though still classic, Science of Knowledge. First
Fichte usefully reviews and restates – with a clarity that is
frequently superior to the phrasing in the original Science – the
main epistemological points he wishes to establish. We should
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remember that all our theorists from Hume on engaged in
epistemological inquiries – which, taken by themselves, seem so
perverse and ex nihil – with moral, ethical, and political concerns
at the forefront of concern. As hard and as long as Kant worked
on Critique of Pure Reason, it is the essential ground of the true
object of concern our theorist had. This, for instance, is how
Fichte described his conversion to Kantianism in September of
1790. The Kantian philosophical system, Fichte writes to his
fiancée Johanna Rahn,
is more difficult that you can imagine and certainly needs to be made more easily accessible . . . . it would give me a double pleasure to be able to contribute something to making this philosophy more comprehensible. Its first principles are admittedly skull-cracking speculations with no direct influence onhuman life. But the consequences of these principles are of the greatest importance for an age whose morality is corrupt at its roots.
It is this link – between broader arguments about how the human
mind processes its diverse environments (in other words,
'epistemology') – on the one hand, and moral or political
consequences that flow from it, on the other, that we want to
trace. In this way, we can understand liberal political thought
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in its purest manifestation (its most indicative; unadorned). A
liberal principle that establishes itself as a new ought, a new
"to be measured against" that makes a fair claim – if not an
indisputable one, as we'll see – to both replace and improve upon
the previous motivational environment for ethical and moral
behavior; namely, belief in God, the Afterlife, and all
associated benefits and costs. In that environment we are first
told to obey. This unyielding demand, allowing for no opposition
and no questioning, was backed by severe sanctions. Disobedience
is treated with appropriate sanctions, under the reigning
assumption that these punishments would be primarily physical.
For the partisans of reason, the problem with this way of
thinking about duty and dereliction is not so much that "there's
no God." That's true, and is strongly linked to the main
objection: that such a system of morality, duty, and restitution
is simply beneath the dignity of humans; fails to rise to the
level of human, much less divine moral capacities. This
conclusion was reinforced by the conclusions of a revolution in
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Biblical scholarship, which pointed to the historical and
"anthropological" origins of such rigid, harsh moral systems that
explicitly refused to grant reason any important role; rather,
stigmatizing reason as a false hope. Such anti-rational and
unconditional moralities were "historicized," that is,
acknowledged as playing a valuable functional role during
humanity's childhood, but as no longer appropriate for a species
that has now "grown up." The growing sense of self-confidence
that began to characterize the human intellectual world is
usefully compared to the rebellion and contrary value-assertion
characteristic of adolescents. Fichte, in this light, can be seen
as the uncompromising adolescence of a cultural world that
asserts its rights and ideas against more moderate, conservative,
and just older thinkers on all sides of the issue.
Fichte begins with his account of human knowledge and
subjectivity – this is, with an account of human nature in its
most original and essential form. In this way, Fichte repeats a
time-honored move. Political philosophers almost always begin
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with an account of human nature. What types of animals are we,
they ask; indeed, are we animals at all? The reason for putting
this question first is not hard to see. Only when we know what
kind of being the "human being" is will we be able to describe
the kind of political and ethical environment appropriate to it.
Humans do the same with other creatures. If we want tigers in
captivity to really be tigers, an environment must be created
that will allow them to continue, as much as possible, to
function as tigers. For instance, tigers don't want to just have
some piece of meat thrown at them at feeding time. They want to
take it out of the body of a gazelle or zebra. Progressive,
modern zoos now provide gazelle-like structures, covered with
gazelle fur, into which they put gazelle meat. Feeding time is
announced by causing splashing sounds in a pond – which sound to
the tiger like so many tasty gazelles walking in the water. These
measures and others like them are designed to establish a fit
between the nature of the animal and the environment they occupy.
Humans also occupy environments, and just as with tigers, these
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can be well or poorly adapted to our natures. Nothing presents us
from warehousing tigers in cages – but that's not the right
environment for them, even though that was the way tigers were
handled for a very long time. The "nature" of human beings is the
concern of the philosophy side of political philosophy; the
construction of appropriate political environments is the
political side.
What, then, is the nature of human beings according to
Fichte? How can we distinguish human beings from other
perceptions we have? We can remember here, for purposes of
comparison, Kant's teleological argument. Fichte's argument is
not teleo-logical but rather essentia-logical. The most important
feature of human beings, the one that most fully captures their
nature, is that they are self-conscious. As Fichte puts it, "The
mark of the rational being is activity that reverts into itself"
(FNR, 18). This is not a feature that we share with tigers. The
tiger engages in activity – it hears the splash of zoo keepers
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throwing large stones in the water and it acts – it lopes down to
the water-line so it can take them eat out of the piece of wood
that's been dressed up to look like a gazelle. But this activity
does not, to use Fichte's phrase, "revert back into itself." The
tiger is conscious. The difference between ourselves and the tiger
is that we are self-conscious. In Fichte's language, we posit
ourselves (18). That is, our will is present in our acts. In
human terms, the tiger lacks a will. "Patterned responses to
selected stimuli" more accurately captures the behavior of the
cat. That is why the zoo keepers are able to continue enticing
the tigers down to the waterline, despite the rather poor means
of deception employed. But in fact the tiger is not being
deceived at all, because it is not as if the cat has some
preconception about "how the hunt is supposed to work," such that
she looks at the wood dressed up in gazelle fur and says to
itself, "this is never a real gazelle." To be self-conscious – to
"posit" onself – is to have (and to know one has) a will. But a
will is nothing other than a pre-conceiving (of how things "will
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be"; the link between the future tense of "to be" and the
psychological property of "willing" is not accidental). A
preconception is not encountered out in the world. The
preconception can be realized or disconfirmed in the world, but
discovered there. A preconception is something that an individual
brings along with her on the way to an encounter with "the
world." This "expectation" is the fundamental basis of every
human experience, whether practical or theoretical – this is what
distinguishes the human experience of the world from other kinds.
And it is at least partly on the basis of this "expectant
comportment" that the "I" is constructed. The logic of this point
is as follows: Where does this expectancy come from?, or, more
simply, "what is this expectancy?" It is nowhere found outside me
in the world. It must be something in me, something that is there
at each expectant instant, evaluating what it had expected in
relation to what is encountered. For expectancy to be
efficacious, there must exist a faculty that compares what is
found with what is expected. It is this evaluative function that
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ends up being described with the word "I." This faculty works
across time as well and so the impression that there is a fairly
solid, continuous, self-aware consciousness is easy to come by.
What makes someone human, Fichte argues, is their
consciousness of having a self. That is, we have our selves – as
the evaluative faculty of the expectant comportment has come to
be called – with us wherever we go, and this constant center of
observation is able to look, not only at the disjunction of
expectation and world, but vice versa as well, as the experience
of the ashamed soldier who fled from battle despite intentions
otherwise will testify. This is how Fichte puts the same point
using philosophical language: "Activity that reverts into itself
(I-hood, subjectivity) is the mark of a rational being" (18). The
tiger's actions expend themselves in the outwardly directed act.
But it's different for humans. Our activity, informed as it is by
expectancy, rebounds back to the source of activity for further
inspection there by the evaluative activity that reports on the
discrepancies, if any, between the expected and the experienced.
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For Fichte, one of the most important features of the self
is that it is created. But not by some God – thus, we can see the
polemical role this kind of description of the self will play.
Rather, each individual creates her own self. True: the emergence
of the self is such a primal event in human psychology that we
are not aware of it when it happens. We couldn't self-
reflectively experience an event before our power of reflection
has been fashioned, but the self is just that power. All humans,
Fichte thinks, necessarily produce their self. But it happens one
human at a time, and each time it happens it is – like all other
creations – done freely. The most essential truth about our
selves, Fichte insists, is that it is freely created by each
individual. Fichte thinks the presence of freedom at this
original moment of self-creation has important implications for
freedom in other spheres and other senses.
In order for a self to experience itself as a self, it must
have ends, purposes. These ends are precisely what accounts for
the expectant mood in human preconceiving. Being an entity with
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ends in mind (as it is said) is the natural, inevitable condition
of an entity with an expectant comportment. It is in this sense
that Fichte is writing a book with the term "natural law" in it.
What's going to be natural about the laws that Fichte's text
comes up with is that they flow naturally – in the sense of
logically from the initial argument about the production of the
self.
The human being creates a self as the efflux, as it were, of
its expectant comportment. By this we mean nothing more than that
the human picks herself out of the activity of reflecting back on
ourselves. What follows, logically, from such a claim? Such an
expectant entity would naturally produce ends for itself,
purposes. Having an end or result in view is intimately linked to
our expectant pose; it thus follows that it is wholly natural –
wholly logical – for someone to preconceive and then exercise
this will. Natural law, then, will respect this natural/logical
progression. The title of Fichte's work on political philosophy
is Foundations of Natural Law. If it is a natural part of our mental
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makeup to reflect on the world we encounter – and Fichte is
persuaded that he has proven just this point – it follows we
approach the world expectantly in a way that is not true for
animals. But this expectancy does not only have to do with the
world we encounter simply. The capacity "to expect" the world to
be such-and-such a way is naturally experienced as desire or
aversion, which in turn points us in the direction of ends or
purposes.
It follows, for Fichte, that human beings are naturally free.
It is so much a part of our nature to be free, that the very
construction of the self – the thing that is both capable of
being free and conscious of it at the same time (which is really
just the same phenomenon seen from two angles) was itself freely
produced. But this freedom does not stop being active, like a god
that leaves the universe to run its course once it is in motion,
on the theory that a god worthy of the name would not have made
any mistakes worth correcting. We constantly replay this founding
act through our expectant comportment. We sketch the world with
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our mind rather than being unreflectively absorbed in it like the
tiger. As frequently happens, what was sketched and what was
encountered do not accord with each other. If the difference is
small enough (relative to the purposes of the individual in
question) it can be "freely ignored." If large, a revision of the
sketch is needed. But there is a third possibility with us,
which, as everyone knows (and which Fichte theorizes), kicks human
freedom up onto a much higher plane: the reality encountered can
be revised according to the preliminary sketch.
The first conclusion, then, of Fichte's political philosophy
is that humans are free. And this freedom is an essential,
irremovable truth about humans. This kind of freedom may have
been confirmed and recognized in the very important political
sphere by events such as the French Revolution, but it is not
invented there, and most certainly freedom's ground is not to be
found in the specific twists, turns, ups, and downs of this or
that specific event. Rather, Fichte has deduced the freedom-
bearing nature of humans logically; philosophically, which for him
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also means 'scientifically.' This description of the cognitive
dynamics resulting in a person who is free has now the status –
so Fichte believes – of an indubitable certainty. What Fichte
will do now is take that certainty and use it as a basis for
establishing other natural laws that flow from it. By the end,
Fichte will have given us a complete system of "right" or "law";
a complete picture of what a political society should look like.
And each feature of that society will, in turn, be directly
traceable to the original principle of human freedom.
The individual is free – absolutely free; that is, both
produced freely and acting freely. It is non-contingent and non-
conditioned – not created by some other source, and so not
dependent on others either. At the start of his Notebooks,
Novalis complains: "Everywhere we search for the unconditioned,
and everywhere we find the conditioned." Fichte will point to his
theoretical work on the self as the revelation as to where the
unconditioned can be found – namely, the in -independent, auto-
produced self. But now Fichte begins to bring in other related
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truths. The free individual confronts a world full of objects
that "check" her freedom. The soil must be worked on; the game
must be hunted; the river must be crossed somehow. These objects,
clearly, do not simply conform to the individual's will without
further ado. The efficacy of our freedom is played out in
interaction with these objects. It follows that the disposition
of distinct, finite objects that resist and respond to the free
will of the individual is the essential arena in which freedom is
operationalized. In order to carry the purposes of the free will
to their conclusion, the individual requires exclusive access to
this finite group of objects. I cannot realize – that is, put
into action – my freedom if I am not able to control the tools
and resources necessary to my projects.
In this way, Fichte has grounded the right to property in
humanity's essentially free nature. The right to property follows
logically, that is necessarily from the original principle on human
freedom. One could not, then, grant the freedom of human beings
without also affirming a right to property. To do so would be to
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contradict oneself, which in the mental environment Fichte is
trying to produce for us, is not allowable. A "right to property"
just means (in Fichte's view) "a right to realize my freedom via a
particular organization of objects that are under the direct and
unimpeded control of a specific human." It is the confrontation
between the absolutely free individual and the "checking" objects
he confronts that (in part) makes it possible for us to see
ourselves as discrete individuals. When we throw out our will
into the space that surrounds us, the check we receive from
objects returns back to us as a kind of outline or sketch of the
will's efficacy. Or we can think of it as a kind of 'depth
measurement,' where what is measured is how much and what kind of
willing will be necessary to transform 'checks' on our will into
realizations, concretizations, of it. Like a ship that uses radar
to trace the topography of an ocean floor, we cast out our will
and receive a report on what our will is able and unable to do
relative to such-and-such expenditure of effort. This "efficacy
of the will" report is one of the circumstances allowing us to
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posit ourselves as individuals. If I were a God, and every single
one of my acts of will encountered no resistance whatsoever, I
would have a very hard time developing a sense of self, precisely
because the feeling of a fungible boundary between myself and the
external world would be non-existent. If merely to will were
enough to transform; if there are no checks to my will; it would
be difficult if not impossible for a self to develop, as the
phenomenon of the self is precisely one that arises when what I
want is thwarted to this or that extent by the existence of
checks. The boundaries surrounding the will are the same ones
that bind us into a self; without those boundaries, a willing
being would simply dissolve into its creations, as there is no
distinction to be made between the former and the latter. Only
beings whose will is checked by external objects develops a sense
of self – which can be thought of as shorthand for partially
efficacious willing. The self is a region mapped out by the
will's partially efficacious strivings. "The self" is what
happens to a will that is partly successful, partly thwarted.
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Once the will makes contact with objects that vary in
responsiveness according to degrees, a limitation and
determination of the will, and "the I [is] therefore capable of
being grasped by reflection" (21).
An important conclusion flowing from this vision of will and
self, for Fichte, is that the self is not a substance but an
action.
As soon as we hear of the I as active we do not
hesitate to imagine a substratum . . . (23).
Thinking of ourselves as a self is an utterly natural consequence
of the founding moments that produce self-consciousness, but
Fichte strove to break us loose from this common-sensical, yet
mistaken idea of ourselves.
[Don't forget Lukacs - freedom - stability of self. Other path
comes from non-contradiction. Thus began the anti-noun movement.]
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