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

1

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

2

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

3

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

4

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

5

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.

6

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

7

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

8

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

9

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

10

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

11

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

12

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.

13

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

14

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

15

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

16

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

17

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,

18

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.

19

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

20

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

21

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

22

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

23

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

24

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

25

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

26

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

27

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

28

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.

29

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

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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

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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.

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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

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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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