Theodor Adorno has long had the reputation of a thinker whose work concentrates on the influence of thought on society and its structures. Central to his most famous composition, Negative Dialectics1, is a critical method which leads one through a critique of society and its structures to a type of direction that brings the reader to a more affective reading within that critique, where critique becomes song. The melody central to Adorno's approach in Negative Dialectics is that of suffering. This melody is towering, and leads through the effort of the criticism in the book, to the Philosophy of negative dialectics, to what Adorno calls the threshold of tragic sympathy.
The purpose of this essay is to recompose Adorno's sense of the influence of thought on suffering in Negative dialectics, and to show parallels in the direction of his philosophy presented in the text with tragic sympathy. First I attempt to present the manner in which Negative Dialectics as philosophical method is a valid approach to understanding. As this unfolds I show parallels to Kant2 that provide the reader with one of the historical antecedents of Adorno's contribution and gives evidence for what Adorno calls his 'axial turn' to the 2nd Copernican revolution.
Next I focus on elements in Adorno's criticism of Heidegger which show the import of the influence of his thought on suffering and thus contributes to the somber tone of Negative Dialectics. Then I show how Adorno's text converges in on, and then pivots on the origin of communication as existentially and thus experientially rooted and also having the form of a moral imperative. This occurs in his treatment of what Adorno calls suffering physical. These elements have distinct parallels to the structure of tragic sympathy. It is at this point that we show a convergence of Adorno's thinking with the Deliverance Within the Tragic, in the tragic sympathy examined by Paul Ricoeur in the Symbolism of Evil3. Let us begin with an investigation of why it is called Negative Dialectics, and how it can be a valid method towards understanding.
Why is it called Negative Dialectics? The movement of knowledge for Hegel was one of unifying particular experiences and objects within the manifold under universals, in order to have a connected experience. For Hegel this was the problem of knowledge itself, and the direction of movement was from particular to universal. It is the process of making an identity between a concept and a particular. Negative Dialectics distinguishes differences between a universal and a particular, dictated by the universal, by recognizing the emergence of elements that cannot be exhausted by the concept. thus there is a fundamental lack in the structure of each and every concept. The direction of dialectics, the synthetic movement from particular to universal is reversed. The movement now proceeds from universal to particular, particular. The general term Adorno uses for this process is 'determinate negation.'
Originated as a response to the fallen Hegelian philosophy, Negative Dialectics takes primary aim at revealing the oppressive structure of identity thinking. Adorno shows that concepts do not go into their objects without leaving a remainder. Although many instances are treated by Adorno, the paradigmatic instance of identity thinking which Adorno uses to base his critique on is found in the section on the critique of positive negation.
Oscillating between the most profound insight and the collapse of that insight is Hegel's line: "Truth also is positive, as knowledge coinciding with the object, but it is this self-sameness only if knowledge has reacted negatively to the other, if it has penetrated the object and has voided the negation which it is."
The qualification of truth as a negative reaction on the part of the knowledge that penetrates the object--in other words: extinguishes the appearance of the object being directly as it is-- sounds like a program of negative dialectics as a knowledge "coinciding with the object." But the establishment of this knowledge as positivity abjures that program. By the formula of "self-sameness," of pure identity, the knowledge of the object is shown up as hocus-pocus, because this knowledge is no longer one of the object at all: it is the tautology of an absolutized .. Irreconcilably, the idea of reconcilement bars its affirmation in a concept.4 pg. 160
For Kant, similarly, to subsume a given particular under a universal that we already possess is a determinate judgment. To find a universal that we do not possess, for a particular that is given, is a reflective judgment. The critique of what it means to say that 'something is black' or that 'something is beautiful' from a reflective standpoint leaves room between the two types of judgment for activity. It is on this pivot, this bifurcation of judgment that Adorno gives the second Copernican revolution an axial turn. For what is at stake for Adorno is the structure of synthetic judgment, and his turn will have a qualitative effect on the essence of what it means to make a determinant judgment. We will thus attempt to find in Kant the parallels that warrant Adorno's axial turn.
For Adorno, then, concepts refer to what is properly non-conceptual. They make an identity with something non-identical to them. This establishes a unity in experience and enable us to connect experience into the sequence of meaning. There is then a contradiction immanent in the very presentation of Negative Dialectics- how can we present a unity if we seek to dismantle unity?, if we seek to show differences?
For Adorno, this process of determinate negation occurs in an activity he terms “discrimination”.5 Discrimination is first an activity that distinguishes differences at the micrological level. Secondly, discrimination accomplishes this through the experience of an object turned into a form of what Adorno calls subjective reaction.
In the first sub-moment, discrimination is the distinguishing of differences at the micrological level. Discrimination accomplishes this through the disintegration of the relation of affinity between a previous set of concept and object. This occurs when the element of nonidentity with the concept emerges in reflection, and in resistance to identity, and explodes the subsuming cover concept. It is the disintegration of antiquated affinity in the identifying process. It is why negative dialectics is called a logic of disintegration. It seems here that the process of disintegration leads one into an infinite series of determinate negations concerned with an ever smaller object of knowledge- minimalism. Another charge leveled has been that negative dialectics is only a philosophy of destruction in an attempt to portray the world of the Jewish European of W.W.II. However discrimination in the first moment of discrimination is accomplished through the second activity of discrimination, where elements of a experience begin to unify and meaning emerges.
In the second aspect of discrimination, as the experience of the object turned into a form of subjective reaction, there is further reduction into complementing sub-moments. The first moment is a moment of extension towards the non-identical in a mimetic movement that destroys both the organization character of the previous instance of discrimination and the previous mimetic arrangement;6 while simultaneously finding likeness in the non-identical element. The second moment is one that logically relates these non-identities into a rational unity. These two moments of the synthetic function of discrimination thus gather non-identical remainder particles to form new models.
Even in the conception of rational knowledge, devoid of all affinity, there survives a groping for that concordance which the magical delusion used to place beyond doubt. If this moment were extinguished altogether, it would be flatly incomprehensible that a subject can know an object; the unleashed rationality would be irrational. In being secularized, however, the mimetic element in turn blends with the rational one. The word for this process is discrimination. It contains the faculty of mimetic reaction as well as the logical organ for the relation of genus, species, and differentia specifica. pg. 45 7
Discrimination thus disintegrates and unifies simultaneously. For Adorno, if the thinker becomes aware of the nature of the contradiction involved in arriving at a concept, at arriving at a unified experience, if the thinker reflects upon this process of determinate negation in the act of a particular judgment, then the thinker has begun to think in a manner befitting a negative dialectics. Further elements of Adorno's thought point toward unified experience, this can be found in the notions of constellation, reconcilement, and happiness.
In Adorno's notion of constellation, the lack in each concept leads it to refer to other concepts,8 and thus in a unity of reference, concepts together illuminate the specific side of the object, the side cut away by the violent identifying activity of the concept. The model for this is the conduct of language, for Adorno. In the interrelation of the stasis of conceptual identification and the dynamics of reference to other concepts, we can know the object completely. Although the process is one of disintegrating and unifying at the conceptual level, it is one of dynamic unity at the level of the constellation, or the sentence level. It is a way for us to make binding statements in a logic of disintegration and thus have a unified experience.
To comprehend a thing itself, not just to fit and register it in its system of reference, is nothing but to perceive the individual moment in its immanent connection with others. pg. 25 9
To perceive the individual moment in its connection with others not only shows a dynamic schema in this mode of understanding,10 it limits the authority of the subject position in the constellation. the result of this is a recognition of value among all the members of the constellation. Thus value can be seen as deriving not from the subject but with the subject in relation to objects. Another element of unified experience is present in his notion of reconcilement.
The reconcilement of the concept and object, for Adorno, can come about by the subject releasing the non-identical element in the concept by tolerating differences between the identical and non-identical.11 But reconcilement does not occur in a single concept, for Adorno. The idea of reconcilement in a single concept is violence because reconcilement in the concept is always a unilateral affair. It is an attempt to negate the non-identical and to make it identical. The attempt is thus totalitarian. Rather reconcilement for Adorno is found where the subject coincides with the object, and thus an objective element is needed for reconcilement to occur. where we experience reconcilement and unity is combined in feeling and completion, in a coinciding of our thinking with objective reality. The indication that reconcilement can occur is located in a feeling, in Adorno's notion of happiness.
Happiness, the only part of metaphysical experience that is more than impotent longing, gives us the inside of objects as something removed from the objects. pg. 374 12
Happiness gives us the inside of objects, but it is also a sensual fulfillment which obtains its objectivity in that fulfillment.13 Thus we have a unity of experience, but it is not experienced subjectively, because for Adorno, reconcilement is objectively experienced and also sympathetically felt.
There are parallels in this presentation with Kant's presentation of sub-conceptual combination in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. The second activity of discrimination mentioned earlier has a strong parallel with the presentation of now men communicate their thoughts in the third critique.
The skill that men have in communicating their thoughts requires also a relation between the imagination and the understanding in order to associate intuitions with concepts, (Adorno's mimetic element) and concepts again with those concepts, (Adorno's rational moment) which then combine in a cognition. pg. 138 14
These complementing functions of associating intuitions with concepts, and then these concepts with other concepts, have the same structure as the structure of Adorno's second aspect of discrimination. Kant later elaborates this process towards the formation of cognition. The aesthetical idea in Kant serves in a similar role as that of Adorno's mimetic moment in discrimination as the object turned into a subjective form of reaction.15 The rational concept in Kant serves in a similar function to that of Adorno's moment of logical relation, logically organizing the symbolic framework with concepts to form an aesthetical cognition. In the aesthetic context the passive estimation by the individual of the artistic object conveys the accord of the imagination and the understanding. The feeling of this accord, for Kant, is beauty. However the act of aesthetic judgment is a passive estimation of the object in a free play of the cognitive faculties, and the rightness that we feel in the estimation of the beautiful object is due to the accord of the judgment and the understanding in passive estimation. So how can this presentation of Kant be a turn toward the non-identical in effort that both disintegrates and unifies? Because this presentation is located not in the reflective estimation of an object, but in the act of aesthetic production.
In aesthetic production, what does the artist estimate? It is not an object per se, that the artist estimates because the object has not materialized. The artist has estimated other objects in the past for the hope of finding a direction, but a direction in what? In aesthetic production there is a turn toward the non-identical, where the estimation of past objects and the ordering that arises from such estimation by the artist is used to discover sense in an estimation of the supersensible, in an estimation of the noumena. Kant writes:
It(poetry) strengthens the mind by making it feel its faculty- free, spontaneous, and independent of natural determination- of considering and judging nature as a phenomenon in accordance with aspects which it does not present in experience either for sense or understanding, and therefore of using it on behalf of, and as a sort of schema for the supersensible. pg. 53-54 16
In the act of aesthetic production, not discussed up to now by Kant, the artist's hand reaches to picture the noumena and creates in sense, realizes to sense, a 'manifold example’17- the material element- the hitherto non-identical element- the aesthetical attribute that conveys the aesthetical idea. The aesthetical idea is not associated with a definite concept, but is conveyed by a surrogate framework, the symbol.
In aesthetic production, passive estimation of the object is turned into estimation of the noumena, and this realization of felt purposiveness is a transposition of sense through practice. Thus Kant's notion of beauty from the position of the artist finds it completion through an objective manner, in a realizing to sense-through labor, in a transposition of judgment and understanding through reason. It is a practice in the middle voice sense. Not static like a pre-formed concept and not disinterested like mere reflection, the activity of the artist is more akin to a 'rendering born', both active and receptive. It is not a concept, nor a reflection, but a conceiving. Kant first elaborates, and Adorno then expands upon what may be called a crude phenomenology of the miracle of birth, in a practical sense. The object then through the aesthetical attribute, must possess something that conveys the aesthetical idea; i.e. subjective purposiveness; to us in it's objective markings independent of the presence of the artist.
After the artist has produced, his object speaks to us, in the form of the beautiful object, the feeling of which is beauty. Thus beauty for Kant, is the experience of the accord of the subjective faculties, but in relation to objective impetus. Although only implied in Kant, this notion of objective communication, the object's dynamism, is recognized by Adorno, who writes;
What the objects communicate in-....-is the trace of the objects definition in themselves, pg. 25 18
Adorno's notion of completeness does not originate solely from the subject, but realizes itself in an objective manner. Kant's notion of beauty, although shown by Kant to occur as an effect in the subject, comes to be only in relation to an object, the object that is the realization of art. The turn to non-identity is present not only in the incomplete character of the complementing functions of cognitive formation in the aesthetic judgment, but in the direction of concept-making. In the realizing to sense of an intuition, the artist reworks reality and brings about a new order. The aesthetical idea is the feeling of the artist extending into the supersensible and returning what it has found in symbolic form. It is the feeling of the returning of the non-identical element.
The feeling of beauty in Kant is parallel to one aspect of Adorno's presentation of reconcilement as happiness, as giving us the inside of objects, as a feeling of completeness and rightness. But the presentation of happiness as also sensual fulfillment ; as fulfillment of suffering is not present in Kant's presentation of aesthetic judgment in the third critique. Kant's presentation also does not account for the violence of the synthetic function in the mimetic activity of the subject.19 For now two distinctions between the philosophies of Kant and Adorno are found in happiness as the negation of suffering, and in the violent character of the dynamics of affinity.
All pain and all negativity, the moving forces of dialectical thinking, assume the variously conveyed, sometimes unrecognizable form of physical things, just as all happiness aims at sensual fulfillment. A happiness blocked off from every such aspect is no happiness. pg. 202 20
Nevertheless we have presented evidence can provide a unified experience, and we have explored how it is that Adorno's claim to give the second Copernican revolution an axial turn has merit. So with reference to this rudimentary understanding of the functioning of a negative dialectics, and in relation to its affinities with Kant of the third critique, how have I arrived at this analysis?
As Adorno unfolds the universal to the particular in his criticism and in his philosophy, he stops at points where the critical method yields to phenomena. It is at these points that he shows the influence of thought on suffering. It is at these points that Adorno shows that reconcilement does not simply end the matter, but is momentary. It is this aspect of Adorno's philosophy that conditions the manner of negative dialectics as not merely haphazard, but directs it to the threshold of tragic sympathy. These points in the text reflect the primary object of critique for Adorno, the relationship between need and thinking-
But thinking, itself a mode of conduct, contains the need, the vital need, at the outset- in itself. The need is what we think from, even when we disdain wishful thinking. The motor of the need is the effort that involves thought as action. The object of critique is not the need in thinking, but the relationship between the two. pg. 408 21
I now turn to the examination of Adorno's criticism and his philosophy following this line of inquiry. I will begin by presenting four examples of the influence of thought on suffering in Adorno's criticism of identity thinking. The first and most famous example of the influence of thought on suffering in Negative Dialectics is the spell cast by the subject in the false identity of subject and object in idealistic conceptual construction. By virtue of the subject's dynamic nature, the subject endows the object with qualities, and the with the character, of a thing that has a life of its own.22 This is due, for Adorno, by acceptance of the concept in a static manner during the occasion of thought, solidifying the appearance of the thing in the hope of a permanence.23 This develops a polarization of subject and object into dynamic subject and static object that combine to show four instance of false consciousness for Adorno in the interaction of subject and object. The totalitarian and the abstract are instances from the domain of the subject while the barbarous and the lifeless are the instances in the domain of the object.
In the first instance identity thinking polarizes the subject and object, and thus does not recognize the permeation that occurs in their interaction. In one instance of this polarization according to Adorno, the subject sees itself as wholly dynamic and thus wholly legislative, wholly magisterial. In this instance of false consciousness the subject focuses on its generating ability, and has mistaken this generating ability for all there is. The subject says what the object is, and in this surge does not yield to the material of the object, the subject does not listen. Its saying is thus by decree and its affirmation is not a balanced listening from a source of heterogeneity, but is an affirmation of 'because I say so'. The subject has become totalitarian,24 the concept has become ideology.
In the second instance the correlate of this particular false consciousness is that in the focus of its self-dynamism, the subject is carried by the specter and the momentum of its dynamism and does not perceive this action as mediated. In the faith in this self-dynamism, the subject has lost hold of that which balances the thinking force of the subject, heterogeneity. Life becomes wholly abstract25 when the self-focusing subject has lost the aggression of its magisterial side. what becomes of the object in this system of identity?
In the correlate to the first instance of the totalitarian subject, the object as shown by Adorno, is treated as a lifeless entity, a dead piece of matter to be formed, ruled, and dominated. Edicts are delivered as to what the object is and should be, and efforts are put forth to coerce the object to conform. In this urge to make alive, in this effort to incorporate the object into the system, the distance of tolerance, of heterogeneity, is eliminated. The object is under attack. For the object this burden is not seen as emanating from an action, but from a system, and thus it becomes a condition is seen as inevitable, as inescapable. The condition becomes as life for the object.26 It is a false life within reality.
The instances of false consciousness of the barbarous and the lifeless come into view when elements of non-identity emerge from the object. They have the effect of dislodging, of an imbalance of the ungrounded subject. These elements appear as something which we wish to go away, as something which with we cannot cope. The predominant faith of the subject here is in the objects as we have made them and as we think they are, objects are then foreign, something other, something barbarous. For the totalitarian subject, the object becomes an instigating adversary, for the subject in vertigo, the object becomes wholly concrete, the source of despair and impending doom.
In the next example Adorno criticizes Heidegger for developing a philosophy whose definitions block the memory of the miseries of humankind.27 This is accomplished by Heidegger, according to Adorno, in his insistence of 'Being" as having the property of resistance to definition. This resistance to definition acts as a blinding mechanism28 by which the subject is unable to reach a clarity. Heidegger's construction points to a mythical superiority beyond the real human miseries that constitute an element of this so-called superiority, and thus beyond these miseries and their memory, finally away from suffering.
In our third example of Adorno's criticism of Heidegger, Adorno takes aim at what he calls Heidegger's 'Ontologization of the Ontical'. According to Adorno the move to ontologize the Ontical is a blatant move to eliminate otherness within Heidegger's existential scheme. By showing the Ontical as an element of the ontological, Heidegger strikes the pose of a philosophy by identity in the manner of the authoritarian. It's focus is on dynamic characteristics of the Ontical that are translated into a function of the ontological, and thereafter has no opposing element to balance the purified assertion. The philosophy thus becomes the most horrible of affirmations, the affirmation of sheer power.
The example we shall present lastly, is Adorno's criticism of Heidegger in the section on the copula. Adorno criticizes Heidegger for taking the sense of 'is' in each particular synthetic judgment, and then raising it to a principle of synthesis generally. Adorno points out that the synthesis cannot occur but in particular judgments and in particular circumstances. Thus Heidegger's move to raise the element of synthesis to a principle without a context is an ignorance of the value of particulars in a particular judgment. For Adorno there is no real synthesis without the elements of subject-synthesis-predicate. Heidegger thus, for Adorno, is caught in a move of reified thinking by raising 'is' to a general principle of synthesis by decree. This false elevation of the synthetic element binds us from these particular moments by pointing to the mythical brighter light of synthesis without context of the real. It is thus totalitarian. I will now move to show how elements of Adorno's philosophy add to this reading of negative dialectics as being at the threshold of tragic sympathy.
The first element of Adorno's philosophy that points us toward tragic sympathy is in his analysis of suffering physical. In the analysis of suffering physical Adorno makes a claim which both raises existence to the form of an imperative and also gives existence a tragic pose.
The physical moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different. pg. 202 31
In this statement, existence affirms itself but only in a movement to negate an aspect of its being. It shows existence as a being-towards in a buried nature, which emerges in the labor to language. The 'ought' is derived from a negative form of 'is', from a lack in being itself which reaches outward and demands of others, that carries a kernel of action, an imperative to both sympathy and action. We can see existence as an affirmation, through negation in this claim if we can agree that suffering is a form of non-being, of death itself, and of disempowerment. This can be seen in the example of non-being that we have in the death of a loved one, where our experience of non-being is felt as loss of experience. Therefore the affirmation of existence is carried in a negative, and thus can be seen as a transposition from non-being to being, as human existence and action itself is a movement away from suffering. The affirmation of being as away from non-being must be unearthed and resurrected through a negative. Here Adorno roots purposiveness in human existence. This principle of communication can be seen as a heuristic principle according to need32.
In the sense that existence is directional for Adorno, in this notion that 'suffering ought not to be', is seen the emergence of purposiveness in negative dialectics while simultaneously being the emergence of speech as both imperative and conduct toward others. Existence, for Adorno, is directional outside of itself. It has the form of a cry. In this principle of communication , in this transposition of suffering to sympathy, Adorno roots existentially what Kant proposes as hypothesis, and thus maintains in a supersensible orbit. That is the possibility of the origin of communication, the sensus communis.
Now this common sense cannot be grounded on experience, for it aims at justifying judgments which contain an ought. It does not say that everyone will agree with my judgment, but that he ought. pg. 76 Critique of Judgment 33
The sensus communis is at the basis for the possibility of communication, for Kant, which we must possess or communication could not occur. But for Kant the common sense is not found in experience, but in a supposition, and is thus the possibility of communication which is derived after the fact.34 Kant argues that 'we must possess a common sense because we do communicate'. Kant's common sense is thus a pure intellectual notion with an undefined supersensible axis. Although physical suffering as a driving force to thought is not thematic in the third critique, the notion of lack is present. The want of accordance that characterizes the feeling of the sublime35, and the feeling of incapacity characterizes respect36, both leave the underlying framework of what can be considered the proper ground, the proper impetus of a moral action wholly negative. There is a parallel here in that Adorno describes his notion of suffering physical as having the characteristic of incompleteness. Thus lack is central in both Philosopher's structure of thought and willed action. To show the congruence more clearly between the supersensible orbit of the unity of the faculties, with the existential axis of Adorno's emergence of language, a presentation of the influence of physical suffering on Kant's notion of the supersensible as unity is in order, which I will take up in a following essay.
Adorno simultaneously roots not only the origin of communication but the notion of imperative in an existential manner, in an experience that speaks. The origin of communication not only emerges from human existence in a rising above sense, but emerges with a twofold imperative imbedded in it's axis, the imperative to sympathy of suffering, and also an imperative to eliminate suffering. Human existence reaches outside itself towards others as speech in the imperative and as the indication of sympathy with the imperative of sympathy. In this manner of rooting the common sense existentially, Adorno attempts to bring concreteness and unity to a fundamental supersensible notion of Kant- the twofold condition, and unity, of humanity as communicative and sympathetic.
.., probably because humanity on the one side indicates the universal feeling of sympathy, and on the other the faculty of being able to communicate universally our inmost (feelings). pg. 201 CJ 37
Therefore communication, for Adorno emerges from a lack, a negative, but it is in the sharing of this lack that the lack is negated. This reconcilement is contingent for Adorno, but it has a model in the 'conduct of language'. In the conduct of language in constellation, we possess the model for reconcilement. Thus constellation is another element of unified experience in Negative Dialectics.
The individual lack inherent in the nature of the concept necessarily lends it to refer to others. It is thus in constellation, in the mutual sharing of lack; in the sympathy that suffering ought not to be that the object can be wholly known and reconcilement can occur. Adorno writes-
More essential, however, is that to which Weber gives the name of "composing", a name which orthodox scientivists would find unacceptable. He is indeed looking only at the subjective side, at cognitive procedure; but the "compositions" in question are apt to follow similar rules as their analogue, the musical compositions. These are subjectively produced, but they work only where the subjective production is submerged in them. The subjectively created context- the "constellation"- becomes readable as sign of an objectivity: of the spiritual substance. pg. 165 38
In constellation, in reference to others we find the sharing of a lack; a communication of sorts; in the shared sympathy that suffering ought not to be. Thus we find the sign of an objectivity, of spiritual substance. This reference towards others has the form of a type of completion, where place is interpenetrated among the members, the universal place of sufferer. In the sharing of our lack, which is only contingent for Adorno, our lack is for the moment overcome. Language serves as the model for this communion, a co-mingling that cannot be arrived at in the immediate clutching of an identity thinking, but in the 'holding lightly’39 of self-reflection, when 'things in being are read as a text of their becoming'. It is a language in symbolic presentation, a 'chorus' of lack so to speak. Thinking becomes as a song.
It is here where we can show Negative Dialectics on the threshold of tragic sympathy as parallel to philosophy outside the tradition of the Frankfurt School.
We show here the parallel between Adorno's sense of suffering to sympathy in his existential imperative in combination with the model of the completion of lack- the constellation, and Paul Ricoeur's presentation of tragic reconciliation in the Symbolism of Evil.40 In determinate negation, of thinking rising to speech, there is a point of unity of the sympathy of suffering and suffering's tracing in the concept, and also the unity of the concepts reference to other concepts in constellation. Language, for Adorno, has its own sense of tragic reconciliation. In the Ricoeur of the Symbolism of Evil, tragic reconciliation occurs in the aesthetic transposition of terror and pity that constitutes the sympathy of suffering in constellation.41 It occurs in a communion, in an Interpenetration of members in the participation of suffering through sympathy. Tragic reconciliation has the form of a constellation that cleanses the cry that is human communication. This 'chorus' completes the individual lack that is the song of human communication, in a universal song of sympathy.
There remains the tragic spectacle itself, to purify whoever yields himself to the sublimity of the poetic word. It is neither counsel in the Apollonian sense, nor an alteration of personality in the Dionysian sense, except, perhaps, in a very remote sense- for example, in the sense that the spectacle fosters 'illusion'. Through the spectacle the ordinary man enters into the "chorus" which weeps and sings with the hero; the place of tragic reconciliation is the "chorus" and its lyricism. Ricoeur, pg. 231 42
The constellation in this sense is Adorno's moment of song of sympathy as model for the solitary subject. This is the moment that provides the 'more' of Adorno. This 'chorus' of the constellation for Adorno, is not a stasis condition for Adorno, but only a moment. In the arena of the objective world it is a moment that requires the objective participation of an other. This cannot be guaranteed for Adorno, no matter what Herculean effort by the single subject. We have only the chance of joining the 'chorus', the limited chorus of others in their song of sympathy. In fulfilling the subjects half of conditions necessary for reconcilement; in thinking--, and in bringing this to voice, to will, we have the possibility of joining the chorus.
Two conditions for Adorno block off reconcilement as permanence and as utopia, and also therefore as a static ideal. The first condition is possibility, the possibility arising in the horizon of the future and thus the negation of any kind of stasis. The second condition is the present conditions which would yet be changeable by human action43 -that others do not participate in the song of sympathy, but clutch in fear to immediate permanence-identity thinking. The common ground of this anti-utopian stance and a type of 'deliverance within the tragic’44 is found in Adorno as the negation of need in the moment of reconcilement. The negation of need in reconcilement is the survival of man, and is therefore the survival of need, the condition of human existence. The continuation of need is therefore the continuation of the tragic pose.
For Adorno we must not look to this reconcilement as an ideal, for this does nothing to bring about the reconcilement. The manner that will place us in a position for this reconcilement to occur, is total self-relinquishment in the particular, in the determinate negation of false identity, with the requirement of a sympathy that suffering ought not to be. It is why he says that for man to be a believer in god he must not believe.45 Reconcilement can become in the determinate negation of suffering that constitutes this no; so we can focus on the particular and reconcilement-God- to become in sympathy with the human side; in sympathy with suffering, in self-reflection on suffering, in the effort of a negative.
What thinking performs in it is a mimicry of the spell of things, of the spell from which it has endowed things, on the threshold of a sympathy that would make the spell disappear. pg. 270 46
Through this negation of need, need survives. This is the element that places Negative Dialectics in the position to be read as only on the threshold of sympathy in the form of the tragic.
Yet the need in thinking is what makes us think. It asks to be negated by thinking; it must disappear in thought if it is to be really satisfied; and in this negation it survives. pg. 408 47
To hold something for Adorno is not a double-one handed affair, where to hold the object is to hold it away from the other in one hand, while pointing towards something else, or beating him, as adversary, with the other. Rather holding in an ordering but non-economic sense is holding in the manner of a holding of a note, a holding with two hands and the object open, as if in an offering. It is an active sharing in the effort that understands, that will relinquish its object. This is the 'holding lightly' that Adorno refers to. However until conditions change, for Adorno, the passage through a negative dialectics can facilitate the advancement towards the threshold of this sympathy, in resistance to the totalitarian nature of the status-quo. So this song of cannot sing affirmation,48 the conditions of a 'chorus', for Adorno have been suppressed. But the model for the 'chorus' is in language, and thus there is possibility. But while there is unneeded suffering in the world, and to those who clutch to the stasis of what is immediately given, Adorno's song sings in its internal resistance that suffering ought not to be. Adorno's song sings No!!
If indeed the earth alone among all the heavenly bodies were inhabited by rational beings, the idiocy of such a metaphysical phenomenon would amount to a denunciation of metaphysics; in the end, men would really be gods- and what gods!--only under a spell that prevents them from knowing it, and without dominion over the cosmos.- pg. 400
Notes
1 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics(New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1973).
2 Adorno, pg. 160.
3 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil(New York: Paul Ricoeur in arrangement with Harper & Row, 1967).
4 Adorno, pg. 12.
5 Adorno, pg. 45.
6 Adorno, pg. 270.
7 Adorno, pg. 45.
8 Adorno, pg. 102.
9 Adorno, pg. 25.
10 Adorno, pg. 52.
11 Adorno, pg. 160.
12 Adorno, pg. 374.
13 Adorno, pg. 202.
14 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment(New York: Hafner, 1972), pg. 138.
15 Adorno, pg. 45.
16 Kant, pg. 53-54.
17 Kant, pg. 155.
18 Adorno, pg. 25.
19 Kant, pg. 96.
20 Adorno, pg. 202.
21 Adorno, pg. 408.
22 Adorno, pg. 346.
23 Adorno, pg. 33.
24 Adorno, pg. 96.
25 Adorno, pg. 91.
26 Adorno, pg. 347.
27 Adorno, pg. 119.
28 Adorno, pg. 104.
29 Adorno, pg. 131.
30 Adorno, pg. 101.
31 Adorno, pg. 202.
32 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility(London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pgs. 26-27 & 202-203.
33 Kant, pg. 76.
34 Kant, pg. 135.
35 Kant, pg. 96.
36 Kant, pg. 96.
37 Kant, pg. 201.
38 Adorno, pg. 165.
39 Adorno, pg. 391-392.
40 Ricoeur, pg. 231.
41 Ricoeur, pg. 231.
42 Ricoeur, pg. 231.
43 Adorno, pg. 190.
44 Ricoeur, pg. 231.
45 Adorno, pg. 401-402.
46 Adorno, pg. 270.
47 Adorno, pg. 408.
48 Adorno, pg. 402.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Chapter 4- Scenes From the Theater of a Moral Desire
Given that Kant denies inclination from the senses as a proper incentive for pure practical reason, how does Kant treat desire throughout the main works involving morality? In the exposition of the table of the higher faculties of the mind in the introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant presents a schema of these faculties as to the manner in which they facilitate the systematic unity of his philosophical project 1. According to this schema the higher faculties of the mind are divided into the faculty of cognition, the feeling of pleasure and pain, and the faculties of desire. Kant further delineates the direction of his project in the next subdivision, where from the heading of 'cognitive faculties' is derived the subdivision to the faculties of understanding, judgment, and reason. This does not mean that in his philosophical project the higher faculties of pleasure and pain are not treated. What it does mean is that these faculties are treated in the course of the study of cognition. This makes sense for Kant, because philosophy can be seen as the study of mind in relation to the feeling of pleasure and pain, and the study of the faculties of desire, as these faculties are manifested through the cognitive faculty. Kant might say that we can know these faculties as effects, or as they appear in the reflection of experience.
Thus the Kantian critical project is divided according to works devoted to the critique of these cognitive faculties. The first work, the Critique of Pure Reason 2, is devoted to the critique of pure theoretical cognition as the faculty of understanding. Another work, the Critique of Practical Reason 3, is devoted to the critique of how cognition is made practical, how cognition emerges through both faculties which constitute the faculty of desire- the faculty of desire through reason, and the faculty of desire through inclination. A third work, the Critique of Judgment is devoted to the critique of cognition as judgment in relation to the feeling of pleasure and pain as it effects judgment. Since there is an exhibition of the manifestation of desire to cognition, generally, in the first subdivision of the faculties of the mind, desire must then be manifested in the work of the latter two faculties, which are distinguished from pure theoretical cognition.
The purpose of my larger project is to examine evidence of the manifestation of desire, as it arises in the texts of these latter two works. I will examine evidence of the manifestation of desire in the Critique of Practical Reason in this article first. Move to examine evidence of the manifestation of desire in the Critique of Judgment next, then finally I will examine evidence of the manifestation of desire in the text of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. 5 The examination of this third work will deepen our understanding of the causality of the will and add evidence for a coherent reading of the Kantian enterprise as a whole.
I will proceed by describing the orientation of the text, and the development of each text, in each section, to the structure of Kant's project and then describe how desire is manifested in this framework, in relation to the framework, and sometimes outside this framework. I will also draw both on the work of commentators of Kant, and other philosophers whose work impacts sections of the text I treat, both in order to clarify the area of focus and to clarify my own specific and limited comments. I begin by examining evidence of the manifestation of desire in the text of the Critique of Practical Reason. I will proceed to elaborate from the scene of the introduction to this work, from here we advance to examine evidence of desire in first the principles of pure practical reason, then show evidence of desire in the concept of the object of pure practical reason, and show evidence of desire in the incentives of pure practical reason, and then finally show evidence of desire in the Dialectic of Pure practical reason.
Desire as Mission in the Critique of Practical Reason-The Introduction to the 2nd Critique
"is pure reason sufficient of itself to determine the will, or is it only as empirically conditioned that it can do so?” 6
A missionary perspective emerges in the introduction to the 2nd critique. Here the subject of inquiry is not practical reason as an object, but the use of reason 7, reason in exercise. Therefore what is being explored is not an archaeology of the subject, nor a tour of dysfunctions. It is clear that the position and direction of inquiry are much different from cognitive psychology, operational psychology, mechanistic psychology, or psychoanalytic inquiry. Rather Kant begins with the position of the will directed toward use, as the will effects cause, with the will as it determines itself, and thus this desire brought to effect is then called a faculty of desire. The subject matter is thus limited to the differentiations in the ways that the will effects causes, or brings objects into the world. Kant does not treat how or why the will is frustrated or inhibited, but treats what the rules and forms are by which the will becomes effective when it is effective. Kant thus demonstrates how the will is effective either subjectively for the individual, objectively in the empirical world, or universally for all rational beings. Thus a full theory of psychology is not developed in this work. Kant's demonstration of pure practical reason focuses on desire in its relation to the act, and the act's relation to the world and others.
Here Kant states that the task of the work is to show that pure reason can be practical of itself, and that this will be shown in an examination of its entire practical faculty 8. The task of the work then is to show how ideas can rise to causality, to effects in the empirical world. This view will elaborate on the manifestation of desire as it exists in the dialectic of decision and inclination, and how this arises to a coming to power, or from the wish to exertion. It is thus a critique of the causality of the will in relation to ideas. In a footnote in the preface explaining the faculty of desire to a contemporary critic, Kant writes that
"The faculty of desire is the faculty such a being has of causing, through its ideas, the reality of the objects of these ideas.” 9
Therefore in this demonstration of pure practical reason the appropriate nature of the causality of the will lies in causality from pure reason and not from sensual inclination. The Critique of Practical Reason then is a critique of the causality of the will in relation to principles. In this movement from principle to sense can be seen how ideas become concrete, come to sense as an effective cause in the empirical world. The noumenal nature of man is then affirmed in the coming-to-be that is elaborated. This follows then the overall method of the development of the book as laid out by Kant in the preface, to begin with principles and proceed to concepts, and then from concepts to the senses 10.
We move from this opening to a twofold examination of the text in the first chapter. The first examination will trace the chronology and form of argument as it is presented in the text, and the second examination will attempt to unpack this sequence to show the manifestations of desire in the text.
Principles of Pure Practical Reason
The process in this chapter is one of definition, and then a spinning away from this notion by a negative delineation of practical principles and their relation to sensuous inclination. There is then a gathering in these negative delineations, and of these negative delineations, in order to define what practical reason might be. Also in the process of this spinning away and negative gathering, a tremendous enlarging of the project occurs as new terms and relations emerge in each theorem, in each problem and each remark. Through this process Kant hopes to demonstrate how pure reason can be practical, and thus show the existence of a higher faculty of desire.
"All material practical rules place the ground of the determination of the will in the lower faculty of desire, and if there were no purely formal laws of the will adequate to determine it, we could not admit (the existence of) any higher faculty of desire." pg. 21 14
We see immediately that there is a manifestation of desire in the text, conveyed by the different forms of the determining ground of the will. What Kant calls practical principles of the will, refer to the stages which differentiate the variety of possibilities for the determining ground of the will. The range by which the will can find a determining ground is thereby limited to the extent by which the individual can effect order. The determining ground of the will refers to the position and orientation of the self in relation to the world and other wills in the exercise of the will. Therefore the direction of the analysis in this section is one of principles toward the act, and the concern of the section is then what form these principles take and how they differ. Furthermore the orientation of the analysis of these principles is from an I-think outward 15, in relation to others, and toward the act.
Practical principles then for Kant are propositions which contain a general determination of the will 16. When the condition of the principle is valid for the subject's will alone, the principle is called a maxim 17. When the condition of the principle is valid objectively for every rational being, the principle is called a practical law 18. There is then another arena of the will depicted in the determining ground of the causality of the will and that is the sphere of the will in relation to objectivity generally. This causes a diffraction in the Kantian terminology, and this sphere is what is indicated by the distinctions of maxim, hypothetical imperative and then categorical imperative.
For an analysis of desire, the notion of principle as a determining ground of the will shows a directionality of notion towards the will, towards the act, but from varied orientations and relations toward the will. It shows a directionality of notion towards efficacy in the empirical world as perishable and thus of import, and shows directionality towards this efficacy in connection with others and how we come to connect with others. A practical principle of the will is a proposition which contains a determination of the will, and thus it is the determination of the will as it rises to form in language, and through language, as how we can recognize the determining ground of the will. To speak of desire in relation to the orientation of principles must necessarily occur in a fragmented manner, for it is in the framework of the demonstration of pure practical reason that principles, and therefore desire is encountered.
Maxims indicate the personal nature of the determining ground of the will. As universal thought is an I-think, so universal action is an I-act. A maxim indicates the orientation of the will insofar as it is not necessarily congruent with others, but carries the possibility of congruence with other wills- but is determinative for it-self. Kant limits treatment of the maxim here to the form it takes as a principle of the pure practical reason.
The hypothetical imperative indicates the orientation of the will in relation to efficacy in the particular instance. This describes the objective nature of the will's coming-to-power as an effect in the empirical world. This indicates the stringent nature of the efficacy in the particular instance. To say that 'whoever wills the ends also wills the means', means that ends are not approachable by indiscriminate types of activity. It means that an end is a specific goal conditioned by the structure of thinking, by pathological affectation, and by the physical structures which govern the accomplishment of the end. An end is specific, and there are only a limited number of ways to achieve an end. Thus the notion of telos not only emerges in the hypothetical imperative, within the structure of action towards the world, but also what emerges is the notion that action takes on specific structure in effective action in this world. This specific structure is that of labor, and of specific labor. It is thus missionary. But we shall not deal with labor yet for we are not yet discussing the practical part of the genesis of sociality, but the formal part of the genesis of sociality. For Kant we come to this formal part of the genesis of sociality in the notion of the categorical imperative, which commands both universally and prior to experience.
How the categorical imperative commands both universally and prior to experience seems to be somewhat unclear. Aside from a postulate which is derived from the hope of a higher faculty of desire, how does the notion of a categorical imperative have a working connection with reality that is more than theoretical construct? What comes clear in this analysis toward the act is that Kant is not speaking from the experience of the I toward the world in his depiction of the categorical imperative, nor is he speaking of the rising of desire towards speech within the I. What Kant speaks about in his depiction of the categorical imperative is the emergence, the formulation of the notion of the we that takes place prior to any experience of the we.
What Kant means to depict in the development of the categorical imperative is that there is no experience of the we prior to the recognition of the other as same 19. All sensory reception before this is pre-cognition and is either a blank stare or confusion. It is in this higher faculty of desire that the moral form of choice originates, and that any notion of morality exists. Prior to this categorical synthesis, man, by necessity, is alone in the world because prior to this recognition man sees no other than himself. In the recognition of another as same man enters into the experience of another, and thus enters the sphere of conduct proper or improper, good or evil. Without the recognition of the we man is not presented with any real choice at all, for all his knowledge is about himself, all his choices are about himself, and all his choices are about inclinations or rules of prudence, about the means to survival. Without this recognition of the we man is completely alone. There are no others, there is no society. The recognition of the we is thus a radical reordering, a categorical synthesis.
This primordial recognition of the we is what Kant means by "the moral law is what first presents itself to us” 20. This is the a priori character of the moral law, and it also shows why the imperative is categorical, for this recognition initially brings about the consciousness of the me belonging to a category of me's, to a category of sameness which diminishes the value of the view of the me in relation to the now new reality of the world. Here the notion of community emerges as a completely new reality from the view of the I towards the empirical world. We can see that this notion of community is parallel to the notion of community as Professor Charles Taylor develops it through Hegel and the analysis of what he calls the 'qualitative view of action'- the ontological inseparability of action and purpose. This view is opposed to another which distinguishes actions by the kind of cause that brings them about. In this analysis the genesis of community has parallel with the demand developed by a categorical imperative, and this notion of community is found within the chapter 'Hegel's Philosophy of Mind' in Taylor's Human Agency and Language 21. Professor Taylor writes-
"By contrast, the qualitative view does not tie action only to the individual agent. The nature of the agency comes clear to us only when we have a clear understanding of the nature of the action. This can be individual; but it can also be the action of a community, and in a fashion which is irreducible to individual action. It can even be the action of an agent who is not simply identical with human agency. pg. 93
Hegel, of course, avails himself to both of these latter possibilities. In his conception of public life, as it exists in a properly established system of objective ethics (sittlichkeit), the common practices or institutions which embody this life are seen as our doing. But they constitute an activity which is genuinely common to us; it is ours in a sense which cannot be analyzed into a convergence of mines." 22
This ontological inseparability, this emergence of community is found in the voice of the categorical imperative as it elaborates the demand, and thus the desire, towards the social in the determination of the will. As I argue, Kant speaks of imperative as it rises from the very receptive capabilities that construct intelligibility. Kant speaks of imperative as it arises in the form of the universal plea of experience, and it is a reception that cannot be received in a form other than dramatic. It is the listening quality of recognition that brings imperative to rise, for Kant, from apprehension and its context. For Kant this type of understanding is imparted to the individual by the very structure of communication. Imperative for Kant is not a projected imperative that wishes to dominate, but the blind imperative of the cry of the other. It is an imperative brought to the fore, an understanding evoked. One might say that for Kant the categorical imperative is heard before it is spoken. In this sense it is heard from the structure of voice, in general, as cry, not as articulated conceptualized demand.
If the categorical imperative is the command to act so that your maxim conforms to universal law giving, then the reception of the imperative takes the form of the reception of the universal itself as, the 'intrusion' of the universal. This is what I believe is the common ground of Kant and Taylor when Taylor speaks of language creating a common sphere, a public space that did not exist before. This is found in the Chapter ‘Theories of Meaning' later in the same book.
"One might say that language enables us to put things in public space. That something emerges into what I want to call public space means that it is no longer a matter for me, or for you, or for both of us severally, but is now something for us, that is for us together." pg. 259
& "But the crucial and highly obtrusive fact about language, and human symbolic communication in general, is that it serves to found public space, that is, to place certain matters before us." pg. 259 23
Therefore what arises in an understanding is a community. Here we find why the notion of universal law-giving is the standard by which our maxim must arise, and not the sensible notion of a utilitarianism. The experience of the we arises in understanding as the receiving of the universal law, of the law of the universal. It is the unshakable law that we are not alone, that we are a public. From here, how does a maxim change so that its form towards the material world and others can hold as a universal law?
The categorical imperative therefore indicates the orientation of the will in relation to other wills and the efficacy of the particular instance for the whole. The categorical imperative indicates that all immediate objectivity and coming-to-power does not have the same consequence for all wills universally, and the very character of this coming-to-power demands that this is so. Thus carried in the demand of conformity to universal law giving is the demand to be efficacious in the particular instance, the hypothetical imperative.
The distinctions Kant makes between maxim and imperative are not completely separate in the treatment of the determining grounds of the will, the principles of pure practical reason. In the formulation of the categorical imperative there is contained a maxim. The maxim is a subjective determining ground of the will that in its primitive stage is not a law. The task demanded by the structure of this imperative is to make your subjective determining ground of the will congruent with a determining ground of the will effective not only objectively, but universally. This does not mean that the maxim aspires to be both objective in the particular instance of application and universal for all persons in its application. What a will does when it conforms to the demand of universality is to take on other than what it is in the particular instance. The will thus keeps an ear to the voice of the other, and does not act from the position of self-love. In this aspiration there is evidence of what Kant calls the higher faculty of desire. Kant writes-
S7 Fundamental Law of Practical Reason
So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle establishing universal law. 24
The subjective principle is congruent with the objective principle, which shows that what is being articulated is how the universal can articulate itself in the subjective. The I of the maxim thus changes form, it con-forms, rises to imperative not for the viewpoint of making its subjectively pleasing condition universal to all, but by accepting the universal form of law-giving generally. The I of the maxim thus conforms to the ought necessitated by the objective sphere, to efficacy in the objective sphere. Only then for Kant can the personal determining ground of the will change and rise to universality as law.
From the viewpoint of the manifestation of desire this is a preliminary statement of the ought as the communication of desire in the form of an imperative. Here, from the viewpoint of the causality of the will, the ought itself is the manifestation of desire in the structure of action as seen in the sign. The ought is a demand articulated upon the other, and it is a demand from dynamic objectivity. The ought is speech as it demands action. We can say in this way that the energetics of language always carries with it a demand, and it is the form of this demand which rises to action, and is carried, transposed by action to the word, and sensibly by the sign. But to describe the ought in terms of sign character and teleology is incomplete, for the imperative ought that expresses the kernel of desire and its directionality, also carries the content of action and telos as having a mission character. 25 That action carries with it an end, a purpose, is transferred to the linguistic field by the word ought. In this way the word ought is a compacted instance of the notion of teleology, directed towards a specific yet common endeavor. In other words both the vector and face of desire as desire comes to appear, as it comes to act, as it appears and is effected, is missionary. Desire comes to reason and to act as use, as labor in the specific.
Aside from the specific relations stemming from this treatment, there are implications from this type of accounting. One implication is that desire is only desire if it can be checked, formed, regulated. Desire must be manifested through a medium if it is to appear. Another implication is the tremendous negation of desire, the ascetic quality of desire in the immediate, for desire to be effected toward an end, and thus take the form of a will. The determining ground of the will is described from a value relation standpoint of mutual effects, it is not unilateral from a subject or self, but in conjunction, or in relation to a subject or self. And yet another implication is the opportunity structure in the tenor and direction of Kant's philosophy, this structure is apparent in the famous 2nd question, "what ought I to do?” 26 We can say then that one of the themes in this direction of Kant's project is the opportunity character of life, played out through desire as reason brought to use. This labor of reason can be seen as the opportunity of desire. 27
In these instances we are dealing with the will determining itself, with desire turning back on itself. Determining itself in this way is desire whereupon desire comes to be a faculty. Human desire is limited. It is through the objects which we bring forth and the causes we effect that desire takes on a face, and it is through this passage that desire, will, and then reason come to use. When desire turns on itself, when it checks itself, when it negates itself, when it briefly focuses elsewhere, only then does it become directional, and thus a will. Thus in an analysis of desire in Kant, desire is not coherently treated, but refracted through the theoretical and practical uses of reason. This is what we can gather in working towards a treatment of desire in this first section.
The Concept of An Object of Pure Practical Reason
The section on the concept of an object of pure practical reason begins with the relation of the will to action whereby either action, or an object is brought into being. 28 Kant then moves from the question of whether something is an object of pure practical reason to the question of whether we should "will an action directed to the existence of an object if it were within our power” 29
The chapter thus takes its task from a twofold orientation. (1) What ought we to do?, (2) From the position of power. The Chapter thus takes its position within the structure of power itself, from within the act itself. 30 "What ought we to do?" is then reframed to a 'Should we do?' when viewed from vantage point of high efficiency rate of success with regard to aims. From the viewpoint of virility we move to the expectation of consequences, consequences of which we are at risk, consequences of which we and others are at stake.
The moral possibility, for Kant, takes precedence when capability of the act is not a question, and when humanity is at stake. From this reduction we arrive at how we determine whether an action is to be done or not. We must then face the destiny of our actions as effects, as either good or evil. The missionary character of Kant's approach is clear again, in that action has its final end for Kant in whether it is good or evil.
But there is a second order uncertainty in this posture by Kant. Given the efficiency of the will in effecting a concrete action from the viewpoint of a particular individual, the options of good or evil present yet another layer of efficacy which is to be achieved. Should the action be done? This viewpoint of a power suspended, a power ungrounded then pervades the approach to the remainder of the chapter and the entire Kantian enterprise. Power is suspended, is not grounded as it faces a humanity at stake. An effective action can be good or evil, and is thus suspended. This suspension of power prior to the moral determination of the will is an appropriate description of the nature of desire. Encapsulated but suspended, directed but suspended, brought to efficacy through matter, but suspended, desire in its manifestations is always incomplete. Desire comes to its proper end with an other whose character is also a form of desire.
The concept of an object of pure practical reason then is the idea of an object both as aim and effect, as an appearance. In reducing the object to its effect Kant renders objectivity to the form of cognition generally. This does not refer to the cognition of the subject who initiates action, nor does this refer to the cognition of the receiving subject, to the subject who listens. Rather the seemingly neutral character of the concept of an object of pure practical reason as both aim and effect shows that Kant is aiming at some third term, some other ground where both the initiator and the recipient of action share common territory.
Sole objects of pure practical reason are then the products of good and evil. The reference to objects does not refer to objects which are good and evil, but refers to these objects as effects of actions as good and evil. Good and evil are then presented as objects made by the will. How Kant articulates this is not so much be describing what the good concretely is, but by describing what the good concretely is not, thus delineating negatively what the good is. The effect of the will is not seen in relating to the initiating self, but in relation to an other. The general direction of duty, and thus the movement toward society is the orientation Kant here speaks from. Making an object of the will is making good or evil for the whole generally. Kant's orientation does not then presuppose pure reason as practical for the self, but for others first, and thus also for the self. Desire is thus manifested in the concept of an object of pure practical reason as aim or as effect, good or evil. If there is a possibility for an action to be good or evil then there is no necessity for an action to be good, and also there must be some bifurcation between end and efficiency in accomplishing this end.
One reason I choose the Kantian tradition is that Nietzsche reduces the debt of morality to the model of the exchange relationship 31. I believe Kant goes deeper to the root of the sublime and the moral tenor of life in showing the nature of debt, of obligation, as deriving from the reverberating character of pathological affectation and its rising to speech in the form of imperative. It is not whether an action is good reflectively, or can be rationalized as good, but whether an action carries a specific character which determines it as good, as it occurs. It is a power in permanent suspension that gives hints to its nature by the very way it unravels, and not by any other means of evidence in the immediate.
Desire is present in this process of idea coming to effect in the description of an efficacious self, and thus an objective worth. It is the desire of coming to mastery, as it emerges from the orientation of the causality of the will, and facing the uncertainty of its power. Here Kant shares ground with Professor Taminiaux. Professor Taminiaux treats the emergence of mastery in the specific within the parallel and contrasting analyses of the Hegel of the Jena period and Hobbes of the Leviathan in the chapter 'Hegel and Hobbes' in his book Dialectic and Difference 32.
From the parameters of the larger comparison and contrast between the German school of natural right and the development of political philosophy as exemplified in Hobbes, from this analysis we narrow to the comparison of the 'practical part of the genesis of sociality'. Specifically we narrow to Taminiaux's recounting of Hegel's view of this genesis. Professor Taminiaux shows in Hegel the emergence of mastery in the specific as the separation of Ego and drive in the making of an article of use, the tool.
"For his own part, Hegel also takes pains to demarcate the human Trieb from animal desire. But he demarcates it otherwise. And it is precisely here that there appears in the most striking fashion the import of the speculative correction of empiricism. According to Hegel, Trieb severs its ties from animality by the production of tools. While animal desire plods along in the repetition of wants and satisfactions, human desire has this specific trait, that "the Ego", the titulary of the conatus, "detaches itself from drive and makes of it an object". This object is the tool, in which the conatus transposes and transforms itself(cf. RP, 204-205). 33
Here Professor Taminiaux speaks of the transformative powers of the tool. We know that it is not so much the tool that transforms, but labor in possession of the tool. The tool is the embodiment of the missionary character of reason. This physical embodiment of reason, the labor of reason, is what I find as the unstated condition, the material indicator of the hypothetical imperative and the practical use of reason. This labor of reason is found in Kant's definition of the concept of the object of pure practical reason where either action or an object is brought into being. In this definition there is a threefold dynamic that exists between the notions of object and action. The first part of the definition refers to action as some 'thing' which is brought into being. This hints at the concrete character of action, its thing-like character as it is received by the sensory apparatus of the other. Action as it is received feels like a thing. The second part of the definition refers to the object of pure practical reason as matter, as the sheer physical support which possesses attributes and meaning. Intertwined in this interplay, and preserved by Kant's definition and context is the sense in which an object is an aim, or an object of desire. Here the definition's references to both action and object lends toward the sense in which both the concrete object and action are carried within the larger framework of desire as an objective. Therefore Kant's definition of the concept of an object of pure practical reason can be said to be about the notions of object and action as they operate in a working framework, in the framework of working. This once more shows the sense of mission in this section as desire towards labor.
The conatus transposes itself in the tool inasmuch as it is henceforth the tool that transforms the conatus: thanks to the tool, the pure and simple animal repetition of the single conatus transforms itself into a universal possibility for the transformation of things and for the transformation of desires. By means of the tool, the desiring individual breaks open his limits and universalizes himself. 34 pg. 21
Where Taminiaux shows in Hegel the universalizing of man through the production of an article of use, we see that Kant develops this type of universalizing in the character of the I-act towards the world embodied by the object of pure practical reason. For Kant the product of individual labor then is only a partial universalizing.
Therefore what we can gather from this section about the treatment of desire is that Kant shows the manifestation of desire as it lends toward the genesis of sociality as a product, and an effect, and the aim of the object of pure practical reason. It is the desire of labor. Labor, however, for Kant, can be good or Evil.
Incentives of Pure Practical Reason
Prior to this chapter Kant began with a demonstration of desire as principle towards action. Desire as pure practical reason manifests itself finally as action. From desire towards the act, and from desire within the framework of power, within the act, Kant now moves to an analysis from the history of the act. The character of events is thus reached in Kant not by pure assertion, but from the observation of events and their root. Thus the procedure implicit in Kant's strategy is one of a reduction from all events, to what constitutes moral events, to the indeterminative nature of consequences as being the ground of moral events, finally to the determining ground of events as they relate to moral events as they can be distinguished from moral events. It is thus not only an analysis from the act, but from the history of the act to the origin of moral act. It is a genealogy of the moral event.
Why is this genealogy not readily apparent? Kant's comments on inclination and the moral law heretofore have come within the context of these different orientation of analysis towards he act. Morality is treated in the 2nd critique in its emergence in the demonstration of practical reason. It is a demonstration from the orientation of principle toward the act, from the orientation of the act as a suspended power, and from the orientation of the genealogy of the act as moral event. The difficulty then in piecing together a clear position on the moral relation is due to its appearance in these scenes, and due to the different orientation of these scenes toward the demonstration of pure reason as practical.
Kant begins this third chapter on the incentives of pure practical reason by again delineating the missionary character of pure practical reason. Here the text shows that Kant is not so much concerned with the pure dynamics of the use of pure practical reason as with its use in relation to the notion of moral worth. 35 Furthermore the fact that moral worth emerges in his philosophy in a section on incentives and not consequences shows that the act as event is described by a regressive analysis temporally. Incentives influence the will and the will impacts the world in the form of events. The focus of Kant’s third chapter then is the moral event as it occurs and can occur from its root in the incentives of pure practical reason. Here is the starting point and direction of the third chapter of the 2nd critique.
At the origin of moral events Kant further delineates the incentive which determines an event as having the character of good. This incentive is the moral law, and it is singular in the determination of what makes an event good. It is a singular incentive that determines universally among men, the character of the event as good. Kant's procedure is then a demonstration of the moral law, from the act, in relation to other types of conduct as derived from the history of the act and their respective determining grounds. I call this procedure critical demonstration.
Therefore, for the purpose of giving the moral law influence of the will, nothing remains by to determine carefully in what way the moral law becomes an incentive and, since the moral law is such an incentive, to see what happens to the human faculty of desire as a consequence of this determining ground......Therefore, we shall not have to show a priori why the moral law supplies an incentive but rather what it effects in the mind, so far as it is an incentive. 36
In this critical demonstration a major theme to be addressed from the direction of analysis and its missionary character is the notion of morality arising as worth, as value. A moral economy, so to speak, is set up in the first two pages of the third chapter. The occurrence of the notion of value 37 in the first sentence, in conjunction with the non-necessity of subjective determining grounds conforming to the objective law as presented in the third sentence of the chapter 38 leads to this conclusion. Therefore with a spectrum of action ranging from subjective determining grounds of the will to those that conform with the objective law, and with the notion or moral worth as determined within this spectrum, and limited to specific criterion, we have the general structure for the outline of a moral economy and the standard by which to discriminate its various types of action. It is because of this structure and direction of the landscape that what is required as Kant sees it, is a critical demonstration.
In the midst of this critical demonstration, the notions of moral worth and the implicit non-worth set the parameters for the spectrum of a moral economy through action. In this scene desire is manifested through the depiction of moral worth as moral worth is spread throughout the spectrum of moral worth in both degrees of strength, or the percentage of effort one gives to the moral act, and also throughout an effort completely exhausted in relation to other effective wills. The parameters for a moral economy are the scene here. Professor Stephen Engstrom shows a moral economy, and thus the possibility of moral improvement in an analysis of the bifurcation between aims and efficiency, and the description of moral strength in his article 'Conditioned autonomy’. 39
In this article, Professor Engstrom delineates the economy of occurrence between heteronomous and autonomous actions from the viewpoint of the Kantian tradition. In the adoption of maxims, morality is not a necessary condition for the adoption of each and every maxim. In other words, since there are many instances in which self-love is integrated into the maxim of an action, the degree of involvement of self-love in this ground indicates a scale of autonomy, both in the number of instances of action in the course of life, and in the degree of strength that the subject has in withstanding the attractiveness to act from inclination. The aim of this argument, as Professor Engstrom shows, is to demonstrate the realistic possibility of the concept of moral improvement over time 40. In this manner Engstrom indirectly develops the notion of an economy of desire.
From the strict Kantian viewpoint moral improvement is seen over the continuum of a lifetime, and not in the degree of autonomy in each act as regarding the mixture of self-love and duty. Kant might say that Engstrom obscures the notion of autonomy with efficiency in regard to the whole. By continuously adopting principles of action in an autonomous manner, for Kant, we gradually become more proficient in becoming efficacious. Engstrom, however, convincingly shows that if there is to be moral improvement, the axis upon which this improvement depends is located in the notion of strength during the concrete instance of the act, or in the ability of the individual to have differing degrees of self-love involved in each and every moral choice. Moral strength is therefore not a constant, as Engstrom shows.
For Kant, however, action grounded upon ever decreasing amounts of inclination only makes the action less evil, but evil nonetheless. Strength as the relation between self-love, in acting from inclination, and duty, which is action in regard for the whole- or from respect, is seen by Kant to not be strictly evil, and not strictly good. But for Kant the moral act, the action done from duty precludes the possibility of inclination mixed in the determining ground of a maxim. This is because duty springs from respect, from the mutually dependent nature of our condition, and is thus completely contrary to the self-centered focus that occurs from the structure of inclination. Professor Engstrom's structure of conditioned autonomy for Kant seems to be arguing from a position of a will acting according to duty but not acting from duty. According to Kant these actions are then good in letter, but not good in spirit. 41
Although this is the strict Kantian response to Professor Engstrom's notion of conditioned autonomy, it fails to adequately treat the entire scope of Professor Engstrom's notion. It is from Kant's notion of conversion as presented in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone that Professor Engstrom receives the strength of his position, which I find to be thorough and correct. It is here that the concept of moral strength receives textual support that goes beyond the position developed by Kant in the incentives of pure practical reason. I therefore speak with Engstrom and not against him. We must then resume this examination in the analysis of desire in the text of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.
To return to our treatment of the chapter, it is then within the parameters of an economy of moral worth, and in the interplay of the individuals action as the action impacts both self and community(as this community is based on recognition) that the comments Kant makes on inclination must be framed.
Inclination for Kant is the form of desire as it arises from the senses. Inclination is based on sensuous feeling, it is pathological affectation, and for Kant can in no manner be part of the determining ground of the will if the action is to be moral, if the will is to be autonomous. Kant's denial of a decision as moral arising from inclination is the ground of attack for those that charge Kant with developing an empty formalism.
However for Kant, the negative feeling of inclination, unpleasantness, serves in a positive way when it is brought to self-consciousness in the form of respect. Negative inclinations brought to consciousness serve to humiliate man in the face of his self-conceit, in attempting to make the conditions of his maxim universal by exposing the root of fallibility in man. Physical suffering brings about the conditions for respect itself, for Kant, by showing man his fallible nature and bringing this to understanding. Physical suffering deepens further the principle of universal law by showing the benevolent side of universality and the road towards an overall positive conception of action done from duty. Kant writes in a most illuminating passage-
Such is the nature of the genuine incentive of pure practical reason. It is nothing else than the pure moral law itself, so far as it lets us perceive the sublimity of our own supersensuous existence and subjectively effects respect for their higher vocation in men who are conscious of their sensuous existence and of the accompanying dependence on their pathologically affected nature. 42 pg. 91
But the suffering as the condition of respect is not the suffering of myself, but the suffering of others. Respect is thus practically effected by the will by deciding and acting from the mutual dependence this implies. 43 This does not mean that actions grounded upon the negative inclination are then to be regarded as moral and autonomous, but to the contrary for Kant these actions play as much role in actions done from self-love as do actions grounded upon the inclination of the physically pleasant. It is not so much suffering that is the condition of respect for Kant, but a suffering brought to consciousness, that suffering as we know it is one half of bringing to consciousness. Thus suffering is the ground of the notion of sense rising to ideas, to the supersensuous and thus the ground of the ought.
'Bringing to consciousness' is the other ground pole of action for Kant here. What grounds an action, a power in its suspended state, is others and our relation with others. It is not pain which serves as the ground point for Kant of the moral law, of duty, of the ought. My suffering is not the condition of respect per se, because the suffering of the I gives rise to inclinations. However suffering and the relation of suffering to the other combined with the recognition and the ability to communicate this interplay, bring about the proper conditions of respect for Kant. The self-consciousness of suffering and its reaching to another of its kind is the structure of the condition of respect as it presents itself in the Kantian philosophy.
The pain of others and the death of others is the vital juncture which determines the nature o the dynamic concept of duty. It is pain understood. It is the material issue of demand, of imperative coming to recognition. It creates an objective nature towards which the will in its efficacy receives meaning in relation to others. This Theatre of understanding is not a point of view, equal among others and it does not change the suspended nature of power as it emerges, but it gives power a medium by which to exhaust itself, and a shadow by which to see itself in its grand dance with suffering and death. Then the value of power changes from its immediate focus and expands to an economy in relation to its community. Thus the recognition of the other as same- as dependent- and then conforming to this objectivity from the power of its voice is what leads to the type of act Kant calls respect for the moral law.
Rather, sensuous feeling, which is the basis of all our inclinations, is the condition of particular feeling we call respect, but the cause that determines this feeling lies in the pure practical reason; because of its origin, therefore, this particular feeling cannot be said to be pathologically effected, rather it is practically effected. Since the idea of the moral law deprives self-love of its influence and self-conceit of its delusion, it lessons the obstacle to pure practical reason and produces the idea of the superiority of its objective law to the impulse of sensibility; it increases the weight of the moral law by removing, in the judgment of reason, the counterweight to the moral law which bears on a will affected by the sensibility. Thus the respect for the law is not the incentive to morality; it is morality itself. 44 pg. 78
It is through the pain of others that we recognize the other as same, and its through the death of others that we learn of our own. And in relation to this pain and this death we observe that our acts as appearance can stop this pain and halt this death. The moral law thus emerges from a higher faculty of desire as it develops from recognition and then principle, and only then does the imperative of moral desire speaks its mission.
The Key of the Work in the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason
Death casts a shadow of imperative upon existence. Existence assumes a very different character when the horizon of its continued state is viewed as limited. Limited in this sense does not mean limited in the configurations of its being, or limited to a specific type of organism structure, or communication, but limited in that the existence that we know of will fail as time advances, and then will cease. The fact of death is that our bodies will fail in a way that will not accommodate our current states of being, our current states of consciousness, and our current states of experience that we know as human, from what we can observe. As time advances, so death advances and the space of life as opportunity grows smaller. Time as human time, becomes a life-time.
Acts however, effect the dimensions and character of this mortal Theatre that is both mine and others, and it is in this Theatre that the moral act reflects a value, a brilliant form. The moral act comes to be in a way that attempts to extend the structure of existence, to extend time as opportunity, to extend time as hope, for specific others and for the whole. This 'is' of concrete existence thus not only tends toward the dynamic character of desire as 'ought' by the structure of pathological affectation, but the 'is' finds a value in a type of assistance that becomes possible only when mortality is both near or present, when while alive death is always and everywhere here but not here, and impends to the point of feeling, and to the point of paralysis. There is a value when the 'is' comes into being in contrast to something else entirely, and when the whole of existence is at stake. Thus death provides a parameter to existence, as an encroaching boundary of human existence as we know it, as advancing towards us ineluctably and relentlessly. We do not see it from an internal experience of consciousness, we feel it as pain, we know we feel it as loss, and we learn of it from the death of others.
Thus death and the other provide the screen by which the act can be seen as having value. The act radiates a brightness in the Theatre of death. The nihilism that nothing matters, that for all our efforts we die, this nihilism is balanced by the hope that springs from within death, that no act would matter unless we do die and others live on, or live better in some part by our effort. Thus it is not only because we are pathologically affective creatures that the moral law is binding and legislative, but also that we are dependent creatures, creatures that die without the hand of the other. This is what I gather from the direction and boundaries of analysis of practical reason and its relation to desire in the analytic portion of the 2nd critique. Desire manifests itself here not visibly, but audibly, by its tone, measure and decibel level. In this voice we hear desire manifested in the face of death as anxiety, not as imperative as the anxiety towards death, but imperative as anxiety towards the possibility of the act, towards the value that arises from an act done from the voice of duty in the face of an advancing death. The condition of death is here that of time as it changes from the unconditioned of raw experience to that of a life-time, and only in this sense do the anxiety and the stringency, do the demands of imperative make sense. We thus extend Professor Paton's development of teleology in the text, to the text's invisible but audible parameters which give the 'key' to the Critique of Practical Reason.
The Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason- Possibility and Extension
We move from the history of the act at the point of its inception, to the point of inception and the delineation of the sphere of its emergence. We move to the as yet uncertain structure of the parameters of condition for human subjectivity. The suspension of power we encountered earlier is amplified in this chapter of the dialectic. A third efficacy is delineated in the notion of the highest good. It is the efficacy of the act in relation to a certain future, a certainly limited future. From this perspective Kant explores the wish character of the will inherent to practical reason. Here power is not only suspended, but the advent of power does not emerge, is suspended as we have not impacted boundaries by which to measure the efficacy of the effort.
One of the forms desire took in the analytic was the anxiety of the act in the face of an advancing death, rebellious to this consequence of order. Kant develops a desire resistant to a harsh reality, in preparation and anticipation to the conflict with this harsh reality. From this point of view, the structure of practical reason is unlimited upon self-reflection, and demands the totality of conditions for itself. In its very character it demands to transascend and to supersede the limits of pathological affectation through which it operates. Towards this, in the heart of the power of the act, from the history of the act, and in relation to death reason continues as a form of desire. Reason aspires beyond the boundary of death. The certainty of aspiration, of exertion in relation to its operation as extension is the scene of analysis here.
The parameters of power, as we showed in the chapter on the incentives of pure practical reason are stretched further in the dialectic. Efficacy and empowerment are a question with regard to the attainment of an aim, and with regard to the extension of practical reason towards the unknown. But the root of possibility becomes a focal point in the analysis beyond the question of efficacy, as do the limits of life and the limits of moral system in relation to the very character of morality. This is found in the self-extension of practical reason, in the postulates of the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and of freedom affirmatively regarded.
From these parameters and the manner in which they are treated we can discern the outline of what I call the 'wish coming to try' as the primary heuristic device by which to understand the import of the dialectic of practical reason with regard to an analysis of the manifestation of desire in this section. Of course Kant's analysis of the antinomy of practical reason, its resolution, and the problem of the extension of practical reason are the immediate focal points of the section. However these analyses rest upon a more fundamental analysis, it is an analysis of wish as it emerges as possibility through a self-transformation towards exertion, towards its extension then as will. Through this foundation and this passage Kant then argues for the existence of the highest good.
From the resolution of the antinomy of pure practical reason comes the aim of the dialectic- to show that "the actions which are devoted to realizing the highest good, do belong to this world.”45 The task then is then further divided to show what is "immediately in our power, and that which is beyond our power.” 46 It is thus between what is in our power and what is beyond our power that the structure of analysis attempts to do is to establish the possibility of the highest good, the importance of possibility and necessity as developed in the previous section in the argument for the necessity of a higher being, Kant shows that if the possibility of the highest good is proved then its existence is necessary. Desire is present as the exhausting of effort within the limits of death, and thus as the honesty and courage of a life as it faces its limit. It is at this point where the import of the refutation of Anselm's ontological argument in the Critique of Pure Reason intersects with Kant's notion of practical reason.
In Kant's refutation of the ontological argument he denies that the notion of existence adds something to the predicate of a purely logically necessary statement47. This is so for Kant because the predicate does not effect the reality of the nature of the subject involved. Nothing is added to the subject area by saying that the subject exists, or the subject area is not enlarged by the predicate in any way. The point Kant wishes to make is not that a logically necessary statement is invalid, but that it has no import for practical reason.
In the analysis then on the possibility of the extension of pure practical reason we find that Kant argues for the possibility of the highest good through a structure that parallels the flight of thought found in Anselm's argument, if the possibility of the highest good be admitted, then its existence is necessary due to the very structure of possibility itself48. In other words any true possibility must include what can be attained at the fringes of subjective engagement, or the upper limits of possibility, as these fringes expand. Rather than being a mere logic game, Kant's argument in the dialectic of practical reason turns the notion of logical necessity and modifies it towards use, towards the act. From the fruits of this discovery between the logic of possibility and necessity then, Kant's notion of the highest good as it sits in relation to the extension of pure practical reason can be formulated as 'that than which nothing greater can be achieved’49. This then exhausts effort within desire. The pivot then in the interpretation of Anselm by Kant on the import of the ontological argument lies between the notion of existence as expressed in Anselm's logically necessary statement and the translation of this formula towards existence as action, as possibility, and thus of practical import.
Using the form of a critique that categorically evaluates the progressively inclusive philosophical positions of Kant, Aristotle, MacIntyre, and Apel, Gamwell arrives at this translation of existence as action after performing a critical reduction of these positions in order to delineate the parameters of his own undertaking. He then articulates his own position following the work of Charles Hartshorne. Beginning with the denial of a moral teleology to the affirmation of a moral teleology. He then reduces, within these more specific parameters, from the denial of the position of transcendental teleology to the affirmation of transcendental teleology, and then further reduces the parameters within this to the discussion of the denial of metaphysical teleology as opposed to the affirmation of a metaphysical teleology. From this reduction and a survey of the problems of these positions Gamwell articulates the argument for a metaphysical teleology from the viewpoint that his negative analysis implies, but for Gamwell,
"To complete the redemption of this alternative(metaphysical teleology), one must give positive reason that his can be coherently affirmed.”51
The last two chapters attempt this positive redemption of metaphysical teleology.
From this critical reduction, transition is made between the Kantian development of phenomena and noumena where noumena appears in Kant's ethic, for Gamwell, as a priori freedom or a constitutive understanding that is independent of all purposes and ends.(thus non-teleological). From this transition Gamwell then attempts to translate Kant's phenomenal/noumenal distinction and display its implications for a philosophical discourse in the area and terms of logic. From this translation, which Gamwell calls the critique of completely negative existential statements, Gamwell develops a moral metaphysical teleology off of the work done in this field by Charles Hartshorne.
The language that binds Gamwell's work to our discussion of existence and action is found in Hartshorne's logical display, and Gamwell's elaboration of the notions of possibility, actuality and creativity. By bringing possibility, actuality and creativity within the domain of the discussion of the logic of existence, Gamwell's rendering of this work intersects with the analysis of the structure of possibility that underlies this chapter on the extension of pure practical reason. Within this structure of possibility his notion of a comprehensive variable thus takes on the similar role and responsibility developed by Kant's notion of the highest good. This work also gives the notion of existence the practical undergirding needed for the logical gymnastics involved in the intricacies involved in the analysis of the structure of possibility, while Kant argues for the possibility of the highest good. This I derive both from the focus on possibility in the section, combined with the argument Kant constructs in the previous section, combined with the argument Kant constructs in the previous section, that the possibility of a highest being leads to is necessity due to the structure of possibility itself. Given this, I find affinity with Gamwell's notion of the divine individual and the area we have delineated that encompasses the analysis of possibility as taking the form of the 'Wish coming to exertion' in the formulation of what constitutes the highest good, as projected by Kant in the postulates of pure practical reason. Gamwell writes,
"Thus, the identity of the divine individual, namely, that each of its activities compares all actuality and possibility with respect to some particular temporal reference, is itself metaphysical. Notwithstanding that all nondivine activities are exemplification’s of the comprehensive variable, no other individual (e.g., no human individual) can be distinguished by it. In contrast to the all-inclusive character of the divine relativity, the relativity of any human individual can only be partial, inclusive in some measure of other things, and the specification of this partiality so as to identify a given individual is contingent. Hence, we may say that one of the transcendental conditions of existence is a transcendental individual." pg. 169. 52
and then, "Moreover, I have sought to argue for the conceivability of 'relative to all actuality and possibility' by showing that the divine relativity is implied by the moral enterprise. Because reality as such must be 'good without qualification,' the comprehensive variable must have a supreme exemplification that concretely evaluates, and thus defined by its complete relativity to, all things.' pg. 173 53
Thus Gamwell's work can serve as a bridge joining the logical necessity involved with Anselm's ontological argument and the practical objection Kant voices in his refutation and then reformulates in the dialectic of practical reason as the highest good, or as I have reformulated, 'that than which nothing greater can be achieved'. Moreover from the reverse side, Kant's own analysis of the extension of practical reason begins with the uncertainty of the attainment of an aim. It begins with a wish, and a wish in principle is a conception. Evidence of this lies in Kant's own formulation of the extension of pure practical reason beyond the reality we now possess, in the postulates of pure practical reason.
From this we return to the 'Dialectic'. Desire as it comes to the limit of its power, as it is exhausted, comes face to face with the structure of life as it confronts the working of desire. We find then that the theoretical conditions of experience as time and space possess correlates in practical reason in the form of hope, fear, and duty as these reflect from the structure of possibility-1) from bringing the 'wish' to 'try' in the turning of inspiration, 2) from the enveloping paralysis of despair, and 3) from duty, which impacts the first two at another level, in the reverberation of participation in community.
In this section Kant makes a connection between need, pathological affectation and the logical notion of condition. Condition thus refers to the dependent nature of man's existence, or the mortality of human existence, and properly delineates the limit character of human subjectivity as it occurs to theoretical reason. Since theoretical reason is confined to the employment of concepts as they are given, this limit character of existence manifests itself as conditioned, as occuring in time and space. However practical reason demands the uncondtioned.
The model practical reason takes for the possibility of its extension is the model of its everyday working, or the model of its appearance character as we observe it in our actions towards others and in the reflection of our maxims as the root or our noumenal nature as a thing in itself. The death of others is real, and every time we assert our 'wish to try' in efforts toward the extension of the others state of being, we assert and affirm the extension of practical reason. For a time we have defeated death in this very 'wish to try'. In attempting to extend the state of anothers being we become effective for the world. Practical reason thus reveals its character as from the wish to try in the face of an advancing death. What real possibility we receive is not just the reflection upon the exertion of the will in the mirror of its appearance, but the view of our action as an appearance victorious in the extension of a life. In affirming the conditions of the good we contribute to the development of a moral life.
So what is it in the character of the moral law that warrants extension, if not the very quality of understanding itself. The moral law descends upon one as the plea of community by which we attempt a changing of the world. Beyond our focus on power in the actor, dependency is a reaching, a stretching, an exertion towards efficacy. Dependency is evocation towards fecundity, a radiation of sort. Dependency is an uneven pulse and indicates beyond our power toward another.
The phenomenon of the extension of pure practical reason through exertion for Kant thus takes the form of hope, fear, and duty. If we can conceive of the idea of possibility then the idea of God is necessary because necessity beckons to the dependent, and thus beckons to the referential structure of possibility. Desire as respect then comes to its end in the allowing to be of recognition. The reprieve, the mercy of recognition is the an accord of understanding. It is not commonality as a path to an excess and as the way outside the self. Desire of the other as it comes to be shared is then the opportunity for a self towards the world, and is the opportunity of the self through the nature of pathological affectation and thus away from the nature of pathological affectation. Here desire tends toward fulfillment provided by opportunity in the structure of dependency.
The 'wish to try' is practical reason in extension, and this then again becomes effective in its power, as man becomes effective for the structure of community, for the structure of the conditions of good. This structure is assistance, giving, and sacrifice as they emerge from the directionality of communication. Thus we affirm and create the good from duty, from the demand of understanding, the claim of reason, and not from the demand of a selfish communiqué towards the world. Then do we articulate the conditioned phrasing of an unconditioned 'wish to try'. We affirm in this both the fantastic and the real in this life of good from labor towards the other. This is the reality of ideas through exertion, of an idea brought to labor, of a love exhausted. And so contributing to this structure of good is objectively participating in the building of an eternity which lasts beyond the limits of a single lifetime to the lifetime of those that follow.
And Then,
The Critique of Practical Reason is an analysis that deals principally with the rhapsody of a moral desire in relation to the act. It is a tracing of desire as desire changes forms, as it becomes will, as will brings itself into existence, as it causes, through, the reality of the objects of these ideas, from both duty and inclination, and all in the face of an advancing death. It details the emergence of desire from the wish to exertion. So does the critique of both faculties, the lower from inclination and the higher from duty, show the efficiency of action from principles. So crucial is the elaboration of desire to this project of pure reason that Kant writes-
.....the a priori principles of two faculties of the mind, cognition and desire, are to be discovered and their scope and limits determined. Thus the firm basis is laid for a systematic philosophy, both theoretical and practical, as a science. pg. 12, Cr. of Pr.
Reason 54
Thus then is the manifestation of desire to sense through the idea. Each and every labor receives value from its relation to another, and bears an efficacy due to the perishable nature of the other. Each and every labor also bears a mission character which must be directed toward some aspect of our pathologically affected, mutually dependent nature. The final ground points for the will can then be found from unspoken coordinates we have taken from the parameters of Kant's urgency, anxiety and anticipation, and thus establish a missionary character to the Critique of Practical Reason. This then extends the legal notion of teleology by the inner parameters of understanding in the experience of time and space as these parameters emerge with death. Time is then a medium of possibility by which we can effect a most curious beauty, and space is then the space of this time as it closes in towards death we have learned of, and thus foresee, from the death of others.
The conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason reflects in awe of the ability of pure reason to be practical, on the rhapsody of this moral desire. In this awe there is seen the outline of the connection between the causality of the will and the feeling of the sublime. It suits our purpose nicely that the conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason is not a full thematic presentation of a theory of desire, but a form of expression of desire, and it points the way nicely. Here in this section the interconnected nature of desire, morality, and the sublime is shown from the viewpoint of the demonstration of pure practical reason we have traced above. But we find it present as well in the Critique of Judgment, Kant writes-
"So the sublime must always have reference to the disposition, i.e., to the maxims which furnish to the intellectual (part) and to the ideas of reason a superiority over sensibility." pg. 115 Cr. of Judgment. 55
We are justified then in anticipating an analysis of the Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone for its statements on the nature of the maxim in relation to radical evil. That will come later. We now move from the demonstration of the manifestation of desire in the text of the Critique of Practical Reason, to the demonstration of the manifestation of desire in the text of the Critique of Judgment.
Notes
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment(New York: Hafner, 1972)
2. Critique of Judgment, pg. 34.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason( New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965)
4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason( New York: MacMillan, 1956)
5. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone( New York: Harper & Bros., 1960)
6. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 15.
7. “ “ , pg. 15.
8. “ “ , pg. 3.
9. “ “ , pg. 9, footnote 7.
10. “ “ , pg. 16.
11. “ “ , pg. 17.
12. “ “ , pg. 19.
13. “ “ , pgs. 20-21.
14. “ “ , pg. 21.
15. In league with Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity( Pittsburgh:Duquesne University Press, 1969), pg. 36.
16. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 17.
17. “ “ , pg. 17.
18. “ “ , pg. 17.
19. Levinas, pg. 39.
20. Critique of Practical Reason, pg.
21. Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
22. Taylor, pg. 93.
23. Taylor, pg. 259.
24. Critique of Practical Reason, pg.
25. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope(San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), pg. 338.
26. Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.
27. H.J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971)
28. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 59.
29. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 60.
30. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 60.
31. Charles Scott, The Question of Ethics(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)
32. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals( New York: Vintage Books, 1967), pg. 70.
33. Jacques Taminiaux, Dialectic and Difference( New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1985)
34. Taminiaux, pg. 21.
35. Taminiaux, pg. 21.
36. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 74.
37. “ “ , pg. 75.
38. “ “ , pg. 74.
39. “ “ , pg. 74.
40. Stephen Engstrom, ‘Conditioned Autonomy’, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, March 1988, pg. 435-453.
41. Engstrom, pg. 450.
42. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 84.
43. “ “ , pg. 91.
44. “ “ , pg. 78.
45. “ “ , pg. 78.
46. “ “ , pg. 124.
47. “ “ , pg. 124.
48. Critique of Pure Reason, pg. 505.
49. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 124
50. Charles Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery(Lasalle: Open Court, 1965), and The Logic of Perfection(Lasalle: Open Court, 1962).
51. Franklin Gamwell, The Divine Good(San Francisco: Harper, 1990).
52. Gamwell, pg. 156.
53. Gamwell, pg. 169.
54. Gamwell, pg. 173.
55. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 12.
56. Critique of Judgment, pg. 115.
Thus the Kantian critical project is divided according to works devoted to the critique of these cognitive faculties. The first work, the Critique of Pure Reason 2, is devoted to the critique of pure theoretical cognition as the faculty of understanding. Another work, the Critique of Practical Reason 3, is devoted to the critique of how cognition is made practical, how cognition emerges through both faculties which constitute the faculty of desire- the faculty of desire through reason, and the faculty of desire through inclination. A third work, the Critique of Judgment is devoted to the critique of cognition as judgment in relation to the feeling of pleasure and pain as it effects judgment. Since there is an exhibition of the manifestation of desire to cognition, generally, in the first subdivision of the faculties of the mind, desire must then be manifested in the work of the latter two faculties, which are distinguished from pure theoretical cognition.
The purpose of my larger project is to examine evidence of the manifestation of desire, as it arises in the texts of these latter two works. I will examine evidence of the manifestation of desire in the Critique of Practical Reason in this article first. Move to examine evidence of the manifestation of desire in the Critique of Judgment next, then finally I will examine evidence of the manifestation of desire in the text of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. 5 The examination of this third work will deepen our understanding of the causality of the will and add evidence for a coherent reading of the Kantian enterprise as a whole.
I will proceed by describing the orientation of the text, and the development of each text, in each section, to the structure of Kant's project and then describe how desire is manifested in this framework, in relation to the framework, and sometimes outside this framework. I will also draw both on the work of commentators of Kant, and other philosophers whose work impacts sections of the text I treat, both in order to clarify the area of focus and to clarify my own specific and limited comments. I begin by examining evidence of the manifestation of desire in the text of the Critique of Practical Reason. I will proceed to elaborate from the scene of the introduction to this work, from here we advance to examine evidence of desire in first the principles of pure practical reason, then show evidence of desire in the concept of the object of pure practical reason, and show evidence of desire in the incentives of pure practical reason, and then finally show evidence of desire in the Dialectic of Pure practical reason.
Desire as Mission in the Critique of Practical Reason-The Introduction to the 2nd Critique
"is pure reason sufficient of itself to determine the will, or is it only as empirically conditioned that it can do so?” 6
A missionary perspective emerges in the introduction to the 2nd critique. Here the subject of inquiry is not practical reason as an object, but the use of reason 7, reason in exercise. Therefore what is being explored is not an archaeology of the subject, nor a tour of dysfunctions. It is clear that the position and direction of inquiry are much different from cognitive psychology, operational psychology, mechanistic psychology, or psychoanalytic inquiry. Rather Kant begins with the position of the will directed toward use, as the will effects cause, with the will as it determines itself, and thus this desire brought to effect is then called a faculty of desire. The subject matter is thus limited to the differentiations in the ways that the will effects causes, or brings objects into the world. Kant does not treat how or why the will is frustrated or inhibited, but treats what the rules and forms are by which the will becomes effective when it is effective. Kant thus demonstrates how the will is effective either subjectively for the individual, objectively in the empirical world, or universally for all rational beings. Thus a full theory of psychology is not developed in this work. Kant's demonstration of pure practical reason focuses on desire in its relation to the act, and the act's relation to the world and others.
Here Kant states that the task of the work is to show that pure reason can be practical of itself, and that this will be shown in an examination of its entire practical faculty 8. The task of the work then is to show how ideas can rise to causality, to effects in the empirical world. This view will elaborate on the manifestation of desire as it exists in the dialectic of decision and inclination, and how this arises to a coming to power, or from the wish to exertion. It is thus a critique of the causality of the will in relation to ideas. In a footnote in the preface explaining the faculty of desire to a contemporary critic, Kant writes that
"The faculty of desire is the faculty such a being has of causing, through its ideas, the reality of the objects of these ideas.” 9
Therefore in this demonstration of pure practical reason the appropriate nature of the causality of the will lies in causality from pure reason and not from sensual inclination. The Critique of Practical Reason then is a critique of the causality of the will in relation to principles. In this movement from principle to sense can be seen how ideas become concrete, come to sense as an effective cause in the empirical world. The noumenal nature of man is then affirmed in the coming-to-be that is elaborated. This follows then the overall method of the development of the book as laid out by Kant in the preface, to begin with principles and proceed to concepts, and then from concepts to the senses 10.
We move from this opening to a twofold examination of the text in the first chapter. The first examination will trace the chronology and form of argument as it is presented in the text, and the second examination will attempt to unpack this sequence to show the manifestations of desire in the text.
Principles of Pure Practical Reason
The process in this chapter is one of definition, and then a spinning away from this notion by a negative delineation of practical principles and their relation to sensuous inclination. There is then a gathering in these negative delineations, and of these negative delineations, in order to define what practical reason might be. Also in the process of this spinning away and negative gathering, a tremendous enlarging of the project occurs as new terms and relations emerge in each theorem, in each problem and each remark. Through this process Kant hopes to demonstrate how pure reason can be practical, and thus show the existence of a higher faculty of desire.
"All material practical rules place the ground of the determination of the will in the lower faculty of desire, and if there were no purely formal laws of the will adequate to determine it, we could not admit (the existence of) any higher faculty of desire." pg. 21 14
We see immediately that there is a manifestation of desire in the text, conveyed by the different forms of the determining ground of the will. What Kant calls practical principles of the will, refer to the stages which differentiate the variety of possibilities for the determining ground of the will. The range by which the will can find a determining ground is thereby limited to the extent by which the individual can effect order. The determining ground of the will refers to the position and orientation of the self in relation to the world and other wills in the exercise of the will. Therefore the direction of the analysis in this section is one of principles toward the act, and the concern of the section is then what form these principles take and how they differ. Furthermore the orientation of the analysis of these principles is from an I-think outward 15, in relation to others, and toward the act.
Practical principles then for Kant are propositions which contain a general determination of the will 16. When the condition of the principle is valid for the subject's will alone, the principle is called a maxim 17. When the condition of the principle is valid objectively for every rational being, the principle is called a practical law 18. There is then another arena of the will depicted in the determining ground of the causality of the will and that is the sphere of the will in relation to objectivity generally. This causes a diffraction in the Kantian terminology, and this sphere is what is indicated by the distinctions of maxim, hypothetical imperative and then categorical imperative.
For an analysis of desire, the notion of principle as a determining ground of the will shows a directionality of notion towards the will, towards the act, but from varied orientations and relations toward the will. It shows a directionality of notion towards efficacy in the empirical world as perishable and thus of import, and shows directionality towards this efficacy in connection with others and how we come to connect with others. A practical principle of the will is a proposition which contains a determination of the will, and thus it is the determination of the will as it rises to form in language, and through language, as how we can recognize the determining ground of the will. To speak of desire in relation to the orientation of principles must necessarily occur in a fragmented manner, for it is in the framework of the demonstration of pure practical reason that principles, and therefore desire is encountered.
Maxims indicate the personal nature of the determining ground of the will. As universal thought is an I-think, so universal action is an I-act. A maxim indicates the orientation of the will insofar as it is not necessarily congruent with others, but carries the possibility of congruence with other wills- but is determinative for it-self. Kant limits treatment of the maxim here to the form it takes as a principle of the pure practical reason.
The hypothetical imperative indicates the orientation of the will in relation to efficacy in the particular instance. This describes the objective nature of the will's coming-to-power as an effect in the empirical world. This indicates the stringent nature of the efficacy in the particular instance. To say that 'whoever wills the ends also wills the means', means that ends are not approachable by indiscriminate types of activity. It means that an end is a specific goal conditioned by the structure of thinking, by pathological affectation, and by the physical structures which govern the accomplishment of the end. An end is specific, and there are only a limited number of ways to achieve an end. Thus the notion of telos not only emerges in the hypothetical imperative, within the structure of action towards the world, but also what emerges is the notion that action takes on specific structure in effective action in this world. This specific structure is that of labor, and of specific labor. It is thus missionary. But we shall not deal with labor yet for we are not yet discussing the practical part of the genesis of sociality, but the formal part of the genesis of sociality. For Kant we come to this formal part of the genesis of sociality in the notion of the categorical imperative, which commands both universally and prior to experience.
How the categorical imperative commands both universally and prior to experience seems to be somewhat unclear. Aside from a postulate which is derived from the hope of a higher faculty of desire, how does the notion of a categorical imperative have a working connection with reality that is more than theoretical construct? What comes clear in this analysis toward the act is that Kant is not speaking from the experience of the I toward the world in his depiction of the categorical imperative, nor is he speaking of the rising of desire towards speech within the I. What Kant speaks about in his depiction of the categorical imperative is the emergence, the formulation of the notion of the we that takes place prior to any experience of the we.
What Kant means to depict in the development of the categorical imperative is that there is no experience of the we prior to the recognition of the other as same 19. All sensory reception before this is pre-cognition and is either a blank stare or confusion. It is in this higher faculty of desire that the moral form of choice originates, and that any notion of morality exists. Prior to this categorical synthesis, man, by necessity, is alone in the world because prior to this recognition man sees no other than himself. In the recognition of another as same man enters into the experience of another, and thus enters the sphere of conduct proper or improper, good or evil. Without the recognition of the we man is not presented with any real choice at all, for all his knowledge is about himself, all his choices are about himself, and all his choices are about inclinations or rules of prudence, about the means to survival. Without this recognition of the we man is completely alone. There are no others, there is no society. The recognition of the we is thus a radical reordering, a categorical synthesis.
This primordial recognition of the we is what Kant means by "the moral law is what first presents itself to us” 20. This is the a priori character of the moral law, and it also shows why the imperative is categorical, for this recognition initially brings about the consciousness of the me belonging to a category of me's, to a category of sameness which diminishes the value of the view of the me in relation to the now new reality of the world. Here the notion of community emerges as a completely new reality from the view of the I towards the empirical world. We can see that this notion of community is parallel to the notion of community as Professor Charles Taylor develops it through Hegel and the analysis of what he calls the 'qualitative view of action'- the ontological inseparability of action and purpose. This view is opposed to another which distinguishes actions by the kind of cause that brings them about. In this analysis the genesis of community has parallel with the demand developed by a categorical imperative, and this notion of community is found within the chapter 'Hegel's Philosophy of Mind' in Taylor's Human Agency and Language 21. Professor Taylor writes-
"By contrast, the qualitative view does not tie action only to the individual agent. The nature of the agency comes clear to us only when we have a clear understanding of the nature of the action. This can be individual; but it can also be the action of a community, and in a fashion which is irreducible to individual action. It can even be the action of an agent who is not simply identical with human agency. pg. 93
Hegel, of course, avails himself to both of these latter possibilities. In his conception of public life, as it exists in a properly established system of objective ethics (sittlichkeit), the common practices or institutions which embody this life are seen as our doing. But they constitute an activity which is genuinely common to us; it is ours in a sense which cannot be analyzed into a convergence of mines." 22
This ontological inseparability, this emergence of community is found in the voice of the categorical imperative as it elaborates the demand, and thus the desire, towards the social in the determination of the will. As I argue, Kant speaks of imperative as it rises from the very receptive capabilities that construct intelligibility. Kant speaks of imperative as it arises in the form of the universal plea of experience, and it is a reception that cannot be received in a form other than dramatic. It is the listening quality of recognition that brings imperative to rise, for Kant, from apprehension and its context. For Kant this type of understanding is imparted to the individual by the very structure of communication. Imperative for Kant is not a projected imperative that wishes to dominate, but the blind imperative of the cry of the other. It is an imperative brought to the fore, an understanding evoked. One might say that for Kant the categorical imperative is heard before it is spoken. In this sense it is heard from the structure of voice, in general, as cry, not as articulated conceptualized demand.
If the categorical imperative is the command to act so that your maxim conforms to universal law giving, then the reception of the imperative takes the form of the reception of the universal itself as, the 'intrusion' of the universal. This is what I believe is the common ground of Kant and Taylor when Taylor speaks of language creating a common sphere, a public space that did not exist before. This is found in the Chapter ‘Theories of Meaning' later in the same book.
"One might say that language enables us to put things in public space. That something emerges into what I want to call public space means that it is no longer a matter for me, or for you, or for both of us severally, but is now something for us, that is for us together." pg. 259
& "But the crucial and highly obtrusive fact about language, and human symbolic communication in general, is that it serves to found public space, that is, to place certain matters before us." pg. 259 23
Therefore what arises in an understanding is a community. Here we find why the notion of universal law-giving is the standard by which our maxim must arise, and not the sensible notion of a utilitarianism. The experience of the we arises in understanding as the receiving of the universal law, of the law of the universal. It is the unshakable law that we are not alone, that we are a public. From here, how does a maxim change so that its form towards the material world and others can hold as a universal law?
The categorical imperative therefore indicates the orientation of the will in relation to other wills and the efficacy of the particular instance for the whole. The categorical imperative indicates that all immediate objectivity and coming-to-power does not have the same consequence for all wills universally, and the very character of this coming-to-power demands that this is so. Thus carried in the demand of conformity to universal law giving is the demand to be efficacious in the particular instance, the hypothetical imperative.
The distinctions Kant makes between maxim and imperative are not completely separate in the treatment of the determining grounds of the will, the principles of pure practical reason. In the formulation of the categorical imperative there is contained a maxim. The maxim is a subjective determining ground of the will that in its primitive stage is not a law. The task demanded by the structure of this imperative is to make your subjective determining ground of the will congruent with a determining ground of the will effective not only objectively, but universally. This does not mean that the maxim aspires to be both objective in the particular instance of application and universal for all persons in its application. What a will does when it conforms to the demand of universality is to take on other than what it is in the particular instance. The will thus keeps an ear to the voice of the other, and does not act from the position of self-love. In this aspiration there is evidence of what Kant calls the higher faculty of desire. Kant writes-
S7 Fundamental Law of Practical Reason
So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle establishing universal law. 24
The subjective principle is congruent with the objective principle, which shows that what is being articulated is how the universal can articulate itself in the subjective. The I of the maxim thus changes form, it con-forms, rises to imperative not for the viewpoint of making its subjectively pleasing condition universal to all, but by accepting the universal form of law-giving generally. The I of the maxim thus conforms to the ought necessitated by the objective sphere, to efficacy in the objective sphere. Only then for Kant can the personal determining ground of the will change and rise to universality as law.
From the viewpoint of the manifestation of desire this is a preliminary statement of the ought as the communication of desire in the form of an imperative. Here, from the viewpoint of the causality of the will, the ought itself is the manifestation of desire in the structure of action as seen in the sign. The ought is a demand articulated upon the other, and it is a demand from dynamic objectivity. The ought is speech as it demands action. We can say in this way that the energetics of language always carries with it a demand, and it is the form of this demand which rises to action, and is carried, transposed by action to the word, and sensibly by the sign. But to describe the ought in terms of sign character and teleology is incomplete, for the imperative ought that expresses the kernel of desire and its directionality, also carries the content of action and telos as having a mission character. 25 That action carries with it an end, a purpose, is transferred to the linguistic field by the word ought. In this way the word ought is a compacted instance of the notion of teleology, directed towards a specific yet common endeavor. In other words both the vector and face of desire as desire comes to appear, as it comes to act, as it appears and is effected, is missionary. Desire comes to reason and to act as use, as labor in the specific.
Aside from the specific relations stemming from this treatment, there are implications from this type of accounting. One implication is that desire is only desire if it can be checked, formed, regulated. Desire must be manifested through a medium if it is to appear. Another implication is the tremendous negation of desire, the ascetic quality of desire in the immediate, for desire to be effected toward an end, and thus take the form of a will. The determining ground of the will is described from a value relation standpoint of mutual effects, it is not unilateral from a subject or self, but in conjunction, or in relation to a subject or self. And yet another implication is the opportunity structure in the tenor and direction of Kant's philosophy, this structure is apparent in the famous 2nd question, "what ought I to do?” 26 We can say then that one of the themes in this direction of Kant's project is the opportunity character of life, played out through desire as reason brought to use. This labor of reason can be seen as the opportunity of desire. 27
In these instances we are dealing with the will determining itself, with desire turning back on itself. Determining itself in this way is desire whereupon desire comes to be a faculty. Human desire is limited. It is through the objects which we bring forth and the causes we effect that desire takes on a face, and it is through this passage that desire, will, and then reason come to use. When desire turns on itself, when it checks itself, when it negates itself, when it briefly focuses elsewhere, only then does it become directional, and thus a will. Thus in an analysis of desire in Kant, desire is not coherently treated, but refracted through the theoretical and practical uses of reason. This is what we can gather in working towards a treatment of desire in this first section.
The Concept of An Object of Pure Practical Reason
The section on the concept of an object of pure practical reason begins with the relation of the will to action whereby either action, or an object is brought into being. 28 Kant then moves from the question of whether something is an object of pure practical reason to the question of whether we should "will an action directed to the existence of an object if it were within our power” 29
The chapter thus takes its task from a twofold orientation. (1) What ought we to do?, (2) From the position of power. The Chapter thus takes its position within the structure of power itself, from within the act itself. 30 "What ought we to do?" is then reframed to a 'Should we do?' when viewed from vantage point of high efficiency rate of success with regard to aims. From the viewpoint of virility we move to the expectation of consequences, consequences of which we are at risk, consequences of which we and others are at stake.
The moral possibility, for Kant, takes precedence when capability of the act is not a question, and when humanity is at stake. From this reduction we arrive at how we determine whether an action is to be done or not. We must then face the destiny of our actions as effects, as either good or evil. The missionary character of Kant's approach is clear again, in that action has its final end for Kant in whether it is good or evil.
But there is a second order uncertainty in this posture by Kant. Given the efficiency of the will in effecting a concrete action from the viewpoint of a particular individual, the options of good or evil present yet another layer of efficacy which is to be achieved. Should the action be done? This viewpoint of a power suspended, a power ungrounded then pervades the approach to the remainder of the chapter and the entire Kantian enterprise. Power is suspended, is not grounded as it faces a humanity at stake. An effective action can be good or evil, and is thus suspended. This suspension of power prior to the moral determination of the will is an appropriate description of the nature of desire. Encapsulated but suspended, directed but suspended, brought to efficacy through matter, but suspended, desire in its manifestations is always incomplete. Desire comes to its proper end with an other whose character is also a form of desire.
The concept of an object of pure practical reason then is the idea of an object both as aim and effect, as an appearance. In reducing the object to its effect Kant renders objectivity to the form of cognition generally. This does not refer to the cognition of the subject who initiates action, nor does this refer to the cognition of the receiving subject, to the subject who listens. Rather the seemingly neutral character of the concept of an object of pure practical reason as both aim and effect shows that Kant is aiming at some third term, some other ground where both the initiator and the recipient of action share common territory.
Sole objects of pure practical reason are then the products of good and evil. The reference to objects does not refer to objects which are good and evil, but refers to these objects as effects of actions as good and evil. Good and evil are then presented as objects made by the will. How Kant articulates this is not so much be describing what the good concretely is, but by describing what the good concretely is not, thus delineating negatively what the good is. The effect of the will is not seen in relating to the initiating self, but in relation to an other. The general direction of duty, and thus the movement toward society is the orientation Kant here speaks from. Making an object of the will is making good or evil for the whole generally. Kant's orientation does not then presuppose pure reason as practical for the self, but for others first, and thus also for the self. Desire is thus manifested in the concept of an object of pure practical reason as aim or as effect, good or evil. If there is a possibility for an action to be good or evil then there is no necessity for an action to be good, and also there must be some bifurcation between end and efficiency in accomplishing this end.
One reason I choose the Kantian tradition is that Nietzsche reduces the debt of morality to the model of the exchange relationship 31. I believe Kant goes deeper to the root of the sublime and the moral tenor of life in showing the nature of debt, of obligation, as deriving from the reverberating character of pathological affectation and its rising to speech in the form of imperative. It is not whether an action is good reflectively, or can be rationalized as good, but whether an action carries a specific character which determines it as good, as it occurs. It is a power in permanent suspension that gives hints to its nature by the very way it unravels, and not by any other means of evidence in the immediate.
Desire is present in this process of idea coming to effect in the description of an efficacious self, and thus an objective worth. It is the desire of coming to mastery, as it emerges from the orientation of the causality of the will, and facing the uncertainty of its power. Here Kant shares ground with Professor Taminiaux. Professor Taminiaux treats the emergence of mastery in the specific within the parallel and contrasting analyses of the Hegel of the Jena period and Hobbes of the Leviathan in the chapter 'Hegel and Hobbes' in his book Dialectic and Difference 32.
From the parameters of the larger comparison and contrast between the German school of natural right and the development of political philosophy as exemplified in Hobbes, from this analysis we narrow to the comparison of the 'practical part of the genesis of sociality'. Specifically we narrow to Taminiaux's recounting of Hegel's view of this genesis. Professor Taminiaux shows in Hegel the emergence of mastery in the specific as the separation of Ego and drive in the making of an article of use, the tool.
"For his own part, Hegel also takes pains to demarcate the human Trieb from animal desire. But he demarcates it otherwise. And it is precisely here that there appears in the most striking fashion the import of the speculative correction of empiricism. According to Hegel, Trieb severs its ties from animality by the production of tools. While animal desire plods along in the repetition of wants and satisfactions, human desire has this specific trait, that "the Ego", the titulary of the conatus, "detaches itself from drive and makes of it an object". This object is the tool, in which the conatus transposes and transforms itself(cf. RP, 204-205). 33
Here Professor Taminiaux speaks of the transformative powers of the tool. We know that it is not so much the tool that transforms, but labor in possession of the tool. The tool is the embodiment of the missionary character of reason. This physical embodiment of reason, the labor of reason, is what I find as the unstated condition, the material indicator of the hypothetical imperative and the practical use of reason. This labor of reason is found in Kant's definition of the concept of the object of pure practical reason where either action or an object is brought into being. In this definition there is a threefold dynamic that exists between the notions of object and action. The first part of the definition refers to action as some 'thing' which is brought into being. This hints at the concrete character of action, its thing-like character as it is received by the sensory apparatus of the other. Action as it is received feels like a thing. The second part of the definition refers to the object of pure practical reason as matter, as the sheer physical support which possesses attributes and meaning. Intertwined in this interplay, and preserved by Kant's definition and context is the sense in which an object is an aim, or an object of desire. Here the definition's references to both action and object lends toward the sense in which both the concrete object and action are carried within the larger framework of desire as an objective. Therefore Kant's definition of the concept of an object of pure practical reason can be said to be about the notions of object and action as they operate in a working framework, in the framework of working. This once more shows the sense of mission in this section as desire towards labor.
The conatus transposes itself in the tool inasmuch as it is henceforth the tool that transforms the conatus: thanks to the tool, the pure and simple animal repetition of the single conatus transforms itself into a universal possibility for the transformation of things and for the transformation of desires. By means of the tool, the desiring individual breaks open his limits and universalizes himself. 34 pg. 21
Where Taminiaux shows in Hegel the universalizing of man through the production of an article of use, we see that Kant develops this type of universalizing in the character of the I-act towards the world embodied by the object of pure practical reason. For Kant the product of individual labor then is only a partial universalizing.
Therefore what we can gather from this section about the treatment of desire is that Kant shows the manifestation of desire as it lends toward the genesis of sociality as a product, and an effect, and the aim of the object of pure practical reason. It is the desire of labor. Labor, however, for Kant, can be good or Evil.
Incentives of Pure Practical Reason
Prior to this chapter Kant began with a demonstration of desire as principle towards action. Desire as pure practical reason manifests itself finally as action. From desire towards the act, and from desire within the framework of power, within the act, Kant now moves to an analysis from the history of the act. The character of events is thus reached in Kant not by pure assertion, but from the observation of events and their root. Thus the procedure implicit in Kant's strategy is one of a reduction from all events, to what constitutes moral events, to the indeterminative nature of consequences as being the ground of moral events, finally to the determining ground of events as they relate to moral events as they can be distinguished from moral events. It is thus not only an analysis from the act, but from the history of the act to the origin of moral act. It is a genealogy of the moral event.
Why is this genealogy not readily apparent? Kant's comments on inclination and the moral law heretofore have come within the context of these different orientation of analysis towards he act. Morality is treated in the 2nd critique in its emergence in the demonstration of practical reason. It is a demonstration from the orientation of principle toward the act, from the orientation of the act as a suspended power, and from the orientation of the genealogy of the act as moral event. The difficulty then in piecing together a clear position on the moral relation is due to its appearance in these scenes, and due to the different orientation of these scenes toward the demonstration of pure reason as practical.
Kant begins this third chapter on the incentives of pure practical reason by again delineating the missionary character of pure practical reason. Here the text shows that Kant is not so much concerned with the pure dynamics of the use of pure practical reason as with its use in relation to the notion of moral worth. 35 Furthermore the fact that moral worth emerges in his philosophy in a section on incentives and not consequences shows that the act as event is described by a regressive analysis temporally. Incentives influence the will and the will impacts the world in the form of events. The focus of Kant’s third chapter then is the moral event as it occurs and can occur from its root in the incentives of pure practical reason. Here is the starting point and direction of the third chapter of the 2nd critique.
At the origin of moral events Kant further delineates the incentive which determines an event as having the character of good. This incentive is the moral law, and it is singular in the determination of what makes an event good. It is a singular incentive that determines universally among men, the character of the event as good. Kant's procedure is then a demonstration of the moral law, from the act, in relation to other types of conduct as derived from the history of the act and their respective determining grounds. I call this procedure critical demonstration.
Therefore, for the purpose of giving the moral law influence of the will, nothing remains by to determine carefully in what way the moral law becomes an incentive and, since the moral law is such an incentive, to see what happens to the human faculty of desire as a consequence of this determining ground......Therefore, we shall not have to show a priori why the moral law supplies an incentive but rather what it effects in the mind, so far as it is an incentive. 36
In this critical demonstration a major theme to be addressed from the direction of analysis and its missionary character is the notion of morality arising as worth, as value. A moral economy, so to speak, is set up in the first two pages of the third chapter. The occurrence of the notion of value 37 in the first sentence, in conjunction with the non-necessity of subjective determining grounds conforming to the objective law as presented in the third sentence of the chapter 38 leads to this conclusion. Therefore with a spectrum of action ranging from subjective determining grounds of the will to those that conform with the objective law, and with the notion or moral worth as determined within this spectrum, and limited to specific criterion, we have the general structure for the outline of a moral economy and the standard by which to discriminate its various types of action. It is because of this structure and direction of the landscape that what is required as Kant sees it, is a critical demonstration.
In the midst of this critical demonstration, the notions of moral worth and the implicit non-worth set the parameters for the spectrum of a moral economy through action. In this scene desire is manifested through the depiction of moral worth as moral worth is spread throughout the spectrum of moral worth in both degrees of strength, or the percentage of effort one gives to the moral act, and also throughout an effort completely exhausted in relation to other effective wills. The parameters for a moral economy are the scene here. Professor Stephen Engstrom shows a moral economy, and thus the possibility of moral improvement in an analysis of the bifurcation between aims and efficiency, and the description of moral strength in his article 'Conditioned autonomy’. 39
In this article, Professor Engstrom delineates the economy of occurrence between heteronomous and autonomous actions from the viewpoint of the Kantian tradition. In the adoption of maxims, morality is not a necessary condition for the adoption of each and every maxim. In other words, since there are many instances in which self-love is integrated into the maxim of an action, the degree of involvement of self-love in this ground indicates a scale of autonomy, both in the number of instances of action in the course of life, and in the degree of strength that the subject has in withstanding the attractiveness to act from inclination. The aim of this argument, as Professor Engstrom shows, is to demonstrate the realistic possibility of the concept of moral improvement over time 40. In this manner Engstrom indirectly develops the notion of an economy of desire.
From the strict Kantian viewpoint moral improvement is seen over the continuum of a lifetime, and not in the degree of autonomy in each act as regarding the mixture of self-love and duty. Kant might say that Engstrom obscures the notion of autonomy with efficiency in regard to the whole. By continuously adopting principles of action in an autonomous manner, for Kant, we gradually become more proficient in becoming efficacious. Engstrom, however, convincingly shows that if there is to be moral improvement, the axis upon which this improvement depends is located in the notion of strength during the concrete instance of the act, or in the ability of the individual to have differing degrees of self-love involved in each and every moral choice. Moral strength is therefore not a constant, as Engstrom shows.
For Kant, however, action grounded upon ever decreasing amounts of inclination only makes the action less evil, but evil nonetheless. Strength as the relation between self-love, in acting from inclination, and duty, which is action in regard for the whole- or from respect, is seen by Kant to not be strictly evil, and not strictly good. But for Kant the moral act, the action done from duty precludes the possibility of inclination mixed in the determining ground of a maxim. This is because duty springs from respect, from the mutually dependent nature of our condition, and is thus completely contrary to the self-centered focus that occurs from the structure of inclination. Professor Engstrom's structure of conditioned autonomy for Kant seems to be arguing from a position of a will acting according to duty but not acting from duty. According to Kant these actions are then good in letter, but not good in spirit. 41
Although this is the strict Kantian response to Professor Engstrom's notion of conditioned autonomy, it fails to adequately treat the entire scope of Professor Engstrom's notion. It is from Kant's notion of conversion as presented in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone that Professor Engstrom receives the strength of his position, which I find to be thorough and correct. It is here that the concept of moral strength receives textual support that goes beyond the position developed by Kant in the incentives of pure practical reason. I therefore speak with Engstrom and not against him. We must then resume this examination in the analysis of desire in the text of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.
To return to our treatment of the chapter, it is then within the parameters of an economy of moral worth, and in the interplay of the individuals action as the action impacts both self and community(as this community is based on recognition) that the comments Kant makes on inclination must be framed.
Inclination for Kant is the form of desire as it arises from the senses. Inclination is based on sensuous feeling, it is pathological affectation, and for Kant can in no manner be part of the determining ground of the will if the action is to be moral, if the will is to be autonomous. Kant's denial of a decision as moral arising from inclination is the ground of attack for those that charge Kant with developing an empty formalism.
However for Kant, the negative feeling of inclination, unpleasantness, serves in a positive way when it is brought to self-consciousness in the form of respect. Negative inclinations brought to consciousness serve to humiliate man in the face of his self-conceit, in attempting to make the conditions of his maxim universal by exposing the root of fallibility in man. Physical suffering brings about the conditions for respect itself, for Kant, by showing man his fallible nature and bringing this to understanding. Physical suffering deepens further the principle of universal law by showing the benevolent side of universality and the road towards an overall positive conception of action done from duty. Kant writes in a most illuminating passage-
Such is the nature of the genuine incentive of pure practical reason. It is nothing else than the pure moral law itself, so far as it lets us perceive the sublimity of our own supersensuous existence and subjectively effects respect for their higher vocation in men who are conscious of their sensuous existence and of the accompanying dependence on their pathologically affected nature. 42 pg. 91
But the suffering as the condition of respect is not the suffering of myself, but the suffering of others. Respect is thus practically effected by the will by deciding and acting from the mutual dependence this implies. 43 This does not mean that actions grounded upon the negative inclination are then to be regarded as moral and autonomous, but to the contrary for Kant these actions play as much role in actions done from self-love as do actions grounded upon the inclination of the physically pleasant. It is not so much suffering that is the condition of respect for Kant, but a suffering brought to consciousness, that suffering as we know it is one half of bringing to consciousness. Thus suffering is the ground of the notion of sense rising to ideas, to the supersensuous and thus the ground of the ought.
'Bringing to consciousness' is the other ground pole of action for Kant here. What grounds an action, a power in its suspended state, is others and our relation with others. It is not pain which serves as the ground point for Kant of the moral law, of duty, of the ought. My suffering is not the condition of respect per se, because the suffering of the I gives rise to inclinations. However suffering and the relation of suffering to the other combined with the recognition and the ability to communicate this interplay, bring about the proper conditions of respect for Kant. The self-consciousness of suffering and its reaching to another of its kind is the structure of the condition of respect as it presents itself in the Kantian philosophy.
The pain of others and the death of others is the vital juncture which determines the nature o the dynamic concept of duty. It is pain understood. It is the material issue of demand, of imperative coming to recognition. It creates an objective nature towards which the will in its efficacy receives meaning in relation to others. This Theatre of understanding is not a point of view, equal among others and it does not change the suspended nature of power as it emerges, but it gives power a medium by which to exhaust itself, and a shadow by which to see itself in its grand dance with suffering and death. Then the value of power changes from its immediate focus and expands to an economy in relation to its community. Thus the recognition of the other as same- as dependent- and then conforming to this objectivity from the power of its voice is what leads to the type of act Kant calls respect for the moral law.
Rather, sensuous feeling, which is the basis of all our inclinations, is the condition of particular feeling we call respect, but the cause that determines this feeling lies in the pure practical reason; because of its origin, therefore, this particular feeling cannot be said to be pathologically effected, rather it is practically effected. Since the idea of the moral law deprives self-love of its influence and self-conceit of its delusion, it lessons the obstacle to pure practical reason and produces the idea of the superiority of its objective law to the impulse of sensibility; it increases the weight of the moral law by removing, in the judgment of reason, the counterweight to the moral law which bears on a will affected by the sensibility. Thus the respect for the law is not the incentive to morality; it is morality itself. 44 pg. 78
It is through the pain of others that we recognize the other as same, and its through the death of others that we learn of our own. And in relation to this pain and this death we observe that our acts as appearance can stop this pain and halt this death. The moral law thus emerges from a higher faculty of desire as it develops from recognition and then principle, and only then does the imperative of moral desire speaks its mission.
The Key of the Work in the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason
Death casts a shadow of imperative upon existence. Existence assumes a very different character when the horizon of its continued state is viewed as limited. Limited in this sense does not mean limited in the configurations of its being, or limited to a specific type of organism structure, or communication, but limited in that the existence that we know of will fail as time advances, and then will cease. The fact of death is that our bodies will fail in a way that will not accommodate our current states of being, our current states of consciousness, and our current states of experience that we know as human, from what we can observe. As time advances, so death advances and the space of life as opportunity grows smaller. Time as human time, becomes a life-time.
Acts however, effect the dimensions and character of this mortal Theatre that is both mine and others, and it is in this Theatre that the moral act reflects a value, a brilliant form. The moral act comes to be in a way that attempts to extend the structure of existence, to extend time as opportunity, to extend time as hope, for specific others and for the whole. This 'is' of concrete existence thus not only tends toward the dynamic character of desire as 'ought' by the structure of pathological affectation, but the 'is' finds a value in a type of assistance that becomes possible only when mortality is both near or present, when while alive death is always and everywhere here but not here, and impends to the point of feeling, and to the point of paralysis. There is a value when the 'is' comes into being in contrast to something else entirely, and when the whole of existence is at stake. Thus death provides a parameter to existence, as an encroaching boundary of human existence as we know it, as advancing towards us ineluctably and relentlessly. We do not see it from an internal experience of consciousness, we feel it as pain, we know we feel it as loss, and we learn of it from the death of others.
Thus death and the other provide the screen by which the act can be seen as having value. The act radiates a brightness in the Theatre of death. The nihilism that nothing matters, that for all our efforts we die, this nihilism is balanced by the hope that springs from within death, that no act would matter unless we do die and others live on, or live better in some part by our effort. Thus it is not only because we are pathologically affective creatures that the moral law is binding and legislative, but also that we are dependent creatures, creatures that die without the hand of the other. This is what I gather from the direction and boundaries of analysis of practical reason and its relation to desire in the analytic portion of the 2nd critique. Desire manifests itself here not visibly, but audibly, by its tone, measure and decibel level. In this voice we hear desire manifested in the face of death as anxiety, not as imperative as the anxiety towards death, but imperative as anxiety towards the possibility of the act, towards the value that arises from an act done from the voice of duty in the face of an advancing death. The condition of death is here that of time as it changes from the unconditioned of raw experience to that of a life-time, and only in this sense do the anxiety and the stringency, do the demands of imperative make sense. We thus extend Professor Paton's development of teleology in the text, to the text's invisible but audible parameters which give the 'key' to the Critique of Practical Reason.
The Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason- Possibility and Extension
We move from the history of the act at the point of its inception, to the point of inception and the delineation of the sphere of its emergence. We move to the as yet uncertain structure of the parameters of condition for human subjectivity. The suspension of power we encountered earlier is amplified in this chapter of the dialectic. A third efficacy is delineated in the notion of the highest good. It is the efficacy of the act in relation to a certain future, a certainly limited future. From this perspective Kant explores the wish character of the will inherent to practical reason. Here power is not only suspended, but the advent of power does not emerge, is suspended as we have not impacted boundaries by which to measure the efficacy of the effort.
One of the forms desire took in the analytic was the anxiety of the act in the face of an advancing death, rebellious to this consequence of order. Kant develops a desire resistant to a harsh reality, in preparation and anticipation to the conflict with this harsh reality. From this point of view, the structure of practical reason is unlimited upon self-reflection, and demands the totality of conditions for itself. In its very character it demands to transascend and to supersede the limits of pathological affectation through which it operates. Towards this, in the heart of the power of the act, from the history of the act, and in relation to death reason continues as a form of desire. Reason aspires beyond the boundary of death. The certainty of aspiration, of exertion in relation to its operation as extension is the scene of analysis here.
The parameters of power, as we showed in the chapter on the incentives of pure practical reason are stretched further in the dialectic. Efficacy and empowerment are a question with regard to the attainment of an aim, and with regard to the extension of practical reason towards the unknown. But the root of possibility becomes a focal point in the analysis beyond the question of efficacy, as do the limits of life and the limits of moral system in relation to the very character of morality. This is found in the self-extension of practical reason, in the postulates of the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and of freedom affirmatively regarded.
From these parameters and the manner in which they are treated we can discern the outline of what I call the 'wish coming to try' as the primary heuristic device by which to understand the import of the dialectic of practical reason with regard to an analysis of the manifestation of desire in this section. Of course Kant's analysis of the antinomy of practical reason, its resolution, and the problem of the extension of practical reason are the immediate focal points of the section. However these analyses rest upon a more fundamental analysis, it is an analysis of wish as it emerges as possibility through a self-transformation towards exertion, towards its extension then as will. Through this foundation and this passage Kant then argues for the existence of the highest good.
From the resolution of the antinomy of pure practical reason comes the aim of the dialectic- to show that "the actions which are devoted to realizing the highest good, do belong to this world.”45 The task then is then further divided to show what is "immediately in our power, and that which is beyond our power.” 46 It is thus between what is in our power and what is beyond our power that the structure of analysis attempts to do is to establish the possibility of the highest good, the importance of possibility and necessity as developed in the previous section in the argument for the necessity of a higher being, Kant shows that if the possibility of the highest good is proved then its existence is necessary. Desire is present as the exhausting of effort within the limits of death, and thus as the honesty and courage of a life as it faces its limit. It is at this point where the import of the refutation of Anselm's ontological argument in the Critique of Pure Reason intersects with Kant's notion of practical reason.
In Kant's refutation of the ontological argument he denies that the notion of existence adds something to the predicate of a purely logically necessary statement47. This is so for Kant because the predicate does not effect the reality of the nature of the subject involved. Nothing is added to the subject area by saying that the subject exists, or the subject area is not enlarged by the predicate in any way. The point Kant wishes to make is not that a logically necessary statement is invalid, but that it has no import for practical reason.
In the analysis then on the possibility of the extension of pure practical reason we find that Kant argues for the possibility of the highest good through a structure that parallels the flight of thought found in Anselm's argument, if the possibility of the highest good be admitted, then its existence is necessary due to the very structure of possibility itself48. In other words any true possibility must include what can be attained at the fringes of subjective engagement, or the upper limits of possibility, as these fringes expand. Rather than being a mere logic game, Kant's argument in the dialectic of practical reason turns the notion of logical necessity and modifies it towards use, towards the act. From the fruits of this discovery between the logic of possibility and necessity then, Kant's notion of the highest good as it sits in relation to the extension of pure practical reason can be formulated as 'that than which nothing greater can be achieved’49. This then exhausts effort within desire. The pivot then in the interpretation of Anselm by Kant on the import of the ontological argument lies between the notion of existence as expressed in Anselm's logically necessary statement and the translation of this formula towards existence as action, as possibility, and thus of practical import.
Using the form of a critique that categorically evaluates the progressively inclusive philosophical positions of Kant, Aristotle, MacIntyre, and Apel, Gamwell arrives at this translation of existence as action after performing a critical reduction of these positions in order to delineate the parameters of his own undertaking. He then articulates his own position following the work of Charles Hartshorne. Beginning with the denial of a moral teleology to the affirmation of a moral teleology. He then reduces, within these more specific parameters, from the denial of the position of transcendental teleology to the affirmation of transcendental teleology, and then further reduces the parameters within this to the discussion of the denial of metaphysical teleology as opposed to the affirmation of a metaphysical teleology. From this reduction and a survey of the problems of these positions Gamwell articulates the argument for a metaphysical teleology from the viewpoint that his negative analysis implies, but for Gamwell,
"To complete the redemption of this alternative(metaphysical teleology), one must give positive reason that his can be coherently affirmed.”51
The last two chapters attempt this positive redemption of metaphysical teleology.
From this critical reduction, transition is made between the Kantian development of phenomena and noumena where noumena appears in Kant's ethic, for Gamwell, as a priori freedom or a constitutive understanding that is independent of all purposes and ends.(thus non-teleological). From this transition Gamwell then attempts to translate Kant's phenomenal/noumenal distinction and display its implications for a philosophical discourse in the area and terms of logic. From this translation, which Gamwell calls the critique of completely negative existential statements, Gamwell develops a moral metaphysical teleology off of the work done in this field by Charles Hartshorne.
The language that binds Gamwell's work to our discussion of existence and action is found in Hartshorne's logical display, and Gamwell's elaboration of the notions of possibility, actuality and creativity. By bringing possibility, actuality and creativity within the domain of the discussion of the logic of existence, Gamwell's rendering of this work intersects with the analysis of the structure of possibility that underlies this chapter on the extension of pure practical reason. Within this structure of possibility his notion of a comprehensive variable thus takes on the similar role and responsibility developed by Kant's notion of the highest good. This work also gives the notion of existence the practical undergirding needed for the logical gymnastics involved in the intricacies involved in the analysis of the structure of possibility, while Kant argues for the possibility of the highest good. This I derive both from the focus on possibility in the section, combined with the argument Kant constructs in the previous section, combined with the argument Kant constructs in the previous section, that the possibility of a highest being leads to is necessity due to the structure of possibility itself. Given this, I find affinity with Gamwell's notion of the divine individual and the area we have delineated that encompasses the analysis of possibility as taking the form of the 'Wish coming to exertion' in the formulation of what constitutes the highest good, as projected by Kant in the postulates of pure practical reason. Gamwell writes,
"Thus, the identity of the divine individual, namely, that each of its activities compares all actuality and possibility with respect to some particular temporal reference, is itself metaphysical. Notwithstanding that all nondivine activities are exemplification’s of the comprehensive variable, no other individual (e.g., no human individual) can be distinguished by it. In contrast to the all-inclusive character of the divine relativity, the relativity of any human individual can only be partial, inclusive in some measure of other things, and the specification of this partiality so as to identify a given individual is contingent. Hence, we may say that one of the transcendental conditions of existence is a transcendental individual." pg. 169. 52
and then, "Moreover, I have sought to argue for the conceivability of 'relative to all actuality and possibility' by showing that the divine relativity is implied by the moral enterprise. Because reality as such must be 'good without qualification,' the comprehensive variable must have a supreme exemplification that concretely evaluates, and thus defined by its complete relativity to, all things.' pg. 173 53
Thus Gamwell's work can serve as a bridge joining the logical necessity involved with Anselm's ontological argument and the practical objection Kant voices in his refutation and then reformulates in the dialectic of practical reason as the highest good, or as I have reformulated, 'that than which nothing greater can be achieved'. Moreover from the reverse side, Kant's own analysis of the extension of practical reason begins with the uncertainty of the attainment of an aim. It begins with a wish, and a wish in principle is a conception. Evidence of this lies in Kant's own formulation of the extension of pure practical reason beyond the reality we now possess, in the postulates of pure practical reason.
From this we return to the 'Dialectic'. Desire as it comes to the limit of its power, as it is exhausted, comes face to face with the structure of life as it confronts the working of desire. We find then that the theoretical conditions of experience as time and space possess correlates in practical reason in the form of hope, fear, and duty as these reflect from the structure of possibility-1) from bringing the 'wish' to 'try' in the turning of inspiration, 2) from the enveloping paralysis of despair, and 3) from duty, which impacts the first two at another level, in the reverberation of participation in community.
In this section Kant makes a connection between need, pathological affectation and the logical notion of condition. Condition thus refers to the dependent nature of man's existence, or the mortality of human existence, and properly delineates the limit character of human subjectivity as it occurs to theoretical reason. Since theoretical reason is confined to the employment of concepts as they are given, this limit character of existence manifests itself as conditioned, as occuring in time and space. However practical reason demands the uncondtioned.
The model practical reason takes for the possibility of its extension is the model of its everyday working, or the model of its appearance character as we observe it in our actions towards others and in the reflection of our maxims as the root or our noumenal nature as a thing in itself. The death of others is real, and every time we assert our 'wish to try' in efforts toward the extension of the others state of being, we assert and affirm the extension of practical reason. For a time we have defeated death in this very 'wish to try'. In attempting to extend the state of anothers being we become effective for the world. Practical reason thus reveals its character as from the wish to try in the face of an advancing death. What real possibility we receive is not just the reflection upon the exertion of the will in the mirror of its appearance, but the view of our action as an appearance victorious in the extension of a life. In affirming the conditions of the good we contribute to the development of a moral life.
So what is it in the character of the moral law that warrants extension, if not the very quality of understanding itself. The moral law descends upon one as the plea of community by which we attempt a changing of the world. Beyond our focus on power in the actor, dependency is a reaching, a stretching, an exertion towards efficacy. Dependency is evocation towards fecundity, a radiation of sort. Dependency is an uneven pulse and indicates beyond our power toward another.
The phenomenon of the extension of pure practical reason through exertion for Kant thus takes the form of hope, fear, and duty. If we can conceive of the idea of possibility then the idea of God is necessary because necessity beckons to the dependent, and thus beckons to the referential structure of possibility. Desire as respect then comes to its end in the allowing to be of recognition. The reprieve, the mercy of recognition is the an accord of understanding. It is not commonality as a path to an excess and as the way outside the self. Desire of the other as it comes to be shared is then the opportunity for a self towards the world, and is the opportunity of the self through the nature of pathological affectation and thus away from the nature of pathological affectation. Here desire tends toward fulfillment provided by opportunity in the structure of dependency.
The 'wish to try' is practical reason in extension, and this then again becomes effective in its power, as man becomes effective for the structure of community, for the structure of the conditions of good. This structure is assistance, giving, and sacrifice as they emerge from the directionality of communication. Thus we affirm and create the good from duty, from the demand of understanding, the claim of reason, and not from the demand of a selfish communiqué towards the world. Then do we articulate the conditioned phrasing of an unconditioned 'wish to try'. We affirm in this both the fantastic and the real in this life of good from labor towards the other. This is the reality of ideas through exertion, of an idea brought to labor, of a love exhausted. And so contributing to this structure of good is objectively participating in the building of an eternity which lasts beyond the limits of a single lifetime to the lifetime of those that follow.
And Then,
The Critique of Practical Reason is an analysis that deals principally with the rhapsody of a moral desire in relation to the act. It is a tracing of desire as desire changes forms, as it becomes will, as will brings itself into existence, as it causes, through, the reality of the objects of these ideas, from both duty and inclination, and all in the face of an advancing death. It details the emergence of desire from the wish to exertion. So does the critique of both faculties, the lower from inclination and the higher from duty, show the efficiency of action from principles. So crucial is the elaboration of desire to this project of pure reason that Kant writes-
.....the a priori principles of two faculties of the mind, cognition and desire, are to be discovered and their scope and limits determined. Thus the firm basis is laid for a systematic philosophy, both theoretical and practical, as a science. pg. 12, Cr. of Pr.
Reason 54
Thus then is the manifestation of desire to sense through the idea. Each and every labor receives value from its relation to another, and bears an efficacy due to the perishable nature of the other. Each and every labor also bears a mission character which must be directed toward some aspect of our pathologically affected, mutually dependent nature. The final ground points for the will can then be found from unspoken coordinates we have taken from the parameters of Kant's urgency, anxiety and anticipation, and thus establish a missionary character to the Critique of Practical Reason. This then extends the legal notion of teleology by the inner parameters of understanding in the experience of time and space as these parameters emerge with death. Time is then a medium of possibility by which we can effect a most curious beauty, and space is then the space of this time as it closes in towards death we have learned of, and thus foresee, from the death of others.
The conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason reflects in awe of the ability of pure reason to be practical, on the rhapsody of this moral desire. In this awe there is seen the outline of the connection between the causality of the will and the feeling of the sublime. It suits our purpose nicely that the conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason is not a full thematic presentation of a theory of desire, but a form of expression of desire, and it points the way nicely. Here in this section the interconnected nature of desire, morality, and the sublime is shown from the viewpoint of the demonstration of pure practical reason we have traced above. But we find it present as well in the Critique of Judgment, Kant writes-
"So the sublime must always have reference to the disposition, i.e., to the maxims which furnish to the intellectual (part) and to the ideas of reason a superiority over sensibility." pg. 115 Cr. of Judgment. 55
We are justified then in anticipating an analysis of the Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone for its statements on the nature of the maxim in relation to radical evil. That will come later. We now move from the demonstration of the manifestation of desire in the text of the Critique of Practical Reason, to the demonstration of the manifestation of desire in the text of the Critique of Judgment.
Notes
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment(New York: Hafner, 1972)
2. Critique of Judgment, pg. 34.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason( New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965)
4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason( New York: MacMillan, 1956)
5. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone( New York: Harper & Bros., 1960)
6. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 15.
7. “ “ , pg. 15.
8. “ “ , pg. 3.
9. “ “ , pg. 9, footnote 7.
10. “ “ , pg. 16.
11. “ “ , pg. 17.
12. “ “ , pg. 19.
13. “ “ , pgs. 20-21.
14. “ “ , pg. 21.
15. In league with Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity( Pittsburgh:Duquesne University Press, 1969), pg. 36.
16. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 17.
17. “ “ , pg. 17.
18. “ “ , pg. 17.
19. Levinas, pg. 39.
20. Critique of Practical Reason, pg.
21. Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
22. Taylor, pg. 93.
23. Taylor, pg. 259.
24. Critique of Practical Reason, pg.
25. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope(San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), pg. 338.
26. Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.
27. H.J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971)
28. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 59.
29. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 60.
30. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 60.
31. Charles Scott, The Question of Ethics(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)
32. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals( New York: Vintage Books, 1967), pg. 70.
33. Jacques Taminiaux, Dialectic and Difference( New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1985)
34. Taminiaux, pg. 21.
35. Taminiaux, pg. 21.
36. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 74.
37. “ “ , pg. 75.
38. “ “ , pg. 74.
39. “ “ , pg. 74.
40. Stephen Engstrom, ‘Conditioned Autonomy’, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, March 1988, pg. 435-453.
41. Engstrom, pg. 450.
42. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 84.
43. “ “ , pg. 91.
44. “ “ , pg. 78.
45. “ “ , pg. 78.
46. “ “ , pg. 124.
47. “ “ , pg. 124.
48. Critique of Pure Reason, pg. 505.
49. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 124
50. Charles Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery(Lasalle: Open Court, 1965), and The Logic of Perfection(Lasalle: Open Court, 1962).
51. Franklin Gamwell, The Divine Good(San Francisco: Harper, 1990).
52. Gamwell, pg. 156.
53. Gamwell, pg. 169.
54. Gamwell, pg. 173.
55. Critique of Practical Reason, pg. 12.
56. Critique of Judgment, pg. 115.
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