Foucault on Kant on Enlightenment

Foucault’s 1978 lecture “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” discusses, at some length, Kant’s short text answering the question, “Was ist Aufklärung?” Then again, at the very beginning of 1983, Foucault opened the year’s course at the Collège de France (published as Le gouvernement de soi et des autres) with a discussion of the same text.

Frédéric Gros, in his ‘situation’ of the 1983 course points to the differences between Foucault’s approaches to Kant’s short text. I find his differentiation obscure at best. He does say,

Demeure en revance, ici et là, l’opposition entre deux héritages kantien possibles: un héritage transcendental dans lequel Foucault refuse de s’inscrire (établir des règles de vérité universelles afin de prévenir les dévoiements d’une raison dominatrice); un héritage ‘critique’ dans lequel au contraire il entend se reconnaître (provoquer le présent à partir du diagnostique de “ce que nous sommes”) (350).

Certainly, Foucault refuses ‘transcendental’ critique. But it seems to me quite clear that the critique he describes in 1978 is fully historical. The whole point is for it to exist within the various forms of ‘asujettissement’ of contemporary governmentality, in order to perform ‘désasujettissement.’ If Kantian Aufklärung is for Foucault a kind of critique to which he can agree, and is also “l’art de n’être pas tellement gouverné” (38), then I don’t think it can be accused, at any moment, of being transcendental. Foucault says specifically, “Nul recours fondateur, nulle échappée dans une forme pure, c’est là sans doute un des points les plus importants et les plus contestables de cette démarche historico-philosophique...” (50).

There remains what, precisely, Foucault is going to do in the 1983 course. I have so far only read the first lesson, which I think is the main place Foucault treats Kant. Yet it seems to me that Foucault there is less concerned with the politics of truth than with Kant’s insertion of the concepts ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘critique’ into temporality. I have often noticed (how could one fail to notice?) the rhetorical gesture, hardly limited to philosophers, of asserting a ‘we’ who are ‘now’ concerned about such and such a thing, justifying the project undertaken. Foucault says,

Il me semble qu’on voit apparaître avec le texte de Kant la question du présent comme événement philosophique auquel appartient le philosophe qui en parle...[with Kant and Aufklärung]...on voit la philosophie...devenir la surface d’émergence de sa propre actualité discursive, actualité qu’elle interroge comme événement, comme n événement dont elle a à dire le sens, la laveur, la singularité philosophiques, et dans lequel elle a à trouver à la fois sa propre raison d’être et le fondement de ce qu’elle dit...Ce ne sera pas non plus la question de son appartenance à une communauté humaine en général, mais ce sera la question de son appartenance à un présent, si vous voulez son appartenance à un certain ‘nous’, à un ‘nous’ qui se rapporte, selon une étendue plus ou moins large, à un ensemble culturel caractéristique de sa propre actualité.

It seems to me that ‘now’ is indeed a meaningful concept only in terms of a ‘we’ to whom this contemporaneity would apply. This ‘we’ turns out generally to be imagined rather than concrete. Yet it seems clear that for Kant it was not at all imagined. There was a public with an institutional and sociological definition. Foucault mentions this, but doesn’t dwell on it. He has other concerns, and spends more time with the temporality than the social location of the ‘we.’ And no doubt this isn’t quite the meaning he would give to the word. In any case, I will continue reading, and see what he does with this as the course unfolds.

Perhaps two years ago, Judith Butler came to Duke and gave a talk about Foucault, his reading of Kant, and academic freedom. I wish I remember what she said, but at the time I hadn’t read the Foucault, and mostly found the talk to swerve uncomfortably between high theory and the possibility of talking about Israel on American college campuses. Perhaps some version of that material has been published, and I could look at it. With the texts she was discussing fresh before me, I’m sure I would get more out of it than a bad taste in my mouth.

In “Was ist Aufklärung,” Kant distinguishes between the private and public use of reason. The distinction famously appears ‘backwards’ (indeed, in the publication of Foucault’s 1978 lecture, there is a transcription of the Q&A in which he excitedly corrects the unfortunate M. Sylvian Zac, who mixes the two up). For Kant, it is one’s ‘private’ use of reason that can be curtailed, and the ‘public’ one that must be protected. I use reason in my private capacity when I pay my taxes, when I am ordered to, for instance, disperse, by a policeman. Foucault explains this by saying that here, the individual is a particular subject, a cog in the machine of state (the image of the machine is emphatically Kant’s). One is a universal subject using one’s reason in a ‘public’ capacity, when one is, as it were, on one’s own time. When one speaks as a scholar to the public of other scholars—this use of reason ought never be curtailed.

The reason that I wish I could remember what Judith Butler had to say about this is that—and although I have read this Kant essay before, I never remarked on this—for Kant, the professor is a functionary of the state, his lectures fulfill a social function and are therefore a private use of reason. Some of the relevant passages:

Der öffentliche Gebrauch seiner Vernunft muß jederzeit frei sein, und der allein kann Aufklärung unter Menschen zu Stande bringen ; der Privatgebrauch derselben aber darf öfters sehr enge eingeschränkt sein, ohne doch darum den Fortschritt der Aufklärung sonderlich zu hindern. Ich verstehe aber unter dem öffentlichen Gebrauche seiner eigenen Vernunft denjenigen, den jemand als Gelehrter von ihr vor dem ganzen Publikum der Leserwelt macht. Den Privatgebrauch nenne ich denjenigen, den er in einem gewissen ihm anvertrauten bürgerlichen Posten, oder Amte von seiner Vernunft machen darf.

And then, from the end of the same paragraph:

Der Gebrauch also, den ein angestellter Lehrer von seiner Vernunft vor seiner Gemeinde macht, ist bloß ein Privatgebrauch ; weil diese immer nur eine häusliche, obzwar noch so große, Versammlung ist ; und in Ansehung dessen ist er, als Priester, nicht frei, und darf es auch nicht sein, weil er einen fremden Auftrag ausrichtet. Dagegen als Gelehrter, der durch Schriften zum eigentlichen Publikum, nämlich der Welt, spricht, mithin der Geistliche im öffentlichen Gebrauche seiner Vernunft, genießt einer uneingeschränkten Freiheit, sich seiner eigenen Vernunft zu bedienen und in seiner eigenen Person zu sprechen. Denn daß die Vormünder des Volks (in geistlichen Dingen) selbst wieder unmündig sein sollen, ist eine Ungereimtheit, die auf Verewigung der Ungereimtheiten hinausläuft.

I find this interesting in the context of discussions about teaching and research, and the various ways in which it is supposed to be ideologically or intellectually good or bad to try to hold the two together. These issues are sharpened by current discussions about the potential for radical restructuring of academic institutions. Kant is, I think, unambiguous here. The professor at the lectern is fulfilling a social function (we’ll leave aside the contextual issue, crucial though it is, that Kant was actually an employee of the government, which is not always the case in the contemporary world of higher education), and therefore is not unconstrained in the exercise of their critical faculties. It is only when publishing as a scholar that a person (now it doesn’t matter, for Kant, if they are a professor or not) is able to dispose of their reason as they will. Interesting that, from a Kantian perspective, it may, now, for ‘us’ academics, matter. A professor’s publications are a major part of their qualifications for teaching (leave aside the rationale for that). I think the issue here is really that the ‘public,’ as Kant beheld it, no longer exists. A very different (late 19th century, rather than late 18th century) conception of the university is in place. Of course there is much to say about why this is, what benefits it has, and so forth. The ‘we’ for whom the academic writes is indeed often (though it should be insisted, not always) either quite restrained or entirely virtual (not to say imaginary). With only a few exceptions, academics do not publish for a public. It seems to me that this difference does not so much render the Kantian perspective meaningless as sharpen it, make it seem more alien and threatening.

Crowd psychology

Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules [1895] ends grandly by responding to a self-posed question, “Si nous envisageons dans leurs grandes lignes la genèse de la grandeur et de la décadence des civilisations qui ont prédédé la nôtre, que voyons-nous?” In the beginning, Le Bon says, at the ‘zero degree’ of civilization, there is only a “pousière d’hommes” (123) These are the very definition of barbarians, because nothing links them together. Over time, however, things change:

“L’identité de milieux, la répétition des croisements, le nécessités d’une vie commune agissent lentement. L’agglomération d’unités dissemblables commence à se fusionner et à se former une race, c’est-à-dire un agrégat possédant des caractères et des sentiments communs, que l’hérédité fixera progressivement. La foule est devenue un peuple...” (124)

After long struggles, this people, this race, will escape from barbarity. They will have, along the way, acquired an ideal—“peu importe la nature de cet idéal,” could be Rome, Athens, or Allah, Le Bon says. The possession of (or by) an ideal is the condition of escaping from barbarism.

“Entraînée par son rêve, la race acquerra successivement tout ce qui donne l’éclat, la force, et la grandeur. Elle sera foule encore sans doute à certaines heures, mais derrière les caractères mobiles et changeants des foules, se trouvera ce substratum solide, l’âme de la race, qui limite étroitement les oscillations d’un peuple et règle le hasard” (124).

After a period of striving for the ideal, degeneration sets in. The civilization grows, and when it stops growing, it declines. “Cette heure inévitable est toujours marquée par l’affaiblissement de l’idéal qui soutenait l’âme de la race.” Individuals have, as the level of the civilization grew, themselves become more strongly individual, “l’egoïsme colectif de la race est remplacé par un développement excessif de l’égoisme individuel...” What had been a bloc, a unity, becomes again simply a collection of individuals, holding on and held briefly together by old institutions and rituals that no longer hold any meaning. At this late stage, “divisés par leurs intérêts et leurs aspirations, ne sachant plus se gouverner, les hommes demandent à être dirigés dans leurs moindres actes, et...l’Etat exerce son influence absorbante.” The civilization has snuffed out the flame of its own ideal, and by consequence, “la race finit par perdre aussi son âme” (125). The civilization dissolves again into the dust of individuals out of which it was first constituted.

Usually, I believe, when Le Bon is discussed, one begins at the other end of this short book. The crowd is fickle, it is non-rational; it requires a leader who knows how to use simple images and forceful repetition to manipulate it. As I read Psychologie des foules, however, what most struck me (aside from the relatively low level of self-consistency) was the use of the concept of ‘race,’ and the basically skeptical (even anti-intellectual) approach to historical knowledge. It therefore seems to me that it is best to begin with the ‘philosophy of history’ in which Le Bon roots his vision of the crowd.

Indeed, every instance of a crowd is like a miniature demonstration of this philosophy of history. A crowd is most characterized by its trait of laying bare, or bringing to the surface, the ‘racial soul’ of those making up the crowd. The crowd, therefore, is a demonstration of the principle of history writ small. This resort to a single, unifying principle is typical of ‘pre-scientific’ sociology. The whole point of Durkheim’s intervention, it seems to me, is that there are different levels of phenomena, which therefore require different kinds of explanations. Le Bon’s mode of essentially psychological sociology is a typical target of Durkheim’s critique.

Gabriel Tarde, the other major French sociologist of the period, stands similarly accused by Durkheim. Not having yet read Tarde’s strictly sociological work, I am not in a position to say more, but it does seem to me that a comparison of Le Bon’s little essay with Tarde’s Monadology is instructive. In that bizarre text, Tarde is performing the typically modern philosophical operation (at least it is typically modern according to the Foucault I have been reading) of deriving a unifying principle or underlying direction from the thought of his contemporaries. For Tarde, this is the return in modern physics and social thought of the monad. It seems to me better to read Le Bon’s nearly-incoherent Psychologie less as a handbook for crowd manipulation, less as a sociological treatise, and more as an involuntary speaking of its own context. The book is a bundled and forcefully phrased translation (to avoid the word: reflection) of Le Bon’s anxieties, intellectual frameworks, and essential problematics.

Hence the pseudo-materialist psychology. Hence the (very 19th century) ‘spiritual’ biological racism (which, it should be noted, rests firmly on Lamarkian, rather than Darwinian evolutionary theory). Le Bon needs, somehow, to reconcile the ideal and the material. So the ideal becomes a force within the material world, manifested through collectivities and their basic underlying behavior patterns. The tautology of this kind of racialism is, to me, fascinating. People form a race because they live together and have similar experiences over a period of time. Then they have durably similar opinions and tendencies because they belong to the same race. As always, the boundaries of races are unclear, it seems at times as if ‘French’ is a race, but Le Bon refers more often to the ‘Latin’ race (which, by the by, carries in its soul a tendency to solve social problems through centralized governmental control working on abstract principles). In a similarly circular fashion, crowds are both the principle agents of historical change, and the reason that it is essentially impossible to have accurate knowledge of historical events. I wonder if those who have written on Le Bon have called this a ‘Heisenbergian’ theory of history.

There are other fascinating things about this book, but they all have to do with its rootedness in context, rather than any kind of reasoning or critical distance that it might achieve from this context. The back of the PUF edition I read calls it a ‘classique.’ It seems to me the opposite of a classic. I cannot imagine reading it without thinking about the late 19th century, the anxieties about democracy, socialism, decadence, the obsessive re-reading of the ‘pathologies’ of the Revolution, the racialism, the incredibly impoverished historical vision. The tensions I find in the text are interesting because of this context. For instance, Le Bon wants to be a relativist. Everyone knows, and no one admits, he says, that Homer is boring (77). But he can’t imagine (although some of his contemporaries could) a relativistic psychology. He can’t imagine a world without ‘ideals.’ So he ends up with a very thin, almost nihilistic relativism. All of which puts him quite squarely in his time, striking a pose of scientific observation of the various ‘pathologies’ of his era, while in fact participating fully in them.


[added: I have just finished reading Susanna Barrows' excellent *Distorting Mirrors* (1981), which I knew was largely about Le Bon, but which I'd only ever flipped through before. Highly recommended.]

Second manifeste

It is tempting, though I think wrong, to say that Alain Badiou represents the rear-guard of modernism, the last echo of a certain idealist response to modernity that was at full strength in the decade or two before the First World War. In what ways is this wrong? It is right in that Badiou’s basic position is to defend universality/eternity (the Idée) in a radically relativist, because scientistic, world. Hence his turn to Plato. There is also something that smacks of modernism in his attempt to fashion out of his metaphysics not exactly instructions for living in the world, but certainly guidelines for what is good and bad. It is wrong first because these sorts of parallels have got to be stable on both sides, and I am not sure how many people would agree with the definition of ‘modernism’ that I imply here. Second, Badiou is very much a philosopher, very much operating within the institutions and traditions of French academic philosophy. I don’t think, in the end, that this is especially modernist. All in all, though, the comparison is not without its utility.

Badiou has recently published several small books, all in the wake of, in support of, his second ‘big book,’ Logiques des mondes (2006). I have just finished one of these, his Second manifeste pour la philosophie (2009), a sequel to the manifeste published after his first ‘big book,’ Etre et evenement (1988). The purpose of these manifestos is to condense and popularize Badiou’s thinking, to introduce the reader to the project of the larger book. I feel, with a certain uneasiness, that the book is aimed almost exactly at me, since I know a little about Badiou already and am trying to decide if I should invest the (considerable) time and energy that would be required to tackle Logiques des mondes.

At the end of his Second manifeste, Badiou commits what we can call the fallacy of the classic. The reasoning goes broadly like this: ‘because I have what I feel to be authentic esthetic experiences of objects that were produced in conditions somehow distant from those in which I experience them, there must be something like eternal beauty.’ That is, if we still read the Iliad and the Odyssey, it is because they are monuments of the universal human spirit. There are more or less vulgar versions of this idea. It has several opposite numbers, going from those who reduce art to pure ‘cultural capital’ and snobbery (an untenable position) to those who root the appreciation of art in tradition (T.S. Eliot, for instance). It would probably be difficult to sort things out at the edges of these various arguments, and my impulse would be to pay more attention to the contextual/political force of each argument (but this gives away where I stand on it myself). My short response to the basic position is that it simply doesn’t follow. At any rate, Badiou’s example is cave-painting. He says that “nous comprenons la puissance artistique de peintures rupestres réalisées il y a 40 000 ans – il faut bien qu’elle soit transtemporelle...La théorie...doit expliquer comment des existences idéales, souvent matérialisées dans des objets, peuvent à la fois être créées en un point précis de l’espace-temps et détenir cette forme d’éternité” (144, see also 36). It seems to me clear enough that any plausible ‘eternity’ here is going to be much more banal than Badiou wants.

Of course, Badiou is arguing about a great deal more than the transtemporality of art. Badiou is interested in truths of four kinds (the famous art, love, politics, science), and also in ontology (mathematics) and phenomenology (logic), which can at least be wrong or not, although I don’t remember my reading of Being and Event well enough to be certain that Badiou believes they can be the scene of events, and therefore give rise to subjects and practices of fidelity. I think they cannot be, since they have to do with the conditions of being, appearance, and the subject, rather than with multiplicities and particular worlds (which it seems means the same thing as ‘situation’ did in his earlier work).

I have mentioned several times now the differences in emphasis and terminology between the work clustered around the earlier big book, and the newer. Badiou is quite clear about this: “En 1988, la question central de l’Etre et l’événement ai été celle de l’être des vérités, pensé dans le concept de multiplicité générique. Tandis qu’en 2006, dans Logiques des mondes, la question est devenue celle de leur apparaître, trouvé dans le concept de corps de vérité, ou de corps subjectivable” (13). In the later 1980s, Badiou felt that he had to defend the existence of philosophy itself against a cresting wave of post-Heideggerians. Now, he says, the problem is not that philosophy is dying, but that it is too present, that it is vulgarized and instrumentalized. Then, Derrida was an opponent, more recently he has been a friend. The 1988 book arrived at ontology through mathematics. The 2006 one arrives at appearance through logic. Certainly, in 1988, Badiou had presented us with a general discussion of the practice of fidelity to an event, and the relation of this fidelity to a situation. Here, he says, the central concept is the body [corps] of the subject to a truth.

Although some interesting material is presented in the earlier chapters of this second manifesto about Badiou’s idea of appearance, I would prefer very much there to have the fully fleshed out version in Logiques. An outline may at least be given, however, of chapters 6 and 7, treating Incorporation and Subjectivation.

“Nous supposons la survenue d’un événement” (97). The event is outside temporality in the sense that it has always either not yet or already occurred. Indeed, generally it has already occurred, since events are by their very nature unpredictable, outside of prediction—so perhaps it would be best to say that either an event has not yet occurred, or the event has already occurred. The immediate indication of this event, that is, of this instantaneous brush with the void, is called an “énoncé primordial.” Thus, “initié par l’énoncé primordial, se forme dans le monde un nouveau corps qui sera le corps de vérité, ou corps subjectivable” (99). This body does exist (is a multiple) as the bearer of the truth of the event in the world (or its trace), and so other multiples are incorporated within it. Badiou says, “s’incorporer au devenir d’une vérité, c’est rapporter au corps qui la support tout ce qui, en vous, est d’intensité comparable à ce qui autorise que vous vous identifiiez à l’énoncé primordial, ce stigmate de l’événement d’où le corps provient.”

It is possible to take three different positions vis-à-vis this body of truth. “La position prise au regard de l’existence de ce corps est le réel, la matérialité de la position prise au regard de l’événement” (105). The first, the position of fidelity, is to be incorporated into the body. The faithful subject accepts the radical innovation of the event, and transcends (not Badiou’s use of this word) itself through this incorporation. Then there is the position of indifference, the simply reactive position. Finally, there is the position of “obscurantisme” (106), which is radically opposed to the event, and attempts to eradicate it. Badiou’s example here is political. The Event is the Bolshevik Revolution. The position of fidelity is evidently that of the communist militant. The advantage of this example is precisely, it seems to me, that it admits how fraught the problem of fidelity really is. What does it mean to be faithful to the event in this case? Clearly not an easy thing to say, yet Badiou thinks it is, for all that, still meaningful. The reactive position in the same example is the new social welfare state (the New Deal, for instance), that recognizes the innovation of the event, but does not entirely accept it, attempting to react and ‘manage’ it (in this case, by offering certain political and social concessions without allowing deeper changes). Finally, the obscurantist position is fascism.

It is interesting, and I think has been pointed out before, that Badiou in a sense adopts Ernst Nolte’s revisionist argument that the Nazis were something like the fault of the Communists. For Badiou, the obscurantists take on the trappings of genuine revolution (that is, of fidelity to an event) because this is necessary in order to marshal the forces required to contest the genuine body of truth. We should note that this suggests fascism is to be thought as essentially an enormous dishonesty, rather than an ideology or religious fanaticism. It is possible to distinguish, Badiou says, between obscurantist non-events and real events in that the first are substantial rather than genuinely evental. Communists practice fidelity to a moment of rupture, to the event of 1917, while Nazis practice fidelity to the non-event, the materiality, of the German Volk. We might extend this into non-political examples: a certain kind of art would practice fidelity to a break or innovation as a logic, rather than as a body of work, attempting to practice the spirit rather than the letter of a text.

I was left, at the end of this little text, with the no doubt illegitimate question, why? Why should an individual practice fidelity to an event? Why go through the dangerous and perhaps traumatic incorporation it requires? It has been suggested to me that anyone who puts forward a political program and claims to have a good reason why any given individual should commit themselves to it is at base dishonest. There is no reason, exactly, for any particular person to do a particular thing; there are only conditions and chances, there is only our throwness in the world and the commitments we undertake here. It is dishonest to say that there is a reason for this kind of thing beyond our impulse (not, I think, our desire) toward it. So I am a bit uncomfortable with the hints Badiou gives of why he things this is a good idea. Essentially, it is the old desire to be more than one ‘is,’ to go beyond one’s self. Badiou puts it this way both regarding the militant (103) and the lover (114). I am unhappy with the idea that it is basically a desire to inject meaning into a meaningless life that should propel a person (in Badiou’s system) into incorporation into the body of a truth. I suppose the answer would be that it will always be difficult to distinguish a genuine fidelity to an event from a false fidelity to the substantial practice called ‘fidelity to an event.’ This seems overly psychological. The question is perhaps enough to get me to buy and throw myself at the larger Logiques.

Gide and complicity

Last night, when I finished reading André Gide’s Straight is the Gate (in translation), I did not want to write about it. I read quickly through the book to the end, because, in fact, the highly literary, over-wrought, lightly incestuous love affair between childhood companions Jérome and Alissa is compelling. Emotional suspense and predictable inevitability are combined in what I found to be a satisfying way. The affair is carried out largely at a distance, with a few difficult physical meetings. (Various references that I don’t entirely get are made to Héloise and Abelard—one of the characters is names ‘Abel,’ ect...). The two lovers are connected intellectually, emotionally, perhaps, depending on what is meant by this, spiritually. Jérome narrates, but we are given substantial quantities of Alissa’s letters to him. I imagine the novel is useful for people working on epistolarity, idealism, and of course gender—both from a queer studies perspective and from a feminist one.

So why didn’t I want to write about it at all? Why did I push it away in disgust? Because the affair between Alissa and Jérome is enormously self-centered and ultimately cruel. Jérome is so radically (one wants to say, pointlessly) obsessed with Alissa, that he does not learn until relatively late that Alissa’s sister, Juliette, is very much in love with him. But he has already made his choice. Alissa, for a variety of reasons, is unable to ‘give herself’ to Jérome. They love one another from a distance, through letters and in their imaginations. It is torture for both. A number of psychologically and culturally interesting consequences flow from this for the two characters. Juliette eventually decides to marry someone else—someone below her—but is able to be something like happy with him. She adjusts herself to her situation, while Alissa and Jérome are so caught up in the (I think we can say) ideality of their mutual love that they end up destroying themselves for it—Alissa literally, and Jérome, we get the sense, has used up that part of his life. But one does not feel at all sorry for Jérome, he is almost the villain of the story. I would want to go back and look at things more carefully, but it seems to me that his over-riding desire deprives Alissa of the selfhood that it seems she should otherwise have had. We might say that his love demanded that she be a certain person, and in attempting to assert a personhood independent of his, she ceased to be a person at all. Her relative culpability, and Gide’s own interpretation of all this, would be interesting to discuss.

Worst—and this is why I now want to record my reaction—the reader is ultimately complicit in this destructive self-absorption. At the end of the novel, there is a scene with Juliette and Jérome, now both older, he a confirmed bachelor, she a bourgeois mother. Alissa is dead—that quintessentially 19th century disease of idealism gave rise to some obscure physical ailment, causing her to wither away into pure essence. Jérome confirms, to Juliette, that he will always love Alissa—Juliette weeps. Her whole life has been less than it should have been—the pointlessness of Jérome’s love for Alissa is so manifest that I don’t think it can be called tragic. The two lovers have, in the name of their ideal love, been radically cruel to this third person. We, as readers, have assisted at, helped to perform, consummated this human cruelty in the service of a morbid literary sensibility.

Grundlegung II

Part of the purpose of writing relatively immediate responses to what I have read—and then putting this writing on the internet, whence it cannot really be ‘taken back’—is to watch myself trip over or knock my head against various elements of the conceptual architecture of complex texts that I have not, at first, noticed. On this occasion, I’ve got to say that I am pleased to find one of my major concerns addressed in the very first sentence of the second chapter of the Groundwork; or, it would be better to say, one of my most hasty misreadings corrected.

I believe that, if pressed, I could mostly explain the content of the transition from popular moral philosophy to the metaphysics of morals. The third and last section, in which we move from metaphysics to critique, makes sense to me more in pieces than as a movement. (Although I retain enough that I should perhaps not say that I can ‘explain’ the second chapter, since, “we can explain nothing but what we can reduce to laws the object of which can be given in some possible experience.” So, perhaps I could paraphrase?) I believe, but I will not demonstrate. Instead, I want to copy out several passages that seem, to me, crucial.

The first is from page 24, in the second chapter. I've lost the italics here, but I'm not sure I want to go and put them back in by hand.

Everything in nature works in accordance with laws. Only a rational being has the capacity to act in accordance with the representation of laws, that is, in accordance with principles, or has a will. Since reason is required for the derivation of actions from laws, the will is nothing other than practical reason. If reason infallibly determines the will, the actions of such a being that are cognized as objectively necessary are also subjectively necessary, that is, the will is a capacity to choose only that which reason independently of inclination cognizes as practically necessary, that is, as good. However, if reason solely by itself does not adequately determine the will; if the will is exposed also to subjective conditions (certain incentives) that are not always in accord with the objective ones; in a word, if the will is not in itself completely in conformity with reason (as is actually the case in human beings), then actions that are cognized as objectively necessary are subjectively contingent, and the determination of such a will in conformity with objective laws is necessitation: that is to say, the relation of objective laws to a will that is not thoroughly good is represented as the determination of the ill of a rational being through grounds of reason, indeed, but grounds to which this will is not by its nature necessarily obedient.

The second passage is from page 58 of the third chapter. It is, I think, a recapitulation on a different level, or from a different perspective, of the same ideas, or the same problem. Both dance around the subject/object division, though, we might say, they’re doing different dances. Perhaps it’s the same dance to two different songs? Though, as I say this, I begin to think that dance is altogether the wrong metaphor.

A rational being counts himself, as intelligence, as belonging to the world of understanding, and only as an efficient cause belonging to this does he call his causality a will. On the other side he is also conscious of himself as a part of the world of sense, in which his actions are found as mere appearances of that causality; but their possibility from that causality of which we are not cognizant cannot be seen; instead, those actions as belonging to the world of sense must be regarded as determined by their appearances, namely desires and inclinations. All my actions as only a member of the world of understanding would therefore conform perfection with the principle of autonomy of the pure will; as only a part of the world of sense they would have to be taken to conform wholly to the natural law of desires and inclinations, hence to the heteronomy of nature. (The former would rest on the supreme principle of morality, the latter on that of happiness.) But because the world of understanding contains the ground of the world of sense and so too of its laws, and is therefore immediately lawgiving with respect to my will (which belongs wholly to the world of understanding) and must accordingly also be thought as such, it follows that I shall cognize myself as intelligence, though on the other side as a being belonging to the world of sense, as nevertheless subject to the law of the world of understanding, that is, of reason, which contains in the idea of freedom the law of the world of understanding, and thus cognize myself as subject to the autonomy of the will; consequently the laws of the world of understanding must be regarded as imperatives for me, and actions in conformity with these as duties.

Now, I understand that Kant has brought together, the realms of freedom and necessity. Yet, perhaps because of the later 19th century stuff I have been reading (which is very much still trying to answer this question of human will and scientific determinism), I want to know more about Kant’s idea of constraint. Constraint, for a variety of reasons, turns out to be an important concept for Durkheim, who was certainly influenced by some kind of Kantianism (although I don’t understand the nature of this yet). I think that Kant would respond to most of the late 19th century French debates I have read by simply saying that they have missed the point. Freedom is not a concept that can be applied in the empirical realm. It is a condition of possibility of rationality, and so its existence can, in a sense, be deduced from that of rationality. Attached as it is to intellection, it applies absolutely but only in the world of general ideas, not specific things. In the empirical world, on the other hand, determinism reigns. The force of the last pages of the text, as I understood them, was to argue that this freedom and this determinism go together, somehow imply one another (or, perhaps, only our capacity to understand anything at all of the empirical world implies the existence of rationality, and thus freedom—I don’t know that rationality implies the existence of the empirical).

However, Kant seems to be perfectly happy to say that certain things ‘cannot be thought.’ This is perhaps a simple rhetorical device. Maybe it means only that certain things make no sense. But even if this is the case, I had understood Kant’s mapping of the active/passive distinction onto the intellect/material one to imply the distinction that intellect experiences no resistance, or, put another way, can never be the passive recipient of sensations, for instance of failure or powerlessness. Maybe I’m getting caught in a metaphor here. At any rate, I’d like to know more about how Kant explains the differences between logical impossibility (in its various empiricized shades), and physical impossibility. Is this, again, an issue of appearance? The result of our incapacity, in fact, to access a reason pure from traces of the empirical?

I will mention only briefly: the appearance of law. It is, clearly, crucial for Kant that practical rationality means the ability (necessity) of representing law to one’s self. I find this fascinating. Law is always representation, is it not? Is this perhaps why law and freedom are linked? They both have the same status as somehow essentially representations—in their nature outside of the empirical? (or, that they have both the same relation to the empirical?)

I can’t possibly mention all the things that I’d like to tease further out of these pages. The Kingdom of Ends: a fascinating utopian construction. I understand that it has received political interpretations. I’m not sure that this makes any sense.

Finally, as I said in the first post, I want badly to strip Kant’s reasoning of the will. I wonder at the source of this desire of mine. After the first chapter I thought it might be possible, briefly, that the will was introduced in order that the human will (subjective) might be contrasted with the divine one (objective in its nature, and therefore not subject to an ‘ought’). But by this point I must admit that the very idea of willing something is too important, you can’t, I think, have a Kantian categorical imperative without some kind of will—and this, maybe, because you need representations, gaps, between is and ought. And as I say this, I think, I’ve got it backwards, all these gaps are there because the will is what needs to be explained and controlled and corralled. Probably this is necessary for Kant for the same reasons that make me uncomfortable about discussing the will at all.

Grundlegung

Some texts are impossible to approach without contamination. This is certainly the case with anything Kant has written. Indeed, I have read various pieces of Kant’s writing in the past (though not, I think this one). Probably I had to read “What is Enlightenment” three or four times. I remember reading “Religion within the limits of reason alone” in college. So now, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; I know almost nothing of what is said about this particular text, which I suppose is the most I can ask for. I’m reading the Gregor translation in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series. Haven’t looked at the introduction yet, and probably won’t. I also have one of those little yellow Reclam editions—but I’m only referring to it occasionally. I was sorely tempted to pause and write a bit after finishing only the preface, but I pushed on through the first part as well. Probably I should have written after the preface, and then again after the first chapter.

The first page of the preface to the Groundwork lays down, or acknowledges, various divisions within philosophy. Kant accepts the Greek division of physics, ethics, and logic. All rational cognition, he then says, may be either material—that is concerned with a particular object—or formal—that is concerned with the rules of thinking about objects in general. Now, a few pages later on, still in the preface, Kant distinguishes between Philosophie and Vernunfterkenntnis. The difference between them is that philosophy “sets forth in separate sciences what the latter comprehends only mixed together.” So we must take Kant here to be expressing a fundamental fact about the nature of reality—although the objects of rational cognition are always either material or formal, cognition becomes philosophy just when it is able to distinguish between them.

Philosophy of form is logic. Philosophy of material may treat either nature (in which case it is called physics) or freedom (in which case it is called ethics).

Logic can only be formal. It can have no material (or experiential) elements whatsoever. I notice here that Kant equates material with experience. Is it therefore impossible to have logical experiences? No doubt my experience of logic is simply not a part of the philosophy of logic.

Then, “natural as well as moral philosophy can each have its empirical part, since the former must determine laws of nature as an object of experience, the latter, laws of the human being’s will insofar as it is affected by nature – the first as laws in accordance with which everything happens, the second as laws in accordance with which everything ought to happen, while still taking into account the conditions under which it very often does not happen.” Next Kant says that philosophy itself can be either based on experience (empirical) or based on a priori principles (metaphysics). So, again, presumably the passage from rational cognition to philosophy is that from confused thinking about the form and content, together, to the clear demarcation between empirical and metaphysical parts of given ‘thoughts.’

Kant insists on this division. There is a paragraph on the philosophical division of labor, in which it is suggested that, just as in the various trades specialization is more efficient than dilettantism (not Kant’s words), so it must be in philosophy also. But although there may be such advantages, Kant ultimately ascribes to “the nature of science” the necessity “that the empirical part always be carefully separated from the rational part.”

I have tried to pay such careful attention to these various divisions and “cleansings” of empirical from metaphysical because it seems to me that Kant immediately—deliberately—confuses things substantially. Indeed, that the whole point of the pages I have so far read seem to me to be not so much about the careful distinction between rational and empirical, but rather about finding the precise point at which the two meet. I suppose that this point cannot be established without, first, or at the same time, a careful delineation of the separate realms.

Perhaps I am misreading (and over reading) rather radically, but Kant poses the question thus: “is it not thought to be of the utmost necessity to work out for once a pure moral philosophy, completely cleansed of everything that may be only empirical and that belongs to anthropology? For, that there must be such a philosophy is clear of itself from the common idea of duty, and of moral laws. Everyone must grant that a law, if it is to hold morally, that is, as a ground of an obligation, must carry with it absolute necessity...”

For proof of the existence if a moral philosophy completely pure of empirical elements, Kant turns to experience, to empirical fact. I suppose that proof of existence of metaphysics may be empirical without giving an empirical sheen to this metaphysics? I’m not sure that it can be.

Later in the same paragraph, Kant says, “the ground of obligation here must not be sought in the nature of the human being or in the circumstances of the world in which he is places, but a priori simply in the concepts of pure reason.” But this obligation has been attested precisely by experience, by the “common idea of duty.” Yet this is how we arrive at what is both a “clue and supreme norm” for our actions [“Leitfaden une oberste Norm”—is ‘clue’ really the best translation for Leitfaden? The phrase seems oddly unbalanced in English]. That is, of course, that our particular acts are to be undertaken not in view of any specific law or guideline, but rather, somehow, of law in the abstract. This will be formulated toward the end of part one as “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”

I have skipped over almost the whole argument of the first chapter. Kant discusses the goodness of the good will, its relation to duty and law. The point here, as the chapter title suggests, is to move from practical morality to a philosophy of morals. Kant is obliged to destroy the idea that happiness is in any sense the goal of life. Happiness is reduced as a concept to something like survival, and the simple existence of reason is brought forward as sufficient evidence that God intended for us something other than brute existence. Ultimately, Kant is able to abstract the particular instances of law from the idea of law, and arrive at the moral principle of principle for its own sake. I found particularly interesting the following passage,

Nothing other than the representation of the law in itself, which can of course occur only in a rational being, insofar as it and not the hoped-for effect is the determining ground of the will, can constitute the preeminent good we call moral, which is already present in the person himself who acts in accordance with this representation and need not wait upon the effect of his action.

Then the long footnote on respect attached to this passage is amazing, from which, “Respect is properly the representation of a worth that infringes upon my self-love...The object of respect is therefore simply the law, and indeed the law that we impose upon ourselves and yet as necessary in itself...Any respect for a person is properly only respect for the law (of integrity and so forth) of which he gives us an example.” This seems to me exactly the sort of passage that one would want to read aggressively in a contemporary context. It is also just the sort of passage that makes me think maybe there is something ‘Kantian’ about Lacanian ethics, or that at any rate it would be more interesting to read Lacan’s ethical writings than Zizek had so far convinced me would be the case.

Finally, although of course I have been told about the Kantian categorical imperative in the past, I do not think that I had quite grasped (not that I have now) the significance of the universalism implicit in it. Universalism, or at least a will to universalism, is for Kant a necessary condition for morality as such. I think that in the past, in as much as I’d given it much thought, I had been caught up in what are basically utilitarian and ‘modernist’ objections. I was confounding good outcomes with morality, partly on the basis of a deep suspicion about the possibility of intention—a deep suspicion that the word doesn’t mean anything at all. Although I still have my uncertainties, it seems to me now that the whole discussion of the will is actually of secondary importance. The categorical imperative (at which we arrive through duty and law), functions primarily as a point of convergence, or interference, between the realm of pure moral philosophy and that of practical activity. In a way this is a banal conclusion to have arrived at: from the very beginning, the whole point was to provide a foundation for practical morals in the pure rationality. Yet it isn’t clear that such a foundation need necessarily take the shape of what is essentially a transgression of disciplinary boundaries.

the division of labor

I want to ask, at the end of De la division du travail social, how Durkheim can be so insightful and open minded about some things, and so committed to other obvious falsehoods? Durkheim asserts, for instance, that the individual is not the substratum of society, but is rather the result of the development of society. This is a rather radical thing to say, and I think especially so around 1890. Yet he also has a remarkably blinkered faith—without basis in evidence, as far as I can tell—that everyone has a ‘place’ in society, that it could be possible for each individual to be ‘fitted’ with a task that adequately fits their personal merits and abilities. Now, in fact, it is possible that he believes the second of these opinions is tenable exactly because of the first—that is, since society has such power in molding its organs (for this is what we individuals are), then of course we will all be shaped to fit our purpose, and ultimately no one will be out of place. I find this a little chilling--it makes me think of Ranciere's classifications of denials of the political from Dis-agreement. But first, what is Durkheim’s broad argument?

As groups of individual humans become larger (in his terms, grow in volume and density) the structure of these groups necessarily changes. At first, societies were segmented, built of a certain number of similar units (families, clans...). This kind of society is strongly conscious of itself and is held together by mechanical solidarity, or similitude (people are mostly the same). As societies grow, and become organized, the division of labor becomes increasingly necessary. The different parts of society become less and less like one another—their form is shaped by their function. A modern society is characterized by organic solidarity, which is solidarity born of mutual dependence. Society is less conscious of itself as such, and individuals, since they are more different from one another, are more conscious of themselves.

A great many consequences flow from this basic understanding of the nature of societies and their modernity. In particular, Durkheim has a clear vision for the primacy of the educational establishment and the government in shaping society. Some active directing agent, he believes, must make certain that the division of labor is not distorted in any serious way, and that each individual, newly opened up to the world, knows just enough about it (and not too much) to feel the dignity of their position as an organ—to feel that they are a part, and only a part, of a larger whole on which they depend, but which also depends on them. Indeed, this is the basis of the morality that Durkheim derives from the nature of society. He says,

La morale des sociétés organisées [as opposed to segmented societies] ...ne suspend pas notre activité à des fins qui ne nous touchent pas directement; elle ne fait pas de nous les serviteurs de puissances idéales et d’une tout autre nature que la nôtre, qui suivent leurs voies propres sans se préoccuper des intérêts des hommes. Elle nous demande seulement d’être tendres pour nos semblables et d’être justes, de bien remplir notre tâche, de travailler à ce que chacun soit appelé à fonction qu’il peut le mieux remplir, et reçoive le juste prix de ses efforts. Les règles qui la constituent n’nt pas une force contraignante qui étouffe le libre examen; mais parce qu’elles sont davantage faites pour nous et, dans un certain sens, par nous, nous sommes plus libres vis-à-vis d’elles. (404)

This is, I must admit, a clear articulation of another kind of liberalism. Not only does the individual ultimately depend on society, but the very idea of individual freedom is emergent from its structure. Yet this understanding of society, I think paradoxically because it is so indebted to ‘sociological relativism,’ is deeply committed to the idea, evoked here, of the ‘juste prix.’ I was surprised to see, near the end of this book, Durkheim cite Karl Marx on how the division of labor cuts down on time wasted in production and, as it were, tightens up the pores of the day (388). Without citing Marx, but I think clearly drawing on him, Durkheim also endorses a version of the labor theory of value—each thing has a value determined socially by the amount of useful labor contained within it. For Marx, this is the necessary starting point for the peculiar nature of labor-power as a commodity that is sold for its true value, and yet produces more value than went into it. For Durkheim, the same observation simply serves as a basis for asserting that since there is a correct price (however impossible to actually calculate), there are just contracts.

I have read that Durkheim and Bergson are in a sense the two master thinkers of this period. Certainly, I had the intense feeling reading De la division... that this was the beginning of a conversation I had heard before. For instance, Durkheim discusses law at length in the early parts of the book, as a way of grasping the structure of social consciousness. He argues, essentially, that certain forms of punishment have less to do with the crime and more to do with affirming the reality of the social bond. It is easy to see how one could begin there, and end with the idea—which I, perhaps incorrectly, associated with Bataille and others—that crime is in a sense necessary and constitutive of the psychic reality of society. Crime is produced by society in order that punishment of it may re-enforce collective consciousness.

Given, then, that Durkheim is foundational, I want very much to better understand the form of his relativism. This is his first book, does he retain the heavy, guiding, organic metaphor? I want to know more about his reading of Marx (it is somewhat remarkable that he mentions him at all, is it the German connection to people like Schmoller?)—how, specifically, does he react to the various increasingly assertive worker’s movements of the 1890s? There is something quite radical about attempting to treat the proletariat and ‘white collar’ workers as, essentially, the same, which is what he does. It also creates the potential for a radical under-evaluation of the claims of the industrial laboring population, and blindness to economic forces more generally.