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.