Kant: Anthropology, Imagination, Freedom 2020035046, 2020035047, 9780367620295, 9781003107590

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Pragmatic Anthropology with Imaginative Intent
1 Freedom as Release from Self-Incurred Tutelage
2 Anthropological Investigations: Difficult Selves
3 The Critique of Impure Reason: The Schematic Imagination
4 The Harmony and Dissonance of the Beautiful and the Sublime
5 Kant’s Political-Cosmopolitan Notion of Freedom: Freedom, Society and Politics in the Context of Unsociable Sociability
6 Creating Sociable Sociability: Practical Imagining
7 Difficult Selves, Imagination and Blurred Sketches of Freedom
References
Index

Citation preview

Kant: Anthropology, Imagination, Freedom

In a new reading of Immanuel Kant’s work, this book interrogates his notions of the imagination and anthropology, identifying these – rather than the problem of reason – as the two central pivoting orientations of his work. Such an approach allows a more complex understanding of his critical-philosophical programme to emerge, which includes his accounts of reason, politics and freedom as well as subjectivity and intersubjectivity, or sociabilities. Examining Kant’s theorisation of the complexity of our phenomenological existence, the author explores his transcendental move that includes reason and understanding whilst emphasising the importance of the faculty of the imagination to undergird both, before moving to consider Kant’s pluralised, transcendental notion of freedom. This outstanding book will appeal to scholars with interests in philosophy, politics, anthropology and sociology, working on questions of imagination, reason, subjectivities and human freedom. John Rundell is Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at La Trobe University and Principal Honorary (Social Theory) in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research focusses on the problems of the imagination, creativity and modernity. He is the author of Imaginaries of Modernity: Politics, Cultures, Tensions and Origins of Modernity: The Origins of Modern Social Theory from Kant to Hegel to Marx; the editor of Aesthetics and Modernity: Essays by Agnes Heller, and the co-editor of Critical Theories and the Budapest School; Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity; Classical Readings on Culture and Civilization; Blurred Boundaries: Migration, Ethnicity, Citizenship; Critical Theory After Habermas: Encounters and Departures; Contemporary Perspectives in Social and Critical Philosophy; Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory; and Between Totalitarianism and Postmodernity.

Morality, Society and Culture Series Editors John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University; and Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Peter Murphy is Adjunct Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University and Adjunct Professor in the Cairns Institute at James Cook University.

The Morality, Society and Culture series publishes rigorous scholarly work exploring how moral questioning and action have been transformed in contemporary social relationships and by contemporary culture. Can cultural texts such as films, television broadcasts and art be vehicles for moral demands? Do we learn what it means to be ‘good’ from soap opera and advertising? If cultural texts are forms of moral mimesis, then are the standards of the ‘right’ and ‘good’ dependent on external considerations of cultural visibility and social relevance – and if so, how are some moral issues made visible or invisible, relevant or irrelevant? Now that morality has become cultural and is amenable to sociological and cultural study as well as philosophical investigation, this series explores how and to what effect moral questioning, action and debate are inextricably entwined with contemporary social and cultural forms, texts and institutions. The books in this series offer new understandings of the connection of morality, society and culture, analyse key contemporary events, and establish new methodologies. Titles in this series On Guilt The Force Shaping Character, History, and Culture John Carroll History of the Present The Contemporary and its Culture David Roberts Kant: Anthropology, Imagination, Freedom John Rundell

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Morality-Society-and-Culture/book-series/ASHSER1429

Kant: Anthropology, Imagination, Freedom

John Rundell

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 John Rundell The right of John Rundell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rundell, John F., author. Title: Kant: anthropology, imagination, freedom / John Rundell. Description: 1 Edition. | New York: Routledge, 2020. | Series: Morality, society and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020035046 (print) | LCCN 2020035047 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367620295 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003107590 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Imagination (Philosophy) | Reason. | Subjectivity. | Liberty. | Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804—Political and social views. Classification: LCC BH301.I53 R86 2020 (print) | LCC BH301.I53 (ebook) | DDC 193—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035046 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035047 ISBN: 9780367620295 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003107590 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

This book is dedicated to the memory of Agnes Heller (1929–2019)

‘Our age is […] the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit.’ Kant, ‘Preface’ First Edition, Critique of Pure Reason, Trans. Norman Kemp Smith (1978), 9 ‘A pure imagination, which conditions all a priori’ knowledge, is […] one of the fundamental faculties of the human soul.’ Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Trans. Norman Kemp Smith (1978), 146/A125

Contents

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction: a pragmatic anthropology with imaginative intent

1

1

Freedom as release from self-incurred tutelage

11

2

Anthropological investigations: difficult selves

21

3

The critique of impure reason: the schematic imagination

49

4

The harmony and dissonance of the beautiful and the sublime

78

5

Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion of freedom: freedom, society and politics in the context of unsociable sociability

107

6

Creating sociable sociability: practical imagining

137

7

Difficult selves, imagination and blurred sketches of freedom

158

References Index

169 179

Acknowledgments

I would especially like to thank Danielle Petherbridge for being such an engaged interlocutor throughout the process and her loving attention to the manuscript. I would like to thank Peter Murphy who read the manuscript and commented on Chapters 3 and 4, especially. His comments were especially helpful in honing my thoughts regarding the schematic imagination, the beautiful and the sublime. I would also like to thank Sergio Mariscal for his discussions and commentary on the manuscript as a whole. A summary of the argument of this book has been published as ‘Kant on the Imagination: Fanciful and Unruly, or “an Indispensable Dimension of the Human Soul”’, Critical Horizons, 2020, 21:2, 106–129. DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2020.1759281

Introduction A pragmatic anthropology with imaginative intent

Anthropology with imaginative intent This book interrogates Immanuel Kant’s work through his studies on anthropology and formulations of the imagination. Most studies on Kant’s work unsurprisingly begin and concentrate on the problem of reason as the core problem in his work. However, these studies minimise, ignore or dispatch altogether the problem of the imagination. This study, on the contrary, highlights this problem of the imagination. Along with his studies on anthropology I argue that these are the two central pivoting orientations of his work. Not only is this heterodox reading of Kant important in its own right, but it also enables a more complex understanding of his criticalphilosophical programme to emerge, which includes his accounts of reason, politics and freedom as well as subjectivity and intersubjectivity, or what will be referred to here as sociabilities. In the context of these two orientations, this current study is engaged in a triple task. The first task is to investigate the way in which Kant theorises the complexity of our phenomenological existence, which is an enduring pre-occupation throughout his work. This reading of his anthropological studies is accompanied by a second task – to investigate the way in which Kant posits an ‘I’ of the phenomenological subject, that is, capacities for understanding, reasoning and imagining. This second task emphasises the importance of the faculty of the imagination as the central, unacknowledged pivot around which his work revolves. The third task of the book is to explore Kant’s notion of freedom, which he simultaneously establishes on transcendental grounds and pluralises. The starting point for this three-fold task is Kant’s mobilising idea of Enlightenment as the release from self-incurred tutelage. This is his central and abiding concern. For Kant the claim to release ourselves from self-incurred tutelage is more than a political claim; it is a claim to be released from the weight of everyday or taken-for-granted knowledge and habits, religious belief and bad truths. Release from self-incurred tutelage is a release from the tyrannies of priests, parents, peers and professionals, demagogues and ideologues. For him, this is not simply a historical claim of the Enlightenment

2 Introduction nor a political one concerning the enlightened public sphere. It is an urgent call for freedom based in a critique of all areas of life – from the most cognitive, to the most political, to the most personal. This claim goes to the heart of who Kant thinks we can be as subjects and persons. The book begins with an investigation of Kant’s famous essay ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ before turning to his anthropological works, especially his Lectures on Anthropology in order to open onto his ruminations concerning the complexity of our phenomenological existence as corporeal, desiring and imagining beings. This turn to Kant’s anthropological works occurs because the freedom to act and become an end for oneself is difficult and less than straightforward for him. We remain difficult selves amongst other difficult selves, caught in a tension between our phenomenal and noumenal existences. In addition, Kant cannot avoid and indeed stumbles over the work of the imagination in his anthropological writings. Here Kant certainly has a view of the imagination as creative; but it is creatively wild, unruly and even fanciful. Yet there is another version of the imagination that is present, one that is productive and creative in a much more profound and extensive way. This view is internal to the core chapter in the book, Chapter 3, on reason and imagination in which the productive, synthesising imagination is the unacknowledged mobilising part of the Critique of Pure Reason. The reconstruction of the synthesising imagination sets the scene for the Critique of Judgment and Kant’s analyses of the beautiful, the sublime and judgements of taste. My analyses of the beautiful and the sublime occur in the light of Kant’s double focus on his notion of the productive imagination and his anthropological-phenomenological preoccupation with our very human condition. This double focus also has important ramifications for Kant’s practical philosophy, especially in relation to his investigations into our unsociable and sociable sociabilities – the topics of Chapters 5 and 6. Kant addresses our unsociable sociabilities from the vantage point of his critique of domination and the creation of republican politics, whilst he addresses the possibility of our sociable sociabilities from the vantage point of virtues or good conduct, of which friendship is the highest, for him. Let’s pursue these lines of enquiry a little more closely.

What can we create? As indicated, this study follows Kant’s own recommendation of an anthropological path. Kant’s anthropology of the subject could be termed an anthropology of practical reason within the possibilities and limits of our imagining and imperfect condition, and always in the context of unsociable and sociable sociability. To put it another way, his programme is a pragmatic anthropology with imaginative intent, which makes his project of practical reason, rather than pure reason, the centre of his work.1 The question of our

Introduction  3 capacity for freedom and judgement is the central issue that is pursued by Kant, especially with regard to the faculties of reason and as we shall see surprisingly, the imagination. In order to address the issues of imagination, freedom and reason in the context of our difficult, phenomenological existence Kant begins by making an anthropologically grounded distinction between nature and humankind in its forms of sociability. He also makes a parallel distinction between the world of sense, which is an empirical world that humans inhabit, and a supersensible world of human capacities, of making the social and empirical worlds understandable by categorising them. This double distinction flows throughout his work, especially his so-called critical period, that is the period after which he writes the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Critique of Judgment (1790, 1793), his ‘so-called’ historical and political essays, his works on Logic and his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798, 1800). For Kant, we do more than categorise and understand. In Kant’s version, human beings have faculties of understanding, reason and imagination through which conceptual resources (categories and concepts) are created that enable us to make sense of, ‘arrange’ and legislate our empirical worlds, irrespective of whether they are ones concerning nature, social arrangements, or even judgements of aesthetic taste. For Kant, in terms of our social arrangements, legislation is more than simply understanding. More profoundly it refers social arrangements and social actions that are normative, value creations and orientations that we must navigate. In order to investigate and ground what reason, thinking and freedom are Kant does not posit a unitary ‘I’ but a tripartite one with relations and tensions between its constitutive faculties, as well as tensions between it and our phenomenal, embodied existence. From the vantage point of our noumenal existence Kant posits and investigates a ‘tripartite’ constitutive ontology in the permanent context of our being in the world. For Kant, we are phenomenal beings with bodies, drives, habits, social lives and social realities. Yet we are also noumenal beings with the three faculties of reason, the understanding and imagination. These faculties, as Kant posits them, are transcendental, and although they exist in tandem, they are separate from one another and enable us to open beyond either an enclosed self-certainty or the phenomenologically contextualised everyday worlds of our habits, opinions and taken-for-granted orientations. If we follow Förster’s recent study on Kant’s work, especially his opus postumum the implication is that there are three possible interpretations of and directions out of Kant’s positing of a tripartite ‘I’ that occurs in parallel with the anthropological one.2 The first direction concerns the status of the faculty of reason itself (Förster); the second direction emphasises the temporal/existential/phenomenological dimensions of Kant’s work in which Husserl’s studies on Kant, Heidegger’s Being and Time and Merleau Ponty’s work on perception are seminal points where context and time, habit and

4 Introduction embodiment are important. There is, though, at least another third path out of Kant’s work that emphasises the faculty of the imagination, which both Heidegger’s and Castoriadis’ interpretations in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and The Imaginary Institution of Society, respectively, alert us to. It is the latter path that is followed here.3 As will be explored below the path that emphasises the imagination is a ‘pivot’ that is not posited in a Romantic form, but nonetheless gives to the imagination a creative power in its own right. As we shall see, Kant establishes this in the Critique of Pure Reason where he argues that the imagination is more than simply a conduit between the understanding and reason. For Kant, at least, the imagination is part and parcel of the process of a transcendental synthesis beyond empirical reference points, which makes it one of the fundamental faculties of the human soul. Yet, the imagination’s power is more than synthesis. The power of the faculty of the imagination lies ‘in representing in intuition an object that is not itself present’.4 In this sense, the faculty of the imagination creates neither simply fancies nor images, but schema, that is human creations that are our own products. For Kant, though, and crucially it is evident that we are imaginative beings, and not only cognitive, political or indeed aesthetic ones. To put it more strongly we imagine our way into freedoms from within and alongside the permanency of our phenomenologically contextualised lives. It is this capacity of imaginative life that provides the impulse, means and scope for the creation and cultivation of all of our freedoms, even when, for Kant, it is in tandem with the faculties of reason and understanding. It is the faculty of the imagination that is the fulcrum around which Kant’s work ultimately revolves and through which his notions and images of freedom emerge, as we will see in Chapter 3. This is especially the case in the context of his discussion of the productive, rather than reproductive, imagination and within this his ruminations on schematicism and what I will term the figurative or non-functional schematising imagination. Kant’s ruminations on the work of the imagination are the unfinished and unfinishable part of his work. However, Kant cannot but help returning to anthropological concerns, which run deeply and lastingly throughout his work as a whole. Again, it is worth following Kant closely in his reflections concerning the question of reason and his Critical Philosophy in his later Jäsche Logic that was prepared and published in 1800, some 13 years after the publication of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: ‘Metaphysics answers the first question, morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology, the fourth. Fundamentally, however, we could reckon all of this as anthropology because the first three questions relate to the last one’.5 Due to reason’s power and its limit Kant cannot but ask a fourth question that underpins his entire critical enterprise, notwithstanding his prevarication in the Canon of the Critique of Pure Reason, and interpretations that want to wish this aspect away.6 This fourth question – ‘what is humankind?’ – makes Kant’s critical philosophy, cosmopolitan or this-worldly. Here

Introduction  5 cosmopolitanism pertains to the human self-image that Kant constructs in wanting his human being to be orientated towards or learn to become – a critico-practical man or woman who thinks for him or herself and is an end in him or herself. In other words, Kant posits that every man or woman can become enlightened. One of the issues that Kant confronts is whether Enlightenment is a practice, a method, or the process of historical context, development, changefulness or a creation. In the Jäsche Logic Kant gives some hint or recommendation to his preferred position. Enlightenment is a practice and a method, to be sure carried out by philosophers, although for Kant all of us are in principle his type of philosopher. His type of philosopher: must be able to determine 1. the sources of human knowledge, 2. the extent of the possible and profitable use of all knowledge and finally 3. the limits of reason. The last is the most necessary, but also the hardest, yet the philodox [or dogmatic, self-certain arguer who believes in his own opinions JR] does not bother himself about it. To a philosopher two things chiefly pertain: (1) cultivation of talent and of skill, in order to use them for all sorts of ends. (2) Accomplishment in the use of all means towards any end desired. The two must be united; for without cognitions one will never become a philosopher, but cognitions alone will never constitute the philosopher either unless there is in addition a purposive combination of all cognitions and skills in a unity, and an insight into their agreement with the highest ends of human reason – freedom.7 However, this technical rendition of the professional philosopher, who should look more to the method of his or her philosophising, is not all that Kant has in mind for the enlightened human being. Quite the contrary. Even in the light of our cognitions Kant argues that ‘the fact that the human being can have an “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth … now he thinks himself’.8 Everyone, in principle, can become enlightened, that is, think for themselves, as far as Kant is concerned. For Kant, thinking for oneself also means thinking in relation to others. Kant takes his tripartite ‘I’ beyond a singularity by engaging in a constant reflection on the conditions of our relations with others, with our sociabilities. This makes us ‘plural’ both internally with ourselves and externally with others, and it is this plurality that Kant works with as he notices the tensions, paradoxes and the less than straight forward ways in which we construct our very human condition. But this capacity for thinking cognitively, critico-practically, and in matters of taste is what makes us human and gives to us our own end or purpose. As he goes on to say in The Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,

6 Introduction All cultural progress, by means of which the human being advances his education, has the goal of applying this acquired knowledge and skill for the world’s use. But the most important object in the world to which he can apply them is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. Therefore, to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’.9 For Kant the human task of becoming an end for him or herself is a pragmatic one – one that investigates the constitutive dimensions of ‘what he as a free-acting being makes of himself or can and should make of himself’.10 As will be argued in my reading of the Critique of Pure Reason we create and think our own freedoms through imaginative schemata – what Kant will go on to call blurred sketches – a key term for this book. In Kant’s hands, a blurred sketch is his attempt to capture the work of the imagination. More fully, a blurred sketch is both a creation of the productive imagination and an approximation on the way to an always inadequate concept, image or symbol that can never be fully articulated or filled out. In addition, whilst Kant transcendentally posits freedom through imaginative schemata, he also pluralises it. For Kant there are imaginative schemata or blurred sketches of freedom that become more than the usual ‘critical’ ones that refers to the freedom to think and argue in the public sphere. For Kant, There are also blurred sketches of freedom to cognitivise or create categories of the world with neither prejudice nor dogmatism; to make aesthetic judgements about matters of taste; to establish free republican government and free relations between republican nations as well as a hope for a ‘perpetual peace’, which includes the condition of cosmopolitanism; and to have good sociable relations with others.11 For Kant, each form of freedom is different in the context of our difficult selves. There are always tensions and interstices between these forms of freedom as there are between our phenomenological and noumenal existences. The tensions and interstices indicate for Kant, that we are impure, imperfect and unfinished beings. In summary, I argue that my reading of Kant’s work is mobilised through four aspects around which it coheres and coalesces. These four aspects are the anthropology of difficult selves, the productive-schematising imagination, unsociable or sociable sociability and creations of freedom. In the light of his formulations (really imaginings) of freedom and his this worldly or this sided anthropology we are all actors in this world, but foibled ones who can nonetheless, think, learn to make good judgements, good government and good conduct within the limits of reason alone.12 Kant’s work is such a seminal and enduring oeuvre to which one can return, again and again because there is always unfinished business: not only ‘an inexhaustible mine

Introduction  7 of suggestion’, but also inexhaustibly new and fresh insights, surprises and spaces for creative invention.13 We begin our journey, then with Kant’s notion of the freedom to think freely and critically – to release ourselves from self-incurred tutelage, before turning to his investigation into our very human condition with his departure point of unsociable sociability. We then turn to the freedoms to cognise, to create aesthetic forms and judgements, before finally investigating our capacity to establish politics as well as good relations with ourselves and one another, all with the recognition that we are difficult, imagining selves.

Notes 1 See also Alan W. Wood, ‘Kant and the Problem of Human Nature’, in Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, edited by Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 38–59. Wood argues there are four inter-related meanings that Kant gives to his pragmatic anthropology – it is based on free action as against be physiologically determined; that it is based on and produces knowledge of the world rather than scholastic knowledge; that this knowledge is useful technically and morally; and finally, prudentially. One can also add a fifth meaning that is related to each. Pragmatic anthropology is critical, and Kant’s aim is to provide grounds for critique as well as make his critical anthropology ‘useful’ and prudential for understanding and changing human affairs. Foucault’s works on Kant – both his early Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology and his later essays on Kant’s ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ have close affinities to this formulation of a pragmatic anthropology with critical intent. See his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, trans. Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs, Los Angeles, CA, Semiotext(e), 2007; Michel Foucault, ‘Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution’ Economy and Society, 15:1, 1986, 88–96; Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, New York, Pantheon, 1984, 32–50. 2 E. Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus Postumum, Harvard, MA, Harvard University Press, 2002. 3 See Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Enlarged Edition, trans. Richard Taft, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1997; Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. David Ames Curtis, Oxford, Polity Press, 1987. One can also ‘hermeneutically’ add that there is an insurmountable gulf between the author and the work. More specifically there are several interstices that involve the everydayness and context of the author, the ‘life’ of the work, the authorial origins of which we can never really know and the reception of a work once it begins to lead a life of its own. This hermeneutic sensibility also denotes a fourth response to and direction out of Kant’s work, which is historical hermeneutics, historicism and historical sociology from Shleiermacher, Dilthey to Max Weber, Gadamer and beyond. See also J. Rundell, ‘The Hermeneutic Imagination and Imaginary Creation: Ourselves, Others, Autonomy’ Divinatio, 8, 1998: 87–107. 4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London, The Macmillan Press, 1978, 165, B151, referred to below as the Norman Kemp Smith translation; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised with a Forward by Dennis J. Schmidt, Albany, State University New York Press, 2010; Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Oxford, Polity Press, 1987. This latter path is explored in my forthcoming longer study on the creative imaginary, entitled The Creative Imaginary: From Kant

8 Introduction to Castoriadis and Beyond. It can be suggested that from a historical perspective there are at least 12 formulations of the imagination that have emerged from Aristotle onwards. There are: (i) Imagination as the conduit between sensuousness and intellect; (ii) The Imagination as simply images; (iii) The imagination as ‘mirror’; (iv) The imagination as functionally internal to the organisation of the organism appropriate to its telos; (v) The imagination in relation to memory. We have imagination in order to have a sense of time and thus to remember things and events; (vi) Imagination as related to action where imaginative action is a form of oscillation and excitement that sets things in motion; the imagination as a motivator for future states; (vii) The imagination as providing material for the reason to work on; as allowing reason to explore hypotheses which themselves are products of the work of the imagination; (viii) The imagination as the ‘scene’ and the ‘space’ protean activity, instincts, unconscious, irrationality, untruth, fantasy; (ix) The imagination as both a response to stimulus and the creator of these (in the case of both vi and vii); (x) Imagination as the road into the real world, which through its creativity and mediation provides the basis for reason, for better or for worse; (xi) The imagination as creativity sui generis; (xii) The imagination as other-worldliness –khora, godliness, the devil. As we shall see throughout this book Kant is concerned with some but not all of these formulations of what he terms the faculty of the imagination. The fact that he accords the term ‘faculty of the imagination’ indicates that he gives it a pride of place amongst his anthropological formulations. As we will see from our ensuing discussions of the imagination, especially in Chapter 2, Kant seems to be primarily interested in the imagination as phantasy, as conduit, as association or creation or production. Kant confronts head-on competing ways to formulate the productive imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason. One of the most trenchant and recent critiques of the idea of the self-creating subject is articulated by Charles Taylor in his two later books, Sources of the Self, and especially A Secular Age. Taylor points to such aspects of human life as the inarticulability of love, the inarticulate void of grief that can be grasped neither linguistically nor even imaginatively, but only through reference to extended mysteries that refer to ‘something’ beyond the human world. I have discussed Taylor’s work in my Imaginaries of Modernity, London, Routledge, 2016, 210–230. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Harvard, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989; A Secular Age, Harvard, MA, Harvard University Press, 2007. See also J. M. Cocking, Imagination a Study in the History of Ideas, London, Routledge, 1991. 5 Kant, ‘The Jäsche Logic’, in Lectures on Logic, translation and edited by J. Michael Young, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, 538. Kant also reiterates the same three questions that he asks in the Critique of Pure Reason in ‘The Jäsche Logic’ before asking this fourth question. See also the earlier ‘1785/85 ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’ where these issues have already been broached by Kant. See ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, edited by Allen W. Wood and Robert B. Louden, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 335–509, and in this context, especially 343–346. The ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’ will be discussed along with Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View especially in Chapter 2. 6 I. Kant, ‘The Jäsche Logic’, 538, at §25. Kant’s series of separations that he makes between nature and humankind, the sensible and the supersensible, and between the faculties of understanding, reason and the imagination and his insistence of sociability (unsociable or otherwise) brings to the surface the way in which each is informed by a philosophical anthropology that is summed up in his four famous questions, three of which are asked in the second chapter of ‘The Transcendental Doctrine of Method’, that is, ‘The canon of pure reason’ in the Critique of Pure Reason. These three questions are:

Introduction  9 1 What can I know? 2 What ought I do? 3 What may I hope? (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Smith translation, 635, A805, B833) 4 It is worth following him at some length on the answer to these questions. As Kant states: The first question is merely speculative. We have, as I flatter myself, exhausted all of the possible answers to it, and at last have found the answer with which reason must perforce content itself, and with which, so long as it takes no account of the practical, it has good cause to be satisfied … The second question is purely practical. As such it can indeed come within the scope of pure reason, but even so is not transcendental but moral, and cannot therefore, in and by itself, form a proper subject for treatment in this Critique [of Pure Reason]. The third question – if I do what I ought to do, what may then I hope? – is at once practical and theoretical, in such fashion that the practical serves only as a clue that leads us to the answer to the theoretical question. For all hoping is directed to happiness and stands in the same relation to the practical and the law of morality as knowing and the law of nature to the theoretical knowledge of things. The former arrives finally at the conclusion that something is (which determines the ultimate possible end) because something out to happen; the latter, that something is (which operates as the supreme cause) because something happens. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Smith translation, 635–636, A805/B833-A806/B834) What is so striking about Kant’s answers to his own questions are the humbling caution and limitations that he places on reason. It is limited in the sense that it cannot address all matters pertaining to human existence, for example, the existence of God. In a choice between God, happiness and freedom, Kant chooses freedom. This choice and limitation, in Kant’s hands, however releases reason’s power, and makes the exploration and explanation of all human acts, including those that once belonged to either God or the Devil (good or evil), occur within the limits of reason alone. And for Kant, reason’s power is not about its analytic capacity – to form categories and tables as it is often assumed in contemporary analytic philosophy that concerns the logic of coming to decisions regarding truth claims. Rather, Kant posits reason’s power and limit as an internal capacity as a synthesiser – a transcendental faculty – that belongs to all of us, legislators and commoners, specialists and non-specialists alike, and constitutes our freedom. In other words, reason and freedom are universal in that they belong to all of us as members of the human species and provide the critical vantage point from which to make judgements, not simply of the truth or untruth (cognitions) of empirical conditions that belong to our natural world, but of freedoms or un-freedoms, good or evil acts that belong to our human one. In terms of the latter, reason both limits and expands our actions. It limits them by enabling acts of judgement or reflection concerning the content of our actions, and it expands our actions by increasing our freedoms, that is, by critiquing regimes of power and domination and expanding our freedoms beyond the limitations imposed by them. See also Manfred Kuehn, ‘Introduction’ to I. Kant, in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Manfred Kuehn, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, vii–xxix. 7 Kant, ‘The Jäsche Logic’, 538; freedom added – JR. 8 Kant, ‘The Jäsche Logic’, 538.

10 Introduction 9 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 3. 10 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 3. 11 As Kant says in The Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View it presents the human species not as evil, but as species of rational beings that strives among obstacles to rise out of evil in constant progress towards the good. In this its volition is generally good, but achievement is difficult because one cannot expect to reach the goal by the free agreement of individuals, but only by a progressive organization of citizens of the earth into and toward the species as a system that is cosmopolitically united. (238, §333) Kant’s second meaning of cosmopolitanism will also be discussed below. 12 Charles Taylor has given a fully developed critique of this-sided philosophical positions in his A Secular Age. See my discussion and critique of Taylor’s position in Imaginaries of Modernity, 210–230. 13 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, New York, Free Press, 39. Even though Whitehead is referring to Plato and states that all philosophy is a footnote to his work, one can argue that Kant also shares this mantle, at least with regard to modern and contemporary philosophy from the late eighteenth century onwards.

1

Freedom as release from self-incurred tutelage

The unsociable sociability of civilisation Kant contests and systematically addresses Rousseau’s ambitious and Jacobin notion of freedom, which is conceptually imbedded in the general will. Rousseau wishes to dissolve two of the conditions of modern society: its life of private self-interest which is usually associated with the market and organised at the expense of others, and a public life where opinion about politics is expressed with others in impersonal and dispassionate discussion. In Rousseau’s view, both are open to the permanent play of corrupting and non-virtuous forces. In The Social Contract especially Rousseau asserts that self-love and politics qua empathy and sympathy can only come together through the love of the common good, rather than through discussion and argument.1 Rousseau’s modern goal in The Social Contract at least is to create a new basis of identity beyond corruptibility and thus rescue freedom from egoistic interpretations and place it under a broader umbrella of the ‘common self’ or the ‘general will’. It is here that virtue and harmony come together in a politicised union. The Rousseauian ‘republique’ made real in some of the models of the French revolution symbolises a fusion of virtue, self, politics and nation, which causes the grey areas between each of them to disappear crucially including the ‘grey’ space of the public sphere. The result, for many commentators including Kant and Schiller, is a deeply problematic and re-sacralisation of politics, which is also equated with a claim to transparency.2 The ‘general will’ is exactly that – both sacred and transparent. There are no hidden corners. It is also demagogic. From Rousseau’s perspective representative democracy is partial, unvirtuous and opaque and cannot represent the general will in its totality. Only unmediated, participatory democracy can be virtuous and transparent, where the political citizen is both performer and spectator, taking his or her place in the public theatres and festivals of the political. Everybody represents themselves and everybody else, where everyone is on display to be judged in a relentless festival of what Foucault would later term in a slightly different context, perpetual surveillant self-governmentality.3 Moreover, in order for these public spectacles and festivals to be coherent and for the members of

12  Freedom as release from tutelage society to identify and participate in them they must be clearly defined and clearly laid out. They must have a catechism of belief that also indicates those who are corrupt and not yet harmonised. The catechism, rather than constitution, is created by the most virtuous of all, the new politicised intellectuals who are the ones with virtue, with judgement.4 Kant cannot accept Rousseau’s starting point of the distinction between the pre-civilisational, natural and uncorrupted state of human existence and the civilisational corrupted one that results in Rousseau’s almost post-civilisational version of virtuous transparency in the politically unmediated republic. Nor can he accept the mergent and impositional nature of human action that Rousseau posits through his own notion of the general will. Rather, in Kant’s view, we are always and already in civilisation, that is in society, and because of this we are always in and amongst other human beings – not always happily or freely; more often in conditions of unsociable sociability. For Kant, we are social creatures and not ones born of instinct or habit alone, but ones who can also act according to thought and judgement. The question he asks is: how does this thinking and judgement occur? In answering this question from the vantage point of unsociable sociability another dimension enters in Kant’s work in addition to that of the faculties of the understanding, reason and imagination that ground thinking and judgement – that of history. In order for Kant to theorise the unsociable sociability of our very human condition he must also simultaneously enquire into our political and thus historical condition. The ‘introduction’ of historical questions and themes in Kant’s work that post-dates The Critique of Pure Reason represents, as one commentator has noted, his ‘other Copernican revolution’.5 This other Copernican revolution helps to pinpoint a fundamental distinction within his critical philosophy; one that pertains to the principles of cognition through the faculty of the understanding, and the other that pertains to the problem of practical reason from the standpoint of its historico-cultural contextualisation. Kant’s second Copernican revolution enables him to make conjectures about human history and progress, conjectures which call on the work of the imagination and not only reason to propel them into life. Let’s turn to Kant’s image of unsociable sociability from the vantage point of his second Copernican revolution before turning to the question of Enlightenment as release from self-incurred tutelage. In an essay written in 1798 that also follows on from his 1786 ‘Conjectural Beginning of Human History’ Kant asks the question ‘Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?’ Whilst his answer is, unsurprisingly, affirmative, it is, nevertheless, also critical. As in the earlier 1786 essay Kant disavows both natural and theological histories of humankind. For him, the human world (which he distinguishes, according to first principles, from the natural world) is one of contingent social relations of unsociable sociability. Violence, cruelty and little evils are as much a part of the human condition as perpetual peace.6 The primary issue for Kant, then, is how human beings

Freedom as release from tutelage  13 live together in this permanent condition of unsociable sociability. This is the topic of his ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’. According to Kant, unsociable sociability constitutes the basic tension that human beings establish between themselves. In other words, human beings are torn between a tendency towards isolation, selfishness and an opposition to others, and a tendency towards social intercourse, which in this context is viewed by Kant initially as a passive absorption in, and identity with, general social life and the opinions of others. For Kant the tension between mutual opposition and society, far from being an unsettling and disordering one, is fundamentally instructive and fecund. Kant transposes contemporary images of individualism into images of creativity. According to him, the knowledge and aggression that mutual opposition generates, and which stems from a desire to both be separate from others and control them, leads to creative activity. At one level, it is irrelevant for Kant whether this activity takes the form of the art of war, the creation of works of art, or creating democratic constitutions. At another level, it is not. Unlike either the Rousseauian image of the noble savage or the Robinsonade image of the isolated human being, this creativity only flourishes when this tension between mutual opposition and society is at its greatest. There are two lines of thought in this deceptively straightforward image: creativity, which belongs to social subjects, and civilisation, which alludes to the social forms in which creativity may flourish or wither. As we shall see in Chapter 5, these two lines of thought come together, for Kant, in the creation of a republic with an active citizenry.7 This tension, though, for Kant, is the most important, but most difficult part of the story, because it is simultaneously a tension between freedom – the principal end of sociability – and the limitations that are placed on freedoms in the context of unsociability.8 For Kant, the construction of limits, which are then imposed as external forces upon others who are excluded from the political processes of deciding what these limits are, is a form of tyranny. Limits, should, for Kant, be constructed internally. From a political perspective this means that limits should be constructed from within political society itself, and from an anthropological perspective, from within the subject. Each amount to a form of self-mastery – Kant’s image of the Enlightenment. Kant puts forward his own definition of the Enlightenment as ‘[humankind’s] release from its self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of another. It is a state of passivity. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!’9 In the light of this definition, Kant makes a distinction between cultivation, civilite/civilisation and maturity. Cultivation refers to the activities of higher learning, particularly in the arts and sciences and learning about

14  Freedom as release from tutelage oneself; civilisation/civilite refers not only to society, but also to courtesy and manners (of which Kant mentions we have an abundance of); maturity refers to the condition of generalised freedom. In this context, it is not a move from savagery to civilisation that Kant has in mind, but one from barbarism to maturity. For Kant, barbarism does not refer to an image of primitivism, but quite specifically to an image of tyranny. From a political perspective this maturity or self-mastery comes about by putting into place a civil constitutional state, where civil society determines the state, and not the other way around. Through this, freedom will be maximised, and violence and tyranny minimised.10 Kant grounds this claim of maturity in a notion of reason that is transcendentally constructed. He wishes to introduce a first principle upon which it can be grounded in order to give it stability, solidity and universality. He establishes this first principle in reason, which he posits as a transcendentally constituted capacity. This transcendental grounding enables him to give reason a form of universality. All human beings, according to Kant are not born free and equal, but they are born with reason. More specifically, they are born with a capacity also to learn to use it. The human species transforms itself by learning to use its pre-given reason. Kant ties his claim of maturity to a universalistically grounded image of human competence which itself is grounded in the use of, in this instance, practical reason. By tying competence and practical reason together Kant’s claim to maturity takes two directions at both levels of the development of the human species and the development of the human subject. Kant’s formulation of maturity can be read in a way that gives rise to at least two interconnected possibilities. From one perspective, in Kant’s view it refers to humankind’s propensity for progress through its own actions. From another perspective, maturity for Kant refers to the creation of critico-reflexive culture (Enlightenment in Kant’s terminology) and the formation of the republican form of government, both of which are tied to his own version of civil society as a publicly constituted one. In the light of the perspective of progress, Kant argues that maturity occurs through trial and error. Nature provides nothing but an impersonal backdrop to a human existence that is, in a fundamental way, on its own. As Kant states, ‘reason does not work instinctively but requires trial and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another’.11 In this context the process of Enlightenment is a developmental and long-term one, in which each generation builds on the knowledge and experience of the previous ones. Thus, for Kant, it is not a move from nature to culture that denotes humanity’s passage. Rather, humanity itself, through its own creative activity, develops cultures and cultural products that are already demarcated from nature and which also demonstrate a capacity for reflexivity. Kant views the civilising process as one in which human beings use their reason, their creativity and by implication their creativity of the imagination. At the theoretical level, Kant posits that the civilising process

Freedom as release from tutelage  15 continues the break that Hume’s sceptical empiricism establishes from older, cosmologically fashioned metaphysics. Crucially, though, in this part of Kant’s work the civilising process implies that the intellectualisation of cognition – that is, our ability to create categories and concepts through which we organise our world – is only one aspect of our important work, to critically reflect upon the world, that is, to think maturely in all contexts, especially political ones. In other words, humankind creates a morally constituted culture that develops a capacity for critico-reflexive activity in which the release from instinctual or habitual compulsion through moral insight and constraint entails a conscious expectation of the future. And for Kant this should all be wholly the work of humankind itself without reliance on the ‘props’ of instinct, the cosmos, or God. Human progress occurs pedagogically, which for him is grounded in the capacity to use reason, even if its constituting condition remains unknown.12

Civil society as the critico-reflexive public In the light of his political theory Kant moves the notion of maturity from a pragmatic anthropology to his version of civil society as the public, with its double remit of the existence of an enlightened public sphere outside the domain of the state, the market and the domestic sphere and republican government in its cosmopolitan exercise of power. It is this two-fold notion of the public that is the cornerstone of Kant’s transcendentally constituted, yet anthropologically inflected political philosophy. Leaving the question of republican government to a later chapter, it is precisely here that ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ becomes a central and seminal essay. The notion of the public that develops from ‘What is Enlightenment?’ appears at first sight to pertain specifically to the problem of the exercise of reasoned autonomy and judgement by ‘the man of learning addressing the entire reading public’.13 As Kant posits, ‘for Enlightenment of this kind, all that is needed is freedom And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all – freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters’.14 However, Kant’s investigation of public reasoning pertains to a wider problem, that is, to the constitutive nature of critico-reflexive thinking. It is against this background that Kant makes his critical remarks against those forms of thinking and practices that ban, curtail or limit critico-reflexive thinking. In the first instance for Kant, immaturity or the lack of critico-reflexive thinking indicates not only a deference to the opinions of others irrespective of whether these are the opinions of clergymen, doctors and lawyers, family, especially fathers (in Kant’s standard eighteenth-century list and one that can be expanded). It is also a timidity or cowardice both in the face of these opinions and in establishing one’s own position – to think for oneself. In addition, Kant contests the basis of not only traditional power and authority,

16  Freedom as release from tutelage but also ones that belong to the orbit of the modern world and its divisions of labour between private and public, and professional or functional, specialised opinions and critico-reflexive ones. The private realm is the world of the household and is supplemented by the worlds of the market and occupations where not only money but also specialist knowledge and training may be required. In Kant’s view, basing authority of opinions on either traditional or professional/credentialed criteria and power is illegitimate. It conceals the power basis of their authority and ensures that opinion functions only according to restrictive criteria where the maxim of ‘obedience’ is central.15 However, Kant’s maxim is ‘argue’. In his view, argument brings not only the basis of opinion into the full light of day, but also contests the basis of its power and authority.16 When one argues in public one argues not as a traditionalist or specialist, but as a citizen. Kant, thus, exposes two of the major fault lines of modernity – not so much that between private and public, but the fault line between traditional and post-traditional, and the one between the professional-specialist and the critically constituted citizen. In Kant’s view, we carry these fault lines inconsistently within us. We cannot really wish them away because of the uneven complexity of the modern world, nor can we resolve them in the manner of a Rousseauian harmonisation of the modern self. For Kant, it is one of the constitutive ‘tensions of modernity’.17 It is here that religion becomes a ‘stand-in’ category used by Kant in ‘What is Enlightenment?’ to portray all kinds of restrictive and demagogic practices that oppose, prevent or restrict the maxim to argue publicly – or more accurately to invoke a model of public argument – and thus to contest all forms of authority and power in the context of modern complexity. For Kant, this is not simply a matter of the, often, uncontested dogmas of religious belief that are learned and practised by both clerics and parishioners. Rather, it goes to the heart of the organisation of such bodies, whether they are religious or political ones (including those of the modern state). In an argument that now sounds familiar after the experience of the totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century, Kant presciently argues that attempts by organisations to restrict decisions for all time to either the present and immediate group or a small group (cadres) who become the guardians and thus impute the truth are forms of authoritarianism and political and argumentative closure. It is worth quoting him at some length here: But should not a society of clergyman, for example an ecclesiastical synod or venerable presbytery (as the Dutch call it), be entitled to commit itself by oath to a certain unalterable set of doctrines, in order to secure for all time a constant guardianship over each of its members, and through them over the people? I reply this is quite impossible. A contract of this kind, concluded with a view to preventing all further enlightenment of mankind forever, is absolutely null and void, even if it is ratified by the supreme power, by Imperial Diets and the most solemn

Freedom as release from tutelage  17 peace treaties. One age cannot enter into an alliance on oath to put the next age in a position where it would be impossible for it to extend and correct its knowledge, particularly on such important matters, or make any progress whatsoever in enlightenment. This would be a crime against human nature, whose original destiny lies precisely in such progress. Later generations are thus perfectly entitled to dismiss these agreements as unauthorised and criminal.18 In addition, Kant goes on to argue that restrictions and censorship of opinion and scholarly works and their publication are a form of censorial despotism by either the Church authorities or, as importantly, the modern state. Again, there should be no sense of harmonisation here. For Kant there should simply be the space of public argument set apart from the spaces of the household, market and the state. For Kant, ‘ecclesiastical’ – or what we would now recognise as Jacobin/Leninist and/or Executive politics – is a type of violence.19 Yet Kant notices a tension here that is built deeply into the modern condition, and this is the tension between two kinds of freedom – intellectual freedom and political freedom, and they, again, irrevocably clash.20 Kant’s formulation of the critico-reflexive public could be seen to belong to the problem of freedom in general and political life in particular. Hannah Arendt, in her important Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, argues, that for Kant the public is the central animating feature of his work. As she says, ‘publicness is the transcendental principle that should rule all action’.21 For her, and as has been indicated above, the reading public is not a limiting concept or practice. In her view, and in line with the republican version of civil society, Kant’s construction of the public qua argument and his accompanying notion of judgement encompass the more general principle of the subordination of empirical political life to the ability of all people to be public and political actors in the political state. It is here that Arendt proposes a dyadic formation of the political actor as both actor and spectator. In Arendt’s view, the two-fold notion of the public that pertains to Kant’s formulation of politics becomes the prerequisite for the civic state. And it does so for an additional reason – the political actor is both spectator and player and the aspect that links them is critical judgement. This capacity is typical of every actor. Arendt’s insightful reading of Kant’s work, especially his Critique of Judgment in conjunction with the so-called political essays, suggests that the public is constituted by actors, who proclaim and make the law, and critics and spectators who reside in the public. For Arendt, we are one and the same, and change perspective depending on our position within the public-political sphere. As she argues in her Tenth Lecture in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy ‘without this critical judging faculty the doer or maker would be so isolated from the spectator that he would not even be perceived … the faculty they have in common is the faculty of judgment’.22 Political actors learn to act

18  Freedom as release from tutelage as enlightened critics – and vice versa – and by so doing learn to orientate themselves to reason and freedom through the faculty of judgement and become real and rational civic sovereigns. In other words, intellectual freedom refers to the work of the critico-reflexive public in the active public sphere, whilst political freedom for Arendt’s Kant refers, not to what have been termed the negative freedoms of the juridical notion of civil society, but to the capacity for rulership, that is to make political arrangements and constitutions. For Arendt’s Kant, there is an unbroken relation or circuit between the two. In Kant’s view, more so than Arendt’s, this distinction between intellectual and political freedom can be seen as a clash between two types of freedom. It is a clash between the reflexive-critical notion of freedom and what could be termed a political-cosmopolitan one, that is, a clash between a freedom to think and a freedom to act politically (as we shall see in Chapter 5 on Kant’s republicanism).23 This is a clash that, for example, de Tocqueville also notices in his Democracy in America between not so much the three branches of government (the judiciary, the Executive and the legislature) but between public opinion or the press and the legislature.24 This makes Kant a new world thinker, not simply in the geographical sense, but more so in the imaginative, creative sense of someone who thinks himself into the condition of modernity in all of its complexity. It is here, too, and notwithstanding Arendt’s insightful reading of Kant’s work, that one needs to pause and ask whether there is such a continuous and unmediated circuit in the dyadic relation between actor and spectator and the two versions of freedom. Perhaps for Kant there is not. Perhaps for him there are tensions, clashes and interstices between the two types of freedom, as there are distinctions and clashes between the specialist and the critic; the market and the book; as there are clashes and tensions between faculties of the ‘I’ and between these and the empirical world.25 This issue of clashes and tensions between freedoms, between the empirical and the noumenal, and between the faculties themselves will now be kept open and before us as we head towards Chapters 3–5, especially. However, before addressing these issues directly we need to first turn to Kant’s investigations into the anthropological dimensions of unsociable sociability, before turning our attention to the issue of the imagination.

Notes 1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston, London, Penguin, 1974; Rousseau explores a different model in Nouvelle Heloise or the New Julie when he posits friendship (the garden at Clarens) as the basis for sociability rather than politics. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Nouvelle Heloise or the New Julie, translation and abridged by Judith H. McDowell, University Park, The Pennsylvania University Press, 1987. 2 I. Kant, ‘Idea of Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in Kant Political Writings, edited by H. S. Reiss, Cambridge, Cambridge University

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7 8

9 10 11 12

Press, 1991, 3; Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1794), trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1967. Rundell, ‘In Search of Transcendence: Charles Taylor’s Critique of Secularisation’, in Imaginaries of Modernity, 210–230; Taylor, A Secular Age, 203; Taylor, Hegel, 1989; M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, London, Penguin, 1978. Rundell, ‘The Jacobin Critique of Modernity’ Thesis 11, 27, 1990: 125–151; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Devils, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971. See W. J. Booth, ‘Reason and History: Kant’s Other Copernican Revolution’ Kant-Studien, 74:1, 1982: 56–71; J. F. Rundell, Origins of Modernity, Oxford, Polity Press, 1987, 13–34; Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 2nd edition, edited M. Gregor, introduced by R. J. Sullivan, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, 147 §52. In the Metaphysics of Morals Kant also argues against Rousseau. More importantly in his political writings and anthropologies Kant emphasises the issue of learning, which Kant terms palingenesis, which is pedagogical at the level of the subject and cumulative by way of trial and error at the level of culture and can be linked to the faculty of the imagination where Kant struggles against biologistic metaphors. See also Howard Williams, ‘Metamorphosis or Palingenesis? Political Change in Kant’ Review of Politics, 63:4, 2001: 693–722. I. Kant, ‘An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?’ in Kant on History, edited by Lewis White Beck, Indianapolis, IN, Bobbs-Merrill, 1963, 137–154. See also Rundell, Origins of Modernity, 13–34; John Rundell and Stephen Mennell, Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization, London, Routledge, 1998, 1–35, from which this discussion is drawn. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Right’, in Metaphysics of Morals, 2nd edition. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Right’, in Metaphysics of Morals, 2nd edition. It is in this context that one can claim that Nietzsche is not only the black sheep of the Kantian family but also one of his heirs. Nietzsche also argues in The Genealogy of Morals that during culture flourishes during periods of civilisational decline and declines during periods of civilisational excess. See Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Genealogy of Morals’, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, translation and edited by Walter Kaufman, New York, Basic Books, 1968, 439–599. I Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?’’’, in Kant Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, 1991, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 54. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Right’. I. Kant, ‘Idea for Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in Kant Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, 13. As Kant states, man accordingly was not guided by instinct, not nurtured and instructed by readymade knowledge; rather he should bring forth everything out of his own resources. Securing his own shelter, food and defence … all amusement which can make life pleasant, insight and intelligence, finally even good ness at heart – all this should be wholly his own work. Kant, ‘Idea for Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, 14

For a more developed version of this interpretation of Kant see my Origins of Modernity, 1987, 14–21. 13 Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? London, Penguin, 2009, 4. See also J. Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, Berkeley, California University Press, 1996; Onora O’Neill, ‘Kant’s Conception of Public Reason’, in Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses. Bd. I: Hauptvorträge. Bd. II: Sektionen I-V. Bd. III: Sektionen VI-X: Bd. IV:

20  Freedom as release from tutelage

14 15

16 17 18 19 20

Sektionen XI-XIV. Bd. V: Sektionen XV-XVIII, edited by Gerhardt Volker / Rolf-Peter Horstmann / Ralph Schumacher, 35–47, DOI (chapter) https://doi. org/10.1515/9783110874129.35; Arthur Strum, ‘Public Space, Language and the Tone of Kant’s Philosophical Republic’, in Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung, Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses. Bd. I: Hauptvorträge. Bd. II: Sektionen I-V. Bd. III: Sektionen VI-X: Bd. IV: Sektionen XI-XIV. Bd. V: Sektionen XV-XVIII, edited by Gerhardt Volker / Rolf-Peter Horstmann / Ralph Schumacher, 257–265, DOI (chapter) https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110874129.2239. Kant, An Answer to the Question, 2009, 3. Kant, An Answer to the Question, 2009; Foucault’s debt to Kant is clear here in his later essay when he speaks of ‘governmentality’, the link between power and knowledge, and the ‘right to be disobedient’. See Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ 32–50. Kant, An Answer to the Question, 1–3. Rundell, Imaginaries of Modernity, 1–20. Kant, An Answer to the Question, 2009, 6–7. Kant, An Answer to the Question, 2009, 8. As Kant goes on to state in his insightful way: This reveals to us a strange and unexpected pattern in human affairs (such as we shall always find if we consider them in the widest sense, in which nearly everything is paradoxical). A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people’s intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent. Kant, An Answer to the Question, 2009, 10

21 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner, Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press, 1982, 60. 22 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 63. 23 Kant, An Answer to the Question, 2009, 10. 24 See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vols. 1&2, New York, Vintage Books, 1990. 25 See, for example, Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’ and ‘Science as a Vocation’, both in From Max Weber, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, London, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1970, 77–128, 129–156, respectively. See also György Markus, ‘Money and the Book: Kant and the Crisis of the German Enlightenment’, in Culture, Science, Society: The Constitution of Cultural Modernity, Leiden, Brill, 2011, 353–398.

2

Anthropological investigations Difficult selves

Kant’s ‘Shakespearean’ observations of the human condition I mentioned at the end of the last chapter that, for Kant, there may be a tension between two forms of freedom qua citizen – the freedom to think critically, and the freedom to act politically. And indeed, as we have just seen, this is the case, for Kant. There is the good arguer who uses ‘books’ (in any form including authored rather than anonymous internet posts and blogs) and there is the good citizen who creates and uses republican politics as well as contract, money and the law. As moderns we inhabit all these worlds, phenomenologically speaking. In addition, rather than seeing the two citizen-freedoms as connected in an unbroken way, there is a mediated space between them, and for Kant this space is called the enlightened public sphere. And for him, this sphere is different to protest per se because it is one of critical criticism.1 To be sure, there is an orientation that is common to both forms of freedom qua citizen – the transcendental condition of practical reason that each of us has within and which we can use as a form of self-mastery, even if this use is not guaranteed. However, it will be argued in Chapters 3 and 6 that that there are at least two other types of freedom in Kant’s work, which are not reducible to either of the other freedoms introduced above. These two freedoms are the freedom to think (categorise) and freedom qua good person. Being a good person is more difficult, more complex than being a good arguer, a good citizen or a good thinker, and this is especially the case with Kant’s dual concerns with subjectivity and intersubjectivity.2 But let’s first begin with Kant’s socalled empirical anthropological reflections, that is, his deep and often very wry knowledge of the human condition, which really sets the stage for his moral philosophy and his philosophy overall. The main texts that I will draw on for these reflections are his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) and his lesser known Lectures on Anthropology, especially his ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’ (1784–1785).3 We all have difficult selves. We are all empirical, embodied beings. Kant knows this all too well, and the clash between our empirical selves and our noumenal ones are a source, for him, of both wry and witty observation as

22  Anthropological investigations well as acute critical reflection that produces positive possibilities out of difficult beginnings. To repeat, for Kant whilst this is no easy task, it is one that ‘widens’ us. It gives depth to being ‘human all too human’. By terming Kant’s observation of our very human condition, ‘Shakespearean’, we will allow Shakespeare to initially explore for Kant the complex vagaries of our lives, from our searing ambitions to our loves and losses that are often the result of comedic or tragic choices. Kant knew a thing or two about the ‘human all too human’ condition, which cheekily makes Shakespeare one of his precursors and Nietzsche one of his heirs, against the grain of their philosophical programmes.4 Kant viewed novels and plays as sources for our knowledge. For him, Shakespeare’s work (which was partially translated and performed in Germany at the time) was a masterful resource with ‘a deep understanding’.5 Even if Kant viewed Shakespeare’s work as faulty  – it could, according to him, mislead through caricature and exaggeration – it can be argued that there is more than a little of the spirit of the ‘dramaturgy’ of Shakespeare’s work in Kant’s own. This occurs not through caricature and exaggeration but through acute observation and his own notion of ‘wide virtues’. All we have to do is to listen to Shakespeare’s Hamlet to get a flavour of Kant’s attitude to this all too human condition: To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life; … Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.6 Like Shakespeare, Kant was fully aware of our desires, lusts and inner struggles and demons as well as our tendencies towards desperate emotional swings brought on by competition, violence and isolation. And he

Anthropological investigations  23 was particularly critical of three desires or lusts – those of wealth, fame and power. These, in particular for him, make the categorical imperative an almost impossible task to fulfil. Or to put it another way, seeking or being subject to the vagaries of wealth, power and fame, and mobilising a life around them as if they were maxims undermines the categorical imperative and heightens an instrumentalising, manipulating relation to the world that simply treats others as mere means, and not as ends. A good person is nowhere to be found. It is here that money becomes a stand-in as Kant develops a critique of the emotional economy of wealth. Notwithstanding Kant’s positive analysis of the function that money has as a medium of social exchanges in developing social distance or separateness and non-dependence, he, like Shakespeare, understands its power to transform a good person into either a greedy, or miserly misanthropic one. Shakespeare’s Timon of Timon of Athens portrays it best when he says in answer to Alcibiades question: AlcibiAdes: What is thy name? Is man so hateful to thee that art thyself a man? Timon: I am Misanthropos and hate mankind.7

Timon’s misanthropy is the rageful and vengeful reaction to his unreflexive philanthropy and generosity that is turned into its opposite once Timon comes to realise that his generosity is based on false motives and manipulation by his recipients. He can only rant: ‘Gold? Yellow glittering, precious gold? No, gods, I am no idle votorist. Roots, you clear heavens! Thus much of this will make black white, foul Fair’ Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward Valiant. Ha! Ye gods why this? What this you gods? Why this Will lug your priests and servants from you side, Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads: This yellow slave Will knot and break religions; bless the accursed; Make the hoar leprosy adored; place thieves And give them title, knee and approbation, With Senators on the bench; and this is it That makes the wappen’d widow wed again; She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices To the April day again. Come damned earth, Among the route of nations, I will make thee Do thy right nature.8

24  Anthropological investigations For Kant, money becomes a motif or means through which he can explore sentiments and emotions of not only resentment, but also general misanthropy which for him can take the forms of avarice/greed or miserliness. As Kant, himself, says: [H]uman beings find an immediate enjoyment in money. For after all it only has a value if it is used as a means. Money can only be used when it is spent. But money grants us an ideal enjoyment when I imagine all the pleasures I can get from it. I procure true enjoyment when I select one of these ideal pleasures and actually try to attain it by using money… But this is an enjoyment of delusion, for it based merely on the imagination… Avarice exists in the fantasy; for that reason, just like the power of imagination, it has no boundaries. The avarice person is completely opposed to reason … he finds more enjoyment in ideal than real enjoyment, and one cannot change his power of imagination. Money is a kind of power, and the surest kind.9 More accurately, misanthropy in the form of either greed or miserliness is derived for Kant more generally from self-centred unsociability and the negative view that accompanies this, when one ‘derives from an erroneous concept of one’s own importance and from a dark representation of the human being’.10 The antidote for misanthropy (rather than money per se) is social intercourse. However, social intercourse is not only positive and affirming, it can also be negative. For Kant, the social intercourse derived from power is as much of a problem as the misanthropy derived from money. Power as discussed in Chapter 5 as either potentia (conflict) or potestas (domination) can grip good citizens when they inhabit the world of institutions. When this happens its aura and pursuit become the raison d’etre for these citizens. They learn its rules, play its game and pursue it for all it is worth usually at the expense of others, irrespective of what position they may hold. The position they find themselves in does not create the power, as such, whether one is ‘the boss’, the departmental head, the union representative, the party official, the parliamentarian, or standing around the water cooler with colleagues arguing. Rather, good citizens might pursue power and make it their own in any number of ways that can expand it to the point of domination and control or reduce it to the point of pettiness. In the case of the latter, envy or cowardice can rule their lives and their relations with others when power (or fame) over-runs these good citizens and they become cruel to others. A door opens inwardly and the negative attributes of power rule these citizens’ lives. Again, Shakespeare could be Kant’s guide here. And it is Macbeth, rather than Timon of Athens that he could draw on. This is especially the case if he viewed Lord and Lady Macbeth, not as ‘royal’ figures, but as ‘everyman’ or ‘everywoman’ with their ambitions and their quests for power and the

Anthropological investigations  25 transformations that may occur in their lives once this quest takes hold. Everyone has his/her own ‘witches’ that knock and stir their hearts, as Macbeth’s certainly did. Macbeth: I am thane of Cawdor: If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is But what is not.11 These witches may take the form of internal imaginings or external speculations and promptings, even in contemporary guise as strategists and political advisors, the people who know ‘best’. For Macbeth they appear as both real and fantastical on that eerie, foggy heath on his way to Glamis/ Cawdor: Macbeth: Say from whence You owe this strange intelligence? or why Upon this blasted heath you stop our way With such prophetic greeting? Speak, I charge you. (Witches vanish) Banquo: The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, And these are of them. Whither are they vanish’d? Macbeth: Into the air; and what seem’d corporal melted As breath into the wind. Would they had stay’d! Banquo: Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root That takes the reason prisoner?12 The issue becomes what one does with the witch’s foretelling to Macbeth and Banquo. Does one fall into the circle of prediction, of being bewitched by others; or does one stay with reason and out of this wild circle of interpretation to simply wait and even live with an unfulfilled desire, and perhaps remain a good, a decent person?

26  Anthropological investigations The Macbeth’s give themselves over to prediction (the foretelling by the witches) rather than contingency. They embrace the pursuit of power and unleash it for its own sake. They ‘screw their courage to the sticking point’ like any ambitious soul.13 Lady Macbeth: Art not without ambition, but without The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly, That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, And yet wouldst wrongly win: thou’ldst have, great Glamis, That which cries ‘Thus thou must do, if thou have it; And that which rather thou dost fear to do Than wishest should be undone.14 Macbeth does – he takes to the knife with both excitement and trepidation: Macbeth: Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw.15 And after this momentary hesitation he kills Duncan. Moreover, and in a parallel and contemporary vein one can murder one’s colleagues in many ways although not in the flesh. Plots, manoeuvrings and even redundancies serve the same purpose. In order to overstep the mark – a vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself16 – tumultuous personal transformations are required. These personal transformations occur for both Lord and Lady Macbeth. They must make themselves hard and could now be any woman or man in the pursuit of power for its own sake: Lady Macbeth: Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood; Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it!17

Anthropological investigations  27 For the Macbeth’s in their pursuit of power either madness or an authoritarian personality awaits that can only be defeated by suicide in the case of Lady Macbeth or by force when the woods of Burnham forest move, in the case of Macbeth. These days and in a different context they might be voted, or even rotated out of office. Kant prefers the route of political contingency rather than foretelling, which he tellingly and wittily critiques in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer.18 For Kant, contingency and social intercourse may lay down a path towards the public sphere and republican government, but it can also include paths of ‘wild’ imaginings, unsociable sociability and wrongdoing. It can be argued that Kant posits three forms of wrongdoing, which in their own ‘dry’ way have affinities with Shakespeare’s characterisations. One form originates in our animality, whilst the other two are reflexively oriented. These three forms of wrongdoing, which are also forms of unsociable sociability are (i) frailty, disagreeability and laziness; (ii) ‘ugliness’, shame, disgust and (iii) evil.19 Disagreeability occurs out of the frailty of human nature, whereby good conduct is known objectively as an ideal and incentive, yet people follow their inclinations. It is a form of conduct that is born out of an excess of appetites that leads to extravagance and excess. For Kant, these frailties or disagreeabilities are murdering oneself (suicide), the unnatural use of one’s sexual inclination, and the excessive consumption of food and drink to the point that it weakens one’s capacity for making purposive use of one’s powers.20 Shakespeare sees much scope for comedy in these ‘disagreeables’: Porter: Faith sir, we were carousing till the second cock: and drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things. MacDuff: What three things does drink especially provoke? Porter: Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance: therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.21

28  Anthropological investigations Kant terms his second form of wrongdoing, ugliness, shame, and disgust. It arises when the immoral and moral motivating causes are mixed. Whilst the adoption of a moral law is not the self-sufficient incentive for actions, it is moral because it denotes for Kant, some relationship to critico-reflexive rationality. As we have seen in the case of Timon, the passions and motives of wealth and/or misanthropy are co-determined in this way. Here, the moral ground is constituted by self-love or self-benevolence as a positive involvement in a general love of humankind as a whole but is undercut once ‘ugly’ or misanthropic imaginings, thoughts and actions develop. As Kant puts it, it is indeed natural that, by the laws of the imagination (namely the law of contrast) we feel our own well-being and even our good conduct more strongly when the misfortune of others or their downfall in scandal is put next to our own condition, as a foil to show it in so much the brighter light.22 Pride, calumny and slander towards others undermines and annihilates a duty or a well-regard towards others. Contempt for the other and for humankind in general becomes the prevailing way of imagining, thinking and doing. Here a well-worn path is tracked that transforms benevolence and self-love into envy, ingratitude and malice, which for him are ‘ugly’ or ‘impure’ judgements.23 Kant also points to another form of discrimination or wrongdoing within this second context of wrongdoing. It is a form of wrongdoing that is judged under the forms of shame and disgust. For him, these are forms of unsociable sociability where one is at the behest of others, that is judged from the vantage point of the perspective of others where one cannot use one’s own understanding. Shame, disgust, fear and cowardice arise out of servitude and subjugation determined by others. They are all derived from external authority – in contemporary language – the gaze of the other. It is where you are made into ‘an other’.24 As Kant notes, ‘shame [] arises out of the surprise of coming into another’s contempt … [It is] the feeling [we have] when we believe that we are contemptible in the eyes of others on account of a mischief. It therefore arises out of sudden fear of disrespect … A human being will not be ashamed in the dark, but only in the presence of others who can observe him in whatever light he should present himself’.25 Because of this gaze, this kind of unsociable sociability promotes secrecy on the part of the subject – not yet person – who is subjected to the power of shame and the gaze of external authority. Kant terms his third form of wrongdoing, evil proper, where wrongdoing can become radicalised. Whilst ‘ugly’ or corrupt conduct can appear to be lawfully good, it nonetheless, is enacted out of a haphazard disregard for moral maxims. In other words, there is an ‘impure’, rather than reflexive, relation to good, moral conduct.26 But something else can happen – a genuine disregard for moral maxims can occur and a free choice is made to embrace evil ones. Here the ‘ugly’ wrongdoings of malice, envy and resentment and even ambition

Anthropological investigations  29 are reversed into positive maxims and take full flight. As we have seen in the case of the Macbeths, Kant terms this reversal radical evil, where evil maxims are consciously chosen to fulfil particular goals. As he states, we call a man evil, however, not because he performs actions that are evil (contrary to the law) but because these actions are of such a nature that we may infer from them the presence in him of evil maxims … Hence, the source of evil cannot lie in an object determining the will through inclination, nor yet in a natural impulse; it can lie only in a rule made by the will for the use of its freedom, that is, in a maxim.27 The creation of a maxim of evil by the subject makes one curiously honest, consistent and even formal in his/her application of ‘the rule’, yet wicked. It undermines, disconnects and dispossesses the personality’s capacity for the respect and but not necessarily the knowledge of others. Radical evil enables the complete manipulation and instrumentalisation of the other, and for this to occur, the other must become knowable and known rather than ‘othered’.28 As we have seen in the case of the Macbeth’s (although usually Richard III is viewed as the paradigm Shakespearean character to be now supplanted by the real figures of Hitler and Stalin), their ambitions are maximised through the radicalisation of evil. A Rubicon is crossed, the humanall-too-human is surpassed, and vices become diabolical.29 A different path can be created apart from the ones associated with the pursuits of wealth, fame and power. This is the path of love and it can be travelled by those who do wrong as much as by good people. It is one where the passions of love begin to reign and reason and good judgement buckle. Reason and good judgement buckle because love, desire, and passion are stronger, as the real Abelard and Heloise explore in their letters or Shakespeare, Rousseau and Goethe explore in their plays or novels. The situation of love can end in disaster for the real or fictional characters involved, where it becomes increasingly clear that a moment of transcendence – let alone the transcendental – cannot save them.30 To be sure, Abelard and Heloise create and experience their own autonomy, even though they pay a high price for it.31 Shakespeare’s characters of Juliet Capulet and Romeo Montague are on the cusp of their own autonomy, as they create and experience a love that shatters the desires, imaginings, plans and interdictions of their city republic, their households and their fathers. In the city republic civility takes the forms of uncivil conduct and violence, which have infected both houses. They are ‘plagued’ by them: Prologue: Two households, both alike in dignity In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny Where civil bonds make civil hands unclean.32

30  Anthropological investigations The contrast could not be more striking in the sweet tenderness and joy between the two lovers who are mismatched in family name only. They are matched lovers because they choose to stand outside the circle of violence and revenge. Although Kant would not have put it this way, they do not remain naïve. They are about to become both enlightened and good, although tragic beyond political-civic conduct. Here an emotional economy of great range – of great width – reigns. There is day and night, light and dark and every shade in between – joy, happiness, hope, despondency, sadness, tranquillity, constancy, anguish and despair. Again, we can listen to Shakespeare: Romeo: Why, such is love’s transgression. Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast. Which thou wilt propagate to have it press’d With more of thin: this love that thou hast shown Doth add more grief to too much of my own. Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs; Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes; Being vex’d, a sea nourish’d with lovers’ tears: What is it else? A madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet.33 Shakespeare shows how love is not only a misery but also an exhilaration once it is mutually declared and a path laid out together for a lifetime. Romeo: O, wilt though leave me so unsatisfied? Juliet: What satisfaction canst thou have tonight? Romeo: The exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine … Juliet: Three words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed. If that thy bent of love be honourable, Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow, By one that I’ll procure to come to thee, Where and what time though wilt perform the rite; All my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay And follow thee my lord throughout the world.34 But these emotional registers of love swing between understanding and misunderstanding, communication and miscommunication. Romeo commits murder and must flee (he is banished from the republican city state).

Anthropological investigations  31 Beginning with exile when Romeo becomes an outsider (from citizen within the civil state to non-citizen outside the civil state), love, nonetheless, continues in this context of ‘more light and light; more dark and dark our woes’.35 There is miscommunication and confusion. Father Lawrence’s letter outlining his secret plan to place Juliet in a suspended state between life and death does not arrive. Only misapprehended news arrives, which brings a miscommunication that leads to the tragic suicidal deaths of Romeo and Juliet. An overwrought Juliet exclaims: Arms, take your last embrace! And lips, O you The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss A dateless bargain to engrossing death…36 Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet stands in a tradition that combines not only day and night, joy and despair, but also love and death. By the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth this tradition becomes identified with Romantic pessimism.37 Kant’s discussion of love stands somewhat to one side of this tradition. Although not as rich as Shakespeare’s portrayal, it is nonetheless as complex as Shakespeare’s and as variegated as his own discussion of wrongdoing. Kant constructs his notion of love in as many as six different registers even though these are informed by his more basic division between phenomena and noumena. Not surprisingly, his discussion of love is brought under, or is subsumed by, his own construction of moral conduct or practical reason, that is, the ethical maxim of freedom. His notions of love are sexual love, passionate love, deferential or acquiescent love, moral love and aesthetic love.38 In many respects Kant is not interested in love as Eros, of ‘making the improbable probable’.39 To be sure, sexual love is, for Kant, ‘the truly greatest sensuous pleasure that can be taken in an object’ as long as it is towards a natural end and not propelled by the force of brute pleasure, but by the law of duty.40 As he says, ‘a man cannot make use of another person for the pleasure of sexual gratification without special restriction through a juridical contract by which two persons are mutually bound together to one another in marriage’.41 And for Kant, as he quaintly puts it, it is in marriage that the union occurs ‘of two persons of different sex for the lifelong possession of each other’s sexual attributes’.42 The context and critical gaze for Kant’s apparent emotionally suspended and formalistic but not de-erotised construction of love is two-fold. On the one hand, the eighteenth century had already seen the topicalisation of love as an erotic adventure – a liaison dangereux – which was seen as the prerogative of court society. On the other hand, another topicalisation of erotic love was beginning to emerge, that of Romantic (as against courtly) love, which was internal to the development of Romanticism. Within Romanticism love became viewed as not only context breaking – but it had been this from the Renaissance onwards – but as a metaphor for emotionally enriched,

32  Anthropological investigations sensuous and embodied self-reflexivity, individuality and autonomy for both men and women alike.43 Certainly for Kant there is a cautionary tale here. In his view, passion is a disease, a mania in which the subject acts ‘in accordance with an end prescribed to him by an inclination’.44 Hence marriage and sexual love are not the real issues for him. The real issue is one of limits in which the passions are subsumed under a regime of the mutual reflexively constituted autonomy of the persons in the love relationship, that is under the maxim of not using another as mere means, and in a contemporary vein, whoever they might be. Kant could never have been a dramatist in the manner of William Shakespeare with his acute observations, dry wit and theatrical genius concerning the full range of human attributes that human beings have, from their loves, hunger for power, cruelties, betrayals, comedic and tragic mistakes and self-delusions.45 Yet, he begins his anthropological investigations precisely here – with our phenomenal existence in its full range. Kant’s genius, though, was pitched elsewhere – to providing a possible ground for our systematic critique of the taken-for-grantedness of this condition, that is, of the possibility that we can critically live and judge it in terms of its sociable and moral worth.

The depth of the subject: wide chords and oscillations In these contexts of difficult selves Kant’s two concerns of subjectivity and intersubjectivity come to life, especially as the subject struggles with the condition of sociable sociability with oneself and with others. And for Kant, these two concerns with which everyone is faced is neither a straightforward nor easy task. There is, if not a conflict of the faculties, a conflict of impulses. To put it slightly differently there is conflict derived from the condition of living in two worlds simultaneously – one of the phenomenal condition of being a human being amongst other human beings, the other of being a human being who can think, judge and act according to the limits of reason alone. There is something indefinable about the human condition. This does not simply refer to the fact, that, in Kant’s view, our knowledge of our empirical anthropological condition can never be complete – but as we have seen it can be supplemented from other sources such as plays, poems and literature – but more so that this condition is indeterminate. The human prerogative that Kant gives to thinking and judgement entails that a pre-established route to knowledge and action is disrupted. There is in metaphorical terms a space between our phenomenal and noumenal selves and it is an open question how this space will be filled – either by desiring, or critical-reflexive, or evil actions in the context of ourselves and with others.46 Depending on how we are and how we act this space can be navigated towards harbours that can be either shallow or deep or, in Kant’s terminology for the latter, wide. As indicated above, in Kant’s terminology being ‘wide’ means being stretched, which also means, for him, feeling alive, feeling emotions,

Anthropological investigations  33 especially extreme ones. Kant knows that we are not ‘well-tempered’ personalities, but we are like the ones in Shakespeare’s dramas who experience and express a full emotional vocabulary that is available to live richly expressive lives that produces both harmonies and discords.47 As Kant, rather than Shakespeare, notes this emotional complexity, colour and range produce differences, rather than the indifference of someone who is aloof and feels nothing. And for Kant, this incapacity to feel nothing is almost animalic; it reduces the human being to a condition of lifelessness, passivity, boredom or languidity. We are, for Kant as for Shakespeare, less melodramatic creatures and more dissonant ones. Dissonance spurs us on. In Kant’s view, if we were not driven by dissonance from one condition to another ‘we would always remain in one condition and do nothing … Providence has determined pain to be the spur to our activity’.48 For Kant, this pain, as one indication of dissonance, should not produce a negativism, but an oscillation – one that moves in this specific context – between pain and enjoyment. ‘What human beings love to the point of passion is a pain that is always cancelled by an enjoyment’.49 This oscillation is experienced as a sense of dissonance. As he says, in opening up our inner complexity, ‘dissonances are pains, but they serve all the more to enhance the enjoyment of the harmonic’.50 The dissonances also affect our sense of time, according to Kant. Pain elongates it and enjoyment shortens it. For Kant, this sense of dissonance is the enduring and permanent condition of being human. Enjoyment, whilst cancelling pain, should not be a permanent condition for it dulls or even worse cancels feeling altogether. The same goes for the condition of pain; once it takes hold we also cease to feel, to live. Yet Kant, more with Shakespeare and against the Stoics, warns against taking the middle-point of equanimity. The movement, oscillation and resultant dissonance of our life can only occur, according to Kant, if all of its dramas, comedies, successes and failures – all of its tones and chords – are available to us, and Kant locates them in the following registers to use another musical term, which extends oscillation and dissonance beyond pain and enjoyment. In addition to the feelings of pleasure and pain, these registers are the faculties of desire, imagination and reason. For Kant, these registers are not strictly speaking separated from one another – only at the conceptual-analytic level which gives the impression of vivisecting coldness – but exist in relation and combination with one another. Kant formulates his notion of the faculty of desire in his anthropological investigations as a way of talking about the constitutive centrality of the empirical/phenomenal/corporeal/lived condition of the human animal.51 More accurately, his formulation of a faculty of desire presupposes feelings (pleasure/displeasure) and inclination and reason, which are combined under a more general category of volition or desire itself. Desire or volition (or oscillation) is the delight ‘in the existence of an object’ and it can be weighted or orientated by inclination or reason.52 For Kant, this desire, volition or oscillation does not denote a separation between inclination and

34  Anthropological investigations reason but rather an orientation or weighting, because reason is involved in both. As he says, either our reason or our inclination wills according to the diverse kinds of our delight. When reason does not will something that the inclination wills, reason is often used in the service of inclination, as inclination must find out the means by which inclination can attain its end. Such is the case with most actions of human beings; inclination rules us through sensations that penetrate more strongly than the concepts of reason.53 In other words, desire or oscillation occurs between the parts of ourselves that he identifies as inclination and reason and imagination. This is in contrast to the movement of separation that occurs in the interpretations of Kant’s works by Adorno, MacIntyre and even Schiller. To extrapolate a little further, Kant extends the couplets displeasure/pleasure, pain/joy (feelings) and even inclination/reason in the following six ways that initiate or orientate our oscillations: propensity, instinct, inclination, passion (which he umbrellas under the faculty of desire), reason and imagination. Kant’s ultimate concern is the direction of the oscillations themselves – of whether they are moving in the direction of feelings (pleasures/displeasures), inclinations, imaginings or moral and sociably orientated reasonings.

Wild imaginings As we have seen, feelings set things in motion, and we can be orientated by our inclination, reasonings or imagination, according to Kant. The faculty of the imagination, though, is really the ‘wild card’ here rather than the inclinations and the passions.54 This is the case for both Kant’s attitude towards the imagination in his anthropological investigations, and for his work overall.55 For Kant, the imagination is ‘wild’, prone to excess and the extreme. It is an indication of fancy, deception and credulity. It is also unpredictable and curiously not especially creative. To be sure, when Kant says that the imagination is not especially creative, he has in mind the work of the imagination in, what appears to be in its first instance, its affinity with our inclinations. As he says, ‘the imagination directs itself according to the inclinations … it is aroused by miens’, that is, by deportments, expressions or really feelings.56 In an argument that is reiterated in his subsequent Anthropology Mrongovius but articulated more systematically in the Critique of Pure Reason where, as we shall see, some constraints are lifted in unpredictable ways (and leaving the Critique of Judgment to one side) Kant posits that the imagination cannot really create anything. According to him, it ‘cannot create any sensations in us that we have not already had, but it can [Kant concedes – JR] create new forms’ in the form of images and representations.57 In this more conventional and restrictive view, if we give way to the power of the imagination we are prone to distraction, embellishment, harm,

Anthropological investigations  35 vice and inner unruliness, that is, we cannot rule ourselves by either our own understanding or reason. However, there is more going on here than meets the eye (the ‘I’). As is well known in the Critique of Pure Reason, which Kant restates in the Anthropology Mrongovius, the imagination is either reproductive or productive. In the Anthropology Mrongovius Kant explores the imagination’s power in ways that become more complex, differentiated and also geared more explicitly to his basic thesis of Enlightenment – to be mature and to use one’s own understanding or reason. In addition, there are significant unfinished insights that occur in Kant’s ruminations here. Writing in the context of critical reflections on the aesthetic theory of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Kant first of all adds in the Anthropology Mrongovius that the power of the imagination can either be involuntary or voluntary.58 In the case of its reproductive power, Kant posits that the imagination is involuntary when it is dominated and geared towards feeling. Certainly, here, for him, the imagination is mad, at least in some specific instances. For Kant, whilst we are less than perfect creatures, we are certainly more imperfect when our existence oscillates towards and is dominated by the combination of inclination and the imagination – when the oscillation becomes, in his quaint phrase, a series of disturbances. These disturbances include dementia and mental illnesses.59 Leaving to one side the condition of dementia, because its cause for him (either correctly or incorrectly) is physiologically determined, mental illnesses concern either the state of the mind or its constitution. When mental illness concerns states of the mind such as hypochondria, misanthropy and melancholy, one’s mental powers, in Kant’s view, are incorrectly used in contrary fashion to the habits of everyday life, which often leads to curmudgeonly or grumpy discord as in the case of Timon, or sometimes outrageous comedy as in Shakespeare’s comedies about love’s labours that can be lost or won.60 The voluntary power of the reproductive imagination is for Kant, something different again. It intuits in representational form an object that is known to us; in the latter it ‘portrays for us an object that is not present in our senses’.61 It is associative and is the ground of our memory. In the case of the former it intuitively brings forth an object as an image or representation that we have previously perceived. In other words, it associates. Memory, alternatively, ‘is the capacity to avail oneself of one’s reproductive power of imagination voluntarily’.62 This may benefit us by recalling things easily, quickly or retaining them for a long time. Yet memory can also be a prop or a mask for immature understanding (we learn and remember many things but understand little); or it can be faulty, unreliable or leave us altogether.63 Once again, for Kant, the imagination in its productive power can be either involuntary or voluntary. It is here that Kant really stubs his toe against a stone and stumbles over formulations of the imagination that take it beyond the more conventional interpretations of it as either ‘mad’, bad or simply a conduit connecting the empirical and the representational parts of ourselves.

36  Anthropological investigations In its involuntary productive power, the imagination works for itself, it is constantly busy. Even when we are, once again, mad there is an insight here that stubbornly remains throughout his work. This self-forming – really self-creating – work of the imagination is found for Kant in dreams, fantasy and insanity. In the case of the latter, for example, there is a quite specific instance of the creativity of the imagination, according to Kant, in the internally constitutive – rather than externally conditioned state of mental illness – under which he discusses insanity and lunacy. Where mental illness is constitutive, the involuntary productive imagination opens a door, or in Kant’s view more correctly instigates the flights of fancy by the mad p erson when reality is loosened from its moorings and an entirely new, alternative and different world is formed that is more than simply neurotically displayed. It is a coherent, yet mad world sui generis, where reason and understanding function only on a ground determined by the imagination. This makes this world more than a fictional creation.64 As Kant says, A person has sound judgment when he compares his judgment with others and his judgment is objectively valid. But the disturbed person [in the constitutive sense – JR] has neither the ability nor the drive to compare his judgment with the judgment of others human beings, but rather believes everything he thinks is.65 From this perspective and in a view that we could impute to Kant, the Macbeths, to understate the case, are not well. They lose their sense of moral perspective and wild imaginings take hold. Even Romeo and Juliet in their anguish and distress allow their productive imaginations to take flight. Once again Kant’s judgement concerning the involuntary work of the productive imagination is determined and over-shadowed by his concerns with the faculties of reason and understanding. Yet, its self-creating power will not vanish from his sight, even if he wants them to. Even in dreams and fantasy we create imaginary worlds, and these, for Kant have a place in our lives that cannot simply be wished away. Dreaming even makes us feel and come alive, it keeps us stimulated. It is a form of involuntary composition that swarms when we compose while dreaming … our power of imagination continues to have an effect, and it is a great benefit for us, as it takes away the disgust of monotony that we sense in the present world, its uniformity, and the events within it, since we can create worlds at will. In sleep we are not disturbed by the senses, hence the power of imagination is stronger. One dreams when one is conscious of the effects of the power of imagination at night. Some human beings pretend never to have dreams. But every human being dreams …66 Everybody dreams and it is an open question – and not only for Kant – whether these dreams remain in the orbit of night to be forgotten, are

Anthropological investigations  37 remembered upon waking, are not given form, or as importantly, are given form. But for Kant, the origin of dreams, let alone their interpretation, remains deeply knotty and enigmatic as they dwell in the domain of the involuntary power of the productive imagination. The voluntary power of the productive imagination is as equally knotty, enigmatic and insightful for Kant as is his discussion of the involuntary power of the productive imagination. Kant initiates his discussion of the voluntary power of the productive imagination in the Anthropology Mrongovius under the umbrella term of composition. Yet, this seemingly musical term denotes, in Kant’s version, both inventing and discovering, terms that take composition beyond musical-aesthetic forms and include all cognitive powers including philosophical and scientific ones. More specifically, the voluntary productive compositional power of the imagination in its form that on the one hand invents in Kant’s view is to ‘produce something that did not yet exist’.67 Discovery, on the other, finds something that has already existed, for example, new worlds, which result from voyages. Inventions, though, are new and may not even occur materially in the world. They are new worlds of a different order altogether such as philosophies, theories, concepts, ideas, fictions and speculations.68 And it is here that Kant stubs his toe again. As in the case of his discussion of the involuntary power of the productive imagination he trips over its creativity in its so-called voluntary form. The voluntary power of the productive imagination creates science (philosophy), politics and aesthetics. It is crucial to the formation of each. But here a tentative and limiting note enters Kant’s ruminations. The creativity of the productive voluntary power of the imagination in its relation to the work of the faculty of reason is suspended, whilst its aesthetic and political creativity is kept in check by the faculty of understanding. It is not dissonance that Kant has in mind here but harmony, eloquence and entertainment, all of which, for him are brought into forms and judged according to the rules of the faculty of understanding. In other words, creativity here is de-limited to the play between sensibility, imagination and understanding. Play, as Schiller would also elevate as a central concept in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, should be harmonious. For both Kant and Schiller, harmony itself is synonymous with the concept of the beautiful. It is precisely here that Kant lays down a path for Romanticism – and not only through the category of the sublime. For Kant, it is not music that is the paradigm here but language, which he explores in a distinction he makes between eloquence and poetry. Curiously, for Kant, it is eloquence rather than poetry that the voluntary power of the productive imagination has a greater yet more problematic free play with its swagger, embellishments and grand gestures. For him, and implicitly related to the power of speaking and arguing in the public sphere. ‘Eloquence flourishes only in a democracy, where everything is unordered and justice is administered by the people, who cannot clearly see through the mirage of eloquence’.69 Writing favourably yet with a touch

38  Anthropological investigations of ambivalence towards parliamentary democracy and speech-making of the Ciceronian-type Kant concedes that rhetoric as a form of argument can deceive. Argument should be a form of speech that is measured making it ready for critico-reflexive engagement and counter claims. For him, and unsurprisingly, the rhetoric of the pulpit or now the populist political ‘preachers’ of the street or the stadium are worse – they are forms of authoritarianism and live by deception alone.70 In Kant’s view poetry is more benign – we want to be entertained and thus deceived. Poetry’s aim is directed ‘at entertainment, and in the case of poetry I want to be tricked’.71 In the end poetry is more honest, for Kant: Poetry appears to want to entertain nothing other than sensibility, but it occupies the understanding at the same time. Eloquence appears to be a difficult business. The orator can deceive, the poet cannot. If the former leads sensibility astray at the cost of understanding, he delivers less than promised. From poets I want only entertainment, but whether the thing is true or not does not concern me. If the poet bestows, in addition to entertainment nourishment to my understanding (which is the case for all poets), he delivers more than promised. Poetry provides only a pure enjoyment. Even if rhetoric does not always deceive, nonetheless it always arouses (awakens) suspicions against it and the one who practices it, as he could at some point let himself be seduced into applying it harmfully.72 In Kant’s view, poetry is a beautiful form of play as it aims at harmony even if it takes us to new worlds, metaphorically speaking. Eloquence is a form of invention that can take us to dangerous or deceptive ones, and yet it is almost, for Kant, a necessary part of being a political being. It becomes deceptive if one plays the game of power. Yet, Kant remains in a quandary here. The imagination may not be especially creative, for Kant, but it is orientating. And this as we have seen is a particular problem of discombobulation, of being disconcerted and disarrayed, lacking in good judgement and indeed wisdom. For Kant, only our capacity or faculty of reasoning can make us steady, thoughtful and morally reflexive in the midst of inclinations, imaginings and difficult characters. To be sure, Kant’s ‘Shakespeareanism’ sets the scene or context for what he thinks we should be working towards, that is our orientation towards reason, rather than only its ground (our faculties are always with us). Orientation is a need for reason inherent in reason itself. As he says, to orientate oneself in thought means to be guided, in one’s convictions of truth, by a subjective principle of reason where objective principles of reason are inadequate’. [Strictly speaking JR] ‘reason does not feel. It perceives its own deficiency and produces a feeling of need through the cognitive impulse. The same applies in this case as in the case of moral

Anthropological investigations  39 feeling, which is not the source of the moral law, for this is entirely the product of reason; on the contrary, moral feeling is itself produced and occasioned by moral laws and hence by reason, because the active yet free will needs specific grounds [on which to act].73 There is a particular kind of dissonance here, more a call from the faculty of reason that may go unheard or not listened to, or only partially so. In full acknowledgment of this human-all-too-human reality, which includes Schiller’s critique, Kant rightly remains an optimist whilst recognising all of these difficulties and even beginning from them. Why is this the case? Let’s first hear from Kant’s call of reason, especially with regard to cognition, to answer this question. Yet, in answering this call, Kant will revisit the problem of the imagination with full force and unexpected results.

Notes 1 Both Marx and Habermas notice and prioritise the idea of critical criticism in their early works, and one could argue that this is the motivating aspect of their work as a whole. See Marx’s Letter to Arnold Ruge, and Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. There is a difference between the public sphere qua tweets, internet blogs and posts and the public sphere qua argument. Whilst the former is geared to immediacy and reactiveness, the latter requires space, time and form for the articulation of reflexive thinking that needs to develop and unfold often at some length. This form requires patience on the part of the recipient/interlocutor for reading/listening. The public sphere though is not only an argumentative/reflexive one. It also includes scholars, intellectuals and librarians; artists composers and writers; journalists. Each group of public ‘practitioners’ has its own particular ‘logic’ and genre. K. Marx, ‘For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing (Letter to Arnold Ruge)’, in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1972, 7–10; J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence, Boston, MA, The MIT Press, 1989. 2 Kant’s notion of freedom and its divisions are as follows: i to think reflexively/publicly and divided between – cognitively, practiconormatively, and aesthetically, ii to act politically and in a cosmopolitan way with a cosmopolitan purpose, iii to act well or in friendly terms with oneself, which includes looking after one’s self corporeally, that is in looking after one’s life, and with others, that is, the freedom to be a good friend – this is also part of a practico-sublime (not as an aesthetic category, but one that falls under practical reason). Whilst strictly speaking Kant doesn’t use the distinction between the good arguer, the good citizen and the good person, nonetheless he does use the distinction between narrow duties (ones according to Right/law) and wide ones (duties according to virtues) and we can ‘translate/transpose’ this into a distinction between the good citizen qua arguer/member of the republican democratic cosmopolitan polity, and the good person. And even Kant knows that the good citizen and the good person are not the same thing. This is the case even if they might have an affinity or a homology – cosmopolitan citizen (the former), and the friend – the latter, for Kant at least. But the friend follows its own ‘logic’ in

40  Anthropological investigations terms of beauty or the beautiful and cannot be mapped on or traced onto the political life of the citizen, or the political life of states. Even though Kant is not a Machiavellian, he knows that states and citizens mobilise contestatory power –potestas – and this requires a particular skill. See Chapter 6 for a discussion of Kant’s notion of the good person. But there is much ground to cover before we can get there. 3 Kant is arguing against three traditions in framing his anthropology of morals – first, the idea of the over-socialised condition of the being in which approbation is the driving force (Hume); second, the notion of a tabula rasa, that is, we are a blank sheet and there is nothing ‘inside’ to which we have reference to or if there is we have to immunise ourselves these aspects or bracket them out (Descartes); third, theological arguments that posit that we are ultimately in the hands of either God or the Devil. Against this backdrop Kant experiments in his moral philosophy, and my interpretation emphasises his experiments in linking anthropology or human self-images with moral philosophy that produces tensions and dissonances as distinct from thought experiments that are more formal and produce a rule book or internal legislative paths, for example, in the Critique of Practical Reason. It can be argued that the ‘Doctrine of Virtue’ belongs to the anthropological current. There is another current that tends to disconnect the phenomenal from the noumenal and wishes to establish the ground of morality on the basis of transcendental argument. This is Kant’s major revolutionary breakthrough in that he wishes to bring human judgement home to itself by drawing on its own resources, against the arguments posited by the other traditions. In this context, and in pursuing his preoccupation with the good person Kant is often viewed as a strictly formal and disciplinary thinker who subordinates the ‘is’ of the phenomenal to the ‘ought’ of the noumenal. Adorno in his highly critical yet nuanced and insightful reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason views his formalism in the following way, a formalism that is part of Kant’s entire work, including his moral philosophy: [W]hat is known as knowledge in an emphatic sense in Kant is something we might really describe as a question of organisation. It is a question of whether and how far we succeed in organising the sensory elements that are given to us with the aid of the forms both of our intuition and also the forms of our thought. By ‘organise’ we mean both to differentiate and distinguish between them and also to bring them together with the aid of unified points of view. Now since this content is something accidental and contingent, something changeable, which therefore does not belong in philosophy as Kant understands it, it follows the whole of philosophy cannot be anything other than the analysis of form. This element of form is really decisive for the whole of Kantian philosophy. You should note incidentally, that this is the point at which Kant’s philosophy has always been the target of the ugliest criticism. When Kant is accused of formalism – as he was by Max Scheler – what this represents is the price Kant had to pay for his preoccupation with the transcendental, that is, with the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments: in other words, with the fact that he had to confine himself to formal constituents because he had no control over the constantly changing contents. Th. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2002 In addition, for Adorno this formalism masks or includes a series of prejudices (Gadamer) that find their way into the formalism itself, and the predominant prejudice is that of German pietism. ‘If you wish – and if you will permit me to put this point in a broader historical context – you can see here something of

Anthropological investigations  41 the bourgeois neutralisation of metaphysical and theological ideas. On the one hand, they are stripped of their authority, whilst on the other hand, they are allowed a shadowy existence on the grounds that we do not really know much about them. Within the bourgeois household they are all postponed until Sunday and they are permitted a kind of Sunday-existence’. This is despite Kant’s modest view that the answers to ultimate theological questions are unknowable (a position repeated by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus), and religious thinking, organisation and politics should be brought under the umbrella of reason and subject to the principles of Enlightenment thinking, in his own version of this term. Th. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Alistair MacIntyre also takes issue with Kant’s transcendental approach in After Virtue, because according to MacIntyre, it cannot account for the substantive depth of human actions that arise from the ‘thickness’ of well understood and practised social virtues. In MacIntyre’s view, in modernity these social virtues have been ‘thinned’ to the point where they no longer exist and Kant’s (failed) formalistic approach is as much responsible for their loss – at the level of intellectual culture – as any socially driven idea of roles, performative testing, leisure pursuits and even value plurality might be. In MacIntyre’s view, Kant’s two deceptively simple theses about morally based action – first, that the rules of morality are rational and this rationality can be the same for all rational beings; and second in a similar way to Adorno’s point, that ‘if the rules of morality are binding, then the contingent ability of such beings to carry them out must be unimportant – what is important is their will to carry them out’ – can only fail. According to MacIntyre Kant’s theses fail because they reduce morality to a rule-based logic akin to mathematical formulas, they separate our desires and natures from reason (and hence separates happiness from freedom and emotion from reason), and there are no criteria external to reason itself. There is neither nature (our empirical selves), a social standard nor a God to whom to appeal. There is only a quest for normative universalism, and in the end, MacIntyre points out that this leads only to inconsistencies and absurdities. See A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edition, London, Duckworth, 1985. One did not have to wait for either Adorno or MacIntyre for these criticisms of Kant’s moral philosophy. Schiller had already pointed these out in his ‘On Grace and Dignity’ (1793) and On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1794). In the latter text, Schiller reiterates Kant’s programme of the Enlightenment – the development of a critically orientated public political world. Unlike Kant, though, Schiller does not share his confidence that the powers of reason will both ground and guarantee this world. In Schiller’s view the Kantian construction of transcendental reason cleaves apart feeling and good judgement, reason and imagination and leaves humankind a cold, technical animal. As Schiller states, ‘… the abstract thinker very often has a cold heart, since he dissects his impressions, and impressions can move the soul only as long as they remain whole...’. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters; Schiller, Schiller’s on Grace and Dignity (1793) in its Cultural Context: Essays and a New Translation, edited by J. V. Curran and F. Fricke, London, Boydell and Brewer, 2005, 123–170. However, if one concentrates on this transcendentally orientated aspect alone one obscures from viewing the important and crucial aspect of tension in Kant’s work, which is played out by the relation and permanent conflict between the phenomenal and the noumenal. From another perspective that is informed by this tension, Kant also makes a threefold distinction between the social, the political and the personal or the psychological. For him, they are not seamlessly connected to one another; rather they have their own particular ‘logics’ and they sit in tension with one another.

42  Anthropological investigations In contemporary critical theory, and against Marx, Arendt, for example, keeps a strict separation between the social and the political, and in later work the separation of both from the person through her notion of the vita contemplative whilst Heller also emphasises the domain of ‘the person’ (or the personality) in her Theory of Feelings. Habermas’ quasi-transcendental theory of communicative action (and despite his best efforts) posits a more or less seamless move between the social and the political, as does Honneth’s theory of recognition. Honneth’s theory of recognition is the strongest version of contemporary critical theory that posits a functional ‘seam’ between the psychological, the social and the political. See Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, Boston, MA, The MIT Press, 1996, and my critique of Honneth’s recognition paradigm in ‘Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory: Imagining Subjects in Tension’, in Critical Theory After Habermas, edited by Dieter Freundlieb, Wayne Hudson, and John Rundell, Leiden, Brill, 307–343. 4 I am indebted to Andrew Cutrofello’s ‘Kant’s Debate with Herder about the Philosophical Significance of the Genius of Shakespeare’ Philosophical Compass, 3:1, 2008: 66–82. Kant certainly has a sense of the dramatic. For example, in the first Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason he references Hecuba’s pain and fury, which is retold by Ovid in The Metamorphoses, as a reference point for the dethronement and loss of metaphysics as the Queen of Science. The lines referred to go thus: ‘Hecuba: My tale of sorrow goes on. I was one the most powerful women in all the world; I was strong in my husband, my sons, and my daughters; Now I’ve been torn from my loved ones’ graves and am helplessly dragged into exile, to serve as Penelope’s prize’. Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book 13, Lines 508–510. Translation David Raeburn with an introduction by Denis Feeney. Penguin Classics, 2014, 521–522. See also Schleiermacher, ‘Review of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View’, in Schleiermacher on Working of the Knowing Mind, New Translations, edited by Ruth Druscilla Richardson, Edwin Mellen Publishers, Lewiston, New York, 1998, 15–19. Kant’s ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, as well as his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, gives a strong indication of why this deep interest might be the case, as will be suggested below. To be sure, Kant uses the, then, conventional language of temperament to indicate the characteristics of the pre-reflexive ‘vital forces’ (sensation and desire), that is, of the life of the mind and the body. Kant ‘psychological’ profiles of the four temperaments are: the sanguine geared towards the desire for satisfaction; the melancholic, which is ruled by a desire or preoccupation with dissatisfaction; the phlegmatic temperament, which is slow to rise and can be viewed as cold-blooded; the choleric temperament, which is quick to rise and is hot-blooded. He reserves the notion of character, as with person for his reflexive subject. See Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 467–472; Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 185–195. Kant goes on to make a distinction between pre-reflexive temperament and reflexive personhood or character (see also the following discussion and Chapter 6). However, Shakespeare is our guide here rather than Kant or even Ovid at this moment of our discussion of his work. Paul Guyer also gives an outstanding overview of the context of eighteenth-century German Idealism in which Kant positions himself with and against. See Paul Guyer, ‘Eighteenth Century German Aesthetics’, in The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. My argument has strong affinities with the work of R. B. Louden’s Kant’s Impure Ethics From Rational Beings to Human Beings, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, and Kant’s Human Being: Essays on his Theory of Human Nature, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, as well as Frierson’s ‘Affects and Passions’, in Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology: A Critical Guide, edited by Alix Cohen, Cambridge,

Anthropological investigations 43

5 6 7

8

9

10

Cambridge University Press, 2014, 94–113 which draws on his earlier works, for example, Frierson 2003, and 2013. Frierson concentrates on Kant’s relation to Shaftsbury, Hutcheson and Hume, whilst Louden investigates the necessity of impurity in Kant’s ethics from the vantage points of Kant’s comments on moral education, institutional supports for ethical action, good judgement, and ‘and ought that will become an is’. See Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics, 169. Whilst sympathetic to Louden’s approach I will draw on Shakespeare’s work to throw this impurity into relief even further. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 346. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London, Rex Library, 1973, 861–862. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act 3, Scene 3, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 789. See also Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, where he follows Kant’s lead in developing a positive analysis of the function of money as a form of social abstraction. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act 3, Scene 3, 789. Marx, commenting in 1844 in the wake of both Kant and Hegel, for one, observes that Shakespeare brings out two properties of money. First, it transforms social and natural properties into their opposites and because of this has a divine or transcendent quality that also functions as, second, a negative, alienating social bond that represents general human alienation. See K. Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, in Karl Marx Early Writings, introduction Lucio Colletti, translation by Rodney Livingston and Gregor Benton, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981, 377. I have discussed Marx’s concept of alienation and his notion of money in Origins of Modernity. See also M. Mauss, The Gift the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls. Forward M. Douglas, London, Routledge, 1990 for an analysis for the power of giving in the form of the potlach. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 458–459; see also 456–459. See also his discussion of avarice in ‘The Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, §10, 227–230. See also 245 where Kant argues that the opposite of philanthropy is misanthropy which is divided into: enemies of man (is glad when things go badly for others); selfishness (indifference to how things go for others); shyness (anthropophobia or turning away from others); malice, which is the opposite of sympathy and makes misanthropy visible and expands it through acts that privilege and promote it (acts such as haughtiness and desire for revenge). At 251 §36 Kant sharpens his analysis and argues that the opposite of benevolence is envy (views the well-being of others with distress and can result in actions to diminish their well-being), ingratitude and unappreciativeness (‘ingratitude is a vice that shocks humanity … because [it] stands love of man on its head, as it were and degrades absence of love into an authorisation to hate the one who loves’ (252), malice and these are also expansive, whilst contempt is narrow or focussed. For Kant, vices are violations rather than creations, although as we shall suggest there is a creative dimension to violation through the invocation of wrongdoing as evil. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 462–463. See also Nietzsche, ‘The Genealogy of Morals’ for an analysis of the relation between creditor and debtor and ressentiment. There is also another quality of money that Shakespeare, Marx and Mauss recognise either implicitly or explicitly, where money is allied to power and control qua potestas. Here money becomes a representation, a schema of a schema or blurred symbol for power and control over ‘purse-strings’ and budgets that can extend beyond the grave to include inheritances, of which Kant was especially critical. Power and control

44  Anthropological investigations can also take the form of a gift that is given with strings or obligations attached, rather than it being given outright or even as part of a potlach. Playwrights and novelists are often sharper in their observations and critiques than philosophers and social theorists when it comes to the emotional economies of power, control and money, for example, Shakespeare in Merchant of Venice and not only Timon of Athens, Jane Austen in Emma and Pride and Prejudice and Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. Jane Austen comes closest to Kant’s moral philosophy in her critique of ugly vices and her pursuit of virtues. MacIntyre, for one, notices differences between Kant and Austen in After Virtue yet there are also strong affinities between them in their sharp observation and wit and as we shall see below in Kant’s own sense and sensibilities. 11 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 824. 12 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 824. 13 Lady Macbeth: We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-place, And we’ll not fail. Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 6, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 827. 14 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 5, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 825. 15 Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 827–828. The wisdom rather than the perversity of power is to know where the limit is, to know when not to use it, when to become the loyal opposition, to walk the bare boards and finally to exit the stage. See, for example, Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber. 16 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 6, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 826. 17 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 5, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 826. The pursuit and accumulation of power can also be an aphrodisiac – even its own aphrodisiac. 18 See I. Kant, Dreams of a Spirit Seer, translation E. F. Goerwitz, introduction and notes by Frank Sewell, New York, The Macmillan Co., 1900. 19 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 503, see also 450. See also Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, translation with an introduction, Th. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson, New York, Harper and Row, 24–25. Kant’s moral categories are the agreeable, the beautiful, the good, the disagreeable, the ugly and evil. See Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 432. 20 See Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtues’, in Metaphysics of Morals, 1991, 216, §4; see also 218–224, §5–8; Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 432–433. 21 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 829; see Kant, Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 377–388. 22 See Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtues’, in Metaphysics of Morals, 253, §36. In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone he will term this type of wrongdoing, ‘impure evil’; see 25. 23 See Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtues’, in Metaphysics of Morals, 1991, 251–254, §36. Other good people can also lie, self-deceive, be self-centred and even have affairs or ‘dangerous liaisons’, as Shakespeare and later de Laclos too would explore.

Anthropological investigations  45

24 25 26 27 28

29

30 31 32 33 34 35

Later and in a contemporary vein to Kant, Rousseau, for example, insists that dissembling is the normal life of civilised men and women who become alienated more than disenchanted, and dissembling becomes the norm. For Rousseau, civility (the French version of goodness) is simply a form of inauthenticity – a form of negativity, which is a position that Sartre will articulate nearly 200 years later. See Pierre, Choderlos De Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons, London, Penguin Classics, 2007; Rousseau, The Social Contract; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. H. E Barnes, New York, The Citadel Press, 1969. See Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malvaney-Chevallier, New York, Vintage Books, 2011; Sartre, Being and Nothingness. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 540. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 503. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 16–17. See Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtues’, 1964, 90–93. See also Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 25, where he states that this type of wickedness may also be called ‘perversity of the human heart, for it reverses the ethical order [of priority] amongst the incentives of a free will; and although conduct which is lawfully good (i.e. legal) may be found within it, yet the cast of mind is thereby corrupted at its root (so far as the moral disposition is concerned, and the man is hence designated as evil’ (see also 31–33). Radical evil is explored and even given a certain pornographic frisson by de Sade beyond envy and resentment. This perspective can lead to a negative anthropology in more general terms. See The Marquis de Sade, ‘Justine or Good Conduct Well Chastised’, in The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, compiled and translation Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, introduction by Jean Paulhan and Maurice Blanchot, New York, Grove Press, 1965, 447–743; Slovaj Zizek, ‘Kant with (or against) de Sade?’ New Formations, 35, 1998: 93–107; M. Horkheimer and Th. Adorno, ‘Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, London, Verso, 1997, 63–93. See Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtues’, 123–127. The choice of the Macbeth’s is deliberate and indicates that everyday people are capable of evil doing. In this sense evil is not necessarily ‘banal’ in the sense portrayed by Arendt in her discussion of Eichmann, but it does require a particular effort. To be sure, the Macbeths, especially Lady Macbeth, are made mad by guilt, by inner conscience. The truly radicalised evil character has no guilt – only maxims. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2006. See Agnes Heller’s critique of Arendt’s use of the term in ‘Open Letter to Hannah Arendt on Thinking’, 2009, congresos.um.es/ahha/ahha2009/ paper/viewFile/6211/5951, accessed 19/4/2017. See J. W. von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther, London, Penguin, 1989; Rousseau, The New Heloise or the New Julie. Peter Abelard and Heloise, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, introduction and notes Michael Clancy, translation by Betty Radice, London, Penguin Classics, 2004. Romeo and Juliet, Prologue, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 744. Romeo and Juliet, Prologue, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene 1, 746. Romeo and Juliet, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Act 2, Scene 3, 753. Romeo and Juliet, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Act 3, Scene 5, 763.

46  Anthropological investigations 36 Romeo and Juliet, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Act 5, Scene, 3, 771. 37 Shakespeare’s portrayal of Romeo and Juliet continues in paradigmatic form a long lasting and influential version of the Eros tradition that combines a supposed internal relation between love and death that constitutes the tragic condition of love. See Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1983; Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, Vols. 1–3, Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press, 1984–1987. Shakespeare also portrays another version of love that emphasises the way it discombobulates, confuses and results in a comedy of errors in which love’s labours are not lost but won. 38 Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtues. Doctrine of Virtues, translation James Ellington, introduction by Warner Wick, New York, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1964, §7, 87; see Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 459–461. 39 See Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion, Oxford, Polity Press, 1986. 40 Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtues, §7, 87; See also Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 142. 41 Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtues Doctrine, §7, 85–87. 42 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Right’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, §24, §25, 62; See also Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtues, §7, 87. Kant’s discussion of erotic love and marriage is a minor although neither uninteresting nor irrelevant part of his argument. Kant presents two further ways in which passion is transposed and directed once it touches hands and is subsumed by practical reason. On the one hand, and as we shall see in Chapter 6, one should take on the aspect of vocation, duty and especially benevolence, whilst, on the other, as will be explored in Chapter 4, love is transposed into the register of aesthetics, especially into the key of the sublime and not just the beautiful, notwithstanding Kant’s dispassionate notion of taste as ‘the sensible pleasure in objects that please in the mere act of contemplating them’. In this sense and by implication love is expansive, for Kant. 43 Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1971; Ursula Vogel, ‘Rationalism and Romanticism; Two Strategies for Women’s Liberation’, in Feminism and Political Theory, edited by J. Evans, London, Sage, 17–46; Pauline Johnson, ‘The Quest for the Self: Feminism’s Appropriation of Romanticism’ Thesis 11, 41, 1995: 76–93; John Rundell, ‘The Erotic Imaginary, Autonomy, Modernity’, in Imaginaries of Modernity, 231–242. Kant’s cultural reference point is also Protestantism and marriage qua mutual friendship. See Singer, The Nature of Love, especially Vol. 2. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 133. Kant is not swayed by 44 Werther’s final act of self-abandonment – of suicide, as portrayed by Goethe in The Sufferings of Young Werther. 45 Marx too could never be a novelist in the manner of Charles Dickens with his acute observations of the dramas, vices and virtues of Victorian England, the homeland of nineteenth-century capitalist modernity. Marx’s observations and genius were pitched elsewhere – to the ‘systematic’ theorising of the conditions themselves that occurred over time, theorisations that had their own metatheoretical dramas. I have extensively discussed Marx’s meta-theoretical dramas in Origins of Modernity; but see especially Chapter 7, ‘Marx against Marx’. Agnes Heller uses the metaphor of the suspension bridge between the phenom46 enal and the noumenal to capture this sense of interstice or space that Kant imagines or posits is between these two worlds within us. See Agnes Heller, ‘Freedom, Equality and Fraternity in Kant’s Critique of Judgment’ Critical Horizons, 19:3, 2018: 187–197, DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2018.1485235.

Anthropological investigations  47 47 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 428. 48 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 426. Kant more or less has an unmusical ear and his preferred aesthetic form is poetry. The work of Agnes Heller, especially her Theory of Feelings, is a continuation of this Kantian anthropological motif. 49 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 426–427. 50 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 426. 51 For Kant, we are not pure, disembodied animals. As his remarks make clear ‘it is a pure moral fantasy to place no value in one’s life and to consider the sexual inclination as improper; those are purists in morals who want us to be guided by grounds of the understanding alone and not by any animal drives whatsoever, which pertain only to pure spirits’. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 460. In his critical philosophy he would replace the faculty of desire with the more simplified distinction between phenomena and noumena. 52 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 439. 53 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 439, emphasis added. 54 See also Frierson, ‘Affects and Passions’, in Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology, 94–113 where he highlights and outlines the structure and development of Kant’s ‘empirical’ anthropology. 55 Here I will look more closely at Kant’s negative assessment of the imagination in his anthropological investigations before turning to his more positive conceptual development of the productive imagination in The Critique of Pure Reason in Chapter 5. There is more to Kant’s view on the imagination than meets the eye (the ‘I’) in his remarks, as it informs the way in which both pure and practical reasoning are constituted. 56 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 385; see 383–386. 57 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 383. 58 See Paul Guyer, ‘Beauty, Freedom and Morality, Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology and the Development of his Aesthetic Theory’, in Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology: A Critical Guide, 113–163. 59 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 415. 60 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 414–415. 61 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 383. See also the Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 165, §24, B151. 62 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 394. 63 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 395–397. 64 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 415–416. Fiction writers know that they are creating and writing fiction; philosophers know that they are creating and writing philosophy. This is a matter of the reflexive and self-conscious creation and interpretation of genres, even when the genres are being blurred. The mad subject and his/her world know nothing of genres. 65 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 415. Kant further argues that insane persons use representations as delusions and thus reverse the relation between understanding and imagination. They ‘rely on a hypothesis that is imagined. The understanding orients itself according to this hypothesis and he is properly clever and witty … With insane persons understanding and reason are correct [they are] just built on an incorrect ground. But in the case of lunacy, it is not just the delusion that underlies the human being;

48  Anthropological investigations

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

rather something correct can also be underlying; but his understanding does not judge according to rules’ (416). This is a philosophical interpretation of madness that, in Kant’s hands, is not yet dominated by the scientific rationality of psychiatry, which created diagnostic charts of mental illnesses that also tended to reduce these to pathological or physiological causes. Kant’s analysis leaves open the work of the imagination. Castoriadis and Foucault take up this aspect of Kant’s work in their own ways – as they take up other aspects of his work. From the position of ontology Castoriadis takes up the aspect of the work of the faculty of the imagination with emphasis on its creativity, where psychosis opens an insightful door, for example, in his essay ‘The Construction of the World in Psychosis’, World in Fragments, edited and translation by David Ames Curtis, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1997, 196–210. Foucault alternatively takes up and prioritises an implicit critique of the scientisation of mental life by way of their genealogies, for example, in Madness and Civilization, A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard, New York, Vintage Books, 1988, and his later History of Sexuality: An Introduction: 1, New York, Random House, 1990. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 402. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 398. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 397–398. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 399. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 400. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 399. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 400. Kant, ‘What Is Orientation in Thinking?’ in Kant: Political Writings, 240 and 243 respectively. Kant uses geographical metaphors in order to posit the idea of orientation. Yet, and as he states, orientation is a need inherent in reason, which is also another way of speaking about orientation as a feeling or inner sense that something is amiss and needs to be attended to. In other words and even though Kant strictly speaking limits feelings to the faculty of desire, and as such they are pre-reflexive, it can be suggested that he implicitly opens onto a relationship between reason and feeling, an issue that is also taken up by not only Schiller, but also later Agnes Heller. See Agnes Heller, A Theory of Feelings, where she discusses this relationship. See also J. Rundell, ‘Agnes Heller’s Theory of Action: The Incompleteness of the Human Being’, in Critical Theories and the Budapest School, edited by Jonathan Pickle and John Rundell, London, Routledge, 2018, 188–207. For a different direction see also John Rundell, ‘Fichte’s Science of Knowledge and the anthropological re-positioning of the faculty of imagination: a contribution to the work of the radical imaginary’ in Thesis Eleven, Vol. 119, 1, 3–21, 2013. Johann G. Fichte’s work is significant because of the way in which it stands in the wake of Kant’s implicit emphasis on the faculty of the imagination. Kant’s implicit reliance on the faculty of the imagination is the topic of the next chapter. Fichte systematically re-conceptualizes (re-imagines) the work of the imagination, but not as ‘wild’ but as creatively productive. He has an astute reading of the Critique of Pure Reason and emphasizes the faculty of the imagination, which for him, provides a space from which to continue interrogations into the self-constitution of the human, more expansive and richer than reason. Fichte links his version of the productive imagination to human self- constitution or self-positing through the terms of oscillation and tension. For Fichte, the issue of human self-constitution is also tied internally to the value of freedom.

3

The critique of impure reason The schematic imagination

Cognition and anthropology From an anthropological perspective, we are not only difficult animals, but also ones who have problems knowing that we categorise the world. As we are difficult selves, according to Kant, we have difficulty with cognition in ways that could give us both certainty and a proper grounding in the way in which this cognition is formed in the first place. There are intuitions and everyday cognitions based on our experience of the phenomenal world. In this sense, we are intuiting and everyday animals who use social habit as the basis for knowledge. We are also embodied and desiring ones, which, as we have seen can also provide a certain context for emotional knowledge. However, knowing or really the freedom to cognize, for Kant, requires work different in kind to everyday, intuitive, imaginative, emotional or even incorrectly formulated philosophical knowledge (thinking about thinking). Notwithstanding Kant’s deep ‘Shakespearian’ comprehension of our very human condition in the midst of material reality, he conducts a war on all these fronts in order to posit a notion of pure or unconditioned reason with which to cognise our world of objects as distinct from our relations with other human beings. In other words, Kant’s aim in his Critique of Pure Reason is to establish the parameters of cognition of our external world in the midst of the everyday, the fictive and the imaginative. We are for Kant, not only difficult selves, but also complicated ones, especially when it comes to thinking.1 Kant is not only interested in a critique of faulty knowing. He is also concerned with the constitution, limits and antinomies of ‘pure reason’.2 More concretely, Kant’s anthropological investigations are partly supressed, or more accurately, condensed and narrowed into our sensible, empirical experience of time and space when he turns to interrogate the formation of our knowledge of objects in the external world. In other words, he is concerned with knowledge limited to objects and in order to establish this he must first establish what constitutes cognition itself. Kant is concerned to address the problem of cognition in ways that go beyond the explanations of his four great Enlightenment

50  Critique of impure reason predecessors  – Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume. For Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, who he gathers under the umbrella of dogmatic or speculative Idealists, human reason which provides the basis of cognition is ultimately reliant on the presence of God or a supreme being. For Kant, in a vein that is almost repeated by such diverse later thinkers as Wittgenstein and Derrida, one should remain silent with regard to arguments pertaining to God.3 Cognition or thinking remains within the limits of human reason alone.4 According to Kant, the human being is a limited being – it does not have all-powerful thinking. It can only think through the categories and concepts, if it thinks at all. If it does not think it is fantastical and delusional. In other words, the human being is not a godly creature but a materially contextualised and phenomenal one who nonetheless uses the faculties of understanding and reason to produce categories and ideas. Once it understands this double-sided context the human being could begin to understand its own limitations. Whilst knowledge of the world may expand the human beings’ sense of their own reach and capability (and hubris because of this sense), they can also contain this capacity so that it could become more realistic, pragmatic and limited to what is understood, what can be done, and what is known and unknown.5 Thus, at first and even second sight, the Critique of Pure Reason seems to concern two questions: what is knowledge or cognition? and what is reason?6 In other words, Kant's apparent task is, first, to enquire into the epistemological conditions through which knowledge is not so much attained, as constituted, and through this enquiry, second to link an epistemological set of problems to the issue of the nature of pure reason itself, for ‘reason is the faculty which supplies the principles of a priori knowledge. Pure reason is, therefore, that which contains the principles whereby we know anything absolutely a priori’.7 Whilst beginning from our empirical existence Kant places the emphasis on the noumena (intelligibility or thinking) and positions phenomena (appearances or sensibilities including all of the ‘difficult’ anthropological ones) under its rules which establish the formal, transcendental and thus universal constitution of cognition, itself.8 The Critique of Pure Reason lays down an architectonic or architecture for the transcendental principles of pure reason. However, in so doing we shall see that Kant cannot avoid another critique of ‘impure’ reason, not one that is derived from phenomenological, genealogical or social-power critiques of the formation of ‘regimes of reason’, but something more telling – it’s reliance on the work of the productive imagination. Whilst Kant’s main concern is a respect rather than hubris towards limits and boundaries of reason, there is also a caution, but not a retreat, from knowing that there is ‘something else’. This ‘something else’ is for him not a ‘religious’ matter but an anthropological one that posits the faculty of the imagination as a region of creative indetermination. In my interpretation ‘impurity’ refers to the productive yet undetermined condition of the faculty of the imagination that stands even at the core of cognition.9

Critique of impure reason  51 Impurity in this instance does not refer to the phenomenal, historical or social (co-constituting) dimensions of reason, but the necessity of the indeterminate productive or creative imagination, which supplies cognition with a third term.10 For Kant, this third term makes cognition possible. As we shall see Kant’s remarks on the voluntary, compositional power of the productive imagination are transposed into the power pertaining to schemata. The work of the productive imagination goes beyond simply initiating cognitive synthesis. It comes to mean not only previously ‘unexhibited’ patterns in the manner of a figurative synthesis, that is, schemata that are more than images or functional homologies for/of the categories of the understanding, but also a means through which Kant ‘thinks’ his way into the nature of the creation of categories and concepts themselves.11 This chapter will look, first, at Kant’s explicit aim of the Critique of Pure Reason of establishing the groundwork for cognitive formations of our empirical claims about the external or natural world, before, second, looking closely at the way in which his formulation of the productive imagination gains an unexpected significance that surprises even Kant. This surprise introduces an unannounced yet necessary ‘impurity’ into the work of reason, not on the basis of Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal and the transcendental, but rather on the ground of his transcendental formulation of the faculty of the imagination and the way that this affects his formulation of freedom, itself.

The daylight of cognition Kant’s aim in the Critique of Pure Reason, which is also succinctly and even beautifully re-stated in his subsequent Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, is to move the basis of our knowledge about the objective world from the night-time of confusion and the mornings of uncertainty to the full day-time of certainty and determination. As Kant indicates in the Anthropology Mrongovius, we work from obscure to clear representations, and thus make obscure ones clearer, even though obscure ones occupy the greatest part of our soul and underlie the clear ones and ‘constitute the majority of our cognition’.12 In this context, we orientate ourselves to the work of the faculties of the understanding and reason in order to make our cognitions of the external world apparent and comprehensible. The metaphor of orientation introduced by Kant in ‘What is Orientation in Thinking’ is a little misleading here because in the Critique of Pure Reason he posits a stronger thesis regarding the way in which cognition occurs. By using the metaphor of orientation, it seems as if there is phenomenal-based understanding and then transcendental understanding that stands alongside or in addition and to which one refers in order to judge the veracity of the former. For Kant, though, there is no prior phenomenal-based understanding; rather this is a misapprehension that Kant wishes to correct about how categories and concepts or representations are formed in the

52  Critique of impure reason first place. For Kant, and as his anthropological investigations show, we are empirical/phenomenological beings who live in the empirical worlds of nature and society. We have an external reality from which we cannot escape, as Kant emphasises in his sympathetic reading of Hume’s work, which as he acknowledges woke him from his dogmatic slumber.13 However, it is not the empirical world that alone explains our knowledge of it (as Kant argues against Hume and empiricism). Kant goes on to say that we cannot think an object save through categories; we cannot know an object so thought save through intuitions corresponding to these concepts. Now all our intuitions are sensible; and this knowledge in so far as its object is given, is empirical. But empirical knowledge is experience. Consequently, there can be no a priori knowledge except of objects of possible experience. But although this knowledge is limited to objects of experience, it is not therefore all derived from experience. The pure intuitions [of receptivity] and the pure concepts of understanding are elements in knowledge and are both found in us a priori.14 In addition, and as my introductory remarks to this chapter have indicated, for Kant, any reference to a subjectivism of a self-completed or self-referential subject explains our cognition of phenomena even less. This is regardless of whether this self-completed subject takes the form of either a dreamer or a fantasist who emphasises internal psychological life or a dogmatic Idealist who constructs a self-positing ‘I’ internally, or externally beyond the human subject. Ironically both positions posit an image of a solipsistically internal, complete and isolated monad or omnipotent Being who is already complete or absolute before or beyond experience.15 As Kant says, the subject or ‘I’ is not a predicate or substance: I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself. The consciousness of self is thus very far from being a knowledge of the self, notwithstanding all the categories which [are being employed to] constitute the thought of an object in general, through combination of the manifold in one apperception … I exist as an intelligence which is conscious solely of its power of combination; but in respect of the manifold which it has to combine I am subjected to a limited condition (entitled inner sense), namely, that this combination can be made intuitable only according to relations in time, which lies entirely outside the concepts of understanding, strictly regarded.16 The explicit aim, then, of Kant’s critical programme is to provide the conditions of navigation, certitude and clarity for our knowledge of objects in the empirical world. As we shall see in Chapters 4–6, Kant also claims we can achieve clarity and certainty in our judgements of aesthetic objects, political freedoms and practice of morals – all of which are of a different order and

Critique of impure reason  53 require different approaches to the problem of thinking and acting freely in the midst of our anthropological contexts. For him, cognitive judgements of objects of experience require a unity of intuitions, derived from our existence in time and space, with categories or concepts – representations – derived from either the faculties of the understanding or reason. This unity is in contrast to a dissonance and a discombobulation between intuitions and concepts. As he says: Our nature is so constituted that our intuition can never be other than sensible; that is, it contains only the mode in which we are affected by objects. The faculty, on the other hand, which enables us to think the object of sensible intuition is the understanding. To neither of these powers may a preference be given over the other. Without sensibility no object can be given to us, without understanding no object can be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.17 In other words, knowledge springs from two sources that must come together – receiving intuitions of objects that we experience and thinking about these intuitions by way of concepts. Kant’s programme concerns discovering, or really inventing the nature of this double-sided unity. The implication or result of Kant’s strategy is that the object, the thing-in-itself, and the ‘I’ are all ‘empty’ and unknown and unknowable entities and are only ‘filled’ by representations (categories and concepts). If … we admit that we know objects only in so far as we are externally affected, we must also recognise, as regards inner sense, that by means of it we intuit ourselves only as we are inwardly affected by ourselves; in other words, that, so far as inner intuition is concerned, we know our own subject only as appearance, not as it is in itself.18 Our knowledge of an object of experience is an ‘invention’ or a constant series of representations or mediations of this ‘object’, which essentially remains unknown and unknowable apart from these representations. We are the representing animals and representations are formed in a very particular way, for Kant. Knowledge is yielded through concepts, which can be ‘gathered’ together. Whilst intuitions might be sensible/empirical in origin actual knowledge is rendered through the ‘act of bringing various representations under one common representation’.19 This means that concepts are not related to other objects, but to other representations. More crucially, judgements about objects of experience are therefore forms of mediated knowledge – mediated through concepts, or as Kant says in a way that sets the scene for the later linguistic turn in philosophy and social theory, ‘a representation of a representation’ – concepts related to other concepts and categories.20 For him, though the important dimension of this mediation of

54  Critique of impure reason concepts is its transcendental aspect; ‘the knowledge that these representations are not of empirical origin, and the possibility that they can related a priori to objects of experience’.21 As Kant puts it in the Critique of Pure Reason, knowledge is created from a human process that occurs at the intersection of the empirical (our existence in time and space) through representational understanding, and this requires the creation of categories and concepts even at the level of everyday life. For Kant, genuine knowledge that places us fully in daylight, as distinct from faulty everyday knowledge, occurs in a second step. It involves the reflection on and possible critique of everyday knowledge and is a product of transcendental critique. Transcendental critique occurs through the mobilisation of categories and concepts that are organised or function according to the rules of the faculty of understanding. Thinking is knowledge by means of concepts.22 It is a process of what might be termed critico-representative critical theorising or representations of representations, or in Kant’s terminology, critical or transcendental Idealism, to separate it from everyday representations, empiricism (rather than materialism, as Kant is a materialist of sorts) and Idealism. According to Kant and given his double or really triple-sided approach to an epistemology of cognition about objects of experience, real judgements about empirical objects that render genuine knowledge occur in two ways: either through analytic or synthetic judgements. Pure or transcendental analytic judgements are essential for clarity – for daylight and enable us to move away or abstract from sensibility and its rules. Pure analytic judgements belong to the rules of the understanding as a science or a logic. Transcendental logic or pure transcendental analytic judgements are an investigation into the ‘possibility of concepts a priori by looking for them in the understanding as their birthplace’.23 Kant reiterates his distinction between intuitions and concepts. Intuitions rest on affections and feelings, whilst concepts rest on the function of the understanding itself, of its ability to bring various representations under the umbrella of one common representation. Kant thinks that this distinction is important not for utilitarian or instrumental reasons but for critico-reflexive ones. Thinking, that is, critico-representative-mediative subjects require ‘special’ concepts originally generated in the understanding, and according to Kant, it is these concepts that make judgements objectively possible. For Kant, transcendental analytic logic has its rightful yet limited place as general rules for the empirical employment of the understanding.24 Yet transcendental analytic logic oversteps its mark and itself becomes illusory or self-deluded when it becomes a technique or instrument of thought (an organon) that is extended to all kinds of thinking and problems. For Kant, thinking or thought has a limited value when it is defined by analytic function alone.25 It cannot explain much except for mundane truths. It cannot explain paradox and indeterminacy, or what Kant would term ‘the spontaneity of our thoughts’.26 This requires synthesis. In this sense,

Critique of impure reason  55 ‘something else’ is required that can create explanations out of a diverse and even paradoxical number of concepts even if these explanations may be factually incorrect. These explanations require imagination even to put the concepts in their ‘right’ as well as their ‘wrong’ place.27 This is not a matter of truth or falsity, as such, but the combination or figuration that requires something in addition to ‘brute concepts’ (rather than ‘brute facts’ – Kant is no Mr Gradgrind).28 In other words, for Kant there is more to the creation of knowledge about objects of experience and the possible criticism of this knowledge, that is, critico-representative critical theorising, than logical procedure. By synthesis Kant means: the act of putting different representations together, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one act of knowledge. Such synthesis is pure, if the manifold is not empirical but is given a priori, as is the manifold in space and time. Before we can analyse our representations, the representations must themselves be given, and therefore as regards content no concepts can arise by way of analysis. Synthesis of the manifold (be it given empirically or a priori) is what first gives rise to knowledge. This knowledge may indeed, at first be crude and confused, and therefore in need of analysis. Still the synthesis is that which gathers the elements for knowledge, and unites them to form a certain content … Synthesis in general is the mere result of the power of the imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely conscious.29 Whilst it appears as if Kant wants to contain synthesis to the faculty of the understanding his analysis nonetheless goes beyond the neat division of his faculties and even critic-representative thinking. Synthetic judgements are where the real work of knowledge creation about objects of experience occurs. Here Kant recasts the voluntary, compositional productive imagination and goes beyond ‘poetry’ (as discussed in Chapter 2) to prise open the nature of creatively thinking, really positing something, even in the domain of so-called objects of experience. As Kant points out the faculty of the imagination plays a central role. As we shall see, synthesis does not simply arrange, combine or figurate diverse and even paradoxical or antinomic concepts. It creates the meaning of these concepts as well as their arrangement, which becomes the basis of thinking freely. Something else happens in the Critique of Pure Reason that again confront Kant’s ruminations on the imagination, especially in its productive capacity. Once again, a primary issue presents itself – the inventiveness, limitation and expansion of the faculty of the imagination and hence ourselves. Kant’s move beyond empiricism, Idealism and logic to the issue of a synthesis goes to the heart of his formulation of pure reason. In so doing, he also confronts head on the issue of the productive imagination, and the relation of both

56  Critique of impure reason reason and the understanding to it. The issue of the universal constituting condition of knowledge, and judgements concerning such a constitution, is internal to the problem concerning the transcendental condition of both reason and the imagination. Let’s look at this more closely.

A mystery X – the productive imagination Transcendental synthetic judgements, that is, spontaneous judgements derived from non-experience rest upon the addition of something else which Kant signals by an ‘X’. As Kant asks himself in his introductory comments to the Critique of Pure Reason: What is here the unknown = X which gives support to the understanding when it believes that it can discover outside the concept A or predicate B foreign to this concept, which it yet at the same time considers to be connected with it.30 To be sure, for Kant this ‘X’ cannot be experienced; it is certainly mysterious, but its mystery refers to knowledge, or rather concepts that are formed a priori. Kant’s task, then, is to answer the question ‘what is this “‘X”?’ or as he asks himself: ‘How are a priori synthetic judgments possible?’.31 For him, answering this question provides the ground for establishing the basis for determinate objective knowledge. Kant answers this question in two sections of the Critique of Pure Reason – ‘The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding’ and ‘The Schematicism of the Pure Concept of Understanding’. Kant argues that appearances are nothing but ‘sensible representations, which as such and in themselves, must not be taken as objects capable of existing outside our power of representation’.32 At first glance it appears, as Kant himself suggests, that his ‘X’ is the representation itself, as we cannot get outside it. On closer examination, though, representations themselves are a synthesis of reason, the legislative power of the understanding and the imagination. In analysing the synthesis, Kant views and constructs the imagination as an essential and prefigurative dimension in the formation of knowledge. He neither dismisses nor constructs it as simply as a conduit, and association, or a wild world of phantasy or chaotic aberration. Rather, to repeat his point, it is ‘an indispensable function of the soul without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious’, which takes it beyond synthesis itself.33 Kant argues that there are three moments within the synthetic formation of knowledge: the synthesis of apprehension in intuition; its reproduction in the imagination; and its recognition in a concept. Synthesis is the process whereby diverse forms and appearances are brought together and relations formed between them. In other words, associations are formed between the diverse forms and appearances that determine the meaning of a certain

Critique of impure reason  57 space and the meaning of a certain time. The activity of association, moreover, both assumes and assures the reproducibility of appearances. Kant initially terms this activity of association the reproductive imagination and it is the indication of the imagination’s power that is not identified with it being ‘wild’. This reproductive faculty of the imagination is directed to perceptions, impressions of which it must have some knowledge of in order to form images. This is what gives to the imagination, for Kant, its empirical nature. In other words, and in a narrower formulation to that found in the Anthropology Mrongovius, the reproductive imagination ‘rests upon empirical conditions’.34 Moreover, and notwithstanding its empirical orientation, the associative or reproductive imagination guarantees that knowledge (representations) not only endures and continues over time, that is, guarantees relations between past and present, but also forms patterns and associations with other knowledge. This power of association is the evidence, for Kant, that the reproductive imagination is also transcendental. This is what ensures that wild chaos is not the condition of the imaginary life and its power, even in the first instance. The reproductive or associative imagination functions according to a priori principles without which the empirical imagination, as Kant argues, ‘would never find opportunity for exercise appropriate to its powers, and so would remain concealed within the mind as a dead and to us unknown faculty’.35 In other words, both because, and in spite of empirical plurality, diversity and difference of ‘at hand’ everyday knowledge there is, so Kant argues, an objective ground of synthesis, and by objective Kant means a priori and antecedent to all empirically orientated associations of the imagination. This objective or a priori ground is the productive imagination which aims at an intercourse between sensibility and understanding or cognition, the outcome of which are categories or concepts that undergird even ‘at hand’ everyday knowledge.36 It is this process of transcendental synthesising mediation that makes the pure productive imagination, for Kant, ‘one of the fundamental categories of the human soul’.37 In the Critique of Pure Reason the imagination is productive and because of this it is more than ‘wild’ in its synthesising activity. Nor is it a mere conduit between the empirical and the noumenal. It is a constitutive component of knowledge formation itself, and as such, the imagination moves to centre stage. Kant’s ‘X’ can now be named: transcendental synthesis by the productive imagination. As Kant, himself, states, ‘the synthesis of the manifold through pure imagination, the unity of all representations in relation to original apperception, precede all empirical knowledge’.38 This suggests that at one level the productive imagination provides a functional unity for intuitions and concepts, which, whilst constitutive, is nonetheless only a necessary synthesising aid to the understanding and the formation of categories, of bringing sensibility under a faculty of rules, that is, the understanding.39 We thus create and produce the order and

58  Critique of impure reason regularity in the appearances of the natural world – which as Kant points out we simply happen to call ‘nature’. However, it is more than transcendental functionality. At another level, Kant’s discussion of the productive imagination is suggestive of a power that is formative and creative in its own right and not simply synthesising. Kant's discussion of the productive imagination comes forward in some crucial remarks that Kant makes, especially when he renames the productive imagination as the ‘figurative synthesis’ in the B Deduction. In fact, the productive imagination splits into two to form a mathematical or functional synthesis and a figurative or dynamic one. The point I wish to make in stressing this difference is that it is the figurative synthesis that remains essentially unfinished for Kant, whereas mathematical synthesis is formulated in a way that remains confined to the construction of functional relational forms in the context of either time or space. Nonetheless, schematicism in its form as mathematical synthesis indicates that it is an a priori productive imaginative process that occurs without the help of any empirical data.40 The products of this process (categories of time and space) are inventions, even if they are geared to our functional organisation of the world. It is suggested that an unacknowledged tension occurs between the productive imagination’s functional aspect limited to schematicism, and its more properly creative and formative dimension denoted by figurative synthesis. Let’s first look more closely at Kant’s discussion of schematicism before turning our attention to figurative synthesis. As Makkreel, for one, points out, ‘schemata are a priori products of the imagination that mediate between concepts and empirical appearances’.41 The task of the schemata is to mediate between the conceptual universality of the categories – time and space – and the empirical act of intuiting time and space. And it does this ‘by translating the rules implicit in the categories into a temporally ordered act of instructions for constructing an objectively determinate nature’.42 In this context, then, the schemata are primarily functional, they have a basic transcendental function, which whilst belonging to the imagination is orientated towards the rule giving propensity of the pure understanding that is orientated to the ordering of space and time. As Kant states: ‘[The] determination of an intuition a priori in space (figure), the division of time (duration), or even just the knowledge of the universal element in the synthesis of one and the same thing in space and time, and the magnitude of an intuition that is thereby generated (number) – all this is the work of reason through construction of concepts, and is called mathematical’.43 And whilst he points to the work of reason, it can be suggested that he actually has the work of the functional, productive imagination also in mind. In Kant’s view, the breakthrough to a more mundane or this-worldly theorising of our cognitive capability that is universal to all human beings is obvious. ‘We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them [objects] – a mode that is peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared by every being, though certainly by every human being. With this alone have we any concern’.44 All

Critique of impure reason  59 of us everywhere construct categories of space and time through which we functionally organise the world in which we live. It is our form of ‘doing’. We are the category-making animals and there is a universal similarity to the process of creating/inventing categories of time and space in all people and all cultures in all times, even if the categories that are created may differ substantively. There is, though, another aspect of schematicism, which alludes to a creative power of the imagination in its own expanded capacity. This is the world of creative differences sui generis. This is where Kant speaks of schema as figurative synthesis, which occurs in addition to function, classification and the formation of images and signs. As he states, ‘indeed it is schemata, not images of objects, which underlie our pure sensible concepts’.45 The schema as figurative synthesis ‘is a product and, as it were, a monogram of pure a priori imagination, through and in accordance with which images themselves first become possible’.46 But these images, so Kant argues can only be conceptualised by being connected to schemata. Whilst representations imply images, Kant’s use of the term schemata signals that they are different to images. Schemata expands the definition of both representation and the imagination away from simply image-making. We are the schematizing animals and not only the representing ones. To repeat, schemata are more than images. Whether a triangle (which can only exist in thought) or the concept ‘dog’, these schemata rely on the ‘art’ and activity of the more than functionalising imagination. The schema of the triangle can exist nowhere but in thought. It is a rule of synthesis of the imagination, in respect to pure figures in space … [even – JR] the concept ‘dog’ signifies a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner, without any limitation to any determinate figure such as experience, or any possible image that I can represent in concreto, actually presents.47 It is really the productive, creating imagination. As Kant notes in way that indicates that he knows the importance of what he is saying: This schematicism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze. This much only we can assert: the image is a product of the empirical faculty of the productive imagination; the schema of sensible concepts, such as figures in space, is a product, as it were, a monogram, of pure a priori imagination, through which, and in accordance with which, images first become possible. These images can be connected with the concepts only by means of schema to which they belong. In themselves they are never completely congruent with the concept.48

60  Critique of impure reason As Kant notes just before this comment: [The] synthesis of the manifold of sensible intuition, which is possible and necessary a priori, maybe entitled figurative synthesis to distinguish it from the synthesis which is thought in the mere category in respect of the manifold of an intuition in general and which is entitled combination through the understanding (synthesis intellectualis) [or functionalising synthesis – JR].49 Whilst both intellectual or functionalising synthesis and figurative or non-functionalising synthesis are transcendental because both take place a priori and condition the possibility of other a priori knowledge, figurative synthesis has the unique power of creating figures that are not necessarily intended for use, immediately or otherwise. They are simply ‘there’. According to Kant, if figurative synthesis is ‘directed’ to the original synthetic unity of apperception, that is, to the transcendental unity which is thought in the categories, it must be called the transcendental synthesis of imagination to distinguish it from the merely intellectual combination. ‘Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present’.50 In parallel with his critique of subjectivism and at this moment in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant posits another image of the subject – not one who is the outcome of a unity between the empirical and the transcendental faculties of reason and the understanding, but one who has a capacity to create, ‘compose’ and ‘invent’ something that has not been created or existed before, from within his or her own capacities. In other words, subjects create ‘objects’ or new ‘figures’, by way of the productive imagination, and these ‘objects’ or figures are new and without empirical referents. They are not simply ‘held’, creatively or laterally combined or interpreted, or less remembered. Representations, images, categories, concepts are inventions or creations that cannot be reduced, strictly speaking, to either an external objective referent, an act of combination, memory, or a functional criterion.51 What Kant terms a figurative synthesis is an attempt to capture what the indeterminate, unknowable, even unfathomable and spontaneous aspect of creativity is in terms of the productive imagination. It is here that concepts, categories, images, philosophies, theories (and not as is often posited, only aesthetic objects) are created. As we shall see in Chapter 4, in his discussions of the mathematical and dynamical sublime in the Critique of Judgment (which nonetheless draws back from this insight) figurative synthesis is, nonetheless, not protean. It does not belong to nature or our natural substrata. It is not, for Kant, a vitalism but the work of the imagination, the freedom and origin of which is both unknowable and indeterminate. It is one step removed, so to speak from nature of a Nature-philosophy, for example, in the manner of Schelling’s work.52 This is why Kant marks it with an ‘X’. It is creative activity that is more than ‘nature’ and more than the

Critique of impure reason  61 creation of images and functions. In other words, in a reading of Kant that ‘leans on’ Castoriadis’ notion of the radical imaginary and imaginary signification, knowledge including everyday ones are also constituted through a process of imaginary creation, which includes representational formation, and yet is not functionally reduced to this.53 Hence, whilst Kant is at pains to point out that knowledge is created synthetically through representations which themselves become further objects of representation, there is a further imaginative dimension of creativity that creates these creations. In the light of Kant’s theory of knowledge, but in a way that brings the role of the imagination much closer to the surface, a tension emerges between the imagination as functionally constitutive to the understanding and as a creative force that expansively invents. The essential point of the above discussion of schemata qua figurative synthesis or the creative imagination, and separating it from schematicism qua functionalisation, is precisely that it is not subsumed to the functional requisites of the pure understanding. My reading of the B Deduction indicates that the creative dimension of the imagination (whether it be in the form of mathematics, philosophy, aesthetics including architectural forms, and material life more generally) is not reduced to a notion of reason that provides rules transcendentally for constructing judgements and actions. Quite the opposite. Rulemaking, even transcendentally constituted ones, in effect, are second-order activities and reliant upon the creativity of the productive imagination.54 This tension between schematicism qua functionalisation and schematicism qua non-functionalisation has the effect, as the Critique of Pure Reason unfolds, not only of highlighting the nature of the productive imagination as a synthesising function, but also of keeping the issues of figurative schemata, fictions, phantasy alive in their voluntary and involuntary activities. Whilst functionalising synthesis, for Kant, is not a function of Nature (now the brain in the manner of current cognitive science), nor a product of an external source of authority, it is an invention but of a particular type. Functionalising synthesis is a limitation according to the reason that enables us to create boundaries and make judgements.55 Creative, productive imagination, though, remains and expands. It is what denotes the indefinability and indeterminacy of all the inventions that constitute the human condition. As Kant says in one of his summary remarks: Such is the nature of the ideal of reason, which must always rest on determinate concepts and serve as a rule and an archetype, alike in our actions and our critical judgments. The products of the imagination are of an entirely different nature; no one can explain or give an intelligible concept of them; each is a kind of monogram, a mere set of particular qualities determined by no assignable rule and forming rather a blurred sketch [italics added] drawn from diverse experiences than a determinate image.56

62  Critique of impure reason On the basis of the above discussion we can now take Kant’s apparently simple and passing formulation that indicates the creating power of figurative synthesis – ‘of representing in intuition an object that is not present’ – to mean that we create functionalising and non-functionalising schemata and gather, hold and keep them in mind, from the most simple to the most complex. To be sure, schemata may begin as ‘monograms’ or ‘blurred sketches’ before coming into view and taking more concrete, thinkable forms. They may never take thinkable form at all. Nonetheless, our capacity to create, gather, hold and keep schemata in mind is the way in which we create forms of meaning for us in which we navigate the complexity of our objective and subjective lives. This complexity and navigation take many forms and without our capacity for schematicism and blurred sketches – reading stars or creating maps – we would certainly be lost. However, we are not only schematising animals but also ones who are neither especially logical nor functional. We notice the aspects of our lives that neither make sense nor can be fully mapped. We notice the paradoxes, antinomies and oppositions that cannot be resolved. We are not only schematicising animals but also antinomic ones who create, discern, combine and connect (or otherwise) sense with non-sense, the natural and the non-natural, the unsociable and sociable. Monograms and blurred sketches are the fruit of the ontological fact that we are schematising and antinomic animals, who ‘know’ and ‘think’ mainly through non-functional schemata. Determinate concepts and ideals of reason begin as indeterminate ‘blurred sketches’ that may quickly or gradually take form, to spring to life as a figure of and for the thinkable in all of its oppositions, antinomies and irresolvable complexities. Or they may simply turn to dust and blow away.57

Indeterminacies from an ‘X’: Kant’s transcendental idea of freedom Perhaps the greatest blurred sketch, monogram, creative schemata or ‘invention’ of all is the creation of the concept or ideal of freedom. Throughout these chapters thus far our investigation of freedom has meant either freedom from constraint or freedom to be autonomous. It could also mean freedom to achieve a goal or purpose related to either success of happiness or both, or freedom as immanent self-actualisation, although Kant is less interested in these particular versions of freedom.58 In all of these meanings, freedom is a norm or value to which we can aspire, and Kant often refers to it in this normative way. Kant carries his own Enlightenment version of freedom as ‘release from self-incurred tutelage’ throughout his critical period and it is this version that, in part, informs his present rumination. More crucially in the Critique of Pure Reason he is more concerned with both what is freedom, and how it might be created and grounded. In this sense, it is a first-order category.

Critique of impure reason  63 It is in this context of his dual concern that the Third Antinomy, ‘The Third Conflict of the Transcendental Idea’, becomes instructive for Kant’s and our enquiry. Kant does not pursue the notion of freedom in either positive, negative or normative terms, strictly speaking. Rather, he investigates it antinomically, through a prism of causing and being caused, and the starting point for his investigation is a rumination over whether Nature or freedom can be viewed as a first cause. As we are about to see his working of the Third Antinomy has a profound impact for the way in which he establishes his own notion of freedom on non-functional schematicised, transcendental grounds. In the Third Antinomy, ‘Third Conflict of the Transcendental Idea’, Kant engages in a series of apparently epistemologically orientated thought experiments on the relation or distinction between causality and freedom, rather than the normative distinction between freedom and unfreedom. Kant addresses the issue of whether a determinism with regard to nature and natural causality is reconcilable with a notion of freedom as a transcendental condition of human beings. Kant notices a paradox – one could say a version of the dialectic of Enlightenment – the possibility that freedom could be divided against itself. From one side, Kant experiments with the claim ‘that everything in nature proceeds according to the law of necessity – that every act is determined by antecedent events and causal laws’. From the other side, he explores the claim that human beings qua complex subjects act freely because their actions ‘cannot be accounted for by any antecedent states or events and causal laws’.59 Kant investigates the issue of the relation or otherwise of causality and freedom, or really Nature and freedom from two angles or perspectives in order to throw into relief by way of a play of paradox, the central question he asks himself – what is transcendental freedom? From the first perspective Kant argues that admitting unconditional or indeterminate causality is a stumbling block, yet it stands as ‘the absolute spontaneity of action’, which ‘remains with a priori knowledge which must be presupposed, even if we cannot comprehend it’.60 As he states, from this position of the transcendental idea of and connection between causality and freedom, we must assume a causality through which something takes place, the cause of which is not something determined in accordance with necessary laws, by another cause antecedent to it, that is to say, absolute spontaneity of the cause, where a series of appearances, which proceeds in accordance with the laws of nature begins of itself. This is transcendental freedom, without which, even in the [ordinary] course of nature, the series of appearances on the side of the causes can never be complete.61 Nonetheless, the claim that there is no other causality besides mechanistic causality runs into a contradiction or paradox. It requires that ‘we explain

64  Critique of impure reason events by reference to antecedent events and causal laws, and that each instance of causality be sufficiently determined a priori where “sufficient” determination means something like complete [ ] infinitely regressing determination’.62 However, it is the basic presupposition of our notion of causality of natural law even if it is in danger of a series of regressions to the idea of a self-positing absolute that Kant had already dismissed, as we have seen. From the opposite side or perspective, which indicates Kant’s capacity for play and experimentation, he declares ‘there is no freedom; everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with the laws of nature’.63 In exploring this side of the paradox of the relation between causality and freedom, Kant subtly declares a distinction between Nature and freedom. In other words, the antithesis of the Third Antinomy holds that ascribing freedom as a causality is untenable because actions are free only if they are free from causal mechanisms of nature. Causal mechanisms of nature are of a different order because they connect empirical events in causal chains that allow explanations based on a unity of empirical experiences that tie natural phenomena together. For Kant, on this side of the paradox, we live under an illusion that there is point of rest, an end, or even a teleology which gives rise to a sense of a completed experience and direction. In this reading, ‘freedom’ is contingent – it can even be ‘blind’.64 This entails that there are no first causes for freedom as this would mean – as it does for the first side of the antinomy or paradox – that we delegate a power to a being outside of this world or outside of ourselves with regard to the condition of our freedom, and this would deny the possibility of our autonomy. In other words, causality belongs to the construction of unitary causes in nature; transcendental freedom indicates our independence from them: A liberation from compulsion, but also from the guidance of all rules. For it is not permissible to say that the laws of freedom enter into the causality exhibited in the course of nature; and so, take the place of natural laws. If freedom was determined in accordance with laws, it would not be freedom; it would simply be nature under another name.65 Kant’s response to both sides of the antinomy or paradox is an appeal – well established in the early pages of the Critique of Pure Reason – to his distinction between phenomena and noumena, and it is this appeal that enables him to ‘reconcile’ or apparently resolve the paradox between natural causality and freedom. Mechanistic causality is sufficient in explaining causes that involve empirical events in Nature, whilst freedom involves ‘events’ or instances that are ‘thought’ or are reflective. The subject is free, for Kant, when he or she is acting intelligibly, that is, thinking. As we have seen, in the context of the Critique of Pure Reason thinking means creating logical and synthetic deductions as well as undertaking critico-representative critique of these deductions, and in this sense, this particular intelligible aspect can never be given to us in experience. Our understanding, cognition, and

Critique of impure reason  65 thinking about Nature, for example, assumes or ‘imposes upon the understanding the exacting task of always seeking the origin of events’, even in the context of causality being conditioned.66 In other words, it is transcendental. For each thinking act, then, there is both an empirical and intelligible or ‘thinking’ aspect and each can be characterised from the position that it is viewed from. Yet as Kant notes, each side of this paradox can lead to over-extension. The side of causality can be over-extended when it is used as an explanatory purpose to explain all conditions, especially the human one. The side of the intelligible is over-extended when it attempts to explain all conditions including natural ones, which can lead to an anthropomorphisation of Nature. Kant evokes a double-sided de-centring move. Natural causality is limited to empirical phenomena (our objects of experience in time and space), and freedom belongs to what human beings ‘do’. This includes thinking and establishing principles, including mathematical laws that make sense of the natural world in abstraction, that is of establishing functional, mathematical principles, as we have seen.67 In order to resolve the paradox as well as not over-extend the limits of causality and freedom Kant makes transcendental freedom regulative and empty. It does not guarantee ‘the truth of [] assumptions or guarantee that the world in its real [i.e. empirical] constitution corresponds to them’.68 Freedom can never be comprehended as such; at this level it is a groundless, regulative transcendentally construed concept. ‘Kant does not think that we can ever prove theoretically that we are free, or achieve any actual cognition of our free actions’.69 To reiterate, for Kant, we are both schematicising and antinomic beings who notice, discern and enjoy opposites, in this case, one between necessity and contingency, causality and freedom. Non-functional schemata can also create bridges as well as ‘un-build’ them, again, for example, between spontaneity and law, nature and freedom, the phenomenal and the noumenal, but in ways that can never be fully explained. We are paradoxically or antinomically ‘in’ and ‘out’ of ‘nature’, ‘in’ and ‘out’ of time, ‘in’ and ‘out’ of society, ‘in’ and ‘out’ of ourselves, between the “is” and the ought’. Each side of the antinomy throws the other into relief and may even act as a limit. Within the Critique of Pure Reason and his subsequent Critique of Practical Reason Kant wants to maintain that freedom is a purely transcendental idea that belongs to or is created by human beings. Cognition or intelligibility becomes part of freedom’s work but is a limited and subordinated part of it. Thinking is subsumed under the a priori regulative idea of freedom, which includes categorising and conceptualising or cognitively thinking for oneself. Cognitively speaking we are free to conceptually establish causal links. We do not make the cosmos, gravity, or the geological histories of the earth, but we do invent/create and make theorisable discernments and connections between and within natural environments, including macro and micrological ones. For Kant, Newton’s Laws of Motion is the paradigmatic case, but these cases would now include quantum physics and genetics.70

66  Critique of impure reason Kant is faced with a conundrum here when it comes to his notion of freedom. He is especially perturbed by this sudden rush of blood to his head – of making freedom unconditioned, especially as he wants to have a transcendental space for it in the constitution of the human condition. Yet freedom is also contingent. This is as far as Kant gets in the Critique of Pure Reason. There is unfinished business here. Because we make ourselves qua noumena beings Kant sails towards the Critique of Practical Reason to ruminate further on the unfinished business of the Critique of Pure Reason. This unfinished business is especially with regard to freedom as the defining a priori condition of human beings in the context of the contingency of their lives. If freedom is a first-order category that defines who we are as human beings, it must extend to our practical and not only our cognitive relations with the world and with others. In the Critique of Practical Reason, which can be read as a formal extension of the architectonics of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant experiments with a more formal approach to his formulation of the transcendental idea of first-order freedom. He will attempt to ground his notion of transcendental freedom on an unconditioned law in the full daylight of freedom’s paradox, when he revisits the Third Antinomy in terms of a paradox between necessity and freedom. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant asks how can someone who has, for example, stolen something, who is a thief – or in the case of Macbeth murdered someone, who is a murderer – ‘be called quite free at the same point of time and in regard to the same action in which and in regard to which he nevertheless subject to an unavoidable natural necessity’, that is the transcendental condition of freedom?71 In an even more spirited way than in the Third Antinomy he answers his question: It is a wretched subterfuge to seek to evade this by saying that the kind of determining grounds of his causality in accordance with natural law agrees with a comparative concept of freedom (according to which something that is called free effect, the determining natural ground of which lies within the acting being, e.g., that which a projectile accomplishes when it is in free motion, in which the one uses ‘freedom’ because while in flight it is not impelled from without … in the same way, the actions of a human being, although they are necessary by their determining grounds which preceded them in time, are yet called free because the actions are called from within, by representations produced by our own powers.72 Kant’s answer to his rhetorical question is that the actions of a thief or a murderer are actions qua representations, which are always the determining ground of causality, in both our knowledge of nature and judgements about ourselves. Even if actions are outside of the subject’s control, or the subject thinks of an action in an evil way, nonetheless he or she, as in the case of the Macbeths, is a being conscious of themselves, that is, thinkable through

Critique of impure reason  67 representations, and as such are determinable only through laws that they give themselves by reason. For Macbeth (and I and not Kant draw on him here as an example), nothing for him, is antecedent to the determination of his feely thinking will. His actions are both inside time – and this is what gives us a sense of a life lived continuously in all of its difficulties and complexities. And yet they are also outside of time but not outside of him as a subject; they are transcendental. As Kant states, The concept of freedom alone allows us to find the unconditioned and intelligible for the conditioned and sensible without going outside ourselves. For, it is our reason itself which by means of the supreme and unconditional practical law cognizes itself and the being that is conscious of this law (our own person) as belonging to the pure world of understanding and even determines the way in which, as such, it can be active.73 However, freedom in Kant’s formulations is more than this. Kant simultaneously experiments with the nascent idea that freedom is a ‘focus imaginarius’ by way of a notion of representation.74 Freedom is tied to both a function of creating concepts, and a non-functionalising monogram, an analogon of a schema.75 We think and act according to ‘focus imaginarius’. We establish schematic, non-functional principles and these belong to, or really undergird freedom in its transcendental or a priori condition. In further establishing the parameters of the transcendental regulative idea of freedom on the basis of schemata in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant lessens the antinomic impulse of the Critique of Pure Reason. The Critique of Practical Reason aims at a minimisation of antinomies and not simply their resolution. Nonetheless, despite this short-circuiting Kant continues, rather than abandons, the sense of the impurities of the human condition, especially the imagining and the anthropological ones that are already present in the Critique of Pure Reason. He does this in ways that go beyond both works. Because of our synthetic, schematising condition, Kant argues that we do indeed ‘fill up’ the empty regulative transcendental idea of freedom with different imaginings and schemata of freedom – to think (the topic of the Critique of Pure Reason), to argue (the topic of ‘What is Enlightenment?’), to make politics (the topic of The Doctrine of Right), and to act well or in ways that are wrong, including evil ones (the topic of the stilted Critique of Practical Reason and the more complex The Doctrine of Virtue). Freedom is the great antinomy. It is both necessary and contingent for us, for Kant. It is an indeterminate necessity, a created monogram, a blurred sketch, yet we live it as a contingent unsociable and sociable sociability, that is, in the context of our cognising, arguing, political and non-political relations with one another and themselves. Non-functionalising schemata are part of the constitution of each of our freedoms. They are also more ‘open’ to his anthropology or ‘Shakespeareanism’, and a notion of contingency. In this context,

68  Critique of impure reason the discussion of Macbeth just above would open onto not only the interplay between Macbeth’s desire for power and ugly reasoning, but also between the latter and his imaginings of power. For Kant, we are difficult, antinomic and complex beings and yet there is an unconditioned aspect that can be articulated in the midst of this difficult and complex very human condition.76 The concept of freedom both is and is not a transcendental creation, for Kant. It is a transcendental creation, an indeterminate or functional or non-functional one that, depending on the realm that one is orientated towards, occurs out of the inventive work of the schema of the productive imagination, which, nonetheless, is historically learned and practised by social actors.77 Within Kant’s work, freedom’s transcendental aspect, now linked more to the faculty of the imagination than to the faculty of reason, is what enables it to be named an idea. Yet freedom also has an experiential, socio-historical reality (we establish and practise it with and amongst others in time and space) anchored in our all too human anthropologies. Kant’s work strains at keeping these two aspects of freedom separate in his distinction between noumena and phenomena, a strain or tension that is continued in his works on (aesthetic) judgement, politics and good conduct as he moves through the web of the transcendental, the creative-imaginative, the political and the anthropological.

Notes 1 Kant recognises that knowing or knowledge is a complicated business, but his attention is on chasing the unconditional or a priori dimension of it in order to simplify our understanding of how we form knowledge. As he says, Among the manifold concepts which form the highly complicated web of human knowledge, there are some which are marked out for pure a priori employment, in complete independence of all experience; and their right to be so employed always demands deduction. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 120, §13, A 85) As he also optimistically indicates in a way that is restated in his so-called ‘historical essays’, this tension between night and day, concealment and unconcealment will improve us: There is in human nature a certain disingenuousness, which like everything that comes from nature, must finally contribute to good ends, namely a disposition to conceal our real sentiments, and to make show of certain assumed sentiments which are regarded as good and credible. This tendency to conceal ourselves and to assume the appearance of what contributes to our knowledge, has, undoubtedly, not only civilized us, but also moralised us. (599, A748/B776) As we shall see this a priori independence even includes the constitution of everyday knowledge, rather than it being a division between the everyday and the scientific or philosophical forms of thinking. The synthetic nature of knowledge makes the division redundant. Rather he is preoccupied with the possession of pure knowledge (rather than who possesses this knowledge because for him all of

Critique of impure reason  69 us can, in principle, think). In addition, Kant lays out the ‘pure’ unconditioned parameters of cognition only in the Critique of Pure Reason, knowing that the task of providing such parameters for pure practical reason is almost an impossible one, given his ‘Shakespearian’ or impure anthropology. As we will see in Chapter 6, and because Kant knows we are difficult selves, a doctrine of virtues in which the moral laws of the free will can be explicated can ‘never furnish true and independent science, because it depends on empirical and psychological factors’ (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 95, §13, A 55). However, even for cognition the ‘pure’ is more ‘impure’ than Kant would like to admit. The issue in this chapter is not an empirical ‘impurity’, but one that stems from the faculty of the imagination itself. 2 To be sure we could introduce Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason from the position of the dialectic of Enlightenment thesis where Horkheimer and Adorno, and Foucault argue that the Kantian project of ‘pure reason’ develops into a project of instrumental and functional domination, which becomes the trademark of modernity. What has been termed modernisation, and later modernity occurred through a number of mechanisms; the differentiation of society and the decentring of power, the universalisation of the recognition of formal freedoms and their institutionalisation, the de-legitimation of religious worldviews, and the secularisation of everyday life, the development of society’s productive capacity, the capitalisation of social relations. One could argue that the cultural component which mediates these multiple phenomena is embodied in the philosophies of reason and rationality, interpreted either as the capacity of humans to form and transform their political lives or as the capacity to purposively or instrumentally form or transform external systemic-administrative or natural environments. Each cultural component can be seen to have a universalising logic in modernity, and each can be seen to be in competition with the other for the control of all domains of life. This impetus of rationalisation has been the focus of investigation in the human sciences since Marx, with Weber, Lukacs and the Frankfurt School being the main figures. Their analysis of the ‘coming of age of reason’ has concentrated on the aporetic conflict between these two cultural forms in modernity or a dialectic of Enlightenment in Adorno and Horkheimer’s terms. See Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment; see also T. McCarthy, ‘Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School’, Political Theory, 18:3, 1990: 437–469. Taylor’s A Secular Age also stands in this current with his concerted attack on instrumental thinking and as a response attempts to develop the idea of the porous self, open to enchantment, as against a buffered one that establishes boundaries between the controllable and the uncontrollable, the immanent and the transcendent. However, the point of my analysis of the Critique of Pure Reason is to suggest a different path altogether, one laid down by the faculty of the imagination. It is this that the notion of ‘impurity’ refers. 3 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 495–531 regarding his critical arguments by those who use speculative reason as proofs for the existence of God or a supreme being. The arguments that Kant critiques are the ontological, the cosmological and the physico-theological. See also Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone; Michelle Grier, ‘The Ideal of Pure Reason’, in The Cambridge Companion to The Critique of Pure Reason, edited by P. Guyer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 266–289; L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, New York, Cosimo Classics, 2007; Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences’, in Writing and Difference, London, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1978, Translated with an Introduction and additional Notes by Alan Bass.

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4 See R. Lanier Anderson, ‘The Introduction to the Critique Framing the Question’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Paul Guyer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 75–92; Allen A Wood, ‘The Antinomies of Pure Reason’, in The Cambridge Companion to The Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Paul Geyer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 245–265; Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987. Omri Boehm, ‘The Principle of Sufficient Reason, the Ontological Argument and the Is/Ought Distinction’ European Journal of Philosophy, 23:3, 2016: 556–579; Omri Boehm, Kant’s Critique of Spinoza, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014; Edmund Husserl, ‘Kant and the Idea of Transcendental Philosophy’ The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 5:3, 1974: 9–56; Corijn van Mazijk, ‘Kant and Husserl on the Contents of Perception’ The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 54:2, 2016: 267–287; James Luchte, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, London, Continuum, 2007; Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment! Which Enlightenment?’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 67:1, 2006: 523–545. 5 See I. Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, translation and edited by Gary Hatfield, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 103–104, §57. 6 To be sure Kant asks three questions in the Critique of Pure Reason: ‘What can I know? What ought I do? What may I hope?’ I have been arguing that these three questions are contextualised by a fourth: ‘What Is humankind?’ See Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 635. 7 Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 58, A11, plus see translator’s note to A11. It might be accurate for Kant to say that we have a desire for rather than orientation towards reason when he states that for human reason, without being moved merely by the idle desire for extent and variety of knowledge, proceeds impetuously, driven on by an inward need, to questions such as cannot be answered by any empirical employment of reason, or by principles thence derived. 56, B21 8 See Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 84, §45, where Kant states that noumena ‘are pure beings of the understanding (better: beings of thought)’. There is some consternation in the Kant literature as to the exact status of these two modalities in Kant’s work. 9 It is worth reminding ourselves that there are two versions – the first version of 1781 and a rewritten second version of 1787, which give different emphases on the faculty of the imagination. On Kant and the imagination see Rudolf Makkreel, ‘Imagination and Temporality in Kant’s Theory of the Sublime’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 42:3, 1984: 303–315; Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, Chicago, IL, The University of Chicago Press, 1990; James Engell, The Creative Imagination Enlightenment to Romanticism, Lincoln, NE, iUniverse, 1999; James Luchte, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 56–97; Sarah Gibbons, Kant’s Theory of the Imagination, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994; Bernard Freydberg, Imagination and Depth in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, New York, Peter Lang, 1994; Martha R. Helfer, Retreat from Representation. The Concept of Darstellung in German Critical Discourse, New York, State University of New York Press, 1996; Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Kant’s Power of Imagination, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018; Jodie Heap, The Seed of Indeterminacy (forthcoming), Lanham, Maryland, Lexington Books; Samantha Matherne, ‘Kant’s Theory of the Imagination’, in Routledge Handbook of the Imagination, edited by Amy Kind, London, Routledge, 2016, 55–68; Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics; Heidegger, The Essence of Human Freedom, trans. T. Sadler, New York, Continuum, 2005; Castoriadis, World in Fragments;

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The Imaginary Institution of Society. Both Heidegger and Castoriadis argue that Kant in the second ‘B’ edition withdraws from insights regarding the faculty of the imagination that are made in the first or ‘A’ edition. The argument here is that these insights continue across both editions. See C. Castoriadis, for example, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition’ Thesis Eleven, 36, 1993: 1–36. My reading of Kant, especially on the topic of the imagination, is indebted to Castoriadis’ emphasis on the creative or radical imaginary and I have explored this elsewhere. See Rundell, ‘Creativity and Judgement’ in Rethinking Imagination, and ‘The Hermeneutic Imagination and Imaginary Creation: Ourselves, Others, Autonomy’ Divinatio 8, 1998: 87–110. This reading of Kant’s work is the basis of a study on the imagination from Kant to Castoriadis entitled The Creative Imaginary: From Kant to Castoriadis and Beyond (forthcoming). In addition, impurity here does not refer to images of taintedness, degeneration or disease as against health, well-being or untaintedness, but rather to tensions between the faculties. As we shall see in Chapter 6 the notion of impurity becomes a mobilising concept for approaching Kant’s ethics with his anthropology in mind and outside of his assumed formalism. The introduction of the problem and centrality of the imagination in Kant’s work is not to reduce the issue of reason or his project more generally to a proto-Romanticism or a possible irrationalism. Rather, the problem of the imagination brings to the surface the problem of the creativity of the human being that cannot be accounted for by reason alone, but which reason requires. In this sense, the imagination heightens the sense of reason and in ways that make it more rather than less central. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 353. See also Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 83, §81. There is another meaning of night qua obscurity that refers to the long European Middle or Dark Ages from the sixth century CE to the twelfth century CE in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire (including its Greek heritage) where intellectual-reflective culture barely survived except in the realm of the Catholic Church. The long journey into daylight in which critico-reflective thinking is (re-)created in the midst of the ‘first long sleep’ (Harris) evokes the dispute between the ancients and the moderns where the modernity of the Renaissance is viewed as a dwarf on the shoulders of a giant (Greco-Roman civilisation). This view was displaced by the end of the sixteenth century and gives way to an emphasis of critico-reflexive thinking or Enlightenment sui generis from the late sixteenth century onwards. See MacIntyre, After Virtue; Agnes Heller, Renaissance Man, New York, Schoken Books, 1987; Robert Harris, The Second Sleep, London, Hutchinson, 2019; Tilo Schabert, ‘Modernity and History I: What Is Modernity?’ in The Promise of History, edited by A. Moulakis, New York, 9–21, de Gruyter, 1986; Israel, ‘Enlightenment! Which Enlightenment?’ 523–545. Kant’s position is to move the images or metaphor Of night/obscurity and day/clarity from a historical argument to a transcendental and universalist one, which also has implications for his transcendental philosophy rather than his philosophy of history, as we have already seen. For Kant, night is a metaphor for fantasy, fear, confusion and being at the behest of monstrous demons and schwarmerei or clairvoyants and fortune tellers who make the most of this in their fore-telling and who Kant hilariously critiques in his Dreams of a Spirit Seer. Alternatively, day, for him, is the metaphor for clarity, certainty and establishing the ground for autonomous self-making and judgement in the areas of objective and practico-political realities. The Critique of Pure Reason addresses the area of objective reality. See Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 10, and especially 7–12; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 55. See also Paul Guyer, Knowledge, Reason and Taste. Kant’s Response to Hume, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2008.

72  Critique of impure reason 14 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 173–174, §27, B166. 15 See Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 86, §47. 16 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 169, §25, B158–159. 17 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 93, A51/B76. 18 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 168, §24, B156. See also Kant, Prolegomena, 45, §13. 19 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 105, B93. 20 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 105, B93. Wittgenstein and Saussure each in their own ways follows this path. 21 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 96, B81. 22 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 106, B94. 23 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 103, A66. Kant’s distinction between intuitive knowledge based on feeling and conceptual knowledge based on the understanding has been widely criticised from phenomenology to feminism to critical theory. Both Heidegger and Agnes Heller in their different ways argue that feeling states and intuitions are already implicated in the formation of knowledge and thinking. According to Heller in A Theory of Feelings, there is already an involvement in the formation of knowledge and thinking. Her position in part dovetails with Heidegger’s critique of the ‘fore-structure’ of knowing in Being and Time. 24 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 92–110, A50/ B74-A76. Kant argues that transcendental analytic judgements operate according to four functions – quantity of judgements (universal, particular, singular); quality (affirmative, negative, infinity); relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive); modality (problematic, assertoric, apodeictic). 25 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 100–101, B88-A64. 26 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 111, A77/B103. 27 See Umberto Eco’s lively and insightful criticism of Kant that highlights synthesis, even if the synthesis is wrongfully thought, as was the case when the platypus was ‘discovered’ by British scientists, explorers and settler colonists. See his ‘Kant, Peirce and the Platypus’, in Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language, New York, Mariner Books, 2000, especially 89–99. See also Peter Murphy’s exhilarating discussion of Kant’s insights concerning paradox (antinomies), humour and imagination – and their necessary combination – in The Political Economy of Prosperity: Successful Societies and Productive Cultures, London, Routledge, 2019. 28 The allusion is to Dickens’ empiricistically orientated character in Hard Times, London, Penguin Random House, 2001. 29 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 111–112, A78, italics added. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 51. See 192. 30 B194. 31 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 55. 32 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 134, §14, A104. 33 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 112, §10, A 78. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 143, §14, A118. 34 As was noted in Chapter 2, the reproductive imagination has quite a ‘wide’ and ‘wild’ scope, which is defined more exactly and for specific purposes in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is worth bearing both elucidations in mind. 35 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 132, §14, A100. 36 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 147, §14, A124–125.

Critique of impure reason  73 37 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 146, §14, A124. 38 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 150, §14, A130. 39 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 147, §14, A25–128. See also Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, 21. 40 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 583–584, A 732/B751 – A725–753. 41 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 30. 42 Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, 31. See also Luchte, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 56–97; Gibbons, Kant’s Theory of the Imagination; Freydberg, Imagination and Depth in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; Horstmann, Kant’s Power of Imagination; Heap, The Seed of Indeterminacy (forthcoming). 43 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 584, A725–753. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 82, §81, A42. 44 This is also the universality of what Levi Strauss, in his own Kantian terms, would call ‘classificatory thinking’ in The Savage Mind. C. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press, 1966; Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences’; Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society. 45 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 182, A141 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 183, A142/ 46 B181. 47 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 182–183, A141. 48 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 183, B181/ A142. Kant also restates this crucial point later in The Discipline of Pure Reason: Thus I construct a triangle by representing the object which corresponds to this concept either by imagination alone, in pure intuition, or in accordance therewith also on paper, in empirical intuition – in both cases completely a priori, without having borrowed the pattern from any experience. 577, A714; B741 49 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 164–165, §24, B151. 50 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 165, §24, B152. 51 Although Kant does not say as much, the creation of representational categories and concepts extends to the creation of social categories such as money, labour and capital. Nonetheless, he almost goes this far when discussing contract and political forms, as we shall see in Chapter 5 and this chapter. It is not only Hegel and Marx who develop the creation of categories and concepts in a social direction as social creations, but also Simmel and Durkheim. Simmel’s Philosophy of Money and Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translation J. W. Swain, introduction by R. Nisbet, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1976 can be read as attempts to put the Kantian programme on a sociological footing. Max Weber’s entire sociological programme is also an attempt via Nietzsche to ‘transpose’ the Kantian programme and its categories into world historical social creations that themselves are products of contingent social change that act like ‘switchmen’. See M. Weber, ‘Social Psychology of the World Religions’, in From Max Weber, Translated, Edited with an Introduction by H.H Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 280. 52 Schiller is closer to the intent of Kant’s insight when he discusses a place for the faculty of the imagination under his notion of play. Schelling, on the other hand, re-naturalises the notion of freedom and by implication the idea of the imagination. Schelling asks the question of what is ‘before’ or prior to both reason and the understanding whilst by-passing the insights that Kant develops concerning the faculty of the imagination. His answer to his question, at least in his

74  Critique of impure reason middle-later ‘Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected Therewith’, is an indeterminate yearning that stems from the groundless ground of God who pushes from darkness into light. God denotes an original and originating unity, one against Kant’s arguments against the ‘I’ as a substance. Effectively Schelling posits a singularity, an autology in which duality is not natural. Humankind is ‘unnatural’ – and this is his critique of socalled Enlightenment rationalism that becomes a hallmark of Romanticism more generally – because humankind is the creature of separation and division, and the greatest division that humankind creates as far as Schelling argues in his text is the duality between good and evil. In other words, Schelling constructs a philosophy of nature as an original unity in which inseparability rather than mergence is the key concept. Humankind wrenches itself apart from Nature and this becomes root cause of its problems. See ‘Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected Therewith’, in Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, translated by Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt, Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 2006, 1–80. I disagree with writers such as Isiah Berlin in his The Roots of Romanticism that wants to establish a more or less direct or unmediated genealogy between Kant’s work, especially his category of the sublime, and Romantic innovations. Kant’s category of the sublime will be discussed in Chapter 4. 53 Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society. It is irrelevant at this moment in Kant’s work, as well as for my analysis, as to considerations concerning the quality or otherwise of the creations that are produced and whether they belong to the everyday, science or culture, or are heteronomous or autonomous. To be sure, Kant is interested in thinking rather than simply knowledge, but in the Critique of Pure Reason he is establishing the ground for this. As we have seen Kant addresses the issue of the quality of creations under the notion of autonomy with regard to politics, and as we shall see in the following chapters, under the concepts of the beautiful and agreement when speaking of the quality of aesthetic objects. His category of the sublime serves a different purpose of expansion or width and is not really related to Romanticism but to the quality of moral life and the concept of friendship. Even in the ‘formal’ setting of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant ruminates on the relationship between anthropology and the combination of the faculties – hence the title of this chapter. 54 From a perspective of the productive imagination, whether from action perspective of language games, or from systems or structuralist perspectives, both language and music constantly cross between functional and figurative syntheses. The linguistic paradigm in either its ‘action’ or structural’ versions tends to emphasise functionalisation. The creativity of the productive imagination also includes the creation of tools, machines and the social organisation of power and work. Marx, for one, indicates as much in an unexpected and unacknowledged Kantian moment in Capital Volume 1 when he remarks A spider conducts operations which resemble those of a weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of his honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. (284) See also J. Rundell, ‘Marx against Marx: ‘The Hidden Imaginary’’, in Origins of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987, 167–189. 55 There is a boundary distinction between the human, Nature including the non-human animal. For Castoriadis, and unlike Habermas, it is not language that denotes the boundary, but an explosion of imaginary flux during the long period of hominisation, the result of which is the replacement of organ pleasure with

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representational pleasure. The flux of imaginary activity refers to the creation of new forms with neither a contextual nor biological origin. Nor for Castoriadis, is the work of the imaginary the same as, or reduced to, the production of phantasies and fictions. The work of the imaginary refers to human creativity in a double sense – the human animal is the animal that is de-functionalised, indeterminate in Castoriadis’ terms, that is, the animal for which nothing can be taken for granted, even in terms of its organic and affective life. Humans create horizons of meaning for their own activities. These activities are also created and imbedded in webs of socially created meaning that are instituted and include not only human ‘nature’ but also nature as a whole, and, thus, the non-human animal world. Without making some distinction between the human and the non-human, a defence of the natural world, the specificity of non-human animals, and a critique of the technicalindustrial imaginary and of cruelties to humans and non-humans more generally becomes problematic and difficult to sustain without falling into the traps of Romantic mergence, instrumentalism and utilitarianism where there are seamless continuities. The distinction that is preferred here is one that is based on the notion of the radical imaginary rather than the use of either tools or language. See Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and Social Instituting Imaginary”, in Rethinking Imagination, edited by Gillian Robinson and John Rundell, London, Routledge, 1994, 136–154. See also Dominick Lacapra, History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence, Ithica, NY. Cornell University Press, 2009; Andrew Benjamin, Of Jews and Animals, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2011, for alternative ways of addressing this issue; John Rundell, ‘Modernity, Humans Animals: Tensions in the Field of the Technical-Industrial Imaginary’ New Formations, 78, 2012: 8–20. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 487. To repeat my key point, Kant earlier states that ‘synthesis in general is the mere result of the power of the imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but which we are scarcely ever conscious’, 112, §10, A78, B103. Peter Murphy, personal correspondence, 26/10/2019. See also C. Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, trans. Helen Arnold, Stanford, MA, Stanford University Press, 2007. Kant is not interested in the liberal version of freedom, especially when it is tied to notions of either success or happiness. He would also have been critical of Hegel’s own programme of the immanent self-actualisation of freedom either in the form of historico-cultural articulation in the Phenomenology of Spirit, or in Hegel’s later version of freedom as the immanent unfolding of categories in The Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller, New York, Humanity Books, 1969/1991. T. D. Janke, ‘A Freewheeling Defence of Kant’s Resolution of the Third Antinomy’ Kritike, 2:1, 2008: 110. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 410–411, A446/ B474. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 410–411, A446/ B474. Janke, ‘A Freewheeling Defence of Kant’s Resolution of the Third Antinomy’, 111. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 409, A445/ B473. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 411, A447/ B475. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 411, A447/ B475. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 410–411, A446/ B474.

76  Critique of impure reason 67 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 561–566, A689/B717 – A697/B725, where Kant argues that reason over-extends itself if it assumes a sense of limitlessness, completeness, and an unchanging empirical world. For Kant reason becomes perverse if it ‘imposes’ itself upon nature without ‘thinking’. In an argument that foreshadows Feuerbach, Kant will also argue that ‘God’ is a certain subtle anthropomorphism’, 568 A700/B728. 68 Wood, ‘The Antinomies of Pure Reason’, 261. 69 Wood, ‘The Antinomies of Pure Reason’, 263. Second italics added. 70 Nor do we make bacteria nor viruses. However, we do invent, rather than discover, incantations, prayers, concepts and theories through which interpretative objects are made such as crosses and prayer wheels or post-traditional vaccines under the auspices of fallible science. Nonetheless, in one full-swoop, and in consistency with his thesis of a dialectic of Enlightenment, Kant creates the distinction between a realm of necessity or raw nature (phenomenon), and a realm of human freedom that attempts to resolve the antinomy between causality and freedom. He leaves the realm of necessity intact and separate from humankind and divides the realm of freedom into two. On the one side, there is the freedom of our cognition that creates laws of nature through the faculty of understanding, and, on the other, a freedom to act with others in the human world. By establishing this division between the pure and the practical within the transcendental idea of freedom Kant provides what would later be viewed as the problematic separation between concerns that belong strictly to the natural sciences in their investigation of objects of experience, and those that belong to the investigation of the human condition in its freedom or unfreedom. See Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, translation and introduction by Mary J. Gregor, New York, Abaris Books, 1979; Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990; Wood, ‘The Antinomies of Pure Reason’; Janke, ‘A Freewheeling Defence of Kant’s Resolution of the Third Antinomy’. The implication is that the first domain is ‘neutral’ in terms of ethical concerns, whilst the latter is ethical, even if it attempts to minimise or bracket this. Nonetheless the cumulation of all knowledge whether of the natural or human sciences is historical and for Kant subject to critico-representation, even though they are limited to their respective domains. One could speak of dissonance here as well, especially in the case of the natural sciences. Even though the real object of enquiry for scientific investigation is objects of experience (nature) which is free from ethical constraints, when ethical concerns arise the response by the scientists in the domain of natural science is an administrative one and committees of experts are formed to address ethical issues – although as Mary Shelley indicated in her Frankenstein that might not solve anything except to direct us to the tragedy, over-reach and hubris of science. In other words, Kant leaves unproblematised his formulation of the work of freely cognitivising through the faculty of the understanding and does not really consider that science itself is an historical hermeneutic enterprise. See Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, London, Dover Thrift Editions, 1994; J. Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2003; G. Markus, ‘Changing images of science’, Culture, Science Society, 131–200; Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press, 2012; Rundell, ‘Modernity, Humans and Animals’. 71 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason in The Cambridge edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, translation and edited Mary Gregor, introduction by Allen Wood, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008, 216, 5: 96. See Benjamin Vilhauer in The Palgrave Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, edited by M. Altman, New York, Palgrave, 2014, 105–125; Matthew C. Altman, ‘A Practical Account of Kantian Freedom’, The Palgrave Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, London, Palgrave, 2017, 211–242.

Critique of impure reason  77 72 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 216–217, 5: 96. Italics added. 73 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 224, 5: 106. Kant will amplify the same point later: It is now clear that those determining grounds of the will which alone make maxims properly moral and give them a moral worth – the immediate representation of the law and the objectively necessary observance of it as duty – must be represented as the proper incentives of action, since otherwise legality of actions would be produced but not morality of dispositions.

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In other words, without this determining ground we would, as far as Kant is concerned, only have empirically based legalism. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 261, 5: 152. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 532, A644/ B672. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 546, A665/ B693. See also Bernard Freydberg, Imagination in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005; Freydberg, Imagination and Depth in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; Horstmann, Kant’s Power of Imagination. Macbeth could have turned his dagger into a wand and wished his ambition away through self-parody if he had been an antinomic character. But this would have been a very different play by Shakespeare. As we have seen in Chapter 1, in this chapter and will see again in Chapter 5 for Kant freedom is historical in terms of peaks, plateaus and troughs in that we learn to use and appreciate it pragmatically. For Kant, freedom is not immanently unfolding nor necessarily secure in its telos (if it has one for Kant), as it would become for Hegel and the later Hegelians.

4

The harmony and dissonance of the beautiful and the sublime

The three directions of the Critique of Judgment The Critique of Judgment is often viewed as Kant’s work about aesthetics. Yet, it builds on, expands, departs from and suspends insights that emerge from the Critique of Pure Reason, especially with regard to the faculty of the imagination and our capacity to create. In addition, the Critique of Judgment is accompanied by concerns that are articulated in Kant’s practical anthropology and centrally his blurred sketching of freedom. Let’s look closely at these concerns when they are filtered through his analysis of aesthetics. At one level, the Critique of Judgment can be seen as a philosophical rendition of a cultural and structural differentiation occurring in modernity that creates an autonomous world of aesthetics freed from the traditional sacred imperatives of religion and separate from the self- reflexive modernising institutions of science and republican democracy.1 For Kant, and using Edmund Burke’s work as a foil, aesthetic judgements of taste are not based on an empirical psychology of pleasure/displeasure, ornamentation, emotion, charm, sensation or simply liking or disliking. These criteria, for him, are empirically egoistic. They should be subject-centred, in Kant’s meaning of the term that involves the a priori ‘free-play’ of the three faculties that are available to all of us. This ‘free-play’ becomes the basis for a plurality of taste (each of us has different tastes because we ‘play’ differently). Yet, for Kant, this ’free-play’ can become the basis of assent or agreement about what taste is, especially about the beautiful. In other words, Kant begins from the particularity of taste and moves to the plurality of taste, which encompasses the different tastes of one another from which one can then can arrive at a consensus.2 In this instance of particularity, though, for Kant judgements about aesthetic taste do not proceed theoretically about the way in which humans construct knowledge of nature and judge the veracity of this knowledge. Nor does it proceed practically in a way that concerns the transcendental condition of the norm of freedom and how we act in relation to ourselves and to others. Instead, we form aesthetic taste about objects of nature, which we regard in a non-purposeful or non-instrumental way and deemed

Harmony and dissonance  79 to be beautiful. Alternatively, we can impute to objects of nature, or create non-natural ones, the characteristics of which can be deemed to be sublime. In the latter case, objects cannot convey sublimity; to characterise something sublime is to ‘speak’ of something beyond the object itself. Kant argues that the reflective, rather than determinative, judgements appropriate to this very specific form of activity that encompass ones of the beautiful and the sublime are aesthetic judgements. There is a freedom to reflect, to come to a judgement that is not immediately given by liking or disliking, or by habit. Nor does this judgement, to repeat, refer to our cognition of natural objects, nor to political ethics or morals. Kant speaks about another type of freedom in addition to the ones already posited by him – the freedom to create works of art, to have aesthetic sensibilities and to come to an assent or an agreement about them. To put it slightly differently, this particular freedom belongs to the spectrum of freedoms, which Kant in this instance posits and pursues in terms of aesthetics or fine art.3 At another level, though, part of the issue that one confronts when reading the Critique of Judgment is that ‘aesthetic sensibility’ is not really about aesthetics in any of its forms (poetry, painting, sculpture and music), but continuing anthropological reflections laid down elsewhere including the pre-critical Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and his anthropological writings. In other words, it is suggested that the Critique of Judgment is not really about aesthetics, as such. To be sure, the book is certainly about how Kant addresses the categories of the beautiful and the sublime, but he addresses these from within the structure of his own transcendentally construed system of the faculties of reason, understanding and the imagination. As will be argued below, and in contrast to aesthetic renditions and interpretations of these categories by both Kant and subsequent interpreters, the beautiful and the sublime are deployed by Kant as ‘standins’ with which to explore different and competing topics or concerns. Some topics are anthropological in nature with regard to the faculties themselves, including the relation between them, as well as the split between phenomena and noumena. In other words, these topics include, for example, representation and its limits (under the umbrella of infinity and finitude), emotions, especially fear and awe, and continuing tensions concerning the relation and oscillations between reason and imagination, and the very meaning of each, and by implication the very meaning of creativity. Other topics address the communicability and assent by people about matters of aesthetic taste, which can be translated (as Arendt indeed does), into matters of political assent in a public sphere and/or sociable sociability more generally. In order to more clearly focus our attention, Kant uses the problem of judgement in the Critique of Judgment as the vessel in which to distil three central issues. I will use the terms aesthetic sensibility, aesthetic creation and aesthetic communicability to capture this distillation.4

80  Harmony and dissonance Kant’s apparent aim is to develop a critical theory of taste, and in so developing this he also redeploys the transcendental construction of, and relation between, the faculties of the imagination, reason and the understanding in ways that are similar to but different from that which we find in his practical philosophy and the Critique of Pure Reason. A transcendental move is necessary if Kant is to go beyond both psychological and empirical-physiological constructions of the idea of beauty and sublimity, which were present in the eighteenth century.5 Kant argues, against Burke in this instance although Hume and Baumgarten are never far away, that notions and judgements of aesthetic taste (of beauty or sublimity) cannot be derived from empirical sensation, delight, pleasure, gratification or even pain. Kant’s aim is to move the problem of aesthetic judgements about taste away from private, subjective (or what he terms egoistic) perspectives to ones that can be communicated and agreed upon, in other words, are ‘intersubjective’. He can only do this if he introduces a transcendental argument about taste that revolves around the notion of harmony between the faculties of the understanding and the imagination. As he says, if we suppose that our liking for the object consists entirely in the object’s gratifying us through charm or emotion, then we also must not require anyone else to assent to an aesthetic judgment that we make; for about that sort of liking each person rightly consults only his private sense. But if this is so, then all censure of taste will also cease… For if taste did not have a priori principles, it could not possibly pronounce on the judgments of others and pass verdicts approving or repudiating them with even the slightest semblance of having the right to do so.6 Kant assumes that his formulation of a transcendental critique of taste, which I will term aesthetic sensibility, is the central and binding ingredient that holds the issues of aesthetic creation and aesthetic communicability and hence the entire text, together. In other words, aesthetic sensibility refers to the ‘act’ of coming to both subjective and intersubjective judgements about taste on transcendental grounds. And yet the Critique of Judgment remains an unsatisfying and unsettling work. A careful reading of it indicates that these three central issues of aesthetic sensibility, aesthetic creation and aesthetic communicability, far from being three aspects of a single argument, break down into three divergent and complex problems, each with their own direction.7 Given that I have already introduced the notion of aesthetic sensibility, what I term aesthetic creation refers to that dimension of Kant’s argument which deals with the creation of aesthetic objects, as well as an emphasis which is given to the role of the productive or creative imagination and is discussed by him from the vantage point of mostly the sublime rather than the beautiful. And yet, Kant seems less interested, even hostile to this

Harmony and dissonance  81 particular aspect of aesthetics and more compelled to move to the ground of possible discernments about taste, that is, the way in which judgements can be about aesthetics that involve everyone. It is here that the notion of communicability comes into play. What I term the formation of aesthetic communicability is a shorthand expression for that aspect of Kant’s discussion that deals with two interrelated activities, which can be brought together under the more general term of communicability. First, it refers to the issue of the plurality and diversity of taste and the public articulation of this in the one social space – the public sphere – and, thus, second, that there can be real or potentially universal agreement about judgements of taste. In the context of communicability Kant anticipates or constructs a modernity conscious of itself, or a self-reflexive modernity in the face of a restlessness in which all fixity is dissolved and a recognition and acceptance of a plurality and diversity of perspectives, dispositions and tastes can occur. This is internal to his idea of the public. He overlays this with a quest for the modern version of the ‘holy grail’ – a transcendentally constituted certitude in the context of dynamic, reflexively orientated plurality and difference. The text breaks down, so to speak, because Kant is pursuing a triple warrant of freedom. He wants to construct a subject who has freedom to have an aesthetic sensibility, to create and to judge. Aesthetics becomes the paradigm through which this triple warrant is posited and generated. Aesthetic sensibility is the free play of the faculties that are available to all of us, whilst aesthetic creativity refers to ‘the imagination to sustain the mind in free activity’.8 Aesthetic communicability is a condition in which particularity is first given and reflected upon, and in the course of this reflection universals are discovered under which the particularities can be subsumed and agreements reached about taste.9 In other words, the difference between universality and particularity is recognised and reflected upon, and a judgement concerning aesthetic taste can be made, communicated and agreed upon in the light of this recognition. I problematise the constructions of aesthetic creation in terms of the nature of the productive imagination, and alternatively, the transcendental grounding of communicability, but from different directions. The construction of aesthetic creation is problematised once the sublime is introduced, and in a way that opens onto the unconstrained activity of the productive imagination. In addition, the transcendental grounding of communicability is problematised by me from a different vantage point entirely, an anthropological one. The issue of the plurality of taste takes place in the context of Kant’s continuing reflections on practical reason, not only from the vantage point of autonomous freedom – the core of the problem of judgement – but also from the vantage point of what he terms ‘the sociability that befits our humanity’, which is a combination of a ‘universal feeling of sympathy, and the ability to engage universally in very intimate communication’.10 His concern with sociability also underpins the Critique of Judgment and is

82  Harmony and dissonance orientated not only to the subject’s own capacity as a freely judging autonomous being, but also as a subject who lives and acts amongst and with others. It is Kant’s recognition of the full ranges of subjectivities, their difficulties, imaginings and relationships, which constitutes his constant companion.11 The dimensions of unsociable and sociable sociability have an effect, too, on how the idea of the creative imagination may be viewed. The issue of transcendentality, which Kant addresses in relation to the activities of aesthetic sensibility and aesthetic creation, as well as the undercurrent of an anthropology of unsociable and sociable sociabilities, entails that the Critique of Judgment becomes more than merely the seminal text concerning the differentia specifica of modern aesthetics. Together, the creative imagination, blurred sketches and unsociable sociability indicate a dimension of Kant’s work that opens beyond the Critique of Judgment, and in a way that lays an unlit fuse against the transcendentality and priority of reason itself. I will begin by expanding on the notion of aesthetic sensibility before addressing the problem of aesthetic creation. I will, then, finally turn to the issue of communicability in the context of the undercurrent of unsociable sociability.

Aesthetic sensibility: purposeless harmony on a transcendental scale There are four places in the Critique of Judgment where Kant spells out the location and nature of ‘harmonious’ judgement in terms of its place within his transcendental system as a whole – the Preface, the First and Second Introductions and the ‘Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment’.12 The problem he addresses is whether judgement has a priori principles, like understanding and reason, and if so whether they are determinatively or indeterminatively constitutive. In the context of aesthetics, the issue is not about how a priori cognitive judgements are possible, but how aesthetic ones are, where a harmonisation occurs between concepts and objects. Kant argues that the question of judgements of taste is beyond, or more precisely, different to, cognitive questions. The task of aesthetic judgement is not to apply objective principles derived from the understanding or reason. The peculiarity of judgement is ‘the ability to think the particular as contained under the universal’.13 It is an activity that begins from the way in which a subject may claim a rationality for his/her own particular aesthetic judgement. The appropriate type of judgements is a reflective one for the subject where the universal for the particular must be found. This is in contrast to a determinative judgement, where the universal rule is already given by a transcendental deduction through the understanding, which constructs objective rules that apply to objects of experience. The change in perspective from an objective to a subjective relation to judgements (which, Kant assumes, completes his system) entails a different conceptual strategy about them.

Harmony and dissonance  83 Yet, for Kant, the universal principle for reflective judgement must stand on transcendental ground. Reflective judgement requires a principle which it can borrow neither from experience nor from elsewhere. As Kant says, ‘this transcendental principle must be one that reflective judgment gives as a law, but only to itself’.14 Kant identifies this principle as the finality or purposiveness of nature. What Kant means by this is that nature in all its multiplicity is capable of being regarded as if it presents a coherent and unified system.15 The principle behind reflective judgement is that ‘nature has adhered to uniformity that we can grasp’, not mechanically, ‘like an instrument guided by the understanding and the senses’, but in a way that presupposes a harmony in nature that is beyond functionality.16 This presupposition of a harmony in nature ensures that, for Kant, nature is apprehended, somewhat misleadingly in his terms ‘technically’. What Kant means by this is that nature can be viewed as having a power to purposively produce things which have no purpose or end to them. Rather, they simply exist. Reflective judgement cannot but work with this idea of purposive purposelessness. As Kant says, ‘the principle of a purposive arrangement of nature is a system – an arrangement [made] as it were for the benefit of judgment... Judgment makes a priori the technic of nature a principle of reflection’, and in a way that neither explains it nor adds anything to our understanding of nature.17 Rather, ‘judgment makes this technic its principle only so that it can, according to its need[s] reflect in terms of its own subjective law, and yet in a way that also harmonises with natural laws in general’.18 In this way, Kant can go on to argue that the sense of purposive purposelessness belongs not to the object itself but to the subject’s freedom and power to reflect. The purposiveness does not belong to an inferred purpose of nature’s products but rather in ‘nature’s harmonising with what the subjective conditions of judgment are under which empirical concepts can cohere to [form] a whole of experience’.19 The purposelessness is experienced as the art of nature and results in a feeling of pleasure governed by the transcendentally posited inference of the purposive purposelessness of nature. Kant’s notion and formulation of reflective judgement generates his own quite specific idea of aesthetics from within his transcendental system. For him, the presupposition of harmony is the means through which we can regard nature as art, and how our notion of aesthetics (and hence the beautiful) is formed. In other words, all human beings in all times and in all places have, really or potentially, an aesthetic sensibility for the beautiful, especially where nature is concerned. Yet, this aesthetic sensibility is one that belongs to the faculties rather than to nature. There is a double harmony present here – ‘double’ harmony occurs between the object of aesthetic experience and the subject and within the subject him or herself. One part of the harmony is the purposive purposelessness of nature, a harmony in nature which itself is doubled to become a ‘harmony in reflection, whose a priori conditions are valid universally,

84  Harmony and dissonance between the presentation of the object and the lawfulness [inherent] in the empirical use in general of the subject’s power of judgment’ (this lawfulness being the unity between imagination and understanding).20 In order to form an aesthetic reflexive judgement of the beautiful, the subject, any subject, according to Kant, combines the faculties of the imagination and the understanding that stands separately yet harmoniously conjoined. The imagination, which apprehends the object’s form, agrees with the exhibition of a concept. As Kant states: In an aesthetic judgment of reflection… the basis determining [it] is the sensation brought about, in the subject, by the harmonious play of the two cognitive powers [involved] in the power of judgment, imagination and understanding; [they are in harmonious play] when, on the given presentation, the imagination’s ability to apprehend, and the understanding’s ability to exhibit, further each other.21 The understanding and imagination oscillate together in harmony. This construction of double harmony allows Kant to transcendentally generate and locate a sensibility of an aesthetics of taste, which at the same time cannot be reduced to cognitive principles. Judgements of taste, nonetheless, are as rational, or as reasoned as any cognitive ones, but they emerge from a different deployment of the faculties. The idea of purposive purposelessness in nature generates an appreciation of the object without cognitive or utilitarian intent, what Kant terms without interest. The result is a reflective judgement of taste. As Kant states: ‘Taste is the ability to judge an object, or a way of presenting it, by means of a liking or disliking devoid of all interest’.22 It is the feeling and appreciation of viewing objects free of interested intent that enables them to be termed, in Kant’s view, beautiful. From the perspective of its quality, an object can be termed beautiful if it is not judged according to either its empirical utility or goodness or simply its agreeable enjoyment.23 In first addressing the problem of reflective judgements in transcendental terms, and from the vantage point of his system as a whole, Kant announces and introduces the problem of the beautiful as a second order issue. Yet, the beautiful remains the centre of Kant’s aesthetics because it attains a systemic and methodological priority over all other aesthetic terms, especially the sublime, because of the harmonic transcendentality that anchors it. Within the category of the beautiful, the imagination has a precise function. It is one of the indispensable, yet intricately linked dimensions through which the feeling of pleasure arises when we witness the form of nature, its purposiveness without purpose. Imagination and the understanding combine or oscillate together in a free play that does not presuppose a determinate concept. As he says, ‘the beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object’, which expands our appreciation and concept of nature beyond its mere utility to an idea of nature as art.24

Harmony and dissonance  85 Yet, Kant argues that the notion of the beautiful is simultaneously bounded – the question is: by what? Kant answers that it is not only the relation between the understanding and the imagination, which is in free play; the imagination itself is also free, by which he means spontaneous and lawful. Here there is reversal of the relation between the understanding and the functional imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason. In an aesthetic reflective judgement of the beautiful the understanding serves the imagination in its capacity as a functional schema. As we have seen in Chapter 2, Kant also captures the activity of the beautiful through the activity of poetry, which works through what he terms in the Anthropology Mrongovius the voluntary, productive imagination. This is what gives the imagination its lawful freedom so that it does not roam to fully become unbridled play or improvisation, or dwell too long on these ‘musical embellishments’. Rather beauty is about sonority, rests and contemplation. In this sense, it has a lightness, is pure and prone to exemplariness (and thus the ever-present danger of perfection especially when it is appreciated technically). As Kant states, in one of his summary remarks: … only a lawfulness without a law, and a subjective harmony of the imagination with the understanding without an objective harmony – where the presentation is referred to a determinate concept of an object – is compatible with the free lawfulness of the understanding (which has also been called purposive without a purpose) and with the peculiarity of a judgment of taste.25 Peculiar indeed! We will have recourse to return to this peculiarity below. As we shall see this idea or blurred sketch of harmony is indicative of something else. As his discussion unfolds at this point, though, his idea of the beautiful can neither be the vehicle for, nor sustain, his investigation of what I have termed aesthetic creation.

Aesthetic creation: white notes/black notes The idea of aesthetic creation only enters tout court when Kant discusses the sublime in Part II ‘The Analytic of the Sublime’ of the Critique of Judgment. For Kant, the sublime is more black than white, combining limitlessness with awe, fear and trembling to produce a world of unease in the face of a sense of the infinite and a dark, unbounded dominating power. Often it is an underworld sui generis. As such it is played always in a minor key. Whilst judgements of the sublime, too, are made without interest, the condition of sublimity is one of restlessness and increased oscillation, of dissonance. The sense of unease, increased oscillation, dissonance and agitation is central to Kant’s formulation of the sublime. Unlike the beautiful, which is indicative of a harmony in free play between the imagination and the understanding, the sublime is indicative of an incongruent, dissonant free play between the

86  Harmony and dissonance imagination and reason. From the vantage point of the productive or creative imagination, aesthetic creation points to the power to expand even beyond the limits already explored in Chapters 2 and 3. In the manner of the Anthropology Mrongovius and the Critique of Pure Reason the productive imagination is seen as ‘the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present’. The imagination is thus freed from association and the constraint of rules imposed by the understanding and once Kant explores the work of the imagination apparently in its own terms but beyond functional schematicism. Kant attempts to locate aesthetic creation on the ground of the beautiful when he states that ‘judging beautiful objects to be such requires taste; but fine art itself, i.e. production of such objects requires genius’.26 However, despite this attempt his notion of genius extends beyond harmonisation (and the quasi-naturalism that stands alongside it). As Kant notices, it is not so much that aesthetics (or fine art), whilst a creative act, is a putative lonely one undertaken by an isolated, alienated creator/genius (in a forerunner of Romanticism). Kant reiterates in the Critique of Judgment that the genius finds a reference in him or herself ‘to something in the subject and outside it’. This reference is the productive imagination’s capacity to both create and re-order reality, a reality beyond the imagination’s empirically orientated power of analogy, association and even functional schematicism.27 The imagination [here] displays a creative activity and puts the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into motion – a motion, at the instance of a representation, toward an extension of thought, that while germane, no doubt to the concept of the object, exceeds what can be laid hold in that representation or clearly expressed.28 In other words, Kant confronts head on not only the problem of the creative power of the imagination, but also its untranslatability, the problem, that is, of defining the undefinable that must admit ‘a communication without any constraint or rules’.29 As he says later in the same paragraph, when the aim is aesthetic, then the imagination is free, so that over and above that harmony with the concept, it may supply, in an unstudied way, a wealth of undeveloped material for the understanding which the latter disregarded in its concept.30 Kant revisits the tension between reason and imagination that occurs throughout the Critique of Pure Reason as well as in the Anthropology Mrongovius. However, in the context of the Critique of Judgment, Kant constructs this as a genuine problem of oscillation, dissonance and incommensurate communicability between two fecund worlds. It is not a question of a dead space between them, but of a gap needing to be filled, that is, of how a representation or really a schema is both created and conveyed. Given that

Harmony and dissonance  87 creativity is ultimately defined transcendentally as the ‘free play of the imagination’, its product can be grasped only barely and inadequately in language or symbolically.31 The association often demanded to make sense of these creations is, for him, a poor substitute or fabrication of what the creative artist had in mind, and what is required of the audience in its reception of the artist’s creation. On the one side, creativity demands, so to speak, an expansion of concepts, symbols, schemata and forms in order to construe what its meaning might be. These expanded concepts, symbols, schemata and forms are termed by Kant the aesthetic attributes of an object, and it is these, on the other side, to which the audience’s imagination must also be attuned. The aesthetic attributes must quicken the mind [of the audience], opening it to ‘an immense realm of kindred presentations.’32 The ‘sublimity and majesty of creation’ can neither be presented nor received in a single coherent concept, but only in what Kant terms an aesthetic idea. Aesthetic attributes are both products of (on the part of the artist/genius) and produce (on the part of the audience) an aesthetic idea. It: [is] presentation of the imagination which is conjoined with a given concept and is connected, when we use imagination in its freedom with such a multiplicity of partial presentations that no expression that stands for a determinate concept can be found for it. Hence it is a presentation that makes us add to a concept the thoughts of much that is ineffable, but the feeling of which quickens our cognitive powers and connects language, which otherwise would be mere letters, with spirit.33 The main issue revolves around Kant’s construction of aesthetic ideas and his notions of the mathematical and dynamical sublime. In Kant’s construction, aesthetic ideas are different to rational ones in which for the latter, the productive imagination is co-present as schematicism in its functional aspect only. The presentation of the productive imagination as figurative or non-functional schematicism is crucial for the development of aesthetic ideas because no determinate concept is adequate to it.34 There is a freedom, but it is an indeterminate one. What Kant terms aesthetic attributes are a subset of aesthetic ideas under his ‘technical’ term of hypotyposis, which brings the entire set of issues of aesthetic creation (and of creativity more generally) to a head. By using the term hypotyposis Kant means a vivid or picturesque description or figure of speech by which something not present is represented as if it is. He divides hypotyposis into figurative schemata, on the one hand, and symbolic forms that may be metonymic, analogic or allegoric, on the other. Symbolic forms have affinities with the sense of something being exhibited rather than created.35 Kant revisits the issue of non-functional synthesis from the Critique of Pure Reason, but this time through the category of the sublime. In other words, non-functional schemata have more affinities with Kant’s status of

88  Harmony and dissonance the sublime than does the symbolic.36 Exhibition qua the symbolic is inadequate to Kant’s ruminations concerning the sublime. Rather schemata point to a fully fledged oscillation qua agitation that involves incommensurate, disrupted relations and movements between the non-functional imagination and representation. As Kant says, The feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that arises only indirectly; it is produced by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger. Hence it is an emotion, and so it seems to be seriousness, rather than [simply free – JR] play in the imagination’s activity.37 This serious play is incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination, and yet we judge it all the more sublime for that … For what is sublime, in the proper meaning of the term, cannot be contained in any sensible form but concerns only ideas of reason, which although they cannot be exhibited, are aroused and called to mind by this very inadequacy … [In] what we usually call sublime in nature there is such an utter lack of anything leading to particular objective principles and to forms of nature conforming to them, that it rather in its chaos that nature most arouses our ideas of the sublime.38 The sublime, then, is a sense of oscillation and agitation in us. For Kant, the sublime in fact does not refer to the imagination, as such, but to the ‘experience’ of agitation between the productive imagination and representation, in this instance of a law of reason, in coming to an aesthetic judgement. As he says, if anything is excessive for the imagination (and the imagination is driven to such excess as it apprehends [the thing] in intuition, then [the thing] is as it were, an abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself. Yet at the same time, for reason’s idea of the supersensible [this same thing] is not excessive but conforms to reason’s law to give rise to such striving by the imagination.39 There is agitation and chaos in the movement between the faculties of the productive imagination and reason in their attempts, not to understand, but to figure out, give form to and conceptualise what is being imagined and felt. There is a subjective ‘play’ of mental powers in which ‘imagination and reason give to such purposiveness by their conflict.’40 Yet, the sublime is this feeling of violence and displeasure, agitation and oscillation, the quality of which is actually purposive for us. And what makes this purposiveness possible, as Kant goes on to say, ‘is that the subject’s own inability uncovers

Harmony and dissonance  89 in him [or her] the consciousness of an unlimited ability which is also his [or hers], and that the mind can judge this ability aesthetically only by that inability’.41 There is the necessity of imperfection in us that the feeling of the sublime captures, for Kant. In Kant’s version, this quickened oscillation/agitation takes two forms with quite different impulses – it is either mathematically or dynamically sublime.

Aesthetic creation: the mathematical sublime According to Kant, we feel the conflict between the productive imagination and reason when we experience magnitude – something that is vast – but which cannot be fully grasped as we might in terms of mathematicised quantity. Kant terms this sense of conflict over ungraspable quantity the mathematical sublime. This is different from functional numericalisation, because in an aesthetic estimation of magnitude in the mathematical sublime an effort is required within the productive imagination itself. A gap presents itself. An effort occurs in both apprehension and comprehension of magnitude and creates ‘a gap’ between the productive imagination and the faculty of reason that produces the concept of infinity as the largest concept of magnitude. What sublime magnitudes ‘actually present in us is our imagination, in all of its boundlessness, and along with its nature, as vanishing[ly small] in contrast to the idea of reason, if the imagination is to provide an exhibition adequate to them’.42 This ‘gap’ between the productive imagination and reason is filled, as Kant puts it, by respect for our vocation of finding and obeying a law – to make the imagination adequate to an idea. As Kant again puts it: But our imagination even in its greatest efforts to do what is demanded of it and comprehend a given object in a whole of intuition (and hence exhibit the idea of reason), proves its own limits and inadequacy, and yet at the same time proves its vocation to [obey] a law, namely to make itself adequate to that idea. Hence, the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our vocation. And yet this resect is formed through tensions and oscillations between ‘feelings’ of adequacy and inadequacy, pleasure and displeasure when we are in ‘the gap’ itself. For Kant, there are two ways within the mathematically sublime that this oscillation and tension of magnitude is played out – by apprehension and comprehension. Both hint at different dimensions of Kant’s version of the productive imagination. Apprehension concerns reason’s a priori concept of time, in this case infinity. In apprehending the idea of infinity, the imagination expands and becomes a moment akin to figurative or non-functional schematicism. In comprehending infinity the imagination also collects and

90  Harmony and dissonance holds together this sense of expansion (we comprehend entirely under a concept which is a priori) but in a moment that has affinities with functional schematicism.43 Once the productive imagination has apprehended and comprehended it nonetheless soon ‘reaches a maximum’ and gathers what it has so that a judgement can be made about magnitude itself.44 Yet this judgement will always be inadequate for the productive imagination overall. This inadequacy is, as Kant puts it, namely to a feeling – that we have a pure and independent reasons, or a power of estimating magnitude, whose superiority cannot be made intuitable by anything other than the inadequacy of that power [of the imagination] which is exhibiting magnitudes (of sensible objects) is itself unbounded.45 Yet, the productive imagination can stir again; it can expand once more through another apprehension only to come to a temporary rest through comprehension. What we might term the comprehending/holding/gathering imagination is limited and temporarily works with and against the apprehending/ expanding imagination, which for want of a better term, chases the idea of infinity. To be sure, instead of dismissing this agitation and violence, Kant recognises it for its worth. The inner violence is a necessary, needful dimension of the human soul: ‘this same violence that the imagination inflicts on the subject is still judged purposive for the whole vocation of the mind’ – to approach but never reach the idea of infinity.46 Kant puts it thus: For when apprehension has reached the point where partial presentations of sensible intuition that were first apprehended are already beginning to be extinguished in the [comprehending, gathering, holding – JR] imagination, as it [the comprehending imagination – JR] proceeds to apprehend further ones, the [productive] imagination then loses as much on the one side as it gains on the other; and so there is a maximum in comprehension that it cannot exceed [at any one given time – JR].47 I read this sentence to mean that the productive imagination suffers a loss in terms of its power to collect, gather and hold, yet gains in terms of its expansive, apprehending or non-functional schematicising power. Yet, here Kant limits his ruminations concerning the productive imagination in its mathematical form of aesthetic magnitude to comprehension rather than to apprehension. ‘It does not matter how far the apprehended magnitude has increased, just as long as our imagination can comprehend it within one whole’.48 To be sure there is a tension, and a creative one at that, in Kant’s ruminations concerning the mathematical sublime. He could have remained with the work of the apprehending productive imagination, which by implication could have given precedence to the issue of creating magnitude schematically

Harmony and dissonance  91 or figuratively in non-functional ways (in terms of his hypotyposis division), rather than simply comprehending and exhibiting it symbolically. Nonetheless, he remains on the ground of oscillation and agitation despite this withdrawal from an insight already contained not only in the Critique of Pure Reason but also in the Critique of Judgment. As he says, the sublime is a feeling of violence and displeasure. ‘[It] is a subjective movement of the imagination by which it does violence to the inner sense, and this violence must be more significant the larger the quantum is that the imagination comprehends in one intuition’.49 Kant confronts another bridge apart from the one between the phenomenal and the noumenal. This time it is a bridge often portrayed as an interstice between reality and unreality (the surreal), between certainty and uncertainty, determinacy and indeterminacy. At this point two incongruities emerge. On the one side, there is an incongruity between the creative productive imagination and schemata or blurred sketches through which its products are apprehended, and on the other, between comprehension and presentation. The former points to the issue of creativity sui generis; the latter points our attention to the possibility of a stability. Kant is caught between this double problem of indeterminate creation of meaning and blurred sketches and their stabilisation (rather than determination). He moves to suppress the first and to resolve the second. The issue of creativity is reined in because Kant is primarily interested in a sound or even melodious aesthetic judgement.

Aesthetic creation: the dynamically sublime Kant is faced with a similar situation with the dynamically sublime. The dynamically sublime is not concerned with magnitude but with fear and in Kant’s view this requires a change in perspective regarding the imagination and its relation to reason. It is here that the issue of good judgement – or judgement of the morally good – comes to the fore. Let’s begin with this apparently straightforward sentence: ‘When in an aesthetic judgment we consider nature as might that has no dominance over us, then it is dynamically sublime’.50 The important phrase is ‘nature as might that has no dominance over us’. In other words, the dynamically sublime has nothing to do with Nature (raging storms, earthquakes, mountainous peaks), nor with magnitude (the wide ocean or the infinite universe), as such. In Kant’s formulation, the dynamically sublime is that which is imputed by us as terrifying, awe-inspiring, powerful and dominant in nature. It arouses fear in us, rather than respect. Fear is aroused when we internally construct a dominating power, to which we cannot establish a resistance. In other words, Kant is at pains to point out that the ‘origin’ of the dynamical sublime is, like that of the mathematical sublime, an internal one. Sublimity is contained not in the thing in nature, but only in our mind, in so far as we become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby to nature outside us (as far as it influences us).51

92  Harmony and dissonance Its origin does not belong to nature, itself, but once again to the ‘play’ or movement of the faculties. ‘Hence nature is called sublime merely because it elevates the imagination [making] it exhibit those cases where the mind can come to feel its own sublimity, which lies in its vocation and elevates it even above nature’.52 This predisposition is part of ourselves, and as Kant goes on to say, it is our self-obligation to ‘develop and exercise this ability’.53 Instead of shying away or avoiding the dynamically sublime we should embrace it. Why? At one level, for Kant, fear is an impositional force in that the fear of domination does not permit resistance or conflict – neither power as potentia nor freedom. Hence the dynamically sublime is Kant’s positing of a pacifying and crippling ‘absolute’ fear of evil, even of God, or in contemporary language a quasi-totalitarian existential or social force that is, again in contemporary terms, traumatic. The dynamically sublime, for Kant, is the absolute contrast to his own version of Enlightenment. From the position of the dynamically sublime we act passively – it is non-, or de-Enlightening. We flee because it terrorises us; we are terrified to the point of fright-full paralysis and we exist in a state of fear, trembling and dread. And for Kant, this is no human condition for the person.54 At another level, the dynamically sublime is the moral category, in Kant’s hands. Whilst part of our inner world or inner life, and a recognition of our ‘physical [and psychical – JR] impotence’, it can simultaneously reveal ‘an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature’.55 In other words, by confronting the dynamically sublime in us we can become independent not only from external Nature (and by implication external social forces of domination), but also of the internal paralysing fear. This new independence reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a selfpreservation quite different in kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us. This keeps the humanity in our person from being degraded; even though we might succumb to the domination.56 A judgment according to the dynamically sublime is a reminder of strength. It is, for Kant, a pre-condition of an enlightened one, of activity, of conflict, of power and of freedom. The dynamically sublime is part of what Kant terms our human vocation or our human condition. It is intimately connected to a sense of fear-less empowerment that Nietzsche would later develop as ‘the will to power’ in his own heretical Kantianism. But for Kant, the dynamically sublime is a gift of ‘nature’ in that we must encourage judgements of the aesthetically dynamically sublime as a necessary vocation that enables us to exercise moral strength. To quote Kant more fully: Hence nature is called dynamically sublime because it elevates our imagination [making] it exhibit those cases where the mind can come

Harmony and dissonance  93 to feel its own sublimity, which lies in its vocation and elevates it even above nature … For here the liking [of the dynamically sublime] concern’s our ability’s vocation, revealed in such cases, in so far as the predisposition to this ability is part of our nature, whereas it remains to us, as our obligation, to develop and exercise this ability.57 In the light of our discussion in Chapter 3, it could even be termed nonfunctional figurative schemata, a first glimpse of a blurred sketch of freedom that also expands us. As already indicated, although Kant may view his version of the dynamically sublime ‘far-fetched’, it is clear that he is linking his formulation not to a fully developed aesthetics or aesthetic theory, but to an anthropological deepening of his own thesis of Enlightenment as ‘release from self-incurred tutelage’. It is in this context that even Kant’s references to a dominating Nature or God are ‘stand-ins’ for further reflections by him on the pre-conditions for the possibility of an enlightened existence. An enlightened existence is not an existence without fear, but one in the face of fear. It is an existence of courage. This existence of courage entails, for Kant, an aesthetic sensibility and an aesthetic creation that equates it with a moral sensibility, that once again belongs to our inner vocation. For Kant, morality or moral culture is sublime because it expands us and makes us confront fear, awe and adversity in a way that swells our moral feeling of courage and the good, both because and despite the unease and agitated oscillations initiated by the experience of sublimity. We confront obstacles in our dynamically sublime condition of unease and ‘resistance’. We confront our difficult selves in the condition of the dynamically sublime. The dynamically sublime is also the ‘gap’ marked by these resistances. As Kant notes, ‘the sublime can be described thus: it is an object (of nature) the presentation of which determines the mind to think of nature’s inability to attain to an exhibition of ideas’.58 The productive or creative imagination strains to schematise, especially when mere exhibition is not enough. Something more is required of it. It must expand even more, even though reason is also expanding through its own ideas of the infinite (for the mathematical sublime) and moral courage (for the dynamically sublime). When expanding our productive or creative imagination either mathematically or dynamically beyond empirical natural or material/social conditions, reason, too expands and arouses ourselves to conceptualise the idea of freedom in a way that may be adequate to the imagination’s own expansion. This means that we are compelled to schematicise, to create monograms or blurred sketches, and hence to also creatively imagine, present, exhibit, conceptualise freedom. We feel the sublime’s call for freedom. We are strained rather than constrained. For Kant, judging under the conditions of sublimity strains the imagination [and reason – JR] because it is based on a feeling that the mind has a vocation that wholly transcends the domain of

94  Harmony and dissonance nature [and even social domination – JR] (namely moral feeling) and it is with regard to this feeling that we judge the presentation of the object subjectively purposive.59 Kant is anything but the cold, formal rationalist here. The dynamically sublime, especially, requires feelings (the faculty of desire) and the creative imagination to move us. The apparent issue for Kant is the relationship that he establishes between the faculties themselves. As he says, in an aesthetic judgement about the sublime we present this dominance (of reason over sensibility) as being exerted by the imagination itself, as an instrument of reason’.60 Yet in an almost Schilleresque moment that goes beyond both Kant and Schiller the free play of the productive imagination in its non-functional schematic capacity occurs here. The creative imagination begins to schematicise and create blurred sketches that are not simply functionally, but more so figuratively formed in terms of metaphor and all of the compositional and inventive practices and contrivances of hypotyposis that are available. Here ‘the imagination must on its own sustain the mind in its free activity’.61 Dynamically sublime free play is anything but vapid, impetuous, despondent, weak, sentimental, misanthropic, prone to fanaticism, delusion or dream-inspired.62 Again in a Schilleresque moment that to be sure belongs to his own anthropology, sublime, agitated free play, for Kant should be enthusiastic, vigorous, humorous or whimsical and sociable – in Nietzsche’s later terminology – life-affirming. ‘Enthusiasm is sublime aesthetically because it is straining of our forces by ideas that impart to the mind a momentum whose effects are mightier and more permanent than are those of an impulse produced by presentations of the sense’.63 The dynamically sublime edifies us and makes us open and receptive to creating freedom and the courage that this requires. However, rather than being positive, as it is for Schiller, free play is negative, for Kant. The productive imagination both expands and allows us to glimpse at what is sacrificed or denied when freedom cannot exist. In the movement of the dynamically sublime the productive imagination creates and agitates according to awe, terror and fear. The productive, non-functional figurative creative imagination is ‘unbridled’ (with an equine image in mind) and can run forth to expand in free play to establish a relation with freedom. In this very particular instance, reason and the productive imagination become porous in the call for and the creation and vocation of freedom. There is not only agitation and oscillation but also mutual interaction and communication – a mutual intercourse – between reason and the productive imagination. To be sure, this is one of the really few times that Kant comes close to reiterating the idea that reason and the productive, schematising imagination may be more intimately and creatively connected than he otherwise does. In the end Kant is more concerned that the subject’s freedom is reflexively constituted freedom, which is law-governed by the faculty of reason and thus knows its limits.

Harmony and dissonance  95 The above analysis indicates that the text breaks into two at this point, with the issue of creativity and its products once again left dangling in the air.64 Here, if we read Kant’s discussion of the genius in §49 alongside his discussion of the analytic of the sublime in §25–29 there is a sense that creativity and judgements of taste are eruptions. To be sure, for Kant they are necessary violations into an empty space, that is violent acts that denote an unease, a dissonance generated by the incongruity between imagination, concepts/symbols and moral practices.65 In other words, Kant refers to the mathematical sublime as pertaining to pure reason and the dynamically sublime pertaining practical reason. The mathematical sublime refers to the conceptual freedom to create the aesthetic ideal of the infinite under the umbrella of pure reason. The dynamically sublime refers to the moral freedom to have the courage to create the (aesthetic) ideal of Enlightenment under the umbrella of practical reason. Crucially, though, in doing so the productive imagination in its capacity as both functional and figurative or non-functional schemata or ‘monograms’ is central to each of these concerns in the context of what is created. This creativity includes the gaps and spaces that can be opened and expanded or closed and contracted. Yet, Kant suspends his ruminations and insights regarding the productive imagination, because his primary concern is with the problem of judgement rather than creativity. We can now, in a final section, turn to the problem of the incongruity of judgement, its possible communicability, and Kant’s search for a stability in the midst of indeterminacy.

Aesthetic communicability: harmony in counterpoint Apart from free creativity Kant is also preoccupied with a third warrant of freedom – the freedom to not only make but also communicate rational judgements. The fact that in Kant’s view, reason is compelled to venture beyond ‘the field of its empirical employment’, and critically confront the limits of all knowledge and human experience indicates that its ultimate aim lies beyond knowledge and cognition.66 The ultimate aim of reason as a non-functionalising monogram or blurred sketch, for Kant, is freedom, and it is from this perspective that Kant subsumes aesthetic concerns to ones regarding practical philosophy. Kant’s dimension of practical philosophy is felt most strongly in this aspect of aesthetic communicability in the Critique of Judgment. He continues to posit his two propositions articulated in his political and anthropological writings (as well as the Critique of Pure Reason) of a subject who critically reflects and stands in relation to others, often in a mutually hostile and antagonistic way. Yet subjects must solve together the problem of antagonism and hostility. In the wake of my analyses above, including Chapter 2 concerning what I have termed Kant’s ‘Shakespeareanism’, unsocial sociability now refers to his image of the human condition replete with complexity, contingency, and excess. In addition, Kant’s anthropology also contains

96  Harmony and dissonance two aesthetic ideas or ‘monograms’ or ‘blurred sketches’ of autonomous freedom and friendship.67 The ‘monograms’ of autonomous freedom and friendship are indicated by the condition and activity of critical reflection that he also terms Enlightenment which requires not only limitation, self-limitation and strangerhood, but also creativity. As we will see in Chapters 5 and 6 freedom and friendship are not synonymous, and the latter is not reducible to political forms. Autonomous freedom is a political category, whilst friendship is not; it is a moral one. In the Critique of Judgment, they stand in counterpoint to one another. It is this counterpoint that I will now explore beginning with autonomous freedom and possible agreement (ostensibly about taste) in a sensus communis as it appears that this is the main aim of the Critique of Judgment, which leaves much of our discussion of the sublime in mid-air. In the context of the Critique of Judgment and building on arguments in Chapter 1, the sensus communis becomes a public sphere (a paradigm for one of the many possible publics) in which critical reflection occurs without pre-conditions and constraints. As we saw in Chapter 1, the sensus communis occurs publicly with other selves through argument. To speak our existence is to interact publicly – for Kant, this is one of our primary goals.68 This entails that participants cannot claim privileged positions either as specialists or as rulers or leaders who ‘require anyone else to assent to an aesthetic judgment that [they] make’.69 Nor is a critical reflection established ‘by gathering votes and asking other people what kind of sensation they are having’.70 A judgement of taste acquires a validity which as Kant argues, ‘must rest... on an autonomy of the subject who is making a judgment about the feeling of pleasure’.71 Two specific features emerge. First, the meaning of communicability is thrown into relief. Each singular judgement has a universality, a right to exist, the construction of which is not dependent on ‘a logical universality governed by concepts’.72 ‘Taste lays claim to autonomy’ and by extension plurality on the ground of freedom.73 This means, that, second, a priori proofs can provide neither the basis for judgement according to taste, nor the reasons for a change of mind, a change of perspective or a change of heart. Kant, however, finds this particular version of indeterminate universality unsettling. In this context of a plurality of tastes he searches for a certitude by which the claim for a sound judgement can be made. It is at this point that we can reintroduce the peculiarity of Kant’s notion of harmony as he moves onto the ground of the transcendentality of the lawfulness of the faculty of the understanding once more. As our discussion of reflective judgement above indicates, Kant assumes that he has transcendentally solved the problem of taste, of the activity of coming to judgement. Effectively suspending the problem of the sublime in all of its complexity in mid-air, Kant prioritises the activity of judgement by means of the inner harmony between the faculties of understanding and the

Harmony and dissonance  97 imagination that is available to everyone and can be communicated and assented to on transcendental grounds. In searching for certitude Kant claims that the subject who judges reflexively refers aesthetic ideas to the combined faculties of understanding and the productive imagination. It is this combination that has the result of harmonising judgement in the realm of the sensible (objects) with the supersensible (ideas). As Kant says: taste, as a subjective power of judgment contains a principle of subsumption; however, this subsumption is not one of intuitions under concepts, but, rather, one of the power of intuitions or exhibitions (the imagination) under the power of concepts (the understanding), insofar as the imagination in its freedom harmonizes with the understanding in its lawfulness.74 It is this transcendentally constructed idea of harmony that enables Kant to argue that singular judgements of the beautiful can be shared or are, as he says, ‘universally communicable’.75 In this construction the sensus communis means the ‘universal communicability’ of the experience of harmonisation. Kant assumes that he brings together two of his (to be sure reconstructed) aims of showing the formation of aesthetic sensibility and aesthetic communicability through the idea of reflective teleology. He assumes that in explaining or demonstrating a reflective teleology of nature it is also possible to explain the movement or end of reflective judgement rather than its creativity. The key argument is located in ‘The Methodology of Teleological Judgment’, and especially in the paragraphs which address the question as to whether things in nature can have a purposive, subjective organisation. Kant’s aim in paragraph 82, in enquiring whether nature establishes a hierarchical chain of purposes, is to show that unknowable ultimate goals cannot be demonstrated. Rather, and in a similar way to the arguments about the antinomies of freedom in Chapter 3, Kant can only refer to a final goal or cause, if we refer to a supersensible substratum of humankind because it refers to the condition and use or human reason. Humankind, then, is the final goal of a teleologically organised nature beyond nature itself. Furthermore, this teleology relies on something that is not determinate or mechanical, but rather on an indeterminate schema. And it is this indeterminant schema which prompts Kant to ask, in paragraph 83, ‘what is it, within [humankind itself], that is a purpose and that [it] is to further through his connection with nature?’76 He goes on to answer that ‘this purpose must either be such as can be fulfilled by nature in its beneficence, or else [must] be [humankind’s] aptitude and skill for [pursuing] various purposes for which [it] can use nature (outside or within...). On the first alternative the purpose of nature would be humankind’s happiness, on the second [its] culture’.77 As has been pointed out by Dick Howard, this answer can be read in two ways that are indicative of the tensions in Kant’s work.78 First and from the vantage point of ‘On the Common Saying: “This may be true in theory, but

98  Harmony and dissonance it does not apply in practice”’, it can mean that the goal may be a product of nature (or what Kant also terms Providence), which acts like a determinate judgement. Yet, in paragraph 83 Kant once again repeats his argument from the Critique of Practical Reason that happiness cannot be the basis of humankind’s purpose or vocation. Nature promises humankind nothing – especially not happiness. Kant, then, puts forward another argument which is much closer to that posited in his ‘Idea of Universal History from the Point of View of a Citizen of the World’. Nature’s ultimate purpose is a formal and subjective condition, namely [humankind’s] aptitude in general for setting [itself] purposes, and for using nature (independently of [the element on nature in [humankind’s] determination of purposes) as a means [for achieving them] in conformity with the maxims of his free purposes generally.79 Humans act purposively in their relation to nature, develop skills and transform it (and from what Kant says in ‘The Idea of Universal History’ this is the easier task), as well as address their own unsociable sociability – their capacity to conduct war and do evil – by developing civil society. In each, they develop history and culture. Nevertheless, Kant’s account of ‘the terrible tribulations that war inflicts on the human race’, of ‘the trouble that results from violence’ and ‘the shining misery’ of insatiability ends up subsuming reflective judgement under teleological judgement. Nature achieves its ultimate purpose – civilised, cosmopolitan humankind – by inflicting all manner of cruelties and evil. In humankind’s misery, suffering and unsociability human beings learn to practice practical reasoning. In this context, Kant, (re)introduces his idea of harmony qua communicability and publicness. For Kant, harmony does not mean assent or agreement as such. Rather, it refers to a concord between the understanding and the productive imagination that is available in all of us, a formulation that is transposed by Kant in categories of politics and morals rather than aesthetics. Citizenship is the harmony of nature’s ultimate purpose with that of humankind in its perpetual and peaceful co-existence with itself.80 In parallel with this emphasis on teleology there is an indication in Kant’s work of a second direction that constructs a path which does not rely on an idea of final purpose, but gives more heed to a substantive twist implied in his transcendental formulation of the blurred sketch. This is evident in the passage quoted earlier in which he argues that the imagination can only be ‘caught’ in concepts in multiple ways, and in ways ‘which quicken our cognitive power and connect language… with spirit’.81 Kant’s use of this term ‘spirit’ is actually indicative of an unacknowledged coupling of the monogram/blurred sketch of freedom with its substantivisation within his transcendental philosophy that heightens

Harmony and dissonance  99 the sense of indetermination. It is this blurred sketch, or aesthetic idea or in the language of the Critique of Judgment, rather than teleology of final purposes that propels his philosophy forward and which fills the gap, so to speak, between the indeterminate creativity of the productive imagination and reason’s exhibition of it. In a stronger sense, a specific aesthetic idea or monogram ‘invents’ Kant’s meaning of reason in which universality and particularity combine and coalesce. In both the Critique of Judgment, and in his critical work as a whole, it can be argued that a gap between universality and particularity, phenomena and noumena is created, filled and utilised by an aesthetic idea – a blurred sketch or ‘monogram’ that is filled out and which I now term a critical personhood in the context of unsociable sociability. From the political perspective, the aesthetic idea or blurred sketch of critical personhood in the context of unsociable sociability is related to the question of political institutions, forms and standards, and their possible universality. Here Kant articulates and develops a republican version of freedom, beginning with the enlightened public sphere, as we have seen in Chapter 1. According to Kant, everyone should be able to take a critical relation to political statements about the world as we have seen in his argument concerning the enlightened public sphere. This entails that the notions of judgement and autonomous freedom are both central and interrelated. As we have seen, the issues of judgement and autonomy were already laid out in the Critique of Pure Reason. In many respects this is what the Critique of Pure Reason is about. It is also the subject matter of the Critique of Judgment, indicating the continuity in Kant’s project of establishing both the reality and ground of a reason ‘with which every human being is endowed’, a reason that concerns opinions, knowing and believing.82 Yet, this reason is now co-dependent on the non-functional schematicised imagination. Together, reasoning and imagining refers to the capacity of social actors to reflect, to ask questions, open the nature of opinions, belief and knowledge, and to make judgements about both these reflections and opinions, beliefs and knowledge. In terms of this reconstruction, and as already indicated in our discussion of Kant’s transcendental idea of freedom in Chapter 3, Kant draws on the creating power of the productive imagination. Kant constructs an ideal type in the form of a blurred sketch of critical citizenship in the political realm, which is the ground that facilitates a non-violent meeting between political subjects. What makes actions and judgements politically ‘rational’ is when they are derived not only from reasons, but also from a universalisable monogram of autonomous freedom from which there can arise the rejection of both domination and what is learnt in a taken-for-granted way. In other words, Kant’s universalisable monogram of autonomous freedom, which is related to a specific human idea of harmony between the faculties in the Critique of Judgment, is transposed by him into his version of the enlightened public sphere, as we have seen in Chapter 1. It is also

100  Harmony and dissonance transposed into his version of institutional republicanism and his critique of domination, as will be examined in some detail in the following chapter. His critique of domination moves from vertical to horizontal images, or more correctly, schemata of free and mutual exchanges and association, including both economic-contractual and political ones. In the context of political ones, harmony or harmonious exchange does not mean agreement or a lack of discord. Harmony or a sensus communis in the public spheres of argument, economic and monetary exchange and the republics of freely created politics is the participation in, or communicability of, the universalisable aesthetic idea or blurred sketch of autonomous freedom in the context of critiques of power. Autonomous freedom is the participation of subjects in all of their phenomenological and noumenal capacities and abilities in creating power and politics. As we shall also see in Chapter 6 on sociability, the aesthetic idea or blurred sketch of friendship is of a different order to that of politics and contracts. For Kant, friendship indicates the form through which relations with oneself and with others could be established and conducted in the context of unsociable sociability. Friendship transforms unsociable sociability into sociable sociability. The aesthetic idea or blurred sketch of friendship is posited in Kant’s anthropology and alluded to his aesthetic notion of harmony and is further developed in a non-political direction in ‘The Doctrine of Virtue’, as we shall see in Chapter 6. Friendship combines an idea of plurality (difference) with a universalisable notion of respect through which this difference is preserved. The combination of ‘monograms’ or blurred sketches of freedom and friendship, the result of which might be termed autonomous respect, provides the outer limits beyond which plurality should not traverse, and the benchmark for reasoned judgements (critical reflections) about good conduct (which Kant terms virtues). Separately these orientating aesthetic ideas or monograms of republican autonomy and friendship, with their reference to the formulation of critical personhood in the context of unsociable sociability, suggest how actions and judgements may be enacted in ways that do not require recourse to teleology or a philosophy of history. But they do require a vocation. It is not so much that there are no exits from history, upon which both Adorno and Beckett would ruminate. To be sure, there are no temporal exits – we are in the present, and contingently so. There are only spatial and existential ‘exits’. These exits can take the form of creating better or worse realities, or even an exodus when required. As my analysis of the Critique of Judgment has shown, Kant posits judgements constituted by the blurred sketches of autonomous freedom and friendship that help us to navigate our dynamically sublime difficult selves. In the following two chapters we now turn to Kant’s continuing work on unsociable and sociable sociabilities – first in the political realm of his ‘blurred sketch’ of republican autonomy, and second in the so-called private realm in terms of his ‘blurred sketch’ of friendship.

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Notes 1 See N. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2000; György Markus, ‘The Paradoxical Unity of Culture: The Arts and the Sciences’, Culture, Science, Society, Brill, 2011, 59–80. 2 As Kant says, we must regard [aesthetic taste] as necessarily pluralistic by its inner nature … But if that is so, then it must be based on some a priori principles (whether objective or subjective, and we can never arrive at such a principle by scouting about for empirical laws about mental changes … For if taste did not have a priori principles, it could not possibly pronounce on the judgments of others and pass verdicts approving or repudiating them with even the slightest semblance of having the right to do so.

3

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8 9 10 11 12

I. Kant, Critique of Judgment Including the First Introduction, translation Werner S. Pluhar, forward by Mary J. Gregor, Indianapolis, IN, Hackett Publishing Co., 1987, 140, §29. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 173, §44. ‘Fine art … is a way of presenting that is purposive on its own and that furthers, even though without a purpose, the culture of our mental powers to [facilitate] social communication.’ See also §36–42. In an earlier study on Kant’s work I deployed the concepts of aesthetic creation and aesthetic sensibility to capture this distinction. On further reflection, the notion of aesthetic communicability better captures the problem of assent (the sensus communis), whilst the notion of aesthetic sensibility belongs to the feeling for aesthetics more generally, whilst the notion of aesthetic creation is deployed to investigate the knotty problem of the sublime. The notion of aesthetic sensibility indicates that, for Kant, there is a sensibility of the subject for aesthetics and aesthetic taste, which I am addressing under the notion of aesthetic communicability. Aesthetic sensibility is a ‘deflection’ by Kant away from his concern with aesthetic creation. See my ‘Creativity and Judgment: Kant on Reason and Imagination’, in Rethinking Imagination, edited by J. Rundell and G. Robinson, London, Routledge, 1998, 87–117. See W. J. Hipple, The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth Century British Aesthetic Theory, Carbondale, The Southern Illinois University Press, 1957; P. J. McCormick, Modernity, Aesthetics and the Bounds of Art, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1990; J. Engell, The Creative Imagination, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1981. See also Jane Kneller’s excellent Kant and the Power of Imagination, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007. My own work on Kant has affinities with Kneller’s interpretation. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 139–140, §29. The text breaks into three different and competing problems – aesthetic sensibility, aesthetic creation, and aesthetic communicability and teleological judgements (which constitutes ‘Division II Analytic of Teleological Judgment’), which do not jell together. Kant returns to the problem of Nature and by implication the faculty of the understanding in Division II on teleology. I will be less concerned with this issue, except where it is relevant for the other three problems, that is aesthetic sensibility, aesthetic creation and aesthetic communicability. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 131, §29. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 18. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 231, §60. See Chapters 2 and 6. This part of my argument closely follows that of McCormick’s Modernity, Aesthetics and the Bounds of Art.

102  Harmony and dissonance 13 Kant, ‘Introduction’, in Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 18. 14 Kant, ‘Introduction’, in Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 19. 15 Kant argues in the First Introduction that reflective judgement must assume that nature, with its boundless diversity has hit upon a division of this diversity (into genera and species) that enables our judgment to find accordance among the natural forms it compares, and [so] enables it to arrive at empirical concepts, as well as at coherence among these by ascending concepts that are more general [though] also empirical. In other words, judgment presupposes a system of nature even in terms of empirical laws and does so and hence by means of a transcendental principle.

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26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

‘First Introduction’ to Critique of Judgment, the Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 400 at footnote 21. Kant, ‘First Introduction’ to the Critique of Judgment, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 401. Kant, ‘First Introduction’ to the Critique of Judgment, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 401. Kant, ‘First Introduction’ to the Critique of Judgment, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 401. Kant, ‘First Introduction’ to the Critique of Judgment, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 405. Kant, ‘Introduction’, in Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 30. Kant, ‘First Introduction’ to the Critique of Judgment, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 413. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 53, §6. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 53–54, see especially §1–9. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 98, §23. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 92, §22; see especially 91–95, ‘General Comment on the First Division of the Analytic’. Kant inadvertently constructs a relation between beauty and technique as if he was from our contemporary perspective an adjudicator at a dressage event or an Olympic diving competition. See also Kant’s comments on the imagination in ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 179, §48. On the creative loneliness of the creative genius see §47 and the Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, especially 580. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 229, §59. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1964, 177, §49. The Meredith translation captures the better sense in this instance. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Meredith translation, 180, §49. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 185, §49. As we shall see Kant prevaricates between formulations of creativity or movement when pursuing his ideas about aesthetics. As we shall see his image of oscillation, which really refers to the relation among the faculties as well as between the faculties and the anthropological/phenomenological aspects of ourselves, subsumes the issue of creativity and non-functional figurative imagining. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 217, §57. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 184, §49. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 185, §49. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar, translation, 182, §49. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 226, §59. Kant’s ruminations here are close to his discussions of the productive imagination at §24 in the

Harmony and dissonance  103 Critique of Pure Reason and involuntary and voluntary productive imagination in The Anthropology Mrongovius. It can be suggested that the sublime combines aspects of both the involuntary and voluntary productive imagination, with or without the paradigm of the genius. 36 Once again Kant retreats from the problem of the schemata and lands on the ground of the symbolic. As he says, ‘Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good, and only because we refer the beautiful to the morally good’. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 228, §59. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1994; see also Helfer, The Retreat of Representation, and Jane Kneller on the distinction they both make between exhibiting/picturing and (more or less) creating. In the following discussion I will emphasise indeterminate creation. As I have argued elsewhere, the beautiful and the sublime became the motifs through which the Romantics searched for an internal source apart from Reason that answered the call of human freedom that was not grounded in principles of rational method. Berlin, in The Roots of Romanticism, argues that Kant’s idea of radical freedom or autonomy, which was central to his moral philosophy, became, in turn, the beacon for Romanticism. Yet, it is not Kant’s notion of reason that the Romantics became interested in but the idea of nature as internal force. As we have seen in Kant’s work this internal force is identified as the creative imagination, which for him was a human faculty and not part of nature per se. In the hands of the Romantics, though, the notion of the creative imagination tied together an idea of natural force with radical freedom, because such a force was viewed as unbounded pure creativity, as well as natural because it was viewed as an inner force that was part of nature. Nature was no longer viewed as a passive object, but rather viewed as an activated energy. The artist, in the form of the genius, was viewed as both the repository of this force and power, and its activator. The artist combined in him or herself the elements of both nature and art. He or she relied on blind spontaneity outside his or her control and produced art by both relying on this spontaneity and freely choosing means that would produce it. A tension emerged within Romanticism between what was thought to be the form of this human self-expression and its source. The first version emphasised meaning and its transmission, language (or by extension other symbolically articulated forms such as music and art). Meaning was viewed as the soul of a culture and language was viewed as the form through which this soul was externalised or objectified in a way that emphasised metaphor and metonymy. The paradigmatic form of linguistification was poetry, which also became a model for art and music. In the second version and given that the source of creativity was no longer viewed as mimetic, an internal source was identified as the productive or creative imagination, The version of the Romantic human self-image that emphasised the creative imagination was viewed as having a more radical potential, and thus became the source of the Romantic critique of modern civilisation. The early German Romantics, the first Romantic generation of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, shared the strong sense of crisis and reacted to it in two specific ways. They constructed a holistic image of humankind through which the various dimensions of human experience that had been split up and broken down into discrete parts by the analytical powers of reason could be re-unified. Romanticism emphasised the creative imagination, or at least subsumed the linguistification of the world to it. This combination of imagination and linguistification led the Romantics to privilege aesthetics as the primary and redeeming form of human activity, which would save and deliver human beings from a life that has been fragmented by the division of labour and political conflicts and narrowed by

104  Harmony and dissonance

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

55

56 57 58 59 60 61

a cognitive rationalism. Reason was to be re-united with feelings, and subordinated to the imagination, to produce an emotional, affective culture. In this way, too, nature and culture, or nature and humankind would be re-united. Culture and cultural creation thus became the primary point of reference for the early German Romantics, and for Romanticism generally, and the basis for their critique of modern, rationalistic civilisation. When taken together, source and form combined as a totality ad a demand for human completeness. See J. Rundell, ‘Modernity, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism: Creating Social Theory’, in The Handbook for Social Theory, edited by George Ritzer and Barry Smart, London, Sage, 2000, 13–29. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 98, §23. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 99, §23. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 115, §27. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 115, §27. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 116, §27. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 112–113, §26. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 108, §26. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 107–114, §26. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 115–116, §27. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 116, §27. Kant repeats this position again a few sentences later where he states ‘[In} view of the necessary expansion of the imagination towards adequacy regarding what is unbounded in our power of reason, namely the idea of the absolute whole, the displeasure is still presented as purposive for the rational ideas and their arousal, and hence so is the unpurposiveness of our imagination’s ability … [The] object is apprehended as sublime with a pleasure that is possible only by means of displeasure’ (117, §27). Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 108, §26, square brackets by John Rundell. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 109, §26. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 116, §27. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 119, §28. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 123, §28. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 121, §28. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 121, §28. Kant goes so far as to think that his notion of the dynamically sublime is ‘far-fetched’, exaggerated or even improbable (121, §28). I will argue that in fact it is not far-fetched, but plausible and convincing. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 123, §28. See also Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. The term power as potentia is derived from Aristotle and taken over by Arendt to refer to power as the ability to publically contest forms of domination. Potentia is more fully explored in Chapter 5. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 120–121, §28. Kant’s connection between the dynamically sublime and morals continues his anthropological and moral investigations that include his pre-critical period, especially Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. In the context of the later Critique of Judgment the issue of the interconnection between the dynamically sublime and morals is moved wholly onto transcendental ground and the relation between the faculties by Kant. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 122, §28. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 121, §28. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 127–128, §29. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 128, §29. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 128, §29. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 131, §29.

Harmony and dissonance  105 62 See Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 135–137, §29. 63 Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 132, §29; see especially §54, where Kant even tells a joke. 64 These two separate domains indicate two separate paths that take their own direction in European intellectual history after Kant. The first path is Romanticism, which concentrates on the issue of creativity, and the second is hermeneutics, which concentrates on the issue of interpretation. There are also other paths that open up in the wake of Kant’s work and his distinction, and here it is neither Heidegger’s nor Lacan’s paths that I have in mind, but the ones opened by György Markus and Cornelius Castoriadis. György Markus’ theory of culture posits a triadic model of the ‘Author-Work- Recipient’, which is tied to the creative, hermeneutic reflexivity and historical revision that is given over to the cultural actors in the triad. Markus works with both creativity and interpretation without reducing one to the other. The strength of this triadic formulation is that it underwrites a multi-dimensional idea of autonomous modern aesthetic and cultural practice that is premised on the inescapable tensions between internalcreative and external interpretations of aesthetic production. Internal creation and external contestation and differences of patterns of reception works of art are intrinsic to and inherent in the very concept of the autonomy of cultural production. See György Markus, Culture, Science, Society: The Constitution of Cultural Modernity, Leiden, Brill, 2011, 15–35. See also David Roberts, ‘György Márkus’s Theory of Cultural Modernity: Presuppositions and Extrapolations’, Critical Horizons, 20:3, 2019: 201–220. Castoriadis concentrates on the notion of creativity sui generis. As Castoriadis points out Kant’s theory of aesthetics forces him ‘to go beyond his strictly dualistic approach and to consider what late neo-Kantians (for example, Rickert) would call “das Zwischenreich des immanenten Sinnes” (the in-between realm of immanent meanings)’ (98). C. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, in Philosophy, Autonomy, Politics, trans. David Ames Curtis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, 98. See Rundell, ‘The Hermeneutic Imagination and Imaginary Creation’. 65 This image of the genius can be transposed into either the ascetic or romantic revolutionary who can quite easily do infinite violence to others and themselves. Certainly, Kant is no Jacobin, nor does he stand on the ground of the redemptive paradigm. He argues that art and genius (and here we also mean the genius for politics) require training (civilisation) and that its unfettered creativity should be made subordinate to cultural demands which themselves are demands for sociability and its responsibilities. See Critique of Judgment, §50. One of the difficulties of Kant’s position is that he gives up the more classical ideas of wisdom and phronesis, and despite the deployment of the language of virtues, constructs good or sound judgement as a version of a theory of action in terms that rely on the operation of the transcendental principles (Chapter 6). Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 630. 66 67 This is not the only anthropological image that can be posited. There are two others that are present which I will term cruelty and love. As indicated above, Kant addresses these in terms of unsociable sociability (war and evil, especially radical evil, cf. ‘Perpetual Peace’ and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone), and the forms which friendship or love as benevolence can take and its orientating values (‘Doctrine of Virtue’). He critiques cruelty and even love from the vantage point of an anthropology of ‘critical personhood’ with its own values of citizenship and autonomous freedom. See Chapters 2 and 6. See not only ‘An Answer to the Question’ and Chapter 2, but also ‘The Disci68 pline of Pure Reason in Respect to its Polemical Employment’ in the Critique of Reason, 593–612. 69 Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 139, §29.

106  Harmony and dissonance 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 144, §31. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 144, §31. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 144, §31. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 146, §32. The image of enlightenment, that is, the release from self-incurred tutelage through the self-legislating use of one’s own reason, is central to Kant’s notion of communicability. This image is what he terms the sensus communis and involves three capacities or maxims which place it both beyond nature and human’s encounter with their first ‘natural’ world, that is, their everyday existence. The first capacity is to think for oneself and thus have an active critical relation to both the taken-forgranted everyday and specialised forms of knowledge and opinion. The second is the capacity ‘to think from the standpoint of someone else’, beyond the parameters of one’s own particularistic perspective. It indicates, as Kant says, ‘a broadened way of thinking’, a capacity to think from ‘a universal standpoint’. The third maxim or capacity is to think consistently, or more accurately to develop a consistent way of thinking that combines as a matter of course the first two capacities. Together they constitute the condition of enlightenment. Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation especially 160–161, §40. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 151, §35. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 162, §40. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 317, §83. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 317, §83. Dick Howard, From Marx to Kant, Albany, NY, Albany State University Press, 1985, especially 140–142. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 319, §83. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 323–324, §84. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 185, §49. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 658.

5

Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion of freedom Freedom, society and politics in the context of unsociable sociability

A freedom to act reflexively: Kant’s image of the outer and inner dimensions of action It is especially in the Metaphysics of Morals, which post-dates the Critique of Judgment and over-runs the Critique of Practical Reason that Kant attempts to give us a clear sense of who and what we are in the context of a tension between our phenomenal and noumenal selves, between reasoning and imagining and between one and another. Kant’s critique of impure reason and the productive-schematicising imagination continues afoot in this later work. But so, too, do the other aspects of his work that I have been focussing on – the anthropology of difficult selves, the blurred sketches of freedom, and unsociable or sociable sociability. In other words, the blurred sketches of freedom that are created by non-functional schematicism becomes the basis for Kant’s mobilisation of impure practical reason from the vantage point of our possible imaginings and creation of republican political institutions – the topic of this chapter – and a vocation of a life lived in an activity of freedom in the context of the anthropology of our difficult selves – the topic of the subsequent one.1 Kant fills out his blurred sketches of freedom qua autonomy and friendship in the forms of concepts, maxims, thought-experiments and formulations, some of which resist complete elucidation. It has emerged from the previous chapters that Kant establishes (at least) three versions of freedom that are internally related to his own notion of maturity and which clash or stand in tension with one another and need not be reconciled – the freedom to think critically in the public sphere, the freedom to cognise and the freedom to come to so-called aesthetic judgements, which as we have seen are more than simply about matters of aesthetic taste. As we have also seen the previous chapter another blurred sketch of freedom has emerged, which I termed critical personhood in the context of unsociable sociability, which he now more concretely develops in a version of a freedom to create republics of political autonomy.2 It can also be termed one of constrained reflexive freedom from a republican-cosmopolitan point of view. This current chapter is concerned explicitly with exploring this version with reference to Kant’s later writings, specifically The Metaphysics of

108  Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion Morals – Doctrine of Right – (1797) and his so-called political writings, especially ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795), ‘Idea of a Universal History From a Cosmopolitan Point of View’ (1784), and ‘On the Common Saying: “This May be True in Theory, But it Does Not Apply in Practice”’ (1793). To begin with, and as we have seen, for Kant, critical personhood entails that desires and appetites especially for wealth, fame and power, and the pleasures or displeasures that they give rise to, can be neither impulsively nor immediately gratified. We are capable of gaining a critical distance on these by being reflexive, that is, without being dependent on these impulses, desires or even ‘wild’ imaginings. As we saw in Chapter 1 being independent means to be released from self-incurred tutelage, and in this current context it is not from the opinions of others, but from our own inclinations. To put it another way, in Kant’s view, we can step back and think and by so doing we make ourselves the author of our own moral law. And, again, in so doing we bring ourselves under the umbrella of our own universal law, or more precisely our own universal maxims. In other words, we experience ourselves as the authors and practitioners of our own practical reasoning and imagining.3 In Kant’s view, there are two forms of constraints – one that originates from us being corporeal beings, and the other from/by the blurred sketch of freedom itself. For Kant, the first type of constraint refers to our phenomenal existence as corporeal and feeling human beings with desires, appetites and needs of all kinds that can lead to pleasure or displeasure, happiness or unhappiness. In this context, we have a possible choice that separates us from the animals and our own animalic nature, but this choice, in this instance, is for Kant based on a negativity, a ‘no’. As Kant says, ‘freedom of choice is this independence from being determined by sensible impulses; this is the negative concept of freedom’.4 For Kant, this realisation of being released from the tutelage of our impulses and establishing our self-authorship is the positive concept of freedom. As he says, ‘the positive concept of freedom is that capacity of pure reason to be itself practical’.5 For Kant, this means that we choose according to a maxim, and thus choose reflexively and wisely. As we have seen a maxim or categorical imperative is a ‘monogram’. More precisely, the categorical imperative begins as non-functional schemata of the productive imagination – a blurred sketch – and takes concrete form as a maxim of practical reasoning. In this particular instance, it is formulated as never to use oneself or another as a mere means, but to treat oneself and another as an end.6 In this sense, there are two interconnected yet separate vocations or duties that Kant prioritises – our vocations to the categorical imperative and our own sense of self-authorship. For him, the practice of these vocations is an art or a practice that can be cultivated. Kant’s formulation entails that we are not perfect beings or even perfectible ones, but that we live in the space between our empirical ‘first nature’ and our transcendentally constituted capacity for figuratively schematically creating reasoned, distancing thinking and thus action.7

Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion  109 In other words, according to Kant’s own formulation there are two types of constraints or two types of freedom – the negative and the positive – that belong, respectively, to the phenomenal and the noumenal parts of our existence.8 In Kant’s formulation, the latter – the noumenal part of our existence – is divided into external free constraint (The Doctrine of Right) and internal free constraint (The Doctrine of Virtue). External free constraint refers to laws that should be freely authored in the socially objective sense, and because of this they should be viewed as duties, according to Kant. Internal free constraint refers to virtues that (again) should be self-authored. According to Kant, given their extra or non-legal status that also refer to cultural forms rather than simply habits which are taken-for-granted, they should be viewed as incentives. As he says, in all lawgiving (whether it prescribes internal or external actions, and whether it prescribes them a priori by reason alone or by the choice of another) there are two elements: first, a law, which represents an action that is to be done as objectively necessary, that is which makes an action a duty; and second, an incentive, which connects a ground for determining choice to this action subjectively with the representation of the law. Hence the second element is this: that the law makes duty the incentive. By the first action is represented as a duty, and this is merely theoretical cognition of a possible determination of choice, that is, practical rules. By the second the obligation so to act is connected in the subject with a ground for determining choice generally.9 As Kant states, practical reason lays down maxims, not laws because laws are external, whereas maxims are internal and can be adopted at will. This makes ethics ‘the system of end of pure practical reason’.10 In both instances the ‘us’, for Kant refers to (i) political communities, in other words societies that have organised themselves politically and contractually (and not simply in term of dominating or impositional power relations) and include property relations as well as political ones; (ii) individual subjects (or what Kant prefers to term personalities); (iii) the so-called intersubjective aspect of our sociality, to which our sociability refers. Kant theorises or constructs a metaphysics of morals for the first aspect of ‘the us’ under the notion of Right, which refers, at one level, to the formal-legal character of these forms in relation to others, whilst he theorises the second aspect under the notion of virtue. The third aspect is present in both because of Kant’s working assumption of unsociable and sociable sociabilities, and the external, formal-legal or internal virtue-based nature of each determines how each is characterised.11 Both ‘external’ and ‘internal’ contexts are orientated by their relationship to the transcendentality of the blurred sketch of freedom and the categorical imperative, and both produce specific kinds of relationships with them. Because of the external formal-juridical nature of the law, Right produces

110  Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion a narrow set of duties, that is, ones than can more or less be defined and codified. As we shall see in Chapter 6, the case is quite different for virtues, according to Kant. Because of the internal, reflexive self-legislating relation to our transcendentally located capacity for reasoning about ethical matters, virtues produce a wide, or increasingly broader set of parameters that denote increasing rather than decreasing scope for sociable sociability towards one-self and others. In other words, according to Kant’s quaint formulation, laws produce a ‘narrow’ vocation or duty; virtues produce a ‘wide’ duty.12 As Kant says, ‘What essentially distinguishes a duty of virtue from a duty of Right is that external constraint to the latter is morally possible, whereas the former [duties of virtue] is based only on self-constraint’.13 The image of the formal Kant is a misnomer, a misunderstanding that hollows out Kant’s work and his positions. For Kant, there is a depth to the subject (the personality), and this depth can be formed through practico-reflexive work. External duties of right are narrow; internal ethical duties are wide. In Kant’s formulation we are ‘narrow’ and ‘wide’ creatures, and this narrowness and width create a depth rather than a shallowness. As we have seen in his anthropological writings, if we are ‘shallow’, we can be prone to uncontrollable and pre-reflexive states.14 This is another way of saying that morals, virtues or ethics develop a subject or personality who, in a more contemporary language, is deep, or as we have seen, expansive.15 Having re-articulated the broad contours of Kant’s notion of action that already belong to his anthropology and the transcendentality of his monogram or blurred sketch of freedom we can now turn to action within the ‘external’ context of social and political unsociable sociability, as it is this unsociality to which Kant’s critically orientated notions of contractual ownership and republican-cosmopolitan politics is geared.

Kant’s critiques of power and violence: from the colonial context of unsociable sociability to the contractual condition of free exchanges Kant’s critical perspective can be brought fully and immediately into relief by his critique of colonialism. In the wake of the earlier age of the European ‘great explorations and colonisations’ of the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the Americas, the Pacific including Australasia, and the imperial colonisations of the already known regions of Africa, Asia and the Indian subcontinent Kant is one of the first and most original Enlightenment ‘post-colonial’ critics. The originality of Kant’s position is double-sided. From one side it is a trenchant counter to the so-called empirical anthropologies and evolutionary theories that plotted the course from the primitive pre-civilisational savages to civilisational states or societies. For Kant, there is no primordial, pre-civilisational ‘aboriginality’, and as we have seen barbarism, for him, is not a synonym for tribal existence, but

Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion  111 16

for political immaturity. From the other side, Kant invokes a universalist transcendentally inflected perspective regarding of external right, in this instance regarding property and its dispossession. Because of his universalistic and transcendentally inflected starting point this is not an issue, for him, of the private or even state possession of property, but rather an issue that begins from the idea of humankind in general as the original, common possessors of all the land on earth. Kant articulates his thought-experiment in the following way, and it is worth quoting him at some length here: All men are originally (i.e. prior to any act of choice that establishes a right) in a possession of land that is in conformity with right, that is, they have a right to be wherever nature or chance (apart from their will) has placed them. This kind of possession … is possession in common because the spherical surface of the earth unites all places on its surface; for if its surface was an unbounded plane, men could be so dispersed on it that they would not come into any community with one another, and then community would not be a necessary result of their existence on the earth. The possession by all men on the earth that precedes any act of theirs which would establish rights (that is constituted by nature itself) is an original possession in common (communion primaeva), which can never be proved. Original possession in common is, rather, a practical rational concept which contains a priori the principle in accordance with which alone men can use a place on earth in accordance with the principles of Right.17 In other words, Kant criticises both often unprovable palaeo-anthropological arguments and ones concerned with power, dispossession and domination from a strong transcendental position concerning the common condition of humankind as possessors of the earth. For him, this starting point is important because it enables him to make another step concerning the transcendental principle of, and connection between, Right, assent and property. Kant’s starting point gives fuller form to his blurred sketch of freedom and in this instance takes the form of a critical theory of possession, which must occur from the a priori point of view ‘as a free choice of each to accord with the freedom of all’.18 Kant recognises that most forms’ acquisition and possession occur through violence and force. They are forms of unsociable sociability that occur contingently and non-reciprocally or ‘bilaterally’ (Kant) without the articulated transcendental principle of Right. Dispossession by force is an act that goes against the universality of the idea of an original possession; moreover, and more importantly it is an act that goes against the mutuality of the participants involved. For Kant, in a way that will find more than an echo in Hegel’s formulations in his Phenomenology of Spirit, possession in his quaint language should be omnilateral or mutually recognising and reciprocating; it is a social relationship between (at

112  Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion least) two parties who recognise one another, and this recognition unites both the phenomenal and conditional existence of property, and as we shall see exchanges more generally, with a noumenal or unconditional notion of a Right based on freedom.19 The expression of this free Right is articulated in a contract, which also lays the condition for the transcendental principles of social or public justice, because the contract is, as Kant puts it, the rightful condition between subjects who are persons. A rightful condition is that relation of men among one another that contains the conditions under which alone everyone is able to enjoy his rights, and the formal condition under which this is possible in accordance with the Idea of a will giving laws for everyone is called public justice.20 Leaving aside Kant’s notion of justice, contract from a transcendental perspective, which is now more than a blurred sketch, solves the problem for a critique of power and force because the right of mine is a right in relation to someone else who is also a person and is irreducible to thingness or ‘property’.21 Hence transfer, for Kant, can only occur in relation to things and not to people and requires a mediation in the form of a mutually, socially recognised norm, and this norm is imbedded in the contract. As Kant says, transfer of property to one another is alienation [the thing is no longer ‘mine’ – JR] An act of the united choice of two persons by which anything at all that belongs to one passes to the other is a contract.22 For Kant, then, the contract is bound to mediated and distanced exchanges between free people in the form of reciprocal/mutual acquisition. Kant insightfully notes that in addition to the form of the contract, there are two other forms of mediated exchange that denote its depersonalisation and release from tutelage – money and the written form in the form of the book. For Kant, it will be shown that the concept of money, as the greatest and most useful means men have for the exchange of things, called buying and selling (commerce), and so too the concept of a book, as the greatest means for exchanging thoughts, can [] be resolved into pure intellectual concepts.23 The intellectualisation of exchange through money, for Kant, indicates its ‘omnilateral’ capacities or abilities, in that by its very use bound to the logic of ‘reciprocal acquisition’ it transfers (in a way that prefigures Marx’s more famous formulations in Capital) something that is useful (and only

Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion  113 goods not persons) into something that can be exchanged, even over great distances. As Kant goes on to note, the positive aspect of money is that it enables transfers and acquisitions to occur not through plunder, theft, colonisation and even gifting, but as exchanges between autonomous persons. In this sense money is an empty symbol or even aesthetic ideal (empty – in that it does not prescribe what can be bought or sold, especially once human beings are delegitimised as commodities). As he further extrapolates: On this basis a preliminary real definition of money can be given: it is the universal means by which men exchange their industriousness (or industry) with one another … This definition brings the empirical concept of money to an intellectual concept by looking only to the form of what each party provides in return for the other in onerous contracts (and abstracting from their matter), thereby bringing to it the concept of right in the exchange of what is mine or yours generally …24 One result of these contractually based, symbolically mediated exchanges is the accumulation of social wealth, rather than simply personal gain.25 In Kant’s view, the important point is that these exchanges of goods occur between free persons and involve the acquisition of only things. In other words, money denotes or signifies, for Kant at least, mediated exchanges between persons across social space that temporarily acquire/possess a ‘thing’ and not a person.26 In this sense, for Kant the contract and the money form are abstract (in Weber’s terms, formal-legal), symbolic social expressions of this blurred, sketch-like transcendental condition that functions both as a monogram and a social institution.27 In a similar way to his analysis of the contract and money, Kant argues that the intellectualisation of exchanges through the book can be posited at two levels. At one level, that is the empirical one, a book is a concretised, mediated linguistic form. As he says, a book is a writing (it does not matter, here, whether it is written in hand or set in type, whether it has few or many pages), which represents a discourse that someone delivers to the public by visible linguistic signs.28 Whilst Kant does not say as much, the book is also part of humankind’s self-cultivation and flourishing. However, Kant ties the book to two forms of (to be sure) modern contexts – the Enlightenment, that is argument within the critico-reflexive public sphere, and the commercial one where money or profit is the primary goal of publication. For Kant, these compete with one another and cannot be contained or resolved wholly within the empirical form of the contract. At the other noumenal level, Kant’s posits that a book falls within the orbit of a blurred sketch of freedom because it is a medium for the exchange of ideas mediated as a social relation between three actors: author-publisher-reader

114  Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion all of whom should act under the condition of autonomy in relation to each other and themselves. Again, as he states, One who speaks to the public in his own name is called author (autor). One, who through a writing, discourses publicly in another’s (the author’s) name is a publisher. When the author does this with the author’s permission, he is the legitimate publisher.29 The reader is presumed under the name of the public. In the context of formal-legal arrangements, Kant is less concerned in the right to speak/ argue or publish from the vantage point of the position of the author, than the rights and responsibilities on the part of the publisher. For Kant, ownership and responsibility towards ideas is the cornerstone within the triadic relation between author-publisher-reader (or public). For Kant, there should be full pronounced ownership of ideas in that the author has created them and thus takes responsibility for them – including stupid, bad or evil ones – and that these ideas should not be stolen or used in an unacknowledged way. For Kant, the onus, thus, falls on the shoulders of both the author and the publisher. The publisher is viewed by Kant as, a ‘tenant’ and thus only has a limited, publicly recognised and legally underwritten contract to publish/ use the author’s work under the conditions of practical right. In Kant’s view everything else – including unauthorised publishing – is theft.30 Internal to Kant’s formulations of the contract, money and the book is a regulative idea based on the blurred sketch of freedom that provides the basis for his critique of dispossession and not only an affirmative notion of possession qua autonomy. Kant’s critique of dispossession, which is also a critique of power as domination, is oriented to two primary conditions of dispossession that at one level, for him, blur the boundaries between the conditions of persons and things, but in so doing and more importantly contravene the categorical imperative with its orientation to autonomy and non-domination. These two primary negative conditions are colonisation and slavery. Both contravene the regulative idea of the blurred sketch of freedom, in Kant’s view, because in the case of the former, dispossession occurs without a contractual recognitive right between two groups of people, and in the case of the latter a condition of reduction to ‘thingness’ occurs on the part of the slave. For Kant both conditions are heteronomous and contravene the categorical imperative of ‘not to use another as mere means’, to reduce others to the condition of mere objects. As he says in the case of the colonial dispossession: it can be still be asked whether, when neither nature nor chance but just our own will brings us into the neighbourhood of a people that holds out no prospect of a civil union with it, we should not be authorised to found colonies, by force if need be, in order to establish a civil union with them and bring these men (savages) into a rightful condition (as

Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion  115 with the American Indians, the Hottentots and the inhabitants of New Holland); or (which is not much better), to found colonies by fraudulent purchase of their land, and so become owners of their land, making use of our superiority without regard for their first possession. Should we not be authorised to do this, especially since nature itself (which abhors a vacuum) seems to demand it, and great expanses of land in other parts of the world, which are now splendidly populated, would have otherwise remained uninhabited by civilized people, or indeed, would have to remain forever uninhabited, so that the end of creation would have been frustrated? But it is easy to see through this veil of injustice (Jesuitism), which would sanction any means to good ends. Such a way of acquiring land is therefore to be repudiated.31 Kant is as firm in the case of slaves and servants in the regime of patrimonial power (Max Weber), when he also states that the head of a household, can never behave as if he owned them (dominus servi); for it is only by a contract that he has brought them under his control, and a contract by which one party would completely renounce its freedom for the other’s advantage would be self-contradictory, that is, null and void, since by it one party would cease to be a person, and so would have no duty to keep the contract but would recognize only force.32 In other words, Kant’s working assumption is that freedom, right, property and possession, and by extension work and the working day can go together and be linked internally without reference to conditions of domination, violence, theft and invisibilisation (in the Australian case of terra nullius). In this way, Kant can make the distinction between heteronomy and autonomy on the basis of an appeal to an a priori principle with its strong universalism that is built into the transcendental, noumenal constitution of the blurred sketch of freedom. In other words, where theft, domination and violence exist, for example, under patrimonial, asymmetrical or in Kant’s terminology bilateral regimes, they exist as heteronomous conditions. In summary, then, Kant’s ‘post-colonial’ critique has two aspects. First, and as we have seen, it is anti-Rousseauian in that it argues against Rousseau’s fiction of an original, communitarian, unsullied ‘state of nature’ that is corrupted by the plurality, variety, variability and complexity of human associations including ones determined by power, corruption and violence. Second, it is anti-imperial in that Kant’s critique argues that the ‘bilateral’ force and violence associated with forms of colonisation and dispossession are illegitimate on the grounds of ‘our common humanity’. Kant’s enduring thesis is: ‘I actually regard every person simply in terms of his humanity, hence as a homo noumenon’.33 For Kant, and from his perspective of the categorical imperative ‘our common humanity’, which is now becoming more fully drawn by him

116  Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion beyond a blurred sketch, is best formed and articulated in two ways. The first way is through a civil society as both a critico-reflexive public sphere and a contractual space and these, for him, are not reducible to one another. The second way is through the formation of a republican nation state constituted through the condition of civil society, which includes a federal rather than imperial arrangement between these republican nation states, and a cosmopolitan attitude to one another.

The republican nation state: Kant’s two models of power Let’s now turn to Kant’s image of his notion of ‘narrow’ duty to the law of the republican nation state, where he will deploy two quite different images or notions of power, broadly speaking a republican one and a juridical one. Within these constellations of power his ‘law’ of the republican state includes the federal arrangement between nations and his formulation of a cosmopolitan attitude towards strangers who are unfamiliar inhabitants of cities and nations, towns, villages and communities, as well as ‘aliens’ and/ or refugees seeking refuge. It also includes Kant’s remarks on the Executive, where his image of power changes from that of the republican one to that of the juridical one, which might be termed reflexive domination.34 Kant transposes the notion of possession into that of sovereignty and both narrows the categorical imperative to that of the law and widens it in terms of his remarks on the federal relations between states and the cosmopolitan attitude. Yet, there are some surprising expanding and limiting results, and not simply ‘narrow’ ones. As an opening observation to this current discussion, and in relation to Kant’s critique of colonialism above, it is worth making a few remarks concerning Kant’s notion of power, especially as they relate to his blurred sketch of freedom. Once again Kant’s language or formulation of ‘the public’ changes from that concerned with reflexive argument (the public sphere, as we have seen in Chapter 1), to omnilateral or mutually reciprocating commercial exchanges (public contract, as we have seen above), and as we are about to see, to his formulation of omnilateral political relations (public right, especially as Kant divides it between constitutionality and cosmopolitanism). As Kant states: Public Right is [] a system of laws for a people, that is a multitude of men, or for a multitude of peoples, that, because they affect one another, need a rightful condition under a will uniting them, a constitution (constitution), so that they may enjoy what is laid down as right…In relation to other peoples [] a state is simply called a power (potentia) (hence the word potentate).35 However, as Mary Gregor observes in one of her footnotes to her 1991 translation of The Metaphysics of Morals, a footnote that is subsequently

Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion  117 dropped from the 1996 edition published in Practical Philosophy, ‘In paragraphs 43 and 44 Kant uses Macht (potential), which was translated as “power”. He now begins to use Gewalt (potestas). But once he distinguishes the three “powers” or “authorities” within a state, it is only the Executive authority that has “power” in one sense, i.e., it is the authority that exercises coercion’.36 To be sure, Kant’s explicit task is to theorise the three-fold relation between the civil condition, the condition of the state, especially when it constituted through the civic condition (it’s republican condition), and federalist relations between states (leaving cosmopolitan hospitality to one side for the moment). In the light of Gregor’s remark, though, the state-centred and federalist/cosmopolitan versions of Kant’s republican model can be viewed as a conflict between republican and juridical versions of power each with their own long history of concept-formation. In other words, it can be argued that in theorising this three-fold relationship Kant’s work is a result of a long history of political thought that culminates in a tension that is evident in his republicanism between the Executive, juridical (Hobbesian) version, a federal-cosmopolitanism inherited from Spinoza, and his own transcendental philosophy. It is the latter that separates him from his forebears and makes his position new.37 Let’s look at this a little more closely. Leaving Kant’s transcendentally created blurred sketch of freedom momentarily to one side, it might come as a surprise given his anthropologically inflected critique, that Kant theorises power at all, and in the two ways just introduced above. Hannah Arendt and Martin Saar reconstruct these two formulations of power as potestas or gewalt, on the one hand, and power as potentia, on the other.38 In early modern political thought, power as potestas or gewalt is consolidated in Hobbes’ thought-experiment of Leviathan as the shift from the restless violence and insecurity of the pre-civilisational individuals or hordes to the centralisation and security of the populace in the consolidation and accumulation of a type of power that can be wielded by a central authority (the state) over the individuals. In other words, sovereignty rests on the singularity of a central figure or power who either is or represents the state, either in the form of royal or Executive power, including Executive republican power. The centralisation takes on the characteristics of power over subjects, which is understood as a legally articulated and sanctioned order backed by force and domination.39 Power as potentia (or its Greek equivalent dynamis) indicates the potential character of power, in that it is not synonymous with domination, force or strength and is changeable, non-measurable and unreliable. In other words, it is contingent. For Arendt, as has been intimated in Chapter 1, the contingency of power as potentia is under-scored by people arguing and acting in the public sphere together. It is thus present when interlocutors argue and disperses when they do not. Whilst Arendt is particularly concerned with the Greek and Aristotelian version of potentia, Martin Saar, in particular,

118  Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion draws our attention to the work of Spinoza as a particularly modern version of potentia in his argument against Hobbesian potestas. In Spinoza’s version of the Dutch republic the potentia of power does not disappear in the civil compact because it is the civil compact itself. As Spinoza says, ‘the right of the commonwealth is determined by the common power of the multitude’, and this makes democracy the most ‘natural’ of political regimes.40 ‘Spinoza broke with Hobbes, as well as Grotius and Pufendorf, with his argument that the democratic foundation of the state in consent does not disappear in the civil compact’.41 In other words, in Spinoza’s view, the institutions of power are constituted through the participation of the citizenry who do not give up power and make a compact with the state, as in the Hobbesian model. To put it another way, instead of power as a centripetal force that is derived from and moves towards a dominating centre, it is centrifugally derived and dispersed. This dispersal of power away from a centre is portrayed or configured by Spinoza as a federalist one. The citizenry creates the institutions of power (governance), and yet disperses these institutions and thus power throughout the body politic. Yet, Spinoza’s model of (Dutch) republican sovereignty – of power qua potentia – is a limited one. Whilst grounded on the constitutive nature of a free citizenry and dispersed throughout the body politic, it is bound to the limited representation of ‘aristocratic’ – corporatism typical of post-Renaissance and early modern city states. In Spinoza’s view, the cities of the United Provinces or the Dutch Republic are united together by their criteria of franchise based on the corporate notables who are selected as representatives in the city assemblies (parliaments). City assemblies are, thus, selected by co-option, magistrates are appointed from the ranks of the assembly, and senators and federal judges ‘are appointed by the patricians of each city and represent their cities on the basis of their proportional share of national population’.42 As we shall see, below, these two views of power that are articulated in early modern political thought and experience find their way into Kant’s model of republicanism. The centralising Hobbesian view of power as potestas (domination) finds its way into Kant’s work through the central role he gives to the Executive, whilst the dispersal-federal power of potentia is located in his versions of the legislature, federalism and cosmopolitanism. Let’s explore both beginning with potentia. As we have seen above in his critiques of slavery and colonialism, Kant is already especially critical of power as domination (potestas), at least in its bilateral, asymmetrical and often non-reciprocating contexts. Taking his lead from Montesquieu’s division in The Spirit of the Laws between autocracy, aristocracy and democracy, Kant’s model of republicanism, initially at least, is one of the dispersal of power based on a model of differentiation between the legislature, the Executive and the judiciary.43 The legislature belongs to the potentia of the citizenry. We see this potentia at work in his 1795 ‘Perpetual Peace’ where he states, ‘the second [aristocracy, power of the

Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion  119 Prince] is the form of government and has to do with the way a state, on the basis of its civil constitution (the act of the general will by which a multitude becomes a people), makes use of its plenary power; and with regard to this, the form of a state is either republican or despotic’.44 The republican dispersal of power, or more conventionally the separation of powers, requires ‘the separation between Executive power (government) and legislative power [as it is formulated in “Perpetual Peace”]; despotism is that of the high handed management of the state by the laws the regent has himself given, in as much as he handles the public will as his private will’.45 In this context, too, Kant insightfully criticises ‘ancient republican’ and Rousseau-inspired direct or participatory democracy as despotic ‘because it establishes an Executive power in which all decide for, and if need be against one (who does not agree)’.46 Kant identifies republican aristocracy with a representative legislature. Yet, for Kant, the legislature, in contrast to the Executive, which will be discussed more fully below, is not structured or designed corporatistically as it is in Spinoza’s or (later) Hegel’s thought-experiments.47 Kant had distaste for corporatist representation, and for him, the basis of the franchise and the election of representatives in the legislature is by ‘active citizens’.48 For Kant, active citizens are enlightened ones; those citizens who are mature, independent and can think for themselves and make a reflective judgement in ‘the spirit of penmanship’.49 For Kant, active citizens are ‘fit to vote’ and this is the only qualification for the franchise. It is precisely here in his rumination on ‘the fitness to vote’ that Kant makes a move that places potentia on a transcendental footing in a way analogous to that of critico-reflexive thinking in ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Potentially and according to the universality inherent in the blurred sketch of freedom, everyone can think for themselves, can become an active citizen. As he says, ‘it is only in conformity with the conditions of freedom and equality that this people can become a state and enter into a civil constitution’.50 Moreover, voting and representation are omnilateral or symmetrical reciprocating exchanges between active citizens and their representatives in the sphere of politics in the same way that money, the contract and the book are abstracted omnilateral exchanges between contingent strangers in the spheres of the economy and the critico-reflexive public.51 Once elected the active citizens qua representatives have the right to legislate over taxation, withhold the right of the Executive to wage war, and crucially ‘to take the ruler’s authority away from him, depose him or transform his administration’.52 In this sense, there are internal divisions or differences within power as potentia, in contrast to Arendt’s formulations, as we have seen in Chapter 1. However, in Kant’s view, neither ‘the people’ qua active citizens nor the legislature may depose or punish the Executive or ‘the Prince’ in an act of revolutionary violence, as Right belongs to the constitution. As he puts it in an important footnote to Paragraph 49 in The Metaphysics of Morals, which is also his critique of the Jacobin violence of the French revolution (and not

120  Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion only the execution of Charles first in the context of the English one), the monarch’s or the sovereign’s execution (where sovereignty can also belong to the body politic itself) overturns the transcendentality of the body politic. Revolutionary violence must be regarded as a complete overturning of the principles of the relation between a sovereign and his people (in which the people, which owes its existence only to the sovereign’s legislation, makes itself his master), so that violence is elevated above the most sacred rights brazenly and in accordance with principle. Like a chasm that irretrievably swallows everything, the execution of a monarch seems to be a crime from which the people cannot be absolved, for it is as if the state commits suicide.53 For Kant, this self-destruction is the self-destruction of the people, the self-destruction of their natural right and their noumenal ground, their transcendentality. As he says, the concept of an external right [] proceeds entirely from the concept of freedom in the external relation of people to one another…This the civil condition, regarded merely as a rightful condition, is based a priori on the following principles: 1 The freedom of every member of a society as a human being. 2 His equality with every other as a subject. 3 The independence of every member of a commonwealth as a citizen.54 In this sense, the demise or suicide of the state is not even a return to a Hobbesian state of nature, of ‘the war of all against all’ because for Kant, in his anti-Hobbesianism, there was never an initial contractual move into a civil state. We always are the civil state qua potentia. Suicide, here is the apt word. There is either freedom/life or nothing.55 Moreover, Kant’s interconnected versions of federalism and cosmopolitan right also represent the freedom and life of potentia qua body politic. However, for Kant, the federal model and its cosmopolitanism is not one that concerns the centripetal dispersal of power within a state, as in the already existing Dutch and American models because he surmises that his notion of ‘active citizen’ has (incompletely) taken care of this. Rather, his federal-dispersal model refers to the circulation of power, or symmetrical reciprocal omnilateral exchanges, between republican states, based on the above a priori blurred sketch of freedom that is now being filled out by him. And here Kant’s preoccupation is again with the conditions of freedom and life; this time not as a critique of suicide but in terms of a critique of war between states, which is also part of his critique of colonialism and imperialism.56 Good republican government cannot exist, let alone succeed unless

Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion  121 wars are significantly diminished and peaceful conditions take hold. At the most basic level, Kant insists that whilst unsociable sociability is the context of and for nation states, they, nonetheless, have a right to exist in peace, even though war may be the ‘normal’ condition between them. As he says, ‘the rights of states, consist, therefore, partly in their right to go to war, partly of their right in war, and partly of their right to constrain each other to leave this condition of war and so form a constitution that will establish lasting peace, that is, its rights after war’.57 Nations have a right to exist and this right should, for Kant, be based on republican principles. Republican principles entails that, in Kant’s view, active citizens should also give assent when their nations go to war, and because war is a relationship between states these citizens and their nations should also set the limits to war within reason alone (to draw loosely on a formulation that Kant uses elsewhere with regard to religion), and this includes negotiated settlements to end wars that should not include reparation or colonisation.58 For Kant, a distinction between friend/enemy (which finds its way into contemporary political philosophy) belongs to the Hobbesian fiction of a ‘state of nature’.59 Kant, thus, lays down three principles on transcendental grounds that should limit war on both sides of the protagonistic relationship – (i) wars between independent states should not be punitive, exterministic, and (ii) should leave the opposing state intact, so that (iii) a rightful relationship can be later established.60 For Kant, though, the most reasoned limit to war is peace – and it is here that his federalism and cosmopolitanism join hands. From one perspective, a federal relationship between states is a form of dispersed balance of power between them in which each nation has its own autonomy grounded in a priori principles that emerge from the blurred sketch of freedom and to which all republican states should adhere and which prescribes the type of relationship these states should have with one another – a federation of republican states. Kant presciently puts it this way: ‘A league of nations in accordance with the Idea of an original social contract is necessary, not in order to meddle in one another’s internal dissensions but to protect against attacks from without. [] This alliance must, however, involve no sovereign authority (as in a civil constitution), but only an association (federation); it must be an alliance that can be renounced at any time and so must be renewed from time to time’.61 Moreover, this federal alliance should not be viewed a supra-state, because, for Kant this would amount to a form of internationalised despotism, a new imperialism. In this sense, power qua potentia qua federal association is contingent, limited, creative and normatively groundable, even though perpetual peace may be an unachievable idea. From another perspective, Kant’s notion of the cosmopolitan attitude appears throughout his writings – for example, in ‘Perpetual Peace’, ‘The Idea

122  Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion of Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, as well as The Metaphysics of Morals. He deploys the notion of cosmopolitanism to denote, first, a right to mutual peaceful settlement, second, as a critique of nations and their violence, and, third, as principle for right conduct towards others who are not legally recognised under the notion of citizenship because they are foreign exiles.62 In Kant’s The Metaphysics of Morals, 1797, cosmopolitanism is articulated as a right to migration and settlement, that is, of the right of populations to move in a peaceful, mutually beneficial and non-dominating way that befits his critique of colonialism.63 The mutual co-habitation of the Earth should, for him, be one orientated to hospitable relations between its co-habitants. This rational Idea of a peaceful, even if not friendly, thoroughgoing community of all nations on the earth that can come into relations affecting one another is not a philanthropic (ethical) principle but a principle to do with rights…[The] right since it has to do with a possible union of all nations with a view to certain universal laws for their possible commerce, can be called cosmopolitan Right.64 As we have seen, his preferred model for these peaceful, mutual relations are open, contingent, symmetrical reciprocating, omnilateral abstracted exchanges. In the 1795 ‘Perpetual Peace’ cosmopolitanism also appears under the condition of hospitality towards strangers. In Perpetual Peace Kant uses the more generic category of the stranger in order to reflect on the relation between a modern polity and its national form, and its obligation to those outsiders seeking refuge in it. As we have seen above in the context of his critique of bi-lateral power qua potestas, Kant points to a form of the state that normalises war, which, for him, is usually a despotic one. The republican one, by contrast can limit it. ‘The [despotic] supreme power is [] the legislative authority which must be obeyed without argument’.65 It is here that Kant alludes to the stranger qua refugee as someone who is an enemy combatant, so threatening to his or her sovereign power, that he or she is vilified, exterminated or exiled.66 Kant invokes the notion of hospitality towards these kinds of strangers under threat as a universal right of humanity. In Kant’s view, the exiled – or stranger in his terms – has the right to reside unharmed when arriving in another’s territory.67 When taken as a critique of war and violence it is clear that Kant’s position is unambiguous. For Kant, the outsider’s status qua humanity is ground enough for this universalisable claim upon another. The host must not treat the outsider as an enemy but treat him or her as an end in him or herself. For Kant, this categorical imperative qua monogram or blurred sketch of freedom, which gives ‘this sided’ substance to the heritage of common humanity, is not only the ground of hospitality; it is also its limit. There is a certain ambiguity to Kant’s reflections on the treatment of the exiled refugee.

Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion  123 Kant argues that the refugee should not claim to be a guest, and thus expect to be welcomed as a friend into the ‘household’ of the national community. The relationship here is one of mutual peacefulness and not mutual openended conviviality.68 For Kant, hospitality is not a gift in the traditional sense of the term, and as such does not imply special obligations of reciprocity by either the host or the outsider. It presumes mutual indifference or impartiality, and as such is marked by distance. Kant’s notion of an autonomy between mutual strangers is co-extensive with his image of the cosmopolitan attitude which should extend to the attitude of civil society and its participants more generally. It, thus, should also extend towards migrants as they resettle and refugees as they flee from conflict. Kant’s image of a cosmopolitan attitude towards strangers – and those who are not simply refugees – is part of the omnilateral constitution of civil society in that the relation of sociability is between those who by definition are detached and distanced from one another, as we have seen with his notions of the contract, public argument and the active citizen. Even though Kant uses the term ‘alienation’ to denote the transfer of property, he does not view the condition of detachment or distance between persons as a generalised alienated one (as a social pathology that needs to be addressed and resolved) but, in principle, an autonomous one between subjects who respond to one another on this basis. For Kant (and Agnes Heller and Jürgen Habermas)69 detachment, rather than alienation, is a positive social condition and belongs to his language of sociable sociability. It is a condition of distance between (contingent) strangers who are not reliant on the approbation of external authority, community, the state or the gaze of others. As such, detachment is not a pathology from the vantage point of disconnection, a negation, as it is with Hegel and Marx. Kant’s task is to explore the normative condition of freedom from a transcendentality of his blurred sketch once he has simultaneously ‘accounted’ for or undertaken his thought-experiments on ‘the social’ and ‘the political’. And these thought-experiments on each entail that the question of distance is important as it evokes an image of possibilities – a space of possibilities of autonomy – that have to be imagined, thought, posited and reflected on. For Kant, at least, detachment or distanciation concerns an image of the human being as a subject, as a person, rather than as an alienated or inauthentic one, as it is the case not only of Hegel and Marx, but also Kierkegaard, Lukacs and Heidegger.70 Despite Kant’s sensitivity to and critique of the dominating tendencies of the Executive as despotic Hobbesian potestas, his formulation of power changes to a more sympathetic reading of the Executive in a republic that works against his insights into power as potentia. As Gregor has pointed out, at §49 including his general ‘Remarks’ Kant introduces potestas in the following way: ‘The ruler of a state is that (moral or natural) person to whom the Executive authority (potestas executoria) belongs’.71 Notwithstanding that Kant is writing at the time of Frederick the Great and has in mind royal power qua Executive (as Hegel would also do in his Philosophy of Right

124  Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion a generation later), constitutionally constituted Executive power belongs to ‘the will of the people’ as its own specialised form of government. The important and crucial point is not that the Executive is separated from the legislature (in a normalisation of the modern division of powers), but that the legislature becomes subordinate to the Executive in these divisions. The Executive not only moves to the centre of power within the civic polity, but also accrues for itself extra-legislative powers. To be sure, Kant attempts to balance and limit this centralising aspect of power in the midst of the centrifugal (legislative) one by arguing that the Executive should neither be paternalistic nor despotic but treat civic subjects as ‘citizens of the state’, that is, ‘in accordance with the laws of their own independence’.72 Like his astuteness towards the New World of public citizenship and its competing New World of political citizenship (the topic of this chapter) that we noticed in Chapter 1, Kant is also astutely aware of the tension between two modern organisational forms of government. He even suggests a judiciary independent of both the Executive and the Legislature to assist with this balancing act. Balance comes with the tensions of modernity. Nonetheless, the Executive accrues the following powers, if we go by Kant’s limiting ‘list’: it distributes salaried offices of administration; it distributes honorary offices; it imposes taxes for both revenue and social welfare; it polices and punishes and can grant clemency; it grants decrees and not laws and thus administers the state through directives; it is the supreme commander of the State’s armed forces, and lastly and not least it has moral cache, that is it is regarded as ‘a moral person’.73 Pettit notes in his sympathetic yet very critical reading of Kant’s republicanism, Kant ‘treats Executive authority – and by implication the judicial – as the “organ of the sovereign”: the agent who gives the legislator a presence in the lives of people, promulgating and enforcing the law. In Kant’s picture, it is as if the legislator is a silent, background power – a force akin to gravity – that becomes incarnate and visible only though the actions of its Executive and judicial organs’.74 The most important features from Kant’s list are the final three – the Executive grants decrees and not laws and thus administers the state through directives; it is the supreme commander of the State’s armed forces and lastly and not least it has moral cache, that is it is regarded as ‘a moral person’ – and they are important for two reasons. First, they direct our attention to the authoritarian potential of Executive power and as importantly to the moral dimension of political life. Second, it is here that ‘the moral’ is more than the virtuous or the ethical. Kant understands that the ‘will of the people’ stands behind or underneath Executive authority and yet this ‘will of the people’ is treated empirically by him as ‘the mob’ (or in later terminology, ‘the crowd’ or ‘the mass’).75 For Kant, there is only representation. However, as Pettit also notes, it is more than the empirical rendition of ‘the will of the people’ for Kant and this ‘more than’ results in a conflation between, the Executive,

Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion  125 the constitution and moral authority. For Kant, the content of ‘the will of the people’ finds form in the civil contract qua constitution, which is a regulative idea, an idea of reason.76 In other words, the constitution and by extension the Executive stand above the law and so cannot be judged. It’s origins, too, cannot be investigated or judged. There is here an almost extra-legal, extra-rational dimension that Kant cannot fully explain even though it is present as part of the blurred sketch of freedom. In other words, Kant grasps but cannot explain that the couplet of the Executive and the constitution functions as the dual ‘sacred’ core of any polity, any civil society, which cannot be fully captured or expressed in written form, including the constitution, itself. To put it differently, but in a way that leans on Kant’s formulations and insights concerning the non-functionalising figurative, productive imagination out of which a blurred sketch is formed, the Executive and the constitution have a sacred and social imaginary component that paradoxically takes it beyond the blurred sketch of freedom itself. In other words, these latter terms of the sacred and social imaginary connect Kant to the works and formulations of Émile Durkheim, Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor and the way they deploy these terms, notwithstanding differences between them.77 For Kant, this imaginary or ‘sacred’ aspect gives the Executive and the constitution an almost inviolate quality. Opposition to the Executive should occur in the form of complaint, which in §49 of the Metaphysics of Morals is less than argument. Resistance and rebellion are illegitimate.78 Given Kant’s comment on the self-inflicted wound or suicide of the polity, which we discussed above, he has certainly ruled these out of court. This is even in the case once Executive authority becomes authoritarian or totalitarian, that is, unleashes its own ‘will to power’ as unbridled potestas or domination and cannot recognise limits and wields this power as its own creative right. For Kant, unbridled ‘will to power’ pushes power into the realm of radical evil. But Kant provides no resources apart from complaint and representation for opposition to bad government, even tyrannous ones.79 Kant’s real task, though, is to enact a ‘new’ balancing act between the ‘rational’ (i.e. now fully sketched), written constitutionality of Executive power and the constitution itself as a sacred imaginary that cannot be expressed fully in written form. The constitution, by necessity remains a blurred sketch to be filled again and again by succeeding generations and new creative imaginings and interpretations. Kant attempts to capture this unfinished aspect under such terms as ‘patriotic’ or the quasi-religious and witty formulation of ‘All authority is from God’, which he uses as analogues or stand-ins for this unresolved problem.80 The reason is that it is not simply Kant’s legitimate anti-Jacobin stance that is at stake here. Kant is exploring the quality of the transcendental that cannot be fully captured and conveyed through concepts, speech and writing but nonetheless is the core of social and political life. Kant locates this core in the constitution and the Executive. This is why the Executive has a moral cache, for Kant, and brings

126  Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion together domination, legitimacy and social sacredness in the Durkheimian sense of the term (and not only Castoriadis’ and Taylor’s). For Kant, there is a conflation between the Executive, the constitution and the transcendental when he states: the reason that a people has a duty to put up with even the unbearable abuse of supreme authority is that its resistance to the highest legislation can never be regarded as other than contrary to the law, and indeed as abolishing the entire legal constitution.81 Kant is fully cognisant of the social conditions of unsociable sociability – of power and violence – and that a civil society is required that contests, limits and delegitimates these conditions. For Kant, this de-legitimation requires a political formation – a civil society – in which unsociable sociability can be limited and contested through argument. For him we can contest these unsociable conditions as heteronomous from the vantage point of a blurred sketch of freedom that functions as a regulative idea that enables him to articulate an extra-social or extra-historical warrant where the conditions of social and political unfreedom can be contested by all parties. Whilst attempting to avoid the trap of a teleologically structured philosophy of history, Kant argues that the practical reasoning that is a product of a blurred sketch of freedom can be a historical development in which we might learn to act autonomously. In Kant’s view, we can contest a historical circle of heteronomy or domination by virtue of our capacity to create, articulate and fill in the regulative ideal or blurred sketch of freedom. In order to make practical philosophy consistent with itself, it is necessary first to decide the question, whether in problems of practical reason one must begin from its material principle, the end (as object of choice), or from its formal principle, that is, the principle (resting only on freedom in external relations) in accordance with which it is said: So act that you can will that your maxim should become a universal law (whatever the end may be). The latter principle must undoubtedly take precedence; for as a principle of right, it has unconditional necessity.82 Kant argues that we are already equipped to make these judgements and that this regulative ideal is not, itself, a product of historical predetermination by those subjects who claim autonomy (or Enlightenment). Although Kant never says as much, the formation of a civil, republican state is a creation, that is, the work of the productive imagination in its non-functional figurative synthesis. It is though neither a creation, strictly speaking, of harmony, of the beautiful nor the sublime, but of knowing where the limits are, especially the limits to all kinds of power, especially those of dominating potestas and even self-positing potentia.

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Notes 1 Kant has three versions of practical philosophy set against the background of his ‘empirical’ anthropologies. These are The Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and The Metaphysics of Morals including The Doctrine of Right and The Doctrine the Virtue’ (1797). 2 Rather, and despite family resemblances Kant’s notion of freedom to act is, strictly speaking, neither liberal nor libertarian See, for example, the useful essay by Kenneth, H. Waltz, ‘Kant, Liberalism and War’ American Political Science Review, 56:2, 1962: 331–340; Chris W. Surprenant, ‘Kant’s Liberalism’, in Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism, edited by Jason Brennan et al., London, Taylor and Francis, 2017, 68–76; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. Rawl’s interpretation, whilst a major influence on contemporary political philosophy misleadingly interprets Kant’s programme from the vantage point of distributive justice. See also Philip Pettit, Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997; Philip Pettit, ‘Keeping Republican Freedom Simple: On a Difference with Quentin Skinner’ Political Theory, 30:3, 2002: 339–356; Philip Pettit, ‘Two Republican Traditions’, in Republican Democracy. Liberty, Law and Politics, edited by Andreas Niederberger and Philipp Schink, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 169–204. 3 In The Metaphysics of Morals Kant expresses the universalism of the categorical imperative in the following way: ‘Freedom (and independence from being constrained by another’s choice) insofar as it can co-exist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law, is the only original right belonging to every man by virtue of his humanity’. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 63. 4 Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 42. 5 Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 42. 6 Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 50 where he states: By such an action the agent is regarded as the author of its effect, and this, together with the action itself, can be imputed to him, if one is previously acquainted with the law by virtue of which an obligation rests on this. A person is a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. Moral personality is therefore nothing other than the freedom of a rational being under moral laws … From this it follows that a person is subject to no other laws than those he gives to himself (either alone or at least along with others). 7 Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 45. In the light of the a priori nature of our moral relation to the world Kant asks, somewhat rhetorically: If, therefor, a system of a priori knowledge from concepts alone is called metaphysics, a practical philosophy, which has not nature but freedom of choice for its object, will presuppose and require a metaphysics of morals, that is, it is itself a duty to have such a metaphysics, and everyman also has within himself, though only as a rule in an obscure way; for without a priori principles how could he believe that he has a giving of universal law within himself? Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 44 8 Kant vacillates or moves between a functional view (normal and the pathological) and a non-functional – ‘voluntarist’ – view (note quotation marks) of a tension/gap between the empirical and the transcendental in which a choice matters out of a conflict (because we are in-between-beings). But a choice is a reflexivity, an activity of second order, which is why an anthropology is important because it is Kant’s recognition of the heterogeneity and complexity of the human condition and our lived experience in it. It is thus the same and different

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for everyone – which is why the choice is important. Agnes Heller, for one, takes this aspect of Kant’s work into her own critical theory and maps it onto her reading of Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 46. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 187; 193. For example, in relation to Right Kant argues that ‘“Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law” If then my action or my condition generally can coexist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a universal law, whoever hinders me in it does me wrong; for this hindrance (resistance) cannot coexist with freedom in accordance with a universal law’. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 56. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 196–197. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 188. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 189. See also Chapter 2. There are many ways to theorise the depth of the subject. Nonetheless the depth of the Kantian subject refers to his/her ability to become wise (rather than clever). As mentioned above, Kantian wisdom refers to the capacity to learn reflexive self-distancing that is orientated to practical reasoning. It is precisely here that some critics of Kant’s programme focus their attention. For example, Schiller and the Romantic tradition that was to follow criticised Kant’s double splitting of the subject, first between phenomena and noumena, and second in the context of the latter between the three faculties of reason, understanding and the imagination. The Romantics, for example, Friedrich Schlegel and J. C. Friedrich Hölderlin, looked for the depth of the subject elsewhere, often in the work of the imagination and works of art (especially poetry), whilst others focussed their attention on the unity of the subject, for example, in the case of Schiller’s harmonisation of the drives, or on feelings and emotions, for example, in the case of Scheler. In each case, though, the question of reflexive self-distancing is often pushed to one side. Heller’s work is one example of a contemporary critical theorist who attempts to combine reflexive critical self-distancing with the emotional depth of the subject without the Kantian split. See: Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters; Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Dialogue on Poetry’, in German Romantic Criticism, edited by Leslie Wilson, New York, Continuum, 1982, 84–133; Friedrich Schlegel, ‘The Athenaeum Fragments’, in Freidrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and The Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1971, 161–197; Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘On the Process of the Poetic Mind’, in German Romantic Criticism, edited by Leslie Willson, Continuum, 1982, 219; A. Heller, A Theory of Feelings, 2nd edition, Lanham, MD, Lexington Book, 2009. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 86–90. In this context, Macbeth (see Chapter 2) could be not only a Scottish Royal, but also a Spanish conquistador or a new world settler. The distinctions between civilisation and civil society, and the juridical/ Absolutist and constitutional/republican political forms are also re-articulated by the extension and ‘export’ of these European forms into the New Worlds of not only the Americas, but also of the Asian southeast, the Pacific and Australasia, as well as the interpretive attempts made to comprehend them. Looked at from the perspective of European forms in the New World, it can be argued that the political ‘mapping’ of these worlds occurred according to an Absolutist imagination of the world, the result of which was that the empires were Absolutist in structure. However, the distances involved provided the possibilities for not only replication, but also the emergence of ‘creole’ and ‘indigenous’ political

Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion  129 structures that were also experiments and not only responses to external forms of control. From the perspective of interpretive visions, the New Worlds were a perplexity, especially for the European enlighteners. Under the sign of universality, the New World represented a test, as well as a confirmation, of the Enlightenment’s faith in the underlying uniformity of the human condition whether that took the form of a search for happiness, beauty, order or freedom. All differences are thus brought under the law of the same. As Holbach notes “The savage man and the civilised, the white man and the red man, the black man; Indian and European, Chinaman and Frenchman, Negro and Lapp have the same nature. The differences between them are only modifications of their common nature, produced by climate, government, education, opinions and the various causes which operate upon them” (Holbach quoted in Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment, London, Oxford University Press, 1977, 72). In its search for the confirmation of the universality of ‘human nature’, the Old World was, as has already been noted, viewed as a source of corruptibility. Thus if the answers were not to be found in the cosmopolitan centres of the Old World, they may well be found in the untouched and unsullied wildernesses of the New ones, for ‘if human nature was the same everywhere, and the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, then the primitive and the pastoral might reveal it in its nakedness’ (Commager, The Empire of Reason). Thus, the New Worlds became part of a civilisational experiment in the search for the universality of human nature, and thus viewed in the idyllic terms of the noble savage (which we have already suggested was a projection of critical attitudes formed from within court society). However, these Worlds (and for many it principally meant the Americas) could also be viewed as the dark counter-model to civilisation itself – untamed, wild and degenerate. A debate raged during the eighteenth century as to the nature, origin and condition of these still largely unexplored lands and its peoples. Furthermore, this debate – if that is what it can be called (more, following Commager, the scribblings of prejudicial and uninformed minds) – was widespread and very influential as it attempted to account for a perceived backwardness of New, as well as other non-European worlds, in which nothing could be cultivated – neither plants, nor people, nor civilisation. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, then, the notion of civilisation converges around three social processes – the development of stylised forms of social conduct termed manners, the development of a separate sphere of political and economic activity termed either republican or commercial civil society, and its growing conflict with the institutional forms of Absolutist-state power and government – in the context of the increasing European exploration and familiarity with the New Worlds of the Americas, the Asian southeast and the Pacific. Holbach quoted in Commager, The Empire of Reason, 72. See also Commager, The Empire of Reason, op. cit. especially Chap 4 ‘America under Attack’, and Jefferson, Nationalism and The Enlightenment, 2015, New York, George Brazillier, especially Chap 2 ‘Jefferson and The Enlightenment’. According to Commager, the most influential argument was put forward by the Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle. In philosophical and scientific terms, the objectivity or externality for which was derived from the biblical image of the Flood, Buffon argued that the New World emerged after the Deluge, and thus later than the Old World. This accounted for the fetid air, the swamps, the infertility of its land and its peoples, and the sense of general decay and languidness. This argument was widely accepted, even by Kant in his early anthropological lectures. See also, Peter Kalm, Travels in North America, 2 Vols, edited by Adolf B. Benson, 1966, New York, Dover Press; Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic

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1750–1900, Pittsburgh, PA, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973; Robert Wokler, ‘Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment: Monboddo and Kames on the Nature of Man’, in Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by Peter Jones, Edinburgh, John Donald Publishers Ltd, 1988, 145–168; and Olive Patricia Dickason, The Myth of The Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas, Edmonton, The University of Alberta Press, 1984. See also Rundell and Mennell, Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization, especially 9; John Rundell, ‘From Indigenous Civilization to Indigenous Modernities’, in Imaginaries of Modernity, London, Routledge, 2017, 144–157; Amy Allen, The End of Progress. Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, New York, Columbia University Press, 2017; Matthew Sharpe, From Amy Allen to Abbé Raynal: Critical Theory, the Enlightenment and Colonialism, Critical Horizons, 20:2, 2019: 178–199, DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2019.1596220. Kant’s position also provides a vantage point for a critique of the empirical-colonial world after Kant, that is, the world of ‘Great Powers’, real-politik and World Wars. See Ethan Mark, ‘Race and Empire. Japan, The Hague Convention and the Pre-War World’, The IIAS Newsletter, 50, 2009: 10–11. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 83–84. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 84. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, §14. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 120, §41. For recent Kantian notions of justice see the work of Rainer Forst, ‘A Kantian Republican Conception of Justice as Nondomination’, in Republican Democracy. Liberty, Law and Politics, edited by Andreas Niederberger and Philipp Schink, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 154–168. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 91, §18. As he says ‘only a transcendental deduction of the concept of acquisition can remove’ all difficulties of basing forms of acquisition on empirical conditions such as force, power, and even (false) promises (92, §19). See Nietzsche’s ‘Genealogy of Morals’, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche for a critique of Kant’s position. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 103, §31. Kant’s formulation of the intellectualisation of exchanges leans on his formulation of functional schemata or functionalising synthesis. Kant has a more positive view of money here than in his anthropology where he treats money as a moral problem in the manner of Timon, as we have seen in Chapter 2. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 104–106, §31. For Kant, non-contractual acquisition in the form of inheritance is bound by the rights of a civic constitution, §34. A civic constitution could now be defined as a socially instituted imaginary of freedom, in Castoriadis’ use of the term. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 106, §31 In quoting Adam Smith, Kant positions himself ‘beyond’ Smith’s The Wealth of Nations without fully realising the implications of his own position. Marx of course will subsume exchange and the money form under the category of labour in order to develop a different critical theory of exchange qua production based on labour power, see Capital, Vol. 1. However, the concept of labour in Marx carries a heavy burden as the philosophical bearer of the concept of freedom (after 1844), as the means through which to have an empirical addressee – the working class, and to posit radical social transformation. One can lessen the burden and posit money a more central social and critical category within Marx’s work, in other words, that exchanges can include exchanges of formally free labour power (as well as other forms of power, but not all of its forms, see Rundell, ‘Marx against Marx’, 1987). Simmel, for one, follows Kant’s lead in developing a critical theory of modernity through his notion of money as ‘positive’ in that it increases social

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distance and abstraction, thus lessening forms of personal dependence and tutelage (see his Philosophy of Money). If one follows Kant’s and Simmel’s leads here one can arrive at a distributive ethics in the light of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program (‘from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs’) whilst keeping the insight of money available, that is, it is a stand-in for even this exchange, even as an abstract mediated one. See, for example, Max Weber, ‘Sociological Categories of Economic Action’ and ‘The Market: Its Impersonality and Ethic’, in Economy and Society, Vol. 1, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978, 63–211 and 635–640, respectively. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 106, §31. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 106, §31. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 106–107, §3; see also §35. See also ‘On the Wrongfulness of unauthorized publication of books’ (1785) and ‘On turning out books’ (1798), both in Practical Philosophy: 23–35 and 623–627 respectively. For a full, nuanced and critical discussion of Kant’s position on this relationship between author-publisher-reader, see Markus, ‘The Money and the Book’, 560–624. I could imagine that Kant would have been critical in two ways of the shift of power in the contemporary world of publishing and the internet where from the side of the publisher, the power balance has shifted even more so to the publisher or publishing businesses, whilst from the side of the author, authorial responsibility has been downplayed by the anonymity that on-line writers, bloggers and opinion-makers can have. For him, this ‘facelessness’ is akin to a type of demagoguery, that is also similar to the demagoguery of ‘the crowd’. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 86–87, §15. See also Kant, ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, translation and edited by Mary Gregor, introduction by Allen Wood, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008, 318–321. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 101, §30. See also Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 1, ‘Traditional Authority’, 226–241. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 111. §35. Kant does not mobilise the historicist distinction between community and society that finds its way into the later Sociological tradition, in the wake of Toennies, for example. Rather, for him the primary distinction is the one between phenomena and noumena; in other words, all human beings at all times and in all places are constituted by these two conditions. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 123. §43. Gregor, translator’s Note to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, 288, Footnote 57. For a history of these traditions see the particularly useful and fruitful works by Philipp Pettit and Quentin Skinner indicated above. These two forms of power were introduced more loosely in the Introduction as the juridical and republican forms of civil society and its sovereignty. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press, 1958, especially 199–207; Martin Saar, ‘Power and Critique’ Journal of Power, 3:1, 2010: 7–20. Arendt’s distinction between these two terms is determined by her emphasis on her own notion of action in the polis, as distinct from work and labour, whilst Saar uses a distinction between an action notion of power and an ontological one. For Saar potestas is related to action qua domination, whilst potentia is an ontologically constituted qua emergence, which might also be viewed as creatively contingent contestation. His particular distinction though blurs the dimensions of action that are present in both domination-centred and emergent-centred contexts. Another way of looking at this has been to make a distinction between institutionally or systemically structured and organised forms of

132  Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion power and contestatory ones. Axel Honneth deploys a similar distinction when he uses the formulations of systems-theoretic and action-theoretic dimensions of power. Yet all of these distinctions also obscure and underplay the ways in which each aspect of power intersects and cannot be fully separated, even in ideal typical terms. Both Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias explore this interplay between these two versions of power in their own work, notwithstanding differences between them and tensions within their own versions. See also Danielle Petherbridge, The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth, Lanham, Maryland, Lexington Books, 2013, 183–200, for her discussion of Saar’s position. 39 Hobbes, The Leviathan, edited by R. Tucker, London, Penguin, 1981, 62–70. See also the portrayal of Macbeth in Chapter 3 where he vacillates about the use of power as potestas and moves to cruelty as murder, where even power as potestas is extinguished. The Hobbesian model need not be solely identified with the royal tradition of sovereignty. See also Pettit, ‘Two Models of Republicanism’, edited by Andreas Niederberger and Philipp Schink, Republican Democracy. Liberty, Law and Politics, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 169–204. This Hobbesian model is given full voice in the social-theoretical tradition by Max Weber when he states Sociologically, the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends. There is scarcely any task that some political association has not taken in hand, and there is no task that one could say has always been exclusive and peculiar to those associations which are designated as political ones: today the state, or historically, those associations which have been the predecessors of the modern state. Ultimately, one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely, the use of physical force… Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence. Hence, ‘politics’ for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber, 77–78 I have argued elsewhere that Weber also experiments with power as a more open contestatory body (which might be viewed as power as potentia) in ‘Democratic revolutions, power and “The City”: Weber and Political Modernity’, in Imaginaries of Modernity, 83–97. Benedict de Spinoza, A Political Treatise: Tractatus Politicus, edited Paul A. 40 Boer Sr and translation by R. H. M. Elwes, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016, Chapter 3.9. 41 Lee Ward, ‘Early Dutch and German Federal Theory: Spinoza, Hugo and Leibniz’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Federalism, edited by Ann Ward and Lee Ward, London, Ashgate Publishing, 2007, 91–106. 42 Lee Ward, ‘Early Dutch and German Federal Theory’, 91–106; Spinoza, A Political Treatise: Tractatus Politicus, Chapters 3–7, Cerebrum Publications/ Createspace Independent Publishing, South Carolina, 2016; Spinoza, Spinoza Theological-Political Treatise, with an Introduction by Jonathan Israel, Cambridge, Cambridge, University Press, 2007, Chapters 16–20; Jonathan Israel, ‘Introduction’, to Spinoza Theological-Political Treatise, Cambridge, Cambridge, University Press, 2007, viii–xxxiv. See also Pettit, ‘Two Republican

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Traditions’, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 169–204; Max Weber, ‘The City’, in Economy and Society, Vol. 2, edited by E. Fischoff, Translated by G. Roth and C. Wittich, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979, 1212–1372; Randall Collins, Macro History Essays in Sociology of the Long Run, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1999, 110–151. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 125, §45. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Practical Philosophy, 324, §8:352. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Practical Philosophy. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Practical Philosophy. See Spinoza, A Political Treatise: Tractatus Politicus; and G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979. See also Rundell, Origins of Modernity, especially Chapter 3 and Manfred Kühn, ‘Kant and Cicero’, edited by Ralph Schumacher, Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Volker Gerhardt, Kant Und Die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des Ix. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses. Bd. I: Hauptvorträge. Bd. Ii: Sektionen I–V. Bd. Iii: Sektionen Vi–X: Bd. Iv: Sektionen Xi–Xiv. Bd. V: Sektionen Xv–Xviii. De Gruyter. 2001, 270–278. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 126, §47. Kant’s distaste is also articulated in §49 where he argues that the Executive sovereign should have no private ownership of public property. See also ‘Theory and Practice’, in Practical Philosophy, 295. See also Robert S. Taylor, ‘The Progress of Absolutism in Kant’s Essay ‘What Is Enlightenment?’’, in Kant’s Political Theory Interpretations and Applications, edited by Elizabeth Ellis, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012, 145–146. Kant, ‘Theory and Practice’, in Practical Philosophy, 302. Kant discusses reflective judgement more fully in the Critique of Judgment. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 126. §47. See also Kant, ‘Theory and Practice’, in Practical Philosophy, 295. To be sure, because of his distinction between active and passive citizenry Kant makes empirically constituted exclusions from active citizenship and thus the franchise that can be fully included in his noumenally constituted version. These exclusions are women, workers and tenant farmers. All are (and here Kant includes children) dependent, immature in the way portrayed by Kant in Chapter 1. I have discussed these exclusions in Origins of Modernity. It is Marx who will universalise ‘the active citizen’ problematically through the category of the worker in another way that also conflates the empirical and the universal. See my Origins of Modernity, especially Chapters 3 and 4. Habermas re-articulates this position in Between Facts and Norms when he argues that the constitution is an ‘embodied’ argument that abstractly mediates relations between contingent strangers. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 127–145, §49. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 132, §49. Arendt, for example, will restate Kant’s position in her own distinction between power and violence in On Revolution, London, Penguin, 1979. Kant, ‘Theory and Practice’, in Practical Philosophy, 290–291. Kant, ‘Theory and Practice’, in Practical Philosophy, 290. Strictly speaking Kant is attempting to limit the power of Rousseauian populist democracy and place this limit within the orbit of both constitutional and parliamentary power or power of the legislature with its representatives. As he says, ‘In what is called a limited constitution, the constitution contains a provision that the people can legally resist the Executive authority and its representative (the minister) by means of its representatives in Parliament’. Metaphysics of Morals, 133, §49. See Kant, Metaphysics of Morals; ‘Perpetual Peace’, ‘Theory and Practice’, in Practical Philosophy; and ‘The Idea of Universal History with a Cosmopolitan

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Purpose’, in Kant Political Writings. See Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, §77 for Kant’s muted critique of suicide, which he views more as a psychological issue than a moral one. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 150, §53. For Kant’s formulation regarding the assent of citizens see Metaphysics of Morals, §55, and for his commentary on the limits to war and negotiated settlements see Metaphysics of Morals, 150, §58. For example, Carl Schmitt, Political Theology Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Boston, MA, The MIT Press, 1986. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 153, §56. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 151, §54. See also 156–157, §61 where he also lays out a model in more explicit ways that distinguishes it from the American version of federalism; in other words, it is more Dutch than American: Such an association of several states can be called a permanent congress of states, which each neighbouring state is at liberty to join. Something of this kind took place (at least as regards the formalities of the Right of Nations for the sake of keeping the peace) in the first half of the present century, in the assembly of the States General at the Hague…By a congress is here understood only a voluntary coalition of different states that can be dissolved at any time, not a federation (like that of the American states which is based on a constitution and can therefore not be dissolved.

62 63 64 65 66 67

Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Practical Philosophy, 1991, 93–130. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 158, §62. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Practical Philosophy, 1991, 120. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Practical Philosophy, 1991, 106. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Practical Philosophy. An ambiguity has been explored by Derrida in his On Hospitality concerning Kant’s discussion of cosmopolitan hospitality towards strangers qua refugees. One can follow Jacques Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s Perpetual Peace, in the distinction he makes between a right to visit and a right to reside. Derrida “translates” this distinction into one between absolute and conditional hospitality. Even if they imply one another, for him there is an indissociability and heterogeneity between them. Conditional hospitality belongs to the historical specificity of any form of hospitality, whether it is given in the name of the father, the household, the community, a polis or a nation state. It has a formal, calculable and juridical dimension to it. As such, the name and the identity of the outsider matters to the host – once named and identified the outsider can slip from the (non-)identity of an indifferently perceived outsider to a potential enemy and/or become subject to the policing mechanisms of the state, with its defined points of entry and exit. Identity becomes permanent and residence temporary. Universality has reached its limit. Hospitality now belongs to the language of rights pertaining to juridically constituted modernity that is procedural in character. Against this backdrop of juridical hospitality, the outsider as refugee can be given a quasi-legal status, and hence be subject to rights, protocols, conventions and conditions of temporary or semi-permanent residence. The refugee is caught in a nether world in which their modernity is one of bureaucratic and juridical processes and the “generosity” or “philanthropy” of quotas instigated by national or supra-national agencies. In contrast, unconditional hospitality is, in Derrida’s terms, ‘a law without a law’, and for him it does not simply pertain to either visitation or residential rights, so to speak. For Derrida, it instead resembles Kant’s notion of unconditionality: it must not pay a debt or be governed by duty, and as such it is indifferent to the specificity of, and what it expects from, ‘the other’. In this sense, it is beyond the law as a code

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that prescribes and sets the limit to the time and space of hospitality. Unconditional hospitality sets no such limits. For Derrida, we are ‘caught’ between these two regimes of hospitality. In a different language, a tension exists between these two modes, a tension internal to the constitution of modernity, even cosmopolitan modernity. Yet, within the context of cosmopolitan modernity, Derrida’s notion of unconditional hospitality can be given greater shape than he suggests. To be sure, for Derrida, unconditional hospitality is a gesture and one that is asymmetrical at the particular moment that it is invoked. However, and in a way that unexpectedly enables a dialogue to be established between not only Kant and Derrida, but also Derrida, Cornelius Castoriadis and Agnes Heller, this gesture belongs to and has content derived from a blurred sketch of freedom, which also includes a regard for the other in the context of their contingency. It is here that cosmopolitanism becomes an empty universal. It is both open and interpretable beyond the limits of territoriality and democratic proceduralism. Thus, this first hospitable dimension – the absolute or unconditional – refers to a cosmopolitan imaginary that comes from a capacity to recognise others qua others as contingent strangers, and not merely as outsiders. From this perspective, cosmopolitanism is not simply a mobilising category of a right that is legalised, and can be instituted, and under which one either does or does not fall. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2000. This footnote discussion draws on my ‘Cosmopolitanism as an Empty Universal’, in Imaginaries of Modernity. See also G. W. Brown, ‘The Laws of Hospitality, Asylum Seekers and Cosmopolitan Right: A Kantian Response to Jacques Derrida’ European Journal of Political Theory, 9:3, 2010: 308–327. Brown, ‘The Laws of Hospitality, Asylum Seekers and Cosmopolitan Right’. See Agnes Heller, ‘Rationality of Reason, Rationality of Intellect’, in The Power of Shame, London, Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1978, and Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1997. See also 119 §40 where the self is non-alienable for Kant – and it is here that Marx and Heller also step in. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 128, §49. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 128 §49. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 129–145, §49, ‘Remarks’. Pettit, ‘Two Republican Traditions’, 188. See Kant, ‘On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory but it is of no use in practice’, Practical Philosophy, 300, especially his footnote. Pettit, ‘Two Republican Traditions’, 191. Even if they wield power (potestas) as constitutional republicans, the Macbeths can claim, monopolise and wield it as Executive power and make it their own. This can occur in any setting – from parliamentary Executives to companies, unions and universities. See Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and his formulation of the scared aspect of collective representations; Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society and his formulation of the social imaginary as an ontological creation of social meaning; and Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, and his formulation of imaginaries as background networks of social understanding. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 130–133, §49A. One response could have been to view ‘active citizenship’ as a contestatory one, in a way that is taken up and developed, for example, by Marx, notwithstanding his imputed universalism given to the working class. Marx gives a wonderful example of contestatory, active citizenship in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a text that stands outside the two-class paradigm, and even the class paradigm itself. I have analysed this work in Origins of Modernity. Pettit’s project is also to recover a lost tradition of contestatory republicanism. See his ‘The

136 Kant’s political-cosmopolitan notion two Traditions’ and Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Good Government, Oxford University Press, 1997/2010. Max Weber’s ‘The City’ also stands in this light. This issue becomes a burning one for twentieth-century critical theorising in the wake of the totalitarian experiments that still continue in the twenty-first century. It pre-occupied such critical theorists as Arendt, Habermas and Heller, who in their own way followed Kant’s lead to posit argument as the limit to dominating power. Alternatively, Foucault and Castoriadis posit more ‘classical’ alternatives that nonetheless remain within the Kantian orbit. Self-mastery becomes a pedagogical relationship of potestas (Foucault) or a self-creation of the polis (Castoriadis). 80 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 130, §49A, 128 §49, respectively. 81 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 131, §49A. 82 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Practical Philosophy, 344, §8:377. Notwithstanding Kant’s comments about women and nations in his empirical anthropologies, which denote eighteenth century prejudices, his strong universalism and his critique of domination that includes critiques of patriarchy and patrimonialism (Max Weber), help to set the scene for the articulation of claims for political inclusion and autonomy (read also as difference) by women in all areas of life from the late eighteenth century to the present. Iris Marion Young also comes close to a modified Kantian position in her important and nuanced reading of the deontological problem in her Impartiality and the Civic Republic. Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory, in Feminism as Critique, Edited and Introduction by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1987, 56–74. See also Nancy Fraser, ‘What’s Critical about Critical Theory?’, 31–55 in the same work; Drucilla Cornell, Philosophy of the Limit, Routledge, London, 1992; Chap. 6, footnote 15 below; Ursula Vogel, Rationalism and Romanticism: Two Strategies for Women's Liberation; Carol Hay, Kantianism, Liberalism and Feminism: Resisting Oppression, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2013.

6

Creating sociable sociability Practical imagining

We are free to be free – but … As we have seen in the Critique of Judgment our difficult selves are re-visited by way of the imagining work of the sublime but become less important as Kant pursues power, conflict and republican politics. For Kant, politics formed through power in any of its types, or judging according to harmony, are not an especially sublime activity, even though the productive imagination is as an important aspect to judging as reason or understanding are. And yet, Kant’s work on the dynamically sublime, especially, where oscillation can make us tremble with imputed fear, is suggestive of the ever-present condition of our visceral lives. In moral judgements, which in this instance are akin to aesthetic sensibility in the broader sense explored above, our phenomenal selves are forever present. In the wake of Kant’s formulations of the mathematical and dynamically sublime as well as the beautiful, a more complex, richer and more expansive picture emerges of moral judgements. Against this backdrop the categorical imperative of not using another as mere means but viewing him/her as an end in him/herself becomes the key for filling out and giving shape and depth to the blurred sketch of freedom once again – with reference to Kant’s moral philosophy. The categorical imperative points to the possibility of a life mutually shared with others, and which others too can share. In this sense, the categorical imperative is directed to not only political projects but also moral relationships with our selves and others that have affinities with aesthetic idea of the beautiful. Both aesthetics and morals presuppose a purposiveness without purpose, that is, a purposiveness with neither functional nor strategic intent. Kant’s argument is quite straightforward. He provides one maxim as a guideline for complex actors in a complex world including a complex inner one; and it is this that we can navigate ourselves in contexts where moral judgements are required. This right of humanity and vocation to ourselves is an internally derived beacon, blurred sketch or ‘monogram’ to which we can direct and cultivate our actions, and which are different to political arguments and formations.1 Whilst terming these innerly formed moral actions of good conduct virtues, Kant nonetheless distances himself from the classical tradition upon

138  Creating sociable sociability which this term leans. The internally derived goal of our actions is part of Kant’s ‘X’ – our capacity to imagine and create freedom. Kant posits freedom transcendentally, and as such we cannot fully know it. It remains unknowable and is an a priori schema which is immeasurable. Even in the context of the transcendental ‘X’ we work or act within our difficult selves.2 Our task, for Kant, is one of invention and appreciation of a complex and rich double-sided human condition. As he says: [We] must study ourselves, and since we want to apply this to others, we must thus study humanity, not however psychologically or speculatively … for we study human beings in order to become more prudent … Lack of knowledge of human beings is the reason that morality [moralism JR] and sermons, which are full of admonitions of which we never tire, have little effect. Morality must be combined with knowledge of humanity.3 Kant, though, not only gives a clear indication of a tension between two worlds of the phenomenal and the noumenal and a bridge between them, but also how this bridge might be crossed in the context of the recognition of our inner obstacles. The argument here is that in his later work Kant does not construct virtue deontologically as a duty to follow moral rules. This deontological version is the way that Kant is usually interpreted if one follows the Critique of Practical Reason, as we have seen in Chapter 3, or as MacIntyre does in his own objection to Kant’s practical philosophy.4 Instead of viewing Kant’s formulation of practical reasoning as deontological and formal, it is more productive to view his formulation as a non-functionalised relation between the phenomenological and noumenal parts of ourselves that indicates a tension, gap or dissonance between these two realms that we must navigate, as well as within the noumenal one. The blurred sketch or non-functional schematicism of freedom together with the categorical imperative becomes Kant’s critique of impure reason from the vantage point of making and expanding our moral rather than political freedoms in the context of our difficult selves. Filling out the blurred sketch of freedom in a moral register produces both a depth and width of and for subjects who become persons.5 In this context, Kant has two very straightforward or simple questions in mind: how are good (or decent) people possible? How is moral sociable sociability possible? Neither questions are answered by the later Kant in terms of duty according to the law of practical reason, but rather in terms of our struggle with filling out the blurred sketch of freedom in moral terms in the permanent context of our difficult selves. Based on the idea of ‘the gap’ between the phenomena of our imaginings, fears, compulsions and the noumenal (our reflexive will), the law cannot specify which way to act. We only have a maxim – a blurred sketch – to do this, which, nonetheless, can be a determining ‘force’ that can place us on the side of the noumenal.6 There is a want of the maxim on the one side of the

Creating sociable sociability  139 bridge and practice of the maxim or virtue along with constrained innerly derived reflexivity on the other. The wider, the more expansive practice of the maxim, the more it shows our imperfection or our imperfect duties.7 Yet, the maxim expands and changes us from being subjects into being persons, if only imperfectly. Kant’s own categories of the person we could be – agreeable, beautiful and good – are internal to moral sociable sociability. Personhood occurs in the context of the subject we are, that is, schematically, non-functionally, even fearfully imaginative, disagreeable and wrongdoing. We are both subject and person, for Kant. Orientating ourselves to agreeability, beauty and the good is no easy task. But the call, the need for moral freedom and autonomy remains. For Kant we cannot reside only within the ‘first order’ states of the phenomenon, for example, in ‘wild’ imaginings, feeling states, or everyday habits. If we continue to do so we exist as a being who only imagines, feels, and acts narrowly and inconsistently. The Doctrine of Virtue – the focus of this chapter – takes us towards the blurred sketch of freedom beyond ‘first-order’ actions created by our ‘wild’ imaginings or orientated by the habits of everyday life and towards the blurred sketch of freedom. As we have seen in Chapter 3, the blurred sketch of freedom, its creation and our navigation towards it is available to everyone qua schematicised representation, for Kant. This is the basis of its universalism. For Kant, this ground is not a speciality; it does not produce specialists of either the spirit or the heart, to paraphrase Max Weber. Rather, as Kant notes, someone versed in practical philosophy [a specialist – JR] is not thereby a practical philosopher. A practical philosopher is one who makes the final end of reason the principle of his actions and joins with this such knowledge as is necessary for it.8 It is available to everyone in the context of the diversity of ‘anthropologies’, that is, our foibles and fallibilities. As Kant states in the First Introduction to his Critique of Judgment, we begin from the particular and then move or orientate ourselves to the universal which makes judging reflective rather than determining: ‘[If] only the particular is given and judgment has to find the universal for it, then this power is merely reflective’.9 We are all impure, antinomic, imperfect practical philosophers in one way or another; yet being so does not make us all the same, but it may make us reasonable, able to make moral judgements and be sociable. Put slightly differently, The Doctrine of Virtue, together with the Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment and his anthropological writings that stand alongside these, even more so than the Critique of Practical Reason, is a theory of second-order social action in the context our frailties, imperfections and fragilities rather than a formal theory of duties.10 Because we are beings who live between realms in which even nature is not

140  Creating sociable sociability taken-for-granted (we are in-between beings, so to speak) we can navigate between the phenomenon of our difficult selves, the blurred sketch of freedom and the categorical imperative, which makes this navigation a reflexive one, an activity of a second order. This second-order reflexive activity constitutes or can lead to good conduct to our ourselves and to others, that is, to the possibility of sociable sociability.

The practice of the blurred sketch of freedom: reflexivity and good conduct If one creates, cultivates and navigates with the categorical imperative beyond habit, ‘wild’ imaginings, discombobulation and even sublime fears one becomes an expansive, wide creature in Kant’s quaint terminology.11 Once we navigate with the maxim of ‘not using another as mere means’ we learn and develop new habits and deportments. Whilst moral freedom is transcendentally constituted out of a ‘monogram’ or figurative or non-functional schematicising imagination, it is something that must be learned, honed and practised. Freedom is not a technique based on a rule book that simply can be followed and applied. It is a practice of developing, in Kant’s terms and in a non-political and non-cognitivist way, the formation of good character or personhood. With human beings, character is the main thing; there is a confluence in their case of everything toward this. Hence it is necessary that we seek out the source of character. The good character would be the good will. Good is different from good instincts and impulses … We have a will by virtue of which we desire something due to principles and concepts, so that one can also wish to have good inclinations, since, due to concepts, one realises that [one’s inclinations] are evil … The good will is good in itself and unconditioned.12 Rather according to Kant, alongside our phenomenal self, we have an inner ‘point’ (the moral imperative), which can act as a beacon with which we can navigate. In other words, there is ‘the is’ and ‘the ought’ and we exist in between – there is a necessary sublime struggle as Kant also intimates in the Critique of Judgment. We are neither angels nor beasts, but we have an end, a capacity to create and a vocation to navigate towards becoming a moral, rational being even though we may never with any finality reach this destination.13 Given this vocation, Kant proposes three inter-related aspects (actions) that could make us better human beings in the context of, but beyond, our phenomenal selves. These are: (i) the practices of freedom within the boundaries of moral rules rather than conformity with habits, unbridled and reactive rebellion or transgression; (ii) moral judgement; and (iii) sociable sociability which, for Kant, does not mean consensus or concord, but rather

Creating sociable sociability  141 the free enjoyment and enjoyability of the company of ourselves and others. In the end, these three inter-related actions constitute Kant’s own version of the beautiful. Kant, in fact argues that we have three powers or abilities in the context of the above aspects: talent, temperament and character (or personhood). He defines character as ‘the determination of the human being’s power of choice through lasting and established maxims.’14 And we should be steadfast and consistent in the practice of these maxims. Yet, character is actually wider and deeper than this. In the light of this added complexity Kant proposes that the following aspects are helpful for creating or inventing character (see our discussions on the productive imagination in Chapters 2–4). These aspects are: that the human being has his own will … [Whoever] wants to have a will of his own must not pay attention to how others judge him [nor must] he follow and consult his own instincts and moods, but his unyielding and determinate principle, and he must not follow these out of habit, but carefully deliberate on them each time … [That] one must keep his word to himself and also keep his word to others … [Unwavering] observation of principles and the attempt to make them consistent and ready at any occasion … [The] representation of the contemptibility of a human being without character … [One] must not only abhor evil, but when something evil is said in society, also oppose oneself to it, not keep silent  … [And finally] one must have genuine love of honour, not ambition and vanity [and] one must not go about with the unworthy.15 We do not have a natural propensity for goodness, but it has to be created and practised across a number of registers that increases our range as persons. To also put it in the context of the discussion of the dynamically sublime in the Critique of Judgment, above, we also create and expand ourselves in the face of and even beyond fear. We develop the courage to create our own person. In other words, Kant argues that to act according to character or personhood requires a multi-dimensionality of practices that are more than simply acting according to the unconditionality of the principles themselves. As he says, the acquisition of character includes: 1. Education … 2. Having the predisposition to character through reflection and conversation with friends about moral things. 3. Through sincere adoption to unyielding principles – One can call this the philosophical rebirth, if that is to say, one turns from rule by instincts to rule by principles. 4. Circumspection regarding the inviolableness of principles. One must be an object of respect even in one’s own eyes.16

142  Creating sociable sociability At one level, and noting Kant’s emphasis on education, we can only experience this expansion into personhood through cultivation. For him, cultivation entails the pedagogical forming of good judgement that is both inner-reflexive and requires institutional settings – good teaching, good public spheres and good republics.17 Inner self-education as well as education in general is of crucial importance. As Kant notes in his historical essays we progress through trial and error and participate in the cultural and civilising processes in two ways that help to cultivate an orientation and vocation to the universalistic horizon of the categorical imperative. The first is through the different educational institutions that are best likely to promote this development, and the second is through critiques of these same institutions, ‘showing how they themselves need to change if we are truly to bring about “a community of peoples on the earth” in which a “violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere”’.18 Crossing the bridge, or the ocean if we are to also use the navigational metaphor, does not in any way demolish nor diminish our difficult self; yet it allows for an accord to be reached out of the tension between the phenomenal and the transcendental aspect of ourselves. As pointed out in Chapter 4, Kant terms this accord beautiful and it is to which education and the progress of civilisation are orientated.19 In other words, whilst he ‘begins’ from an empirical condition of unsociable sociability he accompanies this with an altered positive image of humankind. Leaving to one side momentarily a discussion concerning ‘the predisposition to character through reflection and conversation with friends about moral things’, let’s look more closely at the adoption of unyielding principles, circumspection and respect, which Kant brings under the general formulation of ‘virtues to ourselves’ in ‘The Doctrine of Virtue’. ‘Virtues to ourselves’ are guidelines to a moral life, rather than only deontologically constituted duties.

Sketching and practising moral freedom with regard to oneself In ‘The Doctrine of Virtue’ and the anthropologies Kant gives a series of minimalist guidelines or recommendations for practising practical reason, that is, of how to live well with oneself and with others in the context of his universal maxim. Practical reasoning is the condition of self-constituting and self-practising the blurred sketch of freedom. These recommendations are set against a backdrop of interdictions which he terms negatives that indicate, in a similar way to the dynamically sublime, the practice of unfreedoms. One is unfree or heteronomous rather than autonomous if, in the manner of his ‘Shakespeareanism’, one lies, is avaricious, gluttonous or greedy or alternatively mean-spirited, is servile, fearful or weak, makes oneself sick, maims oneself, commits suicide (or worse a suicide bomber, that is someone who is transformed into pure use by radical evil), or is cruel to oneself, to others and even animals.20

Creating sociable sociability  143 Kant formulates the complexity of practices in terms of vocations to oneself and to others. However, this formulation of duties does not fully capture the complexity that Kant is attempting to convey. Listen to him more carefully here. Rather than duty qua duty, there should be a consistency of the will in terms of creating and navigating towards the principle of the universal maxim not to use ourselves or others as mere means but as ends in themselves. This creation and navigation should occur with regard to three aspects – good living, constrained reflexivity and good conduct. But even this formulation does not, once again, capture the complexity of Kant’s position. To be sure, Kant posits that there are vocations to ourselves, and vocations to others, both of which are viewed as recommendations for a moral life, rather than as strict duties. In so developing these vocations one expands in four directions if we turn this a priori moral endowment into a moral talent that includes (i) moral feeling;21 (ii) respect for oneself;22 (iii) conscience;23 (iv) the love or really friendship for one’s neighbour,24 the result of which is self-mastery and self-government in a non-political sense.25 In other words, Kant makes a distinction between the good citizen and the good person, and here he is talking about the good person. As he says, ‘since virtue is based on inner freedom, it contains a positive command to a man, namely to bring all of his capacities and inclinations under his (reason’s) control and so rule over himself, which goes beyond forbidding him to let himself be governed by his feelings and inclinations (the duties of apathy), for unless reason holds the reins of government in his own hands, man’s feelings and inclinations play the master over him.26 In Kant’s view sketching and practising moral freedom with regard to ourselves is a form of positive self-limitation and self-responsibility. Kant posits that we are the ones constraining ourselves through the use of our own inner blurred sketch of freedom, and this ‘constraint’ paradoxically expands us. It can turn each of us into personalities. Each of us becomes a personality by making reflexive reasoning and imagining the cause of our actions. We each become our own person and at the same time discover humanity (the end of the doctrine of virtue) through each of our own actions. To be sure, the expansive capacity and the duties that go with it are in part negative, that is, they forbid each of us to act contrary to the end of each of our natures, that is, the blurred sketch of freedom which is our endowment by being born a human being. However, this duty is positive and expanding in that by making this end the object of each of our choices, we choose actions that develop our moral health, which expand and cultivate our moral capacities to ourselves and to others. The duty to ourselves is narrow in terms of quality – it hones, strengthens, focusses, limits our inner inclinations – but because of this, paradoxically it also expands because of each of our initial frailties as human beings. Practising moral freedom is imperfect because it always begins from the position of ourselves as imperfect beings.

144  Creating sociable sociability In this context, imagining, passion and even feeling can become a lasting inclination for the practice of moral freedom. The result of this inclination is a complex form of moral freedom that, for Kant, embraces philanthropy, love as friendship and respect and dignity of and for oneself and for others.27 In addition, Kant’s theory and practice of moral freedom is one that includes wit in which one can discern and enjoy the play of antinomy and paradox, wisdom, self-knowledge and self-detachment. As such is not a practice of ‘youth’, but one of ‘maturity’, which cannot be measured in years.28 Although Kant’s practical philosophy takes us up the hills and down the dales of an imperfect inner and outer life (Kant is against the idea of perfectibility), his preferred model for this imperfect life is one of productive wit, sagacity, and originality of thought – modulations, capacities and deportments of that fill out the blurred sketch of moral freedom.29 In this complex setting, one should be true to oneself, which for Kant, is not the same as being authentic. Being true to oneself involves truthfulness, honesty, rectitude, conscientiousness, inner good judgement. In other words, it involves moral self-knowledge, inner self-reflexivity, and humour qua wryness.30 It is within the context of this complex imperfect setting that we should pursue our own end as a capacity for internal law giving, which is a duty to oneself and instils inner worth, inalienable dignity and self-respect.31 This enables us to act with the consciousness of an internally constituted moral disposition. Acting with the consciousness of an internally constituted moral condition is thus the capacity to judge without reference to an external court of appeal, to an external authority that interdicts and sets the standard for us. Rather, for Kant, there is an internal court in us, which is conscience.32 Conscience is our internal judge, our internal interlocutor or own internal voice to whom we turn and listen, and not necessarily only at night. It ‘is the inner judge of free actions’.33 Although Kant ‘leans on’ the classical and early modern traditions at this point, and in a similar way that he draws on the older language of virtue he also leaves it behind. We create this internal voice of the unconditional within ourselves. It is through the development and cultivation of this inner voice – of the ability to be two in one person (accused and prosecutor), to establish self-distance from oneself (a form of objectivity) that we become morally self-aware. In Kant’s view the development of our moral self-awareness does not result in joy (it is not positive) but is a relief from anxiety when we struggle against our inner capacity for wrongdoing and our vices.34 Anxiety, for Kant is the experience of living constantly on the bridge or in between our phenomenological and noumenal selves in a way that has not been fully adjudicated or resolved. Hence the first or real command of the invention and vocation of moral freedom is to know oneself, not simply as a corporeal being, but more so as a moral one. In summary, then, knowing oneself morally means, for Kant, not simply being expansive, but knowledgably expansive with regard to one’s own fears

Creating sociable sociability  145 and evils – otherwise we would not have a conscience.35 Kant’s position is against egoism or what is now termed narcissism, which is misanthropically selfish and self-interested. Despite – or really because of – his realism towards our imagining and phenomenal selves – Kant has a positive human self-image that posits and embraces a ‘mystery X’, the unconditionality of the non-functional schematicising imagination that can create a blurred sketch of freedom and the categorical imperative. In summary, then, there are three dimensions to Kant’s moral philosophy: (1) corporeality or desire; (2) unsociable sociability; and (3) the transcendentally posited blurred sketch of freedom, which is the basis of moral self-knowledge. This latter principle also leads to or constitutes our condition of moral sociable sociability, that is, our relations with others to which I now turn.

Sketching and practising moral freedom with regard to others: sociable sociability or wide connections Kant’s construction of a vocation to oneself appears to be subject-orientated but is actually orientated towards our good relations with others. Moral sociable sociability is not simply social exchange or political cosmopolitanism (even if it overlaps with the latter). It is deeper and wider than this and includes our sexual/corporeal lives, our convivial and conversational forms. In Kant’s view and recommendation, we should not isolate ourselves but be sociable.36 Moral sociable sociability is a cultivation of reciprocity, agreeableness, tolerance, mutual love and respect. It is a ‘duty’ of virtue because of our common humanity – to be with our fellow creatures and to share in this common humanity. In this way moral sociable sociability is an extrapolation of the blurred sketch of moral freedom and the categorical imperative and points to relational forms most appropriate, even if we imperfectly enact them.37 With this in mind, we can now more fully discuss ‘the predisposition to character through reflection and conversation with friends about moral things.’38 In Kant’s formulation, the moral sociability of practical reasoning in the context of others has two components: mutual love (or beneficence), which is emotionally expansive, and respect, which, whilst also expansive, emphasises a sense of common distance rather than the danger of pre-reflexive involvement and immersion in the lives of others. As Kant states, ‘mutual love admonishes men constantly to come together … respect …[keeps] themselves at a distance’.39 Kant, ever alert in his ‘Shakespeareanism’ to our propensity for unsociable sociability, provides an outline of the vices or forms of wrongdoing that violate mutual detachment, love and respect and throws them into relief. Paradoxically, closeness, as Kant points out, is a breeding ground for negative imaginings and feelings. Envy, ingratitude and malice violate mutual love or benevolence, because ‘in these vices [ ] hatred is not open and violent but secret and veiled, adding meanness to

146  Creating sociable sociability one’s neglect of duty to one’s neighbours, so that one also violates a duty to oneself’.40 Contempt, arrogance, defamation and ridicule violate the vocation of respect, for Kant. Contempt denies dignity and respect towards another whilst arrogance, which can also take the forms of pride and conceit, demand that others concern themselves with one’s self-importance, which is tied to a selfishness that cannot concern the welfare of another; defamation (as against slander) and ridicule (as distinct from comedy) detract, demean, deride and diminish others and thus, for Kant, are contrary to the respect owed to others according to their humanity (their end). Malice though is almost a pure misanthropy and for Kant is driven by the law of the imagination and the desire for revenge.41 In each, closeness or familiarity is matched with a desire to wish, imagine or do ill to the other in real or symbolic form. It might even be termed sublime contraction. Against this backdrop of sublime contraction and turning to his universal maxim and its transcendental constitution as a blurred sketch of moral freedom Kant can argue that the vocation of benevolence (love of others) is grounded in humanity ‘as such’ and makes ‘the well-being and happiness of others my end’.42 It is not the emotion or feeling of Eros, but benevolence which is composed of beneficence, gratitude, sympathy and this belongs to an expansive philanthropy that also has affinities with Kant’s notion of the sublime in its expansive forms.43 Yet in many ways, and despite Kant’s emphasis on mutuality, benevolence is a gift that may not be returned. Whilst, beneficence is a universal duty of people because they are considered our fellow rational beings with needs, as Kant states, ‘to be beneficent, that is to promote according to one’s means the happiness of others in need, without hoping for something in return, is every man’s duty’.44 Something similar occurs with Kant’s notion of gratitude, which honours a person because of the benefit s/he has rendered us.45 Yet, Kant states that gratitude is a sacred obligation in the way that Durkheim, for example, would posit this term, as well as an expansively sublime one because it cannot be fully dispatched or discharged. In contrast to Nietzsche’s argument in the Genealogy of Morals it is not a quality of ‘enslaved’ debt that should be repaid with negative feelings of ressentiment. Rather, for Kant, it is accompanied by a positive, appreciative disposition.46 In contrast to both benevolence and gratitude, sympathy is a mutually shared or sharable feeling, even an aesthetically beautiful one according to Kant. In his view sympathy is better than compassion because sympathetic feelings can be cultivated that can result in charity. For Kant, duties that result from sympathy are mutually free duties as they indicate dignity and respect and leave them (dignity and respect) intact on both sides of the relationship between persons.47 Respect, proper, for Kant, though is certainly not charity. Whilst it narrows rather than expands our mutuality it does this by limiting esteem to the dignity of another person that is unquantifiable.48 Moderation and modesty are its deportments and they are deportments of quality, that is,

Creating sociable sociability  147 they have no measurable formula. In other words, in practising the blurred sketch of moral freedom we deport ourselves in ways that cannot be measured in terms of wealth, fame or power. Wealth, fame and power are not only measurable and accumulative deportments and actions, but also ones that accrue negative vices, as we have seen. As Kant states, ‘Moderation on one’s demands generally, that is, willing restriction of man’s self-love in view of the self-love of others, is called modesty. Lack of such moderation (lack of modesty) as regards one’s worthiness to be loved by others is called egotism (philautia). But lack of modesty in one’s claims to be respected by others is a self-conceit (arrogantia). The respect that I have to others or that another can acquire from me (observantia aliis praestanda) is therefore recognition of a dignity (dignitas) in other men, that is, of another worth that has no price, no equivalent for which the objects evaluated (aestimi) could be judged. Judging something worthless is contempt’.49 Conviviality and enjoyment with others are Kant’s forms of moral, practical sociability where respect, especially, is central. It is the central practice of this particular ‘art’ or vocation. Somewhat surprisingly in his work conviviality and enjoyment take the form of the luncheon or dinner with friends. The luncheon or dinner party can be viewed as a paradigm or concretisation for Kant’s blurred sketch of moral sociable sociability, as distinct from the activity of only argument in the public sphere or politics in the sphere of the state. It is also a counter-paradigm to excessive feasting and drinking, lewd and lusty behaviour (‘disagreeables’ and wedding banquets) or even worse revenge, murder and feeding one’s enemies to one’s enemies, as in the case of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. At one level the luncheon or dinner party appears to be an overly constrained form of civility. Yet, this impression trivialises it. The luncheon or dinner party stands in the wake of a great classical, philosophical discursive tradition of Greek and Roman Antiquity, especially that of Plato’s symposia. The luncheon or dinner is where friends meet around the table and not in a public sphere where they simply argue. In addition to political matters, the luncheon or dinner guests discuss matters of intellectual interest and cultural taste and can argue about these as part of the cultivation of culture more generally.50 But they do more than this. Using the luncheon as the counter-paradigm to public and private vices, as well as argument in the public sphere and the pursuits of power, fame or wealth, a sociable moral disposition can be cultivated when one participates in a meal together with others who are also autonomous persons. Kant muses that eating alone is unhealthy. He goes on to say, ‘the way of thinking characteristic of the union of good living with virtue in social intercourse is humanity’.51 He continues, ‘The good living that still seems to harmonise best with true humanity is a good meal in good company (and if possible, also altering company)’.52 One should savour the meal and the company and so cultivate taste in the double meaning of the word – of the cuisine and its subtleties and delights (as a synonym for culture more generally), of the

148  Creating sociable sociability company and their perspectives and insights. Cultivation of taste thus includes the development of conversation, laughter, wit and good judgement, according to Kant. For him, these are more than simply the development of aesthetic taste, or the social arts of politesse and forms of dissembling. Rather they are deeply imbedded in the nature of sociability itself and its maxim of not using another as mere means and treating the other as an end in him or herself. Kant’s paradigm of the dinner party could be termed, in the light of the Critique of Judgment, beautiful sociability in which detached yet companionable interest and regard for an other is the key, rather than harmonious accord.53 For Kant, beautiful sociability also involves conversing and not simply dining together. Conversation is not a monologue, but ‘moderates the egoism of human beings.’54 According to him, it involves speaking about matters that might interest everyone, not showing off, not allowing a deadly silence so that conversation can continue quickly, not becoming cantankerous or argumentative, and so when one argues one is mindful of tone of voice and choice of words.55 Kant could have also suggested that one can learn to listen to other guests and even remain silent, paradoxically, in order to maintain the conversation. One can also be playful in conversation and by so doing one can also be witty, laugh and enjoy laughter, not at another’s expense and not to produce shame. Wit and laughter are different to being clever, ridiculing or being sarcastic to others.56 Rather wit and laughter (comedy) can be aids to practising the blurred sketch of moral freedom in that they can enhance the power of judgement by assisting ‘the power to connect representations.’57 This enhancement can occur by bringing unexpected and even paradoxical representations to the fore and bringing the imagination closer to understanding. ‘Wit allows the mind to recover because judgment on its own is fatiguing.’58 Conversation, wit and laughter, for Kant, are the central ingredients of the recipe for a successful and culturally rich social gathering. As he again surprisingly notes in deference to Plato’s symposia, ‘as one of Plato’s friends from his symposium said, a social gathering must be such that it delighted him not only at the time he enjoyed it, but also every time [and] as often as he thought about it’.59 As Kant also suggests, luncheon and dinner guests qua friends can also reflect, when needed, on moral matters and concerns. Here one combines one’s silent (or soliloquised) inner voice, one’s spoken voice and the voices of others to consider and contemplate difficult and even disturbing moral matters. What is of equal importance is a deportment and disposition that welcomes and enables such reflections in a way that both deepens and widens moral sociable sociability. As already indicated in Chapter 4, friendship is Kant’s primary and privileged category in this context, and it is a key practice of personhood and moral sociable sociability. It is the union or conjunction of respect and benevolence or mutual love. The conjunction entails that love draws two people together and respect keeps them at a proper

Creating sociable sociability  149 distance. There is neither immersion nor repulsion; nor mutual self-interest nor advantage or disadvantage. Friendship is not strategic but moral, generous and mutually trustworthy.60 As has already been indicated the predisposition to character through reflection and conversation with friends about moral things is a core part of the practice of moral sociable sociability. The generosity of mutual friendship and respect enables mutual confidences to be exchanged and kept. There is a mutual trust between friends which is different to the trust between contingent strangers who are kept further apart because of a necessary indifference. This mutual trust means that one keeps one’s word and does not disclose confidences or dissemble. Friendship, for Kant, calls for mutual self-containment rather than either gossip or mergence, and in this sense, it is an Ideal that can never be achieved.61 It is more fruitful to view friendship as imperfect. It is a balancing act between involvement and indifference, but not one often identified with the contingent stranger’s free distancing indifference of city, cosmopolitan life, in another meaning of cosmopolitanism that is hinted at in Kant’s work. Rather, there is a necessary and sensitive balance between involvement and indifference or distance, between semblance and disclosure, between holding back and stating that which then becomes a confidence, something that is intimately revealed. Yet, there is, for Kant, a limit to friendship as one should not disclose everything, and thus one lives with a tension about what one can reveal and what should remain one’s own. As Kant indicates, everyone has his or her own secrets and dare not confide blindly in others, partly because of a base cast of mind in most [people] to use them to one’s disadvantage and partly because many people are indiscreet and incapable of judging and distinguishing what may or may not be repeated.62 Complete revelation paradoxically increases the tension and places a burden on friendship itself. In other words, for Kant, there is a distinction between aesthetic friendship (mergence) and moral friendship. One can sympathise within the limits of practical reason rather than on the basis of passions or feelings. Complete sympathy and enthusiasm produce an excess of feeling and makes bad or no judgement possible where good or cautious judgements might be called for. As Kant points out, friendships can be sacrificed on the altar of enthusiasm.63 Friendship, for Kant, as a combination of being a confidante and being respectful of another as friend, is both expansive (because of the former) and narrow (because of the latter). Importantly for Kant, friendship is the most open, deep, wide, cherished but necessarily imperfect form of moral sociable sociability. To put it slightly differently, the practice of beautiful sociability and the cultivation of friendship go hand in hand.64 We remain both subjects and persons, constantly travelling on the bridge between the phenomena and noumena of ourselves in the context of the

150  Creating sociable sociability everyday lives of one another and our inner selves. There are always tensions and gaps, and these confront us every day, especially in our lives of sociability and friendship. We do not remain on one side or the other once we have ‘crossed over’. We are neither or even little devils nor angels (or ‘goody twoshoes’). Rather we are always crossing between the increasingly complex parts of ourselves. And for Kant, this is not an impossible situation. One can create, navigate the blurred sketch of moral freedom with its maxim ‘of not using others as mere means’. We can learn to use this maxim consistently rather than relying on ‘wild’ imaginings, inclination, desire, analytic logic or functional reasoning. The blurred sketch of moral freedom is synthetic, schematic, figurative and paradoxical. It is in the context of tensions, luncheons, conversations, judgements, friendships, saying and not saying that the creation of, and orientation to, practising moral freedom comes to the fore. Navigation and good judgement require the work of faculty of reason. But as we have seen it also requires the work of the creative, productive, schematicising imagination, even more so. We begin with desire and then learn, even in the face of fearfulness, to expand and hone ourselves by filling out a blurred sketch of freedom through which we can reflexively ‘master’ ourselves. One can, and so often against the grain, enjoy moral sociable sociability, not necessarily at luncheons or dinner parties but in the everyday interactions that occur between contingent strangers and especially friends. By so doing we can accept who we are in all of our complexity.65

Notes 1 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 194, §19. 2 Kant’s emphasis on freedom does not annul desire but expands it. As he says: ‘freedom does not consist in the incapacity of their desires’, but their expansion. ‘Freedom is directed at the decision about which desires one wants to fulfil. It is what is characteristic of human beings, for animals have instincts that they must follow blindly’. ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 442. As will be discussed freedom and expansion are related to critico-reflection and sociable conduct. 3 Kant, ‘Anthropology Friedländer (1775–1776)’, in Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, edited by Allen W. Wood and Robert B. Louden, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 48–49. 4 See MacIntyre, After Virtue. Kant’s notion of virtue does not rely on an idea of human flourishing or excellence, although he does favour a sense of living well. Nor is it based in motivational or dispositional qualities of the subject/ agent. Rather virtue, for Kant, is a combination of good conduct, living well and a critico-reflexive relationship to habits and attitudes that are formed and learnt as part of one’s orientation to practical reasoning, that is of becoming a person. See also O’Neill, ‘Orientation in Thinking: Geographical Problems, Political Solutions’, in Constructing Authorities: Reason, Politics, and Interpretation in Kant’s Philosophy, edited by O. O’Neill, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, 38–55; O’Neill, ‘Kant after Virtue’ Inquiry, 26:4, 1983; O’Neill, ‘Kant: Rationality as Practical Reason’, in Constructing Authorities: Reason, Politics, and Interpretation in Kant’s Philosophy, edited by O. O’Neill,

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Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, 387–405; O’Neill, Kant and the Social Contract Tradition’, in Kant’s Political Theory: Interpretations and Applications, edited by Elizabeth Ellis, University Park, Pennsylvania University Press, 2012, 25–41; Louden, ‘Kant’s Virtue Ethics’, 473–489; See also Silvia Sebastiani, ‘Beyond Ancient Virtues: Civil Society and the Passions in the Scottish Enlightenment’ History of Political Thought, 32:5, 2011: 821–840. 5 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, ‘Introduction’, sections VII and VIII, 193–195. See Onora O’Neill, ‘I. Kant after Virtue’ Inquiry, 26:4, 1983: 387–405, DOI: 10.1080/00201748308602007. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics. O’Neill’s and Louden’s analyses are instructive here. We can make and experience our freedom in moral ways that indicate that we are all capable of practical reasoning. However, this practice is not the same as simply following rules. In her discussion of Macintyre’s narrowing and impoverishing account of Kant’s notion of practical reason in After Virtue, O’Neill argues that the Kantian picture of practical reasoning requires the coordination of a number of elements. It requires capacities for reflective judging, for the critical deployment of concepts which articulates our moral situation. It requires the capacity to universalise which is needed if the fundamental intentions of our lives are not the ones which others cannot share. It requires also capacities for reasoning about means and results which all relate our fundamental intentions to the situations in which we actually find ourselves and lend us to contextually appropriate ancillary intentions. This is hardly an impoverished conception of practical reasoning. (404) Practical reasoning makes us deep (wide in Kant’s terms), alert to others and because of this sociable. O’Neill goes on to argue that Kant offers us primarily an ethic of virtue than rules, and he does not see human reason as merely calculative. His modernity lies in his rejection of a conception of human nature and its telos which is sufficiently determinate to yield an entire ethic … Kant offers us a form of rationalism [practical reasoning – JR] in ethics which (despite the unfortunate suggestions of some of his examples) does not generate a unique moral code, but still provides fundamental guidelines and suggests the types of reasoning by which we might see how to introduce these into the lives we actually lead. (404–405) In their discussion of Kant’s moral philosophy Louden and O’Neill posit and explore two arguments. One is that a weaker version of the categorical imperative to which we are orientated is enough for a reflexive and universalistic response to moral and ethical issues and dilemmas (as against the stronger version that expunges all empirical conditions from it and makes it the sole condition and arbiter of moral action). This weaker version aims to determine moral duties for ‘“human beings as such” by means of applying the categorical imperative to a limited amount of empirical knowledge concerning human nature’. However, as Louden notes against the charges of both strong and weak formalism ‘Kant … endorses the claim that moral theory is inapplicable to the human situation (indeed any situation) without a massive infusion of relevant empirical knowledge’. As Louden goes on to say, and as my above portrayal indicates of Kant’s ‘Shakespeareanism’, which includes ‘wild’ inner imaginative life, a second argument can be developed that also indicates that Kant’s moral philosophy relies on a darker and even discombobulated view of human life than is often supposed. And this darker view gives his moral philosophy a particular hue of tension rather than rule following in either the strong or weak sense. In this sense the

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opposite of Kant’s image of the depth of the subject is not shallowness but dependency in the context of our foibles, a particular type of immaturity different from the immaturity of a dependent public-political citizen. Kant develops a notion of moral immaturity, which is one of being ‘immersed’ in pre-reflexive habits. Cultivation matters because, for Kant, we can learn to become practitioners of practical reasoning, which is not a form of logic orientated to truth nor a form of happiness or felicity. It is a form of wisdom orientated to an inner-reflexive voice that as we shall see points us towards the categorical imperative in a moral register. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in Metaphysics of Morals, 194. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in Metaphysics of Morals, 206. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in Metaphysics of Morals, Note at Preface, 181. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar translation, 1987, 18–19. In this sense, Agnes Heller is Kant’s genuine successor/inheritor. This does not occur in the formal structure of her work but in terms of its disposition. Her ‘Kierkegaardianism’ is a means through which she addresses the Kantian problem, issue and ‘execution’ of choice in the context of contingency with the full recognition that she reworks and historicises Kant’s triplication or three-fold division of human beings into three separate faculties or spheres. See Heller, Theory of Feelings. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 207. Kant, ‘Anthropology Friedländer’, in Lectures on Anthropology, 192–193. It is precisely here that Kant wants to establish a first principle, a metaphysics, to provide ground, solidity and even consonance for our moral life. As he says, if one departs from this principle and begins with sensibility or pure aesthetic or even moral feeling (with what is subjectively rather than objectively practical) … then there will indeed be no metaphysical first principles of the doctrine of virtue, since feeling, whatever may arouse it, always belongs to the order of nature. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 182

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Yet, Kant moves or vacillates between three views of the relation between our phenomenological selves and our noumenal ones. There is first, a functional view based in implicit categories of the pathological and normal (which will be taken up by functionalist Sociology); second, there is a deontological view where formal rules are established that one should apply and follow; and third, there is also a ‘non-functional’ view that places the emphasis on dissonances, ‘gaps’ and orientations to either the passions, imaginings or reasonings in terms of reflexivity and good conduct. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 478. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 481–482. The notion of character is a key interpretative device for Kant. It enables him to speak of the character of the species, subjects, nations and men and especially women, and thus make claims that belong to eighteenth-century prejudices (Gadamer) and have been contested by his own universalising maxims and arguments. Kant collapses particular and universal arguments together, especially in his commentary on nations and the sexes. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 483–484. Kant will formularise this complexity in terms of duties to oneself and duties to others. However, as will be indicated below, the point is that the formulation of duties does not fully capture the complexity that Kant is attempting to convey. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 195–196. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics, 173, including his quotes of Kant in added italics. Learning also directs us to Kant’s other revolution in thought which accompanies his transcendental investigation of the faculties that construe the world,

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that is, his revolution in philosophical history. As already mentioned above his other Copernican revolution of historical understanding helps to pinpoint a fundamental distinction within his critical philosophy; one which pertains to the principles of cognition as they are abstracted from the human condition, and the second which addresses the problem of theoretical, although in the main practical reason from the viewpoint of their historico-cultural contextualisation. For Kant, humanity is not a species that exists in a state of homeostasis. Rather, it is one that can progress gradually through many generations where it attains either a sufficient mastery over nature or a social, political republicanism and moral cosmopolitanism because of the creation of blurred sketches of freedom. In this context the questions, which Kant argues should precede the examination of knowledge and are ultimately tied to another one: what is humankind? What are its constituting characteristics? This is the theme that continually pervades Kant’s work, and the one to which he will constantly return sometimes explicitly often implicitly through the notions of progress and knowledge. Each is used by Kant to establish a confident narrative concerning humankind’s own movement away from self-incurred tutelage and towards the use of the principles of reason. In this context Kant’s famous definition of the Enlightenment joins his two “Copernican” revolutions and does so in a way that establishes a nexus between socio-historical context and the primacy of practical reason. Kant views learning as central to a phylogenetic orientation towards progress in a way that situates reason purely within the domain of culture and education. Because ‘reason does not work instinctively but requires trial and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another’, the developmental process of enlightenment can only be a long-term process in which each generation builds on the knowledge and experience of the previous one. The end of history is ensured through the way in which each generation prepares the next for a life of political and moral worth. 19 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 239. According to Kant, we should cultivate our natural given powers (our endowments) and these endowments, for Kant, are the following: 1 powers of the spirit and here he means principally of mathematics, logic, philosophy or pure reason, now taken to be, in a reduced form, Philosophy of mind/cognition, 2 powers of the mind and here he means memory, imagination for taste and aesthetic judgement or ‘spirit’ (Geist) or ‘high culture’ narrowly defined, 3 powers of the body – our corporeality – the material in human beings. We should be ‘purposively invigorated’. Kant promotes exercise within the limits of reason alone – that is, we should do mild exercise and sometimes with others (240). For example, he might consider the ‘fun-run’ as a form of sociable sociability as against the loneliness of the long-distance marathon runner. See Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 218–232, §5–12. 20 In Kant’s view, there is a duty to one’s health as an animal or corporeal being, that is to preserve oneself and not to make oneself unhealthy, maim oneself or commit suicide. Nor should one be lustful nor defile oneself; nor should one be a glutton nor a drunkard. As he says, ‘Lust is called unnatural if a man is aroused to it not by a real object but by his imagining it’ (220) and belongs to his more sceptical ideas about the imagination. This position is also against the background of Kant’s dictum that sexual pleasure should be brought under the umbrella of practical reason – that it should be orientated by a limiting capacity, not of desire, but of the other who is viewed as a person in their own right. In Kant’s view there is also a duty to oneself, in which one ought not lie for it goes

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against the dignity of our humanity, be servile because it goes against the grain of being a person, of his/her consciousness of him/herself as a rational person (230). This also means, for Kant that one ought not to be in the service of others; not curry favour; not compare; not seek recognition nor fame. One should also not be avaricious, greedy or mean-spirited. Nor should one be cruel to oneself, others or animals (238). Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 201. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 203–204. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 202. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 203. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 208. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 208. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 244. This practice can also contain and block a vice, especially if the vice is potentially turned into a maxim or a radical evil. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 236, §14–15. In this sense, his moral philosophy joins hands with his essay An Answer to the Question. See Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, §54, 115. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 236, §15. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 230, §11. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 233, §13. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 234, §13. Arendt, for example, following Socrates uses an idea of an internal dialogic ‘space’ and interlocutor to whom which and to whom one returns at night for moral introspection. See her The Life of the Mind, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. For Kant, moral introspection, for want of a better term, is available at all times and in all places. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 235, §13. Kierkegaard wishes to heighten a sense of anxiety whilst Kant wishes to relieve us from it. His position is also different to the Socrates’ maxim for self-knowledge of it is better to suffer a wrong rather than to cause one, a maxim that is also located within a critical response to the ‘conscience’ of the polis. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 236, §14, especially where he states that moral self-knowledge, ‘which seeks to penetrate into the depths (the abyss) of one’s heart that are quite difficult to fathom, is the beginning of all human wisdom’. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 265, §48. Kant states that ‘It is a duty to oneself as well as others not to isolate oneself but to use one’s moral perfection in social intercourse. While making oneself a fixed centre of one’s principles, one out to regard this circle drawn around one as also forming part of an all-inclusive circle of those, who, in their disposition, are citizens of the world … to cultivate a disposition of reciprocity – agreeableness, tolerance, mutual love and respect (affability and propriety), and so to associate the graces with virtue. To bring this about is itself a duty of virtue’. See also Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 178, §88. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 265, §48. To be sure, Kant constructs a homology between the moral and the political aspects of our sociable sociability through his notion of cosmopolitanism as a form of political-ethical sociability, which includes a disposition towards friendship. However, strictly speaking, cosmopolitanism comes under the category of Right: the cosmopolitan is a good citizen and a friend is a good person, and as they are of a different order and a mergence between the two collapses the gap and closes a tension between the political and the moral.

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38 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 383–384. 39 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 244, §24; See §23–33. See also my discussion of Kant’s view on love in Chapter 4. 40 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 251, §36; See Kant’s fuller discussion 251–254. 41 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 257–259, §42–44, §36. See also ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 482. 42 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 246, §28. The condition of mutuality is central here, which Kant attempts to place on universal and transcendental ground in the following way: [It] means [ ] lawgiving reason, which includes the whole species (and so myself as well) in its Idea of humanity as such, includes me as giving universal law along with all others in the duty of mutual benevolence, in accordance with the principle of equality, and permits you to be benevolent to yourself on the condition of you being benevolent to every other as well; for it is only in this way that your maxim (of beneficence) qualifies for a giving of universal law, the principle on which every law of duty is based. 245, §27 43 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 246–251, §29–35. 44 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 247, §30. This is also in contrast to Mauss’ argument in The Gift; Derrida, for example, is close to Kant here with his formulation of the gift that cannot be returned. See Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press, 1994. 45 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 248, §.32. 46 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 248–249, §32–33. See urkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life; Nietzsche, ‘Genealogy of Morals’, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche. 47 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 250–251, §34–35. 48 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 254, §37. 49 Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 254, §37. Italics added on ‘has no price, no equivalent for which the objects evaluated (aestimi) could be judged’. 50 See Plato, ‘Symposium’, in Plato Complete Works, translation A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, edited with introduction and notes by J. M. Cooper, Indianapolis, IN, Hackett Publishing Company, 1997, 457–505. Heller takes Kant’s lead here too. See her ‘Culture, or Invitation to Luncheon by Immanuel Kant’, in A Philosophy of History in Fragments, 1993: 136–175. 51 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 178, §88. 52 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 179, §88. His ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’ gives a more fulsome description of the importance of the paradigm of the meal together. 53 One can return to Kant’s ruminations on aesthetics here, more directly from an anthropological perspective rather than one determined by the division of the faculties, although with practical philosophy in mind. Given that Kant acknowledges the diversity of the senses, it can be suggested that a dinner party is the ‘space’ not only for conversation but also for practising, making and consuming the arts of smell and taste (with haute cuisine its high cultural form). It can be suggested too that the other senses – sight, sound and touch – also have their spaces for practice and cultivation. The art of practising seeing occurs through making and viewing visual arts including sculpture (with high art its high cultural form) in the space of a gallery; the art of practising sound occurs

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through music-making and reception or listening (with classical music its usual but no longer exclusively high cultural form) in the space of a concert; the art of practising touch or sensation occurs through clothing and haute couture is its high cultural form in the space of fashion house or even the department store (Kant would not be immune to the idea that touch can also occur erotically through the mutual enjoyment of sexual life in the real or metaphorical space of the bedroom, in his coy way of speaking). It could even be suggested that for Kant, in contrast to the first generation of the Frankfurt School, the cultural forms – high, low, mass – are actually not that important. What is important is practising and cultivating the arts of all of the senses and it is this that ‘contains’ the categories of the beautiful, humour and the sublime, even in relation to harmony and dissonance without reliance on either pure or practical reason. Instead of 'totality' or 'taste' aesthetics could be expansive yet limited to aestheticised sensibilities focussed on aesthetic creation, practice and reception. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 462. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 462. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 387–394; 451–452; ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 258 §44. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 387. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 388–399. Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 390. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View Kant summarises his sociable sociability of the dinner party as composing three stages/courses: narration, arguing, jesting. See Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 181, §88. See also Peter Murphy, ‘The Comic Political Condition; Agnes Heller’s philosophy of laughter and liberty’, in Critical Theories and the Budapest School, 239–261. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 261–264, §46–47; ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 482. See also Heller, ‘The Beauty of Friendship’, The Southern Atlantic Quarterly, 97:1, 1998: 5–22. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 263, §47. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 263, §47; ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 481, 404, 380; ‘Anthropology Friedländer’, 75. Kant, ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 262, §46. As Kant states, a completely perfect friendship, where one confesses to the other all his faults and shortcomings and as it were, reveals his whole heart, would not last long in the world. We must always be somewhat reserved. Fantasts in principle are enthusiasts. ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 404

see also ‘Anthropology Friedländer’, where he states, ‘such enthusiasm produces great excesses, so than one who is enthused by this idea [for example patriotism, for Kant, JR] sacrifices both friendship as well as natural connection, and everything’, 95; see also 159–164. 64 Friendship establishes a framework for a common point of reference, as well as a framework for sanctions, limits and reflective judgement. The field of friendship is both serious and magnanimous, and thus provides a counter-model to cultures of both shame and mean-spiritedness. Those who pass through the relation of friendship are opened by it, but in a way that enhances, rather than reduces the social actors, especially in terms of their freedom and autonomy – on both sides of the relation. The result of this detached form of modern friendship is a tension between mutual involvement and indifference. Friendship under these conditions of autonomy and distancing, then, relinquishes the presumption of

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similarity; rather, it requires a reflective judgement through which the contingency of the intercourse, as well as its nuances, joys and disappointments can be reflected on and learnt from. In this way, Kant and later Agnes Heller can both argue that even in the condition of contingent modernity, social life and action have not been emptied of relational content and depth, concrete orientative practices or meaning because friendships matter and continue across both a life time and the distance of space. Friendship belongs to the complex and unfinished condition of the human being and thus the possibility that there are manifold and competing dimensions to him or her. Like Kant’s view, for Heller, we too are flawed creatures and friendship can stand alongside the flaws and even outshine them. In Heller’s view, though, peoples’ lives in modernity exist in the context of many contingencies that are dissimilar. Modernity is pluralistic, and this pluralism and dissimilarity changes rather than disables or dismantles the paradigm of friendship. In Heller’s view, it is no longer necessary to make a choice between truth and friendship in Plato’s sense. Neither do we need to side with the Aristotelean version even though there is much to be said for it. The Aristotelean one in her view is outmoded and does not speak to moderns. Modernity is grounded on difference rather than similarities and this is nowhere more so than in the friendships that moderns have and make. In addition to Kant’s luncheon, she takes Shakespeare’s Hamlet as her modern paradigm and argues that the more modern life unfolds, the more likely it becomes that differences, sometimes grave differences of opinion and judgment, will develop between even the best of friends. Truthfulness requires us to speak such differences freely, and friendship requires the perseverance of absolute mutual trust. One need not choose between justice and friendship, for friendship not only allows justice, but encourages it. Heller, ‘The Beauty of Friendship’, 18 For Heller, friendship is combined with truth, differences, depth, appreciation and emotional attachment. For Heller, friendship is beautiful. This places friendship in the arena of beauty, not as an aesthetic category, but as a category of relationality and goodness. See also Heller, ‘Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of the Artwork’, in Aesthetics and Modernity Essays by Agnes Heller, edited by John Rundell, Lanham, MD, Lexington Books, 2011, 49–66; Sergio Mariscal, ‘The Image of the Good Friend in Heller: A Bridge between the Everyday and Transcendence’, in Critical Theories and the Budapest School, edited by Jonathan Pickle and John Rundell, London, Routledge, 262–282; Frencesco Alberoni, Friendship, Leiden, Brill, 2017. 65 Kant’s addressee here is not the political subject but the man or woman of everyday life who is not committed to naivety, stupidity or radical evil. He addresses his moral philosophy to subjects who can learn to think and act morally for themselves and with a regard to and for others, that is, to subjects who can become persons.

7

Difficult selves, imagination and blurred sketches of freedom

[Our] task is [] the hardest of all; indeed, its complete solution is impossible, for from such crooked wood as [human beings are] made of, nothing perfectly straight can be built.1

Difficult selves and schematic imaginings Whilst it is often suggested that Kant’s subject-citizen-person is only a benign subject who, in the context of unsociable sociability, politely acknowledges strangers on the boulevard of promised yet unattainable dreams, my study indicates this is far from Kant’s intention, as well as the intention of my own reconstruction of his work. As Kant’s ‘Shakespeareanism’ and notions of the beautiful and the sublime indicate, his impure anthropology presents us with a series of human creations and blurred sketches that are more nuanced and multi-dimensional than what appear at first sight. I have been arguing throughout this study that Kant’s work can be understood from the aspect of the productive-schematicising imagination (the mystery ‘X’) in both functional and non-functional dimensions through which blurred sketches, especially those of freedom, are created. Our difficult, phenomenological selves are the permanent contexts for these imaginings and blurred sketches. We are not a subject without both. These two features or aspects of our subjectivity do not amount to a unity in his work but create tensions within it. In other words, I argue that there are two centres of gravity within Kant’s work – one that revolves around his anthropology and the other that revolves around the faculty of the imagination, even within the Critique of Pure Reason. In many ways the Critique of Pure Reason is the central text for my argument especially when combined with Anthropology Mrongovius, rather than the Critique of Judgment. As we have seen in the analysis of the Critique of Pure Reason, the tension between schematicism qua functionalisation and schematicism qua non-functionalisation has the effect of keeping the issues of the invention or creation of concepts, formulations, figurative schemata or fictions alive. It is thus through schematicism that blurred sketches are created that can never be fully expressed in concepts, images or symbols.

Sketches of freedom  159 We navigate the schematicisms and antinomies that we create in dense ways in order to make sense of them. These dense ways take the form of what Kant investigates as aesthetic sensibilities that connect us to our phenomenal selves. The notions of expansion, harmony (or unity) and dissonance remain central mobilising concepts for Kant’s ruminations and continuously find their way into his later works including his Anthropological Lectures, the Critique of Judgment and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Judgements have recourse to blurred sketches which themselves are not secure. In this sense, and more importantly the transcendental moment is not identified as a particular procedure of thinking and evaluating. The transcendental moment is better described as the creation of a blurred sketch that encapsulates our capacity to invent or compose ideas and images, think, create, participate in and critique social arrangements and relational forms. The interaction between our difficult selves, our sociabilities and the productiveschematicising imagination requires the creation of blurred sketches or monograms through which evaluations, judgements and responsibilities can be created and practised. As Kant well knows we may be transcendentally imaginative, but imaginings can only be articulated and co-constituted in the phenomenological-empirical relations with ourselves and one another. As such and because subjects – difficult selves – create blurred sketches they also create boundaries between self and other that establish where those boundaries might be and whether they should ever be established or even crossed. Blurred sketches evoke boundary formations, gaps, transgressions and can question the ways in which subjectivity and intersubjectivity are created in the first place.2 These blurred sketches can remain just that – blurred – or given concrete social form according to different historical contexts. There are, of course, many blurred sketches which we can create and for which boundaries are formed. We call on and navigate these blurred sketches – from cosmological ones, to redemptive ones, to instrumentalising ones, to ones that give the call for community, or even equality. An activity of critical judgement occurs when one blurred sketch of our existence is thrown into relief by another blurred sketch. As I have argued throughout, the blurred sketch that is central to Kant’s programme in the context of his anthropology is that of the universalising category of freedom and the release from self-incurred tutelage. For Kant, what is at stake is not function but his critique of domination. His enduring question is: what is freedom? For Kant, two other questions flow from this one: who are we? What do we create? As we have seen Kant moves away from the formal laws of freedom articulated in the Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason because they are unworkable within this more complex picture. Kant cannot entirely maintain his position of transcendental freedom without revisiting and expanding his notion of the productive imagination and returning to his anthropological sensibilities. This constellation of imagining and

160  Sketches of freedom anthropological context occurs not only in relation to boundaries, but also to objects of experience, aesthetic taste, politics in the context of unsociable sociability, and good conduct or sociable sociability. We create actions from the most republican, cosmopolitan, friendly and even loving, to the most monstrous and radically evil – and in our judgements about these creations we oscillate between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds, and between the faculties of the imagination, understanding and reason. Out of this creation and oscillation, rather than orientation per se, emerge possibilities of freedom in both their harmony and dissonance. This standpoint of the creation of blurred sketches of freedom is the departure for Kant’s critical theorising where the universal works through the particular in often unexpected ways that might speak to freedom. This standpoint also enables unfreedom to be criticised even though it may be unable to prevent it. As Kant well knew concepts are always inadequate to the task of preventing their opposites. In the end there are only antinomies that cannot be resolved. Nonetheless, by hopefully calling on a blurred sketch of freedom in all of its hues and beginning from our imaginings and phenomenological existences we imagine and ready ourselves for critique.

Blurred sketches of freedom Blurred sketches of freedom evoke critical social spaces and Kant develops five of them that are indicative of the complexity of the modern world. These spaces are thinking critically about categories, creating aesthetics and reaching aesthetic judgements, arguing in public spheres, in making republican politics, and developing good relations with oneself and with others. A release from self-incurred tutelage can occur in all of them. A blurred sketch of freedom in any of its forms gives impetus to a greater range and activity of critique as we often know when we are or become unfree, instrumentalised, anthropologically impoverished or diminished. Let’s briefly reiterate each critical space. Having set his anthropologically perceived parameters for positing ‘a release from self-incurred tutelage’, Kant can argue that genuine knowledge of the objective world is a release from self-incurred tutelage or a release from wild imaginings, inclinations, everyday knowledge, tradition, cosmologies and faulty philosophical knowledge. Kant posits that transcendental critique occurs through the mobilisation of categories and concepts that are organised and function according to the rules of the faculty of understanding. Thinking is knowledge by means of concepts. It is a process of critico-representative critical theorising which, as we have seen, takes Kant to the faculty of the imagination and not simply to the faculties of understanding and reason. The Critique of Pure Reason conceals a nugget that is often overlooked or under scrutinised. This nugget is Kant’s ruminations on the productive imagination, especially when he terms its products schemata and figurations.

Sketches of freedom  161 In the central and core Chapter 3 I argued that in the A and B Deductions in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant speaks of the imagination as functional schemata and as a non-functional figuration, monogram or blurred sketch. Whilst both functionalising and non-functionalising synthesis are transcendental because they take place a priori, figurative synthesis has the unique power of creating figures that are not necessarily useful or bound by utility. Functional and non-functional representations, images, categories, concepts are inventions or creations that cannot be reduced to external objective referents, acts of combination or memory. They are not simply combined, interpreted, or remembered. Non-functional figurative synthesis, in particular, is Kant’s insightful and fertile attempt to capture the indeterminate, unknowable, even unfathomable and spontaneous aspect of creativity itself. Here, the creative, productive imagination is expansive. The non-functionalised monograms and blurred sketches that are created are the fruit of the ontological fact that we are schematising and antinomic animals. We notice the antinomies and oppositions that cannot be fully articulated or ‘mapped’, much less resolved. We combine and connect the natural and the non-natural, the unsociable and sociable, sense with non-sense. Kant’s notion of aesthetic activity is an activity without a function. Unlike cognition, it is an activity without an interest. However, as we have also seen, an idea of aesthetic creation only enters when Kant discusses the genius and the sublime in the Critique of Judgment. Yet Kant defers the problem of aesthetic creativity throughout this work. Kant analyses aesthetics as a problem of oscillation, dissonance and incommensurate communicability between the two fertile faculties of reason and imagination. For Kant, the sublime combines limitlessness with either awe or fear and trembling to produce a world of unease in the face of an imputed sense of the infinite and a tyrannous dominating power. The condition of sublimity is one of restlessness and increased oscillation, of dissonance. The sense of unease, increased oscillation, dissonance and agitation is central to Kant’s formulation of the sublime and his anthropology. In Kant’s hands and from the vantage point of the productive or creative imagination, aesthetic creation points to the power to expand beyond the limits of not only functional schematicism but also our phenomenologically centred selves. Yet, the notion of the beautiful attains a systemic and methodological priority over the sublime in Kant’s aesthetics because of the way he posits a harmonic transcendentality between the faculties. In Kant’s formulation, the imagination has a precise function within the category of the beautiful – imagination and the understanding oscillate together in a free play that presupposes a communicability without a purpose. As we have seen Kant captures the activity of the beautiful through the activity of poetry, which works through what he terms the voluntary, productive imagination in the Anthropology Mrongovius. In the Critique of Judgment and when combined with his anthropology, the beautiful additionally sets the scene for Kant’s formulations of love and friendship.

162  Sketches of freedom As we have also seen, the beautiful also sets the tone for a different context altogether – a political one through Kant’s idea of communicability. Here, though, beauty unsurprisingly gives way to argument, politics and power. Argument/politics/power and beauty/friendship though are not connected, nor should they be; they are not the same thing, for Kant. Whilst they share his version of Enlightenment – ‘to have the courage to use your own understanding without the guidance of another’3 they are not the same in that they have different aims: political and moral ones, and Kant legitimately goes to great length to try and keep these two aims separate. Kant’s narrative of political freedom is one of constrained reflexive freedom from a republican-cosmopolitan point of view. This occurs through the formation of critical public spheres and republican nation states constituted through the constitutional ground of civil society. Kant portrays the public sphere as one of unfettered and critical argument, that is, intellectualcritical freedom, for him, in the form of books, but now it could be refer to digitalised media. Kant argues that restrictions of opinion and scholarly works and their publication is a form of censorship. There should be no beautiful harmonisation or communicability in public spheres; there should simply be spaces of public argument, dissent and discord set apart from the spaces of the household, market, the state and aesthetics. Yet, Kant notices a tension between this and the other kind of political freedom. As we have seen, in Kant’s view, a distinction between intellectual and political freedom is a clash between the reflexive-critical notion of freedom and the political-cosmopolitan one. Political (un)sociable sociability is constituted through forms of power that we have analysed above in terms of potestas (domination) or potentia (conflict). Kant analyses and critiques these types of power as either asymmetrical (bi-lateral) or symmetrical (omnilateral). As we have seen through the play and the character Macbeth as well as Kant’s work, both forms of asymmetrical and symmetrical power have their plots, coups, strategies and emotional economies of envy, cowardice and courage. Potestas or potentia can be either despotic or democratic and often stand in tension with one another. When power is comported as potestas it can take the forms of paternalism, patrimonialism, slavery, colonialism, racism, militarism and Caesarism or Bonapartism. More recently it has been created in the form of redemptive and Jacobin politics, or instrumentalised and/or governmentalised through Executive control. These asymmetrical or bi-lateral forms of power and control may also develop a totalitarian ethos of not only centralised control but also the absolute exclusion and extermination of one group as against another. When analysing and critiquing power as potentia Kant argues that social actors create and comport themselves as mutually autonomous selves through the media of books, money and contracts (law), republican constitutions, the federal dispersal of power from the centre and contestation. Moreover, his federal-dispersal model refers to the circulation of symmetrical power between republican states. A federal relationship within and

Sketches of freedom  163 between states is a form of dispersed balance of power in which each region or nation has its own autonomy limited and transcendentally grounded in the form of a blurred sketch of freedom. Kant’s image of cosmopolitanism encompasses his complex formulation of political autonomy that includes refugees who have sought protection from conflict and migrants and is undergirded by an attitude that befits the (modern) human condition of being a citizen of the world, or really for him, a citizen for all humanity. Yet, as we and Kant have noticed these politically orientated blurred sketches of freedom often stand in paradoxical and antinomic relation with one another. The legislature often clashes with Executive and the public sphere often clashes with both. National democratic politics often clash with cosmopolitanism in all of its guises. Democratic republics live these antinomies on a daily basis and are constituted by them. In other words, democratic politics are antinomic by their very nature. Nonetheless, the blurred sketch of a common humanity undergirds them. It gives sense and meaning to the lived experience and transcendent horizon of these antinomies and provides a boundary and constitutes their outer limit.4 The heritage of our common humanity also gives this-sided depth to our self-creation as phenomenological subjects and persons. Rather than the category of the subject, Kant’s category of the person as beautiful and good is internal to moral sociable sociability. Personhood occurs in the context of the subject we are, that is, schematically, non-functionally, even fearfully imaginative, disagreeable and wrongdoing. We are both subject and person, for Kant. Orientating ourselves to agreeability, beauty and the good is no easy task, but as Kant notes we should not reside only within the ‘first order’ conditions of ‘wild’ imaginings, feelings, everyday habits or tradition. Against this backdrop the categorical imperative of not using another as mere means but viewing him/her as an end in him/herself becomes the key for filling out and giving substance to the blurred sketch of freedom in terms of Kant’s moral philosophy. The categorical imperative points to the possibility of a life mutually shared with others, and which others too can share. As already mentioned, it has affinities with the aesthetic idea of the beautiful as it presupposes a purposiveness without purpose, that is, a purposiveness with neither functional nor strategic intent. As we have seen, Kant’s construction of a vocation to oneself appears to be subject-orientated but is actually orientated towards our good relations with others. Moral sociable sociability is imperfect, complex and multidimensional and includes our corporeal lives, our disagreeables as well as our convivial and conversational forms. Moral sociable sociability is a cultivation of reciprocity, agreeableness, tolerance, mutual love and respect. It is a vocation because of our common humanity – to be with our fellow creatures and to share in this common humanity. Kant’s blurred sketch of moral freedom in each of these ways is universalistic in the midst of particularity. We establish and have particular friends and loves, but this particularity is informed by a universality – the blurred sketch of our common humanity and the categorical

164  Sketches of freedom imperative that is part and parcel of it. This combination of particularity and universality is paradoxically both expansive and limiting. For Kant, beautiful friendship makes us expansive and indicates a sociality that may be constituted and expressed in a simultaneous act of self-suspension and involvement in others outside and beyond oneself. It is the conjunction of respect and benevolence or mutual love, universality and particularity.5 This space of moral sociability can also be a limiting one of non-interference in the life and integrity of the other. If this is the case, then this space can be referred to through another notion of autonomy as ‘letting the other be without interference’. This particular notion of autonomy, derived in this instance from Adorno’s positive notion of freedom, allows the other to remain unknown.6 It is also a re-statement of Kant’s notion of beauty as a type of freedom qua ‘purposiveness without purpose’. This is a space in which one can wait. It is also a space in which one need not assume a circuit of giving and receiving. Sometimes gifts, even of friendship are in no need of ‘the return’. Sometimes gifts are simply given. It is thus a gap in which modalities of love, pleasure, friendship and responsibility may be created in which the other is both known and unknown, in contrast to the technical-scientific and power-saturated spaces and gaps, which aim for control, transparency and complete knowability. ‘Purposiveness without a purpose’ is part of a sensuous-imaginary life where the different sociable sociabilities of love and friendship with their responsibilities to others as persons are lived as a way of life that is orientated towards the future. This future-orientation is not the fast, busy, technically instituted times of progress or success, or even the argumentativeparliamentary times of publics and politics, but is a slow time – the time for different kinds of imaginings, reflection, contemplation, of relationships and non-relationships with human subjects, even ‘nature’ and non-human animals.7 In a debt to Kant, we could say that sociable sociability and the responsibilities that it entails is sapere aude, but transposed as the courage to take responsibility for one’s own imaginings and sociabilities and overcome one’s impulse for control. Importantly though, and although Kant does not say as much, by leaving open the space of freedom and critique, the best that we might come up with is we do not or cannot know.

Crooked and incomplete Even though blurred sketches are indeterminate creations that are both transcendentally and empirically contingent, nonetheless they provide the criteria for judgements through which everyday habit, tradition or other competing blurred sketches can be critiqued and even irrationalised. As has been emphasised throughout this study, Kant’s blurred sketch that provides the universalistically orientated criteria for judgement is the one of freedom. However, as has been intimated Kant conflates the universal with the transcendental. If the transcendental moment is the productive imagination,

Sketches of freedom  165 then the blurred sketch of a universalising notion of freedom is a contingent creation that is historically and socially specific. Yet it becomes the one that Kant refers to for his critiques of domination. Blurred sketches of freedom can become universalisable and universalising creations, and as such becomes points of orientation from which one could critique other blurred sketches and patterns of action. Kant already knows that the modern world is ecumenical and heterodox, autonomous and heteronomous. He knows that it is constitutively plural and multi-dimensional. In the face of this multi-dimensionality there is a burden, and it is the burden of the responsibility towards blurred sketches of freedom. Modernity, in fact, generates a paradox for this burden – freedoms are blurred sketches that cannot be grounded; they can only be articulated substantively. Whilst difficult, discordant and even fearful, we can create and navigate our self-created blurred sketches of freedom and these sketches can be drawn in any of the ways described above – thinking critically with its antinomies and paradoxes; argument in public spheres and decentred republics with a cosmopolitan ethos; moral judgements and the sociable sociability of friendships. There are undoubtedly many more sketches of freedom. Each may make us better human beings amidst our very human condition.8 We can create blurred sketches of freedom and remain within and accept their antinomies and their limits or we can leap out of them at our peril. Contra Hamlet, conscience does not make cowards of us all. In Kant’s view we can create and navigate the full day of practical and moral creative imagining and reasoning, convivial and sharable sociable sociability and not the night of secrecy, deception and isolation, nor the dusk of shame, ugliness, disgust, domination and evil. Often, though, there are many nights or dusky days that are created and navigated. Whilst the images of autonomous freedom and sociable sociability are suggestive of a self-mastery that is not a mastery over others, Kant’s anthropology leaves intact often irresolvable tensions and antinomies. In our quests for instrumentalising control, power and even cruelties, as well as loves, friendships and autonomy these tensions and antinomies occur between both our phenomenal selves in all of our chords and discords, colours and temperaments, and our productiveschematic imagining and reasoning selves. We are complex, imperfect and never complete beings.

Notes 1 Kant ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, Sixth Thesis (1784), from Immanuel Kant, On History, trans. Lewis White Beck, NY, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963. 2 This position is in contrast to strong intersubjectivist paradigms that argue that there is a functionally, linguistically or recognitively determined continuum that constitutes both subjectivity and intersubjectivity. I have critiqued this position and expanded on these formulations in ‘Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory’, 307–343.

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3 Kant, An Answer to the Question. 4 The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 presented a series of paradoxes which at the time of writing have not been resolved and may be if and when a vaccine is created (not discovered). One paradox was represented by an attempt by some but not all national governments to invoke an ‘inclusive-cosmopolitan’ ethos towards its own citizens in the form of public health policy, lockdowns, and subsidies where conservative or neo-liberal governments became Keynesian ones. For most countries at least during the so-called ‘first wave’, the health of the overall national population was viewed as paramount (a common ‘national’ humanity) rather than national populations being segmented into the survival of the fittest versus the non-survival of the vulnerable in the manner of social Darwinism (herd mentality). Lockdowns, which might be viewed as the freedom or right to be or remain healthy or in Kant’s terms, have a healthy life, require balancing acts, especially between the blurred sketches of freedom and life, both of which are legitimate and should not outweigh one another. Antinomies have been on display that require intelligence, wisdom and perspicacity, even though they may not have been always present. The lockdowns stood in antinomic relation with other freedoms such as a freedom of movement, freedom of social contact (closeness/distance) and especially the freedom to protest as against an empty space of the embodied public sphere (the greatest antinomy). However, dissent has not gone away – it moved, as it has for a long time now – online to digital media platforms. Amidst all of this constraint, limitation and self- and social responsibilities, especially in the form of social distancing became mobilising themes from a cosmopolitan perspective. The lockdowns also meant international and intra-national border closures that paradoxically went against the grain of the transnational cosmopolitanism of open borders for the movement of peoples. Trade has remained largely unaffected – unless, again, it involved the movement of goods and some people, for example, in the form of reduced numbers of international students, the migration of transnational labour or tourism. Antinomy, as Kant always knew, is the ‘new’ normal, but not so new from the perspective of democratic political histories. 5 Marcel Mauss, The Gift the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies; Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I, Counterfeit Money. See Rundell, ‘Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory: Imagining Subjects in Tension’. As Kant notices in his own way and as we have discussed, there is also the sociability of love, where its sociability and responsibility is to the unique singularity of the other. It includes an erotic intensity that may or may not be reciprocated, which leads to both the comedy and tragedy of love. Once requited and a love relationship is formed the lovers over time – love has its own temporal horizon – often do not need to account for the foibles and even irritations that each bring to the love relation. These foibles and irritations can often result in resounding laughter rather than tears. Even though Kant does not say as much, love entails an expansion of sociable sociability that includes intimacy, care and concern beyond self-centredness and control, as it involves the decentring of the self. Nonetheless, as Kant makes clear for him at least, sociability of friendship is different to that of love. The sociability of friendship assumes a more or less condition of freely chosen mutuality and reciprocity where we can also act freely and decently qua good conduct in relation to ourselves and others. It includes the norms of loyalty, personal truth-telling and the capacity to live with the differences between another and oneself. Friendship can endure over time – often longer than love. Love and friendship refer to the self-recognition and self-imposition of limits, where self-limitation becomes an act of responsibility, including as even Kant notices, to other non-human sentient beings.

Sketches of freedom 167 6 See Adorno, Minima Moralia, London, Verso, 1974; Martin Seel, ‘Adorno’s Contemplative Ethics’, in Contemporary Perspectives in Social and Critical Theory, edited by J. Rundell, D. Petherbridge, J. Bryant, J. Hewitt, and J. Smith, Leiden, Brill, 2004, 259–270. 7 Agnes Heller, A Theory of History where she discusses the idea of planetarian consciousness and responsibility. See also her ‘The Beauty of Friendship’. 8 Kant, ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’, in Kant Lectures on Anthropology, 480. Kant also adds another maxim, that of dietics which includes learning to eat healthily, mild exercise, sleeping properly and living a fulfilled life.

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Index

absolute 52, 64 action, outer and inner dimensions of 107–110 actors, political 17–18 Adorno, Theodor 34, 100, 164 aesthetics 37, 61, 78–79, 81–82, 137, 160–162 alienation 112, 123 ‘The Analytic of [?] the Sublime’ (Kant) 85 ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (Kant) 2, 15, 16, 67, 119 anthropology 4, 67, 94, 95, 100, 110, 158–159, 161, 165; and cognition 49–51; of difficult selves 6, 107; of practical reason 2; of sociabilities 82; of the subject 2; practical 78; with imaginative intent 1–2 Anthropological Lectures (Kant) 159 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant) 3, 5–6, 21, 122, 159 ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’ (Kant) 21, 34, 35, 37, 51, 57, 85–86, 158, 161 antinomy 64, 65, 67, 144 appearances 56–59 Arendt, Hannah 79, 117; Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy 17; and political actors 17–18 argument 11, 38, 80, 96, 113, 126; critical 162; political 137; public 16–17, 100, 123, 147, 162, 165; reflexive 116 aristocracy 118–119 author/publisher/reader 113–114 authoritarianism 16, 38 authority 15–16, 117; central 117; Executive 123–125; external 28, 61, 123, 144; legislative 122; moral 125; ruler’s 119; sovereign 121; supreme 126

autonomy 29, 32, 64, 99, 114, 126, 139, 164, 165; between mutual strangers 123; distinction between heteronomy 115; natural 121, 163; political 107, 163; reasoned 15; republican 100; and taste 96 barbarism 14, 110 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 35, 80 beautiful 37, 84–85, 141, 142, 161–162; and aesthetic creation 86; aesthetic idea of 137, 163; and sublime 2, 79, 158 beauty 80, 85, 139, 162–164 Being and Time (Heidegger) 3 benevolence 28, 145–146, 148, 164 books 18, 21, 112–114, 162 Burke, Edmund 78, 80 Capital (Marx) 112 Castoriadas, Cornelius 125, 126; The Imaginary Institution of Society 4 causality 66; distinction between freedom 63–65; indeterminate 63; mechanistic 63, 64; natural 63, 65; of natural law 64 censorship 17, 162 certainty 49, 51, 52, 91 character 140–141; predisposition to 142, 145, 149; see also personhood citizens 16; active 119, 121; good 21, 24, 143; independence of 120; and power 24 citizenship 98–99, 122, 124 civil condition 117, 120 civil society 14, 18, 98, 116, 123, 125–126, 162; critico-reflexive public and 15–18; juridicial notion of 18; republican version of 17 civilisation 12, 13–14, 110, 142 civilising process 14–15

180 Index cognition: and anthropology 49–51; daylight of 51–56; epistemology of 54; intellectualisation of 15 colonisation 110, 113–114, 116, 121 colonialism 162; critique of 110, 116, 118, 120, 122 communicability 79, 81, 82, 95, 100, 162; aesthetic 78–91, 95–100; incommensurate 86, 161; meaning of 96; universal 97 composition 36, 37 concepts 3, 15, 37, 50–58, 60, 67, 95–98, 107, 125, 140, 158–161; brute 55; determinate 62; empirical 83; expanded 87; harmonization between objects 82; of reason 34; paradoxical 55; pure intellectual 112; pure sensible 59 conduct: good 2, 6, 27–28, 68, 100, 137, 140–143; moral 28, 31 ‘Conjectural Beginning of Human History’ (Kant) 13 connections, wide 145–150 conscience 143–145, 167 consensus 78, 140 constitution 18, 121, 125–126; civil 14, 119, 121; democratic 13; omnilateral 123; republican 162; and Right 119 constitutionality 116, 125 constraint 15, 62, 96, 108, 143; external free 109–110; internal free 109; of rules 86; self-constraint 110 contempt 28, 146, 147 contingency 26, 27, 65, 66, 67, 95; of power 117 contract 21, 16, 100, 112–115, 119, 121, 123; civil 125; juridicial 31 conversation 141, 142, 145, 148–150 conviviality 123, 147 cosmopolitanism 4–5, 6, 116, 118, 120–122, 149, 163; federal 117; political 145 cosmos 15, 65 cowardice 15, 24, 28, 162 creation, aesthetic 79–82; and beautiful 86; and dynamically sublime 91–95; and mathematically sublime 89–91; white notes/black notes 85–89 creativity 13–14, 60, 79, 91; aesthetic 81; of the imagination 36–37, 61, 87 Critique of Judgment (Kant) 2, 3, 17, 60, 78–82, 86, 95–6, 99, 107, 137, 139, 140, 141, 148, 158, 159, 161; ‘The Analytic and the Sublime’ 85;

‘Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment’ 82; First Introduction 82, 139; Preface 82; Second Introduction 82; three directions of 78–82 Critique of Practical Reason 3, 65–67, 98, 107, 138, 139, 158 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 35, 49–51, 54–56, 60–62, 64–67, 78, 80, 85–87, 95, 99, 139, 158–161; B Deduction 58, 61, 161; Third Antinomy 63–64, 66 critique, transcendental 54, 80, 161 culture 14, 98, 147; moral 15, 93 ‘The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding” (Kant) 56 democracy 118; and eloquence 37; parliamentary 38; participatory 11, 119; representative 11; republican 78 Democracy in America (de Tocqueville) 18 Derrida, Jacques 50 Descartes, René 50 desire 22–23, 25, 29, 33–34, 94, 108, 145, 146, 150 despotism 119; censorial 17; internationalised 121 determination 67, 91; humankind’s 98; of an intuition 58; of choice 109, 141; sufficient 64 ‘Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment’ (Kant) 82 dignity 144, 146–147 disgust 27, 28, 165 displeasure 88–89, 91, 108 dispossession 111, 114–115 dissonance 33, 37, 39, 53, 86, 95, 138, 159, 150, 161 The Doctrine of Right (Kant) 67, 108, 109 The Doctrine of Virtue (Kant) 67, 100, 109, 139, 142 dreams 36–37, 158 Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Kant) 27 Durkheim, Émile 125, 126, 146 Dutch Republic 118 education 141–142 eloquence 37–38 empiricism 15, 52, 54, 55 Enlightenment 1–2, 5, 12, 14–16, 35, 62–63, 92–93, 95, 113, 126, 162; definition 13; version of freedom 62 enthusiasm 94, 149

Index  181 envy 24, 28, 145, 162 evil 27, 28, 66, 98, 145, 165; actions 32; fear of 92; maxim of 29; radical 29, 125, 142 exchanges, free and contractual condition of 110–116 Executive 116, 117, 162–163; power of 119, 123–126 existence: noumenal 2, 3, 6, 109; phenomenal 109, 137, 140, 142, 145, 159, 165 experience 14, 59, 64, 83, 118; aesthetic 83; completed 64; empirical 64; and empirical knowledge 52; human 95; objects of 53–54, 55, 65, 82, 160; of agitation 88; of time and space 49 fame 23, 24, 29, 108, 147 fantasy 8, 36 fear 28, 79, 85, 91–94, 137–138, 140, 141, 144, 161 federalism 118, 120–121 feeling, moral 39, 93–94, 143 fine art 79, 86 focus imaginarius 67 Foucault, Michel 11 freedom 1, 2, 5, 6–7, 13, 14, 15, 21, 51, 87, 92; and antinomy 67; autonomous 81, 96, 99, 100; blurred sketches of 6, 100, 107, 109, 110, 114, 115, 123; capacity for 3; and communication of rational judgments 95; concept of 66–67; constrained reflexive 107; distinction between causality 63–65; distinction between Nature 74; Enlightenment version of 62; ethical maxim of 31; human beings and 66; and imagination 4; inner 143; intellectual 17, 18; moral 140; negative 18, 108–109; norm of 78; normative condition of 123; of choice 108; of people to one another 120; political 17–18, 52, 138, 162; politicalcosmopolitan notion of 18; positive 108–109; reflexive-critical notion of 18; republican 99; and Rousseau 11; to act politically 18, 21; to act reflexively 107–110; to cognize 49, 107; to make aesthetic judgements 107; to think critically 6, 7, 18, 21, 107; transcendental idea of 62–68, 99, 138; triple-warrant of 81; within moral rules 140

freedom, moral 95, 139–140; blurred sketch of 163; with regard to oneself 142–145; with regard to others 145–150 French revolution 11, 119 friendship 2, 96, 100, 107, 143–144, 148–150, 161–162, 164–165 functionalisation 61, 158 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 146 genius 32, 86–87, 95, 161 goodness 84, 141 God 50, 92, 93, 125 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 29 government: branches of 18; republican 6, 15, 27, 120–121 gratitude 28, 146 Gregor, Mary 116–117, 123 Habermas, Jürgen 123 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 22 happiness 30, 62, 97–98, 108, 146 harmonisation 16–17, 86; beautiful 162; between concepts and objects 82; experience of 97 harmony 37, 96, 137; disinterested 82–85; double 83–84; and poetry 38 Hegel, G.W.F. 119, 123; Phenomenology of Spirit 111; Philosophy of Right 123 Heidegger, Martin 123; Being and Time 3; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics 4 Heller, Agnes 123 heteronomy 126; distinction between autonomy 115 history 32, 98; philosophy of 100, 126 Hobbes, Thomas 120; Leviathan 117 hospitality 117, 122–123 human condition 2, 5, 7, 12, 49, 61, 66, 68, 92, 95; double-sided 138; impurities of 67; modern 163; Shakespearian observations of 21–32 human beings 32, 50; feeling 108; and freedom 66; inter-related aspects of 140–141; and nature 83; phenomenal condition of 33 humanity 14, 81, 92, 138, 144, 146–147; common 122, 145, 163; universal right of 122, 137 humankind 3, 12, 15, 28, 97–98, 111, 113, 142 Hume, David 15, 50, 52, 80 hypotyposis 87, 91, 94

182 Index ‘I’ 35, 53; anthropological 3; selfpositioning 52; tripartite 3, 5 Idea, aesthetic 87, 96, 97, 99–100; of the beautiful 137, 163 ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’ (Kant) 13, 108, 122 ‘Idea of Universal History from the Point of View of a Citizen of the World’ (Kant) 98 Idealism 54–55 Idealists 50, 52 The Imaginary Institution of Society (Castoriadas) 4 imagination 1, 3, 33, 34, 55–56, 161; and beautiful 84; compositional power of 37, 51, 55; creative 80, 82, 93–94; creative power of 4, 86; creativity of 36–37, 61, 87; empirical 57; and freedom 4; involuntary productive 36; and knowledge 56; non-functional 88; non-functional schematising 4, 140; power of 4, 24, 35–37, 55, 57, 59, 86; productive 107, 108; reproductive 4, 35, 56–57; and sublime 86; synthesising 2; and transcendental synthesis 4, 57, 60; and understanding 84–85; voluntary and involuntary power of 35; voluntary productive 37, 85 imagination, productive 2, 6, 8, 50, 80–81, 85–91, 94–95, 97–99, 108, 125–126, 137, 141, 159–161, 164; compositional power of 51; creative 61; involuntary power of 36–37; and mystery X 56–62; voluntary power of 37 imagining 1, 144; and schematic, difficult selves 158–160; wild 34–39, 139, 140, 150, 163 immaturity 15; political 111; selfincurred 13 impurity 50–51 inclination 27, 34, 35, 38, 108, 143–144, 150, 160 indetermination 50, 99 infinity, concept of 89–90 insanity 36 instinct 12, 15, 34 institutions 24; educational 142; political 99, 107; of power 118; of republican democracy 78; of science 78 intersubjectivity 1, 21, 32, 159 intuitions 49, 52–54, 57, 97

inventions 37, 58, 60, 61, 161 ‘Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?’ (Kant) 13 isolation 13, 22, 165 The Jäsche Logic (Kant) 4–5 judgement 3, 32, 81, 84, 92; a priori principles 82; aesthetic 79, 82, 88, 91, 107, 160; determinative 82; good judgement 6, 29, 38, 91, 142, 148, 150; harmonious 82; of the beautiful 85; peculiarity of 82; reflective 83; teleological 98 judgements 159; about taste 6, 78, 80, 82; aesthetic 6, 78–80, 82; analytic 54; cognitive 53, 82; moral 137; of the sublime 85; synthetic 54–56 judging faculty 17, 82, 86, 93–94, 137, 139, 147, 149 judiciary 18, 118, 124 justice 37, 112 Kant, Immanuel: and active citizens 119, 121; and aesthetic communicability 79–81, 95–100; and aesthetic creation 91–95; and aesthetic judgments 6, 78–80; and aesthetic sensibility 79, 85, 93, 97, 137; and alienation 112, 123; ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ 2, 15, 16; Anthropological Lectures 159; Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View 3, 5–6, 21, 122, 159; ‘Anthropology Mrongovius’ 21, 34, 35, 37, 51, 57, 85–86, 158, 161; anti-Hobbesianism of 120; and appearances 56–59; and aristocracy 118–119; and author/publisher/ reader 113–114; and authority 15–16, 28, 61, 117, 119, 121–126, 144; B Deduction 58, 61, 161; and beautiful 37, 84–85, 141, 142, 161–162; and beautiful and the sublime 2, 79, 158; and benevolence 28, 145, 148, 164; and books 18, 21, 112–114, 119, 162; and character 140–142, 145, 149; and civilisation 12, 13–14, 110, 142; and civilising process 14–15; and citizenship 99, 122, 124; and colonisation 110, 113–114, 116, 121; ‘Conjectural Beginning of Human History’ 13; and conversation 141, 142, 145, 148–150; and conviviality 123, 147;

Index  183 and communicability 81; and conscience 143–145; and constitutions 13–14, 18, 119, 121, 123, 125–126, 162; and constraint 15, 62, 86, 96, 108–110, 143; and contempt 28, 146, 147; and cosmopolitanism 4–6, 116–118, 120–122, 145, 149, 163; and creativity 13; critical philosophy of 4, 12; critical theory of possession 111–112; critical theory of taste 80; critique of colonialism 110, 116, 118, 120, 122; Critique of Judgment 2, 3, 17, 60, 78–82, 85, 86, 95–96, 99, 107, 137, 139, 140, 141, 148, 158, 159, 161; critique of impure reason 50, 107, 138; Critique of Practical Reason 3, 65–67, 98, 107, 138, 139, 158 Critique of Pure Reason 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 35, 49–51, 54–56, 60–62, 64–67, 78, 80, 85–87, 95–96, 99, 139, 158–161; critiques of power and violence 110–116; and cultivation, civilisation and maturity 13–14; ‘The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding’ 56; definition of Enlightenment 13; ‘Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment’ 82; and displeasure 88–89, 91, 108; and dispossession 111, 114–115; and dissonance 33; The Doctrine of Right 67, 109; The Doctrine of Virtue 67, 100, 109, 139, 142; and dreams 36–37; Dreams of a Spirit-Seer 27; and enlightened existence 93; and Enlightenment (see Enlightenment); and evil proper 28; and Executive 116, 117, 123–126; and fear 28, 85, 91–94, 144, 161; and federalism 118, 120–121; and figurative synthesis 60, 62; and formulation of maturity 14; and freedom 3–4, 6, 13–15, 17–18, 21, 29, 49, 52, 60, 62–68, 78–79, 81; and free-play 78, 81, 84–84, 94, 161; and friendship 2, 100, 107, 143–144, 148–150, 161–162, 164–165; and happiness 98, 108, 146; and harmony 37–38, 96, 98–100, 126, 137, 159; historical and political essays 3; and hospitality 117, 122–123; human condition and (see human condition); and human history 12; and humanity 14, 81, 92, 115, 122, 137–138, 145–147, 163; hypotyposis 87, 91, 94; ‘Idea for a Universal History from

a Cosmopolitan Point of View’ 13, 108, 122; ‘Idea of Universal History from the Point of View of a Citizen of the World’ 98; image of outer and inner dimensions of action 107–110; imagination and (see imagination); and indetermination 50, 99; and intuition, distinction between concepts 54; ‘Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?’ 13; and judgment (see judgment); and judiciary 18, 118, 124; The Jäsche Logic 4–5; and knowledge 54–57, 61; and knowledge of objects in the empirical world 52; Lectures on Anthropology 2, 21; and legislature 18, 118–119, 124, 163; and limits 13; and love 31–32; and luncheons 147–148, 150; and Macbeth 24–27, 36, 66–68, 162; Metaphysics of Morals 107, 116, 119–120, 122, 125; ‘The Methodology of Teleological Judgment’ 97; model of republicanism 118; and modernity 16, 18, 78, 81, 124, 157, 165; and modesty 146–147; and monograms 61; and money 16, 21, 23–24, 112–114, 119, 162; moral philosophy of 21, 137, 145, 163; and mutual love 145, 148, 163, 164; and mystery X 56–62, 138, 145, 158; and nature 58, 83–84; and Newton’s Law of Motion 65; notion of justice 112; Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime 79; ‘On the Common Saying: “This May be True in Theory, But it Does Not Apply in Practice”’ 98, 108; and orientation 51; and parameters of cognition 49; ‘Perpetual Peace’ 108, 118–119, 121, 122; and personhood 99, 107–108, 139–142, 148, 163; and plays, poems and literature 22, 32, 37–38; and pleasure 24, 31, 33–34, 88, 96, 108; post-colonial critique 115–116; and power (see power); and productive imagination 51, 90; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics 51; practical philosophy of 2, 80, 95, 138, 144; and practical reason 2, 14, 81, 95, 98, 107–109, 126, 138, 142, 145; and practical reasoning 98, 108, 126, 138, 142; and property 111–112, 123; and publisher 114; and pure reasoning 50; and reflection 1–2, 35, 54, 79, 81,

184 Index 83–84, 141–142; and refugees 116, 122–123, 163; ‘Remarks’ 123; and republican nation state models of power 116–126; and republicanism 18, 118, 124; and Rousseau’s notion of freedom 11; and Shakespearian observations of the human condition 21–32; Shakespearianism 38, 67, 95, 142, 145, 158; and shame 28; and schematicism 58–59; ‘The Schematicism of the Pure Concept of Understanding’ 56; and slavery 114–115, 118, 162; and sociability (see sociability); and sovereignty 116–118, 120; and strangers 122–123, 158; and sublime 2, 37, 60, 79–81, 84–85, 87–96, 100, 126, 137, 140–142, 146, 158, 161; and subjects 60; and sympathy 81, 146, 149; and synthesis 55–60; and taste 80–82, 84–86, 95–97, 148, 160; thesis of Enlightenment 92, 93; and thinking 53–55; Third Antimony 63–64, 66; ‘The Third Conflict of the Transcendental Idea’ 63; transcendental philosophy of 98; and transcendental system 82, 83; and transcendentality 82, 96, 120, 162; two models of power 116–126; and unsocial sociability (see sociability; unsocial); and virtue 2, 12, 22, 101, 109–110, 137–139, 142–145, 147; and war 98, 119–122; and wealth, fame and power 23; ‘What is Orientation in Thinking’ 51; and wide 32–33; and will of the people 124–125; and wrongdoing 27–28 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Heidegger) 4 Kierkegaard, Søren 123 knowing 49, 99 knowledge 32, 56, 61; a priori 50, 63; creation of 55; emotional 49; everyday 54, 57; genuine 54; and imagination 56; limited to objects 49; mediated 53; of nature 78; social habit as basis of 49; synthetic formation of 56–57 lawfulness 84–85, 96–97 laws 67, 110, 112, 124; causal 63–64; of freedom 159; of nature 64; of the imagination 28; mathematical 65; moral 39; natural 64, 67, 83; and public right 116; universal 122

Lectures on Anthropology (Kant) 2, 21 Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Arendt) 17 legislature 18, 118, 124, 163; representative 119 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 50 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller) 37 Leviathan (Hobbes) 117 logic 54–55, 112 love 29, 31–32; mutual 145, 148, 163, 164 Lukacs, György 123 luncheons 147–148, 150 Macbeth (character) 24–27, 36, 66–68, 162 MacIntyre, Alistair 34, 138 malice 28, 145, 146 Marx, Karl 123; Capital 112 memory 8, 35, 60, 161 mental illness 35, 36 metaphysics 15, 109 Metaphysics of Morals (Kant) 107, 116, 119–120, 122, 125; The Doctrine of Right 67, 108, 107 ‘The Method of Teleological Judgment’ (Kant) 97 misanthropy 23, 24, 28, 35, 146 modesty 146–147 modernity 18, 78, 81, 165; contingent 157; fault lines of 16; pluralistic 157; self-reflexive 81; tensions of 16, 124 monograms 62, 93, 95–96, 100, 108, 110, 159; non-functionalised 161 money 16, 21, 23–24, 112–114, 119, 162 Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws 118 morals 4, 79, 98, 110, 137; metaphysics of 109; practice of 109 music 37, 79 Nature 61, 63, 65, 91, 92, 93; anthropomorphisation of 65; distinction between freedom 64; empirical events in 64 nature 3, 14, 52, 58, 60, 63–64, 91–93, 98, 139; beautiful in 84; causal mechanisms of 64; harmony in 83; knowledge of 78; objects of 78–79; purposive purposelessness of 83–84 Newton, Isaac: Laws of Motion 65 Nietzsche, Fredrich 22, 94; Genealogy of Morals 146

Index  185 objects, aesthetic 60, 87; creation of 80; judgments of 52; of experience 52–55, 65, 82, 160 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (Kant) 79 ‘On the Common Saying: “This May be True in Theory, But it Does Not Apply in Practice”’ (Kant) 98, 108 orientation 1, 21, 34, 38–39, 51, 57, 114, 142, 150, 160, 164, 165 oscillation 33, 34, 35, 79, 85, 86, 88–89, 91, 93, 94, 137, 160, 161 pain 33, 80 paradox 54, 63–66, 144, 165 passion 29, 32–34, 144, 149 peace, perpetual 6, 12, 121 ‘Perpetual Peace’ (Kant) 108, 118–119, 121, 122 person, good 21, 23, 143 personhood 139–142, 148, 163; critical 99, 100, 107–108; through cultivation 142; see also character phenomena: cognition of 52; distinction between noumenal 2, 31, 32, 50, 64, 68, 79, 91, 99, 107, 138, 149, 160; empirical 65; natural 64; of imaginings 138 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 111 philanthropy 23, 144, 146 philosophy 37, 53; moral 21, 137, 145, 163; practical 2, 80, 95, 126, 138–139, 95, 126, 144 Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 123 Plato 147 pleasure 24, 31, 33–34, 80, 83–84, 88–89, 96, 108, 164 pleasure/displeasure couplet 33, 34, 78 poetry 37–38 politics 1, 7, 11, 37, 67, 68, 98, 100, 119, 147, 160, 162–164; democratic 163; Executive 17; Jacobin 162; republican 2, 21, 137, 160; republicancosmopolitan 110 possession 111, 115–116 potentia 24, 92, 116, 118–121, 123, 162; of the citizenry 118; self-positing 126 potestas 24, 117, 122, 123, 125, 126, 162; Hobbesian 118, 123 power 15–16, 23, 26–27, 29, 32, 38, 68, 84, 92, 97, 100, 108, 137, 139, 141, 147–148, 161–163, 165; cognitive 98; critiques of 110–116; Executive 119; of imagination 4, 24, 35–37, 55, 57,

59, 86; republican nation state models of 116–126; royal 123; within a state 120 powers, separation of 119 pride 28, 146 progress 12, 14–15, 164; cultural 5; of civilisation 142 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Kant) 51 propensity 34, 58; for goodness 141; for progress 14; for unsocial sociability 145 property 111; transfer of 112, 123 public sphere 6, 11, 27, 37, 79, 81, 107, 117, 147, 160, 163, 165; active 18; critical 162; critico-reflexive 15–18, 113, 116; enlightened 2, 15, 21, 99; good 142; harmony in 100; sensus communis in 96, 100 publisher 114 reason 4, 14, 18, 29, 32, 33, 33–34, 37, 53, 62, 82, 89, 94, 99, 161; concepts of 34; impure 50, 107, 138; and orientation 38; phenomenal dimension of 51; pure 2, 49–50, 108; through construction of concepts 58 reason, practical 2, 14, 21, 31, 95, 98, 126, 138, 142, 149; and historicocultural contextualisation 12; impure 107; maxims of 108–109; moral sociability of 145; reflection on 81 reasoning 1; human 5, 50, 97; practical 98, 108, 126, 138, 142, 145 reflection 54, 83, 141, 174; aesthetic judgment of 84; anthropological 21, 79; critical 22, 35, 96, 100; on practical reason 81; predisposition to character through 142, 45, 149 reflexivity 14, 139, 140–142; constrained 143 refugees 116, 122–123, 163 religion 4, 16, 78, 121 ‘Remarks’ (Kant) 123 representations 3, 34, 51, 53–57, 59, 60, 61, 66–67, 88; functional and nonfunctional 161; paradoxical 148 republics 100, 107, 142, 163, 165 republicanism 18, 99, 118 resentment 24, 28 Right 119; free 111; notion of 109–110; public 116 Romanticism 31, 37 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 29–31, 36

186 Index Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 16, 29, 115, 119; and democracy 11; and general will 11–12; and image of isolated human being 13; noble savage image 13; notion of freedom 11; The Social Contract 11 Saar, Martin 117–118 Schelling, F.W.J. 60 schemata 58–59, 61, 88, 91, 160; and association 100; creative 62; figurative 61, 87, 158; functional 161; imaginative 6; non-functional 62, 95; non-functioning 65, 67, 87, 108; nonfunctioning figurative 93; of freedom 67 schematicism 4, 58–59, 61, 62, 159; functional 86, 90, 158, 160; nonfunctional 87, 89, 107, 138, 158 ‘The Schematicism of the Pure Concept of Understanding’ (Kant) 56 Schiller, Friedrich 11, 34, 39, 94; Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man 37 science 13, 37, 54, 61, 78 self-authorship 108–109 self-knowledge 144, 145 self-love 11, 28, 147 self-mastery 13, 14, 21, 143, 165 self-reflexivity 32, 144 selves: noumenal 32, 107, 138, 144, 149; phenomenal 32, 107, 137, 138, 144, 149, 159 selves, difficult 2, 21, 32, 49, 137, 138, 140, 142; anthropology of 6, 107; and schematic imaginings 158–160 sensibility, aesthetic 79–85, 93, 97, 137, 159 separation 33–34 shame 27, 28, 148, 165 Shakespearianism 38, 67, 95, 142, 145, 158 Shakespeare, William 22, 29, 32, 33, 35; Hamlet 22; Macbeth 24–27, 36, 66–68, 162; Romeo and Juliet 29–31, 36; Timon of Athens 23, 28; Titus Andronicus 147 sketches, blurred 61, 62, 67, 83, 91, 93–94, 98, 107, 108, 112, 137, 138, 159, 161, 164; of critical personhood 99; of freedom 6, 100, 107, 109, 110, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 122, 125, 126, 137–143, 145, 160–165; of friendship 99; of moral freedom 144, 147, 150, 163; of republican autonomy 100 slander 28, 146

slavery 114–115, 118, 162 social intercourse 13, 24, 27, 147 sociabilities 1, 5, 82, 159, 164 sociability, sociable 2, 6, 32, 62, 67, 79, 82, 100, 107, 109, 110, 123, 138–140, 145–150, 160–161, 164, 165; moral 138–139, 145, 147–150, 163 sociability, unsocial 2, 6, 7, 18, 27–28, 62, 67, 82, 98, 99–100, 107, 109, 110–111, 121, 126, 142, 145, 158, 160–161; of civilization 11–15; political 162 social arrangements 3, 159 The Social Contract (Rousseau) 11 society 12–14, 52, 65; civil (see civil society); court 31; modern 11; political 13 soul, human 4, 57, 59, 90 sovereignty 116–118, 120 Spinoza, Baruch 50, 117–119 spontaneity 52, 55, 63 The Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu) 118 state 14, 15, 17, 35, 117–120, 122–124, 147, 162; models of power of nation state 116–126; modern 16, 17 strangers 116, 119, 122–123, 149–150, 158 subjectivity 1, 21, 32, 158, 159 subjects 2, 60, 63, 95, 99, 100, 112, 123, 126, 159; civic subjects 124; human 164; individual 109; phenomenological 163; power over 117; social 13; thinking 54; who become persons 138–139, 149 sublime 37, 79, 85, 88, 137, 147, 161; and beautiful 2; dynamic 60, 87, 91–95, 137, 142; and imagination 86; judgments of 85; mathematical 60, 87, 89–91, 93, 95, 137 sublimity 79, 80, 91–93; condition of 85, 93, 161; of creation 87 suicide 27, 142; of the state 120, 125 symbols 87, 95, 158 sympathy 11, 81, 146, 149 synthesis 54–58; cognitive 51; figurative 51, 58–62, 161; functionalising 60–61; mathematical 58; non-functional 87; non-functional figurative 126, 161; transcendental 4 taste 5, 84, 86, 96; aesthetic 78–79, 81, 107, 148; critical theory of 80; cultural 80; judgments of 2–3, 6, 78, 80–82, 84–85, 95–97; plurality of 81

Index  187 Taylor, Charles 125, 126 teleology 64, 98–100 theorising, critico-representative critical 54, 55, 160 thinking 15, 32, 50, 53–55, 65, 160 Third Antinomy (Kant) 63–64, 66 ‘The Third Conflict of the Transcendental Idea’ (Kant) 63 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare) 23, 28, 35 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) 147 transcendentality 82, 96; and blurred sketch of freedom 109, 110, 123; harmonic 84, 162; of the body politic 120 transparency 11, 12, 164 tutelage, self-incurred 1–2, 7, 12, 62, 93, 108, 159–160 tyranny 13–14 ugliness 27, 28, 165 uncertainty 51, 91 understanding 1, 3, 53, 57, 82; and analytic judgements 54; and imagination 84–85, 97; immature 35; phenomenal-based 51; transcendental 51

universalism 115, 139 ‘us’ 109 vocation 89–90, 92–93, 98, 100, 107–108, 110, 137, 140, 142–143, 144–147 violence 17, 22, 29–30, 88, 90–91, 98, 117, 122, 126; critiques of 110–116; Jacobin 119; revolutionary 119–120 virtue 2, 11, 12, 22, 101, 109–110, 137–139, 142–145, 147 vocations 108, 143 war 98, 119–122 wealth 23, 108, 113, 147, 28 Weber, Max 112, 139 will: general 11–12, 119; of the people 124–125 wisdom 38, 144 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 50 world: empirical 3, 18, 52; external 49, 51; modern 16, 160, 165; natural 58, 65; phenomenal 49 wrongdoing 27–28, 31, 139, 144, 145, 163