ELLIPSIS: Reading Kant Backwards: Speculative Realism 5

5. Reading Kant Backwards: Autonomy, causality and the absolute.

Despite the completeness of Kant’s grounding for the metaphysics of morals, there is a problem, which he himself identifies after setting out the three formulations of the categorical imperative. He writes:

How such a synthetic a priori proposition [the categorical imperative[1]] is possible and why it is necessary are problems whose solution does not lie any longer within the bounds of a metaphysics of morals. … To show that morality is not a mere phantom of the brain, which morality cannot be if the categorical imperative, and with it the autonomy of the will, is true and absolutely necessary as an a priori principle, we require a possible synthetic use of pure practical reason.[2]

Here Kant points of precisely the problem that was intuitively set out before: Given the autonomy of the moral law how can it have any effect on actual moral action, or, how can any agent freely engage with the moral law in its autonomy. It is easy to understand the moral law as Kant formulates it as a mere abstract and meaningless ‘phantom’ (to use his word). What is more difficult is to see either how that law can be applied in any specific case, or, more fundamentally, how it can even be accessed, known or constructed. To be effective the moral law must somehow both ignore and be applicable to the contingent empirical conditions of the world and agent as well as autonomous from them. This is exactly the problem that Kant identifies at the start of the third section of the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. He sets up the dichotomy as such:

The will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings insofar as they are rational; freedom would be the property of this causality that makes it effective independent of any by alien causes. Similarly, natural necessity is the property of the causality of all non-rational beings by which they are determined to activity through the influence of alien causes.[3]

Natural necessity is a form of heteronomy as there are many different causes; this much is obvious by the mere observation of the world. On the other hand the moral law in having a self-sufficient cause is independent of this world and apparent only through reason. However, this dichotomy is necessarily bound together. For in terms of nature and the necessity of non-rational beings it is impossible to determine the causality between one action and another. Likewise, in purely rational terms the moral law is effective but empty insofar as it never filled by any concrete conditions, only ever analyses its own form. The synthetic or speculative philosophy that Kant proposes would unite these two forms of causality. It is through the moral law that the effectiveness of causation is known, and through the natural necessity of alien causes that this causality can have substance. Freedom would thus be the dialectic movement of the synthetic a priori proposition bridging this dichotomy. Free will or freedom as it is usually understood can only be nothing more than the autonomy of the moral law as it appears in contrast to the heteronomy of the empirical world.

This has implications stretching well beyond the domain of moral philosophy and into the entire metaphysical project of Kant’s speculative philosophy as a whole. From thinking through this disjunction between the causality of freedom or reason and that of the world Kant can reformulate the project of the first critique in the following terms:

Now man finds in himself a faculty which distinguishes himself from all other things and even from himself insofar as he is affected by objects. That faculty is reason, which as pure spontaneity is elevated even above understanding. For although the later is also spontaneous and does not, like sense, merely contain representations that arise only when one is affected by things (and is therefore passive), yet understanding can produce by its activity no other concepts than those which merely serve to bring sensuous representations [intuitions] under rules and thereby unite to them in one consciousness. Without this use of sensibility, understanding would think nothing at all. Reason on the other hand, shows such a pure spontaneity in the case of what are called ideas that it goes far beyond anything that sensibility can offer and shows its highest occupation in distinguishing the world of sense from the world of understanding, thereby prescribing limits to the understanding itself.[4]

This short quote contains all of the work of the Critique of Pure Reason, even including the abyss between sensibility and understanding that opens up within man, and which Kant covers over with man and philosophical anthropology. Likewise, the ability of reason to travel beyond sensibility described here is exactly that effect caused by the sublime and outlined in the Critique of Judgement. What is different here is that it is precisely within this abyss that Kant locates the moral law in the form of the spontaneity of reason as autonomy and freedom. He writes:

As a rational being and hence as belonging to the intelligible world, can man never think of the causality of his own will except under the idea of freedom; for independence from the determining causes of the world of sense (an independence which reason must always attribute to itself) is freedom. Now the idea of freedom is inseparably connected with the concept of autonomy, and this in turn with the universal principle of morality, which ideally is the ground of all actions of rational beings, just as natural law is the ground of all appearances.[5]

The categorical imperative appears here as the middle term between the freedom of the will and the causality of nature. With the moral law, the freedom of the will appears as autonomy stands out from the heteronomic contingency of the natural world; and vice versa, the causality of the world appears as an understanding of the self-sufficiency of the will imposes itself upon the contingency of the empirical world of sense. This reading proposes a reversal of the usual doctrine of Kantian ethics. Rather than saying man is moral because he is rational, it says man is rational because he is moral. Through the lens of the question of the moral law, the universal, absolute and rational erupts into human life, proposing the freedom of the will in opposition, and yet still in a specific relationship of understanding, to the contingency of nature. It is the distinction of autonomy and heteronomy that draws out the possibility of both freedom and causality in both the moral law and the natural laws, and it is upon this basis that the synthetic a priori and thus the metaphysical project of the first critique is possible.

This reading of the moral law as the guarantor of the synthetic a priori relieves the problems of the shadowy unity of apperception which require Kant to rewrite the ‘transcendental deduction of the categories.’ It is perhaps possible to see the writing of the second and third critiques and the detailed examinations of the starry heavens above and the moral law within as another attempt at rewriting this problematic part of the first critique and delving into the very abyss of apperception.

To read the moral law as an abyssal guarantor of apperception and the synthetic a priori returns to the question of the connection between Negarestani’s endogenic tension and his conception of universal synthesis. In examining this very question Negarestani writes:

Endogenic tensions express the inassimilable presence of the universal continuum within the regional field, a resident yet alienating presence that has been bored and nested into the horizon from different angles, contingently, gradationally, infinitesimally. We call this resident […] the Insider. It will be argued that endogenic tensions wrought by the Insider deform the interiority of the horizon beyond recognition and necessitate forms of synthesis[6]

Although the synthesis produced by this insider differs significantly to the synthetic a priori, it is not difficult to see the similarities between such an insider and the Kantian moral law within. In fact, this image of a resident alien(ating) force within the subject that necessitates synthesis is the perfect description of the moral law as the unity of apperception.

This is the most important outcome of Kant’s moral philosophy. That through the moral law reason erupts into the world and makes all understanding possible. The autonomy of the moral law and its opposition to the heteronomy of all empirical facts must find a unity in understanding through synthetic a priori propositions, of which the categorical imperative in all three formulations is the primary form. It is the dialectic understanding between the necessity of nature and the freedom of reason that opens the possibility of the speculative path of philosophy.

Thinking backwards through Kant perhaps allows a reading that does not necessarily fall into either to correlationist dead end, or its necessary rejection. Rather a rescuing of Kant along these lines allows a return to his speculative project and a rethinking of the ideas with which he first set out on this path and a redrawing of the domain of speculative philosophy along this path. In order to do so, it is first necessary to return to both the origin of Kant’s project, and also to the slide into correlationism outlined by Quentin Meillassoux, in order to retrieve the speculative possibilities of this project.

Part Six: From Correlationism to Theology

Part Seven: Traces of Spectres

Part Eight: The Structure of Trace-écart as a new form of sensibility

Part Nine: The Space of the Absolute

Part Ten: The Challenge of Facticity and the Gaps of the Absolute

[1] On the nature of the categorical imperative as a synthetic a priori proposition see Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. p. 29: “This [the categorical imperative] is a practical proposition which does not analytically derive the willing of an action from some other willing already presupposed […] but which connects the will of a rational being as something which is not contained in the concept.”

[2] I. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. p. 48.

[3] I. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. p. 49. Note how what are usually considered “normal” causes are here characterised by Kant as ”alien.” This clearly echoes the comparison between the moral law Negarestani’s endogenetic tension and the theory of alien abduction outlined earlier.

[4] I. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. p. 53.

[5] I. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. p. 54.

[6] R. Negarestani, Globe of Revolution. p. 7.