Abstract
In this chapter, I sketch one possible answer to the question of how one might lead a right life in a wrong world; an answer which begins with the injunction Back to Kant. Such a move requires taking a new look at Kant’s notion of the good which, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he says consists in the good will doing its duty for duty’s sake. Kant’s moral philosophy is often criticized for being overly ‘abstract’ and for issuing ‘impossible’ ethical demands. Here, however, I argue that it is precisely these perceived weaknesses that constitute its subversive core; indeed, it is Kant’s rigorism which brings us face to face (albeit indirectly) with the ethico-political limits of capitalism as such. My aim, though, will not be to provide a wholesale endorsement of Kant’s ethical position, and consequently the argument will move through a further stage. In the second part of the chapter, I contend that any true realization of the ethical point of Kant’s philosophy – which I take to be exemplified by his Formula of Humanity – will require a rediscovery of Kant via Marx, and more specifically a transformation of Kantian ‘pure morals’ into the practice of radical critique. The journey undertaken here will thus be one from moral law to the politics of language via modernist encounters with ‘destructive’ thinking.
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Notes
- 1.
Theodor Adorno, Mimima Moralia, p. 39.
- 2.
Ibid., p. 15.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999), p. 3. Hereafter SXX followed by a page number.
- 5.
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, pp. 309–310.
- 6.
See, for example, Carl Cederström & André Spicer, The Wellness Syndrome (London: Polity Press, 2015). Also, Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979).
- 7.
Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 5.
- 8.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), esp. Introduction and ch. 7.
- 9.
Still the most lucid account of virtue in Greek philosophy is Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1985).
- 10.
Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 88.
- 11.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 38 (AK 4: 429). Hereafter all references to this text will appear in the body of the chapter using the standard method of citing passages from Kant’s work (except for the Critique of Pure Reason). AK 4: 429 says that the passage quoted is on page 429 of Volume 4 of the Standard German Academy edition (AK) of Kant’s works.
- 12.
A second and subsidiary formulation, Formula of the Law of Nature (FLN), runs as follows: ‘Act as if the maxim of your actions were to become through your will a universal law of nature’ (AK 4: 421).
- 13.
Theodor Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, p. 86. Adorno is here clearly gesturing towards a parallel between Kant’s idea and Heidegger’s claim that ‘the silent call of the earth’ ‘vibrates’ in the body of the peasant. See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 159.
- 14.
See, here, Kant’s remark: ‘[L]ove as an inclination cannot be commanded, but beneficence from duty – even though no inclination impels us to it and, indeed, natural and unconquerable aversion opposes it – is practical and not pathological love, which lies in the will and not in the propensity of feeling, in principles of action and not in melting sympathy; and it alone can be commanded’ (AK 4: 399).
- 15.
Added emphasis.
- 16.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Economic Problems of Masochism’ in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 422.
- 17.
Jacques Lacan, ‘Kant avec Sade’, in Écrits, p. 646.
- 18.
For Adorno and Horkheimer, the cruel perfection of the Kantian moral law embodies the essential dialectic of Enlightenment: reason regresses to absolute unreason because of its attempt to expel everything ‘pathological’ – everything ‘non-rational’ – from itself. Sade thus figures as the barbaric truth of Kant: Sade’s Juliette, Adorno and Horkheimer write, is ‘by no means fanatical […] her procedure is enlightened and efficient as she goes about her work of sacrilege […] Juliette embodies (in psychological terms) neither unsubliminated nor regressive libido, but intellectual pleasure in regression – amor intellectualis diaboli, the pleasure of attacking civilisation with its own weapons. She favours system and consequence. She is a proficient manipulator of the organ of rational thought.’ Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 94–95.
- 19.
Rebecca Comay, ‘Adorno avec Sade…’ in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies vol. 17, 1 (2006): 6–19 (7).
- 20.
Lacan here appropriates one of Hegel’s criticisms of Kant. See, G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), § 135.
- 21.
Jacques Lacan, SVII, p. 97. Cf. Lacan, ‘Kant avec Sade’, in Écrits p. 648.
- 22.
Lacan, SVII, p. 98.
- 23.
Ibid., pp. 4–5.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 233.
- 25.
Lacan’s reading bears more than a passing resemblance to the misreading of Kant famously satirized by Friedrich Schiller:Scruples of ConscienceI like to serve my friends, but unfortunately I do it by inclinationAnd so often I am bothered by the thought that I am not virtuous.DecisionThere is no other way but this! You must seek to despise themAnd do with repugnance what duty bids youCited by H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy, (London: Hutchinson, 1947), p. 48.
- 26.
Paul Guyer, Kant’s ‘Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals’ (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 54.
- 27.
Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 29.
- 28.
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 210.
- 29.
Slavoj Žižek, ‘Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple’, Lacanian Ink 13, 1998. Accessible at http://www.lacan.com/zizlacan4.htm [accessed 30 July 2016].
- 30.
We should note here the mutual co-dependence of transgression and the law. As Saint Paul remarks: ‘Where there is no law, there is no transgression’; indeed, the ‘sinful passions’ are themselves ‘aroused by the law’ (Romans 4: 15 & 7: 5). We can thus see how a full-blown Sadean world would be an impossibility: if everything is permitted, there is nothing to transgress, and therefore one is denied the possibility of using the law as a means of exciting jouissance. The paradox of Sadean anti-morality is therefore that it requires conventional morality as its eternal ‘other’: in this respect, it is totally beholden to that which it seemingly rejects.
- 31.
Lucien Goldmann, Immanuel Kant (London: Verso, 2011), p. 176.
- 32.
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 257–258.
- 33.
Fredric Jameson, Capital: A Reading of Volume One (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 148–149.
- 34.
Fredric Jameson, ‘The Politics of Utopia’, New Left Review 25 (Jan–Feb 2004): 35–54 (37). Certain politicians, economists and journalists now claim that the UK is approaching ‘full employment’. Here we should note two things: first, what ‘full’ employment means, in macroeconomic terms, is an unemployment rate of approximately 5%; second, among those classed as ‘fully’ employed are those on zero-hours and short-term contracts (approximately 4% and 11% of the workforce, respectively), part-time workers (19%) and those placed on ‘workfare’ (compulsory labour in return for benefit payments). In this light, the idea of the UK as heading towards a situation of full employment begins to look absurd.
- 35.
Ibid., 38.
- 36.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin/ New Left Review, 1990), pp. 279–280.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 280.
- 38.
Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 61.
- 39.
Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 254–255.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 231.
- 41.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 1964, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Vintage, 1998), pp. 161–169. Hereafter SXI followed by a page number.
- 42.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 222.
- 43.
Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 253.
- 44.
There are, to be sure, arguments in certain (business management) circles for an ethical Kantian Capitalism, which run along the following lines: the worker makes a rational decision to enter into the labour contract; therefore, as long as he is ‘respected’ by the boss he is not treated merely as a ‘means’, as both worker and boss are pursuing their own ‘mutually beneficial’ ‘ends’. Norman E. Bowie, ‘Kantian Capitalism’, Wiley Encyclopaedia of Management Vol. 2, ‘Business Ethics’. The simple reply to this kind of argument is, of course, ‘go back and actually read Capital!’
- 45.
Cited in Guyer, Kant’s ‘Groundwork’, p. 12.
- 46.
In the Groundwork, Kant’s transcendental idealist case for freedom runs as follows. Merely presupposing freedom (for example, in the quotation cited above in the body of the text (AK 4: 448)) seems, Kant says, to lead us into a kind of circle: ‘We take ourselves as free […] in order to think ourselves under moral laws in the order of ends; [but we also] think ourselves as subject to these laws because we have ascribed to ourselves freedom of the will’ (AK 4: 450). We escape this circle, on Kant’s view, by returning to a distinction drawn in the Critique of Pure Reason between a phenomenal world of sense and a noumenal world of understanding. Applied to the self, this distinction, Kant writes, provides the individual with ‘two standpoints from which he can regard himself and cognize laws for the use of his powers and consequently for all his actions’. First, insofar as the individual belongs to the (phenomenal) sensible world, he operates under laws of nature (cause and effect); second, however, as a being belonging to the (noumenal) world of understanding (the intelligible world), he operates under laws which are independent of nature and grounded in reason. As a rational being, moreover, ‘the human being can never think of the causality of his own will otherwise than under the idea of freedom; for, independence from the determining causes of the world of sense (which reason must always ascribe to itself) is freedom’ (AK 4: 452). Here Kant takes himself to have provided an independent reason for regarding ourselves as free: put simply, we are free because we belong to the world of understanding (at the same time as belonging to the world of sense), and thus we are able to act independently of sense impressions and to use our reason to author our own ideas and choices. The circle previously alluded to is, Kant thinks, now broken.
- 47.
Kant, Political Writings, pp. 182–183.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 181.
- 49.
On this ambivalence, both in Kant’s work and in that of German philosophy more generally, see Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), ch. 1.
- 50.
This remark is consistent with Kant’s earlier denunciation of revolution in his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’: ‘[A] public can only achieve enlightenment slowly. A revolution may well put an end to autocratic despotism and to rapacious or power-seeking oppression, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking. Instead, new prejudices, like the ones they replaced, will serve as a leash to control the great unthinking mass.’ Kant, Political Writings, p. 55.
- 51.
These remarks appear in a footnote to this section. (The Metaphysics of Morals, p. 98.)
- 52.
Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, CA: University of Stanford Press, 2010), p. 27.
- 53.
Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, trans. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 68.
- 54.
Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. vii. Here I focus only on the parts of Karatani’s work which deal specifically with ethics. For a more detailed critical exploration of his book as a whole, see Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Parallax View’, New Left Review 25 (January–February 2004): 121–134.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 125.
- 56.
Ibid., pp. 129 & viii.
- 57.
On Hegel’s appraisal of Kant’s ethics, see Ido Geiger, The Founding Act of Modern Ethical Life: Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Moral and Political Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
- 58.
G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), §133.
- 59.
Ibid., §134.
- 60.
Ibid., §135 (added emphasis).
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Ibid., §§ 141–258. See also Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 23–27.
- 64.
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 108.
- 65.
Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, in Early Political Writings trans. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 46.
- 66.
Such a view is taken by, for example, R. G. Peffer, in his Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), ch. 8.
- 67.
Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, p. 45.
- 68.
Karl Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in Later Political Writings, trans. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 214.
- 69.
Ibid., pp. 214–215. For important discussions of Marx and rights, see Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, trans. Dennis Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Costas Douzinas, ‘Adika: On Communism and Rights’, in The Idea of Communism, ed. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2010), pp. 81–100.
- 70.
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), p. 47.
- 71.
Marx, ‘Communist Manifesto’, in Later Political Writings, p. 11 (translation modified).
- 72.
Eugene Kamenka, Marxism and Ethics (London: Macmillan & Co, 1970), p. 5.
- 73.
Norman Geras, ‘The Controversy about Marx and Justice’, New Left Review, 150 (1985): 47–85 (70).
- 74.
Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 144.
- 75.
Marx, Capital Vol. 1, p. 799.
- 76.
It should be noted, however, that in his Inaugural Address of the First International, Marx does make use of overt moral language. Interestingly, though, as Paul Blackledge points out, Marx’s use of ethical vocabulary here does not demonstrate a shift in position, but rather ‘his unsectarian approach to building the most powerful possible international socialist movement’. Marx was thus ‘making a concrete analysis of the balance of class forces’. See Paul Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics: Freedom, Desire and Revolution (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), pp. 69–70.
- 77.
Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 799.
- 78.
On the literary dimensions of Capital, see Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers (New York: Atheneum, 1962), pp. 121–150.
- 79.
Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 91.
- 80.
Ibid., pp. 354–356.
- 81.
Cited in Hyman, The Tangled Bank, p. 138.
- 82.
Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 359.
- 83.
Ibid., p. 92.
- 84.
Ibid., p. 93.
- 85.
In the Postface to the Second Edition of Capital, Marx writes as follows: ‘the mealy-mouthed babblers of German vulgar economics grumbled about the style of my book. No one can feel the literary shortcomings of Capital more strongly than I myself’ (Ibid., p. 99). This, I would argue, is an inaccurate assessment by Marx of his own, quite extraordinary, literary achievement.
- 86.
The very early Marx already signposts his distance from Kant in the third stanza in his poem ‘On Hegel’:Kant and Fichte soar to heavens blueSeeking for some distant land,I but seek to grasp profound and trueThat which – in the street I find. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 1. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), p. 577.
- 87.
Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’, p. 69.
- 88.
On this connection, see Philip J. Kain, Marx and Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) Ch. 1&2.
- 89.
Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’, pp. 69–70.
- 90.
Ibid., p. 64.
- 91.
Letter: Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge, Kreuznach, September 1843. First published in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February 1844. Accessible at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm [Accessed 30 July 2016].
- 92.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Destructive Character’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 541–542.
- 93.
Irving Wohlfarth, ‘No-Man’s-Land: On Walter Benjamin’s “Destructive Character”’, diacritics (June 1978): 47–65 (53).
- 94.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 95 [C6a,2].
- 95.
Benjamin, ‘Karl Kraus’, in Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, p. 456.
- 96.
Ibid., pp. 453, 456, 454, 455. For an interesting discussion of Kraus, which is indebted to Benjamin, see Theodor Adorno, ‘Morals and Criminality: On the Eleventh Volume of the Works of Karl Kraus’, in Notes to Literature, Vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
- 97.
Fredric Jameson, ‘Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory’, Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 403–408 (403).
- 98.
Benjamin, ‘Karl Kraus’, p. 435.
- 99.
Karl Kraus, ‘In These Great Times’, in In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader, ed. Harry Zohn (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1984), p. 82.
- 100.
Ibid., pp. 78 & 80.
- 101.
Kraus, ‘The Last Days of Mankind’, in In These Great Times, pp. 167 & 185–186.
- 102.
Ibid., p. 168.
- 103.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), pp. 144–145.
- 104.
See Michel Pêchaux, Language, Semantics and Ideology: Stating the Obvious, trans. H. C. Nagpal (London: Macmillan, 1983), Ch. 12.
- 105.
Examples of such linguistic virtuosity might include, for example, grammatical re-emphases – ‘Your democracy’; ‘Politics as you imagine it’ – or outright ideological overturnings – ‘the truth of what you say can be revealed by placing a negation sign at the beginning of your remarks’; ‘the victory of which you speak never took place’.
- 106.
Louis Althusser, ‘Philosophy as Revolutionary Weapon’, Interview conducted by Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2006), pp. 8–9. Emphasis added.
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Ware, B. (2017). Living Wrong Life Rightly: Kant avec Marx. In: Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination . Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55503-8_5
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