Subject: Re: HAB: #2: Autonomy as dogma
Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 09:42:04 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)



On Sun, 23 Jul 100 02:29:06 +0300 (EETDST) Antti M Kauppinen 
<amkauppi-AT-cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

> "Certainly this understanding [of changing legal paradigms], like the rule of 
law itself, retains a dogmatic core: the idea of autonomy according to which 
human beings act as free subjects only insofar as they obey just those laws 
they give themselves in accordance with insights they have acquired 
intersubjectively. This is "dogmatic" only in a harmless sense. It expresses a 
tension between facticity and validity, a tension that is "given" with the fact 
of the symbolic infrastructure of sociocultural forms of life, which is to say 
that _for us_, who have developed our identity in such a form of life, it 
cannot be circumvented." (BFN, 445-446)

Antti, thanks for the commentary and the quote, which is good to think. I'd 
like also to wonder aloud about this, but more in comparison with Kant directly.

Kant holds that as human beigns we are part of nature, which means that we are 
entirely, internally and externally, subject to the laws of causality. So our 
freedom is limited not only from the 'outside' but from the 'inside' as well. 
We are no more free 'in ourselves' than we are 'in the world.' Logically 
speaking, it is possible, at least in principle, to explain any act of the 
subject with respect to cause and motive - purely mechanically.

The defining feature of a 'free act' is precisely that it is entirely foreign 
to the subject's inclinations. It could be said, with Kant, that the 'self' 
does not really'live at home' since the foundation of subjective freedom 
resides only in some 'foreign body' - we are strangers in our own houses. 
Approached this way Habermasian ethics is essentially an ethics of alienation, 
since it forces us to reject that which is most truly ours and to submit 
ourselves to an abstract principle that does not take our private 
(non-generalizeable) interests into legislation.

What we know, as subjects, of freedom, according to Kant, revolves around the 
notion of guilt. Guilt must be considered solely in terms of its paradoxical 
structure - the fact that we can feel guilty even if we know that in committing 
a certain deed we were, "carried along by the stream of natural necessity." The 
structure appeas like this: I couldn't have done anything else, but still, I am 
guilty. It is at this very moment when the subject is conscious of being 
carried along by the stream of natural necessity that she or he also becomes 
aware of his or her freedom. It is worth introducing a Freudian formulation 
with strikes us as quite Kantian: We are not only much more unfree that we 
believe, but also much freer than we know.

Habemas's formulation above entails an extraordinary paradox: "human beings act 
as free subjects only insofar as they obey."

But this isn't just blind obedience since only "those laws they give themselves 
in accordance with insights they have acquired intersubjectively" are binding. 
However, thinking with Kant here, those things which have been acquired 
intersubjectively are, at least to some degree, foreign. If they are not 
foreign, and flow directly from the subject, then Habermas's formulation begs 
the question in a non-trivial sense. In other words, if the subject is unique, 
or conceived of as free, then there must be some non-trivial difference between 
subjects: we can introduce here Kant's notion of creation ex nihilo --> where 
human beings come to be ethical subjects through a transfromation, a rebirth, 
"a new creation" (which is precisely the way in which subjective freedom 
departs from mechanical causality - where the will becomes its own 
determination). To but it bluntly: as subjects we are constituted mutually, 
through language, but this constitution is unique and contingent for each 
individual. To be free, as subject, isn't simply to sort out what is public and 
private, rather, to establish a unique coincidence between the two. However, in 
order to bind oneself to valid statements one must break with this unique 
coincidence - in other words, the subject must necessarily sacrifice something 
of themselves to 'play well with others.' In short: intersubjective argreement 
is obtained only through voluntary sacrifice (from a private perspective) and 
willful reciprocity (from a public perspective).

We find here a splitting of the subject, and it is here that we must consider 
the question of "dogma" as "harmless."

The logic of Habermas is quite interesting: since it represents a notion of a 
"forced choice" - subjects can "choose" between freedom (in the communicative 
sense) or of suffering non-existence as a subject (the barred choice). In 
short: there can be no autonomy without a subject yet the very emergence of the 
subject is already the result of a free act!

The idea validity, in Habermas, corresponds to the Kantian notion of duty: 
duty is only that which the subject makes her or his duty. Taking Kant's 
fascinating comments in "On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic 
Concerns" we can detect a similar, if not identical, prohibition in Habermas. 
Under no circumstances, ever, in a communicative ethics, is a moral agent 
permitted to lie (which would entail some sort of self-contradiction). A lie, 
in effect, would destroy the entire ethical foundation of a communicative 
community - in short - a lie cannot ever be justified as moral. There is a 
certain kind of unbearable dimension to this idea, unless one assumes that most 
communities aren't communicative (although I've already mentioned that all 
communicatives, insofar as they are constituted by subjects, are always already 
communicative in some sense). Here, it could be argued, there is a problem - 
since lying is dismissed PRIOR to the positing of any process of testing. In a 
way, there is something in a discourse ethics, and within Kant's analysis of 
the lie, that betrays something pre-moral a pre-discursive commandment 
(contradicting the Kantian notion of duty for the sake of duty and the 
Habermasian notion of intersubjective validity) [since only those norms are 
valid to which subjects have actually agreed]. Viewed in this way, we must 
distinguish between the traditional relation of the universal and the subject. 
The ethical subject cannot be taken to be the agent of the universal, rather, 
the subject is nothing other than the moment of universalization, of the 
constitution or determination of the law: the ethical subject is the point 
where the universal comes to itself and achieves its determination.

By detaching subjectivity from the universal, in the substantative sense, it 
becomes relevant to re-examine Kant's notion of postulate alongside Habermas's 
notion of presuppositions. There is a passage worth quoting at length in Kant's 
chapter "The Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason" --> 
"Transcendental ideas have an excellent and indeed indispensably necessary, 
regulative, employment, namely, that of directing the understanding towards a 
certain goalupon which the routes marked out by its rules converge, as upon 
their point of intersection. This point is indeed a mere idea, a focus 
imaginarius, from which, since it lies quite outisde the bounds of possible 
experience, the concepts of the understanding do no in reality proceed; none 
the less it serves to give to these concepts the greatest possible unity 
combined with the greatest possible extension. Hence arises the illusion that 
the times have their source in a real object lying outside the field of 
empirically possible knowledge - just as objects reflected in a mirror are seen 
as behind it. Nevertheless this illusion is indispensably necessary if... 
besides the objects which lie before our eyes, we are also to see those which 
lie at a distance behind our back."

The phrase, "behind our back" will be familiar to most who have read Habermas's 
engagement with Gadamer. In order to illusion, as Kant calls it, to occur, the 
subject has to be situated between two mirrors in such a way that she or he 
discerns the second mirror the 'effect' he or she has on the first one, the one 
that is situated behind her or his back. Habermas accomplishes this 
intersubjectively --> which amounts to the idea that the organic unity of the 
subject is torn apart through the acquisition of an 'enlarged' intersubjective 
perspective. In an 'intersubjective viewpoint' we are forced to "see ourselves 
seeing" (this opens up all kinds of visual metaphors).

Kant, in his work, establishes three postulates: freedom, the immortality of 
the soul, and the existence of God.

Habermas, in his work, establishes three postulates as well: freedom 
(self-formative processes of cognitive development), the unlimited 
communicative community [or 'transcendence within'], and the principle of 

Universalization (U).

The first postulate in both is a fact, 'a fact of reason' so in a certain sense 
it isn't really a postulate, so I'll focus on the other two.

The immortality of the soul / unlimited communicative community and the 
existence of God / the principle of (U) are postulated / presupposed in order 
to make possible the 'realization' of the highest good / justice. In both 
cases, you can't have one of the postulates without the other.

As Alenka Zupancic has noted, what Kant needs, however, is not the immortality 
of the soul but the immortality of the body [a finite soul]. And also with 
Habermas. The problem for Habermas is that the communicative community ends, 
tragically, with the death of its membership, which is why he denotes the 
process of enlightenment as unfinished. We can then say of Kant that the 
posulate of the immortality of the body is a fantasy of pure practical reason, 
which finds its correlation in Habermas's deployment of Adorno's notion of 
"exact fantasy" in KHI.

Here I think Habermas is supplemented with a critique of Kantian ethics. For 
Kant, diabolical evil is the elevation of the opposite of the moral law. In 
this case, the maxim of a diabolical will is directly opposed to that of the 
moral law. Interesting, diabolical evil and the highest good appear, in a 
non-trivial sense, to be identical --> since if the opposition to the moral law 
were elevated to a maxim or principle, it would no longer be an opposition to 
the moral law, it would be the moral law itself. At this level, no opposition 
is possible. The highest good and diabolical evil are identical. In we contrast 
this with Habermas: the perfectly justified norm is perfectly unjust. In other 
words: from a strictly formal level, evil is indistinguishable from good. The 
highest good/evil and perfect justice/injustice are the result of an 
accomplished ethical act.

The key insight here is that we act out of obligation to a highest good or a 
perfectly just law, we act as instruments of God (Kant) or the Ideal Community 
(Habermas) - and this is precisely where Kant / Habermas / Sade enjoin --> in 
the link between the object of practical reason (the highest good) to the will 
(collective) and positing its realization we find, in operation, the formation 
of what Kant calls a "holy will."

The thesis that might be attempted here is this: that the 'highest evil' and 
the 'highest good' are synonymous with an accomplished act do exist (consensus 
is possible, and it is a fact), but what does not exist is a holy or diabolical 
(collective) will. This has important implications for both Kantian and 
Habermasian ethics - namely - that the definition of a successful act would be 
that it is structued exactly like the paradox of the liar: this structure is 
the same as the one evoked by the liar who says, "I am lying" - someone who 
utters the impossible and thus fully dispalys the split between the level of 
the statement and the level of the enunciation, between the shifter "I" and the 
signifier "am lying." It is at this level that we situate the ethical subject: 
at the level of somethign which becomes what 'it is' only in the act engendered 
by another subject. The ethical subject is not a subject who WANTS the highest 
good or diabolical evil, but rather is this object itself.

My aim is to provide a subtle shift in the Habermasian emphasis: from the 
legitimation of norms to the impossibly to "total" legitimation - which i 
regard to the an essential paradox of democracy. It isn't that norms do not 
require legitimation, but that we must be aware that legitimization is always 
incomplete, and that compliance with the law is still something that we must 
remain ethically responsible for - we do not have a choice bewteen the law 
(good) and the violation of the law (evil), rather, between two evils: 
compliance and noncompliance both entail subjective responsibility.

I've tarried long, and I haven't finished my morning coffee yet. All of the 
above is my appropriation of the work of Alenka Zupancic "grafted" onto 
Habermas. Nothing in the above, save my interjections about Habermas, can not 
be found in Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (Verso, 2000).

ken



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