Kant, Fichte, and Schelling: Freedom As Self-Limiting - From an Essay on German Idealism by Todd McGowan
Part one of Limiting Us to Freedom by Todd McGowan, originally published in Underground Theory by Theory Underground Publishing
“I was delighted to have something published in Underground Theory. My goal is always to see the most complex philosophy—such as that of German Idealism—as it manifests itself in the banality of everyday life. Underground Theory as a volume operates with this same imperative that prioritizes accessibility to all. It is the fundamental project of theory, as I see it, and being a part of it was an absolute privilege for me. Hegel once said that if we can change the world in theory, practice can’t hold out for very long. Underground Theory attempts to realize this idea.”
- Todd McGowan
Ideal Limits
German Idealism appears just as relevant today as it did in 1830. This is because the philosophy of German Idealism represents a fundamental break with the capitalist conception of freedom. It stands like a miracle in the midst of the Western philosophical tradition, articulating a conception of the autonomous subject that acts as a decisive challenge to the imperatives of capitalist society. The existence of this philosophical movement alone provides definitive proof that material conditions cannot be entirely determinative. These theorists, living in the midst of a burgeoning capitalist epoch, manage to break from the thinking that this epoch induces. But as quickly as the alternative to capitalism’s liberal freedom emerges, it vanishes, dying along with the spirit of the French Revolution that German Idealism keeps alive.[i]
Beginning with Immanuel Kant, the thinkers of German Idealism—Kant, J. G. Fichte, G. W. F. Hegel, and F. W. J. Schelling—conceive of freedom in a specifically anticapitalist fashion. For them, freedom involves not the ability to do whatever one wants but the way that the subject limits itself. They have no patience for the liberal conception of freedom that predominates in the capitalist epoch and that predominates among philosophers who exist just prior to them.[ii] They see, collectively, that this liberal freedom is a mask for a profound unfreedom. By looking to them, we can see how an authentic conception of freedom must challenge the assumptions of liberalism. Their turn to the freedom of self-limitation becomes apparent initially in the moral philosophy of Kant.
Kant links freedom to morality in a profoundly original way. By thinking freedom through the moral law, he is able to come up with a conception of freedom that deviates from the freedom demanded by the fledgling capitalist economy. Even though Kant doesn’t develop a thoroughgoing anticapitalist philosophy in the way that Marx does, his conception of freedom represents a theoretical anticapitalism of the first order.[iii]
There is no question for Kant that we might discern freedom through a theoretical proof, which is why he doesn’t develop his conception of freedom in the theoretical philosophy of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781.[iv] It is only when Kant comes to his practical philosophy, first in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785 and, more importantly, in the Critique of Practical Reason in 1788, that Kant asserts the truth of freedom. In this later work, freedom becomes evident only through the moral law’s assertion of what we must do, regardless of our desires or any social constraints. The subject’s self-limitation through the law becomes the site of freedom.
The mere existence of the moral law, with its imperative directing us to act morally, indicates that we are free subjects. An unfree being, according to Kant, could not give itself such a law but would act without measuring its actions against what it ought to do. Tigers don’t, so Kant reasons, measure their action with the moral law before eating a gazelle. When hungry, they simply hunt and eat. In contrast, a subject, even a hungry one, must confront the moral law before stealing a loaf of bread. Even if the subject decides to steal, the interaction with the moral law is nonetheless the site of freedom.
The act of imposing the law on oneself and taking the ought into consideration limits what the subject can do, but this limit is emancipatory. The tiger is not free to eat the gazelle or not in the way that the subject is free to steal the loaf of bread or not. Kant understands that we cannot discern our freedom from a lack of external constraints on our actions because we may have natural or social constraints that govern these actions without our knowledge. This is the theoretical dead end that besets the liberal idea of freedom to do what one wants. If one just goes around doing what one wants, sooner or later one encounters an external barrier that brings this freedom to an end, no matter how rich and powerful one is.
By recognizing this problem with a liberal conception of freedom, Kant anticipates the stumbling block that ideology will pose for freedom. The liberal conception of freedom cannot account for the ideological manipulation that leads the subject to certain choices rather than others, to purchase a new tennis racket rather than giving one’s money to the communist party, let’s say. However, by linking freedom to the self-limitation of the moral law, Kant finds a path around this barrier, a way of conceptualizing freedom beyond the ideological manipulation imposed on the subject. When we think freedom through the self-limitation of morality, we bypass considerations of external constraints—and the internal constraints of ideological programming.
Kant discovers freedom in the imposition of the moral law because we cannot trace the origins of this law to the subject’s situation. There is no historical, social, or familial force that generates the moral law within the subject. While the society can produce various pressures within the psyche, it cannot produce the moral law, which compels the subject regardless of the social incentives for acting or consequences of the act it requires. The remit of this imperative is not bound by the subject’s position within society. The indifference of the moral law to social factors is what leads Kant to link it to the subject’s freedom. It gives the subject the ability to set every other consideration aside when the subject imposes this law on itself. All social and natural determinations can count for nothing in the light of the moral law.
The origin of the moral law, Kant claims, is the subject’s self-relating, the way that the psyche includes a fundamental negativity in relation to its positive content. The moral law is a form through which the subject can approach any content. As a form, it has the ability to bracket any content that emerges, no matter the extent of the subject’s attachment to it. The moral law manifests itself as a negation that the subject imposes on itself. This negativity marks a break from all forms of social pressure.[v] If my friends egg me on to go on a drunken rampage smashing up a series of cars, the moral law can negate this peer pressure.[vi]
The imposition of a limit on oneself is the measure of one’s emancipation from one’s own good. The good prompts one to act in accordance with its proclivities, like a fish swimming along with the current. But the moral law demands that the subject swim according to its dictates regardless of the current.[vii] This defiance of the power of good links the imposition of the moral law to the freedom of modernity, but it is a version of modern freedom distinct from capitalism’s liberal conception of it.
The moral law can free the subject from its place even when one is not conscious of its operations. For instance, if I grow up in a family completely committed to the values of capitalist society—constant struggle for enrichment, using others to advance one’s position, acquiring wealth by any means necessary, and so on—I can nonetheless find something unsavory in these demands. The immorality of treating others as pure means rather than as ends can shock me, prompting me to abandon the investment in capitalist ideology that my milieu imposes on me. The moral law enables me to free myself from the authority of the social context from which I emerge. In breaking from the dictates of the social order, I enact my freedom.
Morality, as Kant sees it, leads us to the recognition of our freedom. In the Critique of Practical Reason, he writes, “It is therefore the moral law, of which we become immediately conscious (as soon as we draw up maxims of the will for ourselves), that first offers itself to us and, inasmuch as reason presents it as a determining ground not to be outweighed by any sensible conditions and indeed quite independent of them, leads us directly to the concept of freedom.”[viii] We might feel like acting contrary to the moral law because of our natural inclinations or societal pressures, but the moral law demands that we disregard such feelings and act according to its dictates. Because we are so used to the liberal conception of freedom, Kant’s notion of freedom through the self-limitation of the moral law seems nothing at all like freedom. It appears as an oppressive unfreedom. But once we recognize that there will always be limits on freedom, we can see the insight of Kant’s idea that we can only be free if we give these limits to ourselves rather than allowing external forces to impose them haphazardly on us, as the liberal conception of freedom does.
What makes Kant’s moral system modern is that it is the first to break from any reference to the good. The modern universe replaces the good that operates as the ideal of premodern societies with the excess of enjoyment. The moral law, for Kant, is a site of excess relative to the social order. It operates without any reference to the good of society, of others, or of the self. In this sense, it bears no resemblance at all to Aristotle’s ethics or those of any premodern thinker.[ix]
Rather than being an ideal that one must strive toward, the good functions for Kant as a temptation that the moral act must avoid. For instance, I might be tempted to lie to a friend and tell him that the pimple on his face is unnoticeable. This lie would clearly contribute to my friend’s good—making him feel better about himself—but it would also violate the Kantian moral law.[x] I must do my duty for my duty’s sake, not for the benefit that will accrue to the other person or to the social order. The fact that it makes me socially uncomfortable is the indication that I am acting morally.
Kant goes so far as even to prohibit obedience to the moral law done for the sake of the good. That is, if I obey the moral law because I think it will make my life or the society better, I actually commit an act of radical evil rather than a moral one. Say someone drops twenty dollars on the ground. I pick it up and return to her in hopes that she will think kindly of me as an upright person. According to Kant, this intent besmirches the morality—and thus the freedom—of the act. When the good intervenes in any fashion, I leave the terrain of morality and imperil the freedom that derives from the imposition of the moral law.
The major modification that Kant makes in his theory of morality from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to the Critique of Practical Reason consists in the relationship between morality and freedom. In the earlier work, he argues that we must believe in our inherent freedom in order to save morality.[xi] But then, in the most revolutionary gesture of his philosophy, the Second Critique conceives of morality as the condition for freedom, rather than vice versa. Our ability to limit ourselves through the act of posing the moral law limits our freedom into existence. The moral law becomes the act of generating a free subject ex nihilo. Kant concludes in this work that we can act freely because we must. That is, the ability to impose the moral law indicates that we can act against our proclivities, whether they are genetic, societal, or even neurological. We no longer have to presuppose our freedom to save morality, as in the Groundwork, but the existence of the moral law as such testifies to the actuality of freedom. The mere act of giving ourselves laws that limit our activity reveals that we must be capable of limiting it.[xii]
Fichte accepts Kant’s deduction of freedom from the moral law and even doubles down on Kant’s investment in the liberatory effect of our morality.[xiii] He claims that the freedom generated by the moral law provides the sole value of the subject. As a result, when one has a choice between obeying the moral law and losing one’s life, one must opt for the path of the moral law, despite possible fatal consequences. I cannot lie, even to save my life, because life has no value in itself outside the freedom derived from the moral law. The freedom bestowed by the moral law is so important for Fichte that he will sacrifice everything else for it.[xiv]
To choose survival over morality, as Fichte sees it, is to turn oneself into a thing. The moral act cuts into the subject’s being, but this cut lifts subjectivity out of the trap of determinations. Without this moral self-limitation, one is nothing but what one’s circumstances produce, and there is nothing worth saving in this valueless existence. Fichte understands that there simply are no naturally existing values. Value requires the subject’s act of creation—the act of sublimation, even though Fichte wouldn’t put it that way. By pushing Kant’s logic to its end point, Fichte makes clear the disjunction between morality and one’s social situation. Even though we typically see morality as reducible to different social situations, it is precisely the failure of any situation to produce the moral law that aligns it with freedom. Obedience to the moral law is thus the way to escape capitulation to the pressures of capitalist society.[xv]
Hegel and Schelling, in contrast to Kant and Fichte, extend self-limitation beyond morality. They accept Kant’s redefinition of freedom as the imposition of limits on oneself as opposed to encountering external limits. They accept Kant’s distinction between the autonomy of the free subject and the heteronomy of the subject of servitude. Their philosophies show how we might illustrate the unfolding of our self-limitation as the process of the subject articulating its freedom. In this way, they indicate the path that modernity might take in opposition to the predominance of the commodity form and the liberal conception of freedom that it imposes on us. Both Schelling and Hegel go beyond Kant and Fichte in their conception of freedom. More than their two forebearers, they see the radical potential for freedom that modernity unleashes.
Schelling’s philosophy of freedom reaches its highest point in the famous essay that he devotes to the subject of freedom, the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. In contrast to Kant, Schelling insists on evil, not morality, as the key to conceiving freedom.[xvi] We must be able to do evil for its own sake in order to be free. The capacity for an unmotivated evil is at once the capacity for freedom, the ability to act against any prevailing interest.[xvii] As Schelling sees it, morality is ultimately too closely associated with interest and the good in order to function as the site for freedom. That said, despite coming at the question of freedom from evil instead of morality, Schelling ends up at the same point that Kant does.
For both Kant and Schelling, freedom consists in our ability to become self-determining beings, which is what the logic of the commodity form precludes. Even though they never articulate direct critiques of the incipient capitalist system, we should nonetheless locate them among its earliest opponents because of their conceptions of freedom. In his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, Schelling contends that freedom is absolute autonomy. Schelling writes, “free is what acts only in accord with the laws of its own being and is determined by nothing else either in or outside itself.”[xviii] Self-determination is self-limitation. Through this act of self-limitation, one takes over the responsibility for what one does. Be it the moral law or diabolical evil, one gives oneself a project that has clearly defined limits, and these limits acts as the markers of one’s freedom.[xix]
This post was an excerpt from Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You. Enjoy it serially here for free. Each part of Limiting Us to Freedom by Todd McGowan will be published over the next two months before Todd’s course at Theory Underground begins in July, 2024 (more info on the course below). If you prefer a physical copy, orders within the U.S. can get it at a discount here. Otherwise, I recommend getting it from Amazon. Also, stay tuned for the Audible version of this - in production now!
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References:
[i] The German Idealist alternative to capitalist free reappears later in theorists such as Frantz Fanon, who finds in Hegel an important touchstone for conceiving of decolonial revolt. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004).
[ii] Jean-Jacques Rousseau dies during the lifetimes of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling. He provides a Romantic version of the liberal conception of freedom, while John Locke, who dies before any of the four were born, offers a distinctively Enlightenment version of liberal freedom. Even though both thinkers come from vastly different political positions, they share an investment in liberal freedom, as do all thinkers who discuss freedom prior to Kant. This is what makes Kant’s breakthrough on the question of freedom so startling.
[iii] For this reason alone, Kant is worthy of a book written about him entitled Red Kant. Although this work deals with The Critique of the Faculty of Judgment rather than Kant’s ethics, its bare existence indicates where we should place Kant as a political thinker. See Michael Wayne, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism, and the Third Critique (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).
[iv] The Critique of Pure Reason concludes with an argument for assuming the existence of freedom, but Kant insists in this work that it cannot be proven. However, The Critique of Practical Reason does just that.
[v] The negative force of the moral law relative to social demands is what Freud misses when he theorizes it as a manifestation of the superego, which is an agency of conformity.
[vi] Unfortunately, during my time as a university undergraduate, the moral law in me was not powerful enough to resist this pressure, resulting in my probation and near-expulsion from the university after a destructive rampage that I joined in. To be fair, I had yet to read Kant, although he would not see that as a viable excuse.
[vii] Kant’s separation of morality from the good marks his definitive breakthrough over all previous moral systems. Kantian morality requires subjects to constantly sacrifice their own good—and even that of others—for the sake of the moral law. For instance, Kant absolutely forbids the lie told to make another person feel better. Telling others that they look nice when they don’t is an unacceptable violation of the moral law, even though it clearly contributes to the good of those one compliments.
[viii] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 163.
[ix] For Aristotle, the ethical subject always acts to promote the good. He preaches virtue not for its own sake but precisely because virtue leads to a good life. This reference to the good is just what Kant leaves behind.
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