Vicious Regress (I’m not bad, I just chose to be drawn that way )

“atemporal act of primordial choice by means of which each of us, prior to his temporal bodily existence…”

an atemporal act, temporally prior to other events?

whatever else is going on in here, I’m pretty sure that part of Zizek’s report is wrong.

But it’s my impression that Kant did float something along these lines, and that Kantians have been apologizing ever since. Not that it’s much worse than the rest of the mess of phenomenal/noumenal double-talk.

I have no comment of help here, as I admit in the past tending to fall asleep whenever Kant came up in class, and my Zizek is largely limited to his take on Lacan and desire. But, I wanted to admire you outloud for your clever title. :)

I should add: Kant thinks that any such choice is inexplicable. You absolutely cannot go about trying to figure out why you made this choice, since (a) it’s not a temporal event to be explained (and whatever that means, it can’t mean something like: a non-temporal event (occurrence), which makes no sense), and (b) ex hypothesi, it’s fundamental — the choice that explains why you have the maxims you do, and thus why you accept one ground for choice rather than another, and so you can’t explain it by citing your reasons.

It’s more like a theoretical postulate needed to secure moral responsibility, but not itself knowable, except by its effects (i.e., our conduct.)

I don’t mean hilzoy’s remarks, but Zizek’s.

How does anything spring, fully-formed, from nothing?

My recollection is that Kant held that one must ultimately be held to choose one’s “Gesinnung”, disposition, not exactly “intelligible character”. He also held that we can not know that we are free, since the only thing we can properly be said to know is phenomenal experience, which is subject to a thorough causal determinism, both in inner and outer sense. A lawless freedom, in turn, he claimed would be a contradiction in terms, hence freedom was a matter of acting in accordance with a maxim, a kind of rule or mini-policy. That would render freedom intelligible, though not knowable, hence consign it entirely to the noumenal, intelligible sphere. But I don’t exactly recall that he was preoccupied with the problem of condemning evil, since he saw evil as all too plentiful in the world, but rather with the problem of how a corrupt or even evil agent could be converted to the moral point of view, which he held to be always possible, since we all know ourselves as finite, sensuous beings to be imperfect, “pathological”, hence in conflict with the moral law.

Sartre more like it. But for him it is not experienced as necessity, and we can always choose a new character.

I’m a simple man, but I don’t find the “problem of evil” terribly difficult.

First of all, things like earthquakes and hurricanes have long ago been explained by impersonal natural forces. Likewise diseases and plagues and such: these organisms want to live, it’s unfortunate but not incomprehensible that they do so by sickening or killing humans.

But what about man’s “evil” towards man? It’s pretty straightforward. 300 million (or however many years) of our evolution has been spent in the “nasty, brutish, and short” stage. Civilisation itself is, what, less than 10,000 years old? The concept of non-violence and forgiveness is 2500 years old or so? The concept of freedom of concience, 500 years old? The concept of equality and democracy, 200 years old? Abolishment of slavery maybe 150 years old? Equality of the sexes maybe 100 years old in some places and still not even present in others?

Civilisation is a very thin and very new veneer atop the mass of jungle emotion and animal motivation which still dominates our lives. Even the most eggheaded among us still thinks with our ape-brains more than we care to admit. And this is the “problem” of evil: our sense of what we *should* be doing has evolved much faster than our ability to actually do it. The “flesh is weak”, indeed– I don’t see “evil” being anything more complicated than that.

I’m sure there are counter-examples, and I’m rounding things off quite severely here and getting some of the dates wrong, but still.

John: it wouldn’t surprise you if you knew me. I haven’t written Kant scholarship (though there’s something in the hopper), but that’s just because I’m more interested in putting (what I take to be) his ideas to use than in justifying the claim that they are, in fact, his ideas. (Not because I’m OK with being slipshod about what he thought — I’m not — but because given the choice between explaining my views of Kant and explaining my Kant-inspired views of, oh, freedom of the will, I choose the latter, and include some statement like: of course, I think I got it all from Kant.)

Whatever else Kant may be trying to say in the relevant passage of the Religion (Ak VI, 30ff.), he does not try to explain why and how some people are (or have become) especially evil “and how it is that we hold an evil person responsible for his deeds”. He is trying to explain “the propensity to evil (Hang zum Boesen)” that Christians have claimed is part of all our (human) nature (in general). He argues (against some Christians and others) that it is wrong to blame or senses or desires. Even the propensity to moral evil must be founded in something rational. He does talk about an “intelligible deed” (intelligibele That) as a necessary condition of the possiblity of the “innate” and “ineradicable” propensity to evil in all of us. It’s primarily something to do with us as a species, not an explanation why anyone turns out a particular way.

I am not sure whether Kant succeeds in explaining the propensity to evil by a transcendental condition of an intelligible deed, if only because I am doubtful that there is such an innate and ineradicable propensity to evil in human nature. I also don’t pretend to understand what an “intelligible deed” is.

I am sure of one thing, though, and that is that Zizek’s interpretation of Kant is rather misleading. Kant was not primitive enough to speak of a “nonphenomenal transcendental, atemporal act of primordial choice by means of which each of us, prior to his temporal bodily existence, choose his eternal character.” An “atemporal act” is nonsense. An individual “eternal character” that someone can choose is in Kantian terms just as much nonsense as any choice “prior to [our] temporal bodily existence.”

It might be worth adding that I don’t think that the “infinite regress” charge quite applies, at least on Kant’s own premises. Kant was rigorously skeptical of the actual existence of freedom, only claiming to demonstrate its possibility. He, in fact, abandonned his attempt to deduce the moral law, in part from the account of freedom in the first “Critique”, that he attempted in the “Groundwork”, and, instead, relied on the “fact” of pure practical reason in the second “Critique”; that is, on the necessity of presupposing the agent’s point-of-view. The claim then would be that freedom is a necessary presupposition of there being moral conduct/deliberation at all. But that is just the structure of a transcendental argument: without the specified condition, a given possibility would not be conceivable at all. Previously, temporality had been specified as a “form of intuition”, without which phenomenal experience would not be possible. But that just would mean that such experience, as causally determined, does not impose its constraints on freedom. Freedom, whose possibility/intelligibility is outside the phenomenal world, would then only be evidenced by the moral law itself, whose “Ehrfurcht”, in the constraint it puts upon our inclinations, would be its only phenomenal manifestation. The basic claim then is that something timeless must enter into our moral judgments of empirical acts, in order for those acts and judgments to be at all intelligible and possible, that is, to make sense at all, and, tracing the implication of such a claim further out, the possible existence of a “good will” implies the assumption of a “timeless” choice of such a disposition. Mind y’all, I’m not a Kantian and don’t buy into the empirical/transcendental split, least of all the assumption that the intelligible is timeless and must be impervious to experience. But it’s important in the interest of accuracy to understand the premises of an argument and evaluate just what the claim of an argument accomplishes, without imposing alien assumptions. And I think Kant’s assumption of a transcendental argument form, at least, backstops the infinite regress argument, even if it remains entirely mysterious just how the intelligible and empirical could interact.

hilzoy:

Yes, -(after waking in the middle of the night to take a pee),- I think I get the difference between hypothetical and categorical imperatives and the different levels of maxims involved in the proposal(s) of Kantian deliberation. But I was trying to make a different point about how the transcendental form of argument, which was Kant’s unique invention, backstops “infinite regress” objections based on an empirical, more-or-less Humean conception of “disposition” and preferences. In that context, the switch from the theoretical attitude to the practical standpoint, after the failure to more directly make the linkage, already implied from the outset, is what necessitates the appeal to an extra-worldly and self-sustained intelligibility. Of course, the horizon of communicability was always an implicit guiding concern of Kant’s notion of transcendental justification. But from my more-or-less Wittgensteinian point-of-view, the solipsism of his premises blocks off the concrete acknowledgement of the other, by which not only specific proposals could be made, involving a needfulness that is not necessarily reducible to mutual self-interest,- (and which should thus necessarily be forfended at all costs)-, but which could “ground” the recognition that it might actually be freedom which is at stake. So my own objection would not be that Kantian style deliberation can not take place, but rather to its abstract intellectualism/formalism that tends to be premised on a refusal/denial of embodiment, temporality and historicity- the very sorts of factors by which dispositions could be formed and wrongs could be “measured”.

Zizek’s gloss on Kant is really a criticism that says :
1) Kant has no moral psychology and all he has to offer is a bit of formalism to explain how one becomes good/evil.
2) Kant’s view doesnt work anyway because it generates regress.

I would make two comments. First Kant has some important things to say about moral psychology but mush of this is discussed in his later work ( Metaphysics of Morals ) and clearly Zizek is focusing only on the early work. To that extent his criticism is weak.
Second once we are able to grant that Kant has important things to say about moral psychology we can reply to the second criticism : Zizek’s view implies that Kant holds that we have direct duties to be good and this it is claimed leads to the regress . But Kant does not think that our obligation to act from moral feelings is a direct duty , something he denies on p160 of TMM. :
” since any consciousness of obligation depends upon moral feling to make us aware of the constraint present in the thought of duty , there can be no duty to have moral feeling or to acqure it.”

rollo- yes of course it would be stupid to think that we have only this one indirect duty and Kant of course doesnt say anything like that. The point that was being made above in # 24 was just to point out that Kant doesnt think that listening to our conscience is a direct duty ( on my understanding of Zizek this is what he thinks Kant is commited to saying )and that in an important sense Kant thinks that our choice of our character is constrained.

Why would I choose to be the sort of person who will choose to do evil?

’cause it’s fun! Bwahahahahaha!

hilzoy- we must distinguish between moral law which is legislated by us ( faculty in question is wille ) and moral psychology which is not legislated by us but rather is the background mechanism that we have only indirect control over. We can fine tune it but as apsychological mechanism it is something that we are born with.( again this is Kant’s distinction see 143-190 TMM ).

Now the question about choosing one’s character can be put this way : can we choose having moral feelings or having conscience ? and secondly what sort of duty is the duty to listen to our conscience ?
To the first question Kant answer is no we have limited control over this mechanism and that is why his answer to the second question is that we do not have direct duty to obey such commands ( we have indirect duties in this regard only, since they are not products of wille ).

I have nothing to add to Hilzoy’s impressive textual insights. But it might help to take a step back and think about the regress in terms of the relationship between choice and responsibility. It is natural to think that we are only responsible for what we have chosen. And choice, here, means a discrete event in time that is causally efficacious. So, in order to be responsible for something, I must have made a choice. But a choice is based on something – a desire, inclination, disposition, habit, impulse, etc. Am I responsible for that desire, etc.? Responsibility exists only on the basis of choice, so I am responsible only if the desire, etc., was itself the product of choice. Hence, the regress.

Think about how Aristotle gets out of this mess. Character is the basis of our actions, and we are responsible for our character. How do we come to have our character? Through habituation and our upbringing. There certainly were choices along the way that we made that affected the character we came to develop, but it would be a mistake to say that there was a moment when we chose our character. And yet, we are still responsible for the character we came to have. This means that responsibility is not tied to a discrete act of choice that can be temporally located. And that picture, I want to suggest, isn’t too far from Kant’s (mature) view.

Talk of an “atemporal act of primordial choice” is confused because it just suggests the same old picture of an act being the ground of responsibility – although in this case, somehow in a different place outside of time. The mistake is obviously compounded by the incoherence of saying that this choice occurs “prior to his temporal bodily existence.” But with the Aristotelian picture of character in mind, we find the grounds of responsibility cannot be located at any discrete moment of choice in a causal history. In that sense, it may make more sense to say that the acquisition of our character and responsibility is atemporal. Admittedly, Kant doesn’t help himself by talking about a transcendent choice, but I’m suggesting that it is really the issue of responsibility that he has in mind. Of course, there’s more Kantian metaphysical baggage that goes along with this picture, but Aristotle had metaphysical baggage of his own.

I think what is being lost here is Zizek’s eternal attempt to read Lacan’s “Kant avec Sade.” Here is with the Jacques Alain Miller when he substitutes desire for character and rolls Kant into a Lacanian ethics of aforesaid “desire.” This category is amoral or perhaps immoral, but is meant to offer an alternative to liberal and Christian notions of good and evil.

Now I think that Zizek is mangling Kant in the process, but you have got to pay attention to his process of thinking…which is anti-liberal to the max and a philosophical explanation of Lacan, which is hardly psychoanalytic at best.

What Zizek might do best is play with a certain mode of sadism, but I think to try to understand this on a purely Kantian level is misguided at best.

Hey. What a great thread. Thanks everyone. (Not that I’m declaring the discussion over or anything. By all means keep it up.)

hilzoy:”that the idea of answering the question ‘what should I do?’ by citing anything other than the sum of your preferences is not nonsensical,”

In other words, it is reasonable, or possible, to justify one’s actions from something else than your preferences — It took me a time to parse all the negatives there.

Although I “use” Kant in much the way hilzoy does (I admit I probably have many of my ideas about things from him, but I can’t be sure I understand him), I have a question to something that was said above:

zdenek: “This is why he does not think that we have a direct duty to be good but only indirect one:”

But what about our duty to not be evil? Some people*, distinguish between a duty to do good, which is conditional and a duty to not do evil, which is unconditional. To quote Thoreau: “It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him”.

But does Kant mean that not doing evil is a direct duty (in the sense of the zdenek quote)?

* (Yes, me included)