Objective-External Material Practical Principles

Finally, Kant identifies moral theories based on objective-external criteria. Kant divides objective practical principles into two kinds of perfection: perfection as a ‘characteristic of the human being’ (objective-internal material practical principles) and perfection as ‘the supreme perfection in substance.’⁵⁷⁶ The latter is God and His “adequacy…to all ends in general.”⁵⁷⁷ For Kant, the latter acts as a practical principle insofar as the will of God can act as a standard to which our will must conform. It still remains a eudaimonistic principle insofar as the only subjective motive for complying with it remains the happiness expected from complying with it.

576 Kant The Critique of Practical Reason 173. [5:41]

577 Ibid 173. [5:41]

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It is also empirical not because God Himself is empirical but because compliance with an external standard must be determined empirically. ⁵⁷⁸ Another way of expressing this moral position is to say that what is right and wrong is determined solely by God’s will. Kant cites one near-contemporary who holds this position: Christian August Crusius.

Crusius’ Divine Command Moral Theory

In Chapter Two we encountered Crusius as a critic of the Wolffian-Leibnizian metaphysical and epistemological tradition. However, he was also a critic of the Wolffian-Leibnizian ethical tradition.⁵⁷⁹ Contrary to Leibniz and Wolff, Crusius sees right and wrong as determined solely by the will of God. Crusius opposed Wolff’s cognitive perfection with an emphasis on ‘conscientious feeling.’⁵⁸⁰ Contrary to Wolff, who claimed that to know the good means to desire it, Crusius divides the understanding and the will, cleaving the presumed necessary connection between knowing and willing. In a move that parallels Kant’s own subservience of the theoretical to the practical, Crusius concludes that “thought and

understanding exist only for the sake of action and the will.”⁵⁸¹ The understanding helps us to understand the natural ends, or ‘perfections’ which we must strive to attain while the will implements the means the understanding has reasoned out to achieve those ends. These means are referred to as goods. ⁵⁸² God, however, designed us with not only an understanding that grasps the good and a will that desires it, but also with fundamental impulses or desires for specific natural ends. These fundamental desires include the desires for truth, self-perfection, happiness, and to love God, but also a desire to obey God’s commands. Happiness is found by

578 Ibid 173. [5:41]

579 Heath, Peter and J.B. Schneewind, “Explanation of Names” in Lectures on Ethics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 459.

580 Ibid 459.

581 Beck, Lewis White, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 401.

582 Ibid 401.

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obeying these divine commands, or, in other words, with complying with the ‘impulse of conscience’ God has given us.⁵⁸³ Therefore, humans possess innate feelings that grasp the Divine will. Since one of the natural ends of humans is to comply with divine commands, ethics is grounded on God’s will.⁵⁸⁴ The will, being free, can choose to assent to the commands of the Divine will or to act contrary to them. We are free to comply or not regardless of our desires or concerns for our own happiness.⁵⁸⁵ Once again, it becomes clear why Kant thinks that the subjective determining ground of the will, even in this case, is happiness.

Beck suggests that this is not technically the same position as Divine Command theory per se, since what is good is ultimately determined not by God’s arbitrary whim but instead by those natural ends God originally chose. Nonetheless would not this position still be an indirect or roundabout version of Divine Command theory (or even Natural Law theory), since

presumably God arbitrarily chose humanity’s natural ends when He designed human nature? ⁵⁸⁶ 3.7 Final Remarks on Heteronomy and Its Threat to Freedom

From this concluding vantage point, an interesting pattern seems evident in the Table of Heteronomy. Granted a left-to-right reading of the Table itself (which I have presented), we can see a (dialectical) movement from the most groundless moral theories to those that

asymptotically approach a universal grounding. Subjective-external material practical principles are anarchic, since they seem to be arbitrarily determined by the tastes of a given culture. They bear the force of law without being the moral law. They are in a sense the simulacra of the moral law, since they give the appearance of law without bearing the substance of law (universality).

Subjective-internal principles, being internal, are at minimum planted on a purely subjective

583 Ibid 401 – 402.

584 Ibid 402.

585 Ibid 459.

586 Ibid 402.

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ground and, having returned into their purely subjective essence, can find a less arbitrary object to affirm: a real subjective state (pleasure) which can be determined by means of what can at best be described as a theoretical analogue to practical reason (prudence). By conceiving of the agent as a theoretical object (namely, a body, or at best, an empirical ego) actual, specific

circumstances that will elicit that internal state can be calculated. It is thus an advancement from the previous moral relativist position since it is mediated by reason, albeit prudential reason rather than practical reason. Nonetheless, taste can never be the basis for universal and necessary moral principles, as what pleases one patient may displease another. Objective-internal principles, in some ways similar to Kant’s own practical principle, seem to aim at autonomy. Seneca, for example, seems to articulate the Stoic position as one in which the agent frees himself from the whims of Fortune by withdrawing the boundaries of the self to the sphere of the rational. Nonetheless, this is not absolute autonomy, since practical perfection amounts to mere skill and compliance with external (human) nature. With objective-external principles we are provided with an example of absolute autonomy (God), but such autonomy, in principle, must be arbitrary without a rational grounding, since any ethical criterion other than the will of God would mitigate the power of that will. Divine Command theory is the purest material practical principle since from a limited human perspective it presents itself as if it were rationally determined from a position of absolute freedom (divine decree). But such a conception proves self-contradictory, since this very Logos seems arbitrarily grounded. Rational beings aside from God can only attain autonomy by means of rationality. Rational autonomy and its concomitant formal practical principle will be explored later when we return to Kantian askesis.

The following chapter has highlighted the four kinds of heteronomy, primarily by providing more in-depth expositions of those ethical theories Kant places under the headings of

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each kind of heteronomy. Even after doing so, it is not necessarily clear which texts Kant read to familiarize himself with each position. Interestingly, our investigations of each ethical theorist’s position did not always confirm a clean correspondence between each theorist and his respective heteronomous variant. There even seemed to be moral theorists that were strangely omitted granted not only their impact on Kant’s own moral development, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also because of Kant’s claim that his was a comprehensive architectonic of moral theories outside of his own. One wonders what is more important: Kant’s conception of each

heteronomous variant or the actual theories. In this chapter I attempted to find a middle ground.

At minimum, Kant does succeed at providing a framework for not only organizing but predicting possible theories that identify a particular kind of contingent object as good. It is arguable that there may be valued objects that are neither subjective or objective, nor external or internal, but at present, what those objects could be remain merely a logical possibility devoid of actual content. And in those cases when it is clear that a theory does conform to the

heteronomous rubric, it is not always clear where it properly belongs. This analysis has shown that to some degree what Kant considers the privileged object of a moral theory is arbitrarily chosen on his part, or at minimum that convincing arguments could be made to the contrary. For example, why should a metaethical analysis of Mandeville’s theory privilege custom when he also seems utilitarian (i.e. to privilege pleasure)?

These complications aside, Kant’s strongest point remains how any practical principle that judges a state of affairs to be either good or bad based on an object, necessarily exterior to the will, leaves an agent at the caprice of factors outside of his control. The agent’s decisions become reactive instead of active, ensnared to the phenomenal realm of determined cause and effect, rather than self-determining. And even if Kant’s typologies are not faithful renditions,

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they still articulate ways in which external conditions can replace the conditions the will sets for itself.

The table of heteronomy is thus a crucial architectonic of domination whose usefulness can be exported from the realm of metaethics. It is from this perspective that I will approach Michel Foucault’s investigations into power-knowledge in the next chapter.

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4.1 The Table of Heteronomy as Architectonic for Foucaultian Forms of Control