Doing what you Ought
It is one of Kant’s greatest claims to fame, that he noticed something truly problematic about the entire idea of Freedom. It is all very well to talk of free choice, and the freedom to act, but that action is clearly very severely restricted two ways. On the one hand, there is that oldest of philosophical chestnuts, the problem of ‘empirical desire’. If one follows one’s lusts is one truly free? Or is one a slave to one’s passions (or affects)? Or slave to a past, in which those passions were first delimited ? What price after all is freedom in the present, if that freedom is always caught up in the fixed desires of the past? Moreover, this lack of freedom is all the more problematic when one allows the idea that this past need not be the past of the individual themselves. Children repeat in new ways the passions of their parents, or nations like to bind up their citizens in a history.
One the other hand, Kant suggested, the very notion of freedom is clearly oddly configured. To choose (or not) to act at a certain time or place, is not just to respond to the past, but also to be caught up in becoming something other. To choose to live in London or Paris or be an artist or a tax official, is to choose, to a degree that which one is caught up in becoming. Kant (who is after all the great philosopher of the apriori truth) is aware that there are deep limits to such freedoms. The past (social or biological) is never simply negated, and so one is not free to ‘become’ anyone or anything. And yet with that past a plurality of different people are possible, people who will constantly emerge (or disappear), as a result of actions taken and choices made.
Here one needs to share Kantian caution, as one very carefully attempts to comprehend what the problem is here. It is as if the individual was straddled between two alternative existences within time. In the one, lies the past, in which that individual is bound up as if in destiny, and lacks any freedom beyond those experiences it has, and the history which they make for it. While on the other side it is as if the individual was almost too free to have a real choice. They can become this or become that (for a while) as every event shifts their nature, and cannot be said to have actively chosen to act consistently in some manner across time.
Before one considers the depth of Kant’s answer to this problem, it is worth considering that problem in depth. For this problem of freedom is surely one of the great problems of modernity. On the one hand we live in a world that is clearly fixated with the freedom of the future. It is a popular (American) dream that everyone, could given the right ‘break’ to be someone… This dream of the big break crosses many different levels in society. On the personal level, many a life is wasted in the hope of the great event that will change everything. A hope that in this case is all the more insidious, as it precludes any action now. But it is also the case that politics are clearly run on the principle that it is the ‘big breakthrough’ which really matters. Politicians seem to spend a fair portion of their time neurotically looking for that moment when everything changes. Moreover party organization (and perhaps increasingly government) appears to be currently designed to maximise the impact of ‘the definitive breakthrough’ rather than to govern the country (what else after all is the politics of spin?). But even more problematically is the image of restless becoming that we have sold to the rest of the world. That is, we have, for example, persuaded other peoples that if they ‘westernize’ (or at least industrialize in some manner) then not only will each individual have both the ability to ‘take control over their lives’; But also that that control itself will involve a constant and restless change, a change which moreover is directly expressed in the endless acquisition of new appliances.
Moreover, such restlessness is made all the more problematic by being combined with that other aspect of the initial problem, that of desire, and the past. If one says blithely, and blandly that everyone has a Right To Be Someone (whatever it takes), we of course beg that rather deep question about what that someone actually is. It is at this point that desire (and the past which it arises from) leaps up, and demands that it is indeed capable of being that person (if no one else is). The freedom to be someone, subtly changes into the freedom to follow the most immediate of desires; whether that desire is lust for fast food, gossip, or porn.
This shift into the past, is then caught up with the need for capitalism to manufacture consumption (and Consumers). For, from the Kantian perspective at least, once one substitutes the past and its desires for the ’Someone’ which the future is so busy creating, then one opens oneself up to the possibility that between the future one becomes, and the past, in which that future comes to be held, other agencies might lurk, agencies that seek to dovetail open dreams into specific futures. That is, one naturally opens one’s mind up to the possibility of advertising. From such a perspective it is perhaps not too fanciful to claim that it is the peculiar role of advertising to seize control of the future, and bend it back into a configured past, and thereby bend dreams back into fixed desires. It would be very little exaggeration to claim that without advertising, the modern individual (who is clearly given in the feedback of future into past, dream into desire) would by and large be unthinkable.
Hence in a deep sense, we live within the ruins of the old Kantian problem. Or perhaps more accurately we live in the ‘ruins’ of our own minds, which resulted from our losing sight of Kant’s answer to the problem, while accepting the problem itself. Kant’s own answer is profound and complex. He realizes that although freedom was to be what an individual enjoyed, in a sense it was not the individual themselves that was free (the problem of past and future showed that), so much as their will. Will here being that element in the mind that could remain fixed, whether it is thought to be in past, future or present. The mind, and the will was then free when it set the agenda. That is when, independent of events, it remained able to affirm its choices and decisions, as so fix itself. Two further implications immediately arise from this last point. Firstly it is clear that, for Kant at least, the move to freedom of will (rather than the individual), allowed one to rework exactly what was free. Freedom lay not in the immediate circumstance, in the event, or even in the particular decision, but rather in the reasons and thoughts that formed the substrate of that decision. Thence freedom lay not in the decision not to steal one’s neighbour’s cow or car, but rather in understanding the deep reasons why stealing at some level always involves one being caught in some trap of desire or other, and therefore is actually caught up in never being truly free. As one is free, one, in a single act, escapes the past of configured desires, and gives oneself a right to act across a future (Heidegger draws heavily on Kant here); and yet at the same time one also frees up that future from ever being simply trapped in a past of its own. That which was free is always to be free again and again throughout one’s life.
Secondly it is clear enough that although freedom is in each and every case constructed within an individual, it must be truly collective in its application. That is, the same logic that demanded that freedom’s principles are fixed across the entire life, also demands that what is truly free could also always be willed by another individual who is acting freely. Freedom in direct contravention of modern (post romantic opinion), is only free when it is collective, and is not therefore the particular concern of any one individual.
It is worth noting that the last move has the additional advantage of solving that other very deep problem of freedom. My freedom to use mobile phones or buy cheap clothes or consume milk at 27p a pint, is another’s oppression. Or even more tellingly my ability to waste fossil fuels how and when I like is another (but also my own) climatic catastrophe. But for Kant the use of freedom here is clearly misapplied. What is more, Kant would clearly wish us to wrest universality, and the dreams of the future away from desires and onto maxims for actions. That is, for Kant the mere fact that (when faced with constant advertising and propaganda) ‘everyone’ wants to live a western lifestyle, is not itself ever enough to claim that that lifestyle of itself represents the epitome of history and freedom. What matters is not that we all must chase after some dreamy goal, which is claimed to be attainable by all. But rather, what matters, is the far more real and everyday matter of decisions which, far from being tied to immediate circumstances or future dreams, need to be treated as something which are active in their own right. It is in such decisions as an active force, that not only we, but also everyone else (and beyond that the world itself) is caught up and created, and the Kantian science of the rationality behind genuinely free decisions (called by Kant ‘Categorical Imperatives’), is the attempt to grasp and will this fact.
At this point however, Kant famously hits two rather complex problems. On the one hand he cannot provide any example that is really ‘up to’ encompassing the deep originality of his argument. His examples tend to be garnered from conventional morality. Thence he proves that it is wrong to steal, which is fine and dandy (it is wrong also to covet camels for that matter), but one hardly needed all the elaborate reasoning, and subtle argument to demonstrate a principle that most children in a kindergarten know. On the other hand, his take of freedom seems far too cold, and too calculating, removing it, as he does from all the mess of history and life.
However, perhaps, it is the case that it is not Kant who is wrong here, so such as history itself, that has taken two hundred years or so to catch up with Kant! Three features after all stand out from the above argument, all of which clearly talk very loudly to modernity (and in particular to the deep problem of environmental collapse).
Firstly each decision to be free needs to be able to be willed again at another time and place. Or to put it in the modern jargon it needs to be sustainable, both within the mind and the world as a whole. So that each of our actions must be such that the mere endless repetition of the action itself never unpicks the fabric of the world, and thereby opens us out to the condemnation of subsequent generations. Kant’s famous moral ‘conservatism’, is coming back to haunt us romantics now! And with this fact it is no doubt time for the West to drop the ‘moral’ (for which also read technological) high ground. If sustainability is the maxim for modernity, there is no reason why other peoples might not, through their confrontation with the West, found other and quite frankly better systems, or at least the starting point for such systems (one thinks here of reusing or individual power production). And the sooner we admit that fact the better (and thereby break our romantic dream, and return to the far more rigorous world of Kant – where morality and Duty have nothing to do with ego).
Secondly, and even more critically, for Kant, the very issue of what it is to be free is tied up with what we all are (and is never purely personal). Every act needs to be understood in terms of its ‘additional’ effects, be they immediate or more long term. That hoary old Kantian chestnut has been transformed, in a society where it is no longer quite clear who is stealing what. After all, are sweatshops a form of stealing? - probably. Or again, and more problematically, are we stealing the environment from countries which have had no track record as polluters? And if so what are we going to do about this fact?
Thirdly, Kant in tearing morality out of the everyday, by using the language of religion and onerous duty, surely is telling us something rather deep about the nature of behaviour itself. To behave in a certain way is to be caught up in a whole variety of possible events, and possible consequences. It is bootless therefore to simply judge the moment, or even to attempt to understand the consequences of any single action (which are likely to be too numerous to contemplate). It is far better, Kant suggests, to start from the other position, that is the science of overall effects; these at least are (possibly) easier to define. And once those maxims exist, one can then twist and turn the flowing world of events, such that the events accord with the maxim’s truths, rather than always seeing freedom the other way around.
Kant properly understood, thereby, reverses that old Hegelian charge, that the imperative was too abstract too removed from the world. That is for Kant the point. Freedom never just simply lies in ‘being free’ at the moment of decision or not. On the contrary, it also includes the ability to take up that decision (and the events which follow on from it), and remodel them according to what is most free within them. Freedom is therefore what escapes the trap of advertising which has been set it. ‘Free choice’ is not the trapping of the dream of freedom within some configuration of the past; but rather the eruption within the past of something quite different. The free tears through the past of memory, splicing together those elements (or senses) in which it is active and thereby allows the mind to constantly rework its own nature. Freedom is therefore never the trapping of the future by the past. On the contrary, freedom is the very breaking away of the future from or with(in) the past, a past that is then endlessly taken up and remodelled (a fact known to Deleuze as much as to Kant).
Kant presents us both with the diagnostic tools to understand where that odd tie in between freedom and consumerism really came from, but also, and far more importantly, with a realistic strategy to resist some of its blandishments. A strategy, whose full richness, perhaps, his own times lacked the experience to comprehend. A fact that in turn, of course sentences us all into a long detour through the romantic period, with its worries about the fate of the ego and its overwhelming passions, a detour or slumber which it is probably about time we awakened from. And I guess we can only hope that our ‘now’ is up to that hard Kantian benchmark….
