Excessive Subjectivity

Kant, Hegel, Lacan, and the Foundations of Ethics

Dominik Finkelde

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231545778
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Critique philosophique

How are we to conceive of acts that suddenly expose the injustice of the prevailing order? These acts challenge long-standing hidden or silently tolerated injustices, but as they are unsupported by existing ethical rules they pose a drastic challenge to dominant norms. In Excessive Subjectivity, Dominik Finkelde rereads the tradition of German idealism and finds in it the potential for transformative acts that are capable of revolutionizing the social order.

Finkelde's discussion of the meaning and structure of the ethical act meticulously engages thinkers typically treated as opposed—Kant, Hegel, and Lacan—to develop the concept of excessive subjectivity, which is characterized by nonconformist acts that reshape the contours of ethical life. For Kant, the subject is defined by the ethical acts she performs. Hegel interprets Kant's categorical imperative as the ability of an individual's conscience to exceed the existing state of affairs. Lacan emphasizes the transgressive force of unconscious desire on the ethical agent. Through these thinkers Finkelde develops a radical ethics for contemporary times. Integrating perspectives from both analytical and continental philosophy, Excessive Subjectivity is a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the ethical subject.

1

EXCESSIVE SUBJECTIVITY AND THE PARADOX OF AUTONOMY AS ITS PREREQUISITE

Excessive subjectivity often manifests itself in the form of underrepresented normative claims. When these claims collide with the established political sphere, they necessarily fail to meet with understanding, but in that failure succeed in revealing something about the nature of the political sphere itself: structured by mechanisms of collective hegemony, it can (to put it somewhat simply) accept and process only those cognitions that allow themselves to be subsumed under its established terms. In contrast, normative claims that appear excessive—claims traveling on a frequency outside the bandwidth of the universal—cannot even be advanced within the political community; they remain for all intents and purposes unrepresentable. Hegemonic processes are no doubt often essential for any political community, since every community’s notion of the universal (its values, norms, customs, and so on) occupies a position of sovereign authority, a position from which it can and may only absorb cognitions that lie within its limits of tolerance. Only through structures that lead to a cognitive stress reduction—that relieve tension between all-too-divergent claims within the political realm—can a community spring up and build normative judgments. Not infrequently the alignment of those judgments occurs independently of any process of deliberation within the realm of the established political order—and nevertheless therefore in support of the universal, because these are the judgments that provide for the homogeneity of the universal in the first place. Excessive subjectivity, meanwhile, emerges on the far side of such blinders. Thus it calls attention to the close link between the question of the autonomy of the subject and the definition of the universal that nourishes the established doxa. Here, already, we see that the concept of the autonomy of the subject is not free from paradoxical forces. Being autonomous also obligates the subject to be part of the ethical life of his life-world (Lebenswelt), even if this ethical life, in turn, often appears to contradict his autonomy. Hegel was well aware of this problem. He inherited it from Rousseau and Kant as the “paradox of autonomy,” a term that was understood to refer to the conflicting relationship between the individual and society, that is, between the universal and the particular.

Before going into detail on Kant, Hegel, and Lacan, the three authors that stand at the center of my analysis of excessive subjectivity, I would like to preface the theory of excessive subjectivity by outlining the problem of the paradox of autonomy. This is necessary because the paradox of autonomy forms the matrix from which excessive subjectivity emerges, like a figure emerging from a background. Hegel, in particular, recognized the challenge that the paradox of autonomy represents for political philosophy. For this reason, I will begin with him.

Hegel’s well-known thesis from his Philosophy of Right that the “spirit of a nation” (der Geist eines Volkes) is “the nature and development of its self-consciousness” (PhR §274) has led many commentators to object to his theory of ethical life on the basis that the “spirit of a nation” provides the individual not only with the paradigm of ethical duties, but also with the criteria of application of those duties.1 This seems to suggest that every spirit of a nation functions as a self-contained, totalitarian whole, and this impression has repeatedly brought Hegel in for strong criticism. In fact, Hegel makes clear that the spirit of a nation is not closed off: He points to the individual who in certain “epochs”—times of crises, for instance—is authorized to determine for herself “what is right and good” (PhR §138). Thus, while the impression of totalitarianism proves false, correcting it presents us with some interesting problems. How, for example, are we to know when a time of crisis has arrived? How can an individual be authorized at such a time to determine “what is right and good”? The individual is, after all, a child of her times: the dominant criteria of application for her time period’s hegemonically defined good are part of her inner nature (of her own ethical life) and part of the inner nature of her fellow citizens as well. Nor is it immediately clear how the individual who has autonomously determined what is “right and good” should be understood by the majority who hegemonically dominate the spirit of the people—assuming, that is, that the individual’s position differs sharply from the majority’s own estimation of the “right and good.”

Here one can deescalate the situation somewhat by pointing to the overdetermination of societal contexts and the polymorphism of political bodies within the spirit of a people/nation. The spirit of a people is never as autocratically one-dimensional as the talk of “a people” or “a nation” would seem to suggest. Especially in democratic societies, the spirit of the people is a conglomerate of civil society’s diverse “discourses.” Yet even here there exists the undeniable tendency for one discourse to assume hegemonic dominion over the others and make them dependent on its premises—which will therefore come to seem restrictive. Thus the problem remains: How can a discourse that diametrically contradicts the hegemonic order assert itself, considering that the normative premises of argumentation are always defined by the ruling body politic? Doesn’t there exist here the danger that the collision of opposing worldviews will lead to a conflict in which, to quote Wittgenstein, “each man declares the other a fool and heretic”?2

Hegel, wishing to distance himself from Kant, considered it important to show how interiority is preceded not simply by an external world, but by an external world that indirectly, through customs and conventions, defines interiority down to its innermost regions. Hegel writes that the good lives when it is “concrete” in deeds (PhR §141), and deeds are concrete inasmuch as they give form to the living good. Economic conditions, for example, give subjects (living during one era) behavioral options that other subjects (living centuries earlier) did not have. Thus, by taking up the courses of action it finds at its disposal, an ethical world becomes actual according to a specific, time-dependent autonomy. Today, in 2017, many citizens of Western industrialized countries understand themselves as autonomous by the premises of their societies, which in most cases are organized around capitalist principles. Their autonomy is of course greater than that of the citizens of Chad, for example, one of the poorest countries in the world, or that enjoyed by the people of the Middle Ages, but even in modern industrialized countries, autonomy is only autonomous to a degree. Children of poor families enjoy less potential for self-realization than children of wealthy parents, who have put themselves in a position to give their offspring a wider range of options for self-realization by amassing capital. The poorer families would have to rob the richer ones in order to make the contingency of options allowing for material realization appear less contingent. They of course are held back by the legal system, which protects the right to property as a cornerstone of bourgeois society. Thus, in order to avoid trouble, the poor accept the (limited) autonomy this century offers them and in so doing reaffirm a legal system that, although backed by a so-called justice system, seems to fall somewhat short of justice.

Thus one could say that, in a way, ethical life is inscribed into the subject even before the subject, in his autonomy as subjectum, can relate to himself or to the “living good.” Robert Pippin speaks in this regard of the “Kantian paradox,” while Terry Pinkard points to the importance of “practices,”3 which provide the conditions for the subject to make himself autonomous, namely, by seizing certain courses of action and forgoing others.4 As Pippin demonstrates in his book Hegel’s Practical Philosophy,5 determining ends about practical matters, choosing means, being able to perform actions, and so on, show that the subject’s power of judgment is inscribed with an extrinsic body of rules: rules that determine subjective interiority and that have their origin in the outer world. They are controlled and maintained by collectively avowed processes that nevertheless always remain partially obscured from the viewpoint of the collective. The established practices generate the ability to judge them and vice versa.6

If the spirit of a nation is the true source of ethical duties, then this same spirit endorses a complete set of ethical duties and their criteria of application. Then the good exists in established customs of my era inasmuch as I do not question them with extraordinary stubbornness and do not, for example, incite a revolt against established ethical life or loot my rich neighbor’s apartment. I accept the autonomy allotted to my family and myself in a bourgeois society, for example, not because I believe it is perfect, but because it is the autonomy to which I am accustomed through cultural imposition. Thus the ethical world is to a certain extent determined by a circular interlacing of conditions between the subject and its historically established form of life. Only political revolts and revolutions show that this interlacing of conditions is not necessarily stable.

My noninsurrection against prevailing customs can thus be understood as a passive act of certification of social practice, even if I judge this practice to be unethical at various levels. Passive sufferance of immoral laws and norms is a part of legal culture. This has led Peter Sloterdijk to coin the term cynical reason for the exhausting coercion of false consciousness, as it accepts with ridicule what it despises.7 Slavoj Žižek interprets this concept in his book The Sublime Object of Ideology and, inverting Karl Marx’s famous definition of ideology in Das Kapital (“They do not know it, but they do it”),8 twists the concept to represent the current zeitgeist: “They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.”9 The problems and aporias caused by this ideological twist for questions of normativity will be revisited frequently in the course of this analysis.

Hegel emphasizes that a subject must be called autonomous even if she is continuously part of an inferential network of behavioral options. In this way, Hegel believes he has overcome Kant’s understanding of autonomy. The subject that acts morally need not be thrown back solipsistically on her pure practical reason in order to prove her abstinence from inclination. The subject constitutes herself as autonomous only due to her participation in practices that, being normative, are her autonomy. Any power of judgment is then partly determined by the established good and the established power of judgment.10 In this regard Hegel writes: “The right of individuals to their subjective determination to freedom is fulfilled in so far as they belong to ethical actuality; for … it is in the ethical realm that they actually possess their own essence” (PhR §153). The laws of practices are “not something alien to the subject. On the contrary, the subject bears spiritual witness to them as to its own essence” (PhR §147).

Acknowledging a practice means being inferentially bound up in a structure of reasons, that, of course, may also include errors. Reasons are conceptual norms; they have been self-referentially embedded into themselves by the prior enactment of their corresponding normative protocols.11 Thus with Hegel one might say: a fact or state of affair is part of a judgment inasmuch as it is part of a practice.12

Yet even if norms are recognized as binding such that they form a dimension of normativity in the discursive and practical structures of social reality and affect the ethical life of individuals, the whole community may still be in error in terms of its ethical life, as “the features of the new world” (PhS §11) are already illuminated, but the old one, though “gradual[ly] crumbling” (PhS §11), has not passed away yet. One day, though, forms of political life can collapse “in one flash” because the interlacing of truth and justification, each in their own historical objectifications, no longer achieves harmony. Truth does not legitimize itself for Hegel—as it does for Richard Rorty—only inferentially or epistemically; rather, Hegel’s inclusive monism makes clear that the priority of truth is necessary as a precondition for the revision of deceptions, and this priority is written into Hegel’s philosophy where he describes the progress of knowledge toward truth as the coming-to-itself of the Begriff, “the concept.”13 His notion of progress as a cumulative overcoming of deceptions in the development of Spirit contradicts any purely epistemic, inferentialist theory of truth.

Does the interlacing of the “living good” and the practicing subject within this living good rob the subject of his autonomy? If the subject is only autonomous when he is already a participant in practices, how can he then relate to those practices (for example, through resistance or questioning)? One could, like Pippin, interpret Hegel as saying that the subject realizes his autonomy within the given established good of dominant ethical life only if he participates in that ethical life: making judgments, questioning others’ judgments, allowing himself to be judged, relating to himself in a recognition relation with others, and so on. This view of Hegel has led Pippin, Neuhouser, and Honneth to understand Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as a theory of social recognition. Indeed, participation is a precondition for any “relation to.” The dominant practices are not dogmatic codices, such that the individual only executes certain behavioral procedures implanted within him like a computer code. Due to the overcomplexity of circumstances, which is a permanent challenge to inferentialism, Hegel knows that within the domain of inferentialist argumentation, norms generated by practices necessarily and repeatedly provoke a redefinition of the given established ethical life. Yet as long as an item of knowledge or a practice is considered justified, there is no cognitive framework with which to question it, or to judge differently the judgments passed on in this practice. Arguments in the established cognitive realm may be interchangeable, but what about the premises that prestructure the actual discursive framework?14

This question gives rise to a problem, one that has been among the factors behind contemporary political philosophy’s shift toward a radical, anti-Kantian, anticommunitarian decisionism (as advanced by Badiou, Žižek, and Laclau). For it is not entirely clear how an inferential web of norms, despite its reciprocal recognition structures, could ever free itself from, for example, a collective error, if that error affected the premises of the web of belief itself. If the practice prestructures the conditions for judgments, ...