A post at Steve S’s reminded me of some stuff I’ve been meaning to paste up hear for ease of access, which in turn reminded me to do a bit of interwebsearching, the results of which are also pasted here.
This may be old hat to those of y’all with better Kant chops (I so want better Kant chops, if only I had more time). Nonetheless, a while back I found some stuff that really struck me. I had started reading a bit of Kant’s history writings, which I’ve unfortunately had to shelve due to time constraints. A remark and reference in the translators’ intro led me to the Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone piece, which is online. I pulled some quotes. I also noticed that the translator prefers the title “Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason.” I’ve not read his article on this yet. The German title is “Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft.” Blossen is the same word which Benjamin and Agamben use for the ‘bare’ in ‘bare life.’ Blossen can also be translated as ‘mere,’ which is the translation used in the version of B’s Critique of Violence that I know of. The Kant connection is interesting. Benjamin wrote in an early piece, discussed here, that comparison with the Kantian system will be a touchstone of the project he called ‘the coming philosophy.’ One of the stakes here is, I think, what one means by abstraction, as Steve discusses in his post and/or the comments on his post, which in turn touches on what is meant by terms like ‘bare life’ and ‘abstract labor’ - are they really bare and abstract, or merely treated that way? Craig and I discussed this recently in comments on a post here. Craig suggested going back to the 1844 Manuscripts to address this, which is a really good idea. I discussed some related themes, loosely related anyway. I’ll have to look over those notes and those Marx passages again, as things might make more sense now.
“[I]f a man is to become not merely legally, but morally, a good man (pleasing to God), that is, a man endowed with virtue in its intelligible character (virtus noumenon) and one who, knowing something to be his duty, requires no incentive other than this representation of duty itself, this cannot be brought about through gradual reformation so long as the basis of the maxims remains impure, but must be effected through a revolution in the man’s disposition (a going over to the maxim of holiness of the disposition). He can become a new man only by a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation (John III, 5; compare also Genesis I, 2), and a change of heart.
But if a man is corrupt in the very ground of his maxims, how can he possibly bring about this revolution by his own powers and of himself become a good man? Yet duty bids us do this, and duty demands nothing of us which we cannot do. There is no reconciliation possible here except by saying that man is under the necessity of, and is therefore capable of, a revolution in his cast of mind, but only of a gradual reform in his sensuous nature1 (which places obstacles in the way of the former). That is, if a man reverses, by a single unchangeable decision, that highest ground of his maxims whereby he was an evil man (and thus puts on the new man), he is, so far as his principle and cast of mind are concerned, a subject susceptible of goodness, but only in continuous labor and growth is he a good man.”
I unfortunately didn’t keep track of which sections these quotes are from, I’ll need to look them up again. My favorite one, however, is this one which is from book three.
“To found a moral people of God is therefore a task whose consummation can be looked for not from men but only from God Himself. Yet man is not entitled on this account to be idle in this business and to let Providence rule, as though each could apply himself exclusively to his own private moral affairs and relinquish to a higher wisdom all the affairs of the human race (as regards its moral destiny). Rather must man proceed as though everything depended upon him; only on this condition dare he hope that higher wisdom will grant the completion of his well-intentioned endeavors.”
Shortly after that he lists “The requirements upon, and hence the tokens of, the true church” (ie, moral commonwealth) as four:
Universality, purity (”union under no motivating forces other than moral ones”, “relation under the principle of freedom,” and modality.
Then he says “An ethical commonwealth, then, in the form of a church, i.e., as a
mere representative of a city of God, really has, as regards its basic principles, nothing resembling a political constitution.”
What I like about the above paragraph is the “proceeding as if.” This is expressed in a way that I like here, as follows:
“Kant denies that we can know that we’re free, in any strong metaphysical sense. But he maintains that we are entitled to assume that we’re free. We, as it were, announce our freedom, and this announcement has priority over any empirical science. The priority seems to be a transcendental priority: if we weren’t free, we couldn’t do science, either, since it is the same faculty — that of reason — which is deployed in science or in morality.
If empirical science could show that we’re not truly free, it would also, at the same time, show that we’re not really capable of science. It would self-destruct.
There’s a similar argument, I think, as to why we’re entitled to accept responsibility for our actions. We cannot know that we’re responsible, in the sense that we cannot control what our actions do in the world. Foucault is completely Kantian when he says:
People know what they do, and they frequently know why they do what they do, but what they don’t know is what what they do does. (in Foucault, Dreyfus and Rabinow; cited as “pers. comm.”)
Exactly: we don’t know — and, Kant would say, we cannot know — what what we do does. In the face of this massive and incomprehensible ignorance, we must announce that we are responsible, act as if we are responsible, and precisely through acting as if we are — become responsible.”
That post cites someone named
Apparently Einstein was interested in this stuff, at least somewhat, as noted in a passing remark here:
“On 23 April 1920, the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences had elected Einstein as a foreign member. The certificate, signed by Queen Wilhelmina, was issued on 19 May, and, while still in Leyden, Einstein accepted his election on the 24th (Doc. 29). Five days later, on 29 May 1920, Einstein was officially inducted during a session of the Amsterdam Academy. His presence in Amsterdam on that day, however, conflicted with earlier plans to attend a special conference of neo-Kantian philosophers in Halle on 29 May, organized by Hans Vaihinger, and devoted to a discussion of the philosophical implications of relativity theory. Vaihinger was promoting a version of neo-Kantian philosophy, dubbed “Philosophy of the As-If” (“Philosophie des Als-Ob”) after the title of Vaihinger’s chief work.[31] Because Vaihinger’s approach dominated the proposed contributions, the Halle meeting came to be referred to as the “Als-Ob-Konferenz,” which was to coincide with the annual meeting of the Kant Society in Halle, the first since 1914. After initially agreeing to participate in the event, Einstein was warned by Paul Ehrenfest, Max Wertheimer, and Elsa Einstein that his presence would lend credibility to a controversial philosophical approach (Docs. 16 and 23).[32] In the end, he decided not to attend the conference in Halle, as the “yakkety-yak makes [him] ill” (Doc. 19), stating his obligation to be present at the Dutch Academy session as an excuse (Doc. 41).”