Kant's Will at the Crossroads by Jens Timmermann;

Author:Jens Timmermann; [Timmermann, Jens]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192649355
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2022-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

¶ 28. Two ‘perfectly legal constitutional transitions’

Kant’s reconstruction of the French Revolution can serve as a model for how practical reason emerges within the human will.31 Both involve a transfer of sovereignty that backfires for those who initiate it. ‘A powerful ruler in our time’, Kant says in the Doctrine of Right with reference to Louis XVI, ‘made a very serious error in judgement when, to extricate himself from the embarrassment of large state debts, he left it to the people to take this burden on itself and distribute it as it saw fit’ (MM, VI 341.23–7). On 24 January 1789, Louis issued a royal edict to summon the Estates General for the first time since 1614. He needed their support to impose higher taxes, since it was the only legitimate way to raise funds he had been advised was still open to him. On 4 May, elected deputies from all parts of France convened at the Palace of Versailles; official proceedings began a day later. As a consequence, Kant says, ‘the monarch’s sovereignty [Herrschergewalt] wholly disappeared (it was not merely suspended) and passed to the people…’ (MM VI 341.31–3). On his view, it was entirely within the rights of the Estates to adopt a new constitution, which they did when—after the departure of much of the nobility and the clergy—the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly on 17 June 1789. The real French Revolution took place in a peaceful and orderly fashion. No blood was shed. It was, in Reidar Maliks’s words, ‘a perfectly legal constitutional transition’ (Maliks, 2014: 133).32

A strikingly similar transition takes place within the human will. At some point, inclination tries to delegate the burden of securing happiness for the agent to another power. It summons human reason, which initially enters its service as empirical practical reason, i.e. as a faculty that investigates causal relations with a view to their practical use. But before long, reason will be dissatisfied with the limited role assigned to it by sensibility. It is—quite rightly—not prepared to confine itself to the menial task of serving inclination and realizes that it has actually been invested with sovereign power. When that happens, reason becomes aware of its autonomy. Now inclination is subject to reason, not vice versa. The sovereignty of inclination has vanished completely—though inclination, like Louis, is extremely reluctant to acknowledge it. Much like the King’s attempt to use the Estates General for his own purposes, the attempt of inclination to enrol reason backfires. Reason is now in charge; and it uses its newly gained authority to impose upon the human will a new constitutional principle.

Now, there are at least three dissimilarities, so the analogy is far from perfect. First, an absolute monarch is invested with legitimate sovereign authority, which cannot be said of a pre-moral, inclination-driven will, which is a causal power devoid of practical legitimacy. So, the French Revolution is a transfer of normative power, whereas there is a sense in which sensibility’s summoning of reason is a transfer of causal power that first gives rise to practical normativity.

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