Over at Archive Fire, Michael has linked to an interesting interview with Brandom. What I find so interesting about this interview is the language, rhetoric, or metaphors he uses to articulate his positions. Throughout the discussion Brandom uses terms like binding, point keeping, responsibility, commitment, accountability, providing reasons and so on. Freud, Lacan, and Derrida have taught us to read for “texts within texts”. There is, on the one hand, the literal surface text which is not unlike the manifest content of a dream and then, on the other hand, the latent, infrastructural text which is like the latent dream thought. The metaphors, analogies, similes, examples, etc, one uses are not secondary to how a thought is structured, they are not mere ornamentations or rhetorical flourishes (sic.), but also reveal another logic at work within the thought that contributes to informing and structuring that thought. In Freudian term, these “parapraxes” are symptoms of unconscious desire or how things are unconsciously conceived.
In this regard, I find Brandom’s references to binding and point keeping particularly interesting. The first things that come to mind when I hear the term “binding” are the binding of Isaac, Chinese foot binding, and sado-masochistic rituals of bondage. The conceptualization of normatively in terms of binding suggests a model of the normative based on bondage, enchaining, or tying down. This seems further suggested by the emphasis on commitment and rule following. And, as I have tried to argue, it is already implied in the connotations of the term “normativety”. All of this fits very closely with Lacan’s analysis of Kant’s moral philosophy in “Kant avec Sade”, where Lacan argues that the categorical imperative or the moral law harbors a sadistic superegoic jouissance aimed at mastery that is the real truth behind the moral law. Just as Sade demanded absolute submission on the part of his victims, and just as their bodies could endure endless punishments and degradations without, apparently, losing any of their beauty or vitality (read the books), Kant’s moral law demands absolute submission, complete sacrifice of any pathological motivations (anything pertaining to preferences, pleasures, interests, etc), and enjoins us with an infinite task to which we can never live up. Thus, in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant will argue that the moral law presupposes the immortality of the soul as a postulate of reason not because the categorical imperative only makes sense if we can imagine an eternal world, but because the moral law, according to Kant, demands an eternity of work from us. In other words, this particular conception of normatively places us in a position of infinite debt, of a debt that can never be paid back and from which we can never escape. And this seems to be the way of things with deontological conceptions of the normative. Reasons, we are told, are something we are obligated to give and the work of giving those reasons is never done.
read on!
The characterization of this concept of normativety as “point giving” is similarly perplexing. Here the normative is situated in the context of sports and economics. The normative becomes a sort of competition where there are winners and losers and where the aim is to assign praise and blame within a framework of correctness. Everything becomes a matter of judgment.
There are, of course, rules. But what perplexes me in deontological normative discourses is why, of all the things one might focus on with respect to the ethical, it is rules and judgment in particular that the deontologists focus on. Since Brandom brings in the sports metaphor, let’s work on that a little bit. To be sure, there are rules in sports. However, if we were to think of sports in ethical terms, if we were to ask ourselves “what constitutes the ethical dimension of sports”, would it occur to us to focus primarily on these rules? The rules are already there in the background of the game (and in this regard, Brandom is right to describe them as implicit). What is odd is the suggestion that normativety consists primarily in making these rules explicit or the focus. For the soccer player, by contrast, the ethical dimension of the game lies not in the rules of the game. The rules of the game are the least of it, the most superficial dimension of the game. Rather, for the soccer play, the normative dimension of the game consists in developing her skill, her facility with her body, her coordination with her fellow players, and so on. In other words, it lies in cultivating herself and her relationship with the other players.
In this connection, let’s shift back to Aristotle. One of the most striking features of the Nichomachean Ethics is that there is almost no discussion of promise keeping, not lying, murder, rape, theft, etc., etc., etc. Nor, for Aristotle, would a person who doesn’t tell lies, who keeps their promises, who doesn’t murder or steal, etc, necessarily be an ethical being. To be sure, it is good that the person does all these things, but these issues, as far as Aristotle is concerned, really aren’t all that central to ethics. They appear only as fleeting and tangental observations. Rather, for Aristotle the focus is on the cultivation of oneself, the actualization of oneself, and the development of ones character where character is not conceived primarily in terms of a person who keeps promises, but rather a person who has developed their talents, their intelligence, etc., etc., etc.
The case is similar with Lucretius and Epictetus. In both cases, we find little discussion of the sorts of issues that would be of crucial importance for the deontologist. These things are largely taken for granted. Rather, the question of ethics for them is one revolving around peace of mind and freedom from fear and anxiety. In part, the ethical person must overcome fear of death. In part, they must engage in a careful therapy of desire, discarding those desires that trouble the mind and fill life with misery and promoting those desires that produce joy and mastery. In part, the ethical project will consist in transforming society so circumstances will be created in which it becomes more possible for people to attain flourishing through the cultivation of their self. In part it will consist in forming deep and abiding friendships and relationships. These projects, for Lucretius and Epictetus are the ethical projects, not the project of binding one to reasons or giving reasons (though, indeed, for both the Epicureans and the Stoics, a life of reason with respect to the passions and the investigation of the world are crucial components of flourishing).
As I already remarked, for Kant we are supposed to exclude consideration of anything “pathological” in living according to the categorical imperative. This is because the categorical imperative must, according to Kant, be universal, whereas the pathological is always individual and idiosyncratic. When Kant refers to the pathological, he is referring to our affections for other people and compassion (these are irrelevant to the formulation of the moral law, says Kant, and its application), any bodily preferences we might have, any outcomes we might like or desire, and so on. No, we are to attend only to what follows from the moral law and nothing else. And indeed, one might defend Kant by pointing out that were the ethical to defend on sentiments like compassion or regard for our fellows (as Hume might put it), it would be impossible to establish the universality of the moral law for certainly plenty of people lack compassion for many of the others (both human and nonhuman) they encounter in the world around them. Therefore duty, Kant tells us, is a more secure foundation for ethics than sentiment or “the pathological”.
From the Epicurean, Stoic, and Aristotlean point of view, by contrast, this vision of the ethical and the vocation of the ethical is an absolute disaster. Although Kant tells us that the categorical imperative dictates that we have a duty to pursue happiness (and here any psychoanalyst will tell you that the possibility of enjoyment dries up when it is commanded, so Kant’s claim is rather hollow), obedience to the categorical imperative is supposed to be undertaken without any consideration of whether it will produce positive outcomes in the form of happiness, flourishing, compassionate social relations, etc. For Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the Stoics, by contrast, the whole point of ethics is to produce happiness, human flourishing, just social relations, and so on. An ethical doctrine that does not aim at this and that is not organized around this project is, at best, perverse, and at worst completely bizarre.
It is not Kant here that is mainly the issue. If Kant is a good point of reference in this connection, then this is solely because he provides us with a particularly clear formalization of ethical models focused on rules, rule following, judgment, discipline, and the sorting of praise and blame. He provides us with a particularly clear example of binding… A binding so perverse that it calls itself freedom. It is this fetishization of rules and judgment that is the issue. Rather than a focus on rules, judgment, commitment, and binding, the issue should instead be one of how we promote flourishing. Ethics should be for something, rather than a question of prohibitions.
The deontologist might respond that this is all well and good, but the fact remains that affects aren’t universal, that not everyone has the same affective responses to other human beings, to other living nonhumans, and to different aspects of the world. Therefore, the argument would run, we need an a priori universal rule that isn’t based on anything “pathological” to guarantee the universality of response. However, this argument is disingenuous to say the least, for it portrays affects as brute responses that are completely irresponsible and over which we have no control. Among the key claims of the Epicureans, the Stoics, Spinoza, and Hume is that our affective responses are based on judgments and beliefs. In this regard, anyone who says “I couldn’t help it, that’s just the way I felt” is in a state of bad faith, for they are treating affective response as a brute response to the world around them, rather than a response that emerges as a result of a number of unconscious beliefs, judgments, and desires that animate us.
These beliefs, judgments, and desires are subject to evaluation and rational scrutiny and can be changed. One person is filled with rage when they see the American flag burned, another with delight. One person perceives the refugees of Hurricane Katrina breaking into stores as looting and theft, another person with sympathy and compassion, filled with sadness for these people having to fend for themselves in such a way. One person encounters their cancer with despair, resentment, and anger, another with resolve and resolution. These different emotional and affective responses are a function of the judgments the person makes about others, themselves, and the world around them. Change those and you change the affective response.
This is why a therapy of desire is a vital component of eudaimonistic projects. The person reading Spinoza’s Ethics might be perplexed to find the first chapter discussing the nature of God/nature, the second knowledge, and the third giving an elaborate account of the structure of affects. “Why this elaborate discussion of the structure of affects in a book on ethics, isn’t that a matter for psychology?” Spinoza would respond by saying that no, it is not. We must understand how affects are structured how they arise, and what distortions they are subject to so we can free ourselves of those affects that cause us suffering and disturb our relations with others and promote those that fill us with joy. The ethical project here isn’t one of obeying a rule, but of engaging in a work of the self that transforms how we affectively encounter the world so that we might have better relations with ourselves, others, and the world around us. This is also one of the reasons that psychoanalysis, the psychoanalytic clinic, is an ethical space, not because patients are judged or taught normative rules, but because patients are engaged in an interrogation of their desire that both de-sutures desires that fill us with misery, and a formation of desires that promote joy. This is why Marx’s project is an ethical project, not because he deploys an abstract model of justice to judge society, but because he engages in a therapeutic or diagnostic work to uncover the manner in which society is organized such that it produces so much misery and horror so that these structures might be transformed allowing for new forms of life and collective relations to be possible. It is perhaps here that we encounter the central problem with deontological ethical approaches. In their focus on rules and rule giving, all of this, this psychology, this sociology, this medicine, etc., is thoroughly obscured such that it falls into the background. And in falling into the background in this way, we are further removed from that which we seek.
Larval Subjects . 
September 3, 2010 at 5:00 am
I’m excited to re-read Aristotle on ethics now–how cool is that? Zizek has a good line about Kant–duty overlaps with radical evil…so you can imagine someone doing all kinds of heinous acts out of a sense of duty.
September 3, 2010 at 9:59 am
And of course where do the roots of Kantian deontology lie (as opposed to Greek forms of ethical thought..and possibly even to the ‘heretical’ Spinoza) if not in the history of Christianity?
The subtle modification was to change the very category of autonomy: the Hellenistic ideal of therapeutic self-realization of the individual gradually became, in Kant’s terms, the submission to hypothetical imperatives, and hence heteronomous will.
Kant’s autonomous will on the other hand is the binding to an internal *and yet absolutely universal* command, the great face in the sky constantly uttering the (purely formal) command ‘You Must’, resonating in the heart of the individual and yet visible by all (which is why the starry sky and the moral law are ultimately the same source of awe). [Of course, Kant believes that morality does not *need* the injunction from a God in order to work, and however the obedience to the pure form of law allows us to postulate the existence of a Superior Moral Being, which is, even if not a legislator, still a guarantor of an eschatological ultimate end (end zveck) of highest good, and hence allowing an answer to the question ‘what may I hope’?]
What is most interesting (and here I merely rehearse Hadot’s arguments) is how this difference in ethics (from self-realization through way of life to submission to a pure form of law which cannot be ‘performed’ but only followed) produces a completely different way of conceiving philosophy as a whole–which touches pretty directly your interest to move philosophy into practical engagement, Levi.
In Greek thought to improve oneself and to achieve happiness are the same movement, and the philosophical discourse has its origin in an existential choice, so that philosophy is essentially a way of life, an ultimately endless ethical process of *paideia* (even when not directly ethical: even Epicurus’ atomic physics is ultimately to ground the possibility of eudaimonia). And if such is the case, philosophical discourse will ‘work’ best if practised through engagement with a community (the stoa’, the garden, the academia).
With Christian normativity, with the individual singularly bound to a commandment of God (or of Reason), both the ‘engaged’ dimension and the communitarian dimension tend to wane (with monasticism and with scholasticism and the foundation of modern academia and the priority of intellectual/contemplative activity over practical engagement).
I am skeptic of an excessive nostalgia for the good ol’ Greek times (which was the case for Hadot) but to trace the evolution of the activity of philosophy by asking what kind of ethics a philosopher follows or aims at (and where such an ethical view comes from) is most useful to understand what we do.
September 3, 2010 at 2:05 pm
As for duty overlapping evil, I think of Ibsen who destroys the ethics of ‘duty’ in play after play. Pastor Manders advise to Mrs Alving in Ghosts–a perfect example of the Kantian imperative gone amuck.
I see this conflict being worked out in literary criticism between those critics who load their analysis with implicit or explicit models of what is ‘good’ and apply them as templates to guide their judgments, as opposed to what Thom Donovan calls a ‘desiring criticism.’
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/01/love-and-criticism/
A terrific post! I placed an order for On the Nature of Things (which I’ve put off reading for years) before I was half way through it.
September 3, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Fabio,
I think one of the things that makes Lacan’s critique of Kant so interesting is precisely that it shows Kant’s will is, in fact, heteronomous. This is the point of his foray into Sade. Through that foray he shows how the voice of the categorical imperative is not the voice of the subject, but rather the voice of the Other, haunting the subject. Within the Lacanian framework, the pervert is the one who relates to himself as the implement of the Other’s jouissance. The masochist strives to completely submit himself to the Other’s jouissance, whereas the Sadist understands himself as the agent of the Other’s jouissance (i.e., doing the Other’s work for the Other). Lacan argues that this is exactly what is going on in Kant’s moral philosophy.
I don’t think I’m engaged in a “excessive nostalgia for the good ol’ Greek times” (perhaps there’s an excessive nostalgia for the good ol’ German times?). Rather, I think I’m talking of two very different versions of how the ethical is conceived. Exactly the same points could be made with respect to Freud or Marx, where both projects are conceived in eudaimonistic terms. In the case of Freud, we must interrogate our desire so as to free ourselves from certain forms of desire that plague and trouble our minds and life. In the case of Marx, we must interrogate the social field and engage in activism to transform the social order so as to render flourishing possible. You speak of hypothetical imperatives as something negative or to be avoided, but this is already to concede everything to Kant. Everything that makes ethics valuable and worthwhile falls in the domain of hypothetical imperatives or those maxims aimed at attain some end such as flourishing.
Lurking in the background of what renders Kant’s categorical imperatives, I believe, is the desire for a moral maxim that would be absolute. Kant degrades the “pathological” and the “hypothetical” because he believes the first lacks universality, whereas the first does not necessarily accomplish what it sets out to accomplish. With respect to the first, however, there seems to be a rather infantile belief that if we move from pathological to pure reason we will be able to persuade and bind those who aren’t moved by certain affects, e.g., a person might not have compassion (a “pathological” affect) for the victims of Hurricane Katrina because these victims are largely black and the person suffers from unconscious racism, but a categorical imperative will get them to do their duty to these victims. I think this is the height of naivete and completely absurd. Formal argument and reasoning seldom changes or affects souls, so we really don’t get much pay-off from the categorical imperative at all. At most we get the pleasure of judging those racists that refuse to help the victims of the hurricane. But that’s a pretty bitter consolation. What is needed is something that truly changes souls and shifts attitudes and desires. This situates us immediately in the domain of hypothetical imperatives, the psychological, the social, practices, and so on.
September 3, 2010 at 2:31 pm
‘You speak of hypothetical imperatives as something negative or to be avoided, but this is already to concede everything to Kant.’
No no no, I was just ‘talking Kant’ not taking sides. Indeed, I completely agree with your last paragraph here:
‘What is needed is something that truly changes souls and shifts attitudes and desires. This situates us immediately in the domain of hypothetical imperatives, the psychological, the social, practices, and so on.’
And in order to be able to make judgments in these ‘hybrid’ domains we need an explanatory framework which allows us to make sense of it all, rather than a set of purely formal norms.
September 3, 2010 at 4:58 pm
Thanks for the post Levi. I couldn’t help but think of the following passage from Nietzsche as I read your comments. As a caveat, I do find much of interest in Brando’s work, but as Nietzsche says, it needs to be taken as a tool for the task of doing philosophy and not an end in itself. Here’s the quote:
“Critical discipline and every habit that is conducive to cleanliness and severity in matters of the spirit will be demanded by these philosophers not only of themselves: they could display them as their kind of jewels–nevertheless they still do not want to be called critics on that account. They consider it no small disgrace for philosophy when people decree, as is popular nowadays: “philosophy itself is criticism and critical science–and nothing whatever besides.” …our new philosophers will say nevertheless: critics are instruments of the philosopher and for that very reason, being instruments, a long ways from being philosophers themsevles. Even the great Chinese of Konigsberg was merely a great critic.’ Beyond Good and Evil, section 210
September 4, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Hello Levi,
Given the ontological singularity of each object, each action is undertaken for itself. Then how can you square it with a statement like the one below?
As it seems to me a problem OOO faces is precisely the relation to others and the world due to a lack of common being. Hence the beat on Kant is located to do with rule following, but more precisely to do with the ‘good’ understood as a common being guaranteed by a big other?
For me (ha!), there needs to be a greater reckoning with (im)possible relationships to others (as absolutely other due to being of different substance).
To this end there is a limit to Spinoza’s use due to a lack of appreciation of this.
Will.
September 6, 2010 at 3:31 am
Levi,
I wanted to point out a couple statements of yours in this thread that threw me off. They may offer you an opportunity to elaborate on your views.
First, I’m surprised by your characterization of Lacan’s argument in Kant vs Sade. His focus there is, ultimately, a critique of Sade’s ethics, which he deprecates for misrecognizing the intersection of desire and the Law. That is, Sade, thinking he has formulated a spectacular subversion of the ethical injunction to deny pathological desires, has in fact only managed to produce a perverse Kantian ethics, an “indirect avowal of the Law.” Zizek puts it well in his “Kant and Sade”:
If, however, the Kantian moral Law cannot be identified with superego (since, as Lacan himself puts it in the last pages of Seminar XI, moral Law is equivalent to desire itself, while superego precisely feeds on the subject’s compromising his/her desire, i.e. the guilt sustained by the superego bears witness to the fact that the subject has somewhere betrayed or compromised his/her desire), then Sade is not the entire truth of Kantian ethics, but a form of its perverted realization. In short, far from being “more radical than Kant,” Sade articulates what happens when the subject betrays the true stringency of the Kantian ethics. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/kant-and-sade-the-ideal-couple/
This, of course, is a treatment that falls in line with his general product of rendering psychoanalysis compatible with German Idealism, but I think it’s still something worth considering. Having reread the essay with this in mind (and it certainly demands rereading, being one of Lacan’s more obliquely presented pieces), I think there’s much to support it.
Second point: I’m confused by your insistence on the promotion of happiness in relation to psychoanalysis, only because I’ve encountered so many instances of Freud, Lacan, and analysts I’ve actually spoken with explicitly stating that this is NOT the goal of psychoanalysis. Lacan often associates it with (American) egoism and I’m sure you remember Freud’s famous definition of the ‘cure’ of neurosis as granting the ability to experience common misery. Perhaps ‘happiness’ is referred to here in a different context?
Anyway, I’m curious as to your response. I don’t mean to come off as overly critical; I’m certainly an admirer of the blog, but must also do my duty as an honest reader.
-dana
September 6, 2010 at 3:32 am
whoops. ‘product’ should be ‘project’ there.
September 6, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Hi Dana,
I just think Zizek gets things wrong in his reading of Lacan here, that’s all. The right interpretation is the one Zizek presents in the second paragraph of the essay you cite:
.
In order for Zizek’s reading to get off the ground we have to entirely dismiss Lacan’s engagement with Civilization and Its Discontents. In my view, that simply doesn’t work.
Eudaimonism or “happiness” doesn’t entail the primacy of the pleasure principle and ignoring desire, as both Lacan and Zizek seem to often suggest. That would be the way of ego psychology where, perhaps, it is believes that all symptoms can be exhausted and the pleasure principle can reign supreme. Eudaimonism refers not to the pleasure principle, but to becoming actual. Much of this involves a careful analysis of ones desires and a knowledge of ones desires. The point here would be that absent that actuality can’t be obtained. Consequently, the Freudo-Lacanian practice of knowing one’s desire would be a central part of this project. When Lacan rails against happiness and the “American way of life”, I think he often misses the mark. It isn’t happiness that is the problem, but the idea that happiness or flourishing can be delivered through the pleasure principle that is the problem. If one lives completely according to the pleasure principle, ignoring the dimension of desire and the real in ones psychic economy, all flourishing dries up. Analysts indeed do not promise “happiness” (in the more familiar sense of the word), but rather knowledge of desire and a more authentic relationship to ones desire. But again, the point is that this relation to desire is the vital component of human flourishing. Absent that, all the goods, recognition, cheetos, drugs, and sex one might are useless and guilt continues to build and torment the subject as a result of betraying desire. So I suppose I would say that Lacan and Zizek have a rather superficial notion of what happiness is, treating it solely as a life lived according to the pleasure principle where we betray desire, rather than seeing it as something a bit richer and deeper than that.
I think Jonathan Lear has a better take on what’s taking place in the clinical setting than Zizek (here and here). When the Greeks and Romans say that happiness is what we ought to pursue in ethics, what they’re asking is “what sort of life is truly worth living for creatures such as ourselves?” It’s unlikely that what Lacan calls the “American way of life” would be seen as an answer to that question. Moreover, “happiness” in the Greco-Roman sense does not mean you go around in a pleasant mood all the time such that you have all your needs satiated. The word really is untranslatable. Rather, happiness can contain great suffering, be punctuated by tragedy, etc., etc., etc., yet still, for these thinkers, be a life characterized by eudaimonia. How is that different from a life that has not given way on ones desire?
September 6, 2010 at 11:40 pm
[…] under Uncategorized Leave a Comment In the comments section to one of my earlier posts, Dana expresses some reservations about my recent references to happiness in the context of Freud and Lacan. As Dana writes in […]