Per virtutem et potentiam idem intelligo.
By virtue and power, I mean the same thing.
~ Spinoza, Ethics
The Possibility of Freedom
In The Multiple States of the Being, Rene Guenon discusses the meaning and possibility of freedom. He defines freedom as the “absence of constraint”. In nonduality, there is no constraint; this establishes the possibility of freedom. Since it is possible, it can be manifested. When there is a multiplicity of beings, each one is limited by the others, but there is a residue of freedom. He goes on:
A being will be free to the degree to which it participates in this unity [of Being]. In other words, it will be freer as it has more unity in itself, or as it is more “One”.
Absolute freedom belongs to the being who has become absolutely “one” at the degree of pure Being, or “without duality” if his realization surpasses Being. … Then one can speak of a being “who is a law unto himself”, because this being is fully identical with his sufficient reason, which is at the same time his principial origin and his final destiny.
“A law unto himself” is not a Nietzschean immoralism; Guenon relates it to Islamic esotericism and to the Hindu doctrines of swechhachari [autocracy, a concept used by Julius Evola in the Individual and the Becoming of the World] or jivan-mukti [enlightened in the body]. In Christian Hermetism, we read
To be something, to know something, and to be capable of something endows a person with authority. … a person has authority to the extent that he unites within himself the profundity of mysticism, the wisdom of gnosis, and the productive power of magic [power, will]. … whoever has this to a high degree can “lay down the law”. ~ Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot (Emperor)
Evola differs from Guenon to the extent that the former incorporates Hermetism and Tantra into his system, while the latter restricts himself to the orthodox schools of the Hinduism.
The Possibility of Sin
For Kant, freedom is a postulate of the practical reason, without which there can be no concept of morality. The corollary is that a man is moral only to the extent that he is free. Since a man is free to the extent that he is not subjected to constraint or privation, it follows that not every man is capable of moral action. In contrast to the modernist, universalist moral absolutism of Kant, the Traditional understanding is more nuanced.
The Catechism of Pope Pius X, lists three necessary conditions for a mortal sin:
- Grave matter
- Full advertence
- Perfect consent of the will
Metaphysically, we can rephrase these conditions.
Logos
A grave matter is action that is contrary to the “law of God”, that is, the cosmic order or Logos. By disturbing that order, a fundamental injustice is introduced. Evola refers to Anaximander, Parmenides, and Empedocles in this regard.
Knowledge or Gnosis
The second condition requires the moral agent to know that the matter is a grave injustice. To be fully effective, this knowledge of the Logos must be of the highest kind: intuition or episteme. Another word for knowledge as it applies to the idea of Justice is “conscience”.
Will or Power
Full consent of the Will means that the agent is capable of performing the act; a man cannot be commanded to do the impossible. The Catechism explains: “Perfect consent of the will is verified in sinning when we deliberately determine to do a thing.” That is, the act is free and not compelled by some necessity or external constraint.
True Will
Thus we see that the very possibility of moral activity depends on the free will. Hence, the only moral “imperative” is the requirement to be free, without which, no moral activity is even conceivable. The place to start is to overcome weakness and concupiscence which are external constraints to our freedom. As Eckhart writes, a free man acts without desire.
Tomberg relates freedom to conscience.
Conscience is neither a product nor a function of character. It is above it and it is only here where the domain of freedom is found. One is free … when one judges and acts according to Justice or conscience. But justice is only the beginning of a long path in the development of conscience and therefore of the growth of freedom.
In Revolt against the Modern World, Evola describes this knowledge:
From the gradual extinction of all images and forms, and eventually of one’s own thoughts, will, and knowledge, what arises is a transformed and supernatural knowledge that is carried beyond all forms.
This is what Evola means by aristocratic asceticism. He writes:
Meister Eckhart addressed the noble man and the noble soul whose metaphysical dignity is witnessed by the presence of a strength, a light, and a fire within him… The principle of spiritual centrality was affirmed: the true Self is God, God is our real center and we are external only to ourselves … an action dictated by desire … must not be undertaken.
Only with God as the center is man “One”. He is then said to have a Holy Will or True Will.
There’s a good article On Freedom and Necessity here
http://www.sacredweb.com/online_articles/sw27_editorial.pdf
“My aim was more to clarify his ethical argument than to mount an independent thesis defending or attacking it.”
Seriously, not a Kantian ethicist. The questions you had originally posed just didn’t seem to indicate that you had understood Kant’s position.
“..man’s first task is to become free and self-governing, without which there is no possibility of moral action.”
Kant would agree, but you’re begging the question against him by refusing to confront his argument for the identity of freedom, moral action, and freely chosen adherence to rational law. Which, to reiterate, I don’t actually accept; however, I do think it cleared a space for questioning which can’t be accessed without engaging with what he’s really trying to do here.
“..the aim of any “moral law” is..”
I assume you meant “should” or “must be”? The law-transgression-redemption paradigm you outline is certainly old and pervasive, but it isn’t the only game in town.
“Kant seems to side with the latter insofar as he makes the CI an end in itself, rather than as the means to an end.”
I find this a little puzzling. Earlier, you instrumentally justified man’s pursuit of autonomous freedom with an appeal to his need for moral action, but you indict Kant for making moral action an end in itself? Seems contradictory, leaving aside the abovementioned fact that Kant isn’t subordinating either to the end of the other; he considers them to be united in a single principle.
Basically, in your bullet points you have reformulated the the argument of the original post. However, we would go deeper and make the claim — starting from your point (1) and against point (6) — that man’s first task is to become free and self-governing, without which there is no possibility of moral action. Only the free man can be moral, and the rest live barely above the level of intelligent animals (which we don’t intend as an insult, as we love animals).
So, given man’s fundamental task, the aim of any “moral law” is to (1) reveal man’s inability to follow it, (2) motivate him to overcome the obstacles (privations) that limit him, and (3) still the mind to create an opening to revelation. This is the path outlines by Patanjali, wherein moral imperatives are merely the early stages in the process leading to Samadhi. This is also the Christian idea of law, properly understood, pace the Pharisaic. Kant seems to side with the latter insofar as he makes the CI an end in itself, rather than as the means to an end.
That’s precisely Kant’s claim, though. My aim was more to clarify his ethical argument than to mount an independent thesis defending or attacking it. Formally put, this is the basic outline of his argument:
(1) A will is morally apt only inasmuch as it is free.
(2) Freedom of the will means: the causal autonomy (lit. ‘self-governance’) of its action.
(3) The will is atomically self-identical and self-certain as a brute fact.
(That is to say, it can only be coherently described as the single identity of all its actions; and at the same time, action as a sort of thing distinct from mere occurrence is only possible through its attribution to a unifying “I.”)
(4) Consequently, the will is determined heteronomously (from outside itself) when its actions are subject to any cause other than one derived from the necessary fact of their own subjective unity; and is hence by (1) and (2) not acting freely or with moral aptitude.
(5) A cause can only descend from the a priori insofar as it applies a proscription to action which corresponds to some a priori truth, which is to say takes the form of a necessary and universal law.
(This is why Kant says that the will must will the good for its own sake in order to be morally apt at all: because to be free it has to make the choice, itself a willed act, to act in accordance with an ‘ought,’ for exactly the reason that it is an ‘ought.’)
(6) Hence, finally, the first formulation of the categorical imperative: One must act as if by acting one sets a universal law for all mankind. Or: One must only act in accordance with a law that could coherently be said to apply to any will whatever, regardless of its contingent circumstances.
Obviously, there’s a lot you can raise problems with there. First off, it’s impossible to obtain more than a handful of concrete ethical rules from the CI – promise-keeping is one of the few solid examples – without either sacrificing the strength of the proof, or engaging in verbal gymnastics to justify why it’s acceptable to take certain contingent causes into account but not others. The latter approach is also needed to justify not merely the impossibility of diabolical/radical evil, but even the availability of a non-arbitrary distinction between it and perfect good – it’s not at all clear why we couldn’t, consistently and coherently, will in our acts the universal maxim that it is good to suffer, just as easily as one which dictates benevolence.
A variety of thinkers have also rejected or reformulated the whole ontology of will and world that Kant bases the proof on. Hegel, for example, supersedes the transcendental split that requires his ethical leap of willing the good for itself, by postulating the final synthesis of particular, contingent desires with universal, rational law in the universal democratic state whose development would thereby end history. Nietzsche and his successors call bullshit on the whole universalist project, whether Kant’s ascetic transcendentalism or Hegel’s declaration of the metaphysical closure of history, arguing that it’s founded on inherited fictitious categories that enable us to flee the chaotic, temporal, irrational reality of the world.
Anyway, sorry, long insomniac rant. The point is, there are critical and interesting questions that can be addressed to Kant’s work all over the place, but I take that as a testament to the richness and originality of his approach, rather than as a mark of inadequacy.
RE: “the will can only possess moral agency at all insofar as it wills the good for its own sake, as a rational duty.”
Do you mean that if it does not will the good rationally, then the will does not possess moral agency? But a will with no agency is incoherent and does not make sense. In other words, by your thesis, the will can only will the good, otherwise it simply doesn’t exist as a moral agent, but rather as the vector sum of desires and other “pre-individual” forces.
Leaving aside for the moment what is really “good”, why is it unreasonable to state that a will that does not will the good, is therefore evil? It is simply a definition. But that evil will is nothing but desires and pre-individual forces, as demonstrated in the preceding paragraph.
His late discussion of diabolical evil aside – didn’t he conclude that it was an impossibility, anyway? – Kant would not agree that the pathological desires which occlude the will’s moral agency are therefore evil. I’m actually not even sure what it means to impute moral standing to a preindividual affect like a desire. Anyway, in his view, the will can only possess moral agency at all insofar as it wills the good for its own sake, as a rational duty. This is exactly the brilliance of Kant’s approach – however flawed it may be in other respects – that he’s able to weld free will, reason, and the good into a single interdependent construct.
Thus, one doesn’t find a im/moral, good/evil binary in Kant; it’s more along the lines of a/moral – you could compare it usefully to Kierkegaard’s distinction between ethical and aesthetic judgment. It’s also not an absolutist binary; elsewhere, Kant will use the impossibility of the will’s moral perfection within time to justify the immortality of the soul. Not exactly his best moment rigorously speaking – by that point he’s standing on tiptoe at the top of a very fragile house of cards – but it nonetheless serves to demonstrate that he considers morality a dynamic, continuous gradient. The common contrary impression comes, I think, from misconstruing the categorical imperative’s proscriptive focus on actions as implying that the moral standing it determines is said of the action, rather than the will which accomplishes it.
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Yes, something like that.
In one of his last books, Kant introduced the idea, very repugnant to Enlightenment thinking, of radical evil. Goethe, for instance, finds this to be evidence of Kant’s senility.
I don’t know to what extent, if any, you are familiar with Gurdjieff’s novel, _Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson_. It is my view that the character of Ashiata Shiemash is based on Kant. At any rate his description of this character could just as well be a description of Kant. He writes, for instance, that the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash taught:
“…that in the subconsciousness of people there are crystallized and are always present the data manifested from Above for engendering in them the Divine impulse of genuine conscience, and that only he who acquires the ‘ableness’ that the actions of these data participate in the functioning of that consciousness of theirs in which they pass their everyday existence, has in the objective sense the honest right to be called and really to be a genuine son of our COMMON FATHER CREATOR of all that exists.”
Interesing perspective, Mr. Bardis, from Kant; Evola knew his German idealism better than I do. How would he understand the rest of the argument?
First of all, we assert that “ought implies can”: there is no obligation to do what can’t be done. Then, a moral act must be chosen freely (if you are coerced to put money in the poor box, it is not a moral act.) Isn’t that what is meant by “intellectual causality”?
What seems logically to follow is that anything which restricts my freedom prevents me from acting morally. In particular, for example, if my sensuous impulses are so strong that they restrict my free will — which is certainly the case for man, such as he is — then these inner necessities are themselves evil. So our first task as moral agents is to develop “virtue”, the power to overcome such impulses. If this is so, then we understand Kan’t categorical imperative, not as an absolute moral law, but rather as a means to bring our own lack of freedom to our awareness. Thus it is that lack of freedom, or privation, that is the real evil.
One form that Kant gives to the categorical imperative [the moral law] is:
“Act so that you use humanity in your own person as well as in the person of everyone else never merely as a means but always at the same time as an end.”
He further says:
“The essential thing in all determinations of the will by the moral law is that as a free will it should be determined solely by the law and, moreover, not merely without the co-operation of sensuous impulses but even with the repulsion of all such impulses and with the breaking off of all inclinations so far as they go counter to that law.”
And:
“But, after all, this law is intrinsically positive, namely, the form of an intellectual causality, the causality of freedom; therefore, in weakening self-conceit by acting against subjective opposition, namely, the inclinations in us, it is at the same time an object of _respect_; and since it even strikes down self-conceit, humiliates it, it is an object of the greatest respect and moreover the ground of a positive feeling which does not have an empirical origin and can be known a priori. Respect for the moral law is therefore a feeling that is produced by an intellectual ground, and this feeling is the only one we can know completely a priori and whose necessity we can comprehend.”
´Who calls us Thelemites will do no wrong, if he look but close into the word. For there are therein Three Grades, the Hermit, and the Lover, and the man of Earth. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
The word of Sin is Restriction.´ [Aleister Crowley’s “The Book of the Law”]
Guenon’s terms are more accurate than Evola’s because as Schuon pointed out necessity does not mean constraint.