ABSTRACT
According to Kant, the answer to the question, “What should I do?,” is provided by the categorical imperative, the universal moral law that has its origin in pure practical reason. To follow the categorical imperative is to subordinate one’s desire for happiness-i.e., the totality of one’s inclinations-to the duty to follow subjective rules, or maxims, that have the form of law. Insofar as one gives these rules to oneself, to act from duty is to act autonomously. By contrast, to allow independently given incentives to determinate the rules one follows is to act heteronomously. As members of the phenomenal realm of nature, our wills are unavoidably subject to such pathological incentives, but when we act we must think of ourselves as autonomous members of an intelligible kingdom of ends. The first thinker to highlight the difficulties that arise from such a divided conception of the will was the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). In contrast to Kant, who, despite his moral argument against hedonism, tries to reconcile reason’s demand that we obey the moral law with the inclinations’ demand for sensuous gratification, Schopenhauer offers a pessimistic argument against hedonism, maintaining that true contentment can be found only in the complete renunciation of desire, the source of all human suffering. In this view, virtue consists not in willing autonomously, but in not willing anything at all. Nietzsche responds to this nihilistic conclusion by renouncing the Kantian opposition between appearances and things in themselves. If will to power is all that there is, then the supposed opposition between reason and pathological incentives of the will is illusory. Every action is autonomous insofar as it arises from the spontaneity of the will, but fundamentally heteronomous in that it is impossible for the will to will otherwise than it does. By providing a genealogy of the feeling of respect, the affective correlate of the categorical imperative, Nietzsche reveals the “pathological” roots of morality itself. Freud complicates this account by calling attention to the role played by the death drive in the genesis of the superego. Lévi-Strauss offers a different explanation than Freud of the normative force of the prohibition of incest, but like Freud he emphasizes the ineluctability of submission to the law. Going back to Nietzsche, Bataille affirms the sovereignty of transgression, an experience that Blanchot characterizes as essentially literary in character. Like Bataille and Blanchot, Levinas attests to an experience of alterity that undercuts the ego’s false pretension to autonomy, but unlike
them he seeks to preserve a distinction between the immanent violence of the will to power and ethical transcendence toward the good. Lacan problematizes this distinction by noting a secret complicity between transgression and fidelity to the moral law, while his critics-Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari, and Kristeva-sustain the desire to subvert a law that they perceive less as normative than as normalizing. For Derrida, finally, the obligation of hospitality bears witness to the interminability of the condition of autonomous heteronomy.
