Abstract
What role do normative ideals play in politics? Since Rawls, many political philosophers have advocated what they take to be a Kantian answer to this question. Normative ideals organize and guide political decision-making and action, and a major task of political philosophy is to generate them. Recently, this position has come under renewed scrutiny among political thinkers identifying as realists and nonideal theorists. These critics argue that ideal theory is too remote from empirical politics. This article turns to Kant for an alternative conception of ideals that is both distinct from the Rawlsian account and better withstands the critiques of realists and nonideal theorists. It argues that, for Kant, ideals are aids to freedom; their aim is to guide us towards forms of autonomy we have yet to fully realize. This leaves us with a much stronger view of ideals than does ideal theory.
“Everything is practical that is possible through freedom.” - Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
1
What role do normative ideals play in politics? Since John Rawls’s influential reconstruction of Kant, many thinkers have advocated what they take to be a Kantian answer to this question: Ideals organize and guide political action and judgment, and a major task of political philosophy is to generate them. Recently, this view has come under renewed scrutiny from a variety of camps that broadly converge on the idea that ideal theory is too remote from ‘real’ politics. Nonideal theorists argue that philosophy needs greater sensitivity to empirical politics if it wants to be able to generate genuinely action-guiding ideals. 2 Realists argue that political thinkers need to be more sensitive to the fact that political conduct is often not like ethical conduct and these two complex domains cannot be reduced to one another. Still others argue that ideal theory simply has little do to with how politics is conducted in the real world, and so is either ideological or irrelevant. 3
And yet, while this debate has focused on the role of ideals in political thought in general, both critics and defenders of ideal theory have tended to take for granted a Rawlsian account of ideals that is both specific and limiting. It is also one that is far from the philosophical project Kant set out in his mature works, which he grounded in a critique of reason aimed at revealing its possibilities and limits. This article turns to Kant to reconstruct an alternative account of ideals, one re-contextualized in light of two foundational moments in Kant’s Critical project: Kant’s critique of reason’s capacities, which aims to determine its possibilities and limits, and his mobilization of this critique to vindicate possibility of human freedom. This article argues that reviving these two moments in Kant’s thought yields a more promising approach to the theory of ideals that understands them as aids to freedom. Kant’s approach both gets their limits into view – he concludes that the limits of our ideals are the limits of our freedom – but also seeks to vindicate them when they guide us toward realizing our own autonomy. This marks an important contrast with Rawls. Where Rawls assumes that his ideal contractors are free, Kant argues that we have a capacity for freedom we are still aspiring to fully realize. Ideals aid us in this pursuit, serving as speculative guides that orient us toward the possible.
I Reality, the nonideal and ideals
Recent debates about ideal and nonideal theory have revolved largely around Rawls’s formulation of this distinction in A Theory of Justice. Rawls famously argues that, in developing a model of justice, we ought first to work out the principles that would regulate a ‘well-ordered society’ under conditions of ‘strict compliance’. 4 Such a conception enables philosophy to gain a ‘systematic grasp’ on the more immediate issues that emerge from the nonideal world. 5 The thought is that in order to develop a genuinely action-guiding model of justice, we first need an account of what justice is and looks like. 6 Given that the function of our account of justice is to guide collective social action toward what we, as rational agents, would accept as the good, it will have to be to some extent ideal. That is, unless we think that our current world fully realizes the right and the good, we will have to engage in some kind of ‘moral imagination’, as Ben Laurence clarifies, to conceive of the just world. 7 An ideal of justice here is thus an imaginative view of it in a simplified, abstracted, and reduced form that yields a systematic account of what justice is, at least to a certain kind of rational agent. This simplified, abstracted, and reduced form will then serve as a model that will guide our efforts to achieve justice in the real world in all of its fullness and complexity.
However, ideals do not just enter Rawls’s picture at the end of his theory when he has developed his model of justice, but are present from the very beginning. This is because Rawls uses various models to develop his account that rely on ideal extrapolations from reality: the ‘well-ordered society’, the ‘moral person’, and ‘the original position’. 8 He uses these models to ‘single out essential aspects of our conceptions of ourselves as moral persons and of our relation to society as free and equal citizens’. 9 These models are ideal precisely because they aim to reduce our conceptions of ourselves away from the complexity of our empirical being down to what Rawls takes to be their essential aspects. These idealized accounts of us as moral persons are then used to determine the kinds of principles that we, as a certain kind of moral person, would endorse. Ideals thus factor into Rawls’s theory of justice in two ways: in the models he uses to develop his account of justice, and as the kind of thing his theory of justice is supposed to be.
Recent critics of this approach have converged on the view that normative ideals tend, in some sense, to exclude relevant features of reality in ways that render them poor or inadequate guides for agency. 10 Elizabeth Anderson, for example, argues that ideal theory misunderstands the nature of normative thought. We are guided mostly by ‘unreflective habits’, for Anderson and we only come to reflect on our conduct when a problem ‘jar[s] us into critical thinking’. 11 In seeking to first articulate a conception of the good in advance of identifying wrongs, Anderson argues that ideal theory overlooks the psychology of human normative motivation. Onora O’Neill has argued along similar lines. 12 But for O’Neill, the problem with ideal theory is not that it is insensitive to empirics, but that it is sensitive to the empirical world only through its selective exclusion of relevant empirical facts about human psychology. The problem with ideal theory is not that it seeks action-guiding principles or conceptions of the good, but that it appeals to a model of human persons purged of important but inconvenient qualities as its starting point for doing so. 13 For O’Neill, moral theory must be to some extent abstract and may seek to yield principles, but it will fail in both aims if it begins from an account of human persons that demands more of us than we are capable.
The fear that ideal theories selectively tailor, exclude, or overlook the facts feeds into the worry that they are susceptible to becoming ideology. O’Neill argues that any abstract ethics of principles needs to be taken up in a contextually sensitive way because the selection of which cases will be relevant examples of those principles or their contravention can be ideological, serving to overlook the precise issues it ought to get into view. 14 Charles Mills (2005), drawing on O’Neill, has argued that ideal theory is ideological in its selective exclusion of relevant facts about the social world in its models. 15 For Mills, ideal theory becomes ideological because its manner of constructing models takes flight from features of the social world that are, in fact, essential subject matters of ethics, like ‘structural domination, exploitation, coercion, and oppression’. 16 In its flight from these features of the social world, Mills suggests, ideal theory becomes irrelevant to the most pressing issues of social ethics. For Mills, ideal theory is ideology not only because it is inattentive to the most urgent ethical concerns of the actual world, but because this inattention reflects the interests and concerns of a privileged minority of White males who happen to dominate academic philosophy. 17
The sense that the philosophical interest in ideals comes at the expense of reality is also at the core of efforts to develop a realist approach to political theory. In its most recent iteration, realism developed out of a rejection of the idea that ethics or morality could provide politics with normative ends prior to the situation of politics. This is a position that realists tend to associate with Kantianism. As Enzo Rossi and Matt Sleat have helpfully summarized, ‘realists maintain that political philosophy should not seek to regiment politics through morality; rather, it should theorise about the distinctive forces that shape real politics’. 18 The organizing fear of realists is that moralizing political theories miss what is distinctive about politics and political conduct, though what motivates this worry varies among its exponents. For some, like Bernard Williams and Rossi and Sleat, the concern is that ethical conduct is often not like political conduct, and so theorists err in reaching to ethics to develop political norms. For others, like Raymond Geuss, David Owen, and Janosch Prinz and Rossi, the worry is that political theory becomes ideological when it is moralizing: it takes flight from the world and distracts itself with illusions while ignoring modes of analysis that could actually be transformative, such as ideology critique. 19 Geuss also argues that recent political thinkers have just failed to understand that ideal norms of the sort that interest philosophers play no great role in guiding human behavior, and this feeds into his fear that ideal theory is susceptible to becoming ideology. 20
Still, to the extent these critiques revolve around objections to the use of idealizing assumptions within ideal theory or its moralization of politics, they address aspects of Rawls’s thought that have little to do with Kant’s. For one thing, as Arthur Ripstein and Christian Rostbøll have argued, Kant already distinguishes between principles of ethics and principles of right in his moral philosophy. 21 For Kant, the forms of normativity appropriate to politics and law really are different from the forms of normativity appropriate to ethical conduct, and he cashes them out in terms of different principles. Realists can dispute whether Kant’s specific means of making this distinction is persuasive, but it is still clear that he makes it.
Secondly and more importantly, Kant’s moral thought, in contrast to Rawls’s, does not begin from idealizing assumptions about persons. Rather, it aims to make sense of our ordinary practices of practical deliberation and moral reasoning. Throughout the Groundwork and the second Critique, Kant is at pains to show that the ‘common understanding’ already realizes the supreme principle of morality in its reasoning. When he first formulates the principle of the moral law in the Groundwork, he writes: Here conformity to law as such, without having as its basis some law determined for certain actions, is what serves the will as its principle, and must so serve it, if duty is not to be everywhere an empty delusion and a chimerical concept. Common human reason also agrees completely with this in its practical appraisals and always has this principle before its eyes.
22
As Eckart Förster writes, ‘the lesson of Rousseau, Kant believed, was that even the philosophically uneducated know what it is moral to do, so that the task of philosophy consists in merely explicating and bringing into view this underlying principle’. 23 In other words, for Kant, the task of a moral philosophy is not to furnish an altogether new moral principle, but to discover the principle that already underlies and explains the moral reasoning we engage in ordinarily. The moral law functions to vindicate practical reason and the form of freedom that it requires, rather than to determine the principles certain communities of reasoners would agree to given certain idealizing assumptions. 24
There is also a surprising kinship here between a key aspect of realism and nonideal theory, on the one hand, and the main thrust of Kant’s own enterprise, on the other. Both use reason to interrogate its limits in the hope that this can yield insight into the domains where it should guide action and those where it cannot. However, it is important not to overstate the kinship between these critics and Kant. In their methods, assumptions and aims, many realists and nonideal theorists are anti-Kantians and argue against his views, even as a number of them – like O’Neill, Mills and Anderson – are more sympathetic. But this makes it all the more striking that even anti-Kantians engage in a practice of critique analogous with Kant’s, one which orients itself toward determining reason’s practical possibilities and limits. In this sense, their project is much closer to Kant’s than they aver because both critique the assumption that reason can guide action. Even as some critics argue that moral norms are the wrong norms to guide political action, and others lament that their critiques reveal reason to be a poor guide and humans too weak to follow it, they aspire to use reason to find where it might gain some kind of transformative purchase toward the better.
II Ideals and the critique of reason
It is here that Kant can provide insight into what we are doing when we engage in critique. For Kant, the critique of practical reason is necessarily an investigation into the nature of freedom and its limits. At its core, it asks if reason really can guide action. We appeal to reason all the time when we make decisions, and so a key task of a critical moral philosophy is to show that we are correct in the assumption, intrinsic to these appeals, that determination according to reason alone is possible. Whether or not this sense of freedom exhausts the meaning of the concept or its many aspects, Kant intends to show that determination according to reason alone at least constitutes a kind of freedom. 25 Here, Kant captures something essential about the activity of critique that extends beyond the particularities of his own philosophy: to interrogate the capacity of reason to yield practical guidance is to inquire into the possibility of freedom. When we ask whether reason can guide our actions, we are asking whether we are free.
This kind of critique is vindicatory because it begins from the premise that reason has the power and authority to judge its own claims.
26
At the beginning of the second Critique, when Kant explains how he could be sure that his search for a principle of practical reason would not be fruitless, he writes: Nothing worse could happen to these labors than that someone should make the unexpected discovery that there is and can be no a priori cognition at all. But there is no danger of this. It would be tantamount to someone’s wanting to prove by reason that there is no reason. For, we say that we cognize something by reason only when we are aware that we could have known it even if it had not presented itself to us as is it did in experience; hence rational cognition and cognition a priori are one and the same.
27
For Kant, the contradiction inherent in trying to use reason to disprove reason reveals the absurdity of such an endeavor. His logic is clear: if reason alone could establish that there was no reason, it would be proving a priori that a priori reason does not exist, a contradiction. Since pure reason can establish its own claims, it has authority in certain domains, and now must vindicate its authority in the practical. Here, the vindicatory dimension of critique comes into clearer focus. Since a critique of reason in its pure and practical use deploys reason’s tools against itself, it already assumes their authority. Thus, a refutation of reason, for Kant, is nonsensical. It would either have to become critique or abandon reason altogether.
The critique of practical reason thus advances an ideal of autonomy in the classic sense of giving the law to oneself. In setting up reason as the judge in its own trial, Kant renders it the sole arbiter in evaluating its own – and any other – claims to authority. As Kant writes in ‘What does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’, ‘freedom in thinking signifies the subjection of reason to no other laws except those which it gives to itself’. 28 This understanding of freedom reflects the structure of the critiques. They set out to determine what forms of knowledge reason can establish independently of experience. Given that rational cognition and cognition a priori are one and the same, to ask how synthetic a priori judgments are possible is to ask what laws reason gives to itself; it is to establish the autonomy of reason. For Kant, ‘human reason always strives for freedom’ precisely in the sense of following only those laws it gives to itself. And this structure is a practical assumption of any effort to use reason to determine where it can guide action. Like Kant’s, any similar effort must set up reason as the judge in its own tribunal, advancing it as our ultimate guide in practical affairs.
This inquiry into the possibility of freedom follows necessarily from the project Kant sets out in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the first Critique’s inquiry into the capacity of reason to attain knowledge a priori, he finds that reason must restrict itself to the domain of sensibility, and so cannot gain knowledge of things-in-themselves, only to realize that these objects still retain practical, heuristic use. Once reason gains clarity into the domains of its legitimate application and those where it oversteps itself, it loses its pretentions toward metaphysical knowledge, but gains insight into its own freedom. As Kant writes in the B preface to the first Critique: On a cursory overview of this work, one might believe that one perceives it to be only of negative utility, teaching us never to venture with speculative reason beyond the boundaries of experience; and in fact that is its first usefulness. But this utility soon becomes positive when we become aware that the principles with which speculative reason ventures beyond its boundaries do not in fact result in extending our use of reason, but rather…result in narrowing it by threatening to extend the boundaries of sensibility…and so even to dislodge the use of pure (practical) reason. Hence…this critique is also in fact of positive and very important utility, as soon as we have convinced ourselves that there is an absolutely necessary practical use of pure reason (the moral use).
29
The objects of classical metaphysics have historically displaced reason from its rightful home: the practical. The Critique of Pure Reason shows how reason’s inability to know anything about the objects of classical metaphysics allows it to reassert its authority over our practices, and so discloses the possibility of human freedom.
Reason, then, cannot determine anything veridical about the objects of classical metaphysics, but it can determine human actions, and this grants it a warrant to venture into the speculative to the extent that the (supersensible) objects it encounters can embody norms that reason gives to itself: the objects of classical metaphysics become ideals. Kant establishes the connection between ideals and action-guiding norms in the first Critique with a distinction between ideas and the ideals.
30
He writes:
Ideas are thus objects of thought that have no sensible counterpart: freedom, for example, or the soul. Kant thinks that, while freedom and the soul can serve to organize, cognize and guide empirical representations, they nonetheless do not correspond to particular, concrete sensible objects that will serve as a real instance of them. We can find a coffee mug that provides a sensible representation of the concept of coffee mug, for example, but we cannot find a sensible instance of freedom that will serve as a perfect, direct and sensuous representation of it. We can, however, imagine such an instance in the form of the kingdom of ends, or Plato’s ideal republic. 32 These serve to lend concreteness and individuality to categories determined solely by the idea, but which do not have any corresponding sensible representation.
For Kant, then, ideals are part of the very capacity for freedom the Critical philosophy sets out to prove; they are its guides and expressions. In providing imaginative representations of reason’s practical and theoretical laws, ideals guide action and judgment toward a horizon of freedom. They are heuristics for reason in its aspirations toward autonomy. In this sense, Kant’s understanding of ideals more closely tracks the concept of ideals recently defended by Kwame Anthony Appiah than the view defended by Rawls. 33 Appiah recovers his account of ideals from the Neo-Kantian philosopher and founding editor of Kant-Studien, Hans Vaihinger. For Appiah and Vaihinger, ideals are useful fictions. We know that they do not correspond to anything real, but we can nevertheless believe in them when they are useful for some purpose. In fact, for Kant, their value for free beings derives from the fact that they do not correspond to anything sensible, but to the laws of reason alone. This means that, unlike in the Rawlsian account, Kantian ideals are not models it is our task to build. Their function is solely heuristic.
To dispute about the content, feasibility and demandingness of ideals thus becomes absurd, from Kant’s point of view. If ideals are mere heuristics that help us to become autonomous, their value has little to do with the material content of the tasks they set for us. Rather, they gain their usefulness in guiding us toward autonomy. Otherwise put, if ideals do set us a task, it is not the end they represent; it is autonomy itself, which we realize when act in accordance with the commands of reason. This reveals a foundational contrast with Rawls’s model-conception of ideals. For Rawls, ideals very much do depict an end for us to realize. His ideal contractors agree to a social goal to collectively pursue. This is in contrast with Kant’s solely heuristic account. We accomplish the task Kant’s ideals set out for us the moment we act autonomously. Thus, if we fall short of realizing our ideals, it is not because our ideals are too demanding, but because something – an institution, a political form, our own egoistic desire – stands in the way of our freedom.
This reveals another foundational contrast between Rawls and Kant, one that shapes the kind of social analysis their theories require: where Rawls assumes that his ideal contractors are ‘moved solely by the highest-order interests in their moral powers and by their concern to advance their determinate but unknown final ends’, Kant argues that the realization of this kind of autonomy remains an open-ended task for us. 34 Rawls’s contractors have the freedom and the capacity to pursue their ideal of justice; Kant’s concrete persons have yet to realize this capacity. This has widespread ramifications for Kant’s political philosophy. For Kant theorizes his own historical moment as one in which humans are beginning to awaken to their capacity to be free. The Copernican revolution has only just begun with the first Critique; Kant lives not in an Enlightened age, but an age of Enlightenment. 35 As a result, in formulating his vision of public reason, critique and political philosophy, Kant turns as much to social, political and individual barriers in the way of autonomy as he does to formulating the principles that would guide the ideal condition. The task for social and political philosophy is to reflect on itself and its own conditions to understand how it might contribute to the realization of freedom.
This self-reflective aspect of Kant’s thought links it with the tradition of critical theory, as Karen Ng has argued, drawing on the work of Max Horkheimer. Ng writes: In binding the objects of experience to human activity, Kant sets in motion an entire project of critique in which what is continuously subject to scrutiny is the very form and capacity of reason itself. Critique becomes, in essence, a form of self-critique, one in which reason itself is continually put on trial. However, this immediately creates a paradox for the very project of critique: in putting reason on trial, reason stands as both the accused and the judge in the case of its own legitimacy, for reason is both the object of critique and the very activity that makes critique possible.
36
For Ng, critical theory inherits a methodology from Kant that uses reason to scrutinize its own limits and possibilities, and this comes to define the activity of critique. Once reason turns its inquiring power on itself, it sets out to determine which of its capacities are valid, and which are illusory. This activity, for Ng, also connects German idealism with critical theory in another way. ‘The critique of reason’, Ng writes, ‘for Kant and even more emphatically for his successors, was essentially a project that aimed to understand the actuality of human freedom – the critique of reason is at once the demonstration of rational life as a free life’. 37 Kant thus opens up a form of philosophical inquiry that uses reason’s self-scrutiny to achieve freedom.
But for Ng, it is only with Hegel that critique must turn its attention to its social and historical circumstances and become social philosophy. 38 Kantian critique, in its focus on pure reason, is not obviously or necessarily linked with a critical theory of society. Given that the critique of pure reason sets out to demonstrate what reason can know independently of experience, its social and historical circumstances cannot affect it. For Hegel, on the other hand, since reason is intrinsically social and historical, the operation of self-scrutiny that defines critique must of necessity turn its attention to its particular historical and social locale. Here, what survives of Kantian critique within critical theory is reason’s scrutiny of itself, but Kant’s understanding of reason must undergo a transformation before critical theory can get the social into view. Reason must be transfigured from a pure and abstract faculty to an immanent and historically conditioned one. The relationship between Kantian critique and a critical theory of society appears more tenuous, and it is not obvious whether Kantian critique must lead to social theory at all.
Here, I want to suggest that Kant nonetheless brings an additional, distinctive perspective to critical theory that inheres in his view of humanity as speculatively oriented by normative ideals. These ideals orient humans toward a world in which we can fully realize freedom’s possibilities and demands. However, these ideals must be speculative because they pertain to us as free beings. We are as free to ignore them as we are to realize them, and human history provides many reasons to believe we will choose the former course. As Kant writes in ‘Idea for a Universal History,’ human actions appear to be ‘woven together out of folly, childish vanity, often also out of childish malice and the rage to destruction’. 39 Empirical human behaviors give many reasons to discredit the idea of progress. But for Kant, the reflective practice at the core of the Critical philosophy reveals that we are free, and that reason’s ideals are always available to us as lodestars and guides. Thus, however much misery and domination can come to predominate in human history, the possibility of transformation toward the better remains open, for Kant, precisely because we are free. Ideals are Kant’s means of expressing this possibility and providing normative guidance to help us contribute to its fulfillment.
III Speculative orientation
Another way of stating this is that ideals express Kant’s hope that the ills and pathologies that arise in human society might be available to us, as agents, for critique and remedy. In this instance, Kant’s view of reason as a transcendental, universal faculty actually motivates his turn to a critical analysis of humanity’s social, political and historical circumstances. It is because Kant vindicates human freedom in terms of transcendental philosophy and the moral law that our propensity to commit acts of violence, domination and evil requires explanation. Kant argues that reason’s principles are universal and even ordinary reasoners can arrive at the moral law, but when he turns to empirical human behavior, he finds scant evidence that we act in accord with reason’s commands. As he formulates this dilemma in ‘Idea for a Universal History’, ‘human beings do not, in the pursuit of their endeavors, follow their mere instincts as do animals, and yet also do not, as would rational cosmopolitans, proceed in accordance with a previously arranged plan’. 40 Our actions are not solely determined by nature, and so it appears that we have agency, but neither are they solely determined by reason, so we have yet to put our freedom to a moral use. This is why ideals are necessarily speculative. They pertain to us as free beings, and so are, in principle, available to us, but it is clear that we have just as much of a capacity to ignore them as to follow them, and we usually chose to ignore them. As a result, when we critique social pathologies and evils, we are engaged in an effort to make them available to reason, but it is an effort that can often appear quixotic in light of the magnitude of human evils and wrongs.
Recent theorists like Loren Goldman and Jakob Huber have forcefully defended Kant’s understanding of ideals according to his conception of practical belief, which refers to beliefs that we hold because they are conducive to some theoretical or practical end, but about which we can have no certain knowledge. 41 However, while these accounts both faithfully reconstruct a promising line of argumentation in Kant and offer a persuasive means of defending his conception of ideals, they remain incomplete. This incompleteness stems from their focus on the role of practical beliefs in guiding individual agents toward the good. In so doing, they overlook the fact that Kant denies that humans will seek the good of our own volition, and they downplay the necessity of Kant’s natural teleology to his view of progress. Goldman suggests that the more dogmatic renderings of Kant’s teleology are in clear contradiction with the first Critique’s limits on metaphysical knowledge and so cannot be squared with his heuristic defense of progress. 42 But I read these passages differently. On my reading, they are the speculative core of Kant’s argument for progress because they locate the mechanism for progress not in human agency, but in the claim that (we ought to regard) nature (as if it) has designed human sociability so as to be sufficiently antagonistic that it drives the need to seek more pacific and equal relations. 43 The motor of progress in Kant’s speculative teleology is not moral agency, but the mutual antagonisms that we ought to regard nature as having willed for us in order to motivate the search for more civil and pro-social relations.
For Kant, we have to understand human progress as if it were willed by nature because human actions give us little reason to believe that agency alone can deliver us toward the better. As Kant writes in ‘Idea for a Universal History’: Here there is no other way out for the philosopher—who, regarding human beings and their play in the large, cannot at all presuppose any rational aim of theirs—than to try whether he can discover an aim of nature in this nonsensical course of things human; from which aim a history in accordance with a determinate plan of nature might nevertheless be possible even of creatures who do not behave in accordance with their own plan.
44
Kant begins from the assumption that humans will not realize our rational duty of our own volition. As a result, we have to rely on a natural teleology to make sense of progress, since human agency is uncertain and is more often put to malign uses than good ones. Without Kant’s natural teleology, his belief in progress becomes self-defeating, since he does not believe that human agency alone can produce it. Moreover, practical beliefs make sense of the appearances, and the puzzle Kant addresses in “Idea for a Universal History” among other essays is that we cannot make sense of the appearances of the will through human moral agency alone. If progress occurs, it is not because we are slowly realizing our moral duty, but because our mutual antagonisms produce conditions so intolerable that we have to establish reciprocally coercive conditions that provide order and stability, conditions that enable us to then seek greater levels of freedom and equality.
In other words, although Kant thinks we need to believe in progress to make moral action intelligible, he actually does not think that our moral actions are themselves a motor of progress. Rather, progress is a result of the forms of war, strife and domination that our ‘unsocial sociability’ drives us to both produce and seek to overcome.
45
Kant’s theory of progress depends on his view that good comes from bad; our natural antagonisms have to force us to improve our collective condition because we are actually averse to doing our moral duty. He formulates this perspective succinctly in ‘Theory and Practice’: Thus it can be considered an expression not unbefitting the moral wishes and hopes of a people (once aware of their inability) to expect the circumstances required for these from providence, which will provide an outcome for the end of humanity as a whole species, to reach its final destination by the free use of its powers as far as they extend, to which end the ends of human beings, considered separately, are directly opposed. For, the very opposition of inclinations to one another, from which evil arises, furnishes reason a free play to subjugate them all and, in place of evil, which destroys itself, to establish the rule of good, which, once it exists, continues to maintain itself of its own accord.
46
For Kant, what motivates the desire to seek more pacific and civil relations is evil. Our individual ends are actually averse to our moral duty and produce evils, which then drive us to seek social relations that ameliorate them. Thus, while human agency is involved in this process, it is not motivated by our reverence for the law, but by human egotism and self-interest.
Why might this matter for the recuperation and defense of Kant’s theory of ideals? I propose that re-centering the more negativistic dimension of Kant’s understanding of progress nuances his understanding of human agency and the role ideals play within it. Not only do ideals serve as practical beliefs that can lend sense and significance to our moral actions, but they also highlight the dimension of human society and politics that remains permanently unsettled. 47 To be speculatively oriented by ideals is not solely or even primarily to have the capacity to engage in altruistic acts of social transformation; it is to have the capacity to assert that our collective existence remains open to contestation, revision and transformation even – especially – when all we are confronted with are the malign intentions of humanity and the magnitude of our wrongs. For Kant, ideals represent the possibility that human agency can eventually be oriented toward the good. But comprehending this possibility also requires acknowledging that it may remain mere possibility, and while it is perpetually open to us, the paths that lead us to it may not be obvious and, indeed, may never materialize.
In this sense, there’s a dialectic between Kant’s ideals and Kant’s negativism.
48
Kant is constantly acknowledging that what it means to have ideals is to realize that they might go unfulfilled. Confronted with the choice between accepting that his ideals are so vanishingly unlikely as to make the pursuit of them verge on the futile and giving up on them altogether, Kant chooses to acknowledge their potential futility and nonetheless continue to advocate for their pursuit.
49
As he writes in The Metaphysics of Morals: Now it is evident that what would be made or duty in this case is not the assumption that this end can be realized, which would be a judgment about it that is merely theoretical and, moreover, problematic; for there can be no obligation to do this (to believe something). What is incumbent upon us as a duty is rather to act in conformity with the idea of that end, even if there is not the slightest theoretical likelihood that it can be realized, as long as its impossibility cannot be demonstrated either.
50
For Kant, so long as it remains metaphysically possible for us to realize our ideals, they continue to bind us and remain available to guide our hopes, judgments and actions. And yet, this also opens us up to the risk of futility. Kant explains in ‘Idea for a Universal History’ that if humanity were unable to realize its telos, its ‘natural predispositions would have to be regarded for the most part as in vain and purposeless; which would remove all practical principles and thereby bring nature, whose wisdom in the judgment of all remaining arrangements otherwise serve as a principle, under the suspicion that in the case of the human being alone it is a childish play. 51 The choice for Kant is between a speculative belief in progress or complete moral senselessness. As Kant frames it here, to give up on progress would be to see human existence as uniquely purposeless in a world where all other objects appear, for Kant, to have a purpose. 52
However, since Kant thinks he has vindicated our freedom and the future remains open, it always remains possible for us to realize our moral ends, and so practical principles still bind us, even if they risk futility. As he writes in ‘Theory and Practice’: It does not matter how many doubts may be raised against my hopes from history, which, if they were proved, could move me to desist from a task so apparently futile; as long as these doubts cannot be made quite certain I cannot exchange [this] duty…for the rule of prudence not to attempt the impracticable…and however uncertain I may always be and remain as to whether something better is to be hoped for the human race, this cannot infringe upon the maxim, and hence upon its presupposition, necessary for practical purposes, that it is practicable.
53
Once again, so long as it remains possible to improve our collective condition, the duty to do so is binding, even if these actions may turn out to have been useless. Here, the belief in progress is of only limited consolation. As he writes of the belief in providence in ‘Perpetual Peace’, ‘we do not, strictly speaking, cognize in these artifices of nature or even so much as infer from them but instead. . . only can and must add it in thought’. 54 This further shows how the belief in progress depends on acknowledging the possibility that it may never materialize; we cannot apprehend whether progress is actually occurring. We simply ‘add it in thought’ to make moral sense of a reality that would otherwise appear senseless.
Here, Kant reveals a dimension of his theory of ideals that often goes unappreciated. Since ideals represent possibilities that are perpetually open to us, but remain constitutively uncertain, they correspond to a fuller, more complex picture of what it means to be free than is sometimes attributed to Kant. Human history might follow uncertain, even regressive paths that produce domination and human misery. But if Kant is right that we are free, the possibility of social transformation is always available to us, even via unpredictable and circuitous routes. Kant captures this nuance particularly well in The Conflict of the Faculties when he writes: Even if we felt that the human race, considered as a whole, was to be conceived as progressing and proceeding forward for however long a time, still no one can guarantee… the epoch of its decline would not be liable to occur; and inversely, if it is moving backwards…a person may not despair even then of encountering a juncture…where the moral predisposition in our race would be able to turn anew toward the better. For we are dealing with beings that act freely, to whom, it is true, what they ought to do may be dictated in advance, but of whom it may not be predicted what they will do: we are dealing with beings who, from the feeling of self-inflicted evil, when things disintegrate altogether, know how to adopt a strengthened motive for making them even better than they were before that state. - But “miserable mortals,” says the Abbé Coyer, “nothing is constant in your lives except inconstancy!”
55
Here, Kant casts humans as unpredictable creatures subject to radical breaks and ruptures in our moral trajectory. We have agency, and so can act morally, but we are also physical creatures with natural predispositions and drives that incline us, for Kant, to act out of egoistic desire and self-interest. Progress is thus always available to us, but so too is decline. Ideals thus remain the possible result of our agency, lodestars and guides for moral actions that may end up being quixotic, but which remain binding on us so long as we are free.
Kant’s view of progress thus serves to amplify the sense in which ideals are speculative guides. They do not merely function as the ends and norms according to which we act and judge as individual agents; they also correspond to a broader sense that the future is constitutively uncertain, but always available to us, even in moments of crisis and peril. To act and judge in light of the ideal is thus not always to suppose that, in so doing, you will produce the better using your own agency. In fact, given Kant’s view that the good often arises out of evil, it is likely that individual actions more often fail to realize progress within his framework. Instead, to act and judge according to ideals is to enter into a relationship with uncertainty structured around the hope that humans will come to realize the good. Here, Kant’s arguments take on an experimental logic he articulates in “Theory and Practice” in analogizing moral and political action with technological experimentation. He writes: For, that what has not succeeded up to now will therefore never succeed does not even justify abandoning a pragmatic or technical purpose (for example, that of flights with aerostatic balloons), still less a moral purpose that, if only it is not demonstratively impossible to effect it, becomes a duty.
56
So long as reason’s precepts remain possible to achieve, we have a duty to continue attempting them. To be free, for Kant, is thus to have a duty to direct our freedom toward the good. But since freedom gives us the capacity to pursue our more malign intentions, our efforts to realize the good often strain against empirical reality. But this is no reason to give up on our efforts to achieve the good even when conditions seem hopeless. Kant connects hope with freedom; so long as we are free, we can sustain a hope for the better.
As a result, for Kant, to be speculatively oriented by ideals is to be caught within a dialectic of progress and uncertainty, one defined by the limits of human reason and the nature of human freedom. This indicates a reflexive, even ironic, dimension to Kant’s theory of progress that is often overlooked. 57 Kant imagines that nature will heal the gap between real human behavior and the highest potentials of our rational freedom. But this theory is avowedly speculative. It responds to the absence of any such guarantees outside of the terrain of speculative of philosophy, which, Kant avers, cannot yield truths, only heuristics. Kantian progress thus depends conceptually on the claim that we cannot have any determinate knowledge that progress is occurring. And it sits side-by-side with his empirical conclusion that human behaviors tend to be at odds with the ideals to which progress is to deliver us. Our pathway to the ideal is thus neither certain nor linear; rather, it is unpredictable and tenuous – if even it exists.
This leaves us with an alternative picture of what it means to have ideals and how they might function in social and political philosophy. Where Rawls assumes in the course of constructing his model that his ideal contractors will be motivated to pursue the good, Kant turns to empirical reality to find that we are frequently motivated by egoistic self-interest and desire. As a result, to the extent that ideals represent a collective social goal, it is not a goal we can expect human beings to pursue. Since Kant thinks that the common understanding can arrive at the moral law, and yet humans still do not act morally, there is no reason to believe that correcting moral ignorance will improve moral behavior.
Ideals thus play a different role in Kant’s moral philosophy. They guide us toward autonomy and, in so doing, affirm to us what is possible for free beings. But that’s it. Our individual efforts to aspire toward the good may or may not contribute to progress, but they will, for Kant, make us free. And if we value the good for its own sake, we do not need any further incentive to pursue it. Here, Kant offers a deeper message about ideals, ethics and politics that poses a challenge to ideal theory and to some harder-headed realisms. To critically reason about politics and judge it in light of an ideal is not to instrumentalize it in service of justice; it is to suppose that we are free and, in being free, ought to promote the good for its own sake. Ideals correspond to the possibility of the good, but not to its likelihood or our capacity to produce it of our own volition. If progress is purposive for this end, we have a warrant to believe in it. But the good we do for its own sake.
Conclusion
So, where does this leave us in the contemporary debate among realists, nonideal theorists and ideal theorists? I have argued that it leaves us with an alternative picture of what it means to have ideals, which provides a richer understanding of their role in political life. Kant does not offer us a model-conception of ideals. Rather, for Kant, ideals correspond to our freedom, and they represent its highest possibilities. As such, they are always available to us as free beings, even when it seems extremely unlikely that we will be able to realize them. Since they correspond to a rational conception of the right and the good, they are binding on us whether or not they seem likely to be realized. They are lodestars and guides for our agency under nonideal conditions. The result is that to insist on acting and judging in light of the ideal can often appear quixotic and even futile. But for Kant, we have no warrant to give up on their pursuit so long as they remain possible, even if they appear exceedingly remote. Otherwise, to give up on our ideals would be to give up on freedom itself.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
For their advice and feedback on prior drafts of this article and conversations around key themes in the article, the author would like to thank: Sankar Muthu, John McCormick, Linda Zerilli, Warren Breckman, Tejas Parasher, Philip Levine, Thomas Fossen, Gordon Arlen, Nica Siegel, Jessica Fischer, Alienor Ballangé, and Rainer Forst. The author would also like to thank the Justitia Center for Advanced Studies and the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften for fellowship support while completing this article, especially: Rainer Forst, Darrel Moellendorf, Matthias Lutz-Bachman, Iris Koban, Beate Sütterluty, and Christine Wagner.
