The Death of the Subject in Art – Part IV: Rousseau, Kant and the Birth of the Enlightened Subject
The Enlightened Subject and His Transcendentalization
The difference between the approach to the human being and to his “subject” in the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth can be traced across countless disciplines. The period itself is one of profound transformations in the Western world: industrialization, and deep changes in the social and economic order.
The dialectical debate is not about whether humanity advances in science or in morality—this happens in any case—but about how that advance takes place. Is the good and the true really given a priori, so that the individual who expresses himself freely thereby promotes both himself and his society toward a better world? Or, in order to realize the humanist narrative, must a complete knowledge of the human be imposed upon him (for example, via state sovereignty)? To what extent do the interests of society truly coincide with those of the individual? How far may the state intervene in the personal or social structure at all? The argument is about the very center where human/social activity is located—whether in the spiritual and cultural sphere, the economic sphere, or the political sphere.
“…subjects can be managed […] the subjects are satisfied with ready access to the prince, so that they have more cause to love him if they want to be good and, if they want to be otherwise, more cause to fear him…”
“A sovereign doth honor a subject with whatsoever title, or office, or employment, or action that he himself will have taken for a sign of his will to honor him.”
These are the political words of Machiavelli and Hobbes. Here, “subject” means “subordinate”: subordinate to his dark drives (aggression, territoriality, and so forth), and subordinate to the one who “knows how to channel” those drives elsewhere (sublimation). In the real world, outside the walls of philosophical reflection, the subject is conceived as a single body—one atom within the people. He is no longer a subject of a divine mediator, but of the powerful man who holds the knowledge and power of the state, and who can direct human development for the benefit of his subjects; the one who decides what is good and evil, what counts as law.
In contrast, the eighteenth century begins to speak in a different tone: the tone of Enlightenment.
“…it is in the situation of an individual contracting with himself; whence it will be seen that there is no kind of fundamental law, and cannot be any, not even the social contract, which is binding on the people as a body. The question is how to distinguish clearly between the respective rights of sovereign and citizen and between the duties that citizens have to perform as subjects, and the natural rights which they enjoy as men.”
The enlightened world—Rousseau as its unmistakable representative—wants to see in the individual first and foremost a human being, a person bound to the political order only in his capacity as citizen. The private concerns of the individual must exist apart from the common interest. He is not an artificial construct in whom the state perceives an abstract entity, but a being endowed with natural rights.
The human being is not born with original sin, as Augustine argued. The essence of man is love, knowledge, and help; what diverts him from these are artificial social structures and competitive economy. Sovereignty must therefore assume a different function: government is obligated to supervise the relations between subjects—whether they are “ruled” or “rulers”—so that their interaction remains within the framework of political and social freedom.
Between Machiavelli/Hobbes and Rousseau we can see a shift from the subject as “subject to…” or “bearer of…” (a passive subject) to an active subject. Even though the subject undergoes a certain collectivization, his movement is a priori toward existential individuation at the level of thought: he strives to be an autonomous moral entity. Ideas such as Rousseau’s define a new kind of human and a new kind of society. A spirit of drive and desire for free self-expression emerges; we might say that the world of empirical facts and solid bodies converges into the projection of the self—a place where the human feels the process of the universe as his home (Berlin 2001).
The social contracts sought by Rousseau and Voltaire, and the values shaped by thinkers such as Herder, Schiller, Bayle and others in their art—human unity, dignity, integrity, rational desire, individual freedom, self-expression, belonging—begin to take concrete form in the actual conduct of European states. New roots for the social order grow, rooted in justice, creativity, and reason.
The enlightened European monarchs of the eighteenth century adopt rational and enlightened ideals, tending toward religious tolerance, freedom of speech, scientific and educational development, and civil equality. These ideas can be felt in the background of the Revolution of 1789 (Talmon 1973).
When Kant asks “What is Enlightenment?” he answers: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.”
Human immaturity is the refusal to use one’s own subjective tools, an intellectual laziness that seeks external guardians—religion, experts, authorities. The more political a society becomes, the more it finds its pleasures in the modern spectacle, the more it generates purposes without conceptual foundation and meanings born as fixed formulas and rules (what Kant calls “mechanical tools of the use of reason”), the harder it is for a person to escape from his immaturity, “which has become almost second nature,” and the less possible genuine subjective freedom becomes.
So what does Kant demand? He demands the freedom to move, the freedom to use one’s own reason. His hero is Socrates, who used his reason publicly—a hero of subjective thought who refuses to accept what is taken for granted. The free voice of reason spoken in public “brings enlightenment to men,” opening their eyes. Independent thought spreads “a spirit of rational esteem for the worth and vocation of every human being to think for himself.” The task is difficult, almost impossible, yet this work— even if it remains only an ideal—has the power to fill a life.
In the real world, the rational and empirical search of the seventeenth century finds an alternative mode of human relations in the political economy of the eighteenth. New relations of resources, communication, property, and production describe a new game of power: the civil market versus the state, the worker versus his employer. In the economic utopia of liberal revolution, the ideal condition in which the collective will is realized lies in the self-interested and rational management of the individual’s own affairs.
“As the capital of an individual can be increased only by what he saves from his annual revenue or his annual gains, so the capital of a society, which is the same with that of all the individuals who compose it, can be increased only in the same manner.”
The role of the state here is again that same supervision of freedom Rousseau spoke of—but now it is economic freedom. The everyday life of the rational individual in the marketplace does not require intervention: the market lives and breathes on its own because it is already grounded in interests and calculations embedded in human desires and passions.
The enlightened thinkers are right about the constitution of the “I,” the importance of the singular human as bearer of the world, and his ethical relations with the other. Yet what happens in actuality is that the primary relations between human beings and between states are economic relations. Daily human activity is work; the most immediate wish of the individual is to provide for his family. He has ideas, interests, a drive to create—but in all of this, he is a trader.
In the liberal view, the disproportion between state and individual arises from the impossibility of allowing every person to realize himself without harming others; therefore, this view prefers to maximize the realization of intellectual property (knowledge, freedom, selfhood), which in principle does not injure anyone. But the spirit of economy absorbs even these. The human being becomes a bundle of experiences formed within economic relations in which he pursues his private interests, without any clearly bounded collective body. The balancing forces operate inside the market itself. No latent religious or metaphysical powers are required: relations between states and their subjects tighten through trade, open borders, and the free movement of goods and people—even as competition and national self-interest sow the seeds of nationalism, for the economic field quickly becomes a national one.
Returning to the ideal line of thought: we ended Chapter 3 with a form of idealism already germinating in Baroque art. The fully developed ideal subject appears with Kant’s planting of the transcendental tree. Kant does not analyze the human being anthropologically, nor does he try to decide between dualism, empiricism, or monism. He does not begin with substance or with appearance, but with the way we know them—with the capacity of our reason, insofar as that way must be a priori. This is the transcendental standpoint.
When Kant uses the term subject he does not mean a passive Cartesian subject, nor a political subject who is subordinate, as in the beginning of this chapter. He means an internal, active structure of the human being. The subject cannot know things as they are in themselves, but only what he himself puts into them. He posits in advance a series of conditions for the very occurrence of experience: the object is already shaped by subjective rules of thought, by the a priori concepts of the subject.
Thus, in contrast to Descartes’ simple “I,” the Kantian “I” is a complex entity which, in the act of self-identity, builds the entire world of phenomena in its own consciousness. The a priori gaze produces the a posteriori judgment (and not the other way around). Every inductive or deductive law is imposed on nature only after it has been organized by the categories—principles given a priori.
Reason is the condition for every act of will; empirical character is merely the sensible side of intelligible character. Pure reason acts as “a free daughter,” autonomous and independent of natural causality; it is itself the initiating cause of events in the realm of freedom. Its freedom “…may be described positively as a faculty of beginning a series of events from itself,” as an unconditioned condition of all acts of will. The pure concepts of the understanding are a priori and legislate for theoretical cognition in relation to nature, while practical cognition—moral principles—legislates in accordance with the concept of freedom. What enables the passage from theoretical to practical knowledge, from the concepts of nature to the concepts of freedom, and from understanding to reason, is the power of judgment: the human being bears moral responsibility.
As a psychological creature, the human always lives in multiplicity and desire, riddled with inner contradictions. He constantly strives to create objects in imagination, even when those objects are impossible: “I would like the moon to trade places with the sun this very moment.” I know this is impossible; it is a fantasy arising from an empty consciousness. Yet that very striving is an inseparable part of the subject’s nature—indeed, one of his fundamental powers. “If we were required to employ our powers only after we were assured of their success in producing an object, most of our powers would remain unused.” This is the power of the acting subject, the creative subject: the power to judge, by his own reason, the possible and the impossible.
The transcendental concept of this imaginative act is neither a concept of nature nor a concept of freedom; it refers to no object of theoretical nature. It represents instead a mode of subjective reflection on such objects, and in doing so, points to a kind of unity we cannot and need not comprehend. “In order to discover what are called empirical laws, the understanding must assume an a priori principle as the ground of all reflection, to the effect that there is in general a nature.” The subject comes to know his own essence as transcendental subject only by reflecting on the unity of consciousness which underlies every judgment as the form of all cognition. There is, therefore, no room left for subjective passivity.
“The aim of the investigation of reason is to discover the grounds of explanation as much as possible in this very subject, and this can be accomplished best by a schema which treats the subject as if it were a real being.”
According to Kant, we cannot think the Whole or the thing-in-itself. He forges a synthesis between Hume’s “relations of ideas” and Leibniz’s “predicate contained in the subject.” Sensibility (the faculty of intuition) and understanding (the faculty of thinking) are distinct. Objects are given in intuition, while the concepts and rules by which the subject grasps them belong to understanding. Space and time themselves are subjective, private forms of intuition, given a priori with their geometrical and mathematical structures. In this synthesis of empiricism and rationalism, reality appears as a world of phenomena.
The crucial point is that this world is catalogued by the subject; every causality is supplied with him. The object exists as the bearer of a category in an active subject. Thus the most fundamental laws of nature, like mathematical truths, are easily understood—not because they describe an independent reality, but because they register its structure as we necessarily experience it. “World” in the transcendental sense means the absolute totality of all appearances; we concern ourselves only with the completeness of this synthesis, and the logical hypotheses arise only from our desire for such unity.
The synthesis is performed through the application of the categories. In categorical cognition—determinism, space, time—the human being knows, arranges, and orders his world. Inner sense is pure intuition; the categories tie images to concepts; experience emerges through the objectification of appearances. No object can be grasped as a thing-in-itself but only as the subject of a thought. The world cannot be perceived as it is in itself, only as phenomenon, viewed through the conceptual net of understanding. The subject is responsible for creating the laws of appearances without needing to explain their a priori basis.
Unlike Descartes’ “I think,” self-consciousness is not an intuition of a substance; it is a purely conceptual representation, an act of a thinking subject. “The consciousness of self in the representation ‘I’ is not an intuition at all, but a merely intellectual representation of the self-activity of a thinking subject.” Without some empirical content providing the material for thought, even “I think” could never be actual. The empirical factor is a condition for the use of pure understanding.
Thus the “I” as a metaphysical entity is less important than the function of synthesis itself. If experience arises only through categories that link images, then this “I” can itself be nothing more than an empirical object of inner intuition. The self-image contains self-awareness as an active necessity for the possibility of that image; it is that spontaneous point of thought which knows, a priori, that the representation is “mine.”
The pure concepts of reason include what Kant calls the categorical imperative. There is an unconditional command to the purposiveness of human life, and this is moral value. Such value can exist in its purity only when it springs from duty—from an inner law—and not from inclination or immediate satisfaction. If nature is the physical law, then ethics is the law of freedom. Precisely because reason is not confined to nature, it can construct a lawful order of ends and human existence beyond experience; reason itself posits this principle for the world.
“…For man, who is affected by so many inclinations, and for whom, although capable of the idea of a pure practical reason, they make it hard to let this idea have practical influence on his life, the moral law appears as a constraint, a command.” The good will must be separated from all other intentions and treated in its “natural sound understanding”—“it needs not to be taught, but only to be cleared up.”