Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

Cameron M. Thomson

Kant’s Imputable Abyss: Mimesis, Freedom, and the Intelligible Ground of Accusation

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ABSTRACT

For Kant, a deed’s imputability and a subject’s moral blameworthiness depend on the deeds’ being one of ‘the will’s manifestations in the world of phenomena’ and no merely natural occurrence. Unless the remote (even if merely ‘intelligible’) ‘fall from innocence’ is unequivocally imputable to the subject, so Kant points out, the proximate, observable evil deed cannot be imputed to its perpetrator as its unique cause or unequivocal source. 

Given these conditions for any legitimate blaming, Kant’s theory of radical evil asserts the noninvolvement — ab origine — not merely of natural inclination or instinct, but of socially mediated influence as well, in the foundation of the fundamental, subjective ground of the maxims of which the subject’s deeds are the empirical manifestation. Although it involves a social and not a merely natural relation to one’s environment, imitation, in Kant’s view, implies a mode of heteronomy that does not really differ from the subject’s submission to incentives deriving from biological exigency. Kant’s restriction of all causality to ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ demands his proscription of imitation ‘in matters of morality’ and implies the impossibility of referring to mimesis as the source of either good or evil deeds.  Broadly speaking, this restriction trivializes the integral and ineliminable role of others at the origin of experience, thought, and language and so supports a distorted account of evil and freedom.  

In this paper I argue that Kant is simply blind to the profoundly mimetic, intersubjective entanglement of human beings which, like his noumena, cannot appear as such in any possible experience of the biologically individual human being.  In particular, I suggest, Kant’s account elides the ontogenetic significance of accusation.  I propose that the subject as she is ‘in herself’ is effaced by the ontogenetic representation of the individual to herself and by her accusers as one for whom ‘the causality of [her] own will’ cannot be apprehended, to use Kant’s own terms, ‘otherwise than under the idea of freedom.’  

I argue that Kant sidesteps the problem of accounting for the ambiguous relationship of imitation to agency because his limited perspective on nature and freedom prevents him from imagining agency in terms of a co-operation of subjects—for better or for worse—that is developed and maintained through mimesis.  In conclusion, I suggest that Kant’s anticipation of an ultimate ‘perpetual peace’ between entirely discrete, autonomous subjects falters on the possibility that the subject’s felt sense of her own autonomy and (transcendental) freedom  is an effect of her being assigned discrete and unique credit and blame by (collective) others and her mimetic reproduction of these accusers’ perspective on herself—beginning at birth.

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Cameron M. Thomson is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh (in the School of Divinity). He  recently completed his MA in Theology at St. Michael's College, in the University of Toronto with a thesis on Habermas, Adorno, and Girard. He is currently doing work on Kant, German Idealism, and the early (German) Romantics.