“If the fear of falling into error introduces a mistrust of Science, which without any such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually comes to know, it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust.” — G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
To date, it must have become evident to every knower that the question of knowledge, before any other question, stands at the forefront of our era’s intellectual horizon. Kant’s fourfold inquiries remain our paramount concern: (1) What can I know? (2) What ought I to do? (3) What may I hope for? (4) What is the human, and what is human beingness? And each of these inquiries is profoundly bound and linked to the others. Although Kant enumerates others who influenced his first question—“What can I know?”—and even credits them for having awakened him from his dogmatic slumber, ultimately it is he alone who formulates this question for us and gives it shape. Thus our question, ranging from its innocent and complacent levels to its most complex later iterations, is the question of the form of reason, of formal rationality, and the question of the possibility of knowledge. Can we truly inquire into the essence of objects, things, and the world? Can we pose a question to the world? What are the delimitations of reason? And on what basis can we be assured that we have answered and possess knowledge of it?
In our everyday lifeworld, we hear and speak of economics and economic, subject-oriented ownership, of man and woman, sexuality and gender, of punishment, religion, theology, and the formal orders of the world and the collapse of form and content, of art and its content and the necessity of form therein, and, in sum, of science, scientific authority, and academic consequences. In any case, whether a human being engages with the primary question or not, they are compelled to immerse themselves in the secondary question: a human being, even if they do not prepare a defence of the orders of their thought, inevitably speaks of the imperatives of praxis and action. Yet whatever the case, the subject cannot find its self-same self in any fixed moment, nor can it know itself either negatively or affirmatively—for the very necessity of believing in and validating such a hypothesis can only find the possibility of authenticity if we deny that, in order to gain knowledge of something, the object of knowledge must behave in a determinate and fixed manner within a given moment so as to attain the status of being posited. The subject, in the very moment it seeks to know itself, is no longer that same self. Hence, it must make its own self into its own object, presupposing that the preceding moment and the present moment are two different things, and further claim that subjectivity can be defined and compounded only as a part of itself, that is, through a relation to something other than itself.
For this reason, we establish our first hypothesis: the subject can never attain knowledge of its own subjectivity, for the subjectivity of the subject—that is, its actual consciousness—cannot become the object of any kind of knowledge, nor become its theme, because in its concept and meaning it is something simple, unless we speak of it negatively and, as with any other simple thing, adopt a negative approach to its definition. Beyond this, when we consider reason, we must pay heed to the question: where is the vessel of possibility for this rationality, and in what manner does rationality take form? Then we must ask: can a human being exercise will beyond reason? Or, more precisely, when we say “human,” can we will anything other than his volitional subjectivity? And, in view of the framework we have laid out, is it at all possible to regard the human as anything other than an indivisible unit hostile to composition?
Plainly, the claim we are making aspires to convey an elucidation of human agency and to invite a reconsideration of human knowledge, so that perhaps the prevailing dogmatism might, once again, in the continuation of history—by linking this era to the preceding one—be broken, dismantled, and deconstructed. Friends and critics will ask what justification there has been for the terminology employed here; I shall endeavour, throughout the text, to provoke crisis in this very inquiry.
To begin my work, in order to point toward the zero point of the discussion, I start from Kant’s second question: “What ought I to do?” Some have argued that Kant’s intention was to move from ethics toward religion. We shall have, in general, no concern with the historical Kant’s own imagination and thought. Rather, we shall ask: does what Kant does—namely, the clarification of the self-sufficiency and autonomy of the moral law and the categorical imperative—stand in opposition to religion, religious discourse, theology, and the like? Such a thought assumes this very position, and must provide a defence for what is taken as self-evidently presupposed, namely, that religious texts and works, as objects, present themselves with a self-interpretation—and, astonishingly, many great and small alike commit this error. With Kant, we must return to the primary question, even if his second question comes before the first, albeit in a methodologically erroneous manner: from what does the self-sufficiency and autonomy of the moral law derive? And, essentially, what is the addressee of such a claim?
The claim of this text is as follows:
Firstly, the subject of the ethical proposition is not its empirical subject. When we say “murder is contrary to ethics,” “murder” as the subject of the proposition has no subjecthood in the foundation and constitution; it is rather the object of the proposition. The core claim resides in the fact that “you shall not commit murder, never and at no time.” On this approach, “murder” as the object of ethical knowledge must be comprehensively defined and delimited: when, provisionally, we are excepted from this rule, and when not; in brief, when we are confronted with murder, and when with something other than what is meant in this proposition. Our proof and argument, by way of evidence, ask: in what sense can the subject-noun, in itself, be situated? When we look at “murder,” pondering its concept and essence, is it not the case that we have attended to something whose subject-noun is once again our will? And, apart from pointing to an aggregate of indirect volitional relations, can it indicate something else? When we examine its concept, can we find any sign or indication of goodness or badness in its lexical meaning and concept? How can it be thought that by pondering the concept of murder and ethical good and evil, the judicative decree—the “is” and “is not” of the proposition—will be evoked for us? And, above all else, this claim itself is romantic, intuitionist, and consequently anti-rational. Apart from this, what meaning does it have, and in what form is it cast, when we say “murder is contrary to ethics,” if not that it is comprehended only within the vessel of will—i.e., within the “oughts” and “ought-nots”? And, in a more collective layer, is meaning anything other than form—and here, the form of the volitional act?
Secondly, what Kant bestows upon us—at the initial stage, even if historically he himself did not realise this, just as Hume historically did not realise the import of his own words—is this: the human being apprehends the ethical proposition and its self-sufficiency and autonomy from any other argument. But to the same degree, by what rational method and in which vessel of intelligence can the two sides of the proposition—i.e., the subject-noun and its product—evoke one another? To put it another way, Kant, in all three Critiques, summons us to a kind of formalism: to see the concept of every thing in its form. And yet every human being will ask themselves: such a form, which cannot be positively analysed (and thus cannot report on anything), from what does it originate, and who enunciates it?
Thirdly, the subject apprehends the ethical proposition only within the vessel of possibility and the power of its own will. Apart from this path, the parts, in the event of collapse, are negators of ethical formalism. And at this point we return to an earlier stage, where we must expand the first claim. If we accept that the moral law and the categorical imperative are conceivable only with regard to the will, then they cannot report on their own truthfulness or falsity, correctness or incorrectness.
Fourthly, no proposition—especially the ethical proposition—can report on the essence of its own subject-noun, even if we accept that that subject-noun might have an essence. In that case, we return to Kant’s first question and the problem of language-games.
We return to the first question and the final part of such a section: Where and when has the subject’s first confrontation with actual knowledge taken place? Subjectivity of the subject—i.e., the subject as a potentiality, prior to actualisation—and here we conduct a negative investigation: in what vessel has the possibility of knowledge been found? And how have the experiences, inductions, syllogisms, and inferences of a knower taken shape, from infancy to old age? Does the knowledge of the knower of the known thing occur except in the form of that thing? And even when he imagines that he reports on the essence of that thing, is it not fundamentally otherwise than what is imagined—that he has come to know the final form and ideal of the thing? And in relation to this same approach: is not the idealism that claims knowledge of the final form—the final form as ideal and cognitive form—obliged to mount a renewed defence of itself against this materialist interrogation and inference? For in that case, we are confronted, in all simplicity, not with a final form but with one state among the possible states of a thing, and we should confine ourselves to this manifest phenomenality. Then, what relation would this have to the science of phenomenology? To answer each of these questions, we must first prepare an answer to the question we have quoted: what sort of vessel is the vessel of knowledge, and in what manner? For if a subject, by taking a negative approach, shows this vessel to be that which negates vessel-hood—if it arrives at a negative determination—has it not thereby committed an act of anti-rationalism?
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