There is no human being who does not feel the heavy yoke of opinion, and no one does away with it.
(Kant Reference Kant2011: 71; BB, 20: 9)Footnote 1
1. Introduction
Immanuel Kant’s relationship to metaphysics is open to a number of interpretations.Footnote 2 Kant himself in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by the Dreams of Metaphysics (1766, hereafter Dreams) suggests that his relationship to metaphysics is erotic in nature.Footnote 3 Plato’s Eros of the mind takes on a decidedly modern twist here in that Kant characterizes metaphysics as a coquette. The coquette is a woman who fascinates, and fascination has metaphysical implications. That is, the fact that we can be fascinated by something tells us something about the kind of reality with which we are fascinated. In this essay I examine Kant’s understanding of attraction and repulsion in order to elucidate the nature of his relation to metaphysics. This in turn will clarify the nature and purpose of Dreams. A more precise understanding of the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau will prove critical in this enterprise. Briefly, Kant learned from Rousseau that society brings human beings together in a way that forces them apart because the human world is constituted by the dialectical relationship between the drive for freedom and the drive for unity. These drives are fundamental and so both Rousseau and Kant are looking for ways to move the human heart that will protect both drives while minimizing their divisive effects.Footnote 4 At the time of publishing Dreams, Kant does not have a total solution to this problem. He does, however, have a clear grasp of the problem and expresses it. In addition, he presents in an ironical way the practical solution of rule of the general will. The irony is necessary because of theoretical problems which Kant cannot yet solve.
In the next section I highlight a number of themes from Kant’s notes that are now known under the title Remarks in the ‘Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime’ (1765–6, hereafter Remarks).Footnote 5 Primary among them is the theme of a drive to honour, with its attendant delusions. To more deeply understand this drive, I examine other remarks that speak to related phenomena, such as inclinations that are exclusive versus those that are participatory, or Kant’s reflections on the role of the crowd or the mob. I give particular attention to a figure that might seem to be unconnected with the drive for honour, but which I argue is simply one of its manifestations: the coquette. In Kant’s cultural context, to win the coquette is to reverse the dynamic: the coquette would now desire the one who has overcome her. Thus all the passages that I examine have in common the theme of the influence of the other. Kant is very aware of the influence that human beings exert upon one another, especially the influence that a group exerts on an individual. This particular theme has not figured very prominently in any analysis of the Remarks to date. We are somewhat used to reading Kant as if he is speaking about the autonomous individual and the conflicts that take place within her. This is not without reason, but Remarks helps us to keep a balance by showing us how concerned Kant was with the influence of the other. Throughout this part I specify Rousseau’s influence on Kant.
In section 3 I examine the text of Dreams to reveal how Kant analysed the problem of intersubjective influence. I concentrate on his revelation of the true ‘purpose’ of Dreams in the second chapter of its second part and the way in which this purpose is further illuminated by the ‘detour’ in the pendant second chapter of the first part. This detour turns out to be a detour from a detour; in other words, it is the proper path to the true purpose of Dreams and is almost wholly concerned with social influence on an individual’s reason and will. As we will see, in Dreams Kant seeks simultaneously to influence the reader and to transform the character of metaphysics from being a coquette to being what ‘one would least expect her to be, namely, the companion of wisdom’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 355*; TG, 2: 369). I will end with a few reflections on where Kant went from this point.
This essay contributes to a deeper understanding of Rousseau’s influence on Kant by concentrating on the theme, running through the Remarks, that the drive for freedom or equality and the drive for unity in the state of nature lead, ineluctably, to the drive for honour, which in turn leads to irrationality and violence, and then showing how this theme leads to the writing of Dreams. In this way I show that one salient feature of the famous comparison that Kant made between Newton and Rousseau is his discovery of an analogy between the Newtonian forces of attraction and repulsion and the two Rousseauian social drives – the drive to equality, which Kant equates with freedom, and the drive to unity. The first is a drive whose focus terminates in the self, the second’s focus is located in others. I will caution, however, that associating the first drive with selfishness and the second drive with altruism is misleading.Footnote 6 Each drive has its own goodness, but together they ground the drive for honour. The drive for honour leads to irrationality or delusion. The delusion leads to inequality and inequality leads to violence.Footnote 7 It is this problem that spawns the reflections that make up Dreams.
This essay further contributes to a deeper understanding of Kant’s critical project. As Joseph Schmucker and Dieter Henrich showed long ago and Richard Velkley and Susan Meld Shell continue to demonstrate in new ways, Kant achieved a real breakthrough in his moral theory while reading Rousseau.Footnote 8 The Remarks include the first formulation of the categorical imperative. As Velkley has shown, Rousseau’s influence was even more profound in showing Kant the way in which reason subverts itself and forcing him to confront the problem of culture in its most general form.Footnote 9 By reading Dreams in the way I propose, we see that being moral and being rational is to follow universal laws and yet these universals laws are not simply what everyone else is doing. They have to be grounded in reason, but it is a reason that is all too influenced by other human beings. Kant’s critical project is to show how rational experience itself grounds a world that is objectively shared.
2. The Remarks
Kant’s encomium to Isaac Newton and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contained in the notes he wrote in his own interleaved copy of Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and Sublime, is well known. While Newton saw ‘order and regularity combined with great simplicity’ in the movement of the starry heavens above, ‘Rousseau discovered for the first time beneath the manifold of forms adopted by the human being the deeply hidden nature of the same and the hidden law, according to which providence is justified by his observations’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 104–5; BB, 20: 58–9). In Remarks Kant occupied himself, among other things, with working out in more detail what this famous comparison implied. He finds in Rousseau the basic forces or drives that constitute a world.Footnote 10Remarks represents a part of Kant’s effort to understand the ‘hidden nature’ of the human being and the ‘the hidden law’ which justifies providence. We will find Kant following Rousseau in going back to ‘natural man’ and perceiving, as Rousseau had predicted, that one finds that ‘man has hardly any evils other than those he has given himself, and that Nature would have been justified’ (Rousseau Reference Rousseau1992: 74; DI, 3: 202).Footnote 11 Through his encounter with Rousseau Kant sees the law that human society, in spite of all its putative progress, ‘necessarily brings men to hate each other in proportion to the conflict of their interests, to render each other apparent services and in fact do every imaginable harm to one another’ (Rousseau Reference Rousseau1992: 74; DI, 3: 202).Footnote 12 That is, Kant understands Rousseau as teaching that the fundamental laws of the metaphysics of morals are somehow interpersonal.
The Two-Fold Drive to Unity
From his reading of Rousseau, Kant found himself reflecting on the basic forces of society, on how they work, and on the effect that their dynamic has on human reason and willing. The basic forces he discovers are ‘the drive for equality and the drive for unity’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 180; BB, 20: 165). The drive for equality is compatible with human beings in a state of nature, and Kant identifies it with freedom. The drive for unity brings about logical perfection when it is unity of thoughts and judgements and moral perfection when it effects a unity of inclinations (Kant Reference Kant2011: 180; BB, 20: 165). The two drives in combination, however, constitute a drive for honour. The drive for honour, as I shall explain below, is meant ‘to promote self-preservation’ but, in fact, leads to ‘pure delusion’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 179; BB, 20: 165). The delusion manifests itself in the dreams of spirit-seers or a kind of metaphysics. That is, there is a direct line from freedom, unity and honour, through delusion or irrationality, to metaphysics.
In Remarks Kant is working out the implications of the connection he intuited between Newton’s physical theories and Rousseau’s theory of society. This comes out most explicitly when he writes:
The only naturally necessary good of a human being in relation to the will of others is equality (freedom) and, with respect to the whole, unity. Analogy: Repulsion, through which the body fills its own space just as everyone [fills] his own. Attraction, through which all parts combine into one.
(Kant Reference Kant2011: 180; BB, 20:165)Footnote 13
These two drives constitute a world: ‘Two powers that move the animal world, as it were’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 180; BB, 20: 165). We have an even more telling expression in Herder’s notes on ‘Kant’s Lectures on Practical Philosophy’, which date from the same period: ‘The disinterested feeling is like a force of attraction, and the self-interested feeling like a force of repulsion. The two of them, in conflictu, constitute the world’ (Kant, Reference Kant1997: 3–4; 27: 4). The drive or ‘instinct’ for unity, as we shall see in more detail below, has an effect on both human reason and human willing.Footnote 14
It is these two naturally necessary goods that, in opposition to each other, lead to the drive for honour. ‘The drive of honour is grounded on the drive for equality and drive for unity’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 180; BB, 20: 165).Footnote 15 In fact, in another place Kant constructs a ‘graduated scale: freedom, equality, honour. (Delusion) Attention, henceforth he loses his entire life’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 90; BB, 20: 34). Kant expands this cursory thought of the graduated scale with a more detailed account of how human beings move through it. The account shows the influence of Rousseau.
First of all, there is comparative evaluation. Kant maintains a distinction between this kind of evaluation and honour (see Kant Reference Kant2011: 130; BB, 20: 96). He states that ‘the drive to evaluate oneself merely comparatively, with respect to one’s worth as well as one’s welfare, is far more widespread than the drive for honour, and contains the latter within itself’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 181; BB, 20: 166). Honour is a mediate drive, an unnatural drive that results from this effort ‘to know one’s own state better through comparison with others’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 181; BB, 20: 166). It is, in a word, Rousseau’s amour-propre. All the negative moments seem to stem from the fact that we have ‘esteem for the judgement of others’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 181; BB, 20: 166).
Kant is both following Rousseau and going his own way. In the Second Discourse Rousseau famously distinguishes between ‘amour-propre and love of oneself’ (Rousseau Reference Rousseau1992: 91; DI, 3: 219).Footnote 16 While it is tempting to simply equate Kant’s drive for equality with love of oneself and the drive for unity with amour-propre, it is more accurate to see Kant as analysing the make-up of amour-propre and seeing it as the result of the interaction of these two forces, one centrifugal, the other centripetal.Footnote 17 While amour de soi is an unproblematic love for Rousseau, for Kant it does not exist in the sense that no actual case of it presents itself. The basic drives towards freedom and unity are already in play, so no simple instance of amour de soi is possible. Kant analyses the complex make-up of amour-propre. Both Kant and Rousseau see honour as based on comparison. Rousseau writes: ‘Amour-propre is only a relative sentiment, artificial and born in Society, which inclines each individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else, inspires in men all the harm they do to one another, and is the true source of honour’ (Rousseau Reference Rousseau1992: 91; DI, 3: 219). For both Rousseau and Kant the ability to compare is a useful means, but as it gets converted into an end, it distorts human knowing and human relations. Rousseau also sees comparison as bringing about progress of a sort, but it always ends badly. Rousseau describes it thus:
People grow accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparisons; imperceptibly they acquire ideas of merit and beauty which produce sentiments of preference. By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer do without seeing one another again. A tender and gentle sentiment is gradually introduced into the soul and at the least obstacle becomes impetuous fury. Jealousy awakens with love; Discord triumphs, and the gentlest of the passions receives sacrifices of human blood.
(Rousseau Reference Rousseau1992: 47; DI, 3: 169)
For Rousseau, the result of this development of appreciation of another is the idea of consideration or honour and the right to it, and with that, offence is joined to harm (see again Rousseau Reference Rousseau1992: 91; DI, 3: 219).
Kant makes clear the importance of comparative evaluation by delineating its outcomes. He is trying to carefully distinguish a good rational activity from its negative effects. He writes:
We have all sorts of drives that should serve us as means to serve and more often immediately rule others. First, comparing ourselves with others in order for us to be able to evaluate ourselves; from this arises the falsity of evaluating one’s worth comparatively, [i.e.] arrogance, and of evaluating one’s happiness in just the same way, [i.e.] jealousy. Second, putting ourselves in the place of another in order for us to know what he feels. From this arises blind pity, which also brings justice into disorder. Third, investigating the judgements of others because this can correct the truth of ours morally as well as logically. From this arises the desire for glory. Fourth, acquiring and saving oneself all sorts of things for enjoyment; from this arises greed, which is miserly.
(Kant Reference Kant2011: 131; BB, 20: 97)
In each drive there is a movement, in which something seemingly good in itself – comparing ourselves with others, putting ourselves in the place of others, investigating the judgements of others, acquiring things – comes to a bad end: arrogance, jealousy, disordered justice, desire for glory, greed. The drive that leads to this bad end can be summed up in the phrase ‘love of honour’ or ‘drive for honour’. It is with this drive that delusion emerges. Nevertheless, for Kant, ‘the origin of the love of honour regarding the judgement of physical qualities lies in the means to freedom, preservation of oneself and [one’s own] kind’, that is, in something positively good (Kant Reference Kant2011: 178; BB, 20: 162). And yet this freedom produces what one does not desire, conflict. In another passage Kant expands this kind of consideration in the following way:
I need things or also human beings. Honour is either mediate or immediate. In the first case, it is a drive of enjoyment; in the second, of delusion. In the first case, the needs are either true or imaginary, to which honour is a means, and the first [is] either in the natural or in the degenerate state. Needs for things in the natural state <to procure them for oneself> do not require honour (because everyone can procure them for himself); but in order to preserve them and oneself they demand that others have an opinion of our equality, so that our freedom does not suffer, since we can seek our needs as we please. Man’s natural need of acquisition is a woman. For this, he needs the opinion not of superiority over but of equality with other men, and he also easily acquires this. In both cases, however, the human being will raise the drive of real honour above equality, partly [so] that freedom [should] be more secure, partly because he begins to prefer one woman over another, so that she will also prefer him.
(Kant Reference Kant2011: 178–9; BB, 20: 163)
As with Rousseau, preference leads to violence. In this way human happiness stands on a knife-edge. In the state of nature humans can supply their needs but it is precarious and so humans attempt to shore up their position and this pushes humanity over the brink to opulence. Then humans have to find a way back to the state of lost simplicity. Kant puts it this way:
The human being in his perfection is not in the state of sufficiency, nor in the state of opulence, but in the return from the latter state to the former. Remarkable character of human nature. This most perfect state rests on the tip of a hair; the state of simple and original nature does not last long; the state of renewed nature is more lasting but never as innocent.
(Kant Reference Kant2011: 170; BB, 20: 153)
While the drive for honour is not natural, it does come out of a necessary good. Kant argues:
That the drive for honour comes from the desire for equality is to be seen from this. Would a savage search for another in order to show him his advantages? If he can be without him, he will enjoy his freedom. Only if he must be together with him, will he attempt to outdo him, therefore the desire for honour is mediate.
(Kant Reference Kant2011: 102; BB, 20: 55)
Only in society are humans evil, and this thought is pure Rousseau.Footnote 18 Only when they cannot escape each other, do humans do evil to each other (see Kant Reference Kant2011: 89; BB, 20: 34). Kant sees that, as a means to the end of preserving one’s freedom, honour is good. Misuse of this means, making honour itself into an end, is the source of our problems.
As we have already seen, Kant gives a rather detailed account of how this comes about. He ties our desire for honour to our need for equality or freedom and for unity. It begins as a means to ensure our equal status, but it becomes an end in itself. We can keep our own freedom when we are left alone, but for unity we need others. With this need, humans begin to pay attention to what others will think and what others will say. Kant even composes an imaginary situation with dialogue:
You marry a woman without wit, without manners, without birth and family, what a decline in your taste. Oh, that is not the rule of my taste, you may answer. But what will the people say, consider how the world will judge you. Before I get involved with this important difficulty, I ask you first what one understands by such people and the world whose opinion is decisive for my happiness. Those are, one answers me, a multitude of persons in which each is just as distressed [by] what people want to say, and I belong among the number of these so-called people whose judgement is so important. Oh, I answer, we people altogether do not at all want to bother each other about the opinion of another any longer because it robs us of enjoyment; for now we understand each other, or I, at least, understand all of you; I am no comedian who is paid by applause.
(Kant Reference Kant2011: 142; BB, 20: 113–14)
Kant give this thought the force of an aphorism, when he writes: ‘The foolishness of vaingloriousness consists in one who esteems others to be so important that he believes their opinion to give him such great value nevertheless despising them so much that he also views them to be nothing compared to him’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 106; BB, 20: 61).
The drive for honour both comes out of and leads to rivalry; it makes humans unequal. Kant sees inequality in much the same way as Rousseau. It robs human persons of their dignity. Once inequality has begun, ‘the ill of oppression is not nearly so great as that the minds of the oppressed become abject and value themselves lowly. A peasant is a much viler human being and has cruder vices than a savage who lacks everything, and just the same [holds for] a common worker’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 135; BB, 20: 102). The comparisons human beings make to get a better idea of their own position end up having a detrimental effect on social relations. The final result of this dynamic is violence.
Although the human being hates no other human being by nature, he does indeed fear him. Hence he is on his guard, and the equality that he thinks he is losing every moment brings him to arms. The state of war soon begins. But since it is based on a noble ground, it surely brings forth great ills but no ignominy. It is less likely to dishonour human nature than a slavish peace.
(Kant Reference Kant2011: 135; BB, 20: 103)
Although Rousseau famously insisted against Hobbes that in the state of nature humans were peaceful, this is only in its beginning. For Rousseau ‘nascent Society gave way to the most horrible state of war’ (Rousseau, Reference Rousseau1992: 53; DI, 3: 176). Following all the tumult and revolutions Rousseau brings us back to ‘a new state of Nature different from the one with which we began’ (Rousseau, Reference Rousseau1992: 65; DI, 3: 191). Here only the law of the stronger prevails. How did it happen? I quote Rousseau here at length to make clear just how much he influenced Kant:
I would point out how much that universal desire for reputation, honours, and preferences, which devours us all, trains and compares talents and strengths; how much it stimulates and multiplies passions; and making all men competitors, rivals, or rather enemies … I would show that to this ardour to be talked about, to this furor to distinguish oneself, which nearly always keeps us outside ourselves, we owe what is best and worst among men, our virtues and our vices, our Sciences and our errors, our Conquerors and our Philosophers – that is to say, a multitude of bad things as against a small number of good ones. Finally, I would prove that if one sees a handful of powerful and rich men at the height of grandeur and fortune, while the crowd grovels in obscurity and misery, it is because the former prize the things they enjoy only insofar as the others are deprived of them; and because, without changing their status, they would cease to be happy if the People ceased to be miserable.
(Rousseau, Reference Rousseau1992: 63; DI, 3: 189)
The drive for honour leads to rivalry, which leads to violence.Footnote 19 Kant tends to see this violence in a positive light: the conflict of human life advances the species towards its final moral end (‘great ills’ but ‘no ignominy’). Nevertheless, he also understands that the chief way human beings avoid violent conflict is through deception. It now becomes more advantageous for a human being to appear virtuous than to actually be so. Rousseau, as is well known, dealt extensively with this theme.Footnote 20 For Kant’s part, perhaps the most damning statement that he wrote in these reflections is the following: ‘Truth is not the main perfection of social life; beautiful illusion here, as in painting, drives it much further’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 99; BB, 20: 49).
Kant defines the
good of delusion [as] consisting in the fact that only opinion is sought after, but the thing itself is either regarded with indifference or even hated. The first delusion is that of honour. The second of avarice. The latter only loves the opinion that he could have many goods of life with his money, though without ever wanting it in earnest as well.
(Kant Reference Kant2011: 102; BB, 20: 55)
In all this Kant espies an essential fact: ‘Others’ love of honour is highly valued because it indicates so much renunciation of other advantages’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 103; BB, 20: 56). That is, to desire honour, to be thought well of by others, means that one hides one’s real desires, one simulates a virtuous appearance, one renounces any advantage that one could grasp that would cause criticism by others. In fact, one practises a kind of asceticism of desire for the sake of honour.
In a different set of reflections Kant also categorizes inclinations as either exclusive (ausschließend) and therefore selfish (eigennützig) or participatory (theilnehmenden) and therefore useful to all (gemeinnützig) (Kant Reference Kant2011: 194; BB, 20: 183). He makes clear that self-love (Selbstliebe) and self-esteem (Selbstschätzung) are not exclusive and so he seems here to be following again Rousseau’s distinction between amour de soi and amour-propre. We saw above how Rousseau holds that what makes some things precious is simply the fact that others are deprived of them, that is, the value depends upon the interpersonal relationship. For Kant amour-propre (Eigenliebe) and self-conceit (Eigendünkel) are exclusive. Kant is explicit that the ‘immediate drive to honour is exclusive with respect to honour’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 194; BB, 20: 184). He calls ‘the quality of mind that desires in objects everything exclusively … envy’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 194; BB, 20: 184). Overall, ‘the drives that are participatory are the best’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 194–5; BB, 20; 184).
I include here some brief considerations on the effect of crowds. Kant writes:
When facing the eyes of a large crowd, few human beings will endure their mockery and contempt with a calm mind, even if they know that those [in the crowd] are all ignorant fools. The great crowd always creates awe (Ehrfurcht), indeed, even the audience shivers with fright at the false step of him who compromises himself in their presence, although each individual, if he were alone with the speaker, would find little disparaging in his disapproval. But if the great crowd is absent, a composed man can very well regard their judgement with complete indifference.
(Kant Reference Kant2011: 197; BB, 20: 187)
In these few lines Kant shows a deep awareness of the influence of the crowd and the way it manufactures a kind of religious presence or awe.Footnote 21
In summary, following Rousseau Kant sees the social world as ruled by the laws that govern the interrelation of two forces: the drive for equality or freedom and the drive for unity. These two forces are in conflict because the pressure to ensure one’s equality leads one to seek honour. Honour, however, instead of ensuring equality, destroys it, making people seek even more honour, leading to unequal social relations. This, in turn, leads to violence and oppression.
The Coquette
Kant knew of one figure that had mastered the art of appearing, of asceticism, of controlling the affects of others, even those of a small crowd, and this figure fascinated him. This figure ignites the drive for honour and preference, bringing delusion in its train. In fact, she plays a game. She ‘has the intention of inspiring inclinations, even though she has none herself; it is a mere game of vanity’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 194; BB, 20: 183). This is the coquette.
Kant’s fascination with the coquette has to do with her power to move the human heart. We tend to think of the coquette primarily in sexual terms and this is not without reason. But the sexual component is part of the larger phenomenon of being both attracted and repelled, being fascinated, of feeling entrapped by someone or something. Kant read Rousseau’s description of the coquette’s art in Emile: ‘On what does this whole art [of coquetry] depend if not on sharp and continuous observations which make her see what is going on in men’s hearts at every instant, and which dispose her to bring to each secret movement that she notices the force needed to suspend or accelerate it?’ (Rousseau, Reference Rousseau2010: 563; E, 4: 734). I think it is this art that Kant is seeking. All of his reflections on the importance of place, of occupying one’s place in creation, point to a need to be able to help guide or move oneself and other people to their respective places.Footnote 22 He asks: ‘The question is whether, in order to move my affects or those of others, I shall take a position outside the world or in it. I answer that I find it [the position] in the state of nature, i.e., of freedom’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 103; BB, 20: 56).
But if Kant finds this position in the state of nature, in the state of freedom, then it would seem impossible for there to be any connection between the position he takes up here and his fascination with the coquette and her ability to move the affects of others. One could hardly imagine another figure further removed from the pure state of nature than the coquette. All this is true, but the fact remains that the coquette embodies or instantiates the truth of Rousseau’s state of nature as an idea: the state of self-sufficiency.Footnote 23
The coquette plays such role in Kant’s Remarks that we can profit by looking at this figure more closely.Footnote 24 Among the accounts offered by people like Freud and Sartre, I have chosen René Girard’s version because he draws the clearest links between the coquette and some of the other phenomena we have been examining in Kant’s Remarks.Footnote 25 The indifference the coquette embodies inflames the desire of the other, and this appears to contradict Girard’s overall analysis in which the origin of desire ‘is always the spectacle of another real or illusory desire’ (Girard Reference Girard1971: 105). Girard explains that the ‘coquette’s indifference toward her lover’s suffering is not feigned but it has nothing to do with ordinary indifference. It is not absence of desire; it is the other side of desire of oneself’ (105–6). This fascinates the lover and he believes that he sees in it ‘that divine autonomy of which he has been deprived and which he burns to acquire’ (106). At the same time his desire feeds the coquette’s desire for herself. This is what Girard calls ‘double mediation’ and its hallmark is that it ‘secures an opposition as radical as it is meaningless, a line by line and point by point opposition of two symmetrical and opposite figures’ (106).
Girard expands on this account in the context of his critique of Freud’s view of desire in his later work, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. I follow that account here. Freud saw the coquette as an instance of narcissistic desire, that is, a desire that does not bestow libido on the other. For Freud, attractive women can be more than just attractive to men, they can fascinate, and they fascinate because of an ‘interesting psychological constellation’ (quoted by Girard Reference Girard1987: 369). Freud sees the very narcissism, the seeming lack of any need for another, the seeming self-sufficiency, as something men envy. ‘It is as if we envied them for maintaining a blessed state of mind – an unassailable libidinal position’ (quoted by Girard Reference Girard1987: 369).
Girard sees Freud as revealing more than he wishes. Freud zeroes in on the coquette’s ‘indifference, which is both terribly irritating and exciting for the male’ (Girard Reference Girard1987: 370). But Girard criticizes Freud for imagining that he has somehow captured the essence of the feminine instead of realizing that he has just noticed the strategy of the coquette. For Girard, what so fascinates Freud is simply the kind of ‘play’ made famous by Molière’s character Célimene.
According to Girard, the coquette knows a lot about desire. ‘She knows very well that desire attracts desire. So, in order to be desired, one must convince others that one desires oneself’ (Girard Reference Girard1987: 370). Given the nature of mimetic desire, the coquette, representing a desire that never gets outside of itself, ‘offers an irresistible temptation to the mimetic desires of others’ (Girard Reference Girard1987: 370). Freud fails to see that what he describes as self-sufficiency is anything but. Rather than real self-sufficiency it is ‘in effect the metaphysical transformation of the condition of the model and rival’ (ibid.). That is, the coquette wants to be desired because ‘she needs masculine desire directed at her, to feed her coquetry and enable her to play her role as a coquette’ (ibid.).
Kant’s desire to occupy the state of nature or the state of self-sufficiency that Rousseau had described in the Second Discourse is not different from his desire to succeed in seducing the coquette; winning her would enable him to influence others. In fact, what he finds is that the desire to be self-sufficient leads to the ‘dreams of a spirit-seer’ or delusion and, eventually, through this to metaphysics as the science of the limits of reason. Girard also points in this direction when he writes:
We have no difficulty in recognizing in all this [the phenomenon of the coquette] the mirage produced by the model and obstacle when it resists our imitation; it is the metaphysical ghost that is invariably conjured up – manifested by the model and obstacle – for the benefit of a desire that becomes increasingly fascinated by it, since desire always returns to bump and bruise itself against it.
(Girard Reference Girard1987, 375)
In Dreams Kant is asking where all these visions of ghosts come from. His interest in this topic is not accidental but is part and parcel of his interest in the way that human beings can affect one another on both an epistemological and moral plane. What Girard helps us to grasp is the logic by which the desire for honour leads to the appearance of metaphysical ghosts.
3. Dreams of a Spirit-Seer
Dreams is a strange text.Footnote 26 One reason for this strangeness is Kant’s unusual authorial presence. Unlike other works, here Kant gives the reader the image of the philosopher as one who almost necessarily presents ‘the impression of the utmost imaginable foolishness’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 305; TG, 2: 317). Kant himself has experienced humiliation in the investigations that led up to this work. In the end he found ‘nothing’, but it is the quality of that nothingness to which we need to pay attention (Kant Reference Kant1992: 306; TG, 2: 318). It is the nothingness of honour or prestige, the nothingness of the coquette. Another reason for its unusualness is that Kant is being a coquette. He is trying to attract the reader by putting him or her off. We see this strategy used throughout the work but in particular in the Preamble. Already its title is a tease: ‘Preamble, which promises very little for the execution of the project’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 305; TG, 2: 317). Who wants to read something that promises so little and yet who can resist? He ends the Preamble by again being the tease: ‘Given its subject-matter, it ought, so the author fondly hopes, to leave the reader completely satisfied: for the bulk of it he will not understand, parts of it he will not believe, and as for the rest – he will dismiss it with scornful laughter’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 306; TG, 2: 318).
In spite of its strangeness, and granting what Kant writes in a letter to Mendelssohn, namely, that the text suffered in its mode of composition because each page was sent to the printer as it was written, it does not have the conceptual difficulty of the critical writings.Footnote 27 It is rhetorically more complex, but not unduly so. Kant puts on a show, he tells a lie that is intended to reveal the truth. When the reader sees through the deception, the purpose of the book has been achieved.
It would seem that the purpose of Dreams is to instruct the reader on the metaphysical status of spirits. To this end Kant gives an explanation of what we mean by the word ‘spirit’ and he reports on the results of his investigation into the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. But it turns out that all of this was a ruse. Towards the end of the ‘Second Chapter: Ecstatic Journey of an Enthusiast through the Spirit-World’ of the Second Part Kant reveals his true purpose. The true goal Kant tells us in one word: metaphysics. Here is the moment of revelation:
If this was the only purpose [responding to the insistent demands of friends about the status of the report of Swedenborg’s communications with the spirit-world] of this effort, then I have been wasting my time. I have lost the confidence of the reader, for, by following a tiresome detour, I have conducted him in his enquiry and in his thirst for knowledge to precisely the point of ignorance from which he set out in the first place. But, in fact, I did have a purpose in mind, and one which is, it seems to me, more important than the purpose I claimed to have. And in my opinion that purpose has been achieved. Metaphysics (und diesen meine ich erreicht zu haben. Die Metaphysik) ...
(Kant Reference Kant1992: 353–4; TG, 2: 367)
What is metaphysics for Kant at this point, or, perhaps better put, who is metaphysics? First of all, metaphysics is personified as a woman, specifically as a coquette. Metaphysics is that which attracts and repels Kant and it is that which theorizes about such attraction and repulsion. The image of the coquette is not incidental or merely literary. It gives us a vital clue to what is going on in this writing. Metaphysics is about humans on the level of their mutual influence in attracting and repelling each other, in an analogous fashion to physics that is about the mutual influence of the stars and planets. Metaphysics promises and disappoints because it is about the promise and disappointment of reason. Kant continues the quotation from above: ‘Metaphysics, with which, as fate would have it, I have fallen in love but from which I can boast of only a few favours’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 354; TG, 2: 367).
In his conception of the discipline at this time, metaphysics offers two kinds of advantage. The first hardly seems an advantage at all. That is, while Kant claims that metaphysics ‘can solve the problems thrown up by the enquiring mind, when it uses reason to spy after the more hidden properties of things’, he immediately adds that ‘hope here is all too often disappointed’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 354; TG, 2: 367). He goes further and admits that ‘on this occasion, too, satisfaction has escaped our eager grasp’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 354; TG, 2: 367). Kant never indicates that this first advantage is anything but disappointed hope. The first ‘advantage’, the first moment of achieving the purpose of this essay, is to have failed to be satisfied in our search for secrets. This disappointed promise is not only constitutive of metaphysics but also implies a social context. There are neither disappointments nor promises apart from a human community.
It is only having passed through this negative moment that one may reach the second advantage of metaphysics, the one that is ‘more consonant with the nature of the human understanding. It consists both in knowing whether the task has been determined by reference to what one can know, and in knowing what relation the question has to the empirical concepts, upon which all our judgements must at all times be based’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 354; TG, 2: 367–8). Kant then characterizes metaphysics as ‘a science of the limits of human reason’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 354; TG, 2: 368).
The second advantage, the actual knowing that the problem one poses is within reason’s reach and grasping the way it is grounded in empirical concepts, is ‘at once the least known and the most important’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 354; TG, 2: 368). One reaches it only late and after long experience; we can assume after long experience of being seduced and disappointed by the coquette in her many guises. Kant is trying, it appears, to spare the reader the ‘trouble of all futile research’ into questions, such as the existence of spirits, for which she lacks data (Kant Reference Kant1992: 354; TG, 2: 368). His own seduction and deception of the reader was for the reader’s own good, in that eliminating ‘the illusion and vain knowledge’ frees up space for ‘the teachings of wisdom and of useful instruction’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 354; TG, 2: 368).Footnote 28 But it would be wrong to limit this teaching to the subject of ghosts.
A Detour in the Detour
We can deepen our understanding of what Kant intends by this science by looking at earlier portions of the text. My reasoning is that Kant reveals his true purpose to be metaphysics by telling the reader that he, Kant, has deliberately misled her through a ‘tiresome detour’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 354; TG, 2: 367). This serves to call to mind an earlier detour, when Kant left his ‘path’ for some observations that ‘give rise to conjectures of a kind which are not disagreeable’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 321; TG, 2: 333–4).Footnote 29 Here we find two kinds of observations that seem to parallel the two advantages of metaphysics. Both observations concern social relations.
The first kind of observation has to do with ‘forces which move the human heart’, and the fact that ‘some of the most powerful seem to lie outside the heart’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 321; TG, 2: 334). That is, although the human heart is obviously moved by ‘the advancement of self-interest or the satisfaction of private need’ and these objectives lie ‘within the person himself’, there are other forces that find their focal point in ‘other rational beings’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 321; TG, 2: 334). Thus ‘there arises a conflict between two forces, namely the force of egoism (Eigenheit), which relates everything to itself, and the force of common usefulness (Gemeinnützigkeit), by means of which the heart is driven or drawn out of itself toward others’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 321; TG, 2: 334).Footnote 30 But by writing that the heart is driven or that the heart is drawn out of itself towards others, Kant is not implying an autonomous subject who is simply attracted to another autonomous subject or altruistically disposed towards another. Rather, the drive is the one ‘which makes us so heavily and so universally dependent on the judgement of others, and causes us to require the approval or applause of others as so necessary to perfecting our own good opinion of ourselves, though this tendency sometimes gives rise to a wrong-headed and misguided conception of honour’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 321; TG, 2: 334.11–15). That is, this ‘generally accepted observation’ concerns the drive for honour that comes out of the drive for equality and the drive for unity. To repeat, this dual drive makes us dependent upon the judgement of others and gives rise to the delusion of honour. Kant sees the negative aspect of this drive operative in the ‘least selfish and most sincere of temperaments’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 321; TG, 2: 334). Even there he spies out a hidden property, namely ‘a hidden tendency to compare that which one knows for oneself to be good or true with the judgement of others, with a view to bringing such opinions into harmony’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 321; TG, 2; 334). Both the theoretical form of reasoning (‘true’) and the practical form of reasoning (‘good’) are affected by this kind of drive. He thinks that humans may go so far as to ‘halt, so to speak, any human soul on the path of knowledge, if it appears to be pursuing a path different from the one we have chosen ourselves’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 321; TG, 2: 334). All of this ‘perhaps reveals’ that we ‘sense our dependency on the universal human understanding’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 321–2; TG, 2: 334). Perhaps. What it certainly reveals is that the drive towards common usefulness has a dark side that can lead to a concern for honour, then to delusion and finally to metaphysical ghosts. Kant hints at the way this happens with his example of the way common folk got revenge on scholars by convincing them of the existence of a hyena in the forests of France (Kant Reference Kant1992: 343; TG, 2: 357). The very concern not to be fooled leads us to make fools of ourselves. At the same time and inseparable from this, the drive seems to indicate the road by which one attains ‘a kind of rational unity’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 322*; TG, 2: 334).
Kant chooses not to linger over the first kind of observation, although he admits that it is ‘not insubstantial’, but instead ‘pass[es] over’ to the second kind (Kant Reference Kant1992: 322; TG, 2: 334). Still, much like the first ‘advantage’ of metaphysics that we looked at above, this first observation is never denied or overcome.
The second observation is ‘more illuminating and more important for our purpose’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 322; TG, 2: 334; my emphasis). I interpret Kant to be signalling the reader that he is referring here to the true purpose of the work: metaphysics. The second observation also elucidates the world-constituting conflict between the drive by which we relate things to our own need and that by which we relate to common usefulness. Kant observes that we cannot follow the first drive ‘without at the same time feeling ourselves bound and limited by a certain sensation; this sensation draws our attention to the fact that an alien will, so to speak, is operative within ourselves and that our own inclination needs external assent as its condition’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 322; TG, 2: 334). Kant even refers to a ‘secret power’ (eine geheime Macht) that ‘forces us to direct our will towards the well-being of others or regulate it in accordance with the will of another’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 322; TG, 2: 334). His point is that there are forces besides those located in ourselves and these forces are to be ‘found in the will of others outside ourselves’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 322; TG, 2: 335). Together they constitute a world of thinking beings with a ‘moral unity … in accordance with spiritual laws’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 322; TG, 2: 335). Thus even in ‘our most secret motives, we are dependent on upon the rule of the general will’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 322; TG, 2: 335).
I agree with Stefan Andriopoulous (Reference Andriopoulos2011: 46), that this ‘rule of the general will’ is a phrase that ‘oscillates between external coercion and adherence to a universally valid formula’ and so ‘can thus be interpreted as our being controlled by a foreign will, while simultaneously anticipating the formal principle of practical reason and its ethical legislation’.Footnote 31 Most commentators have chosen to emphasize the latter possibility and ignore the former, but it is precisely this oscillation between possible interpretations that gives Dreams its particular fascination. Further, this particular oscillation is just a further distillation of the oscillation found in Rousseau’s Social Contract between the individual and the crowd, the person considered as being in the centre and the person considered as part of the group.Footnote 32 This movement also founds the fascination in that text. The rule of the general will founds the sort of moral unity that Kant speculated about in his Remarks.Footnote 33
Kant does not mention Rousseau in this digression on social phenomena although, as we have seen, he borrows the term ‘general will’ from him in order to compare this kind of law-ruled world with the one that Newton articulated when he ‘called the certain law governing the tendencies inherent in all particles of matter to draw closer to each other the gravitation of matter. … he also gave it the name “attraction”’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 322; TG, 2: 335). Therefore, I think that this passage can be read as a public version of Kant’s private comparison of Newton and Rousseau contained in Remarks. Kant wants to represent the phenomenon of the moral impulses in the same way as Newton represents gravitation and attraction. This analogy between physical and moral forces is both attractive and repelling to Kant. Attractive because, as Kant writes:
it would now happen that man’s soul would already in this life and according to its moral state have to occupy its place among the spirit-substances of the universe, just as, in accordance with the laws of motion, the various types of matter in space adopt an order consonant with their corporeal powers, relatively to each other. If, then, the community of the soul with the corporeal world is eventually dissolved by death, life in the other world would simply be a natural continuation of the connection in which the soul already existed during this present life. … The present and the future would, therefore, be of one piece, so to speak, and constitute a continuous whole, even according to the order of nature.
(Kant Reference Kant1992: 323–4; TG, 2: 336)
This analogy is repellent because precisely here Kant’s metaphysical vision reaches its closest point to Swedenborg’s dreams.Footnote 34 I think that the reason most interpreters tend to downplay the significance of the effect that the other has on one’s knowing and willing is because they interpret Kant as understanding that the opposite of autonomy is being affected by another. But Kant was already beyond this position. As Dreams makes clear Kant held that everyone, even the ‘least selfish and most sincere of temperaments’ (Kant Reference Kant1992: 321; TG, 2: 334) are secretly affected and everyone is drawn to conform one’s understanding with the other. There is no escaping this via autonomy. There is only a choice between the kind of influence that yields delusion or the kind that yields a common world. Swedenborg’s achievements are not those of one who belongs to the common world of wakeful beings. Kant is concerned with this loss of a common world. Hence Kant’s reference to the common world we gain upon awakening and its contrast with the private world of dreams (Kant Reference Kant1992: 329; TG, 2: 342). Here I would endorse Pourciau’s interpretation:
According to my reading, however, what the similarity between spirit-seeing and moral feeling endangers is precisely not the autonomy of reason, but rather the possibility of a relation in which autonomy of all kinds is reciprocally and noncoercively limited, that is, the relation of worldhood. Although it is certainly true that Kant ultimately inscribes the autonomy of reason at the very center of the critical system, I argue that the impetus behind this shift lies not in a psychologically motivated preference for autonomy per se, but in the philosophically motivated realization that only autonomy can provide a truly stable (that is, apodictically necessary) foundation for the reciprocal limitation of autonomy that takes place in the moral sphere.
(Pourciau Reference Pourciau2006: 119, n. 16)
4. Conclusion
Kant’s concern throughout Remarks and Dreams is the same: he wants to both give an account of and provide the means for changing the human world. Thus he is looking for those fundamental forces that constitute the world. He believes that with Rousseau’s help he has found them in the drive for equality or freedom and the drive for unity. These two drives found that drive for honour that both builds and destroys the social world. Still, the world remains the standard or the criterion for distinguishing between appearance and reality. ‘Metaphysics’, Kant tells himself in Remarks, ‘is useful in that it removes the appearance that can be harmful’ (Kant Reference Kant2011: 192; BB, 20: 181).
What Kant requires is an account of the world or of experience that grounds the fact that it is common, that is, open to all, without reducing this to an induced fact. To quote Pourciau’s reflections on ‘worldness’ in Kant:
Real, nonhallucinatory experience must be inherently accessible to all humankind, and there is therefore no such thing as an empirical vision that remains in principle unavailable to the less spiritually privileged masses. Stipulations, however, do not suffice as criteria for separation, and this text [Dreams] – unlike the much later Kritik der reinen Vernunft – provides no account of experience that would allow Kant to argue for anything more than a wholly contingent generality ‘induced,’ like the law of gravitation from a necessarily finite number of individual subjective encounters with empirical phenomena. To function as an effective philosophical weapon, experience must be understood as the necessarily universalizable product of a single world.
(Pourciau Reference Pourciau2006: 117)
After writing Dreams, Kant begins a long period of reflection on the fundamental problem of ‘what can I know?’ but he does this in the service of securing the answer he has found to the question ‘what ought I do?’ Kant had an understanding that the answer to the moral question was, I should do what I can will to universalize. He was also acutely aware that what I hold to be universal can just be the influence of others on my thinking. Amour-propre can, paradoxically, lead me to think that whatever others want is ‘right’. Reason has to be purified of this noxious influence of the other without thereby becoming solipsistic but rather ‘necessarily universalizable’.
