Negative Dialectics

Negative Dialectics
Translation by Dennis Redmond � 2001
Part III. Models. Freedom: Metacritique of Practical Reason
�False Problem� [Scheinproblem] 211-213
The talk of false problems once wished to prevent, for the purposes of enlightenment, the 
unquestioned authority of dogmas to set the course of considerations, whose decisions 
would be impossible precisely to the thinking to which they were submitted. There is an 
echo of this in the pejorative use of the word scholastic. For some time however false 
problems are no longer presumed to be those which ridicule rational judgements and 
rational interests, but those which use concepts not clearly defined. A semantic taboo 
strangles substantive questions, as if they were only questions of meaning; the 
preliminary consideration degenerates into the ban on consideration altogether. The 
ground-rules of methods modeled without further ado on the current ones of exact 
science regulate what may be thought, no matter how urgent the matter; approved modes 
of procedure, the means, win primacy over what is to be cognized, the ends. Experiences 
which conflict with the explicit signs assigned to them are given a dressing-down. The 
difficulties which they cause are laid solely to lax pre-scientific nomenclature. � Whether 
the will would be free, is so relevant as the recalcitrance of the termini towards the 
desiderata of simply and clearly stating what they mean. Since justice and punishment, 
finally the possibility of what the tradition of philosophy has throughout called morality 
or ethics, depends on the answer, the intellectual need is not to be talked out of the na�ve 
question as a false problem. The self-righteous tidiness of thinking offers it a poor 
substitute satisfaction. Nevertheless the semantic critique is not to be carelessly ignored. 
The urgency of a question cannot compel any answer, insofar as no true one is to be 
obtained; still less however can the fallible need, even the desperate one, indicate the 
direction of the answer. The objects under discussion are to be reflected upon, not by 
judging them as an existent or a not-existent, but by absorbing into their own 
determination the impossibility of making them tangibly thingly [dingfest], as much as 
the necessity to think them. This is attempted in the antinomy chapter of the Critique of 
Pure Reason and in great swathes of the Critique of Practical Reason, with the express 
intent or without it; admittedly Kant did not totally avoid therein the dogmatic usage, 
which he, like Hume, upbraids in other traditional concepts. He settled the conflict 
between facticity � �nature� � and what is necessary to thought � the intelligible world � 
in dichotomical fashion. If however the will or freedom cannot be pointed out as 
something existent, then this does not at all exclude, after the analogy to simple 
predialectical epistemology, individual impulses or individual experiences from being 
synthesized under concepts to which no naturalistic substrate corresponds, which 
however similarly reduce those impulses or experiences to a common denominator, 
comparable to how the Kantian �object� does to its appearances. According to its model, 
the will would be the lawful [gesetzmaessige] unity of all impulses, which prove 
themselves to be simultaneously spontaneous and rationally determined, as distinct from 
the natural causality in whose framework it in any case remains: no sequence of acts of 
will outside of the causal nexus. Freedom would be the word for the possibility of those 
impulses. But the snap epistemological answer is not adequate. The question as to 
whether the will would be free or not, compels an either/or, just as dubious as conclusive, 
which the concept of the will as the lawful [gesetzmaessiges] unity of its impulses glosses 
over indifferently. And above all the monadological structure of will and freedom is 
tacitly assumed, as in the model of conceptual construction oriented to subjective 
immanence-philosophy. The simplest of things contradicts it: mediated through what 
analytic psychology calls the �reality check�, countless moments of externalized, indeed 
social reality go along together with the decisions designated by will and freedom; if the 
concept of what rationally accords in the will is supposed to say anything at all, then it 
refers to this, however stubbornly Kant may dispute this. What lends the immanence-
philosophical determination of those concepts their elegance and their autarky is, in truth, 
in view of the factual decisions, whereby the question as to whether they are free or 
unfree can be asked, an abstraction; what it leaves over of what is psychological, is 
scanty in contrast to the real complexion of inner and outer. Nothing is to be read out of 
this impoverished, chemical extract, which might predicate freedom or its opposite. Put 
more strictly and at the same time more Kantian still, the empirical subject which makes 
those decisions � and only an empirical one can make them, the transcendental pure �I 
think� would not be capable of any impulse � is itself a moment of the spatio-temporal 
�external� world and has no ontological priority before it; that is why the attempt to 
localize the question of free will in it failed. It drew the line between what is intelligible 
and what is empirical in the midst of empiricism. That much is true in the thesis of the 
false problem. As soon as the question of free will shrinks into that of the decision of 
every individual, dissolving this out of its context and that which is individuated 
[Individuum] out of society, it hews to the deception of absolute pure being-in-itself: 
delimited subjective experience usurps the dignity of what is most certain of all. The 
substrate of the alternative has something fictive about it. The presumed subject, which is 
existing-in-itself, is in itself mediated by that which it separates itself from, by the context 
of all subjects. Through the mediation it becomes itself what, according to its 
consciousness of freedom, it does not wish to be, heteronomous. Even where unfreedom 
is positively assumed, its conditions, as those of an immanently closed psychic causality, 
are sought in the split-off individuated, which is essentially nothing split-off of the sort. If 
not even the individual can find the matter-at-hand of freedom in itself, just as little may 
the theorem of the determination of the na�ve feeling of caprice be simply extinguished 
post festum; the doctrine of psychological determinism was carried out only in a late 
phase.
Interest in Freedom Split 213-215
Since the seventeenth century great philosophy has deemed freedom to be its most 
characteristic interest; under the unexpressed mandate of the bourgeois class, to 
transparently ground it. That interest however is antagonistic in itself. It goes against the 
old oppression and promotes the new one, which lies hidden in the rational principle 
itself. A common formulation is sought for freedom and oppression: the former is ceded 
to rationality, which delimits it, and removed from empiricism, in which one does not 
wish to see it realized at all. The dichotomy is also related to advancing scientization. The 
class is allied to it, insofar as it encourages production, and must fear it, as soon as it 
infringes upon the belief that their freedom, already resigned to sheer inwardness, would 
be existent. This is what really stands behind the doctrine of the antinomies. Already in 
Kant and later in the idealists the idea of freedom appeared in opposition to specific 
scientific research, particularly psychology. Their objects were banished by Kant into the 
realm of unfreedom; positive science is supposed to have its place underneath speculation 
� in Kant: underneath the doctrine of the noumena. With the waning of the speculative 
power and the correlative development of the particular sciences, the opposition 
sharpened to an extreme. The particular sciences paid for this with hidebound pettiness, 
philosophy with non-committal emptiness. The more the particular sciences confiscated 
of its content � as psychology did to the genesis of the character, over which even Kant 
made wild guesses � the more embarrassingly do philosophemes on the freedom of the 
will degenerate into declamations. If the particular sciences seek ever more nomothetism 
[Gesetzmaessigkeit]; if they are thereby, before any fundamental views, driven to the 
party of determinism, then philosophy increasingly becomes the storehouse of pre-
scientific, apologetic intuitions of freedom. The antinomics of freedom in Kant, just like 
the dialectics of freedom in Hegel, form an essential philosophical moment; after them 
academic philosophy, at least, swore by the idol of a higher realm beyond empiricism. 
The intelligible freedom of individuals is praised, so that one can hold the empirical ones 
even more ruthlessly accountable, to better curb them by the prospect of a metaphysically 
justified punishment. The alliance of the doctrine of freedom and repressive praxis 
distances philosophy ever further from genuine insight into the freedom and unfreedom 
of living beings. It approximates, anachronistically, that faded sublimity which Hegel 
diagnosed as the misery of philosophy. Because however the particular science � that of 
criminal justice is exemplary � cannot handle the question concerning freedom and must 
reveal its own incompetence, it seeks assistance precisely from the philosophy which 
through its bad and abstract opposition to scientivism cannot provide such assistance. 
Where science hopes for the decision on what it finds irresolvable from philosophy, it 
receives from the latter only the solace of the humdrum world-view. In it individual 
scientists orient then themselves according to taste and, one must fear, according to their 
own psychological drive-structure. The relationship to the complex of freedom and 
determinism is delivered helter-skelter over to irrationality, oscillating between 
inconclusive, more or less empirical specific findings and dogmatic generalities. 
Ultimately the attitude to that complex becomes dependent on political affiliation or the 
power recognized at the moment. Reflections on freedom and determinism sound archaic, 
as if dating from the early epoch of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. But that freedom 
grows obsolete, without being realized, is not to be accepted as a fatality; resistance must 
explain this. Not the least of the reasons why the idea of freedom lost its power over 
human beings is that it was conceived of so abstractly-subjectively in advance, that the 
objective social tendency could bury it without difficulty.
Freedom, Determinism, Identity 215-217
The indifference towards freedom, its concept and the thing itself, is caused by the 
integration of society, which the subjects experience as if it were irresistible. Their 
interest in being cared for has crippled the one in a freedom which they fear as 
defenselessness. The very mention of freedom, just like the appeal to it, already rings 
hollow. That is what an intransigent nominalism adjusts itself to. The fact that it relegates 
the objective antinomies, in keeping with the logical canon, into the realm of false 
problems, has for its part a social function: to conceal contradictions through denial. By 
holding on to data or their contemporary heirs, protocol statements, consciousness is 
disburdened of what would contradict that which is external. According to the rules of 
that ideology, only the modes of conduct of human beings in various situations would 
need to be described and classified; any talk of the will or freedom would be conceptual 
fetishism. All determinations of the I ought thereby, as behaviorism in fact planned, to be 
simply translated back into modes of reaction and individual reactions, which could then 
be nailed down. What is left out of consideration is that what is nailed down produces 
new qualities in contrast to the reflexes, out of which the former may have originated. 
The positivists unconsciously obey the dogma of the preeminence of the first, which their 
metaphysical archenemies entertained: �What is specifically most revered is what is most 
ancient, the sworn witness is however the most honored of all.�1 In Aristoteles it is 
mythos; what survives of it in straight out anti-mythologists is the conception that 
everything which is would be reducible to what it once was. In the like for like of their 
quantifying methods there is as little room for the self-producing other as the bane of 
destiny. What however has been objectified in human beings out of their reflexes and 
against these, character or will, the potential organ of freedom, also undermines this last. 
For it embodies the dominating principle, to which humanity progressively submits. 
Identity of the self and self-alienation accompany each other from the very beginning; 
that is why the concept of self-alienation is badly romantic. The condition of freedom, 
identity is immediately at the same time the principle of determinism. The will is, insofar 
as human beings objectify themselves into character. Thereby they become, towards 
themselves � whatever that may be � something externalized, according to the model of 
the external world of things, subjugated to causality. � Moreover the positivistic concept 
of the �reaction�, purely descriptive by its own intent, presupposes incomparably more 
than what it confesses: passive dependence on each given situation. What is spirited away 
a priori is the reciprocal influence of subject and object, spontaneity is already excluded 
by the method, in unison with the ideology of adjustment, which breaks human beings, 
ready to serve the course of the world, once more of the habit of that moment. If there 
remained only passive reactions, then there would remain, in the terminology of older 
philosophy, only receptivity: no thinking would be possible. If there is will only through 
consciousness, then consciousness is indeed, correlatively, also only where there is will. 
Self-preservation for its part demands, in its history, more than the conditioned reflex and 
thereby prepares for what it finally steps beyond. Therein it presumably resembles the 
biological individual [Individuum], which stipulates the form of its reflexes; the reflexes 
could scarcely be without any moment of unity. It reinforces itself as the self of self-
preservation; freedom opens itself to the latter as its historically-become difference from 
the reflexes.
Freedom and Organized Society 217-221
Without any thought of freedom, organized society could scarcely be theoretically 
grounded. It would then once again cut short freedom. Both can be demonstrated in the 
Hobbesian construction of the state-contract. A factical, thorough-going determinism 
would sanction, in opposition to the determinist Hobbes, the bellum omnium contra 
omnes [Latin: war of all against all]; every criterion of treatment would fall asunder, if 
everyone were equally predetermined and blind. The perspective of something at an 
extremity is outlined; as to whether, in the demand for freedom for the sake of the 
possibility of living together, a paralogism lies hidden: freedom must be real, so that there 
would not be horror. But rather there is horror, because there is not yet any freedom. The 
reflection on the question concerning will and freedom does not abolish the question, but 
turns it into one from the philosophy of history: why did the theses, �The will is free�, 
and, �The will is unfree�, become an antinomy? Kant did not overlook the fact that this 
reflection originated historically, and expressly founded the revolutionary claim of his 
own moral philosophy on its delay: �One saw human beings bound to laws by their duty, 
it did not however occur to anyone, that they would be subject only to their own and 
nevertheless universal legislation, and that they would only be bound to act according to 
their own yet generally legislated will, according to the purpose of nature.�2 By no means 
however did it occur to him, as to whether freedom itself, to him an eternal idea, could be 
a historical essence; not merely as a concept but rather according to its experience-
content. Entire epochs, entire societies lacked the concept of freedom as much as the 
thing. To ascribe this to them as an objective in-itself even where it was thoroughly 
concealed from human beings, would conflict with the Kantian principle of the 
transcendental, which is supposed to be founded in the subjective consciousness, and 
would be untenable to the degree that the presumed consciousness totally lacked any sort 
of living being at all. Hence no doubt Kant�s tenacious effort to demonstrate the moral 
consciousness as something ubiquitous, existent even in what is radically evil. Otherwise 
he would have had to reject, in the appropriate phases and societies in which there is no 
freedom, along with the character of rationally-endowed beings also that of humanity; the 
follower of Rousseau could scarcely have found comfort in that. Before that which is 
individuated in the modern sense formed, something self-evident for Kant, which is not 
meant simply as the biological individual being but as what is first constituted as a unity 
by the self-reflection,3 the Hegelian �self-consciousness�, it is anachronistic to speak of 
freedom, of the real kind as much as the demand for such. Freedom, to be established in 
its full dimensions solely under social conditions of an unfettered plenitude of goods, 
could on the other hand also be totally extinguished, perhaps without a trace. The trouble 
is not that free human beings act radically evil, as is being done far beyond any measure 
imaginable to Kant, but that there is not yet a world in which they, and this flashes in 
Brecht, would no longer need to be evil. Evil would be therefore their own unfreedom: 
what happens which is evil, would come from the latter. Society determines individuals, 
even according to their immanent genesis, as what they are; their freedom or unfreedom 
is not what is primary, as this appears under the veil of the principium individuationis 
[Latin: individuating principle]. For even the insight into its dependence is obscured to 
subjective consciousness by the ego, as Schopenhauer explained by the mythos of the veil 
of Maya. The individuation-principle, the law of particularization to which the 
universality of reason in individuals is tied, insulates this tendentially from the contexts 
which surround it and promotes thereby the flattering confidence in the autarky of the 
subject. Its epitome is contrasted under the name of the freedom to the totality which 
restricts individuality. The principium individuationis is however by no means that which 
is metaphysically ultimate and unalterable, and therefore also not freedom; this is rather a 
moment in a double sense: not isolatable but imbricated, and for the time being always 
only a moment of spontaneity, a historical intersection blocked under contemporary 
conditions. As little as the independence of the individuated, inappropriately emphasized 
by liberal ideology, prevails, so little is its utterly real separation from society to be 
denied, which that ideology wrongly interprets. At times the individuated has opposed 
society as something self-realized although particular, which could pursue its own 
interests through reason. In that phase, and beyond it, the question of freedom was 
genuine, as to whether society permits the individuated to be as free, as the former 
promises the latter; thereby also, as to whether the former is itself so. The individuated 
temporarily towers above the blind context of society, helping however in its windowless 
isolation just that context to reproduce itself. � The thesis of the unfreedom of historical 
experience registers no less the irreconcilability of inner and outer: human beings are 
unfree in their bondage to what is external, and that which is external to them is in turn 
also themselves. only in what is separated from this and necessarily against it, according 
to the cognition of Hegel�s Phenomenology, does the subject acquire the concepts of 
freedom and unfreedom, which it can then relate back to its own monadological structure. 
The pre-philosophical consciousness is on this side of the alternative; to the na�vely 
acting subject, which posits itself against the immediate environment, its own 
conditionality is impenetrable. To master it, consciousness must make it transparent. The 
sovereignty of thought, which by virtue of its freedom turns back to itself as to its subject, 
realizes also the concept of unfreedom. Both are no simple opposition but in each other. 
The consciousness does not become aware of this out of the theoretical urge towards 
knowledge. The sovereignty which exploits nature and its social form, domination over 
human beings, suggests its opposite, the idea of freedom. Those who were at the top of 
hierarchies, but not visibly dependent, were its historical archetype. Freedom becomes, in 
the abstract general concept of something beyond nature, intellectualized into freedom 
from the realm of causality. Thereby however into self-deception. Put psychologically, 
the interest of the subject in the thesis, that it would be free, is narcissistic, as boundless 
as anything which is narcissistic. Even in Kant�s argumentation, despite his localization 
of the sphere of freedom categorically above psychology, narcissism shows through. 
Every human being, even the �most malign ruffian�, would wish, according to the 
Foundation for a Metaphysic of Morals, that �when one set forth examples of honesty in 
intent, of steadfastness in following good maxims, of compassion and of general good 
will�, even he would like to be so minded. From this he could expect no �gratification of 
the desires�, �no condition in which any other of his real or otherwise imaginable 
inclinations would be satisfied�, �but only a greater inner worth of his person� He 
believes himself to be this better person however, when he puts himself in the standpoint 
of a member of the world of understanding, to which the idea of freedom, that is to say 
independence from the determining causes of the sensible world, involuntarily compels 
him��4 Kant spares no effort to justify that expectation of a greater inner worth of the 
person, which would motivate the thesis of freedom, with that objectivity of the law of 
morality to which, for its part, consciousness would first need to rise on the grounds of 
that expectation. Nevertheless he cannot make us forget that the �practical usage of 
common human reason�5 in view of freedom is coupled with the need for self-exaltation, 
with the �worth� of the person. Meanwhile that immediate consciousness experiences the 
�common moral cognition of reason�, from which the Kantian Foundation methodically 
starts out, no less than the interest to deny the self-same freedom which it proclaims. The 
more freedom the subject, and the community of subjects, ascribes to itself, the greater its 
responsibility, and before the latter it fails in a bourgeois life, whose praxis has never 
vouchsafed the undiminished autonomy to subjects which it was accorded in theory. That 
is why it must feel guilty. Subjects become aware of the limits of their freedom as their 
own membership in nature, ultimately as their powerlessness in view of the society 
become autonomous before them. The universality of the concept of freedom, however, 
in which the oppressed also participate, recoils against domination as a model of 
freedom. In reaction to this, those who are privileged with freedom delight in discerning 
that others would not yet be mature enough for freedom. They rationalize this, 
revealingly enough, as natural causality. Subjects are not only fused with their own 
corporeality, but even in that which is psychological, painstakingly separated from the 
immediate world of the bodily by reflection, a thorough-going nomothetism prevails. The 
consciousness of this rose in proportion to the determination of the soul as something 
unitary. So little meanwhile does an immediately evident self-consciousness of freedom 
exist, as one of unfreedom; it always requires either the mirror-reflection of what is 
perceived in society upon the subject � the oldest is the so-called Platonic psychology � 
or one which is concretized by psychological science, in whose hands the life of the soul 
it discovered becomes a thing among things and ends up under the causality predicated 
by the world of things.
The Pre-egoized Impulse 221-222
The dawning consciousness of freedom nourishes itself on the memory of the archaic 
impulse, not yet directed by a solidified ego. The more the ego curbs this, the more 
questionable pre-temporal freedom becomes to it as something chaotic. Without the 
anamnesis of the unbridled, pre-egoized impulse, which is later banished into the zone of 
unfree bondage to nature, the idea of freedom could not be created, even though it 
terminates for its part in the strengthening of the ego. In the philosophical concept, which 
raises freedom as a mode of conduct as the highest beyond empirical existence, namely 
that of spontaneity, the echo reverberates of that by which the ego of idealistic 
philosophy intends to secure its freedom, by controlling it all the way to its annihilation. 
Through the apology for its inverted form, society encourages individuals to hypostasize 
their own individuality and thereby their freedom. Insofar as such tenacious appearance 
[Schein] reaches, the consciousness is taught the moment of its unfreedom solely in 
pathogenic conditions, as in compulsory neuroses. They command it, in the midst of the 
circumference of its own immanence, to act according to laws which it experiences as 
�ego-alien�; the rejection of freedom in its own domestic realm. The pain of neurosis also 
has the metapsychological aspect, in that it destroys the simplistic notion: free inside, 
unfree outside, without the subject coming to realize the truth which its pathic condition 
communicates, and which it can reconcile neither with its drive nor with its rational 
interest. This truth-content of neuroses is, that they demonstrate the unfreedom of the ego 
in itself in what is ego-alien, the feeling of �But that�s not me at all�; there, where its 
domination over inner nature fails. Whatever falls under the unity of what traditional 
epistemology termed personal self-consciousness � itself compulsory essence, insofar as 
all moments of this unity are stamped with nomothetism � appears to be free to the self-
retrieving ego, because it derives the idea of the freedom from the model of its own 
domination, first the one over human beings and things, then, innervated, the one over its 
own entire concrete content, over which it disposes by thinking it. This is not only the 
self-deception of the immediacy, which is inflated into the absolute. Solely where 
someone acts as an ego, not merely reactively, can their action in any sense be called 
free. Nevertheless that which is not bound to the ego as the principle of every 
determination would be equally free, as that which appears to be unfree to the ego, as in 
Kant�s moral philosophy, and which in fact has been equally unfree to this day. Freedom 
as a given fact becomes problematic through the progress of self-experience and, because 
the interest of the subject in it nevertheless does not wane, is sublimated into an idea. 
This is metapsychologically verified by the psychoanalytic theory of repression 
[Verdraengung: displacement]. According to this the repressing authority, the mechanism 
of compulsion, is, dialectically enough, one with the ego, the organon of freedom. 
Introspection discovers neither freedom nor unfreedom in itself as something positive. It 
conceives of both in the relation to something extra-mental: freedom as the polemical 
counter-image to the suffering under social compulsion, unfreedom as its mirror-image. 
That is how little the subject is the �sphere of absolute origins�, which it is philosophized 
as; even the determinations, by virtue of which it lays claim to its sovereignty, always 
also need that which, according to their self-understanding, are supposed to need only 
them. What is decisive in the ego, its independence and autonomy, can only be judged in 
relationship to its otherness, to the not-ego. Whether or not autonomy exists, depends on 
its adversary and contradiction, the object, which grants or denies the subject autonomy; 
dissolved from this, autonomy is fictive.
Experimenta Crucis [Latin: decisive experiment] 222-226
How little the consciousness can discern of freedom by means of the recourse to its self-
experience, is attested to by the experimenta crucis of introspection. It is not for nothing 
that the most popular one is saddled onto a donkey. Kant still follows its schema in the 
attempt to demonstrate freedom by the decision, something relevant to Beckett�s plays, to 
stand up from a chair. In order to decide conclusively, empirically so to speak, as to 
whether the will would be free, situations must be rigorously cleansed of their empirical 
content; thought-experimental conditions established, in which as few determinants as 
possible can be observed. Every less clownish paradigm contains rational grounds for the 
self-deciding subject, which would have to be chalked up as determinants; the 
experimenta is damned by the principle, according to which it is supposed to decide, to 
silliness, and this devalues the decision. Pure situations in the style of Buridan are not 
likely to occur, except where they are thought out or established for the sake of 
demonstrating freedom. Even if something remotely similar to this could be discovered, it 
would be irrelevant to any person�s life and hence adiaphorou [Greek: indifferent] for 
freedom. Indeed many of Kant�s experimenta crucis have greater pretensions. He draws 
them up as empirical evidence of the right �to introduce freedom into science�, since �the 
experience too confirms this order of concepts in us�;6 whereas empirical evidence for 
something which is according to his own theory simply supra-empirical ought to make 
him suspicious, because the critical matter-at-hand is thereby localized in that sphere, 
from which it has been principally removed. The example is then also not stringent: 
�Supposing, that someone is given over to carnal desire, such that it would be completely 
irresistible for him, if the beloved object and the opportunity thereto presented 
themselves; ask whether if a gallows before the house, where he took this opportunity, 
were constructed in order to hang him immediately after the carnal pleasure, whether he 
then would not repress his desire. It would not take long to guess what he would answer. 
If he was asked however, whether his prince under the threats of the same immediate 
punishment of death required him to bear false witness against an honest man, which the 
former is bent on ruining under a mere pretext, whether there, however great his love of 
life may be, he could consider it possible to overcome this latter. He will perhaps not trust 
himself to say whether he would do it or not; that it would be possible, however, he 
would admit without hesitation. He judges therefore, that he can do something, because 
he is conscious of it, that he ought to do it, and cognizes in himself the freedom, which 
without the moral law would otherwise have remained unknown to him.�7 That he could 
do it, might presumably be conceded by the person charged by Kant with �carnal desire� 
as much as the victim of extortion by the tyrant, who Kant respectfully names his prince; 
it would probably be the truth if both said, in the consciousness of the weight of self-
preservation in these sorts of decisions, that they did not know how they would behave in 
the real situation. In the emergency situation, a psychological moment like the �ego-
drive� and the fear of death would appear irrefutably differently than in the improbable 
thought-experiment, which neutralizes that moment to the cogitative affectless 
conception. Noone can predict, not even those with the most integrity, how they would 
act under torture; this in the meantime by no means fictive situation denotes a limit upon 
what is self-evident to Kant. His example does not permit, as he hoped, the legitimation 
of the concept of freedom according to its practical use, but at most a shrugging of the 
shoulders. Not even that of the card-cheat serves anymore: �He who has lost at cards, can 
be angry at himself and his lack of cleverness, but if he is consciousness of having 
cheated in the game (although thereby winning), then he must despise himself, as soon as 
he compares himself with the moral law. This must therefore be something other, than the 
principle of one�s own happiness. For to be obliged to say to myself: I am a good-for-
nothing, though I have lined my pockets, must have a different standard of judgement, 
than giving oneself applause and saying: I am a clever human being, for I have enriched 
myself.�8 Whether card-cheats despise themselves or not, even assuming they would 
reflect on the moral law, is a crassly empirical question. They may feel themselves, in an 
infantile fashion, to be exempt from every bourgeois obligation; even laughing up their 
sleeves at the successful stunt, their narcissism shielding them against the presumed self-
loathing; and they may simply be following an ethical code approved among their own 
kind. The pathos, with which they are supposed to abuse themselves as unworthy, is 
based on the recognition of the Kantian moral law, which this latter wishes to ground 
with the example. In the group of all those covered for example by the concept of �moral 
insanity� [in English], it is suspended, yet they by no means lack reason; only 
metaphorically could they be classified as insane. What in propositions over the mundus 
intelligibilis [Latin: intelligible world] seeks consolation in the empirical one, must itself 
accord with empirical criteria, and this speaks against the consolation, in keeping with 
that aversion of speculative thought against the so-called example as something inferior, 
for which there is no lack of testimony in Kant: �This is also the sole and great use of 
examples, that they sharpen the power of judgement. For in regards to the correctness and 
precision of the insight of understanding, they commonly cause the latter some 
obstruction, because they only seldom adequately fulfill the condition of the rule (as 
casus in terminis [Latin: case in the end]) and moreover often weaken the corresponding 
effort of understanding, to look into the adequacy of the rules in general and 
independently of the particular circumstances of experience, and ultimately cultivate the 
habit of using these more as formulations than as foundations. Thus examples are the 
leading-strings of the power of judgement, which those, who lack the natural talent for 
the same, can never dispense with.�9 Given that Kant did not, contrary to his own insight, 
disdain to use examples in the Critique of Practical Reason, one suspects that he needed 
them because the relation between the formal moral law and existence, and thereby the 
possibility of the imperative, could not have been achieved except by empirical 
subreption; his philosophy thereby revenges itself on him, in that the examples dissolve 
like smoke. The absurdity of moral experiments might have as their core, the fact that 
they couple what is incompatible; they claim to calculate out, what for its part explodes 
the realm of the calculable.*1*   
The Supplementary [Hinzutretende] 226-230
Despite all this, they demonstrate a moment which, corresponding to its vague 
experience, may be termed the supplementary [Hinzutretende]. The decisions of the 
subject do not roll off as in a causal chain, but occur as a jolt. This supplementary, the 
factical, which realizes itself [sich entaeussert] in consciousness, is interpreted again by 
the philosophical tradition only as consciousness. It is supposed to intervene, as if the 
intervention were somehow conceivable by the pure Spirit. What is construed for the sake 
of the QED [quod erat demonstrandum: what is to be shown]: that solely the reflection of 
the subject would be able, if not to break through natural causality, then at least to add in 
other chains of motivations, to change its direction. The self-experience of the moment of 
freedom is bound up with consciousness; the subject knows itself to be free, only insofar 
as its action appears to be identical with it, and that is the case solely in conscious ones. 
In these alone subjectivity raises, laboriously and ephemerally, its head. But the 
insistence on this narrowed itself rationalistically. To this extent Kant was, in keeping 
with his conception of practical reason as that which is truly �pure�, namely sovereign in 
relation to every material, closely attached to the school which the critique of theoretical 
reason demolished. Consciousness, the rational insight, is not simply the same as the free 
act, is not to be flatly equated to the will. Exactly that occurs in Kant. The will is to him 
the epitome of freedom, the �capacity�, to act freely, the characteristic unity of all the 
acts, which can be conceived of as free. Of the categories which �in the field of the supra-
sensory� stand in �necessary connection� with the �determining grounds of the pure 
will�, he teaches �that they always refer only to beings which are intelligent, and in these 
also only as the relationship of reason to the will, and therefore always only to what is 
practiced.�10 Reason would obtain reality through the will, untrammeled by any sort of 
material. The formulations scattered in Kant�s moral-philosophical texts ought to 
converge therein. In the Foundation for a Metaphysic of Morals the will is �thought of as 
a capacity, to determine oneself to act according to the conception of certain laws.�11*2* 
According to a later passage of the same text, the will would be �a kind of causality of 
living beings, insofar as they are rational, and freedom would be the selfsame 
characteristic of this causality, since it can have an affect independent from alien 
fundamental causes which determine it.�12 The oxymoron �causality through freedom�, 
appearing in the thesis of the Third Antinomy and explicated in the Foundation, becomes 
plausible solely due to the abstraction, which allows the will to be exhausted in reason. In 
fact freedom becomes for Kant a characteristic of the causality of living subjects, because 
it would be beyond the alien fundamental causes which determine them and would shrink 
into that necessity which coincides with reason. Even the treatment of the will as the 
�capacity of purposes�13 in the Critique of Practical Reason expounds this, in spite of its 
orientation to the objective concept of the purpose, as theoretical reason, since the 
purposes �are at every time the determining grounds for the capacity of desire according 
to principles�;14 however, solely the laws of reason are to be conceived under principles, 
which are tacitly ascribed the capability of directing the capacity to desire, which for its 
part belongs to the world of the senses. As pure logos [Greek: logic] the will becomes a 
no-man�s land between the subject and the object, antinomical in a manner which was not 
envisioned by the critique of reason. � At the beginning of the self-reflection of the 
modern, self-emancipating subject, however, in Hamlet, the divergence between the 
insight and the act is paradigmatically displayed. The more the subject becomes an 
existent for itself and distances itself from an unbroken accord with pre-established order, 
the less are the deed and consciousness as one. The supplementary is possessed of an 
aspect which is irrational according to rationalistic ground-rules. It denies the Cartesian 
dualism of res extensa [Latin: extended substance] and res cogitans [Latin: thinking 
substance], in which the supplementary, as something mental, is lumped together with the 
res cogitans [Latin: thinking substance], without consideration of its difference from the 
thought. The supplementary is an impulse, the rudiment of a phase, in which the dualism 
of the extra- and intramental was not thoroughly nailed down, neither to be bridged as 
volition nor an ontological ultimate. The concept of the will is also touched by this, 
which has the so-called facts of consciousness as its content, which are simultaneously 
purely descriptive, and not only such; this lies hidden in the transition of the will into 
praxis. The impulse, intramental and somatic in one, drives beyond the sphere of 
consciousness, which it nevertheless belongs to. With it, freedom reaches deep into 
experience; this animates its concept as one of a condition, which would be so little blind 
nature as suppressed nature. Its phantasm, which reason does not allow to be withered by 
any proof of causal interdependence, is that of a reconciliation of Spirit and nature. It is 
not so alien to reason as it seems under the aspect of its Kantian equation with the will; it 
does not fall from the heavens. It appears as something simply and purely other to the 
philosophical reflection, because the will, reduced to the pure practical reason, is an 
abstraction. The supplementary is the name for what was stamped out of that abstraction; 
without it the will would not be real at all. It flashes like a bolt of lightning between the 
poles of something long past, which has become almost unrecognizable, and that which it 
one day could be. True praxis, the epitome of acts which would satisfy the idea of 
freedom, requires indeed full theoretical consciousness. The decisionism which cancels 
out reason in the transition to the action delivers this over to the automatism of 
domination: the unreflective freedom, which it adjusts to, becomes the servant of total 
unfreedom. Hitler�s realm, which united decisionism and social Darwinism, the 
affirmative extension of natural causality, taught this lesson. But praxis also requires 
something other, something not exhausted in consciousness, something corporeal, 
mediated into reason and qualitatively divergent from it. Both moments are by no means 
experienced separately; yet the philosophical analysis has clipped the phenomenon in 
such a manner that it can not otherwise be expressed in the language of philosophy, than 
as if something other were being added to rationality. By allowing only reason to be a 
movens [Latin: what moves] of praxis, Kant remained in the bane of that faded theoretics, 
against which he invented the primacy of practical reason as complementary. His entire 
moral philosophy labors under this. What is different in the action from the pure 
consciousness, which to Kant compels the former: that which abruptly springs out, is the 
spontaneity, which Kant likewise transplanted into the pure consciousness, because 
otherwise the constitutive function of the �I think� would have been endangered. The 
memory of what has been expelled lives on in him only in the double interpretation of the 
intramentally interpreted spontaneity. It is on the one hand an achievement of the 
consciousness: thinking; on the other hand, unconscious and involuntary, the heartbeat of 
the res cogitans [Latin: thinking substance] beyond this latter. Pure consciousness � 
�logic� � is itself something which has become and something valid, in which its genesis 
perished. It has this latter in the moment glossed over by the Kantian doctrine, of the 
negation of the will, which according to Kant would be pure consciousness. Logic is a 
praxis sealed off from itself. Contemplative conduct, the subjective correlate of logic, is 
the conduct which wants nothing. Conversely every act of will breaks through the 
autarkic mechanism of logic; this jolts theory and praxis into opposition. Kant turns the 
matter-at-hand upside down. However more sublimated the supplementary may 
constantly become with increasing consciousness, indeed however the concept of the will 
may form thereby as something substantial and uniform � if the motor reaction-form 
were totally liquidated, if the hand no longer twitched, then there would be no will. What 
the great rationalistic philosophers conceived under this latter, already repudiates it, 
without giving an account of it, and the Schopenhauer of the fourth book was not wrong 
in feeling himself to be a Kantian. That without the will there is no consciousness, was 
blurred by the idealists into point-blank identity: as if the will were nothing other than 
consciousness. In the most profound concept of transcendental epistemology, that of the 
productive power of imagination, the trace of the will migrates into the pure intellective 
function. once this has occurred, then spontaneity is curiously glossed over in the will. It 
is not merely reason which has genetically developed itself out of drive-energy as its 
differentiation: without that willing, which manifests itself in the caprice of every such 
act of thinking and alone furnishes the ground for its distinction from the passive, 
�receptive� moment of the subject, there would be no thinking in the proper sense. 
Idealism however swore an oath to the opposite and may not permit this to speak, at the 
price of its annihilation; this explains the inversion of as well as its proximity to the true 
matter-at-hand.
Fiction of Positive Freedom 230-231
Freedom is solely to be grasped in determinate negation, in accordance with the concrete 
form of unfreedom. Positively it becomes an �as if�. Literally so in the Foundation for a 
Metaphysic of Morals: �I say now: every such being, which can not act otherwise than 
under the idea of freedom, is precisely thereby really free in the practical consideration, 
i.e. that all laws, which are inseparably bound to freedom, are applicable as much to the 
selfsame being, as if its will also in itself and in theoretical philosophy were validly 
declared free.�15 What is aporetic in this fiction, which perhaps precisely because of its 
weakness lends so much subjective stress to the �I say now�, is illuminated by a footnote, 
in which Kant apologizes, �freedom is sufficiently presumed by our intent only in that the 
actions of rational beings are founded merely in the idea�, �so that I may not be obliged, 
to prove freedom also in its theoretical intent�16. He has however the being in view, 
which cannot act otherwise than under that idea, therefore real human beings; and these, 
following the Critique of Pure Reason, are meant by that �theoretical intent� which 
records causality in its table of categories. To ascribe freedom to empirical human beings, 
as if their will could also be demonstrated as free in theoretical philosophy, in that of 
nature, requires an immense effort on Kant�s part; for if the moral law were simply 
incommensurable with them, then moral philosophy would be meaningless. It would be 
only too happy to shake off the fact that the Third Antinomy punished both possible 
answers in equal measure as border-violations, ending in a deadlock. While in the 
practical philosophy Kant rigorously proclaims the chorismos of the existent and that 
which ought to be, he is nevertheless driven to mediations. His idea of freedom becomes 
paradoxical: incorporated into the causality of the world of appearance, which is 
incompatible with its Kantian concept. With the magnificent innocence, which raises 
even Kant�s errors far above all craftiness, he expresses this in the sentence on the beings, 
who could not act otherwise than under the idea of freedom, whose subjective 
consciousness would be chained to this idea. Their freedom has as its basis their 
unfreedom, on not being able to do otherwise, and at the same time on an empirical 
consciousness, which could deceive itself about its freedom just as much as about 
countless other details of its own psychological life out of amour propre [French: 
narcissism]; the being of freedom would be delivered over to the contingency of spatio-
temporal existence. If freedom is posited as positive, as something given or unavoidable 
in the midst of what is given, then it immediately turns into unfreedom. But the paradox 
of Kant�s doctrine of freedom corresponds strictly to its location in reality. The social 
emphasis on freedom as something existent coalesces with undiminished oppression, 
psychologically with compulsive traits. They are what the Kantian moral philosophy, 
antagonistic in itself, has in common with a criminological praxis in which the dogmatic 
doctrine of the free will is coupled with the necessity of harsh punishment, regardless of 
empirical conditions. All of the concepts in Kant�s Critique of Practical Reason which, in 
honor of freedom, are supposed to fill in the cleft between the imperative and human 
beings, are repressive: law, constraint, respect, duty. Causality out of freedom corrupts 
the latter into obedience. Kant, like the idealists after him, cannot bear freedom without 
compulsion; its undistorted conception already provokes in him that fear of anarchy, 
which later recommended the liquidation of its own freedom to the bourgeois 
consciousness. This can be recognized in formulations taken at random from the Critique 
of Practical Reason, almost more by the tone than by the content: �The consciousness of 
a free submission of the will to the law, as nevertheless bound up with an unavoidable 
compulsion, which is exerted on all inclinations, but only through its own reason, is thus 
the respect for the law.�17 The fearsome majesty of what Kant a prioritized is what the 
analysts trace back to psychological conditions. In that deterministic science causally 
explains, what debased freedom to the non-deducible compulsion in idealism, it really 
contributes to freedom: a piece of its dialectic.
Unfreedom of Thought 231-234
Fully-developed German idealism chimes with one of the songs collected in the same 
period by The Boy�s Magic Horn: thoughts are free. Since according to its doctrine 
everything which is, is supposed to be thought, that of the absolute, everything, which is, 
is supposed to be free. But this wishes only to assuage the consciousness that thoughts are 
by no means free. Even before all social controls, before all adjustment to relations of 
domination, their pure form, that of logical stringency, would be proof of unfreedom, of 
compulsion, in relation to what is thought as much as in relation to those who think, who 
exact it from themselves through concentration. What does not fit into the consummation 
of the judgement is choked off; thinking practices in advance that violence which 
philosophy reflected in the concept of necessity. Through identification, philosophy and 
society mediate each other into the former�s innermost core. The nowadays universal 
regimentation of scientific thought externalizes this Ur-old relationship in modes of 
conduct and organizational forms. Without the moment of compulsion however thinking 
could not be at all. The contradiction of freedom and thinking is so little to be removed 
by thinking as it is to be removed for thinking, but demands instead its self-reflection. 
Speculative philosophers from Leibniz to Schopenhauer were right to concentrate their 
efforts on causality. It is the crux of rationalism in that wider sense, which includes 
Schopenhauer�s metaphysics, insofar as it knew itself to be on Kantian grounds. The 
nomothetism of the pure thought-forms, the causa cognoscendi [Latin: cause of 
cognition], is projected on the objects as causa efficiens [Latin: efficient cause]. Causality 
presupposes the formal-logical principle, actually the non-contradictoriness, that of naked 
identity, as the rule of the material cognition of objects, even though historical 
development proceeded in the other direction. Thus the equivocation in the word ratio: 
reason and ground. Causality must atone for this: it cannot, in keeping with Hume�s 
insight, appeal to any sensory immediate. To this extent, it is severed from idealism as a 
dogmatic remainder, while without causality the former could not exert the domination 
over the existent, which it strives for. Freed of the compulsion of identity, thinking would 
perhaps escape the causality, which that compulsion is modeled after. This last 
hypostatizes the form as committal for a content, which does not assume this form by 
itself; metacritical reflection would have to absorb empiricism wholesale. In contrast to 
this, the entire philosophy of Kant stands under the sign of unity [Einheit]. This lends it, 
in spite of the heavy accentuation of the �material�, which does not stem from the pure 
form, the character of a system: he expected no less from such a one than his successors. 
The prevailing unity however is the concept of reason itself, finally the logical one of 
pure non-contradictoriness. The Kantian doctrine of praxis adds nothing to it. The 
distinction suggested terminologically between the pure theoretical and the pure practical 
ones, just as much as between the formal-logical and the transcendental-logical and 
finally that of the doctrine of ideas in the narrow sense, are not differences inside of 
reason in itself; but are solely such in view of their usage, which either has nothing at all 
to do with objects, or simply refers to the possibility of objects, or, like practical reason, 
creates its objects, the free acts, out of itself. Hegel�s doctrine, that logical and 
metaphysic would be the same, is inherent to Kant, without it yet becoming thematic. To 
the latter the objectivity of reason as such, the epitome of formal-logical validity, 
becomes the place of refuge for the ontology which was fatally assailed by critique in all 
material realms. This not only establishes the unity of the three Critiques: it is precisely 
as this moment of unity that reason achieves that double character, which later helped to 
motivate dialectics. To him reason is on the one hand, as distinct from thinking, the pure 
form of subjectivity; on the other hand, the summation of objective validity, the 
archetype of all objectivity. Its double character permits the turn taken by Kantian 
philosophy, as well as the German idealists: to teach the objectivity of the truth and of 
every content, which is nominalistically hollowed-out by subjectivity, by virtue of the 
same subjectivity, which destroyed it. In reason, both would be already as one; wherein 
indeed whatever is meant by objectivity, which opposes the subject, perishes through the 
abstraction in this latter, however much this dismayed Kant. The structural double-
jointedness of the concept of reason is shared however by that of the will. While in the 
name of spontaneity, of that which is at no price to be concretized in the subject, it is 
supposed to be nothing other than a subject, it becomes, solidified and identical like 
reason, concretized into a hypothetical, yet factical capacity in the midst of the factical-
empirical world, and thus commensurable with this latter. It is only due to its a priori 
ontic nature, which is something available like a characteristic, that the judgement can be 
made, without absurdity, that it would create its objects, the actions. It belongs to the 
world, in which it has its effect. That this can be confirmed to it, is the fee for the 
installation of the pure reason as an indifferent concept. The will, from which all 
impulses which refuse their concretization are banished as heteronomous, has to pay for 
this.
�Formalism� 234-236
The system-immanent objection raised against Kant, that the subdivision of reason 
according to its objects would make it dependent, against the doctrine of autonomy, on 
what it is not supposed to be, on the extra-rational, ought not to weigh too heavily. What 
breaks through in that discrepancy, despite his intent, is what Kant shoos away, the 
innervated referentiality of reason to what is non-identical to it. only Kant does not go 
that far: the doctrine of the unity of reason in all of its presumed districts of application 
presupposes a firm separation between reason and its �what about�. Because however it 
necessarily refers to such a �what about�, in order to be any sort of reason, it is also 
determined, against his theory, in itself by this. The constitution of objects enters for 
example into judgements about what is to be practically done qualitatively differently 
than in the Kantian theoretical founding propositions. Reason distinguishes itself 
according to its objects, it may not be superficially stamped, with varying degrees of 
validity, as always the same in various object-realms. This also informs the doctrine of 
the will. It is not ch�ris [Greek: separately] from its material, society. If it were, then the 
categorical imperative would violate itself; as nothing other than its material, other 
human beings would be used by the autonomous subject only as means, not as ends. That 
is the absurdity of the monadological construction of morality. Moral conduct, evidently 
more concrete than the merely theoretical kind, becomes more formal than this latter as a 
consequence of the doctrine, that practical reason would be independent from everything 
which is �alien� to it, from every object. To be sure the formalism of Kantian ethics is not 
merely damnable, as reactionary German scholastic philosophy since Scheler has branded 
it. While it provides no readily positive casuistic of what is to be done, it humanely 
prevents the misuse of qualitative-substantive differences for the benefit of privilege and 
ideology. It stipulates the general juridical norm; to this extent something of substance 
lives on in, it spite of and because of its abstraction, the idea of equality. The German 
critique, to which Kantian formalism was too rationalistic, has made its bloody colors 
known in Fascist praxis, which made who was to be killed dependent on blind 
appearance [Schein], on membership or non-membership in a designated race. The 
illusory character [Scheincharakter] of such concreity: that in the complete abstraction 
human beings are subsumed under arbitrary concepts and are treated accordingly, does 
not wipe away the stigma which has soiled the word concrete ever since. Therein 
however the critique of abstract morality is not abrogated. It suffices so little, in view of 
the continuing irreconcilability of the particular and universal, as the allegedly material 
value ethics of short-term eternal norms. Raised to a principle, the appeal to one so much 
as the other does an injustice to the opposite. The depracticalization of Kant�s practical 
reason, that is to say its rationalism, and its deobjectification are coupled; only as 
deobjectified does it become that which is absolutely sovereign, which is supposed to be 
able to have its effect in empiricism regardless of this latter, and regardless of the leap 
between the acting and the doing. The doctrine of pure practical reason prepares the re-
translation of spontaneity into contemplation, which really occurred in the later history of 
the bourgeoisie and which culminated in political apathy, something utterly political. Its 
consummated subjectification produces the appearance [Schein] of the objectivity of 
practical reason, as existent-in-itself; it is no longer clear how it is supposed to reach, 
beyond the ontological abyss, into any sort of existent. This is also the root of what is 
irrational in the Kantian moral law, for which he chose the ｅxpression, the given fact 
[Gegebenheit], which denies all rational transparency: it commands the course of 
reflection to halt. Because freedom to him amounts to the invariant self-sameness of 
reason even in the practical realm, it forfeits what the linguistic usage distinguishes 
between reason and the will. By virtue of its total rationality the will becomes irrational. 
The Critique of Practical Reason moves in the context of delusion. It has the Spirit serve 
as surrogate of the action, which is not supposed to be anything other than the sheer Spirit 
there. This sabotages freedom: its Kantian bearer, reason, coincides with the pure law. 
Freedom would require what is heteronomous to Kant. Freedom would be so little, 
without something accidental according to the criterion of pure reason, as without the 
rational judgement. The absolute separation between freedom and accident [Zufall: 
chance, contingency] is as arbitrary as the absolute one between freedom and rationality. 
According to an undialectical standard of lawfulness, it always appears to freedom as 
something contingent; it demands reflection, which rises above the particular categories 
of law and accident.
The Will as Thing 236-237
The modern concept of reason was one of indifference. In it, the subjective thinking 
reduced to the pure form � and thereby potentially objectivated, detached from the ego � 
is balanced out with the validity of logical forms, removed from their constitution, which 
nevertheless could not in turn be conceived without subjective thinking. In Kant the 
ｅxpressions of the will, the actions, participate in such objectivity; they are thus called 
objects.*3* Their objectivity, copied from the model of reason, pays no attention to the 
differentia specifica of action and object. The will, the master-concept or moment of 
unity of the acts, is analogously concretized. What it thereby experiences theoretically, 
does not meanwhile in all flagrant contradiction completely lack truth-content. In view of 
the individual impulse the will is in fact independent, quasi thingly, to the extent that the 
principle of unity of the ego achieves a degree of independence in relation to its 
phenomena as what is �its�. one can talk of an independent and to this extent even 
objective will so much as of a strong ego or, in archaic terminology, of character; even 
outside of Kant�s construction, it is that middle ground between nature and the mundus 
intelligibilis, which Benjamin contrasted to fate.18 The concretization of individual 
impulses in the will which synthesizes and determines them, is their sublimation, the 
successful, displaced redirection, involved as duration, of the primary drive-goal. It is 
faithfully circumscribed in Kant by the rationality of the will. Through it the will 
becomes something other than its �material�, the diffuse excitations. To emphasize the 
will of a human being, means the moment of unity of their actions, and that is their 
subordination under reason.  In the Italian title of Don Giovanni the libertine is named �il 
dissoluto�, the dissolute one; language opts for morality as the unity of the person 
according to the abstract rational law. Kant�s doctrine of ethics ascribes to the totality of 
the subject the predominance over the moments, in which they alone have their life and 
which yet outside of such totality would not be the will. The discovery was progressive: it 
prevented casuistic judgements from being made any longer over the particular impulses; 
it also inwardly prepared the end of the righteousness over texts. This contributed to 
freedom. The subject becomes moral for itself, cannot be weighed according to internal 
and external particulars, which are alien to it. By establishing the rational unity of the will 
as the sole moral authority, it is sheltered from the violence done to it by a hierarchical 
society, which � as even in Dante � judges its acts, without their law being accepted by 
its own consciousness. The individual actions become venial; no isolated one is 
absolutely good or evil, their criterion is �good will�, their principle of unity. The 
internalization of society as a whole steps into the place of the reflexes of a feudal order, 
whose apparatus, the tighter it becomes, fragments the generality of human beings all the 
more. The relegation of morality to the sober unity of reason was Kant�s bourgeois 
sublime, despite the false consciousness in the concretization of the will.
Objectivity of the Antinomy 238-239
The assertion of freedom as much as unfreedom terminates according to Kant in 
contradictions. That is why the controversy is supposed to be fruitless. Under the 
hypostasis of scientific-methodical criteria it is expounded as self-evident, that theorems, 
which cannot be safeguarded from the possibility of their contradictory opposite, are to 
be discarded by rational thinking. Since Hegel this is no longer tenable. Rather than 
blaming the procedure in advance, the contradiction may be one in the thing itself. The 
urgency of the interest in freedom suggests such objective contradictoriness. In that Kant 
demonstrated the necessity of the antinomies, he also disdained the excuse of the false 
problem, overhastily bowing however to the logic of contradictoriness.*4* The 
transcendental dialectic does not entirely lack the consciousness of this. To be sure the 
Kantian dialectic is expounded according to the Aristotelian model as one of trick 
statements [Fangschluessen]. But each time it develops thesis like antithesis non-
contradictorily in itself. To that extent it by no means comfortably disposes of the 
antithesis, but wishes to demonstrate its inevitability. It would �be dissolved� only 
through a reflection on a higher level, as the hypostasis of logical reason in relation to 
that which, whose being-in-itself it knows nothing of, and over which it is therefore not 
entitled to positively judge. That the contradiction would be inescapable to reason, 
indicates it as something beyond that and its �logic�. In terms of content, this allows for 
the possibility that the bearer of reason, the subject, would be both free and unfree. Kant 
settles the contradiction with the means of undialectical logic, by the distinction between 
the pure and empirical subject, which ignores the mediatedness of both concepts. The 
subject is supposed to be unfree to the extent that it, too, is its own object, submitting to 
the lawful synthesis through categories. In order to be able to act in the empirical world, 
the subject cannot in fact be conceived as other than the �phenomenon�. Kant by no 
means always denies this. The speculative critique grants, teaches the work on practical 
reason in unison with that on the pure one, that �the objects of experience as such and 
among these our own subject are valid only as appearance�.19 The synthesis, the 
mediation, cannot be subtracted from anything which can be positively judged. The 
moment of unity of thought, it grasps everything thought under itself and determines it as 
necessary. This would catch up even to the talk of the strong ego as firm identity, as the 
condition of freedom. It would have no power over the chorismos. The concretization of 
character would in Kantian terms be localizable only in the realm of the constitutum 
[Latin: what is constituted], not in that of the constituens [Latin: what constitutes]. 
Otherwise Kant would commit the same paralogism, for which he convicts the 
rationalists. The subject would however be free, in that it posits, �constitutes� in the 
Kantian sense, its own identity, the ground of its lawfulness. That the constituens is 
supposed to be the transcendental subject, the constitutum the empirical one, does not 
remove the contradiction, for there is no transcendental one which is not individuated in 
the unity of consciousness, hence as a moment of the empirical one. It requires what is 
irreducibly non-identical, which simultaneously delimits lawfulness. Without it, identity 
would be so little as an immanent law of subjectivity. only for the non-identical is it one; 
otherwise, a tautology. The identifying principle of the subject is itself the internalized 
one of society. That is why in the realm of socially existent subjects unfreedom is 
preponderant over freedom to this day. Inside of the reality, which is modeled after the 
identity-principle, no freedom is positively available. Where, under the universal bane, 
human beings seem to be relieved of the identity-principle and thereby of comprehensible 
determinants, they are for the time being not more than but less than determined: as 
schizophrenia, subjective freedom is something destructive, which only incorporates 
human beings under the bane of nature that much more. 
Dialectical Determination of the Will 240-241
The will without the bodily impulse, which lives on weakly in the imagination, would be 
none at all; at the same time however it arranges itself as a centralizing unity of the 
impulses, as the authority which restrains and potentially negates them. This necessitates 
its dialectical determination. It is the power of consciousness, by which it leaves its own 
magic circle and thereby transforms what merely is; its recoil is resistance. No doubt the 
memory of this always accompanied the transcendental rational doctrine of morals; as in 
the Kantian avowal of the given fact [Gegebenheit] of the moral law independent of 
philosophical consciousness. His thesis is heteronomous and authoritarian, but has its 
moment of truth in that it limits the pure rational character of the moral law. If one took 
the one reason strictly, it could be no other than the unabbreviated, philosophical one. 
The motif culminates in the Fichtean formulation of the self-evidence of what is moral. 
As the bad conscience of the rationality of the will, however, its irrationality becomes 
crumpled up and false. If it is once supposed as self-evident, exempt from rational 
reflection, then what is self-evident affords shelter to the unexamined residue and to 
repression. Self-evidence is the hallmark of what is civilized: good is what is one, 
immutable, identical. What does not fit into this, the whole legacy of the pre-logical 
natural moment, turns immediately into evil, as abstract as the principle of its opposite. 
Bourgeois evil is the post-existence of that which is older, subjugated, not entirely 
subjugated. It is however not unconditionally evil, any more than its violent counterpart. 
Solely the consciousness, which reflects the moments as far and as consistently as they 
are accessible to it, can render judgements each time over this. Actually there is no other 
authority for correct praxis and for the good itself than the most advanced state of theory. 
An idea of the good, which is supposed to direct the will, without it being completely 
absorbed into the concrete rational determinations, unwittingly obeys the reified 
consciousness and what is socially approved. The will which is torn from reason and 
declared its own purpose, whose triumph the National Socialists [Nazis] themselves 
documented at each one of their party meetings, stands like all ideals which protest 
against reason ready for any atrocity. The self-evidence of good will grows obdurate in 
the mirage, the historical sediment of power, which the will should resist. In contrast to 
its pharisaism, the irrational moment of the will principally condemns everything moral 
to fallibility. Moral certainty does not exist; to posit it would already be immoral, the 
false exoneration of what is individuated from anything which might be called morality. 
The more pitilessly society gathers itself up objectively-antagonistically into every 
situation, the less is any sort of moral individual decision accorded the right to be the 
correct one. Whatever the individual or the group undertakes against the totality, which 
they form a part of, is infected by that evil, and no less are those who do nothing at all. 
That is what original sin has been secularized into. The individual subject, which 
imagines itself to be morally certain, fails and becomes culpable, because harnessed to 
the social order, is hardly able to do anything about the conditions, which appeal to moral 
ingenium [Latin: natural ability, talent]: crying out for its transformation. For such a 
decay, not of morality, but of what is moral, the canny neo-German after the war hatched 
the name of the �overdemand� [Ueberforderung], for its part once more an apologetic 
instrument. All thinkable determinations of what is moral, down to the most formal of all, 
the unity of the self-consciousness as reason, are squeezed out of that matter, with which 
moral philosophy did not wish to soil its hands. Today morality has once again been 
granted the hated heteronomy it loathes, and tendentially sublates itself. Without recourse 
to the material no Ought [Sollen] could issue from reason; however once it is forced to 
recognize its material in abstracto [Latin: in the abstract] as the condition of its 
possibility, then it may not cut off the self-reflection on the specific material; otherwise it 
would thereby become heteronomous. In hindsight the positivity of what is moral, the 
infallibility which the idealists attested to it, reveals itself as the function of a still 
somewhat closed society, or at least of its appearance [Schein] to the consciousness 
delimited by it. This is what Benjamin may have meant by the conditions and boundaries 
of humanity. The primacy taught by the doctrines of Kant and Fichte of practical reason 
over theory, actually of reason over reason, is valid only for traditionalistic phases, whose 
horizon does not even tolerate the doubt, which the idealists imagined they were 
dissolving.
Contemplation 242-243
Marx received the thesis of the primacy of practical reason from Kant and German 
idealism and sharpened it into the demand to transform the world instead of merely 
interpreting it. He thereby underwrote the program of absolute control of nature, 
something Ur-bourgeois. The real model of the identity-principle breaks through, which 
dialectical materialism disputes as such, the effort, by which the subject makes what is 
dissimilar to it similar. However while turning that which is immanently real to the 
concept inside out, Marx is preparing a recoil. The telos of the long overdue praxis, 
according to him, was the abolition of its primacy in the form which dominated bourgeois 
society through and through. Contemplation would be possible without inhumanity, just 
as soon as the productive forces were unfettered to the point that human beings were no 
longer devoured by a praxis, which scarcity extorts from them and which then 
automatizes itself in them. What is bad in contemplation to this day, which contents itself 
to this side of praxis, as Aristoteles was the first to develop it for the summum bonum 
[Latin: highest good], was that it became a piece of narrow-minded praxis precisely due 
to its indifference towards the transformation of the world: that it became a method and 
instrumentalized. The possible reduction of labor to a minimum ought to radically 
influence the concept of praxis. Whatever insights would befall a humanity emancipated 
through praxis, would be divergent from a praxis, which ideologically exalts itself and in 
one fashion or another keeps subjects running on a treadmill. A reflection of this falls on 
contemplation today. Against the current objection, extrapolated from the theses on 
Feuerbach, that the happiness of the Spirit would be impermissible amidst the increasing 
unhappiness of the exploding population of the poor countries, after the catastrophes of 
the past and those which threaten in the future, is not merely that it makes for the most 
part impotence into a virtue. Certainly there is no longer any justification for enjoying 
that of the Spirit, because a happiness forced to see through its own nullity, the borrowed 
time, which is given to it, would be none at all. Subjectively, too, it is undermined, even 
where it still bestirs itself. There is much to speak for the fact that cognition, whose 
possible relation to a transforming praxis is at least momentarily crippled, would not in 
itself be any sort of blessing. Praxis is put off and cannot wait; theory, too, ails from this. 
Those however who can do nothing, which does not at some point threaten to turn out for 
the worse even though it wishes for what is better, are constrained to thinking; that is 
their justification and that of the happiness of the Spirit. Its horizon need by no means be 
that of a transparent relation to a possible later praxis. The delayed thinking of praxis 
always has something inappropriate about it, even when it puts it off out of naked 
compulsion. However things go all too easily awry, for those who spoon-feed their 
thinking by the cui bono [Latin: who benefits]. What will one be incumbent upon and 
bestowed by a better praxis, thinking can so little foresee here and now, in keeping with 
the warning of utopianism, than praxis, according to its own concept, could ever exhaust 
itself in cognition. Without the practical visa-stamp, thinking should push against the 
fa�ade, moving as far as it can possibly move itself. A reality which seals itself off 
against traditional theory, even against the best hitherto, demands this for the sake of the 
bane which shrouds it; it gazes at the subject with eyes so alien, that the latter, mindful of 
its failure, may not spare itself the effort of the reply. The desperate state of affairs, that 
the praxis on which everything depends is thwarted, paradoxically affords thinking the 
breathing-space which it would practically be criminal not to use. Ironically, thinking 
benefits from the fact that one may not absolutize its own concept: it remains, as conduct, 
a piece of praxis, however much this would be hidden from itself. But whoever contrasts 
literal, sensory happiness as something better than the impermissible one of the Spirit, 
fails to recognize that at the conclusion of historical sublimation, the split-off sensory 
happiness takes on the aspect of something regressive, similar to the way adults find the 
relationship of children to food off-putting. To not be similar to the latter in this respect, 
is a piece of freedom. 
Structure of the Third Antinomy 243-244
According to the results of the transcendental analytic, the Third Antinomy would be cut 
off in advance: �Who called upon you, to think up a purely and simply first condition of 
the world and with this an absolute beginning of the gradual sequence of appearances, 
and thereby providing a resting-point for your imagination, by setting borders on 
boundless nature?�20 Meanwhile Kant was not content with the summary observation, 
that the antinomy would be an avoidable mistake of the use of reason, and carried it out, 
like the others. The Kantian transcendental idealism contains the anti-idealistic ban on 
positing absolute identity. Epistemology is not supposed to behave as if the 
unforeseeable, �infinite� content of the experience could be garnered out of positive 
determinations of reason. Whoever violates this, would end up in a contradiction 
unbearable to �common sense� [in English]. This is plausible, but Kant bores further. The 
reason which proceeds, as he upbraids it for doing, must, according to its own meaning, 
and for the sake of its inexorable cognitive ideal, keep right on going where it shouldn�t, 
as if under a natural and irresistible temptation. It is whispered to reason, that the totality 
of the existent would nonetheless converge in it. on the other hand, what is authentic in 
the system-alien necessity, as it were, in the infinite continuation of the reason which 
searches for conditions, is the idea of the absolute, without which the truth could not be 
thought, in contrast to the cognition as a mere adaequatio rei atque cogitationis [Latin: 
making the thing equal with what is thought]. That the continuation, and thereby the 
antinomy, would be inalienable from the same reason, which nevertheless, as the critical 
one, must suppress these sorts of excesses in the transcendental analytic, documents with 
unintentional self-critique the contradiction of the critical approach to its own reason as 
of the organ of emphatic truth. Kant insists on the necessity of the contradiction and at 
the same time stops up the hole, by spiriting away that necessity, which presumably 
originated from the nature of reason, to its greater honor, explaining it as solely a false, 
but correctable, usage of concepts. � The explanation of freedom, as the �causality 
through freedom� mentioned in the thesis of the Third Antinomy, is referred to as 
�necessary�21. Its own practical doctrine of freedom, as unequivocally as its intention 
manifests, can accordingly not simply be acausal or anticausal. He modifies or expands 
the concept of causality, as long as he does not explicitly distinguish it from that 
employed in the antithesis. His theorem is fissured by what is contradictory even before 
all paradoxicality of the infinite. As a theory of the validity of scientific cognition, the 
Critique of Pure Reason cannot deal with its themes otherwise than under the concept of 
the law, not even those which are supposed to be beyond lawfulness.

on the Kantian Concept of Causality 245-246
The most famous, utterly formal Kantian definition of causality holds, that everything 
which happens, would presuppose a previous condition, �upon which it inexorably 
follows in keeping with a rule.�22 Historically it was directed against the school of 
Leibniz; against the interpretation of the sequence of conditions out of inner necessity, as 
something being-in-itself. on the other hand it distinguishes itself from Hume: without 
the rule-based nature [Regelhaftigkeit] of thought, which the latter delivers over to 
convention, to something accidental, unanimous experience would not be possible; Hume 
would then and there have to speak causally, in order to make what he is rendering 
indifferent as convention plausible. In Kant by contrast causality becomes the function of 
subjective reason, and what is imagined thereunder becomes more and more watered 
down. It dissolves like a piece of mythology. It approximates the principle of rationality 
as such, of thinking according to rules. Judgements on causal contexts run out into 
tautology: reason observes in them, what it effects anyway as the capacity of laws. That it 
prescribes laws of nature or rather the law, says no more than the subsumption under the 
unity of reason. It transposes this unity, its own identity-principle, onto the objects and 
shuffles it off on them as their cognition. once causality is thoroughly disenchanted, as if 
by the taboo on the inner determination of objects, then it also corrodes itself in itself. 
Kant�s rescue has the sole advantage over Hume�s denial, that what the latter swept away 
is regarded by the former as inborn to reason, as the necessity of its constitution, as it 
were, though not as an anthropological contingency. Causality is not supposed to 
originate in the objects and their relationship, but instead solely in the subjective thought-
compulsion. That one condition could have something essential, something specific to do 
with the next, is dogmatic for Kant. However nomothetisms of successions, in keeping 
with the Kantian conception, could be set up, which recall nothing of the causal 
relationship. The relationship of the objects to each other, which have gone through what 
is inwards, virtually becomes something superficial to the theorem of causality. What is 
ignored is the simplest of utterances, that something would be the cause of something 
else. The causality which rigorously seals itself off from the inside of objects, is no more 
than its own shell. The reductio ad hominem [Latin: reduction to the person] in the 
concept of law reaches a borderline value, where the law no longer says anything about 
the object; the expansion of causality into the pure concept of reason negates it. Kantian 
causality is one without a causa [Latin: cause]. By curing it from the naturalistic 
prejudice, it melts away in his hands. That the consciousness cannot indeed escape 
causality, as its inborn form, certainly answers to Hume�s weak point. But when Kant 
says that the subject must think causally, he also follows in the analysis of what is 
constituted, according to the literal meaning of �must�, the causal proposition, to which 
he first ought to submit the constituta [Latin: things constituted]. If the constitution of 
causality through the pure reason, which for its part is nonetheless supposed to be 
freedom, is already subject to causality, then freedom is already compromised from the 
outset, that it has scarcely any other place than the complaisance of the consciousness 
towards the law. In the construction of the entire antithetics, freedom and causality 
intersect. Because the former in Kant is so much as to act out of reason, it is also lawful; 
even the free actions �follow rules�. What has resulted from this is the unbearable 
mortgage of post-Kantian philosophy, that there would be no freedom without the law; 
that it would consist solely in the identification with this. Through German idealism this 
was, with unforeseeable political consequences, inherited by Engels:*5* the theoretical 
origin of the false reconciliation.  
Plea for Order 247-249
That claim to totality which is staked on behalf of causality, so long as it coincides with 
the principle of subjectivity, would become untenable along with the epistemological 
compulsory character. What in idealism can appear as freedom only paradoxically, would 
thus become substantively that moment, which transcends the bracketing of the course of 
the world with fate. If causality was sought as a determination � however subjectively 
mediated � of the things themselves, then what would open itself up in such a 
specification, in contrast to the indiscriminate one of pure subjectivity, is the perspective 
of freedom. It would be applicable to what is differentiated from compulsion. 
Compulsion would then no longer be praised as the factual action of the subject, its 
totality would no longer be affirmed. It would forfeit the a priori power, which was 
extrapolated from real compulsion. The more objective the causality, the greater the 
possibility of freedom; this is not the least reason why whoever wishes for freedom, must 
insist on necessity. By contrast Kant demands freedom and prevents it. The foundation of 
the thesis of the Third Antinomy, that of the absolute spontaneity of the cause, the 
secularization of the freely deified act of creation, is Cartesian in style; it is supposed to 
be valid, so as to satisfy the method. The completion of the cognition establishes itself as 
the epistemological criterion; without freedom, �even in the course of nature the 
sequence of appearances [would] never [be] complete on the side of the causes.�23 The 
totality of cognition, which is tacitly equated therein with the truth, would be the identity 
of subject and object. Kant restricts it as a critic of cognition and teaches it as a 
theoretician of the truth. A cognition which disposes over the sort of complete sequence 
which according to Kant can only be conceived under the hypostasis of an originary act 
of absolute freedom; which therefore permits nothing which is sensibly given to be 
outside, would be one which is not confronted with anything divergent from it. The 
critique of such identity would strike the positive-ontological apotheosis of the subjective 
causal concept as well as the Kantian proof of the necessity of freedom, whose pure form 
has something contradictory about it anyway. That freedom must be, is the highest iniuria 
[Latin: injustice] of the legislating autonomous subject. The content of its own freedom � 
identity, which has annexed everything non-identical � is as one with the must, with the 
law, with absolute domination. This kindles the Kantian pathos. He construes even 
freedom as a special case of causality. What matters to him are �constant laws�. His 
deprecating bourgeois aversion to anarchy is not less than his self-conscious bourgeois 
antipathy against disenfranchisement. Even here society reaches deep into his most 
formal deliberations. What is formal in itself, which on the one hand emancipates the 
individuals from the restrictive determinations of what has become so and not otherwise, 
on the other hand confronts the existent with nothing, is based on nothing but domination 
raised to a pure principle, is something bourgeois. In the origins of the Kantian 
Metaphysic of Morals lies hidden the later sociological dichotomy of Comte between the 
laws of progress and to those of the social order, including the partisanship for this latter; 
by means of its lawfulness it is supposed to restrain progress. The sentence from the 
Kantian proof of the antithesis has such an overtone: �the freedom (independence) from 
the laws of nature is indeed an emancipation from compulsion, but also from the 
guidelines of all rules�.24 It is supposed to be �torn down� through �unconditional 
causality�, that is to say: the free act of production; where Kant scientifically criticizes 
the latter in the antithesis, he scorns it, as elsewhere the stubborn fact, as �blind�.25 That 
Kant hurriedly thinks of freedom as the law, betrays the fact that he takes it no more 
scrupulously than his class ever did. Even before they feared the industrial proletariat, 
they combined, for example in Smithian economics, praise of the emancipated individual 
with the apology for a social order, in which on the one hand the �invisible hand� [in 
English] takes care of the beggars as well as the king, while on the other hand even the 
free competitor was obliged to follow a code of � feudal � �fair play� [in English]. Kant�s 
popularizer did not falsify his philosophical teacher, when he named the social order the 
�blessed daughter of heaven� [reference to Schiller�s poem, The Bell] in the same poem, 
which hammers home, that when peoples arise, well-being does not thrive. Both wished 
to know nothing of the fact that the chaos which that generation discerned in the 
comparatively modest terrors of the French Revolution � they displayed less outrage over 
the cruelty of the chouans [French: 18th century counter-revolutionaries] � was the 
monster of a repression, whose traces survive in those who rise up against it. Like all the 
other German geniuses who, as soon as Robespierre provided a pretext, fell over 
themselves in relief castigating the revolution which they at first had hailed, Kant praises 
�nomothetism� at the expense of �lawlessness� in the proof of the antithesis and even 
speaks of a �mirage of freedom�.26 Laws are lent the glorifying epithet �constant�, which 
is supposed to raise them above the specter of anarchy, without a glimmer of the 
suspicion, that exactly these would be the old ill of what is unfree. But what demonstrates 
the primacy of the concept of law in Kant, is that he calls upon it in the proof for the 
thesis as much as for the antithesis, as their alleged higher unity. 
Demonstrating the Antithesis 249-252
The entire section on the antithetics of pure reason argues, as is well known, e contrario 
[Latin: to the contrary]; in the thesis, that the counter-thesis would be guilty of that 
transcendental usage of causality, which violates the doctrine of categories in advance; 
that the causal category in the antithesis would overstep the borders of the possibility of 
experience. What is overlooked therein in terms of content, is that a consistent 
scientivism guards itself from such a metaphysical usage of the causal category. In order 
to escape from the agnostic consequences of scientivism, which the doctrine of the 
theoretical reason unmistakably sympathizes with, Kant constructs an antithesis which 
does not at all correspond to the scientivistic position: freedom is achieved by the 
destruction of a straw-man made to order. What is proven is only that causality ought not 
to be seen as something positively given into infinity � a tautology, according to the tenor 
of the Critique of Pure Reason, which the positivists would be the last to object to. By no 
means however, not even in the context of the argumentation of the thesis, does it follow 
that the causal chain would break with the supposition of a freedom, which is presumed 
no less positively than the former. The paralogism is of indescribable import, because it 
allows it to positively reinterpret the non liquet [Latin: not proven]. Positive freedom is 
an aporetic concept, conceived, in order to conserve the being-in-itself of something 
intellectual in contrast to nominalism and scientifization. At a central moment in the 
Critique of Practical Reason Kant confessed what this was all about, namely the salvation 
of a residue: �Since this law however unavoidably concerns all causality of things, 
insofar as their existence is determinable in time, so would freedom, if this were the 
manner in which one had to conceive of the existence of these things, have to be rejected 
as a nugatory and impossible concept. Consequently if one still wishes to rescue it, no 
other way is left than to attribute the existence of a thing, insofar as it is determinable in 
time, consequently also causality according to the laws of natural necessity, merely to the 
appearance; to attribute to freedom, however, the same essence as the things in 
themselves.�27 The construction of freedom confesses to being inspired by what Elective 
Affinities later called the salvational desire, while the former, relegated to the 
characteristic of the intratemporal subject, is revealed as �nugatory and impossible�. The 
aporetic essence of the construction, not the abstract possibility of the antithesis in the 
infinite, speaks against the positive doctrine of freedom. The critique of reason 
apodictically rejects all talk of a subject beyond space and time as an object of cognition. 
At first even the moral philosophy argues this: �Even of itself and indeed according to the 
knowledge, which the human being has through inner sensation, it may not presume to 
cognize, how it would be in itself.�28 The forward to the Critique of Practical Reason 
repeats this, by citing that of the pure reason.29 That the �objects of experience�, as Kant 
stipulates, would �nevertheless be grounded as things in themselves�,30 sounds crassly 
dogmatic after that. Aporetic meanwhile is by no means only the question of the 
possibility, of cognizing what the subject would be in and for itself. Every merely 
thinkable, in the Kantian sense �noumenal�, determination of the subject ends up this 
way, too. In order to share in freedom, this noumenal subject must, according to Kant�s 
doctrine, be extratemporal, �as a pure intelligence, which is not determinable in its 
existence according to time�.31 The salvational desire makes this noumenal into an 
existence � because nothing at all of this could be predicated otherwise � even though it 
is not supposed to be determinable according to time. Existence however, as anything 
which is given, which has not faded into the pure idea, is according to its own concept 
intratemporal. In the Critique of Pure Reason � in the deduction of the pure concept of 
understanding as well as in the chapter on schematism*6* � the unity of the subject 
becomes a pure temporal form. It integrates the facts of consciousness, as those of the 
same person. No synthesis without the intratemporal interrelation of the synthesized 
moments to each other; it would be the condition of even the most formal logical 
operations and of their validity. Accordingly however timelessness could not be ascribed 
to an absolute subject either, so long as something under the name of the subject is 
supposed to be thought. At most, rather, it would be absolute time. It is unfathomable, 
how freedom, the principal attribute of the temporal act and realized solely temporally, is 
supposed to be predicated by something radically non-temporal; equally unfathomable, 
how something non-temporal of this sort could have an affect in the spatio-temporal 
world, without itself becoming temporal and straying into the Kantian realm of causality. 
The concept of the thing-in-itself steps in as a deus ex machina [Latin: automatic god]. 
Hidden and indeterminate, it marks a blind spot of thought; solely its indeterminacy 
permits it to be utilized as needed for the explanation. The only peep out of the thing in 
itself which Kant permits is that it �affects� the subject. Thereby however it would be 
sharply opposed to this, and only by an irredeemable speculation, nowhere performed by 
Kant, could it be thrown together with the moral subject as something which likewise 
exists in itself. Kant�s critique of cognition prevents the summoning of freedom into 
existence; he helps himself by conjuring up a sphere of existence, which indeed would be 
exempt from that critique, but also from every judgement, over what it would be. His 
attempt to concretize the doctrine of freedom, to ascribe freedom to living subjects, is 
caught in paradoxical assertions: �One can thus concede, that if it were possible for us to 
have a deep insight into the manner of thinking of a human being, as to how it shows 
itself through inner as well as outer actions, that every last mainspring thereof would be 
known to us, along with all the external causes which affect them, one could calculate the 
behavior of a human being in the future with certainty, just like the lunar or solar eclipse 
and nevertheless maintain, that the human being would be free.�32 That Kant even in the 
Critique of Practical Reason cannot do without termini like mainspring, is relevant in 
terms of content. The attempt to make freedom comprehensible, insofar as a doctrine of 
freedom cannot afford to do without this, inescapably leads through the medium of its 
metaphors to conceptions from the empirical world. �Mainspring� is a causal-mechanical 
concept. Even if the previous proposition were valid, however, then the one afterwards 
would be nonsense. It would serve solely to relate what is being metaphysically related 
to, which is empirically in total causality, through the mythical context of destiny, by 
burdening it in the name of freedom with the guilt, which would be nothing of the sort in 
the totally given determination. Through its culpability this would be reinforced into the 
innermost core of its subjectivity. Nothing is left to such a construction of freedom other 
than, under the sacrifice of the reason on which it is supposed to rest, to cow in 
authoritarian fashion those who attempt to think it in vain. Reason for its part however is 
nothing other to him than the legislating capacity. That is why he must conceive of 
freedom from the very beginning as a �special kind of causality�.33 By positing it, he 
takes it back.

ontic and Ideal Moments 252-257
In fact the aporetic construction of freedom is based not on the noumenal but on the 
phenomenal. There, that given fact of moral law can be observed, by which Kant 
believes, despite everything, freedom to be warranted as something existent. Meanwhile 
the given fact, as the very word hints, is the opposite of freedom, naked compulsion, 
exerted in space and time. For Kant freedom means so much as the pure practical reason, 
which produces its objects itself; this would have to do �not with objects, to recognize 
them, but with their own capacity, to really make these (according to the cognition of the 
same).�34 The absolute autonomy of the will implied therein would be so much as 
absolute domination over inner nature. Kant continues: �To be consistent, is the greatest 
obligation of a philosopher and yet is the most seldom met.�35 This not only passes off the 
formal logic of pure consistency as the highest moral authority, but at the same time the 
subordination of every impulse under the logical unity, its primacy over what is diffuse in 
nature, indeed over all diversity of the non-identical; that always appears inconsistent in 
the closed circle of logic. In spite of the resolution of the Third Antinomy, Kantian moral 
philosophy remains antinomic: it is capable, according to the entire conception, of 
conceiving of the concept of freedom solely as repression. The entirety of the 
concretizations of morality in Kant bear repressive features. Their abstractness is 
substantive, because they exclude from the subject, what does not correspond to its pure 
concept. Thus the Kantian rigorism. The hedonistic principle is argued against, not 
because it is evil in itself, but because it would be heteronomous to the pure ego: �The 
pleasure from the conception of the existence of a thing, insofar as it is supposed to be a 
grounds of determination of desire of this thing, is based on the sensitivity of the subject, 
because it depends on the existence of an object; it thus belongs the senses (feelings) and 
not to the understanding, which expresses a relation of a concept of an object according 
to concepts, but not of a subject according to feelings.�36 But the honor with which Kant 
sanctifies freedom, by wishing to purify it from everything which impinges on it, 
simultaneously condemns the person to unfreedom in principle. It cannot experience such 
a freedom, tightened to an extreme pitch, otherwise than as the restriction of its own 
impulses. If Kant inclines nevertheless towards happiness in many passages, as in the 
magnificent second note of the second theorem from the foundations of practical reason, 
then his humanity breaks through the norm of consistency. It may have dawned on him, 
that without such clemency one could not live according to moral law. The pure principle 
of reason of personality ought to converge with that of the self-preservation of the person, 
with the totality of its �interests�, which includes happiness. Kant�s position to this is as 
ambivalent as the bourgeois Spirit as a whole, which would like to guarantee �the pursuit 
of happiness� [in English] to the individual [Individuum] and would forbid it through the 
work-ethic. Such sociological reflection is not introduced from the outside, in a 
classificatory manner, into the Kantian a priorism. The fact that termini of social content 
appear over and over again in the Foundation and in the Critique of Practical Reason, 
may be incompatible with the a prioristic intention. But without such a metabasis Kant 
would have to fall silent before the question concerning the compatibility of moral law 
with empirical human beings. He would have to capitulate to heteronomy, as soon as he 
confessed that autonomy was unrealizable. If in the service of systematic validity one 
wished to expropriate those socially content-based termini of their simple meaning and 
sublimate them to ideas, then one would ignore not only their wording. The true origin of 
moral categories is registered in them with greater power, than Kant�s intention is able to 
handle. Thus the famed variant of the categorical imperative from the Foundation: �Act 
so, that you always use the humanity in your person, as much as in every other person, at 
the same time as an end, never merely as means�,37 then �humanity�, the human potential 
in human beings, may have been meant only as a regulative idea; humanity, the principle 
of human existence, by no means the sum of all human beings, is not yet realized. 
Nevertheless the addition of the factical content in the word is not to be shaken off: every 
individual is to be respected as the representative of the socialized species humanity, no 
mere function of the exchange-process. The decisive distinction urged by Kant between 
means and ends is social, that between subjects as commodities of labor-power, out of 
which value is economically produced, and the human beings who even as such 
commodities remain subjects, for whose sake the entire operation, which forgets them 
and only incidentally satisfies them, is set into motion. Without this perspective the 
variant of the imperative would lose itself in a void. The �never merely� however is, as 
Horkheimer put it, one of those usages of a sublime sobriety, in which Kant, in order to 
not spoil the chance of the realization of utopia, accepts empiricism even in its most 
degraded form, that of exploitation, as the condition of what is better, insofar as he then 
develops it in the philosophy of history, under the concept of antagonism. This reads: 
�The means, by which nature serves to bring the development of all its predispositions 
into existence, is the antagonism of the same in society, insofar as this latter in the end 
becomes nonetheless the cause of a lawful social order of the same. What I understand 
here under antagonism is the unsociable sociability of human beings, i.e. the tendency of 
the same to enter into society, which however is tied to a thorough-going resistance, 
which constantly threatens to separate this society. This predisposition evidently lies in 
human nature. Human beings have an inclination to be socialized: because they feel 
themselves to be more of a human being in such a condition, i.e. the development of their 
natural predispositions. They have however also a great tendency to particularize (isolate) 
themselves: because they find in themselves simultaneously the unsociable characteristic, 
the wish to arrange everything merely according to their mind, and hence expect 
resistance everywhere, just as they know themselves, that they for their part are inclined 
to resistance against others. Now this resistance is that which awakens all powers of 
humanity, bringing it thereby to overcome its tendency towards laziness and, driven by 
the desire for honor, for lordship or for property, to establish a position amongst their 
fellows, which they most likely cannot stand, but cannot do without, either.�38 The 
�principle of humanity as an end in itself�39 is, despite all meditative ethics to the 
contrary, nothing merely innervated, but a promissory note on the realization of a concept 
of human beings, which has its place only as the social, albeit innervated, principle in 
every individual. Kant must have noticed the double meaning of the word humanity, as 
the idea of being human and of the epitome of all humanity. With dialectical profundity 
he introduced it into theory, even if only playfully. Consequently his usage of speech 
continues to oscillate between ontic and idea-related modes of parlance. �Rational 
beings�40 are just as certainly living human subjects, as the �general realm of ends in 
themselves�41, which are supposed to be identical with rational beings, transcends these in 
Kant. He would like neither to cede the idea of humanity to the existent society nor to 
dissolve such into a phantasm. The tension rises to the breaking point in his ambivalence 
towards happiness. on the one hand he defends such in the concept of being worthy of 
happiness, on the other hand he disparages it as heteronomous, especially where he finds 
�universal happiness�42 to be of no use to the law of the will. How little Kant, in spite of 
the categorical character of the imperative, would dream of ontologizing this posthaste, is 
confirmed by the passage, �that� the concept of good and evil must be determined not 
before the moral law (on which it superficially seems it ought to be grounded), but only 
(as also happens here) after the selfsame and through the selfsame.�43 Good and evil are 
no mere existents-in-themselves of some intellectual-moral hierarchy but are something 
posited by reason; that is how deeply nominalism still reaches into Kantian rigorismus. 
However by fastening the moral categories to self-preserving reason, they are no longer 
thoroughly incompatible with that happiness, against which Kant so harshly expounded 
them. The modifications of his stance towards happiness in the course of the Critique of 
Practical Reason are no backpedaling concessions to the tradition of the ethics of goods; 
rather, preceding Hegel, the model of a movement of the concept. The moral universality 
passes, whether willed or no, over into society. This is formally documented by the first 
note to the fourth theorem of Practical Reason: �Therefore the mere form of a law, which 
restricts the matter, must at the same time be a grounds, to add this matter to the will, but 
not to presuppose it. The material may be for example my own happiness. This, if I 
attribute it to everyone (as I may in fact do in finite beings), can thus only become an 
objective practical law, if I include that of others in the same. Thus the law to promote 
the happiness of others originates not from the presupposition, that this would be an 
object for everyone�s caprice, but merely from the fact that the form of universality, 
which reason requires as a condition of giving a maxim of self-love the objective validity 
of a law, becomes the grounds of the determination of the will, and therefore the grounds 
of the determination of the pure will was not the object (the happiness of others), but 
solely the mere lawful form of it, by which I restricted my maxim grounded on my 
inclination, in order to obtain the universality of a law and to make it fit for the pure 
practical reason, solely out of whose restriction, and not from the addition of an external 
mainspring, could the concept of what is committal � to extend the maxims of self-love 
also to the happiness of others � originate.�44 The doctrine of the absolute independence 
of the moral law of the empirical being and indeed of the pleasure-principle is suspended, 
by the incorporation of the thought of living creatures in the radical, general formulation 
of the imperative. 
Doctrine of Freedom Repressive 257-258
Adjacent to this, Kant�s ethics, fragile in itself, retains its repressive aspect. It triumphs in 
unmitigated form in the need for punishment.*7* The following lines stem not from the 
late works but from the Critique of Practical Reason: �Likewise if someone, who 
otherwise is an honest man (or is only placed in thought in the position of an honest 
man), confronts the moral law, in which he recognizes the unworthiness of a liar, his 
practical reason (in the judgement over that, which he is supposed to do) immediately 
departs from the advantage, unifying itself with what preserves the respect for his own 
person (truthfulness), and the advantage will now, after it has been separated from 
everything extraneous to reason (which is solely and totally on the side of duty) and 
cleansed, is weighed by everyone, in order to bring in all likelihood still other cases into 
connection with reason, only not where it could run counter to the moral law, which 
reason never departs from, but thereby unites its innermost core with it.�45 In the 
contempt for compassion, the pure practical reason accords with the �Grow hard� of 
Nietzsche, its antipode: �Even the feeling of compassion and soft-hearted participation, if 
it precedes the consideration of what duty would be and becomes a grounds of 
determination, burdens the well-meaning person, bringing their considered maxims into 
confusion and causes them to wish to be rid of them and to submit solely to the 
legislating reason.�46 At times, the intermixed heteronomy of the inner composition of 
autonomy boils over into rage against the same reason, which is supposed to be the origin 
of freedom. Then Kant takes the side of the antithesis of the Third Antinomy: �Where 
however determination according to natural laws ceases, there cease also all explanations, 
and nothing remains but the defense, that is the driving away of the objections of those, 
who pretend to have seen deeper into the essence of things and hence blithely declare 
freedom to be impossible.�47 Obscurantism entwines itself with the cult of reason as that 
which rules absolutely. The compulsion, which according to Kant proceeds from the 
categorical imperative, contradicts the freedom, which is supposed to be constituted in it 
as its highest determination. This is not the least of the reasons why the imperative, 
stripped of all empiricism, is presented as a �factum�48 which needs no test by reason, in 
spite of the chorismos between facticity and the idea. The antinomics of the Kantian 
doctrine of freedom is sharpened to the point that the moral law counts as rational for it 
and as not rational; rational, because it reduces itself to pure logical reason without 
content; not rational, because it would be accepted as a given fact, it would no longer be 
analyzed; every attempt to do so is anathema. This antinomics is not to be shuffled off 
onto the philosopher: the pure logic of consistency, compliant to self-preservation 
without self-reflection, is deluded in itself, irrational. The hideous Kantian ｅxpression of 
�reasonalizing� [Vernuenfteln: reasoning], which still echoes in Hegel�s �raisonnement� 
[Raisonnieren: reasoning], which denounces reason without any valid grounds of 
distinction, and whose hypostasis is beyond all rational ends, is consistent despite its 
glaring contradiction. The ratio turns into irrational authority.
Self-experience of Freedom and Unfreedom 258-262
The contradiction dates back to the objective one between the experience of 
consciousness of itself and its relationship to the totality. The individuated feels free, 
insofar as it is opposed to society and may undertake something against it or other 
individuals, although incomparably less than it believes. Its freedom is primarily that of 
pursuing its own ends, which are not immediately exhausted in social ones; to this extent 
it coincides with the principle of individuation. Freedom of this type has escaped the 
natural-rootedness of society; within an increasingly rational one it has achieved a degree 
of reality. At the same time it remains appearance [Schein] in the midst of bourgeois 
society, no less than individuality generally. The critique of the freedom of the will, like 
that of determinism, means critique of this appearance [Schein]. The law of value realizes 
itself over the heads of formally free individuals. They are unfree, according to Marx�s 
insight, as its involuntary executors, and indeed all the more thoroughly, the more the 
social antagonisms grow, in which the conception of freedom first formed. The process 
by which what is individuated becomes autonomous, the function of the exchange-
society, terminates in its abolition through integration. What produced freedom, recoils 
into unfreedom. The individuated was free as the economically active bourgeois subject, 
to the extent that autonomy was promoted by the economic system, so that it would 
function. Its autonomy is thereby already potentially repudiated at its origin. The freedom 
of which it boasted was, as Hegel first discerned, also something negative, the mockery 
of the true one; the ｅxpression of the contingency of the social fate of each and every 
individual. The real necessity in freedom, which had to maintain itself and, as ultra-
liberal ideology praised it, prevailed by elbowing its way through, was the cover-image 
[Deckbild] of the total social necessity, which compels the individual towards ruggedness 
[in English and in italics in the original], so that it survives. Even concepts which are so 
abstract, that they appear to approximate invariance, prove themselves to be historical. 
Just so that of life. While it reproduces itself further under conditions of unfreedom, its 
concept presupposes, according to its own meaning, the possibility of what is not yet 
included, of the open experience, which has been so much more lessened, that the word 
life already sounds like empty consolation. The freedom of the bourgeois individuated is 
no less of a caricature, however, than the necessity of its action. It is not, as the concept 
of the law commands, transparent, but strikes every individual subject as an accident, the 
continuation of mythical fate. Life has retained this negativity, an aspect which furnished 
the title for a duet piano piece of Schubert, Storms of Life. In the anarchy of commodity 
production the natural-rootedness of society reveals itself, as it vibrates in the word life, 
as a biological category for something essentially social. If the process of production and 
reproduction of society were transparent to subjects and determined by them, then they 
would also no longer be passively buffeted to and fro by the ominous storms of life. What 
is called life would thereby disappear, including the fatal aura, with which the Jugendstil 
surrounded the word in the industrial age, as the justification of a bad irrationality. At 
times the transience of that surrogate cast out its friendly shadow beforehand: today the 
adultery literature of the nineteenth century is already rubbish, excepting its greatest 
products, which cite the historical Ur-images of that epoch. Just as no theater director 
would dare to play Hebbel�s Gyges before an audience which does not wish to dispense 
with their bikinis � the fear of what is materially anachronistic, the lack of aesthetic 
distance, has at the same time something barbaric about it � something similar will 
transpire, once humanity worked it out, for nearly everything which counts today as life 
and merely deceives one over how little life there really is. Until then the prevailing 
lawfulness is contrary to the individual and its interests. Under the conditions of the 
bourgeois economy this is not to be shaken; the question concerning the freedom or 
unfreedom of the will, as something available, cannot be answered in it. It is for its part 
the molded cast of bourgeois society: the in truth historical category of the individual 
deceptively exempts that question from the social dynamic and treats every individual as 
an Ur-phenomenon. Obediently freedom has innervated the ideology of individualistic 
society badly within itself; this bars every definitive answer to ideology. If the thesis of 
the freedom of the will burdens the dependent individuals with the social injustice, over 
which they can do nothing, and humiliates them unceasingly with desiderata, before 
which they must fail, then on the other hand the thesis of unfreedom metaphysically 
prolongs the primacy of the given, declares itself to be immutable and encourages 
individuals, insofar as they are not already prepared to do so, to cower, since indeed 
nothing else is left for them to do. Determinism acts as if dehumanization, the commodity 
character of labor-power developed into a totality, were human essence pure and simple, 
incognizant of the fact that the commodity character finds its borders in labor-power, 
which is not mere exchange-value but also has use-value. If the freedom of the will is 
merely denied, then human beings are reduced without reservations to the normal form of 
the commodity character of their labor in developed capitalism. No less topsy-turvy is a 
prioristic determinism as the doctrine of the freedom of the will, which in the middle of 
commodity society abstracts from this. The individuated itself forms a moment of it; the 
former is ascribed the pure spontaneity, which society expropriates. The subject needs 
only to pose the inescapable alternative of the freedom or unfreedom of the will, and it is 
already lost. Each drastic thesis is false. That of determinism and that of freedom 
coincide in their innermost core. Both proclaim identity. Through the reduction to pure 
spontaneity, the empirical subjects are subjected to the same law, which expands itself 
into the category of causality of determinism. Free human beings would perhaps also be 
emancipated from the will; surely only in a free society would individuals be free. Along 
with external repression, the inner one would disappear, probably after a long interim 
period and under the permanent threat of regression. If the philosophical tradition, in the 
Spirit of repression, confounded freedom and responsibility, then this latter would pass 
over into the fearless, active participation of every individual: in a whole, which would 
no longer institutionally harden the participation, in which however they would have real 
consequences. The antinomy between the determination of the individuated and the social 
responsibility which contradicts it is no false usage of concepts but real, the moral form 
of the irreconcilability of universal and particular. That even Hitler and his monsters, 
according to all psychological insight, are slaves of their earliest childhood, products of 
mutilation, and that nevertheless the few, which were able to be caught, ought not to be 
allowed to go free, if the atrocity is not to repeat itself into the indefinite future, which the 
unconscious of the masses thereby justifies, in that no ray of light fell from the heavens � 
this is not to be glossed over by jury-rigged constructions such as a utilitarian necessity, 
which quarrels with reason. What is individuated befalls humanity only when the entire 
sphere of individuation, including its moral aspect, is seen through as an epiphenomenon. 
At times the total society, out of the despair of its condition, represents the freedom, 
against individuals, which goes into protest in their unfreedom. on the other hand, in the 
epoch of universal social oppression the picture of freedom against society lives only in 
the torn-apart, maimed traits of the individuated. Where this hides away each time in 
history, is not decreed for once and for all. Freedom becomes concrete in the changing 
forms of repression: in resistance against these. There was so much freedom of the will, 
as human beings wished to free themselves. However freedom itself is so tangled up with 
unfreedom, that it is not merely inhibited by the latter, but has it as the condition of its 
own concept. This is no more to be separated out as an absolute than any other individual 
one. Without the unity and the compulsion of reason, nothing which is similar to freedom 
could ever have been thought, let alone come to be; this is documented in philosophy. No 
model of freedom is available, except as consciousness, as in the social total constitution, 
intervening through this in the complexion of what is individuated. That is why this is not 
thoroughly chimerical, because consciousness for its part is branched-off drive-energy, 
itself also impulse, is a moment, too, of what it intervenes in. If there were not that 
affinity, which Kant frantically denies, nor would there be the idea of freedom, for whose 
sake he wishes to hush up the affinity.

on the Crisis of Causality 262-266
What is happening to the idea of freedom meanwhile appears also to be happening to its 
counterpart, the concept of causality; that in keeping with the universal trend towards the 
false sublation of the antagonisms, the universal liquidates the particular from above, 
through identification. This is not to be short-circuited by returning to the crisis of 
causality in natural sciences. It applies there expressly only in the micro-realm; on the 
other hand the formulations of causality in Kant, at least those of the Critique of Pure 
Reason, are so �large� [in English], that they presumably have room even for merely 
statistical nomothetisms. The natural sciences, which content themselves with operational 
definitions immanent to their mode of procedure, even with respect to causality, and 
philosophy, which cannot dispense with an accounting of causality, if it wishes to do 
more than merely abstractly repeat natural-scientific methodology, are miserably broken 
from each other, and the need alone will not glue them back together. The crisis of 
causality is visible however even in what philosophical experience can still reach, in 
contemporary society. Kant accepted as the unquestionable method of reason, that every 
condition is traced back to �its� cause. The sciences, which philosophy for the most part 
moves further and further away from, the more enthusiastically it recommends itself as 
the former�s spokesperson, may operate less with causal chains than causal networks. 
This is however more than an incidental concession to the empirical ambiguity of causal 
relations. Even Kant had to acknowledge that the consciousness of all causal sequences 
which intersect in every phenomenon, instead of being unequivocally determined by 
causality in temporal succession, is essential to the category itself, in his words, is a 
priori: no individual event is excepted from that multiplicity. The infinity of what is 
interwoven and which intersects in itself makes it impossible in principle, by no means 
merely practically, to form unequivocal causal chains, as the Thesis and Antithesis of the 
Third Antinomy stipulate in equal measure. Even tangible historical inquiries, which in 
Kant still remained in a finite course, involve, horizontally as it were, that positive 
infinity which applies in the critique in the antinomy chapter. Kant ignores this, as if he 
were transposing relationships clearly visible in small towns to all possible objects. No 
path leads from his model to full-fledged causal determinations. Because he treats the 
causal relationship solely as a principle, he thinks past what is interwoven in principle. 
This omission is conditioned by the relocation of causality into the transcendental 
subject. As the pure form of lawfulness it shrinks to one-dimensionality. The inclusion of 
the ill-famed �reciprocal effect� in the table of categories is the retrospective attempt to 
answer for that lack, attesting also to the dawning crisis of causality. Its schemata 
replicated, as did not escape the Durkheim school, the simple generational relationship, 
so very much as its explanation requires causality. It takes on an aspect of something 
feudal, if not, as in Anaximander and Heraclitus, of an archaic juridical relationship of 
vengeance. Causality, the inheritor of the activating spirits in things, has been as 
delimited by the process of demythologization as much as reinforced by such in the name 
of the law. If causality is the actual unity in the polyvalence, which led Schopenhauer to 
favor it among the categories, then the bourgeois era was throughout as much causality as 
system. The more unequivocal the relationships were, the easier it was to speak of it in 
history. Hitler�s Germany caused the Second World War more precisely than the 
Wilhelmine one did the First. But the tendency recoils on itself. Ultimately there is a 
level of system � the social keyword is: integration � in which the universal dependence 
of all moments on all other ones makes the talk of causality obsolete; the search for what 
inside a monolithic society is supposed to be the cause is in vain. The cause is only this 
latter itself. Causality has withdrawn as it were into the totality; in the midst of its system 
it becomes indistinguishable. The more its concept, under scientific mandate, dilutes 
itself to abstraction, the less the simultaneous threads of the universally socialized 
society, which are condensed to an extreme, permit one condition to be traced back with 
evidence to others. Each one hangs together horizontally as vertically with all others, 
tinctures all, is tinctured by all. The latest doctrine in which enlightenment employed 
causality as a decisive political weapon, the Marxist one of superstructure and 
infrastructure, lags almost innocently behind a condition, in which the apparatuses of 
production, distribution and domination, as well as economic and social relations and 
ideologies are inextricably interwoven, and in which living human beings have turned 
into bits of ideology. Where these latter are no longer added to the existent as something 
justifying or complementary, but pass over into the appearance [Schein], that what is, 
would be inescapable and thereby legitimated, the critique which operates with the 
unequivocal causal relation of superstructure and infrastructure aims wide of the mark. In 
the total society everything is equally close to the midpoint; it is as transparent, its 
apologetics as threadbare, as those who see through it, who die out. Critique could 
portray, in every administration building and every airport, to what extent the 
infrastructure has become its own superstructure. For this it needs on the one hand the 
physiognomics of the total condition and of the extended individual data, on the other 
hand the analysis of economic structural transformations; no longer the derivation of an 
ideology, which is not at all available as something independent or even with its own 
truth-claim, out of its causal conditions. That the validity of causality decomposes 
correlative to the downfall of the possibility of freedom, is the symptom of the 
transformation of a society, rational in its means, into that openly irrational one, which 
latently, according to its ends, it was long ago. The philosophy of Leibniz and Kant, by 
means of the separation of the final cause from the phenomenally valid causality in the 
narrow sense, and the attempt at unifying both, felt something of that divergence, without 
getting to its root in the ends-means antinomy of bourgeois society. But the 
disappearance of causality today signals no realm of freedom. In the total reciprocal 
effect, the old dependence reproduces itself on an expanded level. Through its million-
fold web it prevents the long overdue, palpably graspable rational penetration, which 
causal thinking wished to promote in the service of progress. Causality itself makes sense 
only in a horizon of freedom. It seemed to be protected from empiricism, because without 
its assumption the cognition organized into science did not seem possible; idealism 
possessed no stronger argument. Kant�s effort however, to raise causality as a subjective 
thought-necessity to a constitutive condition of objectivity, was no more binding than its 
empiricist denial. Even he had to distance himself from the assumption of an innervated 
context of phenomena, without which causality becomes an if-then relation, which glides 
away precisely from that emphatic lawfulness � �a priority� � which the doctrine of 
subjective-categorical essence of causality wishes to conserve; scientific development 
then fulfilled the potential of Kant�s doctrine. Another makeshift substitute is the 
foundation of causality through its immediate self-experience in the motivation. 
Meanwhile psychology has substantively demonstrated that self-experience not only can 
deceive, but must.
Causality as Bane 266-267
If causality as a subjective thought-principle is tainted with absurdity, if there is no 
cognition however completely without the former, then one would need to seek out a 
moment in it, which is itself not thinking. What is to be learned from causality, is what 
identity perpetrated upon the non-identical. The consciousness of causality is, as that of 
lawfulness, the consciousness of this; as the critique of cognition, also that of the 
subjective appearance [Schein] in the identification. Reflective causality points to the 
idea of freedom as the possibility of non-identity. Objectively causality would be, in a 
provocatively anti-Kantian sense, a relationship between things in themselves, insofar 
and only insofar as these are subordinated to the principle of identity. It is, objectively 
and subjectively, the bane of controlled nature. It has its fundamentum in re [Latin: 
fundamental basis] in identity, which as an intellectual principle is only the reflection of 
the real control of nature. In the reflection on causality, which finds this everywhere in 
nature there, where the latter is dominated by the former, reason also becomes aware of 
its own natural-rootedness, of the bane-casting principle. In such self-consciousness, 
progressive enlightenment separates itself from the regression into mythology, which it 
unreflectively subscribed to. It escapes the omnipotence of the schemata of its reduction, 
�that is what human beings are�, in that human beings recognize themselves, for what 
they are otherwise insatiably reduced to. Causality is nothing other however than the 
natural-rootedness of humanity, which the latter perpetuates as domination over nature. If 
the subject once comes to know the moment of its equality with nature, then it would no 
longer turn nature into what resembles itself. That is the secret and inverted truth-content 
of idealism. For the more thoroughly the subject, according to idealistic custom, makes 
nature the same as itself, the further it distances itself from all equality with it. Affinity is 
the razor�s edge of dialectical enlightenment. It recoils into delusion, the nonconceptual 
execution from outside, as soon as it completely cuts through the affinity. No truth 
without the latter: this is what idealism caricatured in identity-philosophy. Consciousness 
knows as much about its other as it is similar to the latter, not by canceling itself out 
along with the similarity. Objectivity as the residue after the subtraction of the subject is a 
mere aping. It is the schemata, unconscious to itself, to which the subject reduces its 
other. The less it tolerates the affinity to things, the more ruthlessly it identifies. But even 
affinity is no positive ontological individual determination. If it turns into an intuition, 
into an immediate, empathically cognized truth, then it is ground up as an archaicism by 
the dialectic of the enlightenment, as warmed-over mythos; in accordance with the 
mythology which reproduces itself out of pure reason, with domination. Affinity is no 
remainder, which cognition would hold in its hands after the mandatory leveling 
[Gleichschaltung] of identification-schemata of the categorical apparatus, but rather their 
determinate negation. Causality is reflected upon in such critique. In it thinking 
consummates the mimicry of the bane of things, which it cast around these, on the 
threshold of a sympathy, which would cause the bane to vanish. The subjectivity of 
causality has an elective affinity to objects, as the premonition of what the subject caused 
them to experience.
Reason, Ego, Superego 267-271
The Kantian turn of moral law into the factum draws its suggestive power from the fact 
that he can cite such a given fact in the sphere of the empirical person. This is 
advantageous for the mediation, always problematic, between what is intelligible and 
what is empirical. The phenomenology of empirical consciousness, and indeed the 
psychology, runs into precisely that conscience which is the voice of moral law in the 
Kantian doctrine. The descriptions of its efficacy, for example that of �constraint�, are no 
mental phantoms. The traits of compulsion, which Kant carved into the doctrine of 
freedom, are to be read out of the real compulsion of the conscience. The empirical 
irresistibility of the psychologically existent conscience, of the superego, vouchsafes for 
the facticity of the moral law against its transcendental principle, which nonetheless 
ought to disqualify it as the foundation of autonomous morality for Kant as much as the 
heteronomous drive. That Kant tolerates no critique of the conscience, brings him into 
conflict with his own insight, that in the phenomenal world all motivations are those of 
the empirical, psychological ego. That is why he removed the genetic moment from 
moral philosophy and replaced it with the construction of the intelligible character, which 
indeed the subject would initially give to itself.*8* The temporal-genetic and in spite of 
everything once again �empirical� claim of that �initially�, is however not to be 
redeemed. Whatever one knows of the genesis of the character, is incompatible with the 
assertion of such an act of moral Ur-generation. The ego, which is supposed to 
consummate it in Kant, is not anything immediate but itself something mediated, 
something originated, in psychoanalytic termini: branched off from diffuse libido-energy. 
Not only is all specific content of the moral law constitutively related to factical existence 
but also its presumably pure, imperative form. It presupposes the innervation of 
repression as much as the prior development of the fixed, identical self-maintaining 
authority of the ego, which is absolutized by Kant as the necessary condition of morality. 
Every interpretation of Kant, which would complain about his formalism and which 
would undertake to demonstrate, with its help, the empirical relativity of the morality this 
eliminated in the content, does not reach far enough. Even in its most extreme 
abstraction, the law is something which has come to be; the anguish of its abstraction, 
sedimented content, domination reduced to its normal form, that of identity. Psychology 
has concretely caught up with what in Kant�s time it did not yet know and which it 
therefore did not specifically need to concern itself with: the empirical genesis of what 
Kant glorified, unanalyzed, as timelessly intelligible. In its heroic period the Freudian 
school, in agreement on this point with the other, enlightening Kant, demanded the 
ruthless critique of the superego as something alien to the ego, something truly 
heteronomous. It saw through it as the blind and unconscious innervation of social 
compulsion. Sandor Ferenczi�s Building Blocks of Psychoanalysis states, with a caution  
which is best explained as fear of social consequences, �that a real character-analysis 
must remove, at least provisionally, every kind of superego, and thus even that of the 
analyst. Ultimately the patient must indeed become free of all emotional bonds, insofar as 
they go beyond reason and the former�s own libidinous tendencies. only this sort of 
demolition of the superego can lead at all to a radical healing; successes, which consist 
merely of substituting one superego for another, must be characterized as merely 
transference-successes; they certainly do not do justice to the end-goal of therapy, which 
is to be rid of the transference, too.�49 Reason, in Kant the ground of the conscience, is 
supposed to refute it by dissolving it. For the unreflective domination of reason, that of 
the ego over the id, is identical with the repressive principle, which psychoanalysis, 
whose critique was silenced by the reality-principle of the ego, displaced into the latter�s 
unconscious reign. The separation of ego and superego, which its topology insists upon, 
is dubious; genetically both lead equally to the innervation of the father-image. That is 
why the analytic theories of the superego waned so quickly, however boldly they were 
raised: otherwise they would have to infringe on the cherished ego. Ferenczi immediately 
qualifies his critique: �his struggle� is directed �only against the part of the superego 
which has become unconscious and thus impervious to influence�50. But this does not 
suffice: the irresistibility of the compulsion of the conscience consists, as Kant observed, 
in such becoming unconscious, just like the archaic taboos; if a condition of universally 
rational topicality were conceivable, no superego would establish itself. Attempts, like 
that of Ferenczi and particularly psychoanalytic revisionism, which subscribe along with 
other healthy viewpoints also to that of the healthy superego, to divide it into an 
unconscious and a preconscious and therefore more harmless part, are in vain; the 
concretization and process of becoming independent, through which the conscience 
becomes an authority, is constitutively a forgetting and to this extent ego-alien. Ferenczi 
emphasizes in agreement that �the normal human being continues to retain in their 
preconscious furthermore a sum of positive and negative models�51. If however a concept 
in the strict Kantian understanding is heteronomous, in psychoanalytical terms is one of a 
libidinous cathexis, it is that of the model, the correlate of that �normal human being�, 
who Ferenczi equally respects, who deliver themselves over actively and passively to 
every social repression and who psychoanalysis uncritically draws, out of the disastrous 
faith in the division of labor, from the existing society. How closely psychoanalysis 
comes to that repression, as soon as the critique it inaugurated of the superego was braked 
out of social conformism, which to this day disfigures all doctrines of freedom, is shown 
most clearly by passages from Ferenczi like this: �So long as this superego takes care in a 
moderate manner, that one feels oneself as a moral citizen and acts as such, it is a useful 
institution, which ought not to be disturbed. But pathological exaggerations of the 
formation of the superego��52 The fear of exaggerations is the mark of the same ethical 
bourgeois nature, which may at no price renounce the superego along with its 
irrationalities. How the normal and the pathic superego would be subjectively 
distinguished, according to psychological criteria, is something which psychoanalysis, 
coming to its senses all too quickly, is just as silent about as the upstanding citizenry 
[Spiessbuerger] are about the border between what they cherish as their natural national 
feeling and nationalism. The sole criterion of the distinction is the social effect, whose 
quaestiones iuris [Latin: legal question] psychoanalysis declares to be outside its realm of 
competence. Reflections on the superego are, as Ferenczi says, though in contradiction to 
his words, truly �metapsychological�. The critique of the superego ought to become the 
critique of the society, which produced it; if it falls silent before this, then it 
accommodates the prevailing social norm. To recommend the superego for the sake of its 
social utility or inalienability, while it itself, as a mechanism of compulsion, does not 
confer that objective validity, which it claims in the context of affective psychological 
motivations, repeats and reinforces the irrationalities inside of psychology, which the 
latter made itself strong enough to �remove�.  
Potential of Freedom 271-272
What however has been occurring in the most recent epoch, is the externalization of the 
superego into unconditional adjustment, not its sublation in a more rational whole. The 
ephemeral traces of freedom, the emissaries of possibility in empirical life, are becoming 
tendentially fewer; freedom into a borderline value. Not even as a complementary 
ideology is it entrusted to present itself; the functionaries, who meanwhile also administer 
ideology with a firm hand, evidently have little confidence in the attractive power of 
freedom as propaganda-technicians. It is being forgotten. Unfreedom is consummated in 
its invisible totality, which tolerates nothing �outside�, out of which it could look and 
break through. The world as it is, is becoming the sole ideology, and human beings, its 
inventory. Even therein however dialectical justice reigns: it transpires over the 
individuated, the prototype and agent of a particularistic and unfree society. The freedom, 
for which it must hope, could not be merely its own, it would have to be that of the 
whole. The critique of the individuated leads beyond the category of freedom insofar as 
this is created in the image of what is unfreely individuated. The contradiction, that no 
freedom of will and thus no morality can be proclaimed for the sphere of the 
individuated, while without them not even the life of the species can be preserved, is not 
to be settled through the imposition of so-called values. Its heteronomous posited being, 
the Nietzschean new commandments, would be the opposite of freedom. It need not 
however remain, what it originated from and what it was. Rather what matures in the 
innervation of social compulsion in the conscience, along with the resistance against the 
social authority, which critically measures this by its own principles, is a potential which 
would get rid of compulsion. The critique of the conscience envisions the salvation of 
such potential, only not in the psychological realm but in the objectivity of a reconciled 
life among the free. If Kantian morality ultimately converges, apparently against its 
rigorous claim to autonomy, with the ethics of goods, then what it maintains therein is the 
juridical truth of the break, which can be bridged by no conceptual synthesis, between the 
social ideal and the subjective one of self-preserving reason. The reproach, that subjective 
reason puts on airs as an absolute in the objectivity of moral law, would be subaltern. 
Kant expresses, fallibly and distortedly, what ought indeed to be demanded from society. 
Such objectivity is not to be translated into the subjective sphere, that of psychology and 
that of rationality, but will continue to exist for good and ill separated from it, until the 
particular and general interest really and truly concord. The conscience is the mark of 
shame of unfree society. The arcanum of his philosophy was necessarily hidden from 
Kant: that the subject, in order to be able to constitute objectivity or objectivate itself in 
the act, as he entrusted it, must always for its part be something objective. The 
transcendental subject, the pure reason which objectively interprets itself, is haunted by 
the preponderance of the object, without which, as a moment, even the Kantian 
objectivating achievements of the subject would not be. His concept of subjectivity has at 
the core apersonal features. Even the personality of the subject, what is immediate to this, 
what is nearest, most certain, is something mediated. No ego-consciousness without 
society, just as no society is beyond its individuals. The postulates of practical reason, 
which transcend the subject, God, freedom, immortality, imply the critique of the 
categorical imperative, that of pure subjective reason. Without those postulates it could 
not even be thought, however much Kant avers to the contrary; there is nothing good 
without hope.
Against Personalism 272-275
The nominalistic tendency entices thought, which may not renounce the protection of 
morality in view of the immediate violence breaking out everywhere, to anchor morality 
in the person like an indestructible good. Freedom, which would arise solely in the 
institution of a free society, is sought there, where the institution of the existing one 
denies it, in each individual, who needs it, but does not guarantee it, as they are. 
Reflection on society does not occur in ethical personalism any more than that on the 
person itself. once this latter is torn completely from the universal, then it is not capable 
of constituting anything universal either; it is then drawn in secret from existing forms of 
domination. In the pre-fascist era personalism and the twaddle about bonds were hardly 
averse to sharing the platform of irrationality. The person, as something absolute, negates 
the universality which is supposed to be read out of it, and yields its threadbare legal title 
to caprice. Its charisma is borrowed from the irresistibility of the universal, while it, 
losing faith in its legitimacy, withdraws into itself in the privation of thought. Its 
principle, the unshakeable unity which makes out its selfness defiantly repeats 
domination in the subject. The person is the historically tied knot, which is to be loosened 
out of freedom, not perpetuated; the old bane of the universal, ensconced in the 
particular. Anything moral which is deduced from it remains as accidental as immediate 
existence [Existenz]. Otherwise than in Kant�s old-fashioned talk of personality, the 
person became a tautology for those, who indeed were left nothing more than the 
nonconceptual here-and-now of their existence. The transcendence which many neo-
ontologists hope from the person, exalts solely their consciousness. This latter would 
however not be without that universal, which the recourse to the person would like to 
exclude as an ethical ground. That is why the concept of the person as well as its variants, 
for example the I-you relation, have taken on the oily tone of a theology lacking 
credibility. As little as the concept of a right human being can be presumed in advance, so 
little would it resemble the person, the sanctified duplicate of its own self-preservation. In 
the philosophy of history that concept presupposes the subject objectivated into the 
character on the one hand, as assuredly as its disassembly [Zerfall] on the other hand. The 
consummated ego-weakness, the transition of the subjects into passive and atomistic, 
reflex-based behavior, is at the same time the judgement which the person deserved, in 
which the economic principle of appropriation has become anthropological. What could 
be thought in human beings as the intelligible character, is not the persona [Personhafte] 
in them, but how they distinguish themselves from their existence. In the person this 
distinction necessarily appears as what is non-identical. Every human impulse contradicts 
the unity of what harbors it; every impulse for the better is not only, in Kantian terms, 
reason, but before this also stupidity. Human beings are human only where they do not 
act as persons and are not at all posited as such; what is diffuse in nature, in which they 
are not persons, resembles the delineation of an intelligible being, that self, which would 
be delivered from the ego; contemporary art innervates something of this. The subject is 
the lie, because it denies its own objective determinations for the sake of the 
unconditionality of its own domination; the subject would be only what detached itself 
from such lies, what had thrown off, out of its own power, which it owes to identity, its 
shell. The ideological bad state of affairs of the person is immanently criticizable. What is 
substantial, which according to that ideology would lend the person their dignity, does 
not exist. Human beings are above all, and without exception, not yet themselves. Their 
possibility is justifiably to be thought under the concept of the self, and it stands 
polemically against the reality of the self. This is not the least reason that the talk of self-
alienation is untenable. It has, in spite of its better Hegelian and Marxist*9* days, or for 
their sake, succumbed to apologetics, because it gives us to understand with a fatherly 
mien that human beings would have fallen from an existent-in-itself, which it always 
was, while they have never been such and thus have nothing to hope from recourse to its 
archai [Greek: ancient, old] except submission to authority, precisely what is alien to 
them. That this concept no longer figures in the Marxist Capital, is conditioned not only 
by the economic thematics of the work but makes philosophical sense. � Negative 
dialectics does not halt before the conclusiveness of existence, the solidified selfness of 
the ego, any more than before its no less hardened antithesis, the role, which is used by 
contemporary subjective sociology as a universal nostrum, as the latest determination of 
socialization, analogous to the existence [Existenz] of selfness in many ontologists. The 
concept of roles sanctions the topsy-turvy bad depersonalization of today: the unfreedom 
which, in the place of the autonomy which was achieved with such toil and was subject to 
repeal, steps forwards merely for the sake of complete adjustment, is beneath freedom, 
not beyond it. The privation of the division of labor is hypostasized as a virtue. With it 
the ego ordains, what society has damned it to, once more to itself. The emancipated ego, 
no longer locked up in its identity, would no longer be damned to roles, either. What 
would be socially left behind of the division of labor, given radically reduced labor-time, 
would lose the horror which forms individual beings through and through. The thingly 
hardness of the self and its readiness to be deployed and its availability for socially 
desired roles are accomplices. In what is moral, too, identity is not to be negated 
abstractly, but is to be valorized in resistance, if it is ever to cross over into its other. The 
contemporary state of affairs is destructive: the loss of identity for the sake of abstract 
identity, of naked self-preservation. 
Depersonalization and Existential ontology 275-277
The double-jointedness of the ego has found its ｅxpression in existential ontology. The 
recourse to existence just as the draft of authenticity against the �man� transfigure the 
idea of the strong, enclosed in itself, �decisive� ego into metaphysics; Being and Time 
acted as a manifesto of personalism. In Heidegger�s interpretation of subjectivity as a 
mode of being, precedent to thinking, personalism already crossed over into its opposite. 
That apersonal ｅxpressions like being-there [Dasein: existence] and existence [Existenz] 
were chosen for the subject, indicates this linguistically. What returns imperceptibly in 
such usage is the idealistic German, state-besotted [staatsfromme] predominance of 
identity beyond its own bearer, that of the subject. In depersonalization, in the bourgeois 
devaluation of the individual, which is glorified in the same breath, already lies the 
difference between subjectivity as the universal principle of the individual ego � in 
Schelling�s words, egoity � and the individualized ego itself. The essence of subjectivity 
as being-there, thematic in Being and Time, resembles what remains of the person, when 
they are no longer a person. The motives for this are not to be censured. What is 
commensurable in the universal-conceptual scope of the person, its individual 
consciousness, is always also appearance [Schein], imbricated in that transsubjective 
objectivity, which according to idealistic as well as ontological doctrine is supposed to be 
founded in the pure subject. Whatever the ego is capable of experiencing introspectively 
as ego, is also not-ego, unexperienceable by absolute egoity; hence the difficulty noted by 
Schopenhauer, of its becoming conscious of itself. The ultimate is no ultimate. The 
objective turn of Hegel�s absolute idealism, the equivalent of absolute subjectivity, does 
justice to this. The more thoroughly however the individual loses what was once called 
its self-consciousness, the more depersonalization increases. That in Heidegger death 
became the essence of existence [Dasein], codifies the nullity of being, which is merely 
for itself.*10* The sinister decision in favor of depersonalization however bows 
regressively to a doom, felt as inescapable, instead of pointing beyond the person through 
the idea, that it might achieve what is its own. Heidegger�s apersonality is linguistically 
instituted; won too easily, by the mere leaving out of what makes the subject alone the 
subject. He thinks past the knot of the subject. The perspective of depersonalization 
would not be opened by the abstract evaporation of existence into its pure possibility but 
solely by the analysis of the existing innerworldly subject existing there. Heidegger�s 
analysis of existence holds off from it; that is why his apersonal existentialia can be so 
easily attached to persons. The micro-analysis of the latter is unbearable to authoritarian 
thinking: in selfness it would strike the principle of all domination. By contrast existence 
generally, as something apersonal, is unhesitatingly treated as if it were something 
beyond human beings and nevertheless human. In fact the total constitution of living 
human beings as their functional context, which objectively precedes them all, moves 
towards the apersonal in the sense of anonymity. Heidegger�s language bemoans this as 
much as it affirmatively reflects that matter-at-hand as suprapersonal. only the insight 
into what is thingly in the person itself would overtake the horror of depersonalization, in 
the limitations of the egoity, which were commanded by the equality of the self with self-
preservation. In Heidegger ontological apersonality always remains the ontologization of 
the person, without reaching this latter. The cognition of what consciousness became, 
under the sacrifice of its living aspect, has a reciprocal power: egoity has always been so 
thingly. In the core of the subject dwell objective conditions, which it must deny for the 
sake of the unconditionality of its domination and which are its own. The subject ought to 
get rid of these. The prerequisite of its identity is the end of the identity-compulsion. In 
existential ontology this appears only distortedly. Nothing however is intellectually 
relevant any longer, which does not press into the zone of depersonalization and its 
dialectic; schizophrenia is the truth in the philosophy of history about the subject. In 
Heidegger that zone, which he touches, turns unnoticed into a parable of the administered 
world, and complementarily into the despairing rigidified determination of subjectivity. 
Solely its critique would find its object, which he, under the name of destruction, reserves 
to the history of philosophy. The anti-metaphysical Freud�s doctrine of the id is closer to 
the metaphysical critique of the subject than Heidegger�s metaphysics, which wishes to 
be none. If the role, the heteronomy ordained by autonomy, is the most recent objective 
form of the unhappy consciousness, then conversely there is no happiness, except where 
the self is not itself. If, under the unbearable pressure which weighs on it, it falls 
schizophrenically back into the condition of dissociation and ambiguity, which the 
subject historically escaped from, then the dissolution of the subject is at the same time 
the ephemeral and condemned picture of a possible subject. once its freedom 
commanded mythos to halt, then it would emancipate itself, as from the ultimate mythos, 
from itself. Utopia would be the non-identity of the subject without sacrifice.
The Universal and Individual in Moral Philosophy 277-281
The Kantian zeal against psychology expresses, besides fear of once more losing the 
scraps of the mundus intelligibilis [Latin: intelligible world], achieved so laboriously, 
also the authentic insight, that the moral categories of the individuated are more than only 
individual. What becomes evident in them, in keeping with the model of the Kantian 
concept of law, as what is universal, is secretly something social. Not the slightest of the 
functions of the admittedly enigmatic concept of humanity in the Critique of Practical 
Reason is that pure reason would count as universal for all rational beings: a point of 
indifference of Kant�s philosophy. If the concept of the universality in the diversity of 
subjects was won and then becomes autonomous in the logical objectivity of reason, into 
which all individual subjects and superficially even subjectivity disappear as such, then 
Kant, on the narrow ridge between logical absolutism and empirical validity, would like 
to go back to that existent, which the system�s logic of consistency previously banished. 
Anti-psychological moral philosophy converges therein with later psychological findings. 
By unveiling the superego as an innervated social norm, psychology breaks through its 
monadological limitations. These are for their part socially produced. The conscience 
draws its objectivity in relation to human beings out of that of society, in which and 
through which they live and which reaches all the way into the core of their 
individuation. The antagonistic moments are indistinguishably interwoven in such 
objectivity: the heteronomous compulsion and the idea of a solidarity, which surpasses 
divergent individual interests. What in the conscience reproduces the tenaciously 
persisting, repressive bad state of affairs of society, is the opposite of freedom and to be 
disenchanted through the proof of its own determination. By contrast the universal norm, 
which is unconsciously appropriated by the conscience, attests to that which points 
beyond the particularity in society as the principle of its totals. This is its moment of 
truth. The question of the right and wrong of the conscience admits to no conclusive 
reply, because right and wrong dwells within it and no abstract judgement could separate 
them: only in its repressive form does the solidaristic one form, which sublates the 
former. It is essential to moral philosophy that the individuated and society are neither 
separated by a simple difference, nor reconciled. What is bad in the universality has 
declared itself in the socially unfulfilled claim of the individuated. This is the 
supraindividual truth-content of the critique of morality. But the individuated which, at 
fault due to privation, turns into the ultimate and absolute, degenerates thereby for its part 
into the appearance [Schein] of the individualistic society, and mistakes itself; Hegel 
once more discerned this, and indeed most acutely where he gave impetus to the 
reactionary misuse of such. The society, which does injustice to the individuated in its 
universal claim, also does justice to it, insofar as the social principle of unreflected self-
maintenance, itself the bad universal, is hypostasized in what is individuated. Society 
metes it out, measure for measure. The sentence of the late Kant, that the freedom of 
every human being must be restricted only insofar as it impinges on the freedom of 
another,*11* is the cipher of a reconciled condition, which would be not only beyond the 
bad universal, the mechanism of compulsion, but also beyond the obdurate individuated, 
in which that mechanism of compulsion repeats itself microcosmically. The question of 
freedom demands no yes or no but theory, which raises itself above the existing society 
as well as above the existing individuality. Instead of sanctioning the innervated and 
hardened authority of the superego, it carries out the dialectic of the individual being and 
species. The rigorism of the superego is solely the reflex of the fact that the antagonistic 
condition prevents this. The subject would only be emancipated as reconciled with the 
not-ego, and thereby also beyond freedom, insofar as this latter is in league with its 
counterpart, repression. How much aggression hitherto lies in freedom, becomes visible 
whenever human beings act as if they are free in the midst of the universal unfreedom. So 
little however would the individuated frantically protect the old particularity in a state of 
freedom � individuality is as much the product of pressure as the power-center, which 
resists it � so little would that condition be compatible with the contemporary concept of 
the collective. That in the countries which today monopolize the name of socialism, an 
immediate collectivism is commanded as the subordination of the individual to society, 
gives the lie to their socialism and reinforces the antagonism. The weakness of the ego 
through a socialized society, which unremittingly drives human beings together and, 
literally and figuratively, makes them incapable of being alone, manifests itself in the 
complaints about isolation no less than in the truly unbearable coldness which spreads 
everywhere along with the expanding exchange-relationship, and which is merely 
prolonged by the authoritarian and ruthless regimentation of the alleged peoples� 
democracies against the needs of their subjects. That a union of free human beings would 
have to continually gang themselves up, belongs in the conceptual realm of maneuvers, 
of marching, flag-waving, orations of leaders. They thrive only so long as society 
irrationally wishes to cobble together its compulsory members; objectively they are not 
needed. Collectivism and individualism complete one another in what is false. 
Speculative historical philosophy since Fichte protested against both, in the doctrine of 
the condition of consummated sinfulness, later in that of lost meaning. Modernity is 
equated with a deformed world, while Rousseau, the initiator of retrospective hostility 
towards one�s own time, set it alight on the last of the great styles: what spurred his 
revulsion was too much form, the denaturalization of society. The time has come to 
dismiss the imago of the meaningless world, which degenerated from a cipher of longing 
to the slogan of those who fetishize order. Nowhere on earth is contemporary society, as 
its scientific apologists vouchsafe, �open�; nowhere deformed, either. The belief that it 
would be so, originated in the devastation of the cities and landscapes by planlessly self-
expanding industry, in a lack of rationality, not its oversupply. Whoever traces back 
deformation to metaphysical processes instead of relationships of material production, 
virtually delivers ideologies. With their change, the picture of violence could be softened, 
which the world presents to the human beings who do violence to it. That supraindividual 
bonds disappeared � they by no means disappeared � would indeed not itself be bad; the 
truly emancipated works of art of the twentieth century are no worse than those, which 
thrived in the styles which modernity discarded with reason. The experience inverts itself 
as if in a mirror, that according to the state of consciousness and of the material 
productive forces, it is expected that human beings would be free, that they also expect it 
themselves, and that they are not so, while nevertheless no model of thinking, behavior 
and, in that most denigrating of terms, �value�, is left in the state of their radical 
unfreedom, as those who are unfree desire it. The lament over the lack of bonds has a 
constitution of society for its substance, which simulates freedom, without realizing such. 
Freedom exists only, dimly enough, in the superstructure; its perennial failure deflects the 
longing towards unfreedom. Probably the question of the meaning of existence in its 
entirety is the ｅxpression of that discrepancy.   

on the Condition of Freedom 281-283
The horizon of a condition of freedom, which would need no repression and no morality, 
because the drive would no longer have to express itself destructively, is veiled in gloom. 
Moral questions are stringent not in their dreadful parody, sexual repression, but in 
sentences like: torture ought to be abolished; concentration camps ought not to exist, 
while all this continues in Africa and Asia and is only repressed because civilized 
humanity is as inhuman as ever against those which it shamelessly brands as uncivilized. 
If a moral philosopher seized these lines and exulted, at having finally caught up with the 
critics of morality � in that these, too, cite the values comfortably proclaimed by moral 
philosophers � then the definitive conclusion would be false. The sentences are true as 
impulse, when they register, that somewhere torture is occurring. They may not be 
rationalized; as an abstract principle they would end up immediately in the bad infinity of 
their derivation and validity. The critique of morality is applicable to the transposition of 
the logic of consistency onto the behavior of human beings; that is where the stringent 
logic of consistency becomes the organ of unfreedom. The impulse, the naked physical 
fear and the feeling of solidarity with, in Brecht�s words, tormentable bodies, which is 
immanent to moral behavior, would be denied by attempts at ruthless rationalization; 
what is most urgent would once more become contemplative, the mockery of its own 
urgency. The distinction of theory and praxis involves theoretically, that praxis can no 
more be purely reduced to theory than ch�ris [Greek: separately] from it. Both are not to 
be glued together into a synthesis. That which is undivided lives solely in the extremes, in 
the spontaneous impulse which, impatient with the argument, does not wish to permit the 
horror to continue, and in the theoretical consciousness unterrorized by any functionary, 
which discerns why it nonetheless goes unforeseeably on. This contradiction alone is, in 
sight of the real powerlessness of all individuals, the staging-grounds of morality today. 
The consciousness will react spontaneously, to the extent it cognizes what is bad, without 
satisfying itself with the cognition. The incompatibility of every general moral judgement 
with the psychological determination, which nevertheless does not dispense with the 
judgement, that something would be evil, does not originate in thinking�s lack of logical 
consistency, but in the objective antagonism. Fritz Bauer has noted that the same types 
who call for clemency for the torturers of Auschwitz with a hundred lazy arguments, are 
friends of the reintroduction of the death penalty. The newest state of moral dialectics is 
concentrated therein: clemency would be naked injustice, the justified atonement would 
be infected by the principle of brute force, while humanity consists solely of resisting this 
last. Benjamin�s remark, that the execution of the death penalty might be moral, but never 
its legitimation, prophesized this dialectic. If the ones in charge of the torture including 
their chief assistants had been immediately shot, it would have been more moral, than 
putting a few on trial. The fact that they succeeded in fleeing, hiding for twenty years, 
qualitatively transforms the justice which was missed at that time. As soon as a juridical 
machine has to be mobilized with court procedure, black robes and understanding 
defense lawyers, justice, which in any case is capable of no sanction which would fit the 
atrocities committed, is already false, compromised by the same principle according to 
which the murderers once acted. The Fascists are clever enough, to exploit such objective 
insanity with their devilishly insane reason. The historical grounds of the aporia is that 
the revolution against the Fascists failed in Germany, or rather that in 1944 there was no 
revolutionary mass movement. The contradiction of teaching empirical determinism and 
nevertheless condemning the normal monsters � according to the former, perhaps one 
should let them loose � is not to be settled by any supraordinated logic. Theoretically 
reflected justice may not shy away from this. If it does not help this to become aware of 
itself, then it encourages, as politics, the continuation of the methods of torture, which in 
any case the collective unconscious hopes for and for whose rationalization this latter lies 
in wait; this much in any case is true of the theory of deterrence. In the confessed breach 
between a reason of law, which for the last time does the guilty the honor of a freedom 
which they do not deserve, and the insight into their real unfreedom, the critique of 
consistency-logical identity-thinking becomes moral.
Intelligible Character in Kant 283-287
Kant mediates between existence and the moral law through the construction of the 
intelligible character. It leans on the thesis, �the moral law proves its reality�53 � as if 
what is given, what is there, would thereby be legitimated. When Kant talks of this, �that 
the determining ground of that causality can also be assumed outside of the world of the 
senses in freedom as the characteristic of an intelligible being�,54 then the intelligible 
being turns, through the concept of the characteristic, into something which is positively 
conceived in the life of the individuated, something �real�. This however is, within of the 
axiomatic of non-contradictoriness, contrary to the doctrine of what is intelligible as 
something beyond the world of the senses. Kant immediately and unabashedly recalls: 
�By contrast the moral good is something suprasensible in relation to the object, for 
which therefore no sensory intuition of something corresponding to it� � most certainly 
therefore no �characteristic� � �can be found, and the power of judgement under laws of 
the pure practical reason seems thus to be subjected to especial difficulties, which rest on 
the fact that a law of freedom is supposed to be applied to acts as events, which occur in 
the world of the senses and to this extent belong to nature.�55 In the spirit of the critique 
of reason, the passage is directed not only against the ontology of good and evil, 
stringently criticized in the Critique of Practical Reason, as of goods which exist in 
themselves, but also against the subjective capacity ascribed to them, which, removed 
from the phenomena, would vouchsafe to that ontology a character of simply and purely 
supernatural essence. If in order to save freedom Kant introduces the utterly exposed 
doctrine of the intelligible character, which shrank from all experience and which 
nevertheless was conceived as the mediation to the empirical, then one of the strongest 
motives for this, objectively speaking, was the fact that the will is not disclosed as an 
existent from the phenomena, nor can it be defined by its conceptual synthesis, but would 
have to be presupposed as its condition, with the defects of a na�ve realism of inwardness, 
which he, in other hypostases of what is psychological, destroyed in the paralogism 
chapter. The proof, that character would neither be exhausted in nature nor absolutely 
transcendent to it, as its concept by the way dialectically implies, is supposed to take care 
of the precarious mediation. Motivations however have their psychological moment, 
without which no such mediation would be, while those of the human will, according to 
Kant, can �never be anything other than the moral law�.56 This is what the antinomy 
prescribes for every possible answer. It is bluntly worked out by Kant: �For how a law 
could be for itself and the immediate ground of determination of the will (which is 
nonetheless what is essential in all morality), this is an insoluble problem for human 
reason and as one with: how a free will would be possible. Thus we will not have to show 
a priori the grounds, of why the moral law would in itself constitute a mainspring, but 
what, insofar as it is such a one, it effects in the mind (put even better, must effect).�57 
Kant�s speculation falls silent where it should start, and resigns itself to a mere 
description of immanent effect-contexts, which, had he not been overwhelmed by his 
intention, he would scarcely have hesitated  to call a mirage: something empirical worms 
itself into supraempirical authority through the power of the affection, which it exerts. An 
�intelligible existence [Existenz]�,58 of an existence without time, which according to 
Kant aids in constituting what is in the existent, is dealt with without fear of the 
contradictio in adjecto [Latin: added contradiction], without articulating it dialectically, 
indeed without saying what exactly might be thought under that existence. The furthest 
he dares to go is the discussion �of the spontaneity of the subject as a thing in itself�.59 
According to the critique of reason, this could no more be spoken of positively than the 
transcendental causes of the phenomena of external senses, while without the intelligible 
character, the moral act in what is empirical, the effect on this � and thereby morality � 
would be impossible. He must toil desperately, for what the basic outline of the system 
prevents. What comes to his assistance is the fact that reason is capable of intervening 
against the causal automatism of physical as well as psychic nature, of producing a new 
nexus. If he permits himself to think what, in the explicated moral philosophy, is no 
longer the intelligible realm, secularized into pure practical reason, as absolutely 
divergent, then this is, in view of that observable influx of reason, by no means the 
miracle it would seem to be according to the abstract relationship of the Kantian founding 
theses to each other. That reason would be something other than nature and yet would be 
a moment of this latter, is its prehistory, which has become its immanent determination. It 
is nature-like as psychic power, branched-off for the ends of self-preservation; once split 
off and contrasted to nature, however, it turns into its Other. Ephemerally escaping this 
latter, reason is identical with nature and non-identical, dialectical according to its own 
concept. The more ruthlessly however reason makes itself into the absolute opposite of 
nature in that dialectic and forgets itself in this, the more it regresses, as self-preservation 
run wild, to nature; solely as its reflection would reason be supranature. No interpretive 
guile [Kunst] is capable of removing the immanent contradictions of the determinations 
of the intelligible character. Kant is silent over how for its own part it would have an 
influence on what is empirical; whether it is supposed to be nothing but the pure act of its 
positing or to continue on next to that, however jury-rigged this sounds, but which is not 
without plausibility for self-experience. He contents himself with the description of how 
that influence appears in what is empirical. If the intelligible character is conceived 
entirely as ch�ris [Greek: separately], which the word suggests, then it is as impossible to 
speak of it as of the thing in itself, which Kant, cryptically enough, equated to the 
intelligible character in an utterly formal analogy, not even explaining whether �a� thing 
in itself, one in each person, would be the unknown cause of the phenomena of the inner 
senses or, as Kant occasionally put it, �the� thing in itself, identical with all, Fichte�s 
absolute I. By having an effect, such a radically divided subject would become a moment 
of the phenomenal world and would succumb to its determinations, therefore to causality. 
Kant, the traditional logician, ought never to have accepted that the same concept is 
subject to causality as much as it is not subject.*12* If the intelligible character were no 
longer ch�ris [Greek: separately], then it would no longer be intelligible but, in the sense 
of the Kantian dualism, contaminated by the mundus sensibilis [Latin: sensible world] 
and would be no less self-contradictory. Where Kant feels obliged to explicate the 
doctrine of the intelligible character more closely, he must on the one hand ground it in 
an action in time, on that which is empirical, which it is simply not supposed to be; on the 
other hand, neglecting the psychology, with which he embroils himself: �There are cases, 
where human beings from childhood onwards, even under an education, which was of an 
advantageous nature to others of the sort, nevertheless show such malignity early on and 
proceed to increase it into their mature years, that one considers them born evil-doers and 
completely incorrigible in the mode of their thinking, nevertheless because their actions 
and omissions are so judged, that the guilt of their crimes is proven, indeed they (the 
children) themselves find this proof so thoroughly founded, as if they, regardless of the 
hopeless natural constitution of their apportioned inner character, remained just as 
responsible, as any other human being. This could not happen, if we did not presuppose 
that everything which originates from its arbitrariness (as every intentionally perpetrated 
act undoubtedly does), would have a free causality for its grounds, which expresses its 
character in its appearances (the acts) from early youth onwards, which because of the 
uniformity of conduct indicates a natural context, which however does not make the ill-
starred constitution of the will necessary, but rather the consequence of the free-willed 
acceptance of evil and unchangeable principles, which only make them that much more 
reprehensible and worthy of punishment.�60 It does not occur to Kant, that the moral 
verdict might err over psychopaths. The allegedly free causality is relocated into early 
childhood, entirely fitting by the way to the genesis of the superego. It is ludicrous 
however that �babies� [in English], whose reason is only just forming, are attested that 
autonomy, which is attached to the fully developed reason. By backdating the moral 
responsibility of the individual act of the adult to its earliest, dawning prehistory, an 
unmoral pedagogic sentence of punishment is meted out to those who are not yet grown 
up in the name of adulthood. The processes, which decide in the first years of life over 
the formation of the ego and superego or, as in the Kantian paradigm, over their failure, 
can evidently neither be a priorized for the sake of their ancientness, nor can their 
extremely empirical content be ascribed that purity, which Kant�s doctrine of the moral 
law demands. In his enthusiasm for the necessity of punishing childhood criminals, he 
leaves the intelligible realm solely in order to raise mischief in the empirical one. 
The Intelligible and the Unity of Consciousness 287-292
What Kant thought in the concept of the intelligible character, is despite the ascetic 
reticence of his theory not beyond all conjecture: the unity of the person, the equivalent 
of the epistemological unity of the self-consciousness. Behind the scenes of the Kantian 
system, it is expected that the highest concept of practical philosophy would coincide 
with the highest one of the theoretical kind, the ego-principle, which theoretically 
produces the unity as well as practically restraining and integrating the drives. The unity 
of the person is the location of the doctrine of the intelligible. According to the 
architecture of the form-content dualism endemic to Kant it counts as a form: the 
principle of particularization is, in an involuntary dialectic which was first explicated by 
Hegel, something universal. For the honor of universality, Kant distinguishes 
terminologically between the personality and the person. The former would be �the 
freedom and independence of the mechanism of all of nature, yet simultaneously 
considered as a capacity of a being whose peculiar, pure practical laws, given from its 
own reason, the person therefore, is in thrall to the world of the senses, is subject to its 
own personality, insofar as it belongs at the same time to the intelligible world.�61 In 
personality [Persoenlichkeit], the subject as pure reason, indicated by the suffix �-ity�   
[�-keit�, the German equivalent of the English suffix �-ness�] as the index of a 
conceptual generality, the person, the subject, is supposed to be subordinated as an 
empirical, natural individual being. What Kant meant by the intelligible character might 
come very close to the personality in an older usage of speech, which �belongs to the 
intelligible world�. The unity of self-consciousness genetically presupposes not only the 
psychological-factical contents of consciousness, but its own pure possibility; indicating 
a zone of indifference of pure reason and spatio-temporal experience. Hume�s critique of 
the I glosses over the fact that the facts of consciousness would not be available, without 
being determined inside of an individual consciousness, rather than in some other thing 
chosen at random. Kant corrects him, but neglects however for his part the reciprocity: 
his critique of Hume is personality rigidified into a principle beyond individual persons, 
into their framework. He grasps the unity of consciousness independent of every 
experience. Such independence exists to some degree in relation to the variable 
individual facts of consciousness, not however radically against all existing being of 
factual contents of consciousness. Kant�s Platonism � in the Phaedo the soul was 
something similar to an idea � epistemologically repeats the eminently bourgeois 
affirmation of personal unity in itself at the expense of its content, which under the name 
of personality ultimately left behind nothing but the strongman. The formal achievement 
of integration, by no means a priori formal but substantive, the sedimented exploitation of 
inner nature, usurps the rank of the good. The more a personality would be, it is 
suggested, the better it would be, heedless of the dubiousness of the being-of-one-self. 
The great novels of the eighteenth century intuited this. Fielding�s Tom Jones, the orphan 
child, someone who was a �compulsive character� in the psychological sense, stood for 
the human being unmutilated by convention and becomes at the same time comical. The 
latest echo of this is the rhinoceros of Ionesco: the only one, who resists bestial 
standardization and to this extent preserves a strong ego, is an alcoholic and a 
professional failure, not strong at all according to the verdict of life. In spite of the 
example of the radically evil little child, one ought to ask, as to whether an evil 
intelligible character is even conceivable for Kant; as to whether he seeks evil in the fact 
that the formal unity fails. Where there is no unity at all, one could probably no more 
speak of good than among animals, nor of evil either; he may have conceived of the 
intelligible character as closest to the strong I, which can rationally control all its 
impulses, as was taught in the entire tradition of modern rationalism, especially by 
Spinoza and Leibniz, who were in agreement at least on this point.*13* Great philosophy 
hardens itself against the idea of a humanity which is not modeled after the reality-
principle, not hardened in itself. This gives Kant the thought-strategical advantage, of 
being able to carry out the thesis of freedom parallel to consistent causality. For the unity 
of the person is not merely the formal a priori, which appears in the Kantian system, but 
against his will, and for the benefit of his demonstrandum [Latin: what is demonstrated], 
the moment of all individual contents of the subject. Each of its impulses is �its� impulse 
just as much as the subject is the totality of impulses, and thus their qualitative Other. In 
the utterly formal region of self-consciousness both melt together. From it one can 
predicate, without distinction, what is not exhausted in each other: the factical content 
and the mediation, the principle of its context. The matter-at-hand, tabooed according to 
the traditional-logical manner of argumentation, but all the more really dialectical for 
that, is vindicated in the indifference-concept of personality through the most extreme 
abstraction, by the fact that in the antagonistic world the individual subjects are also 
antagonistic in themselves, free and unfree. In the night of indifference, the palest ray of 
light falls on freedom as personality in itself, a Protestant inwardness, removed even from 
itself. The subject is justified, in Schiller�s pithy saying, by what it is, not by what it does, 
just as the Lutherans once were by faith, not by works. The involuntary irrationality of 
the Kantian intelligible character, its indeterminacy, which is mandated by the system, 
tacitly secularizes the explicitly theological doctrine of the irrationality of election by 
grace. This latter was admittedly conserved in advancing enlightenment, always more 
oppressively. If God was once pushed by the Kantian ethics into the as it were provident 
[dienende: serving, providing] role of the postulate of practical reason � this too is 
anticipated in Leibniz and even Descartes � then it is difficult to conceive of something 
under the intelligible character, irrationally existent-as-such, as anything else except the 
same blind fate, against which the idea of freedom took exception. The concept of 
character always oscillated between nature and freedom.62 The more ruthlessly the 
absolute being-so of the subject is equated with its subjectivity, the more impenetrable its 
concept. What formerly seemed to be the election by grace of divine counsel, can 
scarcely be thought anymore as one by objective reason, which nevertheless would have 
to appeal to the subjective one. The pure being-in-itself of human beings, excluding every 
empirical content, which is sought in nothing but its own rationality, does not permit 
rational judgement about why it succeeded here, and failed there. The authority however 
to which the intelligible character is attached, pure reason, is itself something becoming 
and to this extent also something conditional, not anything absolutely conditioning. That 
it posits itself outside of time as what is absolute � an anticipation of the same Fichte, 
with whom Kant was feuding � is far more irrational than any creation doctrine. This 
rendered an essential contribution to the alliance between the idea of freedom and real 
unfreedom. Irreducibly existent, the intelligible character duplicates itself in the concept 
of that second nature, as which society stamps the characters of all of its members 
anyway. If one translated Kant�s ethics into judgements over real human beings, its only 
criterion is: how someone would now once be, therefore their unfreedom. Schiller�s pithy 
saying certainly wished primarily to announce the revulsion evoked by the subjugation of 
all human relationships under the exchange-principle, the evaluation of one act against 
another. Kantian moral philosophy registers the same motif in the opposition of dignity 
and price. In the right society however the exchange would not only be abolished but 
fulfilled: noone would be shortchanged of the yield of their labor. As little as the isolated 
act can be weighed, so little is there something good which is not expressed in acts. 
Absolute reflection, exclusive of any specific intervention, would degenerate into 
absolute indifference, into what is inhuman. Both Kant and Schiller objectively 
anticipated the loathsome concept of a free-floating nobility, which self-appointed elites 
could later attest to at will as their selfsame characteristic. In the Kantian moral 
philosophy lurks a tendency towards its sabotage. In it the totality becomes 
indistinguishable from the preestablished status of the elect. That the right or wrong of an 
act is no longer to be casuistically asked, also has its sinister moment: the competency of 
judgement crosses over into the compulsions of empirical society, which the Kantian 
agathon [Greek: the good] wished to transcend. The categories noble and mean are, like 
all doctrines of bourgeois freedom, ingrown with familial and natural relationships. In 
late bourgeois society their natural-rootedness breaks through once again, as biologism 
and finally race-theory. The reconciliation of morality and nature envisioned by the 
philosophizing Schiller, against Kant and secretly in unison with him, is not at all as 
human and innocent in the existent, as it gives itself to know. Nature, once outfitted with 
meaning, is substituted in place of that possibility, which the construction of the 
intelligible character was aimed at. In Goethe�s kalokagathia [Greek: noble character, 
goodness] the ultimately homicidal recoil is unmistakable. Already a letter of Kant, 
concerning his portrait by a Jewish painter, made use of a despicable anti-Semitic thesis, 
later popularized by the Nazi Paul Schultze-Naumburg.*14* Freedom is really and truly 
restricted by society, not only from outside but in itself. As soon as it is utilized, it 
multiplies unfreedom; the placeholder of what is better is always also the accomplice of 
what is worse. Even where human beings feel themselves to be most free from society, in 
the strength of their ego, they are at the same time its agents: the ego-principle is 
implanted in them by society, and the latter honors it, although restraining it. Kant�s 
ethics is not yet aware of this awkwardness, or posits itself as beyond such.
Truth-content of the Doctrine of the Intelligible 292-294
If one dared to wager as to what the Kantian X of the intelligible character owes its true 
content, which maintained itself against the total indeterminacy of the aporetic concept, it 
would probably be the historically most advanced, periodically flaring, swiftly fading 
consciousness, which is inherent in the impulse to do the right thing. It is the concrete, 
intermittent anticipation of the possibility, neither alien to human beings nor identical 
with them. They are not only the substrates of psychology. For they are not exhausted by 
the concretized exploitation of nature, which has become autonomous, which they 
projected back on themselves from external nature. They are things in themselves, insofar 
as the things are only something artificially made by them; to this extent the world of 
phenomena is truly an appearance [Schein]. The pure will of the Kantian Foundation is 
for that reason not so different from the intelligible character. The verse of Karl Kraus, 
�What has the world made of us� ponders ruefully on it; it is falsified by anyone who 
imagines they possess it. It breaks through negatively in the pain of the subject, that all 
human beings, in what they became, in their reality, are mutilated. What would be 
different, the no longer inverted essence, rejects a language which bears the stigmata of 
the existent: theology spoke once of mystical names. However the separation of the 
intelligible from the empirical character is experienced in the eons-old block, which 
slides that which is supplementary before the pure will: external considerations of all 
conceivable kinds, the many times over subaltern, irrational interests of subjects of the 
false society; in general the principle of the particular self-interest, which prescribes to 
everything individuated without exception its actions in the society, as it is, and which is 
the death of all. The block prolongs itself from within, in the narrow-minded egoistic 
cravings, then in neuroses. These absorb, as everyone knows, an immeasurable quantum 
of available human power and prevent, on the line of least resistance, with the cunning of 
the unconscious, that which is right, which irrefutably contradicts biased self-
preservation. Therein the neuroses have it so much the easier, can rationalize themselves 
so much the better, as the self-preserving principle in a state of freedom would come to 
that which is its own just as much as the interests of others, which damages it a priori. 
Neuroses are the pillars of society; they frustrate the better possibilities of human beings 
and thereby what is objectively better, which might be brought about by humanity. They 
tendentially dam up the instincts, which press beyond the false condition, into narcissism, 
which satisfies itself in the false condition. This is a hinge in the mechanism of evil: 
weaknesses, which are mistaken if possible for strengths. In the end the intelligible 
character would be the crippled rational will. What by contrast would count in it as the 
higher, the more sublime, what is not ruined by what is inferior, is essentially its own 
neediness, the inability to transform what is humiliating: failure, stylized as an end in 
itself. Nevertheless there is nothing better amongst human beings than that character; the 
possibility of being different from what one is, even though all are locked up in their self 
and thereby locked away even from their self. The glaring flaw of the Kantian doctrine, 
that which is elusive or abstract in the intelligible character, also has a touch of the truth 
of the ban on the graven image, which post-Kantian philosophy, Marx included, extended 
to all concepts of what is positive. As the possibility of the subject, the intelligible 
character is, like freedom, something becoming, not anything existent. It would be 
betrayed, the moment it was incorporated into the existent by description, even by the 
most cautious one. In the right condition everything would be, as in the Jewish 
theologoumenon [Greek: theology], only the tiniest bit different than what it is, but not 
the slightest thing can be imagined, as how it would then be. In spite of this the 
intelligible character can be spoken of only to the extent it does not hover abstractly and 
powerlessly over the existent, but really keeps arising in the guilty context of such, and is 
realized by this latter. The contradiction of freedom and determinism is not, as the self-
understanding of the critique of reason would like, one between the theoretical positions 
of dogmatism and skepticism, but one of the self-experience of the subject, now free, 
now unfree. Under the aspect of freedom they are non-identical with themselves, because 
the subject is hardly one yet, and indeed precisely by virtue of its instauration as a 
subject: the self is what is inhuman. Freedom and the intelligible character are related to 
identity and non-identity, without clare et distincte [Latin: clearly and distinctly] allowing 
themselves to be entered on one side of the ledger or another. The subjects are free, 
according to the Kantian model, to the extent that they are conscious of themselves, 
identical with themselves; and in such identity also again unfree, insofar as they are 
subject to its compulsion and perpetuate it. They are unfree as non-identical, as diffuse 
nature, and yet as such free, because in the impulses, which overpower them � the non-
identity of the subject with itself is nothing else � they are also rid of the compulsory 
character of identity. Personality is the caricature of freedom. The ground of the aporia is 
that the truth beyond the identity-compulsion would not be purely and simply its Other, 
but is mediated through it. All individuals are in the socialized society incapable of what 
is moral, which is socially demanded, but which would be real only in an emancipated 
society. Social morality would be solely, to finally bring the bad infinity, the dreadful 
cycle of retribution, to an end. The individual meanwhile is left with nothing more of 
what is moral, than what Kant�s moral theory, which conceded inclination to animals, but 
not respect,63 has only contempt for: to attempt to live so, that one may believe to have 
been a good animal.
Footnotes
*1* [Footnote pg 225]
The Kantian thought-experiments are not dissimilar to existential ethics. Kant, who well 
knew that good will had its medium in the continuity of a life and not in the isolated 
deed, sharpens good will to a decision between two alternatives in the experiment, so that 
it should prove what it ought to. This continuity hardly exists anymore; this is why Sartre 
clings steadfastly to the decision, in a kind of regression to the 18th century. Yet while 
autonomy is supposed to be demonstrated in the alternative situations, it is heteronomous 
before all content. Kant had to provide a despot for one of his examples of the situation of 
decision; analogously, the Sartrean ones stem many times over from fascism, true as the 
denunciation of the latter, not as a condition humaine [French: human condition]. only 
those who would not have to accept any alternatives at all would be free, and in the 
existent it is a trace of freedom, to reject them. Freedom means the critique and 
transformation of situations, not their confirmation by a decision reached within their 
compulsory apparatus. When Brecht, following a discussion with students, permitted the 
collectivistic teaching-play of the Yes-man to be followed by the deviating Nay-sayer, he 
helped this insight to break through in spite of his official credo. 
*2* [Footnote pg 227]
The �conception of certain laws� amounts to the concept of pure reason, which indeed 
Kant defines as �the capacity of cognizing out of principles.�
*3* [Footnote pg 236] 
�By a concept of practical reason, I understand the conception of an object as a possible 
effect through freedom. To be an object of practical cognition as such, means therefore 
only the relation of the will to the action, by which it or its opposite would be really 
made, and the judgement, as to whether something would be an object of pure practical 
reason or not, is merely the distinction between the possibility or impossibility of willing 
the action in question, whereby, if we had the capacity for this (which must be judged by 
experience), a certain object would come to be.� (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 
WW V, Academy-Edition, pg 57).
*4* [Footnote pg 238]
�For that which necessarily drives us to go beyond the borders of experience and all 
appearances, is what is unconditional, which reason necessarily and with every right 
demands in the things in themselves to everything which is conditioned and thereby fully 
achieves the sequence of conditions. If it turns out now, if one assumes, our cognition of 
experience directing itself according to the objects as things in themselves, that the 
unconditional could not at all be thought without contradiction; on the other hand, if one 
assumes, our conception of things, as they are given to us, direct themselves not 
according to these as things in themselves, but that these objects direct themselves rather 
as appearances according to our manner of conception, the contradiction falls away; and 
that consequently the unconditional ought to be met not in things, insofar as we know 
them (as they are given to us), but rather in them, insofar as we do not know them, as 
things in themselves: thus demonstrating, that what we at the beginning only tentatively 
assumed, would be grounded.� (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, WWW III, Academy 
Edition, pg. 13)
*5* [Footnote pg 246]
�Hegel was the first, who correctly portrayed the relationship of freedom and necessity. 
For him freedom is the insight into necessity. �Necessity is blind only insofar as the 
selfsame is not understood.� Freedom does not lie in the dreamed-of independence from 
natural laws, but in the cognition of these laws, and in the possibility given thereby, of 
causing them to act in a planned fashion for determinate ends. This applies as much in 
relation to the laws of external nature, as to those which regulate the bodily and 
intellectual existence of human beings � two classes of laws, which we could separate 
from each other at most in the imagination, but not in reality. The freedom of the will 
means therefore nothing other than the capacity, to be able to decide with relevant 
knowledge [Sachkenntnis]. The freer therefore the judgement of a human being in 
relation to a certain standpoint, the greater the necessity by which the content of this 
judgement is determined; while the uncertainty which rests on ignorance, which seems to 
arbitrarily choose between many various and contradictory possibilities of decision, 
exactly thereby proves its unfreedom, its mastery by the objects, which it is supposed to 
master. Freedom consists therefore in the cognition of the domination, founded in natural 
necessities, over ourselves and over external nature; it is thereby necessarily a product of 
historical development.� (Karl Marx/Frederick Engels, Works, Berlin 1962, Vol. 20, Pg. 
106)
*6* [Footnote pg 251] 
�This now makes clear, that the schematism of understanding through the transcendental 
synthesis of the power of imagination, would amount to nothing other than the unity of 
everything which is diverse of the intuition in the inner sense and thus indirectly to the 
unity of the apperception as a function, to which the inner sense (of a receptivity) 
corresponds. Therefore the schemata of pure concepts of understanding are the true and 
sole conditions for providing these with a relation to objects, hence a meaning, and the 
categories have thus in the end no other possible empirical use, than in thereby serving, 
through grounds of an a priori necessary unity (due to the necessary unification of 
everything conscious in an originary apperception), to submit the appearances to the 
universal rules of the synthesis and thereby to fit them to thorough-going interlinking in 
an experience.� (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ibid. Pg 138)
*7* [Footnote page 257]
In keeping with the tenor of the Critique of Pure Reason, the opposite intention can still 
be found there: �The more that legislation and government were arranged in accordance 
with this idea, the more seldom in any case would punishment become, and thus it is then 
entirely rational (as Plato maintained) that in a perfected arrangement of the former 
nothing of the latter would be necessary.� (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ibid. pg 248)
*8* [Footnote pg 268]
�In the judgement of free acts in view of its causality, we can therefore come only to the 
intelligible cause, but not beyond the same; we can recognize, that it is free, i.e. is 
determined independent of the senses, and in such a manner could be the sensorily 
unconditional condition of appearances. Why however the intelligible character would 
yield exactly these appearances and this empirical character under existing 
circumstances, this goes far beyond all capacity of our reason to answer, indeed beyond 
all capacity of the same even to ask, as if one were asking: why does the transcendental 
object of our external sensory intuition yield precisely only the intuition in space and not 
some other kind.� (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ibid. pg 376) 
*9* [Footnote pg 274]
�This alienation, in order to remain comprehensible to the philosophers, can naturally be 
sublated only under two practical prerequisites.� (Karl Marx/Frederick Engels, The 
German Ideology, Berlin 1960, pg 31)
*10* [Footnote pg 276]
�Shortly after the publication of Heidegger�s masterwork, its objective-ontological 
implication could already be demonstrated in Kierkegaard�s concept of existence 
[Existenzbegriff] and the recoil of the objectless interior into negative objectivity.� (See 
Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, Frankfurt am Main, 
1962, pg 87)
*11* [Footnote pg 279]
�Every such act is right, which can exist together � or, whose maxim permits the freedom 
of the caprice of everyone � with everyone�s freedom in accordance with a universal 
law.� (Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Introduction to the Doctrine of Law, Section C, WW 
VI, Academy Edition, Pg. 230)
*12* [Footnote pg 286]
It is easy to reckon against the concept of the intelligible, that it would be forbidden to 
positively mention unknown causes of appearances, even in the uttermost abstraction. A 
concept over which simply nothing is to be said, cannot be operated with, it would be 
equal to nothingness, nothingness also its own content. Therein German idealism had one 
of its most effective arguments against Kant, without the former stopping very long at the 
Kantian-Leibnizian idea of the border-concept. Meanwhile one would need to 
remonstrate against Fichte�s and Hegel�s plausible critique of Kant. It follows for its part 
traditional logic, which rejects discussing something which would not be reduced to the 
content of the thing, which comprises the substance of that concept, as idle. In their 
rebellion against Kant, the idealists have overzealously forgotten the principle which they 
followed against him: that the consistency of thought compels the construction of 
concepts, which have no representative in the positively determinable given fact. For the 
sake of the speculation, they denounced Kant as a speculator, guilty of the same 
positivism which they accused him of. In the alleged failure of the Kantian apologetics of 
the thing in itself, which the logic of consistency since Maimon could so triumphantly 
demonstrate, the memory lives on in Kant of the ghostly moment counter to the logic of 
consistency, non-identity. That is why he, who certainly did not mistake the consistency 
of his critics, protested against them and would rather be convicted of dogmatism than 
absolutize identity, from whose own meaning, as Hegel recognized quickly enough, the 
relation to something non-identical is inalienable. The construction of the thing in itself 
and the intelligible character is that of something non-identical as the condition of the 
possibility of identification, but also that which eludes the grasp of the categorical 
identification.
*13* [Footnote pg 289]
Concerning the relationship of the Kantian doctrine of the will to that of Leibniz and 
Spinoza, see Johan Eduard Erdmann, History of Modern Philosophy, Neudruck Stuttgart 
1932, especially Volume 4, pg 128.
*14* [Footnote pg 292]
�Heartfelt thanks, my most esteemed and dearest friend, for the revelation of your kind 
sentiments towards me, which duly arrived along with your beautiful present the day after 
my birthday! The portrait which Mr. Loewe, a Jewish painter, produced without my 
permission, is indeed supposed, as my friends say, to have a degree of similarity with me, 
but a connoisseur of paintings said at the first glance: a Jew always paints another Jew; 
whereupon he puts the emphasis on the nose: but enough of this.� (From: Kant�s Letters, 
Volume 2, 1789-1794, Berlin 1900, pg 33)

 Negative Dialectics.hwp
 

Negative Dialectics.hwp

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