This is where we see the critical assimilation and fusion of the ideas discussed into a new paradigm. The political constructivism of Kant veers away from that of Rawls. We will extend and synthetically construct ideas that grow from Kant’s PPR and see how this also tends to fit and explain some radical political theories. The critical perspective taken from PPR will show that Kant’s ideas would dovetail with that of Marx and certain anarchist thinkers. It would also give clarity to some aspects of radical thought in the 20thcentury and into our time as well, and open up space for further theorizing.
Kant’s political heteronomy
Based on the political ideas of republicanism, legalism and constitutionalism grounded on reactionary defence of the status quo, it is hard to see even superficially how Kant’s thinking here could bring forth autonomy. In fact, his entire political edifice rests on not only obedience to laws but of unquestioning acceptance of them. It makes a mockery of his critical philosophy. His political ideas are heteronomous in that they insist that people need external force, constructs and guidance in behaving themselves and doing what is right, and this can be further detected through Kant’s insistence that:
- There is a hierarchy that must be obeyed
- Without laws man is uncontrollable and cannot regulate or discipline himself at all
- That humans cannot be trusted to rely on morality and need external coercion to be good
- The contradictory but convenient conflation of obedience to laws made by man and duty to moral laws that supposedly come from within, and so the supervenience of external laws over internal imperatives
- That only heads of state and the state apparatus can dictate what is best for everyone
- That only legislators and members of the state apparatus know what is best for everyone
- That strict linearity of logical extremism is the answer to the world’s problems
- Statism and the fetishization of its laws lead to a kind of transcendentalism that transmutes into transcendence and thereby mysticism
- Even unjust social contracts must be obeyed for the sake of obeying statist constricting notions which substitute inner motivation for external compulsion, such that everyone is forced into agreeing; it is a matter of expedience and what keeps one’s head intact instead of removal by Statism and Authority
- There can be no form of resistance or rebellion even if it is morally driven as all must be subject to obeisance to statist imposition of laws
- That ideas of a social contract are a priori and therefore a good thing as implicitly all such ideas are
- A fatalistic approach is needed and one accepts one’s lot in life, and injustice and tyranny are justified by a set of legal documents
Even the form of a law, as Kant explains in CP, provides a restraining influence on moral drives which are best expressed as maxims that are generated from the moral grounds of the free will of each person. So laws as such are heteronomous and do not encourage moral growth and progress due to their inherently stifling/restrictive nature.
Interestingly, in the CR the natural laws produced via synthetic/synthetic a priori contructs help give the basis for knowledge and making epistemic claims about the world. However, this approach is anathema for practical reason which seeks discipline from moral expression of the individual that can be harnessed as an imperative force for societal co-creation by people. The heteronomous nature of laws is what distinguishes it from practical reason and its moral constructs.
Kant’s political autonomy
The political autonomy of Kant is fused, of course, with his moral imperatives. Practical reason, the essence of pure reason, expresses itself in what we ought to do to be worthy of happiness as we avoid expediency and self serving interests at the expense of others. So anyone acting from reason as such would do so with moral interests in mind. Thus, based on the earlier discussion, Kant’s political autonomy would maintain that:
- Citizens and those representing them would do what is concomitant with the moral drive
- All members of a state or society would act on the moral imperatives and maxims that guide them irrespective of consequences (would be congruent to highest good of all)
- Doing what is right and not what is expedient is an act of freedom and the expression of our free will as autonomous beings
- The essence of humanity is freedom and this means freeing oneself from constraining constructs and laws that are inevitably heteronomous
- In order to be free we will live in a manner that keeps us in balance and as far as possible unshackled from heteronomous limitations
- To act reasonably and be as free as possible from the physical limitations of the phenomenal world, as well as make our lives intelligible, we must act morally always
- Yet the physical world can be changed to suit our moral force if we all act together as representatives of the supersensuous source of things, or noumena, which further expresses itself through free will and its moral grounding
- We will all act and create what are the right, just and compassionate socio-economic-political structures as they are an expression of our moral centre as rational beings, and this is how moral imperatives imprint themselves on our co-created world
- We create what is for the highest good of all and this emanates from the moral centre of the universe which is also anchored within us (just as we are centred within it)
- What we believe from our free will to be right and for the highest good of everyone should be the societal and economic processes we must abide by and develop
- We are moral legislators of our world and we decide what is best for ourselves and our society from that which comes from our moral consciousness
- We are therefore empowered beings who do not and should not rely on external laws and incentives to divert us from expressing ourselves as members of an empowered society and world
- Human beings are an end in themselves and are of spiritual import that makes us and our moral expression beyond measure; we are indeed Immeasurable
- Fear must not be a stumbling block in realizing the human (noumenal/supersensuous) ideal of realistically living out our moral expressions through better lives and a better world for all
All this entails radical theorizing which tells us that from the root cause of what makes us humans grounded in morality, we would eschew those political institutions and their representatives, politicos, the State and its apparatus misaligned to the moral ground; these are but the epitome of restriction and heteronomy. As Kant says in the CP quote above, heteronomy is “…opposed to the principle of obligation and to the morality of the will” and so anything that is forced on us relieves us of any duty or obligation to it, as it is against morality itself. For we should only obey what we believe to be right for the highest good of all, and these are maxims taken without compromise and are an undiluted expression of the supersensuous in its moral grounding in the world.
To continue with the old paradigm that survives today in its form of feudalism-capitalism is the high end of heteronomy in our world. It needs to be resisted and dismantled as the direct expression of our autonomy. And our autonomy is the source of radical thinking and the ideas that coalesce from it – that is, the imperatives and maxims that manifest through PPR to create the forms, processes and models of distributive justice that are congruent to our moral centre as human beings.
Practical political constructivism
So where does all this leave us? If we extrapolate Kant’s political constructivism we would see that defying reactionary tendencies, as well as authoritarianism, totalitarianism, dictatorships, fascism and feudalism (and the capitalism linked to it) are the basics his PPR would entail. It would also, as a positive thesis, evoke ideas of egalitarianism, sense of justice and fairness, compassion, rectitude, selfless service; speaking, standing and acting out one’s truth and showing moral courage in the face of adversity, danger and death. Kantian PPR would, therefore, fit with radical political theorizing.
All this would be a synthetic extension and creation of Kant’s PPR via his practical political constructivism, or Kantian political constructivism/Kantian constructivism.
It seems that political theories and ideas that would appear a natural fit generated from Kantian constructivism would be socialism, communism and its variants (e.g. Marxism-Leninism), anarchism and various other combinations emanating from the creative energies of people transfused with practical reason. Thus, it can be said accurately that the political trend and constructivism that would naturally evolve from Kantian ideas would be those that could be broadly defined as that of a social economy. It is about empowered people and communities.
A social economy would thereby have characteristics that would include communities based on egalitarian principles which promote empowerment of the individual and the group. There would be active citizen participation in policy creation of a society or community. Representatives elected, where deemed necessary, would be indeed representatives of people and not politicians (whose participation in politics is usually a career option). What would be needed is PPR expressed in the formulation of Green and people friendly solutions and policies that do not need Statism and its repressive representatives, apparatus and laws. A social economy would diverge from all forms of heteronomy and abide by autonomy.
The obvious objection is how could an empowered society be possible, when man leads a Hobbesian life of nastiness. Well, heteronomy has been the perennial so-called solution that has been tried in all its extreme forms and the results have been catastrophic: It is a wonder we still exits as a species. It is a greater wonder that the planet hasn’t died on us. The alternative is to try and develop autonomy as far as is humanly possible. It can be tried in a transition phase from the current restrictive paradigm of heteronomous Statism and the corruption it brings, where everyone is either rewarded/bought through money or the threat of punishment.
This idea of radical empowerment and that we can create the world of our choice is shown in these words of Kant as mentioned earlier, that we can “…confer on the sensuous world the form of a system of rational beings. The least attention to ourself shows that this Idea really stands as a model for the determination of our will.” And so as rational beings we would strive for a moral society and this would be the ideal and the model we would naturally work towards in that we do not have the goal of a specific society which then may place ideological (heteronomous) restrictions on what we need to do.
Instead, we work towards our social economy and moral realm in the way that it will be what it is meant to be so as to make us worthy of happiness in serving the highest good of all life and the planet. This would then be an assertion of our autonomy and free will grounded on morality that is a defining characteristic of being human. This we achieve through PPR and the political constructivism it entails.
An example would be Marx and Engels’s idea of Communism. They call it a goal but it is actually an open ended ideal which is the receptacle of our wishes for the highest good of all. To attempt to define it not only makes it sound utopian, but sets it as a goal to work towards and that makes it heteronomous. That is why, aiming for a specific goal can be damaging to the process in which we strive to attain it. What happens is that we insist on empirical validity in the forms of fixed measurements and specific structures/outcomes to be in place (that becomes the goal in itself) to prove realization of the goal; and people and resources become a means to an end. We sneak in utilitarianism even without intending to.
This does not imply that no form of measurement be used at all within the process of things, as it would be impractical and a block to moving forward. But it does imply that having an end goal that in itself must be measurable and used as the specific set of parameters to decide that the said goal has been achieved, is heteronomous and ultimately self-defeating; and it is damaging to moral evolution and autonomous expression along the way.
It is no wonder that the quest for creating a so-called ‘Communist state’ (a self-contradictory notion) has ended up in disaster. It is also not surprising that Marx and Engels, among others, could never with much clarity describe their exact vision of Communism as it is not meant to be a specific entity to be realized. Rather, it is a term that can be used to describe the use of PPR and Kantian constructivism as an expression of autonomy to do what is right by people in co-creating what is for the highest good of all. It is a never ending process of growth and evolution. The only end goal is to keep doing what is for the highest good of all; it is, therefore, practical reason in action (or PPR in this case) – for it is directing/directive in nature and not constitutive or regulative.
Due to the constructivist nature of this process of PPR, the ground activities of people based on moral imperatives, will feed up into the form of formulating workable socio-economic- political principles that are evolving; and that will ensure the ideas adopted are suitable for people to use so as to realize in the most pragmatic manner that which is for the highest good of all. Therefore, the entire process is grounded in what can be achieved and parameters are stretched as the moral drive shapes the way we choose to lead our lives in the world. This process of ground up adjustment of principles to be used to enact our co-created social economy would be called reflective equilibrium by Rawls. And this would apply to Kantian constructivism as well.
So the co-created moral realm and society of Kantian constructivism demands nothing less than trying to create a realistic utopia and thereby work towards viable and feasible results. This is nothing to do with some ‘do-gooder’ altruism but rather taking the road rarely travelled, and finding our way forward as a species in an attempt to create a new earth. We will need to not only have collaboration between ourselves and various communities, but with other states-in-transition that work towards trans-communal cooperation and assistance.
This transnational group or community of people is akin to Kant’s transcendental idea of a ‘state of peoples’ mentioned earlier. Such a transnational community in its coagulating form will be the driving force of a state-in-transition. The latter is an evolutionary process that will see it move into the dismantling as such, or ‘vanishing/withering away’, of the state and its apparatus; the obverse of which would be the firming up of transnational communities as a social group unit of peoples. This would form the bedrock of radical political ideas some of which we can better appreciate in our moment in history, as they are manifested via the shifting tectonics of change occurring in the Middle East, Europe and as evinced by the Occupy movement in the US.
As for states-in-transition (towards an empowered society/community), the sharing of newly developing technology and non-monetary trade will assist and move us out of trade imbalances (debt forgiveness is a given). Stabilised currencies pegged to precious metals and the use of complementary currencies can assist transition societies towards constructing from the ground up what we want ourselves, communities and world to be. We would also have to channel resources towards good people coming out with the right ideas to solve our problems through citizen assemblies, work/idea groups and legislation that reflect our moral drives. Societal legislation will reflect autonomy and that can be changed not due to expediency but what is deemed to be right in our evolutionary process of growth as moral beings in a moral-centric universe.
And Kant, at the prime of his life and mental prowess, would have demanded nothing less — but possibly much more.
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A new ecology II 