Moral philosophy and other forms of philosophical and theoretical commentary on the increasingly widespread, almost paradigmatic, adoption of enhancement technologies by humans seems often to regard it as necessary to question just whether technology enhances our lives at all or, by contrast, whether in practice technological enhancement delimits or restricts what might be described broadly as our ‘human freedom’.
Any serious theoretical or other enquiry involving this question, however, should not simply consider the way in which humans engage with technologies in terms of the periodicity of or their psychological dependence upon such engagements, but also whether the idea(l) of freedom is itself worth rearticulating, whether freedom has ever really existed as a Real object, or whether, alternatively, the conditions on which freedom depends are to be found elsewhere than in the human being. Thus in his essay, ‘Human Freedom and the Technic of Nature’1, Pheng Cheah addresses what he perceives as a difficulty in Kant’s ‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’ and other writings, namely, that his Critiques oversimplify the distinction between the human techne, or technology (speaking generally), and nature and freedom. Kant does this in spite of his attempt to reconcile or “bridge” the gaps perceived to already exist between these categories. In Cheah’s view, Kant “attempted to make organic life an analogue for the actualization of human freedom”, mechanising and technologising freedom so that it exists only in the Deleuze’s sense of the virtual. One of the most startling ramifications of Kant’s cohesion of technology, nature and freedom, however, is that it ascribes to the category of freedom a quality of humanness that is not, in reality, intrinisic to it. So, as Cheah asks,
What does it mean for freedom to be based on something inhuman when we have always regarded freedom as human and humanity to be free, when we axiomatically view freedom as that which co-belongs with humanity, as humankind’s distinctive and highest trait, so much so that it is redundant to speak of human freedom?
Importantly, for Cheah, there is an a priori distinction between the “technic of nature” and the human techne. This is a distinction Cheah makes apparent not in his own clear terms, but in his general observations about Kant’s own views on nature and freedom. Following Hegel, Cheah observes that organic life enabled Kant to argue that ‘ideality’ was intrinsic to nature, that is, that everything in nature had an end and a purpose under a law. This law was, in Lacanian terms, a law of the father, or, more broadly, a law created and imposed, in the case of an artificial object, by the artificer or, in the case of a natural object, or even human freedom, by the natural laws imposed on it by a higher order, that being whichever natural mechanism governs its actions and abilities. Accordingly, in comparing the human will to the freedom a turnspit has to move in accordance with its mechanical design once wound-up, Kant, in ‘The Critique of Practical Reason’, describes the freedom appertaining to the human will as only that which is permitted in accordance with the laws of human’s natural constitutions or mechanical structures:
if the freedom of our will were none other than the latter (say, psychological and comparative but not also transcendental, i.e. absolute), then it would at bottom, be nothing better than the freedom of a turnspit, which, when once it is wound up, also accomplishes its movements of itself.2
Freedom, therefore, according to Kant, must be both “psychological and comparative” but “also transcendental”, and thus must be conceived of as at least potentially cognisable, or ‘feelable’ in the abstract or relative sense, as well as attainable as a real, constant, and materially static state. It may thus be seen as an instance of the ‘reality of the virtual’.
While Cheah’s essay does not address the sense in which Kant conceives of freedom as a virtualised entity in the Deleuzian sense, it is interesting to consider Kant’s understanding of freedom in this restricted sense as precisely the sense in which freedom obtains its ideological or moral content, that is, that the difference between freedom understood ideologically (in accordance with the human techne) and freedom understood technically and pragmatically (in accordance with natural laws), is simply the “ontological difference between the Virtual and the Actual” whose relationship is constitutively ambiguous (“homologous to the ambiguity of quantum physics”) and precisely the source out of which the Real emerges. As Slavoj Zizek notes in relation to the Deleuzian notion of “transcendental empiricism”,
…in contrast to the standard notion of the transcendental as the formal conceptual network that structures the rich flow of empirical data, the Deleuzian transcendental is infinitely RICHER than reality – it is the infinite potential field of virtualities out of which reality is actualized…The paradoxical coupling of opposites (transcendental + empirical) points toward a field of experience beyond (or, rather, beneath) the experience of constituted or perceived reality.3
In this sense, it is arguable that the infinitely potentiating field of human freedom (that is, the ideological, or the transcendental aspect of freedom) and the actual means by and the extent to which human freedom can be understood to exist or be achieved pragmatically, under natural laws and empirical systems (the empirical aspect) together constitute a virtual or Symbolic freedom that is always in effect ‘becoming’, rather than being, real. Kant’s understanding of freedom, then, quite properly laments the impossibility of actualised human freedom but observes, presciently, its symbolic power.
1 Pheng Cheah, ‘Human Freedom and the Technic of Nature: Culture and Organic Life in Kant’s Third Critique’ in Differences. 14:2: Columbia University Press, 2003.
2 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Thomas Abbott, accessible in ebook form here, last visited 17 June 2011.
3 Slavoj Zizek, Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Routledge: New York, 2004.
