Kant on Freedom and Radical Evil in Infancy more

Why does a child cry at birth without tears? Kant on Freedom and Radical Evil in Infancy Joseph Cannon (forthcoming, Proceedings of the XIth International Kant Congress, de Gruyter) When most of us hear a baby cry, we hear a diaper that needs changing, discomfort, hunger, or a noise that we dearly wish would stop. Kant, however, hears something quite different, and close to the heart of his views of human nature and the possible course of moral and cultural development. He devotes a surprising amount of thought to crying infants in Anthropologie in Pragmatischer Hinsicht (henceforth Anthropologie), opening with it, and returning to it at two pivotal moments of the text, as well as a marginal note in his Handschrift to that work. Kant hears two things in a baby’s cry: 1) an expression of frustration at its inability to freely use its limbs, which is 2) an announcement of its claim, as a rational being, to unconditional freedom. These are connected in Kant’s view: the frustration of the inability to use one’s limbs is a feeling of a hindrance to freedom, which the child (dimly) perceives as an injustice: Ja das Kind, welches sich nur eben dem mütterlichen Schooße entwunden hat, scheint zum Unterschiede von allen andern Thieren blos deswegen mit lautem Geschrei in die Welt zu treten: weil es sein Unvermögen, sich seiner Gliedmaßen zu bedienen, für Zwang ansieht und so einen Anspruch auf Freiheit (wovon kein anderes Thier eine Vorstellung hat) sofort ankündigt 1 This behavior, Kant claims, is entirely unlike that of other animals at birth: “Kein Thier aber außer dem Menschen (wie er jetzt ist) wird beim Geboren werden seine Existenz laut ankündigen”2. This announcement indicates possession of the idea of 1 Anth, AA 07:268.27-31. Kant sometimes explains infant crying as a mechanical response to pain, not Anth, AA 07:327n. frustration (e.g. Päd, AA 09:459.23-26). 2 Page 1 of 10 MINE.docx freedom, which is not possessed by any other animal: “das Gefühl der Unbehaglichkeit in ihm nicht vom körperlichen Schmerz, sondern von einer dunkelen Idee (oder dieser analogen Vorstellung) von Freiheit und der Hinderniß derselben, dem Unrecht, herrühre”3. This is a significant claim; it attributes to a newborn infant, to whom one cannot by any stretch of the imagination attribute the capacity to reason, the possession of reason.4 Unsurprisingly, Kant does not thereby attribute moral accountability to newborns. However, a minimal kind of accountability is surprisingly close behind. According to Kant, the meaning of a child’s cries changes at three months, as indicated by the fact that the child begins to shed tears when it cries, a change to which Kant attributes a striking significance. It indicates, he claims, a development of the child’s representations of “Beleidigung und Unrechtthun”5. Later, he suggests that this development endows the infant with a minimal moral accountability; now possessing dim moral concepts of offense and injustice, he or she can perceive a hindrance as an affront and begins to respond to frustration imperiously: Dieser Trieb, seinen Willen zu haben und die Verhinderung daran als eine Beleidigung aufzunehmen, zeichnet sich durch seinen Ton auch besonders aus und läßt eine Bösartigkeit hervorscheinen, welche die Mutter zu bestrafen sich genöthigt sieht. 6 The first few months of life is thus for Kant a brief period of innocence that ends when the child becomes capable of intuiting perceptual objects, and thus desiring things. At this point, the claim to freedom innocently (because indifferently) expressed by the newborn becomes an impulse to have his own way.7 The description of tearful cries as bösartig suggests a strong connection between these passages and the account of radical evil in Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (henceforth Religion) 3 4 Anth, AA 07:269n. This could also be interpreted as an attempt to deal with a difficult problem in his ethics: how an infant, Anth AA 07:127.26-27. Anth AA 07:269n. This impulse seems to be the same one Kant analyses in “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in prior to attaining the capacity to reason, is yet a person in the sense that obligates others. 5 6 7 weltbuürgerlicher Absicht” under the term ‘unsociability’. Page 2 of 10 MINE.docx since in that work Kant calls the third, most blameworthy, “grade” of evil, Bösartigkeit. Kant, however, does not make the connection explicit. In fact, it is not obvious how to do so, despite the striking terminological similarity. Whereas Bösartigkeit in Religion indicates an intentional moral failing in which one makes satisfying his or her inclinations a condition of obeying the moral law, in Anthropologie it is at least once described as a ‘temperamental predisposition’ and thus not something that is necessarily blameworthy.8 It also, of course, strains credulity to attribute to an infant an intentionally evil act. In this paper I will offer a reading that brings the two accounts together in a way that illuminates a bedeviling problem in Religion: how to consistently claim that humans possess both an original predisposition (Anlage) to the good and an innate propensity (Hang) to evil. I will begin by presenting Kant’s interpretation of a newborn’s cries in their innocence, to show how he ties the use of one’s limbs intimately to the experience and exercise of freedom, and to our predispositions towards the ends appropriate to humanity as a free being. Then, I will examine Kant’s account of the changes that occur in the first three months, showing how he ties them to the child’s capacity to perceive objects, as a precondition for desiring objects. Finally, I will show that a careful look at Kant’s account of crying shows that Religion’s account of an innate ‘propensity to evil’ can be made consistent with a period of innocence in human life, and shows that the impulse to have one’s own way in a young child is a precursor, with the same structural characteristics, of the ‘inversion of the incentives’ Kant calls Bösartigkeit in Religion. The Use of the Limbs The newborn cries because of an inability to use his limbs, which feels to him like a hindrance of his freedom. The figure of the ‘use of one’s limbs’ is writ large in Kant’s account of the nature and possible development of the human being, most clearly in the Pädagogik. There, Kant’s frequently admonishes parents and educators to ensure as 8 E.g. Anth AA 07:293.14. Page 3 of 10 MINE.docx much as possible that a child “seine Freiheit fühlen”9, and explicitly ties the ability to feely use one’s limbs to this feeling. This leads him to, first of all, denounce the practice of swaddling infants, which, he argues, constrains the use of the limbs, causing ‘anxiety’ and ‘desperation’ in the child.10 It also shapes his recommendations for childhood education, leading him to advocate an educational regime in which the child learns, whenever possible, by figuring out how to do things for him or herself, and which relies as much as possible on the child’s own manner of play to develop physical capacities and his or her judgment.11 These recommendations presume a strong reciprocal connection between the physical form of human beings and rational freedom, for which he argues in Anthropologie, claiming that the rationality of the human being can be inferred simply from an examination of our form: Die Charakterisirung des Menschen als eines vernünftigen Thieres liegt schon in der Gestalt und Organisation seiner Hand, seiner Finger und Fingerspitzen […] dadurch die Natur ihn nicht für Eine Art der Handhabung der Sachen, sondern unbestimmt für alle, mithin für den Gebrauch der Vernunft geschickt gemacht und dadurch.12 For Kant the versatility of the limbs, especially the hands, of human beings indicates a unique capacity to be educated to effectively pursue a wide variety of possible ends and a similarly unique need to be educated in order to successfully pursue any ends.13 For Kant the fact that there is no single path set out for us, but we are endowed with a broad set of developable capacities, suggests that we are intended for – have a predisposition (Anlage) to – reason; we are not given ends, but can and must set them for ourselves. Kant, thus, offers an account of human physicality that echoes his ethical 9 Päd AA 09:464.18. Päd AA 09:458.30-1. He praises the practices of some Native Americans, as well as the Italian arcuccio Päd AA 09:467.28f. Anth AA 07:323.14-20. Here he follows George Fordyce’s claim that a being’s ends can be seen in the Ibid. Compare Pädagogik: “Der Mensch braucht Wartung und Bildung. […] Diese braucht, soviel man 10 as superior because it allows the infant “den freien Gebrauch ihrer Glieder” (Päd AA 09:458.23). 11 12 form of its body in utero. (See Metaphysik Mongrovius V-MP/Mron AA 29:916.) 13 weiß, kein Their.” (Päd AA 09:443.3-4) Also compare Anth AA 07:323.26f. Page 4 of 10 MINE.docx accounts of the personhood, the rational freedom, of human beings. A newborn’s cries demonstrate, in addition to the predisposition to free action indicated by the versatility of the limbs, an immediate desire to exercise that versatility as widely as one can, a ‘Freiheitsneigung’ that can become a passion.14 This desire is for Kant the only way an idea or representation of freedom could manifest given a newborn’s mind and physique: When this desire runs up against the limitations of undeveloped limbs, and perhaps the unnatural constraint of swaddling clothes, it becomes expressed as a cry of frustration at the feeling of a hindrance to its free movement. From Birth to Three Months The most important thing to glean from Kant’s account of the development of the human being prior to full moral accountability is the way he takes reason, and thus freedom, to manifest before a person can reasonably be expected to make full use of it. What is crucial for Kant is that, even as newborns, we lay claim to unconditional freedom. Unlike other animals, we are driven to pursue the full range of our possible activity. Our freedom is tied to reason, and reason is a drive to the unconditioned. It is well known that Kant thinks of reason in this way in the theoretical arena. It is what causes the storied problems of ‘natural’ metaphysics, as reason is constitutionally dissatisfied with unanswered questions.15 In the practical arena, this rational predisposition manifests differently: Der eigene Wille ist immer in Bereitschaft, in Widerwillen gegen seinen Nebenmenschen auszubrechen, und strebt jederzeit, seinen Anspruch auf unbedingte Freiheit, nicht blos unabhängig, sondern selbst über andere ihm von Natur gleiche Wesen Gebieter zu sein; welches man auch an dem kleinsten Kinde schon gewahr wird.16 14 15 16 Anth AA 07:268.13. “Metaphysik ist, wenn gleich nicht als Wissenschaft, doch als Naturanlage […] wirklich.” (KrV B21) Anth AA 07:327.17-21. The problem of metaphysics (the ‘peculiar fate’ of reason) parallels the ‘unsocial sociability’ of humanity. Kant describes both the drive to ask metaphysical questions that have no satisfying answer, and the drive to gather with, but try to dominate, others, as Anlagen (predispositions). Compare the “original predisposition (Anlage) to the good” in Religion. Page 5 of 10 MINE.docx Kant detects this dominating eigene Wille, (self-will) in the tone of the cries of the months’-old child, but not in the newborn. (We don’t get to be innocent for very long in Kant’s universe, but contrary to some interpretations of Religion, he allows that we do have a period of innocence.) His analysis of this development ties it to a capacity that the child develops in its first months: the ability to track perceptual objects with its eyes. The capacity to apprehend sensible objects and thus strive towards them opens up a new repertoire of possible desires, and possible frustrations. The newborn simply desires to freely move; at three months, by contrast, he or she wants to move towards a desired object. At this point the child cries with tears, which for Kant implies exasperation (Erbitterung) at the inability to attain that object.17 In this, Kant hears the unconditional claim to freedom developed beyond the pure undifferentiated claim of the newborn, which now allows a minimal moral evaluation of the infant’s behavior.18 The inability to attain a desired object begets a childish resentment at the recalcitrance of things over there that stubbornly refuse to be here. The bösartig crying this elicits, I will suggest, is the first evidence of what Kant in Religion calls the propensity to evil. This is confirmed in a marginal note in his Handschrift of Anthropologie. He there defines evil as: the propensity to desire what is impermissible, although one knows very well that it is wrong. The crying of a child, when one does not fulfill his wish, although it would be fulfilled just as little by anyone else, is malicious, and the same holds true with every craving to dominate others.19 Kant then closes the note with a question, “Why does a child cry at birth without tears?” This makes clear the connection between the marginal note and his published 17 18 Anth AA 07:269n. Compare Pädagogik: a newborn has “die Empfindung vom Lichte, können aber die Gegenstände nicht von einander unterscheiden. […] Mit dem Gesichte findet sich auch das Vermögen zu lachen und zu weinen. Wenn das Kind nun in diesem Zustande ist, so schreit es mit Reflexion.” (Päd AA 09:460.24-9) 19 Anth AA 07:324, marginal note in Handschrift. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, translated by Robert Louden. Cambridge. 2006. For the status of Kant’s Handschrift of Anthropologie, see Louden’s introduction p. xxxvi. Page 6 of 10 MINE.docx discussions of the development of crying, and suggests that the use of Bösartigkeit to describe an infant’s tantrum is tied to its use in the Religion to indicate a corrupt inversion of the incentives: the three-month-old cries with tears because it has developed ideas of offense and injustice; these tearful cries arise at the same time a “malicious” tone creeps into the child’s vocalizations; this tone is evidence that a claim to unconditional freedom has become a desire to dominate others; which is “evil” (Böse).20 Infancy and the Propensity to Evil In Religion Kant writes that human beings are originally good, but that this means only that we are created ‘for’ good, and have an “ursprüngliche Anlage” for the good, not that we are born morally good.21 Kant argues that our original predisposition to the good comprises first the types of ‘self-love’ of which human beings are capable, as well as a specifically moral predisposition to the law itself. Kant argues that the desires of selflove – ‘animal’ desires for sex, food, etc., and the ‘human’ desire to be valued relative to one’s fellows – are innocent and of themselves conducive to the good, but can be misused, and have evil ‘grafted’ onto them. The predisposition to the moral law itself cannot be corrupted, and is the reason why Kant believes even the worst criminal never entirely loses his respect for the law. He analyzes the propensity to evil that tempts our predispositions via three “grades” of escalating impurity of motivation: ‘frailty’, ‘impurity’ and ‘depravity’ (Bösartigkeit).22 Frailty is the subjective weakness of the moral law as an incentive as opposed to inclination. Impurity is the need for incentives of inclination to be combined with the moral incentive for the subject to act on them. Depravity (Bösartigkeit) is the propensity to subordinate moral incentives to non-moral ones.23 Kant considers the propensity to evil itself, and not merely acting on it, to be a choice and therefore evil: “Da dieser Hang nun selbst als moralisch böse, mithin nicht 20 21 22 23 Anth AA 07:127.26-7, 07:269n, 07:327.17-21, and 07:324 Handschrift, marginal note. RGV AA 06:44.18-21. RGV AA 06:29.24ff. RGV AA 06:30.11-12. Page 7 of 10 MINE.docx als Naturanlage, sondern als etwas, was dem Menschen zugerechnet werden kann;” it is a propensity residing “in dem subjectiven Grunde der Möglichkeit der Abweichung der Maximen vom moralischen Gesetze”24. To be evil is thus to be conscious of the moral law but yet to allow oneself in advance the possibility of acting otherwise than from the law. This condition, Kant claims, is universal; even the best of us is subject to it and thus must always struggle against him or herself to do the right thing for the right reason.25 However, although the propensity to evil is innate and universal, it is not “original”; unlike a predisposition or instinct, it requires the right occasion if it is to arise. This is true not just of acting on the propensity, but the propensity itself. Kant’s view of the a priority of experience may be an apt model for comparison: empirical experience is a priori subject to the categories, but if one never had empirical experience, one could have no concept of causality, etc. Here, similarly, the propensity to evil is innate, but if one never encounters the kind of situation in which it would manifest, one remains innocent. But, as our account of infant crying shows, for Kant the occasion for the propensity to evil to arise is – once we have achieved minimal cognitive capacities – ubiquitous. Now, one generally thinks of infant behavior as morally innocent, and it does not seem to be classifiable under any of Kant’s “grades” of evil, because they, at least as presented in Religion, presuppose conceptual capacities that we cannot impute to an infant. But Kant claims that the propensity manifests very early in a child’s life. He writes, “Diese angeborne Schuld (reatus), welche so genannt wird, weil sie sich so früh, als sich nur immer der Gebrauch der Freiheit im Menschen äußert”26. For the bösartig tone of a months’-old child’s screams to indicate this ‘guilt’ it must require nothing more than the minimal cognitive capacities one could plausibly attribute to a three-month-old, but not to a newborn. As we have seen, Kant ties it to the developmental milestone of being able to track a perceptual object, which thus arises together with the first manifestation of a dominating self-will in the form of tearful tantrums. A months’ old, by contrast with a newborn, can set an end in a minimal sense: along with the capacity to 24 25 26 RGV AA 06:32.22-4. RGV AA 06:29.7-9, 32.14-5. RGV AA 06:38.1-3. Page 8 of 10 MINE.docx perceive an object comes the possibility of wanting that object. The months’-old can strive towards objects, and therefore become exasperated by their recalcitrance; he resents not getting what he wants. Now, a newborn or months’-old infant obviously does not distinguish in any cognitive sense between sensibility and the moral law as different kinds of incentive. However, the two fundamental incentives are for Kant present in infancy: We have seen him claim that a newborn’s first cries express a claim to unconditional freedom; similarly, in Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft he argues that the incentives of self-love are “natürlich und noch vor dem moralischen Gesetze in uns rege”27. The infant is a human being, and thus possesses two inalienable grounds for action: the incentives of sensible inclination, and the drive to exercise freedom. Both are “natural and active in us” prior to the cognitive capacities required for moral accountability. In a mature thinker, they manifest as awareness of two possible grounds for action, self-love and the law. Radical evil is the constant temptation to Bösartigkeit, to preferring oneself and thus making “die Triebfeder der Selbstliebe und ihre Neigungen zur Bedingung der Befolgung des moralischen Gesetzes”.28 For Kant, even though a months’-old child is not capable of thinking in these terms, the dueling incentives are present, as is the possibility of inverting them. Thus the unconditional claim to freedom becomes a demand to dominate others via the same inversion of the incentives characteristic of Bösartigkeit as Kant analyzes it in Religion. The unconditional (and in itself good) claim to freedom is subordinated to the inclinations in such a way that it is treated as an inclination.29 The newborn cannot claim to be master over others, because it does not yet have any concept of others; the child possesses the idea of freedom but not the concept of an object, much less of other people. Thus, its claim to freedom can only manifest as a desire to move itself around, and frustration at its inability to do so. An infant’s cries only become bösartig once there is an object to cry at. This is not to say, however, that Kant considers a month’s-old child a moral agent. An infant does not have the capacity to 27 28 29 KpV AA 05:73.16. RGV AA 06:36.29-30. This can also give the drive to satisfy one’s inclinations the unconditionality characteristic of the claim to freedom, the destructive effects of which Kant analyzes in Kritik der Urtheilskraft (§ 83). Page 9 of 10 MINE.docx recognize the moral significance of personhood. It is only once we are capable of realizing that our actions affect other people that we are moral agents and fully accountable. This suggestion is confirmed in Kant’s account of discipline in Pädagogik. The stage at which a child becomes aware of him or herself as an object among others is also when he becomes aware that some of those objects sometimes respond to his vocalizations by giving him things. The child thus responds to his own relative powerlessness by asking (and then demanding) others to do things for him. This is the point at which ‘discipline,’ the shaping of a child’s behavior according to rules, becomes possible, and thus punishment becomes justifiable as a means of teaching a child to recognize and follow rules. It is also when the most damage can be done, Kant thinks, by bad upbringing, the point at which one can “spoil” children in the serious sense of ‘make them go bad.’30 This makes some sense of the way in which Kant considers infant behavior “evil”, because it doesn’t require attributing implausible cognitive capacities or real moral accountability to the child. What is attributed to the infant is an obscure notion of and drive to freedom, and sensible desires. It is thus capable of the Bösartigkeit of an inversion of the incentives in which the drive to freedom becomes bound up with and subordinated to sensible inclination, but in a pre- or proto-moral sense due to its incapacity to practically distinguish persons from objects. For Kant, the claim to freedom that manifests as early as the newborn’s cries is good or bad depending on how it is directed. Good if directed inward, as the demand that one’s own acts be unconditionally free (i.e. morally good), bad if directed outward as the unconditional demand to do as one pleases and have everything go as one wishes. The former is that resolute striving for the good that Kant calls virtue; the latter is a bösartig self-will that takes one’s own satisfaction as an unconditioned end. The infant, without yet understanding what it is doing, falls into this self-will in its responses to the first feelings of frustration that it associates with an object, and in this way exhibits the propensity to evil. 30 Thus, Kant writes: “Verabsäumung der Disciplin ist ein größeres Übel, als Verabsäumung der Cultur, denn diese kann noch weiterhin nachgeholt werden; Wildheit aber läßt sich nicht wegbringen, und ein Versehen in der Disciplin kann nie ersetzt werden.” (Päd 09:444.13-16) Page 10 of 10 MINE.docx