9. Ninth Lecture: Roots of Character, Disposition, and Freedom

In this lecture, I begin laying the groundwork for understanding Kant's moral philosophy, starting with a discussion of the concept of freedom in the sense of free will. Novice students often relate this to freedom of choice, so we re-conceptualize it as the foundational idea of being able to make moral choices at all (which is, in turn, based on the broader concept of freedom of choice). I play devil's advocate to a significant extent, challenging the idea of a person having free will. We examine Schelling's description of Judas, which many other scholars have expanded upon (arguing that Judas's deeds were predetermined before his physical formation and self-consciousness). This lecture forms the basic framework for discussing responsibility and serves as a foundation for many later discussions, including those involving Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, and others.

Exploring the idea of freedom is one of the most important aspects of Kant's approach in general and can be considered the primal problem in the Critique of Pure Reason. In this section, we shall analyze this from a psychological perspective, considering its relation to the evolutionary truth and primordial subjectivity (“S0”).

Schelling described how man’s character is defined at a primordial level before birth, referring to Judas gaining the characteristics that led to his betrayal of Christ before his personality was composed and before he gained consciousness. Regarding Kant, there are many interesting descriptions of similar mechanics at work. The question is: do these determine the subject's character, and to what extent does freedom actually exist when it comes to making one’s judgments?

Arguments against freedom

Let us first consider what might indicate the determination of personality to such an extent. When discussing transcendental ideas, Kant also makes a case for the lack of freedom, phrasing it as follows: “There is no freedom, but everything in the world happens solely in accordance with laws of nature.” His explanation is not weak; on the contrary, he explains convincingly how transcendental freedom is contrary to the causal law. Prior to the first cause, in the absolute beginning state, there could not be anything that would allow the unity of experience for freedom. Therefore, one must turn to nature for the first cause. Kant states: “Thus we have nothing but nature in which we must seek the connection and order of occurrences in the world.”

The argument for determination can also be aligned with the “unknown root” of all sensibility and understanding. Kant says: “There are two stems of human cognition, which may perhaps arise from a common but to us unknown root, namely sensibility and understanding.” One may want to relate this to the unconscious.

Additionally, much as in Schelling’s example of Judas, we can see those natural, primordial mechanics being personal and related to an individual subject. Kant describes this through guiding principles that govern a man. In Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals, he uses the concept of "maxims" as the individual driving force for decision-making, stating that "a maxim is a subjective principle of volition.”

A maxim, as a "subjective principle of acting," is not the same as the "objective principle" (which is the practical law). A maxim is purely subjective and limited by the subject's reason, experience, ignorance, and desires. The objective principle as the practical law can be made categorical (as an imperative) because it is valid for all subjects; however, personal maxims may be completely unaligned with the greater good.

Thus, every decision is based on an evaluation of understanding, a judgment that connects understanding and reason, guided by personal maxims. Therefore, when we examine an individual's character, we see the principle of making choices (as a guiding map) as a series of signifiers. We choose one quality over another because of certain moral (or immoral) values, and that choice is also grounded in a maxim. We choose to use this maxim because of certain values, and that base can also be considered a maxim, and so forth.

When we trace this chain of maxims toward the roots of the first basic maxim, we can see that this chain breaks at a certain point. There are even more primordial and unconscious mechanics of "disposition," which gives us the inclination—a predisposed leaning—to follow certain maxims (or rather to prefer one maxim over another hierarchically). Kant states: "There is in him [the human being] a rock-bottom basis (inscrutable to us) for the adoption of good maxims or bad ones.” That approach already feels a little like Schelling's mysticism (based on Boehme’s theogony as the doctrine of zimzum in the Lurianic Kabbalah).

Kant explains: "The rock-bottom basis for the adoption of our maxims must itself lie in free choice, so it can’t be something we meet with in experience; therefore, the good or evil in man (as the ultimate subjective basis for the adoption of this or that maxim relating to the moral law) is termed 'innate' only in the sense of being posited as the basis for—and thus being earlier than—every use of freedom in experience (including ones in earliest youth, as far back as birth); so it is conceived of as present in man at the time of birth—though birth needn’t be its cause.”

Once again, we can see a similarity with Schelling’s approach to an unconscious choice by the subject that forms one’s character. Kant says: “When I speak of one or other disposition as 'inborn' and 'natural,' I don’t mean that it hasn’t been acquired by the man whose constitution it is, or that he didn’t create it; all I mean is that this didn’t happen over time—that he has always been good or bad from his youth onwards.”

Thus, we can conclude that the (primordial) voluntary act that forms our character as a disposition to prefer certain maxims is unconscious and trans-temporal (outside of time). Kant believes it “precedes every action that is apparent to the senses.”

In the simplest terms, within the phenomenal world (the world of appearances and empirical experience), everything happens according to deterministic causal laws—every effect has a cause. Dispositions exist but are not deterministic.