Kantian ethics is an ethics of alienation since it forces us to reject all that “which is most truly ours.” and to submit ourselves to the abstract priciple that takes neither love nor sympathiy into account. 23
Guilt is the way in which the subject originally participates in freedom.
Freedom manifests itself in the split of the subject. The crucial point here is that freedom is not incompatible with the fact that ‘I couldn’t do anything else’, and that I was ‘carried along by the stream of natural necessity’.
Paradoxically, it is at the very moment when the subject is conscious of being carried along by the stream of natural necessity that she also becomes aware of her freedom. 27
I am guilty even if things were beyond my control, even if I truly ‘could not have done anything else’
Yet at this point we should push the discussion a little further in order to account for how these two apparently opposite conclusions seem to follow from Kant’s view – how Kant’s argument leads in two apparently mutually exclusive directions.
1. On the one hand, Kant seems persistent in his attempt to persuade us that none of our actions is really free; that we can never establish with certainty the nonexistence of pathological motives affecting our actions; that so-called ‘inner’ or ‘psychological’ motives are really just another form of ( natural ) causality.
2. On the other hand, he never tires of stressing, with equal persistence, that we are responsible for all our actions, that there is no excuse for our immoral acts; that we cannot appeal to any kind of ‘necessity’ as a way of justifying such actions – in brief, that we always act as free subjects.
In other words, where the subject believes herself autonomous, Kant insists on the irreducibility of the Other, a causal order beyond her control. But where the subject becomes aware of her dependence on the Other (such and such laws, inclinations, hidden motives . . . ) and is ready to give up, saying to herself: ‘This isn’t worth the trouble’, Kant indicates a ‘crack’ in the Other, a crack in which he situates the autonomy and freedom of the subject.
He does not try to disclose the freedom of the subject somewhere beyond causal determination; on the contrary, he enables it to become manifest by insisting to the bitter end on the reign of causal determination.
What he shows is that there is in causal determination a ‘stumbling block’ in the relation between cause and effect. In this we encounter the (ethical) subject in the strict sense of the word: the subject as such is the effect of causal determination, but not in a direct way — the subject is the effect of this something which only makes the relation between the cause and (its) effect possible. 29