398 Kant: A BiographyThus, if you abscond with the car and never bring it back, you still possess
it, but you no longer have any right to it. It is the owner who has the right
of possession, and only the owner can transfer or give up this right.
Kant's question is, how is ownership possible in the first place? Or, what
are the conditions that make ownership possible? Kant's short answer is:
"a postulate of practical reason."^60 The question is, what does this mean?
His arguments for this claim are difficult to understand, but the rough idea
seems to be simply that the concept of ownership cannot be reduced to
mere physical possession, and that it presupposes moral laws. Ownership,
unlike possession, has a moral component. This component is not a direct
consequence of the moral laws. Rather, it is a postulate, almost like God
and immortality. This also means that ownership is not something that
can be proved directly, but only something that must be presupposed for
morality to be possible. We must presuppose that there is not just empir¬
ical (or physical) possession but also something like "intelligible possession,"
that is, rightful possession without physical possession, or ownership. "It
is therefore an a priori presupposition of practical reason to regard and
treat any object of my choice as something that could be objectively mine
or yours."^61 This idea of intelligible possession is for Kant also the ultimate
explanation of the possibility of external ownership, but this explanation
shows only its possibility as a private right in the state of nature, not how
it is actualizable. In order to understand the latter, we must add the ne¬
cessity of a civil society. Property may precede government, but government
makes it secure. For it is only in a state of right or in a body governed by
public law that external ownership is really possible.
After having made clear how ownership is possible, Kant goes on to ex¬
plain how we can come to own things. First he deals with property rights,
then with contractual rights, and finally and perhaps most interestingly
with how we can acquire rights over persons "in a thing-like fashion." Since
his account of property and contractual rights is fairly straightforward, I
will say something only about rights over persons "in a thing-like fashion."
What Kant has in mind is obvious — at least for the most part. He is talk¬
ing about marriage, parenthood, and indenture: "A man acquires a wife, a
couple acquires children; and a family acquires servants." That these rela¬
tionships must be seen in terms of "acquisition" is far from obvious to us,
but it was obvious to Kant. However, to really understand what Kant
means, it is again necessary to understand what was obvious to Kant and is
no longer obvious to us, namely, the distinction between possession and
ownership. When a man acquires a wife, or "a woman acquires a husband"