Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Off with Their Heads? { 31

an island that is surrounded by the waters of the noumenal world, alluring but

also deceptive and treacherous because ultimately unchartable.^49 Elaborating

on Kant’s metaphor, we could envision the transcendental schemata, which

produce the phenomenal realm of human knowledge by mediating between

sensible intuitions and concepts a priori, as the island’s shoreline: a boundary

that touches the water yet still belongs and lends contours to the land. A space

is only mappable by virtue of its limits, and the schemata set the limits to human

knowledge, delineating its contours.

Kant offers no comparable image to aid in understanding the structure of

practical reason. But if theoretical reason strains outward to its own limit—to

the shoreline it cannot cross without losing itself in perilous waters—practical

reason can be thought of as moving in the opposite direction, from its outer limit

infinitely inward. Practical reason is not constrained by its limit because practi-

cal reason in fact constitutes itself in the very act of setting its own limit. Hegel

was in this sense right in critiquing the categorical imperative as tautologous.

Through the infinite force of its founding tautological gesture, Kantian morality

constitutes itself as an absolute interiority, a space that shares no seam or border

with any exteriority. (I use “interiority” in a purely spatial sense, not as a realm of

human affect or sentiment.) Constituted as it is in its very universality, Kantian

morality is structurally inimical to any alterity. Of course this is not to say that

there is nothing other than morality (the sensible world is rigorously other than

the moral). Rather, there is no possible Other that Kantian morality can recog-

nize as moral. Anything not completely within the realm of moral reason is by

definition radically incommensurable with it.^50

No mediation between the moral and the nonmoral is possible according to

the Kantian system, but neither is any mediation necessary. Kantian theoretical

reason is a kind of epistemological compromise between the sensible and the in-

telligible and can exist only in the form of mediation between the two. In Kant’s

famous formulation, “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without

concepts are blind.”^51 In contrast, Kantian practical reason is sui generis: were

it capable of any dialogue with anything else, were it capable of maintaining a

common border with something other than itself, its self-constituting hermetic

circle would be broken, its infinite inward force lost.^52

Even though, given Kant’s strict dualism, no true mediation is possible be-

tween the intelligible realm of morality and that of the senses, some means of

adjusting the latter to the dictates of the former is required. In Critique of Prac-

tical Reason and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant theorizes this

nonmediatory possibility of adjustment through the related concepts of Willkür

(free choice) and Nötigung (rational compulsion). He distinguishes between