Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

32 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

the terms Willkür and Wille (will), the latter being essentially synonymous with

practical reason itself. Willkür designates the human capacity to make choices

based on pure moral reason.^53 It also encompasses, however, the possibility of

choosing not to do so—in which case, Kant says, Willkür has been “pathologi-

cally affected” by empirical or sensuous causality.^54 Sensuous inclinations such

as greed, lust, envy, and so on may cause one’s Willkür to deviate from the rules of

one’s own deep (or, to use a Kantian idiom, intelligible or noumenal) moral gram-

mar. Such pathologizing influences require a corrective force, and Kant calls this

force Nötigung, a conscious (and therefore potentially corrective) representation

of laws of practical reason. Such a representation is formalized in an imperative.

A protean concept, then, Willkür is both the aspect of the will that is sus-

ceptible to the pathologizing influence of the sensuous realm and the force that

can overcome this influence. In casting difference in terms of pathological de-

viation from the noumenal norm, Kant leaves no room for forms of moral free-

dom whose autonomy could be said to inhere in their very incompatibility with

Kant’s own conception of moral reason (for Kant, this conception is not particu-

lar but universal). Traditional Jewish ethics based on the (from Kant’s vantage

point) heteronomous authority of the mitzvot, for example, can by definition

claim no moral validity, no autonomy.^55 In this way, traditional Jewish practice is

rendered (in a rigorous sense) unreasonable, fundamentally incompatible with

practical reason. Willkür, then, effectively provides a buffer around the pure

moral Wille, allowing the tautologous structure of moral reason to remain her-

metically intact and immune to any form of alterity. Willkür does not mediate

between the pure moral will and the sensuous world; rather, it interposes itself

between the two. One’s Willkür caries out any negotiations or dirty work with

sensuous inclinations, permitting the Wille to remain pristine.

We are now in a better position to see how Kant’s universalism can take the

form of a kind of moral blackmail. One either wills to submit to the maxims that

one’s own moral autonomy generates, or one fails to will to do so and thus to

correspond to one’s own moral self. The only valid ethical sense must be routed

through the universal autonomous subject, which is defined in its essence by

the use of universally generalizable practical reason. Particularity as such—any

heterogeneity between the universal laws of practical reason and an individual’s

ethical sensibilities—is reduced to a failure of resolve and must be corrected by

Nötigung, the enforcer of one’s own moral conscience. From the Kantian per-

spective, the nonuniversalizable, the particular, is by definition not in harmony

with itself. The bifurcated structure of Kant’s moral will (Wille and Willkür), I

would argue, allows moral freedom to coexist with violent coercion because the

freedom and the violence are relegated to separate spheres. The Kantian moral