Can Kant be Politicised?

The Kantian Trump and the Hegelian Macron (or How to Judge the Collapse of Neoliberalism)

Politics was without a doubt immanent to Hegel’s philosophy. Any historical reader of European politics with an interest in philosophy might notice the directly political position that the memory of Hegel occupies in the shadow of Europe’s current political status. Hegel can, in fact, be located in multiple opposed ideologies that shaped modern Europe. Take, for example, Giovanni Gentile, the author of the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals and praised by Benito Mussolini as one of the political-philosophical inspirations for Italian fascism. Gentile’s avowal of neo-Hegelianism led to the development of his own specific brand of Italian idealism. The lines towards the end of his Fascist Manifesto present the obscurely (vulgarly) Hegelian tone to Gentile’s dialectic of the State and the individual:

“This Fatherland, moreover, is a reconsecration of traditions and institutions that endure in civilization, in the flux and perpetuity of tradition. It is also a school for the subordination of the particular and inferior to the universal and immortal. It is respect for law and discipline. It is freedom, but freedom to be won through law, freedom established by renouncing all petty willfulness and wasteful, irrational ambition.”

The individual is by definition particular, and thus by definition inferior to the universal (the Fatherland) to which the individual is submitted in the name of tradition. This step is itself a complete denial of Hegel’s philosophy of the State, in which a particular is in fact able to reconstruct the universal (most notoriously in the forms of ‘substance as Subject’). Gentile’s reliance on Hegel may be misguided, but it does not detract from the immanently political meaning of Hegel’s idealism which has been continuously appropriated by political movements.

We may want to look at the way Lenin celebrates Hegel’s Logic as necessary for our understanding of Marx - an appropriation of Hegel which appears to directly contradict his use as a progenitor of Italian fascism. However a more interesting ‘stain’ of Hegel in modern Europe is seen in the figure which ties him to the idea of a common market, a multinational trade-system: Alexandre Kojève. Kojève was not only the philosopher who introduced a generation of French theorists to Hegel through his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (a disappointing work, which depicts Hegel as a straightforward thinker of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, as well as a teleology of history). He also held a role in the French economy ministry for over two decades (between 1945 and 1968), where he was a principal visionary of a global-capitalist trade system (or rather a pan-European economy with low-tariff international trade). The economist and former French Prime Minister Raymond Barre even credited Kojève as the architect of the Common Market.

An even more perplexing (and recent) instance of European Hegelianism in politics is in fact the current French President Emmanuel Macron. Macron - one of the foremost representatives of 21st century neoliberalism - wrote his Master’s dissertation on Hegel, but even more interesting is the fact that Hegel (or rather some perverted, opportunistic version of Hegel) never seemed to leave Macron. Here is an extract from an interview with Der Spiegel, shortly after Macron was elected:

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. President, since entering office in May, you have made significant waves around the world. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who you read during your university studies, once described Napoleon Bonaparte as "the Weltgeist ("world spirit") on horseback." Do you believe that a single person can, in fact, steer history?

Macron: No. Hegel viewed the "great men" as instruments of something far greater. It should be said that in referring to him in that way, he wasn't being particularly nice to Napoleon, because he of course knows that history can always outflank you, that it is always larger than the individual. Hegel believes that an individual can indeed embody the zeitgeist for a moment, but also that the individual isn't always clear they are doing so.

This may well be one of the first times that a European presidency has been (informally) inaugurated by a discussion of Hegel’s philosophy of history. What’s more, Macron seems to indulge in a piece of critical reconsideration of the meaning of “Weltgeist zu Pferde” (“World Spirit on horseback”), the words Hegel used to describe Napoleon, as inevitably acting in opposition to Napoleon’s individuality. The Macron-Hegelian Spirit of history is contingently carried by individuals only insofar as it remains irreducible to them - in other words, as a message that acts as a negation of its medium. Macron may believe in a global capitalist structure which eventually produces just as destructive effects as its authoritarian opposition, but traces of this Hegelianism seem present in his politics: he has created a strong opposition to negotiating asymmetrical European trade deals just in order to appease Trump’s one-man reforms and hostility towards NATO. Macron has even put pressure on Starmer to recognise the Palestinian State whilst Trump continues his push to criminalise pro-Palestinian protests in the US.

Getting back to the point: Hegel may well be malleable to political positions that are directly self-contradictory - he can act as a justification for pan-Europeanism, international communism, nationalism, or neoliberal globalism - but he can nevertheless very clearly be politicised in some form or another as a consequence of the political colour at the heart of his philosophy. Hegel’s philosophy internally deals with concrete political relations, and recognising signs of Hegel in contemporary politics is not difficult. Hegel is a directly political thinker - he is internally politicised, as is evident by his appropriation from figures like Gentile (fascism) to Macron (neoliberalism). What is clear, however, is that Hegel’s political influence has not been enough - or rather, his potential for influence is immanent enough to render his European legacy directly self-contradictory. As Hardt and Negri put it: “The political solution offered by Hegel to the metaphysical drama of modernity demonstrates the profound and intimate relationship between modern European politics and metaphysics.”

Alternatives to the Trump regime are at the same time currently impossible to conceive of. Trump appears to be shaking the basic coordinates of the neoliberal Empire. But Trump is in fact not a direct negation of the regime of globalised capital, but rather a symptom of its failure to account for or contain the aggressive wealth and power concentrations that inevitable arise from its own economic logic. The revival of right-wing protectionism under the banner of MAGA is little more than a sublimated continuation in global capitalism, with multi-national corporations shifting lanes and rallying to side with Trump in order to further the development of their private enterprises. Any serious democratic or egalitarian project is therefore forced not only to reject Trump but to reject his false opposition in Democratic liberalism or European neoliberalism. A third alternative is needed, but this alternative appears as nothing more than an abstract, inarticulable space: a political formation that rejects its own ‘being thought’. This element of the unthinkable is not, however, a Hegelian component, for whom the noumena-phenomena split could be subsumed as a moment of the becoming between being and nothing. The ‘unthinkable’ is much rather a fact of Kant’s work. But if it is true that the future of politics, or its telos, its ultimate goal, is currently unthinkable, then I believe an important question arises: with the dawn of new, post-neoliberal alliances, is there a way for Kant’s apolitical philosophy to be politicised?

The scholarship on the differences between Kant and Hegel is of course endless. But a question (related to the present, political question) which nevertheless has prominence remains to be answered: which of the two was the truly ontological philosopher? The easy answer, of course, is that Hegel provides an ontological reconstruction of the purely epistemological limits imposed by Kant's critique. Hegel furnishes the ontological ground, in the form of the permanently self-presupposing Concept, which is momentarily expressed as Kant’s (erroneous) distinction between noumenal and phenomenal registers. Yet at the same time, as has been argued elsewhere for example in Žižek’s Less Than Nothing, Hegel performs a humbler task of relativising any ontological premises. He obscures any ontology-epistemology division by having knowledge be an internal moment of being, whereas Kant is framed as the truly ontological dogmatist: Kant maintains the absolute status of an unchanging, external being that is constitutively inaccessible to contingent epistemological categories.

Here, I want to shift the question, or ask a similarly problematic question: who is the political thinker between Kant and Hegel? Kant of course appears to be the largely apolitical precursor to Hegel. For Hegel, the ontology of Spirit cannot be separated from historical, aesthetic, and political forms of expression. Concrete political relations are inherent to Spirit. Kant’s philosophy, on the other hand, appears more passive or neutral on the question of politics. The Critique of Pure Reason does admittedly dispel the illusions of dogmatic metaphysics and theology, and thereby provides a possible methodology for denouncing ideological fallacies. But it has no serous political implication as such, and it is not hard to see how efficiently ideology persisted even after Kant. This same epistemology (through the logic of ‘pure practical reason’) furnishes the categorical imperative, and thereby attempts to provide us with a directly ethical proposition. And yet the imperative that you ‘act in a way that your maxim could become universal law’ may be universally applicable by the confines of pure practical reason, but its great flaw is that its content mirrors its form: it provides no concrete political project. It was for this reason that Hegel entirely denounced Kant’s imperative - it had no historical embodiment nor any directive that was applicable only to a specific body politic at a specific point in time.

Kant’s philosophical position therefore seems entirely divorced from any contemporary political problematics¹ - there are no Kantian MPs or Presidents, nor does the split between phenomena and thing-in-itself tell us how to navigate the apparent collapse of neoliberalism. But the story does not end here - I would argue that a Kantian avatar of political modernity is possible by a leap beyond the confines of the first and second critiques, a leap which Kant himself made. In his third critique, the Critique of Judgement, Kant introduces a paradoxical relation between aesthetics and the unthinkable, which is absolutely irreducible to the first two critiques. It offers us a disjunctive method of establishing a relation with the unthinkable by judging what cannot be thought. This unusual conceptual movement is provided through what Kant calls ‘subjective universal judgements’ (and in the second part of the critique, ‘teleological judgements’), where a subjective primacy of finite judgement imposes itself upon, and even reformulates, an unknowable totality. Where there was previously an absolute separation, the power of judgement (Urteilskraft) suddenly provides us with a type of speculative (albeit inconsistent) bridge between the thinkable and the unthinkable.

Subjective universal judgements pertain to two of the four forms of aesthetic judgement: beauty and sublimity, as opposed to the simpler judgements of agreeableness and goodness. Judgements of ‘agreeableness’ and ‘goodness’ are for Kant determinate judgements: they are easily categorised according to predetermined universals. For example, if I have a set of criteria for the meaning of goodness, I can judge a particular (or a behaviour/idea) as either conforming to these criteria (and therefore good) or as deviating from them (and therefore not good). Agreeableness is an even simpler instance of judgement, where experience is judged either as pleasant or unpleasant for my subjective or personal sensibilities. The more perplexing forms of judgement, however, are ‘beauty’ and ‘sublimity’. To judge something as beautiful, Kant argues, means ascribing a certain objective quality to the judged thing - in other words, beauty would be universally ascribed to the object by everyone who would judge it. It is a universal judgement, and yet it would be impossible for any judging subject to really know whether all other subjects would make the same judgement - there is no cognitive or theoretical basis which allows for a predetermined notion of universal agreement by everyone regarding something’s beauty. Hence Kant calls this type of judgement a ‘subjective universal judgement’: from the perspective of an isolated particular (an orchestral piece, for example) a subjective judgement of beauty is made, which is then reformulated with an ‘ought’: it ought to be a universally valid subjective judgement, whereby everyone would hypothetically judge the piece as beautiful.

“Therefore, in the case of a judgment that demands subjective universality, we are not dealing with a cognitive judgment, neither a theoretical one based on the concept of a nature as such, as given by the understanding, nor a (pure) practical one based on the idea of freedom, as given a priori by reason. Hence what we must justify as a priori valid is neither a judgment presenting what a [certain] thing is, nor a judgment which says that I ought to carry something out so as to produce a [certain] thing. So what we shall have to establish is merely the universal validity, for the power of judgment as such, of a singular judgment that expresses the subjective purposiveness of an empirical presentation of the form of an object.”

The empirical presentation of an artistic object which we judge as beautiful forces us to construct the very universal to which we in turn apply it. This is not a whole which expresses itself in multiple parts, but isolated parts which speculatively construct the whole (or universal) to which they belong: “the subjective principle for judging the beautiful as universal. i.e., as valid for everyone, but as unknowable through any universal concept.” Beauty confronts us with an impossible universal. The judgement of something as beautiful therefore comprises a paradoxical operation. It implies a radical gap between what can be known and what can be judged. More specifically, and unlike anything proposed in Kant’s first two critiques, it requires judgement to transgress epistemological or conceptual boundaries. It is impossible to derive an empirical certainty of beauty’s universality, and yet the force of the subjective impression of beauty (the overwhelming elation it produces in us) drives judgement to construct the very universality which is inaccessible to knowledge. This transgressive gap or disparity which grounds our capacity for subjective universal judgements - an aesthetic disjunction which propels subjectivity to express itself even where it is absent or where subjective knowledge is fundamentally impossible - therefore makes the apparently disconcerting implication that we may judge what is impossible to know.

But it is the judgement of sublimity which takes this line of reasoning to its extreme. Beauty, Kant argues, is predisposed for judgement. It presents itself for us as something to be judged, as something divinely placed before us for our sole benefit as observers. It acts, in other words, as the most perfect accompaniment to the conceptual apparatus of human judgement. Sublimity, on the other hand, emerges as a form of violence against, or break from, our conceptual apparatus:

“(Independent) natural beauty carries with it a purposiveness in its form, by which the object seems as it were predetermined for our power of judgment, so that this beauty constitutes in itself an object of our liking. On the other hand, if something arouses in us, merely in apprehension and without any reasoning on our part, a feeling of the sublime, then it may indeed appear, in its form, contrapurposive for our power of judgment, incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination, and yet we judge it all the more sublime for that.”

The sublime is absolutely irreconcilable to our subjective apparatus of judgement. It emerges as a distortion or mockery of beauty, as perpetually in excess of our ability to contain the sublime object in any formal way. It is “violent to our imagination” itself, an inarticulable excess which at first sight would appear irreducible to any categories of subjective judgement. And yet in its violent deviations from anything familiar, and (unlike beauty) in its negation of the natural perfection of subjective judgements, we nonetheless obscurely affirm our capacity for judgement: we enthusiastically judge this non-judgeable entity as sublime. The judgement of sublimity acts as a type of violation internal to the judging subject - it reframes the fundamental division within judgement. The natural object that is judged as sublime displays the the unique disparity between rational knowing and judgement which only appears in Kant’s third critique.

Judgements of beauty perform a similar conceptual leap: we subjectively judge something as beautiful, but we insist that this empirical-particular judgement has a universal affinity. We construct an intentionally speculative universal from an isolated particular - or rather we construct a non-existent whole from its parts. Sublimity takes this in an even more radical direction: we affirm our power of judgement all the more eagerly in the face of an inarticulable object which seems to violently deny not only our conceptual-subjective knowledge, but our ability to judge in the first place. With sublimity, the negation of judgement becomes a form of judgement. But this disparity between judgement and knowledge - that we are permitted to judge what we nevertheless cannot know, and that we must at times judge what appears as unjudgeable - does not need to be entirely disconcerting. This transgressive leap performed by judgement is, I would argue, where the immanently political dimension of Kant can most effectively be found. In fact, it seems as if this ‘construction of the unthinkable’ is a fundamentally political task in the 21st century. The structure of global capitalism which stages its own antagonisms has left us without the basic coordinates to think any alternatives. Currently, any justified alternative remains, in Badiou’s sense of the term, a pure hypothesis.

Although Mark Fisher’s framework of a globalised political economy, irreducible to any nation-state and constructed along ever-shifting axes of a decentralised capital subjugation (a fluid post-Fordist hegemony, or Empire in the sense meant by Hardt and Negri), has been momentarily interrupted by Trump’s anti-globalist protectionist policies, the basic message of Capitalist Realism remains valid: capitalism has infiltrated even the most marginal, subjectivised forms of resistance, rendering any alternative seemingly impossible. This fact needs to be accepted at the conceptual level - much like Althusser argued that ideology expresses itself in the end even by its influence upon our perceptive apparatus (we recognise an object of inquiry only by mis-recogising it, by colouring it with the ideological coordinates in which the object appears). It is not simply that we have yet to find the right blend of global versus local intervention, of national versus international proletarianisation, of popular mobilisation versus vanguardism (or ‘professional’ revolutionaries). Today, the objective goal of anti-capitalist projects (of a politics aimed at battling global exploitation, destructive super-power conflicts, or climate change, all of which are indistinguishable from the question of political economy), including how we take steps towards this object, is entirely unthinkable. This is, however, where an unexplored dimension of Kant becomes relevant. In purely aesthetic terms, Kant insisted that we are able to establish a relation to this unthinkable in the form of judgement. Judgement persists where thinkable forms are absent. In fact, judgement is all the more effectively deployed as a method of disjunctively articulating a ‘possible (unknowable) object’ when it seems that judgement itself is negated.

The fundamental impasse of late capitalism is clear. Grassroots organisations, marginal resistance movements, and even the push for ‘representation’ by minority groups (LGBTQ, Black Americans, or indigenous populations) have not only shown themselves as ineffective countermeasures to economic hegemony, but have fundamentally been appropriated by the dominant ideology which they claimed to oppose. The ‘unexplored option’ is not only missing, but appears fundamentally impossible to think. But the strategic ‘deployment of the unthinkable’, the movement in which the unthinkable is nevertheless attached to an aesthetic and ethical weight insofar as we can judge what we cannot know, is where Kant is most at home. It is here, faced with this impasse of late capitalism which has been rendered even more untraversable by the shake-up of neoliberal globalism through the return of nationalist right-wing parties, that we might be required to return to and rethink the political status of Kant, or to ‘politicise’ his third critique, in order both to recognise that we are faced with unthinkable alternatives and to deploy this unthinkable opaqueness.

The plea to politicise Kant is in other words a plea to find the political intensities dormant in apolitical doctrines - specifically, to extract the political function of the unthinkable. The spectre of Hegel continues to haunt European political discourse, whereas Kant seems to never have been present in this discourse, beyond his vague assimilation to the modernising projects of the Enlightenment. If globalism persists by its own rejection - where even local grassroots or national political projects always operate with the backdrop of an international market - leaving us awkwardly positioned before an impossible, or unthinkable, future, then learning to construct some type of disjunctive relation to this unthinkable (which for Kant takes the shape of judgement), may be the first necessary step to shift our perspective. If an alternative cannot be thought, then we can begin by utilising this unthinkable to our own advantage - and the principal avatar of articulating the inarticulable, of subjectively appropriating the unthinkable, is none other than Kant.

1. The apparent objection to this accusation of Kant’s philosophy as apolitical would be The Metaphysics of Morals. Two reasons nevertheless lead me to disqualify it in this context. Firstly, it is largely a treatise on the proper laws which could govern a republic, rather than a doctrine of political theory or interpretation. Secondly, unlike Hegel’s political philosophy which reflects the basic coordinates of his dialectical method, Kant’s Metaphysics is to a great extent divorced from his ‘Copernican’ philosophy of transcendental idealism.