Last week, we started to look at Alenka Zupančič’s notion of the ethics of the real by looking at her starting point of Kant; this week, we will go a bit deeper to understand how she views Kant through a Freudian and Lacanian lens. If you haven’t read last week’s newsletter, I recommend reading it here before this week’s.
This week, we continue exploring Zupančič’s view of ethics by exploring how the thinking of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan has shifted our understanding of what it means to be ethical.
Freud and Lacan
For Kant, the essential aspect of ethics is acting with a pure will based on (and only on) a sense of duty.
Freud disrupts Kant’s thinking by evoking the idea of the superego. For those unfamiliar with Freud, he divided the mind’s working into three parts. The id is the part driven by instinctual needs; the ego is a moderating force between the id, reality, and the superego; and the superego is a moralizing force.
The ‘Freudian blow’ to philosophical ethics can be summarized as follows: what philosophy calls the moral law – and, more precisely, what Kant calls the categorical imperative – is in fact nothing other than the superego. This judgement provokes an ‘effect of disenchantment’ that calls into question any attempt to base ethics on foundations other than the ‘pathological’. At the same time, it places ‘ethics’ at the core of what Freud called das Unbehagen in der Kultur: the discontent or malaise at the heart of civilization. 1
Thus, Freud links duty to this superegoic drive from outside the person and contests the idea that duty is not pathological.
Lacan deals a second blow to the Kantian idea of ethics when he says in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis: “the moral law, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state” (2)
Lacan sees Kant’s idea of duty as actually a pure desire.
Traditional ethics – from Aristotle to Bentham – remained on this side of desire (‘The morality of power, of the service of goods, is as follows: “As far as desires are concerned, come back later. Make them wait”.’) Kant was the one who introduced the dimension of desire into ethics, and brought it to its ‘pure state’. This step, crucial as it was, nevertheless needs another ‘supplementary’ step, which Kant – at least according to Lacan – did not take: the step that leads beyond desire and its logic, into the realm of the drive. Hence, ‘after the mapping of the subject in relation to the a [the object of desire], the experience of the fundamental fantasy becomes the drive’. (4)
This is the starting point for Zupančič, who then will go on to formulate what she calls an ethics of the real 2:
An ethics of the Real is not an ethics orientated towards the Real, but an attempt to rethink ethics by recognizing and acknowledging the dimension of the Real (in the Lacanian sense of the term) as it is already operative in ethics. The term ethics is often taken to refer to a set of norms which restrict or ‘bridle’ desire – which aim to keep our conduct (or, say, the ‘conduct’ of science) free of all excess. Yet this understanding of ethics fails to acknowledge that ethics is by nature excessive, that excess is a component of ethics which cannot simply be eliminated without ethics itself losing all meaning. In relation to the ‘smooth course of events’, life as governed by the ‘reality principle’, ethics always appears as something excessive, as a disturbing ‘interruption’. (4)
For Zupančič, ethics goes beyond restricting behavior and is about excessive behavior. Acts that, when looked at closely, our only response is: “I could not have done otherwise.” Kant uses this to explain how acting based on duty requires not considering the end results, even the pain caused to his fellow man.
The Kantian subject cannot escape the Real involved in unconditional duty by hiding behind the image of his fellow-man – but neither can this subject hide behind his duty, and use duty as an excuse for his actions. As Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, as ethical subject I cannot say: ‘Sorry, I know it was unpleasant, but I couldn’t help it – the moral law imposed that act on me as my unconditional duty!’ On the contrary, the subject is fully responsible for what he refers to as his duty. (58)
Choosing a duty
When we examine Kantian ethics, one question remains: How can we decide what is good? The categorical imperative helps, but there are also cases where others may reject what one person accepts as universal law.
Let’s look deeper into where this comes from.
According to the fundamental principles of Kantian ethics, duty is only that which the subject makes his duty; it does not exist somewhere ‘outside’, like the Ten Commandments. It is the subject who makes something his duty, and has to answer for it. The categorical imperative is not a test which would enable us to make a list (even a list that is not exhaustive) of ethical deeds, a sort of ‘catechism of pure reason’, behind which we could hide the surplus-enjoyment we derive from our acts. (59)
Zupančič describes this as a flaw in Kant’s rule against lying, even to a murderer.3 It is not that lying hurts someone else, but that it is stated as a law.
Let us, however, stress once again that this in itself does not diminish the value of the other aspect of the example. It is possible that someone would make it his duty to tell the murderer the truth: paradoxical as it may sound, this could be an ethical act. What is inadmissible is that the subject claims that this duty was imposed upon him, that he could not act otherwise, that he only followed the commandment of the Law.… (60)
The problem here is with the subject’s creation of a universal law.
The crucial problem of the moral law is not the variability of the situations to which we ‘apply’ it, but the place or role of the subject in its very constitution, and thus in the constitution of the universal. The reason why the subject cannot be effaced from the ‘structure’ of the ethical (by means of making a list of duties which would absolve the subject of his responsibility and freedom) is not the particular, the singular, or the specific, but the universal. That which can in no way be reduced without abolishing ethics as such is not the multicoloured variability of every given situation, but the gesture by which every subject, by means of his action, posits the universal, performs a certain operation of universalization.(61)
The moment an individual creates a universal law, it is subjective. Thus, it is pathological according to the Kantian definition. This was what Kant was trying to avoid while, at the same time, avoiding external rules or laws. For Zupančič, this means that the truly ethical person is not someone who brings all their biases to a situation and creates a universal rule that works according to their needs, but one that is “born in this situation, who only emerges from it” and can only create the universal law in a particular moment.
The ethical subject is not a subject who brings all his subjective baggage to a given (moral) situation and allows it to affect things (i.e. by formulating a maxim which corresponds to his personal inclinations), but a subject who is, strictly speaking, born of this situation, who only emerges from it. The ethical subject is the point where the universal comes to itself and achieves its determination.(61-62)
Thus, being ethical requires some ability to separate ourselves from who we are, allowing individuals to create a universal belief or law only through their actions.
What is good and evil?
While we create the universal in the particular instance, this still leaves wide open the notion that to decide if something is good, we must already have some idea of what good is.
The fundamental paradox of ethics lies in the fact that in order to found an ethics, we already have to presuppose a certain ethics (a certain notion of the good). (92)
While Kant thinks he has avoided this challenge with the categorical imperative, this paradox persists:
‘Act so that the maxim of your will can always hold at the same time as the principle giving universal law’ – what is the paradox implicit in this formulation of the categorical imperative? The paradox is that, despite its ‘categorical’ character, it somehow leaves everything wide open. For how am I to decide if (the maxim of) my action can hold as a principle providing a universal law, if I do not accept the presupposition that I am originally guided by some notion of the good (i.e. some notion of what is universally acceptable)? In other words, there is no a priori criterion of universality. (92)
If there can be “no prior criterion of universality”, we cannot know what is good or evil in advance. So, what then defines an ethical act?
The act differs from an ‘action’ in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent). After an act, I am ‘not the same as before’. In the act, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not); the act involves a kind of temporary eclipse of the subject. (83)
Zupančič uses the phrase “I am lying” to explain this. The statement is a paradox; if you are lying, then the statement is false, which means you are telling the truth. However, in our day-to-day life, when someone says, I am lying, we know what they mean. Based on Lacan, she says this is the difference between the enunciation and the statement. That is to say, the difference between the saying of the phrase and its content.
Whereas the ‘subject’ of the statement is determined in advance (he can only use the given signifiers), the (shifter) I is determined retroactively: it ‘becomes a signification, engendered at the level of the statement, of what it produces at the level of the enunciation’. It is at this level that we must situate the ethical subject: at the level of something which becomes what ‘it is’ only in the act (here a ‘speech act’) engendered, so to speak, by another subject. (103)
The “I” who lies is only invoked after the statement is made. The “I” making the statement is not the “I” lying. Only once the statement is made (and taken) as truth does the “I” who was speaking become a liar.
Zupančič describes the ethical act as the act through which one becomes who one is. The action retroactively defines the actor.
This creates a problem for the categorical imperative as the subject’s will can also be seen as only being defined retroactively. What was willed is only seen through the action.
An example that may make this more practical is to think about running. You may define yourself as a runner, but your identity is only established as such through the act of running. It is the running that makes you a runner before you start.
What does this mean for middle managers?
We will conclude the deep dive into the Ethics of the Real next week, but in the meantime, there are a few questions that middle managers can think through.
- What might be playing a superegoic function that drives what you see as right (and wrong)?
- What do you see as your duty? What is it that drives you?
- What do your actions say about who you are becoming? How might they retroactively show who you are?
- Alenka Zupančič, The Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (p. 1). All future page numbers for this book will appear in parentheses. ↩
- This is based on Lacan’s concept of the real, referenced here. ↩
- We looked at this example in last week’s newsletter. ↩