Freedom, writes Kant, manifests itself through the moral law, which “thrusts itself upon us on its own.”¹ Freedom, Levinas would write almost two centuries later, is “ineluctably invoked” by a command that “slips in me like a thief.”² Should we understand freedom, according to these thinkers, as being inseparable from obligation, from a responsibility that in no present has one chosen to assume?³ And if the law that obligates us does not exactly originate in ourselves, would autonomy consist in believing oneself the author of—and thus becoming responsible for—something one has received? Establishing an implicit dialogue between Kant...

How does theoretical reason create objects of knowledge and ideas that imagine a relationship with the objective world? In theCritique of Pure ReasonKant attributes this role to the synthetic activity of the imagination and the understanding. Reason, in turn, produces ideas of things that cannot be experienced, only thought. This chapter explores reason’s attempt to create the idea of the world, an object unavailable to experience, precisely where it fails, in the mathematical antinomy. Through a critical reading of the first antinomy and of the productivity of negation inspired in Monique David-Ménard’sLa folie dans la raison pure...

Kant’s introduction of freedom in the third antinomy of pure reason is momentous.¹ In this antinomy reason famously rehearses the tension between freedom and determinism, between spontaneity and receptivity, and thus the paradox whereby the thinking I of transcendental apperception must present itself as a passive empirical consciousness subjected to natural causality. If we compare this first dynamic conflict with the mathematical failure to form the idea of the world, here reason succeeds in forming a synthesis of causal linkage. And unlike the fourth antinomy, whose synthesis presupposes the transcendent idea of a necessary being unrelated to the empirical world,...

The third antinomy could not introduce the possibility of freedom without the mediation of a subject that embodies it. As bearer of freedom, the subject establishes a relationship between the phenomenal causal series and the intelligible, whose causality exceeds thought. Because it holds together a co-presence, both spatial and temporal, of the two realms, the subject can be envisaged as playing the role of the unconditioned cause or boundary that anchors the cosmological causal series. In lying at once inside and outside, at the boundary, the unconditioned is thesiteof an encounter between two heterogeneous and otherwise unconnectable spaces,...

How does the causality of freedom affect the subject? What is the subject’s relationship to the law? Although freedom is incomprehensible, it manifests itself through the moral law, of whose existence, insists Kant, we know.¹ This would seem to imply that the law is something we can experience, yet Kant defines the law as excluding any matter (any desired object or goal) that could move the power of desire. Surprising as it may sound to us, sensible beings, the desire of an autonomous subjectivity can only be motivated by the law. Th at the law should become the sole incentive...

InOtherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence(1974) Emmanuel Levinas describes subjectivity as abeing disturbedby a call that comes from elsewhere, by “a command exerted by the other . . . upon me.”¹ That a command comes from the other or from elsewhere should surprise no one. What makes this event of the other extraordinary is that it is within the self: It is “a command exerted by the other in me upon me [exercé par autrui en moi sur moi].”² Though the demand does not originate in me, I, its addressee, become its locus of enunciation: the...