Henrik Jøker Bjerre's Kantian Deeds: A Synopsis. Or, Morality: Reform or Revolution? (With a note on Badiou and Kant).

I'm writing here after having read Henrik Jøker Bjerre's Kantian Deeds for the second time. I read it a while ago already, and while I remember coming away thinking that it was very good, its actual content is something that I'd forgotten. I was prompted to return however, while in the middle of reading another book - Martin Hägglund's This Life: Why Morality Makes us Free. There was just something about Hägglund's book which I felt to be deeply insufficient, but I also didn't feel like I had the right vocabulary to articulate exactly what I found missing. And as this itched at me, some weird spider sense in me was telling me that Bjerre's book was the place to go to look for that vocabulary. Turns out, the spider sense was correct! 

Anyway, what follows doesn't deal with Hägglund, but it is a laying out of the land of Bjerre's book. As usual, I like to do this kind of thing to gather my thoughts, and have a kind of place to return to so that - if I ever come to reading this a third time, I'll have more bearings than I did before. I will at some point probably do a big post about Hägglund's book, which will almost certainly be informed by what is below. As it stands, however, this is just a stand-alone synopsis, or rather, a paean, frankly, considering how much I enjoyed this read. Also, I threw in some thoughts about this book and - of all people - Badiou at the end, which may be of interest.

Morality: Reform or Revolution? Such is the choice illuminated here in Henrik Jøker Bjerre's slim and wonderfully written book on Kantian Deeds. For, just as there are 'actions' - everyday practices of obligation and commitment - so too are there 'deeds', 'major acts' of 'surplus actions', ones which make us 'rise above' and fulfill the higher interests of big-R Reason itself. Or at least that's the argument advanced here across eight, stylishly written chapters, each of which serve to deepen and fill out this distinction in surprising and engaging ways.

Structuring Bjerre's reading is his tri-layered cartography of the moral landscape, stretched between the pre-moral, the moral, and the extra-moral. Where the 'pre-moral' belongs to those actions uninformed by norms of language (consider the actions of babies, say), to the ‘moral’ belongs the realm of small-r reason and (linguistically informed) inferential abilities: there where we make promises, track debts, and oblige entitlements: the sphere of ‘oughts’. To these two spheres would Bjerre append a third - that of the ‘extra-moral’: the Deed. The deed being that which enables us to call into question our obligations, to put in abeyance all the little oughts that structure our everyday life and perform - not moral reform, but moral revolution.

As the book’s title might give away, it’s a tussle over Kant and the uses to which he has been put which serves as Bjerre’s launch-pad into these investigations. Taking on the ‘neopragmatist’ readings of Kant exemplified in the work of Robert Brandom and John McDowell, Bjerre works to show that, left in their hands, the sphere of the deed would go untheorized, submersed in the realm of morality which marks the limit of their conceptual apparatus. While appreciative of the ‘inferentialist/normative’ step taken by these thinkers - already an advance on so many others - Bjerre urges for one further step, one more effort, if one is to be truly able to take on board the radicality of the Kantian moral project.

In fact what is distinctive to Bjerre is just his attempt to critique the neopragmatist Kant while nonetheless retaining its key insights: holding fast to its strictures against metaphysics (Kant's 'critical turn'), while refusing, nonetheless, its 'quietist' implications. As Bjerre somewhat puts it, the impossibility of any metaphysics in the wake of Kant is itself a fact of metaphysical importance! Or as Bjerre actually puts it, a fact of ethical importance. For, only without the security of metaphysical givens can Deeds in fact be thought at all - only without such givens can ethical revolutions (at the level of the 'extra-moral'), rather than merely ethical reformations (at the level of the 'moral'), take place.

If this effort to isolate and detail a much missed dimension of ethical thought and practice were not already enough, strewn throughout Bjerre's book are also a cavalcade of tiny insights opened up by occupying the angle of the Kantian deed. From reflections on the beautiful and the sublime (here aligned with morality and extra-morality respectively), to a critique of Hannah Arendt's theory of sensus comunis ('common sense'), all the way to little pepperings of psychoanalytic theory among it all (the work of Lacan and his acolytes rumble not-very-deeply beneath the book), Kantian Deeds is a work of genuine delight and discovery.

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Badiou, a Kantian?

N.B.: One thing that I want to mention here, as a genuine thought of my own, is how close this book's conception of morality is to Badiou's notion of the Event. And that, in turn, makes me think - Deleuzeian 'buggery' at full throttle! - how easily Badiou's own notion of the Event might be called Kantian. No doubt he would hate that. But it wouldn't be the first time Kant and Badiou might have been fruitfully brought together. Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding made a big deal of the Kantian 'fact of reason', and the way in the pure moral law - belonging to the realm of reason - makes itself felt as a fact at the level of subjective demand. This 'pure moral law' is of course one that is evacuated of all 'pathology', of any particularity such as to attain the status of the universal. 

Critchley writes of how the invocation of a 'fact of reason' helps solve (for Kant) what he calls the 'motivational problem' of Kantian ethics: how does get from the coldness of rational universality to the hot passion of moral motivation? Why do the Good Thing? Well, rationality isn't just 'cold', it 'descends' down to the level of the empirical and makes itself felt (or rather, experienced) as a fact. And this 'moral purity' which is nonetheless experienced as a fact is something that Critchely ties to Badiou's Event, insofar as the Event exhibits a "universality based on the situated Faktum of an event that cannot be reduced to any empirical Tatsache" (ID,54). This in itself is pretty cool, insofar as it finds a kind of hidden thread that runs from Kant to Badiou in a way that Badiou would probably be pained by.

But it gets worse. And here is where Bjerre's book got me thinking. What is remarkable about the Kantian 'deed' for Bjerre is the way in which one can never be certain that a deed has been accomplished. Kant's demand that moral action only happen 'wholly from respect for duty', means that no empirical standard of proof can ever live up to testifying for it. For Bjerre, this means that one can only ever look for 'traces of the unconditional', and he spends a remarkable chapter on what such traces might look like, even as they can never fully guarantee the having-taken-place of a deed. But what is this other than the Badiouian distinction between Knowledge and Truth!?

Badiou is everywhere insistent that Truth drills a hole right through Knowledge, and that there can be no 'objective' attestation to the Event. That it is wholly a matter of a fidelity which articulates the Event as a procedure, marking it as irreducibly subjective. But isn't this just what Kant demands of morality? That nothing 'pathological' - we'll call it objective - compromises the purity of the moral law under which I act? I mean, yeah, there are universes of difference between Kant and Badiou but like, once you 'see' this, I think it's really hard to not see! At least I can't shake it. Anyway, I don't even really have too much of a Big Point here other than to file a post-it note at the back of my brain that says, sneakily, and with a big, silly grin, that Badiou is a Kantian if you squint just-so. I will never be able to mention this in public of course.

I should mention that while Bjerre does briefly mention Badiou - just one time, somewhere near the end of the book - this connection isn't something he makes any hay of. All Kantian accusations are mine alone.