Kant's conception of freedom
Using reason to resist manipulation
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“I remember wanting a family, but was that because that’s what women are supposed to want? How do you know if you want something yourself or if your upbringing programmed you to want it?” So spoke Trinity, protagonist of The Matrix movie.
Trinty’s insight captures a challenge that we all face: We want things, but we do not know whether these wants originate from us or whether they have been implanted in us by society and culture. Was it Trinity who wanted a family, or was she programmed to want a family? Trinity found her answer: she wanted to fight for freedom. She discovered that she was once a freedom fighter, fighting to liberate the world from the exploitation of machines. Then machines imprisoned her mind in the artificial simulated world of The Matrix; in this simulated world, she experienced fake wants and fake needs that distracted her from her real yearning. Trinity eventually freed herself from the manipulation of machines and opted for a life of self-determination and freedom.
Like Trinity, we are all exposed to forces that impose on us artificial wants and needs. If we want to be free, we must critically reflect on these forces. Such a reflection is much needed today as we are realizing the threat to freedom that actors in the current globalized digital economy are posing. Just a few days ago, Nevada’s attorney general initiated a lawsuit against several social media platforms accusing them of functioning as “addiction machines” that exploit and manipulate youth1, a similar lawsuit was filed in California last year. Emergent technologies, emergent market practices, misinformation, and so many other forces are all converging to deprive us of our agency and turn us into passively manipulated objects as opposed to free agents.
This article introduces Immanuel Kant’s conception of freedom, a conception that emphasizes our duty to critically examine the sources of our wants, desires, and all types of inclinations that act on us, and to scrutinize the social and natural forces that instill these inclinations in us.
Doing what we want does not necessarily make us free
In the traditional liberal conception of freedom, being free stands for the ability to do whatever one wants without interference or coercion from others. Yet, this conception of freedom is incomplete. Doing what we want does not make us free, because some of our wants do not originate from us, we did not freely choose them. Consider the urge to check our social media accounts: it is hard to tell how much of it originates from us and how much of it originates from the AI algorithms designed to manipulate us into continuously checking, liking, and commenting. Consider the craving for fast food: we know that it does not originate from us, it originates from addictive substances that the fast-food industry fills its products with. Regarding the decision to buy a product, it is difficult to know how much of that decision is ours and how much of it is the outcome of manipulative advertisement. And the list goes on. The tendency to become hosts for desires, cravings, and dispositions that are not ours is an integral part of our social nature.
To be free, we must critically assess any inclination that pushes us to want an object or experience. Whether we call it appetite, craving, desire, emotion, passion, or whatever other label we ascribe to it, we must question that inclination. And we must reflect on whether it is an expression of our free will or a threat to our free will. Plato’s description of the tyrant in The Republic exemplifies such a reflection. The tyrant, all-powerful and able to do whatever he wants to do; on the surface, he seems to be free.
Yet, according to Plato, the tyrant is the least free of all beings because he is fully controlled by his appetites. The very absolute power that allows him to subjugate others to his will destroys his free will: “[He] appears to control everything, but in fact, he controls nothing, not even himself.” (Stohr, 2022, p. 18). Power corrupts, the old saying goes. It corrupts by instilling in us an addiction to power, and through that addiction, it deprives us of our freedom.
It is not only power that corrupts, almost everything around us corrupts. Markets corrupt. They instill in us a perpetual dissatisfaction with what we have and with who we are, pushing us to continuously chase the next commodity that promises to “fix” us and bring us satisfaction. Social media corrupts. With their automated systems of notifications and targeted content, they keep us in front of our screens and polarize our opinions, no matter how irrational or misinformed our opinions are.
Rousseau, in The Social Contract, argued that everything social corrupts. In society, we develop the inclination to want to distinguish ourselves from others and excel over others. This inclination drags us towards activities and associations that preserve or lift our social status, irrespective of whether we think these activities and associations are worthy or not. Social norms subjugate us by promising us protection from being perceived as lesser than others, they provide us with membership in the club of the “normal”. Markets subjugate us by promising us exclusive access to experiences and products that others cannot afford, to levels of comfort that others do not have, to a higher social status. To be free we must confront these corrupting inclinations that pull us away from freedom into submission to forces that are alien to our free will.
The Kantian practice of freedom through reason
To protect our freedom and to practice freedom, we need reason; this was the starting premise of Kant’s philosophy of morality. Reason makes it possible for us to will things (Altman, 2014), to just be inclined towards things. Reason makes it possible for us to develop principles on how we should act, and to act according to these principles even when they clash with our inclinations. These principles, when they are the product of the free use of reason, are beyond the reach of inclinations; nothing external to our will can alter them unless we allow it. By acting on principles, we become self-determined.
Pursuing the wants that originate in our principles makes us free. Pursuing the wants that originate in our inclinations does not necessarily make us free, because not all our inclinations are products of our free will.
Inclinations that we are born with or the ones that are imposed on us by society and authority, it is not us that created them, it is nature and society that created them in us. Like clouds produce rain, our body produces the desire for survival, food, shelter, social belonging, and social status (power). When we passively and uncritically submit to these inclinations and act on them, it is no longer us acting, it is Nature acting in us (Fichte, 1848). We become as predictable and predetermined as physical objects moved by gravity. In contrast, acting on principles makes us free. Principles are products of reason which, unlike everything else in nature, can create its own laws rather than passively obey the unalterable laws of nature2. When we act on principles, it is us, our free will, acting.
Our will, depending on the means and powers at its disposal, can alter our inclinations by making changes to our bodies and material environments. Thus, we change our sleeping habits, so that we avoid the impulsive inclinations caused by sleep deprivation. When experiencing frustrations, we take a deep breath to reduce aggressive inclinations and induce more peaceful ones. Unlike the natural and socially conditioned inclinations, inclinations that we cultivate through rational and willed interventions in our lives become an expression of our free will and support our freedom.
Kant believed that it is our moral duty to protect, preserve, and expand our free will. His moral theory is based on an “is to ought” argument (Guyer, 2016): We are free beings, therefore we ought to remain free; we ought to protect our freedom and not give it away. And to protect freedom, we ought to protect the tool that produces it and makes it possible: reason. We ought to continuously reflect on our actions, rationally articulate principles based on which we make our choices, and obey these principles.
While, on the surface, freedom and obedience seem to be mutually exclusive, in Kant’s philosophy they are not. Obedience to principles is a constitutive element of freedom, as long as the principles that we obey are the ones that are produced by our free will. This is what Kant learned from Rousseau: “Obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty” (Rousseau, 1762/1978, as cited in Schneewind 1992, p. 314). Plato’s tyrant, who had to obey no one and no law, ended up losing his freedom and becoming a slave to his inclinations. Kant’s moral agent obeys her principles and subjugates her behavior to their authority. By obeying her principles, she liberates herself from the grip of inclinations.
Reason: a tool for freedom, a tool against freedom
Reason frees us. It allows us to reflect on the natural and social forces that act in us and on us, to choose whether to follow them or resist them, and even to alter them. Reason allows us to develop our own moral principles, to act on them, and to live as free, self-determined beings.
But sometimes reason gets misused and becomes a weapon against itself (Stohr, 2022). Rather than freeing us, it deceives us into thinking that we are free when in fact we are not, it rationalizes acts of submission to inclinations and gives them the appearance of free principled acts. Thus, indulgence in the gratification of cravings is rationalized as self-care. Submission to greed is rationalized as ambition and self-perfection. A night of binge-watching TV shows is rationalized as a necessary restorative break. Greedy thefts are rationalized as a fair redistribution of wealth. Crimes are rationalized as patriotic honorable acts. Reason can rationalize anything.
It is impossible to tell whether we are free or whether we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we are free. It is impossible to tell whether we are acting on principles, or obeying inclinations that our reason has disguised as rational principles.
In fact, the idea of freedom itself seems to be incompatible with the laws of nature that regulate the material world. Freedom in the material world is a contradiction. In the material world, everything has a cause, and nothing causes itself. Thoughts are created by the activity of neurons in the brain, neurons are produced by specific fixed laws of genetics and biochemistry. We do not choose our genes, we do not choose the neurons that they produce, and we do not choose the thoughts that the neurons produce, yet we experience ourselves as free.
There are two ways of overcoming this contradiction: We either adopt the belief that freedom is an illusion and our experience of being free is an outcome of the forces of nature over which we have no control, or we adopt the belief that the material world that we experience is just an appearance, and that freedom does exist but is inaccessible to our senses. Belief in freedom is an act of faith (Fichte, 1848). Kant had faith in freedom, he believed that it exists, and he believed that it is our duty to be free even though we can never be certain whether we are fulfilling that duty. Freedom is a duty to always strive for, yet never truly experience.
Conclusion
It is our duty to be free, but it is impossible to know whether we are fulfilling this duty or not. This uncertainty should not deter us from seeking freedom, it should not lead us towards crippling self-doubt nor towards cynicism. The uncertainty of our freedom should be the ground for a humble attitude that is committed to continuous learning and continuous moral self-improvement. We should commit to freedom, to liberating ourselves, and to liberating others. And we should do it with humility.
Rather than celebrating our liberation from the authorities and inclinations that we see, we must remember that, maybe, we are still unfree, controlled, manipulated, misinformed, and misguided by other invisible authorities and unconscious inclinations: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist."3 The forces that threaten our freedom the most are the ones that we do not see.
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Louai Rahal on Daily Philosophy:
References
Altman, M. C. 2011. Kant and Applied Ethics: The Uses and Limits of Kant’s Practical Philosophy. Wiley-Blackwell.
Fichte, J. G. 1848/2019. The vocation of man. Anodos Books.
Guyer, P. 2016. Virtues of Freedom: Selected Essays on Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schneewind, J. B. 1992. Autonomy, obligation, and virtue: An overview of Kant’s moral philosophy. In The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. P. Guyer. 309–341. Cambridge University Press.
Stohr, K. 2022. Choosing freedom: A Kantian guide to life. Oxford University Press.
Notes
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Link to story: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/nevada-attorney-general-launches-lawsuits-social-media-firms-106847796 ↩︎
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Materialists disagree with Kant on this, they reject his mind/body and reason/nature dualisms. Responding to their critiques is beyond the scope of this article. ↩︎
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Opening sentence of the movie The Usual Suspects ↩︎
