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Kantian Subjects
Kantian Subjects
Critical Philosophy and Late Modernity
KA R L A M E R I K S
1
1
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© Karl Ameriks 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
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a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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ISBN 978–0–19–884185–2
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198841852.001.0001
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for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Note on Sources and Key to Abbreviations and Translations ix
PA RT I . KA N T
1. Introduction to an Extended Era 3

2. On the Many Senses of “Self-Determination” 14
3. From A to B: On “Critique and Morals” 36
4. Revisiting Freedom as Autonomy 53
5. Once Again: The End of All Things 71
6. Vindicating Autonomy: Kant, Sartre, and O’Neill 87
7. Universality, Necessity, and Law in General in Kant 103
8. Prauss and Kant’s Three Unities: Subject, Object, and
Subject and Object Together 120
PA RT I I . SU C C E S S O R S
9. Some Persistent Presumptions of Hegelian Anti-Subjectivism 139

10. History, Idealism, and Schelling 153
11. History, Succession, and German Romanticism 170
12. Hölderlin’s Kantian Path 189
13. On Some Reactions to “Kant’s Tragic Problem” 207
14. The Historical Turn and Late Modernity 214
15. Beyond the Living and the Dead: On Post-Kantian
Philosophy as Historical Appropriation 231
References 251
Index 267
Acknowledgments
This volume is dedicated to the memory of my closest colleague at Notre Dame,

Gary Gutting (1942–2019), an exemplary friend, philosopher, and teacher of
teachers. He is sorely and widely missed. In these worrisome times, I am all the
more indebted to my wife Geraldine and our whole family. We remain energized
by being, for the most part, still near many of our longtime Notre Dame friends,
including, of late, Robert Audi and Peter van Inwagen. Their active presence has
been a constant spur for me to keep trying to make philosophical progress, and
in a cosmopolitan vein—even if we cannot keep up with their whirlwind aca-
demic travels.
For this volume I am indebted in particular to the helpful philosophers behind
the events that led to these essays, especially: Nicholas Boyle, Elizabeth Millán
Brusslan, Eckart Förster, Paul Guyer, Anja Jauernig, Jane Kneller, Charles
Larmore, Béatrice Longuenesse, Michela Massimi, Dalia Nasser, Jörg Noller,
Judith Norman, Onora O’Neill, Robert Pippin, Fred Rush, Susan Meld Shell,
Dieter Sturma, Eric Watkins, and Rachel Zuckert, as well as again to Peter
Momtchiloff at Oxford and my senior guides on these topics to this day—Karsten
Harries, David Carr, Gerold Prauss, and Manfred Frank. Thanks also to help at
Notre Dame from Linda Grams and Aaron Wells, as well as the organizers, edi-
tors, and participants at the meetings in which versions of these chapters were
presented in Providence, Philadelphia, Worcester, Knoxville, Berlin, Tübingen,
Munich, Notre Dame, San Diego, Edinburgh, Bonn, Warwick, Boston, Cambridge,
Chicago, New Haven, Vienna, and New York.
My focus on many of the themes in this volume was especially inspired by my
Europe-oriented godparents, Lula Jean Elliott (New York/Munich/La Jolla) and
Franz Mikkelsons (Riga/Chicago), along with all our immigrant relatives and
their children, the young and diverse latest generation of United States “Ameriki”:
Nolan, Keizen, Tyki, Teo, Jack, and Maude (a namesake of my mother, who was
fortunate, like many others then, to be born in Brooklyn, and a birthright citizen,
to a family just escaping from the czar’s reach).
Except for Chapters 1 and 8, which have not been published elsewhere, the
essays in this book (now reformatted and updated, with minor but numerous
revisions), which have appeared in an earlier form in the following publications,
are reprinted with permission, and their publishers are hereby thankfully
acknowledged: “On the Many Senses of ‘Self-Determination’,” in Kant on Freedom
and Spontaneity, Kate Moran (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018), 171–94 (also presented as the 2014 Walter de Gruyter APA Kant Prize
viii acknowledgments
lecture and reprinted in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association

92 (2018), 258–83); “On ‘Kritik und Moral’,” in Übergänge- diskursiv oder intuitiv?
Essays zu Eckart Försters “Die 25 Jahre der Philosophie,” Johannes Haag and
Markus Wild (eds.) (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, 2013),
59–80; “Kant on Freedom as Autonomy,” in Freiheit nach Kant - Tradition,
Rezeption, Transformation, Aktualität, Sasa Josifovic and Jörg Noller (eds.) (Leiden
and Boston: Brill, 2018), 95–116; “Once Again: The End of All Things,” in Kant on
Persons and Agency, Eric Watkins (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018), 213–30; “Vindicating Autonomy: Kant, Sartre, and O’Neill,” in Kant on
Moral Autonomy, Oliver Sensen (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 53–70; “On Universality, Necessity, and Law in General in Kant,” in Kant and
the Laws of Nature, Michela Massimi and Angela Breitenbach (eds.) (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2017), 30–48; “Some Persistent Presumptions of
Hegelian Anti-Subjectivism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary
Volume 89 (2015), 43–60 (reprinted by courtesy of the Editor of the Aristotelian
Society: © 2015); “History, Idealism, and Schelling,” Internationales Jahrbuch des
Deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism 10 (2012), 123–42;
“History, Succession, and German Romanticism,” in The Relevance of Early
Romanticism. Essays on German Romantic Philosophy, Dalia Nassar (ed.) (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 47–67; “Hölderlin’s Path: On Sustaining
Romanticism, from Kant to Nietzsche,” in A Companion to Early German
Romantic Philosophy, Elizabeth Millán Brusslan and Judith Norman (eds.) (Leiden
and Boston: Brill, 2019), 258–79; “On Some Reactions to ‘Kant’s Tragic Problem’,”
in Natur und Freiheit. Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant Kongresses, Violetta
Waibel, Margit Ruffing, and David Wagner (eds.) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018),
3255–62; “The Historical Turn and Late Modernity,” in Hegel on Philosophy in
History, Rachel Zuckert and James Kreines (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017), 139–56; “Beyond the Living and the Dead: On Post-
Kantian Philosophy as Historical Appropriation,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy
Journal 40:1 (2019), 33-61.
Note on Sources and Key to

Abbreviations and Translations
References to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Critik der reinen Vernunft, Riga:
Hartknoch, 1781 and 1787) are given in the standard way by citing pages of the
first (“A”) and/or second (“B”) edition, and use the translation of Norman Kemp
Smith, London: Macmillan and Co. (1923). Otherwise, references to Kant’s works
use the abbreviations below and cite, in square brackets, the volume and page of
the Academy edition: Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, Ausgabe der Preussischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900ff). Details on translations
are given in the list of references at the end of this volume.
List 1: Kant’s Writings, Listed by Abbreviation

Anth Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798) [7: 119–333], trans. in Kant
(2007).
AnthFried “Anthropologie Friedländer” (1775–6) [25: 469–728], trans. in ssss
(2012b).
Auf “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” (1784) [8: 35–42], trans. in
Kant (1996a).
Bem Bemerkungen in den “Beobachtungen iiber das Gefühl des Schönen und
Erhabenen” (1764–65), ed. Marie Rischmüller, Hamburg: Meiner, 1991, trans. in
Kant (2011b) [corrected edition of [29: 1–102]].
Br Briefwechsel [10]–[12], trans. in part in Kant (1999).
Diss di mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principii [“Inaugural
Dissertation”] (1770) [2: 385–419], trans. in Kant (1992a).
EaD “Das Ende aller Dinge” (1794) [8: 327–39], trans. in Kant (2nd edition, 2017).
EEMW “Etwas über den Einfluß des Mondes auf die Witterung” (1794) [8:
315–24], trans. in Kant (2012a).
Feyerabend “Naturrecht Feyerabend” (1784) [27: 1319–94], trans. in Kant (2016).
G Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten (1785) [4: 387–463], trans. in Kant
(2011a).
Idee “Idee zur einer allgemeinen Weltgeschichte in weltbürgerlichen Absicht”
(1784) [8: 17–31], trans. in Kant (2007).
JL Immanuel Kants Logik, Ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen [“Jäsche”] (1800) [9:
1–150], trans. in Kant (1992b).
x note on sources and key to abbreviations and translations
KpV Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788) [5: 1–164], trans. in Kant (1996a).
KU Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) [5: 164–486], trans. in Kant (2000).
MdS Die Metaphysik der Sitten (1797–8) [6: 205–493], trans. in Kant (1996a).
MetD “Metaphysik Dohna” (1792–3) [28: 615–702], trans. in part in Kant
(1997a).
MetM “Metaphysik Mrongovius” (1782–3) [29: 747–940], trans. in Kant (1997a).
MetV “Metaphysics Volckmann” (1784–5) [28: 440–50], trans. in part in Kant
(1997a).
MK2 “Metaphysik K2” (early 1790s) [29: 753–75], trans. in part in Kant (1997a).
ML1 “Metaphysik L1” [Pölitz] (1770s) [28: 157–350], trans. in part in Kant (1997a).
ML2 “Metaphysik L2” (1790–1?) [28: 531–610], trans. in part in Kant (1997a).
MM2 “Moral Mrongovius II” (1784–5) [597–633], trans. in Kant (1997b).
MPC “Moral Philosophie Collins” (1774–7?) [27: 243–471], trans. in Kant (1997b).
Nachschrift “Nachschrift zu Christian Gottlieb Mielckes Littauisch-deutschem
und deutsch-littauischem Wörterbuch,” (1800) [8: 445], trans. in Kant (2007).
PPH “Praktische Philosophie Herder” (1762–4) [27: 3–78], trans. in Kant
(1997b).
Prol Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird
auftreten können (1783) [4: 255–383], trans. in Kant (2004).
Raum “Vom dem ersten Grund des Untesrchieds der Gegenden im Raume,”
(1768) [2: 377-83], trans. in Kant (1992a).
Refl Reflexionen [16]–[18], trans. in part in Kant (2005).
Rel Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (1793–4) [6: 1–202], trans.
in Kant (2nd edition, 2017).
RevSch “Rezension von Johann Heinrich Schulz’s Versuch einer Anleitung zur
Sittenlehre für alle Menschen, ohne Unterschied der Religion, nebst einem
Anhang von den Todesstrafen” (1783) [8: 10–14], trans. in Kant (1996a).
RezHerder “Rezension zu Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der
Geschichte der Menschheit (erster Teil)”; “Erinnerungen des Rezensenten der
Herderschen Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit über ein in
Februar des Teutschen Merkur gegen diese Rezension gerichtetes Schreiben”;
“Rezension zu Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte
der Menschheit (zweiter Teil)” (1785) [8: 43–66], trans. in Kant (2007).
RL “Philosophische Religionslehre nach Pölitz” (1817) [28: 993–1126], trans. in
Kant (1996b).
SF Der Streit der Fakultäten in drei Abschnitten (1798) [7: 5–116], trans. in Kant
(1996b).
TP Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht
für die Praxis (1793) [8: 275–313], trans. in Kant (1996a).
VzeF Verkündigung des nahen Abschlusses eines Tractats zum ewigen Frieden in der
Philosophie (1796) [8: 413–22], trans. in Kant (2002).
note on sources and key to abbreviations and translations xi
VorlM Immanuel Kant: Vorlesung zu Moralphilosophie (1770s), ed. Werner Stark,

Berlin: de Gruyter (2004) (a newly edited version of MPC, using Kaehler’s
notes).
WHO “Was heisst: Sich im Denken orientieren?” (1786) [8: 133–47], trans. in
Kant (1996b).
ZeF Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein Philosophischer Entwurf (1795, 1796) [8: 343–86],
trans. in Kant (1996a).
List 2: Abbreviations for Works by Other Authors

E Prauss, Gerold. Die Einheit von Subjekt und Objekt. Kants Probleme mit den
Sachen selbst, Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber (2015).
HW Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva
Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel, Suhrkamp: Frankfurt (1970).
JN Noller, Jörg. Die Bestimmung des Willens. Zum Problem individueller Freiheit im
Ausgang von Kant, Freiburg and Munich: Alber (2015).
RSV New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha, Augsburg: Fortress Press
(1992).
SW Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s
Sämmtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling, Stuttgart: Cotta (1856–61).
PART I
KA N T
1
Introduction to an Extended Era
1.1. Three Kinds of Kantian Subjects
The title Kantian Subjects is to be understood as having a threefold meaning.

First, it signifies a discussion of various topics related to Kant’s Critical philosophy.
Second, it concerns the specific thought that Kant himself had a distinctive—and
often still misunderstood—non-Luciferian1 conception of what it is to be a sub-
ject, especially in the context of modernity, that is, the era dominated by Newton’s
and Rousseau’s demanding claims about our being bound, fortunately, by univer-
sal necessities. For this reason, much of the volume focuses on the Critical philos-
ophy’s “keystone” notions of absolute freedom and strict law, and their
combination in the complex concept of an individual subject’s fundamental
capacity for self-determination, practical as well as theoretical. Third, the title also
points to the idea that, after Kant’s work, there is a significant sense in which most
of us—that is, reflective, educated citizens of post-1780s Western civilization—
have, to a large extent, become subjects in a late modern and broadly (but only
indirectly) Kantian kind of culture.
To be a “Kantian subject” in this extended, cultural sense, is to understand
oneself as having entered into a distinctive late form of what Herder, Kant’s early
and most prominent student, called “this autumn of our reflectiveness.”2 With the
rise, already in the 1790s, of harsh critiques of Kant’s system in its orthodox form,
the classical modern period of philosophy came to a disappointing end. It imme-
diately morphed, however, into a still enduring eon of post-Kantianism, a period
that has often been obsessed with attacking Kant while nevertheless defining itself
in terms of significant relations to his Critical philosophy and especially its notion
of autonomy. Step by step, the initial attempts to restore the classical modern
(Cartesian, Leibnizian, transcendental) ideal of a boldly optimistic system of
tightly linked scientific, metaphysical, and theological claims to knowledge of
pure necessities gave way to a closely related and yet distinct philosophical and
1 See Chapter 6 for a critique of Iris Murdoch’s influential remark about Lucifer. Murdoch (1970)
connects Kant to Milton simply by comparing her own highly unappealing notion of the Kantian
subject with Milton’s Lucifer, while offering no clear textual grounds and entirely overlooking the pos-
itive connections of Kant to Milton and religion. See also Chapter 12 and Kant’s reference (KU §49) to
Milton’s use of “heaven” and “hell” as paradigmatic “aesthetic Ideas.”
2 Herder (1997, 46). See my (2011), (2018a), and (forthcoming b). In this context it is not inappro-
priate to also think of phenomena such as Beethoven (a reader of Kant), and the issue of “late style” in
music as discussed (in their own late work) by Adorno (1998) and Said (2003).
Kantian Subjects: Critical Philosophy and Late Modernity. Karl Ameriks, Oxford University Press (2019). © Karl Ameriks.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198841852.001.0001
4 Introduction to an Extended Era
cultural outlook. In its most influential forms of self-understanding, this outlook

turned to stressing the contingencies of history and a narrative of belatedness,3
although always still under the sign of Kant’s general enlightenment goals. Hence,
this volume’s subtitle: Critical Philosophy and Late Modernity.4
A complication of this era is that the Kantian subjects who occupy it, within
philosophy and in culture at large, fall into quite different groups. Some work
energetically against, or even sympathetically with, numerous unfortunate carica-
tures that define the Critical philosophy in hopelessly subjectivist, monological,
or anti-natural terms. Others work basically in line with Kant’s own thought but
stress the need to supplement it in significant ways in order to be more effective
in achieving the main goals of enlightenment in a later age. This volume will
occasionally concern writings in the first group, which can be shown to involve
influential misunderstandings of the Critical philosophy, but its main concern
will be with members of the second group, and with pointing out underappreci-
ated ways in which they carry forward Kant’s spirit in a manner most appropriate
for our own times.
1.2. Overview of the Whole
These preliminaries should help explain why this volume is divided into two
parts—“Kant” and “Successors”—and how there is an internal relation between
these parts.5 The main focus in most of the essays in the first part is to make clear,
from a variety of perspectives, exactly how central, multi-layered, and ambiguous
Kant’s notion of self-determination is. These essays explain the notion both in
terms of complexities in Kant’s own texts as well as in relation to current interpre-
tations that pick up on, or tend to distort, one or other of its basic features. More
specifically, since the notion of self-determination involves both the concepts of
3 Perhaps the best short characterization of the era comes, not surprisingly, from Friedrich
Hölderlin, who was obsessed with what is to be done in what he calls our “age of need” (dürftiger Zeit).
This theme in Hölderlin is well known for having been stressed by Martin Heidegger, but in a
non-Kantian way. My own study of Hölderlin and Heidegger was first stimulated by the teaching of
Karsten Harries, and a version of Chapter 12 was presented at a conference in his honor at Yale.
4 Some of the main ideas of this story already appear in my (2006), chs. 11–13 and (2012), chs. 13–15
(the term “late modern” is explained at 307). In the present volume, however, even more attention is
given to the philosophical significance of writings from the Early Romantic era. While my (2000a)
stressed negative features of the post-Kantian reaction to Kant, later works have turned more to a
focus on distinctive positive strands in the work of his successors.
5 The essays in this volume are closely connected in time of publication as well as theme. Most of
them have a publication date of 2017 or after, and the remaining essays were published in the period
2013–15. The essays are presented in a natural thematic sequence but can also be read individually in
any order. Numerous cross-references are provided for readers who may take the latter option.
Readers familiar with earlier versions of these essays may notice that numerous emendations and clar-
ifications have been made for this volume, but no substantial changes are intended.
Overview of the Whole 5
self and of determination, it is possible, and quite common, to misconstrue Kant’s

use of these concepts in overly individualistic or contingent terms. In clarifying
these points, the essays in Part I build on, but also go beyond, arguments pre-
sented in my earlier works. They offer my first treatment of several of Kant’s lesser
known positions, as well as new reactions to work by leading senior scholars such
as Eckart Förster, Paul Guyer, Charles Larmore, Onora O’Neill, and Gerold
Prauss, along with arguments that connect with recent work by younger Kant
specialists such as Michela Massimi, Jörg Noller, Owen Ware, and Eric Watkins.
The second part of the book, on the post-Kantians, is not at all an incidental
addendum but is ultimately the book’s main concern. It provides a set of overlap-
ping arguments that there are positive connections—as well as a few key differ-
ences—between genuine Kantianism and what is most valuable in the
ever-developing post-Kantian tradition. The best post-Kantian writing follows
Kant in building on a threefold respect for modern science, autonomy-oriented
practical philosophy, and—in the wake of these developments—the thought that
philosophy has a distinctive constructive role to play even after we have absorbed
the main lessons of the Scientific and French Revolutions as well as of the limits
of philosophy in the old, broadly Cartesian style.
The main positive line to be drawn between Kant’s own modern philosophical
era, and the late modern era that began right after his work, concerns the replace-
ment of Kant’s still largely non-historical and quasi-scientific systematic concep-
tion of philosophy with a more explicitly historical methodology, one that consists
largely in strings of detailed argumentative correction and appropriation of one’s
main predecessors. In discussing the complex interactions of figures such as
Herder, Reinhold, Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schlegel, I argue that
their work, at its best, introduced a productive new paradigm for philosophy, one
that stresses history, subjectivity, and aesthetics in a progressive way that avoids
the shortcomings of historicism, subjectivism, and aestheticism. Rather than
regarding their philosophical remarks, and literary experiments of a philosophi-
cal nature, as a weak substitute for enlightened science, politics, or religion, we
should read these post-Kantians as providing a valuable supplement to, and pow-
erful reinforcement of, what is most valuable in these institutions. This strategy
builds on an influential idea found already in Kant, namely, that the insights of
cultural “geniuses” can be understood as being creatively “exemplary”—especially
for questions of humanity’s vocation (Bestimmung)—in a successive manner that
allows for noteworthy progress even in the absence of an apodictic path of scien-
tific or philosophic proof, mystical intuition, or precise imitation. I compare and
contrast my arguments here with recent work by, among others, Frederick Beiser,
Robert Brandom, Manfred Frank, Gregg Horowitz, Stephen Houlgate, Odo
Marquard, Robert Pippin, and Richard Rorty.
1.3. Overview of Part I: Kant
Chapter 2, “On the Many Senses of ‘Self-Determination’,” begins with a clarifica-

tion of the central concept of the Kantian era. It argues for a middle path between
two extreme but common ways of reacting to Kant’s Groundwork account of
moral self-determination as autonomy. In this case, the Scylla objection claims
that to speak of the moral law as rooted in self-legislation, that is, with a stress on
the “auto” component of “autonomy,” is to be too subjective and to do an injustice
to the essentially receptive character of our reason. Here the contention is that
Kant misunderstands how reason is a capacity that basically appreciates reasons
to act given to the subject by what is outside of it. The contrasting Charybdis
concern stems from a worry about what can appear to be an overly close connec-
tion drawn between morality and freedom as autonomy. Here the critic’s conten-
tion is that the “nomos” component of self-determination in the Groundwork is
too restrictive, and in a sense overly objective. Insofar as it makes our action
appear so thoroughly law-oriented that it seems to leave only the options of
being forced either by our reason to follow the moral law, or by the “natural
necessity” of our sensibility to go against the moral law; and thus (in contrast at
least to Kant’s own later works) it does injustice to the full power of our faculty of
free choice and our ability to act in ways more complex than these two narrow
options. I explain both how Kant can defend himself against these objections
(especially worries about the notion of “giving the law to oneself ”), and how,
because of various terminological complications, it is not surprising that the wor-
ries have been raised.
The essay focuses on the argument at the end of Section II of Kant’s Groundwork
of the Metaphysics of Morals and concludes that, far from serving as an independent
Archimedean lever, Kant’s introduction of what he calls a “principle of autonomy”
is dependent upon the prior formulations of the categorical imperative and is
fundamentally a thesis about the autonomy of a pure faculty of reason (not to be
identified with mere rationality). The key point is that, given the substantive
necessity in the content and force of the imperative, and the limitations of the
faculties of sensibility and understanding, a faculty of pure practical reason
(Wille) is required—just as, for Kant, pure intuition is required for the substantive
necessities of the Transcendental Aesthetic that cannot be grounded in sensibility
or understanding.
Chapter 3, “From A to B: On ‘Critique and Morals’,” presents an account of why
it is that the Groundwork was suddenly written at the particular time that it
appeared (1785)—an important issue that, surprisingly, is rarely discussed. This
time was not only shortly after there had appeared several harsh criticisms and
misunderstandings of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) but also at a moment
when Kant was forced to become aware of a growing wave of anti-libertarian
writings in general—not only in standard Leibnizian and Spinozist circles but
Overview of Part I: Kant 7
also among younger writers such as Herder and J. H. Schulz. Understanding this
context, and the fact that Kant had left the status of the grounds for our belief in
absolute freedom unclear in the first edition of his Critique, helps considerably in
explaining several features of the second edition (1787) as well as the genesis of
the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and its surprising invocation of a “fact of
reason.”6 My interpretation of this phase of Kant’s work is presented as a contrast
to some aspects of important recent work on the period by Förster.
Chapter 4, “Revisiting Freedom as Autonomy,” focuses on two significant new
interpretations of Kant, one in a book-length review of the literature by a German
scholar, Jörg Noller, and the other in a sequence of closely linked apologetic stud-
ies of Kant by the Canadian philosopher, Owen Ware. Noller presents a valuable
treatment of the background of key Kantian terms such as Willkür and Wille, and
this provides another opportunity to more precisely define my account of how
Kant’s notions of freedom and autonomy are to be understood within the devel-
opments of Kant’s Critical period. In his interpretation, Ware argues—against
positions that I and others have favored—that, instead of a great “reversal,” there
is considerable agreement between Kant’s discussions of freedom in the
Groundwork and the second Critique. While appreciating many of the subtle
points Ware raises, I stress passages that still support the claim that there is an
important methodological distinction between the approaches of Kant’s two main
books on ethics.7
Chapter 5, “Once Again: The End of All Things,” concerns a widely neglected
but very noteworthy short essay by Kant, written right around the time of his
retirement. In discussing “the end of all things,” and in pairing the issues of
immortality and the phenomenon of continuing interest in an apocalypse (which
has numerous political aspects that he dares to touch on in a controversial fash-
ion), Kant forces himself to address some of the most difficult features of his eth-
ics and metaphysics. In particular, he gives a new and challenging account of how
the nature of the self, and its vocation, is to be understood in light of his general
doctrine of the transcendental ideality of time. I argue that, after considerable
preliminary work, sense can be given to Kant’s discussion of the mysterious
notion of “noumenal duration,” but I also point out that the implications of his
account contrast with what one might naturally believe that he meant in his many
earlier, albeit brief, discussions of immortality, which seemed to rely on a rela-
tively traditional notion.
Chapter 6, “Vindicating Autonomy: Kant, Sartre, and O’Neill,” contrasts Kant’s
notion of autonomy with two serious misconstruals of it, identified by Onora
6 This argument is largely an amplification of an interpretation advanced in my (1982a) and

(2000b).
7 These passages parallel others that are cited, with more detail, in a contribution by Klaus Düsing
(2018). It was a pleasant and surprising coincidence that Düsing happened to offer his interpretation
in a talk given directly after mine at a conference set up by Jörg Noller (among others) in Munich.
O’Neill as “radical existentialism” and “panicky metaphysics.” As O’Neill shows,

these misconstruals try to force us to choose between two absurd alternatives:
either that, as Iris Murdoch supposed, Kantian ethics is a matter of “anarchy,” or,
as others have assumed, it is a matter of mere uniformity and dogmatic obedi-
ence. While agreeing with O’Neill about the inappropriateness of these options, I
argue that there is also a relatively non-radical form of existentialism that can be
identified in Sartre’s work, and that, once numerous very commonly misunder-
stood aspects of his writing are clarified, his position can be understood as in line
with a sensible version of Kantian autonomy. Similarly, I argue that although
“panicky” metaphysics should be eschewed, there is still a relatively moderate
metaphysical way of understanding some of the key notions (reason, law, and
self-legislation) in Kant’s ethics.8
Chapter 7, “Universality, Necessity, and Law in General in Kant,” focuses on
clarifying the fundamental Critical meanings of three closely related terms that
are essential to understanding Kant’s doctrine of autonomy. I explore these con-
cepts at first mainly in a theoretical and scientific context,9 and note ways in
which the crucial strict conception of them in Kant’s system has often been
underappreciated. To provide an overview, I offer a systematic taxonomy of the
many different ways in which these terms can be employed in the context of the
Critical philosophy. I conclude that Kant’s statements about the mind as “law-
prescribing” claim neither too much, because they back off from theoretically
determining unconditioned things in themselves, nor too little, because their ulti-
mate meaning actually reinforces rather than undercuts the substantive objectivity
that they intend.10 Although Kant’s idealism is central to his Critical philosophy,
and the theoretical rules that we can determinately use cannot transcend the
realm of experience, this does not mean that the very meaning of his notions of
universality, necessity, and law is restricted to a merely ideal realm.
Chapter 8, “Prauss and Kant’s Three Unities: Subject, Object, and Subject and
Object Together,” explores Kant’s theoretical philosophy further in a contempo-
rary context by offering an overview of some features of the extensive discussions
of subjectivity, space, time, and infinity presented in a massive recent volume by
the well-known Kant scholar Gerold Prauss. Prauss is mainly concerned here not
with Kant exegesis but with giving a systematic account of how, as spontaneous
and intuitive subjects in a broadly Kantian sense, we manage to construct a spa-
tial world with very specific a priori constraints. According to Prauss, this occurs
in a manner in which each subject, from its one-dimensional temporal point of
8 See also my (2015) and (2016a). 9 See also my (2013).

10 This discussion parallels, and departs only in a very slight way, from an especially clear presenta
tion of similar issues in Watkins (2017a), which was also presented at an Edinburgh conference hosted
by Michela Massimi and published in the same volume in which my essay originally appeared. More
changes in formulation have been made in this chapter than the others, but none are intended to alter
the substance of the argument.
Overview of Part II: Successors 9
view, forms intentions that generate a tightly structured world of three-dimen-

sional spatial extensions that are always already part of an infinite field, rather
than something built up from separate finite pieces, one independent step at a
time. Rather than attempting an assessment of the full mathematical and scien-
tific complexity of Prauss’s subtle exposition, Chapter 8 mainly reviews some cen-
tral themes in the book that relate to Prauss’s earlier work on the fundamental
role of our intentional spontaneity, as well as to similar developments in
Anglophone Kant scholarship, such as the influence of Strawson and Sellars.11
1.4. Overview of Part II: Successors
Chapter 9, “Some Persistent Presumptions of Hegelian Anti-Subjectivism,” is a

response to Stephen Houlgate’s Hegelian critique of Kant’s philosophy. Houlgate’s
restatement of this kind of critique very efficiently brings together, in the latest
form, many of the stock charges that Hegelians and other post-Kantians have
raised about Kant’s alleged subjectivism. It thus provides an ideal opportunity for
clarifying how it is that such objections have so frequently arisen, and why it is
that Kantians can nonetheless take these charges to rest on misreadings of the
Critical philosophy. The core of the Hegelian attack concerns, but is not limited to,
objections to the doctrine of transcendental idealism—objections that are hardly
limited to the Hegelian tradition but can be resolved, I argue, upon a closer read-
ing of Kant’s texts. To defend Kant from these charges of subjectivism is not, how-
ever, to deny that there are other problems with the Critical philosophy, or that
there are significant advances, or at least interesting proposals, to be found in the
Hegelian program, especially as reformulated by contemporary philosophers.12
Chapter 10, “History, Idealism, and Schelling,” offers a broad overview of
Schelling’s extensive concern with history and of how his discussions on this topic
are closely related to early writings by Reinhold and Hegel. In one early essay,
Schelling seems to deny that a rigorously philosophical treatment of history is
possible, insofar as this field appears not to be amenable to Cartesian or Fichtean
demands of a strict science. It turns out, however, that the very unpredictability of
history, which Schelling stresses here, is a feature that is connected with the spe-
cial creative and aesthetic significance of historical developments that Schelling’s
philosophy eventually values more highly than any quasi-Cartesian or “Identity
philosophy” foundational project. A study of several of Schelling’s lesser known
later writings reveals that he remains dominated by a lifelong interest in turning
the providential dogmas of Christianity into a non-miraculous account of the
11 For a discussion of some of Prauss’s earlier work, see my (1982b) and (1982c).
12 For further discussion of the relation of Kant’s philosophy to Hegel and current interpreters, see
Chapters 14 and 15.
general progressive development of religious thinking in broadly naturalistic

forms of mythology, culminating with the thought that history is “the revelation
of God.” Schelling’s final “positive philosophy” combines this result with a detailed
dialectical account of the main stages of earlier philosophy. He applies this essen-
tially retrospective approach to his own development and concludes that the
“same philosophy which was Naturphilosophie at an earlier stage here became
philosophy of history” (SW [10: 116]).
Chapter 11, “History, Succession, and German Romanticism,” offers an outline
and defense of what I take to be the best version of a philosophy of history devel-
oped by the post-Kantians. The essay focuses on the famous definition by Novalis
and Friedrich Schlegel of Romanticism, in their ideal programmatic sense, as
“progressive universal poetry.” After assigning a specific philosophical meaning
to each of these three key terms, I argue that they provide a useful framework for
defining a distinctive Early Romantic conception of history, one that is all at
once political, philosophical, and aesthetic in a holistic religious sense. Especially
for our late modern age, this conception can be shown to have advantages over
merely linear, circular, or chaotic models of history. I take the most impressive
version of this conception to be expressed by Hölderlin, whose work can be
understood as a further development of the projects of predecessors such as
Milton, Kant, and Hölderlin’s own student comrades, Hegel and Schelling. In
particular, Hölderlin’s celebrated 1801 poem, “Celebration of Peace” (Friedensfeier),
can be understood as a paradigmatic expression of the Early Romantic thought
that our philosophical and cultural history is primarily a matter of the influence
of a sequence of exemplary geniuses13 who have creatively responded to and
gone beyond their major predecessors, from biblical times through Rousseau
and after.14 The poem culminates in a picture of the enlightened culture of late
modernity as an era that transcends the ancient veneration of mere nature
(“thunderstorms”—what Hegel was to call “the parti-colored show of the sensu-
ous immediate”) as well as the medieval fascination with the supernatural
(“miracles”—what Hegel called “the dark void of the transcendent and remote
super-sensuous”).15 Here Hölderlin (who enthusiastically reported to friends that
13 Cf. Michael Friedman (2001, 67) on “the genius of a Descartes, a Newton, or an Einstein.”
Friedman’s analysis of the history of science is similar to my account of the stress on history in
post-Kantian philosophy because it also features the phenomenon of a progressive appropriation of
one’s predecessors, although it does so in a way that puts more emphasis on the goal of convergence.
14 For one recent account of how controversial the interpretation of this poem is, see Die Zeit
(1956). Rather than identifying the “prince of the festival” (Fürst des Festes) in the poem as one
particular figure or party, I take Hölderlin to be celebrating the significance for humanity of an
extraordinary sequence of exemplary figures, a sequence in which his own work as a writer is meant
to occupy a pivotal place.
15 These phrases come from the chapter on “Self-Consciousness” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit, HW [3: 145], just before the mention of the “spiritual daylight of the present,” and the transition
to the discussion of the master/slave relation. In an American context, it may be difficult to believe
that poets, philosophers, or literary figures in general could imagine they might have an enlightened
he was devoting his time to reading Kant) appears to be directly alluding to Kant’s
rejection of the alternatives of that which is either “veiled in obscurity” or in “the
transcendent region.” These terms occur right next to Kant’s famous conclusion of
his practical philosophy with a call to reflect on what is directly present in the
“starry heavens above” and the “moral law within,” and, above all, on the thought
of how they are linked, through the postulates of pure practical reason, in a uni-
fied teleological and cosmological vision of nature and history (KpV [5: 161f.]).
Chapter 12, “Hölderlin’s Kantian Path,” presents a more detailed account of
Hölderlin’s philosophy as the most sophisticated version of a combination of
Kantian and post-Kantian ideas. It offers a reading of the novel Hyperion that
takes it to be intended primarily as an evaluation of the main competing aesthetic,
moral, and religious answers to the prime question of eighteenth-century German
thought, namely, how best to define the vocation of humanity (die Bestimmung
des Menschen). Despite decades of fascination with both Hölderlin and Kant, it
was only in the last stages of researching this essay that I was led to the surprising
discovery of how much Hölderlin’s work can be read as explicitly intended to be,
above all, an advocacy of Kant’s moral philosophy.16 It is not generally appreciated
that, at the time of Hyperion, Hölderlin’s main aim was to illustrate how a Kantian
ethic, properly understood, can incorporate political, aesthetic, and religious con-
cerns in an enlightened way that overcomes the extremes of other treatments of
these concerns, such as in the work of Schiller and Fichte.17 Hölderlin believed
this position could be not only defended on abstract philosophical grounds but
also energetically supported in literature. As an extraordinarily gifted and enlight-
enment-oriented “poet of the people,” he understandably chose to write in a revo-
lutionary style that he believed would be most effective in motivating people at
large to embrace progressive Kantian ideals, and to achieve what he called a
“more beautiful than merely bourgeois society.”18 I defend Hölderlin’s version of
impact on culture at large. Nonetheless, the literary/political work of Milton and Rousseau, and the
general modern notion of the poet as a revolutionary legislator, had considerable influence through-
out the whole era leading to the French Revolution and beyond (for example, in Ireland). The elo-
quent formulations of the “founding fathers,” and the rhetoric of Lincoln, Whitman, and Martin
Luther King have come perhaps closest to playing this kind of role in American society. Some influen-
tial but unenlightened tendencies (still far from “spiritual daylight”) that are unfortunately present in
Kant’s more popular work are discussed in my (forthcoming a) and (forthcoming c).
16 Just after a draft of this essay was finished, it was heartening to learn, through a tip from Manfred
Frank, that recent work by a top Germanist, Friedrich Strack, independently had reached a similar con-
clusion, namely, that relatively unappreciated letters by Hölderlin demonstrate his deep knowledge of
and overriding commitment to Kant’s moral philosophy, including the postulates. See Chapter 12, n. 50.
17 There is added confirmation for this reading in comments in a remarkable discussion of
“Hölderlin’s Sorrow,” by René Girard (2009, 120–1): “It is through Hölderlin, and no one else, that we
can understand what was happening at Jena in 1806 [. . .] Hölderlin is much less haunted by Greece
than we have been led to believe. I see him instead as frightened by the return to paganism that
infused the classicism of his time.” Thanks to David Dudrick for a reminder on this point.
18 See Franz (2015). This essay offers an excellent account of the complex local political situation
surrounding the very early work of Hölderlin and his colleagues.
the Kantian position as superior (because more balanced) even to the ideals of its
most significant post-Kantian successors, namely, Hegel’s conception of ethical
life, Kierkegaard’s conception of religious life, and Nietzsche’s conception of aes-
thetic life.
Chapter 13, “On Some Reactions to ‘Kant’s Tragic Problem’,” focuses on a
remark by Nietzsche that gives a vivid characterization of the basic trajectory of
German philosophy from Kant through the Romantic era and up to his own time:
“man longs to be completely truthful [. . .] that is noble [. . .] but we get only to the
relative [. . .] that is tragic. That is Kant’s problem. Art now acquires an entirely
new dignity. The sciences, in contrast are degraded to a degree.” Early German
Romantic writers can be understood as also having appreciated “Kant’s problem”
in precisely these “tragic” terms. The tragedy here is not a matter of sensory pain
or ethical conflict but comes simply from a restrictive theoretical thesis similar to
a position held by many nineteenth-century philosophers of science, namely, that
our theoretical knowledge cannot make determinations that go beyond phenom-
ena and reach unconditioned things in themselves. In response to this Critical
situation, the Early Romantics developed an appropriate way of giving a “new
dignity” to art that is compatible with the main features of the elevated, but also
objective and disciplined, role that Kant gives to aesthetic values in our apprecia-
tion of nature and art.19 To defend this position, I argue against recent broadly
Hegelian interpretations of the Romantics that sharply distinguish these writers
from Kant or that criticize their position as all too “subjectivist.” I conclude that
the Romantics can be understood as combining the best features of Kantianism
and Hegelianism: a deep, non-relativist appreciation for modern morality and
subjectivity, along with an eye for developing art and philosophy in the context of
a creatively interconnected historical process of succession.
Chapter 14, “The Historical Turn and Late Modernity,” contrasts Hegel’s sys-
tem and the philosophy of the Early Romantics by offering a further account (in
part in reaction to the extensive work of Robert Pippin on this era) of their role
in relation to the two pivotal claims in my interpretation of post-Kantianism:
first, that, with Reinhold and immediately after, a Historical Turn began that has
continued to dominate all thought influenced by philosophy in the German tra-
dition; and second, that this post-Kantian era is best characterized, in contrast to
the ancient, medieval, and modern periods, as the age of late modernity. The
stress on history as well as the stress on lateness are consequences of two funda-
mental reactions: first, a disenchantment with classical modern forms of philos-
ophy that attempted to model themselves upon, or even provide an independent
foundation for, the remarkable achievements of the exact sciences in the
Scientific Revolution; and second, a belief that the practical goal of rational
19 On the ultimately objective orientation of Kant’s aesthetics, see my (2003), chs. 12–14, (2016b),
and (2017a).
self-determination, as advocated in the main ideas of Rousseau’s work, the ideals

of the French Revolution, and the concern with autonomy in Kant’s ethics, is still
worthy of the highest attention by philosophy, despite shortcomings in the
original main advocacies of this goal. I argue that Hegel’s version of this

post-Kantian project, just like the other early Jena systems, remains in part tied
down by questionable broadly Cartesian ideals—certainty, necessity, and
completeness—inherited from the earlier modern period of philosophy, and
that therefore the more tentative, open, and fragmentary approach of the Early
Romantic writers provides a better model (and one that is in part closer to what
is best in Kant) for continuing the Historical Turn in our own late period of late
modernity.20 I conclude by pointing out that Hegelians have tended to neglect
Early Romanticism simply because they have falsely assumed that the movement
was infected by subjective, nostalgic, reactionary, and basically anti-scientific or
anti-philosophic tendencies.
Chapter 15, “Beyond the Living and the Dead: On Post-Kantian Philosophy
as Historical Appropriation,” offers another assessment of the contrast between
Hegelian and Early Romantic approaches to making an emphasis on history
central in philosophical methodology. It notes the recent stress on history by
philosophers such as Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Richard Moran, and
Raymond Geuss, and it focuses on the work of Robert Brandom in particular as
a prime instance of an impressive contemporary appropriation of Hegel’s
philosophy. It concludes by criticizing Brandom’s approach, noting that the
alternative of Early Romantic thought does not suffer, as Hegelians have assumed,
from a rejection of reason (but, on the contrary, has significant similarities
with many of Williams’s remarks), and that Brandom’s specific version of
Hegelianism, despite its emphasis on the term “autonomy,” cannot do justice to
the original and still defensible core Kantian meaning of the notion.
20 In addition to path-breaking work by German scholars, there is a growing philosophical litera-

ture in English on the Early Romantics by philosophers such as Frederick Beiser, Richard Eldridge,
Jane Kneller, Charles Larmore, Elizabeth Millán Brusslan, and Fred Rush. For further references, see
my (2017b).
2
On the Many Senses of
“Self-Determination”
2.1. Preliminary Overview
Many a Scylla and Charybdis threatens the navigations of the dutiful Groundwork
reader. By focusing on a clarification of some of the very different meanings of
“self-determination” in Kant’s work, the following apologetic interpretation seeks
to steer a middle path between two extreme but common ways of reacting to the
Groundwork’s account of moral self-determination as autonomy. In this case, the
“Scylla” objection claims—in view of the “auto” component of Kantian “auton-
omy”—that to speak of the moral law as rooted in “self-legislation” is to be too
ambitious and overly subjective, and to do an injustice to the essentially receptive
character of our reason. Here the contention is that Kant misunderstands how
reason is a capacity that basically appreciates reasons to act given to the subject by
what is outside of it. The contrasting “Charybdis” concern stems from a worry
about what can appear to be an overly close connection drawn between morality
and freedom as autonomy. Here the critic’s contention is that the “nomos” com-
ponent of self-determination in the Groundwork is too restrictive, and in a sense
overly objective, insofar as it makes our action appear so thoroughly law-oriented
that it seems to leave only the options of being forced either by our reason to fol-
low the moral law or by the “natural necessity” of our sensibility to go against it,
and thus—in contrast to Kant’s own later work—it does injustice to our faculty of
free choice, or at least our ability to act in ways more complex than these two nar-
row options.
2.2. Vindicating Kantian Self-Determination
2.2.1. On “determination” and Bestimmung
Unlike “autonomy,” the components of “self-determination,” as well as those of its

German correlate Selbstbestimmung, are everyday terms in their native languages,
and ones that have many similar meanings and ambiguities. The verb bestimmen
(“determine”) is used repeatedly in numerous contexts by Kant, and yet, like
Kantian Subjects: Critical Philosophy and Late Modernity. Karl Ameriks, Oxford University Press (2019). © Karl Ameriks.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198841852.001.0001
Vindicating Kantian Self-Determination 15
casual English speakers, he generally does not bother to make explicit the quite
different senses that the term can have.
One basic ambiguity concerns two distinct philosophical senses of “determin-
ation,” namely, an epistemological (E) and a causal (C) sense. We can say, in a first,
or E sense, that we determine something when—even without having any rele-
vant effect on it—we simply learn something informative about it, for example,
when we cognitively determine the fact that a surface appears warm. We can also
say, in a second, or C sense, that we determine it when we simply bring about that
something beyond our immediate situation is the case, for example, when we
causally determine that a surface is warm—even when, in the relevant sense, we
may not at all know what we are doing. It can of course also happen that cognitive
and causal kinds of determination combine in one complex event; we can come to
learn that something is warm in the very act of making it warm. (In English, these
meanings are combined in a further sense when we use knowledge in a decisive
way to try to bring something about, as when we say, for example, that, “no mat-
ter what,” we are “determined to” heat a surface.)
In addition to these basic E and C senses of “determine,” there are, especially
for the noun form of the term, what I will call its basic F and N senses, namely a
formal or definitional sense,1 as well as a normative sense, one that, for Kant,
ultimately is to be understood as having a complex moral and teleological mean-
ing. For example, in the course of determining the composition of a metal, in the
E sense of merely finding out some things about it, we may eventually arrive at its
determination in the more exact F sense of a formula defining its basic nature.2
(Here the English term has roots in the French verb determiner and the process of
fixing a thing’s boundaries and gaining a relevantly complete notion of it.) In
Kant’s tradition, the nature of something can, furthermore, be something more
than a mere physically defined arrangement, in a broadly mechanical sense, for
this nature can need to be understood in terms of an ideal practical form such as,
above all, the notion of a moral telos or destiny.
It is this biblical and broadly Lutheran sense that is most relevant when, after
J. J. Spalding’s very popular 1748 volume Die Bestimmung des Menschen,3 Kant
and numerous other German philosophers, including especially Fichte, focus on
Bestimmung in the N sense of our essential “vocation,” or “calling,” at a species as
well as individual level. The term “determination” does not have this normative
meaning in English, and thus its relation to the other terms can often get lost in
translation, but this sense must always be kept in mind when reading Kant and
1 See e.g., G [4: 461]: “autonomy—as the formal condition under which it alone can be determined.”
2 See e.g., G [4: 436]: “a complete determination (Bestimmung) of all maxims by that formula.”
3 On Spalding’s significance, see e.g., Munzel (2012) and Brandt (2007).
16 On the Many Senses of “ Self-Determination ”
his use of various forms of the term bestimmen, for it is this kind of determination
that always is of greatest significance to him.4
Kant’s very early works, such as his 1755 Universal Natural History, go along
with the dominant broadly Leibnizian view of his era, which stresses that human
beings have a significant normative determination but maintains a compatibilist
doctrine of freedom, one that denies absolute free choice. This view distinguishes,
as basically a matter of mere degree, our rational essence as human beings with
this kind of (merely relative) freedom from the broadly mechanistic nature of
lower kinds of beings, while still allowing that, according to a more inclusive
meaning of the term “nature,” human beings are thoroughly determined as parts
of nature in the E, C, F, and N senses. Although Kant holds to this view through-
out his earliest works, he then, after the fundamental revolution in his thinking
upon reading Rousseau and achieving philosophical maturity at the age of forty
in the early 1760s, adopts a very different conception of the relation of nature and
human freedom.5 From that time on, Kant believes that our own nature is unique
in having a non-compatibilist Bestimmung in its pure moral vocation, a vocation
that cannot be understood as being fulfilled, as Leibnizians and other compatibil-
ists claim, simply by attaining higher degrees of clear representation and conse-
quent power.
2.2.2. On the “self ” of Selbstbestimmung
Although the notion of “determination” will be my main focus, it is also necessary

to add a few preliminary observations about the “self ” component in the complex
term “self-determination.” In a Kantian context, it is of course crucial to keep in
mind that his use of the word “self ” is not limited to ordinary empirical particu-
lars. When he speaks of “simple acts of reason,” that is, our fundamental logical
capacities, as being found “in my own self,”6 he clearly has in mind, in part, a
general and pure faculty that cannot be explained as the product of empirical
actions or capacities. It is then, I believe, an additional—and of course still much
disputed—feature of Kant’s ultimate moral metaphysics that it favors affirming
that the self (of each of us) has not only a range of pure general capacities (for
pure intuiting, pure understanding, pure theoretical and practical reasoning, and
even for generating feelings that in part have a pure origin) but also a kind of pure
4 See e.g., G [4: 396], “the true vocation (Bestimmung) of human beings must be to produce a will
that is good.”
5 See Ameriks (2012), ch. 1.
6 A xiv: “ich demütig gestehe . . . ich es lediglich mit der Vernunft selbst und ihrem reinen Denken
zu tun habe . . . weil ich sie [deren ausführlichen Kenntnis] in mir selbst antreffe . . . alle ihre einfache
Handlungen.”
Vindicating Kantian Self-Determination 17
and particular independent form of existence, that is, an immortality conceived

of as in itself lacking any sensory qualities, spatial or temporal.7
In addition to these basic empirical and pure senses of “self,” which I take to
include substantial as well as functional characterizations, there is a complex
reflexive meaning to the term “self ” that has a fundamental significance in the
context of self-determination.8 To begin with, this reflexive meaning needs to be
understood as having at least a threefold structure with implications at both
empirical and pure levels of determination (and concerning all E, C, F, and N
senses). For Kant, to say that we are self-determined reflexively is to say, at the
least, that, at both levels, the self is determined (1) in (or, one could also say, of)
itself and (2) by itself as well as (3) for itself.
At the first level, this means that human beings, individually and as a group,
are commonly understood to be acting with empirical effects that are in part
within them, and that are caused by empirical sources in them, and that exist for
the sake of empirical ideals concerning them. Thus, we can speak, as Lincoln did
at Gettysburg, of a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
But Kant would go on to insist that we speak, in addition, in terms of three paral-
lel forms of pure reflexivity, and thus affirm, at a second level, pure effects, pure
causings, and pure ideals—all to be understood as part of our own self-deter-
mined existence and not merely a possibility for divine beings.
The mere general or structural feature of reflexivity thus does not by itself cap-
ture what Kant takes to be most important about us. That is, the three kinds of
Gettysburg empirical reflexivity just listed are by themselves merely empirical,
and they could exhaust the capacities of the kind of agents that Kant memorably
stigmatizes in terms of the image of a mere “turnspit” (Bratenwender) (KpV [5:
97]). In saying this, he realizes, of course, that even at the empirical level human
beings are not literally mechanical turnspits, for, as rational animals, their reflex-
ive acts have a conscious intentionality aimed at complex ideals. But if Kant had
lived long enough to hear Lincoln’s threefold reflexive remark about government,
and understood all that it was directly saying as a merely empirical statement,
presumably he still would have maintained what he says in his 1783 review of
Pastor J. H. Schulz’s “well-intentioned” quasi-Leibnizian tract on penal reform,
namely, that by itself it still misses our essential (for our Bestimmung) and abso-
lutely pure (in E, C, F, and N senses) freedom to act and to think,9 which is denied
7 See, however, Chapter 5, and Kant’s criticism (Rel [6: 128–9 n.]) of the notion of resurrection.
8 See Prauss (1989) and O’Neill (2013).
9 Here Kant at first calls this a freedom to “always act as if one were free [and such that] this idea
also actually produces the deed,” and then he adds that “the understanding is able to determine
(bestimmen) one’s judgment in accordance with objective grounds that are always valid,” and hence we
must “always admit freedom to think, without which there is no reason” (RevSch [8: 13]). These ways
of characterizing the absolute freedom to act and to think are not clearly in line with the best formula-
tions of Kant’s position, but they vividly disclose, in an initial way, the topic that he is most concerned
with writing about right at this time. See the end of his essay “An Answer to the Question: What is
in all compatibilist systems, no matter how sophisticated their picture of us as

conscious, rational, and power enhancing agents.
Once the full context and multiple meanings of Kant’s Groundwork Section II
discussion of autonomy as reflexive self-determination by reason has been spelled
out, and once the pure normative sense of autonomy is understood as its essential
meaning there—in contrast to merely political and psychological senses of
“thinking for oneself ” or being “self-governing” according to just any rational
principles that contrast with merely reacting to “threats and rewards”10—it
becomes possible to deflect common objections to Kantian autonomy as overly
subjective. Explaining this sense can also help clarify aspects of the Groundwork’s
difficult transition from Section II to Section III, and this can set the stage for
responding to objections that Kant has an overly objective or law-obsessed under-
standing of action in general.
2.3. Groundwork, Section III, De Capo
2.3.1. Preconditions
The title of the first subsection of Section III is “The concept of freedom is the key
to the explanation of the autonomy of the will” (Wille) (G [4: 440]). This title
might suggest to some readers that we already have a distinct concept of freedom
at hand, and now we can directly apply this concept to explain a mysterious fea-
ture called “autonomy of the will.” This kind of approach is problematic, however,
because the previous Section culminates in an argument that already elucidates a
normative principle of autonomy, whereas it is the nature and existence of free-
dom, especially in its fundamental philosophical sense, that is, a transcendental
causal one, that has not yet been addressed in a direct way. In other words, at the
outset of Section III, there is an at least partially well-understood notion of auton-
omy that Kant is taking as given at this point—one involving self-determination
basically in the E, F, and N senses—and it is now his goal to introduce a direct
discussion of freedom that may begin to shed light on further features of auton-
omy—features that abruptly shift the discussion of determination largely from its
previously mentioned senses to its C sense.11
Enlightenment?” (1784) and his reviews of Herder in 1785 as well as the Groundwork (1785). His “Idea
for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent” (1784) also has a basic, although indirectly
expressed, concern with absolute freedom. See Ameriks (2012), chs. 9 and 10.
10 See Larmore (2011, 11).

11 Hence the title of the Groundwork itself, and of Section III, which introduces the notion of a
“Critique [i.e., explanation] of Pure Practical Reason.”
Groundwork, Section III, De Capo 19
Prior to this new causal discussion, autonomy is treated in strict normative

terms, as in the title of Section II’s subsection: “The autonomy of the will as the
supreme principle of morality” (G [4: 440]). That title expresses an initial and
relatively non-mysterious idea of what Kant means by autonomy, namely, a way of
characterizing the normative principle of morality as necessarily supreme. Here
the most basic feature of the norm that Kant is concerned with is that it not only
meet the condition of definitely concerning a principle that is “supreme” within
morality but also that it not endanger the claim of morality’s principle to be prac-
tically supreme overall. Kant is looking for a principle that is not threatened by
even the possibility of being normatively derivative, and hence is necessarily
supreme in the sense of being wholly unconditioned in its value, even if it may in
other respects depend on general non-moral features. For this principle to be able
to concern, as Kant has already argued that it must, an imperative that is categor-
ical, it has to be such that it does not get its distinctive normative status from
outside, from “something else” (G [4: 433]).12 The supreme principle is therefore a
kind of essentially reflexive principle in a new and axiological sense. At this point
the idea of a will with autonomy is basically the idea of the faculty of the will as
something that does not take the value of its supreme norm from outside, that is,
merely through faculties external to Wille. In this way, the principle can be said to
have a value that holds true of the will not merely in some kind of psychological
sense but in a reflexively normative sense, that is, in terms of its own basic
resources, and thus purely by or through it, as opposed to on account of some
other source of standards (such as mere sensation).
Given this context, it is understandable that the end of Section II treats what is
outside primarily in negative terms, as when it argues that traditional factors
external to the will, such as empirical conditions—whether turned psychologic-
ally inward or not (that is, involving feelings for others and not just oneself)—or
dogmatic theological or teleological considerations, whatever significance they
may have otherwise, have a kind of externality and contingency13 that conflicts
with the pure standard of necessary value that other parts of the Groundwork
already connect in categorical moral terms with the notion of the will. Hence,
when we then turn to what appears to be the only option left, namely, to what is
inside the will, it turns out that it cannot, after all, be internality in any ordinary
sense that carries the weight of Kant’s argument. This is because, if we were to try
to focus on features that seem in an ordinary sense internal to the will but contin-
gent, we would immediately have to concede that, as conditional, these features
12 See also G [4: 458], and [4: 427], where Wille is described as “the capacity to determine itself to
action in conformity with certain laws . . . the objective ground of its self-determination is the end.” The
term “end” makes clear that the point of speaking of the will’s (“objective”) self-determination is to
stress a matter of normative determination.
13 See G [4: 425], which says the ground of value cannot be in any “special natural predisposition of
humanity.”
are still inappropriate for determining, in an E, F, or N sense, what Kant requires

of a “supreme principle” of morality.14
Therefore, instead of loading Kant’s idea of autonomy with the weight of
some kind of extra and mysterious boot-strapping “willful” process—which
readers are understandably still tempted to do15—it is essential to see that the
underlying claim of Section II depends not on an appeal to internality or even
reflexivity in a traditional general sense but simply on the specific need for
finding a basic faculty that is normatively relevant because of an at least pos-
sibly appropriate connection to an unconditionally necessary principle of
value. On this interpretation, Kant’s basic thought is that we have no adequate
access to such necessity from some faculty altogether outside reason (hence
also his constant attacks on mystical intuition), whereas reason, the faculty
that concerns the unconditioned in general, also belongs, in particular, to
Wille, that is, the pure practical side of the self.16
For Kant, Wille essentially has such a special feature simply because it is defined
as a faculty of practical reason, and by this he means pure practical reason,
in contrast to mere instrumental rationality, let alone mere arbitrium brutum
(G [4: 412]).17 Although this feature, the appreciation of absolute necessity, is in
one sense internal because, on Kant’s view, it is intrinsically needed for us to be
what we most fundamentally are, and thus it reflects what one always is in one’s
“ownmost” self,18 this is not a matter of internality in any kind of ordinary
psychological, subjectivistic, or humanistic sense. Hence, insofar as it rests on a
previously affirmed respect (in principle, in the second formula of the categorical
imperative) for the absolute value of rational agency in this pure sense,19 the nor-
mative self-determination of Kantian morality, as explained in the Groundwork’s
discussion of the supreme practical principle of autonomy, can be read as the very
opposite of what it has appeared to be to many unsympathetic readers—and even
many others who have been trying to be sympathetic. Because Kant argues for the
14 See G [4: 432–3]: “[When] one thought of [oneself] as subject to [unterworfen, i.e., merely
assively subject in contrast to ‘legislating’] a law . . . it had to carry with it some interest or
p
constraint . . . necessitated (genötigt) by something else [because not arising from the will’s own law, my
emphasis] in conformity with a law . . . a certain interest, be it one’s own interest or another . . . But then
the imperative also had to be conditional.” Later Kant also speaks of “interests” generated by reason
itself, in which case they have an intrinsically necessary status.
15 A similar common and understandable, but also self-defeating, approach is often taken to the
metaphysics of Kant’s idealism, as if somehow a special process of human “making” could provide a
consistent Kantian explanation of the necessary conditions of our grasp of spatiotemporality itself.
16 Kant therefore stresses later in Section III that reasons still need to be given for the synthetic
claim that we do have will in a strong sense or at least, in some persuasive sense, must regard ourselves
in this way.
17 See A 534/B 562 and Deligiorgi (2012, 90).
18 See e.g., G [4: 455], “das moralische Sollen ist also unser eigenes notwendiges Wollen als Glied
einer intelligiblen Welt,” and G [4: 457] and [4: 458], “das eigentliche Selbst.”
19 I take this absolute value of being an end in itself to reside for Kant neither in actually acting
with a perfectly good will, nor in simply setting whatever ends, but in having the capacity always to set
ends that meet the conditions of pure morality. See Ameriks (forthcoming a).
principle from the basis of a respect for absolute necessity, the burden is on others
to show that his notion of self-determination has the ultimately subjectivist and
limited character that is attached to it in most contemporary uses of the notion of
autonomy,20 and even in many otherwise perceptive discussions of Kant
himself.21
2.3.2. How to undercut what can seem to be Kant’s self-undercutting
There are, of course, passages that can understandably lead readers astray and
make it appear as if Kant himself goes on to undercut the fundamentally objective
position just discussed. The most frequently cited text of this sort is a passage
from Groundwork II that expresses a principle of autonomy as normatively reflex-
ive pure self-determination, which I will call NRSPD: “Hence the will (Wille) is not
merely subject to the law [as it would still seem to be on moral theories rooted in
contingent factors such as fear or good feeling] but subject to it in such a way that
it must be viewed as also giving the law to itself (als selbstgesetzgebend) and just
because of this as first subject to the law” (G [4: 431]).22 Taken out of context,
NRSPD might appear to be stressing, after all, an act of arbitrary imposition. The
context of NRSPD, however, as indicated by the word “hence,” shows that it is
meant to follow from preceding considerations, and thus, methodologically con-
sidered, it does not invoke mere imposition (or, to be precise, what the rest of the
sentence calls the will’s “regarding itself as the author”)—in the loose popular
sense of autonomy—as an Archimedean point. The immediately preceding sen-
tence, and the logical precondition for NRSPD, is that “all maxims are repudi-
ated” that are inconsistent with “the will’s own universal-law-giving” (4: 431).23 In
addition to the special significance of the qualification “universal” (discussed fur-
ther below) in the essentially unified term “universal-law-giving,” there are two
other basic points here that must be reiterated whenever trying to understand
sentences like this in Kant.
The first point is that the term Kant uses throughout for “will” here is Wille and
not Willkür (choice),24 which means that it does not at all have the common
20 One needs to sharply distinguish Kantian autonomy from less demanding uses of the term,
which concern contingent political or psychological matters. This point about the absolutely necessary
character of Kantian autonomy is compatible, I believe, with an argument by Paul Guyer (2013), that
Kant also develops an empirical account of how humanity gets better over time at committing itself to
autonomous principles.
21 See Ameriks (2012), ch. 6. 22 Cited at Larmore (2011, 9).
23 “der eigenen allgemeinen Gesetzgebung des Willens.” My translation substitutes for the
Cambridge, “the will’s own giving of universal law,” because the latter translation (see also below, note
31) might suggest a contingent relation between the terms, as many Anglophone interpretations tend
to assume. For criticism of this tendency, see Ameriks (2012), ch. 6.
24 This term has a common connotation of arbitrariness in German, e.g., at G [4: 428].
casual and contingent English meaning of a derivative capacity or arbitrary act—

or, for that matter, of anything characterized independently of the rigorous condi-
tions of what Kant calls pure “practical reason.” The second point is that by such
reason, in this context, Kant precisely also does not mean any kind of casual and
contingent reasoning about merely accidental ends25—in contrast to almost all
English uses of this phrase. What he means is not just any form of practical
rationality but instead the strictly universal “legislation” of pure practical reason,
which intends a law that applies by unconditional necessity and not as a matter of
mere general empirical fact, as in Lincoln’s political phrase. What pure reason
alone allows for is a determination of not just any kind of maxims but ones appro-
priate for what Kant calls “lawfulness”—that is to say, law as such, which, in the
pure context of morality, signifies its having the “form” of absolute necessity—
unlike the accidentally posited laws that characterize our merely empirical exist-
ence and “counsels of prudence” (G [4: 416]).
Unfortunately, Kant tends to signal this condition of strictness by simply call-
ing the relevant kind of law “universal,” and this has led to considerable confusion
about what most concerns him. Kant’s frequent use of the term “universal” is
understandable in a sense, as a reminder that laws that are merely posited do not
in fact tend to be universally valid, nor are they generally even meant to apply
universally (and, even if they have a general intention, as with the principles of a
rational egoist or an advocate of mere prudence, this is not an unrestricted uni-
versality, but conditional, Kant would say, on limited interests not shared by all).
But this is just an accidental truth, although it can function as a convenient touch-
stone, for if something can be shown to be in no way universal, then it cannot be
necessary. Kant’s fundamental concern, however, as he makes explicit at least on
some occasions, is with not just any kind of universality but rather a condition of
“strict universality”26 tantamount to necessity. Moreover, in this case, it is a prac-
tical necessity that is understood as absolute, involving a law that holds even for
divine nature (TP [8: 280n.], Rel [6: 104], MPC [27: 277]), and hence it goes
beyond even the transcendental schematized Kantian necessities of the Analytic
of the first Critique, which apply merely at the sensory and ultimately contingent
levels of our existence.
Only once all these qualifications are appreciated can one properly begin to
understand what Kant intends by repeatedly speaking here of the “universal law”
as a matter of Wille’s “own giving.” This reflexive claim is made in both sentences
25 These are ends that one could be “subject to,” so as to meet the first, but only the first, part of the
key phrase, just cited, characterizing autonomy at G [4: 431]. I bracket here the vexed external issue of
whether happiness or universal well-being in general, rather than either accidental particular ends or
the Kantian notion of pure duty, may by itself be an absolutely necessary value.
26 Cf. G [4: 430–1]: “because of its universality it applies to all rational beings as such.” This phrase
surely must be understood as expressing a necessary essence, and not a universality reflecting mere
contingent applicability. See also Chapter 7 and G [4: 426], “it is a necessary law for all rational
beings . . . ”
of the short paragraph that contains NRSPD, as well as in the concluding sentence
of the long immediately preceding paragraph. The reason why Kant insists on
calling the law a matter of Wille’s “own giving” is basically that he is trying to find
a way to express, as he says in this sentence, that a proper normative principle of
Wille must not be rooted in something that would not allow it to serve “as
supreme condition of its [i.e., the will’s] harmony with universal practical reason”
(G [4: 431]). In other words, the “own giving” by Wille here is not a free-floating
feature but is one directly tied to Kant’s attempt to characterize its principle in
such a way that it makes possible a “harmony” with practical reason insofar as
such reason is strictly universal, that is, “fit to be a law” (G [4: 431]).
Kant’s concern here with “harmony” is tied to his thought that the principle of
morality, in accord with the general organizational principle of reason, must have
a consistent threefold specification in “form,” “matter,” and “complete determin-
ation” (G [4: 436]). This harmony has a transcendental faculty assignment
aspect27 as well as, derivatively, a concrete intersubjective aspect. First, practical
reason as Wille, unlike the other basic faculties of mere sensibility and mere
understanding, just is the only faculty that is, as Kant goes one to say, harmonious
in the sense of “well suited” (G [4: 432]; see the contrast of reason and under-
standing at G [4: 452]) for such universal norms simply because reason is defined
as the faculty alone appropriate for expressing and systematizing unconditional
necessity. In this regard, it alone is not possibly dependent in its authority on con-
tingent factors, what Kant here calls the “interests” of the other faculties.28
This is why, secondly, he goes on to note that its norms can always be intended
to apply harmoniously in a “complete determination” or structural specification
of an entire ethical commonwealth (Reich der Zwecke).29 As he stresses in the
universal-law-giving passage right before the NRSPD passage, its norms equally
concern “every rational being” (G [4: 431]) as an agent and thus, as a Kantian
Lincoln might say, they can be understood as having validity in a pure sense, and
are necessarily not only “of ” and “by” but also “for” each rational being as Wille. It
is this interpersonal but a priori sense of normativity, and not any empirical pro-
cess, that is crucial to Kant’s understanding of moral authority. Because it is the
precondition driving Kant’s overall argument toward NRSPD and is sufficient for
his distinctive purposes, the idea of a strict moral necessity and independence
of Wille as a faculty, as expressed in NRSPD itself, should not be read as
27 This is part of Kant’s general project of demarcating the transcendental “location” of the diversity
of our faculties, in opposition to empiricist and rationalist “single root” tendencies that eliminate any
non-derivative conception of will.
28 G [4: 432]: “the principle of . . . universally legislating . . . is founded on no interest, and thus can
alone, among all possible imperatives, be unconditional.”
29 The presumption of this harmony is overly swift. As later work in logic has revealed, even seem-
ingly necessary formal principles of theoretical reason can lead to paradoxes and a multiplicity of
incompatible options, and so one should keep in mind that even Kantian practical norms based on
pure reason may be vulnerable to similar problems.
characterizing some kind of extra process of literal “giving,” in either a humanist

or supernaturalist sense, for this would replace the supreme principle of moral
law with what would have to appear to be a mere quasi-necessity of arbitrary acts
of authorship that could claim no more than ultimately subjective validity. In
other words, Kant’s autonomy formula builds on, rather than undercuts, the
thought that the moral law, and a person’s being an “end itself,” is something that
has a value “in itself,” with an unrestricted validity for all agents as such.30 Kant’s
third basic formula for morality can thus be understood as simply meant to
express the point that this value must not only concern (that is, be “of ” and “for”)
beings with reason but also cannot be explained independently of being rooted in
the faculty of will, which alone can be at once pure—unlike mere feeling—and
practical—unlike mere understanding.
The full final clause of the sentence immediately prior to the paragraph of
NRSPD is: “from this there follows now the third practical principle of the will, as
supreme condition of its harmony with universal practical reason, the idea of the
will of every rational being as a universal-lawgiving-will” (G [4: 431]).31 Note that
in this sentence, which is the crucial step supplementing the first two basic for-
mulations of the Categorical Imperative, Kant is taking NRSPD itself as some-
thing that “follows.” I propose that this means that, for Kant, to fill out normative
reflexive self-determination in transcendentally reflective, intersubjectively “uni-
versal,” and “complete determination” terms,32 is simply to reiterate, in the new
30 This worry is raised by Larmore (2011, 8–9, and 19), who raises the common, and self-defeating,
worry that Kant is literally turning reason into an “agent.” I take my reading of the Groundwork, as
basically just trying to give moral principles their proper faculty location, to entail all that Larmore
wants from his own (allegedly more realistic) normative theory, especially insofar as Larmore goes on
to state that what is valuable is not to be thought of existing in a totally isolated way but as in corres-
pondence with our reason. Larmore himself says, “reasons have a relational character,” that is, involve
relations to “possibilities of thought and action that need to be discovered” (2011, 20)—presumably by
agents with the faculty of reason. Anti-Kantians tend to believe this kind of response is ruled out by
Kant’s characterization of heteronomy as a matter of allowing the “object” to determine the (moral)
law (G [4: 441]), but this is to overlook that what Kant is rejecting is simply the thought that a norma-
tively contingent or indeterminate “object” could be law-determining; in other contexts, he is willing
to speak of the law itself as the proper “object” of practical reason.
31 This again is my modification of the Cambridge translation, which reads, “will giving universal
law,” and thus does not as exactly reflect the German “allgemein gesetzgebenden Willens,” a phrase
that is found on the next page and elsewhere without a break between the terms characterizing will:
allgemeingesetzgebenden Willens. The combining of the terms without a break best expresses the cru-
cial point that Kant is making an essential and not an accidental characterization of what he calls
Wille.
32 This three-step structure dominates the Groundwork from the beginning, although sometimes in
a partially inverted order. The three principles of Section I are introduced heuristically in the order of,
first, “subjective” (that is, existing in the subject) content, that is, the good will and its necessary value
(the notion of necessary value is also placed first in the Preface, G [4: 389]); then “objective” form, that
is, having a right (universalizable) maxim; and, third, “determination” through “pure respect for prac-
tical law,” which “outweighs” all mere inclination (G [4: 400]) and is expressed later in terms of the
formula of autonomy. In the initial presentation of the three basic formulae of the categorical impera-
tive in Section II, and then also in the summary at G [4: 431], the order becomes (1) the “objective”
form of universality, (2) the “subjective” content of the necessary value of being an agent with reason,
and (3) the unity of these in the notion of a “legislating” rather than simply passive Wille—a third
language of the third formulation, our need to resist any reliance on any contin-
gent use of faculties that would undermine a kind of already assumed necessary
practical “harmony.” Rather than imposing on Kant an odd and invalid extra
meaning to the notion of self-determination, one can read him as basically just
repeating a point that is made throughout his work and that is systematically
elaborated, in an explicitly negative manner, in the concluding subsections of
Groundwork II, “Heteronomy of the Will as the Source of all Spurious Principles
of Morality,” namely, that if one were to try normatively to account for the neces-
sary authority of morality in terms of exercises of faculties that are manifestly
contingent, such as our sensitivity to either external or internal empirical pres-
sures, or even theological concepts characterized in a merely arbitrary fashion
(concerning a desire to please the whims of a tyrannical superpower), then this
would be tantamount to sacrificing the normative necessity of the moral law and
its chance for harmony with universal reason.33
Note that although it is true that there is a contingent causal relation between
our awareness of such mere pressures, and the existence of particular stimuli for
them, it is not the relational causal contingency of the pressures that is the key to
Kant’s objection to them; what matters is the immediately evident contingency of
their value relevance.34 There is, for example, no reason to think that the prestige
often associated with social rank is necessarily a moral good. But if contingent
sources of normativity do not as such harmonize with the strict modal and uni-
versal nature of the moral demands of practical reason, some kind of fitting and
necessary location for the possibility of this harmony needs to be sought. From a
Kantian perspective, there is one and only one obvious alternative here, namely,
to look toward practical reason itself. Reason in general is characterized through-
out Kant’s philosophy as precisely that faculty which determines (in E, F, C, and N
senses)35 all strictly necessary truths, and hence it only makes sense to say that
point that “follows” on reflection because the preceding two points about the universality and neces-
sity of the supreme principle of morality cannot be understood in terms of a merely contingently
determined will. See also Allison (2011, 124) and below, note 42.
33 Here Kant has a special problem insofar as he must concede that, of the four basic options, the
perfectionist theory of value need not be vulnerable to the objection of relying on contingent values at
its base. This may be part of the reason why Kant is especially interested in the feature of the universal-
izability of maxims, which he thinks gives his theory a special advantage, given what he takes to be the
inescapable indeterminacy of the notion of “perfection” alone.
34 Hence I assume there is concern about a judgment (ultimately involving freedom) of value, and
not a mere causal relation, at work in passages such as this (G [4: 460]): “it is not because the law
interests us that it has validity for us (for that is heteronomy and dependence [normative!] of practical
reason [this is a point about reason, not mere psychology] . . . ).”
35 This statement about “reason in general” is compatible with allowing that reason “in particular,”
that is, as it is actually taken up on a particular occasion by a person reasoning in action, is part of
what allows that person to be causally effective. The causality of practical reason has been emphasized
in recent work by Stephen Engstrom.
the practical necessities of morality must be sought within the faculty of practical
reason, what Kant also calls Wille.
Given that these necessities are unavoidably valid, it may be disconcerting at
first that Kant uses an active voice here and speaks of “the will” as “giving” the
law36 rather than simply seeing, understanding, or appreciating it. But there are
understandable reasons for his use of the active voice here. The most obvious one
is that he wants to mark a strong contrast with what he takes to be the manifestly
passive and inadequate putative sources of unconditional value that others tend
to rely on: mere sensation, tradition, threats, and such. Moreover, even when, in a
moral context, Kant does use, and even emphasizes, a term that is translated as
“impose” (auferlegen), he also uses it in part in a passive voice, as something
imposed “upon the will.” That is, he states that for actions (for example, not lying
to someone about a truth that they have a right to know) out of “immediate
respect,” “nothing but reason is required to impose them upon the will,” since
“these actions need no recommendation from any subjective proclivity . . . to coax
[erschmeicheln, that is, lure by mere flattery] them” (G [4: 435]).37 Here again it is
clear that the cash value of the term “impose” is simply to sharply oppose the idea
of accepting only manifestly contingent sources of value. As Wille, we “give our-
selves” the law most basically insofar as we cannot, as beings of reason, let a
“supreme principle,” no matter how flattering, be contingently imposed upon us
as normatively decisive. We understand that mere efficient causal determination,
as a contingent fact about events, cannot be the same thing as the normative
determination of a necessary standard of value—and this is true even if the caus-
ation is a matter of our own active imagination.
Throughout his philosophy, Kant makes use of a basic distinction between Tun
and Lassen (G [4: 396]), that is, between being active in a paradigmatic initiating
sense, in contrast to allowing something to happen. But even “allowing” is under-
stood in this context as also a kind of action, and it is clearly Kant’s general view
that, in the context of our relation to the status of norms, for us even to merely
allow any of these actually to hold sway in one’s life is to engage in a kind of act
and to determine oneself “efficiently” in a “self-incurred” way.38 Hence, intentions
36 One should also keep in mind that what look like German uses of the term “give,” that is, geben,
are often translated more properly in non-activist terms. Es gibt does not mean “it gives,” but simply
“there is,” just as in English, when we say “it rains,” we really are not speaking of a separate “it” but just
mean that now “there is rain.” I suspect that Kant is most attracted to the word “give” here simply
because he wants to use a verb that contrasts with “take,” which in this context signifies merely taking
over from an external source in a normatively lazy way. Another complication is that here “give” and
“take” have connotations that contrast with how they are generally used in relation to the English
philosophical notion of the “myth of the (merely passively) given.”
37 I have inserted the phrase “these actions . . . proclivity” from an earlier part of the paragraph, for
grammatical and explanatory reasons. Without the insertion the translation of Kant’s phrase reads, “to
impose them upon the will, not to coax . . . ,” and here one sees perhaps even more directly how Kant’s
main aim is simply to make a contrast with contingent sources such as mere “coaxing.”
38 See Section 2.4.
in which one chooses to ignore the claim of morality and to accept as basic what
Kant calls the merely heteronomous standards of sensibility and self-love must
also involve a kind of act on our part, even if it is not in an explicit phenomeno-
logical sense.39
A common objection at this point is to say that even if the value of a law is not
something to be merely “taken” in the sense of a natural process that is undergone
totally passively, this does not mean that we should say it is self-given either, for
one might want to characterize it as simply recognized as authoritatively present.40
Against this gambit, a Kantian might at first argue that we should speak of the
faculty of reason in active terms simply because of considerations that go back to
a long-standing Scholastic and rationalist tradition of understanding intentional-
ity in general as active because at least implicitly propositional (and thus involv-
ing synthesis, in contrast to mere sensation and primitive feeling), although by no
means in a necessarily arbitrary way. Here, however, one must distinguish
between reason’s general normative (N and F) determination of the standing of a
practical law, and the cognitive and appreciative acts in which a particular reason-
ing subject determines itself, through reason in a concrete E and C sense, to be
committed to a maxim in a way that takes an actual stance on the law. Even
though the latter kind of determination, on each occasion, is understandably
always a matter of activity rather than mere passivity, this may leave it unclear
why the general formal and normative determination of the law’s status as
supreme should be said to be self-given. Nonetheless, there remain the grounds
already given for speaking of even the mere formal determination of the law’s
standing as something that is self-determined, in a non-subjectivist, pure, and
distinctively internal sense, rather than other-determined. Kant’s view is that,
even before trying to ground the synthetic claim that the moral law is in fact
binding on us, the philosophical analysis of what the acceptance of such a law
would entail41 does point directly to a non-subjectivist understanding of NRSPD.
The key point here, once again, is simply that it must be within the faculty of prac-
tical reason itself, and neither of the two other faculties distinct from it, namely,
mere feeling and mere theoretical understanding, that such a strict standard for
practical life would have to reside (and thus is "self-given" with Wille).
It is, to be sure, a bit of provocative language to speak of this necessary har-
mony between pure reason, as a basic faculty, with pure morality, as a practical
standard with content, in terms of reason’s “authoring” and “legislating” morality’s
pure law (cf. G [4: 448]), for this might suggest to some readers the existence of
something like an independent being, such as a person or a government, engaged
with a totally independent other item, that is, an entity that need not be. Reason,
39 This point is stressed in Pippin (2013).

40 See again Larmore (2011).
41 Note Kant’s cautious language in this section: “if there is a categorical imperative” (G [4: 432]).
however, is not a separate individual but is just Kant’s term for a pure general fac-
ulty, and as such it has a necessary relation to content that has lawful form, and
hence it can be said to be “legislating.” Kant sees that in the case of practical rea-
son, the “legislator” and its work are not only in close harmony but are in a neces-
sary and reciprocal relation, for without any work, without some content in
necessary laws, the faculty of reason would be an Unding, far emptier than any
mere thought of a thing in itself. All the same, pure reason itself is responsible
simply for the lawful aspect of value, the universal conditions required to respect
the absolute value of being an agent with reason. Kant recognizes that the mani-
fold empirical contents of the particular and conditioned values and reasons that
arise in everyday life, prior to regulation, are not themselves rooted in pure rea-
son, let alone the bare notion of its universal legislation. His speaking of reason’s
authorship can thus be understood as a technical move, limited to a very specific
meaning concerning faculties, and as having only partial, metaphorical overlaps
with familiar notions of empirical authorship and legislation. The point of the
Groundwork, as a “groundwork,” is basically just to express general formulae for a
necessary practical principle, and to ask the question of which faculty can be con-
sistently understood as correlated with such a principle. In this context it is not
mysterious to propose that reason is crucial, for it is the only faculty that can be
consistently regarded as the relevant authority.42 In a textual sense, this means
that the formula of autonomy need not be regarded as itself independent or meth-
odologically autonomous, insofar as it depends thoroughly on a prior acceptance
of the first two formulae. The independence, or strict lawgiving capacity, of rea-
son by itself as a faculty is only a crucial necessary, but not a sufficient, condition
for moral guidance in the complexities of human life.
42 A fundamental and very different objection to Kant is to insist that it is not clear that reason
itself can have practical content, for it can seem that it is at most a faculty for testing consistency or, as
in its theoretical use, for illegitimately positing unconditioned conditions for items given to it by other
faculties. This kind of objection is not clearly relevant at this point in the text, however, for Kant intro-
duces the notion of reason’s practical self-determination only after he has already characterized mor-
ality in terms of what he calls its “formal” and “material,” or “objective” and “subjective” aspects, the
two aspects that need to be understood as being in “harmony” through a relation to a common third
factor, our faculty of reason’s “complete determination” (G [4: 431]). By these two aspects he means,
first, the formal “objectivity in the rule” that is given with the first formulation of the moral law and
the determination of the categorical imperative in terms of a condition of (necessary) universalizabil-
ity (G [4: 431]); and, second, the “matter” or content that is there, as he says, “subjectively,” meaning
(using the pre-modern sense of the term) that it is present with subjects that can and (normatively)
must have the “end” of rational agency, which is the need to observe the second formulation of the
categorical imperative and the demand to respect “rational being . . . as an end in itself ” (G [4: 431]).
The content of the theory is thus provided by the basic conditions for preserving and enhancing
rational being in this sense, that is, Kant’s fourfold matrix (self/other and perfect/imperfect) of basic
duties, which of course need, in their application, to take into account relevant empirical facts.
Groundwork III and Freedom 29
2.4. Groundwork III and Freedom
2.4.1. A new ambiguity: heteronomous principles

and “heteronomy” in causes
The fundamental normative meaning of “heteronomy,” as the opposite of the

purely normative conception of autonomy, must be kept in mind when turning
back to the text at the very beginning of Section III, which is the prime exhibit of
Kant’s mixing, without a detailed warning, two quite different notions of deter-
mination. In Section II,Kant makes frequent normative references to Wille but
does not begin to provide a formal ontological exposition. The first sentence of
Section III abruptly starts such an exposition by saying, “Will (Wille) is a kind of
causality of living beings insofar as they are rational” (G [4: 446]). The mystery of
why this quite different sense of determination is being brought in is clarified by
the remainder of the sentence, which introduces the topic of freedom, the con-
cept that the heading of the first subsection indicates will be a “key” to the
“explanation”43 of “the autonomy of will.” The notion of causality has to be
brought in because, given Kant’s general categorial theory, freedom is basically a
kind of causality, a causality at first described here as one that “can be efficient
independently of alien causes determining it” (G [4: 446]).
Kant realizes full well that this is not the only way a philosopher might try to
characterize freedom. As noted earlier, Schulz’s characterization, as well as Kant’s
own earliest work, adheres to a compatibilist doctrine of human freedom that
allows for the presence of “alien causes” (at least of certain types). Here in Section
III, Kant goes on immediately to indicate that his first remark about freedom does
not amount to a proper definition but simply provides what he calls a partial and
“negative” “explication.” He moves toward a positive characterization by making a
connection between freedom and lawfulness. Freedom is a kind of causality, but,
contrary to what others have held, and what is assumed in Kant’s own earliest works
(an assumption that is later criticized, in the dialectic of the first Critique, A 447/B
475, as the dogmatic presumption that freedom would have to be “lawless”), it
should not be thought of as possibly a matter of “lawlessness.” Causality as such, he
43 Erklärung, a term that on this topic Kant tends to use in the sense of providing a detailed causal
explanation. The subtle structure of Section III is that it introduces the notion of freedom as if it might
be used to provide such an explanation, but the section concludes by stressing that we can only defend
but not employ, in any particular explanation, the Idea of freedom as an efficient determining cause
(“wirkende . . . bestimmende Ursache” G [4: 462]). Freedom can, however, help to “explain,” in a for-
mal, or purely conceptual sense, what is central to the notion of moral autonomy. Similarly, what we
find out, after the worry is raised at the end of Section II that the moral law, and the freedom that is its
condition, might itself be a mere “phantom of the brain” (Hirngespenst), is that what is really a
Hirngespenst is rather the thought that we need to and can obtain an Erklärung of how freedom
“works.”
now contends (not uncontroversially, to say the least), requires lawfulness,44 that is,
a kind of necessity, for, given a cause, “something else, namely an effect, must be
posited” (G [4: 446]). The alternative he calls an “absurdity” (Unding), although
presumably not because it is meant to be impossible on trivial analytic grounds.
Up to this point the subsection has been discussing determination only in an
“efficient” sense. It continues along this line in the next sentence but takes a sur-
prising turn by introducing a new phrase and saying “natural necessity was a kind
of heteronomy of efficient causes” (G [4: 447]).45 The use of “heteronomy” in this
way is surprising because one might have assumed, from the extensive discussion
at the end of Section II,that it is simply a normative notion. “Heteronomy” is
treated earlier not in causal terms but as a matter of the approval of a kind of
ultimate “principle” (G [4: 443]) of value, one that comes from “something else,”
that is, from a contingent value rather than one that is necessarily authoritative
because essential to (respect for) one’s own self as an agent with reason.
A linking complication here is the fact that, although heteronomy is intro-
duced in this way as a normative concept, principles and choices that are heteron-
omous in this sense also have implications at a causal level. To approve a
heteronomous standard as supreme is to be ready, above all, to move one’s will, as
an efficient cause, to generate intentions and external events with an aim to satis-
fying this standard and attaining what Kant calls merely subjective ends.
Furthermore, the typical way that Kant appears to be assuming that people adopt
heteronomous standards is by a process of incorrectly allowing factors that they
merely passively experience through efficient causation (such as appealing sen-
sory temptations) to count by themselves as providing sufficient grounds for
moral decisions. Nonetheless, in this paragraph Kant surprisingly does not use
the term “heteronomy” with reference to a situation of normative decision and
choice about what counts, for he refers simply to instances of “natural necessity.”
2.4.2. Section III in context
Perhaps because of unusual texts like this, it is sometimes thought that, at least in
this period of his work, Kant does not have a robust view of agency, one accord-
ing to which actions not in line with morality are free choices rather than merely
reactions in line with natural necessity.46 The problem here may rest in part on
44 See e.g., ML1 [28: 216], “every nature has laws.” Cf. Ameriks (2012), ch. 12.
45 A similar phrase, “heteronomy of nature,” is used again at G [4: 452] (cf. [4: 458]), but it is import-
ant to see that at this point Kant is speaking explicitly of regarding our actions as being “appropriate to”
(gemäß) a specific value “principle” (either “pure will” or “happiness”) of action (Handlung). Here Kant
is pointing to N and not mere C determination, and this can be lost in a translation that simply says
“conform entirely with the natural law of desires . . . ” See above, note 12, regarding G [4: 427].
46 This criticism is often identified with Henry Sidgwick, but others, from Kant’s time to our own,
have shared this worry.
Groundwork III and Freedom 31
the mistake of thinking that when Kant speaks of a “heteronomy of efficient

causes” as a kind of “natural necessity,” one can infer that he is committed to
thinking that heteronomy in genuine human action must be a matter of mere
necessity. I do not subscribe to this interpretation. This is not only because of fea-
tures of the Groundwork itself, but also because of the often neglected fact that if
one looks at Kant’s other main works immediately prior to the Groundwork, one
finds that they are distinguished by a new and noteworthy explicit concern with
the issue of free choice in general, and, in particular, a concern with not allowing
immoral actions to be regarded as matters of natural necessity, such as ignorance,
innate pressure, or mere external force. In taking time out then, in the most
intense period of his career, to publish a critical review of the relatively unknown
figure, J. H. Schulz, Kant’s obvious preoccupation is with insisting on a general
rejection of compatibilism, and in particular of the idea that “vice” and “moral
good or evil” can be explained as a mere matter of “degree” (RevSch [8: 12]), of
nature keeping us relatively ignorant and weak, so that there would be “no free
will” and “all remorse is idle and absurd” (RevSch [8: 11]). Even though Kant’s
arguments in the review of Schulz are too brief to be persuasive and are formu-
lated in some ways that contrast with his other writings,47 the review’s clear insist-
ence at this time on absolute and general human causal freedom, absolute moral
value, and an absolute notion of reason is consistent with what is already indi-
cated in the first Critique (1781), and it defines a position that has to be taken as at
least implicitly present in each of the succeeding writings of the mid-1780s.
If the Critical Kant had the belief that our practical errors were simply a matter
of failing naturally to try to do what is right, solely because of the natural neces-
sity of a lack of sufficient knowledge or power, then there would be no reason for
him to be upset, as he manifestly is, by a theory that appears to have no room for
“remorse” with respect to the relevant “frame of mind” (RevSch [8: 11]). Precisely
because Schulz’s book is primarily about punishment, that is, the negative side of
human action, Kant wants to draw attention to the fact that a compatibilist
account here conflicts with what he takes to be the obvious proper belief that vice
is evil in a sense that calls for “just” (RevSch [8: 12]) retribution, rather than being
regarded as simply bad, that is, illegal or weak in its perceptual underpinning. The
review mocks Schulz’s view for turning “all [NB] human conduct into a mere
puppet show” (RevSch [8: 13]), a mockery that would be out of place if Kant’s own
view were that when we act immorally we are simply by nature failing to follow
the moral law of reason, rather than freely rejecting it by adopting a maxim con-
trary to its supremacy.
In the Groundwork itself, “transgression of a duty” is similarly described not as
a mere failure to do the right thing, or the result of an inevitable force that makes
47 Here I have in mind especially Kant’s linking of arguments for freedom from conditions of mere
thinking, to those for action, and his speaking of “reason” in general terms without distinguishing the
demands of pure reason, and its “Idea,” from ordinary rational considerations.
us do less than the best for ourselves. Kant’s account is that, in not being moral,
we “really will . . . that the opposite of our maxim should instead remain a univer-
sal one, [and] we take the liberty (Freiheit) of making an exception to it for our-
selves” (G [4: 424]). This “real willing,” “taking freedom,” and “making” an
exception is introduced precisely as relevant for moral blame rather than excuse
or mere regret, because insisting on “blame” makes sense for Kant only on the
assumption that agents are exerting freedom of choice even when doing evil
rather than good. All this is only to be expected, given Kant’s crucial reference to
blame already within the 1781 edition of the first Critique’s third Antinomy dis-
cussion of absolute free choice (A 555/B 583).
Furthermore, Kant’s 1784 essay on enlightenment has a similar underlying
preoccupation with free evil, even though it is expressed in diplomatic terms
that have led many readers to suppose that Kant’s topic here is merely political
and concerned with choice in a relative and empirical sense. The essay’s initial,
fundamental, and most striking claim is that our lack of enlightenment is “self-
incurred” (Auf [8: 35]), hence a matter of our own activity and presumably
something to be blamed in a non-Schulzian way. This claim is meant to directly
counter the excuse that mere natural stupidity, internal “laziness,” or “coward-
ice” (Auf [8: 36]), which would be the last word in other theories, are the ultimate
causes of our problem. In saying, twice and with emphasis in the first para-
graph, that our general attitude is “self-incurred,” Kant is stressing that it us up
to each of us to determine the kind of concerns we in fact give absolute and not
merely relative priority, namely, either the understandable but merely local and
contingent “private” demands to obey only local figures such as “the officer,”
“the tax official,” and “the [state-appointed] clergyman,” or, instead, the cosmo-
politan call to follow, as supreme, the norm of the free “public use of one’s reason
in all matters” (Auf [8: 36]).
This public use is normatively determined by principles of justice valid for the
world as a whole, that is, the proper kind of law that Kant says a people as such
“could impose upon itself ” (Auf [8: 39]). The “could” is crucial, for it implies that
Kant is not asking about the mere empirical question of what a group of citizens
might happen to do. He is asking about a form of “law” that they could properly
formulate and accept just as “a people,”48 that is, a community of human beings
regulating their actions by a common faculty of reason for discerning rules that
48 I say “just as a people,” because of the noteworthy fact that here Kant asserts that even the “legis-
lative authority” of a monarch derives from the “collective will” of the people (Auf [8: 40]; see also TP
[8: 304], ZeF [8: 381], and MdS [6: 313, 329, 342]). This broadly democratic sentiment contrasts only
superficially with the pragmatic advice concerning obeying the king that Kant gives at this time,
which has tended to mislead critics into supposing that his position is inherently conservative. Here
my reading of Kant is somewhat to the left of the helpful analysis by Katrin Flikschuh (2013). Because
I take absolute moral autonomy, involving the universal necessary values of public reason and not
mere “modest” self-governance (i.e., mere independence of pressures from other people), to be the
concern already of the Enlightenment essay, my reading also differs from Larmore (2011, 8).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Viceroy’s Memorial is chiefly interesting as an example of that
chief and unalterable sentiment which actuates the Chinese literati
and has been one of the strongest pillars of Manchu rule, namely,
that the Emperor is infallible, a sentiment based on the fact that
complete and unquestioning loyalty to the Throne is the essential
cornerstone of the whole fabric of Confucian morality, filial piety, and
ancestral worship. While deprecating the Imperial folly, the Viceroy is
therefore compelled to ascribe it to everyone but Her Majesty, and to
praise the Imperial wisdom and benevolence.
His Memorial is as follows:—
“The present war is due to bandits spreading slaughter and

arson on the pretext of paying off a grudge against
Christianity; thus we are face to face with a serious crisis. The
Powers are uniting to send troops and squadrons to attack
China on the plea of protecting their subjects and suppressing
this rebellion. Our position is critical and the provinces are
naturally bound to look now to their defences. I have already
made the necessary preparations, so that if those hordes of
foreigners do invade us, we shall resist them with all our
might. I feel that our Sovereigns are displaying glorious virtue
and that your Majesties are as bountiful as the Almighty. Your
indulgence to the men from afar indicates the boundless
magnanimity and good faith which animate all your actions.
“At present, the first essential is to make the Throne’s
embarrassments, which have led up to the present situation,
widely known, as well as the quality of consistent kindness
with which you are imbued. By so doing, rebels will be
deprived of any pretext for further rioting.
“At the beginning of the war, my colleagues and I issued a
proclamation bidding the people go about their avocations as
usual, and not to give heed to suspicious rumours. A petition
has now reached me from Chinese residents abroad to urge
effective protection for foreigners in China, so that there may
be no risk of revenge being taken on themselves. The
language used is very strong, and we have taken advantage
of the visit of the foreign Consuls, who suggested certain
measures for the protection of missionaries and merchants, to
give orders to the Shanghai Taotai to come to an arrangement
with them in regard to the preservation of peace in the
Yangtsze valley, and at Soochow and Hangchow. This
arrangement will hold good so long as they do not invade the
region in question. The Consuls have telegraphed to their
respective Governments, and I to our Ministers abroad,
explaining fully this arrangement. The Germans, owing to the
murder of their Minister, were disposed to oppose it, but
finally, under compulsion from their colleagues, gave their
consent also.
“I respectfully quote your Majesties’ decree of the 29th of
the 5th Moon (June 25th): ‘The foreign Ministers are now in a
desperately dangerous position; we are still doing our best to
protect them.’ The decree proceeds to direct us to guard well
our respective provinces and to take such steps as policy may
dictate at this emergency. Again, on the 3rd of the 6th Moon
(June 29th), your decree to our Ministers abroad states ‘We
are now sending troops to protect the Legations, but we are
weak and can only do our best. You are to carry on the
business of your missions abroad as usual.’
“In other words, the Throne is inflicting stern and exemplary
punishment on those foreigners in Tientsin who provoked
hostilities, while doing its utmost to protect those innocent
foreign officials, merchants and missionaries who were not
responsible for those attacks. Your benevolence and the
majesty of your wrath are displayed simultaneously,
manifested as brightly as the sun and moon.
“We have again and again implored you to protect the
foreign Ministers: this is the one all-important step which must
on no account be deferred a day, not only because your
Majesties’ own anxiety recognises its necessity, but because
the crisis now forces it upon you.
“The Ministers abroad, Yang Ju and his colleagues, have
telegraphed to the effect that our first duty is to protect the
lives of the foreign Ministers and of all foreigners in China. I
therefore humbly ask you to send competent troops to protect
the Legations in Peking, and by so doing to protect the lives
of your own Envoys abroad. I also urge you to instruct the
provincial authorities to protect all foreigners within their
respective jurisdictions, and thereby to protect our Chinese
subjects residing in foreign lands. My anxiety is intense.”
To this memorial Tzŭ Hsi replied, by express courier and telegram,

as follows:
“Your memorial has reached us. The Throne was reluctant

lightly to enter upon hostilities, as we have already informed
the several foreign Governments and the various provincial
authorities. We have also issued several decrees ordering
protection for the Ministers and foreign residents all over
China. Hence our ideas seem to be identical with your own.
[101] Happily all the Ministers, except Baron von Ketteler, are
perfectly well and quite comfortable; only a day or two ago we
sent them presents of fruits and viands, in order to show our
commiseration. If the Powers now dare to invade your
provinces, you must all protect your territories and resist with
all your might. Even though at the moment peace may prevail,
you must make most strenuous preparations against possible
emergencies. In a word, we will not willingly be the
aggressors. You are to inform our various Legations abroad of
our calm and kindly feelings towards all foreigners, so that
they may think out some plan of a peaceful settlement, in the
general interest. It is highly desirable that you give no ready
ear to vague rumours which are calculated only to lead to
further lack of unity. This decree is to be conveyed by special
courier, at six hundred li (two hundred miles) a day.”
A few days before this Decree, i.e., on the 1st of July, Her Majesty
had drafted with her own pen an explanatory decree for the
edification of the foreign Powers, recounting how the Throne had
been led into its present unpleasant situation. It is interesting to note
that, ten days before, she had offered rewards for the heads of
foreigners in Peking and had sent orders to Yü Hsien to kill every
foreigner in Shansi, which he did. But Tzŭ Hsi had studied her
classics and knew from her own experience how easily dissension
and jealousies could be created among the barbarians.
“Owing to a succession of most unfortunate circumstances,

rapidly and confusedly following each other, we are utterly at
a loss to account for the situation which has brought about
hostilities between China and the Powers. Our
representatives abroad are separated from us by wide seas,
and besides have no special knowledge of the facts, and they
are therefore unable to explain to the respective Foreign
Offices the real state of the Chinese Government’s feelings.
We therefore desire now to place before you the following
detailed statement of the facts.
“In the Provinces of Chihli and Shantung there has arisen a
certain class of disorderly characters who, in their respective
villages, have been wont to practise the use of the quarter-
staff and pugilism, combining these exercises with certain
magic arts and incantations. Owing to the failure of the local
Magistrates to detect and stop these proceedings, the result
has been that gradually a state of unrest has shown itself
throughout that region until, all of a sudden, the Boxer
movement assumed serious proportions. They spread even to
Peking, where they were regarded as possessed of
supernatural powers, so that they gained vast numbers of
followers and universal sympathy. Following in their train the
disorderly people of the lower sort raised a cry of ‘Death to
the Christians!’ following upon which, in the middle of the 5th
Moon, they proceeded to carry their words into deeds, and to
slaughter the converts. The churches were burned, the whole
city was in an uproar, and the population passed completely
out of our control.
“When the first rumours of the coming disaster were noised
abroad, the Legations asked our consent to bring up special
guards, which consent, in view of the special necessities of
the case, was readily given. In all some five hundred foreign
troops came to Peking, which in itself shows plainly the
friendly disposition of the Throne towards all foreign nations.
Under ordinary circumstances the foreign Legations and their
guards do not come in contact with the local Chinese
authorities, and have no relations with them, friendly or
otherwise; but since the arrival of these troops, the soldiers
have not confined themselves to the duty of protecting the
Legations, but have gone upon the city walls and have even
patrolled the outlying parts of the capital, with the result that
shots have been exchanged and blood has been shed.
Indeed, so great are the liberties which they have taken in the
course of their walks abroad, that on one occasion they
actually endeavoured to force their way into the Forbidden
City, which, however, they failed to do. For these reasons
great and widespread indignation has been excited against
them, and evil-doers have seized the opportunity to commit
deeds of slaughter and arson, waxing daily bolder. At this
stage the Powers endeavoured to bring up[102]
reinforcements from Tientsin, but these were cut to pieces on
their journey from the sea, and the attempt was perforce
abandoned. By this time the rebels in the two provinces had
become so intermingled with the people that it was impossible
to identify them. The Throne was by no means averse to give
orders for their suppression, but had we acted with undue
haste, the result might have been a general conflagration, and
our efforts to protect the Legations might have ended in a dire
calamity. If we had proceeded to destroy the rebels in the two
provinces, no single missionary or native Christian would
have been left alive in either, so that we had to proceed
cautiously in this dilemma.
“Under these circumstances we were compelled to suggest
the temporary withdrawal of the Legations to Tientsin, and we
were proceeding to make the necessary arrangements to this
end when the German Minister was unfortunately murdered
one morning on his way to the Tsungli Yamên. This incident
placed the rebel leaders in a desperate position, like that of
the man who rides a tiger and who hesitates whether it be
more dangerous for him to continue his ride or to jump off. It
became then inexpedient that the proposed withdrawal of the
Legations to Tientsin should proceed. All we could do we did,
which was to enforce urgent measures for the due protection
of the Legations in every emergency. To our dismay, on the
16th ultimo, certain foreign naval officers from the squadron
outside Taku had an interview with the Commandant of the
forts, demanding their surrender, and adding that, if their
demand were refused, they would take them by force on the
following day. The Commandant was naturally unable to
betray the trust confided to him, and the foreigners
accordingly bombarded the forts and captured them after a
vigorous resistance. A state of war has thus been created, but
it is none of our doing; besides, how could China be so utterly
foolish, conscious as she is of her weakness, as to declare
war on the whole world at once? How could she hope to
succeed by using the services of untrained bandits for any
such a purpose? This must be obvious to the Powers.
“The above is an accurate statement of our situation,
explaining the measures unavoidably forced upon China to
meet the situation. Our representatives abroad must carefully
explain the tenor of this decree to the Governments to which
they are accredited. We are still instructing our military
Commanders to protect the Legations, and can only do our
best. In the meantime you, our Ministers, must carry on your
duties as usual, and not pose as disinterested spectators.”
Supplementing this Decree, the Empress, possibly instigated by

some of the master-minds of the Grand Council, proceeded to
prepare the way for a time-honoured, and invariably successful,
device of Chinese statecraft, namely, the creation of dissension and
jealousy between the Powers, and to this end she addressed
telegrams to the Emperor of Russia, Queen Victoria, the Emperor of
Japan, and other rulers. It is typical of the infantile naïveté of
Chinese officials in such matters of foreign policy, that copies of
these extraordinary messages, intended solely to mislead public
opinion abroad, should have been sent in to the (still besieged)
Legations with the cards of Prince Ch’ing, and the Ministers of the
Tsungli Yamên.[103] It is certain that these artless telegrams, as well
as the conciliatory instructions subsequently sent to China’s
representatives abroad, were but the outward and visible signs of
Tzŭ Hsi’s inward and spiritual misgivings caused by the fall of the
Taku Forts, the capture of the native city of Tientsin, and the massing
of the armies of the Allies for the advance on her capital. If possible,
she would therefore make friends in advance among the humane,
and invariably gullible, sovereigns of Europe, making good use of
her knowledge of their little weaknesses in matters of foreign policy,
and be ready to pose in due course as the innocent victim of
circumstance and fate. But “in the profound seclusion of her Palace”
she continued to hope against hope for the Boxers’ promised
victories and the fall of the Legations which she was so carefully
“protecting.”
And here let us briefly digress. Students of modern Chinese
history, desirous of applying its latest lessons to future uses, will no
doubt observe, that in advising the Throne either for peace or war, all
Chinese and Manchu officials (no matter how good or bad from our
point of view, how brave or cowardly, how honest or corrupt) agree
and unite in frankly confessing to their hatred of the foreigner and all
his works. This sentiment, loudly proclaimed by the simple-minded
braggart Boxers, is politely re-echoed by the literati, and voiced with
equal candour by the picked men of the Government, men like Yuan
Shih-k’ai, Jung Lu, and Liu K’un-yi. Those who pose as the friends of
foreigners merely advocate dissimulation as a matter of expediency.
The thought should give us pause, not only in accepting at their
current value the posturings and pronouncements of the monde
diplomatique at Peking, and the reassurances given as to our
excellent relations with such-and-such officials, but it should also
lead us to consider what are the causes, in us or in them, which
produce so constant and so deep a hatred? If we study the
Memorials of high Chinese officials for the past fifty years, the same
unpleasant feature presents itself at every turn. We may meet with
exceptional cases, here and there, like Yüan Ch’ang, who will
profess respect for the European, but even his respect will be
qualified and never go to the length of intimate friendship. Our
perennial gullibility, that faculty which makes the Chinese classical
“allurements” invariably successful with the foreigner, accounts, no
doubt, to some extent for the Chinese official’s contempt for our
intelligence, and for our failure to learn by experience. It is fairly
certain that the Boxers of to-morrow will be pooh-poohed (if not
applauded) in advance by our Chinese Secretariats, as they were in
1900. But for the Chinese official’s unchanging hostility towards us,
no such explanation offers, and it is perhaps, therefore, most
satisfactory to our amour propre to assume that his attitude is
dictated by feelings similar to those which inspired Demetrius of the
Ephesians, ostensibly fearful for the cult of Diana, but in reality
disturbed for his own livelihood.
To return. The following are translations of the telegrams sent
under date 3rd July, by order of the Empress Dowager, to the
Emperor of Russia, Queen Victoria, and the Emperor of Japan. The
text of those which were sent at the same time to the Presidents of
the French and American Republics, and which were dated,
curiously enough, on the 19th of June (the Taku Forts fell on the
16th), have been published in Monsieur Cordier’s most accurate and
painstaking work, Les Relations de la Chine, Vol. III.
Telegram dated 3rd July:—
“To the Emperor of Russia:—Greeting to your Majesty! For

over two hundred and fifty years our neighbouring Empires
have enjoyed unbroken relations of friendship, more cordial
than those existing between any other Powers.
“Recent ill-feeling created between converts to Christianity
and the rest of our people have afforded an opportunity to
evil-disposed persons and rebels to create disturbances, and
the result has been that the foreign Powers have been led to
believe that the Throne itself is a party to their proceedings
and is hostile to Christianity. Your Majesty’s representative at
my Court (M. de Giers) has actually requested our Foreign
Office to suppress the rebellion and thus to allay the
suspicions of the Powers. But at the time that he made this
request, Peking was thoroughly infested with rebels, who had
stirred up the people and gained for themselves no small
prestige. Not only our soldiery but the mass of the people
were burning for revenge against those who practised the
foreign religion, and even certain Princes of our Imperial Clan
joined in the movement, declaring that there was no room in
the Celestial Kingdom for Christianity and the ancient
religions of the soil. My chief anxiety has been lest any
precipitate action on the part of the Government might lead to
some dire catastrophe (i.e., the destruction of the Legations),
and I feared, too, that the anti-foreign movement might break
out simultaneously at the Treaty Ports in the South, which
would have made the position hopeless. I was doing my
utmost to find a way out of the dilemma when the foreign
Powers, evidently failing to realise the difficulties of our
situation, precipitated matters by the bombardment and
capture of the Taku Forts: now we are confronted with all the
dire calamities of war, and the confusion in our Empire is
greater than ever before. Amongst all the Powers, none has
enjoyed such friendly relations with China as Russia. On a
former occasion I deputed Li Hung-chang to proceed to your
Majesty’s capital as my special Envoy; he drew up on our
behalf and concluded with your country a secret Treaty of
Alliance, which is duly recorded in the Imperial Archives.
“And now that China has incurred the enmity of the civilised
world by stress of circumstances beyond our power to control,
I must perforce rely upon your country to act as intermediary
and peacemaker on our behalf. I now make this earnest and
sincere appeal to your Majesty, begging that you may be
pleased to come forward as arbitrator, and thus to relieve the
difficulties of our situation. We await with anxiety your
gracious reply.”
On the same day the Empress Dowager addressed Her Majesty

Queen Victoria in a telegram which was sent in the Emperor’s name
and forwarded through the Chinese Minister in London. Its text runs
as follows:—
“To your Majesty, greeting!—In all the dealings of England

with the Empire of China, since first relations were
established between us, there has never been any idea of
territorial aggrandisement on the part of Great Britain, but only
a keen desire to promote the interests of her trade. Reflecting
on the fact that our country is now plunged into a dreadful
condition of warfare, we bear in mind that a large proportion
of China’s trade, seventy or eighty per cent., is done with
England: moreover, your Customs duties are the lightest in
the world, and few restrictions are made at your sea-ports in
the matter of foreign importations; for these reasons our
amicable relations with British merchants at our Treaty Ports
have continued unbroken for the last half century, to our
mutual benefit.
“But a sudden change has now occurred and general
suspicion has been created against us. We would therefore
ask you now to consider that if, by any conceivable
combination of circumstances, the independence of our
Empire should be lost, and the Powers unite to carry out their
long plotted schemes to possess themselves of our territory,
the results to your country’s interests would be disastrous and
fatal to your trade. At this moment our Empire is striving to the
utmost to raise an army and funds sufficient for its protection;
in the meanwhile we rely upon your good services to act as
mediator, and now anxiously await your decision.”
Again, in the name of the Emperor and through the Chinese
Minister at Tokio, the following message was addressed to the
Emperor of Japan:—
“To your Majesty, greeting!—The Empires of China and

Japan hang together, even as the lips and the teeth, and the
relations existing between them have always been
sympathetic. Last month we were plunged in deep grief when
we learned of the murder of the Chancellor of your Legation in
Peking; we were about to arrest and punish the culprits when
the Powers, unnecessarily suspicious of our motives, seized
the Taku Forts, and we found ourselves involved in all the
horrors of war. In face of the existing situation, it appears to
us that at the present time the Continents of Europe and Asia
are opposed to each other, marshalling their forces for a
conflict of irreconcilable ambitions; everything therefore
depends upon our two Asiatic Empires standing firm together
at this juncture. The earth-hungry Powers of the West, whose
tigerish eyes of greed are fixed in our direction, will certainly
not confine their attention to China. In the event of our Empire
being broken up, Japan in her turn will assuredly be hard
pressed to maintain her independence. The community of our
interests renders it clearly imperative that at this crisis we
should disregard all trifling causes of discord, and consider
only the requirements of the situation, as comrade nations.
We rely upon your Majesty to come forward as arbitrator, and
anxiously await your gracious reply to this appeal.”
These remarkable effusions have been inscribed in the annals of

the Dynasty, by order of Her Majesty, those same annals from which
all her Boxer Edicts have been solemnly expunged for purposes of
historic accuracy. One cannot but hope that, in process of time,
consideration of facts like these may cure European diplomacy and
officialdom generally of its unreasoning reverence for the Chinese
written character, a species of fetish-worship imbibed from the native
pundit and aggravated by the sense of importance which knowledge
of this ancient language so frequently confers.
These Imperial messages throw into strong relief the elementary
simplicity of China’s foreign policy, a quality which foreigners
frequently misunderstand, in the general belief that the Oriental mind
conceals great depths of subtlety and secret information. Looking at
these documents in the light of the known facts of China’s political
situation at that moment, and stripping them of all artificial glamour, it
becomes almost inconceivable that any Government should publish
to the world and file in its archives such puerile productions. But it is
frequently the case that this very kindergarten element in Chinese
politics is a stumbling-block to the elaborate and highly specialised
machinery of European diplomacy, and that, being at a loss how to
deal with the suspiciously transparent artifices of the elderly children
of the Waiwupu, the foreigner excuses and consoles himself by
attributing to them occult faculties and resources of a very high
order. If one must be continually worsted, it is perhaps not unwise to
attribute to one’s adversary the qualities of Macchiavelli, Talleyrand
and Metternich combined. As far as British interests are concerned,
one of the chief lessons emphasised by the events of the past ten
years in China is, that the reform of our diplomatic machinery (and
particularly of the Consular service) is urgently needed, a reform for
which more than one British Minister has vainly pleaded in Downing
Street.
XX
THE FLIGHT FROM PEKING AND THE COURT IN
EXILE
The diarist, Ching Shan, has described in detail the flight of the
Empress Dowager and Emperor from Peking, before dawn, on the
morning of the 15th August. From an account of the Court’s journey,
subsequently written by the Grand Secretary, Wang Wen-shao, to
friends in Chekiang, and published in one of the vernacular papers of
Shanghai, we obtain valuable corroboration of the diarist’s accuracy,
together with much interesting information.
Wang Wen-shao overtook their Majesties at Huai-lai on the 18th
August; for the past three days they had suffered dangers and
hardships innumerable. On the evening of the 19th they had stopped
at Kuanshih (seventy li from Peking), where they slept in the
Mosque. There the Mahommedan trading firm of “Tung Kuang yü”
(the well-known contractors for the hire of pack animals for the
northern caravan trade) had supplied them with the best of the poor
food available—coarse flour, vegetables, and millet porridge—and
had provided mule litters for the next stage of the journey. As the
troops of the escort had been ordered to remain at some distance
behind, so long as there was any risk of pursuit by the Allies’ cavalry,
their Majesties’ arrival was unannounced, and their identity
unsuspected. As they descended from their carts, travel-stained,
weary, and distressed, they were surrounded by a large crowd of
refugee idlers and villagers, eager for news from the capital. An eye-
witness of the scene has reported that, looking nervously about him,
the Emperor said, “We have to thank the Boxers for this,” whereupon
the Old Buddha, undaunted even at the height of her misfortunes,
bade him be silent.
Next day they travelled, by mule litter, ninety li (thirty-two miles),
and spent the night at Ch’a-Tao, just beyond the Great Wall. Here no
preparations of any kind had been made for their reception, and they
suffered much hardship, sleeping on the brick platform (k’ang)
without any adequate bedding. But the Magistrate of Yen-Ch’ing
chou had been able to find a blue sedan-chair for Her Majesty, who
had thus travelled part of the day in greater comfort. Also at midday,
stopping to eat at Chü-yung kuan, Li Lien-ying, the chief eunuch, had
obtained a few tea cups from the villagers.
On the 16th they travelled from Ch’a-Tao to Huai-lai, a hard stage
of fifty li. Some of the officials and Chamberlains of the Court now
joined their Majesties, so that the party consisted of seventeen carts,
in addition to the Old Buddha’s palanquin and the Emperor’s mule
litter. As the cortège advanced, and the news of their flight was
spread abroad, rumours began to be circulated that they were
pretenders, personating the Son of Heaven and the Old Buddha,
rumours due, no doubt, to the fact that Her Majesty was still wearing
her hair in the Chinese manner, and that her clothes were the
common ones in which she had escaped from the Forbidden City. In
spite of these rumours the Magistrate of Huai-lai, a Hupeh man (Wu
Yung), had received no intimation of their Majesties’ coming, and,
when the Imperial party, accompanied by an enormous crowd,
entered his Yamên, he had no time to put on his official robes, but
rushed down to receive them as he was. After prostrating himself, he
wanted to clear out the noisy and inquisitive rabble, but the Old
Buddha forbade him, saying, “Not so; let them crowd around us as
much as they like. It amuses me to see these honest country folk.”
Here, after three days of coarse fare, the Empress Dowager rejoiced
once more in a meal of birds’-nest soup and sharks’ fins, presented
by the Magistrate, who also furnished her with an outfit of woman’s
clothing and suits for the Emperor and the Heir Apparent, for all of
which he received Her Majesty’s repeated and grateful thanks.
It was here, at Huai-lai, while the Court was taking a day’s rest,
that Wang Wen-shao came up with them. He was cordially, even
affectionately, greeted by the Old Buddha, who condoled with him on
the hardships to which he had been exposed, and insisted on his
sharing her birds’-nest soup, which, she said, he would surely enjoy
as much as she had done after so many and great privations. She
rebuked the Emperor for not greeting the aged Councillor with warm
thanks for his touching devotion to the Throne.
From Huai-lai, Prince Ch’ing was ordered to return to Peking to
negotiate terms of peace with the Allies. Knowing the difficulties of
this task, he went reluctantly; before leaving he had a long audience
with Her Majesty, who assured him of her complete confidence in his
ability to make terms, and bade him adopt a policy similar to that of
Prince Kung in 1860.
Wang Wen-shao’s account of the first part of the Court’s journey is
sufficiently interesting to justify textual reproduction.
“Their Majesties fled from the palace at the dawn of day in

common carts. It was only after their arrival at Kuanshih that
they were provided with litters. The Emperor and Prince P’u
Lun rode on one cart until their arrival at Huai-lai, where the
District Magistrate furnished a palanquin, and later on, at
Hsüan-hua, four large sedan chairs were found for the
Imperial party. It was at this point that the Emperor’s Consort
overtook their Majesties.
“So hurried was the flight that no spare clothes had been
taken; the Empress Dowager was very shabbily dressed, so
as to be almost unrecognisable, the Chinese mode of hair-
dressing producing a very remarkable alteration in her
appearance. On the first night after leaving Peking, they slept,
like travellers of the lowest class, on the raised brick platform
of the inn, where not even rice was obtainable for the evening
meal, so that they were compelled to eat common porridge
made of millet. In all the disasters recorded in history, never
has there been such a pitiful spectacle.
“It was only after reaching Huai-lai that their condition
improved somewhat, but even then the number of personal
attendants and eunuchs was very small, and not a single
concubine was there to wait upon the Old Buddha. For the
first few days’ flight, neither Prince Li, nor Jung Lu, nor Ch’i
Hsiu (all of them Grand Councillors), were in attendance so
that Her Majesty nominated Prince Tuan to serve on the
Council. She reviled him at the outset severely, reproaching
him for the misfortunes which had overtaken the Dynasty, but
as time went on, as he shared with her the privations and
troubles of the day’s journey, she became more gracious
towards him. This was to some extent due to the very great
influence which Prince Tuan’s wife exercised at Court.
“When I reached Huai-lai, the Court consisted of the
Princes Tuan, Ching, Na, Su, and P’u Lun, with a following of
high officials led by Kang Yi, and some twenty Secretaries.
General Ma’s troops and some of the Banner Corps of Prince
Tuan formed the Imperial escort; and they plundered every
town and village on their line of march. This, however, is
hardly remarkable, because all the shops had been closed
and there were no provisions to be purchased anywhere.
“To go back for a few days. Yü Lu (Viceroy of Chihli) shot
himself in a coffin shop at a place south of the Hunting Park,
and Li Ping-heng took poison after the defeat of his troops at
T’ungchow. The Court’s flight had already been discussed
after the first advance of the Allies from T’ungchow towards
Peking; but the difficulty in providing sufficient transport was
considered insuperable. On the 19th of the Moon a steady
cannonade began at about midnight, and, from my house in
Magpie Lane, one could note, by the volume of sound, that
the attack was steadily advancing closer to the city, and
eventually bullets came whistling as thick as hail. The
bombardment reached its height at about noon on the 20th,
when news was brought that two gates of the Imperial City
had been taken by storm. I was unable to verify this report. It
was my turn for night duty at the Palace, but after the last
audience, I was unable to enter the Forbidden City, as all its
gates were barred. It was only at 7 a.m. on the 21st inst.
(August 15th) that I was able to gain admittance to the
Forbidden City, and then I learned that their Majesties had
hurriedly fled. On the previous day five urgent audiences with
the Grand Council had been held; at the last of these only
Kang Yi, Chao Shu ch’iao, and myself were present. Sadly
regarding us, the Old Buddha said, ‘I see there are only three
of you left. No doubt all the rest have fled, leaving us, mother
and son, to our fate. I want you all to come with me on my
journey.’ Turning to me she then said, ‘You are too old. I
would not wish you to share in all this hardship. Follow us as
best you can later on.’ The Emperor expressed his wishes in
the same sense.
“By this time it was nearly midnight, and they still hesitated
about leaving the city; judge then of my surprise to learn that,
at the first streak of dawn, their Majesties had left the city in
indescribable disorder and frantic haste. I could not return to
my house that day because all the gates of the Imperial City
were closed, but at 10 a.m. on the following day, I made my
way out of the Houmen.[104] On my way I came across Jung
Lu; he had fainted in his chair, and had been forsaken by his
cowardly bearers. He said: ‘This is the end. You and I never
believed in these Boxers; see now to what a pass they have
brought the Old Buddha. If you see Her Majesty, tell her that I
have gone to rally the troops, and that, if I live, I will join her
later on.’
“After leaving Jung Lu, I made my way to a little temple
which lies midway between the North and the North-West
Gates of the city, and there I rested a while. It was the opinion
of the Abbot in charge that the foreigners would burn every
temple of the city, as all of them had been used by the Boxers
for their magic rites, and he said that, in times of dire peril
such as this, it was really inconvenient for him to offer any
hospitality to visitors. Just at this moment news was brought
us that the foreign troops were on the wall of the city, between
the two gates nearest to us, and that they were firing down
upon the streets; the city was already invested, but the
foreigners were not molesting civilians, though they were
shooting all ‘braves’ and men in uniform. As the priest
declined to receive me, I sought refuge at the house of a man
named Han, retainer in the Imperial Household, who lived
close by. All my chair-bearers and servants had fled. Shortly
after noon I heard that one might still leave Peking by the Hsi-
chih Men; so leaving everything—carts, chairs, and animals—
where they were, I started off at dusk on foot with such money
and clothing as I had on my person. The road ahead of me
was blocked by a dense crowd of refugees. I took the road by
the Drum Tower, skirting the lakes to the north of the Imperial
City. Towards evening a dreadful thunderstorm came on, so I
took refuge for the night with the Ching family. The
bombardment had ceased by this time, but the whole northern
part of the Imperial City appeared to be in flames, which
broke out in fresh places all through the night. At three in the
morning we heard that the West Gates were opened, and that
the City Guards had fled, but that the foreigners had not yet
reached that part of the city.
“I had intended to travel by cart, but the disorganised troops
had by this time seized every available beast of burden. My
second son, however, was luckily able to persuade Captain
Liu to fetch one of my carts out from the city, and this was
done after several narrow escapes. I had left Peking on foot,
but at the bridge close to the North-West Gate I found this
cart awaiting me, and with it my second son, who was riding
on a mule, and the five servants who remained to us following
on foot. When we reached Hai-Tien (a town which lies close
to the Summer Palace) every restaurant was closed, but we
managed to get a little food, and then hurried on after their
Majesties to Kuanshih, where we passed the night. Next day,
continuing our journey, we learned that their Majesties were
halting at Huai-lai, where we overtook them on the 24th day of
the Moon. We expect to reach T’ai-yüan fu about the middle
of next week.
“The dangers of our journey are indescribable. Every shop
on the road had been plundered by bands of routed troops,
who pretend to be part of the Imperial escort. These bandits
are ahead of us at every stage of the journey, and they have
stripped the country-side bare, so that when the Imperial party
reaches any place, and the escort endeavour to commandeer
supplies, the distress of the inhabitants and the confusion
which ensues are really terrible to witness. The districts
through which we have passed are literally devastated.”
From Huai-lai the Court moved on to Hsüan-hua fu, a three days’

march, and there remained for four days, resting and preparing for
the journey into Shansi. The Border Warden at Sha-ho chên had
provided their Majesties with green (official) sedan chairs, and the
usual etiquette of the Court and Grand Council was being gradually
restored. Her Majesty’s spirits were excellent, and she took a keen
interest in everything. At Chi-ming yi, for instance, she was with
difficulty dissuaded from stopping to visit a temple on the summit of
an adjoining hill, in honour of which shrine the Emperor Kanghsi had
left a tablet carved with a memorial inscription in verse.
At Hsüan-hua fu there was considerable disorder, but the Court
enjoyed increased comforts; thanks to the zeal and energy of the
local Magistrate (Ch’en Pen). Here the Old Buddha received Prince
Ch’ing’s first despatch from Peking, which gave a deplorable account
of the situation.
The Court left Hsüan-hua on the 25th August (its numbers being
increased by the Emperor’s Consort with a few of her personal
attendants) and spent the night at a garrison station called Tso-Wei.
The deplorable state of the country was reflected in the
accommodation they found there; for the guards had fled, and the
official quarters had all been plundered and burnt, with the exception
of two small rooms, evil-smelling and damp. There was no food to be
had, except bread made of sodden flour. One of the two available
rooms was occupied by the Old Buddha, the other by Kuang Hsü
and his Consort, while all the officials of the Court, high and low,
fared as best they might in the stuffy courtyard. For once the
venerable mother’s composure deserted her. “This is abominable,”
she complained; “the place swarms with insects, and I cannot sleep
a wink. It is disgraceful that I should have come to such a pass at my
time of life. My state is worse even than that of the Emperor Hsüan-
Tsung of the T’ang Dynasty, who was forced to fly from his capital,
and saw his favourite concubine murdered before his very eyes.” An
unsubstantiated report that the Allies had plundered her palace
treasure vaults was not calculated to calm Her Majesty, and for a
while the suite went in fear of her wrath.
On August 27th the Court crossed the Shansi border, and spent
the night at T’ien-chen hsien. The local Magistrate, a Manchu, had
committed suicide after hearing of the fall of Moukden and other
Manchurian cities; and the town was in a condition of ruinous
disorder. Their Majesties supped off a meal hastily provided by the
Gaol Warder. But their courage was restored by the arrival of Ts’en
Ch’un-hsüan,[105] an official of high intelligence and courage, who
greatly pleased the Old Buddha by bringing her a gift of eggs and a
girdle and pouch for her pipe and purse.
On the 30th August the Court lay at Ta-t’ung fu, in the Yamên of
the local Brigadier-General. They stayed here four days, enjoying the
greatly improved accommodation which the General’s efforts had
secured for them.
On September 4th, they reached the market town of T’ai-yüeh,
having travelled thirty-five miles that day, and here again they found
damp rooms and poor fare. But Her Majesty’s spirits had recovered.
On the 16th, while crossing the hill-pass of the “Flighting Geese,”
Her Majesty ordered a halt in order to enjoy the view. “It reminds me
of the Jehol Country,” she said. Then, turning to the Emperor, “After
all, it’s delightful to get away like this from Peking and to see the
world, isn’t it?” “Under happier circumstances, it would be,” replied
Kuang Hsü. At this point Ts’en Ch’un-hsüan brought Her Majesty a
large bouquet of yellow flowers, a present which touched her deeply:
in return she sent him a jar of butter-milk tea.
On the 7th, the only accommodation which the local officials had
been able to prepare at Yüan-p’ing was a mud-house belonging to
one of the common people, in which, by an oversight, several empty
coffins had been left. Ts’en, arriving ahead of the party, was told of
this, and galloped to make excuses to Her Majesty and take her

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Note on Sources and Key to

List 1: Kant’s Writings, Listed by Abbreviation

x note on sources and key to abbreviations and translations

note on sources and key to abbreviations and translations xi

VorlM Immanuel Kant: Vorlesung zu Moralphilosophie (1770s), ed. Werner Stark,

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Chapter 2, “On the Many Senses of ‘Self-Determination’,” begins with a clarifica-

Overview of Part I: Kant 7

6 This argument is largely an amplification of an interpretation advanced in my (1982a) and

8 Introduction to an Extended Era

O’Neill as “radical existentialism” and “panicky metaphysics.” As O’Neill shows,

8 See also my (2015) and (2016a). 9 See also my (2013).

Overview of Part II: Successors 9

view, forms intentions that generate a tightly structured world of three-dimen-

1.4. Overview of Part II: Successors

Chapter 9, “Some Persistent Presumptions of Hegelian Anti-Subjectivism,” is a

10 Introduction to an Extended Era

general progressive development of religious thinking in broadly naturalistic

Overview of Part II: Successors 11

12 Introduction to an Extended Era

Overview of Part II: Successors 13

self-determination, as advocated in the main ideas of Rousseau’s work, the ideals

20 In addition to path-breaking work by German scholars, there is a growing philosophical litera-

2.1. Preliminary Overview

2.2. Vindicating Kantian Self-Determination

2.2.1. On “determination” and Bestimmung

Unlike “autonomy,” the components of “self-determination,” as well as those of its

Vindicating Kantian Self-Determination 15

16 On the Many Senses of “ Self-Determination ”

2.2.2. On the “self ” of Selbstbestimmung

Although the notion of “determination” will be my main focus, it is also necessary

Vindicating Kantian Self-Determination 17

and particular independent form of existence, that is, an immortality conceived

18 On the Many Senses of “ Self-Determination ”

in all compatibilist systems, no matter how sophisticated their picture of us as

1. Introduction to an Extended Era 3

9. Some Persistent Presumptions of Hegelian Anti-Subjectivism 139