Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Locomotility and Will

It is Kant's initial ambition to develop a concept of Will as equivalent to Pure Practical Reason, i. e. in which the latter is the cause of Locomotility.  However, the plan runs aground when he discovers that even a Categorical Imperative can be resisted, with the source of resistance a second type of Will, one which has the capacity to choose between obedience and disobedience.  And, despite his own, and those of subsequent followers, efforts to somehow eliminate this surd from his system, they arguably do not succeed, which means that only it has the power to initiate Locomotility.  In other words, Will is actually Locomotility itself, i. e. the power of setting oneself in motion, which Kant attempts to suppress by absorbing it into Reason, in the same way that many, including Aristotle, Freud, and Marcuse, do when trying to absorb it into some representation of a Vegetative need.

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