The Norms of Answerability: Social Theory Between Bakhtin and Habermas

5. ACTION AND EROS

5 ACTION AND EROS (Kant-Weber-Bakhtin) This chapter continues to explain Bakhtin’s deep affiliation and difference with Kant’s ethics and introduces a comparison with Max Weber’s sociology of action. The similarities and differences among the three approaches are reviewed by contrasting separate discussions of their general approaches. In order to economize on the presentation, discussion is directed to a more limited focus on how each might theorize the example of Eros as one of a large number of possible action zones in human culture. I comment on the relevance and irrelevance of Kant’s ethics for contemporary actors and argue that although Weber and Bakhtin work through different streams of neo-Kantian epistemology, neither retains a strictly Kantian orientation. Weber learned enough Russian over a period of three months in 1905 to be able to report to his German readership on the complexity of Russian political culture and the geopolitics of the time (Weber 1995b). However, he had no knowledge of Bakhtin ’s group nor is there any evidence that Bakhtin read Weber’s writings . It should be kept in mind that this is not a study of contrasting local influences and contacts but an attempt to continue to outline a broad general theory of the normative and creative dimension in action . In the final section I link the erotic zone of action to a sociological definition of intimacy and contrast the ways in which these three thinkers theorized intimacy with how it might be thought about today. 109 Kant: Duties Toward the Body Concerning the Sexual Impulse In The Critique of Practical Reason Kant asks the question, How ought I act in a way that is universally good and right, that is, regardless of any given context? He initially poses the ethical question of action on an existential and pragmatic level. Action is a problem of immediate creative sensibility. Sensibility is divided into “sense” or the “faculty of intuition in the presence of an object”and “imagination ” or “intuition without the presence of an object” (Kant 1978b, 15) But imagination is also an impediment to knowledge and so his treatment of it is further divided in terms of its different roles in logic and metaphysics (The Critique of Pure Reason) and taste and genius (The Critique of Judgement). In the realm of practical reason he retreats from the specifically creative sensibility to an a priori form of explanation that downgrades the sensual impulse in favor of a universal rule for all action. One of the most intriguing ethical problems that Kant thought through using the Categorical Imperative is to know how humans might ethically consummate a natural sexual inclination toward one another. Kant defines sexual appetite as a universal inclination we have for enjoying another human being’s sex. Sexuality per se “is not an inclination which one human being has for another as such, but is an inclination for the sex of another” (1963, 164). He calls this appetite for another human being “the sixth sense.” Acting on such an appetite means turning the other into an object of impulse. Polygamy, concubinage , prostitution, bestiality, and incest are some of the forms of sexual practice that Kant gives as examples that deviate from the Categorical Imperative. All violate the notion of the person by separating human and sexual love, or by exploiting the other (the object of sexual inclination or possession) as simply a means and not an end. According to Kant, the sexual inclination toward another can only be exercised by all genders ethically should the sexual act with the other be achieved under the umbrella of the monogamous marriage contract. “Sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as the appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon that has been sucked dry” (1963, 163). Sexual love needs to be combined with “human love” and placed under the construct of rights over the body in order to escape degrading the other person. Only when both partners have the same full rights of access to each other’s bodies can one actually give oneself up or abandon oneself in order to get oneself back (1963, 167). Thus, it is only through a con110 The Norms of Answerability tract of marriage rights that we might exercise our sexual impulse without violating the Categorical Imperative. We see in the above example that...