stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

means that it cannot will. It must yield to the feeling of pleasure. Desire becomes the feeling of
pleasure. An ability becomes sensible. This is the paradox of the pathological attitude. The
pathological attitude is the actualization of the ability to will as the annihilation of that ability.
However, Kant argues, that when something is willed that something need not come first. It can
also come in second. In other words, there is willing something where my relationship to that
something is not mediated by the promise of the feeling of pleasure. Instead, such willing is
immediate. This is pure willing. Autonomous attitude is just as paradoxical as the pathological
attitude but in a different sense. When wanting itself wants that wanting presents itself as only
one instance of wanting. Another wanting could just as well have happened. For this reason, my
actuality does not parade for my ability. Instead, it is an opening onto it. Not only do I recognize
that this wanting is my own matter. I recognize that all wanting, in other words, that wanting
itself is my own matter. And is this not what human life is? I win my ability to want. I win my
will. The autonomous attitude is the actualization of the ability to will as the preservation of the
ability to will. In this sense, the will becomes in Kant’s terminology the ‘intelligible.’ “For, the
law of the pure will, which is free, puts the will in a sphere quite different from the empirical,
and the necessity that the law expresses, since it is not to be natural necessity, can therefore
consist only in the formal conditions of the possibility of a law in general” (CPrR 5:34). In this
sense, Kant links the intelligible with an autonomous will, that is, with having a will at all.
Allison recognizes this point. “What Kant must do, then, according to this reconstruction, is to
link membership in the intelligible world with a possession of a will. Moreover, this is precisely
what we find him attempting” (Allison 1990 223). In fact this is why the autonomous will
mutually excludes the pathological will. Yirmiyahu Yovel recognizes this point in “Kant’s
Practical Reason as Will.” “The two rival sets (more precisely, the two motivations, not
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