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

ability to will. This is important. It is also important to recognize that Kant defines the ability to
will as the ability to desire. So we have this point. Ethics is about the actualization of the ability
to desire. But what does this mean? It just means being able to want. Actually it means
something even more specific than that. If actualization of ability is something concrete, that is,
some kind of activity, then ethics just is wanting. This seems like a rather silly, primitive
interpretation of Kant. Nonetheless, it is, I argue, what Kant means. It is important to recognize
that Kant thinks that such wanting is difficult to do. You do not want if some matter—and that
can be any matter including what we take to be the universal moral value or even desire itself—
determines your wanting. When that happens you give up your wanting for that matter. On the
contrary, you want only when your wanting is pure, the pure will, when desire itself is the first
moment of your activity. Kant argues that it is reason that opens me up to this desire. This is why
Kant can use the words ‘reason’ and ‘the will’ interchangeably in his practical philosophy. In any
case, I claim that Kant calls such a life that wants autonomy. To me it is clear that such a life is
synonymous with experimentation, in other words, it is engaging people and situations for
absolutely no reason at all not even that engagement itself. (In fact that may be the last obstacle
of this Kantian ethics, to want to want).
Here I hope that you see the connection to Deleuze’s notion of counter-actualization. Yes
Deleuze talks about ethics as the counter-actualization of the transcendental, but thereby he does
not mean the opposite of what I just described. It is not like he argues that ethics is about not
wanting or about wanting some matter. He too means something like wanting that has no end or
purpose not even that wanting itself. Still, I do not want to say that Deleuze just exactly repeats
what Kant already says. He repeats with difference. Deleuze has a more complex and more vivid
understanding of the transcendental. For him the transcendental does not just stand for desire
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