Human Dignity and Bioethics

338 | Susan M. Shell
feels himself hindered in it.—This impulse [Trieb] to have his
own way [seinen Willen zu haben] and to take any obstacle as
an affront is marked, especially by his tone, and manifests ill
nature that the mother sees herself required to punish; but
he retaliates by screaming even louder. The same thing happens
when he falls, through his own fault. While the young
of other animals play, children begin early to quarrel with
one another; and it is as if a certain concept of justice (which
is based on outer freedom) develops along with their animal
nature, without having to be learned gradually. 13
I linger over the passage because it touches with unusual directness
on the relation between nature and freedom in man, and hence on
the “dualism” with which Kant is so often taxed. Unlike Lucretius,
who interprets such crying as apprehension on the young infant’s
part of the “dolefulness” of the life in store for him, Kant sees in
it the (possible) irruption into nature of the “idea of freedom” as a
genuinely moral cause. To be sure, the immediate consequences are
morally doleful: the malevolent wish, expressed even by the young
infant, to have one’s way without granting similar sway to others.
Still, as in Kant’s other historical and religious writings, this fall into
evil is the path human beings almost inevitably take in their progress
toward earthly realization of the moral idea.
The point for our purposes is this: not the specifics of Kant’s
moral anthropology, but the larger claim about our need to make
sense of our existence as embodied rational beings who are in nature
but not fully of it. We are driven by our end-setting nature to make
sense of the world both in relation to ourselves and as a whole. (Kant
sometimes calls this our capacity for a priori principles of judgment.)
But all the stories that we tell are riven by (partial) failure, beginning
with the infant who angrily discovers that his claim to freedom is not
externally supported. Our very efforts to make sense of the (natural)
world, in their (initial) failure, orient us toward the demands of
moral transcendence.
Whatever “embodied rationality” might mean for other beings
elsewhere in the universe (and Kant kept up a lively openness to the
possibility of life on other planets), it is inscribed, for us, within an
experiential framework that is dialectical in character. The freedom