university of toronto press the kantian imperative humiliation common sense politics aug 2005

THE KANTIAN IMPERATIVE:
HUMILIATION, COMMON SENSE, POLITICS
Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy is almost universally understood
as an attempt to analyse and defend a morality based on individual
autonomy. In The Kantian Imperative, Paul Saurette challenges this
interpretation by arguing that Kant’s ‘imperative’ is actually based on
a problematic appeal to ‘common sense’ and that it is premised on, and
seeks to further cultivate and intensify, the feeling of humiliation in
every moral subject.
Discerning the influence of this model on historical and contempo-
rary political thought and philosophy, Saurette explores its particular
impact on the work of two contemporary thinkers: Charles Taylor and
Jürgen Habermas. Saurette also shows that an analysis of the Kantian
imperative allows a better understanding of specific current political
issues, such as the U.S. military scandal at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and of
broader ones, such as post-9/11 foreign policy. The Kantian Imperative
thus demonstrates that Kant’s moral philosophy and political theory
are as relevant today as at any other time in history.
paul saurette is an assistant professor in the School of Political Stud-
ies at the University of Ottawa.
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The Kantian Imperative
Humiliation, Common Sense, Politics
PAUL SAURETTE
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2005
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-3882-4 (cloth)

ISBN 0-8020-4880-3 (paper)
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Saurette, Paul
The Kantian imperative : humiliation, common sense,
politics / Paul Saurette.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-3882-4 (bound). ISBN 0-8020-4880-3 (pbk.)
1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. 2. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804 –
Contributions in political science. I. Title.
B2798.S28 2005 193
C2005-900775-3
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the
Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through
the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to
its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for
its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
www.utppublishing.com
To
My mom, Kathryn Saurette,
for cultivating my passion for justice and for teaching me
to always question and debate
and
My dad, Phil Saurette,
for passing on his love of problem solving

and his deep respect for education
and
My fellow wanderer, Kathryn Trevenen,
for inspiring me, for pushing me, and above all else,
for laughing with me
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To take scandal at what is merely unconventional (paradoxon) but
otherwise in itself good is a delusion (since one holds what is unusual
to be impermissible as well), an error dangerous and destructive to
virtue.
~ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 6:464
Concepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies.
There is no heaven for concepts. They must be invented, fabricated, or
rather created and would be nothing without their creator’s signature.
Nietzsche laid down the task of philosophy when he wrote ‘[philoso-
phers] must no longer accept concepts as a gift, nor merely purify and
polish them, but first make and create them, present them and make
them convincing.’
~ Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 4
If one concept is ‘better’ than an earlier one, it is because it makes
us aware of new variations and unknown resonances, it carries out
unforeseen cuttings-out, it brings forth an Event that surveys us.
~ Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 28
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Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Humiliation, Common Sense, Morality 3
Part I – The Kantian Imperative
1 Kant’s Imperative Image of Morality 25
2 Common Sense Recognition 46

3 Cultivating a Kantian Moral Disposition 83
4 Kantian Humiliation: The Mnemotechnics of Morality 102
Interlogue: Implications and Speculations 142
Part II – The Contemporary Kantian Imperative
5 Habermas’s Kantian Imperative 161
6 Taylor’s Common Sense Ontology 197
Epilogue: The Post-9/11 Kantian Imperative 235
Notes 251
Index 295
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Acknowledgments
Sparking new thoughts is no mean feat in itself. Cultivating new
modes of engagement is more difficult still. I have been fortunate to
have been surrounded by friends and colleagues who have not only
sparked new thoughts for me, but have embodied new modes of
engaging with the world.
First and foremost, thanks to Kathryn Trevenen. Kathryn has been
central to my thinking since our first intense – and hotly contested –
debates about Nietzsche, Rousseau, and feminism. It is only now – ten
years later – that I am truly beginning to see what she saw back then.
So, while her influence is scattered liberally throughout the book, I sus-
pect she has not been able to save me from all of the new follies I man-
age to produce each day. Her support, her politics, and her integrity
are indispensable sources of inspiration.
Thanks to the three remarkable theorists who helped to usher earlier
versions of this work into being – all of whom have been more than
generous with their encouragement and advice. Thanks to Bill Con-
nolly for sparking the entire work. He continually questions the limits
of political theory, and his exemplary open mode of posing questions,
exploring problems, and engaging interlocutors reassures me that

there are approaches to political theory that do not follow the model of
the Kantian Imperative. Thanks to Jane Bennett for (1) encouraging me
to further explore an initial and very preliminary examination of
humiliation and Kant, (2) reading the entire work and giving extensive
and valuable feedback, and, of course, (3) always being more than will-
ing to alert me when my lists multiplied beyond good sense. Her ethi-
cal generosity and theoretical insight are a rare combination. Finally,
thanks to Richard Flathman for a critical and incisive introduction to
xii Acknowledgments
liberalism. Our shared worry that liberalism can also become alto-
gether too fond of common sense made working with him a rewarding
process.
A number of people read parts of this work in earlier and later stages
and offered insights that have substantially improved it. Thanks, first
of all, to Steve Johnston for the generous, detailed, and thoroughly con-
structive critical feedback on the entire manuscript. His comments sub-
stantially transformed several key elements of the book – not least of
which was convincing me that an epilogue might be worthwhile
(though I’m not sure if I answered his questions in it ). Marc Sau-
rette’s ease with Latin and knowledge of monastic traditions of humili-
ation helped me in both early and late stages of this project. Andrew
Curtofello took time at a very busy time of year to pose a number of
stimulating questions that convinced me to flush out and to speculate
on some key questions in chapter 4 and the interlogue. Similarly, Ian
Hunter’s work – and his feedback – helped me to address several key
questions towards the end of the project. Thanks also to Stephen
White, Bonnie Honig, the editorial board of Philosophy and Social Criti-
cism, and anonymous reviewers at Political Theory, Philosophy and Social
Criticism, and the University of Toronto Press for comments that have
influenced this book in a variety of ways.

The School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada,
has offered an ideal venue in which to revise and complete this book.
With its bilingual culture, its warm and engaging faculty, its dyna-
mism, and its energetic student body, the school is truly an oasis of crit-
ical thinking. This project has benefited in both general and specific
ways from many discussions with my colleagues (especially those in
the political-thought reading group) and with my students (especially
those in ‘Modern Systems of Political Thought’ and ‘Séminaire de Syn-
thèse en Pensée Politique’). Thanks, in particular, to Suzanne Gallant
for exemplary research assistance with material that ranged from the
abstraction of Habermasian theory to the minutia of military legal
reasoning. Thanks also to a variety of institutions that have supported
the development of this book financially, including the Canadian Fed-
eration for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity, the University of Ottawa, and the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.
Finally, I’d like to acknowledge the many friends and families who
make up the web of relations that has sustained me throughout.
Thanks to the Saurette and Trevenen families for simultaneously keep-
Acknowledgments xiii
ing me grounded and pushing me to go farther. My parents, to whom
this book is dedicated, cultivated in me a variety of tendencies (per-
haps most important a deep respect for learning and an intense love of
debate) that have profoundly shaped this book. The camaraderie and
unerring good humour of my brother, Marc, and my sister, Kathleen
(who is never more full of good humour than after having been woken
up by an early morning bell), are huge parts of my life and have
sustained and shaped me for as long as I can remember. Brenda and
Neville Trevenen have welcomed me into their family with more
enthusiasm and Koala Springs than I could ever have expected. My

two incredible nieces, Emma and Lily, and their parents, Paul and
Anna Trevenen, continue to inspire me. They remind me about not
only how fortunate we are but also how much joy, progress, and affir-
mation is possible even in a world that has more than its share of
adversity and suffering. Thanks also to my extended family: to Judy
Saurette and John and Pauline Friesen, who, every time I’ve been in
Toronto over the last fifteen years, have provided an unending supply
of comfy beds, great food, stimulating conversation, and cultural edu-
cation; and to the Western Saurettes, who, whenever I made it out to
the Rockies, both welcomed me and my fellow travellers with gourmet
meals, good humour, and political debate and, equally important, took
the time to lead us to and guide us down the treacherous ‘locals only’
steeps.
The list of friends who have hosted me, visited me, debated and
challenged my ideas, introduced me to perspectives outside political
thought, helped to put things into perspective, sustained my convic-
tion in the value of intellectual work, and generally made life much
richer is far too wide and deep to allow me to name everyone. How-
ever, I want to particularly thank the diverse set of JHU friends who
helped me to laugh my way through the camera obscura (and many
other obscuras), especially Kelly Barry, Jacquie Best, Richard Dilworth,
Spenser Friel, Siba Grovogui, Vicki Hsueh, Jane Lesnick, Patrick Peel,
Jimmy Schaefer, and Paul Tyler. I also want to thank a few other
friends, scattered throughout the world, who were equally important
to the development of this project. Thanks to the Ben-Porats (Guy,
Neta, Shira, and Talia), Shane Gunster, Morgan Harker, Drew Ley-
burne, Salim Loxley, Shelliza Mohamed, Emma Naughton, Jim Ron,
Henrik Thune, Devin Tucker, and many others for keeping me both
engaged and sane.
When I first began to explore the role of humiliation in Kant, a

xiv Acknowledgments
reviewer once enquired rhetorically whether it was ‘not a little odd’
and ‘not a little strange’ to suggest that there was a more complex
relation between Kant and humiliation than generally thought (the
implied answer being an emphatic and dismissive ‘yes’). To me it is
much odder and stranger that so many people would offer – and be
able to provide – so much support, advice, and assistance over such a
sustained period of time. While many strands of philosophy take these
relations of community for granted, I continue to find it an amazing
and hopeful phenomenon that we can cultivate such complex and
strong webs of mutual support. This is why, despite all my concerns
about his project, I can still admire those rare moments in which Kant’s
thinking escapes the logic of the Kantian Imperative and instead
exhorts us not to fall into the trap of rejecting the unconventional sim-
ply because it doesn’t fit with our common sense. For sometimes the
odd and the strange need be not only something about which we
wonder and remark – but also something that we find wonderful and
remarkable.
THE KANTIAN IMPERATIVE:
HUMILIATION, COMMON SENSE, POLITICS
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INTRODUCTION
Humiliation, Common Sense, Morality
The seventh step of humility is that a man not only admits with his
tongue but is also convinced in his heart that he is inferior to all and of
less value, humiliating himself and saying with the prophet: I am but a
worm, not a man, the lowest of men and despised by the people. (PS 21) I was
exalted and then humiliated and overwhelmed with confusion. (PS 87) It is a
blessing that you have humiliated me so that I can learn your commandments.
(PS 118)

~ The Rule of St. Benedict
1
Humiliation. A sick feeling in the pit of the stomach or heart. A rush of
blood to – or away from – the face. Confusion. The shattering realiza-
tion that your most dearly held self-perceptions and bases of self-
respect have been torn down and ripped to shreds. ‘If embarrassment
lingers on the surface of the body, humiliation is located at its deepest
center.’
2
A complex experience and emotion in which conceptual and
cultural expectations and meanings intertwine with powerful affective
and bodily forces, humiliation is not something to be taken lightly.
While few, if any, modern political and moral philosophical ap-
proaches would explicitly laud its edifying value, humiliation has been
viewed as a crucial element of many other traditions of social and
political thought. Humiliation, for example, played an important role
in medieval thought. In fact, as we can see above, the Rule that gov-
erned one of the most influential medieval monastic orders (the Rule of
St. Benedict) not only viewed humility as a virtue. It also viewed
humiliation as a crucial and virtuous process. To modern eyes, this is
almost inconceivable. For humiliation seems to destroy the autonomy
4 The Kantian Imperative
of the modern subject. Humiliation, moreover, by definition would
seem to vitiate the essential dignity and respect that the modern sub-
ject is due.
So why, in Benedict’s eyes, is this process and feeling of humiliation
virtuous? Why is it a blessing to be humiliated? According to Benedict,
humiliation is so important because it can be crucial to the attempt to
cultivate a moral disposition. For Benedict realized that humiliation is
not only a state of being (in which you acknowledge a more perfect state

than your own). He also appreciated that humiliation is an intensely
emotional process of becoming, where a subject’s unwarranted preten-
sions to superior worth are painfully stripped away and unmasked as
false. On Benedict’s recounting, humiliation is the process of moving
from a hubristic sense of exaltation, through overwhelming confusion,
to the deep feeling of unworthiness and self-despising.
For Benedict, this is the key to its moral value. For humiliation
destroys the subject’s pretensions to self-sufficiency. Without humilia-
tion there is only hubris – an elevated self-conception that closes you to
the call of the Lord. With humiliation, there is an intense feeling of
‘lowliness’ and ‘confusion’ from which the moral subject will look for
deliverance and fulfilment in the commandments of the Lord. Accord-
ing to Benedict, only the intensely affective experience of humiliation
ensures that our moral disposition will transcend mere negative obedi-
ence and experience a deep, reverential, and affirmative love of the laws
and the holy creator.
3
Humiliation is thus an indispensable element of
monastic moral orders.
‘Enlightened’ modernity has tended to strongly condemn the pre-
modern employment of humiliation as superstition and authoritarian-
ism. Many early modern thinkers claimed, in fact, that one of the cen-
tral characteristics separating the two epochs is modernity’s categorical
denunciation of humiliation. Kant’s oft quoted distillation of the
enlightenment ethos, ‘Sapere Aude – have the courage to use your own
reason’ is often taken as the paradigmatic expression of this contrast. To
be enlightened is to break free of our humiliating ‘self-incurred tute-
lage’ and ‘monkish slavishness’ to illegitimate metaphysics and tran-
scendentalism.
4

Kant, of course, does not completely dismiss the value
of humility. He does, after all, think that it is crucial that we critically
temper the hubris of speculative knowledge.
5
For Kant, however, the
humility of theoretical reason should not be the result of our humilia-
tion by a higher, heteronymous power. Rather, our theoretical humility
Introduction: Humiliation, Common Sense, Morality 5
should emerge from our own ability to reason critically. In the practical
realm of ethics and politics, moreover, it is the subject’s autonomy, not
its humiliation, that is the basis of morality. In the realm of practical rea-
son, humiliation is antithetical to modernity and enlightenment.
Spinoza, though fundamentally diverging from Kant on many other
dimensions, is in total agreement with Kant on this question. In his dis-
course on Ethics, for example, Spinoza completely inverts Benedict’s
valorization of humility and the experience of humiliation. Far from
being a virtuous end, for Spinoza, humility is merely ‘pain arising from
a man’s contemplation of his own impotence, or weakness.’ According
to Spinoza, those (like St Benedict) who teach a morality of humiliation
are clearly the enemy of enlightenment. They are ‘the superstitious,
who know how to censure vice rather than to teach virtue, and who are
eager not to guide men by reason but to restrain them by fear so that
they may shun evil rather than love virtue.’ They ‘have no other object
than to make others as wretched as themselves.’
6
In Spinoza’s view, far
from inspiring ethical subjects, humiliation merely cultivates ressenti-
ment-filled beings who seek to pull down all those around them.
1. The Pervasive Tactics of Humiliation
There are, of course, very good reasons to share the ethical disavowal

of humiliation and hope that it is a practice we are working to over-
come. For, as anyone who has ever felt humiliation knows, it is an
incredibly potent and painful emotion. It is thus not surprising that
many contemporary theorists view humiliation as one of the most
cruel informal punitive systems of society – and that some go so far as
to name humiliation as the central vice of late-modern society.
7
Nonetheless, humiliation continues to accompany us. William Ian
Miller, for example, shows that humiliation remains one of the most
important communal modes of maintaining social order and hierar-
chy.
8
In fact, he argues that humiliation is becoming an ever more prev-
alent technique of order. According to Miller, as the formal and overt
social markers of status erode, social humiliation (in front of valued
peer groups) becomes increasingly employed to encourage obedience
without resorting to physical compulsion.
Academics can certainly empathize with this view. The threat of
public humiliation has always been one of the more material ways that
largely symbolic professorial power and status can be mobilized to
6 The Kantian Imperative
keep students and junior colleagues in line. Consider the uncomfort-
able silence that accompanies the oft-heard commentator’s reply to a
theoretical paper: ‘While this is certainly a unique and unorthodox
idea, if you read the passages in question closely, it is clear that your
explanation is not nearly as persuasive as Professor X’s authoritative
view on this subject ’ Why does this phrase often inspire downward
glances and shuffling among the audience and the paper-giver? Some-
times it is because everyone realizes that Professor X’s ideas are better.
Often, however, the uncomfortable silence emerges even if most peo-

ple are not familiar with Professor X’s ideas. For if the commentator is
a well-respected professor, the audience generally does not wait to
hear why Professor X’s ideas are better. Rather, the silencing humilia-
tion is immediate, and the implications are clear to both the questioner
and the audience. The authorities have determined that the paper is
not worthy of our sustained attention. The paper has pretensions to
rigorous scholarship, but in fact, it is only a poor replica. Both it and its
author should recognize their proper (lower) place.
A pervasive fear, and utilization, of humiliation is certainly not lim-
ited to academic circles. From high-school cliques to diplomatic rela-
tions, humiliation profoundly influences the way we behave. More-
over, humiliation is not merely a haphazard social dynamic. There are
clearly identifiable ‘tactics of humiliation’ that are consciously mobi-
lized by a various actors in a variety of contexts. Consider, for example,
the increasingly influential and very popular ‘tough on crime’ ap-
proach to incarceration in North America. Not surprisingly, tactics of
humiliation have become central tools used by the proponents of this
approach. Take, for example, the case of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the head of
the Maricopa County Sheriff Office (which oversees the fourth-largest
county jail system in the United States). Arpaio – the self-appointed
‘Toughest Sheriff in America’ – has become wildly popular in Arizona
and a national celebrity for his ‘tough’ approach to crime. What is par-
ticularly interesting about Arpaio is that he explicitly and systemati-
cally employs tactics of humiliation and extols their virtues. He has, for
example, introduced (for the first time ever) chain gangs into the Ari-
zona penal system. Another favourite tactic has been to force male
inmates to wear pink underwear and socks – and then publicly revel in
the fact that these tough inmates are wearing humiliatingly non-mascu-
line clothing (Arpaio went on national television to promote the cloth-
ing and then decided to market it nationally – selling about $500,000

worth each year).
9
Most recently, he has installed live webcams so that
Introduction: Humiliation, Common Sense, Morality 7
the public can tune in twenty-four hours a day to view prisoners being
booked, searched, and incarcerated in the jail.
These tactics serve many purposes, but the idea that prisoners must
be humiliated into obedience underpins all of them. This is especially
true in the case of the pink underwear as Arpaio plays on inmates’
complex relationship with masculinity and heterosexuality. By implic-
itly portraying them as effeminate women without the power to
choose their own clothing, Arpaio seeks to humiliate the implicit
claims of (many) male inmates to be tough, macho men. The implicit
humiliation of their pretensions to the male gender and to a heterosex-
ual orientation is clear for all to see (and the public can even partici-
pate voyeuristically by purchasing the underwear as gifts to mock-
humiliate the receiver).
10
Arpaio clearly believes not only that we can
humiliate people into obedience – but that we should.
Tactics of humiliation, however, are not restricted to the domestic
realm of punishment. They exist at virtually all levels of social and
political interaction. Tactics of humiliation are frequently central to
international politics. It is a virtual truism, for example, that humilia-
tion played a central role in the interwar period in Europe and the
eventual outbreak of the Second World War. Whether or not the desire
to humiliate Germany and put down its pretensions to great-power
status was a conscious goal of those who drew up the terms of the Ver-
sailles Treaty, the humiliation that was experienced and articulated by
important elements of the German population was a critical factor that

allowed for the growth of Nazism and the Holocaust.
11
More recently, the importance of tactics of humiliation have been
clearly demonstrated by the actions of the U.S. military in the most
recent war with Iraq. The revelations of the use of tactics of torture and
humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib are simply the most spec-
tacular evidence of the contemporary relevance of tactics of humilia-
tion. However, there are many other examples – from the way the U.S.
administration controlled and disseminated humiliating video footage
of the members of the Hussein family to the way the United States
explicitly and instrumentally employed humiliating posters to crack
down on Saddam Hussein supporters.
12
It is also worth noting that the results of the tactics of humiliation are
highly unpredictable and rarely effective. Consider the (lack of) success
of Sheriff Arpaio’s tactics of humiliation. Arpaio defends and promotes
the common sense idea that tougher justice, more humiliation, and less
compassion should be effective in deterring criminals. The evidence,
8 The Kantian Imperative
however, does not support this contention. Rather than outpacing the
falling regional and national crime rates, Arizona’s crime rate has
decreased less quickly. Although violent crime rates in the western
United States fell by 3 per cent in 1997 and murders fell by 11 per cent,
the violent crime rates in Phoenix, Arizona, dropped by only 1 per cent.
Even rates that should be directly affected by Arpaio’s tactics – for
example, recidivism rates – have resolutely failed to decline. In fact, a
university study of the recidivism rate of the Maricopa County jail sys-
tem commissioned by Arpaio (and directed by Dr Hepburn and Dr Grif-
fin of Arizona State University) showed that his tactics had no measur-
able effect on inmate recidivism. Instead, they ‘concluded that the addi-

tional hardships don’t really register any additional deterrent effect.’
13
Though the result surprised common sense tough-love advocates
like Arpaio, we shouldn’t find it surprising once we reflect on the logic
of humiliation. For humiliation is not only a cruel model of punish-
ment; it also fails to create any conditions that could function to
motivate obedience in the long term. Consider what happens when
humiliation is successful: it destroys the self-respect of the subject and
leaves little basis to refashion an affirmative subjectivity. Studies by
clinical psychologists have shown that shameful humiliation typically
results in ‘a sense of worthlessness and powerlessness. It steers people
toward denial, anger and blaming others.’
14
Rather than creating con-
ditions for a healthy respect (or even fear) of the law, it merely creates
conditions of ressentiment and scapegoating.
The consequences of unsuccessful humiliation can be even greater. If
we accept Nietzsche’s, Spinoza’s, or even Kant’s contention that the
subject is characterized by a drive for sovereignty, a conatus, or a need
for self-respect and autonomy, it is not surprising that an experience of
humiliation could lead to a strong reaction against the perceived humil-
iator once the humiliatee is no longer immediately subject to the power
of the humiliator. In fact, U.S. military forces counted on this boomer-
ang effect when they flooded Iraq with ‘humiliating’ posters of Sad-
dam Hussein (depicting his head on a variety of Hollywood bodies,
including Zsa Zsa Gabor and Elvis) that mocked and challenged Hus-
sein’s pretensions to being a fundamentally anti-American and all-
powerful figure. For the strategy was not to humiliate Iraqis into obe-
dience; rather, the hope was that the posters would ‘taunt Hussein loy-
alists into showing their colours’ by ensuring that ‘the bad guys will be

upset, which will just make it easier for us to know who they are.’
15
They would feel humiliated but not cowed. Instead, their anger and
Introduction: Humiliation, Common Sense, Morality 9
resentment would ensure that they acted out against the posters, thus
allowing the U.S. military to identify and capture them.
We can think of numerous other practical examples that demon-
strate the counter-productive boomerang dynamics of humiliation
from the re-emergence of white supremacists in the former East Ger-
many to the contemporary dynamics in the Middle East at the begin-
ning of the new millenium. What is clear, however, is that humiliation
is a model of discipline that rarely, if ever, can inspire an affirmative
ethical, moral, or civic disposition. It only teaches its subjects to obey
power – an obedience that tends to disappear the moment the fear dis-
sipates and often is transformed into vicious spirals of revenge. Which
means that tactics of humiliation are not merely cruel and unusual.
They are also one of the least predictable and effective modes of moti-
vation and discipline.
2. Kantian Humiliation
I will analyse and evaluate the role of humiliation in contemporary
politics (especially the tactics of humiliation employed by U.S. military
intelligence in Iraq in the 2003 war) in more detail in the epilogue of
this book. I hope, however, that the brief examples above help to illus-
trate how antithetical the tactics of humiliation are to most of ‘modern’
political and moral thought. Given the cruelty of humiliation, the
fact that its effects are highly unpredictable and frequently counter-
productive, and the fact that it is premised on the denial and denigra-
tion of the very idea of one’s dignity and autonomy, it would seem vir-
tually impossible to erect a political and moral system that views
humiliation as a core resource and value.

It is true, of course, that the work of the Marquis de Sade demon-
strates that a philosophy of humiliation is not entirely impossible
within modernity – and modern reason.
16
Yet the near unanimous
dismissal of this line of thought by most of modern philosophy shows
just how allergic modern philosophy is to a justification of humilia-
tion. Most theorists would agree, moreover, that the philosophy of
Immanuel Kant would harshly critique tactics of humiliation. Given its
profound defence of deontological morality, individual dignity, and
autonomy, one would think that Kant’s philosophy would be reso-
lutely clear and consistent in its absolutely disavowal of all practices
and tactics of humiliation.
Yet in the crucial third chapter of the first book of Kant’s Critique of
10 The Kantian Imperative
Practical Reason, humiliation makes a rather surprising appearance. As
he discusses the origin and validity of the famous ‘special moral feel-
ing’ of respect, Kant explicitly links it back to a process of humiliation:
‘The moral law unavoidably humiliates every human being when he
compares with it the sensible propensity of his nature. If something
represented as a determining ground of our will humiliates us in our self-
consciousness, it awakens respect for itself insofar as it is positive and a
determining ground.’
17
The courage to use our own moral reason, it
turns out, means at least partially the willingness – and capacity – to be
humiliated by a suprasensible moral law we can practically recognize
but cannot theoretically know. On Kant’s telling, it is, in fact, only the
experience of humiliation that can awaken the crucial moral feeling of
respect and dignity. Kantian autonomy thus not only fundamentally

relies on a philosophical conception of humiliation to defend its theoret-
ical cogency. Kantian morality requires practices that actively seek to
cultivate an affective experience of humiliation as well.
These are, to say the least, contentious claims. The idea that humilia-
tion is a key theoretical concept, concrete tactic, and practical experi-
ence of Kant’s practical reason runs counter to virtually every accepted
political and philosophical reading of Kant. Moreover, if humiliation
does play a significant role in Kant’s practical philosophy, it both raises
questions about how we understand the relationship between auton-
omy and humiliation in modern society and philosophy and encour-
ages us to re-evaluate the ethical validity and desirability of Kant’s
(and others’) moral and political systems. This book, then, began as an
attempt to answer two questions: How does humiliation function in
Kant’s thinking (e.g., What is the seemingly paradoxical relationship
between autonomy and humiliation in Kant’s moral and political
thought)? And what effect does this have on our evaluation of Kantian
moral philosophy? Answering these questions remains a major part of
this project.
3. The Kantian Imperative:
Humiliation, Common Sense, Morality
This book, however, is not simply about humiliation. For the more I
learned about how humiliation functions in Kant’s project, the more I
wondered why it appeared at all. Indeed, it is difficult to answer the
‘how’ question without running up against the ‘why.’ Answering the
‘why,’ however, pushed me towards a much broader reconsideration