Autonomy (Kantian)

Kantian Autonomy, as reconstructed in this passage from Ruda's reading of the categorical imperative, names not the liberal-humanist capacity of a self-governing rational agent to choose its own law, but rather the structural outcome of a double-count that renders the will's freedom formally identical to its willing of nothing. Ruda traces the three formulations of Kant's categorical imperative—duty, the end in itself, and autonomy—as a sequence that converges on a paradox: the autonomous will is free precisely insofar as it abstracts from every pathological determination and wills in accordance with a law that has no object in the phenomenal sense. Autonomy is therefore not the positive capacity for self-legislation but the name for the gap produced when the subject is counted twice—once as a phenomenal being subject to natural causality, and once as a noumenal being beyond determination—and freedom is located in the blind spot at which these two counts fail to coincide.

This structural reading renders Kantian Autonomy fatalist rather than voluntarist: the will wills freely only by willing an absent object, an emptiness that the law prescribes. What appears as the highest expression of rational self-governance turns out to be the point at which the subject is most thoroughly subjected—not to empirical inclination but to the incomprehensibility of freedom itself, a "third cognition" that cannot be made transparent to the understanding. Autonomy, in this sense, is the Kantian name for a constitutive splitting that haunts rational agency from within.

Within provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, Kantian Autonomy functions as the third term in a triad—duty, end-in-itself, autonomy—that Ruda extracts from Kant in order to show that freedom is structurally fatalist. The concept is therefore not treated as an independent ethical achievement but as the culmination of an argument about Fatalism (Kantian), the double-count, and the splitting of the subject. Its relation to the cross-referenced canonical concepts is precise: autonomy is possible only because of Lack—the absent object that the categorical imperative prescribes as its content—and it recapitulates the structure of the Lost Object insofar as the will's "free" object is constitutively absent, posited as lost by the very operation of abstraction from pathological inclination. The splitting of the subject (Spaltung) is the mechanism that makes autonomy legible: the subject counted as phenomenal and as noumenal never adds up, and autonomy names the remainder of that failed addition.

Relative to the other canonical concepts provided, Autonomy occupies the place where Dialectics reaches its limit: the double-count is not a dialectical sublation of phenomenal and noumenal but an irreducible incompatibility—what Ruda's source calls a "third cognition"—that resists synthesis. This aligns with the Lacanian principle (visible in the Dialectics synthesis) that Hegelian dialectics cannot grasp the non-dialectizable remainder, here the incomprehensibility of freedom itself. Autonomy is also adjacent to Maeontology and the Real as cross-referenced concepts, since the absent object the autonomous will wills is a structural nothing—a void that belongs to the order of being-less or real incomprehensibility—rather than any determinable thing. The concept thus functions in Ruda's argument as a hinge between Kantian moral philosophy and a Lacanian-inflected ontology of constitutive lack.

Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of FatalismFrank Ruda · 2016 (page unknown)

Kant derives from them the concepts of duty, of an end in itself, and of autonomy.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it presents autonomy not in isolation but as the third term derived from the three formulations of the categorical imperative—marking it as the telos of a sequence rather than a starting point, which allows Ruda to show that autonomy inherits and concentrates the structural paradox latent in duty and the end in itself: the will's self-legislation culminates in the willing of an absent object.