Heteronomy

Heteronomy, as it appears in Ruda's reconstruction of Schmid's Kantian moral rationalism, designates the condition of moral determination by forces external to pure practical reason—specifically, by "material and empirical rules" drawn from sensible inclination, custom, or external legislation. It is the precise negative against which Kantian autonomy is defined: where autonomy names the will's self-legislation through the categorical imperative alone, heteronomy marks any determination of the will by pathological content (pleasure, interest, empirical consequence) or by an authority located outside the rational subject's own legislative capacity. In Schmid's system as Ruda presents it, heteronomy is not merely a moral failure but a structural impossibility for genuine ethics: to base ethics on empirical or material rules is to evacuate the formal universality that alone constitutes moral law. The categorical imperative, respect, and the postulate of God all function precisely as devices to hold open the space of pure rational causality against heteronomy's constant encroachment.

What gives the concept its theoretical charge in this context is that heteronomy marks the limit-point of the Kantian moral system rather than its exterior. Because pure rational action is declared theoretically impossible yet practically necessary, heteronomy is not simply excluded but negatively constitutive: the moral 'splace'—the inscription of rational-moral causality within the phenomenal world—is produced precisely through the ongoing clearing away of heteronomous determination. Heteronomy is thus the structural remainder that the Kantian moral project must perpetually expel in order to constitute itself, making it analogous, in Lacanian terms, to the Real that the Symbolic must exclude in order to function.

Within the source provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, heteronomy functions as the constitutive outside of Schmid's Kantian moral architecture. The concept gains its meaning entirely in relation to the cross-referenced canonicals: most directly, Autonomy (its structural opposite), Categorical Imperative (the formal device that replaces heteronomous determination), and Form (the a priori relational structure that must remain untainted by empirical content). Ruda's move here is to show that the demand to "clear away" heteronomy is not simply a methodological gesture but a systematic one: every positive element of Kantian ethics—respect, the postulate of God, the moral 'splace'—is a response to the impossibility of fully purging heteronomy from a rational being embedded in phenomenal reality. The concept thus inhabits the hinge between Form (pure practical form as the only legitimate moral source) and Infinite (the practically necessary but theoretically unattainable ideal of fully autonomous action), pointing to the constitutive tension that drives the system forward.

Relative to the canonical concepts provided, heteronomy is best understood as a specification of the Form/content split. As the synthesis of Form makes clear, pure form in the Kantian-ethical register is what must become materially operative as a drive—a structure that escapes the form/content binary. Heteronomy names precisely the zone of contamination where content reasserts itself against form's purity. It is not an extension of the Infinite in any positive sense, but it mirrors the structure of "bad infinity": just as the bad infinite is the endless approach to a limit that is always externally imposed, heteronomous determination is always deferred one more step outward, never grounded in the subject's own rational legislation. Ruda's reconstruction thus places heteronomy at the center of a Kantian impossibility-structure that prefigures—without explicitly invoking—Lacanian accounts of the Real as that which the Symbolic cannot fully absorb.

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

a proper moral philosopher . . . must 'clear away all material and empirical rules from the domain of ethics,' since they are all based on 'heteronomy, external legislation'

The phrase "heteronomy, external legislation" is theoretically loaded because it performs an equation: heteronomy is not merely a tendency but is structurally identical to externality itself, meaning that any rule with an empirical or material source is, by definition, a command from outside the self-legislating will. The demand to "clear away" such rules from "the domain of ethics" simultaneously maps the entire territory of morality as the space where heteronomy must be perpetually expelled — positioning ethics as an ongoing, never-finally-completed act of formal purification.