Kantian Sollen
ELI5
The Kantian "Sollen" is basically the idea that morality is always just something you're supposed to do but never quite manage — you keep trying to be good but never get there. Hegel's complaint is that this turns morality into an endless treadmill, and McGowan argues that real freedom means actually achieving the moral law, not just forever reaching toward it.
Definition
Kantian Sollen (German: "ought") names the structural feature of Kantian moral philosophy whereby the moral law is posited as an ideal to be endlessly striven toward but never fully actualized. For Kant, the moral subject is constituted precisely by the gap between what it does and what it ought to do: morality is not an achieved state but a perpetual striving, an asymptotic approach to the law that can never close the distance between the empirical self and the pure moral will. McGowan's theoretical move in the relevant passage is to identify this structure — the ought as permanently deferred actualization — as a limitation that Hegel's philosophy of freedom overcomes. In Hegel's view, Kantian Sollen freezes freedom in pure negativity, leaving the subject perpetually at odds with the actual world and never able to affirm freedom as something achieved within concrete, historical reality.
This endless striving has a precise ideological function within the corpus: the Kantian subject's constitutive failure to fulfill the moral law does not simply describe a psychological inadequacy but structurally licenses an immoral world as its permanent foil. The Beautiful Soul figure — the subject who clings to inner purity while refusing to engage with the soiled actual — is the lived form of the Sollen: the Kantian subject needs the gap between ideal and real to maintain its moral self-identity. For McGowan, Hegel's advance is to insist that true freedom requires the actualization of the moral law, not merely its formal prescription, and that this move is only possible once the subject recognizes the insubstantiality of the big Other — the symbolic authority whose obscurity otherwise holds desire captive to an unreachable ideal.
Place in the corpus
In the source todd-mcgowan-emancipation-after-hegel-achieving-a-contradictory-revolution-colum, the Kantian Sollen functions as a critical foil that allows McGowan to sharpen Hegel's theory of freedom by contrast. The concept is positioned as the defining limit of Kantian ethics: by locating morality entirely in the ought, Kant traps the subject in a structure of permanent striving that can never translate into actualized freedom. This is directly continuous with the corpus's treatment of the Beautiful Soul — the figure whose moral self-image depends on maintaining the gap between ideal and real, and who therefore requires the disorder it deplores as its own structural support. The Kantian Sollen is, in effect, the philosophical formalization of the Beautiful Soul's stance.
The concept also resonates with the corpus's account of Desire, insofar as both structures turn on a constitutive lack: just as desire circulates endlessly around an unattainable object (das Ding) rather than reaching satisfaction, the Kantian Sollen keeps the subject endlessly circling the moral law without ever arriving. McGowan's Hegelian counter-move — that freedom must be actualized rather than merely prescribed — can be read in relation to Absolute Knowing as well: both arguments reject the consolation of an ideal positioned at an unreachable distance (whether epistemic or moral) and insist instead on immanent recognition of a constitutive gap. The Kantian Sollen, in this context, is an extension and specification of the Beautiful Soul pathology, elevated to a structural principle of an entire moral philosophy, which Hegel's dialectic — and the Lacanian critique of the big Other's insubstantiality — is called upon to overcome.
Key formulations
Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (page unknown)
Kant distances himself from moral success. The Kantian subject constantly struggles to act morally but never fully does so. Morality consists of striving toward moral action
The phrase "distances himself from moral success" is theoretically loaded because it frames the Kantian Sollen not as an unfortunate limitation but as a deliberate structural choice: the gap between striving and achievement is constitutive rather than accidental. The term "striving toward moral action" — rather than achieving it — names precisely the asymptotic, never-closing relation to the law that McGowan identifies as the feature Hegel must overcome to reach a genuine theory of freedom.