The Conditioning of the Unconditioned: Derrida and Kant

Paula Keating
University of New South Wales

Introduction: Kant welcomes Derrida to Practical Reason

1. In a number of his essays on hospitality, Derrida extracts Kants reference to
hospitality from Towards Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch and quotes the
Third Definitive Article of this political treatise: Cosmopolitan Right Shall be Limited
to Conditions of Universal Hospitality. He effectively displaces Kants use of
hospitality to condition the world for peace by presenting it as the counterpart to his
idea of absolute hospitality. Derrida believes that the greater hospitality is the
unconditioned variety; hyperbolic and impossible, this is hospitality as an absolute
ethic. What I hope to encourage here is a more hospitable encounter between Derrida
and Kant. I want to take Derridas thoughts on pure hospitality as ethics and displace
them, welcome them, into a Kantian setting for the positioning of absolute ethics. This
means that instead of comparing the uses of the word "hospitality", I will compare the
systems in which they operate.
2. Derridas idea of hospitality is an unconditional ethic, so I will introduce it to Kants
idea of the unconditioned good as the condition of practical reason. In effect I want to
compare Derridas structuring of impossible hospitality with Kants moral law. This
comes down to asking Kant to explain his idea of practical reason and practice of the
moral law and asking Derrida what takes place at the aporia of ethical responsibility:
what is so impossible about impossible hospitality? The exposition of these questions
takes place in the spirit of a comparison between Kant and Derrida on the question of
moral responsibility.
3. It may seem like I am attempting to test these thinkers for a rationally accountable
proof of their respective ideas on morality, indeed I do hope to show that they both
share (and enjoy) a theoretical dizziness when they seek the origins for human moral
enthusiasm, but what I really desire to demonstrate in examining their positing of an
absolute is the very need to assume this (unknowable/impossible) "highest point".
Morality in humanity is something incomprehensible, we all get caught in a whirl
when we try to fathom it, but "it" exists, we attempt to act for the good because we
must do something. There is an unknown stranger on the horizon who will need our
amnesty, there are the problems of peace and there is this sense in me that I am
involved. We cant locate a pure origin for our moral impulses, but nevertheless we do
respond, so we must decide how we should. Moral action is about determination: it is
not already determined. And this is something both Kant and Derrida agree upon; they
agree that responsiveness belongs to morals.

4. I also hope to show that morality and the moral self are created in the lived
response. And here I would like to quote from Max Weber in his essay "Academia as
Vocation", which he wrote in 1919 and followed with the essay "Politics as Vocation":
berall freilich geht diese Annahme, die ich Ihnen hier vortrage, aus von dem einen
Grundsachverhalt: dass das Leben, solange es in sich selbst beruht und aus sich selbst
verstanden wird, nur den ewigen Kampf jener Gtter mit einander kennt, - unbildlich
gesprochen: die Unvereinbarkeit und also die Unaustragbarkeit des Kampfes der
letzten berhaupt mglichen Standpunkte zum Leben, die Notwendigkeit also
zwischen ihnen zu entscheiden. (Weber, 2002: 506)
The proposition that I present here, always takes its point of departure from the one
fundamental fact, that life, as long as it remains immanent and is understood on its
own terms, knows only the eternal battles between these gods with one another. To
speak directly, life knows only the irreconcilability and that the struggle between the
ultimately possible attitudes toward life in general can never be brought to a final
conclusion, hence the necessity to decide between them. (My translation)
5. Weber is not talking about mere moral dilemma; he is talking about ultimate
positions toward life. We take an ultimate standpoint on life when we decide for
morality: this is not a point of view, rather the foundation from which we live.
6. That we can decide for a moral life means we are capable of deciding, determining
and responding morally. Although we cannot understand the origin of our response we
can understand that we are responsive. We take an interest in acting responsibly. So I
begin this paper with the interesting confession that forms the last sentence of Kants
attempt to ground the moral imperative, his Groundwork to the Metaphysic of Morals
(Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten); "And thus we do not comprehend the
practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative, but we nevertheless
comprehend its incomprehensibility; and this is all that can be fairly required of a
philosophy that strives in its principles to the very boundary of human reason." (G:
463)
7. Kant is adamant that there is no consistent theoretical account of the moral response
because it takes place in the practical sphere. This is the use of reason for action and
not epistemology. The non-comprehension of the practical unconditional necessity of
the moral law is all about our lived response to the world. We cannot ground the way
morality enters our lives, it exists in our response and in our response we exceed the
grounds for our own existence. Certainly Derrida would agree with the excess of our
response but the best way I can legitimate this claim is through an examination of
Kants practical reason, where the guiding question is "what should I do?" Essentially
in the above quote from the Groundwork Kant is saying that the moral imperative
remains a practical question, this question of how to assume my response. Practical
reason is a response to a problem and in our response we orient ourselves towards
what we cannot know or prove or do (what I will associate with the impossible) and
we condition ourselves with the unconditioned. In morality there is and can be - no
original determination, rather it is the determination now that is the practical impulse
of metaphysics that orients us towards moral purity, which is for Kant the highest
moral good (a pure will), and for Derrida impossible hospitality.

What should I do? Or the practical use of reason

8. In the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason we witness the
"humiliation" of pure reason. Here, Kant shows the necessary boundaries of human
knowing through the destruction of its most prestigious themes: Soul, World, and God.
Kant reveals these formerly "absolute" concepts as objects of deluding syllogisms. But
they are not totally invalid, for this would mean the complete failure of metaphysics,
rather they are called "ideas of reason". For Kant, Soul, World and God do not
represent any objects but refer to something that is of necessity meaningful to humans.
They are the unanswerables of speculative reason that inspire the inauguration of the
practical use of reason. This is not practical reason solving theoretical problems, rather
what Kant shows is that the significance of these ideas (as revealing the boundaries of
knowledge) lies in moral activity. That these ideas are problematic is important
because the moral response has no transcendental guarantees. The ideas of reason are
part of the imperative to respond.
9. It is important to understand the practical implication of Kants use of the word
"idea". The first section of the first book of the Dialectic is entirely devoted to praise
of Platos definition of "idea". Kant finds Platos term "idea" appealing because it
demonstrates the practical power of ideas: "Plato found his ideas primarily in
everything that is practical, i.e, in what is based on freedom, which for its part stands
under cognitions that are a proper product of reason." (B 371) Kant insists, following
Plato, that ideas represent a maximum, an archetype in order to bring humans closer to
a "possible greatest perfection." (B 374) This is the practical: everything that we are
capable of through freedom.
10. In the Groundwork Kant explains what it means for practical reason to be led by
ideas and create principles. Moral worth, Kant states in the second section, is about the
"inner principles of actions that one does not see". (G: 407) The method by which we
create our principles for action is through practical reason. Reason commands not
based on experience, but through the use of ideas: "for example, pure sincerity in
friendship can be no less required of everyone even if up to now there may never have
been a sincere friend, because this duty as duty in general lies, prior to all
experience, in the idea of a reason determining the will by means of a priori grounds."
(G: 408)
11. Let me make the significance of this sentence clear, since it is clearer in the
grammar of the original German: the idea that guides morality for Kant is that of "a
reason determining the will by means of a priori grounds". In other words, this idea of
determining the will via reason is the unconditioned absolute of morality. So, our duty
consists in acting with pure sincerity, which means pure sincerity exists as a guide for
duty. Kant is not positing what morality is, but is rather showing how we can practice
morality itself, how we can condition our behaviour based on this highest
unconditioned condition. Kant may appear to be being normative, but he is rather
rendering explicit what he sees as the implicit nature of morality. "A reason
determining the will by means of a priori grounds" may never have existed and may
never exist, but this is irrelevant for morality, what matters is the practice of the idea
itself. Try it on for size, exercise it, strive for its possibility, condition your behaviour

with it, set it as your task, implement it into your daily decisions. This is what such an
idea means for morality. We do not guide our moral action with empiricism, and hence
we need a metaphysics of morals.
12. The next example for the practical import of metaphysics, that is for morality, is
God as an idea. The concept of God is a model of the highest good because it is an
idea of moral perfection that reason frames a priori and connects with the concept of a
free will. (G: 409) The idea, in effect, sets us the task of aspiring towards the highest
good, the idea of God inspires us to moral purity of the will, the idea of a sincerity in
friendship causes us to work on our own honesty. We condition our actions with these
ideas, a use of reason that Kant began to explain in the first Critique. Reason, as the
faculty of principles, gives us guidance as to how to strive for the ideas of reason. That
we are endowed with reason means we are able to act in accordance with principles,
which is the same as having a will. "Since reason is required for the derivation of
actions from laws, the will is nothing other than practical reason." (G: 412)
Furthermore, "the will is the capacity to choose only that which reason cognises as
practically necessary, that is, as good. " (G: 412) Practical reason for Kant is the
practice of being guided by reason.
13. Morality presents us with problems that we must respond to, and the response that
practical reason provides us with is an activity: problematic ideas impel us to act. The
content of practical reason is our responsiveness. Our response is to seek the
unconditioned and condition our behaviour accordingly. The highest good, Kant states
in the Canon of Pure Reason, has relevance only for the discipline of practical reason.
In the Groundwork Kant posits morality itself as the highest good, absolute and
unconditioned. In this sense, morality cannot serve action but action must serve and is
conditioned by morality, if it intends to be good. The absolute good is objectively
good. However, we find an exception to the absolute because this absolute good
becomes a condition itself, a condition that is a measure of the conditioned good. We
thus understand why the unconditioned needs the conditioned: because the conditioned
is constitutive of the unconditioned. Kant also accounts for why the conditioned needs
the unconditioned: we need the idea of an unconditioned good in order to condition
action towards the good. So, if the conditions are good - in particular, the intentions then the conditioned good is good; and if not, then it is bad. The absolute good is,
therefore, the prerequisite for the possibility that the conditioned be good at all. This
reciprocal relationship between the conditioned and the unconditioned will be of
relevance later when discussing Derrida and impossible hospitality. For Derrida too
the unconditioned constitutively requires the conditioned, but he is unclear as to
exactly why the conditioned needs the unconditioned.
The problem of responsiveness. Or, There is no deduction.
14. What I referred to in my introduction as "this feeling that I am involved" could
also be called moral consciousness, which Kant makes foundational use of through
examples in The Critique of Practical Reason (see especially the gallows example at
5:30). The movement of the Groundwork goes from "common moral cognition" to
philosophic moral cognition. For Kant, morality exists without philosophy, his concern
is to expose it, to understand what justifies our response to the claims the moral law
makes, what Korsgaard calls "the normative question". (Korsgaard, 1996: 9) Although

Kant wants to uncover the blueprint for moral action, he is motivated by the mystery
or problem of our desire to act for the good. This is the problem of responsiveness: I
experience an awareness of a highest good or what should be done, and
simultaneously an injunction to act on this principle. (Compare Henrich on the concept
of moral insight, 1994: 55 89)
15. According to Kant, the good is a structure of reason, and a good will is the only
unconditional good that can be thought of in the world, or beyond it. That humans are
endowed with reason and that humans are beings that are "constituted purposively for
life" (zweckmig zum Leben eingerichtet) (G: 395) means the destiny of reason is to
regulate moral behaviour, that is, to create a purely good will. Freedom is the
presupposition of rational willing. Rational willing attempts to enact the moral law, the
unconditioned. Kant is able, for the most part, to demonstrate what is needed for such
an unconditional moral law to exist, but he cannot account for the fact that we respond
to it, that it is absolute, that we freely follow it. There is no proof: we assume freedom
and need the moral law. It is the doctrine of the idea that allows freedom to be
connected to the concept of a pure will. In pure volition we already understand
ourselves as rational beings, and in this axiom freedom is already presumed.
16. Kants first mention of the practical with Platos use of idea, also connects it
immediately with freedom. The practical is everything based on freedom, the
"keystone" concept to Kants moral philosophy. The Preface to the Groundwork
clearly defines the laws of freedom as ethics and throughout reference is made to a
free will. Yet, it is not until the third section that Kant attempts to explicate freedom as
logically founding to practical reason. But again, despite the concept of freedom being
the "key to the explanation of the autonomy of the will" there is no adequate
theoretical proof that freedom is possible.
17. To explain this non-deduction we must focus on Section III of the Groundwork.
Freedom is defined as "autonomy, that is, the wills property of being a law to itself"
(G: 447). And Kant aims to prove that the moral law follows analytically from the
concept of freedom and "hence a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the
same." (G: 447). He hopes to "deduce" the concept of freedom from pure practical
reason, which is also crucial to the possibility of the categorical imperative. (G: 447)
Freedom is explained as practically necessary for the actions of rational beings, which
means in order to exercise our reason we require freedom from inclination. Kant
thereby believes to have demonstrated the origin of the concept of morality in the idea
of freedom. But he still cannot account for our motivation to act according to morality,
that is, how "we can regard ourselves as free in acting and so to hold ourselves yet
subject to certain laws in order to find merely in our own person a worth that can
compensate us for the loss of everything that provides a worth to our conditions; and
we cannot yet see how this is possible, and hence on what grounds the moral law is
binding." (G: 450)
18. Kant attempts to clarify this logic of our moral responsiveness and justify its
reality and objective necessity by returning to theoretical reason and cognition of
objects. That there is a distinction between cognition of appearances and things in
themselves, although we can never cognise the later, means that there is a crude
division between a world of sense and an intelligible world (G: 451). These are two

standpoints that one can adopt when observing the self and the relation to the reality of
the world. The world of sense is subordinate to the intelligible world. Things in
themselves, reason, the a priori, freedom, autonomy, the moral law and activity all
belong to the unity that the intelligible world creates. The world of sense, on the other
hand, is a more passive sphere where representations affect us, only appearances are
grasped, the senses, empiricism and inclinations and the laws of nature guide us,
heteronomy is prevalent and endurance (as opposed to activity) determines our
behaviour. Freedom, therefore, and the possibility of the categorical imperative,
require independence from the sphere of sense and a conception of the self as a
rational being; this entails a cognition of the self as a member not only of the world of
the sense but also simultaneously as a member of the intelligible world.
19. It is reason that makes this recognition. "Now, a human being really finds in
himself a capacity by which he distinguishes himself from all other things, even from
himself insofar as he is affected by objects, and this is reason." (G: 452) Reason,
furthermore, is "pure self-activity," and in "ideas" reason displays a pure spontaneity
that exceeds any activity of sensibility (G: 452). Thus, use of reason is freedom
because we cannot think the causality of our own will otherwise than under the idea of
freedom, for this causality occurs apart from the determining causes of the world of
sense. The assumption of freedom is, therefore, logical, in that when you take a
position on freedom, that is, acting under the idea of freedom, you act as if you are
free. Action is definite and hence we must actively take an interest in the ideas that
attach to morality, they do not merely drive us like our inclinations. We must
determine our response to them. The categorical imperative is part of the world of
understanding, it is not a sensible imperative, we must, therefore, take an interest in
compliance with it even when we are not impelled by any interest to comply. (G: 449)
20. Therefore, there is no pre-determination of my will, there is no natural deduction
of the moral law from freedom, or of freedom itself, Kant fails to prove the theoretical
objective necessity of the moral law and can only state that a free will and a will under
the moral law are one and the same. Both freedom and the moral law are wholly
dependent on the doctrine of the idea because the extreme boundary of all practical
philosophy is that the world of understanding must be thought, but it is not
understandable as such. Freedom belongs to praxis: it is not explainable and how it is
possible cannot be known, and furthermore, why the categorical imperative is valid
can also not be given a theoretically consistent account.
21. This is why three years later in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant creates the
doctrine of Faktum der Vernunft, the fact of reason. In 1785 in the Groundwork Kant
emphasised a synthetic a priori connection between autonomy and freedom, one that is
beyond the concepts themselves, he says that they form a "kind of circle". (G: 450) As
soon as we assume ourselves to be free, we experience ourselves in this freedom as
autonomous, and at that moment we are conscious that we are the subject of our own
laws. But this self-legislation only makes sense when the subject of these laws
conceives itself as free, and this is the non-deduction of the relationship between
rationality and agency. We step into the intelligible standpoint in order to assimilate
freedom in our actions. In this way Kant believes that there is a synthetic relationship
between freedom and the laws of morality because we assume another "standpoint"
from which we observe ourselves to be a determining being. (G: 450) According to

this explanation the action of freedom precedes the consciousness of autonomy.

22. This order is reversed in the second Critique, where Kant takes the starting point to
be autonomy and draws freedom from there. But he specifically denies the possibility
of a deduction. Instead we are told of the a priori consciousness of the moral law.
"[T]he moral law is given as a fact of pure reason of which we are a priori
conscious and which is apodictically certain, though it be granted that no example of
exact observance of it can be found in experience. Hence the objective reality of the
moral law cannot be proven by any deduction, by any efforts of theoretical reason,
speculative or empirically supported, so that, even if one were willing to renounce its
apodictic certainty, it could not be confirmed by experience and thus proved a
posteriori; and it is nevertheless firmly established of itself." (CpracR, 5:47)
23. This fact, which can be nothing other than the fact of moral consciousness, Kant
takes to be the ground of the possibility of morality: it is from this fact we can know
what it means to be moral. At the same time this fact also indicates the ground for the
existence of moral action. This is the freedom of each being that makes valid the
unconditional claims that morality makes on the determination of the will. The fact of
moral response breaks the "circle" and represents the synthesis of freedom and
autonomy as an always already adduced achievement because to respond morally is to
act as if we were a free agent. It is an achievement in that we actively produce for
ourselves the connection between freedom and autonomy, it is a synthesis that leaves
behind a "reciprocal" rather than automatic logical relation between freedom and
unconditional practical law. (CpracR, 5:29) Practical reason is an activity, not a
theoretical presupposition. It is up to us to live up to the moral law.
24. So, there is no theoretical deduction of moral responsiveness, there is no original
answer to the question of what should be done. It remains a question. I must ask
always what I should do. The moral law exists only as an impossibility, in the sense
that it is an impossible object of experience. We cannot prove its objective necessity,
we have no empirical guide, we only have its idea and the ability of reason to react
spontaneously to transcendental ideas. The only way we can engage with the moral
law is by acting as if we possess freedom, this is as a sensible-rational being, and as a
rational being and therefore also as an actual self. This is the way we determine our
will, with reason as self-activity and with an attempt for moral purity. Determining our
will by acting on the ideas of morality is how we cope with the lack of deduction for
moral consciousness. We must determine. The ideas of reason are essential compass
points for morality; they represent a maximum in which the impossibility of objective
morality is possible. We respond according to these maximums. From the conditioned
knowledge of moral duty we seek to effect the unknowable unconditioned, this is the
task that practical reason sets us. The task of response.
25. Otfried Hffe remarks that the formulae of the categorical imperative all begin
with the conditionless call to "act !" and only in second place does it designate
under what conditions moral action occurs, namely in a universalisable maxim. Kants
first challenge to us is to act morally, hence the shortest form of the imperative could
be "Act morally!" (Hffe, 1983: 182) We are not here concerned with the foundations
of morality, these must be assumed, but from this assumption future determination
depends. Morality is based merely on ideas requiring fulfilment, not received

metaphysical truths. Morality is a practice. In this way moral response remains an

infinite problem that we must always engage with and determine.
Impossibility and doing it: the need to determine
26: Impossible hospitality as ethics is a central theme of Derridas thought in recent
years. Derrida draws on Levinas to proclaim ethics as a welcome to the other, as an
unconditional invitation to come that is open infinitely to anyone. I have already stated
how this unconditional hospitality is contrasted with Kants conditional model of
hospitality. In Kants plan for world peace he limits cosmopolitan law to the condition
of a universal hospitality, this means that all foreigners within the juridical
cosmopolitan community have a right of resort when they enter a foreign territory. The
conditions on this hospitality are obvious: one needs a legal and political identity and
legally defined territories with identifiable governments in order to claim this right.
For Derrida, however, absolute hospitality means such requirements void the ethical
response. Derrida calls Kants instituting of hospitality as the universal condition for
cosmopolitan law "cosmopolitics", and believes it not to be the advent of hospitality,
but merely its circumscription. (Derrida, 2000b: 10) Absolute hospitality, on the other
hand, is where the stranger becomes the hosts host, displacing ownership and identity
and inverting the economy of the threshold. There are no conditions of identity, no
"papers", no interrogation for political and legal origin, no demand to translate.
27. Unconditional hospitality asks no question of the stranger, there is no legal,
political or moral obligation, it is "rendered", "given" prior to all knowledge of the
subject. (Derrida, 2000a: 29) This hospitality, which is also called "hyperbolic" is an
eternal wait without expectation, an open promise, an unlocked door, a welcome as
reception, an invitation to the unknown, which occurs at an unknowable time, where
you relinquish your place, you receive beyond measure and beyond the capacity of the
"I". (Derrida, 1999: 28) Impossible hospitality is infinite responsibility to the other.
28. So, what is impossible about impossible hospitality? Is absolute hospitality, what
must be given prior to identification, impossible because of the impossibility of not
posing questions to the foreigner, not translating their language and subsuming their
identity into something that is not "strange" any more? No question to the stranger is
pure because we already assimilate their being into terms that we can arrange into our
own conceptions of being. This seems to be a factual impossibility, which is the
empirical impossibility of experiencing or giving unconditional hospitality. The sense
in which unconditional hospitality is impossible seems to be existential, bound up in
the nature of the self.
29. Or is hospitality impossible because of the law of identity? - Which seems at once
both a factual and conceptual impossibility. Is it the factual impossibility of a host
offering everything their name, their territory, their life and happiness? That is, the
master of the house cannot make good the promise of impossible hospitality because
its very act annihilates him and his offer, for without his territorial identity he cannot
call to the unknown stranger on the unseen horizon and with his territorial identity
(and its reciprocal demand of one from the stranger), he cannot offer infinite
hospitality. Is this also the conceptual impossibility of hospitality? Derrida points to
the shared etymology of host and hospitality in hostis. It is the identity required by

hospitality that of a host that constitutes the aporia. To enact hospitality is selfdestruction. This is where the impossibility is both conceptual and factual: the concept
and experience of absolute hospitality is self-contradictory. Why does this selfcontradiction not leave the ethic itself destitute?
30. Unconditional hospitality "produces itself as impossible" and can "only be possible
on the condition of its impossibility" (Derrida, 2000b: 5). This cannot help but suggest
a reciprocal relationship between the conditional and unconditional practice of
hospitality. Derrida, in his identification of ethics as impossible hospitality, establishes
an aporia between what he calls the law of hospitality on the one hand and the laws of
hospitality associated with law and politics on the other. This reflects the relationship
between unconditional and conditional hospitality, which he explains as a necessary
asymmetrical antinomy. For: "even while keeping itself above the laws of hospitality,
the unconditional law of hospitality needs the laws, it requires them. This demand is
constitutive. It wouldnt be effectively unconditional, the law, if it didnt have to
become effective, concrete, determined, if that were not its being as having-to-be. It
would risk being abstract, utopian, illusory, and so turning over into its opposite. In
order to be what it is, the law thus needs the laws, which, however, deny it, or at any
rate threaten it, sometimes corrupt or pervert it. And it must always be able to do this."
(Derrida, 2000a: 79) This suggests that it is a subject that needs to base their
possibility on a conceptual and practical idea of impossible hospitality. Derrida says
that hospitality deconstructs itself precisely "in being put into practice". (2000b: 5) So
the practicing (and self-contradicting) subject is foundational to the impossibility of
unconditional hospitality.
31. The conceptual and practical impossibility of unconditional hospitality could then
be its original singular existence. It exists dependently in an aporia. The relationship
between impossible and conditional hospitality is one of mutual fecundity and
corruption. And yet, the demand for the laws is constitutive for the law of
unconditional hospitality. So while the conditional offer of amnesty to refugees by a
government may in fact sully a true ethic of unconditional hospitality, the latter
requires such examples of conditions on hospitality for its existence. The existence of
unconditional hospitality seems to be the requirement for critique of the legal and
political laws of conditioned hospitality.
32. This movement or orientation at play in the relationship between conditional and
unconditional hospitality is similar to the paradoxical reciprocity of Kants idea of the
highest unconditioned good and the conditioned good. As explained above, the
unconditioned good in fact needs the conditioned good because it becomes a condition
itself for the measurement of the goodness or not of the conditions. If impossible
hospitality were taken to be a Kantian highest good then it would indeed be a prerequisite for the possibility of a degree of goodness of legal and political hospitality.
Derrida actually states that the "pervertibility" born of the relationship between
unconditional and conditional hospitality is essential for the "perfectibility" and
"historicity" of the legal and political laws of hospitality.
33. In the aforementioned quote Derrida states that "it wouldnt be effectively
unconditional, the law, if it didnt have to become effective, concrete, determined."
The very impossibility of hospitality depends on the possible model of hospitality. He

follows this quote with "conditional laws of hospitality would cease to be laws of
hospitality if they were not guided, given inspiration, given aspiration, required, even
by the law of unconditional hospitality." (2000a: 79) This is the exact movement of
practical reason: guiding behaviour by conditioning it with the idea of the
unconditioned. Derrida has presented us with a reciprocal relationship, and again the
reason why he does this must be connected to a notion of the subject who practices
hospitality. Why does the ethical person require the unconditioned? Is it not to guide,
to condition their response as a moral host?
34. Here I am broaching what many would cite as a main difference between Kant and
Derrida: the being of a moral subject. Derrida radically questions this notion and the
ability of such a subject to make a "decision". Kant is explicit in the need to assume
we are capable of rationality for morality; indeed the "I", according to the Paralogisms
of the first Critique, is the first idea of reason that we must create for ourselves. So the
"madness" that Derrida believes belongs to moral responsibility and moral decision
seems absolutely incompatible with Kants attribution of a rational subject to morality.
However, for both thinkers "impossibility" must be conceptual and not contingent. So,
for Kant, the moral law is conceptually impossible for the subject to cognise but
practically necessary to act on. Whereas for Derrida the conceptual impossibility of
unconditional hospitality is that the aporetic structure of moral offering is selfdestruction, which leads one to assume an annihilation of the offering. Implicit in
Derridas ethic, then, is an existence to guarantee the impossibility of morality and,
importantly, to anchor its possibility. The references Derrida makes to Kierkegaard in
this context are important indeed, for if we follow the idea of the madness of decision
in Kierkegaard, we observe that he makes clear that, yes this madness is antithetic to
rationality, but it is in this instant I also construct myself (Kierkegaard, 1962, 64).
Thus, I think that Kant and Derrida share this existential moment of the subject in their
philosophies of moral response.
35. For Kant I have shown that this movement is not about deducing and importing the
highest good into our lives. It is rather the activity of creating it ourselves. Moral
response is the requirement to act on an immediate problem. In the above analysis of
the relationship between Derridas unconditional and conditional hospitality the notion
of a deduction does arise, in the form of locating the origin of the possible in the
impossible, of politics in ethics. And yet in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas Derrida is
insistent on the "hiatus" between ethics and politics, between an ethics of hospitality
("an ethics as hospitality") and a law or a politics of hospitality. (1999: 1920) He
states that he will leave unanswered the classical analysis of this relationship as a
founding of a foundation. He wants to assume that such a deduction is not possible and
believes that the impossibility of a foundation is exactly what allows us to "think law
and politics otherwise". It is the non-deduction of law and politics from ethics that
generates the openness to the possibility of a decision, of a hospitality without the
assurance of an ontological foundation. (Derrida, 1999: 20-21) Thus, there is no moral
subjective paralysis from the lack of a deduction from ethics to politics.
36. But what is the activity of or at the hiatus? In Derridas essay on justice, Force of
Law: the Mystical Foundation of Authority, justice is held to require experience of the
aporia. This presents a problem because experience is a passage and an aporia is a nonroad. But there is no justice without this experience of the aporia. (1992: 16) Derrida

proposes that the result of the non-deduction from ethics to politics is a positive and
productive one for therein lies the possibility of thinking and deciding and acting
otherwise. Ethics remains the infinite responsibility of unconditional hospitality and
politics is the realm where decisions and responsibility must be "taken". Here the
homology with Kant is apparent when we recall his non-deduction of the moral law
but necessity of a free will to act under practical reason. The homology is even more
striking when we hear Derrida call the hiatus between ethics and politics a "Faktum".
(Derrida, 1999: 116) "This relation is necessary," Derrida emphasises in Adieu, "it
must exist, it is necessary to deduce a politics and a law from ethics." (Derrida, 1999:
115) The necessity of a deduction, he writes, is to determine the "better" or the "less
bad." The necessity of a deduction for Kant is to ground the possibility of the moral
law to condition human conduct according to the good.
37. What Derrida is revealing is perhaps something similar to the way I have presented
Kants idea of practical reason: that ethics sets us a task, we must determine how we
should act. In one of his more recent essays called "Hostipitality" Derrida states this
approach quite clearly: "It is necessary to do the impossible. If there is hospitality, the
impossible must be done." (2000b: 14) In this essay he also stresses the importance of
not "knowing" what hospitality is, a state that is entirely compatible with Kants
approach to the ideas of reason as something beyond knowledge but required for
meaningful existence, that is, necessary in a practical sense. Impossibility must be
conceptual for Kant. Hence, we have Derridas injunction to "do" the empirically,
epistemologically, conceptually and ontologically impossible: offer infinite hospitality
to any one. To reiterate this in the terminology I used to describe Kants practical
reason: impossible hospitality sets us a task to perform as a morally responsive
subject.
38. Derridas "it is necessary to do the impossible" recalls, in addition to the common
mantra of Kants moral philosophy "ought implies can", the opening statement in the
first appendix of Towards Perpetual Peace called "On the Disagreement between
Morals and Politics in Relation to Perpetual Peace." Kant writes, "Morality, as a
collection of absolutely binding laws by which our actions ought to be governed,
belongs essentially, in an objective sense, to the practical sphere. And if we have
acknowledged the authority of this concept of duty, it is patently absurd to say that we
cannot act as the moral laws require." (TPP: 116)
39. The question then becomes, is impossible hospitality something that we can
acknowledge as a duty? Yes, because responsibility for the other is for Derrida,
following Levinas, part of our own meaning of being. The relation to alterity is a precondition for ontology. Without pure hospitality we could not have the idea of the
other. I owe hospitality to the other for I do not exist without the other. So we must
commit impossible hospitality. And in order to commit this act, we must determine.
But for Derrida, we cannot decide in an Aristotelian deliberative sense. We must
determine and act "beyond knowledge". "If there are responsibilities to be taken and
decisions to be made, responsibilities and decisions worthy of these names, they
belong to the time of risk and an act of faith. Beyond knowledge. For if I decide
because I know within the limits of what I know and know I must do, then I am simply
deploying a foreseeable program and there is no decision, no responsibility, no event."

(Derrida, 2003: 118)

40. Derrida does give us a style in which we should act, a way of determining this
impossible moral response. He believes we must determine our moral response based
on impossible hospitality. I now quote from one of Derridas most recent discussions
of hospitality, where he speaks of determination in his dialogue after September 11
with Giovanna Borradori, called "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides":
Unconditional hospitality is transcendent with regard to the political, the juridical,
perhaps even to the ethical. But and here is the indissociability I cannot open the
door, I cannot expose myself to the coming of the other and offer him or her anything
whatsoever without making this hospitality effective, without, in some concrete way,
giving something determinate. This determination will have us re-inscribe the
unconditional into certain conditions. Otherwise, it gives nothing. What remains
unconditional or absolute (unbedingt, if you will) risks being nothing at all if
conditions (Bedingungen) do not make of it some thing (Ding). Political, juridical, and
ethical responsibilities have their place, if they take place, only in this transaction
which is each time unique, like an event between these two hospitalities, the
unconditional and the conditional. (2003: 129-130)
41. Even in absolute morality, for Derrida, we determine our response, in the act of
impossible hospitality we must give something determinate. We must ask the question:
What should I do? (Was soll ich tun? Interestingly, in the above quote Derrida makes
deliberate use of the language of Kants moral philosophy German). The
determination remains essential for the effectivity of morality, impossible hospitality
does entail an activity, it is not merely a passive waiting for the eternally deferred
event. This proves practical reason to be, not a mere calculation but an actual response
to a moral problem. We act on impossible ideas because they require construction
themselves, the highest good is something we fathom, something we condition. In this
interview, after more such claims by Derrida, Borradori finally states the obvious:
"This sounds like a regulative idea " To which Derrida replies that he has
"reservations" concerning this name and that "the regulative idea remains for him,
perhaps, an ultimate reservation. Though such a last recourse risks becoming an alibi,
it retains a certain dignity; I cannot swear that I will not one day give in to it." (2003:
134)
42. Derrida has three reservations. Firstly, the way the regulative idea is currently
used, though not in a Kantian way, as an ideal of the possible. His impossible, he says
is nonvirtualizable, the law comes to me from a greater and older other and it never
lets me rest. He says it is not an ideal for it is undeniably real, like the other. His
second reservation is that responsibility for what should be done is not realised by
following a norm or rule. Ethical response is not automatism. The third reservation to
the regulative idea is that in order to employ such a term one would have to subscribe
to the whole architectonic, including taking the world, "ich selbst" (myself) as soul or
as thinking nature, and God as regulative ideas.
43. What I have shown here is that "real" participation in the impossible is the exact
task of moral response. Responding to the impossible is a moral task. The positive
effect of soul as a guiding idea means that it is something that one enacts and this is

the general form of a person, the basis of all our action. The world as an idea means
that it exists as our problem and when we are talking about hospitality it is with the
world as a whole that we are concerned. God exists in much the same way as
impossible hospitality, not as a possible knowledge or experience but rather as moral
perfection. Kants metaphysics of morals is immanent. In the Critique of Practical
Reason Kant wonders what human activity would be like if we did not experience the
questioning of how we should act and the need to determine for ourselves our moral
response, and writes that "human conduct would be thus changed into mere
mechanism in which, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but there
would be no life in the figures." (CpracR, 5:147). Kant too is opposed to automatism.
Morality is not only a part of our natural responses but also an expression of our own
vitality. Derrida believes that it is faith in the possibility of the impossible that must
guide our decisions. (2003: 115) Kant in the Preface to the second edition of Critique
of Pure Reason laments the failure of pure reason and celebrates the necessity of
practical reason when he exclaims: "Thus I had to deny knowledge in order to make
room for faith". (CpR: Bxxx) Moral response is a faithful one, we attempt to live up to
the impossible universal moral law of hospitality.

Paula Keating is a Doctoral Candidate in the School of Philosophy at the

University of New South Wales. The working title of her thesis is 'Kantian
Practical Philosophy: Ethics, Politics and Hope'. Email:
paulalune@myrealbox.com
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