What a Deed Leaves on One’s Own Books

The First Critique asked of every demarcation how far it reaches and what it lets slip, and answered with a ledger: every cut deviates, and the deviation belongs to neither side of the line — it “belongs to this cut.” The second critique asks the same question on the practical side. A person has done something by his own law. What has that deed left on his own books?

The answer is stated up front: it leaves cost, and cost is remainder — the part this cut did not take in. Cost is one’s own cost. Accepting a power has a cost. People often overlook it, not because it is small, but because it makes no sound.

Why remainder? To act by one’s law is to cut a situation: this, not those; for this, not for those. A situation always holds more than one cut can take in. Action Theory sorted what is left after a judgment into three kinds and said “only the third kind is the remainder of this judgment” — what bears on the thing to be done yet falls outside what is handled this time. And when two lines collide on one matter, “the one not followed is not cancelled by that.” Cost is the face these leftovers show on the lawgiver’s own books: something his law holds that this cut did not take in — some never handled, some weighed and yielded.

A Broken Appointment

An example. To get an urgent thing done, a man breaks an appointment with a friend. The friend’s disappointment is real; as something on the friend’s side, it is a consequence, and how heavy it is the friend alone can say.

His own books record something else. His law contains the rule that a promise made is a promise kept, and this time that rule was not taken in. He weighed it and yielded it. Take the same broken appointment where his law held no such rule: the friend is just as disappointed, and that is still a consequence — but it is not his cost.

So cost follows the law, and stands only on the lawgiver’s own books. Two people each have their own law, so there is no common ledger in which to compare whose cost is heavier. The First Critique had already put it in a line with the weight of a definition: “branches are defined by laws, costs are settled against ends.”

One Entry Settles; the Ledger Never Empties

An apology, amends, another appointment can answer this entry, and on the friend’s side the matter may well be over. But every answer is a new cut, with things of its own it cannot take in. The First Critique: “The act of eliminating the remainder is precisely an act that produces remainder.” No cut can claim to have left nothing behind; whoever claims it will meet a case in the book’s chapter on illusion, the false claim of costlessness.

This settles how the book speaks. If cost were a forecast of consequences — do this, and here is what lands on you — stating it could become pressure from outside. If it were a price, stating it would mean measuring it against a common yardstick; but Value Theory had already ruled that remainder submits to no such measure: “every pricing presupposes a common measure and a market”; “to be without price is not to be the maximum of price; it is to be outside the domain of pricing.” So to state a cost is only to point: here is where, in your own law, this cut did not take something in. Whether that is right only he can check, against his law; whether to bear it only he can decide.

That is why no coercion, only the cost stated is not a softer form of coercion. Remainder is neither punishment nor medal; it is a gap, and also a handle. The First Critique: it “gives the next round its conditions, and exerts no compulsion.” Action Theory: “A remainder gives possibility, not a push.” Where the next cut falls often depends on what the last one did not take in.

Four Ways of Entering the Ledger

The First Critique said a demarcation’s deviation enters the ledger in four basic modes, and the second critique borrows the four names for the practical side. The intake-deficit: action never takes in the whole of the law. A law says more than any run of deeds; no one accords with 15DD at every moment. Moral Law put the other face of it: “Perfection, indeed, would be more suspicious than imperfection.” This deficit alone cannot be cleared by treatment of its own kind: “the modes can shift; the ledger does not empty.” Getting it right once does not close the seam between law and deed.

The misplacement-deficit: taking the foreign for one’s own, or one’s own for the foreign. The first half is what Value Theory calls self-colonization — an outside warrant taken as constitution already completed — and its verdict can only look back. The other half runs the reverse way: a man believes he is only following the rules, and sees afterwards that it was his own law at work. Either way the cost is the same: through that stretch, he did not see clearly for whom he was paying.

The double-hit: two demands that cannot both be met in one place — one afternoon, two things that both ought to be done, and only one can be. Adding a condition or a rule does not remove it: “the gap has merely moved to the next line of the list.” Yielding one item is not giving it up: “Yielding belongs to the ordering of action, exit to constitution.” Out-of-field: where one’s own law does not reach — “out-of-field is not error but no-verdict.” One can revise the law to reach it, or record that on this matter one’s law is silent; the cost is that stretch with no law of one’s own to go by.

Cost and Consequence: Two Columns

The First Critique kept the remainder apart from the reverse side of the line; the practical side keeps cost apart from consequence in the same way. Cost is what this cut owes on one’s own books; consequence is how the world and other people respond to the deed. Value Theory gives the split its shape: the adjudication, the thing chosen, its doing, and what followed in the world “are four things. They have their own times, their own subjects, and their own settlements.”

Action Theory puts it most plainly. Of the thing a man failed to do: “Nor does it erase the consequences: the extra quarter the other team spent on the problem is real.” So for the man who changed the number, the cost of leaving goes on his own books; the team’s extra quarter is consequence — his entry of cost does not settle it, and his having paid the cost does not write it off.

One more feature: the subject is moving. After each stroke, the First Critique said, “where the chiseler stands is no longer where it stood before the stroke.” So cost often falls on one’s later self: a word said today is paid for by tomorrow’s self. The mirror of a false claim lurks here — today’s self signing for a cost on behalf of tomorrow’s, as though tomorrow’s person would not change. A promise reaching into tomorrow is not thereby a false claim; treating it as a permanent authorization that never needs asking again is a case the book examines among its false claims (Essay 07).