‘As an incentive to activity, nature has put pain in the human being that he cannot escape from, in order to always progress toward what is better …’
Kant (ApH 7: 235)
Abstract
This paper presents a new reading of Kant's moral feeling: in lieu of highlighting a positive feeling of respect, I am interested in a thorough phenomenological interpretation of a negative feeling of humiliation. The paper's tone is set by underscoring that human moral Gesinnung is that which is necessarily cultivated, which entails that the striving moral agent, among other things, learns to identify and confront inclinations. It is argued, then, that one's mindfulness of the various kinds of pain of humiliated inclinations presupposes the agent's aesthetic attunement to the law of duty. To this end, two phenomenological interpretations are offered. First, general humiliation Kant caters for in the Critique of Practical Reason. Second, specific humiliation Kant alludes to in the Metaphysics of Morals. On the whole, the paper's findings ascertain the epistemic weight of humiliation, which to date has been undervalued.
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Notes
See: Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays in Aesthetic and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and also his “Moral Feelings in the Metaphysics of Morals”, in Lara Denis, ed., Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 130–152; Josefine Nauckhoff, “Incentives and Interests in Kant’s Moral Psychology,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 20 (2003): 41–60; Antonino Falduto, The Faculties of the Human Mind and the Case of Moral Feeling in Kant’s Philosophy (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014); and Owen Ware, “Accessing the Moral Law through Feeling,” Kantian Review 20 (2015): 301–311.
See Falduto, op. cit., pp. 204–205.
For the most recent and comprehensive overviews of the debate focused on the feeling of respect, see Iain P.D. Morrisson, Kant and the Role of Pleasure in Moral Action (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2008); and Patrick Frierson, Kant’s Empirical Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Richard McCarty, “Kantian Moral Motivation and the Feeling of Respect,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 31 (1993): 423.
This camp is represented, most notably, by: Andrews Reath, “Kant’s Theory of Moral Sensibility,” Kant-Studien 80 (1989): 284–302; Allison, op. cit.; Owen Ware, “Kant on Moral Sensibility and Moral Motivation,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 52 (2014): 727–746.
The following commentators represent the affectivists: McCarty, op. cit.; Nauckhoff, op.cit; Morrisson op.cit.; Frierson, op.cit.; Falduto, op. cit.; Jeanine Grenberg, Kant and the Ethics of Humility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and also see her more recent Kant’s Defense of Common Moral Experience: A Phenomenological Account (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Allison, op. cit., p. 125.
Ibid., p. 127.
The only intellectualist (albeit not a strict one) who investigates Kantian humiliation is Ware (2014), whose recent paper on the topic – Ware (2015) – does not mention humiliation at all.
See Nauckhoff, op. cit., p. 49; and Falduto, op. cit., p. 228.
Frierson, op. cit., pp. 127, 151 (footnote 35).
Stephen R. Palmquist, “What is Kantian Gesinnung? On the Priority of Volition over Metaphysics and Psychology in Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason,” Kantian Review 20 (2015): 235–264, 235.
Whether it is taken as a conventional ‘disposition’ (as in Gregor’s translation used here) or as ‘attitude’ (as Pluhar takes it) or, finally, as ‘conviction’ (Palmquist’s reading), my modest goal is to indicate that Gesinnung is that which necessarily changes in accordance with the subject’s choice of incentives. However, see Palmquist’s synoptic overview: op. cit., pp. 249–254.
It is noteworthy that another important term is often used by Kant alongside Gesinnung: namely, Denkungsart. One way to distinguish between the two notions is to observe that the agents’s Gesinnung conditions her Denkungsart. In Religion (6: 30), for example, Kant notes that ‘the mind’s attitude [Denkungsart]’ in the ‘evil’ human is ‘corrupted at its root (so for as the moral disposition [Gesinnung] is concerned).’ (See KpV 5: 152; KdU 5: 294–295; see also Munzel’s seminal work that famously links the two concepts in relation to Kant’s idea of moral character: Felicitas G. Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The ‘Critical’ Link of Morality, Anthropology and Reflective Judgement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
For Kant some inclinations are conducive to morality, while others hinder moral development. In the former group, for example, Kant would place ‘beneficence’ which ‘can indeed greatly facilitate the effectiveness of moral maxims’ (KpV 5: 118); and ‘sympathy’, an inclination ‘to share in others’ feelings’ (MS 6: 456–457; KpV 5: 118). In the latter: arrogance ‘the inclination to be always on top’ entailing a ‘demand that other think little of themselves in comparison with us’ (MS 6: 465); and avarice, the inclination ‘to increase my wealth by every safe means’ (KpV 5: 27). Kant also considers ‘a sense-free inclination’, which results from the ‘pure interest of reason’ (MS 6: 213). Since neither the first nor the third kind can be connected to experiences of humiliation, in what follows, I refer to inclinations in the second (negative) sense.
Eric Entrican Wilson, “Habitual Desire: On Kant’s Concept of Inclination,” Kantian Review 21 (2016): 211–235, 214.
For Kant morality must be internalized, which means that it is by performing single moral deeds that the agent’s Gesinnung is cultivated, on one hand, and made visible, on the other. The latter aspect is important for Kant, who appeals to heuristic examples representing ‘observance of the commonest duty’ and serving ‘as a model but only as a proof that it is really possible to act in conformity with duty’ (KpV 5: 154, 157, 158; MS 6: 478, 480; see also Paul Guyer, “Examples of Moral Possibility,” in Klas Roth and Chris W. Surprenant, eds., Kant and Education: Interpretations and Commentary (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 124–139). Such an example is nothing but ‘the lively presentation of the moral disposition [der moralischen Gesinnung].’ Moreover, insofar as the moral law is the necessary law of humanity that agents gravitate towards, Kant maintains that one would necessarily become interested in the law that such examples represent.
Reath, op. cit., p. 292
The secondary literature on the relationship between ‘self-love’ and ‘self-conceit’ is extensive. My concise reflections are inspired by: Reath, op. cit.; Ware (2014), op. cit.; and, particularly, Kate Moran, “Delusions of Virtue: Kant on Self-Conceit,” Kantian Review 19 (2014): 419–447.
There is another way to distinguish spurious self-esteem from moral: Kant notes that insofar as the subject strives to attend to the demands of reason’s law, he thus becomes conscious of ‘a certainty of disposition in accord with this law’ (KpV 5: 73). Self-esteem grounded on fulfilled inclinations, as a corollary, is highly vulnerable in that, first, its sources are myriad and changeable, and, second, its establishment, by and large, is contingent on external recognition (cf. MS 6: 449, 462).
In terms of the educational parameters of Kant’s thought, he repeatedly emphasizes the necessity of ‘discipline’ (Disziplin), a phase of ‘formation’ (Bildung) preventing ‘the human being from deviating by means of his animal impulses from his destiny: humanity’ (ÜP 9: 442; see 9: 444, 463; KdU 5: 432). Kant’s goal is to train a hardened disposition that is essential to readily challenge all kinds of desires. Ana Marta González sums it up well: ‘[t]he role of discipline, indeed, is to educate inclinations, in order to make them receptive to higher—that is, moral—ends’ (“Kant’s Philosophy of Education: Between Relational and Systematic Approaches,” Journal of Philosophy of Education (2011): 433–454, 439.
For a thorough analysis of Kant’s concept of Herz in Religion, see: Pablo Muchnik, “The Heart as Locus of Moral Struggle in the Religion,” in Alix Cohen, ed., Kant on Emotion and Value (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 224–244. The author argues that in ‘the ‘Heart’, Kant locates the emotional dimension of an individual’s moral life: the distinctive feelings, desires, inclinations, and moods that accompany and express her moral outlook’ (op. cit., p. 232).
One of the key goals of his Lectures of Education is an outline of the phases – care, discipline, scholastic culture, pragmatic culture – one has to go through to eventually learn the necessity to submit the will to the prompts of the moral law, i.e. moral culture.
Structurally, a compelling parallel is found in Kant’s account of the dynamically sublime (KdU 5: 260, 267).
Due to the various cultural and socio-economic factors, there are, undeniably, many agents exhibiting diverse impaired attitudes toward their self-worth; on this point, see: Cynthia Stark, “The Rationality of Valuing Oneself: A Critique of Kant on Self-Respect,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 35 (1997): 65–82. My account, on the other hand, primarily targets agents whose self-worth is spurious rather than impaired.
Cf. an interesting interpretation (helpfully suggested by a referee for this journal) by Krista K. Thomason, who analyses humiliation in terms of the experience of shame: “Shame and Contempt in Kant’s Moral Theory,” Kantian Review 18 (2003): 221–240, 230ff.
At the very end of the second Critique, where Kant is concerned with the pragmatic, pedagogical implications of his moral theory, he emphasises that, during this experience, the agent is confronted with two possibilities. Kant argues that it is essential that the agent by herself, that is, without any guidance, senses the superiority of the moral law. Now, insofar as the agent is mature enough for a solemn and – yet at this stage – tentative acknowledgement of reason’s (that is to say, her prospective) authority over inclinations, the initial feeling of pain fades away replaced with a startling metamorphosis or, in the words of Kant, ‘a modification of its condition’: the mind thereby ‘is made receptive to the feeling of satisfaction from other sources’, i.e. a feeling of respect (KdU 5: 267; KpV 5: 161, italics added).
Cf. Ware (2014) who interprets humiliation in the second Critique as ‘a feeling of reproach, reproach for what we have already done’ (op. cit., p. 738). Strictly speaking, however, this definition is misleading. As demonstrated in what follows, the ‘reproach’ Ware refers to is indicative of a further phase of cultivating Gesinnung, characterized by the agent’s capacity to correlate a given duty with a corresponding transgression so as to possibly identify some specific inclination.
In other words, in the course of this mental episode the agent is ensnared in a state of ‘false humility’ (die falsche Demut) (KdU 5: 273). This ‘slavish’ or ‘merely passive attitude of mind’ is characterized by mere ‘self-contempt’ (der Selbstverachtung) grounded upon abandoning ‘confidence’ in one’s own powers to fight inclinations (R 6: 184n; KdU 5: 273; see MS 6: 435–436); on self-contempt, see: Allen W. Wood, Kantian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 188–189). On the analysis of Gesinnung offered here, the state of false humility is engendered when the agent has not yet built up that strength that would enable her to confront agitated inclinations.
See Guyer (2010), where he attempts to restore a link between all four of Kant’s poorly related ‘predispositions’, viz. moral feeling, conscience, love, and self-esteem.
While Kant uses different terms, English translations do not misguide by using receptivity and susceptibility interchangeably, as the two mean that the subject can be affected by some object or representation.
Only Falduto reads moral feeling in terms of Empfänglichkeit (see: op. cit., pp. 234ff.). Fairly conventionally, however, he comes to the conclusion that ‘”moral feeling” thus denotes only the readiness for feeling of respect, i.e. the faculty which makes realized mental state of respect possible’ (op. cit., p. 238).
In the second Critique, Kant anticipates this discussion by invoking an act of ‘restriction [Einschränkung]’ of ‘all inclinations’ (KpV 5: 78).
While in Religion Kant notes that ‘moral feeling’ is the ‘susceptibility [Empfänglichkeit] to simple respect for the moral law within us’ (6: 27), it becomes clear he refers to a specific mode of ‘susceptibility’ here – that which is sometimes triggered by humiliation.
Cf. Marijana Vujošević, “The Judge in the Mirror: Kant on Conscience,” Kantian Review 19 (2014): 449–474, 459–460, 471; and Ware (2014), op. cit., p. 731.
Cf. Guyer (2010) who, addressing moral feeling in the context of the Metaphysics of Morals, does not do justice to humiliation: ‘its [moral feeling’s] role in the etiology of particular moral actions is thus that of making the moral law in general effective in us, and therefore … what Kant is now calling moral feeling is in fact the same as what he previously called the feeling of respect’ (op. cit., p. 142). In other words, over and above determining the critical function of pain, I argue that ‘the feeling of respect’ is often impossible without the feeling of constraint, which is necessary to acknowledge.
Kant famously draws a thick line between the role of feeling in his moral theory and some moral sense theory, e.g. ‘the determination of the will directly by reason is the ground of the feeling of pleasure, and this remains a pure practical, not aesthetic, determination of the faculty of desire’ (KpV 5: 116; see 5: 38, 85, 116–117; TP 8: 284).
Morrisson, op. cit., pp. 148–149.
Ibid., p. 148.
Grenberg (2005), op. cit., pp. 154–155.
Ibid., p. 157.
Ibid., p. 155.
Grenberg (2013), op. cit., p. 174.
There are a number of approaches to address this difficult topic in Kant's moral theory. Given the focus of this paper, I can only draw the reader's attention to the main trajectories of the debate. Apart from the abundant literature on the ways to cultivate practical intelligence (see, for example, the recent work by: Mavis Biss, “Avoiding Vice and Pursuing Virtue: Kant on Perfect Duties and 'Prudential Latitude,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (2017): 618–635), the relevant scholarship includes the works on developing emotions and feelings. In the former group, the commentators argue about the epistemic status of emotions for cultivating a virtuous character (see, for example: Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Laura Papish, “The Cultivation of Sensibility in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Kantian Review 12 (2007): 128–146). The latter group has offered some interesting treatments lately, among which I would like to call attention to two original pieces: Alix Cohen, “The Role of Feelings in Kant’s Account of Moral Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 50 (2016): 511–523; the author claims that the love of honour can play a considerable role in moral education; and see also a wonderful book by Bradley Murray, The Possibility of Culture: Pleasure and Moral development in Kant’s Aesthetics (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), where the author explores a nexus between aesthetic experience and moral development. These studies, however, are only indirectly related to the discussion at hand, and so I have to return to Grenberg's point.
Which explains why, in the words of Grenberg (2013) ‘[o]one could … experience the conflict between happiness and morality and not take it as a particularly morally edifying experience … This is because one could refuse the attentiveness required to set aside one’s tendency toward rationalisation or self-deception, and, instead, indulge in just that tendency’ (op. cit., p. 174). In my reading, this would be possible in the case of general humiliation indicative of the kind of Gesinnung in accordance with which one can easily ignore the possible import of such an experience. This would not be possible, at least nominally, in the case of specific humiliation as the agent is already interested in the responses of the faculty of feeling and, by the same token, more eagerly embarks on understanding and tackling inclinations.
Grenberg (2013), op. cit., p. 166.
For helpful discussions of this passage, see Ware (2014), op. cit., pp. 733–734; and Julian Wuerth, “Sense and Sensibility in Kant’s Practical Agent: Against the Intellectualism of Korsgaard and Sidgwick,” European Journal of Philosophy 21 (2013): 1–36. On Kant’s demarcation between the possible sources of representations in question, see KpV 5: 23ff.
A moral life, for the late Kant, embraces the affective dimension of moral striving. ‘No human being is entirely without moral feeling’, Kant emphatically observes at MS 6: 400, ‘for were he completely lacking in receptivity to it he would be morally dead’.
One call a diligently cultivated affective receptivity to reason’s law – a Kantian aesthetic moral intelligence, and some curious insights may still remain unascertained on its both (positive and negative) sides (see MS: 6: 387). As Kant observes in the Lectures on Pedagogy, ‘since education partly teaches something to the human being and partly merely develops something within him, one can never know how far his natural predispositions [e.g. moral feeling] reach’ (ÜP 9: 443–444).
I am indebted to a handful of good people. First, I would like to thank Andrew Benjamin for sharing some of the values of an Ancient tradition. Then, my philosophical trials in Melbourne would be less hopeful without the Socratic guidance of Matt Sharpe. I thank Seraphim and Marina, my family, for putting up with my idiosyncrasies. I am also grateful to Liran Medelzi for showing what practical intelligence may mean, and to Robert Albazi for identifying a number of stylistic inaccuracies in this work. Last but not least, I would like to thank the referees for appreciating this paper.
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Vinogradovs, V. Kant’s Phenomenology of Humiliation. J Value Inquiry 53, 193–211 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-018-9647-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-018-9647-8