II.

Emotion in Kant's
Moral Philosophy
IN the last thirty to forty years, in the English-speaking philosophical
world, there have been powerful voices raised against the interpretation of Kant's moral philosophy as the system of a rigorous
moralist with an unhealthy almost Manichean distrust of human
emotion. The foremost voice in England has been that of H J Paton.
The foremost in America has been that of Lewis White Beck. In
1946, in one of his many statements defending Kant, Paton wrote
that: 'it is indeed a strange thing that so many of those who ...
regard Kant as a great, or at least an influential, thinker, ascribe to
him views which can hardly be considered as anything but silly. Thus
he is commonly supposed to maintain that no action can be moral
if we have any natural inclination towards it or if we obtain the
slightest pleasure from its performance . . . These doctrines . . . if
they were held by Kant ... can hardly but suggest that his moral
philosophy may be dismissed as negligible, if not diseased ...
[S]uch interpretations are a distortion of his actual teaching'.l
Writing in 1960, Beck commented, with a touch of irony, that if
on the issue of emotion in morality. Kant had supplied 'repeated
statements that could not be overlooked even by his opponents',
then 'the quantity of writing against his ethics would have been
halved and its quality raised immeasurably'.2 Beck insists that the
practice of virtue, according to Kant, does not leave the human
being with what Hegel described as 'the undigested lump of sour
virtue in the stomach'; and Beck thinks that it is time to lay the
ghost of this old error about a thinker who in fact was not false to
human nature. 3 More recently, in 1972, Keith Ward wrote that: 'far
from conforming to the popular caricature of a pedantic and rationalistic scholar who had little appreciation of the human sentiments.
Kant always asserted that morality is closely bound up with a certain
complex feeling for human nature.'4
Now it seems that in fact there are two sides to Kant's thought
about morality. 5 There is the side which insists on what he calls
puritas moralis,6 moral purity, that is, the purely rational motivation
of the ethically worthy action. Then there is the side which insists
16

EMOTION IN KANT'S MORAL PHILOSOPHY

17

on the indispensability of feeling or emotion for moral accomplishment. The first side has always been stressed. Kant stresses it himself.
It is very well known .The second side has been brought forward by
the twentieth century authors I have mentioned, as something which
tends to be forgotten. But it is arguable that they have not done so
with sufficient attention as to what the resultant total Kantian
theory turns out to be. That is why this paper is more about the
second side than about the first. My ultimate questions are the
following. Are these two sides in conflict? Are they a thesis and an
antithesis? Or, are they two aspects of a quite logical whole, and if
so, what is it like?
First, then, as to the purely rational motivation of the morally
good act. According to Kant, there is an ineradicable tension between
the demands of the moral law and the demands of inclination. This is
most clearly seen where your duty lies in one direction, your inclination in another. But it also occurs, and much more insidiously, where
your duty and your inclination lie in the same direction. Passages in
Kant's writings could be multiplied as evidence of the thesis that for
him, feeling, sensuous inclination, emotion, call it what you will,
can have no place in the motivation of the morally worthy act. That
is, fulfilment of emotive desire is always out of place from the moral
point of view as the reason for action. And it is always out of place
as the basic propellant to action, the basic moving force. To be
motivated by emotion is to search for pleasure, or for the systematic
totality of pleasures which is happiness. And this, to put it briefly,
is to compromise our status as rational autonomous beings. Pleasure
is largely subrational or sensuous. Apart from that, to seek it is to
seek a will 0' the wisp and to ignore the command of reason that we
act in a law-like way. This is the consistent teaching of Kant in his
philosophical maturity, the Kant of the period of the Critiques, the
Kant of the last fifteen years of the eighteenth century. Let emotion
in, even as part-motive, and the act is no longer the act of a good will.
It is impure morally. For now there is present an incentive that
could equally well press one to the violation of the moral law, given
the appropriate circumstances. 7 Further, there can be no absolute
certainty that action on sheerly moral grounds has ever been performed. Everywhere we come across the dear self which is looking
for happiness and is always turning up.s Inclinations work secretly
against the moral motive, as Kant says in the hymn to duty in his
Critique of Practical Reason. 9 And what is the moral motive? It is
to act purely from duty; and to act from duty is to act in a universalizable way because, or for the reason that, you are commanded by
your reason to act in a law-giving universalizable way. The first
and basic formula of reason's categorical imperative is: 'Act only

18

PlflLOSOPlflCAL STUDIES

on the maxim through which you can at the same time will that the
maxim should become a universallaw'.lo
This principle is a priori. This central supreme moral truth is
prior to any sensible experience. It springs pure and unmixed from
practical reason, which is free in that its principle of duty emanates
from within itself. The principle is known spontaneously and
immediately. It is what Kant calls 'a fact of pure reason.'ll It is not
derived from experience. It does not depend on experience for its
essential content. By sticking to your promises, for instance, your
will is good if you do so because you know, however obscurely, that
promise-keeping is an instance of the kind of act which as a matter
of rationality you demand of every person. This is the 'obscurely
thought metaphysics, which is inherent in the structure of every
man's reason', as Kant put it in the preface to his Doctrine ofVirtue.12
However this paper is not about the labyrinthine intricacies of
Kant's categorical imperative, its apriority, its various formulations
and the relations between the various formulations. It is about
emotion in morality according to Kant; and the writer trusts that he
will be pardoned if he refrains from entering the labyrinth, in which,
to boot, so many intrepid souls have got lost.
To return then to the question of feeling in morality. I suppose
that nearly everybody who wants to read Kant on morality turns to
that work to which he humorously said he would give the horrifying
title, The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Anybody who
reads chapter 1 is pulled up short by a famous passage containing
an illustration of his position, an illustration which seems to damn
all protestations that Kant is a humanist:
To help others where one can is a duty, and besides this there
are many spirits of so sympathetic a temper that, without any
further motive of vanity or self-interest, they find an inner
pleasure in spreading happiness around them and can take
delight in the contentment of others as their own work. Yet I
maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however
right and however amiable it may be, has still no genuinely
moral worth. It stands on the same footing as [actions arising
from]14 other inclinations - for example, the inclination for
honour, which if fortunate enough to hit on something beneficial
and right and consequently honourable, deserves praise and
encouragement, but not esteem; for its maxim lacks. moral
content, namely, the performance of such actions, not from
inclination, but from duty. Suppose then that the mind of this
friend of man were overclouded by sorrows of his own which
extinguished all sympathy with the fate of others, but that he

EMOTION IN KANT'S MORAL PHILOSOPHY

19

still had power to help those in distress, though no longer

stirred by the need of others because sufficiently occupied with
his own; and suppose that, when no longer moved by any
inclination, he tears himself out of this deadly insensibility and
does the action without any inclination for the sake of duty
alone; then for the first time his action has its genuine moral
worth. Still further: if nature had implanted little sympathy in
this or that man's heart; if (being in other respects an honest
fellow) he were cold in temperament and indifferent to the
sufferings of others - perhaps because, being endowed with the
special gift of patience and robust endurance in his own
sufferings, he assumed the like in others or even demanded it;
if such a man (who would in truth not be the worst product of
nature) were not exactly fashioned by her to be a philanthropist,
would he not still find in himself a source from which he might
draw a worth far higher than any that a good-natured temperament can have? Assuredly he would. It is precisely in this
that the worth of character begins to show - a moral worth
and beyond all comparison the highest - namely, that he does
good, not from inclination, but from dUty.13
The foregoing long passage has been deliberately quoted in order
to show forth Kant's insistence on the absolutely non-emotional
character of moral motivation. That was indeed the precise purpose
of Kant in writing the passage. But I quote it also in order to make
some negative points, as a preliminary to setting out what I have
called the indispensability of emotion for moral accomplishment,
in Kant's system.
In the first place it needs to be stressed that the passage quoted is
an illustration, offered by Kant, of his concept of moral motivation.
It is only fair to him to recall that in a special section of the Critique
of Practical Reason,1a he expresses at some length quite a definite
view of how best to illustrate the true nature of morality. The most
effective way, he argues, is the most vivid way. The most vivid way
is the type of stark example, the limiting case, where the dutiful act
is obviously done without any help from the presence of feelings of
empirical origin, or without any help from 'the pathologically
determinable faculty of desire'.16 Paton calls this device Kant's
'method of isolation',!' that is, his method of isolating the moral
motive from all others for the purpose of moral instruction. Beck
says that such examples are not examples for imitation but for
illustration.18 What these authors want to indicate is that Kant was
not implying that empirically aroused feeling for the dutiful act
must be absent if the dutiful motive is to be present. The mere

20

PIDLOSOPIDCAL STUDIES

presence of such feeling does not vitiate the motivation, and in that
sense such feeling is morally legitimate. Duty does not demand that
you try to stamp the feeling out. 'Natural inclinations, considered in
in themselves are good, that is, not a matter of reproach, and it is
not only futile to want to extirpate them but to do so would also be
harmful and blameworthy'.19 In what sense Kant meant that it
would be harmful and blameworthy to try to extirpate them remains
yet to be determined. Part of the answer to this question is disclosed
by considering the pointed objection that may now be made. It is
that nothing I have so far said in explanation of Kant's style of
illustration represents feeling as indispensable. Indeed it might be
argued that Kant's stark illustration, however unusual the situation
it depicts, represents feeling not as indispensable but rather
dispensable.
The principal point to be made has to do with Kant's idea of the
process leading up to the emergence of the morally motivated action.
In this process, experience of a sensibly felt desire aroused by our
knowledge of the empirical world has an indispensable role. Such
experience poses the question: what ought I to do? You see on someone's desk a book you are very keen to read. May you take it? What
ought you do? Implicit in that question, and in any reply you give
is your consciousness of the a priori principle of duty. That experience
of the claim of desire functions as the occasion for becoming aware
of the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative in tum
presses its higher, totally exclusive, claim on the higher faculty of
desire, your power of free choice. There is a paralle here with Kant's
theory of cognition. For instance my sensible experience of the
phenomenon of change acts as the occasion of becoming aware of
the a priori principle that every change has a cause, and as the
occasion for my application of that principle of causality.
Analogously, my felt experience of being moved by the emotion of
sympathy to help another acts as the occasion of becoming aware
of the a priori moral law, and for my application of that law to the
action proposed by my sensibility. As the Critique of Practical
Reason puts it, using the contrast of 'formal' and 'material', all the
material of practical rules belongs to 'the general principle of selflove or one's own happiness'; 'every volition must have an object
and therefore a material; but the material cannot be supposed, for
this reason, to be the determining ground and condition of the
maxim' which can be 'presented as giving universal law'.20 Thus I
am arguing that according to Kant, emotion or feeling has an
indispensable role in the genesis of moral motivation. It proposes
action of some kind to us. In actually doing the action, one uses a
maxim which generalises the way of action proposed. In helping

EMOTION IN KANT'S MORAL PHILOSOPHY

21

another, for instance, I am moved by sympathy to act on the maxim:

'if! encounter another in distress, I will try to help'. If! am a dutiful
person, I will use that maxim, but I will use it because it conforms to
the categorical imperative. What Kant asserts is that the moral
person acts along the lines of only that kind of maxim which he
could at the same time will to become a universal law for all rational
agents. The motive of duty must be present at the same time as the
maxim and as the inclination which prompted the maxim. The good
man feels sympathy impelling him but his motive is not sympathy.
One may still press against Kant the objection that in the passage
quoted from the Groundwork his stark illustration, however unusual
the situation it depicts, represents feeling not as indispensable but
rather as dispensable. The naturally friendly person does his duty
even though overclouding sorrows happen to have extinguished in
him his usual sympathy with the fate of others. No longer moved
by any inclination he tears himself out ofthis deadly insensibility ...
I do not think that this constitutes an insuperable objection. Kant
could say that by definition this habitually sympathetic friend of
man in these circumstances knows very well from past experience
what sympathy would move him to do on encountering another in
distress. In the past he has habitually acted on the maxim, 'if I
encounter another in distress, I will try to help'. That is one of the
necessary features of the case in point. But in the past he has done
the action from the motive of satisfying his feelings. What changes
now is his motive. He still has the same maxim. The present encounter
reminds him of it. How could he forget it? His past sympathy is still
relevant. It has done its work of proposing a maxim. His present
insensibility is a deadly thing, threatening the omission of his duty.
Kant would add that although there is no antecedent feeling leading
up to this instance of dutiful action, the action itself begets feeling,
the feeling which he calls 'contentment',21 arising from the decision
to act from duty; but of this I have yet to speak. Even the honest
fellow whom Kant describes as one in whose heart nature had
implanted little sympathy is by definition not quite without all
promptings of sympathy; and he has other emotive gifts, patience
and robust endurance, which keep him clearly aware of the concept
of duty. Thus the defenders of Kant might well and truly argue
(although I have not observed them do so).
These defenders, I have observed, make another point about
Kant and the emotions. It is sometimes thought that Kant frowned
on the desire we feel for 'happiness'. Did he not say: 'if ... we take
as our basic principle eudaemonism (the happiness principle) instead
of eleutheronomy (the freedom principle of inner legislation), we
bring about the euthanasia (painless death) of all morals'?22 But,

22

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

answering his defenders, he has also said: 'this distinction of the

principle of happiness from that of morality is not for this reason
an opposition between them, and pure practical reason does not
require that we should renounce the claims to happiness; it requires
only that we take no account of them whenever duty is in question.
It can even be a duty in certain respects to provide for one's happiness,
in part because (since it includes skill, health, and riches) it contains
means to the fulfilment of one's duty, and in part because the lack
of it (e.g. poverty) contains temptations to transgress against duty'.23
In other words, Kant is simply saying that the basic question to be
answered always is: would it be right for me to seek this happiness?
What all this boils down to is that in Kant's system, one role
given to emotional inclination is that of suggesting a way of acting.
But a truly dutiful person in adopting that way of acting must do so
for a reason other than the fulfilment of the inclination. Again the
dutiful person does what will contribute to his happiness but does
so from a motive other than the desire for happiness. Now if this is
all that Kant concedes to emotion, one might say that it is not a
very great deal. But there is another significant aspect of his teaching
to which one must now turn.
This is his explicit statement about another sense in which certain
aspects of man's emotional make-up are indispensable for the moral
life. He deals with them in The Doctrine of Virtue and describes
them as having to do with 'the mind's aesthetic receptiveness to
concepts of duty as such', by which he means the mind's emotional
receptiveness to the concept of duty.24 The relevant aspects of man's
emotional make-up might be summarised as love and respect. Love
is the capacity to desire to promote the wellbeing of others, the
capacity to be pleased at the wellbeing of another, to feel gratitude
towards another, to feel sympathetic joy and sorrow at another's
wellbeing or misfortune. Then there is the emotion of respect.
Radically this is oriented towards the moral law and as so orientated
he calls it moral feeling. It is also, and as a consequence, orientated
towards oneself as a rational autonomous being capable of knowing
the moral law and orientated towards others as rational beings
with the same legislative power. In the Groundwork he had said:
'All reverence for a person is properly only reverence for the law
(of honesty and so on) of which that person gives us an example'.B5
In the Critique of Judgment further phrases of 'moral feeling' are
mentioned. The beauty of nature can make a dutiful person feel 'a
need to be grateful to someone for it'. Again that person can feel
that need to be conscious that in doing a difficult duty he is submitting himself to the command of a Supreme Lord. Again in
remorse and self-reproach for failing in his duty, the person seems

EMOTION IN KANT'S MORAL PHILOSOPHY

23

to hear the voice of a judge to whom he has to render account.

Kant calls these emotive dispositions, 'special modes of a mental
disposition towards duty'.26
About all such emotive capacities or dispositions as conceived by
Kant, it is necessary to distinguish between: (a) the potentiality or
susceptibility for feeling such emotions, and (b) the actualisation
of these susceptibilities by our awareness of our duty. I am not
thinking here of the capacity of any such emotions to suggest our
duty to us when they are aroused simply and solely by our sensible
experience. I have no doubt that Kant thinks that some forms of
these emotions also do this, and that having suggested the maxim
which turns out to be our duty, they must then as such play no part
in our motivation, if that motivation is to be pure and therefore
moral. I am, rather, pointing to what Kant says about them, that as
susceptibilities they 'lie at the basis of morality, as subjective conditions for our receptiveness to the concept of duty'. Without them
our minds would be incapable of receiving the idea of duty. That is,
they are indispensable for doing our duty. 'To have them cannot
be a duty: every man has them and it is by virtue of them that he
can be obligated'. 'Love and respect are feelings that accompany the
practice' of our duties to others. Moral feeling is our susceptibility
to feel pleasure or pain from our awareness that our acts are consistent with, or contrary to, the law of duty. No man is entirely
without it and were he completely lacking in capacity for it he would
be morally dead. Of respect or reverence for oneself, 'the law in
man irresistibly forces from him reverence for his own being, and
this feeling ... is the ground of ... certain actions in keeping with
his duty to himself'. Of sympathetic feeling, a form of love, he says
that it is 'one of the impulses which nature has implanted in us so
that we may do what the thought of duty alone would not
accomplish'.27
What Kant seems to mean is that there are phrases of our emotive
powers whose function is not to suggest our duty to us. Rather, our
duty suggests them, and without them we could not do our duty.
We need their actualisation if we are to carry out our duty. Why?
Because of the imperfections of the human condition. Man is not
pure intelligence. He has emotions. Part of the psychological mechanism of carrying out one's duty as distinct from knowing our duty is
a certain indispensable help from our feelings. But the uprise of
these feelings is not empirically caused by sense experience. It is
due to the a priori thought of our duty. Thus these feelings are
uncontaminated by the self-love which characterises feelings caused
by objects of the sensible world: 'consciousness of these dispositions
is not of empirical origin; rather it can only follow from conscious-

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PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

ness of a moral law, as the effect this has on the mind'. These
susceptibilities are therefore the servants of our awareness of the
command of duty. We go from thought to action through them.
Kant complicates his theory but adds to its persuasiveness by saying
that we have a duty to cultivate these feelings of respect and love.
We cultivate moral feeling by our wonder at its inscrutable source;
and 'this wonder arises when we find that moral feeling in its purity,
severed from every pathological attraction, is aroused to its full
strength by a purely rational thought'. We cultivate love by doing
our duty of helping others. The saying, you ought to love your
neighbour as yourself, means: 'do good to your fellow-man, and
this will give rise to love of man in you (as an aptitude of the inclination to beneficence in general)'. Kant seems to be implying that we
begin doing our duties of love by means of a weak actualisation of
the feeling of love and that the feeling grows in strength. He seems
to go further and suggest that sympathetic feeling, empirically
aroused by actions such as visiting sick-rooms and debtors' prisons,
is thereby prepared for being subsequently aroused by the unimpeachable source within man, his consciousness of duty. At the
same time, Kant hammers away at his central doctrine that directly
at least our duty is practical love and practical respect i.e .action
whereby we help others and recognise the dignity of man. We can
have no direct duty to feel love or respect. We cannot create these
potentialities in ourselves; nor can we summon up these feelings at
the drop of a hat. Fundamentally we do our duty because of the
constraint imposed by the command of reason. 'And what is done
from constraint is not done from love. '28
Nevertheless Kant has given a place to emotion in the moral life
for which frequently he has not been given credit. He could write,
in answer to a friendly critic in 1793: ' ... if one asks, what is the
aesthetic character, the temperament, so to speak, of virtue, is it
courageous and hence joyous, or fear-ridden and dejected? an
answer is hardly necessary ... [A] heart which is happy in the
performance of its duty ... is a mark of genuineness in the virtuous
disposition - of genuineness even in piety, which does not consist
in the self-inflicted torment of a repentant sinner ... but rather in
the firm resolve to do better in the future. This resolve then ...
must needs beget a joyous frame of mind'.29 Here Kant is surely
including the feeling of contentment of which he wrote in the
Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reasons.
To sum up, Firstly, for Kant, emotion serves to suggest maxims
of action to our rational power of moral discernment. Secondly,
we even have an indirect duty to seek happiness. Thirdly, love and
respect are necessary mechanisms for carrying out our duty. Fourthly,

EMOTION IN KANT'S MORAL PHILOSOPHY

2S

dutiful action begets a joyful frame of mind.

How then would Kant comment on the following kind of objection
to his sOMcalled moral purism? All human decency is grounded on
emotion. You cannot develop a facility for discovering what you
ought to do for others unless you have cultivated, at the emotional
level, love, respect, sympathy, compassion, benevolence towards
others. You get to know the needs of others, you come to underM
stand them, by cultivating these qualities. To help others you must
develop an emotional sensitivity to others. So that you know how
they feel because you feel as they feel. Moreover to help others
involves the communication of hopeful feeling and cheerfulness as
much as the giving of advice or material help. And you cannot
communicate this hope and this cheerfulness unless you yourself
feel in that way and act because you feel in that way. The dead
hand of a cold charity is a poor substitute for the kind of action
which the recipient sees to arise from the warmth of human feeling.
To all this I think that Kant would answer: 'you should read my
books more carefully. I agree with almost everything you have
stated as an objection. Indeed my only criticism is the ambiguity
of your phrase about acting because you feel in a certain way.
Feeling of course is always necessary as well as inevitable in a
morally worthy way of life. It is the antecedent to dutiful motivation.
It is the concomitant of dutiful action. It is the consequence of
dutiful action. But don't make it your motive. If you do, you put it
in the place of rational command. You displace reason. And that
is the kiss of death for morality'.
If one were to answer Kant by saying, 'I am acting partly because
I am commanded by reason to act in this way, and partly because
I feel like acting in this way', Kant would reply: 'Now you have
adulterated your motive and destroyed its purity. You, a rational
self, are now partly governed by what is subrational, and therefore
by what is arbitrary, venal, and capricious. You have lost your grip
on the universal and the necessary. This is unworthy of your dignity
as rational'. Here, I think, we are at the heart of the matter. The
SeIffor Kant is the thinking, willing seIfwhich has a priori knowledge.
Of man, Kant wrote in the Groundwork, that 'he is ... his proper
self only as intelligence (while as a human being he is merely an
appearance of himself)'.30 The fulfilment of this Self is the development of a disposition of will whereby it chooses only the kind of
action which conforms to the a priori and categorical command to
act in a lawMlike way. This is the fulfilment of the person, and it is
seen by Kant as the assertion of the autonomy which characterises
the person. At the same time, he sees this fulfilment as adherence to
a law which sets out the mode of acting proper for every person. The

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PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

law is universal, and its universality helps Kant to think of this kind
of fulfilment as a non-selfish, or unselfish, fulfilment of the self.
But one can question this concept of the self. One can propose the
alternative that the human self is not just a thinking, willing agent
but a thinking, willing, sensing, feeling agent, an agent who has a
human nature. And one can propose that the good of this agent
consists in the fulfilment of all aspects of that nature. Kant, au fond,
was not willing to adopt that point of view, basically because of his
theory of human knowledge. His formula of the Law of Nature, and
the other formulae connected with it, do bid us think of human
nature as a unity of many powers, each of which has a purpose. But
for Kant this idea of human nature is simply a model or scheme which
the mind, by its constitution, has to use. It carries no guarantee that
human nature is really like that. All that we can be sure of is that
we are rational and free and therefore self-legislative.
'Why did you act as you did, towards X?', one might ask of a
good person who had helped X, or who had refrained from harming
X. He might think you mentally unhinged for asking such a question.
But you might dare to ask it, if he was somebody who knew that
you were interested in philosophy. He could give you an un-Kantian
answer: 'I helped him because I was sorry for him. I refrained from
prying into his private affairs because it is revolting to do that sort
of thing to another person'. And you might note the love and respect
involved. Alternatively, the same person might say: 'because I
knew that it was the right thing to do'. That surely would be his
ultimate answer if you kept pressing him. He certainly did not act
out of self-gratification. You could say that his motive was rational
appreciation of the goodness of the act.
The emotions in a person of this kind are more than a mere help
to him. They do bring the good act to his attention. They do help
him to perform it. But it is not enough to say that. For he has an
emotional sensitivity for doing the right thing. His emotions somehow participate in his rational appreciation.a1 'To feel [the emotions]
at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the
right people, with the right motives, and in the right way ... this is
characteristic of virtue.' So wrote Aristotle (E.N. II, 6, Il06b 21-23).
I quote him, even though he was too optimistic about the attainment of harmony between reason and emotion, and too terse about
the 'right motive' (which for him had to do with the rationality of
the virtuous act). Would Kant agree with this sort of analysis? In
part he would; but only in part. But since in part he would, it is
hardly fair of Irish Murdoch to write that 'Kant did not officially
recognize the emotions as part of the structure or morality'. She is
as impressed as Kant was by the power of the anxious avaricious

EMOTION IN KANT'S MORAL PHILOSOPHY

27

tentacles of the self, the ubiquity of the fat relentless ego. She writes:
'When Kant wanted to find something clean and pure outside the
mess of the selfish empirical psyche, he followed a sound instinct
but ... looked in the wrong place. His inquiry led him back again
into the self, now pictured as angelic'.32 She thinks that he should
have looked out towards the world as it really is. The real world in
which man lives, and about which he can get to know a little, and
through which he can learn love of the good. The real world of other
natural things, where beauty can be glimpsed and can be created
with the help of love of the good (for art requires moral discipline).
The real world of other persons, whose special otherness opens up
to us special possibilities of love of the good, since persons invite
love and respect of an unique kind.
Even when one allows for the extent to which she misrepresents
Kant, it remains true that his critical writings offer us a somewhat
different philosophical vision. He thought that we cannot truly
know the real world. He does not make love of the good central.
For him, to be good is to act from constraint; and to quote again,
'what is done from constraint is not done from love'. That was
written in 1797. Perhaps he misinterpreted his own moral experience.
Perhaps what is done from constraint can be done from love. He
may have been groping towards that point of view in 1763, in his
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. 33 For love
can constrain with an iron torturing hand. I like to think that the
old Kant, who in his youth was called 'the elegant young lecturer',
in whose study hung one portrait - that of the emotional J J
Rousseau - who tolerantly wrote that 'from such crooked wood as
man is made of, nothing perfectly straight can be built' ,34 and who
left an annuity in his will to his servant by whom he had been treated
shamefully, who was filled with awe by the starry heavens above
him and the moral law within him, who wisely did not look for
happiness in this life and saw the supreme intrinsic nobility of
virtue ... I like to think that this old man had as his own supreme
virtue a very humble love of the good.
CONOR MARTIN

University College, Dublin

1. The Categorical Imperative, 2nd ed. (London, Hutchinson's University
Library, 1951) 15.
Press, 1963) 120, note 20.
2. A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (University of
Chicago Press, 1963).
3. Op. cit. 229, 231.
4. The Development of Kant's View of Ethics (Oxford, Blackwell, 1972) 23.

28

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

5. This paper uses the following translations of words by Kant (and the
pagination of the translators): The Moral Law, or Kant's Groundwork of the
Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H J Paton, revised ed. (London, Hutchinsons'
University Library, 1953) subsequently cited as Groundwork: Critique of Practical
Reason, trans. L W Beck (New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), subsequently cited
as Crit. Pro R.; The Doctrine of Virtue, Part II of the Metaphysic of Morals, with
the Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals and the Preface to the Doctrine of
Law, trans. Mary Gregor (New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1964); Religion
within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. T M Greene and H H Hudson (New
York, Harper Torchbooks, 1960), subsequently cited as Religion; The Critique
of Judgment, trans. J C Meredith, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1957). Also:
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. J T Goldthwait,
(University of California Press, 1960); 'Idea for a Universal History from a
Cosmopolitan Point of View', trans. L W Beck, and 'The End of All Things',
trans. R E Anchor, in Immanuel Kant, On History, ed. L W Beck, (New York
Bobbs-Merrill, 1963); Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans.
Mary Gregor (The Hague, M Nijhoff, 1974).
6. The Doctrine of Virtue, 113; cpo Crit. Pro R. 157-164.
7. Religion, 24-26; cpo Crit. Pro R., 91.
8. Groundwork, 74-75.
9. 89.
10. Groundwork,88.
11. Crit. Pro R., 48.
12. 33.
13. Groundwork (trans. Paton) 66.
14. A useful phrase added in L W Beck's translation, Foundations 0/ the
Metaphysics of Morals (New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1959) 14.
15. 155-65.
16. Crit. Pro R., 24.
17. Categorical Imperative, 47.
18. Commentary on Crit. Pro R., 120, note 20.
19. Religion, 5l.
20. Cpo 20 and 34 of Crit. Pro R.
21. Groundwork, 64; cpo Crit. Pro R., 165.
22. Doctrine of Virtue, 35.
23. Crit. Pro R., 96.
24. 59.
25. 69, note. Kant's teaching on respect in the Crit. Pro R. and in the Doctrine
of Virtue is synthesised by Beck in his Commentary on the Crit. Pro R., 223-25.
26. Critique of Judgement, 2nd Part, 112-13.
27. For the texts quoted in the foregoing paragraph, see Doctrine of Virtue,
59. 60, 63, 115, 126.
28. For the texts quoted in the foregoing paragraph, see ibid. 59, 60, 62, 63,
116-119, 126. Cpo Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 121.
29. Religion, 19, note.
30. 125.
31. Kant comes perilously close to this point of view in The End of All Things,
82.
32. The Sovereignty of Good (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970),
81-83.
33. 58. What seems to be missing in Kant's philosophy is a development of the
idea of love as an activity of the higher (rational) faculty of desire (of which
faculty he speaks in the Crit. Pro R. e.g. 23-24).
34. Idea for a Universal History, 17-18.