Making Concepts Sensible? Two Problem Cases for Matherne's Account

Kant's Philosophy of Communication

Kantian Moral Motivation and the Feeling of Respect RICHARD MCCARTY RESPECT FOR LAW is a unique, moral feeling which can be known a priori, according to Kant.' He also thought we have an obligation to cultivate our capacity for moral feeling.' These are perplexing claims, even for Kantian sympathizers. How can a feeling be known a priori? What could be the point of a moral obligation to cultivate a capacity for such a feeling, especially in Kantian ethics, which seems to deny feelings any moral significance? A common line of interpretation assumes Kant's enigmatic claims about moral feeling merely reflect a lingering attachment to the sentimentalism of the British moralists he favored in his pre-critical moral reflections. Although he eventually rejected sentimentalist ethical theories for their undue emphasis on pleasant feelings, Kant appears to have once endorsed at least the basic framework of Francis Hutcheson's moral-sense theory.s Commentators have also attributed Kant's puzzling remarks on moral feeling to the historically pervasive , Aristotelian psychology of action, which he may have inherited uncritically from Hume. Even throughout his more mature ethical writings we find Kant making occasional remarks on feeling which seem to reflect Hume's empiricist motivational psychology: a view which traces the causal stream of every action up to its necessary original spring in some feeling of pleasure or pain.4 Attributing Kant's claims about moral feeling to these suspicious, historical influences, many commentators have felt justified in discounting them, espe- ' See Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L. W. Beck(Indianapolis, 1956), 76/Ak V 73; subsequently abbreviated 2C. ' See Metaphysical Principles of Virtut, trans. J. Ellington (Indianapolis, 1964),58/Ak VI 399; subsequentlyabbreviated MPV. sCf. Keith Ward, The Development of Kant's View of Ethics (Oxford, 1972), 26f. 4Cf. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P. I-l.Nidditch (Oxford, a978),574.Commentators frequently cite Aristotle as a source for this view,especiallyhis comment that, "Intellect itself movesnothing..." (Nicomachean Ethics 1t39a36). [421] 422 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:3 JULY I993 cially when they seem at odds with the rationalistic psychology of action his own ethical theory seems to require. Some assume he would not have made such remarks had he only noticed their implications for moral motivation. Others, comfortable with a dualistic picture of Kantian moral agency, have understood Kant's remarks on moral feeling as relevant to the merely phenomenal side of moral action. Yet the former explanation assumes that for many years Kant rather casually overlooked gross inconsistencies in his theory of moral motivation. And the dualistic presupposition of the latter interpretation encounters even more serious problems in its implications for freedom and moral responsibility.s In what follows I attempt to elucidate Kant's understanding of the peculiar feeling of respect or reverence for the moral law, concentrating on its role in moral motivation. I shall thus be offering an alternative to the view of many recent commentators and critics, who are united in denying that feelings can play any role at all in Kantian moral motivation. After clarifying the central interpretive dispute and citing some of the more relevant texts, I go on to explain the necessary role of moral feeling in Kantian moral motivation. I then turn to the question of freedom, showing that the role of moral feeling in Kantian moral motivation does not, as many have assumed, preclude freedom of choice or responsibility for moral failure. I conclude with some brief comments about feeling in Kant's philosophy, addressing some remaining mysteries about the unique, moral feeling of respect. 1. THE INTERPRETIVE DISPUTE In justifying his fundamental moral principle, the categorical imperative, Kant assumed actions are morally worthy just when motivated by respect for the moral law alone. But if the moral law is adequately represented only by a categorical imperative, then it must be binding on moral agents regardless of any of their contingent or empirical motivational resources. Accordingly, we must assume respect for the moral law is capable of motivating obedience to the law independently of the typical, "pathological" motivational resources of human agency. Many commentators and critics have also assumed this means that respect for the moral law...

One of Kant's most characteristic positions in his Critique of Judgment (1790) is that an object's perfection does not enhance its beauty. Although this may be surprising in view of the influential Platonic tradition which regards beauty as the very expression of perfection, Kant observes that the pleasure in an object's beauty and the pleasure in its perfection are distinct and independent pleasures. Although a coin collector, cat fancier, or butterfly enthusiast, for instance, might experience great pleasure upon perceiving a perfect specimen X, this pleasure does not determine that X must be beautiful. That some extremely rare and bizarre-looking insect perfectly exemplifies its biological type does not imply that the insect is pleasurable to look at. Upon such ordinary reflections, Kant recognizes an independence between perfection and beauty. From a more theoretical standpoint, Kant's sharp delineation between perfection and beauty rests substantially upon his claim that judgments of beauty are aesthetic, and do not, as such, provide any knowledge of the object's type. Relying upon an assumed opposition between sensation and intellection, he maintains that a judgment of beauty depends solely upon how the object's appearance makes us feel, and not upon any objective categorization of the object as a thing of a certain kind. More specifically, Kant claims that our judgment of an object's beauty depends solely upon how its appearance makes us feel, as we apprehend how its form is suitable for categorization and systematic understanding. The pleasure in beauty thus resides not in the pleasurable sensations the object might immediately stimulate, nor in the pleasure of noting that it fits some predefined category, but in our reflection upon how the object's design accords with our cognitive interest in systematic understanding. ' The pleasure we take in a beautiful object is indeed explained in reference to our capacity to acquire knowledge (a reference which accounts for the universality of the pleasure in beauty), but that pleasure depends upon no definitive knowledge of the object's type or purpose. Since they are aesthetic judgments, judgments of beauty are fundamentally noncognitive. In reference to the three basic kinds of pleasure mentioned above-pleasures of sensation, cognition, and reflection (of which the pleasure in beauty is a species)-Kant characterizes situations wherein we experience the pleasure of beauty in combination with the other two kinds of pleasures. When judging a flower's shape to be beautiful and its pastel color to be sensuously charming, we combine the aesthetic pleasure of beauty with the aesthetic pleasure of sensation; when judging a flower's shape to be beautiful while noting how the flower perfectly exemplifies a specific kind of rose, we combine the aesthetic pleasure of beauty with the cognitive pleasure of perfection. When beauty is combined with charm, as in the former case, Kant maintains that the charming sensations can either enhance our perception of the object's systematic form (and hence, our appreciation of its beauty), or they can overwhelm our taste, and render it barbaric. If Kant were selecting paradigms of natural beauty, he would prefer delicately articulated snowflakes or the configuration of veins in a leaf to richly fragrant flowers and powerfully brilliant sunsets. Kant does not perceive any fundamental conflict between the aesthetic pleasures of beauty and sensation, since he acknowledges that the pleasure of sensation may increase our sensitiv-

The Analytic of the Beautiful in Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment is a text of unparalleled importance in the history of philosophical aesthetics. Its main claims are adopted by some and rejected by others. A significant number of responses, of both kinds, take the Analytic to apply to all experiences of beauty—most notably, to the beauty of both nature and fine art. Our principal claim is that this assumption is mistaken. The analysis in the misleadingly titled Analytic of the Beautiful applies paradigmatically to judgments of natural beauty. The experience of the beauty of most artworks is different and requires a separate analysis. We detail the modifications required in all four moments of the Analytic and thereby explicate the experience of artistic beauty. This reveals that Kant holds an interesting and historically consequential account of the experience of artistic beauty, which is significantly different from the experience of natural beauty. The analysis further reveals that despite these significant differences, the experiences are both species of a single genus.

Believing in organisms: Kant's non-mechanistic philosophy of nature.

To Discover a Mind: Walter Kaufmann's Celebration of Goethe, Critique of Kant, and Evisceration of Heidegger

ABSTRACT:Kant claims in the third Critique that one can make about wine the merely subjective judgment that it is agreeable but never the universally valid judgment that it is beautiful. This follows from his views that judgments of beauty can be made only about the formal (spatiotemporal) features of a representation and that aromas and flavors consist of formless sensory matter. However, I argue that Kant's theory permits judgments of beauty about wine because the experience displays a temporal structure: the aromas and flavors evolve over the course of a tasting from the bouquet through the palate to the finish. An analogy with music, which Kant describes as ‘a play of sensations in time’, illuminates how wine qualifies as an object of pure judgments of taste: the ‘structure’ of a wine can be compared to harmonic structure, and its development throughout the taste can be compared to the unfolding of melody and harmonic progression.

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant claims that “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.” In this article I offer an interpretation of this claim. According to Kant’s conception of a symbol, the form of judgment operative in judgments of beauty can also be applied to morality. This parallel application highlights that we are directed at an end which cannot be determined by theoretical cognition. I argue that beauty’s symbolism of morality depends upon the solution to the Antinomy of Taste, and Kant’s conclusion that judgments of taste are grounded in the concept of the supersensible. Such an interpretation renders intelligible Kant’s remark that judgment makes possible a transition from nature to morality. Namely, beauty demonstrates to us nature’s openness to transcendence, and thus is a symbol, a making-sensible of our own transcendence and practical determination of nature.

Undoubtedly one of most fascinating aspects of Kant's aesthetics is link Konigsberg philosopher establishes between aesthetic judg ing and idea of being-together and being-in-community. This connec tion is developed through subtle analysis of aesthetic communicability or shareability (Mitteilbarkeit). A judgment of beauty, what Kant terms a pure judgment of taste,?that is, judgment that is not influenced by charm or emotion (though these may be connected with liking for beautiful), and whose determining basis is therefore merely purposiveness of form (CJ, ?13, 223)1?does not postulate everyone's agreement. Yet Kant claims it does require this agreement from everyone. The judgment of sublime, on other hand?which is not based on pure pleasure but on mixture of pleasure and displeasure, on rapid alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, same object (CJ, ?27, 258), or, as Kant writes, on a displeasure we present at same time as purposive (CJ, ?27, 259)?also demands universal validity. But this demand (or call, as Kant sometimes writes) is not as immediate (or un mediated) as in pure judgment of taste. The universal shareability is proper to judgment of sublime passes through moral law. Ac cording to Jean-Francois Lyotard, this implies the sublime feeling is

The experience of beauty is a pleasure, but common sense and philosophy suggest that feeling beauty differs from sensuous pleasures such as eating or sex. Immanuel Kant [1, 2] claimed that experiencing beauty requires thought but that sensuous pleasure can be enjoyed without thought and cannot be beautiful. These venerable hypotheses persist in models of aesthetic processing [3-7] but have never been tested. Here, participants continuously rated the pleasure felt from a nominally beautiful or non-beautiful stimulus and then judged whether they had experienced beauty. The stimuli, which engage various senses, included seeing images, tasting candy, and touching a teddy bear. The observer reported the feelings that the stimulus evoked. The time course of pleasure, across stimuli, is well-fit by a model with one free parameter: pleasure amplitude. Pleasure amplitude increases linearly with the feeling of beauty. To test Kant's claim of a need for thought, we reduce cognitive capacity by adding a "two-back" task to distract the observer's thoughts. The distraction greatly reduces the beauty and pleasure experienced from stimuli that otherwise produce strong pleasure and spares that of less-pleasant stimuli. We also find that strong pleasure is always beautiful, whether produced reliably by beautiful stimuli or just occasionally by sensuous stimuli. In sum, we confirm Kant's claim that only the pleasure associated with feeling beauty requires thought and disprove his claim that sensuous pleasures cannot be beautiful.

It is well known that Kant claims that causal judgments, including judgments about forces, must have an a priori basis. It is less well known that Kant claims that we can perceive the repulsive force of bodies (their impenetrability) through the sense of touch. Together, these claims present an interpretive puzzle, since they appear to commit Kant to both affirming and denying that we can have perceptions of force. My first aim is to show that both sides of the puzzle have deep roots in Kant's philosophy. My second aim is to present three potential solutions to the puzzle and show that each faces problems.

In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Friedrich Nietzsche misquotes Stendhal’s definition of beauty. Beauty is not, as the German philosopher claims, “a promise of happiness” (72). Rather, Stendhal proposes in a footnote to his book De l’amour (1822)—in a chapter entitled “La Beauté détrônée par l’amour”—that “la beauté n’est que la promesse du bonheur” (40). Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s misquotation of Stendhal and his subsequent interpretation of the French author’s aesthetics have held sway in later philosophy, such that Stendhal is regularly recruited to endorse views about beauty quite dissimilar from his own. This article approaches Stendhal as a philosopher in order to develop a clearer sense of what the author really meant by characterizing beauty as “only a promise of happiness.” Through close readings of De l’amour and Rome, Naples, et Florence, it is proposed that Stendhal’s restrictive only allows for and even recommends so-called mere judgments of beauty, or the experience of beauty as a completed pleasure in reflective contemplation, as opposed to the Nietzschean reading of Stendhal, which would define judgments of beauty as forepleasures to future satisfactions. More importantly, this article aims to recover what Stendhal still has to teach present-day philosophers and critics about judgments of taste.

Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy has often been criticised for ignoring a crucial dimension of community in its account of the lives that agents ought to lead. Historical and contemporary critics alike often paint Kant's moral theory, with its emphasis on rationality, as overly formalistic and unrealistically isolating. Against these criticisms, Kate A. Moran argues that Kant's moral philosophy reserves a central role for community in several important respects. In the first part of her book, Moran asserts that Kant's most developed account of the goal toward which agents ought to strive is actually a kind of ethical community. Indeed, Kant claims that agents have a duty to pursue this goal. Moran argues that this duty entails a concern for the development of agents' moral characters and capacities for moral reasoning, as well as the institutions and relationships that aid in this development. Next, Moran examines three specific social institutions and relationships that, according to Kant, help develop moral character and moral reasoning. In three separate chapters, Moran examines the role that moral education, friendship, and participation in civil society play in developing agents' moral capacities. Far from being mere afterthoughts in Kant's moral system, Moran maintains that these institutions are crucial in bringing about the end of an ethical community. The text draws on a wide range of Immanuel Kant's writings, including his texts on moral and political philosophy and his lectures on ethics, pedagogy, and anthropology. Though the book is grounded in an analysis of Kant's writing, it also puts forward the novel claim that Kant's theory is centrally concerned with the relationships we have in our day-to-day lives. It will, therefore, be an invaluable tool in understanding both the complexities ofKant's moral philosophy, and how even a liberal, deontological theory like Kant's can give a satisfying account of the importance of community in our moral lives.

In the introductions to the CJ , Kant claims that his main concerns in this work – aesthetic judgment of beauty, teleological judgment of organisms, and various aspects of empirical knowledge from empirical concept formation to the representation of nature in a systematic natural science – are all products of the faculty of “reflective judgment,” the capacity to find the universal (i.e., a concept) for a given particular, rather than to subsume a particular under a given universal, the task of “determinative” judgment ( v :179; FI, xx :211). Reflective judgment is, Kant claims moreover, governed by a transcendental principle, that of “purposiveness.” And, though Kant had previously discussed these topics in the CPR (even if only to dismiss some of them as unfit for transcendental philosophical treatment), Kant claims that they merit renewed critical attention because reflective judgment, governed by this principle, is necessary for the possibility of empirical cognition and of experience; correspondingly, Kant provides a “deduction” for this principle (v:184). In these two opening chapters I shall be concerned with the shape of the CJ project as so introduced, i.e., with Kant's three main aims here: to introduce a new a priori principle as that of a newly identified faculty of reflective judging; to justify (judging in accord with) this principle as necessary for the possibility of experience; to argue that aesthetic and teleological judgment are cases of reflective judgment in accord with this principle.

This collection of essays brings together the central lines of thought in Onora O'Neill's work on Kant's philosophy, developed over many years. Challenging the claim that Kant's attempt to provide a critique of reason fails because it collapses into a dogmatic argument from authority, O'Neill shows why Kant held that we must construct, rather than assume, the authority of reason, and how this can be done by ensuring that anything we offer as reasons can be followed by others, including others with whom we disagree. She argues that this constructivist view of reasoning is the clue to Kant's claims about knowledge, ethics and politics, as well as to his distinctive accounts of autonomy, the social contract, cosmopolitan justice and scriptural interpretation. Her essays are a distinctive and illuminating commentary on Kant's fundamental philosophical strategy and its implications, and will be a vital resource for scholars of Kant, ethics and philosophy of law.