On the Genealogy of Moral Pleasure1

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores the problematic relation between pleasure and morality in German thought, from the Enlightenment aesthetics of the eighteenth century through to early twentieth‐century psychoanalysis. Specifically, by focusing on the status and function of pleasure in the moral analyses of Kant, the post‐Kantians Schiller and Schopenhauer, then Nietzsche and finally Freud, it argues for a shift in emphasis, over this period, from the moral evaluation of pleasure to a recognition of the pleasurable value of morality. Along the way, it traces the German reception of the Discourse on the Nature of Pleasure and Pain (1773–81) by the Milanese philosopher and economist Pietro Verri.