Kant's Defense of Common Moral Experience : A Phenomenological Account 9781107274068, 9781107033580

Citation preview

KANT’S DEFENSE OF COMMON MORAL EXPERIENCE In this book, Jeanine Grenberg argues that everything important about Kant’s moral philosophy emerges from careful reflection upon the common human moral experience of the conflict between happiness and morality. Through careful readings of both the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, Grenberg shows that Kant, typically thought to be an overly technical moral philosopher, in fact is a vigorous defender of the common person’s first‐personal encounter with moral demands. Grenberg uncovers a notion of phenomenological experience in Kant’s account of the Fact of Reason, develops a new reading of the Fact, and grants a moral epistemic role for feeling in grounding Kant’s a priori morality. The book thus challenges readings which attribute only a motivational role to feeling; and Fichtean readings which violate Kant’s commitments to the limits of reason. It will be valuable to students and scholars engaged in Kant studies. j e a n i n e g r e n b e r g is Professor of Philosophy at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota. She is the author of Kant and the Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption and Virtue (Cambridge, 2005).

MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY General Editor WAYNE MARTIN, University of Essex Advisory Board SEBASTIAN GARDNER, University College, London BEATRICE HAN-PILE, University of Essex HANS SLUGA, University of California, Berkeley

Some recent titles Frederick A. Olafson: Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics Günter Zöller: Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy Warren Breckman: Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory William Blattner: Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism Charles Griswold: Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment Gary Gutting: Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity Allen Wood: Kant’s Ethical Thought Karl Ameriks: Kant and the Fate of Autonomy Alfredo Ferrarin: Hegel and Aristotle Cristina Lafont: Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure Nicholas Wolsterstorff: Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology Daniel Dahlstrom: Heidegger’s Concept of Truth Michelle Grier: Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion Henry Allison: Kant’s Theory of Taste Allen Speight: Hegel, Literature, and the Problem of Agency J. M. Bernstein: Adorno Will Dudley: Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy Taylor Carman: Heidegger’s Analytic Douglas Moggach: The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer Rüdiger Bubner: The Innovations of Idealism Jon Stewart: Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered Michael Quante: Hegel’s Concept of Action

Wolfgang Detel: Foucault and Classical Antiquity Robert M. Wallace: Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God Johanna Oksala: Foucault on Freedom Béatrice Longuenesse: Kant on the Human Standpoint Wayne Martin: Theories of Judgment Heinrich Meier: Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem Otfried Höffe: Kant’s Cosmopolitan Theory of Law and Peace Béatrice Longuenesse: Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics Rachel Zuckert: Kant on Beauty and Biology Andrew Bowie: Music, Philosophy and Modernity Paul Redding: Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought Kristin Gjesdal: Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism Jean-Christophe Merle: German Idealism and the Concept of Punishment Sharon Krishek: Kierkegaard on Faith and Love Nicolas de Warren: Husserl and the Promise of Time Benjamin Rutter: Hegel on the Modern Arts Anne Margaret Baxley: Kant’s Theory of Virtue David James: Fichte’s Social and Political Philosophy Espen Hammer: Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory Robert Stern: Understanding Moral Obligation Brady Bowman: Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity Fabian Freyenhagen: Adorno’s Practical Philosophy

KANT’ S DEFENSE OF COMMON MO RAL E X P E R I E N C E A Phenomenological Account

JEANINE GRENBERG St. Olaf College, Minnesota

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107033580 © Jeanine Grenberg 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Grenberg, Jeanine. Kant’s defense of common moral experience : a phenomenological account / Jeanine Grenberg. pages cm. – (Modern European philosophy) Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-1-107-03358-0 (Hardback) 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. 2. Ethics. 3. Phenomenology. 4. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. 5. Practical reason. I. Title. b2798.g6845 2013 170.92–dc23 2013000788 isbn 978-1-107-03358-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To my mother, Irene Redfoot, who deeply understands in her own way everything that Kant said here, and then taught it to me. And to Anthony, for everything.

CONTENTS

page xi

Acknowledgements Introduction: getting Kant’s joke: a phenomenological defense of common moral experience

1

part i the interpretive framework 1 Kant’s common, phenomenological grounding of morality

15

2 Response to immediate objections: experience

29

3 Response to immediate objections: feeling

58

part ii the “groundwork” 4 Kant’s Groundwork rejection of a reliable experience of categorical obligation 5 The phenomenological failure of Groundwork iii

77 106

part iii the “critique of practical reason” 6 Recent interpretations of the Fact of Reason

137

7 The Gallows Man: the new face of attentiveness

159

8 The Fact of Reason is a forced phenomenological fact

187

9 The Gallows Man’s fact is the Fact of Reason

207

ix

x

l i s t o f c o nt e n ts

10 Thoughts on the deduction of freedom

251

11 Objective, synthetic, a priori, practical cognitions

270

Conclusion

289

Bibliography

294

Index

297

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The ideas of this book provide what I take to be my most mature interpretive understanding of Kant to date. I am grateful to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for providing me with a Millicent C. McIntosh Flexible Fellowship which gave me the time to open my mind to these ideas. I am grateful also to St. Olaf College for a sabbatical leave which allowed me to complete the book. Although any extant errors found within this book are entirely my own, various conversations with Anne-Margaret Baxley, Marcia Baron, Stephen Engstrom and Jens Timmerman helped prevent me from indulging in more erroneous understandings of things. And, as always, the loving yet incisive conversations between myself and my philosopher-husband, Anthony Rudd, kept me focused on the truth and on what really matters. It is to him that I am particularly grateful for helping me to think about and explore the phenomenological nature of Kant’s ethics. And it is to him that I once again affirm my undying love.

xi

Getting Kant’s joke: a phenomenological defense of common moral experience INTRODUCTION

Kant’s joke – Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the whole world, that the whole world was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favour of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 140 Be a philosopher; but . . . be still a man! David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 4

Nietzsche’s thought here on Kant imputes an ironic intent to Kant’s writings that I suspect is not true of Kant’s project; but, like most any of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, this one touches on something profoundly true about the philosopher he addresses. Here, there are two related seeds of truth. First, Kant was concerned to articulate a practical philosophy which depended upon, and articulated more clearly, what was always already in the practical consciousness of everyday people, and which avoided the most common failings of an overly academic, expert approach to it. Secondly, Kant’s writing style is rather “scholar[ly]” in tone, making it difficult for “the people” to understand it. The tragedy of Kant scholarship in the past two hundred years since his death is that this first intention of his project – the defense of a common approach to ethics – has been lost, and he is instead left with a reputation for bringing an overly academic, expert approach to philosophy generally, and to practical philosophy particularly. How to explain this tragic trajectory? One culprit, as in any real tragedy, is the protagonist himself: Kant’s own writing, especially his 1

2

i nt r o d uc t i o n : g e t t i n g k a n t’ s j ok e

emphasis upon the purity and a priority of practical reason, does a lot to put off the common reader. Nietzsche is right, then, that Kant did not write “for the people.” But there is more to say: the emphasis in the interpretive literature over the centuries on an overly restrictive reading of Kant’s a priori morality, spearheaded by at times almost exclusive emphasis upon the First Formulation of the Categorical Imperative, has given the impression that Kant’s practical philosophy is exceedingly rationalistic, narrowly construed, and calculative in nature, thus requiring an expertise the common person lacks. What Kant intended as a simple test to help us avoid our self-deceiving tendencies toward rationalizing and complicating what was meant to be simple has, ironically, fallen victim to just those rationalizing and complicating tendencies. A test meant to secure the heart of a common practical moral consciousness has instead been its demise. This is a tragedy, because wrapped in Kant’s copious discussions of practical philosophy is perhaps the most potent philosophical articulation of common practical moral consciousness in the history of philosophy. It is the intent of this book to articulate that common approach to understanding and grounding moral philosophy. I devote the rest of this introduction to a clarification of the contours of this project.

The common moral philosopher: admonishing the experts Kant believed that moral philosophy must begin with the nonphilosophical and intensely personal moral task of coming to terms with a conflict at the basis of human existence. The conflict is between happiness and morality; a conflict made only more intense by our tendency to deceive ourselves about the true nature of morality’s demands. It is only when we identify, and work honestly to counteract, both this conflict and the self-deceptive tendency that is the most human response to it that both a moral life and moral philosophy can begin. Before that, we have not, as humans, come to terms with our moral state and, as philosophers, have no epistemic or moral warrant to engage in philosophical reflections upon morality. Unfortunately, the business of moral philosophy in Kant’s – and our own – time tends toward an expert, scientifically minded bias that discourages the initiation of thought through appeal to personal, existential experience. The result is the disfigurement of practical philosophy: failure to engage the existential conflict at the basis of human existence turns any would-be practical philosophy into

introduction: getting kant’s joke

3

something other than practical philosophy. At best, it becomes a theoretical, scientific, third-personal reflection upon human practical experience; at worst, it is an exercise in just that self-deception practical philosophy is meant to address. Kant reserves his most derisive tones for those would-be practical philosophers who avoid the problem at the heart of practical philosophy: the dear self. When speaking in the Critique of Practical Reason about a practical point that he takes to be exquisitely clear from the common point of view – viz., that morality and happiness present essentially different, and frequently conflicting, grounds for action – Kant adds the following: This conflict, however, is not merely logical . . . it is instead practical and would ruin morality altogether were not the voice of reason in reference to the will so distinct, so irrepressible, and so audible even to the most common human beings; thus it can maintain itself only in the perplexing speculations of the schools, which are brazen enough to shut their ears to that heavenly voice in order to support a theory they need not break their heads over. (5:35/32)1

The conflict between happiness and morality – and the ultimate recognition of the priority of morality over happiness when the two come in conflict – is exquisitely clear to the common human understanding. The only way things get confused is when “speculations of the schools” introduce obscure distinctions that cloud this clarity and thus blunt the force of what is “so distinct,” “so irrepressible” to one’s common understanding. Furthermore, these obscure distinctions are inspired by a desire academic philosophers have to “support a theory they need not break their heads over.” That is, philosophers are more interested in staying true to their (perhaps already published?) theories than in doing the hard work of following what is in fact morally demanded, and what is in fact more difficult – not philosophically, but morally – to admit.

1 In referring to Kant’s works, I will first note the Akademie pagination (Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften. Hrsg. bd. 1–22, Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften; bd. 23, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin; bd. 24, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Berlin 1900ff.), and then the pagination of the translations, a full list of which can be found in the Bibliography below. When referring to the Critique of Pure Reason, pagination for both the A and B editions of the Akademie edition will be noted, followed by the pagination of the corresponding English translation. Finally, references will largely be provided within the main text of each chapter.

4

i nt r o d uc t i o n : g e t t i n g k a n t’ s j ok e

Kant makes a similar point in the Metaphysics of Morals. Here, he speaks of those “who are accustomed merely to explanations by natural sciences,” and who “band together in a general call to arms, as it were, to defend the omnipotence of theoretical reason” (6:378/143). Such persons simply will never understand morality and virtue: “People who are accustomed merely to explanations by natural sciences will not get into their heads the categorical imperative from which . . . [moral] laws proceed dictatorially, even though they feel themselves compelled irresistibly by it” (6:378/143). Feeling oneself categorically obligated can hit them over the head like a baseball bat, but these obsessively theoretically minded philosophers will turn such a practical encounter into a “proud claim” (6:378/143) of “speculative” or “theoretical” reason (6:378/143), misunderstanding its import entirely. That is, instead of taking on this encounter with an imperative first-personally, such philosophers turn the task of making sense of moral demands into a theoretical observation, making “obligation” (6:378/143) a sort of distant object to be assessed third-personally and scientifically. But in order for the seeds of our practical lives to bear fruit, we must think of ourselves not simply as knowers or explainers, but as living rational actors encountering moral demands. Kant’s point is that taking on the practical point of view isn’t just a philosophical move; it is a moral one. Taking on the practical point of view involves a willingness to view oneself clearly as an obligated actor. Normal people, uninfected by the enthusiasms of the academy, have less trouble looking at themselves this way; but academic philosophers or scientists are often more interested simply in continuing their theorizing than in looking at themselves. They are the only ones who could fail to see clearly what is painfully obvious from the common point of view. One might paraphrase Kant’s point here by appeal to a rough paraphrase of the Gospels: “Philosopher, know thyself!” This is not to say that Kant abandons all philosophy in making sense of morality. Quite to the contrary, his practical philosophy engages the philosopher with the human, the expert with the common person trying to make sense of her moral life. It is only in the combination of the common point of view with commonly oriented philosophical reflection that the task of moral philosophy is accomplished. Kant’s conviction is that we all really do know what is involved in being a moral person; it is just that we all aren’t really good at, or perhaps interested in, articulating in exquisitely clear language what is at the center of our moral consciousness: that is the philosopher’s job.

introduction: getting kant’s joke

5

It makes sense that the common perspective, on its own, would lack philosophical precision. The common perspective is an inherently nonphilosophical perspective on obligation, giving primacy to practical tasks over thought. This does not mean the common point of view is irrational or repugnant to the articulation of reasons. It is just that the person taking the common perspective is busy determining her choice and acting on her reasons instead of working out the fine points of their defense. As philosophers, we are interested in the articulation and defense of reasons, and that is just as it should be. The danger for the practical philosopher, though, is to seek such articulation in the absence of proper guidance by the true object of her concern: the common experience of being an obligated agent. We philosophers are all too good at, and all too invested in, our reason-giving, and this capacity for and attachment to reasons threatens to allow practical philosophy to spin away from its proper realm, turning more into theoretical, third-person reflections on practical experience instead of an engaged, first-personal, but now philosophical encounter with that experience. Kant’s dream for practical philosophy is that it can be truly practical, that is, truly grounded in our common experience.

The development of the practical problem It is, however, hard to envision how Kant could be entitled to robust, common, practical knowledge claims about morality when he admits both that we cannot know things beyond phenomenal experience, and that moral philosophy – especially its central concept of freedom – depends upon things beyond that phenomenal experience. Such was his dilemma: how to engage in a practical philosophy that respects the limits of reason, yet issues not in probabilistic claims but instead in practical certainty about its conclusions, at least enough certainty to assure continued moral practices. It is to resolve this dilemma that Kant introduces the common perspective in moral philosophy. Some would say that a common perspective cannot take us beyond phenomenal experience. But Kant asserts exactly the opposite: we gain confidence about superphenomenal things in the practical realm not from theoretical philosophical argument, but from attentive reflection upon the contents of the common person’s moral consciousness. Such a move in fact makes prima facie sense: the nonphilosophically inclined person is, after all, unmoved by the dire claims of philosophers who assure her that causal

6

i nt r o d uc t i o n : g e t t i n g k a n t’ s j ok e

determinism undermines her freedom. She knows her obligations, and even her tendency to try to avoid them; but she keeps acting anyway, recognizing the unrelenting authority of the demands imposed upon her and trusting that she can decide when and how to deal with them! It is the philosophically innocent perspective of this common person that Kant embraces as a new source of a now thoroughly practical knowledge. Although this move makes sense, it is also a dangerous move to make: it would be uncritical to welcome the contents of human consciousness as given without providing some transcendental deduction of them. It would be naive and lacking in philosophical rigor to depend upon a merely common perspective for philosophical assertions. And yet, with flickers of his Pietist past emerging in philosophical form, Kant takes on these critics in the name of his commitment to a common notion of morality he knew in his own heart. But although Kant does turn to common experiences to orient practical philosophy, he does not thereby abandon traditional philosophical concern for knowledge or cognition; instead, he seeks a new sort of cognition that is both genuinely common and genuinely practical. The common, nonphilosophical person’s experience is a starting point for genuinely philosophical reflection culminating in knowledge, or cognition. There is a shift here, though. When we set aside theoretical modes of pursuing knowledge and turn instead to our practical experiences, we are no longer simply interested in knowing something; we are, more centrally, interested in that knowledge which will secure our status and efficacy as agents. Indeed, it is only by reflecting upon ourselves as agents that we find the very possibility of expanding our knowledge beyond the limits asserted in theoretical philosophy. There is a more precise Kantian way of making the same point: it is only as agents that we find a new goal for the sake of which reason can apply itself and in virtue of which concepts can be determined. A concept like freedom “is not capable of being determined so as to represent a determinate object for the sake of theoretical cognition, yet for the sake of something else (the practical perhaps) it could be capable of being determined for its application” (5:54/47, emphases removed and added). A concept can be determined not by that empirical intuition that would be most appropriate to affirming that concept as realized in an empirical object. Instead, it is determined via appeal to “something else” we find in our practical experience, an end that inspires new epistemic routes for the determination of concepts. The

introduction: getting kant’s joke

7

practical is a “source of cognition” (Bxxvin; 115n): by some sort of appeal to it as yet to be determined, we give birth to new determinations of concepts – that is, to cognitions – that were impossible when our end was theoretical knowledge. It is by altering the goal or end of reason that its realm expands, and new epistemic possibilities are born. We thus need to connect concepts like freedom with an end, goal or purpose that will give them direction, content and significance in a way that has been lacking for them via pursuit of theoretical knowledge. What results is, most decidedly, not knowledge for knowledge’s sake; rather, it is knowledge for the sake of our practical lives. Nonetheless, it will indeed still be knowledge, or cognition. But this move to the practical realm can approach the knowing question – as, for example, knowing the objective reality of freedom – only obliquely. This is because the purpose we find by appeal to the practical is not itself an end of knowing something, but rather the end of what Kant will eventually call “determining the will” (5:46/41), a determination oriented toward doing, producing, or acting. Any questions of knowing are thus oriented by that end of making sense of this doing, producing, or acting. To know something beyond theoretical knowledge, we thus seek an end that is not itself an epistemic end, but which grounds the possibility of further epistemic investigations, now understood, in virtue of their goal, as specifically practical epistemic investigations.

Reassertion of the common point of view This is, however, a good point at which to caution the excited, newly minted practical philosopher: yes, your new philosophical questions do arise when we think of ourselves as agents; it therefore makes sense to investigate a specifically practical cognition. But do not thereby turn the practical into a thoroughly philosophical – and a thoroughly theoretical – exercise! To summarize Kant’s point here, now through a rough paraphrase of Hume: “Be a practical philosopher, but be still a human being!” More precisely: be a philosopher concerned about cognitions related to acting, but do not thereby lose your appreciation of being still a person with a common, nonphilosophical perspective on your life as an obligated agent. Resolve philosophical questions, but do so while maintaining a firm connection to your practical, common experiences. When you lose your connection to these common experiences, you lose your life source – indeed, your very justification – as a practical philosopher. Because of the route through which practical

8

i nt r o d uc t i o n : g e t t i n g k a n t’ s j ok e

philosophy is born – our common, nonphilosophical experience of ourselves as obligated agents – the practical philosopher must, simultaneously, be a common, nonphilosophical human being. We can, for the present, speak only in general terms of what such admonitions mean for the pursuit of practical philosophy; a fuller account is, indeed, simply the story of this book. What we shall see as this book unfolds, though, is that embracing a practical mode of cognition means embracing both common human moral experience and a phenomenological method for exploring it. Practical cognition is surely, as our newly born practical philosopher has just pointed out, a cognition that can be accomplished only when one looks at oneself as an agent. But looking at oneself as “an agent” has more common twists and turns than our all too recently theoretical philosopher might have initially imagined, and appeal to common, agential doings to orient cognition yields a method of practical philosophy unimaginable to the theoretical philosopher. The common person, thinking about herself as an agent, is very far removed from the theoretical concerns of causal determinism versus freedom. Yet she does not enter the world of action cleanly, as if she had never previously been an agent. To the contrary, she discovers herself already deeply enmeshed in pursuing the hopes of her “dear self.” That is, she discovers herself as a person who – when moral demands present themselves as in conflict with but as more authoritative than her hopes for happiness – is tempted to try through rationalization and self-deception to get away with what she can, in the name of that happiness. This is the experience of agency present in and internal to “common human reason” (4:405/18). We all encounter this conflict and temptation toward rationalization, says Kant; indeed, we are all painfully and intimately familiar with it. Here, though, is the crucial point: it is this painfully intimate and common experience of conflict that thrusts us into the world of practical philosophy. To be entitled to the pursuit of cognitions beyond the limits of theoretical reason, the philosopher must enter the common experience of herself as an agent. And that means that the theoretical philosopher must set aside her arguments, her deductions and her worries about causal determinism, and turn instead to phenomenological reflection on this existential conflict at the basis of her existence as a human agent. As agents, we humans find ourselves in an inherently unstable state, facing two conflicting practical demands and a temptation to resolve the conflict by lying to ourselves. This state demands attentive reflection and resolution, and cannot stand happily as it is.

introduction: getting kant’s joke

9

Attentive reflection on this existential experience, once properly conceived, will be the very birth of practical philosophy. To state the point more succinctly, and more urgently: one becomes a moral philosopher only by taking the first steps in becoming a moral person. The philosopher will find her new purpose or end to replace the thoroughly epistemic theoretical one only if and when she takes up and is attentive to her common experience of herself as a moral being. The need to resolve the conflict between happiness and morality provides the new purpose that grounds, guides, and promises significance for our new task of moral philosophy. As such, we will find ultimately that whenever Kant says that the “objective reality” of something is proved, “but only for practical purposes,” we can replace “only for practical purposes” with “only for the purposes of making sense of and resolving that conflict discovered in our practical experiences.” Becoming a good practical philosopher means becoming a better moral person. The true concerns of the moral person are discovered only in attentive reflection upon this intensely intimate, felt, common, first-personal phenomenological experience of the conflict between happiness and morality. What emerges from all these twists and turns is a new method of Kantian practical philosophy. Practical philosophy – and, with it, the very process of becoming a moral person – proceeds according to a phenomenological method of attentive reflection upon a common, felt, first-personal experience at the ground of human agency: the conflict between happiness and morality, and the temptation to resolve that conflict via self-deception. The picture that emerges of Kant’s moral theory thus has some unexpected features. Most crucially, according to this method, Kant prioritizes openness to what is already given in moral consciousness over deductive philosophical argument. He also prioritizes this openness and attentiveness to experience over actively willing to produce things in the world. It is not that activity of the choosing will is abandoned; it is, however, contextualized within the more crucial, first, orienting step of becoming a moral person, that step in which we pay attention to ourselves and discover what is already given within one’s own sensibly affected and therefore felt rational moral consciousness. We will therefore devote much of this study to exploring the notion of attentiveness, Kantian style, envisioning various of its exercises (some successful, others not so successful), so as to appreciate this “activity” so central to the moral person. We will also seek to reveal

10

i nt r o d uc t i o n : g e t t i n g k a n t’ s j ok e

that, in this phenomenological approach to common moral experience, feeling – as the proper object of our attentive reflection – plays a particularly important enabling epistemic role in Kant’s moral philosophy, a role not adequately appreciated by current interpreters of his work. When we appeal to attentive reflection on felt experience, we will not take feeling simply as a wishy-washy and indistinct appeal to what cannot be articulated rationally. To the contrary, we will affirm that the limits of reason demand of us that we put our active and rational deliberation on hold so as to first be truly receptive to what is present in our felt moral consciousness. Only in so doing will Kant, and Kantians, be able to appreciate deep metaphysical truths about one’s rational self that are otherwise inaccessible to merely sensibly affected rational beings.

Chapter summary The book is in three parts. In Part i, I present in general, schematic terms, Kant’s method of attentiveness to common, felt, phenomenological experience as the proper method for both articulating and grounding the most basic claims of practical philosophy (Chapter 1). I then spend the rest of the first part addressing immediate worries about attributing this sort of approach to Kant’s a priori moral philosophy. Worries that we can appeal neither to experience (Chapter 2) nor to feeling (Chapter 3) to ground the claims of practical philosophy are dismissed. First, once Kant admits a practical experience of necessity, an attentive appeal to phenomenological experience (as opposed to an inductive appeal to empirical experience) can indeed point us toward the ultimate rational ground of synthetic a priori practical claims; felt experience will play an enabling, but not evidential, role in the grounding of these claims. Second, once Kant admits a necessarily felt feeling not caught up in the calculus of achieving happiness, this attentive appeal to the enabling role of felt experience in the grounding of the most basic claims of moral philosophy does not reduce illicitly to moral sense theory. I then turn to discovery and analysis of this method of attentiveness in Kant’s two central texts in practical philosophy, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. Part ii is devoted to an analysis of Kant’s failed effort in the Groundwork to appeal to this common method of attentiveness to felt experience in the grounding of claims of freedom and moral obligation. In Chapter 4,

introduction: getting kant’s joke

11

I show both that Kant rejects the possibility of a reliable common experience of categorical obligation, and that his reasons for doing so are inadequate. The refusal of a reliable experience of categorical obligation also undermines his would-be appeal to attentiveness to ground a priori morality: without the discovery of necessity in our common, practical experience, we cannot assure a synthetic a priori outcome for our philosophical reflections. In Chapter 5, I show that this same rejection of a reliable experience of categorical obligation forces Kant, in part iii of the Groundwork, to rely upon a less robust – and ultimately inadequate – common, phenomenological experience of freedom to try to ground both freedom and moral obligation. In Part iii, I turn to Kant’s more successful application of his phenomenological method in the Critique of Practical Reason. After consideration of current interpreters of the Fact of Reason (Chapter 6), I present (in Chapter 7) Kant’s central common, felt phenomenological experience: the experience of the Gallows Man (that is, the man who faces the gallows, first, if he gives into his lusts, and, second, if he refuses to lie upon the orders of his prince). In Chapters 8, 9, and 10, utilizing the method of philosophically informed attentiveness to this first-personal felt experience, I argue for a series of claims: that the Fact of Reason is not an act but a given, forced and inevitable fact, essentially akin to the phenomenological experience of the Gallows Man (Chapter 8); that the Gallows Man’s experience is one at which the philosopher can (and must) look to recognize all the central philosophical claims of the Fact of Reason, viz., that it is a rational, necessary, autonomously legislated determination of the will by the mere form of the law which assures the freedom to act as it demands (Chapters 9 and 10); and that, throughout all this, a common person like the Gallows Man is able to have, through nonphilosophically informed but still attentive consideration of his experience, a practical and common understanding of all these points about morality and freedom that the philosopher articulates more philosophically. Attentiveness to felt phenomenological experience is thus vindicated both as the proper beginning of one’s moral life and as that method most appropriate for grounding the claims of moral obligation and freedom central to Kant’s practical philosophy. In Chapter 11, I argue that this common grounding of both morality and freedom yields, despite its subjective origin in felt experience, genuinely objective, synthetic a priori practical cognitions of both morality and freedom.

12

i nt r o d uc t i o n : g e t t i n g k a n t’ s j ok e

I conclude by reflecting on the picture of Kant that has emerged in this study. In his practical appeal to attentiveness, Kant has an unrecognized debt to Descartes and Leibniz; in his implicit recognition of phenomenological experience of necessity, he is a precursor to Husserl; and in his commitment to the method of attentiveness to felt experience, Kant has an unexpected kinship with Iris Murdoch’s Platonic moral realism.

PART I THE INTERPRETIVE FRAMEWORK

1 KANT’S COMMON, PHENOMENOLOGICAL GROUNDING OF MORALITY

Introduction The central claim of this book is that to engage in practical philosophy, Kantian style – indeed, in order to be entitled to the pursuit of cognitions beyond the limits of theoretical reason – we must set aside third-person, theoretical concerns and enter first into phenomenological reflection upon the common, first-personal experience of ourselves as agents. The purpose of this chapter is simply to describe this common perspective and to describe in general terms how and for what purposes Kant appeals to it in his practical philosophy. It is not yet my intent to defend either the content of this common perspective, nor the philosophical uses to which Kant puts it; such defense, along with a more precise textual tracing of the development of Kant’s common approach to practical philosophy through the arguments of both the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, will be the business of Parts ii and iii below. It is important first simply to describe this common approach to practical philosophy. What is this common point of view and how does he use it in practical philosophy? A succinct way to describe Kant’s appeal to a common point of view is the following: practical philosophy, and, with it, the very process of becoming a moral person, proceed according to a method of attentive reflection upon a common, felt, first-personal phenomenological experience. Ultimately, we will be concerned to make sense of the precise content of that experience. But Kant himself struggles with the question of which experience of oneself is indeed most basic to human moral consciousness, and thus the most appropriate object of our attentive concern: is it the experience of freedom, or the experience 15

16

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

of conflict between happiness and morality with a temptation to resolve the conflict through rationalization and self-deception? So, before turning to the question of the content of this most basic experience, we first reflect upon what common, felt, first-personal phenomenological experience is in general terms, and then upon how Kant uses attentive reflection upon such experience to make claims of practical philosophy. First-personal phenomenological experience. One is tempted to think that appeal to “experience” is an appeal to empirical interaction with objects in the world. But we distinguish phenomenological experience from the empirical experience of objects in the world. Empirical experiences have an irreducibly objective nature to them: they are experiences of objects. Kant’s concern in the first Critique is to affirm the objective validity of the concepts that organize such experiences through appeal to intuitions which complete them as objects.1 But phenomenological experiences involve inward reflection on oneself as an agent, and are thus more “subjective” than “objective.” One can even say, as I will argue in Chapter 2, that phenomenological experiences do not involve objects as such; they do not involve reflection, as a distant spectator, upon objects distinct from me. Kant is ultimately concerned to assert the objective validity of these phenomenological experiences (a point that will be addressed in Chapter 11). But to gain objective practical cognitions, he begins by turning inward to discover subjective, first-personal phenomenological experiences. Kant does not use the language of “phenomenological” in his practical works in quite the sense I mean here; this language developed only in the nineteenth century, and he did not have access to that tradition. Nonetheless, we can recognize in various distinctions that Kant makes between kinds of experience that he is indeed drawing a distinction between what we would today call empirical versus phenomenological experience. “[S]peculative reason,” Kant says, “ha[s] the role of spectator,” and “ha[s] the merit of embellishing a concept that had not grown on its own land” (5:140/117, emphasis added). Here, reason’s role in explaining empirical objects and events in the natural world is not to clarify things proper to itself, but instead to explain 1 The examples of the house and the ship in the Second Analogy (A190/B236 through A193/B238) are good places to look for experiences in which we are spectators of objects and events in the world.

common, phenomenological grounding of morality 17

things distinct from it, on the foreign territory of the natural world. When we are “spectator[s]” in this sense, the experience we are having is an empirical experience. But in a phenomenological experience, we do not look outside of ourselves for our object of concern. Rather, we focus on the subjective experience of being an agent. I enter no foreign territory here; indeed, the concern is a domestic one: I experience myself. Phenomenological experience is thus inherently first- instead of third-personal. This distinction in points of view is, really, just another way of describing the difference between empirical and phenomenological experience. I cannot have phenomenological experience of another person’s experience; I can have it only of my own. Nor can I have phenomenological experience of an object distinct from me; to do so would, nonsensically, be to become that object, to experience the world as that object would. In a phenomenological experience, I encounter the stream of my internal consciousness of myself as an actor, not of other persons or objects. Kant’s practical writings are notable for the examples he gives of persons taking this first-personal point of view on themselves as agents. Interpreters over the years have, I think, not realized the important role these examples play. They are not simply examples given of a point already completely articulated from an example-less point of view. Rather, Kant appeals to first-personal, phenomenological perspective as part and parcel of his method of grounding practical philosophy. In Groundwork i, we encounter a man struggling with the tension between his moral obligations and his pursuit of happiness (4:405/17–18). In Groundwork iii (4:450–451/56), we find someone recognizing himself related actively to some of his representations, and passively to others. There are numerous familiar examples in Groundwork i and ii of persons thinking about making a false promise, or simply feeling tired of life. Examples utilizing the first-personal perspective abound also in the Critique of Practical Reason, confirming for example that common persons understand very clearly the difference between the demands of happiness and of morality (5:35ff./32ff.), that a will is determined only by the form of law (5:35/31–32), and that we all understand the operation of conscience (5:98/82–83). The first-personal point of view which defines phenomenological experiences can be best appreciated by comparing it against the thirdpersonal experience of other agents. In the Malicious Lie example in

18

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

the Third Antinomy, Kant speaks of how one agent looks at another agent who chooses to tell a malicious lie: Now even if one believes the action to be determined by [empirical] causes, one nonetheless blames the agent . . . for one presupposes that it can be entirely set aside how that life was constituted, and that the series of conditions that transpired might not have been, but rather that this deed could be regarded as entirely unconditioned in regard to the previous state, as though with that act the agent had started a series of consequences entirely from himself. This blame is grounded on the law of reason, which regards reason as a cause that . . . could have and ought to have determined the conduct of the person to be other than it is. (A555/B583; 544)

Kant is seeking here to identify an agential awareness of obligation, one that emerges not through thinking about oneself as an actor, but through looking at the actions of another person. We can, says Kant, regard this person as having “started a series of consequences entirely from himself.” And when we judge him as blameworthy, we recognize those obligations that impinge upon all of us.2 Compare this with the point of view taken by the Gallows Man in the second Critique, a man who is being asked by his prince to tell a malicious lie: Ask him whether, if his prince demanded, on pain of the same immediate execution, that he give false testimony against an honorable man whom the prince would like to destroy under a plausible pretext, he would consider it possible to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps not venture to assert whether he would do it or not, but he must admit without hesitation that it would be possible for him. He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it. (5:30/27–28)

2 One might argue that what we have here is actually something more like what P. F. Strawson (“Freedom and Resentment,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action [Oxford University Press, 1968]) calls a reactive attitude, and what Stephen Darwall (The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006]), taking Strawson’s lead, calls a second-personal standpoint. We will not consider Darwall’s second-personal perspective until Chapter 9. For now, while we grant that Kant’s own appeal to blame could be an incipient reactive attitude or second-personal standpoint, it still lacks the engaged relationship that would be distinctive of such a standpoint. The person in this example is blaming someone from a more distanced perspective, much as a judge (or even a philosopher!) would, instead of as an engaged victim of the malicious activity would.

common, phenomenological grounding of morality 19

Here, the third-personal perspective of blame drops out entirely, and Kant instead takes the first-personal perspective of the agent himself contemplating his own act. In so doing, Kant asks us to think about action from the perspective of the actor. He is asking us, imaginatively, to consider ourselves to be in such a situation.3 What we discover when we take this perspective is an opportunity to reflect internally upon one’s own experiences. Taking this point of view allows Kant to emphasize the internal conflicts one discovers in moral deliberations, conflicts which would not be seen, or at least not be seen as perspicuously, from the spectator’s perspective. Here, the conflict is between assuring his own happiness on the one hand, and, on the other, his sense of moral obligation that does not dissolve, even when faced with the possibility of his own death. The distinction between the Malicious Lie and Gallows Man examples clarifies the difference between the first-personal point of view and the third-personal spectator view on reason as a cause of action. To take the first-personal point of view is to consider one’s own action, or a proposed action (as opposed to the actions of another) from the point of view of oneself as actor. Taking this point of view provides insight into the internal course of deliberations and sense of obligation one experiences. This is to be distinguished both from the spectatorial view of events, and from a similarly spectatorial view of another person’s actions, even when such observation is conducted with the practical or moral interest of moral judgment. We shall see that the first-person point of view becomes Kant’s preferred perspective from which to engage in practical philosophy. Why this is the case is a point we will consider in Chapter 2. For now, we can note that the third-person perspective taken in the Third Antinomy is an anomaly.4 In looking at Kant’s practical works, the clearly preferred perspective is the first-personal point of view of an agent reflecting on his own experience of being an agent.

3 One could also point to the man near the end of Groundwork i – the one deciding whether to lie or not (4:402–403/15) – as an excellent example of Kant taking the firstpersonal perspective. 4 Indeed, it is a point of view more similar to what one finds in Hume’s moral works, or in twentieth- and twenty-first-century works in ethics which emphasize reactive states, than in a characteristically Kantian approach to morality. See Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment”; Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint; and Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford University Press, 1998).

20

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

Common experience. But when Kant appeals to first-personal phenomenological experiences, he takes himself to be appealing simultaneously to common experience. In the Groundwork, we find, for example, that the man who “feels within himself a powerful counterweight to all the commands of duty” is not just a man, but “the human being,” led by “common human reason” (4:405/17–18). Later, we find the first-personal experience of “the difference noticed between representations given us from somewhere else . . . and those that we produce simply from ourselves” (4:451/56) described as a reflection “the commonest human understanding can make” (4:450/56). In the second Critique, Kant’s appeal to the commonness of first-personal experiences, if anything, becomes even more frequent. For example, early in the second Critique, he appeals twice within two paragraphs to the judgment of “common human beings” or “common human reason” to affirm his claim that one’s first-personal experience of the distinction between the principles of happiness and morality is “so distinct, so irrepressible, and so audible even to the most common human beings” (5:35/32).5 To what, though, is Kant appealing in all these references to the “common”? One might think “common” human understanding refers to a naive, less educated, or less refined way of understanding than philosophical understanding. For example, in a passage from Groundwork iii, Kant says, when introducing the common point of view, that “no subtle reflection” is necessary in taking it, and that it operates “by an obscure discrimination of judgment which it calls feeling” (4:450– 451/56, emphases added). The common point of view thus seems naive, inadequate, connected to our lower faculties, and in need of refinement by some uncommon higher faculties like reason and understanding. But this would be to misunderstand Kant’s use of the term “common.” The passage just quoted is notable for being unusually dismissive of the perspective of the common person, relative to Kant’s other uses of it. Although there are important connections between the common point of view and feeling we must explore, Kant most often uses the word in connection with phrases like “common human understanding,” “common human reason,” or “common human judgment,”

5 See also 5:27–28/24–25 and 5:91–92/77–78 for other examples of Kant’s appeal to the “common.”

common, phenomenological grounding of morality 21

implying that the common is tied to our higher, rational natures, not to some lower, coarser part of ourselves.6 What, then, does he mean by “common”? The appeal to the common is an appeal to something we all share, something we experience “in common.” In appealing to it, Kant seeks to avoid attributing any radical individuality to first-personal phenomenological experience, even as he takes it up in preference to third-personal experience. What we end up saying about the act from this perspective will not be something that applies only to that individual actor, something that would be, in principle, inaccessible by other individual agents. Rather, we are asked to appreciate what it is for any human being to understand herself as an agent. His appeal to the common to ground practical philosophy is thus an effort to identify these universally shared aspects of our agential experience.7 Felt experience. To reject the common as coarse or low is not, however, to reject its connection to feeling. Indeed, common first-personal experience is, for Kant, felt experience. Kant even claims that the language of “the commonest understanding” is the language of “feeling” (4:450–451/56). The implied distrust of the felt common point of view we have already seen in this passage is, however, an anomaly in Kant’s writings. Whereas Kant’s Groundwork iii appeal to the felt phenomenological experience of activity suggested that there was obscurity in common, felt experience, his other references to it in the Groundwork are all positive, suggesting that it is to be relied upon for gaining moral insight.

6 Further, it does not involve appeal to that “lower” part of ourselves that is our sensible (as opposed to rational) nature. This is why we cannot call Kant’s common grounding of moral philosophy a “common sense” approach to morality. Kant does not appeal to what we encounter within our sensible intuition in order to ground morality, and we do not have a “moral sense” as such. Rather, he appeals to the common understanding, an understanding which relies upon feeling, not sense intuition, as its epistemic tool. We shall discuss this distinction between feeling and sense intuition at more length in Chapter 3. 7 In The Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Karl Ameriks is skeptical of whether the things Kant attributes to the common human understanding really are common. We will consider his worries in Chapter 2, and then again in Part iii. In Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 1990), Henry Allison also attributes import to the common grounding of morality in his interpretation of the Fact of Reason. We will consider his approach in Chapter 6.

22

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

Kant’s second Critique appeals suggest a growing confidence in the felt common point of view, especially in the clarity and perspicuity of felt experience generally. Kant at one point even appeals to the felt first-personal experience of the conflict between happiness and morality to support “the justification of moral principles as principles of a pure reason” (5:91/77, emphasis added). Such justification could, he says, “be carried out very well and with sufficient certainty by a mere appeal to the judgment of common human understanding” (5:91/77). This common human judgment is then described as operating through feeling: “anything empirical that might slip into our maxims as a determining ground of the will makes itself known at once by the feeling of gratification or pain that necessarily attaches to it insofar as it arouses desire” (5:92/77). The difference between empirically and rationally grounded determinants of the will is thus “made known by this resistance of a practically lawgiving reason to every meddling inclination, by a special kind of feeling” (5:92/77). What had been first introduced as obscure is thus elevated to a new level of clarity, indeed, even to a mode of understanding that promises “sufficient certainty” in the practical claims it accesses. Kant’s increase in confidence in the common language of feeling in the second Critique is combined with a decrease in confidence in purportedly expert, rational, academic, scientific, nonfeeling-informed approaches to practical philosophy. We have already discussed these important passages in the Introduction (see, e.g., 5:35/32), but we can now appreciate their import more when Kant’s disdain for the expert point of view is placed next to his growing appreciation for the felt, common point of view. Whereas, in the Groundwork, Kant accused feeling of being obscure, by the time we get to the second Critique he is instead accusing rational academics of obscurity in their mode of judgment. We will see in Chapters 2 and 3 that appeal to feeling is absolutely crucial for the possibility of practical cognitions, as it is the common means through which we access our highest rational natures. What we will need to excise to make our practical cognitions coherent is not feeling, but instead our tendencies toward excessive preference for the desires of the self over morality: the “dear self” (4:407/20). Attention to felt experience. Now that we have a thumbnail sketch of this common point of view – it is the felt, first-personal phenomenological experience of being an agent – what do we do with it? The short answer to this question is: pay attention to it! It is a central claim of this book

common, phenomenological grounding of morality 23

that both the common, nonphilosophical person seeking to claim her moral agency and the philosopher seeking to ground basic claims of moral philosophy must pay attention to the common, felt phenomenological experiences we have been describing. The former needs to do so in order to be moral; the latter to successfully justify claims of moral philosophy. Kant’s own stories of both the content of common phenomenological experience and proper attentive use of it will vary in the Groundwork and the second Critique, so it is hard at this point to give a very precise account of either; more precise accounts of both will be forthcoming in Parts ii and iii below. Nonetheless, across both the Groundwork and the second Critique, at least this remains true: Kant intends to produce a commonly informed practical philosophy that depends upon, and does not merely describe or articulate, our everyday common phenomenological experiences. The philosopher must attentively appeal to such experiences as part of her arguments for justifying that human beings are obligated and free beings. If she does not make such an appeal, then she does not have the tools that are necessary to accomplish these practical philosophical tasks. Let us dwell, then, in a preliminary way, upon what it means for both the common person and the philosopher to be “attentive.” First, let us appreciate what it is not. Neither the common person nor the commonly informed moral philosopher achieves knowledge that she is obligated by logically deducing that claim from previous nonmoral claims. She does not even deduce obligation from previous practical claims. Indeed, no deduction of moral obligation is possible. Instead, at least once we get to the second Critique, obligation is a fact forced upon us, if only we will take note of it. We will consider such things in more detail both in Chapter 2 and in Part iii. For the present it is sufficient to simply emphasize that “taking note” of the forced fact of moral obligation is an act of attentiveness. Instead of deducing obligation, we discover it through attentive, receptive consideration of something always already present in our moral consciousness. We need, that is, simply to “attend to the necessity with which reason prescribes [pure practical laws] to us” (5:30/27, emphasis added). Instead of proving something, we look more carefully at something we already have within us. That something is just these common, felt, first-personal experiences of moral agency of which we have been speaking.8 8 I am thus privileging Kant’s second Critique Fact of Reason account of obligation over his Groundwork iii effort to deduce moral obligation from previous claims about freedom.

24

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

Why insist though that attentiveness is required in order to recognize something already within us? If Kant’s morality is as common as he claims, then should this not be simply self-evident? As we shall see in the following chapters, Kant himself goes back and forth over how to answer this question. But the short answer to it is, once again, the dear self. The very content of our experiences – the conflict between happiness and morality – encourages us to distort their true nature. It is because the human being tries to alter and make more agreeable what she finds in her phenomenologically accessed moral consciousness that she needs to pay close attention to them. She needs to pay this attention in order to assure herself that she experiences what is present in her moral consciousness as it really is, instead of as some distorted version of it more agreeable to the purposes of the dear self. Interestingly, what this means is that the first moral task – and the first task of the discipline of practical philosophy – is an effort not of choice, but of moral perception. We need to get better at seeing clearly how the moral law forces itself upon us, by becoming more subtle appreciators of the feeling-informed twists and turns of our firstpersonal phenomenological experiences. Feeling is, after all, the means by which we will have become aware of the moral law forcing itself upon us. When my prince is telling me that I need to tell a lie, and that I will be killed if I don’t tell this lie, the moral demand to tell the truth reveals itself to me in the horrible, demanding, painful constraint I nonetheless feel to tell the truth.9 I may or may not tell the truth, by the way. The question of choice remains. But choosing to do the right thing assumes a previous ability to recognize the demand that is imposing itself upon me. Were I simply to allow my tendency toward selfdeception to kick in, the question of whether I would choose well would be moot: I wouldn’t even consciously recognize the true weightiness of the moral demand set before me. And, without that, the choosing self would never really have a fair chance; its “choice” would already have been channeled by the poor, self-deceiving perception of

In Parts ii and iii, I provide reasons for this preference. But note: although his fullest commitment to attentiveness does not emerge until the second Critique, Kant does appeal to it in the Groundwork as well. When considering the man assessing whether he should lie or not, he says of this man that such “common human reason . . . knows very well how to distinguish . . . what is good and what is evil . . . if, without in the least teaching it anything new, we only, as did Socrates, make it attentive to its own principle” (4:404/16). 9 I will defend this reading of the Gallows Man at much more length in Part iii, and especially in Chapter 7.

common, phenomenological grounding of morality 25

the agent into following the unconstrained demands of self-love. Attentiveness is, then, the first moral task of the common person, and we will consider its nature in much more depth as this book continues. The attentive moral philosopher. Why attentiveness is the first demand of morality may be obvious at this point. But why does the moral philosopher need to adjust her moral vision, and thus begin to become a moral person, in order to become a moral philosopher? Isn’t any object of philosophical concern best approached from a distant, objective perspective? Wouldn’t I be a better philosopher if I observed and analyzed other persons engaging in a moral life, instead of delving into the messiness of becoming a moral person myself? Won’t I in fact become a better moral person if I first engage in this more objective exercise? For Kant, this objective entry into practical philosophy is simply impossible because, as we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 2, it is beyond the limits of reason. The limits of theoretical knowledge make superphenomenal topics of investigation inaccessible from a theoretical point of view; as such, theoretical, third-personal investigation of the things the practical philosopher needs to know is impossible. The philosopher needs to find some other way to access the proper objects of practical philosophy; that other way will be attentiveness to felt experience. We thus accept the first task of becoming both a moral person and of becoming a moral philosopher to be attentiveness to common, felt, first-personal phenomenological experiences. Our – and Kant’s – reasons for doing so will emerge further as this work continues. Although becoming moral and becoming a moral philosopher begin with the same attentiveness to common experience, we can nonetheless draw some distinctions between becoming moral and becoming a moral philosopher. Although the moral philosopher takes the attentive, common point of view as her starting point, there will be questions that she will have – and philosophical tools upon which she can rely for her analysis – which never occur to the common person and, indeed, for which the common person has no need. To assert this is to reveal to the careful reader of Kant’s texts that I privilege his second Critique account over the Groundwork. In Groundwork i, Kant suggests that the common person must become a fullfledged philosopher to claim her moral nature. He says that “common human reason” will “find no . . . rest . . . except in a complete critique of

26

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

our reason” (4:405/18), akin to the critique of theoretical reason accomplished in the first Critique. This cannot be entirely right, though, since, clearly, not all common people become philosophers, but all do have the possibility of becoming moral. We will consider this problem for Kant’s Groundwork position in more depth in Chapter 4. For now, we simply note that it makes more sense to adopt Kant’s second Critique position on this question: although a certain sort of attentive reflection upon common experience is necessary for all persons, one can, by taking attentive reflection to a further state of articulation, also become a moral philosopher. Such is the position we will find in the second Critique, especially in Kant’s philosophical analysis of the Gallows Man. The relationship of the common person to the practical philosopher is one in which “the [common] public need take no interest in [philosophy’s] subtle investigations” (5:163/135), but in which the philosopher must take “examples of [common] reason judging morally” as her initial data. The philosopher reflects in a way unnecessary for the common person, but also in a way which articulates the common person’s experience at a new level of philosophical clarity. Practical philosophers thus become a bit like chemists, not introducing anything new to common moral experience, but simply analyzing it more carefully – attending to it, now with philosophical tools in hand – for what it is: We can analyze [these examples of reason judging morally] into their elementary concepts and . . . adopt a procedure similar to that of chemistry – the separation by repeated experiments on common human understanding, of the empirical from the rational that may be found in them – and come to know both of them pure and what each can accomplish of itself. (5:163/134)

Where, though, do we draw the line between that attentiveness required for becoming moral and that attentiveness required for becoming a moral philosopher? Must the common person be able, through attentive reflection, to speak the language of the First Formulation of the Categorical Imperative? The answer to this has to be an emphatic “No!” If this demand did hold, most of my undergraduate philosophy majors are never going to be moral! But the common, nonphilosophical person must have some more rough-and-ready appreciation of the moral concern for unfairness that this formulation

common, phenomenological grounding of morality 27

highlights. She may also need to be able to identify certain experiences of being categorically obligated, even if she doesn’t use exactly that language to describe them. What about the deduction of freedom from obligation? Again, she needn’t be able to articulate this as a formal philosophical deduction; but, like the man facing the threats of his prince, she must “judge . . . that [she] can do something because [she] is aware that [she] ought to do it” (5:30/27–28). The common human understanding must be able to in this more practical, on the ground, sense “cognize . . . freedom within [her]self, which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to [her]” (5:30/27–28). In the discussion of the Gallows Man in Part iii below, we will explore this question of how much the common person knows in more depth. Ultimately, although the language and the conceptual distinctions the philosopher makes may be unknown to the common person, it will be crucial – for every point that the philosopher makes – that there is something in the common person’s experience which provides the common ground of that now philosophically recognized claim. Without that connection to the common, the practical philosopher will have lost her legitimation for reflecting philosophically on things practical at all. Reliance upon the common point of view as an entry into practical philosophy is thus necessary; it is the only route by which practical philosophical reflections gain authority. The converse – that the common need necessarily rely upon the philosophical – does not hold, though, despite Kant’s confident Groundwork i assertion of this relation. The common point of view may, at times, lack articulacy, and it will certainly need to come to terms with its tendency to rationalize and deceive itself; but it does not lack moral understanding or moral justification. We do not all need to become philosophers in order to become moral, but we do need to become moral to become moral philosophers. Conversely, the moral philosopher is not simply the person of common human understanding: yet the moral philosopher cannot do without her. The philosopher should only with great caution set aside concern for the perspective of the common moral person.10 10 Drawing this distinction between the attentive common person and the attentive philosopher will be the main distinction upon which we rely in Part iii to respond to Ameriks’ concern that Kant attributes too many implausible things to the common person. The common person will have her own way of understanding things like autonomy and determination of the will by the mere form of the law without needing to introduce expert philosophical language to make sense of these things.

28

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

We will see in this book that the limits of common as opposed to philosophical attentiveness is a line that shifts in Kant’s writings. For example, in Groundwork i, the common conflicted person doesn’t understand the difference between the hypothetical and categorical imperatives, but by the second Critique, he does. We will, as we continue, take on more precise textual analyses of these differences. For the present, though, I have sought only to lay out in the most general terms possible, what it means for Kant to approach the grounding of practical philosophy from the common point of view. To approach practical philosophy from this point of view means to ground its most central claims through attentive appeal to common, felt, first-personal phenomenological experience of oneself as an agent.

2 RESPONSE TO IMMEDIATE OBJECTIONS: EXPERIENCE

Introduction Traditional Kantian moral philosophers will now have a range of alarm bells ringing: common, felt, first-personal experience? At the basis of a pure, a priori morality? I have depended too long upon my reader’s tolerance in not addressing the obvious concerns that arise for Kant scholars when considering my claims. I shall, therefore, enter the perspective of these objectors, articulating in this chapter and the next two worries that arise at the prospect of grounding Kant’s practical philosophy in attentive reflection upon common, felt, first-personal phenomenological experience: to what extent can one appeal to experience and to feeling in grounding rational, a priori morality? The purpose of these chapters is to address these concerns. In so doing, I also provide an overview of the interpretive point of view we bring to Kant’s texts in Parts ii and iii of this book. First, worries arise in appealing to experience. Kant’s moral claims hold with strict universality and necessity; they are, in other words, synthetic a priori claims, not synthetic a posteriori claims of empirical generality. Kant draws this distinction very early in his theoretical philosophy,1 and applies it to his practical philosophy in the Groundwork.2 But an experiential ground for knowledge claims, it seems, promises only synthetic a posteriori claims. Even empirically universal 1 See especially B3–4/137: “First, then, if a proposition is thought along with its necessity, it is an a priori judgment; . . . Second: Experience never gives its judgments true or strict but only assumed and comparative universality (through induction), so properly it must be said: as far as we have yet perceived, there is no exception to this or that rule.” 2 See 4:420/30: “[The Categorical Imperative] is an a priori synthetic practical proposition.”

29

30

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

claims arising from contingent circumstances of experience cannot hold with necessity. This is because the contingent sources from which the universality arose can, because of their very contingency, just as easily change. There is no stability – no strict necessity – for empirically universal claims; things could always be otherwise. This is the point Kant admits in the face of the Humean challenge to induction; that is, the challenge to claims grounded in appeal to repeated experiences of the same experiential relation. Just because the sun rose yesterday, and has risen every day previously, we have no proof this will always necessarily happen in the future. How, then, could we rely on experience to defend synthetic a priori practical cognitions? It appears that any appeal to experience, including felt experience, is subject to this charge that its resulting claims hold only with empirical generality, not strict necessity. Appeal to inductive experience thus seems simultaneously an abandonment of a priori morality. Appeal to feeling in grounding moral claims leads to similar problems. Kant insists, famously, that pure reason is practical; that is, reason is adequate both to justify moral laws and to motivate us to act on them. If a common, phenomenological approach to morality involves turning to feeling to secure practical claims, we seem to abandon the practicality of pure reason, reverting instead to moral sense theory, an approach to practical philosophy that Kant explicitly and repeatedly rejects. Kant’s rejection of moral sense theory is, in fact, tied to the same worries about contingent grounds for moral claims that the previous appeal to experience introduced. Feelings of pleasure and pain are inherently contingent and subjective, and are thus inadequate grounds for universal, necessary and objective moral claims. Even if feelings were shared across agents (that is, if they were commonly felt), we could not rely on them to ground practical laws: But suppose that finite rational beings were thoroughly agreed with respect to what they had to take as objects of their feelings of pleasure and pain . . . even then they could by no means pass off the principle of selflove as a practical law; for this unanimity itself would still be only contingent. The determining ground would still be only subjectively valid and merely empirical and would not have that necessity which is thought in every law, namely objective necessity from a priori grounds, unless one had to say that this necessity is not practical at all but only physical, namely that the action is as unavoidably forced from us by our inclination as is yawning when we see others yawn. It would be better to maintain that there are no practical laws at all but only counsels on behalf

response to immediate objections: experience

31

of our desires than to raise merely subjective principles to the rank of practical laws . . . which must be cognized a priori by reason, not by experience (however empirically universal this may be). (5:26/23–24)

Because feelings of pleasure and pain are contingent, not even a coincidental shared agreement amongst agents as to their proper objects would yield universality, necessity and objectivity for claims grounded in these feelings. Instead, such appeal would always ground only a “contingent” and “merely empirical” universality that does not escape the subjectivity of its origins. This worry is identical to the one expressed above, viz., that any empirically universal claim arising from contingent experience cannot hold with strict necessity, now applied to feeling. Feelings of pleasure and displeasure arise with the same contingency as any empirical experience; as such, they are similarly inadequate grounds for a priori morality. There is a further worry for feeling: appeal to feeling reduces Kant’s moral theory to an illicit moral sense theory. Moral sense theorists appeal to “a certain special moral sense which, instead of reason, determines the moral law and in accordance with which consciousness of virtue is immediately connected with satisfaction and pleasure, and consciousness of vice with mental unease and pain” (5:38/35). It is, in other words, a grounding of morality that relies upon the contingent feelings of pleasure and pain, instead of reason, to justify moral demands, an approach to morality which Kant explicitly rejects. The worry, then, is that in relying on attentive appeal to felt experience, I am, beyond grounding a would-be a priori morality in merely contingent grounds, also illicitly forcing Kant to become a moral sense theorist. My understanding of Kant does demand that we abandon certain long-held beliefs about his practical philosophy, for example, that it is concerned exclusively with choice and action, or that it involves no appeal to experience or feeling. But Kant’s phenomenologically grounded practical philosophy does not abandon the practicality of pure reason, nor the objective, synthetic a priori status of moral claims; and it does not turn Kant into a moral sense theorist. Explanation of how we retain these claims while appealing to firstpersonal, felt, common, phenomenological experience to ground moral claims is a long story; it is, indeed, the story of this book. It is not, therefore, the purpose of this chapter to completely resolve these concerns. Rather, here I articulate an argumentative strategy for

32

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

resolving these two concerns, viz., that appeals to experience and to feeling are illicit in grounding Kant’s a priori practical philosophy. It will not be until our analysis of Kant’s texts in Parts ii and iii that these strategies will be realized, but we will at least know as we enter those chapters what to expect in that analysis. What we shall discover in these chapters is that, although appeal to induction, or to contingently caused feeling, would both be illicit philosophical moves, there are other routes available to Kant for integrating experience and feeling in practical arguments. Instead of an inductive appeal to empirical experience, Kant makes an attentive appeal to felt, and object-less phenomenological experience. He thus makes space for experience of the effects of noumenal practical things like the moral law without violating the limits of reason, and appeals to experience in a way that makes possible an a priori status for any resulting claims. And, because Kant can distinguish between contingent feelings pointed toward the pursuit of happiness and an a priori feeling not caught up in this happiness calculus, he can appeal to attentive reflection on a priori feeling to play an enabling though not evidential role in assuring a rational grounding of a priori claims of categorical obligation, thus preventing that grounding from collapsing into illicit moral sense theory. A priori feeling thus becomes a means by which the practicality of pure reason, and therewith an objective and a priori morality, is assured, instead of abandoned. Let us consider each of these interpretive strategies in turn.

i. Different ways of appealing to experience Introduction. Most recent Kant interpreters avoid explicit appeal to the language of “experience” (Erfahrung) even as they seek to identify something in the practical lives of human agents that helps in grounding practical philosophy. Christine Korsgaard, for example, though she would not claim that we experience ourselves as free, does claim that practical agents cannot help but take themselves to be free, since this is a condition even for acting in the first place.3 3 See Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 94–98. Korsgaard’s claim does find support in Kant’s texts: “I say now: every being that cannot act otherwise than under the idea of freedom is just because of that really free in a practical respect” (4:448/53). But we’ll see that Kant abandons this confident assertion of simple recognition of one’s freedom in the second Critique, in favor of a more complex story that must go through our experience of moral obligation.

response to immediate objections: experience

33

Similarly, Henry Allison argues that though we cannot experience ourselves as free, we must practically conceive of ourselves as being free.4 Though we lack experience of ourselves as free rational agents, we have some “consciousness of our rational agency,” one in which we are “directly aware of a capacity (to act on the basis of an ought).”5 Karl Ameriks, though he criticizes as implausible efforts to take or conceive of ourselves as free,6 does not deny that Kantians need to make some 4 “[T]o conceive of oneself (or someone else) as a rational agent is to adopt a model of deliberative rationality in terms of which choice involves both a taking as and a framing or positing. Since these activities, as expressions of spontaneity, are themselves merely intelligible (they can be thought but not experienced), it is necessary to attribute an intelligible character to the acting subject, at least to the extent to which one regards that subject’s reason as practical” (Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 38, emphasis added). See also Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 40, emphasis added: “[T]he ‘I take’ . . . can be conceived but not experienced. In other words, I can no more observe myself deciding than I can observe myself judging, although in both cases I must be conscious of what I am doing. That is precisely why both activities are merely intelligible in the specifically Kantian sense.” 5 Ibid., p. 44 (emphasis added). For Allison, there is a “‘moment’ of spontaneity, or ‘complement of sufficiency,’ which must be presupposed,” but not actually experienced, “in our conception of ourselves as rational agents” (ibid., p. 52, emphasis added). We presuppose ourselves as free because we regard empirical conditions of action as “nonsufficient, that is, as ‘not so determining’ as to exclude a ‘causality of our will’ since we think of ourselves as initiating causal series through actions conceived as first beginnings” (ibid., p. 45). As such, “the idea of freedom is assigned to the practical sphere, where we think of reason as a cause producing actions and, therefore, as functioning outside the sphere of sensible conditions” (ibid., p. 46, emphasis added). The only hint in Allison’s position of experiencing something related to freedom instead of merely conceiving it is when he speaks of a “capacity” of which we are “directly aware,” “in the consciousness of our rational agency” (ibid., p. 44), an awareness, that is, of “a capacity (to act on the basis of an ought)” (ibid., p. 44), or, a capacity to act as morality demands in the face of inclinations which would suggest otherwise. Yet even Allison’s description of the Fact of Reason – a “brute given” (ibid., p. 233) in our common moral consciousness – avoids explicit appeal to “experiencing” the moral law. Instead, Allison speaks of “the consciousness of standing under the moral law” and “the consciousness . . . of particular moral constraints as they arise in the process of practical deliberation” (ibid., p. 233, emphases added). Allison’s insistence that we cannot experience spontaneity or moral demands thus depends on a fine line being drawn between these “consciousnesses” and “awarenesses” on the one hand, and full “experience” of something on the other. We have the former, but not the latter. 6 “It is hard to see,” says Ameriks, “how any philosopher today can flatly assert that ‘we must regard ourselves as free,’ even if only from ‘a practical perspective’” (Fate of Autonomy, p. 73). Such appeal, he says, is not nearly as “common” as Korsgaard, or Kant, would hope: “it certainly appears that many agents can and do get along in a lot of action without indulging in a commitment to any strong presumption of absolute freedom” (ibid., p. 147). Ameriks insists that any appeal to what he, and Kant, have called the point of view of common human understanding must be accomplished without appeal to implausible claims of “absolute freedom.”

34

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

sort of appeal to a commonly shared point of view on our agency. But even Ameriks does not use the language of “experience” to describe that common starting point, preferring instead to speak of what is “given” to us in “‘popular’ examples” or “moral judgment.”7 All these commentators appeal to some irreducible consciousness, conception or judgment, one which demands of us that we think about things practically that could not be considered theoretically. Yet all of them also carefully avoid the language of “experience” (Erfahrung) to describe this grounding encounter, conception or judgment. As we have seen, there are good interpretive reasons for doing so: universal and necessary claims cannot be grounded in experience. Further, to assert experiences of those noumenal objects most central to practical philosophy – the moral law and/or freedom – would fly in the face of Kant’s first Critique assertion that we cannot have experiences of such intelligible concepts because we lack the corresponding sensible intuition which would give them objective reality.8 These interpreters have good reason, then, to avoid appealing to experience. But despite the prima facie cogency of the interpretive tendencies of these commentators, Kant himself does appeal to what can only be described as common human experiences at the ground of practical philosophy, and this seems to push him precariously toward incoherence. Several examples can be given of Kant appealing to experience both as a starting point for practical reflection, and as further proof of 7 Ibid., p. 62. Interestingly, though, once we recall that the consciousness Allison believes us to have is not so much of freedom, but rather that “we are directly aware of a capacity . . . to act on the basis of an ought,” it becomes difficult to distinguish Ameriks’ position from Allison’s. Allison’s consciousness of the capacity to act on the basis of an ought is very similar to that which Ameriks would assert to be found in “popular moral judgments.” Certainly, Ameriks rejects an “absolute,” that is, an incompatibilist, form of freedom, while Allison defends this. But both begin by appealing to a practical encounter that remains short of a practical experience of freedom. 8 A good place to look for the constraints on practical concepts that arise from first Critique considerations is the second Critique, where Kant reminds the reader of his first Critique conclusions: “If anything is still wanting, it is the condition for the application of these categories and especially that of causality to objects, namely intuition; where this is not given, application with a view to theoretical cognition of an object as a noumenon is made impossible, so that such cognition, when someone ventures upon it, is altogether forbidden (as also happens in the Critique of Pure Reason)” (5:54/47, emphases removed). Likewise, the ground of moral concepts like obligation cannot be found in empirical experience: “[W]ith respect to moral laws, experience is (alas!) the mother of illusion, and it is most reprehensible to derive the laws concerning what I ought to do from what is done, or to want to limit it to that” (A318–319/B375; 398, emphases removed).

response to immediate objections: experience

35

already completed philosophical reflection. In Groundwork i, he describes the experience of someone who encounters a conflict between happiness and obligation as a common starting point of practical philosophy: “the human being feels within himself a powerful counterweight to all the commands of duty” (4:405/17). He does not use the language of “experience” (Erfahrung) here, but it is difficult to say that feeling the weight of duty in competition with the weight of the demands of self-love is not a temporal human “experience” of some sort. Allison might say that this man is thinking, or conceiving, but not experiencing this conflict. But that doesn’t seem the most obvious or intuitive way to describe what is going on. This feeling of the struggle between happiness and morality is, after all, something that occurs temporally, and it is strange to say that something that occurs in time is not an experience. Later, Kant suggests, still without explicit appeal to “experience,” that humans have what is very tempting nonetheless to call a common experience – one which “reaches consciousness immediately” (4:451/ 56). This consciousness we have is of being free, that is, of being active in relation to the production of one’s judgments. We discover this “by means of the difference noticed between representations given us from somewhere else and in which we are passive, and those that we produce simply from ourselves and in which we show our activity” (4:451/56), that is, by means of differences we discover in our experiences of different sorts of relations to our mental contents. Here, too, it is difficult to say that an immediate, felt consciousness in which we compare mental representations to one another in time is not some sort of human experience.9

9 Allison would again, I assume, insist on drawing a distinction between “consciousness” and “experience,” saying that we have a consciousness, but not an experience of this mental activity. What would it mean, though, for me to be conscious of being active or passive in relation to my representations without actually having at least a temporal experience of myself as active or passive? Perhaps this consciousness lacks sensible intuition, whereas experience is consciousness accompanied by sensible intuition. Yet consciousness in this sense would still be “experience” in a less strict sense, that is, something that goes on for a human agent in time, and has a relation to intuition in that minimal sense. Further, not calling this an experience in some sense leaves the impression that what is going on is less experientially robust than in fact it is. We are not simply conceiving here, or deducing something logically. We are having a particular experience in our mental representations, indeed, one which occurs via “feeling” (4:450/56). Our eventual appeal to “phenomenological experience” will provide more robust language for this kind of human experience.

36

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

Our best evidence, though, is when Kant appeals explicitly to experience in the familiar Gallows example in the Critique of Practical Reason. There, as he introduces the example of someone who recognizes himself as both obligated and free, he states that “experience [Erfahrung] . . . confirms” his claims about obligation and freedom (5:30/27). Similarly, explicit appeal to the word “experience” – now connecting it to morally important feelings – is found even as early as in the Groundwork where, when speaking of the moral feeling of respect, Kant asserts that this feeling “which yield(s) no object at all for experience” nonetheless is “an effect that admittedly lies in experience [Erfahrung]” (4:460/64, emphases added). So, whereas Kant interpreters have avoided attributing to him any appeals to experience to make sense of practical philosophy, Kant himself, both indirectly and directly, utilizes such appeals liberally; the challenge is to make sense of how this appeal is a coherent one.10 Two ways of appealing to experience. To approach this challenge, let us first think more carefully about how Kant himself has used experience to ground knowledge claims. One usually thinks immediately, of course, of an inductive appeal to empirical experience, a way of appealing to experience of objects distinct from us to ground synthetic a posteriori knowledge claims.11 Here, one appeals to repeated experience of the relationship of various objects of experience to establish a knowledge claim that holds with empirical generality: after repeated experience of the relationship of various objects in my experience, I claim to know, for example, that a flame will cause the sensation of burning in my hand. Furthermore, these inductive claims are typically causal claims about experience and, as such, “cannot provide us with any relation of cause to effect except between two objects of experience” (4:460/64). When we rely on induction, we thus rely on

10 In the forthcoming account of how appeal to experience can be accepted in Kant’s practical philosophy, it is not my intention to prove that these, mostly constructivist, refusals of appeal to experience are wrong. Rather, I explore the path not taken by them, one in which an appeal to experience is legitimately at the very ground of practical philosophy. 11 See A8/B12, 142: “It is . . . experience on which the possibility of the synthesis of the predicated of weight with the concept of body is grounded, since both concepts, though the one is not contained in the other, nevertheless belong together, though only contingently, as parts of a whole, namely experience, which is itself a synthetic combination of intuitions.”

response to immediate objections: experience

37

repeated experiences of relationships between objects of experience to provide evidence for justification of our claim. Obviously, if this were the kind of experience and the mode of appealing to it which Kant used in his practical philosophy, then we would be in trouble. Even if we could find a way of placing noumenal things like obligation and freedom within empirical experience, inductive appeal to that experience would undermine the a priority of claims which relied upon it evidentially for their justification. Inductive conclusions hold only with empirical generality. Already, in Chapter 1, one way was suggested for how Kant will avoid these problems: he will rely on phenomenological instead of empirical experience. We will consider the import of this appeal as this chapter continues. But there is, first, a further introductory point. Even in his theoretical philosophy, and even when he speaks simply of empirical experience, Kant had another way of appealing to that empirical experience to ground knowledge claims. This is, of course, his famous appeal to the conditions for the possibility of experience, a mode of grounding synthetic a priori knowledge claims. Reminding ourselves of the general contours of this appeal to experience will open up possibilities for understanding the routes Kant has open to him when appealing argumentatively to “experience.” First, Kant found necessary relationships in the ordering of representations in empirical experience itself. He did this by looking at very precise sorts of experiences, like our experience of perceiving a house, as opposed to our experience of watching a ship travel from up stream to down stream.12 These experiences, because they contain necessity within them, can thereby be said to encapsulate various synthetic a priori judgments. Because, for example, of the necessary relationship of representations we experience when we watch a ship moving from up stream to down stream, we can say of all such experiences – let’s call them “events,” “occurrences,” or “happenings” – that every event has a cause, and this is a claim that turns out to be a synthetic a priori knowledge claim. Kant can now seek not whether such synthetic a priori claims are actual but, more modestly, how they are possible.13 He seeks, that is, conditions for the possibility of experiences that contain necessary 12 See A192/B237, 306–307. 13 “The real problem of pure reason is now contained in the question: How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” (B19, 146).

38

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

relations, and thus deduces from them synthetic a priori knowledge claims about the pure concepts of the understanding which we bring to experience so as to structure it as we in fact already find it to be, that is, as containing necessary relations. As he famously states: “we can extract as clear concepts from experience only because we have put them into experience, and experience is hence first brought about through them” (A196/B241, 308–309). In finding such conditions, Kant justifies our synthetic a priori attribution of “cause” to “event.” We can, that is, through appeal to these pure concepts, provide a rational explanation of how it is that the necessary connections of representations we find in experience are possible. One can argue quite a bit about the exact details of Kant’s arguments in the Second Analogy, and many will have quibbles with me about the precise way I describe things here. Few, however, would argue with my main point: in these arguments to defend synthetic a priori claims, Kant starts by appealing to experience. We experience a ship. We experience a house. But the way he uses these empirical experiences is not as the basis of an inductive claim. We don’t need to watch the ship move from up stream to down stream many times, then assert that this holds generally, admitting that it might not hold that way in the future. Rather, we look at perhaps only one experience of a ship moving down stream, and notice there is something interesting about the very structure of that sort of experience; its component parts are related in distinctive ways. For the ship, this distinctive structure is that the representations which compose the experience cannot be ordered in just any way, by my choice.14 Rather, they are forced upon me in a particular order, a necessary order. I thus discover necessity in experience, and need to figure out how to make sense of its appearance in my experience. Further, the way in which Kant appeals to experience here, as opposed to in inductive claims, is to pay attention to it. Instead of looking to a variety of similar experiences to get some sense of statistical regularity among them, one instead looks very closely at an individual experience so as to appreciate its structure. The interesting

14 “I see a ship driven downstream. My perception of its position downstream follows the perception of its position upstream, and it is impossible that in the apprehension of this appearance the ship should first be perceived downstream and afterwards upstream. The order in the sequence of the perceptions in apprehension is therefore here determined, and the apprehension is bound to it” (A192/B237, 307).

response to immediate objections: experience

39

thing Kant discovers in the event of the ship moving down stream is that our mental representations have a necessary ordering and connection. It is worth noting that it is this way of attending to a singular experience that helps to assure the a priori status of any claims emerging from this argument. Here, Kant sidesteps any inductive appeal to experience. He does not rely upon repeated experiences of the same relationship, and thus does not need to hang his epistemic hopes on whether what is experienced now will repeat itself in the future. Our epistemic hopes depend upon experience in a different way than this: instead of depending upon repeated experiences of the same relation, we attend to a singular experience, and discover within it something that presents itself as necessary. This attentive act on experience, which reveals the necessary ordering of our representations, is the starting point for a transcendental argument. It is followed, that is, by a series of inferences which lead us back to the conditions for the possibility of having just that kind of experience. We could not have made this move backwards, though, until we had looked at the initial experience carefully, so as to know what exactly it was for which we were seeking the condition. Attention to individual experiences is thus the first step in transcendental arguments. It is wrong, then, to say that one cannot rely on experience when grounding synthetic a priori claims. Rather, it is by relying on experience in a noninductive way that Kant extracts from empirical experience what was always already there waiting in it to be seen, viz., the necessity of the ordering of its constituent representations and the a priori conditions for such necessity. We need to be careful, then, when we appeal to “experience” to ground knowledge claims. The careful Kantian will ask: in what way are we appealing to experience? Are we making an inductive appeal to experience to ground a synthetic a posteriori claim? Or are we attentively analyzing the structure of experience so as to find necessity in it and thus begin transcendental arguments for synthetic a priori claims? Once this distinction between inductive and attentive appeal to experience is drawn, we can ask whether Kant can rely upon attentive and transcendental appeal to experience to affirm practical synthetic a priori claims like “my will is categorically obligated,” or “my will is positively free.” Do we have experiences of necessity on the practical level, and can we do with them what Kant did with his experience of the ship? That is, can we be attentive to their structure, seeking out the

40

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

necessity implicit in them, and then seek the transcendental conditions for such necessity? Are his appeals to a man experiencing the conflict between happiness and morality, or to the common person recognizing the difference between being active instead of passive in relation to her mental representations in fact something like these first Critique appeals to the ship and house? There are two concerns to address here. The first is a worry about the kind of experience to which we would appeal: it seems that any practical experience of necessity would involve illicit appeal to the empirical experience of noumenal things, like freedom, or the moral law. The second worry is about what we would do with this experience: pursuit of the conditions for the possibility of experience to the practical realm seems to result in a regressive argument that moves illicitly from empirical experience back to an ontological claim about noumenal causes of it. The shared concern of both these worries is that we cannot apply a method appropriate to phenomenal objects of experience to our practical concerns, which involve significant noumenal content; doing so would violate the limits of reason asserted by Kant in the first Critique. Let us consider each of these concerns in turn in order to determine the extent to which they do and don’t prevent Kant from bringing an attentive reflection upon experience to his grounding of practical philosophy.

ii. A new kind of experience: phenomenological, not empirical Our first worry is whether Kant can appeal to an experience of necessity that includes content such as “the moral law” or “freedom” without violating the limits of experience identified in the first Critique. We have already, however, in Chapter 1, drawn a distinction between empirical and phenomenological experience to help us here. It is time to explore phenomenological experience to appreciate why appeal to it allows Kant to avoid just this problem. To recap, empirical experience is third-personal in nature; it is the experience of objects distinct from the experiencing subject. When we take the attitude of science, of theoretical philosophy, or of certain approaches to practical philosophy, we bring a third-personal attitude to the object we hope to know. But phenomenological experience is irreducibly subjective and first-personal; a felt experience of oneself as an acting agent.

response to immediate objections: experience

41

Kant does indeed utilize this first-personal phenomenological experience to present noumenally weighty things such as awareness of obligation and freedom. As we have already seen, in the Gallows Man example of the second Critique, Kant presents a man who discovers, through first-personal reflection, that “he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it” (5:30/27–28). He has, in other words, an experience of the moral law weighing upon him. The Gallows Man is simply experiencing himself as being obligated categorically; this is, apparently, something Kant considers capable of being presented in experience.15 If we remind ourselves, further, that a claim such as “the will is obligated categorically” is a synthetic a priori claim,16 then we see that Kant has just appealed to first-personal experience to present a practical synthetic a priori claim of necessity: the obligation to tell the truth is something this man experiences as categorically necessary, that is, as holding no matter what pressures it puts on his love of life. We will consider in later chapters both how Kant came to the point of accepting that we do have the experience of practical necessity – that is, of categorical obligation – (for he did not have such confidence in the Groundwork),17 and how he relies upon that experience to ground a practical cognition of the Fact of Reason. For the present, a previous concern presents itself: what is it in first-personal phenomenological experience that allows Kant confidently to use it to present experiences of categorical obligation or freedom? What is so distinctive about this inward turn toward first-personal experience that makes it capable, in some sense, of containing noumenal things? The short answer is that first-personal experience is felt experience. The man experiencing conflict at the end of Groundwork i “feels within himself a powerful counterweight to . . . duty” (4:405/17, emphasis added). Later in the Groundwork, the “commonest understanding” encounters the distinction between passive and active relation to her representations “by an obscure discrimination of judgments which it calls feeling” (4:450–451/56, emphasis added). Kant even suggests that the person of “common human understanding” can appreciate the

15 We will defend this claim in Chapter 7. 16 See 4:420/30. 17 “We shall . . . have to investigate entirely a priori the possibility of a categorical imperative, since we do not here have the advantage of its reality being given in experience, so that the possibility would be necessary not to establish it but merely to explain it” (4:419–420/30).

42

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

justification of moral principles through a sort of felt judgment: “anything empirical that might slip into our maxims . . . makes itself known at once by the feeling of gratification or pain that necessarily attaches to it” (5:91–92/77–78, emphasis added). Further, the “dissimilarity of determining grounds” of the will is made known by a “special kind of feeling” with which “the most common human understanding” is very familiar (5:91–92/77–78). Even in first-personal references that do not appeal directly to feeling, we find indirect appeal to felt experiences. For example, the friend of humanity in Groundwork i becomes “overclouded by his own grief,” and needs to “tear . . . himself out of [his] deadly insensibility” (4:398/11–12). What difference does it make, though, that these first-personal experiences are felt experiences? First, felt experience is not experience of empirical objects. Feeling does not refer to empirical objects in the way that a concept connected to an intuition through schematization would: The capacity for having pleasure or displeasure in a representation is called feeling because both [pleasure and displeasure] involve what is merely subjective in the relation of our representation and contain no relation at all to an object for possible cognition of it (or even cognition of our condition). While even sensations, apart from the quality (of, e.g., red, sweet, and so forth) they have because of the nature of the subject, are still referred to an object as elements in our cognition of it, pleasure or displeasure (in what is red or sweet) expresses nothing at all in the object but simply a relation to the subject. (6:211–212/12)18

Feeling is a thoroughly subjective experience because it does not get involved in the construction of a cognizable object of empirical experience. Sensations like red can be understood as subjective at least to the extent that they are experienced by the individual subject. But sensations also get involved in the theoretical cognitive process of identifying objects of empirical experience. Red, ultimately, despite its subjective origin, gets assigned to an empirical object: a red apple or a red fire engine. Feeling, however, is a thoroughly subjective experience in that, 18 See also 6:400/160, where Kant distinguishes a particular feeling (the moral feeling of respect) from moral sense theory by insisting that, whereas “by the word ‘sense’ [we would] usually understand a theoretical capacity for perception directed toward an object,” moral feeling “is something merely subjective, which yields no cognition” (6:400/160).

response to immediate objections: experience

43

while it too is subjectively experienced, it does not get involved in the construction of empirical objects of experience. It “expresses nothing at all in the object,” and instead gives us “simply a relation to the subject” with whatever is being experienced. These are reflections upon feeling which Kant did not articulate until the writing of the Metaphysics of Morals. But if we apply them as an interpretive lens for making sense of the use of felt experiences in his earlier practical works, an interesting thing emerges. When Kant appeals to felt experience to introduce experiences of obligation and freedom, we can, by appeal to this Metaphysics of Morals claim about the nature of feeling, avoid admitting that persons experiencing these feelings have actual, empirical objects connected to their experiences. This allows Kant’s claims about what goes on in these experiences to be more epistemically modest. He is not saying that these people are having some sort of quasimystical experience in space and time of an empirical object of experience beyond empirical experience (“freedom” or “the moral law”). These persons are not spectators to objects in the empirical world. Instead, via feelings, they encounter what we more properly call felt, phenomenological experiences of freedom and obligation. By appeal to feeling instead of sensation, Kant introduces an experience that is not an empirical experience of objects.19 These feelings do not refer to empirical objects of experience as such,20 and therefore do not issue in illicit knowledge of objects of freedom and obligation. Were Kant to appeal to the sensible intuitions (instead of mere feelings) of freedom or obligation (whose role is to assure that concepts do ultimately refer to an object of experience and contribute to assuring that we gain knowledge of that object), then such illicit

19 Although these feelings are subjective, they are nonetheless temporal experiences and, as such, are related to sensible intuition at least to this extent. But this experience, while being connected to a temporal intuition, is not an intuition that refers to empirical objects of temporal experience. By introducing something in time with only subjective significance, Kant thus expands his taxonomy of representations first noted in the first Critique, since there, he describes “intuition” as being an “objective perception” which “is immediately related to the object and is singular” (A320/B376–377; 398–399, emphasis added). Now, with the introduction of the category of representations called feelings, we have a perception which is related to intuition (since it is in time), and is immediate and singular, but does not relate to an object. 20 The feelings do, of course, occur within the context of experiences that are a part of the empirical world of objects. The felt aspect of these experiences, though, is not about those empirical objects. Instead, as we shall see, the feelings point us, mysteriously, toward other concerns beyond those objects.

44

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

results would follow. But, by appeal to feeling, he introduces an experience that is not an empirical experience of noumenal objects in the empirical world.21 We can thus distinguish first-personal, felt phenomenological experience from empirical experience of objects. And it makes good philosophical sense for Kant to do so: there is indeed something distinctively different about experiencing myself as an agent and experiencing a red apple hanging on a tree. It is in focusing on the first-personal, felt nature of some of our experiences, and refusing to grant an explicit object of experience to these experiences, that Kant makes philosophical sense of this common-sense difference in kinds of experiences. It also makes good interpretive sense to appeal to this new kind of phenomenological experience. This is a kind of experience that can contain what he needs it to for practical purposes without violating the limits of reason as set out in the first Critique. We can have an experience that involves categorical obligation, or that involves freedom, without asserting that “the moral law” or “freedom” has become an object of empirical experience.22 And whenever we do see Kant both appealing to experience in defending claims of practical philosophy and (apparently incoherently) insisting that we cannot appeal to experience to ground practical philosophy, appeal to the distinction between empirical and phenomenological experience saves him from contradiction. Consider, for example, two apparently contradictory claims: whatever needs to draw the evidence for its reality from experience must be dependent for the grounds of its possibility upon principles of experience, whereas pure but practical reason, by its very concept, cannot possibly be held to be dependent in this way. (5:47/41)

21 The traditional phenomenologist will worry about this “object-less” quality of this experience, since phenomenological experience is historically understood as experience with an intentional object. This need not be a cause of concern, however. We are not saying that feeling has no intentional structure; to the contrary, it can hold meaning and be about something. Yet this thing which the feeling is about is not an empirical object as such. It finds its intentional meaning in representations with intelligible content instead of in an empirical object. For further consideration of feeling as intentional, see my Kant and the Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption and Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2005). 22 Indeed, as we shall see, the content of our felt experience contains only the effects of these mysterious objects, and not the objects themselves.

response to immediate objections: experience

45

One would never have ventured to introduce freedom into science had not the moral law, and with it practical reason, come in and forced this concept upon us. But experience also confirms this order of concepts in us. (5:30/27)

Without the distinction between empirical and phenomenological experience, we would need to admit that Kant flatly contradicts himself: he first argues that we cannot rely upon experience in grounding practical claims, and then goes on to rely on experience to ground practical claims. But we can resolve apparent contradictions like this easily by appealing to phenomenological instead of empirical experience in the grounding of practical philosophical claims. Furthermore, the distinction between empirical and phenomenological experience is a more attractive interpretive option than the others currently available for making sense of how to talk about our encounter with intelligible things. Allison, in order to avoid admitting experience of intelligible things, draws a fine, and unconvincing, distinction between consciousness and experience of freedom and moral obligation, saying that we have the former, but not the latter. We are thus asked to accept either of two undesirable propositions: either consciousness of intelligible things related to morality (here, most especially free rational agency, but also consciousness of “particular moral constraints as they arise in the process of practical deliberation”)23 is not a temporal thing (because not an experience, and so not in space or time); or this consciousness does occur in time, but is somehow not really an experience. But our distinction between empirical and phenomenological experience gives us a third option: a temporal experience that is not an empirical experience of objects. We thus have a new, powerful interpretive tool for approaching those aspects of the intelligible world most basic to morality. Appeal to feeling also helps us to understand why Kant provides a first-personal instead of a third-personal introduction to practical philosophy. Phenomenological experiences must rely upon feeling in order to gain access to things that experience of empirical objects cannot. But we cannot access feeling third-personally; one cannot experience another’s feelings, through a spectatorial view on that person. Rather, one can only access one’s own feelings. First-personal

23 Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 233.

46

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

experience is thus necessary for gaining access to our practical lives, whereas a third-personal approach would be inadequate to that task. We can thus appeal to temporal experience of obligation and freedom without violating theoretical epistemic constraints on what objects of experience we can have. Just as Kant relied upon empirical experience to provide him with experiences of the ship and the house to initiate his theoretical philosophizing, so he can rely upon felt, objectless phenomenological experiences that point the experiencing agent toward freedom or categorical obligation to initiate his practical philosophizing.

iii. New ways of appealing to experience: wonder and attentiveness Introduction. What philosophical use can be made of such felt, phenomenological experiences? The possibilities seem limited to the two ways we have already considered: either an inductive argument resulting in a synthetic a posteriori knowledge claim, or a transcendental argument resulting in ultimate grounding of a synthetic a priori knowledge claim. We know, though, that the first route of inductive appeal to experience is out of bounds: subjective, felt experience is not the sort of thing to which a scientist would appeal in making inductive claims; or, if she did, it would be in an effort to turn it into an objectively observable experience. What, then, about using felt experience as a basis for a transcendental argument that finds the conditions for its possibility? Trying to do this with our experience of obligation also seems to get us into some difficulties. To find the condition of this experience of categorical obligation would, after all, mean to find, well, the moral law itself, an ontologically existing noumenal object which causes and justifies my experience of categorical obligation. This suggests, though, an illicit epistemic regression from experience back to its noumenal (instead of merely epistemic) ground, thereby once again violating the limits of reason Kant established in the first Critique. Allison has clarified this concern clearly. We are, through transcendental argument, entitled to arrive at an “epistemic condition,” that is, “a necessary condition for the representation of objects.”24 These

24 Ibid., p. 4.

response to immediate objections: experience

47

conditions are those we need to assume since the world as we experience it (as opposed to the world as it might be in itself) is the way it is. In assuming them, we appeal only to those further aspects of our own mind that allow us to experience the world of objects. But when we assert a felt experience of being obligated, it seems the required condition for this experience (not, itself, an experience of an “object”) would not merely be an aspect of my mind; it would have to be the noumenal object of the moral law itself. In moving backwards from experience to that noumenal object, we would thus purport to accomplish just what Kant asserts is impossible, viz., to understand the workings of noumenal causes or objects upon phenomenal (or, here, phenomenological) experience. Kant thus cannot simply use the method of transcendental deduction utilized in the first Critique to establish new knowledge claims based on phenomenological experiences. This does not, however, mean that we cannot apply certain aspects of the method of transcendental argumentation to the practical realm. We cannot claim to know the condition of such experiences, that is, their noumenal causes. Yet Kant insists that we can – and must – consider this inaccessible noumenal cause not as an object of knowledge, but as an object of wonder and mystery. Further, the model of transcendental argument as we’ve considered it points us toward another, more thoroughly epistemic (instead of ontological) option still open to us: get to know the experience itself, really well; that is, attend carefully to the structure of experiences, especially those which contain necessity within them. Let us consider each of these ways of utilizing the felt experience of freedom or categorical obligation in turn. The moral law as an object of wonder. First, we cannot provide a transcendental argument leading back to theoretical knowledge of ontological conditions which both cause felt experiences and justify the truth of synthetic a priori claims (like “the will is categorically obligated”) implicit in them. Whatever we call our relationship to this unknowable cause of our felt experience, it is not theoretical cognition. We have, rather, at the boundary of the limits of both theoretical and practical human knowledge, entered into a different way of relating to the objects of our practical concern, a way of wonder. For finite beings, this cause – what will eventually be identified as the moral law itself – is an object not of knowledge but of wonder.

48

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

To appeal to the moral law as an object of wonder is not, however, to abandon any hope of practical cognition. Rather, admission of our lack of theoretical cognition of the cause of our felt experience takes us one step closer to articulating a different sort of objective cognition; not a theoretical one in which the point of the cognition is to know an object, but a practical one in which, ironically, the cognizer does not know the object of cognition. As such, even the introduction of wonder to practical philosophy will be the result of careful consideration of the nature of our mental capacities, of reason itself, and of our status as finite beings. To appreciate this, reflect upon the limits of our cognition: finite rational beings cannot construct the moral law as an intelligible object for theoretical cognition. Kant affirms this throughout his practical philosophy, but especially in the second Critique: If anything is still wanting [in the possibility of such cognition], it is the condition for the application of these categories and especially that of causality to objects, namely intuition; where this is not given, application with a view to theoretical cognition of an object as a noumenon is made impossible, so that such cognition, when someone ventures upon it, is altogether forbidden. (5:54/47, emphases removed)

Because we have no intuition of either freedom or the moral law to match our concepts of the same, we cannot have a theoretical cognition of such things. To say that we do have, instead of a sensible intuition, a sensible feeling of obligation or freedom changes nothing here since, as we have seen, feeling is not involved in the construction of objects of theoretical cognition in the way that sensible intuition of them would be. We do not, however, therefore abandon any thought about the intelligible cause of our felt experience. Instead, we take that felt experience as an opportunity to wonder at its unknowable intelligible cause. The textual ground for so doing is found in the same section where Kant referred to feeling to identify first-personal, phenomenological experience. In this section, we discover that while felt experience does not refer to empirical objects, it does involve appeal if not to intelligible objects, at least to representations with intelligible content: “feeling . . . is the effect of a representation (that may be either sensible or intellectual) upon a subject and belongs to sensibility, even though the representation itself may belong to the understanding or to reason” (6:212n/12n).

response to immediate objections: experience

49

To be sure, some causes of feelings are merely sensible and, thus, knowable. But because no felt experience refers to an empirical object, it is also a potentially hybrid sensible–intellectual experience: certain sensible feelings could have not a sensible, but an intellectual cause. Such feeling still “belongs” to sensibility; it is a sensible experience.25 But, even as we admit that we could never know the cause of these feelings, it remains possible to think about sensible, felt experiences being caused by and related to intellectual representations. We thus find the basis for taking felt experience as the mental space within which we access, via wonder, intelligible objects beyond our knowledge. Admitting intelligible content to the sources of our feelings provides a structure for doing what Kant told us, back in the first Critique, we could legitimately do with things beyond the realm of empirical experience: you can’t know them, but you can think about them!26 In the first Critique, Kant spoke only briefly of this possibility; but now, through appeal to discussions in the Metaphysics of Morals, we can speak more precisely of the mental structures that allow such thought. It is not just that the realm of logical possibility provides potential topics for thought. That realm is, after all, rather large, and does little to help us identify objects of thought. We find ways to narrow down more promising objects for thought by appealing to felt experiences with intelligible content. Although full articulation of this role for felt experience does not occur until the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant considered the possibility of sensible felt experience with a mysterious intellectual cause long before that. A point he makes in the Groundwork, which, on its own, appears cryptic, is now clear. Having introduced the mysterious idea that the moral law causes a feeling of respect that moves us “in conformity with its principles” (4:460/64), Kant suggests this influence of reason could “yield no object at all for experience,” but is, nonetheless, “the cause of an effect that admittedly lies in experience” (4:460/64). This is the same point made in the Metaphysics of Morals passage just discussed: feeling cannot construct objects of 25 “[F]eeling . . . belongs to sensibility, even though the representation itself [which is its cause] may belong to understanding or reason” (6:212n/12n). 26 “To cognize an object, it is required that I be able to prove its possibility (whether by the testimony of experience from its actuality or a priori through reason). But I can think whatever I like, as long as I do not contradict myself, i.e., as long as my concept is a possible thought, even if I cannot give any assurance whether or not there is a corresponding object somewhere within the sum total of all possibilities” (Bxxviin, 115n).

50

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

experience, but felt experiences point us back mysteriously toward that experience’s intelligible cause. This appeal to mystery about the most central object of morality, the moral law, should not alarm us; indeed, affirmations of the inscrutability of the moral law, and even of the practicality of pure reason itself, abound in Kant’s practical philosophy. For example: It is . . . no censure of our deduction of the supreme principle of morality, but a reproach that must be brought against human reason in general, that it cannot make comprehensible as regards its absolute necessity an unconditional practical law (such as the categorical imperative must be); for, that it is unwilling to do this through a condition – namely by means of some interest laid down as a basis – cannot be held against it, since then it would not be the moral law, that is, the supreme law of freedom. And thus we do not indeed comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative, but we nevertheless comprehend its incomprehensibility; and this is all that can fairly be required of a philosophy that strives in its principles to the very boundary of human reason. (4:463/66)

Kant’s refusal to admit an empirical condition or “interest” that explains our adherence to the moral law (and instead his insistence that we appeal to this strange moral feeling of respect with its inscrutable source as the basis of our nonempirical interest in the moral law) is precisely what pushes practical philosophy “to the very boundary of human reason.” We will not settle for a moral law that holds with mere empirical generality; as such, we must admit a certain inscrutability to our investigations.27 Furthermore, this inscrutability is something upon which we must reflect, as a moral duty. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant asserts that “obligation with regard to moral feeling can be only to cultivate it and to strengthen it through wonder at its inscrutable source” 27 The exact limit between knowledge and mystery shifts for Kant from this early point to his Metaphysics of Morals discussions of mystery. Here, he asserts that “we do not indeed comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative,” that is, we do not comprehend the categorical nature of moral demands. We shall see, however, in Part ii that this limit is tied to his hesitation to admit an experience of being categorically obligated. And we’ll see, in Chapters 7 and 8, that he ultimately does welcome just such an experience. Once he does so, the “incomprehensibility” of morality shifts from the incomprehensibility of categorical obligation to an incomprehensibility of the noumenal causes which ground such categorical demands.

response to immediate objections: experience

51

(6:399–400/160). Kant’s conviction here is that wondrous reflection on the inscrutable source of the moral law will strengthen our initial felt experience of its constraint upon us. Wonder thus underscores the categorical nature of the experience: it is only through appeal to admittedly mysterious causes that we will confirm truly categorical obligation. Reminding ourselves, then, that our obligations do have this inscrutable source is another way of affirming their categorical nature. It is thus both philosophically and morally important to recognize wonder, alongside knowledge, as a means of accessing things that are crucial to our moral lives. Indeed, Kant is happy to admit not only that we cannot explain this strange causal connection between an intelligible object and a sensible feeling, but also that, in virtue of this limit, “it is impossible for us to explain . . . how pure reason can be practical, and all the pains and labors of seeking an explanation of it are lost” (4:461/ 65). This is a powerful claim! Assuring the practicality of pure reason is the ultimate concern of Kant’s practical philosophy. But we will accomplish that task only once we simultaneously admit something wondrous, “inscrutable” and “incomprehensible” at the source of our investigations. We can affirm that pure reason is practical, but there will remain something mysterious about how reason accomplishes this practicality. We thus abandon efforts, as epistemologists, to provide a transcendental argument that affirms the conditions for the possibility of this felt experience. To this extent, a practical philosophy relying on felt experience must differ from the route Kant took in making sense of the movement of a ship down stream in the Second Analogy. That method of transcendental argument in the theoretical realm does, however, provide a model for approaching things in the practical realm: when the limits of reason prevent us from seeking transcendental conditions for felt experience, we rely instead upon a felt relationship of wonder to the inscrutable cause of that experience. Attending to our moral experiences. Kant’s Second Analogy model for transcendental argument does, however, provide us with a final methodological guideline for approaching practical philosophy: just as Kant, previous to his pursuit of transcendental conditions, paid attention to the structure of the experience of the ship moving down stream in order to discover necessity already within that experience, so too the practical philosopher can, without violating the limits of reason, pay attention to felt phenomenological experiences to affirm the necessity implicit in them. For, although the intelligible causes of felt experience

52

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

are only objects of wonder, not knowledge, this does not mean their effects are similarly mysterious. To the contrary, while the intelligible causes of feelings are mysterious, the feelings themselves are quite common, knowable, and even painfully familiar. They are, therefore, apt objects for investigation. Kant affirms this in the second Critique, when he notes that, while the moral law is inscrutable, “what happens to the human faculty of desire as an effect of that determining ground upon it” (5:72/62), or “what [the moral law] effects (or, to put it better, must effect) in the mind” (5:72/62–63), is indeed a possible and worthy topic for consideration. We cannot explain how it is that such feelings become part of human experience; but we can attend to the feelings themselves, learning from our phenomenological experiences of them. Attentive reflection upon felt, phenomenological experience of necessity thus becomes a third way, alongside induction and transcendental argument, to utilize experience as the ground of cognitions – here, the ground of practical, synthetic a priori cognitions. I mentioned attentiveness as a mode for pursuing practical cognitions in Chapter 1. There, we noted simply that attentiveness should be distinguished from logical inference and deduction, and also that both the common person and the moral philosopher must engage in it; the former, to recognize the demands of morality, and the latter, to access superphenomenal objects of philosophical concern. Now that we have the model of the Second Analogy in front of us, though, we can say more about exactly what this attentiveness is. As with all other claims of this chapter, full realization of the method of attentiveness will only occur later on, in Parts ii and iii, and especially in Chapter 11, when we utilize this method to affirm objective practical cognitions. For the present, we seek only the more modest goal of articulating what attentiveness is so that we will be able to recognize it when we turn to analysis of Kant’s texts. Recall first Kant’s method in the Second Analogy. Instead of amassing a statistically significant number of similar experiences to ground an inductive claim, Kant instead turns to a method of appealing to experience that holds more a priori promise: he identifies a singular, distinctive experience (viz., of the ship moving down stream). This method promises an a priori outcome because we needn’t await future repetition of the same sort of experience as evidence to confirm our knowledge claims about experience; instead, we simply attend carefully to the structure of one carefully chosen experience, the

response to immediate objections: experience

53

necessity discovered therein will be our evidence. As such, we once again have a more promising starting point for a priori claims: if we can start with a claim of necessity within experience, we can pull claims of necessity out of experience, thereby avoiding the mere synthetic a posteriori outcome of empirical generality. First, then, Kant looked at this experience of the ship with care, attentively. That care led him to recognize the necessary ordering of representations already present in the experience. Note, though, this attentiveness to the motion of the ship is not, in itself, an effort to go behind that experience to get to its causes; that would be the job of transcendental argument proper, the search for conditions for the possibility of the experience. In this previous moment of attentiveness, one instead stays riveted on what one finds in experience, seeking to understand it as clearly as possible. This same sort of care and close observation of experience is what we describe as attentiveness, and such attentiveness can be brought not only to empirical experiences of objects in the world, but also to first-personal felt experiences of agency; indeed, since, in the practical realm, one cannot go behind one’s experience, except as an exercise in wonder, this previous stage of attentiveness becomes all the more important. Let us dwell more upon how this first stage of attentiveness is to be distinguished from the stage of logical deduction found in the conclusion of a transcendental argument. As philosophers, we are accustomed to establishing premises of an argument for the explicit purpose of going beyond those premises, via inference, to a new thing, the conclusion of the argument. That is the point of argument and inference: to lead us to a new thing that can now be established as a knowledge claim. Transcendental argument, as Kant utilizes it in the first Critique, is similar in this regard to traditional logical argument: Kant moves from the premise of necessary relations in our experience of the ship, via the inference that these necessary relations must have a condition, to something new beyond that experience, viz., to pure concepts of the understanding. The method of attentiveness, in contrast, cannot move behind or beyond the original grounding experience, which is its object. Whatever further claims we get to through close investigation of our experience, we must not, technically, move to a “new” thing – that is, to a new object that was not in our original experience – but instead simply to a clearer, deeper articulation of what was always already within the original grounding experience itself. This deeper articulation of

54

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

experience is akin to Kant’s recognition of the necessary ordering of representations in what is otherwise a simple everyday experience of a ship moving down stream. Would we do better, though, to call the movement to these deeper, more clearly articulated aspects of our experience an “inference”? The word is not apt for the method of attentiveness, because it implies that we move from this to that; but in being attentive, we do not move to a new object of knowledge at all. Instead, we stay with the original experience that was always already given to us. The crucial aspect of attentiveness to appreciate, then, is that attending to an experience is not something that either begins from or results in traditional logical inference. It does not begin from logical inference because it instead begins simply by looking at what is already given and present in our experience. We did not begin with one belief, which then leads us to infer another, which then provides us the beginning of our argument. We do not even begin by thinking at all! We begin by experiencing something, a kind of experience that Kant will eventually describe as something “forced” upon us.28 But neither does this grounding experience lead us to make logical inferences beyond it. This is because the results obtained from looking attentively at experience are better understood as looking more closely at that experience instead of as taking the experience as a premise which leads us beyond that premise to a further conclusion. The results of attentiveness are instead simply clearer and more morally and philosophically rigorous ways of describing what is already found in felt experience. There may, of course, be logical connections to be asserted of the complex parts of one’s experiences; but consideration of their relations to each other simply does not take us beyond that experience itself; it only reveals that original experience more fully as what it is. Nonetheless, the result will be a well-articulated knowledge claim about that experience itself. If, as with the ship example, we are able to find in that experience some indication of necessity of some sort, then that knowledge claim, although it is not a deduction to something beyond the experience and is only a clearer articulation of it, will furthermore have a priori (that is, strictly universal and necessary) status. There is a further distinction to draw between the method of attentiveness and traditional argument. When constructing an argument,

28 See, e.g., 5:31/28.

response to immediate objections: experience

55

one typically considers its grounding premises objectively, with thirdpersonal distance from them. The philosopher does not experience these premises first-personally; instead, she analyzes them, from a thirdpersonal perspective. Or, to the extent that the philosopher has a first-personal experience of her grounding premises, she seeks to distance herself from that experience, considering the premise objectively.29 Exactly the opposite is the case for the practical philosopher considering her felt experience as a premise of sorts grounding her practical cognition. This is, after all, a felt experience, and attending to that “premise” involves, well, feeling it as clearly, honestly and intensely as she can, getting everything that she can from it. This is not, however, a simple abandonment to that felt experience, for, as we shall see, being attentive centrally involves controlling those inclinations that define the dear self, and without such control, the clarity and honesty that one seeks from attentive consideration would be lost. Nonetheless, in attending to one’s felt experience, one fully enters the first-personal experience instead of trying to distance oneself from it, either by making it an object of third-personal consideration or by distorting it and making it seem to be something it is not. This is a crucial point for appreciating our emerging phenomenological method. The felt experience isn’t so much a theoretical premise for attentive consideration as it is its lifeblood. One cannot attend or reap the fruits of attentive consideration unless one is truly engaged with one’s felt experience. That is, after all, the only place from which to draw content for our attentive consideration: everything we’re attending to here is something beyond the reach of theoretical consideration. Attentive engagement with felt experience is not a process, then, of making logical inference from a third-personal perspective, taking certain facts of one’s experience as premises. Instead, it is an engagement with one’s felt experience, making more and more clear to oneself – often, though not always, through use of more precise philosophical terminology – the exact nature of that experience. I say that 29 Kant’s Second Analogy argument provides an interesting variant here: there, Kant is encouraging his reader to “experience” the ship going down stream. This is the aspect of the method of transcendental argument that has something in common with the method of attentiveness. It is not clear to me, however, that once the argument proceeds, Kant is asking us to “stay” with the experience. It is, after all, something that can be experienced third-personally, and which he wants to affirm as an object of experience. As such, it is more appropriate here to enter the third-personal perspective as the argument continues.

56

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

this is not always a matter of introducing more precise philosophical terminology because sometimes what is more necessary is a moral, as opposed to a philosophical, move. This will become clearer when we consider, in Part iii, Kant’s paradigmatic felt experience – that of the conflict between happiness and morality as expressed by the Gallows Man. A crucial question that remains outstanding is whether this nondeductive method of attentiveness to some felt phenomenological experience can indeed ground an objective, synthetic a priori practical cognition. Answering this question will, however, demand that we trace Kant’s efforts to rely upon attentiveness to various kinds of felt experiences, and this is the work of Parts ii and iii. What we shall see there is that it is not until Kant is willing to admit that we find practical necessity within the felt experience of categorical obligation – something that doesn’t happen until the second Critique – that we are able to ground objective synthetic a priori cognitions through attentiveness to that necessity. As with our theoretical epistemic concerns, we cannot get out of experience what we have not already put there ourselves. Once we identify that felt experience of necessity, though, attentiveness to it will reveal a strange epistemic beast: an objective cognition which cannot and need not know its object.

Conclusion The purpose of this chapter has been to assuage worries that Kant couldn’t even possibly have a route open to him for grounding objective a priori practical cognitions in an appeal to experience. This task is now accomplished; we know that Kant can rely upon attentive appeal to felt, phenomenological experience – instead of inductive appeal to empirical experience – to ground synthetic a priori practical cognitions without violating the limits of reason and without undermining the a priori status of the resulting claims. Current interpreters are wrong, then, to entirely eschew the language of experience in the grounding of Kant’s moral philosophy. When the fruits of this method are realized in later parts of this book, we will confirm what was only asserted in Chapter 1, viz., that attentive reflection on felt experience is the only means by which a practical philosopher can legitimately investigate superphenomenal objects of practical philosophy. Unlike in the argument of the Second Analogy, though, the epistemic price we pay for utilizing this method in the practical realm is

response to immediate objections: experience

57

that the ground of this necessity toward which we argue cannot be known as such. Rather, we can only point toward it, with an element of wonder remaining in our epistemic relationship to this ultimate object of our practical concern. The method of attentiveness to a felt phenomenological experience of necessity is thus a genuine method for grounding synthetic a priori knowledge claims, but it accomplishes this, in part, by admitting a mystery about the ultimate object of our practical concern.

3 RESPONSE TO IMMEDIATE OBJECTIONS: FEELING

Introduction We have, then, resolved the worry that Kant cannot appeal to experience in grounding a priori practical cognitions. It is time to turn to our second objector, who worries that reliance on contingent feelings to ground morality not only undermines a priori morality, but also turns Kant illicitly into a moral sense theorist. Kant does indeed reject moral sense theory for just the reason this objector presents, viz., that it would involve grounding morality in merely contingent feelings. Yet this objector has not looked completely at the kinds of feeling, and uses for it, which are possible for Kant. Kant needs to identify a common feeling that is not contingent (that is, does not have a contingent cause), and this route remains open to him. The challenge is to find a necessarily felt feeling that expresses a practical, necessitating determination of the will, but which is also truly common. He thus cannot appeal to feelings that could be felt only after achieving some high level of philosophical sophistication. Rather, he must find a necessary feeling that is also familiar – perhaps even painfully familiar – to all of us. Furthermore, even a noncontingent, common feeling must affirm the justificatory work of reason without replacing it. Felt experience cannot be what justifies the validity of the moral law. Another way of putting this point is to say that this feeling can play only an enabling instead of an evidential role in the justification of the moral law.1 That 1 We are following here a distinction made by both Saul Kripke (Naming and Necessity [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981]) and Timothy Williamson (Knowledge and its Limits [Oxford University Press, 2002]). Both argue that a priori knowledge can appeal to experience as long as experience plays an enabling instead of an evidential role

58

response to immediate objections: feeling

59

is, feeling could not prove practical cognitions, but could still be that upon which I rely to get epistemic access to the thing (for Kant, our rational natures) that will provide evidence or proof of practical cognitions. To clarify this important distinction between the evidential and the enabling, recall the argument of the Second Analogy discussed in Chapter 2. There, the necessity found implicit in the experience of the ship moving down stream played an evidential role in Kant’s argument. That is, the necessity found in this experience is evidence for, or proof of, the assertion that we have pure concepts of the understanding which structure empirical experience. This experience of necessity was not experiential evidence that might eventually be overturned by future experiences. Rather, the singular encounter with the necessary ordering of our representations was authoritative in itself. This experience identifies itself as something that could not be other than it is, and thus serves as evidential ground for an a priori claim based upon its very necessity. If it is possible to identify a similar encounter with necessity within our practical felt experience, it will thus be possible to rely upon that necessity in a similarly evidential role for a priori claims: just as the necessity found in empirical experience was evidence of pure concepts of the understanding, this practical necessity would now be evidence or proof of moral obligation. While necessity would thus play an evidential role in affirming an a priori claim of moral obligation, any feeling involved in the process of coming to an awareness of that practical necessity would not. The feeling would, rather, play only an epistemically “enabling” role. That is, the feeling would enable us to access something else – that is, the necessity implicit in our experience and whatever grounds that necessity – which would play the evidential role. But that something else would be something we couldn’t have gotten to unless we had the feeling. We thus anticipate an evidential role for the necessity we will encounter in practical felt experience, but only an enabling role for the feeling which will reveal that necessity.2 in the grounding of the knowledge claim. Both also go on to detach necessity from a priori knowledge claims, but I do not follow them in that move. 2 Some will find this argumentative move disingenuous: affirming necessary moral demands is the moral Philosopher’s Stone; how could one simply discover them in felt experience instead of arguing to them? This is the worry that prevents Kant himself from admitting a simple felt experience of categorical necessity until the second Critique. Yet such confidence in the thickness of our felt experience is the premise of our study of

60

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

Kant turns to the a priori, noncontingent moral feeling of respect to do this enabling work. Moral feeling, despite enabling us to affirm a practical necessitation of the will and the rational, noncontingent causes which assures this necessity, also remains a commonly felt human feeling. To respond to our objector, we thus first need to understand this a priori, common, moral feeling before considering, in general terms, how Kant will appeal to this feeling in justification of the moral law. With all of these pieces in place, we can return to the question of whether Kant’s use of moral feeling reduces to moral sense theory. Once we understand, on the one hand, exactly what moral sense theory is, and, on the other, the kind of appeal Kant makes to the a priori feeling of respect, we can confirm that Kant’s appeal to moral feeling is not moral sense theory. Rather, moral feeling plays an enabling instead of an evidential role in confirming the practicality of pure reason. Indeed, it is only through this feeling that we gain limited epistemic access to our noumenal rational natures.

i. The a priority of a common moral feeling A special, a priori feeling. We have seen in Chapter 2 how Kant intends to use feeling epistemically. Although felt experience cannot construct empirical or noumenal objects for experience and cannot ground theoretical cognitions, some feelings point toward representations with noumenal content, at which we wonder, as the causes of those feelings. This structure of sensible feelings with noumenal causes clarifies how Kant can respond to objections that felt practical claims cannot hold with necessity. If a feeling has a noumenal instead of a contingent, sensible cause, then it can hold with strict necessity instead of empirical generality. And appeal to that kind of feeling opens up a whole host of epistemic possibilities for its use even as appeal to it avoids moral sense theory. We shouldn’t be surprised to discover, then, that the moral feeling of respect perfectly fits the picture of feeling we have been drawing in Chapter 2: it is a sensible feeling with a mysterious, intelligible cause.

Kant’s practical philosophy grounded in attentiveness to common experience: necessity is to be discovered, not proven. Any proof of necessity to be found is thus to be found in the pudding; that is, it will depend upon the reader exploring her felt experience so as to assess whether Kant and I are right that necessity is to be discovered in it.

response to immediate objections: feeling

61

First, recall that even a feeling that is the effect of intelligible representations does, whatever its causes, “belong . . . to sensibility” (6:212n/12n). Moral feeling is just this kind of feeling: although it connects us to the intelligible object of the moral law, the feeling itself is sensible: “since respect is an effect on feeling and hence on the sensibility of a rational being, it presupposes this sensibility” (5:76/ 65). The sensible aspects of the feeling include both a negative “infringement upon the inclinations,” or even a “humiliat[ion]” of the “self-conceit” of placing satisfaction of one’s inclinations above the moral law (5:72–73/63), and a positive “respect” for (5:72/63) or “contemplat[ion] [of] the majesty of” (5:78/67) this same law that humiliates self-conceit, which is described as a “positive furthering of [the law’s] causality” (5:75/65) yielding an “elevating” feeling of “selfapprobation” (5:81/69). Further, this sensible feeling connects us to a rational, intelligible representation of the moral law and of ourselves as legislators of it. Through this feeling, we discover not only that “the moral law can exercise an effect on feeling” (5:74/64), but also that “the cause determining [this feeling]” – that is, the moral law – “lies in pure practical reason” (5:75/65). This feeling thus allows us to have an admittedly mysterious sense of “an intelligible cause, namely the subject of pure practical reason as the supreme lawgiver” (5:75/65), the intelligible cause, that is, of the feeling itself.3 Appreciation of this cause is, of course, limited in all the ways we discussed in Chapter 2: because we accomplish no transcendental deduction of this sensible experience, we relate to the cause of it not as an object of knowledge but of wonder. Kant himself emphasizes this limit upon human knowledge: “how a law can be of itself and immediately a determining ground of the will (though this is what is essential in all morality) is for human reason an insoluble problem” (5:72/62). He reminds us of this point in the Metaphysics of Morals: “Obligation with regard to moral feeling can be only to cultivate it and to strengthen it through wonder at its inscrutable source” (6:399–400/160, emphasis removed). Although the cause of moral feeling can be only an object of wonder, 3 The feeling Kant discovers thus points us toward our sense of being obligated and not – at least not directly – our sense of being free. For just this reason, he will abandon his Groundwork iii hopes that proof of the reciprocal relationship between the moral law and freedom could begin with a felt experience of freedom from which we would prove categorical obligation. He will, instead, have to work the other way around. Details of this will be discussed in Part ii.

62

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

our experience of moral feeling does, nonetheless, orient us toward this mysterious, intelligible cause. Further, because moral feeling has this intelligible causal history, it deserves the title of an “a priori” feeling. In this claim, Kant’s willingness to move into the realm of wonder gains its epistemic purpose. Were Kant not to appeal to an inscrutable intelligible cause accessible only via wonder, we would have only contingent causes upon which to rely in explaining this feeling, or any feeling; as we know, though – and our objector reminds us strenuously! – such causes would be inadequate for giving feeling a priori status. But because – and only because – Kant enters the realm of the wondrous, of the intelligible as seen through a glass darkly, we can now assert an a priori feeling. Kant asserts the a priori status of the moral feeling of respect repeatedly. He says the negative, constraining effect of the law on one’s inclinations “can be cognized a priori;” indeed, in such feelings of constraint “we have the first and perhaps the only case in which we can determine a priori from concepts the relation of a cognition (here the cognition of a pure practical reason) to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (5:72–73/63). The intelligible, a priori cause of this feeling of constraint is then described as “the subject of pure practical reason as the supreme lawgiver” (5:75/65), that is, one’s own intelligible self as legislator of the moral law. Moral feeling, because of this intelligible cause, is an a priori feeling. When Kant calls this feeling “a priori,” he does not mean that the feeling itself is somehow prior to experience; that would be nonsensical, for, as we saw in Chapter 2, every feeling, qua sensible feeling, is experienced in time even if it does not refer to an empirical object in space and time. Rather, when Kant calls moral feeling “a priori,” he means simply that this feeling, unlike others in our broad experience of feeling, does not have an empirical, contingent cause. Instead, its cause is intelligible. In virtue of this inscrutable intelligible cause, we can say that we experience the feeling of respect not only universally, but also necessarily. This is the true payoff of identifying respect as an a priori feeling. Without asserting an a priori intelligible cause for this feeling, Kant could not assert of it – or of any feeling – that we all necessarily experience it. The most he would be able to say is that, on the basis of some empirical psychological investigation, most of us, generally, experience it. But the moral feeling of respect, because of its a priori cause, is necessarily felt by all sensibly affected rational beings, and this cannot be other than it is. It is a stable, unchanging

response to immediate objections: feeling

63

fixture in human experience. As Kant puts the point: “[O]ne can . . . see a priori this much: that such a feeling is inseparably connected with the representation of the moral law in every finite rational being” (5:80/68). In Part iii, we will defend Kant’s claims about this a priori feeling, making more sense both of the intelligible understandings toward which it points and the practical cognitions it helps to ground. We will discover that an experience of being categorically obligated, which we access through moral feeling, demands we assert of this feeling that it has a necessary cause. That is, explanation of our experience of an absolute, categorical necessitation of the will that does not dissolve under any circumstances will demand recourse to a causal history of our experience that points toward the noumenal realm.4 Further, the rational cause of this feeling will turn out to be the moral law within me, that is, an autonomously legislated moral law. Wondering at that rational cause will thus involve appreciation of our own autonomous, rational natures. And the felt experience itself, apart from any appeal to its inscrutable cause, will be an important focus for our attentive reflection, yielding the most central practical cognition for moral philosophy, the cognition of categorical obligation. Our Part iii discussion will thus provide complete defense of Kant’s claim that we do in fact have this a priori feeling and, further, that through appeal to it we can ground an objective, synthetic a priori practical cognition of the moral law. For now, we simply assert that Kant claims this special a priori feeling as a central aspect of his moral epistemology; not all feeling is contingently caused. Moral feeling as common. It remains for us to consider the related claim of moral feeling’s commonness. As with the claim of a priority, although we will affirm Kant’s assertion of the commonness of this feeling here, complete defense of this claim will have to wait until

4 We will thus distinguish two closely related claims of necessity: first, there is the claim, to be explained in Part iii, that the content of this feeling is one of necessitation, that is, of an absolute, indissolvable categorical obligation; but then there is the claim that will follow from this, viz., that this feeling has a necessary cause and is thus necessarily part of the felt experience of sensibly affected rational beings. Here, we speak only of the latter claim, saving connection of it to the former experience of categorical obligation for Part iii. There, we will discover that, in the experience of being categorically obligated, we find a starting point for practical reflection that mirrors the assertion in the Second Analogy that we encounter necessity in experience.

64

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

Part iii, where we investigate that felt experience within which moral feeling plays a central role: the experience of the conflict between happiness and morality. Our goal for the present is to articulate Kant’s confidence that the same feeling which has a mysterious, a priori origin is also a common one. Kant does indeed explicitly assert that moral feeling is common. For example, having just asserted that the “justification of moral principles as principles of pure reason could . . . be carried out very well . . . by a mere appeal to the judgment of common human understanding,” Kant describes this common understanding as operating via the “special” feeling of “respect”: the dissimilarity of determining grounds (empirical and rational) [of the will] is made known by [the] resistance of a practically lawgiving reason to every meddling inclination, by a special kind of feeling, which . . . is . . . produced only by [the lawgiving of practical reason] and indeed as a constraint, namely, through the feeling of a respect such as no human being has for inclinations of whatever kind but does have for the law. (5:91–92/77–78)

Kant also provides an example of how this feeling operates within the first-personal deliberative point of view of the common person. Even “a moderately honorable man . . . abstain[s] . . . from an otherwise harmless lie . . . solely in order not to have to despise himself secretly in his own eyes,” that is, in order not to descend into the painful “shame” he would feel in ignoring the demands of the law. This refusal to lie, even though telling the truth causes “the greatest distress,” is motivated by “a respect for something quite different from life, something in comparison and contrast with which life with all its agreeableness has no worth at all,” that is, out of a feeling of respect for the moral law (5:87–88/ 74–75). In this example of the deliberative context for experiencing moral feeling, we discover an intense conflict between reason and inclination. This man, though he “has maintained humanity in its proper dignity in his own person” by telling the truth, is nonetheless in “the greatest distress,” a distress “which he could have avoided if he could only have disregarded duty.” What is being described is the emotional conflict that occurs when the demands of happiness are in direct conflict with the demands of duty, a conflict best understood affectively as involving the negative, constraining influence of the law upon one’s inclinations (hence the “distress” he suffers) combined with the

response to immediate objections: feeling

65

positive aspect of moral feeling, that is, respect for the law (and, here, respect for the dignity in one’s own person as the legislator and executor of that law, since, having told the truth, he is “sustained by the consciousness that he has maintained humanity in its proper dignity in his own person”). This positive aspect of respect does not resolve the situation into anything like “happiness,” but instead into an “inner tranquility [which] is therefore merely negative with respect to everything that can make life pleasant” (5:87–88/74). This is a particularly powerful example of how the moral feeling of respect enters into everyday, common moral deliberation. This is indeed the description of the deliberative process of a common, nonphilosophical person. Yet it is distinctive in that one hopes not very frequently to have such stark and painful conflicts between happiness and morality. Kant’s point, though, is that even a normal, common person, when he is unfortunate enough to encounter such circumstances (which “no one would wish the occasion for . . . on himself” [5:88/75]), recognizes through his felt experience that morality is so strong even as to trump “life” itself. This is the role that the moral feeling of respect plays in the moral life of the common person. However dramatic this example of the moral feeling of respect informing one’s agential experiences is, most of Kant’s discussions of particular individuals experiencing themselves as agents suggest, at least implicitly, that these agents are experiencing a conflict, and that this conflict is informed affectively by the moral feeling of respect. Indeed, it seems that the conflict between happiness and morality is a central moral experience, and the moral feeling of respect is, therefore, a central, frequently felt, common feeling. We need not, however, wait for these rare, unusually painful examples in order to appreciate the regular presence of the moral feeling of respect in our moral experiences. This feeling best describes any situation in which the deliberator is faced with even lesser conflicts between happiness and morality, as the man at end of Groundwork i reveals. This man, as we have seen, struggles with a conflict between his “impetuous” inclinations (described as “a powerful counterweight to the commands of duty”) and the “unremitting” demands of reason (4:405/17). Although Kant does not speak of the moral feeling of respect as informing his experience, it is exactly the sort of experience – the conflict between happiness and morality – in which we would expect this feeling to emerge.

66

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

Kant’s identification of the moral feeling of respect as operative in this familiar human experience of conflict thus provides an initial defense for the plausibility of his assertion of the feeling’s commonness: whenever we find ourselves experiencing a conflict between the competing demands of happiness and morality, our affective state is best described by what Kant calls the moral feeling of respect. We affirm, then, that Kant plausibly takes the moral feeling of respect to be a commonly felt feeling.

ii. The rejection of moral sense theory Moral sense theory revisited. We are finally in a position to respond to the objector who worries that any appeal to feeling necessarily degenerates into moral sense theory. First, let’s appreciate the picture we can envision now of Kant’s use of moral feeling in the grounding of practical philosophy: once he admits a felt experience of being categorically obligated informed affectively by the a priori moral feeling of respect (as we shall see in Part iii’s discussion of the Gallows Man in the second Critique), Kant can appeal to attentive reflection upon that felt experience to affirm a practical cognition of moral obligation in finite rational beings. Attentive reflection on moral feeling reveals our existence as rational beings. Then that rational nature – which we cannot know but at which we can wonder as inscrutable – justifies the authoritative status of the moral law for all rational beings. This picture is just what Kant suggests when he says “the justification of moral principles as principles of a pure reason could . . . be carried out very well and with sufficient certainty by a mere appeal to the judgment of common human understanding” (5:91/77), and then goes on to describe the conflict between happiness and morality informed by moral feeling. We can, that is, assert an objective practical cognition of the validity of the moral law through attentive consideration of our felt experience of the moral feeling of respect. There is much work to be done in defending this picture of the justification of the moral law, both textually and philosophically. That is the task of Parts ii and iii. For now, we simply ask: would such justification of morality amount to a moral sense theory justification? We would do well, first, to define more clearly just what Kant means by moral sense theory, and why he so strenuously rejects it as a philosophical method. Once we do that, it will become obvious that Kant, instead

response to immediate objections: feeling

67

of illicitly descending into moral sense theory, has instead appealed to feeling in a justification of moral principles that describes most successfully how it is that the practicality of pure reason operates for finite, sensibly affected beings. First, moral sense theory is the pretense of those who assume a certain special moral sense which, instead of reason, determines the moral law and in accordance with which consciousness of virtue is immediately connected with satisfaction and pleasure, and consciousness of vice with mental unease and pain, so that everything is still reduced to desire for one’s own happiness. (5:38/35, emphasis added)

According to this definition, we can say (at least) two things about moral sense theory: 1. it is a grounding of morality which relies upon sense instead of reason to justify moral principles; 2. it occurs when morality is defined in terms of the overall goal of the desire for happiness, moral goodness or virtue being associated with pleasure, and badness or vice being associated with pain. Why, then, does Kant find such an attempt to ground morality opprobrious? First, to appeal to sensibility instead of reason to justify morality abandons confidence in the practicality of pure reason. It “make[s] what can only be thought by reason an object of sensation; and this . . . would quite do away with any concept of duty and put in its place merely a mechanical play of refined inclinations sometimes contending with the coarser” (5:39/36). Moral sense theory entirely abandons the connection of morality with reason. But when we lose the connection to reason, we also lose the connection to necessary moral demands. The whole notion of a duty that imposes itself with necessity is thus lost. Furthermore, that part of our sensible nature to which a moral sense theorist appeals – our desire for happiness – could not ground moral principles. Indeed, such appeal is utterly nonsensical to Kant. The demands of happiness and the demands of morality are essentially different, and this is obvious from the common point of view. “The direct opposite of the principle of morality is the principle of one’s own happiness,” says Kant, and the difference between the two is “so distinct, so irrepressible, and so audible even to the most common human beings,” that one would never be so confused as

68

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

to try to use one (principles of happiness) to ground the other (principles of morality) (5:35/32). Furthermore, as our objector has already reminded us, even if we could find some conception of happiness shared by all persons toward which we aimed our moral demands, such coincidental agreement of merely contingent desires could never ground necessary principles. Furthermore, happiness has to do with feelings related to love of self, and doing all one can to obtain those things that assure love of self. But all these feelings are merely contingent, and could be otherwise. As such, no coincidental agreement of them amongst agents could be sufficient for grounding truly practical laws of morality. Things could always change. How, then, does Kant’s appeal to feeling in the justification of moral principles stand up against this picture of moral sense theory? It should be obvious that the phenomenological method of attentive appeal to the felt experience of the moral feeling of respect discovered in experience of the conflict between happiness and morality falls victim to none of these criticisms. It does not replace reason with feeling in the grounding of morality, it does not appeal to happiness to ground morality, and it does not rely upon contingently felt feelings or empirical generalizations to ground morality. Let us dwell upon each of these points in turn. Kant’s use of feeling to affirm the practicality of pure reason. First, Kant’s appeal to the moral feeling of respect does not replace reason with feeling in the grounding of morality. It would be more accurate to say that he relies upon feeling as an enabling epistemic tool to access those aspects of reason which do ground morality, but which are also beyond the usual, theoretical epistemic grasp of finite rational beings. We cannot know that intelligible, rational part of our nature that is the autonomous legislator of moral laws; Kant therefore turns to our capacity for feeling to access, admittedly mysteriously, that rational aspect of ourselves which assures the validity of the moral law for all rational beings. The experience of moral feeling is not, after all, what makes moral laws binding; rather, our existence as rational autonomous legislators of the moral law assures that. But we must rely upon experience of moral feeling to gain quasi-epistemic access to that part of ourselves which does assure the validity of moral demands. If Kant is successful in appealing to a feeling that finds its rational, if inscrutable, cause in our rational selves, then such appeal will not subvert the

response to immediate objections: feeling

69

practicality of pure reason. Rather, it will only be to admit that, because this rational part of ourselves is inscrutable to our conscious, phenomenally existing, choosing self, our only access to the practicality of pure reason is through this feeling. The moral feeling of respect plays an enabling instead of an evidential role in the grounding of a priori cognitions affirming the validity of the moral law. So, even though Kant says that common felt judgment is adequate to “justify” morality,5 he is not saying that feeling itself is its justification. Rather, the moral law is justified as binding because of a story I can tell about rational nature, and it is the activity of that rational nature which justifies the validity of the moral law. But this is a story that can be told by finite, sensible, epistemically limited beings like ourselves only by using the epistemically enabling tool of moral feeling. So, it is not that moral feeling justifies the validity of the moral law, but rather that moral feeling allows us epistemic access to our rational natures, and the activity of our rational nature justifies the validity of the moral law as binding on our wills. Second, appeal to moral feeling is not at all an appeal to happiness to define morality. To the contrary, experience of moral feeling affirms that happiness is not the only, or even the primary, goal of our agency. As the man who decides to tell the truth despite great distress to himself reminds us, he is, when he decides to tell the truth despite the injury to his happiness, appealing to “a respect for something quite different from life, something in comparison and contrast with which life with all its agreeableness has no worth at all” (5:88/75). Moral feeling thus identifies morality as the primary goal of agency, a goal which is not only not derived from happiness, but which is also sometimes in painful conflict with our otherwise legitimate pursuit of happiness. It reveals that there is a ground of action that trumps our pursuit of happiness. Through the moral feeling of respect, we discover a law that “infringes upon self-love” and “strikes down self-conceit” (5:73/63). Moral demands are thus not grounded through some calculus of how best to achieve happiness overall; instead, they derive from our rational natures, distinct from our pursuit of happiness. 5 According to Kant, “the justification of moral principles as principles of pure reason,” and not simply the story of how we find ourselves motivated by those principles, can be “carried out very well and with sufficient certainty by a mere appeal to the judgment of the common human understanding,” a common understanding which relies explicitly upon “a special kind of feeling” to provide such justification via the common experience of the conflict of happiness and morality (5:91–92/77).

70

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

Finally, not all felt experience is bound up with contingency in the way our objector assumes. Many scholars who reject out of hand any Kantian appeal to feeling in practical philosophy rely on texts in which Kant speaks of his concerns about relying upon desires grounded in pleasure and displeasure, all pointed toward the ultimate end of satisfying happiness or self-love, for defining morality. The passage upon which our objector relied in making her point is one such passage. The “feelings of pleasure and pain” to which Kant refers when he insists that even a universally felt feeling could not ground a law that held with strict universality and necessity are those feelings of pleasure and displeasure which would, if combined, purport to ground “the principle of self-love as a practical law” (5:26/23–24). That is, they are feelings which take as their ultimate object the achievement of happiness. But Kant draws a crucial distinction between, on the one hand, merely contingent experiences of pleasure and displeasure, all involved in the overall economy of happiness (that is, in the assurance of maximal achievement of those pleasures meant to support and increase our love of self) and, on the other, a necessary feeling with a rational (not empirical or contingent) cause which is not enmeshed in this economy but which instead has the role of constraining the excesses of our pursuit of happiness in the name of the moral law. Once Kant introduces a feeling that is not simply a contingently caused feeling of pleasure or displeasure, he can also speak of a feeling that is not caught up in the cost–benefit analysis of our pursuit of happiness. We find, instead of a contingent feeling, a necessary feeling which, by its very nature, is appropriate not only for grounding universal and necessary practical cognitions (since it too, qua feeling, is necessarily and not contingently felt), but also for reminding us that the pursuit of happiness is not the only legitimate goal of human action. Practical cognition accessed through the a priori moral feeling of respect can thus hold with strict necessity. This is because, unlike contingent feelings, the common moral feeling of respect finds its source (inscrutably) in the moral law itself, and the feeling evoked by this rational cause holds universally (that is, intersubjectively, across agents) and necessarily (that is, our experience of this feeling could not be otherwise, as this rational cause is an unchanging, noncontingent rational cause). I experience certain demands as holding for me categorically precisely because the universal, necessary moral law demands that of me categorically. This is not going to change. It could

response to immediate objections: feeling

71

not be otherwise. I necessarily experience the categorical, absolute necessitation of the moral law upon my will. There is, as we have noted, an epistemic cost to this approach: because we appeal to feelings with nonempirical origins, we lack theoretical cognition of those objects that are most central to our practical lives. There is thus, at the heart of what remains a genuine cognition, a certain inscrutability about the nature of its object. As Kant reminds us, “we do not indeed comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative, but we nevertheless comprehend its incomprehensibility; and this is all that can fairly be required of a philosophy that strives in its principles to the very boundary of human reason” (4:463/ 66). Nonetheless, Kant emphasizes how absolutely crucial appeal to a priori feeling is: “If this feeling of respect were pathological and hence a feeling of pleasure based on the inner sense, it would be futile to [try to] discover a priori a connection of it with any idea” (5:80/68). We have, however, identified a nonpathological, a priori feeling that is not “a feeling of pleasure based on the inner sense.” We have, that is, found a feeling upon which a rational grounding of morality can rely without descending into mere moral sense theory.

Conclusion The story outlined here is rather different from what recent interpreters have asserted about Kant’s appeals to the role of feeling in morality. Most frequently, interpreters limit the role that moral feeling can play. For example, it has been argued that recognition of the validity of the moral law must occur purely rationally, with no appeal to feeling. One might then, apparently less egregiously, appeal to feeling in the philosophical explanation of how we take an interest in the authority of this law. Feeling is, then, important for moral motivation, that is, for the incentive or interest we have to act in accordance with moral principles out of respect for them; but proof of the authority those principles have over us must be accomplished entirely independently of appeal to feelings of any sort.6

6 Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, is the best example of this, though his position is one that he takes from Andrews Reath (“Kant’s Theory of Moral Sensibility: Respect for the Moral Law and the Influence of Inclination,” Kant-Studien 80, 1989, pp. 284–302). Allison, referencing Reath, asserts that we have a nonfelt consciousness of the validity of moral principles previous to and the cause of the moral feeling of respect.

72

t h e in t er p re t i v e f ra m e w o r k

Yet, we have discovered that Kant can adopt a more central role for feeling in practical philosophy while avoiding moral sense theory. Indeed, he embraces the moral feeling of respect as thoroughly as he embraces the common point of view itself. Both are more reliable than any would-be expert point of view on morality. Because Kant has identified a feeling which is rationally, not contingently, caused, but which we nonetheless experience; and because this feeling is not simply another feeling amongst others competing as a possible component of our happiness: for both these reasons, we can now confidently appeal to feeling in the story of the practicality of pure reason. Feeling becomes the means via which sensibly affected rational beings access deep truths about their rational natures. Ironically, then, because it is only through appeal to felt experience that we can access our rational natures, it is only through appeal to our felt experiences that we can vindicate the practicality of pure reason. Our interpretation of Kant does, furthermore, affiliate him more with those contemporary ethicists who would eschew a rational grounding of moral philosophy beginning from some nonmoral starting point, and questions any interpretation of him that sought to ground morality from such a nonmoral beginning.7 By appealing to common, felt phenomenological experiences as the ground for practical philosophy, Kant affirms that any such boot-strapping from a nonmoral toward a moral perspective is misguided. We do not utilize reason to construct arguments, recognizable and convincing to an amoral being, which conclude that we must be moral. Rather, we discover ourselves as agents always already involved in consideration of categorical demands upon ourselves. There is more to say about why we should prefer this first-personal phenomenological approach to morality to those Strawsonian-inspired practical philosophers, such as Stephen Darwall,8 who take secondpersonal experiences as the starting point for morality. Such comparisons will, however, be better accomplished after we have laid out this first-personal Kantian approach in all its detail. We thus put off such discussion until Part iii.

7 Thomas Nagel (The Possibility of Altruism [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970]) is a good example of this strand of Kant interpretation. 8 See Second-Person Standpoint.

response to immediate objections: feeling

73

We now turn to the central concern of this study: a careful reading of both the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, using the perspective of common, felt phenomenological experience as the lens through which we make sense of the development of Kant’s practical philosophy.

PART II THE GROUNDWORK

We can now begin to discuss Kant’s use of common, felt phenomenological experience to ground moral philosophy, a pursuit that takes us into careful readings of Kant’s two central works in moral philosophy, the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason. This is familiar territory for Kant scholars; but, given the discussion in Part i, we know we will read these familiar texts in a distinctive way, looking particularly to those sections which reveal Kant’s reliance upon a felt, common point of view to inform his moral philosophy. Although, in both the Groundwork and the second Critique, there are other threads of argument that could be considered, some of which are in tension with this common approach, we focus our efforts on Kant’s pursuit of a method of practical philosophy grounded in common, felt, phenomenological experience. We know, further, what a turn to the common in the development of practical philosophy must involve, an experience that fits the requirements noted in Part i: a convincingly common, firstpersonally accessed, felt, phenomenological experience of moral agency. This experience needs, furthermore, to be amenable to attentive consideration: when we look at it, it reveals something about our agency and is thus productive of practical cognitions. What we shall discover in the chapters that follow is that Kant goes back and forth on the proper content of this felt experience. He is particularly at odds with himself in the Groundwork. Initially, after a brief flirtation with an innocent nonconflicted experience of categorical demands, he suggests instead that practical philosophy is born when we admit the vexed, “dialect[ical]” (4:405/17) situation of the human being conflicted between his pursuit of happiness and the demands of morality, and then resolve this conflict by moving from the common perspective to a more reliable, noncommon practical philosophical perspective. We will consider this failed effort to give birth to practical philosophy in Chapter 4. Yet, as the Groundwork continues, Kant sets aside the common, felt experience of conflict between happiness and morality, hesitant to admit the implication of categorical moral demands it suggests, and seeks instead to ground proof of obligation in a different common, felt experience, one of experiencing ourselves as active in relation to our mental representations. We shall see, in Chapter 5, what difficulties this shift of felt experiences gets Kant into. They are difficulties that lead him, ultimately, to what Allison (Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 238) calls his “great reversal,” his move to proving freedom on the basis of moral obligation in the second Critique, instead of vice versa, as he sought in Groundwork iii. We will consider this new approach in Part iii below.

4 KANT’S GROUNDWORK REJECTION OF A RELIABLE EXPERIENCE OF CATEGORICAL OBLIGATION

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to argue that, although we find in Groundwork i the birth of the common perspective in felt, first-personal phenomenological experience, Kant’s refusal to admit that this common person has a reliable understanding of categorical obligation leads to an incoherence in his understanding of the role of the common perspective in practical philosophy. This chapter begins with a close reading of the relationship of the common and the philosophical as it emerges in Groundwork i (section i). I turn then to critical analysis of that relationship (section ii), and then, finally, to consideration of the failed argument Kant provides in Groundwork ii for why self-deception prevents the common person from having a reliable experience of categorical obligation (section iii).

i. Kant’s Groundwork appeal to the common The practically wise common person. It does not take long, in reading the Groundwork, to discover how emphatically Kant appeals to attentive reflection upon common, first-personal experience. The first section of the Groundwork is entitled “Transition from common rational to philosophic moral cognition,” and in it, his admiration for and reliance upon the common point of view quickly emerges. The main point of Groundwork i, the introduction of the universal law formula of the Categorical Imperative, is accomplished by someone reflecting from a common, first-personal perspective. Saying that “common human reason . . . agrees completely with this [principle of the Categorical Imperative] in its appraisals” (4:402/15), Kant introduces us to an 77

78

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

individual speaking in the language of “I,” considering his reasons for lying or not lying: Let the question be, for example: may I, when hard pressed, make a promise with the intention not to keep it? Here I easily distinguish two significations the question can have: whether it is prudent or whether it is in conformity with duty to make a false promise. (4:402/15)

Exploration of this question of false promising goes on entirely in this language of “I,” concluding with the familiar claim that “I could indeed will the lie but by no means a universal law to lie” (4:403/15). The most basic principle of morality has thus been accessed “within the moral cognition of common human reason”; indeed, “common human reason, with this compass [i.e., the principle of the Categorical Imperative] in hand, knows very well how to distinguish in every case that comes up what is good and what is evil, what is in conformity with duty or contrary to duty” (4:403/16). Common human judgment thus understands what it is for an imperative to hold for its will categorically, even if “it admittedly does not think so abstractly in a universal form” (4:403/16) when it makes these judgments. But the common person is not entirely on her own when she makes these judgments. Instead, knowing her duty is assured in the common person only if, without in the least teaching [common human reason] anything new, we only, as did Socrates, make [common human reason] attentive to its own principle . . .[T]here is, accordingly, no need of science and philosophy to know what one has to do in order to be honest and good, and even wise and virtuous. (4:404/16, emphasis added)

Although the common person does not become a scientist or a philosopher, she becomes better able to understand her own principle of categorical obligation when, like the slave boy in Plato’s Meno, a Socratic philosopher coaxes from her a clearer explication of what is already within her. Through “attentive” reflection on her deliberative experience, this common person understands moral demands. Looking back to our common person’s reflections on false promising, we do not find the obvious presence of this Socratic guide helping our common man; he is, rather, reflecting on his own. One can, however, find implicit reference to the Socratic moment of attentiveness.

rejection of experience of categoricity

79

Having just distinguished two possible “significations” for the question at hand (i.e., whether it is prudent or dutiful to tell a lie), Kant notes: “the first [signification of whether it is prudent to lie] can undoubtedly often be the case.” In other words, one can indeed appeal to prudential reasons in deciding to lie: a false promise will get me the money I want. Were his Socrates not at least implicitly influential, considerations would stop here. Instead, an attentive moment occurs when this person realizes he needs to look more carefully at his prudential reasons: “I see very well that it is not enough to get out of a present difficulty by means of this subterfuge [of mere appeal to prudence] but that I must reflect carefully whether this lie may later give rise to much greater inconvenience for me than that from which I now extricate myself” (4:402/15, emphasis added). Attentive consideration of his reasons for action leads him to consider more complex prudential reasoning calculating long-term versus short-term gain. His conclusion is that even such apparently “cunning” (4:402/15) calculations “will still be based only on results feared” (4:402/15), and that merely prudential reasoning does not get to the bottom of his experience of the reasons for acting which impose themselves upon him. Careful sifting of prudential considerations thus leads our attentive common person entirely to abandon prudential descriptions of the question. The reason lying is wrong has nothing to do with the inconveniences it introduces: To be truthful from duty . . . is something entirely different from being truthful from anxiety about detrimental results, since in the first case the concept of the action in itself already contains a law for me while in the second I must first look about elsewhere to see what effects on me might be combined with it. (4:402/15)

Through attentive reflection on his would-be reasons for action, this man thus recognizes the difference between what the philosopher would call categorical versus hypothetical necessity. Some reasons appeal to things outside themselves to find their force, but other reasons need not “look about elsewhere” since “the concept of the action in itself already contains a law for me.” “Careful reflection” that coaxes him away from the easy, self-interested, merely prudential mode of rational defense (which is, after all, this man’s first line of thought) is a synonym, then, for that “attentive[ness] to

80

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

[common human reason’s] own principle” (4:404/16) inspired by this person’s Socratic guide. Yet, straight after affirming that he needs this Socrates, this common person is said to have “no need” of science or philosophy (4:404/16). Clearly, though, Kant has just told us that he does need at least Socratic interlocution to become attentive. Nonetheless, because this Kantian Socrates does not teach him “anything new” (4:404/16), Kant considers this therapeutic role of the Socratic philosopher to be nonphilosophical and nonscientific. The Socratic guide only encourages the common person to look more carefully at himself, so the common person does not so much become a philosopher as he becomes better at knowing himself. Perhaps this is why we think of this guide as “Socratic”: not only does he inspire reflection through questioning instead of direct transfer of information; further, the goal of attentive reflection is self-knowledge – Socrates’ own preferred form of knowledge. A passing comment that Kant makes later in Groundwork i helps us to draw this distinction between scientific and Socratic philosophy. When Kant decides (as we will discuss below) that humans need more than Socratic encouragement to recognize categorical demands, he says this is because “even wisdom – which otherwise consists more in conduct than in knowledge – still needs science . . . to provide access and durability for its precepts” (4:405/17). The Socratic influence on our first common agent is implicitly described here as the influence of some practical “wisdom,” a wisdom “consist[ing] more in conduct than in knowledge.” Kant will eventually contrast this practical wisdom with explicitly philosophical and scientific instruction about practical demands, an instruction which, though still concerned with conduct, also introduces that scientific knowledge necessary for assuring a “durable” (that is, reliable, unchanging) understanding of practical “precepts.” We will, eventually, make sense of this shift to scientific, instead of Socratic, philosophy. For the present, we simply confirm that it is no insult to say that our common person, who recognized the difference between categorical and hypothetical reasons on his own, is not a philosopher. Quite to the contrary, when he recognizes his duty, he operates with Socratic wisdom, and understands clearly everything necessary for grounding his moral obligations. Kant admires this practically wise common person, suggesting that his capacity to appreciate the demands of morality might even be more successful than that of a scientific, non-Socratic philosopher:

rejection of experience of categoricity

81

[I]n practical matters, it is just when common understanding excludes all sensible incentives from practical laws that its faculty of appraising first begins to show itself to advantage. It then becomes even subtle . . . [I]t can even have as good a hope of hitting the mark as any philosopher can promise himself; indeed, it is almost more sure in this matter, because a philosopher, though he cannot have any other principle than that of common understanding, can easily confuse his judgment by a mass of considerations foreign and irrelevant to the matter and deflect it from the straight course. (4:404/17)

The fall of the common person. One might expect Kant to end his encomium to the common person here: the non-Socratic, scientific philosopher gets so caught up in irrelevant details that he is not constitutionally built for practical matters. The common person, as long as he remembers that wise, attentive focus his Socrates inspired in him – a focus which assures he knows how to ‘exclude all sensible incentives from practical laws’ – is the true cognoscente of things practical. Non-Socratic, scientific philosophers exit, stage left. Of course, things don’t end like this. If they did, we wouldn’t need the Groundwork or the Critique of Practical Reason. We cannot, says Kant, leave common human reason in this state of “its fortunate simplicity” (4:404/17). Why not? “There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced” (4:404–405/17). The common person thus must move beyond Socratic practical wisdom, welcoming a more scientific philosophical instruction, one that assures “access to and durability” (4:405/17) of those moral principles we thought he had discovered on his own. We now learn that, whatever the success of our first common agent, we humans are not he. That unseducible agent is lost in an irretrievable past; common human reason needs protection from a seduction that would undermine appreciation of its most basic moral principle. This seduction of which Kant warns us is not coming from somewhere external to the common person. The enemy against which she needs to guard herself, and protection against which requires “science” (4:405/17), is, simply, herself. In the conclusion of Groundwork i, Kant thus introduces us to a more complex and vexed common human being: The human being feels within himself a powerful counterweight to all the commands of duty, which reason represents to him as so deserving of

82

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ” the highest respect – the counterweight of his needs and inclinations, the entire satisfaction of which he sums up under the name happiness. Now reason issues its precepts unremittingly, without thereby promising anything to the inclinations, and so, as it were, with disregard and contempt for those claims, which are so impetuous and besides so apparently equitable (and refuse to be neutralized by any command). But from this there arises a natural dialectic, that is, a propensity to rationalize against those strict laws of duty and to cast doubt upon their validity, or at least upon their purity and strictness, and, where possible, to make them better suited to our wishes and inclinations, that is, to corrupt them at their basis and to destroy all their dignity – something that even common practical reason cannot, in the end, call good. (4:405/17–18)

The competing demands of happiness and morality produce a practical dilemma: duty imposes itself “unremittingly,” and happiness responds “impetuous[ly],” yet with apparent underlying justification for its demands (since, although “reason” reacts to them with “disregard and contempt,” these demands of self-love are nonetheless “apparently equitable” and, in any event “refuse to be neutralized by any command”).1 Further, the human has a natural tendency to resolve this conflict by deceiving himself into believing that moral demands are not as strict as they in fact present themselves to be. This “propensity to rationalize against those strict laws of duty” leads this agent to try to weaken the “purity and strictness” of moral laws in the name of that other practical demand, his “wishes and inclinations.” This person is clearly having more trouble with his deliberative process than the common person who recognized false promises as wrong. Our first common person appreciates in a clear, straightforward, unwavering way that the moral law forces itself upon him categorically. One might have expected just such a capable, 1 The implication here that there is something legitimate about this man’s claims of happiness, combined with Kant’s use of the language of “dialectic” to describe his conflict between happiness and morality, suggests that Kant is here, at least implicitly, thinking about the question of the Highest Good, something he does not consider fully until the Book ii Dialectic section of the second Critique (5:107ff./90ff.). There, he discusses at more length why one who acts morally deserves to be happy. Our agent in Groundwork i is a little more confused than that at this point, but it seems right to attribute to him, at least initially, a legitimate concern about what he deserves happiness-wise. It is just that, without philosophical guidance in thinking about where that legitimate demand for happiness sits vis-à-vis competing demands of morality, this agent ends up in selfdeception instead of a deduction of the Highest Good.

rejection of experience of categoricity

83

straightforward, undeceived human agent from Kant’s first Critique promises about what we would find in the practical realm. He promised that by appealing to the practical, we would discover ourselves as strong, free, rational causes of things in the world.2 But now, as he concludes Groundwork i, the powerful image we thought we got of the human agent dissolves. We now find an agent who is neither a straightforward, innocent admirer of categorical demands nor a free, powerful cause of action. Instead, this agent deliberates painfully upon two generally present practical demands, which weigh heavily upon him (the commands of duty and the concern to achieve happiness), and doesn’t seem as able as our first common person to shake off the lure of merely prudential reasons. When happiness and morality conflict, instead of attentively reflecting on the very different qualities of these kinds of reasons, he convinces himself that morality doesn’t hold quite as strictly as he initially thought. This agent thus engages in self-deception with the underlying purpose being to value himself more highly than morality.3 We are far away from the innocent, capable image of the common person with which we began. This agent has fallen, and fallen far. Furthermore, because he has fallen, he needs a heavier reliance upon philosophy. Because this human being wants to avoid a corrupt resolution of his conflict, his “common human reason” is “impelled, not by some need of speculation . . . but on practical grounds themselves, to go out of its sphere and to take a step into the field of practical philosophy” (4:405/18, emphasis added). Practical philosophy, now of a scientific, non-Socratic variety, is thus born through reflection upon a firstpersonal experience of the conflict between duty and happiness and the temptation to rationalize oneself out of the conflict.

2 To recall: in the first Critique, Kant had suggested, within a discussion of the tension between freedom and natural causality, that “to ascribe objective validity to such a concept [as, for example, the concept of freedom] . . . something more is required. This ‘more,’ however, need not be sought in theoretical sources of cognition; it may also lie in practical ones” (Bxxvin, 115). He thus encourages us to expect that, by turning to the practical, we will straightforwardly affirm ourselves as strong, free rational agents. 3 This tendency to rationalize away one’s conflicts is identical to what Kant, in the Religion, describes as the propensity toward evil: “[T]he human being . . . is evil only because he reverses the moral order of his incentives in incorporating them into his maxims. He indeed incorporates the moral law into those maxims, together with the law of self-love; since, however, he realizes that the two cannot stand on an equal footing, but one must be subordinated to the other as its supreme condition, he makes the incentives of selflove and their inclinations the condition of compliance with the moral law” (6:36/59).

84

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

This appeal to philosophy is rather different from its first, Socratic introduction. Socrates’ role had been merely to “make [common human reason] attentive to its own principle” (4:404/16) and he didn’t really need philosophy or science since he was simply seeing more clearly what was already in himself. But this new introduction of practical philosophy assigns philosophy a more robust role on behalf of the common person. When this conflicted human being encounters intense internal moral conflict, his “reason” is not so much coaxed as forced or “impelled” (4:405/18) to take on a new form. The “dialectic” common human reason encounters between happiness and morality “constrains it to seek help in philosophy” (4:405/18, emphasis added). This less than innocent agent needs more forceful encouragement into philosophical reflection on his situation than his innocent friend did. Furthermore, what he gets from philosophy is more substantive. Now, common human reason obtain[s] . . . information and distinct instruction regarding the source of its principle and the correct determination of this principle in comparison with maxims based on need and inclination, so that it may escape from its predicament about claims from both sides and not run the risk of being deprived of all genuine moral principles through the ambiguity into which it easily falls. (4:405/18, emphasis added)

The philosopher here, unlike the Socratic guide, provides “information” and “instruction” to our common person. The common person cannot ground or justify his moral obligations on his own, but must rely upon a philosopher to help him. This philosophical instruction might seem like nothing new. Even in his innocent state, the common agent perhaps does not understand the “source” of his moral principle, nor the respect he has for it.4 But, the corrupt agent now needs to be instructed also about “the correct determination of this principle in comparison with maxims based on need and inclination.” Our common person has lost that most central thing he had previously understood (indeed, had understood more clearly than philosophers did), namely, the categorical nature of moral demands. He must depend upon practical philosophy to “instruct” him about the “correct determination of this [moral] principle in 4 “I [the innocent common person] do not yet see what this respect is based upon (this the philosopher may investigate)” (4:403/16).

rejection of experience of categoricity

85

comparison with maxims based on need and inclination.” He can no longer, on his own, distinguish between hypothetical and categorical imperatives. Because of his self-rationalizing tendencies, he no longer understands the difference between the force with which those competing demands of happiness and morality impose themselves on his will; the common person now needs a philosopher to do this grounding work. Kant has made the move from pure common human reason to fully philosophical (if still commonly informed) practical reason.

ii. Critical analysis Introduction. This has been an extended textual reflection on the relationship of the common and the philosophical in Groundwork i. We need now to assess the success of this account, with particular concern for the relationship of common and philosophical perspectives in the grounding of practical philosophy. What we shall discover is a basic incoherence in this original story of how the common perspective relates to the philosophical, an incoherence traceable to Kant’s refusal to allow the self-deceived common person a reliable understanding of categorical obligation. If the common agent cannot grasp the demands of reason on her own, then, in order to hold her responsible for her actions, we would have to assure her that there is always a philosopher around to remind her of her moral obligations, and this seems wrong. To establish a convincing account of the relationship of the common point to the philosophical, Kant must admit that, whatever the strength of self-deception, the common agent is capable, on her own, of appreciating categorical obligations. This will not occur, however, until the second Critique. Common human experience as first-personal, felt, phenomenological experience. Let us begin by affirming that the story we have just reviewed is the very birth of the common point of view as the point of view of firstpersonal, felt, phenomenological experience. First, in both the innocent and the conflicted agents, we view the common person from the first-personal perspective of his deliberations. And, although these reflections are occurring within an individual person, Kant describes this person as the human being, that is, as any person. These are thus first-personal reflections, but ones we are

86

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

encouraged to consider as our own: we all have experiences like this, and are asked by Kant to take on this individual’s perspective as ours. The contemporary practical philosopher will note something further about the course of these common reflections: it is through the common person’s reflections on particular deliberative situations that he recognizes a general claim of categorical obligation. This is clearest with the first, innocent agent: he does not reflect upon “obligation” as such to access categorical demands. Rather, he reflects on a particular situation in which he is trying to figure out what to do; and through this particular reflection, he learns about the nature of moral obligation generally. It is precisely when figuring out whether it is okay for him to lie now that the innocent common agent discovers a general obligation to honesty. This is simply what it means to discover obligation “firstpersonally”: we discover it in the midst of a first-personal deliberative act. This clarity of vision is, of course, exactly what the second, fallen agent loses. We thus confirm that Kant is relying on first-personal deliberative experience in Groundwork i to construct the common perspective. One might wonder, though, whether we are in the territory of felt experience. Surely, by the time we get to the final, dramatic conflict of the common person, we can describe his experience as felt: Kant describes the conflict as occurring through the experience of feelings: this human being “feels within himself a powerful counterweight” (4:405/ 17) of the demands of happiness, and the language of “impetuous” “inclinations” only encourages us to take this man’s experience as a particularly strong felt one. There is, however, no mention of feeling earlier in the saga of the common person, before his fall. This shouldn’t surprise us, though. Before his fall, this man is not in a painful emotional conflict: although he needs to attend carefully so as not to let the “subterfuge” (4:402/ 15) of relying only on prudential reasoning get in the way of his deliberative process, he is simply considering his reasons, prudential and moral, without any particular difficulty in moving from one to the other. The judging activity of the innocent common human understanding is not a felt experience. This is perplexing, however. For, although we do not gain clarity on this point until Groundwork iii, once Kant does articulate the nature of common human judgment, its territory is just the territory of feeling: “the commonest understanding” is guided in its judgments by “an obscure discrimination of judgment which it calls feeling”

rejection of experience of categoricity

87

(4:450–451/56). We will deal in due course with Kant’s suggestion here that common judgment’s language of feeling is “obscure.” For the present, we simply ask what to make of the apparently nonfelt common experience of the innocent agent. The crucial thing to remember is that this agent is innocent; he has not succumbed to self-deception or the deep, emotional conflict which encourages it. But if he is not in conflict, then feelings are not at the forefront of his consciousness; his experience is not a felt experience simply because he doesn’t have much to feel about! He needs to be attentive, but he is not in need of attending to his feelings (since he doesn’t suffer from strong, conflicted bouts of them). Crucially, though, this innocent agent is not us. Kant appeals to him to describe the movement from innocence to corruption. But we human beings are the corrupt, self-deceived ones, not the innocent, clear-thinking ones. And once we introduce conflict and self-deception into the fallen common person, the language of common human understanding becomes the language of feeling.5 In Groundwork i, we are thus present not only at the birth of practical philosophy, but also at the birth of the common point of view as human beings can have it: common human experience is felt experience. We are now very firmly on the ground of felt, first-personal phenomenological experience when we consider common experience in Groundwork i: in the movement from the innocent to the conflicted agent, we observe the birth of common first-personal understanding in that form most appropriate to conflicted human agents, the felt form of it.6 This story of movement from clarity to opacity in understanding categorical obligation is previous to the question of what individual

5 Kant also thinks, for now, that we need to move away from attentive reflection as a method for knowing obligations: the more conflicted felt experience of the human agent is in need of a more explicitly philosophical cure. He will reclaim attentiveness in the second Critique, where he successfully grounds practical philosophy in attentive reflection on common experience. 6 Stephen Engstrom has suggested to me that one might read this movement from innocence to corruption along Rousseauian lines: we move from an earlier ideal state of society to one corrupted by war, savagery, etc. Something very like that Rousseauian story is going on here, but I see this movement from innocence to corruption on individual instead of societal lines. This story has more in common with the Book of Genesis than it does Rousseau. But, on either the social or the individual reading, we discover a similar movement from an ideal state to a corrupt one, the latter of which has different emotional contours than the former. I am grateful to Engstrom for helping me to think more clearly about these sections.

88

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

motives these agents will act upon. In Kant’s more precise philosophical language, our common agents first seek to understand the objective determination of their wills to imperatives before considering the subjective determination of their wills to action.7 So, in admitting clarity and then opacity in appreciation of one’s obligations, we make no claims about the clarity or opacity of these agents’ actual motives.8 Indeed, we do not know, in either of these cases, anything about these agents’ actual motives, because we do not see them choosing. Instead, we see them at an earlier point in their deliberative processes, a point at which each of them reflects upon what they understand about their obligations.9 Of course, given his clarity of vision at this stage of the process, we suspect the innocent agent would be pretty good at knowing his actual motives as well. But the same clarity of vision cannot be attributed to our fallen agent: if he cannot see his obligations clearly, then it seems equally likely he will not understand his actual motives. Indeed, it is this fall from clarity to opacity on the obligation question that announces the birth of opacity in self-understanding generally for human agents: the fallen common agent of Groundwork i lacks clarity of vision on both the obligation and motive questions. But, given our analysis of the innocent common man, we see that Kant’s famous commitment to opacity in self-understanding is balanced by at least a flirtation with the possibility of clarity of vision about one’s obligations. This clarity of vision about obligations does not last in the Groundwork; it is precisely the thing that our fallen man loses. But a slightly more corrupted version of this clear vision is also precisely what the attentive common person will need to regain, in the second

7 See 4:401n/14n: “A maxim is the subjective principle of volition; the objective principle (i.e., that which would also serve subjectively as the practical principle for all rational beings if reason had complete control over the faculty of desire) is the practical law” (4:401n/14n). 8 See 4:407/19 for Kant’s famous commitment to the opacity of our motives. 9 Dean Moyar has suggested that in Kant’s later, Metaphysics of Morals discussion of conscience, “Kant invests conscience with so much authority that the first-order/secondorder distinction [between obligation and action] becomes completely untenable” (“Unstable Autonomy: Conscience and Judgment in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 5, 2008, p. 347). Whatever the plausibility of Moyar’s reading of conscience, it is clear that in his Groundwork discussion of such things, Kant does draw this distinction. Indeed, we never even see what either of our common agents does, so it is clear that the innocent person’s understanding of obligation, and the corrupt person’s failure of such understanding, both occur previous to a choice being made.

rejection of experience of categoricity

89

Critique, in order to accomplish a more satisfying common grounding of practical philosophy. It is, nonetheless, in our fallen, conflicted agent that we discover a promising version of our general category of felt phenomenological experience. This conflicted experience is a fully practical deliberative experience, which appears also to be quite common.10 Further, it seems a proper object of attentive reflection. We know from Part i that we need an experience of attentive reflection, one which is productive of further practical understandings, and attention to a practical conflict would seem to promise just this sort of productivity: it is a conflict begging for resolution. Indeed, it provides just that goal or object of attentive reflection for which we have been searching. Ironically, though, just when the conflict of this common person is introduced, Kant retracts his reliance on attentiveness, introducing heavier hitters in his philosophical line-up to assure the birth of practical philosophy. This is a perplexing move worthy of further consideration. Is Kant right to refuse the method of practically wise Socratic attentiveness for accessing the moral fruits of this now specifically felt common experience? Has he found a better way of articulating the proper relation of the common to the philosophical in grounding practical philosophy? Two competing models of common–philosophical interaction. To answer these questions, we must step back and appreciate that, in this story of the movement from innocence to corruption of the common agent, we find two distinct stories of the relationship of the common perspective to practical philosophy: each state of the common person requires different levels of philosophical intervention. Although Kant ultimately claims the latter, fallen state as the one from which practical philosophy is born, it will behoove us to look at both this and the earlier state of innocence so as to appreciate more fully the range of possibilities for common–philosophical interaction. In the state of innocence, the common person comes, on her own, to appreciate categorical obligation. She relies upon a practically wise Socratic guide in doing so, but this guide does not provide new ideas or information. All the guide does is to encourage her to be more attentive to her experience. And mere attentiveness to her deliberative 10 We consider this question of whether the conflict between happiness and morality is a convincingly common experience in more depth in Part iii.

90

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

process allowed this agent to distinguish clearly – more clearly, indeed, than typical philosophers! – the nature of categorical demands and the distinctiveness of this demand compared to prudential recommendations. It is pretty straightforward to assess in this story what to attribute to philosophy and what to attribute to the common person. This innocent person gets nonscientific, Socratic philosophical support which encourages her to be attentive to what she always already had within her. The innocent common person thus receives assistance from a special sort of philosopher, not the sort who gets confused by “foreign and irrelevant” complexities (4:404/17), but one who has a special, wise capacity for attentiveness himself and thus is capable of encouraging others to access their own similar capacity. On this story, the common person is entirely capable, on her own, of accessing her own principle of categorical obligation, and this access provides its own justification or ground. This common agent reasonably takes herself to be categorically obligated. Although she might need, occasionally, to remind herself that it is important to reflect carefully, her understanding of categorical demands has what Kant will later call “durability” (4:405/17): once she has it, she has it (as long as she maintains her attitude of wise attentiveness). What the innocent common person gets from philosophy, then, is inspiration to be wise and attentive to herself. There is a different story to tell about the relationship of the common perspective to practical philosophy for the conflicted common person. The corrupt common person loses her ability to distinguish categorical demands from hypothetical ones. As a result, she also needs a more invasive philosophical cure for her ills, one which involves learning from a non-Socratic philosopher both the true source of her moral principle and the distinction between its categorical demands and other, merely hypothetical, demands grounded in inclinations. Because these two points – and especially the latter – are learned as information and instruction from a philosopher, they now seem to be coming from outside of the common person instead of as a mere clarification of that principle which was always inside of her and which she really already knew. Her descent into rationalization and self-deception has destroyed that happy link to her own understanding, and the only cure for her condition is a more invasive, even external, philosophical one. It seems, then, that in his appeal to the philosopher to resolve common conflicts, Kant is asking us to exit the common point of view.

rejection of experience of categoricity

91

As we have seen, “common human reason” is “impelled . . . on practical grounds . . . to go out of its sphere and to take a step into the field of practical philosophy” (4:405/18, emphasis added). The field of “practical philosophy” is not within the sphere of “common human reason”; it is some other form of reason, which is external to it. The rational tools from this external realm might help the common person in her plight, but these tools are not her own. They are tools from the distinct and specialist realm of the philosophical. The non-Socratic philosopher thus does not simply encourage the conflicted common agent to be more attentive to herself; instead, she brings new, uncommon, explicitly philosophical tools to the common experience. Further, if the philosopher brings her own rational tools to the conflicted common person, then she no longer takes that common experience of obligation as self-justifying. Conflicted common experience, unlike innocent common experience, cannot be the proper ground of practical philosophy (that is, the proper basis upon which one justifies or proves the validity of the statement that humans are obligated beings). The common point of view is confused and needs clarification; the cure for its confusion comes from a sphere outside of it, and not from a more attentive consideration of its own sphere. Common experience thus plays not a grounding or justificatory role, so much as a more inspirational role for the practical philosopher: common experience allows the philosopher to think of new, practical things like the experience of being obligated. These are things beyond the limits of the philosopher’s theoretical scope, and it is in virtue of the philosopher’s encounter with the common person that she can even start to think about such things. This inspirational role for the common perspective is thus a genuinely valuable one. The common person may be conflicted, but it is precisely this conflicted experience that gives the philosopher something to think about. Were philosophical reason to abandon this common experience, it would also abandon the only thing that legitimates its new form of activity. But this conflicted experience does not bring with it (implicitly or explicitly) its own justification. It will be the work of the philosopher – on purely philosophical (and not common) rational grounds – to provide a rational justification of whatever hint of moral obligation we find in the common experience. Problems in the common–philosophical relationship. We have, then, two competing pictures of the common–philosophical relationship.

92

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

Furthermore, Kant does not present these as two equally possible scenarios. The clear trajectory of the story he tells is that we have lost our state of innocence and, whatever attractions we might find in the Socratic model of the common–philosophical relationship, we must submit to stricter non-Socratic instruction in order to learn the moral law in a way that assures “durability for its precepts” (4:405/17). Should we be happy with this, though? That is, should we prefer this second story of the relationship between the common and the philosophical? There are a variety of questions that can be raised about Kant’s preferences. First, for those (like myself) who have already indicated confidence in the coherence of a story of the grounding of practical philosophy via attentive reflection on common, felt experience, the first story of the relationship of the innocent common person to his wise Socratic guide is clearly more attractive. One might, however, want to improve this account a little. There is, for example, something odd about this innocent, autonomously legislating moral agent needing anything outside of herself to affirm her capacity for attentive reflection. Could she not be her own Socrates? That is, could she not inspire wise attentiveness within herself without relying on a philosophical guide to help her? Further, if we ultimately accept a picture of the fallen instead of the innocent common agent (as I do), then absence of attentive reflection on explicitly felt experience – in light of the less conflicted state of the innocent common person – is problematic. Fallen common agents need to speak in the language of feeling, and as we have seen in Part i, appeal to feeling is the route by which Kant will even be able to think about superphenomenal, intelligible things. As such, a model for attentiveness that did not focus specifically on felt experience seems to lack something. Despite these details that would need to be addressed, this model of attentiveness to common, deliberative experience as a birth of philosophy remains a strong one, one which it is tempting to apply to the corrupt agent as well as to the innocent agent. There is, in contrast, something strange about the second common– philosophical interaction. On this account, the common person turns to a noncommon philosopher because she has become so thoroughly self-deceived that she can no longer rely on attentive reflection on her felt experiences. The biggest worry that arises about this more invasive, non-Socratic relationship of the philosophical to the common is that, in accepting it, we simultaneously abandon any secure common

rejection of experience of categoricity

93

understanding of the difference between categorical and hypothetical demands. When Kant insists that only the philosopher can explain “the correct determination of this principle in comparison with maxims based on need and inclination” (4:405/18), then he gets himself into trouble. Why? If the common person really does not understand the categorical nature of moral demands, it is impossible to find her culpable when she prioritizes happiness over morality. Perhaps Kant can answer this objection, though. The corrupt common person does have some sense of the authority of moral principles, at least enough to realize he needs help maintaining that authority. If he didn’t have some sense of the superior authority of moral principles, his temptation to place happiness over morality wouldn’t lead him to seek philosophical medicine; it would instead lead him to the reasonable consideration of whether he might become a utilitarian. Perhaps, then, the instruction he will get from the philosopher about the difference between categorical and hypothetical imperatives will be more a solidifying of something that he intermittently gets hold of, but then loses, as opposed to an absolutely new introduction of ideas. But this merely intermittent appreciation of moral demands is also unstable. One cannot say that the common agent, on his own, would be blameworthy for occasionally placing happiness above morality. If he cannot know reliably and regularly that moral demands hold with authority, and there is no philosopher around to instruct him otherwise, it makes perfect sense that he would resolve his conflict by choosing to prioritize one set of demands over the other. Why not prioritize happiness over morality if one really cannot be expected to have a stable appreciation of the fact that moral demands hold with more authority? This person is indeed deceived, but if she cannot do anything about that on her own, then her corruption becomes a legitimate excuse for lack of culpability. One might argue, alternatively, that we humans must instead rely upon the sense we have from a distance of the innocent person’s unconflicted experiential recognition of categorical obligation to have enough of a sense of it ourselves. That person, after all, really did understand the truly categorical nature of moral demands, so could we not simply learn from him? To take this route would be to replace first-personal experience with third-personal experience: we cannot experience categorical obligation reliably ourselves, but perhaps we can conceive of how someone not quite like us does. Such an appeal

94

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

is unconvincing, however: why should we depend upon the experience of a being different from us in order to assure the validity of autonomously legislated moral demands? We should distrust a moral system that would encourage reliance on another kind of being’s moral experiences to ground the validity of one’s own moral obligation. Kant’s conviction that we cannot find the categorical–hypothetical distinction implicit in the common experience itself because of the power of self-deception thus leads to the collapse of his effort to appeal to non-Socratic philosophy to save our common experience of obligation. It leads him to abandon the common–philosophical relationship that had more promise (one in which common experience played a truly grounding and justificatory role in affirming categorical obligation), and to rely instead upon a common–philosophical relationship that cannot accomplish the task at hand (since the means for justifying the common experience of obligation must lie outside that experience). Kant might, instead, have considered whether a more intense version of internal, wise attentiveness to one’s own felt moral experience would be a better antidote to the disease of self-deception. It was, after all, through attentiveness that the innocent “common understanding exclude[d] all sensible incentives from practical laws” (4:404/17), and that is exactly what someone tempted by rationalization and selfdeception needs to do: she needs to realize that her self-deception encourages her to give more weight to “sensible incentives” than they deserve, and such careful sifting through our experience of the relative weight of reasons upon our will is just what attentiveness is meant to accomplish. It is, therefore, odd that Kant relies on a nonattentive appeal to the practical philosopher, instead of a more intense attentive appeal to the common person herself, in order to address her fallen condition. Surely, it is by her failure to deliberate well that this agent has gotten into this mess; it seems, therefore, that she should also be able to deliberate her way out of it! Indeed, by the time he gets to the Religion, Kant affirms just such a strength of soul to the fallen common person, saying that “in spite of that fall, the command that we ought to become better human beings still resounds unabated in our souls; consequently, we must also be capable of” rising from our fallen state (6:45/66).11 11 In the Religion, Kant suggests just such a parallel between descending into and getting out of the state of what he there calls “radical evil,” a state nearly identical to that of our corrupt, fallen, self-deceived agent in the Groundwork: “Since the fall from good into evil

rejection of experience of categoricity

95

iii. Why Kant rejects a reliable experience of categorical obligation Introduction. Kant is thus not willing to grant a reliable and unwavering common, felt experience of categorical obligation. But this refusal makes his grounding of practical philosophy, and the relationship of common to philosophical points of view in that grounding, unstable: if the common perspective can be justified only by appeal to something outside of it, then it will never acquire that justification necessary for autonomously legislated categorical obligation. Why is it, though, that Kant believes the influence of self-deception upon deliberation is so great that we must abandon both a reliable experience of categorical obligation and the method of attentiveness which would allow us to access it? Why could we not simply claim a new version of the first, more innocent, story of the common–philosophical relationship, strengthening it by recognizing that Socratic attentiveness to felt experience is strong enough even to act as an antidote to selfdeception? There are intractable problems in trying to bring this Socratic reading of the common–philosophical relationship to the Groundwork. To appreciate why, we must analyze some arguments of Groundwork ii in which Kant explicitly rejects an experience of categorical obligation because of the corrupting influence of self-deception on our deliberative process. But any adoption of a quasi-Socratic model of the common–philosophical relationship would demand just such an experience. Thus, to the extent that Kant refuses a reliable common experience of categorical obligation, he must also reject the Socratic model of the common–philosophical relationship. Consideration of his Groundwork ii arguments reveals, however, that Kant has no strong argument upon which to rely. Indeed, his refusal of a reliable felt, common experience of categorical obligation is precisely the philosophical move that promises to make the Groundwork as a whole a phenomenological failure. To initiate a successful common, phenomenological grounding of practical philosophy, Kant must eventually embrace – as he does in the second Critique – a reliable common (if we seriously consider that evil originates from freedom) is no more comprehensible than the ascent from evil back to the good, then the possibility of this last cannot be disputed. For, in spite of that fall, the command that we ought to become better human beings still resounds unabated in our souls; consequently, we must also be capable of it” (6:45/66).

96

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

experience of categorical obligation. Let us now investigate the arguments of Groundwork ii which set up this phenomenological failure. Groundwork ii arguments. In Groundwork ii, just after having described the nature of hypothetical imperatives via appeal to examples, Kant asserts that we cannot appeal similarly to an example or experience of a categorical imperative: [W]e must never leave out of account, here, that it cannot be made out by means of any example, and so empirically, whether there is any such [categorical] imperative at all . . . We shall thus have to investigate entirely a priori the possibility of a categorical imperative, since we do not here have the advantage of its reality being given in experience, so that the possibility would be necessary not to establish it but merely to explain it. (4:419–420/29–30)

Even as he claims here that we do not have any experience or “example” of categorical obligation, Kant also laments that he cannot engage in what we have been calling an attentive phenomenological method for grounding categorical obligation. He seems even to be lamenting that he must instead investigate the issue of categorical obligation “entirely a priori.” If only we had the “advantage” of the “reality” of categorical obligation “being given in experience,” we wouldn’t have to “establish” (that is, prove) such obligation, “but merely . . . explain it.” Putting this claim into words we have been using in this study: if only we had a common, felt phenomenological experience of categorical obligation, we would need simply to attend to that experience in order to reveal what is already implicit in it and not worry about proving its very existence. At this point at least, Kant thus, curiously, considers his more austere “entirely a priori” method to be a disadvantage, something to which he is forced because experience itself will allow no more direct route, a route like the one used in making sense of hypothetical imperatives whose “reality [is] given in experience.” In the hypothetical case, it was simple to describe the various sorts of experiential conditions under which one’s will finds itself necessitated: if you want to be healthy, you must do what your physician says; if you want to kill this man, you must use this amount of poison, and so on. But now, as he defends categorical necessitation of the will, he insists experience will be no guide, then provides an argument for why we

rejection of experience of categoricity

97

must accept this limitation of experience. This argument is in agreement with the picture of the conflicted, corrupt person we saw in Groundwork i. Yet Kant’s argument for why self-deception undermines the very possibility of an experience of categorical obligation proves incoherent. Consideration of this failed argument will, nonetheless, give us a deeper appreciation of Kant’s commitments at this moment in his practical philosophy. Here is the argument: It is . . . to be feared that all imperatives which seem to be categorical may yet in some hidden way be hypothetical. For example, when it is said “you ought not to promise anything deceitfully,” and one assumes that the necessity of this omission is not giving counsel for avoiding some other ill – in which case what is said would be “you ought not to make a lying promise lest if it comes to light you destroy your credit” – but that an action of this kind must be regarded as in itself evil and that the imperative of prohibition is therefore categorical: one still cannot show with certainty in any example that the will is here determined merely through the law, without another incentive, although it seems to be so; for it is always possible that covert fear of disgrace, perhaps also obscure apprehension of other dangers, may have had an influence on the will. Who can prove by experience the nonexistence of a cause when all that experience teaches is that we do not perceive it? In such a case, however, the so-called moral imperative, which as such appears to be categorical and unconditional, would in fact be only a pragmatic precept that makes us attentive to our advantage and merely teaches us to take this into consideration. (4:419/29–30)

Here, Kant asserts that we can never be assured an imperative is categorical because it is always possible there is some hidden hypothetical motive for the action ordered by the imperative: it might seem that I choose not to lie simply because it is wrong, but there might be some prudential motive (as, for example, that I don’t want a bad credit report) that is the real motive for my action. Kant’s commitment to the opacity of our motives that emerges from our tendency to deceive ourselves in the name of pursuing happiness over morality thus leads him to reject the very possibility of an example of categorical obligation. Does this argument work? There is at least one plausible thing to note about it. Opacity of motives is indeed a practical concern that would make sense of our common agent as we found him at the end of

98

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

Groundwork i. Indeed, we admitted there that, although we did not see that agent acting, we could expect, when he did, that he would have difficulty understanding his motives for action. Opacity of motives is the child of self-deception, so Kant’s appeal here to the opacity of motives to explain the lack of an experience of categorical obligation is of a piece with his picture of this self-deceived, fallen agent.12 But, despite its promising beginning, this argument does not work because it confuses a basic distinction between kinds of determinations of the will. Drawing that distinction will confirm that Kant cannot appeal to opacity of motives to reject the possibility of an experience of categorical obligation. First, when Kant says that “the will is . . . determined merely through the law” (4:419/30, emphasis added), he could have two things in mind when he speaks of “determination of the will”: he could be speaking either of that will being objectively obligated to an action, or of the subjective motives by which that will is in fact led to a particular act. This is the basic distinction between imperatives (or laws) and maxims (or motives), or, alternatively, between objective and subjective determinations of the will which we referenced earlier in this chapter when affirming that the experience of common persons in Groundwork i was an experience of the former obligation and not the latter motivation.13 The question, then, is which of these two notions of determination of the will is relevant to the current discussion. The answer to this question, though, is exquisitely clear: when Kant is determining whether we can find an example of a categorical imperative, he is asking the former question about whether there is an example of an objective law valid for this will, not the latter of whether there is an example of an individual acting on categorically informed motives or maxims. This is true even if we admit, as we have, that appreciation of general categorical obligation is accessible only via particular instances of being

12 One suspects this is why Kant opens Groundwork ii with his lamentations about the opacity of the motives of the “dear self” (4:407–408/19–20). Having concluded Groundwork i with his picture of the conflicted, self-deceived agent, the next thing to appreciate about such agents is the resulting opacity of motives. 13 There is a large discussion of the nature of motivation for Kant. See, for example, Barbara Herman’s influential discussion of such matters (“On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty,” in Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993]). I am not here seeking to determine Kant’s overall theory of motivation. My point is that, whatever that overall theory, Kant must distinguish between objective and subjective determinations of the will as suggested here.

rejection of experience of categoricity

99

obligated: when the innocent common agent of Groundwork i recognized categorical obligation, it was when he was thinking about whether he could make a false promise to get some money. The fact that he would then go on to make a decision and thus have a particular motivation which explains that act does nothing to prevent us from saying also that, at an earlier point in his deliberative process, attentive reflection on his experiences revealed to him that he was, whatever his eventual motives, first categorically obligated to honesty. The question “What shall I do here?” may have already arisen. But before answering that question, he first asks in that same deliberative instance: “To what am I obligated here?”14 Similarly, as Kant now, in Groundwork ii, turns to the question of whether we can identify categorical as well as hypothetical imperatives, he is asking that earlier question in the deliberative process of whether we can identify categorical obligation. Yet, when Kant appeals to the opacity of our motives as a reason for why we cannot have an experience of categorical obligation, he jumps illicitly from the question of obligation or law to the question of motive or maxim. This move is illicit because if the question before us is the question of whether I have an experience of being objectively obligated to a categorical law, then the question of what motive I in fact act upon is, for the moment, irrelevant. Furthermore, even admitting the opacity of my motives upon action, there is nothing to prevent the possibility of clarity of vision being obligated previous to action. I could indeed still understand through a compelling example the previous, and more basic, point recognized by the innocent common agent of Groundwork i: that lying is wrong no matter what – that is, categorically.15 The problem of opacity arises only

14 Could one argue that he cannot answer the question of obligation until he has acted? Moyar (“Unstable Autonomy”) has suggested something similar to this in his reading of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals discussion of conscience, but we find no hint here in Groundwork ii of anything similar. Further, the suggestion that the question of obligation is not separable from the question of choice is implausible from the perspective of the usual course of deliberation, and certainly not in agreement with Kant’s own description of the deliberative process of the innocent common agent in Groundwork i. There, we never even see what he does; but we do get a clear description of the deliberative process leading him to answer the question of whether he is obligated. 15 Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 7, this is exactly what Kant himself goes on to do in the famous Gallows Man example in the second Critique. The clear distinction between obligation and choice for the Gallows Man will be further evidence for rejecting Moyar’s suggestion (in “Unstable Autonomy”) that a conscience-informed reading of the Fact of Reason collapses this distinction.

100

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

when I am trying to figure out, post-choice, whether I have chosen adequately in relation to that objective demand. That is: once I choose not to lie, am I in fact acting on this categorical demand, or am I not lying because of my own self-seeking reasons? At this moment of choice, “uncertainty” reveals itself, not – or at least not necessarily, or obviously – at the earlier moment of recognizing the obligation by which I am bound. One can, of course, deceive oneself about obligations as well; but, as we have seen, the attentive common agent can see clearly her obligations as they present themselves, and we have, as yet, no indication of why such attentiveness would not be adequate for overcoming tendencies toward self-deception. So when Kant now says, when discussing reasons why one ought not lie, that “one still cannot show with certainty that the will is here determined merely through the law, without another incentive,” he equivocates on what he means by the will being “determined merely through the law.” If he means that the will being determined to choice cannot be shown with certainty not to have been determined by some other, noncategorical motive, he is right: we cannot know with certainty whether I chose not to lie because it was wrong or because it was in my self-interest. But if he means that the will being “determined” in the sense of being categorically obligated to tell the truth (whatever I end up choosing) cannot be shown with certainty, then the purported lack of certainty is not so clear. Indeed, this is the very question at issue. Kant thus confuses matters when he appeals to uncertainty of motives to explain why we have no experience of categorical obligation. And the question of whether we have an experience of categorical obligation (as opposed to one of knowing ourselves to have acted on categorical demands) remains an open question. Furthermore, one cannot appeal to Kant’s further argument that proof of categorical obligation would require proof of the nonexistence of a cause. Kant asks, rhetorically, “Who can prove by experience the nonexistence of a cause when all that experience teaches is that we do not perceive it?” suggesting that achieving certainty about motives involves determining not only that a categorical motive for the act in question exists, but also that no other hypothetical motive exists. This seems right. But the same demand does not hold for proving oneself categorically obligated. To do that, one does not need to prove both that a categorical obligation exists and that there is no noncategorical means grounding the same obligation. Indeed, we can easily see that there are noncategorical reasons to which one might appeal in saying

rejection of experience of categoricity

101

that one must not, for example, tell a lie. But admission of such reasons does not undermine the validity of a categorical reason for the same action. Rather, Kant’s insistence that we cannot figure out with certainty the nature of our motives depends upon just these two differing sets of reasons being actual: we cannot speak of the uncertainty of motives unless there are varying reasons one might do the act in question. So, we just might be able to appeal to experience to confirm categorical demands upon the will. All we need is to encounter a demand that won’t go away, no matter what the status of competing demands of self-love. We don’t need to worry about whether a demand of self-love is secretly operative; we simply ask whether we find ourselves compelled no matter what. We wouldn’t even need to think at all about secret or explicit hypothetical causes of choice. Or, if we did, the categorical nature of the original demand might just be all the clearer: were my reasons for acting on self-love obviously in conflict with the categorical demand, this would simply reveal that I am compelled to do that thing even if it is entirely in opposition to my happiness. We do not even need yet to ascertain what nonhypothetical cause it is that makes this a categorical demand. All we need is the experience of something holding categorically, whatever the cause. We are, however, getting ahead of ourselves. Kant will, by the second Critique, accept that one does have just this experience of being categorically obligated. We will consider such things in Part iii. There is, however, a final point to make. Interestingly, and despite himself, Kant hints even within the Groundwork at what a felt recognition of the difference between hypothetical and categorical demands would be like. When he discusses what we can say of categorical imperatives, he says: In the meantime, however, we can see this much: that the categorical imperative alone has the tenor of a practical law; all the others can indeed be called principles of the will but not laws, since what it is necessary to do merely for achieving a discretionary purpose can be regarded as in itself contingent and we can always be released from the precept if we give up the purpose; on the contrary, the unconditional command leaves the will no discretion with respect to the opposite, so that it alone brings with it that necessity which we require of a law. (4:420/30)

Having just asserted that we have no experience of categorical obligation, Kant now describes the difference between experiencing a

102

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

command categorically or hypothetically! When he says “an unconditional command leaves the will no discretion with respect to the opposite” (4:420/30), whereas “we can always be released from [a merely hypothetical] precept if we give up the purpose,” he implicitly appeals to the reader’s capacity to recognize that there is a difference between the two: the experiences themselves are simply different! His language of the “tenor” of a law even hints rhetorically at what a law feels like as opposed to mere formal reflection upon it. Even as he rejects the possibility of an experience of categorical obligation, Kant thus makes claims about the nature of such experience. Other reasons? There is, however, a more obvious line of argument Kant might have adopted in arguing against an experience of categorical obligation: an experience of categorical obligation would be an experience of strict necessitation, that is, an experience not just of something holding generally as true (e.g., you usually shouldn’t lie), but also holding as an obligation upon the will that could not be otherwise. This means the claim of categorical obligation must be an a priori – probably a synthetic a priori – claim. Thus, we cannot appeal to experience to ground it, because experience grounds only synthetic a posteriori claims. Does Kant himself argue in this vein? Although I would not call it a strict argument as such, we can find, shortly after his discussion of the opacity of motives, the following appeal to synthetic a priori concerns: [I]n the case of this categorical imperative or law of morality the ground of the difficulty (of insight into its possibility) is also very great. It is an a priori synthetic practical proposition; and since it is so difficult to see the possibility of this kind of proposition in theoretical cognition, it can be readily gathered that the difficulty will be no less in practical cognition. (4:420/30)

Kant does not provide any explanation of the particular “difficulty” we face in assuring the possibility of a synthetic a priori practical cognition of categorical obligation. But he does, in a footnote, describe the synthetic a priori nature of a claim of categorical obligation: I connect the deed with the will, without a presupposed condition from any inclination, a priori and hence necessarily (though only objectively, i.e., under the idea of a reason having complete control over all subjective motives). This is, therefore, a practical proposition that does not

rejection of experience of categoricity

103

derive the volition of an action analytically from another volition already presupposed (for we have no such perfect will), but connects it immediately with the concept of the will of a rational being as something that is not contained in it. (4:420n/30n)

A claim of categorical obligation of the will would thus be a practical synthetic a priori claim. Affirmation of categorical obligation would be affirmation that a kind of act is attached “necessarily” and “objectively” to the will. This deed “is not contained” in the concept of the will, so attachment of it to the will is not analytic, but synthetic. Further, this attachment is a priori, not a posteriori, since no a posteriori claim holds with strict necessity. A claim of categorical obligation would thus be a synthetic a priori claim, now not a theoretical one (like “substance is permanent” or “every event has a cause”), but a practical one attaching to our wills. Can we, through appeal to the synthetic a priori status of a claim of categorical obligation, find a viable route for affirming that it is impossible to appeal to an experience of categorical obligation? We can at least say that showing the possibility of any synthetic a priori proposition “require[s] special and difficult toil,” so special and difficult that Kant “postpone[s] [this task] to the last section” (4:420/31). That last section is, of course, Groundwork iii, and we will consider its argument in due course. Meanwhile, what exactly is the special difficulty of proving a practical synthetic a priori claim? Is it a difficulty that prevents us from appealing to experience to ground it? We do not find in Groundwork ii an argument to defend the idea that synthetic a priori claims cannot appeal to experience. But, once we think more carefully about this question, the arguments of our own discussion of the same return. There, we asserted that we obviously cannot appeal inductively to empirical experience to ground such claims: we cannot appeal to repeated experiences of finding persons obligated to tell the truth as proof that all persons are categorically obligated to tell the truth. Such inductive appeal could, at best, provide an empirical claim of generality: it could tell us that, for the most part, people experience themselves as obligated not to lie, but it could not tell us that this could not be otherwise in the future. But in Chapter 2, we discovered another way of appealing to experience to ground synthetic a priori claims: Kant, when defending synthetic a priori claims in theoretical philosophy, appeals to experiences

104

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

of necessity. He begins his argument of the Second Analogy by appealing to the necessary ordering of mental representations in the experience of a ship moving down stream, and moves backwards to the transcendental conditions of such experience. There seems no reason to expect that these same approaches wouldn’t also work for the synthetic a priori claim of categorical obligation. Of course, we cannot work our way backwards to knowledge of the conditions of the possibility of the experience of a necessarily bound will; yet, a combination of wondering at those causes combined with attentive consideration of the experience of necessitation itself promises new avenues of epistemic investigation. The thought that, in defending synthetic a priori propositions, one must entirely eschew appeal to any experience of necessity thus has already been proven wrong. It remains entirely open to Kant to make an attentive appeal to phenomenological experience (instead of an inductive appeal to empirical experience) to affirm the synthetic a priori proposition that the will is necessitated categorically. He has thus failed to defend his refusal to admit an experience of categorical obligation, either through appeal to the opacity of motives, or through appeal to the synthetic a priori status of any claim of categorical obligation.

Conclusion Despite the lack of good reason to do so, Kant takes the influence of self-deception upon the human deliberative process as a reason to reject the possibility of a reliable, grounding experience of categorical obligation. This commitment guides him argumentatively throughout the Groundwork. It is the reason why he will not appeal to the common, felt experience of conflict when he turns to the more precise practical philosophical tasks of affirming the objective reality of freedom and moral obligation in Groundwork iii. This does not mean that he is entirely abandoning the phenomenological method there; rather, he will seek another common, felt experience – that of the difference of the felt experiences of passivity and activity – in an effort to accomplish his philosophical goals. But that felt experience will prove inadequate to his philosophical needs. And when philosophical reason fails to get adequate inspiration from common, felt experience, it can only return to being itself, that is, to being reason in its original, theoretical guise. We will thus see Kant returning to rehearsals of the familiar arguments

rejection of experience of categoricity

105

of the Third Antinomy which enticingly left us an open space for freedom and moral obligation, but which did nothing to fill them in with an affirmation of their objective reality. One might argue that this is just Kant’s point in the Groundwork: common felt experience is simply not adequate on its own to ground or justify those claims most central to our practical lives; it really must rely upon something else, practical philosophy, to ground them. Fair enough, I say to this objector. But making this move would require of Kant that he abandon attentive analysis of felt experience to ground practical philosophy, and there doesn’t seem to be anything other than this attentive phenomenological method upon which reason could rely in order fully to claim its birthright as practical reason. Common felt experience, on this more limited reading of it, would give the philosopher a goal for reason, but nothing else; but the practical philosopher, constrained by the limits of reason introduced in the first Critique, needs more than this from the common person. If the method of phenomenological reflection as a basis for practical philosophy is going to work, Kant needs to find already in felt experience what he is going eventually to need in practical philosophy, viz., confirmation of categorical obligation. This is, however, just what Kant is not willing to do at this point, out of his concerns about the pervasive influence of selfdeception on our moral consciousness, and for fear of begging the question at the heart of moral philosophy (that is, out of fear that by admitting an experience of categorical obligation he would import into his assumptions that which he intended to prove, viz., that we are morally obligated). The birth of practical philosophy heralded at the end of Groundwork i will thus turn out to be a stillbirth. Kant’s ultimate claiming of the phenomenological method will involve abandoning the hope of deducing moral obligation from some previous nonmoral premise and recognizing instead that discovering in phenomenological experience just what we were looking for (viz. moral obligation) is not begging the question; it is the discovery of a genuinely new, and fully practical, way of doing philosophy. Let us turn, then, to a discussion of the argument of Groundwork iii in order to appreciate this next step in the development of Kant’s phenomenological method. What we shall find there is that this new common, felt experience is not robust enough for him to do the moral work he wants it to; the result is, at least at this point, the failure of Kant’s incipient phenomenological method of practical philosophy.

5 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL FAILURE O F G R O U N D W O R K iii

Introduction It is time to consider the argument of Groundwork iii. A review of recent literature on it confirms that Kant’s argument there is the most beloved flawed argument in the history of philosophy. Paul Guyer has, for example, recently suggested that, after precritical arguments focusing on a more naturalistic grounding of freedom, Groundwork iii provides a nonnaturalistic, transcendental deduction of freedom (and the moral law), one that follows the structure of the transcendental deduction of the first Critique.1 But, according to Guyer, this argument is “fatally flawed”: the transcendental rather than psychological method that Kant employs . . . sidesteps altogether the normative task of demonstrating the absolute value of freedom for which he earlier turned to psychology: its argument from our underlying identity as rational beings aims to show that the moral law is valid for us because we really are rational and free beings rather than showing that it ought to be binding on us because we ought to recognize the value of being rational and free beings. (Guyer, “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments,” p. 455)

Henry Allison has suggested that this argument moves from nonmoral premises about the nature of reason to moral conclusions about freedom and obligation to the moral law.2 But the argument fails because the assumption of a theoretical capacity for reason cannot move us to “a supersensible realm governed by moral laws.”3 I want to thank Wayne Martin for helpful conversations on this chapter. 1 Paul Guyer, “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Inquiry 50(5), 2007, pp. 444–464. 2 Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, especially chapter 12 and pp. 227–229. 3 Ibid., p. 227.

106

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 107

Guyer and Allison articulate their readings of the argument differently. Nonetheless, their criticisms of the argument share this structure: the argument moves, unsuccessfully, from a nonmoral, theoretical premise to a robust moral conclusion. Guyer’s nonmoral premise is his appeal to the “rational being” upon which the argument turns: the argument is “an analytical argument deriving the moral law from the concept of a rational being . . . and is parallel to the metaphysical deduction of the categories.”4 Allison’s “needed nonmoral premise”5 is reason, considered theoretically; the failure of the argument is Kant’s unwitting slide from this conception of reason to a more robust conception of positive freedom which entails reason in the stronger sense of being governed by autonomously legislated moral laws, a slide that Allison articulates as an unidentified movement from a Verstandeswelt to an intelligibelen Welt and which, he asserts, “begs the whole question at issue.”6 For both Guyer and Allison, the failure of Groundwork iii is the failure of an argument beginning with nonmoral premises about our theoretical capacity for reason and moving toward affirmation of a robust practical claim about ourselves as free or autonomously legislating rational agents. These interpretations, while successful in pointing to important moments in this difficult argument, fail to provide a complete articulation of Kant’s argumentative approach in Groundwork iii. Our common, phenomenological approach to Kant’s practical philosophy offers another interpretive possibility. Perhaps Kant is not trying to pull the moral rabbit out of the theoretical hat, but instead is introducing a new move in his phenomenological method of practical philosophy: having abandoned the possibility of a felt phenomenological experience of categorical obligation, could we not instead identify a felt, phenomenological experience of freedom to provide a grounding practical (instead of nonmoral, theoretical) premise for the central claims of practical philosophy? If he is utilizing a phenomenological method, then we should expect to find at least two indications of it in the text. First, we should find the argument beginning from a felt, first-personal experience that already possessed if not moral, at least practical content; second, we should expect it to proceed not via rational inference accessible from a 4 Guyer, “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments,” p. 454. 5 Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 227. 6 Ibid., pp. 227–228.

108

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

third-personal perspective, but via attentive first-personal reflection on one’s own felt experiences. We shall, in this chapter, discover exactly these moves within the argument of Groundwork iii. I do not mean to suggest that, in Groundwork iii, Kant defends a fully articulated phenomenological method of practical philosophy, nor that he operates in an unambiguously phenomenological way throughout; such commitment will become obvious and unambiguous only in his later practical writings. I am, however, suggesting that, in writing Groundwork iii, Kant was struggling with the question of what the proper method of practical philosophy was. As a result, we find, right next to more theoretically based arguments of the sort Allison and Guyer have identified, hints of a new and recognizably phenomenological approach to practical philosophy. In focusing on these nascent phenomenological moments, we can articulate the argument of Groundwork iii as practical throughout: from an assumption about practical experience accessed from a common, felt, first-personal perspective, Kant seeks, via attentiveness to this phenomenological experience, to ground our status as categorically obligated, autonomous lawgivers. On this reading, the failure of the argument is a failure to enter fully into this new phenomenological perspective, and, in particular, a failure to admit a starting point robust enough for phenomenological reflection. Kant will be more successful at employing this phenomenological method in the Critique of Practical Reason, where the starting premise of his argument does prove thick enough to be susceptible to phenomenological reflection. We consider the success of that later, more mature set of practical reflections in Part iii. For the present, I shall focus on showing why this first, not entirely explicit effort at practical phenomenology fails. I begin with a phenomenological reading of the argument of Groundwork iii (Section i below). I then turn to an analysis of the argument in two parts, first considering its strengths – and particularly those moments when Kant moves toward a phenomenological method of argumentation (Section ii below) – and then its failure (Section iii below).

i. The phenomenological argument of Groundwork iii The felt phenomenological experience of freedom. Kant, famously, at the opening of Groundwork iii, suggests that rational agents must take themselves to be free:

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 109 I say now: every being that cannot act otherwise than under the idea of freedom is just because of that really free in a practical respect, that is, all laws that are inseparably bound up with freedom hold for him just as if his will had been validly pronounced free also in itself and in theoretical philosophy. Now I assert that to every rational being having a will we must necessarily lend the idea of freedom also, under which alone he acts. For in such a being we think of a reason that is practical, that is, has causality with respect to its objects. Now one cannot possibly think of a reason that would consciously receive direction from any other quarter with respect to its judgments, since the subject would then attribute the determination of his judgment not to his reason but to an impulse. Reason must regard itself as the author of its principles independently of alien influences; consequently, as practical reason or as the will of a rational being it must be regarded of itself as free, that is, the will of such a being cannot be a will of his own except under the idea of freedom, and such a will must in a practical respect thus be attributed to every rational being. (4:448/53–54)

This argument most obviously proceeds from a third-personal point of view. When, for example, Kant says that “to every rational being having a will we must necessarily lend the idea of freedom also, under which alone he acts,” he asks us to take a spectatorial point of view upon another acting agent, not to consider ourselves as that agent, nor to immerse ourselves first-personally in what it feels like to be a rational agent experiencing herself as free. Yet, hidden in the following sentence, we do find the beginnings of a first-personal point of view: Now one cannot possibly think of a reason that would consciously receive direction from any other quarter with respect to its judgments, since the subject would then attribute the determination of his judgment not to his reason but to an impulse.

The first-personal point of view is not immediately obvious here because Kant speaks of “reason” or a “subject.” This impersonal language disguises the shift he has made to the first-personal, as is clear from his later appeal to this reason as “consciously receiv[ing]” guidance. Kant is appealing to someone reflecting upon his own judgments, and finding that he cannot even think of them as his own unless he understands himself as the active cause of them. He “consciously receives direction” from his own reason; that is, he experiences himself as taking direction from himself, as the active and rational cause of his judgments.

110

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

This is clearly a reference to the first-personal point of view, perhaps even to a common first-personal experience. But it is not a reference to a felt experience of freedom. This agent does not feel free; rather, he cannot help but think of himself as free when he finds himself acting. He thus has the experience not of feeling himself to be free, but instead of inferring from his actions that he must be free. This is why some commentators, such as Allison and Christine Korsgaard,7 take this passage, especially its language of “not act[ing] otherwise than under the idea of freedom,” as affirming a rational demand that we take, assume, or infer ourselves to be free. One could, perhaps, use the language of “experience” to refer to this rational reflection upon one’s actions. But this is an inference a third-personal spectator upon my action could make as easily as I could. Kant is thus not, in this passage, entering fully into the felt, first-personal experience of freedom; rather, there remains this remnant of a third-personal, even nonmoral or theoretical, starting point for his argument. A variety of challenges have been raised about this argument, especially when one interprets it as involving a necessary taking of oneself as a free agent. At the heart of these criticisms is the question of what really it is that forces the inference from oneself as actor to oneself as free. The worry is that there are many agents who do not make this inference at all.8 I do not intend to assess these criticisms. Instead, I suggest there is a different starting point to be found in Groundwork iii, a second articulation of Kant’s claim of freedom, one that might seem simply a restatement of his opening premise but which, in fact, articulates more successfully a common, felt, first-personal, phenomenological experience of freedom. In the section immediately following the one just considered, having just asserted that we need to “take a different standpoint when by means of freedom we think of ourselves as causes efficient a priori” (4:450/56), Kant states that this shift of standpoints is made by “the commonest understanding,” albeit only via “an obscure discrimination of judgment which it calls feeling” (4:451/56). Kant thus introduces this new “standpoint” by appealing to common, felt, first-personal 7 See Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom; Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, and Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill (Cambridge University Press, 1996). 8 See, for example, Ameriks, Fate of Autonomy, p. 73: “It is hard to see how any philosopher today can flatly assert that ‘we must regard ourselves as free,’ even if only from ‘a practical perspective.’”

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 111

experience. What emerges is an articulation of the experience of freedom somewhat different from the one referenced in the first argument. Most importantly, we find a new distinction “between representations given us from somewhere else and in which we are passive, and those that we produce simply from ourselves and in which we show our activity” (4:451/56). Kant asks us to look within ourselves and identify two distinct sorts of felt experiences: in the first, representations come from outside of us and we relate to them as passive recipients; in the second, representations are also produced in us – that is, brought about from a previous state in which they did not exist – but are now not caused from outside of us. Instead, they are produced by us. This distinction, he says, is obvious from the common point of view: we experience, even obscurely feel, ourselves as passively receptive to some of our representations and as actively productive of others. No longer is Kant asking us to look as spectators upon another agent; nor is he referring first-personally to the experience of inferring ourselves to be free on pain of logical contradiction. Instead, he moves wholeheartedly toward the assertion of a common, felt experience of being free. How best to understand this experience? Kant himself provides no clarifying example, though he insists that, whatever it is, this experience is accessible to common understanding via feeling,9 and “show[s] our activity” (4:451/56, emphasis added). That, combined with his earlier, nonfelt suggestion that we must understand reason to be the active cause of these representations, makes it tempting to understand this experience as something approaching a revelation or “showing” of positive freedom, that is, the experience of having “a causality in accordance with immutable [and rational] laws” (4:446/52). There is a strain of Kant’s thought that would tempt him toward just this sort of claim. This, however, is a good moment to appeal to our hindsight perspective, which Kant lacks. When we do, we discover that it is impossible, in Kant’s own terms, to make sense of a common and felt experience of rational laws causally influencing the course of mental representations. In Chapter 2, we saw that feeling, although it provides a new epistemic tool for broadening that about which the philosopher could think, also has its limits. Feeling can reveal a 9 The claim of commonness is further supported when Kant suggests this point of view is recognized by “all human beings” (4:455/59), indeed, by “the most common human reason” (4:456/60).

112

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

phenomenological experience that has a noumenal cause, but cannot reveal that cause itself; all we can do with that is wonder at it. But, were Kant to be arguing here in Groundwork iii that the felt experience of activity is the felt experience of positive freedom, he would be arguing to just this illicit noumenal content of felt phenomenological experience: he would be saying that we have a felt experience of being a noumenally rational causal force. Of course, we had to wait until the Metaphysics of Morals to construct that understanding of feeling which affirms its limited epistemic reach. So, perhaps in the Groundwork, Kant was thinking differently. This is, of course, possible. The problem is this: we know, from the only Kantian account we have of how feeling can help epistemically in practical matters, that this approach simply wouldn’t work. Feeling cannot contain noumenal causes; we cannot even successfully infer back to knowledge of such causes on the basis of a less robust but still evocative felt experience. Indeed, it is hard to make sense of what such direct phenomenal experience of the noumenal would amount to. And even if we could make sense of it, it would need to be, in Kant’s terms, a very uncommon experience, bordering on the mystical; so Kant’s hope that he could appeal to a common felt experience to ground morality would also be undermined. Finally, once we get to Kant’s mature account of feeling, it will be nonsensical to say that we experience pure activity via feeling. As we will discuss in more depth in Part iii, feeling is an inherently passive, receptive experience; to appeal to it as the means for explaining pure causal activity would thus be contradictory. So, although Kant might be appealing here to a would-be common felt experience of positive freedom, we know, from our construction of his eventual reliance on such things, that this appeal will not work.10 There is, however, a more promising way to think of this experience of being active in relation to one’s representations, one which, while 10 One could, of course, construct an alternative account of how the felt experience of positive freedom fits into a satisfying, and generally Kantian-inspired, practical philosophy. This is the way one might read the work of Fichte, someone who is inspired by Kant, but has more confidence in the possibility of a felt experience of pure activity, and less concern about the limits of reason as Kant establishes them. See, e.g., J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge University Press, 1982). We will not explore this route here, having already laid out the lines of our own more strictly Kantian framework for making sense of the limited epistemic role for feeling in practical philosophy. We will, however, consider Fichtean interpretations of Kant in Chapter 6. See also Ameriks, Fate of Autonomy for reflection from a Kantian on how Fichte takes on the Kantian notion of autonomy.

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 113

abandoning appeal to a felt experience of pure activity, or to the experience of the operation of one’s reasoning capacity as a cause, retains nonetheless a common sense of activity more accessible through feeling; let us investigate this option on Kant’s behalf. Think, for example, of a child chasing seagulls on a beach: “My mother isn’t doing this; nor is she preventing me from doing this. I am causing those birds to fly away!” Even a child can distinguish the phenomenological nature of this experience from one in which her mother makes her brush her teeth, or in which her inability to walk prevents her from running. She is experiencing herself as being active in relation to her mental representations of the birds. Accepting such an experience as the kind of thing to which Kant refers when he speaks of being active in relation to mental representations is thus an interpretation of that text which helps the experience be both more common and less in tension with felt experience as we know Kant will eventually understand it; as such, it is an interpretation more sympathetic to Kant’s project overall.11 One might worry that this just isn’t what Kant means by an experience of “mental representations.” “Mental representations” refer to interior experience, and so reference to things external to us to explain these representations seems to undermine the pure activity that would be asserted: the child is not being fully productive of the existence of the birds, and not even of their motion, but only of the moment at which they fly. One might therefore wish for some more purely internal experience of oneself as an active cause: the sheer experience of agency itself. We are, however, seeking an experience of activity that is not quite as pure as the bare experience of agency itself. And Kant’s own understanding of the relevant terminology, now of “mental representations,” confirms that we would be wrong to limit ourselves to those experiences that are purely active and therefore purely internal to the agent. In the world of transcendental idealism, a representation (Vorstellung) is simply the most general word for any mental content. This includes mental contents referring to oneself, but also to those that relate us to

11 Even this less purely active felt experience will, once Kant understands feeling as receptive, not be an entirely coherent experience. Once feeling is recognized as receptive, we must also admit that we do not have any kind of felt experience of activity: to accept felt experience as the ground of practical philosophy, Kant must turn to a felt experience of constraint, not activity. We will discuss such matters in Part iii.

114

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

the external world. And appealing to a felt experience of being active in relation to external things need not mean that we experience ourselves as active (or passive) in relation to fully constituted external objects; for, as we recall from Chapter 2, feeling does not refer to empirical objects at all. Yet feeling can connect us with a variety of representations with a variety of contents, some appealing more, some less, to things both internal and external to me. It is thus appropriate to interpret “mental representations” as referring to any mental content, including those that appear to relate to external things. In his appeal to passivity and activity, Kant thus suggests a distinction between experiencing ourselves as sometimes passive and sometimes active in relation to our representations. The active experience is a practical experience of ourselves not so much as pure agents but as simply unconstrained. Sometimes, things just happen, or we find ourselves compelled or constrained to do things; other times, we are not so compelled. On this interpretation, Kant’s appeal to “activity” is thus more appropriately understood not as positive but rather negative freedom. Kant describes negative freedom as “that property of . . . causality that . . . can be efficient independently of alien causes determining it” (4:446/52, emphasis removed), or as “the independence of the power of choice from necessitation by impulses of sensibility” (A534/B562; 533, emphases removed). This emphasis on the negative, that is, on freedom from determination by something, either “alien” or “sensible,” defines the felt activity we experience. I experience myself as having constraints removed from me; I had experienced myself as constrained, but now I experience myself as not having those constraints. We might even allow a slight movement beyond negative freedom, and say, as a result of this removal from constraints, I also experience myself as somehow bringing something about. What cannot be found in this felt experience of activity is reason as the uncaused, lawful cause of my mental representations. In moving toward a more convincing felt first-personal experience of freedom, Kant thus must also move away from his earlier assumption of experiencing ourselves as explicitly rational free agents as the starting point of his argument. This is a felt experience of activity, but it is not (yet) an experience of rational activity; it is a more general, common experience than that. From freedom to morality. Let us return to the course of the argument of Groundwork iii with this new understanding of the felt, common

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 115

experience of freedom in hand. We know that, to achieve a phenomenological grounding of practical philosophy, Kant needs, beyond a convincing common, felt experience, also to take this experience as the basis for attentive reflection, reflection through which one would expect both the common person and the philosopher to learn something more of their experience, ultimately yielding practical cognitions. A closer look at Groundwork iii reveals Kant’s efforts to make this felt phenomenological experience of freedom productive of practical cognition in just this way. Such reflections occur in a section titled “Of the Interest Attaching to the Ideas of Morality,” a section within which Kant seeks to connect human freedom to obligation to a moral law,12 asserting that “consciousness of a law for acting” “flow[s]” from the idea of freedom (4:449/54, emphasis added). That is, consciousness of being obligated somehow comes out of, emerges from, or is produced by consciousness of freedom. At the point he makes this claim, he has only articulated freedom in the more austere, rational inference sense explained earlier, so it seems to make sense that it is upon that conception of freedom that this forthcoming argument must turn. Yet, when he says that the connection between freedom and moral laws he is seeking needs further articulation, that articulation (at 4:451/54) turns out to be the felt sense of it just articulated. So, though we admit that Kant is, at this point, wavering between these two conceptions of freedom, it makes better sense to understand that freedom from which laws of action “flow” as the common, felt experience of negative freedom. Furthermore, in making sense of how morality flows from freedom, Kant hints at a new method of practical philosophy, one very similar to what we have been calling attentive reflection. We must, he says, bring “the most strenuous attentiveness” (4:451/56) and “reflect[ion]” 12 There is ambiguity in the way Kant describes this “interest” in morality, the same ambiguity we found in Groundwork ii. An “interest” is “dependence of a contingently determinable will on principles of reason” (4:414n/25n). But this definition ambiguously spans the two distinct questions of obligation and motivation we saw in Groundwork ii. Is the will “dependent” on reason in that its law is valid for us? Or is our “dependence” as “contingently determinable will[s]” upon principles of reason one that requires something further to assure motivation to act in accordance with reason’s principles? Because Kant does not distinguish these two questions, his discussions of them get muddled into one discussion of “interest.” Given the course of the argument in Groundwork iii though, we can take his reference to “interest” in morality in the former sense of affirming the validity of reason’s law.

116

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

(4:451/56) to this grounding experience of freedom in order for that experience to be productive of moral conclusions. This attentiveness is, furthermore, itself a common, not strictly philosophical, capacity. It is something that is possible, he says, for any “reflective human being,” indeed even for “the most common understanding” (4:451/56). Kant then suggests that if we look at the felt experience of negative freedom attentively, “we must admit and assume behind appearances something else that is not appearance.” That is, we can make “a distinction, although a crude one, between a world of sense and the world of the understanding” (4:451/56). How is this conclusion forthcoming? In the world of sense, everything has a cause external to it; but I experience myself as free from such causes. It must follow that I am not simply a member of the world of sense, since the causality of that world operates only via such alien influences. When I experience myself as negatively free, I thus understand myself as distinct from the world of sense. I must therefore also be a member of a different world – a “world of the understanding” – in which a nonalien form of causality is possible. This may be a claim central to transcendental idealism, but it is accessed here not theoretically but practically, through attentive reflection on one’s common experience. Why, though, is attentiveness needed to yield this conclusion? If negative freedom really is a common human experience, shouldn’t it be just as straightforward and natural a thing to experience ourselves as members of the worlds of sense and understanding? To the contrary, attentiveness is needed because of another common human tendency that operates against drawing this conclusion. The tendency to come to the conclusion that worlds of sense and understanding exist from reflection on “all the things that present themselves” in human consciousness is “found even in the most common understanding.” In fact, common human understanding “is very much inclined to expect behind the objects of the senses something else invisible and active of itself.” The problem? Common understanding “spoils this [discovery] again by quickly making this invisible something sensible in turn, that is, wanting to make it an object of intuition, so that it does not thereby become any the wiser” (4:452/57). Affirmation of the worlds of sense and understanding does not flow naturally from the common human consciousness of negative freedom because we pervert what would naturally be concluded from that experience: we want to make the intelligible into something sensible.

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 117

Kant appeals here to the very human tendency to want to get one’s hands on something in order to know it. To do this with a claim about the intelligible world is, however, to destroy the very conclusion at which one has arrived. The common person’s pursuit of philosophical insight is thus “spoil[ed]” by a tendency to pervert the implications of one’s experience. We need, therefore, to counteract this tendency to go astray by attending more carefully to our experiences. We thus have an explanation of why some agents might not take this conclusion from their felt experience of freedom: it is only the attentive agent – one who is aware of and able to combat this tendency to turn intelligible claims into sensible things – who will reach the desired conclusion. The argument from freedom to morality. Kant now needs to discover an interest in morality. If attentive reflection on the felt experience of negative freedom produces this further practical claim, then, along with affirming the status of ourselves as obligated beings, he will, simultaneously, have grounded a practical cognition of moral obligation via appeal to common, felt experience. What, then, is this argument? We should first articulate more clearly its goal. Near the opening of it (4:449–50/55), Kant makes a distinction between freedom and autonomy. We understand freedom in the sense we have already been considering it: not being guided by alien forces in the production of one’s representations. But Kant puts this negative sense of freedom next to another, that of “the will’s own lawgiving” (4:450/55), or freedom as autonomy. The goal of the argument is, through attentive reflection on the negative conception of freedom, to affirm that “[w]ith [this] idea of freedom the concept of autonomy is now inseparably combined, and with the concept of autonomy the universal principle of morality” (4:452/57). Attention to the felt experience of negative freedom will affirm that we are autonomous legislators of the moral law. We have, furthermore, already seen the first steps of this argument: identify a felt experience, and be attentive to it. The first product of this attentiveness is a clear appreciation of the quality of the felt experience, already articulated. In the second step, further attentiveness to this passive–active distinction yields awareness of a distinction between a world of sense and the world of understanding. Further attentive reflection, now not simply on our felt experience of activity–passivity, but on our newly affirmed status as members of the world of understanding, reveals that, as members of this world, “we are

118

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

under laws which, being independent of nature, are not empirical but grounded merely in reason” (4:452/57). If we are part of a nonsensible world, the only other possibility is that we are members of a rational world, which has its own laws, independent of sense and nature, and crucially, independent of the causal determinism which rules the world of nature. These rationally grounded laws, which transcend nature, are the will’s own laws for which we were seeking under “the concept of autonomy,” and this concept of autonomy (that is, being under laws of reason) is “the universal principle of morality” (4:452/57). So, starting from experience of ourselves as active in relation to some representations, we recognize ourselves as members of a world of the understanding; we then attend to our membership in this world and recognize it as being guided by laws of reason. We thus recognize ourselves as obligated to its law, the moral law. We are, then, autonomous in the sense of being legislators of this law.

ii. Analysis of the argument, part one: a successful introduction of felt phenomenological experience Felt phenomenological experience in Groundwork iii. We need now to assess both this argument and the new method of practical cognition according to which it operates. First, can we accept the felt phenomenological experience of freedom as legitimate? Many interpreters find this to be the biggest problem in Kant’s argument, as it appears to be an utterly uncritical assertion of the pure apperception of the noumenal self, an assertion which ignores Kant’s claims elsewhere that we know the self only through what is given to us empirically. This is a point Norman Kemp Smith makes when he suggests that Kant’s first Critique reference to a similar active experience of “pure apperception” (A5446–547/B574–575; 540) is an early and essentially uncritical remnant of Kant’s Third Antinomy discussion.13 Guyer makes a similar point, now explicitly about the argument of Groundwork iii, 13 Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1984), p. 518. See also A546/B574 through A547/B575: “Yet the human being, who is otherwise acquainted with the whole of nature solely through sense, knows himself also through pure apperception, and indeed in actions and inner determinations which cannot be accounted at all among impressions of sense; he obviously is in one part phenomenon, but in another part, namely in regard to certain faculties, he is a merely intelligible object, because the actions of this object cannot at all be ascribed to the receptivity of sensibility.”

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 119

in recent responses to his critics.14 The worry, then, is that, in asserting a claim of being active in relation to one’s mental representations, Kant is making a strong metaphysical claim about knowing one’s noumenal self, a claim that clearly goes beyond the limits of reason. But simply to transfer a criticism of Kant’s Third Antinomy introduction of pure apperception to the admittedly similar introduction of the felt experience of activity and passivity in the Groundwork is too quick. It is to fail to realize that Kant is at least trying to do something different here than what he did in his first Critique appeal to pure apperception. First, and perhaps most importantly, as we have already discussed, we interpret Kant’s appeal to activity in the more limited sense of negative, not positive, freedom, and this allows him to avoid asserting an experience of a noumenal self or its activity; we have instead only the more mundane experience of not being constrained. Further, even this more modest Groundwork appeal to negative freedom occurs within common, felt experience, something not seen in the Third Antinomy discussion of apperception, and such appeal to common, felt experience opens up those new epistemic possibilities of which we spoke in Part i. As such, we can affirm, in Groundwork iii, that Kant is not making a simple, illicit, theoretical claim that we have privileged access to our noumenal selves or to the rational source of our freedom.15 Instead, he appeals to what is given in the felt, firstpersonal, phenomenological experience of the common human understanding. To recall our Part i discussion, the import of appealing to feeling here is that, while feeling is a sense experience, it does not refer to objects of experience, only to the relationship the feeling subject has to those representations that occasioned the feelings. The feeling agent thus only articulates her relation to representations connected to her feelings and does not refer to an object of experience, either empirical or noumenal, called “freedom” or “the noumenal self.” We thus

14 “My problem with Groundwork iii is precisely that it is based on a metaphysical claim about the noumenal self of a kind that is not merely not used in the Transcendental Deduction [of the categories] but is also presumably ruled out by Kant’s insistence . . . that all of our knowledge even of the self is of the self as it appears, not as it might be in itself” (Paul Guyer, “Response to Critics,” Inquiry 50[5], 2007, pp. 497–510, p. 500). 15 Though, as has already been suggested, attentive reflection upon this experience is meant to yield noumenal conclusions. We shall discuss this point in the second half of our analysis of this argument.

120

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

prevent problematic, uncritical assertions of freedom or the noumenal self as objects of experience. Although Kant himself does not provide the full argument for such appeal to feeling, we can observe in his language some recognition that he is moving beyond empirical experience toward this somewhat mysterious, but still identifiable felt, phenomenological experience of freedom. He suggests, for example, that the common mode of approaching this aspect of human experience is “an obscure discrimination of judgment,” and that this judgment gives us access only “to what there may be of pure activity in [the agent] (what reaches consciousness immediately and not through affection of the senses)” (4:451/56, emphasis added). Had he had access to the difference between senses and feeling articulated in the Metaphysics of Morals at this point, he might instead have appealed to “what reaches consciousness not through affection of the senses but through feeling, which is a sensible experience that does not refer to an object.” Without that later argument, he cannot say that at this point. Similarly, his later unquestioning equation of intuition and feeling shows that, despite his phenomenological appeal to feeling in his discussion of the felt experience of activity, he has not yet recognized the epistemic power of appealing to feeling but not intuition. At 4:458/62, Kant suggests that “practical reason” would “overstep its boundaries . . . if it wanted to intuit or feel itself into [a world of understanding].” Had he already made the distinction between sense intuition and feeling discussed in Part i, he would only have said here that practical reason oversteps its boundaries if it wants to intuit itself into a world of the understanding. Thus, Kant has not yet fully realized the power of his appeals to feeling in Groundwork iii. Nonetheless, his clear appeal there to felt experience (an appeal that was not made in the first Critique appeal to pure apperception), combined with what we can say of felt experience in light of his later distinctions, does allow us to say that Kant successfully introduces a proto-phenomenological felt experience of freedom to start his argument. The practical nature of Kant’s grounding premise. What can we say, then, of what Kant does with this premise? We know that he will access the conclusions of this argument via attentive consideration to this felt experience. As such, we affirm the development of this further aspect of phenomenological method. We can even say that the negative

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 121

freedom accessed via felt experience plays a grounding or justificatory role in Kant’s effort to prove ourselves obligated. Feeling itself plays only an enabling role: it allows us access to negative freedom. But the claim of negative freedom thus accessed will play an evidential role in the forthcoming argument: Kant will appeal to it as one piece of evidence building up to an assertion of moral obligation. So, although we will find problems with this attentive appeal to felt experience in the next section, we at least affirm that this aspect of phenomenological method is present in Groundwork iii. There is a final point to emphasize about Kant’s use of felt experience in this argument: it is acting as a practical, and not a theoretical, premise. Kant’s struggle to give birth to a new sort of phenomenological experience is thus, simultaneously, an effort to introduce a new method of practical philosophy. At the heart of this developing method is a claim, accessed via felt, first-personal experience, about how we commonly experience ourselves as agents, that is, as productive of things instead of simply as knowers of them. There are hints scattered throughout Groundwork iii of Kant’s efforts to articulate this specifically practical mode of argumentation. An early footnote on the first, nonfelt appeal to freedom indicates that he is trying even there to exit theoretical modes of argument.16 Further, he defines, in passing, a “reason that is practical” as one which “has causality with respect to its objects” (4:448/54).17 That is, practical reason is a capacity for reasoning that is productive, instead of merely descriptive, of its objects. The felt experience of activity upon which we have been focusing is a further move toward developing this practical reason: we access some sense of reason having causality through appeal to a common, felt experience of being related to our representations in a way that does not demand appeal to an alien cause of those

16 “I follow this route . . . of assuming freedom . . . so that I need not be bound to prove freedom in its theoretical respect as well” (4:448n/53n). 17 In the second Critique, Kant explicitly draws this distinction between theoretical and practical, saying that practical reason is concerned with doing more than knowing. “[I]f as pure reason it is really practical, it proves its reality and that of its concepts by what it does” (5:3/3). But Kant’s identification of practical reason as a reason with causality needs to be attenuated in light of his recognition of the limits on the sort of freedom we can confidently assert of ourselves as agents. I will discuss such matters in Part iii.

122

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

representations. Kant is pointing us, albeit indirectly, to a practical experience of ourselves as producers of action.18 One might object that the premise of negative freedom isn’t a fully practical premise. Needn’t we seek a normative premise in order to say of Kant that he is starting from a practical premise? But the premise of negative freedom seems to have no normative content. There is something to this objector’s concern. A claim of negative freedom is not a moral claim. It is not even normative in some weaker sense: just because I can distinguish mental representations in relation to which I am sometimes active and sometimes passive does not mean that I should prefer the former. Further argument would need to be provided to derive normative content from this felt experience. It is wrong, however, to assume that the practical is defined by the normative, and that a premise is therefore “theoretical” instead of “practical” simply in virtue of its being nonnormative. Indeed, recent discussions of Groundwork iii are infected by a contemporary concern for proving morality from a nonmoral – that is, a nonnormative – starting point, a concern that is not Kant’s central concern. The bigger worry for Kant at this point is not whether he can argue to morality from a nonnormative starting point; instead, it is a question of whether he can argue to practical conclusions from theoretical premises, or whether practical philosophy is more thoroughly distinct from theoretical philosophy than that. The crucial distinction to draw, then, is not between normative and nonnormative premises; rather, it is between theoretical and practical premises and modes of argument. Once the question is put in this way, it is clear where Kant comes down on the question of whether practical arguments should begin with theoretical or practical premises. In appealing to a felt experience of negative freedom, Kant appeals to a practical, not a theoretical, premise. Even if the felt experience of negative freedom involves no normative content, it still has practical content: in it, we encounter an experience of being an agent. We thus find that the argument of

18 One can even find the slightest hint at introducing a practical mode of philosophizing in the pure apperception discussion of the Third Antinomy: “the human being . . . knows himself also through pure apperception, and indeed in actions and inner determinations which cannot be accounted at all among impressions of sense” (A546/B574, 540, emphasis added).

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 123

Groundwork iii gives birth to the practical conclusion of moral obligation from the practical premise of negative freedom.19 This shouldn’t surprise us. It is a move that is in the spirit of practical philosophy as he introduced it back in Groundwork i: “common human reason is impelled, not by some need of speculation (which never touches it as long as it is content to be mere sound reason), but on practical grounds themselves, to go out of its sphere and to take a step into the field of practical philosophy” (4:405/18). Practical philosophy is not born out of speculative worries, but out of its own genuinely practical concerns. It would be odd, then, for the arguments of practical philosophy to start from a claim of theoretical or speculative reason, that same reason which, purportedly “never touches it.” By introducing a practical argument beginning from a practical premise, Kant thus affirms the independence of the realm of practical philosophy from its distant cousin, speculative philosophy. We will nonetheless continue to push the question of whether the premise Kant identifies here is practical enough. The claim of negative freedom is a practical one, but it may be that Kant needs to admit a beginning premise for the birth of practical philosophy that has not only practical but also normative content. In the Groundwork, though, he is hesitant to do so, for fear of begging the question. Although he is happy to begin with a practical premise that will lead to a normative conclusion, he is not willing to begin with a normative premise leading to a normative conclusion. He hopes, that is, to save that much of an argument from a nonmoral premise to a moral conclusion.20 This is, however, exactly what he will need to abandon in the second Critique.21

19 Kant does, in his theoretical philosophy, appeal at times to first-personal experiences (for example, of watching the ship move from up stream to down stream in the Second Analogy [A192–193/B237–238, 306–307]). But these are not felt experiences; and, because Kant is concerned to refer them to empirical objects of experience, they cannot be felt experiences. Further, as we will discuss more, felt experiences in Groundwork iii have a practical content that examples in his theoretical philosophy lack. 20 A good point at which to recognize Kant’s fears about begging the question is when he considers whether there is an illicit “circle” in his argument. See, for example, 4:450/55 and 4:453/57–58. 21 Allison can keep both theoretical and practical appeal to activity/spontaneity in his reading of this argument only because, for him, we do not experience spontaneity/ activity, but instead merely “conceive” of ourselves via “apperception” (see Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, pp. 38, 40). But Kant is appealing to an experience of negative freedom. Since I accept this starting point of the argument as an experience, we must also reject it as theoretical; no such theoretical experience could exist.

124

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

Nonetheless, for the present, we affirm that Kant’s argument in Groundwork iii begins with a practical, not a theoretical, premise. The commonness and reliability of the felt experience. To affirm the validity of this first step of Kant’s Groundwork iii argument, we need, finally, to assess Kant’s claim that the felt experience of negative freedom is both common and reliable. First, is it common? Karl Ameriks has suggested that the claim championed by Korsgaard, Allison and others that we cannot help but to take or infer ourselves as free is implausible;22 asserting that we have a felt experience of freedom would therefore seem a similarly implausible claim. Ameriks was, however, asserting this implausibility about “absolute” or incompatibilist freedom, one in which we are first in a chain of causes, not ourselves caused, and in which the relevant notion of causality is one in accordance with rational laws. I agree with Ameriks that it is unlikely we would discover within ourselves a common experience of incompatibilist freedom, and further, that we cannot simply assert that we cannot help but to take ourselves as free in this robust sense without further argument.23 We are not, however, asserting so robust an experience of freedom. We ask only whether we have a felt phenomenological experience of being active, setting aside philosophical questions about whether this activity has a deeper, hidden external cause, or whether it is uncaused internal rational activity. Is it the case, then, that all of us commonly experience ourselves, at least sometimes, as being active, as opposed to passive, in relation to our representations? When the question is put in these more modest terms, it becomes harder to see the claim as implausible. We have already suggested that the experience, accessible to a child, of chasing seagulls across a beach provides sufficient content to the claim. Psychologists also describe even very young children as having an experience of being free from constraints and of having an effect on the world when they smush their fingers happily in mud.24 The joy in such experiences comes from the child’s sense of being free from both external and internal constraints, 22 Ameriks, Fate of Autonomy, p. 73. 23 It is not clear to me, however, that Allison or Korsgaard is guilty of this charge. Both provide arguments for their positions which would need to be more fully analyzed as inadequate to make this charge. 24 See Jonathan Brown, The Self (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997).

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 125

and thus of being active in relation to her world. This does seem, then, a plausible common experience: sometimes I feel like I’m moved by things, but other times I feel like I’m moving or causing other things. One might worry further, though, whether a common experience is also a veridical experience. The worry here is that even if we all share this experience, it might still be that we are all subject to it as an illusion. Kant does entertain the problem of illusion, at least insofar as it is inspired by the human tendency toward self-deception. This was what made him abandon simple attentiveness as a method of practical philosophy in Groundwork i. But in Groundwork iii, we find Kant claiming a method of attentiveness to manage another kind of tendency toward self-deception: as we have seen, he appeals to attentiveness to manage the tendency to turn intelligible claims into something we can more easily put our hands on. Some common experiences thus are illusory: we need to make sure we haven’t secretly talked ourselves out of the true intelligible nature of our experiences. But, unlike in Groundwork i, Kant here considers attentiveness an adequate antidote to this particular tendency toward self-deception and is thus happy to take attentively considered common experiences as reliable, nonillusory ones: if, even under attentive reflection on it, the experience does not collapse, then there is something in it to be trusted.25 He thus realizes that some of our common experiences can be illusory because we are beings that tend to deceive ourselves. But attentiveness operates as a protection from being subject to such self-deception.26

iii. Analysis of the argument, part two: the failure of Groundwork iii Introduction. We have now appreciated the strengths of Kant’s argument: Kant successfully introduces a common, felt phenomenological experience along with a convincingly practical means of attentiveness for extracting from that experience what we need. But if Kant’s argument is going to be successful, attentive reflection upon the common 25 In the second Critique, Kant furthers this commitment to attention as a means for dispelling self-deception. See especially 5:30/27–28, the famous Gallows example, which we will discuss at length in Part iii. 26 One would thus need to be more deeply skeptical about one’s experiences in order to find them nonveridical. One would need to believe that, even if we are not deceiving ourselves, there is something about felt experience generally that is not to be trusted. It is difficult, though, to envision what would motivate such deep skepticism.

126

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

felt experience of negative freedom must reveal our status as obligated moral agents. It is, however, this movement from the felt experience of negative freedom to awareness of ourselves as obligated, autonomously lawgiving agents that fails. In pointing to this spot of the argument as its weak point, I thus align myself in general terms with Allison, who finds the move from negative to positive freedom, via an implicit slide from membership in a world of the understanding toward membership in an intelligible world, unsuccessful. But, given my assumption of a practical premise as the starting point of the argument, my understanding of the nature, needed force, and exact point of failure of the argument is different from Allison’s. For Allison, Kant’s argument starts from a “nonmoral premise” of reason and moves to a moral conclusion of positive freedom, and it is in the movement from one to the other that the argumentative gap emerges.27 But we begin with a practical premise of the felt experience of negative freedom, and identify the gap between negative and positive freedom as a failure of the method of attentive reflection on this experience to yield positive freedom. Kant’s new practical method, when applied to this felt experience, fails to produce the desired conclusion. Attentiveness here does not yield an awareness of specifically rational agency, of obligation, nor of our status as autonomous lawgivers. It doesn’t even, more weakly, allow us to assert that we are members of the world of the understanding. Attentiveness to that experience simply does not yield this set of conclusions. The felt experience of freedom is a practical and common experience; but it is also impotent, unproductive of a robust conception of rational agency. Kant’s fear of begging the question thus causes the argument of Groundwork iii to be a phenomenological failure. Let us defend this conclusion further.

27 See Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 227: “Kant refers to both a Verstandeswelt and an intelligibelen Welt . . . and he slides from the former to the latter without sufficient justification. The former is to be understood negatively as encompassing whatever is nonsensible or ‘merely intelligible,’ that is, whatever is thought to be exempt from the conditions of sensibility (the noumenon in the negative sense). The latter is to be understood positively as referring to a supersensible realm governed by moral laws, a ‘kingdom of ends’ or, equivalently, ‘the totality of rational beings as things in themselves’ (Gr4:458;126). This is clearly noumenal in a positive sense . . . The problem is that the possession of reason, which is supposed to provide the entrée into this world, only gets us to the Verstandeswelt.”

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 127

The inadequacy of negative freedom. First, attentive reflection on the experience of not being determined by something external to me and thus of being active in relation to my representations does not give us what we need for a complete conception of agency. The crucial lacuna here is in trying to answer the question of what it is in me that is causing the activity. This is, of course, the loss we admit when we understand this felt experience to be only of negative, not positive, freedom. Despite our affirmation that we can draw from our felt experience that something in us is the source of our activity (since I’m not being caused by something else), we cannot affirm, from the felt phenomenological perspective, that this nonsensible thing is a rational cause. We cannot say what it is in us that is producing our representations, only that they are coming from us, and not from things outside of me or from compelling sensible forces within. The contrast between representations with alien causes and those I call my own is, in fact, crucial for identifying the phenomenological experience of the latter. I notice representations that have a foreign cause and then notice representations that don’t have such causes. Only then can I identify two different phenomenological experiences of the production of my representations. We can thus clarify a distinction in the precise point of the failure of the argument on my account in comparison with Allison’s. For Allison, the failure of the argument is in the movement from negative to positive freedom, and in the corresponding illicit move from membership in the world of the understanding to an intelligible world.28 I agree that the movement from negative to positive freedom is a failure. But on my reading, this failure occurs earlier: not only can we not make the move from the world of the understanding to the intelligible world; we cannot even assert membership in the world of the understanding. All we have is the felt experience of sometimes being active in relation to our representations. But nothing in that experience allows us to identify that activity in us as assurance of some nonsensible status; all we know is that we sometimes experience ourselves as active and sometimes as passive. Why, though, would Kant have thought otherwise? The crucial step that would allow the desired conclusion of membership in the world of the understanding involves introducing a theoretical premise:

28 Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 227.

128

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

a philosopher can reflect on her felt experience of activity, and put it together with the theoretical claim that, in the world of sensibility, everything is caused by something else. The desired conclusion could thus be achieved: since everything in the sensible world has an alien cause, my felt experience of activity has to be nonsensible. I am, thus, a member of the world of the understanding, and not just of the world of sense. But – and this is the crucial point – Kant’s new method of attentive reflection on felt experience allows for no such appeal to theoretical premises. No part of this method – either the felt experience itself or attentive reflection upon it – allows us access to a theoretical claim of global determinism. First, our felt experience only shows that we are sometimes active, sometimes passive in relation to our representations. But to assert membership in a world beyond the sensible world, we must appeal to the further claim that, in the world of sense, everything is caused by an external, alien cause. It is only on the basis of this claim that our recognition of an experience of not being caused by an alien cause would be interesting and argumentatively forceful. But appeal to this claim of global determinism is exactly what Kant is not entitled to from the felt, first-personal perspective. There, we have access only to individual experiences: in this experience I am active; in that one, passive. Second, attentive reflection upon the felt experience of activity or passivity does not yield the conclusion of global determinism. It is, in fact, impossible to access a claim of global determinism from attentive reflection on the felt experience of negative freedom. We have already argued that in the felt experience of negative freedom, one experiences oneself sometimes as determined and sometimes as active. So, attentive reflection on that experience could not yield the conclusion that we are always determined (i.e., the claim of global causal determinism), and any appeal to such a claim would demand exiting this first-personal perspective. Whence this claim, then? When Kant asserts that attentive reflection on our felt experience of activity “yield[s] a distinction . . . between a world of sense and the world of understanding” (4:451/56), he implicitly assumes global determinism in the world of sense as an illicit theoretical premise. Indeed, when he puts global determinism into conversation with freedom in a misguided effort to define the boundaries of practical philosophy toward the end of Groundwork iii (4:455ff./59ff.), Kant returns explicitly to arguments of the first

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 129

Critique to make his points. In so doing, he moves back into a theoretical, third-personal mode of philosophizing, abandoning his new, practical first-personal perspective. By starting with felt, subjective, phenomenological experience and then turning implicitly to the theoretical assertion of global causal determinism, Kant thus turns his new, felt, first-personal and common phenomenological method back into the old, objective, third-personal, speculative method distinctive of theoretical philosophy. But an argument meant to be guided by attentive reflection upon felt experience cannot enter the third-personal mode; it can appeal only to something either present in or attentively extractable from one’s grounding felt experience. The claim of global determinism can assert neither of these provenances; it is thus an illicit theoretical import into the argument. Without this premise, though, Kant’s effort to access membership in the world of the understanding via attentive reflection on felt experience fails. He has chosen a grounding, felt experience that is phenomenologically sterile; attentive reflection upon it does not yield further practical insights, especially the crucial practical insight of affirming membership in the nonsensible world of the understanding. The only way to make the move to the world of the understanding is to introduce illicit theoretical premises that destroy the practical method he is developing. .

A failed effort at attentiveness. Once the move to the world of the understanding fails, the hope of moving to the intelligible world – that world where laws of reason reign – is even more remote. We can appreciate this lack of lawfulness in our felt experience phenomenologically. To go back to our seagull example: should I be chasing this gull, or that gull? Where should I chase them? Why? In trying to answer such questions, we fall short. With no access to the nature of one’s causal force, we also lack determinacy in the course of one’s agency. It is difficult even to call this agent a choosing agent as such, that is, an agent guided by intelligence. On the basis of this phenomenological experience of negative freedom alone, there is no way to avoid the possibility that agency is a blind, unguided power. Of course, none of this matters to the child chasing the seagulls. There is a certain gleeful indeterminacy to her agency, which is great for the child but not great as a complete model of agency. Without access to what guides this active force, there is, in fact, the potential for a frightening model of human agency: a force both too strong (because blind and powerful)

130

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

and too weak (because unguided and indeterminate). A reasoned, lawful, guided agency is thus precisely what we lack in our felt experience of activity, even when we attentively reflect on it. Returning to Groundwork iii, we find Kant seeking to answer precisely these questions of what guides agency and how: he wants to show that reason causes our activity, and determines us as obligated, autonomous, lawgiving beings. The problem he encounters, though, is just the one we have suggested: a rational, guided notion of agency – that is, consciousness within agency of obligation to an autonomous law of reason – simply does not emerge from attentiveness to our felt experience of activity. Even attentive reflection upon our felt experience of activity yields only negative freedom; and the hope that we could have licitly identified a felt experience of positive freedom – one which would clearly contain all these rational legislating elements – is once again lamented. Faced with this spluttering out of his phenomenological experience, Kant implicitly, and illicitly, changes course in his argument. Previously, we saw him appealing illicitly to a theoretical premise. Now, he makes a new illicit move: when he makes the crucial distinction between understanding and reason (at 4:452/57), he draws this distinction from a would-be attentiveness to the nature of an intelligible world instead of to our original felt experience of activity. Having just asserted that the intellectual world is something “of which however [the human being] has no further cognizance” (4451/56), Kant turns around and cognizes further about it. By reflecting on membership in this intellectual world, he says “a human being really finds in himself a capacity by which he distinguishes himself from all other things, even from himself insofar as he is affected by objects, and that is reason” (4:452/57). The appeal to “find[ing] in” oneself this capacity clearly suggests first-personal access to it. Language, later in the same paragraph in which reason is asserted to “show in what we call ‘ideas’ a spontaneity so pure” (emphasis added), further encourages the suggestion of first-personal access to the activity of reason. This effort to be attentive to the world of the understanding is illicit because we can be attentive only to what is in fact given in our felt experience; and neither the world of the understanding nor the intelligible world is so given. The assertion of first-personal experience of oneself as rational is thus unexplained, undefended, and unconvincing. It is, in fact, the assertion of just that sort of experience of oneself as a complete rational agent – in Kant’s words, an autonomous

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 131

legislator – that we have already argued is beyond the limits of experience, empirical or phenomenological. Failure of the movement from freedom to morality. Finally, we are far, far afield from recognizing this autonomously imposed rational law as a moral imperative. We’ve been working with a grounding felt experience of activity, not of restraint; so the idea that a restraining imperative could emerge from attentive reflection on felt experience of unconstrained activity is a curious, and unlikely, one.29 But affirmation of the moral law as an imperative is crucial for affirming ourselves as obligated beings. Kant realizes this and thus tries, in a later section (4:453–455/58–59), to bring the intelligible world into conversation with our sensible sides, thus identifying that other potential determining ground of action in conflict with which the autonomously legislated law is recognized by us as an imperative.30 But that he needs such machinations to describe obligation as an imperative only affirms that something went wrong with his original phenomenological experience.31 Kant’s language in this section, suggesting that “the idea of freedom, that is, of independence from determining causes of the world of sense, constrains him involuntarily” (4:455/59, emphases removed and added), reveals the painful irony of trying to get a notion of constraint out of an experience of not being constrained. We are similarly distant from understanding 29 Guyer makes a similar point when he suggests that Kant does not, around 4:451–452, “regard the rationality of the noumenal self as competing with the nonrational desires of the phenomenal self . . . [H]e is in effect treating the moral law as the causal law of the noumenal self . . . and at the same time making it impossible for himself to explain how there can be anything in the phenomenal self that could resist the moral law” (Guyer, “Response to Critics,” pp. 502–503). 30 “A rational being counts himself . . . as belonging to the world of understanding . . . On the other side he is also conscious of himself as a part of the world of sense. But because the world of understanding contains the ground of the world of sense and so too of its laws, . . . it follows that I shall cognize myself . . . as nevertheless subject to the law of the world of understanding . . . and thus cognize myself as subject to the autonomy of the will; consequently the laws of the world of understanding must be regarded as imperatives for me” (4:453–454/58). 31 Perhaps, had we been able to find proof of ourselves as autonomous legislators in the previous argument, further attentive reflection on both the passive and active felt experiences could lead us to the imperative status of the law, since our rational activity would be in conflict with demands emerging from our membership in the sensible world. It would be odd, though, to have to infer this imperative status of the law once you put passivity and activity together, as opposed simply to finding it as an aspect of felt experience.

132

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

either that or how the law is a motivating force, something that gets relegated to “the extreme boundary of all practical philosophy” (4:455/59) and which remains mysterious, since “discovering and making comprehensible an interest which the human being can take in moral laws” is now said to be as “impossible” as explaining freedom of the will (4:459–60/63–64). In all these conclusions, Kant abandons his original methodological intent of attentiveness to first-personal, felt experiences of activity. We have not simply attentively unpacked what is implicit in that experience. We have, rather, imported a whole range of new ideas about an intelligible world, imperatives and incentives, which, from the perspective of this new practical method, appear to come from nowhere, certainly not from the experience itself. Kant’s argument from freedom to moral obligation is thus a hodgepodge of phenomenological/ practical and quasitheoretical reflections. This is a failure of the method of attentiveness to first-personal experiences as the proper method of practical philosophy. Any hindsight saving of this argument? We have, however, been reading this text with the hindsight of the arguments of Part i above. Could we come to Kant’s rescue, then? Part i has suggested that, if we find a genuinely common, felt experience of necessity, then we could at least wonder at this felt experience’s mysterious rational causes. Could we do the same for a felt experience of activity? How then, would this argument go? The structure of the argument of Part i above requires that we move, via attentive reflection, from felt experience as a sensible, experiential effect to a mysterious indication of that effect’s rational cause. If we apply this general movement of argument to the felt experience of activity, then we produce the following: 1. We have felt experience of being active, an experience of negative freedom. 2. How can this be? What can we know of the cause of this feeling in virtue of attentive reflection upon its nature? 3. The experience of being active involves not being caused by something else; but, because everything in the world of nature is caused by something else, the cause of this felt experience of activity is outside the world of nature. 4. But a nonsensible cause just is a rational cause. We cannot say more about this rational cause, but we can assert it to be one.

the phenomenological failure of “groundwork” iii 133

5. We thus assert an admittedly mysterious access to oneself as a nonsensible, rational, autonomous and obligated being, and take that being as an object of wonder. Once we put the argument in this way, it should be obvious why it does not work. Even with the advantage of hindsight, we cannot achieve our desired conclusion without appeal to our illicit theoretical premise (in step 3 above). Why do we need that premise? We do not have the advantage of a felt experience of necessity here to push us directly toward a nonsensible cause. But the experience of activity, on its own, does not similarly compel us to the nonsensible realm. We thus need appeal to the theoretical claim of global determinism in concert with the felt experience of activity to motivate appeal to a nonsensible cause. But global determinism does not derive either from felt experience or from attentive reflection upon it; it depends instead upon speculative arguments accessed from the third-personal perspective. This premise is thus an illicit theoretical import into the phenomenological argument. Without this premise, our reconstructed effort to access our noumenal, rational selves by appeal to the cause of the feeling of felt activity fails in the same way that Kant’s own argument in Groundwork iii did. Admission of even only mysterious access to our selves, via feeling, does not work here. Kant has chosen a grounding felt experience that is indeed phenomenologically sterile.

Conclusion I thus agree with Guyer and Allison that the argument of Groundwork iii fails. Our disagreement is about what the nature of the intended argument is and also about why it fails. What I have provided here is an articulation of the argument of Groundwork iii as a phenomenological one, and an explanation of its failure as resulting from reliance on an inadequate grounding felt phenomenological experience. The felt phenomenological experience of freedom is not robust enough to yield everything we need practically. We thus lack a proper object for attentive reflection. There is a particular contrast to be drawn between my reading and Guyer’s, since Guyer emphasizes that Kant has, in Groundwork iii, inexplicably pulled away from earlier, naturalistic assumptions that could have been helpful to him in grounding freedom. Although

134

t h e “ gr o u nd w o r k ”

I would not suggest that the argument of Groundwork iii is more “naturalistic” than Guyer suggests, the appeal to phenomenological experience does suggest Kant was looking for something to replace his earlier naturalistic reflections that was not a quasitheoretical, firstCritique-style deduction. Appeal to felt experience is that new, not naturalistic, but instead phenomenological, grounding for practical thought. To be successful in a phenomenological grounding of practical philosophy, Kant thus needs a different grounding experience: that felt experience of conflict between happiness and morality to which he had appealed in Groundwork i, but then set aside. To take on this felt experience as the starting point of his argument, though, Kant must abandon his worries about begging the question and, with that, his conviction that because of our ingrained tendency toward selfdeception we do not have a reliable, felt experience of categorical obligation. In the Groundwork, though, he is simply not willing to accept as a premise an experience so thick with moral content as this one. And that is what explains the phenomenological failure of Groundwork iii.

PART III THE CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON

6 RECENT INTERPRETATIONS OF THE FACT OF REASON

Introduction We are finally in a position to turn to the Critique of Practical Reason and to provide our interpretation of the Fact of Reason from the perspective of attentiveness to common, felt, first-personal phenomenological experience. What we shall discover by the end of Part iii is that, in privileging the common point of view, we affirm a central epistemic role for felt experience in grounding objective, synthetic a priori practical cognitions of both morality and freedom. We need, however, to begin by reflecting on the current state of the literature on the Fact of Reason, and this task will occupy us for this current chapter. Many interpreters find this argument as much a failure as the failed argument of Groundwork iii. Allen Wood describes it as a “moralistic bluster”1 and Paul Guyer, somewhat more colorfully, suggests that it involves more “foot-stamping” than argument, given what he takes to be its “appeal to innate ideas.”2 The central worry raised by these harsh critics of the argument is that it is not really an argument at all; rather, to insist that moral obligation presents itself to us as a fact begs the question of the second Critique, viz., the question of whether we can prove that we are morally obligated and therefore free. Such interpreters insist that one requires a deduction of some sort of moral obligation, usually one starting from nonmoral premises. Even if the argument of Groundwork iii failed, it at least realized that such deduction was necessary. For those who insist on the priority of such a deduction, Kant’s doctrine of the

1 Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 135. 2 Guyer, “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments.”

137

138

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

Fact of Reason is thus a step backwards instead of a more satisfying method for affirming moral obligation. What such interpreters fail to realize, though, is that, if one were to have an experience of moral obligation, then it would be mere stubbornness to refuse that experience on its own terms and insist, instead, that moral obligation must be derived from some previous nonmoral premise. As even the Kant of the Groundwork reminds us, were one to “have the advantage of [the reality of categorical obligation] being given in experience . . . the possibility would be necessary not to establish [such obligation] but merely to explain it” (4:420/30). Reliable experience, were it to be found, would be a starting point not for philosophical proof, but for attentive philosophical explanation. And although the Kant of the Groundwork argued that no experience of categorical obligation was possible, this is exactly what changes in the second Critique. When he appeals to the Fact of Reason, Kant is thus not begging the question; he is, rather, showing us that the main concern of moral philosophy is not to provide a deductive argument from nonmoral premises that proves we are moral, but instead to “explain” with attentive philosophical rigor the wealth of information we gain from our moral experiences. The challenge, on this approach, will be to present a compelling moral experience to guide such explanations, and we shall find just this in the Gallows Man experience. There are, however, more sympathetic readings of the Fact of Reason to be found in the literature. To appreciate the challenges they face in adequately interpreting the Fact, let us first review some helpful framing ideas as presented by two standard interpreters of the Fact, Lewis White Beck and Henry Allison. According to Beck, when we look at Kant’s various assertions of the Fact of Reason, “Kant does not seem to have made up his mind on the best way of expressing it.”3 Kant’s various appeals to the Fact can, he says, be split into two general groups: “a prima facie distinction exists between ‘consciousness of the moral law’ . . . and the law itself, of which we are conscious.”4 What Beck is asking here is whether Kant wants the Fact to be a psychological fact or a metaphysical one, or what Allison has described as either a “subjective” or an “objective” fact.5 Is the

3 Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 167. 5 Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 232. 4 Ibid., emphases added.

recent interpretations of the fact of reason

139

content of the Fact merely a content of my consciousness? Or is the content of the Fact the objectively existing moral law itself? Resolution of this question is of no small consequence, as Allison notes: [T]he problem raised by this classification is obvious. If the fact is construed subjectively as a mode of consciousness, its existence is readily granted but no inference to the validity of the law is warranted thereby. Conversely, if it is construed objectively and equated with the law itself, then the existence of this fact becomes the very point at issue and can hardly be appealed to in order to ground the reality of moral obligation.6

We thus face a problem when we try to make sense of the content of the Fact of Reason. If we take the “subjective” route, then we can grant the Fact but cannot move from it to an objective claim about the moral law: there is no simple move that can be made from mere consciousness of moral obligation to an objective assertion that “the moral law itself” exists.7 But if we take the “objective” route, then the Fact does not seem self-evident and requires some other sort of epistemic defense beyond its mere givenness as a Fact. In reviewing recent literature on the Fact, one finds a definite tendency toward accepting the Fact as having subjective content (usually involving appeal either to a common, or at least a first-personal perspective), and then either providing an argument from this subjective content to the objective content of the moral law, or resting happily in some state of subjectivity short of realization of an objective moral law. In one school of thought, spearheaded by Allison, one admits common, first-personal access to consciousness of the moral law; the Fact is simply a brute given in one’s common consciousness. One then protects both the objectivity of one’s moral assertions and the practicality of pure reason by assuring that the central aspect of the Fact – recognition and justification of the validity of the moral law – is accessed only via the common person’s nonsensible rational judgment. More subjective experiences of moral feeling, or even of pangs of conscience, are thus relegated on such readings to playing, at most, a secondary motivational role. A second, more Fichtean-inspired school claims the centrality of first-personal perspective in affirming the Fact wholeheartedly, but reads the Fact as an activity instead of as a brute given. These interpreters then encounter various problems in 6 Ibid.

7 Beck, Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, p. 167.

140

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

grounding objective cognitions of moral obligation and freedom from these first-personal, subjective starting points. Crucial for our consideration of both these schools of thought is the question of how, on these accounts, the moral feeling of respect, and felt experience generally, is or is not related to the Fact and to first-personal experience. Let us consider each of these schools in turn.

i. Allison’s reading of the Fact of Reason We have already noted, in Part i, how many interpreters avoid direct appeal to feeling in explaining Kant’s grounding of the validity of the moral law, so as to assure that Kant’s project of the practicality of pure reason does not descend into moral sense theory. Indeed, a common way of reading Kant’s ethics is to find feeling important for making sense of the incentive or interest we have to act in accordance with moral principles out of respect for them; but to insist that proof of the authority that those principles have over us must be accomplished entirely independently of appeal to feeling.8 Many who make this assumption appeal to Allison’s standard reading of the Fact of Reason to ground their claims, so it is to Allison that we now turn, taking his account as a paradigmatic example of how one might affirm the validity of the moral law through appeal to a common, but nonsensible, consciousness of the moral law.9 According to Allison, 8 Herman (Practice of Moral Judgment) is one interpreter who assumes this sort of picture. Thomas Hill’s discussions of conscience (“Four Conceptions of Conscience,” in Thomas Hill, Human Welfare and Moral Worth: Kantian Perspectives [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002]) and Anne Margaret Baxley’s recent work (Kant’s Theory of Virtue: The Value of Autocracy [Cambridge University Press, 2010]) both take a similar tack. 9 See Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, chapter 13, pp. 230–249. Allison’s analysis of respect and its relation to the Fact of Reason relies heavily upon Reath, “Kant’s Theory of Moral Sensibility.” Dieter Henrich, “The Concept of Moral Insight and Kant’s Doctrine of the Fact of Reason,” in The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, trans. Manfred Kuehn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 55–87, especially pages 84–85, also affirms a strong connection between the Fact of Reason and the moral feeling of respect, insisting that “[t]he concepts of the ‘Fact of Reason’ and ‘respect for the law’ are the central concepts of the second Critique. The one cannot be conceived without the other” (p. 85). But Henrich also accepts familiar Hegelian criticisms of both the Fact of Reason and the moral feeling of respect. (See Dieter Henrich, “Das Problem der Grundlegung der Ethik bei Kant und im spekulativen Idealismus,” in Sein und Ethos, ed. Paulus Engelhardt [Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald Verlag, 1963], pp. 372–375.) Henry Allison has, however, already considered and rejected this account in ways that are sympathetic with my own reading of the Fact (see Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, pp. 127–128); I thus set aside Henrich’s account.

recent interpretations of the fact of reason

141

the moral feeling of respect follows from the Fact of Reason, and it is not a condition of it: “respect presupposes the doctrine of the Fact of Reason, since it assumes the validity of the moral law and investigates the effects of the consciousness of this law on sensuously affected rational agents.”10 Despite this asserted priority of the Fact of Reason over respect, Allison also suggests that Kant’s “analysis [of respect] . . . plays a crucial role in the presentation of the fact that is to be construed as a Fact of Reason.”11 Indeed, Allison describes respect as a particular “aspect” of the Fact of Reason, namely, the motivational one.12 When we connect the doctrine of respect with the Fact of Reason, we “show that we do in fact take an interest in morality.”13 For Allison, then, respect is both consequent upon the Fact of Reason and an aspect of it. Although the law as “a rule or principle of action” is identified apart from any feeling of respect, the law as “a motive to act or refrain from acting in ways specified by this principle” must rely upon respect, for it is respect which “presents” the Fact of Reason as such a motive.14 For Allison, this move is part of Kant’s “great reversal”15 from his Groundwork to his second Critique understanding of interest: whereas, in the Groundwork, Kant regarded the interest we in fact take in the law as “something mysterious,”16 in the second Critique, this interest, because it is now an immediate result of our previous consciousness of the moral law, is no longer mysterious. Appeal to it is “part of the solution” to the problem of whether pure reason is practical, not “part of the problem.”17 There is some support in Kant’s text for Allison’s claim that grounding of the validity of the moral law occurs previous to any appeal to sensibility, including sensible feeling. Looking back on what he takes

10 Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 237, emphases added. See also p. 121: “[I]t is important to realize that as the third chapter of the Analytic [Kant’s discussion of the Incentive of the moral feeling of respect] follows both the exposition of the moral law and the establishment of its validity as a ‘fact of reason.’ Thus, it presupposes that Kant has already shown that pure reason is practical, that is, that reason, of itself, independently of inclination, is sufficient to determine the will.” 11 Ibid., p. 237, emphases added. 12 See ibid., p. 123, where Allison notes that Kant “starts with the ‘fact’ (itself an aspect of the fact of reason . . . )” that consciousness or recognition of the moral law serves as an incentive via the feeling of respect. 14 Ibid., p. 233. 13 Ibid., p. 237, emphasis added. 15 Ibid., p. 236. The phrase, however, was first used by Karl Ameriks (Kant’s Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982], p. 226. 17 Ibid., p. 238. 16 Ibid., p. 237.

142

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

to have accomplished in the preceding pages of the Analytic of the second Critique, Kant asserts the following: [I]t follows that a critique of the Analytic of reason, insofar as it is to be a practical reason (and this is the real problem), must begin from the possibility of practical principles a priori. Only from these could it proceed to concepts of objects of a practical reason, namely, to the concepts of the simply good and evil, in order first to give them in keeping with those principles (for, prior to those principles these cannot possibly be given as good and evil by any cognitive faculty), and only then could the last chapter conclude this part, namely the chapter about the relation of pure practical reason to sensibility and about its necessary influence upon sensibility to be cognized a priori, that is, about moral feeling. (5:89–90/76)

Kant asserts a three-stage process here for the grounding of practical philosophy, one which corresponds with the three chapters of Part i, the first book of the Critique (the “Analytic of Pure Practical Reason” [5:19/17]). The first chapter (within which he discusses, amongst other things, the Fact of Reason) affirms “the possibility of practical principles a priori”; the second chapter confirms concepts of good and evil as guided by these principles; and the third chapter relates practical reason to sensibility through “moral feeling.” Allison does not appeal specifically to this passage when making his claims about the Fact of Reason. Nonetheless, his appeal to an unfelt consciousness of the Fact of Reason fits nicely with Kant’s claim here that we need to come to terms with the “possibility of practical principles a priori” before we can make application of such principles to sensibility, and can, indeed, be seen as an elucidation of that claim. Further, Allison’s suggestion that moral feeling introduces a motivational aspect of the Fact of Reason fits nicely with Kant’s suggestion here that concern for the influence of reason on sensibility can be considered only after admitting the possibility of a priori practical principles. This brief passage thus acts as a sort of outline for Allison’s reading of the Fact of Reason. But can we agree with both Allison and Kant that access to the main claim of the Fact of Reason is possible without reference to feeling? Unfortunately, this cannot work; and it cannot work because of the limits of reason in sensibly affected rational beings. To try to prove consciousness or knowledge of the validity of morality (or even just the possibility of a priori principles of morality) without appeal to

recent interpretations of the fact of reason

143

sensibility demands that we take a perspective that the limits of reason prevent us from taking. As such, we must rely on something like sensibility, receptivity, or what Kant later even calls “susceptibility to respect for the moral law” (6:27/52) as the means by which we recognize pure a priori practical principles. Let us turn to a defense of this claim. Most centrally, and as we will discuss in more depth in the coming chapters, Kant presents the Fact of Reason not just as something given, but more precisely as something that “forces itself upon us” (5:31/ 28)18 and which is therefore “unavoidable” (5:55/48). But a forced fact has to be a felt fact: when we have something forced upon us, we are passive or receptive in relation to that which is doing the forcing. As such, explanation of how we take in this forced fact must involve some aspect of ourselves capable of being passive or receptive. But such a capacity is our capacity for sensibility. We reject appeal to sensibility as intuition here, though, since anything presented through intuition would be merely empirical, an option for understanding the Fact which Kant explicitly rejects.19 But our Part i discussion of feeling shows that it is that aspect of sensibility which is capable of receiving things nonempirically. As such, we must appeal to our capacity for receptivity in the sensible form of feeling when making sense of how finite rational beings access the Fact of Reason; there seems no other capacity by which sensibly affected beings could take something in as given. It is surprising, then, that Kant claims that he has accessed “the possibility of practical principles a priori” without appeal to sensibility. Not only is this not possible; as further chapters will show, it is not in fact an accurate summary of the first chapter of the first book of the Analytic. What we shall discover through particular focus on the role the common experience of the Gallows Man20 plays in affirming the validity of the moral law is that we must appeal to the common experience of being forced to recognize moral demands in order to make sense of the Fact of Reason. But common experience and judgment, as we have seen in the Groundwork, operate via feeling, and this commonfeeling connection does not disappear in the second Critique; if

18 See also 5:30/27 for another use of the language of “forced” to describe the Fact. 19 See 5:31/28–29: “[The Fact] forces itself upon us of itself as a synthetic a priori proposition that is not based on any intuition, either pure or empirical . . . [I]t is not an empirical fact but the sole fact of pure reason.” 20 See 5:30/27–28.

144

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

anything, it strengthens. As such, to the extent that Kant admits that affirmation of the validity of the moral law involves appeal to a common, forced consciousness of its authority for us, he must also admit appeal to feeling in the grounding of this first aspect of the Fact of Reason. Allison’s interpretation of the Fact of Reason, one which assumes this same nonfelt aspect of the Fact, also collapses under this same criticism. Allison asserts that our nonfelt consciousness of the Fact is a “consciousness of standing under the moral law and the recognition of this law ‘by every natural human reason as the supreme law of its will.’”21 Further, Allison accepts Kant’s claim that this Fact is best construed as “a brute given.”22 He does not, however, make the crucial connections between the given, forced nature of this fact and sensibility we have just suggested. But without appeal to sensibility, we cannot make sense of how the Fact is given. How, then, does Allison ground that consciousness of the validity and authority of the moral law if not via appeal to our capacity for receptivity? Interestingly, Allison does not deny that this previous, unfelt consciousness of the validity of morality is a common one. To the contrary, he asserts that this nonfelt consciousness of the fact is a “common consciousness” of the moral law,23 one constituted by the common person’s awareness of “particular moral constraints as they arise in the process of practical deliberation, with the law serving as the guiding rule. . .actually governing such deliberation.”24 Allison seems, then, to be appealing to something very similar to the type of common experience to which we ourselves will appeal when discussing the Gallows Man example in Chapter 7: we recognize the validity of the moral law not through some general recognition of lawfulness as such, but through particular, common experiences of that law operating upon us in the course of our practical deliberations. Allison thus asserts that within normal, common consciousness (he avoids the language of “experience”) of ourselves as practical deliberators, we find as given this fact of the validity and supremacy of moral 21 Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 233, quoting 5:91/77. 22 Ibid., p. 233. 23 Ibid., p. 235, emphasis added. 24 Ibid., p. 233. Even in his earlier discussion of the Groundwork, Allison admits a common origin of practical moral principles. In his chapter 5 discussion of rational agency in the Groundwork, Allison notes, in passing, that “Kant begins with what he takes to be the ordinary, prephilosophical understanding of morality . . . and proceeds analytically from this to the conception of duty” (p. 85).

recent interpretations of the fact of reason

145

demands. But this appeal to the common only makes things worse for Allison. He seems, in particular, not to have noted that, in the passage immediately following the one to which he appeals to affirm that the Fact of Reason is a common human awareness, that Kant insists both that the very justification of morality can be affirmed by appeal to this common experience of morality, and that this common justification of morality operates via the moral feeling of respect. According to Kant, “the justification of moral principles as principles of a pure reason could also be carried out very well and with sufficient certainty by a mere appeal to the judgment of common human understanding” (5:91/77), a common human understanding which relies upon the moral feeling of respect to make its judgments.25 Kant thus asserts that we have common, felt, first-personal access not just to interest in but also to the justification or validity of the moral law. Common experience of the moral feeling of respect thus is not caused by a previous, common, nonfelt consciousness of the Fact of Reason, as Allison suggests, but is instead part and parcel of that very consciousness. But Allison does not consider Kant’s claims in this section both that the common point of view is the point of view of felt phenomenological experience, and that this point of view is the one from which to affirm the very validity of moral demands. Instead, he argues that the common person has nonfelt consciousness of the validity and supremacy of moral demands, which then causes the felt experience of respect. But this is counter to the very text upon which he is relying. Could Allison’s more complex, two-tiered articulation of the common point of view, nonetheless, make sense, even if it is not quite that felt common experience to which Kant appeals here? Could we, that is, make sense of a common experience as having this two-part, nonfelt and felt structure? Perhaps Allison could say simply that this consciousness is a rational instead of a felt understanding of precise

25 Kant describes how the common feeling of “gratification” attached to the would-be satisfaction of a desire, and the “pain” associated with the failure to achieve that object of desire are both “oppose[d]” by pure practical reason, which aims its attack specifically against these inclination-inspired feelings and which expresses itself in the “special feeling” of “respect . . . for the moral law” (5:92/77–78). Furthermore, he emphasizes with italics the epistemic role that these feelings are playing: the introduction of illicit empirical influences on one’s choices “makes itself known” via these feelings (5:92/77). The first-personal common point of view thus relies upon what the philosopher calls the moral feeling of respect to know the justification of the validity of the moral law upon its will. We will discuss all of this in more detail as Part iii progresses.

146

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

demands which follow from the Categorical Imperative, a simple intellectual admission of what we know is morally demanded of us, without yet taking any particular attitude toward that admission. So, we would attribute to the common person some rational understanding of the demands of the Categorical Imperative, one which only afterwards causes her to take an attitude toward it, that is, to feel respect for it. But separating rational and felt aspects of the common person’s experience in this way doesn’t seem true to common experience. Most centrally, it is odd to think that one’s common experience itself (and not just our philosophical reflections upon them) would be cut up in this rational–emotional way. There is something more holistic about the common encounter with the Fact of Reason (especially, as we shall see, in the way Kant describes it in the Gallows Man’s experience) which this rational–emotional split fails to capture. Allison’s assertion of a nonfelt consciousness that is previous to our experience of respect but which acts as the cause of that feeling thus seems unnecessarily baroque. The Gallows Man simply has a painful experience of the authority of the moral law, and knows that he can act in accordance with it. We might, as philosophers, make a technical distinction between the kinds of recognition that he has of that law: one which affirms its validity, and another which affirms his interest in it. But to insist, as Allison does, that these two points are accomplished by the common person in different ways (i.e., that the former occurs commonly, but previous to the common experience of respect, and is itself the cause of that feeling, which in turn reaffirms the validity of that first, un-felt consciousness by completing our motivational confidence in the practicality of pure reason) is to introduce a complexity to the moral consciousness of the common person that is simply not to be found in any of Kant’s own efforts to articulate that common experience. Indeed, the need to appeal to a nonfelt, rational understanding of moral demands, which we only subsequently take an attitude toward, makes the common experience sound less practical an experience than in fact it is. The first, nonfelt consciousness of the demands of the Categorical Imperative seems more a theoretical, third-personal knowledge of a philosophical claim, not a practical experience of myself as an agent. It is as if this first consciousness is a simple knowledge claim about the moral law. But that is not what the common person is understanding! The common person (especially as exemplified by the Gallows Man) is experiencing a practical demand upon his

recent interpretations of the fact of reason

147

will, not a simple understanding of what the moral law is, thirdpersonally. And it makes most sense to understand that practical demand as something that forces itself upon his will through the affective experience we have described as the moral feeling of respect. If anything, from the common point of view, one would expect to feel the painful feelings first, and only then rationally to articulate to oneself what is demanded of oneself morally. The common person feels no need to reflect on the finer points of moral demands unless she is forced to. And that forcing comes when she feels pain about the decisions she needs to make. Were one to insist upon a two-tiered common approach, then, one would expect the rational–emotional relationship to be reversed. The common person is not pushed to rational reflection about the nature of morality beyond this felt awareness of the practical demand it places upon her unless and until her circumstances somehow demand that of her. A final point to make about Allison’s reading of the Fact of Reason is that it forces us to say that the moral feeling of respect is caused by the actual consciousness we have of moral demands; but, as we have argued in Part i, it is best, both textually and philosophically, to understand the cause of moral feeling not as a previous consciousness of the moral law, but instead, more metaphysically, as the action of one’s autonomous rational nature upon one’s sensibility. Indeed, Allison seems to assume that Kant’s at times vague references to the “moral law” being the cause of respect (see, e.g., 5:72/62) have to be understood as our “consciousness of the validity of the moral law” causing respect.26 And yet there is much text in the second Critique itself, but also before it (in the Groundwork) and beyond it (especially in the Metaphysics of Morals), which confirms a more metaphysically robust understanding of the causal history of moral feeling: reason or our rational nature (and not simply our consciousness of the law that emerges from that nature)

26 At one point, Allison seems to recognize that the cause of respect is not simply our actual consciousness of the law, but goes back to its rational, intellectual source. When affirming respect’s connection with autonomy, he states that “the feeling of respect is . . . the product of an ‘intellectual’ or ‘intelligible cause’” (KprV 5:73–5; 75–7)” (Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 126). He does not, however, recognize that this claim is in tension with his more frequent suggestions that respect is the effect of one’s actual consciousness of moral demands. Indeed, he describes “the main job” of his chapter discussing respect to be “to explore the effects of the consciousness of the (valid) law on agents such as ourselves, who have a sensuous as well as a rational nature” (ibid., p. 121).

148

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

is the cause of the feeling, itself inscrutable to us; and the feeling is the effect of this rational cause upon our sensibility.27 All these texts encourage us, then, to accept that the direct cause of the moral feeling of respect is not so much our consciousness of the validity of the moral law, but instead our rational, autonomous natures. This is not to say that the bare thought of the validity of the law in a particular situation might not sometimes inspire that feeling; but, when it does, the philosopher can tell a deeper story about that conscious experience. Further, we need to admit the possibility of respect coming upon us unbidden, with no previous consciousness of the moral law informing it.28 Something larger than our conscious selves is operative when respect takes hold of us. Our analysis of Allison’s understanding of the Fact of Reason shows, then, that in order to affirm a recognition of the validity of the moral law that is both forced and common, Allison needs to admit that feeling is involved in this consciousness more than he does; there is no other epistemic means for the common person to access this forced awareness. Allison thus is unable to hold to his claim that finite beings have a nonfelt consciousness of the validity of morality that is intact previous to our experience of the moral feeling of respect. There is, therefore, another story to be told about the relationship of the moral feeling of respect to the Fact of Reason. We shall see, in later chapters, that appeal to feeling is absolutely crucial for understanding the Fact, especially for understanding Kant’s claim that the Fact “forces itself upon us of itself” (5:31/28).

ii. Fichtean, first-personal readings of the Fact of Reason Several recent, Fichtean-inspired interpreters, while wholeheartedly affirming a first-personal entry into the Fact of Reason, reject the brute 27 See, for example, 4:460–461/64, where Kant says “reason ha[s] the capacity to induce a feeling of pleasure or of delight in the fulfillment of duty, and thus there is required a causality of reason to determine sensibility in conformity with its principles . . . [H]ere pure reason, by means of mere ideas (which yield no object at all for experience), is to be the cause of an effect that admittedly lies in experience.” In the second Critique, Kant speaks of moral feeling having “an intelligible cause, namely the subject of pure practical reason as the supreme lawgiver” (5:75/65). And in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant speaks of this intelligible cause or “source” of moral feeling as “inscrutable,” and a cause for “wonder” (6:400/160). 28 See, e.g., 5:76–77/66, where Kant says, speaking of the feeling of respect, that “my spirit bows, whether I want it or whether I do not and hold my head ever so high.”

recent interpretations of the fact of reason

149

givenness of the Fact in favor of reading it as an activity of reason. Interpreting the Fact as an activity allows these commentators to avoid some of the problems we have attributed to Allison’s account. However, increased emphasis upon the first-personal perspective does not lead these commentators to attribute a more central role for feeling to the Fact than Allison does. Further, once one admits the centrality of first-personal experience to the extent that these commentators do, the old worries articulated by Beck and Allison re-emerge on a new level: it seems that any claims of moral obligation grounded in first-personal deliberation would be irreducibly subjective instead of the fully objective practical cognitions Kant wants. Let us look more closely at these “Fact as Act” interpreters. For Paul Franks,29 the Fact of Reason is not a given fact but a rational and first-personally performed act. It is only when I, as a reader of Kant, engage in a rational activity akin to the Gallows Man’s apprehension of freedom that I can say of myself that, like him, I am both obligated by categorical demands and free to act as they direct. The activity of the Fact thus has a “peculiarly first person singular character,”30 one in which I do not simply experience, but rather more actively “actually produce the feeling of respect.” Such production is, furthermore, an “actualiz[ation of] our practical freedom,” since in producing this feeling, we “produc[e] an effect necessitated by the moral law.”31 There is something to appreciate about Franks’ interpretation from our perspective: in it we find a wholehearted commitment to taking on the Fact of Reason from a first-personal perspective, and our interpretation of the Fact is in agreement with that move. We must, however, question the relentlessly active point of view Franks finds in the firstpersonal perspective of the Gallows Man, one in which the Gallows Man (and we, when we take on his reflections) actually produces the moral feeling of respect through conscious deliberative activity. Our own account of the Gallows Man, in Chapters 7 and 8, will show that the first-personal perspective revealed there centrally involves a willingness to be receptive to what one discovers to be already present in one’s moral consciousness (as opposed to a capacity to actively and consciously produce a feeling that is not yet present). Moreover, as has 29 Paul Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), especially chapter 5. 31 Ibid., p. 287. 30 Ibid., p. 294.

150

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

already been suggested in Chapter 3, we will tell a more metaphysical than deliberative story of the causal history of moral feeling. Moral feeling is indeed produced by our noumenal selves, but because the perspective of the noumenally legislating self is not something a finite, sensibly affected being can access directly, we need to discover effects of this activity already present in our deliberative consciousness, instead of understanding the course of our conscious deliberations as being actually and originally productive of this feeling.32 We will consider this alternative reading of the Gallows Man in more depth in Chapters 7 and 8. Meanwhile, although he approves of Franks’ assertion of the rational activity of deliberation producing moral feeling, Dean Moyar33 finds a different problem with Franks’ approach, one with which we find some sympathy. According to Moyar: Franks claims that the deduction of freedom is only valid for the reader who successfully takes up and is moved by the examples considered in the text . . . But the cost of such a first-personal reading is unacceptably high. Kant surely meant for the deduction to establish the reality of freedom from the practical point of view, not just from my practical point of view. Franks thinks that Kant does not or cannot simply claim that any moral agent would in fact thus respond to the example, but Kant needs a version of this claim. He needs to be able to say that this responsiveness is constitutive of moral agency, is necessary to be a moral agent at all.34

On Franks’ first-personal reading of the Fact, we cannot affirm the universality and objectivity of moral obligation for which Kant is searching. Whatever the desirability of emphasizing first-personal activity, we need, in Moyar’s terms, to access ‘the practical point of view, not just . . . my practical point of view.’ This first-personal grounding of moral obligation thus proves too radically subjective. One might hope to exit such radical subjectivity by appealing, as Ian Proops does, to an actual, shared unanimity of the experience of conscience.35 If we all in fact have an experience of conscience akin

32 This does not mean that we cannot cultivate moral feeling through conscious deliberation. But when we do so, we are not originally producing the feeling, only choosing to encourage its presence. For more on the cultivation of moral feeling, see Grenberg, Kant and the Ethics of Humility. 33 Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy.” 34 Ibid., p. 334. 35 Ian Proops, “Kant’s Legal Metaphor and the Nature of a Deduction,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 41(2), 2003, pp. 209–229.

recent interpretations of the fact of reason

151

to that of the Gallows Man, or similar experiences, then we should be able to measure the presence of this shared experience and thereby affirm a certain universality of moral obligation, thus moving us beyond Franks’ more radically subjective reading of the Fact: “What would reveal the nonempirical origin of the idea of duty would be its constancy across persons whose quality and level of moral education differ widely.”36 But even this move would not take us far enough. Moyar also rightly criticizes Proops, noting that his unanimity of conscience argument requires an empirical psychological proof that is simply not forthcoming: Though Proops improves on the Factum’s status by showing that Kant thought a proof of the Factum was available (namely the unanimity of conscience), this “proof” either amounts to an assertion of a fact of human nature, or something to be established by empirical study. The latter option, as so much psychology and anthropology of the last two centuries has shown, is simply untenable.37

Moyar’s worry here is that empirical confirmation of the Fact is simply not forthcoming. He might have added that, even if it were, it wouldn’t provide us with the kind of universality Kant is looking for. Clearly, a synthetic a priori claim of moral obligation needs to hold with strict universality and necessity (as we discussed in Part i), and not just empirical generality. Proops’ method of affirming the “constancy across persons” of the Fact would, however, at best, get us only the latter. Would-be first-personal interpreters of the Fact of Reason are thus left with an unhappy dilemma: either defend the mere empirical generality of moral obligation via untenable empirical study, or admit that, at most, I can prove the validity of moral obligation for myself, but no one else. Moyar himself seeks to get beyond the horns of this dilemma. Although he is critical of Franks’ approach for its radical subjectivity, he affirms Franks’ effort to ground the Fact in an act, suggesting that this is “an important step towards a more plausible Factum argument.”38 Moyar then exits the dilemma of first-personal interpreters of the Fact by “interpret[ing] Kant’s theory of conscience . . . as a theory of . . . an act of self-consciousness, a necessary first-person 36 Ibid., p. 226.

37 Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy,” p. 333.

38 Ibid., p. 334.

152

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

presupposition of moral judgment.”39 This reading of the Fact informed by Kant’s later discussions of conscience is Moyar’s effort to sidestep any Proopsian appeal to empirical generality. Instead of appealing to empirical studies to confirm the Fact, Moyar suggests instead that we should appeal to a necessary (and therefore shared) presupposition of moral judgment that must be assumed in any act of conscience for any agent. The Fact, as interpreted through Kant’s account of conscience, thus involves not just activity but also an accompanying moment of self-consciousness, somewhat akin to the Transcendental Unity of Apperception: “Conscience makes sure that all evidence is available, for it is the self-consciousness of everything that takes place within judgment.”40 And, importantly, this necessary assumption of the structure of the judgment of conscience is attributable to all of us, not just to those who consciously and first-personally take up an experience of moral obligation. We thus have an account of the Fact as act attributable to agency as such. There are things to appreciate about Moyar’s approach. Most importantly, his appeal to something necessary in moral agency as such does get us beyond the subjectivity problem encountered by Franks and Proops, even as it continues to affirm a first-personal approach to the Fact; this sort of move is indeed something to encourage, and it will be similar to our own discussion in Chapter 11, in which the necessity found in felt, first-personal experience grounds the objectivity of that experience. There are, however, two large disadvantages to Moyar’s account, which make it untenable as an interpretation of Kant. First, he insists that a Kantian account of deliberative judgment in conscience collapses the distinction between recognizing the authority of moral demands and choosing and being motivated to act in individual situations. According to Moyar, once we grant to conscience (as Kant does in the Metaphysics of Morals) the strong authority of an infallible “divine inner judge,” the first-personal deliberative act of conscience combines the judgment of whether an act is right and the judgment of my individual maxim for acting into one complex judgment of conscience: Given this full-blown account of conscience as the divine inner judge, it is very hard to see how the functions of conscience for Kant can still be kept separate from first-order judgment and deliberation. Conscience, as

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., p. 345.

recent interpretations of the fact of reason

153

Kant describes it, has all the resources of practical reason, which means that the conclusion of conscience is indistinguishable from the conclusion of deliberation. The question for deliberation is to determine what my maxim of action will be. The question before the court is the subjective question, “Do you believe that the action you are about to perform is the right (moral) action?” If you do not believe it is, then you are warned by your conscience. But how do you assess the soundness of your belief? By the same process that would answer the simple question, “What is the right (moral) action?”, namely by considering all the appropriate evidence and arriving at a judgment about the most rational/moral action in these circumstances. The separation of a first-order judgment and a subsequent second-order judgment judging itself begins to seem like a rather desperate assertion of the ideal objectivity of moral judgment.41

If, in conscience, we cannot clearly distinguish first-order and secondorder questions of obligation and choice, then it makes sense, according to Moyar, to reject Allisonian-like readings of conscience (such as, for example, Thomas Hill’s),42 which assume a rational judgment about the validity of moral demands previous to one’s firstpersonal deliberative act of conscience. The hope for any such nonfirst-personal access to the validity of the moral law is just “a rather desperate assertion of the ideal objectivity of moral judgment.” Firstpersonal reflection thus takes center stage in Moyar’s reading of the Fact of Reason, since it is only within the deliberative act of conscience that we can, simultaneously, answer the questions of what I should do and what in fact I will do here. We do not want to reject Moyar’s suggestion, contra Hill, that moral judgment is first-personal throughout; this is, indeed, a commitment deeply sympathetic with our own approach. But it is hard to see why one must accept a collapse of first-order and second-order judgments in order to affirm the first-personal nature of moral judgment. Affirming that we need not do so will require showing that there is to be found in Kant a story of first-personal deliberative judgment that maintains a distinction between questions of what I should do and what I will in fact do; and we will tell just this story as Part iii continues. For the present, we simply assert that, if one can avoid such collapsing of normally distinct aspects of deliberative judgment, one should.

41 Ibid., pp. 346–347.

42 See Hill, “Four Conceptions of Conscience.”

154

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

There is, however, an even larger price to pay in Moyar’s consciencebased reading of the Fact: in it, we lose any sense of the law being valid for us and replace lawfulness with the rational, active power of my own deliberative process. This is, according to Moyar, the “instability” of Kant’s notion of autonomy, which was hinted at in Fichte’s criticism of Kant but which, through his assessment of Kant’s complex and at times conflicting accounts of conscience, Moyar shows to be latently present in Kant’s writing itself: In this paper I address the instability in Kant’s view of moral judgment that Fichte draws out . . . The instability arises because, as Fichte puts it . . . two aspects of Kant’s conception of moral freedom can be separated: “the absolute self-sufficiency of reason” and the “principle of universal legislation.” Fichte is claiming that practical reason and the pure act of the I that is the root of reason’s self-sufficiency are not constituted by the universality of the Categorical Imperative. In maintaining that “The act of judging begins purely and simply with me,” [Fichte] is in effect giving priority to the self over the universal form of lawfulness, and bringing out into the open the latent instability in Kantian autonomy.43

According to Moyar, then, once we grant strong first-personal authority to a rational act of judging that “begins purely and simply with me,” we do not just collapse first orders and second orders of judgment. That collapse is only the symptom of a deeper problem for Kant’s moral philosophy: in strongly emphasizing the authority of the first-personal self of moral judgment (even to the point of insisting, as Kant does, that such judgment is infallible), the connection of the practical reasoning of that self to any would-be “universal form of lawfulness” is lost. If the judgment of conscience cannot be questioned, then it must be that there is no objective law apart from the judgment of conscience. For Moyar, then, first-personal deliberation is not a means of gaining access for me to an objectively valid law; instead, a very strong firstpersonal account of the operations of conscience, one that comes with its own unquestionable “authority,”44 replaces that law. And instead of a moral law, there is only me; a rational me perhaps, but only me: the dynamics of conscience have pushed Kant’s moral theory towards a priority of the self to the law. Because of Kant’s almost exclusive focus on the law as the basis of objective constraint, once the self does come to the 43 Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy,” p. 328.

44 Ibid., p. 345.

recent interpretations of the fact of reason

155

fore he has no way to secure the subject’s accountability for his conscientious mistakes.45

One would think that, without a clear connection between my firstpersonal deliberative acts of conscience and an objective law that undergirds my personal rational reflections on the nature of my duty, Moyar’s reading of the Fact would collapse into radical subjectivity. But, to the contrary, Moyar asserts the following: Conscience can . . . do the work of the Factum, though this will mean lowering our expectations about the extent to which the moral law can provide determinate judgments in the abstract. Demoting the form of lawfulness to a merely heuristic role, the moral law that defines autonomy should be taken to be a law of self-determination plain and simple. Or as Fichte puts it, “the law of absolute agreement with oneself.” This can be read as a version of the Unifying Judgment View of conscience that demands unity of self rather than unity under the form of lawfulness.46

We can thus grant an objective reading of the Fact as long as we grant, in a strong Fichtean sense, that moral demands “should be taken to be a law of self-determination plain and simple,” and that they are not the result of the imposition of “the form of lawfulness.” For Moyar, then, we needn’t, as with Franks’ account, resort to a radically individual act of self-recognition. Nor must we save the objectivity of moral judgments by a weak appeal to empirical evidence of the unanimity of an experience of conscience (as on Proops’ account). Instead, Moyar saves the objectivity of moral judgment by appeal to conscience as “a basic selfconsciousness constitutive of judgment.”47 Even as we let go of any form of lawfulness guiding our moral judgments, we retain the objectivity of the Fact by appealing to a universally shared aspect of moral agency. Moyar is, however, wrong to insist that a first-personal reading of the Fact requires of us the separation between the activity of the rational

45 Ibid., pp. 353–354. Moyar’s conclusion here is the result of an analysis of Kant’s admittedly perplexing claim that conscience can never be wrong. He may be right that, if we really insist on his reading of that strong claim of Kant’s, the problematic conclusions Moyar reaches are unavoidable. We should, however, set that claim of infallibility to the side while investigating the nature of first-personal deliberative judgment for Kant. Doing so will, as we will see in Part iii, prevent the untoward conclusions Moyar reaches while still welcoming a first-personal grounding of an objective synthetic a priori claim of moral obligation. 47 Ibid., p. 358. 46 Ibid., pp. 358–359.

156

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

self and lawfulness. Moyar misses the connection between first-personal moral experiences and lawfulness because he does not explore more carefully how attention to receptive and felt experience (instead of active, nonfelt experience) points us, mysteriously, to just this objective moral law as the ground of our felt experience of constraint. According to him, conscience is not originally a felt experience, but instead is, in a way broadly similar to Franks’ account, an activity that produces a motivational moral feeling of respect: “To cultivate my conscience means to become more responsive to duty, in that when I confront a situation I judge it as a case of duty and I arouse in myself the moral feeling that motivates action.”48 This is an aspect of his account in which he is in agreement with Franks, who also insists that moral feeling is actively and consciously “produce[d]” through the judgment of conscience.49 Indeed, both Moyar and Franks also limit the moral feeling of respect to having a merely motivational role, similar to the limits we have seen Allison place on the feeling. Moyar argues, contra Hill, that we must collapse first-order and second-order moments of deliberative judgment into one first-personal judgment of conscience; but he resorts to the traditionally accepted and limited motivational role for moral feeling, one very similar to the role for it in Allison’s reading of the Fact.50 Franks also emphasizes what Allison would call the motivational side of the Fact when he discusses it, arguing, as we have seen, that the moral feeling of respect is produced by some previous, nonfelt, first-personal activity in the conscience of the Gallows Man.51 So, although both Moyar and Franks emphasize a first-personal account of conscience, and both find a space for the moral feeling of respect in this first-personal activity, neither explores how this feeling, as a receptive experience – one constitutive of (and not just an effect of) the contours of first-personal moral deliberative judgment – could introduce epistemic and justificatory (as opposed to motivational) possibilities for making sense of the Fact. But, as has already been suggested in Part i, and will be explored more in Part iii, welcoming this epistemic and grounding role for feeling has the promise of revealing, albeit mysteriously, noumenal causes of our phenomenal felt experiences. The Gallows Man will be seen not so much as actively choosing to produce the moral feeling of respect, but instead as 48 Ibid., emphases added. 49 Franks, All or Nothing, p. 287. 50 Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy,” p. 358. 51 Franks, All or Nothing, p. 287.

recent interpretations of the fact of reason

157

attentively finding it already present in his agential consciousness. Through attention to the way in which this feeling presses upon him – through being really receptive to what he finds within himself – he will learn, wondrously, of the intelligible causes of that feeling. In appeal to such intelligible causes, we will thus save both the connection of first-personal experience to lawfulness (which Moyar abandons) and the genuinely necessary and objective quality of moral obligation (which Franks can grant only for those who actually engage in Gallows Man-like reflections). Immersion in felt, first-personal moral experiences, properly construed, thus becomes the vehicle by which our only access to objective lawfulness guiding our first-personal deliberations can be affirmed. I do not, on this account, discuss Kant’s discussions of conscience, the most extensive version of which is found in the Metaphysics of Morals. I focus instead on close readings of the language we find in the second Critique itself as guided by the proper role for felt experience we discussed in Part i. In focusing particularly on the experience of the Gallows Man, we will discover a rather different description of the firstpersonal encounter of the Fact of Reason, one which neither abandons the connection of the self to the form of lawfulness nor merges the distinct questions of obligation and choice. This reading will, furthermore, avoid both horns of the dilemma for first-personal interpreters of the Fact outlined above. We will not rest in a radically subjective affirmation of moral obligation, but also will not appeal to implausible empirical studies to gain our conclusions. We will, rather, focus upon how philosophically attentive reflection upon a felt experience of necessity affirms a necessary and intersubjectively shared fact of moral obligation. In so doing, we affirm one important move in Moyar’s account: we need to appeal to something necessary in agency as such in order for a first-personal account of morality to be a convincingly objective account of morality. Attentive reflection upon the experience of the Gallows Man will, in Moyar’s words, reveal something “constitutive of moral agency” as such,52 but this agency will not be one radically removed from lawfulness; to the contrary, we will discover ourselves as the very legislators of that law. Crucially, though, in opposition to both Franks and Moyar, all these results will require affirming an essential felt receptivity or passivity

52 Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy,” p. 334.

158

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

(as opposed to activity) at the heart of first-personal moral experience. Franks’ curious claims (both of which find their parallels in Moyar’s account) that the performative, first-personal experience which affirms moral obligation is one of activity, and further, that moral feeling is consciously produced through this activity, are, as we shall see, both in serious tension with Kant’s claims both about the Gallows Man’s experiences (which do not present themselves as experiences of activity, but rather as forced upon the moral agent) and the nature of moral feeling (which Kant presents as something that comes upon us unbidden, not something we consciously produce ourselves). The sort of first-personal consciousness of activity to which both Moyar and Franks refer is, according to Kant, simply impossible for finite, sensibly affected agents. Indeed, if first-personal access to the Fact of Reason is going to work, then it must be accomplished within the limits of human experience. We have already in Part i considered, in general terms, what these limits are: we cannot experience our noumenal self or its activity, only point toward it as an object of wonder. For finite, sensibly affected agents, our only access to the fact of moral obligation comes from reflections on the effect our rational nature has upon us instead of through any actual conscious engagement in the rational activity of such nature. I thus save the claim of universal and necessary moral obligation not via appeal to self-consciousness as undergirding activity à la Moyer, but instead via attentive reflection upon the receptive, even passive, experience of a feeling of necessitation. Let us turn to that discussion.

7 THE GALLOWS MAN: THE NEW FACE OF ATTENTIVENESS

Introduction Let us turn, finally, to a careful reading of the Critique of Practical Reason. To tell Kant’s new story of the felt, first-personal grounding of moral philosophy in the second Critique, one which culminates in affirmation of objective, synthetic a priori practical cognitions of moral obligation and freedom, we need first to appreciate two things: his new, more confident reliance in the second Critique upon an already familiar felt common experience of conflict, and also the method of attention upon which he relies to extract practical cognition from this experience, both appreciated from the common point of view; it is to these tasks that this chapter is devoted. The rest of Part iii will be devoted to more explicitly philosophical reflections upon this same attentively considered common, first-personal experience, culminating in affirmation of genuinely Kantian and genuinely objective synthetic a priori cognitions of moral obligation and freedom.

i. New confidence in an old, common, felt experience Although he had introduced the felt experience of conflict in Groundwork i, when the time came to ground the objective validity of freedom and morality in Groundwork iii, Kant abandoned this felt experience of conflict and relied instead, as we have seen, on appeal to the felt experience of activity. But in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant turns himself around 180 degrees: now, he explicitly rejects the experience of activity as a starting point for practical philosophy, and returns instead to the experience of conflict between happiness and morality,

159

160

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

now with more confidence in the grounding (that is, justificatory) work this experience can play. First, Kant explicitly admits that he no longer considers the common experience of activity upon which he had relied in Groundwork iii to be sufficient to initiate the most central tasks of practical philosophy: I ask . . . from what our cognition of the unconditionally practical starts, whether from freedom or from the practical law[?] It cannot start from freedom, for we can neither be immediately conscious of this, since the first concept of it is negative, nor can we conclude to it from experience, since experience lets us cognize only the law of appearances and hence the mechanism of nature, the direct opposite of freedom. (5:29/27)

It may seem that Kant is denying here what he had asserted in Groundwork iii, namely, a first-personal experience of freedom; but his point here is more subtle. In our analysis of Groundwork iii, we did affirm a certain experience of freedom, but it was limited to an experience of negative freedom; further, that experience of negative freedom, though actual and common, was insufficient to ground either positive freedom or moral obligation. What Kant states here is not in disagreement with any of that. The experience of freedom from which we cannot start here – because we do not have it – is positive freedom. What Kant realizes, then, is that, although we do experience negative freedom, it is inadequate to ground more robust practical claims about positive freedom or morality. He is, in other words, affirming precisely our own criticism of his Groundwork iii argument: we cannot begin with a phenomenological experience of negative freedom and move from that to affirmation of either positive freedom or moral obligation. This rejection of negative freedom as the starting point for practical philosophy is not, however, rejection of first-personal felt experience as a starting point for practical philosophy. Although it is subtle, there is an implicit appeal in the above passage to reliance upon what we have been calling first-personal phenomenological experience. Kant is not asking what our first cognition of the practical is but, more subtly, from what it arises or “starts.” Cognition of freedom and morality will eventually be born, but it needs to be born from something, and furthermore, from something given in our “conscious[ness].” Hints of a movement toward something like what we have been calling first-personal phenomenological experience as the starting point for acquisition of practical cognition are thus already present.

the gallows man: the new face of attentiveness 161

Of course, Kant also clearly rejects “experience” as the proper starting point for practical philosophy in this passage; one might object, then, that this passage discourages us from identifying phenomenological experience as the starting point for practical philosophy. Yet this objection can be easily overcome. Kant cannot, of course, appeal to empirical experience to ground practical philosophy, and this is just the kind of experience he is here rejecting: reflection on empirical experience would “let . . . us cognize only the law of appearances and hence the mechanism of nature, the direct opposite of freedom.” Yet we know from Part i that empirical experience of objects is only one possible kind of experience; he still has open to him the possibility of appealing to first-personal phenomenological experience to initiate practical philosophy. And this is just what Kant goes on to do. To initiate practical philosophy, he turns to the “experience [Erfahrung]” (5:30/27) of the conflict between happiness and morality which a man facing the gallows encounters. He builds up slowly, though, to the introduction of this first-personal phenomenological experience, introducing first a general framework for understanding the role that this experience will play in grounding practical philosophy; so, let us first trace that general outline. First, Kant states simply that this grounding thing from which cognition of the practical will be accessed is “the moral law, of which we become immediately conscious (as soon as we draw up maxims of the will for ourselves)” (5:29/27). This consciousness of the moral law “offers itself to us” (5:29/27, emphasis added), and thus is present in our consciousness, ready to serve as the ground of practical cognitions. This language of something being “offer[ed]” to “consciousness” again suggests the first-personal phenomenological experience of which we spoke in Part i: the moral law is to be found within us if only we look for it. Further, what we need to do with this consciousness of the moral law is pay attention to it: “we can become aware of pure practical laws . . . by attending to the necessity with which reason prescribes them to us” (5:30/27, emphasis added). Kant thus reaffirms the value of the method of practical philosophy first suggested in Groundwork i and iii: to extract practical knowledge from first-personal experience (here, the experience of how the moral law presents itself in our consciousness), pay attention to it. That which is offered to consciousness needs to be noticed, or attended to, in order for us to reap the

162

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

benefits of practical cognition implicit in it.1 What is discovered through this attentive reflection (and thus the true object of our attentiveness) is the “necessity” we discover in consciousness of the moral law; just as, in the first Critique, we attended to the necessity implicit in our experience of the ship, here too, we attend to the necessity with which the moral law presents itself. Finally, although Kant had in Groundwork i abandoned this method of wise, attentive reflection in the face of conflicted, self-deceived agents (utilizing it there only for an innocent agent not subject to corrupting tendencies), Kant now, as we shall see, happily applies this method of attentiveness to potentially corrupt and self-deceived agents like the Gallows Man. Fullest affirmation of Kant’s initiation of practical philosophy through attentive consideration of the necessity discovered within first-personal phenomenological experience comes, however, when Kant offers a precise “experience” to fill in the formal structure just provided. The experience to which he appeals is that of the man facing the gallows in two distinct situations (5:50/27–28). Further reflection on the first-personal experience of the Gallows Man will affirm the birth of a practical cognition of moral obligation from attentive consideration of common, felt, first-personal phenomenological experience. Let us turn to careful consideration of this crucial appeal to firstpersonal phenomenological experience.2

1 Kant makes a number of other appeals to attentiveness in the second Critique, helping to confirm his interest in maintaining a practical method of cognition centered on it. See, for example, 5:43–44/39, where he suggests that “the most ordinary attention to oneself confirms” our consciousness of subjugation to “a law to which all our maxims are subject”; and 5:38–39/35–36, where, although he does not speak of attentiveness as such, he speaks of the moral import of “establishing and cultivating” one’s moral feeling of respect, that is, of attending to one’s affective moral experiences. Another interesting appeal to attentiveness is at 5:159–160/131–132, where Kant suggests that moral attentiveness to the truly obligatory nature of moral precepts is necessary to cultivate our interest in morality. We will, later in this chapter, consider the new shape that attentiveness takes in the second Critique. 2 The need to interpret this appeal to experience as a different kind of experience than the empirical experience, which Kant has just rejected in the grounding of practical philosophy, is clear. Without the distinction between two kinds of experience, Kant would be blatantly contradicting himself in the short span of two consecutive pages of the Critique! He would, that is, be saying both that “experience” cannot be (5:29/27) and that “experience” is (5:30/27) the point from which practical philosophy begins. Granting a distinction between empirical and phenomenological experience, though, allows us to say instead that Kant asserts empirical experience cannot be a starting point for practical philosophy, but phenomenological experience both can be and is such a starting point.

the gallows man: the new face of attentiveness 163

The Gallows Man as a common, felt, first-personal phenomenological experience. Here, then, is the Gallows Man example, which I present in two parts: (1) Suppose someone asserts of his lustful inclination that, when the desired object and the opportunity are present, it is quite irresistible to him; ask him whether, if a gallows were erected in front of the house where he finds this opportunity and he would be hanged on it immediately after gratifying his lust, he would not then control his inclination. One need not conjecture very long what he would reply. (5:30/27) (2) But ask him whether, if his prince demanded, on pain of the same immediate execution, that he give false testimony against an honorable man whom the prince would like to destroy under a plausible pretext, he would consider it possible to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps not venture to assert whether he would do it or not, but he must admit without hesitation that it would be possible for him. He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it and cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him. (5:30/27–28) What we see here is a description of the same common human agent experiencing two different conflicts. First, he experiences a conflict amongst inclinations (his lust and his love of life); second, he experiences a conflict between an inclination and a moral demand (his love of life and the demand to tell the truth). In both cases, we observe him trying to figure out what to do. Through this man’s own attentive reflection upon these first-personal experiences of conflict, he affirms both his categorical obligation to a moral law and his capacity as a free agent to do what that law demands. As Kant puts it, this man “cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him” (5:30/28). To affirm the objective, synthetic a priori practical cognitions that emerge from this man’s attentive reflection upon his experience (something we will not accomplish until Chapter 11), we must first affirm that we do indeed have here common, felt, first-personal phenomenological experiences of the sort we identified in Part i; we must also appreciate, from a fully common perspective, what it is that this man learns from paying attention to his experiences. It is to these tasks that I now turn.

164

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

We can confirm the first-personal nature of this experience easily, since, in Part i, we used the Gallows example as Kant’s paradigmatic example of reliance on the first-personal approach to moral experience. To recall that discussion: Kant asks us, as readers, not simply to judge this person from a third-personal perspective of blame, but instead to take on this man’s experience as our own. If we were being asked to take a third-personal perspective on this person, Kant would ask us to judge his actions, to determine whether they are right or wrong, worthy of praise or blame (as he does in his first Critique presentation of the Malicious Lie); we see no such appeal in this example. Instead, Kant asks us to reflect upon this man’s experience of conflict and deliberation, trying to imagine ourselves in a similar situation. We need, then, to get to know this man’s experience. We are to “ask him” (emphasis added) whether he would “control his inclination” and whether he “would consider it possible to overcome his love of life, however great it may be.” Through such reflection, we readers thus enter into this man’s experience and deliberative process. We take on as our own his experience of “drawing up maxims of the will” (5:29/27), that agential experience via which we ourselves are to become conscious of the moral law. We affirm, then, that this experience is a first-personal experience. Is it a common one, though? Initially, the question seems odd. Most of us have not had the experience of being threatened with death if we have an affair or if we refuse to tell a malicious lie; and if having such experiences were necessary for recognizing the validity of the moral law, hardly any of us would recognize the pull of morality! Such worries, however, fail to appreciate Kant’s more general suggestion here. He is not assuming that we have all faced the ultimate conflict of whether to place morality above love of life. Instead, he depends upon all of us to have experienced conflicts of two more general sorts: a conflict amongst our inclinations, and a conflict between our pursuit of happiness (i.e., the satisfaction of our inclinations overall) and morality. When we understand these experiences in these more general ways, then their commonness seems almost obvious: we have all had experiences of trying to decide the satisfaction of which of our desires will lead to happiness; and we have all had experiences of really wanting to do something while recognizing that doing that thing would be wrong. We can thus admit the Gallows Man’s experiences as convincingly common agential experiences.

the gallows man: the new face of attentiveness 165

The most difficult aspect of our Part i approach to affirm here is the claim that the entire Gallows Man experience is a felt one. The first half of the example is not so difficult to recognize as felt: although Kant does not use the explicit language of feeling (Gefühl) there, his appeal to the conflict of two very strong feelings (the feeling of lust and the love of life) is obvious enough. But it is more difficult, at least initially, to recognize feeling as operative in the second half of the example, since the feeling for or love of life seems challenged not by other feelings but only by the man “judg[ing] . . . that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it” (emphasis added). But this objection is quickly dismissed. First, this man’s experience of conflict between happiness and morality is similar in kind to the conflicts we saw in the corrupt agent at the end of Groundwork i. And there, we saw that it was the very introduction of conflict and corruption that assured that common human experience would be felt experience: it is just when our experience becomes more conflicted that the common person relies more heavily upon her experience of feeling as a practical epistemic tool. And, when we look now to other parts of the Critique in which this same experience of the conflict between happiness and morality is mentioned, we find that Kant does not abandon, but only intensifies, his Groundwork connection between common judgment and felt judgment; indeed, we discover that the feeling operative in the Gallows Man’s experience is that a priori moral feeling of respect which we identified in Chapter 3. First, when Kant speaks of the “judg[ment]” of the Gallows Man (5:30/27), we need to remember that this is the judgment of common human understanding. But, as we have already seen in the second Critique, the “judgment of common human understanding” (5:91/77, emphasis added) operates via reliance upon “a special kind of feeling,” viz., the moral “feeling of . . . respect” (5:91/77–78). But the “judg [ment]” of the man facing the gallows if he does not tell a malicious lie is an example of just this kind of common judgment. It thus makes most sense to understand his judgment about his conflict to be the felt judgment of the common person experiencing the moral feeling of respect. We thus not only identify the experience of the Gallows Man as a felt experience; further, we affirm that this is a felt experience of that special, a priori feeling we identified in Chapter 3, the moral feeling

166

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

of respect. Here, then, is how Kant describes the felt judgment of the common person: [A]nything empirical that might slip into our maxims as a determining ground of the will makes itself known at once by the feeling of gratification or pain that necessarily attaches to it insofar as it arouses desire, whereas pure practical reason directly opposes taking this feeling into its principle as a condition. The dissimilarity of determining grounds [of the will] (empirical and rational) is made known by [the] resistance of a practically lawgiving reason to every meddling inclination, by a special kind of feeling, which . . . is . . . produced only by [the lawgiving of practical reason] and indeed as a constraint, namely, through the feeling of a respect such as no human being has for inclinations of whatever kind but does have for the law. (5:91–92/77–78)

The play of feelings constituting common human judgment is an overall feeling of “resistance” or “constraint” that occurs when one’s inclinations are challenged by pure reason via “a special kind of feeling” of “respect.” The conflict between happiness and morality is experienced affectively as a conflict between felt inclinations on the one hand, and the feeling of respect on the other. The overall feeling of this agent is, then, a feeling of “constraint,” more specifically, a constraint of inclinations by this special feeling of respect. Furthermore, Kant embraces the specifically epistemic role that feeling plays here: it is through the feelings of constraint and respect that the difference between empirical and moral determination of the will “makes itself known.” This common person becomes aware, through this play of feelings, of the “dissimilarity” between two would-be determining grounds of the will connected to these feelings. She realizes that the law grounding her feeling of respect has a special, authoritative status in comparison to those reasons for action grounded in her feelings related to her inclinations. Here, that distinction is described as the difference between “empirical and rational” determinants of the will. But, from the common perspective, we can simply understand this person as knowing, through attention to her feelings, that although she wants to do what her inclinations prompt her to do, she knows that she should do as morality requires.3

3 This emphasis Kant puts on the epistemic role for feeling is at the heart of our argument against those who would claim a more act-based reading of the Fact. Note the passive

the gallows man: the new face of attentiveness 167

Let us bring this description of felt common human judgment to the second half of our Gallows Man example. Here is how this play of feelings looks when so applied: he experiences feelings of “gratification” (5:91–92/77) (felt in the hope of satisfaction of his happiness, here, saving his life) and “pain” (felt when he experiences as compelling a moral demand which conflicts with his happiness, here, the moral demand to tell the truth and avoid harm to others regardless of the danger to his life). He furthermore recognizes the source of this constraint upon his inclinations as authoritative, regardless of the pain it causes him. It is upon these feelings themselves, then, that one’s attention must be focused in making sense of the moral law’s presence in one’s consciousness; it is such attentive reflection on felt experience in which we will engage in the following section. For the present, we simply affirm the judgment of the Gallows Man as a felt judgment, one guided by this interaction of inclination and respect. We needn’t rely, however, on our own extrapolation of feeling into the judgment of the common person facing death if he does not tell a malicious lie; Kant himself does that work for us and, indeed, somewhat more eloquently than our just completed account. Later in the Critique, just before his affirmation that the judgment of the common human understanding works via moral feeling, Kant explicitly appeals to a Gallows sort of conflict between love of life and the demand to tell the truth as an experience best described affectively as a conflict between one’s inclinations and the moral feeling of respect. It is a long passage, but it is worth quoting in full here. Has not every even moderately honorable man sometimes found that he has abstained from an otherwise harmless lie by which he could either have extricated himself from a troublesome affair or even procured some advantage for a beloved and deserving friend, solely in order not to have to despise himself secretly in his own eyes? When an upright man is in the greatest distress, which he could have avoided if he could only have disregarded duty, is he not sustained by the consciousness that he has maintained humanity in its proper dignity in his own person and honored it, that he has no cause to shame himself in his own eyes and to

voice Kant uses here: moral constraint “makes itself known” to the deliberating agent through feeling. This is a rather different picture of the role for feeling than that suggested by Franks (All or Nothing) and Moyar (“Unstable Autonomy”), both of whom take moral feeling to be something produced (instead of attentively discovered) by the deliberating agent.

168

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

dread the inward view of self-examination? This consolation is not happiness, not even the smallest part of it. For, no one would wish the occasion for it on himself, or perhaps even a life in such circumstances. But he lives and cannot bear to be unworthy of life in his own eyes. This inner tranquility is therefore merely negative with respect to everything that can make life pleasant; it is, namely, only warding off the danger of sinking in personal worth, after he has given up completely the worth of his condition. It is the effect of a respect for something quite different from life, something in comparison and contrast with which life with all its agreeableness has no worth at all. He still lives only from duty, not because he has the least taste for living. (5:88/75)

This is a powerful, dramatic and felt description of the situation of someone like the Gallows Man; indeed, one can take it as a continuation of the common experience of the Gallows Man himself, now at the point of having made his decision to refuse to lie. This is a man who realizes, in painful (perhaps even tragic) circumstances, that he is committed to something more than being a happy person. There is, rather, a large demand that hangs upon his will, “something in comparison and contrast with which life with all its agreeableness has no worth at all.” If he were to ignore this larger demand, he would feel “shame” and even feel “unworthy of life in his own eyes.” But having chosen not to ignore it, he discovers that there is a value – a “proper dignity” – to his life, even when all hope for happiness in it evaporates. Such is the sort of situation within which one experiences the moral feeling of respect as an epistemic tool for making sense of the moral demands which press upon one’s will. One might worry that this painful description of living on despite lacking a love for life is what Kant takes it to mean for anyone to act from the motive of duty anytime one so acts. That would, after all, paint a rather bleak picture of the moral life. But I do not take affirmation of the nature of moral motivation generally to be Kant’s purpose either here, or in the earlier description of the man facing the gallows because of the demands of his prince. In both these sections, Kant is describing an unusually intense version – one most of us would never experience so intensely – of what is, ironically, a very familiar and common experience of the conflict between happiness and morality. The intensity of the conflict in this case is important, though: it is because of the grand conflict between happiness and morality into which we enter when we take on the experiences of the Gallows Man

the gallows man: the new face of attentiveness 169

first-personally, as if they were our own, that we gain a particularly distinctive articulation of the power of the moral law upon us. We shall see, in later sections, that this particularly distinctive experience of the moral feeling of respect is the felt experience of categorical obligation itself, just that sort of experience the possibility of which Kant had rejected in the Groundwork. That we find a common experience like that of the Gallows Man, which fits so easily with the moral feeling of respect, is, furthermore, very important for later philosophical questions we will raise about this experience in the next chapter. As we recall from Chapter 3, the moral feeling of respect is the only feeling in human experience that is truly a priori, that is, a feeling with a necessary cause. But when Kant associates this a priori feeling with the very common human experience of feeling conflicted between competing demands of happiness and morality, then we know just that experience from which we need to begin to make sense of moral feeling and its a priority. As such, when, as philosophers, we appeal to moral feeling as part of a phenomenological explanation of the Gallows Man’s experience of categorical obligation, we will be on safer epistemic ground than if we were able only to appeal to more garden-variety, contingently caused inclinations and feelings. We will need to do further work to appreciate that the Gallows Man’s experience is, simply, a felt experience of categorical necessitation of the will. But once we do that in Chapter 9, the feeling that was, in Chapter 3, simply asserted to be an a priori feeling will, through appeal to the Gallows Man’s experience of necessitation of his will, be affirmed as a genuinely a priori feeling. Such are the concerns of later chapters. For the present, we simply affirm that the experience to which Kant introduces us to initiate practical philosophy is the common, felt, first-personal phenomenological experience of which we spoke in Part I. Our next task is to investigate how this man’s attentiveness to his felt experiences allows him to achieve knowledge of his obligation and his capacity to follow that obligation; two recognitions which Kant will later call objective practical cognitions of the Fact of Reason and positive freedom. It is to that task we now turn.

ii. Recognition of obligation and freedom via attentiveness Paying attention to the felt experience of conflict between happiness and morality. We now move from the mere common, felt experience of

170

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

conflict to a still common but now also attentive reflection upon that felt experience which yields a common, practical cognition. Through a wise, focused attentiveness to the necessity with which practical laws of reason impose themselves upon him, the Gallows Man learns that he is categorically obligated to the moral law and, further, that he is capable of acting as that law demands. As we move into this analysis, we should recall two guides for how to approach our task from what we have said already. First, we know that the Gallows Man’s common judgment is a judgment that operates via the interplay of contingent, empirical feelings tied to our inclinations and the a priori, rationally caused moral feeling of respect which acts to constrain the former. Furthermore, from Kant’s own general outline of it, we know that attentiveness is attentiveness “to the necessity with which reason prescribes [pure practical laws] and to the setting aside of all empirical conditions to which reason directs us” (5:30/27, emphases added). We have, then, a guide for how to approach the felt experiences of the Gallows Man, and also for what to expect to find in his own attentive consideration of his felt experience: we know both what to expect him to look at and what to look away from or “set aside” in his felt judgment. He will identify an experience of necessity by looking away from or “setting aside” (or at least not being unduly distracted by) those “empirical conditions” which press themselves upon him as potential determinants of his will. With this general advice in hand, let us visit the man facing the gallows. Recall the first half of the example above: Suppose someone asserts of his lustful inclination that, when the desired object and the opportunity are present, it is quite irresistible to him; ask him whether, if a gallows were erected in front of the house where he finds this opportunity and he would be hanged on it immediately after gratifying his lust, he would not then control his inclination. One need not conjecture very long what he would reply.

We have here a man who claims initially to have an “irresistible” urge. In other words, he has a felt inclination to satisfy his lust, which he claims is an imperative, something he must do. But he is then presented with new circumstances, which force him to reflect more carefully and attentively on how this lust operates on his will. Is this lust irresistible, no matter what? One might ask instead: is this really a categorical demand upon his will? This man discovers, through reflection on the way in which his feelings impose themselves upon his will,

the gallows man: the new face of attentiveness 171

that the force he thought was an irresistible and categorical force upon his will is in fact neither. It is, surely, very strong; but once another force of equal or greater strength is introduced into the picture (here, the force of his love of life, as inspired by the threat of being hung on the gallows), the way he experiences that first force of lust changes. He no longer experiences it, literally, as irresistible, since it is revealed to him that, in the face of a stronger desire for something else (i.e., staying alive!), the apparently irresistible, categorical nature of the first demand dissolves. Maybe they’ll just go out to a movie together. There is a further, crucial point to make here. Attentive reflection on his felt experience reveals to the Gallows Man that he is not inexorably determined by his lust; it is just that he wanted to believe of himself that he was, so that he could satisfy it without guilt. But this means that his attentive reflection has revealed to him his own act of self-deception, that effort really to believe that his lust could not be resisted. It was by asking himself whether a stronger desire – here, his desire for life – could restrain what he claimed was irresistible that he was able to discover that, all along, he had been misrepresenting to himself the precise nature of that potential determination of the will which was the satisfaction of his lust. It was only through self-deception that he was able to believe that his lust was irresistible; now that he has honestly – that is, attentively – reflected upon his felt experience, he realizes that all these desires, including both his lust and his love of life, operate on him (as a Kantian would put it) only hypothetically, not categorically. Attentive reflection on felt experience does, after all of Kant’s skepticism about it in Groundwork i, turn out to be a tool utilizable by potentially corrupt, self-deceived agents. Furthermore, this removal of his self-deception and the simultaneous dissolving of the apparently categorical nature of his lust are achieved when he pays proper attention to the way in which these various felt, potential determinants of his will do and do not press upon his feelings. When he really looks at his feelings more carefully (here, as inspired by the conflict amongst his desires, a conflict which forces this further reflection upon him), he sees them more clearly for what they are: no categorical demand is operating here, just a pair of very strong feelings vying against each other. It is worth noting, as an aside, that we do not yet know what this man will in fact do; there is no dissolving of first-order questions about categorical demands upon the will into second-order choices about

172

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

what one will in fact do in the light of these demands.4 It seems obvious to us – and to him – that his love of life has proven stronger than his lust, but he still needs to decide whether to let that fact influence his choice. What we do know with certainty here is that this man has a better understanding of the extent to which these would-be determinants of his choice act upon his will as imperatives. Although both are strong, neither is a categorical demand upon his will. One might argue, to the contrary, that what he has discovered is that his love of life is the true categorical, irresistible demand. But we have not yet come to the end of this unfortunate man’s experiences. He might think, from this experience alone, that his love of life is the true categorical demand. But attentive reflection on further felt experiences reveals that even that very strong desire grounds a merely hypothetical imperative. Let us turn now to the second half of the example above: But ask him whether, if his prince demanded, on pain of the same immediate execution, that he give false testimony against an honorable man whom the prince would like to destroy under a plausible pretext, he would consider it possible to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps not venture to assert whether he would do it or not, but he must admit without hesitation that it would be possible for him. He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it and cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him.

This man now encounters yet another felt conflict for his attentive consideration. Here the combatants are that same love of life which we encountered in the first half of the example and now a new potential determinant of the will: the moral demands to tell the truth and not injure others. The man had, previously, taken his lust to be irresistible, or categorical, and now might think that, in fact, it is his love of life that is the true categorical demand upon him. But, perhaps to his surprise, he discovers instead another, and what turns out to be a genuinely categorical, demand upon his will: not his love of life, but instead the moral demand to tell the truth and not injure others. Whereas his purportedly irresistible, categorical demand to satisfy his lust dissolved upon attentive reflection into a merely hypothetical

4 We saw Moyar (“Unstable Autonomy”) suggest just such a dissolving of first- and secondorder questions in his discussion of conscience.

the gallows man: the new face of attentiveness 173

demand that had been unduly elevated through self-deception, this new demand upon the will (the demand not to lie and not to hurt others) just won’t go away, no matter what he does or whatever the circumstances. As he puts it, even though he would “not venture to assert whether he would do it or not . . . he must admit without hesitation that it would be possible for him” to refuse the lie and face the gallows. Even when pitted against what he thought was his strongest, apparently categorical demand to assure the continuance of his life, this demand for truth-telling and noninjury imposes itself on his will as a genuine categorical demand, with no hope of dissolving into a lesser, merely hypothetical demand. What this man has discovered is that he is categorically obligated to moral demands, demands which weigh upon him with more authority than those dedicated to the pursuance of his happiness. We can, furthermore, affirm that this judgment of the common human understanding which issues in a recognition of 5 categorical obligation was, like the first recognition of merely hypothetical obligation, accomplished through attentive reflection on specifically felt experience. We know that common moral judgment operates through the conflict between inclinations and the moral feeling of respect and, ultimately, through the constraint on the inclinations provided by moral feeling. We can thus understand the judgment of the Gallows Man as having operated by reflection upon these feelings. In coming to the conclusion that it is possible for him to do the right thing because he ought to (i.e., because he is categorically obligated), he reflects on that feeling of “pain” he has when “a special kind of feeling . . . of respect” acts as a “constraint” upon those inclinations (5:92/77), reminding him affectively that those inclinations are not the only possible, nor the most authoritative, grounds of determinants of his will. This feeling of constraint thus amounts to what Kant elsewhere calls an “infringement” (5:74/64) on his will. That is, the Gallows Man recognizes affectively that this other, noninclination-based, but still felt, moral determinant of the will is stronger, more authoritative than any of his inclinations, even when those are taken together as his overall pursuit of happiness. Through his experience of feelings of constraint, the Gallows Man thus learns that he can and must exclude his concerns of self-love from

5 We could even call it, more simply, “a cognition of,” but we’ll address that point in Chapter 11.

174

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

his appreciation of those things that weigh upon him morally. The former simply do not hold with the same strength as the latter. Or, as Kant puts the point elsewhere: Now, all that is found in self-love belongs to inclination, while all inclination rests on feeling, so that what infringes upon all the inclinations in self-love has, just by this, a necessary influence on feeling; thus we conceive how it is possible to see a priori that the moral law can exercise an effect on feeling, inasmuch as it excludes the inclinations and the propensity to make them the supreme practical condition, that is, self-love, from all participation in the supreme lawgiving. (5:74/64, emphasis added)

The difference between an affective experience of mere conflict and one specifically of infringement is, therefore, important. Mere conflict would not reveal the authoritative status of moral demands, only equal combatants fighting it out. But infringement reveals that one of the combatants is unquestionably superior. One could, by the way, experience the conflict between happiness and morality and not take it as a particularly morally edifying experience in the way that the Gallows Man has. This is because one could refuse the attentiveness required to set aside one’s tendency toward rationalization or self-deception and, instead, indulge in just that tendency. As such, the conflict would be set to the side of one’s consciousness, experienced as a mere annoyance, something we try to get beyond. This is, however, possible only by perverting the actual terms of conflict. And yet, in such a case, the common experience of conflict would remain just that: a common, unresolved, and unattended-to felt experience of conflict.6 But once one sets such rationalizing tendencies aside, as our Gallows Man has, then the experience of conflict becomes a morally edifying experience: I understand my feelings of gratification and pain as saying something to me morally, namely, that morality infringes upon my would-be satisfaction of my inclinations and that I am in fact categorically obligated to those demands I recognize as authoritative. Such a felt experience, though, simply is what is described affectively as the moral feeling of respect. Association of the conflict experienced by the attentive man in the Gallows example with the moral feeling of respect thus 6 One which might, by the way, give the person in question nightmares as his conscience haunts him, but I set that point aside for now.

the gallows man: the new face of attentiveness 175

allows us to bring a deeper understanding to how it is that the Gallows Man understands the moral law as authoritative. The consciousness of categorical obligation accomplished by the attentive Gallows Man is best understood affectively as his attentive experience of the moral feeling of respect. Through reflection on his experience of the moral feeling of respect, the Gallows Man thus learns that he has “a respect for something quite different from life, something in comparison and contrast with which life with all its agreeableness has no worth at all” (5:88/75). It is his felt awareness of respect for the moral law as authoritative which reveals to him that law’s indissolvable, categorical, and authoritative status, even when challenged by his strongest, apparently most justifiable inclination, his love of life. What we see here, then, is feeling playing what, in Part i, we called an epistemically enabling (instead of an evidential) role in confirming knowledge of moral obligation. Although one might (and we will, eventually) identify the source and cause of this moral demand as a rational one, the Gallows Man accesses this rational constraint on his will only through the enabling experience of feeling.7 Once the Gallows Man recognizes that he is obligated to moral demands, that recognition of categorical obligation leads him immediately (almost simultaneously!) to a further, and final, common conclusion: the very fact that he knows he ought to do something assures him that he can do that thing. There are several things that are important about this recognition (which again, in Chapter 11, we will finally call a “cognition”). First, his recognition that he can do what he ought is the first sign of power (or what the philosopher would call freedom) in this man. We had begun with a rather bumbling, potentially self-deceived agent, but now we see this agent coming into his own as he recognizes (or even somewhat regretfully admits to himself?) the strength that he in fact has to be the cause of action even in the face of potential harm to himself: “he would perhaps not venture to assert whether he would [tell the truth] or not, but he must admit without hesitation that it would be possible for him [to do so]” (5:30/27).

7 This epistemically enabling role for feeling is, further, just what Moyar (“Unstable Autonomy”) misses in his first-personal account of conscience. It is an omission that leads him to the radical conclusion that first-personal accounts of morality must reject any universal form of lawfulness guiding moral judgment. We will see, in the following chapters, that this radical conclusion need not follow.

176

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

But, even as he recognizes his strength, there are limits to this power. This man is not recognizing that he is free to do absolutely anything he wants. He is simply realizing that he has the power – that is, the freedom – to do what is morally demanded of him. He knows that he can, more weakly, give in to those desire-based reasons for action that would lead him to preserve his life. But he also knows that he is capable of being stronger than that, that he is capable of acting as moral demands require. This is indeed what philosophers will eventually call a cognition of both negative and positive freedom (i.e., not merely the cognition of a capacity to not be caused to action by something external to oneself, but also a cognition of one’s own laws of reason as actionguiding and action-producing). Yet even as he recognizes this strength, it is a recognition that comes with limits: the Gallows Man does not recognize within himself a power to put reason to work at just any task. Instead, reason can either be used, in conjunction with his desires, to cause him to pursue self-love; or, more robustly, his reasons can lead him to do precisely that thing which he knows he ought to do, and nothing else. As Kant puts the point: “he is aware that he ought to do it [i.e., to not lie] and cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him” (5:30/28). For this potentially corrupt and self-deceived agent, it is only when he is able really to understand his moral obligations that he is really able also to recognize both his agential power and the limits thereof. This recognition of his freedom is, furthermore, something of which he does not have quite so direct a grasp as he does his obligations. As we have just seen, his obligation is something that, literally, he feels: when he examines his internal consciousness, the weight of obligation is there to be experienced in the felt experience of conflict, as long as he pays attention to it. The same cannot be said of his recognition of freedom: he does not feel free; instead, he thinks about his feelings of obligation a little, and then knows that he is free. In our language, his recognition of freedom is not so much experienced through attentiveness as it is something further that he needs to admit to himself once he experiences himself as obligated.8 We should, once again, note that this man may or may not act as this categorical imperative demands; indeed, this much is clear from what 8 A philosopher would say that this knowledge, though indirectly based in his experience, involves also the drawing of an inference from what he has recognized attentively in his experience; but this is something we will discuss more in Chapter 10.

the gallows man: the new face of attentiveness 177

has been said immediately above. What Kant is showing here is the recognition of the validity of a categorical imperative upon his will, not the result of his choice (or the motives therefor) given that recognized obligation. That the will is necessitated categorically still leaves open the question of what in fact he will choose to do. The further point to take here, though, is that were he to take the easier route out of this difficult situation – that is, were he to agree to lie and thus avoid facing the gallows – even then, the remnants or remains of this recognition of being categorically obligated would linger upon him. His conscience would (again through his felt experience) force him to realize that he had done something wrong.9 Of course, were he to take this route, he might also dodge his conscience by relying – illicitly, surreptitiously – upon that same capacity for self-deception or rationalization that was revealed to him in the first half of the example. But, if he takes this route, he is refusing his continued attentive reflection on his feelings, and is choosing to look at the felt determinants of his will not clearly but as clouded by his own undue love of self. It is only through selfdeception that this man can escape his awareness of the categorical nature of moral obligations. And he can reliably know both his categorical obligations and his capacity to act upon them, if only he demands of himself careful, honest, attentive reflection upon his felt experience.

iii. The new shape of attentiveness Groundwork–second Critique comparisons. We thus affirm that Kant’s presentation of the Gallows Man just reviewed is Kant’s practical phenomenology at its finest. Through it, we affirm the method of attentiveness to felt, conflicted, common experience as that method most appropriate for the grounding of the central claims of practical philosophy (viz, recognition of moral obligation and freedom). It is, indeed, Kant at his phenomenological best. In order to confirm this, let us compare this new second Critique form of attentiveness to the 9 See 6:400–401/160–161, where Kant describes conscience as something that forces itself upon agents through “moral feeling,” that is, through the same feeling upon which the Gallows Man had depended to recognize the weight of categorical obligation in the first place. One might even say that the Gallows Man is exploring his conscience when he attends carefully to his felt experience. To the extent that we identify attentive reflection on feeling with exploration of conscience, we thus reject Moyar’s “Unstable Autonomy” account of conscience, in which he suggests that Kantian conscience involves a collapse of first-order judgments about obligation and second-order judgments about choice.

178

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

Groundwork version of it. Doing so allows us to recognize a major shift in Kant’s thinking on the central question of whether we can have the experience of categorical obligation, a shift that needed to occur in order for his phenomenological method to bear fruit. One might, on the face of it, think that the experience of our Gallows Man is essentially identical to that of the man at the end of Groundwork i; if so, one would be surprised by the very different conclusions we draw here as compared to our analysis of the failure of the Groundwork. Both men are examples of common persons engaged in judgments about themselves as agents. And both encounter the same general kind of conflict within their felt experiences, the conflict between happiness and morality, a conflict which has the potential to lead both of them toward rationalization and selfdeception. Yet there is a crucial difference in the way that Kant presents the Gallows Man, and this difference makes all the difference in understanding Kant’s new commitment to the common point of view in the second Critique. Recall that, in Groundwork i, our corrupt man experiencing the conflict between happiness and morality is unable, through his own reflection, to identify reliably the difference between hypothetical and categorical demands. No mention of the authoritative nature of moral demands is made by this man; indeed, the claims of happiness were, despite their being “impetuous,” said to be “so apparently equitable,” in comparison with moral claims, that they, apparently justifiably, “refuse[d] to be neutralized by any command” (4:405/17, emphasis added). To appreciate the difference between hypothetical and categorical demands, this man has to go beyond his common experience and judgment, and turn to a philosopher: by “tak[ing] a step into the field of practical philosophy” this man “obtain[s] . . . distinct instruction regarding . . . the correct determination of this [moral] principle in comparison with maxims based on need and inclination” (4:405/18). The first, innocent common agent of Groundwork i had needed no such reliance upon explicit philosophical instruction to access his reliable understanding of categorical obligation; but once that innocent agent fell into conflict and corruption, he also lost his capacity for attentive reflection upon his conflicted felt experiences. But with the Gallows Man, Kant presents an entirely different understanding of the capacities of the potentially corrupt, conflicted common person. The Gallows Man recognizes on his own, through attentive reflection on his conflicted felt experience, that his claims of

the gallows man: the new face of attentiveness 179

happiness should be “neutralized” (or at least “set aside”), since moral claims are authoritative. Even this conflicted man recognizes the authoritative nature of the demands of morality: “he is aware that he ought to” sacrifice his happiness in the name of morality (5:30/27–28, emphasis added). What has changed here? Kant answers this question when he reminds us of that general advice about how to approach felt experience. In order to have “immediate consciousness” of the moral law, we have to pay attention: “we become aware of pure practical laws . . . by attending to the necessity with which reason prescribes them to us” (5:30/27, emphasis added). The difference between the Gallows Man and the Groundwork i Man is that the former is able, even in the face of potential self-deception, to attend to his moral experience, whereas the latter is not. Kant thus relies upon the Gallows Man to show that a common person’s attentive reflection upon his felt experience of conflict allows him to access a reliable recognition of categorical obligation (indeed, so reliable that we will eventually call this recognition an objective, synthetic a priori practical cognition). Kant thus relies upon just that sort of experience the possibility of which he had argued against in Groundwork ii. There, he had insisted that because any purported experience of categorical obligation might secretly have a merely hypothetical source, we must reject the very possibility of an experience of categorical obligation. And it was also for this reason that the birth of practical philosophy proved to be a stillbirth: a conflicted person could not be successful in attending to her felt experience; and the new felt experience of activity with which Kant replaced the experience of conflict in Groundwork iii did not have enough in it upon which to attend. But Kant’s reasons in Groundwork ii for rejecting an experience of categorical obligation were shown, in Chapter 4, to be unfounded. And now, with the Gallows Man, Kant finally has decided similarly himself. Even – perhaps even especially – conflicted beings can have a reliable experience of categorical obligation, as long as they pay honest attention to the ways in which felt, would-be determinants of the will press upon them. Once he accepts the possibility of a felt experience of categorical obligation, Kant also alters his understanding of what the sensibly affected agent can and cannot know with certainty. In Groundwork ii, the possibility of secret hypothetical reasons for apparently categorical demands introduced uncertainty not just about our motives but also

180

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

about the very question of whether we were categorically obligated in the first place. But in the second Critique, he now locates the realm of agential uncertainty in the question of whether we could ever know ourselves to be virtuous (and not in the question of whether we are categorically obligated). The Gallows Man “admit[s] without hesitation” (5:30/27) that he is both obligated and capable of acting upon that obligation. But “he would perhaps not venture to assert whether he would do it or not” (5:30/27). He has no question of what his objective obligation is, only a question of whether he will in fact do what he should. A comment Kant makes about virtue just after the Gallows Man example underscores this more limited scope of the Gallows Man’s uncertainty: “virtue . . . at least as a naturally acquired ability, can never be completed, because assurance in such a case never becomes apodictic certainty and, as persuasion, is very dangerous” (5:33/30). So, whereas in Groundwork ii he had collapsed objective and subjective determinations of the will, here Kant distinguishes the two more carefully, admitting certainty in obligation but less certainty in our capacity to be true to it and thus less certainty not only in the action we will choose, but also in the virtue that would result were we successful.10 Furthermore, and most centrally, because Kant grants the capacity for attentiveness to conflicted, potentially self-deceived beings, his understanding of the nature of attentiveness, and what is necessary to achieve it, also shifts. The Gallows Man doesn’t need a philosopher, scientific or Socratic, to guide his attention; recognition of the merely hypothetical nature of some determinants of the will, and the categorical nature of others, is something this man accomplishes himself,

10 We thus firmly reject Moyar’s “Unstable Autonomy” contention that so-called first- and second-order first-personal practical judgments must necessarily collapse into one judgment. Here, Kant clearly distinguishes the questions of what one ought to do and what one will choose to do. Further, we affirm that, although Kant grants the Gallows Man clarity on the former question, he still retains his Groundwork commitment to motivational opacity on the latter: the Gallows Man knows clearly what he should do, but will never be certain about his motivations for what he does do, nor about whether he has obtained the virtue toward which he strives. Admitting motivational opacity does not, however, prevent an agent from relying upon her feelings as she makes individual decisions; it just means that she is only fallibly guided by them in her deliberation about specific choices; what she in fact chooses to do and why she chooses it is not a matter of certainty. For more on how feeling is important in guiding individual choices and pursuit of virtue, see Grenberg, Kant and the Ethics of Humility.

the gallows man: the new face of attentiveness 181

despite his tendency toward self-deception. In Groundwork i, it was only the innocent agent who, with wise Socratic urging, was able to be attentive. But now we see a conflicted agent capable of similar attentiveness, but with no appeal in the text to a wise guide: instead of relying upon external Socratic encouragement, this man is relying only upon himself as his own Socrates. We need not assume, however, that this means Kant is also abandoning the idea that attentiveness to felt experience is an act of practical wisdom. To the contrary, the Gallows Man is engaged in a process of becoming practically wise on his own, confronting his temptation toward self-deception through honest attentiveness to his felt experiences, which reveal to him his best reasons for action. This is a significant development in Kant’s understanding of attentiveness. In the Groundwork, the moral task of relieving ourselves of that self-deception which prevents genuine recognition of moral demands was left to the philosopher; but in the second Critique, this task is accomplished by the attentive, common person. We should, furthermore, be glad for this shift in responsibilities. First, it makes sense to attribute an awareness of the hypothetical–categorical distinction – at least, in how these two imperatives distinguish a difference between desires for happiness and the demands of morality – to the common person. Who amongst us has not had the experience of really wanting to do something that would make us happy but which we also recognize as wrong? Further, as we saw in Chapter 4, the Groundwork i corrupt man’s inability to distinguish categorical from hypothetical demands made Kant’s entire appeal to this common experience unstable. We should thus be glad that Kant has found a more stable, internally coherent common experience from which to initiate practical reflection. Without the common man himself having a reliable understanding of this distinction, we could not blame him when he descended into selfdeception by prioritizing the demands of happiness over the demands of morality. If he really couldn’t reliably understand categorical obligation on his own, then he would merely be considering one legitimate resolution of the problem when he prioritized happiness over morality. As I recall, we thought he might become a utilitarian. But because the Gallows Man pays attention to his experiences on his own, without the need of philosophical guidance, his experience is more internally coherent. He can distinguish for himself when something holds categorically and when something holds merely

182

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

hypothetically, as long as he makes a commitment to wise, attentive, honest, non-self-deceiving reflection upon his felt experience. By admitting that that which we philosophers hoped to prove was in fact always already to be found in our common, felt experience – viz., categorical obligation – Kant thus initiates the true birth of practical philosophy. A new kind of attentive reflection. Let us now stand back from the Gallows Man’s experience and appreciate what we have learned about the nature of attentiveness in general, especially as compared to its initial appearance in the Groundwork. When attentiveness was first introduced in the Groundwork – as the activity of the innocent common agent in Groundwork i – it was understood as a capacity “to exclude . . . all sensible incentives from practical laws” (4:404/17). But Kant refused to grant that this method of attentive reflection, whose goal was the exclusion of sensible incentives from moral principles, could work for conflicted agents. He instead, in Groundwork iii, introduced attentiveness to a different, less conflicted and less corruptible felt experience, that of sometimes being active, and sometimes passive, in relation to one’s mental representations. But, in so doing, he also altered the nature and goal of attentiveness. Attentiveness was needed when the felt experience of activity was its object because the fruits of this felt experience could get “spoil[ed]” (4:452/57) by the person of common human understanding who has difficulty keeping her mind’s eye on the intelligible objects toward which reflection on activity points. The common person needed to attend carefully to her reflections, so as to assure that she did not distort her intelligible conclusions by turning them into sensible conclusions, something she could get her hands on. But in the second Critique, Kant abandons this felt experience of activity and recognizes attentiveness as instead focused upon the felt experience of conflict between happiness and morality, an appeal to attentiveness which he had explicitly rejected in Groundwork i. There, the conflicted common agent had fallen so far that he was no longer a candidate for relying upon his own wise attentiveness to remedy his condition. With his fall, his capacity for practical wisdom had disappeared. But now, Kant returns attentiveness – a capacity that had, in its first introduction via the innocent common agent, been focused on getting sensibly affected agents to “exclude . . . all sensible incentives from practical laws” (4:404/17) – to this original form of it. To be

the gallows man: the new face of attentiveness 183

attentive is to focus on one’s mental contents in a way that sets aside the “sensible” tendency to prefer the self and its desires over everything else imposing itself upon one’s moral consciousness. This new form of attentiveness is just exactly what the corrupt, conflicted agent needs (instead of philosophical instruction) to get out of his predicament. When Kant grants that attentiveness is most properly focused on the felt experience of conflict, the general shape of attentiveness itself shifts back to its original nature, as presented with the innocent common agent of Groundwork i. Attentiveness is that capacity devoted to recognizing and “setting aside all empirical conditions” (5:30/27) so as to allow nonempirical, rational determinants of the will to shine forth. Indeed, the Gallows Man attentively identifies that “necessity” (here, the necessitation of the will) which is the proper object of attentive reflection by comparing the necessity of acting morally against those merely “empirical” would-be determinants of the will. Attentiveness to his experience allows him to “set aside” these desires and therefore recognize necessary determinants of the will for what they really are. It was only when the Gallows Man set aside his attachment to that “empirical condition” (5:30/27) which was his lust and, later, his love of life, that he could see clearly how nonempirical conditions acted upon him with categorical necessity. But now, this original capacity to distinguish sensible incentives from moral principles is possible even for the corrupt common person, someone with a tendency to try to undermine the very goal of this attention. Attentiveness thus acquires a new job: it must act as a corrective to the human tendency toward self-deception. Attentiveness is now required not because of our tendency to turn the intellectual into the sensible, but instead because of our tendency to rationalize our way out of moral constraints in the name of satisfying the empirical demands of self-love. Along with an appreciation for the conflict between happiness and morality, which reveals the categorical nature of our moral demands, our felt experience also contains within it this tendency toward self-deception; and attentive reflection upon our felt experience achieves its goal of recognizing the categorical nature of moral demands only when it succeeds in identifying and setting aside self-deception along with the identification and setting aside of merely empirical would-be determinants of the will. Attentiveness is thus born as the means by which to combat that ingrained human tendency toward self-deception in the name of self-love, a tendency Kant will eventually, in the Religion, describe as our propensity toward evil.

184

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

Kant’s appeal to the pervasiveness of self-deception in human moral judgment thus provides a clear answer to an immediate question one might raise about the need for attentiveness at all in a moral system grounded on common experience. That question is this: if our experience is so common, why do we need to pay attention to it at all? Or, as Kant put the point in the Groundwork (when he was lamenting that we did not have an experience of categorical obligation), once we have an experience of categorical obligation, our only obligation would be “not to establish [this categorical imperative] but merely to explain it” (4:420/30). Why can we not merely explain our experience of categorical obligation? Why must we, more precisely, attend to it? Kant’s clear answer is that humans – all humans – have an ingrained tendency to deceive themselves. The first step in becoming a moral person must therefore be to recognize and get a hold of that tendency. Attention is thus, first and foremost, a directedness in the consciousness of a potentially corrupt person away from one’s natural tendency toward rationalization or self-deception as a means for resolving a practical conflict, and towards one’s authentic, felt, first-personal phenomenological experience of the terms of the conflict themselves (i.e., of happiness and morality as potential determinants of the will). Instead of naturally allowing one’s felt experience of conflict to merge, inattentively, into rationalization and self-deception, one instead focuses one’s mind clearly upon the felt terms of the initial conflict themselves. One looks, that is, with un-self-deceived honesty at the nature of one’s experience of happiness and morality as potential determinants of the will, and recognizes the necessity of the latter demand as compared to the mere hypothetical possibility of the first.11

11 One might raise skeptical objections about whether attentiveness is really capable of getting conflicted agents to a veridical appreciation of the demands pressing upon their wills, or whether such recognition is always possible. One might, for example, suggest that it was only because the Gallows Man faced a very particular set of circumstances that he was able to recognize moral demands for what they are. If that is true, then he could gain his cognition only if he was lucky enough to have certain things happen to him. What if he never faced the gallows, in either case? Would he be blameable for failing to overcome his self-deception then? It is important to emphasize here that, even as we considered the Gallows Man as actually facing these circumstances, we were in fact engaged in an imaginative exercise: we were considering ourselves as being in his position. And such imaginative exercises do indeed have potential to give us what we need in the absence of an actual experience of so horribly intense a conflict between happiness and morality. We all have had some experience of the two kinds of conflicts that the Gallows Man experienced (i.e., conflicts

the gallows man: the new face of attentiveness 185

A final note about the relationship of attentiveness and feeling: we shall emphasize in the next chapter that the feeling to which one attends is an essentially receptive, even passive, experience. Yet the act of attentiveness itself, as described here, involves active judgment: I must choose to look clearly at the contents of my felt experience. We thus distinguish our account from others that we discussed in Chapter 6 (such as, for example, Franks’ and Moyar’s), which emphasize that the activity of first-personal practical judgment is productive of feeling. On our account, the first activity of the moral person is not so much to produce feeling as it is to be properly attentive to that feeling already present in her consciousness, feeling that (as we will see in Chapter 9) has causes other than one’s conscious activity. The “activity” of attentiveness thus has a curiously passive element to it: I am active in the sense that I choose to focus my attention here, not there; but I remain passive in that attentiveness can only be about whatever is already there to be attended to. To try to make something be there that isn’t there would only be a way of continuing my self-deception instead of dissolving it. Attentiveness is thus an activity, but it is not an activity of production; it is, rather, and ironically, an activity of being receptive to what is present.12 Such an account of the activity of the deliberative amongst inclinations and conflicts between happiness and morality). Furthermore, if our actual experiences of conflict don’t seem strong enough to reveal the difference between hypothetical and categorical demands, we can rely on imaginative excursions of just the sort toward which Kant points us here to help supplement them. We hope never to encounter his difficult situation; but, imaginatively, we are appreciative of the Gallows Man for helping us to think about how such extreme, unusual experiences reveal what is true for all of us, even those of us having less dramatic conflicts: viz., that the only thing that holds categorically is the supreme moral command. Indeed, when we look at the text itself, it is clear that (although we’ve been taking the Gallows Man as actually experiencing these things), in fact he too is only being asked what he would do were he to encounter such fraught choice situations (“ask him whether, if a gallows were erected . . . he would not then control his inclination,” and “ask him whether, if his prince demanded . . . he would consider it possible to overcome his love of life” [5:30/ 27, emphases added]). It may be, then, that we would need to allow that certain circumstances would make it more difficult for a person to succeed in being properly attentive, and we might in these cases find reason for forgiveness, or even vindication, of someone so overwhelmed by circumstance. It seems, though, that the actual circumstances of one’s life need not prevent the very possibility of recognizing categorical demands. We can thus affirm that, because of our capacity for attentiveness to our felt experiences, we are indeed capable of seeing ourselves clearly. 12 Moyar’s suggestion, to the contrary, that first-personal reflection produces moral feeling is, I think, based on too strong a reading of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals claim that conscience “affects moral feeling” (6:400/160). In essence, Moyar is saying that conscience effects (that is, causes) moral feeling, but the claim that conscience merely

186

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

agent is, furthermore, as we shall see in Chapter 8, more in agreement with Kant’s overall commitment to the limits of what we can and cannot know about ourselves. This is an account of activity which does not assume that active, deliberative agents experience themselves as noumenal agents; rather, it is one in which deliberation occurs firmly within one’s phenomenological experience.

Conclusion The Gallows Man thus knows, from his own common but attentive perspective, that he is obligated by moral laws and that he is capable of acting on such demands. Now that we have articulated that experience which provides the phenomenological center of Kant’s practical philosophy, it is time to move on to explicitly philosophical attentiveness to the same experience. In so doing, we thus turn, in the next four chapters, to a whole series of explicitly philosophical questions; questions that would not arise in the course of the common person’s deliberation, but which would arise only when a philosopher considers that common course of deliberations. These discussions will affirm that the Gallows Man’s recognition of moral obligation is not just any sort of recognition, but instead has all the hallmarks of Kant’s practical cognition of the Fact of Reason: cognition, that is, of a moral law that holds with universality and necessity, is determined by the mere form of the law, and is autonomously and rationally legislated. Let us turn to that story.

affects instead of effects moral feeling, while weaker, is much more plausible. All this is not to say that Kant would reject the possibility of cultivating one’s feelings in certain directions. It is just to say that there is a more metaphysical story to tell about the presence of some feelings in us. See Grenberg, Kant and the Ethics of Humility for further reflection on the cultivation of feelings.

8 THE FACT OF REASON IS A FORCED PHENOMENOLOGICAL FACT

Introduction Now that we have successfully articulated the new shape of phenomenological attentiveness as exhibited in the Gallows Man, a variety of specifically philosophical (i.e., not just common) concerns arise about the common person’s understanding of both his moral obligation and his freedom: is the Gallows Man’s awareness that he is morally obligated really a recognition of that universal, formal, necessary, rational, autonomously imposed law that Kant defends through his Fact of Reason discussion? Is his recognition of his capacity to act as that law requires really that positive causality of freedom for which Kant argues in the second Critique? And are his recognitions of both his moral obligation and capacity to act really those objective, synthetic a priori practical cognitions of the reality of morality and freedom for which Kant is searching? These questions will not typically bother the common person; he simply realizes it is wrong to lie, he is capable of telling the truth, and goes from there in his decisions about what to do. But philosophers who take up and attend to the conclusions of common human understanding will have these further questions. Raising them will allow us to articulate more precisely various aspects of the common person’s experience that were there all along waiting for such philosophical attentiveness to come to light. In so doing, we also finally reveal the Kantian method of attentiveness at its phenomenological best: we will ground (that is, justify the validity of) the most basic claims of practical philosophy – the claims of objective, synthetic a priori, practical cognitions of both a universal, necessary and autonomously imposed moral

187

188

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

law and the freedom to act upon it – through the phenomenological method of philosophical attentiveness to felt experience. We must also, however, be very careful here. We philosophers must remember that our license to reflect philosophically upon such things at all comes from this felt experience being forced upon us, as one common person amongst others. Even though we make further, more precisely philosophical claims about this common experience, we are only looking more clearly, and with more philosophical (as opposed to moral) attentiveness, at a common, felt experience. As philosophers, we have more tools and language to bring to our task of attentive reflection, but we are engaged in essentially the same kind of task as the Gallows Man himself. Philosophical attentiveness thus requires of us, first, that we ourselves take up the attentive attitude of the Gallows Man: looking attentively at our own common experiences of conflict between happiness and morality, and/or taking up imaginatively the Gallows Man experience as our own, is the first step in becoming a practical philosopher. This need to appeal to the common as the ground of practical philosophical reflection can be defended textually. In a section in which he reflects back on what he takes himself to have accomplished in the first three chapters of the second Critique, Kant reflects also on the differing relationship of the common and the scientific (or philosophical) points of view in theoretical and practical reasoning. He suggests, first, that in theoretical reasoning, “the faculty of a pure rational cognition a priori could be quite easily and evidently proved through examples from the sciences” (5:91/77). The theoretical philosopher could, in other words, begin his reflections from an already scientifically informed point of view. But when searching for the supreme principle of practical reasoning, one must begin from the common point of view, not the scientific, or philosophical: But that pure reason, without the admixture of any empirical determining ground, is practical of itself alone: this one had to be able to show from the most common practical use of reason, by confirming the supreme practical principle as one that every natural human reason cognizes – a law completely a priori and independent of any sensible data – as the supreme law of its will. It was necessary first to establish and justify the purity of its origin even in the judgment of this common reason before science would take it in hand in order to make use of it, so to speak, as a fact that precedes all subtle reasoning about its possibility and all the consequences that may be drawn from it. (5:91/77)

fact of reason as forced phenomenological fact 189

When the practical philosopher wants to confirm the validity of her “supreme practical principle” – that is, the validity of the moral law itself – she cannot begin with explicitly philosophical concepts or methods. Rather, whatever philosophical or “scien[tific]” method she utilizes to confirm this principle must start from the common person’s judgment on such matters, or from her own judgment of common human reasoning on practical matters, a judgment within which, even previous to philosophical analysis, a common “fact” of moral obligation is recognized. “Subtle,” scientific, or philosophical reasoning on this fact will identify it as a fact of reason, and will bring to that common fact a whole slew of more precise philosophical reflections. But this introduction of philosophical reasoning to the realm of the practical must find its ground and orientation in the fact of moral obligation first revealed within common human judgment. We will thus see, in this and later chapters, that Kant’s philosophical discussion of the Fact of Reason is sprinkled throughout with appeals back to what the common person recognizes. Sometimes Kant is more, and sometimes less, successful in drawing this connection to the common; often, he does not rely explicitly on the Gallows Man’s experiences as the common experience upon which we have already relied to orient our grounding of practical philosophy in the common. We, however, will both consider Kant’s own appeal to the common root and then, as necessary, supplement that appeal with our own reflection on Kant’s preferred common example, the Gallows Man, so as to affirm this tether back to the common experience of morality which is the lifeblood of practical philosophical reflections. Most crucially, we should not lose sight of the fact that this reliance of moral philosophy on common practical experience means that the first step in becoming a moral philosopher is starting to become a moral person. This is the real lesson of Kant’s common approach to grounding practical philosophy: although we philosophers will bring more careful reflection to the felt experience of conflict between happiness and morality, we mustn’t let our philosophical reflections abandon the common, phenomenological experience that is their ground. If we were to do so, we would become like those philosophers Kant laments in Groundwork i: “[A] philosopher, though he cannot have any other principle than that of common understanding, can easily confuse his judgment by a mass of considerations foreign and irrelevant to the matter and deflect it from the straight course” (4:404/17). Worse, we might become one of those overly academic

190

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

philosophers of whom Kant speaks in the second Critique; those whose “perplexing speculations” inspire them to be “brazen enough to shut their ears to that heavenly voice” the common person knows so well. That voice announcing our moral demands is “so distinct, so irrepressible and so audible even to the most common human being,” but is distorted and ignored by more academic, speculative philosophers “in order to support a theory they need not break their heads over” (5:35/32). Duly chastened to prevent philosophical meanderings from interfering with our connection to moral experience, we turn, then, to this next stage of commonly informed philosophical attentiveness. The question we consider in this chapter is whether the felt, phenomenological experience of the Gallows Man identified in Chapter 7 is indeed a phenomenological experience of the Fact of Reason. We will thereby affirm that the Fact of Reason – something thought by many commentators to be an odd epistemic animal – is neither an epistemic mystery nor an act, but instead a forced phenomenological fact. It is, in fact, the paradigmatic example of just that common, felt phenomenological experience of which we have been speaking in this study. In the following chapters, we take on all those questions a Kantian philosopher would most naturally raise upon considering the perspective of the Gallows Man. Does the experience of the Gallows Man reveal that this law to which he is held is a universal and necessary one; that when he is determined by it, he is determined by the mere form of the law; and that this formal law finds its source in his own reason, that is, is autonomously legislated (Chapter 9)? Can we affirm that the Gallows Man has just that freedom for which Kant is searching in the second Critique (Chapter 10)? And, finally, can we affirm that the knowledge the Gallows Man has of both morality and freedom is what the philosopher would happily call objective, synthetic a priori practical cognition (Chapter 11)? These are concerns, however, for later chapters. Let us initiate our philosophical analysis of the Gallows Man by first affirming that the Fact of Reason, as experienced by the Gallows Man, is a forced phenomenological fact.

i. The Fact of Reason What is the Fact? Our first philosophical task is to introduce Kant’s philosophical language of the Fact of Reason, and to apply it to the

fact of reason as forced phenomenological fact 191

experience of the Gallows Man. Let us look, then, at how Kant describes the Fact of Reason. Awareness of being obligated to the moral law, says Kant, is simply a fact. But it is not an empirical fact; it is, instead, a “fact of reason” (5:31/ 28, emphasis added). “The thing is strange enough, and has nothing like it in all the rest of our practical cognition” (5:31/28), admits Kant, clearly recognizing the oddness of his claim of an absolute, formal, rational, and a priori command simply being given to us. Admitting the oddness of it does not, however, lead Kant to abandon his claim that it is simply given, by introducing, for example, some complex philosophical deduction to defend the idea that we are obligated. Instead, identification of the central claim of moral philosophy as a fact is the moment at which Kant lets go of his Groundwork dreams for such deductions and turns instead to a claim of the givenness of moral obligation as the starting point for practical philosophy. Kant asserts repeatedly not only that the Fact is given, but even that it is forced upon agents. In his first introduction of the language of the Fact of Reason, he says the Fact “forces itself upon us of itself” (5:31/28). Even previous to this official introduction of the Fact, Kant hints at its forceful quality: “One would never have ventured to introduce freedom into science had not the moral law, and with it practical reason, come in and forced this concept upon us” (5:30/27). Later, when introducing a deduction of our second practical cognition of freedom, he clarifies that a given fact cannot be deduced, as this would be the opposite of such givenness: “the moral law is given, as it were, as a fact of pure reason . . . Hence the objective reality of the moral law cannot be proved by any deduction, by any efforts of theoretical reason, speculative or empirically supported” (5:47/41–2). Finally, after the completion of the deduction of freedom, he reflects back on our cognition of morality, saying: “The objective reality of a pure will or, what is the same thing, of a pure practical reason is given a priori in the moral law, as it were by a fact – for so we may call a determination of the will that is unavoidable even though it does not rest upon empirical principles” (5:55/48, emphasis added). This appeal to a given, unavoidable, nondeducible fact is, perhaps, the defining moment of Kant’s approach to practical philosophy in the second Critique. Unlike in the Groundwork, Kant does not try to deduce the validity of the moral law from some previous philosophical premises; rather, he identifies, and then seeks to articulate more explicitly and philosophically, what is already given in common experience. Our

192

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

first goal, then, is to explain philosophically what it means to appeal to a fact to start practical cognitions. We are, after all, dealing with a very robust philosophical claim here. This law we want to confirm as a fact involves “the a priori thought of a possible giving of universal law, which . . . is unconditionally commanded as a law without borrowing anything from experience or from some external will” (5:31/28). It is, in other words, a law that holds absolutely, necessarily and without condition, for all persons. We are, furthermore, severely limited in where we can look to ground this law. Since the law is to be a priori, we cannot rely upon an inductive appeal to empirical experience to find it. Nor can I look for some force or authoritative will external to me from which to take my command.1 Furthermore, this law “is also not a precept in accordance with which an action by which a desired effect is possible should be done” (5:31/28). That is, this law’s legislative force cannot be borrowed from something else, some other object I desire and for which this law would serve as a rule for that object’s obtainment. This constraint follows from the absolute nature of the lawgiving we are seeking. For, as we know, to rely upon a desired outcome as the force for why I must do something else would ground only conditional demands; but we are seeking the ground of an absolute, categorical demand. Upon what can we rely, then, to recognize this practical cognition of a law that is absolute and unconditional? Kant’s answer to this is simply to admit that, just as the Gallows Man has discovered, we ourselves discover it as a bare fact in our moral consciousness: Consciousness of this fundamental law may be called a fact of reason because one cannot reason it out from antecedent data of reason, for example, from consciousness of freedom (since this is not antecedently given to us) and because it instead forces itself upon us of itself as a synthetic a priori proposition. (5:51/28)

What needs to be said, then, philosophically, about this “fact”? When a philosopher speaks of a fact, she is, unlike the common person, making a statement about how we should understand the epistemic ground of this knowledge claim. One’s knowledge of a fact cannot be reasoned to

1 We save full consideration of this point for Chapter 9, where the story of why the law cannot be externally imposed will be derived also from its absolute and unconditional authority.

fact of reason as forced phenomenological fact 193

or deduced, but is instead given to the knower. In other words, the knower plays a passive, or receptive, role in the knowing process. I must set aside all those things upon which I would usually rely in grounding knowledge (my reasoning capacity, and its particular capacity to construct arguments and actively produce conclusions). Instead, I admit that something is given to me, and that I am simply receptive to it. No deduction is involved here, no activity or construction of argument, only the admission that I am subject to something that is unavoidably given in my consciousness. Most facts of this sort would be simple empirical facts. When I encounter something in my empirical experience of objects, things are indeed given to me in this way: I cannot choose whether to perceive whatever happens to be in my range of sensible perception. I simply take it in, and my experience of such given empirical objects provides a ground for making synthetic a posteriori claims about them. But Kant insists this fact of which he now speaks is “not an empirical fact” in the sense just described, but instead “the sole fact of pure reason” (5:31/29, emphases added). This fact of reason, furthermore, grounds not synthetic a posteriori knowledge claims, but instead “a synthetic a priori proposition that is not based on any intuition, either pure or empirical” (5:31/28). We need, then, to make sense of these claims Kant makes about the Fact of Reason. Two questions immediately present themselves. First, what kind of epistemological beast is this nonempirical but given fact? Does it have epistemic legitimacy? Second, can we affirm that this fact is a fact of reason? This latter question is a task we will save for Chapters 9 through 11. We need first to make sense of the epistemic status of this nonempirical fact, and that is the task for the rest of this chapter. The Fact of Reason is a felt, phenomenological fact. How, then, can we make sense of something that is given but is not empirically given, and which, despite this mere givenness, grounds a synthetic a priori claim? Many interpreters have found this nonempirical, a priori status of the Fact the most perplexing aspect of this doctrine: what can it mean to assert that we are given, or are receptive to, something, but that this something is not simply a content of our empirical intuitions in space and time? How are we given this fact, if not empirically? Further, how could anything be given but still provide the ground of a synthetic a priori proposition? Lewis White Beck provides a standard account of such worries. He insists we must not take the Fact of Reason to be some

194

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

illicit intellectual intuition, that is, a capacity to intuit something that does not come to us via the sensible intuitions of space and time.2 To take the fact in this way would be, in his terms, to see it as a “fact for reason, i.e., as an object of a particular and unique insight or intuition.”3 Henry Allison’s gloss on Beck’s point is instructive: “By [a fact for reason] is to be understood a pregiven, transcendentally real value that is somehow apprehended by pure reason, that is, by a direct nonsensuous insight or ‘intellectual intuition.’”4 Beck realizes, though, that given Kant’s rejection of the very possibility of intellectual intuition,5 we need to understand the fact differently than this. As such, he proposes that we take the fact as a “fact of reason”: “it is a fact for reason only inasmuch as it is the expression of the fact of pure reason, i.e., of the fact that pure reason can be practical.”6 Again, Allison’s gloss on this is instructive. According to him, Beck’s understanding of the fact of reason “requires that pure reason provide both a rule or principle of action and a motive to act or refrain from acting,”7 all the while avoiding appeal to some intellectual intuition of an object of the moral law. While Allison does not follow all of Beck’s account, he does agree that we should construe the fact in this way, as a fact of reason, and not a fact for reason.8 Let us consider, then, how our own reading of the Fact of Reason compares with Beck’s approach. Beck worries that we cannot allow that the moral law is given to us through intellectual intuition, and this is fair enough. He might have added, as Kant himself does in the second Critique, that we also cannot have a sensible intuition of the moral law. The only kind of intuition finite rational beings can have is sensible intuition, that is, intuiting things (or having things given to us) in space and time. But the moral law is not an object that can

2 Lewis White Beck, “The Fact of Reason: An Essay on Justification in Ethics,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Kant (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp. 200–214. See especially pp. 202–204. 3 Beck, Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, p. 168. 4 Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 232. 5 See, for example, 5:45/40, where Kant says that “[t]he possibility of . . . a supersensible nature . . . requires no a priori intuition (of an intelligible world), which in this case, as supersensible, would also have to be impossible for us” (emphasis added). 6 Beck, Comentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, p. 169, emphases added. 7 Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 233. 8 “Beck’s distinction between a fact for and the fact of pure reason is germane, and he is certainly correct to suggest that the fact of reason be construed in the latter sense” (ibid.).

fact of reason as forced phenomenological fact 195

be so given. Neither intellectual nor sensible intuition of the moral law is possible for human beings. The further lesson to take here, though, is that if we are going to make sense of how something is given to us, then it needs to be a story of how something is given to us sensibly. As Kant’s first Critique discussion of such things reminds us, in a world of transcendental idealism, our capacity for sensibility is the capacity we have for receiving things: “[T]here are two stems of human cognition . . . namely sensibility and understanding, through the first of which objects are given to us, but through the second of which they are thought” (A15/B29, 152). Furthermore, Kant emphasizes that this capacity for sensibility is the only capacity we have for taking things in, since he goes on to describe sensible conditions as “the conditions under which alone the objects of human cognition are given” (A16/B30, 152, emphasis added). So, although the moral law cannot be given as an object in sensible intuition, we are left with the challenge of figuring out how something could be given to us sensibly that is not an object of sensible intuition. We can confirm this articulation of the problem facing any interpreter of the Fact through appeal to a later section of the second Critique, “Of the Typic of Pure Practical Judgment” (5:67ff/58ff.). In this section, Kant seeks to “find in the sensible world a case . . . to which there could be applied the supersensible idea of the morally good, which is to be exhibited in it in concreto” (5:68/59), later confirming that by “in concreto,” he means a presentation of the moral law “in objects of the senses” (5:69/60). The topic of the Typic is thus relevant to our current concern; for, in making sense of the Fact, we are trying to make sense of how the moral law is given to us; and this means making sense of how it could be presented sensibly, in concreto, to us, since we have no nonsensible capacity for intuition (that is, no nonsensible capacity for receiving things). A sensible, individual “case” (5:68/59) of moral constraint is thus just what Kant is searching for in the Typic, and finding such an “in concreto” presentation of the moral law would affirm the way in which the Fact is given to us. The problem, then, as Kant presents it, is not so much about whether (as Beck discusses) we could have a nonsensible intellectual intuition, but is rather one of whether and how we could have a sensible intuition of supersensible things. Of course, as Kant quickly notes, “the morally good as an object is something supersensible, so that nothing corresponding to it can be found in any sensible intuition” (5:68/59). Sensible intuition, as we have already suggested, is

196

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

inadequate for presenting supersensible objects like the moral law, and so any effort to present that law in concreto, or sensibly, fails when we appeal to sensible intuition. We have been saying, though, that we are reading the second Critique with the hindsight that Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals discussion of the distinction between intuition and feeling provides us; and this is the ultimate moment at which to apply that distinction. As we saw in Part i, Kant recognizes in the Metaphysics of Morals that the experience of feeling allows something to be given to us sensibly that is not given in sense intuition and which, furthermore, is objectless, pointing only mysteriously to its cause or object. We thus have a third option for making sense of what the Fact of Reason is, or, alternatively, for making sense of how the moral law can be presented in concreto, that was not available to Kant himself when he raised this question in the second Critique: although intuition cannot present supersensible objects, feeling can be understood as an effect of supersensible causes; it thus points mysteriously to those inscrutable supersensible objects which cause it.9 We do, then, have a way of understanding an in concreto experience of the moral law without violating any of Kant’s epistemic constraints. The felt givenness of the moral law is neither an illicit intellectual intuition of the moral law nor a sensible intuition of the moral law. But that does not mean that it is only (as Beck suggests) a consciousness of the practicality of pure reason (that is, its authority for us). It is that, but the felt experience of the efficacy of rational moral demands upon our wills, through which we appreciate the authority of moral demands, does direct us toward appreciating, obscurely, the object or cause of such feeling, if only as an inscrutable object of wonder.10 Felt, phenomenological experience thus provides a framework within which hints of something intelligible can be given to us sensibly, but in which

9 Although Kant did not have the philosophical account of feeling discussed here available to him in the second Critique, we have already seen him, in the second Critique, describing nonphilosophical, common judgment of the experience of moral obligation as operating via feeling (see 5:91–92/77–78). It thus seems in this section that Kant is already moving toward his Metaphysics of Morals position on the epistemic power of feeling, but has not yet fully articulated that position. 10 Although we will not consider it here, Kant’s discussion of beauty as a symbol of morality in the Critique of Judgment promises another way in which, through appeal to feeling (here the feeling of the play of the imagination and understanding), Kant articulates an in concreto case of the moral law being given in our senses.

fact of reason as forced phenomenological fact 197

such givenness is not an illicit intellectual or sensible intuition of an object as such. The Fact of Reason is not a sensible intuition, but the content of a sensible feeling.11 Even when one appeals to attending to the content of such feeling (as we will continue to do in coming chapters), one does not thereby collapse into an illicit intuitive understanding of the moral law. Attentive consideration of feeling is, of course, a bit more active than the mere experience of it: not only are we given something in consciousness; we also decide to look at it carefully. But such more active consideration of felt experience does not involve intellectual or sensible intuition of the object of the moral law; nor is it an assertion that attentiveness produces the feeling in question.12 It is, rather, the heightening of what sensible, felt experience we do have, taking care to get everything out of that felt experience that one can. In appealing to attentive reflection upon felt experience, we thus violate none of the constraints upon either sensible or intellectual intuition, which Kant articulates. Attentive appeal to feeling in making sense of the Fact of Reason as a nonempirical but still given fact of our moral consciousness thus makes good Kantian epistemic sense. Indeed, the strangeness of a nonempirical fact given in our consciousness – that aspect of the fact which is most perplexing for many commentators – is in fact the easiest thing for this interpretive approach to assimilate: what Kant is presenting here is not an empirical fact, but a phenomenological fact. He does not use the language of the

11 So, although we reject any intuition as such of moral demands, we do nonetheless admit a felt experience not unlike what some contemporary philosophers would appeal to in making sense of so-called “intuitionist” accounts of morality. Beck would find this resolution of things disagreeable, as he has a deep suspicion of intuitionist or phenomenological method of any sort. It is not just that we must reject the illicit route of intellectual intuition in making sense of the Fact; beyond that, we should avoid appeal to insight or intuition of any sort, since “[a]n appeal to insight or intuition is a confession of failure to find an argument or premise from which some truth can be derived and an unwillingness to surrender it in spite of that” (Beck, Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, p. 167). Kant, however, laments in the Groundwork that we have no such insight into categorical obligation, and then realizes in the Critique that we can welcome an experience of necessitation. Such “insights” are to be welcomed, then, not disparaged since, if we have them, we don’t need to make an argument from a previous premise. Suspicion of the value of phenomenological insight, like what we find in Beck, has thus prevented a full appreciation of Kant’s project in the Fact of Reason. 12 As both Moyar (“Unstable Autonomy”) and Franks (All or Nothing) assert of the judgment of conscience.

198

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

“phenomenological” here. But it is clear, in his discussion of the givenness of the Fact, that he is grasping for just that sort of experience without having had either his fullest account of feeling or the history of phenomenology before him as a guide. What, after all, would we call an experience of something that is given in one’s internal consciousness but is not an experience of empirical objects? This is nothing other than the felt, objectless phenomenological experience we defended in Part i. The epistemic perspective of an unavoidable, nondeductive, forced, felt fact is particularly appropriate for making philosophical sense of our paradigmatic experience of the Gallows Man and his common, attentive reflection on his felt experience. We saw, in the experience of the Gallows Man, that his felt experience of constraint upon his inclinations revealed to him that while many demands operating upon his will can dissolve in certain circumstances, some demands refuse to go away; they are, rather, present as stubborn, absolute and unconditional demands upon his will. This was not something the Gallows Man needed to deduce or argue to, nor something that he actively brought about; it was, instead, the condition in which he unavoidably found himself. He might try to deceive himself about what he is experiencing, but he cannot avoid dealing somehow with that experience that is forced upon him, a felt experience of the authority of moral demands upon his will. This is, simply, forced upon him, whether he likes it or not, and this experience of receptivity to a determining force is brought to him via the only epistemic capacity built to do such work – his felt experience. Once we affirm the given, forced perspective of the sensibly affected finite agent from which one must access the Fact of Reason, we can also reaffirm our Chapter 6 rejection of Allison’s two-tiered reading of the Fact, one which claims that consciousness of the validity of the moral law as a rule is previous to any experience of the moral feeling of respect. The problem we find for Allison’s reading in light of the forced nature of the Fact is that, because Allison insists that our first consciousness of the Fact is both given and nonfelt, he has no epistemic means for explaining its forced, given nature. Indeed, if he is going to insist that the first aspect of the Fact is nonfelt, it seems he needs to reject the idea that this part of the Fact is given at all. Our reading, to the contrary, by appealing to sensible feeling as a means by which to access the Fact, provides a more satisfying account of its givenness.

fact of reason as forced phenomenological fact 199

ii. Is the Fact instead an act? This reading of the Fact relies heavily upon the assertion that it is given in our moral consciousness. We have already defended that claim textually, and many other commentators, like Allison, affirm this claim that the Fact, whatever it is, is also a “brute given.”13 But, as we have seen in Chapter 6, recent commentators (especially Franks and Moyar)14 argue that the Fact is not given but is instead an act of judgment in conscience. Let us therefore return, in light of our own newly articulated position, to reconsider this interpretive move. Why, given significant textual evidence that Kant presents the Fact as a brute given, might one be tempted nonetheless to read it as an act? Such a move does, after all, put these interpreters in a difficult position. Kant clearly encourages us to understand the Fact as given, forced, and unavoidable; but interpreters of the Fact as an act must either say that Kant didn’t mean this or set aside those aspects of Kant’s text that encourage givenness. Why, then, resort to this move? The history of frustration about making interpretive sense of the Fact is relevant here. Beck,15 as we noted earlier, finds it very difficult to make sense of the Fact within Kantian epistemic constraints. And other interpreters (Allen Wood and Paul Guyer prominent among them)16 see a mere statement of givenness of moral obligation as dodging philosophical argument instead of providing one. But if one is faced with a text recalcitrant to satisfying interpretation, one reasonable move to make is to reject those aspects of it that prevent such a satisfying interpretation. Anyone making such a move would, further, reasonably seek a different, but still Kantian-inspired, way of reading the Fact. Turning to readings of Kant inspired by the tradition of German Idealism fits the bill perfectly here. Interpreters who have historically found Kant’s Fact of Reason position problematic have already moved toward emphasis on the activity of the self and self-consciousness as a way of getting beyond perceived problems with Kant’s Fact of Reason story. Turning to those historical interpreters as an interpretive guide for the

13 14 15 16

Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 233. Franks, All or Nothing; Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy.” Beck, Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Allen Wood, Kantian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2008); Guyer, “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments.”

200

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

Fact thus makes sense, and this is exactly what we have seen interpreters of the Fact as an act, such as Franks and Moyar,17 do. Yet, if we can find a coherent interpretation of the Fact which integrates Kant’s repeated claims of the givenness of it without resorting to non-Kantian (even if Kantian-inspired) interpretive moves, we should prefer this. Our own interpretation provides just such an option. Instead of turning to German Idealism to rehabilitate the Fact, we turn to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals discussion of feeling. We thus turn to interpretive tools outside of the second Critique, but not outside of Kant’s opus, to tell a more satisfying and coherent story of the Fact. Indeed, as we have suggested, even these later Metaphysics of Morals discussions of feeling find their precursors in the second Critique itself, and our interpretive approach helps to put those incipient reflections in their proper context. If this interpretation can be accepted as solid, then we should thus prefer it to interpreters who abandon Kant’s assertions of the givenness of the Fact within their interpretations. We should emphasize, too, that it is not just Kant’s claim about the givenness of the Fact of Reason that is lost when we accept these more German Idealism-inspired readings of the Fact. We have already seen that Moyar himself admits that we must abandon Kant’s claim that a form of lawfulness supervenes upon our moral deliberations, admitting instead only that the active deliberating self is the source of moral obligation. A similarly precious loss on both Franks’ and Moyar’s account is Kant’s emphasis on the perspective of the finite, sensibly affected rational agent as the proper perspective from which to begin practical philosophy. Let us conclude this chapter, then, with further reflection upon how Act interpreters of the Fact must abandon this commitment. Kant’s repeated assertions that we have a forced, unavoidable, nondeduced recognition of moral obligation should be understood as occurring within an important metaphysical context. Most crucially, this claim affirms the perspective from which one must welcome this recognition: in saying that the law forces itself upon a knower, the moral agent, usually active, now takes on the role of being forced. Accessing this law relies, then, on the first-personal experience of being subject to a law, a passive recipient of the force of it. I do not experience myself from the perspective of one actively creating, legislating or constructing the law; rather, I experience myself as being obligated to it.

17 Franks, All or Nothing; Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy.”

fact of reason as forced phenomenological fact 201

In accepting this perspective of obligation as the perspective from which one accesses the law, Kant thus implicitly rejects that other perspective from which one might have hoped to have accessed the law, the perspective of the active, autonomously legislating rational agent. To appreciate the difference in these perspectives, it is helpful to return to the Groundwork, which is the point at which Kant most clearly articulates them. When discussing the Autonomy Formulation of the Categorical Imperative in Groundwork ii, Kant asserts the following: “[t]he will is not merely subject to the law but subject to it in such a way that it must be viewed as also giving the law to itself and just because of this as first subject to the law (of which it can regard itself as the author)” (4:431/39). Here, Kant articulates the ironic situation of someone held to an autonomously legislated law. The will of such a being is, simultaneously, the author of, and subject to, the very same law. The former perspective emphasizes the active, rationally legislating self, whereas the latter emphasizes the receptive, obligated self. In making sense of how we can know this law, Kant is faced with a choice: can I know myself as an active, autonomously legislating self, and thus know of the law directly, as one who causes its existence? Or can I know myself only as a receptive, obligated self, and thus know the law more indirectly, as one subject to its demands? One might have expected that Kant would tell us the story of moral obligation from the perspective of the autonomously legislating will, since this self is, after all, what we will find the ultimate source of this law to be. One might even say that, in the Groundwork, Kant did his best to start his argument for our knowledge of obligation from this active, legislating self. As we saw in Chapter 5, Kant’s Groundwork iii argument begins with an assertion of the activity of the self. We saw there also that, whatever Kant’s hopes that this activity would be of the robust, positive-freedom sort (that is, an assertion of ourselves as positive causes), we had to admit (and Kant, too, did eventually admit, in the second Critique) that we have no experience of ourselves as positive causal forces, nor thus as positive legislators of moral demands. One very good reason to reject this approach, as Kant ultimately does, is that trying to appeal to the perspective of the active, legislating self is a move that takes us beyond the limits of what one can, in the world of Transcendental Idealism, know of the self. To appreciate this point, let us reflect briefly upon the lessons of the Paralogisms from the first Critique. There, Kant asserts, contra Descartes, that any

202

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

introspective reflection upon ourselves will gain for us not metaphysically secure knowledge of our noumenal selves as enduring substances, but instead only our empirical selves. It is impossible to prove anything “about an object of experience beyond the bounds of experience” (B424, 454), and we are instead limited to investigating what can be discovered within our “empirically determined existence” (B427, 455). A limit for knowledge of the self is thus set: one cannot encounter one’s noumenal self via direct introspection of the content of one’s selfconsciousness. Whatever we will know of ourselves is whatever can appear, in space and time, to our phenomenal selves. Self-introspection is thus, ultimately, a task of empirical psychology. As with objects of the external world, we know ourselves not as we are noumenally, but only, at best, as that noumenal self as presented within space and time to our phenomenal selves. One might think that when Kant turns to the simple givenness of moral obligation as a fact, he thereby violates this restriction upon knowing one’s noumenal self. After all, that moral law we come to know is autonomously legislated by our autonomous noumenal selves; as such, knowing it seems also implicitly to assume illicit knowledge of that noumenal self. But, in fact, more careful consideration of the matter shows that the assertion of activity in Groundwork iii is the illicit move to knowledge of one’s noumenal self, and the second Critique assertion of the Fact a more solid and licit appeal to what we can know of ourselves as we appear to ourselves. The illicit move in Groundwork iii occurs when Kant tries to make a claim that, through introspection of the contents of one’s consciousness, one discovers an experience of activity. We have already shown that the most Kant can assert there is a negative experience of freedom, not the pure activity of our noumenal selves. But, to the extent that he was seeking something more than that, was seeking affirmation of our rational, active selves, he is going beyond the limits of what we can know of ourselves through introspection. Such worries are in fact what we found at the heart of traditional interpretive worries about that section of Groundwork iii. We were able, in Chapter 5, to save what we could of that assertion of activity: we can admit an experience of negative freedom (that is, of not being constrained by something outside of me), but no more. But, when Kant turns, in the second Critique, to asserting the Fact of Reason, he shifts the perspective from which one can hope to know the demands of the moral law: we cannot know or experience ourselves as

fact of reason as forced phenomenological fact 203

active and free legislators of the moral law, so it must be that we can only access that law indirectly, as obligated subjects of it. The lesson Kant has learned in his movement to the Fact of Reason is that knowledge or experience of ourselves as autonomously legislating wills is simply impossible for finite sensibly affected beings. The only portal through which such beings will access the moral law is through the experience of how that law affects us, that is, through the experience of being obligated by it. One can even take this recognition of Kant’s as another aspect of that “great reversal”18 Kant undergoes in writing the second Critique: in accepting that the practical project cannot begin from freedom, Kant also more wholeheartedly accepts the perspective of the sensibly affected finite agent as that point of view from which one must make sense of both moral obligation and freedom, thereby reclaiming those limits on knowledge of self that he first articulated in the Paralogisms. Interpreters who take the Fact as involving a strong sense of activity are thus implicitly seeking to return Kant to his Groundwork commitments, including understanding oneself from the perspective of the active, rational legislator. Both Franks’ account (which interprets the Gallows Man as consciously and actively producing the moral feeling of respect through his deliberative acts, thus affirming freedom) and Moyar’s account (in which the Fact is produced through the conscious activity of the judgment of conscience) are good examples of German Idealism-inspired efforts to reclaim the perspective of the autonomous legislator. I will, however, focus here upon Moyar’s discussion, bringing to the forefront its noumenal assumptions. As we saw in Chapter 6, Moyar asserts that a complex act of conscience is the source both of what I should do and what I do in fact do. To say that a conscious act of conscience is the source of what I should do is, though, to take the perspective of one who legislates moral demands. Of course, as we have seen, Moyar rejects the possibility of accessing any law as such on his account, so we shouldn’t call this rationally active person a “legislator” as such: once we claim the perspective of the active rationally legislating self as strongly as Moyar does, the law itself disappears under the weight of the rational self. Nonetheless, on Moyar’s account, we find a very strongly, self-consciously and rationally active self who simultaneously brings about what he should

18 Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 236.

204

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

do and what he will in fact do in one complex judgment of conscience. In taking this perspective, Moyar thus goes beyond the limits that Kant has finally set in the second Critique, illicitly asserting that finite sensibly affected agents do encounter themselves as active, rational, autonomously productive beings. One might argue that by understanding the determination of moral demands through appeal to a conscious, judging agent, and not through appeal to a law, Moyar is also simultaneously abandoning any would-be noumenal content within this rationally active self. But Moyar instead affirms his commitment to integrating the noumenal self into his account: “[C]onscience confirms that I must consider myself as a noumenal agent. This is to consider myself from the standpoint of responsibility, or justification, rather than from the standpoint of explanation.”19 So, although he goes on to describe the very familiar, this-worldly experience of the judgments of conscience, Moyar understands these judgments within which the agent determines the content of those oughts upon her will that are categorical to be the acts of this “noumenal agent.” Furthermore, on our account, access to this noumenal agent will occur via reflection on what is given in felt, phenomenological experience, thus respecting Kant’s Paralogism constraints upon what we can access of ourselves. But for Moyar, as we have seen, moral feeling is an effect of the judgment of this noumenal agent, not something upon which the agent focuses to access her noumenal self: “when I confront a situation I judge it as a case of duty and I arouse in myself the moral feeling that motivates action.”20 As such, he cannot appeal to consideration of this feeling as the vehicle via which one appreciates one’s noumenal self, for one’s noumenal self is already what consciously produces this feeling. Moyar thus asserts illicitly that we have conscious deliberative experience of our noumenal selves actively and autonomously causing the production of moral demands. We accept, however, that we access our autonomously legislating rational selves only by those means available to sensibly affected rational beings: we need to search for how this activity affects us, that is, we need to focus on our experience of being obligated by that law, and that is an experience that can be found in temporal, felt, 19 Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy,” p. 335. 20 Ibid., p. 358. See also p. 335: “The agent ‘imputes to himself’ the causality of his actions, judging that he is responsible and connecting ‘feeling with it morally.’”

fact of reason as forced phenomenological fact 205

phenomenological experience. Feeling, a sensible and receptive aspect of our consciousness, is the route via which we must seek indirect access to our active, legislating, autonomous selves. This is not recognition of the empirical self as such; that is the self we would encounter in sense intuition. But recognition of what we know of ourselves through sensible felt experience does respect the Paralogism limit on recognizing in introspection only how the (noumenal) self presents itself to the (phenomenal) self. Reflection on felt, phenomenological experience reveals the phenomenological self, that self we can access through phenomenological, not empirical, experience. Our reading of the Fact of Reason, because it asserts only what, upon attentive reflection, is merely a phenomenological effect of the activity of the noumenal self, avoids violating the constraints on knowledge of self set out in the Paralogisms. Perhaps one would argue, though, that feeling need not be a passive or receptive thing. What if feeling is a nonintuitive but sensible means of expressing noumenal activity, a method for expressing our noumenal selves that would (like my own approach) avoid the illicit intuitive expression of noumenal things?21 One can, after all, find the assertion of a felt experience of activity in the history of philosophy. In the Nicomachean Ethics,22 Aristotle articulates one definition of happiness as the felt experience of unimpeded activity. Descartes, in Passions of the Soul,23 suggests that we can have intellectual feelings that escape the passivity of our bodies. Such an appeal to feeling as activity is not, however, an option for Kant. As we have already suggested, in the world of Transcendental Idealism, feeling, as sensible, is receptive by nature, thus preventing it from being a means by which directly to express activity. This point is affirmed by Kant in the Metaphysics of Morals, where he defines feeling as “susceptibility to [pleasure or displeasure]” (6:211/11, emphasis added). He certainly does, as we have seen, leave room for the possibility of a sensible, receptive feeling that has an intelligible cause. But this does not mean that he would entertain the possibility of a 21 I am not, however, attributing this interpretive position to either Franks or Moyar. On my reading of them, both appeal to the moral feeling of respect as an effect of rational activity, not as the feeling of rational activity itself. 22 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). 23 René Descartes, “Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume i, trans. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 325–404.

206

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

nonsensible feeling as such, for even feelings with intelligible causes remain, for him, sensible feelings. Nor would he consider the possibility of a sensible experience of being active, for this too would undermine his definition of sensibility as receptivity. Sensible feeling is simply not the sort of thing that can directly express activity. If we are going to access ourselves as active, then it will, ironically, need to occur from the perspective of experiencing ourselves first as receptive, for the most we could hope for from feeling is that it could affirm how one receptive part of ourselves is affected by another part of ourselves that could be active. We will have more to say on this point in Chapter 9, where we consider what access we do have to understanding our autonomously legislating selves. For now, we simply note that in affirming the Fact of Reason as a forced fact, Kant takes the perspective of one subject to the law as that perspective proper to getting to know it, setting aside any would-be first-personal perspective of one doing the legislating.

Conclusion We affirm, then, that the Fact of Reason is a felt, given phenomenological experience of categorical obligation, and find a general, structural similarity between that Fact and the Gallows Man’s experience of obligation. It is time now to investigate whether we can say of the common experience of the Gallows Man that it has all those qualities that Kant attributes to the Fact of Reason.

9 THE GALLOWS MAN’S FACT IS THE FACT OF REASON

Introduction The Fact of Reason, in addition to being an unavoidable, forced, nondeductive and nonempirical fact of moral obligation, is also identified by Kant as having a whole string of specifically philosophical qualities: the Fact is an objective, synthetic a priori cognition of the authority of a necessary, universal, autonomously legislated law determining the will by its mere form. It is, furthermore, that on the basis of which Kant deduces a practical cognition of the objective reality of freedom. We need, then, to defend the connection of the Gallows Man’s common experience to these philosophical claims: can we say that the Gallows Man’s experience of moral obligation is an experience of the Fact of Reason; that is, an experience of the objective, synthetic a priori cognition of that necessary, universal, autonomously legislated law determining the will by its mere form which affirms the reality of freedom? What we shall discover in this and the next two chapters is that through attentive philosophical consideration of the Gallows Man’s common, felt experience of obligation, we can provide the most convincing grounding of both the synthetic a priori objective cognitions of the moral law (as a necessary, rational law determined autonomously through the mere form of the law) and of freedom (as a positive causality of reason). In so doing, we vindicate Kant’s phenomenological method of doing practical philosophy.

i. Darwall’s challenge to the Fact of Reason Stephen Darwall has, however, recently argued that Kant’s phenomenological appeal to the Fact of Reason is insufficient for grounding a 207

208

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

genuinely Kantian notion of obligation. We thus introduce the concerns of this chapter by first considering his criticisms. Darwall’s discussion of the Fact of Reason is situated within a larger claim that one must appeal to second-personal encounters, not just first-personal ones, to ground an autonomously legislated notion of obligation. It is not my intention here to consider that aspect of Darwall’s argument, but instead only his claim that Kant’s first-personal account of the Fact is unsuccessful. But, in considering that argument, and then showing, as is the purpose of this chapter, that an entirely first-personal approach is successful in grounding an autonomously legislated notion of obligation, we thereby raise questions about the necessity of Darwall’s appeal to the second-personal perspective. According to Darwall, then, both Kant’s Groundwork iii and Fact of Reason arguments fail because they provide merely first-personal answers to a question that requires a second-personal approach. Recent efforts to rehabilitate that argument also fail because they too ignore the second-personal standpoint.1 When he turns to the Fact of Reason argument, though, Darwall is concerned not just about Kant’s failure to take a second-personal perspective (though he does argue that Kant’s Fact of Reason argument needs this second-personal point of view),2 but also by Kant’s merely phenomenological (as opposed to philosophical or deductively argumentative) approach. According to Darwall, via Kant’s “phenomenolog[ical]”3 approach to the Fact of Reason, “[t]he most we can get . . . is not an account of, nor any warrant for, the purported authority of moral obligation, but only the reassurance that we do not need such an account since we are convinced of morality’s authority already.”4 In other words, the Fact of Reason simply identifies and confirms our already existing confidence in our beliefs about morality. We should, however, says Darwall, wish for a truly deductive argument or “account” defending morality, not only to “still . . . skeptical worries” about morality, but also because “[w]e

1 “Kant’s official argument in Groundwork 3, as well as arguments that philosophers have recently constructed from materials in Groundwork 1 and 2, all ultimately break down . . . I believe they all fail for a common reason, namely, because they aim to derive the moral law from presuppositions of a (first-person) deliberative standpoint alone” (Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, p. 214). 2 “The second-person perspective is actually required to underwrite the use to which Kant puts the ‘fact of reason’ in the second Critique” (ibid., p. 238). 3 Ibid., p. 237. 4 Ibid., p. 214.

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

209

might . . . reasonably wish for a better understanding of what Korsgaard (1996e) calls the ‘source’ of the moral law’s normativity.”5 For the purposes of my discussion, I set aside Darwall’s criticisms of Groundwork iii, and of recent efforts to rehabilitate it, as I am sympathetic to Darwall’s claim that the first-personal point of view taken in that argument (and in contemporary arguments intended to bolster it) is inadequate, as our own argument of Chapter 5 has similarly argued. I also set aside Darwall’s worries that a phenomenological approach is not really an argumentative approach. This concern is very similar to those raised by Wood, Guyer, Beck, and others about the Fact of Reason; and we have already suggested, in Chapter 6, that Kant affirms something philosophically legitimate about focusing attentively on what is present in our phenomenological consciousness. Further, despite Darwall’s worries that a merely phenomenological account will not adequately describe “the ‘source’ of the moral law’s normativity,” our own phenomenological account will do just that. I thus focus on Darwall’s claim that the Fact of Reason is inadequate because its firstpersonal approach to grounding morality is inadequate. Darwall’s criticisms of Kant’s Fact of Reason argument. Here, then, is Darwall’s reading of the Fact. Darwall agrees with us that Kant presents the Gallows Man as a first-personal, phenomenological approach to understanding morality, and that the Gallows Man’s experience is indeed an encounter with the Fact of Reason: Kant clearly believes that his readers will agree with his moral phenomenology if they will just be honest with themselves, and we can read the example as being offered in that spirit. We put ourselves into the shoes of the person in the example, simulate practical thought from that perspective, and agree that in those circumstances the thing to do is to refuse the corrupt tyrant’s offer and not have an honest person’s death on our hands. Do we think we would do that? Surely we hope so, but alas, we also know the results of the Milgram experiment. But we must accept that we could.6

Darwall clearly appreciates that Kant is asking us to engage in moral phenomenology here. He then asserts, however, that this moral phenomenology misses its target (i.e., to ground a proper notion of moral obligation) because the Gallows Man’s first-personal reflections fail to 5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., p. 237.

210

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

provide adequate justification for “what we are responsible for doing, [and] what members of the moral community have the authority to demand that we do.”7 This indirect appeal to second-personal concerns is the central concern for Darwall, and, although we are not here considering his positive account of the need for second-personal reasons, it will behoove us to appreciate this claim so as to appreciate how it impinges upon his reading of the Fact of Reason. When he refers to the need to understand moral obligation robustly enough to underwrite someone else demanding something of me, Darwall is referring to a central claim of his book, something he explains via appeal to what Strawson calls “reactive attitudes.” These are “distinctive attitudes involved in holding people responsible . . . with prominent examples being indignation, resentment, guilt, blame and so on.”8 Darwall suggests that the reasons we give for our moral obligations need to be adequate to justifying these attitudes. They must justify not only that I am obligated, but also justify “the authority to demand and hold one another responsible for compliance with moral obligations (which just are the standards to which we can warrantedly hold each other as members of the moral community).”9 These reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, and blame via which we hold other members of the moral community accountable for their actions are thus one defining core of the second-personal perspective.10 The very notion of “moral obligation” – and, as he will argue later, the related Kantian moral notion of “dignity” – must take, as central to their natures, this second-personal reference: to be morally obligated is to be in relationship to another member of the moral community who can demand something of me, who can be resentful and indignant if I fail to act appropriately, and can blame and punish me as a result; similarly, “[d]ignity is not just a set of requirements with respect to persons; it is also the authority persons have to require compliance with these requirements by holding one another accountable for doing so.”11 Accordingly, then, any reasons grounding moral 7 Ibid., p. 214. 8 Ibid., p. 17. 9 Ibid., emphasis added. 10 “[R]eactive attitudes are second-personal in our sense, and . . . ethical notions that are distinctively relevant to these attitudes – the culpable, moral responsibility, and, I argue, moral obligation – all have an irreducibly second-personal aspect that ties them conceptually to second-personal reasons” (ibid., p. 17). 11 Ibid., p. 14. This definition of dignity does not reject a first-personal notion of it, but only finds that first-personal piece of it inadequate to describe dignity fully. As Darwall

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

211

obligation must be robust enough to ground this second-personal dimension of it. Darwall also accepts Strawson’s point that reasons based in the results of one’s action or the desirability of the action in question – for example, the social desirability of regulating behavior – would be inadequate for the job of grounding second-personal accountability: Strawson argued that social desirability is not a reason of “the right sort” for practices of moral responsibility “as we understand them” (72, 74). When we seek to hold people accountable, what matters is not whether doing so is desirable, either in a particular case or in general, but whether the person’s conduct is culpable and we have the authority to bring him to account. Desirability is a reason of the wrong kind to warrant the attitudes and actions in which holding someone responsible consists in their own terms.12

Following Strawson, Darwall asserts that we need not only a reason to ground our second-personally informed moral responsibilities, but a “reason of ‘the right sort,’” one which does not reduce to the desirability of such obligations or, as he notes later, to the good results that would be accomplished by adhering to them. Darwall goes on to describe these formal (i.e., nondesire-based or resultbased) reasons of the right sort in Kantian terms as “principle-dependent” (and therefore autonomous) instead of “object-dependent”:13 [T]he agent’s valuing an outcome and even the outcome’s having value, say, its being desirable, are reasons of the wrong kind to ground accepting a principle if that acceptance is to manifest autonomy. Or equivalently, instrumental reasons are reasons of the wrong kind. “Good or evil,” Kant says, “always signifies a reference to the will ” (. . .). Autonomy requires reason-grounding norms of action “all the way down,” that is, principles that are binding on the agent at the most fundamental level simply as a rational agent (among others), independently of the value of any possible state of the world. Only so can the will be “a law to itself independently of any property of the objects of volition” (. . .).14

explains: “Someone might accept the first-order norms that structure the dignity of persons and regulate himself scrupulously by them without accepting anyone’s authority to demand that he do so. He might even accept these as mandatory norms in some suitable sense without accepting anyone’s claim to his compliance. I claim, however, that he would not yet fully acknowledge the dignity of persons or respect persons for their dignity. These involve an irreducibly second-personal dimension” (ibid., p. 14). 12 Ibid., p. 15. 13 Ibid., p. 220. 14 Ibid., p. 221.

212

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

When Darwall says, then, that Kant’s Fact of Reason argument, with its phenomenological example of the Gallows Man, fails when read firstpersonally to provide the right sort of reasons for our obligations, he is saying that it fails to yield formal, autonomous, principle-dependent reasons to ground reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, blame, and punishment. Because the Gallows Man cannot recognize his reasons as these formal, autonomous ones, and cannot recognize himself as a competent practitioner of autonomy generally (understanding, for example, the reasoning process which one needs to go through in order to recognize these reasons), Kant’s example fails. The Gallows Man recognizes himself as bound to an authoritative reason or “ought”; but, because he – and we – cannot recognize in him any adequate notion of autonomy and the ability to reflect on those reasons that would guide this “ought,” his first-personal reflections have done nothing to reveal to him the right kinds of reasons. As such, we cannot understand his reasons as being adequate to ground what members of his moral community have the authority to demand of him. Let us dwell more on this central criticism of the Gallows Man example. The principle-dependent reasons for which we are seeking need to be both autonomously imposed and understood on the one hand, and, on the other, “formal” in the sense that they do not appeal to desires or results but only to some Categorical Imperative-like procedure of thought.15 But Darwall claims there is no clear connection to be found between the Gallows Man’s experience of the Fact of Reason and either autonomy or affirmation that the moral demand he encounters is a determination of his will through a single principle, the “giving of universal law” (5:30/28),16 that is, through the mere form of the law: “there seems no obvious route from the ‘fact of reason’ to autonomy of the will or FPP [the Fundamental Law of Pure Practical Reason].”17 Darwall’s assertion of this lack of connection between the Gallows Man’s experience and lawfulness is similar to the claim we saw Moyar18 make about Kant’s account of conscience: for both, what is lost is the connection between the relevant moral experience (either of the Fact of Reason or of conscience) and an assertion of our reasons being grounded in the mere form of lawfulness. Darwall’s account of this point brings with it an autonomy-inspired twist: the mere form of the 15 Ibid., p. 238. 16 Quoted ibid. 18 Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy.”

17 Ibid., p. 239.

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

213

law is something that needs to be legislated autonomously. And, not only do we not find this mere form of lawfulness in the Gallows Man’s experience; further, we can find nothing in that experience to undergird claims of autonomy. Rather, according to Darwall, the Gallows Man reveals only a lesser sense of reason-giving and a lesser sense of the capacity for acting on those reasons: the sense of can that is in play in Kant’s own discussion [of the prince making demands of the Gallows Man] is simply that of an open deliberative alternative, that is, something such that one’s abilities and opportunities with respect to it do not preclude intelligible consideration of whether to do it. That is why “ought” implies “can” in that sense is so obviously true. “Ought” has the sense of a deliberation-concluding normative judgment: this, of the things I can do, is what I ought to do.19

But on such a nonautonomy-informed sense of ought, we do not get what we need in terms of the moral competence of our moral actors; indeed, non-Kantian notions of obligation could be as likely an explanation of the Gallows Man’s experiences as any assertion of an autonomously legislated formal moral law: “A Rossian intuitionist, for example,” – viz., one who holds that obligations are individual, nonformal demands that are simply “intrinsic” to certain objects20 – “can hold that someone . . . ought to refuse the prince’s demand even if she doesn’t know she should do so, couldn’t know she should, and had no process of reasoning.”21 But such an admission of capacity to act without an understanding of the underlying reasons of that act does not give us that assurance of competence required when we make (unlike the prince) legitimate second-personal demands upon one another. In such cases, we need to know that the persons upon whom we are placing these demands are indeed autonomous in the sense of being able to think through for themselves, via some formal process, what their reasons for acting are. In summary, without appeal to a second-personal point of view in the Gallows Man example, we cannot access the crucial notions of autonomy or determination of the will by a formal, principledependent reason. As such, we must integrate the second-personal standpoint more robustly in our appreciation of moral demands as presented by the Fact of Reason: “the second-person perspective is 19 Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, pp. 239–240. 21 Ibid., p. 240.

20 Ibid., p. 239.

214

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

actually required to underwrite the use to which Kant puts the ‘fact of reason’ in the second Critique.”22 Darwall thus goes on, through the rest of the book, to intertwine this second-personal perspective into the Kantian argument so as to arrive at the conclusion of autonomously legislated, principle-dependent reasons. Clearly, though, if one were able to show that reflection on the firstpersonal reflections of the Gallows Man does indeed yield an autonomously imposed law of morality which is determined by the mere form of the law, then Darwall’s claim that we must appeal to the secondpersonal for such grounding of morality would fail. It is the purpose of this chapter and the next to show that, through philosophical attentiveness to the common experience of the Gallows Man, we can affirm philosophically that the Gallows Man’s understanding of morality is an objective, synthetic a priori cognition of the authority of a necessary, universal, autonomously legislated law determining the will by its mere form. In so doing, we thus simultaneously reject Darwall’s claim of the necessity of a second-personal grounding of any would-be autonomously legislated morality, and Moyar’s assertion of a lack of connection between the Fact of Reason and the mere form of lawfulness.23 To accomplish this, we must first remind ourselves of the discussion of such matters in Part i above. There, we offered a formal strategy for relying upon phenomenological experience to ground objective, synthetic a priori cognitions. Now, we find that strategy coming into its own in our interpretation of the Fact of Reason. The general strategy provided there was this: Kant can rely upon attentive appeal to felt phenomenological experience (instead of inductive appeal to empirical experience) to ground practical cognitions that do not violate the limits of reason and which have genuine objective, synthetic a priori status. Such a method assures a synthetic a priori outcome, first, because it avoids relying on experience in the way that induction

22 Ibid., p. 238. 23 Although I will not provide it here, I think there is also an argument to show that Darwall’s second-personal grounding of morality is not sufficient either. Some secondpersonal encounters succeed in inspiring in some agents just those first-personal reflections necessary to assure the notions of autonomy and formal legislation we seek. But, as the argument of this chapter will show, it is the successful first-personal reflections which do the real work of affirming those categorical obligations which are constitutive of our felt experience. As such, second-personal experiences would be only one way for accessing that crucial set of first-personal reflections, and would not, on their own, be sufficient for assuring autonomy and formal legislation.

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

215

would, relying, that is, on appeal to an empirical experience that might be otherwise in the future. Further, and crucially, this method relies instead upon attentive consideration of a phenomenological experience of necessity, but now (unlike the necessary ordering of our mental representations when the ship moves from up stream to down stream) a practical necessity we encounter in agential experience. If one could find such an experience of necessity, then philosophical attentive reflection upon it could allow one to understand this experience more completely and, further, allow one to affirm what must have caused it, even if one has to admit that such cause is ultimately an object of wonder, not knowledge, and not a straightforward deduction of the conditions for the possibility of our moral experience of necessity. Philosophical attentive reflection on felt experience would thus both confirm the necessitation of our wills and point us beyond that experience of necessitation toward a wondrous appreciation of its source. Appeal to this noumenal cause would, further, open up that epistemological path by which we could recognize the effects of that cause in this world – here, the given Fact of Reason – as a genuinely “synthetic a priori proposition that is not based on any intuition, either pure or empirical” (5:32/28), one of which “we are a priori conscious and [which] is apodictically certain” (5:47/41). Feeling would play an enabling role for achieving this a priori cognition; that is, feeling would give us access to something we could not find otherwise, here, the necessity of moral demands. The necessity accessed through this feeling would, however, play an evidential role in justifying our a priori claim; that is, necessity is something to which we appeal to provide evidence that our claim of moral obligation holds a priori. The assurance of a synthetic a priori outcome for this process depends, then, upon identifying a practical experience of necessity from which the process of attentiveness could proceed. Previously, Kant refused the very possibility of a practical experience of necessity, that is, an experience of categorical obligation. But now, in the experience of the Gallows Man, he does an about-face: he now claims that we do have a nonempirical, phenomenological experience of categorical obligation. This claim of categorical obligation is, furthermore, a synthetic a priori claim, since, in addition to holding with necessity, we can see that “categorical obligation” is not contained analytically in the concept of “the will.”24 24 Kant describes the Fact of Reason as “a synthetic a priori proposition” (5:31/28) and, in the Groundwork, clarifies its synthetic status: “I connect the deed with the will, without a

216

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

We thus take the Gallows Man’s experience of categorical obligation as the common starting point for defending an objective, practical, synthetic a priori cognition of a necessarily binding law. In this chapter, we affirm the rational and autonomous nature of the Gallows Man’s experience of the Fact of Reason, thus challenging Darwall’s claim that first-personal reflection is inadequate to such conclusions; in the next, we consider the Gallows Man’s confidence that he is able to act as he ought, that is, that he is free; and in Chapter 11, we confirm that the claims of both this chapter and Chapter 10 hold as objective and synthetic a priori cognitions. A summary of the rest of this chapter is as follows: we first affirm that the fact encountered by the Gallows Man is a rational one; that is, it is a fact of reason (section ii). We then affirm that, both from a common perspective (section iii) and a philosophical one (section iv), the Gallows Man’s fact is an autonomously legislated one. We thus affirm the Gallows Man’s moral demands as emerging from determination by the mere form of the law, a determination of the will that can be understood through autonomy-informed versions of both the First (Universalizability) Formulation and the Second (Humanity) Formulation of the Categorical Imperative.

ii. The rational cause of the Gallows Man’s experience of obligation The Gallows Man’s categorical obligation. To confirm that the Gallows Man’s experience of categorical obligation is a fact of reason, we must reflect further upon the way in which moral demands press themselves upon him, but now from a specifically philosophical point of view. Common reflection on the Gallows Man experience has already shown that he has an experience of categorical obligation. But when we put his understanding of himself in these terms of categorical versus hypothetical, we already secretly introduced philosophical language to his common experience. The truly common language to apply here would be simply to say that the demand not to lie and not to hurt presupposed condition from any inclination, a priori and hence necessarily . . . This is, therefore, a practical proposition that does not derive the volition of an action analytically from another volition already presupposed (for we have no such perfect will), but connects it immediately with the concept of the will of a rational being as something that is not contained in it” (4:420n/30n).

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

217

others just won’t go away, even if he faces the possibility of his own death in staying true to these demands. Other strong demands on his will dissolve under varying conditions, but his experience of moral demands remains constant no matter how his hopes, desires, and selfinterests shift. Philosophically, though, this stubborn demand has that quality of attachment to his will which Kant attributes to the Categorical Imperative: it is an “unconditional” rule which asserts “one ought absolutely to proceed in a certain way” (5:31/28, emphases added), regardless of changing circumstances. This experience of absolute, categorical obligation is, furthermore, that experience of necessity for which we have been searching to allow Kant’s phenomenological method to come into its own: “the moral law is for [finite beings] an imperative that commands categorically because the law is unconditional; the relation of such a will to this law is dependence under the name of obligation, which signifies a necessitation . . . to an action which is called duty” (5:32/29). It is important to emphasize, though, that this “necessity that the law expresses . . . is not . . . natural necessity” (5:34/31). Necessitation of the will is not a claim that one will inevitably act as the demand directs, as if one’s will were guided by a natural law. Instead, this necessitation is a specifically practical necessity. The law itself is “unconditional,” but it is applied to a will that is “pathologically affected (though not thereby determined, hence still free)” (5:32/29). Absolute necessitation of the will does not guarantee determination of the will to action, but instead awaits the free choice of the agent so affected. This claim fits the Gallows Man’s experiences nicely: he may or may not overcome his love of life in the name of moral demands, so the necessity he experiences is not one in which one experiences oneself as inexorably and unavoidably moved to act. The recognition of necessity is, instead, the recognition of the imperative status of the moral demand: the relationship of his will to moral laws is a necessary one (that is, a relation of categorical obligation, or an imperative). Further, this necessary relationship of the will to moral laws emerges from attentive reflection upon an experience of conflict between these moral demands and those other demands of happiness. Indeed, to recognize the law as an imperative is to recognize it as a demand in conflict with other practical demands pressing upon us, those originating from the pursuit of happiness: “the law has the form of an imperative . . . insofar as [finite beings] are beings affected by

218

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

needs and sensible motives” (5:32/29, emphases added).25 Furthermore, any such “pathologically affected” choice like this “needs a resistance of practical reason which, as moral necessitation, may be called an internal but intellectual constraint” (5:32/29–30, emphasis added) in order to recognize the law. What Kant is describing here is just what we have described in Chapter 7 as the Gallows Man’s common, felt experience of the conflict between happiness and morality, a conflict which issues in an experience of one’s desires for happiness being constrained by awareness of what one ought to do, a constraint the Gallows Man knows only too well. We thus affirm philosophically that the experience of constraint – an experience we have already identified in Chapter 7 as being a felt experience of constraint – is playing an enabling role in accessing our awareness of a necessary, imperative constraint on our will. When we discussed this conflict in Chapter 7, we identified it as an experience of the moral feeling of respect, a feeling Kant has identified as a necessary, a priori feeling. This is not an insignificant point in our march toward affirmation of a synthetic a priori cognition based in felt experience. We are depending upon a very particular felt experience when we look at the felt experience of the conflict between happiness and morality: this is a noncontingent, necessary feeling, and it is just this feeling which provides the Gallows Man with his necessary experience of his absolute, unconditional necessitation of the will. But Kant now introduces new language to this experience of constraint, calling it “internal” and “intellectual,” an experience whose ultimate provenance is “practical reason.” Can we agree with Kant, though, both that the Gallows Man’s experience of a fact is a rational fact, and further, that this feeling which informs his experience is a necessary, a priori one? To answer both these questions in the affirmative, we must first distinguish two closely related claims of necessity in the Gallows Man’s experience which emerge from our above discussion. On the one hand, the content of his felt experience has been affirmed as one of necessitation, that is, of an absolute categorical 25 The point is perhaps more clearly stated in the Groundwork: “[T]his ‘ought’ is strictly speaking a ‘will’ [dieses Sollen ist eigentlich ein Wollen] that holds for every rational being under the condition that reason in him is practical without hindrance; but for beings like us – who are also affected by sensibility, by incentives of a different kind, and in whose case that which reason by itself would do is not always done – that necessity of action is called only an ‘ought,’ and the subjective necessity is distinguished from the objective” (4:449/54–55).

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

219

obligation upon his will. On the other, this experience itself is necessary; that is, it is an experience that will not go away, even as conditions and circumstances change. The force of moral necessitation upon his will is thus itself necessarily experienced. But both these points of necessity were accessed by the Gallows Man through the moral feeling of respect. As such, when Kant says of moral feeling that it is necessary and noncontingent,26 there is a certain plausibility to the claim, especially when we apply the point to the Gallows Man’s experience. The force of moral necessitation upon his will is something that is itself necessarily experienced; it could not be other than it is, no matter what circumstances shift. But he experiences this necessitation, necessarily, through the moral feeling of respect. One is tempted, therefore, to grant that the feeling itself has a necessary status as well. Let us explore this prima facie plausibility further. From the necessary to the rational. This necessary experience of necessitation of the will is the crucial starting point for all attentive philosophical reflection leading to affirmation that the Gallows Man’s knowledge is an objective practical cognition of the Fact of Reason. In Chapter 2, we defended Kant’s use of the experience of necessity as the starting point for arguments, either theoretical or practical, leading to claims that hold with synthetic a priori strength. In the theoretical realm, Kant relied upon the experience of the necessary ordering of our representations: I cannot help but to experience the ship up stream first and then down stream. He then sought the transcendental conditions for the possibility of such an experience. In the practical realm, we now see, through the experience of the Gallows Man, that the relevant experience of necessity is the necessary experience of a categorical necessitation of the will, that is, of finding my will to be unavoidably obligated. One might even call it a necessary necessitation of the will: it is a demand upon the will that cannot be other than it is. This practical experience of necessity is the starting point of our argument. In experiencing himself as categorically obligated, the Gallows Man is experiencing a necessary demand upon his will, a demand that will not go away and that could not be otherwise.27 26 The moral feeling of respect is “a necessary influence on feeling,” and thus an “a priori . . . effect on feeling” (5:74/64, emphases added). 27 One might argue that Kant is here assuming what he is seeking to prove, viz., a necessary constraint upon the will. But we have already argued for the coherence of Kant’s phenomenological method: if we can find an experience which admits of necessity, then we should attend to it, explaining its contours, instead of trying to prove

220

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

Once again, the Gallows Man would not use this language to describe his experience. He would probably just say something like the following: “This demand to tell the truth and not hurt others just won’t go away! I can get over my lusts; they don’t rule my life. But these moral demands do rule my life! I only wanted to satisfy my lusts, but now I know I have to and can do the right thing. I just don’t know, though, whether I’ll have the courage to do so.” Nonetheless, when a philosopher looks at such common language, the philosophical language of necessity versus contingency immediately springs to mind. The Gallows Man’s lusts are merely contingent demands on his will; but the moral demands present themselves with necessity, in the way we have just described. Philosophical reflection thus confirms that we discover necessity in the Gallows Man’s felt experience of constraint. Kant insists, though, that this felt experience of constraint is “an internal but intellectual constraint” (5:32/30, emphasis added). It is, in other words, a constraint, or fact, of reason. Is Kant entitled to this claim? Can we, simply by looking at this felt experience of constraint, confirm that the Gallows Man is experiencing the effects of reason upon his will? When we put the question this way, we place the question of the source of his categorical obligation next to the related question, just mentioned, of whether moral feeling is really a necessary and a priori – that is, a rationally caused – feeling. In Part i, we merely explained what such a claim would mean, and did not defend Kant’s legitimacy in making it. We saw, then, that the feeling of respect is not a priori in the sense that the feeling is prior to experience; that would be nonsensical, for every feeling, qua sensible feeling, is experienced in time even if it does not refer to an empirical object in space and time. Rather, when Kant calls moral feeling an a priori feeling, he means that this feeling, unlike others in our broad experience of feeling, has a rational, noncontingent (instead of an empirical, contingent) cause and, as such, is the only necessary, a priori feeling in all our sensible experience. Is Kant entitled, though, to claim both that the experience of categorical obligation is the experience of reason’s effect on our will

deductively from some nonmoral starting point that we are so necessitated. Further, the structure of this forthcoming argument is no different in this respect from transcendental arguments generally (including the argument of the Second Analogy we considered in Part I); arguments that begin by identifying something necessary in our experience, and then seek conditions for the possibility of such necessity.

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

221

and that, along with that, the feeling upon which one relies to access this categorical obligation is this distinctive a priori feeling with a rational cause? It is precisely in tying the moral feeling of respect to the felt experience of the Gallows Man in just this way that we find a new route by which to defend this feeling as a priori. Indeed, the very same rational cause that will assure the a priori status of moral feeling is the rational cause that affirms that the Gallows Man’s consciousness is consciousness of the Fact of reason, that is, a fact with a rational cause. Once again, though, to make this move from the felt experience of the fact to its rational cause, the crucial point upon which to dwell is that the felt experience of the moral feeling of respect which the Gallows Man experiences, once attended to, is an unavoidable, unconditioned, necessary felt experience of necessitation of the will. Once we establish that the Gallows Man’s felt experience of categorical obligation is this sort of experience, we can do the work that a philosopher has to do in making sense of this odd aspect of our felt experience. In so doing, we affirm both the a priori status of moral feeling and the fact of the Gallows Man’s categorical obligation as a fact of reason. Here, then, is the question the philosopher asks about the Gallows Man’s felt experience: where could a felt experience of a categorical obligation that holds with necessity come from? What cause could be adequate to that effect? Clearly, if ironically, a sensible cause would be inadequate. The moral feeling of respect is itself a sensible experience,28 yet it is a sensible experience that comes with this content of necessity. And if something holds necessarily, then it must be caused by something that itself is necessary; a merely contingent cause could not bring about a necessary and unchanging effect. But all sensible causes have already been identified by Kant as merely contingent causes: they come and go, are sometimes present, sometimes not. It is for this reason (amongst others) that Kant so vociferously rejects moral sense theory: our standard, merely contingent and empirical desires could never bring with them the necessity integral to true moral laws. So, when I encounter something as categorically binding, and then realize that such a thing could not have a contingent cause (because such a cause would be inadequate to the experience of necessity I in fact encounter), I must seek out some other sort of specifically noncontingent cause of my experience. 28 “[S]ensible feeling, which underlies all our inclinations, is indeed the condition of that feeling we call respect” (5:75/65).

222

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

Where, though, could I find a noncontingent cause? Since every influence upon my will derived from the sensible world is, by definition, contingent, I must look elsewhere than in the sensible world. Attentive philosophical reflection thus forces us to admit a nonsensible, intelligible, rational cause of our felt experience of categorical obligation, even as we admit that the exact nature and workings of this cause remain inscrutable. This fact that is forced upon the Gallows Man through the moral feeling of respect, just because of its very nature as a necessary fact of necessitation of the will, is, indeed, a fact of reason! We see here also the first evidential use of the necessity the Gallows Man accessed through his felt experience. Feeling, as we have been saying, played an enabling role in introducing the Gallows Man to his experience of necessity. But now attentive reflection on that necessity itself plays an evidential role in confirming that the source of moral demands is a rational one. The evidential role here for necessity is dual: we simultaneously affirm, through evidential appeal to it, both that the source or cause of categorical obligation and that the source or cause of the feeling by which we are introduced to this categorical obligation are rational, nonsensible ones. The Gallows Man’s fact of moral obligation is, quite literally, a fact of reason; and the moral feeling of respect by which he encounters this obligation is an a priori feeling, that is, a feeling with a rational, noncontingent cause. This account of a rational but mysterious cause of the common person’s felt experience of moral feeling fits perfectly with the account presented in Chapter 2 of Kant’s claim that a sensible feeling can point us toward intelligible representations, which are the cause and focus of that sensible feeling.29 The phenomenological experience of a necessary feeling – itself a very accessible and common aspect of our experience – points us back, mysteriously, to its necessary (i.e., noncontingent, nonsensible), and therefore rational, cause. We need, however, to reassert an important caveat at this point: as we also saw in Chapter 2, because of the limits of reason, Kant cannot simply assert that we have theoretical cognition of this rational moral law, nor any knowledge of how it is that such a rational cause could have its effect in sensibility (i.e., in our experience of the sensible moral feeling of respect). And yet, he can also confidently assert that, whatever that 29 “[F]eeling . . . is the effect of a representation (that may be either sensible or intellectual) upon a subject and belongs to sensibility, even though the representation itself may belong to the understanding or to reason” (6:212n/12n).

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

223

rational, noumenally existing object is, it must indeed be a nonsensible, rational, and intelligible object. We have, through the necessity encountered in the felt experience of conflict between happiness and morality thus affirmed that a rational, intelligible moral law exists and is the source of the categorical obligation under which I find myself compelled. We cannot say how it is that a rational cause has this sensible effect in our felt experience, but we have to admit that it does. We thus welcome the cause of our felt experience of categorical obligation as an object of wonder, not of knowledge.30

iii. Autonomy affirmed through the Gallows Man’s experience The Gallows Man’s incipient common experience of autonomy. We need, however, to appreciate in more detail how both the common person and the philosopher come to appreciate this source of moral experience. In so doing, we will affirm that although the philosopher does not understand this cause’s workings, both the common person and the philosopher can identify it as an aspect of oneself. It is not just any merely contingent part of myself, though; rather, this cause of the necessary, felt experience of categorical necessitation of my will is my very personality or humanity, that part of myself which I share with other rational beings. The rationally legislated law is, in other words, also an autonomously legislated law. In affirming this piece of attentive reflection on the common experience of the Gallows Man, we thus respond most directly to Darwall’s claim that no such hint of autonomy is to be found in the first-personal experience of the Gallows Man. We must, however, be careful as we make this move. We relate to this cause only as an object of wonder, not knowledge; therefore, whatever we say of it philosophically needs to have found its epistemic tether back to the original, common felt experience of categorical obligation. We must, then, once again revisit the common experience of the Gallows Man so as to isolate aspects of his experience that point both him and the philosopher toward understanding the rational ground of his experience of moral demands as his autonomous self. There are, Darwall’s claim to the contrary notwithstanding, at least hints of the autonomous source of rational legislation to be found 30 We will consider in Chapter 11 how it is that we can have an objective practical cognition of the cause of this feeling, even as we admit we do not know this cause.

224

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

within the Gallows Man’s experience. Most crucially, he does not experience this categorical demand as arising from outside of himself: he does not encounter objects in the world that impose themselves upon him as having categorical qualities. That is not to say, of course, that he couldn’t have a first-personal experience of being coerced by something outside him. Not only could he; he actually does! The things he experiences as coming from outside of himself are, however, merely contingent demands upon his will (as, for example, his lust, or the demand from his prince that he lie and hurt someone), not the categorical demands not to lie or hurt others. No one else is telling him he must not lie; no contingent feature of his situation is the source of this demand. The only outside pressure is coming from the prince, who tells him he must lie. It is in the Gallows Man’s ability to distinguish demands which do have an external source from demands which find no external tethering that we confirm his ability to see his moral demands as something special, something with a source other than that hope for happiness which grounds the other demands pressing upon his will. The ability to distinguish different grounds for demands of happiness and demands of morality is an important accomplishment of the Gallows Man. He knows his desires as states of will tied inextricably to objects outside of him (shall we remind him of the object of his lust at this point?), but nothing in his experience suggests that the demands which identify themselves as categorical came from outside of him. There is no prince here to demand these things of him, nor any lustful tug on his desires which point him toward an object outside of himself doing the compelling. He knows what it is like to be tugged at by things coming from outside of himself, these objects of his desire and aversion which contingently present themselves; but that is not what is going on in his experience of the tug of moral demands. Indeed, he knows that this categorical demand points him in a direction opposed to where any of his desires would point him, and that the source of this demand cannot, therefore, come from his desires, or things in the world to which they are attached. The Gallows Man can thus distinguish two different kinds of demands upon his will: one sort comes from outside of him and relates to his happiness; the other sort has no external association and stands above his hopes for happiness. Kant affirms this ability of the common person to distinguish claims of happiness and morality: “The direct opposite of the principle of morality is the principle of one’s own happiness made the determining ground of

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

225

the will . . . So distinctly and sharply drawn are the boundaries of morality and self-love that even the most common eye cannot fail to distinguish whether something belongs to the one or the other” (5:35–36/32–33). Furthermore, when the common person distinguishes claims of happiness as having an external source, and claims of morality as having no such external source, it makes most sense also for him to understand the latter moral demands as coming from himself; there is, after all, nowhere else to look.31 To assert that the categorical demand comes from within his “self” raises an interesting question, though: one might think of one’s self as composed simply of that bundle of desires, the satisfaction of which points this self toward happiness. But now the Gallows Man has identified a part of himself that is not involved in this calculus of pleasures. Who is this part of himself? He is, apparently, a more complex being than even he might first have thought: he has not only a desiring self, but also a self who has different, nondesire-based concerns. This other part of himself is his moral self, his best self, that self which rises above any conception of himself as a mere desiring and happiness-seeking machine.

31 One might wonder whether, having eliminated all empirically existing external influences on his will, there could still be another source of this rational cause beyond himself: how about God? This suggestion has something to it. In the second Critique, Kant rejects a very particular way of understanding God as the source of morality: it is illicit, says Kant, to understand moral demands as coming from the will of God if that divine will precedes our own, that is, is taken “without an antecedent practical principle independent of this idea [of God]” (5:41/37). Such determination would, essentially, be identical to any other external, merely empirical determination of the will. But if we could envision the relationship of the human will to the divine will differently – as Kant himself goes on to do in the Religion – then we might be able to understand our own objective determinations of the will also as divine commands. Kant thus suggests at one point that we experience the voice of conscience as if it came from outside of ourselves in this limited sense of “outside,” that is, as a divine command: “conscience must be thought of as the subjective principle of being accountable to God for all one’s deeds. In fact the latter concept is always contained (even if only in an obscure way) in the moral self-awareness of conscience” (6:440/190). I set aside this discussion for current purposes, however, since proper consideration of this question would require a more complete analysis of Kant’s Religion than we are able to undertake here. It does, however, at least seem plausible to defend the idea that the law a rational God would legislate is the same law I, as a rational being, legislate to myself and which I discover in my struggles with my conscience. Autonomy would thus not be vitiated by appeal to God, but instead given divine affirmation. Such a story would provide an alternative reading of that section from the Metaphysics of Morals quoted here upon which Moyar (“Unstable Autonomy”) depends in his assertion that, when Kant gives divine status to conscience, he undermines the possibility of connecting the deliberation of conscience with the mere form of lawfulness.

226

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

We get a glimpse of this best self in the reflections of the Gallows Man when, looking honestly at himself, he says: “he would perhaps not venture to assert whether he would do it or not, but he must admit without hesitation that it would be possible for him” (5:30/27). What we see here is a glimmer of the conflict between those two parts of himself he has discovered in his deliberations: the part of him who wants to satisfy his inclinations, and the part of him who knows he is capable of rising above his inclinations and doing the right thing. This recognition is, as we have seen, the fruit of his own common judgment about such matters, and that common judgment is, indeed, his: he finds himself capable of rejecting all the demands of his desiring self and acting in a way which places himself above that desiring self.32 This self he accesses, who is capable of acting as morality demands, is thus not that part of himself who deceives himself into believing his lusts are irresistible; this, too, is a part of him, but it is that sensible, affected, phenomenal part of him. The part of him that stands above all this clamoring of the desires and admits that, whatever the state of his desires, he is indeed obligated by and capable of acting on moral demands: that is his recognition of his best, nondesiring self! This is the self who looks honestly and attentively at himself. When the Gallows Man admits that he cannot say whether he would do the right thing, but he knows he could, he reveals to us this internal encounter with the demands of his best self and his worries about whether his worse self is going to beat out his best self. The extended Gallows Man experience: respect or contempt for oneself as confirmation of autonomy. We admit, though, that we get only a glimpse of the autonomous source of moral demands in the text of the Gallows Man example itself: although he knows that the demands of morality 32 Someone might still argue that the Gallows Man must be experiencing the demands of morality with a certain resentment, and that this indicates that these demands are externally imposed. We admit that he could experience moral demands with resentment; but even this does not translate into resentment toward something or someone external to him forcing the demand upon him. Rather, such resentment can be explained internally, through appeal to the interaction between his desiring self and his best self. The desiring self might even experience these moral demands as if they came from outside of him, but this is just to say that he is experiencing an internal struggle between aspects of himself. Indeed, when we remember that we are accessing moral demands upon our will from the perspective of one who is subject to them and is forced to recognize them, then appeal to this internal struggle in the self as a way of describing our encounter seems entirely appropriate.

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

227

do not come from outside of him, nor from his pursuit of happiness, we find no explicit mention of the source of morality as having come from within him. What we have been able to say thus far was achieved by elimination of all other possible sources of the demand, leaving only the self as a plausible source. The reason, though, for this lack of explicit appeal to the autonomous source of moral demands is that we have not yet seen what the Gallows Man does; but, as it turns out, it is in the common, felt experience an agent has of making her decision in such cases that we discover the most powerful phenomenological means for affirming the autonomous source of moral demands. Let us consider some later parts of the Critique which reveal further aspects of the felt experience of the Gallows Man (or of persons in situations) so as to construct more fully a picture of the common appreciation of the autonomous source of morality. So, we have not yet seen what the Gallows Man will do. He admits that he should do it, and that he can do it, but we do not know yet whether he does do what morality demands. But when Kant pursues further the deliberative decisions of someone choosing between competing demands of happiness and morality, he discovers an interesting thing: from the common point of view, we despise ourselves (openly, or secretly) when we do not act as morality demands. We do not despise others or blame something outside of ourselves; rather, we despise ourselves, thus affirming that, in our common experience of such things, what we recognize to have violated in the abuse of moral demands is something within ourselves. Common experience reveals that we identify with the law we violate. The common person thus recognizes herself as the source of moral demands when she invariably despises herself for not following those demands (or when she knows that she would despise herself for not following them). Consider, for example, the following: He who has lost at play can indeed be chagrined with himself and his impudence; but if he is conscious of having cheated at play (although he has gained by it), he must despise himself as soon as he compares himself with the moral law. This must, therefore, be something other than the principle of one’s own happiness. For, to have to say to himself “I am a worthless man although I have filled my purse,” he must have a different criterion of judgment from that by which he commends himself and says “I am a prudent man, for I have enriched my cash box.” (5:37/34)

228

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

The self-contempt this man feels reveals that he has some principle other than his own happiness that is operative: if the principle of happiness were the only one operating, then he would not feel selfcontempt about an action that led to an increase in his happiness. The further, crucial point, though, is that, on the basis of this nonhappiness-based principle, this man feels self-contempt: he despises himself for his failure to live up to this other, nonhappiness-based principle operative upon his will. Not only does his experience of self-contempt tell him that something other than the principle of happiness is operative on his will; beyond that, his self-contempt, in making himself the proper object of that contempt, identifies his self as the source of this other, nonhappiness-related demand. As Kant puts the point, perhaps more subtly than he should: “he must have a different criterion of judgment” (emphasis added) than the principle of happiness. This consideration of the felt experience of someone who has failed to act according to moral demands can be placed next to one of someone who has fulfilled them. Consider Kant’s later revisiting of a man facing a situation strikingly similar to the Gallows Man’s situation, a man who has now chosen not to lie, but instead to suffer the consequences of maintaining his allegiance to the truth. Here, the result of acting as morality demands leads him to respect himself. Once again, as in the previous example of contempt, the object of his immediate respect is not something outside of himself but precisely his own best self. The example Kant gives of someone appreciating himself as the dignified, autonomous source of his moral demands is as follows: This idea of personality, awakening respect by setting before our eyes the sublimity of our nature . . . while at the same time showing us the lack of accord of our conduct with respect to it and thus striking down selfconceit, is natural even to the most common human reason and is easily observed. Has not every even moderately honorable man sometimes found that he has abstained from an otherwise harmless lie by which he could either have extricated himself from a troublesome affair or even procured some advantage for a beloved and deserving friend, solely in order not to have to despise himself secretly in his own eyes? When an upright man is in the greatest distress, which he could have avoided if he could only have disregarded duty, is he not sustained by the consciousness that he has maintained humanity in its proper dignity in his own person and honored it, that he has no cause to shame himself in his own eyes and to dread the inward view of self-examination? This consolation is not

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

229

happiness, not even the smallest part of it. For, no one would wish the occasion for it on himself, or perhaps even a life in such circumstances. But he lives and cannot bear to be unworthy of life in his own eyes. This inner tranquility is . . . only warding off the danger of sinking in personal worth, after he has given up completely the worth of his condition. It is the effect of a respect for something quite different from life, something in comparison and contrast with which life with all its agreeableness has no worth at all. (5:87–88/74–75, emphases added)

Kant needs to build his way up to a gallows-like situation here. Initially, we find a man who chooses not to lie even when the stakes for his happiness are low, one who wants simply to avoid “despising himself secretly,” and isn’t worried about losing his life in the bargain; ultimately, though, we find ourselves considering a man who is in an exceedingly difficult situation, someone who chooses to do his duty even though it causes him “the greatest distress,” indeed, destroys his happiness completely. This is, of course, exactly the fate the Gallows Man faces when he decides not to lie or injure others. What we see here, though, is that, in fulfilling his duty, he has a felt experience of respect for his dignified “personality,” just previous to this excerpted quote, what Kant also called “the humanity in his person” (5:87/74). We thus affirm not only that this gallows-like felt experience of respect reveals to the common person himself as the source of his moral demands; beyond that, it identifies that part of himself from whom this moral legislation emerged: his best self is here identified as his “personality” or “the humanity in his person.” This man recognizes, in the respect he feels for himself in the fulfillment of moral demands under circumstances so harsh as to destroy any possibility of happiness, that he also identifies with these harsh commands. They come from that part of himself which identifies not with his many desires and the hope for their fulfillment, but instead with his very personhood, personality, or humanity. By being wiped clean of any hope for happiness, he identifies, underneath his hopes for happiness, “something quite different from life” and “its agreeableness”; he discovers, that is, the essence of himself as a human being. Let us dwell for a moment upon this important point. We have been saying, from the common point of view, that the part of himself that the Gallows Man respects when he acts as morality demands is his best self, that part of him that rises above all pursuit of pleasure and happiness. But here that best self is now more clearly identified: it is

230

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

the “humanity . . . in his person,” or, alternatively, his “personality” (5:87/74). The best part of a person, who stands above his desires and his pursuit of happiness, is not only a part of himself; it is also the voice of all humanity, indeed, that part of him that makes him human. Kant best explains what he means by “personality” or “humanity” in the Religion. There he claims that “personality” – or what he also calls “the idea of humanity considered wholly intellectually” – is defined as “the idea of the moral law alone, together with the respect that is inseparable from it” (6:28/52). It is one’s very capacity to have, identify with, and respect a specifically moral law that defines the human as human. Importantly, though – and this helps us appreciate why we should react with the respect that in fact we do when we encounter this part of ourselves – this capacity we have to be subject to moral laws assures that we have “freedom and independence from the mechanism of the whole of nature”: “[the origin of duty] is nothing other than personality, that is, freedom and independence from the mechanism of the whole of nature, regarded nevertheless as also a capacity of a being subject to special laws – namely pure practical laws given by his own reason” (5:87/74). We need eventually to address how being “subject” to a law can be just the thing that affirms one’s “freedom from the mechanism of the whole of nature”; this is simply a more philosophical version of the Gallows Man’s recognition that he is able to do what he ought, and it is a topic for Chapter 10. For the present, though, we appeal to this text to affirm that when the Gallows Man recognizes his “personality” or “the humanity within himself” as that part of himself whom he respects as the result of acting morally, it is, simply, his autonomously legislating rational nature that he is respecting. That best part of himself that was revealed to him when he discovered that he had another basis for reasons beyond his desires is, then, his rational self, that part of him which defines him as human. Furthermore, while this independence and lawgiving is indeed distinctive of (even definitional of) his humanity, identifying a “rationality” beyond desire-based rationality to define this part of him affirms that this part of him is something that he shares not only with all other humans but also with all rational beings, including holy beings. As Kant puts the point: This principle of morality, just on account of the universality of the lawgiving that makes it the formal supreme determining ground of the

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

231

will regardless of all subjective differences, is declared by reason to be at the same time a law for all rational beings insofar as they have a will, that is, the ability to determine their causality by the representation of rules, hence insofar as they are capable of actions in accordance with principles and consequently also in accordance with a priori practical principles . . . [This principle of morality] is, therefore, not limited to human beings only but applies to all finite beings that have reason and will and even includes the infinite being as the supreme intelligence. (5:32/29)

So, although the Gallows Man himself might not (probably would not) put his self-understanding in all of these explicitly philosophical ways we have just described it, the philosopher can, when looking at the Gallows Man’s experience of respect for himself in light of his choice to follow moral demands, affirm that he is recognizing himself as an autonomously legislating rational agent, and that, in respecting that part of himself, he is respecting not just some contingent aspect of himself, but the very human being within himself. And although the common person doesn’t use such complex philosophical language, recognizing one’s own moral demands as demands of humanity is a convincingly common claim. “That’s inhumane!” is a common thing to say in response to a horrible act.33 “That is beneath me” is another common phrase that captures the idea of certain acts being outside the realm not of what one could possibly desire, but instead of what one’s self as a human being can accept or tolerate. Indeed, people who are placed in horrifying situations often speak of the injury to their humanity which occurred when they were forced to base actions, or when they themselves were the target of such base actions. People who are haunted by their consciences as a result of inhumane acts they have done are another good place to look for one’s humanity kicking in to punish one’s merely desiring self. Self-contempt is, clearly, and unfortunately, a very common human experience.34

33 I was struck today when James Murdoch, the son of Rupert Murdoch, suggested that the actions of the News of the World in hacking into the cell phones of murder victims and the relatives of war veterans was “inhumane” (www.nytimes.com, July 7, 2011). He is clearly utilizing such a reference in a self-serving matter; yet, even as he does, he knows how to pull at the heart-strings of the common moral person. To call something “inhumane” is to appeal to a very familiar human experience of revulsion or contempt. 34 I think here of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (New York: Vintage, 1993); or of the young German soldier, Karl, in Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower (New York: Schocken, 1969).

232

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

“I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do the right thing” is another good way of placing common language upon this experience of upholding the dignity of one’s humanity even in the face of injury to oneself. This locution is particularly interesting, since it admits the two senses of self with which we have been dealing here (the self seeking happiness and the self standing above that desiring self). When we say “I” couldn’t live with “myself,” the “I” is the better self, and the “myself” is the desiring self who has engaged in self-mutiny. As human beings, we expect certain treatment, and hold ourselves to certain kinds of constraints upon our actions; when these constraints are violated, we typically experience our merely desiring selves as contemptible, and humanity itself as having been injured. To summarize: in the case of cheating, we saw a person recognize himself as an object of contempt as a result of his refusal to fulfill his duties by following the rules of the game; now, we see a person recognizing himself as an object of respect as a result of him fulfilling his duties in spite of the distress (indeed, the utter destruction of his happiness) that it brings him. Such self-contempt or self-respect indicates, in the former case, that he has injured something in himself when he acts contrary to morality and, in the latter case, that he has elevated something in himself when he acts in agreement with morality. It is attentive reflection on these felt experiences of contempt or respect, with the very humanity of the self as its object, and the injury to or elevation of that same humanity which accompanies such felt experiences that reveal the Gallows Man’s rational humanity as the source of moral demands. He is, after all, the one to be honored for this action or despised for his failure to act. There is no other source to which we affectively appeal to understand who is responsible here. He experiences his violation of the moral law as an injury to himself, and his upholding of the moral law as a respect for himself. One might object that this self-contempt or self-respect does not actually show autonomous legislation. Could I not react this way to my violation of a law that finds its legislative source elsewhere, external to me? Self-contempt or self-respect would simply be a reaction to myself as the cause of the action, not as the legislator of the law that I have violated or upheld. Such an objection fails, however, to recognize the particular nature of self-contempt or self-respect. If I were to violate an externally imposed law, then I might cringe; I might worry that I’ll get in trouble; I might even regret that I didn’t follow the law. As Kant puts it, I might

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

233

feel “chagrined,” like someone who lost at a game (5:37/34). I know that there is a law of sorts that advises me to get everything that I can that will make me happy. Failing to enact that law in every circumstance does indeed lead me to be annoyed at myself, or even disappointed in myself. Such reactions are inspired by the unfortunate consequences I will have to suffer as a result of my failure to do what would have assured my happiness. This is how one feels when the object of one’s feelings is the failure of one’s actions, and only that. But I wouldn’t feel contempt for myself in such situations. The selfcontempt I feel when I violate morality reveals more than that I have broken a law; beyond that, it is an admission of the identification I make between myself and that broken law. I would not react emotionally with self-contempt (i.e., “I couldn’t live with myself ”) to the violation of a law that wasn’t a part of me, or with which I did not identify; but I do so react to violating this law. “I couldn’t live with myself if I did that” means, then, that “I would injure a valuable part of myself if I did that.” It is the “I” of the “I couldn’t live with myself” who is injured here. It is that part of myself who is the source of that law, and who has been mutinized by the desiring self. There is a further point to appreciate about this identification of one’s self with the law: this is an unavoidable, necessary identification. We can often choose whether we want to identify with a demand upon our action: if I decide that I care about becoming a cellist, I identify myself with whether I succeed in meeting the demands of musicianship. I can, however, also choose to abandon such identifications, an abandonment that might lead to sadness or wistfulness, but not contempt. But the nagging nature of my experience of obligation combined with the promise of an experience of self-contempt if I act against morality shows that I cannot help but identify with this demand upon my action: this law is not only a part of me, it is inevitably a part of me. This is one good way of appreciating Kant’s point when he says that the Fact of Reason is “unavoidable” (5:55/48) or that moral feeling visits upon me whether I want it to or not.35 I may try to dodge 35 “[B]efore a humble common man in whom I perceive uprightness of character in a higher degree than I am aware of in myself my spirit bows, whether I want it or whether I do not and hold my head ever so high, that he may not overlook my superior position. Why is this? His example holds before me a law that strikes down my self-conceit when I compare it with my conduct, and I see observance of that law and hence its practicability proved before me in fact” (5:77/66). Interestingly, if this were the Gallows Man acting with such feigned superiority, what would be proved to him by this humble man

234

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

this inevitable identification through self-deception, describing my experience of moral feeling, for example, as the effect of too much caffeine. But the weight of the feeling, whatever meaning I try to attribute to it, will haunt me. That I cannot escape this self-contempt is thus evidence of this inescapable identification I make between the law and myself. Reflections on method. It is important to emphasize that this articulation of the extended experience of the Gallows Man all occurred on the terrain of attentive reflection on felt experience. Indeed, the felt experience of self-contempt or self-respect is really just a variation of the Gallows Man’s initial experience of the moral feeling of respect. Initially, he felt a constraint upon his inclinations, and an elevation of himself above his merely desiring self (an indication of which we found in him when he recognized he was capable of acting as he ought). These are the two familiar negative and positive moments of moral feeling as Kant describes them in the “Incentives” section of the second Critique.36 But we can also see self-contempt and self-respect as two particularly strong versions of each of the moments of moral feeling: self-contempt comes from the constraint side of moral feeling, moving toward humiliation as I continue to ignore the demand to constrain myself;37 and self-respect comes from the positive side of the feeling, now taken not simply as respect for the law, but also as respect for my self.38 We thus affirm that attentive reflection on this extended felt experience of the moral feeling of respect yields this understanding of one’s rational self as the source of moral demands. Once again, feeling plays an enabling role in pointing us toward something important in our is that it is indeed possible to act as he should have; it is a reminder of his own realization, accomplished in a finer moment of attentiveness, that “he must admit without hesitation that it would be possible for him” (5:30/27) to do the right thing. I thus affirm that the second-personal standpoint of which Darwall speaks can be one means by which to access that first-personal attentiveness to one’s moral experiences crucial for affirming one’s moral obligations. 36 See, e.g., 5:72–73/63. 37 Kant describes the negative side of moral feeling as “weaken[ing] self-conceit,” or “even strik[ing] down self-conceit, that is, humiliat[ing] it” (5:73/63). 38 “Once one has laid self-conceit aside and allowed practical influence to that respect, one can in turn never get enough of contemplating the majesty of this law, and the soul believes itself elevated in proportion as it sees the holy elevated above itself and its frail nature” (5:77–78/67).

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

235

rational selves: whereas initial reflection on his felt experience revealed to the Gallows Man that he was categorically necessitated, here reflection on this extended felt experience reveals to him that his rational self is the source of these necessary moral demands. Attentive reflection on the felt experience of self-contempt or self-respect thus affirms a common basis for understanding moral demands as autonomously legislated. There is an important methodological point to emphasize here, though: when I assert that a common, felt experience points us toward our status as autonomous legislators, I am not thereby saying that we have a conscious, common, felt experience of legislating the law. As we have already emphasized, we can only have a conscious, felt experience of being subject to the law, not of legislating it; that is the perspective from which we make sense of ourselves as moral beings. But reflection on this experience of being subject to the law indicates to us things about what the nature of the legislation of that law has to be. Here, the way my rejection of the law has an inescapable effect on my felt state – I despise myself – indicates that this law is not something that I put on or take off at will. It is, rather, that rational part of myself which rises above my merely desiring self. I thus know that I am the rational legislator of this law, even if I cannot experience myself as rationally legislating it. Rather, I confirm myself as legislator of the law via attentive reflection on my experience of being subject to it. We thus affirm, once again, the import – and possibility – of accessing affirmation of our autonomously legislating selves from within the limits of what Kant says we can know of ourselves. Unlike Franks and Moyar,39 who, in various ways, turn to claims of recognizing oneself as an active legislator of moral demands to affirm some version of Kantian morality, we instead focus on attentiveness to what we find already present in felt experience to access these same claims. The Gallows Man does not have conscious deliberative experience from the perspective of his legislating self, but instead a felt, receptive experience of constraint, contempt, or self-respect that he can trace to that noumenal self. We also affirm at this point at least a partial response to Darwall’s claim that we cannot access an autonomously legislated law firstpersonally. Through reflection on the Gallows Man’s extended

39 Franks, All or Nothing; Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy.”

236

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

experience of self-contempt and self-respect, we can show that the Gallows Man’s first-personal reflection does indeed allow him to understand his moral reasons as the “right kind” of reasons: they are reasons that do not emerge from his desires, from the hope of good consequences, or from anything outside of himself. They emerge instead from his own best, autonomously legislating self. The second-personal standpoint, though perhaps one means of achieving these reasons, is thus not necessary for doing so. One can even call these reflections of the Gallows Man a sort of justification or grounding of the legitimacy of the moral demands he finds pressing upon him. The Gallows Man himself may not use that language, for “the justification of moral demands” is not a concern of the common person; he may instead simply say that he knows himself better, and rightly respects himself for how he has handled a difficult situation. But when the philosopher looks at the twists and turns of the common person’s felt experience, she affirms that such experience is legitimately taken as a philosophical grounding or justification of the practical cognition of moral obligation: moral demands are properly imposed upon me because they find their source in my own rational nature, and attentive reflection on the common felt experience of the conflict between happiness and morality (instead of philosophical deduction from a nonmoral premise) is the legitimate epistemic means by which to affirm this philosophical claim. To complete our argument in response to both Darwall and Moyar, though, we must consider whether these reasons coming from the Gallows Man’s rational self are “formal” in the requisite sense: are they reasons that find their force simply from the “mere form of lawfulness”? To answer this question, we need to consider how the Gallows Man’s understanding of moral reasons is an understanding of the Categorical Imperative itself. Let us conclude this chapter with that discussion.

iv. The Gallows Man’s common appreciation of the Categorical Imperative Introduction. Connecting the moral experiences of the Gallows Man with the various formulations of the Categorical Imperative to which Kant appeals in the Critique is the final piece of our argument for affirming that the Gallows Man’s felt experience is indeed the felt experience of the Fact of Reason itself. Showing this connection of

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

237

his experience to precise formulations of the Categorical Imperative will, furthermore, reveal the distinctive way in which these formulations are presented in the Critique as compared to the Groundwork. What we shall discover is that both the Universalizability Formulation (or the Natural Law Formulation) and the Humanity Formulation of the Categorical Imperative, precisely because they find their ground in the common experience of the Gallows Man, are both also articulated in connection with an assertion of the autonomous legislation of the law. The crucial point to note in moving from the Gallows Man’s experiences to Kant’s articulations of these formulas of the Categorical Imperative is this: the two aspects of the Gallows Man’s experience upon which we have focused from the common perspective to affirm the autonomous legislation of his moral demands (viz., that nothing in his desires provides the ground for moral demands and that he either despises or respects himself when he either fails or succeeds in acting in accordance with moral demands) are precisely those philosophical points upon which Kant himself focuses in the explicitly philosophical reflections which lead him to autonomy-informed articulations, respectively, of the Universalizability (or Natural Law) Formulation and the Humanity Formulation of the Categorical Imperative. The Gallows Man’s recognition that nothing in his desires provides the ground for the categorical demand upon his will leads us, philosophically, to a combined universalization–autonomy formulation of the Categorical Imperative. And the Gallows Man’s extended experience of self-contempt or self-respect leads us, philosophically, to a combined humanity–autonomy formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Because, through appeal to the common person’s appreciation of autonomy, Kant can begin these arguments with a claim of autonomy, he has, through appeal to the Gallows Man’s experience, a new, autonomy-informed way of affirming these two formulations of the Categorical Imperative. Let us consider each formulation in turn. The autonomy-informed Universalizability Formulation of the Categorical Imperative. So, first, when Kant argues that the Fact of Reason is an autonomously legislated law which demands that “the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law” (5:30/28), he relies centrally upon a philosophical distinction between a principle guided by a material condition and one involving only “the formal conditions of the possibility of a law in general” (5:34/31). Any empirically conditioned, merely contingent

238

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

principle upon which I might act brings with it a “matter”: that object toward which my desire is pointed and the attainment of which would constitute the satisfaction of the desire in question. But because the principle of the moral law holds necessarily, it cannot find its ground in this merely contingent material condition; it must, rather, be determined by the mere form of law: [A] practical precept that brings with it a material (hence empirical) condition must never be reckoned a practical law. For . . . the necessity that the law expresses, since it is not to be a natural necessity, can therefore consist only in the formal conditions of the possibility of a law in general. All the matter of practical rules rests always on subjective conditions, which afford it no universality for rational beings other than a merely conditional one (in case I desire this or that, what I would then have to do in order to make it real). (5:34/31)

This distinction between material and formal determinations of the will may seem an obscure philosophical point, one which finds no basis in the common person’s experience. And yet, we can easily find a very common way of describing the philosophical difference between material and formal determining grounds of the will. The common ground for this philosophical claim that a truly moral determination of the will comes from the mere form of the law can be found in the Gallows Man’s ability, already noted, to distinguish things that he wants to do from things that he has to do. Importantly, the latter bare demand not to lie is unrelated to desire satisfaction, and the Gallows Man knows this. The demand to be truthful is not grounded in the hope of satisfying a desire, because all of his desires would point him in the opposite direction! He can thus say: “My desires aren’t what is pushing me here; I don’t want to do this! But I am obligated by something other than the content of what I hope to achieve for my happiness.”40 But this is exactly Kant’s point when he says that the will is determined by the mere form of the law. Because something presents or “expresses” itself as holding upon the will with “necessity,” we have to look somewhere other than the matter of desires to understand the 40 I am reminded here of the movie High Noon, in which the hero, Will Kane (an aptly named Kantian hero!), says “You think I like this?” when his wife tries to convince him that he needn’t be a hero when he insists upon staying in town to fight the immanently arriving bad guys.

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

239

determining force of the demand. But once the material conditions underpinning our rational imperatives are removed, there is nothing left but the mere form of rational demands, that is, the mere form of the rational law itself. “I don’t want to do it; I have to do it!” thus translates philosophically into the claim that moral demands are determined by the mere form of the law, not any content of it. This mere form of the law is, of course, the bare possibility of the universalization of my maxim,41 or, alternatively, the possibility of seeing my maxim as the giving of a natural law.42 Full defense of this formal, autonomously legislated law as the Universalizability Formulation of the Categorical Imperative (and the relationship of the Universalizability Formulation to the Natural Law Formulation) would require more work than we can here provide. Yet we can see the direction such defense would take, given that we have affirmed that the Gallows Man’s law is determined by the mere form of law. Universalizability is that test which confirms that one’s will is in fact determined by the mere form of lawfulness: if one’s maxim is universalizable, then this assures that the ground of one’s maxim is merely formal, that is, does not depend upon any contingent object of the will/desire to gain its obligatory force. Kant even suggests that such capacity for universalization is at least implicit in the moral experiences of the common person.43 Once we admit this common ground for the distinction between formal and material determination of the will and for the determination of one’s will by the mere form of the law, the philosophical claim that this determination or legislation of the will is an autonomous one is not far off. We have just said that a rational cause that holds with necessity has to be a merely formal cause. It turns out, though, that a nonmaterial, formal cause has to be an autonomous one: if I have no 41 See, e.g., 5:30/28: “So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law,” a point which is defended, in the “Remark” following it, as “a rule that determines the will a priori only with respect to the form of its maxims” (5:31/28). 42 See, e.g., 5:44/39, where Kant describes how “the most ordinary attention to oneself” affirms that “we are conscious through reason of a law to which all our maxims are subject, as if a natural order must at the same time arise from our will.” 43 See 5:27–28/25. Although I affirm the common basis for something that can be described philosophically as the universalization procedure, I would avoid saying that the common person actually consciously engages in that procedure. At most, I would attribute to the common person a capacity for raising questions like “What if everyone did that?” and “Am I making an exception of myself here?”

240

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

object of desire to which to appeal to explain the necessitation of my will, then I have nothing outside of me to which to appeal to explain that necessitation. Formal determination of my will must thus emerge from within the will itself, since it cannot come from any object or content of willing. It must, that is, be an autonomous legislation of law: [T]he sole principle of morality consists in independence from all matter of the law (namely, from a desired object) and at the same time in the determination of choice through the mere form of giving universal law that a maxim must be capable of. That independence, however, is freedom in the negative sense, whereas the lawgiving of its own on the part of pure and, as such, practical reason is freedom in the positive sense. Thus the moral law expresses nothing other than the autonomy of pure practical reason, that is freedom . . . [T]he necessity that the law expresses, since it is not to be a natural necessity, can therefore consist only in the formal conditions of the possibility of a law in general . . . Hence the mere form of a law, which limits the matter, must at the same time be a ground for adding this matter to the will but not for presupposing it. (5:33–34/30–31)

Admission of determination of the will that is independent from any content or matter of one’s desires thus leads us to admit that the will itself has its own determining force. The mere form of the law is the will itself as lawful! Indeed, the only other thing to look for once we remove all matter or content of the will is what the law is once it has no empirical objects. What, though, is left of lawfulness operating on the will once we remove all concern for those objects of desire which might help the will to be necessitated via hypothetical imperative? Only the will itself! Legislation by the mere form of the law is thus, necessarily, autonomous legislation. The will is its own law. Further, we can affirm not only that this autonomous legislation of the will is Kant’s long-sought-after sense of freedom in the “positive” sense (that is, determination of the will through the very notion of one’s own autonomous lawgiving), but also that, because of our removal from determination of the will by objects external to it, this will is negatively free as well (that is, the will is independent from being determined by content external to it). In the Groundwork, Kant had hoped that an experience of freedom would point us toward admission of moral obligation, but no such phenomenological trail was forthcoming. Our only felt experience of freedom was of negative freedom, but that was inadequate for pointing us toward anything. But now, by

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

241

beginning from a robust felt experience of moral obligation, he has been able to trace a phenomenological trail from moral obligation to freedom in the positive sense.44 We thus affirm that the philosopher’s way of making the argument to an autonomously legislated law of universalizability moves from the necessity of the law in question to its merely formal nature to its autonomously legislated source. Affirmation of this formal law comes, though, from the appreciation that a law which holds with necessity cannot appeal to the content or material of what the will desires to ground its lawfulness. Such a ground would be inadequate to the law’s already affirmed necessity. And it is just this point in the argument toward the Universalizability Formulation of the Categorical Imperative that we can find easily in the Gallows Man’s experience: he knows that the demand to tell the truth doesn’t come from his desires (all his desires are opposed to telling the truth!). But philosophically informed reflection on this point allows us to affirm, philosophically, that the Gallows Man’s common experience is one of autonomous legislation through the mere form of a law. First, we see that the demand to tell the truth isn’t based in any of the Gallows Man’s desires. Then we see this means that this demand cannot be based in or determined by the content of those desires. If no content of desire is the ground for the demand, though, the only other thing to which to appeal is a merely formal demand of reason. A rational will, without any appeal to a possible content of that will, has its own demands. And the Gallows Man is experiencing one of those! We can thus reject Moyar’s suggestion that first-personal deliberation related to the Fact of Reason must lose the connection of the rational self to lawfulness.45 To the contrary, it is in attentive reflection upon one’s felt experiences of reasons not grounded in desire that we can affirm that the will is determined precisely by the mere form of the law. We can, too, complete our rejection of Darwall’s suggestion that first-personal reflection does not yield reasons of the right sort. Not

44 There is, though, more to say about how recognition of moral obligation moves us toward recognition of freedom; for, although we have affirmed positive freedom as autonomous legislation and negative freedom as independence from determination by contingent objects of desire, we still have not made sense of the heart of freedom in the second Critique: the Gallows Man’s conviction that he can do what he ought. We take up that question in Chapter 10. 45 Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy.”

242

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

only are the Gallows Man’s reasons not desire-based or consequencebased; they are, further, those “formal” reasons Darwall is seeking. And because, although he does it in his own common language, the Gallows Man can articulate to himself central qualities of this kind of reason, we can attribute to him that competence required of all rational agents which Darwall also seeks. The autonomy-informed Humanity Formulation of the Categorical Imperative. The Gallows Man’s experience of categorical obligation can thus be articulated as autonomous legislation via the mere form of the law, a characterization of his experience that points us toward the Universalizability (and/or Natural Law) Formulation of the Categorical Imperative. But our extended Gallows Man experience (the one in which we appreciate the felt experiences of self-respect or self-contempt when he either does or does not do the right thing) confirms an autonomyinformed version of the Humanity Formulation of the Categorical Imperative. We should preface this argument, though, by reflecting on the very need for a further formulation of that law by which the Gallows Man finds himself obligated. Immediately after his introduction of the Gallows Man and the language of the Fact of Reason, Kant turns to a defense of the Universalizability Formulation of the Categorical Imperative. But nowhere in these sections do we find any reference to the more familiar and accessible Humanity Formulation. We will, eventually, see an indirect reference to this formula visible in the experiences of the Gallows Man; but Kant makes no effort, at least not initially, to articulate those inklings more explicitly as the Humanity Formulation. One might, however, wish that Kant had found the need for a less formal, if still philosophical, articulation of the law guiding the Gallows Man. We are, after all, emphasizing the common ground of moral demands. And there is something unsatisfying from the common point of view about the suggestion that the merely formal Universalizability Formulation of the law is the best way to make sense of an autonomously legislated law. We can indeed, as we have just seen, make sense of the Universalizability Formulation of the Categorical Imperative as an autonomously legislated law as grounded in the Gallows Man’s common experiences. And yet the merely formal nature of the determination of the will seems to leave something lacking. We understand that the will is not determined via reference to the content of our

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

243

desires, but what can it mean for the mere form of a law to have determining force? Indeed, what can it mean, from the common perspective, for the will to be its own law? The Universalizability Formulation answers these questions, of course: the mere form of lawfulness is universalizability, and when the will has no content, it can only rely upon that mere form of lawfulness it finds within itself; so determination of our wills is guided by our ability to universalize our maxims. It is, in other words, guided by the will itself as lawful. Even so, one wants to appreciate, beyond the logical coherence of such a move, why this universalizing capacity of the will matters. This is my will that is determining itself, after all, and the common appreciation I have of my own ability to will and choose is not fully captured in all this language of its formal nature. One needs to appreciate the value that underlies the capacity of a will to determine itself by its mere form. This need is, however, satisfied when we can say of an autonomously legislated law that the determination of the will it imposes comes not simply from the mere form of lawfulness, but also, and simultaneously, from the absolute value of that person who is that will: my will is determined to certain obligations (which can be described as universalizable maxims) because the absolute value of its own rational nature demands that it be so determined. We needn’t, furthermore, be worried that in so doing, we will be turning a merely formal law into something that has illicit content. Rather, in asserting that the will itself, without appeal to merely contingent contents or matters of desire, has its own content (viz., the absolute value of rational nature itself), we will affirm Kant’s suggestion, way back in the Groundwork, that while the First Formulation of the Categorical Imperative articulates that law’s form, the Second Formulation articulates its content or matter.46 Happily, then, Kant does eventually make a direct connection between the first-personal, felt reflections of the Gallows Man and the Humanity Formulation.47 It made sense, though, to think first of this

46 See 4:436/43–44. 47 One might think that the Gallows Man could not gain an appreciation for the absolute value of humanity as such only through reflecting on himself: does he not need to reflect on the value of other persons in order to recognize the true value of persons as such? Such would be the commitment of interpreters like Darwall, who argue that a second-personal standpoint is central for appreciating both moral constraints and human dignity. We are not directly challenging Darwall’s second-personal standpoint account of morality here; but, once again, in showing that we can access an appreciation

244

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

legislation of the moral law as merely formal when we needed to distinguish it from principles of the will pointed toward happiness. This is because all imperatives related to happiness were also related to some object of desire that provided the ground for the imperative. But moral demands are not related to such objects of desire. As such, in relation to desire-based imperatives, we must understand moral imperatives as being merely formal, and our will as being determined by the mere form of lawfulness. All of this does not, however, prevent us from asserting that this determination of the will has some other, nondesire-based content. Let us trace Kant’s movement to that claim in the second Critique first by returning briefly to the Groundwork, where he most clearly identifies that nondesire-based content that would determine our will: But suppose there were something the existence of which in itself has an absolute worth, something which as an end in itself could be a ground of determinate laws; then in it, and in it alone, would lie the ground of a possible categorical imperative, that is, of a practical law. (4:428/36)

The point to appreciate here is that we needn’t appeal to something that is merely formal as the ground of that determination of the will we call a categorical imperative. To the contrary, Kant here looks for something that “exist[s],” not for some abstract, content-less formula. If we could find something whose existence entailed absolute value, then our wills would be determined by that very fact. We would, in other words, be constrained in our willing because that willing would need, in all its willing, to be cognizant of these beings who exist as absolutely valuable. And, of course, this is just what Kant goes on to assert. It is because we can claim “that the human being and in general every rational of the worth of persons as such through solely first-personal reflections, we question the necessity of the second-personal standpoint. In so doing, we follow, perhaps more rigorously than Darwall himself does, Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals claim that “I can recognize that I am under obligation to others only insofar as I at the same time put myself under obligation, since the law by virtue of which I regard myself as being under obligation proceeds in every case from my own practical reason; and in being constrained by my own reason, I am also the one constraining myself” (6:417–418/173). Kant here suggests that the heart of appreciating moral obligation is a first-personal reflection on oneself: it is only when I truly understand, non-self-deceptively, my own situation of moral obligation that I can genuinely appreciate the nature of my obligation to and respect for others.

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

245

being exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be used by this or that will at its discretion” (4:428/37), that we can claim further that our actions are constrained by this existing absolute value. We can, in other words, on the basis of the absolute value of humanity, assert: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (4:429/38). Furthermore, this existing fact of absolute value is the content of the Categorical Imperative, now not content in the sense of the content or matter of one’s willing or desiring, but in the sense of a robust, contentfilled description of that rational being which is the source of willing. Admission of such a content or value to the autonomously legislating need not, however, be contradictory to Kant’s earlier assertion that such legislation is effected via the mere form of the law. It is simply a question of how we want to look at the same determination of the will: either in comparison with determination of the will via desire-based imperatives, or via its own positive source of determination. When we do the former, the language of universalizability and determination by the mere form of the law makes most sense; when we do the latter, a more contentful recognition of the will as an existing absolutely valuable thing and the Humanity Formulation make most sense. One might worry, though, that, although we have described Kant’s Groundwork attitude, this is something he sets aside as less crucial in the Critique. One might even suspect that the second Critique not only downplays but practically ignores the import of this Humanity Formulation of the Categorical Imperative. This is not, however, the case. Kant does not turn as immediately as one might hope to this formulation of the moral law in the second Critique, especially when he is discussing the Fact of Reason in the first chapter of Part i of the Critique. But the Humanity Formulation, as we have just considered it, emphasizes the dignity of humanity, and the third chapter of the Critique – the “Incentives” chapter – is centrally concerned with just this point. Interpretive tendencies, though, lead us to read this section as being concerned only with the question of motivation to moral action, so we can easily miss the fact that, within it, Kant also speaks of the justification of the Humanity Formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Kant presents this articulation of the Humanity Formulation immediately before his articulation of the common experience of respecting oneself of which we spoke in the previous section, eventually taking

246

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

that common experience to be an affirmation in felt experience of the validity of the formulation of the Categorical Imperative he provides. He suggests that recognition of the “idea of personality” – which has just been identified as “a capacity of a being subject to special laws – namely pure practical laws given by his own reason” – “is natural even to the most common human reason and is easily observed” (5:87/74). Indeed, this common experience of self-respect that he goes on to articulate provides the common ground for the Humanity Formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Kant’s articulation of the Humanity Formulation here is, however, a particularly interesting one, since it refers intrinsically to autonomy: In the whole of creation everything one wants and over which one has any power can also be used merely as a means: a human being alone, and with him every rational creature, is an end in itself: by virtue of the autonomy of his freedom he is the subject of the moral law, which is holy. Just because of this every will, even every person’s own will directed to himself, is restricted to the condition of agreement with the autonomy of the rational being, that is to say, such a being is not to be subjected to any purpose that is not possible in accordance with a law that could arise from the will of the affected subject himself; hence this subject is to be used never merely as a means but as at the same time an end. We rightly attribute this condition even to the divine will with respect to the rational beings in the world as its creatures, inasmuch as it rests on their personality, by which alone they are ends in themselves. (5:87/74)

This is a really interesting articulation of the Humanity Formulation, one which follows directly from Kant’s earlier assertion that the moral law is a legislation of the will by the mere form of the law. In that earlier assertion, the Universalizability Formulation is connected to the claim of autonomy, since a universal law is legislated by the mere form of the law, and hence, autonomously, by the will itself. We now see that the Humanity Formulation is similarly connected with autonomy. The crucial link between the Humanity Formulation and autonomy is Kant’s clear statement (one would have wished for such clarity in the Groundwork so as to avoid interpretive confusions there!) that the status of being an “end in itself,” or a being of absolute worth, is conferred upon a being “by virtue of the autonomy of [one’s] freedom” and via which “he is the subject of the moral law” (emphasis added). In other words, we are constrained in the way we treat rational beings because

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

247

they are autonomously legislating beings. A being who has the capacity to be the source of her own laws has absolute value, and must be treated in a way consistent with such value. But that familiar language of the Groundwork articulation of the Humanity Formulation is now articulated so as to make its connection with autonomy clear: “such a being is not to be subjected to any purpose that is not possible in accordance with a law that could arise from the will of the affected subject himself.” To be worthy of being treated “as an end, never merely a means” (4:429/38) is thus equivalent with being worthy of being treated as a being capable of legislating by the mere form of one’s will, that is, autonomously. We can thus welcome a content – indeed a very robust content of absolute value – in the same law that we recognize as legislating by the mere form of the law. The latter demands that the law legislate without reference to objects of desire; indeed, all it means for a will to be determined by the mere form of the law is that it avoids such objects and is determined instead by itself, that mere form of willing that remains when we remove objects of desire from the will. And yet that very same mere form of willing just is the will, that is, the rational will, and the personality of she who is its bearer. The mere form of the will (because it is just the will itself without reference to any of its would-be contents of desire) just is a being of absolute value! And the content that guides autonomous legislation is the absolute value of the autonomous will doing the legislating. The very fact that it can do something on its own is the basis for the value we attribute to it. Affirming the common ground of the Humanity Formulation. It is, however, surprising that we didn’t see this appeal to the Humanity Formulation immediately following the Gallows Man experience. That Kant did not speak of this formula then is just the problem we have in seeing as clearly as we otherwise would that the law upon which the Gallows Man acts is his own law. But once Kant does introduce this Humanity Formulation of the Fact of Reason, he connects it almost immediately with the extended common experience of our Gallows Man of which we have already spoken, taking this experience as confirmation of the discussion concluded above. It shouldn’t surprise us that he makes this connection between the common experience of self-respect and the Humanity Formulation. Indeed, it seems almost obvious, from such common experiences, that the source of morality is indeed oneself: all we need to do is remember

248

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

that one’s “self” here is one’s best self, an absolutely valuable and dignified person. Common experiences that bring out this awareness of one’s absolute value and dignity are thus those that are most useful for revealing the common origin of the philosophical idea that the categorical law by which we find ourselves obligated is indeed our own, autonomously legislated law understood as the Humanity Formulation. One can thus say, quite literally, that one’s self is the source of morality: admission of our existence as rationally legislating wills with absolute value affirms that our actions are categorically constrained in moral ways. This formula of the Categorical Imperative can thus be easily found in the extended felt experience of the Gallows Man: it is his absolute value as an autonomously legislating person that he is respecting when, setting aside the demands of his desiring self, he adheres to moral demands. This man, in telling the truth, is “warding off the danger of sinking in personal worth,” and is respecting something in him “quite different from life, something in comparison and contrast with which life with all its agreeableness has no worth at all” (5:88/75). Clearly, this thing in him which he is respecting has absolute worth: nothing else would allow him to draw such startling contrast with all those other, merely relatively worthy things which constitute his happiness. We can, then, find the common basis for this philosophical articulation of the Categorical Imperative in the Gallows Man’s felt experience. It seems, indeed, the most obvious philosophical connection to make with it.

Conclusion We thus affirm that the moral experience of the Gallows Man is indeed one of the Fact of Reason. When he experiences himself as obligated not to lie or to injure others, and when he respects himself for having acted as this law demands, he is experiencing the effects of that rational, formal, and autonomous legislation of his own will that Kant calls the Fact of Reason. And although we can speak of all of this in the language of the common person, we can also bring all the philosophical language that Kant himself uses to our understanding of this Gallows Man’s experience. The fact the Gallows Man encounters is indeed a necessary, rational, autonomously legislated fact, one that is determined by the mere form of the law and that issues from the humanity or personality of the Gallows Man. Such a law can,

the gallows man’s fact is the fact of reason

249

furthermore, be articulated philosophically in the autonomy-informed Universalizability and Humanity Formulations of the Categorical Imperative. Attentive philosophical reflection on the Gallows Man’s common, first-personal, felt experience thus yields a justification or grounding of his moral demand, since, although the common person himself would not raise the question of justification, the philosopher, having found the rational source of moral demands through reflection on the common person’s experience and attentive reflection, knows that she has identified that thing which gives those demands legitimacy. To summarize: we first brought careful attention to the Gallows Man’s first-personal, felt experience itself, drawing from it everything that was given in it. That felt experience then pointed us back toward its rational cause, but we took that cause as an object of wonder, not of knowledge. We then thought carefully about that cause, but all thought about it – that is, about our rational, autonomously legislating self – was gleaned only by appeal to something given in the Gallows Man’s firstpersonal, felt experience, which acted as the ground from which we direct thought about that object of wonder. We have thus, overall, only discovered a more philosophically articulate formulation of what in fact is already given in common, felt, first-personal experience.48 In these reflections, we did not construct deductive arguments that move us from some nonmoral starting point to philosophical confirmation of moral obligation. Rather, we have simply put into more precise philosophical language just what the Gallows Man, or any common person who attentively and first-personally experiences a conflict between happiness and morality, has already experienced. We thereby realize that strategy for grounding morality we outlined in Part I above: through the enabling role of feeling and evidential appeal to that necessitation of the will toward which felt experience points us, we confirm philosophically that we are obligated to moral demands just as Kant articulates them in the Categorical Imperative.49 And, once again, Darwall’s claim that appreciation of the right kind of reasons requires 48 To use Kant’s Groundwork language, we are only “explaining” what experience has presented to us, since, now we do “have the advantage of [the categorical imperative’s] reality being given in experience, so that the possibility would be necessary not to establish it but merely to explain it” (4:420/30). 49 In Chapter 11, we will consider the problem, still outstanding, of whether these attentive reflections on felt experience hold only for those who actually engage in this attentive process, or whether they are, as Kant suggests, truly universal and necessary moral demands.

250

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

appeal, beyond the first-personal standpoint of the Gallows Man, also to the second-personal standpoint is thereby put into question. There is, however, one further and very important aspect of the Gallows Man’s experience that we have not yet considered: he judges that, because he ought to do something, he can do that thing. It is to both common and commonly informed philosophical consideration of that claim that we turn in the next chapter, a discussion that will lead us into analysis of Kant’s deduction of freedom.

10 THOUGHTS ON THE DEDUCTION OF FREEDOM

Introduction There is a final point to consider in our philosophically attentive analysis of the Gallows Man’s experiences: he knows that because he ought to do something, he can do it. We must therefore consider this “ought implies can” principle, and the so-called “deduction” of freedom (5:42ff./37ff.), which is its philosophical counterpart. I emphasize at the outset that I will not fully explore Kant’s theory of freedom. I seek only the more modest goals of understanding the “ought implies can” claim implicit in the Gallows Man’s experience, and of relating this common experience to Kant’s explicitly philosophical claim that freedom is deduced from morality (whereas the claim of moral obligation is not deduced). We have already seen questions about freedom emerge in our recently completed account of moral obligation; we therefore take these discoveries as the starting point of our current conversation. By proving the moral law to be autonomously legislated, we affirm not only “negative” freedom or the “independence from all matter of the law” (5:33/30), but also that conception of freedom which seemed so elusive to Kant in Groundwork iii: positive freedom, or, the “lawgiving of its own on the part of pure and . . . practical reason” (5:33/30). This accomplishment leads to some perplexity, though: we have already accomplished the most challenging piece of affirmation of freedom via attentive reflection on our felt experience of obligation. But Kant, in the section “On the Deduction of the Principle of Pure Practical Reason,” now suggests we need to say more about freedom than that we have this positive conception of it. Indeed, he proceeds, not via attentive analysis as such but via “deduction,” to assert the 251

252

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

objective reality of freedom as following from the Fact of Reason.1 But why would we need to deduce freedom – and what further, beyond negative and positive freedom, would we need to deduce – if we have already, through attentive reflection upon being subject to a law, confirmed that we are autonomous legislators of that law, and that we are independent of all matter of law in determining our wills? There is an obvious answer to this question: we still need to know whether we have the power to act upon this autonomous legislation. We know that we are independent of determination by contingent objects of desire external to us, and we know that we are the source of the legislation of moral laws. But am I capable of acting on those laws which I have legislated to myself? This is certainly one piece of what Kant needs to affirm philosophically about freedom. But this is not the only, or even the best, way to describe the concerns about freedom that pervade Kant’s deduction of it. Indeed, as we shall see, all common concerns about whether I can act as morality demands are resolved before the text of the deduction itself. The deduction itself goes beyond the concern of the common person, and even, to a certain extent, beyond the concern of the practical philosopher. Its main concern is to bring the common grounding of morality and freedom into conversation with speculative philosophy by asking: can we affirm the objective reality of freedom in the face of global causal determinism? This is the question Kant answers through his deduction of the objective reality of freedom. Before turning to this task, we need first, as always in this study, to reflect on the common agent’s capacity to do what morality demands of her both from the merely common point of view and from the commonly informed but also philosophical point of view. What we shall discover is that deduction of the objective reality of freedom is the fullest explicitly philosophical articulation of the Gallows Man’s common conviction “that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it” (5:30/27–28). And yet, this philosophical deduction of freedom answers a question that Kant needed to consider 1 “The moral law cannot be proved by any deduction . . . But something different and quite paradoxical takes the place of this vainly sought deduction of the moral principle, namely that the moral principle, conversely itself serves as the principle of the deduction of an inscrutable faculty which no experience could prove, . . . namely the faculty of freedom, of which the moral law, which itself has no need of justifying grounds, proves not only the possibility but the reality in beings who cognize this law as binding upon them” (5:47/42).

thoughts on the deduction of freedom

253

only in deference to the concerns of the speculative philosopher, not the concerns of the common person. Common affirmation of “ought implies can.” First, “ought implies can” is part of the common experience of the Gallows Man. Indeed, the common ground of confidence in one’s ability to do what is morally demanded is, perhaps, that point most obviously present in his experience: “He judges . . . that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it and cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him” (5:30/27–28). Because he has encountered moral demands in his felt experience, the Gallows Man can judge that he is capable of acting as those laws demand. Indeed, the Gallows Man sees clearly that he can do what he ought; he is simply worried (since he “would perhaps not venture to assert whether he would do it or not” [5:30/27]) that he will refuse to do what he ought. Why should he have such confidence, though? Is it warranted? Can he really make the move from recognizing his obligations to recognizing his ability to fulfill them? The inference is by no means obvious, or analytic, for just any demand: we can envision things demanded of us which we find ourselves incapable of doing. I could be ordered, even obligated, to move a 200-pound rock (perhaps to save my friend, who has fallen under it), but nothing in the demand to lift it assures my capacity to do so. But the “ought” to which the Gallows Man is held is, as we have just been discussing, a demand that emerges from his own autonomously legislating will. Admitting this, the space between “ought” and “can” becomes a shorter one to traverse. The Gallows Man is saying not simply “If I ought to do it, I can do it,” but more precisely “If my own capacity for acting, free from any external influence, tells me I ought to do it, I can do it.” He might even say “If what I discover as emerging from my very humanity demands it of me, I can do it.” All these assertions are, furthermore, things we can imagine a common person in this sort of experience thinking. Faced with a difficult conflict between happiness and morality, it makes sense both that he would ask himself whether he was capable of taking the higher road, and also that he would answer that question in the affirmative. “I know, when I look at this best part of me, that I am capable of living up to what I expect of myself,” is one common way to appreciate the Gallows Man’s confidence in his capacities. The demands upon which

254

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

the common person finds himself capable of acting are thus only his own autonomously legislated demands. This point is implicit in the text of the Gallows Man itself, quoted above. But at various points in the Critique, Kant makes this point explicitly, from the common point of view. For example, in the last section of the Critique, he discusses the “method” of pure reason, defined as “the way in which one can provide the laws of pure practical reason with access to the human mind and influence on its maxims, that is, the way in which one can make objectively practical reason subjectively practical as well” (5:151/125). He is thus interested here in the question of motivation to moral action. More precisely, he is asking: how do we need to regard laws that impose themselves upon us “objectively” so as to assure they find their influence “subjectively” on choice and action? But one crucial moment in this movement from obligation to action is our current concern about whether “ought implies can”: a piece of the story of moral motivation is the question of whether I find myself capable of doing what is demanded of me. Kant goes on to present two different cases of reflection upon one’s motives: When we can bring any flattering thought of merit into our action, then the incentive is already somewhat mixed with self-love and thus has some assistance from the side of sensibility. But to put everything below the holiness of duty alone and become aware that one can do it because our own reason recognizes this as its command and says that one ought to do it; this is, as it were, to raise oneself altogether above the sensible world . . . even if not always with effect. (5:159/131, emphasis added)

When our incentives2 are “somewhat mixed with self-love,” we cannot pronounce easily upon our capacity to accomplish that toward which we are motivated. Only when we look at moral obligations – and when we look at moral obligations as our moral obligations – do we discover that our moral experience points us toward confidence in a capacity for 2 He would have done better to say “imperatives” instead of “incentives,” or motives. What we are discovering here is that when an imperative “somewhat mixed with self-love” – that is, a hypothetical imperative – imposes itself, we do not know whether we will be able to fulfill it or not. This hypothetical imperative is the best thing to compare against the later moral “command” which does lead to confidence in being able to act as it commands. In speaking of incentives here instead of imperatives, Kant thus goes back to his Groundwork habit of conflating these two questions.

thoughts on the deduction of freedom

255

acting as our motives direct us. This is not, of course, the full story of moral motivation, since we still face the question of whether I will choose to act as my capacities allow. But recognition of the link between obligation and my capacity for action is a crucial piece of the motivational story. Indeed, Kant’s claim here is that it is only when we are able to set aside sensible grounds of our actions and instead “put everything below the holiness of duty alone” that we are able to recognize ourselves as capable of acting as these demands on our will direct. But this is just the experience of the Gallows Man: no “flattering thought[s] of merit” are involved in his decision about whether to lie or not. All concerns for happiness are in absolute opposition to the demand to be truthful. In recognizing moral demands as directly opposed to his pursuit of happiness, he recognizes that acting as this imperative demands would be to “put everything below the holiness of duty alone.” When he is able to do this – that is, when he is able to see the demand to tell the truth as his own, self-imposed duty – he is also able to believe himself capable of acting as his demands direct him. It is precisely, and only, when he understands this demand not to lie or hurt others as an autonomously imposed duty that he simultaneously discovers his capacity to act. But why would I legitimately have more confidence in my ability to act on an autonomously imposed moral imperative than on a hypothetical imperative? Imperatives with a ground external to the will, precisely because of that external ground, do not reveal, in our felt experience, the assurance of our power to act as they demand. To the contrary, we can get very worried about whether we are capable of accomplishing what such imperatives demand. This is because such actions depend too much on the vicissitudes of fortune in the empirical world for us to be able to pronounce upon our capacity to realize them. Such is not, however, the case with a demand that emerges only from one’s own autonomous will. Although we admit that the world may or may not grant the physical effect my will is seeking,3 I can nonetheless be confident that I am capable of putting my will into the state demanded by the imperative it has placed upon itself, and this is all that is demanded of me.4 One might even say that when the will 3 As Kant put it above, if I were to choose to act as morality demands, this choice is “not always with effect.” 4 See also 5:45/40 to confirm this point: “Whether the causality of the will is adequate for the reality of the objects or not is left to the theoretical principles of reason to estimate . . .

256

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

imposes its own law and then seeks fulfillment of it, it is only realizing its own nature, being itself. In such a case, though, it is reasonable to say “ought implies can”: a will demanding something of itself does not demand something foreign to that will, something beyond its grasp or capacities. It demands only that the will be in a certain state, that state which allows that will to be truly what it is. And when the will seeks simply to determine itself, the only real obstacles that could prevent such determination are internal ones: desires, and tendencies toward self-deception that encourage us to believe ourselves incapable of moral actions. So, when the legislation in question is autonomous legislation, “ought” does imply “can,” and the only reason I couldn’t is because I won’t.5 We can, furthermore, confirm in common moral experience just this confidence in one’s ability to determine one’s will to do what that autonomously legislating will demands, along with skepticism about one’s ability to accomplish what externally imposed hypothetical imperatives demand. In a section discussing the common appreciation of the difference between happiness and morality, Kant asserts: To satisfy the categorical demand of morality is within everyone’s power at all times; to satisfy the empirically conditioned precept of happiness is but seldom possible and is far from being possible for everyone even with respect to only a single purpose. The reason is that in the first case it is a question only of the maxim, which must be genuine and pure, whereas in the latter case it is also a question of one’s powers and one’s physical ability to make a desired object real. A command that everyone should seek to make himself happy would be foolish . . . One would have to command of him only the measures – or, better, provide him with them, since he cannot do all that he wants to do. But to command morality

It is here a question only of the determination of the will and of the determining ground of its maxims as a free will, not of its result.” And 5:20/18: “[Imperatives] either determine the conditions of the causality of a rational being as an efficient cause merely with respect to the effect and its adequacy to it or they determine only the will, whether or not it is sufficient for the effect. The first would be hypothetical imperatives . . . ; the second, on the contrary, would be categorical and would alone be practical laws.” 5 We can thus appreciate Kant’s commitment to a nonconsequentialist form of morality. To depend on consequences to determine whether an act is right or wrong puts too much weight on something that is out of the agent’s control. It is not that Kant is unconcerned about whether the world takes the form the moral person would give it. But to place the weight of whether I am right or wrong, good or bad, on resolution of whether the world of nature will be amenable to the demands of my rational will is to expect too much of finite beings in a finite world.

thoughts on the deduction of freedom

257

under the name of duty is quite reasonable; for, first, it is not the case that everyone willingly obeys its precept when it is in conflict with his inclinations; and as for the measures – how he can comply with it – here these need not be taught: for in regard to this, what he wills to do, that he also can do. (5:37/34)

All these common reflections can be taken as an expanded appreciation of what the Gallows Man thought when he said that “he can do something because he is aware that he ought to” (5:30/27–28). He knows he is capable of “satisfy[ing] the categorical demand of morality,” but he is less confident about successfully following his “empirically conditioned” will: he is less certain about whether lying will allow him to achieve his purposes than he is about whether telling the truth will allow him to achieve his purposes. If he lies, he takes on that question of whether he has the “physical ability to make a desired object real”: can he trust the prince won’t hurt him if he does what he asks? Can he get away from him if he does renege on his offer? But when he tells the truth, he seeks only to make his will conformable to his will: “it is a question only of the maxim.” This determination of himself by himself does not throw him into the vicissitudes of fortune in the way that following a hypothetical imperative would. Regardless of what the prince’s actions are, the Gallows Man is capable of choosing to tell the truth: that he is capable of! We are not saying that it is easier to do the moral thing, for doing what he is capable of is also going to bring much suffering. And yet he is more confident that he can accomplish his moral purposes than that he can accomplish what the demands of self-love would impose upon him.6 We have thus closed the space between “ought” and “can” in the common experience of the Gallows Man in two ways. First, the movement from an autonomously legislated law to action on it is less than the movement from an externally legislated law to action on it. This is because one’s own legislation is endemic to the very nature of the will being ordered to act: I only demand of myself what my kind of being does. Second, the “can” in “ought implies can” does not refer to 6 There is, perhaps, even a sort of pessimism that underlies Kant’s confidence in our ability to be moral, but our inability to assure our happiness. It is not that the achievement of happiness is unimportant; but Kant looks at the physical world which would need to be in a certain order for us to achieve that happiness as one that simply is not amenable to our willing.

258

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

whether I bring about in the physical world the results of my choice, but only to whether my will is determined to that action. This is not to say, of course, that I need not try “hard”! To determine one’s will is really to seek the effects of one’s willing. But the question of whether I can do what I ought does not require an outcome in the world, only the determination of my will. Note, though, that in affirming the Gallows Man’s confidence that he is capable of acting as he ought, we are not thereby attributing to him a feeling of freedom. He feels himself obligated (we have even, previously, called this a felt judgment; that kind of judgment distinctive of the common person), and attentive reflection on that feeling allows him to recognize moral demands as given in a fact. But he concludes on the basis of that felt experience that he is capable of acting as morality demands. Although the Gallows Man discovers moral demands as given in his felt phenomenological experience, his freedom is not similarly given. His freedom is something he concludes he must have in light of what is given in his felt experience of moral obligation.7 Finally, there is a limit to what we can say of freedom on this account: the Gallows Man is only warranted in being confident about being able to act in the way that autonomously legislated morality demands, and no further. His ability to act as heteronomously legislated imperatives demand remains an open question. This makes sense, given the limits we noted above: the ability to realize a heteronomously legislated imperative assumes causal efficacy in the external world that realization of an autonomously legislated imperative does not. Fulfilling my desires is not simply a matter of the state of my will; it is, further, a matter of being able to get in the world that toward which my will has directed itself. A common, phenomenological grounding of freedom thus introduces serious limits to the freedom it affirms. A theoretical philosopher might have hoped for affirmation of that freedom which Kant describes at times (even in the second Critique) as “freedom and independence from the mechanism of the whole of nature” (5:87/74). One might have hoped that one had an ability to stand completely above causes outside of oneself, no matter what one’s choice.

7 We shall say more about this methodological distinction after we consider the philosophical counterpart to this common experience of confidence in one’s capacity in the deduction of freedom.

thoughts on the deduction of freedom

259

That is not, however, the picture we find here. The Gallows Man knows only that he is capable of acting as morality demands, no more, no less. And knowing that was possible only when he took a morally attentive attitude toward his felt experience of conflict: when he looked at his experiences attentively, he became confident that he could act as was demanded. Freedom is thus not something that is obviously given to him, or that he knows as an absolute capacity no matter what the circumstances; it is, rather, something he decides must be possible for the purposes of moral action, and this is something he realizes only once he looks at his moral obligations in the right way. Commonly informed philosophical reflections on freedom. Kant does not, however, abandon the theoretical philosopher’s concerns about freedom. Instead, he provides a practical means to resolve the theoretical question of the objective reality of freedom in the face of global determinism. Unlike our earlier philosophical reflections on common experience, our forthcoming reflections will not be simple attentive consideration of felt experience; rather, this will be a strict philosophical deduction of freedom. Whether this practical resolution of the freedom question really gives the speculative philosopher what she wanted is, however, something we will need to consider. Let us turn, then, to a consideration of the “deduction” section of the Critique, appreciating it as Kant’s explicitly philosophical reflection upon the common experience of the Gallows Man. Pretty much everything we have said up to this point about the capacity to act as morality demands occurs in Kant’s text before the section on the deduction of freedom.8 We thus enter discussion of the deduction of freedom already knowing a lot about freedom: we know that the will has positive freedom (is autonomously legislating) and is therefore negatively free (is independent of determination by external objects of desire); we are even warranted in taking ourselves to be capable of acting as morality demands. What, then, is the section on the deduction of freedom doing? What more do we need? We will read this section with two interpretive guides in mind. First, even though it is not a simple philosophically attentive consideration of the Gallows Man’s felt experience, we nonetheless take it as an explicitly philosophical rendering of the Gallows Man’s common 8 The one exception to this is the quote from the method section. This, however, makes a point that was confirmed in text previous to the deduction section.

260

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

confidence in “ought” implying “can.” Secondly, when we introduce the philosopher to the common experience of the Gallows Man, we introduce a whole range of philosophical considerations that are not germane to that common experience. The philosopher – especially the “speculative” (5:43/38) philosopher – is most worried about whether the objective reality of freedom can be saved in the face of global causal determinism in the natural world. But the Gallows Man isn’t worried at all about that. He worries about the conflict between morality and self-love; any questions he has about freedom arise within that context, not this more theoretically inspired one. When the Gallows Man determines he is capable of acting as morality demands, he thus does not say: “Aha! I have thereby proved that freedom and causal determinism can coexist within the phenomenal world, and that freedom is therefore objectively real!” He might in fact have accomplished this, but these considerations do not move him. He is an agent and is concerned with questions of action; so the question of freedom, for him, is not a question of whether he can overcome theoretically inspired worries about causal determinism; it is, rather, a question of whether he can do what he ought to in the face of temptation to the contrary and thereby claim his moral self. Once he decides that he can do as he ought (a realization is pretty much simultaneous with his recognition that he is obligated), his worries about freedom cease. This is not so for practical or speculative philosophers. Kant the philosopher is concerned about freedom in a way that takes him beyond the common person’s concerns. His initial worries about freedom did not arise from the practical perspective of the common person, but instead from the theoretical perspective of the speculative philosopher: Kant worried, in the first Critique, that the conclusion of global determinism to which his theoretical reflections had led him promised the death of human freedom; he wanted to prove that it did not. When he asks, in the deduction section, whether we can affirm the objective reality of freedom in the face of global determinism, Kant is thus asking a speculative philosopher’s question right in the middle of his practical reflections. But, as with the question of moral obligation, if the practical philosopher is going to take on this question on behalf of the speculative philosopher (whose own sources for answering the question have run dry), then the practical philosopher must first take common experience and concerns as his starting point. It is only from that felt,

thoughts on the deduction of freedom

261

common experience that we have legitimated philosophical reflection upon any topics beyond empirical experience; and consideration of freedom, far from being the exception to this rule, is its quintessential expression. And yet, answering this question will involve exiting, to some extent, the realm of philosophical attentiveness to felt experience: by introducing a philosophical question that does not arise within felt experience, Kant must seek an answer to this question through a means that is somewhat different than simple attentive analysis of felt experience (even if such attentive analysis is part of the answer to his question). When we spoke in Chapter 9 of philosophical attentiveness that confirmed the justification of morality, we said something similar, but not identical, to this. There, we noted that the question of justification was not raised by the Gallows Man. But in that case, philosophical attribution of “justification” to what the Gallows Man recognized about his best self was just a new word put on his experience: although he wouldn’t call it that, the Gallows Man is in fact implicitly justifying his moral obligations. But here, something more occurs: not only does the philosopher bring new ways to describe the Gallows Man’s experience; further, she introduces a philosophical question that would not arise at all, even in some lesser common form, within the Gallows Man’s own practical experiences. It is from this perspective that we need to approach the deduction of freedom: Kant is speaking to speculative and practical philosophers, but is appealing to common experience as he does so. He thus relies upon common, felt experience to resolve a vexed philosophical question that does not itself arise within common experience. Let us turn to consideration of this text. The existential starting point of the deduction. Kant’s deduction of freedom finds its common starting point in the felt experience of the Fact of Reason we have discussed. We have no experience of freedom, but we are indeed given the fact of our moral obligation. From this common starting point, Kant seeks an affirmation of the objective reality of freedom that will satisfy the practical philosopher and at least mollify the speculative philosopher. Kant thus opens the deduction by reminding the reader of what he knows of the Fact from the common perspective: This Analytic shows that pure reason can be practical – that is, can of itself, independently of anything empirical, determine the will – and it

262

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

does so by a fact in which pure reason in us proves itself actually practical, namely autonomy in the principle of morality by which reason determines the will to deeds. At the same time it shows that this fact is inseparably connected with, and indeed identical with, consciousness of freedom of the will. (5:42/37)

So much has already been proven from the common perspective: the Gallows Man knows he is the source of moral demands and decides he is capable of acting in accordance with them.9 Kant then reflects further, and philosophically, on this fact: [T]he objective reality of the moral law cannot be proved by any deduction, by any efforts of theoretical reason, speculative or empirically supported, so that, even if one were willing to renounce its apodictic certainty, it could not be confirmed by experience and thus proved a posteriori; and it is nevertheless firmly established of itself. (5:47/41–42)

The Fact cannot be proved by a deduction, a claim already familiar to us from Chapter 8. But the import of this nondeductive appreciation of the Fact of Reason emerges now that Kant recognizes something within practical philosophy that can be deduced, the objective reality of freedom: “the moral principle . . . itself serves as the principle of the deduction of an inscrutable faculty . . . of freedom” (5:47/42). His appeal here to the Fact now acting as a “moral principle” from which one deduces further practical claims provides a helpful contrast to the method of attentiveness upon which we have so far relied: when attentive, we didn’t start from a principle and then infer something further from it. Instead, we started with a felt experience, and then sought to understand and explain it as best we could. Now, though, that felt

9 With Beck (Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, pp. 166–167), I take Kant’s quick summary here of the connection between morality and freedom – that the fact is not only “inseparabl[e]” from but also “identical with consciousness of freedom” – to be too strong a claim. We have already affirmed that we do not have consciousness of freedom, but instead conclude that we are free based on consciousness of a categorical obligation. We thus grant that morality is inseparable from freedom, but not that we have a direct consciousness of freedom. After this quoted text, Kant asserts things that would not be affirmed of the common person’s understanding, viz., that “the will of a rational being . . . cognizes itself as, like other efficient causes, necessarily subject to laws of causality.” Such points were, however, “sufficiently proved elsewhere” (5:42/38, emphasis added), not in the Analytic just completed.

thoughts on the deduction of freedom

263

experience is itself standing in as a “principle” from which the philosopher deduces something: the “credential of the moral law . . .” – that selfassured authority the moral law brings when it reveals itself as a fact – “is itself laid down as a principle of the deduction of freedom as a causality of pure reason” (5:48/42, emphasis added). Something new is going on here methodologically. One might think that when a fact becomes a principle at the basis of a philosophical deduction, it stops being a fact or a phenomenological experience. This is not, however, the case. The beginning principle of the argument is, indeed, still the Fact of Reason, which is a felt, phenomenological fact. So, the principle from which Kant begins the deduction of freedom is a funny sort of “first principle”: the common experience of agency is an existential starting point to the argument. His appeal to the Fact is, really, a call to the theoretical philosopher to take on a certain sort of attitude when figuring out the problem of freedom: the only way to solve that problem is to become enough of a moral person to recognize the Fact of Reason, attentively! If you insist upon resolving the question of freedom from a distanced, thirdpersonal point of view, then you will, inevitably, fail. But if you take an attentive point of view on what is given in your moral experience, you will discover those tools that you need to solve the problem of freedom. Some theoretical philosophers will be unhappy that their question can be solved only morally; others will find that the freedom assured here falls short of what they want. We will consider such worries as our discussion continues. For the present, we affirm that when Kant introduces the Fact of Reason as the starting point of the deduction of freedom, he introduces not simply a principle but an existential attitude.

The deduction of freedom. Here, then, is the deduction: [T]he moral law proves [freedom’s] reality, so as even to satisfy the Critique of speculative reason, by adding a positive determination to a causality thought only negatively, the possibility of which was incomprehensible to speculative reason, which was nevertheless forced to assume it; it adds, namely, the concept of a reason determining the will immediately (by the condition of a universal lawful form of its maxims), and thus is able for the first time to give objective though only practical reality to reason. (5:48/42)

264

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

This is a more philosophical articulation of the Gallows Man’s understanding that he can do what he ought because he knows himself to be obligated; but Kant now speaks of it in a way that goes beyond the concerns of the Gallows Man. The new philosophical language introduced here that the common person would not use is that of “causality.” Had he not said as much by explicitly mentioning the first Critique, we should take Kant’s use of this word in itself as a sign that he is moving back to the theoretical questions from the first Critique that put the question of freedom up against global causal determinism. Finding a form of causality that can stand next to that natural law of causality which grounds causal determinism is the question the theoretical philosopher brings to the purported human experience of freedom. So, when Kant makes a claim here about the positive “causality” of freedom, he indicates an intention of resolving those theoretical worries (and not the practical worries of the Gallows Man). He says as much when he says that what he provides here will “satisfy the Critique of speculative reason.” But even if the speculative philosopher turns out to be satisfied by this move (a claim we will assess below), she seems to accept this new route to the resolution of her problem only reluctantly: the speculative philosopher is “forced to assume” (emphasis added) that “positive determination to a causality” which speculative philosophy, on its own, could only conceive of “negatively,” that positive causality of a will determined by the mere form of the law which the Fact of Reason revealed to us. The speculative philosopher is thus forced to do something she wouldn’t normally do. As such, even as we enter the concerns of the speculative philosopher, we do not entirely leave the common perspective of the Gallows Man behind. Rather, the practical experience of the Gallows Man – that Fact of Reason that was forced upon him just as much as it was on the speculative philosopher – provides what the theoretical philosopher needs to make sense of freedom: “a positive determination to a causality [previously] thought only negatively.” When we lay the Fact down as a principle, the objective reality of freedom as a positive causal force is assured. Why is this? The objective reality of freedom as a positive causal force is assured because, through appeal to the Fact of Reason, we affirm that a will is autonomously determined through its mere form. Once we grant this positive conception of freedom as part of the Fact (here articulated as “reason determining the will immediately [by the condition of a universal lawful form of its maxims]”) – something we

thoughts on the deduction of freedom

265

affirmed in Chapter 9 – we have all that we need to affirm “a positive determination to a causality [previously] thought only negatively”; that is, we have all that we need to affirm the objective reality of freedom as a positive form of causality. If my will is determined by the mere form of the law, then not only can I affirm (as the Gallows Man does) that I can do what is demanded of me; I can, further (as a philosopher), affirm that freedom as a positive causal power is an objectively real thing (viz., that my will contains a positive law of causality which determines it freely), even in the face of causal determinism. The concept of freedom is thus determined, or finds its “significance” as a cognition, not through any appeal to intuition, but instead through appeal to one’s autonomously legislated moral obligations: But as for the concept which [practical reason] makes of its own causality as noumenon, it need not determine it theoretically with a view to cognition of its supersensible existence and so need not be able to give it significance in this way. For, the concept [of freedom] receives significance apart from this – though only for practical use – namely, through the moral law. (5:49–50/44)

Analysis of the deduction. There are a few things to say about this simple deduction of freedom from the Fact of Reason. First, in claiming that the concept of freedom finds its “significance” in the Fact, Kant provides a philosophical understanding of the Gallows Man’s conclusion that he is capable of doing what he ought. “Ought implies can,” for the philosopher, means that the objective reality of moral law assures the objective reality of freedom. It is, simply, that philosophical movement from morality to freedom which has been described by Henry Allison as the reciprocity thesis.10 When thought philosophically, this movement from morality to freedom has to be an inference or a “deduction.” Furthermore, this deduction affirms, philosophically, the Gallows Man’s point that although he feels himself obligated, he concludes that he is capable of acting. The philosophical way of saying this is that freedom is not given in the Fact, but has to be inferred or deduced from what is given, viz., moral obligation. We can, furthermore, import all the limits of the extent of this inference suggested in the common person’s experience to this new

10 See Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, pp. 201ff.

266

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

philosophical context: the objective reality of freedom extends no further than our common experience of the Fact allows: it extends only to our capacity to act as an autonomously legislated morality demands, and no further. And yet, though the deduction of freedom is a philosophical reflection consonant with the Gallows Man’s common experience, it is also one that, to a certain extent, removes itself from that common point of view. In turning to questions of causality and the incompatibility of any free law of causality with the natural law of causality, we exit the common point of view, even as we claim it as the existential starting point to the argument. Common agents aren’t thinking about whether they are causally determined, or whether freedom is a causal power. And yet, we are not abandoning the common point of view entirely. Instead, we ask the philosopher to take that common point of view so as to acquire from it the tools she needs to satisfy her own noncommonly inspired question about the compatibility of freedom and causal determinism. Kant himself suggests as much: [P]ure practical reason now fills this vacant place [which speculative reason had left about the objective reality of freedom] with a determinate law of causality in an intelligible world (with freedom), namely, the moral law. By this, speculative reason does not gain anything with respect to its insight but it still gains something only with respect to the security of its problematic concept of freedom, which is here afforded objective, and though only practical, undoubted reality. (5:49/43)

Kant suggests here that, although we have not solved the speculative problem in speculative terms, we have solved a speculative problem in practical terms. This odd marriage of a speculative question to a practical answer helps us understand Kant’s own ambivalence about whether he has provided an answer to the freedom question that will satisfy speculative philosophers. On the one hand he is: he takes up just that question that the speculative philosopher has (and the common, practical person does not), and is solving it. On the other, he is not: he solves a speculative question by telling the speculative philosopher that she has to stop being a speculative philosopher; her question can be solved only on common, practical grounds. We thus find apparently conflicting claims from Kant about whether or not his argument satisfies the speculative philosopher. On the one hand, he confidently asserts that this deduction “proves [freedom’s]

thoughts on the deduction of freedom

267

reality, so as even to satisfy the Critique of speculative reason” (5:48/42). And yet, he also states that “speculative reason does not gain anything with respect to its insight but it still gains something” (5:49/43, emphases added). The speculative philosopher does not gain further speculative knowledge, but she does get “something.” That “something,” though, is a practical, not a speculative, something: “[Speculative philosophy’s] problematic concept of freedom . . . is here afforded objective and, though only practical, undoubted reality” (5:49/43, emphases removed and added). Kant’s practical answer to the speculative question – that we can, practically, admit the objective reality of that freedom necessary to determine our wills to fulfill that will’s own autonomous legislation – may or may not satisfy the speculative philosopher. One must, after all, abandon any hope for a theoretical cognition of the concept of freedom – that is, of a positive causality of freedom, as opposed to nature – and this puts us in a funny state, epistemically: we literally do not understand this very same freedom of which we have an objective cognition: [Practical reason] can transfer the determining ground of the will into the intelligible order of things inasmuch as it readily admits at the same time that it does not understand how the concept of cause might be determined for cognition of these things . . . For, the concept receives significance apart from this – though only for practical use – namely, through the moral law. (5:49–50/44)

We have no theoretical cognition of freedom, only a practical one. The Kantian speculative philosopher might have accepted this limit as she left the first Critique behind, convinced of the limits on theoretical cognition it had set. Yet maybe even some truly Kantian philosophers had hopes that the practical cognition of freedom was going to look an awful lot like the theoretical cognition we had been forced to abandon. Kant’s own optimistic language in the B edition of the introduction to the first Critique might even be read as encouraging such hopes.11 But, now, Kant’s own ambivalence about whether his deduction of freedom has satisfied the speculative philosopher suggests that he, too, was worried about what the speculative philosopher would think of his practical resolution of a speculative problem. His repeated insistence 11 See Bxxvin, 115n.

268

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

that we have affirmed “only [the] practical . . . reality” (5:49/43, emphases removed and added) of freedom suggests a similar sensitivity. That he finds only a practical solution to a speculative problem might inform, though, our own appreciation of his growing frustration, in the second Critique and beyond, with speculative philosophers and their refusal to enter practical philosophy with a genuinely practical attitude. We noted this frustration in our Introduction above: People who are accustomed merely to explanations by natural sciences will not get into their heads the categorical imperative from which [moral] laws proceed dictatorially, even though they feel themselves compelled irresistibly by it. Being unable to explain what lies entirely beyond that sphere (freedom of choice), however exalting is this very prerogative of a human being, his capacity for such an idea, they are stirred by the proud claims of speculative reason, which makes its power so strongly felt in other fields, to band together in a general call to arms, as it were, to defend the omnipotence of theoretical reason. And so now, and perhaps for a while longer, they assail the moral concept of freedom and, wherever possible, make it suspect; but in the end they must give way. (6:378/143)

Kant was frustrated by people who were not willing to enter a genuinely existential way of doing practical philosophy. And if he really has decided that the question most central not just to speculative philosophy but to philosophy generally (viz., the question of freedom) can only be answered practically, then it makes sense that he would get frustrated with those speculative philosophers who insist on responding to his arguments by taking a different point of view; by starting, that is, from speculative, instead of phenomenological or existential practical assumptions. I, as a practical philosopher convinced by the need for the existential starting point to which Kant here appeals, am satisfied with his account; indeed, this entire monograph has been an effort to defend his claim that practical questions need to be approached differently, and more existentially, than theoretical questions. Kant does provide a truly practical resolution to the problem of freedom, one that is perfectly coherent from that practical perspective. I envision, though, that not everyone will take his argument to be as fully satisfying as I do. The question that remains is whether such complaints come only from outside of the practical point of view (that is, from philosophers

thoughts on the deduction of freedom

269

hesitant to abandon their speculative tendencies), or whether there is something within the practical point of view itself that can be found lacking. There is one final point to consider about the epistemic status of Kant’s claims of both morality and freedom so as to complete our defense of them: have we, in all of this attentive consideration of common experience (and, now also in attentively informed deductive proof), achieved genuinely objective, synthetic a priori practical cognitions of both the moral law and freedom? Can we really trust that this reliance upon first-personal, felt phenomenological experience yields cognitions that are truly objective and a priori in nature? It is to this task that we now turn.

11 OBJECTIVE, SYNTHETIC, A PRIORI, PRACTICAL COGNITIONS

Introduction A final question remains in our phenomenological defense of Kant’s practical philosophy: are the practical cognitions of the moral law and of freedom which emerge from first-personal, felt experience genuinely objective cognitions? The point to which we are led by the arguments of the previous chapters is indeed that they are. The Gallows Man would seem, first, to have an objective practical cognition of the moral law. When he attends to his felt experience, he doesn’t just realize that happiness and morality are in conflict. Beyond that, he knows who should win the battle: he knows, despite his efforts to rationalize, that the moral law holds authoritatively and unconditionally for his will, whereas demands of happiness hold only hypothetically. He knows, further, that his rational humanity is the source of this moral demand. But all these claims are described by Kant both as assertions of “the objective reality of the moral law” (5:47/41–42, emphasis added) and as a cognition of that law: “the moral law . . . provides a fact . . . that . . . lets us cognize something of [a pure world of the understanding], namely a law” (5:43/38, emphasis added).1 The content of this cognition is thus an awareness of the objective reality of the moral law constraining one’s will. Kant’s assertion that knowledge of freedom is an objective practical cognition is, if anything, even more clear. Practical reason “must, of course, cognize . . . causality with respect to the actions of the will in the sensible world, since otherwise practical reason could not actually 1 See also 5:47/42, where Kant asserts that humans “cognize this [moral] law as binding upon them.”

270

objective, a priori, practical cognitions

271

produce any deed” (5:49/44, emphases added). We must cognize that “causality” which determines the will; we must, that is, cognize freedom. Furthermore, this cognition of freedom is asserted to be both practical and objective: “freedom . . . is here afforded objective and though only practical, undoubted reality” (5:49/43, second emphasis added). Kant thus asserts that cognitions of both the moral law and of freedom are objective, practical cognitions. Further, we affirm two distinct routes to such cognitions: cognition of the moral law “has no need of justifying grounds” (5:47/42) and instead is affirmed via attentive consideration of a given fact in felt experience; but cognition of freedom, while beginning from that same attentively considered fact, is affirmed in the common experience of the Gallows Man as a conclusion he reaches on the basis of attentiveness to his felt experience, and in philosophical reflection as the move made deductively from affirmation of the objective reality of morality to the objective reality of freedom. But to call these cognitions “objective” raises an apparent problem about subjectivity for our first-personal reading of the Fact. To recall our discussion of such matters in Chapter 6, Moyar argues that Franks’ account of the Fact holds only for those who successfully engage in the first-personal activities of the Gallows Man.2 But the Fact is meant to be a fact “constitutive of moral agency” as such,3 not just something that is true for some subset of rational agents. In the language of this chapter, Franks’ account of the Fact is radically subjective instead of objective. Our reading of the Fact seems, however, to be vulnerable to a similar criticism. We begin more from what Beck and Allison have called the “subjective” reading of the Fact as consciousness of the law.4 To get beyond this subjective starting point, the common agent needed to be attentive to her philosophical experience. But if one does not have

2 Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy”; Franks, All or Nothing. 3 Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy,” p. 334. 4 Beck, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason; Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 232. This is not entirely accurate, since our defense of the Fact appeals to something in between an intellectual intuition of the law and mere subjective consciousness of moral constraint: in felt experience, we are pointed mysteriously toward the cause of subjectively experienced constraint, without knowing it as such. Our account is, thus, a sort of middle ground between Beck’s and Allison’s strictly “subjective” and “objective” understandings of the Fact. But for the purposes of our discussion here, we can accept a thoroughly subjective reading of the Fact and still defend its objectivity.

272

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

such felt experience, and/or is not attentive to it, then it seems that agent would be neither morally obligated nor morally culpable. Moral obligation would hold only for those who were successfully attentive to the requisite experience, much as, on Moyar’s criticism of Franks, moral obligation held only for those who were successfully and firstpersonally active. Perhaps the felt experience of conflict between happiness and morality is a common one, but to say something is common is not to say it is universal. Moral obligation could thus not be truly objective since it would not hold of all agents. The threat of subjectivity only increases when we recall that feeling is subjective in that it cannot be involved in the construction of an object of experience that could be shared by other perceivers. Further, we relied on this subjectivity of feeling to open up new epistemic routes by which to access indications of the intelligible object of the moral law. Our access to “the moral law itself”5 is thus only as an object of wonder, not objective knowledge. But if feeling “involve[s] what is merely subjective in the relation of our representation and contain[s] no relation at all to an object for possible cognition of it (or even cognition of our condition)” (6:211–212/12), and we cannot know the ultimate object of our practical concerns, it seems we have no object which would correspond with our felt experience, affirming that subjective experience as also objective. Even the deduction of freedom took this subjectively experienced existential fact as its starting point, and did nothing to move us to appreciation of that “moral law itself”6 which would provide the ultimate objective ground of cognitions of both freedom and morality. How, then, can we claim that our cognitions of moral obligation and freedom are “objective” if some agents do not have the requisite firstpersonal experience, and if we have no knowledge of an objectively existing moral law to which our moral experience can correspond? We can defend our account against these objections. Many commentators assume that objective cognition of the Fact must involve either one in which subjective consciousness of morality corresponds to the object of the moral law, or one in which one has direct access to the moral law without appeal to a subjective state. We will discover in this chapter, though, that because the goal of an objective practical cognition is not to know an object (but, instead, to affirm an

5 Beck, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, p. 167.

6 Ibid.

objective, a priori, practical cognitions

273

intersubjectively shared determination of the will), knowledge of the moral law is not required for objective, practical cognition of it. Further, because affirmation of the intersubjectivity of moral obligation and freedom does not depend upon an empirical survey of agents, but instead upon an a priori argument from attentiveness to felt experience, claims of individual agents that they do not experience the feeling are inadequate to undermine the claim of objectivity as intersubjectivity. Because we know both that moral demands necessarily hold for all of us and that we all can act as these laws demand, our cognitions of those demands and our capacity are objective practical cognitions. Practical cognition. Let us begin by understanding what an objective practical cognition would be, were it to exist. When Kant speaks of practical cognition, he asserts the following: The moral law is not concerned with cognition of the constitution of objects that may be given to reason from elsewhere but rather with a cognition insofar as it can itself become the ground of the existence of objects and insofar as reason, by this cognition, has causality in a rational being, that is, pure reason, which can be regarded as faculty immediately determining the will. (5:47/41)

A practical cognition, though it is a “cognition,” does not take knowledge as its goal. Rather, practical cognition aims that the will “become the ground of the existence of objects,” or, alternatively, has a “causality . . . which . . . immediately determin[es] the will.” The goal of a practical cognition is a determination of the will that points that will toward bringing objects (or states of affairs) into existence. Its goal is not to know an already existing object. We may need to know something for our wills to be thus determined; nonetheless, a cognition is practical when it is concerned only with those knowledge claims that confirm the ability to determine a will toward action. A problem immediately arises, though, in identifying cognition of the Fact of Reason as practical in this sense. When Kant speaks of rational causality as determining the will toward the production of objects, he speaks not just of that determination of the will which assures moral obligation, but also of one that assures the capacity to act as the law commands. But awareness of categorical obligation that is the central moment of the Fact is not yet, in itself, awareness of that

274

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

capacity to act (though, as we have seen in Chapter 10, it certainly moves us in that direction). Is this moment of the Fact, then, on its own, not truly a practical cognition? The answer is in one sense, no, but in another, yes. As we noted in Chapter 4, Kant admits at least two kinds of “determination of the will,” objective and subjective.7 The question of categorical obligation is the question of whether the will is objectively determined (whether there is within the will a “principle in accordance with which [the subject] ought to act, i.e., an imperative” [4:421n/31n]). Affirmation of the Fact of Reason would thus be affirmation of objective determination of the will. To this extent, then, we find the cognition of the Fact of Reason to be a genuinely practical one. But a practical cognition that did not find its expression in a chosen maxim and following action would be stillborn. The Fact thus cannot be a sterile, inert recognition of moral obligation; rather, confidence in a capacity to act as it demands must follow from it. We know, though, from our analysis of the Gallows Man, that, whatever the “determination of the will” is that reveals to him his categorical obligation, it also leads him to conclude that he can act as that determination demands. Philosophically, though, this conclusion is a separate, second practical cognition: it is the practical cognition of the objective reality of freedom. Nonetheless, this second cognition is, as Kant would say, “inseparably connected” (5:42/37) with the first cognition of the moral law. So, although cognition of the moral law is not yet itself a determination of the will toward the production of objects, it is one that is inextricably connected with movement toward such production, and has no other goal than to assure such production. Awareness of one’s moral obligation is thus a practical cognition in the sense that it is a cognition whose goal is not knowledge of an object but rather determination of the will. Objective practical cognition. What would it mean, though, for a practical cognition to be truly objective in nature? Let us begin by clarifying the sort of objectivity that cannot be granted. Because feelings cannot construct either an empirical or a noumenal object, and because the felt experience of categorical obligation points us only mysteriously toward the moral law, we cannot guarantee the objectivity of a claim

7 See 4:421n/31n.

objective, a priori, practical cognitions

275

grounded in the feeling through assertion of some correspondence between the feeling and an object; there simply is no object to which we have adequate epistemic access here. We thus need a different notion of objectivity: not objectivity as correspondence to an object, but objectivity as intersubjective validity. To understand this option, let us make a brief excursion into Kant’s theoretical works, where he appeals to an intersubjectively valid experience of necessity to define the objectivity of theoretical cognitions. In the Second Analogy, Kant considers the question of the objectivity of representations we encounter in everyday empirical experiences, like that of a ship travelling down stream. [H]ow do we come to posit an object for these representations, or ascribe to their subjective reality, as modifications, some sort of objective reality? Objective significance cannot consist in the relation to another representation (of that which one would call the object), for that would simply raise anew the question: How does this representation in turn go beyond itself and acquire objective significance in addition to the subjective significance that is proper to it as a determination of the state of mind? If we investigate what new characteristic is given to our representations by the relation to an object, and what is the dignity that they thereby receive, we find that it does nothing beyond making the combination of representations necessary in a certain way, and subjecting them to a rule; and conversely that objective significance is conferred on our representations only insofar as a certain order in their temporal relation is necessary. (A197/B242, 309)

Because, within transcendental idealism, we have no mindindependent object, objectivity cannot be conferred upon subjective representations by appealing to their correspondence with an object. Instead, to affirm “objective significance” for representations, we appeal to the necessary, rule-bound order with which certain representations present themselves in experience. Rule-bound necessity of the order of our representations confers upon those merely subjective representations a new “dignity” called “objective reality.” This appeal to the necessary ordering of representations is not exactly an appeal to intersubjectivity, but further reflection reveals that the one implies the other: if an ordering of representations holds necessarily, anyone encountering them will experience them in the same way. Because my representations have a necessary order, I affirm that the ship moving from up stream to down stream is something all of

276

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

us experience similarly, and that it is impossible to perceive it differently.8 It is thus an intersubjectively shared experience. We might even call it a “common” experience. The universality of this experience, combined with the fact that it couldn’t be otherwise (that is, the necessity encountered in the experience), is all we need to assure its objective reality. We have, then, a sense of objectivity requiring no correspondence of mental representations with an object; all that is required is an intersubjectively valid experience of necessity. It is to this same sort of recognition of necessity within experience that Kant appeals to affirm the objectivity of practical cognitions. Kant does not speak of “intersubjective validity” as such in his practical works. But, as this work has argued, the ground of practical cognition is found in a common felt experience of necessity. And in appealing to such common experiences of necessity, Kant is, essentially, appealing to intersubjectively valid experiences of necessity. He is thus assured of a ground of objectivity for practical cognitions that does not depend upon correspondence to an object.9 It is worth noting that such an approach will also not need to depend upon an empirical study of moral experiences across persons or cultures to affirm the shared, objective nature of practical cognition.10 The approach we bring here is, rather, more similar to Moyar’s effort to find something constitutive of agency itself. His approach affirms “an act of self-consciousness . . . [as] a necessary first-person presupposition of moral judgment,”11 thereby affirming a necessary

8 “I see a ship driven down stream. My perception of its position down stream follows the perception of its position up stream, and it is impossible that in the apprehension of this appearance the ship should first be perceived down stream and afterwards up stream” (A192/B237, 307, emphasis added). 9 One might object that by finding necessity implicit in felt practical experience, Kant thereby assumes what he intends to prove, viz., the necessity, or objectivity, of moral obligation. Such a concern, once again, fails to take to heart Kant’s Groundwork (4:419– 420/29–30) point that if we have an experience of categorical obligation, we need only explain it, not prove it. A willingness to recognize just what is important about morality within moral experience itself is a crucial, central commitment of a phenomenological approach to morality. And Kant’s appeal to necessity within practical experience is no more, or less, egregious than his appeal to necessity in the argument of the Second Analogy just considered. 10 We thus reject interpretations like Proops’, which suggest that such empirical confirmation would be necessary: “What would reveal the nonempirical origin of the idea of duty would be its constancy across persons whose quality and level of moral education differ widely” (Proops, “Kant’s Legal Metaphor,” p. 226). 11 Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy,” p. 334.

objective, a priori, practical cognitions

277

(and therefore shared) presupposition of moral judgment which must be assumed for any agent. We are in sympathy with such an approach, and find it compatible with our own pursuit of an intersubjectively valid experience of necessity. Kant’s practical appeal to the intersubjective validity of experiences of necessity should, furthermore, not be surprising to us. He is, after all, encountering a problem in his practical philosophy very similar to the problem he dealt with theoretically. In both cases, Kant needs to assert objectivity for otherwise merely subjective mental contents; but he is also, in both cases, unable to appeal to a corresponding object. The reasons appeal to an object is impossible differ, though. Theoretically, he encounters the impossibility of asserting a mind-independent object within transcendental idealism: we cannot appeal to the unknowable thing-in-itself as that object which assures the objectivity of our phenomenal experience. In the practical case, he encounters the difficulty that feeling cannot refer to an object of any sort, empirical or noumenal. Of course, Kant’s ultimate theoretical goal is to affirm an empirical “object” in some sense, a goal that he cannot claim in any would-be practical application of this same sort of move.12 Despite these differences, when Kant encounters the same “no reference to an object” problem in seeking objective knowledge claims, it makes sense that he would appeal to a similar sort of resolution: intersubjectively shared experiences of necessity. Objective practical cognition is an intersubjectively valid determination of the will. How, then, can we apply this notion of objectivity to the Gallows Man’s practical cognition of the Fact of Reason? First, we must recall that while the goal of a theoretical cognition is knowledge of an object, the goal of a practical cognition is a determination of the will. What it means to apply an intersubjective notion of objectivity to each of these sorts of cognition thus varies accordingly: a theoretical objective cognition is knowledge of an object shared by all knowers, but a practical objective cognition is a determination of the will shared by all doers. What we seek, then, to ground an objective practical cognition is an intersubjectively shared determination of the will that holds necessarily.

12 The question of whether such a constructed, real, empirical object exists mindindependently in empirical experience is a contested one: should we, in the words of Kemp Smith (Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason), attribute a “subjectivist” or “phenomenalist” reading of transcendental idealism to Kant?

278

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

Put this way, it is obvious, given our previous discussions of it, that the Gallows Man’s common experience of the Fact of Reason is just the sort of experience we need. As we argued in Chapter 9, the constraint the Gallows Man encounters when happiness and morality conflict is a necessary experience of the necessitation of his will: he identifies a demand upon his will that will not evaporate under any condition, and this is a demand he cannot help but experience. We relied upon this claim of the necessary experience of necessitation to affirm a rational cause of the Gallows Man’s experience. We now rely on the same quality of his experience to affirm that experience as grounding an objective practical cognition of the moral law. If his common experience really is an experience of necessity, a philosopher looking at it can affirm that, like the ship moving from up stream to down stream, it is an experience that holds for all similarly situated agents. It is, in other words, an intersubjectively shared experience of the necessary necessitation of the will. Even the Gallows Man himself, when he reflects commonly, identifies these demands operating upon him as demands of his best self, of the humanity, within him. As such, he too recognizes this demand as one he shares with all other humans.13 These moral demands are experienced by the Gallows Man as the necessary demands of a rational humanity itself imposing themselves not only upon his own will but also upon everybody. In the philosopher’s language, this is an intersubjectively valid experience. We should, however, clarify what the common person can say here of her experience, and what the philosopher can say of it. The common person knows that she is obligated, and that this obligation is what anyone in this situation would experience. She even knows that what is compelling her is her own rationality as a human being. She may not, however, use the language of “objective” when describing her moral demands. She would not say: “I recognize the demand not to lie as objectively valid.” But she could easily say: “I recognize that I shouldn’t lie, and I know this is what is demanded of anyone in this situation.” She emphatically does not say: “Oh, this demand appeals

13 Indeed, we have seen that he is experiencing that part of him that he shares not only with all of humanity, but which all of humanity shares with all rational beings. Other, nonsensibly affected rational beings will not access this fact of their rational natures in the same way, but it is the same rational nature they have that the Gallows Man recognizes.

objective, a priori, practical cognitions

279

only to me! I wish I were someone else so that I didn’t have to do this!” Instead, the common experience is an experience of finding all persons bound by similar constraints. “Objectivity” is just the philosopher’s word for this common person’s recognition of her own moral demands as also “what anyone in this situation would experience.” The Gallows Man knows that what he finds given in his felt experience is just what the human being finds in the way that the human being finds it.14 The subjective, felt, first-personal experience of necessity encountered by the Gallows Man thus serves as the ground of a practical objective cognition of the moral law. And it does so without appealing to knowledge of correspondence between that subjective experience and a metaphysically existing object of the moral law itself. It is not that this moral law does not exist; but because we cannot know such noumenal objects, we cannot appeal to it in making claims of objectivity.15 And once we admit this first practical cognition of moral obligation as objective, we grant also that the further cognition of freedom which Kant takes from it through a deduction is similarly objective.16 Subjective feeling grounds objective cognition. We can, furthermore, affirm the objectivity of practical cognition even when we grant that the determination of the will we access comes via the subjective experience of feeling.17 Kant does indeed generally take feeling to be merely subjective. But here we have relied upon the distinctive moral feeling of respect to make these claims of objectivity; that is, after all, the

14 Again, what the human being finds – her own rational nature – is shared beyond humanity, to all rational beings. But not all rational beings find this nature by the same means that sensibly affected human beings do. See Chapter 9 for further discussion of this point. 15 Put in this way, one can see how one could interpret this phenomenological story of the Gallows Man as an epistemically humble story of moral realism. Although he cannot strictly know the reality of the moral law, he recognizes that this real object – his own rational nature – is the ground of moral demands. If he were able to take the perspective of his noumenal self, one might then say that his rational self “constructs” moral demands, and thus pursues more a constructivist instead of a realist account of morality; but because he encounters this rational self only through the effects he finds of it in phenomenological experience, it makes more sense to say that he encounters that self, mysteriously, as a real object grounding moral demands. 16 Indeed, one which, because of its appeal to a deduction from morality to freedom, could be more satisfying for those wanting to assure that an objective cognition is the product of a deduction. 17 “What is subjective in our representations cannot become an element in our cognition . . . and then susceptibility to the representation is called feeling” (6:212n/12n).

280

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

feeling which informs the common experience of the Gallows Man. This means, though, that the moral feeling of respect itself becomes objective. Our central claim of objectivity is a claim about moral obligation, not feeling: what is recognized as objective is the fact of being morally obligated, as all human beings are. But because this objective fact is accessed by a necessarily felt feeling, it is also true that all persons experience moral feeling; the moral feeling of respect is, in other words, a necessarily felt feeling. But a necessary feeling is also an objective feeling in the sense that it is necessarily felt by all sensibly affected rational beings; it is an intersubjectively shared, or objective, feeling. We do not, however, thereby violate the constraints on the subjectivity of feeling in the Metaphysics of Morals. Moral feeling is objective in that it is intersubjectively felt. But that does not mean that the feeling constructs an object of knowledge; and this latter sense of objectivity was the only one which Kant sought to deny for feeling: “What is subjective in our representations cannot become an element in our cognition because it involves only a relation of the representation to the subject and nothing that can be used for cognition of an object” (6:212n/ 12n, emphases removed and added). To say that moral feeling is objective in the sense of being intersubjectively valid thus does not undermine Kant’s claim that feeling is subjective in the sense that it cannot be involved in the construction of an object. Furthermore, connecting moral feeling with an objective cognition is in agreement with Kant’s discussion of the feeling in the second Critique, where he regularly connects moral feeling and cognition, suggesting even that feeling plays an epistemic role in the constitution of objective practical cognitions. For example, he says “the effect of this [moral] law on feeling is merely humiliation, [in] which we can thus . . . cognize . . . the resistance to incentives of sensibility” (5:78/67, emphasis added), thereby suggesting that the experience of moral feeling reveals a “cogni[tion]” whose object or content is just this internal “resistance to incentives of sensibility.” Later, Kant asserts that since this constraint is exercised only by the lawgiving of his own reason, it also contains something elevating, and the subjective effect on feeling, inasmuch as pure practical reason is the sole cause of it, can thus be called self-approbation with reference to pure practical reason, inasmuch as he cognized himself as determined to it solely by the law. (5:80–81/69)

objective, a priori, practical cognitions

281

Here, the affective experience of “self-approbation” is asserted as a further aspect of a practical cognition of being under the authority of the moral law.18 So, Kant does sanction explicitly practical cognitions that are accessed via feeling. Once again, though, feeling plays only an enabling (as opposed to evidential) role in affirming the objectivity of practical cognitions. A practical cognition is successful when I know that my will is determined necessarily, but I am able to access this necessary determination only via the moral feeling of respect. The feeling thus enables me to access that thing (necessity) that goes on to play a more substantive evidential role in affirming the objectivity of moral obligation. Once I know that a determination of my will holds necessarily, I can also say that this determination of the will is an intersubjectively valid one, that is, an objective one.19 Objections to the argument for practical objectivity. Our original objector from the opening of the chapter might, however, reemerge at this point: we claim, on the basis of an a priori argument from the necessity inherent in felt experience, that all persons must experience this conflict between happiness and morality, and must be capable of that attentiveness needed for accessing the practical import of this experience; these are simply, to use Moyar’s words, features “constitutive of moral agency” as such.20 But what to say of someone who stubbornly asserts that she has not had the experience of the conflict between happiness and morality? Given the force of the preceding argument, the answer to this objector has to be: you need to pay more attention! Either you haven’t looked closely enough at your moral experience or, regrettably, you are deceiving yourself about it. Such is the demand of any first-personal phenomenological account which has an a priori argument to back it up: one grants epistemic import to the carefully, 18 Even in the Groundwork, Kant affirms this relationship of cognition and affect: “what I cognize immediately as a law for me I cognize with respect, which signifies merely consciousness of the subordination of my will to a law without the mediation of other influences on my sense” (4:401n/14n, first emphases added). 19 We see here a hint of themes that Kant will explore more, in other contexts, in the Critique of Judgment. There, Kant’s discussion of the subjective universality of aesthetic judgment seems a continuation of the intersubjectively grounded universality of moral obligation accessed via feeling which we affirm here. Determination of the exact contrasts and comparisons to be drawn amongst these accounts is, however, a project beyond the scope of this study. 20 Moyar, “Unstable Autonomy,” p. 334.

282

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

attentively accessed first-personal experience it reveals, and to the philosophical conclusions extracted from it; and any other experience, or failure of experience, needs to be assessed in light of confidence in this attentively accessed one. The phenomenological method thus provides us with a means for sifting through our psychological experiences. What, though, if our objector persists: even if we accept that these features of necessarily felt experience are constitutive of moral agency as such, surely there are certain social and material conditions for being able to be adequately attentive to one’s felt experience. And if those conditions are not present – if, for example, an agent lacks the requisite time, intelligence, or focus necessary for attentive reflection – then must we not admit that such agents are neither obligated nor morally culpable? There is a certain point we must accept from this objector: although the rational requirements for attentive reflection on felt experience are not high (they do not, as we have emphasized, require an expert, philosophical approach to one’s felt experience, only a human one), one does require some basic education and some protection from external threats to realize one’s human capacities. Were these conditions to be utterly and completely absent, one could not hold such persons fully responsible for their actions. If such persons found it nearly impossible to understand moral demands, then they would, of course, need to be restrained, though perhaps not punished as such. Surely, though, were society to produce many such persons, this would be a lamentable state, one which calls for political action and remediation. We thus hold firmly to the conclusions of our a priori argument, even in the face of these objectors. Once we affirm the necessity of a grounding felt experience of necessity and the basic capacity for attentiveness to it, we also affirm that moral obligation holds objectively for all human beings. Human beings or rational beings? A further concern about the scope of this claim of objectivity arises, at this point, however: are we saying that the morality we have affirmed in the Fact of Reason holds only for human agents, and not for rational agents more generally? If so, then we have a problem, since Kant clearly holds that the moral law is valid for all rational agents, not just for human agents. How, though, could this account of objective moral obligation hold beyond sensibly

objective, a priori, practical cognitions

283

affected agents if the method by which we have affirmed it appeals to sensibility (that is, to felt experience)? Can the moral law hold for all rational agents if nonsensibly affected rational agents do not have this common felt experience that humans do? We can, however, without contradiction, assert both that humans know moral demands only via sensible experience, and that nonsensible rational agents are held to the same law. This is because there are a variety of routes by which rational beings access the same moral law. We have, in this book, been telling the story of how human beings access awareness of moral obligation. The law thus accessed is indeed one that holds for all rational beings (including nonhuman beings). But it may be that other sorts of rational beings – especially nonsensibly affected ones – would have another means of accessing this same law. Kant himself affirms as much. First, he says: Now this principle of morality, just on account of the universality of the lawgiving that makes it the formal supreme determining ground of the will regardless of all subjective differences, is declared by reason to be at the same time a law for all rational beings insofar as they have a will, that is, the ability to determine their causality by the representation of rules, hence insofar as they are capable of actions in accordance with . . . a priori practical principles. (5:32/29)

Even though we access the moral law via our sensible, receptive natures, the very universality of the law thus accessed reveals that this law applies not only to us but well beyond us. The point here is not unlike the mystery we need to admit of the cause of our felt experience: we humans have discovered in moral obligation a very unusual thing: something that forces us to admit we are more than just desiring, sensible, happiness-seeking beings. In admitting a piece of us that stands above our desiring selves, though, we also admit of ourselves entrance into the community not just of humanity but also of rational beings more generally. The moral law to which we humans are held holds beyond humanity and applies to all beings who, like us, have this capacity to will. Admitting that we are subject to a law that holds also for beings somewhat, but not entirely, like us raises some epistemic challenges, though. We can investigate our own experience to understand the human process by which we acquire a practical cognition of moral obligation. But when it comes to understanding how beings different

284

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

from us access the same law, we begin to move beyond our epistemic grasp of things. We can, of course, say that nonsensibly affected rational beings are, like us, rational beings. But when we realize that, ironically, it is our sensible capacity for receptivity upon which we relied to access the moral law, we need to admit that the process of knowing the moral law for nonsensibly affected rational beings, whatever it is, is something different from ours and something about which we can say very little. Kant is willing to say a little bit about the difference between the way humans and nonsensibly affected rational beings access the law. The former experience the law as an “imperative,” a “resistance,” or a “constraint” (5:32/30). But nonsensibly affected agents couldn’t access the moral law via this means since they do not have that sensibility which is involved in resisting the moral law. To the contrary, “[i]n the supremely self-sufficient intelligence, choice is rightly represented as incapable of any maxim that could not at the same time be objectively a law” (5:32/30). Because of this inability to act against morality or “holiness,” such beings would “not [be] above all practical laws, but rather above all practically restrictive laws and so above obligation and duty” (5:33/30). We can say a couple things, then, about holy, nonsensibly affected beings. They do not access morality via an experience of necessitation or obligation and, indeed, do not take moral demands as imperatives or duties. They might not even take moral demands as the right thing to do; they are simply the only thing to do, quite literally. Admitting all this, we can still say that the same moral law the Gallows Man accesses via constraint is the law these holy beings take as a guide. Indeed, because the Gallows Man knows that the source of his own obligations is mysterious but rational, it might even make sense to him – though it also might be the cause of amazement – that he is held to the same law by which these holy beings are guided. There is something here, then, that sits on the border of that line between what he knows and what is mysterious to him: he knows that God, for example, would hold to the same principles he does; but it is mysterious to him how he could be enough like God to be held to the same laws as God. That the very law which binds him “is, therefore, not limited to human beings only but applies to all finite beings that have reason and will and even includes the infinite being” is an amazing thing which he admits. To provide an account of that, though, would be to know the mind of God, and I set aside that difficult question for another time!

objective, a priori, practical cognitions

285

The limits and strengths of practical cognition. We can now summarize what we have found in our assessment of the objectivity of practical cognition. Doing so will allow us to reflect upon the admittedly strange epistemic state of a practical cognition, one that holds as synthetic a priori even as we admit that we do not know its object. So, what do I know, and what do I not know, when I say that I have an objective practical cognition of the moral law? First, I know that I am obligated by an unconditional, absolute objective determination of my will; I know both the felt experience, and the categorical obligation it reveals, perfectly well. Further, because of the categorical, absolute, and unconditional nature of this necessitation of my will, I know that what holds for me holds under all conditions, including for all persons; that is, it holds intersubjectively. What I do not know, but only mysteriously wonder at, is that rational, noumenal cause of such categorical necessitation; it is this rational cause – “the moral law itself”21 – that remains shrouded in mystery and is, appropriately, an object of wonder, not knowledge. The cognition I access via attentive reflection, and which holds as objectively true, thus does not have the content of: “the moral law exists as an independently existing, nonempirical object.” Instead, it has the content of: “I, and all rational beings, are categorically obligated.” This content, furthermore, further confirms that this cognition is a truly practical one. The former claim – that “the moral law exists as an independently existing, nonempirical object” – does not have that power to move one towards action. Indeed, it threatens to be a sterile, merely theoretical cognition. This, however, is not what we discover in a practical cognition of the Fact of Reason. When I have that, I know that I am obligated in a way that ties me to all other similarly obligated beings; and that, along with my recognition that this law is my own law, does indeed move me as an agent toward admission of my capacity to act and, potentially, toward action in accordance with the initial demand. This is not a sterile, theoretical cognition, but a truly practical – that is, first-personally motivating – and yet still objective cognition. In all of this, we thus admit that we do not know “the moral law itself.” But Kant never told us that we would have a theoretical cognition of the moral law. Indeed, he repeatedly reminds us that the cognition we gain of both morality and freedom is for practical

21 Beck, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, p. 167.

286

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

purposes only, and that a practical cognition of objective reality is not about knowing objects. Here, he makes that point in relation to a practical cognition of the objective reality of freedom: [Practical reason] can transfer the determining ground of the will into the intelligible order of things inasmuch as it readily admits at the same time that it does not understand how the concept of cause might be determined for cognition of these things . . . For, the concept receives significance apart from this – though only for practical use – namely, through the moral law. (5:49–50/44, emphasis added)22

The goal of a practical cognition is not to know an object; it is, rather, to recognize determinations of my will as genuinely necessary so as to be better situated to access my causal power to act on those determinations. Having a practical cognition of the moral law, or of freedom, is thus entirely compatible with saying that I do not know the moral law, or freedom. The fact that we only mysteriously grasp but do not actually know the source of the moral law is thus not an obstacle to claiming we have an objective practical cognition of the moral law. For it is certainly the case, as our attentive Gallows Man has shown us, that the grasp I have of moral demands is sufficient for determination of my will in the sense of recognizing it as categorically obligated, and as capable of acting as that categorical obligation demands. In other words, we know enough of the moral law to say that we have a practical cognition of it. Interestingly, though, this merely practical cognition has its own epistemic strength. Our cognitions of both morality and freedom are indeed “only for practical use” (5:6/5). Yet, even as we admit the limits of these cognitions, we affirm also that they have synthetic a priori status. This is, after all, what Kant asserts of at least the practical cognition of morality when he claims that the Fact of Reason “forces itself upon us of itself as a synthetic a priori proposition” (5:31/28). Kant is very aware, though, that he has not provided a deduction of this synthetic a priori claim of morality: “The moral law cannot be proved by any deduction” (5:47/42). One might worry (and I suspect, at various points, Kant did worry) that lacking a deduction of one’s claim, one cannot assert anything synthetic a priori about it. And yet, by the time of the second Critique, Kant, now fully in his 22 See also 5:49–50/43–44 and 5:54–57/47–50 for helpful discussions of this caveat that practical cognition is not knowledge of an object.

objective, a priori, practical cognitions

287

practical phenomenological mode, decides instead that this synthetic a priori cognition “has no need of justifying grounds” (5:47/42, emphasis added). And, as we suggested in Chapter 2, and then showed in Part iii of this book, it turns out that, instead of deduction, we can rely upon the method of attentive reflection on felt, phenomenological experience to confirm claims that are synthetic and a priori. Kant’s practical cognition of the moral law fits this method of attentive reflection for assuring a priori cognition perfectly; indeed, it may be its only pure example (since the cognition of freedom does involve a deduction). We have accessed our cognition of the moral law by attentively considering the felt, phenomenological experience of necessity and admitting a mysterious, rational cause for it. The cognition of categorical obligation gained through this method – the cognition, that is, that “My will is categorically obligated” – is both a synthetic claim (since categorical obligation is not analytic to my will) and one that holds with necessity (since I have a necessary experience of necessitation of my will, can point to a wondrous rational cause of it, and do not in all this appeal to induction and the need for repeated experiences of necessitation to confirm that content of necessity). It is, in other words, a synthetic a priori claim. Kant thus emphasizes both that the objective synthetic a priori cognitions we have accomplished are valid “only for practical use” (5:6/5, emphasis added), and that they yield, nonetheless, genuinely “synthetic a priori” validity (5:31/28) and an “objective though only practical reality” (5:48/42, emphasis added). In emphasizing that our cognition of both freedom and the moral law are only practical cognitions, Kant reemphasizes the limits of theoretical reason established in the first Critique: we can indeed know things practically, but this is a different epistemic experience than theoretical cognition. But in granting these claims objective, synthetic a priori status, he reminds us that the limits of reason do not prevent pure reason from being practical. Through attentive and philosophical investigation of the common, felt experiences of agency, a new, practical path for a priori claims is indeed forged. Those looking for objective knowledge in the theoretical sense, for an a priori claim that eschews appeal to experience, or for a practical account of the same which closely resembles these theoretical claims, will thus be disappointed by these conclusions. And yet these more limited senses of both practical objectivity and a priority are just what we need to satisfy the epistemic constraints that sensibly affected

288

t h e “ c ri ti qu e of p r a ct i c a l r e as o n ”

rational beings must accept when investigating intelligible objects like morality and freedom. Attentive reflection on the felt experience of conflict between happiness and morality yields that objective synthetic a priori cognition of the reality of the moral law necessary for practical concerns, and possible for finite, sensibly affected rational beings. From that strong phenomenological basis, we can, furthermore, deduce a synthetic a priori cognition of the objective reality of freedom.

Conclusion We have, thus, completed our defense of Kant’s phenomenological grounding of both morality and freedom. Through attentive reflection on the Gallows Man’s felt experience of the conflict between happiness and morality, we affirm all those philosophical points which Kant makes about both moral obligation and freedom. We must, at this point, also reaffirm, though, the limits to the account of morality and freedom we have just provided. I do not mean to suggest that I have provided the definitive readings of the Universalizability, Humanity, and Autonomy Formulations of the Categorical Imperative; nor have I provided a complete account of Kant’s theory of freedom. Such tasks are, perhaps, tasks of another book (or two). My only goal has been to show that we can find within common, felt, phenomenological experience a defense of a specifically Kantian understanding of that law by which the common person feels herself obligated, and the freedom which assures her capacity for compliance with that law. There are further arguments to be had about how best to understand universalizability, what it means to be determined by the form of the law, whether the account of freedom here is compatible with Kant’s Third Antinomy consideration of the same, and so on. My only point here was to show that we can indeed locate the practical source of such reflections in a very familiar, common experience; and that being able to do so is what gives legitimacy to such practical philosophical reflections: we can philosophize about such things, things which point us beyond the limits of reason, precisely because we have experiences which legitimate such thought: our common experience is the proper source of practical philosophical cognition.

CONCLUSION

Our defense of Kant’s common grounding of morality is now complete. We have defended Kant’s account of morality by appeal to attentive reflection upon common, felt, first-personal phenomenological experience. Although we have focused on the Groundwork and second Critique in this work, we can at least hint at how elements of the approach brought here are maintained and expanded in Kant’s later works. We utilized a theoretical framework drawn from the Metaphysics of Morals to make our claims about the Groundwork and second Critique, so it should not surprise us to discover other aspects of that work which agree with our account. The priority of knowledge of obligation to self over knowledge of obligation to others in the opening of the Doctrine of Elements in the Metaphysics of Morals (6:417–418/173) is one good place to look to affirm the first-personal aspect of our account. And Kant’s emphasis on the role of moral feeling in accessing moral obligation (at 6:399/160) confirms and continues his reliance upon feeling in a morally epistemic role. We have also suggested that the objectivity accessed through a subjective felt experience of necessity prefigures Kant’s Critique of Judgment discussion of subjective universality. Indeed, this third Critique is perhaps the best example of Kant’s tendency in his later works to rely even more upon the epistemic power of feeling. Finally, in the Religion, Kant’s appreciation of the central moral problem of self-deception upon which we have focused here comes into full flower with his account of radical evil. One might even worry that heightening a tendency toward preference for self into a claim about the radically evil nature of humanity could raise even deeper problems for the pressures that self-deception put upon his second

289

290

c o n cl u s i o n

Critique account of moral obligation. All of these concerns are, however, for another book, not this one. I conclude by reflecting upon how, in the light of the ideas of this study, Kant’s place in relation to historical and contemporary movements in philosophy now looks somewhat different than what one might traditionally have expected. First, Kant’s method of attentiveness has a debt to thinkers such as Descartes and Leibniz, both of whom relied heavily upon attentiveness to access innate ideas, albeit for nonpractical purposes. Kant, though perhaps not consciously, takes up both Cartesian and Leibnizian methods of attentive reflection. Descartes and Leibniz used this method of attentiveness to access innate ideas, but Kant adjusts the method for use in accessing practical, as opposed to theoretical, epistemic objects. It is interesting, then, to compare Kant’s approach to attentiveness with the use that these seventeenth-century figures make of it. The particular question at issue is this: how and to what extent must human beings rely upon sensible means to hope to have knowledge of things intelligible, that is, of things beyond the phenomenal world? On a certain strong reading of his Meditations,1 Descartes is at one extreme end of the continuum. Humans are indeed made to perceive the intelligible realm of clear and distinct ideas directly, and in order to do that, we must entirely eschew any reference to the sensible realm in achieving our knowledge claims. The sensible world only serves to distract our attention from truth, not draw us toward it. Indications of the need for attentiveness in just this sense can be found in most all the Meditations. Even in the very opening Synopsis, Descartes warns his reader that he addresses his book only to “those who are able and willing to meditate seriously with me, and to withdraw their minds from the senses and from all preconceived opinions.”2 The crucial point, then, is that attentiveness itself is a mental state in which, having turned away from sensible distractions, we are able to perceive the mental realm clearly and distinctly. It is, in Descartes’ words, an exercise of “purely mental scrutiny.”3 On at least a certain reading of the Meditations, then, Descartes’ admonition to attentiveness and meditation involves an outright rejection of the world of sense. The senses

1 René Descartes, Meditations, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3 Ibid., p. 21. 2 Ibid., p. 8.

conclusion

291

are only confusing and obfuscating, and not at all helpful in moving us toward knowledge of the intelligible. When Leibniz considers attentiveness, though, it is in response to Locke’s empiricist attack upon the very possibility of innate ideas. He is thus concerned at once to defend his own very strong commitment to innate ideas while also making space for Locke’s commitment to the role of the senses in the pursuit of knowledge. In his debate with Locke, Leibniz thus takes a step toward integrating an appeal to sensible means for accessing intelligible objects of knowledge. Leibniz insists that the reason we don’t always know (with a high level of clarity) ideas that have always been innate in us is that we haven’t paid attention to them: “our distractions and needs prevent our being always aware of them,”4 and so it is attentiveness upon which we must rely in order to recognize them. Because our minds are filled with an infinite and cacophonous mix of perceptions of the universe, it is very easy for some of our ideas to not receive the attention they need in order to be perceived clearly. Interestingly, though, Leibniz does not take the Cartesian route of encouraging us to empty our minds of the sensible morass of perceptions in order to focus more adequately on the clear and distinct ones. To the contrary, because of his commitment to the preestablished harmony of mind and body, Leibniz insists that “we cannot have abstract thoughts which have no need of something sensible,”5 and, as such, he suggests that certain sensible experiences act as triggers for our ultimate attentiveness to what is truly an innate and intelligible idea. As he puts it, “there are ideas and principles which do not reach us through the senses, and which we find in ourselves without having formed them, though the senses bring them to our awareness.”6 The sensible experience, then, is not the ultimate source of our idea, but neither is it simple distraction from what we are interested in pursuing. Rather, sensible experiences act as an occasion by which one’s mind can be led to focus on intelligible objects, allowing us to “attend … carefully and methodically to what is already in our minds.”7 We thus consider things which we would not have noticed (or attended to) without that sensible trigger. Sensibility leads us to focus our inner attentive mind in one direction rather than another. 4 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. P. Remnant and J. Bennett (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 52. 6 Ibid., p. 74. 7 Ibid., p. 77. 5 Ibid., p. 77.

292

c o n cl u s i o n

Kant clearly has debts to both these senses of attentiveness. On the one hand, as we have seen, Kant, like Descartes, relies upon attentiveness to remove ourselves from the undue influence of sensibility, though he focuses upon removing ourselves from undue influence of sensible desires upon our will. Yet, on the other hand, Kant relies, like Leibniz, upon a sensible experience (for Kant, the sensible experience of feeling) to point us, albeit mysteriously, toward noumenal objects. In the former, he is taking the Cartesian line that we must remove ourselves from the senses in order to see intelligible things clearly; in the latter, he appeals to a quasi-Leibnizian sensible trigger to inspire reflection on things intelligible. As we move to post-Kantian philosophy, Kant’s commitment to attentiveness to necessity in experience stands out as a central historical predecessor to the phenomenological method that emerges in the nineteenth century. We saw Kant appeal to our ability to be attentive to aspects of experience which present themselves with necessity. Such an appeal is clearly an historical precursor to Husserl’s more developed notion of eidetic reduction, a method by which, beginning with a common, or natural attitude, one brackets the existence of objects within this natural perspective so as to see into the essence of a thing.8 Kant’s appeal to the possibility of finding truly necessary aspects of a given experience can thus be seen as keeping open this portal for phenomenological consideration of experience, even in the face of Hume’s empirical reduction of the epistemic possibilities of appeal to experience. Husserl’s phenomenological method thus owes a debt to Kant in keeping this route open. And finally, on the contemporary scene, although Kant has recently been taken as the historical figure upon whom to rely in making sense of constructivism in ethics, our reflections suggest that Kant is not a constructivist in his moral commitments. Indeed, he has more in common with Iris Murdoch’s Platonism9 than with contemporary constructivism. It is not my intention fully to defend this claim here, only to hint at it by revealing an unexpected similarity between the approach we have presented and Iris Murdoch’s Platonic realism. Murdoch has many criticisms of Kantian morality: she worries that Kantian-inspired morality is concerned only with action and the thin 8 See, for example, Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1982). 9 Iris Murdoch, Sovereignty of the Good (London: Routledge, 1970).

conclusion

293

notion of freedom purportedly guiding it; she worries further that it abandons any concern for addressing the illusions that block our appreciation of moral realities. For her Kant, morality is not about seeing and knowing but about acting, at the point of choice, through the power of a rational will which is not constrained by a moral reality external to it but instead seeks to create its own. But our story of Kant has shown both that there is a moment of receptivity to a forceful, unavoidable moral fact previous to choice which is central for Kantian morality, and that Kant himself was very concerned to address that human tendency toward self-deception which threatens to undermine its effect on one’s life. When Murdoch speaks, then, of what she calls a “compulsively present”10 reality at the basis of our moral lives, one to which we need to attend in light of our internal tendency to want to avoid admitting its power, she does not herself realize just how Kantian she is being. And yet, as this study suggests, that is exactly what she is doing. Murdoch’s attentive reflection upon “a compulsively present moral reality” finds a parallel in Kant’s Fact of Reason, which is forced upon us without deduction and is instead appreciated affectively through the moral feeling of respect, which reveals to us those contours of an otherwise inaccessible, transcendent object of the moral law. Our relation to that moral reality thereby revealed may indeed be respect for the law qua law, not Murdoch’s love of the good qua good. And yet, it seems, nonetheless, that Kant and Murdoch would have far more to say to each other than one might initially expect. Nietzsche was right, then, when he suggested that Kant wrote in defense of “the whole world” instead of for scholarly experts.11 In the final analysis, though, Kant’s “joke”12 is no laughing matter, but instead a very serious one: he provides a phenomenological defense of what is most important in common human moral experience.

10 Ibid., p. 39. 11 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 140. 12 Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary works of Immanuel Kant Gesammelte Schriften. Hrsg. bd. 1–22, Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften; bd. 23, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin; bd. 24, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Berlin, 1900–. Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge University Press, 1998. Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. and ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Secondary works Allison, Henry. Kant’s Theory of Freedom, Cambridge University Press, 1990. “Comments on Guyer,” Inquiry 50(5), 2007, pp. 480–488. Ameriks, Karl. The Fate of Autonomy, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant’s Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald, Indianapolis, IN: BobbsMerrill, 1962. Baxley, Anne Margaret. Kant’s Theory of Virtue: The Value of Autocracy, Cambridge University Press, 2010. Beck, Lewis White. A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, University of Chicago Press, 1960. “The Fact of Reason: An Essay on Justification in Ethics,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Kant, Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965, pp. 200–214. Blackburn, Simon. Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning, Oxford University Press, 1998. Brown, Jonathan. The Self, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997. 294

bibliography

295

Darwall, Stephen. The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham, Cambridge University Press, 1996. “Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume i, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 325–404. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment, trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokonsky, New York: Vintage, 1993. Fichte, J. G. The Science of Knowledge, ed. Peter Heath and John Lachs, Cambridge University Press, 1982. Franks, Paul. All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism in German Idealism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Grenberg, Jeanine. Kant and the Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption and Virtue, Cambridge University Press, 2005. Guyer, Paul. “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Inquiry 50(5), 2007, pp. 444–464. “Response to Critics,” Inquiry 50(5), 2007, pp. 497–510. Henrich, Dieter. “The Concept of Moral Insight and Kant’s Doctrine of the Fact of Reason,” in The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, trans. Manfred Kuehn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, pp. 57–87. “Das Problem der Grundlegung der Ethik bei Kant um im spekulativen Idealismus,” in Sein und Ethos, ed. Paulus Engelhardt, Mainz: MatthiasGrünewald Verlag, 1963, pp. 351–385. Herman, Barbara. The Practice of Moral Judgment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Hill, Thomas. “Four Conceptions of Conscience,” in Human Welfare and Moral Worth: Kantian Perspectives, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1982. Kemp Smith, Norman. A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1984. Korsgaard, Christine. Creating the Kingdom of Ends, Cambridge University Press, 1996. The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. P. Remnant and J. Bennett, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Moyar, Dean. “Unstable Autonomy: Conscience and Judgment in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 5, 2008, pp. 327–360. Murdoch, Iris. Sovereignty of the Good, London: Routledge, 1970. Nagel, Thomas. The Possibility of Altruism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckoff and Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

296

bi bl io g r ap h y

Proops, Ian. “Kant’s Legal Metaphor and the Nature of a Deduction,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 41(2), 2003, pp. 209–229. Reath, Andrews. “Kant’s Theory of Moral Sensibility: Respect for the Moral Law and the Influence of Inclination,” Kant-Studien 80, 1989, pp. 284–302. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism, trans. P. Mairet, London: Methuen, 1948. Strawson, P. F. “Freedom and Resentment,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action, Oxford University Press, 1968, pp. 71–96. Wiesenthal, Simon. The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and the Limits of Forgiveness, New York: Schocken, 1969. Williamson, Timothy. Knowledge and its Limits, Oxford University Press, 2002. Wood, Allen. Kantian Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Kant’s Ethical Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

INDEX

Allison, Henry, 33–35, 45–46, 69, 76, 106–107, 110, 123–124, 126–127, 133, 138–149, 153, 156, 194, 198–199, 203, 265, 271 Ameriks, Karl, 33–34, 110, 112, 124 Aristotle, 205 attentiveness as common, 9, 25, 27, 79–80, 89–90, 94–95, 116, 180–182, 184, 281–282 in the Critique of Practical Reason, 23, 26, 161–162, 177–184 definition of, 10, 23–24, 53, 182–183, 185 and Descartes, 290–292 the Gallows Man’s, 157, 164, 183, 188, 198, 222, 232, 249–250, 259, 288 as ground of practical cognition, 9, 161–163, 182 in the Groundwork, 26, 108, 161–162, 177–184 and Leibniz, 291–292 to the moral feeling of respect, 66, 174–175, 235 to necessity, 40, 53, 56–57, 157–158, 161–163, 170, 179, 183, 214–216, 222, 287, 292 obstacles to, 24 as perception, 24–25 as philosophical, 187–188, 214–215, 222, 249–250, 261 versus deductive inference/argument, 8–10, 23–24, 53–56, 262–263 versus inductive appeal to experience, 32, 38–40, 103–104, 214–215

autonomy Darwall’s criticism of Kant’s conception of, 211–214 Fichtean criticisms of Kant’s conception of, 154–155 formulation of Categorical Imperative, 201 and the Gallows Man, 223–234, 236–237 and God, 225 and the moral feeling of respect, 147, 234–236 as positive freedom, 117–118 autonomy-informed interpretation of First Formulation of the Categorical Imperative, 237–242 autonomy-informed interpretation of the Humanity Formulation of the Categorical Imperative, 242–247 Beck, Lewis White, 138–139, 149, 193–197, 199, 271–272, 285 Categorical Imperative Autonomy Formulation of, 201 common ground of Humanity Formulation of, 247–248 common understanding of, 26, 85, 145–147 felt experience of, 102, 217–219 first formulation of accessed firstpersonally, 77 Humanity Formulation of, 242–247 no experience of, 96, 102–104 and self-deception, 184 taken first-personally, 4

297

298

in d ex

Categorical Imperative (cont.) as uncommon, 2 Universalizability Formulation of, 237–242 common experience of categorical obligation, 5 of the conflict between happiness and morality, 76, 161–169, 177–182 as the grounding of practical philosophy, 5 versus expert, 4 versus philosophical, 4 common human understanding/common human reason, 3, 77–80, 84–85, 90–91, 115–116 common person fallen/corrupt, 83–85, 87–95 innocent, 5–6, 77–78, 86–87, 89–95 conscience, 17, 150–157, 177, 204, 212 Darwall, Stephen, 72, 207–216, 223, 234–235, 242–243, 249 dear self, 3, 8, 24, 55 Descartes, René, 12, 201, 205, 290–292 determination of the will autonomous, 239–244 content of autonomous, 244–245 definition of, 98 and Fact of Reason, 191–192 and feeling, 58–59, 166–167, 279–281 formal, 216, 237–239 intersubjectively shared, 273, 277–279 objective versus subjective, 98–101 and practical cognition, 273–274 enabling, 10, 32, 58–59, 68–69, 121, 175, 215, 218, 222, 234, 249, 281 evidential, 10, 32, 58–59, 69, 121, 175, 215, 222, 249, 281 Fact of Reason, 11–12, 23 Allison’s interpretation of, 33, 140–148 and autonomy, 223–234 Beck’s interpretation of, 138–140, 197 Darwall’s interpretation of, 207–214, 241 and the deduction of freedom, 261–263, 265 definition of, 190–193 and feeling, 199–206, 219–223, 279–281 Fichtean interpretations of, 99, 199–206, 241

and the Gallows Man, 186, 189, 216–219, 223–234, 277–279 and Iris Murdoch, 293 and nonhuman agents, 282–285 objective versus subjective readings of, 138–140 as phenomenological fact, 193–199 and practical cognition, 273–274, 277–279, 285–288 rational cause of, 219–223 recent interpretations of, 137–138, 140 Fichte, J. G., 112, 139, 148, 154–155 Franks, Paul, 149–152, 155–158, 167, 185, 199–200, 203, 235, 271–272 freedom, 6 and autonomous determination of will, 240–241 as common, 124–125 deduction of, 27, 191, 263–269 and the deduction of the moral law in Groundwork iii, 114–118, 125–133 experience of, 34, 36–37, 46, 201–203 felt experience of, 104, 118–120, 159–161 felt experience of in Groundwork iii, 108–114 and the Gallows Man, 175–177, 230–231 practical cognition of, 114–118 as practical premise, 122–124 recent interpretations of in Groundwork iii, 106–108 Gallows Man. See throughout German Idealism, 199, 203 Guyer, Paul, 106–107, 118–119, 131, 134, 137, 199, 209 happiness conflict between morality and, 2–4 principle of, 227–228 Henrich, Dieter, 140 Hill, Thomas, 153, 156 humanity common appeal to, 231–232 Hume, David, 1, 7, 30, 292 Husserl, Edmund, 12, 292 intellectual intuition and the Fact of Reason, 193–195, 197, 271 interest (in morality), 117, 141

index Kemp Smith, Norman, 118, 277 Korsgaard, Christine, 32–33, 110, 124, 209 Kripke, Saul, 58 Leibniz, G. W., 12, 290–292 moral feeling of respect, 72 as a priori, 62–63, 218 is caused by autonomous rational nature, 148 as common, 63–66, 144–145, 147 definition of, 36 does not replace reason, 68–69 as the effect of an intelligible cause, 62–63, 147 as enabling not evidential, 60, 222–223, 234 and the Fact of Reason, 140–144, 148, 293 and the Gallows Man, 149–150, 156, 165, 169, 175, 219, 222, 234 as having inscrutable source, 50 motivational role of, 156 as necessary not contingent, 70 is not about happiness, 69 not moral sense, 68 as objective, 279 as sensible, 61 moral sense theory definition of, 67 Kant’s rejection of, 67–72 motives, 177 of duty, 168 and Fact of Reason, 141, 194 opacity of, 87–89, 97–100, 179–182 and ought implies can, 254–255 versus imperatives, 254 Moyar, Dean, 88, 99, 155, 172, 177, 185, 199–200, 203–204, 212, 214, 225, 235, 241, 271–272, 276, 281 Murdoch, Iris, 12, 292–293 necessity practical experience of, 40, 52, 56, 59, 104, 133, 157, 170, 215–216, 219–222, 275–279, 282, 287 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1–2, 293 ought implies can, 251 as experienced by Gallows Man, 253–258 limits to, 258–259 philosophical understanding of, 265

299

Paralogisms, 201–205 personality definition of, 229–230, 246 and the Gallows Man, 223–229 shared with all rational beings, 230–231 phenomenological experience attentiveness to, 22–25, 51–56, 169–186 of categorical obligation, 85–89, 92–104, 169–182 as common, 20–21 of the conflict between happiness and morality, 159–169 definition of, 16–17, 40–46 and Descartes, 290–291 and the Fact of Reason, 193–199, 263 as felt, 21–22, 40–46 as first-personal, 17 of the Gallows Man, 163–169, 258–259 as ground of a priori morality, 72–73, 125–132, 162, 214–234, 285–288 in Groundwork i, 85–89 and Husserl, 292 limits of, 288 and necessity, 41, 102–104 of negative freedom, 107–114, 118–120, 124–125 not of positive freedom, 258–259 objectivity of practical cognition based in, 285–288 and the phenomenological self, 204–205 philosophical attentiveness to, 25–28 and practical cognition, 115–118, 270–273 as practical premise, 121–124, 263 subjectivity of, 270–273 versus empirical experience, 16–17, 36–37 versus third-personal experience, 17–19, 46 wonder at cause of, 47–51 practical cognition, 7, 69 and attentiveness, 52, 162, 285–286 definition of, 273–274, 285–286 and experience, 41 and the Gallows Man, 169–174, 270, 277–279 limits of, 287–288 objectivity of, 16, 66, 149, 270, 274–277

300

in d ex

practical cognition (cont.) relation to feeling, 22, 55, 59, 70, 115, 117, 159, 281 relation to wonder, 48 synthetic a priori, 30, 104 practical philosophy grounding of, 5, 189–190 like chemistry, 26–27 versus theoretical philosophy, 2 premise practical, 54–55, 108, 121–123, 126, 134 theoretical, 53, 55, 105–106, 122, 127–128, 130, 133, 137, 236 Proops, Ian, 150–152, 155, 276 pure apperception, 118–119 reactive attitudes, 210–212 Reath, Andrews, 71 receptivity, 143, 156–157, 185–186, 193, 198, 201, 204–206, 283, 293 representations (mental) being active in relation to, 113–114, 119 being passive in relation to, 111 Second Analogy, 38, 51–53, 59, 104, 275 self-deception and attentiveness, 125 and blameworthiness, 181 in common experience, 8–9, 16, 87 and the Gallows Man, 171 in Groundwork, 83–84 in Groundwork ii, 92–94, 96–104

and Iris Murdoch, 293 as obstacle to attentiveness, 90, 174, 177, 183–185, 234 and radical evil, 289 as undermining knowledge of categorical obligation, 134, 256 sensibility, 48, 61, 67, 114, 128, 141–144, 147, 194–199, 205–206, 222–223, 280, 284, 291 See receptivity sensible intuition, 21, 35 and the Fact of Reason, 196 limits of, 34 versus sensible feeling, 43, 48 versus sensible feeling in Fact of Reason, 194–195, 197 Strawson, P. F., 18, 72, 210–211 theoretical cognition, 6, 47–48, 60, 71, 102, 222, 267, 275, 285, 287 Third Antinomy, 18–19, 105, 118–119, 288 Williamson, Timothy, 58 wonder and attentiveness, 51–53, 57 moral law as object of, 47–51 Wood, Allen, 137, 199, 209 world of the understanding and attentiveness, 116–117, 126–129 definition of, 116 not given in felt experience, 129–131 not intuited, 120