Feeling, desire and interest in Kant's theory of action

Kant-Studien

Volumn 92, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 153-179

  Grenberg, Jeanine M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950442758     PISSN: 00228877     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1515/kant.92.2.153     Document Type: Review

References (25)

1. In referring to Kant's works, I will first note the Akademie pagination, and then the pagination of the following translations (abbreviations used to refer to these translations in the text are noted in parentheses at the end of the entry): Critique of Judgment. Translation by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Col, 1987. (CJ)
2. Critique of Practical Reason (third edition). Translated by Lewis White Beck. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1956. (CprR)
3. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965. (CPR)
4. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by H.J. Paton. New York: Harper and Row, 1948. (Gr)
5. Lectures on Ethics. Translated by Louis Infield. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980. (LE)
6. The Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (MM)
7. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. Translated by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson. New York: Haprer and Row, 1960. (Rel)
8. Allison, Henry. Kant's Theory of Freedom. Cambridge University Press, 1990
9. See especially Herman, Barbara. The Practice of Moral Judgment. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993
10. See, for example: Baron, Marcia. Kantian Ethics (Almost) Without Apology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995
11. Herman, Barbara. "Making Room for Character," in: Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996
12. Korsgaard, Christine. Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996
13. and Sherman, Nancy. Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Herman (1996) does engage in the most extended discussion of the interrelationship of desire and reason in action, but does so without attributing the ideas specifically to Kant
14. Even Allison himself, when he turns to explaining moral action, insists that "to respect [the law] is to have a sufficient reason (although not a desire) to obey it." (Allison, 127) As such, what is incorporated in moral action is not a sensible drive, but a pure intellectual awareness
15. I will not in this paper, deal specifically with the question of moral action, though the influence of feeling which I discuss here can be shown to hold in the moral case as well. Providing such an argument would require a more thorough investigation of the moral feeling of respect and a discussion of the more stringent limitations placed upon an act in order that it qualify for the attribution of moral worth. For the beginnings of such a discussion, see my "Anthropology from a Metaphysical Point of View," forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Philosophy
16. Triebfeder is often translated as "incentive", but I translate it as "drive", to emphasize that it always involves a sensible influence on the faculty of desire
17. See also CprR 4:9n/9n: "The faculty of desire is the faculty ... a being has of causing, through its ideas, the reality of the objects of these ideas."
18. See, for example, Gr 4:412-413/80-81
19. "[I]f reason solely by itself is not sufficient to determine the will ... then actions which are recognized to be objectively necessary are subjectively contingent." (Gr 4:412-13/80) See also MM 6:218/20, where Kant notes that "a law ... represents an action that is to be done as objectively necessary," but that such representation "is a merely theoretical cognition of a possible determination of choice," and not choice itself
20. See Gr 4:412-13/80, where Kant notes that, in objective determination of the will, "if the will is exposed also to subjecitve conditions (certain impulsions) which do not always harmonize with the objective ones ... then actions which are recognized to be objectively necessary are subjectively contingent."
21. See also CJ 5:206/46-48
22. "Susceptibility to the representation is called feeling, which is the effect of a representation that may be either sensible or intellectual." (MM 6:211/12)
23. See also MM 6:381/146): "An end is an object of the choice (of a rational being), through the representation of which choice is determined to an action to bring this object about."
24. See Gr 4:407/74-75
25. See also CPR A 802, B 830/633 and CPR A 534, B 562/465