Must Morality Crush Our Desires?
Reed Winegar
In this lecture, Reed Winegar investigates a central but often misunderstood dimension of Kant's ethics: moral psychology. Beginning with the concept of the good will and its unconditional value, Winegar traces how Kant distinguishes genuine respect for the moral law from mere outward compliance. He addresses Schiller's famous critique that Kantian ethics ignores human feeling, showing how Kant's own account is far more nuanced than critics suggest. Drawing on the Critique of Practical Reason, Winegar explains how Kant treats respect as a distinctive kind of feeling, one that combines a painful humiliation of self-conceit with a pleasant recognition of our rational autonomy. This "mixed feeling" structure, Winegar argues, also appears in Kant's theory of the sublime, where encounters with overwhelming magnitude or power produce both displeasure and an uplifting awareness of reason's independence from sensibility. In Kant's philosophy, the lecture shows, feeling, pleasure, and pain are deeply intertwined with the moral life.
Suggested reading:
Associated Kant Readings:
Critique of the Power of Judgment, Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment, Analytic of the Sublime
Critique of Practical Reason, The Analytic of Pure Practical Reason, Chapter III. On the Incentives of Practical Reason
Critique of Practical Reason, The Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason, Ch. II. On the Dialectic of Pure Reason in Determining the Concept of the Highest Good
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Sections I and III
Winegar further discusses Kant's debate with Schiller, including the relevance of the sublime to this debate, in "An Unfamiliar and Positive Law: On Kant and Schiller," Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 95: 275-297 (2013).
For an older but very informative overview of the sublime's role in the 18th-century's changing attitudes towards nature, see Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite, Cornell University Press (1959).
