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Schiller's Critique of Kant's Moral Psychology: Reconciling Practical Reason and an Ethics of Virtue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jeffrey A. Gauthier
Jeffrey A. Gauthier*
Affiliation:
University of Portland, Portland, OR97203-5798, USA
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Extract

Mention of the name of Friedrich Schiller among both critics and defenders of Kant's moral philosophy has most often been with reference to the well known quip:

“Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure.

Hence I am plagued with doubt that I am not a virtuous person.“

“Sure, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely,

And then with aversion to do what your duty enjoins you.''

This attention, however, has served to obscure the fact that Schiller truly intended his remark as a joke, representing a serious, if understandable, misinterpretation of Kantian morality. Though Schiller's various attempts to articulate a theory of moral motivation include important divergences from Kant's account, they represent a response to a set of problems that arise in the context of Kantian moral theory. As such, they may be of greatest interest to moralists who are working within the Kantian tradition. In this paper, I clarify certain points of Schiller's critique of Kant's account of moral motivation and place them in the context of his broader project of reconciling Kantianism and an ethics of virtue.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , December 1997 , pp. 513 - 543
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1997

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References

2 See, e.g., Paton, H.J. The Categorical Imperative (London: Hutchison 1967), 48Google Scholar; Beck, Lewis White A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1960), 231Google Scholar; Simmons, Keith ‘Kant on Moral Worth,’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 6 (1989), 85Google Scholar; Galvin, Richard ‘Does Kant's Psychology of Morality Need Basic Revision?’ Mind 100 (1991) 228.Google Scholar

3 On this, see Beck, 231n.

4 Henceforth GD and AE respectively. I shall employ the following notation for reference to Schiller's works:

(AE) On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, translated by Wilkinson, Elizabeth M. and Willoughby, L.A. (New York: Oxford University Press 1982)Google Scholar. All quotations from and translations of the Aesthetic Letters are taken from the Wilkinson and Willoughby edition translation (English and German facing). Quotations are followed by the number of the specific ‘Letter,’ then the paragraph number, then the page number in the Wilkinson and Willoughby edition.

(GD) ‘On Grace and Dignity,’ in The Complete Works of Friedrich Schiller: Aesthetical and Philosophical Essays (New York: Collier 1902), 175-210. The first page number is that of the Collier edition, the second is that of Schiller, Friedrich Schillers Werke (in Zwei Banden), Zweiter Band (Munich: Droemersche Verlagsanstalt 1954), 520–62.Google Scholar

(S) ‘On the Sublime,’ in The Complete Works of Friedrich Schiller: Aesthetical and Philosophical Essays, 135-49. The first page number is that of Collier edition, the second is that of Schiller, Friedrich Sämtliche Werke, Fünfter Band (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag 1967), 792–808Google Scholar.

5 This theme has been developed at length by Lukacs, Georg Goethe and His Age (New York: Howard Fertig 1978), 69, 89, 124Google Scholar; and The Young Hegel (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1954), 148-66. As Frederick Beiser has pointed out, however, for Schiller the problems of the divided will were a consequence of the social development of civilization per se, and not from the ills of a particular social or economic order (Beiser, Frederick Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992], 104)Google Scholar.

6 It is true that in life … pleasure is ordinarily the motive for which we act according to reason. If morality itself has at last ceased to hold this language, it is to the immortal author of the ‘Critique’ to whom we must offer our thanks; it is to him to whom the glory is due of having restored the healthy reason in separating it from all systems (GD 204/544).

7 This itself represents a weaker endorsement of Kantianism than Schiller had originally intended for the work. According to Hans Reiner, in editing the original draft of the sixth letter to the Duke of Augustenburg, Schiller removed the following lines:

I confess … that my thoughts on the main point of philosophy are entirely Kantian. I believe … that only those actions of ours are morally good which respect for the law, and not impulses, determine us to do, no matter how refined some impulses may be or how impressive the names they bear (Reiner, Hans Duty and Inclination: The Fundamentals of Morality Discussed and Redefined with Special Regard to Schiller [Boston: Martinus Nijhof 1983], 48)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

This would indicate that Schiller's disagreement with Kant, or at least his recognition of its extent, came relatively late.

8 As Paul Guyer has convincingly argued, Schiller's conceptions of grace and dignity are best understood as part of a creative defense of Kant's ethics of duty. To state, as Guyer does, however, that Schiller shares Kant's belief that ‘moral approbation is directed most of all precisely to the activity of reason by which we elevate ourselves above passive nature’ glosses Schiller's remarks that such a state cannot in fact express moral freedom. As I shall argue below, Guyer focuses on an important part of Schiller's argument, but one which is inconsistent with his strongest claims against the divided will (Guyer, Paul Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality [New York: Cambridge University Press 1993], 354).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 This marks Schiller's virtue ethics as more sympathetic and less polemical than that of recent critics such as Alasdair Macintyre who have taken Kantianism merely to be an ethics of ‘rules’ (Macintyre, Alasdair After Virtue [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1981], 219)Google Scholar. For accounts that call attention to Kant's emphasis on agency and virtue as opposed to mere ‘rightness,’ see Darwall, Stephen L. ‘Agent-Centered Restrictions from the Inside Out,’ Philosophical Studies 50 (1986) 291–319CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Louden, Robert B. ‘Kant's Virtue Ethics,’ Philosophy 61 (1986) 473–89Google Scholar; Ameriks, Karl ‘The Hegelian Critique of Kantian Morality,’ in Ouden, Bernard de and Moen, Marcia eds., New Essays on Kant (New York: Peter Lang 1987) 179–212Google Scholar; O'Neill, Onora Constructions of Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press 1989), 145–62.Google Scholar

10 As I discuss in section IV, Kant did turn to the issue of the cultivation of desire in his later writings.

11 Schiller's concern with how the agent adheres to the commands of the law is an important forerunner to Nietzsche's critique of ‘listening’ to moral conscience:

“What is it that impels me to listen to it?” You can listen to its commands like a good soldier who hears his officer's command. Or like a woman who loves the man who commands. Or like a flatterer and coward who is afraid of the commander. Or like a dunderhead who obeys because no objection occurs to him. In short, there are a hundred ways in which you can listen to your conscience (Nietzsche, Friedrich The Gay Science, Kaufmann, Walter trans. [New York: Vintage 1974], 335)Google Scholar.

12 Taking up the political metaphor, Schiller writes:

One can, however, imagine two different ways in which man existing in time can coincide with man as idea, and, in consequence, just as many ways in which the state can assert itself in individuals: either by the ideal man suppressing the empirical man, and the state annulling individuals; or else by the individual himself becoming the state, and man in time being ennobled to the stature of man as Idea…. [A] political constitution will still be very imperfect if it is able to achieve unity only by suppressing variety (AE IV.2/19).

13 An action done from duty has to set aside altogether the influence of inclination, and along with inclination every object of the will; so that there is nothing left able to determine the will except objectively the law and subjectively pure respect for this practical law, and therefore the maxim of obeying this law even to the detriment of all my inclinations (Groundwork 68-9/400).

See also Groundwork 65/397, 66/398, 78n/411n, and Critique of Practical Reason 23-4/24, 75/73, 83/81 (henceforth G and CPrR respectively). Even in The Doctrine of Virtue, Kant defines moral perfection in terms of adherence to duty ‘even without the mixture of aims derived from sensibility’ (The Doctrine of Virtue 241/446, henceforth DV).

I shall employ the following notation for references to Kant's works:

(CJ) Critique of Judgment, Pluhar, Werner S. trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett 1987)Google Scholar. The first page number is that of Pluhar's translation, the second is that of the Prussian Academy Edition.

(CPrR) Critique of Practical Reason, Beck, Lewis White trans. (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill 1956)Google Scholar. The first page number is that of the Beck translation, the second is that of the Prussian Academy Edition.

(CPR) Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith, trans. (New York: St. Martin's 1965). The first page number is that of the Kemp Smith translation, the second is that of Prussian Academy Edition.

(DV) The Doctrine of Virtue, Part II of the Metaphysics of Morals, Gregor, Mary J. trans. (New York: Cambridge University Press 1991)Google Scholar. The first page number is that of the Gregor translation, the second is that of the Prussian Academy Edition. (G) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Paton, H.J. trans. (New York: Harper 1964)Google Scholar. The first page number is that of the Paton translation, the second is that of the Prussian Academy Edition.

(R) Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Greene, Theodore M. and Hudson, Hoyt H. trans. (New York: Harper 1960)Google Scholar. The first page number is that of the Greene and Hudson translation, the second is that of the Prussian Academy Edition.

14 As Kant wrote in response to Schiller's On Grace and Dignity, a ‘fear-ridden and dejected …. frame of mind can never occur without a hidden hatred of the law’ (R 19n/22n). Even in passages such as this, however, Kant links joy in carrying out the demands of the law with a sublime ‘courage.’ As I shall discuss in section II, the sensuous being must experience a certain fear in approaching the majesty of the law which is the basis of respect.

15 I am indebted to David Hills for first impressing the importance of this distinction on me.

16 Schiller put the same point somewhat differently in the thirteenth Letter:

If thought forestalls feeling, and the Person supplants the world, then the Person ceases to be autonomous force and subject precisely to the extent that it forces its way into the place of the object — because in order to become manifest, the principle of permanence requires change, and absolute reality has need of limitation. (AE XIII.5/91)

In the eleventh Letter, Schiller identified the ‘Person’ (Person) with the free and spontaneous activity of reason. By contrast, the ‘Condition’ (Zustand) represents the actual determination of the Person. While Person and Condition are identical in infinite being, they remain divided in finite, sensuous beings. Schiller here follows Kant's discussion of the distinction between finite knowledge and pure intellectual intuition (CPR 90/872), and its analogue in the distinction between the finite and the holy will. (CPrR 33/32, 82/79)

17 This is clearest the nineteenth ‘Letter’ in which Schiller specifically linked his approach to Kant's treatment of time and space in the first Critique (AE XIX.1- 12/129-37).

18 Contrary to a popular line of criticism, Kant clearly held that sensuous nature has a place in moral judgment:

Now it is certainly undeniable that every volition must have an object and therefore a material; but the material cannot be supposed, for this reason, to be the determining ground and condition of the maxim. If it were, the maxim could not be presented as giving universal law. (CPrR 34/34)

Kant stated in the Groundwork, the moral law functions as a ‘limiting condition’ on our subjective ends, motives which he assumes as given ( G 98/431 ). The manner in which Kantian morality requires the presence of sensuous motivation has been central to recent defenses of Kant against the charge that his ethics has no place for sensuous motives. See Herman, Barbara ‘On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty,’ Philosophical Review 90 (1981) 372–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Integrity and Impartiality,’ Monist 66 (1983) 236, 240; Darwall, Stephen L. ‘Kantian Practical Reason Defended,’ Ethics 96 (1986) 91–4.Google Scholar

19 See e.g. Stocker, Michael ‘The Schizophrenia of Modem Ethical Theories,’ Journal of Philosophy 63 (1976), 462Google Scholar; Williams, Bernard ‘Persons, Character, and Morality,’ in Rorty, Amelie ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1976), 214Google Scholar; Richard Taylor, Good and Evil, relevant passages reprinted in Sommers, Christina Hoff ed., Right and Wrong (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1986), 65–7Google Scholar; Wolf, Susan ‘Moral Saints,’ The Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982) 419–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Defenses of Kant against this charge include Henson, Richard G. ‘What Kant Might Have Said: Moral Worth and the Over determination of Dutiful Action,’ Philosophical Review 88 (1979) 39–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herman, Barbara ‘On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty,’ Philosophical Review 90 (1981), 372–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baron, Marcia ‘The Alleged Moral Repugnance of Acting from Duty,’ The Journal of Philosophy 71 (1981) 359–82Google Scholar; Benson, Paul ‘Moral Worth,’ Philosophical Studies 51 (1987) 365–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jenson, Henning ‘Kant and Moral Integrity,’ Philosophical Studies 53 (1989) 65–77Google Scholar; Packer, Mark ‘Kant on Desire and Moral Pleasure,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989) 429–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Simmons, Keith ‘Kant on Moral Worth,’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 6 (1989) 85–100Google Scholar.

21 For further discussion of the evolution of Kant's thought on his own ‘solution’ to the problem of sensuous motivation, see Guyer Kant and the Experience of Freedom, 27-33.

22 Schiller also accepted such a limitation on speculation:

[The transcendental philosopher] does not pretend to explain how things are possible, but contents himself with determining the kind of knowledge which enables us to understand how experience is possible. (AE XIX.9 /133)

23 Kant reiterates this point with regard to moral education in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone: ‘Even children are capable of detecting the smallest trace of admixture of improper incentives; for an action thus motivated at once loses, in their eyes, all moral worth’ (R 44/53).

24 Thus respect for the law is not the incentive to morality; it is

morality itself, regarded subjectively as an incentive, inasmuch as pure practical reason, by rejecting all the rival claims of self-love, gives authority and absolute sovereignty to the law. (CPrR 78-79/76)

As I shall discuss in greater detail below, for Kant, respect (Achtung) arises just because the moral agent comes to realize the sublime nature of action from duty: ‘The feeling that it is beyond our ability to attain to an idea that is a law for us is respect’ (CJ 114/257). It is, thus, fundamentally different from a mere inclination to act in accord with our sensuous nature.

25 For it is not insofar as he is subject to the moral law that he has sublimity, but rather in so far as, in regard to this very same law, he is at the same time its author and is subordinated to it only on this ground (Kant G 107/440, cf. CPrR 79-80/76-77, 89/87).

26 Paul Crowther interestingly charts the development of Kant's conception of the sublime and its relationship to respect for our moral vocation from its early statement in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764) to its treatment in Book II of the third Critique. Specifically, Kant moves from the position in the Observations that great depths, heights, and edifices may give rise to sublimity, to the claim in the second Critique that respect for the moral law alone gives rise to such feelings (CPrR 78-80/76-77), to the more nuanced view that respect- the consciousness of our moral vocation — underpins all experiences of the sublime. See Crowther, Paul The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (New York: Oxford University Press 1989), 23–8, 131-5Google Scholar.

27 Sublimity is contained not in any thing of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby also to nature outside us …. And it is only by presupposing this idea within us … that we can arrive at the idea of the sublimity of that being who arouses deep respect in us, not just by his might as demonstrated in nature, but even more by the ability, with which we have been endowed, to judge nature without fear and to think of our vocation as being sublimely above nature. (Kant CJ 123/264, see also CPrR 89/87)

See also Guyer, Paul Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1979), 360Google Scholar; Packer, 431.

28 For further discussion of the ‘comparative character’ of the attitude of respect, and how it differs from the harmonious character of virtuous feeling developed by writers such as Hutcheson, see McCarty, Richard ‘Motivation and Moral Choice in Kant's Theory of Rational Agency,’ Kant Studien 85 (1994), 23–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Consistent with the place of the sublime in moral education, Kant further specifies that the cultivation of a virtuous character comes by ‘wonder at its inscrutable source’ (DV201/399-400).

30 Kant reaffirms this in his noteworthy remarks on the duty to sympathy or humanity, where he distinguishes between a merely passive disposition and the actively willed embodiment of reason:

Now humanity can be located either in the capacity and the will to share in others’ feelings (humanitas practica) or merely in the susceptibility, given by nature itself, to feel joy and sadness in common with others. The first is free… ; it is based on practical reason. The second is unfree … since it spreads naturally to men living near one another. There is obligation only to the first. (DV 250/456-7)

The duty to develop dispositions toward right action cannot include any obligation to cultivate merely ‘natural’ tendencies. Accordingly, Kant held that virtue must be continually purified (DV 189/384).

31 Strictly speaking, to honor the moral will as sublime is not to endorse sublime willing, where the latter refers to an agent's conscious attempt sublimely to overcome the determinations of sensuous nature. Kant consistently rejects any conscious endeavor of this kind as an exhortation to self-conceit (CPrR: 86-7 /84-5). It is clear from the context of letter twenty-three, and Schiller's explicit remarks in his long footnote to paragraph 7, however, that it is with our observation or estimation of sublimity and nobility with which he is concerned (AE XXIII.7n/167n).

32 See, for example, Beiser, 101.

33 Schiller employs the concept of ‘play’ in two senses here. On the one hand, the desire for the beautiful is a play-drive in the sense that it finds its satisfaction in various playful spectacles — color, drama, sculpture, music, sport, etc. But the play-drive is also playful in its apprehension of these spectacles, ‘playing on’ the desires embodied in the other drives:

The sense drive wants to be determined, wants to receive its object; the form drive wants itself to determine, wants to bring forth its object. The play drive … will endeavor so to receive as if it had itself brought forth, and so to bring forth as the intuitive sense aspires to receive. (AE XIV.4/97)

34 Schiller's failure to develop the idea and Kant's rejection of it notwithstanding, the conception of aesthetic freedom developed in the Critique of Judgment may itself be understood to offer a ‘Schillerian’ determination for the moral will. In contrast to the imposed lawfulness of morality, Kant tells us that the judgment of taste displays a ‘lawfulness without a law and a subjective harmony of the imagination with the understanding without an objective harmony’ (CJ 92/241). For Kant, of course (consistent with his arguments discussed above), such an indeterminate judgment is inadequate to generate the respect that must determine the autonomous will:

Beautiful is what we like when we merely judge it (and hence not through any sensation by means of sense in accordance with some concept of the understanding). From this it follows at once that we must like the beautiful without any interest. Sublime is what, by its resistance to the interest of the senses we like directly …. The beautiful prepares us for loving something, even nature, without interest; the sublime, for esteeming it even against our interest (of sense). (CJ 127 /267)

For further discussion of the relation between Schiller's critique and Kant's conception of aesthetic freedom, see Miller, Ronald D. Schiller and the Ideal of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press 1970), 68–88Google Scholar.

35 Schiller's lack of clarity on this point has given rise to the charge that two incompatible strains of thought run through the Letters, one that understands the final development of morality as simply surpassing natural and aesthetic motivation, and another that sees aesthetic sensibility synthesizing the natural and the rational. See Lutz, Hans ‘Schillers Anschauungen von Kultur und Natur,’ Germanische Studien 60 (1928) 169–233Google Scholar, cited in Wilkinson and Willoughby, ‘Introduction’ to AE, xlii-xlviii; Miller, 121-4; Steiger, Emil Friedrich Schiller (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag 1967), 87–92Google Scholar.

36 In his description of such surpassing, Schiller employs the verb aufheben in both of it meanings, to preserve as well as to destroy or annul, to describe the aesthetic synthesis. In their commentary to the English translation of AE, Wilkinson and Willoughby cite Letter Eighteen as the probable source of Hegel's more celebrated use of the term (AE: 304-5).

37 The distinction between a Formtrieb and a Stofftrieb occurred in Reinhold's Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (see Beiser, 106). Kenneth Dewhurst and Nigel Reeves have also argued that Schiller's concept of drives derived from his earlier psychological training at the Karlschule (Dewhurst, Kenneth and Reeves, Nigel Friedrich Schiller: Medicine, Psychology, and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press 1978), 356–8).Google Scholar

38 I call speaking (Sprechend) (in its widest sense) every bodily phenomenon that accompanies and expresses a certain condition of mind (Gemütszustand). Thus, according to this definition all the sympathetic movements are speaking, including those which accompany the simple affections of sensibility (GD 194/536).

39 For further discussion of Schiller's development of the concept of ‘appearances’ in his aesthetics and ethics, see Wilkinson, E.M. ‘Schiller's Concept of Schein in the Light of Recent Aesthetics,’ German Quarterly 28 (1955) 219–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Accordingly, Schiller argues that the animals cannot express ‘personality’ but only nature:

with them it is nature alone which speaks, and not liberty. By the permanent configuration of animals through their fixed and architectonic traits, nature expresses the aim she proposed in creating them; by their mimic traits she expresses the need awakened or satisfied. Necessity reigns in the animal … without meeting the obstacle of a person. (GD 194/536)

41 In the discussion of duties of wide obligation in the Doctrine of Virtue Kant claimed that compliance with the maxims of such duties permit just such ‘latitude (latitudo) ,’ since ‘the law cannot specify precisely in what way one is to act and how much one is to do by the action for an end that is also a duty’ (DV 194/390).

42 G 66/398. Schiller introduced a parallel example in his ‘On the Sublime’ (1801), a later essay in which he appeared to contradict his own requirement of natural dispositions for moral action in ‘On Grace and Dignity’ by stating that some moral acts lack any explanation in the natural world. In an interesting contrast to Kant's former philanthropist who finds himself ‘no longer moved by any inclination’ to aid others, however, Schiller's man of ‘beautiful character’ (schönen Charakter), despite being deprived in Job-like fashion of property, reputation, friends, and family, maintains his ‘joy in the happiness of others’ (Teilnehmung an fremdem Glücke) (S 142/799). His moral dispositions remain intact. This would seem to indicate that for Schiller, the evocation of the sublime in this kind of example follows not from the absence of any natural disposition to perform a specific moral action, but rather from the lack of any self-interested reason for his persistence in the practice of his virtues (Tugenden). The sublime sense of a ‘supersensible world’ is occasioned by the need for an explanation for the persistence of the disposition rather than for the particular act. While such a reading would be consistent with his earlier claim that the rational will must find expression in a sensuous vehicle, however, it conflicts with Schiller's own rather puzzling claim in the same passage that no part of the explanation for the man's acts can be found in his natural condition (S 142-3/799).

43 I have altered the translation of the final sentence of this passage (‘Diese Anforderung macht die Vernunft an die Menschenbildung’), one that the translator inexplicably renders as ‘This is what reason requires in the human face’ (GD 199/540).

44 Schiller generally invokes ‘grace’ (Anmut) in its familiar sense. Sensuous nature can gracefully embody freedom in the manner that spectacles of play, dance, and theatre lend external expression to inner phenomena (see Steiger, 230). Schiller restricts his usage to the term for this classical sense of grace, Anmut, and does not use the term for religious grace, Gnade. In a letter to Goethe in 1795, however, Schiller linked the capacity of sensuous experience to genuinely embody the law to the Christian theological claim that the Holy Spirit permits the incarnation of the Divine in natural form. Maintaining an absolute distinction between the spontaneity of reason and the passivity of sensuous desire, and dismissing the possibility of the mediation of the graces in practical reason (R 19n/22n), Kant rules out the ‘incarnation’ of reason in a ‘free inclination’ (see Reiner, 49).

45 For Kant, the freedom of the experience of the beautiful could serve as the symbol of freedom, whereas the feeling of the sublime (with its implicit subordination of sensuous nature), was grounded in our moral freedom (see n. 24 above). As Frederick Beiser and Paul Guyer have argued, Schiller used Kant's conception of the beautiful in developing an argument against Plato's dismissal of the artists from the political order (Beiser, 98-9, Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, 96-7, 117Google Scholar).

46 ‘Yet duty bids us do this [revolution in our disposition], and duty demands nothing of us that we cannot do’ (R 43/52).

47 In this passage from section 49, Kant appears to return to his more familiar conception of virtue as a capacity to suppress sensuous nature and away from the suggestion in section 35 that sensuous nature is itself capable of transformation (DV 250-251/ 457).

48 I am indebted to Richard McCarty for drawing my attention to this aspect of Kant's theory of virtue.

49 See section II above.

50 Kant actually did suggest such a view with his claim that the mind must be able to have ‘before its eyes the identity of its act, whereby it subordinates all synthesis of apprehension (which is empirical) to a transcendental unity’ (137 I A108, see also 152-3/8131-2). Allison, Henry (Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense [New Haven, Cf: Yale University Press 1983]Google Scholar) and Pippin, Robert (Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (New York: Cambridge University Press 1989]CrossRefGoogle Scholar) have argued that Kant's discussion of the transcendental unity of apperception sometimes appears to imply that the active capacity of the subject to unify the manifold of intuition involves a reflective application of the concepts. If this were the case, however, ‘in any conscious intending, I am aware of my own activity of creating or imposing my order on the world’ (Pippin, 20). Against such a reading, Pippin cites Allison's claim that Kant need only argue for the ‘necessity of a possibility’ of self-conscious attention to the action of representation (Allison, 137). Even if knowledge involves a kind of active judgment in which the agent possesses the capacity to bring to self-awareness in a second order judgment, it does not follow that she must actually form a second-order judgment in every act of knowing.

51 For a discussion of the distinction between rule-following and rule applying in Kant's epistemology, see Pippin, 20-2.

52 Cf. Allison, 137.