SS4.4

From Chapel Hill History of Philosophy

Delight in the good is coupled with interest. ¶4

Even in everyday parlance, a distinction is drawn between the agreeable and the good. We do not scruple to say of a dish that stimulates the palate with spices and other condiments that it is agreeable owning all the while that it is not good: because, while it immediately satisfies the senses, it is mediately displeasing, i. e., in the eye of reason that looks ahead to the consequences. Even in our estimate of health, this same distinction may be traced. To all that possess it, it is immediately agreeable–at least negatively, i. e., as remoteness of all bodily pains. But, if we are to say that it is good, we must further apply to reason to direct it to ends, that is, we must regard it as a state that puts us in a congenial mood for all we have to do. Finally, in respect of happiness every one believes that the greatest aggregate of the pleasures of life, taking duration as well as number into account, merits the name of a true, nay even of the highest, good. But reason sets its face against this too. Agreeableness is enjoyment. But if this is all that we are bent on, it would be foolish to be scrupulous about the means that procure it for us–whether it be obtained passively by the bounty of nature or actively and by the work of our own hands. But that there is any intrinsic worth in the real existence of a man who merely lives for enjoyment, however busy he may be in this respect, even when in so doing he serves others–all equally with himself intent only on enjoyment–as an excellent means to that one end, and does so, moreover, because through sympathy he shares all their gratifications–this is a view to which reason will never let itself be brought round. Only by what a man does heedless of enjoyment, in complete freedom, and independently of what he can procure passively from the hand of nature, does be give to his existence, as the real existence of a person, an absolute worth. Happiness, with all its plethora of pleasures, is far from being an unconditioned good.(SS4.4FN)

DISCUSSION

Briefly discussed under 4.3

==4.4== The first two thirds of this paragraph reinforce points which have already been laid on the table. First, in our ordinary speech or `everday parlance' there is no clear distinction between what we call agreeable and what we call good. The only solutions seem to be to use the word `good' in a sense we agree to stipulate or (what comes to nearly the same thing) to find some adjectives to qualify `good', or to substitute a different word. The other clear feature of the paragraph is the stress that Kant puts on the concept of an end in his thinking about pure practical reason. That point gets some development in the last part of the paragraph, but before coming to that development, we should take a look at the word `Werth' or `Wert'.

Pluhar's translation of `Werth' by `value' strikes me as obtuse; I think that Meredith gets it right. The word derives from the Old High German `werd' which had precisely the same sense as the old English word from which our word `worth' descends. That can be seen in the medieval translations into English and German of the fourteenth century French `Voeux du Paon' in which the `neuf preux' make their first appearance. These appear in English as the `Nine Worthies' and in German as the `neun Werten'. It is worth looking closer at those nine worthies because doing so helps one to maintain a sense of the distance between Kantian ethics and virtue-ethics. One might think to translate Kant's `wert' by `virtue', rather than by `worth' or `merit', but consider the nine worthies: Hector, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar; Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus; Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon. They were chosen, obviously, not because they were virtuous but because they were exemplary as warriors. Furthermore, the customary discussion of the Nine Worthies anticipated Kantian ethics and did not simply recapitulate classical virtue ethics. What I have in mind is the way the grouping of the nine was explained as three who were paradigms of the Pagan law, three who were paradigms of the Jewish law, and three who were paradigms of the Christian law. In Kantian ethics what morally justifies an action is its being determined to be as it is by the moral law and what justifies the moral law is that it is determined to be what it is by its end, which is the actual existence of morally exemplary individuals. That is, the end of the moral law is to make everyone exist as good persons or as satisfactory moral agents. What, one might ask, justifies this as the end? The preceding discussion should help to give that question some bite. The Nine Worthies were moral paradigms for a medieval culture in which the great heroes were warriors whose behavior exemplified the code of the warrior. Kant's ethics is not, or is not overtly, a celebration of the code of the warrior, but it is as relentless and ruthless in its own way as that code. If the end in the Kantian morality is meant to justify the strictures of a Kantian morality, what justifies that end?

That brings us to the last, and most interesting, part of the paragraph. In order to follow Kant's argument we need to look at this phrase `Das eines Menschen Existenz an sich einen Werth habe', where, I think, Meredith's `intrinsic worth' lets us down. The point which, according to Kant, reason will never allow us to concede turns on the distinction between an end which is an end per se (`an sich') and an end which is not an end per se, but rather has no end or has its end somewhere else. An end which is not an end per se is an end which requires justification through something else; it is not an ultimate or question-stopping end. That argument appears, for example in Marx's labor theory of value, where the regress on `gets its value from' is stopped by labor. [Labor is useful for defining exchange value because it can be given a measure (e.g. by the hour) in a way that, for example, degree of aesthetic satisfaction cannot. Kant notes this point as a reason for not beginning the moments in his analysis with the categories of mathematical number]

There are three points about Kant's deployment of the argument here that may help to clarify the corresponding argument about aesthetic judgment in 4.5.

First, Kant says (I use Pluhar here because the word order is more apposite---it does not alter the meaning of our text) ``Reason can never be persuaded that there is any intrinsic [`an sich' or per se] value in the existence of a human being who merely lives for pleasure . . .' Philosophers had seen early on that for reason to be satisfied, the `what for?' regress on ends is as much in need of a `what for' blocker as the ``why?' regress on the premises of a deduction. Here is Duns Scotus on the subject [`God and Creatures: The Quodlibetal Questions' Question 16 `Are Freedom of Will and Natural Necessity Compatible as Regards the Same Act and Object? 16.10 `The second proof is based on the words of the Philosopher in Physics: `The end serves the same function in the practical sciences as principles do in the theoretical sciences.' And also in the Ethics: `As postulates are to mathematics, so the end to matters of conduct.' Now the intellect in theoretical science assents necessarily to the principles, therefore, the will assents necessarily to the last end in matters of conduct.'

Secondly, Scotus and others had had a running debate on the relation between reason and will. Scotus, as a voluntarist, accepted the dictum, Nihil volitum quin praecognitum, which has every act of will preceded by an act of intellect; but (to preserve freedom of the will and avoid psychological determinism) he denies that the object of the intellection is the effective cause of the will's act. Kant recasts the debate by making the fundamental distinction a distinction between theoretical and practical reason but he follows Scotus and the voluntarists in giving priority to practical reason because, he says, it owns the dominion of ends. The fact that the moral end is pure and thereby is entirely the product of practical reason is central to his argument about what reason can be satisfied by. (Kant actually speculates in one place that a unified system might be possible in which theoretical reason is actually subordinated to practical reason.)

Thirdly, my final observation should explain why I am anxious to get the Scotistic ethics of freedom into the discussion of this paragraph as illuminating the argument of 4.5. In his Groundwork and in the 2ndK, Kant takes the our concept of the end which tells us the `what for?' of the moral law (thereby both determining the ground of its validity and determining how it should be interpreted) to be given through our concept of the point of the moral law. Its point or objective is actually to bring into existence beings who exemplify humanity. [Both ideas here were part of the literature before Kant: (a) that laws are both justified as valid and clarified as to their meaning through appeal to some valid `legislative intent' or end and (b) that the governing end for the natural law is humanity.] What is really interesting in 4.4 is a change that Kant makes here in the way he specifies the end which justifies the moral law. What he says here is that it is complete freedom and independence from natural causes in one's actions that gives one moral worth. I believe this re-description of the moral end also shows up in his late popular essays. Giving existence to the idea means realizing freedom in human beings in time and thereby in human history. That point of view certainly appears in Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education and in the whole subsequent 19th century tradition which makes freedom the goal of human history. Doesn't that reading of Kant here put him in the Scotistic tradition: `How freedom coexists with necessity: If you ask, how does freedom coexist with necessity, I answer with the Philosopher: `Do not seek a reason for things for which no reason can be given: for there is no demonstration of the starting point of demonstration'; And so I say here: As this proposition: `The divine will wills the divine goodness,' is immediate and necessary, for which no reason can be given other than that this will and this goodness are the sort of thing they are, so also `The divine will contingently wills the goodness or existence of another.' Again no reason can be given except that it is this sort of will and that sort of goodness, . . .'[Ibid. 16.33]. The fact that Scotus is talking about the divine will rather than the human will strikes me as a surmountable obstacle to the comparison in question.

In an earlier version of these comments, I included a passage from Scotus that is very relevant to a Kantian argument in the second part of the 3rdK but which is just confusing matters here. I have moved it to the Discussion section, substituting here other quotes from Scotus that seem to me to be relevant in the discussion of Kant's argument about freedom as a good-making, `What for?' stopping, characteristic. Richardsmyth