Kant and the Relegation of the Passions

Howard Caygill

Nobody on the other hand wants passion. For who would let themselves lie in chains when they could be free?

—Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View

KANT’S ACCOUNT of the passions occupies a surprisingly marginal place in his philosophy. His few discussions of the passions (Leidenschaften) are dedicated almost exclusively to their role in the pathologies of the will. A sustained analysis of the passions is conspicuously absent from the three critiques, as well as from critical works on physics and practical philosophy such as the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) and the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Although they appear as a marginal theme in the Critique of Judgement and in postcritical works such as Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), the discussion is directed to relegating the passions to a minor role in a larger account of action. The only extended discussion of the passions in Kant’s work is in a section of the lectures on anthropology, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), and here too the approach is focused firmly on the pathology of the passions. Only in the Opus Postumum might Kant be said to begin to return to the wider scope of classical and early modern contributions to the theory of the passions.

Kant’s relegation of the discourse of the passions to a detail in his theory of physical and ethical action is striking, especially given the overwhelming significance and richness of this discourse both before and after him—so striking indeed that it raises the historical and philosophical question of how it was possible for the discourse of the passions to have been so reduced less than a century after the rich and complex contributions of Descartes and Spinoza. The beginnings of an answer can be sought in the impact of Newton’s revolution in the understanding of physical action upon the classical and early modern physico-ethical discourse of the passions. Not only was Kant heir to Newton’s reduction of physical action to the play of opposite and opposed forces, but he also pursued its consequences for moral action. His case for a rigorous distinction between physical and moral action, with the latter governed by an intelligible freedom, denied the passions any constructive role in practical philosophy. They were demoted from their role as a chief source of ethical action and relegated to a role in the pathology of the free will.

The implications of Kant’s relegation of passions become clearer when compared even summarily to the physicoethical account of the passions that it succeeded. In the latter, passion is given conceptual significance in both ethical and physical discourse; indeed, its argumentative force depended upon the close relationship between physics and ethics. In one of the early and influential contributions to this tradition—Plato’s Ti-maeus—aesthesis or sensible affect is closely related to pathe. The Ti-maeus relates how necessity dictated that in man there should be:

First, sensation, the same for all, arising from violent impressions; second, desire blended with pleasure and pain, and besides these fear and anger and all the feelings that accompany these and all that are of a contrary nature: and if they would master these passions they would live in righteousness; if they were mastered by them, in unrighteousness.¹

Plato first relates physical affect and passion by means the soul’s response to pleasurable or painful feelings and then links the mastery of these passions to righteousness and unrighteousness. His intuition concerning the close relationship between the perception of the physical world and the passions is refined by Aristotle in his analysis of the workings of the soul in terms of the characteristics of “movement and sensation.”² Passion is here understood physically as passive sensation and ethically as an expressive movement of the soul.³ In both Plato and Aristotle, what will become known as affect—or the “impression” of the world on the soul—is joined by the emotions of pleasure and pain to passion or the “expression” of the soul in the world. Affect and passion are thus closely related, a relation that is carried over into that of the cognate disciplines of physics and ethics.

The persistence of the relationship between affect and passion is evident in two of the monumental expressions of the early modern philosophy of the passions: Descartes’s The Passions of the Soul (1649) and Spinoza’s Ethics (1677). In spite of Descartes’s opening claim about the “defectiveness” of the ancient philosophy of the passions and his wish to begin anew and to “forsake the paths they followed,” The Passions of the Soul does not abandon the basic premises of the ancient theory. In spite of his use of the revolutionary physiological discoveries of the early seventeenth century, the definition of passion is conducted in terms of the familiar combination of affect with passion or “impression” with “expression.” His preliminary discussion ends in Article 27 with a definition of the passions of the soul as “perceptions or sensations or excitations of the soul which are referred to it in particular and which are caused, maintained, and strengthened by some movement of the spirits.”⁴ The passions, as in Plato and Aristotle, still involve a combination of sensation and movement. While Descartes’s account of this relationship is cast in terms of the mechanical agitation of heart, brain, and nervous system, his point of departure is classical. The body experiences a passion insofar as it receives or “suffers” perceptions from the world, and responds to these with the active passions that originate in the soul.

The same might also be said of Spinoza’s Ethics, which like Descartes but using a more intricate and subtle combination of metaphysics and physiology unfolds a complex variation on the classical concept of the passions. The definition of action in Book III of the Ethics respects the classical distinction between action and passion: “we act when something happens, in us or outside us, of which we are the adequate cause . . . we are acted on when something happens in us, or something follows from our nature, of which we are only a partial cause.”⁵ There follows a definition of the “affections of the body” distributed according to whether “the Body’s power of acting is increased or diminished”: if we are the adequate cause of these affections, then the affect is an action, if we are not, then it is a passion.⁶ The increase in the body’s power of acting—the expression of its desire to act—is a joyful passion or, according to Spinoza’s definition of joy “a man’s passage from a lesser to a greater perfection” while a decrease in the same is a sad passion or “man’s passage from a greater to a less perfection.”⁷ The analysis departs from the opposition of action and passion in both nature and human nature: the movement between joyful and sad passions depends on whether one is the subject of action or subjected to it.

The account of physical action in terms of action and passion was fundamentally challenged by Newton’s “Axioms or Laws of Motion” stated at the outset of the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687). In Newton’s physics of force, the distinction between action and passion no longer holds; the opposition between being the subject of and being subjected to action is succeeded by a complex balance of reciprocal forces. The third law of motion, “To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction,” regards what was traditionally understood as a passion in terms of a counterforce. Both acting and resisting forces are of equal dignity—one is no longer considered active, the other passive. The physical account of action in terms of action and passion was seriously undermined by Newton, and with it the link between affects and passions, or Aristotle’s “motion and sensation.”

While Leibniz would attempt to retrieve the distinction between action and passion metaphysically—notably in section 52 of the Monadology—followers of Newton, including Kant (albeit after an early Leibnizian phase) largely abandoned the physical distinction of action and passion. The implications of the obsolescence of this distinction in physical explanation for the ethical discourse of the passions was considerable, especially given the close links between the physical and the ethical views of action and passion. One solution was to equate the ethical passions with physical force, as was attempted by early-eighteenth-century libertine writers such as Mandeville in the Fable of the Bees. Another response, prompted by a reaction to the work of Mandeville, was to elevate moral action above the play of natural force as an expression of a providential cosmology, as in Hutcheson’s argument for a “moral sense.” Kant’s own practical philosophy represents an extreme case of the latter. While consigning physical nature to the play of the Newtonian equal and opposed forces of action and reaction, he elevated human free action above natural force. One consequence of this elevation of freedom beyond nature was to reduce the constructive role of the passions in the governance of human action, and to restrict them to serving as pathological influences compromising the freedom of the will.

This pattern of argument is already evident in one of Kant’s rare, precritical discussions of the passions or Leidenschaften in the Rousseau-influenced medical text Enquiry into Mental Illnesses (1764). There Kant mobilizes the passions to contribute to a gnoseology of mental illness, using them to distinguish between Torheit (stupidity) and Narrheit (fool-ishness). This derivation of the two mental disturbances forms the central part of a discourse dedicated to the classification of mental pathologies. Already Kant’s view of the passions possessed a number of definite characteristics that distinguished it from the broader physicoethical tradition, although his position was by no means stable. The impact of Rousseau on his thought in the early 1760s led him to regard the passions not as an original part of human nature, but the product of civilization. At the same time, however, they are identified, in an analogy with Newtonian force, with “the drives (Triebe) of human nature.” Like natural forces they possess differences of degree and are described literally as Bewegkraefte or “motivating forces of the will” [die Bewegkraefte desWillens].⁸

Kant immediately relaxes the Newtonian view of the passions as “motive forces” possessing only differences of degree by claiming that they also differ in kind, depending on whether they are morally good or indifferent or “worthy of hate.”⁹ Another property possessed by the passions (Leidenschaften) is their tension with the understanding (Verstand), with the degree of tension providing the etiology of particular mental illness. The degree of tension is determined less by the distinction between the passions and the understanding than by the balance or imbalance of their opposed forces. In Torheit the passion—even if benign—is so strong that it “binds” the reason in those cases and actions that interest it, but without totally incapacitating rational judgment. It applies a selective and particular force to the understanding, neutralizing a part of it but not compromising its overall function. The condition of Narrheit, by contrast, is provoked by an onslaught of passions or “motive forces” that wholly incapacitates the understanding. In this mental illness, the reason is wholly disoriented by an alliance of the forces of the passions of pride (Hochmut) and avarice (Geiz). The verkehrten Vernunft, or “disoriented reason,” is overcome by their superior force and left devoid of the possibility of reflection and judgment.

Kant’s view of the passions at this stage has a number of general characteristics that will survive into his critical and postcritical understanding, although many details will be refined and inconsistencies resolved. The Enquiry into Mental Illnesses is characterized by an anthropological understanding of the passions—they are considered to be features of human psychology. This departs considerably from the broader physico-ethical discourse of the passions sketched above that combined human and physical nature. Yet in spite of his exclusive focus on the psychological features of the passions, Kant cannot entirely free his discourse from the broader entailments of the physico-ethical tradition of the passions.

Not only is the debt marked by the introduction of the discourse of active and reactive force into the psyche, but also by the pronounced Rousseauian features of Kant’s text. Insofar as his account of mental illness is indebted to Rousseau’s distinction between—in Kant’s own words—“The simplicity and contentment of nature” and “artificial compulsion,” then some relation between affect and passion has to be assumed. This relation is largely understood in terms of corruption, with a natural “healthy understanding” (gesunde Verstand) being corrupted by the artificial passions provoked by the world of civil society. Mental illnesses are indeed defined in terms of this corruption of the “healthy understanding,” with Kant noting towards the end of his text that “Humans in the state of nature can be subjected to stupidity hardly at all and only with difficulty to folly.”¹⁰ Stupidity in the civilized state depends on “sensitivity” or Empfindlichkeit, that is, an affectual relation to the social and physical world; without sensitivity stupidity is not possible, leaving Kant to conclude ironically that “The insensitive one is the wise person of Pyrrho.”

While there is clearly a constitutive relationship at work in this text between sensation and the drives that make up the passions, Kant does not subject it to extended scrutiny. While he notes how the “rank and false slogans of civil society gradually become general maxims that tangle the play of all human actions,”¹¹ he does not make any link between the slogans and passions as “motivating forces of the will.” They are in some way related, but Kant does not at this point discuss the relation any further; he does, however, intimate that the relationship can only be understood in terms of corruption. He will subsequently refine his understand ing of this relation, but at the cost of breaking the physico-ethical link by means of a radical distinction between affect and passion.

Another survival of the traditional discourse of the passions is the distinction between their benign and malign forms. The passions that produce Torheit are not intrinsically bad, and the person possessed by them can understand the objections that the understanding might raise against them. The victim of such passions is distracted, but not consumed by them. On the other hand, the exclusive passions that tend towards Narrheit overcome their victims who are unconscious of their hateful and tasteless qualities. The former, benign passions faintly echo the agreeable sensations and passions of the physico-ethical tradition, while the latter echo the painful sensations and passions. Nevertheless, this aspect of the passions is not developed further by Kant, and subsequently he will rigorously separate his understanding of the passions from the influence of agreeable and painful affects.

The Enquiry into Mental Illnesses anticipates many of the characteristics of Kant’s later theory of the passions. It is also important for its links with a near contemporary text, The Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and Sublime. Both texts, under the stimulus of Rousseau, assign the analysis of feelings and passions to the branch of metaphysics then known as “empirical psychology”: the feelings and passions have no longer any ontological or cosmological pretensions. This marks a departure from the position held in the Wolffian textbooks of the mid–eighteenth century, where passion still featured both in ontology and psychology as a physico-ethical phenomenon.¹² Kant, although still teaching metaphysics and ethics according to these officially prescribed textbooks, assigns passion firmly to empirical psychology, the same part of metaphysics that he was in the course of transforming into the new discipline of anthropology. Within this, the passions are assigned to the “higher faculty” and distinguished from the “lower faculty” of sensibility that is the home of the affects: the passions, in terms of Kant’s definition of the “higher faculty,” are the outcome of spontaneity, they “arise from ourselves.”¹³ They do not depend on the properties of objects disclosed in sensibility, but arise from our reflections upon sensible (and later imaginary) objects. This characteristic, intimated in the Enquiry into Mental Illnesses in the transformation of the slogans of a corrupt civil society into the “motivating forces of the will,” entails that passions or “corrupt maxims” become the “drives of human nature.” It also implies that the passions remain at a remove from both sensible perception and the sensible affects of pleasure and pain, an indispensable precondition for Kant’s later argument concerning the imaginary character of the objects of the passions.

Before proceeding with the question of Kant’s resumption of an explicit and consistent discussion of passions in the 1790s, it is necessary first to reflect on their near absence in the critical philosophy. Why is the discussion of passion largely absent from the analysis of physical nature in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) and Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science (1786) and the analysis of morality in Grounding of a Metaphysics of Morals (1775) and Critique of Practical Reason (1778)? The absence from the first critique is consistent with Kant’s Newtonian conception of physical action. In his understanding physical action, Kant, as we saw, no longer subscribed to the traditional contrast of action and passion still defended metaphysically by Leibniz and physically by Wolff. Instead throughout the first critique he uses almost exclusively the Newtonian distinction between active and reactive force (Wirkung und Gegenwirkung).

In the critical philosophy the complement of action is no longer passion—there is no longer a subject that acts and one that suffers action—but an opposed force: action and passion are replaced by active and reactive forces. Even though Kant still very rarely uses the language of action and passion, it is no longer consistent with the overall direction of his analysis. Thus, while in the table of the categories of Critique of Pure Reason, community, or the third category of relation, is described in traditional terms of the interaction between action and passion (“Wechselwirkung zwischen dem Handelnden und Leidenden”), this reference to the tradition is extensively belied by Kant’s use of the Newtonian discourse of force in order to describe physical action in the critical philosophy.¹⁴ In the discussion of the second analogy, the contrast of action and passion is succeeded by one of action and substance—“Wherever there is action—and therefore activity and force—there is also substance.”¹⁵ Kant takes this step in order to argue for the infinite differences between force as substance, thus avoiding distinction between an active and a passive subject of force. Similarly, Proposition 4 of the chapter on mechanics in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, commenting on Newton’s third law, argues that the reciprocal of action is not passion, but reaction: “every impact can communicate the motion of one body to another only by means of an equal counterimpact, every pressure by means of an equal counterpressure, and, similarly, every traction only by an equal countertraction.”¹⁶ In his philosophy of physical nature Kant has replaced the active and passive subject with active and reactive force.

The implications for the understanding of ethical action and passion are evident in the critical contributions to moral philosophy where passion hardly features. In both the Grounding for a Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason the main concern is to distinguish the intelligibility of the moral law from sensible inclination. Kant separates the world of freedom and the moral law from the physical world governed by the laws of motion and force. The discussions of the feelings of respect for the moral law and its attendant humiliation do not add up to a constructive theory of the passions, for these feelings are precisely directed against the claims of the sensible world in the realm of morality. Indeed, at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason after the famous apostrophe to the “starry heavens above and the moral law within,” Kant appeals to the analogy between the scientific analysis that resolves the “fall of a stone and the motion of a sling” into “their elements and forces manifested in them” and the analysis of moral judgments that separates the “empirical from the rational.”¹⁷ The separation of freedom from nature leaves little room for the passions.

Given this scenario, the absence of a discourse of passion in the critical philosophy is perhaps less surprising than its return in the writings of the 1790s. This revival of the passions has two interesting aspects. In the first—evident in the published writings of the 1790s as well as the lectures on anthropology—the theory of the passions is called to help explain moral pathology, while in the second it returns as part of the fundamental rethinking of the philosophy of nature that occupied Kant in the “transition- problem” of the Opus Postumum. The latter completed the movement away from a strictly Newtonian concept of nature already evident in the second part of the third critique on teleological judgment, and its consequences for the passions were already intimated in the changed orientation of freedom and nature implied in the aesthetic judgment of taste.

The dominant line of discussion of the passions in The Critique of Judgement, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, the Metaphysics of Morals, and the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View pursues their role in moral pathology. In the “General Comment on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgements” in the Critique of Judgement, Kant explicitly distinguishes between affects and passions. He distinguishes them according to species, with the affects “related to feeling” and thus “impetuous and irresponsible” and the passions attributed to the “faculty of desire.” As part of the latter, passions are described as “inclinations” (Neigungen) that “complicate or even prevent” the determination of the will by principles.¹⁸ Kant notes further that the passions are “abiding and deliberate,” adding that while affects may impede the freedom of the Gemuet (as in the case of stupidity discussed above), passions can completely “overcome” it.¹⁹ Here the passions are accorded an entirely pathological role, but one that is complicated throughout the text by the emergence of a new relationship between freedom and nature exemplified by the aesthetic judgment. The rigorous distinction between affect and passion—based on the transcendental distinction between the lower faculty of sensibility and the higher faculty of understanding and reason—is also undermined in the course of the argument by the emergence of a concept of pleasure situated between the two faculties.

Of the three main texts published during the 1790s—Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), and the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)—it is the last that contains the most extensive discussion of the pathology of the passions. Based on Kant’s lectures on empirical psychology/anthropology, it contains material accumulated over decades of lecturing, and while it cannot be considered the last word on the subject of the passions, it does offer one of the most detailed reports on the development of his thinking on the topic. Much of the account of the passions in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View is consistent with that of the Critique of Judgement and those of the 1793 and 1797 texts, although much more detailed and comprehensive. The conceptual distinction between affect and passion remains central to all four texts, although the grounds given for the distinction are much richer in the latter three than in the Critique of Judgement. During the discussion of the “feeling of pleasure and displeasure” in the Anthropology Kant carefully distinguishes the affects of pleasure and displeasure from the passions, noting that while they have often been confused with each other, the passions properly belong to the faculty of desire and not that of sensibility.²⁰ This precise location of the passions within the philosophical architectonic is closely respected in the accounts of 1793 and 1797.

The discussion of the passions in the Metaphysics of Morals departs from the distinction between affect and passion, echoing the third Critique with the claim that “Affects and passions are essentially different.”²¹ The essential difference between them is manifest in a number of different ways. The affects belong to feeling—and are fleeting distractions—and succumbing to affects is “something childish and weak, which can indeed co-exist with the best will.”²² Affects can distract the moral work of the will, but do not necessarily damage it; they are more innocent than vicious. A passion, by contrast, is not fleeting but persists. It is understood genealogically as a complication of desire, a temporal extension of an inclination: it is a “sensible desire that has become a lasting inclination (e.g., hatred as opposed to anger).”²³ While the affect agitates and distracts, a passion emerges from a “calm” that “permits reflection” and allows the Gemuet to “form principles upon it,” allowing it to become “deeply rooted” and, in the case of passions contrary to the law, to transport “evil” into the maxims of the will. While the pathology of the affect consists in momentarily distracting the will from doing good, the passion is potentially an enduring corruption of the will that inclines it to do evil.

The role of the passions in corrupting the maxims of the good will is also emphasized in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, where passion is discussed in the context of “radical evil.” In this version of his theory of the passions, Kant does not focus so much on the distinction between affect and passion as upon the genesis of the passions. His genealogy assumes that passion forms part of the faculty of desire, and is characterized by the attempt to show how this faculty is vulnerable to corruption. He begins with a propensity (Hang) that is a predisposition to a delight, which “once experienced, arouses in the subject an inclination to it.”²⁴ Here Kant is trying to explain how we can desire something of which we have no experience—the “propensity” or “instinct” to enjoy something of which we have no concept becomes, when realized, the permanent “inclination” to enjoy the experience. The permanence of inclination, which may conflict with and be overcome by the maxims of the moral law, is then contrasted with a further twist or “stage” in the faculty of desire, namely “passion (not emotion, for this has to do with the feeling of pleasure and pain) which is an inclination that excludes mastery over oneself.”²⁵ In this case, the fleeting desire made into a permanent inclination has succeeded in attaching itself to the determination of the will itself, corrupting its maxims and convincing it to will evil. It is in this sense that Kant in the Anthropology will compare the passions to “largely incurable cancerous sores for pure practical reason,”²⁶ returning to the medical context of his precritical discussion of the passions and viewing the passions within the submerged ethical healing mission of the Anthropology.

Predictably Kant’s discussion in the Anthropology begins by distinguishing passion from affect, and in particular the affect of pleasure and displeasure. Consistent with his other accounts, the passions are a state of the soul—Gemuetsstimmung, literally a tuning of the soul—that form part of the faculty of desire and are associated with reflection over extended periods of time. A new element in the version of the Anthropology is the sustained medical metaphor—affects are momentary disorders, while passions are powerful illnesses, with effects analogous to those occasioned by poison or severe injury. Such illness, Kant continues, requires a “inner or outer soul-doctor” who, however, “knows only how to prescribe palliative rather than radical medicine.”²⁷ Later, in the chapter on the passions, Kant returns to the question of medicine, describing affect as a “rush” (Rausch) and passion as an illness (Krankheit) that shies from any cure. The illness of the passions is now explicitly likened to “cancerous sores” (Krebsschaeden) of the will (pure practical reason), largely incurable not just because only palliative medicines are available, but also because the will is so disabled that the patient does not want to be cured (“der kranke nicht will geheilt sein”).²⁸

The chapter on the passions begins with a rehearsal of the distinctions within the faculty of desire between propensity (Hang), instinct, and inclination (Neigung). In the context of these distinctions passion appears as the inclination “that hinders the working of reason.”²⁹ The pathological relationship with reason makes passion in Kant’s eyes a specifically human pathology. Passion, he explains, “always presupposes a maxim of the subject to act according to ends prescribed by the inclination. It is thus always bound up with reason itself; mere animals cannot be attributed passions, as little as a pure rational being.”³⁰ Kant then proceeds to outline the ways in which the passions are implicated with human reason and in particular with the human exercise of sensible imagination.

In the opening discussion of paragraph 77, Kant points to two pathological links between the passions and reason. The first is that the passions generate maxims in a way analogous to pure practical reason, mimicking pure practical reason and thus earning the epithet “cancerous.” The second is the observation that (in German) the names for many of the passions are associated with the verb Suchen (to seek)—Ehrsucht, Rachsucht, Habsucht or the passions of pursuit of honor, revenge, and riches. Kant notes that by definition these passions can never be “completely satisfied”³¹—like simulacra of the ideas of reason, they can never be made fully present. They are, thus, like parodies of the moral law, the subject of an “endless task.” Kant then moves to show that the mimicry of reason leads the passions to a fatal inconsistency, since while they are in fact partial—based on a particular inclination—they pretend to universality, a pretension that leads to a contradiction that Kant defines in terms of “stupidity” (Torheit)—meaning by this term something quite distinct from the earlier definition in the Enquiry into Mental Illnesses. The claim to universality on the basis of a particular inclination offers another distinction between the affects and the passions: the former do not pretend to universality, and while occasionally morally reprehensible, they are not essentially so. Passions, however, are not just pragmatically, but also morally, reprehensible; they do not represent a temporary loss of freedom and self-control, but rather extend the enjoyment of the feeling of slavery.³² Passions, in short, are implicated in the masochistic pathology of freely electing to be a slave.

After these analyses of the relationship between reason and the passions, Kant proceeds to offer a classification of the particular passions. It is by no means complete, and is intended to make an important point concerning the distinction between natural and artificial passions. Abandoning the Rousseauian premises of the Enquiry into Mental Illness, Kant distinguishes between passions that arise from “natural (inborn)” and those that arise from “human culture (acquired)” inclinations.³³ The inclinations, it should be remembered, are not identical with passions; to become so they must in some sense become maxims guiding the operations of the will. Consequently, the natural inclinations of freedom and sexual attraction “bound with affect” may become passions, but not for intrinsic reasons. Kant’s discussion of the natural passions focuses on freedom, distinguishing the affect of “freedom under moral laws” or “enthusiasm” from the inclination to remain in or extend external freedom that can become a passion. To be consistent with his definition—repeated during the discussion of the passion for freedom—that “Passions are actually only to do with humans and can only be satisfied through them,”³⁴ the passion for freedom will be fixed on the inclination to extend freedom at the expense of that of others, rather than in the name of the moral law.

The second class of acquired inclinations are intrinsically prone to become passions, since they are directed less by a desire for the enjoyment of objects than for the social reflection of the pursuit of such enjoyment—these passions are always, in Kant’s words, directed by a desire issuing “from humans for humans.”³⁵ Passions such as pursuit of honor, pursuit of power, and pursuit of possessions are largely independent of the affect provoked by the enjoyment of their objects, but “bound with the permanence of maxims tied to certain ends.”³⁶ The maxim to act in order to achieve the end of possessing honor, or power, or wealth, is not in itself a passion. It becomes a passion when its realization is extended into infinity and the maxim of the passion universalized. In this case it is phrased thus: always act in order to achieve the end of possessing honor, power, wealth. In this formulation of the maxim it is implicitly acknowledged that for this kind of desire, the objects of honor, power, and wealth can never be attained, or rather their attainment is not the end desired. The passion consists more in the endless pursuit of a chimerical object than in its enjoyment.

Kant then classifies these passions according to whether they are ardent or cold, an example of the latter being avarice. However, most of his interest falls on the ardent and acquired cultural passions of the pursuit of the objects of honor, power, and money—thus encompassing the passions that characterize both feudal and commercial societies. The passionate pursuit of these inclinations is characterized by a number of contradictions—being social, the passions make their subjects dependent on others. They arise out of and provoke further “weakness”—the pursuit of honor depends upon the opinion others, that of power on fear of being dominated by others,³⁷ and the pursuit of wealth on self-interest in the expectation that others will do the same.³⁸ In the more extended discussion of the latter, Kant links possession of money with the desire for the possession of a universal means, by those whose passion is driven by the lack or fear of lacking means to achieve their ends.³⁹

Kant ends his discussion of the passions in the Anthropology with a reflection on Wahn as the motive force of desire. His comments on the human craze for games and gambling nevertheless have some deeper implications for his understanding of the passions. He notes that “From time to time, nature desires to provoke strong stimulations of the feeling for life, in order to renew human activity so that they do not lapse into the mere enjoyment of the feeling of life.”⁴⁰ Nature does so by making imaginary objects seem real and a source for passionate pursuits, namely honor, power, and gold. Kant thus links the passions with the development of culture (a development he sees as a natural one); mere affect or enjoyment of nature’s objects will not promote the development of culture. For this end passion and its pathology are necessary. Thus in the end Kant insinuates that the pathological growths of the passions will indeed contribute to a constructive historical outcome of human history.

The indirectly constructive outcome of the passions that is hinted at in the Anthropology nevertheless assumes that the proper way to understand the passions is as a pathology of reason. With this Kant remains consistent with his separation of the causalities of freedom and nature—with action/passion banished from nature and replaced with action/reaction, passion found itself relegated to a pathology of the free will. However, the possibility of a constructive outcome points to an equivocation in Kant’s accounts of the passions that may already be discerned in the third Critique. The vicious characteristics of the passions according to the Metaphysics of Morals—their universalizing a partial inclination (for Kant the fallacy of subreption) and the enjoyment of subjection—are given a different emphasis in the third Critique. The aesthetic judgment of taste is characterized by what might be described as a “virtuous” subreption—a partial experience rooted in the senses being experienced as if it partook of the universality of the concept.⁴¹ The combination of the qualities of sensibility and the understanding is not considered to be pathological, but indeed opens the possibility of an experience that defies many of the laws of the critical philosophy—aesthetic pleasure. Similarly, the delight in subjection that the passions provoke is given a nonpathological significance in the discussion of the experience of the sublime, where the moment of subjection is part of a wider movement towards the enhancement of the feeling of freedom.⁴² Thus the discussion of the aesthetic judgment in the first part of the third Critique opens up possibilities for a rethinking of the passions within and beyond the critical philosophy.

The tentative beginnings of an extension of the space opened by aesthetic judgment to the passions are evident in the third Critique, although their implications would not be fully realized until the Opus Postumum. Thus, the picture of the passions overcoming free will and judgment is cautiously modified in the Critique when Kant admits that the interest in the object of taste can “fuse also with all the inclinations and passions (Neigungen und Leidenschaften), which in society attain to their greatest variety and highest degree.”⁴³ Initially consistent with his earlier commitment to Rousseau, Kant regards this fusion—a passion for the arts—as affording “a very ambiguous transition from the agreeable to the good” while conceding that this transition might “be furthered by means of taste when taken in its purity.”⁴⁴ This anticipates the possible constructive role accorded the passions in the Metaphysics of Morals, although the discussion remains undeveloped. For this positive insight into the role of the passions in promoting the good remains isolated in the writings of the early to middle 1790s, with Kant inclining to an increasingly sophisticated version of the first, pathological view of the effect of the passions on the free will.

However, in Kant’s late, indeed final, reflections on the theme in the Opus Postumum it is possible to see the emergence of a new approach to the passions, one surprisingly close to that of Spinoza (who is often mentioned by name in these notes). In a note on the “Highest Standpoint of Transcendental Philosophy” Kant observes that “Newtonian attraction through empty space and the freedom of man are analogous concepts to each other. They are categorical imperatives—ideas.”⁴⁵ He continues by describing them in terms that bring them close to Spinoza’s attributes of a unitary substance, with God almost being identified with the universe: “There is one God and one universe. The totality.”⁴⁶ In this totality, humans are the subjects of the divine laws of nature and freedom—there is no longer a distinction between them: “A being who is originally universally law-giving for nature and freedom is God.”⁴⁷ At this point, at the end of his life, Kant puts fundamentally into question the premises of his life’s thought, including the relegation of the passions that these premises entailed.

Kant did not complete the adventure of thought upon which he embarked in the last years of his life, but its implications for his philosophy were considerable. The relaxation of the rigorous distinction between nature and freedom and their unification in a divine/natural totality would have many implications for his thought, not least concerning the passions. Having long relegated them to the status of pathological, even if historically useful, perversions of the reason, the late Kant began a fundamental rethinking of their role. His nascent doctrines of “self-positing” and “auto-affection,” in which we make ourselves the objects of our own representations, promised to restore the concept of passion to the center of the postcritical philosophy. Kant did not live to see this development through to a conclusion, although it did, under other auspices, become significant in the romantic, post-Kantian rethinking of the passions.