Most people who have even a passing acquaintance with Kant’s moral theory will acknowledge that inclination has a dubious reputation.1 Perhaps it is not the villain of the story: Villains seem altogether more crafty and cunning than this passive feature of our sensible nature. But inclination is, at the very least, an antagonist in the story, since it prompts us to formulate maxims that find themselves restricted or rejected by the moral law. What is more, it seems to be an utterly unexceptional antagonist. Autonomy – the hero of our story – is singular, and the defining feature of our will. Inclinations are more like the rabble of our empirical selves. Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that Kant says that “to be entirely free from [inclination] must … be the wish of every rational being” (GMS 4:428).
But perhaps this wish is a step too far. Might not the wish to be rid of inclination concede too much to this passive and unremarkable antagonist? And in renouncing inclination, might we not also lose something of value, even if only contingent value? The question is, of course, purely theoretical – it is impossible for sensible agents ever to be rid of inclination. Nevertheless, the answer to these questions may be philosophically informative. In the first instance, the answer may help to shed light on the Kantian conception of virtue and character. Is virtuous struggle a continuous, vigilant suppression or diffusing of inclination – a lifelong game of “whack-a-mole”? Or, is virtue better described in some other way – perhaps as a matter of shaping, conditioning, and controlling inclination? The answer to these questions, in turn, might give us a more complete and nuanced picture of Kantian happiness and well-being. In particular, it may seem as though merely having inclinations – a fortiori having inclinations that we cannot fulfill – leads to a kind of discontent or misery. Surely there is some truth to this account, but perhaps there is a more detailed tale to be told about the way that inclination and desire contribute to discontent. Perhaps there is even a way to live happily – or at least contentedly – alongside our inclinations.
The discussion that follows proceeds as follows: In Section 2, I examine what is perhaps Kant’s most famous indictment of inclination – his claim in the Groundwork that “every rational being” would wish or hope to be rid of inclination entirely. I will argue that what may initially strike the reader as an offhand remark actually contains an important argumentative clue about what, precisely, is so dangerous about inclination. In particular, it is inclination’s association with need and contingency that makes it problematic. In Section 3, I proceed to examine notions of need and neediness in Kant’s texts. Though a single, unified account of need is difficult to pin down, themes emerge that help to shed more light on Kant’s ultimate concern with desire and inclination. With this analysis in place, Section 4 considers Kant’s discussion of the ideal stance toward inclination – something he refers to as independence or beatitude (Seligkeit). Far from consisting of renunciation of inclination, however, independence requires autocracy and an awareness or certainty of one’s autocracy. Complete independence is an ideal, but agents can fall short of this ideal to varying degrees. Section 5 offers a sketch of the moral and psychological consequences of failing in one’s attempts to attain independence, in particular, the “misery” that Kant associates with awareness of moral failure, and the futile strategies that agents pursue in order to avoid such misery. The chapter concludes with a few optimistic observations about the role of inclination in the life of a sensible moral agent.
Let us begin our search for the ideal Kantian stance toward inclination with one of Kant’s strongest statements on the matter: his assertion in the Groundwork that every rational being must wish to be free from inclination.2
But the inclinations themselves, as sources of need, are so far from having absolute worth – so as to make one wish for them as such – that to be entirely free from them must rather be the universal wish of every rational being.
On its face, we appear to have an open and shut case: Inclinations are burdensome and have no absolute worth. Ideally, a rational agent would be rid of them entirely. There is an element of truth to this reading, but as is so often the case, context is important when it comes to appreciating the subtlety of Kant’s remarks. The assertion appears immediately after Kant first introduces humanity as the source of absolute worth in the Groundwork. The assertion of this absolute worth – “Now I say: a human being and generally every rational being exists as an end in itself” (GMS 4:428) – may seem frustratingly short on justification. Indeed, the reader is at this stage only promised a normative justification (i.e., a deduction) for the formula of humanity in the last section of the Groundwork (GMS 4:429n). Nevertheless, Kant gestures toward an argument by elimination for the absolute worth of humanity in the sentences that follow this initial assertion.3 First, Kant argues that objects of inclination are excluded from having absolute worth. These have only “conditional worth; for if the inclinations, and the needs founded on them, did not exist, their object would be without worth” (GMS 4:428). Objects of inclination, in other words, are only valuable insofar as our inclinations and needs make them objects of worth. They cannot, therefore, have absolute worth.
Crucially, the next sentence – the sentence at issue here – is a response to a silent interlocutor who asks the next obvious question: If objects of inclination are valuable only contingently and depending on inclination, why not suppose that inclinations themselves are of absolute value? Kant’s answer to this unstated question is that “the inclinations themselves, as sources of need, are so far from having absolute worth – so as to make one wish for them as such – that to be entirely free from them must rather be the universal wish of every rational being.” Kant’s assertion that any rational agent would wish to be rid of inclination is thus not an off-the-cuff remark about the moral or psychological burden associated with inclination, but rather an argument that inclination itself cannot be a serious contender for the source of absolute worth in the moral theory he is presenting. But as an argument for that claim, the sentence seems, on its face, to offer little of substance. On a cursory reading, Kant seems merely to assert that inclinations themselves cannot have absolute worth because no rational being would wish for them as such.
Read in this way, the argument is unsatisfying on at least two counts. First, it is awkward, in Kantian terms, to describe something of absolute value as something to be wished for. Even humanity itself is not the sort of end that one ought produce or maximize. Rather, it is the sort of thing one protects and promotes where it already exists. This, of course, is just to say that humanity is a self-existent end, and not an end to be effected.
Perhaps, then, we can charitably assume that Kant means something like, “inclination is so far from being a necessary end for a rational being that any such being would actually wish to be rid of it.” But here we encounter a second problem: that assertion is either question begging or overly psychological. If the argument is that inclination cannot have absolute worth because it is not a necessary end for a rational being, then Kant is simply repeating what it means for something to have absolute worth. Assuming that something’s having absolute worth and its being a necessary end for a rational being are close bedfellows, if not exactly the same thing, then Kant has not offered an argument for why inclinations cannot have absolute worth, but rather scoffed at the apparent absurdity of the idea. If, on the other hand, the force of the argument is meant to rest on what rational beings tend to wish for, then it also falls short. There are, it would seem, plenty of rational beings who do not seem to wish to be rid of inclination, even when it causes suffering on a regular basis. And if Kant means that a truly rational being – a sage, perhaps – would wish to be rid of inclination, then he would seem to owe us some justification for this claim. If the implicit argument is simply that a truly rational being would recognize that inclination cannot be a necessary end, then it would seem to reduce to the earlier question-begging sort of claim. Nor does it seem sufficient to suggest that a sage would recognize how burdensome inclinations can be, and so wish to be rid of them.4 After all, the obligations suggested by the absolute worth of humanity can be burdensome, too.5 To understand why one type of burden is consistent with autonomy, and the other type opposed or detrimental to it, we would need precisely the argument for which we are searching here – an argument establishing the source of absolute worth for rational creatures.
Fortunately, there is more to Kant’s assertion than initially meets the eye. Crucially, the passage states that inclinations – as sources of need (Quellen der Bedürfniß) – are so far from having absolute worth that no rational being would wish for them. The force of Kant’s argument would appear to rest upon the observation that inclinations are the sources of need. We might rephrase Kant’s argument by elimination for the absolute worth of humanity – such as it is – as follows: Objects of inclination cannot have absolute worth because their worth is contingent upon inclination, and inclination itself cannot have absolute worth because it is the source of neediness and contingency. The implicit claim, then, would be that something has absolute worth if and only if it is neither contingent upon something else for its existence, nor itself the sort of thing that generates contingency. Humanity, as a self-existent end, fits both descriptions.6 This reading also helps make sense of the assertion that rational beings would wish to be rid of inclinations in a non-psychological and non-question-begging way. A rational being would not consider something that generates need and contingency to be a plausible candidate for a necessary end.
The preceding analysis of the Groundwork’s indictment of inclination demonstrates that it is inclination’s association with neediness – specifically, that inclination generates neediness and contingency – that makes it both psychologically burdensome and morally threatening. But this claim raises a host of new interpretative questions. What, precisely, does Kant mean by “need”? Do some forms of neediness exist that are more acceptable than others, either from a moral or from a psychological perspective? Does inclination necessarily generate neediness? Or might inclination sometimes exist absent need, such that the dangers described earlier can be avoided?
The preceding analysis of Kant’s apparent renunciation of inclination in the Groundwork leaves us with a new set of questions about his conception of need. Locating a precise understanding of the term is not a straightforward task, however, since Kant’s use of it is not always consistent or determinate. Further, one should be cautious to differentiate philosophical use of this term from what is perhaps more colloquial usage – especially in the transcribed lectures. Despite these challenges, however, certain themes emerge amongst the references to need and neediness in Kant’s texts and lectures.
First, need is associated with satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Kant often describes need as striving for or demanding satisfaction. Satisfaction is a “problem thrust upon the being by its finite nature” (KpV 5:25). Finite beings are “needy, and this need pertains to the matter of its power of desire, i.e., to something that renders to a subjectively underlying feeling of pleasure or displeasure which determines what the being needs in order to be satisfied with its [own] state” (KpV 5:25). Unfortunately, “reason is not sufficiently fit to guide the will reliably with regard to … the satisfaction of all our needs” (GMS 4:396). Indeed, reason often multiplies these needs unnecessarily – an important point discussed later in this chapter. In its demand for satisfaction, need operates as a counterweight to morality. Kant concedes, for example, that securing one’s own happiness is indirectly a duty, since “unsatisfied needs” can become “a great temptation to transgress one’s duties” (GMS 4:399). And if a rational subject is not also a “legislating member of the kingdom of ends,” then that person can only be represented as “subject to the natural law of his needs” (GMS 4:439).
These observations regarding need and satisfaction may prompt the reader to wonder whether need isn’t the same thing as inclination, or at least a subspecies of inclination. After all, Kant also describes inclination as a temptation or counterweight to morality – sometimes in the same breath as a reference to need. In the Groundwork, he describes need and inclination as counterweights to morality, adding that maxims based on need and inclination stand in contrast to a correct determination of the will (GMS 4:405). And in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant defines beatitude – a term discussed in the next section – as “complete independence from need and inclination.”7 And in at least one passage, Kant describes happiness as “the entire satisfaction of need and inclination” (GMS 4:405).
Still other passages suggest that Kant thinks of need and inclination as conceptually distinct. In a footnote to his introduction of the notion of an imperative in the Groundwork, Kant remarks that “[t]he dependence of the desiderative faculty on sensations is called inclination, and this therefore always proves (beweißt) a need.”8 The assertion appears to draw a clear conceptual distinction between inclination and need, since it would be peculiar – or at the very least uninteresting – to say that one always proves the other if the two terms were mere synonyms. Still, nothing in that passage or its context (a discussion of the distinction between practical interest and pathological interest) makes the details of this conceptual distinction clear. Does inclination necessarily generate need? Or does inclination necessarily appeal to or rely upon need? Perhaps the relationship between inclination and need is not a causal one at all: Need might be an aspect or component of inclination, for example.
Looking elsewhere in Kant’s texts, one finds several passages in which Kant indicates that inclination at least sometimes generates need. One of these, of course, is the passage from the Groundwork analyzed in Section 2 in which Kant describes inclination as the source of need. Similarly, in a lecture given around the same time as the publication of the Groundwork, Kant notes that the “thing toward which we are inclined pleases us, but not the inclination itself, since without inclination we would not have so many needs” (Mrong II 29:610). Again, one ought to be cautious about making too much out of a few words in a transcribed lecture, but this assertion does seem to echo two of the conclusions drawn in the preceding section: first, that inclination at least sometimes generates need, and second, that this fact makes inclination burdensome or unpleasant. Another suggestion that inclination generates need appears in the Critique of Practical Reason’s discussion of the need of reason, where Kant responds in a footnote to Thomas Wizenmann’s objection that a hope or a wish cannot provide proof of its object. Kant responds in part by pointing out that the need of reason is different from needs that are based on inclination. Inclination generates needs than can often lead to frustration and disappointment, but the need of reason is, according to Kant, a reliable indicator of at least the possibility of the postulates of pure practical reason (KpV 143n).
The preceding passages suggest that inclination at least sometimes generates need, but readers familiar with the Critique of Judgment may at this point wonder if Kant doesn’t make just the opposite assertion in that text, when he observes that “all interest assumes a need or creates one” (KU 5:210). The claim makes a distinction between moral interest and pathological interest: moral interest creates a need (i.e., the need of reason), while pathological interest relies upon or assumes a preceding need. But here, it is important to recall that interest is not the same as inclination. As Kant explains in the Groundwork footnote cited earlier, interest is “the dependence … of a contingently determinable will on principles of reason” (GMS 4:413n). Crucially, then, interest involves principles of reason, whereas inclination need not.9 So it does not necessarily suggest a contradiction in Kant’s thought for him to claim that pathological interest depends on need, since pathological interest is cognitively a step more advanced, so to speak, than inclination. Inclination might, for example, generate need, and both might be assumed, together with reason, in the formation of pathological interest.10
Further complicating matters is the fact that Kant points, in at least one passage, to the possibility of need existing absent inclination. In the Religion, he defines instinct as “a felt need to do or enjoy something of which we still do not have a concept” (RGV 6:28n). As such, instinct lies between propensity and inclination. Inclination, Kant argues “presupposes acquaintance with the object of desire,” whereas the felt need of instinct does not. Of course, it is impossible to say whether the felt need that characterizes instinct is the same sort of need that concerns Kant in other passages. Still, Kant’s remarks regarding need and instinct may help explain the phenomenon of finding something pleasant in the absence of any inclination for that thing, or, conversely, the phenomenon of having the sense that there’s something that would be pleasant, but not being sure what it is.
There is also a clear suggestion in the texts and lectures that inclination does not always have to generate need. This notion comes across most forcefully in passages in which Kant cautions against allowing certain inclinations – for example, inclinations toward luxury and amenity – to become needs. Kant warns in the Vigilantius lecture that we should “[n]ever seize upon the amenities (Annehmlichkeiten) of life with such inclination that they can become needful to us,” since, when we do this, these inclinations become “a burden, and restrict our freedom in the fulfillment of duty” (Vigil 27:652). And Kant regularly draws a contrast between “true” or “natural” needs, and other sorts of needs, suggesting that it is the latter sort of need that reason itself has a tendency to multiply unnecessarily (e.g., GMS 4:396). According to the early Kaehler/Collins lectures on moral philosophy, for example, Kant admits of a kind of gradation of neediness, distinguishing among distress (Nothdurft); other kinds of needs (Bedürfnisse); and mere amenity (Annehmlichkeit) (Collins 27:441). And in the Doctrine of Method of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant notes that the right kind of moral example “withdraws the learner from the constraint of even true needs,” thus allowing for a “liberation from the manifold of dissatisfaction in which all needs entangle him” (KpV 5:160, author’s emphasis). A similar distinction appears in the Doctrine of Virtue, when Kant defines prodigal avarice as acquisition of the “means to good in excess of true needs” (TL 6:432). Like Rousseau, Kant recognizes that the proliferation of need beyond “true” or “natural” needs is fueled by anxious comparison and competition in society. As Kant describes him in the Religion, the human being’s “needs are but limited, and his state of mind in providing for them moderate and tranquil. He is poor (or considers himself so) only to the extent that he is anxious that others will consider him poor and will despise him for it” (RGV 6:93). Kant cites this anxiety as the source of greed, envy, and the desire for domination.
Based on the preceding observations, we can draw a few conclusions. First, Kant appears to be operating with at least two senses of need. “True” or “natural” needs may describe something like instinct – or at least the set of desires that begin as instincts. But Kant also uses the term in an almost adverbial sense, to denote the strength of a desire, or the intensity of the demand that it be satisfied. Of course, the two senses of the term are not unrelated. Though few, natural or true needs are precisely those instincts or desires that would seem to demand satisfaction most strenuously. But we make a moral error and generate unnecessary psychological burdens for ourselves when we allow other inclinations to take on the urgency of need. It is, I suspect, this kind of burden – including the effort that it takes to keep it at bay – that Kant has in mind when he observes that inclinations are so burdensome that any rational agent would wish to be rid of them. Importantly, however, inclination and need do not appear to be synonymous. Many inclinations probably depend to some degree on natural need or instinct. And inclination can often generate need, when we allow it to, but it must not do so in every case. In principle, it seems possible to have an inclination toward something – a small luxury perhaps – without allowing that inclination to take on the force or demandingness of need. This would certainly require a good deal of moral strength and vigilance, since danger exists wherever inclinations are allowed to flourish. Still, conceptual space between inclination and neediness exists. Most importantly, perhaps, the slide from inclination to need is, in these cases, a moral failure, albeit a subtle one that occurs over time.
We are left with a question about how to respond to or manage inclination and neediness. Kant asserts that the appropriate stance or goal with respect to inclination is “independence” (Unabhängigkeit), and he sometimes associates this notion with beatitude (Seligkeit), which he defines as “complete independence from inclinations and needs” (KpV 5:118). Further, his discussion of independence in the Critique of Practical Reason repeats the earlier observation that any rational being would wish to be rid of inclination, so the reader may be tempted to conclude that independence and beatitude are ideals that involve renunciation or suppression of inclination. However, renunciation and suppression of inclination are neither sufficient nor, in many cases, necessary for independence or beatitude. Instead, independence requires something more difficult of the agent: a kind of mastery of inclination – or autocracy – and a second-order awareness or certainty of this autocracy.11 Of course, like renunciation, these are ultimately unattainable ideals for embodied agents. Precisely because agents are unavoidably subject to need and inclination, certainty of autocracy is impossible. Agents are aware of their capacity for autonomy, but they cannot be certain that they will always properly subordinate inclination to the moral law, or indeed that they have done so in the past. Kant notes that this uncertainty about future moral conduct, and a related uncertainty about how to interpret past action, leads to a kind of moral anxiety (TL 6:440).
Before examining the ideal of beatitude, or Seligkeit, in more detail, it is worth pausing to take note of the use of the term “selig” (or “sälig”) in Kant’s time. The Grimm dictionary notes that selig can have active and passive senses. In its active sense, selig describes a property of something that makes it good, or grants some sort of advantage. Weather, for example, can be selig if it brings much needed rain or sunshine. In its passive sense, selig or Seligkeit describes the condition of being protected or safeguarded against something – a threat or temptation, for example. But even when the term describes protection or safeguarding, it comes along with connotations of contributing to a person’s advantage or happiness, for example, in the saying “Sälig ist der Mann der sich für Weiberlist hüten kann” (Blessed is the man who can protect himself from the cunning of women).
Kant himself seems to pun on this dual sense of “Seligkeit” in the Vigilantius lecture, where he remarks that:
[A] state whose comfort has its source merely in things of nature, or in good fortune, and of which I am not the author through my freedom, would not be called “blessed” (selig), and would have to be called “fortunate” (sälig), in that here the word “Saal” is at the bottom of it – as with every state of things – just as it has this meaning in the words Schicksaal (fortune) and Trübsaal (misfortune).
So even if blessedness can describe a state of being contented, such contentment cannot come about through mere fortune or gifts of nature for it to count as Kantian Seligkeit. Instead, a Kantian understanding of Seligkeit will have to have an agent’s free power of choice at its foundation.
But just what sort of choice does Kant have in mind? In particular, is it necessarily a choice to strive to renounce inclination and neediness? A useful discussion of independence and beatitude appears early in the Critique of Practical Reason, in the context of a discussion about happiness:
To be happy is necessarily the demand of every rational but finite being and therefore an unavoidable determining ground of its faculty of desire. For satisfaction with one’s whole existence is not, as it were, an original possession and a beatitude, which would presuppose a consciousness of one’s independent self-sufficiency (unabhängige Selbstgenugsamkeit), but is instead a problem imposed upon him by his finite nature itself, because he is needy and this need is directed to the matter of his faculty of desire.
Two observations should be made about this passage. First, Kant calls beatitude a possession (Besitz), and associates it with self-sufficiency (Selbstgenugsamkeit). Again, it is clearly more than having the good luck not to be affected by inclination – free power of choice is central to beatitude. And in calling beatitude a possession, the passage brings to mind prominent themes in the discussion of virtue in the Metaphysics of Morals, in particular the observation that virtue is to be regarded as a strength. Second, Kant’s definition of beatitude in this passage is, at least in part, a second-order definition: It includes a consciousness (Bewußtsein) of independence and self-sufficiency. Beatitude is thus a kind of strength or possession, and an awareness or consciousness of this strength.
Later, in the Dialectic, Kant returns to these themes (KpV 5:117–18). On its face, the discussion looks again like an indictment of the inclinations, leading the reader to perhaps conclude that Kant is recommending renunciation. Kant observes that the inclinations always “change and grow with the indulgence that one allows them" and are for this reason “always burdensome to a rational being who wishes to be rid of them” (KpV 5:118). But if we pay attention to the beginning of the next paragraph (“from this it follows”), it becomes clear that Kant’s observations are psychological and prudential. They are meant to show why consciousness of virtue can only ever provide negative satisfaction: Precisely because inclinations are always shifting and changing, we can never achieve certainty and positive satisfaction that we have mastered them completely.
In what follows, Kant goes on to define beatitude as a “complete independence (Unabhängigkeit) from inclinations and needs” (KpV 5:118). Again, one might be tempted to think of this as the elimination or renunciation of inclination, or at least a striving toward that aim. But in the previous paragraph, Kant has given us a definition of independence that warns against such an interpretation. He tells us that “[f]reedom, and the consciousness of freedom as an ability to follow the moral law with an unyielding disposition, is independence (Unabhängigkeit) from the inclinations” (KpV 5:117, author’s emphasis). The definition of “independence” offered here should thus not be understood as freedom from inclinations, but rather as a type of self-mastery and strength to follow the moral law. Independence from inclination is thus not the renunciation of inclination but virtuous strength and consciousness of this strength as the proper use of freedom. Complete independence (or beatitude) would then presumably be to have this consciousness or certainty about all of one’s inclinations – past, present, and future.
Complete independence, thus described, is an impossible ideal. First, since independence describes a state of affairs in which one is certain of having acted from duty, agents quickly run into trouble because of the obscurity of moral motivation. We can never know whether we have acted from duty, and conscience continually brings our actions before “an internal court” where our “thoughts accuse or excuse one another” (TL 6:438). Second, even when conscience acquits us, we can never be certain of similar future success. When it comes to knowledge of our own autocracy, we find ourselves in a state of anxiety and uncertainty – never in a state of complete independence. As Kant remarks in the Doctrine of Virtue, “the blessedness found in the comforting encouragement of one’s conscience is not positive (joy) but merely negative (relief from preceding anxiety); and this alone is what can be ascribed to virtue, as a struggle against the influence of the evil principle in a human being” (TL 6:440).
Independence is thus an ideal that is impossible to achieve or secure with lasting certainty. Nevertheless, it is an informative ideal: Just as independence includes consciousness of moral strength, so too does a deficit of independence include a consciousness of relative weakness. Crucial to the Kantian account of moral failure is the observation that agents are also aware of falling short of independence, even if only dimly. To a large extent, it is this awareness of moral failure and the futile attempt to disguise or compensate for it that accounts for the psychological burden that Kant associates with inclination and need – a burden that he calls “moral misery.” This chapter concludes with a few remarks about the contours of moral misery, in the hopes that this will shed light on how finite agents might strive to live peaceably alongside their inclinations, even if complete independence is impossible.
As is often observed, Kant parts ways with the Stoics in asserting that happiness does not simply consist of virtue, or consciousness of one’s virtue. Still, he concedes that there is a kind of satisfaction that accompanies consciousness of virtue. In the Critique of Practical Reason, he calls this kind of satisfaction “contentment” (Zufriedenheit), describing it as “an analogue of happiness that must necessarily accompany consciousness of virtue” (KpV 5:117). As we have already noted, complete certainty about one’s virtue is impossible: The most an agent can ever hope for is relief from the anxiety that pangs of conscience generate. As such, Kant observes, contentment can only be “a negative satisfaction with one’s existence, in which one is conscious of needing nothing (my emphasis).” Notably, the absence of need – and not of inclination – lies at the core of Kant’s definition.
Kant is eager to distinguish contentment from happiness, but we should be careful not to assume that contentment is merely a placeholder concept, or that contentment is not itself a large part of what constitutes a person’s well-being. Usefully, a later discussion of contentment in the Vigilantius lecture on moral philosophy offers a more detailed account of its centrality, and of the misery associated with unchecked neediness and falling short of independence. There, Kant reportedly describes the condition in which one judges oneself “unworthy of [one’s] own contentment, because he has made himself unworthy of his own existence” as a kind of misery (Elend). In particular, he elaborates, misery signifies a want with respect to “conditions of our contentment”:
Conditions of our contentment in general are called needs (Bedürfnisse); but that need whose non-fulfillment must make us discontented with our whole existence is called a necessity; in the physical sense, for example, hunger, when we want for food. In the moral sense, the outcome is misery (Elend), just as, in the physical sense, it is ill-fortune. Both are based on the fact that no substitute means are available, to remedy the means to contentment that are wanting, and to make the want superfluous.
Again, Kant associates need with satisfaction and dissatisfaction: The satisfaction of a need yields contentment, while the failure to satisfy a need yields discontentment. Indeed, some needs – so-called necessities – yield a thoroughgoing “discontentment with our whole existence” when they are left unfulfilled. Necessities can be physical or moral, but either way the discontent associated with them stems from the fact that “no substitute means are available” for their fulfillment. Proper nourishment is thus a necessity in the physical sense, since nothing can take its place and its lack constitutes a state of being discontented (to say the least) with one’s whole physical existence. We can also make two further observations about physical necessity. First, the conditions of its fulfillment are often a matter of luck or circumstance, and no finite being is immune to the vagaries of fortune that put fulfillment of physical necessity in danger. This, in no small part, is an observation at the heart of Kant’s argument for the duty of beneficence. Second, it is only reasonable to expect that even the threat of deprivation when it comes to physical necessity will be the source of great and understandable anxiety.
But Kant also asserts that rational, sensible agents are susceptible to a kind of moral necessity, namely, the contentment that Kant describes in the Critique of Practical Reason. Instead of proper nourishment, it is awareness of one’s virtue that is the irreplaceable means to the fulfillment of this necessity. Again, this awareness of one’s virtue can at best be backward looking and pertain only to having a mastery over one’s needs (having done one’s duty) thus far. Unlike physical necessity, in the case of moral necessity, the means to fulfillment are not a matter of fortune; they are entirely up to the agent. In this light, Kant’s remarks about the difference between Säligkeit (good fortune) and Seligkeit (blessedness) become all the more trenchant. In the case of physical necessity, it is good fortune on which the fulfillment of necessity is based. In the moral case, it is virtue, and this involves striving for the kind of blessedness – Seligkeit – associated with independence from one’s inclinations.
Still, there are similarities between physical necessity and moral necessity. As with physical necessity and proper nourishment, there is no substitute for awareness of one’s virtue. As we have already seen, even the prospect of losing the means to moral contentment – whether via the introspection of conscience or the thought of future moral challenge – is the source of a kind of moral anxiety. But there is an important difference between the misery associated with physical necessity and the misery associated with moral necessity. In the case of moral necessity, though substitute means are unavailable, agents nevertheless attempt to find alternate means of contentment when virtue and awareness of virtue are lacking. This pursuit of alternate means typically follows one of two strategies.
The first of these is to seek the certainty of moral contentment through external means. An example of this tendency appears in Kant’s discussion of miserliness in various texts and lectures. Kant classifies miserliness as a species of avarice: The miser’s maxim “is to acquire as well as maintain all the means to good living, but with no intention of enjoyment (i.e., in such a way that one’s end is only possession, not enjoyment)” (TL 6:432). In essence, the miser allows a principle of savings to overwhelm his power of free choice. Individuals prone to miserliness often belong to groups whose livelihood or subsistence is insecure – Kant mentions women, the elderly, and scholars in this context. Kant repeatedly describes miserliness as a passion, and this gives the reader an important clue about the etiology of miserliness. Specifically, it is the sort of inclination that becomes entrenched slowly over time. In the case of miserliness, the otherwise reasonable maxim to set aside some money in case of emergency turns eventually into the principle of miserliness, spurred on in large part by a ceaseless anxiety about the future. Indeed, Kant thinks that miserliness cannot come about any other way, since to devise a maxim of miserliness out of whole cloth and then adopt such a maxim would be patently irrational.
The miser is an instructive case study of a fruitless attempt to find alternate means to moral contentment. Recall that Kant defines contentment (Zufriedenheit) as consciousness of needing nothing. Of course, the only way to approach having such a consciousness is to cultivate one’s strength of will. But this is not the strategy that the miser pursues: Instead of pursuing independence from inclination and need, the miser essentially doubles down on inclination and need. Instead of cultivating the moral strength to overcome the neediness associated with the desire to acquire things, the miser pursues an avaricious principle of savings, grounded in fear and anxiety about the future. But in so doing the miser has not overcome inclination and need. Rather, he has simply replaced the need of acquisition or accumulation with the need of fretful penny-pinching. This observation brings us to another important point: There is a sense in which the miser and others like him have given up on themselves morally. Instead of trusting in his own ability to cultivate moral strength in the face of need, the miser instead surrenders to need and anxiously piles one inclination on top of another. The miser thus evinces despondency – a “mistrust of one’s powers” and a forgetting of “self-possession” that Kant counts among the violations of one’s duty to oneself in the Vigilantius lectures (Vigil 27:606). A moral agent, he elaborates, must locate his existence “in his own person,” and not in things outside him. But this is precisely how the miser goes wrong: Rather than responding to the awareness of his own lack of independence and autocracy by asserting self-possession and moral strength, the miser looks to external sources in a fruitless attempt to buttress his neediness. Moral misery and despondency thus seem to go hand-in-hand. As Kant observes in the Vigilantius passage cited earlier, misery is “coupled at the same time with such depression of spirits, that it no longer permits any consciousness of the superiority of one’s strength of mind.”12
The miser and others like him seek to assuage their moral misery through external means. But there is a second, more or less internal, method that agents often pursue in order to escape moral misery – this is self-deception. As Kant describes it in the Groundwork, self-deception is rooted in a tendency to question the “strictness and the purity” of the moral law, or the extent of the requirements of duty and the demand that morally worthy action be motivated by the moral law (GMS 4:398–9). Of course, this is only a very general description of the tendency: Self-deception can be remarkably subtle and clever, as Kant describes it – indeed, it is perhaps most insidious and intractable when it appeals to apparent virtue in its own defense. So, for example, a main source of the vice of ingratitude is a tendency to “misunderstand” (or, presumably, deceive oneself about) the duty of self-sufficiency, such that gratitude is understood as an admission of dependence on others and ingratitude is recast as an assertion of one’s own rugged individualism and self-sufficiency (TL 6:459). As a strategy to attempt to avoid misery, self-deception is primarily effective retrospectively, that is with respect to concerns about past moral failure. But in rationalizing, the agent also allows himself to be less concerned about his ability to rise to moral challenges in the future. After all, if being “perfect” has been so straightforward thus far, why presume it should be any different in the future?
The despondent agent essentially gives up on herself as a moral agent, hoping instead to achieve some analogue of contentment via external means. Meanwhile, the agent who pursues the route of self-deception insists on her virtue and her status as a moral agent, but re-describes the demands of morality in order to fool herself into thinking that she can achieve them effortlessly. Crucially, however, neither strategy is effective. It is easiest to see how the first strategy is doomed from the beginning. Responding to need by acquiring ever more need is something like the moral version of going into more debt to pay an existing debt. Prudentially, the strategy only produces more misery. The miser, it would seem, is doubly tortured since he is beset by the penny-pinching anxieties of his own making, but nevertheless still concerned with the original objects of his inclinations. As Kant describes him, the miser peevishly begrudges others their small luxuries, since he is unable to enjoy any of his own.
It is, admittedly, less obvious that the strategy of self-deception is bound to fail, since Kant evinces a decided pessimism about how skilled agents are at deceiving themselves. Still, his remarks about conscience would seem to suggest that self-deception can never be “complete” in the sense that an agent can never cease to hear the voice of conscience altogether.13 Note, too, that even if self-deception could be complete, or close to complete, it would only be complete with respect to retrospective moral questions. The self-deceiver, in order to maintain the illusion of virtue, must constantly be weaving new tales of apparent virtue. Both the “external” and the “internal” strategies are thus accompanied by the restless anxiety of needing constantly to keep up these endeavors in order to avoid moral misery.
In light of the preceding discussion, we can make some concluding observations about inclination, need, and moral misery. First, when Kant asserts that inclinations are burdensome and that a rational agent would wish to be rid of them, I suspect he has in mind inclinations qua needs, or inclinations that have taken on the urgency and unruliness of need. When inclinations become needs, the pursuit of independence – understood as autocracy – becomes nearly impossible. Crucially, Kant’s account of beatitude and independence demonstrates that this moral struggle is also accompanied by a painful awareness of moral failure, a discontent and misery that agents will go to great lengths to avoid. Neediness thus ushers in the further burdens of misery, despondency, and self-deception described in the preceding section. So it is not inclination as such that any rational agent should wish to be rid of, but rather the moral hazards and psychological burdens of neediness. But this brings us to a second, altogether more optimistic point: Inclination itself does not imply subjection to these burdens necessarily.14 Indeed, Kant’s moral philosophy reserves at least a theoretical space for an autonomous agent who is able to enjoy the pleasure that accompanies satisfied inclination. The ideal of independence suggests that the appropriate approach to inclination is not one of vigilant suppression and constant checking, but rather conscientious cultivation. Such cultivation may indeed involve avoiding certain inclinations to the best of one’s ability (especially those that cannot be managed or fulfilled). But it may also involve encouraging other kinds of inclinations or ends, specifically, those that do not always “change and grow with the indulgence that one allows” it (KpV 5:118). To see what shape such a policy might take, let us return to the passage in which Kant discusses the relief from anxiety that comes along with the “comforting encouragement of one’s conscience”:
[T]he blessedness (Seligkeit) found in the comforting encouragement of one’s conscience is not positive (joy), but merely negative (relief from preceding anxiety); and this alone is what can be ascribed to virtue, as a struggle against the influence of the evil principle in a human being.
Kant suggests that there is something beyond independence and the “relief from preceding anxiety” that embodied agents can enjoy. This “positive” blessedness is “joy” (Freude). A question naturally presents itself: What would Kantian joy look like? The account sketched here may provide a template: Kantian joy would involve having inclinations, having control over these inclinations (and knowing that one has such control), and yet still taking some pleasure in those inclinations and their satisfaction.
What would such joy be like? There is perhaps a hint in the Anthropology and fragments on anthropology, where Kant sometimes associates joy with friendship and society (e.g., Anth 7:171 and HN 15:263). The link is speculative, but fruitful. If we were to take pleasure in inclination, even while being completely independent of inclination, the best candidates for such inclinations would seem to be unselfish or other-directed ones. We could easily take pleasure in their fulfillment (when this is consistent with the moral law, of course) but not suffer (at least for selfish reasons) when these go unfulfilled. Note, too, that the pleasure of friendship does not tend to generate ever-increasing and unsatisfiable inclination: When we develop a new friendship, we do not begin to seek out more of the same. And when we lose a friend, we do not simply acquire a replacement. Indeed, if this link between joy and society with others is apt, the account of independence offered here may tell us something about our relationships with others. Far from being an inevitable locus of dependence, they may in fact be a source of Kantian joy.
1 I would like to thank Wiebke Deimling for her comments on an earlier version of this chapter at the “Nature and Freedom in Kant” conference at Brown University in 2013. A later version was presented at Leipzig University in 2016. I am grateful to audience members at both events for their comments and questions. Thanks also to Jens Timmermann for comments on the chapter.
2 I follow Frierson’s (2014:68–70) account of Kantian inclination. Inclinations are parts of the faculty of desire, but not predispositions or instincts. Rather, they “are the result of experiences of objects for which someone has a propensity” (Frierson 2014:70). However, as Frierson observes, Kant sometimes uses “inclination” to refer to the entire lower faculty of desire. This discussion assumes the narrower definition. For further discussion of inclination, see Schapiro 2009.
3 For a discussion of the argument by elimination, see Timmermann 2007. For an influential alternate interpretation that Kant is offering a regress argument, see Korsgaard 1996a, chapter 4.
4 Compare KpV 5:118.
5 Of course, the source of that burden is the continued resistance of inclination.
6 Though Kant’s argument for a duty of beneficence certainly relies upon claims about the contingent, finite nature of human beings, this is a feature of our sensible nature, and not of humanity as such.
7 KpV 5:118. See also RGV 6:61, where Kant describes sensible beings as “being[s] pertaining to this world and dependent on needs and inclinations.”
9 Compare RL 6:212–13.
12 Vigil 27:644. Compare Kant’s remark in the Doctrine of Virtue that “moral cognition of oneself will … dispel fanatical contempt for oneself as a human being” (TL 6:441). One gloss of this claim is that the person who engages in the difficult work of self-scrutiny will at the very least exercise enough self-possession to dispel complete despondency, since only a being with some moral strength is capable of self-examination.