“Sympathy, Love, and the Faculty of Feeling in Kant”
We have a duty to seek out the places of the poor – sickhouses and prisons – and pick up as by contagion a kind of sympathy for those suffering there, Kant says in the Metaphysics of Morals. This sort of sympathy is generated passively by lower subfaculties of sensibility that fall under the third of Kant’s trio of faculties, the “faculty of feeling.” But Kant’s longstanding and stable views in the Anthropology (and the associated student notes across three decades), combined with developments in his views about the faculty of feeling from 1787-1790, in published works and in letters, establish a richer set of possibilities as well. For instance, there is a certain kind of activity in even these passive lower subfaculties: Kant believes that we can only passively receive the sound of a trumpet because we are, in some interesting sense, also active representers of sound (MetaphysikMrongovius 29:823). By analogy, the kind of active representers of other people’s pain that we are shapes the sympathy we pick up in places like the houses of the poor – for instance, shapes it into something more or less self-focused and self-aggrandizing. Kant’s wariness of self-aggrandizement will accordingly lead to distinctions among varieties of sympathy. And just as Kant believes that even the highersubfaculties of understanding can produce occasional reason-suppressing “affects” (a technical term for Kant for short, powerful emotions which constrain reason), which can nevertheless be morally positive, the higher subfaculties might generate a kind of morally positive sympathy as well. Feelings do not take objects in the way cognitions do; so a Kantian view also has to account for the cognitions that accompany sympathy. We can approach love in Kant’s view in related ways, beginning with his claim that "Love, like water, always flows downward more easily than upward." (VE 27:670) (in Allen Wood’s intriguing, if problematic, translation).
These claims about sympathy and love extend positions about reason-caused “affects” defended in <redacted: one of my publications. The Third Critiqueand the Anthropologyin particular are important sources for affects in this category. One such affect is “enthusiasm” [Enthusiasmus], a natural side effect of moral reasoning that offers such reasoning “momentum” (K3 5:274). The second is a kind of “astonishment” or “admiration,” that, like the oft-quoted Kantian experience of the sublime, points to the existence of our capability to resist and transcend contra-moral inclinations (K3 5:272). A third affect is “fortitude” or courage,the pluck to run into a burning building to save a child, "to not shrink even from losing one's life in doing what duty commands" (A 7:259). Reason not only produces feelings and desires, but sometimes must produce strong, reflection-inhibiting emotions in order for an agent to do his or her duty.
Kant scholars have increasingly recognized that Kant’s theory of “emotion” is far more developed and worth considering than detractors believe, but, even still, the specifics of this theory remain hazy. According to the Anthropology, there are three mental faculties: cognition, feeling, and desire. Little scholarly attention has been paid to the faculty of feeling, although it is a reasonable starting place to locate his theory of “emotion.” Kant uses a variety of terms under the umbrella of what many call “emotion,” including affects, feelings, and passions. But while he associates “passions” with the faculty of desire, he associates “affects” and “feelings” with the faculty of feeling. Kant scholars have sometimes too crudely looked for Kant’s theory of “emotion” only under the faculty of desire. Although Kant discusses feelings in his pre-critical period, as with Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, the first and second Critiques omit any reference to feeling as a separate faculty – or even to the need for a third Critique. Yet, as of the third Critique, feeling has assumed the role of its own mental faculty worthy of its own Critique. The idea that feeling is its own faculty raises many questions: Why does Kant come to believe that feeling must be described as a separate faculty? What is the relationship between feeling and cognition, on the one hand, and desire, on the other? What is the nature of feeling? What do the most discussed Kantian feelings tell about his views on the nature of feeling -- respect, beauty, and sublimity? And what about emotions that are difficult to categorize, like hope and intellectual pleasure? And emotions like sympathy and love that are putatively problematic for Kant? The claims I defend will make headway on these question as well.
(I would consider being a commentator on another paper, should my paper not be accepted to the conference for presentation.)