Ominous Parallels (9 page)

For this reason, the worst corrupters of morality are those philosophers who offer “boasting eulogies ... of the advantages of happiness,” and hold that morality is a means to its achievement. Many false ethical theories have been advanced, in Kant’s view, but “the principle of one’s own happiness is the most objectionable of all. This is not merely because it is false... Rather, it is because this principle supports morality with incentives which undermine it and destroy all its sublimity....”
¹⁰

Most of Kant’s predecessors had assumed that men are motivated by the desire for happiness. Kant concedes this assumption. All men, he holds, “crave happiness first and unconditionally,” and do so “by a necessity of nature.” Nevertheless, he insists, morality has nothing to do with nature. The ground of moral obligation “must not be sought in the nature of man or in the circumstances in which he is placed....” Regardless of nature, therefore, the “real end” of a creature such as man is not “its preservation, its welfare—in a word, its happiness....”

This does not mean that morality is based on divine decree. Philosophy, writes Kant, must “show its purity as the absolute sustainer” of moral laws, “even though it is supported by nothing in either heaven or earth.”
¹¹

Moral laws, according to Kant, are a set of orders issued to man by a nonheavenly, nonearthly entity (which I shall discuss shortly), a set of unconditional commandments or “categorical imperatives”—to be sharply contrasted with mere “counsels of prudence.” The latter are rules advising one how best to achieve one’s own welfare; such rules have for Kant no moral significance. By contrast, a categorical imperative pronounces an action “as good in itself,” no matter what the result, and thus “commands absolutely and without any incentives....”

Unconditional obedience to such imperatives, “the submission of my will to a law without the intervention of other influences on my mind,” is man’s noblest virtue, the “far more worthy purpose of [men’s] existence ... the supreme condition to which the private purposes of men must for the most part defer.”

The name for such obedience is duty. “[T]he necessity of my actions from pure respect for the practical [i.e., moral] law constitutes duty. To duty every other motive must give place... .”
¹²

Kant draws a fundamental distinction between actions motivated by incentive or desire, actions which a man personally wants to perform to attain some end—these he calls actions from “inclination”—and actions motivated by reverence for duty. The former, he holds, are by their nature devoid of moral worth, which belongs exclusively to the latter. It is not enough that a man do the right thing, that his acts be “in accord with” duty; the moral man must act from duty; he must do his duty simply because it is his duty.

In theory, Kant states, a man deserves moral credit for an action done from duty, even if his inclinations also favor it—but only insofar as the latter are incidental and play no role in his motivation. But in practice, Kant maintains, whenever the two coincide no one can know that he has escaped the influence of inclination. For all practical purposes, therefore, a moral man must have no private stake in the outcome of his actions, no personal motive, no expectation of profit or gain of any kind.

Even then, however, he cannot be sure that no fragment of desire is “secretly” moving him. The far clearer case, the one case in which a man can at least come close to knowing that he is moral, occurs when the man’s desires
clash
with his duty and he acts in defiance of his desires. Kant illustrates:

[I]t is a duty to preserve one’s life, and moreover everyone has a direct inclination to do so. But for that reason the often anxious care which most men take of it has no intrinsic worth, and the maxim of doing so has no moral import. They preserve their lives according to duty, but not from duty. But if adversities and hopeless sorrow completely take away the relish for life, if an unfortunate man, strong in soul, is indignant rather than despondent or dejected over his fate and wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it and from neither inclination nor fear but from duty—then his maxim has a moral import.
¹³

This is the sort of motivation that should govern a man in telling the truth, keeping his promises, developing his talents, etc. It should also govern him in the performance of another virtue: service to others. The latter is not a fundamental virtue, in Kant’s view, merely one among many of equal importance. It is, however, one of man’s duties and should be performed as such. There are, Kant says, “many persons so sympathetically constituted that without any motive of vanity or selfishness they find an inner satisfaction in spreading joy....” In Kant’s opinion, however,

that kind of action has no true moral worth.... But assume that the mind of that friend to mankind was clouded by a sorrow of his own which extinguished all sympathy with the lot of others.... And now suppose him to tear himself, unsolicited by inclination, out of this dead insensibility and to perform this action only from duty and without any inclination—then for the first time his action has genuine moral worth.
¹⁴

Kant acknowledges that the dutiful actions he counsels are “actions whose feasibility might be seriously doubted by those who base everything on experience. . . .”
¹⁵
For him, however, this is not a problem.

Experience, according to Kant, acquaints human beings only with the phenomenal realm, the world of things as they appear to man given the distorting structure of his cognitive faculties. It does not reveal reality, the noumenal realm, the world of things in themselves, which is unknowable. In developing this dichotomy, Kant is more consistent than any of his skeptical predecessors. He applies it not only to the object of cognition, but also to the subject. A man’s self, he maintains, like everything else, is a part of reality—it, too, is something in itself—and if reality is unknowable, then so
is a man’s sell.
A man is able, Kant concludes, to know only his phenomenal ego, his self as it appears to him (in introspection) ; he cannot know his noumenal ego, his “ego as it is in itself.”

Man is, therefore, a creature in metaphysical conflict. He is so to speak a metaphysical biped, with one (unreal) foot in the phenomenal world and one (unknowable) foot in the noumenal world.

It is the noumenal foot that is the source of morality, the creator of man’s duties, the entity which issues categorical imperatives and demands unconditional obedience. Man’s earthly reason, Kant explains, is unable to provide a basis for morality; man’s earthly will is ruled by the law of the pursuit of happiness. But when, in thought, we “transport ourselves” into “an order of things altogether different,” we find the solution to these problems. We find that man can be “subject to certain laws,” yet can be “independent as a thing or a being in itself.” We find that man’s true reason is replete with moral commandments, and that his true will is free, free to acknowledge the supreme authority of those commandments and to obey them.

Thus man on earth is obligated to heed the categorical imperatives of morality. He is obligated, whatever the resistance of his desires, because he himself—bis real self, himself in itself—is their author. “[T]he intelligible [noumenal] world is (and must be conceived as) directly legislative for my will, which belongs wholly to the intelligible world.... Therefore I must regard the laws of the intelligible world as imperatives for me, and actions in accord with this principle as duties.”
¹⁶

It must be remembered that the noumenal world, including the noumenal self, is unknowable to man in Kant’s view—and that the category of causality is inapplicable to it. The question, therefore, arises: how can man be influenced in any way. by the dictates of the noumenal self, to which he has neither cognitive nor causal relation? In other words, how is it possible for man on earth to take any interest in morality (as construed by Kant)? “But to make this conceivable,” states Kant, “is precisely the problem we cannot solve.” Kant does not regard this as a flaw in his system; rather, it is “a reproach which we must make to human reason generally. . . .”
¹⁷

Although he is an avowed innovator in epistemology, Kant observes that in the field of morality he is not teaching “anything new,” but merely developing “the universally received concept of morals....”
¹⁸
In regard to the fundamentals of his ethics, this is true. Kant is the heir and perpetuator of the centuries of Christianity, which had urged on man a continuous struggle against “temptation” in the name of obedience to duty. (Kant himself was raised in a moral atmosphere of this sort carried to an extreme by a sect of puritanical Protestants. )

But Kant is not merely the child of his predecessors. There is a sense in which he is an innovator in ethics.

Kant is the first philosopher of self-sacrifice to advance this ethics as a matter of philosophic
principle,
explicit, self-conscious, uncompromised—essentially uncontradicted by any remnants of the Greek, pro-self viewpoint.

Thus, although he believed that the dutiful man would be rewarded with happiness after death (and that this is proper), Kant holds that the man who is motivated by such a consideration is nonmoral (since he is still acting from inclination, albeit a supernaturally oriented one). Nor will Kant permit the dutiful man to be motivated even by the desire to feel a sense of moral self-approval. “An action done merely for the sake of this feeling would be a self-centred action without moral worth,” writes one British Kantian (H.J. Paton). “[I]t is always a denial of morality,” Paton explains, “to bid men pursue it for what they will get out of it. . . .”
¹⁹

The main line of pre-Kantian moralists had urged man to perform certain actions in order to reach a goal of some kind. They had urged man to love the object which is the good (however it was conceived) and strive to gain it, even if most transferred the quest to the next life. They had asked man to practice a code of virtues as a means to the attainment of
values.
Kant dissociates virtue from the pursuit of any goal. He dissociates it from man’s love of or even interest in any object. Which means:
he dissociates morality from values, any values, values as such.
In “volition from duty,” he writes, “the renunciation of all interest is the specific mark of the categorical imperative....” This, Kant declares, is what distinguishes him from his predecessors, who failed to discover morality: they “never arrived at duty but only at the necessity of action from a certain interest.”
²⁰

For the same reason, they never arrived at a proper concept of moral perfection, either. A perfect (or divine) will, Kant maintains, requires moral principles to guide it, though not the constraint of imperatives and duties because, by its nature, it obeys the moral law without any distracting inclinations. Such a will is free from conflict not because it is moved by a consuming passion for morality, but because it is not moved by passion or love of any kind, not even love for the good. Its perfection is precisely that it is untainted by any interest in anything. “An interest,” writes Kant, “is present only in a dependent will which is not of itself always in accord with reason; in the divine will we cannot conceive of an interest.”
²¹

This is Kant’s concept of moral perfection: perfection as subjection to law in the absence of any love or desire, perfection as not merely disinterested but
uninterested
subjection to law, perfection as selflessness, selflessness in the most profound and all-encompassing sense. This is the concept that underlies Kant’s approach to man and to the concerns of human life. Moral imperatives and duties, Kant states, exist only for a “will not absolutely good,” i.e., for a “being who is subject to wants and inclinations,” i.e., for
a being with the capacity to hold personal values.
It is personal values that Kant condemns, not as evil, but as a “subjective imperfection” of man’s lower, phenomenal nature—not as loathsome, but as meriting disdain and even “contempt.” A desire, Kant holds—any desire, no matter what its object—is unworthy of the distinctively
moral
emotion: respect. I can approve of a given inclination, remarks Kant, but “I can have no respect for any inclination whatsoever, whether my own or that of another. . . .”
²²

The opposite of perfection (in Kant’s view)—the opposite of non-interest, non-desire, non-value—is self-love. Christian moralists had always opposed self-love, but no one before Kant ever reached his thoroughness in this regard. The fundamental ethical alternative, according to Kant, can be stated succinctly: it is the law of morality versus the principle of self-love. The first derives from man’s noumenal character, the second from his “natural predisposition.” The first gives rise to categorical imperatives, the second to counsels of prudence. The first, “stripped of all admixture of sensuous things,” has “a worth which thwarts my self-love.” The second “is the source of an incalculably great antagonism to morality,” “the very source of evil.”
²³

This does not mean that self-love in and by itself is evil, according to Kant; it is merely amoral. Evil consists in
loving
self-love; evil consists in giving self-love priority over morality in one’s heart.

Consequently man (even the best) is evil only in that he reverses the moral order.... He adopts, indeed, the moral law along with the law of self-love; yet when he becomes aware that they cannot remain on a par with each other ... he makes the incentive of self-love and its inclinations the condition of obedience to the moral law; whereas, on the contrary, the latter, as the supreme condition of the satisfaction of the former, ought to have been adopted... as the sole incentive.