3 - Kant’s Theory of the Feeling of Pleasure and Displeasure (I)

Summary

Kant adopts and transforms the views on pleasure found both in the empirical psychology of the Wolffian tradition as well as those of critics of this tradition like Crusius. The latter proposed that pleasure in an object results from the satisfaction of a desire or interest while the former conceived of pleasure as the perception of an object’s perfection. Mendelssohn’s analysis of pleasure combined aspects of both views and led to a characterization of the feeling as a preference we have to maintain the representation of an object in our mind when it satisfies our interest in perfection. We find this explication in the third Critique under the title of a “transcendental definition” of pleasure, that is, a definition of an empirical concept that employs only pure concepts of the understanding. The definition, together with the assumption that faculties have interests, leads to the principle that pleasure consists in the satisfaction of such interests.