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On the Value of Happiness: Herder contra Kant

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Sonia Sikka
Sonia Sikka*
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ONK1N 6N5, Canada
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Extract

Introduction

In November of 1785, Kant published a highly unsympathetic review of the second part of Johann Gottfried Herder's Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Herder had once been Kant's pupil, and had greatly admired his teacher, but the content of this review shows how profound the philosophical differences between them had by then become. A central area of dispute emerging from the review concerns the nature of happiness, and its place within the ‘destiny’ or ‘vocation’ (Bestimmung) of the human race. Kant is responding, in particular, to a section of the Ideas entitled: ‘The happiness (Glückseligkeit) of human beings is everywhere an individual good; consequently, it is everywhere climatic and organic, a child of practice, tradition, and custom.’ Although Kant is not mentioned by name in this section, it clearly contains critical rejoinders, often quite harsh in tone, to aspects of his practical philosophy and philosophy of history, as Herder understands them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , December 2007 , pp. 515 - 546
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2007

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References

1 Kants Werke, Akademie Ausgabe (henceforth, AA) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1902), 8, 58-66. Kant had earlier written an equally critical review of the Ideas; see AA 8: 45-55.

2 Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Werke in zehn Bänden (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 1985), 6;327.Google Scholar Henceforth, Ideen.

3 Wood, Allen W. Kant's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999), 228CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Wilson, Catherine ‘Savagery and the Supersensible: Kant's Universalism in Historical Context,’ History of European Ideas 24 (1998) 315–30, at 319CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 In the case of Wilson, I am referring here only to her portrait of Herder. My analysis supports a number of the points she raises in relation to Kant, on the other hand, while building a better appreciation of Herder's critique.

6 See, for instance, Beiser's, Frederick C. Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992), 204.Google Scholar

7 Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Gregor, Mary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997), 19;Google Scholar henceforth, CPrR. AA 5:22.

8 Kant sometimes describes happiness as the satisfaction of all inclinations, and sometimes as the satisfaction of a system of inclinations. In the Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals (trans. Mary Gregor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997]; henceforth, Gr) he speaks of happiness as ‘the sum of satisfaction of all inclinations’ (p. 12/AA 4:399), while, in the Critique of Practical Reason, he defines it as the satisfaction of ‘all the inclinations together … which can be brought into a tolerable system’ (CPrR, 63/AA 5:73). For a discussion of this distinction, see Wikes, Victoria Kant on Happiness in Ethics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press 1994), 6–7.Google Scholar

9 Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, first half, AA 25.1:11-12, 422

10 Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Guyer, Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000), 297;Google Scholar henceforth, CJ. AA 5:430

11 See The Metaphysic of Morals, trans. Gregor, Mary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996),Google Scholar 9-10/AA 6:215-17 (henceforth, MM); ‘On the Proverb: That May be True in Theory, but is of no Practical Use’ (1793), in Perpetual Peace and other Essays, trans. Humphrey, Ted (Indianapolis: Hackett 1983)Google Scholar (henceforth, PP), 72/AA 8:290; CJ, 297/AA 5:430.

12 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Dowdell, Victor Lyle (Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press 1978), 131–2;Google Scholar henceforth, APPV. AA 7:231

13 But see also the following remark, from lectures given in 1772-73: ‘When we enjoy satisfaction, do we increase happiness? A little, but even that only in the beginning. Satisfaction uses itself up, it has no means of renewing itself … the happiness of human beings consists in the absence of pain and dissatisfaction’ (AA 25.1:171).

14 Shell, Susan Meld ‘Kant's ‘‘True Economy of Human Nature’’: Rousseau, Count Verri, and the Problem of Happiness,’ in Essays on Kant's Anthropology, Jacobs, Brian and Kain, Patrick eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), 215Google Scholar

15 At one point in the Anthropology lectures, Kant says that ‘our best happiness lies here in work’ (AA 25.2:1319). Such remarks give an added dimension to Max Weber's claim, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that ‘many of [Kant’s] formulations are closely related to ideas of ascetic Protestantism’ (trans. Talcott Parsons [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1958], 270).

16 Haucke, Kai ‘Moralische Pflicht und die Frage nach dem gelingenden Leben. Überlegungen zu Kants Glücksbegriff,’ Kant-Studien 93 (2002) 177–99,CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 190

17 Murphy, James Bernard ‘Practical Reason and Moral Psychology in Aristotle and Kant,’ Social Philosophy and Policy 18 (2001) 257–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 266

18 Ibid., 274. Although attempts have recently been made to develop a closer rapprochement between Kant and Aristotle, these focus mainly on the contrast between an ethics of virtue and one of duty, arguing that this contrast has been too sharply drawn in the case of Aristotle vs. Kant. Whether are not these arguments are ultimately successful, they do not, I believe, serve to diminish the differences I am outlining on the idea of happiness. See Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996).

19 Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit: Beitrag zu vielen Beiträgen des Jahrhunderts, Werke, 4, Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher, eds., 41. Henceforth, APG.

20 In the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, composed between 1792 and 1797, Herder writes, against nationalism:

The characters of different nations, sects, classes and people push against one another; each fixes itself ever more firmly to its centre. Mania becomes a national coat of arms, the heraldry of a class, the banner of a profession.

It is terrible, how firmly this mania is attached to words, as soon as it once invests them with power. A learned jurist has observed what a series of harmful delusions hangs upon the word Blut, Blutschande, Blutsfreunde, Blutgericht; with the words inheritance, property, possession etc., it is often the same.

Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, Werke, 7, Dietrich Irmscher, ed., 699. Henceforth, BBH.

21 Herder can be defined as a ‘relativist’ only in a highly qualified sense, and some scholars have argued that his position is better described as ‘pluralism.’ See Berlin, Isaiah ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought,’ in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, Hardy, Henry ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1991), 70–90;Google Scholar Spencer, Vicki ‘Beyond Either/Or: The Pluralist Alternative in Herder's Thought,’ Herder Yearbook 4 (1998) 53–70;Google Scholar and my own article, ‘Enlightened Relativism: The Case of Herder,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 31 (2005) 309-41. The last two works in particular would address Wood's concern that Herder's frequent appeals to universal values raise doubts about the internal consistency of his views (Kant's Ethical Thought, 235).

22 This is the aspect of Herder's thought that most deeply impressed, and influenced, Isaiah Berlin. See Nagel, Thomas ‘Pluralism and Coherence,’ in The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin, Lilla, Mark Dworkin, Ronald and Silvers, Robert eds. (New York: New York Review of Books 2001) 105–11.Google Scholar

23 I point out in ‘Enlightened Relativism’ (see note 21) that this view still allows condemnation of practices that cause unhappiness, in line with Herder's limited brand of relativism (322).

24 Herder never claimed, though, that he could explain what ‘force’ is. See Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele (‘On Understanding and Sensation in the Human Soul,’ 1775): ‘I do not here claim to explain anything; I have not yet encountered any philosophy which explains what Kraft is …’ Werke, 4, Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher, eds., 337.

25 Ibid., 338

26 Ibid., 354

27 God: Some Conversations, trans. Burkhardt, Frederick H. (New York: Veritas Press 1940), 163.Google Scholar Werke, 4, 765.

28 Defining varieties of belief about the relation between nature and God is notoriously difficult. In his introduction to the English translation of Gott: Einige Gespräche, Burckhardt describes Herder's position as a ‘dynamic panentheism’ (40). H.B. Nisbet, referring to the complex of ideas associated with the term Kraft in general, suggests that something of the meaning of this term is conveyed by ‘words such as animism, pananimism, panvitalism, panpsychism, panspiritualism, panlogism, hylozoism and the like’ (Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science [Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association 1970], 11).

29 God: Some Conversations, 183; Werke, 4, 785

30 The solution to this problem lies, according to Kant, in confining sex to marriage, and subjecting it to the ‘natural end’ of procreation. See MM, 61-64/AA 6:277-80 (The Doctrine of Right) and MM, 178-80/AA 6:424-26 (The Doctrine of Virtue). Cf. APPV, 20/AA 7:136: ‘How much cleverness has been wasted in throwing a delicate veil over man's desires, but revealing still enough of man's close relation to the animal kingdom so that bashfulness results.’

31 This is reflected in his life as well as in his philosophical writings, as one can surmise from his letters to Caroline Flachsland, the woman with whom he fell in love and whom he married. Herder wrote a large number of these between 1770 and 1771. See the first volume of Herders Briefe (Weimar: Herman Böhlaus 1977); for instance, nos. 83-85, 188-94.

32 Herder argues, in the Ideas, that, while all human varieties are brothers, ‘with the ape you can enter into no brotherhood’ (Ideen, 255). Dagmar Barnouw notes the contrast between this aspect of Herder's position and that of his friend and contemporary, Georg Forster; see ‘Eräugnis: Georg Forster on the Difficulties of Diversity,’ in Impure Reason: Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany, Wilson, W. Daniel and Holub, Robert C. eds. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1993), 336.Google Scholar

33 Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), Werke, vol. 1, 722. Henceforth, Sprache.

34 Korsgaard, C.M. Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 See the account in Forster's well known A Voyage Round the World, first published in English in1777, and then in German, in two volumes, between 1778 and 1780. Georg Forsters Werke, vol. 1, ed. Kahn, Robert L. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1986), 155–92.Google Scholar Forster concludes of ‘O-Taheitee’ that ‘this island is indeed one of the happiest spots on the globe’ (187). Louis de Bougainville provides a similar account in his A Voyage Around the World, translated from French into English in 1772 by Georg Forster's father, John Reinhold Forster. Reprinted by Da Capo Press, New York, 1967; 198-249.

36 A number of commentators have disputed the claim that Kant considered all ‘inclinations,’ including sympathetic ones, to be egoistic, but I find their arguments unconvincing. Korsgaard, for instance, argues that, for Kant, both the man of duty and the man of sympathetic temperament genuinely aim at the welfare of others (Creating the Kingdom of Ends, 107), appealing, in support of her claim, to the same sentence of the Groundwork that I have cited here. On my interpretation, however, the sentence actually says that sympathetic persons have no motive other than the satisfaction they find in spreading joy around them, where such a motive is still ultimately self-interested. On similar grounds, I would take issue with Andrews Reath's claim, that ‘Kant recognizes that we can have inclinations that are straightforwardly other-regarding’ (my italics) so that ‘it seems somewhat misleading to term [the principle of happiness] the “principle of self-love,” as Kant does’ (‘Hedonism, Heteronomy and Kant's Principle of Happiness,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 70 [1989] 42-72, at 60). In fact, Kant's description of his own position is accurate, since he believes that the true aim of sympathetic action is the happiness of the agent, not benefit to others.

37 Creating the Kingdom of Ends, 121

38 Kant's Ethical Thought, 123

39 Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Greene, Theodore M. and Hudson, Hoyt H. (New York: Harper & Row 1960), 51.Google Scholar AA 6:58.

40 Langton, Rae ‘Duty and Desolation,’ Philosophy 67 (1992) 481–505;CrossRefGoogle Scholar 485, 495

41 Guyer, Paul Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (New York: Cambridge University Press 2000), 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Andrews Reath, in his review of Guyer's book, says that ‘Guyer challenges, or at least revises, Kant's understanding of his own method.’ For while ‘Kant holds that the moral law cannot be based on any conception of the good because of his belief that conceptions of the good can only be determined empirically in relation to agents interests and thus cannot ground principles with the requisite necessity and universality … Guyer claims that Kant in fact derives the moral law from an antecedent conception of the value of freedom’ (‘Value and Law in Kant’s Moral Theory,’ Ethics 114 (2003) 127-55; 134.

42 Pippin draws attention to the peculiarity of this aspect of Kant's conception, where freedom, understood as ‘end setting determined by reason,’ is identified as a substantive value, ‘but then its intrinsic value is not defended teleologically or by any appeal to natural purposes or any kind of contentment,’ so that ‘somehow the value-conferring capacity itself has its value conferred’ (Pippin, Robert B. ‘Kant’s Theory of Value: On Allen Wood's Kant's Ethical Thought,’ Inquiry 43 (2000) 239–66;CrossRefGoogle Scholar 255).

43 Scheler, Max Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values, trans. Frings, Manfred S. and Funk, Roger L. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1973), 227–8.Google Scholar

44 Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1799), Werke, 8, Hans Dietrich Irmscher, ed., 499. Henceforth, Metakritik.

45 Heinz, Marion Sensualistischer Idealismus: Untersuchung zur Erkenntnistheorie und Metaphysik des jungen Herders (1763-1778) (Hamburg: Meiner 1994), 139CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996), 186

47 Ibid., 186

48 Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 22. AA 6:26.

49 Werke, 9/1, Christoph Bultmann and Thomas Zippert, eds., 100

50 Litt, Theodor Kant und Herder als Deuter der geistigen Welt (Leipzig: Verlag Quelle und Meyer 1930), 66Google Scholar

51 In fact, while Herder unequivocally condemns viciousness, he does not explicitly analyze the case of a happy but vicious person. Perhaps he agreed with Plato ‘that the inescapable penalty of wickedness is simply to be the sort of person one is,’ as Iris Murdoch puts it in her reading of the Theaetetus (The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists [Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977], 39). I am speculating, but such a view would accord with Herder's understanding of virtue.

52 Korsgaard claims that, for Kant, ‘being sympathetic helps us to be aware of those cases when our assistance or support will be called for,’ but I can see no basis for this claim in the section of The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue to which she is appealing. ‘From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble: Kant and Aristotle on Morally Good Action,’ in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics, 203-36, at 221.

53 ‘Gedanken bei Lesung Montesquieus,’ (1769), Werke, 9/2, Rainer Wisbert, ed., 207

54 Friedrich Schiller, ‘Über Anmut und Würde’ (‘On Grace and Dignity’), Werke in drei Bänden, Göpfert, Herbert G. ed. (München: Carl Hanser Verlag 1966), 408–9Google Scholar

55 Ibid., 405-6

56 See Paton, H.J. The Categorical Imperative, A Study in Kant's Moral Philosophy, 3rd ed. (London: Hutchinson & Co. 1958), 48.Google Scholar

57 Allison, Henry E. Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 Kant und Herder als Deuter der geistigen Welt, 133

59 ‘Duty and Desolation,’ 493-4

60 Johann Gottlob Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett 1987). First published in 1800 as Die Bestimmung des Menschen.

61 Herders Briefe, vol. 5, 106. The letter is dated February 14, 1785.

62 Whether Kant is entitled to such a view is another question; see Wilson, 324: ‘Kant’s optimism about the cunning of nature appears to be in painful contradiction with his intricately elaborated claim that we are ignorant of the properties of totalities, knowledge of which transcends the bounds of experience.’

63 Kant's Ethical Thought, 233

64 Koepke, Wulf ‘Kulturnation and its Autorization through Herder,’ in Johann Gottfried Herder: Academic Disciplines and the Pursuit of Knowledge, Koepke, Wulf ed. (Columbia, SC: Camden House 1996), 177–98 at 192.Google Scholar

65 On this point, see Sikka, ‘Enlightened Relativism,’ 331-2.