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Kant's Psychological Hedonism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

A. Phillips Griffiths
A. Phillips Griffiths
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Extract

As far as consideration of man as phenomenon, as appearance, as an empirical self, is concerned, Kant appears to be a thoroughgoing psychological hedonist.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 66 , Issue 256 , April 1991 , pp. 207 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1991

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References

1 I do not know what were the important antecedents of this view for Kant, whether Hobbes, Locke, Hume or Helvetius; in my view Hobbes is quite mistakenly regarded as a psychological hedonist, and Hume is hardly straightforwardly one; the more plausible antecedents would be Locke, and, perhaps even more so, Helvetius (L'Esprit was published in 1758 and was of course well known in Germany, which Helvetius visited in 1765).

2 Kant obscures this somewhat by saying that such a man, being only partly determined by reason, is only partly free; but his main doctrine is that such a man, since he is capable of acting wholly in accordance with rational principle, is wholly free; not so much half a dog as no dog at all. It is the former way of talking into which Kant frequently slips which leads to the misinterpretation that a man is only free when acting from duty, and hence wholly determined, and hence wholly unfree, and hence not subject to moral blame, when he acts wrongly. Kant's remark (in the Lectures on Ethics) that the freer a man is from stimuli, the more he can be compelled morally, and the degree of his freedom grows with the degree of his morality, similarly leads to the misunderstanding that a man is wholly free and wholly moral only when he is totally indifferent to everything except the moral law; if, indeed, it is entirely a misunderstanding rather than a caricature of himself that Kant was prone to fall into; or, indeed, it now occurs to me with regard to this particular remark, the inattention of Frederico Brauer, who took down notes of Kant's lectures which include references to a painter called Argasti instead of Hogarth.

3 It would be a nice thought if it could be shown that these desiderata were the origin of Bentham's categories of intensity, duration, propinquity, and fecundity in the calculus of pleasures.

4 This paper was contributed to the symposium Kant's Critique of Practical Reason at the World Congress of Philosophy, Brighton, August 1988.