Interanimations

Receiving Modern German Philosophy

Robert B. Pippin

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226259796
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this latest book, renowned philosopher and scholar Robert B. Pippin offers the thought-provoking argument that the study of historical figures is not only an interpretation and explication of their views, but can be understood as a form of philosophy itself. In doing so, he reconceives philosophical scholarship as a kind of network of philosophical interanimations, one in which major positions in the history of philosophy, when they are themselves properly understood within their own historical context, form philosophy's lingua franca. Examining a number of philosophers to explore the nature of this interanimation, he presents an illuminating assortment of especially thoughtful examples of historical commentary that powerfully enact philosophy.After opening up his territory with an initial discussion of contemporary revisionist readings of Kant's moral theory, Pippin sets his sights on his main objects of interest: Hegel and Nietzsche. Through them, however, he offers what few others could: an astonishing synthesis of an immense and diverse set of thinkers and traditions. Deploying an almost dialogical, conversational approach, he pursues patterns of thought that both shape and, importantly, connect the major traditions: neo-Aristotelian, analytic, continental, and postmodern, bringing the likes of Heidegger, Honneth, MacIntyre, McDowell, Brandom, Strauss, Williams, and Žižek—not to mention Hegel and Nietzsche— into the same philosophical conversation.By means of these case studies, Pippin mounts an impressive argument about a relatively under discussed issue in professional philosophy—the bearing of work in the history of philosophy on philosophy itself—and thereby he argues for the controversial thesis that no strict separation between the domains is defensible.

• 1 •

Rigorism and the New Kant

I

According to Kant, pure reason can be practical: it can determine unconditionally what persons ought to do or refrain from doing, and such persons can act solely upon acknowledgment of such a rational law, “solely from duty.” Hegel argued against Kant that the institution of morality cannot be understood as a product of the exercise of pure practical reason, a matter of rational law acknowledged as unconditionally binding by individuals conceived as distinct, self-determining rational beings. Instead, while the content of the claims of morality (the claims of universally binding obligations, of an equal entitlement to moral respect, and of a necessary link between the worth of actions and the intentions of the agent) is quite real and unavoidable according to Hegel, that content is not the result of purely rational self-legislation, and so not to be understood as unconditionally binding. Instead, such normative considerations are aspects of a certain sort of social and historical institution, and have a limited role to play in assessing conduct and holding each other to account. Moral considerations are, but are only, components in a specific, historical form of a common “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit).

Said another way, while both Hegel and Kant agree that morality involves the right sort of respect for and realization of human freedom, and while both agree that such freedom involves the exercise of, and appeal to, reason, Hegel does not agree that this exercise of reason involves the application of a formal criterion, a “test” for, primarily, permissibility. Rather, practical rationality, or acting reasonably, involves a social practice of giving and asking for justifications in a certain way, a way that cannot be specified formally. Hegel also claimed that, viewed collectively, we were in effect getting “better” at such justifyings and appealings over historical time.

Hegel also objected to what he took to be Kant’s picture of moral life as fundamentally a kind of battle between what pure practical reason legislates and what a radically evil sensible nature always inclines us to do. Hegel did not deny that there could be such conflicts, but he did object to giving this form of moral struggle a paradigmatic status. Doing so reveals flaws, Hegel argued, that are typical of all the basic and unresolvable dualisms that make up Kantian philosophy, especially that between reason and sensibility.

A good deal of the argument for these claims rests on two well-known, more specific criticisms of the moral point of view: the formalism and the rigorism objections. The first claims that Kant’s supreme moral principle, the Categorical Imperative, cannot be effectively applied so as to rule in or rule out specific courses of action; it is so “formal” that it cannot be action-guiding.1 This sort of criticism has appeared throughout the history of Kant literature, and a recent version by MacIntyre prompted several spirited responses, especially by O’Neill.2

The second takes note of the fact that Kant in the Groundwork ties the evaluation of the moral worth of an action to the psychological motives of the agent, and that Kant appears to limit the bestowal of any moral approval to what he himself admits to be an extremely rare state: that wherein the agent “acted on duty alone.” In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel disputed the very possibility of such a motive, and tried to show that attempting to meet such a standard would have to insure what he called “dissembling” (Verstellen), a kind of artificial, ad hoc reformulation of maxims so that one could technically and narrowly claim moral worth. Hegel went on to claim that the most likely result of attempting to act from the motive of duty alone would be hypocrisy, not moral worth.

In a better-known version of the rigorism objection, due originally to Schiller, Kant is taken to mean that the presence of any motivating sensible interest, even if accompanying an additional commitment by an agent to do the right thing just because it is right, completely excludes moral worth. This would be quite counterintuitive, as if a great sacrifice for another, performed out of sympathy and love, is of no moral value, but a grudging acknowledgment of a duty to aid, accompanied by no sympathy or even by a great distaste at having to compromise my self-interest, is morally more worthy. (Bernard Williams’s “one thought too many” objection has sparked much of the recent exchange about this issue, as has an interest in moral “particularism,” and so a worry that moral rules ask us only to look at what is common and shared about cases, thus ignoring that our actual reasons to act seem always tied to particular persons and contexts of concern.)3

Responses to these charges have taken a number of forms. In recent years an approach that concentrates on issues of Kant interpretation has become particularly influential, and it is that approach I propose to discuss here.4 The Kant charged with formalism and rigorism is not defended; we hear instead that the Kant charged with these failings is not the real Kant but, in case after case, a straw man. Critics who attack the rigoristic notion of “acting on duty alone” as the criterion of moral worth have not understood the function of that passage in the Groundwork. Critics who wonder about the motivational source for an overriding allegiance to a formal principle need not do so, since they have misdescribed Kant’s position. The claim in defense is that allegiance to such a principle is only an introductory aspect of Kant’s position and that the full position involves a much better account of what is at stake for us when we try to conform to a universalizability requirement. (What is supposed really to be at stake, as we shall see, is a fundamental value, humanity as an end in itself.) Other critics who caricature Kant as an ascetic who formulates a moral theory with no attention to the emotional, anthropological, and historical details of human life are also attacking that straw man. On the contrary, once again our basic allegiance in Kant’s theory is not to “conformity to a rule” (how could it be?) but to a substantive value, and once we understand this properly we can see that Kant hardly ignored or dismissed the anthropological and historical issues raised by his critics. (These concerns turn out to be indispensable in a Kantian theory of moral judgment, in determining what commitment to such a value requires in some place at some time.) If it’s sociality, character, virtue, emotions, or historical change you are worried about and you believe Kant has neglected or misunderstood the issues, think again. They are quite central to Kant too, if his full position is understood.

It is this latter sort of “anything you can do, I can do better” defense, especially against Schiller- and Hegel-type rigorism objections, that I want to discuss. I will concentrate on two main issues here as a way of suggesting that Kant’s defenders have ceded too much to the objections, or too much for Kant to remain a consistent Kantian. The first concerns the duty and moral motivation/moral worth problem. My claim here will be that the clarifications offered by such commentators as Barbara Herman, Marcia Baron, and Allen Wood do not escape the deeper point of the rigorism objection, especially as it bears on Kant’s theory of freedom. The second concerns the role of practical reason in action and the Kantian doctrine of value. Construing Kant as a substantive value theorist (as Hill, Wood, and Herman do) might help avoid many of the standard objections, and others against deontology made famous by Anscombe,5 but there is no internal Kantian reason, I want to argue, for regarding our capacity to set and pursue material ends as a fundamental value that must always be respected in all our activity.

II

It is not difficult to understand why readers like Schiller worried about Kantian rigorism. Consider this passage from the Second Critique.

What is essential in the moral worth of actions is that the moral law should directly determine the will. If the determination of the will occurs in accordance with the moral law but only by means of a feeling of any kind whatsoever, which must be presupposed in order that the law may become a determining ground of the will, and if the action does not occur for the sake of the law, it has legality but not morality.6

And, as a famous, nearly unbelievable passage in the Groundwork puts it:

The inclinations themselves as sources of needs, however, are so lacking in absolute worth that the universal wish of every rational being must be indeed to free himself completely from them.7

The fact that Kant seems to be saying that only actions done “from duty alone” deserve moral praise, or our “esteem” (Hochschätzung), and that he seems to claim that since all inclinations lack absolute worth, they lack all worth, has led some to conclude that Kant must therefore also be saying that acts not done from duty alone have no worth or moral significance at all, or that an act with any sort of nonmoral motive is immediately disqualified from having moral worth.8 If this were true, it might indeed be subject to Schiller’s criticism.

When the objection is understood this way, the literature has not lacked for Kantian rejoinders. Many of these (especially the best and most influential version, Barbara Herman’s) take the form of showing through textual analysis that Kant’s worry in the Groundwork was not about the mere presence of sensible motives, but rather concerned actions that were otherwise appropriate morally (actions that happened to conform to duty) but, in his very specific examples, were done only because of reliance on such sensible motives and would not have been done otherwise.9 A person who acts beneficently only to satisfy feelings of sympathy, without any regard for what is morally right, simply cannot be counted on to do the right thing when such feelings are absent, and so deserves no moral praise. And when we imagine such a person suddenly without those inclinations and instead consumed by misanthropic aversions to aid, we will “see” more clearly in the example what motivation by duty alone is, and we can thus better see that it is possible and that it merits moral praise. So, there is nothing morally second-class in someone saving a loved one when motivated in that case only by love and sympathy. The point is that (a) when all we know is that that particular act was motivated by such a desire, there is no basis for any ascription of moral worth, even as an evaluation of character. (For all we know our supposed subject would also be just as inclined to render aid by buying drugs for or lying to protect the loved one.) And (b) if we do know that the act would only have been performed if such a feeling of sympathy were present, then we know enough to know that the act is disqualified from moral worth. (Indeed it thereby qualifies as a kind of evil, according to Kant’s classification.)

So Herman’s solution leaves us without Schiller’s problem, and is a valuable qualification, but it only clarifies a few aspects of the problem of a good will: i.e., what, for Kant, cannot be a case of moral worth, and the rejoinder makes clear that Kant did not believe we deserve moral worth only if we dislike doing what we ought to do. But since there are hardly any cases where we can definitively say a person “would not have acted” except to satisfy an inclination, or “would have acted” from duty no matter what contrary inclination or aversion, we are left with a virtually unusable positive criterion of moral worth. Surely the much more common, perhaps universal cases are those where there is always some sensible inclination to act (such as to be thought well of), or some aversion to acting (fear of being found out), along with some sort of accompanying moral motivation (and thus, unavoidably and necessarily, some uncertainty about what the “strength” of the moral resolve would be if unaccompanied).

There are basically three interesting interpretive solutions at this point, and none of them seems to me adequate.

(i) The restrictiveness would be loosened somewhat if we could show (as Marcia Baron tries to show) that the criterion of “acting from duty” could still be satisfied even if “what duty demands” is not our “primary” but only a “secondary” motive.10 This would be the case for a very wide range of permissible actions if we could claim that even though in particular cases I acted to satisfy some need or inclination, some sort of check or constraint always functioned as a real “regulative” condition on all my action; that is, if my conduct is always and everywhere “governed by a commitment to doing what is morally right”11 and thus it is true that I would never have performed any of these actions if any were contrary to duty, I can know that I only perform them if they are permissible.

Kant does of course speak of “imperfect duties” like this, as duties of wide latitude, where no particular action is required, and beneficence would be a good example. I must have a policy of some beneficence, but how much and what sort of aid and with respect to whom is not thereby determined. I can save my wife first just because she is my wife, and still merit moral approval if it is also the case that I really do have a policy of beneficence and would have also saved someone if my wife were not a potential victim in this case.

But it also seems highly counterintuitive to suggest that in a particular case an agent deserves what amounts to Kant’s gold standard of approval, esteem, if she were primarily motivated only by a burning desire for respectability, just in case we can also claim something so speculative and hard to demonstrate as that “she would also have so acted if that desire had not been present.” This seems quite an attenuated way to interpret acting “from duty.” It is consistent with the issue of duty never consciously arising, and consistent with morally worthy actions done from the most venal and egoistic (but not immoral) motives imaginable, as long I can be said to have a general commitment to conforming to the moral law. Whatever such a commitment amounts to, it does not seem relevant to the appraisal of a particular action. (It might be relevant to an appraisal of character, as we shall see below.) Moreover, it seems a particularly indeterminate and so virtually inapplicable criterion. Its truth conditions are very hard to state clearly, and it is most unlikely that experience would ever provide us with a clear test case, since, even if it might be plausible to imagine that a person could acknowledge and act on a duty to aid without any of the previously motivating sensible interests, in any real-life instance there would still most likely be other sensible interests at work, no matter the sincerity of the additional moral motive.

(ii) Other commentators (like Richard Henson) claim something very similar: that an individual action could satisfy our self-interest as much as possible and still deserve moral praise if it could also be claimed that in the specific case of a so-called overdetermined action, if the sensible motive were not present, I still would have performed that deed (or perhaps, somewhat more strongly, if it could also be said that even if a sensible aversion to the required deed were present, I still would have acted). (His analogy of a “fitness report” is like this.)12

This is close to a point that Herman also concedes, although it means both end up with the same problem, and in a related way, as does Baron. Herman wants to cleave closer to the Groundwork text and insist that Kant really did mean to restrict moral esteem (Hochschätzung), that particular sort of moral evaluation, to actions actually performed out of duty in the absence of any cooperating interest, but that he fully realized that such occurrences are very rare, and he did not simply ignore considerations of what the agent would do in other circumstances. The counterfactual questions that we raise in order to disentangle why, primarily, I did what I did are, she claims, answers to different questions, questions of moral strength or Kantian virtue, and relevant only to assessments of character. That is, Herman admits that if we are able to claim that the subject really would have acted rightly without such an inclination, we can praise as morally worthy the subject’s character, even if not this particular action.

But again, it is hard to see though how we would ever successfully get out of this bewildering counterfactual jungle. Once we must start seriously worrying about what a person would do in order to specify whether she has a good will or not, we open the door to all sorts of counterfactual speculation, and what we hold constant and what we vary can seem arbitrary. If Kant is going to tie moral worth to a good will, he must be able to specify generally what having such a good will amounts to. The counterfactual speculation is supposed to help out in that task, but then we have no way to limit the scope of counterfactual speculation and it is therefore always possible to consider such a possession a result of moral luck. All we have to do is hold some aspects of the putative life history steady and imagine quite possible variations that make such an attainment much less plausible. If we think we have evidence that in other circumstances the subject would have acted without that interest, but he just ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Rigorism and the New Kant
• 2 Robert Brandom’s Hegel
• 3 John McDowell’s Germans
• 4 Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel
• 5 Axel Honneth’s Hegelianism
• 6 Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche
• 7 Bernard Williams on Nietzsche on the Greeks
• 8 Heidegger on Nietzsche on Nihilism
• 9 Leo Strauss’s Nietzsche
• 10 The Expressivist Nietzsche
• 11 Alasdair MacIntyre’s Modernity
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• Notes