Emotion, Reason, and Action in Kant by Maria Borges;

Author:Maria Borges;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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Physiology and the controlling of affects in Kant’s philosophy

In this chapter,1 I discuss Kant’s theory of emotions, particularly the possibility of controlling affects. I also address the following questions: Is the Aristotelian cultivation of emotions an unreachable end? Does Kant acknowledge the possibility of cultivation of a character in an Aristotelian way? My aim is to criticize some Aristotelian readings of Kant. I argue that Kant’s theory of affects is connected with the eighteenth-century physiology and the concept of excited states, which make affects difficult to control merely by the force of mind. The possibility of controlling affects depends upon a mild temperament. Although in some cases Kant allows for cultivation of character, the limits of this cultivation will depend on the natural temperament of the agent. Kant presents some indirect—or even medical—ways to deal with the strong affects that are not under our control, since apathy is essential for Kantian virtue.

I conclude that Kantian philosophy not only is a matter of a priori principles, but is also dependent on empirical anthropology. The task of Kantian ethics is to attain freedom of strong affects, in order to better attain virtue.

Virtue and the controlling of inclinations

Kant is categorical about the relation between virtue and the controlling of inclinations:

Since virtue is based on inner freedom it contains a positive command to a human being, namely to bring all his capacities and inclinations under his reason’s control and so to rule over himself.2

Virtue presupposes apathy, in the sense of absence of affects.3 Kant brings around the stoic ideal of tranquilitas as a necessary condition for virtue: “The true strength of virtue is a tranquil mind.”4 In the Anthropology and the Doctrine of Virtue, apathy is taken in the sense of freedom from affects.5 In these texts, Kant maintains that we must strive toward a state in which affects are absent. Kant praises the stoic aim of apathy, as a desired state of self-control and self-possession when emotions are suppressed:

The principle of apathy, that is, that the prudent man must at no time be in a state of affect, not even in that of sympathy with the woes of his best friend, is an entirely correct and sublime moral precept of the stoic school, because affect makes one (more or less) blind.6

Although Kant undoubtedly sides with the stoic moral aim, he points out that to control affects is a difficult task. I will show that his strategies for controlling affects rely on a special physiology of emotions, in which they are related to certain bodily movements that cannot be directly controlled by reason. This is so because these movements, once they begin, depend upon physical causation that acts on organs and fluids. Such a standpoint can be found, for instance, in Descartes’s Passions of the Soul. 7 According to Descartes, an essential ingredient of passions is the movement of fluids called spirits, contained in the cavities of the brain. In the passion of fear, for instance, the spirits go from the brain to the nerves that move the legs and allow us to run.

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