Category: History of Philosophy

In this post, Michael Walschots discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Michael’s article can be found here.

Not so long ago, saying that Immanuel Kant had something interesting to say about love would have struck most people as odd. As a prototypical rationalist who looks down upon the sensible side of human existence, it was assumed that love plays an insignificant role in Kant’s thought. Thankfully, this stereotype is fading due to very important research on Kant’s understanding of love published in the past few years.

In Love’s Enlightenment, for instance, Ryan Patrick Hanley argues that Kant is one of the truly preeminent modern theorists of love because of the radical alternative Kant proposes to what Hanley calls the ‘sentimentalist’ and ‘theological’ conceptions that preceded him (Hanley 2017, 135).

In his 2018 book Kant on Love, Pärttyli Rinne carries out the most comprehensive study of Kant’s understanding of love published to date. In it, he illustrates both that Kant has quite a lot to say about love and that his account is relatively detailed, systematic, and consistent throughout all of his major writings (Rinne 2018, 1).

In Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory, Helga Varden argues that, although Kant himself had mistaken views about sex and gender minorities, Kant’s philosophy nonetheless contains the philosophical resources we need to better understand sex, love, and gender in ways that can improve the experience and lives of those most affected by the misunderstanding of these concepts (Varden 2020, 7-8).

Collectively, this recent research illustrates that Kant’s understanding of love might not be as objectionable as one might have expected from a philosopher with such old-fashioned (to put it mildly) views about women, sex, and marriage.

At the same time, a consensus has emerged in the literature, according to which Kant understands love to be a purely pathological phenomenon. Kant himself suggests this reading in various places: in the Metaphysics of Morals, for instance, he claims that

“[l]ove is a matter of feeling [Empfindung], not of willing” (6:401). 

He also states that what he calls “practical love”– namely benevolent action from duty – should not be considered love properly speaking because it is “conduct” rather than a feeling (6:399). 

However, Kant also makes an additional claim about love that complicates conceiving of it as a mere feeling. He claims, namely, that

“love in general […] can be divided into that of benevolence and that of complacence (benevolentiae et complacentiae), and both (as is self-evident) must be rational” (6:45n, translation modified) 

This “general division” of love, as Rinne has called it (Rinne 2018: 1), is central to Kant’s thinking and raises some important questions about his understanding of love more generally. Perhaps most importantly: Does Kant really think that “love in general”, i.e., all love, can be classified as either benevolence or complacence and thus that all love is rational?

We can only answer this question once we know how Kant understands both benevolence and complacence in the first place. And although Kant and his commentators have lots to say about benevolence, unfortunately not much attention has been given to complacence.

My aims in this paper are twofold:

1. I offer an interpretation of Kant’s notion of complacence by situating it next to what is likely the historical inspiration for it, namely Francis Hutcheson’s own very similar notion, with which Kant was familiar and with whose terminology Kant remains consistent. 
2. I seek to identify the sense in which both benevolence and complacence are rational, for Kant, in light of my previous analysis. 

The paper has five sections. 

In section one (1), I introduce Kant’s distinction between benevolence and complacence and its place in his thought.

In section two (2), I outline Hutcheson’s understanding of benevolence and complacence. For Hutcheson, these two types of love correspond to the two central topics of moral philosophy, namely the approval of morally good action, affection, and character by the moral sense (love of complacence) and the motive of morally praiseworthy action (love of benevolence). Hutcheson conceives of these two types of love as rational in the sense that they can only have rational beings as both their subject and object.

In section three (3), I offer an interpretation of Kant’s conception of love of complacence that is informed by certain features of Hutcheson’s understanding of the term. More specifically, I argue that Kant understands complacence as approval and that he distinguishes between two kinds of approval, namely sensible and intellectual, depending on whether the object we approve of is a maxim that promotes happiness or one that is consistent with morality, respectively.

In section four (4), I argue that both complacence and benevolence are rational, for Kant, in the sense that they presuppose that human beings possess certain higher cognitive capacities, namely the capacity to use concepts and the ability to make inferences. I also explain how it is perfectly compatible with, and perhaps even required by, Kant’s empirical psychology for both kinds of love to be rational in this way and yet nonetheless remain a feeling.

I conclude in section five (5) by discussing some broader implications of my previous conclusions. For instance, I give reason to believe that Kant does indeed conceive of all love, properly speaking, as rational in the sense I have described. I also argue that this means that “love as attraction” (6:470), i.e. affectionate love, and sexual love do not count as love properly speaking, for Kant, because they do not involve reason.

As a whole, it is my hope that the paper places us in a position to better understand the nuances of Kant’s conception of love more generally.

References

• Hanley, R. P. (2017). Love’s Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press.
• Kant, I. (1900–). Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie Ausgabe). Vol. 1–22 Ed. Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vol. 23 Ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Vol. 24ff. Ed. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen.
• Rinne, P. (2018). Kant on Love. De Gruyter.
• Varden, H. (2020). Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory. Oxford University Press.

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Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4670/.

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In this post, Charles Goldhaber discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Charles’ article can be found here.

Something very surprising occurs in the “Conclusion” to Book I of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature: he pauses to survey some of the skeptical strands within the “science of man”, and doing so causes his generally dispassionate tone to explode into a turbulent personal narrative.

He describes himself as plunging into an extremely gloomy mood. Sunken, he fancies himself

“some strange uncouth monster…inviron’d with the deepest darkness” (T 1.4.7.2).

When this “philosophical melancholy and delirium” reaches a fever pitch, Hume reports:

“The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another” (T 1.4.7.8–9).

Hume’s drastic shift in literary style and severe mental state are striking, but perhaps even more surprising is the fact that, within just a few pages, he seems to have recovered entirely. He says:

“I feel an ambition to arise in me of contributing to the instruction of mankind, and of acquiring a name by my inventions and discoveries” (T 1.4.7.12). 

He then launches headfirst into his account of the passions in Book II, seemingly untroubled by the skeptical implications of his own findings.

What happened here? How did Hume break out of his melancholy and resume his philosophical pursuits? Why did he even bother to write about his mental state—and in such a curiously stylish way at that?

I think the style of his writing is our best clue to answering all these questions. Or rather, the clue is Hume’s use of a swath of words and images deriving from ancient and medieval medicine.

On the humoral theory, health consists in a balance of four humors, or essential bodily liquids: black bile, blood, yellow bile, and phlegm. Each of them corresponds to one of four temperaments, or disposition to certain characteristic passions, actions, and ailments.

Interestingly, Hume’s recovery from “philosophical melancholy” in the “Conclusion” involves four transitional stages: Before resuming philosophy, Hume is melancholic, enjoys social pleasures, feels aggression toward philosophy, and then rests. Close attention to Hume’s description of these transitional stages reveals that he makes deliberate allusions to one of the four humors or temperaments in each.

This suggests that his recovery occurs when his cycle through the four humors produces a balance between them. For Hume, a healthy mental state is one which incorporates a moderate degree of all four temperaments.

Hume’s humoral allusions resolve a textual puzzle about the progression of his personal narrative in the “Conclusion.” Perhaps more interestingly, they also help us understand how Hume conceived of skepticism and its role in human life.

By associating excessive skepticism with melancholy, heated brains, and lycanthropic delusions, Hume invites his readers to conceive of it along the lines of classical diseases resulting from the excess of black bile. Such diseases were thought to have been especially common in philosophers, whose intense, often brooding reflections encouraged the production of black bile and the corresponding “melancholic” temperament. Philosophers would benefit from tempering these excesses through activities associated with the other humors or temperaments, as Hume himself does in the “Conclusion.”

Yet black bile was not taken to be inherently unhealthy. Some of it was necessary for humoral balance. Likewise, though Hume emphasizes the dangers of excessive skepticism, he finds a more moderate degree to be salutary. Hume’s invocation of the humoral theory of medicine then helps us see that skepticism can both threaten and restore a healthy mind, depending on the degree of its predominance in our thought.

You might wonder whether Hume would really invoke an antiquated medical theory in his writings. After all, Hume was highly critical of the “occult qualities” appealed to by the “antients” (T 1.4.3.8), and he wrote the Treatise during a boom in Scottish medical innovations.

You might also worry that Hume’s invocation of humoral theory saps his claims on the value and management of skepticism of any plausibility. After all, we know that health is more than a matter of balancing liquids.

Both worries are answerable. First, though by Hume’s youth humoral medicine had lost its status as the dominant theoretical orthodoxy, it continued to hold sway over medical practice. On top of this, temperament psychology remained a rich source of themes in literature well beyond Hume’s life.

Second, Hume’s point that skepticism can be both healthy and harmful depending on degree does not rely on any literal endorsement of humoral theory. Indeed, it’s unclear which medical theory Hume endorsed, if any. What is clear is that Hume found humoral theory to be a helpful analogy for thinking about how skepticism can be moderated in ways that promote healthy doxastic dispositions – and that is a point on which we can agree, even while rejecting the medical theory.

The humoral allusions in Hume’s discussion of skepticism can help us revive a promising approach to epistemology which currently has no modern equivalent. The core idea is that proper mental functioning involves a balance of tendencies to reason and believe in certain ways. Certain epistemic vices, such as skepticism and dogmatism, are extreme expressions of the very same tendencies. The vices are then more a matter of degree than of doctrine.

As a result, even skeptics and dogmatists can lead us toward proper mental functioning, when adopting some share of their dispositions helps us correct our own imbalances. We do not need to accept humoral theory to appreciate this idea, but it’s an idea that Hume’s invocations of humoral theory can lead us to see for the first time.

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