The Critique of Practical Reason — Kant — John Shaqi
The Critique of Practical Reason
Kant · en
The negative effect on feeling (unpleasantness) is pathological,
like every influence on feeling and like every feeling generally.
But as an effect of the consciousness of the moral law, and
consequently in relation to a supersensible cause, namely, the subject
of pure practical reason which is the supreme lawgiver, this feeling
of a rational being affected by inclinations is called humiliation
(intellectual self-depreciation); but with reference to the positive
source of this humiliation, the law, it is respect for it. There is
indeed no feeling for this law; but inasmuch as it removes the
resistance out of the way, this removal of an obstacle is, in the
judgement of reason, esteemed equivalent to a positive help to its
causality. Therefore this feeling may also be called a feeling of
respect for the moral law, and for both reasons together a moral
feeling.
While the moral law, therefore, is a formal determining principle of
action by practical pure reason, and is moreover a material though
only objective determining principle of the objects of action as
called good and evil, it is also a subjective determining principle,
that is, a motive to this action, inasmuch as it has influence on
the morality of the subject and produces a feeling conducive to the
influence of the law on the will. There is here in the subject no
antecedent feeling tending to morality. For this is impossible,
since every feeling is sensible, and the motive of moral intention
must be free from all sensible conditions. On the contrary, while
the sensible feeling which is at the bottom of all our inclinations is
the condition of that impression which we call respect, the cause that
determines it lies in the pure practical reason; and this impression
therefore, on account of its origin, must be called, not a
pathological but a practical effect. For by the fact that the
conception of the moral law deprives self-love of its influence, and
self-conceit of its illusion, it lessens the obstacle to pure
practical reason and produces the conception of the superiority of its
objective law to the impulses of the sensibility; and thus, by
removing the counterpoise, it gives relatively greater weight to the
law in the judgement of reason (in the case of a will affected by
the aforesaid impulses). Thus the respect for the law is not a
motive to morality, but is morality itself subjectively considered
as a motive, inasmuch as pure practical reason, by rejecting all the
rival pretensions of self-love, gives authority to the law, which now
alone has influence. Now it is to be observed that as respect is an
effect on feeling, and therefore on the sensibility, of a rational
being, it presupposes this sensibility, and therefore also the
finiteness of such beings on whom the moral law imposes respect; and
that respect for the law cannot be attributed to a supreme being, or
to any being free from all sensibility, in whom, therefore, this
sensibility cannot be an obstacle to practical reason.