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Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy
Annual Conference 2010: Affect
Brisbane, December 3-5
Sune Liisberg (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Affective Minds in a Social World
To a Phenomenological Reinterpretation of Kantian
Anthropology
I
According to Michel Foucault, the threshold of our modernity is not
situated in the historical moment where one wanted to employ
objective methods to the study of man, but in the moment where an
‘empiric-transcendental
doublet
called
man
was
constituted’
(Foucault 1966: 330). Foucault is, of course, referring to the
philosophical work of Immanuel Kant, and his thesis implies, in effect,
that Kant’s entire critical project should be interpreted as a
historically new form of anthropology.
If we take a look at Kant’s late work on Anthropology from a
Pragmatic Point of View (1798/1800), we will find that Kant himself
actually demonstrates the consequence that can be drawn from
Foucault’s point. In the first part of this manuscript, which is also the
most extensive part, Kant employs the tripartition of his three
Critiques, i.e. man’s ability of knowing, of feeling pleasure and
displeasure,
and
of
desiring.1
The
first
part
is
entitled
1 Kant presents the abilities in this order in his Anthropology. The chronological order of the three
Critiques is of course knowledge, desire (will), and the feeling of pleasure/displeasure.
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‘anthropological didactics’ for which the three abilities from the
Critiques serve as an organizing principle.
The second part is entitled ‘anthropological characteristics’. It
deals with the natural dispositions of man, his temperament and the
question of his moral character (1798/1800: B 254). The first two of
these three categories of character examine what man can be
determined to be due to his dispositions, his temperament and
further, in Kant’s perspective, also his nationality. The third category,
i.e. the one that concerns man’s moral character, addresses the
question of what man is prepared to determine himself to be.
These three categories comprise what anthropology from a
pragmatic point of view is about in the overall perspective, insofar as
Kant already in the introduction establishes that anthropology from a
pragmatic point of view is the study of man, not as a physiological but
as a free acting creature that determines himself to be in one way or
another in respect to what he can and ought to determine himself to
be (1798/1800: IV).2
In the introduction Kant also defines man as a creature which is
endowed with reason; in this respect, man is his own purpose
(1798/1800: III). In the closing, Kant follows up on this by stating
that the purpose of mankind as a species is the idea of a cosmopolitan
society, which is a regulative principle for what we ought to
2 The Greek word ‘pragma’ denotes a doing and more specifically it denotes the doings of human
beings in their everyday life.
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Brisbane, December 3-5
determine ourselves to endeavour beyond ourselves (1798/1800: B
330).
Kant points out that the idea of a cosmopolitan society is not a
constitutive principle for an actual matter of fact. For if the idea of a
cosmopolitan society was a constitutive principle, one would have
not only to endeavour and hope for, but to expect actual peaceful
interaction (1798/1800: B 329-30). But as a matter of fact, humans,
according to Kant, in general are characterized by two inclinations:
On the one hand, we want to be part of social life because it makes us
feel more human; on the other hand, sociality involves the
interference of others, which gives us a tendency to isolation. Kant
calls this lived paradox the ‘unsociable sociability’ of man (ungesellige
Geselligkeit3).
We therefore, in effect, have no other choice than to put our hopes
in regulative principles that designate the normative dimension that
we ought to live by. Accordingly, from the perspective of Kant’s
pragmatic anthropology this normative dimension4 is so crucial that
man as a person and as a species would be wiped out without it. The
purpose that man is in and by himself – his dignity – is the very
fundament of humanity in Kant’s philosophy (1785).
But regulative principles are not just mere objectives; they are
always regulative principles for someone, and this subjective side, so
to speak, of the regulative principle of a cosmopolitan society, can
3
4
Kant (1784), 37; cf. 1798/1800: B 315, 323, 329.
Hegel later called this the ‘bad infinity of oughts’ (das Sollen); cf. Hegel (1812), 155.
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hardly be any other than the citizen of the world, which is a notion
that Kant introduces in the preface to his Anthropology. He employs
this notion in most of his late manuscripts and articles, though. For
instance in his lectures On Pedagogic:
In our soul there is something that makes us take an interest, firstly in
ourselves; secondly in others, together with whom we have grown up; and then,
thirdly, there must also be taken an interest in what is best for the world. One
has to make the children aware of this interest, so that they can warm their
souls with it. They should have delight in what is best for the world, also when it
is not an advantage to their mother country or something they will gain from
personally. (Kant 1803: 145-146; my transl.)
The idea of a cosmopolitan society must somehow be lived concretely
as a personal ethos. In this respect the citizen of the world – and not
the cosmopolitan society as such – must be real in some sense, i.e.
real in the form of an attitude of a subject.
But as I have indicated with Kant, we must always also conceive of
human subjects as instances of the general human category of the
’unsociable sociability’ – though, in this respect, there are
considerable individual differences as regards preferences due to
temperament (1798/1800: B 255 ff.). I also note an argument which
the German sociologist Ulrich Beck has put forth, namely that “there
is no cosmopolitanism without localism” (Beck 2002: 19).5
5 Becks ‘dialogic imagination’ as the internalized other of ‘cosmopolitanization’ within traditional
nation-state societies (Beck 2002: 18); contains the problem of our ‘unsociable sociability’ (Kant); it
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I don’t think that we could – or should – dismiss the idea of the
citizen of the world if we want to grasp the overall argument in Kant’s
Anthropology. The question is on what grounds we are to conceive
the possibility and actuality of such a subject who is guided by the
idea of world-citizenship. In this regard my idea basically is that we
should distinguish between being a citizen of the global world,
respectively, being a citizen of the phenomenal world. The former
leads to political issues, whereas the latter leads us to take our point
of departure in human affectivity.
I have divided the rest of my presentation in two. First I go more
into Kant’s theory of ideas inspired by the German psychiatrist and
philosopher, Karl Jaspers who interprets Kant ‘existentially’. I then
take up the question of affection in Kant’s Anthropology in light of
some phenomenological achievements in the 20th Century, which I
finally consider in relation to Beck’s statement that there is no
cosmopolitanism without localism.
II
In his Psychology of World Views (Psychologie der Weltanschauungen),
Karl Jaspers remarks, that ‘One cannot conceive ideas otherwise, than
by realizing that one is living in them’ (Jaspers 1919: 477; my transl.).
The ideas, Jaspers is referring to, are the Kantian ideas. Jaspers
continues:
also casts new light on, what might be happening today in Benedict Anderson’s so called ‘imagined
communities’.
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Brisbane, December 3-5
If one wants to grasp the ideas directly, instead of indirectly in the medium of
finitude and singularity, one is lead to figments of the imagination and thereby
to nothingness. (ibid.; my transl.)
One of Jasper’s efforts as concerns the Kantian theory of ideas is that
he, by way of his existentialist interpretation and reorganisation that
he believes to make ‘without being un-Kantian’ (1919: 470), lets us
see that the ideas – in spite of their regulative character – are real in
the sense that we live in them. This implies Jasper’s reorganisation of
the ideas such that they at the same time have theoretical and
practical significance as concerning, respectively, the totality of
directedness of our experiences and the singularity of this
directedness.
Let me take the idea of the world as a first example. The unity of
the world as a mechanical whole is a regulative idea (Jaspers 1919:
471; cf. Kant 1781/1787 B 674). I never have a complete intuition of
the world as such and since the spontaneous categories of the mind
(Verstand) must refer to intuition in order to form an experience
(1781/1787: B 74-75) they cannot form an experience of the world
as a whole. Nevertheless I presume the world as a whole in my finite
and singular existence, in the sense that the idea of the world forms
the unifying principle for the limited horizon of my proper
experiences. Jasper’s existential reinterpretation of this now consists
in that I first and foremost live in this presumption, i.e. I live in the
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Brisbane, December 3-5
directedness of a process that guides me or moves me, but which I
cannot bring to a completion.
The same is true of the idea of life in relation to which, biologically
speaking, the ‘organism’ is a regulative principle which unifies and
systematizes our knowledge of life as an infinity of purposes (Jaspers
1919: 471), while the third main idea is that of personality or the
soul, which organises and directs human psychology.
I think that we know from our own lives that we actually do not
reflect upon these regulative ideas or hold them up for our minds eye
all the time; so I think Jaspers has a point in arguing that we primarily
live in the ideas as a guided directedness which, insofar as we live it,
must be knit together with our human reality.
Now, as concerns the idea of personality, I will argue that Kant in
effect replaces the philosophical psychology of his predecessors
(Descartes, Locke, Hume) with his anthropology from a pragmatic
point of view. I think this is also what Michel Foucault implies in his
statement about the threshold of our modernity, which I read at the
beginning of my presentation.
The Kantian idea of personality implies, in actuality, that human
psychology cannot constitute an objective experience of personality
as such, but must examine singular personalities. Consequently,
according to Kant, human psychology, which in this respect is
empirical, i.e. resides in the world of phenomena, would not succeed
in establishing the identity of a person. The identity of a human
subject, i.e. the question of who one is, takes place at the moral level,
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Brisbane, December 3-5
not at the psychological level (Kant 1792/93: 155). This means that
personal identity is a purely intellectual enterprise.
If this is true, I will add that the question of personal identity is a
question of what Kant in his Anthropology calls the moral character of
man, which is not something that one has by nature, but something
that one must acquire through an event in one’s intellectual life
(1798/1800: B 268).
Kant surprisingly formulates the foundation of a moral character
in a person as something which happens to him or her, and compares
this happening with a rebirth, an explosion or a revolution entailing
an ‘absolute unity of the inner principle of one’s way of life as such’
(1798/1800: B 269). This seems to me to suggest a kind of selfaffection in the formation of a character. But I will leave that
suggestion without further comment here. Important in relation to
Jasper’s is that the ‘inner principle of one’s way of life as such’ would
itself have to be an idea that one lives in – it would be the lived
answer to the question of who one is.
The
reason
why
I
have
addressed
Jasper’s
existential
reinterpretation of the Kantian theory of ideas as “something” we live
in is that it forms a first step in my attempt to shed light on Kantian
anthropology from the perspective of phenomenology.
III
In his Anthropology Kant initially makes an important distinction
between knowing the world and having the world (1798/1800: VII).
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This distinction is the key to my attempt to reinterpret Kant
phenomenologically. The distinction says that when you know the
world you understand a play (Spiel) of nature or of culture that you
merely have been watching, whereas having the world presupposes
that you have participated in the play, i.e. that you have been coplaying (mitgespielt). This is the reason why the noble world, to take
Kant’s example, is hard to study for the anthropologist, for it conceals
more than it reveals, i.e. its circles are more or less closed and outside
of reach. I understand Kant such that the having of this world is not
an option, and that this implies that I can hardly evaluate it on its own
premises. Hence, my empirical knowledge of the noble world will be
correspondingly poor.
To Kant the distinction between knowing and having the world
primarily concerns a methodological problem for the anthropologist
comparable to the difference between being spectator and being
actor. This was later to become a crucial problem also for
sociologists. Pierre Bourdieu (1974) for instance remarks that the
cohesiveness of the world of fashion is not endangered by a fashion
journalist who is critical to the collection of this season, because
that’s a part of the game in the world of fashion. But if the journalist
suddenly calls in question the value of fashion, which is a sociological
question, then he is out of business – he is no longer a co-player of the
world of fashion.
So a considerable methodological problem for the anthropologist
(as well as for the sociologist) seems to be the problem of how to
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reproduce a model of the ‘having of a world’ of others. Or, to put it in
other words, how do individuals live in the idea of the world, what
does it mean to them more specifically? This problem can only be
solved philosophically by taking one’s point of departure in a general
theory of man, which is what Kant does in his Anthropology, though
he also acknowledges empirical material, such as descriptions of
travelling, world history, biographies, and literature (1798/1800: IXXII). But it is the general knowledge of man from the pragmatic
perspective of the citizen of the world which, according to Kant, is of
interest of the philosophizing anthropologist. Otherwise all we would
achieve would be a fragmentary little of this, little of that
(1798/1800: B IX).
In his Anthropology Kant for instance defines affect in general as an
astonishment vis-à-vis a sensation by which the composed mind is
incapacitated. A distinguishing mark of affect therefore is that it is
rash and non-reflective, irrational. Affect is a feeling of either
pleasure or displeasure in a present state, but as opposed to the
aesthetic judgment of taste, which also relies on the feeling of
pleasure/displeasure and furthermore has a distinctive social
function, the deliberation of whether it would be sound or not to
yield to the actual feeling is laid up when it comes to affect.6 So in
6 Kant treats affect under the ability of desire/appetite. He is aware that, insofar affects concern
feelings of pleasure and displeasure, they should be treated under this very ability, but on the other
hand affects are closely related to the passions, and – as abilities of desiring – they both display the
autonomic power of a subject to produce its own future objectives (Kant 1798/1800: B 176; 202).
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what sense do I, in the case of affect, have the world as a social coplayer in it?
Again one can ask how individuals, in their finitude and
singularity, do live in the idea of the world, what does it mean to
them? Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological attempt to found a
general anthropological theory in his Sketch to a Theory of the
Emotions (1939) is here worth noting.
To Kant, our general knowledge of man must be unfolded a priori
in the tripartition of our abilities of knowing, of feeling pleasure and
displeasure, and of desiring. Sartre’s phenomenological theory of
man takes another point of departure, namely in a combination of
Husserl’s theory of consciousness and Heidegger’s theory of ‘humanreality’ (la réalité-humaine = Dasein). But he, too, aims at an a priori
definition of man.
Sartre thereby establishes a discussion with the empirical
psychology of his time which, according to him, has no chance of
founding a general theory of man. Because of the empirical methods
they use, psychologists have only fragmentary knowledge of the
human subject. What we need is an a priori concept of the essence of
man, and this is where Sartre draws on the phenomenological
concept of consciousness according to which human facts, for
instance emotions, are conscious intentional phenomena that have a
meaning or signify something to the person having the emotion.
Heidegger’s phenomenology, on the other hand, delivers a more
specific notion of man, according to which all research into the
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human reality is different from other types of research because of the
privileged circumstance, as Sartre remarks, that human-reality is
ourselves (Eng. transl. 2004 p.8). This is not a truism, for it entails in
effect that, ‘Emotion is not an accident, it is a mode of our conscious
existence, one of the ways in which consciousness understands (in
Heidegger’s sense of Verstehen) its Being-in-the-World’ (Sartre 1939:
116; Eng. transl. 2004: 61):
From this point of view, Heidegger thinks that, in every human attitude – in
emotion, for example […] – we can rediscover the whole of human reality, for
emotion is the human reality assuming itself and ‘emotionally-directing’ itself
towards the world. Husserl, for his part, thinks that a phenomenological
description of emotion will reveal the essential structures of consciousness,
seeing that an emotion precisely is a consciousness. (Sartre 1939: 22-23; Eng.
transl. 2004: 10)
On the background of this, Sartre argues that phenomenology
actually delivers an a priory concept of man. Emotion is thus an
organized and directed form of our conscious being-in-the-world, and
this is not a way in which we know the world, but, arguably, a way in
which we have the world, i.e. a way in which we are affective coplayers in it not mere spectators. This is even stronger emphasised
where Sartre speaks of the seriousness of the emotional attitude
which comes from the fact that we are always also bodily
‘traumatized’ when we reinterpret a situation emotionally. Emotion
is a response to the world changing its character of being an order of
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utility, which we can organize practically or rationally, and instead
making – and taking – it to be of a ‘magical’ order that for Sartre
designates the way in which we reorganize the world emotionally as
a means of coping with certain difficulties that compromise our
practical and intellectual freedom in the situation (cf. also Kant
1798/1800: B 176).
As regards Sartre’s critique of empirical psychology he has a
programmatic kinship with Kant since they both transform
psychology into philosophical anthropology founded in an a priori
conceptualisation of man. Further, the sense in which Kant
understands the phenomenon of having the world is actually similar
to the way in which Heidegger talks of the being-in-the-world of
human reality, though in a much more elaborated and profound
sense. As co-players we thus have the world beforehand of knowing
the world. This addresses anew the question of whether ‘who one is’
can be a purely intellectual enterprise.
In his Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who
explicitly criticises the Kantian intellectualism in stating, for instance,
that normativity is already born at the level of perception (1945: 74),
argues that affectivity actually is the very beginning of our conscious
being in the world:
If […] we want to bring to light the birth of being for us, we must finally look at
the area of our experience which clearly has significance and reality only for us,
and that is our affective life. (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 180; Eng. transl. 1989: 154)
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Both Merleau-Ponty, when he investigates love and desire (1945: 180
ff.), and Sartre, when he investigates emotion, think of affection as
that, which has ‘significance only for us’. On the other hand, this
significance implies that affectivity in the form of emotional
directedness primarily is a social category. It is this category that
Sartre conceives of as a kind of magical order of the world ‘that
governs the interpsychic relations between men in society’ (1939:
108; Eng. transl. 2004: 56). For, according to Sartre, it is in the form
of being a consciousness modified by passivity ‘that others appear to
us’ (1939: 108; Eng. transl. 2004: 56). In this sense we are affective
minds in a social world beforehand of being intellectual minds in a
social world, which is to say that sociality is founded in affectivity and
that the problem of the ‘unsociable sociability’, that we actually find
again in Sartre’s analysis of intersubjectivity in Being and Nothingness
as the essential conflict between human subjects, is a problem of
affection rather than of intellection.
Conclusion: Consequently, the question of who I am as a social coplayer is not restricted to a question of my moral character, because
we are never fully transparent to ourselves (Sartre 1939: 21;
Merleau-Ponty 1945: 398). Thus, being a citizen of the world is not
just having a certain moral or political attitude. It is this too. But it is
first and foremost, i.e. a priori, being a citizen of the phenomenal
world, that is the world that Merleau-Ponty and Sartre address as our
affective and emotional life, or – more generally – the world that
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Edmund Husserl calls our ‘life-world’ (1936: § 28). This suggests that
we also must regard Ulrich Beck’s (2002) thesis, that there is no
cosmopolitanism without localism, from the existential perspective of
the life-world as the localism of this localism, so to speak. So before
we decide about what we normatively ought to determine ourselves
to be, e.g. citizens of the world in the global, political sense, we must
at the phenomenological level make ourselves clear what it means at
all to have a world from the perspective of affective sociality, which
presupposes the perspective of our embodiment. However, this does
not lead to a self-sufficiency of personal localism – at least not
ontologically. For Beck’s localism-thesis must imply that the lifeworld is always already knit together with the process of
cosmopolitanization, which somehow assumes us whether we want
to assume it or not. Much of our cross-national activities and
understandings might not even be comprehensible to us if we did not
live in the idea of a cosmopolitan society.
[email protected]
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References:
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Kant, I. (1995 [1803]): Über Pädagogik. In Werkausgabe, Vol. XII.
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