Jeanine Grenberg

I argue that there can be, on Kant's account, a significant motivational role for feeling in moral action. I first discuss and reject Andrews Reath's claim that Kant is forced to disallow a motivational role for feeling because of his rejection of moral sense theory. I then consider and reject the more general challenge that allowing a role for the influence of feeling on the faculty of desire undermines Kant's commitment to a morality free from anthropological considerations. I conclude by providing an overview of Kant's discussion of the moral feeling of respect which shows this feeling to meet the criteria he sets for inclusion in moral motivation.

Introduction Recent accounts of humility, such as Norvin Richards', emphatically set aside any “Catholic metaphysics” that might ground the state, finding its view of human nature – one which asks us to consider ourselves as “contemptible” and “foul” – to be deeply problematic. Richards turns instead to an empirical and behavioral analysis of humility, focusing upon an individual agent's awareness of the flaws, failings and limits specific to her to ground humility. For example, when he asks what it would mean to be “humble” about having a scholarly article accepted for publication in a prestigious journal, he says the following: Suppose, for example, that you have just had an article accepted by a leading journal. You have never been successful there before. In fact, this is much better than you ever did earlier in your career, and as you think of your progress, you are pleased. There are other ways to look at things, though. How does your work compare to what your colleagues are doing? To the work of contemporaries at similar institutions? To that of the leading philosophers of the day? To the Nichomachean Ethics, or the Theory of Descriptions?

We are told in the introduction to this volume that what holds together such an apparently diverse collection of essays under a single rubric is the theme of "human nature." And this is fair enough: themes ranging from Kant's reflections on physiology, to his investigation of the vexed notion of what it is that constitutes a race, to his reflections on philosophy of history, to his lectures on pedagogy all fit reasonably enough under the rubric of "human nature." All point us, that is, toward a clearer understanding of how Kant would have answered the question, "What is a human being?" Yet this straight-laced, somewhat mundane description of this volume's contents belies the quirky, unexpected, and downright strange reflections that can be found therein. Perhaps those familiar with Kant's famous dinner parties would have expected him to say that "[b]odily motions prescribed by a doctor who is not a philosopher weaken the invalid's body, unless they are seasoned with some social amusement and affect the body favorably". But who would have expected Kant to recommend that "[i]n.

466 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:3 JULY 1996 offered in Rameau's Nephew called into question his long-held conviction that "even in a society as poorly ordered as ours.., there is no better path to happiness than to be a good man," Hulliung tends to assume too quickly that the Nephew's attacks on this belief carry the day . Diderot did, after all, eventually provide the Nephew's antago- nist with some responses and, while these may not always convince us, it is somewhat rash to assume that Diderot himself viewed them as completely empty. Further, while Hulliung carefully shows us what Rousseau found lacking in the philosophes' Enlighten- ment, it is not entirely clear whether the arguments he offered inJulie, Emile, and the Social Contract really constitute a "positive program for an alternative enlightenment" . Readers may leave the book still questioning whether Rousseau shared anything with his former colleagues other than their most troubling doubts. The tension between the promise announced in the book's title and the more precise focus delineated in the subtitle captures what is at stake rather nicely: in what sense does the quarrel between "Rousseau and the Philosophes" constitute an "Auto- critique of Enlightenment"? Hulliung rightly notes that "it was one of Rousseau's gifts that he always succeeded in bringing out the worst in the philosophes" . The book amply demonstrates that the same could be said of their ability to..