Leonard Feldblyum

Understanding Kant’s account of desire is vital to the project of evaluating his views about moral psychology, as well as his account of freedom qua autonomy. In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant claims that “Desire (appetitio) is the self-determination of a subject's power through the representation of something in the future as an effect of this representation” (7:251). My goal is to clarify which of the subject’s specific capacities Kant means by the “subject's power,” and what role this capacity plays in desire. I argue that the subject's power cannot be her capacity to act. Rather, the subject's power is best understood as her capacity to generate the psychological states that cause action. I call these motivational states 'activation signals'. Desire consists in the self-determination of the subject’s capacity to generate activation signals by her representation of the object of desire together with an accompanying incentive.

In this article, I show that attending to Nietzsche's views about breeding and human enhancement reveals two important ways in which Ken Gemes's account of Nietzsche's uses of the rhetoric of degeneration and Verjüdung must be modified. First, attending to Nietzsche's views about breeding reveals that methods like isolation, quarantine, excision, and extermination are not merely for the weak, as Gemes claims. In fact, for Nietzsche such methods are crucial for producing and maintaining healthy, strong people and societies. More generally, such methods play a vital role in Nietzsche's philosophy, including with respect to his conception of health. Second, contrary to Gemes's claim that Nietzsche was not interested in the actual Jews of his time, I show that Nietzsche was very interested in them, and thought they were important precisely for their relevance to his interest in breeding a new European aristocracy.