This is a paper about two philosophers who wrote to each other. One is famous; the other is not. It is about two practical standpoints, the strategic and the human, and what the famous philosopher said of them. And it is about friendship and deception, duty and despair. That is enough by way of preamble.
In 1791 Kant received a letter from an Austrian lady whom he had
never met. She was Maria von Herbert, a keen and able student of
Kant's philosophy, and sister to Baron Franz Paul von Herbert,
another zealous Kantian disciple. The zeal of her brother the Baron
was indeed so great that he had left his lead factory, and his wife,
for two years in order to study Kant's philosophy in Weimar and Jena.
Upon his return, the von Herbert household had become a centre, a
kind of salon, where the critical philosophy was intensely debated,
against the backdrop of vehement opposition to Kant in Austria as in
many German states. The household was, in the words of a student of
Fichte's, 'a new Athens', an oasis of Enlightenment spirit, devoted
to preaching and propagating the Kantian gospel, reforming religion,
and replacing dull unthinking piety with a morality based on reason.
Here is the letter.
1. To Kant, From Maria von Herbert, August 1791
As a believer calls to his God, I call to you for help, for comfort,
or for counsel to prepare me for death. Your writings prove that
there is a future life. But as for this life, I have found nothing,
nothing at all that could replace the good I have lost, for I loved
someone who, in my eyes, encompassed within himself all that is
worthwhile, so that I lived only for him, everything else was in
comparison just rubbish, cheap trinkets. Well, I have offended this
person, because of a long drawn out lie, which I have now disclosed
to him, though there was nothing unfavourable to my character in it,
I had no vice in my life that needed hiding. The lie was enough
though, and his love vanished. As an honourable man, he doesn't
refuse me friendship. But that inner feeling that once, unbidden,
led us to each other, is no more - oh my heart splinters into a
thousand pieces! If I hadn't read so much of your work I would
certainly have put an end to my life. But the conclusion I had to
draw from your theory stops me - it is wrong for me to die because my
life is tormented, instead I'm supposed to live because of my being.
Now put yourself in my place, and either damn me or comfort me. I've
read the metaphysic of morals, and the categorical imperative, and it
doesn't help a bit. My reason abandons me just when I need it.
Answer me, I implore you - or you won't be acting in accordance with
your own imperative.
My address is Maria Herbert of Klagenfurt, Carinthia, care of the white lead factory, or perhaps you would rather send it via Reinhold because the mail is more reliable there.
Kant, much impressed by this letter, sought advice from a friend as to what he should do. The friend advised him strongly to reply, and to do his best to distract his correspondent from 'the object to which she [was] enfettered' (1). We have the carefully prepared draft of Kant's response.
2. To Maria von Herbert, Spring 1792 (Kant's rough draft)
A love like that wants to communicate itself completely, and
it expects of its respondent a similar sharing of heart, unweakened
by distrustful reticence. That is what the ideal of friendship
demands. But there is something in us which puts limits on such
frankness, some obstacle to this mutual outpouring of the heart,
which makes one keep some part of one's thoughts locked within
oneself, even when one is most intimate. The sages of old complained
of this secret distrust - 'My dear friends, there is no such thing as
a friend!'
We can't expect frankness of people, since everyone fears
that to reveal himself completely would be to make himself despised
by others. But this lack of frankness, this reticence, is still very
different from dishonesty. What the honest but reticent man says is
true, but not the whole truth. What the dishonest man says is
something he knows to be false. Such an assertion is called, in the
theory of virtue, a lie. It may be harmless, but it is not on that
account innocent. It is a serious violation of a duty to oneself;
it subverts the dignity of humanity in our own person, and attacks
the roots of our thinking. As you see, you have sought counsel from
a physician who is no flatterer. I speak for your beloved and
present him with arguments that justify his having wavered in his
affection for you.
Ask yourself whether you reproach yourself for the imprudence
of confessing, or for the immorality intrinsic to the lie. If the
former, then you regret having done your duty. And why? Because it
has resulted in the loss of your friend's confidence. This regret is
not motivated by anything moral, since it is produced by an awareness
not of the act itself, but of its consequences. But if your reproach
is grounded in a moral judgment of your behaviour, it would be a poor
moral physician who would advise you to cast it from your mind.
When your change in attitude has been revealed to your
beloved, only time will be needed to quench, little by little, the
traces of his justified indignation, and to transform his coldness
into a more firmly grounded love. If this doesn't happen, then the
earlier warmth of his affection was more physical than moral, and
would have disappeared anyway - a misfortune which we often encounter
in life, and when we do, must meet with composure. For the value of
life, insofar as it consists of the enjoyment we get from people, is
vastly overrated.
Here then, my dear friend, you find the customary divisions of a sermon: instruction, penalty and comfort. Devote yourself to the first two; when they have had their effect, comfort will be found by itself.
Kant's letter has an enormously interesting and sensitive discussion of friendship and secrecy, much of which turns up word for word in The Doctrine of Virtue, published some six years later.(2) But what Kant's letter fails to say is as at least as interesting as what it says. Herbert writes that she has lost her love, that her heart is shattered, that there is nothing left to make life worth living, and that Kant's moral philosophy hasn't helped a bit. Kant's reply is to suggest that the love is deservedly lost, that misery is an appropriate response to one's own moral failure, and that the really interesting moral question here is the one that hinges on a subtle but necessary scope distinction: the distinction between telling a lie and failing to tell the truth, between saying 'not-p', and not saying 'p'. Conspicuously absent is an acknowledgement of Herbert's more than theoretical interest in the question: is suicide compatible with the moral law? And perhaps this is just as well from a practical point of view. The sooner she gives up those morbid thoughts the better; the less said on the morbid subject, the less likely the morbid thoughts will arise. Perhaps it is also just as well, for Kant, from a theoretical point of view. Kant's conviction that suicide is incompatible with the moral law is not nearly as well founded as he liked to think; so here too, the less said, the better. Having posted his moral sedative off to Austria, and receiving no reply from the patient in more than a year, Kant enquired of a mutual friend who often saw her about the effect his letter had had. Herbert then wrote back, with apologies for her delay. This is her second letter.
3. To Kant, from Maria von Herbert, January 1793
Your kindness, and your exact understanding of the human heart,
encourage me to describe to you, unshrinkingly, the further progress
of my soul. The lie was no cloaking of a vice, but a sin of keeping
something back out of consideration for the friendship (still veiled
by love) that existed then. There was a struggle, I was aware of the
honesty friendship demands, and at the same time I could foresee the
terribly wounding consequences. Finally I had the strength and
revealed the truth to my friend, but so late - and when I told him,
the stone in my heart was gone, but his love was torn away in
exchange. My friend hardened in his coldness, just as you said in
your letter. But then afterwards he changed towards me, and offered
me again the most intimate friendship. I'm glad enough about it, for
his sake - but I'm not really content, because it's just amusement,
it doesn't have any point.
My vision is clear now. I feel that a vast emptiness extends
inside me, and all around me - so that I almost find my self to be
superfluous, unnecessary. Nothing attracts me. I'm tormented by a
boredom that makes life intolerable. Don't think me arrogant for
saying this, but the demands of morality are too easy for me. I
would eagerly do twice as much as they command. They only get their
prestige from the attractiveness of sin, and it costs me almost no
effort to resist that.
I comfort myself with the thought that, since the practice of
morality is so bound up with sensuality, it can only count for this
world. I can hope that the afterlife won't be yet another life ruled
by these few, easy demands of morality, another empty and vegetating
life. Experience wants to take me to task for this bad temper I have
against life by showing me that nearly everyone finds his life ending
much too soon, everyone is so glad to be alive. So as not to be a
queer exception to the rule, I shall tell you of a remote cause of my
deviation, namely my chronic poor health, which dates from the time I
first wrote to you. I don't study the natural sciences or the arts
any more, since I don't feel that I'm genius enough to extend them;
and for myself, there's no need to know them. I'm indifferent to
everything that doesn't bear on the categorical imperative, and my
transcendental consciousness - although I'm all done with those
thoughts too.
You can see, perhaps, why I only want one thing, namely to
shorten this pointless life, a life which I am convinced will get
neither better nor worse. If you consider that I am still young and
that each day interests me only to the extent that it brings me
closer to death, you can judge what a great benefactor you would be
if you were to examine this question closely. I ask you, because my
conception of morality is silent here, whereas it speaks decisively
on all other matters. And if you cannot give me the answer I seek, I
beg you to give me something that will get this intolerable emptiness
out of my soul. Then I might become a useful part of nature, and, if
my health permits, would make a trip to Kñnigsberg in a few years. I
want to ask permission, in advance, to visit you. You must tell me
your story then, because I would like to know what kind of life your
philosophy has led you to - whether it never seemed to you to be
worth the bother to marry, or to give your whole heart to anyone, or
to reproduce your likeness. I have an engraved portrait of you by Bause,
from Leipzig. I see a profound calm there, and moral depth - but
not the astuteness of which the Critique of Pure Reason is
proof. And I'm dissatisfied not to be able to look you right in the
face.
Please fulfill my wish, if it's not too inconvenient. And I
need to remind you: if you do me this great favour and take the
trouble to answer, please focus on specific details, not on the
general points, which I understand, and already understood back when
I happily studied your works at the side of my friend. You would
like him, I'm sure. He is honest, goodhearted, and intelligent - and
besides that, fortunate enough to fit this world.
I am with deepest respect and truth, Maria Herbert.
Herbert's letter speaks for itself. The passion, the
turbulence, has vanished. Desolation has taken its place, a 'vast
emptiness', a vision of the world and the self that is chilling in
its clarity, chilling in its nihilism. Apathy reigns. Desire is
dead. Nothing attracts. Bereft of inclination, the self is
'superfluous', as Herbert so starkly puts it. Nothing has any point -
except of course the categorical imperative. But morality itself has
become a torment, not because it is too difficult, but because it is
too easy. Without the counterweight of opposing inclination, what
course could there be but to obey? The moral life is the empty,
vegetating life, where one sees at a glance what the moral law
requires and simply does it, unhampered by the competing attractions
of sin. Herbert concludes that morality must be bound up with
sensuality, that moral credit depends on the battle of the will with
the sensual passions, a battle which, when there are no passions, is
won merely, and tediously, by default - and where can be the credit
in that? The imperative requires us never to treat persons merely as
means to one's own ends. But if one has no ends, if one is simply
empty, what could be easier than to obey? Herbert draws hope from
her conclusion: if morality is bound to sensuality, with luck the
next life will not be thus accursed.
This sounds like heresy. Is it? If so, Kant is blind to it.
But perhaps it is not heresy at all. What Kant fails to see - what
Herbert herself fails to see - is that her life constitutes a
profound challenge to his philosophy, at least construed one way.
Consider Kant's views on duty and inclination.
An action has moral worth when it is done for the sake of
duty; it is not sufficient that the action conforms with duty.(3)
Now, inclinations are often sufficient to make us perform actions
that conform with our duty. To preserve one's life is a duty; and
most of us have strong inclinations to preserve our lives. To help
others where one can is a duty; and most of us are sympathetic
enough and amiable enough to be inclined to help others, at least
some of the time. But - if we take Kant at his word here - actions
thus motivated have no moral worth. The action of moral worth is
that of 'the wretched man...[for whom] disappointments and hopeless
misery have quite taken away the taste for life, who longs for
death' but who, notwithstanding, preserves his life. The action
that has moral worth is that of the misanthropist, 'the man cold in
temperament and indifferent to the sufferings of others' who
nonetheless helps others 'not from inclination but from duty'.(4)
This looks as though moral credit depends on both the absence
of coinciding inclinations, such as sympathy; and the presence of
opposing inclinations, like misanthropy. If so, Herbert is right:
morality depends on there being inclinations to defeat. It is
important to see though that even here, what Kant says is not
motivated by a kind of blind rule worship, but by a sense of the gulf
between the two standpoints from which we must view ourselves. We
are at once cogs in the grand machine of nature, and free agents in
the Kingdom of Ends. We are persons, members of an intelligible
world, authors of our actions; and at the same time animals, puppets
of our genes and hormones, buffeted about by our lusts and loathings.
Inclinations are passions in the sense that they just happen to us.
And insofar as we let our actions be driven by them we allow
ourselves to be puppets, not persons. We allow ourselves, to use
Kant's own metaphors, to become marionettes or automatons, which may
appear to be initiators of action, but whose freedom is illusory, 'no
better than the freedom of a turnspit, which, when once wound up also
carries out its motions by itself'.(5) The inclinations are effects
on us, they are pathe, and for that reason pathological. If we let
them be causes of our behaviour, we abandon our personhood.
Whether they lead us towards the action of duty or away from
it, inclinations are among virtue's chief obstacles. When
inclination opposes duty, it is an obstacle to duty's performance.
When inclination coincides with duty, it is an obstacle at least to
knowledge of the action's worth. 'Inclination, be it good-natured or
otherwise, is blind and slavish...The feeling of sympathy and
warmhearted fellow-feeling...is burdensome even to right-thinking
persons, confusing their considered maxims and creating the wish to
be free from them and subject only to law-giving reason.'(6) In the
battle against the inclinations we can enlist the aid of that strange
thing, respect, or reverence for the moral law. Reverence for the
law serves to 'weaken the hindering influence of the
inclinations'.(7) Reverence is a kind of feeling, but it is not
something we 'passively feel ', something inflicted upon us from
outside. It is the sensible correlate of our own moral activity, the
'consciousness of the direct constraint of the will through law'. (8)
Its function is not to motivate our moral actions, for that would
still be motivation by feeling. Rather, its function is to remove
the obstacles, to silence inclinations, something we should all look
forward to. For inclinations are 'so far from having an absolute
value...that it must...be the universal wish of every rational being
to be wholly free from them'.(9)
Kant goes so far as to say we have a duty of apathy, a duty
he is less than famous for. 'Virtue necessarily presupposes apathy ',
he says in The Doctrine of Virtue. 'The word 'apathy' has
fallen into disrepute', he continues, 'as if it meant lack of feeling
and so subjective indifference regarding objects of choice: it has
been taken for weakness. We can prevent this misunderstanding by
giving the name 'moral apathy' to that freedom from agitation which
is to be distinguished from indifference, for in it the feelings
arising from sensuous impressions lose their influence on moral
feeling only because reverence for the law prevails over all such
feelings'.(10) Something rather similar to apathy is described in
the Critique of Practical Reason, but this time it is called
not apathy, but 'bliss' (Seligkeit). Bliss is the state of
'complete independence from inclinations and desires'.(11) While it
must be the universal wish of every rational being to achieve bliss,
can we in fact achieve it? Apparently not, or not here. Bliss is
'the self-sufficiency which can be ascribed only to the Supreme
Being'.(12) The Supreme Being has no passions and inclinations. His
intuition is intellectual, and not sensible. He can be affected by
nothing, not even our prayers. He can have no pathe. God is the
being more apathetic than which cannot be conceived.
What of Kant's moral patient? She is well beyond the virtue
of apathy that goes with mastery of the inclinations. She has no
inclinations left to master. She respects the moral law, and obeys
it. But she needn't battle her passions to do so. She has no
passions. She is empty - but for the clear vision of the moral law
and unshrinking obedience to it. She is well on the way to bliss,
lucky woman, and, if Kant is right about bliss, well on the way to
Godhead. No wonder she feels that she - unlike her unnamed friend -
does not quite 'fit the world'. She obeys the moral law in her day
to day dealings with people from the motive of duty alone. She has
no other motives. She is no heretic. She is a Kantian saint. Oh
brave new world, that has such moral saints in it.(13)
What should Kant have said about inclinations? I have no
clear view about this, but some brief remarks may be in order. A
saner view is arguably to be found in Kant's own writings. In the
Doctrine of Virtue (14) Kant apparently advocates the cultivation
of natural sentiment to back up the motive of duty. It is hard,
though, to reconcile this with his other teachings, which tell us
that inclinations, all inclinations, are to be abjured, as 'blind and
slavish', in the graphic phrase from the Critique of Practical
Reason. 'Blind' is an evocative word in the Kantian context,
associated as it is with the blind workings of nature, with the
sensual as opposed to the intellectual. It calls to mind the famous
slogan of the first Critique: thoughts without content are
empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. That slogan famously
captures the synthesis of rationalism and empiricism Kant thought
necessary for knowledge. It acknowledges the twin aspects of human
creatures, as Kant sees us: we have a sensible intuition, a passive
intuition, through which we are affected by the world; and an active
intellect. We need both. If only Kant had effected a similar
synthesis in the moral sphere: for if it is true, as he says, that
inclinations without reasons are blind, it seems equally true that
reasons without inclinations are empty. The moral life without
inclinations is a life of 'intolerable emptiness', as Herbert found.
We need both.
I said that Herbert has no inclinations: but there are two
exceptions. She wants to die. And she wants to visit Kant. She is,
it seems, like the would-be suicide Kant describes in The
Groundwork: her persistence with life has moral worth, because
it is so opposed to her inclinations. But is she really like him?
Not quite. For she is not even sure that duty points to persistence
with life. Notice the change here. In her first letter she believed
that self-respect, respect for 'her own being' required her to
persist with life. But as her 'being' has begun to contract, as the
self has withered, sloughed off, become superfluous - as the
emptiness has grown - so too has her doubt. Now her conception of
morality is 'silent' on the question of suicide. She wants to die.
She has almost no opposing inclinations. And morality is silent. It
takes no expert to wonder if she is in danger.
Why does she want to visit Kant? She says (letter 3) 'I would like to know what kind of life your philosophy has led you to'. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant cites approvingly what he took to be the practice of the ancients: no one was justified in calling himself a philosopher - a lover of wisdom - 'unless he could show [philosophy's] infallible effect on his own person as an example'. (15) Kant thinks we are justified in inquiring after the effect of philosophy on the philosopher, daunting as the prospect seems today. But what does Herbert have in mind? She wonders, perhaps, whether Kant's life is as empty as her own, and for the same reason. She discovered that love is 'pointless' when inclinations have withered, when you have no passions of your own and therefore no passions to share. And she wonders whether Kant's life reflects this discovery. She wonders whether Kant's philosophy has led him to think that it was simply 'not worth the bother' to marry, or to 'give his whole heart' to anyone. Perhaps she is right to wonder.
In reply to an enquiry, Kant received this explanatory letter from a mutual friend, Erhard.
4. To Kant, from J.B. Erhard, January 17, 1793
Yours, Erhard.
Kant writes again, not to Herbert, but to someone about whom we know little:
5. From Kant, to Elisabeth Motherby, February 11, 1793
You have been so fortunate in your upbringing that I do not
need to commend these letters to you as an example of warning, to
guard you against the wanderings of a sublimated fantasy. But they
may serve nonetheless to make your perception of that good fortune
all the more lively.
I am, with the greatest respect, my honoured lady's most obedient servant,
I. Kant.
Kant is unaware that he has received a letter from a Kantian
saint. Indeed, it is hard to believe that he has read her second
letter. He relies on the opinion of his friend, whose diagnosis of
the patient resorts to that traditional and convenient malady of
feminine hysteria. Herbert 'has capsized on the reef of romantic
love'. The diagnosis is exactly wrong. Herbert has no passions.
Her vision is clear. Her life is empty. But it is easier not to
take this in, easier to suppose a simpler illness. She is at the
mercy (aren't all women?) of irrational passions. She is evidently
beyond the reach of instruction, beyond the reach of his moral
sedatives; so Kant abandons her. It is hard to imagine a more
dramatic shift from the interactive stance to the objective.(17) In
Kant's first letter, Herbert is 'my dear friend', she is the subject
for moral instruction, and reprimand. She is responsible for some
immoral actions, but she has a 'heart created for the sake of
virtue', capable of seeing the good and doing it. Kant is doing his
best to communicate, instruct, and console. He is not very good at
it, hardly surprising if he believes - as I think he does - that he
should master rather than cultivate his moral sentiments. But there
is little doubt that the good will is there. He treats her as a
human being, as an end, as a person. This is the standpoint of
interaction.
But now? Herbert is die kleine Schwîrmerin, the
little dreamer, the ecstatical girl, suffering a 'curious mental
derangement', lost in the 'wanderings of a sublimated fantasy', who
doesn't think, especially about important things like dating letters.
Kant is here forgetting an important aspect of the duty of respect,
which requires something like a Davidsonian principle of charity. We
have 'a duty of respect for man even in the logical use of his
reason: a duty not to censure his error by calling it
absurdity...but rather to suppose that his error must yet contain
some truth and to seek this out.'(18) Herbert, now deranged, is no
longer guilty. She is merely unfortunate. She is not responsible
for what she does. She is the pitiful product of a poor upbringing.
She is an item in the natural order, a ship wrecked on a reef. She
is a thing.
And, true to Kant's picture, it now becomes appropriate to use her as a means to his own ends. He bundles up her letters, private communications from a 'dear friend', letters that express thoughts, philosophical and personal, some of them profound. He bundles them up and sends them to an acquaintance under the title, 'Example of Warning'. The end is obscure and contradictory: it seems it is to warn somebody who, on Kant's own view, needs no warning. Is it gossip? Ingratiation? But the striking thing is that the letters are no longer seen as human communications. Far from it: Kant's presumption is that they will not be understood by their new recipient. For the letters 'refer to writings of mine that she read, that are difficult to understand without an interpreter'. This is not the speech of persons, to be understood and debated; this is derangement, to be feared and avoided. These are not thoughts, but symptoms. Kant is doing something with her as one does something with a tool: Herbert cannot share the end of the action. She cannot be co-author. Kant's deceiving of her - neatly achieved by reticence - has made sure of that. Her action of pleading for help, asking advice, arguing philosophy, her action of writing to a well-loved philosopher and then to a friend - these have become the action of warning of the perils of romantic love. She did not choose to do that . Well may Kant have warned 'My dear friends, there is no such thing as a friend'.
But this is too simple. Recall that Herbert puts her dilemma like this: 'I was aware of the honesty friendship demands and at the same time I could see the terribly wounding consequences...The lie...was a...keeping something back out of consideration for the friendship.' (19) She is torn. Friendship demands honesty; and friendship demands dishonesty. Is she confused? Is she in contradiction? Not at all. It is an old dilemma: having an ideal you want to live by, and an ideal you want to seek and preserve. You owe honesty to your friend; but the friendship will vanish if you are honest.
Friendship is a very great good: it is the Kingdom of Ends made real and local. Kant says that the man who is without a frind is the man who 'must shut himself up in himself', who must remain 'completely alone with his thoughts, as in a prison'.(20) One of the goods of friendship is that it makes possible the kind of relationship where one can unlock the prison of the self, reveal oneself to the compassionate and understanding eye of the other. But Kant sees true friendship to be a very rare thing, rare, he says as a black swan.(21) And what threatens friendship most is asymmetry, inequality with regard to love or respect, which can result in the partial breakdown of the interactive stance. This asymmetry can be brought about by the very act of self revelation: if one person 'reveals his failings while the other person concealed his own, he would lose something of the other's respect by presenting himself so candidly'. (22) What Kant is pointing to is the very problem encountered, far more acutely, by Herbert: in being a friend, in acting in the way that friendship demands, one can sometimes threaten friendship. To act as a member of the Kingdom can make the Kingdom more, and not less, remote.
How should we think of Kant's ideal:
is the Kingdom an ideal to be lived by, or a goal to be sought? If
it is ever the latter, then sometimes - in evil circumstances - it
will be permissible, and even required, to act strategically for the
Kingdom's sake. (23) There is a question about what evil is. But for
Kant it must, above all, be this: the reduction of persons to things.
Now consider Herbert's position. There is something we have been
leaving out. Herbert is a woman in a society in which women
start out on an unequal footing and then live out their lives that
way, where women - especially women - must perpetually walk a
tightrope between being treated as things and treated as persons.
She must make her choices against a backdrop of social institutions
and habits that strip her of the dignity due to persons, where what
she does and what she says will always be interpreted in the light of
that backdrop, so that even if she says 'my vision is clear', and
speaks in a manner consistent with that claim, her speech will be
read as the speech of the deranged, a mere plaything of the
passions. Central among the institutions she must encounter in her
life is that of the sexual marketplace, where human beings are viewed
as having a price, and not a dignity, and where the price of women is
fixed in a particular way. Women, as things, as items in the sexual
marketplace, have a market value that depends in part on whether they
have been used. Virgins fetch a higher price than second hand goods.
Such are the background circumstances in which Herbert finds herself.
They are, I suggest, evil circumstances, evil by Kantian lights
(though Kant himself never saw it).
Despite these handicaps, Herbert has achieved a great thing:
she has achieved something like a friendship of mutual love and
respect, found someone with whom she can share her activities and
goals, become a partner in a relationship where ends are chosen in
such a way that the ends of both agents coincide (prominent among
which was, it seems, the happy study of Kant's works!) . She has
achieved a relationship where frankness and honesty prevail - with
one exception. Her lie is the lie of 'keeping something back for the
sake of the friendship'. If she tells the truth, evil circumstance
will see to it that her action will not be taken as the honest
self-revelation of a person, but the revelation of her thing-hood,
her hitherto unrecognised status as used merchandise, as item with a
price that is lower than the usual. If she tells the truth, she
becomes a thing, and the friendship - that small neighbourhood of the
Kingdom - will vanish. Should she lie? Perhaps. If her
circumstances are evil, she is permitted to have friendship as her
goal, to be sought and preserved, rather than a law to be lived by.
So she is permitted to lie. Then other considerations come in. She
has a duty to 'humanity in her own person', of which Kant says: 'By
virtue of this worth we are not for sale at any price; we possess an
inalienable dignity which instils in us reverence for ourselves'.
She has a duty of self esteem: she must respect her own person and
demand such respect of others, abjuring the vice of servility.(24) I
think she may have a duty to lie.
This is strategy, for the Kingdom's sake. Kant would not allow it. He thinks we should act as if the Kingdom of Ends is with us now. He thinks we should rely on God to make it all right in the end. But God will not make it all right in the end. And the Kingdom of Ends is not with us now. Perhaps we should do what we can to bring it about.
END NOTES
This paper is a shortened version of 'Duty and Desolation', which
first appeared in Philosophy 67 1992, and appears in this form
in Singer (ed.), Oxford Reader: Ethics (Oxford University
Press, 1994). Letters are my adaptations and abridgements of those
in Arnulf Zweig, Kant: Philosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799
(University of Chicago Press, 1967), used with kind permission of
Prof. Zweig and the publishers; original language versions in Vol. XI
of the Prussian Academy of Sciences edition of Kant's Works
(Walter de Gruyter, 1922). My interpretation of Kant owes a great
debt to the work of P.F. Strawson ('Freedom and Resentment', in
Freedom and Resentment (Methuen, 1974), 1-25), and Christine
Korsgaard, whose views on Kant and lying are developed in 'The Right
to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil', Philosophy and Public
Affairs 15, No. 4 (1986), 325-49; and, on Kant and friendship,
in 'Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Responsibility and Reciprocity in
Personal Relations', Philosophical Perspectives 6: Ethics,
James Tomberlin (ed.) (Atascadero, California: The Ridgeview
Publishing Company, 1992).
1 Letter to Kant from Ludwig Ernst Borowski, probably August 1791.
2 Immanuel Kant, The Doctrine of Virtue, Part II of The
Metaphysic of Morals, Mary Gregor (trans) (Harper and Row, 1964).
One wonders whether these parts of The Doctrine of Virtue may
have been influenced by Kant's thoughts about Herbert's predicament.
An alternative explanation might be that The Doctrine of
Virtue and Kant's letter to Herbert are both drawing on Kant's
lecture notes.
3 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Paton (trans.)
(Harper and Row, 1964), 397.
4 Ibid., 398.
5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, L.W. Beck
(trans) (Macmillan, 1956), 97, 101.
6 Ibid., 119.
7 Ibid., 80.
8 Ibid., 117.
9 Op. cit. note 5, 428.
10 Op. cit. note 4, 407.
11 Op. cit. note 7, 118.
12 Ibid.
13 See Susan Wolf, 'Moral Saints', The Journal of Philosophy
79 (1982), 419-39, on the perils of sainthood.
14 See for example op. cit. note 4, 456.
15 Op. cit. note 7, 109.
16 Letters 1, 3 and 4 above. Elisabeth Motherby was the daughter of
Kant's friend Robert Motherby, an English merchant in Kñnigsberg.
17 This is Strawson's way of characterizing the two standpoints in
Kant's moral philosophy (op. cit., note 1).
18 Op. cit. note 4, 462, my italics.
19 Letter 3, my italics.
20 Op. cit. note 4, 471. This is a remarkable metaphor for a
philosopher who finds in the autonomous human self, and its
self-legislating activity, the only source of intrinsic value.
21 Ibid., 471. Kant's ignorance of Antipodean bird life is (just)
forgivable.
22 Ibid., 471.
23 This development of Kant's philosophy is proposed by Korsgaard as
a way of addressing the problem of lying to the murderer at the door,
in Korsgaard (1986), op. cit., note 1. I discuss it in more detail
in the original version of this paper.
24 Op. cit. note 4, 434, 435.
25 There is one final letter from her on the record, dated early
1794, in which she expresses again a wish to visit Kant, and reflects
upon her own desire for death.
26 Ibid., 424.
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