Today's Kantian footnote comes from the middle of the second section of Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.
It's footnote 19 on page 34 of this Hackett edition. I'll give you the text and the footnote and then comment on them briefly.
In this section Kant is talking about the true nature of virtue and the way in which he thinks true virtue
is completely separated from all empirical considerations. Here's the text.
"Hence everything empirical is not only quite unsuitable as a contribution to the principle of morality, but is even highly detrimental to the purity of morals.
For the proper and inestimable worth of an absolutely good will consists precisely in the fact
that the principle of action is free of all influences from contingent grounds, which only experience can furnish.
This lax or even mean way of thinking, which seeks its principle among empirical motives and laws, cannot too much or too often be warned against,
for human reason in its weariness is glad to rest upon this pillow. In a dream of sweet illusions (in which not Juno but a cloud is embraced),
there is substituted for morality some bastard patched up from limbs of quite varied ancestry
and looking like anything one wants to see in it but not looking like virtue to him who has once beheld her in her true form."
Footnote: "To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing other than to present morality stripped of all admixture of what is sensuous
and of every spurious adornment of reward or self-love. How much she then eclipses all else that appears attractive
to the inclinations can be easily seen by everyone with the least effort of his reason, if it be not entirely ruined for all abstraction."
So what's Kant talking about here? Kant begins by telling us that the empirical can form no part of the foundation of moral principles.
And we realize this from our previous study of Kant: that anything empirical, anything sensuous, anything connected with the body or with pleasure
or with results or outcomes in the world, is going to be beneath the level of the pure rational motive that
Kant thinks is at the heart of the categorical imperative. He warns us that this is a lax or mean way of thinking, this is
sort of low and base, this is a temptation that we cannot be too, cannot be too often warned against. Human reason grows weary and becomes lazy
and wants to rest in founding its ethical principles and its ethical motivations on these empirical factors: things like pleasure or reputation
or even satisfying one's own natural inclinations. If I happen to take pleasure in being honest or I happen to take pleasure in assisting other people,
making other people happy, I'm simply fulfilling there a natural inclination of my natural being. I'm not performing a moral act.
So Kant suggests that this kind of Humean temptation towards valuing causing pleasure in others as a source of virtue is a temptation,
is drawing us away from the truth about human rationality and human morality.
He says, one can mistake this sort of bastard Frankenstein monster of natural affections and natural inclinations and pleasures for true virtue.
But no one who's ever seen virtue as it truly is could make this mistake. And this is where his footnote comes in, to define for us what true virtue is.
He tells us: Virtue in its proper form is morality stripped of all admixture of what is sensuous, no sensible or bodily component at all,
no reference to pleasure or nature at all. Stripped of any reward or self-love, considered sort of in its rational purity of the maxim behind the action,
that is what virtue is, Kant seems to be saying. How much she then eclipses all else that appears attractive can be easily seen, Kant says,
with just the very least effort of reason, provided your reason has not been corrupted and ruined for abstraction.
So provided you're still capable of some rational thought, of rising above the sensuous and the physical, you ought to be, everyone, he says,
ought to be very easily able, on just the slightest bit of reflection, to see that the true principles of morality cannot have this empirical basis.
They must have this higher, purer, more rational basis.
So that's my explanation of this Kantian footnote from the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. I hope you found it interesting.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.