Subjective-External Material Practical Principles

What does Kant mean by a ‘subjective-external’ material practical principle? A

‘subjective’ principle in this case cannot necessarily mean ‘personal’ since then it would not be external. The only external object that is also subjective, or put otherwise, that lacks objective necessity, is culture, since culture is relative, yet not relative to each individual’s opinion or feeling. Mores, as opposed to morals, are cultural artifacts that vary like any other custom. In a certain respect, the subjective-external register is the sole locus of investigation taken up by the moral (or cultural) relativist, since the latter conflates morals with mores and looks upon the moral codes of a given society as nothing but an arbitrary set of cultural practices contingently selected from a contingent field of possible valuations, neutral and without voice until selected.

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It is in this respect that Kant’s condemnation of heteronomous principles resonates with the critic of the moral relativist, insofar as moral relativism chains us to the contingencies of our culture’s social and historical determinations without providing an objective position ‘outside’ the system to critique its mores and free us.

Kant identifies two kinds of societal principles: education and civil constitution. Before exploring each individually, it is important to question why Kant distinguishes these two

different subjective-external principles from the general pack of subjective-external principles at all, since this organizational decision might indicate a comprehensive division inherent in the nature of subjective-external objects themselves. In fact, this bifurcation can be noted in the subjective-internal register as well, which may point to a characteristic distinction inherent in all subjective objects (even if the principle that distinguishes them turns out to be different in each register). I take it that Kant implicitly emphasizes this in the second Critique, since he presents here a simplified, perhaps more refined version of the list of subjective-external moral theories that he provides in his Lectures on Ethics.³⁷⁷ The distinction must be more than a difference of scale, since moral education need not be one-on-one, such as the tutor-pupil relationship

Montaigne seems to assume in his essay On the Education of Children.³⁷⁸ Theoretically, what is to stop a much broader moral educational program from being instituted? To solve this mystery, it seems plausible to look at both practical principles as just the determining grounds they are, namely as formative of something. It is not insignificant that a moral education traditionally applies to children while a civil constitution does not. Regardless of the scale of application, a moral education forms individuals (in this case, cultivating those virtues in a child necessary for

377377 Kant, Immanuel, “Moral Philosophy: Collin’s Lecture Notes,” in Lectures on Ethics, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and J.B. Schneewind (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 48-50, specifically 49.

378 “When, according to our common practice, a teacher undertakes to school several minds of very different structure and capacity with the same lessons and the same measure of guidance, it is no wonder that, among a whole multitude of children, he scarcely finds two or three who derive any proper profit from their teaching.” Montaigne.

Michel de, “On the Education of Children” in Essays. (London: Penguin Books, 1958), 55.

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becoming a responsible adult) while a civil constitution forms societies. We would consider an education squandered that merely created an orderly classroom, but a civil constitution

successful that created an orderly society.

Furthermore, we should not be too quick to pass over the apparent contradiction between the subjective axis and the external axis, since it is here, more than anywhere, that Kant

emphasizes de jure universality over de facto universality. In fact, the external-subjective designation indicates the qualitative limits of subjective judgment, which reinforces a distinction Kant makes in the Critique of Practical Reason regarding moral necessity and contingency:

But suppose that finite rational beings were thoroughly agreed with respect to what they had to take as objects of their feelings of pleasure and pain and even with respect to the means they must use to obtain the first and avoid the other; even then they could by no means pass off the principle of self-love as a practical law; for, this unanimity itself would still be only contingent. The determining ground would still be only subjectively valid and merely empirical and would not have the necessity which is thought in every law, namely objective necessity from a priori grounds, unless one had to say that this necessity is not practical at all but only physical, namely that the action is as unavoidably forced from us by our inclination as is yawning when we see others yawn.³⁷⁹

Despite the content of the passage pertaining to happiness, Kant is making a broader point about the limitations of heteronomous principles, especially those principles that could potentially claim that their de facto scope is identical to the scope of a universal and necessary categorical imperative. Since happiness is assumed to be the aim of all rational beings, Kant can use it to test the limits of heteronomy. Happiness, like any contingent psychological state, is a matter of fact. Morality, for Kant, cannot be grounded on matters of fact, since matters of fact are

contingent. As Kant notes in the second Critique, at best such principles can act as ‘general rules’ but never ‘universal rules.’³⁸⁰ Subjective-external principles, whose domain can

theoretically extend to the boundaries of all human artifice, will never so extend as to outstrip the

379 Ibid 159-60 (5:26)

380 Ibid 169 (5:26)

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stain of contingency. A set of mores, even if universally assented to by a cosmic and comprehensive multitude, could always be otherwise.

If the reader may indulge a repackaging of the exposition to follow, Kant outlines not merely a distinct class of moral principle (the subjective-external), but also a different kind of subject: the cultural subject. Such a subject is linked either to societal mores or to civil law and its strictures. Since they are ‘external’ to the pathological immediacy of the individual, we can consider such principles to be ‘ideal.’ Any practical science that stays without the confines of a cultural relativist horizon will find nothing but a patient passively shaped by social forces. The only question such a science may ask is which social force is efficacious. I will now turn to the two forms of subjective-external material practical principles: those grounded in education (Montaigne) and those grounded in civil constitution (Mandeville).

Michel de Montaigne’s ‘Education-based’ Moral Theory

In his essay On the Education of Children, Montaigne argues that a proper education is most of all a moral education. When describing the ideal curriculum, Montaigne notes, “…the first ideas which [the pupil’s] mind should be made to absorb must be those that regulate his behavior and morals, that teach him to know himself, and to know how to die well and live well.”³⁸¹

Our pupil should be told…what it is to know and not to know, what the aim of his study should be; what courage, temperance, and justice are; what the difference is between ambition and greed, servitude and submission, license and liberty; by what signs one may recognize genuine and solid contentment; to what extent we should fear death, suffering, and shame.³⁸²

Foremost amongst the pupil’s education is the liberal art that “makes us free,” philosophy.³⁸³ Already we can note a sentiment shared by Kant and Montaigne: freedom is in the province of morality. Before the pupil has encyclopedic knowledge, the pupil must be reared to know the

381 Montaigne. Michel de, “On the Education of Children” in Essays. (London: Penguin Books, 1958), 65.

382 Ibid 65.

383 Ibid 65.

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proper way to use that knowledge, since, as Plato acknowledges in the Republic, the most knowledgeable have the greatest potential to abuse the knowledge they have.³⁸⁴

Montaigne opposed theoretical pedagogical agendas that bore no practical fruit, favoring instead a pruning of speculative investigations:

If we knew how to restrict our life-functions within their just and natural limits, we should find that most of the branches of knowledge in their current usage are valueless to us; and that even in those which are valuable, there are quite profitless stretches and depths which we should do better to avoid.³⁸⁵

Pedagogy should be hands-on rather than based on the excruciating study of texts (Montaigne sometimes reminds us of how few classics he has actually read from cover to cover).³⁸⁶ In line with this approach, the tutor necessarily teaches the pupil that the practice of virtue is joyous rather than burdensome,³⁸⁷ just as all learning should be.³⁸⁸ Montaigne tears down traditional walls, such as those between happiness and virtue, world and classroom, and mind and body, since an education divorced from utility is constantly at odds with everyday life and can never hope to gain traction in the heart of a pupil who must spend the majority of life outside

classroom walls. The world itself becomes the pupil’s classroom,³⁸⁹ a classroom that lends its pupil a lens that puts his or her own circumstances in global perspective.³⁹⁰ Furthermore, the reserve of the mind must be shored up by the natural endurance of a properly trained and hardened body: “When athletes ape the endurance of philosophers, it is rather out of strong

384 Plato, Republic, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004) 495a-b.

385 Montaigne 65.

386 Ibid 49-50. “But as for plunging any deeper, or for biting my nails over the study of Aristotle, the monarch of modern learning, or stoutly pursuing any particular branch of knowledge, that I have never done…I have never settled down to any solid book except Plutarch and Seneca, into which I dip like the Danaids, filling and emptying my cup incessantly. Some part of my reading sticks to this paper, but to myself little or nothing sticks.”

387 Ibid 67-9.

388 Ibid 72-3.

389 Ibid 61. “He must be warned that when in company he should have his eyes everywhere…Let an honest curiosity be instilled in him, so that he may inquire into everything; if there is anything remarkable in his neighborhood let him go see it, whether it is a building, a fountain, a man, the site of an ancient battle, or a place visited by Caesar or Charlemagne.”

390 Ibid 63-4.

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nerves than a steadfast heart.”³⁹¹ And likewise, all idiosyncrasies of taste must be trained out of the pupil, so that he or she can adapt to any custom or circumstance no matter how foreign or unusual; the pupil should always choose the good deliberately rather than merely out of incapacity.³⁹² “It is not a soul or a body that one is training, but a man; the two must not be separated.”³⁹³

However, a complication in Kant’s account immediately arises: in what way can education be a motivating end for the will? Perhaps Kant means that education is what shapes the will, and thus determines it, but what is in question for a practical principle is not the method by which an ethics is acquired but the content of that ethics; what it instructs us to do. In what way is education such a content?

It is in Kant’s Lectures on Ethics that a clearer (but not necessarily more accurate) representation of Montaigne’s position is presented which explains how education can act as a practical material principle:

The empirical system of the theoretical concept of morality includes…external grounds. Those who posit morality therein say that all morality rests on two things: on education and on government. All morality would be a mere custom, and we judge by custom concerning all actions, by rules of education or by laws of the sovereign authority. So moral judgment arises by way of example or legal prescription. Montaigne took the first view. He says: In different parts of the world we also find that men differ in regard to morality; thus in Africa, theft is allowed, in China parents are permitted to throw their children on the street, the Eskimos strange them, and in Brazil they are buried alive.³⁹⁴

Here Kant refers to practical principles based on education as ‘rules’ and ‘examples.’ Further on the same page, Kant elucidates this further, claiming that Montaigne’s position (one that assumes education is the determining ground of the will) is that something is moral merely by virtue of

391 Ibid 58-9.

392 Ibid 74.

393 Ibid 72.

394 Kant, Immanuel, “Moral Philosophy: Collin’s Lecture Notes,” in Lectures on Ethics, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and ed. J.B. Schneewind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 49 (27:253-4).

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custom, or by virtue of being taught it is right to perform. Regarding lying, “Were it to rest upon education…then anyone educated…where lying is permitted, would be at liberty to lie.”³⁹⁵

Is this typology congruent with Montaigne’s own position? What is the possible source material for this apparent caricature? While it is unclear which Montaigne essays Kant himself read, there is some textual support for Kant’s reading. Note for example Chapter XXII of Montaigne’s famous Essays, called ‘Of Custom, and that we should not easily change a law received:’

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom; every one having an inward veneration for the opinions and manners approved and received amongst his own people, cannot without very great reluctance depart from them, nor apply himself to them without applause…[W]hatever is off the hinges of custom is believed to be also off the hinges of reason… ³⁹⁶

By itself, this does not sufficiently demonstrate that Montaigne equates the laws of conscience with morality as such (Kant certainly did not). Nor is there anything prescriptive indicated about this passage.

It is later in this essay that Montaigne shifts from a descriptive to a prescriptive approach to custom, which may give some credence to Kant’s reading:

Let us take another view of the subject: it is a very great doubt whether any so manifest an advantage can accrue from the alteration of a law or custom received, let it be what it will, as there is danger and inconvenience in doing it; forasmuch as government is a structure composed of several parts and members joined and united together, with so strict affinity and union that it is impossible to stir so much as one brick or stone but the whole body will be sensible of it…For my own part I have myself a very great aversion for novelty, what face, or what pretence soever it may carry along with it, and have reason, having been an eye-witness of the great mischiefs produced.³⁹⁷

He follows this with a curious epistemological position: “[It seems] to me very wrong to wish to subject public and established customs and institutions to the weakness and instability of a

395 Kant Lectures on Ethics 49 (27:254).

396 Montaigne, Michel de, Complete Works of Michael de Montaigne. Trans. William Hazlitt (London: John Templeman, 1842) 44.

397 Ibid 46.

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private and particular fancy (for private reason is but a private jurisdiction)…”³⁹⁸ This is not to say that all innovation must be banned outright, as even Montaigne concedes that there are rare occasions that necessitate it, but that without “the hoary beard and wrinkled face of ancient use,”

namely custom, we would grow dissatisfied with a great many things bolstered by custom alone which we should nonetheless practice.³⁹⁹ This seems to be a very strange uncritical position for a philosopher to take. Not only that, but it seems that the grounds Montaigne gives for endorsing obedience to custom – societal stability – would be the implicit moral motivator, not the

authority of custom as such.

Interestingly enough, as we have seen, Montaigne has given us insight into how he thinks a child should be educated, in On the Education of Children. If the principles of a moral

education were up to the caprice of the tutor, then anything would go, which is clearly not Montaigne’s position on the matter. At minimum, that would suggest that the tutor must work within certain constraints. And while it is likely that those constraints, and thus those virtues, at least overlap with those venerated by (French) society, Montaigne, perhaps in a moment of hypocrisy, seems to be advocating a kind of pedagogical reform which is contrary to his hardline against most innovation. Nonetheless, what is relevant is not the accuracy of Kant’s account, but instead how it acts as an exemplar for a possible moral position in a grand meta-ethical system:

one of two versions of moral relativism.

Bernard Mandeville’s ‘Civil Government’ based Moral Theory

The other form of subjective-external practical material principle Kant mentions is political rather than cultural, and includes familiar social contract theories that littered the early modern philosophical landscape, such as those espoused by Thomas Hobbes and Bernard

398 Ibid 47.

399 Ibid 44-5.

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Mandeville. Although Kant mentions both Hobbes and Mandeville in his Ethics lecture, he specifically singles out Bernard Mandeville in the Critique of Practical Reason. Since the modern reader is likely familiar with Hobbes but not Mandeville, I will go more in-depth with Mandeville’s theory, as expressed in his essay An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue rather than Hobbes’ theory, espoused in the Leviathan.

Before I begin, I need to note a discrepancy between the Lectures and the Second Critique. In the Lectures, Kant refers to Mandeville’s principle not as a subjective-external moral principle, but as instead resting on “inner grounds:”⁴⁰⁰

Those who derive morality from the inner grounds of the empirical principle, postulate a feeling, a physical and moral feeling. The physical feeling consists in self-love, which takes two forms, vanity and self-interest. It aims at one’s own advantage, and is a self-seeking principle, whereby our senses are satisfied. It is a principle of prudence. The authors who uphold the principle of self-love include, among the…moderns, Helvetius and Mandeville.

Oppose this to his characterization of Hobbes’ theory, which he says is determined on “external grounds:”

[Hobbes] says: the sovereign can permit all acts, and also forbid them, so actions cannot be judged morally by reason; we act, rather by example of custom and by order of authority, so that there can be no moral principle other than what is borrowed from experience.⁴⁰¹

If Kant originally characterizes Mandeville’s position in the Lectures as based on an inner

principle of self-love (as we will see, primarily based on vanity), why should he re-characterize it as based on an external principle - ‘civil government’ - in the Critique of Practical Reason?

To understand how Mandeville’s moral theory lends itself to this ambiguous reading, I will need to provide an exposition of the moral account found in An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, an essay found in the larger, popular text The Fable of the Bees. The text starts with a poem called ‘The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves turn’d Honest, which uses a bee hive as an allegory to explain the necessary role of vice in a thriving society. To demonstrate the

400 Kant, Immanuel, “Moral Philosophy: Collin’s Lecture Notes,” in Lectures on Ethics, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and ed. J.B. Schneewind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 48 (27:253).

401 Ibid 49 (27:253).

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importance of vice to social prosperity, Mandeville tells the story of how a once vicious but affluent bee hive dispensed with vice, took up of mantel of virtue, and with it, dispensed with all

importance of vice to social prosperity, Mandeville tells the story of how a once vicious but affluent bee hive dispensed with vice, took up of mantel of virtue, and with it, dispensed with all