Happiness and the Command of Morality

In the final, exceedingly brief chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant offers a perfunctory account of what he calls “The History of Pure Reason” (A852/B880-A855/B883). Such a history, he explains, will need to be filled in later, but for now Kant offers a preliminary view of this history from the transcendental perspective of pure reason that describes the edifices of such a past, all of them in ruins (A852/B880). Before entering the discussions familiar from prior discussions, those of Leibniz vs. Locke (intellectualist/empiricist) and Wolff vs. Hume (dogmatism/skepticism), Kant compares Plato as the philosopher of ideas to Epicurus, “the foremost philosopher of sensibility” (A853/B881), rejecting both. Such a rejection of the Epicurean conception, one that prioritizes the sensible in both epistemological pursuits and ethical ones, is no surprise. Just prior to “The History of Pure Reason” chapter, Kant explains that his interest in reason, both speculative and practical, relates to three questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What should I do? 3. What may I hope? The first is the topic of the Critique of Pure Reason, the second that of the Critique of Practical Reason, and the third, Kant explains, relates to happiness, “the satisfaction of all of our inclinations” (A806/B834). Happiness, Kant explains, foreshadowing his moral writings, offers only pragmatic rules of prudence, mere hypothetical imperatives, but no role for reason. Kant explains that reason, in it’s pursuit of the law of morality, the categorical imperative, determines only our “worthiness to be happy.” Kant re-iterates such a rejection of any role for reason in the pursuit of happiness in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, where he explains that Reason is so ill suited for the pursuit of happiness that if happiness were its goal, misology would be its fate (4:395-6). Such a position is also to be found in the Analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason where Kant explains the principle of happiness as the opposite of the principle of morality: in the pursuit of happiness self-love ‘counsels’, while morality commands (5:26). So it’s a surprise when one finally reaches the Dialectic of the Critique of Practical Reason Kant returns to the already rejected Epicurean pursuit of happiness. Kant explains that while moral virtue has been shown to be the “supreme good” (5:110) of human life, still it is not the complete good, for that would require happiness as well, and happiness. This combination of morality and happiness, of the goals of the Stoic and of the Epicurian, Kant calls the “highest good [höchsten Gute]” (5:111). And yet how such pursuits avoid contradicting each other is hardly clear. In this paper I will investigate Kant’s antinomy of pure practical reason, asking both why Kant returns to Epicurean happiness, and how he is able to solve this apparent contradiction without denying humanity her highest good. In so doing I will suggest that Epicureanism plays a more essential role in Kant’s History of Pure Reason.