2. Happiness and its Problems

As Alison Hills observes, Kant sometimes defines happiness in subjective terms, that is, as a state of complete satisfaction, and sometimes in objective terms, namely, as the fulfilment of desires, wishes, inclinations, ends. She takes these to be different accounts of happiness:

But we do not have to attribute indecision to Kant if we consider these different accounts simply to be addressing the subjective and objective components of a single idea of happiness. Moreover, by exploring the character of the subjective, psychological state of happiness, we will see that Hills is also incorrect to identify contentment and pleasure. Complete satisfaction is a key component of the general account of the subjective state that is happiness, while the agreeable/gratification and contentment (equilibrium) could be said to be two competing empirical conceptions of the kind of complete satisfaction that is constitutive of happiness, subjectively speaking. Aesthetic judging and its pleasure then inform, I think, a third conception, a socially integrative well-being that is ‘commensurate’ with humankind.

At the same time that we resist associating pleasure and contentment too closely, we should also resist dissociating them to the point that they are relegated to different orders. Victoria Wike’s account of Kant’s view of happiness makes the latter mistake when associating pleasure with happiness and dissociating pleasure from morality. She relies upon the distinction between ‘sensible’ and ‘intelligible’ happiness: on her view, pleasures are sensible, so any intelligible ‘happiness’ (resulting from moral progress, for instance) cannot be pleasurable. This leads her to reduce ‘moral happiness’ (R, 6: 75n.) to self-contentment (Wike Reference Wike1994: 13–14). Kant’s aesthetic theory, however, signals a change in his thinking about moral feelings: he no longer denies but rather affirms that they can be pleasures. For instance, while the second Critique insists that moral feeling is the feeling of respect, which cannot be a pleasure (5: 77, 117), the Metaphysics of Morals claims that the moral feeling is ‘the susceptibility to feel pleasure or displeasure merely from being aware that our actions are consistent with or contrary to the law of duty’ (6: 399). And though Kant says in the second Critique that the comfort arising from knowing one has done one’s duty ‘is not happiness, not even the smallest part of happiness’ (5: 88; see also 117), this does not entail that this feeling of ‘comfort’ is merely negative. The Metaphysics of Morals characterizes it as a moral pleasure that goes beyond negative contentment:

The third Critique accounts for the differences we see between these pre-1790 texts and the Metaphysics of Morals. This is because, as Rachel Zuckert has argued, the third Critique offers a way to distinguish among different kinds of pleasure (Zuckert Reference Zuckert2002: 242). According to Kant’s earlier view, pleasure is simply sensation, but he concedes in the CAJ that such a view would entail that all pleasures have ‘the same effect on the will’ and aim at the same end, no matter whether they are pleasures in the good or pleasures of gratification (§3, 5: 206). His aesthetic theory allows him to distinguish pleasures by considering whether they involve reflection. Only the agreeable pleases ‘immediately’; pleasures in beauty and the good depend upon ‘reflection’. The good depends upon reflection about ‘whether [something] is merely mediately good or immediately good (whether it is useful or good in itself)’ (§4, 5: 208); with pleasure in beauty ‘reflection on the object … leads to some sort of concept (it is indeterminate which), and is thereby also distinguished from the agreeable, which rests entirely on sensation’ (5: 207).

According to the idea of it, happiness is a subjective state, namely, the experience of ‘our greatest well-being’ (G, 4: 416) not only in the present but also ‘in every future condition’ (4: 418). In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant puts it this way: ‘It is called happiness (continuous well-being, enjoyment of life, complete satisfaction with one’s condition)’ (6: 480). Because the idea of happiness involves reflection on one’s state and the judgement of being completely satisfied with one’s condition as a whole, happiness requires rational capacities not possessed by animals.Footnote ⁴ Our idea of the state of happiness is of a subjectively experienced totality, or whole, that includes the subject, her feeling of well-being or satisfaction in the present, and her ‘complete satisfaction’ with her life as a whole, including all present (even, we might think, presently experienced memories) and future states. Whether or not we are capable of experiencing this psychological state, even if its objective conditions are satisfied, is the key question motivating my analysis of Kant’s aesthetics.Footnote ⁵ In order to pursue an answer to this question, however, we must also keep in mind the possible objective conditions of this state.

As already noted, Kant suggests that happiness is, objectively speaking, the satisfaction of all inclinations, desires, wishes and ends, while at other times it is simply the attainment of (the sum of) one’s freely chosen ends. For instance, in the Groundwork, when distinguishing happiness and duty Kant says that duty is the ‘counterweight of [the human being’s] needs and inclinations, the entire satisfaction of which he sums up under the name happiness’ (4: 405). And according to the second Critique, ‘happiness is the state of a rational being in the world of whose existence everything goes according to his wish and will and rests on the harmony of nature with his whole end as well as with the essential determining ground of his will’ (5: 124).Footnote ⁶ But Kant also insists that ‘what is called happiness’ is the ‘attainment’ of ‘the sum of all ends’ (TP, 8: 282).Footnote ⁷ This may be coupled with the claim in the Introduction to the third Critique that the attainment of any end is accompanied by pleasure (5: 187). While I do not attempt to reconcile these differences here, we can at least see that Kant may distinguish between what we might assume are the objective conditions of happiness prior to adequate reflection and those that we endorse upon more careful reflection: for one’s own inclinations and wishes often conflict and cannot all be satisfied, and prudence is required to determine the ‘means’ to one’s greatest (as opposed to merely fleeting) well-being. Thus this apparent inconsistency seems to reflect not indecision or lack of clarity on Kant’s part but simply sensitivity to the ineradicable lack of clarity in how happiness is generally conceived. That Kant affirms happiness as the sum of all ends in ‘Theory and Practice’ is arguably an endorsement of what he believes is simply to be included in the best way to think of our happiness, especially given the deficiencies of any alternative.

The Anthropology, to which we now turn, is particularly helpful for our purposes because it introduces the problem of happiness in a way to which his aesthetic theory is most easily able to relate, that is, in terms of the subjective, psychological conditions of happiness and not simply in terms of its objective conditions. Susan Meld Shell has explored the evolution of Kant’s view of what one could refer to as a subjective experience of human happiness and how his revised view appreciates the difficulties we have in conceiving of what it would feel like (Shell Reference Shell and Jacobs2003). Shell argues that happiness is a potentially insoluble problem for Kant because he insists on the predominance of pain in human life, the limited and limiting character of sensuous pleasures, and the peculiarity of the mental state of happiness (according to our idea of it), which is a ‘totality’ of satisfaction and thus distinguishable from typical experiences. Thus, rather than focus on the problem of our ignorance of the objective conditions that will cause our happiness, whose solution would require omniscience (G, 4: 418), Kant instead directs his attention to the problem of the apparent incompatibility of our idea of happiness (the idea of a totality of well-being) and the finitude (incompleteness) of our everyday experiences of satisfaction.

Shell’s analysis of the problem of happiness reveals that Kant is aware that the difficulties of achieving happiness are not merely objective, amounting to the external barriers of achieving our ends within nature, but subjective, amounting to the psychological barriers that continually stand in the way of our prolonged and complete enjoyment of the ends we do achieve. Shell demonstrates that, for Kant, our efforts to experience happiness according to our idea of it (‘continuous well-being, enjoyment of life, complete satisfaction with one’s condition’) either through gratification or through self-sufficiency (contentment) are doomed to failure. In the first case, there is a limit to how much pleasure in gratification we can stand, let alone enjoy; and contentment, even if achieved, does not seem to us to count as happiness.Footnote ⁸ Assuming these are the only ways to achieve ‘complete satisfaction’ with our condition, the problem of the subjective experience of happiness is insoluble.

Shell traces the development of Kant’s ‘True Economy of Human Nature’ through his lectures on anthropology from 1772 to 1798, identifying his encounter with Pietro Verri’s Del piacere e del dolere (published in German in 1777) as the key turning point. Kant accepts Verri’s claim that pain outweighs pleasure in human life, insisting in fact that ‘nothing endures in us but pain’ (25: 1070; Shell Reference Shell and Jacobs2003: 216).Footnote ⁹ But physical and mental pain is purposive because it provokes us to change our condition, to make plans and to develop our capacities in an effort to free ourselves from discomfort. Pleasure, in contrast, prompts us simply to preserve our state. Were we to be capable of an ever-enduring pleasure, it seems we might never develop at all (25: 1071). But, in fact, we ‘cannot stand ever enduring pleasure’ (25: 1070); our enjoyments are not ‘self-sufficient’ like pain, but ‘require contrast’ (Shell Reference Shell and Jacobs2003: 215). Thus the human being ‘lives away in a future time, and cannot linger (verweilen) in the present’ (25: 1070; Shell Reference Shell and Jacobs2003: 216).

Given that pain outweighs pleasure in our psychological life, Kant rethinks human happiness.Footnote ¹⁰ According to Shell, once he becomes convinced of Verri’s outlook he no longer believes that happiness is ‘achievable through fortitude of mind’ and that ‘a single principle of “life” or “spirit” unit[es] the physical and intellectual realms’ (Shell Reference Shell and Jacobs2003: 195). And while he continues to maintain that happiness is ‘a state mediated by the mind (Gemüth)’, involving ‘an estimation, of which man alone is capable, of the “value” of our condition in its entirety or as a “whole”’ (Shell Reference Shell and Jacobs2003: 196), Verri’s outlook introduces two complications. First, given that pain predominates in human life, and this is an indisputable and unchangeable fact of life, happiness, if achieved, would have to be based not upon our estimation of the predominance of pleasure but in spite of the predominance of pain. Second, the mental state of happiness should be an enduring enjoyment, but ‘Man cannot represent to himself what an enduring enjoyment would be, in which fear and hope did not interchange’ (25: 1075); thus ‘we can make no concept’ of happiness as ‘the greatest sum of enjoyment’ (die größte Summe von Freude) (25: 1081; Shell Reference Shell and Jacobs2003: 216).

Striving for ‘sufficiency’ or contentment appears the better course: ‘Thus the dispensability of all enjoyments is the condition of wellbeing, in which one is above all remedies against pain; only this is not a condition we find with any human being’ (25: 1071–2; Shell Reference Shell and Jacobs2003: 217). Since we cannot achieve contentment in life, we must simply try to approach it through work, which provides the greatest ‘relief’ and the ‘only course of wisdom’ for ‘securing him a “capital of satisfaction” to draw on that does not depend upon “contingencies or the law of nature”’ (APV, 7: 237; Shell Reference Shell and Jacobs2003: 221). Whereas enjoyments ‘squander’ and ‘spend’ the ‘life force’ and discomforts ‘compress’ it (25: 1089), Shell explains that work ‘nourishes our talents and thus encourages rather than exhaust[s] our life force’ (Reference Shell and Jacobs2003: 218). At the same time, even ideal contentment does not adequately harmonize with our idea of happiness:

Absolute contentment, while more determinate and approachable than happiness as gratification, would bring us closer to death than to life. Driving home the problem Kant’s new outlook faces, Shell turns to his claim in the Groundwork (4: 418–19): happiness is ‘merely an “ideal of the imagination”, demanding attainment, per impossibile, or “the totality of a series of results that is in fact infinite”’ (Shell Reference Shell and Jacobs2003: 220). She concludes that, for Kant, ‘Totality is an idea of reason that cannot be felt (except, perhaps, in the toils of the sublime); and happiness is not the natural end of life (in any but a terminal sense). We can think of happiness “only in progress” that “can never be completed”; should it do so, “happiness would cease”’ (p. 221).

But here I depart from Shell, for it is not in ‘the toils of the sublime’ that we come closest to a ‘feeling’ of this ‘totality’. Reflection on aesthetic pleasure in beauty in comparison with contentment and gratification reveals that it comes closer to the completeness associated with the state of happiness, even though it is not the state of happiness (clearly, the objective conditions of happiness are not met). For this reason it may be in a position to inform an alternative conception of happiness. The Anthropology itself gives us reason to expect this. After Kant has discussed the various deficiencies of conceiving of either contentment or the enjoyment of sensual pleasures as the ‘means of becoming happy with one’s life’, he turns to taste for a contrast: ‘One way of enjoying ourselves is also a way of cultivating ourselves; that is, increasing the capacity for having more enjoyment of this kind, and this applies to the sciences and the fine arts’ (APV, 7: 236). In other words, enjoyment in our cultivation can be felt in the flow of time (unlike contentment) and involves our activity and cultural progress (unlike sensual enjoyments). Even more importantly, however, the problem of a subjective experience of happiness is developed only within the first half of his discussion of pleasure and pain, which considers pleasures that merely ‘amuse’ the senses, before he moves on to discuss ‘the feeling for the beautiful’ (‘the partly sensuous, partly intellectual pleasure in reflective intuition’ (APV, 7: 239)) and the faculty of taste.Footnote ¹¹

Aesthetic pleasure is also presented in the CAJ in terms that are quite relevant to his account of happiness. This might be expected since the two conceptions of happiness Kant examines in the Anthropology, gratification and contentment, are characterized in relation to pleasure. For the sake of happiness, the former indiscriminately recommends a maximized aggregation of pleasures while the latter recommends against any enjoyments that threaten one’s equilibrium. We also saw that our happiness (according to our idea of it) would involve complete satisfaction in the sense of a subjective totality and that, as psychological states, the aggregation of sensual pleasure (gratification) and feelings of contentment fail, in different ways, to live up to this idea. But Kant himself characterizes the experience of aesthetic judging in the CAJ as a felt totality that is constituted in part by a pleasure that is self-sustaining, or so I will argue in the next section. In the end, aesthetic pleasure, once considered in light of the problem of happiness, is in a position to inform a new empirical conception of happiness.

3. Aesthetic Experience and the Idea of Happiness

Aesthetic judging of beauty, I suggest, is a pleasurable state of mind that achieves a subjectively purposive wholeness, or totality, through its ability to maintain itself. Any pleasure is ‘in agreement with itself’; yet, pleasure in beauty ‘strengthens and reproduces itself’ (§12, 5: 222). ‘The pleasure itself’ is, according to Kant, ‘our consciousness of the merely formal purposiveness in the play of the cognitive powers of the subject’, and this is ‘because it contains … an internal causality (which is purposive) with regard to cognition in general, but without being restricted to a particular cognition’ (§12, 5: 222).Footnote ¹² The harmonious activity is not constrained by any concept or set of concepts, yet the imagination is not without limits. The harmonious activity of these faculties is free within the limits of ‘cognition in general’. The limit of the imagination is not externally imposed but rather set by itself, for Kant insists that the harmonious play reveals that it is the ‘natural’ disposition of the imagination to agree with the understanding’s need for unity (§59, 5: 353).

The harmonious play may be characterized as a dynamic whole, and this is in part because it at least appears that no matter what the imagination does, no matter what content it produces, it ‘agrees’ with the understanding; its activity, so long as the play persists, is felt to lie within and not outside of this whole. The whole is the unity of the two parts in proper relation to one another and involves, one might say, the willing yet unencumbered activity of the imagination within the understanding’s constraints. The felt completeness is achieved only because the two become united within a whole, the feeling of which they create through their properly related activity in response to formal features of the representation. This felt completeness incorporates the completeness of content in reflection; aesthetic ideas

Indeed, ‘An aesthetic idea cannot become a cognition, because it is an intuition (of the imagination) for which a concept can never be found adequate’ (§57, 5: 342). Thus our pleasurable state in aesthetic judging can quite plausibly be characterized as a felt (though not also a thought) totality.

In addition, pleasure in aesthetic judging is experienced as an enduring, self-sufficient pleasure. As such, it incorporates, at least to some extent, the self-sufficiency prioritized by contentment (and its feelings of equilibrium) but without the accompanying defects of sensual pleasure. Pleasure in aesthetic judging is enduring and self-sufficient like the underlying, enduring state of unease/pain (25: 1070) and so it appears also capable of enduring without contrast (like this underlying pain). But unlike pain, which is passive, the self-sufficiency of enduring pleasure in aesthetic judging is made possible by the activity of the cognitive faculties. The harmonious play is a purposive state of mind in which the imagination and understanding achieve an ‘internal causality’ as they ‘play’ with the given representation:

Thus pleasure in beauty is experienced as an enduring state without being passive like the underlying state of pain because it is produced by and constituted through an active mind (through the engagement of its cognitive faculties).

In addition, pleasure in aesthetic judging endures like the underlying state of pain/unease without requiring contrast like other pleasures. It may therefore facilitate a transition from simply valuing pleasure as a relief from pain (in the economy of human nature) to enjoying pleasure for its own sake. Drawing from Verri’s account in the 1770s, Kant insists that sensual pleasure is experienced as a relief from pain and cannot endure on its own, not only because such pleasures become stale and even unpleasant as their duration increases but also because these pleasures are only felt in contrast with pain and thus depend upon prior pain. Since Kant explicitly goes on in the Anthropology to distinguish pleasure in beauty as an exception, encouraging his students to occupy themselves with the fine arts as a means for cultivating themselves, it is clear that such pleasure does not suffer from the same deficiencies as ‘passive’ pleasures. His point is to insist that sensual pleasures often do not deliver what they promise: we take pleasure in anticipating them, but upon enjoyment of them, they fall short. They rarely live up to expectations in the here and now. Pleasure in beauty is different. It is unexpected, for we cannot know a priori that any particular object will enable us to feel pleasure in beauty. It also allows us to linger in the ‘now’ in the enjoyment of our activity.

Though Kant never argues explicitly that pleasure in beauty could endure in the same way that the underlying state of pain does, an analysis of his characterization of such pleasure makes clear that we experience it as if it could. Pain is an underlying state of passivity against which we actively resist and from which we seek relief. In contrast, a pleasure in which we are enticed to linger but which does not ‘squander’ the ‘life force’ or ‘enervate the heart’, but rather nourishes it by activating and integrating our capacities, is an experience of a potentially enduring state. Just like work, which resembles ‘contentment’ in the flow of time because it activates our capacities, such a pleasure would appear to sustain us. But unlike work, which relates only to ‘pleasure in prospect’, such an active pleasure would be pleasurable in itself and in the moment. This is precisely what pleasure in beauty involves. Moreover, while this pleasure is like work insofar as it helps to cultivate our capacities, we would enjoy it even if we were ‘fully’ cultivated. Work is not so easily incorporated into an ultimate state of happiness, as the culmination of our progress.

While the third Critique does not explicitly link aesthetic experience to happiness, universal happiness in the idea of the highest good is one of the central and culminating interests of the Critique of Teleological Judgement. There Kant argues that without the idea of a divine creator of nature, we would have to ‘surrender’ ‘the aim of realizing the final end in the world (a happiness of rational beings harmoniously coinciding with conformity to the moral law, as the highest and best thing in the world) by conformity to the moral law’ (§87, 5: 451).Footnote ¹³ But discussions of happiness are not isolated to the CTJ. The handful of comments about happiness in the CAJ and the introductions almost exclusively critique our common beliefs about happiness, either because we fail to give priority to moral goodness as the condition of our happiness or because we assume it can be experienced in isolation from others. Kant’s preoccupation with the problem of happiness lies just beneath the surface of the CAJ.

The First Moment, for instance, insists that happiness conceived of as agreeableness (gratification) is not a ‘true good’ (§4, 5: 208) and that even ‘heavenly enjoyment’ is not in itself ‘an obligation’ (§4, 5: 209n.). Kant’s criticism is directed towards a specific notion of happiness: gratification, or the merely agreeable. But that aesthetics is inseparable from Kant’s thoughts about happiness is confirmed later on in the CAJ when he rebukes those who ‘dream’ of a happiness in isolation, by ‘fleeing’ human beings; it involves no ‘pleasure in human beings’ (General Remark, 5: 276–7). This suggests that taste is not unrelated to happiness and simply a preparation for morality, for the ‘pleasure in human beings’ it cultivates is also considered here to be partly constitutive of our happiness. And when Kant then insists that the ‘dignity of humanity’ and ‘right of human beings’ have nothing to do with ‘their happiness’ in a comment about merely agreeable arts, this critique is also directed specifically to happiness as gratification. For in distinguishing the agreeable from the beautiful, he criticizes novels, sentimental plays and certain sermons for ‘enervating the heart’ and being aligned with the most common conception of happiness: one that that prioritizes a reader’s noble feelings over her moral goodness insofar as they use morality as a mere means to some effect on feeling (General Remark, 5: 273). It is for this reason that he insists that happiness is completely unrelated to dignity and right. Thus the hard distinction he makes in this passage between duty and happiness is in fact between duty and the agreeable (gratification), which in this case does not allow duty to be its condition (indeed, it reverses the order).Footnote ¹⁴ Finally, Kant begins the First Introduction by insisting that happiness conceived of as contentment is wholly incorporated into a philosophy of nature and is not a part of practical philosophy (20: 196). He claims that though contentment appears to conform to the requirements of morality, it uses the appearance of morality (the moderation of inclinations) as a means to individual contentment (see also Introduction, 5: 173).

From this we see that Kant opens his CAJ and the third Critique as a whole with these somewhat critical remarks about our common conceptions of happiness, concludes the CTJ by insisting that happiness, if it is an objective end, must be conditional on our collective moral goodness, and concludes the CAJ by invoking the idea of a happiness that (apparently in distinction from gratification and contentment) is appropriate to humankind. Thus, though the CAJ culminates in an argument defending a relation between morality and beauty that distances pleasure in beauty from happiness conceived of as agreeableness, it is also suggestive of a link between the pleasure of aesthetic judging and an alternative to contentment and gratification as constitutive of happiness, namely, a conception of a socially integrative happiness ‘appropriate’ to humankind. Before exploring this potential, let us look to the Anthropology once more, given that it points us in this direction.

We have already considered the Anthropology’s high praise for the pleasure in aesthetic judging, which set it apart from sensual, ‘enervating’ pleasures. But the last part of his discussion of pleasure and pain focusing on taste includes a passage that ties the idea of a ‘beautiful soul’ to the idea of universally consistent pleasures. It claims that taste ‘gathers’ together all of our judgements of sensuous pleasure that are consistent with moral goodness:

I take Kant to be arguing that the good soul is the condition of the possibility of the beautiful soul, which requires the compatibility of pleasure with morality. Yet, as he points out just before this, it is the soul’s beauty that draws us towards identification with the good soul: ‘beauty … carries with it the concept of an invitation to the most intimate union with the object, that is, to immediate enjoyment (zum unmittelbaren Genuß)’ (APV, 7: 241). In other words, the beauty of the good soul entices us with a promise of enjoyment but only on condition of moral goodness.

Clearly the beautiful soul is no ordinary beautiful object; rather than conflating the two, Kant seems simply to be trying to emphasize the moral significance of beauty in general by relating beauty to the beautiful soul. Taste, he suggests, identifies which pleasures are necessarily compatible with ‘the freedom of understanding’ (APV, 7: 244). Kant previously had claimed that the a priori principle of judgements of taste ‘must spring from the subject’s giving of universal law and so from reason’ (7: 241). When he concludes the discussion of the beautiful soul by claiming that the judgement of taste ‘comes under the principle of duty’ and therefore ‘has a tendency toward the external advancement of morality’ (7: 244), he bases this not on the judgement’s disinterestedness (as he does in the CAJ) but rather on the compatibility the judgement reveals between universally communicable pleasures and duty: ‘it is a satisfaction in the agreement of the subject’s pleasure with the feeling of everyone else according to a universal law’ (ibid.).Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, what becomes clear in aesthetic experience, according to this passage, is that ‘reason’ has made it so that we all necessarily take satisfaction in those pleasures that are universally communicable; and they are in fact communicable only because their realization is constrained by moral duty and so consistent with and even conducive to moral goodness. Beauty reveals ‘law’ to be (one might say) interested in our universally communicable pleasures, for beauty ‘gathers’ together some of the means for our collective enjoyment of life that are (thanks to an a priori principle) necessarily consistent with and even conducive to our moral goodness.

4. An Alternative Empirical Conception of Well-Being

According to the Anthropology, then, pleasure in beauty indicates that reason is interested in the harmonization of universally communicable pleasures and our collective moral goodness. Kant’s characterization of aesthetic experience in the CAJ is in a position to follow this thread by informing a socially integrative conception of well-being (a happiness commensurate with humanity) that could conceivably harmonize with our collective moral goodness.

We need only look to the way that Kant uses aesthetic pleasure as a model for living well in the Anthropology in order to see how in the CAJ it might inform a new empirical conception of socially integrative well-being. When defending our use of ‘taste’ to refer to the sensual experience of food, Kant illuminates a significant relation between sensual pleasures and taste: that we might use aesthetic pleasure as a model for how best to enjoy our sensual and otherwise ‘private’ sensations. Kant characterizes pleasure in beauty as an ‘ideal feeling’ that the good host attempts to evoke in approximation when he uses the meal ‘as the vehicle for supporting the company’: the host chooses ‘with universal validity’ when he ‘sets up his meeting with variety, so that everyone will find something that suits his sense, which yields a comparative universal validity’ (APV, 7: 242). As a result, the enjoyment in a ‘good meal in good company’ can be sustained and repeated more than any other enjoyment ‘in which sensibility and understanding unite’ (ibid.). By using pleasure in beauty as a model, he is able to claim that ‘to live with taste’ in a broader sense is to achieve ‘the due proportion of living well to sociability’ so that enjoyments are ‘mutually beneficial’ and ‘calculated to last’ (7: 250).

These reflections suggest that aesthetic judging and its pleasure could support a conception of well-being that stands in contrast to the well-being promised by gratification or contentment. This is not to say that aesthetic pleasure would serve as a determinate ideal of happiness, but simply that, as an ‘ideal feeling’, it could inform the still indeterminate ideal in its recommendation of new avenues for well-being whose validity would nonetheless require empirical confirmation. According to the Groundwork, the indeterminate ideal of happiness rests ‘merely on empirical grounds’ (4: 418). With no determinate standard toward which to aim, we consider empirical conceptions of gratification and contentment, attempting to conceive of the maximization of pleasure or feelings of equilibrium through aggregation. But mere aggregation of sensual pleasures repels us, according to Kant, while the complete aggregation of feelings of equilibrium resembles death. The ideal draws most of the content for its recommendations from these inadequate notions. As we saw above, however, according to the Anthropology, aesthetic judging and its pleasure can serve as an ideal to approximate in the choice of sensual pleasures and in the ways that they might be integrated both with one another and as shared enjoyments. In the case of a shared meal, for example, one’s enjoyment is sustained and repeatable due to the variety of offerings and of positive interactions of multiple individuals within the self-sustaining ‘whole’ of the social event.

The CAJ also acknowledges that aesthetic experience is socially integrative. The ‘empirical’ interest in the beautiful rests on the universal communicability of the pleasure: taste ‘promotes what is demanded by an inclination natural to everyone’, namely, the inclination to sociability (§41, 5: 296–7). In taste, one ‘feels’ one’s ‘satisfaction in [the object] in community with others’ (5: 297). In addition, the third Critique as a whole considers taste to be a cultural phenomenon marking the historical progress of human society (‘reducing the tyranny of sensible tendencies’: CTJ, §83, 5: 433) that functions to cultivate and to bind individuals together through universally communicable feelings, as well as to foster the worth of the individual who does not defer to social agreement in judgements of taste but looks rather to a universal standard within (§22, 5: 239). The Anthropology points out that this ideal, socially integrative pleasure is compounded by the intellectual satisfaction we are able to take in it: after all, ‘enjoyment can also be pleasing, viz., when we find enjoyment in such objects that it does us credit to be occupied with’ (7: 237).

As his comments about the good meal suggest, the ideal way in which the judgement of taste and its pleasure integrate us into the social ‘whole’ could serve as a model for determining how to foster the most lasting sensual enjoyments. But there is more that the CAJ’s characterization of the judgement of taste and its pleasure could offer up for approximation. As already noted, the pleasurable state in aesthetic judging is itself experienced as a self-sustaining whole. In it, the concerted activity of the understanding and imagination (‘the sensibility of our faculty’ (§59, 5: 344)) produces a pleasurable state whose completeness arguably comes closer than any other subjective state to the feeling of completeness that is abstractly represented in our idea of happiness. The maximum is achieved, however, not through aggregation but through the activation and integration of these very different faculties as they engage with diverse representational content. Thus aesthetic pleasure and the integrative activity that produces it introduce the possibility that the maximization of satisfaction with our state might require activities that integrate, to whatever extent possible, one’s various capacities, intellectual and/or physical.Footnote ¹⁶ They suggest to us (in comparison to the deficiencies of gratification and contentment) that only by approximating the holistic integration of our various capacities might we experience anything close to the state that we represent abstractly as our complete satisfaction, or happiness.

When informed by this alternative conception of well-being the ideal of happiness may be able to offer new ‘empirical counsels’ (G, 4: 418). Thus in addition to recommending intra- and inter-subjectively integrative activities for the more complete and lasting enjoyments that they produce, the ideal could differentiate kinds of sensuous pleasure, recommending, for instance, the inclusion of aesthetic pleasure in one’s happiness not only because it is ‘enlivening’ and ‘increases’ our capacity ‘for having more enjoyment of this kind’ (APV, 7: 236), but also because it serves as a model for how to promote the most sustained enjoyment even of sensual pleasures. The ideal might also be able to recommend social and political institutions, policies, and practices that minimize pain if it has a negative impact on the functioning and integration of our diverse capacities and instead promote the consistent set of diverse ends of one’s community and their accompanying pleasures. Importantly, on the subject of pain, the ideal could conceivably suggest that, to the extent that we are able effectively to incorporate it within our state (with therapeutic or religious practices, for instance), pain in human life might not undermine our happiness. The limit or extent to which one would be able to do this (even in the case of presently experienced pain) would be an empirical question. Admittedly, the ideal presupposes some degree of plasticity of human nature in response to the activity of reflection and its impact on our state; but Kant himself points to empirical evidence of such plasticity (APV, 7: 237).

Indeed, this intra- and inter-subjectively integrative conception of happiness would be just as dependent on empirical evidence as contentment and gratification. But, as I have indicated, aesthetic experience encourages us to look for such evidence. And we may be especially motivated to do so given the context of deep scepticism about our psychological capacity to experience the perfection of our natural state so long as we simply aggregate feelings of well-being (gratification and equilibrium). Reflection on aesthetic experience, in contrast to the individualism of contentment and gratification, suggests that one’s own happiness may not necessarily be in conflict with the happiness of other rational beings and may in fact depend on (and be in part constituted by) inter-subjective integration and cooperation.

To be sure, the ideal of happiness remains indeterminate and unable to specify the means for achieving an individual’s happiness. This is due to continued uncertainty (our lack of empirical knowledge) about how most effectively to integrate one’s own capacities, how exactly and to what extent such integration is dependent upon one’s inter-subjective integration and whether such well-being (even if realized) is adequate to our idea of happiness. But the recommendations informed by the other conceptions are not any more useful to the individual, at least according to Kant’s anthropological lectures. Their already noted deficiencies indicate that they may not identify the sufficient conditions of an individual’s happiness (again this is an empirical question). Indeed, if the integrative conception is closer to the truth for human beings or even simply some human beings, then following such recommendations, to whatever extent possible, may be the only way to experience even the approximation of this ultimate state in ‘this’ life.

Of course, according to Kant, the only way for reason to approve of happiness is if we subordinate our happiness to the moral law: ‘For I must first be sure that I am not acting against my duty; only afterwards am I permitted to look around for happiness, to the extent that I can unite the state of being happy with that morally (not naturally) good state of mine’ (TP, 8: 283). But an integrative well-being may be capable of harmonizing with moral goodness (though this cannot be determined a priori) and thus deserving such approval. After all, reason envisions maximal inter-subjective integration in a universal community whose ends are themselves united in a system of ends, and so ‘a happiness of rational beings harmoniously coinciding with conformity to the moral law’ (CTJ, §87, 5: 451).Footnote ¹⁷ Thus the conception of integrative well-being appears to conform more easily to the requirements of morality than gratification but without the detachment from pleasures (including social enjoyments) in contentment. And because this conception is oriented towards non-individualistic, mutual enjoyment, it may be distinguishable from the individualistically oriented conceptions of gratification and contentment. Moreover, this conception appears to harmonize with the idea that law is ‘interested’ in our universally consistent pleasures and indeed to indicate that pleasurable intra- and inter-subjective integration is possible because it is consistent with morality’s demands.

As already noted, in any case, though Kant missed the opportunity to re-examine the ideal of happiness in light of his theory of aesthetic experience and the unique psychological experiences he claims that it affords us, we do see some evidence in the CAJ that he proposes an inter-subjectively integrative well-being as our happiness. Consider again his curious insistence that happiness cannot be enjoyed in isolation (General Remark, 5: 275–6), as well as his invocation of a socially enjoyed happiness that he deems ‘appropriate’ to humankind:

Importantly, Kant also reaches for the term ‘humanity’ in the Anthropology when he indicates that a moral happiness is socially integrative, using the term to refer to this integration. Thus in a section titled ‘On the highest moral-physical good’, he claims that ‘humanity’ is ‘a way of thinking’ that is ‘characteristic’ of the careful unification of happiness (good living) and virtue:

Though it is not perfectly clear what Kant means by breaking down the end of happiness ‘by counteracting agents’, this ‘way of thinking’ referred to as ‘humanity’ appears to involve the identification of those enjoyments and ends that could be united with moral goodness into a whole. A moral happiness appears also to be socially integrative, as it unites ‘good living with virtue in social intercourse’.

My argument proposes that aesthetic experience has much to contribute to this conception, namely, by introducing the empirical possibility that intra-subjective integration is an important underlying condition of such inter-subjectively integrative happiness. Indeed, as we have seen, aesthetic pleasure could have shed light on the possibility that a complete state that is more adequate to the idea of happiness is produced not through the aggregation of states but through the intra-subjective integration of activities and states coupled with the inter-subjective integration of individuals and their ends, in which we are able to take sensuous, intellectual and even moral pleasure.

In the end, considering aesthetic pleasure in light of the problem of happiness would have enabled Kant to address the worry that we are psychologically incapable of experiencing complete satisfaction without contradicting his claim in the CTJ that human happiness is not a purpose of nature let alone its final purpose. Aesthetic experience would simply offer itself as an ideal feeling to try to approximate, informing in some measure the indeterminate ideal of happiness, without our having to presuppose that a complete state of satisfaction is part of nature’s purpose. As Kant argues, if purposiveness is objective, then the purposiveness of nature itself must be subordinated to the human being considered as a moral being (CTJ, §84, 5: 436). And so happiness, if indeed supported by nature and so an objective and not merely subjective end, would still be a merely conditional end, conditional on and thus a consequence of our moral goodness: ‘as far as [our] state is concerned, happiness is connected to it only as a consequence, in proportion to the correspondence with that end as the end of his existence’, namely as a ‘moral being’ (CTJ, §84, 5: 436n.).