Kant on the Nature of Emotions

Kant on the Nature of Emotions

The aim of this paper is to extract from Kant’s various writings an account of the nature of the emotions and their function – and to do so despite the fact that Kant himself neither uses the term ‘emotion’ nor offers a unified treatment of it. Kant’s position, as I interpret it, challenges the contemporary trends that define emotions in terms of other mental states and defines them instead first and foremost as feelings. Although Kant’s account of the faculty of feeling has not attracted much attention, I argue that it plays the crucial role of producing mental states that function as appraisals of the way our faculties relate to each other and to the world. Insofar as feelings play a crucial orientational role in the general economy of the mind, they are indispensable for beings who act and need to make sense of the world and of themselves in order to act.

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