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A Disciplinary Mixture

Eesti mõtteloo tüvitekstid (FLFI.05.025)

Melville, Peter 2007. Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. [Ch. 2. "The Rights of the Stranger: Kant's "Bond of Hospitality", pp. 61-98.] [Google Books]

If hospitality makes Rousseau uneasy, then the same could be said of Immanuel Kant, whose late writings in particular reveal conspicuous signs of discomfort when questioning the foreign and the strange. In this chapter, I focus on three scenes involving three of Kant's most troubling guests. The first scene, drawn from Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, finds the philosopher imagining the strangely self-consuming habits of the solitary eater, a figure whose refusal to offer hospitality when he eats is both irresponsible and unhealthy. Kant's disavowal of this unruly guest enables him to privilege a meticulous social practice of regulating the subject's "bond" of hospitality: a practice of being responsive to the others with and on whom the subject dines. (Melville 2007: 61)

"Eating alone (solipsismus convictorii) is unhealthy for a scholar who philosophizes" (Kant 2006[1798]: 181-181).

As a way to prepare for that climax as well as to firmly situate the issue of self-relatedness within the sartorial rhetoric of hospitality and eating, Kant poses a curious question concerning the origin of the metaphor of taste: "How might it have happened that the modern languages particularly have chosen to name the aesthetic faculty of judgment with an expression (gustus, sapor) which merely refers to a certain sense-organ (the inside of the mouth), and that the discrimination as well as the choice of palatable things is determined by it?" (145). Despite its ancillary position in the text, the question plays a significant role in establishing the conditions for one of the text's most elaborate and (for Kant) most pleasurable sketches of enlightened anthropological life, that of the cosmopolitan dinner party. In answer to the question why transcendental matters of taste are linguistically similar to those of an empirical or sensuous kind, Kant happily answers: "There is no situation in which sensibility and understanding, united in enjoyment, can be as long continued and as often repeated with satisfaction as a good meal in good company" (145). For Kant, taste is a faculty of "social judgment" [gesellschaftliche beurteilung] that manifests itself most admirably in the ability of a host to make an "acceptable selection" of dishes for his guests (143, 145). The last of Kant's works to be published in his lifetime, the Anthropology presumes that matters of taste are metaphorically tied to the tongue because the tasting of food, seasoned with a disciplinary mixture of table etiquette, provides the optimal conditions for that partly sensuous, partly ethical, partly aesthetic feeling of "civilized bliss" (186). Promising pleasures that gorund the faculty of aesthetic judgment, the dinner table confidently reclaims its position in the Anthropology as the privileged site for the taste advancement of sociality. If "eating together at the same table" is to be regarded as evidence of the "bond of hospitality" (188), then Kant's representation of the "tastefully arranged dinner" (190), with all its various inclusions and exclusions, offers itself as an object lesson on how to welcome and how not to welcome the other. (Melville 2007: 62)

Same in Estonian: maitse ("taste"). Since I haven't yet the Anthropology as a whole, this connection ("the tasteful advancement of sociality") was surprising.

For the pragmatically minded Kant of the Anthropology, however, there is something powerfully attractive about the dinner party and the hospitable pleasures it affords. His enthusiasm emerges in the exclamatory refrains garnishing his instructions for the "full dinner," where "the multitude of courses is only intended to keep the guests together for a long time" (189). (Melville 2007: 63)

Is that actually the reason there was a multitude of courses in high society dinners?

The tension inherent in this entanglement reproduces itself in an ultimately irresolvable conflict between the social eater and Kant's solitary feasting philosopher - the one who eats, drinks, and thinks alone. The struggle between these figures effects an odd but necessary process of consumption in which fellow interlocutors are served, as it were, as dishes for table companions, whereas certain "dis-gusting" others are vomited from the social mechanisms of the meal. (Melville 2007: 63)

Alliteration in "eats, drinks, and thinks alone". I didn't notice the "exclusionary" aspect. He speaks of good company, presumably thereby excluding bad company.

What is especially distasteful about the solitary man of learning is the grisly fact that he is a wasteful consumer, an insatiable eater without manners, recklessly devouring all things before him, including food, thought, and especially himself. (Melville 2007: 64)

Is overconsumption implied somewhere?

The Conflict of the Faculties [Der Streit der Fakultäten] (1798) is surprisingly clear on this point: an example of thinking at "Unsuitable Times," the practice of "occupying oneself with reading or reflecting when dining alone provokes pathological feelings" (199). It "brings on hypochondria," a condition with which Kant was personally familiar (Conflict 199). If hypochondria is the desire to observe oneself too closely (Anthropology 17), then eating and thinking in isolation induce a similar pathology of self-fixation ingestion. (Melville 2007: 64)

Hypochondria is "excessive concern about one's health especially when accompanied by imagined physical ailments" (Merriam-Webster). I don't see how reading or reflecting during a meal should provoke pathological feelings or imagining physical ailments.

In the words of Paul Youngquist, "dinner and company provide the substance of this diet, without which thinking might ravage the stomach" (349). If the subject wishes to survive its own undiscriminating predatorial instincts deep within its breast, it must remain socially responsive. "It is a duty to oneself as well as to others," says Kant, "not to isolate oneself (separatistam agere) but to use one's moral perfections in social intercourse (officium commercii, sociabilitas)" (Metaphysics 588). The self must abandon its most primal and self-destructive urges and embrace the stern strictures of ethical life. (Melville 2007: 65)

How is eating an "undiscriminating predatorial instict"? Without company, a person would eat anything that moves?

A certain discipline is required for eating well, which might enable the subject to prefer, for example, a wine party, normally "merry, boisterous, and teeming with wit," over the "beer-drinking bout" that frequently leads to "taciturn fantasies" and "impolite behaviour" (59). To avoid the dangers of intoxication and excessive eating, the subject must choose wisely.
For Kant, the trick is to mediate one's meal through a screen of sociality. As Gulyga explains, company exerts a "beneficial influence," even upon the hypochondriac, whose "spirits and appetite improve by it" (52). To be an ethical eater one must have other table companions to whom one can respond and be responsible. The solitary eater "loses vivacity," lacking a "companion with alternative ideas" as food for thought. (Melville 2007: 66)

Sounds like autophobia. Solitude automatically produces immoderation?

Oddly enough, this statement restricts Kant from eating with his own colleagues. "I am not attracted to another," admits Kant, "because he has what I already possess, but because he can supply some want of mine by supplementing that in which I am lacking" (Ethics 205). Two scholars, to use Kant's example, are not to dine together. They will not form a friendship of taste because "their capacities are identical; they cannot entertain or satisfy one another, for what one knows, the other knows too" (205). While thinking may be a "scholar's food" (Conflict 199), the thought of another scholar is not. Unable to stomach the other's presence, these scholars dining together resemble too closely the self-consumption of the solitary eater. In the case of the philosophizing man of learning, the scholar is a doppelgänger of the self, detrimental to mental health. (Melville 2007: 66)

What two scholars have the exact same set of knowledge?

Kass reminds us of the etymology of the word "companion," which is composed of the Latin prefix cum (together) and panis (bread), hence, "Company ... comes to accompany the bread" (131). But if man comes together with or through broad, be also comes together as bread. Susan Shell informs us that Kant would refer to his friends as dishes, likening Moses Menhelssohn, for instance, to a rare and unexpected delicacy: "He honoured me," Kant writes in a letter to Marcus Herz, "by attending two of my lectures, taking potluck [fortune du pot], so to speak, since the table was not set for such a distinguished guest" (Correspondence 162). This sharing of the self for consumption is precisely what occurs during the meal that brings together "men of taste" in the Anthropology, who "are not only interested in having a meal together but also in enjoying one another" (187). The main course of the good meal in good company is the company itself. The dinner party appears "only as a vehicle" for "social enjoyment," says Kant, and as such is essentially anthropophagic or cannibalistic in nature (187). (Melville 2007: 67)

The etymology os indeed "literally "bread fellow, messmate"" but the anthropophagic imagery, I think, goes a little too far with the metaphor. Eating together is not eating each other. Very odd.

In the Anthropology, an economy of figural cannibalism underwrites hospitality and the moral code, and specifically, duties concerned with the tasteful consumption of another's secrets [.|.] The pragmatic rule of Kant's table is to digest the other's secrets without regurgitating them. As he states elsewhere, to be human is to feel strongly the need to "reveal" oneself "candidly" to another (Metaphysics 586). However, great risks accompany this desire. Kant knows that there are others whose inhospitality drives them to "prudently keep back" and "conceal" their thoughts and judgments while taking advantage of another subject's personal disclosures (Metaphysics 587). Warning his readers to exercise care in a mercantile world where the usual creed is eat or be eaten, he serves up a more palatable solution in which the subject strikes a mutual confidence with the other. As courteous as he is cautious, the social eater presents his friends with the most precious gifts - his private self, his thoughts, his secrets. (Melville 2007: 67-68)

Kant's "gossip" somehow becomes "secrets".

The analogy, however, inadvertently reveals the darker side of sharing one's food: the refusal to partake of the other, the refusal of his hospitality, is the hostile gesture par excellence. To deny the other is to refuse to give oneself to the other, to offend the other by signalling one's disgust and refusal to digest the other. Kant's social eater, on the other hand, enter into a shared "bond of hospitality" (Anthropology 188). Mutual ingestion sanctifies mutual respect and leaves a good taste in one's mouth. Reciprocally cannibalistic, one's moral friendships guarantee that one's secrets, including one's indiscretions and faux pas, will remain confidential. (Melville 2007: 68)

I would have thought that refusing an offering of food is offensive because it implies something along the lines of "your food is shite", or not decent enough for moi. Having met this trope (communion of food) frequently, I don't think this cannibalistic framework is very good. It might appeal to some but Derrida's "symbolic anthropology" seems whack.

While Kant never liked to "talk shop" in his spare time, he never ceased to speak at mealtime (Gulyga 53). Fearful of long, awkward pauses, he preferred to keep his guests from pausing and inwardly redirecting their hunger for ideas, and subsequently, consuming themselves in thought. His rules are so riddled with anxiety, so rigorous and overdetermined in their desire to keep communication flowing that they expose the precariousness and fragility of his subject. Nothing specific or exclusionary, which might leave some guests bored, silent, and otherwise vulnerable to introspection; no lengthy pauses; nothing abrupt or unexpected; nothing dogmatic; nothing contentious. These are the five commandments designed to limit the conversation and protect the subject from itself. (Melville 2007: 70)

Phatic, in a Jakobsonian sense, though this episode probably reveals more about Kant's vanity than mere anxiety: "let everyone have their say" while himself monologizing, even if others don't mind much.

Midway through his Lectures on Ethics, Kant briefly pauses to censure that other auto-erotic form of self-incorporation, namely "onanism" (170). The onanism exercises the sexual appetite in the "complete absence of any object of sexuality," and in doing so, says Kant, "degrades himself below the level of animals" (170). "Contrary to the ends of humanity," this solitary self-predator is too disgusting even for words (170). (Melville 2007: 71)

One could just as well look at it with a completely different perspective: in the complete absence of the object of sexuality, it transcends animality.

The only difference separating sexual consumption and masticatory ingestion is found "in the manner of enjoyment" (495). One eats one's lover as readily as one chews a piece of cod (Kant's favourite dish). Female reproductive organs are just another set of "consumable thing[s] (res fungibilis)" (495) - the woman herself a mere dish too tasty to be indiscriminately blended with the healthier cosmopolitan platter of the Kantian feast. (Melville 2007: 71)

And here I was, silly thing, thinking that eating and sex employ different organs, have completely different aims, and fulfill different needs.

Published only three years prior to the Anthropology, Perpetual Peace contends that the right to hospitality means, above all else, "the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land ofanother" [|] (32). To the extent that a nation honours this right of the visit, it can be said to be civilized insofar as it contributes to the history and constitution of a "world citizenship" (320). With this stipulation, Kant thus confirms a classical Greek convention that determines that a nation is judged by the gods according to its treatment of foreigners (Reece 47-48). (Melville 2007: 72-73)

Another common trope (strangers as enemies). The greeks reportedly had "a body of traditions connected with strangers, suppliants, guests and guest-friends" (Keller's Homeric Society; in Ross 1920: 83).

Let us begin this task with a question: if national identity is based on the reception of strangers, how then can a nation welcome a foreigner without having already been a nation in the first place? This is also to ask, how can a nation passess a nationality - or a history - prior to the advent of strangeness? (Melville 2007: 73)

It is not, though.

What is more, as the Anthropology shows, the foreigner produces the nation not simply as the effect of his arrival, as though foreigness were strictly a symptom of otherwordliness. Rather, [|] the stranger is constitutive to the production of nationality insofar as the foreign is always already within the nation itself, from its very inception. In other words, the foreigner's arrival plays itself out in the Anthropology as the nation's troubling recognition of its own internal strangeness - or, as Kristeva would have it, as the nation's uncanny encounter with the abject, hidden face of its identity. (Melville 2007: 73-74)

"In the undisguised antipathies and aversions which people feel towards strangers with whom they have to do we may recognize the expression of self-love - of narcissism. This self-love works for the self-assertion of the individual, and behaves as though the occurrence of any divergence from his own particular lines of development involved a criticism of them and a demand for their alteration." (Freud 1922: 55-56)

Do travelogues and oral tales of travel then constitute kinds of travel? Could one rigorously show that there is or was for Kant an essential difference between travel and reading vicariously about travel? It is difficult to say. (Melville 2007: 75)

Likewise, does "Reading, giving the companionship of historical or imaginary characters, [actually] lessens social dependence upon neighbors" (Ross 1920: 576)?

Thus, the German people are not only the most hospitable of nations; they are also, more importantly, the most self-hospitable of nations. They are different from others, but they are also different from themselves. They welcome themselves as strangers. This extra level of difference within the sign of the German reveals the play between the homogeneous pedagogical and the performative heterogeneity of the nation. (Melville 2007: 78)

Yeah, semiologese still makes no damn sense. Maybe everything is not a language?

Kant illustrates the nation's performative, repudiative abjection of the rabble-mob (that "unruly" group within the nation which finds itself at odds with the dominant expression of nationality) by asking his readers to consider the French insult la canaille du peuple [the rabble of the people], which, he argues, finds its origins in the Latin canalicola, meaning "a loafer going to and fro along the canal in ancient Rome, and teasing the working people" (Anthropology 225n). Given our earlier foray into the origins of the Latin natio as a group of outlanders, the foreigners and la canaille (the rabble) seem to be intimately connected in ways that render them similarly otherworldly as alien presences within the state. There are those who come to live here from afar, and there are those who live here, who have always lived here, but who, for the intents and purposes of the nation-building process, seem not to be from here at all. (Melville 2007:79)

John "Walking" Stewart, who in old age sat on a bridge all day, comes to mind.

In his essay "On the Common Saying: 'This May Be True in Theory, but It Does Not Apply in Practice'" [...] Kant explains that while one might have sympathy or an increased respect for the plight of a citizenry that is motivated to reber against the state, "all resistance against the supreme legislative power, all incitement of the subjects to violate expressions of discontent, all defiance which breaks out into rebellion, is the greatest and most punishable crime in a commonwealth, for it destroys its very foundations. This prohibition is absolute" (81, emphasis preserved). To revolt against the state in violence is to defy mutual respect between citizens, which for Kant is the very foundation of civil society. Any who would attempt to do so are moblike in their illegal rabble-rousing. (Melville 2007: 81)

Of this we've seen living proof from USA (the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol) in the recent weeks - hundreds of those present in the mob were arrested by the FBI after the fact, whereas in the moment police even seemed to wave the rioters in.

Not unlike a bad guest who stays too long, who asks too much of the host, peace is an imposition. It imposes itself upon the world; it puts the world out, so to speak - placing on it a certain strain, making it feel a certain "unnatural" discomfort. (Melville 2007: 86)

A strange unpleasant tension.

According to Derrida, "each concept becomes hospitable to its other, to an other than itself that is no longer its other" ("Hospitality: Sessions" 362, emphasis preserved). Opposing itself to the opposable, hospitality gives shelter to the opposable; it draws the opposable into itself, welcomes it as its other, even as it opposes it - indeed, precisely by opposing it. What this suggests, in the end, is that hospitality is not so much opposed to, or the opposite, of opposition. Rather, the relation between hospitality and opposition is best characterized as a relation of apposition. (Melville 2007: 87)

It is the opposition we are hospitable to opposed as such which gives us the hospitality in comparison to something other that gives us the idea of what the idea that wants to be transmitted wants to be.

As a regulatory ideal, it is meant to "produce a harmony among men, against will and indeed through their discord" (322). By this last phrase, "through their discord," Kant surely means to refer to his understanding of the human's frictional nature (which is intended by nature to spread humanity away from itself and across the globe), but perhaps the phrase could be read as a signal revealing a certain (perhaps, subtextual) [|] awareness of the constitutive violence of a perpetual peace itself, its self-cancelling auto-de(con)structiveness. (Melville 2007: 88-89)

Nature has intentions?

One way to understand this is to think about the politics of the welcome and the right of resort in terms of a politics of reading (and misreading) the other who washes onto the nation's shore. Before the right to resort and the right to refuse can even take place, the foreigner must first be read. He must become the problematized object of a scene of reading. The question of a universal hospitality - the first question of this construction - should read: How to interpret the intentions or the history of the stranger? How to determine whether the stranger is peaceful or whether he can be refused "without causing his destruction" (Perpetual 320)? The politics of welcome thus plays itself out on the level of the sign. It is a politics, moreover, in which one says yes - haling the other, reading the foreigner's presence, incorporating this presence within the symbolic realm of readability - before saying no. One must welcome the other's appearance before the nation before one can say "nay" and turn the other away. (Melville 2007: 92)

A valuable addition to the discourse on the stranger (qua enemy or friend).

The other (be it a foreigner on the border or a dinner companion) reminds the subject, in an uncanny moment of self-recognition, that it does not eat alone, that it could never eat by itself even if it should decide to do so. Eating is always a social engagement, and thus calls for a certain responsibility with respect to the subject's reception of the others whom and with whom it eats. (Melville 2007: 94)

Biologists, take note: non-social species and unicellular organisms do not eat. You there! Getting a hamburger by yourself, what the hell are you going to do with that thing?

Baron, Marcia 2012. Friendship, Duties Regarding Specific Conditions of Persons, and the Virtues of Social Intercourse (TL 6:468-474). In: Trampota, Oliver Andreas (ed.), Kant's "Tugendlehre". Berlin: De Gruyter. [De Gruyter] [DOI: 10.1515/9783110229875.365]

It is sometimes claimed that according to Kant, all of our duties to persons are simply duties to persons as such, without regard to differences either in the persons themselves, or in their situations. Brief reflection discloses one error in that claim: we can hardly fulfill our duty to promote others' happiness without attending to the situations of the persons whose happiness we aim to promote. After all, to promote their happiness we need to take into account what their happiness consists in and what hindrances they face. TL 6:468.14-469.12 brings out another way in which that claim is in error. Although it is true that our duties to others are indeed [|] duties to persons qua persons, rather than to persons qua wealthy, or especially virtuous, or very learned, that someone is wealthy, or poor, or depraved, or virtuous, or ignorant, or learned has a bearing on how our duties are to be fulfilled. What sort of bearing? It is not that it is more important to fulfill our duties vis-à-vis the virtuous than the morally depraved, or vis-à-vis the learned than the ignorant; rather, the idea is that just what it is to show another respect is shaped by the other's situation, and the same is true, albeit for slightly different reasons, of the duty to promote another's happiness. As Kant observes in the moral catechism, we are not to "give a lazy fellow soft cushions so that he [can] pass his life away in sweet idleness" (TL 6:480.32-481.1). (Baron 2012: 365-366)

Wasn't one of the pythagorean sayings that one must never help someone unload a heavy burden off their backs but only help them take it on?

Friendship, on Kant's view, properly takes the following forms: (1) "the union of two persons through equal mutual love and respect" (TL 6:469.17f.), and (2) being a "friend of human beings as such" (TL 6:472.33) (hereafter 'Menschenfreund'). The idea in (2) is that one takes an "affective interest in the well-being of all human beings," rejoicing with them (TL 6:472.34f.). (Baron 2012: 366)

This made me realize that the English "human-friendly" does not indeed mean the same as the Estonian inimsõbralik does.

Kant returns to this point in his discussion of friendship: "Taking to heart the duty of being benevolent as a friend of human beings (a necessary humbling of oneself) serves to guard against the pride that usually comes over those fortunate enough to have the means of beneficience" (TL 6:473.8-11; see also TL 6:454.22-28). (Baron 2012: 367)

What is a man compared to humanity.

In such a union, each participates and shares sympathetically in the other's well-being through the moral good will that unites them. Kant also indicates in these two sentences that the adoption of this ideal makes one deserving of happiness, and that in virtue of this fact, human friendship is a duty. (Baron 2012: 367)

A kind of communion.

Although Kant is not explicit about this, it is reasonably clear that the duty is not so limited; that is, it is not just that if we have any friends, we should see to it that the friendship is of such-and-such a sort. Rather, we are to resist any temptation we may have to isolate ourselves (cf. TL 6:473.16-18). We are to strive to be friends to someone (one or more people), and not merely to be Menschenfreunde but to unite with someone in friendship. (Baron 2012: 368)

More of what looks like autophobia.

In the Herder lectures, as in the Tugendlehre, the picture of friendship is that one has at most one true friend (cf. V-PP/Herder 27:54.16-18). (Baron 2012: 368)

One will indeed do.

Kant's discussion of an "Ebenmaß" between love and respect builds on a striking passage at TL 6:449.8-11, where respect and love ar presented as providing counterweights to each other. The "principle of mutual love" admonishes us "to come closer to one another"; that of respect, to keep ourselves "at a distance from one another"; and "should one of these great moral forces fail, 'then nothingness (immorality), with gaping throat, would drink up the whole kingdom of (moral) beings like a drop of water" (TL 6:449.8-14). At TL 6:470.4-7 he develops this theme in relation to friendship: "For love can be regarded as attraction and respect as repulsion, and if the principle of love bids friends to draw closer, the principle of respect requires them to stay at a proper distance from each other." It is one source of objections to Kant's ethics - and especially to how he views persons in relation to other persons - that he places more emphasis on the principle of respect than on the principle of love. (Baron 2012: 370)

Eerily reminiscent of the function of politeness, which "function is not to sweeten the relation of kinsfolk, friends, or lodge-brothers but to lessen the chafing between strangers, colleagues, or rivals" (Ross 1920: 113-114). Politeness and artifice will not sweeten relationships with loved ones, but it is very necessary to remain respectful of others.

The problem is deeply rooted, a facet of our "unsociable sociability" (IaG 8:20.30): we are "meant for society" (TL 6:471.30f.) yet are also "unsociable." In connection with friendship, a particularly troublesome difficulty is that we badly want to reveal ourselves to others, yet "hemmed in [...] by fear of the misuse others may make" of the thoughts we have disclosed, we feel "constrained to lock up" in ourselves a "good part" of our judgments (cf. TL 6:471.33-472.1). (Baron 2012: 371)

There might have been a good reason for Melville (above), replacing "gossip" with "secret", after all.

Although 'unsocial sociability' is more mellifluous than 'unsociable sociability,' Allen Wood has convinced me that 'unsociable' is a better choice than 'unsocial.' As he put it to me in an e-mail, "'Unsocial' suggests withdrawal from society, what Kant calls 'anthropophobia' or 'Menschenscheu' (and is a form of the vice of misanthropy), while 'unsociable' suggests positive engagement with others, not flight from them, but engagement in a way that involves conflict or anti-social behavior - rivalry, competition, one-up-manship [and the like]." (Baron 2012: 371)

"Here I understand by 'antagonism' the unsociable sociability of human beings, i.e. their propensity to enter into society, which, however, is combined with a thoroughgoing resistance that constantly threatens to break up this society" (Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View; in Darwall 2014: 201-202). ...and then the very next footnote quotes the same passage.

In more detail: "The human being has an inclination to become socialized, since in such a condition he feels himself as more a human being, i.e. feels the development of his natural predispositions. But he alse has a great propensity to individualize (isolate) himself, because he simultaneously encounters in himself the unsociable property of willing to direct everything so as to get his own way, and hence expects resistance everywhere because he knows of himself that he is inclined on his side toward resistance against others" (IaG 8:20.34-21.5). (Baron 2012: 371)

As I thought, unsociable sociability approximates what Ross terms egoistic society.

Recall too the second of the three "unalterable commands" (Anth 7:228.29) for thinkers: "to think ourselves into the place of every other man (with whom we are communicating)" (Anth 7:228.32f.). Thinking ourselves into the place of others requires open communication with them, and specifically listening to them, and in a context in which they feel very free to express themselves. (Baron 2012: 371)

More or less how I interpreted it in my essay: "mõelda ennast teiste inimeste asemele, st vaadelda küsimust põhjalikult igast võimalikust seisukohast".

Self-revelation, together with listening to the revelations of others, is thus of vital importance, both objectively and subjectively. Reason requires it, and we badly want this exchange with others (and in particular, it seems, we want to air our views). Egoists excepted, humans do not want to be "completely alone with" their "thoughts, as in a prison [...]" (TL 6:472.12f.). (Baron 2012: 372)

The egoistic society in Malinowski airs "personal accounts of the speaker's views and life history, to which the hearer listens under some restraint and with slightly veiled impatience, waiting till his own turn arrives to speak." (PC 5.4)

Why, then, is there such anxiety about self-disclosure? One might think that the barrier to sharing our thoughts and feelings with others is simply fear - our fear that our friend, particularly if the friendship ends, will abuse our trust, and perhaps also a fear of our friend's disapproval if we express our thoughts and feelings freely. If so, the solution would seem to be just to conquer the fear, and learn to trust our friends. (Baron 2012: 372)

Common sense says that one shouldn't have to guard oneself when talking with good friends.

Kant's debt to Aristotle's discussion of friendship is evident at a number of points in his discussion, one being in his differentiation of moral friendship from both pargmatic friendship and friendship based on feeling. Although not identical to it, it parallels Aristotle's differentiation of complete friendships from friendships for utility and friendships for pleasure. (See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book VIII.) (Baron 2012: 376)

Coincidentally the only chapter of Nicomachean Ethics that I've (tried to) read.

If respect calls for concealing my burden from my friend, am I then not to share with my friend the fact that (for example) I've been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness?
Perhaps. But Kant's lectures on ethics suggest that when he speaks of "sparing the other his burden and bearing it all by himself," he has in mind first and foremost financial burdens, and not such burdens as a diagnosis of cancer. (Baron 2012: 377)

The most bothersome burdens. "Cronies who are not good fellows show their yellowness when one of them falls into trouble. Then he is given to understand that no one cares to see his long face or listen to his tale of woe. For such fair-weather friendship the refrain is, "If you're out of health or money you need n't come around." (Ross 1920: 112-113)

Van Impe, Stijn 2011. Kant on friendship. International Journal of Arts & Sciences 4(3): 127-139. [Open Access]

However, on the basis of anthropological considerations, Kant observes that 'it does not seem that human nature implies a special preposition towards confidence, cordial well-wishing and friendship' (R 15:321, no 726) for by nature man is above all moved by the motive of self-love which attends to the happiness of oneself. Hence, it seems that in putting the motive of the general love of mankind above the motive of self-love, which is the right thing to do from a moral point of view, I forsake my own happiness. (Van Impe 2011: 129)

A rather negative view of human nature.

Kant contends, however, that true friendship generates 'an exchange of welfare'. He writes:
if all men are so minded, that each looks out for the other's happiness, then each man's welfare will be nurtured by the rest; were I to know that others were caring for my happiness, as I would wish to care for theirs, I would be sure of not falling too short in any cultivation of my own happiness, for it would be made good to me, [...] for however well a man takes care of another's happiness, that other will be taking equally care of his. It looks as if a man loses, when he cares for other people's happiness; but if they, in turn, are caring for this, then he loses nothing. In that case the happiness of each would be promoted by the generosity of others, and this is the Idea of friendship, where self-love is swallowed up in the idea of generous mutual love [Wechselliebe]. (LE Collins 27:422-423)
However, we can never know for sure that others will look after my happiness. (Van Impe 2011: 129)

Something likewise figured out by Adam Smith and John Nash (in A Beautiful Mind). Also common to right-wind ideologues: if everyone is free to take what they wish, ultimately it will trickle down to everyone. In other words, says Ayn Rand, egoism is good.

Having discussed the nature of the Idea of friendship in general, Kant distinguishes in the Lectures on Ethics from the mid 1770's till the early 1780's between friendship of need (Bedürfnis), taste (Geschmack) and disposition (Gesinnung) (LE Collins 27:424), a triadic structure closely resembling Aristotle's distinction between friendship based on utility, pleasure and virtue from the Ethica Nicomachea (see Aristotle 2000:1155ff.), which Kant was quite familiar with. (Van Impe 2011: 130)

Addendum to the note above (cf. Baron 2012: 376).

Friendship of need is considered to be the beginning of friendship among men as it arises in the most primitive and roughest social conditions. Kant refers to hunter-gatherer societies where men have to be able to rely on each other in securing their common goals and basic needs for food, shelter, security, etc. As Kant will also contend in his late Lectures on Ethics, the need on which this kind of friendship is based is ultimately 'only the need for self-preservation, the protection so sorely needed against hostile threats, which constitutes the bond [Band] that chains them' (LE Vigilantius 27:681). Consequently, Kant argues that in a state of luxury 'such friendship does not occur, and is not even wanted' for in such a state man 'has many concerns of his own, and then he is all the less able to occupy himself with those of others, since he has himself to look after' (LE Collins 27:425). (Van Impe 2011: 130)

Bonds of union. Friendship of need is what is actually operative in McDougall's connection between sociability and the instinct of fear: people band together for mutual protection from enemies, and they are brought together for no other reason (compelled by no other affection) than this mutual protection.

Friendship of taste is called merely 'an analogue of friendship, and consists in taking pleasure in the company and mutual association [wechselseitige Gesellschaft] of the two parties, rather than their happiness' (LE Collins 27:426). In a note from 1776-1778, Kant contends that friendship of taste is outwardly expressed by 'courtesy' ('Hoflichkeit') (R 15:371, no 830). Likewise, in his late Lectures on Anthropology (Dohna-Wundlacken) from 1791-1792, Kant associates friendship of taste with displaying good manners and 'politeness' ('Politesse') (Kant 1924:228). Moreover, Kant argues that in friendship of taste men are bound together not by 'similarity' ('Einerleyheit'), but rather by 'difference' ('Verschiedenheit'), i.e., 'by what the one can contribute to the other's needs; not by what the other already has, but when the one possesses what supplies a want in the other' (LE Collins 27:426). (Van Impe 2011: 130)

His dinner parties are thus occasions for friendships of taste. Likewise is phatic communion, or generally any sort of enjoying another's company, which does not indeed imply deep affections for the other (i.e. mutual love and respect).

For these reasons, friendship of disposition is regarded as the most perfect form of friendship and is therefore called 'the friendship that is universal' ('die Freundschaft die allgemein ist') (LE Brauer in Menzer (1924:260)). Friendship of disposition rests moreover on communion, openhearted communication and self-disclosure, a feature that is also already suggested in his Lectures on Ethics from the mid 1760's (LE Herder 27:54). (Van Impe 2011: 131)

Here's that word (communion) again. In a perfect friendship "each participates and shares sympathetically in the other's well-being through the moral good will that unites them" (Baron 2012: 376, above).

Kant argues that
even when we engage in social intercourse and companionship, we still do not enter completely into society. In any company we tend to withhold the greater part of our disposition. [...] If, however, we can get rid of this constraint, and impart our feelings to the other, then we are fully in communion with them. So that each of us may be free of this constraint, we therefore have need of a friend in whom we can confide, and to whom we may pour out all our views and opinions; from whom we cannot and need not hide anything and with whom we are fully able to communicate. On this, therefore, rests the friendship of disposition. (LE Collins 27:427)
Friendship of disposition resembles friendship of taste in that it does neither require 'identity of thought' nor the negation of one's personal identity: 'it is difference, rather, which establishes friendship, for in that case the other supplies what the other lacks' (LE Collins 27:429). But in contrast to friendship of taste, friendship of disposition does require and depend upon shared 'principles of understanding and morality' ('Principia des Verstandes und Moralität') (LE Collins 27:429) or upon, what Kant calls in his Lectures on Ethics from the mid 1760's 'identity of personality' ('Einerleiheit der Persönlichkeit') (LE Herder 27:54), and it is this feature that makes that participants in friendship of disposition 'can fully understand each other; if they are not alike in that, they cannot get on at all together, since in judgment they are poles apart' (LE Collins 27:429). (Van Impe 2011: 131)

On point. Phatic communion does not imply friendship, whereas perfect or universal friendship requires true communion (and not only the mere "exchange of words", which I've recently taken as the literal synonym of phatic communion). As a caveat to the characteristic monologue of egoistic society (e.g. PC 5.4), the relevant difference lies in that a true friend is actually interested in your personal views and life history.

Yet, despite of its supersensible quality, the idea of friendship is no less significant in that it proves to be 'so very needful for the elevation [Ehrebung] of human life, and a moral reality to be developed therein for man's end' (LE Vigilantius 27:675). Hence, friendship is given an important propaedeutic function for becoming a moral agent, a picture which contradicts the often but wrongly acclaimed individualism, coldness and moroseness of Kant's ethics. (Van Impe 2011: 132)

"And just in this transcendental or supersensible sphere, where experience affords us neither instruction nor guidance, lie the investigations of Reason, which, on account of their importance, we consider far preferable to, and as having a far more elevated aim than, all that the understanding can achieve within the sphere of sensuous phænomena." (Kant 1855: 4)

In this case, well-wishing love towards others establishes only an 'amor unilateralis' or 'unilateral bond' which comes down to me 'being everyone's friend' without the assumption that everyone else is my friend as well. Yet, in sensu stricto, so Kant argues, well-wishing love towards others is 'more closely and strictly coupled with the idea of friendship' if this love is reciprocal: 'well-wishing changes into friendship (amicitia) through a reciprocal love, or armor bilateralis' (LE Vigilantius 27:676). (Van Impe 2011: 133)

Be human-friendly to everyone.

Kant denies that there can be any true friendship between unequals: 'inter superiores et inferiores no friendship occurs' (LE Vigilantius 27:676). Any relationship of inequality, in which one participant has superiority over the other, can only generate and display favour ('Gunst') and is a hindrance to the intimacy of trust and the unity of personality between friends that allows them to share their thoughts, judgments, feelings and lives with one another (see LE Vigilantius 27:683), but above all to reciprocally share in each other's situation as if they encountered it themselves. (Van Impe 2011: 133)

This throws into another light the following maxim: "the sine qua non of good conversation, is to establish equality, at least momentarily, if you like fictions, but at all costs equality, among the members of the company who make up the party" (Mahaffy 1892: 102).

Kant contends that 'the reciprocal enjoyment of [the] humanity' of friends lies in their standing together by means of 'the mutual disclosure of thoughts' ('die wechselseitige Eröffnung der Gedanken') (LE Vigilantius 27:677). As Kant continues: 'This mutual enjoyment, which arises in that man shares his thoughts with the other, and the other, conversely with him, is the foundation of openheartedness (Ibid.). Significantly, this openheartedness requires more than [|] merely sharing each other's 'sensory fellow-feeling' or 'receptivity to the joys and sorrows of the other' for such a sharing would be based on 'kindliness' ('Guntherzigkeit') (Ibid.), which means that it would therefore be arbitrary and contingent, i.e., merely dependent on one's natural character and temperament. Openheartedness must also - and perhaps above all - imply an intellectual sharing. Moreover, 'in the mutual humanity among friends, openheartedness must serve as the basis, whereby alone the so needful sharing of feelings and thoughts, the necessary enlargement of our various perfections, and the closer bonding with the friend is established' (LE Vigilantius 27:679). (Van Impe 2011: 133-134)

Exactly contra Malinowski's phatic communion, which implies that humans bond by the mere exchange of words - no exchange of feelings or thoughts is necessary. The contradiction is swept away by placing emphasis on "closer bonding". Mere exchange of words can still produce superficial bonding, as can merely frequently seeing a familiar face (even without any exchange of words).

Whereas in the early Lectures on Ethics actual friendship was considered to be defective because it could never completely match with the 'Idea' or 'Ideal' of friendship as a 'maximum of mutual love', and in the late Lectures on Ethics (moral) friendship was regarded as unachievable due to a natural antagonism of dispositions that renders an unconcealed communication and openheartedness nearly impossible, the conclusion that friendship is unachievable is now defended on the basis that it is hard to realize and maintain the balance between love, [...] (Van Impe 2011: 135)

On the whole it comes across as if Kant on all occasions begins with Aristotle's "My dear friends, there is no such thing as a friend" and successively searches for justifications for it. Did he personally have even that one true friend?

In contrast to friendship based on feeling, i.e. 'aesthetic friendship', Kant defines 'moral friendship' as 'the complete confidence of two persons in revealing their secret judgments and feelings to each other' (MM 6:471). (Van Impe 2011: 136)

Aesthetic feelings.

Formosa, Paul 2010. Kant on the Highest Moral-Physical Good: The Social Aspect of Kant's Moral Philosophy. Kantian Review 15(1): 1-36. [DOI: 10.1017/S1369415400002351]

In §88, entitled 'On the highest moral-physical good', in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (hereafter Anthropology for short), Kant argues that 'good living' (physical good) and 'true humanity' (moral good) best harmonize in a 'good meal in good company'. The converastion and company shared over a meal, Kant argues, best provides for the 'union of social good living with virtue' in a way that promotes 'true humanity'. This occurs when the inclination to 'good living' is not merely kept within the bounds of 'the law of virtue' but where the two achieve a graceful harmony. (Formosa 2010: 1)

I'll place my emphasis on "harmony": "Meanwhile the participants in the feast believe - one wonders how much! - that they have found culture of the spirit in one of nature's purposes." (Kant 2006[1798]: 18)

Kant does locate the foundation of moral normativity, which is the focus of the Groundwork, in reason. However, in order to understand Kant's wider moral theory we need to examine not just his account of reason but also his complex distinctions between, and discussion of, empirical and rational desires, attitudes, emotions, feelings, affects, passions, dispositions, predispositions, propensities and character. (Formosa 2010: 2)

As broad a gradient of terms about the "emotional" life of man as Alexander Shand's (emotions, sentiments, sensations, instincts, innate tendencies, impulses, passions, etc.).

Kant differentiates between pathological feelings, which are those that precede reason, and moral feelings, which are the products of reason. The former feelings can, in the case of sympathy and compassion, aid reason in helping us to perform our duty. We should cultivate and strengthen such feelings, as well as the moral feelings of love and respect, and develop a disposition of cheerfulness, sociability, politeness and affection for others. (Formosa 2010: 2)

Wouldn't this make all feelings beside sentiments (i.e. higher-order systems of emotion, in Shand's sense) pathological feelings?

The image of the Kantian moral agent that thus emerges from this study is not that of an asocial and unemotional (yet somehow also guilt-ridden) agent with a rigid fixation on formulating universalizable maxims, the image usually associated with Kant's ethics, but rather that of a warm and engaged (though imperfect) social being who continually strives to become a true friend of human beings as such. The former image, unlike the latter, completely fails to make sense of much of Kant's wider writings on morality, and in particular Kant's focus on the dinner party in his discussion of humanity's highest moral-physical good. (Formosa 2010: 2)

Thankfully I haven't read any ethical works (at least to my knowledge) that depicts Kant's moral agents like that.

Such an ideal is manifested in the humble dinner party where we create, through sociable conversation, a temporary community where virtue and happiness flourish in harmony. (Formosa 2010: 3)

Isn't "communion" a temporary community?

Kant, in the preceding §87, argues that for individuals the highest physical good, the 'greatest sensuous enjoyment, which is not accompanied by any admixture of loathing at all, is resting after work, when one is in a healthy state'. In contrast, the highest physical good for the human species as a whole, which is provided for by the 'strongest impetus of nature', 'love of life and sexual love', is a state of perpetual peace where 'the totality of human beings [are] united socially on earth'. (Formosa 2010: 3)

Netflix and chill is the highest physical good humanity can achieve.

§88 defines the highest moral-physical good for a human being, 'who is partly sensible and partly moral and intellectual', to be a state of 'moral happiness', in which the inclination to 'good [|] living' is not anly limited by 'virtue' but also in harmony with it. While there is no earthly guarantee that our virtue will result in a proportionate amount of happiness, under relatively favourable conditions happiness and virtue are partners, not enemies. (Formosa 2010: 3-4)

Or, "felicity is the use of virtue in prosperity" (Archytas 1818: 159). That is, the greatest wisdom (the intellectual happiness of a rational animal) is to be moral even in sensuous affairs.

Thus, Kant's position here is closer to that of Aristotle than the Stoics. For both Kant and Aristotle it is not virtue alone that guarantees or wholly constitutes earthly happiness, but virtue plus the blessings of good fortune. (Formosa 2010: 4)

Prosperity - good fortune. How "sensuousness" came to take the place of wealth and luxury, I'm not yet sure (there's a vast gap in my knowledge between the pythagoreans and Locke).

Living a virtuous life, as Kant understands it, of wisdom and courage, devoted to justice, and to the pursuit of one's own well-rounded perfection and the happiness of others, is a happy life. And, given the nature of our humanity, the state that is most characteristic of this 'union of good living with virtue' is one of 'sociability', which can unfortunately easily slip into vice and 'false sociability'. Social intercourse thus provides the key link for Kant between virtue and happiness. (Formosa 2010: 4)

Consequences of man being a social creature.

A good dinner party should primarily aim, not at the mere physical enjoyment of eating and drinking, which can be achieved just as well by dining alone, but at the attainment of enjoyable and enlightening conversation. (Formosa 2010: 4)

Which one is enlightening? Narration, arguing or jesting?

Kant notes that during long dinners, with many courses, conversation usually goes through three stages: narration, arguing and jesting. The first stage enlightens by sharing the news of the day, the second stage cultivates our powers of judgment and reasoning through argumentation, and the third stage sharpens our wit through jesting. (Formosa 2010: 4)

Apparently it is the news of the day that enlighten. If narration (of news) serves Reason, and arguing Judgment, then jesting should ideally serve Aesthetic feelings?

Importantly, guests should not express disrespect for humanity through arrogance, defamation or ridicule, and dogmatism must not be allowed to arise; if it does, it should be deflated through the skilful use of jest. (Formosa 2010: 5)

Endnote (#31) is informative: "It is significant that the three vices (arrogance, defamation and ridicule) which violate duties of respect for other human beings are all social vices - see Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 6: 465-8." (Formosa 2010: 27) - These I'll have to look into because so much of social media (as our modern substitute for social intercourse) appears to be based exactly on these vices.

The avoiding of disrespect and dogmatism in turn cultivates 'pluralism' as a 'way of thinking', whereby we become used to avoiding egoism by taking the views of others as a necessary 'touchstone', though not a replacement, for our own thinking. (Formosa 2010: 5)

Concerning the second maxim, "To think oneself (in communication with human beings) into the place of every other person." (cf. Kant 2006[1798]: 124)

Humanity is a mixture of the sensuous and the rational, and to overplay either at the expense of the other, whether in the form of excessive enjoyment (as in drunkenness and gluttony) or fastidious denial of such pleasures (as the cynic or anchorite does), has no claim to humanity. (Formosa 2010: 6)

"The union of soul and body cannot be scientifically explained for man is, as it were, a third substance formed out of two heterogeneous substances" (Arnett 1904: 173)

To understand Kant's attention to the rules of conversation we need to appreciate the wider enlightenment context. Indeed, as Christopher Clark puts it, 'The Prussian enlightenment was about conversation'. Semi-formal conversation flourished in Prussia during the second half of the eighteenth century through a series of transnational networks of voluntary associations. These networks were composed of clubs, such as the Freemasons, reading societies, informal discussions in bookshops and coffee houses (such as Johan Jacob Kanter's bookshop in Kant's native Köningsberg), lecture and discussion groups such as the Berlin Wednesday Society, learned academic societies, and publications such as the famed Berlinische Monatsschrift. Statutes for the regulation of conversation were prevalent among these associations. These were designed not to stifle but rather to encourage free discussion by ensuring the observance of 'transparent and egalitarian rules for engagement' which were' essential if status differences were not to cripple debate from the outset'. The Freemasons, for example, had specific rules of conversational civility which included injunctions 'to avoid immoderate speech, frivolous or vulgar commentary and the discussion of topics (such as religion) that would stir divisive passions among the brothers'. Similar statutes for regulating conversation, to ensure that 'the imperatives of politeness and reciprocal respect' were met, appeared in the constitutions of numerous reading societies, along with prohibitions against 'parlour games and gambling'. (Formosa 2010: 7)

"Did the famous 'rules' for [Catherine II's] Hermitage in St Petersburg, designed to ensure innocent and civilized entertainment for her chosen guests, represent merely the mores of the princely family household in Stettin, or the simple elegance of the salon entertainments of her childhood?" (Bartlett 2006: 277)

Thinking for oneself is thus closely linked with speaking for oneself and being able to converse with others on equal terms. Indeed, Kant goes so far as to ask:
Yet how much and how correctly could we think if we did not think as it were in community with others to whom we communicate our thoughts, and who communicate theirs with us! Thus one can very well say that this external power which wrenches away people's freedom publically to communicate their thoughts also takes from them the freedom to think.
We cannot think for ourselves if we cannot communicate and converse with others. (Formosa 2010: 8)

Eerily reminiscent of Peirce's community of inquirers. Source is Kant's "Wha does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?" in Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (eds.), Religion and Rational Theology, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

We can read Kant's account of the French and the English as emblematic of [|] the two moral forces, respect and love, which are both essential elements of Kant's cosmopolitanism. The English are symbolic of respect, of adhering to principled interactions, and the limitation of hospitality to commercial engagement. The French are symbolic of love and benevolence, of sociable desires to converse and be hospitable to others, including foreigners, even if this is not always kept within the bounds of reasonable norms. (Formosa 2010: 10-11)

Funny how these discussions (in the first and second paper read in this post, respectively) come together.

To be hospitable is to invite the other into your home or country, to share your food and table, and to enter into peaceful social relations with them based on the respect and love due to all humans, wherever they come from. (Formosa 2010: 11)

Or, per Derrida/Melville's symbolic anthropophagy, to let your guest eat you, and eat them in turn?

As Kant notes here, aesthetic feelings are linked with sociability. In the Anthropology Kant writes: "Taste ... concerns the communication of our feeling of pleasure or displeasure to others, and includes a susceptibility, which this very communication affects pleasurably, to feel a satisfaction (complacentia) about it in common with others (sociably). Such sociable conversation, a form of the highest moral-physical good, arises from our ability to communicate valid judgments of taste to all, thus creating a pleasurable solidarity between peoples. (Formosa 2010: 12)

This connection (between aesthetic feelings and dinner party sociability) I've already noticed (cf. Van Impe 2011: 130, above).

For this reason a nation of purely self-interested but amoral devils could agree to abide by principles of justice. Indeed, in the Doctrine of Right, Kant considers humans to be essentially asocial and misanthropic. (Formosa 2010: 13)

Or, "by nature man is above all moved by the motive of self-love which attends to the happiness of oneself" (Van Impe 2011: 129).

Such a personal love is derived from an object of our senses (hence 'pathological'), namely our experience of the person toward whom we feel love, such as our partner, friend, child or parent. Love as a moral feeling, in contrast, takes the form of delight in the mere intellectual representation of human beings. (Formosa 2010: 14)

It looks like Kant might have treated the sensuous as "pathological" from the Greek πάθος ("I feel, suffer"), with emphasis on feeling rather than suffering (from disease, which is implied by the modern use of "pathology"). As in: "A will is sensuous, in so far as it is pathologically affected (by sensuous impulses); it is termed animal (arbitrium brutum), when it is pathologically necessitated." (Kant 1855: 331)

The fear that gratitude undermines self-esteem can also result from the social perversion of our originally good predisposition to humanity. From this natural predisposition 'originates the inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others ... originally ... merely equal worth ... but from this arises gradually an unjust desire to acquire superiority for oneself over others'. A struggle for public recognition as a person of equal worth to any other and due equal respect is a just demand and an expression of our good predisposition to humanity. (Formosa 2010: 17)

Vanity and renown. What the passage aims to say, I cannot make out. Quote from Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6: 27.

Social intercourse also has further moral benefits in that it cultivates a 'disposition of reciprocity - agreeableness, tolerance, mutual love and respect', which does much 'to associate the graces with virtue'. These 'externals or by products' give a 'beautiful illusion resembling virtue', without being deceptive. Kant explains:
Affability, sociability, courtesy, hospitality, and gentleness (in disagreeing without quarrelling) are, indeed, only tokens; yet they promote the feeling for virtue itself by a striving to bring this illusion as near as possible to the truth. By all these, which are merely the manners one is obliged to show in social intercourse, one binds others too.
For Kant, it is through social intercourse that we learn to treat others as ends in themselves, as beings worthy of our love and respect, and to whom we owe a degree of social hospitality. The first and not insignificant step toward being moral is thus at least putting on the show of morality, a point Kant repeats on numerous occasions, including in the first Critique. (Formosa 2010: 22)

Very positive, even suspiciously so. Couldn't social intercourse also foster social vices?

Of course, Kant is far from naïve about the duplicity, mendacity and deception that are endemic to society and social relations. But, despite all the corruptions of society, abandonment is no solution. The romantic withdrawal into an authentic solitude, in order to ensure that one's natural goodness is not perverted, is not a viable solution. Not only are we more likely to find angst rather than happiness there, but we also thereby fail in our ethical duties to promote the happiness of others and our own self-perfection. (Formosa 2010: 23)

Not least because in authentic solitude, one cannot eat.

Kant's detailed discussion of the dinner party in Anthropology is repeated in brief form in the Casuistical Questions for Article III for the duties to oneself as an animal being. There Kant again discusses the banquet which, though a temptation to immoral intemperance through overconsumption, nonetheless still 'aims at a moral end, beyond mere physical well-being: it brings a number of people together for a long time to converse with one another. And yet the very number of guests ... allows for only a little conversation (with those sitting next to one) - see Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 6: 428. (Formosa 2010: 26)

Concerning the number of guests.

Trullinger, Joseph 2015. Kant's Neglected Account of the Virtuous Solitary. International Philosophical Quarterly 55(1): 101-117. [Academia.edu] [DOI: 10.5840/ipq201511527]

The concept of "unsociable sociability" - Kant's term for our human propensity to compete with those whose company we naturally seek - has proved fruitful for recent decades of scholarship attempting to overturn the misinformed commonplace that Kantian morality is stringently individualistic. (Trullinger 2015: 101)

It certainly looks like I'll have to do a separate round of readings that specifically targets "unsociable sociability" to figure out if it can be used to better dissect Malinowski's phatic communion.

On this reading, since it is our sociability that has corrupted our innocence, it is only through societal means that the evil at the root of human nature can be overcome. As Allen Wood puts it, "The source of evil, Kant concludes, is social. The struggle against it, he concludes, if it is to be effective, must therefore also be social." (Trullinger 2015: 101)

"Social reformers like Fourier and Robert Owen assumed that God made man good and that his faults came from living in a bad social system" (Ross 1920: 549). It looks like Kant was in the same boat, as he naturally (before Darwin) should have been.

I have the relatively simple aim of pointing out that Kant does not always endorse communal interaction tout court, and in fact he makes room for a kind of salutary self-isolation in a paragraph tucked away near the end of §29 of the Third Critique (5:275-76). To my knowledge, only one person has analyzed this passage at any significant length, and nobody has noticed its true relevance for the possibility of moral rectitude apart from one's community. (Trullinger 2015: 102)

Kant wrote so damn much that two centuries later people are still finding valuable nuggets that illuminate his other writings.

By tracing the development of Kant's idea of principled solitude in his lectures on anthropology, in addition to demonstrating how this fits with Montaigne's concept of "true solitude" - a concept present in the very same essay from which Kant drew the term "unsociable sociability" - I will provide the historical context necessary for a thorough reading of 5:275-76. (Trullinger 2015: 102)

So well known that it is quoted on Goodreads: “There is nothing more unsociable than man, and nothing more sociable: unsociable by his vice, sociable by his nature.”

To be self-sufficient, hence not to need society, yet without being unsociable, i.e., fleeing it, is something that comes close to the sublime, just like any superiority over needs. (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:275-76)
While the anthropophobe and the misanthrope also withdraw from society, the virtuous hermit's withdrawal is not grounded in a pathological flaw but "rests on ideas that look beyond all sensible interest" (here, the idea of our moral vocation) and is therefore sublime. (Trullinger 2015: 103-104)

"Pathological", as we've seen above, is loaded with sensuousness (and perhaps "needs").

A few years after writing 5:274-76, Kant states that the mere presence of other human beings precipitates evil passions within an individual, even if those other people do not provide him with a bad example. (Trullinger 2015: 106)

Thus, exactly contrary to Herbert Spencer, who writes that "commonly, social union, when by any means established, checks impulsiveness" and implies "checks upon the prompting of the simpler passions" (Spencer 1876: 12-13)

The unsociability within our socializing consists in a self-chosen competitiveness that distorts our perception of ethical experience. In ingratitude, we see the kindness done to us as burdens or social debts that we now have to pay back with beneficence, thereby inducing us to view beneficence as insincere or driven by ulterior motives. (Trullinger 2015: 106)

I don't see how unsociable sociability is connected with this moral self-evaluation. Can't have Kant without ethics, I guess.

It is not simply an innocent desire for companionship that keeps drawing us to socialize. On a deeper and more insidious level, the choice of radical evil in the human heart makes our sociability infested with unsociable tendencies. (Trullinger 2015: 107)

The conclusion is on point. The path taken on the other hand...

Occasionally scholars acknowledge that Kant draws the term "unsociable sociability" from Montaigne's statement: "There is nothing more unsociable than Man, and nothing more sociable; unsociable by his vice, sociable by his nature." To my knowledge no scholar has noticed that the very next sentence articulates an argument for the virtuous man to withdraw from society - a position in keeping with the essay's title ("On Solitude"), yet one antithetical to the conclusion that these scholars form: "And Antisthenes does not seem to me to have given an adequate reply to the person who reproached him for associating with the wicked, when he retorted that doctors live among the sick: for even if doctors do help the sick to return to healthy they impair their own by constantly seeking and touching diseases as they treat them." Montaigne acknowledges the considerable power of social intercourse to corrode one's integrity, and thus finds isolation to be salutary. At the same time, he stresses that simply removing oneself from the presence of others is insufficient for "true solitude" in which one's soul is unencumbered by the tendency to evaluate oneself through the standing of others. The root of the problem lies in oneself even though it may blossom in the presence of others. Nevertheless, we are so habituated to concern ourselves with the opinions of others that we may have to retreat from their company to honestly face and earnestly deal with our internal faults. The person who learns this vital habit of self-possession no longer succumbs to ambition and is able to be in the company of ambitious people (even those in high office) without imitating their vicious habits. (Trullinger 2015: 107)

Found Montaigne's essay on solitude here (the relevant passage in the middle of page 244). It looks like something I should definitely read.

Since it is commonplace for people to remain in society with hidden hostility for the people around them - that is, to socialize for a sense of companionship as well as a sense of superiority to one's companions - it is also possible that philanthropy might be capable of taking a similarly counterintuitive form in withdrawal from society. (Trullinger 2015: 108)

"The self-conceited by no means resign themselves to solitude." (Ross 1920: 112)

This free decision is what separates genuine sympathy from a spurious kind of sympathy, which is our natural receptivity to adopt whatever emotion another person is feeling. As I walk through the slums, I may see a starving child in rags tug on my sleeve, and it is human nature to feel a twinge of sadness. If my response is to give that child some money so as to do away with my feelings of discomfort, then I am merely displaying pity, which Kant sees a disrespectful and condescending. This pseudo-sympathy, which Kant terms "compassion," is unfree since it is a chiefly mechanical reflex that pertains to the way our emotions are largely "communicable." However, if I think that no human being should have to endure such conditions, and for that reason give the child assistance, then I am displaying genuine sympathy. In this case, the child does not just "infect" me with concern. I care about the child's well-being because I respectfully recognize the child's inherent worth as a rational being. (Trullinger 2015: 109)

More or less equivalent to E. R. Clay's distinction between homogeneous and heterogeneous sympathy, i.e. fellowship and pity. Kantian ethics might quite well work out if interposed on that distinction, since homogeneous sympathy implies a "non-mechanical" care for the other (not well versed in Kantian lingo to word it better). The very next sentence does it: "Were I to maintain this sympathy, I would be on the way to becoming his friend in the truest [Kantian] sense possible" (ibid, 109), i.e. it would be sympathy that begets fellowship.

Such philanthropy is nothing less than the effort to be a true friend to any human being primarily because he is a fellow human being, and not merely because he belongs to a certain class of human beings I happen to like. Kant maintains that adherence to the absolute and inclusionary guiding principle of perpetually striving after a morally pure disposition - rather than mutual advantage or shared preferences, which are subject to vacillating empirical conditions - forms the basis of consummate friendship, wherein free beings speak and behave freely among one another, with only a minimal amount of reserve. Such open-heartedness and candor is only sustainable through a shared confidence in the possibility for virtue latent within each human being, or as Kant puts it, "the reciprocal enjoyment of their humanity". Kant differentiates this enjoyment from "instinctual fellow-feeling" (by which he seems to mean the passive receptivity defined above as "compassion"), which implies this enjoyment is actively produced through contemplation of moral capacity and is thus a kind of moral feeling rather than mere empirical feeling. (Trullinger 2015: 110)

Here on the other hand I'm reminded of McDougall's distinction between active and passive sympathy, which is also comparable to Clay's distinction: "for while [passive sympathy] may be wholly one-sided, [active sympathy] can hardly become fully formed and permanent without some degree of reciprocation and of sympathy in this fuller sense." (McDougall 1916: 168)

One must therefore bear in mind the centrality of principle for Kant's notion of philanthropy when one reads the following passage: [|]
It is a duty to oneself as well as to others not to isolate oneself (separatistam agere) but to use one's moral perfections in social intercourse (officium commercii, sociabilitas). While making oneself a fixed center of one's principles, one ought to regard this circle drawn around one as also forming part of an all-inclusive circle of those who, in their disposition, are citizens of the world - not exactly in order to promote as the end what is best for the world but only cultivate what leads indirectly to this end: to cultivate a disposition of reciprocity - agreeableness, tolerance, mutual love and respect (affability and propriety, humanitas aesthetica et decorum) and so to associate the graces with virtue.
The apparent conflict of this passage in §48 of the Metaphysical Principles of Virtue with the permissibility of virtuous solitude is resolved once one notes that one must make "oneself a fixed center of one's principles" first, in order for one's socializing to be genuinely virtuous and not merely behaviour that comes to oneself naturally. This duty not to isolate oneself is constituted by the use of moral perfections one already possesses. It would follow that if socializing were to jeopardize the existence of these perfections, then the ground of this obligation would dictate refraining from social interaction, at least for whatever length of time necessary to establish or reestablish one's principles as a "fixed center" within oneself. (Trullinger 2015: 112-113)

That is, bad company jeopardizes our morals. At the same time, it is "a duty to virtue" to fix one's ethical principles and to see social intercourse as a means to improve the ethical principles of others.

Just as Montaigne thought solitude could lead to the self-possession necessary for truly virtuous social intercourse, this recovery of oneself as the "fixed center of ones' princilpes" is salutary. Without anchoring oneself in principles, one's volitions will be the stirring of affect rather than decisions made through reason, acts of compassion rather than genuine sympathy. Kant's choice of the term "moral apathy" for this self-possession is meant to imply a lack of pathological passion and an according abundance of moral feeling, which accords with philanthropic sympathy. (Trullinger 2015: 114)

In other words, solitude is sometimes a means of "self-control", keeping one's volitions in check by expulsing emotions (or emotional upheaval - pathological passions) and follow reason instead.

The ideal moral disposition would comprise philanthropic concern so deeply rooted in one's character that the debased passions of others could do nothing to deter this practical love. No reception this person's love encounters (no matter how ungrateful) would rattle his disposition because his love proceeds from freely chosen sympathy rather than the receptivity of compassion. This strength of character that loves entirely without need of return is what Kant means by the self-sufficiency "not to need society, yet without being unsociable." (Trullinger 2015: 117)

"An artist should be fit for the best society and should keep out of it" (Ruskuni; in Ross 1920: 98).

Melville, Peter 2004. A "Friendship of Taste": The Aesthetics of Eating Well in Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. In: Morton, Timothy (ed.), Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 203-216. [SpringerLink] [DOI: 10.1057/9781403981394_11]

Despite its ancillary position, the question plays a significant role in establishing the conditions for one of the text's most elaborate and (for Kant) most pleasurable sketches of enlightened anthropological life, the cosmopolitan dinner party. (Melville 2004: 203)

Wasn't aware that his etiquette for dinner parties required the qualifier "cosmopolitan".

For Kant, taste is a faculty of "social judgment" [gesellschaftlichen Beurteilung] manifesting itself most admirably in the ability of a host to make an "acceptable selection" of dishes for his guests (AP 143, 145). The last of Kant's works published in his lifetime, the Anthropology presumes that matters of taste are metaphorically tied to the tongue because the tasting of food, seasoned with a disciplinary [|] mixture of table etiquette, provides the optimal conditions for that partly sensuous, partly ethical, partly aesthetic feeling of "civilized bliss" (AP 186). (Melville 2004: 203-204)

Once again covering all three of the triadic bases - sensible, moral, and intellectual (cf. Formosa 2010: 3-4, above).

In the Critique [of Judgment] Kant stresses that the dinner party is a considerably limited metaphor for the aesthetic: the rules or manners of the dinner table are only "general (as all empirical rules are), not universal, as are the rules that a judgment about the beautiful presupposes." (Melville 2004: 204)

It looks like CoJ might be a very interesting read. It looks like he reiterates the dinner table conversation episode therein (cf. Kant 1914: 186).

The party is a moral tale containing a modified version of the anthropological imperative: if man must "make himself a rational animal" (AP 238), then he must also make himself something good to eat. He must learn to live with taste. In the Anthropology, eating is always a matter of form as well as substance. But for an activity that is literally a matter of life and death (not just for the individual, but for the whole community), form acquires a deeply serious and ethical significance. (Melville 2004: 204)

This "make himself something good to eat" can be read in two ways: a rational animal must eat something good (sensible, normal, understandable) or, per symbolic anthropophagy, a rational animal must make himself edible (what the Derrida?).

The struggle between these figures affects an odd but necessary process of consumption in which fellow interlocutors are served, as it were, as dishes for table companions; whereas certain dis-gusting others are vomited from the social mechanisms of the meal. (Melville 2004: 204)

Here we go again.

What is especially distasteful about the solitary man of learning is the fact that he is a wasteful consumer, an insatiable eater without manners, recklessly devouring all things before him, including food, thought, and especially himself. (Melville 2004: 205)

Or, you know, a measured eater who does the animal thing pragmatically, gaining the energy needed to continue reading and thinking.

In the strangely elliptical and hypochondriacal logic of solipsismus convictorii, the solitary eater is absorbed by the very food he eats. His private victuals are seasoned by his own obsessive contemplation. Feasting on food and mind alike, this hermetic philosopher practices gluttony. Bloated and stuffed, he is thus dis-eased, the subject and the object of one and the same act of incorporation. (Melville 2004: 205)

A physiological impossibility.

Kass reminds us of the etymology of "companion," which is composed of the Latin prefix cum (together) and panis (bread), hence, "Company ... comes to accompany the berad" (HS 131). But if man comes together with or through bread, he also comes together as bread. (Melville 2004: 208)

Nope. By breaking bread man does not himself become bread.

There are, however, several ways to master their hunger, such as eating only once a day (in the evening during middle age, or at midday in later years) and not "giving in" to attacks of thirst, which "are, for the most part, only habit" (CF 197). (Melville 2004: 210)

This message has been brought to you by the committe for promoting kidney stones.

Is the woman, then to eat alone - banished from the brotherhood of taste? Where will she go to eat in peace, to escape the "intentional, but not insulting attacks on her sex" committed by the men of the meal (AP 189)? (Melville 2004: 212)

Note the context: "thus the conversation sinks naturally to the mere play of wit, partly also to please the women present, against whom the small, deliberate, but not shameful attacks on their sex enable them to show their own wit to advantage" (Kant 2006[1798]: 18). Melville makes it sound as if men are constantly attacking women with their jokes, just because - and women must escape from this abuse, whereas the context shows that those gentle "attacks" are meant to engage the women present and let them retort.

The self needs the other to eat back, to be afflicted by a hunger as virile as its own. Kant's dinner party sets noplace for a feminine self that forgoes eating in favor of being eaten. (Melville 2004: 213)

Absolutely nothing "enable[s] them to show their own wit to advantage"?

Baron, Marcia 2014. Kantian Moral Maturity and the Cultivation of Character. In: Cohen, Alix (ed.) Kant on Emotion and Value. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 69-87. [SpringerLink] [DOI: 10.1057/9781137276650_4]

We have a responsibility not to nurse grudges, not to endorse in ourselves (among other things) a smug sense of superiority, a racist outlook, a reckless love of danger, a cynicism that has the effects of giving one an excuse for never trying to improve things, or a readiness to believe whatever makes us feel good. (Baron 2014: 71)

Ever since reading this (above), I've started considering if scrolling reddit, for example, is all that good, seeing as it very often demonstrates the worst of humanity (moral outrages).

The caption explains that they won 'the silent auction for the coveted privilege of whacking the windshield during a church "carbash." The 'carbash' was a fundraiser to 'help send kids to this year's Christ in Youth conference in Tennessee'. (Baron 2014: 72)

Perfectly topping. Smashing car windows, after all, is what Jesus would do.

Despite a renaissance in Kant scholarship that over the past 25 years or so has corrected many misconceptions, inaccurate characterizations and misleading innuendos (though generally not as extreme as Blackburn's) abound. One finds these in many discussions, but a particular common location is any discussion that contrasts virtue ethics to Kantian ethics to explain the appeal of the former. (Baron 2014: 73)

Considering the amount of literature on Kant (thousands upon thousands of books, not to mention papers), it would be surprising if a sizeable portion did not get him wrong.

Even from this brief sketch it is evident that the obligatory ends entail more than simply duties to undertake certain types of actions and to refrain from certain others (and to do so for the right reason). They call upon us (albeit somewhat indirectly) to shape our characters affectively and attitudinally. If I have a tendency to held grudges or to lose my temper easily, I'll need to strive to change that. Doing so requires more than mere behavioral changes. I must come to view what I perceive as slights as not the big deal that I now think they are; I have to train myself not to dwell on the 'infuriating' remarks so-and-so made, or if I already have dwelt on them, to ratchet down the emotional reaction and (before long) to 'drop it'; and I have to steer myself away from looking for slights in the first place. (Baron 2014: 75)

An instance in which Peirce appears to be not very Kantian: "It is impossible for a man to act contrary to his character. It is foolish for him to try to do it; he would be no better man for doing it since the character makes the man. The Very Law of the Growth of Character is contained in the Character." (W 1: 6)

Kant also asserts in 'On the Virtues of Social Intercourse', an appendix to Part II of The Doctrine of Virtue, that it is a duty of virtue to 'cultivate a disposition of reciprocity - agreeableness, tolerance, mutual love and respect' (MS 6:473). Also relevant is his discussion of 'vices that violate duties of respect for other human beings'; these include arrogance (MS 6:465) and wanton faultfinding [|] and mockery (MS 6:467). Part of self-cultivation, Kant implies, is to weaken whatever propensity we have to these vices. (Baron 2014: 76-77)

So it is - a one-page appendix - page 265 in Mary Gregor's translation (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Cultivating my character - making myself more of a Mensch - is also inherently valuable. Some sense of its centrality to Kant's ethics can be gleaned from the following statement, from Kant's Metaphysics of Morals: 'A human being has a duty to raise himself from the crude state of his nature, from his animality (quoad actum) more and more toward humanity, by which he alone is capable of setting himself ends' (MS 6:387). (Baron 2014: 77)

Hence his resentment towards the "sensuous" or "pathological" ("perceptible").

The child must maintain friendships with others and not remain by itself all the time. Some teachers, it is true, are opposed to these friendships in schools; but this is very wrong. Children should prepare themselves for the sweetest enjoyment of life ... . Children must be openhearted too, and as bright as the sun in their expressions. The cheerful heart alone is capable of rejoicing in the good. (VP 9:484-5) (Baron 2014: 78)

A familiar theme. In Uber Pädagogik (1803), or p. 92 in this microfilmed edition.

That Kant does not hold that we should aim to eliminate inclinations is clear from his statement of his differences with the Stoics on this very matter. The Stoics, he says 'mistook their enemy, who is not to be sought in natural inclinations'. Indeed, 'natural inclinations are good ... and to want to extirpate them would not only be futile but harmful and blameworthy as well; we must rather only curb them, so that they will not wear each other but will instead be harmonized into a whole called happiness' (R 6:58). (Baron 2014: 79)

Likewise with social vices (unsociable sociability), which cannot be extirpated from human nature but can be checked and moderated with reason.

Kant's remarks in Anthropology about passionate ambition nicely illustrate this.
The ambition of a human being may always be an inclination whose direction i sapproved by reason; but the ambitious person nevertheless also wants to be loved by others, he needs pleasant social intercourse with others, the maintenance of his financial position, and the like. However, if he is a passionately ambitious person, then he is blind to these ends, though his inclinations still summon him to them, and he overlooks completely the risk he is running that he will be hated by others, or avoided in social intercourse, or impoverished through his expenditures. It is folly (making part of one's end the whole), which directly contradicts the formal principle of reason itself. (A 7:266)
In sum, one aspect of the cultivation of humanity in oneself is taming one's inclinations, bringing them into harmony, and preventing them from becoming ungovernable. This and related features of self-government are crucial components of moral maturity, on Kant's view, and constitute goals that shape, or should shape, moral education. (Baron 2014: 79)

On point. Ambition (in moderation), is indeed a catalyst to social intercourse: going by the Encyclopedic entry on ambitus it is very social (using friends - amitas - to further one's political career, i.e. shaking hands and kissing babies), whereas if ambition becomes the dominant personality trait, that person becomes a social pariah.

Giamario, Patrick T. 2017. "Making Reason Think More": Laughter in Kant's Aesthetic Philosophy. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 22(4): 161-176. [Taylor & Francis Online] [DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2017.1406055]

In particular, section 54 (the Analytic's final section) provides an extended "Remark" on laughter. Here Kant contends that "laughter is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing" (332, §54). (Giamario 2017: 161)

The "Relief theory" of humor: "According to Herbert Spencer, laughter is an "economical phenomenon" whose function is to release "psychic energy" that had been wrongly mobilized by incorrect or false expectations. The latter point of view was supported also by Sigmund Freud. Kant also emphasized the physiological release in our response to humor."

First, although Kant describes joking as an "agreeable art" carrying only empirical significance (330-34, §54), I argue that section 54 demonstrates that laughter constitutes a highly specific form of aesthetic judgment within his critical philosophy. (Giamario 2017: 162)

Meeldimiskunst (vt Rousseau 1993a: 60).

Kant's first two Critiques carefully differentiate nature (the empirical domain of appearances) from freedom (the transcendental domain of things-in-themselves). The Critique of the Power of Judgment - especially the first half on aesthetics - aims to bridge the "incalculable gulf" dividing these two domains (175). To that end, the Analytic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment focuses on two types of judgments: judgments of taste (i.e., judgments about whether an object is beautiful) and judgments of the sublime. The beautiful and the sublime are aesthetic judgments because they concern how the representation of an object pleases or displeases the subject (203, §1). No objective logical, empirical, or moral criteria are involved in the beautiful and the sublime; all that matters is the subject's feeling of pleasure or displeasure. (Giamario 2017: 162)

The parenthesis following judgments of taste seem to restrictive but then again I haven't read CoJ yet.

Whereas in the beautiful a feeling of pleasure results from nature's purposiveness with respect to the subject's cognitive faculties, in the sublime a highly paradoxical feeling of pleasure results from nature's contrapurposiveness with respect to these faculties. Nature is "contrapurposive" when its representation clashes with the subject's ability to judge it. Rather than feeling as if nature is "predetermined" (245, §23) or "suitable" (189) for the subject, the sublime leaves the subject feeling as if nature is at odds with her power of judgment. As Kant writes,
that which [...] excites in us the feeling of the sublime, may to be sure appear in its form to be contrapurposive for our power of judgment, unsuitable for our faculty of presentation, and as it were doing violence to our imagination. (245, £23)
The sublime appears to widen rather than bridge the gulf between nature and freedom. (Giamario 2017: 163)

Define:sublime - "of very great excellence or beauty"; "extreme or unparalleled"; "elevate to a high degree of moral or spiritual purity or excellence".

Kant's discussion of laughter in section 54 completes a lengthy examination of the relationship between art, taste, and genius (§§43-54). In these sections Kant identifies a type of art that pleases the subject by stimulating his cognitive faculties ("beautiful art") rather than by proving sensuous gratification ("agreeable art") (305, §44). Beautiful art launches the understanding and the imagination into the harmonious, disinterested, pleasurable play described above (306, §45). After assessing the value of various artistic practices as beautiful art, Kant concludes in section 54 with an extended, yet rather unexpected analysis of the "play of thoughts," or joking, that subjects engage in at dinner parties (331-32, §54). He describes how clever witticisms generate laughter among guests by playfully reversing their expectations. (Giamario 2017: 164)

It sounds like there's a triad here: (1) agreeable art; (2) beautiful art; and (3) sublime art.

Laughter for Kant constitutes the final stage of a dinner party where "men of taste (aesthetically united)" allow themselves a degree of sensious pleasure after recounting the news of the day and engaging in a robust philosophical discussion (Anthropology 278-81). (Giamario 2017: 165)

Jesting provides sensuous pleasure?

Joking poses a problem for Kant's distinction between beautiful and agreeable art. On the one hand, the dinnertime exchange of witticisms is a "play of thoughts" or "play of the power of judgment" that involves quick changes in the representations considered by the mind (Critique of the Power of Judgment 331, §54; 335, §54). Because laughter is a "pleasure of reflection" in this way (306, §44), joking appears to constitute a beautiful art. But Kant also describes laughter as an enjoyable vibration of the body's organs that aids digestion, thus suggesting that joking more closely approximates a merely agreeable art (332-34, §54; Anthropology 281). The following quote illustrates how joking troubles Kant's distinction between beautiful and agreeable art:
Music and material for laughter are two kinds of play with aesthetic ideas or even representations of the understanding, by which in the end nothing is thought, and which can gratify merely through their change, and nevertheless do so in a lively fashion; by which they make it fairly evident that the animation in both cases is merely corporeal, although it is around by ideas of the mind. (Critique of the Power of Judgment 332, §54)
While Kant acknowledges that laughter originates in a play within the reflective power of judgment, he concludes that because the gratification it provides is ultimately bodily, "the joke [...] deserves to be counted as agreeable rather than as beautiful art" (ibid.; see also 205, §44). (Giamario 2017: 165)

For some reason I'm reminded of William James' polemic over emotions and facial expressions.

Kant explains that laughter arises when a joke presents an idea that clashes with the subject's expectations:
In everything that is to provoke a lively, uproarious laughter, there must be something nonsensical (in which, therefore, the understanding in itself can take no satisfaction). Laughter is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing. (332, §54)
Later, Kant claims that a joke presents an illusion "that can deceive for a moment" (334, §54). (Giamario 2017: 165)

Subverted expectations.

We see Kant's preoccupation with the beautiful in his reference to "the harmonies in [musical] tones or sallies of wit [...] with their beauty" and his characterization of joking as a "beautiful play" (332, §54). Second, Kant characterizes the capacity to produce laughter as an ability akin to genius, the talent of producing beautiful art (307, §46; 334, §54). Third, Kant describes dinner party jesting as an activity enjoyed by "men of taste (aesthetically united)" - that is, men who have a particular sensitivity to the beautiful (Anthropology 278). (Giamario 2017: 167)

Humour is a kind of art.

Kant dwells on laughter because he worries that its source in a "play of the power of judgment" (Critique of the Power of Judgment 335, §54) might lead readers into matters that ultimately carry only empirical significance, thus distracting them from the proper object of critical-transcendental analysis (the possibility of a priori judgments). His efforts to disqualify joking from the domain of beautiful art in section 54 suggest that laughter resides just beyond the borders of critical-transcendental legitimacy. Due to its origin in a play of the power of judgment, laughter is more than a simple affect Kant can write off an an empirical or anthropological issue, but its status as a bodily sensation precludes us from including it in critical philosophy. (Giamario 2017: 169)

A serious, serious philosophical problem.

Kant goes on to suggest that aesthetic ideas do more than merely exhibit the ideas of reason. In section 49 he explains that they stimulate reason to "think more," or to transform its ideas:
Now if a concept is provided with a presentation of the imagination such that, even though this presentation belongs to the exhibition of the concept, yet it prompts, even by itself, so much thought as can never be comprehended within a determinate concept and thereby the presentation aesthetically expands the concept itself in an unlimited way, then the imagination is creative in this and sets the power of intellectual ideas (i.e., reason) in motion: it makes reason think more, when prompted by a presentation, than what can be apprehended and made distinct in the presentation. (314-15, §49; emphasis added)
According to Kant, the imagination can stimulate reason to think beyond what is presently entailed by its ideas. This is an absolutely crucial point because it means that laughter's "play with aesthetic ideas" is in the end not a mental activity limited to the understanding and the imagination. The confrontation between the understanding and the imagination in laughter jostles the mind as a whole and puts reason to work. (Giamario 2017: 171)

This assumes that a joke is an aesthetic presentation. Not sure if this is a problem.

Marshall, David 2005. Food as Ritual, Routine or Convention. Consumption Markets & Culture 8(1): 69-85. [Taylor & Francis Online] [DOI: 10.1080/10253860500069042]

Simmel started his discussion of eating and drinking with a paradox: namely, he stated that eating and drinking are common to all human beings but at the same time they are the most selfish and individual activites ... Because eating combines this completely egotistical interest in an exemplary manner with social interaction and being together, it exercises an enormous importance in all communities, of which the best proof are the innumerable rules and prohibitions that regulate it everywhere. These rules can, among other things, concern the people with whom one is allowed to share a meal. (Gronow 1997, 136-37)
One could argue that food is extraordinary in its ordinariness, exceptional in the extent to which we treat it as mundane, and outstanding as a focus for the study of consumption. (Marshall 2005: 69)

"Meanwhile the participants in the feast believe - one wonders how much! - that they have found culture of the spirit in one of nature's purposes." (Kant 2006[1798]: 18) - Gronow, J. 1997. A Sociology of Taste. London; New York: Routledge.

The etymological roots of "consumption" come from "consumere" (cum sumere) meaning to use up entirely and involves the destruction of matter, and "consummare" (cum summa), to sum up or carry to completion (Barnhart 1988; Williams 1982). (Marshall 2005: 70)

Consummation.

This (re)construction of the body [|] is as much a social phenomenon and eating both mirrors and at the same time constitutes social relations. Food must be not only good to eat it must be "good to think" (Levi Strauss 1963). (Marshall 2005: 70-71)

Eating together something something social relations.

While the sensual pleasures of eating are completely individualised eating is a highly social activity and regulated by the community. (Marshall 2005: 71)

I'm once again reminded of Malinowski's remark about the Trobrianders', who cook food communally but after taking their portion each family eats separately.

Ilmonen (2001) discusses the Durkheimian interpretation of ritual as a means of cerating social order and strengthening group solidarity and explores Malinowski's idea that rituals serve as devices that reduce anxiety arising from uncertainty about what to do in certain situations. In the case of food consumption they act as scripts regulating the sequence and order of dishes and provide guidelines on appropriateness and comportment in certain situations. (Marshall 2005: 72)

Speaking of the devil.

Many of the food festivities celebrated in We Gather Together (Humphrey and Humphrey 1988), capture this ritualistic aspect of family and community get together at clambakes, barbecues, birthday parties, and Halloween each with their own celebratory foods. They refer to the work of the food folklorist Charles Camp who stressled the need to focus on the eating event and to understand what the act of eating together meant for those involved. (Marshall 2005: 73)

I suspect that those are very fugitive meanings indeed.

Visser's observations on the dinner ritual reflect the importance of aesthetics in eating. Gronow (1997), discussing Simmel's 1910 essay on the meal, shows how the beauty of the meal resides in its purity of form rather than in any sensory-physiological aspects of eating. IT is the social form, or interaction, of the meal that embodies the aesthetics and the more it extols these aspects the less it serves the satisfaction of needs and hunger. (Marshall 2005: 74)

This must be Georg Simmel's 1910 newspaper article "The Sociology of the Meal". It's missing from the bibliography.

The meal is more than an object; it is an event or lived experience where the senses (visual, taste, smell, touch, sound) meet with emotions and cognitive energies (Lalonde 1992). This interpretation of meal as event sees the joining of the physiological, psychological, and sociological in a highly symbolic event. (Marshall 2005: 79)

Not only taste.

Giamario, Patrick T. 2020. Laughter as dissensus: Kant and the limits of normative theorizing around laughter. Contemporary Political Theory. [SpringerLink] [DOI: 10.1057/s41296-020-00447-9]

Laughter has been at the center of political life in recent years. From the late-night liberal satire machine to the insult comedy of Donald Trump; from tongue-in-cheek tweets by government agencies to right-wing internet troll farms; from comedians winning elected office to religious militants murdering cartoonists: laughter is a key source, object, and means of political discourse and action in the early twenty-first century. (Giamario 2020)

Probably why "the right can't meme" - they've outsourced their meme-making to paid labour who do it as one does any wage labour, half-heartedly.

According to Kant, practical (or moral normative) philosophy answers the question 'What should I do?' (Kant, 2009, A805/B833). Existing political-theoretic accounts of laughter - even those that eschew the Kantian search for a priori foundations - follow this model: they ask a normative question ('what role should laughter play in the polis?') and provide normative answers (e.g. laughter that challenges gender norms should be encouraged (Butler, 1990, pp. 138-139, 146), while laughter that fuels political cynicism should be avoided (Hart and Hartelius, 2007)). I call this the normative discourse of the politics of laughter. Aesthetic philosophy addresses a very different question: 'What do I feel?' (More specifically, can the subject demand a priori that all others feel the same way when presented with an object? (Kant, 2000, 5: 288)). (Giamario 2020)

What happened to "What can I hope?" The communicability of feeling is an exceedingly intricate one.

It is necessary to acknowledge at the outset that my reading presses Kant's work in directions that he most likely would not want to go. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine Kant himself describing laughter as dissensus. While I attempt to remain faithful to Kant's concepts, distinctions, and overall philosophical problematic, my goal is not simply to present and analyze his views on laughter, but to think with Kant in order to uncover how his theory's various claims, contradictions, and loose ends shed light on laughter in the current conjuncture. (Giamario 2020)

Admirably framed.

Detailing the positive effects that laughter enjoyed at dinner parties has on the body, Kant writes that 'the animation' in laughter 'is merely corporeal' and 'the feeling of the health resulting from a movement of the viscera [in laughter] ... constitutes the whole gratification in a lively party' (2000, 5: 332). Moreover, '[t]he jerky (nearly convulsive) exhaling of air attached to laughter ... strengthens the feeling of vital force through the wholesome exercise of the diaphragm' (2006, 7: 262). (Giamario 2020)

Is this a physicalist view of laughter?

As Katia Hay asks 'how can a certain play of thought or a series of playful connections and associations of the representations of the understanding awaken in us a feeling of pleasure that has absolutely nothing to do with our mind?' (Hay, 2017, p. 200). Or conversely, how can a sensuous pleasure arise out of a 'play of the power of judgment' that has absolutely nothing to do with the body? [|]
One response to this puzzle would be to say that Kant simply does not offer a very good theory of laughter: he opens a gap between reflection and sense that he then fails to close. (Giamario 2020)

It is an asburdity that jokes have nothing to do with the mind.

To determine laughter's relation to this Kantian notion of sensus communis, let's return to the Anthropology. Here Kant expands on the Third Critique's claim that laughter is part of a successful dinner party (Kant, 2006, 7: 263-265; 278-281). Dinner parties (or 'social suppers' (7: 263)) are important for Kant. They constitute a key means by which human beings satisfy their sensuous inclinations while also fulfilling their moral vocation: '[t]he good living that still seems to harmonize best with true humanity is a good meal in good company' (7: 278). Laughter is the pleasure guests allow themselves after they have enjoyed their food and the men have recounted the news of the day and engaged in a robust philosophical [|] discussion (7: 280-281). Kant writes: 'the meal ends with laughter, which, if it is loud and good-natured, has actually been determined by nature to help the stomach in the digestive process' (7: 281). As both a pleasure of reflection and a pleasure of sense, laughter is well positioned to help achieve the dinner party's dual mandate of cultivating virtue and providing sensuous pleasure. (Giamario 2020)

As I've seen from the foregoing papers, the moral imperative of cultivating virtue appears to run much more deeper than the aesthetic imperative of providing sensuous pleasure.

The status of sensus communis in dinner party laughter is highly ambiguous. On the one hand, Kant describes the gentlemen who laugh at each other's jokes as 'men of taste (aesthetically untied)' (7: 278). Their aesthetic unity hinges on laughter's character as a pleasure of reflection. Because laughter arises from a disinterested reflection on a sudden change in form (i.e., a joke's transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing), a subject can expect all others to laugh along with him. In laughing together, the gentlemen appeal to and employ sensus communis, or their shared capacity for judging what is laughable (and beautiful, etc.). They are 'aesthetically united' - that is, they see and hear the world in basically the same way. As Ted Cohen argues, those who joke with one another form a 'community of amusement' with an implicitly acknowledged set of shared feelings (Cohen, 1999, pp. 28-30). (Giamario 2020)

In other words, there is a consensus about what is funny.

Rancière's concepts of the 'distribution of the sensible' and 'dissensus' help unpack the political significance of laughter's ambiguous relation to sensus communis. Rancière argues that aesthetics concerns the a priori rules regulating what subjects see and hear in the sensible world: 'aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense .... as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience' (Rancière, 2004, p. 13). This system of aesthetic a priori constitutes a 'distribution of the sensible', or determination of which bodies appear as visible and which utterances are heard as rational speech (p. 12). (Giamario 2020)

Umwelten.

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