Moral Sentiment as an Acquired Taste: Kant on Moral Cultivation through Analogical Reflection

This essay offers a systematic interpretation of Kant’s account of moral cultivation in the Doctrine of Method of the Critique of Practical Reason . While the objective validity of the moral law is secured in the Analytic, the Doctrine of Method addresses the problem of how the law can become subjectively efficacious in agents who already possess freedom as the transcendental condition of their moral agency, and who must therefore not receive it from without, but acquire it as their own. Kant approaches this problem by introducing Räsonieren , a form of arguing that begins from perplexity and aims at cultivating moral sentiment ( Gesinnung ). I claim that this form of arguing is best understood on the model of reflective judgement as developed in the Critique of Judgement . Drawing on Kant’s account of symbolic presentation in §59, I show that it functions as an ectypal form of analogical reflection already operative in ordinary practical reasoning.