186 Kant: A BiographyThis passage does not imply that all of morality is based upon a moral
sense or feeling. At best, it shows that virtue presupposes feelings, leaving
open the question of what founds the principles upon which moral judg¬
ments ultimately are based. Yet even this cannot be the whole story, for
when Kant speaks about the necessity of subordinating one's own incli¬
nation to one that has been so generalized that it covers all of humanity,
he had in mind certain intellectual operations that generalize initially par¬
ticular feelings. This means that true virtue presupposed for Kant under¬
standing or thinking as well. Thus a person led by sympathy to help a
needy person rather than to repay a debt incurred earlier would violate his
duty of justice, and would thus clearly not be virtuous. Kant went so far as
to claim that sympathy is "weak and always blind." General rules are
needed for true virtue, and these cannot come from any feeling.^159 This
suggests that Kant could not have believed even in 1763 that moral judg¬
ments are simply based on feeling. It is really the business of reason to
analyze and clarify the complex and confused concept of the good by show¬
ing how it emerges from simple sensations of good.^160
Kant's thought underwent a radical change when he came to believe
that reason and sensation cannot be understood as continuous. In the In¬
augural Dissertation of 1770 there was no longer any continuity or bridge
between sensation and reason. He then saw the two faculties as radically
discontinuous, and therefore he argued that the earlier approach could not
possibly work. It was this break that defined the difference between
Kant's precritical view on ethics and his critical view. The rejection of the
continuity thesis marked the end of Kant's search for fixed points in human
nature, and the beginning of his search for them in pure reason. This
change was connected to moral considerations and to a new theory of space
and time.
In the essay "Concerning the Ultimate Foundation of the Differentia¬
tion of Directions in Space" of 1768, Kant argued that space is not an
object of external sensation but "a fundamental concept, which makes all
these sensations possible in the first place." He also assures us that it is not
"a mere entity of reason." It is more than that. Yet he is far from certain
that he has shown the latter, and he ends on a skeptical note, saying that
there is no lack of difficulties surrounding this concept when one, through ideas of rea¬
son, tries to grasp its reality, which is evident enough to the inner sense. But this is a
constant difficulty in philosophical investigations concerned with the first data of our
cognition. But this difficulty is never so decisive as the one which emerges when the con¬
sequences of an accepted concept contradict the clearest experience.^161