Kant’s Defense of Common Moral Experience: A Phenomenological Account by Jeanine Grenberg (review)

In Kant’s Defense of Common Moral Experience: A Phenomenological Account, Jeanine Grenberg introduces a distinctive Kantian approach to practical philosophy—one that begins from, and fundamentally depends on, attentive reflection to common, first-personal, felt experience. Grenberg presents a reading of Kant’s foundational ethical texts according to which, by the second Critique, Kant accepts an essential role for moral feeling in grounding synthetic a priori objective cognitions of the moral law and positive freedom. According to Grenberg, moral feeling enables our recognition of the authority of the moral law: “it is not that moral feeling justifies the validity of the moral law, but rather that moral feeling allows us epistemic access to our rational natures, and the activity of our rational natures justifies the validity of the moral law as binding on our wills” (69).

The book has three parts. Part I makes the initial case for what Grenberg calls Kant’s “phenomenological method,” arguing that Kant endorses attentiveness to common, felt, first-personal experience as essential to grounding fundamental claims of practical philosophy (chapter 1), and addressing anticipated objections to attributing to Kant such reliance on experience (chapter 2) or feeling (chapter 3). Parts II and III offer interpretations of the Groundwork and Critique of Practical Reason. In Part II, Grenberg argues that the Groundwork contains a failed attempt to ground claims of freedom and moral obligation in attentiveness to common moral experience. As Grenberg sees things, Kant erroneously dismisses the possibility of a common experience of categorical obligation in Groundwork II (chapter 4); as a result, he employs only a weak, tentative version of his phenomenological method in Groundwork III (chapter 5). In Part III, Grenberg argues that the second Critique contains a more fully realized, and more successful, employment of Kant’s phenomenological method. Grenberg concentrates on the “fact of reason” and the “Gallows Man,” who, when prompted, realizes that he would resist his desire to gratify his lust in order to preserve his life, and could overcome his desire to preserve his life in order to do what he recognizes he ought. After presenting a few interpretations of the fact of reason (chapter 6) and analyzing Kant’s use of the Gallows Man example as an appeal to felt, first-personal, common experience of conflict between the desire for happiness and the demands of morality (chapter 7), Grenberg argues that the fact of reason is the sort of fact encountered by the Gallows Man (chapter 8), and that attentive philosophical reflection on that experience can ground objective, synthetic a priori cognitions of the moral law and freedom (chapters 9–11). Crucial to Part III is Grenberg’s rejection of interpretations of the fact of reason and its relationship to moral feeling (such as Henry Allison’s) according to which moral feeling follows from consciousness of the authority of the moral law. Grenberg insists that moral feeling is necessary for this consciousness: “there is no other epistemic means for the common person to access this forced awareness” of categorical obligation (148). In an extremely brief conclusion, Grenberg gestures toward support for her interpretation in Kant’s other works, and toward connections between Kant’s phenomenological method and approaches of other philosophers, such as Descartes, Leibniz, Husserl, and Iris Murdoch (289–93).

Historians of philosophy may wish that Grenberg’s interpretive focus were broader. Grenberg provides lengthy, close readings of several passages from the Groundwork and second Critique, and explicates salient philosophical shifts between the two works. She draws effectively on parts of the first Critique, and utilizes a few passages from The Metaphysics of Morals. Grenberg does less than one might hope, however, to situate the positions and concerns she attributes to Kant in the Groundwork and second Critique in relation to what we find in Kant’s other published works, his lectures, or his notes—let alone within the history of philosophy. For instance...