More Than a Feeling: Kant’s Tripartite Account of Pleasure

Abstract Traditionally, pleasure has been understood in three different ways: as a simple feeling or phenomenological quality, as a behavioral disposition, and as an evaluation. While versions of these accounts – and combinations of two of them – have been attributed to Kant, I argue that Kant successfully combines all three. Pleasure, on this view, is an evaluation of an object’s agreement with a particular subject’s ability or intention to act. Because it refers to a particular subject, it has a subjective felt character, and because it is about agreement with an ability or intention to act, it disposes one to action. In addition to being philosophically compelling, this reading incorporates Kant’s disparate characterizations of pleasure.