Nobody can or ever will comprehend how the understanding should have a motivating power; it can admittedly judge, but to give this judgment power so that it becomes a motive able to impel the will to performance of an action-to understand this is the philosopher's stone.-Lectures on Ethics (MPC, AA 27:1428).i n t r o d u c t i o n in contrast to his rationalist predecessors, Kant argues that feeling plays a positive role in moral life.Yet the exact nature of this role is far from clear.As much as Kant repeats that moral motivation must proceed from a "feeling of respect" (Gefühl der Achtung), he maintains with equal insistence that to act out of respect for the law is simply to recognize its value and authority.In what way, then, is respect for the law a feeling?And what place does this feeling have-if any-in Kant's ethics?Despite the large body of secondary literature devoted to this topic, the details of Kant's position still remain elusive. 1 In the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), for example, Kant argues that our recognition of the moral law must elicit both painful and pleasurable feelings in us.It must be painful, he explains, insofar as
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