Kant’s Faculty of Pleasure, or: Why I Cry During Commercials
Let’s start with a confession: I cry during Google Pixel ads. Or that one Ikea commercial with the lamp in the rain. Or, once, a particularly dramatic YouTube pre-roll about sustainable tuna.
Kant would probably not be impressed.
According to Lectures on Metaphysics, humans have three faculties: cognition, desire, and feeling of pleasure/displeasure.¹ The first two get all the love—thinking and wanting are what Enlightenment thinkers thought made us serious people. But Kant doesn’t just acknowledge the feeling faculty—he gives it a job.
Pleasure, for Kant, isn’t just a squishy internal state. It’s a judgment. A way we evaluate the fit between ourselves and the world. In Janelle DeWitt’s terms, it’s a “cognitive signal”—a form of awareness that something aligns with our capacities or goals.² Feeling, then, is a kind of seeing. You don’t just know the world—you feel your way into understanding it.
This means pleasure is not just about hedonism or sentiment. It’s how we register that something matters. It's why your heart breaks a little when you hear a perfectly resolved chord progression, or why justice feels good, not just right.
So yes, I cried when the fictional lamp got thrown away.³ Not because I thought it was sentient. But because something in the ad hit that weird intersection of imagination, empathy, and moral intuition. That judgment—this is beautiful, this is right, this is mine to feel—happened beneath the surface. And Kant says that’s real.
So no, crying during a commercial isn’t irrational. It’s the faculty of pleasure, doing its job.
Just don’t tell the moral law. It would hate that.
Footnotes
[1] Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics (Ak 28:251–253), where he outlines the three fundamental faculties of the soul.
[2] Janelle DeWitt, “Respect for the Moral Law: The Role of Feeling in Kant’s Moral Psychology,” in Kantian Review (forthcoming). See also her essay The Estimative Sense in Kant, where she argues that feelings have intentional content and evaluative structure.
[3] The 2002 IKEA commercial directed by Spike Jonze. You're meant to feel bad for the lamp—until the narrator says, “Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you’re crazy.”
Kant would probably not be impressed.
According to Lectures on Metaphysics, humans have three faculties: cognition, desire, and feeling of pleasure/displeasure.¹ The first two get all the love—thinking and wanting are what Enlightenment thinkers thought made us serious people. But Kant doesn’t just acknowledge the feeling faculty—he gives it a job.
Pleasure, for Kant, isn’t just a squishy internal state. It’s a judgment. A way we evaluate the fit between ourselves and the world. In Janelle DeWitt’s terms, it’s a “cognitive signal”—a form of awareness that something aligns with our capacities or goals.² Feeling, then, is a kind of seeing. You don’t just know the world—you feel your way into understanding it.
This means pleasure is not just about hedonism or sentiment. It’s how we register that something matters. It's why your heart breaks a little when you hear a perfectly resolved chord progression, or why justice feels good, not just right.
So yes, I cried when the fictional lamp got thrown away.³ Not because I thought it was sentient. But because something in the ad hit that weird intersection of imagination, empathy, and moral intuition. That judgment—this is beautiful, this is right, this is mine to feel—happened beneath the surface. And Kant says that’s real.
So no, crying during a commercial isn’t irrational. It’s the faculty of pleasure, doing its job.
Just don’t tell the moral law. It would hate that.
Footnotes
[1] Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics (Ak 28:251–253), where he outlines the three fundamental faculties of the soul.
[2] Janelle DeWitt, “Respect for the Moral Law: The Role of Feeling in Kant’s Moral Psychology,” in Kantian Review (forthcoming). See also her essay The Estimative Sense in Kant, where she argues that feelings have intentional content and evaluative structure.
[3] The 2002 IKEA commercial directed by Spike Jonze. You're meant to feel bad for the lamp—until the narrator says, “Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you’re crazy.”
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