WorkImmanuel Kant

On the Power of the Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings by Sheer Resolution

Kant at seventy-four, answering a doctor's book on longevity (1798): the philosopher's essay on mastering one's own sickly feelings by resolution alone.

by Immanuel Kant28 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Von der Macht des Gemüts, durch den bloßen Vorsatz seiner krankhaften Gefühle Meister zu sein
First published: 1798(aged 74)
Original language: German

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Overview

A physician sent Kant a book, and got a philosophy of health back. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland had written a popular treatise on prolonging human life and forwarded it to Königsberg; Kant, seventy-four, replied at essay length in 1798, and the reply became the third and last part of his book The Conflict of the Faculties. Its subject is the one named in its long German title: the power of the mind, by sheer resolution, to master its own morbid feelings. Kant's claim is narrow and personal. A person cannot cure disease by willing it away, but the hypochondriac's spiral — the sleeplessness, the fixation on every sensation, the fear that feeds the symptom — can be broken by a deliberate turning of the attention elsewhere, and he offers himself as the case study, describing how he governs his own oppressions, his breathing, his refusal to dwell. It is Kant treating dietetics as a branch of practical reason: the art of governing the body through the mind. Slight beside the Critiques and never meant to carry their weight, the essay survives as the rare place where the most disciplined philosopher of the age turns the discipline on his own failing body, and as an early European statement of what a later age would name the psychosomatic.

Key concepts

What does Kant mean by 'dietetics' here?

Dietetics, for Kant, is not diet in the sense of food but the art of preventing illness through how one governs oneself — the mind ruling the body's regimen by resolve rather than by medicine. He treats it as a branch of practical reason: the same power that governs the will, turned on one's own health and habits.

What are the 'morbid feelings' the mind can master by resolution?

Not disease itself, which no will can cure, but the feelings that feed on attention — the hypochondriac's sleeplessness, the fixation on every sensation, the fear that magnifies the very symptom it dreads. Kant's claim is narrow and honest: resolution cannot heal a sick body, but by turning attention deliberately elsewhere it can break that self-feeding spiral.

How does this essay treat health as an exercise of reason?

It makes mastery over one's own body a moral-practical discipline rather than a medical one. The resolve that governs the will is turned on one's oppressions, one's breathing, one's refusal to dwell on sensation — health managed as an act of autonomy. Kant offers himself, at seventy-four, as the working case study of the method.

Where does this essay belong, and who prompted it?

It is the third and last part of Kant's late book The Conflict of the Faculties (1798). The physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland had sent Kant his popular treatise on prolonging life; Kant replied at essay length with a philosophy of health, and that reply became this part — his most personal page on governing the body through the mind.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Mastering the Sickly Feelings

Can a person, by sheer resolution, govern the morbid feelings that feed on attention — and does dietetics belong, of all places, to practical reason?

Disease cannot be willed away, Kant grants, but the hypochondriac's spiral — the sleeplessness, the fixation on every sensation, the fear that feeds the symptom — can be broken by a deliberate turning of the attention elsewhere. At seventy-four he offers himself as the case study, describing how he governs his own oppressions and his breathing by refusing to dwell on them. It is dietetics treated as a branch of practical reason, the art of ruling the body through the mind, and the rare page where the most disciplined philosopher of the age turns the discipline on his own failing body.

reason
health
aging
attention
willpower
self-regulation

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 28
distinct concepts: 45
by passages held, corpus-wide: #740

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “aging” and “health”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 7 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 26 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
aging	health	7
attention	self-regulation	7
health	self-regulation	7
attention	health	6
health	sleep	5
health	willpower	4
aging	willpower	3
attention	sleep	3
attention	willpower	3
self-regulation	sleep	3
aging	habit	2
aging	sleep	2
attention	habit	2
habit	health	2
habit	sleep	2
habit	willpower	2
self-regulation	willpower	2
habit	self-regulation	1
sleep	willpower	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1764 Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral)
Kant's runner-up entry in the Berlin Academy's prize contest, and the sharpest of the pre-critical essays: it already sets philosophy's method against mathematics', the problem the first Critique would finally resolve.
DE
1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen)
The popular essay of Kant's pre-critical years, twenty-six years before the Critique of Judgement gave taste a rigorous grounding; its remarks on race and sex now drive much of the scholarship on him.
DE
1766 Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics (Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik)
The anonymous, ironic book of 1766 in which Kant's faith in speculative metaphysics visibly collapses — the clearing of the ground that the first Critique, fifteen years later, would build on.
DE
1781 The Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
The book at the centre of everything after it: the first of the three Critiques, revised almost past recognition for its 1787 second edition, and the work the Prolegomena was written to explain.
DEEN
1783 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Written to salvage the Critique of Pure Reason after its baffled reception, this shorter 1783 restatement runs the same argument in reverse, and became most readers' first encounter with Kant.
DEEN
1784 An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?)
The most quoted thing Kant wrote, and among the shortest: a 1784 magazine answer to a question a Berlin pastor had left hanging, and the defining slogan of the German Enlightenment.
DE
1784 Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht)
The essay where Kant first treats history as more than chronicle — nine propositions arguing it has a hidden rational shape; the seed of Perpetual Peace, and a device Hegel later took over.
DE
1785 Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)
The short, deliberately preliminary book that isolates the categorical imperative before building anything on it; three years later the Critique of Practical Reason would give the same moral law its fuller grounding.
DEEN
1786 What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?)
An intervention in the pantheism controversy that split the German Enlightenment: written months after Mendelssohn's death, it stakes out a rational faith between dogmatic proof and Jacobi's leap.
DE
1788 The Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft)
The second of the three Critiques, and Kant's reply to those who doubted the Groundwork's freedom; it introduces the fact of reason and the postulates of God and immortality.
DEEN
1790 Critique of Judgement
The book the Romantics and the German Idealists built on: Kant's 1790 account of beauty and of purpose in nature, written to bridge the gulf that had opened between his first two Critiques.
DEEN
1793 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft)
The book that got Kant ordered to stop writing on religion: four essays, from 1793, rebuilding Christian doctrine on reason and consigning revelation and clergy to what Kant called counterfeit service.
DE
1795 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf)
The late essay whose plan for a league of free states reached the twentieth century intact; Kant, past seventy, wrote it as Prussia pulled out of the war against revolutionary France.
DE
1797 Introduction to the Doctrine of Right (Einleitung in die Rechtslehre)
The framing section of the Doctrine of Right, the legal half of Kant's 1797 Metaphysics of Morals; it defines a right through freedom alone and ties every right to a power to coerce.
DE
1797 The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics (Die Metaphysik der Sitten)
Long read as a mere appendix to the Groundwork, this ethical half of the 1797 Metaphysics of Morals is where Kant spells out the duties of virtue; later Kantians recovered it as his theory of character.
DEEN
1798 On the Power of the Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings by Sheer Resolution (Von der Macht des Gemüts, durch den bloßen Vorsatz seiner krankhaften Gefühle Meister zu sein) you are here DE
1803 Lectures on Pedagogy (Über Pädagogik)
One of the last books to appear under Kant's name (1803), though his editor Rink built it from lecture notes; the fullest record of Kant on education, and of his debt to Rousseau.
DE

— or open another of their works