Never treat someone as a means unless that means was childbirth. Kant was complicated, and he was dead wrong on essential matters that shouldn't have eluded his thought. Why this is so, I would wait for Karen Stohr to check-in, but rationality is not the basis of moral progress.

Further affiant sayeth not... as they say. ;-)

Well, probably not. Tolstoy liked to, hmm, shall we say, procreate at the level of children. And Kant enjoyed procreating at level of, shall we say, "Further affiant sayeth not," plus 1030 pages of reason (including end-matter). I really find Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments helpful. And quite frankly (although I anticipate a grunchy response), I think this distinction corresponds to one made by Tolstoy at the end of War and Peace, where he points out, with respect to power, how people always "arrive at such relations among themselves that the largest number of people take the largest direct part and the smallest number of people the smallest direct part in the joint action for which they have come together." (p. 1196, Richard Pevear trans.) The smallest number corresponds to society's elite analytic class (granddads and grandmums), and the largest part to society's workers (all the little kiddies). It also has a mathematical aspect with respect to time (elders, elites, small part-mind, and youth, non-elite many, larger part-body). Analytic truths (the elders who guide things) and synthetic truths (the youngsters who do the things). Between the one and the other is the trouble-maker class, the raucous satyr chorus and their their sweet-singing mermaid friends. The satyrs and the mermaids are so much fun when they get together. Weeee!

I'll bet Kant and Tolstoy would have very little to say to one another...That would be a very silent table...All beards and egos...

The use of language is called what it's called by the use of language, and thus contains a problem of self-reference similar to the use of pictures for the purpose of describing a visible object which exists. You haven't answered my question, though. With regards to a lie which one tells one's self, I didn't ask you whether or not you do it, I asked how it's done. Presumably, when you lie to yourself, you know you're lying. The lie proceeds without ever becoming established as successful. The question for Kant is of course contained in your second sentence from the end above: Could anyone consistently will self-lying to be a universal law in any given case of its performance? That seems to me highly untenable, as "telling the truth" to one's self seems a fundamental tenet with regards to the use of the categorical imperative as a law which the understanding of one's own freedom is supposed to give to itself. Your theory that the use of language equates to self-lying is therefore highly spurious if with it you're trying to critically approach Kant's ethical position. Such a recommendation is subject to the same objection as lying to another, or "successful lying": The institution of trust and promising would be undermined, to the point where human existence would become unsustainable. In the self-lying variant which you suggest, the ability to trust one's self would be similarly eroded, to the point where one could no longer conceive of any long term plans. It's the ability to make a promise to one's self which your suggestion would undermine, and could conceivably be an explanatory factor in some of the undesirable situations previously expressed by the self-liar in this case, which might otherwise have been avoidable.

Firm agreement here it's not his schtick. Pleasure for Kant is not a way to market his philosophy, but a salient and abiding interest of his vocational work. Take where the Antinomy of Practical Reason is introduced in the second Critique (A204/205). Having identified the rational basis of common-sense morals in the first part of the book, Kant claims to have demonstrated that, as virtue can't be identical with happiness, (and therefore neither can duty with pleasure), it must be correctly described as worthiness to be happy, (and therefore also deserving of pleasure). The "highest good" for an individual, states Kant, is to find them both together, thereby determining a concept consisting of two parts: one based on duty as an action's worth (virtue), and another which refers to pleasure or a special kind of pleasure as it's ideal result or concrete association (happiness).

Clearly, then, the topic of pleasure is central in Kant's non-peripheral discussion here. But the next step in his argument is notable, and directly relates to your second sentence above: How are these two parts of the concept related? In the ancient world the Epicurean view, according to Kant, was to identify virtue as whatever leads to happiness, and duty therefore as whatever leads to pleasure, (at least the kind of pleasure which is generated by doing one's duty). The Stoics on the other hand saw virtue as happiness itself. Duty as its own reward doesn't need any further pleasure which completes it beyond its own performance. Without going into the details of the Antinomy itself (which has the Stoics coming out on top with the reservation that their position is only true on condition that the pleasure of duty isn't part of the motive for doing it, but at most an accidental result-- A206/207), I think it's clear how fundamental pleasure is, described as an essential component of the highest good for an individual, in Kant's moral theory. My question for the proponent of this theory, however, is: How are the motive grounds of duty independent from the anticipated subjective effect of doing it? Here I would agree with your first sentence above: His detectable answer to that question remains singularly unconvincing.