Upon first glance, the purpose of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason appears to be an effort to “transform the accepted procedure of metaphysics” into a stricter area of study – one in which philosophers would know more certainly what they can and cannot learn about experience from pure reason alone (113). The task of reforming an entire philosophical field of study would be ambitious in itself; however, Kant goes on to profess a higher purpose beyond merely reforming metaphysics. Instead, Kant claims that his ultimate endeavor lies in “making the terrain for [the] majestic moral edifices level and firm enough to be built upon” (398). When reading his moral theory in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, one can clearly see that, indeed, the Critique provides an essential foundation through its proof of the possibility of freedom. In the Grounding, Kant ultimately arrives at the conclusion that “a free will and a will subject to moral laws are one and the same” (49). But could human beings possibly possess freedom in addition to the natural laws of causality to which we are already subject? If not, Kant’s entire moral theory fails, insofar as all human actions would be merely necessary causal results, and not moral decisions. Without having first composed his Critique, Kant’s Grounding as a moral theory would fail entirely due to the single problem of freedom.
Kant’s moral theory begins with a truth that he argues everyone already believes, that “there is no possibility of thinking of anything at all… which can be regarded as good without qualification, except a good will” (7). He goes on to say that people also generally believe that we express our good will through acting from duty (13). Furthermore, he argues, “duty is the necessity of an action done out of respect for the law” (13). Finally, Kant concludes that the formulation of moral law is that of a categorical imperative – a command that is required in and of itself, and not for some other end. Kant believes that this categorical imperative states that one must “act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (30). Up to this point Kant has shown what the moral law would look like according to a logical clarification of peoples’ generally held moral beliefs; however, he has not yet answered a critical question: does the Categorical Imperative necessarily hold of all rational beings?Kant begins to answer this question by establishing what the conditions of a necessary Categorical Imperative would be: “if there is to be… a categorical imperative, then it must be such that from the conception of what is necessarily an end for everyone because this end is an end in itself it constitutes an objective principle of the will and can hence serve as a practical law” (36). Thus Kant must prove that something exists which is necessarily an end in itself – i.e. something that has an absolute (and not merely conditional) value – in order to prove that an objective principle of the will, the Categorical Imperative, does exist. An object of conditional value would be an object subject to laws that come from outside of itself; in other words, it would be an object of value only in terms of its use toward some other end. Since every object within the natural world is subject to the natural causal laws (and therefore are of only conditional value), Kant argues that the only thing that truly does have an absolute value is our own rationality. Essentially, Kant believes that we as rational beings have absolute value insofar as we are subject only to our own laws and never to any external law, and insofar as our own laws are determined by rationality in such a way that we are only ever an end in ourselves, and never merely a means. Implicit in Kant’s proof of our absolute value is rational beings’ existence in a state of autonomy – rational beings are autonomous in that they are entirely self-legislating and subject to no external law.
By arguing the absolute value of rational beings, Kant proves that the Categorical Imperative must therefore apply to all rational beings (for the Categorical Imperative is the only form that a law of our reason can take); however, his proof of the absolute value of rational beings depends upon the assumption that rational beings are autonomous in the first place. To assume that beings are autonomous is to assume that they are entirely self-legislating, that they are always necessarily able to “choose in such a way that in the same volition the maxims of the choice are at the same time present as universal law” (44). However, in according complete self-legislation to rational beings, Kant assumes the fact that we inherently possess a freedom to choose the direction of our will.
We can now see that the entire basis of Kant’s morality depends upon a single presupposition: that our wills are free, that they are “independent of any determination by alien causes” (49). If our wills were not free, we would have no autonomy; if we had no autonomy, we would have no absolute value; if we had no absolute value, there would be no necessitation of our adherence to the moral law of the Categorical Imperative. So the challenge for Kant becomes, can we presuppose such a freedom? When one looks at the human condition, one can hardly fail to notice that we are in fact subject to alien causes – i.e. the laws of the natural world in which we exist. Furthermore, as subjects to natural laws, we are filled with inclinations and drives that exert influence over our will. How could we think of ourselves as both free from and subject to natural laws? At this point, Kant’s whole argument hinges upon whether or not freedom is even possible for beings existing in the natural world.
In the Preface to his Critique, Kant outlines the practical consequences of his work in general when he says, “a critique that limits the speculative use of reason is, to be sure… negative [to the extent that it proves we can never extend reason beyond the bounds of possible experience], but because it simultaneously removes an obstacle that limits or even threatens to wipe out the practical use of reason, this critique is also in fact of positive and very important utility” (114). In other words, Kant says that one may think that a critique of pure reason might only prove to us that reason cannot answer the question of whether or not we have freedom, because such a condition is beyond the capacity of our intuitions. In reality, however, Kant believes that this very acknowledgement of reason’s inability to find out fur sure whether we are free, leaves us better off in the search for freedom, insofar as we know that we must formulate a new goal, a more realistic goal, a goal that reason may in fact be able to prove.
Kant never doubts pure reason’s inability to prove the existence or nonexistence of reason. Even from the very beginning of his work he announces its incapacity. Nevertheless, he opts to make explicit this limit of reason in his Third Antinomy of Pure Reason. In the Antinomy, Kant constructs two arguments: a thesis arguing that it is “necessary to assume another causality through freedom” (484), and an antithesis arguing that “there is no freedom” (485). As it turns out, Kant manages to prove both opposing arguments using only pure reason, thereby revealing that reason alone cannot prove freedom’s existence or nonexistence, and showing that reason in the case of this question is only a logic of illusion that “entices us with delusions and in the end betrays us” (110). Yet why would he have included such an argument if it yields no actual results? Perhaps Kant included this antinomy to remove any final doubts as to reason’s inability to determine freedom’s existence, and prove once and for all the need to search for freedom by a new route. Furthermore, the antinomy proves that freedom’s existence cannot be entirely denied by reason, which leaves hope for a possible solution to this “stumbling block far philosophy” (486). Indeed, Kant goes on to realize that he can apply pure reason in such a way that – through analyzing the concepts of our understanding and their limits –he can at the very least prove the possibility of freedom’s existence. But in order to understand this possibility, Kant must first make clear the ways in which we experience and understand objects – which he spends much of the Critique accomplishing.
Kant summarizes the basic outline of our experience of objects in the world when he says the following: “The capacity to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility. Objects are therefore given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone affords us intuitions; but they are thought through understanding, and from it arise concepts” (155). Thus, we experience the appearance of objects through our a priori intuitions (Space and Time); and we then go on to understand those objects through the application of our a priori concepts. Kant also takes special care to emphasize throughout the Critique that “all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them to be, nor are their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us… Objects in themselves… remain entirely unknown to us” (168).
This limitation of our sensibility – that we can experience only the mere appearances of objects – is important for Kant to clarify because the same limitation carries over to the concepts of our understanding of objects, which “must ultimately be related to intuitions… since there is no other way in which objects can be given to us” (155). According to Kant, we have two ways of understanding objects given to us: general logic, and transcendental logic. General logic has to do with “nothing but the mere form” of our judgments about objects (195); while transcendental logic has to do with our pure concepts that categorize those objects about which we make judgments.
Kant takes great care in his investigations of the pure concepts to maintain the fact that our pure concepts still remain unable to categorize objects beyond the realm of sensible intuition; however he does make an important distinction between the limits of the intuitions and the limits of the concepts. Kant deduces that if “I leave out all intuition, then there still remains the… way of determining an object for the manifold of a possible intuition. Hence, to this extent the categories extend further than sensible intuition, since they think objects in general without seeing to the particular manner (of sensibility) in which they might be given” (350). By drawing this conclusion, Kant essentially proves the possibility of our having a concept of a thing in itself. He makes sure to remind us that we would not know anything about that thing in itself, nor would we know what intuition would be required to experience the object in itself, but we would be able to cognize the fact that beyond mere appearance “there must be… an object independent of sensibility” (348). In a similar way one can see how Kant concludes that we can conceptualize a possible condition of freedom, given what our concepts know about our non-freedom in the sensible world.
The connection required of Kant in order to prove the possibility of freedom rests upon the two major points listed above: firstly, that we can only know appearances of objects, and secondly, that through our pure concepts we are able to conceptualize things as existing in themselves and freedom as a possible condition of those things in themselves. Only because he mapped out the absolute limits of our experience and understanding, and only because his understanding of our sensibility and our concepts was so thorough, could he finally conclude that freedom is possible. By looking at human beings specifically, Kant concludes that “the will is thought of in the appearance (in visible actions) as necessarily subject to the law of nature and to this extent not free, while yet on the other hand it is thought of as belonging to a thing in itself as not subject to that law, and hence free, without any contradiction hereby occurring” (116).
Kant returns to this very proof in his Grounding in order to explain how his presupposition of freedom does not necessarily contradict our existence in the natural world. He even clarifies the argument by introducing the idea of our existing in two separate worlds, each with different sets of laws: “The rational being counts himself, qua intelligence, as belonging to the intelligible world, and only [in considering himself a member in this world]… does he call his causality a will. But on the other side, he is conscious of himself as being also a part of the world of sense, where his actions are found as mere appearances [determined by]… inclinations and desires” (54). Thus we have two ways of understanding our actions. As members of the intelligible world our wills are free and our actions can be decided entirely according to our rationality; on the other hand, those actions as they appear to us according to our intuitions, are merely causal result, only capable of being intuited as driven by inclination. Kant goes on to answer explicitly the question of the section’s title, “How is a Categorical Imperative Possible?” (54), when he says that “even though on the one hand I must regard myself as a being belonging to the world of sense, yet on the other hand shall I have to know myself as an intelligence and… [therefore] I must regard the laws of the intelligible world as imperatives for me” (55).
Thus Kant has proven that the Categorical Imperative is both possible and necessarily applicable to all rational beings insofar as we presuppose freedom. And yet even still, all Kant has really offered us is a mere possibility of freedom. Essentially, he has only proved that his moral theory cannot be proven wrong; but he has not actually proved that the Categorical Imperative is the basis for our moral law because he has not fully answered the problem of freedom – nor, he admits, can he ever. So must we dismiss Kant’s entire moral theory for its incompleteness? Kant introduces a very interesting solution to this apparent problem in his theory.
Upon reaching this point of indeterminable validity, Kant proposes that we must “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (117). Because all scientific examination of our existence reveals only our subjectivity to natural causal laws, because pure reason can tell us nothing about whether freedom actually exists or not, and because we can have no certain knowledge of the existence of morality, Kant concludes that we must, “from a practical point of view” (50), recognize the fundamental need to assume our freedom. In the third section of the Grounding, he argues that “we cannot possibly think of a reason that consciously lets itself be directed from outside as regards its judgments… [but instead] Reason must regard itself as the author of its principles independent of foreign influences” (50). In other words, Kant believes that rationally we must assume our wills to be free because as rational beings we believe that our wills are subject to our own rational determination and not purely dependent upon impulse. But Kant does not settle for proving merely that freedom must be assumed. Instead, he labors to prove the possibility of freedom in the Critique in order to establish the fact that such faith is not an entirely unfounded belief. Kant wants to prove that our denial of knowledge in favor of a presupposition is not a cause for scrutiny. He wants to prove that our presupposition is reasonable, and that freedom is not merely possible as an idea, but reasonably possible and in fact rather likely! Insofar as he proves that freedom must be presupposed and that such a presupposition has a proven basis, does Kant use his Critique of Pure Reason to establish a level and firm foundation upon which his morality in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals can be accepted as valid.
3/13/08
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