Freedom And Reason In Kant Essay, Research Paper

Freedom and Reason in Kant

Alice Furnari

24 /2/97

Morality, Kant says, cannot be regarded as a set of rules which prescribe

the means necessary to the achievement of a given end; its rules must be obeyed

without consideration of the consequences that will follow from doing so or not.

A principle that presupposes a desired object as the determinant of the will

cannot give rise to a moral law; that is, the morality of an act of will cannot

be determined by the matter or content of the will for when the will is

materially determined the question of its morality does not arise.

This consideration leads Kant to one of his most important theses. If the

moral character of willing is not determined by the content of what is willed,

it must be determined by the form:” If a rational being can think of his maxims

as universal laws, he can do so only by considering them as principles which

contain the determining ground of the will because of their form and not because

of their matter”. Therefore, the morality of a maxim is determined by its

functioning as a universal law, applicable as a general rule to every rational

agent. Since a moral will must be so in virtue of its form alone, the will must

be capable of a purely formal determination; that is, it must be possible for a

man to act in a certain way for the sole reason that willing in this way is

prescribed by a universal law, no matter what the empirical results will be.

A will to which moral considerations apply must be, in the strictest sense,

a free will, one that can function independently of the laws of natural

causality. The concept of morality, therefore, has to be explained in terms of a

universal moral law, and the ability to will in obedience to such a law leads us

to postulate the freedom. The freedom which Kant is talking about, is not only a

negative freedom consisting in the absence of constraint by empirical causes, it

is also a positive freedom which consists in the ability to make acts of will in

accordance with the moral law, for no other reason than that they are in

accordance with it. Freedom, in this sense, corresponds to Autonomy of the will

and its absence ( any situation in which the will is determined by external

causes ) is called Heteronomy. In obeying the moral law for the sake of the law

alone, the will is autonomous because it is obeying a law which it imposes on

itself.

In the third section of the “Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals”, Kant

answers the problem of the possibility of the Categorical Imperative. Is the

problem to be understood as if the Categorical Imperative is possible, or how it

is possible? In the “Critics of Pure Reason”, the problem regarding the

synthetic a priori judgments concerns just the modality in which they can be

applied. The fact that they are actually possible is proved by the synthetic a

priori judgment contained in sciences as mathematics and physics which are

trustworthy sciences. Metaphysics, however, is not a reliable science and,

therefore, Kant suggests that we should look not only for the modality in which

they can be applied, but also for their reliability. Similarly, the Metaphysics

of Morals must prove the validity of the moral imperative. As Paton suggested,

Kant tries to show not only how the Categorical Imperative is possible, but also

that it is possible.[" Furthermore, we have not asserted the truth of this

proposition, much less professed to have within our power a proof of it. We

simply showed by developing the universally accepted concept of morality, that

autonomy of the will is unavoidably bound up with it, or rather is its very

foundation" par. 445].

The condition for the possibility of the Categorical Imperative is Freedom.

The third section contains a demonstration of Freedom which Kant tries to derive

by means of excluding at least other two ways. A first would be to assert that

Freedom is experienced by us, that it is sensed, but this is not the truthful

one, because experience would be the one of my personal freedom and Kant wants

to demonstrate that every rational being is free , in order to infer that every

rational being must obey the Categorical Imperative. A second way would be to

show that every rational being has at least the idea of Freedom, i.e. he is

convinced to act according to reason, not only under instincts; he is persuaded

to act in this way, because he sees that acting this way is right, because he is

determined by his reason and not only by blind instincts. But, if a rational

being had the idea of freedom, but were not really free, he would be mistaken

even about his reasonableness; he would think he were acting for some reasons,

whilst he would actually be like a robot. But, as we saw before, being aware of

being rational means being aware of the necessity of acting in accordance with a

law , and what we are trying to do is to justify this necessity.

Surely, if we consider ourselves to be free, we acknowledge ourselves

obliged to follow the moral law, and if we consider ourselves obliged to follow

the moral law is because we think of ourselves as free. But there seems to be a

vicious circle because, until now, it has been demonstrated neither that we are

obliged to follow the law, independently from the conviction of being free, nor

that we are free, independently from the belief of being subject to the law. We

still have to prove that the Categorical Imperative is possible.

There is still a way open to us: ” To inquire whether we do not take one

point of view when ,by means of Freedom, we think of ourselves as a priori

efficient causes, and another point of view when we represent ourselves

reference to our actions as effects which we see before our eyes” [par. 450].

The point of view of Freedom is the one from which we consider ourselves

belonging to the intellectual world. Everyone understands the distinction

between the sensible world and the intellectual world through this criterion:

any object whose existence is given through a modification or a passiveness of

mine, is given just as a phenomenon, that is, how it appears not how it is in

itself. Thus, if something appears, there must be the thing that appears: the

concept of phenomenon presupposes the one of thing in itself. The difference

between appearance and thing in itself correspond to “the difference between

representations which are given to us from without and in which we are passive,

from those which we produce entirely from ourselves and in which we show our own

activity” [par. 451]. This is also the distinction, shown in the “Critics of

Pure Reason”, between intellectus ectypus and intellectus archetypus; the former

receives from the objects a representation and represents them just as they

appear, the latter learns by creating and learning what it has created: it

learns it as it is in itself.

In the Grounding the knowledge that the human being has of himself through

the internal sense does not get him to know what he is in himself . “For since

he does not create himself and since he acquires the concept of himself not a

priori, but empirically, it is natural that he can attain knowledge even about

himself only through inner sense and therefore, only through the appearance of

his nature and the way in which his consciousness is affected. He must

necessarily assume that beyond his own subject’s constitution as composed of

nothing but appearances, there must be something else as basis, namely, his ego

as constituted in itself.” [par.451]. The person finds in himself a faculty that

distinguishes him from all other objects and from himself as affected by objects.

This faculty is Reason, it is pure spontaneity. Now, Determinism is law of the

phenomenal world, therefore, the person, as Reason, as belonging to the

intellectual world, is not affected by the laws of Determinism: he is free. This

is Kant’s proof of Freedom. Is it satisfactory?

Later on, in the “Critics of Practical Reason”, Kant does not attempt to

deduce synthetically Morality from Freedom, as he tried to do in the Grounding

by stating that Freedom was the necessary condition for Morality, but he assumes

the moral law as a “fact of the reason” from which he infers Freedom. There have

been critics blaming Kant of a sort of vicious circle, because he seemed to

demonstrate Freedom by means of deduction from Morality and then to show the

possibility of the Categorical Imperative deducing it from Freedom. Kant answers

that there is no vicious circle because in the ontological order Freedom is the

condition for Morality ( it is not possible to follow the duty for the duty if

you are not free), but in the order of our knowledge, the moral law is the

requirement for Freedom ( we would not consider ourselves free, if we did not

think of ourselves as subject to the moral law). Freedom is the ratio essendi of

the moral law, but the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of Freedom.

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