Philosophy 433	History of Ethics		Darwall	Winter 2000

KANT VI

I.  What Kant calls the “fact of reason” is the “consciousness of this fundamental law,” 
i.e., the “fundamental law of pure practical reason” or the Categorical Imperative: “So act 
that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving 
[i.e., by one’s will] of universal law.” (5:31)  It is by virtue of our awareness of this law 
that we are aware that we are free.  A person judges that “he can do something because 
he is aware that he ought to do it and cognizes freedom within him, which without the 
moral law, would have remained unknown to him.” (5:30)

II.  In this way we are aware of our “transcendental freedom.”  Here we get Kant’s 
transcendental idealism.  The natural realm, which we learn about through the empirical 
methods that extend what we get through sense, is but a world of “appearance.”  It is 
“empirically real,” but “transcendentally ideal.”  In addition to this realm of appearance, 
there is the intelligible or noumenal realm, “things in themselves.

In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that the only knowledge we can have of 
objects is insofar as they are objects of possible experience (i.e., as appearances), and that 
theoretical reason can have no knowledge of things in themselves.  And some of our 
knowledge of the realm of experience is a priori, i.e. it comes not through reason, but 
through rational conditions of the very possibility of experience.  So Kant argues that any 
experience would have to be structured through the categories of cause and effect, and so 
we can know a priori that the phenomenal or empirical realm is a deterministic world.  

Nonetheless, reason also seeks the “unconditioned,” and so seeks after transcendental 
knowledge of things as they really are, not just appearances.  Left to its own, however, 
reason ends up in contradiction and paradox, with equally good arguments for the 
conclusion that everything is really determined (and there is no freedom) and that there 
really is freedom (and so things are uncaused).  

III.  So far, then, all we know is that freedom is possible.  Through reason’s practical use, 
however, Kant argues that we know that we are actually free.  When we deliberate under 
practical laws (“laws of freedom”) we are uncaused causes (outside of time).  At the same 
time, however, insofar as we and our actions exist as objects of experience or empirical 
knowledge, as part of the natural realm, everything we do is causally determined.

IV.  Chapter III (“On the incentives of pure practical reason”) discusses how it can 
simultaneously be true that, as we really are in ourselves, as part of the noumenal, 
intelligible realm, we choose and act freely, but that our actions and choices are 
phenomenally causally determined.  Indeed, Kant says, if “we would know every 
incentive to action, even the smallest, as well as all the external occasions affecting them, 
we could calculate a human being’s conduct for the future with as much certainty as a 
lunar or solar eclipse and could nevertheless maintain that the human being’s conduct is 
free.” (5:99)

V.  How could this be?  Prominent in Kant’s explication is the feeling of respect.  When 
we are aware of the moral law (or think of someone being guided by the moral law), this 
fills us with a respect that “strikes down” or “humiliates” our self-conceit.  Kant 
distinguishes between self-love and self-conceit.  Self-love is “the propensity to make 
oneself as having subjective determining grounds of choice into the objective 
determining ground of the will in general.” (5:74) (Also: “a predominant benevolence 
toward oneself” (5:73))  And self-conceit is when self-love “makes itself lawgiving and 
the unconditional practical principle.” (5:74) (Also: “arrogantia” or “satisfaction with 
oneself” (5:73)  (What exactly is the difference here?)

In any case, whereas the moral law and pure practical reason only “infringes upon” and 
“restricts” self-love, it “strikes down” self-conceit. (5:73)  We feel this self-humiliation as 
respect for the moral law.

We, constantly we freely act on the moral law, the causal determinant of action in the 
phenomenal realm is this feeling of respect.  But this feeling is not simply a contingent 
feeling.  It is an a priori feeling, in the sense that it is a feeling that any finite rational 
agent would have in being aware of the moral law.  Moreover, respect for the law is not 
really the incentive to moral action, rather it is the phenomenal aspect of freely following 
the moral law through pure practical reason: “respect for the law is not the incentive to 
morality; instead it is morality itself subjectively considered as an incentive inasmuch as 
pure practical reason, by rejecting all the claims of self-love in opposition to its own, 
supplies authority to the law, which now alone has influence.” (5:76)

“The dissimilarity of determining grounds (empirical and rational) is made known by this 
resistance of a practically lawgiving reason to every meddling inclination, by a special 
kind of feeling, which, however, does not precede the lawgiving of practical reason but is 
indeed produced only by it . . . “ (5:92)

Determinism in the phenomenal realm is thus compatible with indeterminism and 
freedom in the noumenal realm.  “A rational being can now rightly say of every unlawful 
action he performed that he could have omitted it even though as appearance it is 
sufficiently determined in the past and, so far, is inevitably necessary.” (5:98)