Abstract
Kant holds that practical reason warrants belief in certain things for which theoretical reason finds no place, particularly freedom of will. Walker argues that Kant is right. For theoretical reason is not a means to truth, but a categorical imperative. We must follow it in interpreting the world, but only in limited respects.
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Notes
- 1.
Marcus Willaschek points out quite rightly that we often do think it entirely reasonable to accept factual claims on practical grounds, without being able to justify them theoretically: e.g., that I am not a brain in a vat (“The Primacy of Practical Reason and the Idea of a Practical Postulate,” in Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason”: A Critical Guide, ed. Andrews Reath and Jens Timmermann [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 168–96). This is a helpful suggestion so far as the beliefs in God and immortality are concerned, but in Kant’s view the Fact of Pure Reason directly proves the reality of freedom (CPrR 5:47).
- 2.
Sebastian Gardiner argues that this cannot be what Kant has in mind in the section on the Primacy of Practical Reason, because the reality of freedom had been established earlier in the book (“The Primacy of Practical Reason,” in A Companion to Kant, ed. Graham Bird [Oxford: Blackwell, 2006], 262–64). I cannot see that this follows; Kant is pointing out its special status, and its importance as the basis for the inferences to God and immortality.
- 3.
Kant is much less confident about the claims for God and immortality than about the claim for freedom. Often he seems to think that what morality requires is just that we must believe that there is a God, and that the soul is immortal, if we are to take morality seriously. That would not do for freedom.
- 4.
This includes the understanding and the productive imagination, but when Kant is using the term “theoretical reason” broadly he includes these under it.
- 5.
It is true that in the first Critique he says that its grounds are “only subjectively sufficient,” and therefore calls it a kind of belief (Glaube) rather than knowledge (Wissenschaft) (A822/B850), though one that is unshakable (A828/B856). But what he must mean here is again that it derives from one’s own awareness of the moral law, so that he could not communicate it to others who were “entirely indifferent in regard to moral questions” (A829/B857). Elsewhere he calls it “rational faith [Vernunftglauben],” and says it is “not inferior in degree to knowing [Wissen], even though it is completely different from it in kind” because it is grounded in the moral law (OT 8:141).
- 6.
Though Kant never makes it quite clear what makes someone a “rational being.” Young children and the insane would seem to be excluded. Perhaps he might also exclude someone wholly lacking “the moral predisposition” (An 7:324).
- 7.
J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 38.
- 8.
Lawrence Pasternak takes this to rest on the principle that “ought implies can” (“The Development and Scope of Kantian Belief: The Highest Good, the Practical Postulates and the Fact of Reason,” Kant-Studien 102, no. 3 [Sept. 2011]: 306). That is not clear. The fact that the law motivates me to do something seems a powerful reason for thinking that I must be able at least to try to do it (which is all that Kant needs); that does not have to depend on the general principle that “ought implies can.”
- 9.
I go into this in more detail in Ralph C. S. Walker, The Coherence Theory of Truth: Realism, Anti-Realism, Idealism (London: Routledge, 1989), 61–82.
- 10.
Though rational beings with different forms of intuition from ours would of course have to apply them differently in consequence; and none of this would apply to a being with intellectual intuition.
- 11.
Admittedly, “principle” translates Grundsatz here and Prinzip at G 4:391, but Kant tends to use them more or less interchangeably. Some of the lines on which he might have sought to achieve a more substantive unity are developed by Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
- 12.
Cf. Prolegomena, §13, note 2 (4:289); and Lucy Allais, Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and His Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), esp. pt. 2.
- 13.
See Rae Langton, Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and (in a non-Kantian context) Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
- 14.
Adding whatever qualifications to this as may be necessary – for example, to exclude the addict whose first-order wants conflict with his second-order wants.
- 15.
Kant had once held such a position, but before he developed his transcendental idealism (NE 1:398–406).
- 16.
Nevertheless, it is hard to reconcile this with the passages in which Kant is at his most deterministic. A549–50/B577–78 firmly takes the view that the agent’s choices are determined by her empirical character, to such an extent as to make all her actions to be “determined in the order of nature”; CPrR 5:99 is equally uncompromising. The agent’s intelligible character is supposed to act freely in timelessly determining her empirical character, but how this could work remains mysterious.
- 17.
P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s “Critique of PureReason” (London: Methuen, 1966).
- 18.
When I wrote the above I was not aware of a paper by Jens Timmermann with which I am in considerable agreement: “The Unity of Reason – Kantian Perspectives,” in Spheres of Reason: New Essays in the Philosophy of Normativity, ed. Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 183–98.
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Walker, R.C. (2017). The Primacy of Practical Reason. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_9
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