A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (23 page)

But there is another kind of imperative—the categorical—which makes no relation to specific desires or needs, and which therefore depends for its validity (should it be capable of validity) on no ‘empirical conditions’, as Kant put it. Such imperatives contain no ‘if.’, no concession to the antecedent interests of the subject. They take the form ‘Do this!’ or ‘You ought to do this!’ The presence of the ‘ought’ indicates that, while they may not obtain validity, they certainly claim it. And the claim here is for a genuine objectivity, independent of theoretical reason. It is a claim to bind the subject irrespective of his actual desires, to lay down, as a dictate of reason, an injunction which must be enforced.

But how is such an imperative justified? It is here that Kant discerned the distinctive task and structure of practical reason. Categorical imperatives are justified by the invocation of certain principles of practical reason, all of which can be shown to be either derivable from, or equivalent to, a single governing principle. This governing principle he called
the
categorical imperative. He formulated it in several ways, the first of which was this: ‘Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will as a universal law.’ This imperative is designed to capture in a pregnant philosophical phrase the persuasive force of the moral question to which all rational beings respond, the question ‘What if others were to act likewise?’ It was represented by Kant as having
a priori
validity. It had the same ultimate status in practical reason that he attributed to the principles of the pure understanding: any further justification of it must be philosophical. It is as much a precondition of practical thought as the law of causation is a presupposition of science.

The categorical imperative was restated in various forms, and Kant claimed that these forms were all equivalent, different formulations of the same philosophical insight. Two that are of particular importance are these: ‘Act so as to will the maxim of your action as a universal law in a Kingdom of Ends,’ and ‘Act so as to treat every rational being, whether in yourself or in another, never as a means only but always also as an end.’ The first of these means, roughly, that in formulating a principle of conduct, a rational being is constrained to postulate an ideal. In this ideal, or Kingdom of Ends, what is, ought to be and what ought to be, is. In positing such a realm, and himself as part of it, the agent sees himself in relation to other rational beings as one among many, of equal importance with them, deserving and giving respect on the basis of reason alone, and not on the basis of those empirical conditions which create distinctions between people.

The second principle implies that a rational being is constrained by reason not to bend others to his own purposes, not to enslave, abuse or exploit them, but always to recognise that they contain within themselves the justification of their own existence, and a right to their autonomy. The principles between them constitute the vital Kantian idea that the moral law is founded in, and expressive of, the ‘respect for persons’.

Kant’s claim that the three principles given are simply separate versions of a single principle is difficult to understand: the principles do not seem the same, and indeed involve different terms in their formulation. However, Kant clearly thought that any philosophical justification of the one would be adequate to ground the others too, perhaps because they each involve some fundamental aspect of a single cluster of concepts: rational agency, autonomy, will, end. These concepts could plausibly be considered to provide the basic ideas of practical reason. It is clear that the three principles (and the various modifications of them which Kant from time to time gave) contain the seeds of a powerful and also common-sensical moral point of view. They enjoin respect for others; they forbid slavery, fraud, theft, violence and sexual misuse; they provide a systematic and plausible test against which the pretensions of any particular morality could be measured. Kant’s claim, therefore, to have discovered the fundamental presuppositions of morality may not be entirely unfounded.

The objective necessity of the categorical imperative

The objectivity of the categorical imperative consists in three separate properties. First, it makes no reference to individual desires or needs, indeed to nothing except the concept of rationality as such. Hence it makes no distinctions among rational agents, but applies, if at all, universally, to all who can understand reasons for action. (It therefore governs reasoning about ends and not about means.) Secondly, the rational agent is constrained by reason to accept the categorical imperative: this imperative is as much a fundamental law of practical reason as the law of non-contradiction is a law of thought. Not to accept it is not to reason practically. Like the law of non-contradiction, therefore, it cannot be rationally rejected. Thirdly, to accept such a principle is to acquire a motive to act—it is to be persuaded to
obedience.
Since the imperative makes no reference to any desire, but only to the faculty of reasoning as such, it follows that, if all those three claims can be upheld, practical reason alone can provide a motive for action. Hence the ground of Hume’s scepticism—which is that reason is inert, and that all practical reasoning is subservient to desire—is cut away. The moral law becomes not just universal, but necessary, for there is no way of thinking practically that will not involve its explicit or implicit affirmation. The categorical imperative has ‘objective necessity’, and achieves this by abstracting from all needs and desires, all ‘empirical determinations’. It represents the agent as bound by his rational nature alone.

How can this claim to objectivity be upheld? It is here that Kant’s moral philosophy becomes difficult and obscure. While he affirms that we know the validity of the categorical imperative
a priori,
he recognises that it is no more sufficient in the case of practical reasoning than it is in the case of scientific understanding to make such a claim. It also stands in need of proof—the kind of proof that the Transcendental Deduction was supposed to provide in the case of the presuppositions of scientific thinking. But Kant did not provide this Transcendental Deduction; instead, he devoted the second
Critique
to an examination of metaphysical questions which, while enormously influential, left the gap between his metaphysics and his morals unclosed. This examination, perhaps intended as a kind of substitute for a Transcendental Deduction, concerns the concepts of freedom, reason and autonomy.

Freedom and reason

Kant argued that no moral law, and indeed no practical reasoning, is intelligible without the postulate of freedom; he also argued that only a rational being could be free in the sense that morality requires. In what then does freedom consist? Not, as Spinoza, Hume and many others had adequately proved, in mere randomness, nor in freedom from those laws that govern the universe. The free agent, as soon as we examine the question, we see to be distinguished, not by his lack of constraint, but by the peculiar
nature
of the constraint which governs him. He is constrained by reason, in its reception of the moral law. Freedom is subjection to the moral law, and is never more vivid than in the recognition of the necessity of that law and its absolute authority over the actions of the moral agent.

To clarify this thought we must distinguish action
in accordance with
the law from action
from
the law. A person might act in accordance with the law out of terror or coercion, or in the hope of reward. In these cases the law is not his motive, and the maxim governing his action, while it may seem to be categorical, is in fact hypothetical. To act from the law is to act out of an acceptance of the categorical imperative itself, and to be motivated by that acceptance. Since this motivation is itself intrinsic to the categorical imperative, it arises from the exercise of reason alone; in acting from the law, therefore, a rational agent at the same time expresses what Kant called ‘the autonomy of the will’. His action stems from his own rational reflection, which suffices to generate the motive of his act. His act is, in a deep sense, his own, and the decision from which it springs reflects his whole existence as a rational being, and not the arbitrary (empirical) determination of this or that desire.

Opposed to this autonomy is the ‘heteronomy’ of the agent who acts not in obedience to the commands of reason, but, for example, out of passion, fear, or the hope of reward. The ‘heteronomous’ agent is the one who has withdrawn from the exactions of pure morality and taken refuge in slavery. He acts in subjection, either to nature or to some superior force. He may disguise his a-morality by religious scruples, which lead him to act in accordance with the moral law out of hope or fear. But in himself, having failed to achieve the autonomy which alone commands the respect of rational beings, he stands outside the moral order, unfree, subservient, diminished in his very personhood, and in his respect for himself.

The antinomy of freedom

Having established a connection between freedom, reason and autonomy, Kant approaches the problem of free will. In the course of doing so he, begins the partial retraction of his strictures against speculative metaphysics. In the ‘Antinomy of Pure Reason’, contained in the Dialectic of the first
Critique,
Kant had purported to show the various ways in which pure reason tries to reach beyond the limited, ‘conditioned’, timedominated world of empirical observation, so as to embrace the unconditioned, eternal world of ‘noumena’. Kant sought to demonstrate that each of these ways of pursuing the ‘unconditioned’, ‘intelligible’ order generates a contradiction.

One of the ‘cosmological’ contradictions seemed to him, however, to demand a resolution. This was the contradiction between free will and determinism. The category of cause, and its attendant principle that every event has a cause, orders the empirical world in such a way as to leave no room for the unconditioned event. And yet human freedom seems to require us to think of ourselves as in some sense the ‘originators’ of our actions, standing outside the course of nature. This freedom is something of which we have an indubitable intuition. The antinomy troubled Kant. He could not accept Hume’s view, that there is, here, no genuine contradiction. Nor could he accept his own official theory, that such antinomies are the inevitable result of human reason’s attempt to think beyond nature, to aspire towards the absolute and unconditioned, instead of confining itself to the phenomenal world. He therefore sought to develop, both here, and in the second
Critique,
a solution to the problem of free will. The solution took the following form:

The intuitive knowledge of our freedom is primitive and original. It is the presupposition of any practical problem and of any practical reasoning that might be brought to solve it. It stands to practical reason much as the Transcendental Unity of Apperception stands to the theoretical understanding: it is the unquestionable premise without which there would be neither problem nor solution. But practical knowledge is not like theoretical knowledge. It aims not to understand nature, not to explain and predict, but to find reasons for action, and to lay down laws of rational conduct. In thinking of myself as free I am thinking of myself, so to speak, ‘under the aspect of agency’. That entails seeing myself, not as an object in a world of objects, obedient to causal laws, but as a subject, creator of my world, whose stance is active, and whose laws are the laws of freedom, knowable to reason alone. (To some extent, this distinction can be understood through another that we all intuitively grasp, that between predicting and deciding. It is one thing to predict that I will get drunk tonight, another to decide to do it. In the first case I look on myself from outside, in the context of the laws of nature to which I am subject, and I observe myself as I would another, trying to arrive at a prediction of my likely behaviour. In the second case I respond as determining agent, and make it my responsibility to bring a future event into being. In one case I give myself reasons for believing something about my future behaviour (theoretical reasons), in the other I give myself reasons for acting (practical reasons).)

It seems then, said Kant, that I know myself in two ways, theoretically, as part of nature, and practically, as agent. And bound up with these two forms of knowledge are two forms of law which I discover through them: the laws of nature and the laws of freedom, the latter being, not surprisingly, the versions of the categorical imperatives. Kant then took the step which was both to undo the conclusions of the first
Critique
and also to inspire succeeding generations of German philosophers to undo likewise. He asserted that in the first form of knowledge I know myself as phenomenon, in the second, practical knowledge, I know myself as noumenon. Despite Kant’s seemingly established theory that noumena are in essence unknowable to the understanding, he has, through invoking the ancient idea of ‘practical’ knowledge, presented a picture of how they might nevertheless be known:

the will of a rational being, as belonging to the sensuous world, recognises itself to be, like all other efficient causes, necessarily subject to laws of causality, while in practical matters, in its other aspects as a being-in-itself, it is conscious of its experience as determinable in an intelligible order of things.

In other words, the world of noumena is made open to reason after all, but reason not in its theoretical employment, but in its legitimate form, the form of practical reason. Kant goes on to argue that, even in this form, it provides us with knowledge. Whether or not the postulation of the self as noumenon resolves the problem of free will I leave for the reader to judge. The question we must now consider is the status and content of this knowledge which practical reason yields.

The postulates of reason

We find, in fact, that practical reason leads us precisely to those crucial metaphysical theories that the first
Critique
had purported to refute: the existence of a noumenal realm, the immortality of the soul, the affirmation of positive freedom, and the existence of God (the last three being known by Kant as ‘Postulates of Reason’). The positive freedom of the rational agent lies in the fact that he