In section three, Kant argues that we have a free will and are thus morally self-legislating. The fact of freedom means that we are bound by the moral law. In the course of his discussion, Kant establishes two viewpoints from which we can consider ourselves; we can view ourselves:
- as members of the world of appearances, which operates according to the laws of nature; or
- as members of the intellectual world, which is how we view ourselves when we think of ourselves as having free wills and when we think about how to act.
These two different viewpoints allow Kant to make sense of how we can have free wills, despite the fact that the world of appearances follows laws of nature deterministically. Finally, Kant remarks that whilst he would like to be able to explain how morality ends up motivating us, his theory is unable to do so. This is because the intellectual world—in which morality is grounded—is something that we cannot make positive claims about.
Freedom and Willing
Kant opens section III by defining the will as the cause of our actions. According to Kant, having a will is the same thing as being rational, and having a free will means having a will that is not influenced by external forces. This is a negative definition of freedom—it tells us that freedom is freedom from determination by alien forces.[xvii]
However, Kant also provides a positive definition of freedom: a free will, Kant argues, gives itself a law—it sets its own ends, and has a special causal power to bring them about. A free will is one that has the power to bring about its own actions in a way that is distinct from the way that normal laws of nature cause things to happen. According to Kant, we need laws to be able to act. An action not based on some sort of law would be arbitrary and not the sort of thing that we could call the result of willing.
Because a free will is not merely pushed around by external forces, external forces do not provide laws for a free will. The only source of law for a free will is that will itself. This is Kant's notion of autonomy. Thus, Kant's notion of freedom of the will requires that we are morally self-legislating; that we impose the moral law on ourselves. Kant thinks that the positive understanding of freedom amounts to the same thing as the categorical imperative, and that “a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same.”[xviii] This is the key notion that later scholars call the reciprocity thesis, which states that a will is bound by the moral law if and only if it is free. That means that if you know that someone is free, then you know that the moral law applies to them, and vice versa. Kant then asks why we have to follow the principle of morality. Although we all may feel the force of our consciences, Kant, examining phenomena with a philosophical eye, is forced to “admit that no interest impels me to do so.”[xix] He says that we clearly do “regard ourselves as free in acting and so to hold ourselves yet subject to certain laws,”[xx] but wonders how this is possible. He then explains just how it is possible, by appealing to the two perspectives that we can consider ourselves under.
Gods-eye and human perspective
According to Kant, human beings cannot know the ultimate structure of reality. Whilst humans experience the world as having three spatial dimensions and as being extended in time, we cannot say anything about how reality ultimately is, from a god's-eye perspective. From this perspective, the world may be nothing like the way it appears to human beings. We cannot get out of our heads and leave our human perspective on the world to know what it is like independently of our own viewpoint; we can only know about how the world appears to us, not about how the world is in itself. Kant calls the world as it appears to us from our point of view the world of sense or of appearances. The world from a god's-eye perspective is the world of things in themselves or the “world of understanding.”
It is the distinction between these two perspectives that Kant appeals to in explaining how freedom is possible. Insofar as we take ourselves to be exercising our free will, Kant argues, we have to consider ourselves from the perspective of the world of understanding. It is only in the world of understanding that it makes sense to talk of free wills. In the world of appearances, everything is determined by physical laws, and there is no room for a free will to change the course of events. If you consider yourself as part of the world of appearances, then you cannot think of yourself as having a will that brings things about.
Occupying Two Worlds
On Kant's view, the categorical imperative is possible because, although we as rational agents can be thought of as members of both the intelligible and the phenomenal world (understanding and appearance), it is the intelligible world of understanding that “contains the ground of the world of sense [appearance] and so too of its laws.”[xxi] In this sense, the world of understanding is more fundamental than, or ‘grounds’, the world of sense. Because of this, the moral law, which clearly applies to the world of understanding, also applies to the world of sense as well, because the world of understanding has priority. As a result, and because the world of understanding is more fundamental and primary, its laws hold for the world of sense too. The categorical imperative, and therefore the moral law, binds us in the intelligible world and in the phenomenal world of appearances.
Kant argues that autonomous rational agents, like ourselves, think of themselves as having free will. This permits such beings to make judgments such as “you ought to have done that thing that you did not do.” Kant claims, in both this work and in the first Critique, that this notion of freedom cannot be derived from our phenomenal experience. We can be sure that this concept of freedom doesn't come from experience because experience itself contradicts it. Our experience is of everything in the sensible world and in the sensible world, everything that happens does so in accord with the laws of nature and there is no room for a free will to influence events.
So, Kant argues, we are committed to two incompatible positions. From the perspective of practical reason, which is involved when we consider how to act, we have to take ourselves as free. But from the perspective of speculative reason, which is concerned with investigating the nature of the world of appearance, freedom is impossible. So we are committed to freedom on the one hand, and yet on the other hand we are also committed to a world of appearances that is run by laws of nature and has no room for freedom. We cannot give up on either. We cannot avoid taking ourselves as free when we act, and we cannot give up our picture of the world as determined by laws of nature. As Kant puts it, there is a contradiction between freedom and natural necessity. He calls this a dialectic of reason.
The way Kant suggests that we should deal with this dialectic is through an appeal to the two perspectives we can take on ourselves. This is the same sort of move he made earlier in this section. On one perspective, the perspective of the world of understanding, we are free, whereas from the other, the perspective of the world of the senses or appearances, natural laws determine everything that happens. There is no contradiction because the claim to freedom applies to one world, and the claim of the laws of nature determining everything applies to the other. The claims do not conflict because they have different targets.
Kant cautions that we cannot feel or intuit this world of the understanding. He also stresses that we are unable to make interesting positive claims about it because we are not able to experience the world of the understanding. Kant argues that we cannot use the notion of the world of the understanding to explain how freedom is possible or how pure reason could have anything to say about practical matters because we simply do not and cannot have a clear enough grasp of the world of the understanding. The notion of an intelligible world does point us towards the idea of a kingdom of ends, which is a useful and important idea. We just have to be careful not to get carried away and make claims that we are not entitled to.
