Kant by Roger Scruton

Author:Roger Scruton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Sterling
Published: 2010-11-11T22:00:00+00:00

Title page from the first edition of Kant’s Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals).

The Transcendental Self

The doctrine of transcendental freedom is both puzzling and appealing. Its appeal lies in its promise of access to the transcendental; its puzzling quality comes from Kant’s previous proof that such access is impossible. By Kant’s own argument, there is nothing to be known, and nothing meaningfully to be said, about the transcendental world. Kant recognizes the difficulty, and admits that the “demand to regard oneself qua subject of freedom as a noumenon, and at the same time from the point of view of physical nature as a phenomenon in one’s own empirical consciousness” is “paradoxical” (P. 6). And he even goes so far as to say that, while we do not comprehend the fact of moral freedom, “we yet comprehend its incomprehensibility, and this is all that can fairly be demanded of a philosophy which strives to carry its principles to the very limit of human reason” (G. 463).

We can go some way toward explaining Kant’s doctrine if we relate the “transcendental freedom” that underlies practical reason to the “transcendental unity of apperception” that underlies our knowledge of nature. Our perspective on the world contains two distinct aspects; and neither the unity of consciousness, nor transcendental freedom, can be deduced from our knowledge of the empirical world. But they are each guaranteed a priori as preconditions of the knowledge that we have. The first is the starting point for all our knowledge of truths; the second the starting point for all deliberation. They are transcendental, not in the positive sense of involving knowledge of a transcendental object, but in the negative sense of being presupposed by the legitimate employment of our rational powers. Hence they lie at the limit of what can be known. Freedom, being a perspective on the empirical world, cannot also be part of it. The knowledge of our own freedom is therefore a part of the “apperception” that defines our perspective. (Authority for this interpretation can be found in the first Critique, notably A. 546–47, B. 574–75.)

Pure reason attempts to know the transcendental world through concepts. In other words, it attempts to form a positive conception of noumena. This attempt is doomed to failure. Practical reason, however, not being concerned in the discovery of truths, imposes no concepts on its objects. It will never, therefore, lead us into the error of forming a positive conception of the transcendental self. We know this self only practically, through the exercise of freedom. While we cannot translate this knowledge into judgments about our nature, we can translate it into some other thing. This other thing is given by the laws of practical reason, which are the synthetic a priori principles of action. Just as there are a priori laws of nature that can be derived from the unity of consciousness, so too are there a priori laws of reason that can be derived from the perspective of transcendental freedom.

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