Kant on Spontaneity by Sgarbi Marco.;

Author:Sgarbi, Marco.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441115287
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

III Spontaneity in Kant’s Critical Ethics

Two years after the Prolegomena, in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant picks up the problem of spontaneity as a central issue in the explanation of the foundation of morality. The solution to the third antinomy is evident if we ‘take a different standpoint where by means of freedom we think ourselves as causes efficient a priori rather than when we represent ourselves in terms of our actions as effects that we see before our eyes’,51 since,

if it were possible for us to have a deep insight into a human being’s cast of mind, then we would become aware that the whole chain of appearances, with respect to all that the moral law is concerned with, depends upon the spontaneity of the subject as a thing in itself, for the determination of which no physical explanation can be given.52

The correct standpoint in order to conceive the human being as free is, therefore, to consider him as a thing in itself in contraposition to its phenomenon. This leads, according to Kant, to the unavoidable distinction between the sensible and the intelligible worlds, ‘the first of which can be very different according to the difference of sensibility in various observers of the world while the second, which is its basis, always remains the same.’53 The intelligible world lies at the root of the sensible world: noumenal causality is therefore the basis of the phenomenal one. This does not mean knowing the moral agent as a thing in itself, but simply means assuming its existence as something intelligible making morality possible.

From this standpoint, Kant’s idea of spontaneity in the practical field as a transcendental conception and heuristic device seems to be, as Allison suggests, the same as in the theoretical field.54 Allison’s interpretation is supported by two passages in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the first, widely discussed passage, Kant asserts that there is a ‘unity of practical with speculative reason in a common principle’,55 and this unity seems to be grounded on the spontaneity of the subject. In the second passage, Kant compares the spontaneity of the understanding with the spontaneity of reason, as in a similar way he does in the Critique of Pure Reason when comparing the spontaneity of the understanding with the spontaneity of the original apperception. Kant states that the human being can be aware of his causality only by means of reason that as a ‘pure self-activity, is raised even above the understanding’.56 Even if the understanding is also in some sense spontaneous, it cannot, however, produce from its activity any other concepts ‘than those which serve merely to bring sensible representations under rules’.57 Reason, on the other hand, shows a spontaneity so pure that it goes beyond sensibility and ‘proves its highest occupation in distinguishing the world of sense and the world of understanding from each other and thereby marking out limits for the understanding itself’.58 For Kant, this absolute spontaneity lies at the basis of

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