FROM SPONTANEITY TO FREEDOM

The antinomy between freedom and determinism set the stage for Kant's next revolution in philosophy. The first Critique had established that human experience resulted from the combination of the spontaneous activity of the mind with its intuitive (passive) faculties. The spontaneity of the intellect was underived from anything else and was not a self-evident truth or indubitable first principle – it was instead a self-producing, self-generating activity. In his second (1787) edition of the Critique, Kant had even gone so far as to claim in a footnote: “The synthetic unity of apperception is therefore that highest point, to which we must ascribe all employment of the understanding, even the whole of logic, and conformably therewith, transcendental philosophy. Indeed this faculty of apperception is the understanding itself.”

Kant's related distinction of appearances and things-in-themselves inevitably raised the question about what exactly Kant had thereby done to traditional conceptions of morality. If with the aid of pure reason we could not establish that there were certain values and goods in the created order that had been intended for us, were we then to become “nihilists” as Jacobi feared, or were we to admit that what we counted as good and evil depended only on what we happened to desire, and that therefore reason could never be more than, as Hume had so famously put it, a “slave to the passions”?