THE NATURAL AND THE MORAL ORDERS

In the picture of the mind's relation to the world that emerged in Kant's first two Critiques and his other works, there was in our general experiential engagement with the world a necessary element of spontaneity on the part of the mind in apprehending objects of experience; this spontaneity was both underived and involved neither an apprehension of any given object nor any self-evident first principle. Instead, its spontaneous character indicated the way in which it, as it were, sprang up by its powers. In such spontaneity, the human agent produced the “rules” by which the “intuitions” of our experience were combined into the meaningful whole of human experience; without the rules being combined with such experiential, intuitional elements, the results of such spontaneity were devoid of significance (Bedeutung), in the sense that they were devoid of any objective relation to the world. When transferred to the moral realm, though, such spontaneity was no longer chained to intuition for its significance, and, in relation to action, spontaneity became autonomy, the capacity to institute the moral law and to move ourselves to action by virtue of having so instituted it.

There had long been a tradition in philosophical thought that held that our individual perceptions of things and our deliberations about what to do required us to have some conception of our own standing in the overall scheme of things.