The distinction between empirical and intelligible character is only one of two distinctions that play a central role in Kant's first Critique account of freedom. The other, and the subject of the present chapter, is the distinction between transcendental and practical freedom. As we shall see, this distinction presents us with a quite different set of problems. Whereas in the first case the issue concerned the coherence of the view that both characters can be attributed to the same agent, the main difficulties now are primarily exegetical. More specifically, there is a need to reconcile the apparently conflicting accounts of the relationship between these two conceptions of freedom contained in the Dialectic and the Canon.

In the present chapter, I shall argue that there is no contradiction between the two accounts and, therefore, no need to invoke the notorious “patchwork theory” in order to reconcile them. I shall also argue, however, that there is an ambiguity in the underlying conception of practical freedom, indeed, one that not only can be found in both the Dialectic and the Canon but also long antedates the Critique of Pure Reason. Moreover, I shall try to show that this ambiguity is not, as is usually supposed, between an incompatibilist and a compatibilist conception but rather between two incompatibilist conceptions. In one, practical freedom is regarded as itself a species of transcendental freedom (a kind of first beginning); in the other, it is regarded as a distinct, limited, yet still genuinely incompatibilistic, form of freedom.