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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2011
According to Kant, being purely rational or purely reasonable and being autonomously free are one and the same thing. But how can this be so? How can my innate capacity for pure reason ever motivate me to do anything, whether the right thing or the wrong thing? What I will suggest is that the fundamental connection between reason and freedom, both for Kant and in reality, is precisely our human biological life and spontaneity of the will, a conjunctive intrinsic structural property of our animal bodies, which essentially constitutes human personhood and rational agency. I say ‘suggest’ because, obviously, no proper argument for such a conclusion could ever be worked out in a short essay. I would nevertheless like to motivate my suggestion by way of a commentary on the second part of Adrian Moore's extremely rich and interesting recent book, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty (henceforth, NIR).
1 This paper is a revised version of a one-on-one discussion presented at the ‘Free Will, Agent Causation, and Kant’ conference at the University of Sussex in June 2005. We would like to thank the British Academy and the University of Sussex, whose support made the conference possible; Lucy Allais, who organized the conference; and the other conference participants, whose comments and questions helped guide the revision of the discussion.
2 For convenience, we refer to Kant's works infratextually in parentheses. The citations include both an abbreviation of the English title and the corresponding volume and page numbers in the standard ‘Akademie’ edition of Kant's works: Kants gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Königlich Preussischen (now Deutschen) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: G. Reimer [now de Gruyter], 1902-).Google Scholar We generally follow the standard English translations, but have occasionally modified them where appropriate. For references to the first Critique, we follow the common practice of giving page numbers from the A (1781) and B (1787) German editions only. Here is a list of the relevant abbreviations and English translations:
CPJ Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
CPR Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
CPrR Critique of Practical Reason, trans. M. Gregor, in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 133–272.
GMM Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. Gregor, in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, pp. 37–108.
MM Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. Gregor, in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, pp. 353–604.
OP Immanuel Kant: Opus postumum, trans. E. Förster and M. Rosen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
3 Moore, A. W., Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variations in Kant's Moral and Religious Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Sellars, W., ‘Philosophy and the scientific image of man’, in Sellars, W., Science, Perception and Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), pp. 1–40.Google Scholar
5 See O'Neill, O., Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 2.Google Scholar
6 See Guyer, P., Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 See Fodor, J., ‘Making mind matter more,’ in Fodor, J., A Theory of Content and Other Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 137–59, at 156.Google Scholar
8 The problem is how to understand both the apparently a priori epistemological and also strongly modal status of these laws, in view of the fact that they are explicitly held to be empirical. See, e.g. Allison, H., ‘Causality and causal laws in Kant: a critique of Michael Friedman’, in Parrini, P. (ed.), Kant and Contemporary Epistemology (Netherlands: Kluwer, 1994), 291–307Google Scholar; Buchdahl, G., Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), pp. 651–65Google Scholar; Buchdahl, G., ‘The conception of lawlikeness in Kant's philosophy of science’, in Beck, L. W. (ed.), Kant's Theory of Knowledge (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), 128–50Google Scholar; Guyer, P., Kant's System of Nature and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 2Google Scholar; Friedman, M., Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), chs. 3-4Google Scholar; Friedman, M., ‘Causal laws and the foundations of natural science’, in Guyer, P. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 161–99Google Scholar; Harper, W., ‘Kant on the a priori and material necessity’, in R. Butts R. (ed.), Kant's Philosophy of Physical Science (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986), pp. 239–72Google Scholar; Walker, R., ‘Kant's conception of empirical law’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 63 (1990): 243–58Google Scholar; and Watkins, E., ‘Kant's justification of the laws of mechanics’, in Watkins, E. (ed.), Kant and the Sciences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 136–59Google Scholar.
9 See: Haken, H., Principles of Brain Functioning: A Synergetic Approach to Brain Activity, Behavior, and Cognition (Berlin: Springer, 1996)Google Scholar; Juarrero, A., Dynamics in Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Kelso, J. S., Dynamic Patterns (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Port, and Gelder, T. Van (eds), Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Thelen, E. and Smith, L., A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Varela, F., Principles of Biological Autonomy (New York: Elsevier/North-Holland, 1979)Google Scholar; and Weber, A. and Varela, F., ‘Life after Kant: natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1 (2002): 97–125.Google Scholar The notion of self-organization used by contemporary theorists of complex systems dynamics is slightly broader than Kant's, in that it includes non-living complex systems as well, e.g. the rolling hexagonal ‘Benard cells’ that appear as water is heated. Kantian self-organizing systems are all holistically causally integrated or ‘autopoietic’, such that the whole and the parts mutually produce each other.
10 See Watkins, E., Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 4.Google Scholar
11 Royce, J., The Letters ofjosiah Royce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 217.Google Scholar
12 Like Hanna, I shall refer to my own book as NIR.
13 Among the misunderstandings that I shall not discuss, two, I think, are worth mentioning in a footnote. One of these concerns is what I call the radical picture. Hanna rightly points out that, while I do not claim to find the radical picture in Kant, I do claim to find pressures in Kant's system to endorse it. Hanna develops this point in terms of Kant's Wille/Willkür distinction, as though that were the place where I took the pressures to be greatest; actually, that is the place where I take Kant to be doing most to keep the radical picture at bay. The second misunderstanding comes in Hanna's claim that I identify rational freedom with the creation of new concepts. I certainly put a heavy emphasis on the creation of new concepts as a paradigm of rational freedom. But I am just as keen to recognize rational freedom in the exercise of old concepts. The creation of new concepts and the exercise of old concepts have much in common, and I do not want to suggest that only when the element of autonomy that is characteristic of both reaches the intensity that is characteristic only of the former does it constitute freedom.
14 This is my term, not Hanna's.
15 I have slightly modified the definition, replacing ‘determinism’ by ‘determination’. I take this to be an inessential difference, though the modified version is somewhat more convenient for my current purposes.
16 Davidson, D., ‘Mental events’, reprinted in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).Google Scholar
17 In my book I tell an old joke which I take to illustrate Kant's extraordinary ambitions here (NIR: 209, n. 1). I shall hereby allow myself the indulgence of repeating this joke. Two people are in bitter dispute with each other about whether some proposed course of action can be justified. They consult a sage. To the one who says that the course of action can be justified the sage says, ‘You are right.’ To the one wh o says tha t it canno t be justified the sage says, ‘You are right.’ A bystander protests, ‘But they can't bot h be right: their views are incompatible.’ Turning to the bystander, the sage says, ‘And you are right too.’
18 I am here drawing on material from NIR, theme two, §3.
19 I shall be drawing on material from NIR, theme two, §5.
20 See further, with references, NIR, pp. 114–15.
