Thursday, September 20, 2012

Freedom (Summary of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason #4)


4 Freedom

4.1 Freedom as a Transcendental Idea

Just like ‘I’, ‘freedom’ can either be a Concept of Understanding which is connected to the empirical world through Sensibility or a Transcendental Idea of Reason.  Most people, including contemporary neuroscientists, use the term in the first meaning; Freedom, or ‘free will’, is the faculty of beginning something spontaneously.  Most modern people believe that they have their freedom and that all (or at least most) actions of theirs are initiated by their freedom. 

Many contemporary neuroscientists oppose this popular belief, offering for example evidence that relevant neural activities are initiated before they make a decision (or become aware of their free will in their consciousness).  I believe that neuroscientists are right when they question our ‘freedom’ as understood as a Concept of Understanding.  In the world of natural science there is no or little room for our free will. 

However, it does not necessarily follow that ‘freedom’ or ‘free will’ as a Transcendental Idea should also be denied.  Kant defines ‘freedom’ as a Transcendental Idea as follows.

By freedom, on the contrary, in its cosmological meaning, I understand the faculty of beginning a state spontaneously.  Its causality, therefore, does not depend, according to the law of nature, on another cause, by which it is determined in time.  In this sense, freedom is a pure transcendental idea, which, firstly, contains nothing derived from experience; and, secondly, the object of this idea cannot be given determinately in any experience, because there is a universal law of the very possibility of all experience, according to which everything that happens must have a cause, and according to which, therefore, the causality of the cause, which itself has happened or arisen, must also in turn have a cause.  In this manner, the whole field of experience, however far it may extend, has been changed into the sum total of mere nature.  As, however, it is impossible in this way to arrive at an absolute totality of the conditions in causal relations, reason creates for itself the idea of spontaneity which can begin to act of itself, without an antecedent cause determining it to action, according to the law of causal connection.  (463)

Dagegen verstehe ich unter Freiheit, im kosmologischen Verstande, das Vermögen, einen Zustand von selbst anzufangen, deren Kausalität also nicht nach dem Naturgesetze wiederum unter einer anderen Ursache steht, welche sie der Zeit nach bestimmte. Die Freiheit ist in dieser Bedeutung eine reine transzendentale Idee, die erstlich nichts von der Erfahrung Entlehntes enthält, zweitens deren Gegenstand auch in keiner Erfahrung bestimmt gegeben werden kann, weil es ein allgemeines Gesetz, selbst der Möglichkeit aller Erfahrung, ist, daß alles, was geschieht, eine Ursache, mithin auch die Kausalität der Ursache, die selbst geschehen, oder entstanden, wiederum eine Ursache haben müsse; wodurch denn das ganze Feld der Erfahrung, so weit es sich erstrecken mag, in einen Inbegriff bloßer Natur verwandelt wird. Da aber auf solche Weise keine absolute Totalität der Bedingungen im Kausalverhältnisse herauszubekommen ist, so schafft sich die Vernunft die Idee von einer Spontaneität, die von selbst anheben könne zu handeln, ohne daß eine andere Ursache vorangeschickt werden dürfe, sie wiederum nach dem Gesetze der Kausalverknüpfung zur Handlung zu bestimmen.  (B561)

Freedom as defined as independent of the law of nature and as unconditioned by any experience is truly a Transcendental Idea.  This idea may be a sheer nonsense in natural science, but it produces in Reason another Transcendental Idea of “ought”, which, as we experience often, orient our thought (and may affect, in the long run, our actions).  You may argure that the imperative of “ought” may be a Transcendental Illusion rather than a Transcendental Idea as it sometimes torments you, but if it is used properly by Reason it has a certain role in our life as we understand and live it.

(Incidentally, Wittgenstein said in 6.52 of Tractatus, “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problem of life have still not been touched at all.  Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.”  Do Kant and Wittgenstein mean almost the same point?  -- A nonscientific idea of “ought” is an orientation that guides or anguishes us—)

That our reason possesses causality, or that we at least conceive such a causality in it, is clear from the imperative which, in all practical matters, we impose as rules on our executive powers.  The ought expresses a kind of necessity and connection with grounds that we do not find elsewhere in the whole of nature.  The understanding can know in nature only what is, what has been or what will be.  It is impossible that anything in nature ought to be different from what in fact it is in all these relations of time; nay, if we only look at the course of nature, the ought has no meaning whatever.  We cannot ask what ought to happen in nature, as little as we can ask what qualities a circle ought to possess.  We can only ask what happens in nature, and what properties the circle has.  (472)

Daß diese Vernunft nun Kausalität habe, wenigstens wir uns eine dergleichen an ihr vorstellen, ist aus den Imperativen klar, welche wir in allem Praktischen den ausübenden Kräften als Regeln aufgeben. Das Sollen drückt eine Art von Notwendigkeit und Verknüpfung mit Gründen aus, die in der ganzen Natur sonst nicht vorkommt. Der Verstand kann von dieser nur erkennen, was da ist, oder gewesen ist, oder sein wird. Es ist unmöglich, daß etwas darin anders sein soll, als es in allen diesen Zeitverhältnissen in der Tat ist, ja das Sollen, wenn man bloß den Lauf der Natur vor Augen hat, hat ganz und gar keine Bedeutung. Wir können gar nicht fragen: was in der Natur geschehen soll; ebensowenig, als: was für Eigenschaften ein Zirkel haben soll, sondern, was darin geschieht, oder welche Eigenschaften der letztere hat.  (B575)


4.2 Antinomy of freedom

It is important to realize that Kant never means to substantiate or hypostatize the Transcendental Idea of freedom.  There is no way to make an unconditioned idea an entity in the conditioned world.

It should be clearly understood that, in what we have said, we had no intention of establishing the reality of freedom, as one of the faculties which contain the cause of the appearances of our world of sense.  For not only would this have been no transcendental consideration at all, which is concerned only with concepts, but it could never have succeeded, because from experience we can never infer something that need not be thought according to the laws of experience.  It was not even our intention to prove the possibility of freedom; for in this, too, we should not have succeeded, because from mere a priori concepts we cannot know the possibility of any real ground or any causality.  We have here treated freedom only as a transcendental idea, which makes reason imagine that it can absolutely begin the series of conditions in appearances through the sensibly unconditioned; but here reason becomes involved in an antimony with its own laws, the laws which it prescribes to the empirical use of the understanding.  That this antinomy rests on a mere illusion, and that nature does not conflict with the causality of freedom, this was the only thing which we were able to show, and cared to show.  (478-479)

Man muß wohl bemerken: daß wir hierdurch nicht die Wirklichkeit der Freiheit, als eines der Vermögen, welche die Ursache von den Erscheinungen unserer Sinnenwelt enthalten, haben dartun wollen Denn, außer daß dieses gar keine transzendentale Betrachtung, die bloß mit Begriffen zu tun hat, gewesen sein würde, so könnte es auch nicht gelingen, indem wir aus der Erfahrung niemals auf etwas, was gar nicht nach Erfahrungsgesetzen gedacht werden muß, schließen können. Ferner haben wir auch gar nicht einmal die Möglichkeit der Freiheit beweisen wollen; denn dieses wäre auch nicht gelungen, weil wir überhaupt von keinem Realgrunde und keiner Kausalität, aus bloßen Begriffen a priori, die Möglichkeit erkennen können. Die Freiheit wird hier nur als transzendentale Idee behandelt, wodurch die Vernunft die Reihe der Bedingungen in der Erscheinung durch das Sinnlichunbedingte schlechthin anzuheben denkt, dabei sich aber in eine Antinomie mit ihren eigenen Gesetzen, welche sie dem empirischen Gebrauche des Verstandes vorschreibt, verwickelt. Daß nun diese Antinomie auf einem bloßen Scheine beruhe, und, daß Natur der Kausalität aus Freiheit wenigstens nicht widerstreite, das war das einzige, was wir leisten konnten, und woran es uns auch einzig und allein gelegen war. (B587)

The antinomy Kant referred above is this:

Thesis: Causality according to the laws of nature is not the only causality from which all the appearances of the world can be derived.  In order to account for these appearances, it is necessary also to admit another causality, that of freedom.  (405)

Die Kausalität nach Gesetzen der Natur ist nicht die einzige, aus welcher die Erscheinungen der Welt insgesamt abgeleitet werden können. Es ist noch eine Kausalität durch Freiheit zur Erklärung derselben anzunehmen notwendig. (B472)


Antithesis: There is no freedom, but everything in the world takes place solely according to laws of nature.  (405)

Es ist keine Freiheit, sondern alles in der Welt geschieht lediglich nach Gesetzen der Natur.  (B473)

This is indeed an antinomy as we can successfully argue either way.  This contradiction is from our confusion between the conditioned and the unconditioned.  Natural science, for example, examines issues in the conditioned world as such, whereas metaphysics deals with issues in the unconditioned world of ideas.  Natural science and metaphysics cannot conflict with each other as their domains and methods are different, although metaphysics tacitly orients natural science, and natural science occasionally demands some changes in metaphisics.

We may be completely determined by the law of nature.  Yet, functions of Reason that we possess almost necessarily produce Transcendental Ideas such as ‘I’ or ‘freedom’ (free will) and we may use them wisely to guide us for a ‘good’ life – here we see another Transcendental Idea—, or play with them delusively.  We certainly need a principle of Reason.







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