Emmanuel Kant and the Possibility of Freedom
Emmanuel Kant and the Possibility of Freedom
Timothy Michael Marskell.
Note on text: originally submitted at the University of Toronto on November 27, 2001.
For Peter Ludwig Berger[a] (17 March 1929–27 June 2017) was an Austrian-born American sociologist and Protestant theologian. Berger became known for his work in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, study of modernization, and contributions to sociological theory.
And for Bernard Zelechow
A reader of Emmanual Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, may be forgiven for wondering at first if the enormous scope of the work will admit to a concise and attainable conclusion. Kant, however, has a definite end in mind: not merely the delineation of the transcendental unity of reason, but a revelation of reason’s limits and what, if any, metaphysical knowledge is possible for human beings. His “Transcendental Dialectic” first lays out the boundaries of reason and the errors into which it naturally leads itself. First, paralogisms, or transcendental illusions posited on the erroneous inference that psychologically unified apperception necessarily supposes certain metaphysical predicates within the unified subject. Kant then leads us to the antinomies, the inevitable dialectical paradox into which reason falls in attempting to discern a pure and objective cosmology, ungrounded in experience. The third antinomy, which deals with the possibility of free or spontaneous causality, will serve a very important purpose for Kant. He argues that the dialectic of the antinomies does not admit to any certain resolution in so far as one seeks in them a description of world in-itself, yet they must have a doctrinal resolution as objects of thought. It is Kant’s understanding of freedom which leads him to a solution: he argues that causality through freedom is a legitimate form, as reason necessarily regards itself as free and not subject to sensible compulsion. The necessity of natural causality is in no way abrogated, however, insofar as Kant posits freedom as a noumenal condition of the subject, which is not apprehended in sensibility and thus does not conflict with it. The unity of reason is therefore maintained and the contradiction of the antinomies refuted, given that the freedom of reason is an intelligible concept whose unconditioned causality appears perfectly deterministic from the sensible perspective.
A discussion of the antinomy of freedom must first be understood in the larger context of the “Transcendental Dialectic.” This paper will summarize the reasoning behind Kant’s paralogisms, and his desire to underscore the inability of reason to move from the transcendental conditions of our common cognitive organization, to a metaphysical understanding of the world in-itself. The paralogisms, errors of form in which psychological predicates are erroneously assigned to the transcendental “I,” point toward the antinomies, in which reason falls inevitably into antithetic cosmological contradiction. My analysis will rest on the third antinomy and Kant’s argument that it is possible to render causality through freedom compatible with natural necessity, thus allowing a doctrinal rejection of the dialectical antinomies. Kant, however, achieves this resolution by assuming freedom is an intelligible aspect of the reasonable being — an unconditioned noumenon — which raises a series of pertinent criticisms I will explore.
I
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Kant introduces his paralogisms after reiterating a familiar warning regarding philosophical enquiry: that reason cannot “contrary to all criticisms, carry us away beyond the empirical use of the categories, and hold out to us the semblance of extending the pure understanding (385).” Kant has provided the comprehensive means by which we can understand the objectivity of experience — as necessary to all rational beings and fundamentally unified — but this has been consistently qualified with the assertion that the a priori conditions of the understanding are simultaneously subjective (transcendentally ideal) and cannot be extended to the world in-itself. Kant refuses to countenance such a project, but he admits that the very capacity of reason for transcendental analysis may lead it to certain falsehoods, which he calls paralogisms: “A transcendental paralogism has a transcendental ground for inferring falsely due to its form. Thus a fallacy of this kind will have its ground in the nature of human reason, and will bring with it an unavoidable, although not insoluble, illusion (411).” Kant seeks to unearth and refute these errors of form.
The paralogisms ultimately follow from the “I think” of transcendental apperception. Kant argues in the “Transcendental Analytic” that “the original and necessary consciousness of the identity of oneself is at the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances (233).” The transcendental “I” is the apodictic condition that unifies experience — but, importantly for Kant, it is only a condition. The paralogisms arise from inattentiveness to this fact and the supposition that the “I” may be construed as a metaphysical existent. Kant argues: “The proposition “I think” is taken here only problematically; not insofar as it may contain a perception of an existence, but only in its mere possibility (415).” The “I” is a part of all experience as its transcendental ground, but is nothing more than merely possible in-itself. Thus, the assertion in the first paralogism that the absolute necessity of “I” as the subject of thought indicates substantiality, is nothing more than a tautology (415–6). No experiential knowledge is gained from the transcendental “I think,” and certainly no absolute, metaphysical knowledge regarding its possible substance — “it cannot teach us any of the usual conclusions of the rationalistic doctrine of the soul (417).” Essentially, the paralogisms are formal errors of logic, where one assumes the subject (transcendental I) necessarily contains certain predicates (substance, permanence, etc.) to which it actually has no right. To identify that which unifies my experience in no way indicates that I have discerned any predicates of an actual existence. For Kant, the paralogisms are a “mere imitation of the form of reason (386)” in which erroneous ontological inferences are passed off as truth.
If the paralogisms are logical errors that deal with the subject of thinking (i.e. psychology), Kant’s antinomies provide a more acute problem: they are not simply fallacious and subject to rejection, but indicate instead the cognitive conflict that arises in the attempt to apprehend the “sum total of existing things (466)” (i.e. cosmology). Reason arrives at such a predicament because it cannot look beyond the conditions of experience, and yet necessarily seeks a totalized understanding of those conditions once they have been illuminated. Kant argues: “reason in continuous progression of the empirical synthesis, has been led to (the antinomies) necessarily when it tries to liberate from every condition, and to grasp in its unconditioned totality, that which can be determined only conditionally (496).” Reason, in a sense, seeks what it can not have and this creates a dialectic contradiction: a thesis that attempts to answer cosmological questions and an antithesis which provides their refutation. The antinomies differ fundamentally from the paralogisms in that there is nothing about them that we can definitely call an illusion — both aspects of the contradiction are perfectly reasonable. Kant argues: “there arise sophistical theoroms, which may neither hope for confirmation in experience nor fear refutation by it; and each of them is not only without contradiction in-itself but meets with the conditions of its necessity in the nature of reason itself (467).” Precisely because reason looks to totalize things outside of the conditions of its own experience, the forms at which it arrive admit to no experiential validation, and simultaneously cannot be discarded.
Kant describes the four theses and antitheses of the antinomies: the necessity of the world’s beginning in time, the necessity of simple, indestructible substances, causality through freedom, and the existence of a necessary being. While a total distillation of the four is not possible, they do share something of a general basis: the acceptance or rejection of unconditioned causality. Both the existence of a necessary being and the beginning of the world in time presuppose this question as does (most importantly to Kant’s subsequent argument) the possibility of rational freedom. The thesis for the antinomy of freedom is described this way: “Causality in accordance with the laws of nature is not the only one from which all appearances can be derived. It is only necessary to assume another causality through freedom to explain them (484).” This argument rests on the assertion that causality is rationally incomplete without “a sufficiently determined a priori cause” that is not subordinate to another. Causal sequences must admit of a beginning or they fall into contradiction, and if we accept this we must accept that spontaneous (i.e. free) causes precipitate those sequences (484). The antithesis to this argument asserts that a spontaneous first beginning, in presuming “a state which has no causal connection at all with a previous one (485),” contradicts the causal law which is the cornerstone of the unity of experience. We have no ground to assume an agent unconditioned by binding transcendental categories. At best, therefore, freedom is an “empty thought-entity,” and at worst a sort of convenient “lawlessness” in which one attempts to abrogate the necessity of nature (485–6).
Both arguments have an intuitive and intellectual consistency (indeed, this is the very root of the problem) as they cannot be empirically tested, and yet are perfectly rational. Kant, however, does not end at this point of philosophical agnosticism. He asserts first, that while reason may lead to the antinomies, they are premised on the illusion that reason may seek objects in-themselves: “the antinomy of pure reason in its cosmological ideas is removed by showing that it is merely dialectical and a conflict due to an illusion arising from the fact that one has applied the idea of absolute totality, which is valid only as a condition of things in-themselves (519).” Thus, we may call antinomies errors of purpose — the assumption that reason can acquire absolute knowledge — as opposed to the paralogistic errors of form. This argument has a corollary, however: while we may not resolve the antinomies in an ultimate, metaphysical sense they must have resolution as objects of thought: “we cannot evade the obligation of giving at least a critical resolution of the questions of reason before us by lamenting the narrow limits of our reason…for each of these questions concerns an object that can be given nowhere but in our thoughts, namely the unconditioned totality of the unity of the synthesis of appearances (506).” The antinomies are soluble in so far as the self-consistency of the rational subject must be maintained. They are arrived at in thought, and their resolution necessarily occurs in the unity of that thought. Kant says: “the only thing left to us is the validity of the principle of reason as a rule for the continuation and magnitude of a possible experience.” The problem, therefore, “that would otherwise be dialectical will be transformed into doctrinal principle (524).” Kant feels that if we keep this delineated purpose firmly in mind, we may arrive at a resolution to the problem of the antinomies.
II
This a resolution ultimately finds form in an analysis of the third antinomy, that of freedom. Kant defines freedom in the cosmological sense as “the faculty of beginning a state from itself,” which grounds freedom in the practical sense as “the independence of the power of choice from necessitation by impulses of sensibility (533).” The question is whether we may assert that such freedom exists without contradicting apodictic nature — if so, the unity of the subject is maintained and the antinomies overcome. To this end, Kant asks us to consider dualistic causality. He asserts first that the “intelligible in an object of sense (is) that which is not appearance (535).” Appearances, Kant has argued, must seek their form in the categories and their causal necessity in the objective unity of nature, yet he feels it is at least possible to simultaneously ascribe another spontaneous causality to an intelligible thing in-itself. Given that this intelligible aspect is not of appearance, it would remain unconditioned by experiential necessity and therefore free. He argues: “in its intelligible character (even though we can have nothing than merely the general concept of it), this subject would nevertheless have to be declared free of all influences of sensibility and determination by appearances; and insofar as it is a noumenon…no connection with appearances as causes is encountered in its actions (537).” Anticipating criticism, Kant argues such a determination “does not contradict any of the concepts we have to form appearances and of a possible experience (536).” Causality through freedom is a disparate frame of reference vis-à-vis natural causality, not a contradictory one. Thus, “without the least interruption of its connection with natural causes, (an effect) could nevertheless be an effect of a causality that is not empirical, but intelligible (539).” Both forms of causality may therefore apply to the same event, which sensibility views only deterministically.
It is apparent to Kant that human beings are just such an object of compatibility. He argues that while we are phenomenally bound to conditions of nature, our reason simultaneously regards itself as intelligible, and therefore as subject to the noumenal category of freedom. Kant argues that “in regard to certain faculties, (the human being) is a merely intelligible object, because the actions of this object cannot at all be ascribed to the receptivity of sensibility. We call these faculties understanding and reason (540).” Freedom then, is an aspect of reason’s very self-definition; it does not stand outside reason, but is the condition under which reason judges itself. This finds form in Kant’s description of the transcendental “ought:” reason, by its very nature, is able to categorically assert that a given action ought or ought not to have happened. This is no discontinuous ability, nor merely the effect of retrospection, but rather an apodictic category of reason as fundamental as any other — the causal sequences that the ought initiates are manifest only unto itself, but this only proves its irrefutability: “The ought expresses a species of necessity and a connection with grounds which does not occur anywhere else in nature (540).” Freedom then, is the unconditioned category of causality reason discerns via its own self-regard.
This argument, however, underscores a criticism regarding the possibility of asserting an unconditional noumenal category in the first place: after repeated warnings to the contrary, is Kant engaged in a sort of covert metaphysics, in which knowledge is acquired outside of experience? Given his rigorous rejection of wholly intellectual proofs and the apparent inability of reason to seek anything more than the apodictic categories of the sensible, the assertion that freedom is an “intelligible” determination, “free of all influences of sensibility” appears implausible. Kant would reiterate that the noumenal designation should not be misconstrued or over-estimated: “we have not been trying to establish the reality of freedom,” he argues and “further, we have not tried to prove the possibility of freedom (546).” The task for Kant is simply to show that nature “does not conflict with causality through freedom” and thus that the antinomy of freedom versus causality is “illusory (546).” Kant wants to maintain the transcendental consistency of the reasonable subject and lay to rest the problem of the antinomies — the assertion of freedom does not provide non-sensible knowledge, but merely a non-sensible elucidation of two forms of causality apparent in the same action.
This argument in many ways only continues to beg the criticism: how can we possibly conceive a category that is neither real, nor possible, yet remains a necessary intelligible idea? The categories of the understanding laid out in the “Transcendental Analytic” were on much stronger ground (insofar as they applied only to the manifest unity of rational sensibility), and yet did not seek so much (insofar as they were never considered noumenally unconditioned). Freedom, by contrast, has a strange double character that seems hard to countenance. To this Kant might employ a characteristic rebuttal — what we might call “non-indicated necessity.” Put simply, can one refute the causal freedom reason apodictically applies to its actions? Kant admits we may not ask why reason views itself through the paradigm of freedom, he only asserts that it does (545). If natural necessity were the only form of causality available to us, reason would stop short before asserting that an action is bound to the condition that it might have been performed otherwise — but reason cannot and will never do this. The assumption of an ought is fundamental to our very organization. And if this ought is to remain consistent with the necessity of natural necessity, it must be sought outside of it, as a noumenal condition not bound to sensible compulsion. Thus reason may carry on, confident that categories through which its sensibility is organized in no way conflict with the freedom it always assumes.
