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ABSTRACT
According to some influential readings of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the view presented there of the kind of spontaneity we are conscious of through theoretical reason and the significance of such self-consciousness is irremediably at odds with the Critical theory, and thus roundly and rightly rejected in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. This paper argues, on the contrary, that the Groundwork can be read as articulating for the first time the account of self-consciousness and spontaneity that Kant goes on to develop in the B-Critique, especially the B-Transcendental Deduction.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Angela Breitenbach, John Callanan, Alix Cohen, Samantha Matherne, and especially Thomas Land for helpful suggestions and discussions of these issues; to Chen Liang for a thoughtful response to a very early version of this paper at the German Philosophy Workshop in Chicago; and to other participants of the German Philosophy Workshop, the Berlin Summer Colloquium, and conferences at Ryerson University and the University of Southampton.
Notes
1. Owen Ware makes the interesting observation that there is no indication that Kant’s earliest readers saw an inconsistency between the two texts (Ware Citation2017, 117–119). Ware traces the debate back to the 1960 publication of now-seminal studies of the Second Critique by Dieter Henrich (Citation1994) and Beck (Citation1960).
2. For readings that find continuity between the two texts, see Onora O’Neill (Citation2002) and cf. Sergio Tenenbaum (Citation2012) and Ware (Citation2017).
3. Some take the Second Critique to give up altogether on the project of justification that is central to the Groundwork. Among these, Ameriks (Citation2000, Citation2003, 161–192, 255–258), Beck (Citation1960, 166–175); Paul Guyer (Citation2016, 127–145), and Henrich (Citation1994) take this to be progress; Allen Wood disagrees, memorably saying that the Second Critique retreats to mere ‘moralistic bluster’ (Citation2007, 134–135). Others find a slightly less-radical change between the two texts – less ‘reversal’ than ‘retreat,’ as Jens Timmermann puts it (Citation2010, 89). Some argue, for instance, that the justificatory project remains in place but is re-conceived, shedding some of the misplaced aspirations of the Groundwork. Henry Allison’s interpretation falls in this category; he takes the Groundwork argument to be deeply problematic, though he mitigates his criticisms somewhat in his latest study (Citation2011, 330n58; cf., Citation1986; Citation1990, 288, 230, 234–239). Timmermann can also be put in this category, though he finds the argument of the Groundwork less hopeless than Allison does (Timmermann Citation2007, 133–144, Citation2010).
4. Many difficult issues are sidestepped in the above. I mention just one: are negative and positive freedom two different kinds of freedom, or are they two ways of conceiving one and the same freedom? After all, as Paul Guyer observes, what Kant says is that these are two concepts of freedom (Citation2018, 129). Positive and negative freedom are treated as two conceptions of the same freedom by O’Neill (Citation1989, 52–53) as well as Guyer; they are taken to be two kinds of freedom by Allison (Citation1995, 18–21).
5. It is sometimes argued that Kant is talking specifically about theoretical reason (except when he explicitly refers to ‘practical reason’). Henry Allison, for instance, accordingly takes this passage to be pointing to ‘the necessity of reason to regard itself as free in its epistemic capacity’ (Citation1990, 217–218; also, Citation2013, 289). Allen Wood agrees (Citation2007, 130–131). But during this period, Kant appears to assume that reason is a unity – indeed, a unity that might one day be demonstrable (CPrR 5.91). As he puts it in the Preface to the Groundwork, ‘there can, in the end, be only one and the same reason, which must be distinguished merely in its application’ (G 4.391; see also Bxxxviii, A811/B839-A812/B840, A840/B868; and CPrR 5.89, 5.91, and 5.121). And in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant often talks about ‘reason’ as a single faculty that has two uses: a ‘speculative use’ in which it ‘accomplishes nothing’ with respect to its highest metaphysical aspirations, and a ‘practical use’ in which it eventually finds its ‘ultimate end’ (A795/B823-A797/B825). (For a helpful discussion of these passages, see Timmermann Citation2019.) Though the distinction between the two kinds of reason becomes sharper in the Critique of Practical Reason, it is not until the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) – e.g., CJ 5.174–5.176 – that the unity of reason is clearly a problem.
6. Kant’s talk of ‘reason’ is again often taken to refer specifically to theoretical reason (e.g., Allison, Citation1990, 221–223, Citation2013, 289; Hill Citation1992, 120; Korsgaard Citation1996, 170). (Indeed, some who deny that the earlier passage (G 4.448) refers specifically to theoretical reason do make that claim here (see Guyer Citation2018, 155; Timmermann Citation2007, 137).) For a dissenting view that takes ‘reason’ to be pure practical reason, cf. Tenenbaum (Citation2012) and Ware (Citation2017). But again, I think that Kant might be thinking of reason as a single faculty (albeit one with an ultimately practical use). Thus note the similarity in language between the Groundwork, where Kant writes that ‘reason…shows in what we call “ideas” a spontaneity so pure that it thereby goes far beyond anything that sensibility can ever afford it’ (G 4.452), and the First Critique, where he writes that ‘reason does not give in to…grounds which are empirically given, and it does not follow the order of things as they are presented in intuition, but with complete spontaneity it makes its own order according to ideas’ (A548/B576). Here Kant is speaking specifically of reason insofar as it generates ‘the ought’ – reason in its practical use (see, e.g., A547/B575).
7. For a different reading that also takes this passage to be significant, especially the reference to obligation, see Tenenbaum (Citation2012, 580–581).
8. In Kant’s Theory of Freedom, Henry Allison also argues that Kant distinguishes between the world of understanding and the intelligible world. According to Allison, the world of understanding is a noumenon in the negative sense, viz., a non-sensible world, whereas the intelligible world is a noumenon in the positive sense, a ‘supersensible realm governed by moral laws,’ i.e., the Kingdom of Ends (Citation1990, 227; Allison has since rejected this view – cf. his, Citation2011, 338n28). In the above, I propose a different reading of this distinction; however, my interpretation of the intelligible world draws on an understanding of what Kant means by ‘intelligible’ that is close to what Allison says in his analysis of ‘intelligible character’ (Citation1990, 29–53).
9. Allison also puts a lot of weight on this passage (Citation1990, 227).
10. A similar reading of the ‘intelligible’ is given by Onora O’Neill, who writes that ‘[t]he intelligible world is not a transcendent realm beyond this world, but the system of formal conditions that our understanding of the empirical world presupposes; it is precisely intelligible, not supersensible’ (Citation1989, 69).
11. Thanks to Alix Cohen for helping me clarify this point.
12. This is in fact what Kant, in the Preface to the Groundwork, says he will do in Groundwork III: there, he says, the argument will proceed ‘synthetically from the examination of [the moral] principle and its sources back to the common cognition in which we find it used’ (G 4.392).
13. As is clear from the above, I take there to be continuity between the Groundwork and the Second Critique. On the reading I am proposing, in the Groundwork, the argument runs from freedom to the moral law – but not from the proof of my freedom. Rather, it runs from the use of my freedom that is necessary to have the experience of moral obligation, to the consciousness of the moral law as binding on me. And this is consistent with the argument of the Second Critique. For as Kant puts it there, ‘had not the moral law already been distinctly thought in our reason, we should never consider ourselves justified in assuming such a thing as freedom…. But were there no freedom, the moral law would not be encountered at all in ourselves’ (CPrR 5.4fn).
14. In Groundwork II, Kant says that the task of grounding the claim that ‘rational nature exists as an end in itself’ is undertaken in Groundwork III. I take it to be in the idea of the intelligible world that this promissory note about ‘rational nature’ is discharged (G 4.428–429 and 4.429fn; emphasis mine).
15. Ameriks says that in this passage, Kant identifies a ‘crucial’ or ‘real’ need that is not met by the arguments of the Groundwork. I agree with this, but Ameriks goes on to suggest that this reveals a weakness in the argument of the Groundwork, whereas I think it does not. See Ameriks (Citation2003, 175).
16. In texts that post-date the Groundwork, Kant frequently emphasizes the fact that the human being must be conscious of herself as at once free and not free. Thus in Bxxvii-xxviii, he writes, ‘I…say of one and the same thing, e.g., the human soul, that its will is free and yet that it is simultaneously…not free.’ And in CPrR 5.6n, the connection is made again with the nature of self-consciousness: ‘the union of causality as freedom with causality as natural mechanism…in one and the same subject, the human being, is impossible without representing him with regard to…the former in pure, the latter in empirical consciousness.’ See also G 4.453, 4.454, 4.455; CPrR 5.97, 5.105; M-L2 28.583; and M-Vig. 29.1019–1020, inter alia.
17. My discussion thus focuses on the subjective strand of the argument; the question of how experience is thereby made possible is largely set aside, and the further tasks of defending the interpretation and the theory that emerges from it is not even embarked upon.
18. Kant uses a number of terms for this kind of consciousness, including ‘logical’ or ‘discursive’ consciousness (Anth. 7.141), the ‘consciousness of understanding’ (Anth. 7.135fn), ‘intellectual consciousness’ (Leningrad Fragment I, M-D 28.670–671). And though Kant’s emphasis remains on apperception as consciousness of an activity, some cryptic remarks suggest that this consciousness is not entirely metaphysically noncommittal. Consider, for instance, Kant’s claim that ‘in the consciousness of myself in mere thinking I am the being itself’ (B429), or that ‘apperception is something real’ (B419).
19. The kind of unity that obtains when a single ‘I think’ accompanies several judgments is the ‘analytical unity of apperception’ mentioned in B133; and the point I discuss in the next paragraph above – that a synthesis is necessary for the analytic premise to obtain – is Kant’s claim that ‘the analytic unity of apperception is only possible under the presupposition of some synthetic one’ (B133-134).
20. For three different interpretations of the analytic principle, see Allison (Citation2004, 166–167), Kitcher (Citation2011, 124–126) and Longuenesse (Citation2017, 177–181). In my analysis, I take Kantian ‘judgment’ the way it is defined in the B-Transcendental Deduction, which I think involves a shift from the view of the Prolegomena (see, e.g., Prol. 4.298, 4.300–4.306). See Pollok (Citation2008) for an argument for this claim; for a defence that the Prolegomena view is consistent with the B-CPR view, cf. Longuenesse (Citation1998, 167–195).
21. I thank Thomas Land for suggesting I make this connection explicit.
22. This point touches on issues that are central to the conceptualism/non-conceptualism debate, which has recently focused on the unity of time and space and whether such unity has its source in intuition itself or whether it is conferred by the faculty of understanding (or perhaps apperception). I believe that what I say above remains neutral. When Kant talks about the ‘pure synthesis of the understanding’, for instance, in the passage quoted above, I take him to be referring not to the synthesis that makes time a unity, but the synthesis that brings the intuition of time to the original-synthetic unity of apperception. For arguments that space and time have their own unity, see, e.g., Allison (Citation2004, 191–193), Colin McLear (Citation2015), and James Messina (Citation2014); for arguments that take the unity of space and time to be generated by a synthesis that is in some sense informed by the understanding (though not itself a conceptual synthesis), see, e.g., Thomas Land (Citation2015), Longuenesse (Citation1998, 214–241, Citation2005, 105–106), Michael Friedman (Citationforthcoming).
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Yoon Choi
Yoon Choi is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University.