Kant's two priorities of practical reason

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

Volumn 6, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 397-419

  Rauscher, Frederick ^a  

^a Eastern Illions University

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EID: 0040134262     PISSN: 09608788     EISSN: 14693526     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09608789808571004     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. Citations to Kant's published works will be given in the text using volume and page number from Kants Gesammelte Schrifien, 29 Vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter [and predecessors], 1902-) except references to Kritik der reinen Vernunft taken from the edition edited by Raymund Schmidt (Hamburg, Felix Meiner, 1926) and identified by page numbers for the first and/or second editions, cited as 'A' and 'B'. The Kants gesammelte Schriften page numbers correspond to Kant's published works as follows: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 4: 387-463 Critique of Practical Reason 5: 3-163 Critique of Judgment 5: 167-485 "First Introduction" to Critique of Judgment 20: 195-251 Translations are my own. I have consulted the following translations: Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith (New York, St. Martins, 1965), Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (New York, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 1997); Critique of Practical Reason and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Mary Gregor (New York, Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1996), Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, Bobbs Merril, 1956), H. J. Paton (New York, Harper and Row, 1967)
2. The most comprehensive recent attempt to understand Kant's claim about priority is a chapter in a survey of Kant's practical philosophy by Roger Sullivan, who offers a solid over- view of Kant's various discussions of priority without delving into the type of criticism I perform in this paper. See Roger Sullivan, Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory (New York, Cam- bridge University Press, 1989), pp. 95-113. The most comprehensive earlier investigation of priority lies in Nathan Rotenstreich's chapter "The Primacy of Practical Reason' in his Experience and Its Systematizatíon (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1965) pp. 111-31)
3. Onora O'Neill, 'Reason and Politics in the Kantian Enterprise' in Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3-27
4. Christine Korsgaard, 'Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit', Philosophy and Public Affairs 18 (Spring 1989) 101-32, p. 120
5. I will limit myself to the three critiques, the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, and the Groundwork. Eckart Förster traces Kant's concern with the relationship between practical and theoretical reason to the Opus Postumum, the notes regarding a system of phil- osophy Kant was working on in the final years of his life. Förster concludes that Kant's final position is that 'Kant attains a speculative unification of theoretical and practical reason' only by limiting the concepts of God, duty, and the world as a whole to being merely posited by humans as part of their self-positing (Selbstsetzung). Hence they cannot be understood as independently existing but only as Ideas of reason in the human mind. Förster takes this position to be a departure from Kant's earlier position. Yet Förster seems to overlook two key points. First, even in the Opus Postumum Kant does sometimes mention the Ideas as relating to things outside ourselves (21: 94) and as being thought as possible forces affecting reason (21: 83), hence he is at least undecided whether we attribute independent existence to those objects for practical purposes. Second, in his earlier works Kant had also denied that these objects can be said to exist independently for speculative purposes but not for practical purposes (5:135-6), discussed below in main text), and this difference may also lie behind Kant's musings in the Opus Postumum in the passages Förster quotes which seem to deny reality to the objects of our Ideas. Förster does not discuss the Critique of Practical Reason in detail. Eckart Förster,' "Was darf ich hoffen?" Zum Problem der Vereinbarkeit von theoretischer und praktischer Vernunft bei Immanuel Kant' Zeìtschrift für ph?losophis- che Forschung 46 (1992) 168-85
6. One apparent exception occurs in the 'Introduction' to the Critique of Judgment where Kant correlates freedom with the faculty of reason, nature with the faculty of understanding, and art with the faculty of judgment (5: 198). If one correlates freedom with the practical and nature with the theoretical, this identification appears to exclude a theoretical use of reason. See also 'First Introduction' to the Critique of Judgment (20: 245-6)
7. See, for example, Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1960) pp. 242-4. A good discussion of the issue is given in Allen Wood's Kant's Moral Religion (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1970) pp. 38-68
8. O'Neill, p. 3, quoting from Kant, Critique of Practical Reason as translated by Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1956)
9. Christine Korsgaard, 'Morality as Freedom' in Yirmayahu Yovel, ed., Kant's Practical Phil- osophy Reconsidered (Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989) 23-48
10. Korsgaard 'Morality as Freedom', p. 40
11. Korsgaard 'Response to Parfit', p. 120, emphasis mine
12. John Rawls holds a similar position regarding the independence of moral justification from metaphysical positions. See John Rawls, "The Independence of Moral Theory' Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association Vol. XLVIII (Newark, DE, Uni- versity of Delaware, 1975) 5-22