Freedom: will, autonomy

Abstract

The concept of freedom is the central normative and metaphysical concept in Kant’s philosophy. Freedom of choice and action from constraint by external forces but also even from one’s own mere inclinations, something that can be achieved not by the elimination of inclinations, which is not possible for human beings, but by the subjection of inclination to the rule of reason and its demand for universalizability, which Kant ultimately calls “autonomy”, “the property of the will by which it is a law to itself” ( G 4:440), is the ultimate value for Kant, the only value that can be an end in itself and has a dignity beyond all price (4:435-6). Freedom of the will, the ability to initiate an action spontaneously, independently of determination by mere laws of nature, so that every human agent has the capacity to act in accordance with the moral law no matter what might seem to be predicted by her entire prior history, is for Kant only a logical possibility in theoretical philosophy but an inescapable postulate of pure practical reason, “the necessary condition of … the complete fulfillment of the moral law” ( PracR 5:132). For Kant, the relation between these two concepts, autonomy as our ultimate value and freedom of the will as our ultimate metaphysical property, although one assertible only on practical grounds, is intimate, to say the least – the unconditional moral law that enjoins us above all else to preserve and promote freedom of action “is merely the self-consciousness of a pure practical reason, this being identical with the positive concept of freedom” (5:29) – although his view about what to do with this identity is not stable. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ,he attempts to prove that we have freedom of the will and then infers from that premise that we are obligated to achieve autonomy through adherence to the moral law, while in the Critique of Practical Reason he argues that our consciousness of our obligation under the moral law is “a fact of reason because one cannot ferret it out from antecedent data of reason, for example from consciousness of freedom (for this is not antecedently given to us)” (5:31), but that this fact of reason is a ratio cognoscendi from which the freedom of our will may be deduced (5:47-9), although only for practical purposes. There are problems with both of Kant’s attempts to establish an unbreakable connection between autonomy as an ultimate norm and freedom of the will as an ultimate fact, and in this chapter, without denying that for Kant himself autonomy and freedom of the will were at bottom identical, these two concepts will be discussed sequentially. At the end of the chapter we shall see that Kant himself ultimately resolves these problems in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason by breaking the identity between moral autonomy and metaphysical freedom of the will.