In his discourse, Kant poses the question: “How is a priori knowledge possible?” His answer: Synthetic knowledge, or a priori knowledge, articulates situations on the prospect of experience. Thus, we know that they are binding not for the things they are themselves – but for the jurisdiction of presence.
Kant’s seminal philosophy receives an abundance of criticism from past and present day academics. The common thread of this criticism is acknowledgement of the abstractness of Kant’s viewpoint. As human beings, we live in a physical place at a point in time. It is not truly conceivable, much less appropriate, for us to isolate rationality from other features of our thinking. It seems to, therefore, be a mistake to assume that we can ignore our own character and particulates in favor of universal principles of reason.
Chapter 3 of the Groundwork for Metaphysics covers our unique ability to cause events through free will. Assuming that autonomy of the will and free will of the same, a will is free when and only when it follows moral doctrine. Thus, morality is understood as resulting from this perception of free will. In order to prove this, however, we need to establish that all rational beings have free will. Kant does this by supposing that rational beings consider themselves as free, and that our founding of the moral code [and the categorical imperative] comes from this understanding of freedom.
This is, to say it lightly, very circular logic. We think of ourselves as free because we are aware of our moral demands – but our concept of morality is based on freedom. How do you think Kant resolves this conflict, and is it logical?
Like you said, I find his explanation of free will to be very circular and self-repeating. The only proof Kant claims is that human beings perceive themselves as free, which leads to our moral code which comes from our understanding of freedom. This leaves a giant hole in his logic, in that we could all just be disillusioned about our supposed free will and it could actually not exist, leading to all our morals based on free will being fallacies. His account, on the other hand, does allow for our understanding of free will and makes sense to us, and appeals to our ideas of free will, regardless of whether it is true or not.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both you and Matt. Honestly, reading your blog post made me realize how confusing the Kantian view point on this subject really is. I think you and matt both explain how very circular it is. Kant's view on free will is poorly explained but Kant claims that humans beings perceive themselves as free and thus the only way we can observe the law is if we as free and rational beings apply the law to ourselves which result in an autonomous being.
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