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Kantian Subjects
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 09/10/19, SPi
Kantian Subjects
Critical Philosophy and Late Modernity
KA R L A M E R I K S
1
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1
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© Karl Ameriks 2019
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198841852.001.0001
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Note on Sources and Key to Abbreviations and Translations ix
PA RT I . KA N T
PA RT I I . SU C C E S S O R S
References 251
Index 267
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Acknowledgments
viii acknowledgments
References to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Critik der reinen Vernunft, Riga:
Hartknoch, 1781 and 1787) are given in the standard way by citing pages of the
first (“A”) and/or second (“B”) edition, and use the translation of Norman Kemp
Smith, London: Macmillan and Co. (1923). Otherwise, references to Kant’s works
use the abbreviations below and cite, in square brackets, the volume and page of
the Academy edition: Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, Ausgabe der Preussischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900ff). Details on translations
are given in the list of references at the end of this volume.
KpV Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788) [5: 1–164], trans. in Kant (1996a).
KU Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) [5: 164–486], trans. in Kant (2000).
MdS Die Metaphysik der Sitten (1797–8) [6: 205–493], trans. in Kant (1996a).
MetD “Metaphysik Dohna” (1792–3) [28: 615–702], trans. in part in Kant
(1997a).
MetM “Metaphysik Mrongovius” (1782–3) [29: 747–940], trans. in Kant (1997a).
MetV “Metaphysics Volckmann” (1784–5) [28: 440–50], trans. in part in Kant
(1997a).
MK2 “Metaphysik K2” (early 1790s) [29: 753–75], trans. in part in Kant (1997a).
ML1 “Metaphysik L1” [Pölitz] (1770s) [28: 157–350], trans. in part in Kant (1997a).
ML2 “Metaphysik L2” (1790–1?) [28: 531–610], trans. in part in Kant (1997a).
MM2 “Moral Mrongovius II” (1784–5) [597–633], trans. in Kant (1997b).
MPC “Moral Philosophie Collins” (1774–7?) [27: 243–471], trans. in Kant (1997b).
Nachschrift “Nachschrift zu Christian Gottlieb Mielckes Littauisch-deutschem
und deutsch-littauischem Wörterbuch,” (1800) [8: 445], trans. in Kant (2007).
PPH “Praktische Philosophie Herder” (1762–4) [27: 3–78], trans. in Kant
(1997b).
Prol Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird
auftreten können (1783) [4: 255–383], trans. in Kant (2004).
Raum “Vom dem ersten Grund des Untesrchieds der Gegenden im Raume,”
(1768) [2: 377-83], trans. in Kant (1992a).
Refl Reflexionen [16]–[18], trans. in part in Kant (2005).
Rel Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (1793–4) [6: 1–202], trans.
in Kant (2nd edition, 2017).
RevSch “Rezension von Johann Heinrich Schulz’s Versuch einer Anleitung zur
Sittenlehre für alle Menschen, ohne Unterschied der Religion, nebst einem
Anhang von den Todesstrafen” (1783) [8: 10–14], trans. in Kant (1996a).
RezHerder “Rezension zu Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der
Geschichte der Menschheit (erster Teil)”; “Erinnerungen des Rezensenten der
Herderschen Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit über ein in
Februar des Teutschen Merkur gegen diese Rezension gerichtetes Schreiben”;
“Rezension zu Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte
der Menschheit (zweiter Teil)” (1785) [8: 43–66], trans. in Kant (2007).
RL “Philosophische Religionslehre nach Pölitz” (1817) [28: 993–1126], trans. in
Kant (1996b).
SF Der Streit der Fakultäten in drei Abschnitten (1798) [7: 5–116], trans. in Kant
(1996b).
TP Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht
für die Praxis (1793) [8: 275–313], trans. in Kant (1996a).
VzeF Verkündigung des nahen Abschlusses eines Tractats zum ewigen Frieden in der
Philosophie (1796) [8: 413–22], trans. in Kant (2002).
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PART I
KA N T
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1
Introduction to an Extended Era
1 See Chapter 6 for a critique of Iris Murdoch’s influential remark about Lucifer. Murdoch (1970)
connects Kant to Milton simply by comparing her own highly unappealing notion of the Kantian
subject with Milton’s Lucifer, while offering no clear textual grounds and entirely overlooking the pos-
itive connections of Kant to Milton and religion. See also Chapter 12 and Kant’s reference (KU §49) to
Milton’s use of “heaven” and “hell” as paradigmatic “aesthetic Ideas.”
2 Herder (1997, 46). See my (2011), (2018a), and (forthcoming b). In this context it is not inappro-
priate to also think of phenomena such as Beethoven (a reader of Kant), and the issue of “late style” in
music as discussed (in their own late work) by Adorno (1998) and Said (2003).
Kantian Subjects: Critical Philosophy and Late Modernity. Karl Ameriks, Oxford University Press (2019). © Karl Ameriks.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198841852.001.0001
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These preliminaries should help explain why this volume is divided into two
parts—“Kant” and “Successors”—and how there is an internal relation between
these parts.5 The main focus in most of the essays in the first part is to make clear,
from a variety of perspectives, exactly how central, multi-layered, and ambiguous
Kant’s notion of self-determination is. These essays explain the notion both in
terms of complexities in Kant’s own texts as well as in relation to current interpre-
tations that pick up on, or tend to distort, one or other of its basic features. More
specifically, since the notion of self-determination involves both the concepts of
3 Perhaps the best short characterization of the era comes, not surprisingly, from Friedrich
Hölderlin, who was obsessed with what is to be done in what he calls our “age of need” (dürftiger Zeit).
This theme in Hölderlin is well known for having been stressed by Martin Heidegger, but in a
non-Kantian way. My own study of Hölderlin and Heidegger was first stimulated by the teaching of
Karsten Harries, and a version of Chapter 12 was presented at a conference in his honor at Yale.
4 Some of the main ideas of this story already appear in my (2006), chs. 11–13 and (2012), chs. 13–15
(the term “late modern” is explained at 307). In the present volume, however, even more attention is
given to the philosophical significance of writings from the Early Romantic era. While my (2000a)
stressed negative features of the post-Kantian reaction to Kant, later works have turned more to a
focus on distinctive positive strands in the work of his successors.
5 The essays in this volume are closely connected in time of publication as well as theme. Most of
them have a publication date of 2017 or after, and the remaining essays were published in the period
2013–15. The essays are presented in a natural thematic sequence but can also be read individually in
any order. Numerous cross-references are provided for readers who may take the latter option.
Readers familiar with earlier versions of these essays may notice that numerous emendations and clar-
ifications have been made for this volume, but no substantial changes are intended.
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also among younger writers such as Herder and J. H. Schulz. Understanding this
context, and the fact that Kant had left the status of the grounds for our belief in
absolute freedom unclear in the first edition of his Critique, helps considerably in
explaining several features of the second edition (1787) as well as the genesis of
the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and its surprising invocation of a “fact of
reason.”6 My interpretation of this phase of Kant’s work is presented as a contrast
to some aspects of important recent work on the period by Förster.
Chapter 4, “Revisiting Freedom as Autonomy,” focuses on two significant new
interpretations of Kant, one in a book-length review of the literature by a German
scholar, Jörg Noller, and the other in a sequence of closely linked apologetic stud-
ies of Kant by the Canadian philosopher, Owen Ware. Noller presents a valuable
treatment of the background of key Kantian terms such as Willkür and Wille, and
this provides another opportunity to more precisely define my account of how
Kant’s notions of freedom and autonomy are to be understood within the devel-
opments of Kant’s Critical period. In his interpretation, Ware argues—against
positions that I and others have favored—that, instead of a great “reversal,” there
is considerable agreement between Kant’s discussions of freedom in the
Groundwork and the second Critique. While appreciating many of the subtle
points Ware raises, I stress passages that still support the claim that there is an
important methodological distinction between the approaches of Kant’s two main
books on ethics.7
Chapter 5, “Once Again: The End of All Things,” concerns a widely neglected
but very noteworthy short essay by Kant, written right around the time of his
retirement. In discussing “the end of all things,” and in pairing the issues of
immortality and the phenomenon of continuing interest in an apocalypse (which
has numerous political aspects that he dares to touch on in a controversial fash-
ion), Kant forces himself to address some of the most difficult features of his eth-
ics and metaphysics. In particular, he gives a new and challenging account of how
the nature of the self, and its vocation, is to be understood in light of his general
doctrine of the transcendental ideality of time. I argue that, after considerable
preliminary work, sense can be given to Kant’s discussion of the mysterious
notion of “noumenal duration,” but I also point out that the implications of his
account contrast with what one might naturally believe that he meant in his many
earlier, albeit brief, discussions of immortality, which seemed to rely on a rela-
tively traditional notion.
Chapter 6, “Vindicating Autonomy: Kant, Sartre, and O’Neill,” contrasts Kant’s
notion of autonomy with two serious misconstruals of it, identified by Onora
11 For a discussion of some of Prauss’s earlier work, see my (1982b) and (1982c).
12 For further discussion of the relation of Kant’s philosophy to Hegel and current interpreters, see
Chapters 14 and 15.
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13 Cf. Michael Friedman (2001, 67) on “the genius of a Descartes, a Newton, or an Einstein.”
Friedman’s analysis of the history of science is similar to my account of the stress on history in
post-Kantian philosophy because it also features the phenomenon of a progressive appropriation of
one’s predecessors, although it does so in a way that puts more emphasis on the goal of convergence.
14 For one recent account of how controversial the interpretation of this poem is, see Die Zeit
(1956). Rather than identifying the “prince of the festival” (Fürst des Festes) in the poem as one
particular figure or party, I take Hölderlin to be celebrating the significance for humanity of an
extraordinary sequence of exemplary figures, a sequence in which his own work as a writer is meant
to occupy a pivotal place.
15 These phrases come from the chapter on “Self-Consciousness” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit, HW [3: 145], just before the mention of the “spiritual daylight of the present,” and the transition
to the discussion of the master/slave relation. In an American context, it may be difficult to believe
that poets, philosophers, or literary figures in general could imagine they might have an enlightened
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he was devoting his time to reading Kant) appears to be directly alluding to Kant’s
rejection of the alternatives of that which is either “veiled in obscurity” or in “the
transcendent region.” These terms occur right next to Kant’s famous conclusion of
his practical philosophy with a call to reflect on what is directly present in the
“starry heavens above” and the “moral law within,” and, above all, on the thought
of how they are linked, through the postulates of pure practical reason, in a uni-
fied teleological and cosmological vision of nature and history (KpV [5: 161f.]).
Chapter 12, “Hölderlin’s Kantian Path,” presents a more detailed account of
Hölderlin’s philosophy as the most sophisticated version of a combination of
Kantian and post-Kantian ideas. It offers a reading of the novel Hyperion that
takes it to be intended primarily as an evaluation of the main competing aesthetic,
moral, and religious answers to the prime question of eighteenth-century German
thought, namely, how best to define the vocation of humanity (die Bestimmung
des Menschen). Despite decades of fascination with both Hölderlin and Kant, it
was only in the last stages of researching this essay that I was led to the surprising
discovery of how much Hölderlin’s work can be read as explicitly intended to be,
above all, an advocacy of Kant’s moral philosophy.16 It is not generally appreciated
that, at the time of Hyperion, Hölderlin’s main aim was to illustrate how a Kantian
ethic, properly understood, can incorporate political, aesthetic, and religious con-
cerns in an enlightened way that overcomes the extremes of other treatments of
these concerns, such as in the work of Schiller and Fichte.17 Hölderlin believed
this position could be not only defended on abstract philosophical grounds but
also energetically supported in literature. As an extraordinarily gifted and enlight-
enment-oriented “poet of the people,” he understandably chose to write in a revo-
lutionary style that he believed would be most effective in motivating people at
large to embrace progressive Kantian ideals, and to achieve what he called a
“more beautiful than merely bourgeois society.”18 I defend Hölderlin’s version of
impact on culture at large. Nonetheless, the literary/political work of Milton and Rousseau, and the
general modern notion of the poet as a revolutionary legislator, had considerable influence through-
out the whole era leading to the French Revolution and beyond (for example, in Ireland). The elo-
quent formulations of the “founding fathers,” and the rhetoric of Lincoln, Whitman, and Martin
Luther King have come perhaps closest to playing this kind of role in American society. Some influen-
tial but unenlightened tendencies (still far from “spiritual daylight”) that are unfortunately present in
Kant’s more popular work are discussed in my (forthcoming a) and (forthcoming c).
16 Just after a draft of this essay was finished, it was heartening to learn, through a tip from Manfred
Frank, that recent work by a top Germanist, Friedrich Strack, independently had reached a similar con-
clusion, namely, that relatively unappreciated letters by Hölderlin demonstrate his deep knowledge of
and overriding commitment to Kant’s moral philosophy, including the postulates. See Chapter 12, n. 50.
17 There is added confirmation for this reading in comments in a remarkable discussion of
“Hölderlin’s Sorrow,” by René Girard (2009, 120–1): “It is through Hölderlin, and no one else, that we
can understand what was happening at Jena in 1806 [. . .] Hölderlin is much less haunted by Greece
than we have been led to believe. I see him instead as frightened by the return to paganism that
infused the classicism of his time.” Thanks to David Dudrick for a reminder on this point.
18 See Franz (2015). This essay offers an excellent account of the complex local political situation
surrounding the very early work of Hölderlin and his colleagues.
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the Kantian position as superior (because more balanced) even to the ideals of its
most significant post-Kantian successors, namely, Hegel’s conception of ethical
life, Kierkegaard’s conception of religious life, and Nietzsche’s conception of aes-
thetic life.
Chapter 13, “On Some Reactions to ‘Kant’s Tragic Problem’,” focuses on a
remark by Nietzsche that gives a vivid characterization of the basic trajectory of
German philosophy from Kant through the Romantic era and up to his own time:
“man longs to be completely truthful [. . .] that is noble [. . .] but we get only to the
relative [. . .] that is tragic. That is Kant’s problem. Art now acquires an entirely
new dignity. The sciences, in contrast are degraded to a degree.” Early German
Romantic writers can be understood as also having appreciated “Kant’s problem”
in precisely these “tragic” terms. The tragedy here is not a matter of sensory pain
or ethical conflict but comes simply from a restrictive theoretical thesis similar to
a position held by many nineteenth-century philosophers of science, namely, that
our theoretical knowledge cannot make determinations that go beyond phenom-
ena and reach unconditioned things in themselves. In response to this Critical
situation, the Early Romantics developed an appropriate way of giving a “new
dignity” to art that is compatible with the main features of the elevated, but also
objective and disciplined, role that Kant gives to aesthetic values in our apprecia-
tion of nature and art.19 To defend this position, I argue against recent broadly
Hegelian interpretations of the Romantics that sharply distinguish these writers
from Kant or that criticize their position as all too “subjectivist.” I conclude that
the Romantics can be understood as combining the best features of Kantianism
and Hegelianism: a deep, non-relativist appreciation for modern morality and
subjectivity, along with an eye for developing art and philosophy in the context of
a creatively interconnected historical process of succession.
Chapter 14, “The Historical Turn and Late Modernity,” contrasts Hegel’s sys-
tem and the philosophy of the Early Romantics by offering a further account (in
part in reaction to the extensive work of Robert Pippin on this era) of their role
in relation to the two pivotal claims in my interpretation of post-Kantianism:
first, that, with Reinhold and immediately after, a Historical Turn began that has
continued to dominate all thought influenced by philosophy in the German tra-
dition; and second, that this post-Kantian era is best characterized, in contrast to
the ancient, medieval, and modern periods, as the age of late modernity. The
stress on history as well as the stress on lateness are consequences of two funda-
mental reactions: first, a disenchantment with classical modern forms of philos-
ophy that attempted to model themselves upon, or even provide an independent
foundation for, the remarkable achievements of the exact sciences in the
Scientific Revolution; and second, a belief that the practical goal of rational
19 On the ultimately objective orientation of Kant’s aesthetics, see my (2003), chs. 12–14, (2016b),
and (2017a).
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2
On the Many Senses of
“Self-Determination”
Many a Scylla and Charybdis threatens the navigations of the dutiful Groundwork
reader. By focusing on a clarification of some of the very different meanings of
“self-determination” in Kant’s work, the following apologetic interpretation seeks
to steer a middle path between two extreme but common ways of reacting to the
Groundwork’s account of moral self-determination as autonomy. In this case, the
“Scylla” objection claims—in view of the “auto” component of Kantian “auton-
omy”—that to speak of the moral law as rooted in “self-legislation” is to be too
ambitious and overly subjective, and to do an injustice to the essentially receptive
character of our reason. Here the contention is that Kant misunderstands how
reason is a capacity that basically appreciates reasons to act given to the subject by
what is outside of it. The contrasting “Charybdis” concern stems from a worry
about what can appear to be an overly close connection drawn between morality
and freedom as autonomy. Here the critic’s contention is that the “nomos” com-
ponent of self-determination in the Groundwork is too restrictive, and in a sense
overly objective, insofar as it makes our action appear so thoroughly law-oriented
that it seems to leave only the options of being forced either by our reason to fol-
low the moral law or by the “natural necessity” of our sensibility to go against it,
and thus—in contrast to Kant’s own later work—it does injustice to our faculty of
free choice, or at least our ability to act in ways more complex than these two nar-
row options.
Kantian Subjects: Critical Philosophy and Late Modernity. Karl Ameriks, Oxford University Press (2019). © Karl Ameriks.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198841852.001.0001
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casual English speakers, he generally does not bother to make explicit the quite
different senses that the term can have.
One basic ambiguity concerns two distinct philosophical senses of “determin-
ation,” namely, an epistemological (E) and a causal (C) sense. We can say, in a first,
or E sense, that we determine something when—even without having any rele-
vant effect on it—we simply learn something informative about it, for example,
when we cognitively determine the fact that a surface appears warm. We can also
say, in a second, or C sense, that we determine it when we simply bring about that
something beyond our immediate situation is the case, for example, when we
causally determine that a surface is warm—even when, in the relevant sense, we
may not at all know what we are doing. It can of course also happen that cognitive
and causal kinds of determination combine in one complex event; we can come to
learn that something is warm in the very act of making it warm. (In English, these
meanings are combined in a further sense when we use knowledge in a decisive
way to try to bring something about, as when we say, for example, that, “no mat-
ter what,” we are “determined to” heat a surface.)
In addition to these basic E and C senses of “determine,” there are, especially
for the noun form of the term, what I will call its basic F and N senses, namely a
formal or definitional sense,1 as well as a normative sense, one that, for Kant,
ultimately is to be understood as having a complex moral and teleological mean-
ing. For example, in the course of determining the composition of a metal, in the
E sense of merely finding out some things about it, we may eventually arrive at its
determination in the more exact F sense of a formula defining its basic nature.2
(Here the English term has roots in the French verb determiner and the process of
fixing a thing’s boundaries and gaining a relevantly complete notion of it.) In
Kant’s tradition, the nature of something can, furthermore, be something more
than a mere physically defined arrangement, in a broadly mechanical sense, for
this nature can need to be understood in terms of an ideal practical form such as,
above all, the notion of a moral telos or destiny.
It is this biblical and broadly Lutheran sense that is most relevant when, after
J. J. Spalding’s very popular 1748 volume Die Bestimmung des Menschen,3 Kant
and numerous other German philosophers, including especially Fichte, focus on
Bestimmung in the N sense of our essential “vocation,” or “calling,” at a species as
well as individual level. The term “determination” does not have this normative
meaning in English, and thus its relation to the other terms can often get lost in
translation, but this sense must always be kept in mind when reading Kant and
1 See e.g., G [4: 461]: “autonomy—as the formal condition under which it alone can be determined.”
2 See e.g., G [4: 436]: “a complete determination (Bestimmung) of all maxims by that formula.”
3 On Spalding’s significance, see e.g., Munzel (2012) and Brandt (2007).
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his use of various forms of the term bestimmen, for it is this kind of determination
that always is of greatest significance to him.4
Kant’s very early works, such as his 1755 Universal Natural History, go along
with the dominant broadly Leibnizian view of his era, which stresses that human
beings have a significant normative determination but maintains a compatibilist
doctrine of freedom, one that denies absolute free choice. This view distinguishes,
as basically a matter of mere degree, our rational essence as human beings with
this kind of (merely relative) freedom from the broadly mechanistic nature of
lower kinds of beings, while still allowing that, according to a more inclusive
meaning of the term “nature,” human beings are thoroughly determined as parts
of nature in the E, C, F, and N senses. Although Kant holds to this view through-
out his earliest works, he then, after the fundamental revolution in his thinking
upon reading Rousseau and achieving philosophical maturity at the age of forty
in the early 1760s, adopts a very different conception of the relation of nature and
human freedom.5 From that time on, Kant believes that our own nature is unique
in having a non-compatibilist Bestimmung in its pure moral vocation, a vocation
that cannot be understood as being fulfilled, as Leibnizians and other compatibil-
ists claim, simply by attaining higher degrees of clear representation and conse-
quent power.
4 See e.g., G [4: 396], “the true vocation (Bestimmung) of human beings must be to produce a will
that is good.”
5 See Ameriks (2012), ch. 1.
6 A xiv: “ich demütig gestehe . . . ich es lediglich mit der Vernunft selbst und ihrem reinen Denken
zu tun habe . . . weil ich sie [deren ausführlichen Kenntnis] in mir selbst antreffe . . . alle ihre einfache
Handlungen.”
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7 See, however, Chapter 5, and Kant’s criticism (Rel [6: 128–9 n.]) of the notion of resurrection.
8 See Prauss (1989) and O’Neill (2013).
9 Here Kant at first calls this a freedom to “always act as if one were free [and such that] this idea
also actually produces the deed,” and then he adds that “the understanding is able to determine
(bestimmen) one’s judgment in accordance with objective grounds that are always valid,” and hence we
must “always admit freedom to think, without which there is no reason” (RevSch [8: 13]). These ways
of characterizing the absolute freedom to act and to think are not clearly in line with the best formula-
tions of Kant’s position, but they vividly disclose, in an initial way, the topic that he is most concerned
with writing about right at this time. See the end of his essay “An Answer to the Question: What is
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2.3.1. Preconditions
The title of the first subsection of Section III is “The concept of freedom is the key
to the explanation of the autonomy of the will” (Wille) (G [4: 440]). This title
might suggest to some readers that we already have a distinct concept of freedom
at hand, and now we can directly apply this concept to explain a mysterious fea-
ture called “autonomy of the will.” This kind of approach is problematic, however,
because the previous Section culminates in an argument that already elucidates a
normative principle of autonomy, whereas it is the nature and existence of free-
dom, especially in its fundamental philosophical sense, that is, a transcendental
causal one, that has not yet been addressed in a direct way. In other words, at the
outset of Section III, there is an at least partially well-understood notion of auton-
omy that Kant is taking as given at this point—one involving self-determination
basically in the E, F, and N senses—and it is now his goal to introduce a direct
discussion of freedom that may begin to shed light on further features of auton-
omy—features that abruptly shift the discussion of determination largely from its
previously mentioned senses to its C sense.11
Enlightenment?” (1784) and his reviews of Herder in 1785 as well as the Groundwork (1785). His “Idea
for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent” (1784) also has a basic, although indirectly
expressed, concern with absolute freedom. See Ameriks (2012), chs. 9 and 10.
12 See also G [4: 458], and [4: 427], where Wille is described as “the capacity to determine itself to
action in conformity with certain laws . . . the objective ground of its self-determination is the end.” The
term “end” makes clear that the point of speaking of the will’s (“objective”) self-determination is to
stress a matter of normative determination.
13 See G [4: 425], which says the ground of value cannot be in any “special natural predisposition of
humanity.”
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14 See G [4: 432–3]: “[When] one thought of [oneself] as subject to [unterworfen, i.e., merely
assively subject in contrast to ‘legislating’] a law . . . it had to carry with it some interest or
p
constraint . . . necessitated (genötigt) by something else [because not arising from the will’s own law, my
emphasis] in conformity with a law . . . a certain interest, be it one’s own interest or another . . . But then
the imperative also had to be conditional.” Later Kant also speaks of “interests” generated by reason
itself, in which case they have an intrinsically necessary status.
15 A similar common and understandable, but also self-defeating, approach is often taken to the
metaphysics of Kant’s idealism, as if somehow a special process of human “making” could provide a
consistent Kantian explanation of the necessary conditions of our grasp of spatiotemporality itself.
16 Kant therefore stresses later in Section III that reasons still need to be given for the synthetic
claim that we do have will in a strong sense or at least, in some persuasive sense, must regard ourselves
in this way.
17 See A 534/B 562 and Deligiorgi (2012, 90).
18 See e.g., G [4: 455], “das moralische Sollen ist also unser eigenes notwendiges Wollen als Glied
einer intelligiblen Welt,” and G [4: 457] and [4: 458], “das eigentliche Selbst.”
19 I take this absolute value of being an end in itself to reside for Kant neither in actually acting
with a perfectly good will, nor in simply setting whatever ends, but in having the capacity always to set
ends that meet the conditions of pure morality. See Ameriks (forthcoming a).
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principle from the basis of a respect for absolute necessity, the burden is on others
to show that his notion of self-determination has the ultimately subjectivist and
limited character that is attached to it in most contemporary uses of the notion of
autonomy,20 and even in many otherwise perceptive discussions of Kant
himself.21
There are, of course, passages that can understandably lead readers astray and
make it appear as if Kant himself goes on to undercut the fundamentally objective
position just discussed. The most frequently cited text of this sort is a passage
from Groundwork II that expresses a principle of autonomy as normatively reflex-
ive pure self-determination, which I will call NRSPD: “Hence the will (Wille) is not
merely subject to the law [as it would still seem to be on moral theories rooted in
contingent factors such as fear or good feeling] but subject to it in such a way that
it must be viewed as also giving the law to itself (als selbstgesetzgebend) and just
because of this as first subject to the law” (G [4: 431]).22 Taken out of context,
NRSPD might appear to be stressing, after all, an act of arbitrary imposition. The
context of NRSPD, however, as indicated by the word “hence,” shows that it is
meant to follow from preceding considerations, and thus, methodologically con-
sidered, it does not invoke mere imposition (or, to be precise, what the rest of the
sentence calls the will’s “regarding itself as the author”)—in the loose popular
sense of autonomy—as an Archimedean point. The immediately preceding sen-
tence, and the logical precondition for NRSPD, is that “all maxims are repudi-
ated” that are inconsistent with “the will’s own universal-law-giving” (4: 431).23 In
addition to the special significance of the qualification “universal” (discussed fur-
ther below) in the essentially unified term “universal-law-giving,” there are two
other basic points here that must be reiterated whenever trying to understand
sentences like this in Kant.
The first point is that the term Kant uses throughout for “will” here is Wille and
not Willkür (choice),24 which means that it does not at all have the common
20 One needs to sharply distinguish Kantian autonomy from less demanding uses of the term,
which concern contingent political or psychological matters. This point about the absolutely necessary
character of Kantian autonomy is compatible, I believe, with an argument by Paul Guyer (2013), that
Kant also develops an empirical account of how humanity gets better over time at committing itself to
autonomous principles.
21 See Ameriks (2012), ch. 6. 22 Cited at Larmore (2011, 9).
23 “der eigenen allgemeinen Gesetzgebung des Willens.” My translation substitutes for the
Cambridge, “the will’s own giving of universal law,” because the latter translation (see also below, note
31) might suggest a contingent relation between the terms, as many Anglophone interpretations tend
to assume. For criticism of this tendency, see Ameriks (2012), ch. 6.
24 This term has a common connotation of arbitrariness in German, e.g., at G [4: 428].
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25 These are ends that one could be “subject to,” so as to meet the first, but only the first, part of the
key phrase, just cited, characterizing autonomy at G [4: 431]. I bracket here the vexed external issue of
whether happiness or universal well-being in general, rather than either accidental particular ends or
the Kantian notion of pure duty, may by itself be an absolutely necessary value.
26 Cf. G [4: 430–1]: “because of its universality it applies to all rational beings as such.” This phrase
surely must be understood as expressing a necessary essence, and not a universality reflecting mere
contingent applicability. See also Chapter 7 and G [4: 426], “it is a necessary law for all rational
beings . . . ”
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of the short paragraph that contains NRSPD, as well as in the concluding sentence
of the long immediately preceding paragraph. The reason why Kant insists on
calling the law a matter of Wille’s “own giving” is basically that he is trying to find
a way to express, as he says in this sentence, that a proper normative principle of
Wille must not be rooted in something that would not allow it to serve “as
supreme condition of its [i.e., the will’s] harmony with universal practical reason”
(G [4: 431]). In other words, the “own giving” by Wille here is not a free-floating
feature but is one directly tied to Kant’s attempt to characterize its principle in
such a way that it makes possible a “harmony” with practical reason insofar as
such reason is strictly universal, that is, “fit to be a law” (G [4: 431]).
Kant’s concern here with “harmony” is tied to his thought that the principle of
morality, in accord with the general organizational principle of reason, must have
a consistent threefold specification in “form,” “matter,” and “complete determin-
ation” (G [4: 436]). This harmony has a transcendental faculty assignment
aspect27 as well as, derivatively, a concrete intersubjective aspect. First, practical
reason as Wille, unlike the other basic faculties of mere sensibility and mere
understanding, just is the only faculty that is, as Kant goes one to say, harmonious
in the sense of “well suited” (G [4: 432]; see the contrast of reason and under-
standing at G [4: 452]) for such universal norms simply because reason is defined
as the faculty alone appropriate for expressing and systematizing unconditional
necessity. In this regard, it alone is not possibly dependent in its authority on con-
tingent factors, what Kant here calls the “interests” of the other faculties.28
This is why, secondly, he goes on to note that its norms can always be intended
to apply harmoniously in a “complete determination” or structural specification
of an entire ethical commonwealth (Reich der Zwecke).29 As he stresses in the
universal-law-giving passage right before the NRSPD passage, its norms equally
concern “every rational being” (G [4: 431]) as an agent and thus, as a Kantian
Lincoln might say, they can be understood as having validity in a pure sense, and
are necessarily not only “of ” and “by” but also “for” each rational being as Wille. It
is this interpersonal but a priori sense of normativity, and not any empirical pro-
cess, that is crucial to Kant’s understanding of moral authority. Because it is the
precondition driving Kant’s overall argument toward NRSPD and is sufficient for
his distinctive purposes, the idea of a strict moral necessity and independence
of Wille as a faculty, as expressed in NRSPD itself, should not be read as
27 This is part of Kant’s general project of demarcating the transcendental “location” of the diversity
of our faculties, in opposition to empiricist and rationalist “single root” tendencies that eliminate any
non-derivative conception of will.
28 G [4: 432]: “the principle of . . . universally legislating . . . is founded on no interest, and thus can
alone, among all possible imperatives, be unconditional.”
29 The presumption of this harmony is overly swift. As later work in logic has revealed, even seem-
ingly necessary formal principles of theoretical reason can lead to paradoxes and a multiplicity of
incompatible options, and so one should keep in mind that even Kantian practical norms based on
pure reason may be vulnerable to similar problems.
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30 This worry is raised by Larmore (2011, 8–9, and 19), who raises the common, and self-defeating,
worry that Kant is literally turning reason into an “agent.” I take my reading of the Groundwork, as
basically just trying to give moral principles their proper faculty location, to entail all that Larmore
wants from his own (allegedly more realistic) normative theory, especially insofar as Larmore goes on
to state that what is valuable is not to be thought of existing in a totally isolated way but as in corres-
pondence with our reason. Larmore himself says, “reasons have a relational character,” that is, involve
relations to “possibilities of thought and action that need to be discovered” (2011, 20)—presumably by
agents with the faculty of reason. Anti-Kantians tend to believe this kind of response is ruled out by
Kant’s characterization of heteronomy as a matter of allowing the “object” to determine the (moral)
law (G [4: 441]), but this is to overlook that what Kant is rejecting is simply the thought that a norma-
tively contingent or indeterminate “object” could be law-determining; in other contexts, he is willing
to speak of the law itself as the proper “object” of practical reason.
31 This again is my modification of the Cambridge translation, which reads, “will giving universal
law,” and thus does not as exactly reflect the German “allgemein gesetzgebenden Willens,” a phrase
that is found on the next page and elsewhere without a break between the terms characterizing will:
allgemeingesetzgebenden Willens. The combining of the terms without a break best expresses the cru-
cial point that Kant is making an essential and not an accidental characterization of what he calls
Wille.
32 This three-step structure dominates the Groundwork from the beginning, although sometimes in
a partially inverted order. The three principles of Section I are introduced heuristically in the order of,
first, “subjective” (that is, existing in the subject) content, that is, the good will and its necessary value
(the notion of necessary value is also placed first in the Preface, G [4: 389]); then “objective” form, that
is, having a right (universalizable) maxim; and, third, “determination” through “pure respect for prac-
tical law,” which “outweighs” all mere inclination (G [4: 400]) and is expressed later in terms of the
formula of autonomy. In the initial presentation of the three basic formulae of the categorical impera-
tive in Section II, and then also in the summary at G [4: 431], the order becomes (1) the “objective”
form of universality, (2) the “subjective” content of the necessary value of being an agent with reason,
and (3) the unity of these in the notion of a “legislating” rather than simply passive Wille—a third
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language of the third formulation, our need to resist any reliance on any contin-
gent use of faculties that would undermine a kind of already assumed necessary
practical “harmony.” Rather than imposing on Kant an odd and invalid extra
meaning to the notion of self-determination, one can read him as basically just
repeating a point that is made throughout his work and that is systematically
elaborated, in an explicitly negative manner, in the concluding subsections of
Groundwork II, “Heteronomy of the Will as the Source of all Spurious Principles
of Morality,” namely, that if one were to try normatively to account for the neces-
sary authority of morality in terms of exercises of faculties that are manifestly
contingent, such as our sensitivity to either external or internal empirical pres-
sures, or even theological concepts characterized in a merely arbitrary fashion
(concerning a desire to please the whims of a tyrannical superpower), then this
would be tantamount to sacrificing the normative necessity of the moral law and
its chance for harmony with universal reason.33
Note that although it is true that there is a contingent causal relation between
our awareness of such mere pressures, and the existence of particular stimuli for
them, it is not the relational causal contingency of the pressures that is the key to
Kant’s objection to them; what matters is the immediately evident contingency of
their value relevance.34 There is, for example, no reason to think that the prestige
often associated with social rank is necessarily a moral good. But if contingent
sources of normativity do not as such harmonize with the strict modal and uni-
versal nature of the moral demands of practical reason, some kind of fitting and
necessary location for the possibility of this harmony needs to be sought. From a
Kantian perspective, there is one and only one obvious alternative here, namely,
to look toward practical reason itself. Reason in general is characterized through-
out Kant’s philosophy as precisely that faculty which determines (in E, F, C, and N
senses)35 all strictly necessary truths, and hence it only makes sense to say that
point that “follows” on reflection because the preceding two points about the universality and neces-
sity of the supreme principle of morality cannot be understood in terms of a merely contingently
determined will. See also Allison (2011, 124) and below, note 42.
33 Here Kant has a special problem insofar as he must concede that, of the four basic options, the
perfectionist theory of value need not be vulnerable to the objection of relying on contingent values at
its base. This may be part of the reason why Kant is especially interested in the feature of the universal-
izability of maxims, which he thinks gives his theory a special advantage, given what he takes to be the
inescapable indeterminacy of the notion of “perfection” alone.
34 Hence I assume there is concern about a judgment (ultimately involving freedom) of value, and
not a mere causal relation, at work in passages such as this (G [4: 460]): “it is not because the law
interests us that it has validity for us (for that is heteronomy and dependence [normative!] of practical
reason [this is a point about reason, not mere psychology] . . . ).”
35 This statement about “reason in general” is compatible with allowing that reason “in particular,”
that is, as it is actually taken up on a particular occasion by a person reasoning in action, is part of
what allows that person to be causally effective. The causality of practical reason has been emphasized
in recent work by Stephen Engstrom.
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the practical necessities of morality must be sought within the faculty of practical
reason, what Kant also calls Wille.
Given that these necessities are unavoidably valid, it may be disconcerting at
first that Kant uses an active voice here and speaks of “the will” as “giving” the
law36 rather than simply seeing, understanding, or appreciating it. But there are
understandable reasons for his use of the active voice here. The most obvious one
is that he wants to mark a strong contrast with what he takes to be the manifestly
passive and inadequate putative sources of unconditional value that others tend
to rely on: mere sensation, tradition, threats, and such. Moreover, even when, in a
moral context, Kant does use, and even emphasizes, a term that is translated as
“impose” (auferlegen), he also uses it in part in a passive voice, as something
imposed “upon the will.” That is, he states that for actions (for example, not lying
to someone about a truth that they have a right to know) out of “immediate
respect,” “nothing but reason is required to impose them upon the will,” since
“these actions need no recommendation from any subjective proclivity . . . to coax
[erschmeicheln, that is, lure by mere flattery] them” (G [4: 435]).37 Here again it is
clear that the cash value of the term “impose” is simply to sharply oppose the idea
of accepting only manifestly contingent sources of value. As Wille, we “give our-
selves” the law most basically insofar as we cannot, as beings of reason, let a
“supreme principle,” no matter how flattering, be contingently imposed upon us
as normatively decisive. We understand that mere efficient causal determination,
as a contingent fact about events, cannot be the same thing as the normative
determination of a necessary standard of value—and this is true even if the caus-
ation is a matter of our own active imagination.
Throughout his philosophy, Kant makes use of a basic distinction between Tun
and Lassen (G [4: 396]), that is, between being active in a paradigmatic initiating
sense, in contrast to allowing something to happen. But even “allowing” is under-
stood in this context as also a kind of action, and it is clearly Kant’s general view
that, in the context of our relation to the status of norms, for us even to merely
allow any of these actually to hold sway in one’s life is to engage in a kind of act
and to determine oneself “efficiently” in a “self-incurred” way.38 Hence, intentions
36 One should also keep in mind that what look like German uses of the term “give,” that is, geben,
are often translated more properly in non-activist terms. Es gibt does not mean “it gives,” but simply
“there is,” just as in English, when we say “it rains,” we really are not speaking of a separate “it” but just
mean that now “there is rain.” I suspect that Kant is most attracted to the word “give” here simply
because he wants to use a verb that contrasts with “take,” which in this context signifies merely taking
over from an external source in a normatively lazy way. Another complication is that here “give” and
“take” have connotations that contrast with how they are generally used in relation to the English
philosophical notion of the “myth of the (merely passively) given.”
37 I have inserted the phrase “these actions . . . proclivity” from an earlier part of the paragraph, for
grammatical and explanatory reasons. Without the insertion the translation of Kant’s phrase reads, “to
impose them upon the will, not to coax . . . ,” and here one sees perhaps even more directly how Kant’s
main aim is simply to make a contrast with contingent sources such as mere “coaxing.”
38 See Section 2.4.
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in which one chooses to ignore the claim of morality and to accept as basic what
Kant calls the merely heteronomous standards of sensibility and self-love must
also involve a kind of act on our part, even if it is not in an explicit phenomeno-
logical sense.39
A common objection at this point is to say that even if the value of a law is not
something to be merely “taken” in the sense of a natural process that is undergone
totally passively, this does not mean that we should say it is self-given either, for
one might want to characterize it as simply recognized as authoritatively present.40
Against this gambit, a Kantian might at first argue that we should speak of the
faculty of reason in active terms simply because of considerations that go back to
a long-standing Scholastic and rationalist tradition of understanding intentional-
ity in general as active because at least implicitly propositional (and thus involv-
ing synthesis, in contrast to mere sensation and primitive feeling), although by no
means in a necessarily arbitrary way. Here, however, one must distinguish
between reason’s general normative (N and F) determination of the standing of a
practical law, and the cognitive and appreciative acts in which a particular reason-
ing subject determines itself, through reason in a concrete E and C sense, to be
committed to a maxim in a way that takes an actual stance on the law. Even
though the latter kind of determination, on each occasion, is understandably
always a matter of activity rather than mere passivity, this may leave it unclear
why the general formal and normative determination of the law’s status as
supreme should be said to be self-given. Nonetheless, there remain the grounds
already given for speaking of even the mere formal determination of the law’s
standing as something that is self-determined, in a non-subjectivist, pure, and
distinctively internal sense, rather than other-determined. Kant’s view is that,
even before trying to ground the synthetic claim that the moral law is in fact
binding on us, the philosophical analysis of what the acceptance of such a law
would entail41 does point directly to a non-subjectivist understanding of NRSPD.
The key point here, once again, is simply that it must be within the faculty of prac-
tical reason itself, and neither of the two other faculties distinct from it, namely,
mere feeling and mere theoretical understanding, that such a strict standard for
practical life would have to reside (and thus is "self-given" with Wille).
It is, to be sure, a bit of provocative language to speak of this necessary har-
mony between pure reason, as a basic faculty, with pure morality, as a practical
standard with content, in terms of reason’s “authoring” and “legislating” morality’s
pure law (cf. G [4: 448]), for this might suggest to some readers the existence of
something like an independent being, such as a person or a government, engaged
with a totally independent other item, that is, an entity that need not be. Reason,