/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | June 20, 2022

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Instead of positing a mysterious noumenal freedom, a reading according to which the distinction boils down to two different points of view from which action can be considered is prima facie much more promising - provided we don't regress to asking which point of view is the "correct" one.

Doesn't Kant, however, straightforwardly posit such noumenal freedom with the doctrine of 'intelligible character' and concept of autonomy, not merely as a way we conceive ourselves but as a "granted presupposition" that constitutes determinate and objectively sufficient "cognition" of our "proper self" in an intelligible world within Groundwork III and as apodictically certain knowledge in the second Critique and onwards? And indeed that were we not really free then the moral law would be a mere "phantasm of the brain"? It seems like it is not 'we' who regress to asking which point of view is the "correct" one, but Kant himself, in many places. Indeed, Kant explicitly says in Groundwork that the principles of practical philosophy are 'absolutely necessary' and not dependent in any way on the 'special nature of human reason' unlike the 'principles of theoretical philosophy', which are dependent upon the 'special' nature of the human mind. This seems to plainly establish an asymmetry between theoretical and practical philosophy regarding the ontological fundamentality of their subject matter. The latter concerns laws which concern the nature of ultimate reality irrespective of the specific nature of human beings, and hence apply even to God's will: the intelligible world. Indeed, I struggle to see how sense can be made of Kant's views about the soul, about natural teleology, about the doctrine of creation, about the theory of natural predispositions and formative drives, about 'realities' and 'perfections' and the need for their possibility to be grounded in an ens realissimum, about religion (e.g., of the need for an eternal prototype of humanity that Kant calls "God's only begotten Son"), etc. To take one example, Kant claims that God does not create appearances, but only creates things in themselves by intuiting them via intellectual intuition. All souls are created by God in this first creation, otherwise they would be miracles. Kant claims in the Metaphysics of Morals that a being endowed with freedom cannot come into being by means of a physical process, as this would contradict its nature as a first beginning. He then says that parents merely bring the soul into the world, as opposed to bringing it into existence (only God does that), and derives moral requirements from these claims (e.g., all parents have a duty to care for the child from conception, as even at conception the child is not a "world being but a citizen of the world"). Here he seems clearly to be saying that all human beings have free will, and therefore that their will did not arise through procreation, but was created in the first creation outside of time.

In the end, though, I guess I don't think that concerns about 'charity' etc. are hermeneutically licit, and that instead they often arise from 20th century prejudices against metaphysics and concerning naturalism, etc. Instead, I think true charity would be to read attentively what someone really says, to take seriously that it is they and not me who could be right -- even if they seem to be talking about nonspatiotemporal noumenal wills and the intuitive intellect and intelligible worlds. And I think that if we do this we will see that, so far from implausible extravagances, Kant's understanding of freedom and the intelligible world is intimately required by his understanding of the moral law as necessitating free acts from inner principles alongside his understanding nature as a deterministic order.

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