Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future MetaphysicsKant, Immanuel
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Kant, Immanuel
Knowledge, Theory of -- Early works to 1800; Metaphysics -- Early works to 1800
Thus practical freedom, viz., the freedom in which reason possesses
causality according to objectively determining grounds, is rescued and
yet natural necessity is not in the least curtailed with regard to the
very same effects, as appearances. The same remarks will serve to
explain what we had to say concerning transcendental freedom and its
compatibility with natural necessity (in the same subject, but not
taken in the same reference). For, as to this, every beginning of the
action of a being from objective causes regarded as determining
grounds, is always a first start, though the same action is in the
series of appearances only a subordinate start, which must be preceded
by a state of the cause, which determines it, and is itself determined
in the same manner by another immediately preceding. Thus we are able,
in rational beings, or in beings generally, so far as their causality
is determined in them as things in themselves, to imagine a faculty of
beginning from itself a series of states, without falling into
contradiction with the laws of nature. For the relation of the action
to objective grounds of reason is not a time-relation; in this case
that which determines the causality does not precede in time the
action, because such determining grounds represent not a reference to
objects of sense, e.g., to causes in the appearances, but to
determining causes, as things in themselves, which do not rank under
conditions of time. And in this way the action, with regard to the
causality of reason, can be considered as a first start in respect to
the series of appearances, and yet also as a merely subordinate
beginning. We may therefore without contradiction consider it in the
former aspect as free, but in the latter (in so far as it is merely
appearance) as subject to natural necessity.
As to the fourth Antinomy, it is solved in the same way as the
conflict of reason with itself in the third. For, provided the cause
in the appearance is distinguished from the cause of the appearance
(so far as it can be thought as a thing in itself), both propositions
are perfectly reconcilable: the one, that there is nowhere in the
sensuous world a cause (according to similar laws of causality), whose
existence is absolutely necessary; the other, that this world is
nevertheless connected with a Necessary Being as its cause (but of
another kind and according to another law). The incompatibility of
these propositions entirely rests upon the mistake of extending what
is valid merely of appearances to things in themselves, and in general
confusing both in one concept.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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