History of Modern Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 841 pages of information about History of Modern Philosophy.

History of Modern Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 841 pages of information about History of Modern Philosophy.

After it has been settled what the categorical imperative enjoins, the further problem awaits us of explaining how it is possible.  The categorical imperative is possible only on I the presupposition of our freedom.  Only a free being gives laws to itself, just as an autonomous being alone is free.  In theoretical philosophy the pure self-consciousness, the “I think,” denoted a point where the thing in itself manifests to us not its nature, indeed, but its existence.  The same holds true in practical philosophy of the moral law.  The incontestable fact of the moral law empowers me to rank myself in a higher order of things than the merely phenomenal order, and in another causal relation than that of the merely necessary (mechanical) causation of nature, to regard myself as a legislative member of an intelligible world, and one independent of sensuous impulses—­in short, to regard myself as free.  Freedom is the ratio essendi of the self-given moral law, the latter the ratio cognoscendi of freedom.  The law would have no meaning if we did not possess the power to obey it:  I can because I ought.  It is true that freedom is a mere Idea, whose object can never be given to me in an experience, and whose reality, consequently, cannot be objectively known and proved, but nevertheless, is required with satisfactory subjective necessity as the condition of the moral law and of the possibility of its fulfillment.  I may not say it is certain, but, with safety, I am certain that I am free.  Freedom is not a dogmatic proposition of theoretical reason, but a postulate of practical reason; and the latter holds the primacy over the former to this extent, that it can require the former to show that certain transcendent Ideas of the suprasensible, which are most intimately connected with moral obligation, are compatible with the principles of the understanding.  It was just in view of the practical interests involved in the rational concepts God, freedom, immortality, that it was so important to establish, at least, their possibility (their conceivability without contradiction).  That, therefore, which the Dialectic recognized as possible is in the Ethics shown to be real:  Whoever seeks to fulfill his moral destiny—­and this is the duty of every man—­must not doubt concerning the conditions of its possible fulfillment, must, in spite of their incomprehensibility, believe in freedom and a suprasensible world.  They are both postulates of practical reason, i.e., assumptions concerning that which is in behalf of that which ought to be.  Naturally the interests of the understanding must not be infringed upon by those of the will.  The principle of the complete causal determination of events retains its validity unimpeached for the sphere of the knowledge of the understanding, that is, for the realm of phenomena; while, on the other hand, it remains permissible for us to postulate another kind of causality for the realm of things in themselves, although we can have no idea of its how, and to ascribe to ourselves a free intelligible character.

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History of Modern Philosophy from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.