CHAPTER II. The Canon[1711] of Pure Reason

THE CANON OF PURE REASON

SECTION I

THE ULTIMATE END OF THE PURE USE OF OUR REASON

The problems of the existence of God, the freedom of the will, and the immortality of the soul have, Kant declares, little theoretical interest. For, as he has already argued, even if we were justified in postulating God, freedom, and immortality, they would not enable us to account for the phenomena of sense-experience, the only objects of possible knowledge. But the three problems are also connected with our practical interests, and in that reference they constitute the chief subject of metaphysical enquiry. The practical is whatever is possible through freedom; and the decision as to what we ought to do is the supreme interest of pure Reason in its highest employment.

“...the ultimate intention of Nature in her wise provision for us has indeed, in the constitution of our Reason, been directed to our moral interests alone.”

This is the position which Kant endeavours to establish in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, and in the Critique of Practical Reason. The very brief outline which he here gives of his argument is necessarily incomplete; and is in consequence somewhat misleading. He first disposes of the problem of freedom; and does so in a manner which shows that he had not, when this section was composed, developed his Critical views on the nature of moral freedom. He is for the present content to draw a quite un-Critical distinction between transcendental and practical freedom. The latter belongs to the will in so far as it is determined by Reason alone, independently of sensuous impulses. Reason prescribes objective laws of freedom, and the will under the influence of these laws overcomes the affections of sense. Such practical freedom can, Kant asserts, be proved by experience to be a natural cause. Transcendental freedom, on the other hand, i.e. the power of making a new beginning in the series of phenomena, is a problem which can never be empirically solved. It is a purely speculative question with which Reason in its practical employment is not in the least concerned. The canon of pure Reason has therefore to deal only with the two remaining problems, God and immortality. Comment upon these assertions can best be made in connection with the argument of the next section.