Kant’s Conception of Freedom

This extensive text (517 pages of full text, 554 overall) is an invaluable new contribution to Kant studies by one of the most important commentators of the last half century. Allison’s ambitious goal here is to give a developmental and systematic account of Kant’s thoughts on free will, spanning nearly the entirety of Kant’s writing life. Not all the texts Allison discusses here explicitly address free will, but his extensions of them to free will are plausible and interesting throughout. It is impossible to offer a comprehensive account of a work of such breadth here, so I will offer just a sketch of its contents, highlighting a few issues that I found to be particularly fascinating, and touching on one point of critique.Chapters 1–5 address Kant’s views in his stages of development prior to the first Critique, with a focus on various forms of compatibilism which Allison reads Kant as endorsing at those points. Chapter 1 addresses Kant’s writings from 1755 to 1759, including Universal Natural History (1955), Nova dilucidatio (1755), his essay on optimism (1755), and Reflexionen from the late 1750s. Allison emphasizes the importance of Kant’s endorsement of Wolff’s “principle of the determining ground” for his compatibilism during this period (KCF 24–27).1 One highlight of this chapter is a fascinating discussion of Kant’s view in Universal Natural History that mind, though not material, is dependent on the nature of the brain in a way that implies that possible intelligent creatures inhabiting planets farther from the sun are more intellectually and morally perfect than those inhabiting planets closer to the sun (KCF 9–12). Kant thinks this is the case because he thinks the matter of planets farther away from the sun is less dense, and that the brains of their possible inhabitants are correspondingly less dense and thus “lighter and finer,” improving the “clarity and liveliness of the concepts they receive through external impressions” and their “agility” in the exercise of their faculties (UNH 1:359).The middle range of Earth’s orbit implies that “human beings are far from the most intelligent creatures in our solar system. While superior to the sluggish denizens of Mercury and Venus ... they are greatly inferior to the more refined intellects of those dwelling on Jupiter and Saturn” (KCF 11). This is relevant for Kant’s thoughts on free will by way of a connection to imputation: Allison comments that “Kant wonders, on the one hand, whether the wise and noble inhabitants of the distant celestial bodies are even capable of ‘lower[ing] themselves to the foolishness that resides in sin,’ and, on the other, whether those who inhabit the lower planets are ‘equipped with far too few spiritual abilities to be permitted to bear the responsibility for their actions before the judgment seat of justice?’” (UNH 1:365–66; KCF 11–12).Chapter 2 addresses Kant’s thoughts on metaphysics in the early 1760s, in the Prize Essay (1764), Negative Magnitudes (1764), the Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of God’s Existence (Beweisgrund, 1763), and Herder’s notes on Kant’s Metaphysics lectures (1762–64). Here I found Allison’s discussion of Kant’s application of the concept of real opposition to moral motivation in Negative Magnitudes particularly helpful. Allison comments that Kant asks us to suppose that someone has ten degrees of a passion, e.g., miserliness, which ... is assumed to be sufficient to conflict with the duty of beneficence. We are further to suppose that this person applies twelve degrees of effort exercised in accordance with the principles of beneficence, with the result being an action expressing two degrees of beneficence. This is then contrasted with another person, who is burdened with only three degrees of miserliness and seven degrees of a capacity to act according to the principle of obligation, which means that the action will exhibit four degrees of beneficence.... [F]rom this Kant concludes that, assuming that the passion in question is natural and involuntary ... the first person’s action will have more moral worth than the second’s because she had to exert more effort to will it. (KCF 53–54; NM 2:200)Allison seems to regard this as a view Kant rejects as his theory of freedom develops, and does not explore its relationship to Kant’s view about degrees of imputation in the Metaphysics of Morals (MM 6:227–28). Chapter 3 addresses Kant’s moral philosophy in the early 1760s, drawing again on the Prize Essay (1764), Herder’s notes from Kant’s Ethics lectures, and Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime (1766). Allison emphasizes Kant’s openness to moral sense theory on the model of Hume and Hutcheson during this period.Chapter 4 addresses the transformative impact of Rousseau’s work on Kant in the late 1760s, which Allison plausibly argues is manifested in Remarks in the Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime and Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766). Allison demonstrates the importance of Rousseau for Kant’s thoughts about freedom not only with respect to Kant’s social philosophy (now widely recognized in the literature) but also for the arguments of the Groundwork and some aspects of transcendental freedom. Allison’s extensive discussion of the “Confession of Faith by a Savoyard Vicar” in Émile is especially illuminating.Chapter 5 is about the 1770s, the “silent decade” during which Kant published little. Allison discusses Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation (1770), various Reflexionen on free will, and notes from Kant’s lectures on moral philosophy attributed to Georg Ludwig Collins. Allison does not note that Collins attended Kant’s lectures in 1784, so there is some room for debate about the degree to which those lectures represent Kant’s thought in the 1770s rather than the early 1780s. However, other scholars argue that the notes Collins used in 1784 were not taken down by him, but instead largely copied from an older set of notes now lost to history, taken down sometime in the mid to late 1770s. If this is right, then the place Allison assigns the Collins notes on the timeline is reasonable.Chapter 6 addresses the first Critique, and contains an extensive discussion of the third Antinomy and the Canon. Allison argues against the “patchwork thesis,” which holds that Kant affirms the dependence of practical freedom upon transcendental freedom in the Dialectic but denies it in the Canon. Allison argues (correctly, in my view) that the Canon does not deny the dependence of practical freedom upon transcendental freedom (KCF 288–95). Allison also argues that the moral incentive as conceived in the Canon is hope for the highest good, and is thus heteronomous from the perspective Kant holds in the Groundwork and thereafter (KCF 295–98).Chapter 7 offers an illuminating discussion of Kant’s review of Johann Schulz (1783) and Krzysztof Celestyn Mrongovius’s notes from Kant’s Metaphysics lectures (1782–83). Its main topic, however, is the Groundwork (1785)—Allison argues that Kant’s argument from the necessity of acting under the idea of freedom is not sufficient to establish the validity of the categorical imperative and leads to an impasse. In Chapter 8, Allison argues that Kant breaks the impasse in a “great reversal” by claiming freedom to be a fact of reason. In these chapters Allison primarily develops arguments he made in previous works in greater detail.Chapter 9 is about the third Critique’s account of a transition from nature to freedom, and is divided into sections addressing Kant’s argument for why this transition is needed (KCF 414–22), how reflective judgment’s concept of purposiveness makes the transition possible (422–34), and how pure judgments of taste play a role by facilitating a transition from sensory enjoyment to moral feeling (434–50). This is a challenging chapter on the most challenging of Kant’s three Critiques. Chapter 10, the last chapter, is entitled “Kant’s Final Thoughts on Free Will.” He begins by defending of Kant against the famous objection (advanced first by Karl L. Reinhold and later by Henry Sidgwick) that for Kant only actions from duty can be imputed. The rest of the chapter is devoted to an account of Kant’s conception of radical evil in the Religion.Let me now turn to an issue on which I was left wishing for greater clarity. The varieties of compatibilism Allison discusses in the first five chapters made Allison’s understanding of compatibilism something of a moving target for me. I had hoped that when Allison arrived at the first Critique, he would provide a more detailed account of the incompatibilism he takes Kant to endorse there than Allison has in previous works, which would allow him to draw in his the discussions earlier in the book and clarify them relative to the incompatibilism of first Critique. Admittedly, explaining Kant’s first Critique theory of freedom is among the most challenging tasks for any commentator, and it may be that the most we can hope for from even the most gifted interpreters like Allison is a partial explanation. But I think Allison leaves a few loose threads in his account, in places where clarity demands an explanation of the ending of the threads even if one thinks Kant’s texts do not allow us to tie them off. Let me mention one.Allison frequently draws a contrast between being determined and predetermined by empirical causality (KCF 30, 44, 212–13, 217, 283, 476, 480), which he has mentioned in previous works but has not made a focus. In this new book he claims that Kant’s critical view is that the former is compatible with free will and imputation, but the latter is not. Allison finds what he takes to be Kant’s “clearest statement” of this view in Reflexion 5619, dating sometime between 1776 and 1779 (KCF 212–13). Allison claims that this contrast is important in understanding how the incompatibilism of the first Critique differs from precritical views. The Second Analogy makes this contrast interpretatively challenging—while there is ample room for debate about exactly what the Second Analogy is meant to imply, it is at minimum clear that we must posit antecedent empirical causal determination to regard succession as objective. Allison’s view is apparently that empirical causal determination is established only in retrospection (212, 216, 217), and that prospective determination conflicts with the “openness of the future” he thinks Kant requires in the “malicious lie” passage in the first Critique (KCF 213, 285, Kant A554–55/B582–83). Some account of how this temporal asymmetry in causal determination can be connected to the Second Analogy would be necessary to really understand this claim, but Allison does not provide one. A further puzzle is raised by Allison’s acknowledgment that Kant does endorse what Allison calls predetermination, in the empirical vs. intelligible character passage at A549–50/B577–78, and the “eclipse” passage at KpV 5:99 (KCF 399), and Allison’s claim that Kant “should have held” that such predetermination is incompatible with the openness of the future in the first Critique. This left me uncertain whether Allison thinks the contrast between determination and predetermination is key to understanding the view Allison thinks Kant actually held in the critical period, or the one Allison thinks he should have held. Allison suggests that predetermination conflicts with the kind of open future entailed by Kant’s claim that we must regard the malicious lie “as though with that act the agent had started a series of consequences entirely from himself” and “could have ... determined the conduct ... to be other than it is” (A555/B583). But he does not appear to present an argument for this. He seems instead to assume that the kind of causation relevant for imputation must occur at a point in time. But we are only pressed to assume this if we reject Kant’s idea that the causality of reason is in a crucial (though admittedly difficult) sense timeless. Pressure to reject this idea presumably derives from Allison’s deflationary, conceptual-not-ontological, “two-aspect” interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism, which he does discuss in various places in the new book, but he does not discuss it in connection with this issue.It is, however, to Allison’s credit that this new book mostly surveys regions of Kant’s corpus which he has not previously discussed, rather than revisiting features of the landscape he has discussed before. In recent years, Kant commentary has placed increasing emphasis on historical detail and close analysis of Kant’s corpus as a whole, and it has become more important for scholars to learn something about everything. To this end, Allison’s new book offers an enlightening tour of key passages throughout Kant’s texts, led by one of Kant’s foremost expositors

Compatibilism · Creatures · Epistemology · Free will · Natural (archaeology) · Sketch · Zeno's paradoxes · Computer Science · History · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy