A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'

by Norman Kemp Smith

SOLUTION OF THE THIRD ANTINOMY[1579]

Statement.—As appearances are representations only, they must have a ground which is not itself an appearance;[1580] and though the effects of such an intelligible cause appear, and accordingly are determined through other appearances, its causality is not itself similarly conditioned. Both it and its causality lie outside the empirical series; only the effects fall within the realm of experience. And that causality, not being subject to time, does not require to stand under another cause as its effect. In this way Kant derives from his transcendental idealism an explanation of the possibility of an action being at once free and causally determined. This explanation he takes as applying either to a first cause of the whole realm of natural phenomena or to a finite being regarded as a free agent. The proof of the possibility of this metaphysical, or, as Kant entitles it, “transcendental freedom,” removes what has always been the real difficulty that lay in the way of “practical freedom.” The conception of freedom is a transcendental Idea which can neither be derived from experience nor verified by it. It is created by Reason for itself;[1581] and reveals the possibility that in this third antinomy both thesis and antithesis may be true. The alternatives—“every effect must arise from nature,” and “every effect must arise from freedom”—are not exclusive of one another. They may be true of one and the same event in different relations.[1582] The event may be free in reference to its intelligible cause, determined as an existence in space and time. Were appearances things in themselves, freedom and causality would necessarily conflict: by means of the above ontological distinction freedom can be asserted without any diminution in the scope allowed to the causal principle. All events, without a single possible exception, are subject to the law of natural determination; and yet every event may at the same time proceed from a free cause.

POSSIBILITY OF HARMONISING CAUSALITY THROUGH FREEDOM WITH THE UNIVERSAL LAW OF NATURAL NECESSITY[1583]

Statement.—The above conclusion is so seemingly paradoxical that Kant devotes this and the following section to its further elucidation. How can events be both free and determined? The answer lies in recognition of the two-sided character of every natural existence. It is, in one aspect, mere appearance; in another, it has at its foundation a transcendental object. It is an appearance of the latter, and for its complete comprehension this latter must be taken into account. Now there is nothing to prevent us from attributing to the transcendental object a causality which is not phenomenal. Such causality may make the appearance just that appearance which it is. In the world of sense every efficient cause must have a specific empirical character, since only so can it determine one effect rather than another according to the universal and invariable law expressive of its nature. We must similarly allow to the transcendental object an intelligible character, and trace to it all those appearances which as members of the empirical series stand to one another in unbroken causal connection. This transcendental object, owing to its intelligible character, is not in time. Its act does not either arise or perish, and is not, therefore, subject to the law of empirical determination which applies only to the changeable, i.e. to events subsequent upon previous states. Such supersensuous causality can find no place in the series of empirical conditions, and though it can be conceived only in terms of the empirical character which is its outcome, the difference between it and natural causality may be as complete as that which subsists between the transcendental and the empirical objects of knowledge. In its empirical character the action is a part of nature, and enters into a causal nexus which conforms to universal laws.[1584] All its effects are inevitably determined by antecedent natural conditions. In its intelligible character, however, this same active subject must be considered free from all influence of sensibility and from all determination through natural events. In so far as it is a noumenon, there can be no change in it, and therefore nothing which is capable of explanation in terms of natural causes. Even its empirical effects are not traceable to it as events in time. For as events these effects are always the results of antecedent empirical causes. What is alone due to noumenal causality is that empirical character in virtue of which appearances are what they are, and owing to which they stand in specific and necessary causal relations to one another.

“...the empirical character is permanent, while its effects, according to variation in the concomitant, and in part limiting conditions, appear in changeable forms.”[1585]

Empirical causality is itself in its specific nature conditioned by an intelligible cause.[1586]

EXPLANATION OF THE RELATION OF FREEDOM TO NECESSITY OF NATURE[1587]

Statement.—No single appearance can be exempted from the law of natural causality. For it would then be placed outside all possible experience, and would be for us a fiction of the brain, or rather could not be conceived at all. Nothing, therefore, in nature can act freely or spontaneously. But while thus recognising that all events without exception are empirically conditioned, we may, as already pointed out, regard empirical causality as itself an effect of a non-empirical and intelligible power.[1588] In events there may be nothing but nature, and yet nature itself, or perhaps even some of the existences composing it, may rest upon powers of a noumenal order. Kant proceeds to show that such an hypothesis is not only allowable, but is indispensable for understanding the distinguishing features of human life in its practical aspect.

Man is a natural existence, and his activities are subject to empirical laws. Like all other objects of nature, he has an empirical character, and in virtue of it takes his place as an integral part of the system of nature. But man is unique among all natural existences in that he not only knows himself as a sensible existence, but also, through pure apperception, becomes aware of himself as possessing faculties of a strictly intelligible character.[1589] Such are the faculties of understanding and Reason, especially the latter in its practical employment. The “ought” of the moral imperative expresses a kind of necessity and a form of causation which we nowhere find in the world of nature. The understanding can know in nature only what actually is, has been, or will be. Nothing natural can be other than it is in the particular relations in which it is found. Moral action transcends the natural in that it finds its cause, not in an appearance or set of appearances, but in an Ideal of pure Reason. Such action must indeed be possible under natural conditions, but such conditions do not determine its rightness, and consequently cannot determine its causality.

“Reason ... does not here follow the order of things as they present themselves in appearance, but frames to itself with perfect spontaneity an order of its own according to Ideas, to which it adapts the empirical conditions, and according to which it declares actions to be necessary even although they have never yet taken place, and perhaps never will take place. And at the same time it also presupposes that Reason can have causality in regard to all these actions, since otherwise no empirical effects could be expected from its Ideas.”[1590]