Reflections on Kant's Quest for the Unity of Reason

I first came to Kant as an undergraduate student, trying to read a text I found at the library with the interesting title, The Critique of Pure Reason.  I recall attempting to figure out what Kant meant by the analytic/synthetic distinction and why he thought it so important.  I liked metaphysics even then, I must admit, and was accordingly puzzled why Kant was so chary of it.

I also vividly remember taking in my last undergraduate semester a course entitled "Freedom and Determinism," in which I wrote a paper complaining that Kant could and ought not be a half-way determinist.  If the results of the First Critique are a thoroughgoing mechanistic determinism, then clearly there is no freedom, certainly not the freedom Kant extols in his Critique of Practical Reason.  I was an incompatibilist back then, I suppose, for I thought that if all acts are determined, then there can be no contra-causal freedom and philosophical libertarianism is false, and conversely, if some actions are contra-causally free -- philosophical libertarianism is true -- then not all acts are determined.

Compatibilism was, I thought, simply a lack of courage.  If I really could have done other than I did do -- and write 'really could not have done' instead of 'really could have done' in the earlier part of this sentence -- then not all acts are mechanistically determined and the results of Kant's First Critique are wrong.  How could the conclusions of both Critiques be true?   If mechanistic determinism, then no freedom; if freedom then no mechanistic determinism.  Tertium non datur!!  

I have read quite a bit of philosophy since those early days, but I must confess that I have not really gotten sufficient clarity on the freedom/determinism issue to make much progress.  Clearly, every event has a cause including each act that I do.  Yet if I am not really free to do other than what I did do, then I cannot be culpable for my actions.  With what propriety can I ascribe praise and blame to someone who cannot do other than what he does do?

Probably James' "Dilemma of Determinism" was most convincing to me.  I can believe in freedom of the will.  On questions that are momentous, unavoidable, and not ultimately empirically determinable, then I have a right to choose that belief which is most subjectively satisfying.  Either freedom of the will is true or it is not true.  If it is not true, then I am in the subjectively unsatisfying position of always regretting actions I do which, if determinism is true, I could not have not done.  My experience is one of regretting what is unchangeable, and even, if enlightened about determinism, regretting my regretting of what is unchangeable.  Why would one choose to believe that which makes a mockery out of one's very moral experience?

But my practical belief in libertarianism (the freedom to do other than what one did do) could not dispel my theoretical doubts. After all, it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that everything in the universe is ultimately physical -- including us.  This means inter alter that explanation schemes for the realization of contra-causal action are difficult to frame. Assume that macro-event A causes macro-event B.  Given that physicalism is likely true -- that what there ultimately is in the universe are those entities over which the quantifiers of our fundamental theories of micro-physics quantify -- then each macro-event must have some realization at progressively lower levels of descriptions terminating in those most basic entities (or fields) over which micro-physics quantifies.

Even though 'A causes B' can perhaps not be given a reductive analysis in terms of a congeries of micro-events and entities constituting A and a congeries of micro-events and entities constituting B, it is nonetheless true that some set of entities and events realize A and some other set realize B.  Presumably, top-down causality does not hold, i.e., that actualizations at upper levels can causally influence the distribution of their realizers at the lower levels.  Accordingly, the laws effecting the distribution of lower level events and entities must be indigenous to those lower levels.  Thus, the distribution of these lower level events and entities will metaphysically determine the causal relations at the upper levels.  Simply put, macro-causality is realized by the physical micro-causal, and there is no room for the contra-causal agency of human beings.  While there is no type/type identity between macro-events and their realizers, there is token/token identity.  That is to say, every occasion of A need not be realized in the same way at the lower levels, but there must be some realization or other of A.   One might say that A and B are multiply realizable at the lower levels.

It is precisely these considerations that have made it difficult for me to get clear on any way to solve the problem of freedom and nature.  Freedom seems not to be part of nature, but profoundly part of what it is to be me.  Nature seems not to have any freedom, and indeed to give it freedom seems to make a mockery out of our science.  How could the lower level physical realizers of uncaused actions spontaneously appear?

All of this is but an extended introduction to Immanuel Kant's Third Critique.  In his 1790 Critique of Judgment -- actually it is Der Kritik der Urtielkraft, or "Critique of the Power of Judgment"-- Kant mounts a spirited defense of a position that animated earlier readers of the Kritik, but has not been much understood since.  In this Critique, Kant argues for the possibility of a rapprochement between Nature and Freedom, between the results of the First Critique and the results of the Second.  Famously, he argues for a different type of judgment than the determinative judgments of the first two Critiques.

While it is the imagination and understanding which work to form and experience the objects of the empirical world according to the laws of nature we ourselves promulgate, and while it is reason that functions to determine our moral experience according to the moral law that we autonomously legislate, there is a judgment tied to aesthetics and teleology that does not determine the particular on the basis of the universal, but which allows a universal to be thought on the basis of the particular.  In this reflective judgment, which Kant does not explicitly connect to aesthetics in the Critique of Judgment, there is granted a license to judge universally and subjectively the purposiveness of that which has no purpose.  In this judgment, one is ultimately allowed to think that there is a supersensible substratum connecting the sensibility of nature and the supersensibility of freedom, a noumenal reality that shows itself in teleological organization in nature, and in the doing, rescues nature from a position of total otherness (alienation?) from freedom.

Imagine John acting to save Mary from her drug addiction.  Presumably, John could not have acted so to save Mary, but did so act, and thus his act is freely done and praiseworthy because of it.  But where does John realize his free decision to do other than what he might have done and take Mary to the drug treatment center?

He seemingly must do this action wholly embodied in nature  -- his body is physical and his actions are physical events -- and thus the entire realization of his free decision so to act is subject to the determinism of nature.  So how could this free act be possible in a mechanical universe?  What are the transcendental conditions allowing for the realization of Freedom in Nature?

Kant's answer is that we are allowed to think that there is in nature purposive structure.  The heart exists to pump blood.  The pumping of the blood allows the heart to be conceived as cause.  The symmetries of nature allow a designer to be thought as cause.  Nature itself organizes itself, and in this organization points to a summum bonum as the limit of such organization, as the attractor towards which all things flow.  In the organization of nature can be found the manifestation of the supersensible, a manifestation that makes possible the realization of freedom precisely in the determinism of nature.  Kant is hoping to locate a unity to reason grounding both its theoretical and practical operations, a unity that does not, however, fall prey to the antinomies of Pure Reason, a unity that escapes the charge of the bare posit of another pulling of a metaphysical rabbit out of the hat.

An evaluation of the degree to which Kant is successful must await, however, a precise statement of the argument for the unity of reason found in the Critique of Judgment.  It is to this that I hope soon to return.