Chapter 1 - Kant’s Justification of the “Fact of Reason” and the Objective Reality of Freedom from a “Practical Point of View”

Summary

In this chapter, I argue that Kant does not offer a theoretical proof of the normative primacy of the moral law and, hence, sees no place for a deduction of its validity. Instead, his efforts are aimed at “showing” the objective reality of morality in one’s actual experience. However, this “showing” cannot stand on its own insofar as it presupposes an interpretive theoretical framework which consists in drawing an analogy between theoretical and practical reason and which relies on the truth of transcendental idealism. I refer to this special strategy of Kant’s justification as his justification from a “practical point of view.” From this follows our cognition of the objective reality of freedom which should not be understood as a theoretical inference from one piece of theoretical knowledge to another of some existent empirical thing but as a form of practical cognition.