3.4 Ethics and Freedom
Last modified 05/17/2008
| Kant's system of philosophy suffers from a seeming complexity of detail, yet proceeds with almost military precision to survey the gist of a new perspective on the nature of thought and action, visible in the classic, and profound, discovery of transcendental idealism, a perfectly conceived framework to stand as a superset to 'common sense realism'. In the wake of Kant's first critique of reason, Kant seemingly moves almost as if to contradict himself, in the emergence of a triad of philosophic discourses, and attempts to formalize a metaphysically cautioned discourse on ethics. We can grab the nature of case very simply by seeing his activities in the context of the Newtonian revolution of causal science. Kant is saying that this revolution must be complemented by 'additional axiom' of freedom, and that this requires a particular construct expressed by his scaffolding of transcendental idealism. In this framework the nature of the 'self' is itself cut short on its hope of any simple empirical description. Given those limits the nature of ethical action must be understood in terms of a real human will, whose place in space-time must remain partially obscured, undoubtedly the reason his classic ethical discourse induces a double-take: it seems at once completely right, yet somehow a new metaphysical adventure, one subject to critique on its own terms. But if we stand back we can see the brilliance and simplicity of the gesture, and the cogency of its 'deductions' in the 'fact of moral consciousness'. We need not conclude that Kant has fully completed this project to see that it expresses the nature of the problem to be solved with unmatched clarity. | ||
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