It is difficult to overestimate Kant's influence in philosophy. Even those who reject his explicit theories often use his terms, whether by wondering how it could be possible for something to be "synthetic" (not a matter of meaning) and yet "a priori" (knowable independent of experience), or by asking what is the source of an ethical "imperative." Kant has sometimes been credited for almost single-handedly creating the German philosophical tradition, and it certainly is hard to imagine what Hegel's or Marx's wrings would have looked like without the influence of Kant.
Many current day writers on philosophical ethics have been influenced by Kant. Some accept the categorical imperative as a valid test of moral rightness, but more commonly one will see Kant's linking of morality and autonomy, or his analysis of moral worth as an inner acceptance of the motive of duty, or his insistence that the good is what the moral aims at as opposed to morality being defined by its aim at the good.
The impact of Kant's writing style has arguably also been extensive, on which topic the twentieth century philosophy Walter Kaufmann tartly reports, "Few philosophers since Kant have approximated his genius, but many of his shortcomings are widely shared even today, and to some extant at least this is due to his phenomenal influence." Kant's insights are often masked by his convoluted sentences and unclear technical terms. Fortunately, the second Critique is significantly more accessible than the first, but still the second Critique elicits many conflicting interpretations.
The Critique of Practical Reason can be regarded as the sequel to theCritique of Pure Reason, picking up where that earlier book left off. In the first Critique, Kant divides our judgments in two ways—the a priori (knowable before experience) versus the a posteriori (knowable through experience) and the analytic (true by virtue of meaning) versus the synthetic (true by virtue of the facts). He ultimately concludes, first, that a posteriori judgments are about how things look to us, not about how things intrinsically are, since they are filtered through our experiences, and, second, all synthetic judgments are a posteriori, since we have no access to the world other than through experience.
This second conclusion rules out the possibility of metaphysically proving the existence of God, freedom, and immortality. It does leave open, though, the right to have faith that such things exist in the way the world is in itself, the noumenal realm, since we can never know what is true in that realm. The second Critique will take this further, arguing that the correct understanding of morality requires us to believe in God, freedom, and immortality. As well as continuing from the Critique of Pure Reason, theCritique of Practical Reason lays the grounds for the Metaphysics of Morals,written nine years later in 1797, and which applies the general moral principles of the second Critique to a variety of cases.
The second Critique in some senses can be seen as the opposite of the first Critique. While the main theme of the first Critique is how little we can know about its topic, metaphysics, the second Critique is about how we can know about its topic, morality. Not only that, but some of the first Critique is arguably taken back. We are directly aware of the application of the moral law to us, and through this, we are aware of our freedom, which, it turns out, is awareness of causation from the noumenal world. More than that, not only can we believe in God and immortality, as the first Critique agreed, but it turns out that reason commands belief in them.
In a different sense, though, the second Critique furthers the work of the first. Kant describes himself in the Critique of Pure Reason as having created a revolution to counter Copernicus'. Copernicus humbles man by removing him form the center of the physical universe, but Kant elevates him by presenting the whole phenomenal world of the senses as being created by us and by our senses. In the conclusion of the second Critique, Kant picks up this metaphor again, explaining how he has now shown how the human being lies at the center of the moral universe, and through that universe man connects with the noumenal world.
Kant's comparison of the first and the second Critique in the preface and his subsequent discussion in the introduction bring out one of the oddities of Kant's writing: a tendency to model his works after one another. Here it is questionable whether the structure of the first Critique was really so suitable for this book, and whether the parallels he discusses are more illuminating or more distracting. The first Critique utilizes theoretical reasoning—roughly, philosophical thinking—to examine the limits of the potential achievements of such thinking. The second Critique, however, as Kant points out, does not use pure practical reason—decision-making based on reason and not on desire—to point out the limitations of such decision- making. For one thing, it is unclear how one could "apply" a faculty of decision-making in a book, which is better seen as a recording of theoretical reason's activity.
Mainly though, Kant is not critiquing pure practical reason but lauding it, saying that it is possible and that it is the ground of morality. True, we can say that he is thereby attacking impure practical reason. Kant believes that although his beliefs about pure practical reason are commonsensical, insofar as common sense can grasp them, philosophers are liable to go astray and enshrine the self-serving calculations of impure practical reason in the place of pure practical reason. But it remains to be seen whether anything is really gained by setting up the analogy in the first place.
A point about the comparison which is important to remember is that the Critique of Practical Reason does not simply contrast with the Critique of Pure Reason, in that it critiques the impure reason which the first Critique still left unexamined. Rather, the title of the first Critique is meant to be understood as elliptical for "The Critique of Pure Theoretical Reason," while the title of the second Critique can be understood as elliptical for "The Critique of Impure Practical Reason". The pure / impure distinction, which has to do with whether contingent, sensory factors are involved, is not the same as the theoretical / practical distinction, which has to do with the faculty of knowing versus the faculty of acting.
This book contains three sections: the Analytic, the Dialectic, and the Doctrine of Method. The Analytic presents, in both critiques, the operations of the faculty in question. In the case of the second Critique, this will turn out to be a derivation of the one principle of pure practical reason, the categorical imperative, and an argument that obeying it is equivalent to freedom. The Dialectic presents, in both Critiques, arguments that the faculty in question can go astray. In the case of the second Critique, this will be an argument that pure practical reason goes wrong when it seeks perfection in this world, as well as an argument that what we should instead do is seek perfection in the next world with God's help, making the assumption that immortality and God exist. The Doctrine of Method in the first Critique plans out the future sciences of pure theoretical reason; the Doctrine of Method in the second Critique plans out the future of educating people in the use of pure practical reason.
The Critique of Practical Reason contains the one true ultimate moral principle, the categorical imperative. However, there is no full discussion of its application. That is because Kant intends everything in the Critique of Pure Reason to proceed a priori, without any reference to what, as a matter of contingent fact, human nature happens to be like. Without such a theory, we cannot say what, concretely, our duties are. The role of the Metaphysics of Morals is to give such a theory.
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