KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Subcontrary Oppositions 117
since the concept cannot be given the appropriate sensible intuition.
This is true of everything supersensible. But Kant limits his claims
even more: "It has not even been our intention to prove the possibility
of freedom. For in this also we should not have succeeded ... "
(B586). The transcendental possibility of freedom can also not be
proved, for a spontaneously acting thing (a thing not fully determined
causally) cannot be subsumed under the category of causality
and is therefore not the object of a possible experience according to
the principle: "the conditions of the possibility of experience in general
are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience"
(B197). The only thing that Kant might be able to prove in this
connection is the logical possibility of freedom, i.e. that the concept
or the "transcendental idea" of freedom can be conceived without internal
contradiction or contradiction to the a priori conditions of
experience. Kant maintains that the complete causal determinism
of the phenomenal world does not contradict the causality of
freedom. "What we have been able to show, and what we have alone
been concerned to show, is that this antinomy rests on a sheer
illusion, and that causality through freedom is at least n o t
incompatible with nature" (B586).
Kant's conception of freedom must now be explicated, and it
must be shown how freedom can sensibly be ascribed causality in
the phenomenal world. The freedom under discussion is the "power
of beginning a state spontaneously [von selbst]" (B561; cf. B476,
B570-72). However, there are three different concepts of freedom
involved here, which must be distinguished; I shall call them psychological,
moral, and cosmological or transcendental freedom.
Psychological freedom or the spontaneity of phenomena is the freedom
asserted in the uncorrected thesis and denied in the corrected
antithesis. Moral freedom or "freedom in the practical sense" is
"the will's independence of coercion through sensuous impulses"
(B562). This is the freedom that is discussed in the Foundations of
the Metaphysics of Morals and in the Critique of Practical Reason as
moral legislation and is the object of practical reason. Moral freedom
is not problematized at all in the Critique of Pure Reason and is
not at all affected by the antinomy; the moral validity of the laws of
freedom depends on practical reason and is not affected one way or
the other by the antinomies of theoretical reason. The freedom that
is dealt with in the resolution of the antinomy is cosmological freedom,
which asserts that moral legislation can also be the cause of