KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Transcendental Idea of Freedom 123
find no ground for thinking that any faculty is conditioned otherwise
than in a merely sensible manner" (B574). Whatever may later be
the case, at least in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant sees no special
connection between freedom and the organism.
2) Thus far it has only been said that humans have empiricaltheoretical
knowledge of themselves as causally determined inhabitants
of the Leibnizian realm of nature and apperceptive access to
themselves as inhabitants of the Leibnizian realm of grace, and that
the supersensible can without contradiction be conceived as the
cause of appearances. The second ground that Kant adduces for
singling out freedom, reads: "'Ought' [Sollen] express a kind of
necessity and of connection with grounds which is found nowhere
else in the whole of nature" (B575). The real sense of Kant's appeal
to "imperatives" in this context becomes clearer through the explanations
that he gives in the introduction to the Critique of
Judgment. There he again distinguishes between nature and freedom,
and twice stresses that nature cannot influence freedom (the
reverse is not asserted). However, even if the physical cannot act
upon the moral, nonetheless the moral ought to act on the physical
and consequently this action must be conceivable:
Hence an immense gulf is fixed between the domain of the concept of
nature, the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, the supersensible,
so that no transition from the sensible to the supersensible (and
hence by means of the theoretical use of reason) is possible, just as if they
were two different worlds, the first of which cannot have any influence on
the second; and yet the second ought to have an influence on the first, i.e.,
the concept of freedom ought to actualize in the world of sense the purpose
enjoined by its laws. Hence it must be possible to think of nature as being
such that the lawfulness in its form will harmonize with at least the
possibility of the purposes that we are to achieve in nature according to the
laws of freedom. (Bxixf; CJ, *14-15)
It is the moral ought that is meant here. Kant's reasons for
attributing causality in the material world to moral freedom, that is,
for assuming a cosmological or transcendental freedom, are moral.
He attempts to show that this transcendental idea of freedom is logically
possible, apperceptively accessible, and furthermore morally
"necessary." 89
89 Compare this position with that of the key sentence of the so-called "oldest
system program" of German Idealism: "How must a world be constituted for a
moral being?" Kant wanted only to prove the conceptual possibility of what
morality demands; his successors, however, drew conclusions about the nature of
the material world from the fact that moral agents can act in this world.