stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

limits of sensibility” (CPR Bxxv). “Pure reason” Kant writes “is here considered in its practical
use, and consequently as proceeding from a priori principles and not from empirical determining
grounds” (CPrR 5:90). The will becomes a higher will that can determine itself when it is
determined by reason. “And thus either there is no higher faculty of desire at all or else pure
reason must be practical of itself and alone, that is, it must be able to determine the will by the
mere form of practical rule without presupposing any feeling and hence without any
representation of the agreeable or disagreeable as the matter of the faculty of desire, which is
always an empirical condition” (CPrR 5:25). Kant also puts this point in positive terms. “Then
only, insofar as reason of itself (not in the service of inclinations) determines the will, is reason a
true higher faculty of desire, to which the pathologically determinable is subordinate, and the
only is reason really, and indeed specifically, distinct from the latter, so that even the least
admixture of the latter’s impulses infringes upon its strength and superiority, just as anything at
all empirical as a condition in a mathematical demonstration degrades and destroys its dignity
and force” (CPrR 5:25). But in what sense does reason determine the will?
“Reason therefore provides laws which are imperatives, that is, objective laws of
freedom, which tell us what ought to happen—although perhaps it never does happen—therein
differing from laws of nature, which relate only to that which happens. These laws are therefore
to be entitled practical laws” (CPR A802/B830). That reason tells what ought to happen rather
than what does happen demonstrates that reason is autonomy. “Autonomy of the will is the sole
principle of all moral laws and of duties in keeping with them; heteronomy of choice, on the
other hand, not only does not ground any obligation at all but is instead opposed to the principle
of obligation and to the morality of the will. That is to say, the sole principle of morality consists
in independence from all matter of the law (namely from a desired object) and at the same time
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