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

object theoretically means that we represent it. However, that we understand the object
practically means that we make it real. “For, it [the good or evil will] is never determined
directly by the object and the representation of it, but is instead a faculty of making a rule of
reason the motive of an action (by which an object can become real)” (CPrR 5:60). In this sense,
I understand practical freedom not so much by making it an object of representation. Rather, I
understand practical freedom by making practical freedom real. But what does it mean to make
practical freedom real? “If no determining ground of the will other than the universal lawgiving
form can serve as a law for it, such a will must be thought as altogether independent of the
natural law of appearances in their relations to one another, namely the law of causality. But such
independence is called freedom in the strictest, that is, in the transcendental, sense. Therefore a
will for which the mere lawgiving form of a maxim can alone serve as a law is free will”
(CPrR5:29). That I make practical freedom real means nothing other than that I act freely. For
this reason, Kant argues, the good will cannot be practical freedom without at the same time
being transcendental freedom. “This freedom ought not, therefore, to be conceived only
negatively as independence of empirical conditions. The faculty of reason, so regarded, would
cease to be a cause of appearances. It must also be described in positive terms, as the power of
originating a series of events” (CPR A554/B582). In this sense, Kant argues, the good will is the
concept of the understanding as transcendental freedom. “Now, since the concepts of good and
evil, as consequences of the a priori determination of the will, presuppose also a pure practical
principle and hence a causality of pure reason, they do not refer originally to object…as do the
pure concepts of the understanding or categories of reason used theoretically;…they are rather,
without exception, modi of a single category, namely that of causality, insofar as the determining
ground of causality consists in reason’s representation of a law of causality which, as the law of
117