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

freedom, reason gives to itself and thereby proves itself a priori to be practical” (CPrR 5:65). I
understand practical freedom not by representing it as an object, but by making it into the
transcendental freedom. This is the sense in which the good will is one of the “categories of
freedom” (CPrR 5:65) (the other being evil). The good that is the object of the autonomous will
is the action itself. “Thus good or evil is, strictly speaking, referred to action, not to the person’s
state of feeling, and if anything is to be good or evil absolutely (and in every respect and without
any further condition), or is to be held as such, it would be only the way of acting, the maxim of
the will, and consequently the acting person himself as a good or evil human being, that could be
so called, but not a thing” (CPrR 5:60). Thus Kant concludes that the object of the autonomous
will is not just the good will as practical freedom but also as transcendental freedom. But this is
nothing other than what it means to say that practical knowledge is an actualization. Reason
actualizes itself in the good will as practical freedom and as transcendental freedom. “Practical
reason, on the contrary, since it does not have to do with objects for the sake of cognizing them
but with its own ability to make them real (conformably with cognition of them), that is, with a
will that is a causality inasmuch as reason contains its determining ground;…it follows that a
critique of the Analytic of reason, insofar as it is to be a practical reason (and this is the real
problem), must begin from the possibility of practical principles a priori” (CPrR 5:90). But the
good will as practical freedom and transcendental freedom is not the only object of the
autonomous will.
I would like to draw together the two claims that I am making. I argue that the
autonomous will does have an object. However I argue that this object is not the determining
ground of the will. Instead, it is the object that the autonomous will actualizes. But what is this
object? It is called the good will. However, when we look into the good will we recognize that
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