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

positive modes of knowledge which belong to the domain of pure reason, and which, it may be,
give occasion to error solely owing to misunderstanding, while yet in actual fact they form the
goal towards which reason is directing its efforts” (CPR A796/B824). What use of reason is that?
“If it is proved that there is pure reason, its use is alone immanent; the empirically conditioned
use, which lays claim to absolute rule, is on the contrary transcendent and expresses itself in
demands and commands that go quite beyond its sphere – precisely the opposite relation from
what could be said of pure reason in its speculative use” (CPrR 5:16). This different use of
reason is practical. “Reason has a presentiment of objects which possess a great interest for it.
But when it follows the path of pure speculation, in order to approach them, they fly before it.
Presumably it may look for better fortune in the only other path which still remains open to it,
that of its practical employment” (CPR A796/B824). “Consequently,” Kant continues, “if there
be any correct employment of pure reason, in which case there must be a canon of its
employment, the canon will deal not with the speculative but with the practical employment of
reason”(CPR A797/B825). The theoretical use of reason thinks the thing in itself. However, the
practical use of reason knows the thing in itself as freedom. “It is really the concept of freedom
that, among all the ideas of pure speculative reason, alone provides such a great extension in the
field of the supersensible, though only with respect to practical cognition” (CPrR 5:103). But we
must stress that this practical knowledge is radically different than theoretical knowledge. “For,
the moral law is not concerned with the cognition of the constitution of objects that may be given
to reason from elsewhere but rather with a cognition insofar as it can itself become the ground of
the existence of objects and insofar as reason, by this cognition, has causality in a rational being,
that is, pure reason, which can be regarded as a faculty immediately determining the will” (CPrR
5:46). Reason in practice does not know freedom as an object. Instead, reason in practice knows
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