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

among all the ideas of speculative reason freedom is also the only one the possibility of which
we know a priori…because it is the condition of the moral law, which we do know” (CPrR5:4).
On the other hand, “the ideas of God and immortality, however, are not conditions of the moral
law but only conditions of the necessary object of a will determined by this law, that is, of the
mere practical use of pure reason; hence with respect to those ideas we cannot affirm that we
cognize…–I do not merely say the reality but even the possibility of them” (CPrR5:4). In fact,
this is why in the “Dialectic of pure practical reason” of the “Doctrine of the elements of pure
practical reason” of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant considers only God and immortality
as real postulates, but not freedom. Alenka Zupančič recognizes this point in Ethics of the Real.
“Unlike the two other postulates, which—as Kant stresses at the beginning of the Dialectic—do
not enter the determining ground of the will, freedom, as indissolubly linked to the moral law, is
the very determining ground of the will. Thus, in the Critique of Practical Reason freedom does
not have only the function of a postulate, but is also, as a condition of any ethics, a fact, a ‘fact of
reason.’ So in a certain sense there are only two genuine postulates: the immortality of the soul,
and God” (Zupančič 75-6). But what does it mean to know freedom practically?
When reason is used by representational knowledge it offers the thoughts of God,
immortality and freedom as knowledge. But what form do these things in themselves take? The
thing in itself that theoretical reason does not know is the transcendental object. God,
immortality and freedom are objects that are separate, external and opposed to representational
knowledge. In other words, God, immortality and freedom are objective facts. I do not mean
objective fact in the non-technical, straightforward sense. Instead, I mean it in the technical,
critical sense. Theoretical reason projects the thoughts of God, immortality and freedom as
something separate, external and opposed to itself. It is in this sense that it understands them as
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