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

cannot know freedom not so much because the determining ground of a free act exceeds our
cognitive capabilities. Instead, we cannot know freedom because freedom is the kind of thing
that has no determining ground, that is, we cannot it because it does not exist in that way. Hogan
gives textual support for this interpretation. “He [Kant] writes, for example, that ‘no one can
grasp the coming about of a free action, because it is the start of all coming about’ (R4180);
again, we must not ‘make the conditions of possible knowledge of things into conditions of
things [in themselves]: for if we do this then freedom is destroyed’ (R6317); or again, ‘The
possibility of freedom cannot be grasped because one cannot grasp any first beginning…For our
understanding cognizes existence through experience, but reason comprehends it when it
cognizes it a priori, that is through grounds…Now first beginnings have no grounds, thus no
comprehension through reason is possible” (R4338; cf. R4006, R4156, R5185, Ak 28:332-3)”
(Hogan 56). Hogan concludes that “Kant’s mature philosophy thus holds…that free acts lack a
determining ground through which they could be non-empirically cognized in principle” (Hogan
56). In this sense, Hogan argues, representational self-knowledge does not so much fail because
it does its job badly. It fails because the job that it does so well is inappropriate for what it is
trying to accomplish. Still, Hogan argues, we learn from failures just as much as we learn from
successes. “Kant’s claim to know that there is nothing through which some features of things in
themselves could be non-empirically known is a claim to substantive knowledge of the
metaphysical constitution of things in themselves. This substantive claim does not conflict with
Kant’s global denial of knowledge of things in themselves, it is rather part of that denial. As a
metaphysical claim regarding reality in itself, it does however provide Kant with a key toehold in
the supersensible, and anchors further conclusions about that realm” (Hogan 60). That
representational self-knowledge does not know freedom means that it knows that freedom is the
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