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

determination of the world and self-determination. German wollen has a bit of this same
problem. However, unlike in English where the meaning more often than not falls towards the
former, in German the meaning falls towards the latter. For this reason, wollen is actually best
translated not by ‘to will’ but by ‘to want.’ Thus the will is for lack of a better word, the want.
However, that the will is the want does not mean that it is on the order of the body. In other
words, the will is not an appearance. On the contrary, Kant argues, the will is a faculty. Kant
defines the will as “the faculty of desire” (CPrR 5:55). When we acknowledge that the will is an
ability, we understand the meaning of Kant’s reason for the reversal of the legitimate and
illegitimate orders of the uses of abilities in practice compared to theory.
I have already suggested the complex nature of abilities. That something is an ability
means that it has to be actualized for it even to be. I have also argued that abilities exist as
activities. The same point holds here. That will is an ability means that it must be actualized into
an activity in order to be. We have seen that the activity of the ability to sense is intuiting. The
activity of the ability to understand is conceptualizing. But what is the activity of the ability to
want? In the context of the Critique of Practical Reason Kant talks about actualization in terms
of Bestimmung, in other words, in terms of determination. Kant argues that both reason and
feeling determine the will. When reason determines the will, the ability to want becomes an
activity that I call the rational-will. On the other hand, when feeling determines the will, the
ability to want becomes an activity I call the feeling-will. In what follows I argue that the
difference between the activity of the rational-will and the activity of the feeling-will is that in
the former case the will wants and causes whereas in the latter case it does not. In other words,
the former activity is the activity of wanting causing, whereas in the latter case it is not. Here
then is the meaning of the reason for Kant’s reversal of the legitimate and illegitimate orders of
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