ABSTRACT

Immanuel Kant, in “The Critique of Pure Reason,” showed at least the possibility of free will, in that transcendental freedom is at any rate perfectly compatible with natural necessity. For human beings there are two selves—the object self known empirically through the senses and therefore determined like all other objects, and the subject self known through pure apperception and in relation to which alone are phenomena determined. The noumenal cause of phenomena Kant called the intelligible or non-sensuous cause, in that it was outside space and time; it existed out of and apart from the series of phenomena, yet its effects were to be found in the series of phenomena. Though when man cognizes himself as object he is certainly a phenomenon, and subject to necessity like all other phenomena, the awareness he has of his actions in pure apperception is a consciousness of a free, active, determining self, and it is this consciousness that Kant means by practical reason.