The Formal And Material Elements of Kants Ethics

f morality by proving or disproving the reality of freedom. In thus dealing with freedom we do more than establish morality; we give reality also to a rational idea, freedom, in the category of causality. In so doing we give objective reality also to all the other categories, but only so far as they stand in necessary connection with the moral law.1 The Critique, therefore, besides being a contribution toEthics, is a continuation of the epistemplogy-of the Critique of Pure Reason. Knowledge, which in that work had been confined to phenomena, is here (as certitude) extended to the supersensible in so far as its formal conditions are concerned. In this work also reality is given to the ideas of God and immortality as conditions of the application of the will to its a priori object. The faculty by which reality is given to these supersensible ideas is the will, or practical reason, " a faculty either to produce objects corresponding to ideas, or to determine ourselves to the effecting of such objects." It is much more difficult to understand the movement of Kant's thought in the Critique than in the Grundlegung. In the latter, certain preliminary difficulties being overcome, it 29] 29 is not hard to see through the gradations of the three sections and the way in which the empty concepts are developed one from the other till " morality is finally reduced to the idea of freedom." In the Critique, however, Kant's historical position must be remembered; as i...