TTHE
CRITIQUE OF PRATICAL REASON
Immanuel Kant
- PREFACE
-
-
- This work is
called the Critique of Practical Reason, not
of the
- pure practical
reason, although its parallelism with the
speculative
- critique would
seem to require the latter term. The reason of
this
- appears
sufficiently from the treatise itself. Its
business is to show that
there is pure practical reason, and for this
purpose it
- criticizes the
entire practical faculty of reason. If it
succeeds in
- this, it has
no need to criticize the pure faculty itself
in order
- to see whether
reason in making such a claim does not
presumptuously overstep
itself (as is the case with the speculative
reason). For if,
as pure reason, it is actually practical, it
proves its own reality
and that of its concepts by fact, and all
disputation against
the possibility of its being real is futile.
-
- With this
faculty, transcendental freedom is also
established;
- freedom,
namely, in that absolute sense in which
speculative reason required
it in its use of the concept of causality in
order to
- escape the
antinomy into which it inevitably falls, when
in the
- chain of cause
and effect it tries to think the unconditioned.
- Speculative
reason could only exhibit this concept (of
freedom)
- problematically
as not impossible to thought, without assuring
it
- any objective
reality, and merely lest the supposed
impossibility of
- what it must
at least allow to be thinkable should endanger
its very being
and plunge it into an abyss of scepticism.
-
- Inasmuch as
the reality of the concept of freedom is
proved by an
- apodeictic law
of practical reason, it is the keystone of the
whole
- system of pure
reason, even the speculative, and all other
concepts (those
of God and immortality) which, as being mere
ideas, remain in it
unsupported, now attach themselves to this
concept, and by it obtain
consistence and objective reality; that is to
say, their
- possibility is
proved by the fact that freedom actually
exists, for
- this idea is
revealed by the moral law
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