Critique of Practical Reason
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~76,800 words · 365 passages
Cite this work
- APAImmanuel Kant. (n.d.). Critique of Practical Reason. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/immanuel-kant/critique-of-practical-reason
- MLAImmanuel Kant. "Critique of Practical Reason." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/immanuel-kant/critique-of-practical-reason.
- ChicagoImmanuel Kant. Critique of Practical Reason. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/immanuel-kant/critique-of-practical-reason.
What it is about
The second Critique in English: how reason can determine the will, and what it means for a moral law to be unconditional.
Context and history
It contains the moral law stated as a fact of reason, and the famous close on 'the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me'. This is an old English translation, in the public domain. The German original is also in the catalogue, and is what should be cited.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
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.
Themes in this work
Quotes
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”
“Morality is not properly the doctrine how we should make ourselves happy, but how we should become worthy of happiness.”