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KANT, SCIENCE, AND HUMAN NATURE

PAUL GUYER

University of Pennsylvania

Hannas Goals and Mine Robert Hannas Kant, Science, and Human Nature1 is an ambitious and challenging work. Hannas goal is to provide a charitable reinterpretation of Kants version of scientic realism and his defense of a libertarian conception of freedom of the will that will avoid the refuge of a strong version of transcendental idealism, that is, one that takes spatiality, temporality, causality, and the other categories of the understanding to be imposed on ultimate reality by ultimate mind, which, whatever properties they both might really have, denitely do not have spatiality, temporality, causality, and so onin other worlds, transcendental idealism on the so-called two-worlds interpretation. The key to Hannas solution is ascribing to Kant a combination of what he calls manifest scientic realism and a two-concept or two-property interpretation of transcendental idealism. According to the former, objects really have the macroscopic spatiotemporal and causal properties that they appear to have as well as whatever microscopic properties that can be associated with those macroscopic properties, but not all of their manifest macroscopic properties are exhausted by the rst set of properties, and they also manifestly have freedom of the will. In particular, Hanna argues that the macroscopically manifest properties of organic life cannot be reduced to the equally macroscopically manifest properties of mechanical causation but are not ontologically incompatible with them either, that is, not possibly ascribable to one and the same kind of being, and that the properties of organic life can in turn support the ascription to human beings of the negatively noumenal property of being able to act in accordance with reasons even when that seems incompatible with mechanical causation, thus libertarian freedom of the will is not merely compatible with mechanical causation but is also itself part of what is manifestly real, grounded as it is in the manifest properties of organic life in human beings and not in some mysterious behind-the-scenes noumenon in a positive sense. I agree with certain of Hannas assumptions, but cannot accept his ascription of this view to Kant nor the suggestion that it is a viable solution to the problem of free will. I agree with Hanna that a charitable reconstruction of Kants philosophy should avoid a strong or two-worlds interpretation of transcendental idealism, because, as I have long argued, this view is not only implausible but is founded on unsound arguments. But strong transcendental idealism is so pervasive in Kant, above all, in his treatment of the freedom of the will, that I do not see how any plausible interpretation of Kant can eliminate it. In particular, I think that a strong form of transcendental idealism is
1. R. Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).

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central to Kants own attempt to reconcile mechanical causation with the peculiarities of organic life, and that these two ideas cannot be combined in a one-level manifest realism to yield a charitable interpretation rather than radical reconstruction of Kants own philosophy. That is, mechanical causality and libertarian freedom of the will cannot be combined in a one-level manifest realism in anything resembling Kants own philosophy. For me, the only charitable approach to Kant on freedom of the will is to reconstruct his normative moral and political philosophy as a theory of the ultimate and unconditional value of the intrapersonally and interpersonally consistent realization of practical rather than transcendental freedom in choice and action; but, then, to reject his assumption that every human being no matter what his/her prior history is always free to act in accordance with the normative demands of morality in favor of the implication of his discussions of imputation in his lectures on ethics, namely, that responsiveness to reason or reasons is an empirically ascertainable and explicable condition of human beings and one that, in particular, can be empirically ascertained to come in different degrees, to vary in degree in different human beings, in different ages of human lives, even within particular days and weeks in human lives (depending on how much an agent has drunk and all sorts of other contingent factors). In what follows, I will not attempt to defend my own conception of what a charitable response to Kant on freedom of the will is, however, but I will discuss what I take to be several of the key problems in Hannas approach. The Dispute over Realism Hannas argument is spread over 450 nely printed pages replete with a wide range of references in both Kant and recent analytic philosophy, and in the space available to me, I cannot possibly give an adequate exposition of it before proceeding to my criticisms. I will give only a quick sketch of it. The work is divided into two parts, Empirical Realism and Scientic Realism and The Practical Foundations of the Exact Sciences, each of which is in turn divided into four chapters. In part I, the rst two chapters present Hannas interpretation of Kants direct perceptual realism, chapter 1 presenting an interpretation of Kants Refutation of Idealism, according to which the nerve of the argument is that self-consciousness requires a spatial substratum for experience and that the representation of space requires orientation in it by means of the axes originating in ones own body, while chapter 2 interprets Kants notion of intuition as a form of what is now called non-conceptual content. Chapters 3 and 4 then contrast the direct perceptual realism described in the rst two chapters to what Hanna takes to be the reigning orthodoxy in contemporary scientic realism, according to which what is real is not just a microscopic realm of real essences, such as atomic or molecular structure (where gold is essentially dened by having the atomic weight of 79 or water by having the molecular structure H2O), but a noumenal realm of empirically inaccessible microphysical structures or essences. Hanna takes this conception of noumenal 16
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microphysical essential structure to be not only implausible in its own right but also wedded to an implausible theory of a posteriori or empirically knowable metaphysical necessities, and instead prefers manifest or direct realism combined with the traditional Kantian view that philosophically signicant synthetic necessities are known only a priori. In part II, Hanna then turns rst to the nature of a priori knowledge, arguing rst that the knowledge of truth in general (chapter 5), mathematical truth in particular (chapter 6), and any other necessary truth (chapter 7) all require practical rationality, or that there cannot be a scientically knowable world in which human value, human action, and human morality are really impossible (p. 252), and then that the mechanical worldview expounded in Kants Analogies of Experience is part of manifest reality but compatible with organic life capable of supporting human value, human action, and human morality as another part of manifest reality this is his two-concept or two-property interpretation of transcendental idealism. I have no fundamental objections to Hannas claim that Kantian intuitions are nonconceptual content or to his claim that Kants concept of selfconsciousness entails our own embodiment, although I have objections to the details of Hannas interpretations of Kant in chapters 1 and 2, in particular, to his interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism as directly invoking rather than indirectly implying the necessity of our own embodiment: On my own interpretation, the Refutation does not work by directly arguing that the representation of space is a condition of the possibility of empirically determinate self-consciousness and then invoking Kants earlier view (from the 1768 essay on Regions in Space) that our own body is necessary for orientation in space; it rather works by arguing that supposing that the sequence of our own representations can only be made determinate by being correlated with a law-governed sequence of states of objects that must be conceived as independent of our representations of them, a set of facts about them that we represent by representing them as located in space apart from our own bodies but as determining the sequence of our mental states by acting on our bodies, although the latter is only hinted at in some of Kants post-1788 reections on the Refutation and not in the published text at all. But I do not think that the details of Hannas interpretation of the Refutation play any role in his ultimate interpretation of Kants position on the freedom of the will, so I will not pursue this dispute further here. Hannas attack upon what he takes to be the assumption of noumenal microphysical essences in contemporary scientic realism is clearly meant to discredit any attempt to use strong transcendental idealism in contemporary philosophy and to prepare the way for his rescue of Kants theory of the freedom of the will by some version of weak transcendental idealism, so I had better say something about that. I have to say that I nd Hannas interpretation of contemporary scientic realism puzzling and unconvincing, because I do not think it would have occurred to any proponent of the recent orthodoxy to describe his position in Kantian terms, that is, to conceive of the microphysical essences posited by sciencemolecules, atoms, quarks, strings, whateveras in principle inaccessible to the human senses and all 17
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technological aids thereto. Hanna conceives of contemporary scientic realism as an amalgamation of the KripkePutnam theory of natural kinds designated by rigid designators referring to microphysical real essences, as water, for example, designates not the phenomenal properties of water in our particular world but rather H2O in all possible worlds, with the view that the microphysical real essence is noumenal, and thus necessarily inaccessible to our sensory perception, whether unaided or extended by any devices from magnifying glasses to electron microscopes. He portrays this view by adding layers to the conception of realism, beginning with minimal scientic realism that is committed only to the two theses that knowable things exist in objectively real physical space and not merely in consciousness and have explanatory primacy in our best theory of the natural world (p. 141), adding to that two further theses to get noumenal scientic realism, namely, that Each knowable physical spatial thing is ontologically constituted by a set of intrinsic non-relational properties and are transcendent, that is, exist whether human minds do not or cannot exist; whether if they do exist, do not know or cannot know them; and are necessarily . . . not directly and non-conceptually humanly perceivable or observable but instead only at best either semantically overdetermined by background theories and concepts or else indirectly humanly perceivable or determinable (pp. 1412); and then nally adding to that yet two more theses to get maximal scientic realism, namely, that There is exactly one true description of the world of knowable physical spatial things and that The essential properties of all knowable physical spatial things are microphysical properties (p. 142). The conjunction of the last thesis with the premise that the essential properties of natural physical objects are transcendent yields the result that their microphysical essential properties are necessarily nonperceivable or only indirectly perceivable. To this maximal scientic realism, which he takes to be current dogma, Hanna opposes and prefers what he calls Kants own manifest realism, according to which, All the essential properties of dynamic individual material substances, natural kinds, events, processes, and forces in objectively real physical space and time are nothing but their directly humanly perceivable or observable intrinsic structural macrophysical properties, Or in other words, for Kant, both cognitively and ontologically speaking, nothing is hidden (p. 142). Hanna claims that Kants physical theory, according to which, matter is constituted by distributions of attractive and repulsive forces in a single all-pervasive ether, is entirely consistent with this manifest realism, because Kants (or the BoscovichianKantian) theory of matter represents a transition from metaphysical substantialism and compositionalism about matter, to metaphysical structuralism about matter, according to which, Individual material things and material kinds are not ontologically independent things-in-themselves, each dened by a set of intrinsic non-relational, mind-independent, non-sensory, unobservable properties, but instead are 18
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essentially determinate positions or determinate roles in a maximally large relational structure or system of empirical nature as a whole. On this theory, matter is essentially relationally constituted by a real spatiotemporally-organized structural complex of attractive and repulsive forces that are nomologically determined by synthetically necessary causal and interactive laws and The plurality of particular macrophysical material substances . . . are nothing but positions in that total spatiotemporal structural complex, or otherwise put, are nothing but determinate causal roles, without any hidden causal-role players (p. 149). I nd both sides of Hannas contrast between contemporary maximal, noumenal, essentialist scientic realism on the one hand and Kants manifest realist ether theory on the other difcult to accept. On the one hand, it seems to me that Hanna attributes to scientic realism a Kantian notion of the noumenal that no contemporary advocate of the doctrine would accept. Hanna appeals to Lockes conception of essentially unknowable real essence as if that is something that contemporary realists are supposed to have taken on board, which I am sure many of the latter would be surprised to hear, and in any case, his attribution to Locke of the view that microphysical properties and physical microstructures are in fact necessarily hidden from . . . empirical inquiry and therefore totally empirically inaccessible (p. 160, my emphasis) is debatable. According to Hanna, the Lockean doctrine suggests . . . that humans are simply not cognitively constituted so as to have direct or even an indirect, progressive, or regressive epistemological access to the . . . uncommonsensical entitiesmicrophysical particles, energy quanta . . . etcrequired by the scientic image of the world. . . . For, in order for images to make sense, there must be isomorphisms, analogies, or some other sort of basic similarity of properties between the image and imaged object. But, as cognizers with our specic sort of sensibility and our specic sort of sensibility-funded conceptual capacities, we are not cognitively equipped to bring about any sort of signicant mapping from the microphysical order into the macrophysical order. (pp. 1612) But that is exactly what Locke thinks we can do, or more precisely, his version of the primarysecondary quality distinction is based on the assumption that we can transfer inferences from the macrophysical to the microphysical order. Locke surely thinks that we do not have microscopic eyes, and do not directly perceive the microscopic particles of macroscopic objects along with their causally efcacious primary qualities; but he never claims that we necessarily lack microscopic eyes. Moreover, what he does in his chapter on primary and secondary qualities2 is precisely to infer to the existence and general character of microscopic particles from the behavior of macroscopic bodies and
2. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Book II, ch. viii.

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processesto realize, in general terms, what the fundamental constituents of matter and their qualities must be like, we simply have to think about what can possibly change in a macroscopic body like a grain of corn if we chop it into ner and ner pieces. Take a grain of Wheat, divide it into two parts, each part has still Solidity, Extension, Figure, and Mobility; divide it again, and it retains still the same qualities; and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible, they must retain still each of them all of those qualities. For division . . . only makes two, or more distinct separate Masses of matter, of that which was one before.3 Thus, for Locke, microphysical properties and microstructures are not, at least in their general character, necessarily hidden from empirical inquiry. Of course, modern science has moved on from Lockes conception of microstructure, beginning with attractive and repulsive forces, but proceeds on the basis of the assumption that there are intelligible analogies or isomorphisms between macrophysical and microphysical propertiesthink of the double helix. The practicing natural scientist does not assume that microstructure is necessarily inaccessible to us, and I do not understand why this view should be attributed to contemporary scientic realist philosophers either. A reason apart from Lockes supposed noumenal realism for the attribution of this view to contemporary scientic realism is Hannas identication of noumenal properties with intrinsic non-relational properties, and then the attribution to contemporary scientic realism of the view that the fundamental properties of matter are intrinsic nonrelational properties and therefore noumenal. This seems to me doubly problematic: The identication of noumenal properties as Kant understands them with intrinsic nonrelational properties, in which Hanna follows Rae Langton, is extremely problematic, because in spite of Kants appeal to such a conception in one argument for transcendental idealism added to the second edition of the Transcendental Aesthetic (B 667; Hanna, p. 233), the two most fundamental roles of things-in-themselves or the noumenal for Kant are to ground appearances in the theoretical sphere and to ground empirical character in the practical spherein other words, because the relation of ground and consequence is for Kant, so to speak, the paradigmatic relation, noumena are, if anything, essentially relational. And further, I fail to understand why any contemporary scientic realist is supposed to believe that the most fundamental properties of matter are essentially nonrelational, and therefore noumenal on the supposed Kantian conception of the noumenalwhether scientic realists are supposed to stop at the molecular level (H2O), the atomic level (golds atomic weight of 79), the subatomic level (protons, electrons), the sub-subatomic level (quarks), or some level even ner than that (strings), it seems to me that they are always positing entities to which it is essential that they be able to and do stand in various kinds of relations. So, I just do not get Hannas assumption that scientic realism takes the fundamental properties of matter to be essentially nonrelational nor his ascription of the specically Kantian notion of the noumenal and therefore necessarily inaccessible to the fundamental properties of matter.

3. Ibid., 9.

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However, I also have problems in understanding Kants physical theory as a form of manifest realism. Kant himself claims in the Opus Postumum4 that the ether is necessarily imperceptible and known to exist only by a priori argumentsthe existence of such a material is not an object of experience and derived from thence, i.e., empirically provable, but must rather be postulated as the object of a possible experience which can also take place conditionally indirectly a priori (21: 576)although that does not lead him to think of it as noumenalfor it is also essentially spatiotemporal, indeed, the hypostatized space itself in which everything moves (21: 224), and, therefore, in Kants view, necessarily phenomenal. Kant argues that there must be an ether in order to explain how forces can be causally efcacious across distances in which there is obviously no perceptible matter, and to explain in particular the special case in which objects (constituted by distributions of attractive and repulsive forces) are causally efcacious on our own sensory organs (themselves, of course, also constituted by such forces) across distances in which we do not perceive an intervening continuum of macroscopic visible or tangible objects the agitation of the senses of the subject through some matter is that which alone makes possible outer perceptions and these moving forces must be thought of a priori as connected in one experience without gaps (21: 582). In other words, our knowledge of the existence of the ether is strictly inferential, not perceptual. Kant did not argue for the existence of the ether in the Critique of Pure Reason, but there, too, allowed that science includes strictly inferential knowledge to imperceptible objects, as when we infer from visible patterns of iron lings to imperceptible magnetic eldswe cognize the existence of a magnetic matter penetrating all bodies from the perception of attracted iron lings, although an immediate perception of this matter is impossible for us given the constitution of our organs (A 226/B 273, emphasis added). Of course, Hanna recognizes Kants use of inferential cognition in his actual scientic views, and attempts to draw a distinction between the bad inference to the imperceptible in maximal and noumenal scientic realism and the good inference to the imperceptible in Kants manifest realism by distinguishing inference to the microphysical (bad) from inference to the microscopic (good). Contemporary scientic realists are supposed to get themselves into a x because they want to claim that empirical knowledge of microphysical essences is possible, But since by their own . . . metaphysical theory the essences actually are not and never can be cognized (sense perceived or empirically conceptualized), there is very good reason to doubt on their account that natural scientists have . . . any empirical knowledge whatsoever of the noumenal microphysical . . . world (p. 168). On Kants manifest realism, however, such things as cloud chambers, Geiger counters, or cyclotrons, . . . telescopes or microscopes . . . all extend the limits of the directly perceivable, thus, while they detect previously undetected ne-grained details of the causal-dynamic natural world . . . they do not go beyond the domain of the manifest. Thus
4. I. Kant, Opus postumum, ed. E. Frster, trans. E. Frster and M. Rosen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Passages in this and in further Kantian works other than the Critique of Pure Reason will be located by the volume and page number of the Akademie edition.

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entities accessible to human perception only via detection technology are still essentially manifest, unhidden entities. They are natural phenomena . . . in sharp contrast with microphysical noumenal entities, which as Verstandeswesen are consistently thinkable but never apparent. For the Kantian manifest realist, Microscopes are not noumenoscopes (p. 239). Hannas claim is that contemporary scientic realism posits an unintelligible inference from the empirical level of macrophysical objects to a noumenal level of microphysical structure, while Kantian manifest realism supposes only a harmless extension of natural, unaided human perception by devices that of course can themselves be explained in intelligible natural terms. But this stretches my sense of direct perception or realism beyond recognition and goes in the face of Kants own explicit assertion that such a theoretical entity as the ether is not known by empirical observation but is known entirely a priori, while saddling other scientic realists with Kants own distinction between phenomena and noumena in a way that I cannot imagine any would accept. To be sure, for Kant, genuine scientic inference is always from something spatiotemporal (e.g., patterns of iron lings) to something else spatiotemporal (e.g., magnetic elds) and, therefore, by reason of his arguments for transcendental idealism, which have nothing at all to do with the nature of such inference, necessarily phenomenal, while other realists, who surely do not afrm Kants own arguments for transcendental idealisms, are nevertheless supposed to conceive of the ultimate objects of science as noumenal. I cannot buy either the account of contemporary scientic realism as noumenal or of Kants own version of inferential science as direct or manifest realism. Transcendental Idealism and Freedom of the Will Because I have just mentioned transcendental idealism, I will have to say a word about that perennially vexed topic, although Hannas reconstruction of Kants defense of freedom of the will, which is what I am ultimately interested in, does not, as far as I can see, actually make direct use of the rst part of his reconstruction of transcendental idealism. There are two stages to Hannas treatment of transcendental idealism. The rst stage is the rejection of what he calls a strong interpretation of Kants transcendental idealism in favor of a weak one. Strong transcendental idealism is the doctrine that things in themselves are mind-independent, non-sensory, unobservable Really Real entities while space and time are nothing but subjective forms of human intuition, and [since] every objective appearance or empirical object is intrinsically structured by space and time, then necessarily every empirical object is nothing but a subjective, humanly mind-dependent entity on which spatiotemporal form is imposed by the human mind, while weak transcendental idealism . . . says that the existence of space and time requires only the necessary possibility [emphasis added] of minds capable of adequately representing space and time by means of pure or formal intuition, and does not say that space and 22
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time are nothing but necessary a priori subjective forms of human sensory intuition (pp. 424). Here, I just want to mention that, on the one hand, although there can be no question that Kants arguments for strong transcendental idealism are awed, there can also be no doubt that Kant held that view (Space is nothing other than merely the form of all appearances of outer sense; A 26/B 42), while, on the other hand, I really do not understand the concept of the necessary possibility of the human perception of space and time which denes Hannas notion of weak transcendental idealism. According to Hanna, Weak transcendental idealism says that by their very nature actual space and actual time properly satisfy, or are correctly represented by, our pure or formal intuitions of them. Therefore the actual or possible existence of material things . . . in actual objectively real spacetime directly entails the necessary possibility of rational human minds. . . . actual space and time can exist in a possible world (including of course the actual world) even if no rational human minds actually exist in that world . . . provided that if there were rational human minds in that world, then they could correctly represent space and time. (p. 169) This seems to me, rst, to y in the face of Kants own assertion that We can . . . speak of space, extended beings, and so on, only from the human standpoint (A 26/B 42), in other words, that we cannot speak of the very nature of actual space and time independently of the constant form of human receptivity (A 27/B 43). And I fail to see how the actual or possible existence of material things in objectively real sense is supposed to entail the necessary possibility of human minds. Hanna suggests that Kant accepts C.I. Lewiss modal logic S4 or else some conservative extension of S4, so that whatever is actual is thereby also possible and whatever is possible is thereby also necessarily possible (p. 304), but even if we were to concede this, it would not seem to explain why the actual existence of space should imply the necessary possibility of human perceivers of space; it would rather imply that the actual existence of human perceivers of space implies their necessary possibility, which nobody would deny, because it really does not mean anything more than that the actual existence of something entails (i.e., necessitates) its possibility. In other words, S4 does not imply that the existence of space entails the necessary possibility of perceivers, but only that the existence of perceivers implies their necessary possibility. Moreover, it seems to me, any foundation of an interpretation of transcendental idealism in a supposedly purely logical principle of inference, even if were valid, would make the truth of the doctrine analytic a priori rather than synthetic a priori, which, I take it, would be an unKantian and therefore uncharitable result. And at a more intuitive level, I just do not understand what is being claimed with this necessary possibilitythat in a spatiotemporal world of cosmic dust and rays, it could not have been impossible for perceivers sufciently like us to be capable of perceiving and representing that world to have evolved? If this just means that there is no logical contradiction between the concept of such a world and the concept of human23
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like representers of it, then we just have a trivial logical possibility; but I am not clear what a stronger sense of, as Kant would call it, real necessary possibility is supposed to be. But in any case, Hannas reconstruction of Kants solution to the age-old conundrum of the freedom of the will, so far as I understand it, does not turn on the ascription to Kant of this notion of weak transcendental idealism but on something else, namely, Hannas ascription to him of a two-concept or twoproperty interpretation of transcendental idealism. Hanna rejects each of what many have regarded as the two alternative models for the interpretation of transcendental idealism, namely, the Two-World or Two-Object Theory, the traditional metaphysical approach on which appearances and things in themselves are ontologically distinct kinds of things, and the Two-Aspect or Two-Standpoint Theory, the epistemological approach of Gerold Prauss and Henry Allison according to which these terms just refer to two different ways in which we can represent what is ontologically a single kind of thing. The problem with the two-world approach, according to Hanna, is that it assumes causal relations between kinds of things that cannot be causally related, namely, spatiotemporal phenomena and nonspatiotemporal noumena, and, as if that were not bad enough, also indulges in causal overdetermination, on which one phenomenal event (an action) has two different kinds of causes, one phenomenal and one noumenal. The problem with the two-aspect approach is that it neither explains why we perversely persist in ascribing contradictory intrinsic propertiesfor example, being subject to phenomenal causation in accordance with laws of nature and being subject to noumenal causation in accordance with laws of pure practical reasonto the same objects, nor does it justify our beliefs in the objective correctness of those ascriptions (pp. 4223). He further rejects approaches to the problem of the freedom of the will in particular that would sally forth under the aegis of these two approaches to the phenomenalnoumenal distinction in general, namely, the Timeless Agency Theory, an application of the Two-World Theory, and the Regulative Idea Theory, which would exploit the Two-Aspect Theory to say that not only can we, but we should, think of phenomenal actions as if they could implement the moral law as well as seeking always to extend the scope of natural causal laws (pp. 4245). Instead, Hanna proposes what he calls the Two-Concept or Two-Property Theory, the core of which is that while we should certainly assert the existence and causal efcacy of macroscopical empirical phenomenal things on the one hand, on the other hand, we should remain consistently agnostic about and methodologically eliminate positive concepts of noumenal things-in-themselves while however attributing to phenomena negative noumenal properties, because both negative noumenal properties and phenomenal properties are not only instantiable but also actually instantiated, and directly known or felt by us to be instantiated (pp. 4256). By negative noumenal properties, Hanna means non-sensible properties which are also spontaneously causally efcacious or nomologically sufcient (for example, the property of trying to do the right thing even when it is counter-prudential, or against the animals best interests or strongest desire, to do the right thing) (p. 427). The idea seems to be that doing the right 24
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thing or trying to do the right thing is not a sensible property like yellow or smooth, so it is not a phenomenal property, but it is not in any way obviously incompatible with phenomenal properties such as yellow or smooth, so it can be attributed to a phenomenal object without contradiction of its phenomenal properties. So far, so good, and perhaps one might argue (although Hanna does not) that there is precedent for a conception of merely negative noumenal properties in the concept of intelligible or noumenal possession that Kant develops in his analysis of property rights in the Doctrine of Right of the Metaphysics of Morals, where intelligible possession consists not in a sensible relation between a person and an object, a persons visible act of grasping or sitting upon an object, but in a nonperceptible relation among the wills of persons regarding an object, namely, their agreement as to who may use the object without hindrance from others. Of course, that notion of intelligible possession by itself does not require any particular interpretation of what it is to have a will, certainly not a positively noumenal conception of free will as not determined by any laws of nature, so we can accept Kants use of the idea of intelligible possession in his theory of property without worrying about approaches to transcendental idealism. Matters are not so simple in the present case, however, for Hanna does not content himself with the simple claim that being able to act in accordance with moral law is just not the kind of thing that is sensibly perceivable and therefore cannot contradict any of the properties of an agent that are sensibly perceivable. Instead, he goes on to ascribe absolute spontaneous causal efcacy or nomological sufciency to the negatively noumenal self-legislating will (p. 427), an ability to bring about a natural causal singularity in contrast to mechanistic causality, and further claims that the existence of such a non-mechanistic and new or one-off causally-dynamic law of nature (p. 429) is epistemologically manifest, part of Kants supposed manifest realism, in a persons non-conceptual, non-propositional consciousness of her own life, in the human conscious experience of embodiment (p. 435), and in her teleological inner sense intuitions of [her] own biological life, a real biological fact that she cannot scientically know but can still truly feel (p. 436). On this view, both mechanistic laws of nature and the laws of one-off causality are supposed to be able to hold, at one and the same level of reality, the level of spatiotemporal reality that is the only level of reality there is, and moreover, the existence of the latter kind of causality is supposed to be manifest in our feeling of our own life. Hanna takes the existence of such a felt biological fact as a persons own spontaneity and its sufciency for the demonstration of freedom of the will as the capacity to create causal singularities and, thus, to ground freedom from the universal constraint of mechanistic laws of nature, to be the lesson of the Critique of the Power of Judgment.5 I cannot accept this interpretation of the third Critique. Although Kant did announce in the introduction to this work that its aim is to demonstrate that the concept of freedom . . . should have an inuence on the domain of the
5. I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. P. Guyer, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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concept of nature, he makes it clear, as Hannas own quotation of this passage reveals, that it is the concept of nature, as the supersensible, that is, to have this inuence.6 That is, he does not claim that freedom is the concept of a nonsensible property that can nevertheless be realized without problem inside of space and time, as Hanna puts it (p. 427), and is thus entirely compatible with the other, deterministically causal, sensible properties of objects in nature, as Hannas two-concept interpretation of transcendental idealism would have it; rather, Kant argues that the phenomenon of organic life itself can only be understood by means of a rm division between sensible and supersensible or positively noumenal properties, and that this fact about the comprehension of organic life gives us further evidence for the correctness and necessity of the two-level or two-world solution to the problem of the freedom of the will. I take this to be the lesson of Kants antinomy of the power of judgment in the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment. Kants resolution of this antinomy does not support Hannas two-concept approach. The antinomy is supposed to obtain between the thesis All generation of material things and their forms must be judged as possible in accordance with merely mechanical laws and the antithesis Some products of material nature cannot be judged as possible according to merely mechanical laws.7 Kant starts his discussion of this antinomy by saying that there would really be a contradiction between thesis and antithesis if both were taken as objective principles for the determining power of judgment, that is, constitutive principles about objects of experience, but that if they are both taken as maxims of a reecting power of judgment, that is, as regulative principles about what sorts of explanations we should seek, then there is no contradiction between them. However, Kant begins his Preparation for the resolution of the above antinomy only after having stated this point, thus implying that the appeal to regulative principles is at best provisional and that the possibility of using two such different regulative principles itself needs to be supported by further argumentation. His further argument then comes in the form of a review of various systems concerning the purposiveness of nature,8 in which he argues that idealism about purposiveness in nature, that is, insistence upon mechanical causation only, cannot be demonstrated, but that realism about purposiveness in nature, that is, assertion of an alternative to mechanical causation and thus allowance for causal singularity, also cannot be maintained in the form of a one-level doctrine about nature, or hylozoism, the view that (at least some) matter is also alive, but can only be maintained in the form of or in a form analogous to theism, that is, by means of the hypothesis that free and purposiveness agency is exercised at the supersensible level, where a free cause can be hypothesized outside of, but as the ground, of nature. This is because the possibility of a living matter . . . contains a contradiction, because lifelessness, inertia, constitutes its essential characteristic9a proposition of which Kant was much enamored, and repeated at least 14 times in his lectures
6. 7. 8. 9. Hanna, p. 343; Kant, CPJ, 5: 176. Kant, CPJ, 70, 5: 387. Ibid., 72, 5: 389. Ibid., 73, 5: 394.

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on metaphysics (at least because that is just the number of occurrences listed in the index of Ameriks and Naragons selection). In other words, in Kants view, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment just as much as in the other critiques, there is a contradiction between mechanical causation and the spontaneous causation characteristic of living beings, and room can be made for the latter only by ontologically distinguishing a supersensible level of existence from the phenomenal level. Kants position is that our experience of organic life does force an idea of spontaneous purposiveness on us, that teleology does have a foundation in phenomenology, as Hanna would put it, but that this sort of spontaneity can only be comprehended, only be conceived as even possible, by appeal to the distinction between the sensible and the supersensible: for us there remains no other way of judging the generation of its products as natural ends than through a supreme understanding as the cause of the world.10 In other words, Kant hardly assumes that our experience of life, whether in our own case (as Hanna supposes) or that of any organism (which is what Kant is actually discussing and the very fact that using the phenomenon of life to support the existence of freedom of the will would make all living beings free, or even, all living beings capable of having a feeling of their life, ought itself to make one suspicious of this argumentative strategy), sufces to conrm the existence of negatively noumenal spontaneity as part of manifest realism; he rather supposes that our experience of organic processes merely poses a problem for us that can only be solved by transcendental idealism as he understands it, namely, as an ontological distinction between the sensible and supersensible levels of existence, where the latter can be the ground, though, of course, not the temporal cause of the former. The point of the third Critique is not to revise Kants obvious use of such an interpretation of transcendental idealism in the second Critique, where freedom of the will can be understood and salvaged only if the whole sequence of [ones] existence as a sensible being is regarded in the consciousness of his intelligible existence as nothing but the consequence and never as the determining ground of his causality as a noumenon,11 but rather to show that the phenomenon of organic life in general, something more general than human life, also requires transcendental idealism so understood and to that extent conrms the use of transcendental idealism in the previous Critique. By adding that the invocation of a supersensible ground of phenomenal reality in the solution to the problem of organic life is only a ground for the reecting, not for the determining power of judgment, and absolutely cannot justify any objective assertion,12 Kant may also mean to remind us that the appeal to transcendental idealism on practical grounds in order to solve the problem of free will should not have been taken to be the objective assertion of a theoretical proposition on theoretically sufcient grounds, but that restriction on the epistemic status of the assertion of transcendental idealism does not change the content of what is asserted, namely, transcendental idealism on the two-world interpretation.
10. Ibid., 73, 5: 395. 11. I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. M.J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5: 978. 12. Kant, CPJ, 74, 5: 395.

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By all of this, I do not mean, of course, to suggest an endorsement of two-world transcendental idealism; my own position that Kant intended the two-world interpretation of transcendental idealism but asserted it on inadequate grounds has long been clear. What I do mean to suggest is that the third Critique does not give us better evidence for an alternative interpretation of transcendental idealism than the previous two do, and that the third Critique therefore cannot be appealed to in support of Hannas two-concept interpretation and thus in support of his strategy for rescuing freedom of the will. My own position on this matter thus remains unchanged, namely, that when it comes to the traditional assumption that freedom of the will is a condition of moral responsibility, we do better to follow the lead of Kants precritical writings, namely, his argument in his rst philosophical work, the Nova Delucidatio of 1755, that a libertarian conception of the freedom of the will would reduce responsible action to random behavior, and the position of his discussion of the imputation of responsibility in his lectures on ethics, namely, that responsiveness to reasons is a natural phenomenon, naturally subject to modication by entirely natural factors such as stupefaction by alcohol, immaturity, injury, and so on, and compatible with our practices of blame and punishment as long as we understand the latter as a matter of deterrence rather than retribution. To be sure, Kant may have rejected such an approach to freedom of the will in his mature period, as he signals in his review of J.H. Schulzs Sittenlehre in 1783, shortly before the publication of his own Groundwork, in which he rejects Schulzs determinism precisely because it cannot support a retributive theory of punishment and instead insists that the ought or imperative that distinguishes the practical law from the law of nature also puts us in idea altogether beyond the chain of nature (8: 1213). But to prefer a view that Kant held but later rejected seems to me a more charitable use of his work than to attribute to him a theory of free will that he clearly never could have held at all.

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