WHAT SORT OF FACT IS KANT’S FACT OF REASON?
Tatiana Patrone
tpatrone@ithaca.edu
Introduction
The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant says, aims to show “that there is pure practical reason”
(5:3).1 Furthermore, if it succeeds in this, then “transcendental freedom is also established”.2 In
order to accomplish both tasks, Kant’s Analytic shows, first, that all and only those wills that are
subject to the categorical imperative of morality are transcendentally free. Second, it argues that
human volition belongs to the set of wills that are subject to the moral law (and thus are free in
this “absolute sense”). This second task involves an appeal to what Kant calls the fact of reason:
through this “fact” Kant is able to ground his claim that humans have the faculty of pure
practical reason and thus are also transcendentally free.3
Kant’s appeal to the fact of reason in the second Critique has not won over many
supporters. The argument from the fact of reason has been called a “moralistic bluster” (by
Allen Wood4) and one of the “most spectacular train wrecks” (by Paul Guyer5). One of the
common concerns about Kant’s appeal to the “consciousness of the fundamental moral law” is
that it begs the question of the second Critique, the task of which is to show (and not to assume)
that our practical reason is in fact pure. Another concern (which is somewhat related to the
question-begging issue) is that Kant intends the fact of reason to do too much heavy lifting in his
1
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (in Kant: Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor
(Cambridge University Press, 1996).
2
Ibid.
3
I should say that this way of reading the second Critique has been developed by Onora O’Neil and Pavel Łuków
(see especially his “The Fact of Reason: Kant’s Passage to Ordinary Moral Knowledge”, Kant-Studien 84 (1993),
pp. 204-221.) And in this basic approach to the structure of the second Critique I agree with these readings that take
the fact of reason to be a part of Kant’s argument to the conclusion that humans have pure practical reason, etc.
4
Allen Wood, Kantian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 135.
5
Paul Guyer, “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant’s Moral Philosophy”, (445) in Inquiry 50 (2007):
444-464.
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system and that the whole critical corpus stands or falls with the success of this central argument
in the Critique of Practical Reason.
In what follows, I will look into one aspect of Kant’s argument from the fact of reason,
namely into the question whether the fact of reason is empirical or a priori. Now, Kant claims
that the fact of reason is a priori (after all, it is a fact of reason). But the Analytic does not give
us a direct argument to this claim. It seems to me, however, that it is important for Kant to have
an argument such as this at least available (if not explicitly presented). And here is why. The
fact of reason is supposed to show unequivocally that humans are subject to the moral law; and it
does this by appealing to our consciousness of being bound by the moral law. The status of the
claim that we are conscious of the binding nature of morality would have important implications
for the status of the claim that we are bound by the moral law. If our consciousness of the moral
ought is an empirical fact about us, then – since a posteriori judgments do not deliver necessity –
the claim that we are bound by the moral law would itself be a contingent claim. If, on the other
hand, the fact of reason itself is a priori (and thus necessary), then the claim that we are bound
by the moral law also becomes unconditional. And so I think it is worth discussing what
arguments to the conclusion that the fact of reason is not an empirical fact about our
psychological makeup are available to Kant.
My plan for this paper is the following. After brief preliminary remarks on the
complexity of the term Faktum and after explaining what I take Kant to mean by it, I will go over
the examples of our common ethical judgments that Kant cites in support of his claim that we are
aware of the binding nature of the moral law. Then, I explain what is at stake in arguing that the
fact of reason is a priori (and not empirical). Before addressing the main question of the paper, I
go over some prominent issues in Kant’s theoretical philosophy (the status of his ‘transcendental
2
psychology’) with the hope of learning some methodological lessons from the literature on this
topic. Finally, I provide an argument (on behalf of Kant) to the conclusion that the fact of reason
is a synthetic a priori proposition and for this argument I draw on what Kant actually says about
the features of our volition.
Preliminary remarks
Before turning to the main question of this paper – whether Kant’s fact of reason is empirical or
not – it is worth noting that there is a set of ambiguities associated with the term ‘fact of reason’.
One ambiguity (which I will not address, but will only mention) is that ‘fact of reason’ is used by
Kant to refer to at least two things. On the one hand, ‘fact of reason’ refers to our consciousness
of the binding nature of the moral law, but on the other hand, Kant uses it to refer to the moral
law itself. (Compare, for instance, 5:31 and 5:47, which say, respectively: “consciousness of
this fundamental law [the moral law] may be called a fact of reason”, and “the moral law is
given [to us], as it were, as a fact of reason”, etc.6)
The second exegetical question concerning the phrase ‘fact of reason’ has to do with the
term Faktum. The term is commonly translated into English as fact; indeed, even in
contemporary German its synonym would be the word Tatsache (and in that English translations
are no more misleading than the connotations of Kant’s text would have today even in his native
language). But the second Critique does not contain a single reference to Tatsache (although
Kant uses this term later, in the Critique of Judgment). Since the term Faktum is derivative from
the Latin facere (to do, which has a connotation of activity) and since (in Kant’s time) it would
I should note that Marcus Willaschek argues that in 5:47 “as a fact of reason” refers not to ‘the moral law’ but
rather to its givenness to us. That is, according to Willaschek, the moral law is given to us as a fact, and the moral
law itself is not a fact of reason. (See his Praktische Vernunft: Handlungstheorie und Moralbegründung bei Kant
(Verlag J.B. Metzler, 1992), p. 181.)
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not have been synonymous with Tatsache (a later term7), it is reasonable to doubt whether
Faktum is a term that describes a state of affairs rather than a certain act of reason.
Within the growing literature on Kant’s notion of fact of reason, at this point I think that
Marcus Willaschek’s analysis stands out.8 This is not the place to get into details of his work,
and so I will only provide a couple of highlights and will also say what I take to be its essential
lessons for the purposes of this paper. First, I think that Willaschek convincingly shows that
Kant’s term Faktum is rich and that it cannot be reduced either to Tat (deed) or Tatsache (fact),
and although it is closer to the former, the term really combines both meanings. Although
Faktum is a noun (and although now its etymology is less telling that it would be in Kant’s time),
the term has a strong connotation of activity, in particular – reason’s activity. Pure practical
reason, Willaschek argues, reveals that we are bound by the moral law since it produces or
delivers this moral law from itself and since it determines our will to moral action.9 In this, pure
practical reason manifests itself through an act (Faktum) of delivering the moral law and of
determining the will to action. In addition to arguing that Faktum is more appropriately rendered
as act (or deed) (and thus is synonymous to Tat rather than Tatsache), Willaschek goes over the
passages containing the term and shows that this rendition would clear up many confusions
associated with the term, including the first ambiguity that I mentioned (i.e., that Kant uses
Faktum to refer both to our consciousness of the moral law and to the moral law itself).
Although the term Tatsache was coined in 1756 (to refer to “matters of fact” and specifically to an event, the
occurrence of which was to be established though testimony), it was not widely used till later in 1790s. Kant does
not use the term in the second Critique, although in his later Critique of Judgment, §91 (On What Kind of Assent
Results from a Practical Faith) Kant uses it to refer to res facti – “objects of concepts whose objective reality can be
proved are matters of fact [Tatsachen] (res facti), etc.” (On the history of the term ‘Tatsache’ and on its relevance to
Kant’s (and then German Idealists’) term Faktum, see e.g., Paul Franks“Freedom, Tatsache and Tathandlung in the
Development of Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre” in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 79 (1997): 310-323,
and also his “Transcendental Argument, Reason, and Skepticism: Contemporary Debates and the Origins of PostKantianism” in Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Perspectives, edited by R. Stern (Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 1999).
8
Marcus Willaschek, Praktische Vernunft: Handlungstheorie und Moralbegründung bei Kant (Verlag J.B. Metzler,
1992), chapter 10 (pp. 174-193).
9
E.g., Willaschek, 181.
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4
What I take to be significant in this analysis is Willaschek’s emphasis on the distinction
between factum brutum (as he puts it) and Faktum of reason. Pure reason, he points out, does
not “discover” the moral law as we discover, e.g., the laws of nature. The moral law is not given
to us as an independently existing fact (in which case Tatsache would be a more appropriate term
for it). Rather, pure practical reason produces the moral law, and the moral law is not
antecedently given to it but springs forth from its activity.
But essentially whether Faktum is better rendered as act or as fact of reason is not what’s
at issue here. Indeed, for the purposes of this paper this ambiguity is not all that important. I just
mentioned that Willaschek’s analysis shows that the primary context of the term fact of reason is
Kant’s claim that through the fact of reason (i.e., through its activity), reason attests to the fact
that we are conscious of the fundamental law of morality. That is, reason’s activity delivers to us
(the philosophers) evidence that humans are conscious of the moral law. The focus of this paper
is this latter claim, i.e., the claim that humans are aware of the binding nature of morality, and
the main question with respect to this claim is this: Is this an empirical (psychological) or an a
priori (philosophical) claim about us?
Before we turn to the passages that will be essential for answering this question, let me
clarify what it is that I am proposing to inquire into. I take it that we can distinguish between at
least three sorts of claims that could be relevant to a normative ethical theory, and that these
claims would have different status in it. Consider the following propositions:
(A) When having done something wrong, we usually feel guilty.
(B) Humans tend to be deterred from wrongdoing by the threat of punishment.
(C) Humans are aware of the binding nature of the moral law.
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In what follows, I will specifically ask whether (C) is crucially different from (A) and (B). Let
me explain. I take it that (A) and (B) are empirical claims about us, although the ways to verify
(A) and (B) would differ. For Kant, as we will see, our awareness of the binding nature of
morality (or (C)) is fundamentally different in that it is not an empirical claim. So, the task that I
will pursue is to bring out the features of (C) that empirical claims such as (A) and (B) do not
have.
Another way that this question can be set up is by referring directly to Kant’s first lengthy
passage that contains the term ‘fact of reason’. Although he briefly uses the term already in 5:6,
the first substantive reference to it can be found only in 5:31. Here is the passage in full:
Consciousness of this fundamental law may be called a fact of reason because one
cannot reason it out from antecedent data of reason, for example, from consciousness
of freedom (since it is not antecedently given to us) and because it instead forces itself
upon us of itself as a synthetic a priori proposition that is not based on any intuition,
either pure or empirical, although it would be analytic if the freedom of the will were
presupposed; but for this, as a positive concept, an intellectual intuition would be
required, which certainly cannot be assumed here. However, in order to avoid
misinterpretation in regarding this law as given, it must be noted carefully that it is
not an empirical fact but the sole fact of pure reason which, by it, announces itself
as originally lawgiving (sic volo, sic jubeo).10
Let me put into focus what will interest us in this passage. Since Kant is talking about the fact of
reason as a “synthetic a priori proposition” (Satz), and that the clear referent of the ‘fact of
reason’ is consciousness of [the] fundamental [moral] law, we can take him to refer, roughly, to
(C), i.e., to the proposition: Humans have consciousness of the fundamental moral law. He then
10
5:31 (emphasis added)
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goes on to say that “it is not an empirical fact but the sole fact of pure reason”. This seems to go
well with the claim that this fact is a “synthetic a priori proposition”: proposition (C), Kant
adds, is not an empirical claim (it is not synthetic a posteriori). Rather, it is a fact of “pure
reason”, namely, it has a priori origin (or else it would not be pure), and it is synthetic since it is
not merely analytically deduced from the claim that humans are free (in the positive sense).
Examples in support of the fact of reason
Now, before we turn to the question itself – Why is the fact of reason not empirical, after all? –
let me trace Kant’s claim that we are conscious of the moral law to the evidence that he provides
for it. The claim itself, he points out, “cannot be reasoned out from antecedent data of reason”
(5:31). By this Kant specifically means that the claim that we are conscious of the moral law
cannot be analytically deduced from another claim – the claim that we are free in the positive
sense of ‘freedom.’ Nonetheless, the claim that we are conscious of the moral law needs to be
contextually situated. (In this, it reminds us of Descartes cogito – the inference that, although it
is justificatorily foundational, nonetheless is thoroughly explained by Descartes.) We are, Kant
says, “immediately conscious of the moral law” (by which, I think, he means that we are
immediately conscious of its binding nature), but, he adds, we are conscious of it “as soon as we
draw up maxims of the will for ourselves” (5:29). Thus, by “immediate” I think Kant
specifically means that our consciousness of the moral law is not mediated (or based on) our
consciousness of freedom. But notice that for the consciousness of the moral law to reveal itself,
we nonetheless first need to “draw up maxims of the will for ourselves”. And so 5:31 that
introduces the claim that Kant calls ‘the fact of reason’ is preceded by Kant’s famous gallows
example in 5:30 (which does just that – “draws up maxims of the will”.) The example has two
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parts (the first of which is the gallows question), and it is the second part that will interest us
here. Kant writes:
Ask [someone] whether, if his prince demanded, on pain of [an] immediate execution,
that he give false testimony against an honorable man whom the prince would like to
destroy under a plausible pretext, he would consider it possible to overcome his love
of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps not venture to assert whether he
would do it or not, but he must admit without hesitation that it would be possible for
him. He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he
ought to do it and cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would
have remained unknown to him.11
Kant’s immediate concern here is to show what he calls “the order of concepts” in us, i.e., to
ground the claim that moral law is ratio cognoscendi of freedom and not the other way around.
This point (concerning how freedom is related to morality) does not interest us here. What is
relevant, however, is Kant’s claim that the case of bearing false witness (or rather our awareness
that it would be wrong to do so) attests to the fact that we are conscious of the binding nature of
the moral law. Notice, of course, that our ability or even our willingness to obey the moral law is
not what’s at issue here; rather, it is our awareness that it would be wrong to bear false witness.
This awareness of our duty not to bear false witness might seem to be too content specific, and
so it is. But what Kant has in mind, I think, is the general fact that in cases where morality
sharply contrasts with other, non-moral concerns (such as one’s wish to preserve one’s life), our
conscience is a moral “compass” (Compasse) (as he says in the Groundwork12) that allows us to
discern what acting out of duty requires. The case where an agent is conflicted between a moral
11
12
5:30 (emphasis added).
See e.g., 4:404.
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obligation (not to bear false witness) and a non-moral inclination (to save his life), because of
this conflict, attests to the fact we are conscious of the “moral law within” us (as Kant puts it in
5:161). And this – Kant says – is not an empirical fact about our volition, but a “sole fact of pure
reason” instead.
What I think makes Kant’s claim even more interesting (and more puzzling) is that he
also refers to like thought-experiments as experiments. Consider what he says in 5:92. Here,
Kant comments on the importance of separating doctrine of happiness from doctrine of morals,
and says that, unlike geometers, philosophers have to rest content with “cognition through mere
concepts” since it is impossible to ground this cognition in “constructions” (the way geometers
do). But he adds that here, philosophy can distinguish between different grounds of willing by
“setting up an experiment”. He says:
[A]lmost like a chemist, [a philosopher] can at any time set up an experiment with
every human practical reason […] namely, by adding the moral law (as a determining
ground) to the empirically affected will (e.g., that of someone who would gladly lie
because he can gain something by it). […] If a man who is otherwise honest (or who
just this once puts himself only in thought in the place of an honest man) is confronted
with the moral law in which he cognizes the worthlessness of a liar, his practical
reason (in its judgment of what he ought to do) at once abandons the advantage [and]
unites with what maintains in him respect for his own person (truthfulness).13
Here we have another clear example of what one morally ought to do – telling a lie is contrasted
with truthfulness, and even in a liar, practical reason “unites” itself with the latter. It is worth
noting that Kant says this experiment to be possible with “every human practical reason” (mit
jedes Menschen praktishen Vernunft). Again, the though here is not that everyone acts morally;
13
5:92-3.
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rather, it is that everyone recognizes that there is such thing as acting morally. In this case
specifically, ‘acting morally’ means being truthful, but Kant presumably wants to make a more
general claim to the point that humans recognize the binding nature of morality. Again, this
claim – although it is manifested in an experiment (akin to like experiments in chemistry) – is not
empirical; rather, it is a synthetic a priori proposition. Armed now with Kant’s statement from
5:31 along with his two cases – (i) of bearing false witness, and (ii) of truthfulness – we are in
the position to unravel Kant’s claim that his fact of reason is a synthetic a priori proposition.
What’s at stake?
Arguably, it must be rather important for Kant to show that the fact of reason is not empirical.
After all, if the claim that we are aware of the binding nature of the moral law were empirical,
then its status in Kant’s theory would have been quite different. As it stands, the fact of reason
(Kant claims) attests to the fact that we are bound by the moral law. This, in turn, attests to the
fact that we are free in the positive sense of ‘freedom.’ Before the introduction of the fact of
reason in section 7 of the second Critique (in 5:31) Kant’s aim was to show the reciprocal
entailment between transcendental freedom and being subject to the “formal practical principle”.
Sections 5 and 6 respectively argue that:
(A) If a will is to be “determinable” by purely formal practical principles, then it must be
“transcendentally free” (Problem I, 5:29).
(B) If a will is transcendentally free, then only a formal practical principle can “determine it
necessarily” (Problem II, 5:29).
After Kant establishes that “freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each
other” (5:29), he turns to the next question concerning which one has primacy in our “cognition”.
10
We are, he claims, “immediately conscious of the moral law”, and thus only secondarily
(through our consciousness of the moral law) we are conscious of freedom as well.
Now, if this consciousness of the moral law were an empirical fact about us, then (in
Kant’s jargon) it would provide us with quid facti, i.e., with knowledge of what is the case. But
answering the question of quid facti is not sufficient for answering the question concerning
whether the proposition is also objectively valid, or the question of quid juri. Essentially, if
Kant’s fact of reason is empirical, a further argument would be needed to show that our
consciousness of the moral law is ‘legitimate’ or, in other words, that this empirically confirmed
consciousness cannot be explained away or dismissed as a contingent feature of ours. Kant’s
argument, however, has no second leg – no inquiry into the question whether the fact of reason is
warranted. This means, I think, that he considered it to be fairly clear that the fact of reason is
not empirical, but rather a synthetic a priori proposition.
Lessons from transcendental psychology
Since the status of the fact of reason has not yet been discussed in the literature, what I will draw
on is the discussion of a parallel issue in his theoretical philosophy. There, Kant’s
“transcendental psychology” has been long regarded as a topic worth considering. His
arguments in the first Critique appear to have a peculiar status since they fall in-between
empirical studies of the phenomenal self (which Kant would want to distance himself from) and
the noumenal realm (of which we cannot have knowledge). And since Kant never tires to insist
on the distinction between quid facti and quid juri, it is essential (for him and for proponents of
his theory) to show that the normative conclusions of the first Critique, i.e., conclusions
concerning the objective validity of e.g., the categories of understanding, are not derived from
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empirical premises concerning our psychological makeup. What I propose to learn from the
discussion of Kant’s transcendental psychology and of issues related to it, are the criteria for
delineating between empirical and non-empirical, transcendental accounts. Let me point out that
there are vast disagreements within this literature, and that I will not be concerned with
discrepancies between various interpretations of Kant. What will interest me here is a possible
position that can be put together based on these discussions, a position that deals with a more
general question about the difference between the features of empirical and of transcendental
accounts of the cognizing self. In particular, I hope that the lessons that we learn here will allow
us to focus on the status of Kant’s fact of reason.
Consider, for instance, the analysis that Paul Guyer develops in his “Psychology and the
Transcendental Deduction”. The question that Guyer sets to answer is “whether Kant’s
transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding is a psychological argument”
and, more precisely, “whether it is damagingly psychological”.14 Kant would obviously want to
avoid psychologism in his transcendental deductions – his argument is supposed to be
philosophical and not psychological, and the new method he devises for answering the quid juri
question is the transcendental method. But the transcendental method – a inference from
features of our cognition to the necessary conditions for them – needs to starts with an acceptable
account of the explananda, i.e., of the features of our cognition. The question about the status of
the explananda becomes crucial since they themselves need to be more than empirical facts
about our cognitive makeup.
Guyer then argues that there are three features (or criteria) that an empirical account of
cognition would have to have. And, he goes on to claim, since none of the three features are
Paul Guyer, “Psychology and the Transcendental Deduction”, p. 47 (in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, edited
by Eckart Förster (Stanford University Press, 1989)).
14
12
applicable to Kant’s account of our cognitive makeup, Kant’s theory must not be empirical in the
damaging sense of ‘empiricism’. The three criteria that Guyer identifies are the following:
(1) “The premises of a psychological argument … must postulate the actual occurrence,
indeed at moments that are at least in principle determinable, of specific forms of
experience or inputs to the mind as well as of specific acts of mental processing of or
reaction to these inputs” and “the character of the output of the psychological
mechanism will be correlated to such features as the actual number of inputs or
frequency of operation”.15
(2) “The assertions about the nature of the mental acts of input and processing that
constitute the premises of psychological arguments are contingent rather than
necessary truths”.16 Put slightly differently, “psychological premises are ones to
which there are conceivable alternatives. They cannot be truths entailed directly by
the concept of human nature, nor even by any more general concept, such as that of a
“cognitive system”, but must, like the more particular propositions they support or
explain, be “matters of fact””.17
(3) “Psychological premises are ordinarily assumed to be discoverable only by some
empirical method, even if that method be as easy as introspection of ourselves and
observation of the manners of others”.18
Using this set as a starting point, we can say that an empirical account is methodologically
different from a philosophical one. I take it, (1) and (3) can be reduced to the same idea: an
empirical account is based on inductive generalization from a set of occurrences a, b, c, etc.,
15
Guyer, 54.
Guyer, 54 (emphasis added).
17
Guyer, 55.
18
Guyer, 55 (emphasis added).
16
13
where a, b, c, etc., are particular events (I think that this is what Guyer means by “actual
occurrence”, etc. in (1)). The last point is important since experience in general is essential for
any account of cognition – psychological and philosophical alike. An a priori account of
cognition would not be independent from all experience; after all, as Kant puts it in B1: “all our
cognition commences with experience, yet it does not on that account arise from experience”.19
Empirical account (borrowing this distinction) would not only “commence with experience” but
also would “arise from experience”. A philosophical account – although it would start with
experience as its explanandum – would not “arise from it”.
Returning to the question concerning the method of an empirical account, then, we can
say that it is essentially inductive, since it starts with particular cases a, b, c, etc., which are the
data of either introspection or observation (or both), and it would ground a conclusion based on
what is learnt from this sample. And, as Guyer points out, “the character of the output of the
psychological mechanism will be correlated to such features as the actual number of inputs or
frequency of operation”. In other words, an inductive inference would be all the stronger, the
more cases we would consider and the more representative our sample would be. This method,
as Guyer says in (2), is a method of acquiring knowledge of “matters of fact” rather than of e.g.,
deducting our knowledge from the concept of a human being. That is to say (as he puts it), “the
premises of psychological arguments are contingent rather than necessary truths”.20 (This latter
In B2, Kant goes on to say: “by a priori cognitions [we will understand] not those that occur independently of
this or that experience, but rather those that occur absolutely independently of all experience” (and he then goes on
to add that there is a difference between a priori and pure, e.g., ‘Every alteration has a cause’ is a priori but not
pure, since ‘alteration’ itself is an empirical concept and a pure cognition has nothing empirical with it). I think that
B2 is consistent with what I have to say, though, since my point is only that the question concerning a priori vs.
empirical cognitions arises insofar as we have cognitions at all, i.e., we start from the fact of experience in general
and ask what the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience are.
20
I have reservations with the way that Guyer puts this last point; or at least, I would make a weaker claim that this.
While for Kant and for his predecessors necessity is a “mark by means of which we can securely distinguish a pure
cognition from an empirical one”, I am not sure that the inverse holds. That is, from the fact that a cognition C is
not necessary we cannot conclude that it is empirical. And since an empirical method (induction) would fail to
produce a cognition with a mark of necessity, it would not follow that the truth is contingent in the sense that it
19
14
way to put it, though, seems to me to be parasitic on the statement concerning the methodology
of an empirical inquiry. In other words, the test of conceivability, I think, is actually a poor
guide to settling the issue. A more reliable way to get to the idea of necessity as opposed to
contingency of our results would be to look at the methods of inquiry and not to the question
whether a feature of ours could be other than what it is.)
But if not through observation, introspection, and generalization from given occurrences,
in what way are we to gather ‘data’ concerning the features of our cognitive makeup? Although
experience is still the starting point of a philosophical inquiry, we are keeping in mind that (i) it
is experience in general we are talking about when we do philosophy rather than psychology and
that (ii) we are reflecting on the features of this experience. In his “Empirical, Rational, and
Transcendental Psychology: Psychology as Science and as Philosophy”, Gary Hatfield echoes
the point made by Guyer.21 Hatfield aims to spell out the features of transcendental psychology
and, more specifically, to show that it is not empirical (and so his discussion is related to Guyer’s
analysis that we just looked into). Hatfield’s considered view on the status of Kant’s project is
the following:
Even in arguing for his transcendental philosophy Kant surely must appeal to
experience to ground some basic claims, for example, that we experience in space and
time, that we are finite intelligences, that we have some sensations and feelings. But
this sort of “empirical” data was accepted even by Crusius, the most avowedly
aprioristic metaphysician of Kant’s time. And reasonably so. If it were otherwise, any
could be otherwise (or, as Guyer puts it, that C has “conceivable alternatives”). At best, from the fact that C results
from an empirical investigation, we can conclude that further proof is required (and might be possible) to show that
C is a priori. (This is, again, the quid facti vs. quid juri distinction at work.)
21
Gary Hatfield, “Empirical, Rational, and Transcendental Psychology: Psychology as Science and as Philosophy”
in Cambridge Companion to Kant, edited by Paul Guyer (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
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sort of reflection on human experience whatsoever would count as “empirical”,
effectively rendering all philosophy empirical by stipulation. For the purpose of
reading and interpreting Kant, and for many other purposes, we are well advised to
distinguish between treating reflection on ordinary experience as a minimal starting
point for philosophy and adopting an empirical approach when formulating and
confirming explanatory theses in philosophy.22
Here, what I take to be significant is the emphasis on “reflection on ordinary human experience”.
A philosophical argument of the variety that interests us here starts with a fairly noncontroversial set of cases, judgments, or propositions about the world that we make all the time.
How often or how reliably we come up with these is not really what’s at issue (as it would be
with an empirical investigation). Rater, our cases or samples will be representative enough in
that any set of cases, etc. of a certain type would do. Thus, in Kant’s speculative realm, any
cognition would do since all cognition has the same fundamental features. Similarly, common
moral judgments that we make would allow us to conclude that humans are aware of the binding
nature of morality. (Or so Kant believes it to be the case.)
Why the fact of reason is synthetic a priori
If we now look at the passages surrounding Kant’s discussion of the fact of reason, we can notice
just that: Kant claims that the fact of reason (i.e., that we are aware of the binding nature of the
moral law) is evident from reflection on our common judgments when it comes to ethical issues.
Let me give a couple of examples where Kant adopts this approach. Consider what he says e.g.,
in 5:32, 5:36, and 5:91-2 (although in general, I would claim, consulting our common judgments
22
Hatfield, 216 (emphasis added).
16
is one of the leitmotifs of the second Critique). Right after Kant first introduces the fact of
reason (in 5:31), he comments on it in the following way:
The fact [of reason] mentioned above is undeniable. One need only analyze the
judgment that people pass on the lawfulness of their actions in order to find that,
whatever inclination may say to the contrary, their reason, incorruptible and selfconstrained, always holds the maxim of the will in an action up to the pure will, that
is, to itself inasmuch as it regards itself as a priori practical.23
We see that Kant is here introducing the method of “analyzing judgments that people pass” – the
tool that will prove both useful and (as we will soon see) indispensible for the argument in the
Analytic. Here (in 5:32), the fact of reason is said to be grounded on an analysis such as this.
In particular, I think, what becomes evident from this analysis is that people without fault
distinguish between morality and self-love. And so in 5:36 (again, appealing to the data of
common moral cognition), Kant will highlight this aspect of our moral judgments. After
introducing the categorical imperative of morality into the second Critique (in 5:31), and after
claiming that we can also see that humans regard themselves to be bound by it (in 5:31-2), Kant
goes on to emphasize that there is a sharp boundary between morality and self-love. He goes
over several features that show that moral principles are quite heterogeneous from counsels of
prudence, and he reiterates that the difference between morality and self-love is apparent “even
to the most common human beings” [für den gemeinsten Menschen vernehmlich]. And so, for
instance, in 5:36 Kant says: “So distinctly and sharply drawn are the boundaries of morality and
self-love that even the most common eye [das gemeinste Auge] cannot fail to distinguish whether
something belongs to the one or the other”. (The details of Kant’s series of claims in this section
23
5:32 (emphasis added).
17
do not interest us here; what is important is the appeal to our common ethical judgments as the
stratum that if not grounds, then surely anchors our moral theory.)
Finally, in 5:91-2, Kant explicitly points out that a project such as his second Critique can
be “justified” by appeal to our common ethical judgments. The principles are the first “data” of
a pure theory: an empirical ethical theory that starts with the sensibly determined notion of the
good has a less sophisticated structure, but a pure doctrine of morals that cannot help itself to a
sensibly determined starting point has no other way to get off the ground but through considering
reason’s principles. When it then comes to answering the question whether these principles are
applicable to our actual volition, the justificational strategy, Kant says, is to consider our
common understanding of morality. Thus, in 5:91-2 he writes: “the justification of moral
principles as principles of a pure reason could also be carried out very well and with sufficient
certainty by a mere appeal to the judgments of common human understanding”. Furthermore,
the feeling of respect for the law that serves as a clear indication of moral principle rather than a
principle of self-love, “is made known so saliently and so prominently that no one, not even the
most common human understanding [der gemeinste Menschenverstand], can fail to see at once in
an example presented to him, that he can indeed be advised by empirical grounds of volition to
follow their charms but that he can never be expected to obey anything but the pure practical law
of reason alone” (5:92). (Notice the appeal to the “most common understanding” here.)
Again, setting aside the details of the arguments in 5:32, 5:36 and 5:92, let me point out
Kant’s characteristic appeal to what we can now call common moral judgments in general, i.e.,
to the general features of how we engage the world practically. This appeal, I think, is akin to
the appeal to experience in general made by transcendental philosophy in the theoretical realm.
And much like Hatfield stresses, the tone of this appeal is not empirical in any meaningful sense
18
of “empiricism”. And although the starting point (in some sense) is experience, the way that we
deal with experience is methodologically not empirical. Reflection on our common moral
judgments has to do with discerning the structure of our faculties in virtue of which our
experience is what it is.
Now, in the second Critique Kant does not complete the argument in this way. That is,
he does not trace the features of our experience explicitly to the structure of our faculties.
Perhaps, he holds the features of our common judgments to be self-evident and requiring no
further explanation.24 Here, in particular, I am talking about our capacity to see the distinction
between moral principles and non-moral counsels of prudence (or self-love, as Kant puts it). The
examples that he provides have to do with our capacity to draw the contrast between the moral
ought and the concerns for one’s happiness. But after introducing the fact of reason in 5:31, in
5:32 we find a discussion that, I think, comes very close to an explanation of why it is that
humans see so clearly the distinction between morality and self-love. 5:32 contains a Remark to
a Corollary (to §7): §7 introduces the “fundamental law of pure practical reason” (in a
formulation that closely resembles FUL), and its Corollary says that “pure reason is practical of
itself alone and gives (to the human being) a universal law which we call the moral law” (5:31).
And so the transition from §7 to its Corollary has to do with moving from the law of pure
practical reason in general to its specifically human manifestation as an imperative. The
24
In some sense, I think that this is exactly the reason for the lack of explicit justification of the fact of reason. I
think that Kant was certain that humans are aware of the binding nature of morality, and that (more specifically) by
‘morality’ he understood the necessary, universal, etc. principles that command us to φ! (unconditionally). Karl
Ameriks in his “The Practical Foundation of Philosophy in Kant, Fichte, and After” puts the more general claim
concerning Kant’s presuppositions this way: “Kant would often appeal to common claims that he (naively, we
would now say) assumed no sane person of his time would put in real doubt. Such claims included the fundamentals
of mathematics and logic, the general fact that there is “experience”, that is, a warranted determination of empirical
objects, and also the fact that we acknowledge categorical demands of morality. Kant understood transcendental
philosophy to be an a priori account of these assumptions, an account that would appreciate the metaphysical
complexities of alternative views, and that would offer its own framework as the best way “to save the phenomena”
and to keep people from abandoning common sense in the face of modern philosophical perplexities”. (See
Ameriks’s “The Practical Foundation of Philosophy in Kant, Fichte, and After” in The Reception of Kant's Critical
Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, ed. by Sally Sedgwick (Cambridge University Press, 2000).)
19
Remark to the Corollary is dedicated to the distinction between our (at best pure) will and what
Kant calls the “holy will”, i.e., “such a will as would not be capable of any maxim conflicting
with the moral law” (5:32). Kant explains that only for the human will (as an imperfect will) the
moral law is an imperative (not merely a law) of reason. He says of human beings:
The moral law is for them an imperative that commands categorically because the law
is unconditional; the relation of such a will to this law is dependence under the name
of obligation, which signifies a necessitation, though only by reason and its objective
law, to an action which is called duty because a choice that is pathologically affected
(though not thereby determined, hence still free) brings with it a wish arising from
subjective causes, because of which it can often be opposed to the pure objective
determining ground and thus needs a resistance of practical reason. […] In the
supremely self-sufficient intelligence, choice is rightly represented as incapable of any
maxim that could not at the same time be objectively a law.25
The contrast that Kant is drawing now is between human volition and holy volition. For our
purposes, we need to focus on the clause that describes our capacity to choose as “pathologically
affected” but at the same time not necessarily “determined” in this way. Our will therefore is
pulled into two directions: on the one hand, there are “subjective causes” (inclinations) at work
here, and on the other hand, our will recognizes the binding nature of the objective moral law.26
25
5:32 (emphasis added).
We find similar analysis of our pathologically affected and yet free choice in The Metaphysics of Morals. Here,
Kant says: “The very concept of duty is already the concept of a necessitation (constraint) of free choice through the
law. […] Such constraint does not apply to rational beings as such (there could also be holy ones) but rather to
human beings, rational natural beings, who are unholy enough that pleasure can induce them to break the moral
law, even though they recognize its authority; and even when they do obey the law, they do it reluctantly (in the face
of opposition from their inclinations), and it is in this that such constraint properly consists”. He then adds (in a
footnote): “Yet if a human being looks at himself objectively […] he finds that as a moral being he is also holy
enough to break the inner [moral] law reluctantly; for there is no human being so depraved as not to feel an
opposition to breaking it and an abhorrence of himself in the face of which he has to constrain himself [to break the
law]” (6:379-80; emphasis added). I am using Mary J. Gregor’s translation here (in Kant: Practical Philosophy
(Cambridge University Press, 1996).
26
20
Perhaps it merits a mention that on the other side of the spectrum, Kant puts what he calls the
“animal choice” (arbitrium brutum) – the capacity to choose that “can be determined only by
inclination (sensible impulse, stimulus)”.27 And so there are three types of volition (or choosing)
possible:
(1) In a holy being, the choice is determined only by the moral law.
(2) In a human being, the choice is determined either by the moral law or by inclination.
(3) In non-rational being, the choice is determined only by inclination.
With this distinction in place, we can see that humans are the only beings who are capable of
feeling the pull of both morality and sensible causes. And the examples that Kant provides in
order to show that we are conscious of the binding nature of morality are the cases where we are
at a crossroads and where the distinction between morality and self-love is manifested especially
clearly. Thus, faced with the choice of “giving false testimony” and “immediate execution”, one
acutely feels the duality of practical principles: one understands that it is wrong to give false
testimony, but one also feels a strong inclination to preserve one’s life. And so any case where
the agent perceives this duality will reveal to us (the philosophers) that the agent considers
herself to be subject to the moral law.
If this is the way ultimately to reconstruct Kant’s argument, then it can be shown that the
phenomenology of our experience, i.e., the fact that we are aware of the binding nature of the
moral law, is grounded on the structure of our faculties.28 In particular, it is based on the fact
27
The Metaphysics of Morals, 6:213.
In “The Fact of Reason: Kant’s Passage to Ordinary Moral Knowledge”, Pavel Łuków makes a similar point. He
says that humans have “dual citizenship” – one in the empirical and one in the noumenal worlds, and that the fact of
reason is a “phenomenological consequence of having to take both standpoints [the empirical and the moral]” (214).
(See Pavel Łuków, “The Fact of Reason: Kant’s Passage to Ordinary Moral Knowledge”, Kant-Studien 84 (1993),
pp. 204-221.) In my paper, I am reluctant to put the point in this way, since I do not want to claim (yet) that the
moral law has its seat in the noumenal realm (although, of course, it does). All Kant needs to show at this leg of the
argument is that we are conscious of the binding nature of a moral law; the rest of the second Critique argues what
the nature of this moral law must be, etc.
28
21
that we are both “unholy enough” and “holy enough” (as Kant puts it in his “Doctrine of
Virtue”) since we are subject to both the commands of morality and the demands of our sensible
nature.
Recall, that I said earlier that this rout of justification – the rout that traces the features of
our experience (in this case, our moral judgments) to the structure of our faculties – would avoid
the problem of empiricism. If this rout is what Kant has in mind, then his claim that humans are
aware of the binding nature of morality would acquire a status of an a priori claim. That is, Kant
is not appealing to our introspection and then generalizing the results of what such introspection
would reveal to a common understanding. Rather, his false testimony example is a case-study in
the structure of our common moral cognition; and this case-study can be part of the
transcendental argument concerning the necessary conditions for the possibility of the fact of
reason. Again, this possibility has to do with the structure of our faculties (in this case our will).
Arguably, at this point Kant’s overall argument to the conclusion that morality rests on
the categorical imperative of reason travels a full circle. What I have in mind (but what I cannot
adequately cover at present) is that Kant’s Groundwork supplies the argument to the conclusion
that our common rational moral cognition attests to the fact that the moral law is none other than
the categorical imperative. The second Critique does not provide the analysis of our common
moral judgments, although it does point to them in support of the claim that we are aware of the
binding nature of morality. Section I of the Groundwork, on the other hand, does just that: it
provides a detailed analysis of our common rational moral cognition that culminates (at the end
of the section) in the pronouncement that the ‘supreme principle of morality’ is the following: “I
ought never to conduct myself except so that I could also will that my maxim become a universal
law” (4:402).
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Conclusion
We started with Kant’s claim that the fact of reason is a synthetic a priori proposition and his
warning not to take this Faktum to be empirical; the fact of reason, he says, is “the sole fact of
pure reason” (5:31). I argued that, given the structure of the second Critique, Kant is quite right
in issues this warning, and that it is unfortunate that he does not spell out an argument that would
sufficiently ground his claim. I said that there exists a similar exegetical worry with respect to
his transcendental psychology – part of his corpus that must belong to philosophy and yet that is
dangerously close to psychology. My hope was to learn from what I consider to be successful
defenses of Kant on that front – from the accounts that spell out the differences in methodology
between psychology and transcendental philosophy. The key difference (I think) is the contrast
between psychology’s inductive method and philosophy’s method of reflection on experience. I
then argued that Kant seems to be ‘reflecting’ on the features of our common moral cognition
throughout the second Critique in that he frequently appeals to the ethical judgments that we
make (‘we’ here is ‘most common human understanding’, not philosophers, of course). And the
key salient feature of these judgments is the sharp distinction between morality and self-love.
Finally, I made an attempt to explain (on behalf of Kant) in virtue of what we acutely perceive
this distinction: I argued that, in comparison to holy and animal volition, human capacity to
choose is uniquely pulled into two directions (toward living up to the moral ought and toward
satisfying the demands of our sensible nature). This duality, then, as a condition sine qua non,
grounds our consciousness of the moral law, and since this duality is a necessary feature of our
volition, the phenomenological consequence of it must be an a priori fact as well.
23