-
Two: The Concept of an Object of Pure Practical Reason: Imagination, Good and Evil, and the Typic
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
t w o The Concept of an Object of Pure Practical Reason Imagination, Good and Evil, and the Typic The central move in the section entitled “The Concept of an Object of Practical Reason” requires close attention. The concepts of good and evil are not given but constructed. Guided by the moral law, imagination constructs them. The fault of all previous moral philosophy , both ancient and modern, both rationalist and empiricist, is that the concept of the good was presupposed as the basis and end of morality.1 The necessary consequence of this presupposition is a heteronomous basis of moral action, such that the good as end is separated from its means. This is the case whether that means is conceived as pleasure or happiness, or as perfection, or as moral feeling, or as the will of God. The good is regarded as a material end existing outside these means, whether these means are related to the feeling of pleasure and/or general well-being in accord with our natural (animal) desire for happiness, or whether these means are conceived in intelligible terms as objects of a completed reason. Therefore, the relation between means and end always involves an element of contingency, since a good so conceived would be un¤t to serve as a basis for “a universally commanding moral law” (V, 65). In other words, all previous moral philosophers proceeded in precisely the opposite way demanded by the subject matter. In the language of the Foundations, all moral judgments would be made hypothetically, a condition that con®icts with their very nature. The only way to preserve moral philosophy from this self-destructive fate, i.e., from this Nemesis of inner self-con®ict, is to derive the concept of goodness from the nature of reason itself, from reason’s own autonomy. But this means that the good is the product of that prior synthesis of imagination whereby the moral law connects with the pure will, and whereby this connection is willed into intentions and maxims. In other words, the good is another pure image in accord with which a human being can orient herself or himself, just as the evil is a pure image that provides a different way of orientation (more on which below). To say this still more strongly, if there is no prior productive synthesis of imagination, then there is no good and no evil. Good and evil are products of imagination’s synthesizing guided by the “pure form of lawfulness in general.” In this regard, Kant even says that “laws as such [are] all equivalent (einerlei)” (V, 70). That is to say, when imagination carries on its synthesis freed from the sensible condition but guided by the form of law, the image produced from the side of the subject is the moral law as expression of the fact of freedom, and from the side of the object this image is the good as its immediate correlate. In the concept of the good as object of pure practical reason, “the method of the highest moral investigation” (V, 64, emphasis mine) and the depth of the Kantian discourse in the blind, unconscious but always present power of imagination are conjoined in one act. As noted earlier, the form of a law in general, is not, strictly speaking, a law. Rather, it stands as that equivalent to which all laws must conform in order to qualify as laws. Its counterpart, evil, arises from imagination’s synthesizing contrary to that form. There is no middle ground, no stance of indifference.2 The generated maxim either images the moral law, and so the object immediately generated along with it is good, or it does not, in which case the object so generated is evil. 80 Analytic of Pure Practical Reason [54.227.136.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:58 GMT) Of the Typic of Pure Practical Reason This vital and challenging section seems, however, to exclude both the process of schematization and the imagination itself from the application of the moral law to objects of nature. After speaking of “the schema (if this word is suitable here) of a law itself ” (V, 68), and after delineating this process in its capacity to relate pure concepts of the understanding to objects of nature by means of the connection to pure intuition, Kant writes: But to the law of freedom (which is a causality not sensuously conditioned ), and consequently to the concept of the absolutely good, no intuition...