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233 4 Formal Transcendental Principles for Education for Inner Freedom: Condition for and Critical Counterpart to External Freedom To this point in our interpretation, the thrust of our examination of Kant’s idea of an education indicates the need for cultivating a way of conducting ourselves in thought (Denkungsart) such that all our cognitive processes are rightly ordered in accordance with the determination and vocation of ourselves as human, rational, moral beings in the world. To do so is to make the transcendental idea of the highest good efficacious in human life, or as we saw Kant put it in theProlegomena, it is to establish a “Denkungsart” in metaphysics, whose “beneficent influence extends to every other use of reason and first infuses it with a true philosophical spirit.” At stake is the establishment of inner freedom (a state literally of inner peace, as we will see) as the condition for a genuine realization of outer freedom (and peace). We have seen (in Kant’s Conception of Moral Character) the force and implication of Kant’s conception of character as a matter of a resolute Denkungsart in accordance with invariable maxims. In and through this Denkungsart, the relation of freedom and nature is secured in such a way that nature is elevated in a whole governed by a principle consonant with the purpose of the whole, our human Bestimmung. For the question of moral character, the requisite invariable maxim is the moral law; the ordering of thought, choice, and willing in accordance with and from respect for it is to achieve inner freedom. In our discussion here we are expanding this issue of how we conduct ourselves in thought to a more general formulation: namely, as the issue of Denkungsart , which intrinsically, in terms of its own inherent structure, secures inner freedom as the ultimate bulwark against the ascendancy of the principle of self-interest as legislative for human thought, discourse, and life. The attainment of moral character in Kant’s sense of it does achieve this, but even Kant’s closing remarks from theCritique of Practical Reason allow room for a wider scope of interpretation: the consciousness of our “inner freedom” is “the best, indeed the only guard, that can 234 A T T E M P T A T A P E D A G O G I C A L I N S T A U R A T I O N keep ignoble and corrupting influences from forcing themselves into our minds” (KpV 161). Methodenlehren: Essays on Ways of Instruction or Kant’s “Missing” Critical, Transcendental Treatise on Pedagogy The wider scope is the whole of human life in all its relations to the world. Not every aspect of these relations is immediately and directly a question of moral duty, but the question of integrity (the truth of a given matter) is universally applicable (and so the possible tension with the demand for dominance by self-interest is ever present).1 As we saw Kant 1. Although we have been indicating the senses of the terms in their various contexts, a recollection and clarification of the distinctions of morality, virtue, wisdom, and integrity may be helpful at this juncture. In its strictest, critical sense,morality refers to the inner relation between practical reason (as the author of the moral imperative) and human choosing and willing (whose adoption of that imperative as its highest maxim is the way that the moral law gains entry into and influence on the human mind [Gemüt]); this relation is subjectively realized as the moral feeling of respect. Our human moral aptitude (Anlage) is our ability to act toward ourselves and others according to this principle of freedom under law. The relation between morality and virtue is compared by Kant in his introduction to theCritique of Pure Reason with the relation between pure general logic and applied general logic. The latter deals with the “understanding and the rules of its necessary use in concreto, namely under the contingent conditions of the subject, which can either hinder or promote this use and which are given on the whole only empirically.” (KrV A54/B79). Applied logic thus deals with “attentiveness, with impediments to it and consequences of it: the source of error, the state of doubt, of having scruples, of conviction, etc.” (KrV A54/B79). Likewise, “pure morality only contains the necessary moral (sittlichen) laws of a free will as such,” and the “doctrine of virtue (Tugendlehre) takes these laws into account under the...

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