A ideia da liberdade em Kant: o percurso da Crítica da Razão Pura à Fundamentação da Metafísica dos Costumes

Abstract

In this work we intend to develop an analysis about the concept of freedom in Kant. For that, we propose running the way since the Critical of Pure Reason to the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, looking for rebuilt the Kant argument in some of its aspects. The concept of freedom appears in the Critical of Pure Reason in a cosmologic conflict that intends to decide if in the world all the casualty is only natural or if together with the natural casualty can be admitted a casualty for freedom. In this sense, Kant characterizes the transcendental idea of freedom as a spontaneity that is able to begin a series of events that occurs on nature. Conceiving the transcendental idea of freedom is problematic, because the ideas, for Kant, are creations of the reason, when it doesn t find out the solution to its tie-ups. The reason necessarily looks for a condition of the condition until the unconditioned, that would complete its knowledge. The problem is that the unconditioned and, therefore, the ideas, are out of the field of the possible knowledge. Based on the transcendental idealism doctrine, Kant comes to the conclusion that the conflict between freedom and nature is only apparent, and there is no contradiction about thinking in these two kinds of casualty working at the same time. The transcendental idea of freedom, although doesn t work to enlarge the knowledge in a constitutive way, it works as a regulation principle that establishes the architecture of the reason. The reason has a particularly interest about seeing a guaranteed idea of transcendental freedom because comes from it the possibility of thinking in a practical sense of freedom, that is related to the actions of the human beings. The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals presents the concept of transcendental freedom as a key of explanation for the autonomy of the will of the human beings or for the practical freedom. Conceiving the will as autonomy reveals the formula of the categorical imperative, the principle for the excellence in morality. The freedom of will has no other principle than acting on the maximum of having itself as the object for the universal law. This statement identifies free will and the will submitted to the law as one and same thing. The freedom must be presupposed as property of the will of all the thinking beings. Thus, the human being is capable to take the morality as a law while rational being. The determined concept of morality must be related to the idea of freedom without it can be showed as something real, but only implied to think about a rational being, conscious of the casualty of its actions. The trouble that it shows, for Kant, is that freedom and morality don t match to the human being, that is affected by the inclinations of the sensibility. Kant presents as a solution to this tie-up, the doctrine of the double point of view under what the human being should be considered.