Polytropy

Below are some notes (by me) on Immanuel Kant’s 1785 treatise, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. This is the work that introduces the categorical imperative. My notes are in sections corresponding to Kant’s, but with my own titles (after the preface):

1. That there appears to be a moral law.
2. What the moral law must be.
3. Whether there can be a moral law.

The English title of the treatise is Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Apparently the first word can also be Grounding or Foundation or even Fundamental Principles, and the ensuing preposition can be of. Also, in imitation of the German, Metaphysics can be made singular in form.

I believe my reading of Kant is helped by the years I have spent reading R. G. Collingwood (and writing about him on this blog, as for example in the series of posts on The New Leviathan). In his autobiography (1939; pages 3–4; bolding mine), Collingwood recalls discovering Kant as a child:

My father had plenty of books, and allowed me to read in them as I pleased. Among others, he had kept the books of classical scholarship, ancient history, and philosophy which he had used at Oxford. As a rule I left these alone; but one day when I was eight years old curiosity moved me to take down a little black book lettered on its spine ‘Kant’s Theory of Ethics’. It was Abbott’s translation of the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten; and as I began reading it, my small form wedged between the bookcase and the table, I was attacked by a strange succession of emotions. First came an intense excitement. I felt that things of the highest importance were being said about matters of the utmost urgency: things which at all costs I must understand. Then, with a wave of indignation, came the discovery that I could not understand them. Disgraceful to confess, here was a book whose words were English and whose sentences were grammatical, but whose meaning baffled me. Then, third and last, came the strangest emotion of all. I felt that the contents of this book, although I could not understand it, were somehow my business: a matter personal to myself, or rather to some future self of my own. It was not like the common boyish intention to ‘be an engine-driver when I grow up’, for there was no desire in it; I did not, in any natural sense of the word, ‘want’ to master the Kantian ethics when I should be old enough; but I felt as if a veil had been lifted and my destiny revealed.

If I have understood correctly from a friend, Collingwood was going to translate Kritik der reinen Vernunft, but deferred to Norman Kemp Smith (whose translation was the one I think most of us used in college).

As for the Groundwork, I think Kant approaches his subject in the right way. He starts with things as they are, in the “real world.” In this world, there are

• natural laws, such as, “To every action, there is always opposed an equal reaction”;
• moral laws, such as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Such laws exist; otherwise, you would not be able to read about them, as you can at the links provided (which are to Wikipedia, as being a convenient initial source for research).

Laws are moral when we can obey them or not. The existence of moral laws thus entails our freedom. If you want to say freedom is an illusion, fine, but the illusion still exists. What then does it mean?

You can’t say that natural laws explain everything, without need for moral laws. The natural laws do not explain the moral laws.

You may think they are going to. Apparently Steven Weinberg thinks that, or did think; he died in 2021, at the age of 88. In “Without God” (New York Review of Books, September 25, 2008), he gives “four sources of tension between science and religion that have been important”:

1. Science explains away the mysteries that have given religion its power.
2. Science takes us out of the center of the universe.
3. Science subjects everything to laws of nature, even God (this more a problem in Islam than Christianity).
4. Science questions authority.

Concerning the second point, Weinberg says:

Most important so far has been the discovery by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace that humans arose from earlier animals through natural selection acting on random heritable variations, with no need for a divine plan to explain the advent of humanity. This discovery led some, including Darwin, to lose their faith. It’s not surprising that of all the discoveries of science, this is the one that continues most to disturb religious conservatives. I can imagine how disturbed they will feel in the future, when at last scientists learn how to understand human behavior in terms of the chemistry and physics of the brain, and nothing is left that needs to be explained by our having an immaterial soul.

Last summer (2024), in “Motivated Reasoning in the Cyropaedia of Xenophon,” I argued that the theory of evolution explains less than people seem to think it does. In particular, it does not disprove Kant’s assertion in The Critique of Judgement (1790),

it is absurd for human beings … to hope that maybe another Newton may some day arise, to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass from natural laws that no design has ordered.

Darwin is not that other Newton, because, as Weinberg says, one component of the theory of evolution is random variation, and this randomness is unintelligible. I say that, even as there is randomness also in the heritability that Weinberg mentions, and this randomness is intelligible, after a fashion, as the experiments of Mendel show. A sexually reproducing organism that is heterozygous for some gene has a 50% chance of passing along the dominant version to its offspring. This leads to the Hardy–Weinberg Law (named for a different Weinberg).

We can make a good guess that mutations will cause viruses to become more virulent, and bacteria to resist antibiotics. Perhaps there is even some mathematics involved, but it needs an identification of the effect one is looking for. If one wants the probability of the evolution of mind, one must first define it. Genes may be out there, waiting to be found, as are the organisms they belong to. Mind is not, or so it seems to me, for it takes one to know one; more precisely, it takes what Collingwood calls criteriological science.

Meanwhile, Wallace is also not the other Newton, if what I see on Wikipedia is right:

Wallace believed that evolution had a purpose (“teleology”) in maintaining species’ fitness to their environment …

Weinberg’s essay was brought to my attention by Wendell Berry, who writes:

Not far into his essay, Prof. Weinberg says, with proper humility, “of course, not everything has been explained, now will it ever be.” But, two paragraphs later, speaking of “religious conservatives,” he abandons the careful and exacting speech of humility, and prognosticates with the absolute confidence and gleeful vengefulness of a religious conservative: “I can imagine how disturbed they will feel in the future, when at last scientists learn how to understand human behavior in terms of the chemistry and physics of the brain, and nothing is left that needs to be explained by our having an immaterial soul.”

This is from “God, Science, and Imagination” (Imagination in Place, 2010; included in Essays 1993–2017, Library of America, page 533).

Pace Professor Weinberg, I think one might just as well try to imagine how disturbed he will feel, once we understand properly the teaching of Anaxagoras,

that mind is what orders and causes all things.

ὡς ἄρα νοῦς ἐστιν ὁ διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων αἴτιος.

This is part of Anaxoras fragment R5 of Laks and Most, Early Greek Philosophy VI (Loeb Classical Library, 2016). The fragment is in turn a part (namely 97b–8c) of the dialogue of Plato called Phaedo. As Socrates tells the story there, when he heard the doctrine of Anaxagoras, he was pleased; then he was disappointed, when

I saw that this man made no use at all of mind and that he did not make certain causes responsible for putting things in order, but instead attributed the responsibility to airs, aethers, waters, and many other strange things.

Socrates has faced the moral question of how to respond to certain charges against him. He has accepted the verdict and the punishment, which will culminate in his poisoning himself to death. While he still can, he points out (99a–b, in the Loeb translation by Fowler),

If anyone were to say that I could not have done what I thought proper if I had not bones and sinews and other things that I have, he would be right. But to say that those things are the cause of my doing what I do, and that I act with intelligence but not from the choice of what is best, would be an extremely careless way of talking. Whoever talks in that way is unable to make a distinction and to see that in reality a cause is one thing, and the thing without which the cause could never be a cause is quite another thing.

Kant would seem to agree. He points out that the morality of an act is not to be inferred from its effects.

As far as I understand, chemistry and physics infer everything from effects. Thus Boyle’s Law is inferred from the effect on the volume of a sample of gas when the pressure on it changes. Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation is inferred more indirectly, from a mathematical demonstration that it entails Kepler’s laws of Planetary Motion, themselves inferred from observations of how the planets move among the fixed stars.

There are attempts to identify lies by their effects on the people uttering them. They fail. As pointed out in the Wikipedia article “Polygraph,”

there are no specific physiological reactions associated with lying, making it difficult to identify factors that separate those who are lying from those who are telling the truth.

You might say, “Difficult, but not impossible.” Such credulity would inhibit science itself, where one has to have a sense for what is not worth investigating.

In mathematics, for example, one should understand that Cantor’s diagonal argument is not going to be refuted. People still try to refute it. I tried to refute it myself, in youth, before I understood it. I talked about this in the context of the second half of Book I of the Republic, where Thrasymachus gets refuted about justice, but won’t admit it.

Meanwhile, a reference for the Wikipedia article is “Lie detectors: Why they don’t work, and why police use them anyway” (Vox, Dec 15, 2014), by Joseph Stromberg, who points out that what a polygraph measures is anxiety.

In “Tests,” I questioned whether one could need a test for anxiety or joy. One could ask further whether such feelings are a physiological response, or whether the response only suggests the feelings, possibly in error.

In any case, anxiety is not an infallible test for lying. Stromberg quotes a psychologist on this, Leonard Saxe:

“All these physiological measures are simply associated with fear and anxiety,” Saxe says. “And people are anxious sometimes when they’re telling the truth, and they can be not anxious sometimes when they’re lying. The more practiced you are at lying, the less anxiety is associated with it.”

Kant may be thinking of the practiced liar near the beginning of § 1 (page 394):

the composure of a villain makes them not only more dangerous, but also immediately more despicable in our eyes.

That famous saying by Whitehead, found in Process and Reality, the printed version of his 1927–28 Gifford Lectures,

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato

– I wish it were literally true. In particular, I wish Kant said where he agreed or disagreed with Plato.

In the Republic, Socrates analyzes us into three parts, which might be called appetite, passion, and reason, and which ought to work in harmony, but often don’t. For Kant, as far as I can tell, we have only reason and “inclinations” or “drives,” and we wish we could get rid of the latter (§ 2, page 428).

In the blog post already mentioned, “Motivated Reasoning in the Cyropaedia of Xenophon,” I argued that all reasoning was motivated reasoning. The argument could be developed more. The main point is that motivated reasoning is not automatically bad or invalid reasoning.

Perhaps I must reconsider. For Kant (§ 1, page 396),

Since reason nonetheless has been imparted to us as a practical faculty – that is, as one that is meant to influence the will – its true function must be to produce a will that is good, not for other purposes as a means, but as good in itself.

I think of reason as being there to confirm or refute our inclinations. The point is at least touched on in “What Mathematics Is.” In mathematics, we somehow identify propositions that we want to be true. Perhaps we are following the “drives” or “inclinations” that Kant talks about. We must then use reason to see whether what we want to be true is true. Perhaps putting reason to use requires the passion or “spirit” that Socrates talks about. In any case, in mathematics, logical deduction decides the question of truth.

Given a deduction, we still have to confirm that its every step is correct. We may be inhibited from doing a good job at this, if we are too highly motivated to believe the result anyway. I wrote something about this in “Antitheses,” “Anthropology of Mathematics,” and probably elsewhere.

In normal life, we don’t need the full power of reason; but sometimes, we do have to pause and ask whether we are justified in what we are inclined to do or not do.

Anyway, motivation is a particular theme of § 3 of the Groundwork.

I could wish that our author were clearer on what he thought of Christianity. Perhaps he was trying to avoid controversy. In Tom Holland’s book Dominion (which I talked about in “Plato and Christianity” and in “Righteousness”), Kant is not in the index, but the Enlightenment is. Under that heading, one of the references concerns Jean Calas, a Protestant in France who was accused of having killed his son for planning to convert to the Roman church. In the year when Kant turned 38, followers of the Pope delighted in torturing Calas to death. They used the same instrument that the Roman emperor had used on a Christian martyr, one of the namesakes of the Catherine Project.

It so happens that the story of another martyr, St Cecilia, is on this blog as constituting the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” among the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer.

To read Kant’s Groundwork, I am using the translation in the Oxford World’s Classics series (because it was the one in stock at a bookshop called Pandora, here in Istanbul). According to the translators, Bennett, Saunders, and Stern,

our aim … has been to target our translation at the ‘general reader’ rather than the specialist or scholar … following the original too literally can also obscure his meaning … we have often broken up and restructured Kant’s famously long sentences … we have allowed ourselves some flexibility in the translation of some German words … we have also translated Kant’s use of Latin terms directly into English, and have used gender neutral language.

I might have preferred a more faithful translation. Nonetheless, in my notes, I too try to get at Kant’s meaning, even in my own words or those of third parties. I am always subject to correction.

Kant may be difficult for a reason. He would seem to have a technical vocabulary, while not using it with mathematical precision. Plato is similar. The point is not to produce such slogans as are found in mathematics:

• e^iπ + 1 = 0 (which I encountered as a graffito in Paris), or
• A = πr² (which I have called a summary of the most difficult theorem in Euclid – Euclid’s Elements, that is, and let us call it one of the most difficult theorems, for having such rigor as was used two millennia later to ground the infinitesimal calculus).

Kant gives us something quotable in the categorical imperative, but he formulates it in three different ways, each with what seem to be a number of variants. Perhaps one should be prepared to come up with one’s own formulation to fit a given situation.

On examinations, students of mathematics may write down such words and symbols as they have seen their teachers use. Apparently they hope these things will fall into such an an order as we find value in. Thus I had a student ask me recently why her exam score was so low, since she had “written something” for two of the three questions.

Again, my translators of the Kant say, “following the original too literally can also obscure his meaning.” Doesn’t this suggest that the original obscures its own meaning? There may be features of the German language that needlessly obscure meaning, the way using the Arabo-Persian alphabet for Turkish formerly obscured its meaning, or at least its pronunciation, by the account of Mîna Urgan. However, by his own account, obscure to us today, Jesus spoke in parables for the sake of obscurity.

Preface

We engage in our present work in order to be moral. Kant will make this clear in the opening pages (406–12) of § 2. See especially the footnote about the late Professor Sulzer’s letter, on page 410 or 11: teaching people about virtue has not made them virtuous, because nobody before Kant has identified the pure concept of duty, although even children can recognize it.

To be moral is to be morally good. There are other ways to be good, mentioned at the beginning of § 1:

• good-natured, or
• well-endowed, or
• good at something (such as physics).

To be morally good is

• to obey the moral law, and
• to obey it on purpose (that is, for its sake).

One might obey the moral law on purpose, while knowing the law only implicitly. In that case, there is still something accidental about one’s goodness, and one may go astray.

If a putative moral law seems practical (easy to follow, conforming to experience), this may keep us from examining it too closely.

Therefore we want to work out what the moral law is purely, without reference to experience.

We still start with experience, working analytically (page 392). We believe in a moral law; what then can it be?

Once we have an answer, we check it synthetically, to see that it agrees with our experience.

We would seem not to be talking here about Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. Etymologically,

• analysis is freeing up,
• synthesis is putting together.

Motion upwards and setting down will appear in § 2, page 409, where Kant will refer to

our ascent to the principles of pure reason … grounding the doctrine of morals on metaphysics.

If we can get the meaning of a proposition by cutting it up into its parts, then the proposition is analytic. It is synthetic, if more than the sum of its parts.

In mathematics, analysis and synthesis go back to the Greeks. To solve a problem, assuming there is a solution, we figure out what conditions are necessary. That’s the analysis of the problem; the synthesis is checking that the conditions are also sufficient. I shall give a couple of examples, ancient and modern. One can skip them, but if mathematics is difficult, can philosophy be easier?

Kant himself uses mathematical examples.

1. He alludes (§ 2, page 417) to Proposition 10 of Book I of Euclid’s Elements,

   to bisect a given finite straight line,

   Τὴν δοθεῖσαν εὐθεῖαν πεπερασμένην δίχα τεμεῖν.

   You may say, “That’s not a proposition, it’s an infinitive phrase!” Strictly, it is the enunciation of the whole proposition, which includes a demonstration.

   • This proposition is specifically a problem, namely a thing to do. It ends with the words, “which was to be done,” Q.E.F., ὅπερ ἔδει ποιῆσαι.

   • The alternative is to be a theorem, something to contemplate or to speculate on; it ends with the words, “which was to be shown,” Q.E.D., ὅπερ ἔδει δεῖξαι. An example is Euclid’s Proposition I.5,

     the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal …

     Τῶν ἰσοσκελῶν τριγώνων αἱ πρὸς τῇ βάσει γωνίαι ἴσαι ἀλλήλαις εἰσίν …

     Kant refers to this proposition in the Critique of Pure Reason. The passage (B x–xi, here in the translation of Guyer and Wood) would seem to explain how mathematical propositions are synthetic, though without using that adjective:

     A new light broke upon the person who demonstrated the isosceles triangle (whether he was called “Thales” or had some other name). For he found that what he had to do was not to trace what he saw in this figure, or even trace its mere concept, and read off, as it were, from the properties of the figure; but rather that he had to produce the latter from what he himself thought into the object and presented (through construction) according to a priori concepts, and that in order to know something securely a priori he had to ascribe to the thing nothing except what followed necessarily from what he himself had put into it in accordance with its concept.

   The distinction between a problem and a theorem would seem to appear in the Groundwork (§ 3, pages 455–6), where, of natural law and freedom, the more useful is said to be

   • the former, for speculation;
   • the latter, for practice (that is, conducting ourselves).

   Meanwhile, the solution to the problem of bisecting a finite straight line consists of synthetic propositions. However, if you want that line in two equal pieces, you have got to bisect it – this is an analytic proposition, since willing the effect means willing the cause.

2. Later (§ 3, page 450), Kant will use a mathematical metaphor. Eight has to 12 the ratio of 2 to 3. In modern terms, the fractions 8/12 and 2/3 are equal. The latter fraction is in lowest terms, but this does not tell us what the ratio in question is. Likewise,

   freedom and the will’s own legislation are both autonomy, and hence equivalent (Abbott has “reciprocal”) concepts. However, precisely because of this, one of them cannot be used to explicate the other or specify its grounds.

   At this point, we are trying to see “how the moral law can be binding,” but we engage in circular reasoning: the moral law binds us because we are free; but then we think we are free, only because we are bound by the moral law. That seems to be Kant’s idea, but he does not put it so simply.

My own mathematical examples of analysis and synthesis are an ancient and a modern one.

1. Archimedes shows how to construct a sphere equal to a given cylinder.

   • He first analyzes the problem. Assume the construction has been done. The cylinder circumscribed about the sphere is half again as large. Using the original cylinder, we can construct another on the same base, half again as tall and therefore half again as large. So now we have a cylinder equal to the one circumscribing the sphere. In this case, the diameter of the sphere and the latter cylinder is one of two mean proportionals between the diameter and height of the former cylinder.
   • Synthetically, if we can find those mean proportionals independently, then we can construct the sphere. There are more details on this in “Astronomy Anomaly,” whose point of departure is a passage in Plato’s Timaeus about how air and water are mean proportionals between fire and earth.

2. Descartes supplies our modern symbolism for analysis. Is there a number, the square root of whose double exceeds by one the square root of one more?

   • We call the number 𝑥. The given condition on 𝑥 is

     √(2𝑥) − √(𝑥 + 1) = 1.

     This entails

     √(2𝑥)	=	√(𝑥 + 1) + 1,
     2𝑥	=	𝑥 + 1 + 2√(𝑥 + 1) + 1,
     𝑥 − 2	=	2√(𝑥 + 1),
     𝑥² − 4𝑥 + 4	=	4(𝑥 + 1),
     𝑥² − 8𝑥	=	0,
     𝑥(𝑥 − 8)	=	0.

     Therefore 𝑥 is necessarily 0 or 8.

   • Now go back:

     • √(2 ⋅ 0) − √(0 + 1) = 0 − 1 = −1.

     • √(2 ⋅ 8) − √(8 + 1) = 4 − 3 = 1.

   Thus, to solve our problem,

   • 𝑥 = 0 is not sufficient, but
   • 𝑥 = 8 is sufficient.

   Therefore the solution is precisely 8.

As for morality, Kant begins his Preface by putting it in a grand scheme, but this could be a distraction. There are three kinds of philosophy:

1. Formal: logic.
2. Natural: physics.
3. Moral: ethics.

These study the laws of thought, nature, and freedom (respectively).

We shall not be looking at laws of thought as such. Examples might include the laws of

• contradiction,
• sufficient reason

(whose formulations by Leibniz I looked at while annotating Charles Bell’s lecture, “The Axiomatic Drama of Classical Physics”).

In § 2 (pp. 436–7), Kant will allude to the categories that he identifies in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787). The categories of quantity are:

1. Unity.
2. Plurality.
3. Totality.

These are supposed to correspond to three formulations of the categorical imperative:

1. Act according to one law for all.
2. Treat everybody as an end (not just a means to your own ends).
3. Treat everybody collectively as a “kingdom” (Reich) of ends.

As for natural laws, they might include those mentioned above, such as

• Kepler’s laws of planetary motion,
• Newton’s law of gravitation.

They are of interest to us as laws that simply are obeyed.

By contrast, moral laws ought to be obeyed, but we are free not to obey them. This explains the alternative term, “laws of freedom,” even though, paradoxically (§ 2, page 420),

the unconditional command of a categorical imperative leaves the will no free discretion to do otherwise.

Perhaps Kant means an ideal will, subject solely to reason. However, he will also say (§ 3, page 452),

freedom just is being independent from the determining causes of the sensible world

– that is, of the world where natural laws apply, as distinct from the intelligible world, where moral ones do. As I suggest below, moral and natural laws are not distinguishable in form. It seems one may obey a moral law as if it were natural.

§ 1. That there appears to be a moral law

Kant’s title: “Transition from common to philosophical rational knowledge of morality.”

Various things (as we suggested above) are good, but only conditionally. For example, if he is cool, calm, and collected, the bad guy only seems worse.

Will, when good, is unconditionally so. We now build our evidence for this.

First of all, reason must be good for something. However, it is not good for happiness. I propose an example: it’s better to have such an appetite that one can eat what one wants, without having to follow a rational plan.

We say that reason is for directing our will to the good. However, we are still arguing from experience (i.e. doing practical anthropology).

Kant makes three numbered points, except he forgot to specify the first:

1. We can distinguish will from inclination in several examples:

   • Not cheating,
   • not killing oneself,
   • being charitable, even
   • seeking pleasure.

   We do these things

   • usually by inclination (or perhaps self-interest), but
   • sometimes, conceivably, out of duty – which is will, subjectively considered.

2. The worth of the dutiful act lies

   • not in the outcome it yields, but
   • in the maxim it follows.

3. Thus duty is a consequence of respect for the law.

Will is determined,

• objectively, by law;
• subjectively, by
  • respect for the law, hence
  • the maxim that the law shall be obeyed.

Results don’t matter, morally, because they can be achieved by other means than will.

What law can we be talking about?

• Not a particular law, but
• a law that everybody can follow.

For, being good is open to everybody, right now, without need for special knowledge.

The moral law does seem to require self-knowledge. (In § 2, page 407, Kant will refer to “even the most searching self-examination,” which may nonetheless fail to reveal our amour propre.)

For, the moral law is what will be called the categorical imperative in § 2. It is a second-order law: that what you do should conform to a conceivable first-order law.

For instance, lying cannot so conform and is therefore always forbidden.

Likewise, suicide is always forbidden, as Kant will argue in § 2. One might think then that killing anybody is forbidden. If Kant is really a pacifist, he ought to say so; keeping it hidden would be a misrepresentation, a kind of lie. Alternatively, if he can make an exception for some killing, then likewise for some lies.

§ 2. What the moral law must be

Kant’s title: “Transition from popular moral philosophy to the metaphysics of morals.”

We are not saying that everybody does respect the categorical imperative, only that they know they should. This knowledge is usually only implicit; we are going to work to make it explicit.

As Jesus Christ teaches the rich young man, the good is

• not empirical – not to be derived from a human example, but
• a priori – to be found in the invisible deity.

Jesus goes on to issue an imperative, here in Matthew 19:21:

If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

In Kant’s terminology (page 414), this is a hypothetical imperative. Perhaps we don’t want to be perfect. On the other hand, in a part of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:43–6) that Kant also alludes to, because it treats love as an act of will, not a feeling or inclination (§ 1, page 399) – Jesus concludes this part by telling us to be perfect:

43 Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
45 That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
46 For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?
47 And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?
48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

Towards the end of this section (pages 441–2), Kant will name perfection as one of the wrong (or perhaps inadequate or misguided) principles of morality. These are the heteronomous principles, introduced (on pages 432–3) as being distinct from the principle of autonomy, whereby we legislate our own moral law.

Meanwhile, we distinguished natural law from moral law. The distinction lies not in the “objective” laws, but in how they are obeyed:

• immediately, or
• mediately, through “representation” (page 412).

I read that last word as an emphatic form of “presentation.”

• Reason presents to us (i.e. to our will) the law, the objective law, as being worthy of obedience.
• We may be driven elsewhere, subjectively – by “drives,” obviously!

The difference between natural and moral law thus corresponds

• not to the distinction between objective and subjective, but
• to the absence or presence of such a distinction.

C. S. Lewis makes the distinction between natural and moral law in The Case for Christianity (New York, 1950; published as part of Mere Christianity, 1952):

… what we usually call the laws of nature – the way weather works on a tree for example – may not really be laws in the strict sense, but only in a manner of speaking. When you say that falling stones always obey the law of gravitation, isn’t this much the same as saying that the law only means “what stones always do”? You do not really think that when a stone is let go, it suddenly remembers that it is under orders to fall to the ground. You only mean that, in fact, it does fall.

In Kant’s terminology (page 412), the stone is not acting “according to the representation of the laws.” Lewis continues presently, seemingly echoing Kant:

But if you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent Behaviour, it is a different matter. That law certainly doen’t mean “what human beings, in fact, do”; for as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey it completely.

To talk about the distinctions involved here, we might bring in also William Egginton, “Why Kant Wouldn’t Fear ChatGPT-4” (Time, August 29, 2023):

Kant’s philosophy tells us that our anxiety about machines making decisions for themselves rather than following the instructions of their creators is misplaced … this fear derives from the misconception that there is no fundamental difference between humans and machines … A being whose cognition consisted entirely of a set of instructions could, by definition, make no distinction between the instructions and an experience of the world outside those instructions … And yet, Kant saw, such a model of knowledge emphatically contradicts everything we know about our experience.

As it seems to me, the computer is pure subjectivity. Likewise the divine will, of which Kant says (page 414),

no imperatives hold for the divine will or the holy will in general.

Egginton continues:

Let’s take the case of memory. You remember a beautiful day you spent as a child … Your memory in this scenario is pure information, but without a lived experience to contrast it to, you wouldn’t be reliving it, you would be living it, again …

For Dante, in Paradiso XXIX, angels have no memory, or at least no need for it:

  These beings, since they first were gladdened by
the face of God, from which no thing is hidden,
have never turned their vision from that face,
  so that their sight is never intercepted
by a new object, and they have no need
to recollect an interrupted concept.

As I understand, memory is subjective knowledge of something objective, and there’s a difference – for us, though not for divinity, as we have seen.

It would seem then that there is no moral law for divinity, but only natural law. At least, this seems consistent with one formulation of the categorical imperative (page 421):

act as if the maxim of your action, by your will, were to become a universal law of nature.

Kant is arguing against those who think there is no point (if there is even a possibility) in identifying an “only genuine supreme principle of morality … established a priori” (page 409).

The debate seems to correspond to one identified by Wendell Berry:

It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.

Source: the section called “Creatures As Machines” of the chapter called “On Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience” of Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000) – the superstition being, apparently, that science can answer all questions. The book is again part of Essays 1993–2017.

Relevant now is Revelation 21:22:

And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.

My attention is drawn to this by Collingwood, who, in Speculum Mentis (1924, p. 139), observes in a footnote, “there will be no religion in heaven.”

Why then should there be religion on earth?

I do not think we have to worry that giving up religion will lead to a moral decline. There are plenty of people without religious faith who live exemplary moral lives (as for example, me), and though religion has sometimes inspired admirable ethical standards, it has also often fostered the most hideous crimes.

Thus Steven Weinberg, again from “Without God” (September 25, 2008). We have noted the crime of killing Jean Calas, effectively for not being Catholic.

Again, Wendell Berry takes exception to Weinberg’s essay in “God, Science, and Imagination” (Imagination in Place, 2010):

Perhaps the most interesting thing that Prof. Weinberg says in his essay is this: “There are plenty of people without religious faith who live exemplary moral lives (as for example, me).” This is of course a joke … The large sad fact that gives the joke its magnitude and cutting edge is that there is probably not one person now living in the United States who, by a strict accounting, could be said to be living an exemplary moral life.

Meanwhile, Kant seems to argue that what we need is perhaps not religion as such, but the categorical imperative. Rather, since we already have it, what we need is to recognize it.

Kant asks (page 417): How is an imperative possible? We consider three examples:

1. Rules of skill (for example, to bisect a line segment, draw the straight line through the two intersection points of the two circles of which the line segment is a radius).
2. Counsels of prudence (for example, “Spend time outside. Eat healthy. Exercise regularly. Quit smoking. Put down your cell phone. Obsess less. Work hard. Pray often. And get enough sleep”).
3. Commands of morality (since Kant describes these too in the plural, he could mean, for example, don’t cheat and don’t lie, rather than the one categorical imperative from which those commands follow).

The first kind of imperative is hypothetical: If you want this result, you can do this. We investigated such imperatives earlier. How can the square root of the double of a number exceed by one the square root of one more than the number? Calling the number 𝑥, we saw that 𝑥

• must be 0 or 8 (this is necessary),
• can be 8 (this is sufficient).

The second kind of imperative is the case of the first where the desired result is happiness.

§ 3. Whether there can be a moral law

Kant’s title: “Transition from the metaphysics of morals to the critique of pure practical reason.”

An analytic proposition comes with a synthetic one:

• A free will is under moral law: this is analytic.
• The free will makes its own law: this is synthetic.

A synthetic proposition joins two things within a third.

Analogously,

• causes and effects are joined in the natural world (page 447);
• will and legislation are joined in the intelligible world

– at least, that is my interpretation of several pages of work, culminating (on page 454) in the assertion,

And thus categorical imperatives are possible because of this: the idea of freedom makes me a member of an intelligible world.

And yet we are also told (pages 458–9),

But reason would overstep all its bounds if it ventured to explain how pure reason can be practical, which would be the same as explaining how freedom is possible.

What is going on? The opening of the section seems to be a good summary of the situation:

The will is a kind of causality that living beings have insofar as they are rational. Freedom would then be a property of this causality insofar as the will is capable of acting independently of any alien causes determining it; while natural necessity is the property that characterizes the causality of all non-rational beings – namely the property of being determined into activity by the influence of alien causes.

Just in case, here is Abbott’s translation in the transcription of Project Gutenberg, but I don’t see any important differences:

The will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings in so far as they are rational, and freedom would be this property of such causality that it can be efficient, independently of foreign causes determining it; just as physical necessity is the property that the causality of all irrational beings has of being determined to activity by the influence of foreign causes.

Can we put that more succinctly? Having free will means moving independently. We might describe this as being self-willed. However, when doors open without being told to, the motion is unwilled. Each case is described by Homer as automatic (αὐτόματος), as I investigate in “Automatia.”

We live in a sensible world, obviously; we live also in an intelligible world, a world of understanding, where there are things behind what we sense. At least there are, sometimes, as we know from the experience of initiating action. According to Kant (page 451–2),

A reflective human being must reach a conclusion of this sort about all the things that may present themselves to [him or her]. Presumably it is also to be found in the commonest understanding, which is known to be much inclined to expect that behind the objects of the senses there is something invisible, and active in its own right. But then it spoils matters by making this invisible thing sensuous again …

Thus, I suppose, the gates of heaven are said to be controlled by the Hours, who get personified as goddesses of whom paintings and sculptures can be made.

The job of reason is to distinguish sense from understanding.

Of course there is more, but for now, Kant has exhausted me, or I have exhausted myself!