Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is surprisingly small. But I suppose its interplay between pure (speculative) reason and pure practical reason must be given its own book… the context of this exchange was given already in Critique of Pure Reason. In a sense, the first critique is a book criticizing the useless illusions of metaphysics. This second critique is a book criticizing the pointless misdirection of inductive, empirical (practical) reason. Thus, this book is to encourage the mix of two.
Between the untouchable and impossible ethics non-empirical law, and the completely contingent and blind non-ethics of pragmatic desire, we have the space carved by Kant as the space allotted to pure practical reason — the space that constitutes free will.
This conjecture encapsulates Kant’s system, how he finds a place for the application of reason (consistency) given the contingencies and inexplicable events arising from nature. In a sense, he unhinges the metaphysics of presence from the mental world and from the physical world, to spin it off into the suprasensible. (In way, perhaps ironically, this is also the conclusion of Badiou’s Being and Event II, in which Badiou was quick to criticize Kant for not pursuing his particular methodology, even though the final conclusion is in some ways so very much the same.)
I see why he chose to write this as a second book rather than including it in his first. In many ways though, this is merely crossing the “t” of the first book.
We’ll see what he has to say in his third critique.
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