Álvaro Rodríguez-González Barredo

We have represented the glittering pretensions of reason to extend territory beyond all the bounds of experience only in dry formulas, which contain merely the ground of reason’s legal claim; and, as is fitting for a transcendental philosophy, we have divested these claims of everything empirical, even though the full splendor of reason’s assertions can shine forth only in such a combination. But in this application, and in the progressive extension of the use of reason, since it commences with the field of experience and only gradually soars aloft to these sublime ideas, philosophy exhibits such a dignity that, if it could only assert its pretensions, it would leave every other human science far behind in value, since it would promise to ground our greatest expectations and prospects concerning the ultimate ends in which all reason’s efforts must finally unite.

Critique of Pure Reason, A 463/ B 491

1

It is a problem as old as philosophy, and one that probably drew many of us into the land of metaphysical speculation the first time we heard of it. Everything that exists has a cause, so either there is an uncaused cause, or there are infinitely many causes – both deeply unsatisfying answers for their own reason. Kant, famously, regards this dissatisfaction as an essential feature of our reason. Reason needs to find the unconditioned in every chain of conditions, much like children won’t stop asking “why?” after every partial answer one can come up with. I was caused by my parents, they were caused by theirs, “and so forth”. Et caetera. This family of lazy end clauses hides a dilemma where the demands of our reason and the possibilities it can actually grasp fail to align.

What’s interesting is that this isn’t quite the conflict of reason Kant has in mind in the Third Antinomy. Sure, it is about causality. We can choose between having a chain of causes go on forever or have it stop at some point, but the question at stake isn’t whether there is an unmoved mover that would solve the regressus of causality at a universal scale. Rather, Kant tells us, the conflict here is between determinism and the possibility of freedom.

2

The most intuitive picture of a free choice we have is probably that of standing at a crossroads. We have two clearly defined paths, we cannot take both of them, and it is within our capacity to decide which one it will be. Our choice trims down the branching tree of possibilities of our lives. This aspect of our free will seems to be absolutely central, that we have a certain power to change the outcome of things. If it was already determined that Brutus was going to betray Caesar, or that I was going to slack and not write this post until the very last minute, the extent to which these are free actions and humans are free beings is, to say the least, put into question.

Of course, this is a pretty elementary form of anxiety around free will, probably most people who have devoted a few minutes to thinking about it have experienced it: it does look an awful lot like we are subject to the laws of physics, it does seem like our experiences take place in the medium of chemical reactions, it does appear that we are made up of smaller pieces, each of which obeys rules of its own.

3

But this isn’t what concerns Kant in the Third Antinomy. Why does the question around the possibility of freedom take the shape of the problem of the unmoved mover? It gets even worse, once we look into it. Antinomies, as previously mentioned, arise because reason is incapable of reaching the unconditioned in a chain of conditions. It can try to find an unconditioned member of the chain, but insofar as it is properly a member (say, a cause), then it will be unclear in what capacity it actually is unconditioned (say, why it itself doesn’t need a cause). It can also say that the chain is infinite, and it is the chain as a whole that is the unconditioned. But we cannot make sense of an infinite chain of causes giving rise to a particular event in time, it seems like an infinity would need to have “ended” for it to reach the point we are at right now.

We can, however, see the dilemma in a positive light, as two apparently conflicting interests of reason. On the one hand, we have an interest in continuing our empirical investigation. When we want to look into the causes of some event in the world, we cannot just put an end at some arbitrary point in the chain of antecedents, we gotta keep looking as far back as we can. On the other hand, our actions cannot be treated like that. It is hardly relevant to say that it was the Big Bang who caused the death of Martin Luther King. We want to put a stop to the regress at the point where a free agent can be said to be, actually, responsible for the action – whatever that may mean for a physical being.

But consider the crossroads we talked about earlier. Ideally, at the moment of choice it is completely up to us to walk down one way or the other, and whichever route we ultimately take, if we wound up to the moment of choice we could have just as easily chosen the other one. How do the two interests of reason behave here? Well, if we are after the completion of empirical explanation, then surely we cannot rest content with saying that things could go both ways. Or, at least, Kant couldn’t. A complete explanation would be a ground for determining the choice one way instead of the other (NE 1:). The choice at the crossroads, for our interest in a thorough empirical investigation, had to be settled the way it was.

Is it any different for the pro-freedom thesis, though? When we stop considering the never-ending chain of phenomena going all the way ’til the Big Bang and, instead, we consider an action as the free product of a rational being, what is it exactly that this free being has done? If it is an unconditioned condition in the sense that a complete empirical explanation is, and if it really is a condition that accounts for whatever causal event we are meant to explain, then it seems like the free agent had to choose the way it did! Otherwise, if it could have just gone either way, is the agent really fulfilling the demands of reason? After all, the point is that an infinite chain of empirical conditions leaves the event hopelessly waiting for a train that has to go through infinitely many stops, while the unmoved mover settles the action once and for all. But if we could have a world where everything is exactly the same, and the agent acts, but the chain that results from that action is completely different, then the agent explains nothing. If the agent is to serve as an ersatz infinite chain of events, it has to be something about the agent that determines what they do. But then the crossroads was already settled from the start.

4

A big point of contention around the nature of divine freedom is, naturally, whether God acts according to a perfect essence, or whether His freedom cannot be curtailed by such metaphysical boundaries. The relentless problem of free will definitely shares something with these theological questions. Kant’s way of positing the questions makes room to this intriguing possibility, which is so much clearer – paradoxically – when stripped from the context of human actions. It may be the case that our intuitive way of understanding freedom is fundamentally at odds with what we are actually looking for when understanding our actions and their place in the world. Still, though, it is fairly strange to think that, while free, we really, like, actually didn’t have much of a choice.

But freedom of choice cannot be defined – as some have tried to define it – as the ability to make a choice for or against the law (libertas indifferentiae), even though choice as a phenomenon provides frequent examples of this in experience. For we know freedom (as it first becomes manifest to us through the moral law) only as a negative property in us, namely that of not being necessitated to act through any sensible determining grounds. But we cannot present theoretically freedom as a noumenon, that is, freedom regarded as the ability of the human being merely as an intelligence, and show how it can exercise constraint upon his sensible choice; we cannot therefore present freedom as a positive property.

Metaphysics of Morals, 6: 226