1

Kants Threefold Autonomy after the Groundwork:

Reasons own law-giving as our own cosmopolitan law-giving

I argue that Kants conception of reasons own law-giving and hence of the autonomy of

reason was always in the critical period also an account of our own individual law-giving. This is

a crucial part of Kants cosmopolitan conception of philosophy. I also argue that Kants work in

the 1780s and 1790s is importantly devoted to the project of developing an account of our

autonomy and its manifestation in sensibility that is able to bring our perception, feeling and

desire under the content-determining guise of our self-governance and of reasons and of our

own law-giving. Kant is thus able to provide an integrated account of us as human beings and as

persons who are also sensible beings embedded in the sensible world with a sense of self that

emerges out of our relationship to the world.

Section I: Reasons Own Law-Giving and the Critique

Kant does not use the term autonomy in either of the two editions of The Critique of

Pure Reason (1781, 1787); however Kant already has a conception of reasons own law-giving in

its first edition. The Critique is an account of how reasons own law-giving can and must become

our own law-giving as we participate in the process of a self-governance that is also the self-

governance of reason. Such self-governance involves an account of the causal efficacy of ideas

and norms. Kants philosophy from the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals (1783) to The

Critique of Judgment (1790), The Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and The Conflict

of the Faculties (1795) fills a deep lacuna in his original Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

account of reasons own law-giving, namely, how reasons own and our own law-giving can
 2

determine and have an effect on our own sensible experience as human beings in perception

(through the imagination), in feeling and in desire. Kant did not in the first edition of the Critique

(1781) have an account of how the normative dimension of self-legislation could display itself to

us in perceptual imagination, feeling or in desire; for he still thought that the concepts of

pleasure and displeasure, of desires and inclinations, of choice, etcare all of empirical

origin (A 15). The imagination is a blindfunction of the soul (A 78), it later becomes a

function of the understanding (B 103; 1787). In 1781, imagination and sensibility are still

separate faculties within a complex of faculties each making a differential contribution to the

ends of our cognition as we engage with the world. In 1787, the productive imagination,

responsible for our perception of objects from different perspectives as well as for our flights of

imagination, becomes the first effect of understanding on our sensibility and the ground of all

others (24, B 152).1

1On my reading of Kant, cf. Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998) my first person privileged normative access to my commitments is expressed in the idea that the I think
must be able to accompany all of my representations. Something only normatively counts as in me to the extent
that it is mine. Mineness is a normative notion for Kant. What is mine reflects my rational authority in self-
justification, I can justify my ownership claim of a representation to myself and to others. Thus for Kant something
that I cannot even in principle claim as mine has no significance for the I think at all. In the second half of the B-
Deduction, Kant shows that all significance is limited to what can or could make a difference to me in my
experience, but he also shows that anything of which I can or could become conscious is connected together by my
imagination governed by my understanding. First person psychological impediments to my self-knowledge are no
more nor less relevant to what I can know about myself than what I can know about anything else. Cf. also Christine
Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (New York: 1996), pp. 93 ff. and Richard Moran, Authority and
Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 142 ff. who are also
primarily concerned with the commitments of the self-conscious agent rather than with an introspective spectatorial
model of self-knowledge. Korsgaard and Moran take self-consciousness in Kant to express the authority of first
person justificatory over third person explanatory reasons. Moran takes self-knowledge to be a matter of the avowal
by an agent of commitments to how things are rather than a matter of drawing inferences from evidence about ones
inner life. It is always up to the agent whether he or she chooses to believe something. Thus self-knowledge is not
about collecting evidence about ones beliefs about oneself. Self-knowledge is grounded in the persons rational
freedom to take on a certain commitment (ibid., p. 151). Self-knowledge does not rely on introspective
psychological evidence (as a more spectatorial conception and abstractly theoretical conception would have it).
Moran does not take the primacy of avowal to threaten first-personal privileged access to ones beliefs but to affirm
and even to constitute such access, since privileged access is not to be understood in psychological but in normative
terms. My commitment to my belief is intrinsically normative, but something that only I can have. Kants emphasis
in the Metaphysics of Morals on self-knowledge as the most important practical commitment is grounded on this
normative-practical conception of self-knowledge: Moral self-knowledge that demands that we penetrate into the
depths (abyss) of the heart, the depths more difficult to access, is the beginning of all wisdomthe harmony of the
will of a being with its ultimate end (6: 441)
 3

Kant already emphasizes in the Critique in 1781 that ideas of our reason have causal

power (A 328/B 385). Practical reason not only has causal power through ideas in the

Groundwork, but our practical reasoning comes to have the power affectively to motivate us

through (our reasons self-caused feeling of) respect that we feel for the moral law and our

own law-giving and the kind of person that we ought to be (4: 401n). In The Critique of

Practical Reason, the second Critique (1788), the will and its autonomy come to be seen not only

as the autonomy of pure practical reason but also as the upper faculty of desire (5: 25) and

Kant now seeks to include the value that our happiness has for us in a comprehensive conception

of the good (as the object of pure practical reason). Finally, in The Critique of Judgment, the

third Critique (1790) and in the still later Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and

Conflict of the Faculties (1795) Kant puts forth an account of how the autonomy of our reason

manifests itself sensibly not only in moral respect, but also in aesthetic appreciation that does

justice to the independence of sensibility and the world from our reason.2 The new conception is

able to make sense not only of how our reason can make a difference in our experience and the

sensible world through what we do, but also of how it can transform the nature of our lives of

feeling and desire.

Kant moves in the Critique from our perceptual situation in the sensible world and in the

forms of human sensibility, space and time, to the way in which our own situation in space and

time is systematically connected by causal laws to all other situations. Kant then systematically

2 In his Anthropology, Kant systematically develops the idea of a human being who is a natural being belonging to
the process of nature, but who is also capable of attaining the standpoint of the autonomous (self-legislative) world-
citizen in the exercise of perceptual and theoretical cognition through the use of language and signs, in aesthetic
appreciation through disinterested, essentially social feeling and in moral judgment and agency through the exercise
of reason to determine our capacity for desire. In this way, one is able to move away from the egoism of cognition,
aesthetic and moral judgment according to which one takes oneself to be the whole world to the pluralist
standpoint in which one is a mere [law-giving] citizen of the world (7: 130). In the second half of the book Kant
includes all of human nature and culture in this development toward the species as a system that is cosmopolitically
united (7: 333).
 4

relates our own situation in space and time to what we as reasoning agents do and how we

govern ourselves in the history of human culture, science and morals. Through the exercise of

our reason in a comprehensive understanding of our experience from the vantage point of the

coherence of our experience with our normative commitments as agents in history, we are able to

legislate to ourselves the laws of nature and morals according to which we ought to govern

ourselves in the world.

To take reasons own law-giving as a model we have to have the philosopher not in the

sense of the person proficient in the craft of technical philosophy before us, but the idea of the

law-giver of human reasonthe idea of whose law-giving lies in every human reason; this is

the cosmopolitan conception of philosophy as the relation of all cognition to the essential ends

of human reason (teleologia rationis humanae) (A 839/B 867). According to Kants

cosmopolitan conception of philosophy, we are reasoning agents who are both subject to,

bound by and sovereign legislating subjects of the laws of nature and of freedom (A 838/B 866).

As world-citizens (cosmopolites), we have sovereignty and are legislators, judges and governors

with respect to the laws governing the system of purposes that defines what the world is for us as

human beings. Philosophy in its cosmopolitan, world or cosmic conception, is concerned with

the systematic coherence of what we know and do with our necessary and ultimate ends in a

comprehensive conception of experience and the good.

Kants conception of his own system of philosophy, the legislation of human reason

containing natural law and the moral law in initially distinct systems and ultimately in a

unified system, is based on thinking things through systematically and comprehensively to their

very grounding origins in the unity of everything we do in self-conscious reason. In bringing

what we as reasoning agents do in line with the comprehensive coherence of our normative
 5

commitments we come to understand what philosophy, in accordance with this cosmopolitan

concept prescribes for systematic unity from the standpoint of ends and especially from the

standpoint of the final end, the ultimate vocation of human beings in the practical (A

839-40/B 867-8). Even actions of thought are in this sense actions that are sunk into practical

reason, they implicitly presuppose the practical idea that is the maximal standard that underlies

exercise according to rules; the practical idea is in respect to real actions unavoidably

necessaryin it reason even has causality to bring about what its concept contains; action ought

ultimately to make a contribution to wisdom, the idea of the necessary unity of all possible

ends that is at least the limiting condition for a rule (A 328/B 385).

Kants conception of theory is ultimately embedded in the practical point of view that

demands a unity of theoretical and practical reasoning in the idea of wisdom and its object, the

highest good. Our theories are always embedded in the systematic practices of science and these

systematic practices are under the umbrella constraint of wisdom and the government of

reason (A 832/B 860). Philosophy in the true sense is: wisdom through the path of science (A

850/B 878). The laws of nature as we formulate them for ourselves must be consistent with our

very ability correctly to formulate and legislate laws to ourselves and to nature on the basis of

our experience and what we do in inquiry. It is thus already part of Kants conception of reason

in the Critique that through our reason we legislate laws to ourselves to which we can comply
 6

because we are obligated by our reason to comply.3

The normativity of principles and of concepts, in Kants terminology, is expressed in the

idea that they ought (sollen) to be adopted both because they are law-like and also universal

in scope. But if we ought to adopt them, then this means that we take ourselves to be able to

adopt them. The ought is the ground of an action that is a mere concept indeed the ought

when one has the mere progress of nature before ones eyes has no meaning (A 547/B 575).

3There is a groundbreaking development of autonomy as the way individuals are unified for Kant under the
constitutional form in Christine Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, Integrity (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009). Cf. especially chapter 7. 5. 3. for her account of self-constitution and the self-governance of
a state according to its own separate constitutional powers and institutions; each power represents the public and
citizens through its delegated authority and distinctive contribution to the whole, the idea of the state as norm for
the states internal constitution The Metaphysics of Morals (6: 313).The connection that Korsgaard draws between
Platos Republic (and Aristotle) and Kant in Self-Constitution is instructive and important. Her discussion focuses on
the moral autonomy of the individual and political autonomy. I include all the forms of human autonomy and
cognition within the scope of my discussion and development of Kants cosmopolitan conception of philosophy; I
take Kants development from 1781 to 1795 to attempt to do justice to Platos notion that our whole soul must be
turned around to the good (and that the good is the ultimate principle of purpose-relevance and significance). The
purpose-relevance of all significance goes with the cosmopolitan conception of philosophy and the primacy of
practical reason with respect to theoretical reason. Although Kant is skeptical of Platos mysticism and his
tendency to hypostasize ideas into objects of purely theoretical reason, understood in terms guided by the practical
use of ideas, Platos spiritual flight in the Republic which considers physical copies in the world order and then
ascends to their architectonic connections according to ends, i.e. ideasis [for Kant] an endeavor worthy of respect
and emulation (A 318/B 375). The Critique is itself a self-discipline of ourselves as reasoning agents according to
which one submits oneself to lawful coercion which alone limits our freedom in such a way that it be consistent
with the freedom of everyone else and thereby with the common good. (A 752/B 780) Kant sees the ideal of a self-
institution of laws as embodied in Plato's Republic and in the Platonic ideal of a philosopher. Platos Republic, as
Kant interprets it, is the ideal of a constitution providing for the greatest human freedom according to laws that
permit freedom of each to exist to exist together with that of others [Platos Republic and the comprehensive
human good and highest good it embodies] is at least a necessary idea, which one must make the ground of all
laws (A 316/B 373). The standpoint of systematic unity according to ends is a standpoint structured by the idea and
ultimately by the idea of the highest comprehensive good. For the proper dignity of philosophy consists in
making these moral edifices level and firm enough to build on; this is based on ideas [that] first make the
experience (of the good) itself possible (A 319/B 376). Kant thinks of the idea in normative terms as a maximum of
perfection. In regard to anything in the world only the whole of its combination in the totality of a world is fully
adequate to its idea (A 317-8/B 374-5). Ideas constitute the self and the world as truly integrated totalities and as
such underlie the very system of laws according to which we relate to ourselves and to the world as autonomous
agents.
 7

Principles of reason are independent of any causal or psychological process of reasoning.4 In our

actions, and such actions include the use of concepts in judgment, in actions of thought, as

well as actions more directly connected with the use of our bodies and under moral norms, ideas

serve as norms governing what we are trying to do.5 Human beings are for Kant both sensible

beings subject to the vagaries of our experience and agents belonging to a realm of ideas and

norms according to which we are able to govern our actions. For Kant, thinking is norm-guided

self-directed action. But thinking is never wholly divorced for us from the (sensible) context in

which we think. Thus every act of thought, indeed every action in general, is also a unification of

the world of ideas (and the norms of reasons own law-giving) with the world of space, time and

sense and the human being in history and culture.

It is an important part of Kants cosmopolitan conception of philosophy that we must

come to understand reasons own law-giving in terms that stem from our own reason and from

our own law-giving. In acting from reasons own law-giving we are not simply acting from what

4Kant does not explicitly use the term ought (sollen) of principles of reason in general including logic until
quite late. In the Jsche ed. Logic, he treats the necessity of logical rules and laws as concerned with how we ought
to think; this is a universal use of the understanding which one finds in regard to oneself without any
psychology (9: 14). The first edition of the Deduction in the first Critique (1781) already treats the pure laws of
the understanding as a norm [Norm] under which and according to which they [empirical laws] are only
possible and appearances take on a law-like form (A 128); the second edition Preface emphasizes the distinction
between logic and psychology (1789; B VIII-IX). Kants articulation of the law-giving of our understanding and his
conception of the norm-guided character (normativity) of the process through which we legislate laws to ourselves
and to nature antedates his use in print of the term autonomy; it also anticipates his use of the ought to apply to
everything that we do as (finite and incompletely) rational agents.

5 Kant takes pure apperception and the actions of our understanding and reason to be independent of sense
human reason shows true causality... where ideas become efficient causes (of actions and their objects) reason
does not give in to those grounds which are merely empirically given, but makes its own order according to ideas to
which it fits the empirical conditionseven declaring actions necessary that yet have not occurredpresupposing of
all such actions that reason could have causality in relation to themwithout that, it would not expect its ideas to
have effects in experience. (A 547-8/B 574-5)
 8

he calls an alien reason (A 836/B 864).6 Our own law-giving is attentive to norms of reasoning

to which we gain access from tradition and training, but our own thought is never exhaustively

constrained by others takes on such norms.7 We use paradigmatic examples of philosophical

thought from tradition to develop and exercise our own thought both in technical philosophy and

in the cosmopolitan conception of philosophy (A 838/B 866). The person however who merely

imitates others and learns a philosophical system by heart is nothing but a plaster caste of a

living human being; if one relies on the understanding of things that others have, then one is

forming oneself according to an alien reason...a reproductive capacity...not a productive

one (A836/B 864). In this section I have argued that Kant has a conception in the Critique of the

causal and normative power of ideas and of reasons own law-giving that manifests itself in our

ability to govern ourselves by that law-giving and to make such law-giving our own law-giving.

Making reasons own law-giving our own law-giving is an implicit commitment in every action

we perform as thinking agents.

6The Critique is the true court of justice for all conflicts of reason. It is as such able to adjudicate conflicts in our
reasoning according to their original institution (A 751/B 779) because this original institution of laws is a
lawgiving based on this critique itself (A 752/B 780). Thus the Critique is the process through which we as
reasoning agents develop the competence in the public sphere to institute, adjudicate, and where appropriate,
execute the laws according to which we govern ourselves in the different contexts in which as agents we move. The
fundamentally cosmopolitan conception of the Critique is revealed in its juridical model of reasoning even in its
epistemological and metaphysical claims in the Doctrine of Elements. Thus the transcendental deduction of the
validity of the categories and principles of the possibility of experience is modeled on the judicial process of
justifying title (deduction) in the Holy Roman Empire, cf. Dieter Henrich, Kants Notion of a Deduction and the
Methodological Background of the First Critique in Kants Transcendental Deductions, ed. Eckart Frster
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). Henrichs own representational, consciousness-oriented and
methodologically solipsistic conception limits him from developing the cosmopolitical implications of Kants
conception of deduction for Kants philosophy.
7For Kant understanding, reason and thought are not about psychological or physical states, but about norm-guided
action, action guided by an ought to do. Kant is even more explicit in rejecting the identification of thought with
psychological states in the Preface to the second Critique: to prove that we do not have a priori knowledge you
would have to use reason and reason; but inference cannot function without an objective rather than the subjective
necessity of psychological associations. Objective necessity presupposes a priori principles. To think that some kind
of subjective necessity might do the trick would involve a kind of knowledge of the similarity of other minds that we
do not have. We cannot infer from the fact that we have no reason to ascribe a different way of representing things
to other rational beings that they are like us (5: 12).
 9

Section II: Autonomy and Authenticity in the Groundwork

In The Groundwork (1783) and in the second Critique (1787), the term autonomy is

explicitly applied only to moral autonomy. According to the notion of autonomy that Kant first

introduces in his published work in The Groundwork, a person is only subject to and also

normatively bound by law insofar as that person gives the law to herself and can also regard

herself as the author or originator (Urheber) of the law. Our reason must regard itself as the

source of its own principles and the will that is practical reason is only its own will [ein

eigener Wille] under the idea of freedom (4: 448). Being the author of the law requires that one

be able to regard oneself as a reasoning agent as subject of all ends and thus as the original

source of the law that governs all ends and not merely as subject to the law. It is only as an end

in itself, as a reasoning agent capable of setting ends for oneself and acting according to the end

of fulfilling ones personhood including that of others (the only end of absolute value) that one is

subject of the law (4: 431). We are able to legislate such laws to ourselves and to bind ourselves

to them in our reasoning action and this is enough for us to take ourselves to be practically free

without it being possible to provide a theoretical proof that we are free agents (4: 448).

Autonomy is introduced as a property of the will and only in virtue of being a property of

the will is autonomy a property of principles of the will: Autonomy of the will is the property of

the will through which the will is a law to itself (independently of any property of the objects of

the will). (4: 440; 447) And autonomy of the will is not independent of our capacity to make

choices: The principle of autonomy is therefore: not to choose otherwise than in such a way that

the maxims of one's choice can be grasped together in the same willing also as a universal

law. (4: 440) In The Groundwork the will is identified with the causality of living beings insofar
 10

as they are rational (4: 446) and with practical reason and the capacity to act according to ones

representation of the laws (4: 412); Kant does not give up on this characterization in the second

Critique, but he does also identify practical reason as the upper faculty of desire (5: 55). And he

makes it clear that the upper faculty of desire is only properly so-called, the will is only a true

higher faculty of desire (5: 25) insofar as our reason determines our willing through its own

legislation independently of any feeling of pleasure or displeasure.

The notion of autonomy answers the question why we should regard norms as binding for

us. We should regard norms as binding for us because they stem from the very normative

conditions under which we can act and truly be who we as agents are. We have a fundamental

interest in morality because the will and its autonomy express our true self as intelligences who

belong to a world in which our reasongives the law (4: 457). For its [reasons] law-giving,

it is required that it [reason] only need presuppose itself because the rule is only then objective

and universally valid, if it is valid without contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one

rational being from another. (5: 21). It is thus tempting to divorce the autonomy of principles (of

practical reason) from the process of making choices and to think of autonomy exclusively in

terms of reasons own law-giving.

Kants overall argument in favor of autonomy involves not only reasons own law-giving
 11

and reason giving itself principles, but also an agents own law-giving.8 It is only through

reasons own law-giving as ones own law-giving that one is truly an agent. It is as

intelligence, as a reasoning agent, that one is truly oneself; intelligence is ones authentic

self (eigentliches Selbst 4: 457). Only as a reasoning agent is one truly an agent rather than a

relatively passive respondent to ones causal circumstances. For this reason, inclinations are not

attributed to the authentic self as will; the laws of the will as intelligence are independent of

sense (4: 457-8). Feelings and desires (including the habituated desires that are inclinations) have

to be implicitly endorsed by one as part of ones sense of self and what one does for one to be

responsible for them. One takes an interest in morality because one sees moral action as an

expression of who one truly is: This much only is certain: that it [the moral law] does not

therefore have validity for us because it interests (for that is heteronomy and dependence of

8Onora ONeill, The Inaugural Address: Autonomy: The Emperor's New Cloths, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 77 (2003), pp. 1-21. ONeill takes autonomy to be predicated by Kant of
principles and neither of individual selves nor of processes of choosing (p. 1). Autonomy and heteronomy are
features of principles according to which we reason. The difference between autonomous and heteronomous
principles is that the former are universal in scope as well as law-like, whereas the latter are at best law-like.
Universality in scope means that our reasons law-giving presupposes only what we must presuppose in our
reasoning about what to do independently of any assumptions or presuppositions that might be made differently by
different agents (p. 16).ONeill notes that if self-legislation is done by individual wills (and given an individualistic
conception of willing), then it is hard to see how what one does is coordinated with what other persons do (p. 12).
Rather than arguing against a purely individualistic reasoning self, she argues that universal self-legislation involves
a reflexivity of rational principles that is not about the self or person at all: The element self in the notion of self-
legislation is reflexive rather than individualistic; it applies to certain justifications of principles rather than to
certain agents or legislators. Kant takes himself to be giving an account of lawgiving that is the sort of lawgiving
that is reasons own and not an account of law-givings that are an agents own. His understanding of self-legislation
places the emphasis on the notion of legislation, rather than on any notion of self. Kantian autonomy is reasons
lawgiving rather than the lawgiving of individual agents (whatever that might mean). (Ibid., p. 17). Although
ONeill rejects the notion that reasons law-giving could be the law-giving of individual agents, it is an important
part of her view that anyone be able to follow the reasoning in question and comply with the demand for living
by principles (p. 18). Thus ONeills view does not seem to allow her truly to divorce the autonomy of principles
from the autonomy of persons who live by and choose according to principles that are embedded in culture, history
and what we do. In her earlier Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) her
emphasis on the history and sociality of reason, a theme with which I am in deep agreement, seems to me to be in
tension with the opposition that she later draws between rational self-reflexive principles of autonomy and
individual persons and processes of choice. Her notion of following, which picks up on Kants conception of
Nachfolge from the third Critique account of autonomy that I discuss in the final section, would bridge the gap,
but undermines the opposition between individual persons and their processes of choice and the abstract self-
reflexivity of principles for which she later argues.
 12

practical reason on sensibility, namely a feeling that is its ground in which case it can never be

morally legislative) but it interests because it is valid for us as human beings, since it has arisen

from our will as intelligence, hence from our own authentic self [aus unserem eigentlichen

Selbst] (4: 460-1). Thus reasons own law-giving is what is truly an agents own because it

belongs to what truly matters to us as agents rather than to what merely appears to us to matter.

The satisfaction of desires is an apparent good, since desires only seems to come from who we

are, while what we truly value must come from our authentic self, from who we truly are. We can

value the satisfaction of our desires, but only as part of a comprehensive good. In the second and

third Critiques Kant develops a conception of moral and aesthetic sensibility that will allow him

to meet charges that his conception of our authentic self comes at the cost that to be who we truly

are we must alienate ourselves from the sensible side of our existence as human beings.

Section III: Threefold Autonomy and Threefold Sensibility

In the second Critique, Kant develops a comprehensive account of moral sensibility and

the highest good as the object of our pure practical reason. Although the second Critique is

presented in terms of the axiomatic method, Kant soon argues that the significance of practical

principles is sunk into and not independent of the most common practical use of reason (5: 91).

Indeed Kant argues that our training in normativity by example, allows us to recognize what is

appropriate without further reflection and without the explicit articulation of a rule: But when

one asks what pure morality is as the metal test with respect to which every action is to be tested

for its moral content, I must admit that only the philosopher can regard this as doubtful; for in

common human reason it is already decided not through abstract general formulae, but through
 13

common use, like the difference between the right and the left hand. (5: 155)9

In commonsense reasoning, one holds oneself up to a standard grounded in one's own

reason. Relative to this idea of ones moral self, one feels the inadequacy of the privacy of one's

desires (hence Kants critical reference to solipsism with respect to reasoning from ones

desires 5: 73). One feels humiliation in ones identification of oneself with ones desires. In

overcoming dependence on desire, we overcome a hindrance to the causal effect of our reason

in how we understand ourselves and what we do that amounts to a positive promotion of

causality in respect to our reasoning (5: 75). We gain a certain indirect satisfaction in our own

person and elevation from identification with our desires. Action done from a moral motive thus

provides us with a certain distinctive feeling of contentment with ourselves (5: 118).

The Groundwork seemed to leave Kant with a fundamental dualism between our sensible

and our intelligible natures. The second Critique promised to heal the breach by embedding pure

practical reason in commonsense reasoning and interpreting the moral feeling of respect not only

as a humiliation of our desires, but as a positive elevation connected with a sense of oneself as a

morally responsible self. The Critique of Judgment (1790) takes up the problem head on in its

Introduction and generalizes it. There is a gulf or crevasse [Kluft] between the domains

of nature and of the sensible and the domain of the concept of freedom or of the super-

sensible (5: 175, but also 5: 195). Understanding in providing the laws of nature and reason in

providing practical laws of moral freedom have two different legislations on one and the same

territory, this territory is that of experience (5: 175). Kant shows how our reason can be both

completely independent of the causal order of nature and nevertheless determine our

9According to the second Critique, training in moral judgment gives virtue or the mode of thought according to
moral laws a form of beauty that one wonders about [like the organization of living creatures], but does not seek...
like everything that subjectively effects a consciousness of the harmony of our faculties of representation... it effects
a liking that can be communicated to others (5: 160).
 14

imagination, our feeling and our capacity for desire through the way imagination, feeling and

desire can come to be expressions of the autonomy of our reason. And thus Kant has an account

of how reason can both be independent of the causal order of our sensible world and yet also

manifest our autonomy in its effects in our very sensible experience. Kant introduces a

threefold autonomy of reason in respect to the sensible faculties of cognition, feeling and desire

to bridge the gulf between our intellectual and sensible life. The gulf between the sensible and

the reasonable remains on the input side of our normative commitments to maintain the

independence of our reasons from any particular causal chain of sense and to maintain the force

of ought implies can. On the output side, the same principle applies; our reason ought to have

an effect (5: 176; 195) in our experience as we make the autonomy of the normative

commitments that we take on manifest in our imagination, feeling and choice.

Kant builds on the manifestation of (moral) autonomy as the moral feeling of respect in

the third Critique, and in his later work. The third Critique makes explicit a conception of

autonomy that applies to reason in general. More importantly Kant also shows how the

autonomy of reason is able to encompass all of the fundamental dimensions of human experience

and at the same time to preserve a sense in which the sensible is both dependent on and also

independent of the autonomy of our reason. Kant now for the first time explicitly ascribes

autonomy to all of the higher faculties, that is, to our faculties insofar as they involve our

reason (5: 196). Understanding is taken to have autonomy with respect to cognition. Reflective

judgment is now taken to play a constitutive role with respect to feelings of pleasure and

displeasure. Finally Kant explicitly recognizes a role for reason in the (higher) faculty of desire.

Reason is not taken to have anything to do with the satisfaction of desire, but our reason

determines our faculty of desire in respect to its final end; such determination of a final end itself
 15

involves an intellectual liking in the object that is independent of any antecedent pleasure or

displeasure (5: 197). Kant now has the resources for a conception of the autonomy of our reason

made manifest in our sensible experience.

According to Kant, the spontaneity in the play of the faculties of cognition that is the

basis of this pleasure makes the concept in question [the concept of purposiveness of nature for

judgment] capable of mediating the connection between the domains of the concepts of nature

and of freedom by promoting the receptivity of mind for moral feeling. (5: 197) Just as one can

understand our imagination as the process through which our understanding forms perceptual

significance for us, so too our aesthetic reflection takes an active delight in such perceptual

significance when it conforms to and contributes to the purpose not only of our coming to grips

with our role as law-givers of nature, but also of the whole realm of norms. There is a certain

looseness of fit in how we systematically connect events under causal laws because we never

have a complete account of causal conditions in nature. Thus we find ourselves compelled in our

judgment to take nature to be conducive to systematization for and by our judgment. Kant refers

to this as the heautonomy of reflective judgment.10 But such systematization starts from where

we are in experience, culture and science. In aesthetic judgment we experience a feeling of

pleasure or delight in our success in taking in an underlying comprehensive order in the seeming

10Kant distinguishes two different senses in which reflective judgment legislates to nature. We use determinative
principles of our understanding (as autonomy) in reflective judgments of taste. We use reflective principles of
judgment as heautonomy" for our reflection on the systematic unity of nature under laws in reflective judgment (5:
185). Our understanding constitutes objects of nature and the laws according to which they must appear to us
according to our spatial and temporal forms of sensibility. But further constraints are necessary to come up with a
full-fledged systematic whole of natural laws and an encompassing causal order of nature. Kant has already argued
in the Canon of the first Critique that the interest-relativity of our attempts at the systematic unification of nature
under laws allows and demands that we seek that systematic unity of nature under laws that is consistent with our
ability in our situation in experience to use our understanding to reason about the world and to act according to
ends, including moral ends (A816-7/B 844-5). Thus the heautonomy of judgment is guided by this conception of a
comprehensive systematic unification of all of our experience under the guise of our participation as agents in the
highest good.
 16

appearance of disorder in our imaginative flights and in nature. Thus is opened up a domain of

feeling that is independent of experience, but that as such is also systematically related to the

moral feeling of respect that we have for the moral law and for our authentic moral self.

Aesthetic feeling prepares the way for the feeling of respect, aesthetic feeling also owes its

validity for humanity in general and not merely for everyones private feeling to that role in

making moral ideas and especially the good sensibly manifest (5: 356). In aesthetic judgment we

are conscious of our truly autonomous aesthetic (affective-imagining) self.

The structure of autonomy that displays itself in the feeling of respect for the moral law is

structurally analogous to the feeling of delight or consciousness of purposiveness of form (5:

221) in aesthetic experience. Kants conception of aesthetic feeling is independent of a direct

relationship to any object, even to the good, but it involves a feeling that is the expression of our

independence from feeling and desire grounded in our causal past. Aesthetic judgment unifies the

autonomy of reasons own-lawgiving with the sensibility of the imagination and perception, of

feeling and not directly, but indirectly of desire. Our imaginative perception and disinterested

aesthetic liking in imaginative perception relates to the world as a comprehensive whole that is

superficially wild, as is displayed in nature, but in the end comprehensively coherent because

amenable to our norm-guided agency as it is embedded in nature. We directly feel this in our

aesthetic liking which is a liking that stems from our own autonomous activity rather than being

caused by an object. What we perceive is merely the occasion for our own autonomous activity

as judgers. This is in the end the significance of the free play of our imagination, the free

lawfulness of the imagination (5: 240) in art and in aesthetic experience in harmony with the

autonomy of our understanding. In aesthetic experience the object has a form that the
 17

imagination if it were left free alone to itself would sketch in general in harmony with the

lawfulness of the understanding. But that the imagination could be free and accord with the law

on its own, i.e. that it has autonomy is a contradiction. Only the understanding gives the law. (5:

241) Kant interprets the free play of the imagination in conformity with the understanding as a

free lawfulness as lawfulness without a law, or purposiveness without purpose (5: 241).

While Kant now ascribes autonomy to the understanding, he nevertheless recognizes both a

dependence of imagination on the activity of the understanding and a certain amount of

independence in the way things are sensibly manifest to us by our imagination according to the

rules provided by the law-giving of our understanding.

IV: Autonomy and Pluralism

In this final section, I develop the connection between autonomy and ones own law-

giving as it emerges from Kants cosmopolitan pluralism and his opposition to egoism, as well as

to extreme realist forms of objectivism. I show that Kant views ones own law-giving as a key

and inextricable feature of autonomy as reasons own law-giving. We take our own judgment to

be right because we take it to reflect the outcome of a process of universal self-legislation, of

adopting a take from our own specific point of view as an agent in the world that we take it all

others ought to be able to adopt in reflection and action from their own vantage point in the

world. Kant takes the inner nature of judgments of taste to be pluralistic and not egoistic

in this sense (5: 278). We are able to make statements of approval or rejection with some

semblance of right [such that] everyone ought to agree with it [the pure judgment of taste]...the

obligation is unconditional [das Gebot ist unbedingt] (5: 278). The unconditional character of

the normative obligation in a judgment of taste is grounded in ones own-law-giving as an

 18

expression of reasons own law-giving and the systematic harmony of overall conception in the

highest good that involves.

Kant develops the cosmopolitan pluralist conception of normativity at greater length in

his Anthropology. He distinguishes egoism from pluralism with respect to theoretical judgment,

aesthetic judgment and practical judgment. True (theoretical, aesthetic or practical) autonomy is

pluralism: The opposite of egoism can only be pluralism, that is the way of thinking in which

one is not concerned with oneself as the whole world, but rather regards and conducts oneself as

a mere citizen of the world. (7: 130) Like the feeling of moral respect which allows us to

overcome moral egoism, aesthetic feeling gives us a sense of overcoming the privacy of

individual feeling to which we are subject (as sensible beings); we come to take pleasure in our

success at overcoming a liking for things that is wholly dependent on our own interests in our

own situation. In cognition, it is our attentiveness to standpoint-invariant laws and our effort at

detachment from our own private interests that allows us to escape what Kant calls logical

solipsism (7: 128). As a world-citizen one is an active participant in the process of law-giving

and the establishment of norms that bear differentially on one's own particular situation in the

world and constitute oneself as a whole as an agent and as judger in relation to the whole of other

agents and judgers with different points of view. As human beings, we come to integrate

ourselves into a public sphere in respect to which we are able to govern ourselves as members of

a cosmopolitan world-historical whole of world-citizens. The claim to universality and to view

things from the standpoint of reasons own-law-giving is based on our own distinctive

understanding of things even if that should in the end prove mistaken.

Kant cites the example of a young poet who later comes to revise his own initial positive

assessment of his poetry, but does not do so because others judge it to be bad. Initially the poet is
 19

what Kant calls an aesthetic egoist in the Anthropology, only later does he attain the standpoint

of the (cosmopolitan) pluralist: The aesthetic egoist is satisfied with his own taste, even if others

find his verses, paintings, music and similar things ever so bad... he isolates himself with his own

judgment; he applauds himself and seeks the touchstone of artistic beauty only in himself (7:

129-130) The poet revises his take as he enlarges his aesthetic appreciation not because of what

others say but because he comes on his own to judge his work in a less self-interested fashion.

He judges and revises his judgment of taste as he does with respect to those judgments that

depend wholly on reason. Taste makes a claim to autonomy. It would be heteronomy to make

alien judgments [of others] the determining ground of ones own. (5: 282) Our use of models

from tradition and culture in no way undermines the claim of our judgments in taste,

mathematics, religion or ethics to autonomy. For in following in the footsteps of those who have

gone before one, one reasons through their procedure to get on the right path to finding

principles in oneself, and so to go on ones own often better way (5: 283). We use our own

reasoning in our own cultural context to bring ourselves both in our judgment and in our

perceptual and affective response to take on reasons own law-giving as our own law-giving.

The judgment of taste is universally (and necessarily intersubjectively) valid because of

our autonomy expressed in it: the universal validity of taste is not to be based on collecting

votes and asking around from others about the way that they sense, but instead on an autonomy

of the subject judging about the feeling of pleasure (in respect to a given representation), that is,

on taste (5: 281). In aesthetic judgment we have the ability to make a normative claim that our

taste ought to be shared by everyone, but it is important that it be ones own taste for which one

is claiming universal validity and that such taste not be based on experience or on a pleasure

arising from ones causal relationship to an object. Aesthetic pleasure itself also expresses
 20

universal validity.11 Like the practical feeling of respect, truly disinterested aesthetic pleasure is

an expression of our success in distancing ourselves from our own individual feelings and desires

and taking up the pluralist and cosmopolitan standpoint of law-giver for oneself and others. The

pleasure we take in both the beautiful and the good is a pleasure in our own success in attaining

to the pluralist standpoint of cosmopolitan thought and away from private egoistic experience,

but not away from our own standpoint as judgers.

Autonomy in judgment is self-legislative in the sense familiar from the first Critique, we

bring forth in ourselves an idea of what is appropriate and normative that is independent of our

causal circumstances. This aesthetic idea is operative both in judgments of taste and especially in

the production of works of art, which is for Kant a distinctive kind of free agency. Kant allows

one to take others as models in ones judgment and to draw on the resources of such models for

the cultivation of judgment which only means as much as: drawing from the same sources, from

which they draw and only learning the way to carry oneself from one's predecessors. (5: 283)

Thinking for oneself, the principle of a never passive reason and the maxim of enlightenment,

are juxtaposed to the heteronomy of reason, in which one passively takes over one's

understanding of things from society without thinking things through on one's own. Such

passivity and heteronomy of reason is displayed in reliance on tradition, and especially in

!11The autonomy of aesthetic judgment involves an identification in judgment of the pleasure that we take in certain
perception with its universal validity. In this respect, I agree with the interpretation of aesthetic judgment by Hannah
Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature (New York: Oxford, 2015). However at times her characterizations, such as
that of pleasure as a self-reflexive mental state that expresses both the harmony of the faculties and its own
universality, suggests that mental states and faculties have a significance that is prior to and independent of the
normativity of the judgment by a person within a social and cultural context. This suggests a mental
representationalist conception of human faculties and of the mental as operating independently of what human
agents do who are embedded in the process of human culture. Kants claim that taste is a faculty belonging to
itself (5: 232) picks up the reflexive aspect of the notion of autonomy as self-legislation. But I would not want to
divorce such reflexivity from the distinctiveness of what we do when we engage in making claims of taste. This is
connected to my previously expressed reservation about ONeills account of a self-reflexivity of moral principles
divorced from persons as well as their processes of choosing, Onora ONeill, Autonomy: The Emperor's New
Cloths, p. 17.
 21

prejudice and superstition (5: 294). Enlightenment and autonomy do not cast off culture and

tradition, but culture and tradition provide us with paradigmatic examples in philosophy, in art

and in morals upon which we exercise our autonomy. It is especially true in aesthetic judgment

that models are needed the aesthetic significance of which cannot be captured in abstract

principles; examples of what has continued to be praised in the process of culture are needed to

avoid regression to the crudeness of first attempts (5: 283).

Autonomy so interpreted is not simply a matter of using one's own judgment. Autonomy

is a matter of using one's own judgment in a very specific sense, one that commits one to the

universality and the necessity of the claim and thus to ones judgment being an expression of

reasons own law-giving: the subject judges for himself without having need to tap about

through experience among the judgments of others...hence the judgment is not to be expressed as

imitation...but a priori. (5: 282) In ethics and religion, an example of virtue or holiness

established from history does not make the autonomy of virtue from ones own and original idea

of morality (a priori) superfluous or turn it into a mechanism of imitation (5: 283). For Kant,

principles are won from paradigmatic examples through our contextual understanding of their

differential significance in what we do within the comprehensive order of our ends and of a

nature that we must take to be conducive to those ends. In this way, aesthetic judgment and its

recalcitrance to exhaustive articulation is a model for Kant for the normativity of all judgment

and rule-following. But it is so only because it displays the way our judgment in general is

embedded in our perceptual experience, in our cultural context and in our normative

commitments, yet also transcends them in a manner that is both unique to everyone and also

expresses what we all have in common. Such transcendence is the ultimate significance of Kants

conception of the transcendental unity of apperception, manifest to us in language as the

 22

expression I and its relation to all other signs, in morals as the self-consciousness of practical

reason and the positive feeling of respect for our own law-giving capacity as persons and in

aesthetic experience as the common sense in terms of which our aesthetic liking is inherently

shareable.