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The Phenomenological Failure of Groundwork III
Jeanine M. Grenberg
a
a
St. Olaf College, USA
To cite this Article Grenberg, Jeanine M.(2009) 'The Phenomenological Failure of Groundwork III', Inquiry, 52: 4, 335
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Inquiry,
Vol. 52, No. 4, 335356, August 2009
0020-174X Print/1502-3923 Online/09/04033522 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00201740903087318
SINQ 0020-174X 1502-3923 Inquiry, Vol. 52, No. 4, June 2009: pp. 138 Inquiry
The Phenomenological Failure
of Groundwork III
Jeanine M. Grenberg
JEANINE M. GRENBERG
St. Olaf College, USA
(Received 30 July 2008)
ABSTRACT Henry Allison and Paul Guyer have recently offered interpretations of
Kants argument in Groundwork III. These interpretations share this premise: the
argument moves from a non-moral, theoretical premise to a moral conclusion, and the
failure of the argument is a failure to make this jump from the non-moral to the moral.
This characterization both of the nature of the argument and its failure is flawed.
Consider instead the possibility that in Groundwork III, Kant is struggling toward
something rather different from this, not trying to pull the moral rabbit out of the theo-
retical hat, but instead seeking a proto-phenomenological grounding of morality: a
grounding that begins from first personal felt experiences that already possess moral
content, and proceeds to its further practical claims via attentive reflection on these felt
experiences. This paper brings this assumption to our reading of Groundwork III,
showing that in doing so we acquire a deeper appreciation both of the argument, and the
reasons it fails. Kants argument is practical throughout. And the failure of the argu-
ment is the failure of Kants nascent efforts to provide a new, phenomenological method
for the grounding of practical philosophy.
I. Introduction
Kants argument in Groundwork III is the most beloved flawed argument
in the history of philosophy. Recent literature only reaffirms our fond-
ness for it, and for figuring out what is wrong with it. Paul Guyer
1
has,
for example, recently suggested that, after pre-critical arguments focus-
ing on a more naturalistic grounding of freedom, Groundwork III seeks
to provide a non-naturalistic, transcendental deduction of freedom (and
the moral law), one that follows the structure of the transcendental
Correspondence Address: Jeanine M. Grenberg, St. Olaf College, Department of Philosophy,
1520 St. Olaf Avenue, Northfield, MN 55057, USA. Email: grenberg@stolaf.edu
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336 Jeanine M. Grenberg
deduction of the first Critique. But, according to Guyer, this argument is
fatally flawed:
the transcendental rather than psychological method that Kant
employs . . . sidesteps altogether the normative task of demonstrating
the absolute value of freedom for which he earlier turned to psychol-
ogy: its argument from our underlying identity as rational beings aims
to show that the moral law is valid for us because we really are rational
and free beings rather than showing that it ought to be binding on us
because we ought to recognize the value of being rational and free
beings. (Guyer, 2007a, p. 455)
Henry Allison has suggested that this argument moves from non-moral
premises about the nature of reason to moral conclusions about freedom
and obligatedness to the moral law.
2
Further, the argument fails because the
assumption of this theoretical capacity for reason cannot get us to what we
want morally, namely, a supersensible realm governed by moral laws.
(Allison, 1990, p. 227).
Allison articulates this argument differently than Guyer. Nonetheless,
they share this premise: the argument moves from a non-moral, theoretical
premise to a robust moral conclusion. The failure of the argument is thus a
failure to make this jump from the non-moral to the moral.
Guyers non-moral premise is his appeal to the notion of a rational
being upon which the argument turns. The argument is an analytical
argument deriving the moral law from the concept of a rational being, . . .
and is parallel to the metaphysical deduction of the categories (Guyer,
2007a, p. 454).
Allisons needed nonmoral premise (Allison, 1990, 227) is that of rea-
son considered theoretically; the failure of the argument is Kants unwit-
ting slide from this conception of reason to a more robust conception of
positive freedom which entails reason in the stronger sense of being
governed by autonomously legislated moral laws, a slide that Allison articu-
lates as an unidentified movement from a Verstandeswelt to an intelligibelen
Welt and which he asserts begs the whole question at issue (Allison,
1990, pp. 22728).
For both Guyer and Allison, then, the failure of Groundwork III is the fail-
ure of an argument beginning with non-moral premises about our theoretical
capacity for reason and moving toward an affirmation of a more robustly
practical claim about ourselves as free or as autonomously legislating
rational agents.
These interpretations, while successful in pointing us to important
moments in this difficult argument, fail as a complete articulation of Kants
developing argumentative approach in Groundwork III. Consider instead the
possibility that in Groundwork III
3
Kant is not trying to pull the moral rabbit
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The Phenomenological Failure of Groundwork III 337
out of the theoretical hat,
4
but instead developing what turns out to be a
proto-phenomenological method of practical philosophy. I call this method
proto-phenomenological for two reasons: first, it begins from felt, first
personal experiences that already possess practical content;
5
secondly, it
proceeds to further philosophical claims not via rational inference accessible
by anyone, but only via attentive reflection on ones own felt experiences.
6
I do not mean to suggest that Kant is defending a fully articulated phenome-
nological method of practical philosophy, nor that he operates in an unam-
biguously phenomenological way throughout the course of Groundwork III.
Rather, I am suggesting that, in the writing of Groundwork III, he was in the
midst of struggling with the question of what the proper method to bring to
practical philosophy was. As a result, we find, right next to more theoreti-
cally based arguments of the sort Allison and Guyer have identified, hints of
a new and what, in hindsight, is a recognizably phenomenological approach
to practical philosophy.
It may sound crazy, but if we bring this assumption to our reading of
Groundwork III, we can appreciate more deeply both the course of Kants
argument and the reasons for its failure. I do not deny that there are obvious
theoretical assumptions lurking in the text of Groundwork III, but these
theoretical references obscure Kants nascent practical method and
arguments instead of clarifying them. In focusing on those moments in
which Kant seeks to develop this new practical method, we can articulate the
argument of Groundwork III as practical throughout: from an assumption
about practical experience, taken from what is given to us from a felt, first
personal perspective, Kant seeks, via a method of attentiveness to this given
phenomenological experience, to ground our obligatedness as autonomous
law-givers.
On this reading, the failure of the argument is a failure to enter fully
into a new practical and phenomenological perspective. Kant will be
more successful at employing this practical phenomenological method in
the Critique of Practical Reason, where the starting premises of his
argument prove thick enough to be susceptible to phenomenological
reflection. I will not, however, consider the success of that later, more
mature set of practical reflections. Instead, I focus on a previous task:
showing how this first, not entirely explicit effort at practical phenome-
nology had to fail.
Although this new method fails here, we can, through investigation of it,
articulate what this new method for practical philosophy would need to be
to work. It needs to rely upon morally thick assumptions, assumptions that,
from Kants still-somewhat-theoretically committed point of view in the
Groundwork, are too thick to be accepted as premises. Only when Kants
reflections on a new method of practical cognition develop in the second
Critique can he more confidently and justifiably assert the assumptions a
phenomenological method needs.
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338 Jeanine M. Grenberg
II. The phenomenological argument of Groundwork III
II.i The felt phenomenological experience of freedom
Kant, famously, at the opening of Groundwork III suggests that rational
agents need to take themselves to be free:
I say now: every being that cannot act otherwise than under the idea of
freedom is just because of that really free in a practical respect, that is,
all laws that are inseparably bound up with freedom hold for him just
as if his will had been validly pronounced free also in itself and in theo-
retical philosophy. Now I assert that to every rational being having a
will we must necessarily lend the idea of freedom also, under which
alone he acts. For in such a being we think of a reason that is practical,
that is, has causality with respect to its objects. Now one cannot
possibly think of a reason that would consciously receive direction
from any other quarter with respect to its judgments, since the subject
would then attribute the determination of his judgment not to his rea-
son but to an impulse. Reason must regard itself as the author of its
principles independently of alien influences; consequently, as practical
reason or as the will of a rational being it must be regarded of itself as
free, that is, the will of such a being cannot be a will of his own except
under the idea of freedom, and such a will must in a practical respect
thus be attributed to every rational being. (4: 448/5354)
This argument is not one that takes place completely from a first personal
point of view. Indeed, it most obviously implies a third person point of view.
When, for example, Kant says that to every rational being having a will we
must necessarily lend the idea of freedom also, under which alone he acts,
he is asking us to take a spectatorial point of view upon another acting
agent, not to consider ourselves as that agent. He is not, at least initially, try-
ing to immerse himself from a first person perspective in what it must feel
like to be a rational agent experiencing herself as free.
Yet, hidden in this argument, we do find the beginnings of a first person
point of view being articulated. It is found in the following sentence:
Now one cannot possibly think of a reason that would consciously
receive direction from any other quarter with respect to its judgments,
since the subject would then attribute the determination of his judg-
ment not to his reason but to an impulse.
The first person point of view is not immediately obvious here because Kant
speaks of reason or a subject. This more impersonal language disguises
the shift he has made to the first person, as is in fact clear from his later
appeal to this reason as consciously receiv[ing] guidance. Kant is here
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The Phenomenological Failure of Groundwork III 339
appealing to someone reflecting upon his own judgments, and finding that
he cannot even think of them as his own unless he understands himself as
the active cause of them. He consciously receives direction from his own
reason; that is, he experiences himself as taking direction from himself, as
the active and rational cause of his judgments.
This is clearly a reference to the first person point of view, but it is not a
reference to what one might call the felt experience of being free. This agent
does not feel a distinctive experience of being free; rather, he cannot help but
to think of himself as free when he finds herself as an actor. When this agent
takes conscious guidance from his reason, he is thus having the experience
not of feeling himself to be free, but instead of thinking or inferring from his
actions that he must be free. This is why some commentators, like Allison
(1990) and Korsgaard,
7
would take this passage, especially its language of
not act[ing] otherwise than under the idea of freedom, as affirming not a
felt experience of freedom, but rather a rational demand that we take,
assume, or infer, ourselves to be free. One can use the language of experi-
ence to refer to this rational reflection upon ones actions. But this is an
inference that a third person spectator upon my action could make as easily
as I could; it is an assumption that anyone must make when observing a
human action, either ones own or anothers. Kant is thus not, in this
passage, entering fully into the felt phenomenological experience of freedom;
rather, there remains this remnant of a third person, even more theoretical,
argument for freedom.
A variety of challenges have been raised about this argument, especially
when one interprets it as involving a necessary inference or taking of oneself
as a free agent. At the heart of these criticisms is the question of what really
it is that forces the inference from oneself as actor to oneself as free, and the
worry that, in fact, there are many agents who do not make this inference at
all.
8
I do not intend to assess the force of these criticisms. I would like,
instead, to suggest that there is a different sort of starting point to be found
in Groundwork III. We can identify a second articulation of Kants claim of
freedom, one that might, on the face of it, seem simply a restatement of his
opening argument, but which in fact enters more fully into a felt first per-
sonal phenomenological experience of freedom.
In the section immediately following the one just considered, having just
asserted that we need to take a different standpoint when by means of free-
dom we think of ourselves as causes efficient a priori, (4: 450/56) Kant states
further that the shift to this new standpoint is made by the commonest
understanding, albeit only via an obscure discrimination of judgment
which it calls feeling. (4: 451/56). Kant thus grounds a distinction between
these two standpoints by beginning with a common, feeling-centered, first
personal phenomenological experience. It is the philosophers job to provide
a more precise philosophical articulation of these common but obscure
feelings, and it is to this task that Kant turns. What emerges is a somewhat
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340 Jeanine M. Grenberg
different articulation of the first personal experience alluded to in the first
argument. We find now a distinction between representations given us
from somewhere else and in which we are passive, and those that we produce
simply from ourselves and in which we show our activity (4: 451/56). Kant
asks us to look within ourselves and admit that we can identify two distinct
sorts of experiences: in the first, representations come from outside of us and
we relate to them as passive recipients; in the second, representations are
also produced in usthat is, brought about from a previous state in which
they did not existbut are now produced by us instead of by something out-
side of us. This distinction is obvious, he says, because of something we get
out of a first person encounter with our representations: we experience, even
obscurely feel, ourselves as passively receptive to some of our representa-
tions and as actively productive of others. No longer is Kant asking us to
look as spectators upon another person acting as agent; nor is he referring,
from a first personal point of view, to the idea that we must all think of
ourselves as free on pain of logical contradiction. Instead, he is now moving
more whole-heartedly toward the assertion of a felt experience of being free.
How best to understand this experience? Kant himself provides no clarify-
ing example of what he means, though he does insist that, whatever this
experience is, it is accessible to the commonest understanding via feeling.
9
Further, he speaks of this experience as show[ing] our activity. (4: 451/56,
emphasis added). That, combined with his earlier, non-felt suggestion that
we must understand our reason as the active cause of these representa-
tions, makes it tempting to understand this experience of activity as some-
thing approaching a revelation or showing of positive freedom, that is, the
experience of ourselves as having a causality in accordance with immutable
[and rational] laws (4: 446/52).
But felt experience of positive freedom would have to be an experience of
the causal influence of these rational laws on our course of representations,
and it is difficult to imagine what a commonly accessible experience of that
would amount to; to experience reason as a causal force seems a very high
level experience indeed, bordering on the mystical.
There is, however, a more common sense way to think of this experience
of being active in relation to ones representations, one which abandons the
concern to articulate a felt experience of the operation of ones reasoning
capacity. Think, for example, of a small child chasing seagulls on a beach:
My mother isnt doing this; nor is she preventing me from doing this. I am
causing those birds to fly away! Even a child can distinguish the phenome-
nological nature of this experience from one in which her mother is making
her brush her teeth, or in which her inability to walk yet prevents her from
running anywhere. She is experiencing herself as being active in relation to
her mental representations of the birds.
One might worry that this just isnt what Kant means by an experience of
mental representations. Might he not mean a more introspective experience,
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The Phenomenological Failure of Groundwork III 341
entirely internal to the active agent? Mental representations seem to refer
to some interior experience, and so reference to things external to us seems
to undermine the pure activity that would be asserted: the child is not being
fully productive of the existence of the birds, and not even of their motion,
only of the moment at which they fly. One might therefore look for some
more purely internal experience of oneself as an active cause or agent, the
sheer experience of agency itself.
There may be some sort of experience like this, though I find it difficult, in
my own phenomenological consciousness, to articulate what that would be.
Articulating such an experience becomes even more difficult when we
remember we are looking for a common experience, one that does not require
a high level of philosophical sophistication.
The difficulty in finding an adequate, common phenomenological experi-
ence of this pure sort thus suggests that this is not the way to go. Kants
definition of mental representations also confirms that we are wrong to
limit ourselves to those experiences that are purely internal to the agent. In
the world of transcendental idealism, a representation [Vorstellung] is simply
the most general word for any mental content. This includes those mental
contents referring to oneself, but also to those mental contents putting us in
touch with the world around us.
As such, it is more appropriate to interpret mental representations as
referring to any mental content, including those referring to things outside of
us. In this appeal to passivity and activity, Kant is thus suggesting a distinc-
tion between experiencing ourselves as passive in relation to the world
around us, and other times as active in relation to that world. The latter is a
practical experience of ourselves as agents in the world. Sometimes, things
just happen, or we are compelled to do things by something either internal or
external to us; other times, we are not so compelled.
This activity is thus more appropriately understood not as positive
freedom, but as what Kant calls negative freedom. Kant describes such
freedom as that property of . . . causality that . . . can be efficient independ-
ently of alien causes determining it, (4: 446/52, emphasis removed) or as
the independence of the power of choice from necessitation by impulses of
sensibility (A534/B562; 533, emphases removed). It is this emphasis on the
negative, that is, on freedom from determination by something, either
alien or sensible, that defines the activity we experience. We might even
allow a slight movement beyond negative freedom, and say that, as a result
of being removed from such external and internal constraints, I also experi-
ence myself as somehow bringing something about. What cannot be found in
this felt experience of activity is reason as the uncaused, lawful cause of my
mental representations. In moving away from an argument based in rational
inference toward a more completely felt first person experience, Kant thus
also moves away from taking the assumption of ourselves as explicitly
rational agents as the starting point of his argument for freedom and
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342 Jeanine M. Grenberg
morality. This is a felt experience of activity, but it is not (yet) an experience
of rational activity; it is a more general and common experience than that.
A final point to emphasize: when Kant later appeals back to this common,
felt experience of activity in relation to ones mental representations, we need
to understand this as reference to a practical, and not a theoretical, premise.
It is a claim, accessed via common, felt experience, about how we commonly
experience ourselves as actors, that is, as productive of things instead of sim-
ply as knowers of them. What we see here is an indication of Kants slowly
developing sense of what it means to approach a problem practically instead
of theoretically. Later, in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant will draw this
distinction between the theoretical and the practical explicitly by saying that
practical reason is concerned with doing or the production of actions as
opposed simply to knowing.
10
Here, we have only a hint of that developing
practical point of view: through appeal to a common, felt experience of our-
selves as being related to our representations in a way that does not demand
appeal to an alien cause of those representations, Kant is indirectly point-
ing us to a practical experience of ourselves as producers of action.
II.ii From freedom to morality
To enter a fully practical point of view, Kant needs, however, beyond refer-
ence to this common, felt experience, also to take this experience as a guide
to our thinking in a way that is different than appeal to a theoretical premise
would. A closer look at Groundwork III reveals Kants efforts to make this
felt phenomenological experience of freedom productive of this new, more
practical cognition.
Articulation of the felt experience of freedom just considered appears in a
section titled Of the Interest Attaching to the Ideas of Morality, a section
within which Kant raises a new question about the interest attaching to the
ideas of morality. He seeks in this section to connect human freedom to
obligatedness to a moral law,
11
asserting that consciousness of a law for
acting flow[s] from the idea of freedom. (4: 449/54, emphasis added) That
is, consciousness of being obligated somehow comes out of, emerges from,
or is produced by our consciousness of freedom.
At the point he makes this claim, he has only articulated freedom in the
more austere, rational inference sense explained earlier, so it seems to make
sense that it is upon that conception of freedom that this forthcoming argu-
ment must turn. Yet, when he says that the connection between freedom and
laws of action he is seeking needs further articulation, his articulation of that
premise of freedom (4: 451/54) turns out to be the more robust, felt sense of
it just articulated. As such, though we must admit that Kant himself is, at
this point in the argument, wavering between these two conceptions of free-
dom, it makes better sense to understand that freedom from which laws of
action flow as the common, felt experience of negative freedom.
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The Phenomenological Failure of Groundwork III 343
Furthermore, in making sense of how morality flows from this experience
of freedom, Kant introduces hints of a new method of practical philosophy.
We need, he says, to bring the most strenuous attentiveness (4: 451/56)
and reflect[ion] (4: 451/56) to this grounding experience of freedom in
order for that experience to be productive of moral conclusions. This atten-
tiveness is possible for any reflective human being, indeed even for the
most common understanding (4: 451/56). If we look at the felt experience of
negative freedom attentively, we must admit and assume behind appear-
ances something else that is not appearance. That is, we can make a dis-
tinction, although a crude one, between a world of sense and the world of the
understanding (4: 451/56).
How is this conclusion forthcoming? In the world of sense, everything has
a cause external to it; but I experience myself as free from such causes. It
must follow that I am not simply a member of the world of sense, since the
causality of that world is one that operates only via such alien influences.
I therefore am experiencing myself as distinct from the world of sense. I must
therefore also be a member of a worlda so-called world of the under-
standingin which a non-alien form of causality is possible. This may be a
claim central to transcendental idealism, but it is here achieved not theoreti-
cally, but practically, through attentive reflection on oneself as an actor.
Why, though, is attentiveness needed to yield this conclusion? If it really is
a common human experience to encounter this difference between activity
and passivity, shouldnt it be just as commonly occurring a conclusion
that worlds of sense and understanding exist? Kant suggests, to the contrary,
that attentiveness is needed because of another common human tendency
that operates against drawing this conclusion. The tendency to come to the
conclusion that worlds of sense and understanding exist from reflection on
all the things that present themselves in human consciousness is found
even in the most common understanding. In fact, common human under-
standing, as is well known, is very much inclined to expect behind the objects
of the senses something else invisible and active of itself. The problem?
Common understanding spoils this [discovery] again by quickly making this
invisible something sensible in turn, that is, wanting to make it an object of
intuition, so that it does not thereby become any the wiser (4: 452/57).
Affirmation of the existence of worlds of sense and understanding does
not flow naturally from the common human consciousness of being active
and passive in relation to our mental representations because we tend to per-
vert what would naturally be concluded from that experience: we want to
make the intelligible into something sensible. Kant appeals here to the very
human tendency to want to get ones hands on something in order to know
it. To do this with a claim about the intelligible world is, however, to destroy
the very conclusion at which one has arrived. The common persons pursuit
of philosophical insight is thus spoil[ed] by a natural tendency to pervert
the implications of ones experience. We need, therefore, to counteract this
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human tendency to go astray in reflection on our experiences by attending
more carefully to them. We thus have an explanation of why some agents
might not take this conclusion from their felt experience of freedom: it is
only the attentive agentone who is aware of and able to combat this ten-
dency to turn intelligible claims into sensible thingswho will reach the
desired conclusion.
II.iii The arguments from freedom to morality
We can now appreciate what is needed in the forthcoming argument to
affirm moral obligatedness: Kant began with a practical, first personal con-
sciousness of oneself as negatively free, and now, through attentive consider-
ation of this experience, needs to affirm the validity of the moral law. This is
not an argument that begins from a non-moral premise and seeks, via theo-
retical argumentation, a moral conclusion. Rather, it is one that begins with,
if not an explicitly moral, at least a practical premise accessed via a decidedly
non-theoretical consideration of felt experience of ourselves as producers of
action.
12
By attending to what is already given in this common practical con-
sciousness of negative freedom, and refusing to give in to that natural
human tendency to reduce an intelligible conclusion to a merely sensible
one, Kant needs to discover an interest in morality. If he can show how
attentive reflection on this felt experience of negative freedom produces this
further practical claim, then, along with affirming the status of ourselves as
obligated beings, he will have simultaneously grounded a new method of
practical cognition.
What, then, is this argument? To appreciate it, we should articulate more
clearly the goal of the argument. Near the opening of it (4: 449-50/55), Kant
makes a distinction between freedom and autonomy. We can understand
freedom in the sense we have already been considering it: being active, or not
being guided by alien forces, in the production of ones representations. But
Kant puts this negative sense of freedom next to another, that of the wills
own lawgiving, (4: 450/55) or freedom as autonomy. The goal of the argu-
ment is, through attentive reflection on the former, negative conception of
freedom, to affirm that [w]ith [this] idea of freedom the concept of auton-
omy is now inseparably combined, and with the concept of autonomy the
universal principle of morality (4: 452/57). Attentive reflection on our felt
experience of negative freedom will affirm our status as autonomous legisla-
tors of the moral law.
We have, furthermore, already seen the first two steps of this argument.
Kant begins by introducing attentiveness to our felt experience of freedom.
The first product of this attentiveness is that clearer first-personal apprecia-
tion for the quality of this experience itself already articulated. In the second
step, further attentiveness to this passive-active distinction yields awareness
of a distinction between a world of sense and the world of understanding.
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The Phenomenological Failure of Groundwork III 345
Membership in this world of the understanding is meant, furthermore,
to confirm the desired final conclusion, namely, that we are autonomous legis-
lators of the law of that intelligible world, the moral law. Further reflection,
now not simply on our felt experience of activity/passivity, but more precisely
on our newly affirmed status as members of the world of understanding,
reveals that, as members of this world, we are under laws which, being inde-
pendent of nature, are not empirical but grounded merely in reason (4: 452/57).
If we are part of a non-sensible world, it seems the only other possibility is a
rational world, which has its own laws, independent of sense and nature.
These rationally grounded laws are then understood to be the wills own laws
for which we were seeking under the concept of autonomy, and this concept
of autonomy (that is, being under laws of reason) is understood to be the uni-
versal principle of morality (4: 452/57). So, starting from our experience of
ourselves as active in relation to some representations, we recognize ourselves
as members of a world of the understanding; we then attend to this world and
recognize it as being guided by laws of reason. We thus recognize ourselves, as
members of an intelligible world, and as obligated to its law, the moral law. We
are, then, autonomous in the sense of being legislators of this law.
III. Analysis of the argument
We need, then, to assess both this argument and the new method of practical
cognition according to which it operates. First, the felt phenomenological
experience of negative freedom is indeed legitimately introduced as a genu-
ine phenomenological experience. There are many interpreters who would
challenge the confidence I place in Kants assertion of the felt experience of
activity and passivity. Many, in fact, find this to be the biggest problem in
Kants discussion, as it appears to be an utterly uncritical assertion of the
pure apperception of the noumenal self, an assertion which ignores Kants
claims elsewhere that we know the self only through what is given to us
empirically. This is a point Kemp-Smith makes when he suggests that Kants
first Critique reference to a similar active experience of pure apperception
(A5446-547/B574-575; 540) is an early and essentially uncritical remnant of
Kants Third Antinomy discussion.
13
Guyer makes a similar point in recent
responses to his critics.
14
Furthermore, it seems particularly problematic to assert of this apper-
ceived noumenal self that it has freedom in any sense; for, to appeal to
freedom either as an object of empirical experience or as an object of some
would-be noumenal experience violates the limits of experience. If you are
engaged in theoretical philosophy, an appeal to any sort of experience of
freedom is entirely out of order, as Kant has already affirmed that we do not
encounter such objects in the empirical realm.
But to bring the same kind of criticisms to Kants admittedly similar intro-
duction of the felt experience of activity and passivity in the Groundwork is
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to fail to realize that Kant is doing something different here than what he did
in his first Critique appeal to pure apperception. The Groundwork appeal to
the felt experience of activity and passivity, unlike the first Critique appeal to
apperception, occurs within the context of an appeal to what is recognized
by the commonest understanding (4: 450/56). Furthermore, this common
understanding is said to operate on the level of feeling (4: 451/56). As
such, Kant is not appealing to empirical experience as such, nor is he making
a simple, theoretical claim that we have privileged access to our noumenal
selves (though, as has already been suggested, attentive reflection upon this
experience is meant to yield noumenal conclusions). Instead, he appeals to
what we must admit as given in the felt experience of common human under-
standing, and this felt experience opens up a new, distinctively practical
and first-personal realm of experience
Kemp-Smith is thus right that Kants first Critique appeal to pure apper-
ception has to fail. But once we distinguish the sort of experience to which
Kant appeals in the Groundwork as something different from that theoretical
appeal to pure apperception, we are also able to grant such an appeal more
space in the critical project. We appeal to a felt phenomenological experi-
ence of freedom, one that does not purport to be either a theoretical asser-
tion of apperception of the noumenal self, nor an experience of noumenal
objects in the empirical world. And this appeal to a felt experience of being
active in relation to some of our representations succeeds on both these
counts.
15
So, Kant is not making a theoretical claim here, but is developing a com-
mon and practical approach to ourselves as actors. Furthermore, because
practical actors access this experience via feeling, and not via sense experience
as such, Kant can avoid asserting that they have an empirical experience of a
noumenal object of freedom. Feeling, as he notes in the Metaphysics of Morals,
is a sense experience, but one that does not refer to objects of experience,
only to the relationship the feeling subject has to those representations that
occasioned the feelings.
16
The feeling agent is thus only articulating her own
relation to representations connected to her feelings, and does not utilize
these feelings to refer to an object of experience called freedom. Felt expe-
riences are thus sufficiently different from empirical experience of objects in
the phenomenal world to prevent us from problematic, uncritical assertions
of things like freedom and morality as objects of experience. They are felt,
phenomenological experiences instead of empirical experiences of objects.
This sort of felt phenomenological experience thus seems a reasonable
starting point for a new method of philosophy: by highlighting a new way of
looking at our experience, we can grant an experience of activity and passivity,
and hope for a new philosophical method based in that experience.
We need, however, to assess Kants claim that this felt experience, and the
distinction between the world of sense and the world of understanding which
results from attentive reflection upon it, is a common one, for this too is a
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The Phenomenological Failure of Groundwork III 347
controversial claim. Allison, for example, has suggested that it is unfortu-
nate that Kant asserted that the transcendental distinction between
appearances and things in themselves is something that requires no subtle
reflection and [is] therefore accessible to the ordinary understanding
(4: 451).
17
It is unfortunate, he says, because this claim of the accessibility or
commonness of this distinction does not sit well with Kants more consid-
ered view of the absolute uniqueness and novelty of transcendental idealism
(Allison, 2007, p. 484).
On my reading of Groundwork III, though, there are in fact two distinct
claims of commonness to assess: that of the initial felt experience of activity/pas-
sivity, and that of the resulting attentive awareness of the distinction between
the world of sense and the world of the understanding. I will consider the
former here, leaving the second assertion of commonness for the next section.
Ameriks has suggested that the more rationally based claim that we can-
not help but to take or infer ourselves as free is implausible (Ameriks, p. 73);
asserting that we have a felt experience of freedom would therefore seem a
similarly implausible claim. Ameriks was, however, asserting this implausi-
bility about some notion of absolute or incompatibilist freedom. This
would be a freedom in which we understand ourselves to be first in a chain
of causes, not ourselves caused, and in which the relevant notion of causality
is one in accordance with rational laws. I agree with Ameriks that it is
unlikely that we would discover within ourselves an experience of such
incompatibilist freedom, and further, that we cannot as philosophers simply
assert that we cannot help but to take ourselves as free in this robust sense
without further argument.
18
We are not, however, asserting so robust an experience of freedom as this.
We ask only whether we have a felt phenomenological experience of being
active in the world, setting aside, for example, philosophical questions about
whether this activity has a deeper, hidden cause outside of us, or whether our
experience of activity is specifically of some uncaused rational activity within
us. Is it the case, then, that all of us commonly experience ourselves, at least
sometimes, as being active, as opposed to passive, in relation to some of our
representations?
When the question is put in these more modest terms, it becomes harder to
see the claim as implausible. As we have already suggested, the experience,
accessible to a child, of chasing seagulls across a beach or pigeons across a
city park is sufficient for providing content to this claim. Psychologists also
describe even very young children as having an experience of being free from
constraints and of having an effect on the world when they smush their fin-
gers happily in mud.
19
The joy in such experiences comes from the childs
sense of being free from both external and internal constraints, and thus of
being active in relation to her world. This does seem, then, to be a plausible
common experience: sometimes I feel like Im moved by things, but other
times I feel like Im moving or causing other things.
20
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III.i The failure of Groundwork III
But if Kants argument is going to be successful via this new, practical,
phenomenological method, it needs to be the case that, from the attentive
first personal point of viewthat is, once we set aside the natural tendency
to turn intelligible claims into sensible onesthis common felt experience of
freedom reveals a further confidence in our status as obligated agents. It is,
however, this movement from the felt experience of negative freedom to this
more robust awareness of ourselves as obligated, autonomously law-giving
agents that fails.
In pointing to this spot of the argument as its weak point, I thus align
myself in general terms with Allison, who finds the move from negative to
positive freedom, via an implicit slide from an assertion of our membership
in a world of the understanding toward our membership in an intelligible
world, unsuccessful.
21
But, given my assumption of a practical premise as
the starting point of the argument, my understanding of the nature and
needed force of the argument is different from Allisons. Allison suggests
that Kants argument needs to be from a nonmoral premise of reason to
this robust moral conclusion of positive freedom, and that it is precisely in
the movement from this weaker, non-moral conception of reason to some
more positive conception of reason as autonomous law-giving that the argu-
mentative gap emerges (Allison, 1990, p. 227) .
But we begin with the practical premise of negative freedom, and identify
the gap between negative and positive freedom as a failure of the method of
attentive reflection on this felt experience of negative freedom to yield this
more positive conception of freedom. The move from negative to positive
freedom fails, then, because Kants new practical method fails to be genu-
inely productive of the desired conclusion. Attentiveness to our felt experi-
ence of freedom simply is not productive; that is, it does not yield an
awareness of specifically rational agency, of obligatedness, nor of our status
as autonomous law-givers. Attentiveness to that experience simply does not
yield that conclusion. To put the point more generally: theres no there there!
The felt experience of freedom is genuine, even common; but it is also impo-
tent, unproductive of a more robust conception of rational agency, and thus
a phenomenological failure. Let us defend this conclusion first by further
reflections on the grounding phenomenological experience, and then by
turning back to the text of Groundwork III.
First, attentive reflection on the experience of being active in relation to
our representations, of not being determined by something external or
internal to me, simply does not give us what we need for a complete concep-
tion of agency. The most crucial lacuna here is in trying to answer the
question of what it is in me that is causing the activity. Our admission that
we cannot affirm our felt experience as one of positive freedom (that is, as an
experience of the activity of reason as such) shows that we cannot answer
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The Phenomenological Failure of Groundwork III 349
this question. Despite Kants earlier suggestion that we think of a reason
that is practical (4: 448/54, emphasis added) as guiding our activity, and despite
our own admission that we might even say that the source of our activity is
at least non-sensible, we cannot affirm, from the felt phenomenological per-
spective, more positively that this non-sensible thing is a rational cause.
Indeed, on the basis of this felt experience alone, we cannot say at all what it
is in us that is producing our representations, only that they are coming from
us, and not from things outside of me or from compelling sensible forces
within. The contrast between representations relying on alien influences
and those I call my own is, in fact, crucial for identifying the phenomeno-
logical experience of the latter. I notice representations that have a foreign
cause and then notice representations that dont seem to have such causes.
Only then can I identify two different phenomenological experiences of the
production of my representations.
There is a second limit to what we can access from this experience via
attentive reflection, related to this first inability to identify the precise source
of ones agency. To go back to our seagull example: should I be chasing this
gull, or that gull? Where should I chase them? Why? In trying to answer such
questions, we also fall short. Not having access to the nature of ones causal
force, we also lack any determinacy in the course of ones agency. It is diffi-
cult even to call this agent a choosing agent as such, that is, an agent guided
by intelligence. On the basis of this phenomenological experience of negative
freedom alone, there is in fact no way to avoid the possibility that our
agency is a blind, unguided power or force. Of course, none of this matters
to the child chasing the seagulls. There is a certain, happy, even gleeful
indeterminacy to her agency. This is great for the child, but not great as a
complete model of agency. Without some access to what guides, forms or
determines this active force, there is, in fact, the potential for a rather fright-
ening model of human agency: a force both too strong (because blind and
powerful) and too weak (because unguided and indeterminate) for our
purposes. A reasoned, limited, guided agency is thus precisely what we lack
in our experience of being active in relation to our representations, even
when we turn attentive reflection upon that experience.
When we look to Kants argument in Groundwork III, we find that he is
seeking to answer precisely these questions of what guides agency and how
agency is thus guided more determinately. In more Kantian language, he
wants to show that reason is the cause of our activity, and that it determines
us as obligated, autonomous, law giving beings. The problem Kant encoun-
ters, though, is just the one we have suggested: a more rational, guided
notion of agencythat is, a consciousness of our agency as one obligated to
an autonomous law of reasonsimply does not emerge from attentiveness
to ourselves as active, instead of passive, in relation to our mental represen-
tations. What we do get from our first personal consciousness of ourselves as
active in relation to our representations is only a sense of negative freedom.
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One might even accept that, via attentive reflection, something approaching
membership in at least a non-sensible (though not specifically an intelligible)
world is a plausible outcome of our phenomenological reflections: if we
really do have the experience of negative freedom, and we are able atten-
tively to set aside those prejudices that would encourage us to assume that
whatever is guiding that activity is really secretly sensible not intellectual,
then something other than the events of the sensible world is going on in our
experience. I am thus, unlike Allison,
22
willing to grant a certain common-
ness to at least this somewhat stripped-down, and more practically accessed,
version of transcendental idealism.
Kants problem, though, is one of how to move from this admission that
there must be something else other than the sensible world to the more
positive claim that what does exist is an intelligible world guided by laws of
reason that are moral laws. And it is difficult to see how we could get to such
robust claims merely from attentive reflection on our felt experience of
negative freedom.
Faced with this sputtering out of his phenomenological experience, Kant
implicitly changes course in his argument. Although Kant argues to a claim
about the world of the understanding via attentive reflection on our phe-
nomenological experience of activity, it is no longer in attentive reflection on
this grounding experience that Kant seeks to make these further claims
about an intelligible world guided by laws of reason. Indeed, when he makes
the crucial distinction between understanding and reason (at 4: 452/57), he
seems to be drawing this distinction more from a would-be attentiveness to
the nature of an intelligible world itself instead of by attending to our ori-
ginal felt experience of activity. Having just insisted that this intellectual
world to which he has brought us is something of which however [the
human being] has no further cognizance (4: 451/56), Kant turns around
and tries to cognize further about it. He suggests that, by reflecting on
membership in this intellectual world, a human being really finds in him-
self a capacity by which he distinguishes himself from all other things,
even from himself insofar as he is affected by objects, and that is reason.
(4: 452/57). The appeal to find[ing] in oneself this capacity is a clear sug-
gestion of first personal access to the capacity for reason. Language later
in the same paragraph in which reason is asserted to show in what we call
ideas a spontaneity so pure (emphasis added) further encourages the
suggestion that Kant is asserting a first personal access to the activity of
reason. But this assertion of first personal experience of oneself as
rational is unexplained, undefended, and unconvincing. It is, in fact, the
assertion of just that sort of experience of oneself as a complete rational
agentin Kants words, an autonomous legislatorthat we have already
suggested is implausible.
23
These further efforts at attentiveness to ones membership in the world of
the understanding are thus illicit because we can be attentive only to what is
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The Phenomenological Failure of Groundwork III 351
in fact given in our felt experience; and the world of the understanding is not
given in that experience, only the hint of a non-sensible one. Kant thus illic-
itly moves to attentive reflection on ourselves as members of an intelligible
world, but this was never a genuine felt phenomenological experience in the
first place (the only proper object of attentive reflection), but only an infer-
ence drawn from attentive reflection on the first felt experience. This, then, is
a lapse out of the new method, and a return to philosophizing not centered
on attentive reflection on phenomenological experience. In the end, what we
do not get in this argument is any real consciousness or experience of our-
selves as autonomous legislators of the law of a specifically intelligible
world.
Furthermore, we are far, far afield from recognizing this autonomously
imposed law specifically as an imperative. Quite to the contrary, weve been
working with a grounding felt experience of activity, not of restraint, so the
idea that a restraining imperative could emerge from attentive reflection on
this activity is a curious, and unlikely, one.
24
But this assertion of the moral
law as an imperative is crucial to affirming our status as obligated beings.
Kant realizes this and thus tries, in a later section (4: 453-455/58-59), to bring
the intelligible world in which we have just asserted our membership into
conversation with our sensible sides, thus identifying that other potential
determining ground of action in conflict with which the autonomously
legislated law is recognized by us as an imperative.
25
But that he needs to
engage in such further machinations in order to describe our obligatedness
as an imperative only suggests further that something went wrong with his
original phenomenological method.
26
We are similarly distant from under-
standing either that the law is a motivating force or how it could be so
(something that, here, gets relegated to something we can spy only at the
extreme boundary of all practical philosophy (4: 455/59), and which remains
mysterious, since discovering and making comprehensible an interest which
the human being can take in moral laws is now said to be as impossible
as explaining freedom of the will (4: 45960/6364).
In all these conclusions, then, we have abandoned our original, first per-
sonal experience of being active in relation to our representations. We have
not simply attentively unpacked what was implicit in that conscious experi-
ence. We have, rather, imported a whole range of new ideas about an intelli-
gible world, imperatives and incentives, which, from the perspective of this
new, emerging practical method, appear to come from nowhere, certainly
not from our grounding experience. Kants argument from freedom to
moral obligatedness is thus a hodge-podge of phenomenological/practical
and quasi-theoretical reflections. He begins with guidance by a felt first per-
sonal phenomenological experience and a method of attentiveness via which
to extract insight from it. But, when attentive consideration of this experi-
ence fails to be productive, he turns back toward more quasi-theoretical
modes of argumentation to achieve the desired conclusions.
27
This is a
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352 Jeanine M. Grenberg
failure of the method of attentiveness to first personal experiences as prac-
tical philosophy. If this method is going to prove successful, we need some
other common, grounding experience, one more amenable to attentive
reflection, and more productive of practical conclusions.
IV. Conclusion
I thus agree with both Guyer and Allison that the argument of Groundwork
III fails. Our disagreement is about what the nature of the intended argu-
ment is and also about why it fails. What I have provided here is an articula-
tion of the argument of Groundwork III as a proto-phenomenological one,
and an explanation of its failure as resulting from reliance on an inadequate
grounding in felt phenomenological experience. The felt phenomenological
experience of freedom upon which we are relying is not thick enough to yield
everything we need practically. We thus lack a proper object for attentive
reflection.
There is a particular contrast to be drawn between my reading and
Guyers, since Guyer emphasizes that Kant has, in Groundwork III, inexpli-
cably pulled away from earlier, naturalistic assumptions that could have
been helpful to him in grounding freedom. Although I would not suggest
that the argument of Groundwork III is more naturalistic than Guyer sug-
gests, the appeal to phenomenological experience does suggest that Kant
was looking for something to replace his earlier naturalistic reflections that
was not a quasi-theoretical, first-Critique-style deduction. An appeal to felt
experience is that new, not naturalistic, but instead phenomenological,
grounding for practical thought.
To conclude, we grant Kants claim that we have a common, felt experi-
ence of being active in relation to our representations. Nonetheless, this felt
experience of negative freedom, when considered attentively, is not produc-
tive of a robust conception of practical agency. The argument of Groundwork
III is thus a failure of Kants nascent and still forming phenomenological
method for practical philosophy. To be successful in defining a realm of
practical philosophy through appeal to a common first person phenomeno-
logical experience, Kant needs a different grounding experience. We need to
appeal to a practical experience that is more compelling, perhaps even more
conflicted, but certainly in any event, more productive of a specifically
rational agency than this. The experience of conflict between happiness and
morality, combined with a natural tendency toward rationalization and/or
self-deception as the mode for resolving that conflict
28
is that new, prefera-
ble phenomenological experience that will confirm the value of Kants
method of attentive reflection. Kant needs, however, to define his new
mode of practical cognition more completely before he can accept as thick
and morally laden a starting point as this. That is, however, a story for
another day.
29
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The Phenomenological Failure of Groundwork III 353
Notes
1. Guyer, P. (2007a) Naturalistic and transcendental moments in Kants moral philosophy,
Inquiry 50(5), pp. 44464.
2. Allison, H. (1990) Kants Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
See especially Chapter 12, and pp. 22729.
3. In referring to Kants works, I first note the Akademie pagination (Kant, I. Gesammelte
Schriften. Hrsg. Bd. 1-22 Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Bd. 23 Deutsche
Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, ab Bd. 24 Akademie der Wissenschaften zu
Gttingen. Berlin 1900ff.), and then the pagination of the following translations: [1788]
(1997) Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Gregor, M. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press). [1781/1787] (1998) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Guyer, P. and Wood, A.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). [1785] (1998) Groundwork of the Metaphysics
of Morals, trans. Gregor, M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), [1797] (1996)
Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Gregor, M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
4. This move from non-moral to moral is a curious tack to take once we recall what Kant
said at the end of Groundwork I: [C]ommon human reason is impelled, not by some
need of speculation (which never touches it as long as it is content to be mere sound rea-
son), but on practical grounds themselves, to go out of its sphere and to take a step into
the field of practical philosophy, in order to obtain there information and distinct
instruction regarding the source of its principle and the correct determination of this
principle in comparison with maxims based on need and inclination (4: 405/18, empha-
ses added and removed). Why would Kant feel the need to argue to morality from non-
moral starting points when the discipline of practical philosophy is inspired on practical
grounds themselves to initiate its investigations?
5. Felt, first personal phenomenological experience might seem, from the perspective of
phenomenology, a redundant phrase. But from the perspective of Kants developing
practical philosophy, it is not. We will see Kant refer to an experience that, while sugges-
tive of phenomenological experience, is neither felt nor exclusively first personal.
Further, his appeal in the Critique of Pure Reason to experience (Erfahrung) as an
objective, empirical experience of objects in the world demands that we distinguish this
first Critique experience of objects from the felt and exclusively first personal experience
referred to in Groundwork III.
6. More could be said in explanation and defense of these presuppositions. But, for the
sake of brevity, I will allow defense of them to emerge in the course of the article. Suf-
fice, for the present, to say that in Kants mature practical works, reference to felt first
personal phenomenological and practical experience abounds. In the Critique of Practi-
cal Reason, Kant speaks of a man facing the conflict of telling a malicious lie or being
hung on the gallows (5: 30/27). In Groundwork I, we encounter a man struggling with
the tension between his moral obligations and his pursuit of happiness (4: 405/1718).
In Groundwork III, we find someone recognizing himself related actively to some of his
representations, and passively to others. There are also the familiar examples in
Groundwork I and II of persons thinking about making a false promise, or simply
feeling tired of life. Kant uses the first personal point of view to confirm that common
persons understand that a will is determined only by the form of law (5: 2728/2425),
and that the principles of happiness and morality are practically opposed to each
other. (5: 3536/32) Appeals to attention and attentiveness are similarly frequent.
See especially 4: 451/56 and 5: 30/27.
7. Korsgaard, C. (1996a) Sources of Normativity, ed. O. ONeil (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press). See also Korsgaard, C. (1996b) Creating the Kingdom of Ends
(New York: Cambridge University Press), Chapter 12.
8. See, for example, Ameriks, K. (2000), Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the
Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 73:
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354 Jeanine M. Grenberg
It is hard to see how any philosopher today can flatly assert that we must regard our-
selves as free, even if only from a practical perspective.
9. The claim of commonness already asserted is further supported when Kant later sug-
gests that this point of view is something recognized by all human beings, (4: 455/59)
indeed, by the most common human reason (4: 456/60).
10. [I]f as pure reason it is really practical, it proves its reality and that of its concepts by
what it does, and all subtle reasoning against the possibility of its being practical is
futile (5: 3/3).
11. There is some ambiguity in the way Kant describes this interest in morality. He defines
interest as the dependence of a contingently determinable will on principles of rea-
son (4: 414n/25n). But this definition ambiguously spans two distinct questions. Is the
will dependent on reason in the sense that its law applies to or is valid for us? This is a
question of whether we are obligated to reasons laws. Or is our dependence as con-
tingently determinable will[s] upon principles of reason one that requires something
further to assure motivation to act in accord with reasons principles? This is a question
of whether and how we are motivated by or have an incentive to act in accordance with
that law. Because Kant does not distinguish these two questions, his discussions of them
get muddled into one discussion simply of interest. Given the course of the argument
in the section currently under consideration though, we can take his reference to inter-
est in morality in the former sense of affirming the validity of reasons law.
12. I thus cannot agree with Allison when he asserts that the reason we find in this new
realm is a straightforwardly nonmoral premise (Allison, 1990, p. 227). The world of
understanding, within which reason is active, is articulated only on the basis of our first
personal experience of negative freedom, that is, on experience of ourselves as actors.
Reason, even in its first introduction in this argument, is already dependent upon and
informed by practical assumptions.
13. Kemp-Smith, N. (1984) A Commentary to Kants Critique of Pure Reason (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc.), p. 518.
14. My problem with Groundwork III is precisely that it is based on a metaphysical claim
about the noumenal self of a kind that is not merely not used in the Transcendental
Deduction [of the categories] but is also presumably ruled out by Kants insistence . . .
that all of our knowledge even of the self is of the self as it appears, not as it might be in
itself. (Guyer, P. (2007b) Response to critics, Inquiry 50(5), 497510, p. 500.)
15. Allison reacts differently to Kemp-Smiths point. He is able to keep both theoretical and
practical appeal to activity/spontaneity only because he insists that we do not experience
such spontaneity/activity as such, but instead merely conceive of ourselves in this way
via pure apperception (see Allison, 1990, p. 3840). But, as I have already argued,
Kant is in fact appealing in this Groundwork passage to explicit first person experiences
of freedom. And even Allison himself has to admit that we have a consciousness of
ourselves as free in some sense (Allison, 1990, p. 44). On my reading, then, since I do
accept these as experiences, we must reject their validity for theoretical purposes, and
seek further argument for why a certain sort of experience of activity could be accepted
on practical grounds.
16. The capacity for having pleasure or displeasure in a representation is called feeling
because both [pleasure and displeasure] involve what is merely subjective in the relation
of our representation and contain no relation at all to an object for possible cognition of
it (or even cognition of our condition). While even sensations, apart from the quality (of,
e.g., red, sweet, and so forth) they have because of the nature of the subject, are still
referred to an object as elements in our cognition of it, pleasure or displeasure (in what is
red or sweet) expresses nothing at all in the object but simply a relation to the subject.
(6: 211212/12).
17. Allison, H. (2007) Comments on Guyer, Inquiry 50(5), pp. 48088.
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The Phenomenological Failure of Groundwork III 355
18. It is not clear to me, however, that Allison or Korsgaard is guilty of this charge as such.
Both provide arguments for their positions which would need to be more fully analyzed
as inadequate to make this charge.
19. See Brown, J. (1997) The Self (New York: McGraw-Hill).
20. One might worry whether a genuinely common experience is also a veridical experience.
The worry here is that even if we all share this common experience, it might still be that
we are all subject to it as an illusion. Kant does entertain the problem of illusion to a cer-
tain extent. The possibility, in particular, of self-deception was what made it necessary
for us to reflect on our experience attentively. In his practical works more generally, he
takes common and attentively considered experiences as reliable ones. That is, if, even
under attentive reflection on it, the experience does not collapse, there is something in it
to be trusted. In the second Critique, Kant further distinguishes such veridical common
experiences from common experiences that, under attentive reflection, reveal, a self-
deception operating in the agent (see 5: 30/27-28, the famous Gallows example). He thus
realizes that some of our common experiences can be illusory, because we are beings that
tend to deceive ourselves. But attentiveness is meant to operate as a protection from
being subject to such self-deceptions.
21. See Allison, H. (1990), p. 227: Kant refers to both a Verstandeswelt and an intelligibelen
Welt . . . and he slides from the former to the latter without sufficient justification. The
former is to be understood negatively as encompassing whatever is nonsensible or
merely intelligible, that is, whatever is thought to be exempt from the conditions of sen-
sibility (the noumenon in the negative sense). The latter is to be understood positively as
referring to a supersensible realm governed by moral laws, a kingdom of ends or,
equivalently, the totality of rational beings as things in themselves (Gr4: 458; 126). This
is clearly noumenal in a positive sense . . . The problem is that the possession of reason,
which is supposed to provide the entre into this world, only gets us to the
Verstandeswelt.
22. See Allison (2007), p. 484, discussed earlier.
23. That reason is introduced in this way is the ground of my own further skepticism about
accepting reason as a nonmoral premise (Allison, 1990, p. 227) of this argument.
24. Guyer makes a similar point when he suggests that Kant does not, around 4: 451452,
regard the rationality of the noumenal self as competing with the non-rational desires
of the phenomenal self . . . [H]e is in effect treating the moral law as the causal law of the
noumenal self . . . and at the same time making it impossible for himself to explain how
there can be anything in the phenomenal self that could resist the moral law. (Guyer,
2007b, pp. 50203).
25. A rational being counts himself . . . as belonging to the world of understanding . . . On
the other side he is also conscious of himself as a part of the world of sense. But because
the world of understanding contains the ground of the world of sense and so too of its
laws, . . . it follows that I shall cognize myself . . . as nevertheless subject to the law of the
world of understanding. . .and thus cognize myself as subject to the autonomy of the
will; consequently the laws of the world of understanding must be regarded as impera-
tives for me. (4: 453454/58).
26. It could perhaps be that, were we able to have convincingly found proof of ourselves as
autonomous legislators in the previous argument, further attentive reflection on both the
passive and active felt experiences could, lead us to an appreciation of the imperative sta-
tus of the law. Our rational activity could be found to be in conflict with the demands
emerging from our membership in the sensible world. It would be odd, though, to have
to infer this imperative status of the law as something admitted when you put passivity
and activity together, as opposed simply to finding it as an aspect of our felt experience.
27. The unproductive quality of Kants grounding felt experience helps us understand why
we find Kant, in other parts of Groundwork III, wandering back to arguments that are
more theoretical in nature, arguments that is, that do not center themselves in attentive
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356 Jeanine M. Grenberg
consideration of practical felt phenomenological experiences, but which instead seek to
draw logical conclusions from some combination of what he takes from felt experience
and other, theoretical premises. In a section titled, On the extreme boundary of all
practical philosophy, Kant, in seeking to articulate a productive conflict or dialectic
that emerges from our felt experience of activity, meshes together theoretical and prac-
tical modes of argumentation which prevent his desired defense of freedom from being a
fully convincing practical argument.
28. A phenomenological experience introduced as early as at the end of Groundwork I
(4: 405ff/17ff), but more fully articulated and utilized in the fact of reason argument of
the Critique of Practical Reason.
29. I want to thank Wayne Martin for helpful conversations on the topic of this paper that
helped me to avoid a variety of errors. Whatever errors do remain are my own.
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