Practical and Productive Freedom in Kant’s Metaphysics of Reason

I aim to develop a new framework for thinking about several of the key distinctions in play in Kant’s discussions of freedom in relation to reason, particularly the discussions found in the Third Antinomy of the first Critique, the Groundwork, and the second Critique. Kant’s discussions here have seemed at best puzzling and at worst incoherent: in the Third Antinomy and the Groundwork, for example, Kant seems to both affirm and deny that we can have cognition of the freedom of our reason; in the second Critique, he seems to both affirm that we can know that our reason is free (in the ‘fact of reason’) but then also insist that we can only ‘postulate’ that we have the requisite freedom. My aim here will be to develop a novel version of the idea that, at crucial points in these writings, Kant is distinguishing between several different senses of ‘freedom’, and that it is important to keep track of these different senses if we are to avoid ascribing to Kant a contradictory or otherwise incoherent position on freedom, whether across the key Critical writings from the 1780s or even within the same text. The main distinction that I myself will draw attention to is that between what I will call (drawing on Aristotelian traditions) merely practical freedom, on the one hand, and genuinely productive freedom on the other. As will emerge below, the freedom specific to the ‘practical’ use of reason, in the classical sense of ‘practical’, is the freedom that pertains specifically to reason in its determination of our ‘power of choice [Willkür]’, and hence is something whose cause (reason) and effect (choice) both lie entirely within our soul. Productive freedom, on the other hand, is the freedom that pertains (or would pertain) to a causality of reason whose cause (as reason) is in the soul, but whose effect lies outside our soul, in ‘outer’ nature (for Kant: in physical space).