227: The final Kantdown

Hi, welcome to classical stuff. You should know a podcast about classical education, classical books, old things, philosophy, history, art. And two doors. And you preempted it.

Oh, yeah. We got some doors. I know where we're headed. You still make fun of me.

You brought it up this time. I know. I took a sting out of Sworpin. A good episode.

They're going to episode. And the doors? Great man. Great man.

This is the end. Do-do-do-do. All right. So anyway, today we are, AJ's got a big book in front of him.

And he's got a lot of scribbles in the margins. That means we're doing philosophy. So is that what that means? So I think this is episode four on Kant.

And I'm keeping my, was it my hankles? You're hankles? I'm keeping my hankles. You can bring them up.

I don't think I'm going to say anything that's going to happen. In fact, I think you will be pleasingly vindicated. Oh, I'm Graham. This is AJ and Thomas.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And we do this podcast. We do this podcast. I'm Thomas.

He's there. And yeah, I say what we got to do. We took the back roads this morning. We got through the intro.

We made it eventually. We got there. So yeah, this is our fourth episode on Kant's journey that matters. I was going to, I was considering not continuing the series.

Because it's play interesting. I really like it. But I thought maybe we had sort of gleaned all we could possibly glean from Kant with the whole category of comparative and that would be the thing you take away. But this is a, I think there will be some good discussions to come out of this final chapter.

Because all of Graham's hackles, the hackles that he has raised, I think will be justified. And he will feel, he will walk with a little more, a little more sway to his hips. Yeah, that's what I need. He'll peacock a little bit around after I get done telling him that he was correct.

Because Kant agrees with him or is Graham just about to disagree with everything you're going to say in the second? And then I think you will be best friends forever. You will come and you will. Yeah, all of your hesitations he addresses.

And then you'll be very happy by the end of it. So chapter three, the final step from metaphysics of morals to a critique of pure practical reason, which obviously makes sense to me. Quite the promise. Yeah, and if you are a conscaler out there and you take issue with the way that I'm presenting as well, I feel like I only am, you guys ever go from your car to the house and you're carrying a whole lot of things.

And there's that one thing that you're kind of holding with just the edge of your elbow and you're not sure. Quite sure you have a full grasp on any moment in my fall. That's kind of how I feel about this last chapter. But I feel like I have a decent of grasp.

And so if I have to stop and gather my thoughts a couple of times, please don't be angry. It's hard to get through. Maybe our Kant Jim friend will win. Yeah, shout out to Kant Jim guy.

You know, popping up the brand and the bicep. Get that extra weapon. We're behind you buddy. As we sit here eating goldfish and talking about philosophy.

So he starts out with talking about freedom and autonomy of the will. I think in the last chapter, he sort of assumed that we are all free. He's sort of assumed human freedom. He's going to address that a little more right now.

And he basically says at the beginning, so here's a couple of definitions. The will is a kind of causality that living beings have so far as they are rational. So is your ability to cause things? Freedom would then be that property whereby this causality can be active independent of alien causes, determining it.

So you can be your causality, work your causality out of the world without something else telling you what to do. Just as natural necessity is a property characterizing the causality of all non-rational beings. So things that work by instinct, they need food, they are pretty much pushed around by the natural world. They don't have a self-determining cause.

And he points out that because that is that thing, then if we have freedom, it sort of carries with it moral autonomy, because if I am free, and I have my own causality without something else determining my will, then it almost implies the categorical imperative. What else can freedom of the will be but autonomy? That is the property that a will has of being a law to itself. And the proposition will is, in all its actions, a law to itself, is essentially the categorical imperative.

So he's pointing out when you have one, you have freedom, you kind of get the other autonomy of the will, moral autonomy. And then in the next section, he talks about how freedom must be presupposed as a property of the will of all rational beings. So it kind of works the other direction. Every being who cannot act except under the idea of freedom is just for that reason really free from the standpoint of practice.

That is to say, all laws and separately bound up with freedom are valid for such a being, just as if his will could be proved to be free in itself and by means of proof taken from theoretical philosophy. It is possible to conceive of a power of reason that consciously regards its own judgments as directed from the outside. So sorry, it is impossible. You cannot think of a person who is talking about morals, and then he consciously conceives of himself as being directed even in that conversation by a force from outside.

So if you are discussing morality, and you're talking about autonomy of the will, you're almost sort of implying your own freedom. So here we have a problem. Freedom sort of implies autonomy of the will, and morality, and autonomy of the will sort of imply freedom. It's this weird circular reasoning that doesn't really give us anywhere except pointing out that they're kind of the same thing, right?

They come together. And that's as far as we've gotten. We haven't really proven freedom or morality. We've just sort of said, well, they sort of come together and imply each other.

That's as far as we've gotten. You guys want me so far? No. Can you give me an example?

Like the fact that we have moral discussions implies that there's some autonomy in making those moral decisions. Or you at least have the idea of freedom. Sure. But isn't that true about if the fact if we have conversations about what we want to have for dinner?

Yeah. Should I also want to have some of those for dinner? Oh, OK. In that, I guess maybe you could say that you are pushed by necessity, natural necessity, to have dinner, right?

And so in that way, you are pushed. But if we're talking about free. OK, if we talk about what glass and what kind of scotch we want to have tonight, do we think? We're not pushed by necessity.

We enjoy tasting certain things. That's a natural thing. Sensational. So we're not pushed by necessity.

Well, I mean, I guess it just says its own judgment as directed from the outside. For in that case, the subject would attribute the determination of his power of judgment to some impulse, not to his reason. Reason must regard itself as the author of its own principles independently of alien influences. It follows that reason, as practical reason, or as the will of a rational being, must regard itself as free.

If you are going to make judgments, you must regard yourself as free. And if you regard yourself as free, moral judgments, right? You have the categorical imperative. So yeah, I guess even choosing in scotch, you would be sort of regarding yourself as free in that way.

But does the two-way street work on both of those things? Like, if I walked into a room and I saw two people talking about scotch, I could assume that they were free? Well, they regard themselves as free. Not that they are free.

And that's its point. It doesn't really prove that freedom is real. All it does is show that they come together, right? If they're making judgments and regarding themselves as free, they're also sort of implying the categorical imperative, which implies freedom.

It's a circular thing. And that's what he's there to address. Like, there's an apparent circular reasoning here, and that's a problem, right? Good.

Good. So far? Yep. OK.

Hackles are confused. OK. So let's see. I'll phrase it how he phrases it.

We must frankly admit that a kind of circle shows up here, from which there seems to be no escape. We suppose ourselves to be free in the order of efficient causes in order that we may conceive ourselves to be under moral laws in the order of ends. And then we proceed to think of ourselves as subject to moral laws on the ground that we have ascribed freedom of the will to ourselves. For freedom and the will's law giving of its own laws are both autonomy and therefore reciprocal concepts.

But just for this reason, one of them cannot be used to explain the other or to furnish its ground. It can be most at most used for the logical purpose of reducing seemingly different ideas of the same object to a single concept, as different fractions of the same value can be reduced to the lowest common terms. Does that make sense? Nope.

There are these two things that seem separate, but they both imply the existence of the other. So we're going to answer how do we know we have them? We're answering how do we know we have both of them, essentially at the same time, right? Both freedom and moral autonomy.

Yeah, well, here he, the two things exactly as he phrases it, is we suppose ourselves to be free in the order of efficient causes, meaning we can cause things in order to conceive ourselves under moral laws. So you can choose to be under moral laws. You have to be free in the efficient causes to conceive yourself under moral laws. But you are also subject to these moral laws on the ground that we have ascribed freedom to will free will to ourselves.

We addressed that last time. You are partially because of your free will subject to all of these moral laws. But where do they come from? Free as a.

So the moral laws, it's still the category of comparative. That's what we reach back to. And the big question you ask, I think you may have already said it. Let's see.

Yeah, he mentions it. And then he's going to mention it more later. Here's this quick address of the thing that you brought up the time last time. What is compelling you to follow these?

You've got the category of comparative. You know what according to the right thing is to do. But what is actually making you do it? What if you don't care about those things?

Or you're like, yeah, I know that this is what everyone should do. What is binding me to this sort of duty? So is it just the love of being logical? The love of being reasonable?

We're going to get the question. So here's his first address of it. For if someone asks us, why must the universal validity of our maxim as a law be the condition that restricts our action? So why does the category of comparative have to be the thing that runs us?

And what is the basis of the worth we ascribe to this way of acting? So why is it worthy to do? Or supposedly so great, there cannot be any interest higher than it and asks how it happens that human beings believe this alone to be the source of their personal worth, your moral, what, polkertut is right, is faith, right? Is that the right word?

Polkertut? Can you google it? I think I got it right. It might also mean hot, like pretty.

Beautiful polkertut is a nice thing. Stinking missed it. So your moral worth, right? We consider this to be directly tied to our personal worth and asks how it happens in contrast to which the worth of a pleasant or painful condition counts as nothing.

Like you will pursue the good even if it hurts. To these questions, we could give no answer. And he's going to address it again later. So he says, right now I can't have no idea.

I have no compelling reason why you need to do this. Yeah, so right there, he says, I don't really have an answer. And then he's going to get further into it in a minute. So he says, here's the solution to our sort of seeming conundrum where we're trying to get free will.

And he starts with something that our high school students often have a problem with. They're like, OK, I see this table. It hits my eyes. I touch it.

It hits my fingers. How do I prove it's real? Right? How do I know it's actually a thing and not just an illusion to my eyes and my fingers?

How do I know any of this is real? I can never really know the table. And the thing is I've had that conversation with a student recently. He's like, how do I prove that anything I know is real?

Well, composition is, you can't really. He calls this the world of the senses. I will never know the actual being, the essential being of this table. I will never be inside it.

I will never know this being. I can only react to it as it comes through my senses. Right? That is the only way that I can interact with literally anything in the world, right?

Including, weirdly enough, my very base ego. Who you are, Graham, sometimes comes at you through your senses. Separate from this, the world of sense is the world of intelligence. I want to see if I can give a good definition for it.

Here, now a human being actually finds in himself a power by which he distinguishes himself from all other things. And even from himself so far as he's affected by objects, that power is reason. A pure spontaneity, as pure spontaneity, reason is elevated even above the understanding and the following respect. Although the latter two is spontaneous activity and is not like sense, confined to ideas that arise only when we are affected by things, it can be produced by its own activity.

Only concepts whose sole purpose is to bring sensuous representations under rules and so unite them in one consciousness. So he basically says, we've got this world of sense that's coming through all of our feels, and we can never know the pure being of those things. We can never get past our senses inside those and know them as they really are. But we have a thing that is separate, that distinguishes us from all those other things, and that is reason.

And we use reason, not only to just basically understand those things, but to bring all of those things under a set of rules, bring sensuous representations under rules and unite them in one consciousness. It's to make sense of everything. So this is our reason. It's kind of pulling all of those things together.

So this is that like Aristotelian thing, the thing that is unique to people. Yes, this is to irrational faculty. Exactly. It manifests its highest function in distinguishing the world of sense from the intelligible world, and thereby prescribing limits to the understanding itself.

Right? Rational being a russ must regard himself as an intelligence, as belonging to the world of understanding rather than the world of sense. So there are these two worlds. We have our world of sense, and we have this world of our understanding.

And this is what all of my students sort of that gap they want to bridge. They want to bring this world of sense across their senses and into that which they know to be themselves. This categorizing faculty that they have that we would call reason. They would probably identify as your soul.

You want to take all these things and touch your soul to the soul of the table and know exactly what the table is, but you never really can. OK, so a human being is essentially living in two worlds all at once. He can consider himself first, so far as he belongs to the world of sense, under laws of nature. So because we are, and you are like, here I can meet Graham, and he is in the world of sense to me.

Hello. And he is even kind of in the world of sense to himself. There are pieces of him that, yeah, exactly. So because of that, you are under the laws of nature.

Right? And the laws of nature mean that sometimes you are forced to do things. I fall. When I trip.

Precisely. I eat. When I'm hungry. I advantage when I'm wrong.

I've never seen it. But I suspect you could add it. OK, and secondly, so far as he belongs to the intelligible world, under laws that are not empirical, being independent of nature and are founded on a reason alone. So you have a second law that isn't bound by the natural world.

That is your own sort of reason. So because you live in these two worlds, you have two different laws working upon you. So as irrational being, consequently. Wait, what's the other world?

So you had world, the sensuous world, and then you have the world of reason. What's OK? So you belong to the intelligible world, under laws that are not empirical, being independent of nature and found on reason alone. Hold the world.

It was all that. No, it wasn't. It came to me. But no, it sounds like a fantastic point of view.

No. I think some rings blend. No, but it's just like, I can imagine things, and I can or I can deduce things. And categorize them.

All these sense things. You're not just sensing them in that world. You get to categorize them. And then I can think about probability.

So I can think about causation. Sure. I think all of that's probably included. So if I'm going to throw a baseball through a ring, like a hanging tire, I want to like thread the baseball through that tire, I want to aim.

And I picture it in my mind. That's the intellectual world. That's my right. That's that one world.

And then when I actually do it, that's the central world. So sometimes your intellectual world and your central world don't line up, because I can think about throwing a baseball through a tire. But I can suck at it and miss it. Yes.

In fact, it's the same thing that kind of happens with right and wrong. You can know a thing is right and not do it. And that dichotomy, living in a world of reason and in a world of sense, is actually what lays the groundwork for even the possibility of saying, this ought to have happened. If we only live in the world of intelligence, the stuff that we knew should happen, we just happen.

We just do it. I will do this. But because we also live in the world of sense, that thing can be undone, because our will is messed with by all these sense experiences that we have, by desires that we have, by all this extra garbage. And so it's like, yeah, I know I ought to have done this.

But I didn't do it because we kind of live in these two worlds. OK. And he says, that sort of solves this whole circular reasoning problem. We've now removed the suspicion which we raised earlier, namely that there might be a hidden circle in our reasoning from freedom to autonomy and from autonomy to moral law.

The suspicion that in effect, we had perhaps assumed the idea of freedom only because of the moral law in order to later derive the moral law from freedom. And that we were thus unable to offer any grounds at all for moral law, but had merely begged the question by putting forward a principle which well meaning souls as a demonstrable proposition. We see now that when we think of ourselves as free, we transfer ourselves into the world of the understanding as members, and we recognize the autonomy of the will together with its consequence, morality. Whereas when we think of ourselves under obligation, we view ourselves as belonging to the world of sense and yet simultaneously to the world of understanding.

So because we are law givers, we can be in this world of intelligence. And because we are subject to laws, we are in the world of sense. So it's not that we are sort of doing a cyclical thing, right? We are subject therefore we must have a law, therefore we must be free.

And because we are free, we can be law givers, it's not the cyclical thing that he has going, right? OK. Thought so far. And the law givingness of us is using our reason to apply the categorical imperative.

Yeah, essentially. OK. What did you say the name of this chapter was? Is it critical of pure reason?

It is. A final step from a metaphysics of morals to a critique of pure practical reason. I'm just wondering where the critique comes in, because he seems very pro that reason that he's talking about. Well, I think practical reason is saying, you know, I've never fully been clear on what he means by practical reason, but I think what he means by practical reason is saying, this specific thing is good.

Yeah. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I could be wrong. It's just, again, at its face value, it seems like he's very pro this need for both of them, which includes reason as one of the pieces here.

But I'm following as much as I can here in this all for the first time. Yeah. I'm doing OK. You're doing great so far.

Definitely. OK. How are we on time? Oh, man.

It's fine. It's fine. I enjoy being in the central world with you. OK.

Yeah. Yeah, it's nice. But I'll never know the true grammar. Our souls never touch.

Never touch. It's that. OK. What's that?

Deathcapson? Oh. I'll follow you in the truth. Oh, it's soul meets body.

Oh, that one. It's a con. It's a con. It's a con.

I don't know. I always made that. Maybe. You have been toying with me all day.

First the Clifford the Dog. You thought that said the dog. And now, soul meets body is a con to the con song by Deathcap. That was the prize.

Shatter. You're giving me dreams and then shattering them all day. OK. You got to go do your AI computer generated imagery of, like, type in Clifford the Dog of the Battle of St.

albums that you get. Oh, I will. Listener, if you are looking to the. If you go back and look at the artwork for last week is an AI generated Clifford the Big Red Dog at the Battle of St.

Albin's. St. Albin's. St.

Albin's. I still haven't. ALB, ANS. OK.

No, he's the same of. I'll do it for sure. It's so funny. Do you guys think we should have episode on what is it, the new chat GPT?

No. You heard about chat GPT? Yeah. Is it classical?

What do you want to talk about? No, but if we walked in and chat GPT was talking to chat GTP of a Scotch, wouldn't we consider that it was, like, intellectuals? I don't know. Maybe.

Although I've read it's writing and it's not very good. Yeah. That's true. No, it's not good.

Because I would love for you to give it one of your prompts that you give to your students and then toss it in and grade it. I did it. So I actually did this process with my students. I put in my most recent prompt.

I said, right in classical rhetorical form, an essay that claims this. And it didn't write in classical rhetorical form. Didn't use any quotes or evidence. And it basically was the most bland, useless, vague language.

And I put it, I put three paragraphs on a page and said, OK, I want you guys all to edit these. And then we'll let them together. And I said, OK, after we edited them, I said, there's one that is good, one that is bad, and one that is mediocre. The good one came from C.S.

Lewis who's at press was Paradise Lost. The bad one came from a leadership book that I'm currently reading. You can delete everything except maybe one sentence. It was all useless.

And the mediocre one was chat, GPT, and blew all their minds. Well, because it really isn't that good. It's just a lot of seemingly substantive language that doesn't actually convey any substance. Maybe this would be a good episode.

That doesn't sound interesting. Anyway, it's fun. Try it out, listener. It's all big.

And then we had it write love letters. And we actually had write vows. The fun thing is if you're not watching it, it'll write a love letter in which it accidentally proposes. The end is like, I can't wait to spend the rest of my life if you're not a love letter.

It took a whole leap in a direction I wasn't expecting. It's lonely. I'm not standing. All my actions would conform perfectly to the principle of autonomy of a pure will.

So if you only lived in the world of your brain space, then all of your actions would completely align with a pure will. If I were solely a part of the sensible world, they would have to be taken as conforming completely to the natural law of desires and inclinations. So if you were only since then just whatever you wanted and whatever your desires were, you'd head for that. You're like a dog boy.

Yeah, consequently to the head around of me of nature. In the first case, they would rest on the Supreme Principle of Morality, the kind of quote unperitiv. In the second case on that of happiness. And here is not your definition of happiness, which is like moral virtue, but his definition of just like human bliss.

You are just feeling good all the time, I think, physically and materially. But since the world of understanding contains the ground of the world of sense, and therefore also of its laws, it thus gives laws directly to my will. So because the world of sense is sort of built on our world of understanding, that's how we interact with the world of sense, it can give laws to the rest of us. We live in these two worlds, but the world of our brain space is the law giver to the rest of it.

And must be conceived as thus law giving. Therefore, although I regard myself, regard, regard myself from one point of view as a being that belongs in the world of sense, I shall have to recognize that as an intelligence, I'm subject to the law of the world of understanding, that is of reason, which contains this idea, it contains in this law the idea of freedom, since you can't really conceive of yourself as making judgments without freedom. And thus in the autonomy of the will, I must therefore regard the laws of the world of the understanding as imperatives for me and see the actions that conform to this principle as duties. Why?

Because the world of our sense is codified, organized, evaluated by the world of our intelligence. And the intelligence contains within it the idea of freedom. He hasn't even proven it yet. He's like, I'm not telling you freedom exists, but when you act as though you are making judgments, you assume your own freedom and thus your own autonomous will.

And so the laws of the world of understanding are imperatives for you. Your judgments are overarching for you because they assume your freedom and also of autonomy of the will. They're not being pushed around by anybody else. They are your judgments.

So they're your duty. But what about when you get competing moral ideas where it's like, they actually kind of pick your poison. Either one is, you wouldn't get blamed for one, but they compete and you need to make a decision. How do you know what your duty is when you have conflicting competing duties?

We can go back to the class example we've always used of fighting in the war for your country or not depriving your mom of her last child. Or remember, I'm sorry. Yeah, again, I don't think Kant is trying to avoid complex moral questions. Your duty is both to your country and to your mother.

It's up to you to decide which one of those things has a greater pull upon you. I don't think you would convert either of those. So the category of imperative then? His point here is to say that either way, those are a duty.

Yeah. It's not to help you choose which one is right. He's saying when you finally figure it out, that one is an imperative for you because you are acting as though you have freedom, as though you have autonomy of the will and because that autonomy of the will is how you interact with the sense of world. It's a duty.

You have to act in accordance with those laws. Well, I guess if your decision was then like be super selfish and not fighting the war and abandon your mom, he would say that that was the immoral thing to do because if everybody did that, that would be bad. Yes. Yeah, it's a thing.

Let's see. I'm wondering if there's a section here I have highlighted to read. I'm not sure if it's actually helpful to us. Where do we get the concept of a duty being something that's bound binding to me?

We're getting there. We're not there yet. Why should I? Again, I know the right way, but I don't want to do it.

So he would say that that's because you have your sense world is interfering with your brain world. So he's saying it can never exist. I know what I'm putting it simply, but where there's something that we can't think of a scenario where it is, the category of comparative should say do this. But if there's a scenario where the category of comparative says to do it, and I don't do it, I'm always wrong.

You are, I think right here he would say that you are going against, you are being subject to the law of necessity, which is the law of essentially the world and not to the law of your own reason, which is telling you what you should actually do. So he points out that even a villain, even the worst villain, when he sees examples of goodness, and that's a section I was just going to read, when he sees examples of goodness and honor and faithfulness and truth, nobody would look at those and say you. He even wants to bring those about himself, but he knows he can't because he's subject to the law of his own impulses. He's like, I don't really want to.

Even though he knows it would be right to do so. And he desires to bring that apart about himself, but the law of his natural desire, because he is so sunk into the sensuous world, he is subject and cannot break himself out of it. Does that help make sense of it? I guess so.

Yeah. Keep going. OK. So then we get to, let's see.

There's another apparent contradiction. So done. So I'm reading my underlines, and he wants to say, OK, I think. Sorry, as you can tell from the reading, this is all kind of complicated.

So I'm trying to both reason. The nature of the events, Thomas? I'm always convinced. I always think the goal is to understand these ideas.

And us agreeing is kind of a secondary thing. Do you think the concept of categorical imperative is a helpful one? Yeah, again, it's rehashing a conversation from before. But I think having that idea of we make decisions as if there are universal laws, and then we don't give ourselves easy outs as to, well, our situation is so special we don't have to follow those universal laws.

I think it's important just on a practical level. I'm curious in this last section how we tie together everything that you're asking about. OK. So the next part he talks about the extreme limit of practical philosophy.

His first point is that we could easily make a mistake in thinking it's a contradiction to describe both personal freedom and natural necessity to the same actions. You live in the sense world, and you have personal freedom. It doesn't that kind of bring you to some sort of impasse, where you're both free and subject. How does that work?

And folks would claim that free will doesn't really exist. In all these things, you are subject to the law of necessity, even if you think you're not. I think that would actually be the modern stance. That even as we make moral judgments, even as we think we are hanging on our family and doing the right things, like all of this is just psychology and that science and our biology drives all of it.

Kant says no. That is not the case. Both of these things exist at the same time. So he then soon realizes that both of these can and indeed must take place at the same time.

For there is not the slightest contradiction in holding that thing as an appearance, as you belong to the world of sense, is subject to certain laws, laws of which it is independent as a thing or being in itself. So because you exist as a human body, you are subject to the physical laws, right? Sense world. But those laws don't really affect you as the thing in itself.

Graham, the Graham core, the soul. Graham core. Graham core. The new fashion that's sweeping the nation.

How's that with his music? Graham core? Yeah. Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Well, go Graham core. Okay, so it says, in reason alone and indeed pure reason is the source of law. And also that since in that world he is his true self as an intelligence only, these laws apply to him directly and categorically. It follows that what desires and impulses spur him to do cannot impair the laws of his will as intelligence.

Indeed, he doesn't even hold himself responsible for these desires and impulses nor impute them as to his true self. So you live in these two worlds and sometimes you have like maybe desires that are inappropriate or thoughts or feelings that aren't quite inappropriate. And you'll really think of that, even as a Christian, you wouldn't think of that as sin. You're just sort of subject to your animal nature.

And it is in your intelligence, in your inner core where the law is truly given. And so you can live in this strange tension between being subject to the laws of nature as a sensuous meaning of the senses. And then also separate from it as an intelligence that chooses among these things. And you actually even right now give yourself license on the things that are from the sensuous world.

Are there things that sort of straddle between the two things? Absolutely. Okay. The ancient, the old Greek hospitality laws, that sort of like those cultural touch points, right?

Where if somebody is coming to your home, you don't murder them. Or not, you don't murder them. What's the cosmetality law? Sometimes come in your house, you feed them, you clothe them, and then you don't talk to them till the next day.

Or if you have- And then when you send them on their way, you can begift. Let's say you had sort of some of those old Bedouin customs of if you invite your mortal enemy to your house and you and your mortal enemy walk into your camp together, you're bound by custom that no harm is going to come to him. So you have those sort of customs. I don't think people would push those as far to say that those were universal categorical imperatives.

We have whole societies that don't use those customs that we wouldn't say are grossly immoral. But those are not natural things. Those are not just completely in the realm of the census. So what do we do about those things that cultures have held up as being customs that they are going to follow for the- And they have sort of good reasons, sociological reasons as to why they want their culture to sort of uphold those things.

But I don't know, or maybe they are categorical imperatives. I think you would say they are, right? As a Greek, as living in the land of Greece at that time, can you say, I want everyone to treat their guests with respect and kindness on the first night there there, and send them off with a gift to encourage future travel and uphold the economy? Yeah.

But that's not- But if someone came to your house, AJ, tonight, and was like, I demand, I demand a place to sleep, you'd be like, nah, nah, bro, you got- There's like a hotel down the street. Yeah, but we live in a wildly different culture. That's my point. So then the categorical imperatives can be bound by culture?

Yeah, sure. Right now, I cannot will that everyone should let strangers into their homes when there's a critically reasonable hotel down the road. So you do not need to be bound by ancient Greek categorical imperatives? No.

So categorical imperatives are changed based on the cultures that they're in. Probably. So are those cultures in the realm of the census or in the realm of the intellect? They're in the realm of the census.

Remember the categorical imperative, right? The one law is that you must act as though your law become a maxim for everyone. Sure. Right?

But it absolutely bridges the gap into the sensuous world, right? When you look at an individual instance, you need to be, say, is this the way I would want everyone to act? It's essentially the golden, not quite the golden. OK, let's say you were raised in that culture and at home.

That's what you guys do. Yeah. And then you get plopped into, you're going on a exchange program. And now you're living in New York City.

Sure. And you're staying with a host family. And you keep inviting people, keep knocking on your door, and you keep letting them stay in your host family's house. And they're like, what, the frig, AJ?

We don't do things that way here. And you're like, this is how we do it in my home nation. I would be wrong if I didn't do this. Everybody should do this.

This is a great thing. Everybody should act this way. And they're like frigging as weirdo from another culture is bringing us weird culture things. I think we're hitting that thing where you are desiring specificity for context.

Right? We talked about it with giving money to the man outside the alcohol store. Yeah, no, this is a little bit different in that. Now, your question is, can a cultural moral apply to everyone?

Part of me can conceive that AJ is you are duty bound to your category or category compared to it because you feel like it's a great idea that everybody should do. But you just happen to live in like Ruff and Temple, New York City where they're like, we're not doing that. So you'd simply be mistaken. I think the full categorical imperative would be within the context of the Greek culture.

When it happens. And the person should do this. And when the context of New York, you shouldn't invite strangers into random people's homes. And he would quickly learn that with the people he was staying with.

I shouldn't invite randos into my house because it doesn't work like it does in Greece. So the categorical imperative of a place in time can trump the categorical imperative of other places in time. Like if you had your own set of understanding categorical imperatives and then you moved to a wildly different culture, you would have to change, you would have to sort of have a different operating system. Yeah, it would probably change according to your context.

OK. But I guess I'm just a couple of reasons. But context would be contained. But if you were going to.

Still don't understand how it's not just like an arbitrary thing. What do you mean? I mean, if it can change by context, if it can change by social place in time, it sounds as if like is the sensual tail wagging the intellectual dog or is the. No, no, no.

So I think, and then one of our. It's sensual. Never mind. Sensual dog.

And I think that we are bumping up on one of our listeners astutely emailed to us. And that is that when we talk about a categorical imperative, it actually needs to be pretty specific. We can't just say broadly like, manage it on our parents, right? It has to be typically fairly specific to what's happening.

And so I don't think that the categorical imperative imperative itself is changing. I think the true categorical imperative would include some, especially if it's a cultural practice, would include some context. So the full imperative would be when in the Greek context or in a context where good hospitality is necessary for the common interest of the people, one should do this. And then when one is in a place where guests can easily stay at a place down the road and there are a lot of dangerous people about one should not be inviting people into their home, right?

Both of those would widely apply in Greece or out of Greece. Yeah. Right? And so I don't think the imperative itself is changing.

I think it's just when we are in Greece, maybe we need to be a little more specific. If I've only ever lived in Greece, I just don't know that I need to be more specific. Just like if I've only ever interacted with my drunk uncle, who when I give money, he always buys me candy. And then I go see a guy outside an alcohol store.

I don't think they call them alcohol. Let's call them liquor stores. Yeah, it's liquor stores. Outside the liquor store asking for my money, maybe I need a little more specificity because I just didn't have the full context, right?

So there is a bigger categorical imperative there. For my own experience, I didn't know that more context was needed, but it was needed. And the actual categorical imperative was just a little bit longer or the imperative. OK.

Good so far? Everybody and be super happy, prepared. OK. The limits of what we can know and explain, the intelligible world, freedom, and interest in morality.

These are like all your big questions right here in this last little bit. So that's the title of it. I'm going to read the first little bit, and then you can like pump your fist when I hit the part where you feel vindicated. Practical reason does not overstep its limits in the least by thinking itself into the world of understanding.

It would do so only if it's sought to inspect or feel itself into that world. That thinking is a merely negative thought. That the world of sense gives reason no laws for determining the will. It is a pot.

So all of this stuff doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Freedom, blah, blah, blah, blah, but if practical reason were also to take from the intelligible world an object of the will, so something that we are working for, that is a motivating cause of action, it would overstep its limits and pretend to be acquainted with something of which it knows nothing. The concept of a world of understanding is thus only a standpoint that reason finds itself constrained to adopt outside of appearances in order to think of itself as practical. The influences of sensibility were determining for human beings.

If the influences of sensibility were determining for human beings, this would be impossible. It is nevertheless necessary unless the human being is denied the consciousness of himself as an intelligence and consequently as a rational and rationally active cause. That is a cause that is free in its operation. The part that I think indicates you is if you look for, in the world of reason, if you look from the intelligible world an object of the will.

So in your brain, we talked about the categorical imperative. What is the thing we are shooting for? Why is your big answer? What's impelling to do this?

It says it can't. It's trying to draw water from a stone. You will never get an object for your will from that inside sense person. You cannot draw it from the categorical imperative.

And getting it from the outside is also a really bad idea. Where does it come from? He says we can't know. OK.

He also says we can't explain freedom either. There's no basis for it because, let's see. But reason would overstep all its limits if it took it upon itself to explain how pure reason can be practical. This would be exactly the same task because explaining how freedom is possible.

If we cannot explain anything unless we can bring it under laws whose object to be given in some possible experience. Freedom, however, is a mere idea. We cannot prove it from experience. You cannot use experience to show that you are free.

No single instance will ever do it. We can merely just sort of defend it. We can point to a thing. Someone else will point to it.

Well, it's just your biology doing it. Freedom, as an idea, cannot be proven. It can be defended, but it cannot be proven. We can never draw that water from the stone.

And the same is true of our interest. Why we should follow morality. And here's the look. I have started.

I have dog eared it. I have circled an R next to it, which means read it. I have like this is the spot where according to your question. Even like a lifetime of examples of freedom isn't a proof.

Like if I would say that there are a lot of natural forces that have gotten you to this place where you do this. Biology and evolution over hundreds of years have made you the kind of person that is curious that wants to be correct. And you can tip over your bubbly can. That wants to tip over my bubbly can to prove to yourself that you have freedom because as it being that wants free, I could give you all sorts of reasons.

You can never prove it from experience. So it's all just like the massive chain of causality just happened. We could put you here. Right?

How could you prove otherwise? Exactly. Right? You can't do it.

OK. So that's one thing. Can't prove freedom. Next thing is the subjective impossibility of explaining freedom of the will is one in the same as the impossibility of locating and making a comprehensible an interest that a human being can take in moral laws.

And yet he does really take such an interest. We call it the foundation in us of this interest moral feeling, a feeling that has been mistakenly taken by some people to be the standard for our moral judgment. It ought to be regarded rather as the subjective effect exercised on our will by the law. It is reason alone that supplies the objective ground.

So this moral feeling that you have cannot be the grounds for the law. It's an effect of the afterglow. Sort of yes. But what this means of grammar is that you were right.

There is no way to derive an interest. Why should you follow the law? Don't know. What is that thing that interests you and makes you fall in morals?

But, some people don't want to fall in morals. And that's the thing. That's fine. They like, Kant makes no claim as to why you should fall in morals.

He says we can't. Logic cannot provide that for us. Because every attempt to say you should follow it for x, all of a sudden reaches into the sensual world and makes law completely subject to the things that you want. You are now all of a sudden completely subject to food, or to happiness, or comfort, or something else.

Whereas morality isn't that. Logic cannot provide it. And it can't provide it, especially if we're talking about the human being in these two worlds, the world of intelligence and the world of sense. The world of intelligence certainly can't do it.

It can't give you any reason why you are interested in following the moral law, only that we are. It can only observe that we are. We do. And in fact, it seems to be one of the most important things to us.

But just like freedom, we can't really derive it from outside. He says, here, here is the limits of what philosophy can be. Is it an a priori thing? Is he just sort of saying like it's built in?

Well, this is what I'm wondering. He doesn't prove like me. Is that the end of it? Essentially, this is the end of the book.

He doesn't make any further claims. He's like, I have bumped up against the limits. And the limit is one of them is we can't really prove reason. Or sorry, prove freedom.

And the other limit is I cannot give you a reason why it is in your interest to follow morality. I simply can't. It is the limit of reason. That's not its job.

I can show you what it looks like. I can give the moral law a grounding in reason. I can show you that to have a moral law to be a law giver, I must assume your freedom. But I can't prove it.

I can't prove it's there. And I can't give you a reason to do it. And saying like, it'll benefit you materially is not enough. Like, that's not a sufficient reason.