Kant and Free Will, can you translate this? I am so confused....?

What does this mean in simple terms?





(1) How can freedom and necessity coexist in the same action? By freedom Kant means the power to spontaneously initiate causal series or to be independent of natural (psychological, physiological, environmental) causes or laws. Necessity means being subject to the uniformity of cause and effect, of acting according to natural laws. All effects in nature (as phenomena) precede necessarily (a requirement of the understanding) from causes, and all causes are the effects of preceding causes. Thus, the ideas of freedom and necessity appear to be true opposites, and it seems an impossible task to bring them together in the same action.





So this would appear, especially with regard to the dynamic psychological field previously described. We lie within a field of forces and causal relations following psychophysical laws, the uniformity of which16 has been a basic presupposition of The Dynamic Psychological Field. It would appear then, that our perspectives and actions are necessary, that they are the effects or dependencies of our motives, sentiments, roles, temperaments, abilities, moods, states, expectations, and our situation--in short, that our behavior follows from our character or personality, our bodily conditions, and our natural environment. Even posing a superego, whose content springs from our culture, and a self-sentiment, seems not to relieve us of this necessity, for the superego's moral dictates and the self's future-oriented, superordinate striving for increasing self-actualization or esteem seems to place us under masters no less dictatorial than the natural laws governing the flight of an airplane.17





Although I may be emphasizing the necessity of our actions beyond contemporary tastes, our bondage to psychophysical. laws, causes, influences, relationships, agents, determinants, antecedents, and the like is a basic presupposition of much contemporary social science, psychology, and political thought. Need I mention behaviorism, Freudianism, or Marxism? At any rate, there is certainly a problem here. If our actions are as determined as many presuppose, then is freedom impossible? If, as I describe it, the self is part of a dynamic field, can we really create our future? Kant's question is clearly mine as well.





(2) Causality belongs to appearances. The world of experience, of empirical knowledge, is of appearances (phenomena). This is a plane of knowing which, at best, can give us only sensual representations of things-in-themselves. Now causality is of this empirical world, as a presupposition of and a rule for understanding phenomena, and uniformity (same cause, same effect) is the embodiment of these observed causal relationships in natural laws. All that happens as phenomena, all that we are sensually aware of, are but continuations of causal series in time.





Kant's notions of causality and natural laws were written at a time when the Newtonian system of nature had captured philosopher's minds, including Kant's. Newton's success in subsuming so much of physical nature under uniform causal laws provided the paradigm for understanding empirical necessity. The existence and status of causal laws is a controversial question in contemporary science, however. With the growth of a statistical view of nature, the development of positivism in some of its more extreme philosophical schools, the relativization of time and space by Einstein,18 and the discovery of quantum indeterminism, philosophers have come to seriously question causal interpretations Of nature and assumptions of any necessity.





In the light of such developments and consonant with the view of The Dynamic Psychological Field, Kant can be revised in the following way without seriously weakening his argument. Causality is of the world of appearances, but the world of appearances contains relationships other than causal ones. Cause and effect do help to order phenomena and constitute some laws. Sensual nature also includes, however, dependencies of a kind different from causality;19 the uniformity of nature under laws involves more varied kinds of relationships than Kant thought possible.





(3) Underlying all phenomena are things-in-themselves. Phenomena are but empirical representations of a reality unknowable to our understanding. This view is close to my position here. In my terms, empirical reality comprises the actualization of underlying potentialities, the transformation of these potentials of things-in-themselves into determinables, dispositions, powers, and manifestations. There are the planes of perceivable actuality and of indeterminate potentiality. In Kant's perspective and my own, then, empirical causality is confined to sensual actuality; our scientific laws and empirical knowledge apply to this plane and not to the underlying reality.





(4) Things-in-themselves may produce empirical causality as effects.20 Although things-in-themselves are empirically unknowable to our under|||On Kant's Good Will It seems to me that Kant tried to uncover the principals behind the common sense morality. The will and it's reasons goal wasn't or isn't to produce happiness, but to produce simply a will that was good to itself, Something simply as something good for the self and out of that happiness to be the satisfaction of all our desires. To him good will wasn't the sole and complete good, but it was the highest good will and the condition of the worthiness to be happy. To achieve this you would require complete good (happiness) combined with good will. In closing one of my personal favorite quotes of his is "Treat humanity, whether yourself or another, as an end in itself and not only as a means". He stated that we can't explain free will, we can only assume it and refute objections against it. To me his approach towards free will was extremely simple compared to Hegel's. It seems to me that Hegel's theory was directed to the masses not giving credit to individuals. Society was categorized and he thought he had found the nostrum for all of society's ills. And to quote something apropos ' I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor" Thoreau. I have spent little time with the topic of the will but I find it very interesting. This might not have helped you but it did me.Thanks for your interest and sharing it. Make it a good one....