Kant and the Metaphysical Problem of Human Freedom - Wolfgang Ertl

Wolfgang Ertl, Professor of Ethics at Keio University, focuses his research on issues located at the intersection of metaphysics and ethics, such as objectivity in morals, free will and responsibility.

Metaphysics is concerned with questions about the fundamental structure of reality, while ethics and moral philosophy are concerned with normative principles that govern a person's behavior.

For these principles to be valid, human freedom is required as a precondition, which would make it a fundamental, and in this case metaphysical, feature of reality.

Q: "The core interest of mine has to do with the problem of human freedom, in particular in connection with what is called determinism. Because we have on the one hand the idea that human beings are in some sense free. They have a choice, they are responsible for what they are doing, they act on insight, but on the other hand we have the natural sciences for example, which assume that there is something like a seamless web of natural laws which regulate everything which happens in the world. Then of course, the question arises: how can these two assumptions, human freedom on the one hand and determinism on the other be held simultaneously. This is probably the most important issue which I do research on, mainly in connection with the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, for whom this was also the crucial problem I should like to say because it's in a sense the connecting point between his theoretical philosophy and his practical philosophy. The practical philosophy only works, if in some sense it's legitimate to say that human beings have freedom. But this seems to be threatened by the idea that there is this set of laws in the natural world which regulates that behavior."

Prior to Kant, the academic philosophers of medieval universities also debated this problem in theological terms, as the paradox of free will. This paradox contends that human freedom and the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent God are inherently incompatible.

Professor Ertl believes that Kant transformed the theological solutions proposed by the scholastic philosophers into a metaphysical solution.

"For many people, connecting Kant and a scholastic philosopher seems to be rather strange because we have this image of Kant as a revolutionary figure who turned philosophy upside down, but Kant was not only a very famous philosopher but he was also a university teacher, and in his lifetime it was still common to have a mandatory textbook which you needed to use for your lectures for example, and this idea of having a textbook, of having a source of common accepted knowledge, that's something which connects Kant to this scholastic tradition of much earlier times, the 17th century or even going back to the high middle ages. It's a bit similar to music, there is this movement in Baroque music to perform music of the Baroque era on traditional, original instruments different from ours, and in a sense we have to listen to Kant on the original instruments of his time, and that means in the context of these old textbooks which we often don't know anymore, and once we do that often very obscure passages in his works sound completely different."

Professor Ertl is therefore working to place the ideas of Kant, especially in regard to the problem of freedom, in a historically accurate context.

"The problem of freedom as I said seems to get treated in an entirely new fashion by Kant but in fact it's probably not the case. He takes up some inspiration from his predecessors and that needs to be carved out in a very painstaking manner. Looking at very small details and trying to reconstruct the ideas of his predecessors comparing it with what he is doing and also comparing it with modern approaches. Because the problem is basically always the same, that's fascinating, I mean the problem of freedom has been a core problem in philosophy for more than 2000 years and it comes again and again in different guises. Now we have it obviously in regard to the problem of neuroscience, that for many people is a challenge for the assumption of freedom, but basically Kant assumed that such a theory is possible, there is some natural science which explains the workings of our action, but still he thought we can meaningfully uphold the notion of freedom in this seamless web of causal laws."


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