The Characteristics Of Kant's Practical Reason And Their Problems

This paper aims to explore the basic connotation and characteristics of Kant's practical reason. Like the past philosophers, Kant explicitly defined the reason or the general intellectual ability as the cognitive ability by means of concepts, which is usually called "thinking." Similarly, in Kant here, the so-called practical reason refers to the practical applications of reason, which regulates and guides the practical acts or the acts of will. In this sense, the Kant's concept of practical reason in general is consistent with the traditional thoughts since Aristotle. However, according to a priori classification principle(i.e. pure and empirical division) of his critical philosophy,Kant divided practical reason into "general(or empirical) practical reason" and "pure practical reason", and claimed just only the pure practical reason is the real practical reason. Therefore, in the writings of Kant's ethics, the so-called practical reason usually refers to the pure practical reason, in the strict and new sense. Therefore, Kant tried to prove that the rational ability which goes beyond or is independent of all the possible experience to expand its applications, not only has a real meaning in practical behaviors, but also is the foundation of all acts of moral values. In terms of its content, we see that Kant's Practical Reason has three characteristics: first, the mission or function of practical reason is to establish a good will, and the task or ideal of establishing a good will by introducing the concept of obligation(or duty) is strictly defined as " legislation on morals "; second, the ground of practical reason's legislation is that the maxim of conducts can be universalized or generalized, and this requirement of universality's substantial meaning by the metaphysical clarification of this general formula of all categorical imperatives is strictly defined as purely logical consistency; third, the nature of practical reason is "absolute spontaneity", but the human reason could never know how this absolute spontaneity is possible. The three characteristics of Kant's Practical Reason are associated with each other in a system, and each of them corresponds to a feature of Kant's moral doctrine, which is both attractive and very controversial. More importantly, in the entire process of explorations, we found that the concept of Kant's will essentially is the possible condition or basis of his concept of practical reason, and thus has the fundamental significance in terms of his entire transcendental rationalism in morals; because it makes the possibly original complex relationship between the will and the reason become more simple, and constitutes the basis of many important arguments in Kant's moral doctrine; however, many philosophers didn't accept Kant's definition of the concept of will, so the issue on the definition of the concept of will in fact becomes a fundamental question whether Kant's moral theory could be firmly established.