Reason and the transformation of nature: A study in Kant's practical philosophy

The task of how freedom can accomplish its influence in nature is one of the overarching problems of Kant's critical enterprise. The crux of this issue is what Kant takes the relation between reason and nature to be. In my project I suggest that Kant takes the task of reason to be to transform nature, wherein reason attempts to give its own form of freedom to nature. I take as my point of departure reason's demand for the unconditioned. Under the rubric of reason's demand, I attempt to demonstrate that nature, understood as that which is conditioned, is the necessary material for, and therefore occasion of, the realization of human freedom. That is, human freedom is made concrete through the transformation of a given nature into a rational world.;Three are three loci wherein human beings, through a will determined to act through reason alone, transform nature to have a rational form. Subjectively, we must transform our natural propensity to make self-love the principle of our actions into virtue, wherein we make the moral law the ground of all of our actions. Objectively, we must work to produce the highest good, the totality of our ends whose form is that of an unconditioned whole---our natural ends of happiness are transformed to have as their condition that which is unconditionally good, namely virtue. Moreover, the highest good requires the production of a moral world, a world whose form is that of a rational whole. In so doing, we must transform our natural relations with others into rational relations, through the domains of a civil condition, culture, and religion.;In this project I suggest that Kant's practical philosophy has at the fore the reality of the human condition, namely that human beings find themselves always already in nature. I also try to demonstrate the way in which our individual human freedom is made real only as part of a collective pursuit of freedom. In reconceiving the relation that grounds Kant's practical philosophy, this project offers a unified portrait of Kant's moral, political, and historical theories.