1788

THE CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON

by Immanuel Kant

translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott


PREFACE.

This work is called the Critique of Practical Reason, not of the
pure practical reason, although its parallelism with the speculative
critique would seem to require the latter term. The reason of this
appears sufficiently from the treatise itself. Its business is to show
that there is pure practical reason, and for this purpose it
criticizes the entire practical faculty of reason. If it succeeds in
this, it has no need to criticize the pure faculty itself in order
to see whether reason in making such a claim does not presumptuously
overstep itself (as is the case with the speculative reason). For
if, as pure reason, it is actually practical, it proves its own
reality and that of its concepts by fact, and all disputation
against the possibility of its being real is futile.

With this faculty, transcendental freedom is also established;
freedom, namely, in that absolute sense in which speculative reason
required it in its use of the concept of causality in order to
escape the antinomy into which it inevitably falls, when in the
chain of cause and effect it tries to think the unconditioned.
Speculative reason could only exhibit this concept (of freedom)