Kant's Theoretical Analysis

With the pure practical faculty of reason, the reality of transcendental freedom is also confirmed. For speculative reason, the concept of freedom was problematic, but not impossible. That is to say, speculative reason could think of freedom without contradiction, but it could not assure any objective reality to it…Freedom, however, among all the ideas of speculative reason is the only one whose possibility we know a priori. We do not understand it, but we know it as the condition of the moral law which we do know ( KpV 3-4).

With a completely different strategy in the First Critique where freedom was explicated in order to confirm the possibility of morality, Kant reverses this doctrine by noting that the moral law is the grounding of the

All we need to know for our purposes is that these writers think that Kant places the formalistic moral law at the basis of his argument, that Kant thinks that the moral conduct of each person is committed to this formalistic moral law, the universal law formula (CI1) is a principle that says to universalize all our actions. In this thesis, I mainly address issues related to the emptiness charge, we must lay aside entirely the consideration whether the Kantian discussions on concepts of formal are fighting for the right or for the wrong side, for the true or for the false. This is actually a very important point for my line of argument, for adopting this claim would make it plausible not to discuss Hegel’s own philosophy in more detail. It would then, indeed, suffice to cite Hegel’s critical remarks and discuss them solely against the background of Kant’s ethics (while ignoring the wider background of Hegel’s philosophy). It has to be discussed solely on the basis of Kant’s ethics, and not already presupposing Hegel’s philosophy (which then had to be discussed critically on its own accord as well). Therefore, in this section, I will discuss Hegel’s

Hegel, in early letters to Schelling, says that he ‘‘took up again the study of Kantian philosophy to learn how to apply its important results to many an idea still current among us, or to elaborate such ideas according to those results’’ (L end of January, 1795), and, ‘‘from the Kantian system and its highest completion I expect a revolution in Germany’’ (L April 1, 1795). In Hegel’s early writings we also shall see clearly in the second part of the book philosophy of right that Hegel makes Kantian morality the task he sets for his own times. The Kantian standpoint of morality is characterized as the opposition between the mere idea of the good and the external world; this has been the way Hegel understands the historical-political plight of his own times in the letters on the philosophy of history.

Geiger explains there are two senses in Hegel’s understanding of the moral content in Kant’s CI, Hegel treats universal form of the law as it ‘cancels’ the content of morality (Hegel NL123), it is impossible to make a transition from its form to its content (Hegel PRS135R), then Hegel’s emptiness charge in Geiger’s view has double standpoints regarding to form and