Individual Freedom in Sartre's Existentialism

What is it that shapes the way the people live in groups, societies, countries, or regions of different places in the world? For example, a dating club or a sporty club in term of a group; a poetry society or an economic society in term of a society, or even Islamic religions or Western or Christian religions? It is obvious that each of these terms involve different set of rules or conceptions for each of the group of which the functioning term represents. A poetry society must have different activities and guidelines for its members to follow than an economic society has for its members. Speaking more generally, Western countries that are not Islamic or Muslim have been living most of their lives governed by biblical ethics that were called Christian values for thousands of years since the day God communicated with Moses to grant His commadments to the people who lived on earth who needed His counsels. Thus, people have been always living in according to some values that were either provided by a divine being or by rules of concepts set by their own groups or societies. Freedom generally speaking and individual freedom specifically speaking are also affected and controlled by political or ethic concepts or even by each person in his or her own rules; however, individual freedom is not totally independent from the societal freedom in a general meaning since a person always belongs to a certain group or a society, or a country, they must somehow adapt or conform themselves to what other people in their groups or societies are doing. Thus, the ways people live seem to have been set up by a priori rules that affected how they behaved. Hereby, I should remind or redefine what it means by the term, a priori. A priori means what is knowable "prior to" experience or beliefs and it is what belongs to concepts or set-up rules that we understand independently of our own experience; and experience means matter of fact or "the process or an instance of personal encountering or undergoing something" in a meaning given by a dictionary. So, a posteriori would mean "posterior to" or what comes after we begin to have experience with something or in an event or by encoutering some particular event. And this a priori term is used in Sartre's propaganda sentence in suporting for his existentialist theory for he says that "life has no meaning a priori" and that "existence precedes essence". In this essay, I will explain what it partly means by those quotes of Sartre's.

What does it really mean by being a man or a woman? Of course, the term a man gives us a big picture that is especially different from the term a woman in a biological meaning as well as in a functioning meaning. Similarly, the term a laborer and the term a physician describe quite different pictures of the two kinds. A man has different bodily functions and different mental thinking than those of a woman although sometimes, in our today's modern society, men and women seem to be more likely to be able to do many the same things. Despite all of the likely or the similarities in some conditions, men and women still have difficult problems in conciliating the physical difference or the degree of intelligence between the two sexes. Men can do a lot more than women in term of physical activities; for example, a typical woman, nor an extraordinary one, cannot lift more than one hundred pounds or cannot do a hard laboring job such as those of a construction worker and of a mechanic who build highways, and repair cars or big trucks by hands. Of course, a woman can do the same labor job that a man do provided that she has the assistance from technical devices or tools to help her with external forces that a machine can support that are not her own forces. In a secular meaning, men and women have different abilities due to the differences in their biological traits, but in a celestial meaning, God is to be claimed of having made men and women different for the purpose of marriage and of forming a family in a reproductive meaning. And this is considered a priori matter or a priori understanding which is beyond any human meaning or experience since in today's modern society, people tend to establish their own secular concepts to adapt themselves with the experience they have faced while living on this earth. Why do women and men have to be different? Is there any human being in other planets that are neither a man nor a woman? With the advancement of modern science and technology, specialists are exploring more deeply and profoundly into the unknown worlds in the universe outside the earth, and therefore, those questions take us to go further into wondering about matters that can be solved and matters that cannot be solved because if there are no other creatures in the universe that are different from those of our own planet then it is obvious that God must have had a purpose for creating men and women. Even if there is doubt that men and women would be the only beings in the whole universe, the concept of a creator such as God can never be extinguished in our thinking. Thus, the concepts of what a men and what a women is are not humanly conceptualized, and they exist before our existence on this earth if we accept the concept of a divine creator. Moreover, since all the creatures that exist on this earth must have an original beginning, a concept of a divine creation is a possible concept that any one who is pondering about how the first lives were made up would be more likely to come up without any difficulty in thinking about the necessity of an original creator. So, it is obvious that the creation of all of the earthly creatures is a priori concept that exists beyond any human experience and before a human existence on earth. Thus, if the concept of a divine creation is accepted then there would be more questions to follow thereafter including ones such as: Why men look like a man or a woman look like a woman? Or why human beings have hands that can function differently than the hands of the animals? Or why animals do not have a big brain and are not as smart as human beings? The answers for those questions were already provided to us by the biblical stories and were also explained by God, or Jesus and His disciples, or the Saints as they were recorded in the bible. Thus, we are informed with some a priori knowledge that we did not even create or set up; the knowledge that is now a priori meaning or knowledge of life. And this means that God creates human beings according to His own images and according to His own essences. The fact that human beings having minds or brains can be explained that human beings are possessing what God also possesses which is a brain or a mind.


Not only the difference in familial roles of a man an a woman, but also the differences in soietal roles and in professional roles that can be easily recognized or understood in term of differences. For example, female workers do not choose jobs that belong the the male realm and neither do male workers. Beside the differences between a man and a woman, individual differences also make another important role in a society. We cannot force everyone to do what he or she does not like to do or do not have the abilities to do, nor do we want all people to do the same functions in a society because a society needs different functions to work well together to provide the different needs for the whole society. Of course, we need factories that can make household necessities and utilities and farmers who can provide grains and fruits for our daily meals. A society has to encourage people to have different professions or jobs to support every one who lives in it, but Sartre seems to oppose the individual choices to praise up what he calls human responsibility. However, Sartre seems to misuse the term human since in his language, it means more than just one person's responsibility, but involves the entire human world, and I will come back to explain about this point later on.


So, what does Sartre means when he says that "life has no meaning a priori"? Of course, this statement will certainly causes us to understand that life does not have any meaning that is bounded in any concept or any belief that is out of our own experience but only in our own experience or our own creation for it. Furthermore, in Sartre's book, Existentialism and Human Emotions, he declares what he means by that statement with his further explanations in a paragraph that follows immediately after that statment: "Before you come alive, life is nothing; it's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose. In that way, you see, there is a possibility of creating a human community." (Sartre, 49) It means that before we are born, we did not exist; that is correct but the next statement is really a problem because it means our lives do not have any meaning except that which we are going to cling to or take as a meaning for our lives. So, it means that no one can tell you what to do or what you should be except yourself. You are the only one who has to tell yourself what you want your life to be and what you want to be, not to include your mother, your father, or any society or any book or any value that you have been taught with. Here, I can see that Sartre's existentialism is a very subjective idea that I have never seen before presented by any other philosopher. That could also mean that any value that you learn from your family, your school, or from your parents does not and cannot intervene with the meaning of your life. "Before you come alive, life is nothing" tell us all what Sartre wants to say even we could have misunderstood him; at this point I think Sartre was not very careful with his language. The statement "life is nothing" is very vague and too general even he already explained what he meant in his book; I think he did not explicate to the readers enough ideas except that the subjectivity of a person is the primary cause for the establishing of the meaning of that subject's life or that individual life.


As I already explained above that life can not be nothing even before we are born to have a life because each of us will be either a man or a woman who by the purpose of creation should do what a man or a woman can do as his or her role in a familial or reproductive meaning. Man is to be the provider and the support of a woman's life while the primary role of a woman is to be able to bear and have children. Furthermore, each of us has different traits from our private parents and ancestors, and nobody are wholly alike. Besides, there are different regions in the whole wide world, the Western, the Eastern, the Uropean, the Chinese, the African, etc. of which different ethics can show that we are different from not just personalities but also from appearances, facial traits, height, speeches, skin colors, etc. So, if Sartre says that life is nothing before we are born is not correct because even before we are born, we should have already known what kind of race we would become since if our parents were Chinese, or African, we would be a Chinese or an African although we haven't yet know if we would be boy or girl, and in fact, we would know our sex about five months before we were to be born; thus, our ancestors, our parents are the sources that can determine what kind of person we will become to a certain couple of parents under certain ancestors.


"It is up to us to give our life a meaning" does not mean that we alone can determine what we ought to be but it can determine what we should be. We can only decide what our lives should be not what our lives ought to be since we already carried out in our bodies our parents' genes and our ancestors' genes and what we would like to be is sometimes also what our parents liked to be in their lives or what our ancestors liked to be in their past lives. What we want us to be is sometimes hidden in the subconcious brain which have been affected unknowingly by our parents' genes or our ancestors' or our relatives' genes that we never knew existed if we did not know bibliographical facts obout them. Thus, the values that our parents, our relatives have for themselves can also affect our values that we sometimes are not aware of. Moreover, life has a priori meanings which were given to us by God, the creator as I already explained above.


Life has a priori meanings says that a Chinese artist is different from a French artist even both of them are modernists or impressionists because their artistic pieces may present their different views, a Chinese point of view and a Western point of view. All Muslim artists will have the same religious point of view although each of them creates his or her own artistic style. All Buddhist monks think in the same Buddhist religous principles that are not the same as Christian principles that all Christian priests think. Life has a priori meanings shows that there are some common points that some people in the same group can have despite their different personalities; for example, republican politicians and democratic politicians in the United States may have different points of view although they all serve one country. Another example of "life has a priori meanings" is that a ballet dancer whose parents are also ballet dancers could be a better dancer than a ballet dancer whose parents are not ballet dancers; besides, a person may never become a ballet dancer if his or her mother or father does not know how to dance or has a different job than that of dancing or may have a diferent job as a physician to cure sick people and does not have any idea about aesthetic values. Thus, when Sartre says "life has no meaning a priori", he seems to reject many values including familial values, conceptual values, biblical values and just want to rely on the values that a person wants to create for his or her own life after he or she is born. Sartre says:

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It meant that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on scene, and only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be... Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principles of existentialism." (Sartre, 15)

And,

Man is the start of a plan which is aware of itself... nothing exists prior to this plan; there is nothing in heaven, man will be what he will have planned to be. Not what he will want to be... But if existence really precedes essence, man is responsible for what he is... Subjectivity means, on the other hand, that an individual chooses and makes himself; and, on the other that it is impossible for man to transcend human subjectivity. (Sartre, 16)

Thus, we see that subjectivity is what an existentialist takes to be his or her guiding point to act forward. An existentialist always has to be a chooser who must follow what he has planned for what he wanted to be, and also is responsible for his or her own choice. Sartre says:

If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses... Man is the future of man. That's
exactly it. But if it is taken to mean that this future is recorded in heaven, that God sees it, then it is false, because it would really no longer be a future. If it is taken to mean that, whatever a man may be, there is a future to be forged, a virgin future before him, then this remark is sound. But then we are forlorn." (Sartre, 23-24)

Sartre then even gives us a story as an example of what he means by forlornness and choice, and the story is:

To give you an example which will enable you to understand forlornness better, I shall cite the case of one of my students who came to see me under the following circumstances: his father was on bad terms with his mother, and, moreover, was inclinced to be a collaborationist; his older brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940, and the young man, with somewhat immature but generous feelings, wanted to avenge him. His mother lived alone with him, very much upset by the half-treason of her husband and the death of her older son; the boy was her only consolation. The boy was faced with the choice of leaving for England and joining the Free French Forces--that is, leaving his mother behind-- or remaining with his mother and helping her to carry on. He was fully aware that the woman lived only for him and that his going off-- and perhaps his death-- would plunge her into despair. He was also aware that every act that he did for his mother's sake was a sure thing, whereas every effort he made toward going off and fighting was uncertain move which might run around and prove completely useless; for example, on his way to England he might, while passing through Spain, be detained indefinitely in a Spanish camp; he might reach England or Algiers and be stuck in an office at a desk job. As a result, he was faced with two very different kinds of action: one, concrete, immediate, but concerning only one individual; the other concerned an incomparably vaster group, a nationally collectivity, but for that very reason and dubious, and might be interrupted en route. And at the same time, he was wavering between two kinds of ethics. On the one hand, an ethics of sympathy, of personal devotion; on the other, a broader ethics, but one whose efficacy was more dubious. He had to choose between the two. Who could help him choose? Christian doctrine? No. Christian doctrine says, 'be charitable, love your neighbor, take the more rugged path, etc.' But which is the more rugged path? Whom should he love as a brother? The fighting man or his mother? Which does the greater good, the vague act of fighting in a group, or the concrete one of helping a particular human being to go on living? Who can decide a priori? Nobody. No book of ethics can tell him. The Kantian ethics says, 'Never treat any person as a means, but an end.' Very well, if I stay with my mother, I'm running the risk of treating the people around me who are fighting, I'll be treating them as an end, and, by doing that, I run the risk of treating my mother as a means... But if you seek advice from a priest; you already knew, more or less, just about what advice he was going to give you. In other words, choosing your adviser is involving yourself. The proof of this is that if you are a Christian, you will say, 'consult a priest.' But some priests are collaborating, some are just marking time, some are resisting. Which to choose? If the young man chooses a priest who is resisting or collaborating, he has already decided on the kind of advice he's going to get. Therefore, in coming to see me, he knew the answer I was going to give him, and I had only one answer to give: 'You're free, choose, that is, invent. (Sartre, 27-28)

So, we see that according to Sartre, since existence precedes essence, man is first forlorn and does not have any essence until he determines what he wants to be. Consequently, man has to choose for himself of what he wants him to be and of what his life has to be and in the story about what the boy should have chosen, i.e., to stay with his mother or to leave for the army? In this case, If I had been consulted by the boy, I would have advised him something different then Sartre's answer for Sartre gave the boy the freedom to choose. I would tell the boy that he should have chosen to stay with his mother since I had a different point of view than Sartre's point of view regarding ethic principles. Since Sartre believes that existence precedes essence, and that a man does not possess any essence before he is born, and that only after he has acquired experience or he has learned how to choose to be what he wanted to be then he would become somebody with some kind of essences; thus based on that view point, Sartre believes in individual freedom regarding one's life or future, he suggested that the boy was to be responsible for his own choice and his own life because he had a life to live and nobody would live for himself or be responsible for his life and his family, he should be free of his own choice and learn how to care for his own life. But I think if we need to give someone some guideline because he or she does not know what to do, then I would say staying with his mother is a better thing to do because before one can learn how to love many other people, one should know how to love one person first. The first principle is easy and also important since if one person cannot love even another person then how can he or she love more than one person or even love a whole group of people. It is obvious that if the boy choose to leave his mother, he may think about his own benefit for enlisting into the army as a career with a purpose to earn a salary or to get other things for himself and not to truly love his mother. I think there are still some basic understanding for every ethic principle that if we carefully think about it, we should know what to do in certain situation.

For Sartre, subjectivity is the main characteristic of an existentialist, and it is this subjectivity that gives him choices because no one can make him an object or tell him what to do: "Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself." Thus, because "life has no meaning a priori", an existentialist is forced by this guidline to choose for himself the meaning of his or her life, and Sartre even goes further than the principle of choice for he says:

In one sense, choice is possible, but what is not possible is not to choose. I can always choose, but I ought to know that if i do not choose, I am still choosing." (Sartre, 41)

That means that even when we do not choose, we already decide for ourselves by staying in whatever we are doing and do not wish to change it. For example, If I am living in one state and do not want to move to any other state even if I can do that for any reason, small or big, I still show that I do like and want to stay in the state I am in now. There are many reasons in one's life that could make one change to a new situation, but if one does not want to change, then it is obviously that he or she likes what he or she has or the situation he or she is in. To Sartre, choice and responsibility go side by side since when one chooses, one must understand why one is making that choice, and therefore, one will be responsible for that choice. But what then this freedom of choice will lead an existentialist to what point?

Now I think I should come back to the topic about Sartre's freedom and responsibility in his book by considering some of his other famous statements:

Besides, I can bring moral judgment to bear. When I declare that freedom in every concret circumstance can have no other aim than to want itself, if man has once become aware that in his forlornness he imposes values, he can no longer want but one thing, and that is freedom, as the basis of all values. (Sartre, 45)

And,

And in wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depend on ours. Of course, freedom as the definition of man does not depend on others, but as soon as there is involvement, I am obliged to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom. I can take freedom as my goal only if I take that of others as a goal as well. Consequently, when in all honesty, I've recognized that man is a being whom existence precedes essence, that he is a free being who, in various circumtances, can want only his freedom, I have at the same time recognized that I can want only the freedom of others. (Sartre, 46)

According to Sartre since there are no a priori values to guide a man, his is supposed to choose for himself the values which he will live in accord with; thus, there is real freedom and this freedom that Sartre calls "the basis of all values." If a man does not have any freedom at all, how can it happen that he can choose? If someone is restricting you or tells you what you can or cannot do then it is obvious that you cannot do certain things, and if the things that you want to do fall into the things that you are told not to do, then you cannot do those things; therefore, you do not have freedom to do what you are told not to do. Here we can see that being able to choose our own values is obviously freedom and it is even freer if there is no previous values to guide before one can choose; and for that, I wonder what kind of freedom I should call under Sartre's ideas, complete freedom? or absolute freedom? Let's read more Sartre's ideas about freedom:

Therefore in the name of this will for freedom, which freedom itself implies, I may pass judgment on those who seeek to hide from themselves the complete arbitrariness and the complete freedom of their existence. Those who hide their complete freedom from themselves out of a spirit of seriousness or by means of deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards; those who try to show that their existence was necessary, when it is the very contingency of man's appearance of earth, I shall call stinkers. But cowards or stinkers can be judged only from a strictly unbiased point of view. Therefore though the content of ethics is variable, a certain form of it is universal. Kant says that freedom desires both itself and the freedom of others. Granted. But he believes that the formal and the universal are enough to constitute an ethics. We, on the other hand, think that principles which are too abstract run aground in trying to decide action. Once again, take the case of the student. In the name of what great moral maxim do you think he could have decided, in perfect peace of mind, to abandon his mother or to stay with her? There is no way of judging. The content is always concrete and thereby unforseeable; there is always the element of invention. The one thing that counts is knowing whether the inventing
that has been done, has been done is the name of freedom. (Sartre, 47)

By the above paragraph, we see that Sartre is against Kant's universal ethics because in the story of the boy who did not know what he wanted to choose, staying with his mother or leaving her for the sake of the country faced with the problems of uncertainties in vague values such as Christian values which told him to love only his neighbor and to choose more general values than to love his poor mother who was in need of him, or Kant's universal ethics of duties, but what kind of duties in this case should the boy follow when both duties, a duty toward his mother and a duty toward the whole country seem to conflict to each other?

For Kant, it was clear that a moral action was one performed out of a sense of duty, rather than simply out of inclination or feeling or the possibility of some kind of gain for the person
performing it. So, for example, if I give money to charity because I have deep feelings of compassion for the needy, I am, in Kant's view, not necessarily acting morally: if I act purely from my feelings of compassion rather than from a sense of duty, then my action is not a moral one. (Warburton, 43)


Thus if the duty is important according to Kant, and quantity is more important than quality then the duty of the boy toward many people or the whole country is what the boy should choose, but what does duty really mean? Is it a demand of what people must do regardless of how people feel or think about what they should do? As I pointed out above that if one person does not even have love for one person then how can that person have love for many others? Duty without love or feelings is faking duty, or people do their duties because they are demanded to do so but not because they think they love to do that duty or like to do that duty for themselves. Thus, duty without feelings for duty is robotic duty, and this kind of duty will turn everyone into a robot that is controlled by some kind of mechanism, and it is therefore a mechanical duty. So, then the horse will return to their old path because it is used to that path if no one tells it what path to go. People will do things they like to do if no one forces them what to do, and so is duty an empty term without any meaning? Since people just do their duties out of an oblige but does not do it based on their true feelings and their true favor for it? Sartre recognizes this problem of duty in Kant's ethics is a remarkable recognition that not every philosopher could have recognized. Here, Sartre came up with a solution for the boy; i.e., to give him the freedom to choose for himself based on his own feelings in his jeopadized situation. Actually, because Sartre believes in his maxim that 'existence precedes essence', so one can freely choose essences that one wants to have. Not only individual freedom is important to an existentialist, Sartre also recognizes the freedom of others beside one's own freedom for he says, "I am oblige to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom." This means that if I like to do something that I choose to do then others can have the same freedom to do something else they choose to do. At this point, I would wonder about the possible conflict that can happen among different things that people want to do including the thing I want to do and the things others want to do. But it seems obvious that Sartre allows for these conflicts to happen because the freedom of others is not less important than my own freedom.

Finally, freedom of choosing is the end of Sartre's existential ethics although throughout his book, he aslo mentions about responsibility that goes side by side with choice. But will responsibility conflict with the choice that one makes? I have not seen the answers for these problems of conflict among individual freedom and between choice and responsibility in Sartre's book. In conclusion, there are vague definitions as well as vague explanations on important terms such as a priori values, subjectivity, freedom, choice and responsibility in Sartre's book although he did present well his points on some of these terms. And I think the most important idea that Sartre wants to bring out under existentialism is that no a priori value can determine what an existentialist want to take as his or her own values to guide his or her life with. An existentialist is first forlone or born without any essence and not until he or she has to decide what he or she has planned to do with his or her life.

References

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions, New Jersey: Carol Publishing Group Edition, 1999.

Warburton, Nigel. Philosophy: the Basics. 3rd Edition. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Universality and Particularity in Kant's Transcendental Idealism

Kant deems that time and space are the elements that depend on the mind; moreover, he says that some physical objects exist independently of the mind. Thus, there are differences between ideas and objects. Descartes and Lock are the philosophers who are enthusiastic about how to draw some references to one object from another. Kant took after Descartes' and Locks' ideas to think that appearances are the representations that the mind impacts on physical objects but not on the objects themselves. Thus, all the facts about space and time and the objects in this frame can be conceived only when they appear in front of the intellectual mind. Actually, Kant's transcendental idealism should be considered as empirical idealism because he has imposed a space and time which he calls an intuition method for which we can take a look at. By looking at this frame, we are using our sensible perceptions, and this makes his theory become an empirical theory.


Now if this intellectual mind is an individual then it will lead us to a denial that there is not a common time and space frame in any unified world. Kant's picture will give us a single object plus a number of many different individual minds in which they are similar to Leibniz's monads. If each object appears in front of an individual subject in a different event of a different space and time frame then what is the connection in which all individual minds have to one another? For some critics, they have a common connection in space since the space frame acts like the Cartesian coordinate system that can apply to all physical objects, but for me time is not a common frame since each individual mind live in a different time frame in the chronology of history. A person who lives in the modern era will have a different viewpoint than the viewpoint of a person who lives in the classical era. However, if we find that John Lock has a persuasive theory then we can sponsor his viewpoints about the main and the auxiliary qualities of material objects. It is not because that they have many characteristics that we cannot conceive except when we use the scientific tool to conceive but it is because of our own sensible agents that make them appear in front of us with different colors,different tastes and sounds which all of these object do not possess in their instrinsic nature. To call the whole physical world in term of transendental idealism we must talk about the mutual difference between the appearance of the things-in-themselves according to each empirical subject since each individual can make a difference. Any idea that is presented by each individual will be impacted with the label "empirical" which is a representation or a description or an activity of the subjects who are perceiving the physical objects and it is these activities that will produce a physical world in which those individuals exist.


When there is no sun's light our eyes will not perceive colors, so the objects that we see will be blocked with a black color although they have their own colors; the sun's light is a representation that makes our brain change and makes us have a distorted perception. A black color has two different qualities, one primary quality and one secondary quality, but in the above example, black color is a production that exists independent of the mind. A black color in the dark or in the light still has a black color while a green color in the dark will become black color and under the light will have a green color, and this is an example of the particularity of idealism. Black color has another different meaning; i.e., it is an empty set in which it does not contain anything including the sun's light; thus, empty space means black color and all physical objects that have black color are perceived the same as with black color by the mind. Thus, according to the mind, the empty space and the objects that have black color have one similar quality while the truth is that they have different qualities in each of them; and this is an example of the universality of idealism.


The third circumstance that can show the universality and particularity of Kant's space and time is that he says that taste and color are not the necessary conditions under which the objects themselves become our sensible object; they are connected with the forms as the effects accidentally added by the construction of our sensible agents. Thus, they are not a priori representations but they are only our basic senses. In another word, there is not any color or any space that can characterize what a subject can understand in its natural instinct. They characterize an object only when this object appears in front of a subject. However, space is a part of the form which must be imposed by a subject and so it can be understood as a priori knowledge. In contrast, color is a part of a sensible agent; thus, it is nothing but the material that is imposed by a subject and is an accident appearance in the construction of a subject that can be altered in different ways from one subject to another. Space and time are the general manner in which physcial objects can be appeared as having the same characteristics while color is the manner in which the objects appear as accidents. Kant accepts that all objects except human beings may not have sensible forms and so may not perceive as the objects in space; thus, if each individual among us has this sensible agent then it may be necessary that objects appear to each of us without space. In both cases, the necessity is that if a subject is an experience subject who has certain laws then everything will appear to him or her in the general manner that are applicable by those laws and each individual mind that imposes a space that is something that each mind can possess the same way then all the different minds will be similar to this are in which all our agreements about space will be a ridiculous fact as to the case in which all of us perceive colors in the same way. Kant obviously wants to say that an object of experience appears necessarily as having a space characteristic and does not appear necessarily as having a color characteristic.

Reason vs. Assertion

Reasoning is also known in another term as logic, and the first modern philosopher who gave praise very much to it is Descartes. He was the one who discovered his own existence by just reasoning; Descartes says, "I think therefore I exist." Another philosopher who gave a lot of credits for reasoning is Hegel with his famous dicussion in his big book, Science of Logic, Hegel believes in his absolute logic as the only method in searching for truth. He says, "the rational is the real, and the real is the rational." Did he overstated his compliment for logic? Should logic be given the highest honor in playing its role as an excellent instrument in science and philosophy?


First of all, do all human beings live according to their own reasoning? Is it always the case that you must give a sounding reason before you eat? Nobody has to reason for eating a breakfast or a lunch; we eat just because of a natural reason: hungriness. We eat because we are hungry, and hungriness is not a reason but a state or a mood that we are always in if we don not eat. Eating is not caused by a reasoning; it is a disposition or a condition, a sufficient condition. By saying that eating is a sufficient condition, I mean eating is sufficient in order to maintain our lives because if we don't eat we will die. Living and eating have the same meaning. Thus, when I say I eat because I am hungry, or I eat because I have to is not a reasoning even it can be put into a logical statement if-then or because-of statement. Assertion is a condition that falls into this case. When I say that I am going to eat my lunch in 15 minutes, I am making an assertion without reasoning. An assertion is sometime known as a demand; however, it can also be presented by a reasoning. An assertion is not necessarily a reasoning all the time; sometime, when we demand something, we want to achieve it without reasoning. Most of the times, we need reasons why we do this or why we do that, and this is when an assertion becomes a reasoning.


Reasoning, in contrast, is more than just a reason. As I already stated above in the introductory paragraph that Reasoning means logic, and logic is a formal instrument that is used in science, especially in mathematics. In the instroductory part of Hegel's Science of Logic, Hegel taks about his pre-suppositional ideas for logic. The reason why I use the term presupposition is because Hegel made good intellectual guesses by giving good evaluations when he was trying to introduce the Science of Logic to his readers. Before reading Hegel's book, I never had an idea that logic was the absolute tool to use to search for the truth. It was because I was not an excellent logician and because I lacked the knowledge to believe that logics was the best tool ever known. Talking about why I use the term presupposition, I mean I want to differentiate it with hypothesis. The term hypothesis is a mathematical term that is used especially in geometry to prove the trueness of a theorem. To come to a conclusion that this theorem is right, we need to prove it using two parts: a hypothesis and a conclusion. There must be several operational equations or tasks to be done to connect a hypothesis to a conclusion. The difference between a hypothesis and a presupposition is that in a hypothesis, we are given real facts, and facts that are known as information while what is given in a presupposition is just an intellect guess. We can presuppose about anything and almost about everything even we do not know for sure if what we suppose has ever really happened or not. For example, when a science-fiction writer writes a story about space-ship aliens, he or she presupposes that the universal aliens exist in such and such planet or in such and such galaxy without any true knowledge or any specific knowledge of whether those aliens really exist.


Back to Hegel's Introduction to Logic, Hegel has made good presuppositions before proving in the body part of his book that logics is a science and also the best way in searching for the truth. However, to believe in everything Hegel wrote about the truth of logics depends on how well the readers understand his viewpoints and every proof that he presented in his book. For myself, I know that there are people who would not believe in Hegel, especially the Christians, Since a lot of Christians believe in miracles, and since miracles are phenomena or events that cannot be explained scientifically or logically, the Christian would not think that the rational is the real. Miracles are events that are sometimes known as unreal or mystical; therefore, miracles are not rational events; for example, sometimes, science cannot explain why a blind person can see without taking any therapy or any medecine and we know that Jesus is the one who did a miracle so that a blind man could see, and this is an event that no science can explain it according to its scientific methods. Thus, we see that what Hegel says is not correct because the irrational in Jesus' case would be the real thing that happened in the history of the Bible. So, not everything that is real that would be rational as Hegel said. To conclude for the reason why I use the term presupposition to refer to Hegel's intellectual ideas bout his logics, the above explantion is perhaps an enough proof to give out as a reason.


But that is not all what I want to say in this discussion, even logic is not always true because of the above example, I do believe that logic is one of the best tools to use in searching for the truth. This is where I have to go back to what I mean by an assertion. If we achieve our assertions, we prove that our own reasoning is true. In geometry, theorems are the assertions that are always proved to be true. When a scientist or a mathematician asserts something, they will set out to prove it true by mathematical methods or by scientific experiments, Finally, do we always live according to mathematical reasoning or a sound argument? I will leave this question to the readers to answer because sometimes we do something just because our natural instincts require us to do and because of eating so that we can live is a natural way nobody needs a reason not to.

A Discussion of Hegel's Introduction to Logic

Hegel's Introduction to Logic is an interesting text, more interesting to discover about the so-called logic than the contents of Science of Logic itself. But perhaps he has over-evaluated logic. Is it true that as he put it in a statement that "But in the first place it is most inept to say that Logic abstracts from all content, that it teaches only the rules of Thinking without going into what is thought or being able to consider its nature. For since Thinking and the Rules of Thinking are the subject of Logic, Logic has directly in them its own peculiar content"?


First of all, Hegel acknowledges that there are two separate parts of knowledge: the rules of Thinking which is the Form of Knowledge and the Thinking which is the Content of Knowledge. It is also that this Content of Knowledge is known as material of knowledge but is rawer than the content itself because the material of knowledge has not yet become the Object of the Thinking or has not been connected with the subject by the means of the Form of Knowledge; in another word, Thinking is empty in itself towards the material of knowledge. Next, these two constituents then have a reciprocal relation and cognition is then constructed out of them in a best mechanical fashion called Logic, and unless these constituents are placed in a relation, thought is something incomplete and has to adapt itself to its raw material. Of course, Hegel's important statement in this part is that: "Truth is supposed to be the agreement of thought with its object, and in order to bring about this agreement (for this agreement is not there by itself) thinking must accommodate and adapt itself to its object." This is where he began his Logic with.


When thinking is connected with material, the material becomes Matter, or Object of Thought. However, in the Older Metaphysic world - Hegel's language - Thought in its relation to Object does not go out of itself into the Object, and the Object is a thing-in-inself that also remains as something beyond Thought. The Older Metaphysic which Hegel talks about refers to Platonic and Kantian systems of thoughs whereas "that alone is what is really true in them; that what is really true is not things in their immediacy, but only things when they have been taken up into the Form of Thought, as conceptions" are pointing towards Plato's ideas of abstract concepts or essence and the necessary conflict of the reflections is what Kant calls the antinomies in his Prolegomena. But above all is Hegel's acknowledgmetnt that the contradiction in those antinomies is necessary and "is the lifting of Reason above the limitations of Understanding, and the dissolution of these." And this is an interesting point where my opposing thought had to stop myself to think while reading him. But it was not very explosive until I have finished the next statements. In latter passages, Hegel who seems to forget what he just said opposes Kant's famous statement that "we can never understand things-in-themselves" with a serious voice. He writes:


Instead of starting from this point to make final
step upwards, knowledge recognizing the unsatisfactory
nature of the determinations of Understanding, flies
straight back to sensible existence, thinking to find
therein stability and unity. But on the other hand,
since this knowledge knows itself to be knowledge
only of appearances, its insufficiency is confessed,
yet at the same time it is supposed that things, as
though only the kinds of objects were different, the
other kind,namely things in themselves, did not fall
within knowledge, and the other kind, namely Appearances
did so fall.


He then concludes mockingly "It is as though accurate perception were attributed to a man, with the proviso that he yet could not perceive Truth but only untruth. Absurd as this could be, a true knowledge which did not know the object of knowledge as it is in itself, would be equally absurd." Here again, Hegel gives more credits to his Logic by thinking that things-in-themselves can become reasonably and order cognitive if they are to be related in a manner where they can be drawn together under one subject using logic. This is where my opposing point is going to the highest intense because it seems that Hegel has just contradicted himself with the previous thoughts that contradiction is a useful means to uplift Reason. When he fist said that contradiction was one of the instruments to help uncover an illogical link that may come up in a logic chain, right away, I thought that this point of view couldn't be wholly true for since this would mean nothing in the case of one subject that is considered in different perspectives where no perspective can make the arguments in relation to the subject become wholly logical. Moreover, in seeking for the correct answer, if there are 2 propositions that are both right or both wrong, then it is easier to approach a certain conclusion than one is right and the other is wrong. If the righ one that is actually the wrong one that is presupposed to be the right then the wrong one is always considered to be right, and if so we can never have a precise knowledge of which is truly right and which is truly wrong. The first presupposition is a wrong one or a right one is very dangerous; sometimes it's better that we don't presuppose anything wrong or right but just list out some seem-to-be-conflict propositions as Kant did for his antinomies, and then proceed to prove whether which one is more correct than the other.

Externalism and Internalism: Cognitive vs. Non-cognitive

Debates in morality usually involves many terms, aspects and views by different branches such as externalism and internalism, and one of the most important debates is about which one in these two branches that can show strongly whether it is cognitive or non-cognitive. Internalism has two main viewpoints: one is internalism of motive and the other is internalism of reason. In this essay, my thesis is not to show in details whether externalism or internalism is the one that is more cognitive than the other; rather, my thesis will be to show 2 main areas that can be used in considering for this debate that is related to reason and motive as its two main elements that are related to cognitivist and non-cognitivist views. The two main views are: (a) to consider a particular example of a moral judgment; and (b) to consider some different main aspects between cognitive internalism and non-cognitive internalism presented from other authors such as David Brink and Korsgaard, and to finally see how these two areas collaborate with each other in proving that they apply the same principle that reason is a better way to use to motivate action and therefore internalism that are based on reason as a motivation to conduce action is considered cognitivist internalism that opposes Dawal's comment that: "According to judgment internalism, nothing counts as a genuine normative or ethical thought or utterance unless it has the appropriate connection to motivation. Internalism of this sort has loomed large in twentieth-century arguments for ethical non-cognitivism." (Darwall, 9)

All matters involving morality are very sensitive and nature-inclined matters; by this, I mean that moral matters that are closed to our natural ways of living. For example, all societies seem to agree that human beings must live according to 'family values', and these values are marriage between a man and a woman, care of children, ect. All of these matters come from our natural ways of living as human beings. Thus, when there is a strange way of living arising such as the love between two people of the same sex, a homosexuality, it is immediately judged as 'homosexuality is immoral', and this is called the Fallwell's claim.

In the Elements of Moral Philosophy, James Rachels points out that there is no proof to prove that this judgment is true, or in contrast, the judgment is not reasonable or doesn't have any good arguments to protect it. Rather, to prove that this judgment is right is just to show that 'it is very unnatural to do homosexual actions because homosexuality is against natural values.' Rachels writes:

The case against homosexuality thus reduces to the familiar
claim that it is 'unnatural' or to the claim often made by
followers of Falwell that it is a threat to 'family values'. As
for the first argument, it is hard to know what to make of
it because the notion of 'unnaturalness' is so vague. What
exactly does it mean? (Rachels, 50)

He then gives out three meanings and uses three arguments to rationalize against that judgment as the following: (1) First, 'unnatural' might be taken as a statistical notion. In this sense, a human quality is unnatural if it is not shared by most people. Homosexual cound be unnatural in this sense but so would left-handedness. Clearly, this is no reason to judge it bad. On the contrary, rare qualities are often good. (2) Second, 'unnatural' might be connected with the idea of a thing's purpose. The parts of our bodies seem to serve particular purposes. The purpose of the eye is to see; the purpose of the heart is to pump blood. Similarly, the purpose of our genitals might be said to be procreation. Sex is for making babies. It may be argued that gay sex is unnatural because it is sexual activity that is divorced from its natural purpose. It rests on the assumption that it is wrong to use parts of one's body for anything other than their natural purposes, and this is surely false. The purpose of the eyes is to see; it is therefore wrong to use one's eyes for flirting or for giving signal? Or the purpose of the fingers may be grasping and poking; it is therefore wrong to snap one's fingers to keep time with music? The idea that it is wrong to use things for any purpose other than their 'natural' ones cannot reasonably be maintained, and so this version of argument fails. (3) Third, the word unnatural might be understood simply as a term of evaluation. Perhaps, it means something like "contrary to what a person ought to be". But if that is what 'unnatural' means, then to say that something is wrong because it is unnatural would be utterly vacuous. It would be like saying thus-and-so is wrong because it is wrong. This sort of empty remark provides no reason for condemning anything.

Thus, the judgment that homosexuality is wrong is not reasonable and has no practical facts to support for its correctness. Consequently, most of moral judgments are judgments against natural ways of living, and therefore to prove that they are correct, there are not many reasons that can be taken except that it is not natural to live that way, and surely this judgment is an empty judgment without any valuable concepts beside the value of a natural way of living. What I mean is that there is no such a system of concepts such as Aristotelian doctrine of moral wisdom, intellectual wisdom, virtues, the highest good, activities of the soul, ect. In another word, the moral obligations under Aristotelian doctrine are secured by reasoning, a set of conception values to protect their meanings, and Aristotelian doctrine is of course an internalist theory of morality because it concentrates on the agent's own desires to obtain the highest good as the motives to motivate him or her to perform moral acts.

Now, the next area is to consider important issues involving internalism and externalism as whether they contain non-cognitivism or cognitivism. In this area which contains the main arguments involving this debate, I will use the ideas presented in chapter 3 which has the title "Externalist Moral Realism" in David Brink's book, Moral Realism and the Foundation of Ethics, as important guiding issues to see whether why he thinks that internalism about motive which is non-cognitive expresses only mental states, and why he prefers moral realism to internalism; however, Brink's moral realism is just a branch that is rooted deeply from cognitivist internalism and cognitivist internalism borrows heavily on non-cognitive internalism's main views about motive and reason. Thus, Brink's view of moral realism can be compatible to the kind of cognitivist internalism's view which I mentioned in my above thesis.

Brink's chapter three starts with the classifications of different characteristics of internalism and their main views as well as externalism and its most important version moral realism. In addition to providing readers with sufficient information concerning his thesis, Brink also gives readers his own arguments and assessments of why he comes to certain conclusions regarding his favor for externalist moral realism. I will summarize his main points, and at the end state my own opinions about Brink's thesis as well as my own thesis as to why I want to use the layout as presented in the above introduction of this discussion.

There is a distinction between internalism about motives and internalism about reasons. The internalist is responsible for a moral action that is affected by the will, so if one recognizes a moral consideration that comes from his/her passions and at the same time not motivated to act accordingly is unconceivable, and this is the view of motive internalism. It can easily explain the authority of moral consideration which is one's moral commitment that are attached to one's own interests and desires. The internalist of this kind claims that moral belief and moral judgment provide with motivation for action and is known as appraiser internalism. Hybrid internalism claims that it is a conceptual truth about morality that the recognition of a moral obligation provides the agent with reason for action. And finally, agent internalism is more objective in the sense that it links reason as motivation for action that is independent of anyone's recognition of these obligations.

Internalism has three distinguishable components. The first claim is that moral considerations provide reason for action. The second claim is that it is a necessary that moral considerations must provide motivation for action. And the third claim is that since it is the concept of morality that determines the rationality, the motivational power cannot come from other things such as the content of morality, facts about agents, except the agent's own desires and interests. Externalism denies all these three claims of internalism and establishes their three claims that moral considerations only contingently motivate or justify; the rationality of morality can be known as a posteriori; and whether the rationality of morality is necessary or contingent depends on things other than the concept of morality.

Externalism seems unable to account for the motivational aspects of morality and for the authority of moral considerations; by contrast, internalism seems to account for the effect that morality has on the will and seems to account for the authority of moral considerations. However, if we must recognize the practical characters of morality of which moral realism is the representative then moral realism is incompatible with internalism; otherwise, it is compatible with internalism. In particular, the moral realism must claim it is a conceptual truth about morality that moral considerations provide reasons for action. According to this view, it must be inconceivable that someone could recognize a moral fact and remain unmoved or fail to reason to act, and on this view, realism combined with internalism. This view is also considered as the amoralist view.

Despite this view, internalism is a premise for many arguments for non-cognitivism because some claims that no general set of facts or cognitive states can necessitate any motivational attitude that people take their moral obligations to follow. Internalism exploits morality because it claims that moral obligations are what everyone has desires to act with; however, others don't have desires to act according to moral obligations. Moral beliefs cannot impose those actions that people have no moral obligations to follow, or moral beliefs cannot create moral obligations that one doesn't have desires to do them because it is not practical to do so. Since there are some people who don't have any moral considerations, the view of internalism that moral obligations motivate actions depends only on those who are motivated by moral considerations is the weakest view of internalism. These are the reasons to reject internalism about motives as the right idea about the connection between morality and motivation.

Moreover, the internalist cannot forcibly hold the extension claim that everyone is motivated by moral considerations because even it is a conceptual truth about morality that recognition of moral considerations motivates, we still ask if such a motivation is justified. Now, internalism defends his position by distinguishing between strong and weak amoralisms. Weak amoralism asserts that agents don't have sufficient reason to be moral while strong amoralism asserts that agents don't have any reason to be moral at all. Since internalism is weak internalism, the internalist who claim internalism about motives could rule out the strong amoralist and so need not to disapprove the weak amoralist. Thus, there are reasons for rejecting internalism about motives as the correct account of the connection between morality and motivation for internalism overstates the connection between morality and motivation, and internalism prevents us from recognizing the amoralist.

Externalism provides more plausible account of the connection between morality and motivation; it makes the motivational force or moral considerations a matter of contingent psychological fact, depending of the beliefs and desires agents happen to have. First because it doesn't make the motivational force of moral obligations a conceptual feature of morality; this means externalism doesn't hold that moral obligations must possess people's actual desires. Second, externalism makes the motivational force of moral judgments and belief a matter of psychological fact, depending on both the contents of people's moral views and their attitudes and desires. Finally, externalism allows us to take amoralism case seriously because it doesn't try to find the motivation force within moral considerations themselves; it thinks that we can imagine someone who recognizes moral considerations and remain unmotivated.

The following paragraphs are more particular considerations about the connection between morality about motive and about reasons. Before making conclusions about how reasonable internalism is, Brink creates five propositions that are the below:

(1) To be under a moral obligation to do x, one must have reason to do x.

(2) One has reason to do x just in case x would contribute to the satisfaction of one's desires.

(3) Hence, one can have a moral obligation to do x only if doing x would contribute to the satisfaction of one's desires.

(4) Not everyone has the same desires.

(5) Hence, there is no single set of moral requirements that applies to everyone, there will be different moral requirements that apply to different people in virtue of their different motivational sets.

To evaluate these propositions, Brink wants us to consider Kant's two themes which are (a) moral requirements apply to agents independently of their contingent and variable desires; (b)the rationality of moral considerations is independent of agent's contingent and variable desires. Proposition (3) follows from (1) and (2) and denies Kant's first theme and asserts that moral requirements must be relative to the agent's desires or motivational set which is known as moral relativism. If everyone were to share all the relevant desires, then there could be a single true morality. If moral relativism is a denial of a single true morality that applies to everyone, then the argument for moral relativism must establish (5) not just (3), but (3) is sufficient to establish moral relativism. Since we know that moral realism considers other characters of morality against one's own desires and interests, (3) is against realism. Moreover, the interest in the debate between moral realism and moral relativism often depends on thinking of the realist as embracing and of the relativist as denying the existence of a single true morality that applies to all moral agents. We have examined that (3) is weaker than (5), but with a closer look, (5) doesn't in fact follow from (3) and (4). In particular, even if there are some descriptions of an action under which an agent does not desire to perform it, there may be other descriptions of an action that show the action to satisfy desires the agent has. For example, I may not desire to forgo my Sunday afternoon nap in order to help you proofread your paper, but it may nonetheless be true that proofreading your paper would contribute to the satisfaction of desires that you like me. So, this fact that people have different desires establish that there may be a set of moral requirements whose fulfillment would satisfy at least one desire of every agent. (1) doesn't make a strong claim that moral obligations provide sufficient reason for action; it makes only the weaker claim that moral obligations provide some reason for action. However, (1) depends upon the assumptions about the connection between morality and rationality in (1) and about the nature of rationality in (2). Premise (1) can be defended by an appeal about reasons, and this form of internalism claims that it is a conceptual truth about morality that moral considerations provide agents with reason for action. But no one thinks that merely believing or judging that one has a moral obligation to do x gives one reason to do x; one's moral belief or judgment may be wrong or in some way unwarranted. Although in favor of moral realism, many times in Chapter 3, Brink still gives trustworthy credits to internalism such as in the following paragraph:

The more plausible we find the claim that an agent's reasons for action depend on his desires, the more plausible we should find that claim that moral obligations do not always provides reasons for action. I think (2) is implausible view about the nature of individual rationality. But if we were to accept it, the independence of duty and inclination should lead us to deny that moral requirements are rational for everyone to follow in all circumtances. This would requires us to reject second Kantian theme, but not the first: Moral requirements would still apply to agents independently of their contingent and variable desires, even if they would not provide agents with reasons for action independently of their desires. Thus, we could still charge people who violate their moral obligations with immorality, even if we could not always charge them with irrationality. (Brink, 75)

And that means that acting immorality is not irrational but considerable because sometimes, one still can recognize a moral consideration but unable to be motivated by it because it is against one's own interests.

In the rest of the chapter, Brink gives out two more important considerations; that is the concepts of a counterfactual desire-satisfaction theory, the objective theories, and the assumption that sacrifice requires compensation (SRC). Counterfactual desire-satisfaction is a theory against the actual desire-satifaction theory which is nothing strange but a term to refer to an agent's desires. A desire-satisfaction theory claims that value is a form of subjectivism, because it makes the value of things depend on whether people happen to desire those things. A counterfactual desire-satisfaction theory claims that what is valuable is what would satisfy the desires one would have if one to occupy some preferred epistemic state. Objective theories claim that what is valuable is neither consists nor depends upon anyone's psychological states, and most will claim that the main constituents of value are things that contribute to a valuable life. A theory of value is purely objective if it contains only objective components. Consequently, according to Brink, reasons that are not based on one's own desires and interests and that can apply Kantian first and second themes are valuable reasons because they are justified, prudential and objective reasons.

And if so, then people have and act on all sort of reasons, and there are many different kinds of behavioral norms which, if adopted, would supply an agent with valuable and explanatory reasons for action. Therefore, these theories of rationality lead to a question that whether all good or justified reasons for action are agent relative, and this agent relative theory assumes that sacrifice requires compensation (SRC); that is, an agent has reason to make sacrifice to benefit another if and only if the agent receives some benefit in return. Is SRC plausible? SRC implies that if I am to have reason to benefit you, then I must benefit from your benefit -- an idea drawn from Hobbes' idea. Or I can have reason to do something that will satisfy your desires because doing so will also satisfy my desires as a matter of a contingent psychological fact. SRC also has different implications about the scope of justified sacrifice on different evaluative assumptions such as a variety of social or other regarding components in a person's good, family relations, friendships, and social relations involving mutual concern and respect that make our lives more valuable than just the satisfaction of our own interests and desires. Thus, Brink concludes that SRC is good, and on such views, the good of others is part of our good, and so we will benefit directly and necessarily by benefiting them. However, as usual, and in some explanatory intervals, Brink reminds us about the important role of the internalist and that it is hard to reject the internalist because there are always problems existing in rejecting internalism:

Perhaps the non-cognitivist will tell us that we can invite others to share our attitudes or prescribe courses of action without believing those attitudes or courses of action are objectively valuable so long as we share enogh closely related attitudes and preferences with our audience. But this reply not only leaves our attitudes unexplained; it makes our moral practices look too much like the practices of some exclusive club. The fact is that we address our moral judgments to audiences whose psychology we are not familiar with or whom we fear hold preferences and attitudes different from our own. (Brink, 79)

Korsgaard also is another author who favors internalism and therefore defends for cognitivist internalism in Chapter 11: "Skepticism about Practical Reason" of her book, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, by using Kant's view to oppose Hume's view that "reason by itself cannot provide any motivation for any action." The following paragraph will say why internalism is not always a non-cognitive view and that Kantian law of pure reason is a better way that can apply to motivate action.

According to Korsgaard, practical reason is not understood as pure reason but understood as a reason to motivate us to act. Since practical reasons involve also reasons from one's own interests that are most urgent and essential in motivating a person to act, there are doubts about the scope of reason as called motivational skepticicism of whether formal principles or pure reasons can have any contents and can give substantive guidance to action. One of the most important things that Korsgaard makes is involved in the theory of means/end reasons that draws on an apparent motivational source, and according to her, being motivated by the consideration that an action is a means to an end demands that the motive force attached to the end must be transmitted to the means in order for this to be a consideration that motivates a human body; otherwise means/end reasoning will not meet the internalism requirement. Like Brink's idea about the irrationality of the amoralist challenge, Korsgaard's use of means/end rationality allows for at least one form of true irrationality that is the failure to be motivated by the consideration that action is the means to an end. Kant in the Groundwork imagines such a human being in such a condition of being able to reason theoretically but not practically. The necessity of rational considerations lies in those considerations themselves, not in us, so we will not necessarily be motivated by them but we can act in comply with their suggestions. We are human beings capable of doing rationality but we don't necessarily have it as a desired condition inside us. We can exploit means/end reasoning to apply a deliberative process that doesn't belong to a subjective motivational set but does belong to an objective motivational set. And at this point, Korsgaard's idea is compatible with or has similar traits to Brink's objective theories. Thus, theoretical or pure reason must be capable of convincing us and at the same time capable of motivating us to act in order to satisfy the internalism requirement. Kant is the philosopher who thinks that human beings are imperfectly rational, and like Aristotle, he wants to use education or formal principles to teach human beings to listen to reason. Since theoretical argument or reason is a deliberative process, to have the motivational aspect, it must be capable of convincing us to act in accordance with its guidance. If we say that we come to accept the principle through reasoning then there are grounds for saying that all rational persons could be brought by this principle to understand that they have reason to act, and this what internalism requires. Korsgaard then gives out an example of an agent who wants to consider a certain principle as a guidance to live by it will wonder if it will violate her own interests. If she thinks that it is better to act on such a principle then she may approve it and proceed to be motivated by it. Thus, the internalism requirement based on reason is correct, and it doesn't exclude utilitarianism or intuitionism which are considered to rather incline towards externalism. The force of the inernalism requirement is that it doesn't refute ethical theories but it wants to make a psychological demand on them.

In summary, Brink and Korsgaard, both don't deny that internalism's views are totally implausible because the internalists are the ones who have the most practical characteristic in the connection between moral consideration and its motivation for action, and even the moral realists, they cannot hold their assertions against internalism in all aspects; there are areas where the internalist become more plausible than the realist, and there are areas in which the moralist is more plausible than the internalist. But Brink thinks that non-cognitive internalism that demands our attitudes or mental states to have effects on motivational morality cannot have normative or a valuable ethical theory because it doesn't have any objective value since we cannot invite others to share our own attitudes if we cannot hold that these attitudes are correct or valuable. And Korsgaard thinks that internalism about reason is better than internalism about motive since internalism about reason contains more cognitive views and is based on pure reasons or general principles that can guide every rational person to acknowledge and to be otivated by them.

In conclusion, the example of a moral judgment that defends homosexuality is an example of a judgment that uses reasoning and valuable objective arguments against the natural ways of living that can fall into the self-interest or desire case of non-cognitivist internalism because every human being on this earth is inclined towards natural ways of living, and he or she will more likely to have natural ways of living as his or her own desires and will be motivated by them as moral guides. People can exploit or abuse their desires if they are approved by non-cognitivist internalism that it is a conceptual truth that moral considerations based on desires provides agents with reason for action, and the results of this exploitations may lead to social crimes, sexual violence, incest which become the cases that in turn oppose family values. Thus, unless natural ways of living are proved to have objective values, they are still considered as basic human desires existed inside each person and can become considerations that belong to a subjective motivational set but not an objective motivational set.

The particular case of moral judgments in favor of homosexuality are based on the reasons that are drawn from facts to oppose the natural concepts of vague family values that are laid out by some people, and it shows that it considers different moral requirements that can be applied to different people rather than just a set of particular people. Thus, reasoning, values, and objective ends play important roles in providing motivations for morality, and better moral judgments come from considering different moral requirements that can apply to different people who have different interests or desires. And this particular case of homosexuality uses reasoning, objective values but not internal interests or internal desires as shown with the common sexual desires that are used as the natural ways of living related to "family values" to extablish it own set of reasons why homosexuality should not be considered as immoral. The internalist is cognitive in one way what it rests on reasoning to provide motivations for moral actions, but it is non-cognitive when it does consider only one agent's interests or desires as the motivations for moral actions.

Referenceces

Brink, David. Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Dore, Clement. Moral Skepticism. McMillan Academic and Professional LTD, 1991.

Korsgaard, Christine M. "Chapter 11: Skepticism about Practical Reason". Creating the kingdom of Ends. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 311-332.

Rachels, James. The Elements of Moral Philosophy. 3rd ed. The McGraw-Hill Companies, 1999.

Dawall, Stephen. "Chapter 3: Externalist Moral Realism." The British Moralist and the Internal "Ought". Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Williams, Bernard. Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Harper & Row Publishers, 1972.

Korsgaard's Skepticism about Practical Reason

Korsgaard is one of the critics who favors very much internalism and in her article "Skepticism About Practical Reason", she gives readers many valuable ideas and definitions about what a practical reason is and how it should be applied as one of the most important ethical principles that guide human actions. In this article, Korsgaard mentions many philosophers such as Hume, Kant, Nagel and Williams as the ones whose ideas are related to practical reason that are close to her topic; however, Hume and Kant are the two traditional philosophers who get more of her attention than others. Essentially, her main ideas revolve around the doubt of how strong human action can be directed by reason and desire as well as the doubt about the scope of reason as a motive for human action which she calls motivation skepticism. In short, she tries to argue that motivational skepticism must not always be based on content skepticism. The below paragraphs will discuss about how successful Korsgaard's job is in presenting her arguments.


First of all, Korsgaard says that skepticism about practical reason involves Hume's ideas about the relationship between reason and desires and that Hume uses desire as means to get reason obey it without telling whether a desire is rational or irrational. In another word, to say that a desire is rational or irrational is a non-sense, but our standard rules that come from reason is effective in choosing the means to our ends. However, there is a limitation of practical reason in playing its role in choosing a means; that is it prevents reason from determining the ends and from ranking them. Self-interests that make us like the greatest good are not necessarily to be a stronger desire or a stronger reason than the desire of a smaller good or any particular good; thus, reason by itself doesn't classify or select our ends.


Korsgaard says that Hume has proved against the modern philosophers who assert that we must regulate our conducts by reason by the following arguments: (a) reason by itself cannot provide any motivation for any action; and (b) reason never oppose passion in the direction of the will. Since all reasons either concern the abstract connection of ideas or the connections of cause that we learn from experience and since the abstract connection of ideas are mathematical subjects no one supposes that they give rises to any motives. And we are moved by the perception of the causal connection only if there is a motive that exists previously in a case of event. The argument that reason cannot oppose a passion in the direction of the will depends on the argument that reason by itself cannot give rise to a motive, and only if reason leads us to a motivation that opposes a passion then it can oppose a passion. What Hume means is the possible content of principles of reason that carry out action and the scope of its motivational force, and the answers for these matters are what Korsgaard wants to provide.


The reason why an action is right and the motivation that we have for doing an action are two different things, but this falls out of the position of an internalist who asserts that the reason why an action is right is the reason that motivates us to act and is called practical reason. Nagel gives out an example of this idea by using Hobbes' theory that the reason for an appropriate action and the motivation to do it belong to our interests, but the institutionists don't believe in practical reason because human beings can be moved by a special psychological mechanism: a belief that the conclusion of sound arguments are true. Kant is one of the institutionists whose position is in the question that whether he is an internalist or an externalist. Falk asserts that the difference between internalism and externalism as one of whether the moral command arises from a source outside the agent or from within. If the difference is described in this way then Kant's attempt to derive morality from autonomy makes him a paradigmatic internalist. On the other hand, Kant's view that moral commands are indifferent to our desires and interests that it is categorical makes him a paradigmatic externalist. Since Kant takes the classified characteristic of autonomy and the imperative to be necessarily connected, Korsgaard also wants to take his view into consideration for her arguments.



Bernard Williams is also an internalist who argues that there are two kinds of reason claims: an internal claim and an external claim also asserts that only internal reasons really exist by giving an example that a person has a reason to do action A is a person who has a motive to do A, and this claim is of an internal claim. He points out that an external-reason claim does not imply the existence of a motive, and it cannot be used to explain anyone's action: that is, we cannot say that the person P did the action A because of reason R for R does not provide P with a motive for doing A, and the motive for doing A comes from inside P but not from a reason created by outside forces. Nagel's argument is also the same as William's argument about the agent's perspective that unless reasons are motives, they cannot explain actions, and unless reasons are motives, we cannot be said to be practically rational.


Practical reason claims that if they are really to present us with reasons for action, then they must be capable of motivating rational person, and Korsgaard call this the internalist requirement. Reason is the faculty that judges of truth and falsehood, and it can judge our ideas to be true or false; however, passion is an original existence not a copy of anything: it cannot be true or false and therefore it cannot be reasonable or unreasonable. Passion can be unreasonable by Hume in two cases: one is when passion is founded on the supposition of the existence of objects that don't exist; and the other is when in exerting any passion in action, we choose insufficient means for the designed end and deceive ourselves in our judgment of cause and effects. There is no case in the two cases that Hume considers is a true irrational case: relative to their beliefs, people never act irrationally. However, Korsgaard says that there is something else one might mean in the second case which is that knowing the truth about the relevant causal relations, we might choose insufficient means to our end and fail to choose sufficient and available means to the end, and she calls that a true irrationality. Hume indeed says this:


.... the moment we perceive the falsehood of any supposition, or
the insufficient of any means, our passions yield to our reason
without any opposition.


But it looks as if a theory of means/end rationality ought to allow for at least one form of true irrationality, namely, failure to be motivated by the consideration that the action is the means to an end. It is possible to imagine a sort of being who could engage in causal reasoning could engage in reasoning that would point out the means to the ends, but who was not motivated by it. Kant, in a passage early in the Groundwork, imagines a human being in just such as condition of being able to reason theoretically but not practically. He is talking about what the world would have been like if nature had had our happiness as her end, but in fact nature didn't have our happiness as our ends in all situations. Kant says that:


... if, over and above this, reason should have been grated to
the favored creature, it would have served only to let it
contemplate the happy constitution of ist nature.


The favored creature is portrayed as able to see that his actions are rational in the sense that they promote the means to his end of happiness; but he is not motivated by their reasonableness; he acts from his inctinct. Reason allows him to admire the rational appropriateness of what he does, but this is not what gets him to do it -- he has the sort of attitude toward all his behavior that we in fact might have towards the involuntary well-functioning of our bodies. The motive force attached to the end must be transmitted to the means in order for this to be a consideration that sets the human body in motion. A practically rational person is not merely capable of performing certain rational mental operations, but capable also of transmitting motive force along the paths laid out by those operations. Otherwise even means/end reasoning will not meet the internalism requirement.


But the internalism requirement does not imply that nothing can interfere with this motivational transmission. There seems to be plenty of things that could interfere with the motivational influence of a given rational consideration: rage, depression, distraction, physical and mental illnesses, and all of these things could cause us to act irrationally; that is, to fail to be motivationally responsive to the rational considerations available to us. The necessity of rational considerations lies in those considerations themselves, not in us: that is, we will not necessarily be motivated by them. Rather, their necessity may lie in the fact that, when they do move us, they move us with the force of necessity. But it will not be the case that they necessarily move us. So a person may be irrational, not merely by failing to observe rational connections but also by being "willfully" blind to them, or even by being indifferent to them when they are pointed out. In this respect, practical reason is no different from theoretical reason. Many things might cause us to fail to be convinced by a good argument. For Korsgaard, to be a theoretically rational person is not merely to be capable of performing logical and inductive propositions, but to be appropriately convinced by them: the conviction in the premises must carry through to a conviction in the conclusion:


Thus, the internalism requirement for theoretical reasons is that
they be capable of convincing us insofar as we are rational. In
order for a theoretical argument to have the status or reason, it
must of course be capable of motivating or convincing a rational
person, but it does not follow that it must AT ALL TIMES be
capable of motivating or convincing any given individual. Many
things can interfere with the functioning of the rational operations
in a human body; thus there is no reason to deny that human beings
might be practically irrational in the sense that Hume considers might
be practically irrational: that, even with the truth of our disposal, we
might from one cause or another to be interested in the means to
our ends. (Korsgaard, 321)


Her speculation is that skepticism about practical reason is sometimes based on a false impression of what the internalism requirement requires. It does not require that rational considerations always suceed in motivating us. All it requires is that rational considerations succeed in motivating us insofar as we are rational. And this means that theoretical reasons and practical reasons are equal only when we have a reason inside us that motivates us to do what theoretical reasons require us to do. One can admit the possibility of true irrationality and yet still believe that all practical reasoning is instrumental. But once this kind or irrationality is allowed in the means/end case, some of the grounds for skepticism about more ambitious forms of practical reasoning will seem less compelling, and the case of prudence or self-interest will show what Korsgaard wants to present to us. And an important matter in Korsgaard discussion in her thesis is the similarity between Kant's ideas and Hume's ideas in theoretical reasoning. she says that Hume thinks that there is a "general appetite to good, and aversion to evil" and that a person will act prudently insofar as this calm and general passion remains dominant over particular passions. It is under the influence of this end that we weigh one possible satisfaction against another, trying to determine which conduces to our greater good for Hume says it is not contrary to reason to prefer an acknowledged lesser good to a greater one. In the case where a person chooses a lesser good, what the argument in favor of prudence would vary from theory to theory; here, the point is this: there is no doubt whether preferring a greater good is rational because someone may fail to be motivated by thinking that something will serve her greater, preferring a greater good may be irrational. Not everything that drives us to conclusion is a theory, and not everything that drives us to action need to be a desired end. Rationality is a condition that human beings are capable of, but it is not a condition that we are always in. Thus, Aristotle and Kant are the two who most concerned with the methods of education. Human beings must be taught to listen to reason because Kant says that we are imperfectly rational.


The fact that a practical reason must be capable of motivating us might still seem to put a limitation on the scope of practical reason: it might be thought that it is a subjective matter which considerations can motivate a given individual and that, therefore, all judgments of practical reason must be conditional in form. In Hume's argument, this kind of limitation is captured in the claim that motivation must originated in a passion. In the means/end case, we are able to be motivated by the consideration that action A will promote purpose P because we have a pre-existing motivational impulse, a passion, attached to purpose P. This does not limit practical reason to the means/end variety, but it might seem to impose a limitation of this sort: practical-reason claims must be reached by something that is recognized as a rational deliberative process from interests and motives one already has. Internal reasons are reasons reached by deliberation from the subjective motivational set: they can motivate us because of their connection to that set. Means/end deliberation, where the end is in the set and the means are what we arrive at by the motivating deliberation, is the most characteristic source of reasons for action. Anything reached by a process of deliberation from the subjective motivational set may be something for which there is an internal reason, one that can motivate. Williams, by contrast, points out that external reasons exist regardless of what is in one's subjective motivational set, and that there must be some rational process, not springing from the subjective motivational set and therefore not relative to it, which could bring us to acknowledge something to be a reason and at the same time to be motivated by it. Reason must be able to produce an entirely new motive, the thing that Hume said could not be done.


Thus, Williams takes a piece of practical reasoning must start from something that is capable of motivating us and drops the only kind of reasoning is means/end. If one accepts the internalism requirement, it follows that pure practical reason will exist if and only if we are capable of being motivated by the conclusions of the operations of pure practical reason as such. Williams seems to think that this is a reason for doubting whether pure practical reasons exist: if we can be motivated by considerations stemming from pure practical reason, then that capacity belongs to the subjective motivational set of every rational being. However, one cannot argue that the subjective motivational set contains only ends or desires; for that would be true only if all reasoning were the means/end variety. Nor can one assume that the subjective motivational set consists only of individual elements; for that is to close off without argument the possibility that reason could yield conclusions that every rational being must acknowledge and be capable of being motivated by. Korsgaard then gives out an example that we consider the case of an agent who after being raised to live by a certain principle, comes to question it. Some doubt or argument has made her consider eliminating the principle from her subjective motivational set. Now what will she think? The principle does not admit of an ultimate justification, so she will not find that, but this doesn't necessarily mean that she will reject the principle. She may find that she thinks that people should have and act on such a principle that is in some rough way a good idea, and so she may retain it and even proceed to educate those under her influence to adopt it. More to the point, what this kind of case shows is that for Williams as for Hume, the motivational skepticism depends on what Korsgaard calls the "content skepticism". Williams doesn't think that there are unconditional principles of reason that can apply to action that could not be motivated by them; he only thinks that there are none.


From considerations concerning the necessity that reasons be internal and capable of motivating us which are almost identical to Williams', Nagel argues that investigations into practical reason will yield discoveries about our motivational capacities. He thinks that if we then are able to show the existence of reasons, we will have shown something capable of motivating us. As Nagel points out, this approach also characterizes the moral philosophy of Kant. By the end of the Second Section of the Groundwork, Kant has done what he set out to do: he has shown us what sort of demand pure reason would make on action. Working from the ideas that reason is general must be universal, that reason seeks the unconditioned, and that its binding force must derive from autonomy, has shown us what a law of pure reason that could applied to action would look like. However, until it has been shown that we can be motivated to act according to the categorical imperative, it has not been completely shown that the categorical imperative really exists-- that there really is a law of pure practical reason. Kant does try to argue that we can be motivated by the categorical imperative appealing to the pure spnontaneity of reason as evidence for our intelligible nature and so for an autonomous will. Korsgaard says:


In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant turns his strategy around.
He argues that we know that we are capable of being motivated by
the categorical imperative and therefore that we know in a practical
sense that we have an autonomous will. Again, explorations into
practical reason reveal our nature. It is important; however, that
although in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant does not try to
argue that pure reason can be motivated, he has detailed things to
say about how it can be motive -- about how it function as an incentive
in combating other incentives. (Korsgaard, 330)


At the end of the essay, Korsgaard says that what she has attempted to show is that motivational considerations do not provide any reason for skepticism about practical reason. If a philosopher can show us that something that can be recognized as a law of reason, there is no special reason to doubt the human beings might be motivated by that consideration. However, she also realizes that the idea that an acknowledged reason can never fail to motivate is a strange idea and that it is based on some sort of misunderstanding, but she has also suggested that a misunderstanding of the internalism requirement is a possible account. The correct response is that if someone discovers what are recognizably reasons that can affect conduct, and those reasons fail to motivate him, then that only shows the limits of our rationality. Kant maintained that, if we thought about it, we would see that we are not immune to the laws of pure practical reason: that we know we can do what we ought. But there is no guarantee of this; for our knowledge or our motives is limited. The conclusion is that, if we are rational, we will act as the categorical imperative directs, but we are not necessarily rational. Thus, if there is a motivational skepticism about practical reason then it must depends on skepticism about the possible content of rational requirements as to whether this content could become a motivation that moves our inner desire to act.


In summary, I think although Korsgaard acknowledges that Kant's view about practical reasons as universal laws of reason can provide additional features that Hume's views do not have, Korsgaards still thinks that Kant hasn't shown that his categorical imperative really exists, and the most important point of all is that Kant didn't try to argue that pure reason could motivate people and that all he tried to prove was that how it functioned as an incentive in combating with other incentives. Finally, I think Korsgaard is reasonably successful in answering Hume on kant's behalf.






Rerferences


Korsgaard, Christine M. "Ch. 11: Skepticism about Practical Reason". Creating the kingdom of Ends. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 311-332.