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How does the causality of freedom affect the subject? This question concerns the alterity of the law and the subject's relationship with it. Kant refers to the law's impact on subjectivity in terms of respect (Achtung), a singular feeling originating not in sensibility but in practical reason. Respect produces a positive affect that furthers the law, but also a negative one whereby the law appears to consciousness as a threatening command. This chapter analyzes the positive and negative senses of respect in relation with two different conceptions of ethics that coexist in the Critique of Practical Reason, an immanent one defined by unconditionality (Analytic) and a transcendent one that privileges finality (Dialectic). Since, as this chapter shows, the discrepancies between these two conceptions parallel those between the third and the fourth antinomy of pure reason, it proposes to turn to the third antinomy for insight into an immanent ethical subjectivity.

This chapter explores Immanuel Kant's own systematic account of the critical project. It also demonstrates how Kant locates the implicit metacritical dimension of the critical project within a transcendental account of human culture. Kant understands that the deduction of freedom in the Groundwork is inadequate, thus precipitating the revision of the Critique of Pure Reason and the writing of the Critique of Practical Reason. There is one fundamental distinction in the Critique of Pure Reason, concerning thought and intuition. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant describes the ends of reason as interests of reason. The problems that have been determined in the account of the self-critique of reason can be decreased to equivocity of reason and unity of reason. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's ‘metaphysical empiricism’ involves acts of ‘psychic repetition’. It is noted that human history is to be examined from the perspective of the concept of ‘repetition’.

If freedom can manifest itself in the world, it is only insofar as freedom is the excess that constitutes subjectivity. From a practical perspective, that freedom is actual means it motivates the subject to act. Freedom manifests itself as a power to obligate that affects the faculty of desire through the moral law: we find ourselves responding to something without knowing to what. In the Critique of Practical Reason, being free means having freedom act in and through oneself, that is, being animated by a causality one does not understand. This chapter envisions the law as that which in the subject exceeds and addresses the subject as something other. It explores how the subject gives the law its power as cause by making of it the element that initiates and motivates the causality of freedom in oneself. Autonomy, it proposes, consists in offering oneself as origin of what has no origin.

The essay is divided into three parts. The first provides a brief account of what Kant understands by a practical justification and the various types of such justification found in his writings. The second examines the different ways in which Kant attempts to provide a practical justification of freedom in various texts, chiefly the Groundwork and the second Critique. Its main focus is on the tension between Kant’s attempt in the former work to ground the necessity of presupposing freedom in our conception of ourselves as rational agents, and therefore independently of any specifically moral considerations, and his view in the latter that it is only our consciousness of standing under the moral law that justifies the assumption of freedom. It attempts to resolve this tension by linking the former with freedom as spontaneity and the latter with freedom as autonomy. The third part reflects upon the ontological issues posed by these two types of practical justification.