Critique of Practical Reason

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Core Ideas

Postulates of Pure Practical Reason

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Core Ideas Postulates of Pure Practical Reason

Postulates of Pure Practical Reason

In the Analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant provides us with reason to believe in one noumenal object, our freedom—when we feel the moral law on us, we feel our freedom to obey it. In the Dialectic, we are given reason to believe in two more noumenal objects, God and immortality.

The aim of the moral will is the highest good. Although this is true, because the highest good is not to be found in this world, it is confused to say that that is where we must aim. The highest good requires both our moral perfection and our well-being proportionate to our moral perfection, but we are not capable of bringing about either of those. Yet we could not in good will follow the moral law unless we believed that somehow or other the highest good would follow from it.

It is God, according to Kant, who will bring about our ultimate happiness commensurable to goodness. He will bring it about in the afterlife, which we would need to believe in anyways, since only in an eternal afterlife can flawed humans reach moral perfection.

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