Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 17, 2025
Subjection to a law not springing from one's own will implies interest or constraint, and constitutes a certain necessity of action, but never makes Duty. Be the interest one's own or another's, the Imperative is conditional only. Kant's principle is the Autonomy of the Will; every other its Heteronomy. The new point of view opens up the very fruitful conception of an Empire or Realm of Ends.
But what interests us more here is to know that the prime foundation of morality laid down by all these principles is nothing but heteronomy of the will, and for this reason they must necessarily miss their aim.
There follows a division and criticism of the various possible principles of morality that can be set up on the assumption of Heteronomy, and that have been put forward by human Reason in default of the required Critique of its pure use. Such, are either Empirical or Rational.
In contrast with the Legislative, the Executive power expresses the heteronomy of the nation in contrast with its autonomy.
I will therefore call this the principle of autonomy of the will, in contrast with every other which I accordingly reckon as heteronomy.
In every case where an object of the will has to be supposed, in order that the rule may be prescribed which is to determine the will, there the rule is simply heteronomy; the imperative is conditional, namely, if or because one wishes for this object, one should act so and so: hence it can never command morally, that is, categorically.
Not only so, but it is INEVITABLY ONLY HETERONOMY; the will does not give itself the law, but it is given by a foreign impulse by means of a particular natural constitution of the subject adapted to receive it.
But the fatal objection to all four is their implying Heteronomy; no imperative founded on them can utter moral, i.e., categorical commands.
If the will seeks the law which is to determine it anywhere else than in the fitness of its maxims to be universal laws of its own dictation, consequently if it goes out of itself and seeks this law in the character of any of its objects, there always results HETERONOMY. The will in that case does not give itself the law, but it is given by the object through its relation to the will.
Physical necessity is a heteronomy of the efficient causes, for every effect is possible only according to this law, that something else determines the efficient cause to exert its causality. What else then can freedom of the will be but autonomy, that is, the property of the will to be a law to itself?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking