Christophe Bouton Time and Freedom

Time and Freedom
Christophe Bouton
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
English translation by Christopher Macann copyright © 2014 by Northwestern
University Press, with the support of the Institut Universitaire de France. Published
2014. Originally published by Presses Universitaires de Toulouse in 2007
as Temps et liberté; copyright © 2008 Presses Universitaires du Mirail (Toulouse,
France). All rights reserved.

TIME AND
FREEDOM
Christophe Bouton
Translated from the French by Christopher Macann
Northwestern University Press

Evanston, Illinois
Introduction
Time and Freedom. The title of this book will become clearer in the
course of the following chapters. Let us just say, for the moment, that
it designates an inquiry into a specific problem— that of the relation
between time and freedom— whose genealogical tree I will sketch out
with a view to making a number of contributions towards a solution.
Before becoming a philosophical question, time existed as a reality
that haunts our innermost being, expressed so wonderfully by Borges as
follows:
Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along,
but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a
fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. (Borges 1964, 234)
Time is both what is closest to me and what is farthest from me. We bathe
continually in the flux of time and we are quite incapable of mastering
it conceptually. This well-known paradox, immortalized by Saint Augus-
tine in The Confessions— “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know;
if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know” (1998,
256)— implies a pre-comprehension of time that the philosopher tries
to make explicit. But it has to be admitted that, like an impregnable
fortress, time resists all attempts to plumb its depths. Among the latter,
at least five possible strategies can be distinguished, strategies that have
been employed in the history of philosophy to confront the problem of
time. By summarizing them here, I will at the same time be outlining the
strategy adopted in this book.
1. The most basic is the quantitative approach, which consists in determin-

ing time as the measure of motion. The very first philosopher to theorize
this approach was Aristotle, in the fourth book of his Physics, who defines
time as the “number of motion in respect to ‘before’ and ‘after’” (Physics
219b1– 2).1 As we shall see at the beginning of the first chapter, it is not
possible to restrict the Aristotelian conception of time to the question
3
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of its quantification. Nevertheless, a central place is certainly granted to

quantification. Time appears as a succession of nows. The now is the limit
between the before and the after. As such, it cannot offer a unit of mea-
surement for time,2 since a limit has no duration. It makes no sense to say
of any movement that it has lasted for ten nows. It is much more plausible
to say that it has lasted for ten seconds, but this kind of affirmation already
presupposes a number of preliminary operations. In order for time to be
the measure of movement, it must itself be measured by a movement, a
movement that provides a unit of objective measure. This is why, Aristotle
tells us, “not only do we measure the movement by the time, but also the
time by the movement, because they define each other” (Physics 220b15–
16). In order that the measurement of time should be as universal as
possible, not just any movement can be adopted to measure time; rather,
“uniform circular motion” has to be chosen (Physics 223b19– 20), since
this is both the most familiar and the most regular movement. With refer-
ence to the movement of the stars one obtains measurable unities of time,
which are ever more precise (the year, the month, the day, the hour), and
thanks to which we can measure all the other movements—calculate their
speed and compare them with each other.
In Aristotle’s day, nobody talked of seconds. The measurement of
time was obtained by instruments such as the gnomon, a vertical post
planted on a horizontal surface illuminated by the sun, or by solar clocks.
For more precise measurements clepsydras were used, as in courts of
law, where it was necessary to fix the time of speech in a fair way, or in
astronomical observations.3 Since Galileo, the quantitative approach to
time has been mathematized, in the sense that time has become a vari-
able “t” in the equations of physics.4 The quantification of time finds
its most rigorous expression in physics, which constantly improves the
precision with which time is measured by making use of atomic radia-
tion, for example, which produces waves of an extremely regular and
short wavelength. Despite these differences, the procedure is the same
as that brought to light by Aristotle. Time is to be measured first of all
by a regular motion, which then serves as a standard for measuring all
other movements. In this sense, it is not time that measures movement
but a certain regular movement that measures all other movements by
way of temporal mediation. Measuring movements by time comes down
to comparing them among themselves.5
2. We can understand why the quantitative approach must have seemed

unsatisfactory to many philosophers, even though it enjoys a certain au-
thority and never ceases to remind us of its usefulness, both in science
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and in daily life, where it features as clock time. What is a watch, if not, at
the level of the body, a regular movement that reproduces a movement
like that of the stars? Instead of being thought as time, time is in each
instance simply used to calculate movements. The quantitative approach
to time gets around the problem of time without ever really getting into
it. As banal an experience as boredom suffices to bring out the extent
to which measurable time does not exhaust the reality of time: there are
minutes that last for hours and inversely. To get free of the quantitative
utilization of time, the philosopher can start out from his or her own
experience of time, resistant to measurement. Consciousness of time
thereby becomes the Trojan horse set up to get us into the fortress, and
to do so better than the analysis of movement itself. This is the subjectiv-
ist approach to time: time is refracted across the prism of the subject who
experiences it. The argument is the following. By examining the time of
our consciousness in particular, we will be able to elucidate the meaning
of time in general. To illustrate this position, it will be enough to cite a
few well-known examples. Saint Augustine is the first to have ventured
down this path: “‘There are three tenses or times: the present of past
things, the present of present things, and the present of future things.’
These are three realities in the mind, but nowhere else as far as I can see,
for the present of past things is memory, the present of present things is
attention, and the present of future things is expectation” (1998, 261).
In this way, time is reduced to the consciousness of time.6 The question
of the measure of time is also to be found in book 11 of the Confessions.
But it is quite rightly displaced from the domain of external and natural
movements to that of mental interiority: “In you, my mind, I measure
time” (1998, 269). In reality, I never measure time but only the conscious-
ness I have of it. So it is not time itself that drags on in boredom but my
expectation of future events.
This way of presenting the problem will be endlessly developed. By
making of time the form of internal sense, Kant appeals to the subjectiv-
ist approach in his transcendental aesthetics. Time is the a priori form—
universal and necessary— of sensibility, that which makes it possible for
the subject to intuit itself, to perceive its own internal states. To be sure,
time is also and mediately the condition of the perception of the exter-
nal world and, as such, along with space, it is one of the foundations of
the objectivity of nature. But both space and time belong to a pure in-
tuition which resides a priori in the subject. If we abstract entirely from
all subjectivity, time disappears, purely and simply: “Time is therefore a
purely subjective condition of our (human) intuition . . . ; and in itself,
apart from the subject, is nothing” (CPR, A 35/B 52). Despite his reserva-
tions vis-à-vis Kantianism,7 Bergson commits himself to the fundamental
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philosophical decision, which consists in defining time on the basis of

consciousness. True time is duration, “the form which the succession of
our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains
from separating its present state from its former states” (TFW, 100). Here
again, it’s a matter of disclosing the essence of time by plunging into the
arcane depths of consciousness, which can be opened up like a book,
a book that then has to be closed again with a view to trying to think a
duration more appropriate to the universe itself.8 In making of time a
determination of human reality foreign to being in itself, Sartre, as we
shall see in chapter 8, does not call into question this way of thinking of
time on the basis of the subject.
There can be no doubt that Husserl managed to carry the subjectiv-
ist approach to time further than anyone else. Husserlian phenomenol-
ogy grasps time as an activity inseparable from consciousness. The time
of consciousness coincides with the consciousness of time, from which
the time of the world is derived. In his Ideas I, at section 81, Husserl notes:
The transcendentally “absolute” which we have brought about by the

reductions is, in truth, not what is ultimate; it is something which con-
stitutes itself in a certain profound and completely peculiar sense of its
own and which has its primal source [Urquelle] in what is ultimately and
truly absolute.
Fortunately, we can leave out of account the enigma of conscious-
ness of time in our preliminary analyses without endangering their
rigour. (1982, 193– 94)
If the phenomenological reduction is to be complete, radical, it has to

go back to the source of time; it has to explore the consciousness of time
and the time of consciousness. Husserl in a footnote refers us to his lec-
tures delivered in 1905 at the University of Göttingen, published years
later by Heidegger in 1928 under the title Lectures on the Phenomenology
of the Consciousness of Internal Time. Did Husserl manage in these lectures
to resolve the enigma of time consciousness? The lectures begin with a
phenomenological reduction of time that comprises two phases. First of
all, objective time has to be “suspended,” “bracketed.” Objective time
corresponds to “world time,” to “the real time,” to “the time of nature in
the sense of natural science” (Husserl 1991, §1, 4– 5). Objective time is
hereby placed in parentheses, in the sense that one refuses to make any
use of it, to affirm it, to entertain any preconceived beliefs with regard
to it. In a second step, the meaning of time has to be traced back to its
origin in consciousness. We need to understand how objective time, or
temporal objectivity, “can become constituted in subjective consciousness
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IN T ROD U CT ION
of time” (Husserl 1991, 3). The first part of this course of lectures trans-
forms the entire problem of time into a problem of the purely subjective
consciousness of time, with explicit reference to Saint Augustine, rightly
quoted as an indispensable predecessor. Husserl’s aim is to think the
fundamental connection of time and consciousness: “What we accept,
however, is not the existence of a world time [Weltzeit], the existence of
a physical duration, and the like, but appearing time [erscheinende Zeit],
appearing duration as appearing” (Husserl 1991, §1, 5). The conscious-
ness of time refers back of itself to the time of consciousness, which is
the “immanent time of the flow of consciousness” (Husserl 1991, §1, 5),
time as it appears to consciousness, lived time, felt time. When one gets
outside the circuit of objective time and “slides into the ‘corridors’ of an
already constituted experience” (Granel 1968, 60), the only remaining
certainty is that of the existence of lived time, a time that now needs to
be examined in its own right.
For our purposes it will not be necessary to go over Husserl’s analy-
ses in detail, analyses which distinguish two levels of temporality. Tempo-
ral objects (Zeitobjekte)— for example an enduring sound, a melody, and
so on— are constituted through a double intentionality, a retention of the
past and a protention of the future. As for the temporal flux of conscious-
ness, it constitutes itself continually and so forms an “absolute subjectiv-
ity” (Husserl 1991, §36, 79), thereby incarnating that “ultimately and truly
absolute” evoked at section 81 of Ideas I. An approach of this kind consists
in reducing (in the phenomenological sense) time to the consciousness
of time. This reduction of time certainly does make it possible for us to
deepen our knowledge of the specific temporality of consciousness, but
it brings with it at least three difficulties.
The first arises out of the rigorous symmetry, proposed by Husserl,
between retention and protention,9 a symmetry that masks the essential
asymmetry of time. Contrary to retention, protention aims at a moment
of time which is absent, as yet indeterminate. To the extent that the past is
charged with the reality of what was present and gives rise to a retentional
intentionality that constitutes it, to that same extent the future partly es-
capes the hold of protention, which remains incapable of determining
the meaning of what is about to happen with the same certainty as the
retention of what is no longer. Between the anticipation of the future mo-
ment, in protention, and its “fulfillment” in the now, there is a change of
meaning, a hiatus that merits further analysis. Husserl grants primacy to
the past, implicitly at least, a past in which the in-determination of time
has disappeared to leave room for the activity of primary memory.
The second difficulty bears upon the constitution of objective time,
which forms, as an outcome of the flow of consciousness and the ongoing
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flow of temporal objects, the third stratum of time. At the beginning of

his lectures, Husserl points out several a priori temporal laws of objective
time, which he presents as evident: “Naturally, I mean by this laws of the
following obvious sort: that the fixed temporal order is a two-dimensional
infinite series, that two different times can never be simultaneous, that
their relation is a nonreciprocal one, that transitivity obtains, that to every
time an earlier and a later time belong, and so on” (Husserl 1991, §2, 10).
The present “now” cannot coexist with other “nows,” past and future, the
past “now” can never be present again. But is objective time, with its prop-
erties of succession and irreversibility, actually constituted by conscious-
ness? To find out, the reduction has first to be completed by exposing the
process by which objective time, the time of the world, gets constituted,
and this out of a meaning giving consciousness. The phenomenology of
time is a search for a time that has been overlooked, a natural time placed
in brackets by the reduction and to which Husserl refers as follows: “Time
is fixed, and yet time flows. In the flow of time, in the continuous sinking
down into the past, a nonflowing, absolutely fixed, identical, objective
time becomes constituted. This is the problem” (Husserl 1991, §31, 67).
The solution proposed in the Lectures of 1905 is to appeal to sec-
ondary memory in the constitution of objective time, as is explained in
section 32 entitled “The Role of Reproduction in the Constitution of the
One Objective Time.” Contrary to retention, which is an immediate or
primary memory, included automatically in perception, secondary mem-
ory is the active recall of a past representation, which only comes about
after the retentions have stopped. Secondary memory, or recollection, is
characterized by its ability to make the past present again (Vergegenwärti-
gen). According to Husserl, it is this reproduction of the past by the sec-
ondary memory which inserts each phase of the lived flux into the fixed
order of objective time, by assigning to it its determinate place. When
we remember a past event, we situate it in the calendar of the world. But
doesn’t this solution consist in making of objective time something ideal,
subjective, a simple creation of remembering? Unless one simply presup-
poses it as given in advance, as Husserl does, when he simply enumerates
the properties of objective time over again as “a priori laws,” laws like suc-
cession, irreversibility, homogeneity, continuity, and the ceaseless welling-
up of a now (Husserl 1991, §33, 73– 75). These temporal characteristics
are all referred to the time of the world, to a natural time that is simply
not clarified. On this point it is difficult not to agree with Paul Ricoeur,
who thinks that “the price of the Husserlian discovery of retention and
secondary remembrance is that nature is forgotten, yet succession is pre-
supposed by the very description of the internal consciousness of time”
(Ricoeur 1988, 59).
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The limit of the Husserlian phenomenology of time is not that of

dissolving objective time in consciousness but of having enclosed it in a
circle, by presupposing as established what it is supposed to be constituting.
3. The subjectivist approach no doubt throws some light on the time of

consciousness, but at the price of an irreducible incompleteness, leaving
the time of the world in a vast zone of inaccessible darkness. There are
several ways of going about the business of thinking time in its worldly,
cosmological dimension. First of all, nature can be taken as the means of
access to worldly time. The approach by way of nature marks, to a consider-
able extent, the approach adopted by Aristotle. For the latter, time is not
just in the soul, it is in all things, “in earth and in sea and in heaven” (Phys-
ics 223a16– 17). Time is linked to movement, because all movement takes
place in time, but it cannot be identified with movement itself, whose
number and whose measure it supplies. Being in time means being mea-
sured or measurable through time. But can time subsist without the soul
that measures it? After having taken account of objections, Aristotle con-
cludes in the affirmative, at least in the sense in which movement, from
which time is inseparable, can obviously exist without the soul (Physics,
223a21– 28). That time cannot be perceived, noted, enumerated except
by the soul does not mean that it is constituted in its very being by soul.
To admit that would be to confuse the perception of time, which depends
effectively upon the soul, with its very existence, which is independent of
it. Being in time is to be enveloped by natural time as by a horizon which
comprehends all beings whether in movement or at rest.
We see that several different approaches to the problem of time can
be found in one and the same philosopher. Thus Aristotle combines the
quantitative approach with the via naturalis. Even a thinker like Hegel will
try to combine the subjectivist conception of time with that which sees in
the latter a natural being. In the system of the Encyclopaedia, time is situ-
ated at the beginning of the Philosophy of Nature, where it figures as the
abstract negativity of nature, which engulfs all events in the nothingness
of the past. The destructive power of time, evoked by Borges across the
image of the tiger and of fire, is symbolized with Hegel by the God Kro-
nos/Chronos devouring his own children. From this point of view, there
is nothing subjective to time and “time does not involve the difference
between objectivity and a distinct subjective consciousness” (Philosophy
of Nature, 1970, §258, 230). Like Aristotle, Hegel conceives the time of
nature independently of consciousness and so, in contrast to Kant, effects
a kind of de-subjectivization of time. But he also confirms that time is
“abstract subjectivity, the same principle as the: ‘ego = ego’ of pure self-
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consciousness” (Philosophy of Nature, 1970, §258, 230). So does time arise

out of nature or out of consciousness? Out of both in fact. For Hegel, time
is a Janus whose two faces are nature and spirit, sharing in common the
principle of negativity. Considered as the universal negativity of nature,
time is opposed to spirit. But through memory, language, and thought,
spirit can surpass the destructive negativity of natural time and convert it
into a creative negativity appropriate to historical time: “Future and past
are separate only in our thought, in nature there is only the now. History
exists only in spirit; what has happened is past, time being the tomb of
what was, but spirit conserves the past” (Hegel 2002, 37). Under the form
of history, time is reintegrated within the domain of spirit.10
4. The approach by way of nature does justice to the fact that time can-
not be restricted to a structure of finite human subjectivity. If this were
the case, the history of the universe and of the earth before the appear-
ance of man would simply be inconceivable. Time did not wait for man to
exist! All the same, the recognition of the autonomy of natural time can-
not fail to raise the problem of its relation with human time, the time of
consciousness. With Hegel, the dialectical reversal of a natural time into
a historical time of spirit is possible because nature is already concealed
spirit, spirit existing in itself. But if one refuses this thesis, if one holds that
spirit is not capable of raising the veil of Isis, of penetrating the secrets of
nature, the via naturalis can only lead on to cosmological time, and so runs
the risk of never rejoining psychological time, which then takes on the
enigmatic figure of a will-o’-the-wisp in the endless night of the universe.
To grasp time in all its facets as both human time and a world time,
a mode of access has to be adopted which is even more general than that
of nature— being itself. The ontological approach adopted by Heidegger
consists in saying that time is the horizon of any comprehension of being,
of the being of Dasein, human existence, or that of any other beings, enti-
ties readily available to us, “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden), or merely present
for us, “present-at-hand” (vorhanden). The first two published sections of
Being and Time show how time, under the form of ecstatical temporality,
is the “ontological meaning of care” (§65), that is, the condition of the
possibility of the existence of Dasein. All the existential characters of Da-
sein, the “existentialia”— like projection, resoluteness, facticity, thrown-
ness, care, and so on— are only possible within the horizon of the three
ecstatical dimensions of time, the future, the “having-being” (the past),
and the present. At first sight, one might suspect Heidegger of having
latched onto the subjectivist approach, which deduces time from the sub-
ject, even though the latter might now have been re-baptized “Dasein.”
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This is not in fact so. Temporality remains the horizon of all beings, of
Dasein just as much as those other beings which it is not itself. This thesis
is announced from the very outset of Being and Time: “Whenever Dasein
tacitly understands and interprets something like Being, it does so with
time as its standpoint. Time must be brought to light— and genuinely
conceived— as the horizon for all understanding of Being and of any
way of interpreting it” (SZ, 17). Temporality has two aspects which are
two sides of the same phenomenon. As Zeitlichkeit, it is the horizon of
the being of Dasein. As Temporalität, it is the horizon of being in general.
Thus it is only through “the exposition of the problematic of Temporality
[Temporalität]”11 that “the question of the meaning of Being will first be
concretely answered” (SZ, 19). All the same, this program is not carried
through in Being and Time, which ends with the following questions: “Is
there a way which leads from primordial time to the meaning of Being?
Does time itself manifest itself as the horizon of Being?” (SZ, 437). The
reply should have been given in the third section of the first part of Being
and Time. But Heidegger destroyed the latter at the end of the year 1926,
shortly after he had finished composing it, for the reason that he found
it inadequate.
For want of this deliberately destroyed first version, the lectures
of summer 1927 entitled The Basic Problems of Phenomenology can be con-
sidered as a “new elaboration of this third section” (BP, 24: 1). At the
end of these lectures (BP, §21), Heidegger makes another attempt at ad-
dressing the problem of the Temporality of being. Temporality is ecstatic-
horizonal. Each of the three ecstasies bears a horizontal schema, render-
ing possible the understanding of the being of beings: “we understand
being from the original horizontal schema of the ecstasies of temporality” (BP, 24:
436). The ecstasis of the present projects itself towards the horizon of
the praesens, which is the condition of the possibility of the “readiness-to-
hand” (Zuhandenheit). In other words, “readiness-to-hand formally implies
praesens [Praesenz], presence [Anwesenheit]” (BP, 24: 439, trans. modified).
What does that mean? Any interaction with some ready-to-hand thing—
object, thing, instrument, and so on— is possible only on the basis of an
understanding of its specific being, of its availability, which is itself only
possible because the entity is perceived within the horizon of the praesens,
because it is there present, close at hand. Let’s admit that the praesens—
the ecstatical horizon of the present— designates the Temporality of the
thing ready-to-hand. It remains to be seen what might be the two other ec-
statical horizons governing the future and the past, which, by definition,
cannot be reduced to the praesens. Surely, the future and the past project
being in its non-presence, enveloping being with a halo of absence? But
Heidegger dodges the problem: “In order not to confuse unduly our
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vision of the phenomena of temporality, which moreover are themselves

so hard to grasp, we shall restrict ourselves to the explication of the pres-
ent and its ecstatical horizon praesens” (BP, 24: 435– 36). The ontological
approach remains incomplete, even if it does not lead to an impasse.12
5. Despite the different approaches adopted to decipher the enigma,

the problem of time confronts an apparently insurmountable resistance.
The two paths that go by way of subjective or nature seem incompatible,
the adoption of the one bringing with it the abandonment of the other.
After completing a recapitulative survey of the main lines of thinking on
the subject, Ricoeur concludes that philosophy is not able to find its way
out of the maze of temporality, split between two conceptions, the cos-
mological, inaugurated by Plato and especially Aristotle, which makes of
time a being of nature, and that of psychology, which sees in time a form
of consciousness, this along a line of thought that runs from Saint Augus-
tine to Husserl. Time of the world or Time of the soul? This alternative,
described in detail by Ricoeur in Time and Narrative, constitutes one of
the most obscure aporias of temporality, perhaps even the most obscure.
The aporetic approach consists in recognizing the powerlessness of philos-
ophy to resolve the problem of time, whose solution has therefore to be
sought outside its own domain. In Ricoeur’s eyes, the thread permitting
Ariane to get out of the maze of the “aporetics of temporality” is narrative
(historical or fictional). In its historical and literary forms, narrative is the
“guardian of time,” it unifies our temporal experience and makes it pos-
sible for us to develop “a third-time,” one that bridges the gap between
lived time and cosmic time. Relating an event is reinscribing a fragment
of lived time in the universal calendar of the time of the world. This
process applies equally to the third and more familiar form of narrative,
that by which an individual relates its life and develops its own “narrative
identity,” interwoven with narrated stories which get made up and then
unmade (Ricoeur 1988, 241– 49).
One might even ask whether Ricoeur does not refute his own theory,
in the sense in which his work Time and Narrative certainly constitutes a
carefully worked out, philosophical response to the dilemma of temporal-
ity. But the real problem is located elsewhere. Is the first and most familiar
experience we have of time really that of narrative? We might be permitted
to question this. In one way or another, narrative refers to the past. Narra-
tive identity is retrospective, fabricated out of accomplished actions which
it inevitably follows upon. Ricoeur was certainly aware of this, since he un-
derlines, from the first, and at the very start of his work, that the operation
of mimesis and of plot, through which he defines narrative, always refers
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to actions. Mimesis is the representation of an action, just as plot is the

synthesis of goals, causes, and of chance, that “are brought together within
the temporal unity of a whole and complete action” (1984, ix). “Mimesis
II”— creative imitation, the act of relating properly so called— has to be
distinguished from “mimesis I,” which designates the pre-narrative expe-
rience of action. Before relating one’s life one has to live it. But this first
stage of mimesis I implies, among other things, a “pre-understanding”
of the temporality proper to action. This is the way Ricoeur invokes the
“temporality of human action” (1984, 82), a “properly practical temporal-
ity” (1984, 83), which precedes and makes possible the time related in the
narrative. What does this all mean?
The answer is laconic. One finds this remark, for example: “it is
easy to see that the project has to do with the future, in a very specific
way that distinguishes the future from prevision or prediction” (Ricoeur
1984, 60). It is indeed easy to take note of this, but difficult to explain it.
In what does the future of the time of action differ from that of prevision?
Are there two modalities of the future, one for natural events that can be
predicted by appeal to scientific laws, and another unpredictable modal-
ity reserved for human actions? As if to have done with these difficulties,
Ricoeur appeals to Heidegger’s concept of within-timeness: “This struc-
ture of within-timeness [Innerzeitigkeit] seems the best characterization of
the temporality of action for my present analysis” (1984, 61). When we
act, we certainly situate ourselves in time and count on it. But this mode
of temporality cannot exhaust the temporality of action, if it turns out,
as we shall see in chapter 6 devoted to Heidegger, that it only designates
one modality of existence: its improper, inauthentic form, centered on
the present, that which is furthest removed from any true action emanat-
ing from the free choice of the individual. By approaching time from the
standpoint of narrative, the temporality of action remains a blind spot,
constantly presupposed but never made fully explicit.
6. In this book I propose to follow up this unexplored path, one that

addresses the problem of time not from its quantification, not from sub-
jectivity, from nature, from being, or from narrative but in the light of
action, and from that by which it is conditioned: freedom. I am not going
to pretend that this practical approach to the problem of time offers the
final key. What I hope for is something more in the way of throwing new
light on the scene. My starting point is the idea that action is a specific
experience of the world whose cause is freedom. It is based on a specific
experience of time oriented towards the future. I assume that human
freedom exists as a choice between several possibilities, and I try to inves-
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tigate the conception of time which is involved in that notion of freedom.

In other words, I do not deal with the classical issue of the existence of
freedom, but only with the relation of human freedom to time. From
a practical point of view, the future is not an object of narrative but of
the will. In his actions, the individual spontaneously complies with this
dimension of time, most often turning his back on the past and living in
the future. Pascal has described this phenomenon in these terms:
Everyone should study their thoughts. They will find them all centred
on the past or on the future. We almost never think of the present, and
if we do it is simply to shed some light on the future. The present is
never our end. Past and present are our means, only the future is our
end. And so we never actually live, though we hope so, and in constantly
striving for happiness it is inevitable that we will never achieve it.13
Why does the future enjoy such a primacy? Pascal suggests that it is dis-
traction or diversion (divertissement) which commits us to continual anxi-
ety. The future is the refuge of the one who never stops running away
from himself. A refuge that has all the attraction of a prison, for, by dint
of fleeing the present, man becomes a prisoner of the future. Without
denying the pertinence of Pascal’s analysis, I think, nevertheless, that it
might be possible to develop a different interpretation, and even one that
moves in the opposite direction. For us, the primacy of the future can
be explained as a function of the privileged place occupied by human
freedom. Which implies the following: if one is going to find a solution
to the dilemma of temporality, one is going to have to look in the direc-
tion of the practical. Narrative identity presupposes a practical identity,
constituted by the interconnection of freedom and time. The process
of action consists in writing the subjective temporality of the individual,
made up of memories, impressions, and projects, into the time of the
world, which, by that very token, becomes a human time. However, the
practical approach to time in turn raises a new problem, which crystallizes
around the articulation of time and freedom. In what way does freedom
manifest itself through time? How can time accommodate the process of
acting? Through the future, one might want to say. But does the future
really provide a stage upon which freedom can be enacted or is it not
really already determined in advance?
Questions such as these have sometimes been raised in the history
of philosophy, notably across controversies relating to fatalism. But curi-
ously, the analyses implied by such questions relative to the concept of
freedom have rarely been accompanied by the no less necessary reflec-
tion bearing on the nature of the time thereby taken into consideration
15
IN T ROD U CT ION
and, in particular, on the status of the future, no matter how important

this kind of reflection might turn out to be. Hence their unfinished,
unthought character, leaving the way open for aporetic dilemmas. The
few remarks Leibniz devoted to the notion of the future in his Essay on
Theodicy pale into insignificance by comparison with the ample and de-
tailed efforts he devoted to the definition of freedom. One could say
the same of Kant, who talks very little of the future in a thematic way.
So what I am proposing to do is to examine the birth and development
of the problem of the relation of freedom and time insofar as it can be
read out of the history of philosophy. A difficult birth and a slow develop-
ment, since it seems that this problem has still not been fully worked out,
even today. It takes root in Leibniz’s interpretation of the Aristotelian
debate on future contingents. Kant’s “Third Antinomy” allows for a first
formulation, which constitutes a kind of common trunk from which the
problem branches out in different directions: Schopenhauer on the one
side, Schelling, on the other, then, through the intermediary of Kierke-
gaard, finding further ramifications with Heidegger in Germany, and
Bergson, Sartre, and Levinas in France. Over and beyond their differ-
ences, all these philosophers have this in common, that they were one
and all confronted with the problem of the temporality of human freedom
and, in order to resolve this problem, felt obliged to think the plasticity of
time,14 that is, its capacity to be modified and configured by freedom. The
guiding thread of this book will then be the concept of the “possible.” Is
it legitimate to employ this concept in connection with the future? And
if so, what meaning do we need to confer upon it?
2
Three Kantian Solutions to the

Problem of Pre-Determinism
Leibniz never managed to find his way out of the labyrinth of freedom and
necessity, perhaps because he failed to identify and take control of what
plays there the role of Minotaur: time. Can Kant offer us an Ariadne’s thread
allowing freedom to escape from the maze of temporality? By considering
his thinking in the light of this question, we shall perhaps be able to find
not one but several solutions— at least three. This solution does not make
things simpler, since each, as we will see, engenders its own difficulties. As
if that were not already enough, Kant radically modified his conception of
Leibniz’s philosophy, in particular with what pertains to human freedom.
After having taken over Leibniz’s pre-determinism in his New Elucidation,1 he
turns his back on it in the Critique of Practical Reason, likening the freedom
of the “spiritual automaton” to a “turnspit which when once wound up also
carries out its motions of itself” (CPrR, 5: 97). But instead of deriving from
this critique a more open conception of the future, Kant adds, a little later,
the astonishing phrase claiming that if we could know the entire character
of a man in the least detail together with all the circumstances of his life,
“his future conduct could be predicted with as great a certainty as the occur-
rence of a solar or lunar eclipse, and we could nevertheless still assert that
the man is free” (CPrR, 5: 99, trans. modified). From reading this text, we do
not know if the future of this man is necessary or not, nor even whether the
eclipse in question might not indeed be that of his freedom. What are his
reasons for reversing his position vis-à-vis Leibniz? Is it really a reversal? Is a
pre-determinism of this kind really compatible with the thesis of freedom?
And if such is the case, what conception of the future is presupposed by this
Kantian attempt to render the two compatible?
Kant and the Principle of

Determining Ground
Kant thought about Leibniz’s position, which he knew from a direct read-
ing of works like the Theodicy and through the prism of the philosophy of
41
42
T H E T RE E OF P OS SIBILITIES
Wolff, who takes up again the fundamental concepts of the system of prees-
tablished harmony.2 Like Leibniz, Wolff admits the existence of a plurality
of possible worlds. He defines the contingent as that whose opposite is pos-
sible and so involves no contradiction. The necessary, on the other hand, is
that whose opposite is self-contradictory. Wolff insists upon the distinction
of two necessities, absolute and hypothetical, in order to escape the charge
of Spinozism. These two notions are clarified with the help of the principle
of reason. A being is absolutely necessary if it has the reason for its existence
built into its essence. With the exception of God, all beings are therefore
only hypothetically necessary, for their sufficient reason is situated outside
their essence. The pre-determinism that results from the principle of suf-
ficient reason leads Wolff too to affirm the truth of future contingents in
his Cosmologia Naturalis (§§106– 8). Future events are predetermined and
propositions bearing on the latter enjoy a completely determinate truth
value. But they are no less contingent for all that, for they do not contain
in themselves the sufficient reason of their existence. Does Kant accept this
way of reconciling pre-determinism and contingency?
The Kantian position vis-à-vis the metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff
underwent an appreciable evolution, as is manifest from the example
of the Theodicy, approved in his essay on Optimism of 1759,3 condemned
out of hand in 1791 in the little work entitled “On the Miscarriage of All
Philosophical Trials in Theodicy.”4 I limit my investigation to the problem of
pre-determinism and through it, I will raise again our initial question: is
the future necessary? All the more embarrassing, since Kant rarely tack-
les the question of the future thematically. So I will approach the matter
from the standpoint of pre-determinism, discussed from the time of the
New Elucidation of 1755.
In this text, with Leibniz and against Wolff, Kant claims that the
principle of reason is not reducible to that of contradiction. Following
Crusius, he calls the principle of sufficient reason the “principle of de-
termining ground,” to the examination of which section 2 is devoted. We
should bear in mind Leibniz’s definition of the “principle of determin-
ing reason,” which is the ontological version of the principle of reason:
“Nothing ever comes to pass without there being a cause or at least a
reason determining it, that is, something to give an a priori reason why it
is existent rather than non-existent, and in this wise rather than in any
other” (Theodicy, art. 44, 147). The logical form of the principle of rea-
son examines the reasons or grounds (ratio, Grund)5 of a statement and
so appeals to the analysis of propositions; its ontological form investi-
gates causes (causa, Ursache) and corresponds to the principle of causality,
which then becomes an obstacle to any theory of human freedom. Kant
sets about examining the meaning of this principle.
43
THREE KANTIAN SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM OF PRE-DETERMINISM
To determine means attributing a predicate to a subject by exclud-

ing its opposite. A ground is not what makes it possible to understand
why a thing is rather than not being. This Wolffian definition Kant simply
finds tautological. Rather, a ground is what determines the subject, by es-
tablishing a link between the subject and its predicate. A ground either
determines antecedently (ratio essendi), responding to the question: why?
Or it determines consequentially (ratio cognoscendi), responding to the
question: what? According to its logical form, the principle of determin-
ing ground signifies that “nothing is true without a determining ground”
(New Elucidation, 1: 393). In this case, the ground that determines ante-
cedently is the demonstration of the proposition, establishing its truth,
and the ground that determines consequentially is simply its explanation.
According to its ontological form, the principle is expressed as follows:
“Nothing which exists contingently can be without a ground which de-
termines its existence antecedently” (New Elucidation, 1: 396). Everything
that is contingent presupposes some other thing containing the ante-
cedent ground that determines its existence. Contingency is seen as that
whose determining ground exists outside itself. From this point of view,
only God escapes the principle of determining ground posed above, for
God’s existence is absolutely necessary. Kant, by contrast with Wolff, does
not make this absolute necessity reside in the idea that God possesses,
in his very essence, the ground for his existence, but in the fact that the
opposite of his existence is unthinkable.
All contingent beings, including humans, are subject to the prin-
ciple of determining ground, for they are determined by an antecedently
determining ground. It is not difficult to see that this pre-determinism
threatens to lead straight to the negation of free will. An act of will is con-
tingent, and is therefore necessarily preceded by a ground that fixes its
content. Crusius had already produced the following objections against
the principle of Leibniz and Wolff.6 Applied in a universal way, the prin-
ciple of determining ground leads to Stoic fatalism, and so to the sup-
pression of freedom and morality. Since everything is coordinated by the
chain of grounds, it is pointless hoping for the contrary of an event, which
would amount to wishing for the impossible. The distinction between
absolute and hypothetical necessity is illusory, since the opposite of an
event can never take place, the grounds for its existence not having been
given. If God has supervised the connection of all that happens to us, he
is the unique cause of our acts, and so of sin. Caius lied. He cannot not
lie at the very moment he lies, for otherwise he would disturb the order
of grounds implied from the very beginning of the world.
For Crusius, free action is undetermined. Caius lied freely because
that is what he wanted to do. One cannot go further back than that.
44
Freedom is the natural power of the will to determine itself to act without
being determined, neither from without, nor from within. It’s an uncon-
ditioned cause capable of beginning a causal series. In his New Elucidation,
Kant rejects this concept of freedom, which he takes up again however in
1781 in the name of transcendental freedom.7 For, in the form it assumes
with Crusius, it stands opposed to the principle of reason in its univer-
sal form, which the latter wants to restrict: “that whose non-existence is
thinkable [the contingent] stems from a sufficient cause and, if an initial
free action did not take place, this is the result of causes of such a kind
that, given the circumstances, what happens cannot proceed or unfold
otherwise.”8 That is, if an initial free action did not take place. This supple-
ment to the principle of reason makes of freedom a pure and simple
exception to the law of causality.
In his refutation of Crusius, Kant begins by conceding that the dis-
tinction between the two necessities is hardly pertinent.9 Necessity does
not admit of degrees. The distinction between absolute and hypothetical
(or moral) necessity concerns the origin and not the nature of neces-
sity, which is not at odds with freedom. If this origin is external to the
subject, the act is indeed constrained. But if it is in the subject, the act is
free. True freedom is not therefore the freedom of indifference, whose
specter haunts Crusius’s entire theory. Rather it consists in a spontaneity
determined by the representation of the best. An act is free not because
there is no ground for it, but because it is determined by grounds that
stem from intelligence and influence the will. No exception to the prin-
ciple of determining ground is possible. Even when the will takes itself
to be free, it is still determined by more or less obscure motives.10 Kant
criticizes the position of Crusius not only because it contradicts the prin-
ciple of reason (as determining ground) but divine foreknowledge as
well. Crusius adopts Aristotle’s solution to the problem of future contin-
gents, which remain undetermined in the case of human actions. Loyal to
Leibniz, Kant thinks on the contrary that it would be impossible for God
to foresee things whose existence could not have been determined by
antecedent grounds. The principle of determining ground is the secret
to divine foreknowledge:
The events which occur in the world have been determined with such
certainty, that divine foreknowledge, which is incapable of being mis-
taken, apprehends both their futurition [futuritio] and the impossibility
of their opposite. And He does so in conformity with the connection of
their grounds, and as certainly as if the opposite were excluded by their
absolute concept. (New Elucidation, 1: 400)
45
If future events are predetermined, propositions bearing on future con-

tingents are themselves certain and determinate, their truth value re-
maining fixed for all eternity, and so from now on. Even though the truth
of these propositions is only accessible to divine omniscience, it predeter-
mines the future as necessary. What necessity are we talking about? Kant’s
proximity to Leibniz reaches its limit at this precise point. For Leibniz,
the hypothetical necessity of the events of the world is compatible with
their contingency, for their opposite is possible. Kant affirms on the con-
trary that God knows the impossibility of the opposite of future events,
that is, their absolute necessity, which then takes the place of that said to
be hypothetical. So in what does the contingency of worldly events then
consist? A definition of contingency that might be called causal, inspired
by Wolff, has to replace the modal definition. The contingent is no lon-
ger that whose opposite is possible, but that which does not have in itself
the ground for its existence. From this point of view, the events of the
world are all contingent since they are all determined by an antecedent
ground. Like every contingent event, an act of the will does not possess
in itself the ground for its existence; it has an antecedently determining
ground. If this ground is internal to the subject— the representation of
the best by the understanding— the will is free. If the ground is external
to the subject— the blind force of nature, bodily drives— it is not free. In
both cases, the will remains caught in a chain of grounds whose necessity
is absolute.
At the stage of the New Elucidation, Kant takes up again for his own
account Leibniz’s pre-determinism, reinforcing all the same the necessity
of the future. There are not two futures— present future and hypotheti-
cal future— but one single figure of the future, supported by one single
meaning of necessity (the impossibility of the opposite). The future is
absolutely necessary.
The Antinomy of Freedom and Time
The inconsistencies encountered earlier in connection with Leibniz have

become more flagrant than ever. If the future is absolutely necessary,
predetermined, what is the meaning of human freedom? How can one
escape fatalism, if the logical argument of two necessities is abandoned?
These difficulties led Kant to rework the totality of his theory of
freedom, which takes on a new form in the critical system. This form is
well known. Kant defends a strong compatibilism of human freedom and
46
the causal necessity of nature.11 So, in the economy of the critical philos-
ophy, what becomes of Leibniz’s pre-determinism? How does Kant now
understand the relation of freedom to the future?
From Leibniz to Kant, the problem of human freedom has been
displaced. Molina claims that free will, as the power of contraries, is not
subject to the fatal and extrinsic necessity of causes, without asking him-
self how such a phenomenon is possible. Even while rejecting the liberty
of indifference, Leibniz makes of the human will a sort of miracle ex-
empt from the natural laws which regulate the order of efficient causes.
With both philosophers, the problem of the compatibility of divine fore-
knowledge and human freedom eclipses that of articulating the relation
between freedom and causality. With Kant, the critique of rational the-
ology and its ontological proof pushes God back from the status of first
truth to that of an Idea of pure reason, with regard to which it is impos-
sible to know whether any reality corresponds to it. The argument of lazy
reason can henceforward be eliminated with one sentence. For in fact
it relies on a constitutive instead of on a merely regulative Idea of a Su-
preme Being.12 The enigma that has to be resolved now bears not upon
the agreement of human freedom with divine foreknowledge, but with
the causal pre-determinism of nature raised to the status of knowledge a
priori. This is what is at stake in the “Third Antinomy,” which sets up the
thesis that there exists in addition to the causality of natural laws a free
and unconditioned causality, against the anti-thesis according to which
all that happens, happens solely in accordance with the laws of nature.13
Kant sums up the difficulty in a note to Religion within the Boundaries of
Mere Reason. What needs to be examined is
how can pre-determinism coexist with freedom, when according to prede-

terminism freely chosen actions, as occurrences, have their determin-
ing grounds in antecedent time (which, together with what is contained
therein, no longer lies in our control), whereas, according to freedom,
the action, as well as its contrary, must be in the control of the subject at
the moment of its happening. (Religion, 6: 49– 50n)
From the very beginning of this inquiry, all the dilemmas gravitate around
the question of time, more exactly the future, which is the blind spot in
the controversy, to the extent that it is never analyzed thematically. The
contribution of the Critique of Pure Reason is to partly fill this gap; and this
from the very beginning of the work in the celebrated “Transcendental
Aesthetic,” and then in the chapter on “Schematism.” Unfortunately for
us, the three dimensions of time studied by Kant are not the past, the
present, and the future, but permanence, simultaneity, and succession.
47
All the same, this analysis of time has the merit of bringing to light the
temporal dimension of the principle of reason in its transcendental form,
causality.14 Everything that happens, Kant said in his New Elucidation, has
an antecedent ground by which it is determined in advance, hencefor-
ward clearly designated by the notion of cause.15 This anteriority is noth-
ing other than time. This is why causal determinism is always, for Kant,
a pre-determinism (Prädeterminism), claiming as it does that any present
phenomenon is determined by a cause that precedes it in time. In other
words, “the principle of sufficient reason is thus the ground of possible
experience, that is, of objective knowledge of appearances in respect of
their relation in the order of time” (CPR, A 201/B 246). As presented
in the “Second Analogy of Experience,” succession is the schema of the
category of causality, that which makes it possible for the latter to be ap-
plied to experience. Every effect necessarily follows upon its cause accord-
ing to a law of causality. By implication this means that every temporal
event in the world is situated in a causal order. The result of the tempo-
ralization of the principle of reason is the submission, without excep-
tion, of time to causality—proton pseudos, as Kant’s successors never cease
to confirm.
From a phenomenal point of view, there is no reason for Kant not to
include human actions under the jurisdiction of the principle of causality.
To do otherwise would be to hand over human action to blind chance,
and so to contradict the very idea of a principle, which implies univer-
sality. Freedom is not a “private miracle” exempt from the subordinate
laws of nature, as Leibniz thought. Kant goes into this in his “Critical
Examination [kritische Beleuchtung] of the Analytic of Practical Reason”:
“Therefore, if one attributes freedom to a being whose existence is de-
termined in time, it cannot be excepted from the law of natural necessity
of all events in its existence, including also its actions. Making such an
exception would be equivalent to delivering this being to blind chance”
(CPrR, 5: 95). There is no chance in nature (non datur casus). Everything
that happens has an anterior cause in time which determines it, this cause
in turn has its cause, and so on to infinity. The temporal formulation of
the principle of reason therefore makes it possible to disentangle the
dilemma of freedom and time. (1) Every action is an event that takes
place at some moment in time. (2) This event is determined by some
cause situated in a previous time. (3) Past time is however no longer in
my power. (4) Therefore we are no longer free at the moment we act,
for our present is determined by a past which escapes us by definition. In
short, freedom always arrives too late to be free. It is the prisoner of “an
already predetermined order [vorherbestimmte Ordnung]” in which nothing
like a beginning is possible (CPrR, 5: 94– 95).
48
The Problem of Psychological

Pre-Determinism
Does Leibniz’s Kantian critique imply a rejection of psychological deter-

minism, symbolized by the image of the turnspit? In the Critique of Pure
Reason, the distinction of the two characters, empirical and intelligible,
designating two modes of causality, conditioned and unconditioned, al-
lows one to think that an action is free, as the effect of an intelligible
cause and, at the same time, determined, as the consequence of other
phenomena according to the necessity of nature. Far from being aban-
doned, Leibniz’s pre-determinism is then paradoxically reintroduced
into the field of appearances in an even more rigorous sense,16 since it
excludes other possible worlds. Kant hardly explains the way in which
the principle of causality can be applied to inner sense and, contrary to
Leibniz, he does not limit it to final causes alone. He finds it enough to
take note of the result:
All the actions of men in [the field] of appearances are determined in

conformity with the order of nature, by their empirical character and by
the other causes which cooperate with that character; and if we could
exhaustively investigate all the appearances of men’s wills, there would
not be found a single human action which we could not predict with
certainty, and recognize as proceeding from its antecedent condition.
So far then as regards this empirical character there is no freedom.
(CPR, A 549– 50/B 577– 78)
Kant is all the more inclined to exclude any liberty from the causal order
of nature inasmuch as he reintroduces it fully and completely in the
noumenal point of view. Thanks to the distinction between these two
points of view, he does not need, as did Leibniz, to reconcile freedom
and pre-determinism by introducing a purely formal contingency. He can
even allow himself to accentuate psychological pre-determinism: “Before
ever they [the actions of the will] have happened, they are one and all
predetermined in the empirical character” (CPR, A 553/B 581). The ex-
ample of a malicious lie sowing disorder in society shows that the em-
pirical character brings into play three types of causes: internal causes of
a psychological nature (thoughtlessness, levity, etc.); long-term external
causes (defective education, bad company, etc.), and short-term causes
(occasional circumstances).17
In Kant’s eyes, that actions can be predetermined and fully ex-
plained exists by right and so not as a matter of fact, for such a knowledge
is not accessible to man. This is why he always employs the conditional
49
when he evokes psychological determinism. In the Metaphysical Founda-

tions of Natural Science, he explains that the empirical theory of the soul,
psychology, cannot become a science of nature, for “mathematics is not
applicable to the phenomena of inner sense and their laws” (4: 471).
Kant does not say that there are no causal laws regulating our empirical
character, only that these laws are not of the same character as physical
or chemical laws, which, thanks to mathematics, make it possible for men
to calculate and predict future phenomena. At best, psychological pre-
determinism authorizes an a posteriori causal explanation, one that does
not apply to future actions. At any rate, this is what is suggested in the
Reflection 5616 from the years 1776– 79:
A posteriori we will be able to find in sensibility the ground for action,

that is the explanatory ground [Erklärungsgrund] but not the determining
ground [Bestimmungsgrund] for the latter; a priori however, and when the
action is represented as future [antecedenter], we feel undetermined with
regard to the latter and still capable of accomplishing a first beginning
in the series of phenomena. (18: 256)
Affects only provide the explanatory ground for action and not
its determining ground, a ground that would make it possible for the
action to be foreseen. But the impossibility for man of finding the deter-
mining causes of actions does not mean that they do not exist. At most
it means that psychology does not get further than the simple empirical
observation of behavior, that is, the study of explanatory grounds, which
can only be undertaken after the event. This text cannot be used to call
in question Kant’s psychological pre-determinism.18 Kant writes that we
feel undetermined and capable of acting freely. As is confirmed in later
texts, the principle of causality also applies according to him to internal
sense, by way of the empirical character, though in a way that is certainly
too complicated for us to be able to understand. From a phenomenal
point of view, this feeling of freedom only rests on a subjective igno-
rance. We are not far from Leibniz’s argument, which throws a veil of
ignorance over the future. Even if our future is predetermined, we do
not know how, and so must continue to act as thought we were free. A
conditional freedom responding to a conditional pre-determinism, ex-
pressed in conditional form: “If some person were capable of complet-
ing the whole demonstration by means of which he could prove this
connection of the subject (which is Caesar), with the predicate (which
is his successful enterprise), he would then show that the future dicta-
torship of Caesar had its foundation in his notion or nature” (Leibniz
1998a, 65).
50
Kant takes up again this idea of a conditional pre-determinism, with

this essential difference that he refuses to consider, as does Leibniz, that
divine foreknowledge constitutes an effective knowledge of the latter. On
this question the Critique of Practical Reason remains in the lineage of the
Critique of Pure Reason. For in it Kant confirms yet again his psychological
pre-determinism in a passage that touches on the mystery of freedom:
It may be admitted that if it were possible for us to have so deep an

insight into a man’s character as shown both in inner and outer actions,
that every, even the least, incentive to these actions and all external oc-
casions which affect them were known to us, his future conduct could
be predicted with as great a certainty as the occurrence of a solar or
lunar eclipse, and we could nevertheless still assert that the man is free.
(CPrR, 5: 99, trans. modified)
In principle, for an infinite understanding, for example, the future con-

duct of a man is calculable in the last detail by virtue of laws of causality of
a quite special kind. Kant takes us right back to Leibniz’s pre-determinism,
in both its physical and psychological form, but not before ridding it of
the embarrassing residue still concealed in it. The hypothesis of free-
dom as a “private miracle” is set aside, and the theory of the plurality
of possible worlds is relegated to the status of an unprovable metaphysi-
cal doctrine.
There Is No Fate (Non Datur Fatum)
How does Kant sketch out the objection of fatalism? In what sense can he
continue to declare that man is free? The first reply is that the reinforce-
ment of phenomenal pre-determinism is counterbalanced by the claim
that the true origin of acts is noumenal freedom. At the heart of this dis-
tinction, to which I shall recur later, we find the idea that the radicality
of pre-determinism knows no equal save the radicality of freedom. But
it’s worth adding that the necessity that reigns in the phenomenal world
is by no means absolute, contrary to what was stated in the New Elucida-
tion. To understand this, it is worth remembering how Kant redefined the
categories of modality bit by bit with the help of the principle of causal-
ity. In the philosophy of Leibniz, necessity and contingency are charac-
terized by the notion of the possible, itself understood out of the prin-
ciple of contradiction. The contingent is that whose opposite is possible
(non-contradictory). The absolutely necessary is that whose opposite is
51
impossible (contradictory). Moral or hypothetical necessity is a necessity

founded in reason but whose opposite remains possible.
In the New Elucidation, contingency is no longer understood on the
basis of the possible, but in the manner of Wolff, as that which does not
contain in itself the determining ground for its existence. On the other
hand, Leibniz’s conception of absolute necessity— that whose opposite
is impossible, inconceivable— is retained. In The Only Possible Argument in
Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763),19 Kant goes into the
modal conception of absolute necessity in greater depth, without calling
into question its definition in terms of the possible. The absolute neces-
sity that intervenes in the proof of God’s existence is either, in the formal
sense of the possible, that whose opposite is self-contradictory, or else, in
the material sense of the possible, that whose nonexistence abolishes all
the data making up the domain of the thinkable.20 In both cases, necessity
is established on the basis of the notion of possibility.
We have to wait for the Critique of Pure Reason to see Kant break
with this Leibnizian conception of necessity. The refutation of the on-
tological proof relativizes the notion of absolute necessity. In the proof,
God is understood to be an absolutely necessary being, the being whose
nonexistence is impossible. But, replies Kant, “the absolute necessity of
the judgment is only a conditioned necessity of the thing, or of the predi-
cate in the judgment” (CPR, A 593– 94/B 621– 22). Once the triangle has
been posited as given, it necessarily contains three angles. The predicate
“three angles” is absolutely necessary even while being conditioned by the
existence of the subject. In the same way, it should be said: if God exists,
he is the absolutely necessary being. Contrary to what it pretends to be,
absolute necessity has a purely logical sense; it is dependent upon the
existence of the subject of the proposition, which latter has to be proved
on the basis of pure or empirical experience, which is impossible in the
case of God.
In the chapter devoted to the categories of modality, Kant explains
the material meaning that necessity has in experience, as opposed to
that logical meaning, which connects concepts without being able to
found existence in any way whatever. The principle of causality, in ac-
cordance with which “everything which happens is determined a priori
through its cause in the [field of] appearances,” means that “everything
which happens is hypothetically necessary.” According to Baumgarten’s
axioms (Metaphysica, §382 and §383),21 there is in nature neither blind
chance (non datur casus) nor blind necessity (non datur fatum), “always a
conditioned and therefore intelligible necessity” (CPR, A 227– 28/B 280).
Kant takes up again the terminology of Leibniz but in a quite different
sense. In his view, the category of necessity, in its material form, receives
52
from now on a causal meaning. This hypothetical necessity is not a ne-

cessity whose opposite is possible, but rather a necessity derived from a
given cause, in accordance with a law of causality. “Hypothetical” means
conditioned by a cause. Causal necessity is limited for different reasons:
(1) necessity never bears on the existence of substances but only on
the relation between phenomena whose existence is attested by experi-
ence; (2) it therefore has as a condition at least one already given entity;
(3) it always bears on the effect, the cause being given. One can never
know the necessity of the cause; for that would mean getting into an
infinite regression transcending the limits of experience, and therefore
of any possible knowledge. The human understanding is no more able
to go back up the series of past causes than it is able to scrutinize the
infinite series of future effects. Conditioned necessity therefore simply
means that for such and such a given cause, such and such an effect is
necessary. As opposed to blind and inexplicable destiny ( fatum),22 hypo-
thetical necessity is intelligible, it includes laws of nature, reasons, deter-
mined causes that render the world if not transparent at least accessible
to knowledge and understanding, within the strict limits of experience.
Understood in this way, conditioned necessity coincides with what
Kant calls “empirical contingency.” Here again, it is important to distin-
guish modal from causal conceptions of contingency. According to the
first view, inspired by Leibniz, the contingent is something whose nonex-
istence is thinkable, or again that whose opposite is not contradictory.23
This “intelligible contingency” has to be reformulated in the light of the
principle of causality: the contingent is something that can only exist as
the consequence of something, that is, as the effect of a cause. In the
absence of this cause, it could never have taken place. In a remark to the
thesis of the fourth “Antinomy,” Kant recalls that empirical contingency
designates the dependency of phenomena with regard to empirically de-
termining causes.24 He adds this crucial clarification, that it is quite im-
possible to conclude from this empirical contingency to any modal or in-
telligible contingency. His argument is that at the very moment an event
takes place one can never know whether its contrary is possible. Take the
example of a body in motion (= A) which passes over into the state of
rest (= non-A). One can say that non-A is possible because it has actually
taken place (what is real is possible). But at the moment A occurs, one
can never know if non-A is possible, therefore if A is contingent according
to this definition, because the state of rest does not yet exist. Intelligible
contingency presupposes an event whose contrary is simultaneously pos-
sible. However, since the principle of causality implies succession between
the cause and the effect, the opposite state occurs always after the first
state. All that we know is that “motion at one time and rest at another are
53
not related as contradictory opposites” (CPR, A 460/B 488, my emphasis).

The causal conception of contingency replaces the purely modal, which
thereby become problematic.
The pre-determinism that reigns in nature is therefore not a fatal-
ism. Just as destiny and chance are thrown out into the common category
of what is contrary to reason,25 (hypothetical) necessity and (empirical)
contingency are brought together under the idea of ground, the ground
of a previously determining cause. In this way Kant succeeds in reconcil-
ing causality and contingency, without appealing to the Leibnizian prin-
ciple of different possible worlds. The question whether at a certain mo-
ment an event is contingent, in the sense in which its contrary is possible,
cannot be answered, once the realm of possibilities, that of the divine un-
derstanding, has been set aside: “That yet another series of appearances
in thoroughgoing connection with that which is given in perception, and
consequently that more than one all-embracing experience is possible,
cannot be inferred from what is given; and still less can any such infer-
ence be drawn independently of anything being given” (CPR, A 231– 32/
B 284). There exists no other possible world running parallel to the real
world. By replacing intelligible contingency, defined in relation to the
possible, with empirical contingency, founded on causality, the Critique of
Pure Reason subjects the Leibnizian tree of possibilities to a severe prun-
ing, to the point that there remains only the trunk (experience) and the
roots (the principle of causality). One single phenomenal series effec-
tively determines one single future as the totality of real possibilities—
bound by the formal conditions of experience— which figure as so many
future presents, that is to say, events which will not fail to transpire by
virtue of causally necessary laws. What distinguishes this pre-determinism
from fatalism is not freedom, but the intelligibility of the causal series.
However, even if conditioned necessity is rational and contingent, it is no
less strictly determined and determining. So it can be of no help to us in
trying to decide the problem of freedom, whose solution has to be sought
elsewhere, in the existence of man viewed from a noumenal standpoint.
Solution 1: The Ideality of Time
To resolve the contradiction between the causality of nature and human

freedom, Kant disposes of the Leibnizian solution consisting in situating
freedom within the rational spontaneity of creatures, that is to say, in the
internal mechanism of the representations of the “spiritual automat.”
This was moreover the solution of the New Elucidation. But in the Critique
54
of Practical Reason, Kant now recognizes that it makes the mistake of clos-
ing freedom within a strict pre-determinism, ironically comparable to
the movement of the turnspit cited in the introduction to this chapter.
The “Critical Examination” refers explicitly to the solution of the “Third
Antinomy” from the first Critique, which holds, as one knows, to the dis-
tinction between phenomenon and thing in itself, what Michel Puech has
called the “dual worldliness” of man (1990, 460).26 As phenomenon, man
is endowed with an empirical character that subjects him, as it does all
other entities, to the necessity of the laws of nature. But nothing stands in
the way of also attributing to man, considered this time from a noumenal
standpoint, an unconditioned causality, situated in his intelligible char-
acter, entirely cut off from the conditions of experience. As a member
of the sensible world, man is situated in the causal series of nature, but
as belonging to the intelligible world, he remains fully free. The Critique
of Practical Reason reinforces the distinction between temporal phenom-
enon and atemporal thing in itself. Kant emphasizes that it is thanks to
the “principal supposition of the ideality of time” (CPrR, 5: 101) that the
solution to the dilemma of freedom could be found. In what sense? The
reasoning is based on the link between time and causality. If time existed
in itself, independent of the subject, if it affected things in themselves
instead of being limited to phenomena alone, there would be no way
out for human liberty; for being in all its forms would be subject to the
rigorous connection of the principle of causality, which latter accompa-
nies all succession. As a result of the causal conception of time, temporal
realism became synonymous with generalized fatalism. But because it is
ideal, an a priori form of the sensibility of the subject, time only concerns
phenomena and so leaves open the possibility (in the case of man con-
sidered as thing in itself) of a strictly atemporal noumenal freedom, one
which as such is independent of natural causality.
If Kant drastically prunes Leibniz’s tree of possibilities by suppress-
ing the hypothetical future, he frees freedom, understood in a tran-
scendental sense, from the limits imposed upon it by the system of pre-
established harmony, with its foreknowledge and its pre-determinism.
From now on it ceases to be necessary to make of freedom a mysterious
exception to the principle of sufficient reason, in the manner of Cru-
sius, because freedom no longer falls within the realm where empirical
causality exercises its sway. Kant now has room to take up again the
concept developed by Crusius, but this time by situating it upon the
purely noumenal plane. Transcendental freedom, which founds practi-
cal freedom, is an absolute spontaneity, in the sense of an unconditioned
causality;27 causality, since it is after all a power of beginning by itself a
series of phenomena, so conforming to the truth that there is no cause
55
without an effect; unconditioned, for freedom is a cause which is not

itself the effect of another anterior cause. Freedom, thus understood, is
independent of physical necessity (the causal laws of nature) and of all
divine preordination.
Solution 1 (continuation): The

Atemporality of Freedom
The price of the solution to the “Third Antinomy” is high. The causal
structure of time leaves no room for freedom, and freedom allows for
no temporal determination. The counterpart to the thesis of the ideality
of time is the atemporality of human freedom. In spite of temporal pre-
determinism, freedom is free because it is not subject to time. Freedom
is a causality of pure atemporal reason, which is omnipresent in all our
acts even while remaining withdrawn from the causal order of nature:
“Reason is present in all the actions of men at all times and under all
circumstances, but it is not itself in time” (CPR, A 556/B 584). Under the
figure of freedom, reason is determining and produces its effects in the
phenomenal world, but it is not determinable, since its causality is uncon-
ditioned. The agent is immediately under the power of reason, not in the
sense in which he will always act morally, but in the sense that despite his
past history the liar could precisely not have lied. As an absolute spon-
taneity, freedom has the power to suspend the course of time, it offers
the agent a task as if “the agent in and by himself began in this action
an entirely new series of consequences,” and in such a way that when we
judge his action, “we can regard the past series of conditions as not having
occurred” (CPR, A 555/B 583). It matters little that at the time when we
act, the past should no longer be in our power, since this past no longer
has any power over us. When the subject is conscious of his existence as
noumenon, he places himself under the atemporal jurisdiction of reason:
In this existence nothing is antecedent to the determination of his will;

every action and, in general, every changing determination of his exis-
tence according to the inner sense, even the entire history of his exis-
tence as a sensuous being, is seen in the consciousness of his intelligible
existence as only a consequence, not as a determining ground of his
causality as noumenon. (CPrR, 5: 97– 98)
Without developing it further, Kant here sketches out a fundamental idea

making it possible to disclose a relation, be it only negative, between free-
56
dom and time. Freedom does not simply have the power to suspend the
causal succession, it can also, and more profoundly, invert the course of
time. From a phenomenal point of view, time goes from the past towards
the future, for the past is the determining cause of the present and so
on for the future. However, freedom can make it be that the entire past
series of existence should be the effect and not the cause, the conse-
quence of the determination of the will. This reversal does not mean
that reason can change the past. It simply describes the temporal pro-
cess of free action: for the absolute spontaneity of freedom, it is not the
past which determines the future of the agent, but his future, under the
auspices of the goal of his action which determines his present and there-
fore, as a result, the whole of the past series of his acts. From a noumenal
point of view, causal predeterminism no longer makes any sense.
Human Freedom and Divine Freedom
What remains of the problem, so fundamental for Leibniz, of the compat-

ibility of human and divine freedom? The “Third Antinomy” only makes
sense for a being who is at once free and temporal; it makes no sense
for God, who, as an atemporal being, cannot be subject to any kind of
pre-determinism, “since in God no temporal sequence is thinkable, this
difficulty has no place” (Religion, 6: 50n). If divine freedom is not threat-
ened by determinism, and if, on its side, human freedom can be thought
without contradicting the principle of causality in nature, it only remains
to ask how the two freedoms can be brought into agreement with one
another. However secondary it might be, this problem is not ignored
by Kant, who addresses it in the “Critical Examination.” As intelligible,
noumenal beings, humans are independent of natural causality, but they
still could be dependent upon the causality of God, which would destroy
the idea of freedom. Kant gets back to Leibniz’s question from another
angle: it is no longer a matter of reconciling two established truths but
two ideas of reason. The transcendental ideality of time, the Kantian Ari-
adne’s thread in the labyrinth of freedom, provides a new way out.28 God
is a purely intelligible being, independent of the form of time, the cre-
ator of man as noumenon, not of man as phenomenon: “Just as it would
therefore be contradictory to say God is the creator of appearances, it is
also a contradiction to say that He, as the Creator, is the cause of actions
in the world of sense, as these are appearances; yet at the same time He
is the cause of the existence of the acting beings (as noumena)” (CPrR,
5: 102).29 Because he does not step outside the limits of the noumenal
57
world, God cannot be the cause of actions produced in the phenomenal

world, left to human free will. The critical distinction of the two points
of view cuts both ways. Natural necessity is a causality that only concerns
man as phenomenon and not as noumenon. Divine causality is a causal-
ity that only concerns man as noumenon, not as phenomenon. In this
sense, there is compatibility between divine atemporal freedom, human
freedom, at once atemporal in its cause and temporal in its effects, and
purely temporal natural necessity. The entire reasoning rests on the dis-
tinction between phenomena and things in themselves, through which
human freedom can be saved. If man were only phenomenal, he would
be entirely subject to the pre-determinism of nature (whether mechani-
cal or psychological), and he would be no freer than a turnspit. But in-
versely, if man were a thing in itself, a noumenon, his actions would be
regulated by divine causality, which would make of him a “marionette
or an automaton like Vaucanson’s, fabricated and wound up by the Su-
preme Artist” (CPrR, 5: 101). Vaucanson’s automaton is more elaborate
than a vulgar turnspit, but it remains an automaton deprived of freedom.
The image of the automaton employed by Leibniz serves to support the
Kantian theory of freedom. Leibniz overlooked human freedom in fa-
vor of God’s freedom. With Kant, divine freedom provides the model of
human action as a creative power, a power to begin something, with this
sole difference, that divine creation is eternal and infinite, whereas that
of man is finite and temporal.
One might bring against Kant the objection that the intelligible
freedom of man in its noumenal form remains, or so it seems, deter-
mined by God. Surely, what has to be demonstrated is the compossibility
of foreknowledge, inherent in the idea of God, with human freedom? No
doubt all this raises metaphysical questions that transcend the limits of
human knowledge. But for Kant, the idea of God is logically possible and
morally necessary. For, so far from being an obstacle to human freedom,
it remains a guarantee of the harmony between the two realms of nature
and of grace, interpreted as “this harmony of nature and freedom” (CPR,
A 815/B 843).30
Solution 2: Noumenal Duration
This reference of Kant’s thinking to that of Leibniz and his doctrine of

the two realms of nature and grace, undertaken with a view to throw-
ing light on the two worlds, phenomenal and noumenal, should not be
allowed to conceal the opposition between the two thinkers. Kant rein-
58
forced the physical pre-determinism that obtains in the realm of nature

and eliminated divine foreknowledge from the realm of grace. The future
now only exhibits one form instead of the two implied in the system of
preestablished harmony, namely, the temporal series of events that will
be present according to the conditioned necessity of causal laws— the
present future. In principle, this future is entirely predetermined, and
any speculation on possibilities which might never be present themselves
is a metaphysical illusion. And straightaway we are faced with a dilemma.
Freedom is an unconditioned causality, an atemporal cause, which is sup-
posed to produce temporal effects. How can freedom produce effects in
time if time is a predetermined causal order? Either freedom acts, but
loses itself at the very moment it temporalizes itself. Or else, it withholds
itself from the order of time, but then it has to give up acting. Two ways of
getting out of this alternative present themselves, the first of which moves
in the direction of a noumenal temporality that is essentially practical.
According to Kant, “pure reason, as a purely intelligible faculty, is
not subject to the form of time, nor consequently to the conditions of
succession in time” (CPR, A 551/B 579). As a purely theoretical and so
intelligible power, reason is eternal. But as a practical power, surely it has
to enter into a certain relation with time? In the “Critical Examination,”
Kant relies upon the practical reality of freedom— the ratio essendi of the
moral law— to bring out the idea of spontaneity. The intelligible char-
acter of the individual is not an original and unchangeable given, it is a
reality that is self-given: “For this action and everything in the past which
determined it belong to a single phenomenon of his character, which he
himself creates, and according to which he imputes to himself as a cause
independent of all sensibility the causality of that appearance” (CPrR,
5: 98). This creation of the character implies the idea of a process, an
intelligible noumenal duration, and opens up a new conception of the
future, laid out in the postulate of the immortality of the soul.
What is the genuinely temporal meaning of this postulate? The
object of the good will is the good, which is the highest good when it
is total and fulfilled. The moral law demands of the human will that it
seeks above all else to realize the first component of the highest good,
holiness, defined as the “complete fitness of the will to the moral law”
(CPrR, 5: 122). On the one hand, everyone is subject to this requirement,
which is a moral imperative. On the other hand, no finite rational being
could ever attain such a perfection of its will at any moment of its exis-
tence. Therefore, holiness “can be found only in an endless progress to that
complete fitness,” and “this infinite progress is possible, however, only
under the presupposition of an infinitely enduring existence and personal-
ity of the same rational being; this is called the immortality of the soul”
59
(CPrR, 5: 122). The complete realization of the highest good by the will
is only possible with this practical postulate, through which man awaits
“a further uninterrupted continuation of this progress, however long his
existence may last, even beyond this life” (CPrR, 5: 123). In other words,
the moral law requires of man, as person, that he postulate an infinite
duration. The “beyond this life” in no way designates the passage into an
eternal world, into a future life where the effort toward the good could
be brought to a definitive close; rather the contrary, the expression in
question indicates a hoped-for extension of mortal and finite duration
at the very heart of the phenomenal world into an infinite duration at
the service of the moral law. For man “cannot hope here or at any fore-
seeable point in his future existence” that the perfect adequation of his
will to the law be realized, and that is precisely why the will cannot hope
to attain this ideal save “in the infinity of its duration [in der Unendlichkeit
seiner Fortdauer]” (CPrR, 5: 123– 24).
The postulate of the immortality of the soul is in this sense the pos-
tulate of the infinity of time. It is the sign of a new form of temporality
which, following the expression of Philonenko, might be called “practi-
cal time” (1988, 170). What are the determinations of this temporality
required by human freedom? First of all, its infinity, which has to be
distinguished from that analyzed in the “Transcendental Aesthetic.” In
this case “the infinitude of time signifies nothing more than that every
determinate magnitude of time is possible only through limitations of
one single time that underlies it” (CPR, A 32/B 47– 48). This infinity of
time follows from its very nature as an intuition that is unlimited a priori.
It can be represented with the help of a spatial analogy figuring time as a
“line progressing to infinity, in which the manifold constitutes a series of
one dimension only” (CPR, A 33/B 50). The infinity of practical time con-
cerns not time as a form of intuition but the duration of existence. Dura-
tion is defined by Kant in a wholly general manner in the first “Analogy
of Experience”: “Only through the permanent does existence in different
parts of the time-series acquire a magnitude which can be entitled dura-
tion” (CPR, A 183/B 227). So duration is the permanence of existence in
a temporal series, capable of being more or less prolonged. To the ex-
tent that one cannot prove the permanence of the existence of man save
within the limits of his life, one has to conclude that human duration is
finite, in the sense of mortal. Whereas the succession of nows is infinite,
the form that this succession takes for human existence, that is, its dura-
tion, is limited. The postulate of the immortality of the soul, a postulate
that presupposes the infinity of duration itself, expresses the practical
requirement of a surpassing of the finitude of human duration, attested
in the experience of death.
60
Could it not be held that this very surpassing itself is caught in a

process of bad infinity, since the effort of the will towards the total reali-
zation of the highest good is an infinite progress whose end, even if it is
actually proposed as possible, can never be attained? In fact, this infinite
moral progress itself presupposes the anticipation of its own fulfillment.
It is at one and the same time indefinite and total, still being worked out
and fully accomplished. Its very indefiniteness presupposes its perfect and
unconditioned infinity. Kant suggests that the apprehension of this infin-
ity in act makes itself known in the second postulate, that of the existence
of God, the only one who alone is able to comprehend the infinity of my
duration.31 In this sense, one can say that “the immortality of the soul is
then, according to Kant, an immortality under the eye of God” (Marty 1996,
249). But this total apprehension of the infinite duration has also to be
accessible to the will of the acting individual, to the extent that progress
towards holiness presupposes an immediate and effective apprehension
of this finality, admittedly not by intuition or even by understanding but
at least by reason. A passage from the Opus postumum describes the self-
evidence of just such a practical and unconditioned finality:
The conditions of time, which make for the representation of hu-

manity and of its goal phenomena of sensible intuition, disappear if
the destination of man as a species admits, as founded in reason, his
ultimate finality as a principle. Man is already that being he realizes he
ought to be.32
The infinite duration of moral progress is then above all a tension whose
final destination, the perfection of the will, is always already presupposed.
On the one hand, the will is separated from its ideal of perfection by the
infinity of the future it has to traverse to achieve its realization. On the
other hand, however, it gets beyond this infinity by an immediate insight
that anticipates and grasps this ideal, with which it is identified from the
first. It has therefore already reached this end that it knows it has to wait
for. But the clear grasp of this end, far from suppressing the assignment
of the will to its temporally infinite perfectionment, far from extracting
it definitively from the course of time, only reaffirms, on the contrary,
the infinity of the duration needed for man to complete the realization
of his ideal.
In Kant’s view, death is not a boundary, an absolute closure as with
Heidegger, but, above all, a limit whose overcoming is made possible by
the practical use of our reason. The practical subject certainly knows
that his death will arrive, he knows that his duration is limited. But he
constantly projects himself beyond this limit, inscribing his action not in
61
the restricted duration of his life, threatened as it is at every moment by

death, but in an infinite future which has to last as long as his existence
can last and “even beyond this life.” To act on behalf of a future situated
beyond one’s own mortality, to work for a future which will probably
be not one’s own but that of others is the choice of a freedom that ad-
vances in the horizon of practical time, a freedom “in spite of death,” to
use Ricoeur’s expression (2007, 409).33 Practical time is therefore what
founds the realization of practical action; it is the condition that freedom
gives itself to respond to its own duty, and so to accomplish its destiny.
According to Kant, by the practical is meant what is possible through
freedom. Practical time is the time of freedom. So the question of the
relation of freedom to time in the Kantian philosophy can find a second
solution here, a solution other than the first one based on the atempo-
rality of noumenal freedom. As we have seen, this first solution certainly
makes it possible for freedom to avoid the mechanical causality in which
the time of experience is caught up. But by the same token, freedom is
caught in a rigid opposition between the atemporal supersensible and
the temporal domain of phenomena. So how can the free act be inserted
into the order of time? How can free will change and progress over time?
To the extent that, in the domain of the supersensible, reason constructs
the idea of an infinite duration, from a practical point of view one might
want to accept that the eternity of reason does not so much retain the
meaning of an absolute atemporality as that of an infinite practical tem-
porality. Reason is not subject to time in the sense that it is certainly sub-
ject neither to the succession of nows, nor to the finitude of duration.
But in its openness to the moral law, the will has to be thought in relation
to an infinite duration with which, moreover, it has to be aligned. Two
orders of the real have to be distinguished here, the mechanical order
of the time of experience and the order of practical time.34 Inasmuch as
the a priori causality of phenomenal time leaves no room for freedom,
practical time opens up a horizon for freedom, that of an infinite future.
The complex problem of the inscription of freedom in time is also
to be found at the heart of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,
though in a different perspective, that of the conversion to the good.
Man will only become good through “an endless progress,” in “inces-
sant laboring and becoming” (Religion, 6: 47– 48). But this progress itself
presupposes the radical conversion of the will, “a kind of rebirth” (Reli-
gion, 6: 48). The conversion of the will to the good has two determina-
tions. It is an “atemporal act of an intelligible character,” one which “has
to be manifest over time through a continual progress” (Bruch 1968,
82). In the noumenal order of freedom, this conversion implies both a
succession, a before and an after, and an infinite temporal progression.
62
How is that possible? Even if it is not affected by simple empirical suc-

cession, the act of conversion implies a form of temporality that renders
possible the idea of change and progression. Does the Kantian philos-
ophy include an explicit reference to this mode of practical temporality,
even if only in the form of a sketch? This is what is suggested by a text
from 1794, entitled The End of All Things.35 In this text, Kant tells us that
eternity has to be understood as the association of the idea of “an end of
all time [Ende aller Zeit] along with the person’s uninterrupted duration”
(8: 327). Eternity is not then an indefinite succession in time, even less
an absolute atemporality regarding which death allows for a transition.
It is a “duratio Noumenon” (8: 327). What is meant by such an expression,
an expression that sounds like an oxymoron? With this paradoxical idea,
Kant does not just have in mind the sense of eternity as the condition
of man after death, for “nothing stands in the way of its being applied
to homo noumenon in this life” (Bruch 1968, 90). The duratio noumenon
designates a duration that is noumenal, that is, infinite, unconditioned,
wholly transgressing the limits of experience, but it is, at the same time,
also a duration, a specific temporality, that precisely of practical time,
of freedom in its conversion and its infinite progression toward moral
perfection. With Kant, we are now in a position to offer a temporal for-
mulation of the categorical imperative: “We must take our maxims as
if, in all alterations from good to better going into infinity, our moral
condition, regarding its disposition (the homo Noumenon, ‘whose change
takes place in heaven’) were not subject to any temporal change at all”
(The End of All Things, 8: 335). In other words, we have to act as if our
good will commanded the whole of an infinite duration of existence, a
duratio noumenon.
To be sure, no one could deny the finitude of that temporality which
flows from human mortality.36 But the force of Kant’s thinking is to under-
stand the essence of this finitude as a limit. Just as any limit necessarily
presupposes the surpassing of the limit, the finitude of time is at the same
time the transgression of this finitude, the positing of the integral infinity
of our duration, on the basis of which alone we can apprehend our own
finitude. So the infinity of time can be called originary, to the extent that
is given from the first with finitude, a finitude with which it is immediately
co-originary. This means that in practical action, the lucid apprehension
of our mortality in its both certain and indefinite immanence is, at the
same time, the opening upon a beyond of our death, on an infinite future
in which the end envisaged by our freedom is situated. This is what one
might call the “practical immortality,” or rather the “transmortality” of
man, in the sense in which his possibility of dying is linked to a power to
63
transcend his death at the very heart of his life, by the inscription of his
acting into the horizon of practical time.
Practical time is primarily oriented toward the future. Such a future
is noumenal, in that it corresponds to an ideal, holiness, which will never
be present, therefore to a goal that exceeds the time of the world even
while conferring a practical orientation upon it. In this sense, with Kant,
we find not one but two figures of the future: the first, phenomenal, is
predetermined; the second, noumenal, would be the true abode of free-
dom. Is this solution entirely satisfactory? It might be if only it did not
leave the question of the relation between these two heterogeneous forms
of the future in the dark, thereby accentuating the opposition between
noumenal freedom and phenomenal pre-determinism. Faced with this
seemingly unanswerable difficulty, we shall explore another path, which
consists in seeking at the very heart of the phenomenal world a form of the
future that is not predetermined causally.
Solution 3: The Moral Possibility
My hypothesis is that, in his practical philosophy, and still more in his

theory of history, Kant is induced to sketch out an open conception of
the future, one that calls for a rehabilitation of the possible defined in a
new way. The modal conceptions of the categories of necessity and con-
tingency, rejected by the philosophy of knowledge, are reappropriated by
moral philosophy, which gives them a practical extension.
The Lectures on Ethics define “practical necessitation” in the frame
of the principle of reason, as determination by reasons or grounds. The
necessitatio pathologica operates per stimulus and so only applies to the an-
imal will (arbitrium brutum), which is incapable of withstanding it. The
necessita practica, proper to man, is per motiva; it only necessitates the free
will (arbitrium liberum) through motives which are either moral or patho-
logical: “An action is necessary if one cannot resist it; grounds are neces-
sitating if human powers are not adequate to resist them. But man can be
practically compelled per motiva, and then is not compelled but moved”
(27: 267). By virtue of his free will, man can also resist a pathological
motivation (like hunger, like torture), as also stand opposed to a rational
moral motivation, if his will is bad. In short, practical necessitation is not
absolute, ineluctable. But what do we mean by a necessity that “moves”
without necessitating? To become clear about this notion, the idea of
determination by some preceding reason is insufficient. So the notion of
64
possibility has to be brought in again, since practical necessity is a neces-

sity man can depart from.
In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant explains that the imperative
implied by the moral law is categorical and not hypothetical: “So act that
the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of
a universal legislation” (CPrR, 5: 30). This means, in the first instance, that
duty is absolutely necessary. At the same time, obedience to the moral law
is contingent, in the sense that its contrary is possible. Even if Kant identi-
fies free will with the autonomous will, he admits that the will can choose
what is wrong, commit itself to a malicious lie, for example.37 As opposed
to God, man does not carry out what is right according to a process that
is guaranteed in advance. For man, “the moral necessity is a constraint, an
obligation” (CPrP, 5: 81). What is the meaning of this “moral necessity”?
Moral obligation is not an absolute necessity, rather a free constraint, one
that inclines one to do the good rather than forcing one to do so. The
obligation is at one and the same time both morally necessary, it imposes
an unconditioned duty, a categorical imperative founded on the moral
law, while also presupposing the contingency of choice, in the sense in
which the opposite action, which is morally impossible, remains possible
in reality by virtue of the fact that this obligation appeals to the human
freedom of the finite subject. With Leibniz, the possibility of the oppo-
site action, included in moral necessity, remains purely formal, since it is
out of the reach of the individual, outreaches his complete notion. For
Kant, it is really in the hands of the subject, who can refuse to obey the
moral law, can choose heteronomy. Inversely, whatever the constraints of
the pathological inclinations might be, the autonomy of the will is always
possible.
In the “Critical Examination,” Kant employs a modal conception of
necessity, founded on the possible, to qualify the pre-determinism of nature:
Suppose I say of a man who has committed a theft that this act, by the
natural law of causality, is a necessary result of the determining grounds
existing in the preceding time and that it was therefore impossible that
it could have not been done. How then can judgment according to the
moral law make any change in it? And how can it be supposed that it
still could have been left undone because the law says that it should
have been left undone? (CPrR, 5: 95)
The reference to absolute necessity— that whose opposite is impossible— is

aimed at underlining, by way of contrast, the contingency of choice, de-
fined in a modal manner as that which might not have happened, that
whose nonexistence remains possible. The subject can try to hide behind
65
the idea of necessity, but the moral law reintroduces the possible in the
very process of action. For every action contrary to the law, the individual
has to say that “he could have left it undone” (CPrR, 5: 98). Repentance
bears witness to this past possibility. In the present moment of action, the
imperative of the moral law is the appeal to a future possibility.
The imperative of the law is a moral necessity that opens up two
possibilities for freedom: that of obeying the law, and its contrary, that of
not doing so. Necessity of the obligation (the prescribed action), versus
the contingency of the act (the action carried out). To say that is not to
attribute to Kant any defense of the freedom of indifference, since the
alternative in question is not symmetric. Since the choice is always made
if not according to, at least before the moral law, the agent is morally
bound to do the good. Take the example of the prince who asks of one
of his subjects that he make a false deposition against an honorable man,
threatening him with death if he refuses to do so. Duty commands abso-
lutely that one should not lie. The subject is conscious that he can refuse
the prince’s order and sacrifice his life to accomplish his duty; he knows
that he can die for someone else: “Whether he would or not he perhaps
will not venture to say; but that it would be possible for him he would
certainly admit without hesitation” (CPrR, 5: 30).
What is the meaning of this possibility? It is not simply logical but
real, since the action of resisting a sovereign is an event which can be
perfectly well integrated into experience, or, in other terms, is compat-
ible with the formal laws of experience. We have to resist the tempta-
tion to think that the object of the moral law is for Kant an inaccessible
ideal. Rather, it invariably assumes the form of an action that is on every
occasion concretely realizable, even if one can never be certain of its
purely moral character. This is true even of the supreme object of duty.
Thus, “the subjective effect of this law, i.e., the intention which is suit-
able to this law and which is necessary because of it, the intention to
promote the practically possible highest good, at least presupposes that
the latter is possible. Otherwise it would be practically impossible to strive
for the object of a concept, which, at bottom, would be empty and with-
out an object” (CPrR, 5: 143). To logical possibility— the conformity with
the law of thought, with non-contradiction— and to real possibility—
the agreement with the formal conditions of experience, notably the
law of causality38 — there has to be added a moral39 or practical possi-
bility, which has to be defined as conformity with the moral law. On the
other hand, moral impossibility is what contravenes the moral law (in
the sense in which, for example, it is morally impossible to lie). Moral
possibility is not formal, it is a real possibility posited by the moral law
and capable of being or not being realized. On the basis of this new defi-
66
nition of the couple possible/impossible, a modal conception of moral

necessity can be constructed. Duty is morally necessary for its contrary
is morally impossible, since it contradicts the moral law. So it pertains to
moral possibility to transform itself immediately into moral necessity; it
exhibits a tendency to exist, which is what we call duty: what is morally
possible, in conformity with the moral law, is morally necessary and so
has to be realized. Moral necessity implies the real possibility of the act.
You ought, therefore you can. The possibility in question here is not a
purely moral possibility— in which case the statement would be a tru-
ism (what is demanded by duty is a fortiori allowed by the moral law, in
conformity with the latter). Quite the contrary, it is a real possibility— in
the absence of which the categorical imperative would take on this para-
doxical form: you ought to do something but you can do nothing. For
all that, the categorical imperative does not abolish the contingency of
the act; for it is conditioned by the choice made by the will, and in such
a way that its contrary— what is wrong— is always possible (in the real
sense). Thus, moral necessity is a strange synthesis of the two necessi-
ties (absolute and hypothetical) Leibniz had already distinguished; it is
that whose contrary is morally impossible and which still is, nevertheless,
really possible.
By introducing surreptitiously a new figure of possibility, the moral
doctrine overthrows the conception of the future, whether from a phe-
nomenal or from a noumenal point of view. The very idea of duty in-
cludes within it analytically a reference to the future. Thou shalt not kill.
The duty to do or not to do something implies that the duty to carry out
or to refuse a possibility refers to what is still in the future at the time
the obligation is formulated. From this point of view, the phenomenal
future is not just a series of predetermined events predictable along the
lines of an eclipse, it is also a totality of undetermined practical possibili-
ties, which may or may not be actualized. To appreciate this, it is enough
to be reminded of the example of the individual engaged by his prince
to bear false witness under pain of death. Is the action of this individual
predictable? If one replies that the subject is necessarily going to obey
the prince and not the moral law, by accepting to lie under pain of death,
then one denies a priori his freedom, one attributes to him a will deprived
of choice (arbitrium brutum), which makes of the imperative of the moral
law an absurdity. If inversely one affirms that the individual is necessarily
going to resist the sovereign, sacrifice his life, one predicts an action that
relies on holiness, not on virtue. The only thing that can be said is that
the action is morally and really possible. So for human actions at least an
indetermination of the future has to be admitted, an indetermination
that does not rely on our ignorance. The action is unpredictable because
67
both this outcome and its contrary are within the power of the subject at
the moment of its accomplishment.
The Unforeseeability of the Future
Moral philosophy silently undermines the pre-determinism of nature.

Whenever it is operative, the moral law opens up an undetermined
future, and this even within the phenomenal field. At the moment he
decides to lie, the individual really can not lie and inversely. The predic-
tion of human behavior is in this sense impossible and this in principle
as well as in fact. The movements of the will always prove to be infinitely
more complex than those of the stars. But, it might be objected, practi-
cal possibility is not a demonstrable knowledge, since it derives from the
moral law as a fact of reason and so conforms to the regime of rational
belief. So it does not conflict directly with the pre-determinism of nature.
Kant did not always respect this critical limitation. In the theory of
history, where he struggles against fatalism, he adopts little by little the
thesis regarding the impossibility of objectively determining the future.
To be sure, not in the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim
of 1784, which begins with the reminder that all human actions, in their
phenomenal manifestations, are determined by universal laws of nature
(8: 17). In order to confer a sense on history, the philosopher has there-
fore to operate with the hypothesis of a hidden plan of nature, regulating
the historical life of man. In his essay Toward Perpetual Peace (1795),40 Kant
takes up again the idea that progress in history is guaranteed by nature.
In this way nature guarantees perpetual peace through the mechanism

of human inclinations itself, with an assurance that is admittedly not
adequate for predicting its future (theoretically) but that is still enough
for practical purposes and makes it a duty to work toward this (not
merely chimerical) end. (8: 368)
The guarantee offered by nature takes on the form of a practical pos-

tulate designed to support action in favor of perpetual peace, which it
shows not to be impossible. But why is this hypothesis incapable of pre-
dicting theoretically the future of humanity? Why, in a general way, does
this future transgress the bounds of human knowledge? Is it on account
of our ignorance of specific causal laws regulating human actions in their
phenomenal manifestations, or by virtue of a freedom which cannot be
subject a priori to any natural law?
68
The essay Toward Perpetual Peace does not respond to this question.
The lectures in Anthropology41 do however provide a significant indication,
under the head devoted to the gift of divination:
All prophesies that foretell an inevitable fate to a people, for which they
are themselves still responsible and which therefore is to be brought
about by their own free choice, contain an absurdity— in addition to the
fact that the foreknowledge is useless to them, since they cannot escape
from it. For in this unconditional fate (decretum absolutum) there is thought
to be a mechanism of freedom, by which the concept contradicts itself. (7:
188– 89)
This passage seeks once again to underline the falsity of fatalism. But
instead of relying upon the classical argument of the confusion between
absolute necessity and conditioned necessity, Kant suggest that peoples
are the authors of their own destiny, as if, in the domain of history, free-
dom authorized an open-ended conception of the future.
We have to wait for Kant’s last reflections on history, the second sec-
tion of The Conflict of the Faculties of 1798,42 to see him resolve the equivocal
status of the future. Kant raises the question of the possibility of a predic-
tive history, a history directed towards the future and not towards the past,
one that might make it possible for us to know whether the human species
is progressing constantly and will continue to do so. A history of the future!
What a surprise. In order to think such a concept, it helps to refuse both
those representations of history that deny progress (“terroristic” and “ab-
deritic”) and those, inspired by Leibnizian optimism, which advocate an
indefinite progress guaranteed in advance (“eudaemonistic”) (7: 81– 82).
No experience can be adduced that will make it possible to resolve the
problem of the future progress of humanity. For what reason? For “we are
dealing with beings that act freely, to whom, it is true, what they ought to
do may be dictated in advance, but of whom it may not be predicted what
they will do” (7: 83). The indetermination of the future is objective, not
the result of some subjective ignorance with respect to causes, but the
consequence of human freedom. As the Reflection 8077 stipulates, “with
regard to freedom nothing can be predicted with certitude” (19: 605). To
pretend to be able to foresee the future, to anticipate what actions men
will do, comes down to adopting unconsciously an infinite point of view:
For that would be the standpoint of the Providence which is situated

beyond all human wisdom, and which likewise extends to the free ac-
tions of the human being; these actions, of course, the human being
can see, but not foresee with certitude (for the divine eye there is no
69
distinction in this matter); because, in the final analysis, the human

being requires coherency according to natural laws, but with respect to
his future free actions he must dispense with this guidance or direction.
(The Conflict of the Faculties, 7: 84)
Far from being an argument against human freedom, divine foreknowl-

edge is here a possible point of view serving to throw into relief the finitude
of humankind. One would have to be endowed with an infinite under-
standing to be able to foresee actions that conform to no natural law of
causality, which is impossible for man. So we have to recognize that free
acts are predictable neither along the model of divine foreknowledge,
which remains an unprovable simple idea, nor along that of the eclipse,
which is quite inadequate for the task. Freedom is certainly subject to a law,
the moral law, but this cannot be equated with a law of causality giving rise
to a possible prediction. Prescription is not prediction. For what reason ex-
actly? Because the indeterminateness of the future is rooted in the finitude
of human freedom, as a power of doing either right or wrong. After the
previous quote, Kant adds that “if we were able to attribute to the human
being an inherent and unalterably good, albeit limited, will, we would be
able to predict with certainty the progress of his species toward the better,
because it would concern an occurrence that he himself could produce”
(7: 84). But this is not the case. We do not know a priori what will be the
choice of our freedom, what possibility it will actualize. The categorical
imperative is a moral necessity; it obliges without necessitating.
The Principle of Insufficient Reason
We have seen that Kant contests the application of the principle of cau-
sality to human freedom, for the reason that the latter is situated beyond
the sphere of jurisdiction of this principle (that is beyond the experi-
ence). This does not mean all the same that freedom is lawless and acts
without any ground. Such a freedom of indifference is, for Kant, an illu-
sion, a pure nothing.43 The will is always determined according to max-
ims that assume the form of motives— respect for the law or inversely,
egoism— but these motives are themselves accepted by virtue of a free
act of will, whose ground cannot be determined. The research into max-
ims that motivate the act gets lost in an infinite regression of such a
kind that “the first subjective ground of adoption of moral maxims is
inscrutable [unerforschlich]” (Religion, 6: 22). In this sense, free will blocks
the principle of sufficient reason, whether the latter bears on a search
70
for causes or for maxims. Kant refutes both what he calls “determinism”
(Determinismus)— he invents the word— defined as the determination of
the will “through inner sufficient grounds” (Leibniz), and “indetermin-
ism” (Indeterminism), which concerns the freedom of indifference (Reli-
gion, 6: 49– 50n). Free will has this paradoxical structure of being reason-
able even while remaining inscrutable, and so presupposes what I will
call “the principle of insufficient reason.”44 This principle signifies that,
in the case of free acts, there always do exist reasons, grounds (maxims,
motives, circumstances, etc.), but that these grounds never completely ex-
plain why the act took place, that is to say, never succeed in establishing a
necessary relation of cause to effect between the grounds and the act. For
that it is necessary to appeal to free will, which is not, in the strict sense, a
sufficient explanation, for it implies precisely that the act might not have
taken place. This is particularly evident in the case mentioned earlier of
the malicious liar. The liar did not lie without any ground; indeed he did
it for reasons both internal (wickedness, levity) and external (defective
education, bad company, circumstances, etc.). But these grounds do not
sufficiently explain the act, whose origin is to be traced back to the abso-
lute spontaneity of freedom. In the eyes of Kant, the act does not appear
to us as absurd, for we grasp its grounds, but we think that all the same
the individual might not have lied, so that he is morally responsible for
his act. He is entirely culpable just as soon as he lied. Even in the case of
a moral action, one cannot say that the motive of practical reason, respect
for the law, is sufficient to explain the act. If it were the case, there would
never be bad actions. The moral possibility is not even in itself a sufficient
ground to produce the act, which requires the adhesion of the free will.
Three Figures of the Future
Kant thought he had found the solution to the problem of pre-determinism

with his thesis concerning the atemporality of human freedom, by at-
tributing to it, mutatis mutandis, one of the properties of divine freedom,
creation, in the sense of the capacity to begin by oneself a series of phe-
nomena. This brought with it a refashioning of the conception of the
possible and of the future, whose stages I will recapitulate to conclude
this chapter.
1. Practical philosophy breathes life back into the tree of possibilities,

drastically pruned by theoretical philosophy. In fact it rehabilitates a
71
modal conception (defined out of the possible) of the categories of ne-

cessity and contingency, which had been set aside by transcendental phi-
losophy in favor of a causal interpretation of the former. Logical possi-
bility, defined by the principle of contradiction, is replaced by a moral
possibility founded in conformity to the moral law.
2. The unpredictability of the future not only has a theoretical cause

(the finitude of the human understanding, ignorant of so many of the
laws governing universal pre-determinism in nature), it also stems from
the radical finitude of freedom as a power of good and evil, which Kant
integrated little by little into his system.
3. Now there exists not just one but three figures of the future in Kantian
thinking, which can be distinguished with the help of the categories of
modality. The future is for man the branching of possibilities, which can
be divided into three. (1) The noumenal future is a pure possibility, a
future which can never be made present but which is the object of a moral
postulate. (2) The phenomenal future is a totality of real possibilities,
that which can be present. It presents two facets: (2.1) the predetermined
future covers events subject to the causal laws of nature on the model
of the eclipse. It is that which will be present, according to a conditioned
necessity that includes empirical contingency (dependence upon an an-
terior cause); (2.2) the practically undetermined future corresponds to
those events which bring human freedom into play; it is that which ought
to be present, according to a moral necessity that preserves in each instance
the contingency of the choice (as that whose contrary is really possible),
therefore remains unpredictable in principle. The future is thereby
understood to be a possibility which ought to be and which can still not
be. In this last figure, absent from the Leibnizian system, the future is
thought not as a differed present or as an all already accomplished past,
but as future. As such, the future includes an indetermination that follows
from the principle of insufficient reason and, in the final analysis, from
freedom as the power of contraries, the power of positing alternatives.
This indetermination lies outside the principle of bivalence and of divine
foreknowledge. Propositions bearing on future contingents, whenever
they bear on human actions, can in consequence be said to be indeter-
minate as to their truth value. To take up again the earlier example, the
statement that says that “the subject threatened by his prince will agree to
bear false witness to save his life” is neither true nor false. Kant has liber-
ated the branching of possibilities: there no longer exists as with Leibniz
72
one and one path only, laid out in advance for each individual, but a plu-
rality of pathways realized as a function of the choices made by the free
will of individuals. Several questions remain in suspense. The boundary
between the predetermined future of natural phenomena (2.1) and the
practically undetermined future of human actions (2.2) remains surely,
in itself, and in certain cases, undetermined, and difficult to define? In a
general way, one might ask how the three figures of the future are to be
laid out, one in relation to the other. Don’t they imply a multiplication of
the modes of temporality, one that renders untenable the Kantian thesis
of the atemporality of human freedom?

Christophe Bouton Time and Freedom

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Time and Freedom

Northwestern University Press

English translation by Christopher Macann copyright © 2014 by Northwestern

2014. Originally published by Presses Universitaires de Toulouse in 2007

as Temps et liberté; copyright © 2008 Presses Universitaires du Mirail (Toulouse,

France). All rights reserved.

Translated from the French by Christopher Macann

Northwestern University Press

1. The most basic is the quantitative approach, which consists in determin-

of its quantification. Nevertheless, a central place is certainly granted to

2. We can understand why the quantitative approach must have seemed

philosophical decision, which consists in defining time on the basis of

The transcendentally “absolute” which we have brought about by the

If the phenomenological reduction is to be complete, radical, it has to

flow of temporal objects, the third stratum of time. At the beginning of

The limit of the Husserlian phenomenology of time is not that of

3. The subjectivist approach no doubt throws some light on the time of

consciousness” (Philosophy of Nature, 1970, §258, 230). So does time arise

vision of the phenomena of temporality, which moreover are themselves

5. Despite the different approaches adopted to decipher the enigma,

to actions. Mimesis is the representation of an action, just as plot is the

6. In this book I propose to follow up this unexplored path, one that

tigate the conception of time which is involved in that notion of freedom.

and, in particular, on the status of the future, no matter how important

Three Kantian Solutions to the

Kant and the Principle of

To determine means attributing a predicate to a subject by exclud-

If future events are predetermined, propositions bearing on future con-

The Antinomy of Freedom and Time

The inconsistencies encountered earlier in connection with Leibniz have

how can pre-determinism coexist with freedom, when according to prede-

The Problem of Psychological

Does Leibniz’s Kantian critique imply a rejection of psychological deter-

All the actions of men in [the field] of appearances are determined in

when he evokes psychological determinism. In the Metaphysical Founda-

A posteriori we will be able to find in sensibility the ground for action,

Kant takes up again this idea of a conditional pre-determinism, with

It may be admitted that if it were possible for us to have so deep an

In principle, for an infinite understanding, for example, the future con-

There Is No Fate (Non Datur Fatum)

impossible (contradictory). Moral or hypothetical necessity is a necessity

from now on a causal meaning. This hypothetical necessity is not a ne-

not related as contradictory opposites” (CPR, A 460/B 488, my emphasis).

Solution 1: The Ideality of Time

To resolve the contradiction between the causality of nature and human

without an effect; unconditioned, for freedom is a cause which is not

Solution 1 (continuation): The

In this existence nothing is antecedent to the determination of his will;

Without developing it further, Kant here sketches out a fundamental idea

Human Freedom and Divine Freedom

What remains of the problem, so fundamental for Leibniz, of the compat-

world, God cannot be the cause of actions produced in the phenomenal

Solution 2: Noumenal Duration

This reference of Kant’s thinking to that of Leibniz and his doctrine of

forced the physical pre-determinism that obtains in the realm of nature

Could it not be held that this very surpassing itself is caught in a

The conditions of time, which make for the representation of hu-

the restricted duration of his life, threatened as it is at every moment by

How is that possible? Even if it is not affected by simple empirical suc-

Solution 3: The Moral Possibility

My hypothesis is that, in his practical philosophy, and still more in his

possibility has to be brought in again, since practical necessity is a neces-

The reference to absolute necessity— that whose opposite is impossible— is