3i2 Kant: A Biographypriori and empirical knowledge.^161 He also informed Schütz that he would
not review the third part of Herder's Ideas because he had to "work on the
Foundation of the Critique of Taste."i(>2
The second Critique follows the main outlines of the first. It has a long
first part, entitled "Doctrine of the Elements of Pure Practical Reason,"
and a short "Doctrine of the Method of Pure Practical Reason." The first
part is divided into an Analytic and a Dialectic. It also has a Deduction, a
Typic (corresponding to the schematism in the first Critique), as well as an
Antinomy. But the second Critique, and especially the Analytic, also shares
some characteristics with the mathematical method of the Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science. There are definitions, theorems and prob¬
lems, and observations, though deduction seems to be substituted for proof.
It is not always clear whether the subject matter demands the divisions and
the methodical treatment Kant provides for it, or whether this is due to
Kant's forced attempts to make the second Critique conform to the first.
But the work does succeed in clarifying the concerns of the Foundations and
of the more popular essays and reviews that preceded it.
According to the Groundwork, moral philosophy has three tasks: (i) to
identify and establish "the supreme principle of morality," (2) to exam¬
ine pure practical reason critically, and (3) to establish a metaphysics of
morals.^163 Kant believed he had accomplished the first task in the Ground¬
work, and he thought in 1785 that the other two tasks could be accom¬
plished easily in another work to be entitled the Critique of Practical Reason.
Since the metaphysics of morals was "capable of a high degree of popu¬
larity and adaptation to the common human understanding," the third
task would be easy enough. But the second task turned out to be much more
complicated than he had thought, and so the second Critique accomplished
no more than the second task. The Metaphysics of Morals had to wait for
another day.
Whereas much of his theoretical work was concerned with showing that
reason has much less power than had been assumed by his rationalistic
predecessors, Kant's moral philosophy may be seen as an attempt to show
that morality is the exclusive domain of reason. Since "freedom" is also
one of the basic ideas to which theoretical reason leads us, it forms the
point at which the two Critiques come together. Kant believes that the sec¬
ond Critique shows that "freedom" is a genuine concept, that is, not a mere
thought, but something that has a genuine foundation in morality. Never¬
theless, Kant insists that we cannot know ourselves to be free in any strict
sense. It is our moral experience, or perhaps better, the experience of our