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Having asked in his first Critique what we can know, Kant turns here to the question of what we ought to do. He argues that pure reason, without help from…
Having asked in his first Critique what we can know, Kant turns here to the question of what we ought to do. He argues that pure reason, without help from desire or experience, can give us a moral law, and that our awareness of this law shows that we are free. From morality he goes further: since we must hope that virtue and happiness will finally be united, practical reason leads us to believe in God and the immortality of the soul, which theoretical reason could never prove.
Context and significance
Published in 1788, three years after the Groundwork, the book ends with Kant's most famous words: two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, 'the starry heavens above and the moral law within'. This translation is by T. K. Abbott. Read his Critique of Pure Reason, and see Kant's life.
About the author
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) spent his whole life in and around Königsberg in East Prussia, where he taught at the university for decades and kept such regular habits that, according to legend, neighbours set their clocks by his afternoon walk. He was fifty-seven when he published the Critique of Pure Reason, which changed philosophy.
Answering David Hume, who he said woke him from his dogmatic slumber, Kant asked what we can know, what we ought to do and what we may hope, and gave the world the categorical imperative and the motto of the Enlightenment, 'Dare to know'. His short essay Perpetual Peace is his most accessible work.