What are Kant's actual views on faith? Everyone knows what he says in the preface to the second edition of the CPR about limiting knowledge to make room for belief but elsewhere, especially in the third section of the Groundwork, he speaks of freedom (and hence by implication God etc.) as something that can be demonstrated from reason. Because we have reason that transcends experience our causality is free, and reason itself can effect the division between appearances and things-in-themselves necessary for us to 'know' our freedom. The only thing that makes freedom not-knowledge is that we can't know anything about it in itself. In the Dialectic on the other hand he speaks of it as something that we are merely allowed to think of for practical purposes. Usually people present Kant as an agnostic who leaves you the option to believe in freedom and this certainly is how he sounds in the Dialectic but in the Groundwork he sounds quite different. There is another relevant passage in the CPR in the section on the transcendental ideal and the cosmological proof (in which he permanently BTFO's all retarded Godproofs and assblasts zoomer tradcaths into all eternity): "The transcendental object which forms the basis of phenomena, and, in connection with it, the reason why our sensibility possesses this rather than that particular kind of conditions, are and must ever remain hidden from our mental vision; the FACT IS THERE, the reason of the fact we cannot see." In other words the transcendental object is not something we 'believe' in, we must posit it logically, it's just unknowable in itself, and it would seem he wants freedom (hence God etc.) to be like this. But then how is this not knowledge?What did Kant mean by faith and what is the relation between faith and reason, especially practical reason, for Kant? This has always confused me about him, he seems to vacillate between language of faith alone and language of rational demonstration; in the second critique he seems to vacillate back and forth from page to page honestly. Fichte, on the other hand, makes belief in freedom an absolute choice that is prior to thinking.
I believe in what I know and know what I believe in: the transcendental aesthetic.
