Among the causes in appearance there can surely be nothing that could begin a series absolutely and from itself. Every action, as appearance, insofar as it produces an occurrence, is itself an occurrence, or event, which presupposes another state in which its cause is found; and thus everything that happens is only a continuation of the series, and no beginning that would take place from itself is possible in it. Thus in the temporal succession all actions of natural causes are themselves in turn effects, which likewise presuppose their causes in the time-series. An original action, through which something happens that previously was not, is not to be expected from the causal connection of appearances. (CPR, A 543/B 571, 538)
In other words, as Kant also concludes: “If, therefore, everything happens according to mere laws of nature, then at every time there is only a subordinate but never a first beginning . . .” (CPR, A 444/B 472, 484).
Now, without such beginning, one could never have arrived at this present state, which is of course an impossibility. The impossibility of finding a first cause would signify that no completeness of causes can be reached, which would contradict the principle of sufficient reason, which precisely demands such a completeness. This is why Kant insists that by following the mere causality of nature one could never attain a “completeness of the series on the side of the causes descending one from another” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484). This aporia signifies the impossibility of the antithesis (“There is no freedom, but everything in the world happens solely in accordance with laws of nature”), which precisely claimed there was only one causality, the causality of nature: such causality cannot provide the first beginning that would ensure the completeness of causes and satisfy its own requirement. Kant then concludes that “the proposition that all causality is possible only in accordance with laws of nature [nach Gesetzen der Natur], when taken in its unlimited universality, contradicts itself, and therefore this causality cannot be assumed to be the only one” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484, emphasis mine).
As a consequence, another causality must be admitted, and another sense of the event than the one presented in the second analogy, one that would happen “without its cause being further determined by another previous cause” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484). Such an event would happen outside the law of cause and effect, and as it were “from itself,” a pure happening as opposed to the neutralized or “impoverished” events of the second analogy of experience. Kant describes this new sense of the event in terms of spontaneity, that is, as that which begins from itself, an “absolute causal spontaneity beginning from itself” that he also names “transcendental freedom,” transcendental insofar as it transcends the course of nature. Such a transcendental freedom must be assumed, although “no insight into it is achieved” (CPR, A 450/B 478, 486), since it is not a part of the phenomenal world, which remains subject to natural deterministic causality. Indeed, it cannot be part of the phenomenal world as it contradicts the fundamental law of causality structuring the unity of the world as nature.
Kant first and provisionally characterizes freedom negatively as foreign to law, as a sort of “lawlessness” (CPR, A 447/B 475, 485) rebel to universal determinism, leaping out of natural causality. Indeed, in one sense (the negative sense), freedom is independence from the laws of nature, a “liberation from coercion” or “from the guidance of all rules.” Freedom in this context is identified with lawlessness: Kant for instance speaks of the “lawless faculty of freedom” (CPR A 451/B 479, 489), and he goes so far as to claim that freedom is “contrary” to causal law: “Thus transcendental freedom is contrary to the causal law” (CPR, A 445/B 473, 485). Freedom seems as antinomical to rules and laws as nature is structured according to them, to such an extent that Kant adds pleasantly: “if freedom were determined according to laws, it would not be freedom, but nothing other than nature” (CPR, A 447/B 475, 485)! With transcendental freedom, we are, as it were, leaping out of causality, that is to say, of nature, if not out of the world. Such faculty of freedom is indeed literally “out of this world” because it cannot appear in the field of appearances as a spatiotemporal given and is for that very reason termed “transcendental.” Kant explains that freedom taken in the cosmological sense, that is, as the faculty of beginning a state from itself, “is a pure transcendental idea, which, first, contains nothing borrowed from experience, and second, the object of which cannot be given determinately in any experience” (CPR, A 533/B 561, 533). Such faculty of freedom is noumenal since it cannot appear in a spatiotemporal causal network. In fact, such freedom is “contrary to the laws of nature,” “to all possible experience” (CPR, A 803/B 831, 676). It can only be assumed as an outside of the world, and yet this outside makes the world possible by securing the completeness of causes. The completeness of the world, and its possibility, rests upon this noumenal, outerworldly freedom. Such is the enigma presented by Kant: the completeness of the world lies outside the world, and yet this outside constitutes the world: it is, as it were, the outsideness of the world.25
Transcendental freedom, Kant explains, is the capacity of a cause to produce a state spontaneously, or “from itself” (von selbst) (CRP, A 533/B 561, 533). A transcendentally free cause would be a “first cause,” that is, without a prior cause. Kant justifies this claim by appealing to a requirement of reason, going back to the ancient tradition of the first mover: “The confirmation of the need of reason to appeal to a first beginning from freedom in the series of natural causes is clearly and visibly evident from the fact that (with the exception of the Epicurean school) all the philosophers of Antiquity saw themselves as obliged to assume a first mover for the explanation of motions in the world, i.e., a freely acting cause, which began this series of states first and from itself” (CPR, A 450/B 478, 488). The first instance of a free-acting cause is thus the first mover, which allows one to conceive of an origin of the world. The origin of the world cannot be in the world. Yet, as mentioned, the world as a totality is only possible on such basis. In fact, nature and freedom are for Kant thoroughly intertwined: absolute spontaneity is said to begin, “from itself,” “a series of appearances that runs according to natural laws” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484), this already indicating that free causality, although independent from natural causality, is intertwined with it: just as natural necessity rests on transcendental freedom, freedom in turn produces effects in the world.
Kant recognizes that so far he has only established the necessity of a first beginning of a series of appearances from freedom “only to the extent that this is required to make comprehensible an origin of the world” (CPR, A 448/B 476, 486), which clearly for Kant does not apply to us. However, he insists, because “the faculty of beginning a series in time entirely on its own is thereby proved” (while he immediately recognizes, as alluded to prior, that this proof gives us no insight into it since such a faculty is transcendental and never to be observed within a field of appearances), then “we are permitted,” he continues, “also to allow that in the course of the world different series may begin on their own . . . and to ascribe to the substances in those series the faculty of acting from freedom” (CPR, A 450/B 478, 486). Kant thus posits the capacity to begin absolutely, to be a spontaneous free cause, cause of itself, causa sui, while also stating that such power is operating in the world. Further, Kant warns us not to be “stopped here by a misunderstanding, namely, that since a successive series in the world can have only a comparatively first beginning, because a state of the world must always precede it, perhaps no absolutely first beginning of the series is possible during the course of the world” (CPR, A 451/B 479, 488). This is only a misunderstanding, “for here we are talking of an absolute beginning not, as far as time is concerned, but as far as causality is concerned” (CPR, A 451/B 479, 488). There is the origin of the world, and there is also an origin in the world. It will be possible to speak of an absolute beginning in the world.
Kant