Kant’s Social Contract and Transcendental Illusion
The Social Contract According to Kant
The social contract allows individuals to leave the state of nature to enter a civil state. It is not a historical fact but a regulative idea that requires the legislature to enact laws as if these were the outcome of the united will of the people. The social contract entails the total submission of individuals to an authority, similar to Kantian thinking about Hobbes. However, it also implies that the individual is a co-legislator; that is, no law can be adopted without his consent. Therefore, the ruler has to make laws as if emanating from the general will, which approximates Kant’s thought to that of Rousseau.
If a person or a group of people applies force to others, it shall not be considered that a social contract has been mediated if it has been imposed by force.
Freedom and Political Philosophy
Freedom, for both Kant and Rousseau, is a natural right that belongs to each individual. Kant argues for positive political freedom, for which each individual becomes a legislator, that is, a co-author of the laws of the State. At this point, Kant departs from Hobbes and approaches Rousseau’s idea of self-legislation in the concept of the general will. The ruler should legislate as if it were possible for the united will of the people to consent to the laws.
The legal concept of freedom does not express civil disobedience, since Kant, like Hobbes, believed that submission to state power was a necessary condition for social order. To avoid excesses of the ruling power, Kant relies on his defense of freedom of expression. The juridical concept of freedom does not express civil disobedience, as Kant did not defend it in his time.
Transcendental Illusion
The first thing to know about the third and final power of knowledge is that reason does not know but thinks. Here, to know, according to Kant, is what the understanding does in judgments; that is, applying general concepts, some of them *a priori* (categories), to particular phenomena. Therefore, knowledge requires two necessary elements: concept and experience (phenomenon). To think is only to organize concepts according to their logical relations, fitting them inside each other as more or less universal. The result of the activity of reason are concepts Kant calls universal Ideas of reason:
- Soul: The whole of our knowledge about the phenomena of inner experience.
- World: The whole of our knowledge about the phenomena of external experience.
- God: The synthesis of both.
Ideas cannot allow us to know anything because it would require us to have experience of the Ideas of reason, which is not possible. Therefore, metaphysics as science is impossible because the limit of our knowledge is sensory experience. The mistake is what we call transcendental illusion (delusion).
By pure reason, Kant thinks we can make a new approach to the great metaphysical themes through practical reason. The postulates of practical reason are necessary conditions for the existence of morality. God, immortality, and freedom are not phenomena but noumena. They are unprovable and unknowable. The postulates of practical reason only allow us to believe in them, but to think with a rational faith; that is, believing in a rational foundation. Ultimately, the outcome of the first two critiques is to remove the [metaphysical] knowledge to make room for faith.