Dilemma and Rebirth: How Marx’s View of Practice Overcomes Kant’s Dilemma of Freedom

Abstract

For laying the foundation for human knowledge, Kant distinguished the ontological world from the phenomenal world. Kant put freedom in the ontological world to make its existence possible, and relied on the moral practice according to the pure rational. By criticizing God, Kant established reason as a relative absolutist that human beings can trace back to. However, in the path of freedom realization, he re-quoted God as a secular arbiter for the need of his system. The deviation of “God being” in Critique of pure reason and critique of practical reason exposes the difficult problem of Kant’s realization of freedom that perceptual beings cannot realize freedom. Marx’s view of freedom experienced two turns and finally came into reality. Based on the realistic, Marx sought the realistic path to realize freedom by enriching the connotation of practice, and completed the redemption of Kant’s dilemma.