From Autonomy to Heautonomy

Abstract

In this paper, I will shed light on Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s and Friedrich Schiller’s conceptions of practical self-determination after Kant. First, I outline Kant’s conception of freedom as autonomy. I then explain the so-called “Reinhold’s dilemma,” which concerns the problem of moral imputability in the case of immoral actions, which arises from Kant’s theory of autonomy. I then show how Reinhold and Schiller tried to escape this dilemma by developing an elaborated theory of individual freedom. I will argue that Reinhold’s and Schiller’s symmetrical account of freedom to act according and against the moral law is not to be confused with freedom of indifference but can be reconstructed in terms of practical self-determination on the basis of first-order desires and second-order volitions.