What does Kant's "pure" and "practical" reason mean? What's the difference?
I know something about the categorical imperative and practical reason according to Kant, but I don't understand the definition of the category "pure".
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First of all, Kant's” pure “and” practical ” reason are not antonyms. Kant has, for example, such a term as “pure practical reason”.
The opposite of pure knowledge is, as Kant explains at the very beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, empirical knowledge. The first is knowledge a priori, the second is a posteriori. A priori knowledge (to which, in fact, pure reason belongs) is knowledge that is not directly deduced from experience. An example of a priori natural science knowledge for Kant was the law of conservation of mass: this principle was the basis of chemistry before received a thorough empirical verification, meaning it was initially adopted as neobychnoe assumption (for example, “encyclopedia Britannica” article Lavoisier reports: “the assertion that the lot is stored during chemical reactions was more of an assumption of the researchers of the Enlightenment than a discovery made as a result of experiments”).
In other words, Kant draws attention to the fact that even the empirical sciences are based on extra-empirical assumptions; it is the nature of such assumptions that occupies Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, which is formally expressed in the form of its main question: “How are synthetic judgments possible a priori?”, i.e., how are extra-experimental judgments possible, which nevertheless give new knowledge. The ability to make such judgments, in fact, is “pure reason”, it is pure from external (empirical) factors.
In turn, practical reason, as explained in the introduction to the Critique of Practical Reason, is the antonym of theoretical reason. The first one relates directly to human behavior (roughly speaking, it answers the question “What to do?”), the second – to study the world (“How does everything work?”). As a consequence, Kant's” practical reason ” belongs to the field of ethics. “Pure practical reason”, accordingly, concerns a priori ethical norms.
“Pure” in Kant's terms is very close to” theoretical “and”experimental”. In essence, the difference is simple: pure reason deals only with knowledge (knowledge within the framework and conditions that are inherent in us), while practical reason deals with will, inclinations, experience and actions. Therefore, practical reason really cannot be “pure”: actions occur only in concrete circumstances, and never in the abstract, at all.