He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.

— Immanuel Kant

The phenomenality of the empirical world was made fully clear by Kant. Though it is not subject to compelling knowledge, because it cannot be perceived objectively but only by a transcending, nevertheless it imposes itself on every intellect that is capable of transcendence. And then it does not add a new particular knowledge to the knowledges we had before, but effects a shift in our whole consciousness of being. Hence the sudden but enduring light which is kindled in the philosophical approach to the reality of the world. If the light is not kindled, the propositions of philosophy remain unfulfilled and hence fundamentally not understood. It is not only the absolute world systems that are gone. The world is not self-contained and for our knowledge it breaks down into diverse perspectives, because it cannot be reduced to a single principle. The reality of the world as a whole is no object of knowledge.

I ask about the possibility of being in the sense found by Kant: How is experience regarding objectivity possible at all? How is a systematic unity of this experience possible? How is autonomous action possible? How is a perception of beauty possible? How are living creatures possible? These questions are transcending because their point is not to get an understanding of one definite being from other being; rather, it is an understanding of existence itself that each question seeks at the boundary of existence, from principles that do not belong to existence as objects of cognition. … As answered by Kant, each question of possibility touches on the supersensory—on the thing-in-itself, on the objectivity of the idea, on the intelligible character, on the supersensory substrate of humanity, on the unity of the source of mechanical and teleological legality in the existence of life. But the supersensory itself is not touched upon in Kant's transcending. He stops at the boundary. What his transcending in thoughts of possibility clarifies, together with the mode of our existence, is its phenomenality as an expression of our assurance of intrinsic Being.

“When I say: I think, I act, etc., then either the word I is applied falsely, or I am free. Were I not free, then I could not say: I do it, but rather I would have to say: I feel in me a desire to do, which someone has aroused in me. But when I say: I do it, that means spontaneity in the transcendental sense. But now I am conscious to myself that I can say: I do; therefore I am conscious of no determination in me, and thus I act absolutely freely.” — Immanuel Kant

“By freedom in the cosmological sense … I understand the power of beginning a state from itself, the causality of which does not in turn stand under another cause determining it in time in accordance with the law of nature. It is especially noteworthy that it is this transcendental idea of freedom on which the practical concept of freedom is grounded, and the former constitutes the real moment of the difficulties in the latter, which have long surrounded the question of its possibility.” — Immanuel Kant

Freedom (Existenz) is “transcendental” because transcendental subjectivity consists of two forever mutually conditioning aspects: freewill and causal structures ("karmic seeds", in Yogācāra terms; "elementary particles", in modern scientific terms).

Transcendental freedom can't be observed as a phenomenal object, it can only be lived. It can neither be proved nor disproved. It can only be a matter of faith.

Within the framework of individual existence there is no freedom without causal structures, for absolute freedom terminates the individual existence of transcendental subjectivity in the absolute perspective of Consciousness — in transcendent consciousness-in-itself, the nondual Light of mystical/transpersonal experiences. Freewill is never absolutely free. Absolute freedom is not freedom, it is Absolute.

Freedom is emanation, becoming. Through freedom and causal structures of transcendental subjectivity the Light becomes everything we know as ourselves—transcendental and empirical subjects—and the empirical world of intersubjective phenomena.

“Freedom is a self-bestowal by Transcendence. This freedom is not expedience, not obedience to a calculated duty, not forced activity, but a will detached from all compulsion, and this will is transcendent necessity.” — Karl Jaspers

M.R.

As long as one interprets transcendental subjectivity as an isolated ego and—like the Kantian tradition—ignores the whole task of establishing the legitimacy of the transcendental community of subjects, any prospect of a transcendental knowledge of self and world is lost.