Being Able to Do Whatever You Want Doesn't Make You Free: Freedom According to Kant

Almost all of us have found ourselves at one in the morning, scrolling aimlessly through our phones. No one is forcing us. In theory, you can stop whenever you want—or can you? If someone asked you, right then, whether you were scrolling freely, you'd say yes. After all, you're doing exactly what you want. And yet that dazed, almost anaesthetised state often leaves us with an uneasy feeling, as if we weren't truly free in that moment. We're doing precisely what we desire, but we don't feel like our own masters. Why?

This experience, probably far too common in today's world, is a good place to begin thinking about the most fundamental concept of human existence: freedom, quite simply, to our essence, what we truly are. And precisely because of that, misunderstanding it can create a host of problems, both in how we treat others and in how we treat ourselves.

To gain some clarity on a concept this fundamental yet this hard to pin down, it's worth turning to the most important Western thinker since Aristotle: Immanuel Kant. He was a philosopher who placed freedom at the very centre of his deepest reflections. This article explores what it means to be truly free from a Kantian perspective, why caprice or whims, simply following our impulses, can be a form of slavery, and how true freedom is something very different from “doing whatever we want.” It's a philosophical question with profoundly existential consequences. It touches directly on how we decide to live, because in what we do and how we do it, we can win or lose ourselves.

What We Usually Mean by Freedom

When people talk about freedom in general, they almost always picture the same thing: the absence of external obstacles to doing whatever we want. Understood this way, being free would mean having no one to tell you what to do. It would mean having as many options and means as possible—money, for instance—to chase your desires wherever they lead. Freedom, in this widespread image, is doing what you want, when you want, and how you want. This picture, so heavily endorsed by the system around us, is the ideal of our age, something we should pursuit.

This way of understanding freedom guides and motivates us, in part because there's some truth to it. Vital forms of freedoms like political freedom, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement all rest on the absence of coercion and obstacles. The problem appears when we transfer that same scheme inward, to ourselves. We take a framework built for outward expressions of freedom and apply it to understand ourselves, assuming that being free simply means satisfying whatever whim happens to arise. This is where Kant sharpens the concept of freedom by introducing a distinction that changes everything.

Kant's Ladder of Freedom: the Animal, the Calculator, and the Legislator

One of Kant's insights was to notice that the word “freedom” has more than one meaning. Following the account of the great commentator Otfried Höffe, we can see freedom as unfolding across several ascending levels. We can simplify them into three.

The first level is that of impulse, of immediate inclination. Kant calls it, in his Latin terminology, arbitrium brutum—which we might render as animal choice, because the decision is determined by sensory stimuli of pleasure and pain. At this level there is no real freedom, only reaction. The person is pushed to do what their animal side demands: whatever brings pleasure or avoids pain.

The second level is that of calculation. Here we're already able to weigh alternatives, to think about the future, to give up an immediate desire for the sake of a more rewarding one down the line. This is the pragmatic freedom of self-interest, steering our choices by the long-term satisfaction of our impulses. It's more than raw impulse, because reason calculates what will bring us greater pleasure over time. But it still revolves around satisfying impulses—around caprice.

The third level is that of self-legislation. Only here, according to Kant, does freedom appear in its full sense. It's the capacity to give ourselves a law that frees us from our impulses, whims, and desires, in the name of ends that don't aim to satisfy desire but whose focus is to act ethically. What we normally call “freedom” actually lives on the lower rungs of this ladder. For Kant, what is essential about being human is precisely this: the capacity to rise above the ends our impulses hand us, in favour of ends we set for ourselves through reason.

The Difference Between Being Pushed and Choosing

Let's bring this Kantian idea down to everyday life. Think of the impulse purchase you regret an hour later, once you realise you never needed it. The second helping when you weren't even that hungry. The cutting message you fire off in the heat of the moment and immediately wish you hadn't. The endless scroll at midnight. On the view of freedom as the absence of obstacles, in all these moments we believe we're choosing and acting freely. And if that's true, why do we feel a twinge of guilt afterward? Why the bad taste, the trace of regret, the sense of not being at peace with ourselves? Perhaps something in us is warning us that acting from impulse is a kind of self-betrayal. There's a part of us—an essential part—telling us we've overstepped ourselves, that in that moment we forgot our essence and weren't actually free.

There's a fundamental difference between being pushed to do something and freely choosing to do it. When an inclination arises and we simply follow it, we're not so different from a billiard ball struck by another. Something moves us, and we just go along with the impulse. This capricious urge that we feel as “wanting,” and that we “freely” decide to act on, is not an expression of our genuine freedom. It's a wanting that imposes itself on us and takes over, seizing our resources—the very opposite of the freedom we credit it with. These desires arrive uninvited, impose themselves, and only afterward do we rationalise them as if they'd been a sovereign decision made fully by us.

Why Following Mere Caprice Is a Form of Slavery

Here we reach the heart of Kant's proposal. When our choices are dictated by whatever desire happens to appear, an external force is still steering the ship. This force still the one in charge. Kant calls this heteronomy: being governed from outside. The word comes from the Greek héteros (other) and nómos (law)—receiving the law from another. It means submitting to laws that govern our whims and mere desires.

The paradox is that this heteronomy disguises itself as freedom. We think we're free—masters of our own lives—because we can do whatever we please. But if what we want is set by impulses we've never examined or chosen, whether through habit, advertising, anxiety, or fear, then we're not masters of our conduct at all. We're subjects or slaves of our own caprice. Following whim isn't autonomy. It's letting yourself be dragged along under the illusion of freedom.

Autonomy: the Freedom to Follow Reason and Your Own Self

If what we normally call freedom is nothing more than disguised slavery, then what is freedom for Kant? It's autonomy: giving yourself the laws that guide your conduct. In his own words in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, autonomy is the property of the will by which it is a law to itself. This isn't negative freedom—being free from coercion or obstacles. It's a positive freedom: the capacity to determine yourself according to a law that reason recognises as its own.

It's worth clearing up a common misunderstanding. Kantian freedom isn't the simple “I could have done otherwise.” It doesn't consist in arbitrary choice between options, as though freedom were measured by how many whims are on the menu and how cleverly we manage them. That's just reason lending its services to our impulses, which dictate the ends we're supposed to pursue. Freedom in the full sense means the capacity to choose what reason prescribes. For Kant, our essence is fundamentally rational. But reason shouldn't be understood only as the ability to calculate or analyse. It's also the faculty that prescribes genuine duty—the kind of duty defined precisely by its power to stand against our whims.

This point is crucial, because it sets Kant apart from a certain later existentialist image. As Höffe notes, some nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers held that, to be free, a person must start from zero, begin from nothing, and create themselves without any support, free of obstacles and coercions. Kant doesn't share that view. For him, freedom isn't about fashioning a self out of the void. It's about finding your true self in by recognizing and overcoming inclinations, impulses, and whims—the ones that answer to our biology and your social context. Autonomy doesn't deny that we're beings with needs, history, and bonds. It acknowledges them, but it doesn't let them have the last word, because there's always the option of acting by giving ourselves a rule through reason.

What This Means for a Life: the Existential Turn

If Kant is right, then the question “am I free?” isn't answered by counting how many options I have. It's answered by examining where I choose from. It means recognising that genuine duty appears as something that springs from our essence and stands against the dictates of our inclinations. To be free is to become who we truly are, rather than who your impulses make of you. This doesn't happen automatically. It takes work: attending to your own principles of action—what Kant called our maxims—and asking whether you could sustain them as a law for your own life and the lives of others.

Here philosophy stops being abstract and turns vital. We reflect on our maxims—the laws we've given ourselves to run our lives. These might be maxims to perfect ourselves physically and morally, to help others, to care for our bodies, or to follow the law. The actions that follow those precepts, those self-given laws that meet the demands of reason: that is what it means to be genuinely free.

Telling apart the desire that governs us from the decision we take ownership of, recognising where we're heteronomous and where we begin to be autonomous—that is a vital exercise in reflective self-governance. It isn't about repressing life or denying our emotions or impulses. It's about no longer being driven by them without examination. Freedom, understood this way, isn't a starting point we already possess. It's a task: becoming, little by little, the authors of our own lives through the maxims we take on.

And perhaps that's Kant's most uncomfortable—and most liberating—lesson. The freedom we thought we had, the freedom to do whatever we want, isn't genuine freedom at all. Real freedom begins when we stop asking what we feel like doing and start asking what, on reflection, we can truly recognise as our own—so that our actions don't leave us with guilt, or with that uneasy feeling so typical of “I shouldn't have done that.”

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References

Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A German–English Edition. Edited and translated by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-521-51457-6

Höffe, Otfried. Kant's Critique of Practical Reason: A Philosophy of Freedom. Translated by Manfred Weltecke. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2023. Political Philosophy Now. ISBN 978-1-83772-045-3