Kant, on the other hand, in spite of his epistemology which prohibited a direct intuition of the noumenal world, was compelled to postulate two orders of causality to justify moral responsibility, saying that "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith,"12 and "though I cannot know freedom, I can yet think freedom." 13 Kant, who took freedom (in the cosmological sense) to mean "the power of beginning a state spontaneously,"14 encountered difficulty in explaining the apparent experiential fact of the freedom of the will, since he maintained firmly that the principle of causality applied strictly to all phenomena. By adhering closely to the
　

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principle of causality, freedom of the will (which, according to Kant's epistemology. is not a sensible object of knowledge) had to be excluded from human reality. Accordingly, Kant was forced to rectify the constraint which he imposed upon himself by his epistemology, namely, how to relate freedom of the will (as a noumenal condition) to the principle of causality operative in the phenomenal world. Kant solved this conflict by placing freedom of the will outside the series of the causal principle, the cause of freedom becoming relegated to what Kant called the "intelligible" cause, and its effect to the "sensible" cause. He writes:

　　 The effects of such an intelligible cause appear, and accordingly can be determined through other appearances, but its causality is not so determined. While the effects are to be found in the series of empirical conditions, the intelligible cause, together with its causality, is outside the series.15

　　 This is. in effect, to postulate two orders of causality, the notion of freedom extending into the two disparate worlds of phenomena and noumena, and the bridge between them is an effect of the freedom of the will. Therefore, freedom as "the power of beginning a state spontaneously" was viewed by Kant as having its cause in the intelligible causality, which is beyond our experience, while its effect is in the sensible cause which is experienced in our sensible intuition. In short, Kant rejected the notion of freedom as a possible object of knowledge.

　　 The "reconciliationists" (for example, Schlick. Hobart, Ayer) were opposed to any kind of "metaphysical" (and, to them, hopelessly obscure) resolution of the problem of freewill/determinism and, tracing their ancestry back to at least Hume, argued that the problem could be solved by a careful analysis of the meaning of the concepts "freedom" and "causal law." A proper analysis of these concepts, they believed, would show that rather than being opposed to freedom, causal law was necessary for its realization.

　　 Schlick in particular argued that causal laws are essentially descriptive in character; they do not prescribe how events should occur (or must occur); they only describe how events do occur.16 Psychological laws, he argues, thus do not compel a person to behave in a certain way, they simply express how a person does behave in certain situations "in the same manner as the astronomical laws describe the nature of planets." 17  Freedom, when understood in its most general signification as the absence of external constraint, has then as its opposite not caused behavior but just chaos. Without causal regularity (of a noncompulsive kind) freedom would be impossible.
　

II
　

　　 Although there is no explicit treatment of freedom in Zeami's works―his main concern as an art critic being to formulate, based upon his own experience on stage as an actor, a theory of theatrical art (Noh)―a rich
　

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conception of freedom nevertheless may be seen to emerge out of his examination of Noh. Freedom here opens up its horizon through "training" [keikoc] which aims at attaining "flowers" [hanad] that blossom out of "artistic ranks" [gei-ie]. The metaphor of "flowers" is said to designate particularly a "beauty" that is expressed through the actor's performance on stage, and abstractly an "ideal" or "essential property" of the art of Noh drama that is to be achieved in each stage of an actor's lifelong training.18 Zeami places primary importance on "training" as instrumental to attaining "flowers." In his own words, "even if an artistic rank is attained naturally, without training, it is useless." 19

　　 The purpose of "training" is to attain "flowers": "To know flowers in Noh is ... a supreme first priority, and essential."20 But. according to Zeami, "flowers" should not be attained in view of enhancing one's artistic ranks, for, he says: "To train oneself in view of attaining an artistic rank is ... inappropriate."21 It might seem that Zeami's contention, derived from his own experience, here is paradoxical, for he says that the purpose of "training" is to attain "flowers" which blossom out of an artistic rank, but one should not train himself with the intention of attaining an artistic rank. How then―should one go about training himself, or what is "training" as understood by Zeami?