Kant’s Enlightenment
*Note: This was originally a paper presented at the 2023 APSA
Immanuel Kant is associated with the Enlightenment.[1] Moreover, he self-identified with the Enlightenment and answered the question, “What is Enlightenment?” Kant said it is “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,”[2] suggesting he agreed with the Enlightenment’s more full-throated spokesmen who maintained the Enlightenment represented a new beginning for mankind, marked by a radical rejection of what had gone before, namely, classical philosophy and Judeo-Christian revelation—which had formed Western civilization up until Kant in the eighteenth-century— but had become moribund, before the eighteenth-century, to the point of coming under the public attack to which they are still subject.
As in all radical revolutions, primarily intellectual ones, the revolutionaries of the Enlightenment were giddy at the prospects opening up before them as they threw off the ancient constricting faiths in favor of an instrumental rationality which promised to control a reality— Reason replacing God and now enlisted in the service of power rather than truth— that no longer was willing to contemplate it. They drove religious influences from their public squares, quite literally in the French Enlightenment, they embraced the genuine advances being made in the hard sciences and believed the same advances could be made in the human sciences as well, and they placed their hopes in historical progress, not religious salvation. Kant often embraced the hope for continuing historical progress in the moral sense.[3] The modern figure of a rebel– a character who questions all authority and tradition, who seeks, in politics, to constantly radically transform whatever is– emerged from the Enlightenment. The French Revolution, the first of the great modern political revolutions, grew out of the Enlightenment. Recall in 1793, Robespierre turned Notre Dame into the Temple of Reason, an example of how the world became “disenchanted.” Thus, as Gerhart Niemeyer put it, “any thought of mystery was disallowed; there were only things already known and things that eventually would be known.”[4]
The legacy of the Enlightenment was at least ambiguous and much criticism has been leveled at it.[5] The French Revolution itself, in which Kant placed great hope and interest, issued in terror and blood, to his great consternation.
Even apart from his identification with the Enlightenment, Kant is usually thought of, by those who have not read him in any depth and/or may only have heard of his
“reputation,” as a modern philosopher that concerned himself almost exclusively with epistemology. Kant exploded all of the proofs for the existence of God, leaving us with, if anything, only deism, created a very strict ethics based only on duties and rules and denying to man the happiness he craves, and insisted religion be restricted by reason, conceived in the narrowest possible sense.
I want to argue, however, the picture of Kant as an Enlightenment thinker, as otherwise so narrowly drawn, is simply incorrect. In reading Kant, or at least in making that difficult effort, readers realize they are in the presence of perhaps the greatest mind of the last few centuries, and his mind is roiled at the prospect of opening up what will later become known as “modernity.” David Walsh puts it in his ground-breaking treatment of Kant as an existentialist:
. . . Kant was intensely aware of the sense of crisis created by the modern world. Instrumental rationality had begun to devastate the moral landscape. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, however, Kant did not seek refuge in some primal innocence of nature or dream of a lost Arcadia. He remained within the classical and Christian traditions, glimpsing the possibility of carrying them to a higher level of moral truth. This is why his arguments have proved so powerful and so durable in the modern world. Far from departing from Western history, he carried it to a higher level by compelling it to confront its own inner logic.[6]
Kant should not be thought of as an emblematic Enlightenment thinker, rather as the thinker who saved Western civilization from the worst aspects of the Enlightenment by elevating practice over theory in a way that perhaps no thinker— before him— had done. We might say Kant made a double movement relative to the Enlightenment; he embraced its most positive aspects: its emphasis on the importance of human freedom, human rights, personhood, and the corresponding concept of human dignity. Kant reached back before the dawn of the Enlightenment to recapture Western civilization’s ancient emphasis on the moral as the pivot around which everything must turn— ethics thus preceding epistemology, metaphysics, and ontology. As Walsh put it, Kant demonstrates that “Our deepest access to being . . . lies through the moral life. The implication, as Kant saw, is that practical reason illuminates more than theoretical.”[7] If Isaac Newton and the modern scientific revolution convinced us the world of nature, bound by the iron laws of cause and effect, was all that there was, human freedom did not exist– a belief still embedded in twenty-first century culture, but Kant found a way out of that conundrum in proclaiming autonomy as the heart of human dignity.[8]
Kant struggled with, and against, the thought of many of the luminaries of his age. Kant was influenced by Newton, whose new science had eliminated Aristotelian final causality, yet he found a way, in his Third Critique– Critique of Judgment– to reestablish teleology on a modern footing. And Kant was, as he said, “awakened from [his] dogmatic slumber” by David Hume, the great epistemological and moral skeptic of the eighteenth-century, yet he found a way to overcome Humean skepticism in both fields.
Even beyond all of this, one has the sense in reading Kant that one is in the presence of a soul possessed, from the first, by a God whom he cannot know, who he must insist is there, by whom he manages to somehow derive the meaning of it all, the “highest good,” and a God who, above all, even in revelation, insists we all do our duty.
Kant may not be thought of as a theologian, but his work is clearly a philosophical approach to theology. Kant, who penetrated as no one else, had the mysteries of human cognition, ultimately found the most important things shrouded in mystery, as had all the greatest philosophers before him, and extolled faith over knowledge. His absorption in nature, in cause and effect, yielded to the experiences of morality, beauty, the sublime, purpose, and even the possibility of grace. This thirst for knowledge, at last, led Kant to talk about love.
Kant himself is not entirely above critique. In his thought, much is gained and much is recovered, but some important things are also lost. For example:
(1) The term “virtue,” in the classical sense in which we find it in Aristotle and Aquinas, loses its meaning in Kant’s deontological ethics, even though he uses the same term and pens “The Doctrine of Virtue” in The Metaphysics of Morals. Thus, Kant formulates the second of his three fundamental questions in Critique of Pure Reason as “What ought I to do?” (A 805, B 833), rather than, as classical ethicists would have formulated it, “What character ought I to develop?” or “What sort of person should I become?” Kant’s virtuous person is not virtuous in Aristotle’s sense, only continent.
Having said that, I note Kant’s moral philosophy does, in its own way, evidence a concern for the development of character. Furthermore, in beginning Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, his first exclusively moral work, he asserts “There is no possibility of thinking of anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be regarded as good without qualification, except a good will” (393).[9] Kant acknowledged, at least implicitly, his debt to St. Paul and St. Augustine. And we can say, after all, virtuous and vicious persons are relatively rare, compared to the continent and incontinent categories into which most of us fall.
More on Kant’s moral philosophy later.[10]
(2) Comparing Kant and Aristotle again, we recall Aristotle’s political science consisted primarily of his Ethics and Politics, the former preceding the latter; the relationship between ethics and politics— that we find in Aristotle’s political science— is severed, or at least attenuated, in Kant. In “The Doctrine of Right,” Kant’s principle political work, which appears as the first Part of The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant, one of the developers of modern liberalism and whose thought was to so greatly influence John Rawls two centuries later, stressed freedom, not character development.
Kant defines the “doctrine of right” as “The sum of those laws for which an external law giving is possible” (6:229).[11] The universal principle of right is “any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law.” (6:230)[12] And the universal law of right is “. . . so act externally [ a categorical imperative] that the free use of your choice can coexist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a universal law.” (6:231)[13] There is only one “innate right,” and it is the right to freedom. (6:237-238)[14] In contrast, Kant says, “The supreme principle of the doctrine of virtue [which is a categorical imperative] is: act in accordance with a maxim of ends that it can be a universal law for everyone to have.” (6: 395)[15]
Kant drew on the political philosophy of the other great modern liberal philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau to formulate his own. Judging only from his political work, Kant’s philosophical anthropology owed the most to Hobbes, and this kept Kant very sober in his estimation of human nature and his demand for the rule of law. The emphasis in Kant’s politics is on law, which can only govern external actions through external laws, not internal dispositions (those are the subject of virtue). Thus, Kant’s politics is limited primarily to sorting out the concepts of “mine” and “thine.”
While Kant did not say with Aristotle that man is a political animal, he did say that persons have a moral obligation to leave the state of nature (in Kant, an imaginary rather than an historical construct, only an idea of reason) and agree to form the juridical state. Man is political not by nature but by choice. Kant also thought the positive laws to be formulated by that state would have to begin with and be based upon the “natural law” in Kant’s sense of that term, a subject would take a Paper of its own. Positive law in the juridical state is the natural law as positivized, and law consists entirely of a priori principles.[16]
And while one is left at the end of “The Doctrine of Right” wondering how virtue, even in Kant’s attenuated sense, will find its way into his juridical state apart from the natural law hopefully instantiated in the positive laws, one finds an answer in Book Three of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. Here, Kant suggests it will be through the influence of religious teaching conveyed by the churches. The public square is not naked in Kant. In fact, in Religion, Kant posits four “polities”:
The juridical state of nature, lending to the juridical-civil state; and
The ethical state of nature, leading to the ethical-civil state.
The ethical-civil state may, and Kant believed should, exist within the juridical-civil state.[17]
The following quotation from Religion reveals Kant’s insistence that the ethical penetrate the political:
As far as we can see . . . the sovereignty of the good principle is attainable, so far as men can work toward it, only through the establishment and spread of a society in accordance with, and for the sake of, the laws of virtue, a society whose task and duty it is rationally to impress these laws in all their scope upon the entire human race. For only thus can we hope for a victory of the good over the evil principle. In addition to prescribing laws to each individual, morally legislative reason also unfurls a banner of virtue as a rallying point for all who love the good, that they may gather beneath it and thus at the very start gain the upper hand over the evil which is attacking them without rest.[18]
Furthermore, recall Kant’s “Doctrine of Right” is itself a moral doctrine, even if it differs from virtue, appearing as it does in The Metaphysics of Morals. Right, in other words, falls under morals and law.
So perhaps Kant’s politics is not that far from Aristotle’s politics after all.
In any event, Kant does give us his own unique way in which to conceive of political liberalism, a liberalism we can certainly recognize in our own country.[19]
(3) Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone is one of Kant’s most fascinating works. In it we find, perhaps to our surprise, Kant was a great student of and much influenced by the New Testament.[20] We also find an inversion of the relationship between nature and grace. Kant cannot seem to bring himself to believe that grace comes before and makes genuine moral action possible. Thus, Christ is not just the archetype of the moral life, but the person who, through his act of atonement, overcomes evil, thereby enacting a “new birth” of the moral life.
(4) It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine Kant gaining the insights Plato gained in his acceptance of the gifts bestowed through “Divine Madness.”[21] Kant either seems to leave room open for a type of “knowledge” that may come through mystical experience. We are, after all, often more moved by what happens to us, by pathos, than by the conclusions we can arrive at through the use of reason.
I have come primarily to praise Kant, so let me return to the main road.
I wanted to present the story of Kant—something of a drama, really—by focusing not on the Enlightenment but on Kant himself, recognizing that certain contrasts would thereby appear. I had hoped to consider, in summary, each of the principal works of Kant in the chronological order in which they were published: Critique of Pure Reason (1781–1st Ed. and 1787–2nd Ed.), Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Critique of Judgment (1790), Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793—1st Ed. and 1794–2nd Ed.), and The Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Alas, that project was misconceived from the start. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to adequately “summarize” any of Kant’s principle works, much less all of them. In the event, I began with the first, Critique of Pure Reason, but I never got beyond this one work, summarizing it only inadequately.
Fortunately, it is with this work that any study of Kant must begin, and it was— in that work— that Kant anticipated virtually all of his subsequent projects. Critique of Pure Reason is much more than a work of epistemology, and in it, time after time, Kant makes the point I most wish to highlight: in the study of our reason, we may find limits, but these limits are also pointers. And then come the poignant questions, both implicit and explicit in Kant’s work: Why are we pointed beyond our limits, towards what are we pointed, how is it that what we most long to know is what we cannot know, and why are we– in all of nature– the oddest of creatures, possessing this thing called reason, which seems to be both a blessing and a curse?
Eric Voegelin said the classical experience of reason as differentiated in Plato and Aristotle was as “the sensorium of transcendence.”[22] And so the tension of human existence experienced by everyone is reason’s tension toward transcendence. That sense of reason does appear, as we will see, in Kant. Perhaps the tension of human existence is revealed most clearly in Kant in the pairs of categories that structure all of his thought like
Phenomena — Noumena
Nature — Freedom
Knowledge — Faith
a posteriori — a priori
Mechanical laws — Moral laws
Mechanism — Teleology
Positive laws — Natural laws
Science — Religion
Sensible/empirical world — Intelligible world
Physical faculty — Moral faculty
Happiness/inclinations — Duty
Heteronomy — Autonomy
Heteronomous imperatives — Categorical imperatives
No one thinks of Kant as a “mystery writer,” but the most compelling thing about Kant’s writing– and I am not now referring to the well-recognized impenetrability of much of it– is the way in which the mystery of things is revealed in his work, perhaps sometimes with Kant himself being unaware of it. I do not claim to have read all of Kant, be a Kantian scholar, or even have penetrated all of the depths of Critique of Pure Reason, but I merely have become excited by and have formed certain impressions in struggling through Kant’s principle works.[23] And so I turn to the first of them.
CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON
In Kant’s First Critique, or Critique of Pure Reason (1781 (1st ed.) and 1787 (2nd ed.)), Kant makes reason itself the subject of his study, putting reason under the microscope of reason.[24]
What is so striking about Critique– even more than its length, depth, and complexity– is Kant’s radically new epistemology; he tells us how we may obtain knowledge of the phenomena of objects in the realm of nature, or another part of his metaphysics, which also concerns our attempts to know, in which, time and again, how he both approaches and recedes from what we most want to know in the realm of ideas though cannot ever know. Ideas are special concepts that arise out of our knowledge of the realm of nature and the sensible, empirical world, yet seem to point beyond nature to some transcendent realm.[25] The metaphysical ideas of God, human freedom, and the immortality of the soul are the paramount examples. Even if we cannot have knowledge of the objects of such ideas—because these objects are not sensible—the undeniable fact that we all have such ideas must itself be accounted a form of “knowledge,” even if not knowledge in the more proper sense in which Kant uses the term. After all, a directional marker such as a highway sign telling us it is 60 miles to Los Angeles on Interstate Route 10 is no proof that Los Angeles exists, but it is at least highly suggestive.
It is obvious Kant is captivated by the fact that creatures– such as we– should mostly want to know what we cannot know. Lesser so-called philosophers simply claim ideas point to no reality at all, and so become materialists, skeptics, or nihilists. They are, perhaps, afraid of the great mystery our all-too-human lives present us with. Kant, on the other hand, tells us simply that “I . . . had to annul knowledge in order to make room for faith.” (B xxx) Kant thus rejects the atheism and antitheism of the Enlightenment in order to make room for a quite different sort of enlightenment. If the faith that had sustained Western civilization for hundreds of years before the Enlightenment had atrophied to the point where it had come under public attack in the Enlightenment, Kant sought to restore that very same faith, albeit sometimes in rather unorthodox ways. It is something of a paradox that perhaps the greatest philosopher of human knowledge should have been so caught up in the mystery.
Consider in the very last words of the First Critique when Kant refers to human reason’s “desire to know” in the context of his hope “to bring human reason to complete satisfaction in what has always—although thus far in vain—engaged its desire to know.” (A 856, B 884) While, even on his own principles, Kant was wrong to claim human reason could ever be brought to “complete satisfaction.” Sub specie aeternitatis, or the last words of Kant’s First Critique, bring to mind the very first words of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know.” Philosophy, in its greatest practitioners, transcends the centuries to speak to the most fundamental of human questions. What is it, ultimately, that all of us desire to know? In both Aristotle and Kant, although arriving at the answer to that question in their rather different ways, the answer is the same: All persons desire to know being even unto its divine ground.
My discussion of Critique of Pure Reason below is primarily limited to the topic thus suggested.
Preface to the First Edition
I begin with comments on the Prefaces to the First and Second Editions of Critique. As David Walsh said, “The two prefaces constitute a rich set of reflections on the great work.”[26]
In the very beginning of his Preface to Critique’s First Edition (1781), we find Kant noting there is something mysterious about human reason in that it compels us to confront questions it cannot answer: “Human reason has a peculiar fate in one kind of its cognitions: it is troubled by questions that it cannot dismiss, because they are posed to it by the nature of reason itself, but that it also cannot answer, because they surpass reason’s very ability.” (A vii) Reason, Kant continues, cannot be blamed for this, for it “starts from principles that it cannot avoid using in the course of experience, and that this experience at the same time sufficiently justifies it in using;” however, it “ascends ever higher, to more remote conditions.” (A vii-viii) In this way, reason “becomes aware that . . . since the questions never cease, its task remains forever incomplete.” (Ibid.) Finally, reason, untethered to experience, “plunges into darkness and contradictions,” and enters “The combat arena of these endless conflicts” called “metaphysics.” (Ibid.)
Kant’s project in the First Critique will accordingly be to separate what we can know through our reason from what we cannot know. Thus, it is to overcome both the dogmatists and the skeptics, and, more importantly, the “weariness and utter indifferentism, which is the mother of chaos and night,” resulting from the “endless conflicts.” (A x) “For,” Kant maintains, “it is futile to try to feign indifference concerning inquiries whose object cannot be indifferent to human nature.” (Ibid.) Kant will, as he puts it, answer the “call to reason to take on once again the most difficult of all its tasks—viz., that of self-cognition—and to set up a tribunal that will make reason secure in its rightful claims and will dismiss all baseless pretensions, not by fiat but in accordance with reason’s eternal and immutable laws. This tribunal is none other than the critique of reason itself: the critique of pure reason.” (A xi-xii) Reason, as Kant indicates, calls to itself, and we are forced, through reason, to respond to this call.
As for the results of his efforts, Kant makes the audacious claim “that there should not be a single metaphysical problem that has not been solved here, or for whose solution the key has not at least been provided.” (A xiii) This claim, however, whatever its merits, should not blind us to the great modesty of Kant’s “solution” itself. Recall that the Enlightenment tended to place Reason on the throne formerly occupied by God. Advances in modern science, especially those made by Isaac Newton (1642-1726/27) and others in the Scientific Revolution that preceded and sparked the Enlightenment, seemed to promise infinite progress in the human condition, a conclusion that Auguste Comte (1798-1857) would draw out in the nineteenth-century. Reason, in this sense, would come to seek power rather than truth. Kant’s critique of reason demonstrated, more than anything else, its limits, and thereby also the limits of the Enlightenment.
Preface to the Second Edition
In Kant’s Preface to the Second Edition of Critique (1787), Kant refers to the “Copernican Revolution” in his epistemology; Kant turns from a previous view that all our cognition must conform to objects to his own view that objects must conform to our cognition. (B xvi et seq.) This Revolution, affected by Kant, will, he believes, prove the existence of a real world of nature against the idealists and the skeptics, a world apprehended through the combination of intuition and the understanding, which is the domain of the synthetic a priori categories and concepts that make the cognition of objects possible. Much of the First Critique is given over to an explanation of how cognition in this sense occurs and of how we can have genuine knowledge of objects in the world as phenomena, even though a knowledge of noumena is denied to us. One catches Kant’s own excitement at his discovery in his assertion “that metaphysics will be on the secure path of a science in its first part, viz., the part where it deals with those a priori concepts for which corresponding objects adequate to these concept can be given in experience. For on the changed way of thinking we can quite readily explain how a priori cognition is possible; what is more, we can provide satisfactory proofs for the laws that lie a priori at the basis of nature considered as the sum of objects of experience. Neither of these accomplishments was possible on the kind of procedure used thus far [that is, in classical and medieval epistemology].” (B viii-xix)
Note Kant’s reference here to the “first part” of the science of metaphysics, which is his epistemology directed at the sensible world, or the world we can possess knowledge. There is a “second part” of Kant’s science of “metaphysics.” This is the part that deals with beyond the sensible and our knowledge, and Kant’s respective discussions of the two “parts” may be said to structure the entire First Critique.[27] Kant may have “solved” the problem to the first part of metaphysics, that is, by demonstrating we can have knowledge of the appearances of objects presented to us in intuition and how such knowledge is possible. However, that solution itself demonstrates the “second part” of metaphysics, which, we sense, Kant regards as the more interesting “part” (which cannot be “solved” as much as we would like to see it solved), because it presents matters that transcends an experience we cannot partake in due to limited knowledge that exceed our experience. The second part of metaphysics might also be regarded as an epistemology, albeit one that does not issue in knowledge but in a “rational faith.”
Kant here introduces two concepts that will structure all of his thought: phenomena— the appearances of objects in the sensible, empirical world of which alone we can have knowledge— and noumena— things-in-themselves in the intellectual world that lay behind appearances we can never have knowledge of. Kant says:
On the other hand [that is, in connection with the “second part”], this deduction—provided in the first part of metaphysics—of our power to cognize a priori produces a disturbing result that seems highly detrimental to the whole purpose of metaphysics as dealt with in the second part: viz., that with this power to cognize a priori we shall never be able to go beyond the boundary of possible experience, even though doing so is precisely the most essential concern of this science. Yet this very [situation permits] the experiment that will countercheck the truth of the result that we obtained from the first assessment of our a priori rational cognition: viz., that our rational cognition applies only to appearances, and leaves the thing in itself unrecognized by us, even though inherently actual. For what necessarily impels us to go beyond the boundary of experience and of all appearances is the unconditioned that reason demands in things in themselves; reason—necessarily and quite rightfully—demands this unconditioned for everything conditioned, thus demanding that the series of conditions be completed by means of that unconditioned. (B xix-xx)
This “second part” of metaphysics, about which we cannot have knowledge, concerns what Kant in various places calls the “unconditioned,” “suprasensible,” “supersensible,” or “supernatural.” Kant will later say this is the realm of freedom, of God, and of the immortality of the soul. Kant is led by reason itself, as Aristotle was, to search for the ground of the sensible being of which we can have knowledge in the suprasensible, of which human beings cannot have knowledge. This is, as Kant says, “disturbing.” Being “disturbed,” we long for knowledge— especially— of that which we cannot know, and often, says Kant, try to exceed the boundaries of our possible knowledge (often with bad results).
Kant’s limited concept of reason put him in this dilemma. The dilemma was overcome by the classical and medieval philosophers who took a broader view of reason, who saw reason, as Eric Voegelin characterized it as “the sensorium of transcendence,” an evocative formulation suggesting a form of knowledge in the longing itself. Kant did not give up hope of acquaintance with the suprasensible, the transcendent, escaping the dilemma through a different, his own, route:
Now, once we have denied that speculative reason can make any progress in that realm of the suprasensible, we still have an option available to us. We can try to discover whether perhaps in reason’s practical cognition data can be found that would allow us to determine reason’s transcendent concept of the unconditioned. Perhaps in this way our a priori cognition, though one that is possible only from a practical point of view, would still allow us to get beyond the boundary of all possible experience, as is the wish of metaphysics. Moreover, when we follow this kind of procedure [i.e., the use of practical rather than speculative reason], still speculative reason has at least provided us with room for such an expansion [of our cognition], even if it had to leave that room empty. And hence there is as yet nothing to keep us from filling in that room, if we can, with practical data of reason; indeed, reason summons us to do so. ((B xxi-xxii)
Pure theoretical / speculative reason may not be able to access the suprasensible, but it somehow points us toward it; pure practical reason actually does provide us with an access to it, with a “rational faith” in it even though without a knowledge of it.
Speculative metaphysics thus benefits us negatively “by instructing us that in [using] speculative reason we must never venture beyond the boundary of experience; this instruction is indeed its primary benefit.” (B xxiv) But the benefit becomes positive as well by removing any threat that speculative reason will “venture beyond the boundary of experience . . . [and] displace the pure (practical) use of reason. . . . a use of pure reason which is practical and absolutely necessary (viz., its moral use).” The use that, as we will see, moved Kant to his core. Indeed, we might even say that while Kant worked many years on his First Critique, Critique of Pure Reason, and while Critique is usually considered to be his most important work, he was most interested in it as clearing the ground and paving the way for his moral philosophy that followed its completion. For without the distinction between phenomena and noumena, Kant acknowledges he would not have been able to derive human freedom, requisite for morality, rescuing it from the mechanical laws of cause and effect in nature and leading to the postulates of God and immortality. (B xxv-xxx) As the Third Antinomy of Pure Reason will show (A 444-451, B 472-479), freedom and natural science can both exist side-by-side.
Referring now more explicitly to the moral and the theological opened up by his epistemology, Kant says:
I cannot even assume God, freedom, and immortality, [as I must] for the sake of the necessary practical use of my reason, if I do not at the same time deprive speculative reason of its pretensions to transcendent insight. For in order to reach God, freedom, and immortality, speculative reason must use principles that in fact extend merely to objects of possible experience; and when these principles are nonetheless applied to something that cannot be an object of experience, they actually do always transform it into an appearance, and thus they declare all practical expansion of reason to be impossible. I therefore had to annul knowledge in order to make room for faith. And the true source of all the lack of faith which conflicts with morality—and is always highly dogmatic—is dogmatism in metaphysics, i.e., the prejudice according to which we can make progress in metaphysics without a [prior] critique of pure reason. (B xxix-xxx)
Kant’s famous saying, that he had to annul knowledge in order to make room for faith, may be taken as simply an epigram from the great modern philosopher of the human mind. But any reading of Kant’s principle works will indicate the seriousness of the statement. It might even be said to summarize Kant’s works, especially Critique of Pure Reason. As Kant goes on to say in this Preface, the value of his metaphysics is in “the inestimable advantage of putting an end, for all future time, to all objections against morality and religion. . . . Hence the primary and most important concern of philosophy is to deprive metaphysics, once and for all, of its detrimental influence, by obstructing the source of its errors.” (B xxxi) And here we also think of the third and final questions Kant said united all of his reason’s interest, speculative as well as practical, namely, “What may I hope?” (A 805, B 833) Kant’s hope rested on faith, a “rational faith,” and in some respects, at least, an unorthodox faith.
While pure theoretical / speculative reason can go only so far in its pursuit of knowledge, Kant maintains the limit he has assigned to it affects “only the monopoly of the schools; in no way does it affect the interests of the people.” (B xxxii) The public—for Kant, a most important audience–has never been influenced by what earlier metaphysicians had taken—wrongly, according to Kant—to be their dogmatic “proofs” for the immortality of the soul, the freedom of the will, or the existence of God:
I take it that these proofs have never reached the public and influenced it in that way; nor can they ever be expected to do so, because the common human understanding is unfit for such subtle speculation. Rather, the conviction spreading to the public, insofar as it rests on rational grounds, has had to arise from quite different causes. As regards the soul’s continuance after death, the hope for a future life arose solely from a predisposition discernible to every human being in his [own] nature, viz., the inability ever to be satisfied by what is temporal (and thus is inadequate for the predispositions of his whole vocation). As regards the freedom of the will, the consciousness of freedom arose from nothing but the clear exhibition of duties in their opposition to all claims of the inclinations. Finally, as regards the existence of God, the faith in [the existence of] a wise and great author of the world arose solely from the splendid order, beauty, and provisions manifested everywhere in nature. . . . [While] the arrogant claims of the schools [are thus denied] . . . On the other hand, a more legitimate claim of the speculative philosopher is nonetheless being taken care of here. He remains always the exclusive trustee of a science that is useful to the public without its knowing this: viz., the critique of reason. For that critique can never become popular; nor does it need to be. . . . Solely by means of critique can we cut off, at the very root, materialism, fatalism, atheism, freethinking, lack of faith, fanaticism, and superstition, which can become harmful universally; and finally, also idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous mainly to the schools and cannot easily cross over to the public. If governments do indeed think it proper to occupy themselves with the concerns of scholars, they should promote the freedom for such critique, by which alone the works of reason can be put on a firm footing. (B xxxii-xxxv)
From this long quotation, several observations suggest themselves:
First, as he will stress in his subsequent works of moral philosophy, Kant maintains genuine philosophy first reflects then explains in a deeply penetrating way, beyond the ken of most of us, the common sense of things, what he calls here “the common human understanding.” The youngest child fighting against his inclinations in order to do the right thing is in the grip of the Categorical Imperative. Kant may have been influenced by Thomas Reid, the founder of the “Scottish School of Common Sense” and fierce opponent of Hume, a prominent figure in the “Scottish Enlightenment” (a quite different “Enlightenment” than, for example, the French). Most people are not, thank God, philosophers. Yet the philosopher goes wrong when beginning with anything other than what Kant calls “the common human understanding,” which Kant never belittles. In this sense, Kant’s methodology is the same as Aristotle’s. And Kant is especially hard on thinkers who claim to be philosophers and whose work is intended to undermine “the common human understanding,” especially of the most important things, including those thinkers who traffic in ideas beyond what can be known. This number of which has, if anything, grown exponentially in the centuries since Kant wrote. Whenever Kant might be seen to undermine that understanding, as by his insistence on the limits of what we can know, he is apologetic, explaining his position in such a way that “the common human understanding” is preserved on higher ground. Those familiar with Kant only as an alleged “modern philosopher” may be surprised, even shocked, to see his explicit opposition to an entire range of ideas that bedevil modernity, materialism, fatalism, atheism, freethinking, lack of faith, fanaticism, superstition, and idealism and skepticism that have, long before now, “cross[ed] over to the public.”
Second, in referring to the common “hope for a future life” as having arisen “solely from a predisposition discernible to every human being in his [own] nature, viz., the inability ever to be satisfied by what is temporal (and thus is inadequate for the predispositions of his whole vocation),” Kant reminds us of St. Augustine’s “You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” This is similar to Voegelin’s concept of reason as “the sensorium of the transcendence” noted above, and it is at the core of the thought of the twentieth- century Catholic theologian, Henri de Lubac. It may be the best “proof” for the existence of God there is. It is too bad Kant did not follow up on this, but his concept of reason did not permit it. At least here Kant does not again say it.
Third, Kant here introduces the concept of the human “vocation,” a concept that will appear throughout his work, especially in his moral and religious works. For now, we note the significance of the fact that Kant affirms that each human person has a “vocation,” or to which he or she is in effect “called.” It is a vocation that gives meaning to human life and differentiates it from all other forms of life. To put it in very shorthand, our vocation is to do our duty. Kant’s “vocation” reminds us of Heidegger’s “care.”
Fourth, in referring to “the freedom of the will,” and asserting that “the consciousness of freedom arose from nothing but the clear exhibition of duties in their opposition to all claims of the inclinations,” Kant in effect summarizes his moral philosophy, the principal works of which will follow his First Critique.
Fifth, in referring to the common faith in the existence of God as “a wise and great author of the world” as having arisen “solely from the splendid order, beauty, and provisions manifested everywhere in nature,” Kant already anticipates his Third Critique, Critique of Judgment, in which he explores in depth pleasure and displeasure, beauty and the sublime in nature, and purposiveness in nature. (Indeed, Kant seems to have anticipated all of his future work in the Critique of Pure Reason, which he refers to at one point as a “propaedeutic” (B xliii).)
Sixth, and relative to Kant’s political concerns, which unfortunately have not received the same attention given to the other areas of his thought, Kant here suggests, in a way different from Plato and certainly from Machiavelli, the importance of genuine philosophers to good government. Kant’s Critique is intended to advance “a more legitimate claim of the speculative philosopher,” and we assume Kant is referring to himself. The genuine speculative philosopher “remains always the exclusive trustee of a science that is useful to the public without its knowing this: viz., the critique of reason.” And it is “Solely by means of [this] critique [that we] can . . . cut off, at the very root” the many false ideas and ideologies otherwise brewing in what will become known as “modernity” of “which can become harmful universally” and can become harmful by “crossing over” into public consciousness. Kant says, “If governments do indeed think it proper to occupy themselves with the concerns of scholars, they should promote the freedom for such critique, by which alone the works of reason can be put on a firm footing.” While, as we will see when we consider “The Doctrine of Right” in The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant is a founder of modern liberalism; he is not unconcerned with the relationship among morals, politics, and law, and he voices that concern even in his First Critique. His implicit request made to governments to “promote the freedom for such critique” because it is only thereby that “the works of reason can be put on a firm footing,” was prophetic in much of history subsequent to Kant can be read as the failure to heed that request.
Returning now to the remainder of the Preface to the Second Edition– I note only the importance of footnote 144, in which Kant says that an addition in his Second Edition of the First Critique
. . . consists . . . in a new refutation of psychological idealism, and a strict proof (also, I believe, the only possible proof) of the objective reality of outer intuition. However innocuous idealism may be considered to be (without in fact being so) as regards the essential purposes of metaphysics, there always remains this scandal for philosophy and human reason in general [if we accept idealism]: that we have to accept merely on faith the existence of things outside us (even though they provide us with all the material we have for cognitions, even for those of our inner sense); and that, if it occurs to someone to doubt their existence, we have no satisfactory proof with which to oppose him.
These are problems of idealism and skepticism. If we cannot anchor our reason in which is outside of us, what can we anchor it in?
Kant’s concern was “some obscurity in the expressions I used in that proof” in the First Edition of Critique, and he amends it in the Second Edition. He concludes, “I am conscious with just as much certainty that there are things outside me that have reference to my sense, as I am conscious that I myself exist as determined in time.”
Thus, it is clear Kant’s position is there is a real world of objects outside of us, of the appearances of which we can have knowledge through the combination of our intuition and understanding. Those who might reject Dr. Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley as not “sophisticated” enough—Johnson struck his foot against a large stone, crying, “I refute [Berkeley] thus”—may be more satisfied with Kant’s. Kant’s argument goes beyond merely refuting Berkeley.
What We Can Know; What We Cannot Know
As I mentioned above, Kant’s project in Critique of Pure Reason is to separate what we can know through our pure theoretical / speculative reason from what we cannot know. My principle interest in this Paper is with what we cannot know, but it is necessary to say something first about what we can know in order to make the distinction clear.
What and How We Can Know
We can know the sensible, the empirical, and the realm of nature, and Kant tells us how in the first parts of the First Critique.[28]
Rejecting both the rationalism of Leibniz and the empiricism of Hume but combining aspects of each, Kant tells us we can have knowledge of phenomena, of the appearances of objects, through a combination of our “intuition;” Kant means our sensibility that which “presents” such appearances to us for cognition,[29] with our “understanding.” The understanding is the contribution to knowledge made by our pure theoretical / speculative reason— without which knowledge would not be possible. It also represents what Kant called his “Copernican Revolution.” As Copernicus replaced the earth by the sun as the center of the universe, so Kant replaced the idea that our cognition must conform to objects with the idea that objects must conform to our cognition. Our participation in the acquisition of knowledge is active, not passive. Understanding is part of our pure reason, rational faculty or power, and it is concerned with actively producing knowledge by means of “concepts.” It is the realm of our pure reason in which such concepts exist and through which they operate upon intuition to produce knowledge.
Kant lists the concepts under four “Categories:” quantity, quality, relation, and modality. Three concepts appear under each Category. (A 80, B 106). Kant maintains, “This, then, is the list of all the original pure concepts of synthesis that the understanding contains a priori.” (A 80, B 106) The concepts are the synthetic a priori rules that we ourselves bring to the act of cognition by which we are enabled to understand the manifold of experiences presented to us in intuition, which, without the concepts, would be mere chaos. Only understanding, combined with intuition, makes knowledge possible. For example, Hume argued that we could derive no concept of causation from seeing that one event followed another. In response, Kant maintained that causation is a pure synthetic a priori concept, appearing under the Category of relation. It was Kant’s “discovery” that there could be synthetic, not just analytic, a priori concepts that made his epistemology possible.
Kant thus establishes there is a sensible world we have access to, we can have knowledge of it, and we can think about it.
What We Long to Know, But Cannot Ever Know
We can know phenomena, the appearances of objects we encounter in experience, but we cannot know noumena, the reality “behind” the appearances of objects. Noumena is, however, a broader term– it is not just what is “behind” the appearances of objects we cannot know. We cannot know, as much as we want to do so, what Kant (or his translators) variously refer to as the “suprasensible,” the “supersensible,” the “supernatural,” or the “hyperphysical.” It is in this realm we encounter the “ideas” pure reason itself presents us with like God, freedom, and immortality, but we cannot “know” these concepts, including those we can understand, since they are not objects in the sensible world.
By drawing the distinction between what we can know and what we cannot know, Kant hopes to protect—really, to save—epistemology, metaphysics, and ontology, ultimately validating the knowledge produced by natural science and, in Kant’s own way, the “reality” of what we cannot know. If the two realms are confused, as Kant claims they often have been in the history of philosophy, great damage can be done to both realms.
In any event, the recognition of both uses of reason– to obtain or to attempt to obtain knowledge, one successful and one a failure– overcomes idealism, skepticism, rationalism, and empiricism, “cut[ing] off, at the very root,” the parade of horribles listed in the Preface to the Second Edition.
Table of Contents
As indicated, my principal interest in the body of Critique of Pure Reason are in the parts of it Kant discusses what we long– but cannot– know. There is a great “Why?” question behind this phenomenon: Why should creatures/humans have a desire for a knowledge we cannot have? If Kant’s metaphysics diverges from Aristotle’s, still each can be said to be activated by this question.
In the inevitable struggle involved in wading through the First Critique, frequent repair to a Table of Contents is often necessary. And so below is a Table of Contents, drafted with the principal interest of this Paper in mind.
At the end of the Introduction to the Second Edition, Kant tells us his “science” will be divided into (1) a doctrine of elements, and (2) a doctrine of method, of pure reason. (A 15, B 29) While this is the division of the entire work, the former takes up its greatest bulk.
Transcendental Doctrine of Elements:
Part I. of the “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements” is the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” the subject of which is intuition, the presentation to us of the appearances of objects in the sensible, empirical world of nature, including the two forms of sensible intuition which are synthetic a priori principles of cognition: space and time.
Part II. of the “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements” is the “Transcendental Logic;” its principal division is between Division I., the “Transcendental Analytic,” and Division II., the “Transcendental Dialectic.” Broadly speaking, we can say Kant’s explanation of what we (can) know and how we (can) know it is contained in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” and the “Transcendental Analytic.,” while Kant’s discussion of what we cannot know is contained in the “Transcendental Dialectic.”
Transcendental Doctrine of Method:
This relatively short Section contains four Chapters, “The Discipline of Pure Reason,” “The Canon of Pure Reason,” “The Architectonic of Pure Reason,” and “The History of Pure Reason.”
Introduction
Following the Prefaces, Critique opens with Introductions to both the First and Second Editions.
Kant begins the Introduction to the Second Edition by saying, “There can be no doubt that all our cognition begins with experience.” (B 1) Objects present themselves to us through intuition, and our understanding processes the raw material of these sense impressions into a cognition of objects that is called experience. The understanding can do this because, as we have seen, it is the domain of the synthetic a priori concepts that, combined with intuition, make cognition possible. The concepts in our understanding structure intuitions in such a way that we can obtain knowledge of the manifold of objects (their appearances) presented to us by the world of sense, the empirical world. The “understanding” is Kant’s term for use of pure theoretical / speculative reason that gives us as much knowledge of objects as we can have.
But there is another use of pure theoretical / speculative reason– it is the use that always wants to go beyond the knowledge we can have through the combination of intuition and understanding. Kant refers to it also at the beginning of the Introduction by saying: “Much more significant yet than all the preceding [discussion of the first use of pure reason] is the fact that there are certain cognitions that [not only extend to but] even leave the realm of all possible experiences. These cognitions, by means of concepts to which no corresponding object can be given in experience at all, appear to expand the range of our judgments beyond all bounds of experience.” (A 2-3, B 6) It is these cognitions
which go beyond the world of sense, where experience cannot provide us with any guide or correction, [in which] reside our reason’s inquiries. We regard these inquiries as far superior in importance, and their final aim as much more sublime, than anything that our understanding can learn in the realm of appearances. Indeed, we would sooner dare anything, even at the risk of error, than give up such treasured inquiries [into the unavoidable problems of reason], whether on the ground that they are precarious somehow, or from disdain and indifference. These unavoidable problems of reason themselves are God, freedom, and immortality. But the science whose final aim, involving the science’s entire apparatus, is in fact directed solely at solving these problems is called metaphysics. Initially, the procedure of metaphysics is dogmatic; i.e., [metaphysics], without first examining whether reason is capable or incapable of so great an enterprise, confidently undertakes to carry it out. (A 3, B 6-7)
Here, Kant appears to limit “metaphysics” to this second use of pure theoretical / speculative reason, and we see Kant, whose usual writing style is metaphysically dry, can be eloquent when he wants to be. Again we note the similarity of Kant’s concept of metaphysics to Aristotle’s, and while Kant does not use the word “wonder,” as Aristotle did, he might have. We note as well that Kant, in the very Introduction to his First Critique, refers to the subjects that will occupy virtually all of his work subsequent to the First Critique– God, freedom, and immortality.
Only the first use of pure theoretical / speculative reason, in which we find such reason in the synthetic a priori concepts of the understanding, can issue in knowledge (when combined with intuition). The second use of pure theoretical / speculative reason cannot issue in knowledge, and Kant will go on to harshly criticize those “dogmatic” metaphysicians who think it can[30] and find “proof” of God, freedom, and immortality are not in pure theoretical / speculative reason but are found only in pure practical reason. As Kant will show, synthetic a priori judgments that go beyond all possible experience cannot be justified theoretically / speculatively at all, though they may still be justified in the practical / moral realm.
The “pure reason” Kant has in mind in his Critique of this subject is the realm of the synthetic a priori concepts, rules, principles, and ideas existing in our minds of which themselves Kant wants to have knowledge.
In Chapter V. of the Introduction to the Second Edition, Kant maintained that all theoretical sciences of reason contain synthetic a priori judgments as principles, including “Mathematical judgment are one and all synthetic” (B 14), “Natural science (physica) contains synthetic a priori judgments as principles” (B 17), and “Metaphysics is to contain synthetic a priori cognitions” (B 18)– note the present tense relative to mathematics and natural science, and the future tense relative to metaphysics. Kant’s discussion of metaphysics here is confusing, as best, but he appears to be using metaphysics to mean the science of the supersensible, and to suggest that, through his work, metaphysics will attain the same status as mathematics and natural science relative to the possession of synthetic a priori cognitions.
In Chapter VI. of the same Introduction, entitled “The General Problem of Pure Reason,” Kant, in attempting to “bring a multitude of inquiries under the formula of a single problem,” says, “Now the proper problem of pure reason is contained in this question: “How are synthetic judgments possible a priori?” (B 19). Kant argues that metaphysics, to date, has “remained in such a shaky state of uncertainty and contradictions” because “this problem, and perhaps even the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, has not previously occurred to anyone. Whether metaphysics stands or falls depends on the solution of this problem, or on an adequate proof that the possibility which metaphysics demands to see explained does not exist at all.” (Ibid.) Kant will conclude that metaphysics stands because his “Copernican Revolution” revealed that and how synthetic a priori judgments are possible.
Hearkening back to Chapter V., Kant raises the related questions of “How is pure mathematics possible?,” and “How is pure natural science possible?” (B 20) He answers by saying that in solving the problem of “How are synthetic judgments possible a priori?,” he has answered these questions as well. (B 20-21) That leaves, we recall from Chapter V., the question, “How is pure metaphysics possible?” But Kant, who continues to use “metaphysics” to refer to the suprasensible realm now, does not ask this question.
As he indicated in his discussions in Chapter V. of the theoretical sciences of mathematics, natural science, and metaphysics. Metaphysics is different from mathematics, because it presents us with entirely pure concepts; natural science presents us with objects we can cognize through the combination of intuition and understanding. As he further indicated in Chapter V., in contrast with mathematics and natural science, metaphysics is to contain synthetic a priori cognitions, that is, it does not contain them now, given that we are only at the Introduction to Kant’s great work. Continuing to contrast metaphysics with mathematics and natural science, Kant says:
As regards metaphysics, however, there are grounds on which everyone must doubt its possibility: its progress thus far has been poor; and thus far not a single metaphysics has been put forth of which we can say, as far as the essential purpose of metaphysics is concerned, that it is actually at hand.
Yet in a certain sense this kind of cognition must likewise be regarded as given; and although metaphysics is not actual as a science, yet it is actual as a natural predisposition (i.e., as a metaphysica naturalis). For human reason, impelled by its own need rather than moved by the mere vanity of gaining a lot of knowledge, proceeds irresistibly to such questions as cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason and any principles taken from such use. And thus all human beings, once their reason has expanded to [the point where it can] speculate, actually have always had in them, and always will have in them, some metaphysics. (B 21)
And so we hear again, over the centuries, the voice of Aristotle raised at the very beginning of Western metaphysics: “All men,” not just philosophers, “by nature desire to know.” We are all, from the loftiest college philosophy professor to the lowliest so-called “street person,” by nature, metaphysicians, to greater or lesser extents. Nature, with an irresistible force, predisposes us thus. And we are left again with wonder that we are such creatures that can have such a desire, a wonder that perhaps can only be resolved by revelation, by the Biblical assertion that we are all made in the image and likeness of God in that we have reason and free will. Genesis 1:26.
Instead of asking the question, “How is pure metaphysics possible?,” Kant asks the question, “How is metaphysics as a natural predisposition possible?, i.e., how, from the nature of universal human reason, do the questions arise that pure reason poses to itself and is impelled, by its own need, to answer as best it can?” (B21-22)
However, given that “Thus far . . . all attempts to answer these natural questions—e.g., whether the world has a beginning or has been there from eternity, etc.—have met with unavoidable contradictions” (B 22), we must go beyond our “natural predisposition,” and Kant’s vocation is to show us the way. “Hence,” he says,
we cannot settle for our mere natural predisposition for metaphysics, i.e., our pure power of reason itself, even though some metaphysics or other (whichever it might be) always arises from it. Rather, it must be possible, by means of this predisposition, to attain certainty either concerning our knowledge or lack of knowledge of the objects [of metaphysics], i.e., either concerning a decision about the objects that its questions deal with, or certainty concerning the ability or inability of reason to make judgments about these objects. In other words, it must be possible to expand our pure reason in a reliable way, or to set for it limits that are determinate and safe. (Ibid.)
“This last question,” Kant goes on, which flows from the problem as to how, in general, synthetic judgments are possible a priori, “may rightly be stated thus: How is metaphysics as science possible?” (Ibid.) Again, we may have been expecting the questions, “How is pure metaphysics possible?,” but Kant does not ask it. Perhaps in the case of metaphysics the questions, “How is metaphysics as science possible?” and “How is pure metaphysics possible?” are the same question, and they are resolved in the proposition left open in Chapter V. by completing it as follows: “Metaphysics does contain synthetic a priori cognitions.” After all, Kant does go on to assert metaphysics, as science, is possible, and to demonstrate it is possible as science, and as pure, because it contains synthetic a priori cognitions. And we might say the rest of Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to that demonstration. Further, it seems to me that, in that work, Kant both expands pure reason in a reliable way and sets for it limits that are determinate and safe, in effect doing the one by also doing the other, but I am not sure about that.
In any event, following the question, “How is metaphysics as science possible?,” Kant continues:
Ultimately, therefore, critique of pure reason leads necessarily to science; the dogmatic use of pure reason without critique, on the other hand, to baseless assertions that can always be opposed by others that seem equally plausible, and hence to skepticism.
This science, moreover, cannot be overly, forbiddingly voluminous. For it deals not with objects of reason, which are infinitely diverse, but merely with [reason] itself. [Here reason] deals with problems that issue entirely from its own womb; they are posed to it not by the nature of things distinct from it, but by its own nature. And thus, once it has become completely acquainted with its own ability regarding the objects that it may encounter in experience, reason must find it easy to determine, completely and safely, the range and the bounds of its use [when] attempted beyond all bounds of experience. (B 22-23)
Kant’s great worry, that dogmatism in metaphysics leads only to skepticism, that is, to the denial of any reality behind the ideas of God, freedom, and immortality, and so ultimately away from “rational belief,” is suggested in the beginning of the next paragraph, which completes Chapter VI. of the Introduction:
Hence all attempts that have been made thus far to bring a metaphysics about dogmatically can and must be regarded as if they had never occurred. For whatever is analytic in one metaphysics or another, i.e., is mere dissection of the concepts residing a priori in our reason, is only a prearrangement for metaphysics proper, and is not yet its purpose at all. That purpose is to expand our a priori cognition synthetically, and for this purpose the dissection of reason’s a priori concepts is useless. For it shows merely what is contained in these concepts; it does not show how we arrive at such concepts a priori, so that we could then also determine the valid use of such concepts in regard to the objects of all cognition generally. Nor do we need much self-denial to give up all these claims [of dogmatic metaphysics]; for every metaphysics put forth thus far [including Aristotle’s?] has long since been deprived of its reputation by the fact that it gave rise to undeniable, and in the dogmatic procedure indeed unavoidable, contradictions of reason with itself. A different treatment, completely opposite to the one used thus far, must be given to metaphysics–a science, indispensable to human reason, whose every new shoot can indeed be lopped off but whose root cannot be eradicated. We shall need more perseverance in order to keep from being deterred–either from within by the difficulty of this science or from without by people’s resistance to it–from thus finally bringing it to a prosperous and fruitful growth. (B 23-24)
Kant, like Voegelin and other philosophers of consciousness after Kant, thus focused his principal attack on dogmatism, which had led in the realm of metaphysics, as it leads in other realms, including the spiritual, to skepticism, in the throes of which reason may completely slipped its moorings and issue in all sorts of things having little or no relationship to reality at all. One thinks here of the mass political ideologies arising in the centuries after Kant might have been prevented by careful attention to Kant.
At the beginning of Chapter VII., the last Chapter of the Introduction, Kant says: “From all of the above we arrive at the idea of a special science that may be called the critique of pure reason. For reason is the power that provides us with the principles of a priori cognition. Hence pure reason is reason that contains the principles for cognizing something absolutely a priori.” (A 10-11, B 24-25) A critique of pure reason, which must limit itself to the study of reason, is really only a propaedeutic to the system of pure reason. “For such a critique would serve only to purify our reason, not to expand it, and would keep our reason free from errors, which is a very great gain already. I call transcendental all cognition that deals not so much with objects as rather with our way of cognizing objects in general insofar as that way of cognizing is to be possible a priori. A system of such concepts would be called transcendental philosophy.” (A 11-12, B 25)
Kant distinguishes a critique of pure reason and a transcendental philosophy. The former is limited to a consideration of synthetic a priori cognition, and the latter also includes analytic a priori cognition.[31] Kant will limit himself to the former. And he has a “foremost goal” in dividing the science he is proposing:
no concepts whatever containing anything empirical must enter into this science; or, differently put, the goal is that the a priori cognition in it be completely pure.[32] Hence, although the supreme principles and basic concepts of morality are a priori cognitions, they still do not belong in transcendental philosophy. For they do of necessity also bring [empirical concepts] into the formulation of the system of pure morality: viz., the concepts of pleasure and displeasure, of desires and inclinations, etc., all of which are of empirical origin. Although the supreme principles and basic concepts of morality do not lay these empirical concepts themselves at the basis of their precepts, they must still bring in such pleasure and displeasure, desires and inclinations, etc. in [formulating] the concept of duty: viz., as an obstacle to be overcome, or as a stimulus that is not to be turned into a motive. Hence transcendental philosophy is a philosophy of merely speculative pure reason. For everything practical, insofar as it contains incentives, refers to feelings, and these belong to the empirical sources of cognition. (A 14-15, B 28-29)
The critique of pure theoretical / speculative reason is devoted to an analysis of the synthetic a priori concepts of the understanding, by which we cognize objects in nature presented to us in intuition. Pure practical reason, the realm of Kant’s moral philosophy, and of God, freedom, and immortality, which has its own synthetic a priori concepts, and which is the subject of Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, and The Metaphysics of Morals, is rather sharply distinguished from pure theoretical / speculative reason, which is the subject of the Critique of Pure Reason.
In proposing to divide the science he is setting forth in terms of the general viewpoint of a system as such into a doctrine of elements and a doctrine of method, of pure reason. Each of which will be further subdivided, and Kant concludes the Introduction as follows:
Each of these two main parts would be subdivided; but the bases on which that subdivision would be made cannot yet be set forth here. Only this much seems to be needed here by way of introduction or advance notice: Human cognition has two stems, viz., sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from a common root, though one unknown to us. Through sensibility objects are given to us; through understanding they are thought. Now if sensibility were to contain a priori presentations constituting the condition under which objects are given to us, it would to that extent belong to transcendental philosophy. And since the conditions under which alone the objects of human cognition are given to us precede the conditions under which these objects are thought, the transcendental doctrine of sense would have to belong to the first part of the science of elements. (A 15-16, B 29-30)
“Transcendental Aesthetic”
And so Kant begins the “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements” with Part I., the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” which concerns intuition, and it’s a priori presentations of space and time. We will not consider it here.
“Transcendental Logic”—“Introduction”
Part II. of the “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements” is the “Transcendental Logic.” It contains two “Divisions:” Division I., the “Transcendental Analytic,” and Division II., the “Transcendental Dialectic.” Broadly speaking, the “Transcendental Analytic” is about understanding, and the “Transcendental Dialectic” is about “reason.”
In the “Introduction” to the “Transcendental Logic,” entitled “Idea of a Transcendental Logic,” Kant famously says,
Without sensibility no object would be given to us; and without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind. Hence it is just as necessary that we make our concepts sensible (i.e., that we add the object to them in intuition) as it is necessary that we make our intuitions understandable (i.e., that we bring them under concepts). Moreover, this capacity and this ability cannot exchange their functions. The understanding cannot intuit anything, and the senses cannot think anything. Only from their union can cognition arise. (A 51-52, B 75-76)
Knowledge depends on the full cooperation of sensibility (or intuition) and understanding– therefore what is beyond sensibility is beyond knowledge.
The science of the rules of sensibility as such is aesthetic,[33] and the science of the rules of the understanding as such is logic. (A 52, B 76) Of the various kinds of logic, “Transcendental Logic” is the logic that “deals merely with the laws of understanding and of reason [hence the two Divisions]; it does so only insofar as this logic is referred a priori to objects—unlike general logic, which is referred indiscriminately to empirical as well as pure rational cognitions.” (A 57, B 81-82) In the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” Kant isolated sensibility for examination, and in the “Transcendental Logic,” he isolates the understanding and reason for examination.
Kant calls the “Transcendental Analytic” “a logic of truth” (A 62-63, B 87), and the “Transcendental Dialectic” “the logic of illusion” (A 61, B 85-86). Relative to this distinction, Kant warns us of
great enticement and temptation to employ these pure cognitions of understanding and these principles by themselves, and to do so even beyond the bounds of experience, even though only experience can provide us with the matter (objects) to which those pure concepts of understanding can be applied. As a consequence, the understanding runs the risk that, by idly engaging in subtle reasoning, it will put the merely formal principles of pure understanding to a material use, and will make judgments indiscriminately even about objects that are not given, or indeed about objects that perhaps cannot be given in any way at all. Properly, then, transcendental analytic should be only a canon for judging the empirical use. Hence we misuse transcendental analytic if we accept it as the organon of a universal and unlimited use, and if with pure understanding alone we venture to judge, assert, and decide anything synthetically about objects as such. Hence the use of pure understanding would then be dialectical. Therefore the second part of transcendental logic must be a critique of this dialectical illusion, and is called transcendental dialectic. It is to be regarded not as an art of dogmatically creating such illusion (an art that is unfortunately quite prevalent in diverse cases of metaphysical jugglery), but as a critique of understanding and reason as regards their hyperphysical use. We need such a critique in order to uncover the deceptive illusion in the baseless pretensions of understanding and reason; and we need it in order to downgrade reason’s claim that it discovers and expands [cognition]—which it supposedly accomplishes by merely using transcendental principles—[to the claim that it] merely judges pure understanding and guards it against sophistical deceptions. (A 63-64, B 87-88)
In our passionate seeking to cognize the non-material, purely intellectual “ideas” that “reason” inevitably presents us with, such as God, freedom, and immortality of the soul, which “entice and tempt” us far beyond the objects presented to us in intuition, we are tempted to use the “concepts” of the “understanding” which do, in combination with intuition, permit cognition of the “objects” of the empirical, sensible world, forgetting that cognition of such “ideas” is not possible through the use of pure theoretical / speculative reason. We cannot go beyond the bounds of experience in this way, in effect forgetting or failing or refusing to realize that “only experience can provide us with the matter (objects) to which those pure concepts of understanding can be applied.” If we try to do that, as so many metaphysicians have in the past, we risk establishing a dogmatism which, because it is based on a logical fallacy, will undermine all possible cognition. As we will see in the “Transcendental Dialectic,” we are not without a way to cognize the “ideas” of “reason,” and that way is through pure reason, but only of the “practical” variety. And so, while Kant properly says here that his critique is “need[ed] . . . in order to downgrade reason’s claim that it discovers and expands [cognition] . . . [to the claim that it] merely judges pure understanding and guards it against sophistical deceptions,” that is not the end of reason’s story.
“Transcendental Logic”—Division I. The “Transcendental Analytic”
We will not consider the “Transcendental Analytic,” which concerns the synthetic a priori concepts of the understanding, here. Instead we will move on to consider the “Transcendental Dialectic,” having been warned by Kant it can be the source of metaphysical error. What we will also find in it is the luminosity of the ideas thrown to us by pure reason.
“Transcendental Logic”—Division II. The “Transcendental Dialectic”
Division II. of the “Transcendental Logic” is the “Transcendental Dialectic.” Following an “Introduction” and a Book I., “On the Concepts of Pure Reason,” Book II. contains three Chapters entitled “On the Paralogisms of Pure Reason,” “The Antinomy of Pure Reason,” and “The Ideal of Pure Reason.”
Introduction
As indicated, while the “Transcendental Analytic” focused on the understanding and its concepts which, together with intuition, make cognition of the objects of the empirical, sensible world possible, the “Transcendental Dialectic” focuses on reason and its ideas, and warns against all attempts to cognize such ideas through the methodology set out in the “Transcendental Analytic.” In the “Transcendental Dialectic” Kant will show, in Paralogisms, Antinomies, and the Ideal of Pure Reason, how reason may overstep its boundaries in attempting to free the understanding from the limit it has to experience, leading to what Kant calls “dogmatism”[34] and “Transcendental Illusion.”[35]
The “Transcendental Dialectic” offers a justified discipline to reason, and considerations of it often stop there. “Transcendental Dialectic” is one of the most important parts of Critique of Pure Reason, because there Kant discusses in a thorough-going way the “ideas” of “reason,” which we cannot cognize through the understanding. As he indicates several times in Critique, it captures our interest much more than do the “objects” we can actually cognize through the “understanding.” How remarkable it is that creatures such as ourselves should even seek to know, above all other possible matters, what we cannot ever know, that we cannot avoid the “transcendental illusion” (A 297, B 353-354)! At the end of Chapter I, “On Transcendental Illusion,” of the “Introduction” to the “Transcendental Dialectic,” Kant stresses the staying power of the “Transcendental Illusion”:
Hence the transcendental dialectic will settle for uncovering the illusion of transcendent judgments, and for simultaneously keeping it from deceiving us. But that illusion should even vanish as well (as does logical illusion) and cease to be an illusion–this the transcendental dialectic can never accomplish. For here we are dealing with a natural and unavoidable illusion that itself rests on subjective principles and foists them on us as objective ones, whereas a logical dialectic in resolving fallacious inferences deals only with a mistake in the compliance with principles, or with an artificial illusion created in imitating such inferences. Hence there is a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason. This dialectic is not one in which a bungler might become entangled on his own through lack of knowledge, or one that some sophist has devised artificially in order to confuse reasonable people. It is, rather, a dialectic that attaches to human reason unpreventably and that, even after we have uncovered this deception, still will not stop hoodwinking and thrusting reason incessantly into momentary aberrations that always need to be removed. (A 297-298, B 354-355)
Some philosophers would go on to argue from the “transcendental illusion” that, as with illusions generally, there is nothing behind it. They would leave us only with Kant’s epistemology concerning objects, if even that. Nietzsche comes to mind but not Kant, who clearly sees that, even though the “transcendental illusion” is an illusion, it is not your ordinary, everyday illusion. It is, in fact, “natural,” “unavoidable,” and it “attaches to human reason unpreventably.” So close is this “attachment” that “even after we have uncovered this deception,” it still will not let go. The Table of Categories does not exhaust pure reason. Reason reaches for the absolute, the unconditioned, generating the concepts of God, freedom, and immortality, which “it borrow neither from the senses nor from understanding.” (A 299, B 355) Kant takes it with the utmost seriousness, not just as a mistake, but, paradoxically, as a pointer. As it turns out, even more important for our purposes than Kant’s turn to reason’s ideas is the fact that, while in the “Transcendental Dialectic” Kant is adamant that the ideas of reason cannot be cognized through the pure theoretical / speculative reason that is the proper subject of the Critique of Pure Reason, the “Transcendental Dialectic” itself “makes room,” as it is sometimes put, for the ideas of reason to be cognized through pure practical reason that is the proper subject of Kant’s subsequent moral works, and Kant in effect, however briefly, introduces his moral work in the “Transcendental Dialectic.”
In Chapter II. of his “Introduction” to the “Transcendental Dialectic,” Kant considers pure reason as the seat of the “transcendental illusion.” He also finds a positive use of reason in that, while the understanding unifies the concepts by which we can cognize objects, it is reason that unifies the concepts of the understanding.
Book I: On the Concepts of Pure Reason
Book I of the “Transcendental Dialectic” is “On the Concepts of Pure Reason,” particularly the ideas. Kant called the pure concepts of understanding categories, so he provisionally assigns to the concepts of pure reason, that is, the “ideas,” a new name, “transcendental ideas.” (A 311, B 368)
Section I. of Book I. is entitled “On Ideas as Such.” “Ideas” in its common use refers to anything that may pop into the mind. But by “ideas,” Kant means something like, but also different from, what Plato meant by “Ideas.” Kant’s “ideas” are part of the reason that always points beyond the understanding. “Plato,” says Kant,
well discerned that our cognitive power feels a much higher need than merely to spell out appearances according to synthetic unity in order to be able to read them as experience; and that our reason naturally soars to cognitions which go far beyond the point where any object capable of being given by experience could ever be congruent with them, but which nonetheless have their reality and are by no means mere chimeras.
Plato found his ideas primarily in whatever is practical [as Kant will do], i.e., whatever rests on freedom–freedom in turn being subject to cognitions that are a product peculiar to reason. . . .
. . .
But Plato sees an origin from ideas not merely in that sphere where human reason shows veritable causality and where ideas become efficient causes (of actions and their objects), viz., in the moral sphere; but also in regard to nature itself he rightly sees distinct proofs of its origin from ideas. A plant, an animal, the regular arrangement of the world edifice (hence presumably also the whole natural order) show distinctly that they are possible only according to ideas. They show that although no individual creature under the individual conditions of its existence is congruent with the idea of the most perfect creature of its kind (any more than a human being is congruent with the idea of humanity which, as the archetype of his actions, he yet bears in his soul), yet in the highest understanding these ideas are individual, unchangeable, thoroughly determined, and are the original causes of things; and that only the whole of the combination of things in the universe is, solely and exclusively, fully adequate to that idea. If we separate what is exaggerated in Plato’s manner of expression, then the philosopher’s intellectual soaring–whereby he rises from the merely replicating contemplation of what is physical in the world order to this order’s architectonic connection according to purposes, i.e., according to ideas–is an endeavor that deserves to be respected and followed. But this intellectual soaring is of quite particular merit in what concerns the principles of morality, legislation, and religion, where the ideas make the experience itself (of the good) possible in the first place, although they can never be expressed fully in it. (A 314-318. B 370-375)
Kant is in dialogue with Aristotle and now with Plato. Kant apparently agrees with Plato that nature originated from ideas, or an intelligent source. Kant insists “the expression “idea,” in its original [that is, Platonic] meaning” must be “safeguard[ed.]” (A 319, B 376) In referring to “this order’s architectonic connection according to purposes,” Kant anticipates his treatment of “teleological judgment” to appear in Critique of Judgment, not to be published until 1790. Perhaps we were wrong to say Kant’s concept of reason, taken altogether, is narrower than Plato’s and Aristotle’s concept of reason as “the sensorium of transcendence!”
Section II. of Book I. is entitled “On Transcendental Ideas.” It deals generally with the task of reason insofar as it may extend, if possible, to the unity of understanding and to the unconditioned.
Kant laments here what had happened to the word “absolute,” a critical word and familiar from classical philosophy that the genuine philosopher cannot do without:
But in speaking here of the totality of conditions and of the unconditioned as the title common to all concepts of reason, we again come upon an expression that we cannot dispense with and that yet, in view of an ambiguity attaching to it through long misuse, we cannot use safely: the word absolute. This is one of the few words that in their very initial meaning were adapted to a concept for which offhand there is no other word at all in the same language that fits it precisely. Hence the word’s loss–or, what is tantamount, its shaky use–must entail also the loss of the concept itself. Moreover, because this concept occupies reason very much indeed, we cannot dispense with it without great detriment to all transcendental judging. (A 324, B 380-381)
Kant will employ the word in its “expanded meaning . . . and oppose it to what holds only comparatively or in a particular respect; for the latter is restricted to conditions, but the absolute holds without restriction. Now, the transcendental concept of reason always concerns only the absolute totality in the synthesis of conditions, and never ends except at what is unconditioned absolutely, i.e., in every reference.” (A 326, B 382)
In the same Section, Kant goes on to say that whatever the limits of the ideas of reason, “the idea is the indispensable condition of any practical use of reason. . . . In the practical idea pure reason even has a causality for actually producing what its concept contains. Hence of wisdom we cannot say–disdainfully, as it were–that it is only an idea. Rather, precisely because wisdom is the idea of the necessary unity of all possible purposes, it must, as an original and at least limiting condition, serve everything practical as a rule. Now, although we must say of the transcendental concepts of reason that they are only ideas, yet we shall have to regard them as by no means superfluous and null.” (A 328-329, B 385) With his references to wisdom, for which he gives a definition and purposes, Kant anticipates Critique of Judgment. Further, Kant believes “that perhaps the transcendental ideas of reason make possible a transition from the concepts of nature to the practical concepts and in this way provide for the moral ideas themselves support and coherence with reason’s speculative cognitions.” (A 329, B 386) In Critique of Judgment, Kant will later come to give the power of judgment the credit for the transition from the theoretical / speculative use of pure reason, the subject of the First Critique, to the practical use of pure reason, the subject of the Second Critique, Critique of Practical Reason.
In Section III. of Book I., entitled “System of Transcendental Ideas,” Kant holds all transcendental ideas can presumably be brought under three classes:
(1) The absolute (unconditioned) unity of the thinking subject, the “I,” the thinking subject is the object of rational psychology.
(2) The absolute unity of the series of conditions of appearance, and the sum of all appearances (the world) is the object of rational cosmology.
(3) The absolute unity of the condition of all objects of thought as such, and the thing containing the supreme condition of the possibility of all can be thought (the being of all beings) is the object of theology. (A 334, B 391)
“Hence,” Kant continues, “pure reason provides us with the idea for a transcendental psychology (psychologia rationalis); for a transcendental cosmology (cosmologia rationalis); finally, also for a transcendental theology (theologia transcendentalis). Even the mere outline for each and every one of these sciences cannot at all be ascribed to understanding . . . rather, even any such outline is a pure and genuine product or problem solely of pure reason.” (A 334-335, B 391-392) Kant acknowledges “a thought that at first glance seems extremely paradoxical,” that is, how reason is able, from its own nature, to subjectively derive each of these three mere ideas. (A 335-336, B 393) Kant, as always, is attuned to the mystery in things.
He concludes this Section by remarking on the “natural . . . advance” “from the cognition of oneself (the soul) to the cognition of the world and, by means of it, to [the cognition of] the original being.” (A 337, B 394-395) In a footnote here, Kant continues:
Metaphysics has only three ideas as the proper purpose of its investigation–God, freedom, and immortality–and in such a way that the second concept, when combined with the first, is to lead to the third as a necessary conclusion. Everything else that this science deals with serves it only as a means for arriving at these ideas and at their reality. It needs these ideas not for the sake of natural science, but in order to get beyond nature. Insight into these ideas would make theology, morality, and–through combination of the two–religion and hence the highest purposes of our existence dependent merely on our speculative power of reason and on nothing else. In a systematic presentation of those ideas the mentioned order would, as the synthetic order, be the most fitting. But in the treatment that must necessarily precede such systematic presentation the analytic order, which reverses the synthetic order, will be more appropriate to the purpose of carrying out our great plan–which we do by proceeding from what experience provides us with directly, viz., psychology, to cosmology, and from there up to theology [the cognition of God].
There can be no further transcendental concepts of reason whatever beyond the three Kant has listed. (A 338, B 396)
Kant has set up the subject matter of Book II. of the “Transcendental Dialectic,” which will deal in its three Chapters, respectively, with the paralogisms of pure reason, which concern the soul (the self), the object of rational psychology; the antinomies of pure reason, which concern the world, the object of rational cosmology; and the ideal of pure reason, which concerns God, the object of rational theology. Kant’s point in each Chapter will be that pure reason cannot give us any knowledge of any of these objects as much as we wish it could do so.
Before we get to the first Chapter of Book II., Kant says, “we cannot become acquainted with the object corresponding to an idea . . . we can have a problematic concept of it” (A 339, B 397), an interesting, but puzzling, statement.
Book II: On the Dialectical Inferences of Pure Reason
Chapter I.-III. of Book II. are the ways in which reason, by its very nature, goes wrong, leads us into illusions by having us think we can obtain knowledge we cannot obtain.
Chapter I: On the Paralogisms of Pure Reason
Paralogisms, the subject of Chapter I., are wrong forms of reasoning, pieces of illogical reasoning, especially ones which appear superficially logical or the reason believed to be logical. The mistake is in applying the concepts of the understanding to the ideas of reason. Kant raises the question of whether we can know the soul / the self / the “I” through pure reason, as the paralogisms claim, but the answer is no. Rationality by itself cannot establish that “I,” as a thinking being (soul), is a substance; that I am simple; that I am a person (an enduring soul); or that the existence of all objects of outer senses is doubtful.[36] Rational psychology is limited. We are reminded “this refusal of reason to give a satisfying answer to our inquisitive questions reaching beyond this life should be regarded as a hint of reason to turn our self-cognition away from fruitless transcendent speculation and to fruitful practical use. Although this use is directed always only to objects of experience, it obtains its principles from higher up, and determines our conduct in such a way as it would if our vocation reached infinitely far beyond experience and hence beyond this life.” (B 421)
Moreover,
Yet not the slightest loss arises from this for the right–indeed, even the necessity–of assuming a future life by following principles of the practical use of reason, which is linked with the speculative use. For the merely speculative proof of a future life has never been able to have any influence on common human reason anyway. . . . The proofs that are usable for the world are all left with their value undiminished by this. On the contrary, by doing away with those dogmatic pretensions they gain in clarity and in a conviction that is not artificial. For they transfer reason to the domain peculiar to it, viz., the order of purposes, which is yet simultaneously an order of nature. But then reason, when regarded as in itself a practical power that is not limited to the conditions of the order of nature, is justified in going beyond this order by simultaneously expanding the order of purposes, and with it our own existence, beyond the bounds of experience and life. (B 424-425)
We see purposeness everywhere in nature, a point upon which Kant will expand in Critique of Judgment. We see “the human being . . . can alone contain the ultimate final purpose of all this clearly purposive natural order,” and we necessarily conclude that human beings are not excluded from this purposive order. Kant, with eloquence, now praises the moral law within him, as he will do at the end of Critique of Practical Reason, saying:
For his natural predispositions–not merely concerning his talents and the impulses to make use of these, but concerning, above all, the moral law in him–go far beyond all the benefit and advantage that he could draw from them in this life. They go so far beyond these that this moral law teaches him to esteem above everything even the mere consciousness of a righteous attitude–and this in the absence of all advantages, including even the shadowy construct of posthumous fame; and that he feels inwardly called upon to make himself fit, by his conduct in this world and while forgoing many advantages, to be a citizen of a better world, which he has in his idea. Thus there always still remains this powerful and forever irrefutable basis of proof, accompanied by an incessantly increasing cognition of purposiveness in everything that we see before us and by an outlook into the immensity of creation, and hence also by the consciousness of a certain unboundedness in the possible expansion of our knowledge along with an urge commensurate therewith. This basis of proof remains despite our having to give up any claim to insight into the necessary continuance of our existence from the merely theoretical cognition of ourselves. (B 425-426)
This is an excellent example of how Critique of Pure Reason clears the ground for the Critique of Practical Reason, stating immortality of the human soul will be postulated.
Chapter II: The Antinomy of Pure Reason
The subject of Chapter II. of Book II. is the antinomies of pure reason. The question here is whether we can know “the world” (the cosmos) through pure reason, and the answer again is no. “. . . just as the paralogisms of pure reason laid the basis for a dialectical psychology, so will the antinomy of pure reason put before us the transcendental principles of a supposed pure (rational) cosmology. The antinomy will do so not in order to find this cosmology valid and adopt it, but–as is, indeed, already indicated by the very name, conflict of reason–in order to exhibit it in its beguiling but deceptive illusion, as an idea that cannot be reconciled with appearances.” (A 408, B 435)
While the antinomies may present us with “beguiling and deceptive illusions,” Kant’s discussion of the antinomies is among the most interesting parts of Critique of Pure Reason for our purposes; it deals with four of the most fundamental existential questions human beings ask, and Kant does not limit himself to the sense in which the answers given by pure theoretical / speculative reason to these questions are “beguiling and deceptive.” On the contrary, Kant enters into the questions themselves on a deeper level.
There are four and, Kant maintains, only four possible antinomies of pure reason. Each antinomy sets forth a thesis and an antithesis– the latter being the opposite of the former. The antinomies are:
(1) The cosmological antinomy,[37] concerning the question “whether the world has a beginning and some boundary to its extension in space” (A 463, B 491). The thesis answers yes, the antithesis no.
(2) The ontological antinomy,[38] concerning the question “whether somewhere, and perhaps in my thinking self, there is an indivisible and indestructible unity–or nothing but what is divisible and passes away” (ibid.). The thesis affirms the former proposition, the antithesis the latter.
(3) The antinomy of causality,[39] concerning “whether in my actions I am free or, like other beings, led along the course of nature and fate” (ibid.). The thesis affirms the former proposition (I am free in my actions), the antithesis the latter (I am determined in my actions, as everything in nature is determined by the iron law of cause and effect).
(4) The theological antinomy,[40] concerning “whether there is a supreme cause of the world, or whether the things of nature and their order amount to the ultimate object, at which we must stop in all our contemplations” (ibid.). The thesis affirms the former proposition, the antithesis the latter.
The first two antinomies are called the “mathematical antinomies,” and the last two are called the “dynamical antinomies.”
In each antinomy, both the thesis and the antithesis appear to be right, but, because they contradict each other, both must be wrong. In the antinomies, reason is in conflict with itself. (Reason went wrong in the paralogisms, but it was not in conflict with itself.) The antinomies suggest unending arguments because both sides are “right,” and unending arguments lead to “pure reason’s euthanasia.” (A 407, B 434) Notwithstanding all of that, the antinomies will stay with us after we have gotten over the paralogisms, for the antinomies “can be rendered innocuous, but never obliterated.” (A 422, B 450)
Section III of Chapter II of Book II: “On the Interest of Reason in This Its Conflict”
One of the most important parts of the First Critique for our purposes is Section III of Chapter II of Book II of the “Transcendental Dialectic,” entitled “On the Interest of Reason in This Its Conflict,” which immediately follows the four antinomies in Section II. Kant states reason has an “interest” in the conflict represented by the antinomies, or reason’s own conflict. For, given reason’s practical-moral interest, each of us has a need to believe in God, freedom, and immortality. Recall the First Critique is a critique of pure reason, not a critique of practical reason, and that one of the principal purposes of the First Critique is to make room for the Second.
In Section II, Kant presented and knocked down the antinomies as logical fallacies. Lesser thinkers might stop there and conclude, as some did, the questions raised by the antinomies cannot be resolved on any basis whatsoever– they are meaningless, should not even be raised, or some similar other conclusion. Not Kant. Kant saw the fundamental importance of these questions for each and every human person, and therefore for the philosopher.[41] In Section III, Kant acknowledges the significance of the questions raised by each antinomy:
There we have, then [in the four antinomies of pure reason], the entire dialectical play of the cosmological ideas. These ideas in no way permit an object congruent with them to be given in any possible experience; indeed, they do not even permit reason to think them in agreement with universal laws of experience. Yet they are nonetheless not thought up by choice, but reason is led to them necessarily in the continuous progress of empirical synthesis–viz., when it wants to free from any condition and comprehend, in its unconditioned totality, what according to rules of experience can always be determined only conditionally. These subtly reasoning assertions are so many attempts to solve four natural and unavoidable problems of reason. Hence there can only be exactly four of these assertions, neither more nor fewer, because there are no further series of synthetic presuppositions that bound the empirical synthesis a priori. (A 462, B 490)
Kant is very close here to Voegelin’s reading of the classical Greek philosophers in Voegelin’s essay, “Reason: The Classic Experience.”[42] There, especially with reference to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Voegelin discusses how, in the experienced tension of our lives, we are drawn by the divine transcendent ground of being to seek that same ground. Kant says the ideas reason presents us with are “not thought up by choice.” On the contrary, “reason is led to them necessarily” in its seeking of the “unconditioned.” The antinomies are reason’s “attempts to solve four natural and unavoidable problems of reason” itself.
While the antinomies represent “The glamorous pretensions that reason has in expanding its domain beyond all bounds of experience,” and while they “have been presented by us only in dry formulas that contain merely the basis of reason’s claims of its right;” nevertheless,
in the progressive expansion of reason’s use by starting from the realm of experiences and gradually soaring up to these sublime ideas, philosophy shows a dignity that, if philosophy could only maintain its pretensions, would far surpass the value of all other human science. For philosophy promises to us the foundation for our greatest expectations and outlooks concerning the ultimate purposes wherein all endeavors of reason must in the end be united. . . . [The questions raised by the antinomies] are questions for whose solution the mathematician would gladly give away his entire science, since it still cannot provide him with satisfaction regarding humanity’s highest and most treasured purposes. (A 463-464, B 491-492)
In the antinomies, “reason finds itself–in the midst of its greatest expectations–quite disconcerted in a throng of arguments and counterarguments. Yet because of reason’s honor and even security, neither withdrawing from the quarrel nor watching it indifferently as a mere mock combat is feasible, and even less feasible is simply commanding peace; for the object of the dispute is of great interest.” (A 464, B 492) Is reason in the grip of a “mere misunderstanding”? (Ibid.)
Kant defers this question. Instead, he “consider[s] first which party we might best like to join, should we be compelled to take sides. We are consulting, in that case, not the logical touchstone of truth but merely our interest.” (A 465, B 493) Kant will take something of an existential leap, beyond the iron laws of logic and into the nature of the “interest” thrown up by the fact that reason insistently confronts us with questions we cannot avoid without the loss of the most important part of our humanity.
Kant begins by comparing
the principles from which the two parties start. Among the assertions of the antithesis one discerns a perfect uniformity in the way of thinking and a complete unity of the maxim–namely, a principle of pure empiricism–not only in explaining the appearances in the world but also in solving the transcendental ideas of the universe itself. By contrast, the assertions of the thesis lay at their basis, besides the empirical kind of explanation within the series of appearances, also intellectual beginnings, and to that extent the maxim is not simple. Now, I shall call this maxim, after its essential distinguishing characteristic, the dogmatism of pure reason. (A 465-466, B 493-494)
Kant, we recall, rejects both empiricism and dogmatism, and we will see where his involvement in this “combat” takes him.
He begins on the side of dogmatism, that is, on the side of the thesis in each of the antinomies, and notes the following:
(1) There is a certain practical interest on this side, which, Kant says, “is heartily shared by any well-meaning person if he understands what is truly to his advantage. For [the theses] are so many foundation stones of morality and religion. The antithesis robs us of all these supports, or at least seems to do so.” (A 466, B 494) We know Kant will find the genuine “foundation stones” of morality, and also religion, in his practical-moral works following the First Critique; we sense here this will ultimately tip Kant to the side of the theses, notwithstanding the theses, as the ideas of pure theoretical / speculative reason, themselves cannot ground morality or religion, as only practical reason can.
(2) “. . . there manifests itself on this side also a speculative interest of reason.” (Ibid.) The theses have the advantage of starting from the unconditioned, while the antitheses can never arrive there—the antitheses always leave us with further questions to ask.
(3) The theses have the advantage of popularity. We might at first be startled by the tribute a philosopher of Kant’s “sophistication” pays to popularity; we remember Kant, like Aristotle, believed his vocation to be supporting, on a deeper level, the common sense of humanity. Kant, we might say, did not “look down” on the populace, but “up from” it. He continues, saying that the advantage of popularity
certainly plays more than the smallest part in commending [the theses]. The common understanding finds not the least difficulty in the ideas concerning the unconditioned beginning of all synthesis. For it is more accustomed anyway to proceed downward [to consequences] then to ascend to the [antecedent] bases; and in the concepts of the absolutely first (over whose possibility it does not ponder) it has something convenient as well as a fixed point to which to tie the line that guides its steps, whereas in the restless ascent from the conditioned to the condition–always with one foot in the air–it can find nothing at all to like. (A 467, B 495)
Having in effect convinced us to follow the theses and reject the antitheses, Kant next turns to the side of empiricism, urging the acceptance of the antitheses and the rejection of the theses, for the following three reasons, which correspond to the three reasons advanced in support of the theses above:
(1) Morality and religion cannot be supported by the pure principles of reason, which do not issue in any practical interest. Kant may be thinking especially of Hume, and he goes on: “Mere empiricism seems, rather, to deprive both of these [morality and religion] of all force and influence. For if there is no original being distinct from the world; if the world is without a beginning and hence also without an author; if our will is not free and the soul has the same divisibility and corruptibility as does matter; then the moral ideas and principles also lose all validity, and fall along with the transcendental ideas that amounted to their theoretical support.” (A 468, B 496) Note the remarkable chain of reasoning. Without God, morality fails. Kant sounds like Dostoevsky. We know in Critique of Practical Reason that Kant will derive God from the moral law within us, but it is also of interest here that he refers to “the transcendental ideas that amounted to [the] theoretical support” of the theses—I am not certain which “transcendental ideas” Kant is referring to, but he had before argued that the theses could find no “theoretical support.”
(2) “On the other hand, empiricism offers to the speculative interest of reason advantages that are very enticing and that far surpass what advantages the dogmatic teacher of ideas of reason may promise.” Because empiricism always minds its own business, it is conducted only in the realm of intuition and the understanding, the realm of possible experiences. “The understanding not only does not need to leave this chain of the natural order so as to attach itself to ideas, with whose objects it is not acquainted because as thought-entities they can never be given, but it is not even permitted to leave its business.” (A 468-469, B 496-497) Given this,
the empiricist will never permit one to assume any epoch of nature to be the absolutely first; or to regard any boundary of his outlook into the range of nature as being the outermost; or to cross over, from the objects of nature that he can analyze by observation and by mathematics and that he can determine synthetically in intuition (i.e., from the extended), to such [objects] as neither sense nor imagination can ever exhibit in concreto (i.e., to the simple). Nor will the empiricist grant us permission to lay down as basis even in nature a power of producing effects independently of laws of nature (i.e., freedom), and thus to encroach on the understanding’s business of exploring, by the guidance of necessary rules, how appearances arise. Nor, finally, will the empiricist allow us to seek the cause for anything outside of nature (i.e., to seek an original being); for we are acquainted with nothing more than nature, since nature alone offers us objects and can inform us regarding its laws. (A 469-470, B 497-498)
There seems to be a false note in what Kant says here, given what we have said about him up to this point. What Kant says about empiricism here may be true as far as it goes, but we cannot imagine Kant settling for it, much less really believing that “empiricism offers to the speculative interest of reason advantages that are very enticing and that far surpass what advantages the dogmatic teacher of ideas of reason may promise.” What is “enticing” about limiting humanity to the realm of nature, conceived as an absolute limit, is denying that the world began with an author, convincing human beings that their actions are not free, or denying them any access to the ultimate questions regarding God and immortality? Who would settle for this? Perhaps Kant is being ironic in thus presenting the nightmare world of the empiricists, a world even the most empirical empiricist would not endorse in his or her actions.
In any event, Kant does go on to say this about the empirical philosopher:
The empirical philosopher might, to be sure, have no other aim with his antithesis than to subdue the inquisitiveness and presumption of reason. For reason may, mistaking its true vocation, boast of insight and knowledge where in fact insight and knowledge cease. . . . If, I say, the empiricist settled for this aim, then his principle would be a maximum for moderation in claims, for modesty in assertions, and simultaneously for the greatest possible expansion of our understanding through the teacher who is in fact assigned to us, viz., experience. For in that case the intellectual presuppositions and faith that we need for the sake of our practical concerns would not be taken from us. We merely could not let them come forward under the title and with the pomp of science and rational insight. For speculative knowledge proper cannot concern any object at all other than an object of experience; and if we step beyond the boundary of experience, then the synthesis seeking cognitions that are new and independent of experience has no substratum of intuition on which it could be performed. (A 470-471, B 498-499)
The problem is empiricism usually becomes dogmatic with respect to ideas, and “itself commits the mistake of immodesty, which is all the more censurable here because it causes irreparable detriment to reason’s practical interest.” (A 471, B 499) We might say that if an empiricist simply refuted the theses, rather than advancing his own antitheses, that empiricist would be in agreement with Kant.
(3) As for popularity, the third advantage of the theses, Kant finds it “extremely strange” that “empiricism goes entirely against popularity.” (A 472, B 500) Kant seems to think the common understanding would be pleased to just stick with what can be learned from experience, rather than being compelled “to ascend to concepts that far surpass the insight and rational power of the minds most practiced in thinking.” (Ibid.) But as it turns out, the common understanding is pleased to “find[] itself in a situation in which even the most scholarly person can presume nothing that is beyond the common understanding.” (A 473, B 501) If the subject is the investigation of nature, the common understanding would have to yield to those who really know what they are talking about.
“Human reason,” Kant affirms, “is by its nature architectonic.” (A 474, B 502) The antitheses “make the completion of an edifice of cognitions entirely impossible.” (Ibid.) In the antitheses, everything is conditional. “Hence reason’s architectonic interest (which demands not empirical but pure a priori rational unity) carries with it a natural commendation for the assertions of the thesis.” (A 475, B 503)
If a human being could consider the theses and antitheses merely according to their merits, such a human being “would be in a state of unceasing vacillation. . . . If, however, doing and acting now came up, then this play of merely speculative reason would vanish like the shadowy images of a dream, and he would choose his principles merely according to practical interest.” (Ibid.) It is to the practical interest Kant is always drawn, even in his Critique of Pure Reason, notwithstanding that it precedes his Critique of Practical Reason, to the point even of comparing “merely speculative reason” to “the shadowy images of a dream” when the human being is called beyond thought to actual doing and acting, that is, to putting himself or herself on the line.
The “Dynamical Antinomies”
Section IX of Chapter II of Book II of the “Transcendental Dialectic” contains four subsections. After the second subsection there appears a “Concluding Comment on the Solution of the Mathematical-Transcendental Ideas, and Advance Notice on the Solution of the Dynamical-Transcendental Ideas.” (A 528-532, B 556-560) I mentioned above that the first two antinomies are called the “mathematical antinomies” and the last two are called the “dynamical antinomies.”
Kant previously indicated the only remedy for removing the conflicts represented by all four antinomies “consisted in declaring both the opposed assertions to be false.” (A 528, B 556) Kant now admits he had overlooked an essential difference between the mathematical and the dynamical antinomies: “For previously this contest was dismissed as built, on both sides, on false presuppositions. But now, in the dynamical antinomy, perhaps there occurs a presupposition that can that coexist with reason’s pretension; and from this point of view, and with the judge compensating for the lack of legal bases that were mistaken [as being such] on both sides, the contest can be settled to the satisfaction of both parties–which could not be done with the dispute in the mathematical antinomy.” (A 529-530, B 557-558)
The dynamical antinomies admit, as the mathematical antinomies do not, a non-sensible, merely intelligible unconditioned condition that is not itself an appearance or part of the series of appearances. This unconditioned condition lies outside the series of appearances and is prior to them. The theses and antitheses in the dynamical antinomies “can, by contrast [with the mathematical antinomies], both be true.” (A 532, B 560) While the antitheses of the third and fourth antinomies are thus also true, we are struck that Kant can now declare their theses to be also true he can uphold the truth of the most important of the propositions in all of the antinomies, namely, human freedom is possible notwithstanding the laws of nature, and there is a necessary being. This opens up the possibility of faith on rational grounds. The third and fourth subsections of Section IX of Chapter II of Book II of the “Transcendental Dialectic” will, respectively, expand on each of these points.
The third subsection begins with the statement that “Only two kinds of causality can be conceived in regard to what occurs, viz., either a causality according to nature or one from freedom.” (A 532, B 560) The importance to Kant’s entire project of his finding that causality from freedom is possible cannot be overemphasized. If causality from freedom is not possible, there would be no basis for Kant’s practical-moral philosophy, or for his postulates of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. He could not have written virtually any of the great works that followed Critique of Pure Reason. He might just as well have retired, completely dispirited, to continue his work as a teacher of the little that was left in philosophy, in the same way so many of our modern teachers of that subject do, or he could have become Nietzsche, but it is doubtful he had the personality for that sort of thing.
The third subsection goes on to discuss freedom in anticipation of Kant’s practical philosophy. He says he is using “freedom” in the cosmological sense of the term, in which it means “the power to begin a state on one’s own. Thus the causality of freedom is not in turn subject, according to the law of nature, to another cause that determines it as regards time. Freedom, in this meaning of the term, is a pure transcendental idea.” (A 533, B 561) This idea of freedom borrows nothing from experience. In freedom in this sense, “reason creates for itself the idea of a spontaneity that can, on its own, start to act–without, i.e., needing to be preceded by another cause by means of which it is determined to action in turn, according to the law of causal connection.” (Ibid.)
In paragraphs that might also have appeared in Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals or the Critique of Practical Reason, and that are here in effect a prolegomenon for those works, Kant says:
Extremely noteworthy is the fact that this transcendental idea of freedom is the basis of the practical concept of freedom, and that transcendental freedom is what in practical freedom amounts to the proper moment of the difficulties that have all along surrounded the question of practical freedom’s possibility. Freedom in the practical meaning of the term is the independence of our power of choice from coercion by impulses of sensibility. For a power of choice is sensible insofar as it is pathologically affected (i.e., affected by motivating causes of sensibility), it is called animal power of choice (arbitrium brutum) if it can be pathologically necessitated. The human power of choice although an arbitrium sensitivum, is an arbitrium not brutum but liberum; for its action is not made necessary by sensibility, but the human being has a power to determine himself on his own, independently of coercion by sensible impulses.
We readily see that if all causality in the world of sense were merely nature, then every event would be determined by another event in time and according to necessary laws; and hence, since appearances insofar as they determine the power of choice would have to make every action necessary as their natural result, the annulment of transcendental freedom would simultaneously eliminate all practical freedom. For practical freedom presupposes that although something did not occur, it yet ought to have occurred, and that hence the cause of this something in [the realm of] appearance was not completely determinative: not so determinative, viz., that there did not lie in our power of choice a causality for producing, independently of those natural causes and even against their force and influence, something that in the time order is determined according to empirical laws–and hence a causality whereby we can begin a series of events entirely on our own. (A 533-534, B 561-562)
One catches here Kant’s sense of excitement at having found the way to ground practical philosophy, which will then also be the ground of the heart of his project, namely, moral philosophy. How else than through freedom do we explain the insistent, constant call of the ought, the call that, as Kant will later say, we experience in our conscience? Our dignity lies in the fact we stand free even against the “force and influence” of “natural causes,” “entirely on our own.” We alone in the sensible world of nature can rise above it, and in our vocation as human beings, as persons, we are called to do so.
Digression: Kant’s “Virtue”
Although we are not considering Kant’s moral philosophy in full here, I note an objection to it, which is that even though Kant uses the word “virtue” in his ethics, he has stripped it of the meaning it had in the classical “virtue ethics” of an Aristotle and an Aquinas, which took account of the whole person, the passions as well as the reason. I mentioned this subject briefly above. Kant in effect rules the passions out of moral consideration except as the negative force against which practical reason strives. For Aristotle, the virtues are the habits by which we rationalize our passions. The virtues involve not just the right order of human actions, but the corresponding right order of the passions as well.
As Robert Sokolowski has noted,[43] in Aristotle’s ethics, we find four character types, each a function of the relationship between reason and the passions. At the top of this array, the virtuous person is the person who has so rationalized his or her passions that the performance of virtuous acts is enjoyable. He or she actually enjoys performing the acts of justice, courage, and temperance, and derives happiness from them. At the bottom is the vicious person, the person in whom the relationship between reason and the passions is so skewed that he or she enjoys performing vicious, evil acts. In the middle are the continent and incontinent persons. The continent person struggles against his or her passions to do the right thing (and succeeds). The incontinent person struggles against his or her passions to do the right thing (but fails).
Kantian deontology replaces eudaimonism, reducing moral philosophy to the continent and the incontinent, eliminating the virtuous and the vicious. Even though in The Metaphysics of Morals, we find “The Doctrine of Virtue,” Kant still means by “virtue” only continence. Why this surgical move? Has it somehow become impossible to imagine that one can be virtuous in the classical sense and also thereby happy? Perhaps Kant may have a point here: how many persons do I know who are virtuous in Aristotle’s sense, who do not struggle against their passions? I know that I am not one of those persons, and cannot think of any offhand. Aristotle claimed he could not find even a hundred virtuous men in Athens. We might ask, Were there any?
In any event, something is lost and perhaps gained in Kant’s reduced moral philosophy. For example, if we only know of Kant’s moral philosophy, the possible heights of virtue in the Aristotelian sense may escape us altogether, and we may settle for nothing more than the constant struggle Kant puts before us. And we note that when we come to the first section of Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Religion Alone, which considers evil, we see a very watered-down conception of that subject; the incontinent person appears, but not the vicious one. On the other hand, given the prevalence of the continent and the incontinent, and the comparative rarity of the virtuous and the vicious, we do find in Kant one of the finest accounts of the former on offer in any philosopher. We note Kant does reintroduce happiness into his moral philosophy in his Critique of Practical Reason through his postulates of God and immortality. If we had to sum up Kant’s moral philosophy, it would be in the injunction: Be worthy to be happy.
End of Digression: Back to “Critique”
Kant continues his discussion of human freedom, noting if appearances were things in themselves, freedom could not be saved. But appearances necessarily have grounds that are not themselves appearances, that is, an intelligible cause that is not, as regards its causality, determined by appearances. Kant continues, in his obscure way: “Hence this cause, along with its causality, is outside the series of empirical conditions, whereas its effects are encountered within the series. Hence the effect can be considered as free with regard to its intelligible cause, and yet with regard to appearances be considered simultaneously as resulting from these according to the necessity of nature.” (A 537, B 565) We might say human freedom exists in the realm of the noumena, while the law of nature is in the realm of the phenomena. We exist in both realms, including in the tension between them.
In subsection IV of Section IX, Kant applies similar reasoning to overcome the fourth, the theological antinomy.
Chapter III: The Ideal of Pure Reason
Chapter III of Book II of the “Transcendental Dialectic” is entitled “The Ideal of Pure Reason.” It follows the Paralogisms of Chapter I and the Antinomies of Chapter II, both of which, in their ways, took down illegitimate claims of pure theoretical / speculative reason. In Chapter III, Kant confronts the classical proofs for the existence of God—the ontological (the argument from the concept of being as such), the cosmological (the argument from necessity), and the physico-theological (the argument from design), which he regards as the only ways of proving the existence of God through theoretical / speculative reason—and demonstrates they do not give us proofs for the existence of God. In doing so, he regards the ontological proof as the basis of the other two proofs, and regards the physicotheological proof as “deserv[ing] always to be mentioned with respect”:
This proof deserves always to be mentioned with respect. It is the proof that is oldest, clearest, and most commensurate with common human reason. It enlivens the study of nature, just as the proof itself has its existence from and acquires ever new force through this study. It brings purposes and aims to things where our observation would not have discovered them on its own, and it expands our acquaintance with nature through the guidance provided by a special unity whose principle is outside nature. But this acquaintance with nature reacts again on its cause–viz., on the idea that prompted it–and increases the faith in a supreme originator to an irresistible conviction.
Hence any attempt to detract from the authority of this proof would not only be hopeless, but also entirely futile. For reason is lifted up unceasingly by bases of proof that, although only empirical, are very powerful and are forever increasing under reason’s very eyes. And thus no doubts arising from subtle abstract speculation can weigh reason down so much that it would not quickly recover. For casting one glance upon the marvels of nature and upon the majesty of the world edifice would tear reason out of any brooding indecision, as out of a dream; and reason would lift itself up from one magnitude to the next until reaching the most supreme, and would lift itself up from the conditioned to the condition until reaching the highest and unconditioned originator.
Thus we have indeed no objection to make against the rationality and usefulness of this procedure, but must, rather, recommend and encourage it. Yet we cannot therefore endorse the claims which this kind of proof would like to make to apodictic certainty and to an approval requiring no favor or extraneous support whatsoever. And the proof’s good cause cannot be harmed in any way if the dogmatic language of a disdainful subtle reasoner is tuned down to the tone of moderation and modesty of a faith that suffices to calm us–but precisely without commanding unconditional submission. (A 623-625, B 651-653)
Again we note Kant’s respect toward “common human reason,” and that Kant certainly does not write as one bereft of faith in the religious sense. An “irresistible conviction” may not be proof, may not rise to the level of “apodeictic certainty,” or knowledge, but it is an “irresistible conviction” nevertheless.
Kant thus sees in these proofs, not proofs so much as pointers, and there is a problem inherent in the claim that pure theoretical /speculative reason can prove God’s existence so it becomes a matter of knowledge in the strict Kantian sense, which is that such “proofs” will inevitably ossify and, to the extent they take the place of genuine belief, lead to skepticism.[44] This was part of Kant’s concern, and if we look back at what are often called “proofs” for the existence of God in their most classical form, namely, in Question 2 of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, it seems that we should call them “demonstrations” rather than strict logical proofs. After all, Aquinas, like Kant, wanted to leave room for faith!
Kant’s conclusion, that we cannot know God through pure theoretical / speculative reason, did not mean Kant did not believe in God. On the contrary, not only did he believe in God,[45] and not only was he, in his own way, a very religious person, but he devoted a great deal of his practical-moral philosophy to demonstrating that God must exist. Indeed, in his postulates of God and the immortality of the soul that appear in Critique of Practical Reason, he reminds us of the Myths of Last Judgment that we find at the end of Plato’s Republic and Gorgias. Kant does not derive the existence of God from revelation, as most of us do, from the exercise of practical reason and the moral demands it makes on each of us.
Section VII of Chapter III is an elaborate “Critique of Any Theology Based on Speculative Principles of Reason,” in which Kant notes, among other things, the difference between reason and revelation. He there “maintain[s] that all attempts to make a merely speculative use of reason in regard to theology are entirely fruitless and are–by their intrinsic character–null and void. . . . [and] that unless moral laws are laid at the basis or used as a guide, there can be no theology of reason at all.” (A 636. B 664)
However, although “transcendental theology” (a form of “rational theology”) is insufficient, it
still has an important negative use. For it is a constant appraisal of our reason when this reason deals merely with pure ideas–which permit none but a transcendental standard precisely because they are ideas. For the presupposition of a supreme and all-sufficient being as highest intelligence may once incontestably assert its validity, even in a different–perhaps practical–reference. And in that case it would be of the greatest importance to determine this concept accurately on its own transcendental side, as the concept of a necessary and maximally real being; and to remove from this concept whatever goes against supreme reality and belongs to mere appearance (viz., anthropomorphism in the broader meaning of this term); and to get rid at the same time of all opposing assertions–whether atheistic, or deistic, or anthropomorphistic. (A 640, B 668)
Transcendental theology demonstrates the counter-assertions made by the opponents of genuine theology— there is no God, God does not care about us, or God is simply a human projection—must all fail.
And so
the supreme being remains for the merely speculative use of reason a mere ideal–but yet a faultless ideal, a concept that concludes and crowns the whole of human cognition. Although the concept’s objective reality cannot be proved by this speculative path, it also cannot be refuted by it. And if there were to be a moral theology that can compensate for this deficiency, then transcendental theology–previously only problematic–proves itself indispensable: by the determination of its concept [of a supreme being], and by the unceasing appraisal of a reason that is deluded often enough by sensibility and is not always in harmony with its own ideas. Necessity, infinity, unity, existence outside the world (rather than as world soul), eternity without conditions of time, omnipresence without conditions of space, omnipotence, etc.: all of these are transcendental predicates; and hence the purified concept of them, which any theology needs so very much, can be obtained only from transcendental theology. (A 641-642, B 669-670)
Thus, transcendental theology, while failing to prove “God,” “a concept that concludes and crowns the whole of human cognition,” opens the way to moral theology (Kant’s own), leaves open a space for faith, and frees us of wrong ways of conceiving of God.
Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic
Kant closes the “Transcendental Dialectic” with an Appendix.
Here Kant sets forth one of his fundamental principles: “Whatever has its basis in the nature of our powers must be purposive and be accordant with their correct use–if only we can prevent a certain misunderstanding and thus can discover these powers’ proper direction.” (A 642-643, B 670-671) Kant expands upon this subsequently in the Appendix in reference to the supreme reason and teleology, and greatly expands upon it in Critique of Judgment: We can regard Kant’s perception of the purposiveness of things as part of his philosophical theology.
After the “Transcendental Dialectic,” Kant neatly sums up the “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements” as follows: “Thus all human cognition begins with intuitions, proceeds from there to concepts, and ends with ideas.” (A 702, B 730)
“On the Ideal of the Highest Good, As a Determining Basis of the Ultimate Purpose of Pure Reason”
In the “Transcendental Doctrine of Method,” the second major division of the entire First Critique (the “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements” having been the first), we find in Chapter II, “The Canon of Pure Reason,” a Section II entitled “On the Ideal of the Highest Good, As a Determining Basis of the Ultimate Purpose of Pure Reason.”
This is one of the most interesting parts of the Critique, if not the most interesting, for in it Kant sets out his famous three questions, introduced by his statement that the Critique has not yet provided the “complete satisfaction” Kant has been seeking. We are struck by this statement because we did not know Kant had been seeking “satisfaction” all along in this, his great work on pure reason, much less “complete satisfaction,” given that satisfaction is “merely” a feeling. Be that as it may, Kant says:
Reason in its speculative use let us through the realm of experiences and, since complete satisfaction can never be found of for it in that realm, from there to speculative ideas. But in the end these ideas let us back again to experience, and thus they fulfilled their intent in a way that, although beneficial, did not at all conform to our expectation. This leaves us with one more attempt. Viz., we must inquire whether pure reason can be found also in reasons practical use; whether in this use it leads us to the ideas which reach the highest purposes of pure reason that we have just mentioned; and whether, therefore, pure reason cannot perhaps grant us from the viewpoint of its practical interest what it altogether denies us with regard to its speculative interest.
All my reasons interest (speculative as well as practical) is united in the following three questions:
What can I know?
What ought I to do?
What may I hope?
(A 804-805, B 832-833)
As it will turn out, pure reason does have a practical side, and it will lead Kant to the “highest good” and the “complete good,” which is human happiness proportioned to moral worth. This is Kant’s version of a summum bonum. So perhaps Kant, at least in this way, is not so far from the “virtue ethics” of Aristotle and Aquinas as we had thought.
This Section is like a prolegomenon to Kant’s moral philosophy, but we do not have the time to consider it here in the detail in which it should be considered.
One thing to note: Kant derives God from the moral law, rather than the moral law from God.
I leave this very rich Section with a quotation in which Kant talks in a rather personal way about the depth of his “moral faith”:
. . . since the moral precept is thus simultaneously my maxim (as, indeed, reason commands), I shall inevitably have faith in the existence of God and in a future life. And I am sure that nothing can shake this faith; for that would overturn my moral principles themselves, which I cannot renounce without being detestable in my own eyes.
In this way, even after all the ambitious aims of a reason roaming beyond the bounds of experience have been defeated, we are still left with enough in order to have cause to be satisfied from a practical point of view. No one, indeed, will be able to boast that he knows that there is a God and that there is a future life; for if he knows this, then he is just the man that I have been looking for all along. All knowledge (if it concerns an object of mere reason) can be communicated, and hence I could then hope that I might through his instruction see my own knowledge extended in such a marvelous degree. No, the conviction is not a logical but a moral certainty; and because it rests on subjective bases (of the moral attitude), I must not even say, It is morally certain that there is a God, etc., but must say, I am morally certain, etc. In other words, the faith in a God and in another world is so interwoven with my moral attitude that, as little as I am in danger of losing my moral attitude, so little am I worried that my faith could ever be torn from me. (A 828-829, B 856-857)
CONCLUSION
We conclude with the great epigram with which Kant concluded his Critique of Practical Reason, the much-loved epigram which also appears on his tombstone in Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg): “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” (5:161)[46] No one else drew the connection between those two things in quite the way Immanuel Kant did.
NOTES:
[1] “The Enlightenment” is at least a somewhat misleading term in that there were different “Enlightenments,” with different thinkers. The Scottish Enlightenment, for example, was much different from the French Enlightenment. The term is used here as a convenient shorthand.
[2] Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” (1784), in Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, tr. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 54.
[3] See, for example, Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784), Political Writings, 41-53, and his “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795), Political Writings, 93-130. But Kant at least saw something passing odd in the idea of historical progress: “What remains disconcerting about all this is firstly, that the earlier generations seem to perform their laborious tasks only for the sake of the later ones, so as to prepare for them a further stage from which they can raise still higher the structure intended by nature; and secondly, that only the later generations will in fact have the good fortune to inhabit the building on which a whole series of their forefathers (admittedly, without any conscious intention) had worked without themselves being able to share in the happiness they were preparing.” “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” Political Writings, 44.
[4] Gerhart Niemeyer, “Enlightenment to Ideology: the Apotheosis of the Human Mind,” in The Ambiguous Legacy of the Enlightenment, ed. William A. Rusher with Ken Masugi (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1995), 46. As the title of his essay indicates, Professor Niemeyer argues that the Enlightenment of the 18th century led to the ideological movements of the 19th century, which are still so much with us today.
[5] See the essays collected in The Ambiguous Legacy of the Enlightenment, ed. William A. Rusher with Ken Masugi (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1995); and Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).
[6] David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 44
[7] Walsh, 49.
[8] Ironically, in certain decisions of the United States Supreme Court, the concept of autonomy has been given a meaning the opposite of that which Kant assigned to it.
[9] Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals with On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns, trans. James W. Ellington, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), 7.
[10] An interesting work critical of Kant’s moral philosophy written by a Kantian—and the son of Ernst Cassirer—is Heinz W. Cassirer, Grace and Law: St. Paul, Kant, and the Hebrew Prophets (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988).
[11] Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans Mary Gregor, ed. Lara Denis (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 26.
[12] Ibid., 27.
[13] Ibid., 28.
[14] Ibid., 34-35.
[15] Ibid., 168.
[16] Kant’s natural law is, of course, not Aquinas’s. In Kant’s moral philosophy, the struggle is against our natural inclinations. Aquinas’s natural law is based on our natural inclinations.
Byrd and Hruschka maintain that “. . . Kant is [not] a legal positivist in the usual meaning of that term. Certainly, Kant is properly considered to be a natural law theorist, and he makes abundantly clear that he thinks a merely empirical theory of law is brainless. Kant’s “Doctrine of Right” indeed develops law from a priori ideas of reason about the way law should be to protect our rights, and Kant insists that positive law not contradict these a priori ideas.” B. Sharon Byrd and Joachim Hruschka, Kant’s “Doctrine of Right”: A Commentary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 35-36.
They continue: Justice can be perverted. Positive law in a state can be perverted when legislators impose rules that contradict principles of natural law. . .Positive law, and thus public legislation, is evaluated according to the standard set by natural law, which is “based only on pure a priori principles” and can be recognized “by everyone’s reason.” Because it can be recognized by everyone’s reason, the universal legislating will legislates according to these pure principles of natural law. Kant’s “Doctrine of Right” is to a great degree an explication of this natural law or law of reason. Natural law cannot “suffer impairment” “through the statutory provisions” in a state. Its principles remain in force, even when positive law, which has only the appearance of law, deviates from those principles. Natural law is the standard by which statutory law is to be measured.
Natural law proceeds from the “axiom of eternal freedom.”
Byrd and Hruschka, 39-40.
For a contrary view, see Jeremy Waldron, “Kant’s Legal Positivism,” 109 Harv. L. Rev. 1535 (May 1996). Waldron, however, seems to ignore much of what Kant had to say about the subject.
[17] Was Kant influenced by St. Augustine’s two cities?
[18] Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 86.
[19] An excellent book devoted exclusively to Kant’s “Doctrine of Right” is B. Sharon Byrd and Joachim Hruschka, Kant’s “Doctrine of Right”: A Commentary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Hannah Arendt and Ronald Beiner maintain that one of the best, if not the best, ways to approach Kant’s political philosophy is through the Critique of Judgment, given the importance of making judgments in political life. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983). Many of Kant’s occasional political writings are collected in Kant: Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), including “On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice’” (61-92).
[20] References to Scripture appear as well in other parts of Kant’s work.
[21] Josef Pieper, “Divine Madness”: Plato’s Case against Secular Humanism, trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995).
[22] Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), 75.
[23] I see in the literature a debate as to whether Kant’s thought “evolved” over time. I am in no position to join that debate, but I did note, as many others have, something of an expansion of his thought and of its subject matter in the Third Critique, the Critique of Judgment (1790), and I confess to having experienced great surprise on reading Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793/1794), and finding Kant so attuned to revelation.
[24] The text I used was Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Werner S. Pluhar, Unified Edition (with all variants from the 1781 and 1787 editions) (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996). Citations to the text are to both the A and B editions.
[25] In Kant, the “transcendent” must be distinguished from the “transcendental.” I note as well that I sometimes use “knowledge” and “cognition” interchangeably, and perhaps improperly, and so I ask the reader to recall the distinction, which is that cognition is the means by which we gain knowledge, and knowledge is the product of cognitive processes.
[26] Walsh, 29.
[27] Sometimes Kant refers to his entire philosophy as “metaphysics,” and sometimes he refers only to the second part as “metaphysics.”
[28] See the “Table of Contents” below.
[29] Recall that we cannot have knowledge of noumena, the “reality” behind the appearances of objects.
[30] Even Plato does not escape Kant’s criticism: “Captivated by such a proof of reason’s might [that provided by mathematics, which achieves so much, independently of experience, in a priori cognition], our urge to expand [our cognitions] sees no boundaries. When the light dove parts of the air in free flight and feels the air’s resistance, it might come to think that it would do much better still in space devoid of air. In the same way Plato left the world of sense because it sets such narrow limits to our understanding; on the wings of the ideas, he ventured beyond that world and into the empty space of pure understanding. He did not notice that with all his efforts he made no headway. He failed to make headway because he had no resting point against which—as a foothold, as it were—he might brace himself and apply his forces in order to set the understanding in motion. But [Plato is no exception]: it is human reason’s usual fate, in speculation, to finish its edifice as soon as possible, and not to inquire until afterwards whether a good foundation has in fact been laid for it. Then all sorts of rationalizations are hunted up in order to reassure us that the edifice is sturdy, or, preferably, even to reject altogether so late and risky an examination of it. But what keeps us, while we are building, free from all anxiety and suspicion, and flatters us with a seeming thoroughness, is the following. A large part—perhaps the largest—of our reason’s business consists in dissecting what concepts of objects we already have. This [procedure] supplies us with a multitude of cognitions.” (A 4-5, B 8-9) To this we might reply that Kant misunderstood Plato and his Forms / Ideas, given that Plato’s concept of reason was much broader than Kant’s. The Parable of the Cave is not about epistemology but about the ascent of the soul to a vision of the transcendent.
[31] I am not certain that this is the distinction Kant is drawing.
[32] Kant had earlier distinguished between “a priori” and “pure”: “In what follows, therefore, we shall mean by a priori cognitions not those that occur independently of this or that experience, but those that occur absolutely independently of all experience. They contrast with empirical cognitions, which are those that are possible only a posteriori, i.e., through experience. But we call a priori cognitions pure if nothing empirical whatsoever is mixed in with them. Thus, e.g., the proposition, Every change has its cause, is an a priori proposition; yet it is not pure, because change is a concept that can be obtained only from experience.” (B 3)
[33] Kant’s term, which is not the way we usually think of “aesthetic.”
[34] Claiming to know what cannot be known.
[35] Which contrasts with empirical (e.g., optical) illusion. (A 295, B 351-352) “. . . transcendental illusion carries us, even despite all the warnings issued by critique, entirely beyond the empirical use of the categories and puts us off with the deception of there being an expansion of pure understanding. Let us call the principles whose application keeps altogether within the limits of possible experience immanent principles, and those that are to fly beyond these limits transcendent principles. But by transcendent principles I do not mean the transcendental use or misuse of the categories, which is a mere mistake made by the power of judgment when, not being duly curbed by critique, it does not pay enough attention to the boundaries of the territory on which alone our pure understanding is permitted to engage in its play. Rather, I mean by actual principles requiring us to tear down all those boundary posts and to claim an entirely new territory that recognizes no demarcation at all. Hence transcendental and transcendent are not the same.” (A 295-296, B 352)
[36] As for this last point, Kant rejects idealism. Transcendental idealism along with empirical realism is Kant’s own view.
[37] “Thesis: The world has a beginning in time and is also enclosed within bounds as regards space.” “Antithesis: The world has no beginning and no bounds in space, but is infinite as regards both time and space.” (A 426-427, B 454-455)
[38] “Thesis: Every composite substance in the world consists of simple parts, and nothing at all exists but the simple or what is composed of it.” “Antithesis: No composite thing in the world consists of simple parts, and there exists in the world nothing simple at all.” (A 434-435, B 462-463)
[39] “Thesis: The causality according to laws of nature is not the only causality, from which the appearances of the world can thus one and all be derived. In order to explain these appearances, it is necessary to assume also a causality through freedom.” “Antithesis: There is no freedom, but everything in the world occurs solely according to laws of nature.” (A 444-445, B 472-473)
[40] “Thesis: There belongs to the world something that, either as its part or as its cause, is an absolutely necessary being.” “Antithesis: There exists no absolutely necessary being at all, neither in the world nor outside the world, as its cause.” (A 452-453, B 480-481)
[41] Kant can seem so terribly abstract and dry! It may be helpful in reading Kant to recall that everything he says is intended to have applicability to each of us flesh and blood human beings. And so think of the “intuition,” the “understanding,” the “concepts,” “reason,” the “ideas,” and Kant’s similar terms as his attempts to explain what goes on in the consciousness, the deep consciousness, of each of us. It may be easier to do this in connection with the Second and Third Critiques than with the First, but at least the effort can be made as to all three Critiques.
[42] Eric Voegelin, “Reason: The Classic Experience,” in Anamnesis, trans. and ed. Gerhart Niemeyer (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 89-115.
[43] Robert Sokolowski, “Appendix D: Kant,” in Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985), 215-220.
[44] So many Catholics of my generation lost their faith through being forced by their well-meaning teachers to memorize and recite the Baltimore Catechism.
[45] We are reminded of Kant’s Pietist upbringing, about which there is a literature, sometimes suggesting acceptance, and sometimes rebellion.
[46] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 129.
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