Critique of Pure Reason

Reflection on Kant’s First Two Critiques

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I just finished reading Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Having thus reached another benchmark on my journey through the major works and essays of Immanuel Kant, I feel this is a good space to pause and reflect on the substance of Kant’s thought.

Apart from the obvious rigor and judiciousness with which Kant undertook his first two Critiques, the nobility of the man’s thought cannot be too highly esteemed. The distinctions he draws, however tedious, are central to the feasibility of his system. It works as a functioning whole, despite its unfortunate dualisms and the murky connection which ostensibly unites them (“freedom,” according to the second Critique).

So, without going too much into the specifics of Kant’s argumentation (an exhaustive discussion would prove far too long for popular presentation), a few words might be said about the general “direction of fit” in his first two major works.

The Critique of Pure Reason deals with theoretical cognition. It moves from objects given to us by sensory intuition and proceeds to the categories of our understanding and their derived principles by which we make such objects intelligible. The second Critique, by contrast, deals with practical volition. It proceeds from the moral law prescribed by our will to a formal principle (the famed Categorical Imperative) to fundamental concepts of good and evil and then finally to the world of sensibility, which we hope to effect by our rational action upon it. This can be (analytically) organized as follows:

First Critique: Noumenal source of intuition → Sensibility (Aesthetic) → Pure concepts or categories of the understanding (Logic) → Natural principles

Second Critique: Noumenal source of volition → Moral principles → Pure concepts of the understanding (good and evil) → the Sensible world

An interesting incongruity lies between the implied noumenal sources in each case. (The difficulty in any positive description of these sources is obviously compounded by the fact that Kant claims that we cannot say anything about their constitution). In the first case, it would appear that the objects in-themselves (apart from our cognition of them) are the causa noumena of objective appearances. In the second case, it would appear that the transcendental freedom of the will is the causa noumenon of the moral law. Might this be a contradiction? It is difficult to say, because Kant only allows for noumena to occupy a purely negative place in his exposition.

Note Concerning the Metaphysical Structure of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

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In reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason today (I’m attempting my first reading of it in toto, from cover to cover), I had a revelation as to the structure of the “Transcendental Logic” section of the book’s greater “Doctrine of Elements.” It came to me that the subdivision of the “Transcendental Logic” into “Transcendental Analytic” and “Transcendental Dialectic” corresponds respectively to the classic philosophical distinction between general metaphysics (metaphysica generalis) and special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis). There is no doubt in my mind that others have reached this insight before me. Nevertheless, its truth struck me with such force that I feel compelled to publicly elaborate on it, to speak out loud. In all honesty, it dawned upon me in a manner akin to what Kant would have derided as an “intellectual intuition” (though his Idealist successors would not discourage me from this claim).

The pure categories of the understanding, which Kant deduces in the “Transcendental Analytic,” fall under what is traditionally described as general metaphysics. There are twelve categories, which fall under the broader classifications of Quantity (Unity, Multiplicity, Totality), Quality (Reality, Negation, Limit), Relation (Substance/Accidence, Causality, Community), and Modality (Possibility/Impossibility, Existence/Non-existence, Necessity/Contingency). If my memory is correct, these are the categories. Some of the wording might be slightly off. In any case, however, Kant argues that these pure concepts, transcendentally deduced, may be validly applied to objects given to us by the manifold of intuition (via the Transcendental Æsthetic). Determinations which rely upon their proper conceptual application are held to be mathematically (in terms of Quantity and Quality) constitutive and dynamically (in terms of Relation and Modality) regulative, though in the latter case these dynamics are nonetheless empirically constitutive. These, Kant argues, metaphysically ground the legal (i.e., lawful) possibility of any future science.

Conversely, the ideas of reason, which are the subject of the “Transcendental Dialectic,” relate to the three venerable sciences of special metaphysics: 1) psychology/pneumatology, 2) cosmology, and 3) theology. In the second book of the Dialectic, entitled “Dialectical Inferences,” each of the three chapters respectively matches up with these disciplines. The “paralogisms” deal with transcendental psychology, the celebrated “antinomies” deal with transcendental cosmology, and the “ideal” deals with transcendental theology. Since Kant believes that these “sophistic” sciences of speculation transgress the bounds of possible experience (taking them beyond the limits of space and time), he declares that their so-called insights amount to nothing more than illusion. Nevertheless, he reminds us that human reason naturally elicits speculation on these matters, almost ineluctably, and that a rigorously critical attitude must be adopted in order to guard against its seductions.