CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON - Immanuel Kant

CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON -   Immanuel Kant

 

“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”

                                 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

 

            When I was there, Cornell offered a bachelor’s degree in “Government,” which is what I pursued. Even then, the analogous departments at comparable universities were commonly labeled “political science,” a term which I sensed was generally disapproved of by professors in our Government Department. What I cannot specifically recall is whether anyone actually explained the implications of the distinction.  We were simply educated in an environment in which it was obvious that “science” played little part. Our concern was with the texts of political philosophy.

            Although I am not of a scientific bent in any event, I cannot contend that this approach made the life of a Cornell Government major any easier. Reading Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, et al. was quite enough of a challenge, and when it came to Teutonic thought -- well I immediately developed a horror of reading German philosophy. Each time I made the attempt, it occurred to me that perhaps these thinkers are more easily digested in their original German -- a possibility not open to me. So for the most part I have been left with a plague of Deutsche indigestion.

Now decades later I have picked up Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason) (1781) and find that even now I have not entirely overcome my old difficulties. Kant’s writing is dense and by its nature not always penetrable. Much of the time he goes completely over my head. Indeed he even furnishes this discouraging remark in his Introduction to the Critique: “the present work is not intended for popular use” and therefore it “must be delivered in the driest scholastic manner.”[1]

I also confess that I have begun this immediate project with some skepticism because I have always been offended by the self-congratulatory tone of the thinkers of that epoch – extending even to academics today – when they refer to the period of which Kant’s work it is often considered the sine qua non – as the “Age of Enlightenment.” If not implicitly dismissive of the magnificent thinkers of the preceding eons (which it is), the “enlightenment” designation has been embraced by cynics, atheists, dissenters, and soi-disant intellectuals as some sort of shield against verities which they have rejected. After all, they are themselves complacently “enlightened.”

In any event, the more modest name given to the same period is “the age of reason,” which is fairly descriptive of the intellectual approach characteristic of the era and devoid of the hauteur suggested by the smug name “enlightenment.” And since at bottom both designations imply a methodological approach to getting at the truth, it would be ignorant of me to reject either of them without considering the means which inform the strategy that has propelled them. In short, if the calculations and definitions utilized by the acknowledged masters of the age, whatever the age is called, can lead me to the truth, I should force myself to understand, if possible, what they are saying. And if the effort exceeds my ability, I will eventually give it up. There are more congenial ways to spend my time.

 

Kant’s Mission.

 

1.     In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s objective is to create a doctrine – an “architectonic” – by which knowledge – apparently all useful knowledge -- will become a science. This does not require actually dismissing philosophy, but rather relegating it (sympathetically, of course) to its own place. His field is mathematical knowledge.

 

“ . . . [T]he only way of arriving at this knowledge is through the essential principles of reason, and thus it is always certain and indisputable, because reason is employed in concreto – but at the same time a priori – that is, in pure, infallible intuition; and thus all causes of illusion are therefore are excluded. Of all the a priori sciences of reason, therefore, mathematics alone can be learned. Philosophy – unless it be in an historical manner – cannot be learned; we can at most learn to philosophize.”

 

2. My Private Goal.

                  I would accomplish little in this note if I tried to summarize or simplify Kant’s painstaking line of thought. It would require too much of me and I confess that I would surely fail. I am not even in a position to propose that his method is brilliant or muddled. Surely it must be the former, but even if my intellect were up to the challenge, neither my confidence nor my energy is. Though my efforts have been taken in good faith, I can only see myself as one of those tiny people on the sidewalk looking up, up at a man confidently walking a tightrope from one skyscraper to another above a busy boulevard. What an achievement, but he cannot have done it for entertainment.

3. The Text.

            I began with a translation of the first edition, including the author’s preface in which he starts with the caution that the word “critique” in his title is only intended to mean “a critical inquiry into the faculty of reason,” specifically those a priori thoughts that we are born with “without the aid of experience.” He is asking whether what we call metaphysics, which aims to dissect such innate thoughts, is even a worthwhile enterprise, since the inquiry, proceeding without experience, must be made on the basis of abstract principles alone. Without experience, how far can reason actually go? Rejecting opinion or even hypothesis, “the grand question is, what and how much can reason and understanding, apart from experience, cognize . . . .”

            Then I confronted his table of contents, five pages of small type, infinitely divided and then subdivided into formidable headings such as “Of the Originally Synthetical Unity of Apperception.”[2] Gad. My copy of this book is 480 pages long (no pictures). And yet, as revealed by this table of contents, the book relies heavily on a minute consideration of the definition of the many concepts which must be defined (i.e. understood) to give the work its genuine influence.

4.     The Introduction.

            Reason is not the same as knowledge, and knowledge is where Kant’s inquiry begins.  He starts his Critique by assuring us that although we begin life with a priori knowledge which arises from our reason, nevertheless all of our reliable knowledge begins with our ensuing experiences, meaning that our knowledge is a posteriori. Instead of reassurance, however, the analysis immediately becomes complicated. We cannot proceed without being alert to “impure” a priori knowledge if it seems to be deduced from some remote conception. This idea is difficult to convey because when a proposition is conceived a priori, if it is useful, it will be proved a posteriori.

            He then distinguishes between mathematical and “synthetical” judgments, the latter of which are empirical[3] -- i.e. proved by observation or evidence.[4] But in all theoretical sciences (e.g.  reason) synthetic judgments are always a priori and are commonly regarded as “principles.” He explains this by asserting that we are inclined to believe the opposite because we are misled by intuition – i.e. the fact that we start by counting on our fingers, an empirical launching pad. The sum of two figures is really intuition, proven, he says, by “synthesis” when we add two numbers which exceed the numbers of fingers on our hands.

            Soon enough he comes to the link between knowledge and “pure reason” -- i.e. the announced subject of his book. The proper problem of pure reason, he says, “is contained in the question ‘How are synthetical judgments a priori possible?’” This consideration takes him back to the significance of “purity.” For example, he says that physics is a “pure” natural science, dealing with “the permanence of the same quantity of matter, . . . . the equality of action and reaction, etc.” But metaphysics “is a natural disposition of the human mind.”  It is a “feeling of need toward such questions as cannot be answered by any empirical application of reason.” By this, I think he means that metaphysics is the inherent sense of wonder that every person has because of our “faculty” of pure reason.

            But this takes us no farther than the first men who looked at the nighttime sky. The modern age demands more. “It must be possible to arrive at certainty in regard to the question whether we know or do not know the things of which metaphysics treats.” Hence, Kant’s “universal problem”: “How is metaphysics possible as a science?” This question is urgent because

“the dogmatical use of reason without criticism leads to groundless assertions, against which others equally specious can always be set, ending unavoidably in skepticism.”

This view itself seems dogmatic to me, at least insofar as it assumes first, that those things we intuit inherently are also inherently subject to scientific proof and second, that skepticism must be avoided. But it is our “duty,” Kant goes on, not merely to analyze metaphysical conceptions to illustrate what is contained in those metaphysical dispositions, but also show how we arrive at them a priori. And yet reason itself having its own contradictions, there is a need for a rigorous new “method” to develop “a science indispensable to human reason.”

          And so this takes Kant to stating modestly that “the sole object of [his] present essay” is

“only a transcendental critique, because it aims not at the enlargement, but at the correction and guidance of our knowledge, and is to serve as a touchstone of the worth or worthlessness of all knowledge a priori.”

Although I have stated, however, that his aims might thus appear to be modest -- he says that he is dealing “solely with the mind” and “only in respect of its cognition a priori” -- he also goes on to concede that his ensuing analysis is to prepare an “organon” and that regardless of the success of his immediate efforts, a “complete system of the philosophy of pure reason . . . might one day be set forth both analytically and synthetically.”

            This said, Kant concludes his introduction with certain guidelines. A priori knowledge, he avers, must be completely pure, leaving the “empirical” out of bounds, meaning that although fundamental conceptions of morality, though possibly arising a priori, must not be considered as consisting of motives and feelings. That would be “impure.”[5] Thus understood, we must then consider the “elements” of pure reason, and only then, after that, the “methodology” of the science which he recommends.

            I pause here. If I have faithfully recapped the premises which Kant has set forth in his introduction, for me the temptation to continue reading has concomitantly been diminished, for this is simply not political philosophy. To say this, is not to deprecate the obsessive and meticulous zeal betrayed in the balance of the book. Kant’s section on the “Transcendental Analytic” is all of 150 earnest pages, followed by nearly 200 pages of comparable scholarship on the “Transcendental Dialectic.” He then concludes with 80 pages describing his “Doctrine of Method.”

            But as I continued to read, I found myself recalling those countless magazine cartoons, the ones showing a professor standing beside a blackboard entirely full of one single chalked-out equation beginning in the upper left corner and ending six or eight rows beneath in the lower right hand corner with a tiny “equals” sign.  If I ever get to the right of that equals sign, it will have been an exhausting and dismal triumph. And since Kant has deliberately excluded the concept of ethics, my enthusiasm will also have been ejected.

            5. The Transcendental Doctrine of the Elements.

            Much of the following material is clotted with the author’s need to define his terms[6]. Insofar as this technique permits the close reader to follow the author’s logic[7], there can be little argument, but the process is laborious in the extreme and it necessarily obliges the reader to accept rather than cavil with any proffered definition. As a means of persuasion, this is risky and in fact dubious. For example, I offer Kant’s definition of “transcendental[8] exposition”:

“The explanation of a conception, as a principle, whence can be discerned the possibility of other synthetical a priori cognitions.”

In German, this statement may be a truism; in English, it is risible. At most – and this is an extremely tentative conclusion – perhaps this is Kant’s version of Plato’s conception of forms:

“nothing which is intuited in space is a thing in itself, and that space is not a form which belongs as a property to things; but that objects are quite unknown to us in themselves . . . .”

Kant’s elaborations on time and space which he uses to introduce this segment of his book are detailed and presented apodictically. As noted, his thoughts are largely definitional -- what I suppose might be called “cosmology” -- but nothing like the challenging physics of the centuries to come. Whether or not they hold up over 200 years later, after Einstein, et al.[9] I am in no position to judge. It could be that they are irrelevant in Einstein’s arena, but as pertains to Kant’s dogged mission they certainly are not.

Knowledge. He tells us that knowledge is the “united operation” of intuition and conception, both of which he assures us are either “pure” or “empirical.” Of course, to assist our understanding of this integration, he has already furnished his definitional premises of all four concepts. Unfortunately, there then arise subcategories which we must also master, e.g. logic of the general or of the particular. “General” logic is then also explained, “but merely [as] a cathartic of the human understanding.” This might strike the reader as something of a relief, but then we are cautioned that it must nevertheless be kept firmly in mind that “applied” logic “treats of” a variety of considerations, each with “impediments and consequences” such as “the origin of error, of the state of doubt, hesitation, conviction, etc.” And then, of course we must be alert to “feelings, inclinations, and passions.”

            Truth. No one, it seems, should be assured he knows the truth of anything until he has considered Kant’s dissection of the concept. While it is beyond my powers to simplify this segment of the Critique, be assured that whoever undertakes the job will certainly require familiarity with transcendentalism, as well as analytic and dialectic logic. Space is too limited to quote the entirety of the following endless sentence, but perhaps this fragment will help:

“. . . the mere form of a cognition, accurately as it may accord with logical laws, is insufficient to supply us with material (objective) truth [because] no one, by means of logic alone, can venture to predicate anything of . . . objects, unless he has obtained, independently of logic, well-grounded information about them . . . .”

Wett, that’s the truth.

            Having arrived here, I must confess that I have overlooked the author’s definition of “sensibility.” It occurs somewhere in the shower of words that I have just plowed through, though I have a horror of going back just to find how it is described. At best, I seem to feel that it is situated on the “empirical” side of Kant’s analysis and is consequently not part of the purity which is the subject of his main thesis.

6.     Religion.

The Soul. It can be no surprise that Kant’s consideration of the soul is as dry as the rest of his book. His departure point is the work of Moses Mendelssohn for whom he expresses conditional admiration for his analysis of the soul’s eternality. Kant himself appears to acknowledge that there is indeed a soul by some definition[10], but also that it is evanescent and therefore Mendelssohn (and Descartes) did not consider deeply enough.

On the other hand, he does give a bit of ground in his own verbose way by turning to “the analogy of the nature of living beings.” Here, he says,

 

“reason is obliged to accept as a principle that no organ, no faculty, no appetite is useless, and that nothing is superfluous, nothing disproportionate to its use, nothing unsuited to its end. . . . [O]n the contrary, everything is perfectly conformed to its destination in life . . . . [T]hat man, who alone is the final end and aim of this order, is still the only animal that seems to be accepted [sic] from it. For his natural gifts, . . . especially the moral law in him, stretch so far beyond mere earthly utility and advantage, that he feels himself bound to prize the mere consciousness of probity, apart from all advantageous consequences . . . above everything, and he is conscious of an inward call to constitute himself, by his conduct in this world . . . the citizen of a better. This mighty irresistible proof . . . remains to humanity even after the theoretical cognition of ourselves has failed to establish the necessity of an existence after death.”

 

God. After then dealing with many other subjects, Kant comes to the question of God. And yet, but for the accepted idea of omniscience, he avers that God is no more than a “highly useful idea” which “serves merely to indicate a certain unattainable perfection, [and] rather limits the operation than . . . extends the sphere of understanding.” Oversimplifying, his method is to begin with the statement “God does not exist.” Conceptually, framing it this way necessarily eliminates the accepted definition of God as omnipotent. The predicate having thus been abolished, there is no contradiction, and contradiction is the workhorse of Kant’s normal approach, i.e. what he calls “the only criterion of impossibility in the sphere of pure a priori conceptions.” Thus we apparently have reached the ultimate reality (ens realissimum).

 

If only this were the place to stop. But “the existence of a conception which is not self-contradictory is far from being sufficient to prove the possibility of an object.” Hence God, so far, is simply an uncontradicted “possibility” – i.e. a being which we do not yet know to exist. There follows a laborious tautology (which I decline to outline)[11] showing that the object of an idea cannot belong in a world of experience; therefore an a priori judgment about God is still lacking because that requires a synthesis of real properties which must — but which cannot -- be specifically presented from the world of experience. And thus “Leibnitz has utterly failed . . . to establish upon a priori grounds” the possibility of God’s existence and the ontological Cartesian argument is also “insufficient.” 

 

            Cosmological Proof. No one could ever accuse Kant of doing things by half. Once I had done my utmost in working out the two foregoing paragraphs, about 100 pages later I found a much longer section in the Critique entitled “Of the Impossibility of a Cosmological Proof of the Existence of God.” I have duplicated that entire title here because, out of sheer exhaustion, I cannot face the prospect of untangling the “cosmological” from the “ontological” method which I had just struggled so hard to understand. That title itself tells me (if not the more serious reader) all I wished to know. To put it in more demotic terms, I have no reason to understand that difference. My purpose in writing this essay has been to simplify the work, not to endorse it.

 

7.     A Conclusion.

 

In an earlier paragraph which I wrote a week or more ago, I said that I feared that my curiosity about Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason might not survive the full 480-page trek to the summit. Now I must confess: my curiosity has indeed been satisfied short of my original intention. The promise, for example, of reading and digesting a section labeled “Of the Empirical Use of the Regulative Principle of Reason with Regard to the Cosmological Ideas” has no attraction for me.

             This is not because I feel that A Critique of Pure Reason is Kant’s failure. In translation, it is true, his writing is often cumbersome to the point of being impenetrable, laborious, and indefatigable. And yet, as I said at the outset, I have approached it as a sincere (and impressive) effort to show a path to the truth through a process of “pure reason.” It is sincere. Indeed, even if it can be said to be tendentious, which it really is not, its sincerity overrides that. So on this my one, probably only reading, I come away, first, impressed with Kant’s intellect and devotion to his task, second, with a sense that “purity” may be overrated as the alembic for truth, and third, that reason is not really an assured path to truth.

            Otherwise, for the lay reader, the Critique is no more inviting than instruction manual.

 

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[1] Yes, the emphasis was in the original.

[2] He defines this as “a consciousness of self” and later as a reality.

[3] Throughout this work, “empirical” is used more or less as the opposite of “pure.” At least once I also found the author linking a priori to “primitive.”

[4] And fortified by a “principle of contradiction.” Likewise, metaphysics, he says, contains synthetical propositions a priori.’’

[5] And yet, for poor players like me – even if the author thus insulates himself from any suggestion of harboring any of his own motives – this approach necessarily also eliminates considerations of poetry, religion, joy, enthusiasm, and even love, i.e. what he calls dismissively a “rhapsodic state.” By Kant’s lights, he has embarked on a strict mission of rigorous scientific endeavor, unencumbered by what makes life worthwhile.

[6] To accomplish this, he relies heavily on the concept of “intuition,” which is clearly vital to his purposes. His definition of it, unfortunately, I continue to find opaque. N.B. he says that it is not “thought.”

[7] Given the abstruse nature of his material, this instinct has obvious merits, but it does invite certain arguments, as definitions frequently will.

[8]  In ordinary conversation, “transcendental” is not a word difficult to understand. Kant uses it liberally in a variety of contexts, most often (I think) in the conventional meaning of a notion or theory covering two or more different concepts. “Cognition,” for example, can be purely both a priori and also applied to empirical objects. In any event, we have variously the “transcendental critique,” which includes the transcendental “analytic” and the transcendental “dialectic”) and, of course the “transcendental exposition.” All of them are presumably comprehended by the “transcendental philosophy.”

[9] And because Kant is concerned with the effect of uncoupling human subjectivity from objective objects, there actually seems to be more of a foreshadowing of Freud than of our modern physicists.

 

[10] Yet he dismisses such “chimeras” in a footnote.

[11] It is based on his definitions of “predicates” “conceptions,” “existence,” and “being.”