THE EMPIRICAL EMPLOYMENT OF THE REGULATIVE PRINCIPLE OF REASON IN REGARD
TO ALL COSMOLOGICAL IDEAS[1569]
SOLUTION OF THE FIRST AND SECOND ANTINOMIES
=Statement.=--The fundamental fact upon which, as Kant has already stated,
the regulative principle of Reason is based, is that it is impossible to
experience an absolute limit. It is always _possible_ that a still
higher member of the series may be found; and that being so, it is our
duty to search for it. But as we are here dealing with possibilities
only, the regress is _in indefinitum_, not _in infinitum_.
“...we must seek the concept of the quantity of the world only
according to the rule which determines the empirical regress in it.
This rule says no more than that however far we may have attained
in the series of empirical conditions, we should never assume an
absolute limit, but should subordinate every appearance, as
conditioned, to another as its condition, and that we must then
advance to this condition. This is the _regressus in indefinitum_,
which, as it determines no quantity in the object, is clearly
enough distinguishable from the _regressus in infinitum_.”[1570]
We are acquainted only with the rule, and not with the whole object. Any
assertion, therefore, which we can make, must be dictated solely by the
rule, and be an expression of it. Neither the thesis nor the antithesis
of the first antinomy is valid; there is a third alternative. The
sensible world is neither finite nor infinite in extent; it is
infinitely extensible, in terms of the rule.
Unfortunately Kant is not content to leave his conclusion in this form.
He complicates his argument, and bewilders the reader, by maintaining
that this is a virtual acceptance of the antithesis, in that we assert
negatively, that an absolute limit in either time or space is
empirically impossible;[1571] and affirmatively, that the regress goes
on _in indefinitum_, and consequently has no absolute quantity.
Kant also repeats the argument of the preceding section in regard to
given wholes.[1572] When the problem is that of subdivision, the regress
starts from a given whole, and therefore from a whole whose conditions
(the parts) are given with it. The division is, therefore, _in
infinitum_, and not merely _in indefinitum_. This does not, however, he
argues, mean that the given whole consists of infinitely many parts. For
though the parts are contained in the intuition of the whole, yet the
whole division arises only through the regress that generates it. It is
a _quantum continuum_, not a _quantum discretum_.[1573] This argument
has been criticised above.[1574] Kant here ignores the possibility that
the parts of matter, though extended, may be physically indivisible, or
that they may be centres of force which control, but do not occupy, a
determinate space.
REMARKS ON THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE MATHEMATICAL-TRANSCENDENTAL AND
THE DYNAMICAL-TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAS[1575]
=Statement.=--Kant again[1576] introduces the distinction between the
mathematical and the dynamical. The mathematical Ideas synthesise the
homogeneous, the dynamical may connect the heterogeneous. In employing
the former we must therefore remain within the phenomenal; through the
latter we may be able to transcend it. The way is thus opened for
propounding, in regard to the third and fourth antinomies, a solution in
which the pretensions of Reason no less than those of understanding may
find satisfaction. Whereas both the theses and the antitheses of the
first and second antinomies have to be declared false, those of the
third and fourth antinomies _may both be true_--the theses applying to
the intelligible realm, and the antitheses to the world of sense.
=Comment.=--When the distinction between the mathematical and the
dynamical is thus extended from the categories to the Ideas, its
validity becomes highly doubtful. Space and time are certainly
themselves homogeneous, and the categories of quality and quantity, in
so far as they are mathematically employed, may perhaps be similarly
described. But when the term is still further extended, to cover the
pairs of correlative opposites with which the first two antinomies deal,
those, namely, between the limited and the unlimited, the simple and the
infinitely divisible, Kant would seem to be making a highly artificial
distinction. The first two antinomies deal not with space and time as
such, but with the sensible world in space and time; and within this
sensible world, even in its quantitative aspects, qualitative
differences have to be reckoned with. Common sense does, indeed, tend to
assume that the unlimited and the simple must, like that which they
condition, be in space and time, and so form with the conditioned a
homogeneous series. But this assumption ordinary consciousness is
equally disposed to make in regard to a first cause and to the
unconditionally necessary.
Kant further attempts[1577] to distinguish between the mathematical and
the dynamical by asserting that the dynamical antinomies are not
concerned with the quantity of their object, but only with its
_existence_. He admits, however, that in all four cases a series arises
which is either too large or too small for the understanding; and that
being so, in each case the problem arises as to the _existence_ of an
unconditioned.
The artificiality of Kant’s distinction becomes clear when we recognise
that the opposed solutions, which he gives of the two sets of
antinomies, can be mutually interchanged. As the sensible world rests
upon intelligible grounds, both the theses and the antitheses of the
first two antinomies may be true, the former in the intelligible realm
and the latter in the sensuous. Similarly, both the theses and
antitheses of the third and fourth antinomies may be false. In the
sensible world, about which alone anything can be determined, the series
of dynamical conditions forms neither a finite nor an infinite series.
There is a third alternative, akin to that of the antitheses, but
distinct in character from it, namely, that the series is infinitely
extensible. Kant’s differential treatment of the two sets of antinomies
is arbitrary, and would seem to be due to his having attempted to
superimpose, with the least possible modification, a later solution of
the antinomies upon one previously developed. In the earlier view, as we
have already had occasion to observe, Reason has a merely empirical
application. Its Ideas are taken as existing “only in the brain.” Only
their empirical reference can substantiate them, or indeed give them the
least significance. And as they are by their very nature incapable of
empirical embodiment, all assertions which involve them must necessarily
be false. Later, Kant came to regard Reason as having its own
independent rights. Encouraged by his successful establishment of the
objective validity of the categories, progressively more and more
convinced of the importance of the distinction, which that proof
reinforced, between appearances and things in themselves, and
preoccupied with the problems of the spiritual life, his old-time faith
in the absolute claims of pure thought reasserted itself. Through Reason
we realise our kinship with noumenal realities, and through its demands
the nature of the unconditioned is foreshadowed to the mind. The theses
and antitheses, which throughout the entire history of philosophy have
competed with one another, may both be true. Their perennial conflict
demonstrates the need for some more catholic standpoint from which the
two great authorities by which human life is controlled and directed,
the intellectual and the moral, may be reconciled. Neither can be made
to yield to the other; each is supreme in its own field. The distinction
between appearances and things in themselves, recognition of which is
the first step towards an adequate theory of knowledge, and without
which the nature of the intellectual life remains self-contradictory and
incomprehensible, itself affords the means of such a reconciliation. The
understanding is the sole key to the world of appearance, the moral
imperative to the realm of things in themselves. Reason with its demand
for the unconditioned mediates between them, and enables us to realise
our dual vocation.
This radical alteration of standpoint was bound to make the employment
of manuscript representing the earlier and more sceptical attitude
altogether unsatisfactory; and only Kant’s constitutional unwillingness
to sacrifice what he had once committed to paper can account for his
retention of the older expositions. He allows his previous treatment of
the first two antinomies to remain in its sceptical form, and, by means
of the distinction between the mathematical and the dynamical, develops
his newer, more Idealist view exclusively in reference to the third and
fourth antinomies. That it is no less applicable to the others, we have
already seen.
Though the Idealist view, _as here expounded_, may be thus described,
relatively to the sceptical view of Reason, as later, that is not to be
taken as meaning that it represents the latest stage in the development
of Kant’s Critical teaching. It seems to belong to the period prior to
that in which the central sections of the _Analytic_ were composed. The
evidence[1578] for this consists chiefly in its subjectivist references
to the nature of appearances. It would seem to be contemporary with
Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental object.
SOLUTION OF THE THIRD ANTINOMY[1579]
=Statement.=--As appearances are representations only, they must have a
ground which is not itself an appearance;[1580] and though the effects
of such an intelligible cause appear, and accordingly are determined
through other appearances, its causality is not itself similarly
conditioned. Both it and its causality lie outside the empirical series;
only the effects fall within the realm of experience. And that
causality, not being subject to time, does not require to stand under
another cause as its effect. In this way Kant derives from his
transcendental idealism an explanation of the possibility of an action
being at once free and causally determined. This explanation he takes as
applying either to a first cause of the whole realm of natural phenomena
or to a finite being regarded as a free agent. The proof of the
possibility of this metaphysical, or, as Kant entitles it,
“transcendental freedom,” removes what has always been the real
difficulty that lay in the way of “practical freedom.” The conception of
freedom is a transcendental Idea which can neither be derived from
experience nor verified by it. It is created by Reason for itself;[1581]
and reveals the _possibility_ that in this third antinomy both thesis
and antithesis may be true. The alternatives--“every effect must arise
from nature,” and “every effect must arise from freedom”--are not
exclusive of one another. They may be true of one and the same event in
different relations.[1582] The event may be free in reference to its
intelligible cause, determined as an existence in space and time. Were
appearances things in themselves, freedom and causality would
necessarily conflict: by means of the above ontological distinction
freedom can be asserted without any diminution in the scope allowed to
the causal principle. All events, without a single possible exception,
are subject to the law of natural determination; and yet every event may
_at the same time_ proceed from a free cause.
POSSIBILITY OF HARMONISING CAUSALITY THROUGH FREEDOM WITH THE UNIVERSAL
LAW OF NATURAL NECESSITY[1583]
=Statement.=--The above conclusion is so seemingly paradoxical that Kant
devotes this and the following section to its further elucidation. How
can events be both free and determined? The answer lies in recognition
of the two-sided character of every natural existence. It is, in one
aspect, mere appearance; in another, it has at its foundation a
transcendental object. It is an appearance of the latter, and for its
complete comprehension this latter must be taken into account. Now there
is nothing to _prevent_ us from attributing to the transcendental object
a causality which is not phenomenal. Such causality may make the
appearance just that appearance which it is. In the world of sense every
efficient cause must have a specific empirical character, since only so
can it determine one effect rather than another according to the
universal and invariable law expressive of its nature. We must similarly
allow to the transcendental object an intelligible character, and trace
to it all those appearances which as members of the empirical series
stand to one another in unbroken causal connection. This transcendental
object, owing to its intelligible character, is not in time. Its act
does not either arise or perish, and is not, therefore, subject to the
law of empirical determination which applies only to the changeable,
_i.e._ to events subsequent upon previous states. Such supersensuous
causality can find no place in the series of empirical conditions, and
though it can be conceived only in terms of the empirical character
which is its outcome, the difference between it and natural causality
may be as complete as that which subsists between the transcendental and
the empirical objects of knowledge. In its empirical character the
action is a part of nature, and enters into a causal nexus which
conforms to universal laws.[1584] All its effects are inevitably
determined by antecedent natural conditions. In its intelligible
character, however, this same active subject must be considered free
from all influence of sensibility and from all determination through
natural events. In so far as it is a noumenon, there can be no change in
it, and therefore nothing which is capable of explanation in terms of
natural causes. Even its empirical effects are not traceable to it as
events in time. For as events these effects are always the results of
antecedent empirical causes. What is alone due to noumenal causality is
that empirical character in virtue of which appearances are what they
are, and owing to which they stand in specific and necessary causal
relations to one another.
“...the empirical character is _permanent_, while its effects,
according to variation in the concomitant, and in part limiting
conditions, appear in changeable forms.”[1585]
Empirical causality is itself in its specific nature conditioned by an
intelligible cause.[1586]
EXPLANATION OF THE RELATION OF FREEDOM TO NECESSITY OF NATURE[1587]
=Statement.=--No single appearance can be exempted from the law of natural
causality. For it would then be placed outside all possible experience,
and would be for us a fiction of the brain, or rather could not be
conceived at all. Nothing, therefore, _in nature_ can act freely or
spontaneously. But while thus recognising that all _events_ without
exception are empirically conditioned, we may, as already pointed out,
regard empirical causality as itself an effect of a non-empirical and
intelligible power.[1588] In events there may be nothing but nature, and
yet nature itself, or perhaps even some of the existences composing it,
may rest upon powers of a noumenal order. Kant proceeds to show that
such an hypothesis is not only allowable, but is indispensable for
understanding the distinguishing features of human life in its practical
aspect.
Man is a natural existence, and his activities are subject to empirical
laws. Like all other objects of nature, he has an empirical character,
and in virtue of it takes his place as an integral part of the system of
nature. But man is unique among all natural existences in that he not
only knows himself as a sensible existence, but also, through pure
apperception, becomes aware of himself as possessing faculties of a
strictly intelligible character.[1589] Such are the faculties of
understanding and Reason, especially the latter in its practical
employment. The “ought” of the moral imperative expresses a kind of
necessity and a form of causation which we nowhere find in the world of
nature. The understanding can know in nature only what actually is, has
been, or will be. Nothing natural can be other than it is in the
particular relations in which it is found. Moral action transcends the
natural in that it finds its cause, not in an appearance or set of
appearances, but in an Ideal of pure Reason. Such action must indeed be
possible under natural conditions, but such conditions do not determine
its rightness, and consequently cannot determine its causality.
“Reason ... does not here follow the order of things as they
present themselves in appearance, but frames to itself with perfect
spontaneity an order of its own according to Ideas, to which it
adapts the empirical conditions, and according to which it declares
actions to be necessary even although they have never yet taken
place, and perhaps never will take place. And at the same time it
also presupposes that Reason can have causality in regard to all
these actions, since otherwise no empirical effects could be
expected from its Ideas.”[1590]
If such action of pure Reason be admitted to be possible, it will have
to be viewed, purely intelligible though it be, as also possessing an
empirical character, i.e. as conforming to the system of nature. Its
empirical consequences will be the effects of antecedent appearances,
and will empirically determine by natural necessity all subsequent acts.
In this empirical character, therefore, there can be no freedom. Were
our knowledge of the circumstances sufficiently extensive, every human
action, so far as it is appearance, could be predicted and shown to be
necessary. How, then, can we talk of actions as free, when from the
point of view of appearances they must in all cases be regarded as
inevitable? The solution is that which has already been given of the
broader issue. The _entire_ empirical character, the whole system of
nature, is determined by the intelligible character. And the former
results from the latter, not empirically, and therefore not according to
any temporal, causal law. It does not arise or begin at a certain time.
The intelligible character conditions the empirical series _as a
series_, and not as if it were a first member of it.
“Thus what we have missed in all empirical series is disclosed as
possible, namely, that the condition of a successive series of
events may itself be empirically unconditioned.”[1591]
The intelligible character lies _outside_ the series of appearances.
“Reason is the _abiding_ (_beharrliche_) condition of all free
actions....”[1592] Freedom ought not, therefore, to be conceived only
negatively as independence of empirical conditions, but also positively
as the power of originating a series of events. The empirical series is
in time. Reason, which is its unconditioned condition, admits of nothing
antecedent to itself; it knows neither before nor after. The series is
the immediate effect of a non-temporal reality.
In illustration of his meaning, not, as he is careful to add, with the
profession of thereby confirming its truth, Kant points out that moral
judgment upon a vicious action is not determined in view of the
inheritance, circumstances and past life of the offender, but is passed
just as if he might in each action be supposed to begin, quite by
himself, a new series of effects. This, in Kant’s view, shows that
practical Reason is regarded as a cause completely capable,
independently of all empirical conditions, of determining the act, and
that it is present in all the actions of men under all conditions, and
is always the same. To explain why the intelligible character should in
any specific case produce just this particular empirical character, good
or bad,
“...transcends all the powers of our Reason, indeed all its rights
of questioning, just as if we were to ask why the transcendental
object of our outer sense-intuition yields intuition in _space_
only and no other.”[1593]
In conclusion Kant states that his intention has not been to establish
the reality of freedom, not even to prove its possibility. Freedom has
been dealt with only as a transcendental Idea; and the only point
established is that freedom is, so to speak, a _possible possibility_,
in that it is _not contradicted_ either by experience or by anything
that can be proved to be a presupposition of experience.
=Comment.=--Adequate comment upon this section is difficult for many
reasons. The section is full of archaic expressions from the earlier
stages of Kant’s Critical teaching. Secondly, the section anticipates a
problem which is first adequately dealt with in the second _Critique_.
And lastly, but not least, the discussion of freedom in connection with
a cosmological antinomy leads Kant to treat it in the same manner as the
general antinomy, and in so doing to ignore the chief difficulty to
which human freedom, as an independent problem with its own peculiar
difficulties, lies open. For it is comparatively easy to reconcile the
universality of the causal principle with the unconditionedness of the
transcendental ground upon which nature _as a whole_ is made to rest. It
is a very different matter to reconcile the spontaneous origination of
_particular_ causal series, or the freedom of _particular_ existences,
such as human beings, with the singleness and uniformity of a natural
system in which every part is determined by every other.
Self-consciousness, with the capacity which it confers of constructing
rational ideals, certainly, as Kant rightly contends, creates a
situation to which mechanical categories are by no means adequate. But
the mere reference to the conceivability of distinct causal series,
having each a pure conception as their intelligible ground, does not
suffice to meet the fundamental difficulty that, on Kant’s own
admission, each such separate series must form an integral part of the
unitary system of natural law. In only one passage does Kant even touch
upon this difficulty. Speaking[1594] of Reason’s power of originating a
series of events, he adds that while nothing _begins_ in Reason itself
(as it admits of no conditions antecedent to itself in time), the new
series must none the less have a beginning in the natural world. But the
proviso, which he at once makes, indicates that he is aware that this
statement is untenable. For he adds the qualification that though a
beginning of the series, it is never an absolutely first beginning. In
other words, it is not a beginning in any real sense of the term. As the
argument of his next paragraph shows, it is the entire system of
nature, and not any one series within it, which can alone account, in
empirical terms, for any one action.
It is open to Kant to argue, as he has already done,[1595] that the
transcendental object conditions each separate appearance as well as all
appearances in their totality, and that the specific empirical character
of each causal series is therefore no less noumenally conditioned than
is nature as a whole. But this does not suffice to meet the
difficulty--how, if all natural phenomena constitute a single closed
system in which everything is determined by everything else, a moral
agent, acting spontaneously, can be free to originate a genuinely new
series of natural events. We seem constrained to conclude that Kant has
failed to sustain his position. A solution is rendered impossible by the
very terms in which he formulates the problem. If the spiritual and the
natural be opposed to one another as the timeless and the temporal, and
if the natural be further viewed as a unitary system, individual moral
freedom is no longer defensible. Only the “transcendental freedom” of
the _cosmological_ argument can be reckoned as among the open
possibilities.
As regards the character of the Critical doctrine which underlies this
section, we need only note that the statement in A 546-7 = B 574-5, that
man knows himself through pure apperception as “a purely intelligible
object,”[1596] does not conform to Kant’s final teaching. The section
can be dated through its unwavering adherence to the subjectivist
doctrine of the transcendental object.[1597]
SOLUTION OF THE FOURTH ANTINOMY[1598]
=Statement.=--The above solution is adopted. Both thesis and antithesis
may be true, the latter of the world of sense and the former of its
non-empirical ground. All things sensible are contingent, but the
contingent series in its entirety may nevertheless rest upon an
unconditionally necessary being. The unconditioned, since it is outside
the series, does not require that any one link in the series should be
itself unconditioned. “Reason follows its own course in the empirical,
and again a peculiar course in its transcendental use,” _i.e._ it limits
itself by the law of causality in dealing with appearances, lest in
losing the thread of the empirical conditions it should fall into idle
and empty speculations; while, on the other hand, it limits that law to
appearances, lest it should wrongly declare that what is useless for the
explanation of appearances is therefore impossible in itself. This does
not prove that an absolutely necessary being is really possible, but
only that its impossibility must not be concluded from the necessary
contingency of all things sensuous.
=Comment.=--Kant’s method of distinguishing[1599] this conclusion from
that of the preceding antinomy is again artificial. “Necessary being” is
not in conception more _extramundanum_ than “unconditioned cause.” If
Kant’s distinction were valid, the argument of the fourth antinomy would
no longer be cosmological; it would coincide with the problem of the
_Ideal of Pure Reason_.
CONCLUDING NOTE ON THE WHOLE ANTINOMY OF PURE REASON[1600]
=Statement.=--When we seek the unconditioned entirely beyond experience,
our Ideas cease to be cosmological; they become transcendent. They
separate themselves off from all empirical use of the understanding, and
create to themselves an object, the material of which is not taken from
experience, and which is therefore a mere thing of the mind (_blosses
Gedankending_). None the less the cosmological Idea of the fourth
antinomy impels us to take this step. When sensuous appearances, as
merely contingent, require us to look for something altogether distinct
in nature from them, our only available instruments, in so doing, are
those pure concepts of things in general which contingent experience
involves. We use them as instruments in such manner as may enable us to
form, through analogy, some kind of notion of intelligible things. Taken
in abstraction from the forms of sense, they yield that notion of an
absolutely necessary Being which is equivalent to the concept of the
theological Ideal.
CONCLUDING COMMENT ON KANT’S DOCTRINE OF THE ANTINOMIES
We may now, in conclusion, briefly summarise the results obtained in
this chapter. Kant fails to justify the assertion that on the dogmatic
level there exist antinomies in which both the contradictory
alternatives allow of cogent demonstration. His proofs are in every
instance invalid. The real nature of antinomy must, as he himself
occasionally intimates, be defined in a very different manner, namely,
as a conflict between the demand of Reason for unity and system, and
the specific nature of the conditions, especially of the spatial and
temporal conditions, under which the sensuous exists. In this wider form
it constitutes a genuine problem, which demands for its solution the
fundamental Critical distinction between appearances and
things-in-themselves, and also a more thoroughgoing discussion than has
yet been attempted of the nature of Reason and of the function of its
Ideas. It is to these connected questions that Kant devotes his main
attention in the remaining portions of the _Dialectic_, so that in
passing to the _Ideal of Pure Reason_ he is not proceeding to the
treatment of a new set of problems, but to the restatement and to the
more adequate solution of the fundamental conflict between understanding
and Reason.
The observations which closed our comment upon the _Paralogisms_ are
thus again in order. The teaching of the sections on the _Antinomies_,
no less than that of those on the _Paralogisms_, is incomplete, and if
taken by itself is bound to mislead. The Ideas of an unconditioned self
and of an unconditioned ground of nature have thus far been taken as at
least conceptually possible, and as signifying what may perhaps be real
existences. These Ideas are in certain of the remaining sections of the
_Dialectic_ called in question. They are there declared to be without
inherent meaning. They are useful fictions--_heuristische
Fiktionen_--and in their psychological nature are simply _schemata_ of
regulative principles. Their theoretical significance consists merely in
their regulative and limitative functions. They must not be regarded,
even hypothetically, as representing real existences. In the practical
(_i.e._ ethical) sphere they do indeed acquire a very different
standing. But with that the _Critique of Pure Reason_ is not directly
concerned. The reader may therefore be warned not to omit the chapter on
the _Ideal of Pure Reason_, on the supposition that it embodies only a
criticism of the Cartesian and teleological proofs of God’s existence.
It is an integral part of Critical teaching, and carries Kant’s entire
argument forward to its final conclusions. Only in view of the new and
deeper considerations, which it brings to light, can his treatment even
of the _Antinomies_ be properly understood. Its main opening section
(Section II.) is, indeed, among the most scholastically rationalistic in
the entire _Critique_; but in the later sections it unfolds, with a
boldness and consistency to which we find no parallel in the treatment
of the _Paralogisms_ and of the _Antinomies_, the full consequences of
the more sceptical of Kant’s alternating standpoints. It disintegrates
the concepts of the unconditioned, which have hitherto been employed
without analysis and without question; and upon their elimination from
among the legitimate instruments of Reason, the situation undergoes
entire transformation, the two points of view appearing for the first
time in the full extent of their divergence and conflict. For Kant’s
Idealist view of Reason and of its Ideas still continues to find
occasional statement, showing that he has not been able decisively to
commit himself to this more sceptical interpretation of the function of
Reason; that he is conscious that the Idealist view alone gives adequate
expression to certain fundamental considerations which have to be
reckoned with; and that unless the two views can in some manner be
reconciled with one another, a really definitive and satisfactory
solution of the problem has not been reached. When, therefore, we speak
of Kant’s final conclusions, we must be taken as referring to the
twofold tendencies, sceptical and Idealist, which to the very last
persist in competition with one another. The greater adequacy of Kant’s
argument in the chapter on the _Ideal of Pure Reason_ and in the
important _Appendix_ attached to the _Dialectic_ consists in its
forcible and considered exposition of both attitudes. Most of the
sections on the _Antinomies_ must, as we have seen, be dated as among
the earliest parts of the _Critique_. Their teaching is correspondingly
immature. The chapter on the _Ideal_ and the _Appendix_, on the other
hand, were among the latest to be written, and contain, together with
the central portions of the _Analytic_, our most authoritative
exposition of Kant’s Critical principles.
CHAPTER III
THE IDEAL OF PURE REASON
SECTIONS I and II
THE TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAL[1601]
The statements of the first section cannot profitably be commented upon
at this stage; they are of a merely general character.[1602] I pass at
once to Section II., which, as above stated, is quite the most archaic
piece of rationalistic argument in the entire _Critique_. It is not
merely Leibnizian, but Wolffian in character. For Kant the Wolffian
logic had an old-time flavour and familiarity that rendered it by no
means distasteful; and he is here, as it were, recalling, not altogether
without sympathy, the lessons of his student years. They enable him to
render definite, by way of contrast, the outcome of his own Critical
teaching.
As Kant here restates the Wolffian notion of the _Ens realissimum_ in
such fashion as is required to make it conform to his deduction of the
theological Idea from the disjunctive syllogism, a preliminary statement
of the more orthodox formulation will help to set Wolff’s doctrine in a
clearer light. In so doing, I shall follow Baumgarten, whose
_Metaphysica_ Kant used as a class text-book. Briefly summarised
Baumgarten’s statement is as follows.[1603] The _Ens perfectissimum_ is
that Being which possesses as many predicates, _i.e._ perfections, as
can possibly exist together in a single thing, and in which every one of
its perfections is as great as is anywhere possible. This most perfect
Being must be a real Being, and its reality must be the greatest
possible. It is that in which the most and the greatest realities are.
But all realities are affirmative determinations, and no denial is a
reality. Accordingly no reality can contradict another reality, and all
realities can exist together in the same thing. The _Ens
perfectissimum_, in possessing all the realities that can exist
together, must therefore possess all realities without exception, and
every one of them in the highest degree. The notion of an individual
existence that is at once _perfectissimum_ and also _realissimum_ is
thus determinable by pure Reason from its internal resources. It is the
ground and condition of all other existences; all of them arise through
limitation of its purely positive nature.
Kant seeks to justify his metaphysical deduction of the _Ideal_ from the
disjunctive syllogism, by recasting the above argument in the following
manner. Since everything which exists is completely determined, it is
subject to the principle of complete determination, according to which
one of each of the possible pairs of contradictory predicates must be
applicable to it. To be completely determined the thing must be compared
with the sum total of all possible predicates. Although this idea of the
sum total of all possible predicates, through reference to which alone
any concept can be completely determined, seems itself indeterminate, we
find nevertheless on closer examination that it individualises itself _a
priori_, transforming itself into the concept of an individual existence
that is completely determined by the mere Idea, and which may therefore
be called an Ideal of pure Reason. That is proved as follows. No one can
definitely think a negation unless he founds it on the opposite
affirmation. A man completely blind cannot frame the smallest conception
of darkness, because he has none of light. All negations are therefore
derivative; it is the realities which contain the material by which a
complete determination of anything becomes possible. The source, from
which all possible predicates may be derived, can be nothing but the sum
total of reality. And this concept of the _omnitudo realitatis_ is the
Idea of a Being that is single and individual. As all finite beings
derive the material of their possibility from it, they presuppose it,
and cannot, therefore, constitute it. They are imperfect copies
(_ectypa_), of which it is the sole Ideal. The Idea is also individual.
Out of each possible pair of contradictory predicates, that one which
expresses reality belongs to it. By these infinitely numerous positive
predicates it is determined to absolute concreteness; and as it
therefore possesses all that has reality, not only in nature but in man,
it must be conceived as a personal and intelligent Primordial Being. The
logical Ideal, thus determining itself completely by its own concept,
appears not only as ideal but also as real, not only as logical but also
as divine.
Kant so far anticipates his criticism of the ontological argument as to
give, in the remaining paragraphs of this second section, a preliminary
criticism of this procedure. For the purpose for which the Ideal is
postulated, namely, the determination of all finite and therefore
limited existences, Reason does not require to presuppose an existence
corresponding to it. Its mere Idea will suffice.
“All manifoldness of things is only a correspondingly varied mode
of limiting the concept of the highest reality which forms their
common substratum, just as all figures are only possible as so many
different modes of limiting infinite space.”[1604]
This relation is not, however, that of a real existence to other things
but of an Idea to concepts. The Idea is a mere fiction, necessary for
comprehending the limited, not a reality that can be asserted, even
hypothetically,[1605] as given along with the limited. None the less,
owing to a natural transcendental illusion, the mind inevitably tends to
hypostatise it, and so generates the object of rational theology.
=Comment.=--The explanation of this illusion, which Kant proceeds to give
in the two concluding paragraphs, is peculiarly confusing. Though the
concept of an all-comprehensive reality may, he argues, be required for
the definition of sensible objects, such a concept must not for that
reason be taken as representing a real existence. The teaching of the
section on _Amphiboly_ is here entirely ignored; and the reader is
bewildered by the assumption, which Kant apparently makes, that
something analogous to the Leibnizian Ideal is a prerequisite of
possible experience.
These last remarks indicate the kind of criticism to which the argument
of this section lays itself open. In expounding the teaching of the
Leibnizian science of rational theology, Kant strives to represent its
Ideal as being an inevitable Idea of human Reason; and in order to make
this argument at all convincing he is constrained to treat as valid the
presupposed ontology, though that has already been shown in the
discussion of _Amphiboly_ to be altogether untenable.[1606] Limitation
is not merely negative; genuine realities may negate one another. Though
the objects of sense presuppose the entire system to which they belong,
the form of this presupposition is in no respect analogous to that which
Wolff would represent as holding between finite existences and the _Ens
realissimum_. The passage in the _Analytic_[1607] in which Kant directly
controverts the above teaching is as follows:
“The principle, that realities (as pure assertions) never logically
contradict each other ... has not the least meaning either in
regard to nature or in regard to any thing-in-itself.... Although
Herr von Leibniz did not, indeed, announce this proposition with
all the pomp of a new principle, he yet made use of it for new
assertions, and his followers expressly incorporated it in their
Leibnizian-Wolffian system. According to this principle all evils,
for instance, are merely consequences of the limitations of created
beings, _i.e._ negations, because negations alone conflict with
reality.... Similarly his disciples consider it not only possible,
but even natural, to combine all reality, without fear of any
conflict, in one being, because the only conflict which they
recognise is that of contradiction, whereby the concept of a thing
is itself removed. They do not admit the conflict of reciprocal
injury in which each of two real grounds destroys the effect of the
other--a process which we can represent to ourselves only in terms
of conditions presented to us in sensibility.”
Thus the Ideal which Kant here declares to be a necessary Idea of Reason
is denounced in the _Analytic_ as based on false principles peculiar to
the Leibnizian philosophy, and as “without the least meaning in regard
either to nature or to any thing in itself.” The teaching of the
_Analytic_ will no more combine with this scholastic rationalism than
oil with water. The reader may safely absolve himself from the thankless
task of attempting to render Kant’s argumentation in these paragraphs
consistent with itself. Fortunately, in the next section, Kant returns
to the standpoint proper to the doctrine he is expounding, and lays
bare, with remarkable subtlety and in a very convincing manner, the
concealed dialectic by which the conclusions of this metaphysical
science are really determined.[1608]
SECTION III
THE SPECULATIVE ARGUMENTS IN PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF A SUPREME
BEING[1609]
=Statement.=--Though the Ideal is not arbitrary, but is presupposed in
every attempt to define completely a finite concept, Reason would feel
hesitation in thus transforming what is merely a logical concept into a
Divine Existence, were it not that it is impelled from another
direction to derive reality from such a source. All existences known in
experience are contingent, and so lead us (owing to the constitution of
our Reason) to assume an absolutely necessary Being as their ground and
cause. Now when we examine our various concepts, to ascertain which will
cover this notion of necessary existence, we find that there is one that
possesses outstanding claims, namely, that Idea which contains a
therefore for every wherefore, which is in no respect defective, and
which does not permit us to postulate any condition. The concepts of the
Ideal and of the necessary alone represent the unconditioned; and as
they agree in this fundamental respect, they must, we therefore argue,
be identical. And to this conclusion we are the more inclined, in that,
by thus idealising reality, we are at the same time enabled to realise
our Ideal.
This line of argument, which starts from the contingent, is as little
valid as that which proceeds directly from the Ideal. But since these
arguments express certain tendencies inherent in the human mind, they
have a vitality which survives any merely forensic refutation. Though
the conclusions to which they lead are false, they are none the less
inevitably drawn. Our acceptance of them is due to a transcendental
illusion which may be detected as such, but which, like the ingrained
illusions of sense-experience, must none the less persist.
The opening paragraph of Section V[1610] is the natural completion of
the above analysis. The ontological argument, in _starting_ from the
concept of the _Ens realissimum_, inverts the natural procedure. It is
“a merely scholastic innovation,” and would never have been attempted
save for the need of finding some necessary Being, to which we may
ascend from contingent existence. It maintains that this necessary Being
must be unconditioned and _a priori_ certain, and accordingly looks for
a concept capable of fulfilling this requirement. Such a concept is
supposed to exist in the Idea of an _Ens realissimum_, and this Idea is
therefore used to gain more definite knowledge of that which has been
previously and independently recognised, namely, the necessary Being,
“This natural procedure of Reason was concealed from view, and
instead of ending with this concept, the attempt was made to begin
with it, and so to deduce from it that necessity of existence which
it was only fitted to complete. Thus arose the unfortunate
ontological proof, which yields satisfaction neither to the natural
and healthy understanding nor to the more academic demands of
strict proof.”[1611]
To return to Section III.: Kant breaks the continuity of his argument,
and anticipates his discussion of the cosmological proof, by stopping to
point out the illegitimacy of the assumption which underlies the first
step in the above argument, namely, that a limited being cannot be
absolutely necessary. Though the concept of a limited being does not
contain the unconditioned, that does not prove that its existence is
conditioned. Indeed each and every limited being may, for all their
concepts show to the contrary, be unconditionally necessary.[1612] The
above argument is consequently inconclusive, and cannot be relied on to
give us any concept whatever of the qualities of a necessary Being. But
this is a merely logical defect, and, as already noted, it is not really
upon logical cogency that the persuasive force of the argument depends.
In conclusion Kant points out that there are only three possible kinds
of speculative (_i.e._ theoretical) proofs of the existence of God: (1)
from definite experience and the specific nature of the world of sense
as revealed in experience; (2) from indefinite experience, _i.e._ from
the fact that any existence at all is empirically given; (3) the
non-empirical _a priori_ proof from mere concepts. The first is the
_physico-theological_ or _teleological_ argument, the second is the
_cosmological_, and the third is the _ontological_. Kant finds it
advisable to reverse the order of the proofs, and to begin by
consideration of the ontological argument. This would seem to indicate
that the ‘scholastic innovation’ to which he traces the origin of the
ontological proof has more justification than his remarks appear to
allow.
SECTION IV
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF AN ONTOLOGICAL PROOF[1613]
=Statement.=--Hitherto Kant has employed the concept of an absolutely
necessary Being without question. He now recognises that the problem,
from which we ought to start, is not whether the existence of an
absolutely necessary Being can be demonstrated, but whether, and how,
such a Being can even be conceived. And upon analysis he discovers that
the assumed notion of an absolutely necessary, _i.e._ _unconditioned_
Being is entirely lacking in intelligible content. For in eliminating
all conditioning causes--through which alone the understanding can
conceive necessity of existence--we also remove this particular kind of
necessity. A verbal definition may, indeed, be given of the Idea, as
when we say that it represents something the non-existence of which is
impossible. But this yields no insight into the reasons which make its
non-existence inconceivable, and such insight is required if anything at
all is to be thought in the Idea.
“The expedient of removing all those conditions which the
understanding indispensably requires in order to regard something
as necessary, simply through the introduction of the word
_unconditioned_, is very far from sufficing to show whether I am
still thinking anything, or not rather perhaps nothing at all, in
the concept of the unconditionally necessary.”[1614]
The untenableness of the concept has been in large part concealed
through a confusion between logical and ontological necessity, that is,
between necessity of judgment and necessity of existence. The fact that
every proposition of geometry must be regarded as absolutely necessary
was supposed to justify this identification. It was not observed that
logical necessity refers only to _judgments_, not to _things_ and their
relations, and that the absolute necessity of the judgment holds only
upon the assumption that the conditioned necessity of the thing referred
to has previously been granted. If there be any such thing as a
triangle, the assertion that it has three angles will follow with
absolute necessity; but the existence of a triangle or even of space in
general is contingent. In other words, the asserted necessity is only a
form of logical sequence, not the unconditioned necessity of existence
which is supposed to be disclosed in the Idea of Reason. All judgments,
so far as they refer to existence, as distinct from mere possibility,
are hypothetical, and serve to define a reality that is only
contingently given. In adopting this position, Kant is in entire
agreement with Hume. The contradictory of a matter of fact is always
thinkable. There has, Kant claims, been no more fruitful source of
illusion throughout the whole history of philosophy than the belief in
an absolute necessity that is purely logical.[1615] In the ontological
argument we have the most striking instance of such rationalistic
exaggeration of the powers of thought.
=Comment.=--Had this criticism of the Idea of unconditioned necessity been
introduced at an earlier stage in Kant’s argument, much confusion would
have been avoided. It involves the thorough revisal of his criticism of
the third and fourth antinomies, as well as of the whole account
hitherto given of the function of Reason and of its metaphysical
dialectic. The principle, that if the conditioned be given, the whole
series of conditions up to the unconditioned is likewise given, must no
longer be accepted as a basis for argument. Indeed the very terms in
which Reason has so far been defined, as the faculty of the
unconditioned, become subject to question. In that definition the term
unconditioned has tacitly been taken as equivalent to the
unconditionally necessary, and on elimination of the element of
necessity, it will reduce merely to the concept of totality, which is a
pure form of the understanding. Those parts of the _Dialectic_, which
embody the view that Reason is simply the understanding transcendently
employed, will thus be confirmed; the alternative view of Reason as a
separate faculty will have to be eliminated. But these are questions
which Kant himself proceeds to raise and discuss.[1616] Meantime he
applies the above results in criticism of the ontological argument.
=Statement.=--In an identical judgment it is contradictory to reject the
predicate while retaining the subject. But there is no contradiction if
we reject subject and predicate alike, for nothing is then left that can
be contradicted. If we assume that there is a triangle, we are bound to
recognise that it has three angles, but there is no contradiction in
rejecting the triangle together with its three angles. The same holds
true of an absolutely necessary Being. ‘God is omnipotent’ is an
identical and therefore necessary judgment. But if we say, ‘There is no
God,’ neither the omnipotence nor any other attribute remains; and there
is therefore not the least contradiction in saying that God does not
exist. The only way of evading this conclusion is to argue that there
are subjects which cannot be removed out of existence. That, however,
would only be another way of asserting that there exist absolutely
necessary subjects, and that is the very assertion which is now in
question, and which the ontological argument undertakes to prove. Our
sole test of what cannot be removed is the contradiction which would
thereby result; and the only possible instance which can be cited is the
concept of the _Ens realissimum_. It remains, therefore, to establish
the above criticism for this specific case.
At the start Kant points out that absence of internal contradiction,
even if granted, proves only that the _Ens realissimum_ is a _logically_
possible concept (as distinguished from the _nihil negativum_[1617]); it
does not suffice to establish the possibility of the object of the
concept. But for the sake of argument Kant allows this initial
assumption to pass. The argument to be disproved is that as reality
comprehends existence, existence is contained in the concept of _Ens
realissimum_, and cannot therefore be denied of it without removing its
internal possibility. The really fundamental assumption of this argument
is that existence is capable of being included in the concept of a
_possible_ being. If that were so, the assertion of its existence would
be an analytic proposition, and the proof could not be challenged. (The
assumption is partly concealed by alternation of the terms reality and
existence: in their actual employment they are completely synonymous.)
As the above assumption thus decides the entire issue, Kant sets himself
to establish, in direct opposition to it, the thesis, that every
proposition which predicates existence is synthetic, and that in
consequence its denial can never involve a logical contradiction.
Existence can never form part of the content of a conception, and
therefore must not be regarded as a possible predicate. What logically
corresponds to it in a judgment is a purely formal factor, namely, the
copula. The proposition, ‘God is omnipotent,’ contains two concepts,
each of which has its object--God and omnipotence. The word ‘is’ adds no
new predicate, but only serves to posit the predicate in its relation to
the subject. Similarly, when we take the subject together with all its
predicates (including that of omnipotence), and say, ‘God is’ or ‘there
is a God,’ we attach no new predicate to the concept of God, but only
posit the subject in itself with all its predicates as being an object
that stands in relation to our concept. In order that the proposition be
true, the _content_ of the object and of the concept must be one and the
same. If the object contained more than the concept, the concept would
not express the object, and the proposition would assert a relation that
does not hold. Or to state the same point in another way, the real must
not contain more content than the possible. Otherwise it would not be
the possible, but something different from the possible, which would
then be taken as existing. A hundred real thalers do not contain the
least coin more than a hundred possible thalers. Though my financial
position is very differently affected by a hundred real thalers than by
the thought of them only, a conceived hundred thalers are not in the
least increased through acquiring existence outside my concept.
Kant presents his argument in still another form. If we think in a thing
every kind of reality except one, the missing reality is not supplied by
my saying that this defective thing exists. On the contrary, it exists
with the same defect with which I have thought it. When, therefore, I
think a Being as the highest reality, without any defect, the question
still remains whether it exists or not. For though, in my concept,
nothing may be lacking of the possible real _content_ of a thing in
general, something is still lacking in its relation to my whole state of
thinking, namely, knowledge of its existence; and such knowledge can
never be obtained save in an _a posteriori_ manner. That is owing to the
limitations imposed by the conditions of our sense-experience. We never
confound the existence of a sensible object with its mere concept. The
concept represents something that may or may not exist: to determine
existence we must refer to actual experience. As Kant has already
stated, the actual is always for us the accidental, and its assertion is
therefore synthetic. A possible idea and the idea of a possible thing
are quite distinct.[1618] A thing is known to be possible only when
presented in some concrete experience, or when, though not actually
experienced, it has been proved to be bound up, according to empirical
laws, with given perceptions. It is not, therefore, surprising that if
we try, as is done in the ontological argument, to think existence
through the pure category, we cannot mention a single mark
distinguishing it from a merely logical possibility. The concept of a
Supreme Being is, in many respects, a valuable Idea, but just because it
is an Idea of pure Reason, _i.e._ a mere Idea, we can no more extend our
knowledge of real existence by means of it, than a merchant can better
his position by adding a few noughts to his cash account.
There are many points of connection between this section and the first
edition _Introduction_; and in view of these points of contact Adickes
has suggested[1619] that the considerations which arose in the
examination of the ontological argument may have been what brought Kant
to realise that the various problems of the _Critique_ can all be traced
to the central problem of _a priori_ synthesis.
SECTION V
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF A COSMOLOGICAL PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD[1620]
=Statement.=--Kant, as already noted, views the ontological proof as ‘a
mere innovation of scholastic wisdom’ which restates, in a quite
unnatural form, a line of thought much more adequately expressed in the
cosmological proof. To discover the natural dialectic of Reason we must
therefore look to this latter form of argument. It is composed of two
distinct stages. In the first stage it makes no use of specific
experience: if _anything_ is given us as existing, _e.g._ the self,
there must exist an absolutely necessary Being as its cause. Then, in
the second stage, it is argued that as such a Being must be altogether
outside experience, Reason must leave experience entirely aside, and
discover from among pure concepts what properties an absolutely
necessary Being ought to possess, _i.e._ which among all possible things
contains in itself the conditions of absolute necessity. The requisite
enlightenment is believed by Reason to be derivable only from the
concept of an _Ens realissimum_, and Reason therefore at once concludes
that this concept must represent the absolutely necessary Being.
Now in that final conclusion the truth of the ontological argument is
assumed. If the concept of a Being of the highest reality is so
completely adequate to the concept of necessary existence that they can
be regarded as identical, the latter must be capable of being derived
from the former, and that is all that is maintained in the ontological
proof. To make this point clearer, Kant states it in scholastic form. If
the proposition be true, that every absolutely necessary Being is at the
same time the most real Being (and this is the _nervus probandi_ of the
cosmological proof in so far as it is also theological), it must, like
all affirmative propositions, be capable of conversion, at least _per
accidens_. This gives us the proposition that some _Entia realissima_
are at the same time absolutely necessary Beings. One _Ens realissimum_,
however, does not differ from another, and what applies to one applies
to all. In this case, therefore, we must employ simple conversion, and
say that every _Ens realissimum_ is a necessary Being. Thus the
cosmological proof is not only as illusory as the ontological, but also
less honest. While pretending to lead us by a new road to a sound
conclusion, it brings us back, after a short circuit, into the old path.
If the ontological argument is correct, the cosmological is superfluous;
and if the ontological is false, the cosmological cannot possibly be
true.
But the first stage of the cosmological argument, that by which it is
distinguished from the ontological, is itself fallacious. A whole nest
of dialectical assumptions lies hidden in its apparently simple and
legitimate inference from the contingent to the necessary. To advance
from the contingent to the necessary, from the relative to the absolute,
from the given to the transcendent, is just as illegitimate as the
opposite process of passing from Idea to existence. The necessity of
thought, which is in both cases the sole ground of the inference, is
found on examination to be of merely subjective character. No less than
three false assumptions are involved in this inference. In the first
place, the principle that everything must have a cause, which can be
proved to be valid only within the world of sense, is here applied to
the sensible world as a whole; and is therefore employed in the wider
form which coincides with the fundamental principle of the higher
faculty of Reason. We assume, that if the conditioned be given, the
totality of its conditions _up to the unconditioned_ is given likewise.
No such principle can be granted. As it is synthetic, it could be
established only as a condition of the possibility of experience. But no
such proof is offered: the principle is based upon a purely intellectual
concept. Secondly, the inference to a first cause rests on the kindred
assumption that an infinite series of empirical causes is impossible.
That conclusion can never be drawn, even within the realm of experience.
How, then, can we rely upon it in advancing beyond experience?
Certainly, no one can prove that the empirical series is infinite, but
just as little can we establish the opposite. In discussing the third
and fourth antinomies Kant has shown that the existence of a first cause
or of an absolutely necessary Being, though possible (or rather,
possibly possible), is never demonstrable. Thirdly--as has been shown in
A 592-3 = B 620-1--in inferring to an unconditioned cause, it is blindly
assumed that the removal of all conditions does not at the same time
remove the very concept of necessity. Our only notion of necessity is
derived from experience, and therefore depends on those finite
conditions which the argument would deny to us. The concept of
unconditioned necessity is entirely null and void.
The fourth defect, which Kant enumerates, refers to the second stage of
the cosmological argument, and has already been considered. He ought
also to have mentioned a still further assumption underlying its first
stage, namely, that a concept which represents a limited being, as, for
instance, that of matter, cannot represent necessary existence. This
also is an assumption which it cannot justify. This objection Kant has
himself stated in A 586 = B 614 and A 588 = B 616.[1621]
=Comment.=--We are apt to overlook the wider sweep which Kant’s criticism
takes in this section, owing to his omission to notify the reader that
he is here calling in question a principle which he has hitherto been
taking for granted, namely, the principle in terms of which he has in
the opening sections of the _Dialectic_ defined the faculty of Reason,
that if the conditioned be given the totality of conditions up to the
unconditioned is given likewise. The first step in his rejection of this
principle occurs as merely incidental to his criticism of the
ontological argument. It is there shown that the concept of the
unconditionally necessary is without meaning. Now, in this present
section, he calls in question the principle itself. It must be rejected
not only, as stated in the third of the above objections, because the
concept of the unconditioned, which tacitly implies the factor of
absolute necessity, is without real significance, but also for two
further reasons--those above cited in the first and second objections.
How very differently the problems of the _Dialectic_ appear, and how
very differently the Ideas of Reason have to be regarded, when this
principle, and also the concept of the unconditioned of which it is the
application, are thus called in question, will be shown in the sequel.
DISCOVERY AND EXPLANATION OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL ILLUSION IN ALL
TRANSCENDENTAL PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF A NECESSARY BEING[1622]
=Statement.=--We do not properly fulfil the task prescribed by Critical
teaching in merely disproving the cosmological argument. We must also
explain its hold upon the mind. If it is, as Kant insists, more natural
to the mind than the ontological, and yet, as we have just seen, is more
fallacious; if it has not been invented by philosophers, but is the
instinctive reasoning of the natural man, it must rest, like all
dialectical illusion, upon a misunderstanding of the legitimate demands
of pure Reason. _Reason demands the unconditioned, and yet cannot think
it._
“Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the
last bearer of all things, is for human Reason the veritable
abyss.... We can neither help thinking, nor can we bear the
thought, that a Being--even if it be the one which we represent to
ourselves as supreme amongst all Beings--should, as it were, say to
itself: ‘I am from eternity to eternity, and outside me there is
nothing save what is through my will; _but whence am I_?’ All
support here fails us; and _supreme_ perfection, no less than the
_least_ perfection, is unsubstantial and baseless for the merely
speculative Reason....”[1623]
We are obliged to think something as necessary for all existence, and
yet at the same time are unable to think anything as in itself
necessary--God as little as anything else.
The explanation[1624] of this strange fact must be that which follows as
a corollary from the limitation of our knowledge to sense-experience,
namely, that our concepts of necessity and contingency do not concern
things in themselves, and cannot therefore be applied to them in
accordance with either of the two possible alternatives. Each
alternative must express a subjective principle of Reason; and the two
together (that something exists by necessity, and that everything is
only contingent) must form complementary rules for the guidance of the
understanding. These rules will then be purely heuristic and regulative,
relating only to the formal interests of Reason, and may well stand side
by side. For the one tells us that we ought to philosophise as if there
were a necessary first ground for everything that exists, _i.e._ that we
ought to be always dissatisfied with relativity and contingency, and to
seek always for what is unconditionally necessary. The other warns us
against regarding any single determination in things (such, for
instance, as impenetrability or gravity) as absolutely necessary, and so
bids us keep the way always open for further derivation. In other words,
Reason guides the understanding by a twofold command. The understanding
must derive phenomena and their existence from other phenomena, just as
if there were no necessary Being at all; while at the same time it must
always strive towards the completeness of that derivation, just as if
such a necessary Being were presupposed. It is owing to a transcendental
illusion or subreption that we view the latter principle as
constitutive, and so think its unity as hypostatised in the form of an
_Ens realissimum_. The falsity of this substitution becomes evident as
soon as we consider _that unconditioned necessity, as a thing in itself,
cannot even be conceived, and that the “Idea” of it cannot, therefore,
be ascribed to Reason save as a merely formal principle, regulative of
the understanding in its interpretation of given experience_.[1625]
=Comment.=--The reader may observe that, when Kant is developing this
sceptical view of the Ideal of Reason, the explanation of dialectical
illusion in terms of transcendental idealism falls into the background.
The illusion is no longer traced to a confusion between appearances and
things in themselves, but to the false interpretation of regulative
principles as being constitutive. When it is the cosmological problem
with which we are dealing, the two illusions do, indeed, coincide. If we
view the objects of sense-experience as things in themselves, we are
bound to regard the Ideal completion of the natural sciences as an
adequate representation of ultimate reality. But in Rational Theology,
which is professedly directed towards the definition of a Being distinct
from nature and conditioning all finite existence, it is not failure to
distinguish between appearance and things in themselves, but the
mistaking of a merely formal Ideal for a representation of reality, that
is alone responsible for the conclusions drawn.
In A 617-18 = B 645-6 Kant makes statements which conflict with the
teaching of A 586 = B 614 and A 588 = B 616. In the latter passages he
has argued that the concept of a limited being may not without specific
proof be taken as contradictory of absolute necessity. He now
categorically declares that the philosophers of antiquity are in error
in regarding matter as primitive and necessary; and the reason which he
gives is that the regulative principle of Reason forbids us to view
extension and impenetrability, “which together constitute the concept of
matter,” as ultimate principles of experience. But obviously Kant is
here going further than his regulative principle will justify. It
demands only that we should always look for still higher principles of
unity, and so keep open the way for possible further derivation; it does
not enable us to assert that such will actually be found to exist.
Notwithstanding the Ideal demands of the regulative principle, matter
may be primordial and necessary, and its properties of extension and
impenetrability may not be derivable from anything more ultimate.
In this connection we may raise the more general question, how far the
Ideal demand for necessity and unity in knowledge and existence can be
concretely pictured. Kant gives a varying answer. Sometimes--when he is
emphasising the limitation of our theoretical knowledge to
sense-experience--he reduces the speculative Idea of Divine Existence to
a purely abstract maxim for the regulation of natural science. When the
Ideal occupies the mind on its own account, and so attracts our
attention away from our sense-knowledge, it is an unreality, and
perverts the understanding; it yields genuine light and leading only as
a quite general maxim within the sphere of natural science. From this
point of view necessary Being, even as an Ideal, can by no means be
identified with a personal God. It signifies only the highest possible
system and unity of the endlessly varied natural phenomena in space and
time, and can be approximately realised in the most various ways. Its
significance is entirely cosmological. It is an Ideal of positive
science, and signifies only systematic unity in the object known. In
being transformed from a scientific ideal into a subject of theological
enquiry, it has inevitably given rise to dialectical illusion. At other
times,--when he is concerned to defend the concept of Divine Existence
as at least possible, and so to prepare the way for its postulation as
implied in the moral law, or when he is seeking, as in the _Critique of
Judgment_, to render comprehensible the complete adaptation of
phenomenal nature in its material aspect to the needs of our
understanding--Kant insists that we are ultimately compelled, by the
nature of our faculties, to conceive the Ideal of Reason as a personal
God, as an Intelligence working according to purposes. Only by such a
personal God, he maintains, can the demands of Reason be genuinely
satisfied.
These two interpretations of the Ideal of Reason are in conflict with
one another; and so far as the _Critique of Pure Reason_ is concerned, a
very insufficient attempt is made to justify the frequent assertion that
the Idea of God is _the_ Ideal of Reason, and not merely one possible,
and highly problematic, interpretation of it. If the Idea of God is a
necessary Idea, it cannot be adequately expressed through any merely
regulative maxim. It demands not only system in knowledge but also
perfection in the nature of the known. It is not a merely logical Ideal
such as might be satisfied by any rational system, but an Ideal which
concerns matter as well as form, man as well as nature, our moral needs
as well as our intellectual demands. If Kant is to maintain that the
only genuine function of theoretical Reason is to guide the
understanding in its scientific application, he is debarred from
asserting that a concrete interpretation of its regulative principles is
unavoidable. And he is also precluded by his own limitation of all
knowledge to sense-experience from seeking to define by any positive
predicate the transcendent nature of the thing in itself.
Such justification as Kant can offer in support of his assertion that
the Idea of God, of Intelligent Perfection, is an indispensable Idea of
human Reason, is chiefly based upon the teleological aspect of nature
which is dealt with in the physico-theological proof. Mechanical science
implies only the cosmological Idea: teleological unity presupposes the
theological Ideal. Further enquiry, then, into the necessity of the Idea
of God as a regulative principle, and its dangers as a source of
dialectical illusion, we must defer until we have examined the one
remaining argument.[1626]
SECTION VI
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE PHYSICO-THEOLOGICAL PROOF[1627]
=Statement.=--The teleological proof starts from our definite knowledge of
the order and constitution of the sensible world. The actual world
presents such immeasurable order, variety, fitness, and beauty, that we
are led to believe that here at least is sufficient proof of the
existence of God. Kant’s attitude towards this argument is at once
extremely critical and extremely sympathetic. Though he represents it as
the oldest, the clearest, and the most convincing, he is none the less
prepared to show that it contains every one of the fallacies involved in
the other two proofs, as well as some false assumptions peculiar to
itself. It possesses overpowering persuasive force, not because of any
inherent logical cogency, but because it so successfully appeals to
feeling as to silence the intellect. It would, Kant declares, be not
only comfortless, but utterly vain to attempt to diminish its influence.
”[The mind is] aroused from the indecision of all melancholy
reflection, as from a dream, by one glance at the wonders of nature
and the majesty of the universe....”[1628]
Meantime, however, we are concerned with its merely logical force. We
have to decide whether, as theoretical proof, it can claim assent on its
own merits, requiring no favour, and no help from any other quarter. On
the basis of empirical facts the argument makes the following
assertions. (1) There are everywhere in the world clear indications of
adaptation to a definite end. (2) As this adaptation cannot be due to
the working of blind, mechanical laws, and accordingly cannot be
explained as originating in things themselves, it must have been imposed
upon them from without; and there must therefore exist, apart from the
sensible world, an intelligent Being who has arranged it according to
ideas antecedently formed. (3) As there is unity in the reciprocal
relations of the parts of the universe as portions of a single edifice,
and as the universe is infinite in extent and inexhaustible in variety,
its intelligent cause must be single, all-powerful, all-wise, i.e. God.
Now, even granting for the sake of argument the admissibility of these
assertions, they enable us to infer only an intelligent author of the
purposive form of nature, not of its matter, only an architect who is
very much hampered by the inadaptability of the material in which he
has to work, not a Creator to whose will everything is due. To prove the
contingency of matter itself, we should have to establish the truth of
the cosmological proof.
But the assumptions implied even in the demonstration that God exists as
a _formative_ power, are by no means beyond dispute. Why may not nature
be regarded as giving form to itself by its blindly working forces? Can
it really be proved that nature is a work of art that demands an
artificer as certainly as does a house, or a ship, or a clock? Kant’s
argument is at this point extremely brief, and I shall so far digress
from the statement of it, which he here gives, as to supplement it from
his other writings. Even so-called dead matter is not merely inert. By
its inherent powers of gravity and chemical attraction it spontaneously
gives rise to the most wonderful forms. When Clarke and Voltaire, in
their first enthusiasm over Newton’s great discovery, asserted that the
planetary system must have been divinely created, each planet being
launched in the tangent of its orbit by the finger of God, just as a
wheel must be fixed into its place by the hand of the mechanician, they
under-estimated the organising power of blind inanimate nature. As Kant
argued in his early treatise,[1629] the planetary system can quite well
have arisen, and, as it would seem, actually has come into existence,
through the action of blindly working laws. The mechanical principles
which account for its present maintenance will also account for its
origin and development. But it is when we turn to animate nature, which
is the chief source from which arguments for design are derived, that
the insufficiency of the teleological argument becomes most manifest. As
Kant points out in the _Critique of Judgment_, the differentia
distinguishing the living from the lifeless, is not so much that it is
organised as that it is self-organising. When, therefore, we treat an
organism as an analogon of art we completely misrepresent its essential
nature.[1630] In regarding it as put together by an external agent we
are ignoring its internal self-developing power. As Hume had previously
maintained in his _Dialogues on Natural Religion_,[1631] the facts of
the organic world not only agree with the facts of the inorganic world
in _not_ supporting the argument of the teleological proof, but are in
direct conflict with it.
But to return to Kant’s immediate statement of the argument. Setting the
above objection aside, and granting for the present that nature may be
regarded as the outcome of an external artificer, we can argue only to a
cause adequate to its production, _i.e._ to an extraordinarily wise and
wonderfully powerful Being. Even if we ignore the existence of evil and
defect in nature, the step from great power to omnipotence, and from
great wisdom to omniscience, is one that can never be justified on
empirical grounds.[1632] Since the Ideas of Reason, and above all the
completely determined, individual Ideal of Reason, transcend experience,
experience can never justify us in inferring their reality. The
teleological argument can, indeed, only lead us to the point of admiring
the greatness, wisdom, and power of the author of the world. In
proceeding further it abandons experience altogether, and reasons, not
from particular kinds and excellencies of natural design, but from the
contingency of all such adaptation to the existence of a necessary
Being, exactly in the manner of the cosmological argument. And it ends
by assuming, in agreement with the ontological proof, that the only
possible necessary Being is the Ideal of Reason. Thus after committing a
number of fallacies on its own account, the teleological argument itself
endorses all those that are involved in the more _a priori_ proofs. The
teleological argument rests on the cosmological, and the cosmological on
the ontological, which therefore would be the only proof possible, were
the proof of a completely transcendent proposition ever possible at all.
The strange fact that the convincing force of the arguments thus varies
inversely with their validity shows, Kant maintains, that we are correct
in concluding that they do not really depend upon their logical cogency,
and merely express, in abstract terms, beliefs deep-rooted in the human
spirit.
SECTION VII
CRITICISM OF ALL THEOLOGY BASED ON SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES OF
REASON[1633]
=A 631-3 = B 659-66.=--On the distinction between “theist” and “deist,”
cf. _Encyclopædia Britannica_, vii. p. 934:
“The later distinction between ‘theist’ and ‘deist,’ which stamped
the latter word as excluding the belief in providence or in the
immanence of God, was apparently formulated in the end of the
eighteenth century by those rationalists who were aggrieved at
being identified with the naturalists.”
=A 633-4 = B 661-2.=--Kant here does no more than indicate that by way of
practical Reason it may be possible to postulate, though not
theoretically to comprehend, a Supreme Being. On the distinction between
postulates and hypotheses, cf. A 769 ff. = B 797 ff., and below, p. 543
ff. Cf. also p. 571 ff.
=A 634 = B 662.=--On relative necessity, cf. below, pp. 555, 571 ff.
=A 635-9 = B 663-7= only summarises points already treated.
=A 639-42 = B 667-70.=--Kant concludes by declaring that the Ideal, in
addition to its regulative function, possesses two further prerogatives.
In the first place, it supplies a standard, in the light of which any
knowledge of Divine Existence, acquired from other sources, can be
purified and rendered consistent with itself. For it is “an Ideal
without a flaw,” the true crown and culmination of the whole of human
knowledge.
“If there should be a moral theology ... transcendental theology
... will then prove itself indispensable in determining its concept
and in constantly testing Reason which is so often deceived by
sensibility, and which is frequently out of harmony with its own
Ideas.”[1634]
And secondly, though the Ideal fails to establish itself theoretically,
the arguments given in its support suffice to show the quite
insufficient foundations upon which all atheistic, deistic, and
anthropomorphic philosophies rest.
=Comment.=--These concluding remarks cannot be accepted as representing
Kant’s true teaching. The Ideal, by his own showing, is by no means
without a flaw. In so far as it involves the concept of unconditioned
necessity, it is meaningless; it is purely logical, and therefore
contains no indication of real content; it embodies a false view of the
nature of negation, and therefore of the relation of realities to one
another. In short, it is constituted in accordance with the false,
un-Critical principles of Leibnizian metaphysics, and is found on
examination to be non-existent even as a purely mental entity. Reduced
to its proper terms, it becomes a mere schema regulative of the
understanding in the extension of experience, and does not yield even a
negative criterion for the testing of our ideals of Divine Existence.
The criterion, which Kant really so employs, is not that of an _Ens
realissimum_, but the concept of an Intuitive Understanding, which, as
he has indicated in the chapter on _Phenomena and Noumena_,[1635] is our
most adequate Ideal of completed Perfection. This latter is not itself,
however, a spontaneously formed concept of natural Reason, and does not
justify the assertion that the Idea of God is a necessary Idea of the
human mind. In attempting to defend such a thesis, Kant is unduly
influenced by the almost universal acceptance of deistic beliefs in the
Europe of his time.[1636] His criticism of the Ideal of Reason and of
rational theology is much more destructive, and really allows that
theology much less value, even as natural dialectic, than he is willing
to admit.[1637] Architectonic forbids that the extreme radical
consequences of the teaching of the _Analytic_ should be allowed to show
in their full force. These shortcomings are, however, in great part
remedied in the elaborate _Appendix_ which Kant has attached to the
_Dialectic_.
APPENDIX TO THE TRANSCENDENTAL DIALECTIC
THE REGULATIVE EMPLOYMENT OF THE IDEAS OF PURE REASON[1638]
Before we proceed to deal with this _Appendix_ it will be of advantage
to consider the section in the _Methodology_ on _the Discipline of Pure
Reason in regard to Hypotheses_.[1639] That section affords a very
illuminating introduction to the problems here discussed, and is
extremely important for understanding Kant’s view of metaphysical
science as yielding either complete certainty or else nothing at all.
This is a doctrine which he from time to time suggests, to the
considerable bewilderment of the modern reader.[1640] In discussing it
he starts from the obvious objection, that though nothing can be known
through Reason in its pure _a priori_ employment, metaphysics may yet be
possible in an empirical form, as consisting of hypotheses, constructed
in conjectural explanation of the facts of experience. Kant replies by
defining the conditions under which alone hypotheses can be entertained
as such. There must always be something completely certain, and not only
invented or merely “opined,” namely, the _possibility_ of the object to
which the hypothesis appeals. Once that is proved, it is allowable, on
the basis of experience, to form opinions regarding its reality. Then,
and only then, can such opinions be entitled hypotheses. Otherwise we
are not employing the understanding to explain; we are simply indulging
the imagination in its tendency to dream. Now since the categories of
the pure understanding do not enable us to invent _a priori_ the concept
of a dynamical connection, but only to apprehend it when presented in
experience, we cannot by means of these categories invent a single
object endowed with a new quality not empirically given; and cannot,
therefore, base an hypothesis upon any such conception.
“Thus it is not permissible to invent any new original powers, as,
for instance, an understanding capable of intuiting its objects
without the aid of senses; or a force of attraction without any
contact; or a new kind of substance existing in space and yet not
impenetrable. Nor is it legitimate to postulate any other form of
communion of substances than that revealed in experience, any
presence that is not spatial, any duration that is not temporal. In
a word our Reason can employ as conditions of the possibility of
things only the conditions of possible experience; it can never, as
it were, _create_ concepts of things, independently of those
conditions. Such concepts, though not self-contradictory, would be
without an object.”[1641]
This does not, however, mean that the concepts of pure Reason can have
no valid employment. They are, it is true, Ideas merely, with no object
corresponding to them in any experience; but then it is also true that
they are not hypotheses, referring to imagined objects, supposed to be
possibly real. They are purely problematic. They are heuristic fictions
(_heuristische Fiktionen_), the sole function of which is to serve as
principles regulative of the understanding in its systematic employment.
Used in any other manner they reduce to the level of merely mental
entities (_Gedankendinge_) whose very possibility is indemonstrable, and
which cannot therefore be employed as hypotheses for the explanation of
appearances. Given appearances can be accounted for only in terms of
laws known to hold among appearances. To explain natural phenomena by a
transcendental hypothesis--mental processes by the assumption of the
soul as a substantial, simple, spiritual being, or order and design in
nature by the assumption of a Divine Author--is never admissible.
“...that would be to explain something, which in terms of known
empirical principles we do not understand sufficiently, by
something which we do not understand at all.”[1642]
And Kant adds that the wildest hypotheses, if only they are physical,
are more tolerable than a hyperphysical one. They at least conform to
the conditions under which alone hypothetical explanation as such is
allowable. “Outside this field, to form opinions, is merely to play with
thoughts....”[1643]
A further condition, required to render an hypothesis acceptable, is its
adequacy for determining _a priori_ all the consequences which are
actually given. If for that purpose supplementary hypotheses have to be
called in, the force of the main assumption is proportionately
weakened. Thus we can easily explain natural order and design, if we are
allowed to postulate a Divine Author who is absolutely perfect and
all-powerful. But that hypothesis lies open to all the objections
suggested by defects and evils in nature, and can only be preserved
through new hypotheses which modify the main assumption. Similarly the
hypothesis of the human soul as an abiding and purely spiritual being,
existing in independence of the body, has to be modified to meet the
difficulties which arise from the phenomena of growth and decay. But the
new hypotheses, then constructed, derive their whole authority from the
main hypothesis which they are themselves defending.
Such is Kant’s criticism of metaphysics when its teaching is based on
the facts of experience hypothetically interpreted. In regard to
transcendent metaphysics, there are, in Kant’s view, only two
alternatives.[1644] Either its propositions must be established
independently of all experience in purely _a priori_ fashion, and
therefore as absolutely certain; or they must consist in hypotheses
empirically grounded. The first alternative has in the _Analytic_ and
_Dialectic_ been shown to be impossible; the second alternative he
rejects for the above reasons.
But this does not close Kant’s treatment of metaphysical hypotheses. He
proceeds to develop a doctrine which, in its fearless confidence in the
truth of Critical teaching, is the worthy outcome of his abiding belief
in the value of a “sceptical method.”[1645] As Reason is by its very
nature dialectical, outside opponents are not those from whom we have
most to fear. Their objections are really derived from a source which
lies in ourselves, and until these have been traced to their origin, and
destroyed from the root upwards, we can expect no lasting peace. Our
duty, therefore, is to encourage our doubts, until by the very
luxuriance of their growth they enable us to discover the hidden roots
from which they derive their perennial vitality.
“External tranquillity is a mere illusion. The germ of these
objections, which lies in the nature of human Reason, must be
rooted out. But how can we uproot it, unless we give it freedom,
nay, nourishment, to send out shoots so that it may discover itself
to our eyes, and that we may then destroy it together with its
root? Therefore think out objections which have never yet occurred
to any opponent; lend him, indeed, your weapons, or grant him the
most favourable position which he could possibly desire. You have
nothing to fear in all this, but much to hope for; you may gain for
yourselves a possession which can never again be contested.”[1646]
In this campaign to eradicate doubt by following it out to its
furthermost limits, the hypotheses of pure Reason, “leaden weapons
though they be, since they are not steeled by any law of experience,”
are an indispensable part of our equipment. For though hypotheses are
useless for the establishment of metaphysical propositions, they are,
Kant teaches, both admirable and valuable for their defence. That is to
say, their true metaphysical function is not dogmatic, but polemical.
They are weapons of war to which we may legitimately resort for the
maintenance of beliefs otherwise established. If, for instance, we have
been led to postulate the immaterial, self-subsistent nature of the
soul, and are met by the difficulty that experience would seem to prove
that both the growth and the decay of our mental powers are due to the
body, we can weaken this objection by formulating the hypothesis that
the body is not the cause of our thinking, but only a restrictive
condition of it, peculiar to our present state, and that, though it
furthers our sensuous and animal faculties, it acts as an impediment to
our spiritual life. Similarly, to meet the many objections against
belief in the eternal existence of a finite being whose birth depends
upon contingencies of all kinds, such as the food supply, the whims of
government, or even vice, we can adduce the transcendental hypothesis
that life has neither beginning in birth nor ending in death, the entire
world of sense being but an image due to our present mode of knowledge,
an image which like a dream has in itself no objective reality. Such
hypotheses are not, indeed, even Ideas of Reason, but simply concepts
_invented_ to show that the objections which are raised depend upon the
false assumption that the possibilities have been exhausted, and that
the mere laws of nature comprehend the whole field of possible
existences. These hypotheses at least suffice to reveal the uncertain
character of the doubts which assail us in our practical beliefs.
”[Transcendental hypotheses] are nothing but private opinions.
Nevertheless, we cannot properly dispense with them as weapons
against the misgivings which are apt to occur; they are necessary
even to secure our inner tranquillity. We must preserve to them
this character, carefully guarding against the assumption of their
independent authority or absolute validity, since otherwise they
would drown Reason in fictions and delusions.”[1647]
We may now return to A 642-68 = B 670-96. The teaching of this section
is extremely self-contradictory, wavering between a subjective and an
objective interpretation of the Ideas of Reason. The probable
explanation is that Kant is here recasting older material, and leaves
standing more of his earlier solutions than is consistent with his final
conclusions. We can best approach the discussion by considering Kant’s
statements in A 645 = B 673 and in A 650 ff. = B 678 ff. They expound,
though unfortunately in the briefest terms, a point of view which
Idealism has since adopted as fundamental. Kant himself, very strangely,
never develops its consequences at any great length.[1648] The Idea,
which Reason follows in the exercise of its sole true function, the
systematising of the knowledge supplied by the understanding, is that of
a unity in which the thought of the whole precedes the knowledge of its
parts, and contains the conditions according to which the place of every
part and its relation to the other parts are determined _a priori_. This
Idea specialises itself in various forms, and in all of them directs the
understanding to a knowledge that will be that of no mere aggregate but
of a genuine system. Such concepts are not derived from nature; we
interrogate nature _according to them_, and consider our knowledge
defective so long as it fails to embody them. In A 650 = B 678 Kant
further points out that this Idea of Reason does not merely direct the
understanding to search for such unity, but also claims for itself
objective reality. And he adds,
“...it is difficult to understand how there can be a logical
principle by which Reason prescribes the unity of rules, unless we
also presuppose a transcendental principle whereby such systematic
unity is _a priori_ assumed to be necessarily inherent in the
objects.”
For how could we treat diversity in nature as only disguised unity, if
we were also free to regard that unity as contrary to the actual nature
of the real?
“Reason would then run counter to its own vocation, proposing as
its aim an Idea quite inconsistent with the constitution of
nature.”[1649]
Nor is our knowledge of the principle merely empirical, deduced from the
unity which we find in contingent experience. On the contrary, there is
an inherent and necessary law of Reason compelling us, antecedently to
all specific experience, to look for such unity.
“...without it we should have no Reason at all, and without Reason
no coherent employment of the understanding, and in the absence of
this no sufficient criterion of empirical truth. In order,
therefore, to secure an empirical criterion we are absolutely
compelled to presuppose the systematic unity of nature as
objectively valid and necessary.”[1650] “It might be supposed that
this is merely an economical contrivance of Reason, seeking to save
itself all possible trouble, a hypothetical attempt, which, if it
succeeds, will, through the unity thus attained, impart probability
to the presumed principle of explanation. But such a selfish
purpose can very easily be distinguished from the Idea. For in the
latter we presuppose that this unity of Reason is in conformity
with nature itself; and that, although we are indeed unable to
determine the limits of this unity, Reason does not here beg but
command.”[1651]
This last alternative, that Reason is here propounding a tentative
hypothesis, in order by trial to discover how far it can be empirically
verified--an alternative which Kant in the above passage rejects as
unduly subjective, and as consequently failing to recognise the
objective claims and _a priori_ authority of the Ideas of Reason,--is
yet a view which he himself adopts and indeed develops at considerable
length in this same section. This, as already stated, affords evidence
of the composite character and varying origins of the material here
presented.
The _Dissertation_ of 1770 gives a purely subjectivist interpretation of
the regulative principles, among which, from its pre-Critical
standpoint, it classes the principle of causality and the principle of
the conservation of matter.
”[We adopt principles] which delude the intellect into mistaking
them for arguments derived from the object, whereas they are
commended to us only by the peculiar nature of the intellect, owing
to their convenience for its free and ample employment. They
therefore ... rest on _subjective_ grounds ... namely, on the
conditions under which it seems easy and expeditious for the
intellect to make use of its insight.... These rules of judging, to
which we freely submit and to which we adhere as if they were
axioms, solely for the reason that _were we to depart from them
almost no judgment regarding a given object would be permissible to
our intellect, I entitle principles of convenience_.... [One of
these is] the popularly received canon, _principia non esse
multiplicanda praeter summam necessitatem_, to which we yield our
adhesion, not because we have insight into causal unity in the
world either by reason or by experience, but because we seek it by
an impulse of the intellect, which seems to itself to have advanced
in the explanation of phenomena only in the degree in which it is
granted to it to descend from a single principle to the greatest
number of consequences.”[1652]
This, in essentials, is the view which we find developed in A 646-9 = B
674-8. Reason is the faculty of deducing the particular from the
general. When the general is admitted only as _problematical_, as a mere
idea, while the particular is certain, we determine the universality of
the rule by applying it to the particulars, and then upon confirmation
of its validity proceed to draw conclusions regarding cases not actually
given. This Kant entitles the _hypothetical_ use of Reason. Reason must
never be employed constitutively. It serves only for the introduction,
as far as may be found possible, of unity into the particulars of
knowledge. It seeks to make the rule _approximate_ to
universality.[1653] The unity which it demands
“...is a _projected_ unity, to be regarded not as given in itself,
but as a problem only. This unity aids us in discovering a
principle for the manifold and special employment of the
understanding, drawing its attention to cases which are not given,
and thus rendering it more coherent.”[1654]
The unity is merely logical, or rather methodological.[1655] To
postulate, in consequence of its serviceableness, real unity in the
objects themselves would be to transform it into a transcendental
principle of Reason, and to render
“...the systematic unity necessary, not only subjectively and
logically, as method, but objectively also.”[1656]
The above paragraphs are intercalated between A 645 = B 673 and A 650-63
= B 678-91, in which, as we have already seen, the directly opposite
view is propounded, namely, that such principles are _not_ merely
hypothetical, _nor_ merely logical. In all cases they claim reality, and
rest upon transcendental principles; they condition the very possibility
of experience; and may therefore be asserted to be _a priori_ necessary
and to be objectively valid. To quote two additional passages:
“...we can conclude from the universal to the particular, only if
universal qualities are ascribed to things as the foundation upon
which the particular qualities rest.”[1657] “The foundation of
these laws [cf. below, pp. 550-1] is not due to any secret design
of making an experiment by putting them forward as merely tentative
suggestions.... It is easily seen that they contemplate the
parsimony of fundamental causes, the manifoldness of effects, and
the consequent affinity of the parts of nature, as being in
themselves both rational and natural. Hence these principles carry
their recommendation directly in themselves, and not merely as
methodological devices.”[1658]
Thus, in direct opposition to the preceding view of Reason’s function as
hypothetical, Kant is now prepared to maintain that the maxims of Reason
are without meaning and without application save in so far as they can
be grounded in a transcendental principle.[1659]
Let us follow Kant’s detailed exposition of this last thesis. The
logical maxim, to seek for systematic unity, rests upon the
transcendental principle that the apparently infinite variety of nature
does not exclude identity of species, that the various species are
varieties of a few genera, and these again of still higher genera. This
is the scholastic maxim: _entia praeter necessitatem non esse
multiplicanda_. Upon this principle rests the possibility of concepts,
and therefore of the understanding itself. It is balanced, however, by a
second principle, no less necessary, the transcendental law of
specification, namely, that there must be manifoldness and diversity in
things, that every genus must specify itself in divergent species, and
these again in sub-species. Or as it is expressed in its scholastic
form: _entium varietates non temere esse minuendas_. This principle is
equally transcendental. It expresses a condition no less necessary for
the possibility of the understanding, and therefore of experience. As
the understanding knows all that it knows by concepts only, however far
it may carry the division of genera, it can never know by means of pure
intuition, but always again by lower concepts. If, therefore, there were
no lower concepts, there could be no higher concepts;[1660] the gap
existing between individuals and genera could never be bridged; or
rather, since neither individuals nor universals could then be
apprehended, neither would exist for the mind. As the higher concepts
acquire all their content from the lower, they presuppose them for their
own existence.
“Every concept may be regarded as a point which, in so far as it
represents the standpoint of a spectator, has its own horizon....
This horizon must be capable of containing an infinite number of
points, each of which again has its own narrower horizon; that is,
every species contains sub-species, according to the principle of
specification, and the logical horizon consists exclusively of
smaller horizons (sub-species), never of points which possess no
extent (individuals).”[1661]
Combining these two principles, that of _homogeneity_ and that of
_specification_, we obtain a third, that of _continuity_. The logical
law of the _continuum formarum logicarum_ presupposes the transcendental
law, _lex continui in natura_. It provides that homogeneity be combined
with the greatest possible diversity by prescribing a continuous
transition from every species to every other, or in other words by
requiring that between any two species or sub-species, however closely
related, intermediate species be always regarded as possible. (The
paragraph at the end of A 661 = B 689, with its proviso that we cannot
make any definite empirical use of this law, is probably of later
origin; it connects with the concluding parts of the section.) That this
third law is also _a priori_ and transcendental, is shown by the fact
that it is not derived from the prior discovery of system in nature, but
has itself given rise to the systematised character of our
knowledge.[1662]
The psychological, chemical, and astronomical examples which Kant
employs to illustrate these laws call for no special comment. They were
taken from contemporary science, and in the advance of our knowledge
have become more confusing than helpful. The citation in A 646 = B 674
of the concepts of “pure earth, pure water, pure air” as being “concepts
of Reason” is especially bewildering. They are, even in the use which
Kant himself ascribes to them, simply empirical hypotheses, formulated
for the purposes of purely physical explanation; they are in no genuine
sense universal, regulative principles.
In passing to A 663-8 = B 691-6 we find still another variation in the
substance of Kant’s teaching. He returns, though with a greater maturity
of statement, and with a very different and much more satisfactory
terminology, to the more sceptical view of A 646-9 = B 674-7.[1663] The
interest of the above principles, Kant continues to maintain, lies in
their transcendentality. Despite the fact that they are mere Ideas for
the guidance of understanding, and can only be approached
asymptotically, they are synthetic _a priori_ judgments, and would seem
to have an objective, though indeterminate, validity. So far his
statements are in line with the preceding paragraphs. But he proceeds to
add that this objective validity consists exclusively in their
heuristic function. They differ fundamentally from the dynamical, no
less than from the mathematical, principles of understanding, in that no
schema of sensibility can be assigned to them. In other words, their
object can never be exhibited _in concreto_; it transcends all possible
experience. For this reason they are incapable of a transcendental
deduction.[1664] They are among the conditions indispensably necessary
to the possibility, not of each and every experience, but only of
experience as systematised _in the interest of Reason_. In place of a
schema they can possess only what may be called the _analogon_ of a
schema, that is, they represent the Idea of a _maximum_, which the
understanding in the subjective interest of Reason--or, otherwise
expressed,[1665] in the interest of a certain possible perfection of our
knowledge of objects--is called upon to realise _as much as possible_.
Thus they are at once _subjective_ in the source from which they arise,
and also _indeterminate_ as to the conditions under which, and the
extent to which, they can obtain empirical embodiment. The fact that in
this capacity they represent a _maximum_, does not justify any assertion
either as to the degree of unity which experience on detailed
investigation will ultimately be found to verify, or as to the noumenal
reality by which experience is conditioned.
In A 644-5 = B 672-3 Kant employs certain optical analogies to
illustrate the illusion which the Ideas, in the absence of Critical
teaching, inevitably generate. When the understanding is regulated by
the Idea of a _maximum_, and seeks to view all the lines of experience
as converging upon and pointing to it, it necessarily regards it, _focus
imaginarius_ though it be, as actually existing. The illusion, by which
objects are seen behind the surface of a mirror, is indispensably
necessary if we are to be able to see what lies behind our backs. The
transcendental illusion, which confers reality upon the Ideas of Reason,
is similarly incidental to the attempt to view experience in its
greatest possible extension.
ON THE FINAL PURPOSE OF THE NATURAL DIALECTIC OF HUMAN REASON[1666]
This section is thoroughly unified and consistent in its teaching. Its
repetitious character is doubtless due to Kant’s personal difficulty
either in definitively accepting or in altogether rejecting the
constructive, Idealist interpretation of the function of Reason. He at
least succeeds in formulating a view which, while not asserting anything
more than is required in the scientific extension of experience,
indicates the many possibilities which such experience fails to exclude.
As the Ideas of Reason are not merely empty thought-entities (_entia
rationis ratiocinantis_[1667]), but have a certain kind of objective
validity (_i.e._ are _entia rationis ratiocinatae_[1668]), they demand a
transcendental deduction.[1669] What this deduction is, and how it
differs from that of the categories, we must now determine. Its
discovery will, Kant claims, crown and complete our Critical labours.
Kant begins by drawing a distinction between representing _an object
absolutely_, and representing _an object in the Idea_.
“In the former case our concepts are employed to determine the
object, in the latter case there is in truth only a schema for
which no object, not even a hypothetical one, is directly given,
and which only enables us to represent to ourselves indirectly
other objects in their systematic unity, by means of their relation
to this Idea.”[1670]
An Idea is only a schema (Kant in terms of A 655 = B 693 ought rather to
have said _analogon_ of a schema) whereby we represent to ourselves, as
for instance in the concept of a Highest Intelligence, not an objective
reality but only such perfection of Reason as will tend to the greatest
possible unity in the empirical employment of understanding.
With this introduction, Kant ushers in his famous “_als ob_” doctrine.
We must view the things of the world _as if_ they derived their
existence from a Highest Intelligence. That Idea is heuristic only, not
expository. Its purpose is not to enable us to comprehend such a Being,
or even to think its existence, but only to show us how we should seek
to determine the constitution and connection of the objects of
experience. The three transcendental Ideas do not determine an object
corresponding to them, but, _under the presupposition of such an object
in the Idea_, lead us to systematic unity of _empirical_ knowledge. When
they are thus strictly interpreted as merely regulative of empirical
enquiry, they will always endorse experience and never run counter to
it. Reason, which seeks completeness of explanation, must therefore
always act in accordance with them. Only thereby can experience acquire
its fullest possible extension. This is the transcendental deduction of
which we are in search. It establishes the indispensableness of the
Ideas of Reason for the completion of experience, and their legitimacy
as regulative principles.
We may here interrupt Kant’s exposition so far as to point out that
this argument does not do justice to the full force of his position. The
true Critical contention--and only if we interpret the passage in the
light of this contention can the proof be regarded as transcendental in
the strict sense--is that the Ideas are necessary to the possibility of
each and every experience, involved together with the categories as
conditions of the very existence of consciousness. They are not merely
regulative, but are regulative of an experience which they also help to
make possible.[1671] They express the standards in whose light we
condemn all knowledge which does not fulfil them; and we have
consequently no option save to endeavour to conform to their demands. In
other words, they are not derivative concepts obtained by merely
omitting the restrictions essential to our empirical consciousness, but
represent a presupposition necessarily involved in all consciousness.
Some such restatement of the argument is demanded by the position which
Kant has himself outlined in A 645 = B 673 and in A 650 ff. = B 678 ff.
Unfortunately he does not return to it. The more sceptical view which he
has meantime been developing remains dominant. The deduction is left in
this semi-Critical form.
A 672-6 = B 700-4 give a fuller statement of the “_als ob_” doctrine. In
psychology we must proceed _as if_ the mind were a simple substance
endowed with personal identity[1672] (in this life at least), not in
order to derive explanation of its changing states from the soul so
conceived, but to derive them from each other in accordance with the
Idea. In cosmology and theology (we may observe the straits to which
Kant is reduced in his attempt to distinguish them) we ought to consider
all phenomena both in their series and in their totality _as if_ they
were due to a highest and all-sufficient unitary ground. In so doing we
shall not derive the order and system in the world from the object of
the Idea, but only extract from the Idea the rule whereby the
understanding attains the greatest possible satisfaction in the
connecting of natural causes and effects.
In A 676-7 = B 704-5 Kant resorts to still another distinction--between
_suppositio relativa_ and _suppositio absoluta_. This distinction is
suggested by the semi-objectivity of principles that are merely
regulative. Though we have to recognise them as necessary, such
necessity does not justify the assertion of their independent validity.
When we admit a supreme ground as the source of the order and system
which the principles demand, we do so only in order to think the
universality of the principles with greater definiteness. Such
supposition is relative to the needs of Reason in its _empirical_
employment: not absolute, as pointing to the existence of such a being
in itself.
“This explains why, in relation to what is given to the senses as
existing, we require the Idea of a primordial Being necessary in
itself, and yet can never form the slightest concept of it or of
its absolute necessity.”[1673]
This last statement leads to the further problem to which Kant here
gives his final solution, how if, as has been shown in the _Dialectic_,
the concepts of absolute necessity and of unconditionedness are without
meaning, the Ideas of Reason can be entertained at all, even mentally.
What is their actual content and how is it possible to conceive them?
Kant’s reply is developed in terms of the semi-Critical subjectivist
point of view which dominates this section. The Ideas are mere Ideas.
They yield not the slightest concept either of the internal possibility
or of the necessity of any object corresponding to them. They only seem
to do so, owing to a transcendental illusion. On examination we find
that the concepts which we employ in thinking them as independently
real, are one and all derived from experience. That is to say, we judge
of them after the analogy of reality, substance, causality, and
necessity in the sensible world.[1674]
”[They are consequently] _analoga_ only of real things, not real
things in themselves. We remove from the object of the Idea the
conditions which limit the concept of the understanding, but which
at the same time alone make it possible for us to have a
determinate concept of anything. What we then think is, therefore,
a something of which, as it is in itself, we have no concept
whatsoever, but which we none the less represent to ourselves as
standing in a relation to the sum-total of appearances analogous to
that in which appearances stand to one another.”[1675]
They do not carry our knowledge beyond the objects of possible
experience, but only extend the empirical unity of experience. They are
the schemata of regulative principles. In them Reason is concerned with
nothing but its own inherent demands; and as their unity is the unity of
a system which is to be sought only in experience,[1676] qualities
derived from the sensible world can quite legitimately be employed in
their specific determination. They are not inherently dialectical; their
demands have the rationality which we have a right to expect in the
Ideals of Reason. When Critically examined, they propound no problem
which Reason is not in itself entirely competent to solve.[1677] It is
to their misemployment that transcendental illusion is due. In the form
in which they arise from the natural disposition of our Reason they are
good and serviceable.[1678]
To the question what is the most adequate form in which the regulative
schema can be represented,[1679] Kant gives an answer which shows how
very far he is from regarding the Leibnizian _Ens realissimum_ as the
true expression of the Ideal of Reason. It is through the employment of
teleological concepts that we can best attain the highest possible form
of systematic unity.
“The highest formal unity ... is the _purposive_ unity of things.
The _speculative_ [_i.e._ theoretical] interest of Reason makes it
necessary to regard all order in the world _as if_ it had
originated in the purpose of a Supreme Reason. Such a principle
opens out to our Reason, as applied in the field of experience,
altogether new views as to how the things of the world may be
connected according to teleological laws, and so enables it to
arrive at their greatest systematic unity. The assumption of a
Supreme Intelligence, as the one and only cause of the universe,
though in the Idea alone, can therefore always benefit Reason and
can never injure it.”[1680]
For so long as this assumption is employed only as a regulative
principle, even error cannot be really harmful. The worst that can
happen is that where we expected a teleological connection, a merely
mechanical or physical one is met with. If, on the other hand, we leave
the solid ground of experience, and use the assumption to explain what
we are unable to account for in empirical terms, we sacrifice all real
insight, and confound Reason by transforming a concept, which is
anthropomorphically determined for the purposes of empirical
orientation, into a means of explaining order as non-natural and as
imposed from without on the material basis of things.
This is a point of sufficient importance to call for more detailed
statement. Hume in his _Dialogues_ points out that the main defect in
the teleological proof of God’s existence is its assumption that order
and design are foreign to the inherent constitution of things, and must
be of non-natural origin. The argument is therefore weakened by every
advance in the natural sciences. It also runs directly counter to the
very phenomena, those of animal life, upon which it is chiefly based,
since the main characteristic of the organic in its distinction from the
inorganic is its inner wealth of productive and reproductive powers.
With these criticisms Kant is in entire agreement. From them, in the
passage before us, he derives an argument in support of a strictly
regulative interpretation of his “_als ob_” doctrine. The avowed
intention of the teleological argument is to prove _from nature_ the
existence of an intelligent supreme cause. If therefore its standpoint
be held to with more consistency than its own defenders have hitherto
shown, it will be found to rest upon the regulative principle, that we
must study nature as if an _inherent_ order were _native_ to it, and so
seek to approach by degrees, in proportion as such _natural unity_ is
empirically discovered, the absolute perfection which inspires our
researches. But if we transform our Ideal into an instrument of
explanation, beginning with what ought properly to be only our goal, we
delude ourselves with the belief that what can only be acquired through
the slow and tentative labours of empirical enquiry is already in our
possession.
“If I begin with a supreme purposive Being as the ground of all
things, the unity of nature is really surrendered, as being quite
foreign and accidental to the nature of things, and as not to be
known from its own general laws. There thus arises a vicious
circle: we are assuming just that very point which is mainly in
dispute.”[1681]
Such a method of argument is self-destructive, since if we do not find
order and perfection in the nature of things, and _therefore in their
general and necessary laws_, we are not in a position to infer such a
Being as the source of all causality.
To the question whether we may not interpret natural order, once it has
been discovered by empirical investigation, as due to the divine will,
Kant replies that such procedure is allowable only on the condition that
it is the same to us whether we say that God has wisely willed it or
that nature has wisely arranged it. We may admit the Idea of a Supreme
Being only in so far as it is required by Reason as the regulative
principle of all investigation of _nature_;
“...and we cannot, therefore, without contradicting ourselves,
ignore the general laws of nature in view of which the Idea was
adopted, and look upon the purposiveness of nature as contingent
and hyper-physical in its origin. For we were not justified in
assuming above nature a Being of those qualities, but only in
adopting the Idea of it in order to be able to view the
appearances, according to the analogy of a causal determination, as
systematically connected with one another.”[1682] “Thus pure
Reason, which at first seemed to promise nothing less than the
extension of knowledge beyond all limits of experience, contains,
if properly understood, nothing but regulative
principles....”[1683]
CONCLUDING COMMENT ON THE DIALECTIC
I may now summarise Kant’s answer to the three main questions of the
_Dialectic_: (1) Whether, or in what degree, the so-called Ideas of
Reason are concepts due to a faculty altogether distinct from the
understanding, and how far, as thus originating in pure Reason, they
allow of definition; (2) how far they are capable of a transcendental
deduction; (3) what kind of objective validity this deduction proves
them to possess.
These questions are closely interconnected; the solution of any one
determines the kind of solution to be given to all three. Kant, as we
have found, develops his final position through a series of very subtle
distinctions by which he contrives to justify and retain, though in a
highly modified form, the more crudely stated divisions between Ideas
and categories, between Reason and understanding, upon which the initial
argument of the _Dialectic_ is based.
The answer amounts in essentials to the conclusion that understanding,
in directing itself by means of Ideals, exercises a function so distinct
from that whereby it conditions concrete and specific experience, that
it may well receive a separate title; that the Ideas in terms of which
it constructs these Ideals, though schematic (_i.e._ sensuous and
empirical in content), are not themselves empirical, and so far from
being merely extended concepts of understanding, express transcendental
conditions upon which all use of the understanding rests.
Now if this position is to be justified, Kant ought to show that the
fundamental Idea of Reason, that of the unconditioned, is altogether
distinct from any concept of the understanding, and in particular that
it must not be identified with the category of totality, nor be viewed
as being merely the concept of conditioned existence with its various
empirical limitations thought away. Needless to say, Kant does not
fulfil these requirements in any consistent manner. The _Critique_
contains the material for a variety of different solutions; it does not
definitively commit itself to any one of them.
If the argument of A 650 ff. = B 678 ff. were developed we should be in
possession of what may be called the Idealist solution. It would proceed
somewhat as follows. Consciousness as such is always the awareness of a
whole which precedes and conditions its parts. Such consciousness cannot
be accounted for on the assumption that we are first conscious of the
conditioned, and then proceed to remove limitations and to form for
ourselves, by means of the more positive factors involved in this
antecedent consciousness, an Idea of the totality within which the given
falls. The Idea of the unconditioned, distinct from all concepts of
understanding, is one of the _a priori_ conditions of possible
experience, and is capable of a transcendental deduction of equal
validity with, and of the same general nature as, that of the
categories. It is presupposed in the possibility of our contingently
given experience.
As this Idea conditions all subordinate concepts, it cannot be defined
in terms of them. That does not, however, deprive it of all meaning; its
significance is of a unique kind; it finds expression in those Ideals
which, while guiding the mind in the construction of experience, also
serve as the criteria through which experience is condemned as only
phenomenal.
But this, as we have found, is not a line of argument which Kant has
developed in any detail. The passages which point to it occur chiefly in
the introductory portions of the _Dialectic_; in its later sections they
are both brief and scanty. When he sets himself, as in the chapter on
the _Ideal of Pure Reason_ and in the subsequent _Appendix_, to define
his conclusions, it is a much more empirical, and indeed sceptical, line
that he almost invariably follows. There are, he then declares, strictly
no pure, _a priori_ Ideas. The supposed Ideas of unconditionedness and
of absolute necessity are discovered on examination to be without the
least significance for the mind. The Ideas, properly defined, are merely
schemata of regulative principles, and their whole content reduces
without remainder to such categories as totality, substance, causality,
necessity, transcendently applied. As _Ideas_, they are then without
real meaning; but they can be employed by analogy to define an Ideal
which serves an indispensable function in the extension of experience.
From this point of view, the transcendental deduction of the Ideas is
radically distinct from that of the categories. The proof is not that
they are necessary for the possibility of experience, but only that they
are required for its perfect, or at least more complete, development.
And as Kant is unable to prove that such completion is really possible,
the objective validity of the Ideas is left open to question. They
should be taken only as heuristic principles; the extent of their truth,
even in the empirical realm, cannot be determined by the _a priori_
method that is alone proper to a _Critique of Pure Reason_.
The first view is inspired by the fundamental teaching of the
_Analytic_, and is the only view which will justify Kant in retaining
his distinction between appearance and things in themselves. All that is
positive in the second view can be combined with the first view; but, on
the other hand, the negative implications of the second view are at
variance with its own positive teaching. For when the Ideas are regarded
as empirical in origin no less than in function, their entire authority
is derived from experience, and cannot be regarded as being
transcendental in any valid sense of that term. In alternating between
these two interpretations of the function of Reason, Kant is wavering
between the Idealist and the merely sceptical view of the scope and
powers of pure thought. On the Idealist interpretation Reason is a
metaphysical faculty, revealing to us the phenomenal character of
experience, and outlining possibilities such as may perhaps be
established on moral grounds. From the sceptical standpoint, on the
other hand, Reason gives expression to what may be only our subjective
preference for unity and system in the ordering of experience. According
to the one, the criteria of truth and reality are bound up with the
Ideas; according to the other, sense-experience is the standard by which
the validity even of the Ideas must ultimately be judged. From the fact
that Kant should have continued sympathetically to develop two such
opposite standpoints, we would seem to be justified in concluding that
he discerned, or at least desiderated, some more complete reconciliation
of their teaching than he has himself thus far been able to achieve, and
that no solution which would either subordinate the Ideal demands of
thought, or ignore the gifts of experience, could ever have been
definitively accepted by him as satisfactorily meeting the issues at
stake. The Idealist solution is that to which his teaching as a whole
most decisively points; but he is as conscious of the difficulties which
lie in its path as he is personally convinced of its ultimate truth. His
continuing appreciation of the value of sceptical teaching is a tacit
admission that the Idealist doctrines, in the form which he has so far
been able to give to them, are not really adequate to the complexity of
the problems. As further confirmation of the tentative character of
Kant’s conclusions in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, we have his own
later writings. In the _Critique of Judgment_, published nine years
later, in teaching less sceptical and more constructive, though still
delicately balanced between the competing possibilities, and always,
therefore, leaving the final decision to moral considerations, Kant
ventures upon a restatement of the problems of the _Dialectic_. To this
restatement both of the above tendencies contribute valuable elements.
APPENDIX A[1684]
TRANSCENDENTAL DOCTRINE OF METHODS
CHAPTER I
THE DISCIPLINE[1685] OF PURE REASON
Kant is neither an intellectualist nor an anti-intellectualist. Reason,
the proper duty of which is to prescribe a discipline to all other
endeavours, itself requires discipline; and when it is employed in the
metaphysical sphere, independently of experience, it demands not merely
the correction of single errors, but the eradication of their causes
through “a separate negative code,” such as a Critical philosophy can
alone supply. In the _Transcendental Doctrine of Elements_ this demand
has been met as regards the _materials_ or _contents_ of the Critical
system; we are now concerned only with its _methods_ or _formal
conditions_.[1686]
This distinction is highly artificial. As already indicated, it is
determined by the requirements of Kant’s architectonic. The entire
teaching of the _Methodology_ has already been more or less exhaustively
expounded in the earlier divisions of the _Critique_.
SECTION I
THE DISCIPLINE OF PURE REASON IN ITS DOGMATIC EMPLOYMENT
In dealing with the distinction between mathematical and philosophical
knowledge, Kant is here returning to one of the main points of his
_Introduction_ to the _Critique_.[1687] His most exhaustive treatment of
it is, however, to be found in a treatise which he wrote as early as
1764, his _Enquiry into the Clearness of the Principles of Natural
Theology and Morals_. The continued influence of the teaching of that
early work is obvious throughout this section, and largely accounts for
the form in which certain of its tenets are propounded.
“...one can say with Bishop Warburton that nothing has been more
injurious to philosophy than mathematics, that is, than the
imitation of its method in a sphere where it is impossible of
application....”[1688]
So far from being identical in general nature, mathematics and
philosophy are, Kant declares, fundamentally opposed in all essential
features. For it is in their methods, and not merely in their
subject-matter, that the essential difference between them is to be
found.[1689] Philosophical knowledge can be acquired only through
_concepts_, mathematical knowledge is gained through the _construction_
of concepts.[1690] The one is discursive merely; the other is intuitive.
Philosophy can consider the particular only in the general; mathematics
studies the general in the particular.[1691] Philosophical concepts,
such as those of substance and causality, are, indeed, capable of
application in transcendental synthesis, but in this employment they
yield only empirical knowledge of the sensuously given; and from
empirical concepts the universal and necessary judgments required for
the possibility of metaphysical science can never be obtained.
The exactness of mathematics depends on definitions, axioms, and
demonstrations, none of which are obtainable in philosophy. To take each
in order.
I. =Definitions.=--To define in the manner prescribed by mathematics is to
represent the _complete_ concept of a thing. This is never possible in
regard to empirical concepts. We are more certain of their denotation
than of their connotation; and though they may be _explained_, they
cannot be defined. Since new observations add or remove predicates, an
empirical concept is always liable to modification.
“What useful purpose could be served by defining an empirical
concept, such, for instance, as that of water? When we speak of
water and its properties, we do not stop short at what is thought
in the word water, but proceed to experiments. The word, with the
few marks which are attached to it, is more properly to be regarded
as merely a designation than as a conception. The so-called
definition is nothing more than a determining of the word.”[1692]
Exact definition is equally impossible in regard to _a priori_ forms,
such as time or causality. Since they are not framed by the mind, but
are _given_ to it, the completeness of our analysis of them can never be
guaranteed. Though they are known, they are known only as problems.
“As Augustine has said, ‘I know well what time is, but if any one
asks me, I cannot tell.’”[1693]
Mathematical definitions _make_ concepts; philosophical definitions only
explain them.[1694] Philosophy cannot, therefore, imitate mathematics by
beginning with definitions. In philosophy the incomplete exposition must
precede the complete; definitions are the final outcome of our enquiry,
and not as in mathematics the only possible beginning of its proofs.
Indeed, the mathematical concept may be said to be given by the very
process in which it is constructively defined; and, as thus originating
in the process of definition, it can never be erroneous.[1695]
Philosophy, on the other hand, swarms with faulty definitions, which are
none the less serviceable.
“In mathematics definition belongs _ad esse_, in philosophy _ad
melius esse_. It is desirable to attain it, but often very
difficult. Jurists are still without a definition of their concept
of Right.”[1696]
II. =Axioms.=--This paragraph is extremely misleading as a statement of
Kant’s view regarding the nature of geometrical axioms. In stating that
they are self-evident,[1697] he does not really mean to assert what that
phrase usually involves, namely, absolute _a priori_ validity. For Kant
the geometrical axioms are merely descriptions of certain _de facto_
properties of the given intuition of space. They have the merely
hypothetical validity of all propositions that refer to the
contingently given. For even as a pure intuition, space belongs to the
realm of the merely factual.[1698] This un-Critical opposition of the
self-evidence of geometrical axioms to the synthetic character of such
“philosophical” truths as the principle of causality is bound up with
Kant’s unreasoned conviction that space in order to be space at all,
must be Euclidean.[1699] Kant’s reference in this paragraph to the
propositions of arithmetic is equally open to criticism. For though he
is more consistent in recognising their synthetic character, he still
speaks as if they could be described as self-evident, _i.e._ as
immediately certain. The cause of this inconsistency is, of course, to
be found in his intuitional theory of mathematical science. Mathematical
propositions are obtained through intuition; those of philosophy call
for an elaborate and difficult process of transcendental deduction. When
modern mathematical theory rejects this intuitional view, it is really
extending to mathematical concepts Kant’s own interpretation of the
function of the categories. Concepts condition the _possibility_ of
intuitional experience, and find in this conditioning power the ground
of their objective validity.[1700] Here, as in the _Aesthetic_,[1701]
Kant fails adequately to distinguish between the problems of pure and
applied mathematics.
=III. Demonstrations.=--Kant again introduces his very unsatisfactory
doctrine of the construction of concepts:[1702] and he even goes so far
as to maintain, in complete violation of his own doctrine of
transcendental deduction, that where there is no intuition, there can be
no demonstration. Apodictic propositions, he declares, are either
_dogmata_ or _mathemata_; and the former are beyond the competence of
the human mind. But no sooner has he made these statements than he
virtually withdraws them by adding that, though apodictic propositions
cannot be established directly from concepts, they can be indirectly
proved by reference to something purely contingent, namely, possible
experience. Thus the principle of causality can be apodictically proved
as a condition of possible experience. Though it may not be called a
_dogma_, it can be entitled a _principle_! In explanation of this
distinction, which betrays a lingering regard for the self-evident
maxims of rationalistic teaching, Kant adds that the principle of
causality, though a principle, has itself to be proved.
“...it has the peculiarity that it first makes possible its own
ground of proof, namely, experience....”[1703]
This, as we have noted,[1704] is exactly what mathematical axioms must
also be able to do, if they are to establish their objective validity.
SECTION II
THE DISCIPLINE OF PURE REASON IN ITS POLEMICAL EMPLOYMENT
This section contains an admirable defence of the value of scepticism.
“Even poisons have their use. They serve to counteract other
poisons generated in our system, and must have a place in every
complete pharmacopeia. The objections against the persuasions and
complacency of our purely speculative Reason arise from the very
nature of Reason itself, and must therefore have their own good use
and purpose, which ought not to be disdained. Why has Providence
placed many things which are closely bound up with our highest
interests so far beyond our reach, that we are only permitted to
apprehend them in a manner lacking in clearness and subject to
doubt, in such fashion that our enquiring gaze is more excited than
satisfied? It is at least doubtful whether it serves any useful
purpose, and whether it is not, indeed, perhaps even harmful to
venture upon bold interpretations of such uncertain appearances.
But there can be no manner of doubt that it is always best to grant
Reason complete liberty, both of enquiry and of criticism, so that
it may be without hindrance in attending to its own proper
interests. These interests are no less furthered by the limitation
than by the extension of its speculations; and they will always
suffer when outside influences intervene to divert it from its
natural path, and to constrain it by what is irrelevant to its own
proper ends.”[1705] “Whenever I hear that a writer of real ability
has demonstrated away the freedom of the human will, the hope of a
future life, and the existence of God, I am eager to read the book,
for I expect him by his talents to increase my insight into these
matters.”[1706]
SECTION IV[1707]
THE DISCIPLINE OF PURE REASON IN REGARD TO ITS PROOFS[1708]
This section merely restates the general nature and requirements of
transcendental proof. The exposition is much less satisfactory than that
already given in the _Analytic_ and _Dialectic_. The only really new
factor is the distinction between apagogical and direct proof. The
former may produce conviction, but cannot enable us to comprehend the
grounds of the truth of our conviction. Also, outside mathematics, it is
extremely dangerous to attempt to establish a thesis by showing its
contradictory to be impossible.[1709] This is especially true in the
sphere of our Critical enquiries, since the chief danger to be guarded
against is the confounding of the subjectively necessary with the
independently real. In this field of investigation it is never
permissible to attempt to justify a synthetic proposition by refuting
its opposite. Such seeming proofs can easily be secured, and have been
the favourite weapons of dogmatic thinkers.
“Each must defend his position directly, by a legitimate proof that
carries with it transcendental deduction of the grounds upon which
it is itself made to rest. Only when this has been done, are we in
a position to decide how far its claims allow of rational
justification. If an opponent relies on subjective grounds, it is
an easy matter to refute him. The dogmatist cannot, however, profit
by this advantage. His own judgments are, as a rule, no less
dependent upon subjective influences; and he can himself in turn be
similarly cornered. But if both parties proceed by the direct
method, _either_ they will soon discover the difficulty, nay, the
impossibility, of showing reason for their assertions, and will be
left with no resort save to appeal to some form of prescriptive
authority; _or_ the _Critique_ will the more easily discover the
illusion to which their dogmatic procedure is due; and pure Reason
will be compelled to relinquish its exaggerated pretensions in the
realm of speculation, and to withdraw within the limits of its
proper territory--that of practical principles.”[1710]
CHAPTER II
THE CANON[1711] OF PURE REASON
SECTION I
THE ULTIMATE END OF THE PURE USE OF OUR REASON[1712]
The problems of the existence of God, the freedom of the will, and the
immortality of the soul have, Kant declares, little _theoretical_
interest. For, as he has already argued, even if we were justified in
postulating God, freedom, and immortality, they would not enable us to
account for the phenomena of sense-experience, the only objects of
possible knowledge. But the three problems are also connected with our
_practical_ interests, and in that reference they constitute the chief
subject of metaphysical enquiry.[1713] The practical is whatever is
possible through freedom; and the decision as to _what we ought to do_
is the supreme interest of pure Reason in its highest employment.
“...the ultimate intention of Nature in her wise provision for us
has indeed, in the constitution of our Reason, been directed to our
moral interests alone.”[1714]
This is the position which Kant endeavours to establish in his
_Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals_, and in the _Critique of
Practical Reason_. The very brief outline which he here gives of his
argument is necessarily incomplete; and is in consequence somewhat
misleading. He first disposes of the problem of freedom; and does so in
a manner which shows that he had not, when this section was composed,
developed his Critical views on the nature of moral freedom. He is for
the present content to draw a quite un-Critical distinction between
transcendental and practical freedom.[1715] The latter belongs to the
will in so far as it is determined by Reason alone, independently of
sensuous impulses. Reason prescribes objective _laws of freedom_, and
the will under the influence of these laws overcomes the affections of
sense. Such practical freedom can, Kant asserts, be proved by experience
to be a natural cause. Transcendental freedom,[1716] on the other hand,
_i.e._ the power of making a new beginning in the series of phenomena,
is a problem which can never be empirically solved. It is a purely
speculative question with which Reason in its practical employment is
not in the least concerned. The canon of pure Reason has therefore to
deal only with the two remaining problems, God and immortality. Comment
upon these assertions can best be made in connection with the argument
of the next section.[1717]
SECTION II
THE IDEAL OF THE HIGHEST GOOD, AS A DETERMINING GROUND OF THE ULTIMATE
END OF PURE REASON[1718]
Reason in its speculative employment transcends experience, but solely
for the sake of experience. In other words, speculative Reason has a
purely empirical function. (This is the explanation of the somewhat
paradoxical contention, to which Kant has already committed himself,
that the problems of God and immortality, _though seemingly speculative
in character_, really originate in our practical interests.) But pure
Reason has also a practical use; and it is in this latter employment
that it first discloses the genuinely metaphysical character of its
present constitution and ultimate aims. The moral consciousness, in
revealing to us an Ideal of absolute value, places in our hands the only
available key to the mysteries of existence. As this moral consciousness
represents the deepest reality of human life, it may be expected to have
greater metaphysical significance than anything else in human
experience; and since the ends which it reveals also present themselves
as _absolute_ in value, and are indeed the only absolute values of which
we can form any conception, this conclusion would seem to be confirmed.
Happiness has natural value; morality, _i.e._ the being worthy to be
happy, has absolute value. The means of attaining the former obtain
expression in prudential or pragmatic laws that are empirically
grounded. The conditions of the latter are embodied in a categorical
imperative of an _a priori_ character. The former _advise_ us how best
to satisfy our natural desire for happiness; the latter _dictates_ to us
how we must behave in order to deserve happiness.
Kant’s further argument is too condensed to be really clear, and if
adequately discussed would carry us quite beyond the legitimate limits
of this _Commentary_. I shall therefore confine myself to a brief and
free restatement of his general position. The Critical teaching can be
described as resulting in a new interpretation of the function of
philosophy.[1719] The task of the philosopher, properly viewed, does not
consist in the solution of _speculative_ problems; such problems
transcend our human powers. All that philosophy can reasonably attempt
is to analyse and define the situations, cognitive and practical, in
which, owing to the specific conditions of human existence, we find
ourselves to be placed. Upon analysis of the cognitive situation Kant
discovers that while all possibilities are open, the theoretical data
are never such as to justify ontological assertions.[1720] When,
however, he passes to the practical situation, wider horizons,
definitely outlined, at once present themselves. The moral consciousness
is the key to the meaning of the entire universe as well as of human
life. Its values are the sole ultimate values, and enable us to
interpret in _moral_ terms (even though we cannot comprehend in any
genuinely _theoretical_ fashion) the meaning of the dispensation under
which we live. The moral consciousness, like sense-experience, discloses
upon examination a systematic unity of presupposed conditions. In the
theoretical sphere this unity cannot be proved to be more than a
postulated Ideal of _empirical_ experience; and it is an Ideal which,
even if granted to have absolute validity, is too indefinite to enable
us to assert that ultimate reality is spiritual in character, or is
teleologically ordered. The underlying conditions, on the other hand, of
practical experience have from the start a purely noumenal reference.
They have no other function than to define, in terms of the moral
consciousness, the ultimate meaning of reality as a whole. They
postulate[1721] a universe in which the values of spiritual experience
are supported and conserved.
But the main difference in Kant’s treatment of the two situations,
cognitive and practical, only emerges into view when we recognise the
differing modes in which the transcendental method of proof is applied
in the two cases. The _a priori_ forms of sensibility, understanding,
and Reason are proved by reference to possible experience, as being its
indispensable conditions. In moral matters, however, we must not appeal
to experience. The actual is no test of the Ideal; “what is” is no test
of what ought to be. And secondly, the moral law, if valid at all, must
apply not merely within the limits of experience, but with absolute
universality to all rational beings. The moral law, therefore, can
neither be given us in experience, nor be proved as one of the
conditions necessary to its possibility. Its validity, in other words,
can be established neither through experience nor through theoretical
reason.