Kant on the Role of Pure Reason (B366ff.)

Concepts of Pure Reason, Platonic Ideas, the Is/Ought Distinction, & Kantian Ideas as Transcendental

The sections that lead up to the paralogisms of pure reason are devoted to exploring the nature of reason itself. In them, Kant distinguishes the role of reason from that of our faculty of understanding. In particular, he discusses the role reason plays in the conception of transcendent and transcendental principles that guide our understanding. In doing so, Kant compares his, pure ideas of reason to the platonic ideas and discusses is/ought distinction.

A few questions emerge from his discussion as leading points of inquiry. For instance, does reason create its own concepts or merely arrange them according to a logical order of priority (i.e. according to which is more foundational)? How does Kant overcome the divide between experience and a priori knowledge that his predecessors took to be impassible? Or in Humean terms, how does he overcome the divide between relations of ideas and matters of fact? Finally, Kant has shown us how the categories of our understanding are transcendental, but are the concepts of reason transcendental, an if so, how?

Contents:

1. Concepts of Pure Reason
2. Cultural Concepts of Pure Reason
3. Platonic Ideas and Concepts of Reason
4. Is/Ought
5. Kant’s Transcendental Ideas

Concepts of Pure Reason

We have been exploring the way our understanding develops concepts on the basis of experience. But does reason itself produce any concepts and if so, what sort of concepts might they be? How might they differ from those the understanding yields to us?

To answer this question, we should begin by recalling that our understanding has certain limits. It is not capable of certifying the truth of synthetic principles. But this means that it is not a faculty that produces them. Notice what Kant writes in B357:

The understanding can, then, never supply any synthetic modes of knowledge derived from concepts; and it is such modes of knowledge that are properly, without qualification, to be entitled “principles.”

Reason, by contrast, is the faculty of principles (B356). Such principles as “There can only be one straight line between two points,” which is not an analytic, but a synthetic proposition, are apprehended by what Kant calls “pure intuition” in B357. Thus, while our intellect does not have intellectual intuition in the positive sense, according to which it might be able to apprehend intelligible objects (see B307), it does, nevertheless, possess the capacity to apprehend the truth of synthetic propositions by pure intuition, something our understanding is incapable of.

Furthermore, such principles as might be considered “purely” rational are those that are, in Kant’s words, “transcendent in relation to all appearances [so that] there can never be any adequate empirical employment of the principle” (B365). Our understanding, by contrast has principles which are entirely immanent. Such principles are those that make experience as such possible-the categories. Our understanding takes such judgments as refer immediately back to our experience as its proper field of operation. Reason, on the other hand, plays the role of developing synthetic principles that transcend any experience that might be sufficient to certify their truth, such as that every effect must have a cause.

Finally, at B362ff. (in Pure Reason as the Seat of Transcendental Illusion part C “The Pure Employment of Reason”) Kant takes up reason as a faculty that not only intuits true synthetic principles as such, but also as one that searches for them. He tells us that the “maxim” (which might be glossed as a “guideline for action” or “operating principle”) of reason is to always seek the condition for any condition; that is, to “wherever practicable” try to reach for a more universal principle or concept to cover a more particular one. In other words, in developing a chain of causes or a chain of being, reason always tries to subsume one condition under another. Suppose we start with the judgment “Caius is mortal.” The next move toward formulating an argument would be to discover a more general principle such as “All men are mortal.” From that point the conclusion may be drawn that “Caius is a man.”

Cultural Concepts of Pure Reason

As mentioned, Kant pictures reason as being led to such propositions by ascending ever higher in its attempt to discover unifying principles for our understanding. To readers of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, his description of reason as drawn by an inner impulse to reach the heights of knowledge (see Avii-vii, for example) may recall the role desire plays in Metaphysics I.1. But in Kant’s development of the theme, its desire for the heights of a unified conception of knowledge can never quite be trusted and must be subject to ongoing critique.

Metaphysics is a completely isolated speculative science of reason, which soars far above the teachings of experience, and in which reason is meant to be its own pupil…in it reason is perpetually being brought to a stand, even when the laws into which it is seeking to have, as it professes, an a priori insight are those that are confirmed by our most common experiences. Ever and again we have to retrace our steps, as not leading us in the direction in which we desire to go.

Bxiv

In doing so, it economizes upon principles, seeking to reduce the principles that make knowledge possible as few as possible [B361, B362]. Kant’s picture of the process that reason undergoes in arriving at the goal of knowledge is sometimes caricaturized as one in which principles are simply read off reality without much further ado. But here, as elsewhere, there is a strong pragmatic streak in Kant’s writing, perhaps due to the blossoming of the scientific method in his time.

Kant’s way of describing reason as compelled to seek unconditioned universal principles, yet restrained by ongoing critique might has also been taken to owe something to the cultural conditions in which the Critique was written. Adorno (in his lectures on the Critique of Pure Reason), for example, has noted a certain bourgeois economizing sensibility that runs through Kant’s writings. The need to restrain desire in its flights of fancy might be taken to exemplify a certain religiously motivated conservatism. The “error” he describes reason as unavoidably falling into when it attempts the heights might remind some of the human condition in the face of original sin:

The perplexity into which it thus falls is not due to any fault of its own. It begins with principles which it has no option save to employ in the course of experience, and which this experience at the same time abundantly justifies it in using…. But by this procedure human reason precipitates itself into darkness and contradictions; and while it may indeed conjecture that these must be in some way due to concealed errors, it is not in a position to detect them.

It might be added “…without the aid of a critique of pure reason” in much the same way the Christian scriptures were said to have revealed to us where our nature leads us astray.

Yet these comparisons, instructive as they may be, should also be weighed against the established norms of the philosophical tradition itself, grounded as it is in Socratic elenchoi: Socrates, after all, economized on principles and threw away any he considered inadmissible (consider the maieutic theme in the Dialogues) and has himself been considered a tragic figure, whose tragedy was brought about by his willingness to follow reason wither it may lead. His passion for the truth, it could be said, inevitably led him to his end. The Critique may be read in many ways as a response to the philosophical tradition and the critique itself is a case in point.

Platonic Ideas and Concepts of Reason

Kant’s description of his concepts of reason has a real similarity to the Platonic ideas in the following sense: both are transcendent, both are accessible to reason, and both are seen as a way to emerge beyond knowledge by experience and acquire an a priori knowledge that is applicable to our experience. Kant puts the matter as follows in B370:

Plato made use of the expression ‘idea‘ in such a way as quite evidently to have meant by it something which not only can never be borrowed from the senses but far surpasses even the concepts of understanding (with which Aristotle occupied himself), inasmuch as in experience nothing is ever to be met with that is coincident with it.

B370

Kant goes so far as to indicate that because Plato recognized that his “ideas” are archetypes of things in themselves, and not merely keys to possible experiences (B370), the dialogues may be read as an anticipation of his own view, where he writes that despite a few inconsistencies, “we understand him better than he has understood himself” (B370).

The main difference lies in the basis for our ability to formulate such ideas. For Plato, the Ideas/Forms are innate in us, having acquired a place in our memory by virtue of our having contact with them in an ideal realm before our birth; for Kant, concepts of reason are a result of reason’s capacity for synthesis as discussed above.

Is/Ought

But the core of Kant’s discussion of the Platonic ideas may be taken to lie in the distinction between “what is” and “what ought” to be the case, or in other words between statements of fact and value claims. Kant writes with emphatic approval of the need to recognize an incommensurability between such statements of fact and statements as part of his discussion of the platonic ideas:

Whoever would derive the concepts of virtue from experience and make (as many have done) what at best can only serve as an example in an imperfect kind of exposition, into a pattern from which to derive knowledge, would make a virtue of something which changes according to time and circumstance, an ambiguous monstrosity not admitting of the formation of any rule.

B370

Interestingly, we have another positive engagement with Hume: if we are interested in determining the best way of acting (in a purely moral sense) there is no set of empirical facts from which we can draw a necessary conclusion about what should be done. The thrust of the argument serves to highlight the problem of finding a basis for arguing about ethical claims; it suggests that any claim to know what we ought to do must be held suspect. It indicates that the truth of statements about what we ought to do should rather be considered a matter of personal or culturally relative belief (or conviction).

Yet, despite his agreement with Hume on the is/ought question, Hume is Kant’s main opponent when it comes to the possibility of finding a ground for knowledge. In fact, he is in full agreement with Plato’s views on the basis for moral reasoning, who attempted to ground the ultimate truth of ethical claims in the separate, ideal Forms. With this tension in mind, we might look for ways in which he manages to agree with Plato while avoiding Humean skepticism.
Let’s establish the point of opposition between Plato and Hume clearly. Both authors recognize an epistemic gap between sensible and the intelligible objects of knowledge. Both recognize that each type of object places limitations on the kind of knowledge we may have of them. For Hume, judgments concerning matters of fact are founded upon the relation of cause of effect (See an Enquiry Concerning Human Reason, IV,1). Since the relation of cause of effect does not yield any results with deductive necessity (where is the line between correlation and causation?) all such judgments fall short of deductive certainty. Those judgments that do admit of deductive certainty on the other hand, cannot be based upon judgments of fact since any demonstrably true conclusion must proceed from an a priori basis and judgments of fact are taken from experience. That all such judgments must be considered to be only contingently true owing to the mutability of material objects is a position both Plato and Hume take regarding our capacity to know them.

Plato, like Hume, furthermore regards mathematical reasoning as having deductive certainty; however, unlike Hume, he admits an even higher set of objects, the purely immaterial Ideas, as the only potential source of true knowledge concerning moral facts or the nature of mutable objects in our sensory experience. This difference makes all the difference for Kant. But it isn’t one that mitigates the importance of Hume’s distinction; rather, it makes it all the more crucial. Incorporating both lines of argument, he writes,

Nothing is more reprehensible than to derive the laws prescribing what ought to be done from what is done, or to impose upon them the limits by which the latter is circumscribed.”

B375

In B373 he writes,

…at the start we are required to abstract from the actually existing hindrances, which, it may be, do not arise unavoidably out of human nature, but rather are due to a quite remediable cause, the neglect of pure ideas in the making of the laws. Nothing, indeed, can be more injurious, or more unworthy of a philosopher, than the vulgar appeal to so-called adverse experience. Such experience would never have existed at all, if at the proper time those institutions had been established in accordance with ideas, and if ideas had not been displaced by crude conceptions which, just because they have been derived from experience, have nullified all good intentions.”

In other words, the is/ought distinction merely reminds us of the need to seek the ideal beyond our current understanding, both in the case of our ethical judgments and those concerning the natural world. The role reason plays, and especially the freedom to conceive underlying its use (B374), is to lift us beyond our current level of understanding to heights that reason alone, in its search for a more well-founded and coherent basis for knowledge, can attain. Without some notion of an archetypal “maximum” (see B373) and the freedom to conceive it, there would be nothing to spark that search.

Kant’s Transcendental Ideas

Turning to our last question, whether Kant’s ideas of reason are transcendental, it is interesting to observe that he makes the a priori the focal point when he discusses transcendental ideas of reason directly (section 2, B378ff.). His strategy might be understood as follows: by emphasizing the tie between the a priori and the transcendental, he will be able to link the universality and logical priority of purely rational ideas to the broader theme of the transcendental in the Critique. In other words, among all the ways in which the transcendental nature of purely rational ideas might be discussed he finds the concept of the a priori a useful way to make the link between the two.

Let’s first see how he makes the a priori a point of emphasis. He writes,

Similarly, we may presume that the form of syllogisms, when applied to the synthetic unity of intuitions under the direction of the categories, will contain, the origin of special a priori concepts, which we may call pure concepts of reason, or transcendental ideas, and which will determine according to principles how understanding is to be employed in dealing with experience in its totality.”

B378

What he has in mind when he refers to “the form of syllogisms” is the need for a covering concept as discussed at the end of the first section above. If we begin with a concept like “Caius” we look for a more universal term that covers all instances of Caius such as “Man.” If the two concepts have a predicate in common such as “Mortal,” then we can conclude that if All men are mortal, and Caius is mortal, then he is a man. The point of the example is not of course, to prove that Caius is a man, but to show how logical priority works: even if we knew nothing at all about Caius except that he is mortal, we could conclude something about him on the basis of pure logic provided we began with a certain kind of concept, what has been referred to as a covering concept. This shows the importance of the a priori: there are things we can know prior to any experience provided that we have a logical basis in syllogistic reasoning, based upon the logical priority of concepts, for doing so.

Now, as the quotation above spells out for us, a pure synthetic a priori concept, one that is logically prior to any others in a deductive chain, may furthermore originate (recall from the first section that reason is the origin of such concepts) from the use of our reason when it brings together “synthetic…intuitions under the direction of the categories” such as mathematical intuitions like the assertion that between any two points there is one and only one shortest distance. Such ideas may be regarded as principles that may be employed in relation to the totality of our experience. But most significantly for our purpose here, as Kant writes in the quotation from B378 given above, such ideas, being pure concepts of reason, are transcendental ideas.

But lastly, this conception of pure ideas of reason as transcendental may seem to conflict with Kant’s own distinction between the transcendent and the transcendental. Kant staked out the boundary between the two in his section on transcendental illusion at B352ff. where he wrote that transcendent judgments are those that go beyond the limits of possible experience (hence there would be no way to confirm the truth of their falsity); transcendental ones, by contrast, are those that are immanent: they do fall within the limits of our possible experience and hence may be tested and shown to be false. In a passage that anticipates Popper’s falsifiability criterion for scientific reasoning Kant writes,

A principle, on the other hand, which takes away these limits, or even commands us actually to transgress them, is called transcendental. If our criticism can succeed in disclosing the illusion in these alleged principles, then those principles which are of merely empirical employment may be called, in opposition to the others, immanent principles of pure understanding.”

B353

But pure synthetic ideas on the other hand, such as the principle of causality, would appear to be card-carrying instances of transcendent, rather than immanent principles. Hence, it would appear that they cannot be considered transcendental.

In fact, they appear to belong to both categories. In B384 Kant runs the two concepts together in the same sentence where he writes, “…they are transcendent and overstep the limits of all experience; no object adequate to the transcendental idea can ever be found within experience.” this need not be regarded as a mistake, however. Let’s ask ourselves whether a concept or judgment can be both transcendent in the sense that it transcends any empirical verfication and transcendental. The sense in which it can appears to be tied to the unitary function that transcendental concepts have in relation to our experience.

Kant writes of his rational ideas in a way that is reminiscent of his notion of a “kingdom of ends” that appears in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (4.433):

The practical idea is, therefore, always in the highest degree fruitful, and in its relation to our actual activities is indispensably necessary. Reason is here, indeed, exercising causality, as actually bringing about that which its concept contains; and of such wisdom we cannot, therefore, say disparagingly, it is only an idea. On the contrary, just because it is the idea of the necessary unity of all possible ends, it must be original, and at least restrictive condition, serve as the standard in all that bears on the practical.”

B385

Our attention should be drawn most of all to the last sentence. Because reason proposes concepts that are able to bring unity to our understanding, we are able to act upon the very way of understanding that reason provides. Put differently, reason provides us with rules that can be used to guide our understanding so that we may make consistent, productive use of it. It also acts to help our understanding come to an understanding of its own judgments (B383). In this way it shows our understanding the way to its unity (ascensus) and to the use of that understanding (descensus).

This sense of the transcendental as unitary in relation to our experience is consistent with Kant’s earlier description of the transcendental nature of the categories, which supply a priori, transcendental content to our judgments about our experience (see B105). As he argues in the Transcendental Deduction (see especially A107) if we begin with the unity of our consciousness as a brute fact of our awareness (as the foundation for personal identity), there must be something that brings about that unity, that makes it possible. That unity would not be possible, Kant argues, unless there were concepts already in us that make the world as we experience it possible. This may be seen where he writes,

The original and transcendental condition [of our experience] is no other than transcendental apperception. Consciousness of self according to the determinations of our state in inner perception is merely empirical, and always changing. No fixed and abiding self can present itself in this flux of inner appearances. Such consciousness is usually named empirical apperception. What has necessarily to be represented as numerically identical cannot be thought as such through empirical data. To render such a transcendental proposition valid, there must be a condition which precedes all experience, and which makes experience itself possible.

A107

What makes experience itself possible is the presence of the categories. They are, according to the accustomed formula, necessary for the possibility of experience, the experience we have of the world, or so Kant argues. The two usages of transcendental are furthermore consistent with respect to the idea that it is the presence of the transcendental in us that makes the unity of our experience possible.