Kant’s treatment of transcendental illusion appears in the opening section of the Transcendental Dialectic (B349ff.). In it, he addresses the way in which reason, when not tethered to the guidance of the senses, takes flights of fancy that lead it into realms of unverifiable speculation. In doing so, the reasoning mind is apt to produce illusions of truth and reality whose very reasonableness is the ground of their deception. The section may be seen as part of Kant’s attempt to critique reason itself, that is, to show its proper limits by revealing where it may fall into error.
Contents:
- Kant’s Dialectical Method of Textual Exposition & His Definition of the Terms “Transcendental” and “Illusion”
- Characterizing Reason and its Relationship to our Understanding
I. Kant’s Dialectical Method of Textual Exposition & His Definition of the Terms “Transcendental” and “Illusion”
The method Kant uses in order to set forth the topics he intends to investigate, is itself instructive. In what follows, an explanation of both transcendental illusion and how he arrives at it will serve to illuminate the pattern that underlies his textual expositions, perhaps rendering them more easily readable.
It may be observed, first of all (and perhaps most significantly), that Kant sets forth his subject by way of defining his terms. The term “transcendental illusion” is in this case his target. The understanding of each of the terms “Transcendental “and “illusion” structures his text. But he approaches his task by way of a procedure that might well conceal his intent from the eyes of attentive readers. He doesn’t simply define his terms straightaway as might be done in a mathematics or logic textbook. Instead, he takes a roundabout, dialectical, explorative approach, leading us toward the meaning he intends for his terms by us what he does not mean before telling us how he does define his terms.
Socratic and Kantian Dialectic
One way of justifying such a procedure might be to say that it is “Socratic” in a pedagogical sense, i.e., that it is meant to provoke questions in the reader’s mind that raise our attentiveness and help us arrive at a better comprehension of what he does and does not intend. He certainly covers all or most of the possible misunderstandings in most cases. In this respect, his method resembles the Socratic one.
It may be recalled that the Socratic dialogues proceed in much the same fashion: by first defeating his opponents’ attempts to define a particular term (such as Justice, Piety, etc.) Socrates is both educating his interlocutor and clear the way for the discussion itself to bring forth what it does mean. To do so is to bring the discussion to the point where the initial topic is susceptible of a “scientific” treatment: one that begins from a set of first principles that may serve to guide and shape the nature of the exposition that follows from them.
Finally, we may notice a certain point of continuity with Aristotle’s treatises, which begin in a similar “Socratic” way by exploring a constellation of unsuccessful logoi that may be attributed to his predecessors, but with this important difference: whereas the Platonic dialogues show us the dialectical process required for arriving at first principles, the Aristotelian treatises eventually show us how to carry out their semantic and ontological implications in a consistent manner.
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant utilizes both procedures. The current section is an example of Kant going through possible misunderstandings of what is meant by the term “transcendental illusion;” meanwhile, the Transcendental Dialectic as a whole has a more Aristotelian-Socratic backbone: Kant wades through the impasses created by the opposing claims made by the rationalists and empiricists before arriving at transcendental solutions to the difficulties they have raised. The Antinomies best exemplify this process.
Semantics and Science
The semantic side of the this dialectical-scientific process is not one that should be immediately passed over. Inasmuch as such processes are scientific, they will involve an attempt to find a consistent meaning for a term that doesn’t conflict with other propositions one would like to accept as true. In an even broader sense, where the questions that are undertaken involve an inquiry into the basic foundational principles of fields like ethics or metaphysics (such as are raised in the Critique), a good answer to Socratic questioning would more or less leave the semantic webs that underlie the world as we recognize it intact, in a way that doesn’t lead to absurdities. Furthermore, a properly situated term, semantically speaking, is one that is adequately differentiated from its semantic neighbors and also capable of identification in its own right. These steps are integral to the Socratic method of sifting truth from falsehood.
But because the aim is not only to arrive at an internally consistent web of concepts, but to arrange them hierarchically (according to the design of arriving at “first principles”), ultimately, the dialectician is attempting to make the scientific side of the inquiry consistent with the semantic one. Perhaps it could be said that we have arrived at a general principle for dialectic-scientific reasoning: in attempting to arrive at a primary deductive principle we must simultaneously involve ourselves in the creation of a semantic web that has the potential to act as a conceptual scheme for a particular cluster of concepts.
Rounding out the picture, this finally brings us to the Wittgensteinian emphasis upon usage as a key to understanding meaning. If someone says “Justice is ‘p,'” “p” might be anything, any answer that appears to fit the question. But what constrains us in finding the “right” meaning is capacity to successfully function with its semantic neighbors so that, in using the term we may be able to “go on” when we are reasoning our way through an activity (such as acting justly). This is essential to the Socratic project of discovering truth. If we find such inconsistencies, we know that we haven’t arrived at our goal.
Kant’s Use of the Via Negativa and the Meaning of “Transcendental Illusion”
Kant carries out this negative-positive procedure in B349-B366. The process may be given in outline form as follows:
In the phrase a “dialectic of illusion,” the sort of illusion Kant intends to reveal as a difficulty for reason, the term “illusion” does not indicate: (a) a logic of probability, nor (b) does it involve the problem of distinguishing appearance from reality. In fact, the type of illusion he is interested in is not empirical at all. Rather, (c) the problem of “illusion” he is concerned with in this section is the problem of transcendental illusion. This is the sense in which he intends to discuss the topic.
(a) and (b) correspond to the initial negative movement of Socratic dialectic; (c) to the initial stage before undertaking of a positive account of what is meant by illusion in this case. In effect, Kant’s dialectical approach has allowed for a way of locating the term/concept/topic he is concerned with within a sematic web of related topics.
The next step is to discuss transcendental illusion as such. He begins with an initial characterization as follows: it “exerts its influence on principles that are in no wise intended for use in experience, in which case we should at least have had a criterion of their correctness.” He goes on to say that it “carries us altogether beyond the empirical employment of categories and puts us off with a merely deceptive extension of pure understanding” (B352). What Kant has in mind is reasoning that carries us into realms not merely beyond our experience, but beyond any possible experience. From a dialectical process that proceeds toward truth under the guidance of coherence and consistency, we may be led to posit a first principle that cannot be verified by the senses. Medieval speculations about the nature of angels come to mind as a possible target here, but the example he gives in B353 provides an instance that fits his description well. It is the proposition, “the world must have a beginning in time.”
One can see in this instance where reason might be tempted to exceed our empirical limitations. If we begin with the senses, we can see that where one thing always follows another, we may begin to look for a cause-effect relationship. It appears, furthermore, that wherever a series of connected events presents itself, the way to truly understand its possibility of continuation or repetition would be by reasoning our way through to the discovery of a cause or series of causes that would reliably account for it. In this case, because understanding is the goal, we are tempted to think that the world (or universe) must have had a beginning in time in order to satisfy the demand for comprehension generated by our understanding.
Immanent vs. Transcendent vs. Transcendental
Our understanding seems to require that where a series of events present themselves, something must have initiated it. But in this case, we are led to a first principle that cannot be grounded in our sense experience. We cannot know that the contrary statement, “the world is eternal” is not actually true and the proposition that it must have had a beginning in time false. For Kant, to suppose that the latter must be true without considering the limitations upon reason pointed out by the Critique is to engage in groundless speculation in order to satisfy the demands of our understanding. He provides the terms immanent and transcendent in order to demarcate the two domains of reason involved: where our reasoning is grounded or can be grounded in our experience it may be called “immanent;” where reason exceeds those bounds, as in the example at hand, it may be considered “transcendent.” When we are led by our reason to suppose principles or causes that transgress the limits of what may be grounded empirically, we fall into transcendental illusion. The transcendental may be distinguished from the transcendent in that, unlike transcendent concepts (of reason) transcendental ones are both immanent and have the categories as the ultimate foundation for their judgments.
The “Two Forces” Diagram
Lastly, Kant provides us with an interesting image that helps distinguish the respective roles of the senses, the understanding, and our capacity for forming judgments. He writes that our faculty of understanding and our sensibility might be thought of as “two forces” with “the erroneous judgment” pictured as “the diagonal” between them, creating an angle. What Kant very likely has in mind is a force-vector diagram such as is used in classical physics that resembles the positive-positive quadrant of a standard diagram for drawing lines according to the Cartesian coordinate system. Two lines at a right angle that may be extended (the vectors) should give the right sort of picture of the diagram he has in mind, with at a diagonal. The vectors represent the forces pulling a judgment in different directions.
Kant writes that whereas pure understanding and the senses cannot be in error (insofar as the senses are taken strictly as reporting a sensation) Our judgment, as a kind of force pulled opposing ways by the other two, is susceptible of error. Kant intends the diagram to show the difference between two uses of the understanding. In one way, in its purest form, our understanding is not susceptible of error (neither by a transcendent extension of reason or by its empirical employment); but in another, it may be susceptible of error either because it is employed in a purely formal sense or because its judgments are grounded not only in the senses but also represent a proper use of the categories.
Although Kant doesn’t do much more with the diagram, it might be useful as a heuristic device in other ways. The diagram might be used to think about reason as an extension of the understanding. We may think of reason as proceeding correctly (to draw out the implications of the graph) when the coordinates mapped out by reason may be related back to some coordinate founded upon the senses, the understanding, or both. Synthetic judgments would fall in the latter group of propositions and such cases would amount to an “immanent” employment of one’s understanding according to Kant’s terminology. A transcendent employment of reason could be pictured as the line represented by reason exceeding the vectors represented by the senses and understanding, where no coordinate originating from either axis could be given. A further application is possible: if the line representing reason is thought of as a diagonal closer to either the senses or understanding, we might think of it as approaching a grounding in “pure” understanding or pure sensory experience and as being less susceptible of error. Each state might be thought of as corresponding to pure logic or to phenomenology respectively.
II. Characterizing Reason and its Relationship to our Understanding
(On Section 2, “Reason in General”)
Kant’s strategy in characterizing reason is to differentiate it from a nearby concept, our understanding. The most salient differentiating features may be given with respect to a primary division, the logical and transcendental employments of reason (this will become clear further on) as follows:
Reason vs. Understanding
- Reason in its logical employment
- Whereas our understanding is a faculty of judgments, reason is a faculty of inference.
- Reason in its transcendental employment
- Whereas our understanding is a faculty of rules, reason is a faculty of principles
- Whereas our understanding operates by applying concepts to the manifold of experience in our imagination (B103), reason goes beyond images (see B364) in developing principles from out of itself.
- The principles reason develops from out of itself are synthetic; and unify concepts; however, our understanding grasps the relationships between concepts after analysis makes them clear and does not operate by going outside the concepts themselves.
Reason in its logical employment deals with its application to logic, for which syllogistic inference in particular is the model. He views the syllogism as a formal paradigm for the structure of an argument. The subject-predicate propositions are the “judgments” with which our understanding is concerned. Reason, on the other hand, is that faculty in us through which we are able to assess the relations between different judgments toward arriving at a conclusion. Kant’s way of saying this is that if the conclusion can be understood as subsumed under the rule given in the major premise, then it can be said that our reason has correctly drawn the conclusion (see B361)
Meanwhile, the transcendental employment of reason is contrasted with our understanding in other ways. It is concerned with a kind of unity that supersedes that of our propositional judgments, inasmuch as it acts to unify them into arguments and, ultimately, to bring unity to our understanding in the broadest sense through more generally unifying rational principles. In order to achieve a unified understanding of our experience, it produces synthetic principles from out of itself that enable our understanding to proceed beyond the mere analysis of concepts. It is only through our reason that we are able to reason synthetically and find a rational basis for applying our faculty of understanding to mathematics and physics.
In what follows, these points will be clarified and their significance will be given greater depth by considering the difference between the way rules and principles function in relation to our other cognitive processes, particularly the formation of concepts, toward a unified way of grasping our experience.
Rules & Concepts: The Functions of Reason and our Faculty of Understanding Contrasted
What, then, does Kant mean when he writes that whereas our understanding is a faculty of rules, our reason is a faculty of principles?
There are two primary usages of the term rule that relate to this context. In one way, a “rule“ is simply a rule for inference such as was already discussed above in the brief discussion on the logical employment of reason; in another way, a “rule” is a guide for the imagination developed by our capacity to schematize General ideas.
Rules & General Ideas
General ideas do not come from immediate sensation any more than they can be represented in concreto. The process begins with sensation and ends with the recognition of commonalities or ways of relating one perception (e.g., of an object) to another (see B80). Once the understanding has been given a sufficient number of instances of an object, it is then able to discover ways to relate one instance to another so as to form a general idea that can be associated with a single representative image according to a schematic rule.
Taking these steps in order, we have:
- The given manifold of pure intuition (e.g. multiple instances of an object or related objects)
- The synthesis of the manifold of our experience by our imagination according to a rule
- The development of a concept adequate to the representational synthesis, ultimately based upon the categories.
Consider what Kant says in the chapter on Schematism in B180:
The concept ‘dog’ signifies a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner, without limitation to any single determinate figure such as experience, or any possible image that I can represent in concreto, actually possesses.”
The concept ‘dog’ signifies a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner, without limitation to any single determinate figure such as experience, or any possible image that I can represent in concreto, actually possesses. Again, in B103 he writes that “Synthesis in general…is the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever.” Our experience of manifold triangular objects might yield any odd representation of a triangular object. We could imagine a Styrofoam triangle or one made of orange carpeting or even a solid gold triangle, for example, as a stand in for our notion of a triangle.
But finally, in an even more fundamental sense, the ultimate basis for the unity, consistency, and adequacy of the rules that shape our general ideas in relation to such representations may be found in the categories themselves. Categorical concepts such as unity, plurality, reality, negation, etc. are the “pure a priori conditions of possible experience” because every concept adequate to our understanding must be based upon them. As Kant writes,
The concepts which thus contain a priori the pure thought involved in every experience, we find in the categories.
Transcendental Deduction A, A96
It is only by means of the analytical, concept-forming work of the understanding that the synthetic work of the imagination can yield knowledge. Our understanding of anything, including our capacity to form concepts, is based upon the categories, the fundamental bases of our understanding of anything. Whatever that may appear in our perception that does not conform to the categories simply cannot be understood. The work of the understanding might be thought of as the analysis of our experience of things as we perceive them, towards an implicit harmony with the categories that may require much effort to discover.
Reason and Universals
Let’s finally bring Kant’s picture of the mechanics of cognition (Knowledge-work comes to mind as more precise an all-encompassing term) together with a fuller consideration of the role that reason plays. As was said, reason is faculty of principles. Reason has the capacity to act as the “source” of principles. An example of such a principle in B356 is “there is only one straight line between two points.” In delivering such principles, our reason
- Does not borrow its principles “either from the senses or from the understanding”
- Are anything other than knowledge based on concepts
It appears that reason is meant to function much like Aristotle’s nous and yet there is an ambiguity that recurs in the Critique just as does in Posterior Analytics II.19. an interpretive dilemma arises in B356-7 whether reason (a) acts as the source for any proposition that can function as a principle, whether they are “fundamental” i.e., pure, a priori principles or merely universal propositions that might serve as the starting point (major premise) of a syllogism or (b) just the highest, most fundamental universal propositions that can serve to unify our understanding of our experience. The term “principle” can have either signification.
What has been said thus far appears to indicate that (b) must be the correct answer. However, as sometimes happens in the Critique, just when the transparency of its waters at one moment is dashed a moment later. The following reading seems to justify a more encompassing view of the function of reason with respect to principles. In B356, Kant writes that such principles as the example above are universal a priori principles. Such principles are not inferred from other principles, but are apprehended only by a pure intuition. But in a looser sense any universal proposition (B357) might be considered a principle inasmuch as it may serve as the potential starting point of a syllogism. Knowledge from principles is, therefore,
that knowledge alone in which I apprehend the particular in the universal through concepts. Thus every syllogism is a mode of deducing knowledge from a principle. For the major premiss always gives a concept through which everything that is subsumed under the concept as under a condition is known from the concept according to a principle.”
Now Kant rather straightforwardly tells us that whereas reason is our faculty of principles, understanding the faculty of concepts. It appears therefore, to be a faculty that delivers to us universal propositions and concepts. As the quotation above indicates, the subsumption of the particular under the universal (whereby a conclusion may be drawn) is accomplished through the grasp of a concept that underwrites the logic of the deduction. The deduction is carried out “according to a principle.”
However, this reading relies upon the assumption that (i) Kant considers reason alone to be the only faculty within us capable of delivering universals up to our understanding and (ii) that the act of pure intuition that coincides with the recognition of such principles would entail that reason cannot be in error in the recognition of them. However promising the case for a broad interpretation might have seemed (siding with a), (i) can certainly be contested. In the text of B356, Kant, in effect defeats the notion where he writes,
Every universal proposition, even one derived from experience, through induction, can serve as major premiss in a syllogism
Clearly, the process whereby universal propositions are delivered up to our understanding for analysis emerge not only from pure intuition, but from experience and indeed from the process described earlier in which an imaginative synthesis of the manifold of our experience works in tandem with the formation of a rule for such a synthesis. Such rules and syntheses are only certifiable as genuinely universal if they can be shown to follow from propositions that truly are-ones that Kant recognizes as universal a priori propositions. As Kant puts it,
The principles arising from the supreme principle of pure reason will, however, be transcendent in relation to all appearances, i.e. there can never be any adequate empirical employment of the principle.
B365
“Reason” then, for Kant has a rather restricted role, but one that is absolutely essential if we are to have any genuine synthetic knowledge. Since Kant is arguing for genuine knowledge primarily against Humean skepticism, it is essential that reason should have such a role. It is, as was said earlier, the only faculty in us whereby we are able to produce synthetic propositions that our understanding can recognize as true and evident in their own right. In the final analysis, the effort to defeat Humean skepticism is rewarded to the extent that Kant’s intuitionistic way of justifying universal a priori truths is in turn justified by his transcendentalism.
2 Responses
[…] of reason bears a resounding 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 […]
[…] Dialectic, Kant shifts from a general discussion of the principles of his inquiry (in Book I) (see Kant on “Transcendental Illusion” & The Proper Function of Reason and Kant on the Role of Pure Reason ) to their application. As will soon become clear, we are now […]