Kant's Philosophical Revolution: A Short Guide to the Critique of Pure Reason - Hardcover

Yovel, Yirmiyahu

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691180520 ISBN 13: 9780691180526

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2018

Synopsis

A short, clear, and authoritative guide to one of the most important and difficult works of modern philosophy

Perhaps the most influential work of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is also one of the hardest to read, since it brims with complex arguments, difficult ideas, and tortuous sentences. A philosophical revolutionary, Kant had to invent a language to express his new ideas, and he wrote quickly. It's little wonder that the Critique was misunderstood from the start, or that Kant was compelled to revise it in a second edition, or that it still presents great challenges to the reader. In this short, accessible book, eminent philosopher and Kant expert Yirmiyahu Yovel helps readers find their way through the web of Kant's classic by providing a clear and authoritative summary of the entire work. The distillation of decades of studying and teaching Kant, Yovel's "systematic explication" untangles the ideas and arguments of the Critique in the order in which Kant presents them. This guide provides helpful explanations of difficult issues such as the difference between general and transcendental logic, the variants of Transcendental Deduction, and the constitutive role of the "I think." Yovel underscores the central importance of Kant's insistence on the finitude of reason and succinctly describes how the Critique's key ideas are related to Kant's other writings. The result is an invaluable guide for philosophers and students.

About this title

About the Author

Yirmiyahu Yovel (1935–2018) was professor emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books include Kant and the Philosophy of History and Spinoza and Other Heretics (both Princeton).

From the Back Cover

"Very few short introductions to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason are this clear and well informed, and very few Kant scholars can compete with Yovel's broad knowledge of the philosopher. This book is distinguished from other introductions and greatly enriched by the way it highlights important connections between the Critique and Kant's other writings. Offering helpful explanations of some of Kant's most baffling doctrines, Yovel's book will serve as a useful guide for those reading Kant's text for the first (or second or third) time."--Sally S. Sedgwick, University of Illinois at Chicago

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Kant's Philosophical Revolution

A Short Guide to the Critique of Pure Reason

By Yirmiyahu Yovel

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Yirmiyahu Yovel
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-18052-6

Contents

Preface, ix, 
PART 1 PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS: RETHINKING THE OBJECT, 1, 
The Foundations of the Sciences, 3, 
The Critique as Self-Consciousness and as an Act of Autonomy, 4, 
Finite Rational Beings, 7, 
No Intellectual Intuition, 7, 
Skepticism and Dogmatism, 10, 
The Interests of Reason and Its History, 15, 
PART 2 FOLLOWING KANT'S ARGUMENT, 21, 
The Introduction, 21, 
On the Structure of the Book, 28, 
Space and Time as Forms of Intuition: The Transcendental Aesthetics, 29, 
The Direct ("Metaphysical") Explication, 31, 
The Indirect (Regressive or "Transcendental") Explication, 33, 
The Transcendental Logic: The Categories as the Foundations of Objects, 36, 
Analytic and Dialectic, 37, 
The Analytic of Concepts, 38, 
The Metaphysical Deduction and the Discovery of the Categories: What Are the Facts of Reason?, 39, 
Synthesis as Judgment, 41, 
The Transcendental Deduction: Validating the Categories, 45, 
The Regressive Argument, 47, 
The Conditions of Possibility of Nonscientific Experience, 51, 
The Deduction in Edition A: The Hierarchy of Syntheses, 52, 
The Progressive Argument, 55, 
Schematic Presentation, 62, 
Schematism, 67, 
The Analytic of Transcendental Principles: The "Pure Science of Nature", 70, 
Logical and Empirical Necessity, 78, 
The Object as Phenomenon and the Enigmatic Transcendental X, 79, 
The Refutation of Idealism, 82, 
In What Sense Is the Transcendental Logic Considered a Critical Metaphysics?, 84, 
Phenomena and Noumena, 86, 
The Transcendental Dialectic, 88, 
The Unconditioned as Totality, 88, 
The Ideas of Reason, 89, 
The Immortality of the Soul: The Paralogisms, 91, 
The Antinomies: The World as Totality, 92, 
God's Existence, 95, 
The Regulative Idea, 101, 
Metaphysical Tension and Self-Knowledge, 103, 
Select Bibliography, 105, 
Index, 107, 

CHAPTER 1

PART ONE

Preliminary Observations: Rethinking the Object

KANT MAINTAINS THAT every human advancement, especially in the sciences, originates in a revolution in the mode of thinking, which elevates a certain domain of knowledge to the level of an apodictic science. In the past, this had taken place in mathematics and physics, and now, after many centuries of groping in the dark, the conditions are ripe for a revolution that would signal the royal road also for philosophy.

The core of the philosophical revolution lies in a completely new understanding of the concept of object, or objective being, and its relation to human knowledge. Kant compares the required reversal to the one Copernicus performed in astronomy. Until Copernicus, the earth was seen as fixed in the center and the sun as revolving around it. Copernicus made us see that, on the contrary, the sun stands in the center while the earth revolves around it. Similarly, philosophers since ancient times believed that human knowledge revolves around the object, that is, must fit the structure and features of an object that stands in itself independently from the outset, and does not depend on the process of knowledge. The Kantian revolution abolishes the object's metaphysical independence and makes it dependent on the structure of human knowledge. The structure of the object — meaning the empirical object, the only one we know — is derived a priori (free of sense-experience) from the human understanding (intellect) that connects a multitude of sensible items into a unity; and the modes of this unification are drawn from the primordial unity of the "I think." Kant's bold idea thus says that the understanding, in knowing the world, does not copy the basic patterns of its knowledge from the world, but rather dictates these patterns to the world. Doing so is a condition for the very existence of an empirical world ruled by necessary laws (which alone deserves the title "objective"), and for the existence of real objects and events in it.

This means not that the human understanding creates the world ex nihilo, but that it constitutes a cosmos from chaos. The understanding is a formal, a priori structure that cannot function without the material we acquire from the senses by being passively exposed to them. The senses supply the understanding with a crude element that is not yet a real object but only the material for it; and the understanding, a spontaneous factor, must order and shape this material according to its (the understanding's) own a priori modes of operation.

This implies that objectivity is a status that is constituted rather than immediately given or passively encountered. When the understanding applies its a priori patterns, called "categories," to the sensible material, it creates an objective synthesis between them. It is this objective synthesis that constitutes the empirical entities and states of affairs that deserve being called real or objective. As such, the concepts "object," "objectivity," and "empirical reality" acquire a radically new philosophical interpretation.

At the background of this doctrine stands the recognition that all the contents of our thinking and perception are mental images (called "ideas" by Descartes and Hume, and "representations" [Vorstellungen] by Kant) and never things beyond the mind. Humans have no way of leaping outside the sphere of the mental and hold on to something that lies in itself beyond their representations. Therefore, even such features as permanence and substantiality, and the rest of the necessary relations that build up an objective state of affairs, must be drawn from the mind itself — in its function as intellect.

Few would deny that an objective state of affairs lays down a normative model to which, in order to be true, all our cognitive propositions must correspond while also agreeing among themselves. This is a nominal feature of truth; and the question is how the correspondence is achieved. The prevailing metaphysical realism maintains that objective states of affairs exist in themselves, outside the mind, which must adjust its representations to them; whereas Kant reverses this order in stating it is the mind itself that endows the representations with the unity, the permanence, and the necessary relations by which the objective state of affairs (in short, the object) is constituted.

The Foundations of the Sciences

The question about the object takes in Kant also the form of the question about the foundations of mathematics and the natural sciences: what makes their validity possible? The two issues converge because it is on the scientific level of knowledge that the synthesis of the sensual materials that constitutes an object is carried out. For this reason — and also because of the historical context — the question about the natural sciences and the question about the object are two faces of the same investigation by which Kant sought to create a critical metaphysics. Many English-speaking interpreters, as well as neo-Kantian German scholars, tended to present the issue from the viewpoint of the natural sciences, and thereby reduced Kant's philosophical innovation to epistemology and the validity of science. The present study prefers the standpoint of the object, in order to highlight the Critique's broader philosophical meaning (and role in modern thinking), which concerns the human being's standing in the universe and his or her relation with the world — including the world of action, ethics, and history — and not only the validity of the science we possess.

In this context, two opposed and complementary directions are to be observed. On the one hand, Kant's revolution places the human subject at the metaphysical/philosophical center, as a constitutive and determining factor with respect to the world and within it. On the other hand, human reason, in all its doings, is inexorably dependent on the presence of sensible material — the given of Being — without which the spontaneous activity of reason could not take place, or would be meaningless and void of content. As a result, Kant distinguishes himself from all his predecessors who were philosophers of reason — from Plato to Descartes and from Spinoza to Leibniz and from the thinkers of the pre-Critical enlightenment — and stands in dual opposition to them: first, in ascribing to human reason an extraordinary power within its legitimate domain, and second, in radically shrinking and limiting this domain. Hence, as much as Kant is the modern philosopher of reason in its world-shaping role, he is also the genuine philosopher of reason's finitude and the finitude of the human being.

The Critique as Self-Consciousness and as an Act of Autonomy

This duality already inheres in the Kantian concept of critique, which has an affirmative and a negative side. The Critique is a complex reflective act in which philosophical reason explores and examines itself. Due to his tendency to legal metaphors, Kant assigns the Critique the mission "to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws." The ruling of this court is based upon a descriptive examination of the facts and functions of reason that allows to determine its limits and pass judgment on all its claims, the valid and the invalid. In this respect, the Critique is first of all a mode of philosophical self-consciousness. Kant argues that such self-consciousness must precede and prepare, and also criticize in advance, all claims to know objects. The knowing human subject must first know itself, its mental capabilities and inexorable ontological limitations, before trying to determine anything about the world, what it contains, and what is supposed to lie beyond it.

In calling his Critique "an essay on method" Kant links onto an issue that has been on the philosophical agenda since Bacon and Descartes. Most premodern philosophers (excepting Spinoza) agreed that prior to setting out to know, one must study and determine the nature of knowledge itself and how it is legitimately obtained. Kant widely broadens this approach: in order to know the ways and modes of knowledge one must first know the knowing being, and the spectrum of his or her capabilities — mainly, though not only, the a priori capabilities, those that are not derived from experience. The Critique, says Kant, in performing this task, serves as "propaedeutic" (preparatory essay) to a new, valid metaphysics that would at long last count as a rigorous science rather than mere opinion. However, we should notice that the Critique itself already supplies substantive philosophical contents and not merely a formal method, and can therefore be seen as a philosophical science of self-consciousness and a kind of "metaphysics of metaphysics," as Kant himself once called it.

This new metaphysics that the Critique was to prepare was meant to branch off into two branches, a critical metaphysics of nature (including epistemology and ontology), and a critical metaphysics of moral action (including law, politics, history, and a moral religion). But again, it turns out that the Critique itself offers a substantive theory, not only of self-consciousness but also of the foundations of the natural world. For, according to the "Copernican" principle set by the Critique, the conditions for thinking objects in nature are equally the conditions for these to be objects in nature. Therefore, in knowing the grounds of thinking natural objects we at once know the first grounds of nature itself, that is, we possess what Kant calls "a pure science of nature" (and also, "nature in a formal sense"). Based on these foundations and on sensible materials, we also need an empirical science of nature (such as physics and its derivatives in astronomy, organic chemistry, biology), since it is only by empirical science that we come to know particular objects and specific natural laws, and even to know there is a world. And since empirical science is based on the a priori science, we are able to know in advance, as a conditional proposition, that if there is a natural world and there are natural objects in it, they all necessarily obey certain primary conditions, which the Critique determines and formulates a priori. In this respect, the Critique that exhibits the science of consciousness generates, by the same move, an a priori science of the foundations of nature.

This is the affirmative aspect of the Critique: discovering the legitimate power of the understanding in constituting the formal foundations of nature. Yet the same reason that affirms this power and ascribes it to itself at the same time realizes its boundaries and forbids itself to contravene them. This is its negative role. In Kant's legal metaphor, reason stands trial before its own court: not only does it discover its limits through a cognitive act, it also determines itself, in an act of will, to respect those limits and prevail over the temptation to transgress them, a temptation that Kant sees as inherent in the nature of rationality and therefore as possessing a privileged power, which nevertheless must and can be overcome. This means, in Kantian terms, that the Critique performs an act of autonomy already in the field of knowledge.

Kant's concept of autonomy is usually associated with the areas of action and morality, where it refers to the will that restrains itself according to the laws of its own rational nature (as spelled out in the categorical imperative) and thereby attains self-determination and freedom. A similar pattern exists (latently) in the critique of knowledge: theoretical reason restrains itself — not in an arbitrary and accidental way but "according to the eternal and unchangeable" laws of reason itself (see the quote above, Axii), and thus realizes itself and becomes autonomous. In less doctrinal words, by submitting to the limits of reason, with all the pain and sense of loss this may entail, there lies a constructive liberating force.

Finite Rational Beings

Accordingly, Kant calls the human being "a limited rational being" and also "a finite thinking being." Both adjectives, "rational" and "finite," are equally essential to the definition (and to each other). The human being is not rational in separation from his finitude; rather, his reason is finite and his finitude rational. This intermediation is central to Kant's theory of man. We cannot be rational except through reason's finitude, just as this finitude must be attributed to us as creatures of reason from the outset.

No Intellectual Intuition

A major expression of human finitude is the ontological fact that we have no intellectual intuition nor an intuiting intellect. By intuition Kant understands the perception of particulars, and by intellectual activity he means the thinking of universal concepts and principles. An intuiting intellect (an imaginary construct) would, by thinking a universal concept or principle, know immediately all the particulars that fall within the range of that universal principle, without having to acquire them inductively from external sources, like sense perception. And intellectual intuition is one that observes a single particular and immediately sees in it the full power of the corresponding universal, without the need to go through all other particulars in order to draw the universal from them. These two modes of perception express one and a single capability, by whose negation the human finitude is defined, namely, the power to grasp immediately, without further assistance, the universal factor within a single particular and the totality of particulars within the common universal they share. The activity of such an intellect is creative throughout, devoid of all sensibility and subject to no external influence, yet particularizes itself into specific contents.

Kant does not say there are actually creatures with such superhuman qualities, nor that there is a God who fulfills this ideal; he uses this superhuman image only as a model against which to define our own limitations, the kind of rationality we do not possess. The starting point of the Critique is that humans are not endowed with an intuitive intellect. Our intellect can only think, and our intuition can only perceive particulars. In other words, human intellect is discursive and not intuitive, and human intuition is always sensible and never intellectual. These two, thinking and intuition (more precisely, sensation, which serves intuition as material), are two radically distinct operations that should by no means be confused. Rather, their rigorous separation is the living nerve of the Critique. The intellect's action is spontaneous and flows from itself, whereas sensation is receptive, and passively driven by outside stimuli (just as the British empiricists described it). Thereby the intellect is considered pure and a priori, contrary to sensation, which is empirical and a posteriori. Yet the intellect is merely formal, and depends on sense perception in order to receive the necessary data for the cognition of objects. Therefore, albeit the fundamental heterogeneity between them, our intuition and understanding must work together in order for us to have an objective cognition and an empirical world to be cognized. Here it is worthwhile quoting Kant's own words:

Our cognition arises from two fundamental sources in the mind, the first of which is the reception of representations (the receptivity of impressions), the second the faculty for cognizing an object by means of these representations (spontaneity of concepts); through the former an object is given to us, through the latter it is thought in relation to that representation (as a mere determination of the mind). Intuitions and concepts therefore constitute the elements of all our cognitions, so that neither concepts without intuitions corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition. Both are either pure or empirical. Empirical, if sensation (which presupposes the actual presence of the object) is contained therein; but pure if no sensation is mixed into the representation. (A50/B74)

If we will call the receptivity of our mind to receive representations insofar as it is affected in some way sensibility, then on the contrary the faculty bringing forth representations itself, or the spontaneity of cognitions, is the understanding. It comes along with our nature that intuition can never be other than sensible, i.e. that it contains only the way in which we are affected by objects. The faculty for thinking of objects of sensible intuition, on the contrary, is the understanding. Neither of these properties is to be preferred to the other. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. ... These two faculties or capacities cannot exchange their functions. The understanding is not capable of intuiting anything and the senses are not capable of thinking anything. Only from their unification can cognition arise. But on this account one must not mix up their roles, rather one has great cause to separate them carefully from each other and distinguish them. (A51–52/B75–76)

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691180520
• ISBN 13: 9780691180526
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128