Imagination in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason

Six: Imagination and the Moral Extension of Reason

s i x Imagination and the Moral Extension of Reason How Is It Possible to Think (Denken) of Extending Pure Reason in a Practical Respect Without Thereby Extending Its Knowledge as Speculative? It is clearly possible in a formal-logical sense to think the extension spoken of in the title to this section. Mere non-contradiction is suf¤cient for the thinkability of any proposition (Bxxvin). However, the question concerns possibility in a transcendental-logical sense, i.e., as pertaining a priori to the possibility of experience. Clearly, only propositions including a relation to intuition qualify. The Principles of Pure Reason are the ultimate ones as both a priori and synthetic. Kant gives a somewhat surprising and convoluted answer to the question posed in the title of this section. He claims ¤rst that by asserting the reality of the ideas of reason in order to render them suitable for employment by pure practical reason, “no synthetic proposition is made possible by conceding their reality” (V, 134). Further, he claims that the three ideas “are not in themselves cognitions (sind noch nicht an sich Erkenntnisse),” though they are “transcendent thoughts in which there is nothing impossible” (V, 135, emphasis mine). Practically, it can be shown that they have objects, by virtue of their having been asserted as belonging to the concept of the highest good. However, “this, too, is not yet knowledge of these objects; for one can neither make synthetic judgments about them nor theoretically determine their application” (V, 135, emphasis in original). A way to approach these puzzling claims can be located in the ¤nal paragraphs of this section, where Kant recalls the importance of the “laborious deduction of the categories” in the Critique of Pure Reason . This deduction, in establishing their a priori source in pure understanding but restricting their employment to objects of sensuous intuition (“empirical objects”), introduces that “relation of balance wherein reason in general can be purposefully used” (V, 141, emphasis in original). Our theoretical knowledge is restricted to objects as they appear. By virtue of our extension of the a priori concepts of understanding to the ideas, we may further “have de¤nite thoughts about the supersensuous when applied to an object given by pure practical reason” (V, 141, emphases in original) and so locate the “path of wisdom” (V, 141). Yet one cannot help but note the ambiguity and the consequent tension with which Kant is wrestling in the notion of knowledge (Erkenntnis) and of synthesis. At times he asserts that they belong to the practical realm. At other times he denies their belonging to it. The questions one must raise here are vexing. How, for example, can religion provide knowledge of duties as divine commands when there is no knowledge of God? How can the ideas associated with the highest good not admit of the possibility of synthesis when the highest good is itself said to be the outcome of a synthesis? Perhaps it might be argued that, granting the antecedent presupposition of God’s existence and of the synthesis belonging to the highest good, religion can properly be called a kind of knowledge and properly claim that the ideas of the soul and God are incapable subsequently of yielding synthetic propositions. But isn’t it clearly fallacious to derive knowledge from belief, or doesn’t this derivation require at least some explanation? And aren’t “the soul is immortal” and “God exists” synthetic propositions by their very nature, wherever they occur and whatever their epistemological status? According to the interpretation offered here, there is no escape from this ambiguity and from its attendant dif¤culties. For this am114 Dialectic and Methodology of Pure Practical Reason biguity is nothing other than the one that haunts and that empowers the entire critical philosophy, namely the play of imagination and understanding. Strictly speaking—speaking, that is, according to the strictures established by the transcendental deduction of the categories to which Kant here appeals—there is nothing in the practical realm that can properly be called knowledge, and those judgments associated with the ideas are one and all synthetic. Practical “knowledge ” and the ideas as “non-synthesizable elements” of the highest good gain “sense and signi¤cance” through that extension of the categories of understanding by imagination as they attach to the assertion of the fact of freedom. Kant denies that the categories are either “inborn,” a view he (mistakenly ) attributes to Plato...