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Prologue: From the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of Practical Reason
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p r o l o g u e From the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of Practical Reason Between Kant’s two “larger” critiques, the Critique of Pure Reason (884 of Kant’s pages for the 2nd edition) and the Critique of Judgment (482 pages), sits the quantitatively meager (163 page) Critique of Practical Reason. Despite the proportionally greater attention paid by scholars to the quantitatively larger critiques, it could not be clearer that the middle, moral critique held the highest signi¤cance for Kant. This is so not only because he expressly proclaimed “The Primacy of the Practical,” but because both its predecessor and its successor in the critical philosophy gave unmistakable indications as well. On the ¤nal page of the Final Purpose of the Natural Dialectic of Human Reason in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant calls the resolution of all of our transcendent knowledge into its elements valuable, and “to the philosopher . . . indeed a matter of duty” (A703, B731, emphasis mine). As action from duty is the only acceptable moral intention, it therefore follows that the entire undertaking of the ¤rst critique took place under the sway of a moral command. On the ¤nal page of the Critique of the Aesthetical Judgment in the Critique of Judgment, Kant writes that “it appears plain that the true propaedeutic for the foundation of taste is the development of moral ideas and the culture of the moral feeling, because it is only when sensibility is brought into agreement with this that genuine taste can assume an invariable form” (V, 356). In this book I shall attempt not only to take Kant’s own words on the centrality of the Critique of Practical Reason more seriously than is usually the case, but I shall also attempt to show, by means of this initial chapter and later by means of the concluding chapter, (1) how the Critique of Pure Reason should and must be read as leading up to and opening onto the Critique of Practical Reason, and (2) how the Critique of Practical Reason leads up to and opens onto the Critique of Judgment. Would that this task be as straightforward as it sounds! Instead, a painstaking and, at least apparently, radical interpretation of the Critique of Practical Reason itself is required in order to display the ®ow of the three critiques as indicated above. Why is such an interpretation required? As my title has already disclosed, imagination shall serve as the abiding fulcrum of the critical philosophy in general and of the three critiques in particular. There is little dif¤culty in locating de¤ning passages in the Critique of Pure Reason and in the Critique of Judgment that would place imagination at their hearts. However, in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant speci¤cally and directly excludes imagination from having any role in practical philosophy. This exclusion is no doubt at least partially responsible for the reputation of coldness, dryness, mechanism, excessive rationality, etc., that has attached to Kant’s moral philosophy. It would seem, also, to put special and perhaps insurmountable obstacles before an interpreter like myself who wishes to claim both (1) that imagination is the single, unique element that unites the three critiques and that (2) the Critique of Practical Reason provides the linchpin of that unity. Yet that is exactly what I propose. Readers with an interest in how this interpretation relates to the work of other scholars and how their scholarship bears upon this interpretation can ¤nd discussions and dialogues, some of which are extensive, in the endnotes. The book, however, can be read straight through. * * * The following sentence occurs in the ¤nal paragraph of the Introduction of the Critique of Pure Reason: 2 Imagination in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason [54.242.75.224] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:18 GMT) Only so much seems to be needed (nötig) by way of introduction or anticipation (Vorerrinerung) [to both divisions of the Critique of Pure Reason], that there are two stems of human knowing (Erkenntnis) that perhaps spring from a common, but to us unknown root, namely sensibility and understanding; through the former objects are given to us, but through the latter they are thought. (A15, B29) This sentence has attracted much attention as a result of Heidegger ’s famously dramatic and surprising reading according to which imagination is this root. The responses to it have been many and various , although this reading, by virtue at least of its...