The Gathering of Reason: Second Edition

CHAPTER IV. THE GATHERING OF REASON IN THE ANTINOMIES

The antinomy of pure reason, which constitutes the second type of dialectical inference, is the most significant from a genetic point of view. Indeed, there are grounds for regarding the problem of the antinomies as “the cradle of the critical philosophy”;1 and Kant himself testifies in a letter to Garve that this problem was what awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers and drove him to a critique of reason.2 The antinomy of pure reason is the topic of the second chapter of the critical investigation of the dialectical inferences of pure reason. In a brief introductory passage leading up to Section 1 of this chapter Kant sketches the general character of such inference. The characterization involves three items. First, Kant notes that, in terms of the general analogy between pure (dialectical) reason and logical reason, this type of dialectical inference corresponds to the hypothetical syllogism. The point of the correspondence is simply that, just as hypothetical syllogism involves regression or progression in a simple linear series of conditions (most notably if extended through prosyllogisms or episyllogisms), so in the antinomy of pure reason the concept of a linear series of conditions is central. Second, Kant observes that the content involved in such dialectical inferences is “the unconditioned unity of the objective conditions in the [field of] appearance” (A 406/B 433), that is, “absolute totality of the synthesis of appearances” (A 407/B 434). Such content, taken in various regards, constitutes transcendental ideas of a distinctive kind; Kant calls them “cosmological ideas” or “cosmical concepts” (Weltbegriffe). CHAPTER IV The Gathering of Reason in the Antinomies 97 They are the concepts that belong to rational cosmology. It is especially to be noted that such concepts, and, hence, the inferences in which they are involved, are related only to appearances. In the antinomies reason surpasses the limits of possible experience, not by leaping from appearances to things-in-themselves, but rather by passing from the synthesis of appearances in experience to the absolute totality of that synthesis. Finally, Kant calls attention to a special point of contrast between the antinomies and the paralogisms. In the case of the paralogisms the illusion that is produced is purely one-sided: There is not also produced an illusion in support of the opposing assertion. By contrast, in the case of the antinomies both an assertion and its opposite find support, and this means that reason falls into contradictions. As with all results of dialectical inference, these contradictions are no mere products of an artificial sophistry that could be corrected by logical criticism. Rather, they are unavoidable; they constitute “an entirely natural antithetic . . . into which reason of itself quite unavoidably falls” (A 407/B 433–4)—an antithetic belonging to the sophistry of pure reason itself. As Kant elaborates subsequently, this antithetic involves “a natural and unavoidable illusion, which even after it has ceased to beguile still continues to delude though not to deceive us and which though thus capable of being rendered harmless can never be eradicated” (A 422/B 449–50). 1. THE COSMOLOGICAL IDEAS (A 408/B 435–A 425/B 453) Kant’s first major task is to derive the system of cosmological ideas and the antinomies linked to them. As a basis for undertaking this task, he resumes his earlier considerations of the relation between reason and understanding. Previously (A 326–7/B 383–4, with Ch. II, 4) Kant focused on the parallel between reason and understanding: Just as understanding brings to unity the manifold given in intuition, so reason brings to unity the manifold knowledge supplied by understanding. Thus, concepts of reason, i.e., transcendental ideas, are unities for the unification of what remains manifold at the level of understanding. In a sense such ideas may be regarded as originating from reason; they constitute the pure content originated by reason, corresponding to the categories originated by understanding. Yet, the two cases do not wholly 98 THE GATHERING OF REASON correspond: The ideas are themselves derivative from the categories in a way that prevents their being regarded as simply generated by reason. In the more precise account which Kant now offers, this derivativeness is unequivocally expressed: In the first place we must recognize that pure and transcendental concepts can arise only from the understanding. Reason does not really generate any concept, but rather, at most, it frees a concept of understanding from the unavoidable limitations of...