The Gathering of Reason: Second Edition

CHAPTER III. THE GATHERING OF REASON IN THE PARALOGISMS

Kant’s actual critique of dialectical reason is entirely contained in the second of the two Books into which the Transcendental Dialectic is divided. Everything else is preparatory for the critiques of rational psychology , of rational cosmology, and of rational theology which he carries through in the course of this Book. The actual problematic, the locus where the issues of the Transcendental Dialectic are to be worked out, is named by the title of this Book: The Dialectical Inferences of Pure Reason. Appropriately, Kant introduces the Book by reiterating, in still another formulation, those two determinations of reason by virtue of which the problem of reason has its locus in the domain of dialectical inference, namely, reason’s aloofness from all objects of experience and its correlative involvement in inference. Already Kant has stressed that transcendental ideas do not correspond to any objects of experience, that, to state it conversely, nothing given in experience can correspond to what is represented in such ideas. This aloofness of reason Kant now formulates in a different way. He says that the object of a transcendental idea “is something of which we have no concept” (A 338/B 396). This formulation must be taken in its specific intent, for there is obviously a sense in which one does have a concept of the object of a transcendental idea: One has the transcendental idea itself, and it is a concept of that object. The specific intent of Kant’s formulation is: Of such an object one does not have the kind of concept that could be exhibited in experience, that “allows of being exhibited and intuited in a possible experience” (A 339/B 396). CHAPTER III The Gathering of Reason in the Paralogisms 63 In other words, we have no concept of understanding (Verstandesbegriff) corresponding to such an object but only a concept of reason (Vernunftbegriff). An additional formulation makes this intent still clearer: “although we cannot have any knowledge of the object which corresponds to an idea, we yet have a problematic concept of it” (A 339/B 397). Kant reiterates, secondly, the role played by inference in the origination of ideas: “The transcendental (subjective) reality of the pure concepts of reason depends on our having been led to such ideas by a necessary syllogism” (A 339/B 397). As executed by pure reason, such syllogisms will, Kant notes, have no empirical premises; nevertheless, they will begin with something known (etwas, das wir kennen)— presumably, therefore, with something known a priori rather than empirically—and will proceed to something else of which one has no concept, i.e., of which one comes to have a problematic concept only through the inference. In such inference an inevitable illusion is operative , an illusion through which one ascribes objective reality to that which is reached by the inference. Again Kant stresses that these conclusions are not merely invented but spring from the very nature of reason . They belong to the sophistry of pure reason. Kant names the three kinds of dialectical inference corresponding to the three kinds of transcendental ideas derived in Book I. The idea of the soul is reached by transcendental paralogism, that of the world by the antinomy of pure reason, that of God by the ideal of pure reason. The task is to exhibit in their actual unfolding these forms of inferences , here hardly more than named, and to expose them as dialectical. 1. PARALOGISM IN GENERAL (A 341/B 399–A 348/B 406; A 381–405; B 406–432) (a) The Issues of Paralogism (A 341/B 399–A 343/B 401) Kant offers an initial description of transcendental paralogism: In this kind of inference “I conclude from the transcendental concept of the subject, which contains nothing manifold, to the absolute unity of this subject itself . . .” (A 340/B 397–8). Several questions are immediately provoked. What does “paralogism” mean, and what is the significance of Kant’s use of it in the present context? What exactly is that 64 THE GATHERING OF REASON “transcendental concept of the subject” from which the dialectical inference proceeds? What precisely is the “absolute unity” of the subject itself, and how does the dialectical inference lead to it? What is the basic fallacy that renders the inference dialectical? These four questions sketch the principal issues and provide an initial way of access to the complexities of Kant’s own exposition. An index of...