Critique of Pure Reason: A Kantian Perspective
The Enlightenment and Reason
The 18th-century Enlightenment, situated between the English Revolution (1688) and the French Revolution (1789), emphasized reason, tolerance, and empirical observation. Beginning in England with figures like Locke and Newton, the Enlightenment spread to France, where thinkers like Diderot and d’Alembert championed individual rights and social progress through works like the Encyclopédie. In Germany, Kant focused on reason as a system of principles guiding knowledge and action.
Reason as a Foundation
The Enlightenment viewed reason as a universal human faculty, establishing the principle of equality. This emphasis on reason promoted empirical analysis to understand natural laws and improve human lives. The autonomy of reason demanded freedom of thought and opinion, leading to the concept of human progress characterized by values like freedom, equality, and tolerance. These ideals, disseminated by intellectuals and philosophers, shaped modern thought and contributed to the rise of the bourgeoisie.
Critique of Pure Reason
Introduction
Kant argues that scientific knowledge is possible due to two types of conditions: empirical and a priori. Empirical conditions are specific and derived from experience, while a priori conditions are universal, necessary, and independent of experience. These a priori conditions are the foundation of knowledge.
Classification of Judgments
Science consists of interconnected judgments. Kant distinguishes between analytic judgments (based on reason and explicative) and synthetic judgments (adding new knowledge). Judgments can also be a priori (universal and necessary) or a posteriori (based on experience). Scientific judgments are synthetic a priori, expanding knowledge while remaining universal and necessary.
General Structure
Transcendental Aesthetic: Kant examines sensibility, which produces sense knowledge through intuition. Space and time are pure a priori forms of sensibility, necessary for perceiving objects.
Transcendental Analytic: Kant analyzes understanding, which uses a priori categories to unify sensory knowledge. These categories apply to phenomena, enabling scientific judgments.
Transcendental Dialectic: Reason uses ideas to unify knowledge. These ideas, however, do not apply to phenomena but to noumena (things that can be thought but not known). Applying categories to noumena leads to the transcendental fallacy.
Conclusions
Pure reason supports synthetic a priori judgments in science but not in metaphysics. We cannot access noumena through pure theoretical reason. Noumena represent the limits of knowledge, and attempting to apply categories of experience to them constitutes a constitutive use of pure reason.
Kantian Philosophy
Doctrinal Assumptions
Kant distanced himself from both rationalist dogmatism and empiricism, while upholding Newton’s scientific method. He sought to reconcile the possibility of knowledge with its sources.
The Problem of Knowledge: The Copernican Revolution
Kant addressed two key questions: the possibility of knowledge and its sources. He adopted a middle ground between rationalism and empiricism, emphasizing the cooperation of sensibility and understanding. He shifted the focus from the object of knowledge to the knowing subject, arguing that the object conforms to the subject’s conditions for knowledge. This is Kant’s “Copernican Revolution.”
Key Terms
- Proper Use of Reason: Applying pure principles of reason to objects of experience (phenomena).
- Constitutive Use of Reason: An incorrect application of reason to noumena, leading to the transcendental fallacy.
- Sensibility: The first level of mental activity, studied in the Transcendental Aesthetic.
- Categories: Pure a priori concepts of understanding applied to phenomena.
- Phenomenon: An object knowable through experience.
- Noumenon: Something that can be thought but not known.
- Space and Time: A priori forms of sensibility.
- Transcendental Fallacy: The error of applying categories to noumena.