kant Lecture 8

So, here we are, eighth week, and we come now to what Kant refers to as the much-needed discipline of reason. Remember, what’s promised in the first Critique is that reason will become its own pupil by way of the paralogisms and antinomies that Kant will expose—reason’s tendency to overstep its legitimate grounds. And when Kant refers to reason overstepping its legitimate grounds, you want to take that literally. It’s overstepping the grounds that a juridical proceeding would find to be, uh, impermissible—that the overreaching, overstepping, it, it is, as it were, unlawful.

The paralogisms and antinomies are developed late in the Critique, but the groundwork is done quite early. In fact, the groundwork for these is done just after the transcendental aesthetic. Recall that, under the transcendental doctrine of the elements, part one is devoted to the transcendental aesthetic. This is followed immediately, uh, with what Kant heads the transcendental logic. And it’s his aim there to distinguish transcendental logic from general logic. Remember the letter to Marcus Herz, where he says, “I have a mania for systematization,” and, “I’m sorry to regale you with these subheadings and sub-subheadings and the like”? But Kant found it very important to keep the books orderly on these subjects. So, he wants to make now a distinction between transcendental logic and general logic. And general logic is further divided into what he refers to as analytic and dialectic. And it’s that second one that is the cause of all the mischief.

Analytic logic is just the formal logic bequeathed by Aristotle, and it stands as what Kant refers to as the canon of judgment. Dialectic is another matter entirely. Formal logic, that is, a canon of judgment, is now used not as a canon but, Kant says, as an organon. It’s a method; it’s treated as if it were a method of discovery, which, in the end, becomes, says Kant, “the sophistical art of giving to ignorance the appearance of truth.” So, it’s the dialectical logic that’s going to be the culprit, as illustrated in the paralogisms and the antinomies. Those who are guilty here fail to realize the utter dependence that knowledge claims have on the proper assimilation of appearances to categories. Thus, both the empiricists and the rationalists have wandered in darkness and confusion.

He says he’s going to turn in something of a pathologist’s report. There’s a point where he refers to “the euthanasia of reason”—quite, you know, you think of him as a kind of dour Prussian Pietist family background. He does have a lot of fun in the first Critique. He’s got these turns of phrase, and he’s got these characterizations of people. And, as I’ve told you, at supper, he was really a barrel of monkeys, according to some of his friends. You’d have to be there.

Well, what is a paralogism? Kant defines it thus, quote: “It is a syllogism which is fallacious in form, be its content what it may.” His specific target here is the transcendental paralogism. Here, we have a transcendental grounding—that is, we’re going to have a proposition that is grounded in what is recognized to be a necessary condition or enabling condition, but it’s a transcendental ground that then leads to a formally invalid conclusion, precisely because such syllogisms are transcendentally grounded. That, he says, “is in the nature of human reason and gives rise to an illusion which cannot be avoided but may be rendered harmless,” do you see?

Once you’ve established a ground as transcendental, it becomes a necessary part of our cognitive apparatus. So, it’s not something that you can abandon; it isn’t even something that you would be aware of in a self-conscious way. So, it’s by way of Kant’s critical analysis that he will at least draw attention to this. And although we can’t stop doing this sort of thing, we can at least tame it and know when we’re doing it, you see. He’s establishing the bounds of sense and reason. And so, once you know what the boundary conditions are, it doesn’t mean you’re not going to cross over into territory that’s not really reason’s to claim, but at least when you do it, you’ll know you’re doing it, and you’ll be ready for a scolding. Thank you.

What’s common to such syllogisms is a lack of empirical premises. So, although they are lacking in necessary empirical content, we nonetheless use them, says Kant, to conclude from something which we know to something else of which we have no concept and to which, owing to an inevitable illusion, we yet ascribe objective reality. What the paralogisms have in common is an attempt to derive, rationally, from the transcendental unity of consciousness, some factual synthetic propositions about the soul or the self. The basic mistake is confusing the transcendental necessity of how we must regard ourselves—that’s the transcendental part, how we must regard ourselves—with what we are as noumena.

So, rational psychology thus wrongly argues from a transcendental necessity to an empirical discovery of the thing in itself, which, in this case, is the real self as in itself it really is. That’s the failure of rational psychology and also the lifelong mission of rationalists to establish the true essence of the soul—the soul, spirit, substance. At A340: “I conclude from the transcendental concept of the subject, which contains nothing manifold, the absolute unity of this subject in itself.” That’s the paralogism. So, the first paralogism, contra Descartes’ cogito and what Kant calls the rational doctrine of the soul, is defeated by the very transcendental logic of the case.

Now, rationalists long sought to establish that the soul can be known and can be known to be at once a substance, simple, and indestructible. That is, rationalists had good arguments for the immortality of the soul—such good arguments as to claim that the immortality of the soul could be settled as a matter of knowledge itself. But, of course, if such knowledge actually were reached through reason alone, Kant’s entire project would be defeated. It would amount to the claim that noumena are directly given in experience. The arguments for this contain no empirical premises. Moreover, the pure categories are empty of the very objects that would be accessible to experience alone. You’ll recall that famous maxim: “Concepts without intuition are empty,” at A52/B76. Concepts can be applied solely to appearances as these are grounded in pure intuitions.

Well, knowledge, as you now know, depends on the full cooperation of sensibility and understanding, not on either alone. Thus, what is beyond sensibility is beyond knowledge. He made all this clear as early as B147, where he writes, quote: “For if no intuition could be given corresponding to the concept, the concept could still be thought, so far as its form is concerned, but would be without any object, and no knowledge of anything would be possible by means of it. So far as I could know, there would be nothing, and could be nothing, to which my thought could be applied.” You’d be thinking about nothing, you know. In the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the old Macmillan edition, you might amuse yourselves by looking up the article on “nothing,” where an analytical philosopher says, “Part of the difficulty of analyzing the concept of nothing is there’s no settled position on how to conjugate the verb ‘to not.’”

Thus, such transcendental use of the understanding, independent of sensibility, is simply a mistake, generally one of the illusions of reason seeking knowledge of things that are independent of experience, is seeking noumena, and it’s doomed to fail. You want to consult A246/B303, and this includes the search for the noumenal self. It includes the search that was conducted by Descartes and by Leibniz. Rather than uncovering the noumenal self, Descartes and Leibniz confused the logical self of propositions with an ontological discovery of something, you see. They confused the transcendental necessity—if there is to be a unification of a sensuous manifold, the necessary condition—for the thing itself. Alas, quote—this is Kant at B421, now this is where he’s actually in the heart of the discussion of the paralogisms—quote: “From all this, it is evident that rational psychology owes its origin simply to misunderstanding. The unity of consciousness is only unity in thought, by which alone no object is given, and to which, therefore, the category of substance, which always presupposes a given intuition, cannot be applied.” So, arguments to the effect that we can directly know a soul-substance, that there’s a rational proof of a soul-substance, is just, again, based on a mistake.

The second paralogism turns to the putative simplicity of the soul. So, now we’ve seen that the argument to the effect that rationality by itself can establish that there is a soul-substance—that’s just one of the misunderstandings of rational psychology. And now, that the soul is a simple substance—that’s a second claim, which Kant refers to as “the Achilles of all dialectical inferences.” He says that at A351. The main argument for the soul’s simplicity goes something like this: well, the total thought, or one’s total thought, the combination of thoughts held by more than one soul—there would be no unity of thought, and absent unity, no proposition could be expressed, you know. It’s a Ned Block’s Chinese nation, you know that? So that everybody gets a separate piece of paper, but, uh, no, there’s no place to put all this together in one unified, simple substance. At A352, Kant, in relation to this, says: “It’s therefore possible only in a single substance, which, not being an aggregate of many, is absolutely simple.” That’s the conclusion of the argument.

But the required conclusion, says Kant, doesn’t follow. First, the proposition that requires the unity of a thinking subject, if multiple representations are to yield a single representation, is certainly not an analytic proposition. In other words, the concept of the unity of a thinking subject is not synonymous with or included in the concept of multiple representations condensed into a single representation. Therefore, the proposition is not established by way of the principle of identity; in other words, it’s not a claim capable of vindication by reason alone. Well, nor can it, as a synthetic proposition, be known a priori, for a single representation could be derived by the concerted action of a collective. Nor is it empirically confirmed, for nothing in experience is generative of the logical necessity that attaches to the proposition itself. We see that the alleged simple substance is not the content of an experience but merely a subjective condition of knowledge, that’s at A354.

So, challenged here is the alleged objective reality of the soul’s simplicity, you see. He’s knocking these bottles off, one after another. He concludes as follows, quote: “It’s obvious that in attaching ‘I’ to our thoughts, we designate the subject of inherence only transcendentally, without noting in it any quality whatsoever—in fact, without knowing anything of it either by direct acquaintance or otherwise. Simplicity of the representation of the subject is not knowledge of the simplicity of the subject itself.” And so, the whole of rational psychology is involved in the collapse of its main supports.

Now, that of an enduring self—of course, at your age, you are immortal. Now, some of us are much more concerned about the third paralogism than others might be. Yesterday was birthday number 74; don’t send cake. So, you understand that I have a very focused attention on this third paralogism, which promises to give us nothing less than an enduring, continuing self. Here’s the paradigmatic argument: that which is conscious of the numerical identity of itself at different times is, insofar, a person. Now, the soul is conscious of the same, unchanging, etc., over time; therefore, it is a person, which is to say, there’s something there that survives alterations, you know. Kant makes a distinction between change and alteration: substance undergoes alteration all the time, but it doesn’t change. You can do lots of things with gold; it stays gold. And lots of things happen to a self, but the essential, substantial, etc., etc.—that’s what endures over all mere alterations.

Well, is there an enduring, persisting self or soul that could be knowable by way of the arts of reason? There is, indeed, a case for the self or person—a transcendental self—as a necessary concept to account for the unity of our apperception. We’ve been through all that. But not as an object of knowledge. As Kant says at A366: “We can never parade it as an extension of our self-knowledge through pure reason and as exhibiting to us, from the mere concept of the identical self, an unbroken continuation of the subject.” Granting the unity and simplicity of the soul-substance, there’s still no guarantee of its continuing existence. He says, later, at B414: “Thus, the permanence of the soul, regarded merely as an object of inner sense, remains undemonstrated and, indeed, indemonstrable,” close quote. To which I reply: what the paralogisms make clear is that reason, liberated from necessary discipline, seeks to go beyond its own transcendental grounding to what is, finally, the transcendent, and therein lies the illusion. If you want to get to heaven, you will not do so by way of reason alone. You will not do so by way of the understanding, nor will you do so by correctly subsuming the manifold of the sensuous manifold correctly under the pure concepts of the understanding. So, what’s left to you? I should think, is prayer.

Let me move now to the antinomies of pure reason. It’s in the transcendental dialectic, at A339/B397, that Kant lists the three pseudo-rational dialectical syllogisms productive of illusory knowledge. The first of these, the first of the three, being the paralogisms. Now, as we’ve seen, these find one drawing inferences from transcendental concepts to particular inferences—that is, from concepts lacking empirical content to some claimed known fact about the real world. The second form of, uh, pseudo-rational syllogisms finds one drawing inferences from a series of appearances to the transcendental concept of the absolute totality of conditions, and this is where the antinomies set in. The third form, which I do hope to have time to get to, the third form of pseudo-rational inference moves from the synthetic unity of all one does know by way of the understanding to what one could not know by way of the same concepts—an inference to the ens entium, an inference to God. And here we have what Kant calls the ideal of pure reason.

Whereas the paralogisms feature conjectures without empirical content, the antinomies are rich in empirical content, in which, nonetheless, yet another set of fallacies tends toward what Kant calls “the euthanasia of pure reason.” The paralogisms generate illusions regarding the subject of thought—that is, regarding the self or soul—but now a different class of illusions sets in, a class of illusions that, quote, “arises when reason is applied to the objective synthesis of appearances.” The paralogisms pertain to the unwarranted reach of reason toward a noumenal self or soul; the antinomies are exemplified by unwarranted rational inferences toward the objects of knowledge, toward what Kant calls “the world,” this being, as he says at A420, quote, “the absolute totality of all existing things.”

Well, what about the world? The world is to be understood as the ultimate source of all appearances, all objects, all events. So understood, in these terms, the burning question is whether we can know the world through pure reason. And the antinomies are intended to illustrate what Kant refers to as “a necessary skeptical method” when it comes to addressing a question of that kind. And he makes a very sharp distinction between skepticism and the skeptical method. Let me read this passage very quickly—I’m sorry it’s so long, but it’s a particularly informing one in Kant: “This method of watching, or rather provoking, a conflict of assertions, not for the purpose of deciding in favor of one or the other side, but of investigating whether the object of controversy is not perhaps a deceptive appearance, which each vainly strives to grasp, and in regard to which, even if there were no opposition to be overcome, neither can arrive at any result. This procedure, I say, may be entitled the skeptical method. It’s altogether different from skepticism, a principle of technical and scientific ignorance, which undermines the foundations of all knowledge.”

So, the skeptical method is the one that puts to the test competing claims. It’s not doubtful about our capacity for objective knowledge, but it applies the skeptical method as a test of what is available to us by way of objective knowledge. So, the process of euthanasia begins when reason, appropriating from the understanding concepts whose valid function pertains solely to sensuous intuitions—proper deployment of the pure concepts of the understanding is to subsume intuitions under them and thereby make the objective world thinkable, to make possible nothing less than experience itself. But all that is sensible is not, for that reason, thinkable.

Note, too, that the pure and transcendental concepts issue from the understanding, not from reason as such. And this creates the possibility of metaphysical mischief. Look, reason can contrive all sorts of things—the imagination, spontaneity. You can put together worlds that no one has ever experienced or ever will experience. You can contrive possibilities that constitute the art and measure of science fiction, but these are not things you can know. These are not things that fall under the heading of understanding. Reason can produce a wide range of possibilities that go beyond the reach of understanding, properly understood, understanding being that amalgam now of the sensuous intuitions and the pure concepts, properly experience, on the concepts properly assembled.

Reason is able to liberate concepts of the understanding from the limitations imposed by possible experience. That’s what reason can do: it frees the understanding of the otherwise necessary bondage that it should have to experience. By way of this liberation, reason would now extend the concepts beyond the empirically accessible, and therein we find what is illusory. But now, reason would go beyond all this, reaching for absolute totality. It’s not enough to subsume representations under general concepts and thus possess a genuine experience. No, reason now overextends itself to reach nothing less than the totality, the world. And in so doing, reason converts the concept, otherwise empirically supplied, into some sort of transcendental idea that is so liberated from what is given in intuition as to be beyond understanding.

Now, having established how the process works, Kant is then in a position to examine his four antinomies of pure reason and illustrate the illusions arising from each. If you, as we all hope you do, spend long hours engaged in what I sometimes call café metaphysics—ideally suited to 2 a.m., 3 a.m., sixth cup of coffee, chin in your hand, chum looking at you with sort of drooping eyelids as you ask whether the world had a beginning or whether it has existed from all eternity, whether there really is free will, etc., etc.—well, you’re in the game of the antinomies. And if you’re actually believing that with one more cup of coffee, you’re going to settle this, Kant is your remedy.

The four antinomies are divided into two categories: two of them are what Kant calls mathematical antinomies, and two are what he calls dynamic or dynamical antinomies. What makes the first two mathematical is that they pertain to that world of objects that exist in space and time, and so they have a scalar or magnitude-type dimension. Is the world finite? Is it limitless? Is everything divisible? Are there indivisible wholes? The dynamical antinomies arise from very different questions. Is the world to be understood as the outcome of strict and mechanical causation? Must there be, behind everything, some causal power, itself free of causal constraints? If there is such freedom, then that uncaused source must stand outside the order of spatio-temporal causation. Is there an absolutely necessary being? And I told you, and we even have time to spare—is there an absolutely necessary being standing as the uncaused originator? And, you know, it’s the intelligent design sort of thing. Remember Aristotle in the Physics: “If the art of shipbuilding were in the wood, we’d have ships by nature.” So, this is a sensible question; it’s a sensible question. We get in trouble when we think, at the level of knowledge, we have the answer.

The first antinomy is what Kant refers to as the cosmological antinomy, and these are set up in the form of a thesis and an antithesis. Here’s the thesis: the world has a beginning in time and a limit in space. Antithesis: the world is infinite in temporal duration and spatial extent. We’re at A426/B454. The second antinomy is the ontological antinomy. Thesis: substance and substances in the world are ultimately composed of simple parts. Antithesis: nothing simple is ever to be found in the world; thus, everything is infinitely divisible. Third antinomy is the antinomy of causality. Here’s the thesis: causality in accordance with laws of nature is not the only kind of causality; there must be a causality of freedom. And the antithesis: everything in nature takes place in accord with deterministic laws alone. And the fourth antinomy is the theological antinomy. Thesis: there must be a necessary being as the cause of the whole sequence of contingent beings, either as its first member or underlying it. And the antithesis: no such being exists, inside or outside the world.

In the paralogisms of pure reason, Kant put rational psychology on notice, offering a refutation of any proposition by which the soul or self could be known noumenally. Now, by way of the antinomies, he will set the same limits on cosmology and theology and causality. Reason must learn to discipline itself and spare itself self-delusional conclusions. Neither experience nor pure reason, as now properly assessed by Kant by a sound metaphysical method, that is, can establish any of this as knowledge. And this, after all, is to note, yet again, the limits of sense and reason.

Now, on the question, uh, is there any place for God? And here, I want to say, this is a good place to be brief, because the alternative to being brief is eight weeks of lectures. In the first Critique, Kant is setting the stage for the Critique of Practical Reason, for his moral philosophy. In the antinomy regarding causality, Kant does take up the question of free will and determinism. He makes, by the way, the very interesting observation that, from a moral point of view, it’s not necessary to prove freedom; it’s sufficient that it be thinkable. That is, from a moral point of view, it is sufficient for the actor to act on the supposition that the chosen course of action is authentically his own. That would be a topic for one of the lectures on the second Critique.

But Kant says that, in referring to the laws of freedom—sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it, the laws of freedom? He says, well, look, what do we mean by that? On the assumption that, at a choice point, there really is a choice, which is to say, it is within your power of agency to go left or right at any such choice point, the decision you make—if it is a decision, which is different from flipping a coin—if it is a decision, there must be some reason for choosing left or right, which is to say, there must be some principle that guides the choice. And the more consequential the choices, the more fundamental must the principle be. You might think that, when it comes to the most consequential choices, there would be a ruling principle that would cover all of them, all such choices, for a being or entity of such a nature that, at any and every consequential choice point, a principle that governs the choice is an ideal principle, a flawless principle, a principle applicable over all such cases and always right—call that God. Thank you.

Now, what Kant is offering, then—remember, he had already been instructed by the monarchy to write no further on religious subjects, and, uh, he obeyed, as it were. This was not a good time to be drawn into wrangles of a religious nature, closing decades of the 18th century in the German-speaking world. But Kant is not offering some sort of fig leaf for it; there’s no sort of veiled theology here. Kant will reach the concept of God by way of morality; that is, the steps will be primarily anthropological, not theological. It’ll be something in human nature that triggers or guards thoughts of a certain kind, recognizing all the way that, as far as we will get with that kind of argument, we’ll never reach knowledge itself.

So, yes, even in the first Critique, there’s ample room for the sorts of theological issues engaged by the issue of free will and determinism, engaged by morality itself. But neither experience nor pure reason, now properly assessed by a sound metaphysical method, will establish any of this as knowledge. And this, after all, is to note, yet again, just what are the limits of sense and reason. Our powers of knowing have real limits, even as they make nature itself possible. And this, after all, was the very point of the first Critique.