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Kant

The Critique of Pure Reason 

 the aims of The Critique

return to 'critique of pure reason' contents page 

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

1. Sciences, such as physics, make progress over a period of time. More is learned, and there are standards, generally accepted by the scientific community. But metaphysics, and philosophy overall, has made no progress over a long period of time. People disagree on everything, and there seems to be no hope for any agreement. The Critique intends to set metaphysics on the path of a well established science, to reach real and solid knowledge.

2. People disagreeing is one thing, but the current state of metaphysics is so wish-washy, so very much based upon empty speculation, that there’s little hope of arriving at agreement. This is especially the case, in that, a great many subjects of metaphysics we can no little or nothing about; such as, the soul, God, or the world as a whole. Therefore, what metaphysics has been coming up with does not deserve the term knowledge. And this crisis, Kant says, is not because metaphysicians are particularly stupid or perverse but the problem lies in the nature of reason itself. We ask for ultimate explanations even though reason is incapable of giving those explanations. And if we don’t realize where this leads to, or that reason is incapable of delivering knowledge in certain areas, then we will inevitably be led along a disastrous path of empty speculation, which is the current state of metaphysics. In The Critique Kant intends to investigate the nature of reason in order to draw the limits of reason, those areas where reason cannot give us knowledge. This will safeguard us from what Kant calls a “transcendental illusion,” meaning, we cannot attain to knowledge about many lofty subjects by way of reason. And so, Kant comes to traditional metaphysics as “the all destroyer.” He tears down almost all of metaphysics.

3. Kant wants to know, is metaphysics even possible? Kant’s worry here is expressed in his terms “synthetic” and “analytic” statements. An analytic statement is one we can know to be true by analyzing the information it gives or its concepts; such as, “all circles are round” or “all dogs are animals.” We can see the truth of these statements by the very definition of these concepts within the statement itself. However, the analytic statement doesn’t offer us any new information, we don’t learn much from it, but a restatement. A synthetic statement does offer new information, and we do not derive this merely from the statement itself; for example, “there is a blue van outside my house.” There is no necessary connection between the van and where it’s parked, nothing about the concepts themselves that say that the statement must be true. My observation indicates that the statement is true. Empiricists had said that synthetic judgments might come only through observation. Science is built on this. But what about metaphysics? In metaphysics exists, it must do so in the form of “synthetic a priori judgments.” It would be “synthetic” in the sense that we would learn something new (not just truth by definition) and also “a priori” (meaning, “coming before” observation, experience, fact-gathering) that is, based on pure thought alone, and not be observation. The question, is metaphysics even possible? devolves to, are synthetic a priori judgments possible? – whether it is possible to extend our knowledge without bringing in data from observation and the senses. The Critique is Kant’s attempt to show that, yes, synthetic a priori judgments are possible, and therefore metaphysics is possible. And so, by this, Kant becomes the savior of metaphysics not the “all destroyer.”

4. What Kant is concerned about, in an uppermost way, is the relation between ethics and natural science. Specifically, Kant is worried about freedom, which is necessary for ethics, in a world that is determined by strict causal laws. How can science be right, with its deterministic laws, telling us how everything happens, and is determined to happen, and yet, in this determinism, how can we be free, that we have the freedom to make choices, and therefore responsible for our actions, all of which is the basis of ethics? How is this possible? Kant doesn’t believe that theoretical reason – the kind dealt with in The Critique – can prove free will, but he does believe -- by analyzing reason, determining what reason can do and cannot do -- that we can show that reason cannot disprove the existence of free will. We can show that reason – including the kind of reason used by the sciences – can never imply the non-existence of free will. And so what Kant does in The Critique is to safeguard the possibility of freedom by setting limits to reason, or as he famously said in the B Edition, “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” We can have faith in our freedom because Kant has shown us that we can never know that we are not free.

5. Kant aims to defeat Cartesian doubt or skepticism; e.g., how do we know that we're not dreaming right now, or that we're not just brains in vats? does the external world really exist or is it just my own thoughts? Kant says that these are a "scandal to philosophy", to the extent that the existence of things outside us must be accepted on a basis of faith; even, if one were to say, I doubt my own existence, we presently have no convincing argument against this. Kant wants to combat this kind of skepticism by developing a new kind of argument, which has been called a "transcendal argument."

6. David Hume had cast serious doubt on the question of causation, which impinged upon the claims of science that we can affirm the existence of “laws” and cause-and-effect in nature. Hume cast much doubt on reason’s role in determining the claims of science. Kant credits Hume with having awakened him from “dogmatic slumber,” however, Kant will answer Hume and argue that reason can establish universal causal knowledge – because, we can know a priori (before experience) that the world is going to be lawful and structured by causation.

7. Kant wants to rethink the entire role and nature of philosophy itself, and what its questions should be. He is worried about how we make judgments about the world. For example, we say “grass is green” or “everything has a cause” or “not everything has a cause,” etc. We make judgments about objective reality, the world that we see, all the time. And this world that we perceive is the world that we think about. One of Kant’s most fundamental quests is analyze these judgments, which require two things: concepts being applied to intuitions – concepts like “blue” or “big” or “causation”; intuitions (for now) we can think of as sensations. We need these in order to make judgments about the world. Kant: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” In this statement, Kant is speaking to, criticizing, both the empiricist and the rationalist traditions of philosophy. According to the empiricists, from Locke to Hume, sensations (experiences) were primary; that, our cognitions are built up out of sensations. The rationalists said that sensations were a kind of confused thought. Kant disagrees with both. Concepts and sensations are not built one out of the other, one is not just a bad version of the other, they’re really two different things, and this is one of Kant’s fundamental insights. But this creates a problem: how can concepts apply to sensation? If they are radically different things, how can we apply one to the other, how can we think about the external world, how can we know that our judgments about the world have any applicability to the world as it exists, independently of us? How can thoughts ever latch onto things? Kant explores how thought and sensation can come together. How can our finite thinking ever adequately reflect the objective external world? Answering these questions completely reshapes philosophy. The traditional way of stating this is that Kant takes the positions of the two main sides and synthesizes them in a new way.

8. Our view of the world is not God’s view of the world. We are finite thinkers. The Critique focuses on, lends respectability to, this human view of the world. Kant refers to “transcendental realism,” the world as it intrinsically is, independent of ourselves. The other philosophers attempt to bring in God’s view of the world with a comparison to our finite view, and this inevitably shows the latter as something lacking.

stanford.edu: "knowledge consists in objects satisfying our epistemic conditions; our beliefs about the world do not have to live up to some fictional standard 'God’s eye point of view' to constitute knowledge."

This leads to skepticism. But Kant wants to take our human finite position seriously, as our only starting point, as the only vantage point we have – Kant’s Copernican Revolution. To do this, we have to develop a new approach to philosophy which he calls “transcendental idealism.”