What Does the Title Mean?

Critique of Pure Reason

Immanuel Kant: 1724–1804

Kant's title sounds forbidding, but each word carries a precise meaning.

Critique

Here critique does not mean an attack or a negative judgment. It means a careful examination of powers, capabilities, and limits.

Kant is putting reason itself on trial—not to condemn it, but to determine:

What can reason legitimately know, and what lies beyond its legitimate reach?

Pure

Pure means unmixed with experience.

Kant is interested in what reason can contribute a priori—from its own resources, rather than from particular observations of the world.

Thus pure reason means reason considered independently of empirical experience.

Reason

Reason is not simply "thinking" in the everyday sense.

Kant uses reason for the human faculty that seeks principles, ultimate explanations, and ultimately the unconditioned. It wants to know not merely what happens, but why, and ultimately what accounts for the whole.

This is the faculty that asks questions about:

God, freedom, immortality, the soul, causation, and the ultimate nature of reality.

Put the three words together

Critique of Pure Reason

can be rendered in plain English as:

An examination of what human reason, operating independently of experience, can legitimately know—and where its powers reach their limits.

Or, even more simply:

Reason examining the powers and limits of reason itself.

And this gives us a particularly interesting connection with our own study.

Kant is asking whether the jet engine of human reason can determine the limits of its own flight.

The project is therefore simultaneously:

an examination of reason's extraordinary power

and

an investigation of the boundaries beyond which that power cannot legitimately carry us.

That tension—the magnificence of reason versus the limits of reason—is the central drama contained in the title itself.

Editor's last word: