German Philosophy: Kant’s concept of reason
Critique of Pure Reason
Prateek S Kolhar (EE10B109) 29th April 2014

1. Introduction
During the period of enlightenment in Europe, there were 2 schools of thought that talked about the way we acquire knowledge: Rationalism and Empiricism. Rationalists like Leibniz claimed that knowledge is innate, that is, we are born with all the knowledge and the experiences that we have in this world just help us in uncovering/ remembering this knowledge. Empiricist believed that all knowledge is got only through experience in other words we are born with our minds/souls like a clean slate and the experiences write on them. With this struggle between the two schools of thought enlightenment Europe was striving to find ways to arrive at a consensus about some of these aforementioned central issues of theory of knowledge. And the champion of a philosopher who accomplished with task was Immanuel Kant. Kant borrowed many concepts from both empiricism and rationalism. But he felt that the many of the rationalist ideas were too simplistic and dogmatic and some of the empiricist ideas we too skeptic about the ability of humans to acquire true knowledge. As a part of his critical philosophy, with an aim to resolve this problem of theory of knowledge he wrote 3 critiques: Critique of pure reason, Critique of practical reason and Critique of judgment. Critique of Pure Reason talks about the process of knowledge acquisition in natural sciences, the way in which the structures of our mind influences what we understand about the world and the limitations of our understanding. In Critique of Practical Reason, he addresses the issues of moral judgment and preconditions of our minds to arrive at such judgments. Critique of Judgment talks about aesthetic judgment and attempts to unify pure natural sciences and ethics.

2. Critique of Pure Reason:
In the critique of pure reason, we understand a lot about what Kant’s idea of knowledge acquisition is and how the mind influences the very process of acquiring the percepts. It also talks about something called the pure reason and presents pure reason as a faculty to which other faculties of the mind are subordinated. He says that we receive the percepts from the world through our senses but theses percepts are influenced by the structures of our mind. These preconditions in some sense filter out some information

about the true world or the so called noumenal world. The world as we know through our senses is called the phenomenal world. He says that we cannot acquire knowledge about the noumenal world as we can’t experience it. It is like seeing through say red colored glass ever since we were born, we would not be able to conclude about the actual color of the real world (noumena) and the phenomenal world in this context would have just shades of red. Here he agrees with the model of knowledge acquisition of Hume, where he also talks about our senses deceiving us in being able to acquire knowledge about the true world. Unlike Hume, Kant never doubted the possibility of genuine knowledge. He tries to understand the way in which reason has arrived at some principles which it has long been in in the habit of acquiring knowledge. He says that true knowledge is possible but only about the phenomenal world and not the noumenal world. He also says that there are certain preconditions or a priori structures of the mind that influence the way we sense the world. And these preconditions of the mind are not got through experience; they are just a priori part of the mind. Here he is borrowing some concepts from the rationalists where they say knowledge is innate. Though he says that there are certain a priori concepts in our mind he disagrees with the rationalists with regards to having knowledge about everything already in our minds, when he says that the knowledge about the noumenal world is not possible. The critique of pure reason is divided into 3 parts: Transcendental Aesthetic- it talks about the problem of sensibility and several issues related to sense perception through the study of space and time as the a priori forms of perception. Transcendental Analytic: talks about problems related to the relating of various concepts got from the perceptions of the different objects in the world. It studies the means by which the mind categorizes data from the senses. Transcendental Dialectic: deals with reasoning, as it addresses issues related to inference from the concepts of our understanding and can be seen as “the study of the fallacious attribution of the objective reality to the perceptions of the mind of external objects”: what this means is that it tries to study the bad habit of the mind to conclude that the percepts received from the experiences give us the truth about the noumenal world.

2.1. Transcendental Aesthetic:
It talks about the factors that are absolutely necessary in perceiving things and there factors act as the preconditions of our mind in all possible perceptions. It deals with those preconditions that influence the sensory process but are not characteristics of any specific perception object. As these factors are preconditions and are not got from any experience that is they do not have any empirical origin, they are a priori and hence are also transcendental. It affirms the importance of intuition in receiving information of the world and says that intuition is the only way in which we can relate to the objects immediately. This section presents a faculty called the sensibility. Sensibility is the capacity of the mind to be able to receive representations of objects by being affected by them. The way we receive the information/percepts from the world is influenced by the structures/preconditions of our mind and these preconditions that influence the sensibility are the

notion of space and time. Space and time are called the forms of sensibility. They are not part of any object, they are part of the sensory process and we don’t really acquire this perception of space and time, it has been in use all the while and hence they have no empirical origin and hence are transcendental. Space and time have been affecting the precepts that we receive ever since we can remember; there was not a point in life where we didn’t know the spatial and temporal orientation of objects. We have never been able to think out of these constructs of time and space. We have never learnt about the notion of space and time through any particular experience; so we conclude that these so called forms of sensibility have been innate and are hence transcendental.

2.2. Transcendental Analytic:
This section of the critique addresses the next stage in the process of in acquiring knowledge that is the understanding and its relation with sensibility. While sensibility is the faculty of receiving the impressions of the objects in the world, understanding is the ability to produce concepts from the percepts and think of the objects in context. In some sense understanding is forming the imagery of objects in our minds. Transcendental analytic is concerned with the aspects of the a priori concepts or principles that govern our understanding and the application of these a priori concepts to the percepts that we receive from the sensibility. In simpler words it looks at the a priori concepts that the mind uses to synthesize the phenomenal world in the mind. Kant says that the act of understanding can be reduced to the act of judgment. He says that the mind in its unique process of judging is trying to unify different representations with the help of different concepts to form one final conclusion or cognition. In other words, judgments synthesize representations by means of concepts. Understanding tries to assimilate and relate different concepts and also unite there concepts to produce a new concept. Kant says that there are 12 categories of understanding and they actually stand for the possible ways in which the human mind synthesizes the concepts from the percepts it receives through sensations. And the broad categories of these 12 categories are quality, quantity, modality and relations. The different types of judgments have a close relation to these 12 categories of understanding. Quantity: unity, plurality and totality. Quality: reality, negation and limitation. Modality: possibility/impossibility, existence/non-existence and necessity/contingency. Relations: inherence & subsistence, causality & dependence and community.

2.3. Transcendental Dialectic:

Kant here critically analyses the ability of understanding and reason, the faculties of the mind to give us true knowledge about the noumenal world. Transcendental Dialectic gives an account on pure reason and how it influences understanding and the working of the mind as a whole. To understand the difference between “understanding” and “reason”, let’s look at their definition as per this critique. Understanding is the faculty concerned with actively producing knowledge through of concepts. Understanding is quite commonly attributed to being the mind itself. It produces logical perspective and compares different concepts with each other, and also to the empirical perspective (where it is also called judgment). This enables us to relate concepts with our intuition in order to produce phenomenal knowledge. For Kant, reason is both a logical and a transcendental faculty of the mind. As a logical faculty, it produces or rather directs the conclusions through abstractions of the concepts from the ‘understanding’, as a transcendental faculty. It creates conceptions and contains a priori ideas whose objective existence cannot be concluded empirically. Kant presents the transcendental ideas of pure reason as regulative concepts of the mind. Kant proposes that there are three regulative ideas that help us go further after the sensual experience of the objects in the world. He claims that our mind tries to unify the concepts that are there in the mind and these ideas are necessary in our attempt to unify the plurality/differences of our experiences. These transcendental ideas are: the self, the cosmos and the God. These ideas are transcendental because they do not correspond to any object of our direct experience. Kant suggests that they are not the result of intuition, but pure reason. He says that the human reason has a tendency to construct a totally unified, coherent and systematic world-view and the roots of this tendency lie in these ideas of reason.

2.3.1. Ideas of reason:

The self is the idea of a subject that is a unification of all experience, all powers of perception & thought. All the changes in this ‘self’ belong to one being and the activity of thought is devoid of the phenomena of the world. We cannot experience this ‘self’. It is in built in us. Even when we experience any object in the world it is already implied that the information/percept is experienced by this ‘self’. For example the statement “This is a pen”, already implies that, “I think” is appended to the statement, making it “I think this is a pen”. Since we cannot get any precepts about the ‘self’, it is a priori and hence transcendental. Pure reason also tries to create synthesize a unified collection infinitely long causal series of event in experience by forming the concept of the world or cosmos. Our mind likes to believe that all the events outside the self, form a long chain of connected events. Here it tries to unify all that the mind experiences as one entity that is the cosmos. The world cannot be experienced from the beginning to the end and hence cannot be experienced as a long causal series of related events. Hence as there is no percept to this concept, it is an in built idea in our mind and hence transcendental. The idea of God is the attempt of reason to unify our experience and everything else including the self and the cosmos into one entity. Kant says the idea of God is the transcendental ideal. This is because God is the perfect being to which everything connects to and all perfections are attributed to. Hence

God is treated as an ideal to which our thoughts and understanding aims to get unified into. To put forward his point that the idea of God is transcendental Kant says: “We have not the slightest ground to assume in an absolute manner the object of this idea…. It becomes evident that the idea of such a being, like all speculative ideas, seems only to formulate the command of reason, that all connection in the world be viewed in accordance with the principles of a systematic unity—as if all such connection had its source in one single all-embracing being as the supreme and sufficient cause.” Through these 3 ideas of reason our mind is constrained or inspired to reach to the virtual points of understanding that lie in these unifying concepts. Our mind tries to bring all the experience and thought and houses it under one roof and not as separate entities. This is probably why it is easier for us to understand things when we study them in a systematic manner connecting to a central topic or object. So to put forward his concept of knowledge, Kant chooses the middle ground between skeptical empiricism and dogmatic rationalism. He says that we cannot get knowledge about anything that is not given to us empirically and by this agrees with the empiricists to some extent. He says that the reason has a negative effect on the mind when it tries to apply the categories of understanding to prove the existence of these ideas of reason. Hence he warns us by saying that “concepts without percepts are empty. Percepts without concepts are blind”. Nevertheless, ideas produced by reason alone such as self, cosmos, and God can help us synthesize coherence to our experiences. However, Kant makes it clear that he disagrees with the rationalists who believed that these ideas corresponded to some objects whose existence could be proved. He says that these ideas govern our mind but to try to prove or disprove their existence is being foolish. He says: “…there is a great difference between something given to my reason as an object absolutely or merely as an object in the idea. In the former case our concepts are employed to determine the object [transcendental]; in the latter case there is in fact only a scheme for which no object, not even a hypothetical one, is directly give, and which only enables us to represent to ourselves other objects in an indirect manner, namely in their systematic unity, by means of their relation to this idea. Thus, I say, that the concept of a highest intelligence is a mere idea.” So the whole concept of sensibility, understanding, reason and theory of knowledge can be summarized in the following diagram:

Ideas of reason

Self

Cosmos

God

Pure Reason

True World / Noumena

Sensory process / Sensibility

Percepts

Mind / Understanding

Knowledge of the phenomenal world

concepts

concepts

Space and Time

12 categories of understanding

Fig: shows the relation between different components of the mind it producing the phenomenal knowledge from the noumenal world.

References
1. 2. 3. NPTEL lectures on European Philosophy: http://nptel.ac.in/syllabus/109106051/ Online course on Philosophy from the CSUN: http://www.csun.edu/~kdm78513/subjects/philosophy/ Stanford blog on philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/