by Robert Wicks
4 Why are the categories which are discussed in the ‘analogies of experience’ especially relevant to establishing the objectivity of our experience?
5 How does the syllogistic structure of the transcendental deduction inform Kant’s discussion of the schematism of the categories of the understanding?
6 In what sense do the categories referred to in the axioms of intuition and the anticipations of perception ‘constitute’ our sensory intuitions?
7 What is the difference between the subjective order and the objective order of our perceptions? How does the subjective order relate to the category of reciprocity? How does the objective order relate to the category of causality?
8 What is the difference between ‘change’ and ‘alteration’?
9 What does Kant think of arguments that begin with simply a conceptual definition of some item, and argue from the definition itself that the item actually exists?
10 In order to become aware of ourselves, why must we presuppose that we perceive objects in the external world?
8
Metaphysical knowledge of the human soul
We are naturally curious about our ultimate metaphysical being. Some philosophers – a prime example is René Descartes – argue that we are thinking substances, that our inner being is simple, that it contains our personality, and that we can know ourselves independently of all physical objects.
In his discussion of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, which this chapter will discuss, Kant maintains that each of the above claims is either unprovable or false. At the core of his arguments is the observation that all of our experience, both of the external world and of ourselves, occurs in time. As such, we can know only how we appear, and never as we absolutely are.
As we turn to the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason – a book that examines whether our capacity to think rationally is powerful enough to provide metaphysical knowledge – we should pause upon the section title, ‘Pure Reason as the Seat of Transcendental Illusion’ (A298/B355). It says that reason generates a kind of illusion. To appreciate the meaning of this suggestive section title, it is important to grasp how Kant distinguishes ‘understanding’ from ‘reason’.
Through the application of pure concepts, the faculty of understanding contributes the basic intellectual form of all our experience. As the formal expression of the rational quest for knowledge, this faculty applies twelve logically based categories to given sensory manifolds to constitute and stabilize those manifolds into comprehensible experiences. During the course of the understanding’s operations, various types of experiential sequences are put together. There are causal sequences amongst actual objects, sequences of thoughts in one’s mind, and an overall awareness of everything as sequentially organized in one way or another. In principle, the sequences blend endlessly into one another. The most obvious cases are causal sequences, which extend into the past and future from whatever point we designate.
For Kant, the human mind is driven to comprehend the world and itself as maximally as possible. We always want to know more, and are disposed to extend what we know as far as we can, even if for the sake of greater comprehension, we go beyond what the evidence will support. The feature of the mind from which this effort to comprehend everything extends, is reason. It draws inferences, sometimes extensive, from the knowledge we already have. It seeks the ultimate truth and is relentlessly expansive.
As Kant describes it, reason aims for the highest unity of thought seeking ‘to find for the conditioned knowledge of the understanding, the unconditioned, whereby the unity of the understanding is brought to completion’ (A307/B364). Our reason essentially strives to uncover the absolute unity beneath the changing appearances in our experience. In this regard, Kant refers to the ‘unity of reason’.
In the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic, Kant argued at length that since our knowledge is conditioned by what is given in sensation, the nature of our intellect and the nature of our receptivity, it is impossible to know anything beyond space and time. Nonetheless persisting within this restricted cognitive environment is our reason, which generates the illusion that we can have knowledge of non-spatio-temporal realities. He states:
Reason is exclusively concerned with absolute totality in the use of the concepts of the understanding, and aims to carry the synthetic unity, which is thought in the category, up to the completely unconditioned.
(A326/B383)
Kant is aware that as humans, we ask perennially and inevitably about the nature of the self, the nature of the external world, and the nature of being in general, or God. In reason’s speculations about the nature of self, world and God, logical inferences extend the categories of substance, causality and reciprocity to their ultimate and ideal point. These inferences, syllogistic in form, are all invalid in Kant’s view, and they create the illusion that we can know the nature of the self, the world and God, when this is impossible.
Key idea: Our reason generates illusion
For Kant, humans construct their experience according to spatial, temporal and logical forms that are inherent within us. We cannot knowingly go beyond these forms, but in a rational effort to know everything, we are disposed nonetheless to extend our logic beyond its legitimate bounds. These extensions generate illusions which make it appear that we can know what in fact, is impossible to know.
The three main segments of the Transcendental Dialectic – the total length of which is about 400 pages in the original edition, occupying the bulk of the Critique’s second half – respectively address whether we can have metaphysical knowledge of the self, the world and God. ‘The Paralogisms of Pure Reason’ investigate the knowledge of the self as a permanent substance. ‘The Antinomy of Pure Reason’ surveys four questions related to the physical world’s ultimate nature. ‘The Ideal of Pure Reason’ explores our knowledge of God’s existence. These lengthy queries constitute much of the ‘critique’ of pure reason per se, since Kant is determined to show, based on the theory of knowledge he established in the Critique’s first half, how incapable our reason is for providing ultimate answers to these philosophical questions that have haunted, and will forever haunt, human beings.
Spotlight: Dialectic
‘Dialectic’ is a style of inquiry which assumes that through the use of logic, we can advance towards truth by developing the conflict between opposing opinions. When two individuals debate logically over some question, intelligently struggling to establish which argument is closer to the truth, their dialogue exemplifies dialectic. As reasonable as it seems, sometimes the truth is more complex than a straightforwardly oppositional contest of opinion will admit, and it requires us to reconcile and assimilate aspects from each side of a debate into a more comprehensive understanding of the situation. The original ‘either/or’ style of dialectic can thus give way to a ‘both/and’ style. The latter introduces a new meaning of dialectic as the ‘reconciliation of opposites within a more comprehensive perspective’.
As history has shown, the latter dialectics of opposition and reconciliation tend to become regimented into a mechanical and inherently expansive, three-step format, where one begins with some topic, or ‘thesis’, recognizes its opposite as an ‘antithesis’, and rather than trying to decide between the two in an exclusive way, amalgamates the opposing positions into a reconciliatory ‘synthesis’. This synthetic result can then be taken as the initial ‘thesis’ of a further three-step sequence, the structure of which can be expansively reiterated over and over again until a grand synthesis eventually comprehends everything.
This notion of dialectic as the reconciliation of opposites is important in the German Idealist philosophies of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, as well as in Marxism. Kant, however retains the original, more traditional, meaning of dialectic. In reference to questions that lead us beyond the realm of possible experience, he maintains in the Transcendental Dialectic that oppositional debate ends in a stalemate that never advances towards
the truth.
1 The paralogisms of pure reason – the nature of the self
Kant defines a ‘paralogism’ as a ‘syllogism whose form is fallacious, whatever its content might be’ (A341/B399). A ‘paralogism of pure reason’ is a pattern of syllogistic reasoning that appears when the category of substance is used to unveil the ultimate nature of the self. Rather than achieving this revelation, the category’s extension beyond possible experience generates unprovable assertions about our ultimate inner being. These are sometimes encountered in religious thought where it is maintained that our inner being, or soul, is a substance that is simple, personal and capable of existing independently of space and time. Descartes believed this as well. Kant admits that such assertions might be true, but he argues that we cannot prove them to be true.
Long ago, Aristotle defined a substance as that which has qualities attributed to it, but which is not in turn, attributable to something else. Substances are where the attributions end, and substances are ‘primary’ in this respect. The earth and the moon are primary substances, as different individuals in which qualities such as sphericality and solidity inhere. In the same respect, my judgements are features of ‘me’, but I am not a judgement. My judgements change, but I substantially remain the same, so it always appears to me. The judgements inhere in me as their primary support.
Such parallels suggest that in my ultimate being I am a thinking substance. Kant argues in the First Paralogism, however, that this inference is fallacious. Our faculties of understanding and sensibility are originally empty of sensory content: the transcendental unity of apperception (the ‘I think’ which is in principle attached to all of one’s mental images) has no content, the pure concepts of the understanding have no content, and space and time have no content. To know anything at all – and this includes the experience of knowing oneself – the originally empty forms of understanding and sensibility require some sensory inputs to compose into an experience. Once this content is in place, though, everything known through the faculties of understanding and sensibility will only reveal the appearances of things in time and space, not the things in themselves.
Such appearances include the experiential knowledge we have of our inner being, so from our experience of self-awareness, nothing follows about the ultimate nature of that inner being. Whether or not it is a substance, or immortal soul, remains unprovable. Kant repeats this kind of argument throughout the Paralogisms, appealing to how our knowledge is always in time, and is thus only about appearances.
In addition to considering oneself as a thinking substance, it might also be thought that one’s ultimate inner being is simple and unitary. This is the topic of the Second Paralogism. The rationale is simple: it is difficult to imagine a set of thoughts that could inhere in a consciousness that is not a simple being. Kant points out, however, that it is not impossible for there to be a set of thinkers which together form a single thought, as might happen in a group consciousness. The arrangement would be analogous to how an integrated set of finger movements constitutes the single movement of a hand that, for example, makes a fist, plays the piano, or flashes a two-fingered ‘V’ sign for victory.
Kant’s opinion is that the motivation for people to assert the soul’s simplicity is mainly to distinguish the soul from matter, which appears to be thoroughly composite, since they believe that such a distinction can establish the possibility of life after death. Again recalling his theory of knowledge, Kant finds the motivation misplaced. Since the material world is in space and time, it is only the appearance of some ultimate being that is in itself neither spatial, temporal nor material. Little is therefore to be gained in distinguishing the soul from matter, since matter is not an ultimate reality to begin with. As a potential threat to the existence of the soul, Kant regards matter as nothing to worry about.
The Third Paralogism challenges the common and natural thought that one’s ultimate inner being is infused with one’s personality. In daily life, it is undeniable that there remains a constant awareness of oneself as ‘me’ as the same person today that I was yesterday and the day before that, so it is easy to assume that the ultimate reality of oneself includes this ‘me’ as its permanent character or personality. These ideas present themselves when reflecting upon the post-death condition of other people and ourselves, as when imagining that a deceased family member’s spirit is watching over contemporary happenings, or when people suppose that some newborn infant is the reincarnation of someone recently deceased. Kant does not find the proposition contradictory. He argues that the day-to-day sense of one’s personal continuity does not prove that one’s personality carries over into one’s ultimate inner being.
The reason, now familiar, is this: the awareness of oneself as ‘me’ is an awareness in time, so as such, it is only an appearance of whatever one ultimately is as a subject. Kant suggests that it is (remotely) possible that ultimately, there instead could be a flow of different subjects that transfer their consciousness to each other, similar to how a ball, upon hitting another, transfers its energy to it. His point is that the ultimate subject of experience remains unknowable, since we always experience ourselves in time.
The Fourth Paralogism returns us to the themes of the Refutation of Idealism and the associated Problem of the External World. Here, Kant reiterates his rejection of the proposition, shared by many empiricists and rationalists alike during Kant’s era, that each of us is immediately aware only of our mental images, and that the existence of the external world is consequently doubtful. In the present discussion, we learn more explicitly that Kant rejects this theory of perception in favour of a ‘direct’ theory of perception. In the latter, we apprehend external objects without the need for any intermediary, self-enclosing set of mental images (A371).
Kant’s rationale is that since space itself is a form of our awareness, we directly apprehend objects in the space that our minds project. The objects that we apprehend are admittedly only appearances of things in themselves, but they are nonetheless perceived directly as having an ‘outer’ reality. The theory of perception based on the assumption that we are immediately aware only of our mental images is thus mistaken, based as it is on an ambiguity in the expression ‘outside us’. As he states, the expression is ‘unavoidably ambiguous, sometimes signifying what as thing in itself exists apart from us in itself, and sometimes signifying what belongs merely to outer appearance’ (A373). Its ‘directness’ notwithstanding, it is important to keep in mind that Kant’s direct theory of perception establishes an awareness of outer appearances, not of things in themselves. All in all, though, Kant is confident that there is no problem about the existence of the external world because the world’s externality is of our very own making, stemming from our own projection of space.
As he showed in the Refutation of Idealism, Kant’s deeper point in the Fourth Paralogism is to underscore how our self-awareness depends inextricably upon the supposition of an external world, and that it is impossible to know ourselves independently of that external world. With this claim, Kant implicitly criticizes Descartes’s famous effort in the cogito (‘I think, therefore I am’) to know himself with certainty, under the assumption that there might be no external world.
When considering the Four Paralogisms as a whole, we are not left simply in a condition where the knowledge of our ultimate inner nature is denied to us. There is a bright side. Kant regards reason’s inability to attain knowledge of things in themselves as ‘a hint from reason, to turn our self-knowledge towards fruitful practical use, and away from fruitless and extravagant speculation’ (B421). The revelation of the Paralogisms as invalid arguments clears the way for us to focus more productively on another side of our reason, namely, its role in moral awareness as a solid guide to practical life. As our examination of Kant’s moral theory will show, he maintains that reason gives us an a priori foundation for action in reference to what we ought to do. In contrast to the sceptical spirit of the Paralogisms, Kant will postulate
the immortality of the soul as a moral necessity, despite the absence of scientific knowledge of the soul’s immortality.
Key idea: The failure of metaphysics shifts our attention to morality
Insofar as Kant repeatedly maintains that metaphysical knowledge is impossible – as in the Paralogisms – he appears to be a sceptic. His positive philosophical project, however, is to emphasize our moral awareness in light of the inadequacy of constructing airtight logical proofs. This effort to highlight morality occurs throughout the second half of the Critique of Pure Reason.
Dig Deeper
Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, Part Four, Sections 12 and 13 (Yale University Press, 1983)
Karl Ameriks, Kant’s Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (Clarendon Press, 1982)
Andrew Brook, Kant and the Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Michelle Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, Chapter 5 (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
C. Thomas Powell, Kant’s Theory of Self-Consciousness (Clarendon Press, 1990)
Study questions
1 What is the difference between understanding and reason?
2 What is ‘dialectic’? What are the two main kinds of dialectic? Why does Kant entitle this section of the book the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’?
3 What are the respective topics of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, the Antinomy of Pure Reason and the Ideal of Pure Reason?
4 The Paralogisms of Pure Reason discuss the self in relation to which category of the understanding?