The Powers of Pure Reason

Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy

Alfredo Ferrarin

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226243290
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Critique of Pure Reason —Kant's First Critique—is one of the most studied texts in intellectual history, but as Alfredo Ferrarin points out in this radically original book, most of that study has focused only on very select parts. Likewise, Kant's oeuvre as a whole has been compartmentalized, the three Critiques held in rigid isolation from one another. Working against the standard reading of Kant that such compartmentalization has produced,   The Powers of Pure Reason  explores forgotten parts of the First Critique in order to find an exciting, new, and ultimately central set of concerns by which to read all of Kant's works.    Ferrarin blows the dust off of two egregiously overlooked sections of the First Critique—the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method. There he discovers what he argues is the Critique's greatest achievement: a conception of the unity of reason and an exploration of the powers it has to reach beyond itself and legislate over the world. With this in mind, Ferrarin dismantles the common vision of Kant as a philosopher writing separately on epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics and natural teleology, showing that the three Critiques are united by this underlying theme: the autonomy and teleology of reason, its power and ends. The result is a refreshing new view of Kant, and of reason itself.

CHAPTER ONE

The Architectonic and the Cosmic Concept of Philosophy

Newton saw for the first time order and regularity combined with great simplicity, where before him was found disorder and barely paired multiplicity; and since then comets run in geometrical courses. Rousseau discovered for the first time beneath the multiplicity of forms human beings have taken on their deeply buried nature and the hidden law by the observation of which providence is justified. Before that the objection of Alphonsus and Manes still held. After Newton and Rousseau, God is justified and Pope’s theorem is true.

—I. Kant, Bemerkungen, Ak 20: 58–59, ENG 9

1. Reason’s Needs, Interests, Dissatisfaction

In the first edition of the first Critique (1781), long before he realizes the implications of the notion of purposiveness and elaborates the critique of teleological judgment, Kant compares reason to an organism (KrV A 832–33).

Generally speaking a living body may be understood as a self-sustaining and internally organized independent being that is an end to itself. Reason has a life, and this implies it is not a neutral spectator, external and indifferent to its objects. In fact, it is inseparable from its interests and what it cares about.1

For an organism, living means turning its passivity into some form of activity. Reason’s passivity includes feelings and needs it finds in itself. But needs demand recognition and an activity that fulfills them. This is how passivity begins to be turned into activity. Reason’s neediness is not merely its unfortunate predicament of lacking what it desires, for this very condition reveals that it has drives and aspirations it deeply cares to realize. It is involved in its world. It has interests and on that account feels discontent with what it has. It actively pursues them insofar as it sets itself ends and promotes activities that give it satisfaction. Most of all, it values the importance of applying itself to the world in maximally coherent ways.

These are indeed analogies, but not arbitrary or imaginative figures of speech that can be replaced by other metaphors that might prove more adequate or appealing to our literary taste. Kant is describing how reason proceeds, what moves it, why and how, from its needs and desires to its highest and ideal aspirations. The internal necessity of his vocabulary, which borrows its analogies first from the language of the organism and later from that of an architect planning an edifice and of a personality setting itself ends, rests on its underlying theme, namely, reason’s purposiveness.

Reason is famously described as allotted a destiny (“to be burdened with questions it cannot dismiss,” KrV A vii) to which it is subject. It has drives that appear as insuppressible: most notably, it is bound to trespass limits whether it wills or not. Occasionally Kant speaks of reason’s instinct.2 When it comes specifically to reason’s needs, he shows how potent they can become. Reason is moved by a fundamental need that guides it: the search for meaning. What “reason seeks and needs” (welches doch die Vernunft sucht und bedarf, KrV B xiii, my translation) is the constancy of laws: a sensible nature. In a conception we will have to discuss later, reason seeks itself in the world in the form of a necessary and stable order, for it knows it has insight only into what it has produced according to its own design.3 This need to find meaning in its experience is a powerful drive for reason. It sets reason into motion, puts it to work, compels it to search for unity, necessity, a tight system of laws.

A need demands satisfaction. When it comes to reason’s general needs, as the need for it to orient itself in the field of the supersensible, Kant adds that reason has a “right” to see its needs satisfied.4 And yet if reason seeks lawfulness in its objects, still it cannot find rest or satisfaction in its empirical use. Even a perfectly sensible nature will be insufficient to satisfy reason. Neither the unity of experience in which its pure concepts have a meaningful and legitimate use,5 nor even mathematics with its shining examples of reason’s spontaneous and synthetic advancements,6 can appease reason and silence its ultimate questions.

If searching for meaning is reason’s fundamental need, the most pressing and highest expression of this need is the search for answers, especially to the three questions outlined in the Canon and to the question of man’s final destination (What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?). Not only does this need exert the strongest pull, it is a drive that is at once an end. To put it more sharply: the drive becomes an end, an interest, once we endorse it and take it as our motivation.

If in its empirical use reason looks for the unity of appearances under rules, in its pure use reason is the power to go beyond the understanding’s manifold cognitions to the minimal number of principles underlying and guiding the use of the understanding. When the series of conditions is given, reason looks for the subordination of the whole series under its maximum unity, its unconditional principle (KrV A 302–8/B 359–65). Thus reason produces the highest unity of knowledge. Reason’s demand is also reason’s maxim: to bring the understanding in its several rules to a complete unity with itself.

Reason rules the cognitions of the understanding, through whose mediation alone it is in contact with appearances. Reason acts on the understanding as the faculty of the unity of its rules under principles. In all this what reason demands is to go beyond experience, to the condition and the principles that make experience possible as a coherent whole. And what it cares about and seeks is the maximum completeness for all concepts used, because only completeness can satisfy it (Prol § 57, Ak 4: 354, ENG 143; § 44, Ak 4: 332, ENG 123). The ideas are the shape in which reason can think the completeness at which it aims in a determinate way (ibid.).

The distinction between a speculative and a practical interest of reason, and between a metaphysics of pure speculative principles and a metaphysics of morals, follows from this. The complex evolution of the concept of the highest good, from its separate ideal status in another world to its becoming the historical goal of practical reason (from the Canon and the Postulates to the Critique of Judgment and Religion), must also be understood in this context. And so must, finally, the distinction between a satisfaction unattainable for us in speculative terms and a practical satisfaction we hope for. Strictly speaking, however, a speculative satisfaction does obtain, not in the form of final theoretical answers to questions concerning the supersensible that are bound to remain unanswered, but in that of a solution that finally puts metaphysics on a scientific path, which again has completeness as its key. Except that it is the completeness of a system of cognitions for which the negative determination of limits is constitutive. And this is the full satisfaction Kant refers to in the very last sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason.7 Reason’s satisfaction is its full self-possession. The language of satisfaction is the best way to represent the inner dialectic of reason, and expresses Kant’s ambition to distance himself from ancient and modern conceptions of reason.

At the end of the Architectonic, Kant speaks of what the essay on Swedenborg first introduced: a sort of unrequited love reason has for metaphysics (Dreams, Ak 2: 367, ENG 354; KrV A 850/B 878). In the prefaces to the first Critique Kant returns to the theme through different analogies, all equally concrete and seemingly naturalizing, or even personifying, an all-too-human pure reason. In the A Preface (x–xi), Kant speaks of what reason must undertake and what it expects. He describes the task, to institute a tribunal, and says it is vain to pretend indifference toward metaphysics for in it lie reason’s highest interests. In the B Preface, he announces the promise of a brighter future, when metaphysics finally assumes the secure path of science. Reason’s love is unrequited because we are relentlessly sent back to metaphysics as to an estranged lover, who keeps leading us astray. Reason is not Luther’s “whore.” If anything, it is metaphysics that proves to be as seductive as it is beyond possession. As in Aristophanes’s myth in Plato’s Symposium, metaphysics (here dogmatic metaphysics) is intrinsically disappointing for reason’s love because what reason desires is a completion it cannot achieve, which metaphysics represents as a forever elusive mirage. This desire for completeness accounts for why lower forms of reason are directed outside reason, such as drives and impulses to trespass limits, which make sense only in light of the goal of completeness, of the totality they tend to.8

Especially if we are used to a reading of the first Critique that privileges the model of the natural sciences (notably, physics and mathematics), we may be surprised by the appearance of this teleological and quasi-psychological vocabulary precisely where we have to deal with what transcends nature and is altogether other than it, i.e., reason, and with science itself, from which teleology has presumably been banned. It might seem as if the model of science were progressively receding into the background as the Architectonic embraces the models of organic nature and of personality to articulate the essence of reason. But it would be quite wrong to conclude thus, for Kant’s aim is precisely to turn metaphysics into a science and to understand reason as a system. This is invariably what Kant stresses and is proud of: he has made metaphysics into a science. The organic and practical models are instrumental in this characterization.

If pure reason is compared to an organism, with drives, needs, interests, maxims, and ends, it has a distinct form of teleology we must analyze carefully. And it is in a broad sense practical before the specific distinction between knowledge and morality. “It is still one and the same reason which, whether from a theoretical or practical perspective, judges according to a priori principles” (KpV, Ak 5: 121, ENG 237). Pure reason is a free power (KrV A 738/B 766) that determines its interests (KpV, Ak 5: 119–20, ENG 236) and pursues the ends it sets itself. This power is not a power of insight or description. It is a normative power. Whether it is addressed to what is or what ought to be, reason legislates over its domains and prescribes a form of conduct as its end. It commands us to look for the unconditional unity of our experience of nature as it extends our cognitions, and commands us to carry out actions according to maxims for categorical imperatives. Its interest is not formal consistency with itself, but the promotion of ends (ibid.).

It is crucial to keep pure reason’s need distinct from all need arising from inclination and to distinguish between analogical and literal or descriptive discourse. When Kant speaks about the needs and interests of pure reason, he does mean they dictate its conduct. But they do so in a way that differs from how a need based on inclination makes us pursue objects.9

Pure reason needs to objectivize ideas, i.e., to find an object for its problematic concepts of complete and perfect totalities. In other words, a need responds to a problem. The problem arises because reason projects an idea for its consideration and wants to determine it. Ideas are therefore those ideal totalities in which reason becomes aware of its internal articulation and limits.

If a rational need is wholly different from a natural need, it is because reason is not a nature at all. Insisting on the interests, needs, love, and ends of reason and comparing reason to an organism do not come down to taking it as natural (if a very peculiar sort of nature). Reason is wholly unlike Hume’s nature.10 Kant’s understanding of reason as an organism is a very effective way to highlight the functional and interdependent unity of all members within a whole, but we would misunderstand Kant if we took him to explain or describe human nature the way we describe living beings. Describing nature means for Kant bringing it back to laws, the laws through which we can get an insight into its workings. Nature is given to our investigation as an object of study and a well-defined being. Kant’s reason does not purport to identify human nature, and not only because it is a pure reason, i.e., it looks for the principles according to which reason must think, not what individual minds or a presumed human nature happens to think. More fundamentally, reason is not a given or natural being alongside others because it has the being of an activity. Far from being purely metaphorical, the language adopted by Kant to talk about reason is the most appropriate way to address an activity, not a given. Far from being psychological, this language denotes a pure spontaneity that produces laws.

Reason’s proper activity is that of giving rules, laws, and ends to itself. If no laws or rules are given to reason, which is the only possible source and origin of all rules and laws and does not know of any authority outside itself it can pay heed to (KrV A xi–xii and n.; PhilEnz, Ak 29: 36), then hoping to bring reason back to laws is contradictory. For one thing, the comparison of reason with the organism is no more than an analogy: there is no naturalistic model or biological presupposition. For another, if we need an analogy at all, one with personality seems to fit reason better than that of organism because of reason’s most vital concern, its preoccupation with our ultimate destination and final end. This form of teleology definitely has nothing natural. It is qua rational that we have ends, not qua living organisms. Ends are not comparable to bodily urges, drives, or desires we find in ourselves. Ends are such that we must take it upon ourselves to pursue them. We must make them ours for them to be at all.

In fact, reason’s teleology is quite unnatural. Typically, an organism feels sorely a certain ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• introduction
• Chapter One : The Architectonic and the Cosmic Concept of Philosophy
• Chapter Two : A Priori Synthesis
• Chapter Three : Kant on Kant
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index