A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'

by Norman Kemp Smith

“The simplicity of substance ... is not presupposed as the real ground of the properties of the soul. For these may rest on altogether different grounds of which we can know nothing.”

That, however, is only Kant’s unbiassed estimate of the theoretical evidence; it is not an expression of his own personal belief.

CHAPTER II
THE ANTINOMY OF PURE REASON[1495]

This introduction summarises the preceding argument, and distinguishes the new problems of Antinomy from those of the Paralogisms. In rational psychology pure Reason attains, as it were, euthanasia; in the antinomies an entirely different situation is disclosed. For though rational cosmology is able to expound itself in a series of demonstrated theses, its teaching stands in irreconcilable conflict with the actual nature of appearances, as expressed through a series of antitheses which are demonstrable in an equally cogent manner.

SECTION I
SYSTEM OF THE COSMOLOGICAL IDEAS[1496]

The first eight paragraphs of this section are of great textual interest. They must have been written at a time when Kant still intended to expound his entire criticism of metaphysical science in the form of a doctrine of antinomy. For they define the Ideas of Reason as exclusively cosmological,[1497] and give a very different explanation of their origin from that which has been expounded in the preceding chapters. Evidently, therefore, this part of the section must have been written prior to Kant’s formulation of the metaphysical deduction from the three species of syllogism. This is supported by the fact that the argument begins anew, just as if the matter had not previously been discussed; and that, though a new view of the nature of Reason is propounded, there is not the least mention of the more Idealist view which it displaces. Reason, Kant here teaches, is not a faculty separate from the understanding, and does not therefore produce any concept peculiar to itself. Reason is simply a name for the understanding in so far as it acts independently of sensibility, and seeks, by means of its pure forms, in abstraction from all empirical limitations, to grasp the unconditioned. “The transcendental Ideas are in reality nothing but categories extended to the unconditioned.” The intelligible, as thus conceived by the understanding, expresses itself, as he later shows, in a series of theses; while the sensuous expresses its opposite and conflicting character in a series of antitheses.

Yet not all categories yield a concept of the unconditioned. That is possible only to those which concern themselves with a series of members conditioning and conditioned, and in reference to which, therefore, the postulate of an unconditioned would seem to be legitimate, viz.: (1) unconditioned quantity in space and time; (2) unconditioned quality (indivisibility and simplicity) of reality in space (matter); (3) unconditioned causality of appearances; (4) unconditioned necessity of appearances. As this arrangement is determined by the needs of Kant’s architectonic, no detailed comment is here called for. Its consequences we shall have ample opportunity to consider later. As already noted, Kant’s statement in A 414 = B 441, that “the category of substance and accident does not lend itself to a transcendental Idea,” shows very clearly that, at the time when he composed this passage, he had not yet bethought himself of placing a separate and independent Idea at the basis of rational psychology. But as Kant here strives to follow the fourfold arrangement of the categories, the content of these paragraphs must either have been later recast or have been composed in the interval between his discovery of the metaphysical deduction of the categories and his formulation of the corresponding deduction of the Ideas from the three forms of syllogism. It may also be observed that the derivation of the cosmological Idea from the hypothetical syllogism, which embodies only the category of causality, clashes with the above specification of it in terms of all four rubrics of category.

The remaining paragraphs (ninth to thirteenth) of this section must be of later date, as they are developed in view of the independent treatment of the theological Ideal.[1498] (Adickes, in dating the ninth and tenth paragraphs with the preceding instead of with the concluding paragraphs, would seem to have overlooked this fact.) In order to justify the treatment of the Ideas of a first cause and of unconditioned necessity, as cosmological, Kant now asserts that the antinomies concern only appearances—“our [cosmical] Ideas being directed only to what is unconditioned among the appearances,”[1499] and not to noumena.[1500] His explanation of the nature of transcendental illusion, and of the antinomies in particular, as being due to a failure to distinguish between appearance and things in themselves, is thus ruthlessly sacrificed to considerations of architectonic. Kant could not, of course, consistently hold to the position here adopted; but it causes him from time to time, especially in dealing with the third and fourth antinomies, to make statements which tend seriously to obscure the argument and to bewilder the careful reader.

Kant is far from clear as to the relation in which the concepts of the totality of conditions and of the unconditioned stand to one another.[1501] In A 322 = B 379 they would seem to be taken as exactly equivalent concepts. In A 416-17 = B 443-5 they are apparently regarded as distinct, the former only leading up to the latter. But discussion of this important point must meantime be deferred.[1502]

SECTION II
ANTITHETIC OF PURE REASON[1503]