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

by Norman Kemp Smith

SOLUTION OF THE FOURTH ANTINOMY[1598]

Statement.—The above solution is adopted. Both thesis and antithesis may be true, the latter of the world of sense and the former of its non-empirical ground. All things sensible are contingent, but the contingent series in its entirety may nevertheless rest upon an unconditionally necessary being. The unconditioned, since it is outside the series, does not require that any one link in the series should be itself unconditioned. “Reason follows its own course in the empirical, and again a peculiar course in its transcendental use,” i.e. it limits itself by the law of causality in dealing with appearances, lest in losing the thread of the empirical conditions it should fall into idle and empty speculations; while, on the other hand, it limits that law to appearances, lest it should wrongly declare that what is useless for the explanation of appearances is therefore impossible in itself. This does not prove that an absolutely necessary being is really possible, but only that its impossibility must not be concluded from the necessary contingency of all things sensuous.

Comment.—Kant’s method of distinguishing[1599] this conclusion from that of the preceding antinomy is again artificial. “Necessary being” is not in conception more extramundanum than “unconditioned cause.” If Kant’s distinction were valid, the argument of the fourth antinomy would no longer be cosmological; it would coincide with the problem of the Ideal of Pure Reason.

CONCLUDING NOTE ON THE WHOLE ANTINOMY OF PURE REASON[1600]

Statement.—When we seek the unconditioned entirely beyond experience, our Ideas cease to be cosmological; they become transcendent. They separate themselves off from all empirical use of the understanding, and create to themselves an object, the material of which is not taken from experience, and which is therefore a mere thing of the mind (blosses Gedankending). None the less the cosmological Idea of the fourth antinomy impels us to take this step. When sensuous appearances, as merely contingent, require us to look for something altogether distinct in nature from them, our only available instruments, in so doing, are those pure concepts of things in general which contingent experience involves. We use them as instruments in such manner as may enable us to form, through analogy, some kind of notion of intelligible things. Taken in abstraction from the forms of sense, they yield that notion of an absolutely necessary Being which is equivalent to the concept of the theological Ideal.

CONCLUDING COMMENT ON KANT’S DOCTRINE OF THE ANTINOMIES

We may now, in conclusion, briefly summarise the results obtained in this chapter. Kant fails to justify the assertion that on the dogmatic level there exist antinomies in which both the contradictory alternatives allow of cogent demonstration. His proofs are in every instance invalid. The real nature of antinomy must, as he himself occasionally intimates, be defined in a very different manner, namely, as a conflict between the demand of Reason for unity and system, and the specific nature of the conditions, especially of the spatial and temporal conditions, under which the sensuous exists. In this wider form it constitutes a genuine problem, which demands for its solution the fundamental Critical distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves, and also a more thoroughgoing discussion than has yet been attempted of the nature of Reason and of the function of its Ideas. It is to these connected questions that Kant devotes his main attention in the remaining portions of the Dialectic, so that in passing to the Ideal of Pure Reason he is not proceeding to the treatment of a new set of problems, but to the restatement and to the more adequate solution of the fundamental conflict between understanding and Reason.

The observations which closed our comment upon the Paralogisms are thus again in order. The teaching of the sections on the Antinomies, no less than that of those on the Paralogisms, is incomplete, and if taken by itself is bound to mislead. The Ideas of an unconditioned self and of an unconditioned ground of nature have thus far been taken as at least conceptually possible, and as signifying what may perhaps be real existences. These Ideas are in certain of the remaining sections of the Dialectic called in question. They are there declared to be without inherent meaning. They are useful fictions—heuristische Fiktionen—and in their psychological nature are simply schemata of regulative principles. Their theoretical significance consists merely in their regulative and limitative functions. They must not be regarded, even hypothetically, as representing real existences. In the practical (i.e. ethical) sphere they do indeed acquire a very different standing. But with that the Critique of Pure Reason is not directly concerned. The reader may therefore be warned not to omit the chapter on the Ideal of Pure Reason, on the supposition that it embodies only a criticism of the Cartesian and teleological proofs of God’s existence. It is an integral part of Critical teaching, and carries Kant’s entire argument forward to its final conclusions. Only in view of the new and deeper considerations, which it brings to light, can his treatment even of the Antinomies be properly understood. Its main opening section (Section II.) is, indeed, among the most scholastically rationalistic in the entire Critique; but in the later sections it unfolds, with a boldness and consistency to which we find no parallel in the treatment of the Paralogisms and of the Antinomies, the full consequences of the more sceptical of Kant’s alternating standpoints. It disintegrates the concepts of the unconditioned, which have hitherto been employed without analysis and without question; and upon their elimination from among the legitimate instruments of Reason, the situation undergoes entire transformation, the two points of view appearing for the first time in the full extent of their divergence and conflict. For Kant’s Idealist view of Reason and of its Ideas still continues to find occasional statement, showing that he has not been able decisively to commit himself to this more sceptical interpretation of the function of Reason; that he is conscious that the Idealist view alone gives adequate expression to certain fundamental considerations which have to be reckoned with; and that unless the two views can in some manner be reconciled with one another, a really definitive and satisfactory solution of the problem has not been reached. When, therefore, we speak of Kant’s final conclusions, we must be taken as referring to the twofold tendencies, sceptical and Idealist, which to the very last persist in competition with one another. The greater adequacy of Kant’s argument in the chapter on the Ideal of Pure Reason and in the important Appendix attached to the Dialectic consists in its forcible and considered exposition of both attitudes. Most of the sections on the Antinomies must, as we have seen, be dated as among the earliest parts of the Critique. Their teaching is correspondingly immature. The chapter on the Ideal and the Appendix, on the other hand, were among the latest to be written, and contain, together with the central portions of the Analytic, our most authoritative exposition of Kant’s Critical principles.

CHAPTER III
THE IDEAL OF PURE REASON

SECTIONS I and II
THE TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAL[1601]