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

by Norman Kemp Smith

But the first stage of the cosmological argument, that by which it is distinguished from the ontological, is itself fallacious. A whole nest of dialectical assumptions lies hidden in its apparently simple and legitimate inference from the contingent to the necessary. To advance from the contingent to the necessary, from the relative to the absolute, from the given to the transcendent, is just as illegitimate as the opposite process of passing from Idea to existence. The necessity of thought, which is in both cases the sole ground of the inference, is found on examination to be of merely subjective character. No less than three false assumptions are involved in this inference. In the first place, the principle that everything must have a cause, which can be proved to be valid only within the world of sense, is here applied to the sensible world as a whole; and is therefore employed in the wider form which coincides with the fundamental principle of the higher faculty of Reason. We assume, that if the conditioned be given, the totality of its conditions up to the unconditioned is given likewise. No such principle can be granted. As it is synthetic, it could be established only as a condition of the possibility of experience. But no such proof is offered: the principle is based upon a purely intellectual concept. Secondly, the inference to a first cause rests on the kindred assumption that an infinite series of empirical causes is impossible. That conclusion can never be drawn, even within the realm of experience. How, then, can we rely upon it in advancing beyond experience? Certainly, no one can prove that the empirical series is infinite, but just as little can we establish the opposite. In discussing the third and fourth antinomies Kant has shown that the existence of a first cause or of an absolutely necessary Being, though possible (or rather, possibly possible), is never demonstrable. Thirdly—as has been shown in A 592-3 = B 620-1—in inferring to an unconditioned cause, it is blindly assumed that the removal of all conditions does not at the same time remove the very concept of necessity. Our only notion of necessity is derived from experience, and therefore depends on those finite conditions which the argument would deny to us. The concept of unconditioned necessity is entirely null and void.

The fourth defect, which Kant enumerates, refers to the second stage of the cosmological argument, and has already been considered. He ought also to have mentioned a still further assumption underlying its first stage, namely, that a concept which represents a limited being, as, for instance, that of matter, cannot represent necessary existence. This also is an assumption which it cannot justify. This objection Kant has himself stated in A 586 = B 614 and A 588 = B 616.[1621]

Comment.—We are apt to overlook the wider sweep which Kant’s criticism takes in this section, owing to his omission to notify the reader that he is here calling in question a principle which he has hitherto been taking for granted, namely, the principle in terms of which he has in the opening sections of the Dialectic defined the faculty of Reason, that if the conditioned be given the totality of conditions up to the unconditioned is given likewise. The first step in his rejection of this principle occurs as merely incidental to his criticism of the ontological argument. It is there shown that the concept of the unconditionally necessary is without meaning. Now, in this present section, he calls in question the principle itself. It must be rejected not only, as stated in the third of the above objections, because the concept of the unconditioned, which tacitly implies the factor of absolute necessity, is without real significance, but also for two further reasons—those above cited in the first and second objections. How very differently the problems of the Dialectic appear, and how very differently the Ideas of Reason have to be regarded, when this principle, and also the concept of the unconditioned of which it is the application, are thus called in question, will be shown in the sequel.

DISCOVERY AND EXPLANATION OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL ILLUSION IN ALL TRANSCENDENTAL PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF A NECESSARY BEING[1622]

Statement.—We do not properly fulfil the task prescribed by Critical teaching in merely disproving the cosmological argument. We must also explain its hold upon the mind. If it is, as Kant insists, more natural to the mind than the ontological, and yet, as we have just seen, is more fallacious; if it has not been invented by philosophers, but is the instinctive reasoning of the natural man, it must rest, like all dialectical illusion, upon a misunderstanding of the legitimate demands of pure Reason. Reason demands the unconditioned, and yet cannot think it.

“Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human Reason the veritable abyss.... We can neither help thinking, nor can we bear the thought, that a Being—even if it be the one which we represent to ourselves as supreme amongst all Beings—should, as it were, say to itself: ‘I am from eternity to eternity, and outside me there is nothing save what is through my will; but whence am I?’ All support here fails us; and supreme perfection, no less than the least perfection, is unsubstantial and baseless for the merely speculative Reason....”[1623]

We are obliged to think something as necessary for all existence, and yet at the same time are unable to think anything as in itself necessary—God as little as anything else.

The explanation[1624] of this strange fact must be that which follows as a corollary from the limitation of our knowledge to sense-experience, namely, that our concepts of necessity and contingency do not concern things in themselves, and cannot therefore be applied to them in accordance with either of the two possible alternatives. Each alternative must express a subjective principle of Reason; and the two together (that something exists by necessity, and that everything is only contingent) must form complementary rules for the guidance of the understanding. These rules will then be purely heuristic and regulative, relating only to the formal interests of Reason, and may well stand side by side. For the one tells us that we ought to philosophise as if there were a necessary first ground for everything that exists, i.e. that we ought to be always dissatisfied with relativity and contingency, and to seek always for what is unconditionally necessary. The other warns us against regarding any single determination in things (such, for instance, as impenetrability or gravity) as absolutely necessary, and so bids us keep the way always open for further derivation. In other words, Reason guides the understanding by a twofold command. The understanding must derive phenomena and their existence from other phenomena, just as if there were no necessary Being at all; while at the same time it must always strive towards the completeness of that derivation, just as if such a necessary Being were presupposed. It is owing to a transcendental illusion or subreption that we view the latter principle as constitutive, and so think its unity as hypostatised in the form of an Ens realissimum. The falsity of this substitution becomes evident as soon as we consider that unconditioned necessity, as a thing in itself, cannot even be conceived, and that the “Idea” of it cannot, therefore, be ascribed to Reason save as a merely formal principle, regulative of the understanding in its interpretation of given experience.[1625]

Comment.—The reader may observe that, when Kant is developing this sceptical view of the Ideal of Reason, the explanation of dialectical illusion in terms of transcendental idealism falls into the background. The illusion is no longer traced to a confusion between appearances and things in themselves, but to the false interpretation of regulative principles as being constitutive. When it is the cosmological problem with which we are dealing, the two illusions do, indeed, coincide. If we view the objects of sense-experience as things in themselves, we are bound to regard the Ideal completion of the natural sciences as an adequate representation of ultimate reality. But in Rational Theology, which is professedly directed towards the definition of a Being distinct from nature and conditioning all finite existence, it is not failure to distinguish between appearance and things in themselves, but the mistaking of a merely formal Ideal for a representation of reality, that is alone responsible for the conclusions drawn.

In A 617-18 = B 645-6 Kant makes statements which conflict with the teaching of A 586 = B 614 and A 588 = B 616. In the latter passages he has argued that the concept of a limited being may not without specific proof be taken as contradictory of absolute necessity. He now categorically declares that the philosophers of antiquity are in error in regarding matter as primitive and necessary; and the reason which he gives is that the regulative principle of Reason forbids us to view extension and impenetrability, “which together constitute the concept of matter,” as ultimate principles of experience. But obviously Kant is here going further than his regulative principle will justify. It demands only that we should always look for still higher principles of unity, and so keep open the way for possible further derivation; it does not enable us to assert that such will actually be found to exist. Notwithstanding the Ideal demands of the regulative principle, matter may be primordial and necessary, and its properties of extension and impenetrability may not be derivable from anything more ultimate.