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

by Norman Kemp Smith

They do not carry our knowledge beyond the objects of possible experience, but only extend the empirical unity of experience. They are the schemata of regulative principles. In them Reason is concerned with nothing but its own inherent demands; and as their unity is the unity of a system which is to be sought only in experience,[1676] qualities derived from the sensible world can quite legitimately be employed in their specific determination. They are not inherently dialectical; their demands have the rationality which we have a right to expect in the Ideals of Reason. When Critically examined, they propound no problem which Reason is not in itself entirely competent to solve.[1677] It is to their misemployment that transcendental illusion is due. In the form in which they arise from the natural disposition of our Reason they are good and serviceable.[1678]

To the question what is the most adequate form in which the regulative schema can be represented,[1679] Kant gives an answer which shows how very far he is from regarding the Leibnizian Ens realissimum as the true expression of the Ideal of Reason. It is through the employment of teleological concepts that we can best attain the highest possible form of systematic unity.

“The highest formal unity ... is the purposive unity of things. The speculative [i.e. theoretical] interest of Reason makes it necessary to regard all order in the world as if it had originated in the purpose of a Supreme Reason. Such a principle opens out to our Reason, as applied in the field of experience, altogether new views as to how the things of the world may be connected according to teleological laws, and so enables it to arrive at their greatest systematic unity. The assumption of a Supreme Intelligence, as the one and only cause of the universe, though in the Idea alone, can therefore always benefit Reason and can never injure it.”[1680]

For so long as this assumption is employed only as a regulative principle, even error cannot be really harmful. The worst that can happen is that where we expected a teleological connection, a merely mechanical or physical one is met with. If, on the other hand, we leave the solid ground of experience, and use the assumption to explain what we are unable to account for in empirical terms, we sacrifice all real insight, and confound Reason by transforming a concept, which is anthropomorphically determined for the purposes of empirical orientation, into a means of explaining order as non-natural and as imposed from without on the material basis of things.

This is a point of sufficient importance to call for more detailed statement. Hume in his Dialogues points out that the main defect in the teleological proof of God’s existence is its assumption that order and design are foreign to the inherent constitution of things, and must be of non-natural origin. The argument is therefore weakened by every advance in the natural sciences. It also runs directly counter to the very phenomena, those of animal life, upon which it is chiefly based, since the main characteristic of the organic in its distinction from the inorganic is its inner wealth of productive and reproductive powers. With these criticisms Kant is in entire agreement. From them, in the passage before us, he derives an argument in support of a strictly regulative interpretation of his “als ob” doctrine. The avowed intention of the teleological argument is to prove from nature the existence of an intelligent supreme cause. If therefore its standpoint be held to with more consistency than its own defenders have hitherto shown, it will be found to rest upon the regulative principle, that we must study nature as if an inherent order were native to it, and so seek to approach by degrees, in proportion as such natural unity is empirically discovered, the absolute perfection which inspires our researches. But if we transform our Ideal into an instrument of explanation, beginning with what ought properly to be only our goal, we delude ourselves with the belief that what can only be acquired through the slow and tentative labours of empirical enquiry is already in our possession.

“If I begin with a supreme purposive Being as the ground of all things, the unity of nature is really surrendered, as being quite foreign and accidental to the nature of things, and as not to be known from its own general laws. There thus arises a vicious circle: we are assuming just that very point which is mainly in dispute.”[1681]

Such a method of argument is self-destructive, since if we do not find order and perfection in the nature of things, and therefore in their general and necessary laws, we are not in a position to infer such a Being as the source of all causality.

To the question whether we may not interpret natural order, once it has been discovered by empirical investigation, as due to the divine will, Kant replies that such procedure is allowable only on the condition that it is the same to us whether we say that God has wisely willed it or that nature has wisely arranged it. We may admit the Idea of a Supreme Being only in so far as it is required by Reason as the regulative principle of all investigation of nature;

“...and we cannot, therefore, without contradicting ourselves, ignore the general laws of nature in view of which the Idea was adopted, and look upon the purposiveness of nature as contingent and hyper-physical in its origin. For we were not justified in assuming above nature a Being of those qualities, but only in adopting the Idea of it in order to be able to view the appearances, according to the analogy of a causal determination, as systematically connected with one another.”[1682] “Thus pure Reason, which at first seemed to promise nothing less than the extension of knowledge beyond all limits of experience, contains, if properly understood, nothing but regulative principles....”[1683]