CONCLUDING COMMENT ON THE DIALECTIC
I may now summarise Kant’s answer to the three main questions of the Dialectic: (1) Whether, or in what degree, the so-called Ideas of Reason are concepts due to a faculty altogether distinct from the understanding, and how far, as thus originating in pure Reason, they allow of definition; (2) how far they are capable of a transcendental deduction; (3) what kind of objective validity this deduction proves them to possess.
These questions are closely interconnected; the solution of any one determines the kind of solution to be given to all three. Kant, as we have found, develops his final position through a series of very subtle distinctions by which he contrives to justify and retain, though in a highly modified form, the more crudely stated divisions between Ideas and categories, between Reason and understanding, upon which the initial argument of the Dialectic is based.
The answer amounts in essentials to the conclusion that understanding, in directing itself by means of Ideals, exercises a function so distinct from that whereby it conditions concrete and specific experience, that it may well receive a separate title; that the Ideas in terms of which it constructs these Ideals, though schematic (i.e. sensuous and empirical in content), are not themselves empirical, and so far from being merely extended concepts of understanding, express transcendental conditions upon which all use of the understanding rests.
Now if this position is to be justified, Kant ought to show that the fundamental Idea of Reason, that of the unconditioned, is altogether distinct from any concept of the understanding, and in particular that it must not be identified with the category of totality, nor be viewed as being merely the concept of conditioned existence with its various empirical limitations thought away. Needless to say, Kant does not fulfil these requirements in any consistent manner. The Critique contains the material for a variety of different solutions; it does not definitively commit itself to any one of them.
If the argument of A 650 ff. = B 678 ff. were developed we should be in possession of what may be called the Idealist solution. It would proceed somewhat as follows. Consciousness as such is always the awareness of a whole which precedes and conditions its parts. Such consciousness cannot be accounted for on the assumption that we are first conscious of the conditioned, and then proceed to remove limitations and to form for ourselves, by means of the more positive factors involved in this antecedent consciousness, an Idea of the totality within which the given falls. The Idea of the unconditioned, distinct from all concepts of understanding, is one of the a priori conditions of possible experience, and is capable of a transcendental deduction of equal validity with, and of the same general nature as, that of the categories. It is presupposed in the possibility of our contingently given experience.
As this Idea conditions all subordinate concepts, it cannot be defined in terms of them. That does not, however, deprive it of all meaning; its significance is of a unique kind; it finds expression in those Ideals which, while guiding the mind in the construction of experience, also serve as the criteria through which experience is condemned as only phenomenal.
But this, as we have found, is not a line of argument which Kant has developed in any detail. The passages which point to it occur chiefly in the introductory portions of the Dialectic; in its later sections they are both brief and scanty. When he sets himself, as in the chapter on the Ideal of Pure Reason and in the subsequent Appendix, to define his conclusions, it is a much more empirical, and indeed sceptical, line that he almost invariably follows. There are, he then declares, strictly no pure, a priori Ideas. The supposed Ideas of unconditionedness and of absolute necessity are discovered on examination to be without the least significance for the mind. The Ideas, properly defined, are merely schemata of regulative principles, and their whole content reduces without remainder to such categories as totality, substance, causality, necessity, transcendently applied. As Ideas, they are then without real meaning; but they can be employed by analogy to define an Ideal which serves an indispensable function in the extension of experience. From this point of view, the transcendental deduction of the Ideas is radically distinct from that of the categories. The proof is not that they are necessary for the possibility of experience, but only that they are required for its perfect, or at least more complete, development. And as Kant is unable to prove that such completion is really possible, the objective validity of the Ideas is left open to question. They should be taken only as heuristic principles; the extent of their truth, even in the empirical realm, cannot be determined by the a priori method that is alone proper to a Critique of Pure Reason.
The first view is inspired by the fundamental teaching of the Analytic, and is the only view which will justify Kant in retaining his distinction between appearance and things in themselves. All that is positive in the second view can be combined with the first view; but, on the other hand, the negative implications of the second view are at variance with its own positive teaching. For when the Ideas are regarded as empirical in origin no less than in function, their entire authority is derived from experience, and cannot be regarded as being transcendental in any valid sense of that term. In alternating between these two interpretations of the function of Reason, Kant is wavering between the Idealist and the merely sceptical view of the scope and powers of pure thought. On the Idealist interpretation Reason is a metaphysical faculty, revealing to us the phenomenal character of experience, and outlining possibilities such as may perhaps be established on moral grounds. From the sceptical standpoint, on the other hand, Reason gives expression to what may be only our subjective preference for unity and system in the ordering of experience. According to the one, the criteria of truth and reality are bound up with the Ideas; according to the other, sense-experience is the standard by which the validity even of the Ideas must ultimately be judged. From the fact that Kant should have continued sympathetically to develop two such opposite standpoints, we would seem to be justified in concluding that he discerned, or at least desiderated, some more complete reconciliation of their teaching than he has himself thus far been able to achieve, and that no solution which would either subordinate the Ideal demands of thought, or ignore the gifts of experience, could ever have been definitively accepted by him as satisfactorily meeting the issues at stake. The Idealist solution is that to which his teaching as a whole most decisively points; but he is as conscious of the difficulties which lie in its path as he is personally convinced of its ultimate truth. His continuing appreciation of the value of sceptical teaching is a tacit admission that the Idealist doctrines, in the form which he has so far been able to give to them, are not really adequate to the complexity of the problems. As further confirmation of the tentative character of Kant’s conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason, we have his own later writings. In the Critique of Judgment, published nine years later, in teaching less sceptical and more constructive, though still delicately balanced between the competing possibilities, and always, therefore, leaving the final decision to moral considerations, Kant ventures upon a restatement of the problems of the Dialectic. To this restatement both of the above tendencies contribute valuable elements.