%(c) The Reason's Ideas of the Unconditioned (Transcendental Dialectic).%—"All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds thence to the understanding, and ends with reason." The understanding is the faculty of rules, reason the faculty of principles. The categories of the understanding are necessary concepts which make experience possible, and which, therefore, can always be given in experience; the Ideas of reason are necessary concepts to which no corresponding object can be given. Each of the Ideas gives expression to an unconditioned. How does the concept of the unconditioned arise, and what service does it perform for knowledge?
As perceptions are connected by the categories in the unity of the understanding, and thus are elevated into experience, so the manifold knowledge of experience needs a higher unity, the unity of reason, in order to form a connected system. This is supplied to it by the Ideas—which, consequently, do not relate directly to the objects of intuition, but only to the understanding and its judgments—in order, through the concept of the unconditioned, to give completion to the knowledge of the understanding, which always moves in the sphere of the conditioned, i.e., to give it the greatest possible unity together with the greatest possible extension. The concept of the absolute grows out of the logical task which is incumbent on reason, i.e., inference, and it may be best explained from this as a starting point. In the syllogism the judgment asserted in the conclusion is derived from a general rule, the major premise. The validity of this general proposition is, however, itself conditional, dependent on higher conditions. Then, as reason seeks the condition for each conditioned moment, and always commands a further advance in the series of conditions, it acts under the Idea of the totality of conditions, which, nevertheless, since it can never be given in experience, does not denote an object, but only an heuristic maxim for knowledge, the maxim, namely, never to stop with any one condition as ultimate, but always to continue the search further. The Idea of the unconditioned or of the completeness of conditions is a goal which we never attain, but which we are continually to approach. The categories and the principles of the understanding were constitutive principles, the Ideas are regulative merely; their function is to guide the understanding, to give it a direction helpful for the connection of knowledge, not to inform it concerning the actual character of things.
Since reason is the faculty of inference (as the understanding was found to be the faculty of judgment), the forms of the syllogism perform the same service for us in our search for the Ideas as the forms of judgment in the discovery of the categories. To the categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive syllogisms correspond the three concepts of reason, the soul or the thinking subject, the world or the totality of phenomena, and God, the original being or the supreme condition of the possibility of all that can be thought. By means of these we refer all inner phenomena to the ego as their (unknown) common subject, think all beings and events in nature as ordered under the comprehensive system of the (never to be experienced) universe, and regard all things as the work of a supreme (unknowable) intelligence. These Ideas are necessary concepts; not accidental products nor mere fancies, but concepts sprung from the nature of reason; their use is legitimate so long as we remember that we can have a problematical concept of objects corresponding to them, but no knowledge of these; that they are problems and rules for knowledge, never objects and instruments of it. Nevertheless the temptation to regard these regulative principles as constitutive and these problems as knowable objects is almost irresistible; for the ground of the involuntary confusion of the required with the given absolute lies not so much in the carelessness of the individual as in the nature of our cognitive faculty. The Ideas carry with them an unavoidable illusion of objective reality, and the sophistical inferences which spring from them are not sophistications of men, but of pure reason itself, are natural misunderstandings from which even the wisest cannot free himself. At best we can succeed in avoiding the error, not in doing away with the transcendental illusion from which it proceeds. We can see through the illusion and avoid the erroneous conclusions built upon it, not shake off the illusion itself.
On this erroneous objective use of the Ideas three so-called sciences are based: speculative psychology, speculative cosmology, and speculative theology, which, together with ontology, constitute the stately structure of the (Wolffian) metaphysics. The Critique of Reason completes its work of destruction when, as Dialectic (Logic cf. Illusion), it follows the refutation of dogmatic ontology—developed in the Analytic—which believed that it knew things in themselves through the concepts of the understanding, with a refutation of rational psychology, rational cosmology, and rational theology. It shows that the first is founded on paralogisms, and the second entangled in irreconcilable contradictions, while the third makes vain efforts to prove the existence of the Supreme Being.
(i) The Paralogisms of Rational Psychology. The transcendental self-consciousness or pure ego which accompanies and connects all my representations, the subject of all judgments which I form, is, as the Analytic recognized, the presupposition of all knowing (pp. 358-359), but as such it can never become an object of knowledge. We must not make a given object out of the subject which never can be a predicate, nor substitute a real thinking substance for the logical subject of thought, nor revamp the unity of self-consciousness into the simplicity and identical personality of the soul. The rational psychology of the Wolffian school is guilty of this error, and whatever of proof it advances for the substantiality, simplicity, and personality of the soul, and, by way of deduction, for its immateriality and immortality as well as for its relation to the body, is based upon this substitution, this ambiguity of the middle term, and therefore upon a quaternio terminorum,—all its conclusions are fallacious. It is allowable and unavoidable to add in thought an absolute subject, the unity of the ego, to inner phenomena;[1] it is inadmissible to treat the Idea of the soul as a knowable thing. In order to be able to apply the category of substance to it, we would have to lay hold of a permanent in intuition such as cannot be found in the inner sense. Empirical psychology, then, alone remains for the extension of our knowledge of mental life, while rational psychology shrivels up from a doctrine into a mere discipline, which watches that the limits of experience are not overstepped. But even as a mere limiting determination it has great value. For, along with the hope of proving the immateriality and immortality of the soul, the fear of seeing them disproved is also dissipated; materialism is just as unfounded as spiritualism, and if the conclusions of the latter concerning the soul as a simple, immaterial substance which survives the death of the body, cannot be proved, yet we need not, for that reason, regard them as erroneous, for the opposite is as little susceptible of demonstration. The whole question belongs not in the forum of knowledge, but in the forum of faith, and that which we gain by the proof that nothing can be determined concerning it by theoretical reasoning (viz., assurance against materialistic objections) is far more valuable than what we lose.
[Footnote 1: The rational concept of the soul as a simple, independent intelligence does not signify an actual being, but only expresses certain principles of systematic unity in the explanation of psychical phenomena, viz., "To regard all determinations as existing in one subject, all powers, as far as possible, as derived from, one fundamental power, all change as belonging to the states of one and the same permanent being, and to represent all phenomena in space as totally distinct from acts of thought.">[
(2) The Antinomies of Rational Cosmology. If in its endeavor to spin metaphysical knowledge concerning the nature of the spirit and the existence of the soul after death out of the concept of the thinking ego the reason falls into the snare of an ambiguous terminus medius, the difficulties which frustrate its attempts to use the Idea of the world in the extension of its knowledge a priori are of quite a different character. Here the formal correctness of the method of inference is not open to attack. It may be proved with absolute strictness (and in the apagogical or indirect form, from the impossibility of the contrary) that the world has a beginning in time, and also that it is limited in space; that every compound substance consists of simple parts; that, besides the causality according to the laws of nature, there is a causality through freedom, and that an absolutely necessary Being exists, either as a part of the world or as the cause of it. But the contrary may be proved with equal stringency (and indirectly, as before): The world is infinite in space and time; there is nothing simple in the world; there is no freedom, but everything in the world takes place entirely according to the laws of nature; and there exists no absolutely necessary Being either within the world or without it. This is the famous doctrine of the conflict of the four cosmological theses and antitheses or of the Antinomy of Pure Reason, the discovery of which indubitably exercised a determining influence upon the whole course of the Kantian Critique of Reason, and which forms one of its poles. The transcendental idealism, the distinction between phenomena and noumena, and the limitation of knowledge to phenomena, all receive significant confirmation from the Antithetic. Without the critical idealism (that which is intuited in space and time, and known through the categories, is merely the phenomenon of things, whose "in itself" is unknowable), the antinomies would be insoluble. How is reason to act in view of the conflict? The grounds for the antitheses are just as conclusive as those for the theses; on neither side is there a preponderance which could decide the result. Ought reason to agree with both parties or with neither?
The solution distinguishes the first two antinomies, as the mathematical, from the second two, as the dynamical antinomies; in the former, since it is a question of the composition and division of quanta, the conditions may be homogeneous with the conditioned, in the latter, heterogeneous. In the former, thesis and antithesis are alike false, since both start from the inadmissible assumption that the universe (the complete series of phenomena) is given, while in fact it is only required of us (is an Idea). The world does not exist in itself, but only in the empirical regress of phenomenal conditions, in which we never can reach infinity and never the limitation of the world by an empty space or an antecedent empty time, for infinite space, like empty space (and the same holds in regard to time), is not perceivable. Consequently the quantity of the world is neither finite nor infinite. The question of the quantity of the world is unanswerable, because the concept of a sense-world existing by itself (before the regress) is self-contradictory. Similarly the problem whether the composite consists of simple elements is insoluble, because the assumption that the phenomenon of body is a thing in itself, which, antecedent to all experience, contains all the parts that can be reached in experience—in other words, that representations exist outside of the representative faculty—is absurd. Matter is infinitely divisible, no doubt, yet it does not consist of infinitely numerous parts, and just as little of a definite number of simple parts, but the parts exist merely in the representation of them, in the division (decomposition), and this goes as far as possible experience extends. The case is different with the dynamical antinomies, where thesis and antithesis can both be true, in so far as the former is referred to things in themselves and the latter to phenomena. The contradiction vanishes if we take that which the thesis asserts and the antithesis denies in different senses. The fact that in the world of phenomena the causal nexus proceeds without interruption and without end, so that there is no room in it either for an absolutely necessary Being or for freedom, does not conflict with this other, that beyond the world of sense there may exist an omnipotent, omniscient cause of the world, and an intelligible freedom as the ground of our empirically necessary actions. "May exist," since for the critical philosopher, who has learned that every extension of knowledge beyond the limits of experience is impossible, the question can concern only the conceivability of the world-ground and of freedom. This possibility is amply sufficient to give a support for faith, as, on the other hand, it is indispensable in order to satisfy at once the demands of the understanding and of reason, especially to satisfy their practical interests. For if it were not possible to resolve the apparent contradiction, and to show its members capable of reconciliation, it would be all over either with the possibility of experiential knowledge or with the basis of ethics and religion. Without unbroken causal connection, no nature; without freedom, no morality; and without a Deity, no religion. Of special interest is the solution of the third antinomy, which is accomplished by means of the valuable (though in the form in which it is given by Kant, untenable) conception of the intelligible character.[1] Man is a citizen of two worlds. As a being of the senses (phenomenon) he is subject in his volition and action to the control of natural necessity, while as a being of reason (thing in itself) he is free. For science his acts are the inevitable results of precedent phenomena, which, in turn, are themselves empirically caused; nevertheless moral judgment holds him responsible for his acts. In the one case, they are referred to his empirical character, in the other, to his intelligible character. Man cannot act otherwise than he does act, if he be what he is, but he need not be as he is; the moral constitution of the intelligible character, which reflects itself in the empirical character, is his own work, and its radical transformation (moral regeneration) his duty, the fulfillment of which is demanded, and, hence, of necessity possible.
[Footnote 1: On the difficulties in the way of this theory and the possibility of their removal cf. R. Falckenberg, Ueber den intelligiblen Character, zur Kritik der Kantischen Freiheitslehre (from the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. lxxv.), Halle, 1879.]
(3) Speculative Theology. The principle of complete determination, according to which of all the possible predicates of things, as compared with their opposites, one must belong to each thing, relates the thing to be determined to the sum of all possible predicates or the Idea of an ens realissimum, which, since it is the representation of a single being, may be called the Ideal of pure reason. From this prototype things, as its imperfect copies, derive the material of their possibility; all their manifold determinations are simply so many modes of limiting the concept of the highest reality, which is their common substratum, just as all figures are possible only as different ways of limiting infinite space. Or better: the derivative beings are not related to the ideal of the original Being as limitations to the sum of the highest reality (on which view the Supreme Being would be conceived as an aggregate consisting of the derivative beings, whereas these presuppose it, and hence cannot constitute it), but as consequences to a ground. But reason does not remain content with this entirely legitimate thought of the dependence of finite things on the ideal of the Being of all beings, as a relation of concepts to the Idea, but, dazzled by an irresistible illusion, proceeds to realize, to hypostatize, and to personify this ideal, and, since she herself is dimly conscious of the illegitimacy of such a transformation of the mere Idea into a given object, devises arguments for the existence of God. Reason, moreover, would scarcely be induced to regard a mere creation of its thought as a real being, if it were not compelled from another direction to seek a resting place somewhere in the regress of conditions, and to think the empirical reality of the contingent world as founded upon the rock of something absolutely necessary. There is no being, however, which appears more fit for the prerogative of absolute necessity than that one the concept of which contains the therefore to every wherefore, and is in no respect defective; in other words, rational theology joins the rational ideal of the most perfect Being with the fourth cosmological Idea of the absolutely necessary Being.