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57 pages 1 hour read

Immanuel Kant

Critique of Pure Reason

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1781

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Part II: “Transcendental Logic,” Book I, Chapter IChapter Summaries & Analyses

Transcendental Doctrine of Elements

Part II: Transcendental Logic, Book I: Analytic of Concepts: Introduction - Chapter I, Section I Summary

Next, Kant engages the second half of the doctrine of the elements: the transcendental logic. According to Kant, all cognition arises from intuition or concepts. Intuitions are given in sensibility and concepts are given in the understanding. Kant writes, “Only from their union can cognition arise” (107). Both intuitions and concepts can be either pure or empirical. They are empirical if they involve sensations, and they are pure if not.

Kant is now concerned with pure understanding. Logic is “the science of the rules of the understanding” (107). A pure, general logic completely abstracts from the content of thought and deals only with the form of that thought. These are the a priori laws governing the use of the understanding. Kant’s transcendental approach to logic deals with the origins of these laws. Agreement with the formal laws of logic is not enough to guarantee truth, but it is a necessary condition.

Kant makes an important distinction between analytic and dialectical logic. The analytical use of logic examines its elementary components. The dialectical use of logic leads to illusions by making illegitimate claims about objects without access to the proper information. The transcendental logic will be divided into the analytic and the dialectic, and Kant begins with the analytic. The transcendental analytic engages in the “dissection of the power of understanding itself” (119). Whereas general logic might satisfy itself with dissecting concepts, the transcendental analytic must dissect the faculty of the mind that makes concepts possible. While our sensations are based on the affections of the mind, concepts are determined by functions, by which Kant means the productive capacity of thought to arrange appearances and unite them. This is also known as the power of judgement. Kant writes that if he can describe all the functions of judgment, then we can discover all the a priori elements of understanding, a necessary goal for the transcendental philosophy.

Part II: Transcendental Logic, Book I: Analytic of Concepts, Chapter I, Sections II-III Summary

Since understanding is the power of judging, Kant presents a table of the logical functions of judgment, of which there are 12 (124). The table is divided into four categories: quantity, quality, modality, and relation. Each of the four categories contains three closely related functions of judgment. For instance, the category of quantity contains the concepts of the universal, the particular, and the singular—the three fundamental ways in which the mind can judge the quantity of an object. This is meant to be a complete table of the power of judgment. Kant then includes a few comments on specific issues in the table. He writes that the transcendental logic differs from general logic insofar as it does not abstract from the content of the judgment itself.

Kant is still concerned with the constitution of human experience. The possibility of this experience rests on a synthetic procedure in which the “manifold” of the world is spontaneously processed by the mind: “the spontaneity of our thought requires that this manifold, in order to be turned into a cognition, must first be gone through, taken up, and combined in a certain manner. This act I call synthesis” (130). Synthesis is an act of a specific faculty of the human mind: the imagination. Though we have very little and infrequent awareness of the operation of the imagination, it is an “indispensable function of the soul” (130).

To have concepts, though, which are required for cognition, the synthesis of the imagination is not enough. The creation of concepts is the work of understanding. There are three steps, then, to the creation of concepts. First, consciousness must be given the manifold through space and time. Then, the imagination must synthesize this manifold. Finally, the understanding must produce concepts that determine the unity of an object presented to consciousness.

The present task is to comprehend how the understanding produces concepts. Kant provides a “Guide for the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of Understanding” (129). He follows the table of judgments with a table of fundamental categories. There are four kinds of categories that correspond to the kinds of judgement: quantity, quality, relation, and modality. Quantity, for example, includes unity, plurality, and allness, which correspond to the universal, particular, and singular in the table of judgment. These twelve categories are the “root concepts” of understanding, and therefore necessary for all other concepts (133). Kant ends this chapter with specific engagements with some of these root concepts to clarify common errors in the history of philosophy. 

Part II: “Transcendental Logic,” Book I, Chapter I Analysis

This chapter initiates Kant’s extensive engagement with the “transcendental logic,” the second part of the “doctrine of elements,” and by far the longest and most challenging part of the Critique. It is useful to continually reference Kant’s table of contents because the structure of this book is highly complex. Knowing where the current material is situated within the architecture of Kant’s project is very helpful for clarifying its purpose and contribution. Recall that the transcendental aesthetic dealt with the intuitions of space and time, which are of the faculty of sensibility. Transcendental logic, on the other hand, investigates concepts, which are of the faculty of understanding. All this is still within a critical project that attempts to determine the limits of human cognition. Therefore, the transcendental logic seeks to comprehend those limits as they regard understanding. The complete table of judgments and the corresponding table of categories (or “root concepts”) are meant to outline the most basic capacities of thought. Anything beyond the threshold of our capacity for judging is, by definition, unthinkable. Kant writes, “a cognition’s agreement with the universal and formal laws of understanding and reason, is indeed the conditio sine qua non, and hence the negative condition, of all of truth” (113).

In other words, the fact that a cognition agrees with the laws of understanding is not enough to guarantee its truth, but there can be no truth without this agreement. This is why Kant is keen on the division between the transcendental analytic and the transcendental dialectic, the basic division within the transcendental logic. Whereas the analytic presents the legitimate, pure, elementary, and complete forms of thought, the dialectic deals with a critique of the “logic of illusion” (114). Dialectical logic does not conform to the boundaries articulated by the analytic, and therefore is merely “a sophistical art of giving an air of truth to one’s ignorance” (114). Kant discusses the analytic first, which includes the table of judgments and table of categories, because it is only through knowing what the mind is and is not capable of that we can properly identify when reason is caught in the throes of dialectical illusion.

Additionally, it is important to develop the notion of transcendental logic itself, as opposed to the general logic. Transcendental logic is Kant’s invention. In some sense, it is more fundamental than a general logic. The latter uses laws of understanding regardless of whether they are empirical or pure. “Hence,” Kant writes, “the impudent use of general logic as an instrument (organon), in order (at least allegedly) to broaden and expand one’s knowledge, comes down to nothing but idle chatter, where anything one wishes is–with some semblance of plausibility–asserted or, for that matter, challenged at will” (115). For example, whereas in general logic we might empirically observe that some law is always valid, in transcendental logic we investigate the a priori conditions of the mind that would make such a law possible. Transcendental logic operates based on an idea of the unity of the understanding. This is the unity of the cognitive capacities of understanding before they are applied to empirical reality.

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