Critique of Pure Reason

Much of Kant’s work in the prefaces and introduction explain the need for and nature of his project. Although this is a serious theoretical project, the opening of the 1781 (First Edition) preface makes it clear that Kant’s starting point is practical. According to Kant, human reason uses principles that are valuable and useful but when pushed beyond the realm of experience are incoherent and self-contradictory. Still, human reason must ask itself troubling questions that it cannot justifiably answer. Metaphysics is the “combat arena of these endless conflicts” (6).

Kant encounters four discrete types of metaphysical views, all of which, by his assessment, are faulty. Two of these include dogmatism and skepticism, which appear to be engaged in an antiquated battle between fundamentally baseless (but dogmatically asserted) claims on metaphysical truth, and a disturbing, eccentric skepticism about the validity of any claims on truth. For Kant, Leibniz and Hume are the greatest representatives of these views in the modern age, and he surely has them in mind here. John Locke’s empiricism represents an alternative to dogmatism and skepticism, but it fails to prove anything with necessity since it reduces knowledge to that gathered through the senses. Most unfortunate is an “indifferentism” that rejects the value of metaphysics in total. This is born of a spiritual weariness in Kant’s epoch that he thinks needs addressing. The old types of philosophical views have failed to contend with, and have perhaps even caused, this indifference. Thus, there is a practical requirement for a new kind of metaphysics, which Kant’s transcendental idealism aims to embody.

The indifferentism that Kant sees as so widespread functions, he writes, as “a call to reason to take on once again the most difficult of all its tasks–viz., that of self-cognition–and to set up a tribunal that will make reason secure in its rightful claims and will dismiss all baseless pretensions” (8). For Kant, this tribunal is the critique of pure reason, a project whose importance cannot be overstated since it avoids the illegitimate despotism of the dogmatists, the itinerant emptiness of the skeptics, and the unscientific, potential fanaticism of the empiricists. Indifferentism, “the mother of chaos and night,” is also addressed because Kant is attempting to provide metaphysics with a solid foundation, one that is solely based on necessary conditions and not on mere opinion.

Kant makes clear in the 1787 (Second Edition) preface that he cares about three metaphysical objects: “God, freedom, and immortality” (31). None of these can ever be known by reason directly, and so once again it is the practical importance of the concept that is essential. Kant’s transcendental idealism is a practical philosophy that seeks to situate human beings in the proper relationship with God, freedom, and immortality, by proving what we can and cannot know about them. In doing so, Kant hopes to overcome the dogmatists, skeptics, and indifferentists. If he can convince others that transcendental philosophy can do this, then he will not only change the way we think, but also the way we behave. It is an enlightened attempt at the transformation of the world: “Hence the primary and most important concern of philosophy is to deprive metaphysics, once and for all, of its detrimental influence, by obstructing the source of its error” (32). In part, this foreshadows the work Kant will undertake in a later division of the book, the “Transcendental Dialectic

The Critique of Pure Reason is Kant’s attempt at such a criticism of metaphysics. The introduction to the second edition outlines, in seven distinct sections, how to arrive at the nature of such a critique, and thus it sets the stage for the remainder of the work. The subtitle for the third section sums up the underlying practical reason for this rigorous theoretical enterprise: “Philosophy Needs a Science That Will Determine the Possibility, the Principles, and the Range of All A Priori Cognitions”(48). Indispensable assumptions and questions are raised in the introduction, especially the question as to the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments, as well as the distinction between sensibility and understanding. Kant writes: “Human cognition has two stems, viz. sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from a common root, though one unknown to us. Through sensibility objects are given to the mind; through understanding they are thought” (67). These two primal sources of cognition are of central importance to Kant’s distinction between experience and the operations of pure reason independent of experience. They will be of critical importance going forward.