Critique of Pure Reason

“It is humiliating for human reason that it accomplishes nothing in its pure use, and even requires discipline to check its extravagances and avoid the deceptions that come from them” (672)

What we know about the world can never be reached purely through reason or purely through experience but only through both. Experiences, made up of the manifold of sense data (appearances) from our waking lives, would be a chaotic jumble without concepts to organize and bound those appearances via schemas into objects about which we can have axiomatic predispositions and engage with through logically-derived maxims of action. Without the acid test of experience, however, pure reason is a problem as well. Dealing only with transcendental ideas show more leaves nothing for falsification except logical contradiction, which, when transcendent of experience and the limitations of time and space, spins off into the infinite and its ensuring rational paradoxes (e.g., if all things have a cause what caused the first cause?). Pure reason also leaves the problem of the transcendental “I” that wrongly elevates the singularity of the rational individual to the plurality of all reason.

It is the mark of an elegant idea if it can be summarized substantively and succinctly. Whether I have done that kind of justice to Kant’s thesis is for you to judge, but any failing is my own. For despite this volume’s lack of brevity, it is consistent and persistent in its presentation of this main argument. Kant can be blamed, I think, for using 50 words where 10 would do, and for repeating arguments often and at length, and for inventing many new terms that lack distinct intuitive meaning but clearly have systematic relationships to each other. However, the overall intellectual experience is worthwhile if not entirely or consistently enjoyable.

There is hardly a discussion of rationality or phenomenology today that does not reference some or many of Kant’s ideas. Readers might also be surprised to see how many of Kant’s ideas find their way into mainstream understanding of cognition and experience. This book is an undertaking, however, and I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone even if I think that the experience was rewarding. For those interested in an introduction to these ideas, Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics is plenty sufficient.

I can’t summarize the argument, as vast as it is, so I want to talk about why I think this argument still matters and why engaging with it is worthwhile. The appeal is in recognizing, as Kant does, that appearances are all that we have available to us as the grounds upon which to know anything. I’ll take a little shortcut here to say that it’s our “experience” of the world that matters and not just our experience but the “manifold of experiences” or all experiences of phenomena that make up the things in themselves (i.e., the noumena). It a plurality of experiences that reveal to us more of the conditions of possibility that allow for those experiences to be. When we cultivate experience or limit or deny experiences (our own or other’s) we close off routes to knowledge. Engagement with pure reason and its transcendental concepts instead of engaging with experience and with others who experience easily results in replacing knowing with dogmatism, and dogmatism is subject to all the biases of pure reason even if it feels like truth. Systematic disengagement from experience, whether by willful self-isolation in our media bubbles, or by other means, degrades understanding rather than enhances it. And denying the legitimacy of the experiences of other thinking and experiencing people flattens the manifold of experience and also degrades understanding.

When dealing with metaphysics, as Kant sets out to do, it is hard to appreciate the value of a branch of thought that seems to concern itself with the transcendental at the expense of (even in spite of) pragmatics, but these arguments do nothing short of secure the foundations of intellectual enterprises (e.g., mathematics, natural science) that form the basis of rational, utilitarian inquiry and intellectual processes. He makes a case that those endeavors must work metaphysically but also that metaphysics means not a thing outside of the methodological and systematic organization and interpretation of experience that these fields support. The whole book is a careful, elaborate description of how experiences aggregate into understanding, which, under the guidance of reason, organizes and sets expectations and intentions toward the world that guide our experiences. Knowing is a cyclical and self-checking process that must be guided by methodological discipline. show less

To call Kant "dense" is an understatement on par with saying the same about the core of a neutron star. Kant's critiques are not easy going, but the bright side is that his description of the human condition, an attempt to restore science and knowledge in a world transformed by Newton and Hume, is worth the effort.

The Critique of Pure Reason is a (perhaps the) watershed in Western philosophy, rightly likened to Kant's own description of a "Copernican revolution" in thought. The book is Kant's groundwork for knowledge itself: the nature of space and time and logic as preconditions for knowledge, shared among all humans, at the cost of sacrificing metaphysics to the transcendental realm of the "unconditioned". In exchange, we restore show more free will, morality, and (for those so inclined) God to the world of human existence.

Kant is very much the "lawyer" and the detail-man, and his almost obsessive need to sort human nature into a concrete taxonomy is perhaps the weakest part of the work. Still, Kant's division into the phenomenal and the noumenal, the human and the unconditioned, remains foundational, and to understand Kant's argument here is to understand everything that comes after in the Continental tradition. Even if you disagree with Kant's conclusions, there is a wealth of thought to draw upon, from Kant's conception of human existence to his ideas on "things in themselves", morality, and freedom.

The Critiques are a chore, but the kind of chore that pays off dividends. show less

Having been awakened from his "dogmatic slumber" by reading Hume, Kant undertakes to defend his faith in both God and rationality from the nightmarish skepticism Hume explored. In the end, he borrowed most conceptual categories from Aristotle, buried them in new terminology and some of the best obfuscation known to Western philosophy, and proceeded to tell himself a nice bedtime story so that he could go back to peaceful sleep. It's a shame, because he was on to something. Modern psychological research is only confirming the reality of some of the conceptual categories Kant describes, locked inside the human nervous system a priori to experience. To unravel the sophistry of his extended argument requires cutting through the blurriness show more to clearly see the premises he so carefully hides. To understand much of Western philosophy which follows, some notion of Kant's argument is necessary. Unless, however, you are interested in theology, the second part of this book may be safely skipped. show less

The Critique of Pure Reason is listed among Good Reading’s 100 Significant Books. I found reading through that list was a great education--as valuable as college, and I’ve learned enormously from reading it--much more aware of the underpinnings of Western culture. That’s why I stuck though this, even though I’d have ordinarily turned away from this book from the very first paragraph:

Our reason has this peculiar fate that, with reference to one class of its knowledge, it is always troubled with questions which cannot be ignored, because they spring from the very nature of reason, and which cannot be answered, because they transcend the powers of human reason.

OK, right there I thought this is not a guy really worthy of spending my show more time with, because if something transcends the powers of human reason, you can’t argue for it, so what’s the point of philosophy? The rest of the preface explains he’s going to resort to “pure reason”--by which he means reason without resort to experience. And without experience, how can we check out premises? I guess that makes me an empiricist, but that just there made me skeptical of learning much from Kant before I’d ever gotten beyond the Preface. Kant’s tone also grated on me more than any philosopher I’d ever read--much, much more than Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Locke... Take this from the Preface:

But I beg to remind him that, if my subjective deduction does not produce in his mind the conviction of its certitude at which I aimed, the objective deduction, with which alone the present work is properly concerned, is in every respect satisfactory.

And that’s just the impression from the first dozens of pages of a book over 400 pages long. Once I dove into Kant’s main argument, it was easy to get lost. I don’t think he’s quite as difficult as Spinoza, but then I was far more sympathetic to Spinoza’s arguments and tone, which helped me see his Ethics through. I probably have just about as much philosophical disagreement with Plato, but Plato is a very engaging writer--truly--I found The Republic, The Symposium, The Apology and the other dialogues very engaging reads. But Kant combines the thorny prose of Spinoza with a philosophy even more inimical to me than Plato. Yet I did find pushing through much of this valuable--for the same reason as the other works on the list. My rating reflects that I hated the style and substance of Kant--but that doesn't mean I don't think the ideas aren't important to grasp. Because I can see Kant’s lines of argument descending from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in The Republic and threaded through so many other thinkers after him:

The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding. show less

Let me be completely straightforward here: this is not a review. Any attempt on my part to produce such a thing on none other than the great Critique would be a mix of hubris and dishonesty. What is this then?

Well, since reviewing this is out of question, this will be a kind of fairy-tale telling of my experience reading this monumental work. For let’s face it: just the prospect of having it all read is such a daunting task that if someone were to ask you if you would rather do this or go slay a dragon, you would probably happily choose the latter.

But jokes aside, truth is that Kant’s writing tends to be as clear as Victorian London’s famous smog. This is so much so that this opaqueness of his is almost a common trope among show more philosophers. So, for the purpose of my tale, what this means is that tackling it head on, especially on this Critique, looked then more like a challenge to be overcome than an opportunity for a philosophical promenade on Kant’s ideas. So what inspired me to overcome my fears? What was the tale behind this accomplishment?

Well, it all started when I found myself a philosophy student at college, and Kant was always popping up in the course’s syllabuses in the many classes I took on the subject of modern philosophy. However, since the philosophical canon is so vast, and there’s so little time to read all of it, that if it is true that I had until now many opportunities to read Kant, it is also true that almost all of those readings were mainly fragmentary, of selected texts focusing on particular subjects, never the whole of one of the critiques.

That meant that I kind of dodged my way throughout most of college without having neither the inclination nor the obligation to read Kant in depth, least of all this Critique. What I knew about it was mostly encyclopedic common places based on what I had learned in class and the things I read here and there on secondary sources. But this was about to change.

What happened was that I was finally presented with an opportunity to enroll in a class completely dedicated to reading Kant’s first critique. This class was a seminar, so the work was to be divided in parts, and each student would be assigned a bit of the critique to present to the rest of the group. So now I was faced with a choice: I could, if I so wished, to remain a fragmentary reader of Kant, going happily about my college life without ever thinking much of it; or I could make the most of the opportunity and give the whole reading a try. Naively, I chose the latter (I’m not much of a dragon slayer anyway).

And this was how I got into reading this book in the first place. Now that I have finished it, and with that perfect accuracy that only hindsight offers, I’m pretty glad I chose to do so. Imagining philosophy as country, Kant would be one of its most important cities, and this work this city’s most splendid cathedral. And since I was more of a philosophical tourist reading it, I now at least have this selfie to show off my intellectual prowess while I bask on the superficial joy of having accomplished such a colossal task.

Now, if you were to ask me for details about what I have learned and what insights I got from this work, I would definitely start spewing some trivialities that in the end would just amount to an incoherent blabber about Kant’s epistemological ideas. But I’m not worried. Why not? Because perhaps my tourist eye allowed me to fall in love with things I noticed here and there, and since this is such a complicated work, covering a lot of ground and with many layers of interpretation, I’m now more willing to return there and appreciate once again its beauties, but now with a different regard—and, who knows, maybe I can now move there and really get to know in depth this awesome cathedral. Until then I at least have this: been there, done that. For now this will have to do. show less

Kant is systematic, thorough. I like his way of writing. He is intense, And dense, part of the reasons is because of concepts, definitions. However, I do not think he is the most difficult writer. The brilliant, deepest thinker so far I know is Jonathan Edwards. Kant is crucial to modern Philosophy, definitely worth reading his piece if you enjoy Philosophy.

The important things I learnt from this book was that, Knowledge we gain is systematized through our senses. Yes, our knowledge starts from experience but Kant does not claim that every knowledge must be from experience alone or through reason alone. He calls his system transcendental knowledge, which does not mean beyond our experience but it means knowledge which both synthetical show more and a priori.

Imagine you are wearing a blue glasses, And looking at the world. The world will be blue through your eyes, which you will never get to find out. Therefore, we are unable to completely understand the world. He classifies these as Noumena and Phenomena. Noumena is the reality, the thing itself and Phenomena is the appearance. Space and time constitute as a foundation for everything. His writings on cosmological, ontological arguments were impressive and makes me think more.


"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind" - Kant show less

Kant is systematic, thorough. I like his way of writing. He is intense, And dense, part of the reasons is because of concepts, definitions. However, I do not think he is the most difficult writer. The brilliant, deepest thinker so far I know is Jonathan Edwards. Kant is crucial to modern Philosophy, definitely worth reading his piece if you enjoy Philosophy.

The important things I learnt from this book was that, Knowledge we gain is systematized through our senses. Yes, our knowledge starts from experience but Kant does not claim that every knowledge must be from experience alone or through reason alone. He calls his system transcendental knowledge, which does not mean beyond our experience but it means knowledge which both synthetical show more and a priori.

Imagine you are wearing a blue glasses, And looking at the world. The world will be blue through your eyes, which you will never get to find out. Therefore, we are unable to completely understand the world. He classifies these as Noumena and Phenomena. Noumena is the reality, the thing itself and Phenomena is the appearance. Space and time constitute as a foundation for everything. His writings on cosmological, ontological arguments were impressive and makes me think more.


"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind" - Kant show less