I.2.2. Transcendental Dialectic: Introduction

We have already entitled dialectic in general a logic of illusion. This does not mean a doctrine of probability; for probability is truth, known however on insufficient grounds, and the knowledge of which, though thus imperfect, is not on that account deceptive; and such doctrine, accordingly, is not to be separated from the analytic part of logic. Still less justification have we for regarding appearance and illusion as being identical. For truth or illusion is not in the object, in so far as it is intuited, but in the judgment about it, in so far as it is thought. It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not err—not because they always judge rightly but because they do not judge at all. Truth and error, therefore, and consequently also illusion as leading to error, are only to be found in the judgment, i.e. only in the relation of the object to our understanding. In any knowledge which completely accords with the laws of understanding there is no error. In a representation of the senses—as containing no judgment whatsoever—there is also no error. No natural force can of itself deviate from its own laws. Thus neither the understanding by itself (uninfluenced by another cause), nor the senses by themselves, would fall into error. The former would not, since, if it acts only according to its own laws, the effect (the judgment) must necessarily be in conformity with these laws; conformity with the laws of the understanding is the formal element in all truth. In the senses there is no judgment whatsoever, neither a true nor a false judgment. Now since we have no source of knowledge besides these two, it follows that error is brought about solely by the unobserved influence of sensibility on the understanding, through which it happens that the subjective grounds of the judgment enter into union with the objective grounds and make these latter deviate from their true function,—just as a body in motion would always of itself continue in a straight line in the same direction, but if influenced by another force acting in another direction starts off into curvilinear motion. In order to distinguish the specific action of understanding from the force which is intermixed with it, it is necessary to regard the erroneous judgment as the diagonal between two forces—forces which determine the judgment in different directions that enclose, as it were, an angle—and to resolve this composite action into the simple actions of the understanding and of the sensibility. In the case of pure a priori judgments this is a task which falls to be discharged by transcendental reflection, through which, as we have already shown, every representation is assigned its place in the corresponding faculty of knowledge, and by which the influence of the one upon the other is therefore likewise distinguished.

We are not here concerned with empirical (e.g, optical) illusion, which occurs in the empirical employment of rules of understanding that are otherwise correct, and through which the faculty of judgment is misled by the influence of imagination; we are concerned only with transcendental illusion, which exerts its influence on principles that are in nowise intended for use in experience, in which case we should at least have had a criterion of their correctness. In defiance of all the warnings of criticism, it carries us altogether beyond the empirical employment of categories and puts us off with a merely deceptive extension of pure understanding. We shall entitle the principles whose application is confined entirely within the limits of possible experience, immanent; and those, on the other hand, which profess to pass beyond these limits, transcendent. In the case of these latter, I am not referring to the transcendental employment or misemployment of the categories, which is merely an error of the faculty of judgment when it is not duly curbed by criticism, and therefore does not pay sufficient attention to the bounds of the territory within which alone free play is allowed to pure understanding. I mean actual principles which incite us to tear down all those boundary-fences and to seize possession of an entirely new domain which recognises no limits of demarcation. Thus transcendental and transcendent are not interchangeable terms. The principles of pure understanding, which we have set out above, allow only of empirical and not of transcendental employment, that is, employment extending beyond the limits of experience. A principle, on the other hand, which takes away these limits, or even commands us actually to transgress them, is called transcendent. If our criticism can succeed in disclosing the illusion in these alleged principles, then those principles which are of merely empirical employment may be called, in opposition to the others, immanent principles of pure understanding.

Logical illusion, which consists in the mere imitation of the form of reason (the illusion of formal fallacies), arises entirely from lack of attention to the logical rule. As soon as attention is brought to bear on the case that is before us, the illusion completely disappears. Transcendental illusion, on the other hand, does not cease even after it has been detected and its invalidity clearly revealed by transcendental criticism (e.g. the illusion in the proposition: the world must have a beginning in time). The cause of this is that there are fundamental rules and maxims for the employment of our reason (subjectively regarded as a faculty of human knowledge), and that these have all the appearance of being objective principles. We therefore take the subjective necessity of a connection of our concepts, which is to the advantage of the understanding, for an objective necessity in the determination of things in themselves. This is an illusion which can no more be prevented than we can prevent the sea appearing higher at the horizon than at the shore, since we see it through higher light rays; or to cite a still better example, than the astronomer can prevent the moon from appearing larger at its rising, although he is not deceived by this illusion.

The transcendental dialectic will therefore content itself with exposing the illusion of transcendent judgments, and at the same time taking precautions that we be not deceived by it. That the illusion should, like logical illusion, actually disappear and cease to be an illusion, is something which transcendental dialectic can never be in a position to achieve. For here we have to do with a natural and inevitable illusion, which rests on subjective principles, and foists them upon us as objective; whereas logical dialectic in its exposure of deceptive inferences has to do merely with an error in the following out of principles, or with an illusion artificially created in imitation of such inferences. There exists, then, a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason—not one in which a bungler might entangle himself through lack of knowledge, or one which some sophist has artificially invented to confuse thinking people, but one inseparable from human reason, and which, even after its deceptiveness has been exposed, will not cease to play tricks with reason and continually entrap it into momentary aberrations ever and again calling for correction.

All our knowledge starts with the senses, proceeds from thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which there is no higher faculty to be found in us for elaborating the matter of intuition and bringing it under the highest unity of thought. Now that I have to give an explanation of this highest faculty of knowledge, I find myself in some difficulty. Reason, like understanding, can be employed in a merely formal, that is, logical manner, wherein it abstracts from all content of knowledge. But it is also capable of a real use, since it contains within itself the source of certain concepts and principles, which it does not borrow either from the senses or from the understanding. The former faculty has long since been defined by logicians as the faculty of making mediate inferences (in distinction from immediate inferences, consequentiis immediatis); but the nature of the other faculty, which itself gives birth to concepts, is not to be understood from this definition. Now since we are here presented with a division of reason into a logical and a transcendental faculty, we are constrained to seek for a higher concept of this source of knowledge which includes both concepts as subordinate to itself. Following the analogy of concepts of understanding, we may expect that the logical concept will provide the key to the transcendental, and that the table of the functions of the former will at once give us the genealogical tree of the concepts of reason.

In the first part of our transcendental logic we treated the understanding as being the faculty of rules; reason we shall here distinguish from understanding by entitling it the faculty of principles.

The term ‘principle’ is ambiguous, and commonly signifies any knowledge which can be used as a principle, although in itself, and as regards its proper origin, it is no principle. Every universal proposition, even one derived from experience, through induction, can serve as major premiss in a syllogism; but it is not therefore itself a principle. The mathematical axioms (e.g, that there can only be one straight line between two points) are instances of universal a priori knowledge, and are therefore rightly called principles, relatively to the cases which can be subsumed under them. But I cannot therefore say that I apprehend this property of straight lines in general and in itself, from principles; I apprehend it only in pure intuition.

Knowledge from principles is, therefore, that knowledge alone in which I apprehend the particular in the universal through concepts. Thus every syllogism is a mode of deducing knowledge from a principle. For the major premiss always gives a concept through which everything that is subsumed under the concept as under a condition is known from the concept according to a principle. Now since any universal knowledge can serve as major premiss in a syllogism, and since the understanding presents us with universal a priori propositions of this kind, they can also be called principles in respect of their possible employment.

But if we consider them in themselves in relation to their origin, these fundamental propositions of pure understanding are anything rather than knowledge based on concepts. For they would not even be possible a priori, if we were not supported by pure intuition (in mathematics), or by conditions of a possible experience in general. That everything that happens has a cause cannot be inferred merely from the concept of happening in general; on the contrary, it is this fundamental proposition which shows how in regard to that which happens we are in a position to obtain in experience any concept whatsoever that is really determinate.

The understanding can, then, never supply any synthetic modes of knowledge derived from concepts; and it is such modes of knowledge that are properly, without qualification, to be entitled ‘principles’. All universal propositions, however, may be spoken of as ‘principles’ in a comparative sense.

It has long been wished—and sometime perhaps (who knows when!) may be fulfilled—that instead of the endless multiplicity of civil laws we should be able to fall back on their general principles. For it is in these alone that we can hope to find the secret of what we are wont to call the simplifying of legislation. In this domain, however, the laws are only limitations imposed upon our freedom in order that such freedom may completely harmonise with itself; hence they are directed to something which is entirely our own work, and of which we ourselves, through these concepts, can be the cause. But that objects in themselves, the very nature of things, should stand under principles, and should be determined according to mere concepts, is a demand which, if not impossible, is at least quite contrary to common sense. But however that may be (it is a question which we still have to discuss), it is now at least evident that knowledge derived from principles which are genuinely such is something quite different from knowledge obtained merely through the understanding. The latter may, indeed, also take the form of a principle and thus be prior to some other knowledge, but in itself, in so far as it is synthetic, it does not depend on thought alone, nor contain in itself a universal obtained from concepts.

Understanding may be regarded as a faculty which secures the unity of appearances by means of rules, and reason as being the faculty which secures the unity of the rules of understanding under principles. Accordingly, reason never applies itself directly to experience or to any object, but to understanding, in order to give to the manifold knowledge of the latter an a priori unity by means of concepts, a unity which may be called the unity of reason, and which is quite different in kind from any unity that can be accomplished by the understanding.

This is the universal concept of the faculty of reason in so far as it has been possible to make it clear in the total absence of examples. These will be given in the course of our argument.

A distinction is commonly made between what is immediately known and what is merely inferred. That in a figure which is bounded by three straight lines there are three angles, is known immediately; but that the sum of these angles is equal to two right angles, is merely inferred. Since we have constantly to make use of inference, and so end by becoming completely accustomed to it, we no longer take notice of this distinction, and frequently, as in the so-called deceptions of the senses, treat as being immediately perceived what has really only been inferred. In every process of reasoning there is a fundamental proposition, and another, namely the conclusion, which is drawn from it, and finally, the inference (logical sequence) by which the truth of the latter is inseparably connected with the truth of the former. If the inferred judgment is already so contained in the earlier judgment that it may be derived from it without the mediation of a third representation, the inference is called immediate (consequentia immediata I should prefer to entitle it inference of the understanding. But if besides the knowledge contained in the primary proposition still another judgment is needed to yield the conclusion, it is to be entitled an inference of the reason. In the proposition: “All men are mortal”, there are already contained the propositions: “some men are mortal”, “some mortal beings are men”, “nothing that is not mortal is a man”; and these are therefore immediate conclusions from it. On the other hand, the proposition: “All learned beings are mortal”, is not contained in the fundamental judgment (for the concept of learned beings does not occur in it at all), and it can only be inferred from it by means of a mediating judgment.

In every syllogism I first think a rule (the major premiss) through the understanding. Secondly, I subsume something known under the condition of the rule by means of judgment (the minor premiss). Finally, what is thereby known I determine through the predicate of the rule, and so a priori through reason (the conclusion). The relation, therefore, which the major premiss, as the rule, represents between what is known and its condition is the ground of the different kinds of syllogism. Consequently, syllogisms, like judgments, are of three kinds, according to the different ways in which, in the understanding, they express the relation of what is known; they are either categorical, hypothetical, or disjunctive.

If, as generally happens, the judgment that forms the conclusion is set as a problem—to see whether it does not follow from judgments already given, and through which a quite different object is thought—I look in the understanding for the assertion of this conclusion, to discover whether it is not there found to stand under certain conditions according to a universal rule. If I find such a condition, and if the object of the conclusion can be subsumed under the given condition, then the conclusion is deduced from the rule, which is also valid for other objects of knowledge. From this we see that in inference reason endeavours to reduce the varied and manifold knowledge obtained through the understanding to the smallest number of principles (universal conditions) and thereby to achieve in it the highest possible unity.

Can we isolate reason, and is it, so regarded, an independent source of concepts and judgments which spring from it alone, and by means of which it relates to objects; or is it a merely subordinate faculty, for imposing on given modes of knowledge a certain form, called logical—a faculty through which what is known by means of the understanding is determined in its interrelations, lower rules being brought under higher (namely, those the condition of which includes in its own sphere the condition of the lower), as far as this can be done through [processes of] comparison? This is the question with which we are now provisionally occupying ourselves. As a matter of fact, multiplicity of rules and unity of principles is a demand of reason, for the purpose of bringing the understanding into thoroughgoing accordance with itself, just as the understanding brings the manifold of intuition under concepts and thereby connects the manifold. But such a principle does not prescribe any law for objects, and does not contain any general ground of the possibility of knowing or of determining objects as such; it is merely a subjective law for the orderly management of the possessions of our understanding, that by comparison of its concepts it may reduce them to the smallest possible number; it does not justify us in demanding from the objects such uniformity as will minister to the convenience and extension of our understanding; and we may not, therefore, ascribe to the maxim any objective validity. In a word, the question is, does reason in itself, that is, does pure reason, contain a priori synthetic principles and rules, and in what may these principles consist?

The formal and logical procedure of reason in syllogisms gives us sufficient guidance as to the ground on which the transcendental principle of pure reason in its synthetic knowledge will rest.

In the first place, reason in the syllogism does not concern itself with intuitions, with a view to bringing them under rules (as the understanding does with its categories), but with concepts and judgments. Accordingly, even if pure reason does concern itself with objects, it has no immediate relation to these and the intuition of them, but only to the understanding and its judgments—which deal at first hand with the senses and their intuition for the purpose of determining their object. The unity of reason is therefore not the unity of a possible experience, but is essentially different from such unity, which is that of understanding. That everything which happens has a cause, is not a principle known and prescribed by reason. That principle makes the unity of experience possible, and borrows nothing from reason, which, apart from this relation to possible experience, could never, from mere concepts, have imposed any such synthetic unity.

Secondly, reason, in its logical employment, seeks to discover the universal condition of its judgment (the conclusion), and the syllogism is itself nothing but a judgment made by means of the subsumption of its condition under a universal rule (the major premiss). Now since this rule is itself subject to the same requirement of reason, and the condition of the condition must therefore be sought (by means of a prosyllogism) whenever practicable, obviously the principle peculiar to reason in general, in its logical employment, is:—to find for the conditioned knowledge obtained through the understanding the unconditioned whereby its unity is brought to completion.

But this logical maxim can only become a principle of pure reason through our assuming that if the conditioned is given, the whole series of conditions, subordinated to one another—a series which is therefore itself unconditioned—is likewise given, that is, is contained in the object and its connection.

Such a principle of pure reason is obviously synthetic; the conditioned is analytically related to some condition but not to the unconditioned. From the principle there must also follow various synthetic propositions, of which pure understanding—inasmuch as it has to deal only with objects of a possible experience, the knowledge and synthesis of which is always conditioned—knows nothing. The unconditioned, if its actuality be granted, is especially to be considered in respect of all the determinations which distinguish it from whatever is conditioned, and thereby must yield material for many synthetic a priori propositions.

The principles arising from this supreme principle of pure reason will, however, be transcendent in relation to all appearances, i.e. there can never be any adequate empirical employment of the principle. It will therefore be entirely different from all principles of understanding, the employment of which is wholly immanent, inasmuch as they have as their theme only the possibility of experience. Take the principle, that the series of conditions (whether in the synthesis of appearances, or even in the thinking of things in general) extends to the unconditioned. Does it, or does it not, have objective applicability? What are its implications as regards the empirical employment of understanding? Or is there no such objectively valid principle of reason, but only a logical precept, to advance towards completeness by an ascent to ever higher conditions and so to give to our knowledge the greatest possible unity of reason? Can it be that this requirement of reason has been wrongly treated in being viewed as a transcendental principle of pure reason, and that we have been overhasty in postulating such an unbounded completeness of the series of conditions in the objects themselves? In that case, what other misunderstandings and delusions may have crept into the syllogisms, whose major premiss (perhaps rather an assumption than a postulate) is derived from pure reason, and which proceed from experience upwards to its conditions? To answer these questions will be our task in the Transcendental Dialectic, which we shall now endeavour to develop from its deeply concealed sources in human reason. We shall divide the Dialectic into two chapters, the first on the transcendent concepts of pure reason, the second on its transcendent and dialectical syllogisms.