Autonomy of Reason in the Critique of Pure Reason Laurian Kertesz T.z. 322039595 Kant’s picture of the human mind involves the separation between three faculties: sensibility, understanding and Reason. Among these three, the Reason is the one which plays the most controversial role, whose status is the most debatable and heterogeneous. As it is known, Kant considers knowledge to be the resultant of two forces: the understanding and the sensibility. Reason seems to play no role in it . The main idea of my paper is to rehabilitate Reason, as it appears in the CRP, as a necessary and autonomous faculty for the constitution of human knowledge, or at least for the awareness of knowledge. While being the most controversial of the three faculties, Reason is also the most mysterious. Reason as defined by Kant is the faculty of principles; it is involved in drawing syllogistic (mediate) inferences ; it engenders such monsters as the Antinomies; it is the source of transcendental illusions; it has a regulative role if it is appropriately tamed; it both limits and stimulates the understanding. It is not very easy to point to what is common between all these functions. The main ideas of my essay are two: first: to ascribe to Reason what I believe to be its due place in the CPR. This due place is that of a metafaculty, of the faculty that is able to provide a view from the outside to the other two faculties and to the things-in-themselves. Pace Kant or not, my view of the Reason will amount to a rehabilitation of our access to the things-in-themselves, since my argument is that Reason does provide an access to the things-in-themselves. (So to speak: concepts without the Ideas would be lazy, and Ideas without concepts would be too fast). My argument that we have an access to the things in themselves and that this access is provided by Reason is based on my analysis of two counterfactual situations: if we had only sensibility and lacked understanding, then we would have access to the things-in-themselves given the sensibility’s receptive (passive) function in the economy of knowledge; if we had only understanding and lacked sensibility, we would have access to the things in themselves since the understanding (the categories themselves) would be the only available objects of knowledge, and the understanding is itself a thing-in-itself. The mere fact that a possibility of having access to the things-in-themselves is implicitly considered by Kant is an argument that the thing in itself may be accessible, and the only motive and it is only the cooperation between sensibility and understanding that prevents us from having access to it. The second part of my essay will be an attempt to criticize the other functions that Kant ascribes to Reason: more specifically, I will attack Kant’s thesis that the transcendental illusion arises because mere appearances are treated as things-in-themselves, and will argue for the reverse thesis: transcendental illusion arises precisely because things-in-themselves are treated as mere appearances. Such a claim is made possible by the claim I make in the first section, namely that Reason provides access to the things-in-themselves. 1. Reason as a metafaculty. Reason provides access to the things in themselves Kant repeatedly writes that Reason is tempted to overstep the boundaries of experience and that this is the cause of the troubles created by it: see, for example 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. (P 303) “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.” WHERE FROM? The thesis that I want to develop in this section of my essay is that some kind of access to the things in themselves is possible, even required for Kant. The most obvious way to argue for such a thesis is to look for evidence in the second Critique (of Practical Reason) where Kant repeatedly makes the claim that we are free insofar as we are noumena and are caused insofar as we are appearances. This argument can be continued if we ask “Are all appearances ‘backed’ by underlying numena, or the human being is the only appearance who has such a hidden backing? And what are the criteria according to which we decide whether an appearance is backed by a noumenon or not?”. Such a question would be, I think, very difficult for Kant, given his well-known disinterest in the problem of Other Minds in the first Critique. For the second Critique, however, the problem of Other minds becomes crucial. I want to use however another direction to argue for the thesis that Reason provides access to the things-in themselves. My argument is that Kant’s Aesthetics and Analytic contain and imply some counterfactuals who become meaningless if Reason is dismissed and our only remaining faculties, the sensibility and the understanding, would be in place. My argument is thus an indirect one: in order to understand a claim about “what would be if we had no understanding, or a different understanding” cannot be answered by understanding alone, for the same reason for which a person born with a normal sight cannot express only through the sense of seeing to other sighted people how it would be for him/her to be blind. If it does explain how it would be for him/her to be blind, s/he will have to use other senses, such as hearing and taste, and point to objects that would be inside and outside his visual field. But such a task could not be performed using only the seeing and drawing attention to objects within other people’s visual field. 1.1. Kant’s tacit counterfactuals There are some counterfactual situations that Kant alludes to and whose consequences can be guessed, based on his text: (1) If we had only sensibility and no understanding (2) If we had only understanding and no sensibility Possibility (1) needs to be carefully distinguished from the more trivial counterfactual situation, in which our sensibility would not be affected by any stimulus. 1.1.1. If we had only sensibility, we would have access to the things-in-themselves If situation (1) were actual, then all we could get is the manifold of sense-data. (Perhaps this is the rudimentary knowledge that animals have? Or even plants?) The hint that Kant offers about this issue is that our pseudo-knowledge would be “blind” . By this blindness he meant the lack of the concepts of ordinary objects. We would lack any experience properly so-called, because our only input would be completely disorganized, lacking any law, necessity or identity of objects. By losing the concept of identity of objects, we would live in Heraclitean world of colours, smells, auditory impressions and tastes. But the more important question is: who, in such a situation, would inform us of the lack of the understanding? It seems to me obvious that only a faculty that is beyond the sensibility and the understanding could do so. This is a very strong suggestion to the effect that only Reason can offer this outer view of the sensibility and of the understanding. But I want to analyze and elaborate this suggestion. Kant often insists that the sensibility is passive (receptive) while the understanding is active (spontaneous). Now, this suggests the following picture: Instead of locating the three faculties within one and the same person, let’s imagine three Martians: the first receives impressions from the thing-in-itself from a mysterious neighbour. The second Martian receives the impressions that affected the first Martian and processes them according to concepts, both a priori (which are inviolved in the processing of all the products that the first offered him) and empirical (each empirical concept applies to only some of the products that are delivered to him). The third Martian receives the products of the second and shows to the second man some ideal, perfect products. The second Martian is impressed by the perfect, ideal products that the third man showed him and sets on the Sisyphic task of producing them while processing the products of the first man. The second man will not succeed in such a task, but at least both he and the first man will feel stimulated by the exigencies of the third Martian.. Such a Martian society would be an excellent model for Kant. But there are some problems. If the first man does nothing but receive impressions from the thing in itself, and then transmits them to the Second man, where lies is receptivity? The first man would be the closest to the thing-in-itself, and the job of the second man would play a rather distorting role. The moral of this analogy is that if sensibility were truly receptive, then sensibility would provide the most undistorted access to the things in themselves. If sensibility does not provide such an access to the thing in itself, the reason is that, pace Kant, sensibility is spontaneous, like the understanding. This suggests that the terms “receptive” and “spontaneous” are liable to two interpretations, one absolute and one relative. In the absolute sense, a “receptive” faculty is one that merely transmits an output that is identical with its input, that adds no modifications of its own to the products it receives; while a “spontaneous” faculty is one that adds modifications, so that its output is radically different from the output and the difference between the input and the output would only be accountable in terms of the contribution of that faculty.. I argued in the above paragraph that if sensibility were receptive in this absolute sense, then all we would need to do in order to know the things in themselves would be to deprive ourselves (if such an operation were possible) of the use of the understanding and of its categories. If this answer seems unpalatable, it is because it can be replied that there is a relative sense of the opposition between receptive and spontaneous. Thus, it can be said that the difference between the inputs that reach the sensibility and its outputs is smaller than that between the inputs that reach the understanding and its outputs. Indeed, in this picture the inputs that reach the sensibility are the things in themselves and its output is the manifold of sense data; this same manifold is the input of the understanding whereas the output of the understanding is the experience organized under concepts and laws. In this sense, sensibility would be less spontaneous than the understanding. Another tacit premise, that I believe Kant assumed but which I am not going to comment, is that the understanding is spontaneous because it applies to the manifold offered by sensibility a status that characterizes our knowledge, that would characterize our knowledge no matter to which manifold it would appear. This second relative sense of the opposition between receptive and spontaneous is thus a measure of the distance not between the inputs that a faculty receives and its products (outputs), but of the closeness of its outputs to the form of knowledge that we necessarily have and would had in the closest situations in which we would have knowledge. This is related to Kant’s constant assumption that necessary connexions, either between objects under concepts or between concepts under laws, can only have their source in our subjectivity. But there is no apparent reason why these relative senses of the opposition between receptivity and spontaneity should be preferred over the absolute one. The only motive for which I introduced the relative sense was the apparent discomfort with the thesis that mere sensibility would bring us closer to the things in themselves than sensibility cum understanding. If we are ready to accept this thesis, then we can indeed preserve the absolute sense of the opposition between receptivity and spontaneity and should conclude that if we had only sensibility and not understanding, then we would have access to the things in themselves, and would have such an access precisely because of the receptive, non-spontaneous (in an absolute sense) status of sensibility. On the other hand, if we want to preserve the absolute distinction between sensibility and understanding and still deny that mere sensibility puts us closer to the things in themselves, then we should conclude that sensibility is spontaneous: it modifies the input that it receives from the things in themselves such that its output (the manifold of sense-data) is unrecognizable. Thus, we need to make an option between (a) considering sensibility as spontaneous; (b) rejecting the absolute opposition between sensibility and receptivity and replacing it with the relative opposition; and (c) accepting that the sensibility without the understanding provides access to the things in themselves. Thesis (a) is clearly not Kantian; thesis (b) is artificial and is not supported by Kant’s writing; thesis (c) is the most plausible one. Now, the fact that an access to the things in themselves would be possible if we only had sensibility does not by itself prove that we actually have such an access. In order to prove such a conclusion, we need only to pay attention to what can be called Kant’s claim of separation between the contribution of different faculties to our knowledge. This claim of separation proves that for Kant it made sense to think of what would have happened if the counterfactual possibility of our having only sensibility and lacked understanding, or vice versa. But the faculty that can inform us what would have happened if we had only sensibility cannot be, for obvious reasons, sensibility itself; it cannot be either the understanding, since our starting hypothesis was that we lack sensibility. It seems to me natural to conclude that only Reason can perform this task, as it is a faculty that can offer a perspective “from the outside” to both understanding and sensibility. 1.1.2. If we had only understanding, we would have access to at least part of the thing-in-themselves If (2) were true, then we would have no knowledge in general; all we would have would be empty concepts with no application to experience. According to Allison, it is only because of the sensibility that we lack access to the thing-in-itself. If we had only sensibility, we would have access to the thing-in-itself, since this is a numenon postulated by our understanding: “Kant clearly allows for a logical (as opposed to a real) use of the categories for the thought of things in general as they are in themselves; and there are numerous passages in which Kant explicitly states that to think or consider things as they are in themselves is just to think them as some pure intellect might, that is, one that is not restricted by sensible conditions” (Allison, p. 7-8) As Allison presents the issue, sensibility is rather a stumbling-block that prevents adequate knowledge. If sensibility is still a part of the whole picture of Kantian knowledge, it seems that the only reason why it is kept is that it is an annoying ancilla intellectus, a biological necessity: human nature is so constituted that it is endowed with sensibility. Another argument why Alllisson’s interpretation is wrong, in my opinion, is that Kant repeatedly writes that only we, humans, as finite creatures, need the understanding. A divine conscience will only have intuitions and could do away with the understanding. What is shocking about Allison’s interpretation is that its author disregards the obvious question: via what faculty would we have access to the thing-in-itself, if we were devoid of sensibility? There are two possibilities: via the understanding or via the Reason. The first possibility, which Allison seems to embrace, is untenable in view of Kant’s well-known slogan that concepts without intuitions would be empty. There is another reason for rejecting it, and it comes from the Refutation of Idealism. In the Refutation of Idealism Kant is explicit that our knowledge of our own representations is by no means more basic than our knowledge of outer appearances. (Of course, provided that “outer” is here understood in an immanent sense, i.e. objects in time and spaceand not as characterizing things-in-themselves). If Allison’s interpretation is rejected, this does not imply that its conclusion, namely that if we had only understanding and lacked sensibility, is wrong.. I want to argue precisely for the truth of Allison’s conclusion, although using a different path. The path that I want to use is that of considering the very understanding itself, with its categories, as a thing-in-itself. I claim both exegetical and logical support for this thesis. Exegetical support is provided by the fact that Kant writes that “It would be a great stumbling-block or rather would be the one unanswerable objection, to our whole critique, if there were a possibility of knowing a priori that all thinking beings are in themselves simple substances, and that they are conscious of their existence as separate and distinct from all matter. For by such procedure we should have taken a step beyond the world of sense and have entered into the field of noumena (B 409) In the Transcendental Aesthetic we have proved, beyond all question, that bodies are mere appearances of our outer sense and not things in themselves. We are therefore justified in saying that our thinking subject is not corporeal; in other words, that, inasmuch as it is represented by us as object of inner sense, it cannot, in so far as it thinks, be an object of outer sense, that is, an appearance in space. This is equivalent to saying that thinking beings, as such, can never be found by us among outer appearances, and that their thoughts, consciousness,desires, etc. , cannot be outwardly intuited. All these belong to inner sense. (A 358) “Understanding appears to have always relied upon it, and thus already, from the earliest times, to have regarded souls as quite different entities from their bodies. But although extension, impenetrability, cohesion, and motion -- in short, everything which outer senses can give us -- neither are nor contain thoughts, feeling, desire, or resolution, these never being objects of outer intuition, nevertheless the something which underlies the outer appearances and which so affects our sense that it obtains the representations of space, matter, shape, etc. , may yet, when viewed as noumenon (or better, as transcendental object), be at the same time the subject of our thoughts. (A 358)” These passages strongly suggest to me that Kant regarded the human understanding as that part of a person that represents the noumenal component, the thing-in-itself of a human being. I do not pretend that such a claim is not open to objections: after all, why not consider even the sensibility – with its two a priori forms – as things-in-themselves ? After all, all the abilities of the human mind are not encoutnerable in experience and could not be classified as appearances. Leaving such complications aside, there are logical reasons for considering the understanding itself, with its categories, as a thing-in-itself. Of course, this is not to deny that the categories only operate (or should operate) within the limits of experience. . 1. The alleged regulative usage of Reason leads to contradiction As it is known, Kant was ambivalent towards the Reason in the CPR: Reason is both the illness and its cure. Moreover, the possibility of the illness will result in the whole organism’s (the mind) being more healthy than without it, i.e. without the possibility of being ill. The illness consists in outstretching the limits of experience and produce transcendental illusions (the reified Ideas). The cure consists in debunking the transcendental illusion qua illusion. The good usage of Reason consists in its regulative usage: it stimulates the understanding to look for the unconditioned whenever the conditioned is met in experience . The unconditioned has the forms that are discussed in the Paralogisms, in the Antinomies and in the Ideal of Pure Reason. The regulative, as opposed to the constitutive, role of Reason has been duly criticized in the exegesis. STRAWSON BENNETT It is not obvious why a statement that purports to speak about non-existent entities should be interpreted as a maxim, as an imperative addressed to the understanding. AICI MAI AI DE BAGAT To Bennett’s arguments against the distinction between constitutive and regulative, I will add two criticisms of my own. From the text of the CPR, we learn both that on the one hand (a) Reason postulates entities that are not encounterable in experience and imposes maxims that cannot be obeyed by the human understanding; (b) on the other hand, such maxims are helpful, if not necessary, to the advancement of the understanding in its task of discovering new appearances and synthetizing them, according to the categories, to previously known appearances. It is difficult to make sense of this picture, since it is difficult not to regard (a) and (b) as contradictory. How should behave someone who sincerely wants to obey Kant’s intentions? Kant’s suggestion is that one should behave as if one believed that the entities postulated by Reason were encounterable in experience. But it is not obvious how to assess the degree of resemblance between believing that p and believing as if one believe that p. S/he should act as compelled by an urge to deceive oneself: should actually look for the unconditioned as if s/he believed that the unconditioned were really discoverable. The problem with Kant’s account of the regulative function of the Ideas of Reason is that he writes as if the Ideas were necessary only from a psychological point of view. (Our human nature is such that we cannot make empirical discoveries of causal chains without believing that this chain has an end). It is however difficult to imagine how one could entertain both the belief that the unconditioned can be found in experience and the contradictory belief. For Kant does not only claim that the discovery of the unconditioned is something that is logically possible, but highly unlikely, such as the possibility that I will live forever, or that we will live in a perfect society. Kant’s attitude to the Ideas of Reason is not comparable with that of a moralist or political theorist’s attitude towards an utopian system of government or towards a situation in which people always obey moral norms. Kant’s attitude towards Ideas is in a sense more favorable and in a sense more forbidding. Favourable, since he explicitly urges us (any human person and especially scientists) actually to believe the possibility of finding in experience the fulfillment of Ideas. And forbidding, since he excludes from the start the possibility of finding the unconditioned in experience. The task he assigns to the scientist is thus a Sisyphic one, even more so to the extent at which the victim of the Sisyphic task should be, according to him, aware of the persistent failure of finding the unconditioned in experience. It is difficult to imagine how someone who read the CPR and agreed with Kant that the Ideas have a merely regulative function could continue his/her empirical research as before. From the point of view of someone who formerly believed that the Ideas might be used in a constitutive sense, reading the Transcendental Dialectic and agreeing with Kant’s discovery that the Ideas have a merely regulative role amounts to a loss of naivety, after which it is rationally impossible to fall back in the previous state. In other words, anyone who agrees with Kant’s thesis that Ideas are useful only in a regulative, but not in a constitutive, sense cannot be seduced by the hope of discovering the unconditioned; but s/he must be so seduced if – as Kant writes, or at least suggests – the Ideas are necessary for scientific progress. The regulative function of the Ideas is parasitic on the constitutive one, since to use the Ideas in a regulative sense means believing to use them in a constitutive sense. And if Kant replied that the believing in the constitutive role of Ideas is not a necessary condition for the advancement of science, but only a psychological aid, the objection can be made that such an aid should be rather dispensable, to the same extent to which any false belief should be dispensable. As I explained above, in my comparation of the Idea of finding the unconditioned with the belief in the possibility of a Utopian perfect state, the regulative use of the Ideas is not a belief devoid of truth-value, which may still be useful on pragmatic grounds; rather, it has the status of a false belief that is claimed to be useful, perhaps even necessary, to forming true beliefs. This status is paradoxical and unacceptable , all the more so since the claim is that realizing that the belief in the possibility of discovering the unconditioned is false is held by Kant to be a tool towards the progressive discovery of true facts. Reason can be viewed as constitutive for its Ideas3õ (Reason constitutes the intellect) In the previous section of my essay I tried to analyze the consequences that the alleged regulative usage of the Ideas of Reason has for the progress of the understanding. The most serious problem is however why Kant felt the need to defend reason in its regulative role. As it is known, the criterion of the distinction between regulative and constitutive functions is the adequacy to experience. If the “products” of a faculty find something in experience corresponding to them, then the faculty is constitutive. But nothing in experience can be found which corresponds to the Ideas of Reason; therefore the usage of Reason is not constitutive. What I want to point is that the mere fact that nothing empirical corresponds to the products of a faculty does not, by itself, plead for the non-constitutive status of that faculty. Kant supports the claim that Reason is only regulative with the argument that its Ideas are illusory if reified, since they involve outstretching the boundaries of experience. What Kant nowhere does is to justify his criterion of significance, as Strawson calls it. But from this it does not follow that their ontological status is in any way inferior to that of the concepts. Why, in other words, does not Kant accept that the entities that Reason postulates have a different ontological status than those of the understanding? After all, Kant would be trivially wrong if he simply denied existence to the anything that corresponds to the Ideas of Reason based on the mere argument that nothing in experience corresponds to them – even the categories of the understanding, insofar as they constitute the self, the thinking being “in itself” are not encounterable in the experience. This suggests another question: why does not he accept that these Ideas constitute a priori categories of the understanding? True, he writes that the fundamental mistake of the Reason is that it tries to consider subjective rules for objective entities or connections: “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” (p 299). But the same could be said about the categories of the understanding: they are subjective forms which we are tempted (if we are transcendental realists) to consider as relying on an objective necessity. Despite this, Kant does not consider the understanding as the source of transcendental illusion, nor does he condemn the constitutive usage of the concepts – both a priori (categories) and ordinary concepts on the grounds that no thing-in-itself corresponds to them. To make my point clearer: Kant’s criterion of significance (or, better saying, of the legitimacy of a faculty) is that an object in experience corresponds to it. But this criterion is not in any way motivated, since the Reason stands to the experience in the same relation as the understanding stands in relation to the things-in-themselves. Nothing in the experience corresponds to the Ideas; so well , nothing in the things-in-themselves corresponds to the concepts of the understanding. But this does not and should not, in Kant’s opinion, amount to delegitimizing the concepts of the understanding. Although nothing among the things-in-themselves corresponds to the concepts of the understanding, the understanding is still legitimate in its constitutive function. Then why is Reason not legitimate? Why did not Kant consider the understanding as illegitimate and a source of illusion, on the grounds that nothing in the things-in-themselves corresponds to its concepts? This question is equivalent to the question: Why does Kant consider reason as illegitimate (to the extent at which it is illegitimate) and the source of transcendental illusion? Using a way of argumentation similar to that of Kant, the understanding could in its turn be considered an illusory faculties, since none of its products (the concepts) is adequate to the realm of the things-in-themselves: we wrongly believe that the categoriess apply to the things in themselves, and this wrong belief is analogous with the wrong belief that the Ideas apply to the appearances. : Kant writes about the work of unification of concepts that Reason performs via mediate inferences and concludes that “The unity of reason is not the unity of a possible experience, but is essentially different from such unity, which is that of understanding” (p 305); 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. The understanding “injects” unity into the manifold of sense-data through its concepts, and the Reason injects unity into the syntheses of the understanding via mediate inferences (syllogisms). However, Kant considers that the unity that the understanding injects into the manifold is legitimate, while the unity injected by the Reason is illusory. No argument is provided in favour of this thesis, and this leaves open the question: why the accusations that Kant brings against the Reason are not equally valid against the understanding? Or: if the understanding is OK in its job of conceptual unification of the manifold, why not also the Reason? Kant’s highest critical instance is a tribunal of experience operates with different standards towards the understanding and towards the reason, and it cannot do otherwise since it is a tribunal of experience. A tribunal of the understanding would have probably issued a verdict of Not-guilty for the Reason. And a more severe and objective tribunal would have condemned the Understanding for not being constitutive for the things-in-themselves, and the Reason for not being constitutive for the experience. The only answer for the discriminatory stance towards Reason is in my opinion, that Kant had an irrational (intended pun!) preference for the understanding. Although the understanding provides no access to the things in themselves (and is even less constitutive for the thing in itself), it is still recognized as a sine qua non component of knowledge. The understanding provides the concepts under which the manifold of experience is organized and unified. But the same work of unification is done also by the Reason with respect to the understanding. Therefore: the Reason is no less constitutive than the understanding. The difference is that the understanding is constitutive with respect to the experience, whereas the Reason is constitutive with respect to the understanding. 4 The Antinomies and the Paralogisms occur when the thing in itself is treated as mere appearance 4.1. Argument from the Antinomies It is not my purpose to present in detail the four antinomies that Kant presents. As it is known, the first two (the mathematical) antinomies deal with the world's being infinitely extended or infinitely divisible. Kant’s conclusion is that the question whether the world is infinitely divisible or extended is an illegitimate question, and as such typical for the Reason's irresistible and intolerable tendency to transgress the boundaries of experience. The most basic remark that is to be made in this context is that the four predicates of infinitely or finitely divisible or extended make sense (according to Kant%s criterion of sense) only if applied to the world as it appears to be, that is to the phenomenal world. It is beyond doubt that, concerning any part of the experience, the alternative whether that object is finite or infinite makes sense, although its verification may raise additional difficulties: what we need is adequate instruments of measure and a reasonably good memory. (without memory we would be at a risk of forgetting where and when did we start our measurement). If the world, or any entity, is regarded as an appearance, there is nothing in principle that could prevent us from measuring it and establishing whether it is finite or infinite in space, or from attempting a division of it towards more and more elementary particles. On the contrary, if the world is understood as referring to the things-in-themselves, it is not clear what its infinite or finite extension and divisibility would look like. (In the Aesthetics, Kant proved, or hoped to prove, that space and time can only be applied to appearances, and not to the thing-in-itself. But, as I understand this issue, he did not prove that things in themselves are not inherently spatial or temporal. That is, he left open the possibility that things in themselves are inherently spatial or temporal in a way that is inaccessible to us From the denial of our possibility of knowing the thing in itself, it does not follow that the thing in itself is not characterized by any predicate applicable to the phenomenal world; it rather follows that we can make no sense of the thing in itself being so characterized. It is precisely because we can make no use of the thing in itself being spatial or temporal that the measurement of the extension or divisibility of the things in themselves makes no sense. A closer look at the first two antinomies can provide further support for my thesis 2.1.1 the argument for the thesis of the first antinomy, namely that the world is finite, is that we cannot complete, through successive synthesis, an infinite series. It is obvious that the mistake Kant ascribes to this argument is that the world as measured by us could not be infinite in space. But the world as measured, or measurable, by us is nothing else than the phenomenal world, the world of appearances. If the world that is referred to by Kant in the (wrong) arguments for the infinity of the world in the first antinomy were treated as thing-in-itself , the argument would be extremely easy to dismiss: why should the reference to our capacity of measuring be relevant for any characteristic of the world? In other words: the mere fact that the finitude of our cognitive abilities is involved in discussing whether an object a has property F proves that a is considered only as an appearance; its identity is constituted by our cognitive abilities. The same could be said about the thesis of the second antinomy, namely that the world is only finitely divisible, i.e. that simple objects exist and they are the building blocks of composite objects. Kant’s argument is, predictably, that an operation of infinite dividing the objects cannot be performed by the human mind. Now, if by “the objects” we understand the things-in-themselves Kants argument against infinite divisibility would be wholly irrelevant: why involve our cognitive abilities in ascribing a property to the things in themselves? Kants argument works well only insofar as we have to do with appearances. With the antithesis of the first two antinomies, namely that the world is infinitely extended, respectively infinitely divisible, the story is similar. KAnts antithesis of the first antinomy is supported by the argument that, if the world would be finite, it would be bounded by nothing, which woulod be absurd, since the nothing cannot be encountered in experience . The argument for the antithesis of the second antinomy is that a simple, i.e. indivisible object cannot be met in experience. With respect to both these arguments, the question might be asked : why bother about what can be encountered in experience at all, since we already know from the Analytic that our experience is constituted by the mixture between our receptivity and our spontaneity, of our sensibility and our understanding? If the world with which we deal were considered as a thing in itself, scruples about the limits of our experience should find no place. Such scruples are admissible and relevant only to the extent at which we deal with the world as an object, or the totality of objects, encounterable in experience. It might be replied to my thesis that I have only dealt with infinite extension or divisibility in space, while ignoring their temporal side. (As a matter of fact, Kant only discusses the possibility of infinite extension in time in the context of the first antinomy; the second antinomy does not deal specifically with the infinite divisibility of objects in temporal moments, although I believe that it can be applied to this problem. More specifically: the temporal interpretation of the second antinomy would oblige us to ask whether time is continuous, or at least dense, and it can be argued that , on the one hand, time must be dense since a time interval that cannot be further divided cannot be encountered in experience and, on the other hand, time cannot be dense since it is impossible to complete the synthesis of an infinite series of intervals, ranging from a relatively long period of time to one of the smallest temporal intervals that compose it. The status of the question concerning the (in)finite extension or divisibility in time might seem more problematic, if we take notice of the fact that the very completion of an infinite temporal series takes an infinite time. In other words, someone would need to live an infinitely long life (and to have a reasonably good memory) in order to assess whether a certain object lasts for an infinite or finite time. The most natural conclusion, on this line of argument, would be that the world , if by it we understand the world as it appears to us, can only be finite, since our lives are themselves finite. And that the world could be infinite only if considered as a thing in itself. This seems to be a good argument (although not explicitly formulated by Kant) that the formulat6ion of the antinomies assumes that we regard the appearances as things-in-themselves: that is, a thesis opposed to my thesis. My answer to such a reply is that the synthesis of a temporally infinite series is by no means more difficult than the synthesis of a spatially infinite series. If by “completing an infinite series” Kant meant a process of effectively taking an infinite number of steps, then the completion of an infinitely long spatial series of objects should take, in its turn, an infinite amount of time. In reality, such an objection is not valid, since (1) it dismisses the role that could be played by imagination in ascertaining whether a certain series is finite or infinite. The mere fact that we cannot - as it is supposed – take an infinite number of steps does not prove that we cannot imagine ourselves performing them. (And the experience that Kant talks about is not, in my opinion, a personal experience but rather the experience of all possible personal subjects; optherwise Kant’s apriorism would amount to a a trivial version of solipsism, whose consequence would be that the world , as it appears to us, is finite given the finitude of any human life (2) It is possible, in principle, to perform an infinite number of steps in a finite period of time. (So to speak, it is merely false that “our mind is too small for the task of completing an infinite series). True, Kant never writes, in the Aesthetics, that time is continuous or dense, but I think that he would have agreed with such a thesis, because the argument for the antithesis of the second antinomy is precisely that no absolutely simple object can be found in experience. Therefore: the temporal version(s) of the mathematical antinomies are not, in any way, more problematic than their spatial counterparts. The solution to the mathematical antinomies is that we should not consider the world as an appearance, since it is really a thing in itself. It does not thus follow that, if the "World" in the first two antinomies is considered as "the totality of experience", then the world should be finite. Therefore, the temporal interpretation of the second antinomies is compatible with my thesis that what is wrong with the antinomies is that things in themselves are considered as mere appearances. That is: the Reason has an autonomous domain in the CRP. Besides the indirect proof (from the Antinomies) that the Reason is the faculty that provides access to the things-in-themselves, there are explicit passages in which Kant asserts this The ideas with which we are now dealing I have above entitled cosmological ideas, partly because by the term 'world' we mean the sum of all appearances, and it is exclusively to the unconditioned in the appearances that our ideas are directed, partly also because the term 'world', in the transcendental sense, signifies the absolute totality of all existing things, and we direct our attention solely to the completeness of the synthesis, even though that is only attainable in the regress to its conditions (p. 192) As further evidence that my hermeneutical hypothesis is correct: Kant addresses the problem of the limits of experience in the Refutation of Idealism, writing that “As regards a void which may be conceived to lie beyond the field of possible experience, that is, outside the world, such a question does not come within the jurisdiction of the mere understanding – which decides only upon questions that concern the use to be made of given appearances for the obtaining of empirical knowledge. It is a problem for that ideal reason which goes out beyond the sphere of a possible experience and seeks to judge of that which surrounds and limits it; and is a problem which will therefore have to be considered in the Transcendental Dialectic (B 281-282) 4.1. Argument from the Paralogisms The first three paralogisms provide even more striking support for my thesis 4 The doctrine that the section about the Paralogisms criticizes is, as it is known, the claim that the existence of an immaterial, persisting and non-composite personal substance might be inferred from the evidence of the I think, which is only the form of transcendental apperception. As we know from the Appercetion, we cannot know anything about the self that the I think involves than that it exists, not how it exists. As I noticed in the first section of this essay, the transcendental self has somehow the status of the thing-in-itself. The purpose of the first three paralogisms is to protect the transcendental self from the threat of transforming it into a part of the experience, that is into an appearance. “The rational doctrine of the soul is really an undertaking of this kind: for if in this science the least empirical element of my thought, or any special perception of my inner state were intermingled with the grounds of knowledge, it would no longer be a rational but an empirical doctrine of the soul” (A 400 B 342) “I think is therefore the sole text of rational psychology, and from it the whole of its teaching has to be developed. Obviously, if this thought is to be related to an object (myself), it can contain none but transcendental predicates of that object, since the least empirical predicate would destroy the rational purity of the science and its independence of all experience”. (A 343, B 401) What the paralogisms do, is precisely to ascribe to the soul predicates that can only characterize appearances. Ascription to something of the properties of substance involves treating that something as an appearance. For substance is a category and only appearances can be subjected to the categories and can be known to be the bearers of such predicates as simple, persistent and temporal. That a is simple only makes sense if a has or can be subjected to attempts at infinite divisibility, and such attempts may be performed only on appearances. That a is persistent makes sense only provided that it has temporal duration; that a characterizes a person only makes sense provided that a is applicable to a (human) body that can only exist as part of experience. The correct status of the I is that of a thing-in-itself, a numenon. In this sense, treating the soul as a part of experience would be similar to the error (which I signaled in respect to the Antinomies) of treating the thing-in-itself as a part of experience, i.e. to treat an objective entity as a subjective one. In this sense, the section of first three Paralogisms are an application to the soul of the general mistake that Kant signaled in the section about the Antinomies: the believer in Antinomies made the mistake of considering things-in-themselves as mere appearances, while the believer in the Paralogisms makes the particular mistake of considering a thing-in-itself, a numenon (the soul) as an appearance: “Through this I or he or it (the thing) that thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts=X.”(A 404, B 346); “We do not have, and cannot have, any knowledge of any such subject [ The most striking formulation is perhaps this: “If our knowledge of thinking beings in general by means of pure reason were based on more than the cogito, if we likewise made use of observations concerning the play of our thoughts and the natural laws of the thinking self to be determined from these thoughts, there would arise an empirical psychology, which would be a kind of physiology of inner sense, capable perhaps of explaining the appearances of inner sense, but never of revealing such properties as do not in any way belong to possible experience (e.g., the properties of the simple)” ( A 347, B 405).