Kant’s Metaphysics: Foundations and Limits of Pure Reason
Kant’s Metaphysics: Foundations and Limits
In the analyzed text, Kant discusses metaphysics and its foundational possibilities. He claims that metaphysics, despite being the basis of all sciences and the first to appear (and the last to be lost), cannot substantiate itself using sound methods available to science. Metaphysical demonstrations should be made a priori and, therefore, can be misleading. To safeguard against this problem, the situation is reversed: objects are suited to the subject, meaning they fit the human way of understanding.
Analysis of Kant’s Argument
The text is part of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, one of his most important works, which examines the nature, role, and limits of human reason. The problem posed at the beginning is the rational foundation of metaphysics. Despite being the ‘mother’ of all sciences and the only one to survive if the others cease to exist, metaphysics has proven difficult to ground in rational and objective methods, such as those used in natural science or mathematics. For Kant, metaphysical concepts are based a priori, without universal validity, and are obtained using simple concepts and groping. Therefore, they cannot be regarded as valid knowledge.
Kant concludes that attempts to ground metaphysical knowledge have failed and proposes what is known as the Copernican Revolution of philosophy: instead of the subject imposing order on the object, the object now fits the subject and its way of knowing. This idea is known as transcendental idealism, a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism.
He concludes that objects, i.e., experience, possess a priori rules that we know before knowing the object and are adapted to all objects of nature.
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant investigated whether and how mathematical, physical, and metaphysical knowledge was possible, while claiming universality and necessity. Knowledge should not be considered from the perspective of objects, but conversely, objects should be considered from the conditions that make our knowledge of them possible. Kant’s Copernican Revolution allows us to realize that objects are not independent realities; in fact, the perception of an object is not a passive reception but an activity. The object is constituted by the subject as a unity of many synthetic perceptions. This synthetic activity exerted by the subject is what makes the object possible. The object is constituted by the subject from the data of sensible intuition, but only by focusing not on the thing in itself. Kant introduces the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon. A phenomenon is the thing as it appears to a subject. A noumenon is the thing considered in itself, unrelated to any subject; only phenomena may be subject to scientific knowledge.
The Limits of Metaphysics
The alleged objects of metaphysics—the world, the soul, and God—are not phenomena of our experience, as they do not rely on sensible intuition. The lack of scientific rigor in metaphysics is due to the use of reason and sophistical reasoning. Metaphysical ideas do not arise arbitrarily but originate in the very structure of reason. Reason always tends to subordinate a subject to a superior condition and thus tends to establish a synthetically unconditioned condition through infinite progression. This transcendental illusion is inevitable; it is natural, and we can never concoct the alleged objects of metaphysics, nor can we ask reason to stop. According to Kant, metaphysics as a science is impossible, but it is unavoidable as a tendency inherent in man.