Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic: Reason and Ideas
The Transcendental Dialectic
To discuss the transcendental dialectic, we must first consider the use of reason. Reason has two primary purposes:
- A theoretical use, which is the scientific application, used to understand things as they are. It organizes experience at two levels: a sensible level and a level of understanding.
- A practical use, which is the moral application. It guides us toward our goals, teaching us how to use our freedom to decide, not as things are, but as they should be.
Ideas of Reason
We have established that:
- Sensitivity synthesizes objects.
- Understanding summarizes objects under a concept, forming judgments.
Reason seeks an absolute foundation for experience, aiming for the unconditioned. It seeks the most general synthesis possible, establishing broader relations between judgments. This is reasoning, exemplified by the syllogism: “All men are mortal” + “Caius is a man” = “Caius is mortal.”
This process could continue until the entire experience is grouped, finding the most general opinion as the absolute foundation. However, this is unattainable, as any given trial basis can always be traced back to a previous trial. The fundamental reason is the unity of the whole experience, so it brings together all of the internal experience under the notion of soul, all external experience under the notion of the World, and the whole experience as possible under the notion of God.
Kant divides this precisely because there are 3 types of judgments according to their relationship: categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive. The division is as follows:
- The idea of world engages with hypothetical judgments, forming an absolute unity of the series of the conditions of the phenomenon. “Cosmology speculative”
- The idea of soul is related to categorical judgments, forming an absolute and unconditional unity of the thinking subject. “Speculative psychology”
- The idea of God deals with disjunctive judgments, forming an absolute unity of the condition of all objects of thought in general. “Speculative theology”
Kant calls these concepts Ideas of reason or pure concepts. Kant states that pure reason orders and systematically summarizes the diversity of judgments under metacategóriales principles.
So much for the use of reason is right. However, we can not think if it is not applying the categories of understanding what we think. Here the problem arises because the reason applied to ideas, the categories of understanding, as if it were the objects of experience. Nevertheless, analyzing the problem we see that the reason contradicts itself when it tries to answer from their “theoretical use” those interests pertaining only to their “practical use”. This will address and resolve all contradictions but find their particular kind of reality within the world of moral.
Kant called these contradictory judgments issued by the reason:
- Paralogisms when dealing with the Soul
- Antinomies when dealing with the World
- Ideas of pure reason when dealing with God.