Reading and Understanding Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: A No-Nonsense Guide

By Alberto Palazzi

There is no greater satisfaction than breaking the veil of age-old naivety with which we consider the things around us, and looking at the world again with the experience of having read the Critique of Pure Reason. But it is difficult: other people’s reports are not satisfying, and the meaning of Kant’s intense text cannot be grasped, because the philosopher, seeing things so differently from the usual, could not find a way to express himself that was adequate to the presuppositions of readers of the time to come.
This guide, designed to be read not before, but together with Kant’s text, leads today’s readers to experience the immense pleasure of mastering the meaning of the great Enlightenment scholar’s most important work. A guide that can be read together with Kant’s text because it consists of short comments specifically referring to the paragraphs of the Critique of Pure Reason which need explanation, comments that translate Kant’s words into clear and familiar language for today’s readers. The instructions in this book first of all warn readers about Kant’s implicit presuppositions, which are the first source of difficulty, and then acknowledge those presuppositions of Kant that a twenty-first century reader cannot accept: so that we will be able to understand Kant standing humbly on his shoulders.
The little we know from experience, what we would like to know, the things we conceive as ideal, after reading the Critique of Pure Reason appear in a completely different light: no longer as things that overwhelm us, but as ideas that we produce through elementary states of consciousness that are within us, and that determine the way in which we interpret the universe of perceptions that affect us. The explanatory texts of this guide accompany the reader in appropriating Kant’s book while the meaning of the great philosopher’s vision appears increasingly clear, and ultimately also simple, as profound thoughts are once the path that leads to understanding them has been walked with the due commitment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: GogLiB
• Release date: Apr 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9788897527633

Book preview

Foreword to this Guide

General considerations: why this guide to Kant’s classic

This volume contains a guide intended to be read together with the text of the Critique of Pure Reason, a book which needs first-hand knowledge in order to enter Kant’s philosophy and to appropriate his grandiose vision of human experience in the world. Therefore readers will not read this guide in full before trying their hand at Kant, but (having read this introductory part) they will keep it open and use it to grapple with the great Kantian classic.

Readers will immediately notice one thing: that here Kant is commented and explained with a language of our present, and not by endlessly mixing and recomposing Kant’s words, which is what secondary literature usually does, leaving the expectations of those who seek help from it unsatisfied. This organization of the text will lead readers to be able to read both of Kant’s theoretical critiques with satisfaction—in this volume the Critique of Pure Reason, later the Critique of Judgment—and will do this through a completely unprejudiced attitude, which will show how Kant’s words can be read and understood after more than two hundred years, in a world that is no longer that of Torricelli’s barometer and rococo taste, climbing on Kant’s shoulders. This way of reading Kant is not an option, but a necessity: we must understand Kant taking into account what happened between his time and ours, and what allows us to stand modestly on the shoulders of this giant. After all, Kant didn’t even know that the formula for water is H2O, and he had a vision of mathematics so tied to the priority of geometry that every time he had to talk about algebra he missed the point (as we will see in detail) and used to say things that were not worthy of him. However, Kant knew that to know something more about water it would be necessary to find a way to break it down into its elements and then recompose it, controlling the process in both cases; he knew that mathematical theorems prove nothing about the existence of things; and he knew that pure form, devoid of semantics, is what we call art, even if he invoked wallpaper and the feathers of stuffed birds as examples of abstract painting, because in his experience he could not find anything better, and on his studio wall did not hang a Kandinsky, but a portrait of Rousseau.

This guide, which presumes to speak to readers who are either almost completely unaware of Kantian philosophy, or disoriented and perplexed, and which therefore allows itself to give instructions to its readers as if it were a user manual, is based first of all on frank expression of the fact that there were some fundamental considerations that Kant could not make, because the time was not ripe, and which instead after two hundred years we are able to make, and which indeed the entire culture of the twentieth century could have made. So we read Kant’s text differently from the way Kant understood himself, and there is nothing strange in this: Kant spoke about conceptual problems common to his time and ours, but he interpreted them through some prejudices that it was impossible for him to remove, and thus they hindered the potential that was implicit in his immense unconventional attitude and analytical depth. One thing, however, must be frankly premised: that many of Kant’s ideas did not at all resolve the problems that he raised, and the commentary on the text must highlight this clearly, not silence it as interpretative literature usually does, generally presenting the classics to us as if the thought they contain were always completely coherent, complete and conclusive with respect to their premises. The differences in attitude between Kant and us are many, and we will later illustrate them in detail, encountering them in the text; but in general they can be summarized in three or four main factors.

First of all, Kant did not conceive that formal logic could be described differently from the Aristotelian and scholastic tradition, while we know that at least mathematical logic, information science, and perhaps alternative logics do exist. Therefore, on this point, today we conceive in relative terms a matter that Kant took as absolute; and this has many methodological implications: first of all, that Kant believed he could produce a thoroughly demonstrated theory of the object of his research, when instead he gives us an interpretation of it (certainly brilliant, but not demonstrable as he would have liked).

The second capital difference between Kant and us is that Kant believed he could construct a complete, definitive and absolute answer to the problems he posed. He believed, after having theorized that logical and mathematical forms are inside the conscious human subject, that he could describe them and put them into a system with completeness only by looking inside himself, while we know that the experience of struggling with things and the passage of time are needed. We will see that Kant very soon encounters the difficulty of looking inside himself and finding nothing, and that although the potential of his own philosophy could immediately guide him to search outside himself, however the primitive certainty of being able to build the system of Pure Reason introspectively is never questioned. Although the belief of the modern age in the stability of the subject is put into crisis precisely by the speculations on the metaphysical notion of the soul that we read in the first Critique, it remains that Kant believes he has obtained, by looking into himself, a settlement of the philosophical problems of absolute value and immutable in time to come: a belief in which it is obvious that we cannot follow him.

Moreover, a third difference between Kant and us is a factor that rather concerns the interpretation of the Critique of Judgement; therefore as long as we limit ourselves to the Critique of Pure Reason it is premature to talk about it. However, just to mention it, the problem is that we know that the brain of us humans, highly evolved animals at the top of the intelligence scale (for those who want to believe it), but also that of our friends dogs, monkeys etc., works through the implementation of certain shape recognition strategies called Gestalt, and which lead us to say: this is an apple, this is a portrait of my grandfather, and so on, without the need to make explicit the reasoning steps we carry out. Kant had no idea of the concept of Gestalt, however his profound analysis of cognitive processes led him to the need to talk about something very close to Gestalt, but having no idea of it he found himself confusing Gestalt with its product. This means, Kant realized that the proposition this is an apple is pronounced when, in the face of experience, a state of the mind has been produced that makes us certain of that judgment, that is, the vision of an apple that is present before us and is distinct from everything else and can be classified into a given species of things; but he was unable to distinguish these two dimensions, the natural event of recognition from logical classification, and he was unable to create an adequate terminology to express what was created by so great effort of his mind. We will see that this limit, which Kant, living in the culture of his time, could not have overcome even if his intelligence had been superhuman, is the reason why the reader, even if he reads with profit and interest the large quantity of observations and descriptions of aesthetic facts that there are in the Critique of Judgement, fails to follow the argument of this book, and it is also the reason why books on the history of philosophy usually reproduce the words that are read in the Critique of Judgment without knowing how to give the minimal convincing illustration of what they mean.

Returning to Pure Reason, there is finally a fourth source of misunderstanding that inhibits in us the possibility of a living relationship with the Kantian text, and which, unlike those mentioned so far, cannot be attributed to Kant’s limits, but comes from a confusion what we do, as a consequence of a legacy that idealist philosophy has bequeathed to the entire culture of the twentieth century and its present appendix in the twenty-first century. In the era of the epochal change in the self-image of modern man, the era of the Revolution and Napoleon, German philosophy produced a new declination of the idealist attitude, which was expressed in proclaiming that the world of values that humanity builds in its historical world is an absolute horizon, outside of which there is nothing, because we cannot see anything outside it. The human spirit is self-sufficient, and so its historical vicissitude is in itself the absolute: an idea that would never have occurred to either Plato or Descartes, who nevertheless shared with Fichte and Hegel the label of idealists, and which is an invention with which the culture of the dawn of our age attempted to exorcise the loss of the naive certainties of the world of the ancient regime; and it is an invention from which, despite its fantastic character, we have gained the awareness that the facts and choices of the human spirit are always motivated, and never completely irrational (although they do not deserve to be called always rational in themselves, as Hegel used to do): which is the reason why something of the idealism of that era remains in our present culture as an institution, and it manifests itself when we recognize that what appears to us as irrationality and error in human affairs is nevertheless always a response to a need that stimulates it.

Now, it is impossible to deny that there are methodological problems that inevitably appear to us non-historical and non-temporal (or rather: they appear such to us when we assume a certain point of view), and they are those relating to the more general conditions of logical correctness in reasoning and the conditions of truth. However, every attempt at a coherent philosophical arrangement of the principles of logic, of scientific methodology, of the interpretation of experience and nature, and even of the metaphysical world if one wants to take it seriously, if on the one hand intentionally focuses on these things abstracting from every aspect extraneous to them, on the other hand is conditioned, more or less consciously, by the entire system of values and beliefs that gives shape to the culture of its time. It is here that there is a very clear watershed precisely in correspondence with the idealistic philosophy immediately following Kant. The ancients, like the modern age, believed that it was possible to concentrate thought on logical, physical and metaphysical problems, leaving aside every ideological and political dimension concerning values. Idealism and historicism born from the ashes of Enlightenment Kantianism have instead taught us that things are not like this, but quite the opposite: every apparently abstract thought with respect to the historical and conflictual dimensions of this world is actually based on the values of its own time, and while it expresses something about its object abstractly isolated from every conflict of the human world (for example: a problem of mathematical methodology), at the same time, with the words it uses, with what it places attention on and what it neglects, metaphorically expresses something completely different and full of value and conflictual implications. The three words critique, pure and reason are alone an Enlightenment manifesto full of controversy and politics, as was noted by the political philosopher Schmitt (who was a reactionary, and therefore gifted with this kind of sensitivity), and the culture of our time easily accepts this characterization, which probably would have aroused Kant’s horror.

So our present now understands that there is an inevitable dialectic: on the one hand, thought is forced to deal with problems relating to things that man considers external to his own world of history, values and conflicts, and therefore to believe he can escape from the historical world together with its objects, while on the other hand any thought will always be at the same time an act full of meanings within the historical world, and will determine conflicts and divisions, identifications and marginalizations, and will imply choices between contrasting theses. We cannot escape this dialectic, because it will always happen that we will feel the need to analyze in detail the logical process, the methodology and the consistency of a scientific theory or a technical practice, and the more we will fulfil the duty to go into detail and not be satisfied of superficial formulations, the more the professionalism that we will put into our analytical work will take us back to the innocence of the ancients, to the belief that we can be perfectly objective and concentrated on some innocent and irrelevant problem with respect to human conflicts (an example could be a problem referring to the geological history of the Earth, where what happened millions of years ago happened as it happened, and is certainly not the business of men in historical times). But others will see and make us see all the political and historical connotations of our work, and they will destroy our innocence.

But precisely because here there is an inevitable dialectic, when one reads a rich text like Kant’s one, one must know how to be ambivalent: sometimes following Kant in his innocent argument concentrated on things such as the categories of the intellect and the ideas of reason, and appropriating or not his conclusions, correcting them or rejecting them; sometimes going back to considering those discourses as belonging to a time that is no more ours. Because yes, on the one hand, encountering certain arguments in the first Critique, e.g. Mendelssohn’s argument regarding the immortality of the soul and the seriousness with which Kant refutes it, they will seem equally naive to us; but on the other hand we are terribly ignorant regarding to the meaning of words like soul, universe and God, and we still have to learn from Kant, and to be led by him to dismantle what is inside the superficial thoughts which are triggered in our heads when we hear the sound of those words.

In short, the fourth source of difficulty in understanding the writing of this classic author, who for the culture of our time is nominally a classic, but is not at all well understood, and is very far from being metabolized, is an attitude by which we historicize his ideas when we are still much more clueless than him regarding the things he talks about. An attitude that comes from idealistic philosophy, for which problems such as those of the method of science were taboo until the moment of having to say something specific about them, and then it usually expressed its opinion so amateurishly as to expose itself to ridicule; attitude also strengthened by the twentieth-century cultural relativism of anthropological nature, with all its innumerable manifestations (which often teaches us true things, and yet just as often ungenerously dismisses our past); an attitude attested, and this is a very curious story, by the perception that the German culture had of Kant in the few years in which the Critique of Pure Reason was in vogue, the so-called years of the Aetas Kantiana, more or less around 1790, when the book had many readers who understood it more easily than us because they were familiar with the German university philosophy that was taught at the time, and therefore with the language of Kant, but who wanted to see within it what did not yet exist, i.e. the metaphor of the human spirit as creator of itself who marked the philosophy of the following generation. We must read Kant, understand Kant, historicize Kant, and contradict ourselves in doing this as is inevitable, because we are as involved in the game as Kant was: for us too there are problems that inevitably appear absolute, objective and foreign to the historical world, but everything that in a certain perspective appears foreign to the historical world, then in another becomes part of it again. What should not be done is to judge Kant in the way of Hegel, who judged him because he did not find his own declination of idealist philosophy in Kant’s one, and so historicize his ideas for their metaphorical value before having fully understood them.

This volume and the next one, which will offer a guided reading of the Critique of Judgement, are connected. Overall we will talk about the Critique of Pure Reason and that of Judgment as a single work, even if this volume concerns only the first of the two (little or nothing we will say about the Practical Reason, a much simpler text to understand, compared to the other two). The two books are separated by the nine years between 1781, in which the first version of the Critique of Pure Reason was published, and 1790 in which Kant published the Critique of Judgment, and it is absolutely true that the second book contains thoughts of which at the time of the first there was no trace, at least conscious, in Kant’s mind; however we will see that the second theoretical Critique (although at first sight it adds imaginary and artificial solutions to the residual problems of the first) completes the first, gives it the basis of reality that it lacked, makes it walk on its own legs, and therefore ideally the two books make up only one. However, all this must be put aside for now, until the first Critique is truly known.

In his 1923 Book of the It Georg Groddeck warned the reader with these words: everything in this book of mine that sounds reasonable, or perhaps only a little strange, comes from Professor Freud of Vienna and his colleagues; but for everything that is completely senseless, I claim my paternity. The same warning applies here, replacing Freud with the letter of Kant’s text, the authoritative issues of the journal Kant-Studien and the innumerable mass of academic writings that reshuffle Kant’s words in search of solutions to problems that are not clear even in their initial formulation, and Groddeck with my work. Readers, after having invested as much of their time as they wish in reading this unorthodox introduction, will be free, if they want, to think badly of it and return to a more conventional way of reading Kant; but even in this case their relationship with the Kantian text will have changed: each of Kant’s sentences will have acquired a concrete meaning and readers will no longer have to resort to conscience transactions to convince themselves that they have understood what they have instead only learned to associate through Pavlovian reactions, rich in rewards and gratifications, agreeing to statements that for them remain shrouded in the black clouds of mental confusion only for having recognized the Kantian style in them, which has a very marked and unmistakable character, and which can also be learned as a kind of music, making oneself capable of reproducing it (even virtuously) despite the absence of any meaning.

Instructions for readers and prerequisites

This introduction (by which I mean not only these premises, but also all the commentary that I have inserted into the Kantian text) is aimed mainly at those who already know (even briefly) the structure of Kant’s philosophy, but are aware of many issues that are not clear to them. However, it should be easily understandable even to those who approach Kant’s philosophy for the first time through it, but in this case readers should always keep in mind that Kant does not say literally what is said in this introduction. The meaning of this introduction is that Kant’s philosophy has a strong potential for clarification with respect to unsolved conceptual problems of our present, but as long as we read it with the experience of the twenty-first century, not the eighteenth. As for the minimum requirements to understand this introduction, the first indispensable condition is that readers know the rudiments of ancient and modern formal logic, even if only from elementary treatises. It is not necessary to have studied the abstract problems of the philosophy of logic, but you need to know what all the following things are, that I will take for granted: Aristotle’s doctrine of concepts and categories, the judgments and syllogisms theory of the scholasticism, including the meaning of the nursery rhyme Barbara, Festino, Baroco (what is this? does baroque have anything to do with it?), as well as the modern logic of propositions and truth tables, and possibly also quantifiers, predicate logic and its demonstrating technique. If readers had the misfortune, as can happen today, of not having had any school teaching of Euclidean geometry, before starting to read Kant they should familiarize themselves with any old treatise on geometry, with the Euclidean axioms and with the technique of demonstration of the first theorems encountered there, those of Thales and Pythagoras.

In this introduction I will accompany my readers in reading the Critique of Pure Reason, and subsequently I will do a similar operation for the Critique of Judgement, assuming that they want to reach the satisfaction of reading and understanding them in full. While proceeding according to the sequence of the Kantian text, I shall save repeating here once more the usual scholastic exposition of the structure, especially of the Critique of Pure Reason, which is available in countless variants, all similar to each other: I therefore assume that readers are documented, by any source (any philosophy textbook used in high schools will do), first of all on the fact that there are two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, A from 1781 and B from 1787, and then on the fact that the book is divided into a first part called Transcendental Aesthetic, which does not speak of what is meant by Aesthetics in the modern sense, that is, it does not speak of the problems of art and beauty, but speaks of sensitivity in the elementary cognitive sense. Then there is a second part called Transcendental Logic, divided in turn into an Analytic which speaks of the concepts having objective use with respect to experience (such as those of number and cause), and into a Dialectic which speaks of idealized concepts beyond experience (like the soul and the universe), which we always believe to be able to make use of, and which instead destine us to the repetition of inevitable frustrations. Finally, I assume that the reader possesses the scholastic notion that analytic judgments (for example, the tautologies of logic) and synthetic a posteriori judgments (derived from experience) must be distinguished, and that Kant was looking for a third type of judgment, the one called of synthetic a priori judgements, such that they were neither tautologies nor inductive generalizations of experience; but I do not assume that readers have understood how judgments of this kind can be made and where they can be found: the notion of a synthetic a priori judgment, to tell us something useful, is one that requires us to interpret it taking into account what happened in the almost three hundred years that have passed since the time when young Kant attended school. As regards the Critique of Judgement, I shall assume that the reader knows that that book is divided into two parts, the first of which talks about the problem of aesthetics in the sense that has become usual, therefore of beauty and art, and the second of which talks about the methodological problems of biology; and that the two topics are connected, because Kant considered them relevant to each other: something that to a contemporary reader should appear inexplicable and extravagant at first sight. The relationship between these two problems is described by all the scholastic expositions of Kant’s philosophy, but I challenge any readers to understand it unless they go beyond Kant’s technical language, which is precisely what the scholastic treatises cannot do.

Then there is another precondition to take into account, and this is that Kant’s philosophy often says exactly the opposite of twentieth-century speculative physics. I’m not talking about the sciences to which we owe heart transplants, communication via smart phones, the sending of probes to Mars, the mastery of countless chemical processes, and all the technology that surrounds us: this science proceeds in a way that could very well be still described with the means of Kant’s philosophy, if this proved useful. I am talking about non-classical, theoretical physics, which describes scenarios at the borders of customary logic and which through them knows the age of the Universe, the structure of matter and the origin of time: this science is always incompatible with Kant’s philosophy, which denies in principle the possibility of similar knowledge, and which has a concept of the universe and time that is completely different from that of twentieth-century physics. So why still study Kant? The motivation from which we will start will generally be historical, and we will read Kant thinking that his philosophy is part of a path of development that has led to our present, and that its importance in the past and its persistence in our memory is a reason enough to desire to understand it. What will happen then, we will see: perhaps we will be more convinced than before that Kant’s teaching is outdated, perhaps that a more coherent vision of things is obtained by merging together the two perspectives, his and that of twentieth-century physics, perhaps something else. From this introduction readers will come away with clearer ideas than before regarding Kant’s side, and probably more curious than before to understand, for example, why the fastest of Einstein’s two proverbial twins should age later than the slowest: the study of non-classical physics and its methods will be an excellent complement and counterbalance to Kant’s philosophy, starting with Einstein’s very simple theory of special relativity, the understanding of which is within everyone’s reach, and which however almost no one knows, given that those who know it, usually cannot explain it or make it understandable to anyone else.

This edition of the Critique of Pure Reason has only a not too long introduction, with which to convey to readers the general idea of the book, and then numerous reading aids are interspersed with the text. Remember that the complexity of this classic is such that it is difficult to be satisfied by just one reading: you have to return to it several times. This also gives rise to a particular difficulty in commenting on the text, because on the one hand it is necessary to inform the reader of certain notions without which it is impossible to grasp the meaning of the chapters that are about to be read, on the other hand it is necessary to avoid creating confusion by pretending to anticipate too much what must be assimilated little by little, with repeated readings.

The central idea of the Critique of Pure Reason

Let us now move on to get an idea of the central themes of the Critique of Pure Reason, starting with a very free paraphrase of the central idea of the book. Unlike the following, which will help the reader to master Kant’s text first-hand, what will be read in these introductory pages will not have any exact and literal correspondence with Kant’s expression.

The relation of representation is a primitive notion

The notion of representation of things in the consciousness (of men) has a shared meaning, and constitutes something we can talk about because we all understand it. It obviously makes sense for us, as it did for Kant’s time (as a starting point, but also with the aim of analyzing it and then conceiving it in a new way). And it is at the foundation of a way of thinking typical of the mentality of modern times, that is, of the principle according to which philosophical problems make sense if they are addressed by placing attention on the characteristics of the relationship with the things which we call knowledge, or, more generically, representation. What is necessary to assume is only this: that the statement that men have representations, images and concepts of things is a significant statement, and that anyone reading these lines instinctively recognizes that the distinction and relationship between things and their images in human consciousness is something that exists. This distinction is peaceful for the majority of modern men (but not for all men: not for the infantile or primitive mentality), while it is problematic for philosophers, but in any case it is in this relationship, and only in this relationship, experienced subjectively in the existence of each of us, that the world of sensations, images, concepts and ideas that constitutes the cultural community of men has a reality.

Representing, feeling, thinking are the abilities that distinguish the community of men from the whole of existence, taken in general. The Kantian text assumes this, and consequently assumes that the relationship of representation, knowledge and communication that forms the world of culture of men constitutes a given and inexplicable reality as regards its existence, but knowable in its structure, and reducible to a perspective in which it is interpreted like any other known reality, and therefore is reducible to a composition of simple and constitutive elements, just as any other content of experience can be. The Critique of Pure Reason is a science of the structure of the relationship of representation, based on the idea that for us humans things are related to their representations in our consciousness, but are not identical to them.

The fact that the community of beings capable of having representations includes only men, or perhaps in some respects also those animals with which men are capable of establishing some relationship of mutual recognition in communication, is an accidental fact and in itself incomprehensible, just as is incomprehensible everything that generally concerns the event of existence. According to the concept that we possess of it, the general community of culture would include any reality existing in nature with which we could be capable of establishing mutual recognition in communication. That this is a common conception, is sufficiently attested by the example of the naive projections of fairy-tale imagination and fantastic literature regarding our possible cohabitation with unknown species of rational beings in the world: fantasies whose naive character lies in the exchange of the mere possibility with a sufficient reason for the assertion of the reality of things, but whose concept attests the need to think that anything existing in the world, which knows how to place itself in a relationship of communication with men, would for this reason alone become an interlocutor.

Foundation of the distinction between subject and object

After assuming that it is legitimate and significant to say that our consciousness has representations of things other than itself, what distinguishes the terms of the relationship, the subject and the object of the representation? As regards first of all the object, the easiest general characteristic that we can attribute to it (and in fact we are used to doing so) is that of contingency: we know that the object of representation appears to our experience in a contingent way, and that is, in a way which is perhaps governed by some rule inherent to the object itself, perhaps is completely devoid of rules, but which is nevertheless independent of the dimension of subjectivity; otherwise, if subjectivity itself generated the appearance of its own objects, the irreducible heterogeneity of