11 - The Ideal of Pure Reason

Summary

Discussions of the “Ideal of Pure Reason” in the Transcendental Dialectic often focus on Kant's rejection of the three types of argument traditionally offered in support of the existence of God (the so-called “ontological,” “cosmological” and “physico-theological proofs”). Kant's critique of these arguments, however, is prefaced by two very dense preliminary sections, the purpose of which is evidently to illuminate the “grounds of proof of speculative reason for inferring the existence of a highest being” (A 584/B 612). I am referring here to Sections 2 and 3 in the Ideal (A 572/B 600-A 590/B 618). Kant's prefatory discussions in these two sections appear to be designed to accomplish two distinct things. First, in Section 2, Kant wants to demonstrate the rational necessity of the idea of the ens realissimum. This idea, as we shall see, is said to be philosophically necessitated by our need to represent the “necessary thoroughgoing determination of things” (A 578/B 606). Second, Kant wants to account for what he takes to be an inevitable confluence of the idea of the ens realissimum with that of a necessary being. Because Sections 2 and 3 seem to be offering two distinct accounts of the origin of the idea of God, some have suggested that Kant was simply confused or uncertain about the basis for the idea of rational theology.