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The Satisfaction of Reason: The Mathematical/Dynamical Distinction in the Critique of Pure Reason

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2011

Brent Adkins
Brent Adkins
Affiliation:
Loyola University, Chicago
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Extract

In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant explicitly states that his motivation for writing this work is to make room for faith or the practical employment of reason (Bxxv, xxx). How does Kant accomplish this? The topics of God and the immortality of the soul do not arise until the conclusion of the antinomies. How does Kant get from the desire to make room for faith to its fulfilment in the latter parts of the first Critique? A common response to this question is a discussion of the constitutive and regulative employment of the ideas of reason. It is this distinction that sustains Kant's attempt at reconciling empirical knowledge and moral discourse. The constitutive and regulative analysis, however, has its roots deep within the initial stages of the Critique of Pure Reason. It is, in fact, the mathematical/dynamical distinction, which Kant introduces early in the analytic, that makes possible the constitutive/regulative distinction. Not only has the mathematical/ dynamical distinction itself been disregarded, but the relation between the mathematical/dynamical and the constitutive/ regulative has been almost universally ignored by commentators. If a commentator does mention the mathematical/dynamical distinction, it is usually in a dismissive tone. Walsh, for example, calls the distinction ‘hard to interpret’ and ignores it for the rest of his commentary.

Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 3 , March 1999 , pp. 64 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Kantian Review 1999

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References

Notes

1 I do not find the mathematical/dynamical distinction explored in its own right in any commentaries on the Critique of Pure Reason. Allison's, Henry E.Kant's Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, deals with the distinction as merely stipulative on Kant's part. Its introduction in the table of categories goes unnoticed for the most part, and when it is discussed at any length for the antinomy of pure reason the fact that the difference between the first two antinomies and the second two antinomies happens to be related to their status as mathematical and dynamical is regarded as unessential. This is also the case in Smith, Norman Kemp, A Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Humanities Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Paton, H. J., Kant's Metaphysic of Experience, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1936)Google Scholar; Strawson, P. F., The Bounds of Sense, an Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen, 1966)Google Scholar; Walsh, W. H., Kant's Critique of Metaphysics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975)Google Scholar, Cohen's, HermannKommentar zu Immanuel Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1925)Google Scholar, Vaihinger, H., Commentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1881–1892)Google Scholar; and Nagel's, GordonThe Structure of Experience: Kant's System of Principles (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983).Google Scholar The only discussion of Kant which seems to treat the mathematical/dynamical distinction with philosophical weight is Žižek's, SlavojTarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 53–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Heidegger also notes that the distinction is used throughout the First Critique in Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978); published in English as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, by Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 176–7.

2 Walsh, , Kant's Critique of Metaphysics, pp. 236–9.Google Scholar These commentators might respond, however, that the relation between the mathematical/dynamical distinction and the constitutive/regulative relation is ambiguous, and that one cannot assume that the same relation holds from the analytic to the dialectic. In support of this position, Kant clearly says that ‘dynamical [regulative] laws are constitutive in respect of experience’ (A664/B692). I will argue, however, that Kant does not equivocate in this instance and employs the mathematical/dynamical and constitutive/regulative distinctions unequivocally throughout the first Critique. In response to the above quoted passage I propose that, while Kant does blur the line between constitutive and regulative, this blurring is the result of a shift in perspective from the understanding to reason and does not indicate an ambiguity in Kant's use of the terms. See below p. 77.

3 This distinction is also found in the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement. Kant does not add anything to his analysis of the mathematical/dynamical distinction in the second Critique, nor does he employ it in a way distinct from its use in the Critique of Pure Reason. He merely reaffirms that the solution to the dynamical antinomies in the Critique of Pure Reason makes freedom possible, and thus the deploy ment of reason in its practical mode. See Akademie edition of Kant, 's work: Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1913), 5: 42, 104, 105Google Scholar. In the Critique of Judgement, however, the mathematical/dynamical distinction is used to distinguish two types of judgement, determinative and teleological, and two types of the sublime. See Ak. S: 234, 247, 260, 268. The relation between the uses of the mathematical/dynamical distinction in the third Critique and the first Critique, however, lies well beyond the scope of this paper.

4 All quotes are from Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason, tr. by Smith, Norman Kemp (New York: St Martin's Press, 1965).Google Scholar

5 Perhaps this initial lack of clarity on Kant's part is responsible for the failure by most commentators to treat the distinction with any weight. Walsh is the exception insofar as he notes this omission. Other comment ators do not even do this.

6 In the categories, however, Kant's concern is with the a priori application.

7 I use the term ‘synonymous’ here to indicate that Kant simply substitutes ‘constitutive’ for ‘mathematical’ and ‘regulative’ for ‘dynamical’. I also maintain that this relation holds throughout the first Critique as we see a similar substitution going on in A664/B692.

8 I introduce the qualifications here in order to reproduce Kant's modesty on this score as well as pave the way for the way Kant will speak about the possibility of freedom in the antinomy of pure reason. Here Kant is speaking of causality when both cause and effect are objects of experi ence. Ultimately, however, Kant will need the possibility of causation where the cause is not an object of experience, thus allowing the possibility of freedom.

9 Kant is best read (I think) as trying to avoid the need for a pure empirical given. There is no experience possible prior to the application of the categories of judgement. If we were (hypothetically) to remove the categories of judgement we would be left with a radical indeterminacy of experience, to the extent that it could not be called experience at all. The categories of judgement make possible objective experience which is prior to anything that might be called subjective experience. Furthermore, subjective experience is really a misnomer since it is not something we have access to in experience.

10 It is perhaps here that we can best identify the subsequent shift from critical philosophy to post-Kantian idealism. Hegel locates the difference between Fichte and Schelling on precisely this point. Fichte continues to maintain that the ideas of reason can only be employed regulatively, while Schelling maintains that the ideas of reason can be employed constitutively. See, Hegel, G. W. F., The Difference between the Fichtean and Schellingean Systems of Philosophy, tr. Harris, H. S. and Cerf, Walter (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Hegel Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1968), 4: 1–92Google Scholar.

11 I would like to thank Paul Abela, Andrew Cutrofello, Brian Bowles and the anonymous reviewers from Kantian Review for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.