Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller
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The translator’s English as printed (F. Max Müller). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
obscurity in our idea itself, which is a problem admitting of no solution, though we insist obstinately that a real object must correspond to it. A clear explanation of the dialectic within our own concept, would soon show us, with perfect certainty, how we ought to judge with reference to such a question.
If people put forward a pretext of being unable to arrive at certainty with regard to these problems, the first question which we ought to address to them, and which they ought to answer clearly, is this, Whence do you get those ideas, the solution of which involves you in such difficulty } Are they phenomena, of which you require an explanation, and of which you have only to find, in accordance with those ideas, the principles, or the rule of their explanation ? Suppose the whole of nature were spread out before you, and nothing were hid to your senses and to the consciousness of all that is presented to your intuition, yet you would never be able to know by one single experience the object of your ideas in concreto (because, in addition to that complete intuition, what is required is a completed synthesis, and the consciousness of its absolute totality, which [p. 483] is impossible by any empirical knowledge). Hence your question can never be provoked for the sake of explaining any given phenomenon, and as it were suggested by the object itself. Such an object can never come befpre you, because it can never be given by any possible experience. In all possible perceptions you always remain under the sway of conditions, whether in space or in time ; you never come face to face with anything unconditioned, in order thus to determi'ne whether the unconditioned exists in an absolute beginning of the synthesis,
Transce7idental Dialectic 395
or in an absolute totality of the series without any beginning. The whole, in its empirical meaning, is always relative only. The absolute whole of quantity (the universe), of division, of origination, and of the condition of existence in general, with all the attendant questions as to whether it can be realised by a finite synthesis or by a synthesis to be carried on ad ijifinitum^ has nothing to do with any possible experience. You would, for instance, never be able to explain the phenomena of a body in the least better, or even differently, whether you assume that it consists of simple or throughout of composite parts : for neither a simple phenomenon, nor an infinite composition can ever meet your senses. Phenomena require to be explained so far only as the conditions of their explanation are given in perception ; but whatever may exist in them, if comprehended [p. 484] as an absolute whole, can^ never be a perception. Yet it is this very whole the explanation of which is required in the transcendental problems of reason.
As therefore the solution of these problems can never be supplied by experience, you cannot say that it is uncertain what ought to be predicated of the object. For your object is in your brain only, and cannot possibly exist outside it ; so that you have only to take care to be at one with yourselves, and to avoid the amphiboly, which changes your idea into a pretended representation of an object empirically given, and therefore to be known according to the laws of experience. The dogmatical solution is therefore not only uncertain, but impossible ; while the critical solution, which may become perfectly
^ Read keine in original, not eine.
39^ Transcendental Dialectic certain, does not consider the question objectively, but only with reference to the foundation of the knowledge on which it is based.
THE ANTINOMY OF PURE REASON [p. 485] Section V
Sceptical Representation of the Cosmological Questions m the Four Transcendental Ideas ,
We should no doubt gladly desist from wishing to have our questions answered dogmatically, if we understood beforehand that, whatever the answer might be, it would only increase our ignorance, and throw us from one incomprehensibility into another, from one obscurity into a still greater obscurity, or it may be even into contradictions. If our question can only be answered by yes or no, it would seem to be prudent to take no account at first of the probable grounds of the answer, but to consider before, what we should gain, if the answer was yes, and what, if the answer was no. If we should find that in either case nothing comes of it but mere nonsense, we are surely called upon to examine our question critically, and to see whether it does not rest on a groundless supposition, playing only with an idea which betrays its falsity in its application and its consequences better than when represented by itself. This is the great advantage of the sceptical treatment of questions which [p. 486] pure reason puts to pure reason. We get rid by it, with a little effort, of a great amount of dogmatical rubbish, in order to put in its place sober criticism which, as a true cathartic, removes successfully all illusion with its train of omniscience.
Transcendental Dialectic 397
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