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CHAPTER 1
A Matter of Orientation
I identify two key methodological points in Kant's critical philosophy that make visible the epistemological and metaphysical commitments of his universalizing claims regarding history. First, when we are reflecting on empirical history as a whole, we are in effect aiming to group together a number of particular events under a hypothetical universal narrative. The procedure for projecting such a unity onto particular realities is what Kant calls, in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), "the hypothetical use of reason." (KrV, A646–47/B674–75) Here, he also dubs the origin of such a hypothetical unity "an imaginary focal point." (KrV, A644/B673) Second, in his essay "What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?" (1786), he develops this procedure further and formulates our need to subjectively guide our thinking by means of such imaginary focal points as "a need of reason" and as a matter of orientation in thinking. (WO, AA 8:142) In this essay, the idea of God and its corollary maxim of purposiveness allow us to orient ourselves in systematic thinking in general, as well as, I argue, in systematic thinking about history and politics in particular. Thus, the maxim of a purposive unity is a compass that renders a diverse array of empirical things intelligible; thanks to this compass, we are able to posit an imaginary focal point according to which various components of our thinking about the world connect and make sense together.
Teleology in the Critique of Pure Reason
Kant's idea that a cosmopolitan world order is the overall aim of historical progress stems from the guiding thread that history as a whole can be viewed as a purposive unity. In his critical philosophy, we find the first systematic exploration of such a purposive unity in the Critique of Pure Reason, specifically, in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic. It is important to remember that for Kant such a unity will always remain hypothetical. Kant makes purposiveness a subjective or regulative maxim of the hypothetical use of reason, a principle that guides our inquiry into diverse particulars by allowing us to hypothesize in advance that these particulars will merge in an imaginary focal point. His coinage of the term "the hypothetical use of reason" originates from the inability of the human intellect to arrive at exact normative universals or a systematic theory from a mere survey of a diverse array of particulars. In order to proceed from such particulars to universal claims with some sense of assurance, then, Kant allows us to presuppose a hypothetical unity. This hypothesis is useful, for it points the way toward an imaginary focal point at which our particular cognitions may come together purposively.
A major question of the Appendix is just how we can have unified knowledge or knowledge of the world as a whole, how we can know everything, including what is already given to experience and what is not yet and perhaps never can be given to it. Kant tells us that these questions about systematicity are the task of reason, as opposed to the understanding: while the understanding synthesizes given sensible intuitions with its concepts and yields theoretical cognition, reason's job is to organize these theoretical cognitions into a systematic and unified whole. Reason presupposes an idea
[that] postulates complete unity of the understanding's cognition, through which this cognition comes to be not merely a contingent aggregate but a system interconnected in accordance with necessary laws. One cannot properly say that this idea is the concept of an object, but only that of the thoroughgoing unity of these concepts, insofar as the idea serves the understanding as a rule. (KrV, A644–45/B673–74)
In the Kantian system, the faculty of understanding provides us with rules for the judgments we make about our experience. These rules of the understanding, however, remain too broad, because they provide only the rules for the possibility of experience in general and do not furnish us with particular empirical concepts or rules for everything that we may encounter in experience. When we encounter a new animal, for instance, we may want to know under which rules we can call it a "mammal." These rules are constructed empirically and by means of the guiding idea of the unity of the genus "animal" and the species "mammal." We presuppose that there must be a sufficient amount of affinity between various species of animals such that we can group some of them under the empirical concept or genus of "mammal." Kant calls the guiding presupposition behind this constructed empirical concept "the idea of a systematic unity."
This idea of a systematic unity is far from being an arbitrary assumption for Kant. If such a unity of all of our cognitions is not presupposed as a higher-order rule, then the totality of our empirical concepts risks becoming a haphazard collection, an aggregate or a merely contingent and conditional mass of information (KrV, A645/B673). Without the idea of a unity, we would have no basis for presupposing a unity of all animals as a species, as in my example above, nor would we be able to generalize from particulars that exhibited significant affinities. Presupposing such a unity then becomes a rule of systematic research, and this rule originates from what Kant calls the ideas of reason. This systematic unity, however, will be hypothetical and only subjectively and indirectly valid for our cognitions, because it is provided by the ideas of reason and does not apply directly to our experience (KrV, A665–66/B693–94). It is the kind of guiding thread that can provide higher-order reflections on our experience and concepts, because reason's job is to guide the understanding.
Ideas of Reason as Hypotheses
In these sections of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant assigns ideas of reason an important function in his critical system. Ideas of reason, such as the world-whole, the soul, or God, can never become objects of experience or knowledge, nor can they refer to anything that we find in our experience. They do not have any direct use for our experience in the sense that they do not have any experiential content. They do, however, have an indirect use, since they can function as loci of a hypothetical unity of our cognitions. When we reflect on a set of diverse particulars and wonder if and how they come together, we are permitted to assume that they are hypothetically united. Kant dubs this procedure, one which starts with particulars and tries to find a universal, "the hypothetical use of reason" (KrV, A646–47/B674–75).
Consider again the example of the classification of a mammal that I gave above. Unlike what Kant calls the apodictic use of reason, according to which we subsume particular objects under given universal concepts or rules of the understanding (such as causality or substance), the hypothetical use of reason starts with the particulars for which no specific universal concept is given. In this case, our thinking about these particulars needs to be guided by a general hypothetical unity of such particulars, and from there we posit a problematic empirical concept that should bring them together in a meaningful whole. The empirical concept of "mammal," then, is a problematic universal concept which we obtained as a result of the procedure of the hypothetical use of reason. It is now a tentatively universal and normative concept, for it will also provide a rule for judging other similar particulars that we may come across. All investigations aimed at such a systematic unity or at the creation of a universal empirical concept in this way involve the hypothetical use of reason.
Imaginary Focal Points
The hypothetical use of reason means that the overarching concept we project onto a handful of particulars will remain problematic or open to revision. This use of reason is nevertheless beneficial for theoretical inquiries, as ideas of reason provide us with an imaginary focal point. Kant writes,
[Ideas of reason] have an excellent and indispensably necessary regulative use, namely that of directing the understanding to a certain goal respecting which the lines of direction of all its rules converge at one point, which, although it is only an idea (focus imaginarius) — i.e., a point from which the concepts of the understanding do not really proceed, since it lies entirely outside the bounds of experience — nonetheless serves to obtain for these concepts the greatest unity alongside the greatest extension. (KrV, A644/B672)
The hypothetical unity of all of our cognitions tells us that we should not be discouraged by the seeming infinitude and diversity of the sensible content that we encounter in the world; we are allowed to proceed hypothetically or as if all these diverse particulars merged in or originated from an imaginary focal point. The chief use of the ideas of reason, then, is to direct us toward such an imaginary focal point. This focal point allows us to produce an umbrella term, a problematic universal concept, which brings together our seemingly disparate particular concepts and cognitions.
One such imaginary focal point of theoretical inquiry, for Kant — namely, the idea that we have to consider the unity of all possible experience "as if the sum total of all appearances (the world of sense itself) had a single supreme and all-sufficient ground outside its range ... as if the objects themselves had arisen from that original image of all reason" (KrV, A672–75/B700–703) — is the idea of God. While God can never become an object of knowledge or refer directly to experience, the very idea of God can serve as a unifying focal point for us, providing us with the principle of the purposiveness of the world as a whole. This means that we are allowed to view the world as a purposive and interconnected unity, as if it were to originate from one original point.
The use of the idea of God and the principle of purposiveness has important caveats in the Kantian system, however. Any empirical claim based on such an imaginary focal point will be of a weak epistemic status and of regulative use only. Therefore, the purposiveness of the world can only be assumed as a subjective heuristic maxim of research, and not as an ontologically thick principle constitutive of reality as such, as I show below.
Purposiveness as a Regulative Maxim of Theoretical Inquiry
While its referent cannot be proven necessarily to exist (since there is no sensible intuition corresponding to it), the idea of God gives us the principle of purposiveness, that is, the principle "to regard all combination in the world as if it arose from an all-sufficient necessary cause" (KrV, A619/B647). According to Kant, the idea of God:
means nothing more than that reason bids us to consider every connection in the world according to principles of a systematic unity, hence as if they had all arisen from one single all-encompassing being, as supreme and all-sufficient cause. ... This highest formal unity that alone rests on concepts of reason is the purposive [zweckmässige] unity of things; and the speculative interest of reason makes it necessary to regard every ordinance in the world as if it had sprouted from the intention of a highest reason. (KrV, A686–87/B714–15)
The mere idea of God provides us with the principle of purposiveness, which must then direct our systematic inquiries regarding nature as a whole. Because we have no insight into the existence of God as the intelligent ground of nature, we cannot use purposiveness as a constitutive principle by means of which to conclude that God created everything for a purpose. Instead, reason makes God into the principle of a systematic unity and order, and therefore we make the purposiveness (Zweckmässigkeit) of the world's arrangement into a regulative principle of our investigation of nature (KrV, A697/B725). In other words, we cannot prove, either a priori or a posteriori, that nature itself is governed by this teleological principle; however, the principle of purposiveness as a regulative principle can still be useful for us, as it opens up the possibility of "connecting up things in the world in accordance with teleological laws, thereby attaining the greatest systematic unity among them" (KrV, A687/B715). Therefore, it is useful to assume such purposiveness in nature as a heuristic maxim of research based on the hypothetical use of reason. To return to my previous example, the concept of "mammal" is a useful universal concept for describing certain animals and it also provides us with a rule for the judgment of other similar particulars, though we do not (and cannot) claim to have revealed the essential constitution of these particulars, as God intended them, when we use the concept. This is what it means to make use of a regulative as opposed to a constitutive principle of reason.
We can see the usefulness of the maxim of purposiveness more clearly when we look at how our systematic research would fare without the idea of God used as an imaginary focal point. Kant argues that we naturally strive after a systematic and unconditioned completion of all of our cognitions, all the while knowing that we cannot find anything unconditioned in our experience (KrV, A307/B364). In other words, we want to know about things even if they are not found in our experience and even when they can never be given to experience — things like the beginning of the world, the existence of God, and the purpose or interconnectedness of the natural formations in the world. These are the objects of inquiry of a metaphysica specialis, which for Kant is a precritical metaphysics — as he puts it in the Preface to the first Critique, a pointless battlefield of concepts without reference to experience, "a groping among concepts" (KrV Bxv). The pointless battle of the concepts is this: when we pursue thoughts and concepts as objects of knowledge, we are led to make contradictory claims — such as, "Everything in the world must have a purpose," and, "Everything in the world exists without purpose"; or, "God exists," and, "God does not exist." Such contradictions cannot be resolved through an appeal to experience; evidence could point either way, depending on how it is construed. Either claim could plausibly be justified, because in the terrain of precritical metaphysics we do not need to make reference to objects or experience: mere conceptual grounds will suffice to prove that something unconditioned exists or does not exist.
Here, Kant's critical philosophy and especially its notion of imaginary focal points offers a productive and pragmatic compromise regarding these questions. The idea of God taken as merely an imaginary focal point provides us with the heuristic maxim of purposiveness and obviates the pointless battle about whether or not God exists. If, as Kant claims, all that the idea of God means for theoretical inquiry is that we must assume the purposiveness of nature in our systematic inquiries — without turning this principle into an objective or constitutive principle of nature itself — then not only are we safe from error and contradiction, but our inquiry is empirically sound. We will neither dogmatically assert that nature is created purposively by an intelligent author nor skeptically refrain from making any judgments regarding its possible purposive unity. We will be able to construct a regulative concept of the mammal based on certain empirical affinities that we find among animals, even if we are not able to claim that God must have created animals with such a classification in mind. The maxim of purposive unity among animals provides our empirical research with a guiding principle. This is what Kant's imaginary focal points grants us, thereby saving us from falling into pointless disputes.
Kant summarizes the uses of this maxim in the following way: for every cognition we have, we must search for something at a higher level, a universal concept or explanation that makes it necessary, and for the sake of unity must keep searching for a complete a priori explanation — as he puts it, "you should philosophize about nature as if there were a necessarily first ground for everything belonging to existence, solely in order to bring systematic unity to your cognition by inquiring after such an idea, namely an imagined first ground" (KrV, A616/B644, emphases added). If and when our aim is systematic unity, we treat the imagined first ground of reality, God, as a rational hypothesis. We can then orient our research by such an imagined first ground as long as we do not turn that into a sure thing. This principle only tells us to proceed as if there were an unconditional first ground of all things in the world and gives us a hypothesis to connect various cause-effect relationships in the world into a single first cause as if they all stemmed from it. In other words, such a principle allows us to explain natural phenomena as a whole, hypothetically and in purposive terms: this is the hypothetical use of reason in action.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Kant's Nonideal Theory of Politics"
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