Metaphysica Naturalis: Kant on the History and Discipline of Reason

• In Event: The Highest Good and the Grounds of Political Order in Kant’s Political Thought

Abstract

Commentators sometimes point to Kant as instituting a newly “historical conception of reason,” while scholars like Dieter Henrich and Onora O’Neill observe that many of the 1781 Critique’s introspective appeals to the pure “I” were eliminated and replaced by the second edition’s appeals to the political and historical dimension of pure reason. Kant often claims that transcendental critique will set the history of reason straight along the secure course of a science—effecting a “revolution in the way of thinking” and the attainment of “perpetual peace in philosophy”—via the discipline of our natural predisposition to metaphysics. This paper looks more closely at these two under-appreciated doctrines in the Critique of Pure Reason in order to explicate Kant’s conception of scientific metaphysics. First, this paper considers the negative injunctions in the Doctrine of Method, arguing that there are good reasons to take Kant seriously when he claims that the “discipline of pure reason” is foundational for transcendental argumentation and critical philosophy. Second, it considers the particular nature of the abstracted supraindividuality of Kant’s conception of reason, understood in terms of Kant’s reflections on the “history of pure reason,” which bookend the first Critique. We can better understand the strange claim that “pure reason itself” is historical if we attend to the discipline of pure reason. The discipline is not only a statement of meta-philosophical method, but also the theoretical assertion of reason’s capacity for autonomous reflexivity, whereby reason can consider itself not through Cartesian meditation but through quasi-historical analysis of the way reason operates in polemical debates. Hence Kant’s repeated claim that transcendental philosophers should not engage openly in debates with dogmatic metaphysicians, but should rather become an observer who watches their battles “peaceably from the safe seat of critique”—a claim that Hannah Arendt found central to the proper understanding of Kant’s political philosophy.

Author

• Zachary Calhoun, Tulane University