칸트의 「순수이성비판」변증론에 나타난 이성의 역할 = The Role of Reason in the 'Transcendental Dialetic' in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer(A vii).
With this phrase, Kant starts the Preface to First Edition. Those questions are what has been considered the preoccupation of the traditional metaphysics in the western philosophy. They are the questions about God, the immortality of the soul, and freedom. In the Transcendental Dialectic in the first Critique, Kant contends that the traditional metaphysics, especially within the rationalist tradition, makes an illegitimate claim to knowledge of what goes beyond the limit of human understanding and reason. Metaphysics, once entitled the Queen of all the sciences, now must be reinstituted as a tribunal of reason (i.e., as a critique of pure reason) which will dismiss all groundless pretensions and extravagances of reason to guard it against self-deceptions that give birth to despotic dogmatism. Thus conceived, metaphysics serves as a discipline for preventing errors and limiting the power of pure reason rather than for extending knowledge. Metaphysics for Kant has only a negative function to check the exaggeration of reason and its pure speculative use, and thus merely serves as a propaedeutic to metaphysics in its proper sense.
In this essay, I examine Kant 's formulation of the function of reason concerning our knowledge Kant claims that reason in contrast to understanding only has a regulative function with regard to empirical knowledge, and that its constitutive use gives rise to a transcendental illusion on which traditional metaphysics is based. The concepts of reason, unlike the concepts of understanding, do not constitute the concepts of an object, but rather constitute the regulative ideas in accordance with which our empirical knowledge is organized, ordered, and given a direction. The essential function of these ideas is to maximize the systematicity within the body of our knowledge, which is made possible through the principles of reason. The ideas and the principles of reason then have a logical and methodological validity lacking an objective validity. They are valid subjectively-in view of reason itself. They serve the subjective interest of reason which lies in the pursuit of a certain possible perfection or complete systematization of our knowledge of objects.
However, a problem arises when Kant claims that the logical principles of reason must presuppose a transcendental principle whereby a systematic unity achieved through the logical principles is a priori assumed to be necessarily inherent in the objects. What Kant claims is that the systematic unity of reason must be based on the unity in nature. Reason would otherwise run counter to its own vocation, proposing as its aim an idea quite inconsistent with the constitution of nature. Maintaining this, however, Kant takes the function of reason not merely to be regulative, but to be constitutive also. This makes Kant 's position in the first Critique incoherent. I argue that Kant 's attempt to ground the systematic unity of reason on the unity in nature in the first Critique is not compelling, though not a total failure. In order to make sense out of Kant 's claim about the necessity of the laws of reason, we must turn to the notion of the purposiveness of nature that is needed as a principle in our reflection on nature. In the third Critique (the Critique of Judgment), Kant holds that when we reflect upon natural things and phenomena, we must regard them as if some conscious being (whether it be God or not) made nature conform to our understanding of it. The purposiveness (Zweckmassigkeit) of nature is taken by Kant as an a priori concept originated from the reflective judgment.
Given the conception of the purposive unity of nature as the principle of reflective judgment, then, Kant ' claim that the unity of reason must presuppose the unity of nature amounts to the laim that the unity of reason must be based on the principle of reflective judgment. But here the problem raised few paragraphs ago takes us one step backward to the question of the status of the principle of reflective judgment. (What secures the necessity of the principles of reason is the unity in nature which in turn is accounted for as the principle of reflective judgment.) I contend that this peculiar feature of Kant 's position concerning the necessity of the lawful function of reason is no more than the commonplace of Kant 's transcendental idealism.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. 서론
• Ⅱ. 선험적 분석론의 결과
• Ⅲ. 이성의 통일
• 1. 오성과 이성
• 2. 이성
• 3. 반성적 판단력의 원리로서의 자연의 체계성
• Ⅳ. 결론
• Abstract