Response to Critics: What is the Human Being? Kant’s Architectonic of Pure Reason and its Limitations
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Systematic unity and purposivenessKant's reflections on systematic unity in the Architectonic of Pure Reason, the final part of the first Critique, are mostly famous as an object of derision.If the aim of this section is to introduce readers to the importance of 'the art of the system', it is no exaggeration to say that the artist's work has traditionally encountered an audience, at best, indifferent, at worst, hostile.All the different elements through which Kant's analysis unfolds (from the distinction between an aggregate and a system of cognitions to the mysterious references to a schematism of reason, from the link between ideas and ends of reason to the reflection on organisms) have been dismissed without much further analysis.In The Architectonic of Pure Reason: Systematicity and Purposiveness in the Critique of Pure Reason (Ypi 2021), I set out to do the opposite.I tried to show how its presence in Kant's first major critical work is not only due to the philosopher's Liebe für architektonische Symmetrie, as Arthur Schopenhauer maintained in his appendix to Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, his Kritik der kantischen Philosophie (Schopenhauer 1924: 610-25).Nor is it merely interesting for those who want to engage with aspects of his 'personality', as suggested in one of the most authoritative commentaries on the first Critique (Kemp Smith 1962: 579-82).I sought to explain how the interest in architectonic unity was at the heart of Kant's preoccupations from the initial stages of drafting the first Critique and that this section constituted an organically central, rather than accidental, part of the development of the critical system.Indeed, in a letter to Markus Herz dated November 1776, we find the term 'architectonic' mentioned for the first time in connection with Kant's indication of the different parts of the work that was due to appear under the name of Critique of Pure Reason (10: 199).We also find both the term and the concern with systematic unity present in all of Kant's other major critical works, for example, in the Critique of Practical Reason, with reference to the relation between the idea of the system and different human faculties, and in The Critique of the Power of Judgement with reference to the necessary systematicity of sciences and the importance of proceeding architectonically and not simply technically in ordering the sum total of our cognitions.
Source: Kantian Review
Author: Lea Ypi
Institution: London School of Economics and Political Science
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,255
OpenAlex ID: W4386744368