THE
CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT
Immanuel Kant
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 1790
The faculty of knowledge from a priori principles
may be called pure reason, and the general investigation
into its possibility and bounds the Critique of
Pure Reason. This is permissible although "pure
reason," as was the case with the same use
of terms in our first work, is only intended to
denote reason in its theoretical employment, and
although there is no desire to bring under review
its faculty as practical reason and its special
principles as such. That Critique is, then, an investigation
addressed simply to our faculty of knowing things
a priori. Hence it makes our cognitive faculties
its sole
concern, to the exclusion of the feeling of pleasure
or displeasure and the faculty of desire; and among
the cognitive faculties it confines its attention
to understanding and its a priori principles, to
the exclusion of judgement and reason, (faculties
that also
belong to theoretical cognition,) because it turns
out in the sequel that there is no cognitive faculty
other than understanding capable of affording constitutive
a priori principles of knowledge. Accordingly the
critique which sifts these faculties one and all,
so as to try the possible claims of each of the
other faculties to a share in the clear
possession of knowledge from roots of its own, retains
nothing but what understanding prescribes a priori
as a law for nature as the complex of phenomena-the
form of these being similarly furnished a priori.
All other pure concepts it relegates to the rank
of ideas, which for our faculty of theoretical cognition
are transcendent;
though they are not without their use nor redundant,
but discharge certain functions as regulative principles.
For these concepts serve partly to restrain the
officious pretentions of understanding, which, presuming
on its ability to supply a priori the conditions
of the possibility of all things which it is capable
of knowing, behaves as if it had thus determined
these bounds as those of the possibility of all
things generally, and partly also to lead understanding,
in its study of nature, according to a principle
of
completeness, unattainable as this remains for it,
and so to promote the ultimate aim of all knowledge.
*[The word is defined in SS 17 & SS 57 Remark
I. See Critique of Pure Reason, "Of the Conceptions
of Pure Reason" - Section 1 & 2: "I
understand by idea a necessary conception of reason,
to which no corresponding object can be discovered
in the world of sense." (Ibid., Section 2.)
"They contain a certain perfection, attainable
by no possible empirical cognition; and they give
to reason a systematic unity, to which the unity
of experience attempts to approximate, but can never
completely attain." (Ibid., "Ideal of
Pure Reason"). |
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