Critique of Pure Reason - I. Transcendental Doctrine of Elements - Transcendental Logic - Second Division: Transcendental Dialectic

Second Division: Transcendental Dialectic

Following the systematic treatment of a priori knowledge given in the transcendental analytic, the transcendental dialectic seeks to dissect dialectical illusions. Its task is effectively to expose the fraudulence of non-empirical employment of the understanding. The Transcendental Dialectic shows how pure reason should not be used. According to Kant, the rational faculty is plagued with dialectic illusions as man attempts to know what can never be known.

This longer but less dense section of the Critique is composed of five essential elements, as follows:

Introduction (to Reason and the Transcendental Ideas) Rational Psychology (the nature of the soul) Rational Cosmology (the nature of the world) Rational Theology (God) Appendix (on the constitutive and regulative uses of reason)

In the introduction, Kant introduces a new faculty, human reason, positing that it is a unifying faculty that unifies the manifold of knowledge gained by the understanding. Another way of thinking of reason is to say that it searches for the 'unconditioned'; Kant had shown in the Second Analogy that every empirical event has a cause, and thus each event is conditioned by something antecedent to it, which itself has its own condition, and so forth. Reason seeks to find an intellectual resting place that may bring the series of empirical conditions to a close, to obtain knowledge of an 'absolute totality' of conditions, thus becoming unconditioned. All in all, Kant ascribes to reason the faculty to understand and at the same time criticize the illusions it is subject to.