How do Kant's metaphysical and transcendental deductions differ?

August 3, 2008 11:45 AM

In Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, what's metaphysical about the metaphysical deduction (of the categories), and what's transcendental about the transcendental deduction?
posted by limon to Religion & Philosophy (7 answers total)

Best answer: What's "metaphysical" about the metaphysical deduction of the categories can be understood by reference to the Aristotelian definition of metaphysics -- the study of being as being. Kant, I believe, was trying to understand what kinds of concepts are used in our thinking about what exists, and how we use these concepts to make judgments.

What's "transcendental" about the transcendental deduction is that Kant is trying to show that these concepts are a priori, and thus transcend all of our thinking, and are used by all thinkers.
posted by jayder at 12:13 PM on August 3, 2008 [4 favorites]

Can't beat jayder for a concise, precise answer there. It helps to remember that the term "transcendental" got taken up after Kant to have all its current New Age connotations. (Actually, the same thing kind of happened to "metaphysical," I guess.) It might help to remember that it's all a distinction about representations (thoughts) and what transcends particular representations and particular representers by appearing in every possible version of them. So it's not an appeal to some additional realm beyond thought.
posted by el_lupino at 12:23 PM on August 3, 2008

jayder's answer is correct, and I only want to add that there is an important distinction made between the "transcendental" and the "transcendent": the latter refers to that which is beyond a limit, the former to the limits themselves.
posted by voltairemodern at 2:21 PM on August 3, 2008

at the risk of being deleted for not answering the question, you or someone else might enjoy these lectures. can't remember where i got that link from - might have been here - but i have fond memories of long bus journeys listening to those...
posted by not sure this is a good idea at 2:35 PM on August 3, 2008

Nitpicking: I think that thinking of transcendental concepts as "transcending" tends to confuse my thinking about them. I grasp the thought more clearly when I think of them as the prior and necessary conditions for all possible experience—which necessity, I take it, is the source of their universal and a priori status and thus of their "transcendence," such as it is.

(I know your question was about why they are transcendent; this is just my two pfennigs on the terminology.)

Transcendental concepts also refer to what exists; they just refer to it before any experience. Metaphysical concepts concern the further determination of an empirically given object—which is to say that though they are also a priori, they concern objects that are not given a priori. Thus, there is both a transcendental and a metaphysical concept of, say, change as it affects a body, and it is not enough of a distinction to say that transcendental principles are a priori, or that the metaphysical is concerned with being, if you're trying to keep the metaphysical and the transcendental apart.

But here's the man himself, saying it better than I can. Critique of Judgment, Second Introduction, 181:

A transcendental principle is one by which we think the universal a priori condition under which alone things can become objects of our cognition in general; on the other hand, a principle is called metaphysical if it is one [by] which [we] think the a priori condition under which alone objects whose concept must be given empirically can be further determined a priori. Thus the principle by which we cognize bodies as substances and as changeable substances is transcendental if it says that a change in them must have a cause; but it is metaphysical if it says that a change in them must have an external cause. For in order for us to cognize the proposition a priori in the first case, we must think the body only through ontological predicates (pure concepts of the understanding), e.g., as a substance; but in the second case we must base the propostion on the empirical concept of a body (as a movable thing in space), after which we can, however, see completely a priori that the latter predicate (of motion that must have an external cause) applies to the body.

That's the Pluhar translation, by the way.
posted by felix grundy at 7:48 PM on August 3, 2008

oh yeah, and as long as we're dropping lecture references into the thread: here's my fabulous department chair's series of lectures on the Critique of Pure Reason. There are downloadable notes (click the description of each session), too. There's also a series on the Critique of Judgment at that same site, if you're going all the way through Kant.
posted by felix grundy at 7:51 PM on August 3, 2008

Response by poster: Thank you all for the answers, and for the links to the audio lectures -- I'll most definitely check those out!
posted by limon at 9:43 PM on August 3, 2008