Kant's Criticism of the First Paralogism
Kant argues in the Transcendental Dialectic that the knowledge of the self as a substance as put forth by rationalists is in fact unreachable knowledge beyond human constitution. Submitted for PHIL 3903 on May 10, 2021.
On the assumption that substantiality necessitates permanence, rationalists believed that proving the “I” as a thinking thing is a substance would lead them one step closer to proving immortality of the soul. Kant, however, argues in the first paralogism under the Transcendental Dialectic that such a knowledge of the self as a noumenal substance is beyond our constitution. In this paper, I will delineate Kant’s contribution to this question as put forth in the Critique of Pure Reason. First, I will describe the rationalists’ stake in the soul’s permanence. I will then turn to Kant’s definition of a paralogism and demonstrate how rationalists’ argument falls under a paralogism by examining the first paralogism. Next, I will present Kant’s criticism of the rationalists’ argument. Finally, I will provide a brief comment on the merits of Kant’s criticism as I have come to understand it.
The rational psychologists’ sole enterprise to prove the immortality of the soul requires that the soul is a noumenal substance—a persistent object that “neither arise[s] nor perish[es]”—for it is then that one’s soul may endure all alterations even after their physical demise (A349). Kant admits that if the rational psychologists were to only form conclusions within the bounds of the temporal, phenomenal realm, then the rationalists very well could have attained the substantiality they are longing after (A350). However, the “substance only in idea but not in reality” that Kant concedes is not what the rational psychologists have in mind when they argue for the substantiality of the soul as shown in the first paralogism (A351). Quite the contrary, the rationalists wish to ascribe permanence to both noumenal and phenomenal substances (Wuerth, 220). Indeed, the rationalists’ argument in the first paralogism, which will be outlined shortly, seeks to infer the concept of immateriality and thus permanence based on the substantiality of the soul (A345).
Before delving into the rationalists’ argument in the first paralogism, it serves to clarify the kind of paralogism Kant believes the rationalists are defending. For Kant, a transcendental paralogism is a syllogism and a dialectical inference sophistical not as a result of the conclusion it puts forth, but as a result of its form, which is erroneously rooted in “transcendental grounds” (A341). Nonetheless, these paralogisms which ascribe objective reality to conclusions derived from syllogisms lacking empirical premises are not our intentional doings, but the “sophistries … of pure reason itself” (A339). It is, as Kant puts it, the work of an “unavoidable illusion” which we can never have total control over, but which we can be made aware of so that we may preemptively guard ourselves against it (A339, A341).
The structural form of the rationalists’ syllogistic argument in the paralogisms can be summarized as follows. The major premise is an overarching, universal statement containing a condition necessary for a certain predicate to follow. The minor premise then strives to show that a certain subject satisfies such a condition. Should the subject in the minor premise truly fulfill the condition, then the conclusion links the two premises together, announcing that the predicate in the major premise is indeed a proper determination of the subject in the minor premise (Wuerth, 237).
The first paralogism, originating from Descartes’ cogito in the Second Meditation, which Kant denotes as the “sole text of rational psychology” and the foundation of the “rational doctrine of the soul,” is a fallacious syllogism of this kind (A343). As presented by Kant, in the attempt to establish the substantiality of the soul, rational psychologists like Descartes and Leibniz first define substance as an “absolute subject of our judgments” which therefore cannot be used as a predicate to determine some other subject (A348). That is, the major premise asserts that the condition for something to be a substance is that it must be an absolute subject and never a predicate. They then identify that the “I” as a thinking thing is the absolute subject of all my possible judgments and also cannot be used as a predicate (A 348). Here, in the minor premise, the rationalists try to show that the “I” satisfies the condition demanded in the major premise. Believing that the condition is satisfied, the rational psychologists finally conclude that the “I” as a thinking thing, or the soul, is a substance (A348).
Kant’s core criticism of the rationalists’ argument for the soul’s substantiality as presented in the former paragraph is that the conclusion is drawn “per Sophisma figurae dictionis,” or from a fallacy of equivocation (B411). In the first paralogism, Kant contends that the substance described in the major premise is not the same substance found in the conclusion, because the major premise makes a “merely transcendental use of the category” of substance, whereas the minor premise and the conclusion make an “empirical use of the same category” (A402-403). That is, the rationalists have mistakenly equated substance in the transcendental sense and substance in the empirical sense, thus they have fallaciously taken for granted what may be true for the empirical substance as also something that may be true for the transcendental substance, when we in fact have no access to things in themselves transcendentally.
More specifically, the transcendental sense of substance refers simply to something general that states, or accidents, adhere to. Because the transcendental substance is not schematized, it does not entail the kind permanence argued in the First Analogy. On the other hand, because the empirical sense of substance is schematized, situated temporally and thus phenomenally, it does entail permanence, albeit only as the substance is understood within space and time (A144). Consequently, the pure category of substance as depicted in the rationalists’ major premise is insufficient for us to infer the soul as a substance containing properties of persistence and imperishability as assumed in their conclusion (A349). In other words, because the rationalists have grounded their argument for the soul’s substantiality in the transcendental sense of substance, and because the “pure intellectual concept” of substance without sensible intuition—without an immediate, singular representation of an individual—is “of no use at all,” they are not warranted to conclude the permanence of the soul as a noumenal substance (A403).
In the First Analogy, Kant states that the substance persists “in all change of appearances” and is neither created nor destroyed (A181). Kant justifies this argument by highlighting that “all appearances are in time,” and time is how simultaneity as well as succession can alone be represented” (A182). Since time “cannot be perceived by itself,” it must be the changing states, or the varying appearances, of objects of perception that represents a unified time, without which we cannot have experience (A182). Therefore, because it is only through these underlying substances that any “transition from one state into another, and from non-being into being” is at all possible, alterations can only be perceived through substances whose existence and quantity remains persistent and unchanged at all times (A188). However, the consistent and persistent substance Kant here reckons is not the same substance the rational psychologists believe the soul to be. The former is empirical, whereas the latter is transcendental.
And this, going back to the first paralogism, is where the rationalists err. Failing to realize that the distinction between sensibility and understanding is a distinction is kind and not a distinction in degree only, the rationalists naturally also fail to realize that the concepts which apply to objects of sensibility are different from those that apply to objects of understanding. While we are able to conclude permanence from the concept of substantiality for the object in space and time (phaenomenon), we cannot, as the rationalists claim in their argument for the soul substance, conclude that permanence for the object itself, outside of space and time (A183).
Following the rationalists’ argument, then, all we are able to conclude is that the “I” is a substance “insofar as I distinguish it from mere predicates and determinations of things” (A349). In this way, the soul is only shown to be substance in a logical sense, not in the schematized sense where permanence can be derived. But identifying the “I” as an enduring, indestructible thinking being is the only way that “the concept of the substantiality of my thinking substance can be useful to me” (A349). Since we cannot infer these properties solely from the pure category of the substance, if we wish to apply the “empirically usable concept of substance” of permanence, Kant proposes that we ground the argument in experience (A349). But the “I” is not an empirical object that we can experience, for no “intuition is bound up with this representation” of the “I” (A350). We cannot examine the “I” from a third-person perspective, so to speak, and no amount of self reflection or introspection can yield knowledge of the “I” as an empirical substance. Hence it is shown that the rationalists have confused the “logical substance of thinking” as the cognition of a transcendental substance outside of space and time (A350). In doing so, the rationalists apply the determinate and useful concept of substantiality to the soul, when only the indeterminate and useless concept of it is warranted (Wuerth, 244).
The evaluation of whether Kant’s criticism of the first paralogism is successful requires an extensive amount of investigation, an amount which I feel I have yet to achieve, so in truth I do not feel qualified to weigh in on the merits of Kant’s treatment of the rationalists’ argument for the soul’s substantiality. But I will remark that once I have understood what exactly is being mistakenly conflated in the first paralogism per sophisma figurae dictionis, Kant’s argument became much clearer and more convincing. It seems to me that a fallacy of equivocation found in a logical paralogism conflate different concepts due to a confusion of their linguistic meanings—where a singer who is a star, for instance, may be equated to a cosmological star and thus pronounced as the congregation of plasma held together by its own gravity. The fallacy of a transcendental paralogism, on the other hand, is that it conflates different concepts due to a confusion of their being as an object of sensibility when it is in fact an object of understanding, and vice versa. Once this is grasped, and drawing from how Kant views the sensibility-understanding distinction to be a distinction in kind, it is quite effortless for me to understand that the concepts that apply to these different objects are distinct in kind as well, so a concept applicable to an object of sensibility is not applicable to an object in understanding, and vice versa. In this manner, I find Kant’s argument against the first paralogism rather persuasive.