Immanuel Kant: Transcendental Analytic and Dialectic
The Transcendental Analytic
The second cognitive faculty is the understanding (entendimiento). It is characterized by the ability to think or make judgments based on intuitions provided by sensibility. It subsumes various impressions, giving them meaning. There are two types of concepts:
- Empirical concepts: These arise from observing and comparing experiences.
- Categories: These are not derived from experience. They are spontaneous creations of the mind that serve to group and structure the insights of sensibility.
Kant identifies twelve categories, such as reality, negation, and completeness. A concept without sensory material is meaningless; therefore, knowledge requires the combination of both understanding and sensibility to comprehend a phenomenon.
The Transcendental Dialectic
This section analyzes the third cognitive power: reason. Reason seeks to provide general knowledge through arguments. This tendency is marked by three a priori transcendental ideas:
- Idea of the Soul: Reason subsumes all subjective phenomena of inner experience.
- Idea of the World: It unifies the phenomena of external experience, considering them as originating from the same world.
- Idea of God: This idea groups both inner and outer experience, unifying the phenomena of the self and the world.
Reason can be used correctly or fraudulently; the latter does not advance knowledge and leads to contradictions.
The Possibility of Metaphysics
Metaphysics treats transcendental ideas (soul, world, and God) as if they were realities that give meaning to everything that occurs. Kant views this as a disproportionate ambition of reason to go beyond phenomena to access the noumenon (reality itself).
This step is illegitimate, as the noumenon is inaccessible to humans and constitutes the limit of what can be known. Consequently, metaphysics is not a science. Questions such as personal freedom or the immortality of the soul can never be demonstrated, justifying an agnostic position.