The second paralogism of the Second Book of the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason pertains to the simplicity of the soul as approached by the rational psychologists, such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Mendelssohn. Specifically, Kant wants to deal with the pure doctrine of the soul, which is that formulation of the soul that is derived from pure reason. Pure reason, in turn, is the central enterprise of the rationalists; its purity is purity from all traces of empiricism. On a purely a priori basis must the rational psychologists give their account, from their “sole text” of “I think” (A343), lest they cease to be rationalists, just as an empiricist may make no claim that is not rooted in experience. The latter two, of course, are necessarily in opposition in their pure forms, and Kant refuses to embrace either one; hence, he is both a rationalist and an empiricist in different, nuanced respects, throwing his lot with neither one nor the other, so also bearing much antagonism with both. In his criticism of rational psychology, here again on the simplicity of the soul, Kant was led to at least two conclusions of particularly important note. The first is his denial of the knowability of the simplicity of the soul, despite his acknowledgement of that same simplicity on other grounds. The other is his conclusion, in a way adding insult to the injury of the rational psychologists, is that even granted the simplicity of the soul, their desired conclusion of immortality yet remains entirely remote.
According to Kant, the project of the rational psychologists is directed to the ultimate end of inferring immortality for all rational beings. Thus the rational psychologists conceive of the soul as a unified, simple substance which interacts with bodies of matter. From substance, the soul is supposed to be immaterial; from simplicity, it is supposed to be incorruptible; from unity of identity over time, it should have personality; and from interaction, it may be understood how bodies of matter are given animality—soulishness (A345/B403). These, according to Kant, are the necessary conditions that the rationalists believe establish the immortality of the soul, and the rationalists believe that these have been demonstrated. Kant, in turn, argues that each conclusion—substantiality, simplicity, unity, and interaction—is a paralogism of pure reason, and in this way he attempts to dissolve the so-called science of rational psychology, which he considers to be a false science (A345/B403).
It is fitting now to define what Kant means by a paralogism and moreover what he means by a transcendental paralogism. In short, a logical paralogism is a fallacious argument that appears to be formally sound, but which critical philosophy exposes as fallacious. A transcendental paralogism, as one might suspect, is one in which there is a “transcendental ground for inferring falsely due to its form” (A341/B399). It is a distinguishing feature of a paralogism, resulting from the transcendental ground for false inference that it is attributed to the psychology of human reason itself; that the human proclivity to be deceived by a paralogistic illusion is somehow innate (A341/B399). Thus, all four of Kant’s paralogisms of pure reason are presented as being guilty of an amphiboly, which is the fallacy of equivocation, which Kant also refers to as an argument per Sophisma figurae dictionis (B411). This involves the use of a particular term in two different senses in the major and minor premises of an argument; despite their bearing different meanings, they are equivocated.
In the first edition of the Critique, Kant formulates the second paralogism on the simplicity of the soul from the premises, “That thing whose action can never be regarded as the concurrence of many acting things, is simple,” and, “Now the soul, or the thinking I, is such a thing” (A351). From there, that the soul is simple follows perfectly obviously. Now specifying the argument for the simplicity of the soul, simple substance is to be differentiated from composite substance, and given this distinction, Kant points out that “the action of a composite is an aggregate of many actions or accidents,” which may be unified in effect, as a human body may move in unison (A351-352). Such presents no problem, being an outer effect, but concerning thoughts, directed inward, the situation grows trickier, and Kant’s formulation of the paralogism is a reductio ad absurdum. For if thinking were composite, the thought would be constructed from its parts, but in order to have parts, the whole thought must first come, and this, goes the paralogism, is contradictory (A352).
The question now, of course, is the location of the fallacy in the aforesaid argument. The contradiction must not arise somehow. Kant denies that “many representations have to be contained in the absolute unity of one thought” (A352), meaning the idea that a collection of representations can constitute a single thought, after all. Kant’s contention is that this is unprovable from concepts, meaning that pure reason is without hope to prove the simplicity of the soul in this way. “The proposition, ‘A thought can be only the effect of the absolute unity of a thinking being’ cannot be treated as analytic” (A353), Kant concludes. In other words, the concept of a thought does not entail unity in the subject of the thought, which may be divided across subjects as a result. Again, without analyticity in the concepts, the rational psychologists are without a leg to stand on, as they have precluded empirical reasoning by the parameters of their own project. Empiricism is, however, open to Kant. Still, Kant is left with no concrete position regarding the position of the soul, having defeated this first argument of the second paralogism.
Kant then moves on to the paralogism surrounding the foundational thought of the rationalists, as championed by Descartes, “I think.” This is unique, says Kant as he builds the argument, inasmuch as it is the only representation for which the subject assumes the position of the object (A353-354), since the only thinking being only knows itself as a thinking being. Because the subject, the thinker, is an absolute unity, and because in this case the subject and the object are one in the same, the object, too, is an absolute unity, and so it cannot be thought but by a unified subject. One knows that the subject is unified from the thought, “I think,” since thinking, “I think” entails the absolute unity of the “I” (A354).
How is Kant to defeat this pillar of the rationalists? The trouble, says Kant, is that the “I” of the rationalists is quite simply “wholly empty of content” (A355). What he means by this is that the “I” does not necessarily refer to an absolute unity; the “I” is not clear at all what it is actually referring to. Rather, the “I” is a unity only as a representation, but it may represent a composite. The rationalists, then, in speaking of the “I,” are not dealing with the actual thinking being when they make pronouncements about simplicity, but about the representation of that thinking being, which may not be simple at all. Kant argues further that, just as the Cogito, ergo sum of Descartes is a tautology, since appending “I am” to “I think” does not contribute anything new to the expression, “I think” may be appended to any thought, demonstrating that “the simplicity of my self (as soul) is not really inferred from the proposition ‘I think’” (A354). In this way, declaration of one’s own simplicity refers only to the representation “I,” which is really nothing more than a perfectly vague “Something,” (A355), according to Kant, and by itself, there is nothing to a Something.
For the remainder of the Second Paralogism, Kant addresses the simplicity of the soul in relation to matter, and for this he turns to the transcendental aesthetic. According to Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, what is empirically discernable is done so through the pure forms of intuition, space and time, and it is only appearance that is empirically observable. Thus, from the vantage point of the transcendental aesthetic, one may experience an intuition of matter being represented by the mind in space and through time, but one may not know what matter is in itself. Matter “is merely an outer appearance” (A359), says Kant. Regarding the place of the soul in the transcendental aesthetic, Kant notes that “this Something is not extended, not impenetrable, not composite, because these predicates pertain only to sensibility and its intuition” (A358). The soul, the Something, is not a sensible object; in other words, it is not a phenomenal object, it is a noumenal object, “or better, [a] transcendental object” (A358). That said, it is in addition the recipient of the outer sense, which gives it a rather peculiar place.
The potential trouble distinguishing the soul and matter arises at the level of substratum, specifically the substratum of matter, which “is not cognized through any specifiable predicates,” for which reason Kant assumes that the substratum of matter could well be simple (A359). It would appear that Kant is acknowledging the possibility for the substratum of matter to exhibit thoughts and consciousness, being simple, and thereby eliminate the concept of the soul, subsuming its functions in the substratum. Because soul and matter are inwardly indistinguishable, as nothing can truly be established of the substratum of matter, there is no means by which the two may be certainly severed, at least for Kant (A360). What Kant is trying to do in making this point is crushing as thoroughly as he can any remaining attachment one might have to the rational psychologists’ concept of the soul, based on the assumptions of the transcendental aesthetic. The idea is that the simplicity of the soul is uncertain to the point that the soul may be conjoined with matter itself and may remain simple. At the same time, empiricism is so indeterminate about matter and the soul that it is not equipped to establish anything but the appearances of matter. The simplicity of the soul, for Kant, is very much unknowable, and as a result, so too is the much sought-after conclusion of the rational psychologists from the simplicity of the soul, its imperishability.
In the second edition of the Critique, a related issue arises with Moses Mendelssohn’s argument against the perishability of the soul, given its simplicity. Kant takes this as an opportunity to finish off one final matter with the rational doctrine of the simplicity of the soul, and that is that imperishability even follows from simplicity at all. The trouble that Mendelssohn tried to confront is that, though simplicity does preclude perishing by disintegration, it does not at all stand in the way of perishing by vanishing (B413). It is against this that Mendelssohn directed his argument, which Kant summarizes as
attempting to prove that a simple being cannot cease to be at all because, since it cannot be diminished and thus lose more and more of its existence, and so be gradually transformed into nothing (since it has no parts and thus no plurality in itself), there would be no time at all between a moment in which it is and another moment in which it is not, which is impossible. (B413-414)
Kant’s response still assumes the simplicity of the soul, which it must if it is to show that simplicity does not entail imperishability, and he does so by arguing for “elanguescence” (B414). This essentially means the diminishment of the soul’s powers until they are no more, rendering the soul no more. Such attributes like consciousness, says Kant, may be present in differing magnitudes, even in a simple substance, since these to not make the substance composite, and if these faculties diminish in magnitude, or gradually remiss as Kant would have it, then the soul may very well be left powerless. What is a powerless soul, or more exactly, what is a soul without powers? It is nothing, as these faculties and powers represent all that “constitutes its existence” (B414). Thus, argues Kant, not only is the rational psychologist unable to say that the soul is simple, even if it is, it cannot be said to persist.
To summarize Kant’s stance on the simplicity of the soul, it seems suitable to begin with his conclusion to the first edition of the Paralogisms, saying, “the fundamental concept of a simple nature is of such a kind as cannot be encountered anywhere in experience, and hence there is no way at all by which to reach it as an objectively valid concept” (A361), thereby severing knowledge of the simplicity of the soul from empiricism. It is even less challenging to recall the ongoing argument against the rational doctrine of the soul, which is the whole subject of the Paralogisms. In short, because “I think” does not mean simplicity for the “I” in any meaningful sense, Kant concludes that the foundational argument for simplicity by pure reason is flawed. To make matters worse for the rationalists, Kant even pursues a line of argument to show that, even if the soul is simple, the conclusion does not even fulfill the function that they think it should, namely to establish the imperishability of the soul and establishing our immortality. Hence, since the simplicity of the soul is indeterminate by both rational and empirical investigation, and it is additionally shown to be conclusively indeterminate (for Kant) by the transcendental aesthetic, the views of Kant regarding the knowability of the simplicity of the soul are largely apparent, so they may be stated. It is not by pure reason that conclusions about the soul are reached, but by practical reason, otherwise “deny[ing] knowledge to make room for faith” (Bxxx), perhaps hearkening back to Hume, the empiricist and skeptic, who first awakened Kant from his “dogmatic slumber” (PFM, 4:260). It is that denial that allows for the practical reason that allows Kant the breadth of his moral conclusions, which he would contend a rationalist could never do.
Bibliography
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, tr. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 2008.
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