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The Ontology of Speculative Reason Richard B. Wells ©2006 Chapter 9 The Ontology of Speculative Reason Wisdom increases in men according to their present state Empedocles § 1. The Phenomenon of Reason In everyday language we use the word “reason” in three distinct ways. As a verb, “to reason” denotes acting to analyze, to think or present arguments logically or systematically, or to draw inferences and conclusions from premises that we either assume or hold to be true. As a noun, we use the word “reason” in one sense to denote an explanation, motive, or justification. In a second sense, “reason” denotes the ability to reason. Thus, everyday usage views “reason” in terms of either: 1) a mental activity; 2) a ground or condition for something else; or 3) the ability to perform the mental activity. In this treatise, we use the term “power of reason” (which we abbreviate as ‘Reason’) to mean, in part, the third of the above usages. However, as will become clear shortly, restricting this idea of Reason to simply the ability to perform acts of thinking, judgment, inference, and conclusion will prove to be too restrictive when we consider the Organized Being as a whole. First of all, we have distinguished “judgment” as a mental ability in its own right, even to the extent of classifying the phenomenon of judgment into three types – determining, reflective, and practical – in the faculty of consciousness. Second, thinking is cognition through concepts and while it is true that Reason plays a part in this process, it is equally true that the process of thinking we have described in the previous chapters also involves processes contributing to understanding that we choose to distinguish from the power of reason in our mental anatomy. Finally, there must come into our theory at some point the fact that not all of our mental acts are represented in objective perceptions (e.g. the feeling of Lust or Unlust) and some are not presented in conscious representation at all (e.g. a voluntary motor act1). 1 I can be aware of "willing" my fingers to type this sentence, but the representation of the motor act is not presented to my consciousness so far as the efferent motor schemes are concerned. My perception of motor activity is ex post facto through kinaesthetic feedback. 744 Chapter 9: The Ontology of Speculative Reason Our theory must, of course, take all these into account since, as we have said several times already, our ‘anatomical divisions’ of the mental faculty are merely logical divisions and, furthermore, we are not permitted to introduce any real division between mind and body. This presents the need for a broader Realerklärung of Reason than is contained in the dictionary definitions of everyday language. At the same time, there seems at this point no “reason” to make our description so broad as to include phenomena such as the autonomic somatic functions which, although factually related to brain activity, are not properly regarded as activities of nous. Let us therefore agree to the following explanation: Reason is the power to direct and regulate the spontaneity of an Organized Being insofar as this spontaneity is not autonomic. With this description of Reason we take in all mental acts related to directing and regulating the processes which bring us understanding through thinking as well as all ‘voluntary’ and ‘motivated’ acts of spontaneity involving the motoregulatory powers. Under this umbrella we can retain a useful logical division of the faculty of Reason, namely one division that is manifested in the process of employing determining judgment in thinking, and another division that is manifested in behaviors for which we must infer the existence of pre- conscious or unconscious mental acts. The former division we will call speculative Reason; the latter we will call practical Reason. Our descriptions of “what goes on” in the process of thinking in terms of the making of inferences, the drawing of conclusions and the general employment of the powers of understanding in concreto – i.e., the know-how of reasoning – we will place under speculative Reason. Acts that we say determine the spontaneity of the Organized Being will belong to practical Reason. The mark by which these two divisions are distinguished is this: speculative Reason always has cognition as an outcome; practical Reason always has an activity as an outcome. In objective terms, we can say with Kant that speculative Reason goes to determining an object and its concept while practical Reason is concerned with making its object actual [KANT1a: 107 (B: ix-x)]. The adjective ‘pure’ in the Critical Philosophy always denotes something that takes in no element of experience or sensation and, therefore, is a priori. Insofar as knowledge is concerned, we may then describe pure Reason as the faculty (organization) of a priori principles of knowledge [KANT1a: 132 (B: 24)]. Those of such principles that pertain to determining an object would belong to a faculty of pure speculative Reason; those that pertain to the acts by which some object is made actual would belong to a pure practical Reason. Now, whether we are talking about speculative Reason or about practical Reason, in either case Reason stands aloof from immediate relationship to cognitions. This is because the making of cognitions, as we have seen in the previous chapters, is the direct concern of the process of determining judgment – a faculty of nous we have logically set apart from Reason. Speculative Reason stands in an immediate relationship only with the phenomenon of understanding as required by the principle 745 Chapter 9: The Ontology of Speculative Reason of the unity of apperception (which is an acroamatic principle for pure Reason). The immediate consequence of this is that the idea of the power of reason has for its Object a noumenon. Thus, we must base any exposition of the idea of pure Reason on transcendental grounds where the appearance of Reason as an object is deduced as that which is necessary for the possibility of experience. By now this is nothing new to us since imagination, judgment, and the entire catalog of our mental anatomy and physiology have been subject to this same requirement. But the more removed our theory becomes from the immediate data of the senses, the greater care we must take in our exposition because we can reach the more ‘remote’ parts of the theory only through our deductions of those ideas that stand closer to factual experience and thus are “clearer to us” than “clearer in nature.” Every science proceeds in this fashion as it “peels back” appearances to discover its more fundamental principles; yet in this process of discovery we will still bear in mind Bacon’s dictum and add lead weights to our ideas so they will not fly away to become transcendent rather than transcendental. Our objective in this Chapter is therefore a relatively modest one, namely to explore the ontology of speculative Reason and complete our Realdefinition of the categories of understanding. As notions, the categories are the rules for the making of those rules we call concepts. In Chapter 8 we dealt with these rules as they pertain to conceptualization of sensible objects – the constituents of the matter of Nature and Reality. In this Chapter, we turn our attention to the form of Nature and Reality2 and, because Nature and Reality are noumenal ideas, our exposition of this form must turn to consider the supersensible objects of Reason. In our doctrine of method this means we must call upon the metaphysics proper of Rational Cosmology (for Nature) and Rational Theology (for Reality). Now since we have said that the categories ‘belong’ to determining judgment in the faculty of our understanding, why is our present task called the ontology of speculative Reason? The answer to this question is simple. Ideas – concepts of noumenal objects – involve, by their very definition, inferences in which we find representations that contain constructions that are not given in sensation. Such constructions have their origin in the power of Reason rather than the data of the senses. Yet these representations still refer, through the representation in concreto of appearances, to objects “of” or “in” Nature and which are thought in some sense as “real.” The categories are the rules under which such representations are made, but in the case of noumena it is reasoning rather than immediate experience which determines the object. The ‘thing in itself’ cannot be given to us through receptivity and so it is the regulation of the employment of the 2 Reality in this context does not refer to the category of reality, which is a notion, but rather to the Idea of "reality in general" as the "quintessence of all that is real." Unfortunately, neither English nor German supplies us with different words by which we might distinguish these two homonyms. In this treatise the word Reality refers to "reality in general"; when we refer to the category, we will write it as "the category of reality" or simply as reality. Nontechnical usage is indicated by placing it in quotes, e.g. “reality.” 746 Chapter 9: The Ontology of Speculative Reason categories that makes the determination. By the phrase “ontology of speculative Reason” we mean nothing other than the Realdefinition of the categories under principles of pure Reason that provide the ground of objective validity in ideas and which delimit the horizon beyond which the employment of the categories cannot be pushed without the ideas becoming transcendent. It is precisely at this horizon where we draw the distinction between knowing in the strict sense (which expresses objective sufficiency in one’s holding-to-be-true) and believing (which expresses merely subjective sufficiency in one’s holding-to-be-true).3 But although the objective for this Chapter is limited to this relatively modest aim, we obviously cannot expect to make an exposition of the relationship of the categories and Reason without first understanding a little bit about the phenomenon of Reason.
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