The Unity of Reason

Abstract

Understanding provides one form of in our experience?let us say, at least for sake of illustration, that form of constituted by capacity to assign any given experiences a uniquely determined place relative to any other given experiences in ideal chronology of our ex perience as a whole. But of experience does not, as Kant sees things, exhaust forms of among our representations which we must seek. In addition to of experience sought by understanding, Kant suggests, faculty of aims at the of reason (A 302/B 359).1 But what might Kant mean by of reason? Two ways to in terpret this phrase readily come to mind. First, we might take it to imply that has a single domain of application: there is only one species of pure reason. Second, we might take it to connote uniqueness of way in which pure functions or product it aims to yield: pure aims to introduce a single special sort of into whatever it is to which it is appropriately applied. Neither of these propositions would initially appear to capture Kant's conception of pure reason. First, Kant seems to suppose, at least in Critique of Pure Reason, that pure can be both theoretical and prac tical; while there must obviously be some connection between theoretical and practical reason, pure apparently cannot be described as having a unique domain of application. Second, Kant in fact seems to ascribe two different products to pure reason, not just one, or to see it as functioning in two distinguishable ways. Some pages after introducing phrase unity of reason in Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that pure can serve understanding as a canon for its extended and harmonious [ausgebreiteten und einhelligen] employment, by means of which understanding does not, to be sure, come to know any object beyond what it would know according to its own concepts, but is led better and further in this knowledge (A 329/B 385). In a note written a few years before publication of Critique, Kant wrote that Reason serves to give necessi