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from PART I - THEORETICAL PHILOSOPHY
All our cognition starts from the senses, goes from there to the understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which there is nothing higher to be found in us to work on the matter of intuition and bring it under the highest unity of thinking. Since I am now to give a definition [Erklärung] of this supreme faculty of cognition, I find myself in some embarrassment.
(CpR A 298–9/B 355)It may seem odd that Kant's first formal introduction of reason in the Dialectic to his Critique of Pure Reason proceeds with such abashedness. Kant suggests that the difficulty lies in the fact that in addition to its merely formal or logical use, reason purports to have a “real use”: it purportedly “contains the origin of certain concepts and principles, which it derives neither from the senses nor from the understanding” but which at least seem to be generative of some a priori knowledge of objects (A 299/B 356). Kant thus suggests a division of reason into a logical and a “transcendental” faculty, and it is apparently the possibility of the latter that needs examination. As Kant shortly thereafter asks:
Can we isolate reason, and is it then a genuine source of concepts and judgements that arise solely from it and thereby refer it to objects; or is reason merely a subordinate faculty that gives rise to given cognitions of a certain logical form, through which cognitions of the understanding are subordinated to one another?
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