Ideas of reason

The Transcendental Dialectic turns from the ordering of intuitions by the understanding to our faculty of reason. This investigation delves deeper into the sources of illusion in metaphysics and theology, which are intertwined with a predisposition toward comprehensive explanation. Kant begins with an overview integrating the understanding with the unifying faculty of reason: “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” (A298/B355). Reason is the highest faculty because its procedures are the most abstracted from experience. But reason in itself, without the understanding’s ordered reception of sense intuitions, cannot generate knowledge of reality. The entities hypothesized by metaphysics and theology are emblematic of the endeavors of reason to make ontological assertions disconnected from intuitions.