CONCEPTS AND INTUITIONS: PROBLEMS AND SCHEMATA
With one fell swoop, so it seemed, Kant had dismantled both rationalist and empiricist trains of thought. The empiricists had made the mistake of thinking that concepts were only abstractions from sensory experience, when in fact we could not have any conscious sensory experience at all without our already being in the possession of certain very basic, “pure” concepts. Those concepts were, moreover, not innate but were generated by the spontaneity of the human mind itself as it shaped experience into judgmental form. The empiricists had also confused psychological explanations of how we come to have certain patterns of association with the normative considerations of how we adjudicate judgments as being true or false. Likewise, the rationalists had made the mistake of thinking that, since the senses were only confused modes of intellection, we could produce substantial doctrines about the existence and structure of supersensible metaphysical entities without any independent check by sensible experience; they had failed to understand that concepts are only rules for the synthesis of experience, and that abstracted out of that role they were completely empty, were merely the logical forms of judgment, and could not serve to provide substantive doctrines of anything.
概念与直观：问题与图型
由此看来，康德将理性主义和经验主义的思路一并摧毁了。经验主义者的错误在于，概念只是从感官经验中抽象出来的，而实际上，如果我们不是已经具有了某些特别基本的、“纯粹的”概念，我们根本就不会有任何有意识的感官经验。此外，这些概念不是天赋的，而是人的理智在塑形经验以适应判断形式的过程中，由理智本身的自发性产生的。经验主义者还将如下两种解释混为一谈：一是关于我们如何具有某些联想范式的心理学解释；二是关于我们如何裁定判断之真假的规范性思考。类似地，理性#主义者的错误在于，由于感官只是混乱的思维模式，我们能够得出关于超感觉的形而上学物的实存和结构的实质性学说，而无需由感性经验来做独立查验；他们未能理解，概念只是经验综合的规则，如果抽离了这^作用，概念就完全是空洞的，就仅仅是判断的逻辑形式，并且不能用于提供关于事物的任何实质性规定。
Our conscious experience of independent objects in the world thus depended on our taking up the sensory components of our experience and actively combining them according to certain necessary rules, that is, concepts. This was, moreover, not something that we could introspectively observe in ourselves, since all consciousness in general, even of our own subjective psychic lives, presupposed that we had already synthesized concepts and intuitions. We could not, as it were, introspectively observe the intuitions coming in and then observe the concepts being applied to them. Indeed, so it seemed to follow from Kant’s own line of thought, we could never be aware of an “unsynthesized” intuition at all. We could, that is, never be aware of anything like simply “seeing blue” in a way that was unmediated by any conceptual content; the very experience of attending to anything even resembling a direct introspective awareness of a sensation of “blue” could itself only be an abstraction from the more full-blooded consciousness of a world of objects in space and time, which meant that the intuitions themselves must already have been put into conceptual form.
因此，我们关于世界中独立对象的有意识的经验，依赖于我们对我们经验的感官要素的处理，并依据某些必然规则即概念主动将它们联结起来。此外，这不是我们通过内向省察就能获得的，因为所有的意识，即使是关于我们主观心理生命的意识，都预设了如下一点：我们已经将概念与直观综合起来了。可以说，在内向省察中，我们是不可能看到直观进来了，之后又看到概念应用到直观上了。按照康德自己的思路，我们绝不可能意识到一种“未被综合的”直观。也就是说，即便是简单如“看到蓝色”，如果不经概念中介，我们也是绝不可能意识到的；专注于任何东西的经验甚至就像对一种“蓝色”感觉的直接内省意识那样，本身只能从关于时空中对象世界的内容的更为充实的意识中抽象出来，这意味着，直观本身必须早已被置于概念形式当中了。
Kant thus provided a “transcendental” metaphysics and thereby deftly responded both to the Scottish skepticism sweeping in from offshore and to the exhausted Wolffian rationalism dominating German thought at the time. Certain things such as causality were indeed metaphysical concepts, since, as Hume had shown, we can never directly perceive the causal “power” bringing something about but could only perceive a constant regularity associating events of one type with those of another. That was, however, no reason to be skeptical of whether there was anything such as causality; the capacity to judge things to be causally connected (as distinct from “experiencing” them as causally connected) was, in fact, a condition of the possibility of experience at all. We were required to conceive of the objects in the world as causally connected since, if we did not, we could not combine our sensory experience in any way that would make it susceptible to judgment and therefore intelligible. (It did not, of course, follow that we were required to think of any particular thing as causally linked with any other particular thing; particular causal connections required more empirical investigation; we were required only to understand that all the occurrences of which we could be conscious were the effects of other causes, and we were licensed by the category of causality to search in all empirically ascertainable patterns of succession for the necessary rule that would be the causal relation in that succession. ) Without such combinations, without structuring our experience into the complex, unified representation of an objective world ordered along causal lines, our mental lives would be, as it were, completely dark; we might be able to respond in more-or-less successful ways to our environment, but we could never be conscious of it. Likewise, so Kant argued, we had to order our experience in terms of its being of independent substances whose interaction with each other proceeded according to these causal laws.
因此，康德提出了“先验的'’形而上学，并以此灵巧地回应来自海外的苏格兰怀疑论和当时统治德国思想界的沃尔夫理性主义。像因果性这种概念，的确是形而上学的，因为如休谟已经表明的，我们从来不能直接察觉到引发某种后果的因果性“力量”，而只能察觉到将一个事件与另一个事件联系起来的恒常合规则性。然而，这并不是怀疑是否存在因果性的理由；实际上，判断事物具有因果联系的机能（这不同于将事物经验为具有因果联系的）是经验得以可能的条件之一。我们必须确信世界中的对象是具有因果联系的，因为如果我们不这样做，那么我们就不能以易于做判断因而是理智的方式将我们的感官经验联结起来。（当然，这并不是说，我们必须认为任何东西之间都是有因果联系的；具体的因果联系需要更多的经验研究；我们只是必须理解，所有我们能够意识到的事件都是其他原因的结果，通过因果性范畴，我们能够在所有经验上可确定的相继范式中找到必然规则，这种规则将是这种相继中的因果关系[M]。）如果没有这种联结，如果没有依照因果关系链条将我们的经验建构为关于对象世界的复合的统一表象，我们的心智生活将是完全黑暗的；若此，我们也许或多或少能够成功地应对我们的环境，但我们绝不可能意识到它。类似地，如康德所说，我们必须根据我们的经验独立于实体（实体之间的互动是根据这些因果律进行的）这一点来整理我们的经验。
However, it was not a condition of the very possibility of conscious experience itself that it contain within itself a representation of God; and it was not a condition of the possibility of experience that it contain any encounters with an immortal soul. This was not to deny that such things might exist “beyond” the bounds of experience; it only showed that neither “pure” nor “empirically applied” reason could establish any truths whatsoever about those things, since the only synthetic a priori truths that were available to us either had to do with the propositions of mathematics and geometry or with the conditions necessary for the possibility of a self-conscious relation to our ourselves. From the standpoint of pure reason, we simply had to be agnostic on those matters.
然而，有意识的经验在自身之中包含关于(上帝的表象，这并不是有意识的经验得以可能的条件；经验包含与不朽灵魂的相遇，这不是经验得以可能的条件。这并不否认，这些东西可能是“超越”经验边界而存在的；而只是表明，无论是“纯粹的”理性还是“经验运用的”理性，都不能建立起关于这些东西的真理，这是因为，那些对我们有效的先天综合真理，只与数学和几何学命题，或与我们同自身的意识关系之得以可能所必需的条件有关。从纯粹理性的立场出发，我们对那些东西只能保持不可知的态度。
However, if indeed there was no possible consciousness of “unsynthesized” intuitions, no direct awareness of any kind of basic sensory datum that did not involve concepts, then Kant seemed to have put himself in a bind. On the one hand, he spoke of there being two different types of “representations,” concepts and intuitions. On the other hand, if he was right, sensory inputs could only become representations, “intuitions” – only acquire any cognitive content and meaning – by being synthesized with concepts, which implied that prior to that synthesis they were not representations (not “of ” anything) at all even if their form was spatial and temporal.
然而，如果的确不可能有对“未经综合的”直观的意识，没有对基本感官素材的直接意识，那么康德似乎是遇到麻烦了。一方面，他谈到有两种不同类型的“表象”，即概念与直观；另一方面，如果康德是对的，那么感官输人的东西只能通过与概念相综合而变成表象、“直观”（只获得认知内容和意义），这意味着，在这种综合之前，它们根本就不是(“关于”某物的）表象，即使它们的形式是空间的和时间的。
For those reasons, Kant proposed a third faculty, the “imagination,” as that which actually combined the concepts with the intuitions and made sure that they matched up with each other. The “transcendental imagination” – so called because it, too, was a condition of the possibility of experience and was not something that, in principle, could be encountered in introspection – prepared the temporal succession of intuitions and the abstract forms of judgment to be suitable to each other. The two aspects of our mentality – receptivity and spontaneity, intuition and concept, sensibility and understanding – had to be mediated with each other, and it had to be done by the spontaneous faculty itself (since intuitions could not combine themselves). The “spontaneous” faculty, that is, must be able to supply both the rule and the conditions for the application of the rule. The only way this could be done was by the a priori form of temporality being combined according to a rule with the concept (itself a rule) to produce a category. Indeed, unless the logical form of judgment is temporalized, Kant argued, it has no real significance at all. As he noted: “Substance, for instance, when the sensible determination of permanence is omitted, would mean simply a something which can be thought only as subject, never as a predicate of something else.” The logical forms of judgment actually become the categories of experience only when they are rendered into temporalized form, what Kant called their “schema,” which provide us with the rules to construct them in terms of how they actually apply to experience: the formal notion of “that which is always a subject, never a predicate” when applied to the pure form of temporality becomes “that which endures over time and has various accidents which can change over time,” in other words, a substance.
基于这些原因，康德提出了第三种机能，即“想象力”，这种机能事实上将概念与直观相联结，并确保它们是相互匹配的。“先验想象力”——之所以如此称呼它，是因为它也是经验得以可能的条件，并且，原则上是不能通过内省发现的——为直观在时间上的相继与判断的抽象形式之间相互适应做好了准备。我们的心智的两个方面——性、直观与概念、感性与知性——自发性与接受必须是相互中介的，并且这必须由自发的机能本身来完成（因为直观是不能自己将自己联结起来的h:也就是说，“自发的”机能必须同时提供规则和运用规则的条件tM]。而能够做到这一点的唯一方法就是，依据一定的规则，将时间性的先天形式同概念相联结以产生出一个范畴。康德认为，如果判断的逻辑形式没有被时间化，那么它就根本没有意义。如他提及，“例如实体，如果我们去掉了持存性的感性规定，它就不过是意味着一兮可以被思考为主词（而不是关于某种别的东西的谓词）的某物”[31]。只有当判断的诸逻辑形式被转化为时间化形式时，它们才能确实变成经验的范畴。康德将这后一种形式称为它们的“图型”，这为我们提供了建构将它们实际应用到经验上的规则：当“它总是一个主词，而从来不是谓词”这一形式观念被应用到时间性的纯粹形式当中时，就变成“它随着时间推移而存在，并且具有各种随着时间而变化的偶性”，即变成了实体。
Kant’s own “schematism” of the “pure concepts of the understanding” only underwrote his more general theory of mentality. To have a mind is not to be made of any kind of particular “stuff ”; it is to be able to perform certain kinds of activities that involve norms (or “rules” in his terminology). Even the calculations of mathematics and geometry, although founded in the “pure intuitions” of space and time, themselves require schemata. A schema is thus just a rule or set of rules that specifies how to construct a concept and therefore a judgment. The laws of arithmetic are such schemata; the transcendental categories of experience are also such schemata; and even ordinary empirical concepts, such as that of “horse,” are schemata. In each case, to be in possession of the concept is not to have some specific type of mental occurrence going on inside of oneself nor to have any kind of “image” before the mind’s eye; it is to be able to do something – to add and subtract, to construct a geometrical figure or proof, or to be able to recognize and discriminate horses from other things (such as cows or boulders). But, of course, Kant also introduced a problematic element into his theory: how was it that the transcendental imagination used “rules” to combine concepts (“rules”) with intuitions?
康德自己的“纯粹知性概念”的“图型法”只是他更一般化的心智理论的担保。“有意向”（tohaveamind)不是指列出具体“素材”，它是指能够执行涉及规范（或康德所说的“规则”）的某类活动。甚至是数学和几何学中的计算（尽管是在对时空的“纯粹直观”中被发现的）本身也要求图型。因此，图型正是规则或系列规则，其用来规定如何建构概念及判断。算术法则是这种图型;甚至那些普通的经验概念，如“马”的概念，也是图型。在各种不同情况下，拥有概念不是指一个人内心当中发生的某类心智事件，也不是指在理智的眼前形成了某种“图像”；而是指能做什么——添加和扣除、建构集合图形或证明——或者从其他东西(如牛或卵石）中将马认出来、挑出来。但是，康德也将一个成问题的要素引人到了他的理论当中：先验想象力是如何运用“规则”来将概念(“规则”）与直观相联结的[32]?
"IDEAS," THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES, AND FREEDOM
“理念”、自在之物和自由
Perhaps the most shocking thing to Kant’s readers was the conclusion he drew throughout the Critique about whether these categories or schemata had any application to the world apart from the conditions under which we experienced it – famously, he concluded that we simply cannot know anything about things-in-themselves; apart from what we discover in possible experience and what can be demonstrated by the methods of transcendental philosophy, we know nothing. All our knowledge is restricted to the way in which the world must appear to us; what metaphysical knowledge we have about non-sensible entities is itself restricted to those categories (causality, substance, and so forth) that are the conditions of the possibility of that experience, which themselves are supplied by us to experience in general and are not imposed on us whatsoever by the nature of things-in-themselves. We cannot even conclude, for example, that the world as it is in itself, apart from the way in which we must experience it, is spatial or temporal; we can only conclude that we cannot intuit it in any other form; and we cannot conclude that the categories that our own spontaneity brings to experience are the way things are in themselves, since they are explicitly generated by us and applied to such intuitions.
对于康德的读者来说，也许最令他们震惊的，是他的整部《批判》所得出的关于如下问题的结论：如果没有我们据以经验世界的那些条件，这些范畴或图型是否会运用到世界上？众所周知，他的结论是，我们对于自在之物是一无所知的；如果我们没有在可能经验中发现的东西，如果没有我们通过先验哲学的方法证明的东西，我们什么都不知道。我们全部的知识受限于世界必然向我们呈现的方式；我们关于非感官物的形而上学知识本身，受限于作为经验得以可能的条件的范畴（因果性、实体，等等），这些范畴是由我们提供给一般经验的，而根本不是由自在之物的本性施加给我们的。例如，如果没有我们必然经验世界的方式，我们甚至都不能得出结论说，世界就如它自在所是那样处于时空当中；我们只能得出结论说，我们不能以其他形式来直观它；我们不能得出结论说，我们自己的自发性带给经验的那些范畴就是事物自在存在的方式，因为它们是我们自己创造出来并应用到这些直观上的。
This was especially disturbing, since it explicitly denied that we had any knowledge of God, and it seemed to many at the time to counsel a more thoroughgoing skepticism than any that had yet been attempted. It was, however, a skepticism with a difference. Although it quite boldly asserted that we could know nothing of things-in-themselves, it also asserted equally boldly that behind all human experience was the necessity of human spontaneity in generating that experience. Moreover, this spontaneity was “universal”; it was not a property only of educated or noble minds; it was a property of all human experience, of, as Kant put it, a “universal self-consciousness.”
这一点特别令人不安，因为这恰恰否认我们拥有关于上帝的知识，并且，这对于当时的许多人来说，似乎是提出了比以往更为彻底的怀疑论。然而，这是一种与众不同的怀疑论。尽管它相当大胆地主张，我们对于自在之物一无所知，它还同样大胆地主张，在所有人类经验背后的，是经验形成过程中的人类自发性的必然性。此外，这种自发性是“普遍的”；它不仅仅属于受过教育的或高贵的心智；它是所有人类经验的性质，或如康德所说，是一种“普遍的自我意识”。
Kant terminologically distinguished appearances from things-inthemselves by speaking of the world as it must appear to us as the “phenomenal” world and speaking of that same world as it is in itself, conceived as apart from any possible experience we might have of it, as the “noumenal” world. Kant then turned that distinction between phenomena and noumena to the critique of traditional metaphysics. In the largest section by far of the Critique – a section titled the “Transcendental Dialectic” – Kant dealt with the outstanding traditional metaphysical problems not by proposing new solutions to them but by dissolving them, by showing how they were questions which never should have been raised in the first place. Concepts, Kant had shown, have significance (Bedeutung) only in relation to possible experience or as transcendental conditions of the possibility of experience. Traditional metaphysics had simply erred when it had tried to use pure reason to speak of what thingsin-themselves were like – as when it asked whether, for example, the things of the world were “in themselves” manifestations of one substance, or were instead changeable instantiations of eternal forms, or were sets of unconnected monads, or were mere atoms in the void, and so on. While it can always seem to the metaphysical inquirer that he is indeed talking sensibly about deep things, he is in fact suffering from what Kant called the “transcendental illusion” that necessarily occurs when one oversteps the bounds of possible experience. Traditional metaphysics thought it could speak coherently about noumena, when in fact we can only speak coherently about phenomena.
康德对于同一个世界有两种谈论方式：一是，它必须作为“现象”世界向我们呈现出来；二是，它是自在的，我们对之不会形成任何可能经验，它是“本体”世界。由此，康德在术语上就将现象和自在之物区分开了[M]。之后，康德将现象和本体之间的区分变成对传统形而上学的批判。“先验辩证论”部分中，在处理长期悬而未决的传统形而上学问题时，康德不是提出新的解决方案，而是消解了这些问题，即表明它们从一开始就是不应该出现的问题。康德已经表明，概念只有在同可能经验的关系中或作为经验得以可能的条件时才有意义（•Becfeumng)。传统形而上学的错误正在于，它试图用纯粹理性去谈论自在之物是什么样的。例如，它问：世界中的事物是一个实体的表现形式还是永恒形式的可变示例，是一系列互不相干的单子还是虚空中的单纯原子，等等。然而，形而上学研究者似乎总是以感性的方式讨论深层的东西，他实际上遭遇了康德所谓的“先验幻相”，一当人们越过可能经验的边界，这种幻相就必然会发生。传统形而上学认为它能够前后一贯地谈论本体，但实际上，我们只能前后一贯地谈论现象。
For Kant, though, that could not be the whole story. Stepping beyond the boundaries of possible experience is not simply a failing on our part, nor is it simply falling for an enticing illusion. In fact, the very nature of reason itself demands that we go beyond the bounds of possible experience in certain ways if we are to be able to make sense of our experience as a whole. Whereas the “understanding” (the intellect, der Verstand ) is a faculty of “principles,” reason is a faculty that connects those principles in terms of which principles provide evidential support for each other. The most obvious use of reason in this respect is in constructing formal inferences (such as “all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal”) in which true premises always lead to true conclusions. However, reason alone cannot determine whether the premises themselves are true; it can only say what follows from what else. As such, reason is thus led to search for “grounds” or “conditions” for judgments, which in turn leads it inevitably to seek something that is unconditioned, that is a final ground, a ground that has no further ground behind itself.
然而，对于康德来说，这并不是事情的全部。超越可能经验的边界，这不仅仅是我们的弱点，也不仅仅是对一种迷人幻相的信以为真。实际上，如果我们能够将我们的经验作为一个整体来理解的话，那么正是理性自身的本性要求我们以某种方式超越可能经验的边界。“知性”（理智，秘der是一种“原则”机能，而理性则是依据那些原则相互提供证明性支撑而将它们关联起来的机能。就此而言，理性最明显的运用是建构形式推理（例如，“所有人都会死，苏格拉底是人，所以苏格拉底会死”），在这种推理中，正确的前提往往会得出正确的结论。然而，单就理性自身而言，它不能决定前提是否正确，它只能说由什么推出什么。正因如此，理性导致了对判断之“根据”或w条件”的找寻，而这反过来使得它不可避免地去寻找无条件的东西，即终极根据，一种其背后不再有别的根据的根据。
Reason is thus driven to look for more than merely valid inferences; it inevitably seeks to find the end-points of certain types of series and to look for the unconditioned, the “whole” of which various individual appearances are only moments. Kant called such “wholes” conceived as totalities “Ideas” of reason (Ideen in German to distinguish them from ordinary “representations,” Vorstellungen). Whereas concepts apply to the objects of perception (and make conscious perception of such objects possible), Ideas structure and order our reflections about the world. Ideas have a kind of second-order status as they gather up and order our reflections and speculations about our first-order perceptions of individual objects. However, such Ideas have a perfectly proper and even necessary use when they are used to provide an order to experience that, while being “subjectively” necessary, is nonetheless not required as a condition of the possibility of experience. For example, thinking of the world as an interconnected whole is subjectively necessary for us to carry out scientific investigations, although such a conception of the world is not transcendentally necessary, since we could very well remain the self-conscious agents we are without thinking of the world in those terms. Whereas the a priori concepts of “the understanding” give us the objectivity of nature, the Ideas supply us with a representation of the order of nature.
因此，理性所欲找寻的不仅仅是有效的推理；它必然试图找出序列的终点，试图寻找无条件的“整体”（各种个体现象只是这种“整体”的要素）。康德将这种被视为总体的“整体”称为理性的“理念”（在德语中，Wem不同于普遍的ForeteWimg(表象））+概念适用于知觉的对象(并使对这些对象的有意识知觉成为可能），然而，理念则是建构并规整我们关于世界的反思。理念具有一种二阶地位，因为它们是所收集并规整的，是我们关于我们对个体对象的一阶知觉的反思和思考。然而，当这些理念用来为经验提供秩序时，对它们的运用就是十分恰当甚至是必要的，虽然是“主观上”必要的。尽管如此，这种运用并不是经验得以可能的条件。例如，对于我们进行科学研究来说，将世界设想为一个相互关联的整体，这在主观上是必要的，然而这种世界概念并非先验意义上必要的，因为即便我们不从这种角度来思考世界，我们依然是具有自我意识的行动者。“知性”的先天概念给予我们的是自然的客观性，而理念提供给我们的则是关于自然之秩序的表象。
However, when such Ideas are employed not merely to give us “regulative” methods for investigating phenomena and ordering our experience, but also to be themselves accurate representations of the world as a whole – as it would be apart from all possible experience of it, as a “noumenon” – then they lead directly to what Kant called “antinomies,” statements about such “unconditioned totalities” that result in equally well-licensed contradictions. For example, using pure reason alone, we can generate equally good arguments for such assertions as “the world has no beginning in time,” and “the world has a beginning in time.” The decisive failure of traditional metaphysics to resolve the problems it had set itself, along with the proliferation and multiplicity of classical metaphysical systems, were to be directly attributed to such transcendental illusion. Since arguments that on their surface seem to be good can be equally well made for such assertions and for their opposites, classical metaphysicians had been seduced into thinking that they only needed to tighten up their arguments a bit to show that the opposite conclusion was wrong; they failed to see that such Ideas necessarily lead to such mutually contradictory positions, and that no further investigation or tightening of arguments could, in principle, get them out of that fate.
然而，如果这些理念不仅用来为我们研究现象和规整经验提供“范导性”方法，而且它们本身也要形成世界是一个整体（我们对之不可能形成经验，它是一个本体）这种准确表象，那么，它们就导致了康德所说的“二律背反”，这表示的是那些导致了矛盾双方均可成立的“无条件总体”。例如，如果只运用纯粹理性，我们能为如下两个相反论断提供同财样好的论证：“世界在时间中没有开端”和“世界在世界中有一个开端”。传统形而上学在解决自己提出的问题时失败了，随着古典形而上学体系的扩展和多样化，这种决定性的失败直接促成了先验幻相。由于表面看来似乎合理的论证能够同时支持相互对立的论断，所以古典形而上学家们就误以为，他们只需把他们的论证再加强些，以表明对立结论是错误的；他们没有看到，这些理念必然导致这些相互矛盾的观点，并且原则上，进一步的研究或加强论证都不能使它们摆脱这种命运。
The most famous of these antinomies was the third, which asserted that there must be a radical freedom of will that initiates a causal series but is not itself an effect of any other cause; and that there must be a cause for every event, and hence there can be no freedom. This was, of course, curious even in Kant’s own terms. The transcendental employment of other Ideas resulted in antinomies – such as the world’s having and not having a beginning in time – in which both assertions were held to be without ultimate cognitive significance. However, with regard to freedom and determinism, Kant held that we must believe both that we are beings obeying the laws of a deterministically conceived universe, and that we are radically free, and determine our own actions; both elements of the antinomy were true. The solution to antinomy, as Kant was to later argue, was that, from a practical point of view, we must conceive of ourselves as noumenally free, but, from a theoretical point of view, we must be either agnostic on the question of freedom or deny outright its very possibility. However, what Kant seemed to be saying in his first Critique was that the issue of freedom – what in fact seemed to be the crucial issue in all of his work – simply in principle admitted no theoretical resolution to itself. Thus, on Kant’s view, freedom was the great problem of modern thought, and modern thought was destined by the very nature of reason itself to find any solution to this problem quite literally to be unintelligible since the necessary answers contradicted each other. We simply had to live with the beliefs that we were both free (regarded from a practical standpoint) and not free (regarded from a theoretical standpoint).
这些二律背反中最为著名的是第三个，相互对立的两个论点分别是:必然有着一种根本的意志自由，这种自由创造了一个因果序列，但它本身不是任何其他原因的结果；每一事件都必然是有原因的，因此没有自由。在其他理念的先验运用所导致的二律背反（例如，世界在时间中有开端和没有开端）中，相互对立的论断都被认为不具有最终的认知意义。然而，关于自由和决定论，康德认为，我们必须同时相信如下两点：一方面，我们作为存在者，必须遵守一个在决定论意义上构成的宇宙的诸规律；另一方面，我们从根本上来说是自由的，并且可以决定我们自己的行动。这个二律背反的两个要素都是真的。之后，康德说，二律背反的解决方法是：从实践的观点看，我们必须认为我们在本体意义上是自由的；但是，从理论的观点看，我们必须对自由问题持不可知论，或者根本就否认自由的可能性。然而，根据康德的《批判》，自由问题——的全部工作的关键问题——这实际上是他原则上就不允许理论视角的解决方法。因此，在康德看来，自由正是现代思维的大问题，并且，基于理性自身的本性，现代思维必然会去找寻这一问题的解决方案（毫不夸张地说，这一问题是不可理解的），因为必然的答案是相互矛盾的。我们不得不活在这样的信念中：我们既是自由的（从一种实践立场上来看），又是不自由的（从一种理论立场上来看）。
With that, Kant radically shifted the ground of philosophical discussion that had gone on before him. All previous metaphysics had been founded on “transcendental illusion”; the problems of traditional metaphysics were thus not solved but shown to have been falsely posed. Moreover, the firm conviction that “philosophy” and “reason” itself had demonstrated the existence of the Christian god, and had thus indirectly shored up the authority of the German princes, was shown to be itself an illusion incapable of repair.
由此，康德从根本上颠覆了前人的哲学讨论的基础。所有先前的形而上学都是建立在“先验幻相”上的；因此，传统形而上学的问题并未得到解决，而是表明它们是以错误的方式提出的。此外，如下坚定的信念也被证明是无可救药的幻相：“哲学”和“理性”证明了基督教上帝的实存，并因此直接支撑了德意志君主的权威。
There was, quite simply, no theoretical knowledge to be gained of God at all. Kant himself, however, claimed that he had only made clear what was really at stake in such religious matters; as he remarked in his preface to the 1787 edition: “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.” That call for “faith,” though, was intensely worrisome to many of his German readers and was equally liberating for others; out of it came a new theological debate that has shaken intellectual life until our own day.
相当简单明了的是，我们根本不能对上帝形成理论知识。然而，康德自己却主张，他只是阐明，在这些宗教问题中什么才是真正紧要的，如他在1787年版的序言中所说的：“因此我不得不悬置知识，以便给信仰腾出位置。”[34]尽管如此，对于他的许多德意志读者来说，这种对“信仰”的要求是相当令人不安的，而对另一些读者来说则是相当具有解放意义的；由此产生了一场新的、撼动了知识界的神学论争，直到今日。
Moreover, alongside Kant’s destruction of traditional metaphysics was his radically new emphasis on human spontaneity and freedom. After Kant, it seemed that we could no longer explain our powers of thought in terms of a set of natural dispositions or in terms of their fulfilling some metaphysical potentiality for their own perfection. Thinking was to be understood in terms of judging according to the normative rules that govern discursive synthesis, not in terms of any kind of natural, causal, or metaphysical relation to objects (in anything like the traditional sense). Our mentality consists in the specific way in which we take up a normative stance to experience, and without that active “taking up,” there is, quite simply, no consciousness, no mentality at all. In even the most ordinary perceptions, we find only the results of human spontaneity, expressed in self-imposed conceptual rules, combining itself with the given elements of sensory and intuitive experience, not the preordained results of a perfect order disclosing itself to us.
此外，康德在摧毁传统形而上学的同时，他还从根本上重新强调人的自发性和自由[35]。在康德之后，我们似乎再也不能依照一系列自然性质，或依照思维力量为它们自己的倾向而实现某种形而上学潜能这一点，来解释我们的思维力量了。我们在解释思维时所依照的，是根据掌控演绎性综合的规范性规则来进行判断这一点，而不是依照同对象的自然的、因果的或形而上学的关系。我们的心智包含我们对经验采取规范性立场的方式，并且，如果没有这种主动的“采取立场”，那么就根本没有意识、没有心智。在最普通的知觉中，我们没有发现向我们呈现出的完美秩序的命定结果，而只发现了人的自发性的结果，这表现在：自己给自己施加概念规则，将自身与既定的感性直观经验的要素相联结。
The old world, so it seemed, had melted away under the heat of Kant’s
Critique.
由此看来，在康德的《批判》的高温下，旧世界已经消融了。
