I It is a familiar point that one aim of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason ...

I It is a familiar point that one aim of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , particularly in the Transcendental Dialectic , is to exhibit the fundamental incompleteness of human thought. This incompleteness is, for Kant, a consequence of the operation of the very principles of reason itself, of the inevitability of its own critical questioning, in accordance with these principles, of its own scope and limits.

What Kant, in the Dialectic , calls “transcendental illusion” results from our tendency to misunderstand the principles of reason, construing these actually subjective rules as if they were objective principles really governing things in the world.

The misunderstanding results from reason’s inherent function, to synthesize the principles of the understanding into a higher unity.[^291] It does so by means of inference , striving to reduce the variety of principles of the understanding [ Grundsatze ] under the unity of a small number of inferential principles of reason [ Prinzipien ].[^292] But in so doing, reason also creates the problematic “pure concepts” or “transcendental ideas” (A 321/B 378) that stand in no direct relationship to any given object.

The transcendental ideas arise from reason’s synthesis by means of inference, in particular, when this process of synthesis is thought of as complete .[^293] According to Kant, in seeking to unify knowledge under higher inferential principles, reason seeks the condition for any given conditioned, leading it ultimately to seek totality in the series of conditions leading to any particular phenomenon: Accordingly, in the conclusion of a syllogism we restrict a predicate to a certain object, after having first thought it in the major premiss in its whole extension under a given condition.

This complete quantity of the extension in relation to such a condition is called universality (universalitas) . In the synthesis of intuitions we have corresponding to this the allness (universitas) or totality of the conditions.

The transcendental concept of reason is, therefore, none other than the concept of the totality of the conditions for any given conditioned.[^294] The search for totality, Kant explains, takes three forms, corresponding to the three kinds of inference through which reason can arrive at knowledge by means of principles.[^295] These three forms furnish the rational ideas of soul, world, and God that are the objects of transcendental dialectic.