In each case...

In each case, however, the transcendental critique will show that the pretension of these ideas to furnish to knowledge objects corresponding to them is unfounded. Whatever the subjective validity of the ideas of reason in instructing us to pursue the search for ever-greater unification, the attempt to provide objects of knowledge corresponding to the total synthesis of conditions cannot succeed.

Accordingly, one upshot of the Kantian critique of the totalizing ideas of reason, significant for the critical projects that would descend from it, is that the work of reason in synthesizing knowledge is, for Kant, essentially incomplete . The critique of transcendental illusion opens an irreducible gulf between the sphere of possible knowledge and the satisfaction of reason’s own demands, disrupting every attempt or pretense to present the work of reason as complete or completeable.

As John Sallis (1980) has argued, the Kantian critique of totality thus reveals the impossibility of any final repair of the “fragmentation” that is characteristic of finite knowledge.

By contrast with the unifying power of the deduction of the categories in the Transcendental Analytic , which succeeds in gathering the manifold of intuition into unities under the categories of the understanding, the “gathering of reason” attempted in the Transcendental Dialectic ultimately fails: Thus, in each of the gatherings of reason, critique exhibits a radical non-correspondence between the two moments that belong to the structure of the gathering, between the unity posited by reason and the actual gathering of the manifold into this unity.

It shows that in every case the actual gathering of the manifold falls short of the unity into which reason would gather that manifold. An inversion is thus prepared: With respect to its outcome the gathering of reason is precisely the inverse of that gathering of pure understanding that is measured in the Transcendental Analytic .

Whereas the gathering of reason culminates in the installation of radical difference between its moments, the gathering of understanding issues in identity, unity, fulfillment.[^296] Whereas the categories in the Analytic result in a gathering of the representations of the intuition into a unity that is stable and uncontestable, the gathering of reason fails to result in a unity of knowledge, instead installing a kind of essential difference at the heart of reason’s work.