The Critique (of Pure Reason) investigates nothing less than the nature of human reason and knowledge (epistemology), and the basic constitution of the natural universe (metaphysics). Weigelt, Introduction of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Penguin Books), p.xvi-xvii
Kant defines metaphysics in terms of “the cognitions after which reason might strive independently of all experience” and his goal in the book [Critique of Pure Reason] is to reach a “decision about the possibility or impossibility of a metaphysics in general, and the determination of its sources, as well as its extent and boundaries […]”. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/kant/#KanProThePurRea
[…] although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience. For it is quite possible that even our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and of that which our own faculty of knowledge (sensible impressions simply prompting it to do so) supplies from itself, an addition which we do not distinguish from that raw material until long practice has made us attentive to it and rendered us capable of separating one from the other. It is therefore a question which at least deserves closer investigation, and one that cannot be disposed of at first sight, namely, whether there exists a knowledge that is independent of experience and even of all impressions of the senses. Such knowledge is called a priori, and is distinguished from empirical knowledge, which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p.37-38
[…] the real problem of pure reason is contained in the question: How are synthetic judgements a priori possible? That metaphysics has hitherto remained in so vaccillating state of uncertainty and contradiction is entirely due to the fact that people have never previously thought of this problem, or perhaps even of a distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements. The solution of this problem, or the sufficient proof that a possibility which it demands to have explained does in reality not exist at all, is a question of life and death to metaphysics. David Hume, who among all philosophers came closest to this problem, though he was far from conceiving it with sufficient definitiveness and universality, confining his attention only to the synthetic proposition about the connection of an effect with its causes (principium causalitatis), believed he had discovered that such an a priori proposition is entirely impossible. According to his conclusions, everything which we call metaphysics would turn out to be a mere delusion of rational insight into what in reality is only borrowed from experience and has, by mere habit, assumed the appearance of necessity. If he had grasped our problem in all its universality, he would never have thought of an assertion that destroys all pure philosophy, because he would have perceived that, according to his argument, no pure mathematical science was possible either, on account of its certainly containing synthetic a priori propositions; and from such an assertion his good sense would probably have saved him. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p.49
Analytic and Synthetic Judgements
In all judgements in which a relation between subject and predicate is thought, this relation is possible in two ways. Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A as something which is (covertly) contained in the concept A; or B lies outside concept A, though connected with it. In the former case I call the judgement analytic, in the latter synthetic. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p.43
In synthetic judgements the connection of the predicate with the subject is thought without identity. […] Those add to the concept of the subject a predicate that had not been thought in it at all, and that could not have been extracted from it by any analysis. […] Empirical judgements, as such, are all synthetic. In synthetic judgements […] I add […] the predicate synthetically to the concept. For although neither of the concepts [the subject and the property/relation attributed as predicate] is contained in each other, yet they belong to each other, though only contingently, as parts of a whole, namely, of an experience which is itself a synthetic combination of intuition Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p.43-44
Analytic judgements are therefore those in which the connection of the predicate with the subject is thought through identity. […] they are called elucidatory because […] nothing is added through the predicate to the concept of the subject, and the concept is only analyzed and broken up into its constituent concepts which had all along been thought in it (though confusedly). […] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p.43
In synthetic a priori judgements, this help [of experience] is entirely lacking. If I am to go beyond the concept A, and to know that another concept B is connected with it, then what is that on which I rely and which makes the synthesis possible, considering that I cannot have the advantage of looking about in the field of experience? Take the proposition: Everything that happens has its cause. The concept of a cause is entirely outside that concept [the event that happened] and indicates something different from that which happens; hence it is in no way contained in that representation. How then can I predicate of that which happens something totally different from it […] as belonging to it, and belonging to it necessarily? What is here the unknown […] on which the understanding relies when it believes it discovers, outside the concept A, a predicate B foreign to concept A, which it nevertheless believes to be connected with that concept? It cannot be experience, because the above principle, that all which happens has its cause, has added this second representation to the first, not only with greater generality, but also with the character of necessity, and therefore entirely a priori and from mere concepts. Upon such synthetic, i.e., expansive, principles rests the whole final aim of our speculative a priori knowledge; for the analytic principles are no doubt very important and necessary, but only to arrive at that distinctiveness of concepts which is requisite for a safe and wide synthesis as will lead to a genuinely new acquisition of knowledge. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p.44-45
Examples of analytic judgements: - All bachelors are unmarried - All triangles have three sides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic_distinction
Hegelian Tradition
Finally, from the ever-greater complexity and variety that raises sub­atomic particles through the course of evolution to those conscious, self­ reflexive life forms we call human beings, we cannot help but speculate about the existence of a broadly conceived telos and a latent subjectivity in substance itself that eventually yields mind and intellectuality. In the reactivity of substance, in the sensibility of the least-developed microor­ganisms, in the elaboration of nerves, ganglia, the spinal cord, and the layered development of the brain, one senses an evolution of mind so coherent and compelling that there is a strong temptation to describe it with Manfred Eigen's term, "inevitable." It is hard to believe that mere fortuity accounts for the capacity of life forms to respond neurologically to stimuli; to develop highly organized nervous systems; to be able to foresee, however dimly, the results of their behavior and later conceptu­alize this foresight clearly and symbolically. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.364
The prospect that life and all its attributes are latent in substance as such, that biological evolution is rooted deeply in symbiosis or mutu­alism, indicates how important it is to reconceptualize our notion of "matter" as active substance. As Manfred Eigen has put it, molecular self-organization suggests that evolution "appears to be an inevitable event, given the presence of certain matter with specified autocatalytic properties and under the maintenance of the finite (free) energy flow [that is, solar energy] necessary to compensate for the steady produc­tion of entropy." This much is clear: we can no longer be satisfied with a passive "dead" matter that fortuitously collects into living substance. The uni­verse bears witness to an ever-striving, developing-not merely a "moving"-substance, whose most dynamic and creative attribute is its ceaseless capacity for self-organization into increasingly complex forms. Natural fecundity originates primarily from growth, not from spatial "changes" of location. Nor can we remove form from its central place in this developmental and growth process, or function as an indispensable correlate of form. The orderly universe that makes science a possible project and its use of a highly concise logic - mathematics - meaningful presupposes the correlation of form with function. From this perspec­tive, mathematics serves not merely as the "language" of science but also as the logos of science. This scientific logos is above all a workable project because it grasps a logos that inheres in nature-the "object" of scientific investigation. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.359
My point here is that substance and its properties are not separable from life. Henri Bergson's conception of the biosphere as an "entropy­ reduction" factor, in a cosmos that is supposedly moving toward greater entropy or disorder, would seem to provide life with a cosmic rationale for existence. That life forms may have this function need not suggest that the universe has been exogenously "designed" by a supernatural demiurge. But it does suggest that "matter" or substance has inherent self-organizing properties, no less valid than the mass and motion at­tributed to it by Newtonian physics. Nor is there so great a lack of data, by comparison with the conven­tional attributes of "matter," as to render the new properties implausi­ble. At the very least, science must be what nature really is; and in na­ture, life is (to use Bergsonian terminology) a counteracting force to the second law of thermodynamics-or an "entropy-reduction" factor. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.357
Bloch’s Not-Yet
The central idea of not yet carries the double sense of not yet (but expected, a future presence) and still not (a current absence and lack). The not yet operates at two levels: the subjective, individual not-yet-conscious, the essentially creative preconscious utopian impulse, that which is on the verge of coming to consciousness; and the objective, external condition of the world, the not-yet-become. The not yet is real; for Bloch, reality includes the horizon of future possibilities and the novum as it comes into being. He refers to the perception of the future in the present as Vor-Schein, pre-appearance or anticipatory illumination. Utopia as forward dreaming is not an esoteric byway of culture nor a distraction from class struggle, but an unavoidable and indispensable element in the production of the future, for ‘the hinge in human history is its producer’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 6
The idea of the Not-Yet-Conscious is developed through a critique of Sigmund Freud. In Bloch’s view, Freud regarded the unconscious as a kind of rubbish bin of repressed material that was no longer conscious; this overly negative approach on Freud’s part disregarded the additional and countervailing characteristic of the unconscious, that of being a creative source of material on the verge of coming to consciousness. The unconscious is also the pre-conscious, is intrinsically creative and the source of the utopian impulse, which Bloch appears to regard as a fundamental human propensity. The expression of the Not-Yet-Conscious is of course subject to social determination and thus varies with individual and historical circumstance; hence the variation in utopian expression demonstrated in the rest of The Principle of Hope. The Not-Yet-Conscious is at its strongest in youth, is expressed par excellence in the creative arts and is intensely present in times of change, particularly revolutionary change. Thus ‘all times of change are filled with Not-Yet-Conscious, even overfilled; a Not-Yet-Conscious which is carried by a rising class’. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 101
What prevents the Not-Yet-Conscious from being a purely psychoanalytic or ontological category is that it is the subjective correlate of the Not-Yet-Become, a category which applies to material reality. It is fundamental to Bloch’s argument and to the concept of the Not-Yet-Become that the material world is essentially unfinished, the future is indeterminate and therefore that the future constitutes a realm of possibility. Once the world is seen as in a constant state of process, but a process whose direction and outcome is not predetermined, there are always many possible futures – futures which are real possibilities, rather than merely formal possibilities. Not all projected futures are real possibilities; there are of course constraints, and Bloch’s model is not one of pure voluntarism. Nor are all real possibilities desirable: they include ‘devastatingly, possible fascist Nothing’ as well as ‘finally feasible and overdue, socialism’. These possible futures must be seen as part of, rather than outside, reality despite the fact that the indeterminacy of the future means that there is no necessary development from potentiality to actuality, and despite the fact that not all real possibilities will in fact be realised. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 101-102
The designation of utopia as ‘anticipatory consciousness’, which is the subtitle of part two of The Principle of Hope, depends upon Bloch’s central concept, the Not Yet. It has two aspects, the Not-Yet-Conscious and the Not-Yet-Become – its ideological and material, or subjective and objective aspects. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 101
Life Forms
One can live a whole life without experiencing anything, by being very careful not to think and feel. Existence is then reduced to a slow process of degradation. It wears down and ruins, instead of giving form. After the miracle of the encounter, relations can only go from wound to wound towards their consumption. Life, on the contrary, gradually gives form to whoever refuses to live beside themselves, to whoever allows themselves to experience. They become a form of life in the full sense of the term. In sharp contrast to that, there are the inherited methods of activist construction, so grossly defec­tive, so exhausting, so destructive, when they are so focused on building. Communism does not hinge on self-renunciation but on the attention given to the smallest action. It's a question of our plane of perception and hence of our way of doing things. A practical matter. What the perception of entities-individual or collective­ bars our access to is the plane where things really happen, where the collective potentials form and fall apart, gain strength or dissipate. […] To live communism is not to work to ensure the existence of the entity we belong to, but to deploy and deepen an ensemble of ties, which sometimes means cutting certain ones. What is essential occurs at the level of the smallest things. […] Perception in terms of bonds dismisses the whole alternative between individual and collective, and does so positively. In a real situation, an "I" that says what needs to be said can be a "we" of extraordinary power. And so, the particular happiness of any "commune" reflects the plenitude of its singularities, a certain quality of ties, the radiant energy of each frag­ment of world that it harbors-good-bye to entities, to their protrusiveness, good-bye to individual and collective confinement, adios to the reign of nar­cissism. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.143-144
Contrary to what a bad philosophical legacy has taught us, form does not pertain to visible appearance but to dynamic principle. The real individuation is not that of bodies, but of forms. One only has to reflect on the process of ideation to be convinced of this: nothing better illustrates the illusion of the stable and individual Self than the belief that "I" have ideas, since it is abundantly clear that ideas come to me, even without my knowing from where, from neuronal, muscular, and symbolic processes so opaque that they pour in naturally while I'm walking, or when I'm falling asleep and the boundaries of the Self are giving way. An occurring idea is a good example of form: there enters into its realization, in a language envi­ ronment, something that's infra-individual-an intuition, a splinter of experience, a bit of affect­ in a constellation with something that's supra-indi­ vidual. A form is a mobile configuration that holds together, in a tense and dynamic unity, heteroge­ neous elements of the Self and the world. "The essence of form," said the young Lukacs in his idealist jargon, "has always resided in the process by which two principles that absolutely exclude each other become form without mutually abolishing each other. Form is the paradox that has mate­rialized, the reality of lived experience, the true life of the impossible. For form is not reconciliation but the war of conflicting principles, transposed into eternity." Form is born of the encounter between a situation and a necessity. Once born, it affects things far beyond itself. In the conflict of the spring of 2016, one could have seen the birth of a form from a perfectly singular, perfectly identifiable point. On the Austerlitz Bridge, a courageous little group forced the riot police to pull back. There was a first line of masked people sporting gas masks and holding a reinforced ban­ner, other masked ones backing them in case of attempted arrests and making up a bloc behind the first line, and behind that bunch and on the sides, baton-wielding masked folk who whacked on the cops. Once this little form had appeared, the video of its exploit circulated on the social media. And kept making babies in the weeks that followed, up to the acme ofJune 14, 2016 when its offspring could no longer be counted. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.152-154