Critique of reason

Whatever else a critique of reason attempts, it must surely criticise reason. Further, if it is not to point towards nihilism, a critique of reason cannot have only a negative or destructive outcome, but must vindicate at least some standards or principles as authorities on which thinking and doing may rely, and by which they may (in part) be judged. Critics of ‘the Enlightenment project’ from Pascal to Horkheimer to contemporary communitarians and postmodernists detect its Achilles’ heel in arrant failure to vindicate the supposed standards of reason that are so confidently used to criticise, attack and destroy other authorities, including church, state and tradition. If the authority of reason is bogus, why should such reasoned criticism have any weight?

Suspicions about reason can be put innumerable ways. However, one battery of criticisms is particularly threatening, because it targets the very possibility of devising anything that could count as a vindication of reason. This line of attack is sometimes formulated as a trilemma. Any supposed vindication of the principles of reason would have to establish the authority of certain fundamental constraints on thinking or acting. However, this could only be done one of three ways. A supposed vindication could appeal to the presumed principles of reason that it aims to vindicate – but would then be circular, so fail as vindication. Alternatively it might be based on other starting points: but then the supposed principles of reason would lack reasoned vindication, so could not themselves bequeath unblemished pedigrees. Finally, as a poor third option, a vindication of reason might suggest that reasoning issues in uncompletable regress, so that prospects of vindicating any claim, including claims to identify principles of reason, never terminate: To reason is only to keep the door open to further questioning. In each case the desired vindication eludes. These unpromising thoughts lend some appeal to Pascalian faith, to Humean naturalism or even to postures of postmodernity as responses to the challenge of scepticism about reason.

If the Critique of Pure Reason is to live up to its title and its reputation it must deal with scepticism with regard to reason. The whole magnificent and intricate critical structure will have little point if it draws on an unvindicated or unvindicable conception of reason. Yet it is far from clear where or how Kant handles these topics.