Kant on the Theoretical Use of the Ideas of Reason: A Transcendental Interpretation

This essay defends a new interpretation of Kant’s account of the theoretical use of the ideas of reason based on the idea that reason is the faculty that delivers comprehension, i.e., cognition that essentially involves explanatory understanding. I argue that the ideas are conditions of the possibility of comprehension, just as the categories are conditions of the possibility of experience. Precisely in virtue of being constitutive of comprehension, the ideas are also regulative of experience: our implicit conception of comprehension, which involves the ideas, guides the exercise of the understanding by which we acquire experience. For experience is acquired not for its own sake but for the sake of comprehension, and thus we ought to exercise our understanding, as far as we can, in such a way as to acquire experience that advances our comprehension.