Critique of Pure Reason. (Summaries And Comments).

Lee, Seung-Kee

KANT, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xi + 785 pp. Cloth, $74.95--Aside from the benefits of an excellent introduction, a short but sensible bibliography, informative notes (including cross-references to Kant's Handschriftliche Nachlass), and useful glossaries, two features in particular make this translation by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (also the general editors of "The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant") by far the best text of the Critique of Pure Reason available thus far in English. For the first time we are provided with an English translation that supplies in their entirety both the first ("A") edition (1781) and the second ("B") edition (1787) versions not only of those sections that Kant rewrote completely for the 1787 edition: the preface, "Transcendental Deduction," and "Paralogisms of Pure Reason," but also of those sections that Kant revised "extensively although not completely" (p. 74): the introduction, the "Transcendental Aesthetic," and the chapter on the "Distinction between Phenomena and Noumena." This feature avoids the inconvenience created by Norman Kemp Smith's widely-used translation (London: Macmillan, 1929), which, based mainly as it is on the second edition, places most of the passages from the first edition in notes (except for those sections that were rewritten completely), and which thus makes it "difficult for the reader to get a clear sense of how the first edition read" (p. 74). (For this purpose some owners of Kemp Smith's edition have found Max Muller's translation of the first edition of the Critique [Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966; originally, London: Macmillan, 1881] to be a useful supplement; both texts, however, may now be replaced by the more literal and reliable translation by Guyer and Wood.)

Another feature that makes this translation most desirable is that it contains the notes Kant himself made in his personal copy of the first edition of the Critique (no such copy "has ever been known to exist" [p. 75] of the second edition). These notes were published by Benno Erdmann in 1881 (Nachtrage zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Kiel: Lipsius & Tischer]). While Kemp Smith's edition mentions only a few, Guyer and Wood have included all of the notes prepared by Erdmann. One can thus "have the experience ... of reading Kant's own copy" of the Critique (p. 75). The Cambridge Edition is the first edition of the Critique with this feature, in English or German. While not all the notes are transparent, some do illuminate; for example, to Kant's remark that a concept is "never immediately related to an object, but is always related to some other representation of it (whether that be an intuition or itself already a concept" (A 68/B 93) is added the following footnote: "Kant's copy of the first edition replaces this parenthetical aside with the following words, without parentheses: `which itself contains intuition only mediately or immediately'" (p. 205).

The translators note that their aim "to try to give the reader of the translation an experience as close as possible to that of the reader of the German original" has necessitated "as much consistency as possible in the translation of Kant's terminology" (p. 73). Evidently such consistency is indispensable when the words involved play a critical role not only in the Critique of Pure Reason but in Kant's philosophy as a whole. One such word is "determination" (Bestimmung). A careful examination of Kant's use of this word in the Critique of Pure Reason (and in his other writings) reveals that he often distinguishes a thing's being "determined" (bestimmt) from its being left "undetermined" (unbestimmt) with regard to some particular context. Moreover, there are at least four different phrases that Kant uses as synonyms for something's being left unbestimmt: "abstract from" (abstrahieren von), "without regard to" (ohne Rucksicht auf), "indifferent" to (gleichgultig), and leave "undecided" (unausgemacht). It is through the use of these phrases that Kant articulates the determinate-indeterminate distinction, which fulfills an indispensable function in his analysis of the distinction between empirical reality and transcendental ideality of space and time as well as between general and transcendental logic, and thereby between subjective and objective employment of the logical function of judging, and between analytic and synthetic judgments. While Kemp Smith's translation of these phrases as well as of bestimmt and unbestimmt does not (besides "determine" numerous other English verbs and phrases are used to translate bestimmen; and in a number of places the latter is simply left untranslated), Guyer and Wood's transition of these terms remains consistent throughout (with a few minor exceptions).

In an effort to "avoid imposing [their] own interpretation of the Critique as much as possible" (p. 75), and to allow that "as much interpretative work be left for the reader of the translation as is left for the reader of the original," the translators have endeavored to preserve not only "Kant's sentences as wholes, even where considerations of readability might have suggested breaking them up," but also "ambiguous and obscure constructions in Kant's original text wherever possible" (p. 73). The result, the reader (whether scholar or student) of the Cambridge Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason will find, is not an "ambiguous and obscure" but on the contrary, a more absorbing, penetrating, engaging Kant.--Seung-Kee Lee, Drew University.