Knowledge, Discipline, System, Hope: The Fate of Metaphysics in the Doctrine of Method

Despite being dwarfed by “The Transcendental Doctrine of Elements” in both size and influence, “The Transcendental Doctrine of Method” is officially the second main part of the Critique of Pure Reason. It starts with an architectural metaphor: in the first part of the book, Kant says, we “made an estimate of the building materials and determined for what sort of edifice, with what height and strength, they would suffice” (A707/B735). Those materials came from both sensory intuition (Transcendental Aesthetic) and conceptual understanding (Transcendental Analytic). But although “we had in mind a tower that would reach the heavens,” it turned out that speculative a priori reasoning did not offer legitimate materials for the purposes of either knowledge or science (Transcendental Dialectic).