Møller, Sofie: Kant’s Tribunal of Reason: Legal Metaphor and Normativity in the Critique of Pure Reason

There are about as many ways to approach Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as there are readers. Some philosophers have interpreted the book as an anti-metaphysical treatise, while others have seen it as the last (and best) attempt at delineating the limits and possibilities of traditional metaphysics. Some have preferred a purely epistemic reading of the Critique, while others, most notably Heidegger, have argued for an ontological interpretation. Theologians have focused on Kant’s arguments concerning the (im)possibility of gaining knowledge of the absolute, including God. Constructivists have seen the Critique as the first(?) attempt to provide a thoroughly constructivist account of our knowledge of the world. And so on and so forth.

This plurality of interpretive approaches is not surprising. Not only is the Critique of Pure Reason a complex and difficult text. It is also a text written at a particular time in Kant’s philosophical development. There is thus good reason to believe that Kant’s views on many of the systematic and fundamental questions discussed in the Critique changed, sometimes even substantially, in the years following the publication of the first edition in 1781. Contrary to the opinions of at least some critics Kant’s mature critical philosophy is not a monolithic whole but should rather be seen as a work in constant development.

Furthermore, Kant did not write his magnum opus in splendid isolation from the social, political, cultural, and intellectual developments of his age. This becomes particularly clear when we turn from the substantial issues discussed in the Critique to the way in which Kant frames and discusses these issues. One prominent example of this is Kant’s extensive use of legal metaphors and juridical terminology throughout the Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant frequently refers to lawyers, judges, witnesses, legislators and legislation, laws, legality and other juridical terms, when he attempts to explain the basic notions of his theory. And as Dieter Henrich pointed out in an influential paper from 1989, Kant’s use of the term “deduction” (in, for instance, his (in)famous “Transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the Understanding”) is best understood not in purely logical terms, but rather as an extension of or metaphorical allusion to the at Kant’s time well-known German legal term “deduction” (see Henrich 1989, 29–46).

Sofie Møller’s excellent book is the most extensive attempt to systematically account for and systematically explain Kant’s use of legal metaphors and terminology in the Critique of Pure Reason. Møller not only goes through the Critique and highlights the many and varied ways in which Kant employs juridical terms and images. She also links such use to Kant’s own reflections on law and right in both the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals from 1797 and in several of his students’ lecture notes, and she relates such insights to juridical discussions among philosophers and legal scholars of Kant’s own time. The result is a novel and highly interesting account of Kant’s philosophical project in the Critique of Pure Reason that deserves to be read by everyone with a serious interest in Kant.

According to Møller, Kant’s use of legal metaphors in his account of the structure and function of reason is not simply an incidental pedagogical tool, but plays an important, indeed indispensable, cognitive role in the first Critique. Drawing on Kant’s own account of the functions of symbols and metaphors in the Critique of Judgement, Møller suggests that “the legal metaphors are examples of symbolic hypotyposis that provide concrete presentations of thought processes which cannot be represented directly to the senses.” (p. 7). This is important because one of the aims of the Critique of Pure Reason is to establish the a priori conditions for empirical cognition, and such conditions, by definition, cannot be directly represented to the senses. The legal metaphors thus serve as an indirect, sensible representation to the human mind of those a priori conditions and principles that make empirical cognition possible.

Most of Møller’s book is dedicated to elaborating, explaining, and justifying this claim. To do this Møller discusses Kant’s understanding of law and lawfulness as the distinctive mark of reason (chapters 1 and 2); the precise nature of the legal metaphors used in the transcendental deduction (chapters 3 and 4); Kant’s complex (and perhaps not completely coherent) use of the image of reason as a sort of tribunal (chapters 5 and 6), and his attempt to elucidate the epistemic authority of reason by comparing and contrasting it with (different forms of) judicial authority (chapters 7 and 8). Chapter 9 shows the importance of Kant’s legal metaphors for his views on the systematicity of reason. The book concludes with a brief (four pages) summary of the main arguments.

Each chapter highlights Møller’s extensive grasp of both Kant’s own texts, the relevant secondary literature, and the (somewhat obscure) historical concepts and ideas from the German legal tradition, that Kant implicitly and explicitly draws upon. Each chapter discusses a distinct and clearly defined set of problems and questions, yet at the same time also contributes to Møller’s overarching project. Møller is usually quite explicit about the specific role each chapter plays in her overall argument. However, sometimes the discussions go into such extensive details concerning some minor exegetical points that the reader may occasionally loose her sense of direction. At least until the end of the chapter or the beginning of the following chapter, where Møller usually provides a clear and very much to the point map of her (and Kant’s) argumentative strategy.

Møller’s book succeeds in doing what she has set out to do namely to explain the cognitive function of and the systematic importance of Kant’s use of legal metaphors in the Critique of Pure Reason. However, as all other good philosophical books, Kant’s Tribunal of Reason also raises questions, which it does not discuss, either because they are not part of Møller’s overall project, or because she does not explicitly recognize their importance. Let me conclude this review by briefly attending to such questions.

One minor discussion in Møller’s book concerns the relation between Kant’s use of political and legal metaphors to describe the function and purpose of the Critique of Pure Reason. This discussion is particularly important in chapters 1 and 8. In these chapters Møller argues that the primary aim of the Critique of Pure Reason is to establish the lawful authority of reason, in a way akin to the way natural right philosophers understand the political establishment of “a rightful condition” to replace the lawless “state of nature”. Møller’s conclusion is that the legal metaphors take precedence over the political because: “It is the fundamental legislating relationship which allows reason to be the legislator of nature and this structure enables cognisers to have peaceful rational debates. The political community thus presupposes a lawful condition in both the practical and the theoretical case… reason is only political because it is legislative” (p. 145).

This conclusion seems a bit too easy for me. More precisely, I am not sure whether I agree with Møller’s (and perhaps Kant’s?) view that legislation (or at least the ability to legislate) is a precondition for politics, whereas politics apparently is not a precondition for legislation. This might be true if one only focuses on theoretical philosophy and questions concerning cognition. But is it also true if one turns to practical philosophy and to the metaphors from the fields of practical philosophy discussed by Møller? It seems to be at least an open question whether we really can discuss (theoretical and practical) legislation completely apart from the political conditions that makes such legislation possible. The relationship between law and politics (and between legal and political metaphors) appears to me to be both more vexed and more complicated than Møller’s discussion seems to allow for.

This leads me directly to my second point, namely how we are to understand Kant’s use of legal metaphors within his practical philosophy, and how this use relates to his employment of such metaphors within his theoretical philosophy? Møller’s book explicitly focuses on and analyzes Kant’s use of legal metaphors in the Critique of Pure Reason, i.e., within theoretical philosophy. To do this she draws extensively on Kant´s practical philosophy, in particular his philosophy of right, but also (in chapter 6) his analysis of moral consciousness.

Møller does not, however, provide a detailed and systematic discussion of Kant’s employment of legal metaphors and juridical terminology within his practical philosophy as such. This is understandable, since it is not what her book is about. But it would have been interesting to see, e.g., how Kant’s distinction between the will’s legislative and executive functions maps on to his use of similar metaphors within theoretical philosophy. Or how Kant’s (clearly juridically inspired) notion of the will as autonomous relates to the will’s role within theoretical philosophy.

These, however, are only minor quibbles, which should be seen as suggestions for further discussion of Møller’s highly recommendable and notable engagement with the legal aspects of Kant’s philosophy.