The Non-Regulative Dynamics of Reason. Rethinking the Foundation of Kant’s Metaphysics of Idea

Kant's attitude towards metaphysics is complicated and ambivalent. On the one hand, Kant tries every measure to distance his critical philosophy from the traditional Wolffian metaphysics which endorses a demonstration from a dogmatic principle; on the other hand, Kant also names his new philosophical project not only "critical philosophy" but also "critical metaphysics". The task of critical philosophy is limited in searching for the condition of possibility for human knowledge and then presenting it from the bottom up, instead of developing a top-down constitutive structure of it. The human cognition is strictly restricted in the sphere of understanding, and any attempt to expand the cognition beyond this border is refuted.
     In this paper, I will argue that Kant's search for the subjective foundation of human knowledge would inevitably lead to the possibility of a cognition which takes place in the sphere of reason rather than understanding, but its regulative structure presented in CPR is not sufficient to establish a stable dynamics of reason in order to make its application possible. In the next step, by comparing the different strategies of interpretation to this problem adopted by analytic philosophers like Quassim Cassam and Lucy Allais, as well as idealistic philosophers like Schelling and Konrad Cramer, I will also argue that it's necessary to make a "transcendental-ontological commitment" at the very foundation of Kant's project, which acknowledges the application of rational abilities, presupposing a new mode of metaphysics. Finally, I shall present and reconstruct Kant's project in his less known "Orientation Essay" published in 1786, in which Kant develops a new mode of rational cognition based on the orientational function of reason. With the orientational dynamics of reason, the "transcendental-ontological commitment" as the foundation of Kant's critical metaphysics can be fulfilled.

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