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Perhaps this is an occupational hazard for thinkers, but here again we find a philosopher favoring the ideal over the material as the final source of meaning. And once again, the kinds of structures of meaning can’t easily be spoken; they need to be visualized in text.

Kant’s metaphor for the work he is doing is “architectonics,” taking the form of a plan of “the system of all principles of pure reason.”²⁰⁴ At the highest level of understanding, the system acknowledges the play of the material and the ideal. On the one hand, there is the empirical, or our relations to the world via sensation, “the effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by it.” On the other hand, there are our intuitions, our understanding of experience by means of concepts.²⁰⁵ However, the “bounds of sense” in Kant (to use a wonderful phrase of Strawson’s which is the title of his celebrated reading of Kant) remain within the ideal. In the final analysis, Kant does not have a plausible account of the dynamics of material effect.²⁰⁶

The world, for Kant, is a product of our a priori mental constructs, the “pure concepts of the understanding” created according to “reason’s legislative prescriptions.”²⁰⁷ These are reducible to four macro categories, each subdivided into three: quantity (unity, plurality, totality); quality (reality, negation, limitation); relation (inherence/subsistence, causality/dependence, community/reciprocity); and modality (possibility, existence, necessity).²⁰⁸

In addition to these categories of reason where the mind at least maintains a secondary connection with the material world, the mind constructs experience as “pure intuitions,” a priori idealities such as the dynamics of time and space. For, Kant says, there is nothing in what is represented from the world to indicate that time or space have any material reality.^§AS1.3

In the structuring of meaning, “the concept determines a priori not only the scope of its manifold content, but also the positions which the parts occupy relatively to one another.”²⁰⁹ Kant’s metaontology is founded in a process of structuring favoring mental system over material reality, as later would also the architectures of meaning proposed by Saussure in his systems of signs,^§MS3d and Chomsky in his syntactic structures.^§MS3.1.2f

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²⁰⁴ Immanuel Kant, 1787 [1933], Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N.K. Smith, London, UK: Macmillan, A13/B27.

²⁰⁵ Ibid., A19–20/B34.

²⁰⁶ P.F. Strawson, 1966, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, London, UK: Methuen, p. 41.

²⁰⁷ Immanuel Kant, 1787 [1933], Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N.K. Smith, London, UK: Macmillan, A77/B103, A832/B860.

²⁰⁸ Ibid., A80/B106.

²⁰⁹ Ibid., A832/B860.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 321–322. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” §MS3.3e