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HISTORIANS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY are beginning to find in Kant's Transcendental Doctrine of Method, the second half of the Critique of Pure Reason, a proposal that bears qualities generally attributed to "modernity." Furthermore, the chapter there on an Architectonic of Pure Reason is recognized as suggesting an important task for modern philosophy.1 A few years ago this would have been unthinkable among Kant scholars who generally held to a very negative view of these parts of the Critique, most especially "Kant's architectonic."2 But now Kant scholars are giving more attention to what the essential ends of human reason might be, recognizing that whatever Kant meant by an "architectonic"-something which is still not well understood-his conception of it does seem to be connected in important ways to the method whereby we can at least think about what those ends are.3 Whether we also have a responsibility as philosophers to do that kind of thinking, and whether Kant prepares us in any non-trivial way to do so are still very controversial issues among Kantians.4 However, the approach to these issues has become more historically sophisticated over the past twenty years, showing more than just a "side of Kant" for the ordinary reader of philosophy.
Historians may become more interested in the historical context of Kant's conception of architectonic if they were to realize that "architectonic" is not something peculiarly Kantian.5 It was a technical term in philosophy with an interesting history, one with philological anomalies, historical vicissitudes, and philosophical pretensions. Architectonic and its correlates can be found in metaphysics, jurisprudence, political philosophy, ethics, belles lettres, theories of living organisms, and-one suspects-life itself when "rightly ordered."6 Kant developed a conception of architectonic with an awareness of a good deal of that history. He writes a chapter on it in the Critique to explain how what he means by "architectonic" is related to his view on what the purpose of philosophy ought to be, a cosmopolitan notion aiming at a teleology of human reason. Kant was very serious in thinking through what he meant by architectonic as an "art of systems" that could also be a "teaching [Lehre] of the scientific."7
The paper will begin by showing how Kant's Architectonic fits into his proposal for a transcendental doctrine of...