If one could get the idea of a transcendental logic from the section titled, “The Idea of a Transcendental Logic” then one would not need to read the whole of the Critique of Pure Reason. Transcendental logic, like general logic, is true for everyone at all times and places. To have the idea, to have grasped it, is to understand the “origin of our cognitions of objects insofar as that cannot be ascribed to the objects” (A 55-56/B 80). That is, one would have self-knowledge and knowledge of what it means to be human — that which is the hardest to come by.
The paradoxical truth at the very start of this part of the Critique of Pure Reason is that we are prevented from grasping this logic by the very thing that attracts us to it. Logic, at its heart, is seductive. It promises more than it delivers.
Like all tales of seduction, the seduction of logic begins with the truth. Without some basis in reality there would be no seduction. Beauty really is beautiful and seems to betoken happiness. Logic provides solid criteria for truth. It is, to use Kant’s vocabulary, a canon for judging that gives negative criteria for truth. Break a rule of logic and you can never be logically certain whether you have reached the truth. Follow them and you are assured of the possibility of truth. Kant goes on:
Nevertheless there is something so seductive int he possession of an apparent art for given all our cognitions the form of understanding, even though with regard to their content one may yet be very empty and poor, that the general logic, which merely a canon judging, has been used as if it were an organon for the actual production of at least the semblance of objective assertions and thus in act it has thereby already been misused. Now general logic, as a putative organon, is called dialectic. (A 60-61/B 85)
The whole story of the Second Part of the Doctrine of Elements, of the Transcendental Analytic is contained in this quotation. Logic seduces us to use a canon as an organon, to use a measuring instrument instead of an organic process, and this leads us to a dialectic or a conflict that requires a cathartic or a critique of the dialectical illusion. We are led in our seeking the truth to a logic of illusion.
Kant expands upon the nature of the seductiveness of “pure knowledge.” It tempts us to think it can be used beyond the boundaries of experience.
Transcendental Doctrine of Elements; Second Part; The Transcendental Logic
Introduction: The Idea a Transcendental Logic
