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The critical branch
The critical stance does not ask first what reality is; it asks what a knower would have to be able to do to answer that question, and lets the answer set the limits of what may be claimed. Metaphysics is not abandoned but reformed — turned from the description of a reality beyond experience toward the examination of the conditions under which experience, and so any knowledge at all, is possible. The move is owed almost entirely to one thinker, and the generation after him spent its energy trying to undo the limit he imposed.
Kant’s turn
Kant was provoked by a scandal: metaphysics, alone among the sciences, made no progress, its systems endlessly succeeding and contradicting one another. He located the cause in an overreach. When pure reason leaves all possible experience behind and pronounces on the soul, the world as a completed whole, or God, it falls into antinomies — pairs of equally cogent proofs of contradictory conclusions. That reason can prove both sides is the sign that it has exceeded its competence.
His response, the Copernican revolution, reverses the assumed relation of mind and object. Rather than knowledge conforming to objects as they are in themselves, objects as we can know them conform to the forms the mind supplies — the pure intuitions of space and time, and the categories of the understanding, causation among them. These are not read off the world; they are the conditions under which anything can be an object of experience for us at all. Metaphysics survives, transformed: not knowledge of a supersensible reality but the systematic account of these a priori conditions. It becomes transcendental — concerned with the structure of possible experience — rather than transcendent. The cost is a permanent boundary: the thing as it is in itself, apart from the conditions of our knowing, falls outside what can be known. After Kant no metaphysics in this branch can take its own access to reality for granted; the standpoint of the knower becomes part of the subject matter.
Idealism’s attempt to overcome the limit
The generation that followed found the boundary unstable. An unknowable thing-in-itself that nonetheless affects us seemed to use, beyond the limit, the very category — causation — that Kant had confined to within it. German idealism took this as a reason to remove the limit rather than respect it. Fichte dropped the thing-in-itself and derived the structure of experience from the activity of the I positing itself and its other. Schelling sought the point of indifference at which nature and mind are one and the same productivity seen from two sides. Hegel made the most systematic attempt: there is no fixed boundary between thought and being to begin with, and what looks like a limit is a stage that reason passes through and supersedes. Metaphysics returns as the self-development of the categories themselves, reality and the thinking of it advancing together through their own contradictions.
Where the critical stance stops
The critical stance is built around a boundary, and the boundary is also its standing difficulty — the one its successors seized on. To mark off a realm of things as they are in themselves, knowable in no respect, is already to say something about it: that it exists, that it grounds appearances, that it is not itself spatial or temporal. The limit seems to require, in order to be drawn, a glimpse across the line it forbids. Kant’s heirs read this as an instability with two exits, and the branch never reconciled them: either the unknowable in-itself is retained and the charge of incoherence with it, or it is dissolved — at which point the critical restraint gives way and the constructive ambition returns in idealist form, claiming exactly the access to reality the critique was meant to deny. The stance that set out to discipline metaphysics by the limits of the knower could not, from within, hold the limit it discovered.