"Die Reinheit," and purity

I never noticed that Kant's first and most famous critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, really stresses "purity." Kant in his title (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) and in his terminology uses die Reinheit to specify a type of reason that would grasp the a priori synthetically, that is, via pure intuition, pure apprehension. This reason is reinen Vernunft. One could argue that this would be better translated as "clean reason." Die Reinheit is the weiss, the white, without blemish, just as much as it is the abstract, the absolute, the immediate. In German, one says "reinen" when one is talking about a "clean slate," about a "clear intention." Translating it as "clean" would efface Kant's stress on abstraction, indeed. But it would also bring forth what an absolutely revolutionary task this book undertook, and indeed saw itself as undertaking: it is the destruction of the purity of the mind naively thought as what has access to the absolute; it is the destruction of the innate cleanliness one attributes to the human. Hannah Arendt concretely embodies the unbelievable thrust of such a critique in words when she says that Kant's intentions bring forth a "destruction" of the world as we knew it ("Existenz Philosophy," in The Phenomenology Reader, 349): in other words, the only world we live in after a critique of a reason that is supposed to be clean, will be a destroyed world, a sullied, unclean world. Even in the title of the work, Kant is out to destroy, to render unclean.