Kant and the Subject of Critique

Avery Goldman

Description

Brings philosophical and critical unity to the self

Immanuel Kant is strict about the limits of self-knowledge: our inner sense gives us only appearances, never the reality, of ourselves. Kant may seem to begin his inquiries with an uncritical conception of cognitive limits, but in Kant and the Subject of Critique, Avery Goldman argues that, even for Kant, a reflective act must take place before any judgment occurs. Building on Kant's metaphysics, which uses the soul, the world, and God as regulative principles, Goldman demonstrates how Kant can open doors to reflection, analysis, language, sensibility, and understanding. By establishing a regulative self, Goldman offers a way to bring unity to the subject through Kant's seemingly circular reasoning, allowing for critique and, ultimately, knowledge.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Circularity of Critique
1. The Ideas of Reason
2. The Boundary of Phenomena and Noumena
3. The Designation of the Region of Experience in the Critique of Pure Reason
4. Transcendental Reflection: Interpreting the Amphiboly via Section 76 of the Critique of Judgment
5. The Paralogisms of Pure Reason: In Search of a Regulative Principle for Transcendental Reflection
6. Transcendental Method: The Orientation of Critique
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Phenomenology
• Continental

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 02 mars 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253005403
• Langue: English

Extrait

STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT
John Sallis, editor
Consulting Editors
Robert Bernasconi
Rudolph Bernet
John D. Caputo
David Carr
Edward S. Casey
Hubert Dreyfus
Don Ihde
David Farrell Krell
Lenore Langsdorf
Alphonso Lingis
William L. McBride
J. N. Mohanty
Mary Rawlinson
Tom Rockmore
Calvin O. Schrag
Reiner Schürmann
Charles E. Scott
Thomas Sheehan
Robert Sokolowski
Bruce W. Wilshire
David Wood
KANT
AND THE
SUBJECT OF
CRITIQUE
ON THE REGULATIVE ROLE OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IDEA
AVERY GOLDMAN
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
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© 2012 by Avery Goldman
All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldman, Avery, [date]
Kant and the subject of critique : on the regulative role of the psychological idea / Avery Goldman.
    p. cm.—(Studies in Continental thought)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35711-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—
ISBN 978-0-253-22366-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-253-00540-3 (electronic book) 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. 2. Subject (Philosophy) I. Title.
B2779.G65    2012
193—dc23
2011034869
1   2   3   4   5   17   16   15   14   13   12
For Theo, Noa, and Pippa
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Circularity of Critique
ONE The Ideas of Reason
TWO The Boundary of Phenomena and Noumena
THREE The Designation of the Region of Experience in the Critique of Pure Reason
FOUR Transcendental Reflection: Interpreting the Amphiboly via §76 of the Critique of Judgment
FIVE The Paralogisms of Pure Reason: In Search of a Regulative Principle for Transcendental Reflection
SIX Transcendental Method: The Orientation of Critique
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book developed over many years out of the research I undertook for my doctoral dissertation in the Philosophy Department at The Pennsylvania State University. I have benefited greatly from the involvement of both John Sallis, who directed my dissertation, and Pierre Kerszberg, with whom this research began. They offered not only important direction for my research, but also examples of the kind of scholarship that I have tried to undertake. I am indebted to them both. Special thanks go to David Farrell Krell and Rick Lee, my colleagues in DePaul University's Philosophy Department, both of whom read through drafts of the manuscript as it neared completion, and offered extremely helpful comments. Michael Baur, Andrew Cutrofello, and John Russon have all offered important assistance for my research. I have also benefited greatly from the many undergraduate and graduate students at DePaul University who have engaged with these issues in my seminars. The anonymous reviewers for Indiana University Press offered very helpful recommendations.
I would like to thank the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the University Research Council at DePaul University for supporting my research through grants and paid leaves. The Philosophy Department at DePaul has been an extremely hospitable environment for bringing this research to fruition. I am also grateful for the support that I received in the Philosophy Departments at Fordham University and The Pennsylvania State University. Dee Mortensen, Angela Burton, and Marvin Keenan at Indiana University Press patiently moved this project along, and Merryl Sloane offered her fine editorial eye. All are to be thanked.
Finally, I am grateful to the editors of the following journals and collections who have given me permission to include material from my previously published articles: “Kant, Heidegger, and the Circularity of Transcendental Inquiry.” Epoché 15.1 (2010): 107-20; “What Is Orientation in Critique?” In Recht und Frieden in der Philosophie Kants: Akten des X. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses , ed. V Rohden, R. Terra, G. de Almeida, and M. Ruffing, vol. 2, 245-54. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008; “Critique and the Mind: Towards a Defense of Kant's Transcendental Method.” Kant-Studien 98.4 (2007): 403-17; “The Metaphysics of Kantian Epistemology.” In Philosophy at the Boundary of Reason: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association , ed. Michael Baur, 239-52. New York: American Catholic Philosophical Association, 2003; and “Transcendental Reflection and the Boundary of Possible Experience.” In Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses , ed. V Gerhardt, R. Horstmann, and R. Schumacher, vol. 2, 289-97. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001.
Introduction:
The Circularity of Critique
This book opens with a dilemma: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) begins by rejecting the possibility of knowledge of things in themselves (noumena), restricting itself to investigating appearances (phenomena). In this way Kant is able to uncover the conditions of the possibility of experience, deducing the faculties of cognition from this limited field of appearances. But in so distinguishing the faculties of sensibility and understanding, Kant would appear to have transcended the very limits that he has set for himself, making some sort of metaphysical claim about our cognitive faculties. And so, while Kant repeatedly claims that we “know even ourselves only through inner sense, thus as appearance” (A278/B334), 1 as phenomena and not noumena, the account that he offers of the cognitive faculties would seem to be asserting something about what the self is like apart from its appearance to itself. The question with which this book begins is thus: What can be said on behalf of these faculties, namely, sensibility, with its a priori forms of space and time; the understanding, with its twelve a priori concepts; and the transcendental unity of apperception that they imply? Such a question requires that we investigate the underlying methodology of Kantian critique. Kant is clearly arguing for more than merely inductive certainty when he defines the a priori conditions of experience, but what claim is being made on behalf of these faculties that appear to fit comfortably within the realms of neither appearances nor things in themselves? 2 And further, what does Kant claim on behalf of such human experience, the limited, spatiotemporal field of appearances within which the analysis of the cognitive faculties takes place?
Kant admits the complexity of the relation that binds experience and the a priori rules that are deduced from it when, in the Transcendental Doctrine of Method, he describes “the special property [ die besondere Eigenschaft ]” of his method of proof (A737/B765). Kant explains that the principles (Grundsätze) , the rules governing empirical objects that follow from the a priori concepts of the understanding, both depend upon experience in order to be proven and are themselves shown to be necessary for the designation of the realm of experience, inasmuch as already prior to their analysis these principles distinguish its confines. In the case of the modal principle of possibility (Möglichkeit) such circularity is especially clear: possibility is distinguished by Kant as an a priori condition of experience; and yet experience is itself defined by this conception of possibility, which limits experience to what can be sensibly given to a perceiving consciousness. In short, the Kantian conception of experience both permits the analysis of such a priori rules and follows from them.
But how can we understand such circularity? It would appear difficult to interpret Kant as naïve about his own presuppositions when he so clearly admits the dependence of his analysis of the cognitive faculties on the conception of experience from which they are deduced. 3 Martin Heidegger has emphasized such circularity in his interpretation of Kantian critique, arguing that it helps to clarify the limits of the analysis. 4 The circularity of critique points Heidegger to all that lies between the subject and the thing, the complexity of an entanglement that surpasses the attempt to designate its ground. 5 What this means for Heidegger is that we must now set aside such cognitive analysis, emphasizing instead that which precedes it. 6 But must we? Clearly an investigation of the circularity of transcendental inquiry will change the way that we view the a priori claims about the cognitive faculties that this method affords. But it is not so obvious that uncovering such circularity must lead us to set aside the faculties altogether, as it does for Heidegger, as if the circularity of critique marked a deficiency in the inquiry and so pointed beyond, which is to say away from, the analysis of the cognitive faculties. The present goal is to follow Heidegger in emphasizing such circularity, but rather than being led beyond the critical system I will instead investigate whether such an interpretation of Kantian circularity might not, in fact, be the key to understanding Kant's elusive transcendental method. The question then is: What can be claimed on behalf of the cognitive faculties once the circularity of their elucidation has been distinguished?
Kant offers further discussion of such circular