Kant and the Continental Tradition

Sensibility, Nature, and Religion

Sorin Baiasu, Alberto Vanzo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351382465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Immanuel Kant's work continues to be a main focus of attention in almost all areas of philosophy. The significance of Kant's work for the so-called continental philosophy cannot be exaggerated, although work in this area is relatively scant. The book includes eight chapters, a substantial introduction and a postscript, all newly written by an international cast of well-known authors. Each chapter focuses on particular aspects of a fundamental problem in Kant's and post-Kantian philosophy, the problem of the relation between the world and transcendence. Chapters fall thematically into three parts: sensibility, nature and religion. Each part starts with a more interpretative chapter focusing on Kant's relevant work, and continues with comparative chapters which stage dialogues between Kant and post-Kantian philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard, Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida. A special feature of this volume is the engagement of each chapter with the work of the late British philosopher Gary Banham. The Postscript offers a subtle and erudite analysis of his intellectual trajectory, philosophy and mode of working. The volume is dedicated to his memory.

Part I
Introduction

1 Kant and the Continental Tradition

Sorin Baiasu and Alberto Vanzo

1. Introduction

The influence of Kant’s philosophy on the so-called Continental tradition has been immense.¹ While Kant’s influence on modern philosophy more generally is extremely significant, it would not be very contentious to say that Continental philosophy cannot be conceived of without Kant. The current volume focuses precisely on several themes in this area, in particular on the importance of Kant for relatively recent Continental philosophy, a topic which remains still underexplored.²

Apart from this introduction and a postscript, the present volume includes eight original essays, which focus on three central themes in Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, namely, sensibility, nature and religion. The collection combines essays on Kant’s philosophy and post-Kantian thinking, with a focus on Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Jean-François Lyotard. The essays discuss thorny exegetical issues in Kant scholarship, such as the character of intuition, the unity of nature and the constitution of symbolic representation in religion, as well as ways in which post-Kantian, Continental thinkers have engaged with Kant’s views on these topics. The collection employs insights from post-Kantian philosophy to shed light on Kant’s views, and it discusses the relevance of Kant’s ideas to current philosophical debates.

What follows in this introductory chapter is a discussion of the contributions and the ways they relate to each other, with particular emphasis on the unity of the volume and the significance of the various arguments advanced in the essays of this volume, including the postscript.

2. The Volume’s Structural Unity

Some of the chapters in the collection (namely, Chapter 2, by Dermot Moran; Chapter 5, by Christian Onof and Chapter 8, by Nicola J. Grayson) focus specifically on Kant’s philosophy and have a primarily interpretative focus. They aim to disentangle complex exegetical knots that emerge in the interpretation of Kant’s own views of sensibility, nature and religion. Apart from the postscript, the remaining chapters (Chapter 3, by Roxana Baiasu; Chapter 4, by Andrea Rehberg; Chapter 6, by Keith Crome; Chapter 7, by Rachel Jones and Chapter 9, by Dennis Schulting) turn to the interactions that arise, in those three thematic areas, between Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. All chapters in the volume engage with, or refer to, Gary Banham’s work, to whose memory this volume is dedicated. Joanna Hodge’s postscript (Chapter 10) provides an account of a journey through the main works and themes of Banham’s philosophy with a specific focus on genealogy, teleology and conceptuality, a journey exploring Banham’s engagement with, among others, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.

A brief overview of the more comparative contributions can be structured around the three main parts of the volume, Parts II, III and IV. In Part II, Roxana Baiasu focuses on the significance of Kant’s schematism for the way Heidegger reconceives of metaphysics (in particular, space and time, as the fundamental structures of sensibility) as part of a more basic and adequate ontological view of our being. Rehberg’s chapter examines the role Kant’s work plays in what she regards as the long and slow process of rediscovery of the significance of sensibility and affective life for the judging subject, with particular emphasis on an examination of the contributions of Arendt and Lyotard.

In Part III, Crome brings to the fore deep tensions in Kant’s views on nature and sensibility by interpreting them in the light of Lyotard’s notion of différend, not so much by a reconsideration of Lyotard’s reading of the Critique of Judgement but by focusing on Lyotard’s appeal to the Critique of Pure Reason. Jones discusses whether Kant’s views on sensibility and nature can be fruitfully brought to bear on recent discussions within post-Kantian philosophy, specifically on feminist thinking as developed by Irigaray. In Part IV, Schulting evaluates Derrida’s critique of Kant’s polemic against religious or quasi-religious talk in philosophy both by responding to Derrida’s objection that Kant’s polemic is not neutral and by presenting Kant’s own reasons for this objection to religious talk in philosophy.

The unity within the diversity of the contributions is not only thematic but also structural. The thematic unity will be discussed in more detail in the next section. In this section, the focus will be on structural unity. Each of the three main parts of the volume starts with an interpretative chapter, which sets the conceptual framework of the discussion, and each part continues and concludes with more evaluative and critical essays, which examine the Kantian legacy and the way it has been appropriated and transformed by recent (mostly twentieth-century) Continental thinkers.

Part II, for instance, begins with Moran’s comprehensive investigation of Kant’s crucial notion of intuition. It starts with a discussion of the sources of Kant’s conception of intuition and the way Kant’s thinking breaks away from the philosophical contexts at the time; it continues with an overview and critical reflection on Kant’s discussion of intuition from the Inaugural Dissertation to the Critical period and even some aspects in the Opus Postumum; finally, it focuses on specific vexing issues, such as the significance of the characteristics of singularity and immediacy for Kant’s conception of intuition or the distinctions between form and content of intuition, pure and empirical intuitions or forms of intuition and formal intuitions. While these discussions are significant by themselves, they also provide the background and starting points for the following comparative chapters in this part.³

For instance, in the discussion of Kant’s sources for the notion of intuition, Moran examines the relation between Kant’s and Leibniz’s views of intuition and the particular way this is understood by Eberhard.⁴ Thus, one interesting aspect is that Eberhard argues that Kant has not gone beyond Leibniz’s distinction between intuitive and symbolic knowledge. Moran notes that Kant’s notion of intuition is in the process of being rethought by Kant and, in the Critique of Judgement, Kant places the symbolic under the intuitive mode of representation, to be distinguished from the schematic mode of representation. Schemata are introduced by Moran as direct presentations of concepts, but he notes a further discussion of schemata goes beyond the scope of his text. Yet this is precisely the focus of the third essay in the volume, namely Roxana Baiasu’s ‘Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant’s Transcendental Schematism’. Roxana Baiasu’s contention is that Heidegger’s objections to Kant’s conception of schematism make evident a limited conception of space in Kant, a conception which undermines Kant’s temporal schematism; moreover, by offering a new understanding of space and time, as structures of sensibility, Heidegger’s discussion of the schematism is a confirmation of his project of fundamental ontology.

Moran’s discussion of the tension concerning the nature of intuition in the Dissertation and the Critique of Pure Reason, as well as Kant’s significant rethinking of the concept of intuition in the Critique of Judgement, direct us to the fourth chapter of this volume, Andrea Rehberg’s ‘On Affective Universality: Kant, Arendt and Lyotard on Sensus Communis’. Rehberg notes that Kant is standardly assumed to be completely in agreement with the Western philosophical tradition’s rejection of the entire nexus comprising the body, the senses, emotions and desires, a tradition emerging from its influential Platonic-Christian conceptual and ideatic background. She argues, however, that it is precisely in Kant’s Third Critique, the Critique of Judgement, that it becomes evident that Kant foreshadows, if not even prepares, a move towards the reconsideration of affective life as playing a major role in our experience.

The essay by Onof begins the third part of the volume, this time dedicated to nature. According to Onof, in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason, at stake is the unity of nature. Here the ideas of reason are not constitutive of experience but play merely a regulative role. Yet, in the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique, dynamic principles play also a regulative role, in this context, however, regulative for the unity of experience. Moreover, in the Critique of Judgement, the term ‘regulative’ is presented through the concept of purposiveness, which plays a significant role in the reflective use of the faculty of judgement.

From this starting point, several questions are then discussed in the chapter, including the relation between the notions of ‘regulative’, particularly as applied to the dynamic principles of the understanding in the Analytic and to the regulative principles of reason in the Dialectic, as well as the status of these principles of reason, in particular whether we should regard them as merely heuristic or as having some kind of ‘realist’ status. As Onof notes in his chapter, the theme which connects these questions is that of unity, and his contribution is to the central question that exercised scholars investigating the regulative use of the ideas of pure reason and the status of the systematic unity of nature.

Whether we regard the systematic unity of nature as a merely heuristic principle or as a principle which is active within nature, interpretative problems arise for Kant, since each alternative is in tension with some of Kant’s claims in the Critique of Pure Reason. The solution Onof, following Banham, defends in his chapter acknowledges that the systematic unity of nature is more than a merely heuristic principle, while at the same time rejecting its status as a principle of the possibility of experience. Instead, it is considered a transcendental principle. The question, then, concerns the relation between this principle of the systematic unity of nature and the principle of purposiveness for reflective judgement, which Kant introduces in the Critique of Judgement.

On some accounts, Kant’s principle of purposiveness provides a distinct answer to the problem that the systematic unity of nature tried to solve in the Critique of Pure Reason. This answer, commentators claim, is not only distinct from, but it is in fact in tension with, the solution in the first Critique. By contrast, Onof argues that the principles have complementary functions. The principle of the systematic unity of nature is a transcendental principle but not a constitutive one: it is objectively valid (in the sense that it is about the world of appearances) but hypothetical. By contrast, the principle of the purposive organisation of nature is subjective.

As noted by Onof, Kant introduces the notion of a regulative principle of reason in his resolution of the Antinomies in the Critique of Pure Reason. In his chapter, Crome identifies precisely the Antinomies as the source of Lyotard’s idea of a différend, as a conflict that cannot be resolved by reference to a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments. Crome formulates his project against standard readings of Lyotard as concerned mainly with ethico-political conflicts and as developed primarily in relation to Kant’s Critique of Judgement. While the significance of Kant’s Third Critique for Lyotard cannot be exaggerated, Crome’s reading regards Lyotard’s The Différend from the perspective of Kant’s First Critique as a tribunal in which philosophical reason investigates its limits and legitimacy. In his project, however, Crome identifies a différend between Kant and Lyotard concerning the concept of nature. From the perspective of Lyotard’s thought, Kant’s account of subjectivity entails a blindness to nature, which favours the technological domination of the natural world. Lyotard’s appeal to Kant’s Third Critique is an attempt to resist precisely this limiting perspective on nature.

As we have seen, Onof’s focus is on the status of the principle of the systematic unity of nature, a principle which accounts for nature mechanically. To investigate the nature of this principle, he clarifies its regulative character by a discussion of the dynamic principles of the understanding and the principle of purposiveness (which accounts for nature teleologically), both of which are also regulative. In her essay, Jones finds in Kant’s Third Critique a number of implicit instances of chemism, a third principle in addition to those of mechanism and teleology. Jones identifies in these implicit instances of chemism the starting point of a reconsideration of the relation between sexes. While Kant’s account is still seen as dependent on a gendered hylomorphism and a reproductive telos, she thinks that Irigaray’s conception of the elemental can make chemism more amenable not only to sexual difference but also to a fluidity of differences, including those between human and non-human life or between non-human life and inorganic matter.

Grayson’s chapter marks the beginning of the fourth part of this volume and the transition to the theme of religion. Her focus is on Kant’s notion of hypotyposis, as the process through which concepts are inspected, illustrated and granted reality. Kant’s notion of hypotyposis is presented in the Third Critique (§59), and discussions in the literature are based on this text, as well as on the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding in the First Critique; however, this leads to a mistaken understanding of hypotypsis as the only means of granting reality to an idea. Grayson’s intention is to correct this trend by considering as an important part of the discussion Kant’s analysis of the realisation of both the theoretical ideas, in the Architectonic of Pure Reason of the First Critique, and practical ideas, in the Typic of the Pure Practical Power of Judgement in the Second Critique. In this way, the distinction between these two types of hypotyposis is made clear.

Grayson also notes Kant’s discussion of a schematism of analogy in Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason. Through this schematism of analogy, practical ideas are realised indirectly (in the way in which symbolisation grants reality to ideas). At the same time, as a form of schematism, there is also a sense of direct exhibition of ideas in the schematism of analogy. The example offered is Christ, who indirectly embodies human aspects (such as the capacity to suffer and be tempted) but also realises directly and schematically the idea of God. The schematism of analogy appears in this way as a bridge between the two types of hypotyposis, the schematic and symbolic.

Grayson’s chapter focuses on the process of exhibition, of making a concept sensible. She notes that Kant’s distinction between schematic and symbolic exhibition or hypotyposis in the Critique of Judgement gives the wrong impression that ideas of reason can only be exhibited symbolically. Whereas schematic exhibition gives intuition a priori to a concept of the understanding, symbolic exhibition is supposed to supply an intuition to a concept which only reason can think (an idea of reason), a process which is treated as merely analogous to that of schematism.⁵ As we have seen, questions remain concerning Kant’s discussion, in the Critique of Practical Reason, of a process similar to schematism for ideas of reason,⁶ as well as his mention, in Religion, of a schematism of analogy.⁷

This raises a more general question concerning the presentation of the ideas of reason, in particular of religious ideas, as well as the relation between philosophy and religion. This is the topic of Schulting’s chapter. As Schulting notes, this metaphilosophical question has been of central concern to Kant, beginning with his pre-Critical work, including, among others, Religion (which resulted in an imperial rescript from October 1794, which prevented him from publishing on religious affairs) and culminating with the 1796 essay ‘Of a Recently Adopted Exalted Tone in Philosophy’, which is the focus of Schulting’s chapter.

Schulting discusses not only this Kantian essay but also an oblique commentary Jacques Derrida wrote in 1983: ‘On a Recently Adopted Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’. According to Derrida, no absolute distinction is possible between the rationality of philosophy and the ‘irrationality’ of religion. Hence, to privilege, wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Sensibility
• Part III Nature
• Part IV Religion
• Part V Postscript
• Contributors
• Index