Studies in Continental Thought

On the Regulative Role of the Psychological Idea

Avery Goldman

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780253005403
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

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.

NOTES

Introduction

1. Citations from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (first Critique) follow the standard A and B pagination of the first and second editions, respectively, and are placed within the text. References to Kant's other books provide the page number of the translation listed in the bibliography (changes to translations are noted), as well as a bracketed reference to the volume and page number of the Akademie-Ausgabe (AA). References to translated works of other authors will give the page number of the translation followed by a bracketed reference to the original edition. If no published translation is cited, the translation is my own.

2. Kant interpreters in the Anglo-American tradition have addressed the self, the subject, or, more typically, the mind of Kantian critique. I will address a number of these interpreters in chapters 1 and 3. Patricia Kitcher and Wayne Waxman exemplify the opposing claims. Kitcher minimizes the claims of the Kantian project, arguing that all Kant offers is an analysis of the phenomenal self (Kant's Transcendental Psychology, 22), while Waxman claims that in terms of the subject of critique, Kant has contradicted his professed limits on cognition by introducing a “thing in itself at the center” of his account of cognition (Kant's Model of the Mind, 272).

3. Gary Hatfield criticizes Kant for the dependence of his analysis on a conception of experience, arguing that he fails to address his presuppositions: “In taking these starting points as a given, Kant was remarkably oblivious to the charge of begging the question” (The Natural and the Normative, 80).

4. Others, including Rüdiger Bubner, Pierre Kerszberg, Pauline Kleingeld, Claude Piché, and Dieter Sturma, have interpreted Kantian critique in terms of such self-referentiality or circularity. I will address these interpreters in chapter 3.

5. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 244 [189].

6. Later in this introduction, I will return to a discussion of Heidegger's analysis of the Kantian transcendental imagination as just such a prior moment.

7. Translation altered.

8. The regulative roles played by the cosmological and the theological ideas (the world and God, respectively) will be investigated in chapter 2. The examination of the regulative role of the psychological idea is the goal of this entire book and will be most directly addressed in chapter 6.

9. Doing so will agree with Karl Ameriks that Kant's lectures on metaphysics demonstrate a continued interest on his part in these arguments, even after he rejected the possibility of knowledge of their objects (Ameriks, “Kant's Lectures on Metaphysics,” 25); however, it will offer a way to conceive of such a metaphysical influence on Kant's account of finite cognition without “supplementing Kant's doctrines” by accepting a “modest mentalism” in his name, as Ameriks does (Kant's Theory of Mind, 8).

10. Both Pauline Kleingeld and Heinz Heimsoeth investigate the regulative role of the psychological idea, but while Kleingeld writes that it distinguishes “reason's interest in its own unity” (Kleingeld, “Kant on the Unity of Theoretical and Practical Reason,” 318), both maintain that what it offers is merely an account of the empirical subject rather than the transcendental subject that is distinguished in Kant's first Critique (Heimsoeth, Transzendentale Dialektik, Dritter Teil, 617).

11. Kant goes so far as to argue that our assuming knowledge of the “highest order being” does not grant us the “unity of nature” but “does away with it” (A693/B721, translation altered). If we take the idea of God as a regulative goal for our analysis of nature, then we can progressively pursue such unity in our investigation of nature; but if we instead assume knowledge of such an idea, then we will have disconnected it from the appearances of nature, deeming any apparent unity as merely a “contingent [zufällig]” occurrence.

12. See Hamann, “Metacritique of the Purism of Reason.”

13. See A672/B700 and A682-83/B710-11.

14. Title translation altered; I have decided to use the traditional English title of this book, Critique of Judgment (third Critique), rather than the more literal Critique of the Power of Judgment that is used in the Cambridge translation. The importance of §76 is emphasized by both Schelling (Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy, 127 [vol. 2, 175]) and Heidegger (“Kant's Thesis about Being,” 355 [469]).

15. See the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, where purposiveness is introduced in section v in discussing the principle of all reflective judgment, or what Kant describes as “a peculiar [eigentümlicher] concept of the reflective power of judgment” (Kant, Critique of Judgment, First Introduction, v, 19 [AA 20, 216], translation altered); see also sections vi and x in the First Introduction, and sections v-viii in the Second Introduction (which was the introduction that was originally published).

16. Kant terms this “the hypothetical use of reason [der hypothetische Gebrauche der Vernunft]” (A647/B675).

17. For a naturalizing reading of Kant, see Walsh, “Philosophy and Psychology in Kant's Critique,” 196; and for an attempt to transform Kant into a realist, see Ameriks, Kant's Theory of Mind, 169-70. For discussion of these and other related interpreters, see chapter 3.

18. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 241-42 [187-88].

19. Ibid., 242 [188].

20. A15/B29; see Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 112 [160]; and Sallis, Spacings—of Reason and Imagination, 73-81. For a criticism of Heidegger's association of the transcendental imagination with Kant's source of the dual stems of cognition, that “which may perhaps arise from a common but to us unknown root,” see Henrich, The Unity of Reason, 19-21. Henrich raises the possibility that such a root is described by Kant as “unknown” not because we have until now failed to conceive of it but because it is by definition beyond our faculties and so relates to the noumenal realm. I will return to this question in chapter 4.

21. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, §31, 112 [160].

22. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 242 [188].

23. Heidegger, “Kant's Thesis about Being,” 337-63 [445-80].

24. Ibid., 361 [478].

25. For Hegel's criticism of Kant's first Critique, see Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 90 [vol. 4, 341]. I will address his criticism of Kant in chapter 4.

26. Kant, “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” 7-18 [AA 8, 131-47].

27. The pantheism controversy (Pantheismusstreit) pitted Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi against Moses Mendelssohn, with the former arguing that Mendelssohn's close friend Lessing was, at the end of his life, a Spinozist. Jacobi's charge was that Lessing had in this way embraced a pantheism that was essentially a fatalistic atheism. Mendelssohn attempted to defend Lessing against this charge by arguing for the role of common sense in limiting rational speculation, but in so doing he risked embracing the very anti-rationalism that Jacobi promoted and that he wished to reject. In Kant's entrance into this controversy, he briefly defended Mendelssohn's conception of common sense before offering his own account of the role of reason in thinking, one that neither denigrated such a faculty nor praised it in a manner that excluded the possibility of human freedom. See chapter 6 for further discussion of this episode.

28. Andrew Brook, for instance, claims that transcendental apperception offers an awareness of the noumenal self (Kant and the Mind, 250-52).

ONE • The Ideas of Reason

1. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 231 [AA 7, 119], translation altered. Kant's Anthropology was published in 1798, although Kant first lectured on this topic in 1772.

2. Ibid.

3. See A848–49/B876–77, where Kant connects empirical psychology to anthropology.

4. In the Anthropology, Kant explains that he will set aside “physiological” anthropology, the study of “what nature makes of the human being,” in favor of a “pragmatic” anthropology, the study of what a human being “makes of himself, or can and should make of himself” (Kant, Anthropology, 231 [AA 7, 119]). (Following the general rule of the Cambridge edition, I have used bold type in the English translation to represent Kant's Fettdruck, rather than the italics which are used in a few of the works, including the Anthropology and the Prolegomena.) In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant disparages such empirical psychology, which he refers to as a “physiology of the human understanding” in reference to Locke (Aix), and its rationalist counterpart, the “physiology of inner sense” (B405/A347), which he opposes in the Paralogisms. I will return to the question of Kant's conception of physiology at the end of this chapter, and then again in chapter 6.

5. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations…. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us, they are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos'd. (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 165)

6. Kant describes his undertaking as an “experiment [Versuch]” in the introduction to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Bxvii).

7. For Hume's description of the self as a “bundle,” see A Treatise of Human Nature, 165. I will return to the skepticism introduced in the first edition's Third Paralogism in chapter 3.

8. Translation altered.

9. Kant writes: “wir uns gegen uns selbst als leidend verhalten müßten” (B153). While leidend is more typically translated as “suffering,” and so the relation to ourselves would be what we suffer or what is borne by us, Kant does not seem to be implying any such hardship. Heiner Klemme explains that what is at issue is passivity; the paradox concerns how we can conceive of ourselves as “at the same time active and passive subjects [zugleich aktiven und passiven Subjekts]” (Kants Philosophie des Subjekts, 222).

10. Kant explains that the “transcendental unity of apperception” that brings unity to the manifold does so by means of offering an a priori identity (A108/B134) that is itself but an analytic, and not a synthetic, unity (B134). Dieter Henrich emphasizes these two passages in “Die Identität des Subjekts in der transzendentalen Deduktion,” 52. On the conception of identity that is here manifested, and particularly on its connection to the rules of the understanding, see Henrich, “Identity and Objectivity: An Inquiry into Kant's Transcendental Deduction,” in his The Unity of Reason, 199-204 (Identität und Objektivität, 101-107).

11. See also Kant's First Analogy of Experience (B224-32/A182-89), where he argues that substance as persisting is required of all temporal succession.

12. This might be one of the reasons why in the second edition Kant adds a discussion of the priority of space over time to the end of the Transcendental Aesthetic. Kant describes “the representations of outer sense” as “the proper material [den eigentlich Stoff] with which we occupy our mind” (B67). I will return to this emphasis on spatiality.

13. In the Anthropology, Kant describes a “paradox” as a “semblance [Anschein] of egoism,” born of an interest in contradicting what is commonly held (Kant, Anthropology, 241 [AA 7, 129]). Kant explains that if this paradox is pursued for reasons other than merely wanting to appear exceptional, then it “arouses [erweckt] our mind to pay attention and investigate the matter—and this often leads to discoveries” (ibid.).

14. In the second edition's Transcendental Dialectic, Kant writes: “We cannot think any object [Gegenstand] except through categories; we cannot cognize any object that is thought except through intuitions that correspond to these concepts” (B165; see also B146-47, A50/B74); and in the famous passage in the introduction to the Transcendental Logic, Kant writes: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• 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