Phenomenology in Kant’s Idealism

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 22, Number I, 2000

Review Essay:

Phenomenology in Kant's Idealism: Pierre Kerszberg's Critique and Totality

Miguel Vatter

1. On Reading Kant Phenomenologically

Pierre Kerszberg's Critique and Totality is one of the boldest and most intriguing phenomenological readings of the Kantian critical project to date. The gambit of the book is that phenomenology can unlock the authentic sense of Kantian critique only on the condition that it, in turn, does not lose sight of the critical standpoint. The book is an invitation to consider phenomenology and (transcendental) idealism as compatible and mutually enabling doctrines, while it also lays bare, indirectly, the tensions between them. Since the current alternatives to analytical philosophy of language draw mostly from one or both of these doctrines, this book offers an important contribution to the debate on the origins and trajectories of contemporary continental philosophy out of the Kantian revolution.

Infinitely contestable, the meaning of Kant's transcendental idealism nonetheless finds a point de capiton in the idea that knowledge of objects is possible only insofar as these objects appear, and that appearances find their condition of possibility in the pure intuitions of space and time as subjective forms of sensibility. Kant often expresses the transcendental ideality of space and time in terms of the limitation of human cognition to appearances and not to things in themselves. But the 'loss' of the thing-in-itself as object of possible cognition is quickly made up because it enables the famous 'Copernican revolution' in thinking, the thought-experiment whose primary hypothesis is that the conditions of possible objects are the conditions of possible knowledge of objects rather than the other way around. Since the experiment calls

303

GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL

for proof that space and time are subjective conditions of appearances only and not conditions of things in themselves, the case can be made that the whole critical enterprise turns on whether there is evidence and argument enough for such a distinction. Kerszberg argues that Kant's thought-experiment is best understood through a phenomenological reading, since at bottom the fundamental question for the critical project concerns the essence of the appearance.! What makes an appearance appear? What is the ultimate horizon of appearing? These questions are none other than variations of the basic preoccupation of phenomenology.

Kerszberg's phenomenological approach to Kant works through two further, decisive claims. First, the thing-in-itself or noumenon is not an entity abstractly separate from the appearance, but should rather be considered "as the other of appearance, as if it were the latter's back side seen in a mirror" (p. 19) in the sense that it constitutes the horizon or essence of the sensible appearance (in a way that I discuss shortly). This internal relation between phenomenon and noumenon follows from a consideration of the "critique of pure reason" as a thought-experiment whose direct and indirect proofs (i.e., its analytic and dialectic unfolding, respectively) require that "the very same objects ought to be seen from a twin perspective, first as objects of experience and then as objects of pure thought" (p. 58). The second claim is that the object of pure thought, the essence of appearance, can itself be made to appear. Kerszberg identifies this "appearing of appearance" with Kant's concept of "transcendental appearance" (Schein), and studies it in relation to the cosmological antinomies. These antinomies are said to play a decisive role in the critical thought-experiment because, assuming that the Transcendental Analytic illustrates the subjective construction of objective reality (objects of appearance), it is still necessary to test the cognitive claims of our mental constructions by having "the world itself teach us how to make sure that it is what it is."2 Kant's antinomies concerning the world would be the place where the horizon of sensible appearance itself is made to appear as transcendental, hence as the place where the world checks, in all senses of the word, the validity of our subjective constructions.

In the vocabulary of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, the essence or horizon of appearances also happens to be termed the "world." Hence the connection between transcendental idealism and phenomenology occurs within the confines of Kant's dialectical discourse on cosmology. Husserl at one point remarks that the "enigma of enigmas" consists in "the obviousness that there is, constantly and prescientifically, a 'world' for us, considered as the register for an infinity of self-evidences which are indispensable to all objective sciences."3

304

VAITERlKERSZBERG'S CRITIQUE AND TOTALl1Y

Kerszberg reads the cosmological antinomies as Kant's exploration of the enigma of the world, which is at once also the ultimate ground of certainty of our cognitive claims.

By situating phenomenology within the confines of a "dialectical" cosmology, rather than those of a "fundamental" ontology, Kerszberg's approach is markedly distant from Heidegger's own, justly famous, phenomenological reading of Kant. Where Heidegger understands the question of the world as an essential part of metaphysica generalis or ontology (dealing with being as being), Kant treats the world, together with the soul and God, as elements of metaphysica specialis (dealing with the highest beings and with beings as a whole). But Kerszberg suggests that Kant's concept of "world as totality," or of the "whole of being" as idea of reason, far from falling short of Heidegger's "question of being" (p. 4), in fact "seems to play the role that Heidegger ascribes to ontology" (p. 3). For Heidegger the world as being of beings manifests itself authentically not as the idea of the totality of beings, but as the network of attachments (Umwelt) that surrounds us and designates (be-deuten, Bedeutsamkeit) what and how we care for things (Sorge). Kerszberg proposes that "before passing to the practical mode (or the existential mode in the sense of Heidegger), a cosmic philosophy must involve itself to the farthest possible extent in the ontic meaning of natural objects. This ontic meaning is, indeed, the place of an authentic opening unto the world" (p. 13). Cosmology offers the guiding thread through which to describe the Kantian critical project from the point of view of a general theory of beings, where 'theory' does not mean empirical cognition but the originary openness of thought to the horizon of appearing or givenness.

The originary openness of thought to the given, something that Kerszberg calls "the phenomenality of thought," is indicated by the priority assigned to sensibility over understanding and reason in the Critique of Pure Reason. According to his reading, the priority of sensibility as givenness is presupposed by the Transcendental Aesthetic and is employed by the Transcendental Analytic in order to support its contention that understanding determines sensibility a priori. But it is the burden of the first chapters of Critique and Totality to show why no merely constructivist reading of Kant's first Critique can do justice to the "phenomenality of thought." The construction of objects of experience requires that the understanding overdetermine sensibility, but it also presupposes a more primordial relation of thought to the phenomenal, a relation that precedes all construction and is irreducible to it. This relation is thematized only in the Transcendental Dialectic, which shows how and why sensibility overdetermines, in its own turn and completely a priori, the activity of the understanding.

305


Kerszberg's interpretation of the relation between the three main parts of the Critique of Pure Reason offers an interesting refutation of the Neo-Kantian attempt to reduce transcendental philosophy to the model provided by mathematics as pure construction and to the model of mathetnatized natural sciences.4 But this book is no less critical of Heidegger's reading, which counteracts the Neo-Kantian emphasis on the action of the understanding on sensibility by reasserting the primacy of Kant's doctrine of the transcendental aesthetic and positing the priority of pure sensibility over pure understanding. Heidegger articulates this priority by linking the possibility of both sensibility and understanding in their pure forms (space and time as pure intuitions and transcendental apperception) to the activity of productive imagination. Kerszberg takes this to mean that Heidegger does not really overcome constructivism as much as he finds a new, extra-cognitive origin for it: the essence of appearance is now built up in and through the "world-forming" (welt-bildend) power of imagination, whose three modalities of a priori synthesis of appearances (apprehension, reproduction, and recognition) match the three ecstases of temporality. Furthermore, since the transcendental deduction of the categories requires that the synthetic unity of transcendental apperception be found as much in intuition as in thought, Heidegger is quick to draw his provocative and famous conclusion that "time and the 'I think' no longer stand incompatibly and incomparably at odds; they are the same."· Since Heidegger, most interpretations of the first Critique have been irresistibly tempted to grant the productive imagination a magical capacity of resolving the difficulties of the transcendental deduction of the categories, upholding the conviction that the latter holds the master key to the work.

Kerszberg's book mounts a spirited effort to reverse this interpretative trend. It argues that space and time as pure forms of intuition are by no means reducible to products of pure imagination, which only constructs its objects in intuition by delimiting the (pre-)given infinity of the forms of sensibility in accordance with the demands of the rules of the understanding. The primary role of imagination in the construction of objects of experience is acknowledged, of course; however to take only this role of imagination as one's starting point would amount to giving too much to the determination of sensibility by understanding and to forgetting the more fundamental determination of understanding by sensibility. Space and time as pure intuitions can and must be understood in their radical independence from imagination.6

Critique and Totality offers a much-needed corrective to the contemporary tendency to read Kant's first Critique by favoring the Analytic over the Dialectic. The thesis that the Transcendental Dialectic reveals

306

VATrERlKERSZBERG'S CRITIQUE AND TOTALITY

the limits of constructivism by pointing out how the givenness of sensibility overpowers all the other faculties, imagination included, is original, well-argued, and textually supported. What prevents it from being completely convincing, perhaps, is that Kerszbergs text, in highlighting these limits, falls into the opposite extreme of downplaying the effective reach of constructivism in Kant's idealism. Thus the undeniable priority assigned to pure understanding in the Transcendental Analytic, to pure (practical) reason in the second Critique, and to pure (reflective) judgment in the third Critique remains insufficiently addressed in this book. I suggest below an alternative reading of the limits of construction that nonetheless does not place (a part of) the Kantian critique outside of constructivism but, instead, pushes it toward an internal critique.

2. Kant's Idealism and the Copernican Analogy

To read the first Critique from the cosmological antinomies backwards, so to speak, is unusual but by no means unwarranted if it is true that Kant himself confesses that "the antinomy of pure reason ... is what first aroused me from my dogmatic slumber and drove me to the critique of reason itself, in order to resolve the scandal of ostensible contradiction of reason with itself' (p. 100).7 Kerszberg is evidently correct in assuming that one should pay careful attention to Kant's cosmology in order to understand why the project of critique is conceived in terms of a shift from the "scholastic" to the "cosmic concept" of philosophy (A8381B866).8 It is yet another thing to contend that the cosmological antinomies reveal the true sense of the Copernican revolution. Kerszberg takes this momentous step by arguing that the question of the world, or cosmology, corresponds to the priority of phenomenality over thinking, to the originary openness of thought to appearance. This priority, in turn, is cashed out in the ascription to sensibility of a power capable of overwhelming all the other mental faculties (a power that corresponds to the unsublatable presupposition of the given on the part of the constructive in the human mind). The question of cosmology and the doctrine of pure sensibility then come together in the cosmological antinomies.9

This book proposes to read the "analogy with Copernicus" not as "a way of describing Kant's originality" but as "a way of characterizing his own thought" (p. 61).10 The elegant unpacking of this particular claim is in my opinion the most felicitous part of the book and alone makes it necessary reading for Kant scholars. Kerszberg uses the analogy with Copernicus to illustrate the fundamental priority of sensibility over understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason. The analysis of the anal-

307


ogy moves from a treatment of Copernican astronomy through Galilean and Newtonian physics to Kantian cosmology. Kerszberg is able to map the dialectical relation between mental faculties onto the concrete development of astronomical theory:

the extension of the force of gravitation to the whole universe is a demand ofthe understanding in its empirical use .... But only reason is able to conceive from the unconditioned totality which the universe is .... The unifying force of gravitation partakes of both the idea of reason and the concept of understanding, however, and it is just at this point that Kant takes leave of Newtonian physics ... and engages with a problem of his own. (pp. 64-5)

Reason stands to understanding as the universe stands to the solar system. The cosmological antinomies of reason are understood as a kind of transposition in thought of Kant's own cosmological theory regarding the universe beyond the solar system. 11

Moving from the perspective of philosophy of science to that of metaphysics, the analogy with Copernicus acquires the following significance:

Within the solar system, the science of dynamics can be said to correct the senses and make them correspond to the kind of ideal accuracy required by the understanding in its proper use. That is why "the sensible world ... has no subsistence by itself." But outside the system, the senses seem to take exception to this correspondence and regain some sort of independence. This is already quite clear from the way Newtonian science thematizes the Copernican system, since it assumes that the relation between the solar system and the stars is purely kinematic. In Kant's wording: through the "mere form of thought ... I can cognize nothing determinate." Because it loses itself when it deals only with itself in the empty space beyond our solar system, the concept gives way to the senses, and allows them to speak for themselves again. At this point, reason begins to speak the language of irresolvable heterogeneity. (p. 67)

Newtonian physics is exemplary for the meaning of Kant's Copernican revolution only insofar as the latter is assumed to consist in the proof of the a priori determination of sensibility by the understanding in its construction of a dynamical system of objects of experience. This proof spans the logical space covered by the Transcendental Analytic, and offers one possible reading of transcendental idealism according to which "the sensible world has no subsistence by itself" because it is overdetermined by the mind's conceptual schemes (if one may use this N eo-Kantian language).

The point of Critique and Totality, though, is to show precisely the limited validity of what may be called Kant's Newtonian, constructivist

308


moment. The Neo-Kantian belief that the first Critique is reducible to a philosophical justification of Newtonian physics, and therefore has the status of epistemology, is thereby shown to be a one-sided and inherently restrictive reading of the critical project. For in terms of the Newtonian perspective itself, that the world is a construction seems to be demonstrably valid only for the solar system. Once the problem is posed concerning the relation between the solar system and the rest of the universe, the understanding is no longer able to construct objects of experience by determining a priori sensibility. When the understanding is constrained to transcend itself into reason in the attempt to bridge the gap between solar system and universe, at that moment sensibility regains what Kerszberg refers to as its "independence" with regard to the understanding, and begins to exert what Kant calls the "unobserved influence of sensibility on the understanding" (A2941B350). To explore the manifestation of this influence, Kant opens up the new logical space of the Transcendental Dialectic, which offers another possible reading of transcendental idealism, namely, the phenomenological one according to which space and time as pure intuitions are responsible for the essence or ideality of the appearance in a way that exceeds every conceptual determination of this appearance because the possibility of thought itself is internally related to this essence or ideality.

The central chapters of Critique and Totality (chapters three through five) investigate the claim that critique, as "cosmic concept" of philosophy, depends on the possibility of bringing to bear on the constitution of experience the shift of perspectives involved in moving from the horizon of the solar system to that of the totality of possible appearances, or universe (which, incidentally, explains the meaning of the title). This perspectival shift is articulated by Kant in the "cosmological principle," the culmination of the critical solution to the cosmological antinomies. The cosmological principle contains both a negative and a positive aspect: "no maximum of a series of conditions in a sensible world, regarded as a thing-in-itself, is given through the cosmological principle of totality," but this maximum "can only be set as a task that calls for regress in the series of conditions" (A508-15/B536-43). The upshot of the long and complicated analysis of this principle is that the regress through the "series of conditions in a sensible world," when taken as a task, not only never arrives at the "absolutely unconditioned" but also calls for the "destruction of any given totality" so that the world as totality of appearances, in the end, is "nothing at all" (pp. 67-8). The "regress in infinitum" turns out to be a "regress in indefinitum" because "however far we may have advanced in the ascending series we must always enquire for a still higher member of the series, which mayor may not become known through experience" (A5181B546).

309


Kerszberg assigns a great deal of significance to this last proposition because he sees it as grounding the distinction between the general and the concrete knowledge of nature. It is well known that for Kant the "special" laws of concrete or particular nature cannot be derived from those a priori laws, the conformity to which defines nature in general (B164-5).

In the process of the ever renewed enquiry referred to in the positive aspect of the cosmological principle, it is clear that the gaining of 'special' knowledge is no longer necessarily related to its transcendental condition, that is, nature 'in general' .... Rather, the cosmological principle "serves as a rule postulating what in the regress ought to happen from us, but not anticipating what is given in itself in the object prior to all regress" (A5091B537). Thus, passing from nature in general to nature in its concrete totality, the linearity by which no portion of the world can be distinguished from any other is put into question. (p. 69)

By attacking the "tacit assumption of all truly universal cognition ... that the sample of the universe which it unifies is a sufficiently representative part of the totality, regardless of how far it has really advanced" (p. 69), i.e., by putting into question the "linearity" of the phenomenal world, the Kantian cosmological principle would ground the possibility of discontinuities in the phenomenal world. In phe- . nomenological terms, the cosmological principle allows one to think of the phenomenal world in terms of distinct regions of beings, each with their unique conditions of phenomenality. This regional or discontinuous constitution of the phenomenal world brings into evidence the presupposition that there is 'more' to the given, to the phenomenal, than can be a priori determined by the human mind, and therefore counts as a strong point of support for Kerszberg's post-constructivist reading of Kant.

As both Heidegger and Wittgenstein illustrate, the discontinuous character of the phenomenal world is a privileged site from which to analyze the 'essence of the appearance' (however one wishes to construe this expression) for the simple reason that only where the phenomenal world experiences a 'break' or 'discontinuity' is it conceivable to catch a glimpse of its originary conditions of emergence. This consideration leads to the second point that Kerszberg draws out of the cosmological principle. Since this principle cannot anticipate "what is given in itself in the object prior to all regress," the question emerges as to "what is a rule that does not enable us to anticipate" (p. 69)? Kerszberg's answer is that

even though, as a rule, it remains a condition of intelligibility of the manifold, the principle does not really work as a condition.

310

VATIER/KERSZBERG'S CRITIQUE AND TOTALITY

Rather, it is itself transcended by something given, inasmuch as this given is not there yet. Such is the human condition with regard to the cosmos: our action in it (the use of a rule) is also the index of a withdrawal. To be sure, the remotest object of perception is still the index of a possible journey toward it, even if it wiU never be accomplished in fact. The impossibility for the rule to perform its function of actualization releases a regressive synthesis toward a given which is always put off. (pp. 69-70; emphasis mine)

On this reading, the cosmological principle becomes the principle of the givenness of appearances insofar as they withdraw from their possible construction. More precisely, this principle gives expression to the openness of the mind to the totality of appearances, in the sense of essence of appearances, because it describes the transcendence of the givenness of appearances with respect to these appearances themselves. The cosmological principle describes the openness (of the mind) to what is given outside of it, which is not an object but the horizon of all appearances. 12

3. On the Unobserved Influence of Sensibility on Understanding: Kant between Realism and Idealism

The central problem raised by this phenomenological interpretation of Kant's Copernican revolution concerns the relation between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism. Indeed, it should be quite obvious that whatever Kant had in mind when he advocated "empirical realism," the meaning of the latter can only be determined in relation to the other two doctrines, and not vice versa. If there is anything that the Copernican revolution should achieve it is precisely to question our prejudices with regard to what is 'empirically' real. By inscribing the world as horizon of appearances within a cosmological discourse, Critique and Totality both thematizes and blurs the distinction between (transcendental) realism and (transcendental) idealism. Kerszberg claims that

there is something to see in sensibility that the understanding in its empirical employment could not see: not the embryonic form of the higher reality aimed at by the faculty of reason, but the residue of activity in sensibility that the original synthetic unity of apperception could not absorb. As it turns out, however, this residue has something to do with the sought-after higher reality .... The cosmological problem exposed in the Transcendental Dialectic is concerned essentially with the critical examination of that part of activity which persists in the objects of the senses over and above the newly discovered activity of the spectator. And it is at this level that the cosmological principle sits happily with an actual image of the concrete universe in its

311


structure and appearance. There is nothing coincidental about Kant devoting so much attention to cosmology that, already quite early in his intellectual journey, he could work out a consistent model of his own. (p. 71; emphasis mine)

If "the newly discovered activity of the spectator" acknowledges the 'Newtonian moment' of the analogy with Copernicus, then "that part of the activity which persists in the objects of senses over and above" the constructions of the mind is best addressed by following Kantian cosmology beyond its Newtonian limits. But here Kerszberg's extrapolations from the analogy with Copernicus seem to clash with the use of this analogy as illustration of transcendental idealism. For the text links the extra-conceptual "activity which persists in the objects of the senses" to "an actual image of the concrete universe" in such a way that the world as horizon of appearances not only figures the excess of sensibility, but actually grounds this excess on a transcendentally real universe, as totality of appearances, in a way that throws into question the transcendentally ideal construal of the essence of appearances. 13

The theory of the unobserved influence of sensibility indicates that there exists "an excess of appearance that happens not to be fully mastered by the mind. The experience of such a surplus forces human reason to seek the unconditioned within the series of conditions of the phenomenal world" (p. 178). The cosmological antinomy deals with this unconditioned or a priori and Kerszberg believes that "the chief lesson of the whole of Kant's critical enterprise is that we can only tryindeed, we cannot help but try-to speak a posteriori about the a priori. Once one says something about the a priori as such, one makes it an in-itself' (p. 175). A priori here means the unconditioned that, in its inborn dogmatism, pure reason believes to exist outside of itself and before itself. The critique of pure reason deals with this dogmatism through the cosmological principle in which the regress to the unconditioned is posited as a task, to be approached a posteriori rather than assumed as given a priori.

The critical solution to the cosmological antinomies is taken to cor-roborate the thesis at the heart ofKerszberg's philosophical position:

thought must relate to an outside, to the world, without knowing what this outside is. This is the ultimate meaning of the Copernican reuolution that Kant initiated; only by positing an outside can thought "find itself" in itself, but then it never adheres to itself again. What allows knowledge to reflect upon itself and thus to legitimate itself is that, within knowledge, there is an origin which escapes it. For thought there is no origin of thought, and yet there clearly must be one. (pp. 175-6; emphasis mine)

312

VATTERlKERSZBERG'S CRITIQUE AND TOTALITY

Thought can "find itself" in self-reflection, and understand itself as constructive of experience, only if it is equally cognizant of the fact that something about the world of appearance escapes it because this something is that 'outside' toward which thought must constitutively tend, without ever reaching it. For this reason Kerszberg says that the critical solution to the antinomies of pure reason does not simply annihilate "the old dogmatic dreams of reason" but instead, that these

are the result of a much more profound situation of thought, one which only critique really addresses, namely, the phenomenality that constitutes all thought in its original relationship to the world. Once thought seeks to investigate its own origin in the world, this phenomenality becomes unmasterable. The only way to combat these old dreams is to invent an illusion of the illusion, to duplicate the illusion in which the antinomy would have trapped us. This doubling is the final attempt of critical reason to master the phenomenality of thought. This attempt is made possible by the fact that the absolute totality of conditions (the universe) is a very peculiar object; it can be thought only in the mode of pure reflection, with no prior determination. (p. 175; emphasis mine)

The 'outside' of thought that makes thought possible, i.e., the "phenomenality of thought," is accessible only as the transcendental appearance, or as the appearing of appearances, and is expressed in reflection in terms of the idea of "the absolute totality of conditions (the universe)."

Depending on how the 'outside' of thought is described, Critique and Totality oscillates between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism. According to one possibility outlined by this book,

taken by itself, an appearance does not need the support of the functions of thought: it is free-floating, suspended nowhere, pent in the free play of pure appearing. The aim of the deduction is to eliminate this free play by connecting the appearance with the fixed subjective conditions of knowledge. But the moving field of pure appearing always exceeds the steadiness imposed by the understanding, because it is indifferent to whether or not an appearing appears, whether or not it exists, or whether or not it is merely illusory. The categories regulate the field where the question as to whether an object is something or nothing is decided .... We could say that the appearing of something is an appearance. But the original field of appearing, in which something is not distinguishable from nothing, always exceeds the field of appearances. The ideas remind us of this fact, because they take up again the field of pure appearing at the point where the understanding took leave of it. The object of the ideas, considered in their relation to the categories, are pure appearances, that is, appearances of nothing-whereas the understanding is always concerned with appearances of something = x. (pp. 137-8)

313


The appearing of an object counts as an appearance, and these are a priori determined by the application of the categories to the sensible manifold. But it is also possible for no object to appear, in which case one has a "pure appearing," the appearing of appearance itself, the phenomenality of the phenomenon. I. This pure appearing is in tum the "object" of the idea of the world, i.e., the transcendental appearance. The 'outside' to which thought must always already have access turns out to be not the appearance in outer sensible intuition, but the pure appearing of such appearance. Indeed, on this idealist reading, "if totality is determined, then it vanishes as a totality; totality can be no more than an idea without determinate correlate in a possible experience." Cosmological ideas reaffirm "the primacy of pure reflection" (p. 158).

But this book can also be read as indulging in the temptation to give a substantial ground to the "field of pure appearing," and the temptation to grant the universe as the totality of appearances the consistency of a thing-in-itself which would be radically mind-independent and at the same time determining of the possibility of sensible appearances. 15

Kerszberg speaks of the need to "leave room for nature's own activity, which is represented transcendentally as an uncontrolled action of sensibility. Through this action, our 'constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining' becomes totally meaningful, even though it is also the seat of the unknowable thing-in-itselr' (p. 83; emphasis mine). Obviously Kerszberg is aware that to speak of "nature's own activity," in contraposition to what the subject puts into nature, is strictly dogmatic talk for Kant. But his point is precisely that such dogmatism is not only ineliminable from Kantian criticism but is actually what keeps its Copernican revolution from understanding itself, in tum, in dogmatic terms and so keeps it from performative selfcontradiction. The dogmatic belief in the universe as primordial givenness prevents the critique from falling into the dogmatism of its own constructivism.

By determining the ultimate horizon of appearances-what Heidegger calls the being of beings-through the cosmological principle, Critique and Totality verges on the brink of ontic reductionism: it thinks of the universe as a thing (in itself), when, as horizon of appearances, it should be no-thing. Hence in arguing for the primacy of the idea of world over the other two ideas of reason, Kerszberg states that

the idea that concerns the world as totality is very different from the other two, the idea of soul and the idea of God (A6731B701). There will always be materialists who simply deny the existence of the soul, as well as atheists who simply deny the existence of God. But can we deny the existence of the universe? Surely not, since then we also deny the existence of the sensible world which

314

VA'ITER/KERSZBERG'S CRITIQUE AND TOTALITY

is a part of it, and the sensible world is indisputably the source of all natural krwwledge. In other words, the idea of universe can neither disentangle itself from the sensible nor can it be fully materialized in it. (p. 100; emphasis mine)

From the perspective of transcendental idealism, it is difficult to know what to make of the claim that the existence of the universe is presupposed by the "existence ofthe sensible world which is a part of it." The issue cannot be resolved by the obvious retort that the possibility of something being a part of something else is rooted in our pure intuition of space, which is subjective and the sole ground of the sensible world, and therefore has no link to "the existence of the universe" as something-in-itself, standing outside of the sensible world.

To reject the seduction of the transcendental realism of the universe (with its seemingly overpowering 'self-evidence'), one must be willing to conjure up a different picture of what Kant's critical idealism permits one to think and do than the one presented in this, but.not only in this, book. The first move in this direction would be to think of the universe as something purely virtual, a figment of reason and piece of poetry that holds our attention as if it were 'the real thing' only because it reflects our seeing back to US. 16 In other words, Kant's cosmological principle, far from articulating the principle of givenness beyond constructibility, should be understood as formulating the principle of deconstructibility immanent to every mental construction. Such a principle would show how the world-as horizon of the appearances that make up objective reality-is a source of virtuality whose power consists in the capacity to generate an internal critique of the objectivity of objects of experience by showing its always imminent and immanent collapse (virtualization).

From the point of view of this other reading of the Kantian idea of world, Kerszberg's formulation of the critical solution to the cosmological antinomies is right, but for the wrong reasons.

If we tried to annihilate the appearances produced by reason, we would fall into the following trap: they would have been annihilated only in accordance with the very illusion of reason that produces them. Thus, the invisible influence of sensibility over reason is the condition of absolute visibility of the objects that result from this influence. Thinking the absence of a transcendental appearance means doubling that very same appearance. This logic of illusion defines the pherwmenality of thought, which is more originary than pure thought itself The difference between understanding and reason in terms of the horizon of sense attached to each of them initiates a movement of thought which will culminate in Kant's assertion that reason is actually the

315

GRADUATEFACULTYPH~OSOPHYJOURNAL

touchstone ofthe truth contained in the rules of the understanding (A647IB675). (p. 137; emphasis mine)

The logic of illusion that characterizes reason in its self-critique is the "touchstone of the truth contained in the rules of the understanding" not because reason has a more direct purchase on the reality of the world of appearances, but for precisely the opposite reason, because it shows more effectively the transcendental ideality, i.e., virtuality, of this world. If the world is an illusion, then all the more will the empirical appearances that occur within its horizon, and only within it, be an illusion. The transcendental ideality that subtends the empirical reality of all objects of experience will show its effectivity by rendering all claims to "objective reality" on the part of these objects, in the very progress of experience determined by the cosmological principle, vain and illusoryY

Kerszberg's provocative intuition that the constructivism of Kant's critical project harbors a new dogmatism-of which Kant is aware and which he tries to exorcise in the Transcendental Dialectic-seems to me to be correct. Critique and Totality offers impeccable arguments to support the claim that the Dialectic is not merely exorcism of pre-critical dogmatism, as most interpreters have it, but of the dogmatism inherent in the critical project itself. Where I disagree is on the interpretation of Kant's strategy to eliminate the dogmatism of constructivism. For Kerszberg this strategy boils down to an ambiguous restoration, under the vestiges of phenomenology, of the ancestral rights of the 'myth of the given'. I suggest that Kantian criticism defends itself from its own dogmatism by pushing its constructivism to the limit and that this takes the form of revealing how every construction of objective reality is itself only virtual. This internal critique of criticism can legitimately be called deconstructive.

Kerszberg's phenomenological reading does not take the path of deconstruction, which is nonetheless open to it, because it operates with a concept of rational reflection that is non-constitutive of its objects. Not by chance, Kerszberg spends much energy in carefully separating the idealism of Kant from that of his idealist followers, from Maimon and Fichte to Schelling and Hegel. This effort at separating transcendental idealism from the variety of subjective, objective, and absolute idealisms that follow it turns on the belief that it is possible to distinguish, as self-evident, what is given from what is reflection. The crucial exhibit that Kerszberg employs for this purpose consists in the observation that "in the critical solution to the antinomies, Kant announces that the empirical concept becomes, once again, the standard of measure (Richtrnass). How can we understand this unexpected

316


reversal?" (p. 158). The return of the empirical in matters having to do with the cosmological antinomy is interpreted as an avowal by Kant of the merely derivative, non-constitutive character of reason's self-critical powers of reflection as these are exhibited in the cosmological principle. This principle substitutes the proposition "if the conditioned is given, the entire series of all its conditions is likewise given" for the proposition "if the conditioned is given, a regress in the series of all its conditions is set us as a task [aufgegebenl (A497-8)" (p. 165). Kerszberg reads this substitution as "bestowing a heuristic value upon the analytical proposition, or, equivalently: the cosmological object is an object of synthetic knowledge, but only a posteriori" (ibid.). But if the world as idea is "finally reduced to an a posteriori reflection concerning an a priori that escapes us radically" (ibid.), then it is not surprising that the "a priori" in question, namely, the horizon of empirical appearances, can be so easily construed as transcendentally real, as consisting in a mindand reflection-independent universe.

The step from the idea of the world as product of self-critical reflection to the world as thing-in-itself-i.e., the step that leads from the transcendental idealism of the critical solution to the transcendental realism that, according to Kerszberg, underpins this solution-is carried out through the following reasoning:

The very idea of world tends to vanish as a result of the dialectical opposition. It is not true that the world is a whole existing in itself; but ifit does not exist in itself, it is also not a whole. Now, even though the regressive synthesis can never contain itself in its entirety, suppose that the world must, in one way or another, possess a magnitude inasmuch as it continues to be a whole. Is not the claim that the world has no magnitUde tantamount to saying that the world has a magnitude, but that the synthesis corresponding to it can only be posited? Kant's cosmological principle of totality (kosmologischen Grundsatz der Totalitat) (A5081B536) ... comes at this point as a final expression of the supposition that a whole exists. It prompts the regressive synthesis to continue endlessly beyond possible experience, precisely because it is torn between the world within (the sensible world of experience) and the world without (the world in itself). In this way, the common presupposition underlying all dialectical. opposition (that the totality is a thing-in-itself) is and is not accepted at the same time. (pp. 167-8; emphasis mine)

Kerszberg's position veers into transcendental realism at the very moment that it poses the crucial question in a merely rhetorical fashion: "Is not the claim that the world has no magnitude tantamount to saying that the world has a magnitude, but that the synthesis corresponding to it can only be posited?" For it is not "tantamount" at all that one can infer, from the critical and reflexive solution to the cosmo-

317

GRADUATEFACULTYPHlLOSOPHYJOURNAL

logical antinomy according to which "the world has no magnitude," to the non-critical and transcendentally realist thesis that "the world has a magnitude" but its synthesis "can only be posited."

Such an inference, paradoxically, undermines Kant's point that the reflection of reason is the "touchstone of the truth contained in the rules of understanding" because it assumes that the claim to objective reality on the part of the empirical syntheses of the understanding is unconditionally valid prior to the calling into question of these syntheses by the claim, on the part of the critical solution to the antinomies, that the horizon of such syntheses is a virtual image (focus imaginarius) projected by pure reflection. This kind of inference is only needed if one believes that the totality of appearances must exist, in itself, as a cipher to the 'world without' that pulls the regressive synthesis away from the 'world within (the sensible world of experience)'. But in speak.ing this way Kerszberg gives substance to the 'outerness' of the horizon of appearing and turns the noumenonlphenomenon distinction into a two-world idea-world-outside and world-inside-that stands opposed to one of his own innovative and original suggestions, namely, that the thing-in-itself is nothing but the phenomenality of the appearance, what he calls its "back side seen in a mirror" (p. 19). This mirror is the universe as virtual reality.

4. What Is the Outside of Thought? On Phenomenality as Semiosis

Is there a way to avoid the slide into transcendental realism while maintaining Kerszberg's intuition that the relation between thought and phenomenon, reflection and appearance, is one of externality or outerness? I believe one can, if only one further pursues another construal of 'outerness' that is found at the margins of Kerszberg's text and which disassociates it from the realist and genetico-causal interpretation of the thing-in-itself as ground of empirical appearance in order to link this 'outerness' with the problem of sense and meaning. 18

The most original claim of Critique and Totality, as we have seen, is that reason, not understanding, has a more direct access to the essence of appearances, and that such access is addressed by Kant's theory of the "unobserved influence of sensibility over the understanding" (p. 136). The basic line of argument in favor of this claim runs as follows:

We recall that intuitions without concepts are blind to their own meaning, whereas concepts without intuitions are empty. Sensibility is the seat of sense. A bare concept is thus more than blind to its sense: it is completely senseless; it does not even have a meaning that remains withdrawn (A2401B299) . ... The

318

VATIERlKERSZBERG'S CRITIQUE AND TOTALITY

function of the concept is to throw light upon the sense concealed within intuition, but by itself the concept is deprived of sense. Kant goes on to argue that conversely, besides the categories, there must exist pure concepts of reason (the ideas) which, when taken independently of sense conditions, cannot be different from these categories. But the action of sensibility over the understanding has no equivalent in the ideas, because the special property of the ideas is that they are never empty. If there is anything like an originary unity between thought and intuition, it is exhibited in the ideas and their play of illusions, not in the categories. (p. 136)19

Whenever the unobserved influence of sensibility on understanding is picked up by reason in its cosmological reflection, what is at stake is an excess in sensibility that coincides with an instance of sense. This coincidence is referred to as "the originary unity of thought and intuition," but one could speak of the impossibility of separating the sensible trace from the semiotic trace, so that phenomena are excessive precisely because they are expressive. In any case, such an instance of sense must be understood in strict opposition to the instance of an inaccessible substantial core of sensible objects of experience. For nothing is more different from a thing than its sense.

The instance of sense that coincides with the excessiveness of the phenomenal, and which is reflected in rational ideas, is articulated by Kerszberg in terms of its outemess or exteriority.

When Kant specifies the kind of intuition that is required in order to demonstrate the objective reality of the categories, he indicates that "we need, not merely intuitions, but intuitions that are in all cases outer intuitions" (B291). But this outemess is always naturally available in the ideas. They seem to have objective reality, because the transcendental appearance never ceases (A2971B353), even after it has been detected critically in accordance with the innemess of self-examination. Thus the identity between the category and the idea rests on the fiction that consists in sundering thought from sensibility, but the fiction is itself suggested by the idea inasmuch as it alone never lacks a visible reference to outer intuition; the categories only have a reference to outer intuition, which does not become visible until sensible intuition has bestowed a sense upon the forms ofthought. (p. 136)

Everything turns on whether the "outemess [that] is always naturally available in the ideas" refers to the outerness of sensible intuitions, as Kerszberg suggests, or to something completely different, but which is nonetheless equally active in every sensible appearance.

I suggest that it is necessary to distinguish two senses of outerness: ideas are never empty and carry an intrinsic relation to outerness not

319


because they are directly connected to outer sensible intuitions, or objects of appearance, but rather because they are directly connected to the semiotic character of every sensible appearance. Sensibility is the ground of sense only because it is thoroughly imbued with semiosis. Every signifier has the characteristic of indicating Something outside of itself: the signifier therefore constitutes a species of outemess, and one which is, furthermore, always already postponed, for one always and only encounters chains of signifiers. My hypothesis is that the outerness to which ideas refer, and which is made visible in the so-called transcendental appearance, is nothing less than the semiosis constitutive of the 'field of pure appearing'.

Critique and Totality does not mention the problem of semiosis and it does not consider the possibility of reading Kant's Transcendental Dialectic as a treatise of semiotics (much like the Transcendental Analytic could be read as a treatise of semantics). But the text does seem on the verge of taking such a step in those rare moments when it touches on the relation between the transcendental appearance (of appearances) and the problem of sense and meaning: "If the ideas do not generate any concept, this is precisely because they are closest to the originary relationship of thought to intuition. The specific difficulty of Kant's Dialectic-but also its unique character-is that the ideas give us to see the generation ofrneaning [sic] without any new concept being thereby generated" (pp. 169-70). The possibility of generating sense without a concept is, of course, a possibility that Kant openly discusses only in the Critique of Judgment where, not entirely by accident, the reflection that he first analyzes through the cosmological principle is subsequently identified as originating in an autonomous faculty, that of reflective judgment or interpretation. After all, to semiosis as horizon of appearance, i.e., to the idea of world of appearances as expression, there can only correspond a theory of reflection as interpretation. There is only interpretation where there are signifiers, and signifiers where there are interpretations. Put another way, it is only when the appearance is seen to be possible through the signifier, when semiosis is the horizon of phenomenalization, that reflection ceases to be merely a posteriori and becomes a priori, i.e., constitutive of the essence of appearance.

Kerszberg is therefore correct, in the above passage, to hint that the excess of sensibility that Kantian critique brings to the fore must be ultimately reckoned in terms of a theory of pre-conceptual sense, or what in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Heidegger is referred to as pre-predicative world-openings (Welt-erschlossenheit). But it would be a mistake to give an ontic and transcendental realist interpretation of the possibility of pre-conceptual sense, rather than a

320

VATTERlKERSZBERG'S CRITIQUE AND TOTALITY

semiotic and transcendental idealist interpretation of the same. For the most part, phenomenology until Levinas and especially Derrida (perhaps with the partial exception of the late Heidegger and MerleauPonty) errs in attempting to understand signs through phenomena rather than phenomena through signs, even though phenomenology is never far from following the tum taken by the so-called semantic tradition, which takes this turn precisely with reference to Kant's Copernican revolution.20 In this sense, Kerszberg's book can be read as a portrayal of phenomenology at the crossroads of the 'linguistic tum' and of its resistance to embarking on its path.

Such resistance, operative whenever this book flirts with an ontic and transcendental realist reduction of the horizon of appearance, hides a rather obvious point, namely, that in Kant the idea of the world as an endless task of moving from one conditioned condition to another without ever encountering the unconditioned (the world as such) is nothing less than the transposition of the movement(s) in the chain of signifiers whose condition of possibility is precisely the absence of a referent (i.e., the non-existence of the whole). Indeed, the totality or whole of appearances is not a thing-in-itself, the Parmenidean hard core of being, but, on the contrary, its noumenal status signifies only that this world is a hole in beings: it is the rip or tear in the appearance of objects which reveals the merely virtual objectivity of every object (i.e., the fact that every referent or meaning is always already overdetermined by an instance of sense or semiosis that shows the referent to be just another signifier). Behind this tear in the "starry heavens above me" there is nothing to be seen: one is only thrown back on the transcendental reality of noumenal freedom, which speaks through "the moral law within me."

That the world-whole is a hole in beings is a thesis that fits with Kerszberg's interpretation of Kant only when this interpretation resolutely sticks to its idealistic formulations. Then, it is possible to make sense of the repeated claim that the point of the critical solution to the antinomies is to show "the absence of any unconditioned beyond the limits of experience" (p. 168). Such an absence or hole (which is the only way in which the whole manifests itself) allows for the return "to the origin of our own sensibility," and more particularly to the fact that

when the influence of sensibility on the understanding is unobserved, the determination of a manifold beyond any possible experience of nature is also a necessary illusion, in the sense that that in which all vision takes place becomes visible-the "absolute quantity" of pure intuition. The transcendental ideal character of inner sense emerges strengthened by the trial which it has just undergone by involving itself in the colossal

321


sham of its provisional abandonment, strengthened to the point that it remains as the only possible vision. (pp. 168-9)

The belief that the transcendental reality of the world is a "colossal sham" can only be defended by realizing that the absence or hole generated by the idea of the world-whole (the chain of signifiers) makes sense in the context of the semiotic character of phenomenality. What is missing, in Critique and Totality, is the recognition that the "absolute quantity" of the pure intuitions of space and time, the excess in sensibility, does not signal a mysterious yet massive presence of the 'world without' but only the inescapable inseparability of the semiotic and the phenomenal. The "absolute quantity" of space and time as pure forms of intuitions is but a name for this infinite signifying potential of the grounds of the phenomenal. The outemess that characterizes both forms of pure intuition with respect to conceptual thought, i.e., the idea that there is always 'more' space and time than can be conceptually determined (which is what Kerszberg means by the expression "absolute quantity"), can only be an achievement of semiosis: for it is only the signifier, in its materiality, that 'spatializes' and 'temporalizes' in advance of any possible referent. Such spatialization and temporalization, forming the horizon of every appearance, is what I call the expressivity of appearance, i.e., its semiotic force, which Kant begins to discover in the Critique of Judgment.

If the semiotic dimension of language is not mentioned in Critique and Totality, this is not to say that the kind of phenomenology it advocates cannot, still, help to modify the direction taken by the 'linguistic tum' since Kant. Indeed, Kerszberg's phenomenological reading of Kant's critical project, if it were to be construed in terms of semiotics, is potentially extremely useful in p'roviding pointers for this change of direction because it helps one see what is lost if the 'linguistic tum' is narrowly construed as privileging (formal) semantics while downplaying its semiotic underpinnings (this would be analogous to reading the Transcendental Analytic without the Transcendental Dialectic, in Kerszberg's understanding of the relation between these two parts of the first Critique). What is lost, among other things, is the idea of sense as expression; the inseparability of semiosis from phenomenalization; the idea of preconceptual thought; the originary role of pure intUitions in sign-use or linguistic performance; and the understanding of the praxis oflanguage in ethico-political terms, leading to an originary politics of interpretation.

322


5. Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Practical Life of Signs

The last two chapters of Critique and Totality (chapters six and seven) discuss the expansion of the cosmological problematic of the first Critique-into the fields of the experience of the beautiful, the sublime, life, and external freedom or rights-that Kant opens up with the Critique of Judgment and the later ethico-political writings. This part of the book is extremely dense and full of interesting conjectures that would require another volume for their proper development. Kerszberg's main thesis is that the expansion of the cosmological principle beyond the region of phenomena of "ordinary objects" pushes critical philosophy to yet another stage of self-awareness, from its "cosmic" to its "cosmopolitical" concept.

One could describe the shift from the cosmic to the cosmopolitical understanding of critical philosophy as the project of investigating the pre-conceptual givenness of the phenomenal in terms of the trace of the other. In this sense, one can say that the shift from the first to the third Critique corresponds to the task of thinking the given as other, for there is no analytical connection between the two, even if the given is understood always already as pre-conceptual and non-constructible. In Kant's doctrines of beauty, life and rights, the question becomes that of articulating the givenness of the other and the otherness of the given. To employ Kerszberg's terminology, the openness of thought to the other is different from its openness to the given insofar as the former is inextricable from a practical dimension, whereas the latter can remain unproblematically within a dimension of pure theory. This practical dimension explains the cosmo-political shift that the self-understanding of critical philosophy undergoes in the third Critique. Nevertheless, in spite of the added dimension of practice, Kerszberg argues that in life, aesthetics, or rights, one still remains at an abyssal distance from the dimension of pure practical reason because otherness is still thought in and through givenness, the excess in sensibility, whereas morality requires thinking otherness precisely in its radical separation from any rootedness it may have in sensibility and in the phenomenal. In a formula: in life, beauty, and rights it is a question of thinking the other as self, whereas in morality it is a question of thinking the self as other.

Kerszberg interprets Kant's doctrine of life as articulating a crisis in the problematic of the world or totality: the critique of teleological judgment operates what he calls a reversal of the Copernican revolution. There are two ways to read this crisis and reversal, one which Kerszberg pursues fully, the other which he only indicates, and which I will try to push further along. According to the first reading, the phe-

323


nomenon of life furnishes an ultimate evidence for a transcendental realist construal of the world as horizon of appearances. If in the case of "ordinary" objects "the upshot of the transcendental critique is that the allegedly objective correlates of thought withdraw within the subjective sphere," in the case of "living" objects "the subjective sphere itself withdraws and is no longer part of the world" (p. 187). Living beings would therefore be accessible to the subject only once "the subjective sphere itself withdraws and is no longer part of the world." This "withdrawal" corresponds to Kant's claim in the third Critique that the phenomenon of life is only possible if natural teleology is the object of reflective, rather than determinative judgment. Reflective judgments are said to have only 'merely subjective' validity, as opposed to the 'objective' validity of determinative judgment.

However, what Kant means by 'merely subjective' validity in relation to reflective judgment is a disputed, and understudied, matter. For Kerszberg, reflective judgment is 'merely subjective' because it withdraws from the construction of the world in order to respond to something that lies outside of the subject's cognitive or determinative powers. In this sense, Kant's theory oflife "amounts to no less than assuming a condition in the object as prior to subjective conditions" (p. 192). For this reason, one may legitimately speak of a reversal of the Copernican revolution. Nonetheless, this reversal remains within the trajectory opened up by the solution to the cosmological antinomies of the first Critique because, if the totality of appearances is revealed by the cosmological principle to be a problematical object, wavering between transcendental reality and nothingness, the solution to the teleological antinomy shows that "we come closer to characterizing totality in its authentic sense, if we note that a living being must constantly, from the very start, solve a problem" (p. 200). Totality as a problem becomes (transcendentally) real only in and through the phenomenon of life.

The continuity between cosmological and teleological antinomies can also be picked out in the meaning that Kerszberg gives to the reversal of the Copernican revolution that is at issue in the possibility of the phenomenon of life. In the Critique of Judgment, sections 76 and 77, Kant argues that human beings can think of the teleological causality responsible for living things only by appealing to the idea of a nonhuman intuitive understanding. Kerszberg interprets this demand in the following way:

Just as a transcendental illusion results from the unobserved influence of sensibility on understanding, the reference to a supreme understanding, if it is to be acceptable to the limits imposed by critical reason, must result from an as yet unob-

324

VATIERlKERSZBERG'S CRITIQUE AND TOTALIIT

served influence of the understanding on reason .... Through the search for the unconditioned which is supposed to be the ground of the whole world, our reason elevates us beyond ourselves, that is, beyond the condition whereby we belong to the human species. Nevertheless, it is precisely the understanding's call to order which makes us aware that we belong to the human species. It is a restriction (down to earth) without which any opening (beyond the earth) would lose any basis. Our understanding could not be what it is (in relation to determinative judgment) without being at the same time beyond itself (in relation to reflective judgment). Indeed, for our understanding, to think anything at all means "merely presenting the thing as possible" (CJ 402). That is, the thing may not necessarily exist, which is more than what is available to an intuitive understanding, where thinking coincides strictly with being: any thing that is could not possibly be otherwise or not be at all. The intuitive understanding, which conceals the ultimate cause of the world, can be legitimately projected by our human understanding, because "such a being could have no presentation whatever of the possibility that some objects might not exist after all" (CJ 403). (pp. 214-5)21

Whereas in the first Critique the understanding is responsible for the Copernican reversal that allows the subject to leave its earth-bound condition in the name of objective cognition, here the understanding reverses this Copernican reversal and brings reason "down to earth," by using the hypothesis of an intuitive understanding in order to clarify the possibility of living beings. Through the interpretation of the phenomenon of life, reflective judgment brings the subject back to an awareness of itself as a living and terrestrial being, awakening it from its constructive mania.

In this reading the concept of life remains caught within the logical space of cosmology (the 'return to earth' is in the same logical space as the displacement of the subject from the center of the world), even though by reversing the Copernican de-centering of the earth, it places an internal limit to the cosmological discourse of totality. In reality, through the analysis of the phenomenon of life, Critique and Totality seems to be implicitly pursuing a conversation with the Husserlian and Heideggerian motifs of the strife between world and earth, where the latter corresponds to the horizon of beings insofar as they withdraw from the horizon of phenomenality and, in so doing, check the uncontrolled expansion ofphenomenality (an expansion addressed by the cosmological principle).

The objection to this kind of reading is that it inscribes reflective judgment within the problem of cosmology, rather than seeing the latter as a particular instantiation of the transition from nature in general

325


to nature in particular that is made possible by a priori principles of reflective judgment (CJ, first introduction). Indeed, the cosmological principle can be construed as a principle of discontinuity in and of the phenomenal. The phenomenon of life clearly exemplifies another such discontinuity, whose constitution depends on reflective judgment. Hence one can easily make the case that cosmology, and with it the problem of totality, does not exhaust the question concerning the essence of appearance but only poses this question for a certain phenomenal region, or, better, for the understanding of phenomena as possible objects, rather than for the understanding of phenomena as expressions. The discovery of the faculty of reflective judgment in the Critique of Judgment corresponds to Kant's attempt to articulate this wider (a-cosmic) understanding ofphenomenality as expression.

The reversal of the Copernican reversal that Kerszberg identifies in the question oflife can be read otherwise: it is not a way of approximating a transcendental reality that remains apart from our phenomenal constructions, but rather it is a way to thematize how reflective judgment endows phenomenality with a quasi-subjectivity that stands in a relation of alterity with respect to the subjectivity of the 'I think'. For Kant's thesis that reflective judgment has 'merely subjective' validity need not be construed to mean that the subject withdraws from the objectivity of the phenomenal world, but, contrariwise, it can mean that a withdrawal of this very objectivity from the phenomenal world happens in exactly the same proportion as this phenomenality is, always already, endowed with quasi-subjective traits. Life, in Kant, is not a particular region of phenomena as much as a different mode of phenomenality or being: it is better understood as living expression in opposition to the reified expression that one calls objectivity.

If Kerszberg is correct in assuming that the problem of totality in Kant refers to the irresolvable task of reducing phenomenality to objectivity, then one must acknowledge that the question oflife in Kant cannot be circumscribed by the problem of totality, of cosmology, but spells out the utter breakdown of this problem in favor of the question of infinity, which, since Levinas, is understood to denote the non-objectifiable otherness that confronts the constructive subject. But this otherness is precisely what Kantian reflective judgment envisages in its attempt to withdraw objectivity from the phenomenal and read out of it the quasi-subjective traces of alterity that are irreducible to the reified constructs of the cognitive subject. Otherness is not encountered by the withdrawal of the subject from the world-by making of reflection something merely secondary and absolutely distant from the given as thing-in-itself-but, conversely, through the withdrawal of the object

326


from the world, such that the latter is altered (becomes other) in its givenness by subjectivizing and enlivening itself.

In tenns of the semiotic reading of the world-problematic sketched above, one can say the following. The world as totality refers to the chain of signifiers which, constitutively, lack a referent. In other words, the whole is a hole. The construction of the world of appearances as an objective reality is an attempt to fill up this hole by providing referents (appearances as objects) that are serially, in the progress of experience, shown to be virtual referents. This is what the cosmological principle tells us. The critique of teleological judgment picks up from the collapse of totality. Life is the acknowledgment of the torn, unwhole character of the world-whole of appearances. Life is that gap in the totality of appearances through which infinity appears as language. For only language (sense), and not objects, can be infinite. At best, objectivity is the medium of interaction (hence no objects are possible without the dynamical principles of experience). Language (the practical life of signs), on the contrary, is the medium of communication. Insofar as the whole of appearances is reified into objective reality, or, put otherwise, insofar as the semiotic character of appearance is employed primarily in view of fixing reference, the world is merely interaction (dynamical system of objects of experience). Once objective reality is shown to be itself a virtual reality, or, put otherwise, once the semiotic character of appearances is employed primarily in view of allowing for the flow of sense (which requires the pennanent and a priori loss of the referent), the world of appearances becomes a world of communication. Life, as contemporary biology is making ever more explicit, is nothing but the coding and decoding of signs constitutive of an infinite flow of infonnation. If the cosmological principle of the first Critique teaches that the world-whole is a hole, the solution to the teleological antinomy of the third Critique teaches that this hole is the opening of a cavity that makes sounds (Schlund). Viewed from the critical standpoint, life is the world as oral expression.

Given the semiotic reading of Kant that I have been advocating, it is not surprising that the one place in the critical edifice where Kerszberg acknowledges that thought masters the excess in sensibility is the realm of the aesthetic idea, i.e., the site where language ("communication between subjectivities") is most evidently at issue.22 But the link between the excess of sensibility, as it is given symbolical expression by the faculty of aesthetical judgment, and the semiotic character of appearances as expression is not pursued, nor is the relation between this semiotic character and infinity (as opposed to totality). Rather, the last chapter of the book employs infinity as a backdrop from which to reconstruct "the Kantian philosophy of the human relation to finitude

327

GRADUATEFACULTYPHlliOSOPHYJOURNAL

and death" (p. 238), more or less directly in competition with Heidegger's analytic of Dasein. The Levinasian moment of the book disappears as quickly as it emerged. Kerszberg gives up on the possibility of articulating the given as trace of the other-where this other emerges as the infinity of semiosis-by choosing to counter Heidegger's claim that Kant determines human finitude externally, in opposition to the intellectual intuition, with the claim that it is a "thoroughly internal determination of finitude that Kant gives in the Critique of Judgment: it is the finite which expels the infinite, in keeping with its resources, by analogy with, and not in opposition to, the nonhuman understanding" (p. 238). In articulating the given as trace of the other, infinity is no longer employed by the finite for its own ends (onto-theology, "God of the philosophers"), but is what sets the finite in play. Whether such an infinite semiosis should be thought as the essential characteristic of the Holy (Levinas) or, much more mundanely, as the (writing-)machine for the creation of gods (Nietzsche, Deleuze, Derrida) is unfortunately another question that cannot be treated here, and that would lead into the vicinity of Kant's last great work, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.

By giving priority to the finite over the infinite, Kerszberg articulates Kantian aesthetics and politics (the discourse on rights) as the domains where the subject experiences its own finitude with respect to other subjects. But it remains possible to reconfigure these realms as the sites where subjectivity as such (and therefore also intersubjectivity, conceived as the a priori relationality between subjects) confronts what is other to it. The latter approach to the Critique of Judgment, in its internal connection with Kant's theologico-political writings, would be the one to take should one want to establish a conversation, as interesting as it is urgent, between Kantian morality and post-phenomenological ethics: for both these doctrines, in the final analysis, attempt to think the self as other and, consequently, are required to think what is other to the subject. The latter task, as the last chapters of Critique and Totality indicate, is the achievement of the third Critique, the interpretation of which becomes essential to any future attempt to make the Critique of Practical Reason speak in a voice free of facile moralisms. If the philosophy that is nourished from idealism and phenomenology has a future, this may well consist in articulating the other of the subject by taking seriously its character as trace or semiosis. One can only hope to do justice to the discourse of morality by thematizing the ethical dimension present in the practical life of signs, in each and every speech act. The study of this dimension of language, which must be conducted simultaneously as both aesthetics and politics, is perhaps

328

VA'ITERlKERSZBERG'S CRITIQUE AND TOTALITY

the most important legacy bequeathed to contemporary philosophy by Kant's last critical work.

NOTES

1. Kerszberg speaks of "an authentically phenomenological reading of Kant's dialectic" which intends to show that "the non-immediacy of its [reason's] relation to intuition would be the vision of the otherwise concealed essence ofthe appearance" (Critique and Totality [Albany: SUNY Press, 1997], pp. 19, 20). All further citations of this work will be given parenthetically in the text. All of Kerszberg's citations from the Critique of Pure Reason are taken from the Norman Kemp Smith translation (London: Macmillan, 1929) and follow the standard 'NB' format. References to the book under review will be given parenthetically; in those instances where Kerszberg cites Kant, I will also provide a reference to Kant following the above style. Likewise, my own citations of Kant will also follow the above format.

2. "When the understanding understands something which is given immediately in intuition, Kant tells us in the Analytic, it recognizes, that is, it sees itself at work in the ordering of the immediately given manifold. When I know something, I also know myself in this something inasmuch as a trace of my own intellectual activity is visible in it. Thus, the essence of the appearance, or the appearance as appearance and no more than appearance, is concealed at all times, precisely because it can only be recognized .... Our mental appropriation of the appearance has the effect of splitting the cognitive powers into pure sensibility and pure understanding, whereas we still would like the appearance to be redoubled (i.e., to appear as appearance) so that the world itself could teach us how to make sure that it is what it is" (p. 20).

3. Cited in Kerszberg, "Husserl et Merleau-Ponty: la prose bourdonnante du monde," Archives de philosophie 59 (1996), p. 184.

4. See also Kerszberg, Kant et la Nature (Paris: Belles-Lettres, 1999) and his "Natural versus Transcendental Philosophy," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 18:2 (1995), pp. 17-61.

5. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 134.

6. "Inner sense is not, as it were, 'manipulated' by the category as it is applied to the schema. Rather, inner sense retains its infinite untouchability, because the time which is made categorial through the process of schematization can only unfold what in inner sense is always and already closed upon itself with its infinity. Mathematics provides a measure by which the failure of any infinite synthesis ... is secured in advance" (p. 40).

7. Kerszberg is quoting Kant's letter to Christian Garve, September 21, 1798, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10 (Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1902-), p. 252.

329


8. See p. 3.

9. The cosmological principle affords a "new look at the faculty of sensibility" (p. 70) because it pinpoints the exact sense in which sensibility overdetermines the understanding. "Sensibility is here endowed with some kind of power over the understanding's tendencies to inertia. In its normal sense, sensibility rather furnishes the purely material part of knowledge, that is, it is a pure receptivity by which sensible impressions may be represented (A50IB74). The ground of error is simply the action of sensibility on the operations of the understanding, and this reverses its being normally subordinated to it. This activity, of course, is precisely what determines reason to extend its conquests beyond the realm of a possible objective knowledge. It enables the understanding to know the member of the series which falls beyond the domain of already established knowledge, even in the absence of a member to be experienced as an object" (ibid.).

10. As Kerszberg also says: "there are some indications in the Critique that metaphorical expression as it relates to astronomical theory and the history of astronomy is possibly the only way of coming to grips with the main thesis of the critical method as an experiment (applicable in any context other than the moral)" (p. 62).

11. Kerszberg is the author of an important work in philosophical cosmology, The Invented Universe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

12. This is equivalent to Heidegger's understanding of Da-sein as Welterschlossenheit, where the 'world' gives itself by withdrawing, always already, as possible object of empirical experience and hence of cognition (the doctrine of truth as a-letheia).

13. In "Husserl et Merleau-Ponty," Kerszberg speaks freely about the "original horizon of the world" as "absolute foundation" (p. 185) of subjectivity, language, and appearance (pp. 188-91).

14. See p. 149 where Kerszberg speaks of the "transcendental illusion" as "appearances of appearances" and p. 150 where he speaks of the "duplication of appearance, i.e., the constitution of cosmic appearance as appearance of appearance."

15. For instance, if on p. 138 Kerszberg clearly distinguishes the "field of appearing" from the "appearances of something = x" (i.e., the transcendental object), on p. 157 he claims that "the being of nature (defined transcendentally as conformity to law) is the transcendental object, an x which makes appearance possible as such." Here the transcendental object seems to be responsible for the "field of appearing," for what "makes appearance possible as such," where before the "field of appearing" preceded the possibility of the transcendental object.

16. According to a series of Orphic fragments, the universe is nothing but the reflection in the mirror that Dionysius holds up to himself. (For instance, see Proclus, On Plato's Timaeus, 33b [II, 80, 19-24 Diehl]: "in antiquity the mirror was understood by theologians as the symbol of adequation to the intuitive perfection of the universe. That is why they say that Hephestus made a mirror for Dionysius, and that the god, looking into it and contem-

330


plating his own image, threw himself into the creation of the whole plurality." Cited from Giorgio Colli's new translation of the pre-Socratics, La Sapienza greca [Milan: Adelphi, 1997], vol. 1, p. 251.) The critique of the principium individuationis (i.e., empirical reality) found in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy can be considered both as a commentary on these Orphic sayings and as an extension of Kant's idealism. This understanding of the relation between perception, reflection and world is the opposite of the one conjured by Merleau-Ponty when he seeks to prove the existence of the world independently of the subjectivities that intuit it: "that the person over there sees, that my sensible world is also his, I know without contradiction because I am a spectator to his vision, it can be seen in the way his eyes hold on to the spectacle" (cited by Kerszberg, "Husserl et MerleauPonty," p. 191). Kerszberg comments on this passage by saying that "the doubling of myself into someone else goes together with the recognition that the presence of an other is not assimilable to the consciousness of the subject only if these two aspects are rooted in one and the same world that escapes the hold of private spheres" (ibid.).

17. A dispassionate look at the progression of the natural sciences, from Copernican astronomy to contemporary bio-genetics, would no doubt validate this nihilistic reading of empirical reality: from substance to function, and from function to metaphor, the progress of empirical science by itselftends to dissolve reality in its objecthood.

18. Kerszberg pursues the connection between a phenomenological construal of the question of the world and the problem of semantics in "Husserl et Merleau-Ponty," but this problem is unfortunately only alluded to in the book under review.

19. In Critique and Totality 'sense' and 'meaning' are used interchangeably and this is a problem, for it is symptomatic of the porous nature of the distinction between 'ontic' and 'ontological' in its phenomenology. Nevertheless, one could easily distinguish these in Kerszberg's phenomenological vocabulary, if only one were to take 'sense' as the semiotic or signifying function that is inseparable from 'pure appearing', and one were to take 'meaning' as referring to the semantic or propositional function that is inseparable from 'appearance' as the appearance of an object.

20. For an exemplary reconstruction of this tradition, see Alberto Coffa, The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

21. Kerszberg is quoting from Kant's Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987); hereafter cited parenthetically as CJ, followed by the marginal page numbers that refer to volume five of the Akademie Ausgabe.

22. In aesthetics Kerszberg finds "the only point in critical philosophy where the excess of sensible experience over any possible determination is actually mastered by means of thought is a special kind of idea, the aesthetic idea . ... The fundamental fact of cognition, namely, that thought cannot but go outside of itself in order to determine something-even if nothing is actually given in an experience-receives a sensible expression, because this outside is now the medium whereby communication between subjectivities takes place" (p. 234).

331

Documents

Phenomenology in Kant’s Idealism