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ISSN 1918-7351
Volume 3 (2011)
Movements of the World:
The Sources of Transcendental Philosophy
Iain Hamilton Grant
This new dimension of post-Kantian thought must now be made to bear
fruit beyond the most general formulations of the basic idea, with the
twofold aim of providing foundations for natural inquiry and of securing
philosophy a real basis in nature.1
A great difference is made to contemporary accounts of transcendental
philosophy if the question is raised as to how far down its inquiries into the
sources of cognitions extend. It is true that the transcendental deduction is
designed to reset the orbit of metaphysics around experiences rather than things;
and although there are exceptions, neither Kant nor his successor
transcendentalists ceased to extend the inquiry into the ultimate grounds of
cognition insofar as these are made possible not by objectives, but by what
exceeds their being, that is, their formation. Indeed, it is in thinking sources, in
descendence, that transcendental philosophy most achieves its objects.
Transcendental philosophy does not consist only in the derivations of
concepts legitimately applicable in experience and in demarcating the thresholds
beyond which epistemological title is accordingly forfeit. It is true that
transcendental derivability rearticulates the problem of ground such that it no
longer subtends, as it did for Leibniz, the ascent from physics to metaphysics,2
but takes the plane thus achieved to supplant the depth from which it was raised,
and to ground the series of now only appearing natures on an Abgrund, an abyss
or the unground.3 Yet “reason demands the unconditioned” (KRV A564/B592)4
1
Klaus Stein, Naturphilosophie der Frühromantik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004), 25.
Leibniz, Principles of Nature and Grace, §7: “So far, we have spoken as simple physicists; now
we must rise to metaphysics, by making use of the great principle . . . that nothing takes place
without sufficient reason” in trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, in G.W. Leibniz Philosophical
Essays (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 209-210.
3
“Unconditioned necessity, which we so urgently require as the last bearer of all things, is for
human reason the true abyss [Abgrund]”, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (KRV), trans.
Norman Kemp Smith (London and New York: Macmillan, 1929) cited according to the A/B edition
pagination as per standard, at KRV A613/B641. Otherwise, Kant’s works are cited according to
2
1
that is necessary if grounds are to be thinkable at all. Ground cannot ‘precede’
the grounded since it cannot, by definition, be an element of experience, and only
such elements can appear temporally ordered. But rather than concluding
ontological nullity from epistemological partition, it is only by “carrying the
empirical synthesis [of conditions] as far as the unconditioned” that reason “is
enabled to render it absolutely complete; and the unconditioned is never to be
met with in experience, but only in the idea” (KRV A409/B436). No deduction
of grounds can achieve what reason demands, but reason cannot cease
demanding it. Nor without the idea of an unconditioned ground can grounds be
identified at all, since a ground is only a ground if it has a consequent, but not if
it is itself consequent upon something else. “Absolute completeness” in the
synthesis of conditions is therefore possible only on the basis of the
transcendental idea which is nothing for experience. Accordingly, as it is the
purpose of the antinomies to show, completeness in objective conditions of the
possibility of objects cannot be achieved. By allocating the parts of judgments to
their originating faculties and to transcendental ideas, transcendental logic is not
equivalent to the distribution of epistemological title or to answering the question
quid juris, since it divides the unconditioned from the conditioned, into what can
and what cannot be synthesized into spatiotemporal objects. Accordingly, the
distribution effected by transcendental logic extends the conditions of possibility
which, as the paralogisms demonstrate, cannot be subjectively completed.
Neither, as the Antinomies symmetrically show, can objective conditions be
completed. What therefore underpins incompleteness is unconditioned; or,
incompleteness is absolute for transcendental philosophy.
Being unconditioned, no experience thereof is possible. This means in
particular that the role of the unconditioned ground of all determination cannot be
schematized as prior or posterior to the series of conditions within which alone
time has purchase. Nor therefore can conditions be schematized as accidents of a
basic substance, nor again as standing in any causal relation to antecedents, since
this would be to apply the understanding’s pure concepts of relation—substance
and accident, along with mechanical and ultimately reciprocal causality—to a
domain to which sense has no access. It is for this reason that the transcendental
turn in philosophy has been considered a subjectivist supplanting of the
‘dogmatic’ concept of ground, a metaphysics capable of abandoning the temporal
and causal depth from which objects emerge. It is from this that the emphasis on
“making” (Fichte), “manufacture” (Kant) or on the transcendental as a “new
dimension” (Husserl) 5 becomes focal both for practical and speculative
transcendentalism.
Kants Werke, Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (AK), 29 vols (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1902).
4
See also Kant, Critique of Judgment, hereafter KUK, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1987), AK V, 401: “Reason is a power of principles, and its ultimate demand aims at the
unconditioned.”
5
Fichte claims the core attitude of transcendental philosophy is “the world is something made.”
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, System of Ethics, hereafter Ethics, trans. and eds. Daniel Breazeale and
2
Notwithstanding the ubiquity of these practicist or productivist accounts,
the “descendent” dimension, the pursuit of grounds, remains a vital element of
transcendental philosophy, and involves transcendental philosophy in a
systematic inquiry into causes that leads, ultimately, from metaphysics back to
physics. Thus it leads on the one hand to the system of incomplete or regulative
reciprocity presented as organic form in KUK § 65-6, where causes are
reciprocally effects and effects causes, forming a series maintaining this
“dependence both as it ascends and as it descends” (KUK AK V, 372).6 On the
other hand, it leads to the system of the complete community of force and
activity ‘deduced’ as the ether in the Opus postumum (62ff, AK XXI, 206ff). Yet
Kant’s “second comment” on the table of categories to the categories of relation
(KRV B110-111) had already laid the groundwork for both, or set reciprocity
down as the Urform of all philosophy, according to Schelling’s reading of it.7
The problem is this: either causal reciprocity goes all the way down, remaking
the cosmos into the Platonic “cosmic animal;” or it is “regulatively” limited, as
Kant maintains in KUK, by how we must think of organic beings; or again it is
constitutively limited, as Fichte, Kant’s self-appointed heir in transcendental
philosophy, seeks to show in ‘Propositions for the Elucidation of the Essence of
Animals.’8 Yet animalization is not the only possible consequence of extended
reciprocity. Kant’s ‘Ether Proofs,’ for example, hypothesize a dynamic
reciprocity of force and activity as the possibilizing condition of our acting in the
world, albeit at the cost of antinomizing time: either complete reciprocity of
cause and effect eliminates priority and posteriority altogether; or the ascendingdescending reciprocity series hypothesized in KUK has no beginning or end. In
both cases, natural history becomes a geography of arrested time. 9 “True history
is nothing but a continuous geography” (AK IX: 161).
Yet since transcendental philosophy originates from the project of the
Universal Natural History and from the “fruitlessness” of “all attempts to prove
the principle of sufficient reason” (KRV A783/B811), we take transcendental
philosophy to be the attempt to complete the former, cosmogonic project given
Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 334. Kant writes, “He who would
know the world must first manufacture it.” Immanuel Kant, Opus postumum, AK XXI, 41,
hereafter OPP, trans. Eckart Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 240. Husserl
discusses the transcendental as Kant’s “new dimension” in Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of
European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, hereafter Crisis, trans. David Carr
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 11, 8-121.
6
Kant provides the classic statement of organic reciprocity at KUK, AK V, 374: In thinking of a
“natural purpose” we must “think of each part as an organ that produces the other parts (so that
each reciprocally produces the other,” and constitutes “an organized and a self-organizing being.”
7
F.W.J. Schelling, “On the Possibility of a Form of all Philosophy,” in Schellings Werke (hereafter
SW), 24 vols., ed. K.F.A. Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1856-61), band I, 107; trans.
Fritz Marti, in The Unconditional in Human Knowledge (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press,
1980), 52.
8
Fichte, “Sätze zur Erläuterung des Wesens der Thiere,” in Fichtes Werke, ed. I.H. Fichte,
hereafter W, 11 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971), at W 11, 362-7.
9
In his 1802 Lectures on Geography, Kant writes “true history is nothing but a continuous
geography” (AK IX, 161).
3
the latter obstacle, the indiscoverability of ground. This is why Kant insists that
“in transcendental philosophy, the only questions to which we have a right to
demand a sufficient answer bearing on the constitution of the object, and from
which the philosopher is not permitted to excuse himself on the plea of their
impenetrable obscurity, are the cosmological” (KRV A478/B506).
These cosmological-epistemological concerns recall Schelling’s accounts
of transcendental philosophy’s “derivative” character with respect to the
philosophy of nature which alone is capable of grounding it. “There is an
idealism of nature, and an idealism of the I. To me, the former is the original, and
the latter the derivative,” he writes, the reason for which “lies in things” (SW IV,
83-4). 10 From Fichte to McDowell, protests against naturalism in philosophy
have assumed that were it conceded that nature precedes consciousness, or that
“it is not because there is thinking that there is being, but because there is being
that there is thinking,” 11 then the transcendental project, the hallmark of
philosophical modernity, must be abandoned. I contend that such a view stems
from an insufficient naturalism, since for any such position, either all existents
are instances of nature, or they are not. In the latter case, naturalism affirms itself
ontologically parochial and so on its own testimony cannot provide a complete
account of being. If it is claimed that any existent not part of nature does not
therefore exist in reality, then such a naturalism finds itself in the odd position of
affirming a domain of existents that have it in common that they do not exist.
Accordingly, the only adequate naturalism must be able to account for all
domains of being, including the transcendental. Our question therefore is what a
naturalistic account of the transcendental must look like. Moreover, since
philosophers are more accustomed to considering transcendental philosophy as
proto-phenomenological (Husserl), as epistemology (Allison, Korsgaard)12 or as
reducibly practical (Fichte, Brandom), recasting it in terms of the twin demands
for (a) the unconditioned ground, and (b) sufficiency in explanations of object
constitution with cosmological scope, seeks to reopen the naturalistic and
ontological dimensions of that philosophy to contemporary scrutiny. In doing so,
moreover, we will present transcendental philosophy, following Ernst Cassirer,
10
It is this repeatedly emphasized difference that Hegel omits from his symmetrical, antecedenceindependent account of Schelling’s two “grounding sciences” in the Differenzschrift, Trans. Walter
Cerf and H.S. Harris, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy
(Albany: SUNY, 1977), 161: “In transcendental philosophy, the subject, as intelligence, is the
absolute substance and nature is an object, an accident. In the philosophy of nature, the absolute
substance is nature, of which the subject, intelligence, is only an accident. Now the higher
standpoint is not one that suspends one or the other of the two sciences, and asserts that the subject
alone, or the object alone is the Absolute. Nor is it a standpoint which mixes the two sciences
together.” That Hegel’s analysis here proceeds by way of the first of the categories of relation—
substance and accident—provides an index of his own extension of reciprocity to nature and
transcendental philosophy, betraying the fundamentality of transcendentalism for him.
11
F.W.J. Schelling, The Grounding of Positive Philosophy. The Berlin Lectures, trans. Bruce
Matthews (Albany: SUNY, 2007), 203n (SW XIII, 161n).
12
For a discussion of epistemological as opposed to ontological accounts of Kant’s transcendental
philosophy, see Eric Watkins, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality, hereafter Causality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 317-326.
4
as the attempt to “attain knowledge of the forces that generate this knowledge
and have brought it forth.”13
Three Forms of Transcendentalism
From Kant may be derived three accounts of transcendental philosophy. The first
presents that philosophy as answering the question quid juris or deducing the
entitlement of a judgment to empirical application in accordance with the
originating faculty. It asks “of the origin of the modes in which we know objects,
in so far as that origin cannot be attributed to the objects” (KRV A55-6/B80).
This is a grounding account of transcendentalism, as it posits a sequence of
grounds that always terminate in the transcendental ideal, or the concept of an
absolute ground. 14 As Kant says (KRV A566/B594), “the existence of
appearances, which is never self-grounded, requires us to look around for
something different from all appearances, that is, for an intelligible object in
which this contingency may terminate.” It is also a heterogeneity-preserving
transcendentalism, insofar as an absolute ground can never be in principle
available to experience and the schematization of which would therefore fall foul
of transcendental philosophy’s proscription of transcendent or dogmatic claims.
As a consequence of this division, nature, in so far as it is phenomenal, is raised
above what grounds appearances, which ground must accordingly be other than
nature; what grounds nature is, moreover, “an abyss for human reason” so that,
taken strongly, the unground of human reason is the ground of a nature that is
now phenomenal only, transfigured into an accident of the subject. The
heterogeneity so preserved therefore severs nature from its appearing and its
causing.
Accordingly, transcendental logic, which has as its function to consider
origins as arising other than from objects, subjects questions of grounds to
transcendental relocation in order that they can no longer be uncritically affirmed
13
See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic
Forms, trans. John Michael Krois (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 150.
14
For a discussion of the concept “absolute ground” in Kant’s pre-critical and critical works, see
Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism in
German Idealism, hereafter All or Nothing (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3543, 204-211. Franks notes that Kant’s most discussed transcendental arguments—the
Transcendental Deduction and the Refutation of Idealism—“do not argue for an unconditioned
condition,” although the deduction of freedom in the Critique of Practical Reason does (All or
Nothing, 207). But he also notes (p. 43) Kant’s overt articulation of the question in the first
Critique: “If one asks . . . whether there is anything different from the world which contains the
ground of the world order . . . then the answer is: without a doubt” (KRV A696/B725). Franks here
interprets Kant as arguing that, “the requirement that genuine groundings terminate in an absolute
is an unavoidable demand of reason,” yet this seems to contravene the ban on dogmatic assertions
concerning what does not figure in experience (All or Nothing, 46). The solution, argues Franks, is
that Kant can assert that such an absolute ground exists, but not what it is or in what way. It is
difficult, however, to see how asserting that X exists necessarily does not amount to characterizing
how it exists. Despite this, it is clear that the concept “transcendental ground” plays a role in Kant’s
critical speculative philosophy as well as in practical.
5
as empirical or dogmatic. Moreover, the division between unconditioned and
conditioned grounds, and the reducibly transcendental concept furnished by the
former and the interminably regressive series entailed by the latter, withdraws
causality from the domain of ‘natural history’ in order to distribute it between
antinomy-generating experience and blind, rational assertion. Thus critical
transcendentalism works ultimately, as the Copernican revolution expressly
signalled, to replace objects with the subject as the ground qua insuperable
source of rational legitimacy.
This is especially the case, as Robert Brandom has claimed, 15 insofar as
such a subject articulates such necessity simply by a commitment to reasoning
entailed by the fact of reasoning. In reasoning, that is, a subject seeks to integrate
the reasons for an action or judgment into the range of other reasons and
commitments that subject claims to hold. To do so is, Brandom claims, “to
synthesize an original unity of apperception.”16 Insofar as something original is,
at first sight at least, not something that requires prior synthesis, the cited
characterization further indicates the “recollective” function of reason he calls the
“rational reconstruction” of the community of reasons such as Brandom finds
recommended in Hegel.17 Accordingly the subject’s apperceptive capacity is not
so much “original” in the sense of first as it is originative or productive of
precisely those integrative and recollective synthesis which, as a ‘spontaneous’
act, is the ground in turn of the subject’s actual apperceptions, or ‘realizations’ of
this fact. Reason is a commitment to reasons evident only in reasonings which
are responsible, the subject realizes, for the subject articulated as related claims
and commitments.
While Brandom’s version of transcendentalism overtly acknowledges its
debt to Kant and Hegel, its rational bootstrapping has a Fichtean genealogy. For
Fichte as for Brandom, the primacy of the practical is evident not only in the
content of overtly held normative commitments, but also in the rational practises
that underlie such commitments. Attending reflectively to the constitution of
such practises, Fichte demonstrates, entails the foundations of transcendental
philosophy lie not in anything given, but only in what is made. This productivist
transcendental philosophy is exemplary of philosophical activity in general as
Brandom and many other idealists consider it.18 One paradigm of this is provided
in Fichte’s account of the ‘Duties of the fine artist’ in The System of Ethics,19
where the artist is said to “make the transcendental point of view the ordinary
point of view.” The practical lesson concerning transcendental philosophy the
artist furnishes is the transcendental lesson that “the world is something made”
15
What follows glosses pp. 9-16 of Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009), hereafter Reason.
16
Brandom, Reason, 14.
17
Ibid., 16
18
See the discussion of Brandom and the forms of idealism occurring in contemporary philosophy
in Jeremy Dunham, Iain Hamilton Grant and Sean Watson, Idealism. The History of a Philosophy
(Stocksfield: Acumen, 2011).
19
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, System of Ethics, hereafter Ethics, trans. and eds. Daniel Breazeale and
Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005).
6
and only from the ordinary point of view is it given. The artist therefore takes
made-ness as given, as should the transcendental philosopher. 20 This differs
greatly from the role of art in Schelling’s philosophy, for which art must equally
withdraw from and return to nature 21 —where it must take leave of the blind
operation of the living idea in order to form something which then becomes, to
use Malevich’s concept, an “additional element” in nature, a new component in a
suprematist ontology. 22 At the same time, the emphasis this version of
transcendental philosophy places on its productivity opens another dimension of
that philosophy’s important and underexploited novelty.
While these two accounts of transcendental philosophy dovetail to a
certain extent, the first terminating in a disjunction and the second in a
production monism, a third transcendentalism shares the grounding agenda of the
first with the production monism of the second. It is one that, in Kant’s own
philosophy, sought to articulate the disjunction between the objects of
speculative and those of practical philosophy as occupants of one and the same
dynamic field. Although explicitly discussed most extensively in the work known
by Kant’s contemporaries as Transition from the Metaphysical Foundations of
Natural Science to Physics but known since 1920 as the Opus postumum,23 its
provenance is evident in changes in Kant’s philosophy of chemistry signalled in
his introduction to S.T. Sömmering’s Über das Organ der Seele (1796). 24
Crucially, it reconceives the movement of the transcendental not as vertical flight
from immanence, so to speak, nor as orbit, but rather as transition. In place of the
search for grounds or for a substrate, Kant recasts transcendental philosophy as
the production of transitions; instead of bodies being accorded primacy both in
his physics and metaphysics, they are considered generated, late products of
forces. Such a recasting has important consequences regarding the categories of
relation in the first Critique’s table of categories (KRV A80/B106), as we shall
see. For the moment, however, we note that transition transcendentalism asserts
the community of force and activity as necessary to a systematic metaphysics,
and generates the concepts necessary to such a community in order to form
experience such that from it such a community is derivable in turn. It thus
20
Fichte, Ethics, 334.
Compare Schelling’s account in his lecture “Concerning the Relation of the Plastic Arts to
Nature,” trans. Michael Bullock in Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling (London: Faber and
Faber, 1957), 321-364 (SW VII, 289-330).
22
See Kasimir Malevich, “An Introduction to the Theory of the Additional Element in Painting,” in
The World as Non-Objectivity, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Edmund T.
Little (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976), 147-194.
23
Schelling gives this title in his 1804 obituary for Kant, SW VI, 8. It continued to be used until
Erich Adickes’ Kants Opus postumum was published in 1920 as Kant-Studien Ergänzungsheft 50,
trans. Eckart Förster, Opus postumum (OPP) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
24
AK XII, 33-5. See also Mai Lequan, La chemie selon Kant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, Alexander Rüger, 1995); idem, “Brain Water, the Ether, and the Art of Constructing
Systems,” in Kant-Studien 86, 26-40; Michael Friedmann, Kant and the Exact Sciences
(Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 1992), 264-290; and Martin Carrier, “Kant’s Theory
of Matter and His Views on Chemistry,” in Eric Watkins, ed., Kant and the Sciences (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 205-230.
21
7
integrates the bootstrapping productivity hitherto ascribed solely to pure practical
reason, and later to be exploited by Fichte and Brandom alike, with a solution to
the problem of grounding that drives the first Critique. In so doing, transition
transcendentalism offers an alternative to that production transcendentalism for
which, as for Brandom, “all transcendental constitution is social institution,”25
without sacrificing antecedent nature to the epistemological impenetrability that
critical transcendentalism’s division of grounds condemns it. The cost of this
accommodation, however, is that transcendental philosophy must now rest
content with reason and nature settling symmetrically opposite one another such
that neither may be derived from the other, forsaking therefore the derivation
quest that underlies transcendental logic. As Brandom has it “the insight that
even natures have histories” must be balanced by “rationality . . . imposing the
obligation to construe histories as revelatory of natures.” 26 The question,
therefore, is whether transition transcendentalism could in fact resolve the
problem of the relation of phenomenal to non-phenomenal nature, a problem that
has given currency to transcendental approaches amongst philosophers of
quantum mechanics, 27 given that it entails the elimination of the question of
origin from transcendentalism’s remit. What this means, in short, is that the
transition between physics and metaphysics is accomplished at the cost of causal
relations underlying reason. To this extent, transition transcendentalism remains
a critical solution to the problem of nature and freedom: nature, that is, remains
phenomenal not solely such that time and space follow and therefore causality
takes place only within the field of appearance, but also such that it is felt.
Transition transcendentalism, therefore, expands the domain of the aesthetic to
furnish the foundations of reciprocity or community between activity and force.
As a result, objects and subjects become reciprocally constitutive such that there
neither are nor can be entities or events without their being capable in principle
of impinging upon the sensitive faculties of a subject, just as the “formal
principles of the phenomenal universe . . . are the schemata and conditions of
everything sensitive in human cognition” (AK II, 398).28
Kant’s account of cosmological as aesthetic cognition will be echoed in
two alternative solutions Cassirer will give in the late 1920s to the problem of
form, to the problem, that is, of “how it is possible for the form of being to be
pictured in the form of knowledge:” either by an analytic relation obtaining
25
Brandom, Articulating Reasons. An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 34.
26
Reason, 112.
27
See, for example, Bernard d’Espagnat, Physics and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006) and the references cited by Gabriel Catren in “A Throw of the Quantum Dice Will
Never Overturn the Copernican Revolution,” in Collapse V (2009): 453-499, especially M. Bitbol,
P. Kerszberg and J. Petitot, eds., Constituting Objectivity: The Transcendental Approaches of
Modern Physics (Berlin: Springer, 2009).
28
As Kant says in his “Inaugural Dissertation,” trans. and ed. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote,
Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 391, hereafter
Theoretical.
8
between them, as in Parmenides’ “thinking and being are the same,”29 or by the
causal or inductive series typified by Empedocles’ “We see Earth by means of
Earth, Water by means of Water,” or by the knowing being a part of the known.30
Regardless of which version of identity Kant had assumed in the Inaugural
Dissertation, since all of these three accounts of the identity of cosmos and logos,
of nature and reason, whether analytic, inductive-causal, or mereologicalparticipatory, are precisely rejected in the first Critique, what must be explained
by transcendental philosophy is how they come to be divided in the first place.31
From the Categories of Relation to the Problem of Form
In the B edition of KRV Kant adds two comments concerning the Table of
Categories and its relation to the “scientific form” of philosophy, or the
“momenta of a projected speculative science,” he considers that table to provide.
The Second Comment notes that “the third category in each class always arises
from the combination of the second category with the first.”32 Thus, in terms of
the class of quality, Reality is primitive, Negation derived, and Limitation their
product; similarly, Totality is the product of Plurality derived from Unity; and
Community or Reciprocity the product of Substance and Accident and Cause and
Effect. The categories of Modality are antinomic, and do not concern us here.33
29
I use the simplest translation of Parmenides’ Fragment B3, as offered by E.D. Phillips,
“Parmenides on Thought and Being,” Philosophical Review 64 (1955): 546-60, as avoiding either
an objectivist (“it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be”) or the subjectivist (“to
think is the same thing as to be”) accounts. See F.M. Cornford’s discussion of this problem in Plato
and Parmenides (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1939), 33-4 and 34n.
30
Empedocles Fragment 109, as cited and discussed by Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms, vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, trans. and eds. John Michael Krois and Donald
Phillip Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 194-5. Schelling first advances
Empedocles’ thesis as both causal and inductive, characterizing the principle as “like produces
like,” in his 1806 “Preliminary Characterization of the Medical Standpoint on Naturphilosophical
Principles,” SW VII, 281. See also F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of
Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (Chicago: Open Court, 1986), 8, hereafter Freedom, where
the emphasis is on the roots of recognisability lying in nature: “Whosever takes physical theory as
his point of departure . . . knows that the doctrine ‘like is recognized by like’ is a very ancient one. .
. . But, alas, those who are unsympathetic towards science traditionally regard it as a kind of
knowledge which is quite external and lifeless like conventional geometry.”
31
This is the problem discussed at length in the “Introduction” to Schelling’s Ideas for a
Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), 9-42 (SW II, 11-56), hereafter Ideas.
32
KRV B110. See Schelling own remarks to this effect in his discussion of Plato’s concept of cause
in his 1794 Timaeus, ed. Hartmut Buchner (Stuttgart Bad-Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994),
27-8, 69-72, and in his “Treatise Explicatory of the Idealism in the Science of Knowledge,” trans.
Thomas Pfau, in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory. Three Early Essays by F.W.J. Schelling
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 71-2 (SW I, 356-7).
33
See my “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism: The Antinomies of Transcendental
Naturalism,” Collapse V (2009): 415-451, for a discussion of the categories of modality and their
importance in post-Kantian philosophy.
9
We owe to Schelling the “astute point” 34 that the categories of relation—
Substance and Accident, Cause and Effect, and Community or Reciprocity (KRV
A80/B106)—are less one class of categories amongst others than the original
from which the others are derived. In consequence, Schelling claims that the
“forms of thought” identified in the Table of Categories can in fact be reduced to
one Urform which “grounds all the others.”35 Two questions will arise from this:
first, how far from Kant’s understanding of the categories is Schelling’s
intervention? And second, what consequences follow from the account Schelling
makes explicit?
1. Kant’s account of the pure concepts of the understanding in general
(KRV A77-80/B102-5) does not present them as given but as products of
pure syntheses following an order. A synthesis is pure when the
manifold thus synthesized contains nothing empirical, as for example the
manifold of space and time. It is an “effect [Wirkung]” of the
imagination. There is a distinct order to pure synthesis: first must be the
manifold of pure intuition; second the imagination synthesizes this
manifold, that is, “goes through it in a certain way, takes it up, and
connects” it; “the concepts that give unity to this pure synthesis” are
third, and “consist only in the representation of this necessary synthetic
unity.” The B edition comment therefore implicates this synthetic order
in the production of the pure concepts of the understanding themselves. It
is as though the syntheses are themselves derived from an analysis of the
pure manifold of space (distribution and individuation) and time
(sequence).
In other words, the Second Comment follows through the implications of the
necessity of synthesis in the production of any cognition whatever. Schelling is
correct in ascribing fundamentality to the Categories of Relation exactly and only
if the syntheses can be understood causally, exactly as the description of
synthesis as an “effect [Wirkung] of the power of imagination” (KRV A78/B103)
does. In this regard, Kant produces the outline of a transcendental account of
transcendental concept production. That is, if the pure manifold of intuition is
itself sufficient to furnish the material for the categories, then their synthesis
produces cognition of the formation of forms of knowing (concepts), rather than
knowledge of experience, or of what Kant calls “Nature.” Not all transcendental
arguments are therefore concerned to demonstrate the subjective source of the
34
See Franks, All or Nothing, 85, n.1, for a discussion of Schelling’s “astute point” concerning the
original or foundational role of the categories of relation not only with respect to the table of
categories at KRV A80/B106, but also with respect to the form of transcendental philosophy in
general. Franks cites Schelling’s first essay, “On the Possibility of a Form for All Philosophy,”
hereafter Form, trans. Fritz Marti in F.W.J. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge.
Four Early Essays (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 52 (SW I, 107).
35
Forms 52 (SW I, 107).
10
faculties, and not all a priori space and time is formed according to the world of
experience.
2. As to the consequences of the fundamentality of relation, they follow the
implications of this causal-transcendental account of concept production.
The first of these concerns the role of dynamics as the “grounding
science” of philosophy that Schelling’s first edition Introduction to the
Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature generates, and its implications for
grounding science, or the science of grounds, in general. The second then
concerns the implications of a dynamic ground for concept production,
for the emergence of philosophical form, and thus for the range of
possible objects of transcendental philosophy as such.
Both the above accounts emerge from considerations of form that are not
themselves merely formal precisely because they are concerned with the question
of the formation of form. It is transcendental to the extent that an argument may
be accounted transcendental just when it (a) rises above its content to (b) inquire
after the conditions of that content. Precisely such an inquiry is undertaken by
Schelling’s Introduction to the Ideas, and it is from this transcendental inquiry
that it follows that the science of grounding cannot not be a naturephilosophy.
The precise manner in which the problem of nature inflects transcendental
philosophy concerns the necessity of priority. The manner in which
transcendental philosophy inflects the philosophy of nature consists in (a) what
follows from the extension of transcendental arguments from tracking cognitions
to their apperceptive grounds to problematizing the grounds of apperception; and
(b) how ideation, if generated, invests world.
The Introduction forms a continuous argument from which the entire
basis, form, and problems of a “grounding science” is to arise.36 It addresses the
possibility of separation, the nature of freedom, the constitution of matter, the
causes and the consequences of confusing a transcendental with a dualistic
account of the emergence of concepts, under the rubric of the problems which a
philosophy of nature has to solve. Following an initial statement on the theme of
why it is that philosophy (a) must arise because (b) an answer to the question of
what it is cannot be given immediately, the argument begins by asking, “How a
world outside us, how a Nature and with it experience, is possible” (SW II, 12,
Ideas 10). Because implicit in this manifestly transcendental question is the
separation between world and representation [Vorstellung], 37 and because this
separation has not itself been derived, Schelling asks after its conditions. The
36
“My object, rather, is first to allow natural science itself to arise philosophically
[philosophischentstehenzulassen], and my philosophy is itself nothing else than natural science.”
Ideas, 5 (SW II, 6).
37
Harris’ and Heath’s translation consistently gives “idea” for both Vorstellung and Idee. That the
text of the Introduction is an extended examination of the presuppositions of transcendental
philosophy and what is necessary in order to ground that philosophy remains entirely unclear from
the translation as a result. I have therefore amended the translation accordingly.
11
separation between world and representation must be made if nature, regarded as
mechanism, cannot be held responsible for the production of my representations;
it can be made if there can be “no native sons of freedom,” which turns out
therefore to supply an uncaused separation. But how, if freedom is uncaused, i.e.,
steps outside the causal sequence of mechanism, can it step back into it in order
to effect anything within it? If an uncaused cause cannot in turn cause effects in
what cannot affect it, then such a cause can only cause effects within a world that
must henceforth be separated from the mechanically causal one.
This is where transcendental philosophy ends up if it denies the relation
between nature and representation [Vorstellung]: “intellect and thing inhabit two
worlds, between which there is no bridge,”38 wasting mental power against an
imaginary world. Power that is not wasted is therefore directed against a world
which has influence upon minds. Accordingly, between mind and world “no rift
must be established; contact and reciprocal action must be possible between the
two,”39 making the world a community of forces, just as follows from making the
Categories of Relation fundamental.
Yet two things obstruct this one world account: the first is that if
representations and world are of the same, mechanical kind, so that the latter
causes the former, then “they precede representations.” If things precede
representations and so can’t be represented, we can never know them. Since,
however, I do represent, I ask how this is possible. In so doing, I “raise myself
above the representation” and thereby “survey representing itself and the whole
fabric of representations beneath” me. Hence arises the concept of myself as
noumenal, as something that “has being in itself [Seyn in sichselbst],” but at a
cost: in that “I adopt a position where no external force can reach me,” I exempt
myself from the world, so that “the two hostile beings mind and matter
separate”40—not, of course, in reality, but only as regards how I represent myself,
i.e., transcendentally. Conversely, transcendentalism cannot consist in world
invention on dynamic grounds.
The second obstacle concerns the theory that the matter that underlies
nature and therefore my representations is inert. If so, then it must be caused, and
these causes must lie outside it. Alternatively, matter causes, in which case it is
false to consider it “inert,” since it “has forces.”41 It is obvious however, argues
Schelling, that to say ‘matter has forces’ is not to explain anything, since if
matter has forces, then these are mere accidents of matter and do not inhere
necessarily in it, so that we retain the inert concept of matter and have no
conception of how the one interacts with the other. Perhaps forces are, as the
Newtonians say, “implanted” in matter; but what would this “implanting” that is
neither force nor matter be, and how could it take place? For we “know only how
38
J.G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), hereafter Science. References are first to Fichtes Werke (W), 11 vols., ed.
I.H. Fichte (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971), at W I, 436, Science 17.
39
Ideas, 10-11 (SW II, 13).
40
Ideas, 13 (SW II, 16).
41
Ideas, 20 (SW II, 26).
12
. . . force itself works against force; but how effects can be produced on
something which originally is not force, we have no conception at all.”42
Schelling’s “result” is that the separation to which I “raise myself” is a
separation that is itself transcendental rather than actual or wirklich. That is, it
must be an ideal separation that arises derivatively from a community of
substances without which representing would not be possible at all. Yet as an
ideal separation, its derivation from the nature of which it is a product is actual.
In this sense, Schelling’s arguments constitute a transcendental derivation of the
transcendental itself not as an artefact of a subjectivity, but of nature. Hence the
Introduction’s triumphant conclusion:
For what we want is not that Nature should coincide with the laws of our
mind by chance . . . but that she herself, necessarily and originally, should
not only express but even realize, the laws of our mind, and that she is, and is
called, Nature only insofar as she does so.43
Moreover, it is clear that the identity presupposed in this productivist account of
how nature realizes the laws of mind is of the inductive-causal or Empedoclean
rather than the mereological or part-whole sort that is often presupposed by and
for Romantic philosophies of Nature.44
What then are the consequences concerning the form of philosophy if the
Categories of Relation are basic? Firstly, we must reconceive form as forms of
motion, as inherently spatiotemporal rather than reducibly spatial, i.e., as
stemming already from the synthesis of pure intuition. Hence Schelling’s
provision of the categorial forms consequent upon dynamics being the
“grounding science” of a philosophy of nature:
1. Quantitative motion, which is proportional only to the quantity of
matter—gravity;
2. Qualitative motion, which is appropriate to the inner constitution of
matter—chemical motion;
3. Relative motion, which is transmitted to bodies by influence from
without (by impact) mechanical motion.
It is these three possible motions from which natural science engenders
and develops its entire system.45 Where for Kant and Fichte, organic form issues
from the reciprocity of cause and effect, of substance and accident, for Schelling
42
Ideas, 17 (SW II, 24), translation mine.
Ideas, 41-2 (SW II, 55-6).
44
See “The Natural History of the Unthinged,” chapter 4 of my Philosophies of Nature after
Schelling, 2008, hereafter Nature, for a discussion of linear and nonlinear accounts of the
Grundform problem.
45
Ideas, 22 (SW II, 28). It is important to note that this table of categories already pre-empts
Schelling’s derivation of mechanism from the community of forces he calls “organization”—
importantly, not organism—in F.W.J. Schelling, On the World Soul, trans. I.H. Grant, Collapse VI
(2010): 66-95, at 90-92 (SW II, 348-350).
43
13
it provides the system of motions from which natural science—the thinkability of
nature—arises. If the form of science is his focus, this is because a science is (a)
derivative and (b) therefore derived from something. But it is precisely the
ground of all derivation that the research into forms is supposed to supply.
We are left, then, with a problem, not unlike that of assigning priority to
function or to structure in morphology: 46 how are we to conceive of a
fundamental form, the form of all science and a fortiori of the “grounding
science,” given the insuperability of motion? How is fundamentality to be
exhibited if it entails, as does a causal understanding of the origins of our
Vorstellungen, an equally insuperable precedence?
What Must Transcendental Philosophy Become?
On Fields, Forms and Seinssphären
We noted above the two uses that Kant made of extended reciprocity, that is, the
organic and the dynamic. The definition of “the form of an object” as consisting
in “being bounded [Begrenzung]” (KUK AK V, 244) provides a certain insight
into the problem of form as regards objects: the object’s being bounded entails
that it be set apart from or set off against its ground. Objects, that is, possess or
inhere in what Husserl, in his discussion of Kant in the Crisis, calls Seinssphären,
“spheres of being”. Although it is not a Kantian term, it introduces the concept of
sphere or “field” into transcendental philosophy. By it, Husserl means to indicate
what may otherwise be called the ontic domains of the special sciences. Kant
attributes “actual validity” to the “truths and methods” of those sciences precisely
to the extent that they enter into the constitutive fabric of transcendental
philosophy. The particular sciences of which Kant makes such use, most clearly
in the B edition KRV, are chemistry and mathematics, specifically, arithmetic
and geometry. Chemistry to the extent that Kant acknowledges that he owes to it
the experimental method that stipulates synthesis as the productive corollary of
analysis,47 such that “Where the understanding has not previously combined, it
cannot dissolve” (KRV B130). Arithmetical propositions cease to exemplify
analytic truths and come instead to embody synthetic judgments (B15f); and
geometry as an a priori science rather than, as would be demonstrated in the
following century, consequent upon a posteriori assumptions concerning the
nature of space (B40-41). As Jules Vuillemin has noted, transformations in the
sciences make the determination of the conditions of possible experience “the
46
“The contrast between the teleological attitude, with its insistence on the priority of function to
structure, and the morphological attitude, with its conviction of the priority of structure to function,
is one of the most fundamental in biology.” E.S. Russell, Form and Function: A Contribution to the
History of Animal Morphology (London: John Murray, 1916), 78. See also Timothy Lenoir, The
Strategy of Life (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982).
47
See the remarks on Stahl in the B edition Preface (Bxiii and n) and the footnote concerning the
“experiment of pure reason” at Bxxi.
14
most elusive concept in transcendental philosophy” 48 which, in the present
context, demonstrates the effects of the composition of the transcendental from
Seinssphären. Anything given, that is, determines the transcendental as the
transcendental of what is given: the double demand of chemical epistemology,
that an object remains unknown even after analysis should synthesis not follow
it, makes transcendental philosophy productivist to the extent that synthesis may
equally precede as succeed analysis. The knowable and the produced become
coextensive, but at the cost of the unknowability of production.
If Seinssphären are not beings themselves, but rather penumbra of
objects’ relations, they would be determined transcendentally in accordance with
the categories of relation: accidents to the substances that are objects, which
latter are the effects of causes belonging amongst these relations, and into which
therefore they enter relations of community. To the extent that the categories of
relation are considered dynamically, that is, as resulting in such community
however, objects are their causal relations, making substance and accident
inseparable. Two problems can be derived from this. First, if form is the being
bounded of an object, and the synthesis of the categories resets those boundaries
around the causal histories and futuritions49 amongst the reciprocities constituting
that object, the boundaries that determine an object’s form must now lie at the
termini of the series, opening form once again to the problem of the “infinite
extent of creation” Kant investigates in the Universal Natural History.50 Second,
are the dynamics by means of which the transcendental object, whatever its
extent, is produced, part of that object or its Seinssphäre or not? If the object is to
be an object, and thus be bounded against a ground, then these dynamics cannot
be part of it; if, on the other hand, the object includes its relations, then its
production must be included, but can never produce an object. If there are
objects, that is, then form must either be bounded against its ground once and for
all, such that the form in which objects are given already includes
spatiotemporal determination; or the forming of form is not settled, so that the
form of all forms, the Urform, is itself formless in the sense of producing all
forms, and therefore the form of all forms to the extent that it is the form of their
production.
I will make one further remark with regard to these problems which, it is
worth recalling, have as their source the application of Kant’s Second Remark on
the Table of Categories to the Categories of Relation. To the extent that these
problems remain determined by the substance-accident metaphysical fundament
48
Jules Vuillemin, “Kant’s ‘Dynamics’: Comments on Tuschling and Förster,” in Eckart Förster,
ed., Kant’s Transcendental Deductions:. The Three ‘Critiques’ and the ‘Opus postumum’ (Stanford
CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 247.
49
In “The Question Whether the Earth is Aging, Physically Considered” (AK I, 193-213), Kant’s
solution is not to seek age in the earth’s past, but in its capacity for a future. “Age is not a measure
of past time, but of a projected future duration” (AK I, 195). He borrows Leibniz’s term
futuritionem from the latter’s Theodicy § 36-7 in the “New Elucidation of the First Principles of
Metaphysical Cognition” (AK I, 400), trans. in Theoretical, 23.
50
Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, trans. Stanley L. Jaki
(Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), 148-161, AK I, 306-322.
15
that grounds the emergent reciprocity at the summit of the Categories of
Relation, the introduction of Seinssphären brings with it the prospective
transition from substance to field ontologies. At the same time, however, it alerts
us to a problem regarding the determination of these spheres of being with regard
to their adequacy vis-à-vis the morphogenesis of fields: why would beings and
their relations all form spheres? What would account for the geometrical
homogeneity? The only form fields qua fields are determined in accordance with
is the form from which they are determined. As Vuillemin notes, fields vary in
strength according to its producer and its object such that two fields may not be
‘isomorphic’ with respect to one another.51 If what is given with respect to the
formation of any field is the strength of the forces involved in its production, then
what is given is precisely the producing of that field, so that, once again, what is
given determines the transcendental as the transcendental of what is given. What
is given but never available is, in every case, what cannot be apperceptively
reproduced because it exceeds this as its source. In this sense what is given is
formless production.
Yet what is transcendental in transcendental philosophy is the “rising
above” what is given to transform what is given into something taken or made.52
Transcendental philosophy has always been concerned with the production of
objects. It is exemplary, therefore, of transcendental philosophy that it can accept
both that “the ultimate knowledge from experience is this, that a universe exists;
this proposition is the limit of experience itself;” and “that a universe exists is
only an idea [Idee],”53 where the orbit of subject around object and object around
subject is itself propelled into a “dependence both as it ascends and as it
descends” (KUK AK V, 372), into a series without end.
Insofar as it does this, transcendental philosophy takes from what is
given, insofar as what is given is its own source, its “being derived.” In
consequence, transcendental philosophy is the inquiry into the form of all forms,
or into the unconditioned ground, just as reason demands. Since as we have seen,
no form can be ascribed to all forms if form is determined as Begrenzung, as
“being bounded,” the form of all forms cannot have bounds, and “being
bounded” must be a rejection of form. The form universal with respect to all
forms is, in consequence, the form that encompasses the derivation of the derived
as the ground of the produced, the morphogenetic field, in other words, from
which the object arises, rather than the Seinssphären deriving from objects.
“Being derived,” not “being bounded,” is the form of all form, and in order that
being derived is possible, it is necessary that the origin of form is a dynamic
51
“Kant’s introduction of the ether could be interpreted as an inkling of the notion of a field. Fields,
however, are useful because they allow us to analyse forces into what produces the field and what it
acts on. . . . But this principle, which applies exactly to electrical forces, is not exact for gravity if
the field is too strong.” Vuillemin, Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, 246.
52
In part I am here drawing on Jean-François Lyotard, Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime (Paris:
Galilée, 1991), 222, and the profound analysis there of the role that thought makes of a nature
rendered “unstructured or formless” by the discord of the faculties.
53
Ideas, 18 (SW II, 24).
16
problem such that the form thus originated is dynamic in character. The form of
all form, the product of transcendental philosophy as such, is itself derived
necessarily from what precedes it, from what it cannot produce. And since it
must contain “being derived” in itself, the form of all form is grounding precisely
insofar as it refers to a ground producing transcendental philosophy, a nature that,
insofar as it produces, is precisely this producing of forms, amongst which is the
form of all forms that is realized only through transcendental philosophy. How
else might this happen? This is why we may say, with Schelling, that what is
common to all forms is not this or that boundedness (spherical, hyperspherical,
planar, etc.), but rather, insofar as they are produced at all, motion: “the essence
of absolute identity, insofar as it is the immediate ground of all reality, is
force.”54
The transcendental is the in itself formless form of all forms that is
always posterior to the unconditioned that generates it and is its ground, and that
augments being in turn.
54
SW IV, 145, translation modified from Michael Vater, “F.W.J. Schelling. Presentation of My
System of Philosophy,” in Philosophical Forum, 32 (2001): 371. Vater translates Schelling’s Kraft
at the end of the sentence as “power.”
17