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dd 1
COLLAPSE V
Prospects for Post-Copernican
Dogmatism: The Antinomies of
Transcendental Naturalism
Iain Hamilton Grant
For it is not because there is thinking that there is being, but
rather because there is being that there is thinking.
Schelling1
[T]he fundamental error of dogmatism [...][is to] search outside
the I in order to discover the ultimate ground of all that is in
and for the I.
Fichte2
What is the dogmatism against which transcendental
philosophy launched its Copernican revolution? Since
Kant’s invention of the thing-in-itself, we are apt to think
dogmatism in terms of an access problem,3 and therefore
to conclude that any philosophy is dogmatic that, through
insufficient attention to its own conditioning, denies that
there is an access problem. Yet characterising dogmatism as
1. F.W.J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. K.F.A. Schelling, 14 vols (Stuttgart und
Augsburg: Cotta, 1856-61), vol. XIII, 161 n., trans. B. Matthews, The Grounding of
Positive Philosophy (New York: SUNY, 2007), 203 n.
2. J.G. Fichte (1971) J.G. Fichtes sämmtliche Werke (hereafter: W), ed. I.H. Fichte, 8 vols
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), vol. IV, 174, trs. D. Breazeale and G. Zöller, The
System of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 165.
3. For an excellent recent account of the access problem, see Chapter One of Quentin
Meillassoux’s After Finitude (London: Continuum, 2008).
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COLLAPSE V
Grant – Post-Copernican Dogmatism
access-positivism does little to define it positively, providing
only a formal regression to inhibit speculative or rational
egress beyond reflection, as the Fichte citation above makes
sun-clear. Nevertheless, the Fichtean egress-prohibition has
latterly been posited as a positive criterion of ‘philosophically effective’ transcendental arguments:
Schelling’s claim above: it is a transcendental argument in
that it stipulates what conditions the possibility of thinking
without reducing these conditions to any given or particular
domain of objects. Hence Kant’s having noted, with regard
to Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, that ‘transcendental idealism is realism in an absolute sense’ (1993,
255). In accordance with this absolute realism, Schelling’s
thesis stems from his ontological naturalism:7 being is the
necessary condition of thinking and not vice versa.
The point to note is that neither claim is inherently
inconsistent, both are transcendental, and accordingly, that
transcendental positions are themselves open to counterpositions. Given this, in what follows, we shall argue that transcendental philosophy is itself a dogmatism8 on the basis of
the applicability of three criteria specified by transcendental
The transcendental argument must not invalidly infer objective
and or unrestricted conclusions from purely subjective and/or
merely parochial premises.4
Again, following Fichte, this criterion is expressly designed
to counter any claim to a ‘transcendental naturalism’, which
comes close, as Bell claims, to an oxymoron.5 It follows
from the above criterion that the only valid transcendental argument is one that demonstrates and asserts the
parochial subjectivism of its premises. What is striking is
that the double assertion of subjectivity and parochialism is
asserted against the rest of being or nature. We must ask,
however, whether the Bell-Fichte subjective parochialism
thesis does in fact exhaustively define transcendentalism,
so that to reject the one is to dismiss the viability of the
other, and thus to assert that there can be no other basis for
transcendental philosophy. If this is so, transcendentalism’s
parochialism is as much the grounds for its rejection as for
its putative value. If not, we cannot conclude a transcendental naturalism to be oxymoronic.6 Consider for example
what Kant sought by way of the ‘ether proofs’ in the Opus postumum, trans. by E.
Förster, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 62-99. Transcendental
philosophy is then defined as the ‘system of ideas, which are problematic (not
assertoric) in themselves […] but must nevertheless be thought as possible forces
affecting the rational subject’ (ibid., 250), necessitating a dynamica generalis (ibid., 224)
to ground both the system of objects and the system of ideas.
7. ‘Anything whose conditions simply cannot be given in nature, must be absolutely
impossible’ (Schelling, Werke III, 571). Although it could be argued that the ‘positive
philosophy’ of the Grounding is incompatible with the ‘negative philosophical’ theses
of the System of Transcendental Idealism, this would be to disguise the extent to which
Schelling’s naturalism is precisely the kind of ‘absolute realism’ with which Kant
identifies ‘transcendental idealism’.
6. The prospect of a naturalistically grounded transcendental philosophy is precisely
8. As indeed Fichte claims in the ‘Review of Anesidemus’: ‘the [Dogmatic] system holds
open the possibility that we might someday be able to go beyond the boundary of
the human mind, whereas the Critical system proves that such progress is absolutely
impossible, and it shows that the thought of a thing possessing existence and specific
properties in itself and apart from any faculty of representation is a piece of whimsy,
a pipe dream, a nonthought. And to this extent the Humean system is sceptical and
the Critical system is dogmatic – and indeed negatively so’ (W I, 16; Eng trans. by
D. Breazeale in Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1988, 70-71).
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4. D. Bell, ‘Transcendental Arguments and Non-Naturalistic Anti-Realism’, in R.
Stern (ed.) Transcendental Arguments. Problems and Prospects (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999),189-210, at 192.
5. Ibid., 194.
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COLLAPSE V
Grant – Post-Copernican Dogmatism
philosophers for the identification of dogmatism. These
criteria are:
Since (3) can itself be construed as satisfying (2), it may
be subsumed under it. Our point in its separate statement
is threefold. Firstly, to highlight the crucial role played
by ‘things’ not only in the determination of the nature
of dogmatism, as above, but also in the development of
transcendental philosophy’s ontology, for which the concept
‘thing-in-itself’ asserts only the most elementary determination of existents; but transcendental philosophy is itself
dogmatic when it concludes that therefore that they exist at
all, and that this is how being is, as when, for instance,
it asserts that ‘concepts of relation presuppose things
which are absolutely [schlechthin] given, and without these
are impossible’.12 That is, the condition of possibility of
objects of intuition – even of their distinction – is simply
‘things absolutely given’. At this point, transcendental
philosophy, whose ‘supreme concept […] is the division
into the possible and the impossible’, can avoid dogmatic
ontological commitment only at the cost of antithesis:
C.1 Logical: the susceptibility of dogmatic systems to
internally consistent but antinomic counter-systems.9
C.2 Metaphysical: the attempt to provide a ground or cause
of beings external to the I, or to satisfy the Principle of
Sufficient Reason;10 and
C.3 Ontological: the thesis that beings are things or
objects.11
9. ‘[Reason, in] its dogmatic employment [...] lands us in dogmatic assertions to
which other assertions, equally specious, can always be opposed’ (Kant, Critique
of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan, 1958, B22-3; hereafter
CPR). ‘[I]n the dogmatic procedure of reason […] unavoidable contradictions of
reason with itself have long since undermined the authority of every metaphysical
system yet propounded’ (CPR: A10/B23-4). In ‘the dispute between the idealist and
the dogmatist […] reason gives us no principle of choice [… and n]either of these
two systems can directly refute its opposite’ (Fichte W I, 429-432; trans. by P. Heath
and J. Lachs, The Science of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982;
hereafter SK, 12-14).
10. While metaphysics, ‘as science […] has to deal […] only with itself and the
problems which arise entirely from within itself, and which are imposed upon it by
its own nature, not by the nature of things which are distinct from it’ (CPR: B23),
‘dogmati[sm] claim[s] acquaintance with the constitution of the object fuller than that
of the counter-assertion’ (CPR: A388). See also Fichte W IV, 174; System of Ethics, trans.
and ed. by Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 165: ‘[T]he fundamental error of dogmatism [...][is to] search outside
the I in order to discover the ultimate ground of all that is in and for the I’. Wayne
Martin confirms this diagnosis in his Idealism and Objectivity: Understanding Fichte’s Jena
Project (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 37: ‘dogmatists are not identified
simply as those who assert that things-in-themselves exist; rather they are those who
assert that things in themselves constitute the ground of experience’.
Thus the object of a concept to which no assignable intuition
whatsoever corresponds is = nothing. That is, it is a concept
without an object (ens rationis), like noumena, which cannot be
reckoned among the possibilities, although they must not for
that reason be declared to be also impossible.13
The ‘things absolutely given’ on which the objects of
intuition depend are neither possible nor impossible, and
11. ‘[D]ogmatic enquiry concern[s] things (objects), [whereas] a critical enquiry concern[s]
the limits of my possible knowledge’ (CPR: A758/B786). Dogmatism thus ‘requires
an insight into the nature of the object such that we can maintain the opposite of what
the proposition has alleged in regard to this object [...] claiming acquaintance with the
constitution of the object fuller than that of the counter-assertion’ (CPR A388). ‘Any
philosophy is [...] dogmatic, when it equates or opposes any thing to the self as such;
and this it does in appealing to the supposedly higher concept of a thing (ens), which
is thus quite arbitrarily set up as the absolutely highest conception. In the critical
system, a thing is what is posited in the self; in the dogmatic, it is that wherein the
self is itself posited’ (Fichte W I, 119-120; SK, 117).
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12. CPR: A284/B340.
13. CPR A290/B346-7.
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COLLAPSE V
Grant – Post-Copernican Dogmatism
therefore not susceptible of a transcendental investigation
that cannot deny their existence. The very essence of the
dialectic, or the unavoidable errors entailed in reason’s own
nature, we might say. Yet as Kant’s naturalistic inquiries
continue (the analysis of fundamental forces in the Metaphysical Foundations, for example; that work’s assuaging of Kant’s
doubts concerning chemistry as a science, and its possible
applicability to emergent neuroscience; or more explicitly,
the ‘ether proofs’ from the Transition from Metaphysics to
Physics),14 this possible-impossible determination that there are
things becomes increasingly open to dispute: perhaps things
are not ‘absolutely given’, but forces assume ontological and
explanatory priority over things. At issue here is the susceptibility of parochial (in Bell’s sense) transcendentalisms to
naturalistically driven ontological change. By criterion (1),
then, the revealed contestability of a thing-based ontology
demonstrates the transcendental philosophy’s propensity
for dogmatism.
The second reason for the initial separation of condition
(3) from (2) is to accommodate a recent argument made
by Wayne Martin concerning Fichte’s identification of
dogmatists not ‘simply as those who assert that things-inthemselves exist’ but rather as ‘those who assert that thingsin-themselves constitute the ground of experience’ or, in other
words, that ‘the I is a thing’.15 Such arguments – properly
parochial, in Bell’s sense – highlight the implicit assertion
that an argument is transcendental if and only if it avoids
dogmatic assertion and therefore susceptibility to counter-assertion (‘things-in-themselves do/do not exist’). Such transcendentalisms therefore tend to propose a metaphysics
without ontology. The third and final reason for the initial
distinction is therefore to raise the question as to whether
this is possible. Dogmatisms, by contrast, argue that any
consistent metaphysics is an ontology, and any consistent ontology is
a metaphysics.
Consider a metaphysical problem such as causality.
When Kant examines self-organisation in the third Critique,
he makes precisely the claim that its ubiquity in experience
cannot warrant any assertion or denial of its existence in
nature. Yet this ‘problematic’ address to natural causality
nevertheless finds that it is ‘necessary for reason to think’
that ‘matter can receive more and other forms than it
can get through mechanism’.16 Rational necessity avoids
ontological commitment if and only if it does not entail
that the theses concerning matter and causation so necessitated are not theses concerning matter and causation at all,
but only reason; or, in other words, if the thesis, although
rationally necessary, is contradictory. If the rational necessity
so identified is not to be contradictory, then they are indissociably ontological theses. In other words, a resolutely
14. See Kant, Aus Soemmering, Über das Organ der Seele, Ak. XII, 33-7, trans. by Anulf
Zweig as ‘From Soemmmering’s On the organ of the soul’ in Immanuel Kant, Anthropology,
History and Education, ed. by Gunter Zöller and Robert Louden (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 219-226; and Alexander Ruerger, ‘Brain water,
the ether, and the art of constructing systems’, Kant-Studien 86, 1995: 26-40. The
Transition between Metaphysics and Physics was the working title by which what became
Kant’s Opus postumum was contemporarily known (cf. Schelling SW VI, 8).
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15. Martin, Idealism and Objectivity, op. cit., 36-7.
16. I. Kant, Kants gesammelte Schriften (Henceforth Ak.), ed. Königlich Preussischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Georg Riemer, later Walter de Gruyter,
1900-), vol. V, 411; trans. W.S. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1987).
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COLLAPSE V
Grant – Post-Copernican Dogmatism
problematic metaphysics must either satisfy the principle
of sufficient reason, or break the law of non-contradiction.
Neither, for the same reason, can ontology be separated
from metaphysics unless the latter does not concern being
at all. If it does not, it can only concern not-being, and
is then not metaphysics, but meontology. If it does, then
the distinction is untenable. Or ontology is not concerned
with being, but with the reason-of-being, its logos. Such an
account must either again face the problems encountered
by Kant’s ‘rational necessity’, or the reason-of-being must
become the sole focus of ontological enquiry. This is why
many of the immediate post-Kantians understood the transcendental undertaking as a ‘critique of natural cognition’17
or of the ‘natural antithetic’;18 that is, an inquiry into the
nature of reason itself.
It is precisely this that Schelling’s thesis about being
denies. For it asserts not only that being is the necessary
condition of thinking, but also that being is first necessary in
order that there be thinking; being is the cause and ground
of thinking, so that the Sufficient Reason for thinking is
indistinguishable from ontology. Schelling’s is, on this
reading, a transcendental dogmatism, specifying conditions
of possibility by satisfying criteria (1) and (2) above. As to
the non-separable criterion (3), Schelling will indeed deny,
following from the force-ontologies developed by early
experiments in electromagnetism, that ‘things’ can provide
an adequate ontological basis for either the natural sciences
or for speculative naturalism. If this is taken to mean that
any ontological thesis resting on forces rather than things is
for that reason non-dogmatic, then the difference between
transcendental and dogmatic naturalisms rests on contingent
differences in the ontologies of the natural sciences.
The dilemma initially facing a transcendental naturalism
is accordingly that it must either assert determination by
contingent entities of whatever nature (things, forces) or
assert parochialism and deny that even in those of its theses
that putatively address nature, no such address takes place
insofar as the ‘nature’ in question is phenomenal only. The
problem with this perhaps over-familiar claim, for those
of us steeped in Kantian lore, is that there is an implicit
assertion that nature as it is in itself is separable from nature
kat’ anthropon, as Kant says – nature as it appears for us. For
this asserts in turn both that phenomenal nature is not nature,
which therefore transcendental philosophy does not and cannot
address. This is exactly the problem that Kant encounters
when he attempts the transition, firstly, from the dogmatic
naturalism of his pre-critical works; and secondly, from
metaphysics to physics in his final accounts of transcendental philosophy. If the Copernican revolution does not
resolve this problem, then the problems Kant encountered
remain ours: How, if at all, is a nondogmatic account of the
relation of reason to nature possible?
17. Schelling, Werke XI, 526.
18. CPR: A407/B434.
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1. Every Consistent Dogmatism is a Naturalism
How then is the Critical system different from what was
previously described as the Humean one? The difference
consists entirely in this: the Humean system holds open the
possibility that we might someday be able to go beyond the
boundary of the human mind, whereas the Critical system
proves that such progress is absolutely impossible, and it shows
that the thought of a thing possessing existence and specific
properties in itself and apart from any faculty of representation
is a piece of whimsy, a pipe dream, a nonthought. And to this
extent the Humean system is sceptical and the Critical system
is dogmatic.19
If thetic be the name for any body of dogmatic doctrines,
antithetic may be taken as meaning not dogmatic assertions
of the opposite, but the conflict of the doctines of seemingly
dogmatic knowledge in which no one assertion can establish
superiority over the other.20
It would be a matter of considerable irony that a
Copernican revolution in philosophy should have put paid
to the project of a Universal Natural History – were it true. It
does not, however; yet this is precisely what it is considered
to have achieved: with having put an end to worries about
how to adequate intellect to thing, since things must now
instead comply with intellect. Yet how is any ‘unthinged’
naturalism to survive the revolutionary injunction? Are
such ‘things’ reducibly those that are intellect-compliant, or
19. Fichte, Werke I, 16; Early Philosophical Writings, ed. and tr. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1988), 70-71.
20. CPR: A420/B448.
Grant – Post-Copernican Dogmatism
are all things so? Must they be made so? Of necessity or by
reconstruction? If the occasion for the revolution is that it
has proven impossible to integrate reason with nature as it
is in itself, what becomes of the problem of the integration
of reason and nature after it?
It is immediately evident that not only does the problem
of nature not disappear from the transcendental philosophy,
but also that, as the critical project progresses, it resumes the
central role it enjoyed under Kant’s precritical or dogmaticnaturalist period. The engagement with chemistry in the
first Critique, which persisted long afterward;21 the problem
of the teleological judgment of nature with regard to the
actuality of self-organising beings in the third. But nothing
makes this cohabitation of dogmatic naturalism with
transcendental philosophy more immediate than Kant’s
final, unfinished project, known under the title Transition
from Metaphysics to Physics,22 with its ether deductions and
its attempt to square transcendental deduction with
ontogenesis.23
21. For a survey of Kant’s chemism, see M. Lequan, La chemie selon Kant (Paris: PUF,
2000). On Kant and the sciences more generally, see M. Friedman, Kant and the
Exact Sciences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), E. Watkins (ed.) Kant
and the Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and M. Friedman and A.
Nordmann (eds), The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: MIT,
2006). For a substantial philosophical account of the persistence of naturalism in
the critical philosophy, see J. Edwards, Substance, Force and the Possibility of Knowledge
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), and for the naturalism in the Opus
postumum, E. Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2000). For my own account of the conflict between somatism and field physics
in Kant’s philosophy of nature, see Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, 2nd edition
(London: Continuum, 2008).
22. Schelling, Werke VI, 8: ‘In the year 1801 he [Kant] was still labouring, in those
few hours in which his power of thinking remained free, on a work: Transition from
Metaphysics to Physics which, had age allowed him to complete it, would doubtless have
been of the greatest interest.’
23. What I have in mind here is the Transition’s discussions of ‘how matter becomes
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Grant – Post-Copernican Dogmatism
Allowing that the Copernican revolution was expressly
undertaken to eradicate (at least Kant’s) dogmatic
naturalism; and acknowledging also that the problem Kant
held dogmatism incapable of resolving is the integration of
reason and nature into a single and consistent philosophical system; then the purpose of the critical philosophy is to
prepare a Transcendental resolution of reason and nature.
The beginnings of this can be seen in the first Critique’s
account of nature as ‘the dynamical whole of all appearances’,
as opposed to ‘world’, which designates ‘the mathematical sum-total’ thereof.24 Dynamics is invariably the means
whereby the Transcendental philosophy undertakes to
avoid the fate of dogmatic naturalism without eliminating
nature. Force-fields provide, by disputing criterion (3),
above, egress from dogmatism without sacrificing nature,
while the dynamical categories enable a reconstruction of
reason as itself a dynamical and productive system. In the
overt transcendental naturalism of the ether deductions,
it will finally integrate freedom with natural causality in
a single, necessary and a priori, physical medium, long
after the failure of the third Critique’s analogical attempt to
achieve the same end. Of the ether, Kant writes that
necessity of its a priori presupposition, I now prove a priori in
the following manner.25
the question is whether it is to be regarded, not just as a hypothetical material, in order to explain certain appearances, but a
real world-material – given a priori by reason and counting as
a principle of the possibility of the experience of the system
of moving forces [...] The existence of this material, and the
a physical body’ (Kant, Ak. XXI, 476-7). I discuss this in Philosophies of Nature after
Schelling (London: Continuum, 2008): 59-81.
24. CPR: A418-9/B446.
25. Kant, Ak. XXI, 216; Opus postumum, ed. and tr. Eckhart Förster (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 67.
26. Kant, Ak. XXII, 326; 1993: 110.
27. E. Förster in Kant, Opus postumum, xi, citing Ak.XXII, 138-9; Opus postumum: 46.
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With this, Kant seems to condemn his physics to
the same fate as his geometry: changes in the sciences
apparently undermine the a priori necessities Kant ascribes
to their theses. At the same time, therefore, the transcendental project in general is opened to charges of dogmatism
on the grounds of susceptibility to antinomic dispute. Yet
the reason why Kant argues for the a priori necessity of
the ether as world-material is this: that dynamics composes
being from actions, not things. As Kant writes, ‘the moving
forces of matter are what the moving subject itself does to
[other] bodies’.26 The twofold gambit of this claim, as of
any transcendental naturalism, is that the transition from
things to actions is sufficient both to avoid dogmatic traps
concerning antithetical ontologies of things-in-themselves
(are such disputes only possible between rival claims as to
the nature of things?); and to integrate reason and nature
into a single system susceptible to determination by free
and self-constitutive acts (ontogenesis, categorial synthesis,
etc.), now cast as causes. The problem is whether the transcendental determination of nature is in fact a determination of nature
at all, i.e., a determination ‘at once a priori and physically
conditioned’,27 or merely a determination of the nature of
Reason. If nature is not so determined, then things are not
intellect-compliant, and dogmatism’s inconclusiveness or
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revisability becomes the price to pay for the failure of the
Copernican experiment. If it is, then the question is either:
What kind of nature is it that is directly determinable in
accordance, as Kant twice stipulates, with the ‘power of
desire’ as cause?;28 or: What is the nature of reason such
that it can so determine nature?
It is freedom and/or reason, or their necessary combination,
as Fichte was first to point out, that denaturalises as a
precondition of nature as an objective of transcendental
philosophy. Accordingly, transcendental anti-naturalism
has its avatars: Heidegger, for instance, in On the Essence of
Ground (1929), comparing the dogmatic with the transcendental concept of ‘world’ in Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation and
first Critique, respectively, concludes in strict accordance with
the replacement of the dogmatist’s things with actions, that
‘world never is, but worlds’.29 Thus ‘there are reasons’ why,
Heidegger insists, ‘nature is apparently missing [from this
account], not only nature as an object of natural science, but
also nature in an originary sense’:30 nature is not original,
but only appears as a determination of world for a form of
attention paid to it.
While Heidegger’s remains a Copernican transcendentalism, Husserl’s 1934 work ‘Foundational Investigations
of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature:
The Originary Ark, the Earth, Does not Move’ reverts
to a more Cartesian, or Archimedean strategy. In a reprise
of the first of the antinomies of pure reason,31 the essay
begins the search for a ‘a transcendental theory of natural
scientific knowledge’32 by arguing against the ‘absurdity –
indeed, the absurdity’ of naturalistic accounts of the origins
of world, and for a world that is instead constituted by
and for experience. Nature and its causes are not things,
but ‘elaborated intuitions’, and for experience, indeed, as its
condition, the Earth, even as a body, does not move. The
paradox is alarming: what began with the Copernican
revolution has returned, on transcendental grounds, to
Ptolemaic geocentrism, to a ‘restitution of a sense of the
earth as ground beyond Copernicus’, as Merleau-Ponty
describes Husserl’s undertaking.33
Such transcendentalisms amplify their Kantian
inheritance, and in particular the problem of whether a transcendental naturalism can supply a naturalism at all. Asked
following these latter examples, the answer would clearly be
in the negative. For precisely this reason, the post-Kantian
fate of the transcendental project reveals something about
that project in turn – its susceptibility to antinomy:
28. Kant, Ak. V, 9n: Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L.W. Beck (New York: Macmillan,
1993) and Ak.V 177 n., Critique of Judgment, op. cit., 16.
29. Heidegger, ‘Kant’s Thesis about Being’ in M. Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. W.
McNeill (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), 126.
30. Ibid., 370 n. 59.
ANTITHESIS
Thinking
precedes the
Nature it thinks
31. CPR: A426/B454ff.
32. E. Husserl, ‘Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of
the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth, Does not Move’ (1934) in
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, trans. and ed. Leonard
Lawlor and Bettina Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 117131: 117)
33. Ibid., 67.
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THESIS
Nature precedes
the thinking it
spawns
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What is important to note is that the antinomy revolves
around the problem of ontological as opposed to conscious
priority, just as Schelling’s thesis stipulates. A naturalistic
ontological solution will therefore think this priority in
terms of physical conditionality, while a transcendental
anti-naturalist solution will, by contrast, think it in terms of
the co-natality of Ich and nicht-Ich (Fichte), of experience and
its ground (Husserl), or of the priority of projection over
world (Heidegger). We will return to its solutions below.
passage, nature clearly conditions thinking; while in the
post-Copernican period, the causes of such impediments
are found to ‘aris[e] from the very nature of our reason’.36
Thus we have a first element, corresponding to criterion (1)
above, in a definition of the dogmatism it is the Copernican
project to supplant:
The antinomy or ‘natural antithetic’ echoes either side
of the transition in Kant’s own work from dogmatic to transcendental naturalism. For example, the Universal Natural
History provides reasons for the critical project that are
themselves naturalistic:
If one looks for the cause of impediments, which keep human
nature in such a deep debasement, it will be found in the
crudeness of the matter into which his intellectual [geistige] part
is sunk, in the unbending of the fibres and in the sluggishness
and immobility of fluids which should obey its stirrings. The
nerves and fluids of his brain deliver only gross and unclear
concepts [...].34
In this light, Kant’s post-Copernican attention is
directed not away from nature, but towards the nature of
‘self-constituting’ reason’,35 a ‘natural dialectic’. In the above
34. Kant, Ak. I, 356; 1981: 187.
35. ‘Transcendental philosophy is the autonomy of ideas, insofar as they form,
independently of everything empirical, an unconditioned whole, and reason
constitutes itself to the latter as a separate system’ (Kant, Ak. XXI, 79; Opus postumum,
op. cit., 246). This is also clear from CPR, where Kant defines critical philosophy as
that ‘science [which] has to deal […] only with itself and the problems which arise
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D.1 Any philosophy is dogmatic whose theses can be antinomically
disputed.37
It follows from this that, if transcendental theses are
susceptible to antinomy, their assertion is dogmatic. Since
they are so susceptible, then it cannot be concluded that the
Copernican revolution entails the elimination of dogmatism,
which is why naturalism remains a problem for transcendental philosophy.
A second element towards a definition of dogmatism
may also be drawn from Kant’s neuro-anatomical critique
of human reason. It is clear from the above passage, as
well as from other works of the 1750s and 60s, that the
dogmatism at issue during the critical revolution is indeed
any metaphysics that might support a dogmatic naturalism.
On one view, the critique of such naturalism attests to
Kant’s conversion to the ‘experimental method’ in the
consideration of nature, leaving all a priori reasonings
regarding nature blinded by their want of experimentally derived intuitive content. On another, however, it is
entirely from within itself, and which are imposed upon it by its own nature, not by
the nature of things which are distinct from it’ (B23).
36. CPR: A669/B697.
37. ‘[The] dogmatic employment [of reason …] lands us in dogmatic assertions to
which other assertions, equally specious, can always be opposed’ (CPR: B23).
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not empty concepts, but the determination of causes that
presents the problem. The Universal Natural History is clear
that the causes of conceptual confusion are the materials
from which the brain is composed. ‘Dogmatism in its pure
form is materialism’, wrote Hegel.38 It is not that this must
necessarily be wrong, but rather that the determination of
the specific causes of contingent things is held to determine
reason in turn. That is, if a contingent neural architecture
(others are conceivable) is responsible for unclear concepts,
then reasoning concerning concepts is duly inflected by
such neurology. This is why the first Critique stipulates that
while the proper means for ‘determining the limits of [all]
possible knowledge’ are a priori, ‘when my ignorance is
contingent [zufällig] it must incite me […] to a dogmatic
enquiry concerning things (objects)’39 – precisely because
it is the principle of the Copernican revolution that it is
not objects that determine thought, but rather thought that
determines objectality. Fichte makes the point explicitly:
dogmatism that, though often overlooked, remains a crucial
dimension in the struggles of the post-Kantian philosophers
against the mechanistic materialism then migrating from the
natural sciences into philosophy (hence Fichte’s constant
complaints against Spinoza).
It is by the principle of causality that dogmatism wishes to explain
this nature of intelligence in general, as well as its particular
determinations.40
This is extremely telling: not only does it clarify the reasons
for Kant’s apparent abandonment of the geological, cosmological and mechanical investigations that preoccupied him
during his precritical period, but specifies a dimension of
38. G.W.F Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, ed.
and trans. by H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf (New York: SUNY, 1977), 126.
39. CPR: A758/B786.
40. Fichte, Werke I, 436; The Science of Knowledge, ed. and tr. Peter Heath and John
Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 17.
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D.2 Any philosophy is dogmatic for which (physical) contingencies
determine the possibilities of reason
It should be noted that D.2 adds to C.2 and 3, insofar as
the latter stipulate that dogmatism locates the ground of
being in things, which D.2 recasts in terms of determinability. Thus, rather than rejecting the world of physically
contingent states of affairs, transcendental naturalism will,
on the above grounds, argue for the primacy of actions
determining by free causes over objects determined in
accordance with necessity.
2. The Necessary Indeterminacy of Being
The claim that dogmatism is in fact dogmatic naturalism
is supported not only by Kant’s overt assertion that
dogmatism always entails the assumption of the principle of
(efficient) causality in its explanations,41 that is, of the things
41. See, for example, Kant’s attempts to determine the causes involved in a putative
alteration of the Earth’s axial rotation (Ak. I, 183-191) and of ‘The Age of the Earth,
physically considered’ (Ak. I, 193-214). Critically reflecting on this proceedure in
the Antinomy of pure reason, Kant writes: ‘the assertions of the thesis, on the other
hand, presuppose, in addition to the empirical mode of explanation employed within
the series of appearances, intelligible [intellektuelle] beginnings; and to this extent
its maxim is complex. But as its essential and distinguishing characteristic is the
presupposition of intelligible beginnings, I shall entitle it the dogmatism of pure
reason’ (CPR A466/B494). Finally, in the Critique of Judgment, Kant notes: ‘Now as
we talk about the syustems that try to explain nature as concerns final causes, we
must note carefully that the dispute among all of them is dogmatic – i.e., the dispute
is about objective principles concerning the possibility of things, whether through
causes that act intentially or only those that act unintentionally’ (Ak. V, 391).
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(cosa) which ground experience, but also by subsequent antidogmatist philosophers, chief amongst whom is Fichte. Yet
the rejection of causal explanations in metaphysics is only
one element of a transcendental naturalism designed to
replace it; an additional, ontological part of this programme
derives from Kant’s critique of the primacy of the law of
non-contradiction, initially presented in the New Elucidation
(1755). Proposition I of that work states that ‘there is no
unique, absolutely first, universal principle of all truths’.42
The ground of this argument stems from the problems into
which basic ontological propositions fall if the law of noncontradiction is held to fulfil the office of such a principle.
Drawing on Parmenidean propositions (what is, is; what is
not, is not), Kant argues that any truly simple proposition
must be either affirmative or negative. If the one, then
not the other, and so neither can be universal, since an
affirmative proposition cannot be the principle of a negative
one, and vice-versa. Even the proposition that might be held
indirectly to prove the above assertion false, namely, that
‘everything of which the opposite is false, is true’,43 is itself
an affirmative rather than a negative proposition; just as its
antithesis, that is, ‘everything of which the opposite is true,
is false’, is a negative one. Since neither can be derived from
its antithesis, neither could have a foundation save in itself,
from which it follows that there are two propositions, rather
than one unique one. Moreover, from the combination
of these two propositions the principle of identity is
derived. Kant states this concisely in the following terms:
‘whatever is, is, and whatever is not, is not’.44 The principle
of identity is synthetic and necessarily true, but not a priori,
insofar as the principle maintains the difference between
being true of reason and being true of things.
The pertinence of Kant’s adoption of this Parmenidean
couple45 consists in its abandonment of a single first principle,
and its replacement with two such principles on the one
hand, and their derived synthesis in the Principle of Identity on
the other. This synthetic aspect is further borne out when
we consider the place of existence [Dasein] and not-being
[Nichtsein] in the first Critique’s Categories of Modality.46
TABLE OF CATEGORIES
I Of Quantity:
Unity
Plurality
Totality
II Of Quality:
Reality
Negation
Limitation
III Of Relation:
Of Inherence
and Subsistence
Of Causality and
Dependence
Of Community
(Reciprocity)
IV Of Modality:
PossibilityImpossibility
ExistenceNonexistence
NecessityContingency
In the considerations concerning the Table of Categories
added in the B edition, Kant asserts that Modality and
Relation belong to the dynamical categories, Quality and
44. Kant, Ak. I, 389; Theoretical Philosophy, op. cit., 7.
42. Kant, Ak. I, 388; Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, trans. and ed. by David Walford
and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 6.
45. Parmenides DK 28 B2: ‘the only ways of inquiry to be acknowledged are: one,
that <that which is> is, and it is impossible for it not to be […] another, that It is
not, and must needs not be – this, I tell you, is a path that is utterly indiscernible,
for you could not know that which is not, for that is impossible, nor utter it’. I
follow Cornford’s translation and insertion, Plato and Parmenides (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1939), 30-31. Importantly, Parmenides’ argumentation proceeds by
antitheticals, a procedure that Plato’s Parmenides repeats and of which Kant’s dialectic
is a direct heir.
43. Ibid.
46. CPR: A80/B106.
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Quantity to the mathematical. The distinction is significant
since the latter are concerned with objects of intuition and the
former with their existence. In all cases, Kant notes, ‘the third
category in each class always arises from the combination
of the second category with the first’. According to the
Categories of Modality, then, ‘necessity is just the existence
which is given through possibility itself’.47 This reiterates
what the New Elucidation has already affirmed: that existence
is necessary and non-existence impossible.
Descending from the synthetic, while ‘all a priori division
of concepts must be made by dichotomy’,48 the dynamical
categories operate by dichotomous antitheses of concepts. On
the scale of systems rather than concepts, the principle of
identity explicitly sanctions extra-systemic contradictions
between those that are affirmatively and those that are
negatively grounded, setting up the problem the Transcendental Dialectic examines between antinomic systems. To
these formal concerns, the New Elucidation’s protocritical yet
still dogmatic argumentation adds a material element: in
keeping with its Parmenidean source, Kant draws expressly
ontological consequences from the principle of identity. It is
not the identity of any particular content that is established
by the principle, but rather the primary differentiation of
being from not-being, and therefore the identity of what
is as what is. Both principles are self-identical, insofar as
their contraries facilitate no derivation: ‘being is not’,
that is, does not yield any derivables, not even nothing.49
Accordingly, ‘whatever is not not, is’50 avoids the trap of
asserting the being of what is not, or of asserting the being
of ‘not-being’ (Parmenides’ ‘way of opinion’).
Ontologically, the important consequence of both this
Parmenidean and modal argumentation is that all predication
is of what is and no predication can be of what is not. Being is
not therefore a predicate, as the critical Kant will assert,51
but rather that of which all predicates are predicates, the
referent or Bedeutung of all predication, regardless of its
Sinn.52 In other words, no information is or can be given as
to what is: all that is specified concerning being is that it is
impossible that it is not. This modal account is an important
first element of the ontology transcendental philosophy
presupposes but cannot own without reverting to
dogmatism. The elucidation of this ontology will therefore
[sive] nothing’ is true iff ‘you invest the sign of the negative concept with the power
of cancelling [vim tollat] the affirmative concept’ (Ak. I, 390; 1992: 9). This power of
cancellation, however, is precisely what the principle of contradiction presupposes,
but that the principle of identity denies as active between assertions and negations.
With no such power, nothing cannot derive from the combination of something with
something that is not. The power of cancellation operates only between identicals, so
that Kant rephrases the principle of identity thus: ‘whatever is not not, is’, where the two
‘nots’ cancel each other out (Ak. I, 389; 1992: 8). In effect, Kant is arguing that the
impossible is not nothing, but is impossible.
50. Kant, Ak. I, 389; Theoretical Philosophy, op. cit., 8.
51. CPR: A598/B626.
49. Kant expressly disputes that the product of a contradiction is nothing: ‘“+ A – A
= 0”, [or i]n other words, affirming and negating the same thing is impossible or
52. This elicits a dimension often overlooked in the Fregean account of the Bedeutungen
of propositions. In ‘On Sinn and Bedeutung’ (1892), Frege writes ‘all true sentences
have the same Bedeutung” (in Beaney, ed., The Frege Reader [Oxford: Blackwell, 2000],
159), namely, as the ‘Comments’ on that essay (1892) make clear, ‘the True’. Just
as Kant claims all predication is of being, so Frege argues that since all propositions
aim at the True, ‘thought and Being are the same’ (ibid., 174). Finally, in ‘Thought’
(1919), Frege generalizes this account to the classical Platonic triumvirate: ‘Just as
“beautiful” points the way for aesthetics and “good” for ethics, so do words like
“true” for logic’ (ibid., 325).
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48. Ibid., B110.
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demonstrate that transcendentalism offers a new species of
dogmatism in philosophy.
We are not alone in affirming an ontology underlying
the transcendental project. For example, Heidegger notes in
his address to ‘Kant’s Thesis About Being’, that the thesis
at issue does not affirm that beings or things are, and thus
does not even inform us as to whether being is comprised
solely of beings. All Kant’s thesis tells us is that ‘being is
obviously not a real predicate’. Heidegger identifies this as
the ‘negative thesis about being’.53 The ‘positive thesis’, by
contrast, characterises being as
are in this or that way that makes the proposition a transcendental one, but the positing of things as this or that mode
of existence (agit, facit, operatur, dirigit).56 That this is so will
become especially evident not only in the Selbstsetzungslehre
and the ‘Ether deductions’ of the Opus postumum, but also in
Kant’s heirs’ (especially Fichte’s) accounts of the constitutive or determining role of the act of positing with regard to
the facts so posited. Against these Copernican credentials,
the second sub-thesis automatically triggers accusations
of dogmatism, at least insofar as the term applies to all
metaphysics that takes as its object the determination of
things ‘existing in themselves’.
The question then concerns the relation between the
two sub-theses; whether, that is, the first sub-thesis’s identification of being with positing is identical with or different
from the second sub-thesis’s identification of positing
and determination. If it is, then being is determinable in
itself by positing; if not, then the being of the positing is
not equivalent to the determination so posited. Note that
from the thesis that being is what all predication is of, it
follows that all predication must be the determination of
being. Meanwhile, positing posits determinations as ‘existing
in themselves’. It does not, that is, determine anything that
exists in itself, but makes determinations exist in themselves.
In effect, this is what a second constituent of Kant’s modal
ontology stipulates: ‘I have been reproached’, Kant writes,
the positing of a thing, of certain determinations as existing in
themselves. 54
From this we gain a sense of the dogmatism inherent in
ontological determination, while at the same time the
properly critical element is foregrounded. In this late
analysis of Kant’s ontology,55 Heidegger takes the entirety
of the above proposition as constituting the ‘positive
assertion’, despite its containing two distinct – and perhaps
antithetical – sub-theses: first, being is identified with
positing; second, positing is identified not only with determination, but with determinations ‘as existing in themselves’.
That the first sub-thesis fulfils the critical requirements of
this ontology is evident from the positing: it is not that things
53. M. Heidegger ‘Kant’s thesis about being’, op. cit.
54. CPR: A598/B626.
for defining the power of desire as the power of being the cause,
through one’s presentations, of the actuality of the objects of
55. Heidegger’s first published examination of Kant’s ontology is Kant and the Problem
of Metaphysics (1929, trans. by R. Taft, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997),
an analysis to which he returns in ‘Kant’s Thesis about Being’ (1961) and What is a
Thing? (1962, trans. by W. B. Barton and V. Deutsch, Chicago: Regnery, 1968).
56. ‘Nature causes (agit). Man does (facit). The rational subject acting with consciousness
of purpose operates (operatur). An intelligent cause, not accessible to the senses, directs
(dirigit).’ (Kant, Ak. XXI,18; Opus postumum, 224-5)
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these presentations [die Definition des Begehrungsvermögens als
Vermögens, durch seine Vorstellungen Ursache von der Wirklichkeit der
Gegenstände dieser Vorstellungen zu sein].57
Firstly, that the categories are to fulfil the ‘identity of subject
and object’, that is, satisfy the speculative proposition,
may seem like Hegel’s own imposition. Yet it is Kant who
stipulates that, although the categories in general constitute
‘all original pure concepts of synthesis that the understanding contains within itself a priori’,59 the dynamical categories
are in addition ‘concerned with existence’.60 With what
existence? Categories or acts of thought that had no such
effects could satisfy no subject-object or concept-intuition
identity. In other words, although the categories cannot
determine a priori the existence and specific differentia of
particular matters, the categories of modality are nonetheless
held to posit ‘determinations existing in themselves’. Yet
we have seen how the transcendental philosophy demonstrates the necessity attaching to existence as the ground for
its determination, which extends, in the form of practical
reason, to the determination of actuality (Wirklichkeit) as
such. Why then does Hegel expressly deny this determination, asserting instead that Kant’s categories of modality
‘determine nothing objectively’ and that ‘the nonidentity of
subject and object essentially pertain to it’?
The criticism hinges on the claim that the categories
of modality, qua categories of the understanding, are
determining only of forms of thought, and thus provide a
merely subjective determination of actuality. Hence it can
be denied that anything is thereby determined objectively.
Further, this is necessarily the case insofar as these categories
are premised on the non-identity of subject and object,
Just as the thesis that all predication is of what is
critically buttresses the New Elucidation’s modal proposition
concerning being, viz., that it is impossible that it is not, so
the thesis that being is a positing of determinations existing
in themselves turns into an account of the determining
causes of actuality. From this, we derive an initial statement
of Kant’s ontology:
Being is necessarily indeterminate if actuality is determinable.
Or, in practical terms:
The necessity of contingency is necessary for the determinability of the
actual.
It is precisely at this juncture that a comment Hegel makes
in the Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of
Philosophy with regard to Kant’s table of categories acquires
significance as regards the investigation of a transcendental dogmatism. The framing of Hegel’s comment is, in this
regard, especially instructive. In Kant’s deduction,
The identity of subject and object is limited to twelve acts of
pure thought [reine Denkthätigkeiten] – or rather to nine only, for
modality really determines nothing objectively; the nonidentity
of subject and object essentially pertains to it.58
57. Kant, Ak. V, 177 n., citing Ak.V, 9 n.
59. CPR: A80/B104.
58. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, op. cit., 80.
60. Ibid., B110.
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which the ontology supporting the Copernican revolution
presupposes: the determination of reason is simply not the
determination of things. In other words, if it is through
the positing that ‘determinations exist in themselves’, then
these determinations have existence only consequent upon
their positing. Since, at the same time, no determinations
can be made of things-in-themselves, then the categories of
modality, especially those of existence and non-existence,
‘determine nothing objectively’.
While possessing no capacity for objective determination, the categories do nevertheless determine the only
possible actions that speculative reason can perform, regardless
of whether such performances obtain or are actualised. As we have
seen, the transition to actuality is not an element of speculative
reason, but a power only practical reason can effect. To
effect is ultimately to determine actuality in accordance
with freedom as the only unconditioned and necessary cause.61
Accordingly, since it is a necessary presupposition of the
Copernican revolution that being is determinable but not
determining, being so determined is actuality: subjectivity remains impotent in being, but powerful in actuality.62
The reason for this is the Copernican thesis that objects
are determinable for reason while reason is not determinable by objects, which entails that objective determination
– that is, determination of existents anterior to determination – is impossible. Neither existence nor any of the other
categories can therefore be extended to objects as such, but
only to actuality, by positing. If being has no ‘objective’
side, in what then does nature consist? Grasping the implications, it is Fichte who is Kant’s true heir, exactly as he
claimed, when, in the Science of Knowledge, he characterises
the object for the subject as the nicht-Ich, finally subjectivising all nature. ‘Is it true’ then, as Georges Cuvier asked his
erstwhile professor of comparative anatomy, Carl Friedrich
Kielmeyer, ‘as the Kantians seem to maintain’, that
external nature [...] may be deduced from a priori principles,
i.e., those that are present prior to all experience […] – in short,
from the nature of our minds[?]63
The problem is excellently posed: if there are principles
prior to all experience, then external nature emerges only
after its subjective determination. Thus Hegel’s intervention clarifies the ontology presupposed by transcendentalism, and articulates its dichotomous structure: nature
cannot be objectively but only subjectively determined;
therefore objective nature is of necessity objectively indeterminate in itself. By contrast, Cuvier’s problem suggests
that it is only if the deduction of external nature is not the
deduction of external nature that a subject-object dichotomy
is conceivable. Rather than the subject-object pair, the
Cuvier question (so like Jacobi’s challenge to Kant)64
63. C. F. Kielmeyer, Natur und Kraft. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. F.H. Köhler (Berlin:
Kieper, 1938), 236.
61. Ibid., A418-9/B446-7.
62. Kant was never as clear as Fichte about this: ‘if the Science of Knowledge should
be asked, how then, indeed, are things-in-themselves constituted, it could offer no
other answer save, as we are to make them. [… H]ence we can never speak of the
existence of an object without a subject’ (Fichte, Werke I: 286; SK: 252).
64. ‘The transcendental idealist […] must have the courage to assert the strongest
idealism that has ever been taught, and not even to fear the charge of speulative
egoism’ (F.H. Jacobi, ‘Realism and Idealism’, in B.Sassen (ed.), Kant’s Early Critics:
the Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 175.
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COLLAPSE V
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works out the implications of the priority of thinking over
being asserted by transcendental naturalism. Both sets of
concerns, however, present an antinomy of transcendental
naturalism: the opposability of transcendental to dogmatic
naturalism, on the one hand, and the priority of thinking
over being, on the other. Since these theses are opposable,
transcendental ontology is dogmatic by criterion (1), above.
Nevertheless, the core problem of the identity of reason and
nature remains open. As for all dogmatisms, therefore, transcendentalism is a naturalism concerned not with the determination of mind by nature, but with that of nature by free
causes supported by necessary contingency. We will now
examine both the Hegelian and the Cuverian Antinomies
of Transcendental Naturalism in turn.
is characterised by its antithesis to freedom. ‘Nature determines
itself’ must [accordingly] be translated into ‘nature is determined
by its essence, formaliter, to determine itself’; nature can never
be indeterminate, as a free being can very well be; and materialiter too, nature is determined just in one way and no other;
unlike a free being, it does not have the choice between a
certain determination and its opposite.67
3. The Antinomies of Transcendental Naturalism
i. The Hegelian Antinomy
Hegel presents an antinomy of transcendental naturalism
in The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy,
through Fichte’s transcendental deduction of nature. The
deduction is transcendental insofar as its starting point
is the absolute Ich’s oppositing of nature to the empirical
Ich, or the ‘self-limitation of free activity’.65 In other words,
the differential between the absolute and the finite Ichs, or
the degree to which the latter approximates the absolute
identity of the former, provides the necessary conditions
for thinking nature in accordance with the programme of
the Science of Knowledge. Hegel66 cites Fichte postulating that
nature
65. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, op. cit., 136.
Fichte here makes explicit the necessary indeterminacy
of being that is merely implicit in Kant, and applies this to
the production of a nature as formal and material being-determined. Accordingly, nature is formal and material determinability. The determinable is never possibly not-determined,
so that the empirical Ich can never not be determined in
turn by determinacies it posits as its own limits. Empirical
or living self-consciousness therefore sets itself as its task an
unlimited striving to overcome these limits and increase the
indeterminacy of or in being.
Because striving takes time, and because it must be
unlimited if it is a free striving rather than a determined and
therefore merely natural drive, Hegel complains that rather
than resolving the antithesis of nature and freedom, Fichte
replaces it with an antithesis between ‘a limited present and
an infinity extraneous to it’.68 Replacing an ‘absolute object’
with an absolute subject merely produces, notes Hegel, a
‘dogmatic idealism’;69 antinomising it by way of a living
self-consciousness generates no solution, therefore, to the
antithesis of nature and freedom, but transposes the ground
67. Fichte, Werke IV, 112-3; The System of Ethics, op. cit., 108.
68. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, op. cit., 139.
69. Ibid., 127.
66. Ibid., 137-8.
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COLLAPSE V
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of this antithesis outside itself, a subjectivity as objective
and absolute as the object of dogmatic materialisms. This
is borne out by Fichte’s the concept of ‘drive’, drawn from
physiological researches into the nature of living beings.
Thus, he writes:
to overcome dichotomy. Yet Reason by its own nature is
driven to maintain the dichotomy in and as its identity with
the Absolute. The ‘speculative proposition’ that satisfies
this need always and necessarily asserts identity with the
Absolute (Frege’s Hegelianism), but never equivalence to it,
so that the ‘identity of identity and dichotomy’ resolves the
antinomy of finitude and extrinsic infinity.
Therefore it is a condition of Reason’s nature that it
is both unconditioned by the dichotomy of freedom and
nature, and maintains it. This is an important solution in
three ways. Firstly, Hegel’s is a species of naturalised epistemogenesis in accordance, as both the Greater Logic and the Phenomenology show, with living reason. Secondly, it is a largely
forgotten solution to a problem that remains unresolved:
namely, the relation of reason to nature, on the one hand,
given the nature of reason on the other. Speculative
idealism, in this regard, shares its concerns with philosophical inquiries regarding naturalised epistemology, neurophilosophy, and dialethism,73 amongst others. Thirdly, Hegel’s
proposals do not resolve but amplify antinomy, making his
a hyperdogmatism that remains undetermined with regard
to nature or reason.
The highest exhibition of intelligence outside itself, in nature,
is the drive.70
Positing the drive as the highest exhibition of intelligence in
nature – rather than, for example, the closest nature gets to
exhibiting intelligence – therefore���������������������������
clearly exhibits transcendental dogmatism’s maintenance of the dichotomy, while
at the same time demonstrating the site of the struggle over
determinacy versus purpose, between physics and ideality.
Fichte reconstructs ethics as the direct conflict of matter and
ideality, as the infinitely unresolvable struggle of embodied
determinacy for absolute indetermination, and thus posits
‘Nature [as] something essentially determined and lifeless’.71
Nothing demonstrates more concretely this antinomy of
transcendental naturalism than the ‘shock of the objective
world’,72 or nature determined as absolute object.
Hegel’s own solution follows from a view of Kant’s
transcendentalism he shares with Schelling. That is,
when reason takes itself as its own object, transcendental philosophy is the investigation of the nature proper to
reason. Accordingly, the Hegelian solution to the antinomy
concerns the latter’s provocation of the need of philosophy
70. Fichte, Werke XI, 363.
71. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, op. cit., 139.
72. Schelling, Werke I, 337.
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73. For naturalised epistemology, see W.V.O. Quine ‘Epistemology naturalized’ in
Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).
For neurophilosophy, see P. M. Churchland, Neurophilosophy (Cambridge: MIT,
1986), 482: ‘so it is that the brain investigates the brain, theorizing about what brains
do when they theorize’. Graham Priest, in Beyond the Limits of Thought (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), defines dialethism as a transcendental investigation into the
nature of true contradictions.
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ii. The Cuverian Antinomy
Let us then return to the indeterminacy of being thesis
common to transcendentalism in general. If what is at stake,
for Fichte, is the relative determinability of the Ich and its
opposited ‘nature’; and if, for Hegel, it is the determinability of all dichotomy by Reason’s nature that matters;
transcendental philosophy has, in the ‘positing’ principle
considered above, a naturalistic means for accounting for
determination. We will first investigate this before pursuing
the Cuverian antinomy of transcendental naturalism.
Positing is an act, the actualisation of a power in the
world, subject to resistances and limitations. If nature or
being is able to impose resistances and limitations upon subjectivity, philosophy returns to pre-Copernican dogmatic
naturalism. Thus the antidogmatic critique of causation
consists in a refutation of its capacity to determine reason.
To be so capable, a thing or cause (causa) would have to be
ascribed powers; without a thing-in-itself as their possessor
or vehicle, there remains only a set of powers. If a powers
ontology is generalised, and if determination is a power of
reason, then reason acts in one and the same world as do
others. As Warnke notes,
Actions are conceived by traditional metaphysics as the
expressions of things. [Transcendentalism] stands this common
view on its head [and] determines things as expressions of actions,
objects as products of relations, being as a reified, objectified doing,
exhausted in its product.74
74. C. Warnke, ‘Schellings Idee und Theorie des Organismus und der
Paradigmawechsel der Biologie um die Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert’ in Jarhrbuch für
Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie 5, 1998: 187-234, at 200.
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Grant – Post-Copernican Dogmatism
Considered along these lines, the powers or Vermögen
of the first Critique, held responsible as they are for the
existence or actuality of determinations, constitute a step
towards supplanting bodies with forces in fundamental
physics. This, for example, is how the medical scientist
Andreas Röschlaub read Fichte, rendering the latter
capable of a philosophy of medicine,75 and how the natural
historian Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer reports the substance of
Kant’s Copernican revolution to Cuvier:
This experiment of Kant’s is astute, and it recommends itself
in that in this way, the necessary, the universal and the certain
in our knowledge remains subjective in our mind, while the
contingent and the particular will be attributed to objective
nature, which is unknown in itself. 76
As for Kant, then, although he allows no naïve
knowledge of nature ‘in itself’, Kielmeyer’s ontology is
modal, consisting of what necessarily and what contingently is. Objective nature is not nature-as-objects but as
matter and, as matter, subject to further determination by
forces. Here Kielmeyer joins Hegel in asserting that Kant
does not go far enough (although for different reasons),
for to turn matter, as the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science attempts to, solely into the product of attractive and
repulsive forces, would have satisfied naturalistic demands
75. Developing the theme of Idealist influences in their contemporaneous sciences,
Tsouyopoulos (1978: 90) cites Röschlaub’s assessment of transcendental naturalism
from the latter’s Magazine for the Improvement of Medicine vol.8, part 3 (1805): 473: ‘The
philosophemes of a Kant, a Fichte and a Schelling have given the labours of the
physician and the natural scientist a manifest and proper direction in our own day,
just as the philosophemes of Empedocles, Democritus, Heraclitus and Aristotle did
earlier’.
76. Kielmeyer, Natur und Kraft, op. cit., 243.
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on the first Critique without sacrificing transcendentalism.
According to Kielmeyer, however,
question raises precisely this prospect, we will restate the
substance of Schelling’s account of it:
A transcendental naturalism based on powers may be
Kant neither achieved this, and nor, although he ought to,
would he want to; the proof is still wanting that all qualititative
differences in matter are simply and immediately differences in
the quantitative relations between the attractive and repulsive
forces. I would very much like to see this proof undertaken and
the qualities of matter explained from these two forces without
the intervention of a tertium, whether this be God, atoms, or
some third force.77
So Kielmeyer demands that the powers hypothesis become
an objective ontology. What we are left with now, however,
are two accounts of transcendental naturalism: in one,
the necessary indeterminacy of being is maintained at
the cost of anything other than the subjective determination of actuality; in the other, forces supply a unified
and speculative ontogenetic account of the material of
knowledge, or objectivity. However, to complete this as
an account of Transcendental Naturalism, an additional
element must be added to the powers thesis, namely, the
ontological thesis regarding the necessary indeterminacy –
and therefore determinability – of being. It is with this in
mind that we turn finally to the Cuverian Antinomy.
The Cuverian Antinomy is also Schelling’s, and
concerns priority and posteriority in relations of determination. Where Cuvier asks whether external nature can be
deduced according to principles of mind prior to experience,
Schelling asserts that being precedes thinking and not the
converse. Since the implicit antinomic contrary in Cuvier’s
THESIS
Nature precedes
the thinking it
spawns
ANTITHESIS
Thinking
precedes the
Nature it thinks
held to supplant the problem of logical and real priority
with that of reciprocity – powers are reciprocally, rather
than mechanically or efficiently determined. Since, however,
reciprocity is simply a time-cancelling version of Husserl’s
co-natality thesis, this strand of transcendental naturalism
is clearly dogmatic, in that it asserts a perfected equilibrium
or static eternity of forces against the time-based antithesis
of that view, as stated in the above antinomy.
If being is necessarily indeterminate, then this indeterminacy must precede its determination, since the converse
would entail that being is determinate in advance of its
determination, thus defeating the transcendental gambit
from the outset. From this, it follows that, once Kielmeyer’s
Kant-derived powers ontology is added to it, not that being
is inert and only acted upon by powers-possessors, since
this would amount to a dogmatic reversion to things in
themselves, but rather therefore that being itself is determinability in accordance with powers. It is this, then, that
gives Schelling his conviction concerning the priority of
being over thinking, and Cuvier his scepticism concerning
the priority of thinking over nature: Being is therefore
potentiality for determinate being, Seynkönnen, rather than
the object over which transcendental subjects struggle.
77. Ibid., 245.
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The Schelling-Cuvier antinomy thus results, its transcendental condition-giving notwithstanding, in a dogmatic
naturalism premised on the multiple determinability of
being. Finally, therefore, transcendental naturalism is either
a dogmatic naturalism of the Cuvier-Schelling-Kielmeyer
type, or simply naturalism – or it is not a naturalism at all,
like those of Fichte, Heidegger and Husserl. Copernicanism does not eliminate dogmatism, but continues it in new
forms – a dogmatism of appearance as opposed to that of
essence, as has been recently made crystal clear by Béatrice
Longuenesse:
the topics and interlocutors addressed therein. Accordingly,
I will conclude by drawing out some implications of powers
ontologies.
Firstly, powers necessarily involve modal concepts.
Against Hegel’s denial that the categories of Modality
determine anything objective, objectality is nothing other
than a set of potentials for actualisation, as Plato insisted.
Powers make contingency into an ontology, a metaphysics
and a physics.
Secondly, and again emphasising contingency, powers
necessarily involve time determination, not as the transcendental form of inner sense, but, as Johann Heinrich
Lambert noted, as determining change: ‘If changes are real,
then time is real [...]. If time is unreal, then no change can be
real’.79 Of course, this does not mean that the nature of time
is given in advance as linear, as again physicists remind us.
Thirdly, powers do constitute a dogmatically assertible
transcendental field insofar as they are both necessary to
determination and in and of themselves indeterminate.
Fourthly and finally, the prospects for dogmatism are
raised wherever the certainties of transcendental reflection
are revealed not as another species of reason, but rather as
dogmatism parochialised:
It is a fact that we live in a world of things. Still, we must
understand that these things are our fact, our doing – not in the
sense that a philosophy of praxis would give to this statement
[...] but in the sense of a metaphysical account of the world as
constituted by a process of thinking.78
Just as this dogmatism of appearances resulted from Kant’s
experiment in thought, it remains true of transcendentalism
now, and prompts a challenge to those who pursue transcendental philosophy – to demonstrate that theirs is not
simply a dogmatic anti-naturalism.
In conclusion, the ontology of powers, with its modal
determinations (necessity, contingency, possibility,
actuality), can only be regarded as a reducibly metaphysical problem if the physical dimensions of its actuality are
ignored. Field ontology entered physics and philosophy
at the same time, although its philosophical pedigree is
perhaps longer, stretching back at least to Plato’s Sophist and
78. Béatrice Longuenesse, Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 6.
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Being is necessarily indeterminate if actuality is determinable.
Or, in practical terms:
The necessity of contingency is necessary for the determinability of the
actual.
79. Lambert to Kant, October 13th 1770, in Kant Ak. X, 107.
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