Sorin Baiasu, Alberto Vanzo - Kant and The Continental Tradition - Sensibility, Nature, and Religion (2020)

Kant and the Continental
Tradition
Immanuel Kant’s work continues to be a main focus of attention in almost

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

the Keele-Oxford-St Andrews Kantian (KOSAK) Research Centre and
Co-convenor of the Kantian Standing Group of the European Consortium
for Political Research. He published Kant and Sartre: Re-Discovering
Critical Ethics (2011), edited several collections on Kant and published
articles in, among others, Kant-Studien, Kantian Review and Studi
Kantiani.
Alberto Vanzo is an independent scholar. He has published a monograph

on Kant’s views on concept formation (Kant e la formazione dei concetti,
2012) and essays on Kant’s philosophy, early modern natural philosophy
and the history of philosophical historiography.
Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy
Kant and the Reorientation of Aesthetics

Finding the World
Joseph J. Tinguely
Hume’s Science of Human Nature

Scientific Realism, Reason, and Substantial Explanation
David Landy
Hume’s Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Psychology

Edited by Philip A. Reed and Rico Vitz
Kant and the Problem of Self-Knowledge

Luca Forgione
Kant on Intuition
Western and Asian Perspectives on Transcendental Idealism
Edited by Stephen R. Palmquist
Hume on Art, Emotions, and Superstition

A Critical Study of the Four Dissertations
Amyas Merivale
A Guide to Kant’s Psychologism

via Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Wittgenstein
Wayne Waxman
Kant and the Continental Tradition

Sensibility, Nature and Religion
Edited by Sorin Baiasu and Alberto Vanzo
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Eighteenth-Century-Philosophy/book-series/SE0391
Kant and the Continental
Tradition
Sensibility, Nature and Religion
Edited by Sorin Baiasu and

Alberto Vanzo
First published 2020
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Baiasu, Sorin, editor. | Vanzo, Alberto, editor.
Title: Kant and the continental tradition : sensibility, nature, and
religion / edited by Sorin Baiasu and Alberto Vanzo.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge
studies in eighteenth century philosophy | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019051574 (print) | LCCN 2019051575
(ebook) | ISBN 9781138503748 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315145501 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. | Continental
philosophy. | Banham, Gary, 1965–
Classification: LCC B2798 .K222725 2020 (print) | LCC B2798
(ebook) | DDC 193—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051574
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051575
ISBN: 978-1-138-50374-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-14550-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Acknowledgementsvii
PART I
Introduction1
1 Kant and the Continental Tradition 3

SORIN BAIASU AND ALBERTO VANZO
PART II
Sensibility21
2 Kant on Intuition 23
DERMOT MORAN
3 Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant’s Transcendental

Schematism 61
ROXANA BAIASU
4 On Affective Universality: Kant, Arendt and Lyotard on

Sensus Communis 79
ANDREA REHBERG
PART III
Nature99
5 The Role of Regulative Principles and Their Relation to

Reflective Judgement 101
CHRISTIAN ONOF
vi Contents
6 Disputing Critique: Lyotard’s Kantian Differend 131
KEITH CROME
7 Kant, Hegel and Irigaray: From ‘Chemism’ to the Elemental 146

RACHEL JONES
PART IV
Religion171
8 The Schematism of Analogy and the Figure of Christ:

Bridging Two Types of Hypotyposis 173
NICOLA J. GRAYSON
9 The ‘Proper’ Tone of Critical Philosophy: Kant and

Derrida on Metaphilosophy and the Use of Religious Tropes 194
DENNIS SCHULTING
PART V
Postscript223
10 Remembering Gary Banham: Genealogy, Teleology,

Conceptuality 225
JOANNA HODGE
Contributors239
Index240
Acknowledgements
Some of the chapters in this volume have been specially commissioned.

Others were originally delivered at the workshop ‘Themes from the
Work of Gary Banham’, held at Manchester Metropolitan University on
20 March 2014 thanks to a grant from the Department of Politics and
Philosophy and the Institute of Humanities and Social Science Research
of Manchester Metropolitan University. The editors acknowledge their
support with gratitude and thank all contributors for their patience. The
editors would also like to thank Alexandra Simmons (Editorial Assis-
tant), Andrew Weckenmann (Editor) and Tony Bruce (Senior Publisher)
at Routledge for their help throughout the publication process. For the
final editorial work, we are particularly grateful to Aruna Rajendran
(Project Manager at Apex CoVantage Ltd) for her excellent work and
support.
Part I
Introduction
1 Kant and the Continental
Tradition
Sorin Baiasu and Alberto Vanzo
1. Introduction
The influence of Kant’s philosophy on the so-called Continental tradition
has been immense.1 While Kant’s influence on modern philosophy more
generally is extremely significant, it would not be very contentious to
say that Continental philosophy cannot be conceived of without Kant.
The current volume focuses precisely on several themes in this area, in
particular on the importance of Kant for relatively recent Continental
philosophy, a topic which remains still underexplored.2
Apart from this introduction and a postscript, the present volume
includes eight original essays, which focus on three central themes in
Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, namely, sensibility, nature and
religion. The collection combines essays on Kant’s philosophy and post-
Kantian thinking, with a focus on Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt,
Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Jean-François Lyotard. The essays
discuss thorny exegetical issues in Kant scholarship, such as the character
of intuition, the unity of nature and the constitution of symbolic repre-
sentation in religion, as well as ways in which post-Kantian, Continental
thinkers have engaged with Kant’s views on these topics. The collection
employs insights from post-Kantian philosophy to shed light on Kant’s
views, and it discusses the relevance of Kant’s ideas to current philosophi-
cal debates.
What follows in this introductory chapter is a discussion of the contri-
butions and the ways they relate to each other, with particular emphasis
on the unity of the volume and the significance of the various arguments
advanced in the essays of this volume, including the postscript.
2. The Volume’s Structural Unity

Some of the chapters in the collection (namely, Chapter 2, by Dermot
Moran; Chapter 5, by Christian Onof and Chapter 8, by Nicola J. Gray-
son) focus specifically on Kant’s philosophy and have a primarily inter-
pretative focus. They aim to disentangle complex exegetical knots that
4 Sorin Baiasu and Alberto Vanzo
emerge in the interpretation of Kant’s own views of sensibility, nature and
religion. Apart from the postscript, the remaining chapters (Chapter 3,
by Roxana Baiasu; Chapter 4, by Andrea Rehberg; Chapter 6, by Keith
Crome; Chapter 7, by Rachel Jones and Chapter 9, by Dennis Schulting)
turn to the interactions that arise, in those three thematic areas, between
Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. All chapters in the volume engage
with, or refer to, Gary Banham’s work, to whose memory this volume is
dedicated. Joanna Hodge’s postscript (Chapter 10) provides an account
of a journey through the main works and themes of Banham’s philosophy
with a specific focus on genealogy, teleology and conceptuality, a jour-
ney exploring Banham’s engagement with, among others, Kant, Hegel,
Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.
A brief overview of the more comparative contributions can be struc-
tured around the three main parts of the volume, Parts II, III and IV. In
Part II, Roxana Baiasu focuses on the significance of Kant’s schematism
for the way Heidegger reconceives of metaphysics (in particular, space
and time, as the fundamental structures of sensibility) as part of a more
basic and adequate ontological view of our being. Rehberg’s chapter
examines the role Kant’s work plays in what she regards as the long and
slow process of rediscovery of the significance of sensibility and affective
life for the judging subject, with particular emphasis on an examination
of the contributions of Arendt and Lyotard.
In Part III, Crome brings to the fore deep tensions in Kant’s views
on nature and sensibility by interpreting them in the light of Lyotard’s
notion of différend, not so much by a reconsideration of Lyotard’s read-
ing of the Critique of Judgement but by focusing on Lyotard’s appeal to
the Critique of Pure Reason. Jones discusses whether Kant’s views on
sensibility and nature can be fruitfully brought to bear on recent discus-
sions within post-Kantian philosophy, specifically on feminist thinking as
developed by Irigaray. In Part IV, Schulting evaluates Derrida’s critique
of Kant’s polemic against religious or quasi-religious talk in philosophy
both by responding to Derrida’s objection that Kant’s polemic is not neu-
tral and by presenting Kant’s own reasons for this objection to religious
talk in philosophy.
The unity within the diversity of the contributions is not only thematic
but also structural. The thematic unity will be discussed in more detail in
the next section. In this section, the focus will be on structural unity. Each
of the three main parts of the volume starts with an interpretative chap-
ter, which sets the conceptual framework of the discussion, and each part
continues and concludes with more evaluative and critical essays, which
examine the Kantian legacy and the way it has been appropriated and
transformed by recent (mostly twentieth-century) Continental thinkers.
Part II, for instance, begins with Moran’s comprehensive investigation
of Kant’s crucial notion of intuition. It starts with a discussion of the
sources of Kant’s conception of intuition and the way Kant’s thinking
Kant and the Continental Tradition 5
breaks away from the philosophical contexts at the time; it continues
with an overview and critical reflection on Kant’s discussion of intuition
from the Inaugural Dissertation to the Critical period and even some
aspects in the Opus Postumum; finally, it focuses on specific vexing
issues, such as the significance of the characteristics of singularity and
immediacy for Kant’s conception of intuition or the distinctions between
form and content of intuition, pure and empirical intuitions or forms of
intuition and formal intuitions. While these discussions are significant by
themselves, they also provide the background and starting points for the
following comparative chapters in this part.3
For instance, in the discussion of Kant’s sources for the notion of intui-
tion, Moran examines the relation between Kant’s and Leibniz’s views of
intuition and the particular way this is understood by Eberhard.4 Thus,
one interesting aspect is that Eberhard argues that Kant has not gone
beyond Leibniz’s distinction between intuitive and symbolic knowledge.
Moran notes that Kant’s notion of intuition is in the process of being
rethought by Kant and, in the Critique of Judgement, Kant places the
symbolic under the intuitive mode of representation, to be distinguished
from the schematic mode of representation. Schemata are introduced by
Moran as direct presentations of concepts, but he notes a further discus-
sion of schemata goes beyond the scope of his text. Yet this is precisely
the focus of the third essay in the volume, namely Roxana Baiasu’s ‘Hei-
degger’s Interpretation of Kant’s Transcendental Schematism’. Roxana
Baiasu’s contention is that Heidegger’s objections to Kant’s conception
of schematism make evident a limited conception of space in Kant, a
conception which undermines Kant’s temporal schematism; moreover, by
offering a new understanding of space and time, as structures of sensi-
bility, Heidegger’s discussion of the schematism is a confirmation of his
project of fundamental ontology.
Moran’s discussion of the tension concerning the nature of intuition
in the Dissertation and the Critique of Pure Reason, as well as Kant’s
significant rethinking of the concept of intuition in the Critique of Judge-
ment, direct us to the fourth chapter of this volume, Andrea Rehberg’s
‘On Affective Universality: Kant, Arendt and Lyotard on Sensus Com-
munis’. Rehberg notes that Kant is standardly assumed to be completely
in agreement with the Western philosophical tradition’s rejection of the
entire nexus comprising the body, the senses, emotions and desires, a
tradition emerging from its influential Platonic-Christian conceptual and
ideatic background. She argues, however, that it is precisely in Kant’s
Third Critique, the Critique of Judgement, that it becomes evident that
Kant foreshadows, if not even prepares, a move towards the reconsidera-
tion of affective life as playing a major role in our experience.
The essay by Onof begins the third part of the volume, this time dedi-
cated to nature. According to Onof, in the Transcendental Dialectic of
the Critique of Pure Reason, at stake is the unity of nature. Here the ideas
of reason are not constitutive of experience but play merely a regulative
role. Yet, in the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique, dynamic
principles play also a regulative role, in this context, however, regulative
for the unity of experience. Moreover, in the Critique of Judgement, the
term ‘regulative’ is presented through the concept of purposiveness, which
plays a significant role in the reflective use of the faculty of judgement.
From this starting point, several questions are then discussed in the
chapter, including the relation between the notions of ‘regulative’, par-
ticularly as applied to the dynamic principles of the understanding in the
Analytic and to the regulative principles of reason in the Dialectic, as
well as the status of these principles of reason, in particular whether we
should regard them as merely heuristic or as having some kind of ‘real-
ist’ status. As Onof notes in his chapter, the theme which connects these
questions is that of unity, and his contribution is to the central question
that exercised scholars investigating the regulative use of the ideas of
pure reason and the status of the systematic unity of nature.
Whether we regard the systematic unity of nature as a merely heuristic
principle or as a principle which is active within nature, interpretative
problems arise for Kant, since each alternative is in tension with some
of Kant’s claims in the Critique of Pure Reason. The solution Onof, fol-
lowing Banham, defends in his chapter acknowledges that the systematic
unity of nature is more than a merely heuristic principle, while at the
same time rejecting its status as a principle of the possibility of experi-
ence. Instead, it is considered a transcendental principle. The question,
then, concerns the relation between this principle of the systematic unity
of nature and the principle of purposiveness for reflective judgement,
which Kant introduces in the Critique of Judgement.
On some accounts, Kant’s principle of purposiveness provides a dis-
tinct answer to the problem that the systematic unity of nature tried to
solve in the Critique of Pure Reason. This answer, commentators claim,
is not only distinct from, but it is in fact in tension with, the solution in
the first Critique. By contrast, Onof argues that the principles have com-
plementary functions. The principle of the systematic unity of nature is a
transcendental principle but not a constitutive one: it is objectively valid
(in the sense that it is about the world of appearances) but hypotheti-
cal. By contrast, the principle of the purposive organisation of nature is
subjective.
As noted by Onof, Kant introduces the notion of a regulative prin-
ciple of reason in his resolution of the Antinomies in the Critique of
Pure Reason. In his chapter, Crome identifies precisely the Antinomies
as the source of Lyotard’s idea of a différend, as a conflict that can-
not be resolved by reference to a rule of judgement applicable to both
arguments. Crome formulates his project against standard readings of
Lyotard as concerned mainly with ethico-political conflicts and as devel-
oped primarily in relation to Kant’s Critique of Judgement. While the
significance of Kant’s Third Critique for Lyotard cannot be exaggerated,
Crome’s reading regards Lyotard’s The Différend from the perspective of
Kant’s First Critique as a tribunal in which philosophical reason investi-
gates its limits and legitimacy. In his project, however, Crome identifies
a différend between Kant and Lyotard concerning the concept of nature.
From the perspective of Lyotard’s thought, Kant’s account of subjectivity
entails a blindness to nature, which favours the technological domina-
tion of the natural world. Lyotard’s appeal to Kant’s Third Critique is an
attempt to resist precisely this limiting perspective on nature.
As we have seen, Onof’s focus is on the status of the principle of the
systematic unity of nature, a principle which accounts for nature mechan-
ically. To investigate the nature of this principle, he clarifies its regulative
character by a discussion of the dynamic principles of the understand-
ing and the principle of purposiveness (which accounts for nature tele-
ologically), both of which are also regulative. In her essay, Jones finds in
Kant’s Third Critique a number of implicit instances of chemism, a third
principle in addition to those of mechanism and teleology. Jones identi-
fies in these implicit instances of chemism the starting point of a recon-
sideration of the relation between sexes. While Kant’s account is still
seen as dependent on a gendered hylomorphism and a reproductive telos,
she thinks that Irigaray’s conception of the elemental can make chemism
more amenable not only to sexual difference but also to a fluidity of dif-
ferences, including those between human and non-human life or between
non-human life and inorganic matter.
Grayson’s chapter marks the beginning of the fourth part of this vol-
ume and the transition to the theme of religion. Her focus is on Kant’s
notion of hypotyposis, as the process through which concepts are
inspected, illustrated and granted reality. Kant’s notion of hypotyposis
is presented in the Third Critique (§59), and discussions in the literature
are based on this text, as well as on the Schematism of the Pure Concepts
of Understanding in the First Critique; however, this leads to a mistaken
understanding of hypotypsis as the only means of granting reality to an
idea. Grayson’s intention is to correct this trend by considering as an
important part of the discussion Kant’s analysis of the realisation of both
the theoretical ideas, in the Architectonic of Pure Reason of the First
Critique, and practical ideas, in the Typic of the Pure Practical Power of
Judgement in the Second Critique. In this way, the distinction between
these two types of hypotyposis is made clear.
Grayson also notes Kant’s discussion of a schematism of analogy in
Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason. Through this schematism
of analogy, practical ideas are realised indirectly (in the way in which
symbolisation grants reality to ideas). At the same time, as a form of
schematism, there is also a sense of direct exhibition of ideas in the sche-
matism of analogy. The example offered is Christ, who indirectly embod-
ies human aspects (such as the capacity to suffer and be tempted) but also
realises directly and schematically the idea of God. The schematism of
analogy appears in this way as a bridge between the two types of hypo-
typosis, the schematic and symbolic.
Grayson’s chapter focuses on the process of exhibition, of making a
concept sensible. She notes that Kant’s distinction between schematic and
symbolic exhibition or hypotyposis in the Critique of Judgement gives
the wrong impression that ideas of reason can only be exhibited sym-
bolically. Whereas schematic exhibition gives intuition a priori to a con-
cept of the understanding, symbolic exhibition is supposed to supply an
intuition to a concept which only reason can think (an idea of reason), a
process which is treated as merely analogous to that of schematism.5 As
we have seen, questions remain concerning Kant’s discussion, in the Cri-
tique of Practical Reason, of a process similar to schematism for ideas of
reason,6 as well as his mention, in Religion, of a schematism of analogy.7
This raises a more general question concerning the presentation of
the ideas of reason, in particular of religious ideas, as well as the rela-
tion between philosophy and religion. This is the topic of Schulting’s
chapter. As Schulting notes, this metaphilosophical question has been of
central concern to Kant, beginning with his pre-Critical work, includ-
ing, among others, Religion (which resulted in an imperial rescript from
October 1794, which prevented him from publishing on religious affairs)
and culminating with the 1796 essay ‘Of a Recently Adopted Exalted
Tone in Philosophy’, which is the focus of Schulting’s chapter.
Schulting discusses not only this Kantian essay but also an oblique
commentary Jacques Derrida wrote in 1983: ‘On a Recently Adopted
Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’. According to Derrida, no absolute dis-
tinction is possible between the rationality of philosophy and the ‘irra-
tionality’ of religion. Hence, to privilege, with Kant, the dictating voice of
reason over the emotive resonance of the non-discursive voice of religion
is an arbitrary decision. On Derrida’s account (according to Schulting’s
reading), Kant relies on a non-rational ground, a ‘mystery’ or ‘secret’,
which cannot subsequently be vindicated by reason. Hence, whether this
is interpreted by the fanatic religious believer or by the agent who obeys
the Categorical Imperative, the normative force of the ensuing interpre-
tations is the same. Yet this relativisation of the normativity of claims is
self-undermining for Derrida’s own claims and raises questions about his
critique of Kant.
So far, we have seen illustrations of the volume’s structural unity: apart
from the introduction and postscript, each of the three middle parts of
the volume has an interpretative chapter focused on Kant, which opens
up avenues of research, primarily to be pursued in the following, more
comparative chapters of the respective section. However, the interpreta-
tive texts in this volume do not simply pave the way for the discussions
in the subsequent comparative essays in their respective sections; there is
also significant cross-reference and dialogue across sections.
For instance, as we have seen, Moran’s discussion of the distinction
between the schematic and the symbolic modes of representation, as
parts of intuition and as hypotyposes, connects directly with Nicola
Grayson’s essay on ‘The Schematism of Analogy and the Figure of Christ:
Bridging Two Types of Hypotyposis’. In her text, Grayson takes as start-
ing point Kant’s distinction, in the Critique of Judgement, between sche-
matic and symbolic modes of representation. The problem she identifies
is that Kant’s reference to a ‘schematism of analogy’ in Religion Within
the Boundaries of Mere Reason seems to be a reference to neither form of
representation. Similar cross-references can also easily be noticed between
the chapters by Roxana Baiasu and Crome (in the attempt to argue for
a broadening of Kant’s limited perspective on sensibility and nature by
twentieth-century Kantian philosophers) or the essays by Rehberg and
Jones (in the way Kant’s philosophy is interpreted as a starting point
for a reconsideration of the philosophical significance of sensibility and
the unity of nature). In the next section, some further illustrations of the
unity of content of the various parts and chapters will be provided.
3. The Volume’s Thematic Unity

In the previous section, we have seen that the three middle parts of this
volume display structural similarities which give it significant formal
unity. The thematic unity of the volume was illustrated at the end of
the section through some of the cross-references between the chapters
of the various parts. In addition, each of the three middle parts has a
particular focus on one of the three inter-related themes of the volume:
sensibility, nature and religion. What is more, each of the three middle
parts of the volume problematises aspects of the fundamental relation
in Kant between appearances and things in themselves, a relation which
Kant only saw himself as having solved in the Critique of Judgement
and then in the Opus Postumum. Part II focuses on the relation between
sensibility and reason, Part III focuses on the relation between nature
and freedom, whereas Part IV examines the relation between philosophy
and religion.
The first focal point of the collection is sensibility and the relation
between sensibility and reason broadly understood. Concerning the focus
on sensibility, as we have seen, Moran’s chapter separates some of the
threads that run together in Kant’s discussions of sensibility and intui-
tion. He focuses on Kant’s notion of intuition and highlights the tensions
among some of these threads. Starting from Heidegger’s interpretation
of the Kantian schematism, Roxana Baiasu examines Heidegger’s evalu-
ation of this—for Heidegger, crucial—part of Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason and makes clear the significance of the schematism for Hei-
degger’s ontological ground-laying. Rehberg’s chapter turns to the role
of sensibility—more specifically, the notion of sensus communis—within
the Third Critique, with the aim of reconsidering the role of affectivity in
philosophy and understanding the nature of political community.
Concerning the focus on the relation between sensibility and reason,
we have already seen that Moran takes a broad look at Kant’s doctrine
of sensibility. He concludes that ‘Kant’s understanding of intuition is too
diverse to provide a single coherent doctrine’. Kant’s sources provide an
incoherent starting point, and his terminology fails to overcome several
key ambiguities. First, Kant wavers between conceiving of sensations as
mere theoretical postulates and as the actual building blocks of intui-
tions. Second, Kant presents sensible intuitions and intellectual concepts
as the two sources of knowledge, but he ‘never gives an account of how
this two-fold nature of the mind comes about’. His ambiguity on whether
all intuitions are subsumed under concepts complicates matters further.
Third, Kant regards space as the form of outer intuitions. It is unclear
how this spatiality can arise, given that neither sensations nor intuiting
acts are spatial. Fourth, pace Hintikka, the essence of intuition includes
far more than singularity, especially givenness and immediacy. But Kant’s
notion of immediacy is unclear and elusive.
All these objections to Kant’s account of sensibility, and in particu-
lar of intuition, test the coherence of the picture provided by Kant. The
requirement of coherence is a precondition of the unity and systematicity
which Kant regarded as essential for philosophy and which he thought
reason had as role to pursue. Bringing the manifold under unity was a
process which Kant identified both in the relation between intuition and
the understanding and also in the relation between the understanding
and reason. In this sense, Moran’s chapter can be seen as an investigation
into the relation between Kant’s account of sensibility and the unity and
systematicity of his philosophy.
In the third chapter, Roxana Baiasu provides a reading of Heidegger’s
interpretation of Kant’s schematism in Kant and the Problem of Meta-
physics. She presents Heidegger’s main implicit criticisms of the sche-
matism, in particular the notion of sensible presentation of the rules of
intelligibility, the formality of the schematism (connected with an onto-
logical indefiniteness of the relation between subject and object) and a
metaphysical cut between inner and outer. These problems are related to
Heidegger’s critical view of the role of space in the schematism. The sche-
matism involves a presentational formation of time images, but space is
required for the presentational formation of the possibilities of objectiv-
ity. Space, as specific to sheer presence, is involved in the metaphysical
cut between the inside and the outside. It is for this reason that Heidegger
regards as ontologically inadequate a schematism which involves space
specific to sheer presence. Heidegger thinks that it is possible to reap-
propriate the Kantian project by eliminating the space of sheer presence.
The focus here is not only on sensibility, with its two intuitions (space
and time), but also on their relation to the understanding through the
schematism, more exactly, on their roles in the sensible presentation of
the rules of intelligibility. The chapter shows how Heidegger’s objections
to the Kantian schematism attempt to revalue the Kantian project by
overcoming the difficulties introduced by Kant’s limited conception of
space. Heidegger regards this process as part of his project of fundamen-
tal ontology, and the focus is on a reconsideration of the Kantian relation
between space and time, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rules of
intelligibility.
Rehberg’s ‘On Affective Universality’ turns to an expression of sen-
sibility that takes centre stage in the Third Critique, namely the notion
of sensus communis. Sensus communis is not only the affective basis
for the universality of aesthetic taste, but it also grants us affective, pre-
conceptual access to a universal community of judging subjects. The
political implications of this idea have attracted the attention of interpret-
ers working in the Continental tradition, most notably Hannah Arendt
and Jean-François Lyotard. After providing an interpretation of sensus
communis, Rehberg argues that an approach to its political implications
based on Lyotard’s insights is far superior to Arendt’s approach. Arendt
presents the community to which sensus communis gives us access as a
community of empirical subjects, which is an object of actual experience.
By contrast, on the Lyotardian approach developed by Rehberg, sensus
communis discloses a pre-conscious, non-empirical, transcendental com-
monalty that is a ‘silent condition of possibility of all empirical commu-
nity’, ‘without being in any way reducible to it’. Its political potential lies
in ‘opening up the possibility of a human existence in dialogue with the
beautiful’, freed from any telos and utilitarian regime.
Rehberg’s discussion of sensibility and affectivity is presented in the
context of the nineteenth-century shift from regarding affectivity as
an obstacle to the pursuit of truth, knowledge and the good to a con-
sideration of the significance of pre-conscious, pre-cognitive and pre-
theoretical aspects of human existence. In this context, sensibility and
affectivity start to gain significance and to be considered as important
elements of our epistemic activities. Kant is discussed by Rehberg as a
crucial eighteenth-century precursor of this shift in our views of affectiv-
ity, and the focus on the relation between sensibility and judgement takes
centre stage in her chapter.
In the next part of the volume, the focus is expanded from sensibility to
nature in general and the relation between the domain of nature and that
of freedom, including the preconditions for an understanding of nature
and its unity. As we have seen, Onof’s chapter examines the possibility of
nature’s unity and, in particular, the status of the principle of the system-
atic unity of nature, which has preoccupied and continues to exert Kant
scholars. Crome focuses on Kant’s view of nature and identifies an irrec-
oncilable conflict between this view and Lyotard’s account, favouring the
latter as better able to give nature its due. Jones explores an alternative
principle of the unity of nature, a principle which is formulated by Hegel
but has its implicit source in Kant and which is also better able to account
for the relations between sexes and even species.
As we have seen, Onof’s chapter discusses the thorny issue of nature’s
unity. In the first Critique, Kant introduces three regulative principles
that guide the extension of our knowledge through the search for farther
spatial regions, further causes for known events and so on. This exten-
sion of our knowledge presupposes the principle of the unity of nature,
that is, the assumption that nature is systematically organised in a single
all-encompassing system of genera and species. There is a long-standing
debate about the status that Kant ascribes to the principle of the unity
of nature. Interpretations range from the view that this unity is a mere
fiction that cognising subjects project onto the world in their search for
knowledge, to the view that systematic unity is an objective, necessary
feature of nature. Onof defends a version of the objective reading. He
carefully specifies in what sense the principle of the unity of nature is
objective, and he distinguishes it from the weaker, subjective version of
that principle that can be found in the third Critique.
His focus is, therefore, on nature and on a particular aspect of the
relation between appearances and things in themselves, namely the rela-
tion between our view of nature and the idea of a totality to which the
systematic unity of nature refers. The principle of the systematic unity
of nature is not regarded as constitutive, although it is not considered
merely heuristic either. Instead, the principle is deemed transcendental
but with a hypothetical character.
Crome’s chapter interprets both the unity of nature and Kant’s notion
of intuition as instances of a Lyotardian différend between the objective
and the subjective. As we have seen, a différend is a conflict where both
sides have a claim to legitimacy and no rule of judgement can adjudicate
in favour of one side. As Lyotard notes, the matter of intuition points to
‘whatever it is that’ produces ‘the sensible impression’ upon the subject.
Yet a subjective spatio-temporal form is at once imposed upon that matter
without ever asking to what extent that form might be ‘appropriate to the
“that” to which it refers’. Crome argues that this results in the risk of not
hearing the suit of nature and of opening an unbridgeable gulf between
the subjective, phenomenal realm and the objective, noumenal realm.
In this chapter, again, the focus is on nature but also on the appropri-
ate relation between nature and freedom, between the phenomenal and
noumenal realms. A conception of subjectivity which is blind to nature,
as Lyotard views Kant’s conception of the transcendental subject, runs
the risk of generating this gap between the phenomenal and noumenal
realms but also of providing an inadequate image of nature. It is this
image which encourages the technological domination of nature, and the
question raised in this chapter through Lyotard concerns the possibility
of a more adequate view.
Jones focuses on a mediating structure that appears in Kant’s philos-
ophy of nature and is fleshed out by Hegel. This is what Hegel calls
chemism. Chemism is found when distinct items presuppose a common
element that makes their subsistence, communication and—in a broad
sense—reproduction possible. Instances of chemism can be found, for
instance, in Kant’s discussion of the category of reciprocal action and his
biological theory of the perpetuation of life. Jones compares chemism
with Luce Irigaray’s notion of the elemental, understood as ‘the fluid
material elements that pass between beings to constitute and sustain life
and becoming’. Jones concludes that, unlike Irigaray’s elemental, Kantian
and Hegelian chemism is embedded in an outlook that ascribes ontologi-
cal primacy to the male vis-à-vis the female, reduces the female body to
a tool for reproduction and fails to contemplate a non-reproductive rela-
tion between the sexes.
The emphasis here is again on nature and on the relation between
nature and the principles which make its unity possible. Chemism is sup-
posed to be an alternative to mechanism and teleology, and Jones identi-
fies the origins of this principle in Kant. Further developed by Hegel, the
principle presupposes an ontological primacy of the male over female
and is unable to account appropriately for the relation between the sexes.
Irigaray’s elemental provides an avenue for addressing these problems.
The third focal point of the collection, in Part IV, is religion and the
relation between religion and philosophy. Grayson’s focus is on a peculiar
mediating structure, a link between our mental contents and the world.
The idea of God is problematic in this regard. It lacks a schema or symbol
in the proper, technical sense that Kant ascribes to these terms, yet Kant
denies that it is fictitious. While Kant ascribes an important moral role
to the idea of God, he denies that we can appeal to divine revelation as
a source of justification for our claims, including philosophical claims.
With a distinctively reflexive move, Kantian reason takes centre stage
in vindicating both specific philosophical claims and the legitimacy of
philosophical practice as such. The last chapter—Schulting’s—assesses
Jacques Derrida’s defence of religion against this Kantian outlook.
As is well known, Kant stresses the importance of showing that our
mental contents are not fictitious but have an anchorage in the world.
According to Kant, two kinds of representations can provide this anchor-
age: schemata and symbols. Grayson argues that, within Kant’s philoso-
phy, it is the figure of Christ that provides the required link between
God—more specifically, its moral aspect—and the sensible world in
which we live. Christ ‘embodies and presents the goodness of God’,
giving it ‘human form to bring the otherwise impossibly transcenden-
tal within our realms of possibility’. By doing this, Christ plays the role
of a sui generis schema of the idea of God. Grayson sheds light on the
working of this ‘schematism of analogy’, which shares certain traits with
schemata and symbols but differs from both.
The focus is here again on a particular aspect of the relation between
appearances and things in themselves, between nature or the world and
the idea of God. Kant’s solution of a schematism of analogy is interpreted
as embodied by Christ, who mediates what would otherwise appear as
an unbridgeable gap between a merely fictitious idea and our world. The
‘reality’ the idea of God acquires in this way is not theoretical or scientific
but practical or moral.
Kant intimates that reason depends on a ‘non-rational exogenous
ground, a mystery, a secret’, which Derrida presents as the religious
ground of reason. The religious nature of this ground is expressed by a
cautious, watchful attitude that is pre-eminent in apocalyptic discourse
and that results in a reserve about any ‘presumed coagulated formality
in philosophical speech’. Against Derrida’s view that reason is grounded
in religion, Schulting argues for the primacy of reason with the justifica-
tion that only reason can set the parameters that decide what counts as
religious watchfulness. He also notes a striking parallel between Kant’s
and Derrida’s modes of argument. Kant employs reason in the justifica-
tion of philosophical claims, which are reason’s own claims. Similarly,
Derrida applies the cautious reserve that is the hallmark of religion to his
own discourse about religion. Derrida’s religious defence of the religious
ground of reason exhibits the same distinctly Kantian form of reflexivity
and self-determination that can be found in Kant’s rational defence of
reason’s claims.
In this final chapter, before Hodge’s postscript, the topic is a new
instantiation of the relation which, we have argued, is at the centre of
this volume. The question of the status of religious claims and their rela-
tions to philosophy is particularly significant given Derrida’s challenge
to Kant’s epistemic priority of philosophy over religion. Schulting’s point
is not simply that Kant can be defended against Derrida’s objections but
also that there is a similarity between the argumentative structures in
Kant and Derrida.
So far in this section, we have presented several aspects of the thematic
unity of the volume. We have seen that the central parts of the volume
focus on the related themes of sensibility, nature and religion, but each
chapter is an elaboration of specific aspects of the more general ques-
tion of the relation between appearances/phenomena/world and things
in themselves/noumena/transcendence. There is, in addition, another
significant unifying theme, which will be discussed in the next section,
particularly in relation to the volume’s postscript.
4. A Further Unifying Element

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Gary Banham. Each of the
texts in the collection makes reference to Banham and his important
work on Kant and post-Kantian philosophy. Before concluding, we will
present these various references and bring out what is sometimes implicit
with the help of Hodge’s excellent and very useful postscript. What will
emerge more clearly, we hope, is the breadth of Banham’s scholarship
and the significance of his work.
Moran’s essay, dedicated to the memory of Gary Banham, makes ref-
erence to Banham in the first footnote of the text, acknowledging his
comments on the chapter. From the perspective of Hodge’s chapter, it is
easier to guess what shape those comments might have taken. As noted
by Hodge, Banham’s commitment to Kantian critique and transcendental
grounding was ‘enhanced by his willing self-exposure’ to Nietzsche and
Derrida. For instance, Hodge notes that, in the discussion of the Analo-
gies of Experience in the First Critique, the three determinations of time
(permanence, succession and coexistence) are ‘subverted by a Derridean
plus or minus one, in a fourth determination as lapsus’.
Moreover, according to Hodge, Banham’s research on Heidegger and
on Heidegger’s critique of Kant is the likely reason for his conviction of
the ‘as yet unexhausted potential for a renewal of transcendental phi-
losophy’. This renewal would start from the idea of a transcendental
sensibility, in which intuitions and concepts mutually inform one another.
Moran’s critical discussion of Kant’s account of intuition would have
received a sympathetic reaction from Banham and very likely also com-
ments both on the particular points concerning Kant’s account and on
ways in which the discussion could go beyond a standard reading of
Kant’s account of intuition towards readings influenced not only by
Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, but also Husserl.8
Banham’s engagement with Heidegger’s work is also discussed in Rox-
ana Baiasu’s chapter. She notes that Banham is one of the few Kant schol-
ars to discuss in detail Heidegger’s examination of Kant’s schematism. On
Banham’s reading of Heidegger, the fundamental meaning of schematism
is given by the schema-image.9 Yet Kant seems to deny precisely this point
when he claims that the schema of a pure concept of the understanding
‘can never be brought to an image at all’.10 One first step in the discus-
sion of this issue is the introduction of Heidegger’s threefold distinction
between three meanings of the notion of ‘image’: as immediate empirical
intuition of something individual, as presentation of a likeness (e.g., by a
photograph) and as the image of something general (conceptual represen-
tation). The schema-image refers to the third meaning.
According to Roxana Baiasu, for Heidegger, schematism has two struc-
tural moments: the schema and its corresponding schema-image. The
schema is a general rule for the sensible presentation of concepts. The
schema-image is a possible presentation of the rule of presentation repre-
sented in the schema. The pure concept is not brought to an empirical or
general image, but to a pure schema-image of time. These are ‘figurations
of time’, a term she borrows from Banham, rather than empirical intuitions
or presentations of likeness. These figurations of time indicate a significant
point on which Roxana Baiasu’s analysis relies, namely the necessity in
schematism of representing time spatially. This leads to the fundamental
claim of her chapter, namely, that the relation between space and tran-
scendental schematism is a central one in Heidegger, as shown by what he
regards as the three types of limitation of Kant’s transcendental idealism.
Banham’s discussion of the concept of end, in his Kant and the Ends
of Aesthetics, is presented in Rehberg’s chapter.11 On Rehberg’s reading,
Banham distinguishes between three senses of end: as limit, as purpose
and as conclusion or destination. This distinction, Rehberg notes, allows
Banham to present a reading of Kant’s Third Critique which provides a
new sense of unity to the Critical project. Rehberg’s chapter, however,
does not focus on this issue as such; by contrast, it discusses the ‘affective
wellspring of not just reflective, but also, implicitly, constitutive judge-
ment’. This is an aspect of Kant’s thought which is not often discussed
and which may even be controversial. Banham takes into consideration
another important reader of Kant who emphasised this significance of
affectivity, namely, Lyotard.
However, this is not an aspect of Kant’s Third Critique which Banham
develops in Kant and the Ends of the Aesthetics. Where Rehberg differs
from Banham is in their views of the coherence of the Critical system.
On Rehberg’s account, the claim to this coherence is problematic and
perhaps even unwarranted, not as a result of any mistakes on Kant’s part
but because this coherence is necessarily illusory, since it is ‘based on a
prior model of reality which omits to take account of the hiatuses and
lacunae that co-constitute it’. She argues for a displacement of the con-
cern for systematicity through a ‘post-modern insight into the essentially
fragmented’. In this way, she also believes that the focus is shifted to the
central concern of her chapter, namely affectivity.
Onof’s text is among those in this volume which engage in a substantial
way with Banham’s work. He takes as a starting point Banham’s discus-
sion of the various notions of regulative in the First and Third Critiques.
As we have seen, Onof presents first the notion of the regulative in the
Transcendental Analytic of the First Critique, this being a notion which
refers to the role played, for the unity of experience, by the dynamical
principles. In the Transcendental Dialectic, the regulative role of the ideas
of reason refers to the projected unity of nature.
Onof makes reference not only to this discussion of the notion of the
regulative, which can be found in Banham, he actually focuses his chap-
ter on a problem Banham, together with other Kant scholars, considers
central for Kant’s philosophy, namely the question of the status of the
regulative principles of the Dialectic. Furthermore, Onof develops and
further clarifies an answer to this problem, which Banham has suggested
in ‘Regulative Principles and Regulative Ideas’.12 Banham suggests that the
regulative principles, and in particular the principle of the systematic unity
of nature, are objective—that is, required for the cognition of objects.
In his essay, Crome makes reference to the formative influence Banham
had on him, in particular on his reading of Lyotard (a connection we
have seen Rehberg mentions, too). Whereas Lyotard’s reception in the
1990s was marked by the success of The Postmodern Condition, this led
to the overlooking of his other works or to their misinterpretation from
the perspective of this occasional study. It is, for instance, forgotten that
Lyotard is a serious interpreter of Kant, who had a lasting influence on
his later work. Banham had access to aspects of Lyotard’s work which
were usually overlooked—not only an appreciation of his work on Kant
but also of Lyotard as an authority on fine arts and of his political back-
ground in Marxism.
In her postscript, Hodge notes Banham’s interest in the work of Gillian
Rose, particularly her study The Melancholy Science: An Introduction
to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno. Banham’s interest in the context
of this work concerned not only the reference in the title to Nietzsche’s
Gay Science but also the further references to the ‘dismal science’ of
Malthus’s political economy, criticised by Marx in Capital: Critique of
Political Economy. Hodge also mentions the programme of work for
Banham’s post-doctoral position at the Manchester Metropolitan Uni-
versity between 1994 and 1996, a programme entitled ‘The Teleology
Project’, which included the revisiting of the challenges raised to Kantian
and Hegelian accounts of teleology not only by Nietzschean and Derrid-
ean approaches, but also by the Marxist critique.
Another substantial explicit discussion of Banham’s work can be
found in Jones’s chapter. She notes Banham’s discussion of chemism as
an alternative to the principles of mechanism and teleology.13 We find
in Banham, Jones notes, a discussion of Hegel’s account of chemism
as a principle that also ‘persists in animal beings as the basis of the
sex relation, and that translates into spiritual form as the “formal
basis” of love and friendship’. The Hegelian version of this principle,
however, reflects a logic which affirms a domination of the symboli-
cally male over the symbolically female. At the same time, the logic
of chemism allows a change in this pattern of domination through
the diversity of material elements which can constitute natural objects
and, moreover, through an open space for the formation of relations
between the sexes.
Banham’s discussion of chemism, Jones notes, suggests the possibil-
ity of a reading of Hegel through an Irigarayan lens but ‘also opens the
possibility of reading Irigaray through the lens of chemism’. By reading
chemism through Irigaray, and Irigaray through chemism, an alterna-
tive to the Kantian and Hegelian logic of domination can be found for
an account of nature, which can also respond to some of the problems
in Irigaray’s thought. The suggestion, as we have seen in the previous
discussions of Jones’s work, is for an elemental, connective materiality,
which allows for a ‘fluidity of differences’.
Another aspect of Banham’s work, which is well presented in this vol-
ume, is apparent in Grayson’s chapter. Her focus is on the realisation of
ideatic structures, and she begins with a discussion of Kant’s distinction
between the realisation of pure sensible concepts, empirical concepts and
pure concepts of the understanding. The first type of concept needs a
monogram generated by the a priori imagination; the second, a mono-
gram generated by reproductive imagination; the third one needs time as
an element homogenous with both concept and intuition. Now, the sche-
matic exhibition of theoretical ideas does not involve imagination. Given
the distance between ideas of reason and intuition, ideas of reason need
systems for their realisation. Ideas guide the way parts are devised and
connected towards an end or aim. Grayson notes at this point Banham’s
term for this mode of realisation: a final end schema. The schema is based
on a monogram, which is a product of reason. Ideas of reason become
realised through their regulative function.
Banham’s work on the realisation of practical ideas is also discussed
in Grayson’s chapter. She refers to Banham’s discussion of the typic and
notes the affiliation he establishes between the typic and the final end
schema. Banham’s work on the typic is one of the few discussions of the
role of schema in practical philosophy. As we have seen in the previous
discussion of Grayson’s chapter, Banham’s accounts of the typic and of
the final end schema are useful for the clarification of Kant’s notion of
a schematism of analogy, which is the focus of Grayson’s chapter. Nev-
ertheless, the account of the schematism of analogy, which is made pos-
sible in this way, Grayson notes, ‘risks the anthropomorphism that Kant
warned us against’. Moreover, Banham does not address the role of the
figure of Christ in the realisation of the idea of the highest good. This is
the avenue pursued by Grayson, an avenue which, as we have seen, leads
also to Schulting’s essay.
Schulting’s chapter, too, is dedicated to the memory of Banham and
starts by acknowledging (in the first footnote of the text) his research
on Kant and Derrida. Banham’s research on Derrida is, however, very
well presented in Hodge’s rich postscript. Particularly relevant for the
theme of this part of the volume (Part IV, Religion) is the discussion
of the special issue of Derrida Today edited by Banham on the topic
‘Jean-Luc Nancy and the “Deconstruction of Christianity” ’. In his essay
for this special issue, as noted by Hodge, Banham discusses the criti-
cal tension between Nancy’s project of the ‘Deconstruction of Christian-
ity’ and Derrida’s reservations. On Hodge’s reading, Banham notes that
Nancy’s claim that a deconstruction of Christianity is itself a Christian
project is complicated by a plurality of deconstructions. The Christian
tradition, for Banham, constitutes an ‘opening for a negotiation between
philosophy and its Christian inheritance’ and takes, in Nancy, the form
of a deconstruction of Christianity. This theme is particularly relevant for
Schulting’s discussion of the relation between philosophy and religion. By
contrast, Hodge distances herself in general from monotheistic traditions.
Hodge contrasts Banham’s and her reaction to Nancy’s deconstruction
of Christianity. On her reading, Nancy re-affirms the Nietzschean death
of God and the Heideggerian destruction of onto-theology. His response,
through a reading of Husserl and Heidegger, is a reconfiguration of a
new materialism. On Hodge’s reading, Nancy opens the way to a think-
ing of the loss of meaning and ‘rubbishing (l’immonde) of the world, in
technical practices, exemplified in trolling and plastic waste’. Banham’s
route, by contrast, goes back to the Kantian Critical project, through
the encounter with Nancy and Derrida, ‘into the context of twenty-first
century concerns’.
Hodge’s essay offers a subtle and erudite discussion of Banham’s
work, from a trajectory of his thinking (with the three phases focusing
on genealogy, teleology and conceptuality), to the three distinctive fea-
tures of Banham’s mode of working (specifically, his mode of writing,
his excellence as an interlocutor and the balance between a ‘playful dis-
ruptiveness, and a rigorous respect for the order of the concept’), to the
revaluation of the Kantian Critical project and, finally, to the differences
between his and her projects. A further feature of Banham’s work, which
is mentioned by Hodge, is his mode of Critical retrieval in the discussion
of other philosophers’ works. In this respect, however, Hodge resembles
Banham, as is visible in her critical retrieval of Banham’s projects, works
and life.
5. Conclusion
The main aim of this introductory piece has been to present the unity of
this edited volume. We have discussed this unity from three perspectives:
structural, thematic and critical. We have seen that the volume has a
recurrent structure, which can be found in each of the three main parts of
the volume: each part starts with an interpretative essay focused on Kant’s
work and continues with comparative chapters which set Kant’s work in
dialogue with the works of recent post-Kantian continental philosophers.
Thematically, the volume focuses on three themes, one for each of the
three main parts of the book. Moreover, each chapter approaches aspects
of the same general but fundamental problem of Kant’s philosophy and
of the Kantian critical project more generally: the problem of the rela-
tion between appearances/phenomena/world and things in themselves/
noumena/transcendence. Finally, critically, each chapter engages more
or less explicitly with themes from the work of Gary Banham, whose
trajectory of thinking, mode of working, focal themes and projects are
aptly and affectionately remembered in the postscript. This volume is
dedicated to his memory.
Notes
1 For an excellent study, see Marguerite LaCaze, ‘Kant and Contemporary
Kantians: The “Continental” Tradition’, in The Kantian Mind, ed. Sorin
Baiasu and Mark Timmons (London: Routledge, 2020).
2 For some recent studies, see the essays in Kant, Kantianism, and Idealism:
The Origins of Continental Philosophy, ed. Thomas Nenon, vol. 1 of The
History of Continental Philosophy (8 vols.), ed. Alan D. Schrift (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010).
3 Some of the comments in this chapter also connect with issues discussed in
the following parts of the volume.
4 This is presented mainly in Section 3 of Moran’s paper.
5 References to Kant’s work will cite the volume and page number of the
Akademie edition (Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich
Preußische (Deutsche) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Reimer [later:
de Gruyter], 1900–) with the exception of the First Critique, which will be
referred to, as usually, by citing the page numbers of the first and second edi-
tions. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indi-
anapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), vol. 5: 351.
6 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indi-
anapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), vol. 5: 67–71.
7 Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason, trans. Werner
S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2009), vol. 6: 65.
8 Hodge notes Banham’s research and teaching interests in Husserl’s work and
also mentions that he presented work on Husserl at the meetings of the Hus-
serl Circle, including that at University College Dublin, a meeting hosted by
Dermot Moran.
9 Gary Banham, Kant’s Transcendental Imagination (London: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2005), 162.
10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. W. S. Pluhar (Indianapolis,
IN: Hackett, 2000), A142/B181.
11 Gary Banham, Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2000).
12 Gary Banham, ‘Regulative Principles and Regulative Ideas’, in Kant und die
Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht: Akten des XI. Kant-Kongresses
2010, ed. Stefano Bacin, Alfredo Ferrarin, Claudio La Rocca and Margit
Ruffing (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), vol. 2, 15–24.
13 Gary Banham, ‘Chemism, Epigenesis and Community’, in Kant and the Ends
of Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 165–179.
Part II
Sensibility
2 Kant on Intuition1
Dermot Moran
In memory of Gary Banham
It is well known to the point of being commonplace that, for Immanuel

Kant, intuitions are the entry point and the lynchpin of the epistemo-
logical process. They account for the encounter with singularity, with
the sensuous and with what Kant calls ‘the real’ [das Reale].2 Intuitions,
famously, also act as limits, providing constraints on the cognitive task
of thinking objects, placing limits on ‘knowledge’ or ‘cognition’ [Erk-
enntnis] in Kant’s specific sense. Kant approaches the problem of intui-
tion both from above and below. At the bottom, there is what is ‘given’
[gegeben] in human experience, that is, sensuous intuition; such passive,
sensible intuitions distinguish human knowledge from its putative divine
counterpart. Theoretically, for Kant (as, traditionally, for Christian the-
ology), at least in the case of a pure intellect such as that theorised to
belong to the infinite divine being, intuition counts as the highest form
of knowing and not just the first step in knowing. God knows immedi-
ately and comprehensively the object of thought because He knows his
own will; His intuition is ‘original’, not ‘derivative’—intuitus originarius
(B72). Furthermore, consideration of the overall nature and role of intui-
tion forms a central part in the distinction between critical and dogmatic
metaphysics, as Kant conceives of this distinction. Kant’s account of
intuition is many-sided, and it has been seen as providing an account of
singular terms, a theory of direct reference,3 a theory of meaning and a
theory of intentionality (whereby the objects of intuition are intentional
objects).4 In addition, intuition is, of course, central to Kant’s account
of the transcendental nature of space and time and plays a crucial but
controversial role in his account of the nature of mathematics.5 Intui-
tions, however, prove to be a very problematic starting point for Kant,
raising questions of the consistency between his accounts of intuition
in the Transcendental Aesthetic and in the Analytic of the Critique of
Pure Reason and epistemological and metaphysical questions concerning
the nature of the given, the structure of reference to the object and the
24 Dermot Moran
problematic issue of whether Kant is a direct or a representative realist.
In introducing intuitions, Kant is, as the American philosopher Wilfrid
Sellars rightly puts it, ‘fighting his way towards a clarity of structure
which he never achieves’.6 And the distinguished Kant commentator
William Henry Walsh, for instance, has even raised the question as to
whether the notion of intuition can be made at all intelligible in Kant.7
In Kant’s discussions of intuition, there is a curious mixing of the empiri-
cal psychological, the phenomenological, the epistemological, the logical
and even the metaphysical (following on from the tradition of Wolff). It
is therefore necessary to attempt to disentangle these strands in order to
clarify the notion. In order to do this, I shall begin by sketching briefly
the emergence of intuition in rationalist philosophy. In particular, I shall
focus on the following problems:
• First, how are we to understand the defining characteristics of intui-

tion in general, namely immediacy and singularity, and, furthermore,
the characteristics of human intuition in particular, namely given-
ness, passivity and receptivity?
• Second, what, precisely, is given immediately in intuition? Is it merely
private sensations and inner representations, sense data, or is it (and
in what sense) the empirical object as understood in naïve discus-
sion? Or, indeed, is it the ‘thing in itself’ as it appears to us?
• Third, in Kant’s distinction between form and content, how can the
pure forms of intuition (space and time) be themselves intuitions?
We do not propose to resolve all issues but simply to articulate clearly

Kant’s account of intuitions to the fullest degree possible and thereby
expose the complexities, ambiguities and fissures in his central conception.
1. Kant and His Sources: The Different Senses of

Intuition in the Tradition
Kant’s technical terminology, notoriously, is not stable and, indeed, might
be termed systematically ambiguous. Not only do most of his technical
terms have a variety of meanings in different contexts, but the terms are
relational: the meaning of each is qualified by its relations with other
terms about it. It is thus difficult to single out the meaning of an indi-
vidual term without taking into account more holistic considerations. To
further complicate matters, Kant uses a combination of both Latin Scho-
lastic and German technical terms. Intuition [Anschauung, intuitus] is
related to at least the following terms: ‘impression’ [Eindrück], ‘sensation’
[Empfindung], ‘appearance’ [Erscheinung],8 ‘receptivity’ [Rezeptivität,
A19/B33; Empfänglichkeit, B129], ‘experience’ [Erfahrung], ‘percep-
tion’ [Wahrnehmung, Perzeption], ‘sensibility’ [Sinnlichkeit], ‘phenome-
non’9 and ‘representation’ [Vorstellung, repraesentatio]. We must further
Kant on Intuition 25
recognise that Kant employs the one term ‘intuition’ variously to mean
the act of intuiting (not quite a propositional attitude, because intuit-
ing that p is ‘blind’ on its own, and Kant speaks of intuiting an object
as presenting a particular),10 the content of that act, the form of the act
and the intentional object intuited.11 Of course, Kant had not quite extri-
cated himself from the complex nature of the ‘idea’ as found in mod-
ern Scholastic philosophy (and as used by Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff and
others)—its formal reality, objective reality, material reality and so on,
although his broadside against the prevailing use of the term ‘idea’ shows
how uncomfortable Kant was with the inherited metaphysical and epis-
temological traditions.12 Norman Kemp Smith claims that the German
term Anschauung is, from its etymology, a generalization of the notion
of visual sensation (schauen means ‘to watch’, ‘to look at’),13 just as the
Latin intuitus is related to the verb intuĕre, ‘to see’. He further claims that
Kant introduces this term in place of the more usual ‘sensation’ because
he wants to be able to call the formal intuitions of space and time intui-
tions rather than sensations.14 Of course, space and time are, for Kant,
the forms of intuition, but they can still be intuited in themselves and
thus count as ‘formal intuitions’, as he explains in a famous footnote
in the Transcendental Aesthetic (B160–161). More generally, intui-
tions are a sub-species of the general field of ‘representation’,15 and in
the Leibnizian-Wolffian-Baumgartenian view, which Kant inherited and
modified, the soul is characterized by having representations (either of the
world or of itself). Whenever a cognizing subject has experiences, she or
he has ‘representations’, among which are sensuous intuitions. According
to the standard account of Kant, which, mirabile dictu, receives consid-
erable support from Kant’s own writings, impressions [Eindrücke] are
the ‘effect’ [Wirkung] of objects on the senses, producing sensations,
which are the ‘matter’ or ‘stuff’ [Materie, Stoff] of intuitions. The term
Eindrück has been used to translate Hume’s ‘impression’, and certainly
Kant associates the term with Hume.16 It is noteworthy that in rewriting
the Introduction of the first Critique for the B-edition, Kant replaces the
phrase in the A-edition, ‘the raw material of sensible sensations’ [der rohe
Stoff sinnlicher Empfindungen, A1], with the phrase ‘the raw material
of sensible impressions’ [der rohe Stoff sinnlicher Eindrücke, B1], to use
the translation of Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. This distinction is not
maintained by Kemp Smith, since the latter translates both phrases as
‘the raw material of sensible impressions’, presumably because the phrase
‘sensible sensations’ would have seemed to him redundant.
Let us address a basic confusion. Are impressions, for Kant, sensa-
tions tout court or do impressions cause sensations? Kant is unclear. In
any case, our sensory faculty, sensibility, must be affected or modified in
some way. It seems that intuitions can occur on their own, as modalities
of the receptive faculty (noises, itches, sensory irritations), but, accom-
panied by the right intentional consciousness, they are called by Kant
26 Dermot Moran
‘perceptions’, and when united in an orderly connection of perceptions,
the whole is entitled ‘experience’ [Erfahrung, A110, B161]. Sensations,
on this account, are mere undergoings without any objectifying referen-
tiality. According to Kant, impressions supply the first ‘occasion’ [Anlaß,
Gelegenheit, A86/B118]17 for knowledge, and he refers favourably to
Locke in this regard, arguing, however, that this origin provides no jus-
tification for the use of concepts, though it does explain the occasions
of their production. Something must awaken the understanding; in this
sense, impressions knock on the door, but the impressions themselves
have no normative force. On this account, knowledge is constructed on
the basis of passively received sensations. Paton, for instance, endorses
this picture:
The simplest interpretation is to suppose that Kant is speaking at the

commonsense level. The object may be taken to be a body, such as a
chair. It is given to us so far as it affects our minds through the sense-
organs and produces, for example, a sensation of colour. [. . .] If we
speak strictly, even the phenomenal object is given only as regards its
matter. What is given to us is, for example, a colour. We think that
it is the colour of a chair. Without thought, although we might see a
colour, we could not know that it was the colour of a chair, or indeed
of anything.18
In support of the view of sensations as pure experiences, we might cite

the A-Deduction, where Kant talks of intuitions on their own, which
he calls appearances, as ‘crowding in upon the soul’.19 In fact, however,
Kant explicitly states that such a play of representations on its own never
gives rise to experience that might be considered epistemic:
The appearances might, indeed, constitute intuition without thought

[gedankenlose Anschauung], but not knowledge; and consequently
would be for us as good as nothing.
(A111)
Even as modifications of our sensibility, the sensations must be ordered

under the ‘mode’ [Art] of the form of sensibility, Kant’s version of the
Scholastic principle that whatever is received is received according to the
mode of the receiver [receptum est in recipiente per modum recipientis].20
The pure form of intuition, the a priori structure of sensibility, supplies
spatial location and temporal ordering to the manifold of sensations.
Already in his Dissertation (1770), Kant explains why the form of sensa-
tion may be called sensitive even though it is devoid of sensory matter:
Thus there belong to sensory cognition [sensualis cognitio] both mat-

ter, which is sensation and in virtue of which cognitions are called
sensory [sensuales], and form, in virtue of which, even if it were to
be found free from all sensation, representations are called sensitive
[sensitivae].
(D 393)
The form of intuition provides a minimum organization, ‘an accidental

order’ (B219), which must then be taken up and undergo a combination
through understanding:
The manifold of representations can be given in an intuition which

is purely sensible, that is, nothing but receptivity, and the form of
this intuition can lie a priori in our faculty of representation, without
being anything more than the mode [als die Art] in which the subject
is affected [wie das Subjekt affiziert wird]. But the combination [die
Verbindung, conjunctio] of a manifold in general can never come to
us through the senses, and cannot, therefore, be contained in the pure
form of sensible intuition.
(B129)
In agreement with Aristotle (and against Husserl, for whom there is

already a passive synthesis at the level of perception), for Kant, combina-
tion is always an act of the understanding, ‘an act of its [the understand-
ing’s] self-activity’ [ein Aktus seiner Selbststätigkeit],21 and combination
already requires as a condition a higher ‘unity’ [Einheit] that comes from
the subject itself. For this reason, in one of his Reflexionen, Kant calls
the concept of what happens, or the concept of an event, ‘a determina-
tion of sensibility’ [eine Bestimmung der Sinnlichkeit].22 There is a strong
temptation to read this standard account as, at its base, an acceptance of
Lockean empiricism, whereby the sensations themselves provide some
kind of intelligible ‘raw material’ (Kant’s roher Stoff) from which concep-
tual knowledge is somehow abstracted and the concepts thereby gained
are somehow re-imposed on the flow of experience. This view, however,
fails to acknowledge the full complexities and radicality of Kant’s unique
epistemological position. On the standard account, Kant would be a
modified Lockean, an empiricist with a constructivist account of concep-
tual knowledge. However, it is, I maintain, precisely Kant’s intention to
overcome Locke and Leibniz by introducing a new notion: intuitions as a
separate ‘source of knowledge’ [Erkenntnisquelle].
2. Revisiting Kant’s Distinction Between Intuitions

and Concepts
Beginning with the Dissertation of 1770, where Kant struggles with the
distinction, and thereafter throughout his critical period, Kant distin-
guishes sharply between two separate faculties—sensibility [Sinnlichkeit]
28 Dermot Moran
and understanding [Verstand].23 As is well known, these two faculties
provide two distinct ‘sources of knowledge’ (A260/B316). Kant later
rightly regarded this distinction as the cornerstone of his critical phi-
losophy, serving to distinguish it both from dogmatic Wolffian rational-
ism that (following Descartes) placed sense and thought on a continuum
(according to which sensations are confused thoughts) and from ‘physi-
ological’ Lockean empiricism, which made ideas into pale reflections of
the more vivacious ‘lively’ impressions. In the Dissertation, Kant explic-
itly accuses Wolff of having misunderstood this distinction and hence
misunderstanding the difference between noumena and phenomena
(D 395). As it would turn out, this distinction would also mark out Kant
from later German Idealism.24 Kant, however, never gives an account
of how this twofold nature of the mind comes about, although at one
stage he claims that the Transcendental Aesthetic has ‘shown’ that all
our intuition is sensible (B146), when in fact he has simply proclaimed
it. It is simply a contingent fact about human nature (e.g., B146). Kant
always refers to the distinction as occurring ‘in us’ [bei uns], ‘at least in
human beings’ [uns Menschen wenigstens, B33], ‘in humans’ [beim Men-
schen].25 Although merely human understanding can generate concepts,
it can propose no object to itself; the objects about which it thinks must
always be given in advance, and that wherein they are given is sensibility.
Similarly, human understanding is constrained to think discursively (B93)
rather than in some kind of intellectually intuitive fashion and then about
something not of its own making. Without sensuous input, the engine of
the mind would, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, simply be idling.
3. The Break With Rationalism and the Rejection of

Sensations as ‘Confused Thoughts’
As we noted previously, Kant introduces the distinction between intui-
tions and concepts as a way of separating himself from the Leibnizian-
Cartesian heritage where sensations were considered ‘confused
thoughts’.26 As is well known, Descartes problematically placed sensa-
tion and imagination at the end of his list of ‘thinking’ activities in the
Second Meditation.27 They featured at the end because, although they
were mental acts, they require the presence of the body and are linked to
the body in an essential manner (as later becomes clear in the Sixth Med-
itation). Sensing [sentire], Descartes explicitly says, is a ‘special mode
of thinking’.28 Whereas purely mentally entertained thoughts (e.g., of a
priori laws) could be clear and distinct, no thought emanating from the
senses could be more than obscure, confused and limited. As Descartes
regarded the mind as a single, indivisible unity, sensation and thought
had in some sense to be identified as belonging to the one faculty, or,
as Kant repeatedly says, there is only a ‘logical distinction’ (D 395) and
not a real distinction between them. In the Regulae, Descartes defines
intuitions in a manner which makes them sound like what Kant would
later (D 397) call ‘intellectual intuition’ or ‘divine intuition’:
By intuition I do not mean the fluctuating testimony of the senses,

or the deceptive judgment of the imagination as it botches things
together, but the conception of a clear and unclouded mind which is
so easy and distinct that there can be no room for doubt about what
we are understanding [. . .] intuition is the conception of a clear and
attentive mind which proceeds solely from the light of reason [. . .]
thus everyone can mentally intuit that he exists.29
Leibniz, by and large, follows Descartes’s account of sensation and intel-

lection but places it under the general category of perception and rep-
resentation (and distinguishes between perceptions and apperceptions).
Leibniz proposes that every monad is distinguished from every other by
its own inner perceptions.30 Perceptions, for Leibniz, are views of the
world, albeit mostly confused.31 For Leibniz, a representation is clear
if it can be used to recognize an object. But, furthermore, a clear rep-
resentation can itself be confused or distinct, depending on the number
of ‘marks’ or ‘characteristics’ [notae] the representation picks out in the
object. Leibniz writes:
Knowledge is clear when I have the means for recognizing the thing
represented. Clear knowledge, again, is either confused or distinct. It
is confused when I cannot enumerate one by one marks sufficient for
differentiating one thing from others, even though the thing indeed
does have such marks and requisites into which its notion can be
resolved. [. . .] But a distinct notion is like the notion an assayer has
of gold, that is, a notion connected with marks and tests sufficient to
distinguish a thing from all other similar bodies.32
A distinct notion on this account is an insight into essence, similar to

what Descartes meant when he said that to grasp a thing as thinking or
as extended is to grasp it essentially. Again, for Leibniz, aside from being
confused and distinct, distinct perceptions themselves can be ‘adequate’
(all the marks are known) or ‘inadequate’ (a sufficient number of marks
are known). Clarity and confusion are thus the distinguishing features
between thought and sensation, since all involve the apprehension of
qualities of an object.
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, in his Metaphysica, on which Kant
lectured through most of his teaching career, develops the view of per-
ception and representation which he found in Leibniz. Baumgarten, in
agreement with Leibniz, sees sensations and thoughts as species of repre-
sentation. He summarizes the Cartesian-Leibnizian ‘sensations are con-
fused thoughts’ view when he formally defines a confused representation
30 Dermot Moran
as sensible: repraesentatio non distincta sensitiva vocatur.33 At the same
time, Baumgarten recognizes that all changes in perception mirror
changes in the world, either distinctly or confusedly. For him, representa-
tions can be either immediate or mediate. A sensation is a representation
of my present state and is always of something singular (Metaphysica,
§561). Internal sense represents the present state of my mind (Metaphys-
ica, §535); external sense represents the present state of my body. The
law of sensation, Baumgarten says, is that
As the states of the world and the states of myself follow one another,
so must the representation of their presences follow one another.
(Metaphysica, §541)
The relation between representation and the world seems to be direct.

Kant will challenge this general picture. While accepting that sensation
is of singulars and concepts as containing marks, he disagrees completely
with Baumgarten’s assumption that the subjective order of my states
should mirror the objective order of states of the world or the ‘objec-
tive’ states of myself. Baumgarten’s view that the subjective order mirrors
the objective order is somewhat ambiguous in the Latin text. It is not
clear whether he is claiming that the subjective order actually mirrors the
objective or that it should mirror it (in order to gain truth). The former
reading would make error impossible.
It is undoubtedly true that Kant, even in his critical phase, retains some
aspects of the standard Cartesian-Leibnizian picture. From one point of
view, thoughts ‘materially speaking’ (materialiter, as Descartes says) are
modes or modifications of the mind; they are temporal distortions of
the thinking activity (B63). They are ‘states’ [Zustände, status] or ‘deter-
minations’ [Bestimmungen, A362] of the mind,34 although we must be
careful not to equate the Kantian unified consciousness under an ‘I think’
with a Cartesian substance. In a note dating from the 1750s, Kant writes:
Representation is an inner determination of the mind, which refers to

certain things that differ from it, that is, representations. It is a deter-
mination of the soul, which refers itself to other things. [Repraesen-
tatio est determinatio mentis interna, quatenus ad res quasdam ab
ipsa nempe repraesentationes diversas refertur. Ist diejenige Bestim-
mung der Seele, die sich auf andere Dinge beziehet.]35
Kant, however, rejects the Leibnizian-Wolffian account whereby all

thoughts or ideas represent something; for Kant, there are non-referring
thoughts. Kant distinguishes between every sensation having a cause and
every sensation having an object.36 Furthermore, he departs from Leibniz
by emphasizing that referring thoughts represent appearances only—not
things as they are in themselves. Nevertheless, both agree that the real (as
opposed to the logical) function of thoughts is to be representative. For
Kant, furthermore, both understanding and the senses can be clear or
confused. So there is some continuity between Kant and the Leibnizian
tradition.
In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant explicitly criticizes the
Leibnizian-Wolffian account of sensibility, whereby our sensibility ‘is

nothing but a confused representation of things’ by which we do actually
grasp things in themselves but only partially and confusedly:
The concept of sensibility and of appearance would be falsified and

our whole teaching in regard to them would be rendered empty and
useless, if we were to accept the view that our entire sensibility is
nothing but a confused representation of things [nichts als die ver-
worrene Vorstellung der Dinge sei], containing only what belongs to
them in themselves, but doing so under an aggregation of characters
[Zusammenhäufung von Merkmalen] and partial representations
that we do not consciously distinguish.
(A44/B61–62)
For Kant, Leibniz had treated sense and thought as having the same con-
tent and differing only in their logical form (A44/B62), whereas he thinks
the two have different origins and different contents (A44/B62), repeat-
ing the view of the Dissertation. For Kant, we do not apprehend things
in themselves in any way in our intuition; it is thus not the case that we
apprehend them confusedly. As Kant defines his understanding of intui-
tion here:
The representation of a body in intuition [. . .] contains nothing that

can belong to an object in itself, but merely the appearance of some-
thing, and the mode in which we are affected by that something; and
this receptivity of our faculty of knowledge is termed sensibility.
(A44/B61)
Kant repeats this criticism of Leibniz in the Amphibolies (A270/B326):

Leibniz mistook appearances as the appearances of knowable things in
themselves (e.g., a rainbow signifies rain, B63), whereas, for Kant, the
sensory form of intuiting provides a different array of qualities than does
the intellectual contemplation of things. Kant famously remarks that
‘Leibniz intellectualized all appearances’ (A271/B327), whereas Lockean
empiricists had sensualised concepts of the understanding. The Lockean
tradition—as exemplified by Hume—tended to treat ideas as pale reflec-
tions of sensations or impressions. The mistake is to treat impressions
and concepts as belonging to the one faculty on a continuum of con-
fusedness or distinctness (vividness or liveliness in Hume’s language).
In his refutation of his contemporary critic Johann August Eberhard,
32 Dermot Moran
who accused Kant of being a Leibnizian dogmatist, Kant claims that the
Leibniz-Wolffian concept of intuition attributes obscurity to the confus-
edness of the manifold of the representations in the intuition but still
holds that it represents things in themselves, ‘the clear knowledge of
which, however, must come from the understanding (which recognizes
the simple parts in that intuition)’.37 Sensory intuition is not merely the
confused version of a clear intellectual intuition. For Kant, the ground of
intuition is the receptivity of the human mind, ‘whereby it receives rep-
resentations in accordance with its subjective constitution, when affected
by something (in sensation)’.38 It is noteworthy, however, that in discuss-
ing repraesentationes, the term intuition [intuitus] does not appear in
either Leibniz or Baumgarten. Intuitus is a rare occurrence in Leibniz’s
writings. The locus classicus is in the short 1684 article, Meditations
on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas,39 where Leibniz distinguishes intuitive
from ‘blind or symbolic’ knowledge. We have intuitive knowledge if the
object is fully and clearly given in itself, which is the case only with sim-
ples. We have symbolic knowledge when we are blind to the object and
have instead only a sign of the object. Most of our knowledge (not just
mathematical knowledge) is symbolic (as Husserl will also assert). Intui-
tive knowledge is not possible when the object is very complex; indeed,
we have intuitive knowledge only of ‘distinct primitive ideas’. Similarly,
although much of Kant’s other terminology comes from Baumgarten,40
the term intuitus is used in Baumgarten’s Acroasis logica to mean a singu-
lar concept,41 whereas it appears only once in Baumgarten’s Metaphysica,
and, as in Leibniz, it occurs in a discussion of the facultas characteristica,
which is the faculty which understands things through pointing them out,
exhibiting or designating them through their marks:42
If, in perceiving, the sign is joined to the signified, and the perception
of the sign is greater than that of the signified, this is called a cognitio
symbolica, if the representation of the signified is greater than that of
the sign, it will be cognitio intuitiva (intuitus). For whichever form of
the characteristic faculty the law is: the perception of one shall be the
medium for the knowledge of the existence of the other.43
Later, Eberhard, attempting to argue that Kant had not gone beyond
Leibniz, takes up this same distinction but misinterprets Leibniz’s inten-
tion. According to Eberhard’s version, we have intuitive knowledge of
the sensible and symbolic knowledge of the supersensible (rather than
no knowledge of it).44 Eberhard was arguing that Kant was right about
the limitations on sensory knowledge but neglected that we also have
intellectual knowledge of a priori truths. This Leibnizian distinction
between the intuitive and the symbolic (retrieved in Husserl) survives
in Kant’s earlier writings, although it has lost most of its force. Thus, in
the 1770 Dissertation, Kant offers a distinction between intuitive and
symbolic cognition that is halfway between the old Leibnizian and the
new critical view:
There is (for man) no intuition of what belongs to the understand-

ing, but only a symbolic cognition, and thinking is only possible for
us by means of universal concepts in the abstract, not by means of a
singular concept in the concrete. For all our intuition is bound to a
certain principle of form, and it is only under this form that anything
can be apprehended by the mind immediately or as a singular, and
not merely conceived discursively or by means of general concepts.45
The notion of symbolic knowledge is still thoroughly Leibnizian, but the

notion of intuition is in the process of being rethought. Intuition is now
linked in Kant with the idea of entertaining a singular concept, but Kant
explicitly goes on to deny that humans can know in this way.
Later, in the fully critical period, in Critique of Judgment, Kant rethinks
the distinction and includes the symbolic under the intuitive:
Notwithstanding the adoption of the word symbolic by modern logi-

cians in a sense opposed to an intuitive mode of representation, it
is a wrong use of the word and subversive of its true meaning: for
the symbolic is only a mode of the intuitive. The intuitive mode of
representation is, in fact, divisible into the schematic and the sym-
bolic. Both are hypotyposes, i.e., presentations [exhibitiones], not
mere marks. Marks are merely designations of concepts by the aid of
accompanying sensible signs devoid of any intrinsic connection with
the intuition of the object.46
Concepts, according to Kant in the Critique of Judgment, are exhibited

by intuitions. Intuitions that fill in concepts in an intuitive way are called
‘schemata’ and are direct presentations of concepts, whereas symbols are
indirect presentations of concepts. Our knowledge of God, for exam-
ple, Kant says, is ‘symbolic’.47 Kant’s mature rethinking of the symbolic
as a mode of the intuitive helps to highlight the nature of intuition in
this account—intuitions are direct exhibitions or presentations (be it
of objects or concepts). In this discussion, regrettably, I must forgo fur-
ther discussion of the nature of schemata that, in a sense, are sensible
instances of the concept. To summarize, Kant accepts from the Leibnizian
inheritance that:
• intuitions and concepts are two species of representation;

• intuitions are ‘singular representations’;
• concepts are general and are grasped by means of ‘marks’.48
34 Dermot Moran
Kant rejects:
• the view that sensation is confused thought (i.e., sensation and think-
ing are on a continuum);
• the view that intuition is in direct contact with ‘things in themselves’.
Kant’s mature position is the view that:
• sensibility and understanding are two distinct faculties;

• intuition grasps appearances only.
4. What About Putative Intellectual Intuition?

Another important feature of Kant’s departure from the Scholastic and
rationalist tradition is his rejection of intellectual intuition, of the imme-
diate apprehension of singular objects by intellect without the media-
tion of sensibility.49 Divine knowledge, which is a knowledge without
aspects or profiles, does not passively undergo experiences and does not
need to ‘receive’ or ‘grasp’ objects in an apprehension for Kant; rather, it
creates the objects through its will. It has intellectual, creative intuition,
intuitus originarius (B72). No such intuition is available to humans,
who have only intuitus derivativus (B72), though Kant does not think
the concept is intrinsically absurd. The importance of this point is to
realize that, as a genus, intuitions are characterized not only by singu-
larity but also by immediacy. In intellectual intuition, givenness, under-
stood as givenness from without, and sensuality both drop out, but for
humans, intuitions are intrinsically both ‘given’ and ‘sensibly filled’.50
Givenness ‘from without’ is understood as passivity. In other words,
our intuition is dependent on the prior or contemporaneous existence of
the object. Divine intuition, on the other hand, has, as it were, givenness
from within, givenness produced by self-conscious willing, whereby the
object is dependent for its existence on the act of intuition itself (D 397),
and here intellectual intuition merges with the faculty of spontaneity.
Kant writes:
An understanding in which through self-consciousness all the mani-

fold would eo ipso be given, would be intuitive; our understanding
can only think, and for intuition must look to the senses.
(B135)
In fact, then, givenness and immediacy have to be understood as ulti-

mately the same thing; that is, givenness is immediate for sensory intui-
tion. For divine intuition, however, immediacy is achieved through
spontaneity (which Kant defines as ‘the mind’s power of producing rep-
resentations from itself’, A51/B75).
Intuition, as it appears in the writings of Descartes, is immediate in
contrast to the mediated, discursive nature of deductive reasoning. In the
Regulae, Descartes allows for pure intuitions that contain nothing but
intellectual, apodictic knowledge. Descartes connects intuition with the
natural light, but Wolff’s follower Heinrich A. Meissner, in his Philosophis-
ches Lexicon (1737), records that Wolff freed the notion of intuition from
the natural light of reason and retained it for the notion of an immediate
judgement.51 Immediacy is a central feature of the Cartesian concept of
intuition, and here Kant follows Descartes. Kant, however, links specifically
human intuition to sensibility, whereas, for Descartes, as we have seen,
thinking need have no sensory or imagistic component. Descartes distin-
guished between thinking and sensory imaging: we can think about a chili-
agon though we cannot imagine one, and we can have a positive idea or
concept of infinity which transcends all sensory experience. Eberhard, in
his criticism of Kant as a confused and incomplete Leibnizian, mentions
these examples to refute Kant’s view that mathematics requires sensory
intuition. Kant argues that all geometrical demonstrations, for example,
drawing a 96-sided figure inside a circle, require intuition, and he denies
Eberhard’s gradation between the sensible and the supersensible.52 In reject-
ing this whole rationalist way of thinking about sensation, Kant is, in fact,
to some extent reviving the Aristotelian-Scholastic formulations of the
notion of intuition, acknowledging that sense provides immediate contact
with singulars.53 Aristotle had stated that the particular can only be grasped
by sense (Posterior Analytics I, 18, 81b7) and that each sense has its own
proper object (the ‘proper sensibles’). Sensible objects are different from
intellectual objects, as sensory forms are different from intellectual forms.
Furthermore, following the Scholastics, Kant acknowledges that there must
already be some kind of synthesis or apprehension at the level of sense [sim-
plex apprehensio]. Here his influences are Wolff and Tetens, but the tradi-
tion is one more associated with Scotist rather than Thomist scholasticism,
Wolff being an avid reader of Suarez.54 The difference between Thomism
and Scotism lies largely in the possibility of the reception of forms of indi-
viduals, the ability to understand and conceive haecceitas.55 Duns Scotus
speaks of a cognitio intuitiva whereby an object is immediately given, inde-
pendently of its relation to other things: cognitio autem intuitiva est objecti
ut objectum est praesens in existentia actuali.56 Kant could have given
exactly the same definition, except that for Scotus, the object is given sicut
et in se, whereas for Kant, it is given only as appearance.57 For Scotus, intui-
tive cognition is essentially a part of intellectual cognition, and Richard A.
Smyth has interpreted Kant as making the same claim:
Intuitive cognitions are intellectual representations or representa-

tions by the understanding (of which sensibility and understanding
are parts) and these representations are representations of an object
that are based on the presence of this object here and now.58
36 Dermot Moran
While this goes too far in bringing intuition under the understanding, the
point is well taken that for Kant, knowledge requires the understanding
operating on intuition, and talk of intuitions as independent sensations is
misleading in the extreme.
5. Intuition in the Inaugural Dissertation: On

the Cusp of Critique
Perhaps paralleling the rarity of usage of the term intuitus in the
Leibnizian-Baumgartenian school, the term intuitus appears rarely in
Kant’s early writings and emerges first in a significant way in the 1770
Dissertation.59 When it is first introduced, it more or less coincides with
the articulation of the sensible limitation on human understanding. In
line with Baumgarten, in the Dissertation (397), Kant calls intuition a
‘singular concept’, as distinct from a ‘universal’ or ‘general’ concept. An
intuition, on this account, somewhat confusingly, is a special kind of con-
cept, one that contains its objects within it as opposed to under it, a view
that is repeated in the Aesthetic. We represent a concept to ourselves by
means of an intuition in the concrete (D 387). When all the composition
of the understanding is removed, what is left is simple (D 387) and is
arrived at by analysis, whereas the whole is arrived at by synthesis. The
nature of intuition is here understood in terms of the part/whole rela-
tion. Kant mentions the laws of intuitive cognition. The matter supplied
consists of simples, whereas space and time are the forms of this world.
According to the Dissertation, the intuition of space and time is such that
we can only tell different parts of time or space apart by intuition and not
by any characteristic marks they might present to the understanding.60
Thus, the left and right hands can be identical in terms of the space they
occupy and the relations between the parts, but that they are distinct and
incongruent can only be reached by intuition. Kant takes this as proof
of the purity of our intuition of space. He repeats this argument in the
Prolegomena (§13), but, curiously, this argument is left out of the Cri-
tique. This is unfortunate because the incongruent counterparts example
expresses something irreducible about intuition—its irreducibility to a
conceptual analysis in a standard conceptual account. Akin to the idea
of space, the concept of time, Kant concludes in 1770, is ‘primitive and
originary [primitivus et originarius]’.61
The Dissertation and the later Transcendental Aesthetic of the Cri-
tique of Pure Reason both carry an unresolved tension regarding the
nature of intuition. One of the classic Scottish commentators, Edward
Caird, makes a telling point when he explains the difference of emphasis
between the accounts of intuition as a feature of Kant’s lecturing style,
according to which he would introduce general principles that are sub-
sequently modified.62 As Caird says, the story in the Aesthetic is neces-
sary in order to make intelligible the discussion in the Analytic.63 Thus,
in the Aesthetic, Kant makes no mention of the role of imagination and
conceptuality in intuition, although these emerge as features in the Ana-
lytic. Caird writes:
In short, he [Kant] seems in the Aesthetic only to revive the view of

the Dissertation, according to which all that is necessary to produce
experience is that the understanding in its formal use should general-
ize the ideas of perception. Sensibility is presented as a receptivity,
not merely of impressions and sensations but of perceptions, as if
perceptions could be received without any activity of the conscious-
ness that receives them. And from these perceptions we are supposed
to be able to read off at once the characters of individual objects pre-
sented in them, provided we are careful not to make any assertions
which go beyond these individual objects.64
This is taken to be a claim that there can be no observation statements

that are not already theory laden.65 Kant, however, does say that we can
in fact have intuitions without concepts: ‘appearances can certainly be
given in intuition independently of the functions of the understanding’
(A90/B122), but such appearances ‘would be for us as good as nothing’
(A111). Similarly, at B145, he claims that ‘the manifold to be intuited
must be given prior to the synthesis of the understanding, and indepen-
dently of it’. In order to have meaningful experiences, we have to have, in
true Kantian mode, conceptuality or rules for ordering and unifying rep-
resentations under higher representations, but there is a sense in which the
sensory given remains entirely independent and occurs at the local cor-
poreal level. The Transcendental Aesthetic talks as if the sensory domain
constituted a separate epistemological domain and certainly endorses the
notion that there are pure intuitions that are not conceptual. It is perhaps
best to see the Aesthetic as revealing only one half of the story to be told,
introducing elements that must later be gone over and taken up to get
their place in the whole story. Kant discovers or postulates the domains
of sensation, impression and their formal organisation in intuitions. They
are arrived at by a transcendental argument, according to Wilfrid Sellars;
they are theoretical constructs.66 Intuitions with no conceptual overlay
do not yield knowing, erkennen, recognition or objective reference but
only subjective modifications of the sensory faculty that can go on just
because we are embodied living sensitive beings.
6. Intuition in the Critical Period

Following the Dissertation and throughout the critical period, the concept
of intuition moves to an anchoring role in the whole system. The concept
of intuition is significantly rethought to a certain extent in the Critique of
Judgment (1790); nevertheless, it continues to appear in a recognizable
form in the late lectures on Logic (so-called Jäsche Logic, 1800)67 and in
the Anthropology from the Pragmatic Point of View (where Kant discusses
38 Dermot Moran
the relation between the five senses and intuition), and Kant continues to
invoke the distinction between intuition and concepts as a given fact of
human Erkenntnis. The starting point for Kant’s mature analysis contin-
ues to be that both intuitions and concepts are species of representation.
Intuitions and concepts are two ways in which the mind represents things
to itself. In the Dissertation, the dualism of sense and intellect led to a two-
world theory,68 a world of phenomena and a world of noumena. By the
time of the Critique, this has disappeared. Now there is only one world to
cognise, and this cognition requires both intuition and conception:
Intuition and concepts constitute, therefore, the elements of all our

knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some
way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts can yield
knowledge.
(A50/B74)
Intuitions without concepts are blind, or non-referring;69 concepts with-

out intuitions are empty. Hegel and others had read this as an admission
of the essentially inescapable belonging together of sensibility and under-
standing, such that Kant’s positing of them as two separate sources of
knowledge is fundamentally mistaken.70 Kant, however, believes the deci-
sion to keep them apart answers many of the epistemological problems of
earlier philosophy, both rationalist and empiricist.
Kant’s examples of intuitions are often misleading. Sometimes he seems
to be referring to the matter of intuition, namely sensation, sometimes
to the form, sometimes to examples that help to illuminate a concept
and sometimes to empirical objects. It is often thought that intuitions
consist of sensations, that is, of some cluster of sense data, whereas, in
the Critique, Kant refers to the intuition of a house, by which he clearly
means a set of sensory experiences organized such that an object is given.
Of course, these alternatives are not incompatible, but Kant’s language
is loose. Elsewhere, Kant’s Logic distinguishes between a savage who
sees a house and does not know what it is and a person who does know
what a house is.71 Both have the same intuition; indeed, ‘the same object’
is before both, but the house-knower also has the concept of house. He
has ‘intuition and concept at the same time’ (AA 9:33). Kant returns to
this example several times. Kant’s Wiener Logic (AA 24:905) offers a dif-
ferent but related example of the person (Adam?) who saw the first tree,
without being able to categorize it. Here intuition stands for the whole,
unified, discriminated, sensory given. Kant says the savage has ‘mere
intuition’, and the example is used to explain the distinction between
matter and form. It is not clear from the passage whether Kant thinks the
savage is having an intentional representation of something or just a set
of non-referring representations. The language is deeply ambiguous. But
it is clear he thinks the savage sees something. The same section of the
Logic gives as an example of intuition: ‘we see a cottage in the distance’.
Although we see it as having windows and other features, ‘we are not
conscious of this presentation of the manifold of the parts, and our pres-
entation of the said object is therefore an indistinct presentation’.72 This
is very close to a passage in the sensualist Étienne Bonnot de Condillac at
the beginning of his Logic.73 It is clear that intuitions are our perceptions
of objects in the world. Intuitions, like concepts, can be clear or confused,
distinct or indistinct.
As we have seen, at various times in the Dissertation, in the Logic lec-
tures and elsewhere, Kant states that intuitions are individual concepts
or concepts of individuals, but it is better to say that they are representa-
tions of individuals.74 An intuition is an immediate, singular representa-
tion. In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant denies that space and time
are ‘empirical’ (B38) or ‘discursive or general’ (B39) concepts. Rather,
they are pure intuitions (A24/B39). However, both in the Dissertation
and the Transcendental Aesthetic, he also refers to the ‘concept of space’
and even offers a metaphysical exposition of the concept of space (B38).
Indeed, he even inserts the word ‘concept’ into the phrase ‘the exposition
of space’ in the A-edition. So space and time are not just pure intuitions
but also concepts. Now if an intuition is only a singular concept, then
we need worry no further about this slippage—an intuition just is a con-
cept. As we shall see, I do not believe that singularity is the sole defining
characteristic of an intuition, although Kant does indeed argue that space
and time are intuitions by arguing that they are singular entities whose
totalities come before the parts. I consider immediacy also to be central
to the notion of an intuition. I suggest that we can explain the fluctuation
in Kant’s language here (calling space and time both intuitions and con-
cepts) as, in a way, invoking the notion of ‘concept’ that will appear later
in the Analytic. Space and time are given to us as pure intuitions; that is,
there is an irreducible experience of their unity and givenness. In order to
discuss them, we must already have conceptualized them, but the concept
of an intuition is that it is an intuition. Let us briefly review the main
terms characterizing the difference between intuitions and concepts:
Intuitions Concepts
singular universal/general
blind Empty
single Unitary
concrete Abstract
given constructed/discursive
immediate relation to object mediate
receptivity of impressions spontaneity of thought
affection function
–– rule bound
40 Dermot Moran
Intuitions stand in immediate relation to objects (A68/B93). What
objects are involved? How is immediacy to be understood here? Imme-
diacy has been understood as the intuition pointing to an object directly
and not by means of ‘marks’;75 to intuit is to represent a ‘this’, in Aris-
totelian terms. This notion of pure ‘immediacy’ was subjected to intense
critique by Fichte and Hegel, for whom all immediacy resolves into medi-
acy. According to Sellars, the notion of immediacy is itself ambiguous:
it could refer to the causal impact of impressions on our sensibility or to
the fact that the intuition is not mediated though concepts.76 For Sellars,
immediacy can be construed on the model of the demonstrative ‘this’.77
Sellars gives this a special interpretation. In his account, an intuition (at
least as synthesized by the productive imagination) is a representation of
this-such, ‘this cube’78 (where ‘cube’ is not a general term at all), before
we can have an explicit judgement in the explicitly propositional form:
‘this is a cube’ (what Kant calls a judgement of experience). In the intui-
tion, we represent this as a cube.79 This is in line with Kant’s distinction
between judgements of experience and judgements of perception in the
Prolegomena (§17). A judgement of perception (‘the room is warm, sugar
sweet and wormwood bitter’) is merely ‘subjectively valid’,80 expressing
a relation between two sensations in a subject and then only at present.
A judgement of experience is objective and has necessary universality.
The judgement of experience is close to the notion of the experiencing
of a sensuous intuition. The experience this-such does not, at this level,
involve the occurrence of cube as a general concept. As Sellars says, Kant,
like Aristotle, is requiring this-such to be limited in its content to what
is perceptible (the ‘proper sensibles’).81 Sellars sees the sensory manifold
not as a part of the concept but as a non-conceptual element which con-
strains the concept ‘from without’.82 Yet it is Hegel who, in his critique
of Kant, argues that the notion of a content outside thought is itself the
product of thought. Kantian intuitions, then, have a content that is pro-
duced from within. Hegel’s aim is to reunite receptivity and spontaneity.
For Sellars, an intuition contains ‘non-spatial complexes of unextended
and uncoloured impressions’ and ‘intuitive (but conceptual) represen-
tations of extended structures located in space’.83 Why must intuitions
always involve the givenness of the object? Even late in the Critique of
Judgment (§57, Remark 1), Kant suggests that we cannot know if an
object is perceivable unless it is actually perceived in sensory intuition.
We can contemplate or theorize a possible object, but we cannot know a
priori if it is a possible object of perception. Concepts of the understand-
ing can only be given in intuitions; for example, the concept of cause
is actually intuited in the impact of bodies. The answer is that, for us,
intuitions can never be other than sensible; they contain ‘only the mode
in which we are affected by objects’ (B75). For humans, givenness is in
the form of passive receptivity. The whole contact with the real, with
existence, comes from this receptivity, as Kant puts it in the Critique of
Pure Reason:
For that the concept precedes the perception signifies the concept’s
mere possibility; the perception which supplies the content to the
concept is the sole mark of its actuality.
(A225/B273)
It is the task of understanding, however, to structure this given into the

experience of objects. The only time when an intuition does not have an
object before it is when we are experiencing the pure form of intuition
(aside from the instances when our understanding can run in advance of
perceptions through the use of analogies, e.g., from iron filings to mag-
netic matter, B273):
Therefore in one way only can my intuition anticipate the actuality

of the object, and be a cognition a priori, namely: if my intuition
contains nothing but the form of sensibility, antedating in the subject
all the actual impressions through which I am affected by objects.
(Prolegomena, §9)
In mathematical knowledge, the understanding operates on purely a pri-

ori intuitions. But if there are pure intuitions, that is, intuitions contain-
ing no empirical element, what is the relation between intuition and its
matter, that is, sensation?
7. Sensation, Sensibility and the Manifold

Kant states that sensation may be called the ‘material’ of sensible knowl-
edge.84 On the other hand, receptivity in general is characterized by sensi-
bility: ‘the receptivity of our mind, its power of receiving representations
in so far as it is in any wise affected, is to be entitled sensibility’.85 Simi-
larly, in the Dissertation, Kant defines sensibility as follows:
Sensibility [Sensualitas] is the receptivity of a subject in virtue of

which it is possible for the subject’s own representative state to be
affected in a definite way by the presence of some object.
(D 392)
Sellars claims Kant’s notion of receptivity is not transparent and the con-
nection between intuition and receptivity is more complex than it first
appears, because there are some intuitions that seem to be processed by
the understanding.86 This should perhaps be understood phenomenologi-
cally. We experience the world (and the flow of temporality) as a whole, as
42 Dermot Moran
given to us in the manner that we are passive receivers. We have no sense
that we control the flow of time or the expanse of space or the appear-
ances that invade the senses. However, this in no sense implies that we
are in fact merely passive receivers. Sensibility is the general characteriza-
tion of our experience as having the raw feel of receptivity, for example,
I open my eyes and am invaded by the world. But surely Kant wants to
say more. He wants to acknowledge a bedrock connection between our
sensory apparatus and something in the world, the givenness of the given.
There is an overlap between the definitions of sensibility and the defini-
tion of sensation in the first Critique:
The effect of an object [Die Wirkung eines Gegenstandes] upon the

faculty of representation [die Vorstellungsfähigkeit], so far as we are
affected by it, is sensation.
(A19/B34)
Sensibility is the capacity to be affected; sensation is also the ‘effect’ of

the object on that faculty. Elsewhere, Kant gives slightly a different defini-
tion of sensation, one that connects sensation with the subjective state of
the perceiver rather than with the object:
A perception [Perception] which relates solely to the subject as the

modification of its state [als die Modification seines Bestandes] is
sensation [sensatio].
(A320/B376–377)
According to some of the Reflexionen, Kant took sensations to be merely

subjective87 and to be private states that cannot be compared with those
of another subject:
Since sensation cannot be communicated (either through understand-

ing or through participation) [. . .] sensation does not allow of any
touchstone; concerning sensation everyone is right before himself.88
And, again: ‘concerning colour everyone has his own type of sensation’
(Reflexion 6355, AA 18:681). Kant says similar things in the A-Deduction
of the Critique of Pure Reason: ‘what is first given to us is appearance
[Erscheinung]. When combined with consciousness it is a perception
[Wahrnehmung]’ (A119–120), and ‘appearances, as such, cannot exist
outside us—they exist only in our sensibility’ (A127). Walsh believes that
such statements are more common in the A- than in the B-edition, and
that Kant is more of a Lockean in the earlier edition but that he cor-
rects this tendency in the second edition. As a result of statements like
these, Kant is often assumed to have held a kind of sensationalism or
phenomenalism.89 Kant’s examples of sensations, for example, the taste
of wine, colour, sound, warmth, pain, seem to confirm their phenom-
enal character.90 Sensation, moreover, is that element in the appearance
that can never be known a priori (A167) and hence cannot be antici-
pated (in the Epicurean sense of prolepsis, A167). Walsh has suggested
that a Kantian sensible intuition is only ‘proleptically’ the awareness
of a p
articular—that is, a sensation in combination with a concept in
a judgement enables us to experience particular objects.91 What we can
understand are the relations between sensations rather than the sensa-
tions themselves. For Kant, moreover, the apprehensions of sensations
do not take up any time; they are instantaneous. Sensations similarly
are not extended or located in space; they have ‘no extensive magnitude’
(A167/B209). They are not, then, to be identified with the Lockean or
Humean atomistic impressions. Sensations are not the atoms of experi-
ence in Kant. Rather, sensations are the matter and not the object of our
experience. Edmund Husserl, in the Logical Investigations, holds exactly
the same view, and derives it from Kant:
I see a thing, e.g., this box, but I do not see my sensations. I always
see one and the same box, however it may be turned and tilted. I have
always the same ‘content of consciousness’—if I care to call the per-
ceived object a content of consciousness. But each turn yields a new
‘content of consciousness’, if I call experienced contents ‘contents
of consciousness’, in a much more appropriate use of words. Very
different contents are therefore experienced, though the same object
is perceived. The experienced content, generally speaking, is not the
perceived object.92
And again:
Sensations, and the acts ‘interpreting’ them or apperceiving them,

are alike experienced, but they do not appear as objects: they are not
seen, heard or perceived by any sense. Objects on the other hand,
appear and are perceived, but they are not experienced.93
For Kant, ‘sensation’ is a theoretical item that we think about when

thinking of the object of our sensing. Taken on its own, which is taking
it purely hypothetically, it would be merely a modification of the subject
and would represent nothing.94 However, Kant appears to deny that sen-
sation is in itself an experience of an object. At A166/B208, he states that
‘sensation is not in itself an objective representation [keine objektive Vor-
stellung]’. And at A190/B235, he distinguishes between the appearance
as itself an object and the object which is referred to [bezeichnet] by the
representation. Walsh has made a strong argument for not considering
44 Dermot Moran
sensible intuition to be anything like the empiricist’s experience of sen-
sory particulars, that is, nothing like knowledge by acquaintance:
sensation is not strictly a form of awareness, since it has no true

objects, but a mode of experience sui generis, without it experience
of particulars would be impossible, though it is false to describe it as
presenting particulars for description. Sensory content—‘intuitions’,
as Kant calls them—are not objects of any sort, public or private.95
When intuitions are brought under concepts, they facilitate the concept
in referring to particulars, but they do not in themselves have objects.96
Sensation, for Kant, at the very minimum, requires two elements: (a)
immediate presence of the object (through its effects), (b) passive change
in state of the subject. Kant insists on the necessity of the presence of
something or other in sensation. Intuition is ‘the immediate relation of
cognition to its object’ (A19/B33). The emphasis on the presence of the
object is of course meant to distinguish sensation from imagination. Kant
is never troubled by the problem of how we know we are not dreaming,
of whether we can distinguish sensory intuitions from imaginary experi-
ences of the same intensity and apparent representationality. This is the
gist of the famous footnote added to the B-Preface to the first Critique:
For outer sense is already in itself a relation of intuition to something

actual outside me, and the reality of outer sense, in its distinction
from imagination, rests simply on that which is here found to take
place, namely, its being inseparably bound up with inner experience,
as the condition of its possibility.
(B xl)
We can distinguish imaginary experiences from real ones only by paying

attention to the rules by which they are formed and assuming a backdrop
of real experiences.
But we do have a degree of intensity of the sensation that we then
ascribe to the object. The quality of a sensation is always merely empiri-
cal (A175/B217) and wholly subjective:
Sensation (here external) also agrees in expressing a merely subjec-

tive side of our representations of external things, but one which is
properly their matter (through which we are given something with
real existence), just as space is the mere a priori form of the possibil-
ity of their intuition; and so sensation is, nonetheless, also employed
in the cognition of external objects.97
Sensation is employed in the cognition of external objects—not that sen-

sation is itself the cognition of external objects. Perhaps sensation is the
condition for the cognition of objects but does not in fact play a constitu-
tive role in that cognition.
Finally, Kant says that sensation is in us what corresponds to ‘the real’.
Kant uses a number of terms—Dasein, Sein, Realität, das Reale—to char-
acterize this element in his analysis of the cognitive process. The ‘real’ (a
term derived from the Latin res, meaning ‘thing’ and corresponding to the
genuinely possible or the conceptual essence of something) or sensation
in general does have intensity. This property of possessing a degree can
be known a priori. Sensation is always the consciousness that the subject
is affected to a certain degree. Real objects, for Kant, are largely dynamic
pieces of extension, fields of force, but they differ from Descartes’s objects
in that they are of varying degrees of density and hence have intensive
magnitude as well as extensive magnitude; moreover, they consist entirely
of relations, and we know them because they have forces that they exert
on us. Kant is a modified Cartesian in his concept of the physical object—
it is largely a piece of extension, not resolvable into atoms but produced
by a play of forces of attraction and repulsion.98 Nevertheless, it is the
concept filled out by intuition that for us encounters this reality.
Sensations, furthermore, are never isolated but are always given to us
in a manifold, a variety, a diversity, something multifarious. What is a
manifold? In Kant’s writings, mannigfaltig is used both as an adjective
and a noun. According to Gerhard Wahrig’s Deutscher Wörterbuch,
the German adjective ‘mannigfaltig’ most often qualifies nouns such as
Erlebnisse, Erfahrungen, Eindrücke.99 Kant also uses it as a noun: ‘the
manifold of sensation’ [das Mannigfaltige der Empfindung]. But does it
mean a chaotic buzzing, blooming confusion or an ordered variety? Con-
dillac has a passage in which he describes opening the windows onto
a scene and taking in everything in one view, and yet, unless one goes
through the landscape detail by detail, one could not give an account of
what one has just seen.100 Similarly, Leibniz distinguishes between the
‘little perception’ and the overall apprehension. The manifold of intui-
tion must be gone through successively and ordered. This is done by the
synthesis of apprehension or the figurative synthesis. Intuition presents
us with a manifold but not with the representation of a manifold as a
manifold. On many occasions in the Critique, Kant tells us that, without
objectifying concepts or categories, all we would have is the blind play of
representations, a rhapsody of perceptions, a mere figment in the brain,
‘nothing for us’ (A102, A112, B195, B196). Unfortunately even here, the
language of sensation is crossing over into the language of perception;
the language of modifications of inner states is mingled with the language
of being affected directly by outside objects. In the Anthropology, Kant
writes that the senses themselves do not confuse:
We cannot say of a person who grasps, but has not yet ordered, a
given manifold, that he confuses it. Perceptions of the senses can only
46 Dermot Moran
be called inner phenomena. Only the understanding, which joins per-
ceptions and combines them under a rule of thought, by introducing
order into the manifold, establishes them as empirical cognition, that
is, experience.101
Kant fully accepted the view expressed in the Scholastics (and also by
Descartes and Baumgarten) that the senses do not deceive but only the
understanding, when it judges, for instance, the tower in the distance to
be round. Such a person mistakes appearance for experience.102 For Kant,
a pure ‘rhapsody’ of sensations is a theoretical postulate of what would
be the case, were it not for the synthesizing powers of the understanding
working through the application of the imagination to our sensory given.
8. More on Singularity and Immediacy

There are problems relating the notions of singularity, immediacy and
non-discursivity. Some philosophers have challenged either the imme-
diacy condition or the particularity or singularity condition as a way
of trying to make sense of Kant’s doctrine. The late Finnish philosopher
Jaakko Hintikka states boldly: ‘Intuitivity means simply individuality’103
and argues that there is no logical connection between intuitivity and
sensibility; this is merely a contingent feature of human experience. Fur-
thermore, non-empirical intuitions must be understood to be singulars
rather than sensibles.104 For Hintikka, an intuition is equivalent to a sin-
gular term.105 It is certainly true that, in his lectures, Kant invokes the
notion of singular concept [conceptus singularis], for example, Socrates,
Caesar and the moon, all examples taken from his Logic.106 In the Dis-
sertation of 1770, as later, in the 1800 Jäsche Logic, intuition is a rep-
resentatio or conceptus singularis, in contrast with concepts which are
general and known through common characteristics [representatio per
notas communas]:
All cognitions, that is all representations consciously referred to

an object, are either intuitions or concepts. Intuition is a singular
representation (repraesentatio singularis), the concept is a general
(repraesentatio per notas communes) or reflective representation
(repraesentatio discursiva).
(Logic, §1)
At A320/B376, Kant writes that an intuition ‘relates immediately to its

object and is single’ [bezieht sich unmittelbar auf den Gegenstand und ist
einzeln]. Singularity is clearly a defining characteristic of Kantian intui-
tion in general.107
Hintikka has been accused of misunderstanding the immediacy cri-
terion by Charles Parsons, among others.108 For Parsons, intuitions are
not to be understood as equivalent to singular terms in logic. There are
universal concepts which can be applied singularly, for example, definite
descriptions (Kant says ‘the black man’ is such a concept).109 As Parsons
points out, Kant does refer to a concept being used in a singular way in
the lectures on logic, for example, ‘this house is being cleaned in such and
such a way’110 or ‘this world is the best’.111 In classical logic, the singular
judgement [judicium singulare] was treated as not different from the uni-
versal judgement [judicia communia, A71/B96] in form, though it does
differ in quantity. For Kant, it is obvious that all concepts are general,
and it is mistaken to divide them into singular, particular and general;
only their use makes them such. A concept is singular only in a specific
employment or application.
Hintikka has replied to Parsons that he never denies that immediacy
belongs to the Kantian notion of intuition, but immediacy is just ‘a
corollary of the singularity condition’.112 Hintikka explains immediacy
by contrast with concepts. In concepts, the ‘marks’ or characteristics
intervene between the concepts and their objects, whereas in singular
intuitions, there is no intervening of marks. Parsons has a stronger
concept of immediacy whereby it yields immediate or direct knowledge
of objects, and Parsons invokes the case of intuitions such as those
of incongruous counterparts. Hintikka objects that this understand-
ing would make the concept of a priori intuition problematic, that is,
intuitions where the object is by no means present to mind. Hintikka
quotes the Prolegomena (§9), where Kant writes that pure intuition
can, as it were, ‘anticipate the actuality of the object’, and refers to
similar passages in the Aesthetic, where Kant says we can have intui-
tions without the presence of objects (B40–41). For Hintikka, it is not
‘the immediacy of intuitions that enables them to yield knowledge, but
their ideality’.113 In stressing singularity above immediacy, Hintikka
seems to be ignoring the irreducible nature of the given in intuition.114
Parsons correctly identifies that incongruent counterparts are a given
in intuition; that is, they cannot be conceptualized and yet they are
present. Hintikka takes this to prove that they are particulars, confirm-
ing his view that intuition is pre-eminently a singular representation.
In a recent paper, Parsons gives the example of the visualizing of sets
or groups, for example, ‘IIII’ as opposed to ‘III I’ or ‘II’. There is no
rule for determining conceptually how close the fourth stroke has to
be to count as a set of four and not a three and a one. Yet we do actu-
ally immediately read this off from our experience. This illustrates that
irreducible givenness is something more than singularity per se. These
discussions show the need for a much deeper phenomenological explo-
ration of the nature of intuitive givenness, one which directs discussion
toward Husserl, who navigated these very issues in a subtle manner
which he thought went beyond Kant (unfortunately outside the scope
of this paper).
48 Dermot Moran
Kant distinguishes between the singularity of intuitions and the mul-
tiple instantiability of concepts (B376–377). Similarly, Kant alternates
in the Dissertation and in the Aesthetic between talking of intuitions of
space and time and concepts of space and time. This can be adequately
explained: Kant’s talk of intuitions as singular concepts can be seen as
slipshod usage—a survival of pre-Critical thought.
The notion of an intuition is indeed strongly connected with singu-
larity, as Hintikka noted, but there is more to an intuition, and, as we
have seen, Parsons argues that singularity is broader than immediacy.115
Sometimes Kant seems to treat these as mutually implicating. But some-
thing could be cognised as an individual and yet not intuited; indeed, the
ideas of God are singular but at the same time purely ideal or rational
and not sensible.116 Perhaps Kant recanted on this, because in the Opus
Postumum, he calls the ideas of God, soul and so on intuitions and not
concepts: ‘Ideas are not concepts, but on the contrary, pure intuitions, for
there is only one such object’.117 Alternatively, something’s being given is
quite different from its being singular. Immediacy relates to the episte-
mological concept of givenness, whereas singularity is a logical notion.
Immediacy might be something like Russell’s knowledge by acquaint-
ance. There is still tension between the view that intuition is of singulars
and the view that it provides a sensory manifold.
One way to understand singularity is to relate it to Kant’s discussion
of parts and wholes.118 For universal concepts, the parts are under the
whole; for intuitions, the parts are within the whole. This can be difficult
to understand, and Kant has only explicated with regard to a specific
aspect of intuition—the forms of intuition, space and time. A concept
has an extension; it ranges over an infinite number of possible individual
objects, but a concept is also made up of a potentially infinite number
of partial concepts, and there are no infimae species. In the Dissertatio,
Kant maintains there can be no intuition of the infinitely small or of the
very large. What is given in intuition is always a set of relations (B66–67).
Some of these relations (e.g., right to left, above and below) cannot be
made intelligible in any concept (Prolegomena, §13).
Sensations are immediate. Intuitions immediately relate objects (both
Kant and Descartes agree), and in the Refutation of Idealism, Kant
claims that ‘outer experience is really immediate’ (B276). How are we
to understand immediacy? According to Parsons, immediacy means at
the very least that an intuition ‘does not refer to an object by means
of marks’.119 As we saw earlier, Sellars sees it as having a number of
possible meanings, including a causal meaning or being unmediated by
conceptual marks or characteristics. Is this immediate relation the causal
impacting of ‘impressions’ on our sensibility? According to Kant, what is
immediately given in intuition is a singular representation that is sensible
(made up of sensations). These sensations are in turn the result, at least
on one plausible reading of Kant, of the impact of things in themselves
on our receptivity. What is immediately given, then, is a set of sensations;
we have a passive experience of undergoing a manifold of sensations.
But how, then, is sensibility in immediate relation with objectivity at all?
Surely we are now only in immediate relation with our own experiences,
and who would deny that? Aren’t we in immediate relation with our own
conscious experiences—including our mental acts? Receptivity starts to
merge with spontaneity.
Now if what is immediately given is our own inner sensations, pas-
sively received, how can Kant’s refutation of idealism work at all?
Because the refutation of idealism argues that our flow of inner modifica-
tions requires an immediate contact with something permanent, namely
the object. According to Kant, idealism ‘assumed that the only immediate
experience is inner experience’ (B276), and the challenge of idealism was
that the causes of these representations might be in us. Kant’s answer is
that we must presuppose outer experience, which is immediate; indeed,
he adds in a note that the ‘immediate consciousness of the existence of
outer things’ is proved, not presupposed (B277 n.) Inner experience is
possible only through the mediation of outer experience, which itself
must be immediate.
But with what is outer experience immediately related? With spatio-
temporal material objects? With properties of objects? With the effects
of those objects on the senses? Furthermore, if with objects, what are the
objects in question here? Are they spatio-temporal appearances or things
in themselves? Do all sensations have objects? In one sense, everything
apprehended in whatever way is called an object by Kant in the Sec-
ond Analogy: ‘everything, every representation even, in so far as we are
conscious of it, may be entitled object’ (A189/B234). Kant distinguishes
between the representation taken as an object itself and that object which
it represents [bezeichnet, A190/B235]. Sensations only actually refer to
objects if we bring in conceptualization and the acts of synthesis. This is
the famous problem of ‘double affection’ in Kant. The things in them-
selves act on us and so do the empirical objects. Clearly we cannot resolve
this issue, only show how the very notion of immediacy is implicated in
this problematic.
9. Another Way of Slicing Intuitions: Form and

Matter (Content)
Kant distinguishes between the form and matter of intuition in the Aes-
thetic and relies on this distinction in the Axioms of Intuition and the
Anticipations of Perception.120 As early as the Dissertation, Kant argues
that the form of sensation is supplied by the subject: for Kant, objects do
not strike the senses in virtue of their form or specificity, going directly
against the Scholastic inheritance whereby it is specifically through the
form that something acts on the senses. For the Scholastic tradition, it is
50 Dermot Moran
the form and not the matter that is transmitted from object to subject.
Kant reverses this in one bold and unexplained move (as early as the Dis-
sertation). But Kant’s argument that space and time belong to the form
of intuition is meant to prove that space and time are ‘subjective’ or,
better, objectifying structures based in the subject. His argument for the
claim that space and time are not, in the first instance, concepts is meant
to show they are intuitions. They are not concepts because they are sin-
gular: the whole comes before the parts and the parts do not make up
the whole. Space is a totum, not a compositum. Space and time are origi-
nal totalities; they are the one case where human knowledge is like the
divine—creative of and grounding its object rather than grounded by it;
hence Kant’s use of the term intuitus originarius for time in Dissertation.
In the Transcendental Aesthetic (A20–21/B35), we arrive at the form
of intuition by a mental act of stripping away (abstraction). Take any
empirical intuition and abstract all that belongs to the intellectual con-
sideration of it (substance, force, divisibility) and also everything that
belongs to the sensory experience (impenetrability, hardness, colour), and
we are left with something, namely extension and figure, the pure form
of the intuition—spatial locatedness, the mere form of sensibility. This
is presented as a thought experiment, as something we can actually psy-
chologically perform. Patricia Kitcher calls it ‘the method of isolation’.121
At B132, Kant says: ‘that representation which can be given prior to all
thought is entitled intuition’. This seems to imply that we can have a pure
intuition without either sensations or categorial concepts and that it is
still a ‘presentation’ [Vorstellung, repraesentatio], that is, that something
is being presented. Furthermore, what is grasped in the act of abstrac-
tion is not just a form of intuition but is itself a pure a priori intuition
(A20/B34).
As we have already seen, sensation is the matter of intuition; space and
time are the forms of intuition. Kant defines form as
That which so determines the manifold of appearance that it allows

of being ordered in certain relations, I term the form of appearance.
(A20/B34)
But how can space be the form of outer intuition? According to Kant’s
customary account, what we actually receive are impressions that pro-
duce sensations in us. We have seen that the impressions are not spatial,
nor can the intuiting acts be spatial. So how can the form of intuition be
spatial at all? Sellars thinks the notion is incoherent.122
10. Pure and Empirical Intuition

But Kant also makes a distinction between pure and empirical intuition.
We have to be careful in distinguishing between an intuition in which
no conceptual element is present and an intuition in which no sensory
(and hence a posteriori) element is present. It is the latter that Kant calls
pure intuition. A pure intuition according to his usual definition of ‘pure’
contains no admixture of the empirical; it is purely possible a priori:
‘Pure intuition, therefore, contains only the form under which some-
thing is intuited’ (A51/B75). As we saw earlier, in the Dissertation, Kant
characterizes this pure intuition as ‘sensitive’ [sensitiva], even when it
is explicitly ‘devoid of sensation’ (D 397). Pure intuition is a ‘singular
concept’ that provides something special—‘originary intuitions’ (D 398).
How can we make sense of originary intuitions? Space as a pure intuition
cannot mean that we have an intuition of empty space or time, and in
the Aesthetic, Kant argues that we indeed do have these pure intuitions.
In the Analytic, Kant explicitly denies that we have an intuition of time
on its own. At A196/B241, he says that we can abstract ‘clear concepts’
[klare Begriffe] of space and time from experience only because we have
put them there. Ian White has argued that we can understand what a
pure intuition means by attending to the discussion of the anticipation of
perception in the Analytic. Imagine standing on a train and being able to
see out of both opposite windows at once. We would see two landscapes
and know they are spatially related, although we could not see the space
relating them.123 This is an experience (intuition) of space but not an
experience of empty space.124
The Anticipations of Perception suggest that the form of outer intui-
tion includes more than spatial organization—there is also recognition
that qualities will have intensity. The variation consists in the degree of
variability of sensibility itself. This is a principle of all perception (A166).
Kant says it is surprising, but nonetheless true, that we can anticipate
regarding the matter of intuition and not just regarding the form (A167/
B209). We can have an instantaneous sensation, given in the blink of an
eye [Augenblick, A167/B209], that nevertheless has a relational aspect—
a magnitude. This cannot be an extensive magnitude, as this would mean
a successive synthesis of parts, and hence can only be an intensive mag-
nitude, an a priori anticipation. Colour, heat and so on always have a
degree. This is mainly employed in a transcendental argument to the
effect that different equal regions of space do not contain equal quantities
of matter, but there can be differences of degree, for example, different
degrees of radiated heat can still occupy the same space (A174/B216).
11. Forms of Intuition and Formal Intuitions

Kant introduces another notorious distinction in a footnote in the
B-Deduction (B160): form of intuition [die Form der Anschauung] and
formal intuitions [die formale Anschauung] are distinguished. Much has
been made of this distinction.125 Not only are space and time the forms of
intuition, but they are also themselves intuitions containing a manifold
52 Dermot Moran
within them (presumably the manifold of individual places and times).
A formal intuition is a unified representation of space or of time (inde-
pendent of its content). Here Kant goes over the area of the Aesthetic
from a different perspective in the Transcendental Logic. In the Tran-
scendental Deduction, the aim of the synthesis is to combine and to unite.
These are two separate acts. Verbindung is a separate act from the act of
Vereinigung.
We now see that even for there to be a manifold of sensation, a uni-
fying or synthesizing act must already be happening. This unifying act
gathers the material together before it can be thought under the concept
and the category. Kant explicitly says that the figurative or transcenden-
tal synthesis of the imagination belongs to sensibility (B151). Yet he also
says that ‘synthesis is an expression of spontaneity’ (B152). Imagination
determines sensibility a priori. In this B-account, imagination is the man-
ner in which the intellect (spontaneity) acts when it is thinking the cat-
egory through the schema. It is generating a figure or an image. In the
B-edition, imagination is part of the activity of the understanding. In the
A-edition, there appears to be room for a synopsis and combination at
the level of sense. Appearances are given to us in intuition (A90/B122),
but these are ‘as good as nothing’ (A111) unless they are ‘run through’
and connected.
If this is the case, however, we now cannot talk of intuitions on their
own prior to concepts (though this may be why Kant oscillates between
referring to concepts and intuitions of space and time). Kant says that
space and time are concepts that contain an infinity within them, whereas
other concepts contain a potential infinity of denotata under them.
Conclusion
Having traversed the rich and varied terminology and multiplex charac-
terizations of intuition in Kant, how can we conclude? What, finally, are
intuitions for Kant? In interpreting intuitions in relation to mathematics,
the standard view articulated by Russell is that they are mental images
and pictures, for example, we need to draw lines in our heads to intuit
what a line is. There is no doubt that there are many passages where
Kant talks in just this manner. We must accept that in at least one of
its meanings, an intuition merely means a sensible example, an illustra-
tion, a sensory envisaging of something (e.g., time as a flowing stream).
But arguably, in mathematics, the notion of constructing a concept and
‘exhibiting’ [expositio] the intuition that corresponds to it (related to
the German darstellen) means something much more precise and deter-
mined, as Charles Parsons shows. Geometry and arithmetic proceed by
the construction of concepts in intuition. Hintikka takes this to mean
that mathematics studies special cases of general concepts, namely par-
ticular representatives, and hence Kant can see algebra as dealing with
intuitions.126 Finally, let us consider the relation between intuitions and
sense. Kant explicitly connects sensuous intuition with the sense-giving
component of our experience. Without intuition, there is neither sense
nor reference. This has led to the identification of intuitions with Sinn in
Frege’s sense, with intentional objects. Several critics have proposed that
intuitions offer something like an intentional object.
A central claim is that intuitions are singular representations. As we
have seen, although Kant persisted in these formulations throughout his
teaching career, and specifically in his logic lectures, in fact, human intui-
tions, at least, require much more than singularity. We must also take
into account the irreducible non-conceptualisable givenness of intuitions
(as exemplified by incongruent counterparts) and the character of imme-
diacy. We should also take seriously the idea that intuitions on their own
are more of a theoretical postulate than any part of lived experience. Fur-
thermore, the sensory manifold in intuition is to be understood as a kind
of limit constraining the nature of the concept rather than being either
the object or the content of the intuition. On Kant’s theory, the form of
the intuition is itself intuitable, and I think this is a necessary part of his
doctrine in the Aesthetic. The changed account in the Analytic is not a
new and incompatible doctrine, as Norman Kemp Smith believes, but
rather a change in emphasis.
In the end, this review of meanings of intuition in Kant shows, I believe,
that the various accounts of intuition in Kant are too diverse to be melded
into a single coherent doctrine. Kant’s sources for the notion are diverse,
and this diversity is mirrored in his own account, and his own language
fails to clarify whether intuitions convey private sensations to the mind
or formed objects. Edmund Husserl saw himself as bringing new clarity
and rigor to the notion of intuition, overcoming the inconsistencies he
diagnosed in Kant.
Notes
1 An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Second Annual Confer-
ence of the UK Kant Society in Manchester in 1995. I am grateful to Graham
Bird, Gary Banham, James O’Shea, Cynthia McDonald and other members
of the audience at that time for their comments. References to the Critique of
Pure Reason appeal to the 1st and 2nd edition pagination (A and B). Quota-
tions are from Norman Kemp Smith’s translation (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1965), supplemented by reference to Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood’s
translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The following
abbreviations have been used: AA = Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften,
ed. Königlich Preußische (Deutsche) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin:
Reimer [later: de Gruyter], 1900–); D = ‘On the Form and Principles of the
Sensible and Intelligible World’, in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy,
1755–1770, ed. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), cited with page numbers of the Akademie edition
(AA 2:385–416).
54 Dermot Moran
2 Kant writes: ‘Objects are therefore given to us by means of sensibility, and it
alone affords us intuitions [. . .] there is no other way in which objects can
be given to us’ except through intuition (B33). ‘For in the appearances of
objects, indeed even properties that we attribute to them, are always regarded
as something really given, only insofar as that property depends only upon
the kind of intuition of the subject’ (B69). See also B146; A218/B266; A244;
A376–380.
3 Robert Howell, ‘Intuition, Synthesis and Individuation in the Critique of
Pure Reason’, Nous, 7 (1973), 207–232; Richard A. Smyth, Forms of Intui-
tion: An Historical Introduction to the Transcendental Aesthetic (The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1978), 139.
4 See Richard E. Aquila, ‘Intentional Objects and Kantian Appearances’, Philo-
sophical Topics, 12 (1981), 9–37, and Hoke Robinson, ‘Kantian Appearances
and Intentional Objects’, Kant-Studien, 87 (1996), 448–454. See also Colin
Marshall, ‘Kant’s Appearances and Things in Themselves as Qua-Objects’,
Philosophical Quarterly, 63 (2013), 520–545.
5 See Alfredo Ferrarin, ‘Construction and Mathematical Schematism: Kant on
the Exhibition of a Concept in Intuition’, Kant-Studien, 86 (1995), 131–174,
and Michael Friedman, ‘Kant on Geometry and Spatial Intuition’, Synthese,
186 (2012), 231–255.
6 Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Kant on Sensibility and Understanding’, in Kant Studies
Today, ed. Lewis White Beck (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1969), 182.
7 W. H. Walsh, Kant’s Criticism of Metaphysics (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1975), 13.
8 Appearance is what is first given to us (A119). But appearance is also the
object of our perceptions when combined with concepts (A120).
9 D 397: ‘whatever, as object, relates to our senses is a phenomenon’.
10 See Charles Parsons, ‘On Some Difficulties Concerning Intuition and Intuitive
Knowledge’, Mind, 102 (1993), 233–246, esp. 233, where Parsons refers to
intuiting as a propositional attitude. Parsons acknowledges that, for Kant,
intuition is concerned with objects, whereas judgements are concerned with
propositions. Intuition, then, ‘is a component of or at least gives rise to prop-
ositional knowledge’.
11 Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1983), 68. I have complicated his threefold division by adding in
the form of intuition, which Kant also calls ‘pure intuition’.
12 See also his discussion of Plato’s conception of ideas at A313/B370. On the
complexity of ideas in Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant, see Wayne Waxman,
Kant and the Empiricists: Understanding Understanding (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
13 In fact, it first appears among the German mystics, for example, Jacob Boe-
hme, who use it as a term for a mystical apprehension. See Smyth, Forms
of Intuition, 145, quoting Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der
Deutschen Sprache (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1957). Jaakko Hintikka repeats the
connection between Anschauung and schauen in his ‘On Kant’s Notion of
Intuition (Anschauung)’, in The First Critique, ed. Terence Penelhum and J. J.
Macintosh (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1969), 38. He also connects the term
with Boehme (40). Although Kemp Smith translates Anschauung as ‘intui-
tion’, others including Weldon have translated it as ‘perception’. See Hans
H. Rudnick, ‘Translation and Kant’s Anschauung, Verstand and Vernunft’,
in Interpreting Kant, ed. Moltke S. Gram (Iowa: University of Iowa Press,
1982), 99–114.
14 Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’,
2nd edition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1923), 79.
15 See A320/B376–377 and Andrew Janiak, ‘Kant’s Views on Space and Time’,
in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Win-
ter 2016 Edition, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/kant-
spacetime/, archived at www.webcitation.org/6sss2W7KP.
16 See Marco Sgarbi, ‘Hume’s Source of the “Impression-Idea” Distinction’,
Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía, 29 (2012), 561–576; Wolf-
gang Hermann Müller, ‘Eindruck’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philoso-
phie, ed. Joachim Ritter (Basel: Schwabe, 1972), vol. 4, 4681–4684. Kant
had access to the German translation by G. A. Pistorius of Hume’s Enquiry
and refers to it in his Logic lectures of 1770. Kant began to use the term ‘Ein-
drück’ in his Reflexionen from around 1771 (see, inter alia, Reflexion 4473,
AA 17:564).
17 Kant’s terms Anlaß and Gelegenheit can be translated as ‘stimulus’ rather
than ‘occasion’, but Kant in general is neutral between an occasionalist and a
causal interactionist account. I thank Alberto Vanzo for pointing this out.
18 H. J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience (London: Allen and Unwin,
1936), vol. 1, 95–96.
19 A111, Kemp Smith’s translation. Guyer and Wood speak of a ‘swarm of
appearances’ filling up the soul, without giving rise to experience.
20 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo, 1999),
1.84.1. See Francis O’Farrell, ‘Intuition in Kant’s Theory of Knowledge’, Gre-
gorianum, 60 (1979), 481–511, esp. 504.
21 B130. Smyth, Forms of Intuition, 159, notes that Aktus is not a usual term
used by eighteenth-century German philosophers to refer to a mental act and
was in fact a legal term.
22 Reflexion 4682, AA 17:668–669.
23 See Logic, trans. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz (New York:
Dover, 1988), Introduction, §1, p. 13.
24 Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel all criticized Kant’s sharp separation

between sensibility from understanding. See, for example, George di Gio-
vanni, ‘The First Twenty Years of Critique’, in The Cambridge Companion
to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
417–448.
25 See, for example, Reflexion 220, AA 15:84.
26 D 394: ‘From this one can see that the sensitive is poorly defined as that
which is more confusedly cognized, and that which belongs to the under-
standing as that of which there is a more distinct cognition’.
27 See Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, rev. Joseph
Beaude, Pierre Costabel, Alan Gabbey and Bernard Rochot (Paris: Vrin,
1996), vol. 7, 28; John Cottingham, Descartes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986),
122–127. Cottingham concludes that sensation does not fit comfortably into
either res cogitans or res extensa for Descartes, and, of course, it is true that
sensation requires embodiment and hence the union of mind and body.
28 Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. 7, 78, trans. in The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), vol. 2, 54.
29 Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. 10, 368, trans. in The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, vol. 1, 14.
30 See A267/B323: ‘Leibniz first assumed things (monads) and within them a
power of representation’.
31 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ‘Monadology’, in Philosophischen Schriften,

ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1875–1890), vol. 6, 607–623, trans. in Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, ed. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989), 213–225, §60, see §19: ‘the nature of the
56 Dermot Moran
monad is representative’ and nothing can limit it to represent only parts; it
therefore represents the whole of reality but confusedly (as opposed to dis-
tinctly). For Kant’s critique of this view, see A267/B323.
32 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ‘Meditations on Knowledge, Truths, and Ideas’,
in Philosophischen Schriften, vol. 4, 422–426, trans. in Philosophical Essays,
23–27.
33 Alexander Gottlob Baumgarten, Metaphysica, 7th edition (Halle: Hemmerde,
1779), §521; trans. Courtney D. Fugate and John Hymers as Metaphysics:
A Critical Translation with Kant’s Elucidations, Selected Notes, and Related
Materials (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
34 See, however, the footnote at A364, where Kant, employing the analogy of
colliding elastic balls striking each other in a straight line and communicating
their motions to one another without loss, postulates that minds could pass
their ‘states’ from one to the other, so that the same state would be present
in different substances such that the last would possess all the states of the
others as well as its own. Here the contents of the state pass from one to the
other together with the ‘consciousness’ of that state.
35 Reflexion 1676, AA 16:76. See Smyth, Forms of Intuition, 153.
36 Reflexion 695, AA 15:308–309: ‘Leibniz takes all sensations (that stem from)
certain objects as cognitions of them. But beings who are not the cause of
the object through their representations must in the first instance be affected
in a certain way so that they can arrive at a cognition of the object’s pres-
ence. Hence sensation must be the condition of outer representation but not
identical with it [. . .] Hence cognition is objective, sensation subjective’. As
translated in Rolf George, ‘Vorstellung and Erkenntnis in Kant’, in Interpret-
ing Kant, 33.
37 Immanuel Kant, On a Discovery According to Which Any New Critique of
Pure Reason Has Been Made Superfluous by an Earlier One, trans. Henry E.
Allison in The Kant-Eberhard Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1973), 132.
38 Ibid., 136.
39 See also ‘Monadology’, §§60–63.
40 See Otfried Höffe, Immanuel Kant, trans. Marshall Farrier (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1994), 54.
41 Baumgarten, Acroasis Logica, 2nd edition (Halle: Hemmerde, 1773), §§556,
561. See also §§49–51, 444.
42 Leibniz called this the ars characteristica. See Kant, Theoretical Philosophy,
417n4.
43 Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §620, my translation.
44 Allison, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, 22.
45 D 396. This Leibnizian distinction appeared in Johann Christoph Adelung’s
Grammatisch-Kritisch Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart (Leipzig:
Breitkopf, 1793–1801), a work to which Kant had access, which states: ‘in
philosophy one takes as intuitive each piece of knowledge which is acquired
by means of the senses, or by representing to ourselves the thing or its pic-
ture; that is, representative knowledge, or sensible knowledge, as opposed to
symbolic knowledge, in which we think of things in terms of words and other
symbols’ (trans. in Hintikka, ‘On Kant’s Notion of Intuition (Anschauung)’,
41–42).
46 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1959), §59, p. 222. Kant introduces the term ‘hypo-
typosis’ (which normally means ‘vivid description’) to cover two kinds of
presentations—the schematic (illustrated by an intuition) and the symbolic
(which only reason can think). On the types of hypotyposis, see Nicola
Crosby, ‘The Schematism of Analogy and the Figure of Christ: Bridging Two
Types of Hypotyposis’, in this volume.
47 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §59, p. 223.
48 See Houston Smit, ‘Kant on Marks and the Immediacy of Intuition’, Philo-
sophical Review, 109 (2000), 235–266.
49 On Kant’s theory of intellectual intuition, see Francis O’Farrell, ‘Intuition
in Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, Part Two: Intellectual Intuition in Kant’s
Theory’, Gregorianum, 60 (1979), 725–746; Yolanda Estes, ‘Intellectual
Intuition: Reconsidering Continuity in Kant, Fichte, and Schelling’, in Fichte,
German Idealism, and Early Romanticism, ed. Daniel Breazeale and Tom
Rockmore (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 165–178.
50 In fact, Gottlob Frege noted that the definition of intuition in Kant contains
no reference to sensibility. See Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic:
A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number, trans. J. L.
Austin, rev. edition (New York: Harper, 1960), 19.
51 Heinrich Meissner, Philosophisches Lexicon (1737), cited in Smyth, Forms of
Intuition, 150. Indeed, Meissner speaks of ‘lautere Vernunft’, which is per-
haps the inspiration for Kant’s ‘reine Vernunft’. On the other hand, Wolff and
his disciples commonly used the notions of pure reason and pure cognition
(for cognitions obtained through inference, rather than through experience),
so it seems likely that Kant found his notion of pure reason directly in Wolff
rather than from Meissner’s lautere Vernunft.
52 Kant, On a Discovery, 127.
53 See O’Farrell, ‘Intuition in Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, Part Two’, 732.
54 See Giorgio Tonelli, ‘Das Wiederaufleben der deutschen-aristoteliscen Ter-
minologie bei Kant während der Entstehung der Kritik der reinen Vernunft’,
Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, 9 (1964), 233–242.
55 See John Boler, ‘Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition’, in The Cambridge His-
tory of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Anthony Kenny, Jan Pinborg and Nor-
man Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 460–478.
56 Cited in Smyth, Forms of Intuition, 146. The same definition of intuitive cog-
nition is to be found in Rudolph Goclenius, Lexicon Philosophorum (Frank-
furt a.M., 1613) s.v. notitia. See Smyth, Forms of Intuition, 149.
57 See ibid., 148–149.
58 Ibid., 149.
59 See Hans-Georg Juchem, ‘On the Development of the Term “Intuition” in the
Pre-Critical Writings of Kant, and Its Significance for Kant’s Aesthetics with
Particular Reference to the “Wortindex zu Kants gesammelte Schriften” ’, in
Proceedings of the Third International Kant Congress, ed. Lewis White Beck
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), 685–692; Charles Parsons, ‘The Transcendental
Aesthetic’, in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, 92n14.
60 The Dissertation treats of time before it treats of space, reversing the order of
the treatment in the Transcendental Aesthetic.
61 D 402. The notion of an intuitus originarius, as we saw, was connected with
the intellectual divine intuition which generated its own object. Does Kant
mean here that the form of intuition generates temporal objects in some way?
This seems unlikely, although intuition could bestow a temporal order on
the flow itself. Kant contrasts intuitus originarius with intuitus derivativus.
Although the notion of intuitus originarius is connected with the divine intui-
tion, which does indeed generate its objects, this divine intuition does not
generate its objects in virtue of being originarius but in virtue of being arche-
typus. However, Kant’s meaning is not entirely clear in this text.
62 Edward Caird, The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Glasgow:
Maclehose and Sons, 1889), vol. 1, 282–283.
58 Dermot Moran
63 Ibid., 283.
64 Ibid., 282.
65 Höffe, Immanuel Kant, 55, and Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics:
Variations on Kantian Themes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968),
15, agree on this.
66 Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, 17.
67 Immanuel Kant, Logic, trans. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz
(New York: Dover, 1988). The dating of the lectures on logic is difficult pre-
cisely because they were lectures that were delivered over a long period of time
and regularly reworked. To be precise, the Jäsche Logic is a combination of
passages derived from Kant’s Reflexionen, lecture transcripts and additions by
Jäsche. The example of the savage mentioned below, for instance, can be found
in the Logic Pölitz, AA 24:510, and, in a partly different context, in the main
text of the Logic Bauch, in Immanuel Kant, Logik-Vorlesung: Unveröffentli-
chte Nachschriften, ed. Tillman Pinder (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998), vol. 1, 44.
The Logic Bauch is a combination of materials from different years, including
materials from the 1770s and maybe even from the 1760s.
68 See Lorne Falkenstein, ‘Kant’s Account of Intuition’, Canadian Journal of
Philosophy, 21 (1991), 179.
69 See Rolf George, ‘Kant’s Sensationalism’, Synthese, 47 (1981), 229–255, esp.
243.
70 See Sally Sedgwick, Hegel’s Critique of Kant: From Dichotomy to Identity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
71 Kant, Logic, Introduction, §V, pp. 37–38. This passage also appears in the
Logic Pölitz, AA 24:510.
72 Kant, Logic, Introduction, §V, p. 38.
73 Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Logique, Part 1, ch. 2, quoted in Joseph

Moreau, ‘Intuition et appréhension’, Kant-Studien, 71 (1980), 282. It cannot
be shown that Kant had actual knowledge of this passage.
74 Sellars agrees (‘Kant on Sensibility and Understanding’, 182).
75 See, however, Houston Smit, who argues that intuitions have marks. Houston
Smit, ‘Kant on Marks and the Immediacy of Intuition’, Philosophical Review,
109 (2000), 235–266.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., 5.
79 Ibid.
80 Prolegomena, §19.
82 Ibid., 16.
83 Ibid., 28.
84 A50/B74. See Lorne Falkenstein, ‘Kant’s Account of Sensation’, Canadian
Journal of Philosophy, 20 (1990), 63–88; George, ‘Kant’s Sensationalism’;
but see also Tim Jankowiak, ‘Sensations as Representations in Kant’, British
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 22 (2014), 492–513, who argues that
sensations can be construed as representing external objects in Kant.
85 A51/B75, see B1, A19/B33.
87 See, e.g., Reflexion 695, AA 15:309: ‘cognition is objective, sensation is
subjective’.
88 Reflexion 755, AA 15:330, as translated in George, ‘Kant’s Sensationalism’, 239.
89 See George, ‘Kant’s Sensationalism’, passim.
90 Ibid., 239.
91 Walsh, Kant’s Criticism of Metaphysics, 15, 95–96.
92 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. John N. Findlay, ed. and
rev. with a new introduction by Dermot Moran and new preface by Michael
Dummett (London: Routledge, 2001), vol. 2, 104.
93 Ibid., 105.
94 As Rolf George states, the mental states initially induced are ‘non-intentional
or non-referential’ (‘Kant’s Sensationalism’, 229).
95 Walsh, Kant’s Criticism of Metaphysics, 14.
96 Allison supports this interpretation in general, although he acknowledges
that it does not resolve all the ambiguities. See Kant’s Transcendental Ideal-
ism, 67–68.
97 Kant, Critique of Judgment, Introduction, §VII, p. 29.
98 See Rae Langton, ‘Receptivity and Kantian Humility’, Australasian Society
for the History of Philosophy Yearbook (1994), 15.
99 Gerhart Wahrig, ed., Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (München:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978), 522. I am told that it is etymologi-
cally related to the folding over of a quilt. The verb falten is to fold, and
the noun die Falte indicates a fold or a wrinkle, a crease, a pleat. See also
the entry ‘Manifold’, in Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary, 284. ‘Mani-
fold’ is applied by Kant to intuitions, to representations and to sensibility in
general.
100 See n. 77 previously.
101 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology From the Pragmatic Point of View, trans.
Victor Dowdall, ed. Hans Rudnick (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Uni-
versity Press, 1978), §9, p. 29.
102 Ibid., 31.
103 Jaakko Hintikka, ‘Kant on the Mathematical Method’, in Beck, Kant Stud-
ies Today, 120. Hintikka quotes D 396 and A320/B376–377.
104 Hintikka, ‘On Kant’s Notion of Intuition (Anschauung)’, 42–43.
105 Ibid., 43.
106 George, ‘Kant’s Sensationalism’, 244.
107 Sellars sees this: ‘it is clear that Kant thinks of intuitions as representations
of individuals, this would mean they are conceptual representations of indi-
viduals rather than conceptual representations of attributes or kinds’ (Sci-
ence and Metaphysics, 3).
108 See Charles Parsons, ‘Kant’s Philosophy of Arithmetic’, in Kant on Pure
Reason, ed. Ralph Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 13–40;
Kirk Dallas Wilson, ‘Kant on Intuition’, Philosophical Quarterly, 25 (1975),
247–265. Hintikka replies to Parsons in ‘Kantian Intuitions’, Inquiry, 15
(1972), 341–345.
109 Letter to Jacob Sigismund Beck, 3 July 1992, AA 11:347.
110 Wiener Logik, AA 24:909, quoted in Parsons, ‘The Transcendental Aes-
thetic’, 64.
111 Philosophische Religionshlehre Pölitz, AA 28:1098.
112 Hintikka, ‘Kantian Intuitions’, 342.
113 Ibid., 344.
114 Hintikka in an appendix to his article, ‘On Kant’s Notion of Intuition
(Anschauung)’, 52–53, actually claims that the discussion of counterparts
supports his view. He points out that Kant uses the example to prove dia-
metrically opposed conclusions in 1768 and 1770. In his 1768 Ground of
the Distinction of the Different Regions of Space, it proves the absoluteness
of space; in 1770, it proves the subjectivity and intuitivity of space.
115 See Parsons, ‘Kant’s Philosophy of Arithmetic’; Parsons, ‘On Some Diffi-
culties Concerning Intuition and Intuitive Knowledge’, Mind, 102 (1993),
233–246; Hintikka, ‘Kantian Intuitions’, 341–345.
60 Dermot Moran
116 See William Blattner, ‘The Non-Synthetic Unity of the Forms of Intuition in
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason’, in Proceedings of the Eighth International
Kant Congress, ed. Hoke Robinson (Milwaukee: Marquette University
Press, 1995), vol. 2.1, 170.
117 Immanuel Kant, Opus postumum, AA 21:79, as translated in Smyth, Forms
of Intuition, 143.
118 This is the strategy of Wilson, ‘Kant on Intuition’, 254–256.
119 Parsons, ‘The Transcendental Aesthetic’, 64.
120 See Ian White, ‘Kant on Forms of Intuition’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, 79 (1978), 123–135.
121 Patricia Kitcher, Kant’s Transcendental Psychology (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1990), 39–40.
123 This example is stimulated by Ian White’s example of a creature with eyes
on opposite sides of the head where two different landscapes are seen at
once with no overlap. See Ian White, ‘Kant on Forms of Intuition’, Pro-
ceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 130–131. The image is reminiscent of
Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion that if humans had eyes on either side of their
heads, like birds do, they might have a completely different conception of
the nature of physical objects.
124 Jonathan Bennett, Kant’s Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1966), 175, denies that we could have a sensation = 0 which is still a sensa-
tion. For him, it is a ‘failure of sensation’, that is, no sensation at all. But it
could mean we are confronted by a space without having any sensory evi-
dence of that space. On the other hand, we commonly report that we are not
experiencing a sensation, so it seems possible to sense having no sensation,
for example, I am not in pain now.
125 See Christian Onof and Dennis Schulting, ‘Space as Form of Intuition and as
Formal Intuition: On the Note to B160 in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason’,
Philosophical Review, 124 (2015), 1–58.
126 C. D. Broad had argued that Kant cannot fit algebra or arithmetic into
his account of an intuitive basis of mathematics. See C. D. Broad, ‘Kant’s
Theory of Mathematical and Philosophical Reasoning’, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, 42 (1941–1942), 1–24.
3 Heidegger’s Interpretation
of Kant’s Transcendental
Schematism
Roxana Baiasu
Kant’s chapter on the schematism is notoriously obscure and Heidegger’s

reading of Kant notoriously contentious.1 But the significance of Kant’s
schematism chapter for Heidegger’s philosophy and for the tradition of
phenomenology should not be underestimated. It can be argued, as Hei-
degger and Ricoeur do, that the Kantian schematism anticipates phe-
nomenological accounts of that which lies at the heart of intentionality,
of our embeddedness in the world and our being. My contribution to this
volume offers a close reading of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Kantian
schematism as the climax of a turning point in the history of philosophy,
of a major shift from a limited deficient metaphysics of subjectivity to a
more basic and adequate ontological conception of our being. I spell out
central features of Heidegger’s reading of the schematism in Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics, and in relation to this engage with Banham’s
discussion of the schematism in Kant’s Transcendental Imagination. I lay
out Heidegger’s main implicit criticisms of the schematism and argue that
these criticisms point to a limited conception of space which undermines
Kant’s temporal schematism. The argument can shed new light on the
ways in which Heidegger sought to reconceive of the ‘schematism’ which
lies at the heart of our being in terms of a renewed understanding of
space and time.
Heidegger’s interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason is meant to
offer a confirmation of his project of fundamental ontology. The main
task of this project is to work out the essential relation between Being
and time through an analysis of the Being characteristic of the human.
Heidegger acknowledges that his interpretation of Kant is marked by
a certain form of ‘violence’.2 As Otto Pöggeler points out, Heidegger
develops the question as to ‘how transcendental philosophy is ontol-
ogy’ by discussing not Husserl but Kant.3 Heidegger’s interpretation of
Kant attempts to make explicit important issues that remained implicit
or unsaid in Kant’s work. These issues concern the connection between
subjectivity and time.4 Perhaps following Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur points
out that Kant’s philosophy contains an implicit phenomenology of
62 Roxana Baiasu
subjectivity, in the context of which the transcendental schematism plays
a central role.5
Heidegger planned to develop an interpretation of the first Critique
and, in particular, of the schematism in Part II of Being and Time, which
has never been published as such. As designed by Heidegger, Division
One of this part should have been devoted to ‘Kant’s doctrine of schema-
tism and time, as a preliminary stage in a problematic of Temporality’.6
However, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, which was published
two years after Being and Time, serves, as Heidegger says, ‘as a fitting
supplement’7 and ‘as a “historical” introduction of sorts to clarify the
problematic treated in the first half of Being and Time’. It must be noted
here that Heidegger favours the first edition of the Critique. Some of the
main reasons for this will become clear later. However, it is important
to note from the outset that, in general terms, an important difference
between the two editions, for Heidegger, is this: while the second edition
does not allow for what he calls an ontologically more ‘original’ interpre-
tation of Kant’s ‘ground-laying of metaphysics’, the first edition makes
possible both a reading of an ontologically limited, deficient ground-
laying and also a more original interpretation.
In the Kant book, Heidegger is mainly concerned with the more origi-
nal interpretation of Kant’s metaphysical project, an interpretation which
is meant to function as a confirmation of his own ontological project.
By contrast, this chapter attempts to reconstruct what Heidegger saw as
major limitations of Kant’s project and, in particular, of his transcenden-
tal schematism, which he sought to overcome in his ontological project.
This provides a contrasting background which is useful to understand
Heidegger’s ontology. The discussion begins with an account of Hei-
degger’s view of the extraordinary significance of Kant’s schematism in
the context of his transcendental philosophy. This is followed by a more
detailed analysis of Heidegger’s interpretation of the schematism which
spells out its structural elements. This, finally, makes it possible to shed
light on what, for Heidegger, were the major limitations of the Kantian
schematism, understood as the core of the Kantian project.
1. The Centrality of the Schematism

In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger argues for the funda-
mental role of the transcendental schematism and time by discussing key
stages of Kant’s account of the possibility of metaphysics. These are stages
of what Heidegger calls the ‘laying of the ground for metaphysics’, that
is, the working out of the possibility of the ontological knowledge which
makes it possible to encounter objects within the world. Heidegger uses
the term ‘transcendence’ to refer to this possibility. More broadly under-
stood, transcendence consists, for Heidegger, of the possibility of being
oriented towards things and making sense of them. Stressing the relation
Heidegger and Kant’s Schematism 63
between his project and Kantian transcendental philosophy, Heidegger
notes that the analysis of transcendence is ‘a pure phenomenology of the
subjectivity of the subject’ (KM 62, H 87). He characterises the specific
transcendence of ontological knowledge in terms of the ‘play-space’ of
the ‘turning toward . . . which lets-[something]-stand-in-opposition’ in
relation to the knowing subject (KM 50, H 71).
In Heidegger’s reading, the problem of the possibility of metaphysics
requires the determination of ontological knowledge in its unified struc-
ture and possibility (KM 8, H 12). For Heidegger, the transcendental
doctrine of elements constitutes the first stage of Kant’s ground-laying
of metaphysics which offers an account of the two essential items of
pure knowledge: pure intuition and pure thinking. According to Hei-
degger, the Transcendental Aesthetic indicates, in a provisional manner,
the privileged role of the pure intuition of time as an essential element
of subjectivity.8 Heidegger points out that ‘time has a pre-eminence over
space’ due to the universality of its scope, since time is a condition of
possibility for both external appearances and internal representations
(KM 34, H 49). The understanding is the faculty of pure thinking, which
is constituted by the categories. In Heidegger’s reading, these are formal
‘notions’, ‘ontological predicates’ (KM 39, H 55), ‘possible ways of uni-
fication’9 of that which intuition brings forth.
In Heidegger’s reading, the Transcendental Analytic shows how imagi-
nation and time gradually come to the fore as central to the constitution
of possible experience in general (KM 34, H 49). In his interpretation, the
Analytic is concerned with the connection of pure thinking to the pure
intuition of time, that is, with the unity of the two elements of ontologi-
cal knowledge. The second stage of the ground-laying of metaphysics is
taken to reveal, in a provisional manner, imagination understood as the
faculty of synthesis, which determines the unity of pure understanding
and pure intuition as constitutive of the unity of possible experience. The
account of the possibility of such a necessary structural unity as an ‘elu-
cidation’ of the constitution of transcendence, that is, of the orientation
towards objects, is, for Heidegger, the main concern of the Transcenden-
tal Deduction, which constitutes the third stage of Kant’s project (KM
53, H 76). The Deduction offers ‘the proof for the possibility of the a
priori ability of pure concepts to refer to objects’ (KM 60, H 86) through
the pure synthesis of imagination; it thus reveals the unity of transcend-
ence as that which makes possible the discovery of things as objects.10
Characterised by Heidegger as ‘the occurrence of transcendence at
its innermost [level]’, the transcendental schematism is taken to mark
the final stage of the ground-laying of metaphysics: the transcendental
schematism constitutes the ‘essential ground’ of transcendence through
its temporal formation (KM 71, H 101; see KM 80, H 113). As men-
tioned previously, in Heidegger’s reading, the essential relation between
pure understanding and universal pure intuition (time) has been already
64 Roxana Baiasu
demonstrated by the Deduction; the task of the transcendental schema-
tism is then to reveal the constitution of this relation which is effected
by the imagination (KM 73, H 103). Heidegger points out that the main
result of this still-preliminary interpretation of Kant’s metaphysical pro-
ject is an understanding of time as the fundamental condition of the pos-
sibility of ontological knowledge or, in other words, of subjectivity as
oriented towards the horizon of possible experience of objects.
Let me note briefly here the significance of this result for what Hei-
degger takes to be a provisional or preliminary interpretation of Kant’s
project. For him, this result makes a more original interpretation of Kant’s
thinking possible, an interpretation that Heidegger presents in Part III
of the Kant book. This original interpretation develops the claim of the
fundamental role of imagination in the constitution of transcendence. An
important implication of this original interpretation is Heidegger’s con-
strual of the understanding as pure imagining through the schematism.
Heidegger’s interpretation of the understanding in terms of imagination
prepares Heidegger’s move from categorial understanding [Verstand] to
existential understanding [Verstehen].11 Furthermore, in Part III of the
Kant book, Heidegger argues for an ‘original’ understanding of primor-
dial temporality as the ground of imagination12 and transcendence. This
is meant to support his claim that ‘the original ground which becomes
manifest in the ground-laying is time’.13
Heidegger suggests that his original interpretation of Kant’s meta-
physical project paves the way for the exposition, in the last part of the
Kant book, of his ‘retrieval’ of the Kantian ground-laying of metaphysics
through a reinterpretation of subjectivity and its transcendence in terms
of the analytic of Dasein.14 Heidegger’s retrieval involves what Sallis calls
‘the effacement of imagination’15 for the sake of Dasein’s temporality and
understanding of Being. For Heidegger, Imagination becomes an inap-
propriate name to designate the condition of possibility of the under-
standing of Being.
2. Schema and Schema-Image

In the chapter on ‘The Fourth Stage of the Ground-Laying: The Ground
for the Inner Possibility of Ontological Knowledge’, Heidegger gives an
account of Kant’s transcendental schematism as ‘the goal of the ground-
laying’ (KM 80, H 113). As we have seen, for Heidegger, the problematic
of the transcendental schematism is of the highest significance for the
elaboration, in terms of time, of the possibility of ontological knowledge,
which precedes experience and makes it possible. This section spells out
significant moments of the structure of the Kantian schematism as inter-
preted by Heidegger.
According to Heidegger’s interpretation, for something to be encoun-
tered, it is necessary that the horizon of its objective encounterability
offer itself in a sensible yet pure manner. This pure look is formed by the
transcendental power of imagination. Heidegger interprets Kant’s tran-
scendental schematism as the pure making-sensible [Versinnlichung] of
the categories.16 Let us look more closely at what he means by this.
For Kant, ‘a concept is always, as regards its form, something univer-
sal which serves as a rule’ (CPR A106); it is a universal formal rule of
unification. The conceptual rule of the understanding requires a schema-
tism which makes the concept sensible and makes possible its connec-
tion to what is encountered in experience. In Heidegger’s view, this can
be achieved only insofar as the schematism provides the concept with a
peculiar ‘look’ [Anblick] or ‘image’ [Bild]. This image, which makes the
concept sensible and enables it to determine the constitution of experi-
ence, is provided by the power of imagination. The transcendental imagi-
nation combines the spontaneity of the rule of unification represented in
the concept with the receptivity of intuition.
Heidegger’s notion of the ‘schema-image’ is central to his interpreta-
tion of the transcendental schematism of the pure concepts of the under-
standing. Gary Banham, one of the few Kant scholars who engage in
some depth with Heidegger’s discussion of the schematism, points out
that Heidegger argues that the schema-image constitutes ‘the fundamen-
tal meaning of schematism’.17 Heidegger’s interpretation of the schema-
tism might appear to be puzzling if we take into consideration Kant’s
statement that ‘[t]he schema of a pure concept of the understanding [. . .]
is something that can never be brought to an image at all’ (CPR A142/
B181). Is Heidegger guilty of an exegetical error in this context, as Kant
scholars like Banham seem to suggest?
Heidegger starts his discussion of the schematism with an account of
the schematism of empirical and mathematical concepts. I do not present
this account in much detail but only mention some of its central points.
Heidegger distinguishes between three meanings of the notion of ‘image’
and, correspondingly, three types of making-sensible. First, ‘image’ can
mean the immediate empirical intuition of something individual. Second,
it can refer to the presentation of a likeness [Abbild], for example, the
one provided by a photograph. Finally, it can mean the image of some-
thing general, that is, of a conceptual representation. In this case, the
making-sensible is effected by the power of imagination which provides
a schema and therewith an image for a concept.
Heidegger uses the example of the empirical perception of a particular
house. Such an empirical perception makes manifest the representation
of our concept of house. In relation to the perceiving of a house, the
schema which ‘regulates’ [regelt] the possible appearing of something like
a house makes possible, through a possible look, the representation of
a concept in its unifying rule character: ‘in the empirical look it is pre-
cisely the rule which makes its appearance in the manner of its regulation
[Regelung]’ (KM 67, H 96). The term ‘regulation’ must be understood
66 Roxana Baiasu
in connection with the Kantian definition of concepts as rules. In Hei-
degger’s reading, the schematised concept necessarily involves a peculiar
kind of image, which is different from an empirical image. For instance,
the schematic image of the concept ‘house’ is something different from
the direct, empirical look of a particular house: ‘what is thematically
represented in the making-sensible is neither the empirical look nor the
isolated concept, but is rather the “listing” of the rule governing the pro-
viding of the image’ (KM 68, H 96).
Heidegger quotes Kant’s definition of the schema, which Kant offers in
the context of the discussion of the schematism of mathematical concepts:
‘This representation of a general procedure of the power of imagination
in providing an image for a concept I entitle the schema of this concept’.18
But, as Banham notes, Kant further explains that ‘it is not images of
objects but schemata that ground our pure sensible concepts. No image
of a triangle would ever be adequate to the concept of it’ (CPR A141/
B140). It might seem that Kant is equivocal about the role of images in
the schematism and unclear about the very issue as to whether the sche-
matism involves an image. However, it can be argued that Heidegger’s
distinction between different types of images could perhaps help clarify
Kant’s account and, in particular, his equivocation in the use of the term
‘image’ in the Schematism chapter.
In order to distinguish the peculiar kind of image belonging to the
schematism from an empirical look and from the presentation of a like-
ness, Heidegger calls it ‘the schema-image’ (KM 68, H 97). Heidegger’s
interpretation of the Kantian schematism, as ‘the formation of the schema
[Schemabildung] in its fulfilment as the manner of making the concept
sensible’ (KM 68, H 97), indicates that the schematism is constituted by
two structural moments: the schema and its corresponding image aspect
or the schema-image. For Heidegger, the schema is itself a general rule
for the sensible presentation of concepts or, as Kant puts it, ‘a method for
representing a rule in an image’ (CPR A140/B180). The schema-image is
‘the true look which belongs structurally to the schema’, ‘a possible pres-
entation of the rule of presentation represented in the schema’.19
In Heidegger’s interpretation, the schema has a double role with regard
to the sensibilisation of the concept. On the one hand, as ‘the represent-
ing of the rule’ (KM 69, H 98), that is, of the concept, the schema has
a rule character. The schema is a universal rule which, ‘as schema in
general [. . .] represents unities, representing them as rules which impart
themselves to a possible look’ (KM 73, H 104). On the other hand,
insofar as it is a product of imagination, the schema forms an image or
a look out of itself. Accordingly, the schema-image is not an immedi-
ate empirical intuition, but its look is governed by the schema which
provides a rule of presentation. That which the schema-image makes
sensible is the ‘regulative unity of the concept’, the rule ‘in the “how”
of its regulating’ (KM 68, H 96). As such, the image has a determinate,
discernible character which makes the generality of the concept intu-
itable.20 Banham, however, contends that this might be the case with
regard to empirical and mathematical concepts but not with regard to
the categories of the understanding.21 To adequately engage with Ban-
ham’s contention, let us look more closely at Heidegger’s argument for
the necessity of a schema-image in the transcendental schematism of the
categories of the understanding. Heidegger points out that the transcen-
dental schematism does not bring the pure concept to an empirical image
or a general image. However, it makes the pure concept sensible, and
thus applicable to experience, by means of its sensible presentation in a
pure schema-image of time.
By distinguishing the pure schema-image from empirical images and
from general images of pure mathematical concepts, and by conceiving
of it as a ‘horizon’ of objectivity, that is, as a sensible prefiguration of
possibilities of objective knowledge, Heidegger’s interpretation seems to
disambiguate Kant’s talk of images in the Schematism chapter. Further-
more, it offers an account of the sensibilisation of the categories of under-
standing in terms of what could be called ‘figurations of time’, a term that
I borrow from Banham and to which I come back later. On this account,
it would be impossible for the pure concept understood as a rule of intel-
ligibility to be made sensible and thus connected to experience without a
schema-image insofar as the schema of the concept has also a rule char-
acter. A sensible, pure prefiguration of the pure concepts is required for
them to be formed as constitutive of experience.
In Heidegger’s reading, in the case of the transcendental schematism
of the pure, most fundamental concepts, which are the rules of objectiv-
ity in general, the schema and the schema-image must operate in a basic
formative manner:
If these are the true ‘primal concepts’ [die echten ‘Urbegriffe’], how-
ever, then the Transcendental Schematism is the original and authen-
tic concept-formation [Begriffsbildung] as such.
(KM 78, H 110)
Original concept formation requires that the horizon of objectivity be

given in a fundamental preliminary view which forms this horizon as a
priori intuitable. Since the pure concepts are ‘those rules in which objec-
tivity in general as preliminary horizon for the possible encountering of
all objects is formed’ (KM 73, H 103), their pure schematisation by the
transcendental imagination must occur in a peculiar pure look, a univer-
sal a priori image. According to Heidegger, the schema-image of the pure
concept can no longer be the image of something in general, as is the
case with the schematism of empirical concepts or that of the pure sen-
sible, mathematical concepts. Only a pure universal intuition can offer
the pure look for the rules of objectivity in general. Heidegger points
68 Roxana Baiasu
out in his interpretation of the Aesthetic that time is the universal form
of sensibility. As we have seen, in his view, the Deduction demonstrates
the necessary connection between time and the pure concepts. Hence,
only time as pure intuition can provide the pure schema-image for the
pure concepts. Heidegger argues that, because time is, as Kant defines
it, a ‘unique object’,22 ‘time is not only the necessary pure image of the
schemata of the pure concepts of the understanding, but also their sole
possibility of having a certain look’ (KM 73–74, H 104). Hence, accord-
ing to Heidegger, the schemata of the pure concepts of the understanding
must be, as Kant defines them, ‘a priori determinations of time according
to rules’, which transform the unitary intuition of time into a multiplicity
of temporal images corresponding to the categories.
Let us note here a significant feature of the temporal schema of the
pure concept as this emerges from Heidegger’s analysis. If the schema is
the representation of the pure concept as a rule, the schema must have a
universal rule character with regard to the a priori constitution of experi-
ence. The rule character of the transcendental schema can be understood
as twofold. First, the transcendental schema regulates the a priori sen-
sible presentation of the pure concept in the image of time.23 Second,
the schema functions as a rule for the determination of a pure tempo-
ral image which makes the horizon of objectivity perceivable (KM 76,
H 108). These two aspects of the schematism are essentially correlated in
the formation of transcendence and, more specifically, of the possibility
of encountering objects.24
3. Heidegger’s Critique of the Schematism

As mentioned previously, Heidegger’s interpretation in the Kant book is
guided by an attempt to introduce his own ontological project by means
of a positive reconstruction of the Kantian project, developed in his own
terms. He only implicitly suggests certain limitations of the Kantian pro-
ject. Heidegger’s criticisms of Kant are more explicit in Being and Time.
I therefore refer to some relevant passages from this work.25
As we have seen, Heidegger defines the ontological formation of the
possibility of objectivity that is produced by the transcendental schema-
tism in terms of pure sensible presentation and time images. Heidegger
characterises the transcendental imagination [Einbildungskraft] as ‘a
faculty of forming’ [Vermögen des Bildens]26 or the ‘formative centre of
ontological knowledge’.27 The ‘productivity’ [Produktivität] of imagina-
tion is manifest in the schematism, which shows
in a far more original sense the ‘creative’ [schöpferische] essence of the

power of imagination. Indeed, it is not ontically ‘creative’ at all, but
[is creative] as a free forming of images. [. . .] In the Transcendental
Schematism, however, the power of imagination is originally picto-
rial [darstellend] in the pure image of time.
(BT 93, H 132)
Thus, according to Heidegger, the schematism forms the articulation of

objectivity in a presentational manner through pure images of time. This
presentational formation determines the scope of that which is formed as
the scope of the possibility of appearances or representations. As Kant
says, ‘appearances are not things in themselves, but rather the mere play
of our representations, which in the end emerge from determinations of
inner sense’.28 Heidegger suggests that, from the perspective of the ontol-
ogy of Dasein, the scope of the Kantian ground-laying of metaphysics is
narrow and not delineated in a fundamental way. This is still the case
even if this citation is interpreted more originally in terms of the a priori
play-space of transcendence, wherein ‘pure representations of objectivity
as such have played up to one another’ (KM 138, H 198). The reason
for this is that, for Heidegger, the original possibilities of transcendence
exceed the sensible formation of objectivity.
Heidegger’s view that the scope of Kantian metaphysics is ontologi-
cally narrow is also suggested by another structural feature of the Kan-
tian ground-laying of metaphysics and, in particular, of the schematism,
namely their formal character. Heidegger notes that the pure concepts
of the understanding are conceived of not only as abstract notions but
also as universal rules of thinking (judging) which rigidly determine
representations and their play-space. In order to clarify this view of a
restrictive, formal character of the transcendental schematism, let me
begin by briefly considering Heidegger’s critique of Kant’s account of the
Self as the ‘I think’ in Section 64 of Being and Time. Here Heidegger
claims that, although Kant’s conception of the transcendental appercep-
tion goes beyond an ontical explanation, it does not raise the existential-
ontological problem of Selfhood.29 In this context, Heidegger points out
that the Kantian Self of the ‘I think’ is understood as the ‘logical subject’
and ‘the form of representation’, ‘the subject of the logical behaviour, of
binding together: “I think” means “I bind together” ’ (BT 367, H 319).
According to Heidegger, notwithstanding Kant’s rejection of the sub-
stantiality of the ‘I’ and ‘the genuine phenomenal starting-point’ of the
‘I think’’, Kant ‘has to fall back on the “subject”—that is to say, some-
thing substantial’ (BT 367, H 320). The reason for this is Kant’s failure to
fully understand the ‘I think’ as an ‘I think something’. Heidegger argues
that, although Kant emphasises the correlation between the ‘I think’ and
appearances, he does not work out the ontology of the terms involved in
this correlation. The ‘I think’, the ‘something’ and the relation between
them remain ‘ontologically indefinite’. Kant did not see these items as
belonging to an articulated whole which can be adequately understood
70 Roxana Baiasu
only in terms of its existential-ontological framework and, in particular,
in terms of our embeddedness in the world.30 In Heidegger’s reading, the
ontological indefiniteness mentioned previously is a levelling off of Being.
Heidegger refers to such a restrictive, formal approach in a different con-
text with regard to
the thesis that every subject is what it is only for an Object, and vice
versa. But in this formal approach the terms thus correlated—like
the correlation itself—remain ontologically indefinite. At the bot-
tom, however, the whole correlation gets thought of as ‘somehow’
being, and must therefore be thought of with regard to some definite
idea of Being. Of course, if the existential-ontological basis has been
made secure beforehand by exhibiting Being-in-the-world, then this
correlation is one that we can know later as a formalized relation,
ontologically undifferentiated.31
Heidegger’s critique points out the narrow, formal, indefinite character

of the Kantian conception of the ‘I think something’ and its failure to
properly distinguish between different modes of Being. This critique is
made from the perspective of the ontology of Dasein, the being whose
basic state is that of Being-in-the-world, and which, as such, is defined
by its factic, concrete existence which gets covered up by the notion of
an ‘ideal subject’.32
Is not such a subject a fanciful idealisation? With such a conception

have we not missed precisely the a priori character of that merely
‘factual’ subject, Dasein? [. . .] The ideas of a ‘pure I’ and of ‘con-
sciousness in general’ are so far from including the a priori character
of ‘actual’ subjectivity that the ontological character of Dasein’s fac-
ticity and its state of Being are either passed over or not seen at all.
(BT 272, H 230)
In relation to the transcendental schematism, the following question can

now be addressed: if the formal framework of the ‘I think something’
delineates the scope of that which is formed in the schematism, how
can the ontological indefiniteness and formalism that Heidegger assigns
to the Kantian ‘I think something’ be revealed in a more basic manner
at the level of the schematism of the universal rules of the understanding
(thinking)?
We have seen that, in Heidegger’s reading, the universal concepts of
thinking cannot become operative unless they are made sensible through
temporal schemata. Heidegger points out that the schemata, understood
as a priori time determinations, arise from the form of time in accord-
ance with the categories. Kant defines the schemata in accordance with
the Table of Notions, which he presents by starting from the Table of
Judgements. In relation to this aspect of the transcendental schematism,
Heidegger points to a limitation of Kant’s account of temporal schemata
and their images:
According to the four moments of the division of the categories

(Quantity, Quality, Relation, Modality), the pure look of time must
exhibit four possibilities of formability as ‘time-series, time-content,
time-order, and time-inclusiveness’. These characters of time are not
so much developed systematically through and out of an analysis of
time itself, but instead are fixed in it ‘according to the order of the
categories’.33
In Heidegger’s reading, the multiplicity of the formal schemata emerges

from time, understood as a unique pure intuition, and in accordance with
the categories, conceived of as the rules of objectivity in general. The
transcendental schemata remain ontologically indefinite because Kant
did not elaborate what Heidegger takes to be an original conception of
time.34 On this account, the ontological indefiniteness of Kant’s project is
ultimately understood in terms of temporal indefiniteness. In Heidegger’s
view, Kant’s conception of time is deficient in the sense that it fails to
grasp a fundamental, rich temporality and its multiple possibilities of
self-temporalising which are characteristic of our mode of Being. From
this perspective, the transcendental schemata, understood as determina-
tions of time which are rules for the sensibilisation of the categories, are
seen as temporally indefinite.
In Heidegger’s view, the scope and originality of Kant’s ground-laying
which is constituted by the schematism are not sufficiently inclusive and
fundamental. The formation of the possibilities of the understanding is
shaped by an indefinite, formal time characterised by an undifferenti-
ated ‘temporalising’. The possibility of representations is formed through
universal, formal schematic rules which constitute indefinite time deter-
minations. These schematic rules prescribe in a strict way the pictorial
sensibilisation of notions through temporal schema-images. The scope
of the Kantian ground-laying of metaphysics appears to be abstract, for-
mally delimited and restrictive. It is taken to miss the rich lived temporal-
ity of human existence.
Heidegger’s criticism concerning the formality of the transcendental
schematism is connected to another criticism he puts forward in relation
to Kant’s conception of the transcendental schematism. This criticism is
concerned with the issue of a metaphysical cut between the inner and the
outer and the problem of the priority of the inner. As we have seen, Hei-
degger notes that the fixed multiplicity of the transcendental schemata
emerges from time as a pure intuition. In the Transcendental Aesthetic,
Kant defines the pure intuition of time as the form of inner sense. Hei-
degger questions this definition of time. He points out that, although
72 Roxana Baiasu
Kant articulates it in terms of the universality of the scope of time, it
presupposes a certain privilege of the inner. For Kant, as Heidegger notes,
time as pure intuition is the immediate condition of possibility for inner
appearances, and only in a mediate manner is it the sensible form of outer
appearances, namely insofar as they are given to us as representations in
the inner sense.35
In Being and Time, Heidegger offers a phenomenological critique of
Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’ which, in his view, is meant to offer a
proof of the reality of the external world. Kant argues that conscious-
ness of representations ‘in me’ establishes the reality of objects in space
‘outside me’, since consciousness of the changes of representations in
me requires something permanent to be posited outside me.36 Heidegger
writes that Kant develops his proof
by starting with the empirically given changes ‘in me’. For only ‘in
me’ is ‘time’ experienced, and time carries the burden of the proof.
Time provides the basis for leaping off into what is ‘outside of me’ in
the course of the proof.
(BT 248, H 204)
For Heidegger, Kant’s error is not that he makes a distinction between

the ‘in me’ and the ‘outside me’.37 Heidegger indicates that a positive
aspect of Kant’s discussion is that he thinks that the correlation between
the ‘in me’ and the ‘outside me’ is to be approached in terms of time. As
Heidegger sees it, Kant’s error begins with the ontological assumption of
the priority, over the outer, of an isolated inner and of its temporal deter-
mination (BT 248, H 204). Heidegger argues that, because of the pre-
supposition of a worldless subject which covers up Being-in-the-world,
Kant holds an inadequate ontological conception of ‘the whole distinc-
tion between the “inside” and the “outside” and the whole connection
between them’ (BT 249, H 205), and therefore he is ‘incorrect’ about
them ‘from the standpoint of the tendency of his proof’38 as a proof of
the reality of external world.
Heidegger claims that Kant’s proof does not succeed in proving the
ontological relation between subject and object, and the connection
between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’, but merely shows the necessary
joint presence of the changing and the permanent:
What Kant proves—if we may suppose that his proof is correct

and correctly based—is that entities which are changing and enti-
ties which are permanent are necessarily present-at-hand together.
But when two things which are present-at-hand are thus put on the
same level, this does not as yet mean that subject and Object are
present-at-hand together.
(KM 248, H 204)
But if this proof is carried through ‘when one takes time as one’s clue’,
the question of the correct basis for such a proof, to which Heidegger
refers between dashes in the previous quote, has to be more fundamen-
tally raised with regard to Kant’s conception of time. And, as Heidegger
indicates, Kant talks here about the time of changing entities, the time of
the succession of representations in an empirical consciousness.
In the Kant book, Heidegger points out that Kant did not elaborate
the problematic of time in an original manner, but he understood it in an
ontologically derived way as a succession of nows. Heidegger notes that
this formal, indefinite conception of time is based on a spatial model,
the model of the space specific to sheer presence of objects, or what Hei-
degger calls ‘presence-at-hand’. Moreover, as Heidegger says, ‘space in
a certain sense is always and necessarily equivalent to time so under-
stood’.39 Such claims are more emphatically held by Heidegger in relation
to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Heidegger refers to
Kant’s indication in a ‘General Note on the System of Principles’, a text
added in the second edition, that space has a role to play in the transcen-
dental schematism. In relation to this text, Heidegger makes a radical
claim, namely that the inclusion of space undermines the ontological sig-
nificance of the transcendental schematism, given the association of space
with sheer presence. Heidegger also suggests that, despite the possibility
of a more original interpretation of the first edition, even in this edition,
the transcendental schematism can be read as involving space in the sense
indicated above.
In Kant’s Transcendental Imagination, Banham points out that the
Transcendental Aesthetic already ‘show[s] the need to represent time
spatially’40 in order for the experience of outer appearances to be pos-
sible. In a section on ‘Space and the Schematism’, Banham argues that
the necessity of representing time spatially is reflected in the Schematism
chapter. Interestingly, he notes that ‘the figuration of time in space’ would
‘threaten to resurrect Heidegger’s notion of a “schema-image” ’.41 Such
an interpretation offers a way of making sense of Heidegger’s identifica-
tion of a schema-image within the transcendental schematism as part of
a critical engagement with Kant’s schematism.
Banham’s reading of the schematism is not as critical of Heidegger’s
interpretation as it might first appear. There are some important points of
agreement between them, such as a claim concerning the important role
of imagination. Also, they both agree that space is implicitly required by
the transcendental schematism and is manifest in the ‘figuration of time
in space’.
For Heidegger, the problem of the relation between space and the
transcendental schematism is not a peripheral one. This is suggested by
Heidegger’s view of the three types of limitations of the transcendental
schematism, which I have spelled out in this section. First, the spatial is
manifest in the way in which the transcendental schematism involves a
74 Roxana Baiasu
presentational formation of time images. More exactly, space shapes the
sensible, presentational formation of the possibilities of objectivity and
the scope of representations. Second, the space specific to sheer presence
is involved in the reoccurrence of a metaphysical cut between the ‘inside’
and the ‘outside’. This reinscription may be traced back to the priority of
an ontological inner within the structure of time and subjectivity. These
considerations can shed some light on Heidegger’s claim that, if the tran-
scendental schematism involves the space specific to sheer presence, the
schematism is ontologically inadequate.
To sum up, the analysis has started by pointing out the centrality of
the schematism in Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant. The problem of
the transcendental schematism is, for Heidegger, the turning point from
a reading of an ontologically deficient ground-laying of the possibility
of metaphysics towards a more original interpretation oriented towards
the project of fundamental ontology. The discussion offered here has,
however, taken the opposite direction of interpreting and reconstructing
certain aspects of Heidegger’s critical reading of Kant’s transcendental
schematism. The main points of this critical reading concern first the
notion of sensible presentation of the rules of intelligibility; second, the
formality of the schematism, which, as we have seen, is connected with
an ontological indefiniteness of the relation between subject and object,
which is taken to be grounded in an undifferentiated notion of time; and
third, a metaphysical cut between inner and outer. Heidegger’s identifica-
tion of the limitations of Kant’s schematism in these terms is ultimately
connected to his critical view of the role of space in the schematism.
From this perspective, it can be said that, for Heidegger, the ontologi-
cal significance of the schematism hinges on the elimination of references
to the space characteristic of sheer presence; to the extent that the think-
ing of time and of the schematism involves spatial and representational
articulations, the scope of the ontological ground-laying has not been
thought through in an adequate manner. For Heidegger, a positive reap-
propriation of possibilities already sketched out in the Kantian project
should overcome the difficulties and limitations of the transcendental
schematism and thus reveal the ground of ontology in a primordial man-
ner. This is what the project of fundamental ontology is set to undertake.
Notes
1 The following abbreviations have been used: BT = Martin Heidegger, Being
and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Black-
well, 1997); CPR = Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Nor-
man Kemp Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; cited with the original
pagination of the two editions, A and B); KM = Martin Heidegger, Kant and
the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James Spencer Churchill (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997); Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, ed.
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1950; cited
with the page numbers of the English edition, followed by the abbreviation
‘H’ and the page numbers of the original German edition).
2 KM xx, H xvii. See ibid., prefaces to the second and fourth editions. As
Macann notes, ‘it was his intention to subject the Critical philosophy to an
interpretative procedure which would make it possible for him to bring to
light structures which match and reflect the fundamental structures of Being
and Time’. However, Macann also makes a more contentious claim. He con-
tends that Heidegger ‘never really acknowledges that this is what he is doing’
and that Heidegger would suggest that the ‘violence’ of his interpretation
is legitimated by revealing ‘what Kant “intended to say” ’. See Christopher
Macann, ‘Heidegger’s Kant Interpretation’, in Critical Heidegger, ed. Chris-
topher Macann (London: Routledge, 1996), 103. See also Maria Villela-Petit,
‘Heidegger’s Conception of Space’, ibid., 137–138.
3 Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak
and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991), 62.
4 From this perspective, as William Richardson notes, ‘Heidegger’s problematic
is nothing else than a re-trieve of Kant’s’ and, ‘because so profoundly a com-
plement’ to Being and Time, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics ‘is there-
fore the best propaedeutic to it’. See William John Richardson, Heidegger:
Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), 29. For
the significance of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics in relation to Being
and Time and the comparison between Heidegger’s and Husserl’s phenom-
enologies in relation to Kant’s transcendental philosophy, see Richard Palmer,
‘Husserl’s Debate with Heidegger in the Margins of Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics’, Man and World, 30 (1997), n. 1, 5–33, esp. 8ff. This article
was initially intended as an introduction to Palmer’s translation of Husserl’s
marginal remarks on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Husserl read
Heidegger’s book on Kant a few weeks after its publication. His marginal
comments appeared only in 1994 in the Husserl Studies and were published
in English in Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the
Confrontation with Heidegger: The Encyclopaedia Britannica Article, The
Amsterdam Lectures, ‘Phenomenology and Anthropology’, and Husserl’s
Marginal Notes in ‘Being and Time’ and ‘Kant and the Problem of Metaphys-
ics’, ed. Thomas Sheehan and Richard Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997).
5 Paul Ricoeur, A l’école de la phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 1987).
6 BT 64, H 40. See also ibid., Section 6 (‘The Task of Destroying the History
of Ontology’), and Heidegger’s Preface to the first edition of Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics. As Eva Schaper notes, Heidegger offers a radical
development of Kant’s insight in the schematism, namely that ‘human nature
includes temporality’. See Eva Schaper, ‘Kant’s Schematism Reconsidered’,
Review of Metaphysics, 18 (1964), 281.
7 KM xix, H xvi. Richardson notes that, although the Kant book was published
after Being and Time, it ‘was conceived beforehand (1925) and intended as
the first section of Sein und Zeit, Part II’ (Heidegger: Through Phenomenol-
ogy to Thought, 28). However, Heidegger indicates that the articulation of
the interpretation in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is different from
the initial plan of interpretation designed for Being and Time. As Heidegger
notes in the Preface to the first edition, his ‘interpretation of the Critique of
the Pure Reason arose in connection with a first working-out of Part Two of
Being and Time. [. . .] In Part Two of Being and Time, the theme of the fol-
lowing investigation was treated on the basis of a more comprehensive man-
ner of questioning. By contrast, a progressive interpretation of the Critique of
Pure Reason was rejected there’ (KM xix, H xvi).
8 KM 35–36, H 50–51. As Sherover points out, Heidegger insists that the Aes-
thetic ‘can only be regarded as an introductory statement, that it cannot be
taken as a self-contained discussion legitimately examined by itself’, although
the interpretation of the Aesthetic guides Heidegger’s analysis. See Charles
76 Roxana Baiasu
Sherover, Heidegger, Kant and Time (Washington, DC: Centre for Advanced
Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1988), 52.
9 According to Heidegger, ‘the finitude of thinking intuition is therefore a know-
ing through concepts; pure knowing is pure intuition through pure concepts’
(KM 36, H 51–52). Heidegger emphasises the distinctive active character of
the pure concepts conceived of as pure notions, namely the act of ‘reflecting
unifying’ (KM 36 ff., H 54ff). According to Heidegger, the understanding of
pure concepts as notions reveals only part of the essence of the pure concepts.
What is decisive is their relation to pure intuition, which is established in the
schematism.
10 See Alphonse de Waelhens and Walter Biemel, ‘Introduction’, in Martin Hei-
degger, Kant et le problème de la métaphysique, trans. Alphonse de Waelhens
and Walter Biemel (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 27.
11 ‘[T]his pure schematism, which is grounded in the pure power of imagina-
tion, constitutes precisely the original Being of the understanding, the “I think
substance”, etc. As representing which forms spontaneously, the apparent
achievement of the pure understanding in the thinking of the unities is a pure
basic act of the transcendental power of imagination. [. . .] Now if Kant calls
this pure, self-orienting, self-relating-to . . ., “our thought”, then ‘thinking’
this thought is no longer called judging, but is thinking in the sense of the free
forming, and projecting (although not arbitrary) “conceiving” of something.
This original “thinking” is pure imagining’ (KM 106, H 151).
12 See ibid., Section 33, where Heidegger argues that the ontological synthesis of
imagination is rooted in primordial temporality, which is also the condition
of possibility of time, as Kant would have understood it.
13 KM 141, H 202. Heidegger contends that since temporality also determines
the transcendental Self, this shows in a decisive manner that temporality is,
in the most fundamental sense, constitutive for the structure of subjectivity.
Hence, according to Heidegger’s original interpretation, ontological knowl-
edge, the Being of the Self and their essential relation are made possible by
temporality.
14 See Macann, ‘Heidegger’s Kant Interpretation’, 108.
15 See John Sallis, Echoes: After Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990), 109. Philipse also indicates that ‘in Heidegger’s hands, Kant’s
transcendental imagination becomes Dasein’s projective understanding’. See
Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 124. As Heidegger writes, ‘in
the end, what has hitherto been known as the transcendental power of imagi-
nation is broken up into more original ‘possibilities’ so that by itself the des-
ignation ‘power of imagination’ becomes inadequate’ (KM 98, H 140). Sallis
draws attention to this inadequacy of the Kantian notion for Heidegger’s
ontological project (Echoes, 108–109, 111). However, Sallis suggests the pos-
sibility of a delimitation in relation to fundamental ontology, a delimitation
which involves a ‘reinscription of imagination’.
16 ‘Transcendence is formed in the making-sensible of pure concepts. [. . .] The
pure making-sensible occurs as “Schematism” ’ (KM 64, H 91).
17 Gary Banham, Kant’s Transcendental Imagination (London: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2005), 162.
18 CPR A140/B179, quoted in KM 68, H 97.
19 Ibid. In the context of his interpretation of the schematism of mathematical
concepts, Heidegger writes: ‘This schema-image, then, within its restric-
tion comes closer to the unity of the concept; with this greater breadth it
comes closer to the universality of this unity. But as always, the image still
has the appearance of an individual, while the schema has the unity of a
universal rule governing many possible presentations “as its intention” ’
(KM 70, H 99).
20 For the distinction between schema and schema-image in relation to the sche-
matism of empirical concepts, see KM 69, H 97–98; in relation to the sche-
matism of pure sensible, mathematical concepts, see KM 70, H 99; and in
relation to the transcendental schematism, see KM 73, H 103.
21 Banham, Kant’s Transcendental Imagination, 162.
22 CPR A31/B47, quoted in KM 73, H 104.
23 ‘The schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding, therefore, must
necessarily regulate these [concepts] internally in time’ (KM 73, H 104).
24 ‘This schematism forms transcendence a priori and hence is called “transcen-
dental schematism” ’ (KM 74, H 105).
25 As has been noted previously, in Being and Time, Heidegger notes that the
task of his destruction of Kant’s doctrine of the schematism is undertaken
from the perspective of the problematic of the Temporality of Being. He indi-
cates that such a task involves a demonstration of ‘why this area is one which
had to remain closed off to him [Kant] in its real dimensions and its central
ontological function. Kant himself was aware that he was venturing into an
area of obscurity’ (BT 45, H 23).
26 BT 91, H 129. See also BT 64, H 90.
27 See ibid., Section 26, entitled ‘The Formative Centre of Ontological Knowl-
edge as Transcendental Power of Imagination’ [Die bildende Mitte der ontol-
ogischen Erkenntnis als transzendentale Einbildungskraft].
28 CPR A101, quoted in KM 138, H 198. Heidegger gives this quotation in the
context of his original interpretation of Kant’s ground-laying in Part Three
of the Kant book in order to show how the Kantian ground-laying in its
originality is made possible by fundamental ontology. As I have indicated
previously, the analysis developed here does not take this direction of Hei-
degger’s positive progressive interpretation, but moves regressively towards
Heidegger’s provisional reading of Kant.
29 See BT, Section 64 (‘Care and Selfhood’). In note xvi, Heidegger refers
to Part Three of the Kant book. As Robinson and Macquarrie indicate,
this note replaces the following note in the earlier editions, referring to
the unpublished analysis of Kant’s schematism in Being and Time: ‘The
first division of the second part of this treatise will bring the concrete
phenomenologico-critical analysis of transcendental apperception and its
ontological significance’ (BT 496).
In Part Three of the book on Kant, Heidegger reconstructs the Self as
apperception in terms of time understood in an original, existential man-
ner. See esp. KM, Section 34. Since this account belongs to what Heidegger
takes to be his original interpretation of the Kantian ground-laying, the crit-
ical dimension of Heidegger’s reading of the problematic of the ‘I think’ is,
in this context, overcome for the sake of the re-articulation of the Self from
the perspective of the radical thinking of fundamental ontology. Therefore,
a discussion of Heidegger’s account of the Self in the Kant book cannot pro-
vide a useful textual basis for the purpose of the current exposition. Instead,
we can turn towards the critical analysis offered in Being and Time. How-
ever, as Richardson points out, even in the Kant book, Heidegger indicates
that ‘time, as self-affection, and transcendental apperception are both called
stehend und bleibend (stable and abiding)’. Richardson notes that the static
character of the Kantian notion of the self is criticised in Being and Time as
having Cartesian, present-at-hand determinations. See William Richardson,
‘Kant and the Late Heidegger’, in Phenomenology in America, ed. James
Edie (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 128.
78 Roxana Baiasu
30 With regard to Kant’s ‘ontologically indefinite’ conception of the ‘I think
something’, of the relation between subject and appearances, Heidegger
writes: ‘Even the “I think something” is not definite enough ontologically
as a starting-point, because the something remains indefinite. [. . .] Kant did
not see the phenomenon of the world, and was consistent enough to keep the
“representations” apart from the a priori content of the “I think”. But as a
consequence, the “I” was forced back to an isolated subject, accompanying
representations in a way which is ontologically quite indefinite’ (BT 368, H
321). This can provide a clue to Heidegger’s claim concerning the two main
reasons for the impossibility in the Critique of Pure Reason of an original
conception of time and of the temporality of Being: ‘In the first place, he alto-
gether neglected the problem of Being; and, in connection with this, he failed
to provide an ontology with Dasein as its theme or (to put this in Kantian
language) to give a preliminary ontological analytic of the subjectivity of the
subject’ (BT 45, H 24, emphasis added).
31 BT 252, H 208. This passage appears in a subsection where Heidegger

discusses Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’. I come back to this discussion
subsequently.
32 BT 272, H 231. In the context of his discussion of the conception of the
truth of knowledge, on which I do not elaborate here, Heidegger raises the
question of Dasein’s facticity in relation to the ‘philosophy’ of the a priori,
and the ‘ideal subject’. Otto Pöggeler expresses some aspects of what I spell
out here in terms of Heidegger’s perception of the restrictive formality of
Kant’s thinking as follows: ‘Kant calls pure thinking, the I, “permanent” and
“abiding”; he describes time in the same way. He thinks—like metaphysics
in general—in terms of the permanent and abiding presence, but he does
not think this presence in accordance with its complete temporal character
[. . .]. Kant does not grasp the transcendental I as factical, essentially tempo-
ral existence’ (Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, 65).
33 KM 74, H 105, with quotations from CPR A145/B184–185 and italics by
Heidegger.
34 See KM 140, H 105; BT 45, H 24.
35 Heidegger suggests that this definition is problematic in KM 34, H 48–49. In
Being and Time, he opposes it explicitly. See BT 471, H 419.
36 CPR B275, quoted in BT 247, H 203. Although from a different perspec-
tive, the significance of Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’ for phenomenology is
emphasised by Ricoeur. In relation to Kant’s passage at B275, Ricoeur states
that this passage offers ‘a definition of intentionality avant la lettre’ (A l’école
de la phénoménologie, 235).
37 ‘Kant presupposes both the distinction between the “in me” and the “outside
me”, and also the connection between these; factically he is correct in doing
so’ (BT 248, H 204).
38 BT 248, H 204. See also Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, 65.
39 BT 140, H 200. The relation between the concepts of space and time with
regard to Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s schematism requires a more
detailed treatment, which cannot be provided here.
40 Banham, Kant’s Transcendental Imagination, 163.
41 Ibid.
4 On Affective Universality
Kant, Arendt and Lyotard on
Sensus Communis
Andrea Rehberg
Affectivity has generally been considered an obstacle to the pursuit of

truth, knowledge and the good, both in the individual and in the commu-
nity, throughout the history of Western philosophy. This is most starkly
exemplified by what is arguably one of the founding texts of Western
metaphysics, namely Plato’s Republic, in which affectivity, feeling and
desire are portrayed as detrimental to the project of establishing a just
individual in a just society, to such an extent that they should even be
purged from the realm of art, just as the poets who overindulge in them
should be banished from the kallipolis that is to be established. More
generally, it is not just affectivity per se but the entire nexus comprising
the body, the senses, emotions and desires that has tended to be defamed,
disparaged and denigrated in the Western philosophical tradition under-
stood as Platonism, thereby paving the way for the systematic vilifica-
tion of this entire nexus by Christianity. In other words, affectivity, this
essential dimension of human existence, has been not just sidelined but
effectively excluded from what was considered the legitimate space of
philosophy, dominated as it was by the belief in pure thought, pure rea-
son and pure cognition.
It is only with Schopenhauer, and above all with Nietzsche, that the
slow, gradual rehabilitation of all aspects of bodily being in thought
can be seen to get underway. Although Schopenhauer’s thought for the
first time in modernity systematically takes the profound effects of our
bodily being on our epistemological, existential and artistic projects
into account, this is there still wedded to an entirely negative evaluative
stance, according to which desiring equals suffering, such that one of
the most basic assumptions of the Platonic-Christian tradition is clandes-
tinely reaffirmed. It is only in the work of Nietzsche that the elision of all
aspects of our bodily being from the space of thought is not only remedied
(as it also is in Schopenhauer’s philosophy) but is at the same time and
for the first time joined to a comprehensive re-evaluation of the respective
values of the human cognitive and affective capacities. And it is only in
this thoroughgoing re-evaluation that the philosophical rehabilitation of
bodily being finds its culmination, from which there open up the multiple
80 Andrea Rehberg
paths into psychoanalysis, feminism and all other philosophies of the
body that distinguish twentieth-century thought from that of the earlier
Western philosophical tradition, whilst also emerging from out of it to
an extent. Put differently, in the thought of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and
also—at least up to a point—Heidegger, despite the significant differences
between them, the central importance of the pre-conscious, pre-cognitive
and pre-theoretical aspects of human existence is being (re-)established.
These developments have allowed us to become attuned to the undeni-
ably central significance of the affective dimensions of our being and to
the exigency of their reincorporation into the body of thought that both
shapes and expresses our culture. So much for the historical context—at
least in its broad and somewhat schematic strokes—within which the fol-
lowing reflections occur.
But what is most remarkable, and what may perhaps be rather unex-
pected to anyone who is generally accustomed to hermeneutic orthodoxy,
is that Kant can arguably be seen as an important precursor of this long,
slow movement of the philosophical convalescence of our affective life
and that it is in certain aspects of the Critique of Judgement1 that this
is being foreshadowed, if not even prepared. More specifically, it is by
according the feeling of pleasure or displeasure the status of a power or
faculty of the soul (Gemütsvermögen) and thereby crediting it with a
(broadly speaking) constitutive capacity for a certain type of judgement
that Kant can be seen to contribute to the change of perspective charted
previously. The reason this is remarkable and perhaps unexpected is of
course that Kant is often depicted, if usually by non-specialists, as an
arch-rationalist, that is, a thinker for whom reason is the highest and
most central human capacity. Although it is undoubtedly the case that
Kant did valorise theoretical and especially practical reason above all
other human powers, this neither detracts from nor rules out the fact that
Kant was not blind to the importance of, broadly speaking, non- or pre-
rational factors and the way they can and do affect the judging subject.
Apart from the general yet fundamental rediscovery of the (in the non-
technical sense) constitutive role played by affective life in the formation
of the subject’s—facultatively predetermined—relations with its world,
a number of concrete textual moments in the Critique of Judgement can
be pointed to in which Kant specifically and in some detail discusses how
this affectivity plays itself out. The key textual instances here are the
second and fourth Moments of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement as
well as the Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgements, all of which will
be discussed in the following. The idea that Kant’s text moves towards,
which eventually emerges in an explicit manner and which, it is my claim,
acts as the main focal point of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement is that
of sensus communis. This idea has given rise to a great deal of discussion
in the literature, but the pinnacle of this discussion is, to my mind, to be
found in the work of Lyotard. Hannah Arendt’s unearthing of this issue
On Affective Universality 81
also provides an important staging-post, so, despite the radical differ-
ences between her and Lyotard’s interpretations, it will also be consid-
ered. This foray into their work is necessitated by the fact that it opens
up a vista for how Kant’s thought can be explored within and adapted
to twentieth-century contexts and concerns, especially pertaining to the
question of how the space of the political can be projected.
As is only to be expected, there are a host of technical issues, questions
and often thorny problems surrounding the Critique of Judgement, such
as its role in Kant’s critical system, the relation between its parts, that
is, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the Critique of Teleological
Judgement, the relevance of the categorial framework to the Critique
of Aesthetic Judgement and so on. Here only one small segment of the
text, namely the part played by aesthetic judgement in the life of the
subject, and the implications of this for a thought of the political, will be
discussed. Needless to say, the secondary literature on any aspect of the
Critique of Judgement is vast and, for the most part, cannot be taken into
consideration here for reasons of space.
What will therefore be completely bracketed out are questions con-
cerning the overall coherence of Kant’s critical system and the bridging
function of the third Critique in it, since such questions would extend
this chapter beyond all reasonable limits. Also, for the sake of thematic
coherence and textual concision, the discussion will be restricted to
judgements of taste on the beautiful, since the other articulation of judge-
ments of taste, namely judgements of taste on the sublime, whilst impor-
tant in their own right,2 would unnecessarily complicate the discussion
and since the latter type of judgement does not immediately concern the
issues under discussion here, that is, those related to the idea of sensus
communis.
By contrast, Gary Banham, in his first monograph, Kant and the Ends
of Aesthetics, as the title clearly indicates, concentrates on the manifold
senses of the concept of ‘end’ in the Critique of Judgement and at the
same time teases out the political implications of this concept and relates
it to a wide range of Kant’s texts, both critical and doctrinal. In addi-
tion, he shows how the third Critique fits into the critical system, and he
does so by emphasising the role of what he calls an ‘overall’ or ‘general
aesthetic’ (KEA 33) spanning the three Critiques and giving coherence
to them. In this project, Banham is greatly served by his comprehensive
knowledge of Kant’s texts and in particular by his in-depth understand-
ing of the critical system. That he also takes important readers of Kant
such as Lyotard into consideration only enhances the appeal of his text.
To be more specific, Banham chisels out three senses of the term ‘end’
at work in the third Critique: first, as limit; second, as purpose and third,
as conclusion or destination (KEA 2–9). This focus allows him to develop
a reading of Kant which, as he says, ‘unites many otherwise disparate
inquiries and which provides us with a new sense of the unity of the
82 Andrea Rehberg
Critical endeavour’ (KEA 2) in terms of these teloi. This is, of course, an
important contribution to Kant scholarship and helps both novice read-
ers of Kant and more experienced interpreters to appreciate the complex-
ity of Kant’s critical project.
However, in this chapter, as already indicated, I would like to take up
an issue on which Banham touches in Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics
but which he does not choose to develop, namely the affective wellspring
of not just reflective but also, implicitly, constitutive judgement. Admit-
tedly, attention to this facet of Kant’s thought is neither interpretatively
orthodox nor hermeneutically uncontroversial, but then careful readers
of Kant such as Lyotard and Banham himself have more than gestured
in this direction, so that this perhaps rather unorthodox approach might
be understood as an extension of aspects of their thought. Moreover, and
this is where I differ most sharply from Banham, perhaps Kant’s claim
to the coherence of the critical system is at least problematic, if not alto-
gether unwarranted, not of course due to any oversights or mistakes on
Kant’s part, but simply because, in my view, the coherence said to attach
to systematicity is always, necessarily and in principle illusory since it
is based on a prior model of reality which omits taking account of the
hiatuses and lacunae that co-constitute it. In other words, I share the con-
viction that the modern belief in conceptual systematicity as adequately
reflecting reality (a belief to be found not only in Kant’s work but also in
Hegel’s and that of the other German Idealists) must be displaced by the
post-modern insight into the essentially fragmented, at bottom incoher-
ent and ultimately abyssal nature of the real. This qualification of course
in no way invalidates Kant’s critical work as a whole (or any text dealing
with it) but merely shifts the emphasis from the aspect of it on which
Banham focuses (its systematic coherence) to that which forms the topic
of this chapter and which I thematise under the heading of affectivity,
thereby foregrounding the chasms rather than the continuities in Kant’s
critical thought.
1. Kant on Aesthetic Reflective Judgement

on the Beautiful
Each of the three Critiques on its own terrain (the theoretical, practi-
cal and aesthetic-teleological, respectively) is devoted to examining the
question of how synthetic a priori judgements are possible and on which
faculties and principles they are based in each case.3 In fact, it is this ques-
tion which provides the motivation for each of the three Critiques,4 and
so at the beginning of the Critique of Judgement, Kant asks—if some-
what rhetorically—whether ‘[the faculty of] judgement [. . .] also [has] a
priori principles of its own’,5 a question which is only finally, explicitly
resolved in the Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgements.6 Broadly speak-
ing, a judgement is synthetic a priori if it combines material gleaned by
sensibility (itself structured according to the a priori forms of intuition,
namely space and time) with conceptual forms organising this material
according to a priori (necessary and universal) structures of thought. In
other words, synthetic a priori judgements are expressions of the mind’s
encounter with the world in accordance with certain of its, the mind’s,
regularities common to all judging subjects.7 What is to be emphasised
here is that, at least in the order of time, the judging subject must first of
all be affected by aspects of the world before the formation of judgements
about those aspects can proceed.8
The need for a Critique of Aesthetic Judgement on one level arises
from the realisation on Kant’s part that theoretical and practical judge-
ments do not exhaust the entire sphere of the human capacity to judge
but that we also respond to certain givens in nature and art (that we deem
beautiful) in necessary and universal ways, meaning that we also make
synthetic a priori judgements on them. The first Book of the Critique of
Aesthetic Judgement, concerned with the Analytic of the Beautiful, must
therefore establish the a priori features of an aesthetic reflective judge-
ment on the beautiful made by the judging subject in its9 encounter with
those phenomena it regards as beautiful.
It is one of Kant’s most fundamental insights that apriority rests with
those features of the understanding, namely the categories, which both
formally derive from10 and ultimately enable the formation of judge-
ments (CPR A148/B187-A235/B294). This is why Kant—if not uncon-
troversially so11—uses the table of categories familiar from the first
Critique to also structure the Analytic of the Beautiful according to the
four Moments of, in this case, Quality, Quantity, Relation and Modality.
But, as always, before the categories can be applied, their material has
to be given, and so in this case, too, the singular, beautiful phenomenon
must first be given or presented.12
But, and this is the first13 of several crucial differences between the
application of the faculties to a given as described in the first and in the
third Critique, in the latter the given of intuition as presented in imagina-
tion is not subsumed under a determinate concept of the understanding.
Instead, both these faculties are said to be ‘in free play’, meaning that they
interact in such a way that they ‘refer a given presentation to cognition
in general’ (CJ §9, 62). They do so in a way that Kant describes in the
following terms: ‘the mental state in this presentation must be a feeling,
accompanying the given presentation, of a free play of the presentational
powers directed to cognition in general’.14 This feeling is one of ‘pleasure
in the harmony of the cognitive powers’ (imagination and understanding,
CJ §9, 62), yet without issuing in a concept that would determine the
given object and that would thereby terminate the free play stimulated
by the object. This pleasure enhances the subject’s ‘feeling of life’ (CJ §1,
44) and registers a ‘quickening’ or animation [Belebung] of its faculties
(CJ §9, 63). It is at bottom this pleasure which registers with the judging
84 Andrea Rehberg
subject in such a way that it feels compelled to ascribe a, as it were, cor-
responding attribute to the given object, which is hence called beautiful.
In other words, we attribute beauty to a given object as if it were an
objectively determinable characteristic of the given phenomenon,15 when
in fact all we do is register this intellectual, if very fundamental, pleasure
in the joyfully free interaction of our presentational faculties.
Parenthetically, it should be remarked that in Kant’s critical thought,
‘subjective’ can have two very different senses, namely either referring to
the fundamental constitution of the faculties and their interaction in a
judgement and what is therefore transcendental, hence to do with what is
common to all judging subjects, or, on the other hand, to what concerns
only my individual, private, empirical being, that is, what is commonly
meant by ‘subjective’. We might speak of the transcendentally subjective
and the privately subjective, respectively, a parlance that will be adopted
throughout this chapter.
In addition to the two previously mentioned fundamental features of
aesthetic judgement, namely that it merely registers transcendentally sub-
jective, facultative pleasure (rather than being objective) and that it is
aesthetic and not cognitive (CJ §1, 44), that is, reflective and not deter-
minative, subjectively and not objectively valid, such a judgement must
also be free of interest, since this would mean its shading or even wholly
turning into either a judgement on the agreeable or a judgement on the
good. The former would be privately subjective, merely stating ultimately
incommunicable preferences related to my particular sense organs,
whereas the latter would involve the interests of practical reason and
thereby also fall outside the realm of the aesthetic.16 Only an aesthetic
reflective judgement free of all interest can elevate me above the narrow
circumference of my private liking for this or that kind of material being.
As Kant puts it in what is, for him, an unusually polemical tone: ‘Many
things may be charming and agreeable to [the private individual]: no
one cares about that. But if [the judging subject] proclaims something
beautiful, then [it] requires the same liking from others; [it] then judges
not just for [itself] but for everyone’.17 For the same reason, namely to
ensure that the condition of—albeit non-conceptual—universalisability is
fulfilled, the pleasure I take in the beautiful presentation must exclusively
concern its form and must not be distracted by its matter or the charm
and emotion it may exert on me in my privately subjective capacity (CJ
§§13, 14, 31, 38).
A crucial step in the Analytic of the Beautiful occurs in the second
Moment (of Quantity), where Kant introduces the requirement of subjec-
tive universality. This may at first sight appear to be a contradiction in
terms, since anything that is subjective—as long as we mean by this pri-
vately subjective—seems to militate against the attribution of universality
to it. But precisely here is where the difference (which remains inexplicit
in the Critique of Judgement) between the privately subjective and the
transcendentally subjective comes in. For it is, in fact, exclusively the lat-
ter which admits of universality, since it is only this transcendental consti-
tution that is shared among all judging subjects, whereas the former from
the beginning isolates me from all other judging subjects, in Kant’s view.
A problem arises through a further requirement made of aesthetic
reflective judgement on the beautiful, namely that (as already mentioned)
it proceed without determinate concepts, which by definition grant
objective universality to the judgements made using them. But, as Kant
explains, if my judgement on the beautiful is free of all interest, this indi-
cates that it is precisely not hampered by ‘any private conditions’, so that
I ‘must regard it as based on what [I] can presuppose in everyone else as
well’, namely the identical facultative constitution (CJ §6, 54). This is the
reason I can ascribe subjective universality to my aesthetic judgements as
long as they are genuinely free of interest, and so the quantity of (albeit
only subjective) universality follows by necessity from the quality of the
aesthetic judgement being without interest. If the free play of the facul-
ties of cognition, imagination and understanding, in the encounter with a
certain type of ‘beautiful’ presentation, marks the, in the order of impor-
tance, first step towards the idea of sensus communis in the Critique
of Aesthetic Judgement, then this requirement of subjective universality
marks the second step towards the same goal. And if I claim subjective
universality for my aesthetic judgement, this means that I expect every-
one else to feel the same pleasure (in the free play of the faculties) when
confronted by the beautiful presentation that stirred the faculties into
their free activity in this particular case that I have marked with my aes-
thetic reflective judgement.
A key point to remember in this context is that it is not the case that
everyone does always actually, empirically agree with my aesthetic reflec-
tive judgements on the beautiful but merely that I harbour the a priori
expectation that they should. So, although empirically, agreement with
my aesthetic reflective judgements is withheld often enough, Kant agrees
that it is strange that ‘the taste of reflection should nonetheless find itself
able [. . .] to conceive of judgements that can demand such agreement
[. . .] from everyone for each of its judgements’ (CJ §8, 58). He solves this
puzzle by reminding us that what is disputed (in the case of actual disa-
greement) is not whether this expectation is warranted (it always is) but
how to apply it in a particular, that is, empirical case (CJ §8, 58). In this
sense, the conundrum of application mirrors that of the faculty of judge-
ment per se, which does not provide either form or material for judge-
ments but merely shows how the former should be applied to the latter.
What is also important to remember is the difference between judge-
ments that are objectively universally valid and those that are only subjec-
tively so, since the former imply the latter but not vice versa (CJ §8, 58).
The key difference between them is that objectively universally valid
judgements rest on the concept of the object, ‘considered in its entire
86 Andrea Rehberg
logical sphere’ (CJ §8, 59), whereas subjectively universally valid judge-
ments merely extend the predicate of beauty (without a concept) to the
entire sphere of judging subjects, meaning we demand the same attribu-
tion of that predicate to that object of everyone.
But if we were to extend this type of judgement to all objects of that
kind (e.g., ‘all flowers are beautiful’), we would turn it from an aesthetic
into a logical judgement based on an aesthetic one (CJ §8, 59). How-
ever, as Kant says in a noteworthy manner, as if he considered logical
statements of a lesser kind than aesthetic reflective ones, ‘if we judge
objects merely [bloß] in terms of concepts [. . .] we lose all presentation
of beauty’.18 So no prior rule (on a par with the rule for subsumption
expressed in a concept) and no abstract argument can compel me to find
something beautiful. Only my own judgement, when confronted with
the form of the singular object given to sensation, can lead to such an
assessment (CJ §8, 59). And yet, says Kant in one of the, for us, most sig-
nificant points in the text, ‘if [I] then call the object beautiful, [I] believe
[I] have a universal voice, and lay claim to the agreement of everyone’.19
Now, this postulation20 of a universal voice (which is only an idea)21 that
proceeds without being based on concepts constitutes the third key step
towards the idea of sensus communis and in fact foreshadows it signifi-
cantly, since it puts my aesthetic reflective judgement in relation to an
abstract, non-empirical (and even empirically unrealisable) ideal commu-
nity of judging subjects, for all of whom I claim to speak in my aesthetic
reflective judgement.
These reflections in the second Moment of the Critique of Aesthetic
Judgement culminate in the question of whether it is the universal com-
municability of, or the pleasure registered in, an aesthetic reflective judge-
ment on the beautiful that has (logical) priority. Kant accords the solution
to this problem such importance that he calls it ‘the key to the critique
of taste’ (CJ §9, 61). If the pleasure in the judgement came first, it would
be the kind of pleasure which exceeds all universalisability, but the only
pleasure of that sort Kant allows for is the pleasure in the agreeableness
(of the sensation, the matter) of the object, which, as we have already
seen, in no way admits of universality, since it only concerns the pri-
vately subjective aspects of my existence. Hence it must be its universal
communicability which precedes the pleasure in an aesthetic judgement
and in fact contributes to this pleasure (CJ §9, 61). But what this univer-
sal communicability takes pleasure in communicating is ‘nothing other
than the mental state [. . .] in the relation between the presentational
powers insofar as they refer a given presentation to cognition in general’
(CJ §9, 61f.). In actual fact, then, it is not so much an either-or between
universal communicability and pleasure as concerns their precedence but
a certain circularity involving the free play of the two faculties and the
communicability of this mental state,22 such that without the pleasure
in the faculties’ free play, there is nothing to communicate, but without
the condition of communicability being fulfilled, there is no genuinely
facultative pleasure.
In this context, Kant makes the important point that all cognition (‘cog-
nition in general’), including cognition proper or cognition in the narrow
sense of the word (involving determinate concepts), is based on the har-
monious interplay between imagination and understanding, or what he
calls their ‘proportioned attunement [proportionierte Stimmung]’.23 As
he puts it, ‘cognition always rests on that relation as its subjective condi-
tion’,24 a relation that, when felt without any conceptual overlay (such
as occurs both in theoretical and practical judgements), gives rise to a
considerable pleasure. What he thereby seems to imply is that in aesthetic
reflective judgement, we, as it were, dig down to and, importantly, affec-
tively get in touch with the most fundamental condition of all cognitive
judgements, namely that which is fulfilled when imagination and under-
standing harmonise with each other before their free play is terminated
by the imposition of a determinate concept. This impression is confirmed
when Kant speaks of the feeling of the ‘quickening [Belebung]’25 of the
two powers in their indeterminate interplay, which can be understood as
a vitalising sensation that not only involves the two faculties concerned
but the entire judging subject, intensifying its feeling of life.
The wider implication of this is that aesthetic judgement is not, as
might have been thought, some later, perhaps even slightly frivolous,
adjunct or supplement to the serious business of (theoretical or practical)
judgements but that it expresses their fundamental condition of possibil-
ity, namely the free relation between the two faculties or, more precisely,
the universal communicability of the pleasure we take in the free play
of imagination and understanding when faced with the form of a given
object that incites them to this free play. Last, on this issue, it is the fact
(or rather the founding assumption of Kant’s critical work) that the facul-
ties and their manner of interaction are the same in all judging subjects
that allow me to postulate the universal communicability of my aesthetic
reflective judgement and to expect everyone’s assent with my judgements
of this type, even though they are not based on determinate concepts and
thus are not objectively universally valid.
This train of thought is continued and in fact pursued to its (as I claim)
ultimate ground, namely the sensus communis, in the fourth Moment of
the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement.26 This deals with the modality of an
aesthetic reflective judgement and hence with the question of whether the
modal status of the pleasure to which it gives voice is that of possibility,
actuality or necessity. To emphasise, it is not the judgement itself whose
modal status is being discussed but only that of the pleasure registered
in it. Kant avers that any presentation may be connected with pleasure;
aesthetic judgements of sense, that is, those on the agreeable, are actu-
ally connected with pleasure; but only in aesthetic reflective judgement
is there necessarily pleasure (CJ §18, 85). However, this pleasure can
88 Andrea Rehberg
certainly not lay claim to the same kind of binding necessity as does any
cognitive, conceptually based judgement which can assert either theo-
retical or practical objective necessity. Instead, to it there attaches only
‘exemplary’ necessity (CJ §18, 85), meaning that its claim to necessity
is merely grounded in the assent expected of every judging subject, to
whose assent it appeals. Thus, as with universality, so with necessity: its
scope is merely subjective, that is, concerning the entirety of judging sub-
jects, and not objective, that is, based on concepts. Also, importantly, this
necessity cannot be based on empirical factors, which in this case would
be everyone’s actual agreement with my aesthetic reflective judgements,
first because experience tells us that others’ agreement is not always
forthcoming, but also simply because necessity can never be derived
from merely empirical elements.27 Put differently, I demand that everyone
ought to agree with my judgement, even though in fact they don’t always,
and perhaps even never, do so (CJ §19, 86). Since this is one of the crucial
points in Kant’s characterisation of aesthetic reflective judgement on the
beautiful and also of central importance to this discussion, it is worth
quoting how Kant introduces the idea of sensus communis:
judgements of taste [. . .] must have a subjective principle, which

determines only by feeling rather than by concepts, though nonethe-
less with universal validity, what is liked [. . .] Such a principle [. . .]
could only be regarded as a common sense [. . .] [sensus communis]
[. . .] Only under the presupposition [Voraussetzung] [. . .] that there
is a common sense (by which [. . .] we [. . .] mean the effect arising
from the free play of our cognitive powers) [. . .] can [reflective]
judgements of taste be made.28
This, then, is the principle underlying all aesthetic reflective judgements

into which Kant was rhetorically enquiring in the Preface to the Critique
of Judgement and which now turns out to be the sensus communis. What
he means by this, I believe, is that we must assume such a sense for a com-
munity of, literally, like-minded subjects, access to which community we
only have affectively, by means of a feeling or a sensus communis, rather
than cognitively, by means of concepts. I feel the pleasure in the harmoni-
ous interaction of the faculties and I feel that this must be the same for
the entirety of judging subjects, to which plenum I feel myself to belong.
To recap, the sensus communis is based on feeling, not on concepts;
hence, it is only subjectively, not objectively, universal; it is not based
on experience but postulates an ought (everyone ought to agree with
my aesthetic reflective judgement); it does not claim to predict anything
empirical (not: everyone will agree with my judgement); the necessity it
expresses is exemplary, not objective. Finally, though, the sensus commu-
nis, like the universal voice that prefigures it, can only have the status of
an idea (‘a mere ideal standard’)29 that we must presuppose to guide our
judgements of taste. At the end of the fourth Moment, Kant underlines
the importance of the sensus communis by saying that his task in the
Analytic of the Beautiful has been ‘to analyse the power of taste into its
elements and to unite these ultimately [zuletzt] in the idea of a common
sense’.30 In other words, all the features of the judgement of taste are
finally united in the idea of a sensus communis, the idea of the univer-
sal communicability or universalisability of our (pre- or non-cognitive)
aesthetic judgements, so that the sensus communis can be understood
not just as the end-point but as the culmination and focal point of the
Analytic of the Beautiful.
Last in this section, we briefly turn to the Deduction of Pure Aesthetic
Judgements (§§30–40), which, as previously mentioned, is necessitated
by the fact that pure aesthetic reflective judgements claim to be synthetic
a priori31 judgements and therefore universally valid, meaning they must
be based on an a priori principle (CJ §30, 141). However, we only need
to look at the Deduction quite briefly, since it merely reconfirms and
states more explicitly what has already been said in the Analytic of the
Beautiful.32 We might say that where the Analytic of the Beautiful focuses
on the characteristics of judgements, on the objects with which they deal
and how they do so, the Deduction, without adding much substantially
new material, shifts the focus to the facultative constitution of the sub-
ject that makes such judgements. So it is not the case that the Deduction
of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement goes much beyond the thoughts
offered in the Analytic (as is the case in the first Critique) but merely
that it re-examines them from the facultative side, thereby fulfilling the
demands of the Copernican turn in the realm of aesthetics.33
In fact, as Kant states at the beginning of the Deduction, all that has to
be established is the subjective universal validity of a singular aesthetic
reflective judgement on the beautiful, that is, ‘how it is possible for every-
one to be entitled to proclaim [their] liking as a rule for everyone else’.34
But the crucial qualification Kant immediately adds is that the subjective
universal validity of a judgement of taste ‘is not to be established by
gathering votes and asking other people what kind of sensation they are
having’ (CJ §31, 144). Instead, the aesthetic judgement’s subjective uni-
versal validity must be shown to be based on the facultative ‘autonomy
of the subject who is making a judgement about the feeling of pleasure
(in the given presentation)’35 and who does so directly, in response to the
given presentation, and not mediately, based on concepts, arguments or
proofs.36
In essence, then, the argumentative steps in the Deduction exactly
mirror those of the Analytic of the Beautiful, and so they need not be
repeated here. And, like the Analytic, so the Deduction, too, culminates
in the postulation of a sensus communis, which follows by necessity from
all the other a priori features of a judgement of taste, namely that it
is without interest, subjectively universal, not based on a determinate
90 Andrea Rehberg
concept, addressing only the object’s form, subjectively necessary and
so on. The pleasure we take in a beautiful presentation is that of mere
reflection (i.e., neither of mere material enjoyment nor governed by ideas
of reason)37 and so purely based on the free interaction of the faculties of
imagination and understanding, which must be the same in every other
judging subject, first, because this is the subjective condition of all cog-
nition as such (CJ §39, 159), and second, if this wasn’t the same in all
judging subjects, we could never communicate any of our cognitions, not
even those based on determinate concepts (CJ §21, 88).
In conclusion, Kant says that by sensus communis is meant ‘the idea of
a communal [gemeinschaftlicher] sense, i.e., a faculty to judge [. . .] that
in its reflection takes account in thought (a priori) of everyone else’s man-
ner of presentation [Vorstellungsart]’38 and that it does so by reflecting
not the actual but the possible judgements of taste of every other judging
subject, such that we ‘put ourselves in the position of everyone else’ (CJ
§40, 160) by abstracting from the limiting, privately subjective conditions
of our aesthetic reflective judgements. It is important to remember that
this access to an ideal, universal community of judging subjects is granted
by means of liking and pleasure and is thus a purely affective ingress to
subjective universality. When the aim of our reflections is to envisage or
project how the Kantian idea of sensus communis can be adapted to a
thought of the political, how it can become the basis of such a thought,
we have two—diametrically opposed—models we can refer to, namely
those of Arendt and Lyotard. We first turn to Arendt’s response to Kant’s
idea of sensus communis to see how she understands it.
2. Arendt’s Discovery: Sensus Communis and

a Political Community
Although Hannah Arendt is generally credited with being the first to
attempt to develop the Kantian notion of sensus communis for a political
thought, we will see that the conceptual problems with her understand-
ing of it outweigh its advantages. We might say that her work opens up
a terrain of thought while at the same time immediately shutting it down
again, due to the conceptual framework it imposes on this newly discov-
ered space of thought. The locus classicus for this work are her Lectures
on Kant’s Political Philosophy (first delivered in 1970), to which we now
briefly turn.39 In this brief section, both the advantages and the limita-
tions of the new vista on the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, opened up
by these Lectures, will be briefly set out.
Although it is undoubtedly the case that Arendt’s general observations
on political philosophy in the Lectures are very insightful indeed and
provide often surprising new points of view,40 many aspects of her more
detailed interpretation of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement41 are, to
my mind, nevertheless problematic when held up to the letter and spirit
of Kant’s text, and they are even, I would venture to say, unhelpful for a
post-Kantian thought of the political, for the following reasons.42 In these
lectures, Arendt again uses one of the key distinctions running through
her work, namely that between the vita activa, here via the notion of
the political actor, and the vita contemplativa, the philosophical life,
here realised in the figure of the spectator. She adopts these notions from
Kant’s post-critical, anthropological writings, above all from Perpetual
Peace (1795) and The Conflict of the Faculties (1798). Unfortunately, she
uses this fairly rigid and, I would say, ultimately philosophically spurious
distinction between theory and practice to centrally organise her inter-
pretation of Kant’s political thought. More importantly, though, I suspect
that it is this distinction which leads her to overlook the infinitely more
crucial Kantian distinction between the transcendental and the empirical,
which is clearly the central concern of Kant’s critical works. I believe it
is by mixing these two levels central to Kant’s critical thought and, as it
were, redistributing them along the theory-practice axis that she sets up
the main problem for her text.
Arendt seeks to establish that, in principle, Kant can be read as say-
ing that the communicability of any judgement, and thus the public to
which it implicitly refers, are the conditions of all thought (LKPP 39f.).
I have shown (in Section 1, previously) that this is true to the extent that
the communicability of an aesthetic reflective judgement is indeed its key
condition and that this type of judgement (due to the optimal attune-
ment between the faculties of cognition found in it) provides the very
model for all cognitive judgements. But Arendt substantially extends this
as yet technically uncontroversial claim by saying that the same com-
municability of my judgement must also be the condition of ‘the very
humanity of the human being’,43 which takes the claim out of the purely
transcendental realm and squarely anchors it in the empirical. In the
course of raising the key question of the status of this public (LKPP 60),
she elaborates three instantiations of it that she finds throughout Kant’s
oeuvre, from the reading public and scholars of ‘An Answer to the Ques-
tion: “What is Enlightenment?”’ (1784), to the spectators of the French
Revolution,44 via the for this discussion central one of the community of
those who judge aesthetically, that is, those who have taste (LKPP 61–5).
Arendt focuses on §41 of the Critique of Judgement, ‘On Empirical
Interest in the Beautiful’—which Kant had dismissed by saying: ‘This
interest [. . .] is [. . .] of no importance for us here, since we must concern
ourselves only with what may have reference a priori [. . .] to a judge-
ment of taste’45—and interweaves it with assorted remarks gleaned from
Perpetual Peace. From these she extrapolates the most fundamental sense
of community as being that of a ‘world citizen’, who is, according to her
conceptual framework, at the same time a ‘world spectator’ (LKPP 76),
whose ‘cosmopolitan existence’ is ultimately grounded in ‘the sheer fact
of being human’ (LKPP 75). The problem here is, of course, that it is very
92 Andrea Rehberg
far from clear what ‘being human’ in a philosophically rigorous sense
might actually mean and whether it even has any determinate meaning at
all. That is to say that any appeal to this nebulous category, which, more-
over, is not further specified in her text, rather than clarifying this com-
plex issue, ends up obscuring it even further. It also raises the question of
whether we can be sure that by appeal to this vague concept as a basis for
a political thought no detrimental effects ensue. One could merely men-
tion the question of the moral and political status of non-human animals
to indicate one sense in which this appeal might be problematic.
To be fair, at the very point where Arendt invokes this world commu-
nity held together by ‘the sheer fact of being human’, she also acknowl-
edges that this is a mere idea, which should mean that it is not capable of
being actualised. Unfortunately, this key insight is counteracted at points
throughout the Lectures by innumerable references to a public, to ‘oth-
ers’ and their judgements, as if it were a matter of empirical others and
their empirical judgements.46 But, as Kant had already stressed and as
Lyotard confirms, ‘the whole of all others, as a totality, is not a category
for which there can be a corresponding intuition in experience. It cannot
be a question of an intuitable ensemble. This whole is [merely] the object
of an idea’.47
The answer to this question is, of course, the biggest bone of con-
tention between those who follow Arendt and those who take their cue
from Lyotard in their reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement:
namely, what is the status of the community whose (perhaps de facto
withheld) assent, according to Kant, my aesthetic judgement may legiti-
mately demand, for which it speaks in a universal voice, to which it is
referred by means of the sensus communis and to which I may therefore
always already consider myself as belonging? Is it a community that may
be realised or actualised? Is it an already existing or possible empiri-
cal community? Or, by contrast, must it be understood as a mere ideal,
that is, a transcendent concept whose only function can be to guide me
towards the political? What the import of these questions for a contem-
porary political thought may be is the topic of the third and final section,
in which we turn to Lyotard’s understanding of this issue.
3. Lyotard on Emergent Subjectivity

Here, the key text to consider is Lyotard’s short essay ‘Sensus communis:
The Subject in statu nascendi’,48 in which (contra Arendt, I suspect)49 he
states categorically that ‘the community [of the sensus communis] [. . .]
is certainly not to be observed in experience [. . .] It is certainly not what
we call a “public”’.50 He identifies such an Arendtian reading as prone
to what he calls ‘the anthropological temptation’, which must first of all
be got rid of before ‘the true difficulty of understanding [. . .] the sen-
sus communis’ can emerge (SC 226). Now, undoubtedly, an empirical
community could be much more easily conceived, would be much more
accessible and efficacious than any of its possible alternatives and is per-
haps even the object of a great longing for the fractured subjects in a
fragmented society we are. But in order to be able to appreciate why Lyo-
tard considers it so important to rule out the possibility of any empirical
instantiation of the sensus communis, we must trace, at least in broad
outline, the main points of his argument to the contrary, that is, in sup-
port of reading the sensus communis exclusively as a purely transcen-
dental idea, in relation to which he even speaks of the ‘impermeability of
[this] idea to experience’.51
In brief, Lyotard’s point is that, as we know, all cognition must have
as its basis, as its transcendentally subjective condition, the free play or
optimal attunement of the faculties of imagination and understanding,
which registers purely as pleasure and hence only as a feeling.52 This is
to say that all cognition must have a non- or pre-cognitive basis, one
that is both, on the one side, inter-facultative and, since the facultative
arrangement is the same for all judging subjects, cross-subjective. But,
importantly, ‘cross-subjective’ does not mean ‘inter-subjective’, for the
simple reason that, as Lyotard points out, the pleasure felt as a result of
the mutual attunement of the faculties (when confronted by the form of
an appearance which is called beautiful) is not ‘internal’ to an already
fully constituted, ‘unified’ subject (SC 232).
In terms of the first Critique, such a unified subject can only be said to
have come into existence once the transcendental unity of apperception,
the ‘I think’, has come on the scene and, according to the A-Deduction
of the first Critique, this only happens once the threefold synthesis is
complete, that is, once the given presentation has been subsumed under a
determinate concept. But, as we saw, in a pure aesthetic judgement, this
subsumption is precisely what does not happen and so the free play of the
faculties is not interrupted by the imposition of a determinate concept on
the given appearance. And as long as the pleasurable facultative free play
(whose a priori communicability, based on a sensus communis, precisely
motivates an aesthetic judgement) continues, no unified subject can be
said to have emerged.
In a sense, then, Lyotard stresses a point that is only implicit in the
Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and that is perhaps as such unthinkable
for Kant, namely that, just as the aesthetic reflective judgement of taste is
pre-conceptual and therefore, strictly, non- or pre-objective, so the judg-
ing is done in a ‘pre-subjective’ state by what is not yet a fully constituted
subject that, as Lyotard puts it, is ‘à l’état naissant’,53 that is, always in a
state or timeless process of being born, without this ever reaching com-
pletion, without subjectivity ever being fully actualised, at least as long
as it only remains in the presence of the beautiful appearance. But what
this obviously means for the sensus communis is that it cannot concern
a community of already constituted, actual subjects but rather only one
94 Andrea Rehberg
of emergent or virtual subjects, and thus it does not admit of empirical
instantiation.54 How, then, is the community referred to in the sensus
communis to be envisaged, and what is its significance for a political
thought?
By way of tentative characterisation,55 I would say that it would be that
purely transcendental commonalty to which the emergent or ‘pre-subject’
always already belongs in its pre-cognitive, affective yet f acultatively-based
aspects and into which ideal commonalty it is always already inserted,
whether it is aware of this or not. As Lyotard puts it, ‘every [actual]
community will forget and will have forgotten this sensus [communis]’,56
although it is the silent condition of possibility of all empirical commu-
nity, the ubiquitous, distributed being-with that, without being in any
way reducible to it, enables every particular human association. What
we see here, then, is that not only on the level of the individually opera-
tive,57 but also on that of the communally inoperative (empirically unre-
alisable), a pre-conscious, affective force that had largely been eliminated
from the space of thought is being retrieved in Kant’s text—as long as
it is being read in rigorously transcendental, critical terms. Put differ-
ently, both on the facultative level and on the political, communal level
to which it refers, this commonalty confirms the essential, irretrievably
ecstatic character of that notional being, its a priori being beyond itself.
And it is precisely the utterly irretrievable, inoperative character of it that
leads to the final point to be made about this commonalty.
Like the aesthetic judgement in relation to cognition, it issues in no
determinate concept, content or substance. Being unrealisable, it has
no telos and serves for nothing. Also, by lying outside the realm of my
empirical interests (in the agreeable) and my practical interests (in the
morally good), both the aesthetic judgement and the commonalty that
sustains it cannot be co-opted into my plans, projects, aims and intrigues,
and yet both are a priori.
What is at stake, then, is to think (and only to think, the mere idea of) a
transcendental community without any of the suffocating paraphernalia
of identity, substance, subject and so on, or indeed without the detritus of
empirical interests, and to celebrate its entirely useless, inoperative char-
acter, as it opens up the possibility of a human existence in dialogue with
the beautiful, freed, if only at brief intervals, of the utilitarian regime, the
tyranny of the telos.58
***
Obviously, this Lyotardian reading of sensus communis and the commu-

nity it intimates are radically at odds with both the focus and the tenor
of Banham’s reading of the third Critique. It is true that the ambitious-
ness and scope of Banham’s project—anchoring the third Critique in the
whole critical system, taking into consideration not only the Critique of
Aesthetic Judgement but also the Critique of Teleological Judgement, giv-
ing equal weight to the Analytic of the Sublime, bringing Hegel’s thought
into the discussion—perforce lead to a significantly different thematic
orientation. But beyond this extensional issue, they also diverge signifi-
cantly in their orientation—Banham’s text more towards a progressive,
liberal-cosmopolitan,59 this chapter, I would claim, more towards a libid-
inal-materialist bent. This is so even though they begin and end at similar
points, from the question of how Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgement
can be related to a thought of the political to that of the status of the
community referred to by sensus communis. But rather than leading to
a differend,60 I would say that these two approaches complement each
other, both aiding in the wider project of a reconsideration of aspects
of our contemporary situation in the terms suggested by Kant’s critical-
aesthetic thought.
Notes
1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1987), hereafter CJ. In addition, the following abbreviations have
been used: CPR = Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman
Kemp Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1964); KEA = Gary Banham,
Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2000); LAS = Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sub-
lime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994);
LKPP = Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ron-
ald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); SC = Jean-François
Lyotard, ‘Sensus communis: The Subject in statu nascendi’, in Who Comes
After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy
(London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 217–235.
2 As witnessed by a number of important texts devoted to the topic of the sub-
lime, above all LAS and Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey
Librett, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: SUNY Press, 1993).
3 CJ, Introduction, sec. II, 12–14 and §36, 153.
4 CJ, Preface, 5f.
5 CJ, Preface, 5. Pluhar’s elision of the difference between judgement and the
faculty of judgement, whilst unproblematic for most of the text, does cause
some confusion in this instance and demands to be remedied.
6 CJ §§30–40. As we know, and as Banham also discusses, there is some con-
troversy about the question where exactly this deduction proper begins and
ends, with candidates for the latter ranging from §38 to §40. Since this is
not a central issue here and since §40 does contain material pertinent to my
discussion, I will consider it part of the deduction proper, which will be dis-
cussed in the following. See KEA 96–102.
7 See also CJ, Introduction, sec. IV, where the problem is posed in terms of
the particular (the material) and the universal (the form), which says much
the same thing. For a discussion of this, see also Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life
and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1981), 275–279, 308–310.
96 Andrea Rehberg
8 Kant makes this very basic point, for instance, in the famous opening sen-
tences of the Introduction to the first Critique, ‘[t]here can be no doubt that
all our knowledge begins with experience. For how should our faculty of
knowledge be awakened into action did not objects affecting our senses
partly of themselves produce representations, partly arouse the activity of
our understanding [. . .] and with experience all our knowledge begins’ (CPR
B1), and also when he later states, ‘all intuitions, as sensible, rest on affec-
tions [Affektionen]’ (CPR A68/B93). Being-affected provides the first impulse
for cognition.
9 The Kantian transcendental subject is not gendered, so references to it in terms
of gender (he, she) are illegitimate. For this reason, the personal pronoun used
for the subject will be ‘it’ throughout, to reflect the fact that for Kant this is
merely an otherwise undetermined facultative, notional ‘space’ or site.
10 As shown in the so-called metaphysical deduction (see CPR B159 for this
appellation) of the categories (CPR A70/B95-A76/B101).
11 Derrida, for instance, raises substantial doubts about the applicability of the
table of categories to aesthetic judgement. See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in
Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: Chicago Uni-
versity Press, 1987), esp. 37–82. See also Banham’s brief reference to this
(KEA 62–64).
12 CJ §8, ‘In their logical quantity all judgements of taste are singular judge-
ments’, 59; in other words, the incomparable, unsubstitutable, individ-
ual object or phenomenon must first of all be given in order for the entire
‘machinery’ of aesthetic judgement to be initiated.
13 First not in the order of presentation in the text of CJ but first in the temporal
order.
14 CJ §9, 62, emphasis added.
15 CJ §6, 54: ‘the judging person [. . .] will talk about the beautiful as if beauty
were a characteristic of the object and the judgement were logical (namely, a
cognition of the object through concepts of it), even though in fact the judge-
ment is only aesthetic and refers the object’s presentation to the subject’.
16 Both of which lapses Kant discusses throughout the first Moment of the Cri-
tique of Aesthetic Judgement.
17 CJ §7, 55, trans. modified, emphasis added. Kant calls the taste concerning
the agreeable the taste of sense and the one concerning the beautiful the taste
of reflection, although both issue in aesthetic judgements, albeit of radically
different kinds (CJ §8, 57f.)
19 CJ §8, 59f., trans. modified, emphasis added. Where I have inserted the pro-
noun ‘I’, Kant has ‘we’, but ‘we’ don’t judge, ‘I’ do.
20 A postulate in general is an indemonstrable assumption posited as a basis for
the discussion. Importantly, what is being postulated is only such a universal
voice and not the actual agreement of everyone, since, as Kant says, only a
logically, that is, objectively valid, universal judgement could do so (CJ §8, 60).
21 CJ §8, 60; ‘idea’, as a technical term in Kant’s thought, means a concept
for which no corresponding object can be given in experience. In CJ, Kant
reminds us that ‘[a] rational idea can never become cognition because it con-
tains a concept (of the supersensible), for which no adequate intuition can
ever be given’ (CJ §57, 215).
22 This is a state we like to prolong. As Kant writes, ‘we linger in the contempla-
tion of the beautiful because this contemplation reinforces and reproduces
itself’ (CJ §12, 68, trans. modified).
23 CJ §9, 64. See also later in CJ, where he states that this attunement ‘is the
subjective condition of [the process of] cognition, and without it cognition
[in the sense of] the effect [of this process] could not arise’ (CJ §21, 88,
Pluhar’s interpolations). There, he also says that, although the proportion of
the attunement may change, depending on the given presentation (such that
some objects ‘demand’ to be known, some ‘demand’ to be admired for their
beauty), there must nonetheless be one attunement that is optimal for the
interaction of the two faculties leading to cognition, yet this optimal attune-
ment can be gauged only by feeling (CJ §21, 88). Needless to say, it is the
singular, beautiful, given object which stimulates this optimal attunement.
25 ‘Belebung’ being a cognate of ‘Leben’, ‘life’. CJ §9, 63.
26 This follows upon the discussion of the ‘purposiveness without a purpose’,
which, according to Kant, is thought in an aesthetic reflective judgement to
attach to the presentation thus judged, namely to the beautiful object, as
formally purposive for the free play of the two faculties which gives rise to a
feeling of pleasure in the act of judging through its universal communicabil-
ity (see esp. CJ §§11, 12). Given the focus of his text, Banham of necessity
spends more time on a discussion of this type of ‘end’ than on the aspects
of aesthetic reflective judgement I privilege in this section (see esp. KEA
69–74).
27 CJ §18, 85f. See also LAS 193.
28 CJ §20, 87, interpolations in square brackets and first emphasis added.
29 CJ §22, 89. See also note 18 previously.
30 CJ §22, 90, trans. modified, emphasis added.
31 We recall that necessity and universality are the markers of apriority, even if
they are merely subjective; see CJ §31, 143. Kant discusses subjective univer-
sality in the second Moment (Quantity) and subjective necessity in the fourth
Moment (Modality) of the Analytic of the Beautiful.
32 See also LAS 193.
33 See also CJ §34, 150, where Kant indicates this by claiming scientific status
only for an investigation in the manner of a transcendental critique, that is,
one that examines the work of the faculties rather than only their products.
34 CJ §31, 143f., trans. modified.
35 CJ §31, 144. See also CJ §32, 145, where Kant writes that, when a subject
makes a judgement of taste, ‘we demand that [they] judge for [themselves]’
and not ‘grope about among other people’s judgements by means of experi-
ence’, since this would be heteronomous (CJ §32, 145, trans. modified).
36 CJ §34, 149. See also CJ §38, 154, where Kant stresses this point again by
stating that ‘all judgements of taste are singular judgements, because they do
not connect their predicate, the liking, with a concept but [. . .] with a singu-
lar empirical presentation that is given’ (emphasis added).
37 CJ §39, 158.
38 CJ §40, 160, trans. modified, emphasis added.
39 Although Arendt also developed these thoughts on the political import of the
sensus communis in other texts (e.g., Between Past and Future: Six Essays
in Political Thought [New York: Viking Press, 1968]), I will concentrate on
LKPP here, not least because it is her most sustained effort in that direction.
40 See, for example, LKPP 26, 30, 32, 35f. Her observations there are often
more in the nature of a history of ideas, which is where, in my view, her real
forte lies.
41 Above all, CJ §§39–41.
42 The thirteen lectures divide into a preliminary part (lectures 1–5), a prepara-
tory part (lectures 6–10) and a summative part (lectures 11–13). Arendt’s
explicit attention to the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, and the set of prob-
lems attendant on it, does not begin until lecture 10.
98 Andrea Rehberg
43 LKPP 70, see also 74–76. Arendt’s text still uses ‘man’, ‘mankind’ etc., as
generic terms to refer to a human being, humanity, humankind etc. I have
adjusted her language to the contemporary, gender-neutral terms.
44 As discussed by Kant in LKPP, 61.
46 She does so (e.g., LKPP 40, 44, 67, 72–74), although Kant, as discussed in
Section 1, previously, explicitly insists that the aesthetic judgement be auton-
omous (CJ §32, 146; see note 35 previously for the quotation).
47 SC 234, trans. modified, interpolation added.
48 Both Sections 1 and 2, previously, are also heavily indebted to LAS, esp.
193–197, 200–202, 218.
49 It is my belief that the Arendt of LKPP is the silent interlocutor of SC, which,
while not explicitly addressing itself to her text or even mentioning it, seems
in many of its points to be in implicit dialogue with Arendt’s text. She is being
referring to at LAS 18.
50 SC 224. Lyotard further clarifies that ‘it is not a question of an historical and
social community [. . .] It is not a question of “culture”, or pleasure shared in
[. . .] culture’ (SC 221), the pleasure of art-lovers.
51 SC 230, interpolation added, spelling modified. Lyotard rather acerbically
speaks of those who believe in this impossible transition as ‘all well-meaning
people, philosophers, politicians, theoreticians of art’, who ‘joyously’ insert
themselves into this non-passage (SC 230).
52 SC 226. See CJ §21, 88, and note 22 previously.
53 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Sensus communis, le sujet à l’état naissant’, Cahiers
Confrontation, 20 (1979): ‘Après le sujet qui vient’, 161–179. In this context,
Lyotard speaks of a ‘pre-I, a pre-cogito’ (SC 233).
54 Lyotard keeps stressing this point, both in LAS and in SC, since to do other-
wise indicates the profound technical error of confusing the transcendental
and critical with the empirical, ‘anthropological’ level. See, for example, LAS
218–223.
55 This characterisation is based on, but in some particulars goes beyond, SC.
56 SC 217, interpolations added.
57 As discussed in the opening pages of this chapter.
58 The issues discussed here, and especially the perspective on them adopted in
Sections 2 and 3, have been the topic of a number of conference presentations
I have given, one of which was published by the Turkish journal Cogito, 74
(Summer 2013), 150–166. However, here, no doubt aided by consideration
of Banham’s work, they are treated much more extensively and in much more
depth and detail than before.
59 See, for instance, KEA 186f.
60 As is the case with Arendt’s and Lyotard’s approaches. Lyotard describes a
differend as an irresolvable dispute amongst incompatible claimants. On the
Kantian roots of Lyotard’s differend, see Keith Crome, ‘Disputing Critique:
Lyotard’s Kantian Differend’, in this volume.
Part III
Nature
5 The Role of Regulative
Principles and Their Relation
to Reflective Judgement1
Christian Onof
This chapter takes cues from insightful views that Gary Banham formu-
lates about the different notions of ‘regulative’ in the Critique of Pure
Reason (CPR), as well as the notion of reflective judgement in the Cri-
tique of Judgement (CJ).2 The theme which connects these topics is that
of unity. In the Transcendental Analytic of the CPR, the dynamical prin-
ciples play a regulative role for the unity of experience. In the Transcen-
dental Dialectic of the CPR, it is the projected unity of nature that is at
stake, with the ideas of reason playing a regulative role by providing
maxims for the employment of our understanding. In the CJ, this unity
of nature is further characterised through the concept of purposiveness
that guides the reflective use of the faculty of judgement.3
The following questions which Banham addresses in his writings are
discussed in this chapter: how can the notion of regulative principle used
to describe the Dynamical Principles in the Analytic inform our under-
standing of the regulative principles of the Dialectic? What is the tran-
scendental status of the latter? How are these principles related to the
account of reflective judgement Kant gives in the CJ? Given the scope
of these questions, this chapter cannot claim to cover more than some
aspects of the issues they raise, and the focus will be upon seeking a
consistent account in which novel interpretative perspectives upon these
questions are proposed.
1. The Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic:

Logical, Weak and Strong Objective Principles
In the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant discusses the ‘reg-
ulative use of the ideas of pure reason’ (A642/B670), which introduces
a positive perspective on these ideas. The Dialectic had shown that the
ideas of reason, when used in an ‘extravagant’ (A643/B671) way, give
rise to paralogisms (about the soul), antinomies (about the world) or
ungrounded knowledge claims about God. The source of the problem
was the ‘transcendent’ use of the ideas whereby they were ‘taken for
concepts of real things’ (ibid.). It is in his resolution of the Antinomies
102 Christian Onof
that Kant first introduces the notion of the ‘regulative principle of rea-
son’ (A508/B536). These regulative principles are directed at extending
our knowledge by looking for further spatial regions, further causes
for a given event and so on in all cases, with the aim of asymptotically
approaching an unconditioned.4
This notion of regulative principle is at the heart of Kant’s identifi-
cation of a positive role for the ideas of reason. Kant’s motivation for
investigating the positive use of these ideas stems from his conviction
that ‘[e]verything grounded in the nature of our powers must be pur-
posive and consistent with their correct use [. . .] [so that] the transcen-
dental ideas will presumably have a good and consequently immanent
use’ (A642–643/B670–671). This claim of purposiveness is also pre-
sent in Kant’s moral philosophy: for Kant, we take it as an axiom that
‘[i]n the natural constitution of an organized being [. . .] no organ will be
found for any purpose which is not the fittest and best adapted to that
purpose’.5 In both cases, the primary purpose of these claims is to guide
the transcendental investigation.
Kant thus considers the nature of the faculty of reason as a faculty
of systematisation (A645/B673) and examines the ‘hypothetical use’ of
reason (A647/B675) which assumes a systematic unity ‘of the manifold
of the understanding’s cognition’ (A648/B676). That is, a unity of cogni-
tion is projected and a heuristic is defined around it to enable the project
of systematisation to proceed. Kant identifies three heuristic principles:
‘a principle of sameness of kind in the manifold under higher genera,
[. . .] a principle of the variety of what is same in kind under lower
species, [. . .] another law of the affinity of all concepts, which offers
a continuous transition from every species to every other’ (A657–658/
B685–686).
1. Kant’s first claim about these principles, which he characterises as
regulative, is that they bring unity to the cognitions of the understanding
‘as far as possible and thereby approximating the rule to universality’
(A647/B675):6 in this role, these principles are essential to the progress
of our cognition. This claim is generally considered fairly unproblematic,
insofar as it reflects the positive role that projecting a unity of knowledge
plays in the pursuit of knowledge. To illustrate this, Kant provides a good
example at A686/B714, where the idea of God is seen to foster further
investigation into the astronomical implications of the flattened shape of
our planet.7 The systematic unity which is posited in this hypothetical use
of reason is described by Kant as a ‘logical principle’ (A648/B676).
2. Kant then asks whether it is also a ‘transcendental principle of
reason, which would make systematic unity not merely something sub-
jectively and logically necessary, as method, but objectively necessary’
(ibid.) And Kant’s answer to that question will be positive. Kant uses an
example to show that the systematic unity that reason presupposes holds
in reality (A650/B678).
Regulative Principles and Judgement 103
Kant’s second claim is therefore that the systematic unity that is pos-
ited by these regulative principles is not merely logical but also objective.
This defines a transcendental principle, the Systematic Unity of Nature
(SUN; A650–651/B678–679).
Kant does not offer much of an argument for this objective status but
merely indicates that ‘it cannot even be seen how there could be a logical
principle of rational unity among rules unless a transcendental principle
is presupposed, through which such a systematic unity, as pertaining to
the object itself, is assumed a priori as necessary’ (A650–651/B678–679).
One might feel that this is not enough to achieve Kant’s aim here, which
is to support the claim that the principle of the systematic unity of nature
is a transcendental principle, that is, is objectively necessary. This is not
overly convincing: what if reason found it useful, to advance knowledge,
to posit some fictions? And, indeed, some of Kant’s language seems to
endorse that possibility (A681/B709). One does get the impression that
Kant himself is not convinced by the strength of the case he has made
for this point, because he finds it necessary to refer to how widespread
the endorsement of this principle has been in philosophy (A652–653/
B680–681).
3. Interestingly, Kant’s tactic is to support the second claim (which one
might call the weak objective principle) by making a stronger one as to
the purported transcendental function of such systematic unity. Kant’s
third claim is thus that ‘the law of reason to seek unity is necessary, since
without it we would have no reason, and without that, no coherent use of
the understanding’ (A651/B679), or as he puts it, ‘without it no empiri-
cal concepts and hence no experience would be possible’ (A654/B682).8
This progression in the description of the function of this systematic
unity lies at the heart of much controversy in Kantian scholarship. Fol-
lowing Abela, Banham describes the problem as the ‘central question that
has bedevilled interpretation of Kant’s treatment of the regulative use of
ideas of pure reason. Are these ideas to be understood only as heuristic
or do they also have some kind of “realist” status?’9 If the first, then
the problem lies in explaining Kant’s statements at A650ff/B678ff, where
the principle of the unity of nature seems a requirement for cognition
and therefore is seemingly assigned a ‘realist’ status. If the second, the
problem arises from Kant’s earlier claim in the Introduction to the Tran-
scendental Dialectic that such a principle ‘does not prescribe any law to
objects, and does not contain the ground of possibility of cognising and
determining them as such in general’ (A306/B362).
And if a realist status is granted to SUN, the further claim that it is a
necessary condition of objective knowledge would seem to clash with
the completeness of the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental
Analytic which, culminating in the Principles of the Pure Understanding,
provide all the transcendental conditions accounting for our cognition of
objects (A21/B36, A148/B188, B198/A159).
104 Christian Onof
There are two important strands in the literature which define the
responses to these two problems. A first response involves endorsing the
idea that this principle is more than a heuristic one, that is, that it is
indeed a transcendental one but rejecting the stronger claim that it is a
principle of the possibility of experience.10 This amounts to what one
might call a weak interpretation of the notion of transcendental condi-
tion. This solution has little to offer to explain how it is that Kant clearly
states that this principle is a ‘necessary law’ without which we would
have ‘no coherent use of the understanding’ (A651/B679) and ‘no experi-
ence would be possible’ (A654/B682).
A second response to this problem involves opting for an understand-
ing of this principle as essentially heuristic and playing down any real-
ist implications of the necessity it is endowed with.11 The problem this
option encounters is that Kant explicitly distinguishes the regulative prin-
ciples from a useful ‘device of reason’ (A653/B681) and further when
he differentiates between ‘heuristic fictions’ and the regulative principles
they serve to ground (A771/B799), as Banham points out.12 According to
Banham, ‘[t]he advocates of a general heuristic approach to the regula-
tive use of the ideas of pure reason must essentially reject the position
that Kant states’13 when he says that without such regulative principles
‘no experience would be possible’ (A654/B682).
In this chapter, I shall follow Banham in defending an interpretation
which upholds a strong version of the transcendental principle, that is,
the claim that SUN is an objective principle which is required for the
cognition of objects. To do so, a detour via an analysis of the commonali-
ties between the two senses of ‘regulative’ found in the Analytic and the
Dialectic will help us understand the move to a strong version of SUN.
2. Two Senses of the Regulative

One interesting feature of Banham’s investigation into the notion of regu-
lative principles is his attempt to draw out similarities and differences
between two uses of the term ‘regulative’ in the CPR. Much as the notion
of ‘regulative principle of reason’ is first introduced in the Antinomy
(A508/B536), the term ‘regulative’ is first used by Kant in the chapter
on the Principles of Pure Understanding. Kant distinguishes between the
mathematical principles (Axioms of Intuition and Anticipations of Per-
ception) in which the object is constructed and the dynamical principles
(Analogies and Postulates of Empirical Thought), where it is not, as these
‘concern only the relation of existence’ (A179/B221–222). The latter are
thereby called ‘regulative’ as opposed to the former, which are constitu-
tive. Banham discusses the meaning of this contrast and takes issue with
Guyer’s claim that what is at stake is the issue of indeterminacy.14 Guyer
claims, for instance, that the Second Analogy tells us that there must be
a causal relation explaining any event, but it does not provide us with
a way of identifying the cause, so the latter is indeterminate. Banham
wants to resist Guyer’s identification of the distinction between constitu-
tive and regulative as one between determinacy and indeterminacy. What
he is pointing at is the fact that although, indeed, Guyer is right to say
that the Second Analogy does not provide a way of identifying the cause
of a given event, that is, of determining this existence a priori, this is not
the essential feature of the distinction. Rather, as Kant himself puts it, the
issue is not that existence cannot be determined a priori but that ‘exist-
ence cannot be constructed’ (A179/B221).
Banham sees this as defining an important difference from regulative
principles of reason.15 He concurs with Guyer that it is the distinction
between indeterminateness and determinateness that is at stake in distin-
guishing them from the principles of the understanding which are now
all viewed as constitutive.
Kant himself, however, explains this notion of ‘constitutive’ as that
which is ‘for determining something in regard to its direct object’ (A680/
B708), from which the regulative principles of reason are distinguished
insofar as they are for ‘furthering and strengthening the empirical use
of reason’ (ibid.) For sure, as Banham claims, this amounts to a distinc-
tion between determinate and indeterminate, but it is not clear that this
should be the defining feature. After all, one could refer to indeterminate
principles of the understanding, as we just saw previously. It is indeter-
minate when I say that event E has a cause, but there are no regulative
principles of reason involved here. So there are different notions of deter-
minacy in play. But even if one could provide an account of the different
senses of determinacy, Kant’s text does not suggest that it is determinacy/
indeterminacy as such that is definitive of the constitutive/regulative dis-
tinction in either the Analytic or the Dialectic.
To get greater clarity here, we should refer to Kant’s own statements
on the different uses of ‘regulative’ and ‘constitutive’, to which Banham
alludes only briefly.16 Kant explains how the dynamical principles of
the understanding are contrasted with the mathematical ones insofar
as the former are ‘regulative principles of intuition’, while the latter are
constitutive of it (A664/B692). Nevertheless, all these principles are ‘still
constitutive in regard to experience since they make possible a priori
the concepts without which there would be no experience’ (ibid.) So
now we have distinctions between constitutive and regulative princi-
ples which are based upon whether these principles are a priori condi-
tions for the possibility of representations, either intuitions (hereafter
constitutiveI/regulativeI) or conceptually informed experience (hereafter
constitutiveC/regulativeC). Kant is claiming that the a priori conditions
of there being perception, that is, intuitions of objects,17 are the math-
ematical principles of the understanding, while the a priori conditions
of there being experience, that is, concepts in addition to intuitions of
objects, are all the principles of the understanding. What defines the
106 Christian Onof
notion ‘constitutive’ is therefore that which is a priori necessary to con-
stitute a representation, either intuition or concept.
What, then, of regulative principles? Can we give more than a merely
negative characterisation of it as the non-constitutive? If we consider an
appearance, its intuition has a form that is defined by a constitutive prin-
ciple and a matter that is a posteriori. But an intuition does not exist in
isolation. The issue of how it relates to other intuitions and how it relates
to the whole of my cognition therefore arises. RegulativeI principles pro-
vide an a priori form for such relations: the Analogies provide rules for
relating intuitions to one another in their temporal relationships, and the
Postulates of Empirical Thought define rules for the relation of intuitions
to the whole of knowledge (A219/B266).
ConstitutiveI /RegulativeI Principles
From the definition of constitutive principles, we can see that they can
be derived by considering the conditions for constituting the type of
representation in question. So, to constitute an intuition of an object,
it is necessary to have principles guiding the construction of the intui-
tive representation: these are the mathematical principles of the under-
standing. But to derive regulativeI principles, we need to consider the
way distinct intuitions are unified and what objective principles govern
this. Syntheses of intuitions are unified under the transcendental unity
of apperception (TUA) and thereby brought under a concept. It is con-
ceptual unity which therefore provides the ‘meta-principle’ governing
the derivation of regulativeI principles, that is, the dynamical principles
which govern how intuitions of objects are related to one another and
to our cognition.
Let us briefly examine how the Analogies fulfil the first function. Since
the relations between intuitions are temporal, we must distinguish the
relations between intuitions of objects which are simultaneous from
those which are consecutive.
a. Simultaneous intuitions of objects can be brought under the category

of community according to the Third Analogy.
b. Successive intuitions of the same object can be brought under the
category of substance according to the First Analogy.
c. The Second Analogy then provides us with an account of how the
successive intuitions of different objects can be unified, namely under
the category of causality, thereby providing a unity of intuitions
which extends beyond any actual discrete set of representations to
the continuous evolution of these objects over time.
We thus have three ways in which intuitions must be unified under

concepts.
ConstitutiveC /RegulativeC Principles
This brief investigation into the notion of regulativeI principles should
help us understand how regulativeC principles arise. In line with the
points we made previously, constitutiveC principles are those which are
required to constitute conceptual representations of objects. This is no
longer a construction as in the case of an intuition but an objective deter-
mination. And since any such determination involves all the categories,
the dynamical principles of the understanding are also involved in this
process. Analogously to the role of regulativeI principles, regulativeC
principles are therefore those which define rules for the unification of
distinct concepts.
Since for regulativeI principles, the conditions of conceptual unity pro-
vide a ‘meta-principle’, as we saw previously, the question of the meta-
principle that might govern the derivation of regulativeC principles arises.
But here, we have the problem that there is no higher principle of objec-
tive knowledge than the Synthetic Unity of Apperception (SUA), as Kant
tells us (B136). And, indeed, ideas, which are the representations that
Kant defines as being able to bring unity to our concepts, do not have
objective reference. This is the key result of Kant’s investigation in the
Transcendental Dialectic. It would therefore seem that the analogy with
regulativeI principles breaks down.
Kant nevertheless sees a positive role for such ideas, and he addresses
the situation by introducing a hypothetical principle which fulfils the role
of SUA but for unities of concepts: the idea of God in particular is used
to define the principle of SUN, which plays the same role as SUA in
uniting intuitions of objects. SUN functions exactly as SUA in providing
rules for the unification of concepts but with the whole of our experi-
ence now at stake, rather than temporal relations of intuitions. Using the
non-schematised categories of relation but here applied to the relations
between empirical concepts under SUN,
a. The idea of the unity of nature defines a rule for bringing all con-
cepts together under genera: that which inheres among a plurality
of concepts defines the genus of which these concepts are species.
This application of the category of substance defines the principle of
homogeneity of forms.
b. The unity of a particular object defines a rule for further conceptual
determinations of the object which amount to identifying further spe-
cies and sub-species of conceptual representations of this object: in
this way, further differentiation springs from any conceptual deter-
mination in the same way that the whole system of concepts springs
from the purposiveness of nature. This application of the category
of causality and dependence defines the principle of specification of
forms.18
108 Christian Onof
c. The unity of nature defines, beyond the set of species defined by any
discrete conceptual determinations, a rule for seeking further objects
determined by concepts of species that lie in the continuum between
any two such species: this is a search for further species that are in
community with others under the same genus. This application of the
category of community defines the principle of continuity of forms.
Because the idea of the unity of nature does not refer to an object, these
principles do not issue in a final set of unified concepts but rather define
an endless process which is asymptotically directed to the unity defined
by SUN.
3. Does Experience Require the Systematic

Unity of Nature?
We can now return to the question of the justification for Kant’s claims
(2. and 3. in Section 1) about the objectivity of SUN. Looking first at regu-
lativeI principles, their status as transcendental principles is never in doubt
because they are, at the same time, constitutiveC principles. More pre-
cisely, these principles govern the determination of objects of experience,
and in that function, they ensure that the intuitions which are thereby reg-
ulated do indeed refer to objects. Without these regulativeI principles, that
is, the dynamical principles of the understanding, our intuitions would
not be determined as referring to substances in causal interaction and in
community with one another. This does not mean that one could not have
intuitions that are not thus conceptually determined.19 But they would
not be intuitions of empirical objects but rather disconnected intuitions:
such intuitions would not make experience possible. Conceptualisation is
therefore a necessary condition for intuitions being of empirical objects.
When Kant explains that, with constitutiveC principles, we do not have
sufficient conditions of truth (B83/A59), he is pointing to the fact that it
is not enough to have a priori conditions governing the lawful connection
of intuitions for us to actually have cognition. At first, the problem, as
Kant presents it, is analogous to that of disconnected intuitions: reason’s
role, with the introduction of the logical principle of SUN, is to create
‘unanimity among [the understanding’s] various rules under one princi-
ple (the systematic), and thereby interconnection’ (A648/B676).
As with disconnected intuitions, the solution lies in principles that
provide a structure to our empirical concepts so that they are indeed
applicable to our experience, that is, so that they find more than one
instantiation. This solution provides what Banham refers to as a ‘crite-
rion of use’.20 Preserving the analogy with regulativeI principles, what
plays the role of ‘meta-principle’ here is the logical principle of systematic
unity with its appending three principles of homogeneity, specification
and continuity of form, as explained previously.
This does not yield a principle that can be called transcendental but
merely a logical one, which has its use in the progression of our knowl-
edge. Kant, however, wants us to consider the possibility of a transcen-
dental principle, that is, a principle of the objective SUN, thus at first
using the subjunctive mood: ‘that would be a transcendental principle of
reason, which would make systematic unity not merely something sub-
jectively and logically necessary, but objectively necessary’ (A648/B676).
The problem is that, while regulativeI principles find their justification
in that they are constitutiveC, that is, through them our experience of
objects is constituted, there are no higher objects the experience of which
would be constituted by regulativeC principles. This was the whole point
of the negative part of the Transcendental Dialectic: the ideas of rea-
son, which Kant is now examining for their ability to bring unity to the
knowledge of the understanding, ‘are not concepts of real things’ (A643/
B671): they do not refer to real objects. RegulativeC principles are there-
fore not justified by being constitutive of transcendental ideas.
If there is going to be any justification for such new principles, it can
therefore only come from what is needed for our experience of objects,
and this explains Kant’s apparently puzzling move of providing support
for 2. by claiming 3 (see Section 1). For Kant, the additional condition
that is required over and above SUA is a ‘sufficient mark of empirical
truth’ (A651/B679). We can shed some light on this claim by again con-
sidering the analogy with regulativeI principles.
What regulativeI principles deal with is ‘relations of existence’ between
perceptions (A179/B221–222). Their regulative status is connected to
the fact that ‘it cannot be said a priori which and how great this other
perception is’ (A179/B222). These principles serve to provide a priori
guidance to the understanding’s exploration of the a posteriori material
it is provided with. The material is already grasped in terms of the con-
stitutiveI principles, that is, in terms of quantity and quality, but these are
merely rules enabling us to construct objective intuitions. Which objects
are thereby represented is left completely indeterminate. How to go about
bringing the required determinacy is what the regulativeI principles tell
us: we should seek that which persists in time, we should seek regularity
in alterations and so on.
What Kant now draws our attention to is the fact that, while such
regulativeI principles are well-grounded transcendental principles inso-
far as they are constitutiveC principles that are necessary for there to be
experience of objects, that is, while their status as a priori principles of
cognition is well established, there is nothing guaranteeing that the a
posteriori material that is given to our sensibility will be amenable to our
search for something that persists in time, for regularities in temporal
successions and so on. Kant is thus drawing our attention to the worry
that, when I seek to apply the categories to the manifold in intuition,
I might fail to identify any empirical concept under which this manifold
110 Christian Onof
can be subsumed.21 Indeed, Kant considers the extreme case where there
would be a universal failure of the principle of genera:
If among the appearances offering themselves to us, there were such a

great variety—I will not say of form [. . .] but of content, i.e. regard-
ing the manifoldness of existing beings—that even the most acute
human understanding, through comparison of one with another,
could not detect the least similarity [. . .], then the logical law of
genera would not obtain at all, no concept of a genus, nor any other
universal concept, indeed no understanding at all would obtain.
(A654/B682)22
Existence and the A Priori

That Kant expresses a solution to this worry in terms of identifying suf-
ficient truth conditions is just another way of describing the problem as
that of the irreducibility of existence to the a priori. Indeed, consider an
empirical truth claim, such as:
Planet Neptune causes planet Uranus to deviate from its predicted

orbit.23
This claim can be put in the form:
There exists an x such that x is a planet named Neptune and x causes

Uranus to deviate from its predicted orbit.
And therefore the truth of the claim depends upon the existence of such
an x. RegulativeI principles tell us to look for an x that causes Uranus to
deviate from its predicted orbit (Second Analogy). RegulativeC principles
in their subjective logical function tell us to look preferentially for an x
that is another natural celestial object rather than a magnetic field or an
alien spaceship (principle of homogeneity). If, having looked for objects
of the two most likely species (e.g., planets and asteroids), one finds an
object that is not categorisable in either, although it shares many proper-
ties with each, one would seek to identify a new species that lies between
these two species (principle of continuity). Because what we are looking
for is a particular, once we have defined its species, we shall seek to fur-
ther determine it, for example, by asking whether it is entirely solid, has
an atmosphere and so on, thereby identifying sub-species it belongs to
(principle of specification).
This exemplifies how the logical regulativeC principles of reason define
a structure for the use of the understanding in its attempt to grasp an
existence. But now the question is whether any object x can be found that
causes Uranus to deviate from its predicted orbit. And, clearly, this will
indeed be the case if appearances are organised according to the same
structure, that is, if these principles of reason are objective.
This sheds light on why Kant states the issue in terms of truth condi-
tions: ‘For the law of reason to seek unity is necessary, since without
it we would have [. . .] no sufficient mark of empirical truth’ (A651/
B679). Truth for Kant is the ‘agreement of cognition with its object’
(B82/A58). So, if our cognition is organised by regulativeC principles
and appearances are also structured in this way, then we do have a case
of agreement. It is important to understand that this agreement con-
cerns existence, that is, that which amounts to the a posteriori element
of appearances, since it is already true that the a priori conditions of
knowledge structure the world of appearances in a transcendentally ide-
alistic framework. As a result, the objectivity of regulativeC principles
provides sufficient material conditions for the possibility of true empiri-
cal cognition, which, in our example, means that they ensure that such
an object x can be found.
The RegulativeC Principles, Truth Conditions and

the Use of the Understanding
As we have seen, SUN and its regulativeC principles are required for
empirical truth. But does this new requirement not clash with the Tran-
scendental Analytic, in which the highest principle of knowledge is iden-
tified as SUA? The question then has to be: what is missing from the
necessary conditions for knowledge identified in the Transcendental Aes-
thetic and the Transcendental Analytic for sufficiency as conditions of
empirical truth? When identifying SUA as the highest principle of the
understanding, what is at stake is the possibility of my taking my intui-
tive representations to refer to an object. And the principle states that it
must be possible to accompany my representations (of the object) with an
‘I think’; that is, I must be able to synthesise manifolds of representations
under the Transcendental Unity of Apperception. Kant does not suggest
that such conditions are sufficient for empirical truth.
When examining the further conditions for true cognition of objects,
we must start with (possible) representations of these objects. From the
principle of SUA, we have learnt that such representations are charac-
terised by the possibility of including them in a synthetic unity under
the TUA (B131–132). Second, if there is true cognition of an empirical
object, such unities are conceptual determinations of this object.24 With-
out thereby questioning the status of the principle of SUA as the highest
principle of the employment of the understanding, one must nevertheless
ask the further question as to what must be the case for such synthetic
unities to instantiate some (universal) empirical concept of an object,
since there is nothing in the TUA which guarantees that such a unity is an
instantiation of any empirical concept.
112 Christian Onof
To examine what these further conditions might be, it is useful to dis-
tinguish two aspects of what is involved in having true cognitions involv-
ing empirical concepts:
a. if the object is not specified, the issue is the possibility of true cogni-
tions of nature in general: this will define transcendental conditions
for the objects of our cognition to form a nature;
b. when a particular object is considered, the issue is the possibility of
true cognitions of this object: this defines transcendental conditions
for the objects of our cognition to be particulars.
In case (a), a condition that would ensure the possibility of synthetic uni-
ties being in agreement with objects forming a nature is that the empirical
concepts which these unities are found to instantiate display some neces-
sity, over and above the formal necessity of the synthesis under the TUA
which defines the synthetic unity. Indeed, that would account for why
any particular synthetic unity (i.e., an ‘empirical synthesis’, B140) might
instantiate a universal feature of nature. Such necessity must involve an
organisation of the plurality of empirical concepts which is not contin-
gent. For Kant, such necessity can only be understood in purposive terms
(A686/B714). With such a notion of purposiveness, we see all empirical
concepts as springing from an original (unknown) unity, that is, that of the
purpose.25 From this unity of all concepts, there is but one step to the prin-
ciple of homogeneity, namely that it must be possible for empirical con-
cepts to be subsumed under unities as species under genera, in an endless
process converging asymptotically towards the systematic unity of nature.
With such a systematic unity in place, the possibility of varying any
particular determination of the object from a degree 0 to its full instantia-
tion may be considered, so that concepts which are intermediate between
any two similar concepts are possible. This principle of affinity enjoins
us to seek species which lie between any two species that have already
been identified.
In case (b), we must ensure that a set of possible representations refer
to a particular object. What this means is that these representations con-
tain the basis for differentiating this object from any other object. For
this to be possible, it must be possible to consider an endless process
of further determination of the object, through which sub-species of
any concept are defined through differentiation. The process is endless
because universal determinations are always universal and never reach
the particular. But the hierarchy of species and sub-species which thereby
emerges is that of the principle of specification.
We thus see how these regulative principles would provide sufficient
conditions for the possibility of true knowledge of objects of nature, that
is, for the employment of empirical concepts. However, these principles
remain hypothetical.
From Sufficiency to Necessity: A Hypothetical
Transcendental Principle
So far, we have shown that SUN and the regulativeC principles are suf-
ficient for empirical concepts to find application. But this falls far short
of establishing necessity, and while the need for SUN is defended by many
commentators,26 others reject this necessity.27 Against it, one could con-
struct a thought experiment: suppose that we live in a world in which
some of the manifold in intuition can be brought under a certain set of
empirical concepts (e.g., magnitudes) but with the following features:
a. it might be the case that further determination of objects beyond the

use of this fixed set of concepts is not possible: aside from instan-
tiating these concepts, they would have no further determinable
characteristics;
b. it might additionally be the case that there are no common traits
between these concepts which would enable them to be viewed as
species of more generic concepts.
This odd scenario would amount to an invalidation of the principles of

homogeneity and specification.28
Such a thought experiment would be criticised by Kant for being
merely logically possible. That is, the notion of a limited order in appear-
ances, defined by the particular set of empirical concepts that do find
applicability, has not been shown to be really possible. But as a rejoin-
der, it could be pointed out that neither has it been shown to be really
impossible. A stronger Kantian response could involve pointing out that
there is an explanatory deficiency here: a property cannot be instantiated,
that is, a particular brought under a universal, without there being some
ground for this, that is, without necessity. So, just as the strict universality
of transcendental features of experience is grounded in the necessity of a
priori transcendental structures (A2, B5), reason demands that there be
an objectively necessary systematic unity that accounts for the instantia-
tion of universal empirical concepts (A648/B676). If there is a necessary
ground to the structure of appearances in terms of a set of empirical
concepts, then these concepts are not independent of one another, but
their applicability has a ground, and this implies that they can be ordered
on the basis of this common ground. This order is therefore hierarchical
in some at least minimal sense because of the unicity of the ground.29
Next, if, as we are supposing in this scenario, some determinations
{Φ1, Φ2, . . . Φn} defined by empirical concepts, for example, concepts of
magnitude, have a necessary ground, then if there are no further deter-
minations of the objective world, for example, so that shape and other
properties are in constant lawless flux, it would be a contingent matter
as to what shape currently has a certain determination of magnitude. But
114 Christian Onof
that is not consistent with the claim that there is a necessary ground to
features {Φ1, Φ2, . . . Φn}, for example, magnitude features, of this world,
because what happens to be Φ1 or Φ2 and so on at any point in time is
a contingent matter. By reductio, it must therefore be possible to further
determine any object, which means that the empirical concepts in ques-
tion will have sub-species, and they, in turn, further sub-species. Finally,
it is certainly possible that the necessary grounds of these empirical con-
ceptual determinations should also ground other determinations which
are intermediate between any two such determinations. In summary, the
three regulativeC principles would have to be objective features of nature;
that is, SUN would be an objective principle.
While this does not establish the necessity of SUN, it does establish this
necessity under two conditions:
a. that we accept that universality must have a necessary ground,

b. and that some empirical concepts find application to appearances.
So, if SUN as an objective principle does indeed provide a sufficient con-

dition of truth, it still remains only hypothetically necessary. But that
should not necessarily be a problem. After all, the critical enterprise
sets out to identify the conditions for the possibility of experience and
knowledge. These must be necessary conditions, and as a whole provide
a sufficient set of conditions, but in terms of its logical form, the whole
enterprise can be understood as hypothetical, with the hypothesis being
that we have objective experience.30
Nevertheless, there is a clear difference between the regulativeC princi-
ples and the constitutiveC principles because the latter do not presuppose
anything more than the mere fact that we have spatio-temporal experi-
ence and are self-conscious. For the regulativeC principles, the truth of
some empirical knowledge is a condition under which Kant claims that
these principles are necessary.
Does this require appealing to the existence of bodies of empirical
knowledge, such as the sciences provide us with? No: all that is needed is
that some empirical concepts do indeed apply to appearances. So, while
it is correct that the CPR can be seen as applying to a range of bodies of
knowledge, as Kant indicates in the Preface (B x—xiv), we have shown
that, in fact, in order for the regulativeC principles to be necessary (under
hypothesis 1), it suffices that some empirical concepts apply to appear-
ances. The sceptic will find it much harder to challenge such a weak
assumption as (b).
Consequently, the issue must be the plausibility of hypothesis (a). Some
of Kant’s texts can be understood precisely as addressing this. First, as
I observed previously, he claims that ‘[e]verything grounded in the nature of
our powers must be purposive and consistent with their correct use’ (A642/
B670). So Kant concludes that the transcendental ideas of reason will also
have ‘good and consequently immanent use’ (A643/B671). One can see this
not only as supporting some positive role for the ideas of reason but further
as endorsing the view that reason’s universals, the ideas, and the appending
regulativeC principles, will apply to nature because there exists some ground
to this universality in nature, a ground that is presented in purposive terms.
So Kant is saying, for reason’s universals, that (a) applies.
Second, Kant draws upon the endorsement of the hypothesis of SUN by
other philosophers (A652/B680), thereby giving support to both hypoth-
eses but in particular to hypothesis (a), when he mentions the covert
claim made by many scholastic philosophers that ‘systematic unity of all
possible empirical concepts must be sought insofar as they can be derived
from higher and more general ones’ (A652/B680). The use of ‘derived’
indicates that this is a search for necessary grounds for the universality of
these empirical concepts.
With (b) effectively endorsed and (a) given strong support, Kant need not
be overly concerned about the possibility that the hypothetically necessary
status of the principle of SUN might reduce the appeal of his enterprise.
Status of Fiction
A further property of regulativeC principles needs to be elucidated. That
is that the regulative ideas are considered as if they referred to objects,
namely the soul, the totality of the series of conditions for any condi-
tioned in outer sense (‘the world’) and God. The status of the objects of
these ideas31 is that they operate as fictions; that is, we proceed in our
cognitive enquiries ‘as if’ there were a soul, a world and God: ‘this being
of reason is [. . .] taken as a ground only problematically’ (A681/B709).
How should we understand Kant’s claim about the necessity of adopting
these fictions, for which Kant provides little in the manner of an explana-
tion, stating simply that ‘reason cannot think this systematic unity in any
other way than by giving its idea an object’ (A681/B709)? Prima facie, it
might look as if the Critical enterprise is here reaching its limits insofar
as reason cannot rid itself of the illusion that the transcendental ideas
that were at the heart of traditional metaphysics refer to something real.
While the CPR reveals that they do not thus refer, it is still necessary to
proceed as in old metaphysics, as if they did.
While it is certainly true to say that the CPR shows that metaphysics
is thus inherent to the nature of reason, it would be wrong to view this
as a limitation of the critical enterprise. Rather, we can shed light upon
the need to treat regulative ideas as if they referred to real objects in criti-
cal terms. To do so, it is again useful to consider regulativeI principles.
As discussed previously, these principles are objective insofar as they are
constitutive of experience; that is, without them, it is not possible for our
intuitions to refer to an empirical object. This connection between objec-
tive status and constitutive function is no residue of old metaphysics. On
116 Christian Onof
the contrary, it is central to the critical stance and its transcendentally
idealistic perspective according to which transcendental conditions are
those conditions that are necessary for the very possibility of objective
experience. It is therefore natural to ask what aspect of experience is
being constituted by such conditions.
This means regulative ideas can be viewed problematically as though they
were each to have an object. By thus understanding the regulativeC princi-
ples as if they constituted the soul, world and God, their objective status can
be understood by analogy with the status of regulativeI principles.
The idea of God, however, plays a particular role in that Kant clearly
shows that it is connected with the regulativeC principles of reason, for
instance, by giving an explanation of how this idea leads the understand-
ing to explore what impact the flattening of the Earth’s spherical shape has
upon the Earth’s rotational pattern (A687/B715). There, Kant starts with
the notion of a God that is a wise ‘world-author’ (ibid.) and shows through
examples how considering such a ‘purposive unity of things’ (A686/B714)
enables us to attain ‘to the greatest systematic unity’ in the field of experience.
Conversely, it is possible to start from the regulativeC principles and
show why, for Kant, an organisation of nature characterised by the three
principles of homogeneity, continuity and specification is a purposive
one. Why? According to these three principles, the empirical world is
characterised in terms of a hierarchical structure which acts as a horizon
from a standpoint (the highest genus) defining the unity of nature. Within
this horizon, species which are represented as ‘a multiplicity of points
must be able to be given to infinity, each of which in turn has its narrower
field of view’ (A658/B686) within which sub-species are found—and so
on to infinity towards the full determination of particulars.
This structure is such that no part of it can be altered without altering
the whole: if a node in this structure (a species) is altered, then there must
be something different about the standpoint from which this point was
found to lie in its horizon (an alteration of the genus of the species), and,
of course, the horizon from this point will also be altered (an alteration
of the sub-species). Therefore, one cannot account for the existence of
any part of the structure independently of the whole. With our discursive
intellect, we can therefore only make sense of the existence of such a
structure as caused by a concept of it as a whole. This, for Kant, means
that SUN can only be understood in purposive terms, since a purpose is
that of which the concept precedes the actuality and is causally responsi-
ble for it (CJ 180). Importantly, of course, this understanding of SUN in
purposive terms is one which characterises our discursive intellect and no
conclusion can be drawn as to the actual design of nature by God.
This purposive understanding of SUN calls for an examination of how
the role Kant assigns to regulativeC principles coheres with what the CJ has
to say about the role of purposes in our cognition. This is the question that
Gary Banham examines in his Pisa Kant Kongress paper,32 and subsequently
I present an interpretation of the CJ’s principle of purposiveness for reflec-
tive judgement that distinguishes it from the principle of SUN.
4. RegulativeC Principles and Reflective Judgement

Upon reading the section IV (CJ 179f) of the published introduction to
the CJ,33 the first impression is that Kant is going over the same material
as in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic. Thus, Horstmann34
talks of both passages as providing an answer to the ‘problem of how to
account for the unity of empirical knowledge in view of the contingency
of empirical laws concerning natural objects and processes for our fac-
ulty of knowledge’. Similarly, Guyer views the CJ as going over the same
issues as the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic and reassigning
what had there been explained in terms of regulativeC principles of the
faculty of reason to the faculty of judgement and reflective judgement.35
And a number of scholars believe that the theory of reflective judgement
that Kant proposes in the CJ is incompatible with the role of regulativeC
judgements in the CPR. Thus, Horstmann’s verdict is that the answer
that Kant provided in the CPR ‘is largely incompatible with the theory
put forward in the Critique of Judgment’ (ibid.)36
Purposiveness: A First Examination

It is important to note that those scholars who see Kant’s views in the
CJ as contradicting his earlier statements in the CPR do so on the basis
that the question that Kant is addressing is the same. This is an assump-
tion that needs to be looked at carefully. And guidance for our examina-
tion of this issue is provided by Banham’s (2010:2) questioning whether
the notion of purposiveness that is at the core of the theory of reflective
judgement really is identical to the notion of purposiveness in the CPR.
A closer look at Kant’s text suggests that it is not. First, in the pub-
lished Introduction to the CJ, Kant discusses a purposiveness that is
directed to our cognitive faculties. Kant uses the expression ‘principle
of purposiveness for our cognitive power’ (CJ 184, 186), and he further
explains that this involves nature making ‘its universal laws specific [. . .]
in a way commensurate with the human understanding’ (CJ 186). That
means that this purposiveness is at least partially determinate, insofar as
a purpose of commensurability has been specified. In the Appendix to the
Transcendental Dialectic, there is no such determinacy to the purposive-
ness that is introduced to make sense of the hypothesised SUN.37 Kant
mentions the purposiveness of a ‘supreme intelligence’ (A687/B715), and
the realisation of God’s purpose is directed to an aim that is suited to
His wisdom: ‘as if this being, as the highest intelligence, were the cause
of everything according to the wisest aim’ (A688/B716). Exactly to what
end nature has been created is not at issue here.38
118 Christian Onof
A second distinction between the uses made of the notion of purpo-
siveness in the CPR and the CJ lies in the fact that the latter’s principle
of purposive unity is ‘not a principle of reason and hence requires no
intentionally operating cause’, as Brandt observes.39
Finally, the end to which nature has been created is not a topic that finds
its proper place in the CPR, which is concerned with the conditions of cog-
nition. It does, however, have a place in the CJ. It is a stated aim of this work
to bring together the ends of freedom identified in the Critique of Practical
Reason and the deterministic world of appearances whose constitution was
analysed in the CPR to explain how it is possible that ‘the lawfulness in its
[nature’s] form will harmonize with at least the possibility of [achieving] the
purposes that we are to achieve in nature according to the laws of freedom’
(CJ 176). Insofar as the implementation of the moral law obviously requires
our ability to grasp the natural world in which we live, a minimum condi-
tion for such harmony is that the empirical laws which specify the causality
characterising the form of this nature should be such that they can easily
be understood. This is so that we can evaluate what states of affairs our
actions will bring about in the empirical world.40 So, in particular, the first
difference flagged previously is a consequence of this broader conception of
nature as purposively designed for the realisation of the moral law.41 These
distinctions suggest a need to examine carefully the transcendental princi-
ples of these two texts to see how these differences are reflected in them.
5. The Different Transcendental Principles of the

Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgement
To bring out how the different notions of purposiveness at work in these two
texts are reflected in different transcendental principles, we shall consider
in turn the status, content, function and complementarity of these princi-
ples. Let us first remind ourselves what they are. The transcendental prin-
ciple PCPR of the Appendix of the Dialectic of the CPR is SUN, which is the
hypothesis that nature is systematically unified, that is, that it is the product
of a wise creator (A686–687/B714–715). This systematic unity defines three
regulativeC principles of reason which guide the cognitive activity of the
understanding. The transcendental principle PCJ of the Introduction to the
CJ is the principle of purposiveness according to which nature is organised
purposively for our cognitive faculties (CJ 181–184). This principle governs
the use of our power of judgement in its reflective mode.
Status of These Principles

As discussed previously, PCPR is an unusual transcendental principle inso-
far as no deduction of it is possible. Rather, it has a hypothetical status.
This does not, however, prevent it from being objectively valid, that is, of
being about the world of appearances (A651/B680).
PCJ, on the other hand, is described by Kant as indeed being a transcen-
dental principle but a subjective one (CJ 184). The subjectivity of PCJ clearly
reflects the focus of the purposiveness in the CJ as directed to the subjective
end of my cognition. This subjectivity is a key difference from PCPR which,
like all principles of CPR, states conditions for knowing objects: PCJ defines
conditions for the employment of our faculty of judgement.
This difference is not immediately apparent when one considers the
regulativeC principles as they are first introduced, namely as principles
for the employment of the faculty of the understanding (A645/B673). It
would seem that both principles have the same function, namely to pro-
vide guidance to the subject in her search for universal concepts under
which to bring the manifold in intuition. But it is noteworthy that there
is little mention of the manifold in the CJ text. What this means is that
Kant is taking it as given that we have experience of objects, that is, that
the manifold in intuition can be brought under the categories. Further
evidence for this is to be found in Kant’s referring to a diversity of empiri-
cal laws (CJ 182): he therefore takes it for granted that at least some
empirical laws have been identified (CJ 209), that is, that the analogies
have been applied in identifying causal links.42 On the contrary, in the
CPR, the question is what a priori conditions are required to account for
our experience and knowledge of objects.
What is at stake in the CJ text is how we will be able to find univer-
sal empirical concepts that might be appropriate, and since this task is
distinct from the determination of objects, the principle PCJ governing it
is not objective. Insofar as it is subjective, it does not make any claims
about the empirical world but only about how we must view it: ‘the
basis of that principle is a mere presupposition that judgment makes for
its own use’ (CJ 210’). This differs from the hypothetical principle PCPR
which posits this unity as an objective feature of appearances.43 While
both principles are hypothetical, the subjectivity of PCJ means that judge-
ment proceeds ‘as if’ (CJ 200’) nature were organised systematically so as
to facilitate the acquisition of empirical knowledge. On the contrary, PCPR
makes the assumption that nature is organised according to SUN, which
is a necessary condition for empirical knowledge, but nature is thereby
understood ‘as if it had sprouted from the intention of a highest reason’
(A686/B714). In that sense, it would be appropriate to state that PCJ pos-
its a fiction while PCPR posits a hypothesis about objective reality, which
hypothesis derives from an idea that has mere fictional status.
Content of These Principles

In the CPR, PCPR defines three principles ‘of the homogeneity, specifica-
tion and continuity of forms’ (A658/B686). The first two characterise the
organisation of species under genera and of sub-species under species, and
the third indicates how one should assume that between any two species
120 Christian Onof
of a genus, further ‘intermediate’ species can be found. In this hierarchy
of species and genera, the key point is ‘that the several species must be
treated only as various determinations of fewer genera, and the latter
of still higher families’ (A651–652/B679–680). The key feature of this
pyramidal structure is the fact that one moves from larger to smaller num-
bers of different species as one ascends towards ‘higher families’ (ibid.)
The CJ’s principles, which spell out how to proceed in seeking a universal
under which to bring the particular, are first presented by Kant as wide-
spread in metaphysics: ‘Nature takes the shortest way [. . .] its great diver-
sity in empirical laws is nevertheless a unity under few principles’ (CJ 182).
What we notice in this formulation is that Kant no longer uses comparative
forms (‘fewer’) but turns to the superlative (‘shortest’) and non-relational
forms of adjectives (‘few’).44 This is because Kant is not describing a hypoth-
esised unity of nature but considering what should obtain and indeed what
would be optimal to facilitate our grasp of the order of nature.45
This is confirmed in the second formulation of the CJ’s principles
which amounts to viewing nature as exhibiting
a subordination graspable by us of species under genera; that genera

in turn approach one another under some common principle so as
to make possible a transition from one to another and so to a higher
genus; that while initially it seems to our understanding unavoidable
to assume as many different kinds of causality as there are specific
differences among natural effects, they may nevertheless fall under a
small number of principles which it is our task to discover, etc.
(CJ 185, my italics)
It is clear that these principles do not follow the tripartite structure of the
regulativeC principles, all the more so as, with the ‘etc.’, Kant suggests
that the list is not complete. The italicised clauses show that all these
principles are subjective, and although they resemble the regulativeC prin-
ciples, they are clearly distinct. That is, even though the first sentence in
the last quote reminds us of the principle of genera, it contains a reference
to our cognitive powers which is foreign to the CPR principle; but it does
assume a species-genera structure.46 The principle of genera is given a fur-
ther subjective twist in that the higher genera of which the current genera
will turn out to be species can be identified by examining the similarities
between these genera, that is, their ‘affinity’ (CJ 210).
It therefore seems that, rather than producing a new version of the regu-
lativeC principles in the CJ, Kant is taking over some of this structure and
imposing new conditions upon it. So, while the regulativeC principles define
a structure of nature that fulfils the criteria of use of empirical concepts, the
principles of CJ identify how we are to take nature to be organised to facili-
tate the actual use of empirical concepts: ‘what is presupposed is that nature,
even in its empirical laws, has adhered to a certain parsimony suitable for
our judgment, and adhered to a uniformity we can grasp’ (CJ 213). What is
at stake is no longer that which is in principle required of appearances for
empirical concepts to be applicable to them but how we must think of these
appearances if we are to manage to identify suitable empirical concepts for
them. In the case of empirical laws, this is achieved by conceiving of nature
as having a small number of such principles which cover the diversity of
our empirical laws, and these principles have a certain affinity that makes it
possible to understand how they are related as species of more general laws.
So, the pyramidal structure of the principle of SUN is here characterised as
being very flattened, since the number of genera decreases quickly as one
ascends the pyramid, which makes it easy to ascend.
The issue flagged previously, namely the focus of the content of PCJ upon
empirical laws, must also be addressed.47 The rationale for this focus is
explained in the First Introduction when Kant asks how we could hope to
identify empirical concepts for appearances ‘if nature, because of the great
variety of its empirical laws, had made these [natural] forms exceedingly
heterogeneous’ (CJ 213). It would seem that Kant views our knowledge of
nature as requiring that we have a grasp of empirical laws, through which
we shall be able to bring unity to our knowledge, that is, to our empirical
concepts, because it is according to these laws that nature’s products are
created and transformed. This lends support to the claim that the issue at
stake with PCJ is the subjective one of how we can actually go about acquir-
ing empirical knowledge: the implication of the focus upon laws is that by
discovering their systematic arrangement, we shall be provided with guid-
ance as to how to organise empirical concepts in general.
Function of These Principles

The different status and content of PCJ as opposed to PCPR already imply
different functions. To fully grasp these differences in function, it is useful
to consider what Kant has to say about what would happen were such
principles not to be applicable to the world of appearances.
In the CJ, Kant considers a state of affairs in which the ‘specific differ-
ences in the empirical laws of nature [. . .] [are] so great that it would be
impossible for our understanding to discover in nature an order it could
grasp’ (CJ 185). This text is very reminiscent of the CPR text about what
would happen ‘if among the appearances offering themselves to us there
were such a great variety [. . .] that even the most accurate human under-
standing, through comparison of one with another, could not detect the
least similarity’ (A653/B681).
And if we look at the consequences of these hypothetical scenarios,
they initially appear identical: (i) it would be ‘impossible for [our under-
standing] to divide nature’s products in genera and species’ (CJ 185); (ii)
‘then the logical law of genera would not obtain at all’ (A653/B681). And
this similarity has led commentators to view these scenarios and their
outcomes as identical.48
122 Christian Onof
But, in fact, while the second quote refers to the law of genera and
therefore to the possibility, among appearances, of bringing unity to spe-
cies, the first refers to the same activity of the faculty of judgement but
for nature’s products. By referring to nature’s products, Kant is already
assuming empirical objects, as we pointed out previously: in the first
scenario, Kant is not considering that there should be no determinate
empirical objects featuring in our experience as a result of the principle of
purposiveness not applying to nature, whereas he does in the case of the
CPR text, a point which Horstmann49 overlooks because he avoids this
part of the appendix as introducing additional unhelpful complications.
And, indeed, looking at what Kant writes next in each case confirms
this difference: (i) if the principle of purposiveness did not apply, it would
be impossible for our understanding ‘to use the principles by which we
explain and understand one product to explain and grasp another as
well’ (CJ 185); (ii) without the regulativeC principle of genera, ‘no empiri-
cal concepts and hence no experience would be possible’ (A654/B682).
What is at stake in the CJ is our ability to achieve ‘coherent experience’
(CJ 185), whereby Kant means to bring together the diverse parts of our
cognition of laws of nature under a small number of principles. But it is
assumed that some laws can be identified. Thus, Kant says that ‘though
we might on occasion discover particular laws in terms of which we could
connect some perception to [form] an experience, we could never bring
these empirical laws themselves under a common principle’ (CJ 209).
One can thus see the relation between the functions of PCPR and PCJ.
The principle of purposiveness concerns a nature that we cognise accord-
ing to the principles of CPR; the issue that CJ deals with is the subjective
aspect of bringing order to our cognition, and it thereby not only requires
that we take nature to be systematically organised (at least in terms of
having species under genera) but it also defines further constraints upon
this systematic organisation of nature:
• it must be possible to infer the genera easily by comparing species

(affinity); and
• there must not be too many empirical laws that are the genera of the
specific causal laws we identify when applying the Second Analogy
(parsimony).
So a failure of the principle of purposiveness due to one of these two con-

straints not being satisfied would not threaten our ability to identify some
empirical concepts and laws that apply to the manifolds in intuition but
would make it very difficult for us to bring unity to our cognition, even
if nature were otherwise organised according to SUN. This would, for
instance, be the case if the pyramid-like structure referred to earlier were
difficult to ascend, because it is very steep, so that the number of species
would only be reduced a little when moving up one notch, and/or if it
were difficult to infer the genera by comparing similar species.
Complementarity of These Principles
While CJ takes over the theme of SUN in relation to reflective judgement,
it does not follow that it rejects PCPR: CJ should not be seen to be taking
SUN away from the domain of reason to assign it to reflective judgement.
Indeed, importantly, Kant even refers in CJ to ‘reason and its principle
concerning the possibility of a system’ (CJ 221). The roles of reflective
judgement and reason should rather be viewed as complementary.
As Kant puts it, while the understanding is described as the ability to
‘cognize the universal’, judgement is ‘the ability to subsume the particular
under the universal’, while reason is ‘the ability to determine the particu-
lar through the universal’ (CJ 201). The interaction of these cognitive
powers can therefore be understood to operate as follows: judgement
seeks out a universal under which the particular, for example, an empiri-
cal law, can be subsumed. This universal will be a more general empirical
law, and it can be cognised through the understanding. What reason adds
to this is a grasp of the particular empirical law as a specification of the
more general one according to a necessary unity of nature. Reason and
judgement are both in the business of connecting the particular with the
universal, and this explains the overlap of their cognitive principles.50 But
their roles are distinct.
To illustrate this, consider the development of electromagnetism. The
conception of magnetism and of electricity as phenomena that belong to
a common genus had already been voiced in the eighteenth century, for
example, in Kant’s Danziger lectures on physics.51 After such exercises of
the power of judgement, the laws of electromagnetism, that is, the work
of the understanding, were discovered by a number of physicists in the
first half of the nineteenth century (Ampère, Ørsted, Faraday, Lenz, . . .).
But an understanding of how magnetic and electric phenomena could be
seen as instantiations of the universal laws of electromagnetism, that is,
the work of reason, had to wait until Maxwell produced his mathemati-
cal theory of electromagnetism in 1865. Both Kant and Maxwell were
operating with the same conception of a system of laws of magnetism
and electricity under a common denominator, the laws of electromag-
netism. But for Kant, this was a judgement based upon ideas of affinity
and parsimony, while Maxwell was aiming to uncover a further piece of
the systematic unity of nature by mathematising the laws of electromag-
netism; that is, he was aiming to determine the necessity inherent in the
collection of laws discovered by Faraday and others.
6. Conclusion
This chapter has sought to contribute to the understanding of Kant’s
notion of regulative principles and their relation to the doctrine of reflec-
tive judgement in the Third Critique. By taking cues from Gary Ban-
ham’s work, it has aimed to clarify in what way the regulative principles
discussed in the Transcendental Dialectic define SUN as a hypothetical
124 Christian Onof
transcendental principle. This principle must be distinguished from the
principle of purposiveness in CJ, which is a subjective transcenden-
tal principle governing reflective judgement. Kant’s statements are not
always consistent between CPR and CJ, so that it is doubtless that more
than one reading is possible. The proposed interpretation draws chiefly
upon Kant’s statements in the published introduction to the CJ and aims
to do justice to the different roles and features of these two principles.
Notes
1 Comments on earlier versions by Alberto Vanzo and Dennis Schulting
are gratefully acknowledged. The following abbreviations have been used
for Kant’s writings: AA = Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußische
(Deutsche) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Reimer [later: de Gruyter],
1900–); CJ = Critique of Judgment, ed. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hack-
ett, 1987); CPR = Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W.
Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
2 Gary Banham, ‘Regulative Principles and Reflective Judgment’, paper pre-
sented at the Seminar on Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft, Amsterdam, 2010,
www.garybanham.net/PAPERS_files/Regulative Principles and Reflective
Judgment.pdf, archived at www.webcitation.org/6qJRU25QQ; Gary Ban-
ham, ‘Regulative Principles and Regulative Ideas’, in Kant und die Philoso-
phie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht: Akten des XI. Kant-Kongresses 2010, ed.
Stefano Bacin, Alfredo Ferrarin, Claudio La Rocca and Margit Ruffing (Ber-
lin: de Gruyter, 2013), vol. 2, 15–24.
3 For these three notions of unity, see, respectively, A180/B222, A680–681/
B708–709 and CJ 32.
4 This aim of extending our knowledge seems very compatible with that pre-
sented in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, and Kant wants to
subsume it under the ideal of systematicity that he presents in the Appendix.
Paul Guyer (Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005], 19) argues that this identification fails because,
for instance, distinct regions of space need only be numerically distinct, not
qualitatively distinct as species must. While Guyer correctly notes the role of
the infinity of the form of intuition in enabling the requirement of reason to be
satisfied (at least in the case of the mathematical antinomies), he does not see
that the notion of a qualitative distinction between species is found in regions
of this infinite space. In a sense, they are of course ‘just’ numerically differ-
ent, but spatial relations provide the condition for this numerical difference
(see Christian Onof and Dennis Schulting, ‘Space as Form of Intuition and as
Formal Intuition: On the Note to B160 in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason’,
Philosophical Review, 124 [2015], 1–58.) And these spatial relations define
these regions as qualitatively distinct, in a pre-conceptual sense defined by
their spatial characteristics: numerical difference could not be represented in
intuition without this property of space (and similarly for time). It is therefore
appropriate to view spatial regions located inside a larger space as different
species. This interpretation also draws support from the notion of purposive-
ness (which I examine further): the hierarchy of the systematic unity of nature
springs from a purposive unity whose relation to all the species under it is that
of the unity of space to its parts: it precedes them.
5 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapo-
lis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 395.
6 We note also that this systematisation concerns not only our concepts but the
beliefs that constitute our knowledge: as Briesen puts it, the projects of sys-
tematisation Kant discusses in the Appendix aim at a ‘complete and hierar-
chical organization of our empirical concepts and beliefs’. See Jochen Briesen,
‘Is Kant (W)right? On Kant’s Regulative Ideas and Wright’s Entitlements’,
Kant Yearbook, 5 (2013), 1–32, at 6.
7 It is worth noting in passing that Kant is making some important points of
interest to philosophy of science about the role of notions of unity in science,
either within a scientific discipline (think of the importance of the concept
of a theory of everything in physics), or between scientific disciplines (the
breaking down of scientific barriers between disciplines is viewed as one of
the drivers of progress in the sciences).
8 I take it that, when Kant refers to experience here, he refers to a sufficiently
rich notion which implies determinate cognition of empirical objects. Indeed,
Kant focuses upon the issue of true cognition in his discussion (A651/B679),
and it can only be said that there is a true cognition of an empirical object
if some determinate empirical concept is involved. This implicit reference
to determinate empirical concepts at this point in the Critique implies that
Kant’s claim that further conditions are required for the possibility of true
cognition of empirical objects does not contradict his earlier claim that the
general transcendental conditions of experience are found in the Transcen-
dental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic (see Guyer, Kant’s System of
Nature and Freedom, 29–34 on this issue in CJ).
9 Banham, ‘Regulative Principles and Regulative Ideas’, 21. See Paul Abela,
Kant’s Empirical Realism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).
10 See John D. McFarland, Kant’s Concept of Teleology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
11 Rolf-Peter Horstmann, ‘Why Must There Be a Transcendental Deduction in
Kant’s Critique of Judgment?’, in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, ed. Eck-
art Förster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 157–176, at 167–168;
Michelle Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001), 288–294.
12 Banham, ‘Regulative Principles and Regulative Ideas’, 21.
13 Ibid., 22.
14 Banham, ‘Regulative Principles and Regulative Ideas’, 16–17. See Paul Guyer,
Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987), 188.
15 Banham, ‘Regulative Principles and Regulative Ideas’, 19–20.
16 Ibid., 20.
17 I emphasise ‘intuitions of objects’, because one can in principle have intui-
tions that have not been brought under the TUA and therefore are not objec-
tive. See Onof and Schulting, ‘Space as Form of Intuition’; Christian Onof,
‘Is There Room for Nonconceptual Content in Kant’s Critical Philosophy?’,
in Kantian Nonceptualism, ed. Dennis Schulting (Basingstoke: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2017), 199–226.
18 The idea here is that a species acts as ground for the identification of sub-
species through further determination of this species.
19 These might for instance be intuitions that are brought under the TUA by
applying the mathematical categories only to the manifold in space, as in
geometry. See Onof and Schulting, ‘Space as Form of Intuition’.
20 Banham, ‘Regulative Principles and Regulative Ideas’, 23. This will therefore
define sufficient conditions for empirical truth, that is, for the applicability of
empirical concepts we might form. Note that this must be distinguished from
the broader issue of a general criterion of truth, about which Kant clearly
126 Christian Onof
states that ‘no general sign of the truth of the matter of cognition can be
demanded, because it is self-contradictory’ (B83/A59).
21 Note that this does not mean that I could never synthesise a manifold, and
therefore that transcendental self-consciousness would never be instantiated:
for I can make judgements about objects which do not involve empirical
concepts. Such judgements as ‘this is larger than that’, or ‘there is a curved
shape’, which draw upon basic concepts of arithmetic and geometry, together
with demonstratives, can be taken to refer to indeterminate objects of experi-
ence, and the unity of the syntheses they involve is the TUA.
22 The problem Kant raises here has in fact already been mentioned in the
Transcendental Deduction in its A version. An important feature of the first
part of this deduction (A98–A110) is that it presents the syntheses that are
required for an empirical judgement to be made which involves subsumption
of the manifold in intuition under the concept of an object. The synthesis of
reproduction is seen to rely upon the imagination’s ability to detect features
of appearances that are reproduced, something which it could not do ‘[i]f
cinnabar were now red, now black, now light, now heavy’ (A100). However,
here, Kant explains this affinity of appearances in terms of the transcendental
affinity that is brought about through the TUA (A113–114). This is in ten-
sion with the claims in the Dialectic, and the reason why can easily be seen by
looking at the different form taken by the TUA: when Kant talks of a ‘pure,
original, unchanging consciousness’ (A107), he is viewing all possible rep-
resentations as united under this single unity. This enables him to say, later,
that ‘we ourselves bring into the appearances that order and regularity in
them that we call nature, and moreover we would not be able to find it there
if we, or the nature of our mind, had not originally put it there’ (A125), and
further, ‘[t]he unity of apperception, however, is the transcendental ground
of the necessary lawfulness of all appearances in an experience’ (A127). If all
possible representations are viewed as relating to the one unity of appercep-
tion, then it makes sense to view this unity of apperception as the ground of
all lawfulness in nature. Representations subsumed under distinct concepts
can be viewed together as relating to the one unity of apperception, so that
all concepts can be seen as belonging to one unified unity, that of nature.
Clearly this is too strong and must be seen as conflicting with the claims in the
Dialectic. Kant rectifies this with his B-deduction, which introduces the possi-
bility of accompanying any manifold of representations with an ‘I think’: ‘all
unification of representations requires unity of consciousness in the synthesis
of them’ (B137). Kant then clarifies the scope of this principle with his dis-
tinction between natura formaliter spectata and natura materialiter spectata
(B163–165): apperception is the ground of nature in a formal sense, and thus
of the formal laws of nature but not of the empirical laws of nature.
23 This refers to the famous discovery by Le Verrier and Adams of the insuf-
ficiency of appealing to Saturn and Jupiter’s pull to explain the deviations
of Uranus’s trajectory from a simple ellipse around the Sun. See Robert S.
Ball, The Story of the Heavens (London: Cassell, 1886), 322f. The ‘predicted
orbit’ therefore refers to Uranus’s orbit as computed based upon the Sun,
Jupiter and Saturn only.
24 Note, as discussed in footnote 22, that the principle of the SUA does not
require that all my representations be subsumable under a single synthetic
unity, pace Pierre Keller, Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 72. Kant clearly states that there
must be some synthetic unity for any representation that is to be something
for me, that is, to represent an object (B136–137).
25 Note that there is no claim that there is actually a purpose at work, but pur-
posiveness is the way in which we understand systematic organisation.
26 See, for example, Reinhard Brandt, ‘The Deductions in the Critique of Judg-
ment: Comments on Hampshire and Horstmann’, in Kant’s Transcendental
Deductions, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989),
177–190; Gerd Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969; Ido Geiger, ‘Is the Assumption of a Systematic
Whole of Empirical Concepts a Necessary Condition of Knowledge?’, Kant
Studien, 94 (2003), 273–298.
27 See, for example, Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom, 24–28.
28 Guyer (Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom, 23) argues that the systematic
order of nature cannot be necessary for concept application, but as we see
below, Kant can counter such claims.
29 In the limit, this could be a one-level hierarchy: all concepts belong simply to
one genus.
30 Exactly what this involves is a matter of debate: it might be anything from
the most basic experience of objects to the knowledge contained in scientific
theories, as a neo-Kantian interpretation would have it.
31 They will, of course, acquire another status in Kant’s practical philosophy.
32 Banham, ‘Regulative Principles and Regulative Ideas’.
33 I shall focus more upon the published introduction but occasionally refer
to the First Introduction. More would need to be said about the problem of
reconciling the notion of purposiveness in the Appendix to the Dialectic with
that of the First Introduction (CJ 216’).
34 ‘Why Must There Be a Transcendental Deduction in Kant’s Critique of Judg-
ment?’, 165.
35 See Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom, ch. 1; see Banham, ‘Regu-
lative Principles and Regulative Ideas’, 16.
36 Guyer finds a way of broadly reconciling the two texts but at the cost of
rejecting Kant’s claim that the regulativeC principles provide conditions for
the applicability of empirical concepts to appearances.
37 I therefore disagree with Brandt’s interpretation of this text as claiming that
‘nature is purposive for our knowledge’ (‘The Deductions in the Critique of
Judgment’, 181).
38 It might be objected that any purposiveness that is manifested to me (such as
that of SUN on the assumption of the objectivity of this unity of nature) is
also purposive for my cognition. This follows because, insofar as I can grasp
the purposive relation, it is indirectly purposive for me since this purposiveness
makes a unity of what presents itself graspable by my cognitive faculties. While
this establishes an important link between any manifest purposiveness of divine
creation and what is purposive for my cognition, it does not enable them to
be identified. Indeed, it remains the case that my cognition does not thereby
become part of any purported purpose of the creative act: indeed, if A is done
for purpose P, and I grasp (i.e., am able to cognise) that this A is purposive, this
does not mean that P is or includes my ability to cognise.
39 See Brandt, ‘The Deductions in the Critique of Judgment’, 186.
40 Kant’s moral theory is, of course, not consequentialist, but it is a fallacy to
believe that this entails that consequences are irrelevant to the evaluation of
the morality of one’s actions. As Kant’s examples in the Foundations of the
Metaphysics of Morals show, they are central to understanding the moral
worth of an action because they make it possible to evaluate whether it is
possible to will the universalisation of one’s maxim of action. See Christian
Onof, ‘A Framework for the Derivation and Reconstruction of the Categori-
cal Imperative’, Kant-Studien, 89 (1998), 410–427.
41 The requirement that we be able to get an understanding of nature that ena-
bles us to act in it also brings out a difference of emphasis between the CPR
and the CJ: it is empirical laws that Kant chiefly focuses upon in the latter
128 Christian Onof
work, as opposed to empirical concepts in general in the earlier text. As
Alberto Vanzo helpfully points out, this is only a superficial difference since
concept formation presupposes that nature is organized according to empiri-
cal laws (AA 20:211–212).
42 I take it that the Second Analogy, perhaps together with considerations about
the nature of causality requires that irreversible changes can be brought under
causal laws, which is a strong reading of this principle—see Eric Watkins, Kant
and the Metaphysics of Causality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005), 286–291. There is no space to argue for this point here, but it is worth
noting that proponents of a weak reading must explain why Kant assumes that
it is unproblematic that empirical laws can already be identified: this would, on
their reading, require more than simply applying the Second Analogy.
43 Here, I disagree with Banham’s (2010:8) equating the hypothetical status of
the regulativeC principles with their being subjectively necessary.
44 This point is overlooked in the literature, and indeed, commentators view the
claim that there are fewer genera than species below them as implying that
there are few genera (e.g., Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom, 17).
But, while it is true that the number of genera is meant to converge asymp-
totically to one, it is not specified how fast or slow this convergence might be
(i.e., how steep the pyramidal structure is).
45 Grier (Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, 294) shows how SUN
itself, as a logical principle, does not make it easier to acquire knowledge of
empirical laws.
46 We note also that Kant does not mention the principle of continuity in CJ.
The second principle in the quoted passage might at first appear to be a for-
mulation of a principle of continuity. But the point of the principle is differ-
ent: the idea is that the closeness of genera will enable the identification of
higher genera to which these belong as species. The principle of continuity on
the other hand, enjoins the subject to look for further species under a given
genus, which fill in the gaps between those species which have already been
identified. From the notion of purposiveness of nature however, it is arguably
possible to derive these conditions, along the lines proposed earlier when
considering Kant’s notion of purposiveness in the CPR. As for the principle of
specification, although Kant refers to ‘specification’ in the First Introduction
(CJ 215’), he does not mean the principle of CPR as there is no mention of
the possibility of finding further sub-species for any given species.
47 See Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, 289–290.
48 Horstmann, ‘Why Must There Be a Transcendental Deduction in Kant’s Cri-
tique of Judgment?’, 163–165.
49 Ibid., 166.
50 This is probably what makes it possible to examine the notion of systematic-
ity in Kant’s critical work without addressing the issue of the respective roles
of the power of judgement and the faculty of reason. See, for example, Gerd
Buchdahl, ‘The Conception of Lawlikeness in Kant’s Philosophy of Science’,
Synthese, 23 (1971), 24–46.
51 AA 29.1,1:91; see Christian Onof, ‘Kant’s Lectures on Physics and the Devel-
opment of the Critical Philosophy’, in Reading Kant’s Lectures, ed. Robert R.
Clewis (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 461–483.
Appendix: Limits and Completeness
The positive role of the ideas of reason brings about a major shift in
CPR. The bulk of the Dialectic had focussed upon defining what was
out of our cognition’s reach. As a result, the case for debarring the
faculty of reason from pursuing its traditional metaphysical activities
of enquiry into the nature of God, the soul and the world was over-
whelmingly convincing. The faculty of understanding was apparently
the great ‘winner’ at the tribunal of reason: the case for the prosecu-
tion, made first by thoroughly examining its first witness, the under-
standing, and using the results thereof to explain the inconsistencies
and shortcomings of the claims made by the defendant, reason, was
seemingly final. By putting what turns out to be the case for the defence
in the Appendix, Kant is first of all indicating that the tribunal is not
closed with the First Critique. But he is also providing the reader with
an extraordinary twist in the tale. First, we are told that reason actu-
ally has a very good character: its role as a guide to the understanding
is made forcefully. Second, Kant, now in the role of the defence law-
yer, sets the stage for a fight back of the faculty of reason: it turns out
that if it were not for reason’s postulated systematic unity, the under-
standing would be of no use. Of particular interest here is the notion
that, while CPR defines limits to what we can know, it is also making
the prima facie conflicting claim that the completeness of this knowl-
edge must remain an unattainable ideal, because if it were complete, it
would be transcendent knowledge. There is in fact no contradiction in
these claims, since that which is limited in one sense (by the principles
of the pure understanding) can very well be unlimited in another (by
the overarching imperative of reason to extend our knowledge towards
the unconditioned).1
At the end of the First Critique, we are therefore left with a cliff-
hanger of sorts as far as the role of reason in cognition is concerned,
with the faculty of reason staging a fight back which leaves the out-
come of the tribunal of reason undecided. What Kant has achieved is
130 Christian Onof
to rehabilitate a faculty that was originally presented as a source of
deception, thereby setting the scene for the Second Critique in which
reason’s foremost function as an autonomous self-legislating faculty is
identified.
So it is left to the Third Critique to revisit the cliff-hanger of the First
Critique and introduce a mediating faculty, judgement. This faculty, it
turns out, is that which, in our cognitive practice, actually enables the
understanding to go about its business. This is not to say that reason
was wrongly attributed a key positive role towards the end of the First
Critique. Rather, the examination of the faculty of judgement shows how
the SUN that reason posited is ultimately a component/necessary condi-
tion of something higher, the Highest Good, which reason defines as the
end of its primary function, to govern our practice by giving itself the
moral law.
Note
1 On this issue, I disagree with Grier’s assessment that ‘The demand for com-
pletion in our exposition of concepts is essentially linked in the critical phi-
losophy to the correlative demand for limits to the understanding’ (Kant’s
Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, 284).
6 Disputing Critique
Lyotard’s Kantian Differend
Keith Crome
In memory of Gary1
Along with Discourse, Figure and Libidinal Economy, Lyotard counted

The Differend as one of his three ‘ “real” books’.2 Its concern is with
argument, in the sense of dispute. The neologism differend is a straight-
forward transposition of the French différend, which denotes a disa-
greement, a quarrel or controversy, a difference of opinion. The English
translation retains the French term in preference to any of its English
equivalents in order to signal to the reader ‘the particular, technical sense’
that Lyotard gives to the term (D 194). Casting his definition in forensic
terms, and contrasting a differend to a litigation, Lyotard writes that a
differend is ‘a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot
be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both
arguments’ (D xi). Observing that in the case of a differend, ‘one side’s
legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy’, he continues by
arguing that ‘applying a single rule of judgement to both in order to set-
tle their differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at
least) one of them’ (D xi). A wrong arises when, in the case of conflict,
one of the parties is divested of the means to argue and allow their argu-
ment to become known.
In The Differend, Lyotard says his concern is ‘to examine cases of dif-
ferend’ (D xiv). This terse declaration, issued by Lyotard in his prefatory
remarks, which he says will serve to save the reader the trouble of reading
the book, has legitimated, if not led to, a misunderstanding of the stakes
of The Differend. Some have seen the examination of differends as an
ethico-political enterprise—an enterprise devoted to the exposure of the
ethical and political ‘wrongs’ that are occasioned by mistreating differends
as injuries that can be litigated. The Differend is taken both as an example
of this enterprise and as laying the ground for it by way of its exposition
of the principle underlying—or, better, the regulative Idea guiding—its
ethico-political judgements: the principle or Idea of dissensus. Certainly,
the concept of the differend can be (and has been) used to expose a whole
132 Keith Crome
variety of more or less contemporary injustices that are occasioned by the
denial or suppression of the legitimacy of the complainant’s complaint
and are incapable of recognition or resolution within established political
jurisdictions.3 However, if the concept of the differend can be used in this
way—and Lyotard made such use of it h imself—the stakes of The Differ-
end are different. Said by Lyotard to be his ‘philosophical’ book (D xiv),
The Differend is bent towards inducing a crisis within the tradition to
which Lyotard explicitly affiliates it, exposing the differends which that
tradition has wrapped up and in which it has got itself all wrapped up.
To ignore this, to conflate the ethico-political application of the differend
with the stakes of The Differend, would, to make use of Lyotard’s own
term, produce something like a ‘wrong’.
Reading The Differend in the way I am proposing means viewing it
as a critical enterprise—as a tribunal in which philosophical reason calls
itself to account. It is, in this sense, a repetition of the Kantian project.
A full demonstration of this is not possible within the limits of this essay.
Instead, and as my title taken in one of its senses suggests, what I should
like to try to do is say something about the Kantian provenance of Lyo-
tard’s concept of the differend. There is, I think, some merit to this under-
taking in itself. For despite the obviousness of Lyotard’s relation to Kant,
this particular debt to my knowledge has not in itself attracted much
commentary or exegesis; Lyotard’s commentators have for the most part
preferred to focus on what he says about Kant’s account of the sublime
and the use he makes of it.4
However, if Lyotard draws on the funds of Kant’s philosophy, he also
turns them back on to that philosophy and exposes a differend harboured
in Kant’s critical project—a differend concerning the concept of nature.
This differend is not simply one differend among others; rather, it is an
historically fateful differend, a differend that is profoundly implicated in
the history of the West. As my title taken in another sense indicates, I am
also concerned in what follows with elaborating this differend between
Lyotard and Kant.
1. The Battlefield of Metaphysics

The aim, the ambition, of the Critique of Pure Reason is to put an end to
the controversies that have beset metaphysics. In his preface to the first
edition of the Critique, Kant dramatises the situation that provoked his
critical enterprise: the realm of Metaphysics, misgoverned since its incep-
tion, beset by intestine wars, has long since become a ‘battle-field’ (CPR
A viii). The despotic rule of the dogmatists, which first prevailed, gave
way to anarchy, and the sceptics, ‘a species of nomads, despising all modes
of settled life’ (CPR A ix) repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, sought to break
apart the polity. More recently, Kant observes, the right of Metaphysics
to rule over all the sciences has been contested by the vulgar sedition of
Disputing Critique 133
the physiologists, but their challenge, made on false pretences, came to
naught, and dogmatic despotism has re-established itself once more. The
restoration of dogmatism has, Kant says, led to a ‘mood of weariness and
complete indifferentism—the mother in all sciences, of chaos and night’
(CPR A x). However, this indifferentism is not final. Instead, surpris-
ingly, it is a spur to further action and the prelude to reform. For, real or
feigned, this indifference, affecting those sciences whose knowledge, if
it could be attained, ‘we should least of all care to dispense with’ (CPR
A x), is a sign, not of ‘levity’ but of ‘the matured judgement of the age’,
which refuses to tolerate illusory knowledge. It is a call to criticism, a
provocation that moves reason to undertake once more the age-old task
of philosophy, the task of acquiring self-knowledge.
The call that summons reason to its vocation is not a call to arms—
or not in any simple sense, at least. Indeed, on one reading of the first
Critique, the opposite would appear to be the case. Criticism does not
embark on a final battle, a war to end all wars. Instead, reason’s interven-
tion in the historic and internecine battles of metaphysics is judicial—the
institution of a ‘tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims,
and dismiss all groundless pretensions, not by despotic decrees, but in
accordance with its own eternal and unalterable laws’ (CPR A xii). This
tribunal, Kant adds, is ‘no other than the critique of pure reason’ (CPR
A xii), and it effects a restoration of civility: the ‘battle-field’ of metaphys-
ics is transformed into a courtroom, and antagonism and the fighting
of the factions give way to the order of the law. In short, criticism puts
an end to war, replacing it with ‘the peace of a legal order, in which our
disputes have to be conducted solely by the recognised methods of legal
action’ (CPR A752/B779).
As Lyotard himself notes, the ‘theme of the war between doctrines has
long been a rhetorical staple [. . .] of prefaces to philosophical works’ (JD
358n9). The example of this that Lyotard gives is that of Hume, whose
own incursion into the territory of Metaphysics Kant credits with rousing
him from his uncritical partisanship for dogmatism. In the introduction
to A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume casts his procedure in opposite
terms to Kant: whereas Kant brings the warring factions to prosecution,
Hume abjures the ‘tribunal of reason’ and instead seeks to prosecute all-
out war. Having made advert to the disarray and confusion that is the
current condition of the sciences, to the abundance of vexatious debates
and disputes that testify to the nigh near-universal uncertainty which pre-
vails in matters of the greatest moment, he declares that ‘the only expedi-
ent from which we can hope for success in our philosophical researches’
is ‘to march up directly to the capital or center of these sciences, to human
nature itself’.5 Once having seized this chief citadel, it is then possible to
hope everywhere else ‘for an easy victory’.6
If Kant can have such confidence in the tribunal of reason as he shows
in the 1781 preface, if he can be confident that peaceful legislation can
134 Keith Crome
replace the perpetual polemics that have previously been the lot of phi-
losophy, it is because he is assured of the inherent lawfulness of reason
in a way that Hume is not. The competing claims of the rival parties are
ultimately settled not on the battlefield but in the court: force is trans-
muted into forensics and pacified by the binding power of reason’s right-
fully recognised legality. But this confidence begs many questions; not
least, as Lyotard notes, it leaves unexplained why criticism did not ‘come
into play at the very beginning in order to spare thought the useless tor-
ment of dogmatic quarrels’ (JD 328). Reading into what Kant says, one
might attribute the tardiness of critical reason’s intervention to its being
initially indisposed to such critical activity. However, contrary to what
one might think, this indisposition is not a consequence of the conten-
tions that beset metaphysics, contentions that would have enfeebled
the critical spirit, although it is perhaps their cause. The indisposition
to criticism is the index of reason’s own immaturity, and the disputes
over which criticism eventually rules (in the legal sense) are a necessary
condition for its development: the critical disposition is a potentiality of
reason’s combative nature, and it is roused from its slumbering state by
polemic. Moreover, once stung into wakefulness, it requires the perpetual
threat of a recurrence of war in order to remain alert. Thus, the prospect
of perpetual peace, the serene progress in the sciences, promised by the
institution of criticism, is, if not illusory, then at least complicated by its
dependence on the maintenance of the combative disposition with which
nature, according to Kant, has endowed reason.
Lyotard detects this combative and critical disposition of reason in
the exercise of judgement, which he opposes to the mere application of
doctrine, and it is pre-eminently evidenced in the exercise of reflective
judgement. Judgement in general is a way of ‘thinking the particular as
contained under the universal’ (CJ §IV, p. 179), or, in the language of the
tribunal, it is a way of finding a case for a rule or a rule for a case. Whilst
determinant judgement is a mode of judgement that is procedural, in the
sense that it is a subsumptive exercise, reflective judgement is inventive.
It is exercised when ‘only the particular is given and the universal has to
be found’ (CJ §IV, p. 179), and so it must discover its rule rather than
presuppose its knowledge as a principle. However, to judge reflectively is
not simply to invent or discover a rule for a case. In discovering the legiti-
mate rule for a case, judgement is called on to discriminate, to divide, in
the sense that it must reveal the incommensurability between different
cases—or in some instances within the same case. It must intervene in
order to settle disputes between rival claimants, and this it must do with-
out having an established body of doctrine upon which to rely. With the
differend, and in The Differend, Lyotard seeks to maintain this combat-
ive, critical spirit. The predicament posed in and by the differend requires
the exercise of reflective judgement inasmuch as the particular case that
provokes the differend demands the discovery of a new rule of judgement
capable of giving expression to it, that is, of recognising its claim to legiti-
macy and thereby preventing it from becoming or remaining a wrong.
2. The Kantian Provenance of the Differend

It is not only Kant’s critical spirit that sustains Lyotard’s recourse to
judgement; the immediate inspiration for Lyotard’s idea of the differend
derives from Kant’s critical intervention in the doctrinal controversies
that beset metaphysics and that issued from the dialectical employment—
or misemployment—of pure reason. Criticism is in a permanently armed
state against this misemployment, and Kant addresses the controversies
that arise from it in the second division of the second part of the Critique
of Pure Reason, entitled the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’. Dialectic is itself
a ‘logic of illusion’, since dialectical arguments have only the semblance
of truth. They are sophisms, but they are not simply false arguments born
from the desire to convince; they arise from the ‘natural and inevitable
illusion’ of human reason (CPR A298/B354).
‘Human reason’, Kant says, ‘has this peculiar fate that in one species of
its knowledge it is burdened by questions, which, as prescribed by the very
nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending
all its powers, it is also not able to answer’ (CPR A vii). Beginning with
principles that it of necessity employs in the course of experience, and
which experience justifies it in so employing, reason is nevertheless led
beyond the bounds of experience to claim knowledge of objects that are
never given in experience. In this way, it ‘precipitates itself into darkness
and contradictions’ (CPR A viii), and whilst it is able to guess that these
are due to errors of its own making, it is not able to detect them. It is the
function of criticism to expose these illusions, although it cannot make
them disappear, because they are ‘natural and inevitable’.
Of particular interest to Lyotard is the incitement to criticism that
arises from the ‘antinomies of pure reason’. Kant’s identification of the
antinomies is a criticism of the conflicting doctrines of empiricism and
rationalism concerning the ‘object’ of cosmology, one of the three definite
branches of metaphysics. It is characteristic of cosmology, Kant says, that
it attempts to achieve knowledge of the totality of all beings by means of
concepts of reason—or, to be more exact, by means of freeing ‘a concept
of the understanding from the unavoidable limitations of possible experi-
ence, and so to endeavour to extend it beyond the limits of the empirical’
(CPR A409/B435). However, in so doing, it lapses into conflict, develop-
ing two opposing propositions about the same object (or rather non-
object, since the totality of beings is not an object of experience but an
Idea of reason) but in such a way that each is maintained with equal
necessity. Because in each of the antinomies that it generates reason is
brought to exceed the bounds of experience, it comes to a position where
if none of its propositions can ‘hope for confirmation in experience’,
136 Keith Crome
neither can they ‘fear refutation by it’ (CPR A421/B449). For each of the
antinomies, it is possible to show ‘clear, evident and irresistible proofs’.7
It is consequently impossible to effect a resolution of the impasse that
they occasion by denying the validity of either the thesis or the antithesis
on merely logical grounds. Moreover, each thesis ‘is not only in itself free
from contradiction, but finds the conditions of its necessity in the very
nature of reason—only that, unfortunately, the assertion of the opposite
has, on its side, grounds that are just as valid and necessary’ (CPR A421/
B449). The antinomies are not arbitrary, then. The desire of reason to
exceed all conditions and to grasp the world itself in its unconditioned
totality leads naturally to them. Experience never satisfies reason com-
pletely: every question posed to it, it answers only by referring us further
back along an infinite chain of conditions and reasons and thus brings
forth no final and ultimate conclusion. The dissatisfaction that experi-
ence occasions shows not the vanity of metaphysics in striving beyond
the empirical but the insufficiency of all physical modes of explanation to
answer to the higher faculty of reason.
In each of the antinomies, reason has an interest in both the thesis
and antithesis that renders their conflict unavoidable. On the side of the
theses, the interest is threefold. First, reason has a certain practical inter-
est: the arguments themselves forming the foundation of morality and
religion. Second, it has a speculative interest: the postulation and employ-
ment of the Ideas concerning the world are such as to allow of a definitive
completeness. Third, there is a popular interest: they satisfy common-
sense insofar as ‘the common understanding finds not the least difficulty
in the idea of an unconditioned beginning’ (CPR A467/B496). On the
side of the antithesis, there is no immediate or obvious practical interest
on the part of reason, since the ideas themselves appear deprived of all
power and influence by the antithetical arguments: ‘If there is no primor-
dial being distinct from the world, if the world is without beginning and
therefore without an Author, if our will is not free, if the soul is divisible
and perishable like matter, moral ideas and principles lose all validity’
(CPR A468/B496). However, if they have no obvious practical appeal,
the antitheses offer a superior speculative interest. At least they do whilst
the scope of their own arguments is limited to restricting the pretensions
of the theses to extend their cognitive claims beyond what they can prop-
erly know, for then they have in themselves a critical validity. However,
they too are susceptible of overstepping the mark and becoming dog-
matic, confidently denying ‘whatever lies beyond the sphere of [their]
intuitive knowledge’ (CPR A471/B499).
In its pre-critical state, reason is tortured by these interests: by dint of
them, the antinomies arise, but because of them, it is neither possible for
this pre-critical reason to negate both sides of the antithetical conflict and
so realise the impasse that it brings itself to, nor affirm both sides so that
its impasse would not appear. In the conflict between the antinomies, it
is, then, as Kant says, the side who contrives ‘to make the last attack,
and [is] not required to withstand a new onslaught from their opponents,
[that] may always count on carrying off the laurels’ (CPR A423/B450).
It is in order to ensure that victory is not secured in this antithetical field
simply by virtue of speaking the last word—and since the last word can
only truly be had through the use of force—that criticism is called on to
intervene.8
The critic—the critical ‘watchman’ or ‘sentinel’ Lyotard says, reflecting
the fact that criticism is always in a state of alertness, on guard, ‘in a per-
manently armed state’ (JD 328)—must adopt the ‘method of watching,
or rather provoking, a conflict of assertions’ (CPR A423/B451). This he
does not in order to decide for one or other side of the antinomies but to
investigate ‘whether the object of controversy is not perhaps a deceptive
appearance, which each vainly tries to grasp, and in regard to which,
even if there were no opposition to be overcome, neither can arrive at any
result’ (CPR A423/B451).
In the first two antinomies, Kant argues that the opposing conclusions
are false, whilst in the last two, the opposing conclusions may be true.
What is at issue in all four antinomies is a procedure of regress from
conditioned to condition. In the first two mathematical antinomies, the
regression is always homogeneous: the conditioned and condition belong
to the same spatio-temporal series, and since what is at stake is whether
the series is finite or infinite, this homogeneity entails that the opposing
claims are contradictories. The former, then, are not true differends in
Lyotard’s sense, and their conflict is dispelled or dismissed by the inter-
vention of the critical ‘watchman’. The case is different, however, when
it comes to the latter dynamical antinomies. In the third antinomy, the
dynamical antinomy par excellence, the opposition is between the thesis
that causality accords with both the laws of nature and freedom and the
antithetical claim that there is no free causality since ‘everything in the
world takes place in accordance with laws of nature’ (CPR A445/B473).
This opposition produces a conflict [Streit]. Or, to be more precise, it pro-
duces what Lyotard comes to call a differend, because, as he observes, the
two conflicting sides ‘don’t speak in the same idiom, although they are
talking about the same thing’ (JD 336). There is no contradiction between
the thesis and the antithesis because, as critical philosophy shows, ‘nature
[. . .] and freedom [. . .] can be attributed to the very same thing, but in
different relations—on one side as a phenomenon, on the other as a thing
in itself’.9 Consequently, both can be right. However, if the situation is
such that ‘one side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legiti-
macy’, it is nevertheless the case that when both parties are called to pre-
sent evidence for their claims before the tribunal of cognition, a ‘mistrial’
will occur. Cognition is not competent to judge both cases. For although
the advocate of determinism, who speaks in the idiom of the understand-
ing, can bring forth demonstrable proofs of his thesis, the defender of
138 Keith Crome
freedom is unable to demonstrate his claims in a way that is acceptable to
the tribunal. No series of phenomena will ever provide evidence of spon-
taneous causality. Predisposed to favour one party, ‘applying a single rule
of judgement to both in order to settle their differend as though it were
merely a litigation’, the tribunal of cognition creates a wrong.
Criticism is able to identify this wrong because it observes the distinc-
tion between phenomena and things-in-themselves; without it, the legiti-
macy of both thesis and antithesis could not be acknowledged and would
instead collapse into a mere contradiction. But as well as admitting the
possibility of the legitimacy of both thesis and antithesis, criticism is also
called upon to institute a new tribunal—‘one that would be competent to
pass judgement on freedom’s suit’ (JD 337). This tribunal takes the form
of the Critique of Practical Reason. With it comes acknowledgement that
‘understanding and reason [. . .] have two distinct jurisdictions over one
and the same territory of experience’ (CJ §II, p. 175).
In this critical treatment of the third antinomy, Lyotard finds more
than the formal anticipation of the idea of the differend—more, that is,
than the possibility of ‘referring to one phenomenon in two (or indeed
many) essentially different ways’.10 If in the Analytic Kant established the
constitutive limits of the understanding—limits that are the condition
for the possibility of cognition of the world—the Dialectic establishes,
or at least ‘marks out’, a beyond to those limits. For Kant, that beyond
is the space of freedom. Whilst an agitated scientism, committed to the
understanding and so paradoxically unable to comprehend anything of
its own limits, might want to deny the possibility of this freedom, on it
depends (at least for Kant) the possibility of Enlightenment, which finds
its fulfilment in the moral autonomy of the subject. Critical of human-
ism, Lyotard will refuse the solace offered to judgement by the idea of
the autonomous subject, but, like Kant, he will equally refuse the self-
inflation of the understanding and instead turn his critical attention to
the differends that are marked out by the passage beyond the limits of
the understanding. By way of this critical attention, by way of his refusal
of humanism, Lyotard is moved to remark his own differend with Kant,
a differend that concerns the Idea of nature.
3. The Differend Concerning the Idea of Nature

In his appeal to the Critique of Pure Reason, Lyotard gives priority to
the Transcendental Dialectic. Before his discovery of the differend in
the antinomies, Lyotard had made use of the concept of paralogism
in The Postmodern Condition. For Lyotard, as for Kant, a paralogism
violates accepted rules of argumentation. However, unlike Kant, Lyo-
tard does not regard such a violation negatively; for him, paralogy is
not something to guard against. Recasting and extending Kant’s insight
that the paralogisms are inherent to reason, Lyotard conceives paralogy
positively as the principle of reason, identifying it as the driving force
behind contemporary science and knowledge. Pointing to the fact that
contemporary science recognises and accepts as legitimate propositions
that challenge the rules and axioms of classical science and logic (for
example, Gödel’s identification of the existence of a proposition within
the system of arithmetic that is neither demonstrable nor refutable), he
argues that postmodern knowledge progresses—and conceives itself as
progressing, paralogistically—giving credence to utterances that desta-
bilise the accepted order of scientific reason by instituting new rules for
its language games. In a series of conversations with Jean-Luc Thébaud,
published in English under the title Just Gaming, Lyotard makes positive
appeal to the Ideas of reason, used regulatively, if paradoxically, to chal-
lenge or destabilise the sedimented ‘laws, [. . .] customs and [. . .] regulari-
ties’ by which a society passes judgement about ‘what is to be done’.11
As Dietmar Kövekar has argued, in privileging the ‘Dialectic’ over the
‘Analytic’, Lyotard proceeds in opposition to ‘the mainstream, or at least
the prevalent tendency amongst analytic neo-Kantians to marginalise, if
not totally neglect, the questions of the Transcendental Dialectic’.12 Like
Hegel before him, who regarded Kant as having ‘resuscitated the name
of Dialectic and restored it to its post of honour’,13 Lyotard sees in Kant’s
account of the Dialectic a means of challenging the tendency to reduce
the logos to logic and to recognise the wrong that proceeds from the
hegemony accorded to the claims of cognition. However, Lyotard is not
guided in his reading by a pretension to discover the systematic integrity
of the first Critique. Instead, he applies his discovery of the differend to
his reading of the Analytic, using it to decompose what Kant calls the
immediacy of intuition. By virtue of this decomposition, Lyotard is able
to discern in Kant’s account of intuition an order of activity at the level
of the reception of the manifold. In this sense, the account of intuition as
it is set out in the very first two pages of the Transcendental Aesthetics,
which is itself the first part of the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements,
reveals itself as the artery of the Analytic insofar as it oscillates between
the poles of passivity and activity, receptivity and spontaneity, that gov-
ern the entire structure of the whole critical enterprise.
Intuition, Kant says, is the ‘immediate relation’ (CPR A19/B33, my
emphasis) of cognition to objects. It takes place ‘only in so far as the
object is given to us’ (CPR A19/B33). Its being given presupposes a recep-
tive capacity on the part of the subject: it ‘is only possible, to man at least,
in so far as the mind is affected in a certain way’ (CPR A19/B33). This
receptive capacity is entitled ‘sensibility’. The subject’s activity is exerted
at the level of the understanding, judgement and reason. It is this activity
which gives the given its sense. However, for Lyotard, the ‘immediacy’
of the given is not immediate—there is already an activity exerted at the
level of the Aesthetic in the forms of intuition. In truth, the constitution
of the given in sensibility supposes two moments. In the first moment
140 Keith Crome
there is that which is presented to sensibility by means of sensation. Sen-
sation ‘supplies only the matter of the phenomenon, which gives but the
diverse or the singular’ (D 61). This ‘matter’, which Kant says is ‘that in
the appearance which corresponds to sensation’ (CPR A20/B34), that is
presented in sensibility, acts on the subject; it affects the subject, who is
receptive to it. In the second moment, there is the active imprinting of
the forms of space and time on this ‘matter’. Matter receives the forms of
space and time, which turns it into a phenomenon. In the first moment,
matter affects a subject who is susceptible to it (Lyotard will later say
‘passible’). However, this receptiveness on the part of the subject is lim-
ited. The subject knows only this—that she has been affected, touched.
She knows nothing of what it is that affects her, what touches her. The
‘matter’ that affects her through sensation remains unknown to her in as
much as the subject does not know to what the impression that affects it
refers since in this first moment it is not endowed with a referential sta-
tus. It has a conative sense only, not a denotive one, since it is registered
at a sentimental level, and it relates only to the receptive subject.
In the second moment, the situation is reversed: the subject passes to
the active pole of the relation; it imprints the forms of space and time
on the matter that affects it, and in doing so, it endows it with a ref-
erence. The referent is called the phenomenon. According to Lyotard’s
description of Kant’s account of this second moment, the representa-
tion that appears results from the active capacity of the subject ‘to show
the moment and place of whatever it is that by its matter produces the
effect or the sensible impression upon [the subject]’ (D 62). He contin-
ues: ‘This is what we call the ostensive capacity: It’s over there, It was a
little while ago. The second [moment], which applies deictic marks onto
the impressions procured by sensation, is called in the Kantian lexicon,
intuition’ (D 62).
This constitution of the given by intuition entails a differend between
the two active moments that together make up intuition, that is, between
what gives itself in the first instance, namely ‘matter’, and that which
endows that matter with its referentiality, namely the subject. The subject
can only refer to the ‘that’ that gives itself in the first moment in spatio-
temporal terms. But it does this without ever knowing if this is appropri-
ate to the ‘that’ to which it refers. It is, Lyotard suggests, a differend on
‘the scale of the loss of the concept of nature’ (D 63). As Lyotard writes,
‘the question of the There is [il y a], momentarily evoked on the occasion
of the sensible given, is quickly forgotten for the question of what there
is’ (D 65).
How is it possible to hear the suit of nature? It can be received at the
level of sentiment, but in terms of the Aesthetic in being so received,
it is immediately censured. It is accepted in the second part of the Cri-
tique of Judgement, the Critique of Teleological Judgement, but then it
is only admitted as an Idea. It is the task of the Critique of Judgement to
overcome the division between the theoretical and the practical effected
by the first two Critiques. In Lyotard’s terms, and as we have seen, Kant
recognises the differend between freedom and necessity by acknowledg-
ing the different jurisdictions of reason and understanding. ‘Neither can
interfere with the other’ insofar as ‘the concept of freedom just as little
disturbs the legislation of nature, as the concept of nature influences leg-
islation through the concept of freedom’ (CJ §II, p. 175). However, this
supplementation of ‘right’s deficiencies in the area of freedom’ (JD 337)
by this institution of the tribunal of the second Critique does not result in
completeness. Instead, it opens up a severe division, a ‘great gulf’ (CJ §III,
p. 176) between the theoretical and the practical, between nature and
its necessity and freedom and its spontaneity, between the knowledge of
objects according to the conditions of possible experience and the realisa-
tion of freedom under the unconditioned of the moral law. Still, Lyotard
argues, for Kant, completeness is required not only in order to satisfy the
idea—or Idea—of a philosophical system, but it is necessitated by the real
differend between cognition and morality. Both make claims on the same
object in as much as ‘the concept of freedom is meant to actualise in the
sensible world the end proposed by its laws’ (CJ §2, p. 176).
This task is fulfilled through the regulative Idea of a finality of nature,
which is developed in the Critique of Teleological Judgement. This Idea
forms the a priori principle by which judgement allows itself to think
particular natural laws as forming a system of experience. In doing this, it
answers to reason’s demand that the whole of nature should be systema-
tised. As a principle for judging nature, it is regulative, not constitutive,
since it is used to treat nature as if it formed, as a whole, a unity of expe-
rience. The regulative employment of this principle to orient judgement
is taken as a sign of nature’s purposiveness which pursues its own ends
through man, ‘the only being in the world that is not entirely conditioned’
(JD 339), thereby enacting the sought-for unity of freedom with nature.
The regulative employment of the principle is authorised by being taken
as an expression of nature’s purpose: it is ‘a means set to work by nature
in order to prepare its final end’ (D 134). But one might suppose—and
the principle would doubtless tolerate such a supposition since it is an
expression of the unity of man and nature, freedom and necessity—that
the employment of the principle is less an expression of nature working
through the human than the human subject imposing itself on nature.
And if that were indeed so, then we would be no nearer to discovering a
tribunal that would be able to hear nature plead its case.
Confirmation that this is indeed the case is given in Lyotard’s analysis
of the sublime, which is perhaps not surprising given that in the sublime
nature is, as Lyotard writes, ‘ “used”, “exploited” by the mind accord-
ing to a purposiveness that is not nature’s, not even the purposiveness
without purpose implied in the pleasure of the beautiful’ (IH 137). But,
paradoxically, if not unsurprisingly, his analysis of the sublime, oriented
142 Keith Crome
by a concern for the differend, also reveals in the sublime the capacity,
the potential, for the subject to address nature otherwise, to address it
in such a way that it is sensitive to it, that it opens itself otherwise to
nature’s address.
According to Lyotard, Kant’s analysis of the sublime ‘depends on the
disaster suffered by the imagination in the sublime sentiment’ (IH 136).
The feeling of the sublime is aroused by the incapacity of the faculty of
imagination to comprehend the ‘absolutely great’—either the extensively
great, that is, an absolutely large object like the desert, or a mountain or
a pyramid, or the intensively great, that is, an absolutely powerful object
like a storm at sea or a volcano erupting. The imagination cannot form
an image adequate to the manifold of sensation. Thus, with the sublime,
the mind suffers a shock in that it is constitutively unprepared to accom-
modate the manifold of sensation by which it is touched and of which it
cannot therefore make representation. This failure of the imagination to
make representation of the manifold of sensation that besets it gives rise
to pain: it suffers because of its incapacity.
There is a certain strength in this incapacity, nevertheless. It provides
an opportunity to establish the primacy of reason. A sign of this pri-
macy is found in the fact that at the same time as it causes pain, this
failure also provokes pleasure since the impotence of the imagination
directly reveals the potency of reason: it is a negative sign of the immense
power of Ideas that the imagination is unable to make representation of
them. As Lyotard puts it, ‘in the sublime “situation”, something like an
Absolute, either of magnitude or of power, is made quasi-perceptible (the
word is Kant’s) due to the very failing of the faculty of presentation. This
Absolute is, in Kant’s terminology, the object of an Idea of Reason’ (IH
136). But this disaster of the imagination that is registered in the sublime
feeling leaves no room for an aesthetic—not on account of the failure of
the imagination to put into form the manifold of sensation but because
the imagination finds itself and its ends subordinated to those of reason.
In fact, the principal interest that Kant sees in the sublime sentiment is
an interest proper to ethics. For Kant, the sentiment of the sublime is the
aesthetic sign of reason assuming the vocation (perhaps one might say the
sublime vocation) proper to it, namely its realisation of its own interest in
its freedom. As Lyotard observes:
Kant writes that the sublime is a Geistesgefühl, a sentiment of the

mind, whereas the beautiful is a sentiment that proceeds from a ‘fit’
between nature and the mind [. . .] The Geistesgefühl, the sentiment
of the mind, signifies that the mind is lacking in nature, that nature is
lacking for it. It feels only itself. In this way the sublime is none other
than the sacrificial announcement of the ethical in the aesthetic field.
Sacrificial in that it requires that imaginative nature (inside and out-
side the mind) must be sacrificed in the interests of practical reason
[. . .] This heralds the end of an aesthetics, that of the beautiful, in the
name of a final destination of the mind, which is freedom.
(IH 137)
Armed with the concept of the differend derived from his reading Kant,
and with the advantage of having ‘at [his] disposal the experiments and
essays of Western painters of musicians of the last 200 years’ (IH 138),
experiments and essays which have had as their main concern ‘something
which has to do with the sublime’ (IH 135), Lyotard is able to turn or
twist the disjunction of matter and form revealed in the sublime to the
advantage of nature. For if the failure of the imagination to synthesize
matter—to gather up the manifold of sensation and present it in accord
with the forms of intuition—is seized on by Kant as an opportunity for
the mind to exercise its freedom, for Lyotard, sensitive to the differend, it
becomes the occasion to become open to the invasion of matter, ‘passible’
to the pure ‘push’ of matter, which, as Lyotard observes, was known to
the Greeks as phusis, ‘the power of phuein, to grow’ (IH 139).
What is at stake in this matter without form that, according to Lyo-
tard, the painters and musicians of the last two centuries have made it
their business to approach (or perhaps it would be better to say that they
have sought to allow to come to presence in their work)? It is undoubt-
edly always the case, as Lyotard remarks, that colour or sound can be
determined by the exercise of the understanding in terms of ‘vibrations,
specifying pitch, duration and frequency’ (IH 139). Yet grasped in this
way, their affective presence is lost—and one might even say their truth,
too (which would imply accepting that truth is more, or even other, than
what is at stake in cognition), since both colour and sound are lost in
being transformed into something other than themselves. But if the truth
of colour and sound are swallowed up by the determination of the under-
standing, what escapes the determination of the understanding are timbre
and nuance, which ‘are scarcely perceptible differences between sounds
or colours which are otherwise identical in terms of the determination of
their physical parameters’ (IH 140). As Lyotard notes, from the perspec-
tive of the understanding, or even from that of the receptivity of intuition,
this aspect of matter is paradoxically immaterial: forms and concepts, to
adopt the Kantian lexicon that we have been using here, are constitutive
of objects—‘they produce data that can be grasped by sensibility and that
are intelligible to the understanding’ (IH 140); the matter of nuance and
timbre is immaterial in this sense ‘because it can only “take place” or find
its occasion at the price of suspending these active powers of the mind
[. . .] at least for an instant’ (IH 140). They are affective qualities or inten-
sities that are intrinsically recalcitrant to the mastery of the intellect; they
insist and resist the mind’s imposition of form on matter, an imposition
instituted by philosophy and which has shaped the history of the West.
It is in testifying to this immaterial matter—this brute ‘push’ of nature,
144 Keith Crome
phusis—that Lyotard gives voice to his differend with Kant and with the
philosophical tradition itself.
Notes
1 I first met Gary Banham in 1994, at Manchester Metropolitan University.
I was a new PhD student doing some part-time teaching at the University,
writing my doctorate on the work of Jean-François Lyotard. I was fortu-
nate to find in Gary someone who knew Lyotard’s work well, and who over
time became a good friend to me. At the time of our first meeting, appre-
ciation of Lyotard’s work suffered from the success of The Postmodern
Condition. Despite bringing Lyotard fame (or notoriety, depending on your
perspective), this short, occasional study—superficially more ‘sociological’
than philosophical—cast a shadow over the rest of his work and doubtless
provoked scorn among many who, sufficiently assured of their own power
of judgement, deemed it unnecessary to read his writings before condemn-
ing them. There is more, however, to Lyotard’s work than the postmodern.
Among the notable French philosophers of his generation, a significant
number of whom wrote important works on Kant (most notably, Deleuze,
Derrida and Foucault), Lyotard is distinguished not only by the number of
books and articles he devoted to the great critical philosopher but also by
the decisive influence that Kant had upon his own (later) work. Lyotard’s
most important works on Kant are: Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of
History, trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009); Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rot-
tenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); ‘Judiciousness in
Dispute, or Kant After Marx’, trans. Cecile Lindsay in The Lyotard Reader,
ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 324–359. As an emi-
nent Kant scholar, schooled in Continental philosophy, Gary acknowledged
the importance of Lyotard’s writings on Kant. As an erudite intellectual with
a political background in Marxism, which also exercised a formative influ-
ence on Lyotard, and a love of the fine arts, on which Lyotard was an author-
ity (particularly painting), he had an interest in Lyotard’s work for its own
sake. I was a beneficiary of this knowledge. I am grateful to be able to have
the opportunity to acknowledge that debt here, and I would like to thank the
editors for making this tribute to Gary possible.
The following abbreviations have been used: CJ = Immanuel Kant, The
Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, [1952] 1986); CPR = Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans.
Norman Kemp Smith, introduction Howard Caygill, bibliography Gary Ban-
ham (London: Palgrave Macmillan, [1929] 2007); D = Jean-François Lyo-
tard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 193; IH = Jean-François
Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and
Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); JD = Lyotard, ‘Judiciousness
in Dispute, or Kant After Marx’.
2 See Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manches-
ter University Press, 1988), 2.
3 See, for example, Simon Malpas, Jean-François Lyotard (London and New
York: Routledge, 2003), 57–58. Malpas relates the story of a legal dispute in
Australia between a group of aboriginal women and a construction company
who wanted to build on an island that the women claimed was for them a
holy site. Because of their beliefs, the women can only discuss the meaning of
the site between themselves; if it is discussed with people outside this group,
it is profaned. Thus, the holiness of the site cannot be established in court
without the site losing its holiness. Mohammed Ramdani, in his introduc-
tion to Lyotard’s La Guerre des Algériens: Écrits, 1956–1963 (Paris: Galilée,
1989), originally published anonymously for the Marxist group Socialisme
ou barbarie, argues that these essays can retrospectively be seen as exposing
a series of differends.
4 Notable exceptions to this include: Bennington, Lyotard; Richard Beards-
worth, ‘On the Critical “Post”: Lyotard’s Agitated Judgement’, in Judging
Lyotard, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1992), 43–80; and
Dietmar Kövekar, ‘Le(s) temps du différend: Remarques sur la logique des
énoncés temporels selon Jean-François Lyotard’, in Jean-François Lyotard:
L’exercise du différend, ed. Dolores Lyotard et al. (Paris: Presses Universi-
taires de France, 2001), 223–239.
5 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. Peter
Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), xvi.
6 Ibid.
7 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Can Qualify
as a Science, trans. Paul Carus (Chicago: Open Court, 1993), §52.
8 For Lyotard, there is, properly speaking, no last word. For, as he points out,
how could such a word ever be declared last without immediately refuting its
pretension so to be. Nevertheless, it is possible, he says, to ensure one’s oppo-
nent cannot speak, or, if he can speak, that he is not heard. This former can
occur by means of the threat of violence or through violence. But in the latter
case—and this defines the efficacy of the strategy that turns a differend into a
wrong—one can have the final word all the more successfully not by speaking
last, nor for that matter by preventing one’s opponent from speaking, but by
ensuring that what one’s opponent has said is understood in one’s own idiom
and in a manner that confirms one’s own position and one’s own arguments.
9 Kant, Prolegomena, §52c.
10 Kövekar, ‘Le(s) temps du différend’, 232.
11 Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Luc Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad
Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 82.
12 Kövekar, ‘Le(s) temps du différend’, 236.
13 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Ency-
clopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. W. Wallace (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1975), §81.
7 Kant, Hegel and Irigaray
From ‘Chemism’ to the
Elemental
Rachel Jones
Nature is to be regarded as a system of stages, one arising necessarily

from the other and being the proximate truth of the stage from which it
results: but it is not generated naturally out of the other but only in the
inner Idea which constitutes the ground of Nature.
—Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §2491
There is essentially Understanding in Nature. Nature’s formations are

determinate, bounded, and enter as such into existence. So that even if
the earth was once in a state where it had no living things but only the
chemical process, and so on, yet the moment the lightning of life strikes
into matter, at once there is present a determinate, complete creature, as
Minerva fully armed springs forth from the head of Jupiter.
—Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §3392
The inner logic of nature, it seems, depends on a pregnant female body

being swallowed whole, displacing the possibility of birth from a mother.
Or at least, this is the implication of the reference to Minerva in the sec-
ond epigraph for this chapter. In the original myth, the Titaness Metis
is raped and impregnated by Jupiter (or Zeus, in the ancient Greek ver-
sion) and then consumed by him as he attempts to evade a prophecy that
she will one day bear him a son who will go on to overthrow him.3 The
daughter that Metis is already carrying, Minerva (or Athena), is subse-
quently born into the world directly from her father’s head. Minerva’s
more well-known appearance in Hegel’s writings is of course through
her sacred animal, the owl, which functions as a symbol of philosophy
itself.4 Yet it is this second, less well-known image that reveals the pat-
tern of thought on which I wish to focus here. This pattern has been
analyzed in depth by Alison Stone, who shows how the underlying logic
of Hegel’s thought is shaped by a ‘sexuate symbolism’ in which mat-
ter is aligned with the female and conceptual form with the male, and
the impotent materiality of nature is redeemed by becoming ever more
concept-permeated (MF 223–225). Hegel thereby repeats in his own way
Kant, Hegel and Irigaray 147
a gendered hylomorphism that, as Stone notes, has characterized the
Western philosophical tradition since Plato (MF 212).
It is this pattern of thought that is reflected in the image of Minerva
from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature cited previously: nature’s material for-
mations are represented by an idealized feminine figure, while the ideas
from which those forms spring (the ‘ground of Nature’) are symbolized
by a divine male head. Nonetheless, given its original mythic context, the
image of Minerva’s ‘birth’ carries with it a further, more disruptive impli-
cation, suggesting that the condition of this particular representation of
nature is the prior consumption of a maternal body.5 Hegel’s invocation
of Minerva would thus seem to support Luce Irigaray’s claim that the
Western philosophical tradition depends on an originary yet disavowed
matricide that silently structures the philosophical scene. As I will go on
to discuss, the condition of viewing nature in terms of a gendered hylo-
morphism is the refusal of a generative maternal-materiality, a refusal
that must itself remain invisible and unacknowledged, just as the story of
Metis remains concealed behind Hegel’s reference to her daughter.
Along with the maternal body and the messy, material kind of birth
that human beings share with other animals, Hegel’s image also displaces
the vulnerability of the newborn. Minerva emerges from her father’s head
both fully formed and already armed. She is thus an appropriate figure
to represent Hegel’s claim that when organic life appears, it does not
evolve gradually out of inorganic matter but is fully determined from
the start by the inner logic of the Idea that externalizes itself in (and as)
Nature.6 Hence, Minerva’s organic form is contrasted with the natural
formations produced by merely chemical processes: each represents a dif-
ferent stage in the progressive self-actualization of the Idea. And yet: an
earth composed of merely chemical relations, while not yet supporting
living beings, would not quite be the dead matter of mechanistic, post-
Cartesian nature either. This is because the material relations produced
through the chemical process find their grounding idea in a third princi-
ple, ‘chemism’, which, as Gary Banham shows in ‘Chemism, Epigenesis
and Community’, stands somewhere in between mechanism and teleol-
ogy. As both connective principle and material process, chemism fore-
grounds the constitutive role of those elements (such as water) that act as
a medium through which objects can be connected and transformed. Such
patterns of de- and re-composition exceed merely external causal connec-
tion without yet embodying the reproductive logic of the organism.
Intriguingly, as Banham notes, Hegel also identifies chemism as a princi-
ple that persists in animate beings as the basis of the sex relation, and that
translates into spiritual form as the ‘formal basis’ of love and friendship.7
In keeping with what Irigaray might describe as the specular relation
between logic and nature in Hegel’s thinking, actual chemical processes
are an externalization of the underlying Idea that gives them their form,
148 Rachel Jones
imperfectly materializing the modes of being (or more specifically the
modes of relation) articulated in the logical principle of chemism.8 To
this extent, chemism continues to instantiate Hegel’s distinctive brand
of hylomorphism, in which the Idea alienates itself in Nature only to
master this (symbolically female) materiality by progressively imbuing
it with (symbolically male) conceptual forms, until the Idea is returned
to itself in the fully realized form of Geist.9 Nonetheless, the ‘schema’ of
chemism10 seems to pull away from a hylomorphic logic to the extent
that it allows diverse material elements to play a constitutive role in the
formation of natural objects through the connective relations they make
possible; at the same time, chemism also seems to hold open a space for
relations between the sexes not yet governed by the reproductive logic
that has so often been used to justify women’s social and political subor-
dination to men.
This dual emphasis—on the dependence of nature’s formations on a
connective element, and on the sexes as exemplifying such ‘chemical’
relations—generates a further suggestive connection with the work of
Irigaray. Although Irigaray contests Hegel’s philosophy via the lens of
sexual difference,11 she too foregrounds an elemental materiality (air,
breath, water, amniotic fluids) that mediates relations between beings
while developing an account of the relation between the sexes that is no
longer subordinated to a reproductive telos. My proposal in this chap-
ter is that these unexpected connections are worth pursuing and that,
in view of its emphasis on both a constitutive relationality and a non-
reproductive principle of sexual relations, chemism can be seen as an
unlikely but potentially generative ally for feminist thought.
In what follows, I will briefly introduce chemism as a third princi-
ple between mechanism and teleology before turning to Kant’s account
of nature as well as to Stone’s analysis of Hegel to show what might
be appealing about such a principle from a feminist perspective. In Sec-
tion 2, I will draw on Banham to outline both chemism and its femi-
nist potential in more detail, before showing how, on Hegel’s account,
chemism nonetheless remains too deeply enfolded within the gendering
of his metaphysics to be entirely helpful to feminist ends. In the final sec-
tion, I will explore how Irigaray’s reclamation of a generative maternal
body opens onto an elemental materiality that can be read as twisting
chemism free both from a gendered hylomorphism and from the repro-
ductive telos of the organism.
If Banham’s particular characterization of chemism suggests the pos-
sibility of reading Hegel back through a (somewhat irreverent) Irigarayan
lens, it also opens the possibility of reading Irigaray through the lens of
chemism. Doing so, I will suggest, helps avert some of the problems that
arise in Irigaray’s own thought, where sexual difference too quickly solid-
ifies into a model of ‘being two’ that (both ontologically and politically)
re-prioritizes heterosexual relations and closes down the more radically
fluid aspects of her work. By reading chemism through Irigaray, and Iri-
garay through chemism, it becomes possible to retrieve an account of
elemental, connective materiality that provides a distinct alternative to
both the Kantian and the Hegelian accounts of nature. This elemental
materiality is not only hospitable to sexual difference but to a fluidity of
differences, including the imbrication of human life with non-human and
inorganic matters.
1. Gendered Hylomorphism in Kant and Hegel

On Hegel’s account, the chemical processes that are contrasted with
Minerva’s organic form exceed the mere mechanism of efficient causality
while still ‘fall[ing] short of what is required for life’.12 As the external-
ized correlate of the logical principle of chemism,13 the transitional sta-
tus of chemical processes reflects the status of that principle insofar as
it stands in between mechanism and teleology. In this way, as Banham
notes, Hegel introduces an additional, third principle that exceeds the
established Kantian division of nature and that serves as an ‘intermedi-
ary’ between ‘thinking in terms of efficient causes’ and ‘thinking in terms
of purposes’.14 This third principle applies to ‘a state between the lifeless
and the life-filled’ that is characterized by the ‘interaction between two
objects through a third: this third state is that of being a chemical ele-
ment. This element is the medium through which the objects cognized
find common connection: it is their basis of interaction’ (CEC 166).
Rather than being mechanically connected in ways that preserve their
complete externality to one another, or teleologically organized in ways
that involve the reciprocal dependency of parts and wholes, objects are
understood via chemism as related through a common medium that pro-
vides a basis for connectedness and interaction (CEC 166–167), allowing
new unities and objects to be formed.
From the perspective of both Hegel’s Logic and his metaphysics of
nature, there is nothing excessive about such a principle. It is introduced
only because it is necessary for the full determination of the Idea that
realizes itself in both thought and nature. Yet from a feminist perspec-
tive, the invocation of a third principle that exceeds the mechanism/tel-
eology dyad is inviting, insofar as both of these ways of conceptualizing
nature have been aligned with the devaluation of the female. On the one
hand, the (broadly speaking) Cartesian image of nature as essentially
‘dead’ matter that operates on mechanical principles can be read as an
attempt to remove all trace of generative female power and to render
nature entirely penetrable by active masculine reason.15 On the other,
the philosophical image of organic nature has typically been feminized
in ways that implicitly or explicitly support patriarchal social relations
by aligning women with the natural realm that has to be transcended so
as to establish both civil society and individual autonomy.16 Insofar as
150 Rachel Jones
women tend to be identified with the reproductive function on which the
organism depends, and this is understood as both their natural purpose
and their social duty, the logic of the organism typically becomes a trap
for women.
In fact, both the mechanistic ‘neutralization’ of nature17 and the femin-
ized image of the organic have their roots in the older, more longstand-
ing tradition referred to by Stone, in which passive or inert matter is
typically seen as female, while active, form-giving principles are typically
represented as male. When robbed of its generative capacities, a once-
living female matter becomes the dead ‘stuff’ of a mechanistic universe;
when allied with essentially inert matter that needs to be given life by an
animating principle, birth from a female body is reduced to a merely re-
productive function, governed by formative powers that are defined by
their transcendence of the female and the feminine. It is exactly these pat-
terns of gendered hylomorphism that play out in the account of mecha-
nism and teleology given in Kant’s third Critique. Given that, as Banham
notes, chemism is designed to supplement this conceptual frame, it is
worth outlining some features of Kant’s approach that help to show why
this additional ‘third principle’ might hold some feminist appeal.
According to Kant, judgements about nature in terms of mechanism, or
efficient causes, need to be supplemented by teleological judgement that
refers to final causes. This is because some natural products simply don’t
make sense to us without our assuming them to be natural purposes; that
is, we cannot explain the possibility of their existence or their form unless
we judge them as if they came about through a causality ‘whose ability
to act is determined by concepts’ and ‘regard the cause’s action as based
on the idea of the effect’ (CJ 248, 244 [5:369, 367]). Such a causality is
‘added’ into nature (CJ 282 [5:399]) on the basis of an analogy—though
only a ‘remote analogy’—with ourselves and, more specifically, with our
own reason understood as a ‘practical power’ to determine our own ends
(CJ 237, 255 [5:360–361, 375]). It is this capacity for practical reason
and the autonomy it affords that is affirmed in aesthetic judgements of
reflection, in particular, those of the sublime, where we ‘judge ourselves
independent of nature’ and ‘regard nature’s might [. . .] as yet not having
such dominance over us, as persons, that we should bow to it if our high-
est principles were at stake’. In parallel fashion, teleological judgements
of reflection involve ‘regarding [nature’s] product as if it had come about
through a causality that only reason can have’.18
If we did not judge in terms of final purposes, we would be unable to
explain the specific character of those of nature’s products that appear to
us as organized beings. More specifically, we would be unable to account
for the three key features of an organism, summed up by John Zammito
as ‘reproduction, internal growth and development, and reciprocal inter-
dependence of parts’.19 The first two of these features—the continued
life of the organism considered both as a species and as an individual
being—depend on the third. For a product of nature to be seen as an
organized being and hence a natural purpose, the parts must reciprocally
determine one another to form the kind of whole in which a judging
subject can discern an underlying concept, one that could have been the
cause of this particular body being created as it was (CJ 252 [5:373]).
Nonetheless, because experience provides neither direct observation
of natural purposes nor proof that mechanism alone could not possibly
be sufficient to produce the kinds of beings that we cognize as natural
purposes, we cannot prove that such things necessarily are natural pur-
poses (CJ 280–283 [5:398–400]): all that can be shown is that we human
beings, given our specific cognitive faculties and (crucially) their limits,
have to think of certain products of nature as natural purposes so as to
be able to make sense of them. The concept of a natural purpose lacks the
objective basis needed for determinative judgement; it is not constitutive
but ‘merely regulative for reflective judgment’ (CJ 278 [5:396]), forming
the basis for a subjective principle (or maxim) that guides our enquiries
into nature and its empirical laws.
From the fact that Kant describes natural purposes as not just organ-
ized but crucially ‘self-organizing’ (CJ 253 [5:374]), we should not con-
clude that he is breaking with a hylomorphic frame by allowing for the
possibility of self-organizing matter. On the contrary, running through
his account of teleological judgement (and his rejection of hylozoism) is
a repeated emphasis on the essentially inert and lifeless nature of matter:
‘we cannot even think of living matter [. . .] as possible. (The [very] con-
cept of it involves a contradiction, since the essential character of matter
is lifelessness, inertia.)’20 So confident is Kant that to conceive of matter is
to conceive of ‘lifeless material’ that even when ‘we speak of nature as if
the purposiveness in it were intentional’, there cannot really be any room
for misunderstanding: it is clear that this is just ‘a method’ for investigat-
ing nature, for ‘no one would attribute to lifeless material an intention
in the proper sense of the term’. To turn nature into ‘an intelligent being
[. . .] would be absurd’ (CJ 263 [5:383]).
Indeed, it is because matter is thus conceived that, according to Kant,
we have to supplement the laws of nature understood in terms of mechan-
ical causality with a reflective principle that judges in terms of final pur-
poses. On this approach, either nature is dead matter that operates like a
‘mere machine’ (CJ 253, 269 [5:374, 388]), or, if it is living and organic,
the formative force that makes it such inheres in the imputed purpose
that is thought of as acting as the cause of the organism’s form and exist-
ence and not in the bare matter that is formed into an organism by that
cause. Thus, Kant praises Blumenbach for declaring it ‘contrary to reason
[. . .] that matter could have molded itself on its own into the form of a
self-preserving purposiveness’ (CJ 311 [5:424]).
The gendered implications of this parsing of nature between mechanical
and teleological principles become clear in one of Kant’s more dramatic
152 Rachel Jones
examples. In a section discussing the scientific advantages of attempt-
ing to extend merely mechanical principles as far as possible, Kant dis-
cusses a ‘daring adventure of reason’ in which ‘mother earth’ is imagined
‘emerg[ing] from her state of chaos’ and giving birth to creatures that
evolve in ever more purposive forms, until eventually nature’s ‘womb’
ossifies and ‘confine[s] itself to bearing definite species that would no
longer degenerate’. Such an imaginative exercise remains rational in that
it does not conceive of organic life emerging from ‘the mechanics of crude,
unorganized matter’ (Kant is as clear as Hegel that such a possibility is
‘absurd’). Nonetheless, Kant notes, this daring hypothesis is only con-
vincing to the extent that it has already smuggled in a reference to final
causes, both by conceiving of this ‘universal mother’ as herself a natural
purpose (as something like ‘a large animal’) and by implicitly attributing
to her ‘an organization that purposively aimed at all these creatures’,
whose own organization would otherwise remain just as inexplicable as
without this adventurous tale (CJ 304–305 [5:419–420]).
For Kant, this thought experiment confirms his view that it is the limits
of our (distinctively human) cognitive capacities that mean we have to
presuppose that nature operates according to final purposes as a regula-
tive principle for judgement. It also shows, though, how a female body
that births becomes split between merely mechanical and organic nature,
operating as a hinge between the two. When ‘the archaeologist of nature’
(CJ 304 [5:419]) wants to see how far he can progress by extending the
principle of natural mechanism, it is to a figure of ‘mother earth’ that he
turns, in ways that perversely align the female body that brings new life
into the world with ‘dead’ matter that operates like a machine. Insofar
as this body also instantiates the essential capacity of a living organism
to reproduce itself, it can do so only because of a productive power that
belongs not to its materiality but to the underlying organizing principle
or ‘natural purpose’ that determines both that body’s own form and the
form of its offspring.21 Just as Metis disappears behind the image of Min-
erva’s paternal birth, so Kant’s hylomorphic account of nature depends
on the constitutive exclusion of a generative maternal body, capable of
giving form to matter through its own corporeal rhythms. As Zammito
sums up, ‘at the origin, there must be some form of causality which is
not material and which then persists and governs the whole process of
reproduction and variation across time’.22
Nonetheless, this natural purposiveness remains ultimately ‘inscruta-
ble’ (CJ 254, 311 [5:374, 424]): analogous neither to life (for then we
would succumb to the contradictory idea of a ‘living matter’) nor to a
soul conjoined with matter (for then the generative power would no
longer belong to nature at all, and its products would be the artistic crea-
tions of some ‘alien principle’, CJ 254 [5:375]). It is thinkable only by
analogy with our own reason, the only kind of cause we know ‘whose
ability to act is determined by concepts’. While this reason is in principle
universal, in practice, things are not so clear cut. Ironically, the reasons
for this are tied to Kant’s own use of teleological judgement in his theo-
ries about both race and the role of the sexes in reproduction.
In the former, Kant appeals to epigenesis to support the division of
human beings into four races based on skin colour.23 As others have
argued in detail,24 this version of what Fanon will later call an ‘epider-
mal racial schema’25 played a key role in the development of the modern
concept of race while reinforcing the racism that takes whiteness as the
(unmarked) mark of humanity (as given away by Kant’s closing com-
ment in his 1785 essay, which notes that ‘even the character of the whites
[selbst der Charakter der Weissen] is only the development of one of
the original predispositions’ that characterize the species).26 For Kant,
humanity finds its fullest expression in the moral autonomy that makes
of man a purpose as the being who is able to determine his own purposes.
His repeated rehearsals of colonial commonplaces about the indigence
of the Negro and the American Indians thus imply that these ‘primitive
people’ lack the industry required not only to develop the land but to
cultivate the purposive thinking that in the end makes both morality and
self-determination possible.27 The type of causality that, in teleological
judgements, ‘we’ project onto nature by analogy with ‘our’ own reason
turns out to be instantiated in a typically white, European subject.
Moreover, because of Kant’s account of reproduction, that reason is
ideally male. In the brief description given in the third Critique, Kant
doubles down on the teleological point of view by suggesting that repro-
duction is the only case in nature where extrinsic purposiveness (where
one thing serves another as a means to an end) is connected with the
intrinsic purposiveness of the organism. Not only are male and female
creatures each organized so as to propagate the species, but together they
amount to ‘an organizing whole, even if not to an organized whole in a
single body’ (CJ 312–313 [5:425]). As in any organic whole, the fact that
the two sexes can be thought of as parts that exist ‘as a result of’ and ‘for
the sake of’ each other does not mean they perform the same functions.
As Kant comments in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,
as a member of the female sex, woman’s natural purpose is to give birth.
To help fulfil this goal, nature has ‘implanted’ in woman a fear ‘of physi-
cal injury and timidity before similar dangers’.28 While such fear will help
her fulfil her natural purpose, it also ties her more closely to material
nature (her own, and that which might threaten her and her offspring).
As Christine Battersby argues, it therefore blocks her from fully develop-
ing her moral capacity to determine herself through reason alone, which
would require her to overcome ‘nature within us, and thereby also [. . .]
nature outside us (as far as it influences us)’.29 Thus it becomes clear
that the self-determining reason which sees itself reflected by analogy in
nature’s purposes is ideally male, or at least detached from woman inso-
far as she is a member of the female sex.
154 Rachel Jones
In his essay ‘On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy’, Kant
refers to a ‘not exactly unmanly’ fear that reason might get ‘unhitched’
from first principles and ‘wander about in unbounded imaginings’.30 The
third Critique suggests that one of those imaginings is of a ‘common
original mother’ (CJ 304 [5:418]). Woman’s (natural) fear of nature is
thereby matched by an archetypally white, male subject’s (reasonable)
fear of a generative materiality that might disrupt the possibility of seeing
nature as a reflection of (his own) rational causality. Such a fear seems to
haunt Hegel’s thinking, too, along with the gendered hylomorphism that
Stone so helpfully traces. The distinctions between form and matter that
run through Kant’s philosophy,31 and whose gendering shows up particu-
larly clearly in his account of teleological judgement, coalesce in Hegel’s
distinction between the material and the conceptual sides of nature and
the symbolic association of the former with the female and the latter
with the male.32 Considered as matter, nature is an ‘impotence’ whose
individual shapes lack a concept of themselves; its differentiation thus
depends on its existence as externalized Idea, and the extent to which
it becomes ‘concept-permeated’.33 Thus, as Stone notes, ‘[g]iven Hegel’s
sexual symbolism, the process that he narrates in his philosophy of
nature—whereby the concept re-emerges from matter and progressively
remodels matter in its own image—amounts to a progressive mastery of
the female by the male’ (MF 212).
In some ways, Hegel can be read as extending the patterns of gendered
hylomorphism we find in Kant. For both thinkers, nature as a whole
is represented by another ancient goddess, Isis. But whereas for Kant,
reason would be emasculated by ‘lift[ing] the veil’ that conceals Isis, as
the symbolic representative of unconditioned or noumenal nature,34 for
Hegel, the inscription that forbids this act of unveiling ‘melts away before
thought’ (PN §246A, p. 10). As Stone shows in detail, the permeation of
matter by concepts extends through the whole of nature at every stage
of its unfolding, as does the gendering of this process. Thus, in Hegel’s
account of reproduction, it is the female who contributes the necessary
material elements, while the male contributes the seed that contains ‘sub-
jectivity’ and represents individuation.35 In other words, because of the
underlying mapping of the male with conceptual form and the female
with (in itself undifferentiated) matter, woman has always already been
denied any properly formative role in birth (Metis has always already
been absorbed and her generative capacities expropriated). The female
body is destined to a merely re-productive role that consists in material-
izing the differentiating forms provided solely by the male.
Crucially, as Stone explains, reproduction is conceived by Hegel ‘in
metaphysical rather than narrowly biological terms, as the process of
resolving the difference between individual and species (Gattung) by
producing a third in whom this difference is—temporarily, imperfectly—
overcome’. Male and female animals do not ‘play different roles in
reproduction because they have different anatomies’ (MF 218). Rather,
there must be different anatomies so as to fulfil the necessarily different
roles required by reproduction. As the latter is designed to resolve the
tension between identity and difference as well as between individual
and species, one of the animals involved must relate to its offspring ‘as to
something that is other to or different from it’, while the other will relate
to it as ‘something identical with them’ (MF 218).
Given Hegel’s alignment of the male with the conceptual, it follows
that those whose reproductive role is to relate to their offspring as some-
thing different to themselves—and hence, as individuated—will develop
the male anatomy, characterized by external genitalia, that produces (and
expels) the semen that bestows singularity and subjectivity. Equally, given
the symbolic alignment of the female with matter, it is logical that it is
female anatomy that should develop so as to allow their offspring to be
enclosed ‘within their own bodies, as part of their own bodily processes’,
in ‘an undifferentiated unity’ (MF 219). As Stone notes, Hegel extends
this corporeal lack of differentiation to suggest that mother and child also
exist in a state of ‘self/other fusion’ in which ‘no firm psychical boundary
demarcates the sensations of the mother from those of the child’.36
These differences between the sexes translate into the next level, as
nature is spiritualized to become culture. Again, as Stone carefully points
out, just as the differing reproductive roles of male and female do not
spring from their differing anatomies, so anatomical sex difference does
not determine men’s and women’s differing social roles. Rather, meta-
physically necessary differences in both reproductive roles and social
structures play out in gendered forms that follow from the underlying
association of matter with female and concept with male.37 Thus, the
image of the reproductive female body as existing in a relatively undif-
ferentiated unity with others translates into women’s social role as guard-
ians of family life: a role to which they are suited ‘because their bodies
and psyches are organized by the same principle of “immediate unity”
that regulates the family’.38 In contrast, the alignment of the male with
individuation means that men are more suited to emerging from immer-
sion within the family to become individuated subjects within the civil
sphere, where they learn to subordinate both individual desires and
familial bonds to the higher universal of community.
In this way, the development of civil society involves the appropriation
and subordination of women in ways that directly mirror the increasing
permeation of matter by the concept in the unfolding of nature:
the progression of male citizens beyond the family and their entrance
into spheres of economic and political life from which they exercise
jurisdiction over the family represent a culminating stage in this pro-
gressive domination of (female) matter by (male) mind.
(MF 212–213)
156 Rachel Jones
As Stone shows, Hegel’s account of organic life translates into an organic
model of the state that not only naturalizes women’s relegation to the
family but makes such socio-political subordination metaphysically nec-
essary.39 In light of these patterns, in which a gendered hylomorphism
forecloses the possibility of a generative maternal corporeality and
undergirds the social subordination of women to men, it becomes clear
why the thought of a third principle, somewhere in between mechanism
and teleology, might hold feminist appeal, particularly if such a principle
were capable of schematizing relations between the sexes in non-organic,
and therefore non-reproductive, terms. In the next section, I will out-
line Hegel’s principle of chemism in more detail, drawing on Banham to
examine its feminist potential.
2. Between Mechanism and Teleology: Chemism as

Connective Principle
In Hegel’s account of chemism, ‘chemical’ objects are differentiated by
what they are oriented towards (as John Burbidge notes in his defini-
tive study, without being differentiated, they would not exist as objects;
without that differentiation being determined by what they are oriented
towards, they would not be chemical objects).40 This orientation is char-
acterized by Hegel in terms of the way the objects are ‘tensed against one
another’, a relationship he calls their ‘affinity’,41 drawing on a concept
which—due in large part to Goethe—already had an established usage
bridging human and chemical relations.42 What allows chemical objects
to realize their affinity is a third, mediating element; however, because
we are here dealing with a logical (and, following Houlgate, ontological)
principle of relations, and not merely the descriptive principles of a physi-
cal science, the meditating element can be the sexual relation or language
as well as water or air.43 As Burbidge notes, this mediating element ‘reaf-
firms the separate existence of the two objects, since unity comes from
somewhere else’. At the same time, by facilitating this unity as ‘the two
objects are brought together in this common element’, the difference or
‘tension’ between them is dissolved ‘and they achieve some kind of peace-
ful co-existence’ (RP 84). Nonetheless, as Burbidge also emphasizes, by
fulfilling its necessary role, the connecting element has ‘done too much’:
in being united, the originally differentiated chemical objects lose their
differentiated character; their affinity is realized, but their active orien-
tation towards one another is also exhausted.44 The original chemical
objects are dissolved, their difference ‘cancelled’: ‘The tension, which was
their productive capacity, has disappeared’ (RP 86).
Nonetheless, if the chemical process as it realized itself in these original
objects is ‘exhausted’, the product of this process becomes the basis for
a new incarnation of the chemical, as it in turn can now be de-composed
into separate elements, thereby reintroducing the difference required for
a properly ‘chemical’ relation. These elements in their turn become the
basis of a third form of the chemical relation, for while they are indiffer-
ent to one another insofar as ‘[w]hat makes one distinctive has nothing
to do with any of the others’, as elements that ‘divide themselves between
one object and another’ they introduce tensions and distinctions between
those objects (RP 90–91). In this way, we ‘have come full circle’ and
are returned to the tensions and affinities between chemical objects with
which we started (RP 91).
As Burbidge makes clear, this ‘circle’ does not yet form a self-determining
whole (in other words, has not yet attained the form of the organic), for
there is no necessary relation between each of the three stages sketched
previously. At the end of the first stage, ‘[t]he process does not spontane-
ously re-kindle itself’, Hegel notes.45 As Burbidge elaborates, if the neu-
tral product of the first process ‘turns out to be differentiated from other
objects, and subject to other combinations, that would not follow from
the first process on its own. Nor does it require that a consuming activity
break it up into its elements’ (RP 93). Likewise, the differences between
the elements that result from the decomposition of the neutral product
of the first process do not necessarily match those between the chemical
objects with which that process began (RP 94). The interrelated pattern
formed by the three moments of the chemical relation is suggestive of the
purposive whole of organic form but as yet lacks its self-determining and
reproductive character. Instead, there remains a fundamental discontinu-
ity at each stage.
The three stages of chemism outlined previously are simultaneously
logical forms of judgement, which can be encapsulated in distinctive
syllogisms (RP 83–91), and ontological or metaphysical forms, which
articulate the types of relation that structure different modes of being. As
Cinzia Ferrini notes, once it is translated into the realm of chemistry in
Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, the broken circle of chemism will mani-
fest itself in the way that ‘the chemical process [. . .] depends on exter-
nally given circumstances and so does not “return into” itself: it does not
renew and reproduce itself of its own accord’.46 Once a chemical process
is completed, ‘further activity ceases, unless external factors cause a new
process to begin’. As Ferrini continues:
The beginning and end of the chemical process thus fall apart, in the
sense that the end of the process does not of itself lead back to the
beginning and initiate the process once more. In this respect, chemi-
cal processes fall short of what is required for life.47
In so doing, however, they also reveal that reproduction is a necessary

condition of life, which requires not only that the purposive organiza-
tion that sustains a specific kind of organism can be reproduced across
each individual life but that it can be transmitted to future generations
158 Rachel Jones
through sexual reproduction. Nonetheless, as the image of Minerva is
supposed to remind us, organic life does not evolve naturally from the
chemical process, which instead ‘points forward logically to life’ in a
transition ‘that hinges on conceptual inner necessity, not a natural one in
which chemical processes actually give rise to living organisms at specific
points in time’.48 While particular living beings grow and change, the
form of the organic fully informs them from the start, and it is in this
sense that they can be said to spring forth, like Minerva, fully formed.
Despite its clearly transitional status for Hegel, as a stage along the way
to the organic, Banham’s description of chemism illuminates its potential
appeal for feminist thinking in at least three ways. The first is found in
his emphasis on chemism as a principle of interconnection through a
common medium. Chemism is at work, he notes, ‘wherever we find dis-
tinct bodies or parts thereof in a common element which is their medium
of communication’ (CEC 166). Given that chemism is not simply elimi-
nated by the teleological principles through which we understand organic
life but sublated within it, Banham suggests that chemism leads to a con-
ception of both reason and life as incomprehensible ‘except through the
postulation of mediums of connection’ (CEC 176). This emphasis on a
‘transcendental principle of enabling and connecting’ (CEC 167) reso-
nates with the turn in recent feminist philosophy away from the atomis-
tic individual and towards the role of relation and connectedness in the
constitution of individuated beings.
Second, by foregrounding Hegel’s emphasis on the role of the medium
of connection, Banham also helps us to see why this mode of thinking
might be of particular interest from an Irigarayan perspective, given Iri-
garay’s own emphasis on the role of a fluid, relational ‘in-between’ in
both the constitution of sexuate subjects and the generation of sexual
difference as non-specular and irreducible difference. Just as, for Hegel,
chemism is the principle that articulates the role of a mediating element in
the material constitution of objects, so, for Irigaray, the elemental speaks
of a fluid materiality that constitutes beings by passing between them in
ways that sustain life and becoming.
Third, Banham draws attention to the ways in which chemism reaches
beyond ‘the possibility of interconnection between basic elements’ (CEC
166) to include the schematization of sexual relations, highlighting Hegel’s
own claim that: ‘In the animate world, the sex relation [das Geschlechts-
verhältnis] comes under this schema and it also constitutes the formal
basis for the spiritual relations of love, friendship and the like’.49 Extrapo-
lating from this, we might understand the ‘chemical’ mode of the sex rela-
tion to express itself in the ‘affinity’ that attracts the sexes to one another
and encourages them to ‘resolve’ the tension between them through the
unifying medium of sexual intercourse. Just as the organic world contin-
ues to obey the laws of mechanism even as it is teleologically organized, so
we can continue to understand it in terms of the relations articulated in the
principle of chemism, even though those relations will be sublated by the
higher principle of organic life through which they find their true meaning.
Thus, the ‘sex relation’ points forward to Hegel’s account of reproduction
while simultaneously holding open the thought of a relation between the
sexes that is not (yet) fully determined by the reproductive imperative. As
noted previously, given the ways in which this imperative has been socially
and politically oppressive for women, such a thought has feminist appeal.
Nonetheless, as it appears within Hegel’s philosophy, the ‘chemical’
affinity between the sexes remains inimical to feminist ends, caught as
it is between a gendered metaphysics and a reproductive telos. On the
one hand, as we have seen via Stone, Hegel’s account of sex difference
emerges in the context of an underlying schema that maps matter onto
female and concept/form onto male. On the other, this very gendering
leads to an account of reproduction in which the necessary matter is
supplied by the female sex while the male contributes the individuating
form. Moreover, within Hegel’s account of the unfolding of nature as
the progressive externalization of the Idea, the ‘dead end’ of the chemi-
cal process points logically ahead to the organic need for reproduction,
while the truth of chemism as a non-reproductive principle is revealed
only from the perspective of that higher (organic, teleological) stage. To
be sublated into that more advanced, reproductive logic, the difference
that creates the ‘chemical’ affinity between the sexes must thus be of a
kind that can be productively taken up, incorporated and transformed.
Happily (or not, depending on one’s perspective), the underlying gen-
dering of Hegel’s conception of matter and form ensures that it is likely
to be so. Within this frame, the ‘chemical’ attraction of the female to the
male can readily be explained by her alignment with a materiality that
seeks to ‘resolve’ itself by becoming ever more concept-permeated, while
the male would naturally be drawn towards a female matter through
which he can further externalize the subjectivity he bears within. Thus,
although in principle we can separate a ‘chemical’ desire from a repro-
ductive logic, even in its non-reproductive form, that desire is always
already structured by a difference that finds its fullest bodily expression
in reproduction. This means, however, that chemism is not only subor-
dinated to the higher, reproductive principle required by life, its non-
reproductive promise is always already permeated by the deeper patterns
of (gendered, hylomorphic) thought that secure the reproductive process.
And thus another constitutive exclusion reveals itself, for here sexual
desire has always already been structured on a heterosexual matrix which
equates sexual attraction with desire between two (male and female)
sexes and excludes the very possibility of same-sex relations, providing
no explanatory model of the tension and attraction that might express
itself in such desire.50 Nonetheless, the non-reproductive relations articu-
lated via the principle of chemism leave open the possibility of desires
that do not spring from the elective affinity of female matter and male
160 Rachel Jones
form. Reading with deliberate perversity, by refusing to look back at
chemical desire from the vantage point of reproduction, we could hold
the inclusive promise of ‘elective affinities’ open to a vast variation of
desiring bodies, allowing for differences of multiple kinds and relations
that encompass not just non-reproductive sex but sex without the pos-
sibility of reproduction. Such a reading would suggest that reproductive
sex (as Hegel conceives it) is dependent on a sublation that amounts to
a violent suppression of a primary mode of desiring attraction, whose
queer forms exceed a reproductive logic.
As should by now be clear, however, for desire to be thus reclaimed,
sex difference needs to be released not just from a reproductive telos
but also from the underlying gendering of the matter/concept relation
that Stone delineates. Despite the ways in which chemism is designed to
supplement Kant’s parsing of matter between dead mechanism and tele-
ological organization, what remains foreclosed in Hegel’s system is the
thought of a generative materiality capable of birthing forms—of bodies,
of relations, of bodies as relations—that are not always already the reflec-
tive product of the Idea. This foreclosure ensures that matter can be fig-
ured not only as that which can be progressively taken up by the forms of
thought but as entirely ‘concept-permeable’ (to use Stone’s phrase). The
contingencies that arise when nature deviates from the externalization
of the Idea—what Elaine Miller calls the ‘erratic birth of misshapen or
monstrous exceptions’51—are signs not of nature’s creativity but matter’s
failure to hold fast to conceptual forms. They result from matter’s ‘Ohn-
macht’, its impotence, which makes nature into the ‘Abfall’ or refuse of
the Idea.52 In ways that echo Kant’s conception of inherently lifeless mat-
ter, nature ‘estranged from the Idea’ is presented by Hegel as ‘only the
corpse of the Understanding’ (PN §247A, p. 14).
The (anti-hylomorphic) thought of a genuinely generative matter—
a matter capable of producing forms that do not reflect a pre-existing
concept or idea—would translate this ‘Ohnmacht’ into a potency that
would disrupt the foundations of Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies.53 Con-
ceding such a possibility would allow both for a conception of birth as
non-teleological and generative rather than merely reproductive,54 and
for the non-reproductive relations of queer sex as a site where unfore-
seen affective and social relations might take shape. In the next section,
I will suggest that Irigaray’s rethinking of birth as just such a generative
maternal-materiality offers a way of breaking with gendered hylomor-
phism and developing an approach to ‘the elemental’ that recovers the
relational, non-reproductive promise of chemism. Just as Metis is hidden
behind Minerva, so Irigaray helps us discern another, shadowy possibil-
ity hidden behind nature’s ‘failure’ to realize the concept: perhaps such
contingencies are the expression of some other logic, some other order of
being, one that does not—for example—divide form so firmly from mat-
ter or map that hierarchy onto a division between the sexes.
3. From Chemism to the Elemental: Recovering a Fluidity
of Difference
In Banham’s exploration of chemism, he foregrounds the way that this
‘third principle’ points ahead to the organic not only by signalling the
need for reproduction but also by revealing death as a necessary part of
life. As we have seen, the unity of parts attained via a mediating chemical
element neutralizes or cancels their difference and hence their individu-
ated existence. The extinction immanent to the chemical process thereby
reveals death as a condition of life:
This peculiar principle is what makes possible the realisation that

individuals work beyond themselves. It ensures that any thought of
purposiveness which does not understand the notion of purpose to
include an aiming of the process beyond the point of any part will
not and cannot in principle understand the conditions of life.
(CEC 168)
Banham suggests that Kant, for one, does not sufficiently appreciate
this insight: because his philosophy ‘works only with principles that are
mechanical or organic,’ Kant ‘does not uncover the importance of death
as a principle of life’ (CEC 168).
Stone’s analysis helps us to see that, for both Hegel and Kant, the for-
getting of birth is also a condition of organic life as they conceive it.55 As
we have seen, this forgetting is manifest both in the reduction of birth to
nothing more than a reproductive function in which the maternal body
supplies only the material elements and in the reduction of the female
to an inert (non-generative) matter that requires permeation by active
male forms. As Irigaray succinctly puts it, ‘You had form, I was mat-
ter for you’.56 If the mediating element of chemism produces a certain
indifference as well as a neutralization of already existing forms, thereby
showing death to be an intrinsic part of life,57 Irigaray can be seen as
flipping the emphasis around to show how a fluid maternal-materiality
generates the differences and relations that allow individuated beings to
emerge, thereby foregrounding the ontological significance of birth.
Throughout her work, Irigaray delineates two different processes of
individuation: the first rooted in unity, identity and constitutive exclu-
sion (which together produce the phallocentric One of the Western
philosophical tradition), the other dependent on a fluid materiality and
an originary, bodily relationality which means that each singular being
emerges together with another from which it is differentiated without
being wholly separable and inseparable without being wholly fused.58
Such singular beings are ‘neither one nor two’;59 rather, their distinct con-
tours depend on a generative matter whose rhythmic flows allow singular
bodies to emerge in relation to one another.
162 Rachel Jones
One key site of this generative materiality is found in Irigaray’s invoca-
tion of a ‘placental economy’.60 This suggestive figure of thought, itself
borrowed from the maternal body, allows Irigaray to develop a concep-
tual register in which to articulate both the generativity of that body and
its capacity to bear otherness within. In so doing, she draws closely on an
interview with embryologist Hélène Rouch, who describes the placenta
as constituting ‘the mediating space between mother and fetus’ and oper-
ating as ‘a system regulating exchanges between the two’, allowing nutri-
ents to flow from mother to fetus while simultaneously ‘modifying the
maternal metabolism’.61 Here we begin to see how Irigaray breaks with
the underlying alignments of the Hegelian frame. By thinking in terms
of a placental economy, she displaces the image of a mediating element
that neutralizes differences and instead presents it as allowing difference
to be sustained within a birthing body. Equally, gestation is here figured
as neither fusion nor mere indistinction but as a mediated, fluid relation
more akin to a continuous negotiation.
We might pause here to recall the image of Minerva, whose armour in
one version of the myth is not inherited from her father’s warlike qualities
but wisely made by her mother, who remains ‘hidden beneath the inward
parts of Zeus’.62 The image of Metis protectively arming her daughter
before she is born suggests a maternal relation that is far from undiffer-
entiated fusion, hidden within the male body by which it is swallowed
up.63 Reclaimed as a myth of Metis-Minerva, Hegel’s image carries with
it a certain excess, a feminine remainder that cannot quite be absorbed
by the matricidal logic that erases the significance of female specificity,
mother-daughter genealogies64 and birth.
On Irigaray’s somewhat gentler recuperation, the maternal relation
involves an always already regulatory spacing as well as the temporal
rhythms that allow one bodily being to emerge within another without
simply belonging to either:65
Neither permanently fixed, nor shifting and fickle. Nothing solid sur-
vives, yet that thickness responding to its own rhythms is not noth-
ing. Quickening in movements both expected and unexpected. Your
space, your time are unable to grasp their regularity or contain their
foldings and unfoldings.66
This generative space-time refuses the severance of form and matter. It is

not quite that a female materiality is now thought as active and formative
rather than passive and formless. Rather, new forms emerge from the fluid
movements of a matter that is distinctively but not determinately sexu-
ate (for the placenta is shared between the fetus and the maternal body,
which need not also share the same sex). While these movements are cer-
tainly generative, they do not involve the active imposition of form upon
inherently undifferentiated matter. In keeping with Irigaray’s increasing
emphasis on the importance of the middle voice in ancient Greek,67 the
fluidly generative movements of the placental economy are not only a
spatio-temporal ‘relation-between’,68 shared between mother and fetus,
but also in between active and passive, refusing this very opposition.
In this way, Irigaray breaks with the gendered hylomorphism that
Stone shows to characterize Hegel’s thinking. On Irigaray’s account,
maternal matter is inherently form-giving, in ways that depend on a gen-
erative, elemental materiality that is manifest in the placental relation but
that extends well beyond the human bodies and forms that are consti-
tuted by it. Thus, in The Forgetting of Air, Irigaray explores the depend-
ence of human being(s) on a fluid materiality that refuses to operate as
either solid ground or a passively absorptive container. Insofar as its life-
sustaining powers depend on its capacity to flow through and between
bodies (both as the oxygen passed between mother and fetus and as the
breath that passes in and out of each body once born), air destabilizes the
closed forms that depend on clear-cut boundaries between self and other,
organic and inorganic, life and matter:
No gap, breach, spacing or distancing is possible between the living

organism and the blood that has always already nourished it, includ-
ing with oxygen. Nor is there any more of a gap between it and the
ambient air it continuously breathes once born.69
Just as Hegel binds conceptual and ontological forms together, air con-
founds material, spatial and conceptual boundaries simultaneously, as
‘space prior to all localization, and a substratum both immobile and
mobile, permanent and flowing’.70 In her other work, Irigaray shows
how this generative, elemental materiality is found in water, mucous and
amniotic fluids.71 At the same time, reclaiming the fluidity of matter as air
also makes possible a return to the earth which sees its manifold matters
as sites of becoming, rather than freezing them into deathly solidity.
Irigaray’s exploration of elemental materialities renders that which
passes (and allows passage) between beings ontologically primary. The
space-time produced by such generative matters is shared inseparably
between beings even as it is the condition of the relations that differenti-
ate them. The ‘modest back-and-forth motion’ found in both the pla-
cental flow between mother and embryo and the flow of breath in and
out of those already born thus constitutes ‘the groundless ground of the
relation-between’.72 Yet because differentiated forms here emerge from
the fluid but rhythmic movements of a generative matter—and do not
depend on the permeation of matter by concepts—when already differen-
tiated entities are drawn together through a common medium, they need
not be united in such a way that their differences are necessarily can-
celled or dissolved. Rather, as it is only through phusis as ‘fluid medium’
that their differences first emerge,73 this medium can allow for continued
164 Rachel Jones
passage between them while sustaining their differences, rather than neu-
tralizing them into indifference.
In this way, while Irigaray’s appeal to the elemental more obviously
references the ancient Greek notion of the elements, she can also be read
as re-thinking the constitutive connective medium that Hegel approaches
via the concept of chemism from a perspective inflected by sexual differ-
ence and birth. By refusing the alignment of the female with matter and
the male with form and instead thinking maternal matter as itself both
en-forming and differentiating, the ‘affinity’ that animates the relation
between the sexes need no longer be understood as arising from a female
animality seeking to allow its own undifferentiated materiality to be pen-
etrated by a male, form-giving force. And because difference is sustained
by a mediating element that no longer simply absorbs and neutralizes, the
sexual relation is permitted to be generative in and of itself, rather than
finding its telos in the production of a child as an external third term. As
Irigaray writes in her retelling of Diotima’s teaching from Plato’s Sym-
posium: ‘Love [eros] is fecund prior to any procreation. [. . .] Diotima
returns to a progression that admits love as it had been defined before she
evoked procreation: as an intermediate terrain, a mediator, a space-time
of permanent passage’.74
Despite this non-reproductive model of desire and sexual difference,
it remains the case that in Irigaray’s explicit response to Hegel, par-
ticularly as formulated in i love to you, her own thinking seems to get
trapped back into a dualistic frame in which sexuate difference is figured
in terms of ‘being (as) two’ and desire is most fully realized between
women and men. This troubling reinstatement of a heterosexual norm
can be avoided, I want to suggest, if, instead of following the contours
of Irigaray’s explicit response to Hegel, we read her account of the pla-
cental and the elemental back through Hegel’s chemism, as I have tried
to do here. Such a reading gives ontological priority to a fluid, genera-
tive materiality that is able to pass between and sustain a multiplicity of
bodily beings that are neither one nor two, producing forms that are dis-
tinctively yet not determinately sexuate (insofar as they easily exceed our
clumsy conceptual distinctions between male, female, intersex or trans-),
and sparking desires that refuse to be contained by a heterosexual or
reproductive frame.
If we look again, we see that the myth of Metis-Minerva was already
pointing us in this direction: given that Metis is consumed whole by
Jupiter/Zeus, his capacity to give birth is at least partly a result of absorb-
ing a feminine, maternal matter, making this archetypal virile body rather
less exclusively male than it might appear. If sexuate difference itself is
both natural and universal, as Irigaray suggests, in the account I have
sought to develop here, what is natural and universal is a fluidity of dif-
ference that—as ‘[a]lways at least two’—remains irreducible to either ‘a
multiple of the one’ or a duality of only two.75
Before leaving Hegel’s chemism behind, it is worth turning to the
role of indifference one last time. While clearly at odds with Irigaray’s
thought of sexual difference as irreducible and ontological difference,
pausing with indifference might nonetheless help to draw out another
crucial dimension of elemental materiality as Irigaray conceives it. The
reason that the elements separated out in the second stage of chemism
can, in the third, divide themselves between objects and thus differenti-
ate them is, in Hegel’s account, because those elements are themselves
‘indifferent’ to each other (RP 90). In order to give themselves something
through which they can enter into relation, they divide themselves into
different objects, thereby engendering the tension between objects that
initiates the first stage of the chemical process. We might translate this
‘indifference’ of basic elements into the non-sexuate nature of elemental
materialities—air, water, fire, earth—that allows them to pass between
differently sexuate bodies without collapsing them into one, participating
each time in a becoming-sexuate while remaining open to other deter-
minations. Indeed, just as chemism stands between the dead matter of
mechanism and organic life, so the elemental materialities can be seen to
retain an ambiguous position within Irigaray’s thought. If sexual differ-
ence ‘cuts across all realms of the living’,76 then the non-sexuate material-
ity of the elements is not straightforwardly part of living nature (phusis)
even as it is necessary to all living (and thus sexuate) beings, sharing
constitutively in their existence.
Because Irigaray concentrates (with good reason but some problematic
effects) on the ways in which rethinking matter is essential to recovering
sexuate difference, her invocation of the elements often works to recall
a fluidly sexuate, maternal matter, as in the way la mer doubles as la
mère and air is linked to the vital breath of the mother. She also tends
to problematically reinforce a constitutive division between human and
animal life.77 Reading Irigaray together with Hegel on chemism helps to
bring out more strongly the ways in which her concept of the elemental
provides an opening onto the multiple dependencies of sexuate, human
beings on non-sexuate, non-human matters.
Conclusion
If Irigaray would be suspicious of Hegel’s invocation of Minerva-Athena,
as a mode of femininity already too well assimilated to the ‘Father-King’,78
it is in the chemical relations that Minerva’s organicism supplants that
she might find the traces of a different logic of being. In this chapter,
I have suggested that these traces emerge most clearly when we begin
to discern the buried figure of Metis, springing her free from the projec-
tions of a reproductive logic to allow for the resistant metamorphoses
of a m aternal-materiality whose queerly generative fluidity refuses to be
contained by the bounds of organic form.79 If we can turn back through
166 Rachel Jones
Minerva towards the generative figure of Metis, then with Irigaray’s
help, we can also turn back through chemism to find an alternative way
of articulating both the form/matter relation and sexual difference. On
Irigaray’s approach, Hegel’s account of a connective chemical medium
becomes an elemental materiality that is disclosed by birth but no longer
governed by a reproductive logic, constituting instead the elemental con-
dition of difference and bodily becoming.
The reading I have proposed does a certain violence to Hegel’s text
as well as the internal logic of his system. Chemism is as fully enfolded
in the dialectical unfolding of the Idea as woman is enfolded within the
dialectical development of society. In the approach offered here, I have
drawn on both Irigaray and Stone to deliberately disrupt the internal
logic of chemism by reading with certain feminist commitments in
mind. This disruption was not, therefore, entirely arbitrary, insofar as
it involved foregrounding that which has been constitutively repressed,
both in Hegel’s thought specifically and the Western philosophical tra-
dition more generally: namely sexual difference, femaleness and birth,
understood in terms of a generative, non-teleological materiality capable
of producing forms relationally, through its own fluid movements. At the
same time, my reading has also been somewhat unfaithful to Irigaray.
I have suggested that in her own response to Hegel, Irigaray’s thinking
problematically re-prioritizes heterosexual relations along with a mode
of ‘being two’ that closes down the more radically fluid relational ontol-
ogy that appears elsewhere in her work. By reading chemism together
with Irigaray, a version of her account of sexuate difference emerges that
is both more attentive to the imbrication of human life with the non-
human and inorganic, and more hospitable to a fluidity of differences.
Finally, despite the importance of both Hegel and Irigaray to the
approach taken here, as well as the crucial work of Alison Stone, this
reading is most directly indebted to Gary Banham’s exploration of
chemism as ‘the revelation of life as dependent on conditions of com-
munity’ (CEC 175). Without that text, this one would never have been
written. I hope that in its own way it pays tribute to those forms of con-
nection to which Banham draws our attention and without which, as he
notes, ‘there could be no relations of friendship or love’ (CEC 174)—or,
for that matter, of shared philosophical endeavour.
Notes
1 Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2004), §249, p. 20. The following abbreviations have been
used: CEC = Gary Banham, ‘Chemism, Epigenesis and Community’, in
Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 165–179;
CJ = Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indian-
apolis: Hackett, 1987); MF = Alison Stone, ‘Matter and Form: Hegel, Organ-
icism and the Difference Between Women and Men’, in Hegel’s Philosophy
and Feminist Thought, ed. Kimberly Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen (New
York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 211–232; PN = Hegel’s
Philosophy of Nature; RP = John W. Burbidge, Real Process: How Logic and
Chemistry Combine in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1996). Citations of Kant’s works also provide the volume and
page number of the Akademie edition between brackets.
2 PN §339, p. 284.
3 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), vol. 1, 46.
4 Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1967), 13.
5 For an extended reading of the myth of Metis, which also draws on Irigaray,
though in a more psychoanalytic vein, see Amber Jacobs’s excellent On Matri-
cide: Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007). Jacobs argues that the incorporation-appropriation
of Metis functions as the necessary (and necessarily disavowed) condition of
a fantasy of paternal generative omnipotence.
6 See, for example, PN §250, p. 22: ‘as Nature, it [the Idea] is external to itself’.
7 Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Human-
ities Press, 1989), 727 [§1580].
8 Here I follow Stephen Houlgate, who emphasizes that logical or concep-
tual forms are not ‘merely’ forms of thought for Hegel but at the same time
the forms of being. See Houlgate, ‘Logic and Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy:
A Response to John W. Burbidge’, The Owl of Minerva, 34 (1) (2002–2003),
107–125, at 109.
9 MF 212, 224–225. For an illuminating parallel reading of the way that
Hegel’s mature philosophy involves ‘the sacrifice of nature as a whole for
the sake of spirit’, see Elaine Miller, The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy
of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002),
125. While Stone’s focus on matter and form is particularly helpful for my
argument here, my approach is also informed by Miller’s hermeneutic strat-
egy of reading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German thought for ‘the
non-obvious places in which misogyny is concealed’ while also ‘delving’ for
‘productive possibilities for feminist philosophy’ (17).
10 Hegel, The Science of Logic, 727 [§1580].
11 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 214–226.
12 Cinzia Ferrini, ‘The Transition to Organics: Hegel’s Idea of Life’, in A Com-
panion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (Oxford: Black-
well, 2011), 208.
13 I am leaving aside the larger issue of the relation of Hegel’s Logic to his Phi-
losophy of Nature. For key discussions, with particular reference to chemism,
see John W. Burbidge’s definitive study (RP) and Houlgate’s response (‘Logic
and Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy’). See also Stone’s defence of ‘strong a pri-
orism’ in Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy (New York:
SUNY Press, 2005).
14 Banham, Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics, 9.
15 See Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity (New York: SUNY Press, 1987).
16 For a classic analysis of the way in which this pattern of thinking permeates
Western philosophy, see Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason (London and
New York: Routledge, 1993).
17 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 112.
18 CJ 120–121, 248 [5:261–262, 370], my emphases.
19 John Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1992), 218; see CJ 249–250 [5:371–372].
168 Rachel Jones
20 CJ 276 [5:394]; see also 254, 311 [5:374, 424].
21 This view is reinforced by Kant’s account of epigenesis in which the variations
that occur in later generations (or in response to differing environmental con-
ditions) must be seen as realizing a potential already latent in the ‘purposive
predispositions’ that preserve the species as a kind; see CJ 306, 309 [5:420,
423]. While my approach takes its lead from Banham, here I diverge some-
what from the direction of his analysis. By reading Hegel back into Kant’s
account of epigenesis, Banham sees the latter as a chemical moment already
implicit in Kant’s thought, signalling the dependence of organic life on inter-
connectedness (CEC 171–175). Turning this around, my reading places the
emphasis more on the ways in which, by taking up ‘connectedness’ within
an organic model, epigenesis prefigures the sublation of chemism into the
organic in Hegel’s thought.
22 Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, 217, my emphasis.
23 See ‘Of the Different Races of Human Beings’ [1775], ‘Determination of the
Concept of a Human Race’ [1785], and ‘On the Use of Teleological Principles
in Philosophy’ [1788], in Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Edu-
cation, ed. Günther Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge
24 See, for example, Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Dif-
ference (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Robert Bernasconi, ‘Who Invented
the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of
Race’, in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Emma-
nuel Chukwudi Eze, ‘The Color of Reason: The Idea of “Race” in Kant’s
Anthropology’, in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, ed.
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
25 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York:
Grove Press, 2008), 92.
26 Kant, ‘Determination of the Concept of a Human Race’, 159 [8:106]; my
emphasis. On the ways in which Hegel’s philosophy of nature also reinforces
racialized hierarchies, see Miller, The Vegetative Soul, 126.
27 CJ 259 [5:379]; see also ‘On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy’,
209 [8:174].
28 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, in Anthro-
pology, History, and Education, 402 [7:306].
29 CJ 123 [5:264]; see Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference,
62–63.
30 Kant, ‘On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy’, 215 [8:180].
31 This distinction structures Kant’s conception of mechanical nature too, inso-
far as the understanding is ‘the lawgiver of nature’ (Critique of Pure Reason,
A126–127) and determines its form through the a priori categories, thereby
organizing the sensible matter of intuition into recognizable objects.
32 MF 224–226. Hegel does sometimes figure Nature as male, as in the image
of Proteus in PN §§244, 246, pp. 3, 9. However, insofar as what is at stake
in this image is nature’s capacity to change form (its ‘transformations’, §244,
p. 3), it still fits the deep gendering whereby the production of form is sym-
bolized as male, while the material side of nature is symbolically female.
33 PN §§248, 250, pp. 17, 23–24; MF 224–225.
34 Immanuel Kant, ‘On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority in Philoso-
phy’, in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, ed. Henry E. Allison and Peter
Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 439–440 [8:399–
400]; see also CJ 185n [5:316n], and Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and
Human Difference, 88–99.
35 MF 227; see also PN §368, pp. 413–414. The seed/semen in Hegel’s account
is thus akin to the ‘Keim’ that carries the formative principle in Kant’s account
of the epigenetic formation of species and races; ‘Of the Different Races of
Human Beings’, 89 [2:434].
36 MF 220, my emphasis.
37 ‘If Hegel is an essentialist with respect to sex, he is a metaphysical rather than
a biological essentialist’ (MF 222).
38 MF 221, my emphasis.
39 Stone thereby reinforces the work of other feminist thinkers who have argued
that on Hegel’s approach, woman constitutes a resource of natural or spir-
itualized matter for an archetypally male subject; see Irigaray, Speculum,
214–226, and Lloyd, The Man of Reason, 71–93.
40 RP 80–81.
42 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1809] 1978); see also Isabelle Stengers, ‘Ambigu-
ous Affinity: The Newtonian Dream of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century’,
in A History of Scientific Thought, ed. Michel Serres (Oxford: Blackwell,
1995), 372–400.
43 Hegel, The Science of Logic, 727–729 [§§1580, 1583].
44 RP 85; see also Hegel, The Science of Logic, 729 [§§1584–1585].
45 Ibid., 730 [§1586].
46 Ferrini, ‘The Transition to Organics’, 207; see also 211: ‘chemicals, unlike
organisms, neither reproduce themselves through their own activity, nor con-
serve themselves in a state of functional activity, nor do they have the capacity
of adapting themselves to an indefinite number of changing circumstances’.
47 Ibid., 208. See also Hegel, The Science of Logic, 732 [§1591].
48 Ibid., 214, my emphasis; 203. On Hegel’s hostility towards evolutionary
theory as an explanation for the emergence of species, see also Houlgate,
An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History (Oxford: Blackwell,
2005), 173–175.
50 Disturbing traces of this blind spot are found in some of Irigaray’s more
recent comments about same-sex relations; see, for example, Irigaray, Con-
versations (London: Continuum, 2008), xii.
51 Miller, The Vegetative Soul, 122.
52 PN, §§248A, 250, pp. 17, 23–24; Miller, The Vegetative Soul, 122.
53 Such a disruptive potency would speak of an alternative logic of being, rather
than the potency of nature’s contingencies within the Hegelian system, where
they provide the negation of the Idea required for its dialectical unfolding. See
Andrew Haas, Hegel and the Problem of Multiplicity (Evanston, IL: North-
western University Press, 2000), 177.
54 It is the non-teleological dimension of birth that allows it to break from the
logic of ‘reproductive futurism’; see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory
and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004).
55 Irigaray does not dismiss the significance of death, either as ontological hori-
zon or as part of the process of becoming we call ‘life’, though her account
of a generative, elemental materiality does re-situate death in relation to the
ontological primacy of birth (without which we would not be exposed to
dying), while resisting an account of birth and death as symmetrical events.
See, for example, Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air, trans. Mary Beth
Mader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 12: ‘this matter [air] escapes
mastery and . . . the debate between man and physis, with respect to air, is the
170 Rachel Jones
one that most constantly threatens death. . . . To air he owes his life’s begin-
ning, his birth and his death’ (my emphasis).
56 Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (Lon-
don: Athlone, 1992), 60.
57 ‘Broadly speaking therefore the principle between mechanism and teleology
is the principle of community understood as dependence of parts on a third
which includes them and sends them to oblivion’ (CEC 167).
58 See Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air, 84.
59 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Caro-
lyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 26.
60 Luce Irigaray, je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison
Martin (London: Routledge, 1993), 37–44.
61 Ibid., 39.
62 Hesiod, Theogony, in The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, ed. and trans.
Hugh G. Evelyn-White (London: Heinemann, 1914), lines 929a–929t.
63 On this point, see also Stone’s re-conceptualization of the mother-child (and
in particular, the mother-daughter) relation as involving differentiation with-
out separation in Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2011), 7, 9, 103–106, 162–165. Stone thereby refigures the
maternal relation ‘in terms of an active process and [the] work of generating
meaning out of body relations,’ ibid., 61.
64 See Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993); An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans.
Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: Athlone, 1993).
65 While the placenta is formed within the maternal body, Rouch emphasizes
that the placental tissue derives from the embryo; Irigaray, je, tu, nous, 38–39.
66 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 13.
67 Luce Irigaray, ‘The Return’, in Teaching (London: Continuum, 2008), 220,
223.
68 See Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air, 80–85.
69 Ibid., 84.
70 Ibid., 8.
71 See, for example, Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
72 Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air, 85.
73 Ibid., 83.
74 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 25, 28.
75 Luce Irigaray, To Speak Is Never Neutral, trans. Gail Schwab (London: Con-
tinuum, 2002), 231; my emphasis.
76 Luce Irigaray, I Love to You, trans. Alison Martin (New York and London:
Routledge, 1996), 37.
77 Luce Irigaray, In the Beginning, She Was (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 58,
60, 75.
78 See Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, 12, 134.
79 Graves, drawing on Apollodorus 1.3.6, notes that Metis ‘turned into many
shapes’ to escape Zeus (The Greek Myths, vol. 1, 46).
Part IV
Religion
8 The Schematism of Analogy
and the Figure of Christ
Bridging Two Types of
Hypotyposis
Nicola J. Grayson
Hypotyposis is commonly defined in terms of a vivid, picturesque descrip-

tion of scenes or events. However, Kant uses the term to refer to the
process through which concepts are subjected to inspection, illustrated
and thereby granted reality either schematically (directly) or symbolically
(indirectly). Hypotyposis derives from the Greek hypo-, meaning ‘under’,
‘below’, ‘beneath’, and typosis; ‘figure’, ‘sketch’ or ‘outline’, and the sub-
ject of exhibition in Kant’s Critical works is traditionally treated through
an initial study of §59 of the third Critique on Beauty as the Symbol of
Morality, where Kant states:
All hypotyposis (exhibition, subiectio sub adspectum) consists in

making [a concept] sensible, and is either schematic or symbolic. In
schematic hypotyposis there is a concept that the understanding has
formed, and the intuition corresponding to it is given a priori. In
symbolic hypotyposis there is a concept which only reason can think
and to which no sensible intuition can be adequate, and this concept
is supplied with an intuition that judgement treats in a way merely
analogous to the procedure it follows in schematising; i.e., the treat-
ment agrees with this procedure merely in the rule followed rather
than in terms of the intuition itself, and hence merely in terms of the
form of the reflection rather than its content.
(5:351)
Attempts to present a comprehensive explanation of Kant’s account of

exhibition often begin with this passage, grant it central significance and
interrogate it with reference to the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of
Understanding from the first Critique. However, examining §59 in light
of the schematism chapter alone leads to the mistaken assumption that
Kant views symbolic hypotyposis as the only means of granting real-
ity to an idea. The schematic realisation of theoretical ideas addressed
in the Architectonic of Pure Reason is not taken into account (A832/
B860-A851/B879), nor is the realisation of practical ideas by analogy
with the form of a natural law discussed in the Typic of the Pure Practical
174 Nicola J. Grayson
Power of Judgement (5:67–71). As a result, one cannot gain a compre-
hensive understanding of the topic of exhibition, the nature of practical
exhibition is not interrogated and Kant’s distinction between the two
types of hypotyposis is unclear.
Kant designates the exhibition of practical ideas as ‘schematic’, as the
idea of the good (the form of the moral law) is realised by analogy with
laws of nature. Exhibition of the moral law is judged according to a
hypothetical imperative: we may judge the actions of ourselves and oth-
ers as ‘good’ only if we would will them to become a universal law. How-
ever, in Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason,1 Kant refers to a
‘schematism of analogy’ through which practical ideas appear to be real-
ised indirectly in a manner akin to symbolisation (6:65). Christ indirectly
embodies human elements (he can suffer, be tempted and must strive to
overcome desires), yet he directly and schematically presents the idea of
God (as part of the Trinity). Exhibition is not strictly direct (as Christ is
granted the human traits necessary for him to serve as an example for
us to emulate), nor is it indirect (as Christ is part of God and presents
the idea of the highest good directly). The ‘schematism of analogy’ pos-
sesses schematic and symbolic features, and the figure of Christ presents
a means through which one can bridge the human and the divine and
correspondingly also the two types of hypotyposis.
This chapter will begin by outlining the difference between schemata
and symbols in order to demonstrate the limitations of Kant’s distinction
in relation to practical exhibition. It will build on an analysis of the Typic
with reference to the ‘schematism of analogy’ to show that the practical
modes of exhibition possess a combination of direct and indirect fea-
tures. Finally, it will suggest that, just as a schema serves as the ‘third
thing’ which makes possible a bridge between concept and intuition, the
figure of Christ (as a personified ideal) may be thought of as the ‘third
thing’ which bridges the human and the divine and likewise also Kant’s
distinction between schematic and symbolic hypotyposis.
Schematic Realisation
In the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements, Kant explains that sche-
matism is necessary, as “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions
without concepts are blind” (A51/B75). It is of equal importance to make
our concepts sensible as it is to make our intuitions intelligible, and we
do this through schemata. The schema is not a concept or an intuition;
it is a ‘third thing’ homogeneous with both which makes application of
the former to the latter possible. No application is ever strictly direct, as
a concept must be made applicable to an intuition and modified through
the schema. However, we may consider an application ‘direct’ if the con-
cept is not referred to or transposed into anything other than itself in
order to be realised.
The Schematism of Analogy and Christ 175
In the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding, Kant dis-
cusses pure sensible concepts, empirical concepts and pure concepts of
the understanding. Though the precise ways in which these concepts are
realised may differ, they are all realised directly and schematically. Pure
sensible concepts (e.g., triangles) are realised using a monogram2 gen-
erated by the a priori imagination (A141–2/B181), empirical concepts
(e.g., dogs) are realised using a monogram generated by the reproductive
imagination and pure concepts of the understanding (e.g., causality) are
realised through time, which acts as the ‘third thing’ homogeneous with
both concept and intuition.
Pure sensible concepts are mathematically determinable, and, a pri-
ori, they are realised through a ‘figural schema’ according to space (or
shape).3 As a figure, the monogram enables greater generalisation than
any image would allow (though it is akin to a pure image) and serves
to determine an intuition, for example, of a particular triangle as illus-
trating the concept ‘triangle’. Empirical concepts are dependent upon
experience, and their application has to be learnt; they share homoge-
neous features with the intuitions which exemplify them and are real-
ised through a ‘recollective schema’ via a monogram which has figural
qualities. For example, a dog is judged with reference to its appearance
as a ‘four footed animal’ (A141/B180) and a plate with reference to
‘roundness’ (A137/B176). The imagination recalls previous correctly
judged examples to generate a general template that is homogeneous
with both concept and intuition. As a result I may correctly judge that
given four-footed animals are dogs in accordance with their appear-
ance in space (as figures) and their temporal context (as part of a causal
nexus governed by pure concepts of the understanding). Pure concepts
of the understanding are realised by a transcendental schema which
Kant describes as a mediating representation that is both intellectual
(pure) and sensible (connected to intuition) (A138/B177). The transcen-
dental schema is a product of the imagination that gives the formal and
pure temporal conditions of sensibility to which the employment of the
pure concepts of understanding are restricted (A140/B179). It serves to
realise a concept in time (experienced through intuition), and the scope
of the concept is restricted to certain sensible (temporal) conditions.
We have unified experience, as these concepts concern functions of the
understanding that bear an intrinsic relation to the self (as the unity of
apperception).
The schematic exhibition of theoretical ideas (discussed in the Archi-
tectonic of Pure Reason) does not involve mediation by the imagination.
To show that ideas are not empty abstractions, we must connect them to
knowledge and experience; however, their distance from intuition makes
this problematic. Theoretical ideas present a standard in the form of a
maximum which regulates the production of a system, and these ideas
become realised through systems (or works) that possess architectonic
unity; they guide realisation of themselves by projecting a whole (as an
end or aim) which guides the way in which the parts are devised and is
also that which they aim towards (A833/B861). The system as a whole
becomes realised through what Gary Banham fittingly terms a final end
schema.4 This schema is devised in accordance with a monogram that
is a product of reason, and although theoretical ideas are not granted
objective reality, they become realised through their capacity to perform
a regulative function (as a systematic means of organising an aggregate).
Through the final end schema, a theoretical idea may retrospectively
guide the schematic realisation of itself.
Symbolic Realisation
A symbol is a representation of an indemonstrable concept or idea by
analogy with something demonstrable. In §59 of the third Critique, Kant
is clear that
all intuitions supplied for a priori concepts are either schemata or

symbols: schemata contain direct, symbols indirect, exhibitions of
the concept [. . .] Symbolic exhibition uses an analogy [. . .] in which
judgement performs a double function; it applies the concept to the
object of a sensible intuition; and then it applies the mere rule by
which it reflects on that intuition to an entirely different object, of
which the former is only a symbol.
(5:352)
The examples Kant gives reveal a profane, a linguistic and a higher

type of symbolisation which differ according to the nature of the anal-
ogy on which each relation is based. The analogy forms a mere part of
the symbolising relation and operates according to a rule that relates to
the schema of a concept of the understanding (e.g., causality or relation).
Although the analogy derives its rule from the schema through which a
pure concept of understanding is realised, the symbol is a mode of intui-
tive presentation that is distinct from and exceeds the analogy on which
it is based.5
A monarchy ruled according to its own constitutional laws is symbol-
ised by an animate body, and a monarchy ruled by an individual absolute
will is symbolised by a mere machine: a hand mill (5:352). ‘For though
there is no similarity between a despotic state and a hand mill, there
certainly is one between the rules by which we reflect on the two and
on how they operate [Causalität]’ (5:352). Other objects could serve in
place of the hand mill, the despotic state is not strictly an idea of reason
and the analogy between the two relata is constructed (not natural). The
profane examples provide a means of substituting a complex concept for
a simple one, achieving a subsequent simplification of the former by the
latter, but this is much less than what a symbol can achieve by definition:
the indirect exhibition of an idea in sensible intuition.
The words ‘foundation’, to ‘depend’, to ‘flow’ are linguistic symbols
as, by analogy with movement and a living scene, they supplement the
direct communication of meaning. Linguistic symbols enable a word to
expand beyond its determinate meaning and, although these examples
may appear to be the most profane, as Kant states that ‘[o]ur language is
replete with such indirect exhibitions according to an analogy’ (5:352–3),
symbolic language is presented for reflection as a supplementary accom-
paniment that allows the imagination an expansive yet controlled role in
communication. However, this is not the same as exhibiting an otherwise
indemonstrable idea.
Through an analogous rule of reflection between relata concerning the
ennoblement of the mind above mere sensation, the presence of beauty
serves as a symbolic realisation of the idea of the morally good.
Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good;
and only because we refer [Rucksicht] the beautiful to the morally
good (we all do so [Beziehung] naturally and require all others to do
so, as a duty) does our liking for it include a claim to everyone else’s
assent, while the mind is also conscious of being ennobled, by this
[reference], above a mere receptivity for pleasure derived from sense
impressions, and it assesses the value of other people too on the basis
of their having a similar maxim in their power of judgement.
(5: 353)
A precise analysis of the nature of the analogy on which this symbol-

ising relation is based is problematic, as the terms are open to a degree
of dispute and interpretation. Felicitas Munzel demonstrates that, aside
from §59, there are five other passages in Kant’s published works in
which Kant refers to das Sittlich-Gute as an idea of reason.6 The higher
symbol is, therefore, the only example that could (arguably) be consid-
ered an intuitive experience (or symbolisation) of an idea of reason.
The idea of the morally good is represented in intuition and becomes
realised through our experience of beauty; my mind is ennobled, and this
provides me with a standard by which to judge others according to a par-
allel capacity to make aesthetic or moral judgements. Kant designates the
way we refer our sensible experience of beauty to the idea of the morally
good as ‘natural’ and the analogy between beauty and the morally good
is set in relation to a shared feeling of ennoblement and four points of
comparison, which gives it a double strength (5:354–5).
The analogy in this symbolising relation reveals an aesthetic unity
(or totality) that differs in kind from the synthetic unity between a con-
cept and an intuition and the architectonic unity of a system. The mind
becomes elevated in the experience of beauty by a natural reference to
morality which arises from a feeling of harmony as ‘even our higher cog-
nitive powers harmonise’ (5:353). The mind becomes conscious of its
own higher unity through what Gasche terms in The Idea of Form, a tab-
leau or living picture.7 It is the higher symbol of beauty that reveals the
aesthetic nature of the symbol most fully, as the possibility of symbolic
representation enables the mind to present a living picture of its own aes-
thetic unity as a dynamic whole which unites the practical and theoretical
domains of Kant’s critical system.
The examples discussed communicate the performance of three sepa-
rate tasks: profane symbols achieve the simple presentation of a com-
plex concept, linguistic symbols enable the aesthetic supplementation
of a simple concept to enhance communication and the higher symbol
achieves indirect exhibition of an idea and enables Kant to bring unity to
his critical system. In all three examples, symbolisation involves analogy
and a transposition, so that one thing represents another and exhibition
is indirect.
Exhibition of the Morally Good Through the Typic of

the Moral Law
In contrast to theoretical ideas, practical ideas are not concerned with
architectonic unity; they are not systematic and do not yield cognition.
Though it may appear that they can be realised more directly (through
actions which take place empirically), nothing corresponding to the mor-
ally good can be found in any sensible intuition. Whereas theoretical
ideas attain a projected reality on the basis of their regulative function,
practical ideas are realised through moral actions committed and judged
in line with the good. Our actions refer to the practical ideas of good and
evil which cannot themselves be presented; rather, we infer their presence
(or absence) within the motivating disposition of a freely acting subject.
It is the relation of these ideas to the free actions of an individual that
gives them their moral worth. The realisation of practical ideas therefore
reveals a creative capacity of the will and a sense of causality which dif-
fers from that pertaining to the causal nexus which governs objects of
nature in the theoretical realm.
Kant claims that a natural law (which can be exhibited) may be used
in its formal aspect to secure reality for the practical idea of the good.
We may compare maxims of action with universal natural laws, and the
latter grant us a determinate basis on which to judge the morally good.
The comparison enables realisation of the moral law as the practical idea
of the good becomes realised by analogy with a formal aspect of the type
of the natural law:
What the understanding can lay at the basis—as a law for the sake
of the power of judgement—of the idea of reason is not a schema of
sensibility but a law, but yet a law that can be exhibited in concreto
in objects of the senses, and hence a law of nature, though only in
terms of its form; therefore we can call this the type of the moral law.
(5:69)
How can our actions be occasioned by a law of freedom that deter-

mines the will independently of nature (and the empirical domain) and at
the same time belong to experience and nature as they take place empiri-
cally? Here we get to the crux of the problem with practical ideas:
the morally good is something that, in terms of the object, is supra-

sensible, so that nothing corresponding to it can be found in any
sensible intuition; hence the power of judgement under laws of pure
practical reason is subject to special difficulties which are due to
[the fact] that a law of freedom is to be applied to actions as events
that occur in the world of sense and thus, to this extent, belong to
nature.
(5:68)
Mediation by the imagination cannot suffice to connect the very sepa-

rate domains of nature and of freedom, and realisation of practical ideas
with reference to the typic does not involve a monogram (of reason or
of the imagination), nor does it directly involve a schema of sensibility.
Kant’s concern here ‘is not with the schema of a case according to laws,
but with the schema (if this word is fitting here) of a law itself’ (5:68).8
A different kind of causality is operative, as it is the determination of
the will through the law itself (and not the action as the result) that ‘ties
the concept of causality to conditions that are entirely different from
those that amount to natural connection’ (5:68). Here causality does not
constitute a natural connection between objects, it is that which enables
objects (as ideas) to be realised as actual as they are brought into being
by the free actions of a subject.
A law of nature must have a corresponding schema, but for the law
of freedom, Kant is quite clear that ‘there is no intuition and hence no
schema that can be laid at its basis for the sake of its application in con-
creto’ (5:69). The imagination is not operative here, and the moral law
has no cognitive power to mediate its application to objects of nature
other than the understanding. The understanding cannot lay a schema
of sensibility for the power of judging at the basis of an idea of reason.
Instead, what it gives is:
a law that can be exhibited in concreto in objects of the senses, and

hence a law of nature, though only in terms of its form; therefore we
can call this the type of the moral law.
(5:69)
Laws of nature have corresponding schemas, but the law of freedom
has no schema; it is realised instead by analogy with a natural law (that
can be exhibited in objects of sense) only in terms of its form as the type
of the moral law. The idea of the morally good is therefore exhibited
through actions that typify this law.
Kant states that the rule for judging under the practical power of rea-
son is this:
Ask yourself whether, if the action you propose were to occur accord-
ing to a law of the nature of which you yourself were a part, you
could indeed regard it as possible through your will.
(5:69)9
The procedure (of hypothetically testing the categorical imperative)

enables us to judge actions by analogy with laws of nature to gener-
ate a type of the moral law. It is a hypothetical device we may use to
test whether an action fits the form of a categorical imperative. We test
whether we can will our maxim and at the same time view it as a uni-
versal law without contradiction. If we cannot conceive of our action as
a law of nature, or if it can be conceived but not willed by us without
inconsistency arising, it is contradictory (and therefore cannot be judged
as realising the idea of the good).
This gives us criteria for judging whether actions are good, and Kant
refers to three examples: deceiving to one’s advantage, ending one’s life
due to weariness and viewing the plight of others with weariness. He
asks: ‘if you too belonged to such an order of things, would you indeed
be in it with the agreement of your will?’ (5:69). If we cannot be a part of
such an order of things in agreement with our will, then these actions and
behaviours cannot be judged as good in accordance with the moral law.
By analogy with the form of a natural law, we can make moral judge-
ments about a maxim of action according to whether it realises a practical
idea. The law of nature gives us a type for judging particular maxims of
action. The type is not a universal, but it may function as such. We judge
according to the causality of the will through freedom, and in doing so
we make the law of nature ‘merely the type of a law of freedom’ (5:70).
By tying the application of the law of pure practical reason to experience
(by analogy with nature), we may judge given actions as examples, and
this is how practical ideas are exhibited. For Kant, using the nature of
the world of sense as a type of intelligible nature is permitted as long as
I do not transfer any intuitions to the latter and refer it only to the form
of lawfulness as such. This means that none of the material aspects of the
law of nature are transposed (in the analogy), just the formal ones.
Secondary accounts which seek to explain the nature of this practical
mode of exhibition confirm that its status is not clear. Heiner Bielefeldt
claims that the law of nature is treated as a symbol of the moral law.10 His
claim is based on the mistaken view that ideas can only be demonstrated
indirectly (symbolically), and, as moral ideas cannot be schematised by
the imagination, he claims that the understanding functions symbolically.
For Bielefeldt, the analogy between the law of nature and the law of
freedom allows us to take the latter as a symbol of the former. He quotes
Gerhard Luf and H.W. Cassirer in support of his designation of this mode
of exhibition as ‘symbolic’, describing the natural law as ‘the necessary
symbolic medium for representing the moral law’.11 Bielefeldt extends
what he terms ‘the symbolic significance of nature’ further to encompass
purposiveness (as teleological order) to claim that ‘[t]his totality of the
moral system also finds its symbolic representation in the order of nature,
when considered as a purposive whole’.12
The interpretation is problematic, as Kant never claims that the typic is
symbolic. Instead, he refers to it repeatedly as a ‘schema’ (albeit he is not
happy about calling it this either). It is also confusing, as what is symbol-
ised for Bielefeldt changes: first he claims that the understanding performs
a symbolic function (when this is performed by reflective judgement in
the third Critique). Second, he states that the law of nature symbolises
the law of morality/freedom, but Kant understands the symbol as a mode
of intuitive presentation, and neither relata in this relation are intuitive or
directly demonstrable. Third, he claims that the order of nature symbol-
ises the totality of the moral system. Once again, this causes problems, as
both relata have the status of ideas. The typic concerns a presentation of
practical ideas by analogy, and this is not in dispute, but the use of anal-
ogy does not equate it with or define it as symbolic.13 A symbol and an
analogy are not the same thing, as, though the former requires the latter,
the latter can occur without the former being attained. Neither relata
involved (the practical idea or the natural law) are directly demonstrable,
and the typic does not equate with any of the symbols outlined by Kant
in §59. Also, the morally good is not transposed into something else in
order to be presented; what is transposed is form as a device for judging,
it is therefore problematic to consider this mode of exhibition straight-
forwardly ‘symbolic’.
In Kant’s Practical Philosophy, Gary Banham affiliates the typic with
the final end schema and states in relation to the latter:
With this type of schema we can see the dependence of the organi-
sation of a whole enquiry on a part that makes it possible and is
supreme. This is the type of schema that is employed in practical
philosophy.14
Banham has valid reasons to resort to the final end schema, as, like the
typic, it does not have a direct reference to intuition. He claims that a
use of analogy is necessary in practical philosophy and seeks to connect
the two types of exhibition. His rationale is that the final end schema
concerns how a system must be organised (in accordance with an end
that is also responsible for parts) and ‘the typic supplies the condition
under which a law is presentable and hence organises the sensible in
accordance with an intelligible principle’.15 Banham equates the final end
schema with the typic, as the latter shapes moral character in accordance
with an end. Though his account is less problematic than Bielefeldt’s (as
he does not designate the typic as symbolic), the typic differs from the
final end schema, as the latter concerns realisation of a theoretical idea
(which differs in nature to a practical one), it does not enable realisation
with any objective reality (but only in terms of a projected end or aim)
and it concerns a system (which differs in nature, kind, unity and cau-
sality from the motivating disposition of a free moral agent). A further
marked point of difference is that through the final end schema, a theo-
retical idea is realised using a monogram of reason, and no such figure
is mentioned by Kant (or indeed possible) in respect to the realisation of
practical ideas. The idea of the morally good cannot be presented within
an architectonic construct or system; likewise, theoretical systems do not
have any moral requirements. Realisation of practical ideas is possible in
relation to a personified figure which embodies the highest good (as we
will discuss), but this is distinctly different to a monogram.
Attempts in secondary literature to reduce the typic to the schemata
discussed in the first Critique risk compromising its practical nature, and
the necessary distance from intuition possessed by both relata in this ana-
logical relation prevents us from designating it as symbolic. The typic
constitutes a means through which practical ideas can be realised in con-
creto by analogy with the formal aspect of a law of nature; it therefore
presents a challenge to Kant’s claim that there are only two types of exhi-
bition. Interpretations alternate between attempting to show similarities
to the schemata of the first Critique or disregarding definitive features
of the symbol (e.g., its intuitive, demonstrable status). Neither approach
provides a viable solution, as both suffer the same consequences, and the
difference between practical and theoretical ideas becomes compromised.
The typic successfully highlights a problem in relation to Kant’s distinc-
tion between the two types of exhibition, yet it may also suggest a means
by which to solve it.
The Schematism of Analogy and the Figure of Christ

In a footnote to the main text in Religion, Kant refers to a ‘schematism
of analogy’ (6:65). Here the figure of Christ plays an integral role in
realising the practical idea of the highest good and reveals a capacity of
pure practical reason to utilise figures (as personifications) in relation to
exhibition. On the one hand, Christ directly and schematically presents
the idea of the good (as he is part of God), yet he indirectly represents an
ideal goal as a standard for human beings. A complex relation between
three relata therefore takes place; God is a supersensible idea and tran-
scendental ideal, Christ is an ideal figure who presents the idea of the
good and represents an exemplary human being and humans can think
both by analogy with an extension of their own attributes but can never
be adequate to either. The three figures relate to one another in a com-
bination of direct and indirect ways, and this forms part of the problem
when seeking to determine the true nature of the schematism of analogy.
Kant poses a hypothetical question; he asks us to:
Assume a human being who honours the moral law, and who allows
himself to think [. . .] what sort of world he would create, were this
in his power, under the guidance of practical reason—a world within
which, moreover, he would place himself as a member.
(6:5–6)
As human beings, we are subject to the external world of nature in

which objects are causally related beyond our control, and we make
sense of our cognitions by systematising them under theoretical con-
structs. Morally, we are free to create our own world, and the actions we
take indicate the dominant moral concepts that regulate our disposition.
We judge the former determinately based upon cognitions and the correct
application of concepts and the latter based on the presence of a rational
feeling which determines the existence of the good.
Kant refers to Christ as the personified idea of the good principle and
states that this idea has complete reality in itself, for it resides in morally
legislative reason (6:62). This practical concept must possess reality as we
ought and therefore must be able to conform to it, and it does not need to
meet the same conditions as a concept of nature to be realised:
There is no need, therefore, of any example from experience to make

the idea of a human being morally pleasing to God a model to us; the
idea is present as a model already in our reason.
(6:62)
The example of such a being need not exist nor ever have existed, and
the idea is not created by us, yet it possesses necessity and reality in itself.
The prototype of a human being well pleasing to God resides in reason,
and each human being has within them an example of this idea. Outer
examples or actions allow inference to one’s inner moral disposition, but
they cannot adequately communicate or present it. To judge the moral
worth of an action, we must portray the actor in human guise; thus, if
an exemplary human being descended from heaven, ‘we would have no
cause to assume in him anything else except a naturally begotten human
being’ (6:63).16 The human being well pleasing to God must be afflicted
by the same needs and inclinations as us; they must withstand suffering
and resist temptation if they are to serve as an example to be emulated.
One who possesses innate goodness is good merely by omission, whereas
one who endures through a process of resistance and suffering commu-
nicates an active goodness that can only be attained through free action.
Christ possesses a dual status as part of God and example for human-
ity, but it is the latter that enables the realisation of the idea of the highest
good. In the first Critique, God is presented as a Transcendental Ideal—
as the sum and ground of all that exists—in a figure that stands out-
side of any possible emulation by humans. However, through the figure
of Christ, a different perspective and a new engagement with God are
undertaken and this solidifies Christ’s position as key in regard to the
realisation of practical ideas. Christ embodies and presents the good-
ness of God, yet he represents this in human form to bring the otherwise
impossibly transcendental within our realms of possibility. We could fol-
low a rule that superhuman conduct communicates as a precept, but this
type of being could ‘not be presented to us as an example to be emulated’
(6:65), and the pedagogical value that Christ possesses as an example
would be removed.
In the footnote to the section The Objective Reality of this Idea, Kant
states that we need an analogy with natural beings to make supersensible
characteristics comprehensible to us (6:65n). He refers to how ‘philo-
sophical poets’ and the Scriptures ascribe a higher rung on the moral
ladder to finite, flawed and free human beings as ‘[t]he world with its
defects/is better than a realm of will-less angels’.17 We can emulate Christ
as he can suffer, make choices, be tempted and overcome temptations.
To communicate God’s love for us, the Scriptures use a form of repre-
sentation that attributes to God the highest sacrifice a living being could
perform: he gives humanity his only son:
although through reason we cannot form any concept of how a self-

sufficient being could sacrifice something that belongs to his blessed-
ness, thus robbing himself of a perfection. We have here (as means of
elucidation) a schematism of analogy, with which we cannot dispense.
(6:65)
The Scriptures impose a narrative so we can make sense of God’s love

for us by analogy with ourselves and what this act would mean for us.
The schematism of analogy does not make this comprehensible via con-
cepts or via a schema of object determination (cognitions). Through the
act of sacrificing his only son, we can infer that the highest good is pre-
sent in God’s disposition and becomes actualised through an act that
we respect by analogy with what it would mean for us to do the same.
This communicates God’s love as excessive, but it does not mean that
we can or should infer that our human response to such an act belongs
to the concept of God (or could expand our cognition of him). God’s
disposition is not really exemplified, but a schematism of analogy makes
his love for us comprehensible as the highest good is personified and real-
ised through the figure of Christ (and exemplified in his actions).
To clarify the meaning of this practical mode of exhibition, Kant states
that in ascending from the sensible to the supersensible, we can sche-
matise, which he here defines as ‘render[ing] a concept comprehensible
through analogy with something from the senses’ (6:65n). But we cannot
infer that what belongs to the sensible must therefore be attributed to the
supersensible. If we look back to the definition of symbolisation given
earlier, it is difficult to differentiate this schema from symbolism. How-
ever, as with the typic, though a transposition occurs, it is not one that
concerns any intuitive content. Christ need never have existed, and he is
not a sensible empirical intuition, even though he serves to demonstrate
the indemonstrable concept of God.
We comprehend God’s love for us by analogy with an act of sacrifice
that we too are capable of, and thus we render the concept of this love
comprehensible by analogy with our own experience of loss. But we can-
not infer that what belongs to our experience can be attributed to God,
that is, that he would suffer the same feelings; this is anthropomorphism.
Kant claims we cannot say:
Just as I cannot make the cause of a plant comprehensible to me

(or the cause of any organic creature, or in general of the purposive
world) in any other way than on the analogy of an artificer in rela-
tion to his work (a clock), namely by attributing understanding to
the cause, so too must the cause itself (of the plant, of the world in
general) have understanding.
(6:65n)
We use an analogy to make the supersensible comprehensible, but it

does not follow that traits which belong to what is used to construct the
analogy must also belong to the supersensible concept. Kant states that,
if we illustrate a concept with an example, the example does not neces-
sarily belong to the object itself. Since this is not true of the other types of
concept realised schematically using examples (triangles, dogs, causality),
this would seem to be an indirect exhibition. But what Kant implies here
is a dislocation of schema, concept and object, as he states:
between the relationship of a schema to its concept and the relation of

this very schema of the concept to the thing itself there is no analogy,
but a formidable leap which leads straight to anthropomorphism.
(6:65n)
The schema uses an analogy to make a concept comprehensible, but

this does not necessarily belong to or expand the thing itself that the
concept refers to. The transposition serves to exhibit the concept, not to
give cognition of the thing itself. Kant states that it would run counter
to all analogy to say that, if we use a schema for a concept, this schema
must also belong to the object. Just because I make a scenario (e.g., the
cause of a plant) comprehensible by analogy with another scenario (an
artificer’s creation of a watch), I cannot infer that traits possessed by the
artificer (understanding) must be possessed by the cause of the plant.
I can exhibit the relation between the cause and the plant by analogy with
the other relation, but this does not expand my cognition of the cause of
the plant. Likewise, I can exhibit the significance of God’s gift of Christ
to humanity by analogy with my own ability to sacrifice my child, but
this does not mean that I can attribute the loss that I would suffer to God.
Using a schematism of analogy, humans may emulate Christ, but
human attributes cannot be extended to God. Christ exhibits the idea
of the highest good and makes it comprehensible; he is the ‘third thing’
homogeneous with sensible human beings and the supersensible idea of
God. However, the human traits he possesses in order to be utilised as an
example for humanity cannot be attributed to God. God is the supersen-
sible object, Christ is the schema and humans provide the analogy, but
the human traits which make the supersensible idea comprehensible via
the schema of Christ cannot expand the concept of God or enable cogni-
tion of him.
As a mode of exhibition, the schematism of analogy realises the idea of
the highest good. God gives his son as an example for humanity, and we
infer a disposition behind this blessed, altruistic, loving act which enables
the practical idea of the highest good to become realised. Christ directly
presents this idea (as he is part of God and therefore no real transposition
takes place), yet he indirectly represents a perfected instance of humanity
as an example we may use to guide our moral conduct. God’s act enables
a schematism of analogy with humans to become operative. It is not
strictly schematic, due to the indirect component and the use of analogy,
nor is it symbolic, as there are three relata, there is no intuitive compo-
nent and Christ has a direct relation to God.
In Kant’s Practical Philosophy, Gary Banham observes that Kant
describes this schema in contrast to the schema of object determination
but does not set out the procedure with clarity. To make sense of this
practical schema, Banham recalls the final end schema used to realise
theoretical ideas in the first Critique. His attempt to elucidate the sche-
matism of analogy is as follows:
It would be my contention [. . .] that it is best pictured not after

a manner of pathological motivation but through practical feeling,
the very practical feeling that it is a major task of the Religion to
describe. However, the pattern of determining this practical feeling in
the divine and in ourselves is in accord with a final end schema such
as is described in the First Critique and it is this that describes the
true schema of analogy.18
Banham claims that through a developing (open) account of the

nature of practical feeling, we can conceive of an appropriate analogy
between the supersensible capacity of freedom within us and that which
lies beyond us (as both exceed the domain of nature). The analogical
procedure adopted becomes more sophisticated as it develops, and
in turn this alters the description of practical feeling. If we overlook
the fact that the final end schema refers to the realisation of theoreti-
cal ideas, we can see how affiliating practical exhibition with it would
secure the latter as a mode of direct exhibition. However, Banham then
goes on to state:
This schematism of analogy will further the final end schema by

utilizing the procedure described in the Third Critique: ‘judgement
performs a double function: it applies the concept to the object of
a sensible intuition; and then it applies the mere rule by which it
reflects on that intuition to an entirely different object, of which the
former is only a symbol’.
(5:352)19
Banham claims that the concept of practical feeling (respect) is applied

to the sensible intuition of persons; then the rule of reflection on these per-
sons is applied to a different object (God as the supersensible outside us)
which is judged in accordance with freedom as the supersensible within
us. For Banham, the symbol of God is given through traits of personality
belonging to human beings and symbolisation of the supersensible ‘gives
us the peculiar supersensible figuration we term “God” ’.20 He claims that
the schematism of analogy opens up a recursive analogical connection, as
the traits of this figuration are a reference back to ourselves.
Banham affiliates the schematism of analogy with the direct schematic
realisation of theoretical ideas (as systems) and the indirect symbolisation
of God. Despite his recognition of practical feeling as a pivotal defining
feature of practical ideas, recourse to the final end schema does not take
this into account, as it is not a necessary part of any system. Insight into
the disposition of God as a moral creator adds a distinct new component
which not only transforms the status, nature, task and purpose of the
final end schema but also shifts its sphere of influence from concepts of
nature to the concept of freedom. By claiming that this mode of exhibi-
tion is also symbolic and that it opens up a recursive analogical connec-
tion, Banham risks the anthropomorphism that Kant warned us against.
Kant nowhere designates this exhibition as symbolic, and, although we
may exhibit the idea of God by analogy with traits that we possess, we
cannot and must not infer that these traits belong to God.
Banham’s enquiry is not conclusive, as he does not explicitly address
the role of the figure of Christ (as the third relatum) in exhibiting the idea
of the highest good, and he presents this mode of exhibition as combining
both types of hypotyposis, thereby failing to clarify its nature in relation
to Kant’s distinction.
In his Commentary to Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere
Reason, James DiCenso observes the dual nature of Christ’s status. On
the one hand, Christ is referred to as prototype, archetype and original
image by means of the term Urbild, which conveys a rational principle
in a graphic image. On the other, he is characterised as a Vorbild; which
DiCenso defines as an anticipatory image which is yet to come.21 It is the
latter which Kant uses when he states:
There is no need, therefore, of any example from experience to make

the idea of a human being morally pleasing to God a model to us; the
idea is present as a model already in our reason.
(6:62)22
The interpretation suggests that Christ acts not merely as an existing pro-
totype but as a projection of that which we should aspire to be: a model
for our conduct. Dicenso’s temporal reading of Vorbild enables us to see
an affiliation with the projected whole used to regulate a system via the
final end schema, but he does not recognise or pursue this affiliation.
Instead, Dicenso draws on similarities to Kant’s account of the sym-
bol, and this is apparent in the language he uses: Christ ‘represents’ a
fully realised ethical disposition, and we ‘reflect’ on his example to cul-
tivate our own inner morality. DiCenso claims that the representative
nature of religious images in relation to practical ideas highlights their
symbolic function, as they imperfectly express an ideal ethical disposi-
tion for us to emulate. Christ serves as teacher, guide and exemplar, and
though the ethical responsibility for our actions lies within us, the ideal
figure of Christ may give us courage, force and strength. DiCenso claims
that we personify ethical endeavours to make them ‘more imaginatively
accessible’ and this shows the ‘pedagogical importance’ of Christ and
reveals our propensity to render ideas in an intuitively graspable form.23
DiCenso notes an equivalence between the philosophical poets with their
rendering of abstract concepts in accessible terms and traditional reli-
gious imagery and claims that the Scriptures use representation as, given
the limitations of human beings, ‘some form of imagistic representation
is not entirely optional for guiding our moral practice’.24 He affiliates the
schematism of analogy with imagistic, intuitive symbolisations; however,
when he attempts to clarify practical exhibition in a footnote, he writes:
In the third Critique, Kant differentiates such schemata from sym-

bols that generate representations of ideas in accordance with mere
analogy (CJ V:352). Religion further divides the notion of schema-
tism into two types, ‘object determination’ and ‘analogy,’ and these
generally parallel the prior differentiation between schematism as
such and symbolism.25
Here DiCenso tries to preserve the schematic status of this mode of

exhibition; he claims it is a type of schematism which differs from that
of object determination because it uses an analogy and this renders
it parallel to symbolisation but not equal to it as such. He does not
address how it is possible for the schematism of analogy to be different
from the schema of object determination, parallel to symbolisation,
and still be schematic. As a result, the boundaries between the two
types of exhibition become blurred in a manner that is not properly
accounted for.
DiCenso’s presentation of the difference between the two modes of
exhibition is problematic in itself, but he then goes one step further to
claim:
The schematism of analogy follows Kant’s definition of symbolism as

offering analogical representation, drawing from the world of sense,
of ideational abstractions and intellectual faculties that cannot be
directly represented (e.g., our propensity to evil, moral laws, a moral
disposition).26
Kant is clear that the idea of the highest good personified through
Christ has reality in itself and resides in reason; it is a rational idea that
need never be made intuitive in the world of sense; this is like asking
for miracles. This idea could only be brought near to the world of sense
through an account of practical feeling or lawfulness in a manner akin to
the typic—but DiCenso does not draw upon either.
Conclusions
There is evidence within and outside Kant’s Critical works of modes of
exhibition that do not sit within his distinction between schematic and
symbolic hypotyposis. In order to show this definitively, the topic of exhi-
bition must be traced as it develops, and this requires an understanding
of the theoretical schemata of the first Critique, the practical modes of
exhibition in the second Critique and Kant’s account of symbolisation as
distinct from the exhibition of aesthetic ideas in the third Critique.27 By
supplementing discussion of the typic with an account of the ‘schematism
of analogy’ in Religion, we gain insight into a mode of practical exhibi-
tion which uses an analogy and has indirect features, yet has no intuitive
content and differs from the profane, linguistic and higher types of sym-
bol discussed in §59 and the schemata of the first Critique.
Kant’s distinction between the two types of exhibition does not encom-
pass either of the practical modes, and Howard Caygill claims that,
because Religion was written after the third Critique, it signals Kant’s
desire to reduce the symbolic to the schematic, but the situation is more
complex.28 Confusion about the nature of the practical modes of exhibi-
tion not only impacts upon the distinction itself, it influences our under-
standing of the topic of exhibition as a whole. If the practical examples
were the only ones to lie outside of Kant’s distinction, Caygill’s explana-
tion could suffice, but there is further evidence of modes of exhibition
which fall outside of Kant’s distinction between schematic and symbolic
hypotyposis, for example, the realisation of aesthetic ideas through works
of art and the realisation of the aesthetic standard idea of beauty; both
suggest pertinent areas for further investigation that cannot be pursued
here.29
Through the schematism of analogy, the figure of Christ demonstrates
a capacity to bridge the divide between the schematic and the symbolic
without being reducible to either. As a personified figure, Christ enables
us to utilise God (formerly a transcendentally ideal figure) as an example
of the highest good which is exemplified through his gift to humanity of
his only son. Christ is not merely human (and capable of limited good
conduct), nor is he solely divine (and innately good); he occupies a posi-
tion which enables him to be both and neither at the same time, and this
mirrors the status of practical exhibition in relation to Kant’s distinction.
Whether one interprets Christ as means of synthesising the two modes of
exhibition or as that which bridges them, as a figure he undoubtedly pre-
sents a means through which practical ideas can be realised in a manner
that is not addressed, accounted for or made explicit within the distinc-
tion Kant makes in §59 of the third Critique.
Notes
1 Hereafter referred to as Religion.
2 A monogram is defined in terms of a design according to an identifying mark
which can be constituted by an overlapping of letters or images.
3 I explain the different types of schema and Kant’s three-tier account of the
symbol in detail in N. J. Crosby-Grayson, Schematic and Symbolic Hypoty-
posis in Kant’s Critical Works (Ph.D. Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan Uni-
versity, 2015), chs. 3, 7.
4 Gary Banham, Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2000), 57.
5 For a full analysis of the different examples Kant uses, see my unpublished
paper ‘Kant’s Three Tier Account of the Symbol’, presented at the Annual
Conference of the Dutch Association of Aesthetics, Ghent, 2011.
6 The passages occur in the Typic of the second Critique, the Analytic of
the Beautiful and the discussion of intellectual interest in the beautiful in
the third Critique, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, and the
Metaphysics of Morals. G. Felicitas Munzel, ‘ “The Beautiful Is the Symbol
of the Morally-Good”: Kant’s Philosophical Basis of Proof for the Idea
of the Morally-Good’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 33 (1995),
317–331.
7 Rodolphe Gasche, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003), 210–211.
8 Note Kant’s hesitancy in applying the word ‘schema’ to this type of exhibition.
9 This is first presented in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
(4:421). Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Practi-
cal Philosophy, ed. and trans. M. J Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1996).
10 See H. Bielefeldt, Symbolic Representation in Kant’s Practical Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 47–53.
11 See ibid., 50 n. 35, where Bielefeldt quotes H. W. Cassirer in respect to Kant’s
use of ‘typic’: ‘His meaning would be more adequately expressed by the term
‘symbol’ [. . .] What he is trying to show is that the finite moral being is
capable of symbolising the supersensible law by means of the concept of a
universal law of nature’. He also refers to Paul Diedrichson’s view that ‘what
[Kant] calls the ‘type’ (Typus) of the moral law is precisely a concretising of
the abstract moral law in a symbolically concrete form’. Ibid., 50–51.
12 Ibid., 51–52.
13 The symbol is defined as a mode of intuitive presentation that concerns dem-
onstration of an otherwise indemonstrable object by analogy with something
that is directly demonstrable (5:351–352).
14 Gary Banham, Kant’s Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine (Lon-
don and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 233.
15 Ibid., 233–234.
16 Kant states: ‘For let the nature of this human being well pleasing to God be
thought as human, inasmuch as he is afflicted by just the same needs and
hence also the same sufferings, by just the same natural inclinations and
hence also the same temptations to transgressions as we are. Let it also be
thought as superhuman, however, inasmuch as his unchanging purity of will,
not gained through effort but innate, would render any transgression on his
part absolutely impossible’ (6:64).
17 Albrecht Haller, Concerning the Origin of Evil, 1734 (as cited in Religion
6:65).
18 Ibid., 123.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 DiCenso states: ‘Noteworthy here is the use of the term Vorbild, rather than
the previously employed Urbild, to indicate Jesus’ role as an ethical exemplar.
A Vorbild is literally a “before image”; it therefore anticipates something
that is yet to come [. . .] Just as Jesus is a prototype (Urbild) for the perfected
moral disposition toward which we all should be striving, so too is he a
model (Vorbild) of ethical autonomy that we must actively emulate.’ James J.
DiCenso, A Commentary on Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere
Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 100.
22 It is interesting to note that vor carries temporal and spatial connotations.
DiCenso’s use of Vorbild emphasises the temporal, but vor also refers to a
model that we hold before our eyes so that we may reproduce or imitate it.
23 Ibid., 105.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 The realisation of aesthetic ideas and how this differs from symbolisation
could not be pursued here.
28 Caygill states: ‘Kant develops this thought in RL [Religion] by dropping the
distinction between symbolic and schematic procedures of judgement and
regarding both objective and analogical determinations as forms of schema-
tism’. Further analysis of later texts would be needed to prove this asser-
tion, though Caygill does not cite any. Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 66.
29 See Crosby-Grayson, Schematic and Symbolic Hypotyposis in Kant’s Critical
Works, chs. 7, 8.
Bibliography
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———. Kant’s Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine, London and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
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University of Chicago Press, 1960.
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bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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ence of the Dutch Association of Aesthetics, Ghent, 2011.
———. Schematic and Symbolic Hypotyposis in Kant’s Critical Works, Ph.D.
thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2015.
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Mere Reason Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
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bridge University Press, 2001.
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and Cambridge: Hackett, 1996.
———. Critique of Judgement, translated by Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis and
Cambridge: Hackett, 1987.
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and translated by M. J. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
———. Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason and Other Writings, edited
by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University
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———. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, translated by T. M. Greene
and H. H. Hudson, Chicago and London: Open Court, 1934.
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Philosophical Basis of Proof for the Idea of the Morally-Good’, Journal of the
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Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Todorov, Tzvetan. Theories of the Symbol, translated by Catherine Porter,
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977.
9 The ‘Proper’ Tone of
Critical Philosophy
Kant and Derrida on
Metaphilosophy and the
Use of Religious Tropes1
Dennis Schulting
Without a doubt, Immanuel Kant is the quintessential Enlightenment

philosopher who, whilst not recoiling from subjecting it to thorough-
going critical philosophical inquiry, was fully alert to the fact that, not
least because of its social relevance, religion could not be dismissed out
of hand. Of course, I am not suggesting that Kant was by any means a
religious philosopher as his contemporary Friedrich H. Jacobi or Søren
Kierkegaard after him were. Kant was certainly no apologist for religion.
For Kant, the general perspective on religion remained unabatedly criti-
cal in the strict sense that he bestowed upon the term (what this means
will become clearer in the course of this essay). Nevertheless, Reason
(Vernunft) cannot simply elevate itself, by decree, above faith (Glauben)
or religion. There is, moreover, a systematic reason religion must play a
role in the practical domain. For Kant, namely, if we take religion as at
least concerned with the highest good, ‘reason needs to assume, for the
sake of [. . .] a dependent highest good, a supreme intelligence as the high-
est independent good [. . .] in order to give objective reality to the concept
of the highest good’.2 Kant was thus vigilantly attentive to the complexity
of the relation between faith and Reason, between philosophy and reli-
gion. This complexity is borne out by the often largely implicit assump-
tions underlying philosophical theories on the relation between faith and
Reason. More than any other philosopher of the modern age, Kant was
aware of the threat of prejudice and dogmatism, also and perhaps espe-
cially in philosophy.
The question of the relation between faith and Reason, specifically
with regard to the use of Reason, was of central concern to Kant, already
in his eloquently written early pre-critical essay Dreams of a Spirit-Seer
(1766) and then famously in the aftermath of the Pantheism debate
between Moses Mendelssohn and Jacobi, with the essay What Does It
Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (1786), but particularly after he
had completed, in 1790, the trilogy of the Critiques, when he became
involved in a fiercely fought public debate concerning the role of religion
in Prussian society. This concern culminated in the publication, in 1798,
The ‘Proper’ Tone of Critical Philosophy 195
of his major politico-theological tract The Conflict of the Faculties, after
a short period in which he was forced to remain silent about his views on
religion because of the anti-Enlightenment edict issued some years earlier
by Frederick William II, himself a man given to relying on spirit-seers for
political policy. More specifically, the publication in 1793 of his Religion
Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason resulted in the curb, by way of
an imperial rescript that Kant received in October 1794, on his freedom
to speak out on religious affairs, by which Kant no longer felt obliged
upon the death of Frederick in November 1797.3 However, the work on
which I shall focus here is Kant’s neglected metaphilosophical tract Of a
Recently Adopted Exalted Tone in Philosophy (henceforth RTP),4 which
was published in the intervening time in the Berlinische Monatsschrift of
May 1796.
I do not wish to go into the precise historical context of this minor
work.5 Neither do I discuss its relation to Kant’s other aforementioned
publications on religion and religious affairs. I am primarily interested
in the ways in which RTP thematises the legitimacy of speaking in an
exalted, quasi-religious tone apropos of the authority of Reason as a self-
legitimising capacity in philosophical speech, specifically in relation to
religion. An important additional reason for taking a closer look at this
text is because the late Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) took a great inter-
est in this work of Kant’s and, indeed, emphasised, rightly I think, that
despite its prima facie rhetorically charged, polemical nature, this work—
which might at first be taken to be merely a lampoon—is anything but
insignificant in Kant’s oeuvre. Derrida’s On a Recently Adopted Apoca-
lyptic Tone in Philosophy, originally published in 1983,6 is an oblique
commentary on Kant’s RTP and aims to expose to view the alleged hid-
den underpinnings of Kant’s polemic against exaltation or fanaticism
(Schwärmerei)7 in philosophy. Derrida tries to show that Kant’s appeal
for tonal moderation in philosophy, for a measured speech, which should
rein in exalted modes of speech, is itself not neutral and rather funda-
mentally biased against an exalted, quasi-religious manner of thought. It
is evident that, as he himself notes early on in RTP, Kant is predisposed
towards a more Aristotelian, academic kind of philosophy, which adopts
a ‘proper’ tone or pitch in philosophical debate, but Derrida claims that
Kant himself raises his voice precisely in lampooning exalted thinkers.8
Here, I am not so much interested in delineating Derrida’s own
grounds for criticising Kant on this score, which are concerned with the
way in which what he calls ‘apocalyptics’ presumably accounts for the
very possibility of raising a tone in any arbitrary discourse and thus also
for moderating one’s voice, thus revealing ‘apocalyptics’ as a transcen-
dental condition of sorts of the philosophical speech mode.9 Rather, I am
particularly interested in the extent to which Derrida’s critique manifests
a fundamental misapprehension of the Kantian mode of moderating cri-
tique. (I shall therefore expand on some elements of this view insofar as
196 Dennis Schulting
this is needed for my critical assessment of Derrida’s critique of Kant.) By
expounding this misapprehension, Kant’s own reasons for his philippic
against religious or quasi-religious talk in philosophy are foregrounded,
thus showing the nature of properly critical thought. At the same time,
I shall show how Derrida underestimates the self-reflexivity, and hence
properly critical, self-authorising mode of thinking, underlying his own
oblique references to the adieu as a trope for quasi-transcendental inten-
tionality towards the so-called ‘Other’.
1. The Self-Legislation of Reason

Before I discuss central aspects of Kant’s account in RTP and Derrida’s
critique of it, I shall give a very rough outline of what I take to be the
Kantian critical mode of thought. One of the central planks of Kant’s
philosophy is the thought that there is no room for a dogmatic belief
in or an appeal to a heteronomous force, ground or fact of the matter,
or any exogenous or endogenous (mental) content, incentive or disposi-
tion, which would externally legitimise a theoretical concept, a judging
or belief that so and so is the case, or motivate a specifically moral act.
Relying on a heteronomous determination of any belief, or judging of
a state of affairs, or moral act would not thereby provide an a priori
demonstrable insight into the grounding relation between the putative
justifying power or authority and the objective validity or moral value
which is, implicitly or explicitly, assigned or attributed to it by the cog-
nising judger or the moral agent, respectively. According to Kant, such
a determination would ex hypothesi not carry necessity and would thus
lack normative force for the judger or moral agent.10
For, given heteronomy, on what grounds can I be sure that the putative
determining or justifying power or ground that is external to my think-
ing may be assigned universal epistemic validity because it is indeed the
determining or justifying power or ground of the content of my belief
that it is necessarily true that B is causally effected by A, say? Mutatis
mutandis, how may I attribute a moral value to a particular incentive to
act, which derives from a certain interest or from the striving for happi-
ness, having at any rate a specific end in mind that is not exclusively based
on Reason, if that same incentive might as well cause me to act immor-
ally or at least cause me to be morally negligent?11 Since no amount of
appealing to a heteronomous authority or ground will provide insight
into the reasons for my attributing specifically moral value or my assign-
ing a truth value to p rather than to q, Kant considers it necessary to
privilege the autonomy, or self-legislation, of our human rational capac-
ity. This capacity to know or act purely from Reason is the sole means
of determining a priori the ‘causality’ of both specifically moral actions
and cognitive knowledge, namely the epistemic or moral agent’s own
self-causing rational activity—or Reason itself, to which a human being
eo ipso subjects herself by making specifically moral or epistemic claims.
Only such rational self-legislation yields a touchstone, Kant believes, for
the possibility of an adequately determinable and universally valid con-
ception of both moral and natural causal efficacy. In this self-legislation,
that is, ‘the subjection of reason to no laws except those which it gives
itself’ (OT, AA 8: 145 [Kant, ‘What Does It Mean’, 16]), consists the free-
dom of thought or will. Self-legislation, ‘[t]hinking for oneself’, ‘means
seeking the supreme touchstone of truth in oneself (i.e. in one’s own rea-
son)’ (OT, AA 8: 146n. [Kant, ‘What Does It Mean’, 18]).12
But in what precisely does such subjecting oneself to a law, that is, self-
legislating, consist and what justifies Kant’s privileging of such a strat-
egy? In general, as Kant writes in OT,
[t]o make use of one’s own reason means no more than to ask one-
self, whenever one is supposed to assume something, whether one
could find it feasible to make the ground or the rule on which one
assumes it into a universal principle for the use of reason.
(OT, AA 8: 146n. [Kant, ‘What Does It Mean’, 18])
We can put this idea of self-legislation differently and more concretely if

we consider the fundamental assumption underlying Kant’s thought that
is paradigmatically expressed by the scholastic dictum forma dat esse rei,
which in principle Kant endorses. This dictum is mentioned by Kant in
RTP and is, as will become clear, also, in some sense, very dear to Der-
rida. The dictum means that
in the form [. . .] lies the essence of the state of affairs [Sache] [. . .]
insofar as this essence must be known through Reason [durch
Vernunft].
(RTP, AA 8: 404 [Kant (1999), 70], trans. emended)13
In other words, if and only if the thinking self or epistemic agent, and
mutatis mutandis the moral agent, gives a certain form (forma dat)
to what she cognises—the state of affairs or object of her interest—in
accordance with the general principles of her own rationality, then she is
able to know something essential (esse) about a particular state of affairs
(res); that is, she knows it through Reason, which for Kant means to
know it necessarily and universally (or a priori; cf. CPR B4). This rule
expresses the ‘universal principle for the use of reason’ (OT, AA 8: 146n.
[Kant, ‘What Does It Mean’, 18]).
As a corollary, the form that in accordance with her rational capacity
a thinker, and mutatis mutandis a moral agent, puts into, or contributes
to, the Sache (res) to be determined corresponds to the essence of the
thing known, insofar as it is known; the form of thought is thus the
known thing’s essence.14 Reason knows the form of what it cognises with
certainty and a priori, for it itself contributes this form, to which the
known thing isomorphically corresponds. As a consequence, we as think-
ers or moral agents are our own authors of the conditions under which
we cognise things and act on maxims, respectively—we are subject to no
law or cognitive constraint that we do not subject ourselves to ourselves
or legislate for ourselves.15 Reason is self-legislative insofar as the neces-
sary form of any cognition or moral action, or meaningful proposition,
for that matter, is concerned. That means that any rational agent need
not appeal, in virtue of a putative intellectual intuition, say, to heter-
onomous or non-rational means, be it any causal determinacy or inner
dispositional force or a sheer feeling or a sensus divinitatis, even, for the
warrant of her cognitive-determinative or moral capacity.
The justification for choosing autonomy as the determining ground
of our knowledge of reality, of the Sache, stems purely from the a priori
provability of a cognition that is grounded in such self-legislation, that is,
from the possibility of explaining the thing’s essence, its necessary form,
in and by virtue of thought or Reason itself. An element of philosophi-
cal parsimony and epistemic harmony is also involved here, the latter
aspect, as we shall see, being closely related to the tonality of philosophi-
cal speech. This choice for autonomy implies that the state of affairs
(Sache) itself, apart from the manner in which I know it, is, in a manner
of speaking, left for what it is (cf. CPR Bxx), involving Kant’s metaphysi-
cal doctrine of idealism, which says that we can know only appearances
and not things in themselves and thus giving rise to a noumenal realm
grounding our specifically moral claims without these having any theo-
retically provable basis in reality.
Consequently, with regard to the issue of faith and religion and the
alleged generalised epistemic function which Derrida supposes it to have
(I shall come to this subsequently), a formal privileging of discursive
Reason over faith conceived of as revealed (historical) faith is required.
This is so because revealed faith, or any other form of non-discursive
‘knowledge’ dependent on exogenous sources of warrant (revelation,
say), does not yield a priori provable knowledge of any arbitrary state
of affairs, event or action, whether it be a case of sensible or putatively
super-sensible experience. Belief in an exogenous cause of one’s cogni-
tion or moral action, or of an allegedly super-sensible experience, for
that matter, does not result in a rationally coherent, a priori hanging
together of the constitutive elements that make up the cognition, experi-
ence or action. For, first, there is ex hypothesi a gap between the external
warrant of the belief and the particular cognition’s or action’s inherently
subjective thought form, in which, as claims of some kind, they are neces-
sarily expressed. Second, any belief content must be able to be rationally
justified in terms of such a belief necessarily taking on a certain subjec-
tive form, namely the way that the belief content, that is, a particular
cognition, experience or action, is constrained by the subject’s mode of
expressing it and taking the belief content as her content.
Given the limitations of our discursive capacities, it is impossible to
verify whether the conception of a putative transcendent or an at any rate
external source or cause as the ostensible warrant of one’s experience (or
cognition, belief, act and so forth) veridically corresponds to the de facto
subjective experience (or cognition etc.) that one self-consciously has.
(Notice that a denial of the possibility of having an alleged super-sensible
experience is not the issue here, since nobody can contest somebody else’s
own de facto feelings or experiences, whatever their causes;16 what is at
issue is the validity of making a claim to having such an experience or
intuition, that is, the objective validity of one’s beliefs apropos of one’s
experiences or intuitions. It is nonsensical to deny someone having the
experiences she has or the fact of those experiences.)17 Therefore, a belief
in the heteronomous nature of the warrant of one’s actual experience,
cognition or action cannot be assented to, rationally, in the same apo-
dictic way that one is, on the empirical level, intuitively certain to have
an experience (putatively super-sensible or not). To act upon revealed
faith or to philosophise through feeling18 may provide immediate cer-
tainty through sensible intuition for the person involved but, according
to Kant, it will never yield philosophical certainty and hence universally
and a priori insightful truth, since the putative certainty is intersubjec-
tively incommunicable (and so not objectively valid). For Kant, com-
municability of one’s thoughts is an intrinsic feature of the capacity for
thinking itself (OT, AA 8: 144).19 If we abandon the maxim that ‘reason
alone can command validity for everyone’ and declare ourselves as it
were liberated from the constraints of reason, ‘a confusion of language
must soon arise’ (OT, AA 8: 145 [Kant, ‘What Does It Mean’, 17]). This
will result in fanaticism (Schwärmerei)—where ‘each one [. . .] follows
his own inspiration’ (OT, AA 8: 145 [Kant, ‘What Does It Mean’, 17])20
and thus ‘loses touch with the sensus communis’21—and eventually ‘the
complete subjection of reason to facts, i.e. superstition’ (OT, AA 8: 145
[Kant, ‘What Does It Mean’, 17]).
The authority to which revealed faith, or any act based upon it, appeals
lies ex hypothesi outside of itself.22 Religion, by its very definition, signals
dependence on an external power or authority as its legitimating ground.
Philosophically speaking, to appeal to a revealing power or authority—
God or any other presumably external source—for the justification of
one’s belief(s), experience(s) or action(s) can only amount to a petitio
principii, for one’s appeal to the authority of the heteronomous source
of authorisation of one’s beliefs presupposes that one has always already
accepted that source as primordial source of authorisation.23 This cir-
cularity would appear to be vicious, for an unbridgeable gap remains
between the warrant provided by the authority to which one appeals (the
instance of authorisation) and the act of belief itself in respect of it. Noth-
ing tells a believer, apart from the sheer acceptance on authority, that
she is justified to believe in the authority’s authorising force, even if the
authority appealed to were indeed the ultimate warrant for one’s beliefs.
This is different from the circularity of the self-legislation of Reason—at
least in Kant’s internalist conception of it—because in Reason no conflict
arises as to the relation between the subjective appeal to the authorising
source and that source, the warrant for one’s appeal, itself as the source
of authorisation. For Reason, and hence every rational agent employing
it, appeals to itself and, as authorising authority, is not exogenous with
respect to the appeal. Succinctly put, Reason, and hence every rational
agent, is self-authorising or self-legitimating. Reason provides its own
authority or warrant. In Reason, an intrinsic, internal connection obtains
between autonomy as warrant and justification, which is wanting in con-
structions of justification that appeal to heteronomy for warrantability.
In light of the previous, given the appeal to heteronomy that is charac-
teristic of religion, an investigation of the status of philosophy vis-à-vis
religion itself can therefore not non-question-beggingly be based on an
inversion of the relation between philosophy and religion with respect
to the authorising source of the former, so that religion would become
the terminus a quo of analysis, as the telling title of an important recent
book, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion,24 suggests (in the next sec-
tion, I elaborate on this peculiar strategic move).
In this context, it is interesting to observe—and this becomes clearer
shortly—that in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant stipulates, in the con-
text of an account of the discipline of Reason, that it is ‘not the state of
affairs [Sache], but the tone [which is] in dispute [streitig wird]’ (CPR
A744/B772, trans. mine). Neither the orthodox (read: academic) phi-
losopher nor the believer, who appeals to a religious intuition or revela-
tion for authorisation, is able to know the state of affairs (res) directly
by means of a putative intellectual intuition—nobody can, so to speak,
verify his representation with the idea archetypa.25 Therefore, knowledge
is a matter of the proper measure (Maß, Mäßigung) in which the tonal
chord of any claim—which, for Kant, comes down to a certain forma of
thought—represents the state of affairs (Sache, res). That is to say, meas-
ure is a matter of the proportion or ratio of the constituent elements of
knowledge, the ratio in the modulation of tones, which constitutes the
epistemically harmonious grasp of the state of affairs (Sache) that is to
be known.26 It is Kant’s claim that only discursive Reason can satisfy this
demand of rational proportionality—whereby it should be kept in mind
that the typical synthetic a priori form of a conceptual representation
of an objective state of affairs is directly proportional to the discursive
nature of our intellect.27 What is thus fundamentally at stake is the nature
of the measure of the tonal chord of philosophical speech. My central
claim is that, all things considered, the tone of speech in philosophy, by
definition, cannot be religious if, that is, one should remain, as Derrida
proposes, within the critical parameters of the Kantian discourse, for the
latter, unlike what Derrida proposes, stresses the self-authorising, neces-
sarily discursive character of Reason.
2. Différance and the Apocalyptic Discourse
Derrida claims that a certain ‘differentiating’ mode—what he calls
différance—that is itself not explicitly identifiable as such undermines
the stability of Kant’s premise that, in accordance with the earlier quoted
scholastic dictum, philosophy ‘beforehand demands certain forms, under
which the [intuitive] material can be subsumed’ (RTP, AA 8: 395, trans.
mine; cf. RTP, AA 8: 404). Why is this so? And what has religion or
faith got to do with this so-called structurally differentiating and derail-
ing mode, as Derrida suggests?
Derrida appears to be saying that a distinction between, on the hand,
the ‘formal’ and, on the other hand, the ‘concrete’, ‘material’ or the
‘empirical’, is not absolute or fixed but relative, for the possibility of such
a distinction rests on a more originary form, what Derrida dubs a quasi-
structural différance. As a corollary, no absolute dividing line is possible,
Derrida argues, between the rationality of philosophy and its a priori
forms and the so-called irrationality of religion and its historical-positive
manifest forms, which are dependent on a posteriori, historically contin-
gent, material content, that is, concrete experience. For this reason, Der-
rida questions the justifiability of the distinction between what Kant calls
‘rational faith’ and what on Kant’s account is to be regarded as supersti-
tious theophany.28 To put it in language that fits the arithmetical termi-
nology of ‘ratio’ or ‘measure’ (Maß) that Kant employs in RTP, Derrida
would appear to argue that the distinction between, on the one hand,
a scientific arithmetic and, on the other hand, a mystical, Pythagorean
numerology29 or a geometry based on intellectual intuition—a distinction
on which, significantly, Kant insists in his apology of the ‘academic’ Plato
against Plato the mystagogue—is not rigorous and a priori fixed.30
In other words, Kant would thus not be justified to make an absolute
distinction between the dictating voice of Reason (dictamen rationis),31
which Kant suggests is mathematically proportioned and hence pure,32
and the emotive resonance of the exalted voice of the non-discursive
‘oracle’,33 to which belong all the tonalities of religion as well as the tones
and tunings, and detunings, of the heart (pathos).34 In Derrida’s view,
to privilege Reason over the irrational, ‘pathological’ appeal to such an
oracle by virtue of an intellectual intuition would betray an arbitrary
choice.35 It would disregard that both voices, the untuned or detuned
exalted one of the fanatic who calls upon his immediate intuition and
the so-called pure voice of discursive Reason, are effectively intonations
(vibrations) of the same differentiating and differentiable tonal range.36
In some sense, the commanding voice of Reason itself (particularly in the
case of morality) appeals, in the very strictness of its bidding, to a mys-
terium tremens, a fundamental secret that is no longer rationally deter-
minable. That is to say, it summons up the ‘Idea of duty’ as ‘the majesty
of the law’, on hearing of whose ‘adamant [ehernen, iron] voice’—as,
interestingly, Kant himself asserts—‘every human being [. . .] trembles
[. . .] when inclinations, which try to make him deaf and disobedient to
this voice, arise within him’ (RTP, AA 8: 402 [Kant (1999), 68], empha-
sis added).37
According to Derrida, then, there is thus no overriding reason what-
soever to consider, as Kant does, the authority of Reason, through its
‘adamant voice’, superior38 to the call of faith or of the heart just because
Reason ostensibly speaks to everyone unambiguously and in a man-
ner that is presumably publicly and universally sanctioned. This is so,
according to Derrida, since, as we have just seen, Kant considers—or so
it seems—Reason itself to presuppose an apparently non-rational exog-
enous ground, a mystery, a secret, which she cannot subsequently deter-
mine according to its own principle of autonomous self-determination or
self-legislation.39 Consequently, the ground of the interpretation of the
secret by, on the one hand, the fanatical speculator, the religious believer
or the mystic and, on the other hand, the philosopher who is led by the
principle of self-legitimation or the agent who, in conformity with the
a priori rules of self-legislation, duly obeys the categorical imperative
of Reason and accordingly acts from duty alone is, so Derrida argues,
in all cases the same. Reason and faith would thus appear to have the
same common primordial root to which they must all make an essentially
‘emotive’ appeal.40
The secret of the voice of Reason is, on Kant’s own account, impen-
etrable.41 Here Reason cannot fall back on the same arsenal of discursive
concepts and constitutive principles which it applies in its determina-
tive or moral judgements, so as to uncover the secret, for this original
‘true secret’—as Kant typifies the ground of the idea of freedom42—that
reveals but also ‘conceals’ itself, as Kant himself admits (RTP, AA 8: 403
[Kant (1999), 68]), withstands all cognitive analysis just because, as Der-
rida suggests,43 it is the indeterminable ground of thought’s determina-
tive predications.44 From this, Derrida believes it justified to infer that
both the constative determinations of thought and the ethical maxims
of moral action, on the one hand, and the idiomatic ‘rhythm’ (Takt) of
religious-mystical consciousness, on the other hand, rest on the same
original equivocality, namely a conflict between the interpretation of the
secret of the supersensible and its effective exposure, that is, ‘the lifting
of its veil’.45 This conflict, an antinomy almost, cannot be neutralised: in
Derrida’s view, every representation of the supposedly supersensible, or
indeed any representation and hence any cognition or action whatsoever,
is merely an orientation toward the most singular, that is, an adieu or
hint (a Heideggerian Wink)46 toward what is Other (l’autre, autrui) and is
thus itself necessarily nothing but a particular articulation of the latter.47
By implication, this Other cannot be revealed as such, as Other, on pain
of contradicting the singularity of the modus of the adieu, as an indispen-
sable mere orientation toward alterity.
The equivocality at issue thus rests on the fact that the adieu cannot
reveal or expose itself (to interpretation) just because in order to do that,
it would first require itself as a means of so doing, which is epistemi-
cally circular.48 It cannot sublate—that is, aufheben, as in Kant’s reference
to the lifting of the veil of Isis (RTP, AA 8: 399)49—its own orientating
mode, not in terms of exposing it to view, let alone in terms of literally
destroying it (which captures both meanings of ‘apocalyptics’). Conse-
quently, the adieu as a mode of the apocalyptic—being the prototypical
manifestation of the equivocality at issue—must be regarded, according
to Derrida, as ‘the transcendental condition of each discourse, even of all
experience, of each sign or trace’.50
Despite its ostensibly Kantian roots, Kant of course throws this ingen-
ious juggling with ambiguity or equivocality in the face of the mystagogue
or hierophant, who, as Kant says, paraphrasing Schlosser’s Platos Briefe,
‘approach[es] so near the goddess of Wisdom, that one can discern the
rustling of her garment’ (RTP, AA 8: 399, trans. mine). The wilful ambi-
guity or equivocation at play here consists in the fact that, as Kant points
out, at the same time ‘the veil of Isis’ must be thin enough so that ‘one can
intimate the goddess under this veil’ but also ‘thick enough so that one
can make the specter into whatever one wants’ (RTP, AA 8: 399 [Kant
(1999), 64]).51 In Kant’s view, the equivocation issues from a deliberate
detuning of the tonal chord, as it were, with which any thought should—
on his account at least—reasonably comply to the extent that one should
conform to a publicly validated cognition of the intelligible substrate
(the Sache), which is the intended object of thought. The intonation is
detuned so that, as Kant puts it, in the multitude of voices or tones the
‘heads [are incited] into exaltation’ (RTP, AA 8: 399), which only leads
to mystical sectarianism in philosophy.
In fact, this equivocality concerns a leap (Übersprung), ‘a mysterious
rhythm’ (mystischer Takt), in respect of the concept of the indetermi-
nable, beyond it ‘into the unthinkable’ (RTP, AA 8: 398 [Kant (1999),
62]). This leap is what characterises the fanatical thinker’s speculations,52
for in the detuning—that is, the adoption of an exalted tone—he is sup-
posedly able, on the one hand, to appeal to an insight that, on the other
hand, he believes he need not justify in terms of a rationally insightful,
let alone intersubjectively valid, harmony—the latter being the ‘rhythm’
of a ‘measured’ beat (Takt). The disclosure of the secret, into which the
fanatic presumes to have special insight (amounting to esotericism), is
announced but is at the same time with intent infinitely postponed by not
actually illuminating it (aufzuklären). This results in what Kant labels the
‘superior tone’ of a certain type of philosophising ‘in which one can do
without philosophy’. Kant writes:
[The fanatic] posits true philosophy (philosophia arcani) in precisely

the fact that he broods over an Idea in himself, which he neither can
make comprehensible nor even communicate to others, and so here
poetic talent finds nourishment for itself in the pleasures of raving
[im Gefühl und Genuß zu schwärmen].
(RTP, AA 8: 393 [Kant (1999), 56], trans. emended)53
However, by what right can Kant claim, Derrida will insist, that this
so-called leap (Übersprung), enacted by the fanatic, issues in ‘surrogate
cognition’ and presumably effects the death or emasculation of philoso-
phy, which alone yields ‘proper knowledge’ (eigenen Erkenntnis) (RTP,
AA 8: 398)? Is the ‘proper knowledge’ that Kant intends not also merely
an interpretation, a merely ectypal knowledge (cf. RTP, AA 8: 391), that
is, a mere ‘surrogate’ (RTP, AA 8: 398) for the archetypal Platonic ideas,
the ideas representing the ‘proper’ in the strict sense, ‘die Sache selbst’?
Does Kant’s own oblique, transcendental perspective on the thing in
itself, by way of his doctrine of transcendental idealism, not in fact pre-
scribe a surrogate mode of cognition of the thing in itself? How should
we then properly understand ‘proper’ in Kant’s sense?54 Do we not indeed
encounter here an equivocality to which the so-called ‘proper knowledge’
to which Kant aspires is subject, too?
To a certain extent, according to Derrida, religion even has primacy as
regards what amounts to proper knowledge. This explains philosophy’s
‘turn to religion’ announced by Hent de Vries,55 the affirmation of a reli-
gio perennis, for a certain testimony of faith is said always to precede
all knowledge, each act of thought in general. Derrida associates this
testimony with a ‘promise [of a] (quasi-transcendental) axiomatic per-
formative’,56 ‘an elementary faith’.57 This testimony or ‘elementary faith’
goes beyond all ostensive proof or ‘demonstrative Reason’.58 In this way,
the equivocal relation between Reason and religion, which according to
Derrida results in their indistinguishability, their formal substitutability,
appears to have been surreptitiously translated by him into the language
of religion itself as the quasi-‘proper’ discourse, to which what Kant calls
the ‘Herculean labor’ (RTP, AA 8: 390 [Kant (1999), 53])59 of Reason is
also subjected or from which Reason at least only first originates. The
transcendental-formal substitutability of religion and Reason, which are
to be sure undeniably related terms or concepts, now appears to be sub-
stituted by religion itself, as quasi-universal form. This suggests that, in
the Derridean view, Reason is not just on a par with religion but in fact
subordinate to it. The question then arises: how does religion function as
the substitute of the transcendental, as the ‘quasi-transcendental’,60 as it
were, which supposedly governs the very possibility of philosophy?
The antinomial equivocality, to which I alluded previously, of a secret
that must simultaneously be revealed and remain transcendent, intangi-
ble, is the characteristic, Derrida suggests, of apocalyptic discourses.61
It is not only the adherent of fanatical speculation, who, as Kant (RTP,
AA 8: 398) indicates, hopes with much anticipation for an explication
of the secret—but, conspicuously, does not want to have it thereby
exposed at the cost of it losing its seductive charm. According to Der-
rida, the Enlightenment itself also proves to be a discourse that strikes
an apocalyptic tone, since it typically promises or announces to reveal or
uncover (apokalupto) the secret of what philosophy proper is, without
in fact exposing the secret, namely the thing in itself or the Absolute
that is the very topic of philosophy. (This is paradigmatically demon-
strated by Kant’s transcendental critique of ontological realism, which
leaves open the metaphysical possibility of perspectives on reality other
than the human-discursive one. In Kant’s critical perspective, one is ex
hypothesi left to wonder what the real ‘secret’ of metaphysical, ultimate
reality could be.) Consequently, Derrida believes that one should speak
of a generalised detuning, of which the apocalyptic tone is not just an
effect among other such religious effects. Rather, apocalypticity is itself
in a certain respect the unisono voice, in which the various discourses,
religion and philosophy, specifically Kant’s progressivist transcendental
philosophy, manifest themselves62—which is not to say that apocalyp-
ticity is tantamount to ‘one fundamental scene, one great paradigm’.63
Apocalypticity is just the generalised mode in which both philosophy and
religion manifest themselves as forms of progressivism in terms of offer-
ing ways to enlighten, to illuminate (aufzuklären), which are at the same
time ‘destructive’ of previous attempts to do so.64
But do Derrida’s own beliefs in this regard not closely resemble an
unmediated ‘apotheosis’ (RTP, AA 8: 390 [Kant (1999), 53]), even if
no appeal is made to a special, metaphysical intuition of what is trans-
cendent, of ‘die Sache selbst’? Has Derrida perhaps created, over and
above Kant’s distinctions, a fourth level of ‘assent’ or holding-to-be-true
(Fürwahrhalten), a kind of ‘pre-sentiment’ (RTP, AA 8: 397 [Kant (1999),
61]) of the quasi-transcendental?65 What actually remains of Derrida’s
critical vigilance? Can Derrida’s ‘enlightened Enlightenment’ by way of
a formalised apocalyptics still be called Kantian? Or is Derrida perhaps
a hyper-Kantian?
3. Derrida’s Formalised Exaltation

At first sight, Derrida’s ‘hypercritical’ critique of Kant appears to neglect
the conditional nature of the formal distinctions underlying Kant’s
thought. As we have seen (Section 1), these formal distinctions are aimed
at enabling a universally valid and intersubjectively obtainable insight
into the matter at issue, that is, the res or Sache of philosophical enquiry
(‘die Sache selbst’, things). It does not imply that other (non-discursive)
ways of knowing regarding the same thing have no validity whatsoever,
nor that religious experience as such has no warrant at all.66 It also does
not mean that material aspects of cognition or moral action are not at all
relevant for the possibility of knowledge and morality, respectively. Of
course, Derrida insists on the quasi-formal nature of différance, almost
as if it were a principle, which is made manifest by the structural indis-
tinguishability, or substitutability, of formal (Kantian) knowledge and
more empirical forms of knowledge. In Section 2, I referred to this as the
equivocality between interpretation and revelation of the transcendent
substrate, an equivocality deriving from the ambiguous meaning of the
concept of ‘revelation’ or ‘apocalyptics’ itself, as suggested by the mysti-
cal trope of ‘lifting the veil of Isis’ to which Kant refers; hence Derrida’s
reference to apocalyptics, which aptly expresses the equivocality that
Derrida wants to expose. The structure of indistinguishability between
the two terms of this relation, interpretation and revelation, is the same
as with the presumed relation of substitutability between formal and
empirical kinds of cognition, the latter of which ostensibly signal more
concrete types of knowledge.
Suggesting a close proximity to Kant’s idea of the transcendental form
of knowledge, Derrida even speaks of the ‘quasi-transcendental’,67 or
indeed apocalyptics as a ‘transcendental condition of each discourse, of
experience even’ or as ‘transcendental structure’.68 However, in Derrida’s
account, the terms in the theoretical (re)construction of the state of affairs
(res, Sache) would seem to be substitutable in the manner of an expressly
intended infinite regress, so that the formality of différance, which effects
this substituting mode, is not an a priori formality in the strict Kantian
sense. Not a single form (forma), then, is isomorphically correspondent
to the state of affairs (res, Sache) and so constitutive of its essence in the
manner of the aforementioned scholastic dictum to which Kant adheres
(see Section 1). Hence, for Derrida, no form is in principle superior to
other ways of ‘formation’, formalisation or interpretation, and certainly
no a priori form can be privileged over any merely a posteriori content
(with its own particular forms).
Given this scepticism with respect to the possibility of distinguishing
explicitly between form and material content and a fortiori in respect of
a standardisation of a given formalisation as the a priori form, the epis-
temological question arises about the extent to which Derrida is actually
justified to give credence to his own thesis—if it may be so called—of
différance. What is the epistemic warrant for this meta-epistemic trust?
Can it be belief (faith) or the performative testimony itself, which is said
to accompany every theoretical formalisation or enunciation and is one
among many concrete manifestations of the so-called apocalyptic dis-
course, as Derrida contends, which provides this warrant? Does this not
constitute a petitio principii in that he presupposes what he first means
to establish as the quasi-epistemological ground of all thetic knowledge?
If the authorising force of différance, the apocalyptic tone in terms of
a promise or threat even, as Derrida characterises it, possibly manifests
itself in arbitrary psychological-empirical motivations, the emotive force
of the ‘rhetoric of astonishment’69 or perhaps a mystical feeling, then
this authority can equally, and wholly justifiably, be ignored or rejected
as having no jurisdiction beyond any individual’s personal experience.
Nothing indicates that we should, in virtue of the de jure force of a rea-
sonable demonstration, take Derrida’s invocations seriously and not cast
him off as just another fanatic. To put it otherwise, on the basis of which
authority should we be vigilant (a trope of apocalyptics),70 as Derrida
urges us to be, and what forces us to feel bound by this authority, when
it must be observed that the quasi-transcendental structure of apocalyp-
ticity has possibly destructive as well as constructive consequences? Can
such vigilance, for which the adieu is a trope, really be the same as the
apocalyptic equivocality itself (constructive and destructive)? That is to
say, should the credence lent to the apocalyptic authority, manifest in
one’s vigilance, not be seen as solely positive in nature, an ‘original yes’
(oui originaire), as Derrida himself asserts,71 a yes that is not simulta-
neously a no? On the other hand, does Derrida perhaps try to exploit
the indisputable equivocality of modern critique—and, by implication,
of the notion of ‘vigilance’—which is by nature destructive as well as
constructive, by playing off the critical (Kantian) perspective against
itself? (Notice again that, in an important sense, the Kantian philosophy
‘destroyed’, in a manner of speaking, the possibility of nominalist, realist
or naturalist takes on reality, on the Sache, so that affirmatively subscrib-
ing to the Kantian perspective ipso facto means negating, or ‘destructing’,
other ways of looking at reality. The metaphilosophical implication of
the critical philosophy is ‘construction through destruction’, as it were.)72
But how does Derrida justify this well-nigh dialectical strategy?
The central question, therefore, is: how can Derrida legitimate the
claim regarding the acceptability or even the truthfulness of an ‘elemen-
tary faith’ as a fundamentally apocalyptic tone, by which all discourses,
philosophical and religious, are typified, without succumbing to a cir-
culus in probando? On what, ultimately, does the persuasiveness of his
claims rest so that we cannot but accede to their epistemic authority? To
argue that Kant himself would be guilty of circular reasoning in that he
acknowledges Reason as the sole legitimating authority is not pertinent,
for, as noted, Kant formulates, wholly consistently, the justification of
Reason as the ground of knowledge in the terms of Reason itself. Kan-
tian rational justification boils down to Reason’s self-justification or self-
authorisation. The burden of proof lies therefore entirely with Derrida,
who, although clearly being engaged in reasoning himself (in whatever
way one takes it), paradoxically appeals to a different non-identical (that
is, non-self) source of legitimation, a warrant that is not thought or Rea-
son itself but is somehow principally external to it. By persistently forsak-
ing the principle of identity as the quintessential principle of any thought,
including his own, that is to say, by denying the identical form of thought
itself as not only the necessary but also the sufficient ground of objec-
tively valid cognition,73 Derrida effectively repudiates the existence of
a ground that would substantiate self-reflexively, in virtue of reasoning
itself, his thesis of différance. The act of seeking authority whilst making
pronouncements of some kind and the very authorising instance seem
to come apart in Derrida’s reasoning. On the face of it, Derrida’s think-
ing thus appears to be precisely non-self-reflexive to the extent that he
rejects the idea of self-legislative, autonomous thought as sufficient for
the grounding of possible knowledge.
The rub is, of course, that, according to Derrida, the characteris-
tic mark of différance is precisely that there is no such substantiating
ground to be revealed internally, from within thought itself, that is, self-
reflexively, whilst différance is also not specifically external to thought
(in terms of a putative exogenous content or entity to which one can
appeal for warrant, a ‘mythical given’ of sorts). By calling attention to the
intrinsic ambiguity of the apocalyptic discourse, Derrida highlights the
heteronomous quasi-ground that he alleges is effective from within self-
legislating thought itself. In this way, Derrida believes to have pinpointed
an inherent structure that cannot be located externally nor sublated inter-
nally or indeed ‘unveiled’ by Reason by virtue of the internal process
of its self-legitimation—for, given the nature of apocalyptic apophansis,
it cannot literally be unveiled, exposed to view, as it would then effec-
tively be nullified. Consequently, Derrida does not feel obliged to inter-
nally justify his claim about différance in the terms of a self-authorising
rationality, for that would ex hypothesi undermine the very purport of
his reasoning concerning the irrefutable equivocality underlying all self-
authorising discourse. Paradoxically, however, this structural aspect of
différance would appear to reinforce formally the semblance of a typical
Kantian transcendentality. I come back to this later.
Certainly, one could rejoin that, first, Derrida is not at all interested in
a philosophical legitimation of his assertions or in philosophical or meta
philosophical issues concerning circularity, and, second, that to reorgan-
ise Derrida’s pronouncements in the terms of Kantian logic is entirely
misplaced, itself tantamount to begging Derrida’s primary question. His
locutions would be purely evocative or perlocutionary and would, quasi-
formally, as a performative event, rather precede and thus go beyond the
formal requirement of justification.74 Such an originary event of faith or
testimony which precedes all rational discourse and hence appears to
indicate a messianic structure, a ‘messianicity’75, is, as Derrida writes,
‘not justifiable in the logic of what it will have opened up’.76 Reason,
as Derrida writes with reference to Montaigne and Pascal, must simply
acknowledge ‘an irrecusable [. . .] “mystical basis of authority [fonde-
ment mystique de l’autorité]” ’.77
However, by shirking the philosophical demand of a legitimation of
one’s assertions, Derrida would appear to speak precisely in ‘the tone of a
lord who is so lofty as to be exempted from the burden of proving the
title of his property’ (RTP, AA 8: 395 [Kant (1999), 58]). Forswearing the
need for a self-legitimating internalist justification of one’s claims makes
Derrida a quintessentially religious or ‘fanatical’ thinker, at least from
a Kantian perspective. Consequently, his contentions would appear to
carry little philosophical weight. At the very most, they might have a
heuristic value. What I am tempted to call Derrida’s ‘formalised exalta-
tion’ (Schwärmerei) in regard to the relation of the philosophical and
religious discourses seems a classic case of an amphiboly of concepts. By
means of this, he effects the coup d’état of religious or quasi-religious
consciousness in philosophy, even if it is stipulated to amount to noth-
ing but a mere orientation toward alterity—epitomised by the trope of
the adieu. It is telling that in the context of an account of the adieu, De
Vries78 talks about a sacrificium intellectus. But De Vries’s programmati-
cally announced ‘turn to religion’ would effectively appear to imply, as
Kant puts it, ‘a vaulting leap (salto mortale) beyond concepts into the
unthinkable, [hinting at] a capacity to grasp what evades every concept,
an expectation of secrets or, rather, a suspense-ridden tendering of secrets
[Hinhaltung mit] that is actually the mistuning of heads into exaltation’
(RTP, AA 8: 398 [Kant (1999), 62]).79 Thus, Kant’s criticisms against
the fanatic, who complains about academic philosophy, seem equally
pertinent in the case of the Derridean ‘sophist’, who shuns philosophy’s
obligatory formalisms. Kant writes:
The disparaging way of denouncing formulations in our knowledge

(which is indeed the principal activity of philosophy) as pedantry
under the name of ‘form-giving manufacture’ confirms the suspicion
of a secret intention: in fact to ban all philosophy under the shop-sign
of philosophy, and to act superior as the victor over philosophy.
(RTP, AA 8: 404 [Kant (1999), 69])
Must we therefore denounce Derrida’s ideas about the adieu, being one
of the tropes of différance, as non-sensical ‘fanaticism’ intent on une-
quivocally banning academic philosophy, intent on completely exposing
it and putting it to an end full stop ‘under the shop-sign of philosophy’?
4. The Self-Consistency of Différance

One might want to argue that Derrida’s intonation is more in line with a
contemporary mode of thinking in continental philosophy, which is wary
of the kind of formalised approach, characteristic of Kant’s thought, to
the thinking subject and its a priori activity and to philosophy in general.
It remains a problem, however, that Derrida systematically substitutes
the semantics of his argument, or its narrative content, for its operative
structure without thereby accounting for the undeniably reflexive mode
of the substitution itself, as I pointed out previously. Derrida seems insuf-
ficiently aware, purposely or not, of the meta-philosophical implications
of his own reasoning. In this way, the tonality of the philosophical dis-
course that Derrida engages is consistently but nonetheless entirely ad
hoc, disturbed by the introduction of a (non-philosophical) dissonance.
Yet Derrida’s tone of voice threatens to evaporate (flatus vocis) into a
mode of merely describing hints at supposed implicit structures with-
out making, or willing to make, them explicit for thought. Therefore,
an orthodoxly Kantian ascesis in regard to such arbitrary tonal Verstim-
mungen, which are directed at disturbing the critical ear or hearing, is
called for.80 The ascetic intonation of Kant’s analysis reveals a choice for
rational measure and clarity, which ex hypothesi implies a certain moder-
ation.81 This tonal moderation seems wanting in Derrida, notwithstand-
ing his painstaking dissection of the diverse timbres of philosophy.
On the other hand, however, Derrida’s mode of thought seems in fact
rather highly consistent with its own semantic content, namely the adieu
or religion as the supposed (quasi-)ground of philosophy (the ‘mystical
basis’ of philosophical ‘authority’). Derrida’s thought modus is, in other
words, paradoxically extremely self-consistent. It manifests its own par-
ticular self-reflexivity. As I argued previously, Derrida keeps the ambigu-
ity underlying the relation of the terms of argumentation or narration,
form and content, firmly in place in that he consistently substitutes that
which is being structured by rational thought, either descriptively or
formal-logically, for what threatens to coagulate in terms of a formal
thought structure (the form in which something is expressed or enun-
ciated). By virtue of his ‘method’ of suspicion, Derrida sees to it that
content prevails consistently and persistently over form. This is thrown
into relief by pointing up the ‘essentially’ religious feature of such an
ambiguous mode of reasoning. In contrast to philosophy, religious speech
is essentially elliptical. It is conceptually necessary to speak of the essence
of religion in such an oblique way so as to begin comprehending its fun-
damental alterity—as Derrida aptly writes: ‘Just as its name [sc. religion]
indicates, one must [. . .] talk about the essence of religion with a certain
religio-sity [religio-sité]’.82 For Derrida, to talk about différance as the
ground of philosophy, then, means to speak ‘elliptically’ or ‘obliquely’ of
philosophy’s origin, as if speaking religiously, in the tone of an apocalyp-
tic modality.
But what would it mean to speak ‘elliptically’ or religiously of the
ground of philosophy, to speak of philosophy ‘with a certain religiosity’?
One cannot speak of it in this way, that is, ‘elliptically’ or ‘religiously’,
just by going about producing neat syllogisms or analysing concepts, even
if that is what one normally does as a philosopher. The elliptic mode that
Derrida has in mind, a certain reserve (retenue) apropos of a presumed
coagulated formality in philosophical speech, is probably precisely that
which typifies religion.83 In this respect, namely in objectively positing the
object of its investigation, that is, religion as the equivocality of the adieu,
equivocality as religion—which in its turn presumably articulates the
ground of philosophy itself—Derrida’s mode of thinking is, in an impor-
tant respect, conspicuously similar to Kant’s rational model of reflection,
for which the form of the understanding provides the necessary structure
to the thing to be cognised (in conformity with the principle forma dat
esse rei), so that a correspondence between subject and object, thought
form and semantic content, becomes clear. That is to say, the mode of
irreducible substitutability, différance, necessarily substitutes itself ad
infinitum, that is, the adieu as a trope of différance, as object of descrip-
tion or analysis as well as mode of description or analysis. In this way, the
structure of the adieu isomorphically maps onto the alterity to which it is
oriented in the same way that the form of Kant’s transcendental subject
isomorphically maps onto the object of cognition that it intends.
To a certain extent, Derrida’s thinking articulates an infinitely repeated
infinite judgement similar to the mode of negative or apophatic theology
(not-p, not-q, not-s etc.).84 Put differently, negation—being one of the
categories of quality, as the quintessential feature of objective determi-
nation, which in its turn results in a ‘limitation’ of the infinite sphere
of possible experience by means of infinite judgement—is infinitised or
infinitely negated, consistently aufgehoben, to put it in Hegelian language
(recall the earlier mentioned lifting of the veil of Isis). One discerns that by
means of the mode of consistent self-substitution, through infinite nega-
tion, Derrida enacts a certain mimesis of the self-legitimation of Reason.
That is, Derrida mimics Kant’s thesis that subject and object qua their
objective-unitary form exhibit a reciprocal and self-referential unity (par-
adigmatically expressed by the dictum forma dat esse rei), which shores
up discursive thought’s self-legitimation and constitutes the possibility
of thought and experience. How so? In Derrida’s manner of thinking,
the positing of the structural directedness, or the adieu toward what is
different (alterity), is reciprocal to the manner in which, whilst consist-
ently differentiating and with a certain reserve (retenue), the ‘object’ of
his thought—that is, the differentiating orientation of the adieu itself—is
posited. This mimicry of transcendental philosophy, of its self-legitimating
mode, is différance. Différance structurally ‘corresponds’ to the religious
way of imaging the Absolute, or ‘die Sache selbst’, namely taking up the
position of the adieu, which does not determine or attempt to determine
the Absolute formal-logically, descriptively or in any other positively
determinate sense but is fundamentally and consistently ‘merely’ oriented
towards it, as if it is the ‘vehicle’ of religious thought (cf. A341/B399).
The adieu is quintessentially ‘mere’ orientation—which is expressed by
the literal meaning of adieu, which expresses a direction, namely à dieu.
5. Derrida’s Hyper-Kantianism

Notwithstanding the fundamental differences between Kant and Derrida
insofar as the formal reflection upon the terms in the reflexive relation
is concerned (Reason/faith-religion, rational/irrational, harmony/dis-
sonance and so forth), and notwithstanding the serious epistemological
problems issuing from Derrida’s stance, we may say that there is a strong
resemblance in the way that both Derrida and Kant aim at a certain
consistency whilst expounding the matter (Sache) under consideration,
a consistency that is true to the nature of the object of their respective
enquiries—for Kant, it is the object of possible experience; for Derrida,
the object of enquiry is the adieu, or différance. True, Kant strives for
systematic harmony from within the perspective of rational reflection,
since he believes that an internal justification of the means of argumen-
tation will secure the tonal purity of the debate. Derrida, on the other
hand, would not shy away from stirring things up by effecting a tonal
disturbance, creating a dissonance, in order to refocus our minds, that
is, to draw our attention again to the fundamental issues at stake—this
refocusing reflects the characteristic apocalyptic attitude of watchfulness
or vigilance to which Jesus of Nazareth exhorts his disciples.85
Such an approach ties in with the structural directedness, in Derri-
da’s thinking, to the ‘most singular’, time and time again. Derrida thus
attempts to think formally about the singular without letting thought get
bogged down in formal, let alone a priori, structures. Nevertheless, to
the extent that Derrida, in the act of describing or narrating the adieu,
strives for a certain systematicity that is appropriate to the matter at
hand and thereby reveals a rational coherence in that specific intentional
sense, which shows a self-reflexiveness between the subject and object
of description, between form and content (namely to consistently think
‘singularly’ about the ‘singular’), one may say that Derrida is heir to the
legacy of Kantian thought. The prima facie arbitrary tonal disturbance—
to consistently ‘singularise’ what threatens to become too formalised or
generalised—serves a rational goal; indeed, it aims, as Derrida asserts, at
an ‘enlightenment of the Enlightenment’.
As a result, one might even be inclined to argue that Derrida remains
closer to the state of affairs, the Sache, more than Kant, who consistently
thinks from the perspective of a certain old-fashioned structuring formal-
ity, distanced from the concrete object. Derrida’s approach is one of a
more intimate focus. In a way, Derrida is a hyper-Kantian to the extent
that he takes absolutely seriously, and thus repeats, Kant’s ‘zur Sache
Selbst!’ (RTP, AA 8: 390). With the measure (Maß) and rhythm (Takt) of
the adieu, it is no longer the acceptance on authority—either God’s voice
or, indeed, the ‘adamant’ voice of Reason pure and simple—but unremit-
ting vigilance which supersedes all measure in the self-critique of pure
Reason precisely in moderation, by not presenting the truth as if it were
an observable, eternal fact, not even qua formal transcendental struc-
ture. Vigilance, then, is the quasi-reflective form of tonal moderation par
excellence, of hyper-moderation, by consistently keeping one’s focus on
the concrete, the singular, on what is presently before us. Consequently,
speaking religiously in Derrida’s sense does not mean to put forward
religious, speculative claims whilst speaking in an exalted tone but rather
discloses a critical circumspection in regard to the legitimacy of any kind
of claim, philosophical or other, with respect to concrete, lived reality
and the experience of concrete particulars.
Just as between the movements of a string quartet the musicians must
retune their instruments, the tuning of Reason should never be taken for
granted as if it were tuned once and for all. Reason, in all of its various
manifestations, will always need to be fine-tuned, to be enlightened, as it
were. Just as with the playing of a string quartet a detuning or mistuning
(Verstimmung) of the tones—which is generated due to the materiality of
the instruments86—will inevitably occur when the strings of the instru-
ments are stroked (vibrations cause a slackening of the strings), sensibil-
ity has an ineradicable negative influence on the purity of the discursive
intellect which is tempted to go astray by indulging in transcendent
claims (cf. A294–6/B350–2). This ineluctable historical or natural neces-
sity is shown by the given fact alone of the occurrence, in the history of
philosophy, of fanatic dilettantes who ‘act the philosopher’ (RTP, AA 8:
403 [Kant (1999), 69]), one of whom one might at first blush be inclined
to claim is Derrida.87
However, one should take heed that the watchfulness that is expressed
by the adieu presupposes rather than quasi-grounds the Kantian formal
starting-point of the transcendental reflective subject. Therefore, such
vigilance needs to show respect indeed for the unmistakable and ‘ada-
mant’ voice of Kant. In contrast to what Derrida will have us believe, the
critical philosophy and thus Reason itself, and not the thesis of structural
différance, let alone religion, stipulates the parameters of watchfulness—
notice that Kant himself uses the same religious trope by speaking, in
RTP, of an ‘ever-vigilant critique’ (RTP, AA 8: 404 [Kant (2002), 443]).88
In fact, even to speak of the adieu, as a structural mode of orientation, is
intelligible only on that condition. The detuning that occurs during the
performance of the movements of a string quartet does not contradict the
purity of tone, which—as is apparent while the players, before actually
starting the piece, are still tuning their instruments—is the exemplary
standard for playing in tune.
Primacy must thus be accorded to the formality of the understand-
ing, of Reason, and not to religion or apocalyptics, as Derrida suggests;
for, as I argued previously, the form in which Derrida states his views
regarding the adieu or différance cannot escape its own self-referentiality
or self-reflexiveness and so is therefore unmistakably a thought form
that articulates a particular claim, a form of which one is necessarily
self-aware as a thinker, even if only implicitly or elliptically—this reflex-
ive form is adverbial, so to speak, to any philosophically articulable or
articulated claim and should be able to be brought to light in a philo-
sophical analysis.89 Derrida’s philosophy of différance, as a necessary
quasi-religious, apocalyptic speech form, is by the same token a reflexive
form of self-legitimising thought which does not, or at least not merely,
rest on a heteronomous authority of elementary faith. Rather, it necessar-
ily gives itself, reflexively, a form in virtue of which, precisely in making
pronouncements about the adieu, it thus is witness, even if only implicitly
through an elliptic performative gesture or by means of mimesis, of the
self-authorisation of autonomous thought—namely, of its own thought.
All in all, Derrida might still be said to be a Kantian, just because he
adopts and then slightly tilts a Kantian mode of thinking by way of an
oblique perspective on Kant’s own paradigmatic intentio obliqua, that is,
by consistently looking for the form in which the object of investigation
must necessarily be thought, which means, in the case of philosophy’s
other, religion, or what religion is said to express uniquely, le tout autre
as such, to look for a form that is ex hypothesi not articulable in the for-
mal language of philosophy and must be thought elliptically.
Notes
1 This essay, the earliest draft of which dates right back to the very early nough-
ties, when I was pursuing my Ph.D. at Warwick University, is dedicated to the
memory of Gary Banham (1965–2013), who besides being a staunch Kantian
had a keen interest in Derrida. I would like to thank Johan de Jong, Giuseppe
Motta and Jacco Verburgt for their helpful comments on an earlier version
of this essay. I also thank my fellow Warwickian Tom Bailey for commenting
on a very early draft, in particular on the parts that deal with Kant’s moral
philosophy. Special thanks are due to Robert Clewis for his extremely help-
ful remarks on the penultimate draft of this article, especially regarding the
proper translation of Kant’s technical term Schwärmerei. Christian Onof read
and commented on the penultimate draft, for which thanks, as always.
2 OT, AA 8: 139 (‘What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’, in Reli-
gion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen Wood and George DiGio-
vanni [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001—henceforth, ‘What
Does It Mean’], 7–18, 12). All citations of Kant’s works are from the Akad-
emische Ausgabe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1900–) by means of the abbreviation
AA followed by the respective volume and page numbers. The Critique of
Pure Reason is cited from the original A and B editions. Other abbreviations
of Kant’s works used in this paper are:
Corr = Correspondence
CPJ = Critique of the Power of Judgement
CPR = Critique of Pure Reason
CPrR = Critique of Practical Reason
DDS = Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics
EMH = Essay on the Maladies of the Head
GMM = Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
OT = What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?
PPP =
Proclamation of the Imminent Conclusion of a Treaty of
Perpetual Peace in Philosophy
Obs = Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime
Religion = Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
RTP = On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority in Philosophy
3 For an extensive and illuminating account of the history leading up to this
injunction, see B. Stangneth, ‘Einleitung’, in Kant, Religion innerhalb der
Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, ed. Bettina Stangneth (Hamburg: Meiner,
2003), ix–lxi. Interestingly, Stangneth’s introduction partly debunks certain
persistent myths about Kant’s own position in this affair. See also Manfred
Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
361ff., 378ff.
4 The essay is variantly translated as On a Recently Prominent Tone of Supe-
riority in Philosophy. The original German title is Von einem neuerdings
erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie. Unless otherwise indicated,
for quotations I make use of the translation of Kant’s text in Raising the
Tone of Philosophy. Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique
by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1999), 51–81; whenever reference is made to Kant’s text contained
in Fenves’ edition, I refer to Kant (1999). Occasionally, I use Kant (2002)
to refer to the translation in the Cambridge edition by Peter Heath in Kant,
Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, ed. and trans. Henry Allison et al. (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 431–445. Page references are to
the volume and page numbers of Kant’s original text as it is published in the
Akademische Ausgabe, followed by the page numbers in the 1999 edition by
Fenves.
5 See for this, for example, Kant (2002), 427–428 and especially Fenves, Rais-
ing the Tone of Philosophy, 72–75.
6 The title of the French original is D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère
en philosophie, first published with Galilée in 1983. The text of the original
English translation of this work by John Leavey Jr. can be found in Fenves,
Raising the Tone of Philosophy, 117–171. I shall, however, cite the French
original (Jacques Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en phi-
losophie [Paris: Galilée, 1983]—henceforth, D’un ton apocalyptique) and,
when quoting, give my own translations from it.
7 Schwärmerei is generally best translated as ‘fanaticism’. However, Fenves
(Raising the Tone of Philosophy) translates it consistently as ‘exaltation’,
which I think is appropriate and sometimes perhaps even preferable given the
main theme of RTP, namely the critique of a superior tone in philosophy. The
term ‘fanaticism’ lacks the connotation of ‘prominence’ or ‘superiority’ that
is the object of critique in RTP. The Cambridge translation consistently uses
the term ‘enthusiasm’ for ‘Schwärmerei’, which in its archaic English sense
does indeed appear to refer to fanaticism, namely meaning ‘extravagant reli-
gious emotion’ (see the OED). However, in light of Kant’s distinction between
fanaticism and enthusiasm in Obs (AA 2: 251n.), it seems appropriate not to
use the latter term as a translation for Schwärmerei in the context of RTP. See
also the observations made by Stephen Palmquist on Kant’s use of the term
Schwärmerei in Stephen Palmquist, ‘Kant’s Lectures on Philosophical Theol-
ogy’, in Reading Kant’s Lectures, ed. Robert Clewis (Berlin and Boston: De
Gruyter, 2015), 365–390, 384–385n. Thanks to Robert Clewis for discussion
on this topic.
8 Cf. RTP, AA 8: 393, 406n.
9 I should also note that to the extent that I discuss Derrida’s own thought,
I do not make an effort to distinguish between earlier and later phases of his
work. I take Derrida’s oeuvre to be a continuous body of work conveying a
central idea across the various guises in which Derrida expresses it. Whereas,
for example, such an idiosyncratically Derridean concept as différance might
be taken to specifically refer to Derrida’s early thought, I employ all such
concepts as though they applied to his thought in general.
10 If we relate this directly to an appeal to a heterogeneous warrant for one’s
belief in the existence of a super-sensible object, God, say, Kant is clear that
Reason ‘deserves the right to speak first in matters concerning supersensible
objects such as the existence of God and the future world’. If this is disputed,
‘then a wide gate is opened to all enthusiasm [Schwärmerei], superstition and
even to atheism’ (OT, AA 8: 143 [Kant, ‘What Does It Mean’, 15]). Compare
also a passage a bit earlier in OT, where Kant writes: ‘The concept of God
and even the conviction of his existence can be met with only in reason, and
it cannot first come to us either through inspiration or through tidings com-
municated to us, however great the authority behind them. [. . .] [I]n order
to judge whether what appears to me, what works internally or externally on
my feelings, is God, I would have to hold it up to my rational concept of God
and test it accordingly. [. . .] [N]o one can first be convinced of the existence
of a highest being through any intuition; rational faith must come first, and
then certain appearances or disclosures could at most provide the occasion
for investigating whether we are warranted in taking what speaks or presents
itself to us to be a Deity, and thus serve to confirm that faith according to
these findings’ (OT, AA 8: 142–3 [Kant, ‘What Does It Mean’, 14–15]). For
Kant, any appeal to or basic belief in an exogenous source of one’s experience
or representations must be preceded by an endogenous rational justification.
11 Cf. RTP, AA 8: 395n.
12 Cf. RTP, AA 8: 402.
13 When Kant uses the term ‘Sache’, he almost always means the really existing
thing (de re). I translate this by ‘state of affairs’, which, although somewhat
ungainly, is closer to the original meaning of the word ‘res’; more impor-
tantly, I want to avoid confusion with the Kantian terms ‘Ding’, ‘Gegenstand’
and ‘Objekt’. However, sometimes I use to term ‘Sache’ as designating ‘thing
in itself’.
14 Cf. CPR Bxii and Bxviii.
15 For a paradigmatic description of the aspect of self-legislation in Kant’s moral
philosophy, see especially GMM, AA 4: 431.
16 Cf. RTP, AA 8: 395.
17 Kant argues, in the context of his critique of exaltation or fanaticism in phi-
losophy, that if I could make it credible that my feelings are not ‘merely sub-
jectively in me but can be demanded of everyone and is therefore held to be
objectively valid’, I would ‘have a great advantage over those who must first
justify themselves before they are allowed to celebrate the truth of their asser-
tions’. Kant sarcastically adds: ‘Long live philosophy drawn from feelings, a
philosophy that leads us directly to the things themselves!’ (RTP, AA 8: 395
[Kant (1999), 58]). The question thus is not that one can or cannot have
feelings that putatively provide insight not otherwise to be won. What Kant
disputes is that such feelings can have objective validity and be epistemically
relevant.
18 Cf. RTP, AA 8: 401.
19 Kant writes here: ‘[H]ow much and how correctly would we think if we
did not think as it were in community with others to whom we communi-
cate our thoughts, and who communicate theirs to us! [. . .] [If an] external
power [. . .] wrenches away people’s freedom publicly to communicate their
thoughts, [it] also takes from them the freedom to think’ (Kant, ‘What Does
It Mean’, 16). Cf. RTP, AA 8: 389.
20 On exaltation or fanaticism, see also Obs, AA 2: 251, esp. 251n; EMH, AA
2: 267; DDS, AA 2: 348, 365; CPJ, AA 5: 275 and OT, AA 8: 145.
21 Gregory Johnson, ‘The Tree of Melancholy. Kant on Philosophy and Enthu-
siasm’, in Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion, ed. Chris L. Firestone
and Stephen Palmquist (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006),
43–61, 55.
22 Notice, however, that, for Kant, revealed faith requires rational faith. Kant
writes: ‘[R]ational faith [. . .] must also be taken as the ground of every other
faith, and even of every revelation’ (OT, AA 8: 142 [Kant, ‘What Does It
Mean’, 14], emphasis added).
23 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Vernunft und Offenbarung’, in Stichworte. Kritische
Modelle 2 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), 20–28, 25.
24 I refer to Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
25 Cf. RTP, AA 8: 391.
26 Compare the exposition in RTP, AA 8: 392–393, where Kant discerns a con-
spicuous connection between mathematical ratios, music (tonality, harmony)
and the principle of autonomy and self-determination in Pythagoras. This
will be explored further in Section 5.
27 Cf. RTP, AA 8: 391, where Kant suggests that Plato espoused a proto-Critical
theory of the synthetic a priori. I cannot here expand on the precise nature
of Kant’s synthetic a priori or Plato’s supposed precursor notion of it. For
more general reflections on the reference to Plato in RTP, see Rüdiger Bubner,
‘Platon—Der Vater aller Schwärmerei. Zu Kants Aufsatz “Von einem neuer
dings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie” ’, in Antike Themen und
ihre moderne Verwandlung (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), 80–93.
28 Regarding the distinction that Kant makes between theology and theoph-
any, see RTP, AA 8: 401n. In his Religion book, Kant differentiates rational
faith (Vernunftglauben) from revealed historical faith (Offenbarungsglauben)
(Religion, AA 6: 163). Of course, revealed historical faith is not to be conflated
with superstitious theophany for Kant; historical faith has a positive role to
play, whereas superstitious theophany certainly has no such role. Although
historical-positive aspects of religion cannot be privileged over rational faith,
Kant is certainly not simply dismissive of historical religion, as Derrida might
be taken to suggest. However, the privileging of historical faith over rational
faith would indeed result in false worship or superstition. Notice that Kant’s
concept of (pure) rational faith is already introduced in OT, AA 8: 141 (Kant,
‘What Does It Mean’, 13–14), where it is defined as a belief ‘grounded on no
data other than those contained in pure reason’. Rational belief or faith ‘can
never be transformed into knowledge by any natural data of reason or experi-
ence, because here the ground of holding true is merely subjective, namely a
necessary need of reason [. . .] to presuppose the existence of a highest being,
but not to demonstrate it’.
29 RTP, AA: 392–393.
30 Cf. Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique, 41.
31 RTP, AA 8: 401–402.
32 In the first Critique, Kant speaks, in the context of pointing out the impos-
sibility of a physico-theological proof of God’s existence, of a ‘measured and
modest tone [Ton der Mäßigung und Bescheidenheit]’ (Kant, CPR A624/
B652; cf. A749/B777). Kant employs the same terms in RTP, AA 8: 403. The
voice of Reason is pure, but that does not mean that philosophy is toneless
or even atonal, as Derrida (D’un ton apocalyptique, 18) seems to suggest
by pointing to philosophy’s ‘neutrality’ of tone. Also, De Vries (Philosophy
and the Turn to Religion, 369–370, 380) believes, wrongly, that philosophy
is atonal or tone-neutral. Purity of tone is not tonelessness; rather, it signals
tonal moderation.
33 Cf. RTP, AA 8: 390. Kant also speaks of the ‘oracle of reason’ for that matter
(RTP, AA 8: 393).
34 Cf. Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique, 34–35.
35 Kant clearly dismisses intellectual intuition as a legitimate mode of cogni-
tion. However, he takes issue with the typical reproach that the formalism
of the critical philosophy, its reliance on discursivity, would imply an ‘arbi-
trary form-giving undertaken by design, or even machine-made [plan- oder
fabrikenmäßig [. . .] eingerichtete willkürliche Formgebung]’ (RTP, AA 8:
404 [Kant (2002), 444]). The discursivity of the understanding requires that,
in contrast to ‘intellectual intuition [which] would immediately present the
object and grasp it all at once’, ‘a great amount of labor [is expended] to ana-
lyze its concept and then combine them again according to principles [. . .]
and [. . .] many difficult steps [must be climbed] in order to make progress
in knowledge’ (RTP, AA 8: 389 [Kant (1999), 51], trans. emended). There
is at any rate nothing arbitrary about the discursive nature of philosophy or
indeed about Kant’s reason for privileging discursive cognition over intellec-
tual intuition, since the latter is an impossible form of cognition for human
beings.
36 Cf. Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique, 70: ‘a pure differential vibration.’
37 Cf. Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique, 35–37. See also Kant, Religion, AA 6: 87.
38 Reason must ‘outweigh [überwiegen] [. . .] all [these inclinations]’, as Kant
puts it (RTP, AA 8:402 [Kant (1999), 68]).
39 Cf. RTP, AA 8: 395 and especially RTP, AA 8: 403, where Kant, significantly,
identifies the mystery as freedom.
40 See also Derrida, Foi et savoir (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), 46, 89.

Although Kant would seem to admit as much regarding an essential emo-
tional involvement in the last section of his treatise, when he offers his oppo-
nents a truce (RTP, AA 8: 405), Derrida’s portrayal of course rests on a false
representation of Kant’s position. For Kant says emphatically that the amaze-
ment at the sublimity and impenetrability of the secret of freedom, that is,
the feeling engendered from ideas (RTP, AA 8: 403), does not precede moral
legitimation, so as to provide it a ground; feeling rather lends weight ex post
factum to the obedience which the law of Reason calls forth in virtue of
itself. That is to say, feeling accompanies the law. The secret can be felt only
after ‘long development of concepts of the understanding and carefully tested
principles’, that is, ‘only through work’ (RTP, AA 8: 403 [Kant (1999), 69]).
Feeling is not the ground of knowledge (which would imply mysticism), but
by means of clear knowledge our knowledge is increased, ‘which has an effect
on (moral) feeling’ (RTP, AA 8: 403, trans. mine; cf. Religion, AA 6: 114).
See also OT, AA 8: 139–40n., where Kant writes regarding ‘the felt need of
reason’ to postulate a subjective maxim in order to orient oneself in specula-
tive thinking (i.e., in the super-sensible domain): ‘Reason does not feel; it has
insight into its lack and through the drive for cognition it effects the feeling
of a need. It is the same way with moral feeling, which does not cause any
moral law, for this arises wholly from reason; rather, it is caused or effected
by moral laws, hence by reason, because the active yet free will needs deter-
minate grounds’ (‘What Does It Mean’, 12). In other words, feeling is not
primary and neither precedes nor grounds Reason but is rather an effect of
Reason. Nevertheless, it appears that Kant acknowledges that Reason itself
has a ‘drive’ (cf. RTP, AA 8: 404: ‘ [. . .] zum Übersinnlichen, wozu uns die
Vernunft unwiderstehlich treibt’; emphasis added), and this at least remains
mysterious. I think Derrida wants to highlight this inexplicably mysterious
element in Reason’s own motivating drive for knowledge.
41 See RTP, AA 8: 403.
42 In fact, ‘freedom constitutes the secret itself’ (RTP, AA 8: 403 [Kant (1999), 68]).
43 Derrida, Foi et Savoir, 46, 89.
44 See per contra the passage where Kant distinguishes strictly between, on the
one hand, a mystical instance, namely ‘merely hearing and enjoying the ora-
cle in oneself’ (Kant, RTP, AA 8: 390, trans. mine) and basing one’s cognition
on it (RTP, AA 8: 403), for which no discursive concepts are needed and, on
the other hand, ‘the secret, which can be felt only after long development of
the concepts of the understanding, and of carefully tested principles, that is to
say, solely through work’ (RTP, AA 8: 403 [Kant (1999) 69], trans. emended).
45 Cf. Kant’s reference to the ‘veil of Isis’ in RTP, AA 8: 399. See further below.
46 See, for example, De Vries, ‘Theotopographies: Nancy, Hölderlin, Heidegger’,
Modern Language Notes 109 (1994), 445–477. On the notion of the adieu
see De Vries, Religion and Violence. Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to
Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 178–187.
47 For Kant’s account of Reason’s ‘orientation’, see ‘What Does It Mean’.
48 Cf. CPR B404/A346 in regard to the circle concerning an attempted deter-
mination of the ‘I think’ as an object sui generis. The similarity here between
the nature of the adieu and Kant’s ‘I think’ as an incontrovertible necessary
condition of, and thus adverbial to, experience is significant. This will be
explored in the subsequent sections.
49 Cf. CPJ, AA 5: 316n.
50 Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique, 77.
51 I forego an analysis of the interesting psychoanalytic allusions that Derrida
makes in the context of this illustration of Kant’s and also in reference to
Kant’s remarks concerning an alleged Entmannung der Vernunft (see Der-
rida, D’un ton apocalyptique, 45–49).
52 Cf. Obs, AA 2: 251.
53 I thank Robert Clewis for suggesting an alternative translation.
54 Cf. Derrida, Foi et savoir, 16, 49–50, 64.
55 De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion.
56 Derrida, Foi et savoir, 97.
57 Ibid., 68; cf. ibid., 31, 44–45, 48–49, 66, 91, 96. Compare what Kant says
about the use of the word ‘faith’ in a theoretical context (see RTP, AA 8:
396n.). Derrida hints at what Kant calls ‘Fürwahrhalten’ (CPR A820ff./
B848ff.), which should, however, not be equated with the practical
objectively-real ‘Glauben’ in the super-sensible let alone a revelatory faith
(Offenbarungsglauben).
59 See also RTP, AA 8: 389, 393.
61 Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique, 67ff.
62 See Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique, 67–68. See also ibid., 57–58, 77–78.
Notice that Kant’s critical thought, too, is in an important sense an announce-
ment of the end of all dogmatic metaphysics, just as apocalyptic discourses
announce the end of the old system of things and the arrival of a new order.
63 Ibid., 67.
64 Significantly, the French equivalent for ‘Enlightenment’ (Aufklärung) is the
plural les lumières, suggesting that there are more than one Enlightenment.
65 Cf. Kant, RTP, AA 8: 396–397. See also again CPR A820ff./B848ff.
66 Derrida’s (D’un ton apocalyptique, 82–83) criticism that everything that is
detuned (tout ce qui détonne) or is eo ipso not admitting of general debate
(collocution général) is by definition regarded by Kant as obscurantist or
mystical and therefore without any validity rests, I believe, on a non sequi-
tur. Kant’s diatribe against obscurantism in thinking is rather directed at the
claim made by mystagogues that their manner of speaking amounts to phi-
losophy, to philosophy proper, and what is more, that it is the only true
directly provable kind of philosophy (cf. Kant, RTP, AA 8: 390, 395). It is
this claim, for which all legitimation is wanting, that is criticised by Kant. It
is furthermore noticeable that Kant acknowledges—for example, in a letter of
March 1790 to L. E. Borowski concerning the increasing tendency to fanati-
cism (Schwärmerei)—that an ‘[e]laborate refutation’ of this ‘humbug’ is to no
avail and would be ‘beneath the dignity of reason’ (Corr, AA 11: 142–143
[Kant, Correspondence, ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 338]). It is striking that Kant more or less seems
resigned to the fact that nothing much can be done against this obscurantism
other than ‘grant space for disorganization, so long as it pleases them [viz.,
the ‘animal magnetizers’; D.S.] and others who are easily fooled’ (Corr, AA
11: 142 [Fenves, Raising the Tone of Philosophy, 108]).
68 Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique, 77–78.
69 Fenves, Raising the Tone of Philosophy, 7–8.
70 See the locus classicus of the notion of Christian ‘vigilance’ in Matthew,
24:42.
72 Compare the important notion of Destruktion of traditional metaphysics in
Heidegger’s thought, which might thus be regarded as one of the quintessen-
tially Kantian traits of the Heideggerian philosophy.
73 For Kant, this identical form is the original-synthetic unity of apperception,
or transcendental self-consciousness, which constitutes the possibility of hav-
ing an objective unity of representations that is correspondent to the object
of experience (see CPR B131–137). This identical form of self-consciousness
is the same as the form that, according to the earlier mentioned scholastic
dictum, constitutes the essence of an object. Any thought that I have about
something is a thought that is accompanied by an act of apperception, that
is, of an awareness that I’m the one having that thought. See further Dennis
Schulting, Kant’s Radical Subjectivism. Perspectives on the Transcendental
Deduction (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), chs. 3–4.
74 See Derrida, Foi et savoir, 32.
75 Ibid., 72.
76 Ibid., 32.
77 Ibid. It is striking that Derrida speaks of spontaneity in this context. Herein,
Derrida links his notion of ‘messianicity’ as performative event to the tradi-
tional notion of a ground that is itself ungrounded, a self-causing cause, an
automaton. Contrary to Kant, however, Derrida interprets this spontaneity or
automaton not in terms of rational self-activity, but he associates it with an
antecedent unique capacity, which distributes itself ‘machine-like’ (automati-
cally) in the various discourses (cf. Derrida, Foi et savoir, 46), reminiscent of
what Kant labels the mere relative spontaneity of a ‘turnspit’ (CPrR, AA 5: 97).
78 De Vries, Religion and Violence, 178.
79 Fenves fittingly translates ‘Hinhaltung mit’ as ‘suspense-ridden tendering of’.
Indeed, the Duden. Deutsches Universal Wörterbuch (1989) gives as one of
the meanings of ‘hinhalten‘ ‘durch irrreführendes Vertrösten (immer weiter)
darauf warten lassen’!
80 Cf. Adorno, ‘Vernunft und Offenbarung’, 28.
81 The ascesis that I allude to here is hinted at by Kant himself in response to
a criticism by Schiller of Kant’s characterisation of the concept of obligation
in rigorist terms, which, presumably, ‘carries with it the frame of mind of a
Carthusian’ (Religion, AA 6:23n. [Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of
Mere Reason, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen Wood
and George DiGiovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
57–215, 72]). In this response to Schiller’s critique of Kant’s rigorist view of
duty, for which Schiller wants to substitute grace, Kant asserts that ‘Hercules
becomes Musagetes only after subduing monsters, a labor at which those
good sisters shrink back in fear and trembling’ (Religion, AA 6:23n. [Kant,
Religion and Rational Theology, 72]), just as he pits ‘the Herculean labor’
of rigorous philosophy against the immediate intuition of fanatical modes of
thinking in RTP, AA 8: 390 (Kant [1999], 53).
82 Derrida, Foi et savoir, 38
83 See ibid., 61.
84 The relation of Derrida’s thought to negative or apophatic theology has
been amply elucidated in the literature. See, for example, John Caputo, The
Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Blooming-
ton, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997); De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn
to Religion, and De Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason
in Adorno and Levinas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), in
particular the Appendix.
85 See again Matthew, 24:42–44.
86 Cf. Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique, 34.
87 Cf. ibid., 24 and RTP, AA 8: 389. The pure meaning of philosophy is never
guaranteed against a detuning or a false tone. In this respect, one should
heed the fact that the peace treaty that Kant proposes in philosophy, aimed
at a ‘mutual understanding’ among the opposing parties, can ‘at least be
announced as near its conclusion’ (PPP, AA 8: 421 [trans. Fenves, Raising
the Tone of Philosophy, 92]), but it cannot be expected to have already been
concluded. This would seem to indicate a messianic tone in Kant’s philosophy
if ever there was one.
88 This phrase is wrongly (and unforgivably, given the topic) translated by
Fenves (Raising the Tone of Philosophy, 70) as ‘an ever increasing critique’,
presumably reading ‘wachsenden’ for ‘wachsamen’.
89 This adverbial reflexivity is paradigmatically expressed by Kant’s principle
of apperception, which states that the ‘I think’ must be able to accompany
all my representations (CPR, B131). See Schulting, ‘Apperception, Self-
Consciousness and Self-Knowledge in Kant’, in The Palgrave Kant Hand-
book, ed. Matthew Altman (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2017), 139–161.
Part V
Postscript
10 Remembering Gary Banham
Genealogy, Teleology,
Conceptuality
Joanna Hodge
It says something about touching in general, or it touches on the

sensitive point of touching: on this sensitive point that touching con-
stitutes par excellence (it is, in sum, ‘the’ point of the sensitive) and
on what forms the sensitive point within it. But this point is precisely
the point where touching does not touch and where it must not touch
in order to carry out its touch (its art, its tact, its grace): the point or
the space without dimension that separates what touching gathers
together, the line that separates the touching from the touched and
thus the touch from itself.1
The citation is taken from the English translation, in 2008, of Jean-Luc

Nancy’s 2003 text, Noli me tangere: Do Not Touch Me, Essay on the
Raising up of the Body. It is cited by Gary Banham in his essay ‘Touching
the Opening of the World’ in the special issue of Derrida Today on Jean-
Luc Nancy and the ‘Deconstruction of Christianity’, which he also edited
and for which he wrote a preface.2 The phrase ‘noli me tangere’ is the
authorised Latin translation of the injunction, attributed to Christ on the
occasion of his encounter with Mary Magdalen, who at first supposes him
to be the gardener.3 This encounter takes place shortly after the supposed
resurrection of Christ on the third day and before the Ascension, and he is
reported as saying: ‘Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my father’.
In this essay, Banham provides a delicate and judicious account both
of the encounter between Christ and the Magdalen and of the encounter
between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. He also sketches in the
salience of the disruptive relations to Christianity portrayed and explored
in the readings by Derrida and by Nancy of both Friedrich Nietzsche on
the death of God and of Georges Bataille on the migration of religious
commitment into figures of sacrifice.
Banham’s appreciation of what is in play is grounded in his extensive
work on the idealisms of Kant and of Hegel and from his extended critical
reflections on aesthetic practices, which defy convention. This is explored
further in another special issue edited by him, this time in Angelaki:
226 Joanna Hodge
Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, special issue on ‘Aesthetics and
The Ends of Art’.4 In his preface to the Derrida Today special issue, Gary
Banham marks up his admiration for the work of Gillian Rose, especially,
but not only, her study Hegel contra Sociology, in which she explores her
commitment to a view of a ‘speculative’ logic that refuses resolution.5
Banham remarks on another occasion that this work of Rose is in turn
embedded in her study, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the
Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (1978).6 The ‘melancholy science’ is so
named by Adorno in contra-distinction to Nietzsche’s Gay Science, Die
froehliche Wissenschaft (1887), in turn named by contrast to the version
of political economy, the ‘dismal science’, proposed by Thomas Robert
Malthus, for which Karl Marx criticises him in Capital: Critique of Polit-
ical Economy, volume one (1867). Not the least of Banham’s marked
talents was his capacity to hold in play such a series of referrals and
embeddings of one set of enquiries into the multiple contexts provided
by the enquiries of others.
This Derrida Today special issue prompted me to return to this vexed
question of how to construe Nancy’s enthusiasm for the phrase ‘decon-
struction of Christianity’, as contrasted to Derrida’s very marked hesita-
tions and reservations. At the end of his essay, Banham sets up for further
discussion a negotiation between Derrida on the messianic and Nancy on
this ‘deconstruction’ to think with Nietzsche on the death of God and
with Kierkegaard on the radical leap required in Christian conversion.
The last sentence of Banham’s essay reads:
Such a conclusion points, without reserve, to the need to think

together Nietzsche with Kierkegaard, a meeting therewith of Nancy’s
‘deconstruction’ with Derrida’s ‘messianic’ that would traverse texts,
that, in their difference, would arrive at the need for something that
neither alone can state but which, in their polemos, would emerge as
the ‘beyond’ of/in nihilism.7
This, then, is Banham’s envoi, an incitement to revisit these disagree-

ments or contestations (polemos). It is relevant to note here that Jacques
Derrida, in his reading of Heidegger in 1989, offered under the title
‘Geschlecht IV: Of Philopolemology’, had put the focus on Heidegger’s
reflections on the term ‘polemos’ in the writings of Heraclitus and in
his own lectures on the Greek origins of philosophy and metaphysics,
Introduction to Metaphysics, Lectures from the Summer Semester, 1935
(GA 40, 1953).8 The epigraph for my remarks, from Nancy’s essay, and
as cited by Gary Banham, concerns, suitably enough, the raising up,
or resurrection, of the body. For in the figure of resurrection, there is
remembrance of and a coming to terms with loss, and, in remembrance
of loss, there is an overcoming of mourning, in commemoration and
memorialisation.9
Remembering Gary Banham 227
1. Outline of a Trajectory of Thinking
The three terms of my title, genealogy, teleology and conceptuality, pick
out three phases of what seems to me to be the single trajectory of Gary
Banham’s enquiries of which his work consists. Questions of genesis, and
the genesis of the distinctively Nietzschean notion of genealogy, formed
the topic for his doctorate, which he wrote with minimal supervision at
Oxford in the early nineties. In it, he made a close reading of the move-
ment of thought in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of
Music (1871), paying attention to the manner in which, for Nietzsche,
the unique combination of forces in Greek culture makes available a
new form of collective expression, tragedy. The reading, then, in parallel,
showed how a unique combination of forces in Nietzsche’s own evolving
sensibility makes it possible for Nietzsche to arrive at this diagnosis. It
might be termed a study of the collectively given conditions of possibility
for a unique articulation of meaning. ‘The Teleology Project’ was the title
of the programme of work we invented for the post-doctoral position he
held at MMU from 1994 to 1996. For this, he revisited the challenges
posed to both Kantian and Hegelian notions of teleology by the Nietzs-
chean programme, by Marxist critique and, increasingly, by the Derrid-
ean disruption, as explored in the various phases of Derrida’s developing
notions of deconstruction: supplementarity, destinerrance and clandesti-
nation, topolitology and philopolemology. Derrida’s Specters of Marx:
The State of the Debt, the work of Mourning and the New International
was published at this time, and, as Derrida presented that text on a num-
ber of occasions in England before publication, at the University of York
and at the University of Warwick, it was much discussed.10
The third term, ‘conceptuality’, marks up the overarching pre-
occupation of his work: with the question of how it is possible to capture
what there is in thought. This is the central focus for his work, and the
aim, in this essay, is to suggest how a commitment to Kantian critique
and to some form of transcendental grounding for reason and think-
ing was enhanced by his willing self-exposure to the Nietzschean and
indeed to the Derridean challenges, which he encountered while writing
that doctorate. He once said his favourite piece by Derrida was Eperons:
Spurs, or Headlands: The Styles of Nietzsche (1978). His reflections on
the upshot of some perceived conflict between critical delimitations of
meaning and the inherent, but unpredictable, genealogical processes of
transformation and metamorphosis were augmented by his systematic
working through of the Hegelian formulations of speculative dialectics,
with rigorous readings of Hegel’s Greater Logic, under the lead of the
writings of Gillian Rose.11 Intriguingly, thereafter, he pursued this ques-
tioning of a tension between the quest for conceptual determinacy and
the unravelling processes of genetic formation, under the lead of Husserl’s
attention to the processes of genesis, in both active and passive synthesis.
228 Joanna Hodge
This line he pursued with increasing dedication in the early years of
the noughties, in his teaching on the MA European Philosophy at Man-
chester Metropolitan University of the newly translated lectures by Hus-
serl, from Analyses Concerning Active and Passive Synthesis: Lectures on
Transcendental Logic (HUA XI and HUE 9, 2001), offered by Husserl
in 1920–21, 1923 and 1925–26.12 Banham also took work from that
engagement to meetings of the Husserl Circle in Washington, DC, hosted
by John Barnet Brough; in Boston, hosted by Nicolas de Warren and
at UCD, Dublin, hosted by Dermot Moran. Thus, in this later work,
attention to questions of Husserlian genesis, prompted in part by Der-
rida’s responses to Husserl, provides an alternative both to Nietzschean
genealogy and to a Hegelian notion of becoming, as derived from what
has been. This defused attention allows for an account of a manifold of
becomings, as opposed to either a single unified teleological trajectory of
the concept actualising itself or to some occasional ‘being interrupted’ in
some as-yet-to-be-delineated process of self-actualisation.
In his third study of Kant’s philosophy, Kant’s Transcendental Imagi-
nation, the question of genesis comes to the fore in the attention there
to a questioning of Kant’s account of a genesis of synthesis and of the
presentation of a transcendental unity of apperception.13 In addition,
Heidegger’s insistence on the A edition of the First Critique, developed
in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and in the lectures from 1928,
Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s First Critique, had been a
major feature of Banham’s return to Kant after completing the doctoral
dissertation on Nietzsche.14 This line of analysis is, however, prompted as
much by the early engagement with Nietzsche on transformatory thinking
and the thinking of transformation, but it becomes articulable as a con-
sequence of an immersion in the writings of Husserl. Important for this
was the re-arrival of Jacques Derrida’s early study, which is now much
better known, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology, first
published in 1990 but written in the early fifties and translated into Eng-
lish, by Marion Hobson, only in 2003.15 This brings about an unlikely
but highly productive conjuncture between the concerns of a Nietzschean
genealogy and those of a Husserlian phenomenology between Husserl
on origins and genesis and Nietzsche on how the world became a fable.
Attention to a non-organic genesis may be pursued in parallel to the
work on the derivation (Herkunft) of concepts in Nietzschean genealogy,
tracing out the emergence and subsequent decline of configurations of
concepts, most notably but not only in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals
(1886). Genesis is also at work, for Husserl, in the noeses, the think-
ing processes of registration, through which noematic contents become
determinate and determinable. This is explored by Husserl in the pairing
of terms, activity and contents, noesis and noemata, from his Ideas One:
General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology onwards.16 In their dif-
ferent ways, through notions of genealogy, genesis and synthesis, Kant,
Nietzsche and Husserl, and Banham, in his responses to them, pay atten-
tion to the workings and development of distinctive configurations of
sensibility and sensitivity in the emergent determinations of conceptuali-
sation. This is one of the connections from Gary Banham’s own philo-
sophical projects to his readings of both Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc
Nancy, who also explore these disruptive contra-flows between Hege-
lian conceptuality and Husserlian phenomenology, between Nietzschean
genealogy and a Kierkegaardian leap of faith.
2. Three Distinctive Features of Gary’s Mode of Working

Three aspects of Gary Banham’s mode of working call out for remark,
and indeed for celebration. First, there is something irreducibly distinc-
tive about his mode of writing, in its manner of combining ways of read-
ing and of setting out a response to the text of the other. It pays the
closest attention to the detail of the text at hand but contrives to lift the
thought off the page and give it life. The text is dynamised and activated:
in the phenomenological phrase, the meaning is reactivated. The mode
of reading is marked by a distinctive combination of attention and focus,
with an intellectual energy and exuberance, which was characteristic of
him and of his way of being. It marked his teaching, both undergraduate
and graduate, and his manner of taking part in reading groups; it was
immensely valued by students and colleagues alike and made his contri-
butions to reading groups especially telling. There was an exceptionally
productive series of reading groups of Husserl texts, first initiated by
Richard Hamilton at the University of Manchester, which significantly
contributed to my appreciation of both Husserl and of this distinctive
mode of reading. This supported doctoral work on Husserl by Joaquim
Siles i Borras, published as Ethics in Husserl’s Phenomenology, and by
Jonathan Hunt, under our joint supervision.17 It also resulted in the col-
lection of papers he edited, Husserl and the Logic of Experience, includ-
ing his own fine essay on mereology.18 Banham also, of course, supervised
doctoral work on Kant in conjunction with Professor Martin Bell while
they were both still at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Second, Gary Banham was an excellent interlocutor, intrigued by the
readings and responses of others to the classic texts and their problems,
in which our various traditions consist. His range was quite remarkable,
moving happily between seventeenth-century metaphysics, detailed Kan-
tian commentary and the various contemporary versions of deconstruc-
tion. These two sets of skills, his range and his precision, helped make
him an excellent editor of the writings of others, marked in his enthusi-
asm for commissioning special editions of journals, for Angelaki: Journal
of Theoretical Humanities, for the Journal of the British Society for Phe-
nomenology and for Derrida Today, and, in addition, in the monograph
series Renewing Philosophy, which he edited for Palgrave Macmillan.
230 Joanna Hodge
He was a painstaking editor, keen to assist younger scholars to reach for
their own distinctive mode of reading, and of intervention in the trans-
mission and renewal of philosophy.
Third, he maintained an astonishingly productive balance between two
contrasting sets of forces, between a playful disruptiveness and a rigorous
respect for the order of the concept. He was quick to spot the ridiculous
or deflate the pompous, and he marked his active dissent from conven-
tion by plastering the walls of his office at work. In some satirical take on
a car repair shop, with its page-three female nudes and calendar girls, he
had reproductions of photographs of naked men and their sexual organs,
largely, but not only, by Helmut Newton. The distinction between nudity,
addressed to the gaze of the other, and nakedness, as a mode of self-
presentation would not be lost on him. His respect for, and sensitivity
to, conceptual orderings of various distinct kinds was deeply grounded
in both his appreciation for the virtues and potentialities, still untapped,
in the Kantian system and in his sense for the untapped resources of the
Nietzschean dream states and states of intoxication, explored in Birth of
Tragedy (1869), which work their way through into the writings of Wal-
ter Benjamin. In an essay, ’Apocalyptic Imagination’, published in a col-
lection entitled Kant after Derrida (2001), he anticipated an alternative
mode of transcendental imagination, sketching out a law of anachrony,
informed by, but departing from, Derrida’s take on that term.19 Under
this rubric of an ‘apocalyptic imagination’, he invokes a Kant under ‘a
spectral sign of futurity’, responding thus to the unorthodox Kantianism
of both Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. This kind of innovative,
disruptive reading, this time of the Kantian Transcendental Aesthetic, is
made the more powerful by the attention to the detailed configuration of
the thought thus disrupted.
The principles of the Analogies of Experience in Kant’s First Critique
are to be supplemented to open out a futural horizon of change. The
Analogies analyse how a permanence of substance, a succession in time
and a co-existence in a principle of community give rise to the determina-
tions of time as permanence, succession and unity. However, these deter-
minations can be shown to be subverted by a Derridean plus or minus
one, in a fourth determination as lapsus, and in a law of anachrony,
or, as Jean-Luc Nancy will rephrase it in The Discourse of the Syncope:
Logodaedalus (1976), by the arrival of a certain syncopation in Kant’s
text. Futurity, for Heidegger; anachrony, for Derrida and a certain syn-
copation, as non-simultaneity, for Jean-Luc Nancy provide a suppressed
fourth determination of time, which might be found in Kant’s Critique of
Judgment (1788) and which disrupts the results of the previous Kantian
analysis. A critical delimitation of the concept modulates into a topolitol-
ogy of borderlines on the threshold of futurity (l’a-venir), into which the
initial thinking of differance comes to be transposed. This notion of ‘l’a-
venir’, that which is to-come, disrupts any closed teleologically formed
or grammatically inscribed conception of the future (le futur). This work
is humorous, for who could be less likely as interlocutors than Nietzsche
and Husserl, but it is also ironic, in the style of Kierkegaard, and satirical,
for the plus and minus one of Derrida’s uptake of Kant, by insisting on
the letter of the text, leaves nothing intact. This is especially evident in
his The Truth in Painting, much admired by Gary.20 Here, then, are three
moments of disruption of the Kantian principles of order, permanence,
succession and unity: first, in a humorous conjunction of Nietzsche and
Husserl, thinking becoming otherwise. Second, in the attention to the
ironic, almost Kierkegaardian reformulation by Husserl of what should
be one and indivisible, a unified systemic transcendental logic is to be
installed by a differential logic of experiences, each modifying their own
hyletic data; and, third, in this satirical refiguring in the Heideggerian
challenge and a Derridean deconstruction of the Kantian determinations
of time.
3. Genealogy, Teleology, Critique

In his doctorate on Nietzsche, there is a close reading of the movement
of thought in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music,
paying strict attention to its transformatory, metamorphic effects. As
remarked, the reading attends to the manner in which, for Nietzsche,
the unique combination of forces in Greek culture makes available a new
form of collective expression, tragedy, and, in parallel, on how a unique
combination of forces in Nietzsche’s own evolving sensibility makes
it possible for Nietzsche to arrive at this diagnosis. As is well known,
Nietzsche hypothesises how a certain splitting of aesthetic energy into
both a tranquil dreaming, figured as Apollo, and a disruptive intoxica-
tion, figured as Dionysus, is overcome in the genesis of Greek tragedy.
These two, Apollo and Dionysus, are two faces of one structure, the
Olympian and the chthonic versions of the one divinity. A further read-
ing of Nietzsche might then explore how Christ, the crucified, becomes
a third incarnation in this study of the generative powers of affect, arriv-
ing in the mode of the dream state, and in the mode of intoxication, as
subsequently elaborated by Walter Benjamin. These then migrate into the
problematic identifications with the sufferings and sacrifice of Christ on
the cross. The movement from passive dreaming to physical intoxication
and from physical intoxication to a fantasmatic suffering provides a grid
for distinct ways of conceiving a relation between passive and active syn-
thesis. The modes of embodiment, too, are starkly contrastive.
Such an overcoming of divided forces in the invention of genre is
marked up in the evolving dynamics of Nietzsche’s own distinctive mode
of writing, which requires the invention or inauguration of the work
of a tenth muse to demarcate its innovative power: the muse of geneal-
ogy, transformation and overcoming. The task of a critique of reason
232 Joanna Hodge
turns into a task of self-reinvention, charted by Nietzsche in Ecce Homo
(1889) and culminating in the invocation of Dionysus the crucified. This
attention to a genesis of Nietzschean genealogy is thus a placeholder for,
more generally, the question of genesis, about how innovation in systems
of registration of what there is might be possible to keep up with changes
in what there is. In this, a disruptive reading of Kant’s Transcendental
Analytic is in play, in which an irreducible givenness of the unity of the
manifold takes centre stage and not the supposed necessity of the divi-
sions of the table of judgment and of the related categories. The various
layers and levels of a unified manifold are subject to re-organisation and
reconfiguration, with a negotiation between Kant, Nietzsche and Hus-
serl, in ways that the table of categories is not.
The Teleology Project, as remarked, was the title of the programme
of work devised for the post-doctoral position he held at MMU from
1994 to 1996, in which Banham revisited the challenges posed to both
Kantian and Hegelian notions of teleology, first by the Nietzschean pro-
gramme and then, increasingly, by the Derridean disruption. There was
also a proposal to re-read Karl Marx alongside a reading of Heidegger,
as intimated in Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1946), and to rethink
a relation between nature and technical transformation, between Hei-
degger on techne and phusis and Derrida on grammatology, muthos and
logos and on an originary technicity, as developed in conjunction with
Bernhard Stiegler. In this context, Banham drew together responses to
the contrastive temporalities of Derridean spectrality, with respect to the
temporalities of Hegelian spirit and to the unifying functions of Kantian
teleological judgment, by re-reading Marx and revisiting the disputes
between a humanist and a structuralist Marxism, roughly speaking, the
readings of Alexander Kojève versus those of Louis Althusser. A later
incisiveness as a reader of philosophical text owes much to this time of
consolidation, putting the focussed, detailed work of his doctorate back
into the broader context of his wider intellectual, political and cultural
interests.
A Hegelian teleology, in which the differences between a mechanism
and an organicism are to be reconciled in a somatisation of psyche and
spiritualisation of matter, was not for him. What did intrigue him about
the Hegelian system was the potentiality of the differential conceptuality
made available within the various distinct domains of dialectical differen-
tiation, logic, nature, Geist and their distinctive modes of incompletion. It
was at this time, too, that he began locating the shifts of register between
Heidegger’s various responses to Kant, of which he picked out three.
There is the reading of Kant offered by Heidegger in Being and Time,
especially in Division Two, Section 64: ‘Care and Selfhood’.21 There is
another reading, as given in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and,
in between, the lectures, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant, in
which Heidegger works up his reasons for privileging the First Edition
of the Critique of Pure Reason and for the first version of the Tran-
scendental Deduction of the categories over the second. For while the
former lends itself to phenomenological appropriation and to Derrida’s
disruptions; the latter leads to Claude Levi-Strauss’s structural reading, in
which the processes of a self-transformatory thinking drop out of view in
favour of a new table of categories based on, amongst other invariants,
kinship relations and rules concerning endogamy and exogamy.
While reading Nietzsche may have given Gary Banham his sense of
how to analyse the inception of the new, it is maybe this reading of Hei-
degger which convinced him of the as yet unexhausted potential for a
renewal of transcendental philosophy and specifically of the Kantian sys-
tem. This renewal was to be focused not on the derivation of the catego-
ries per se but on the formation of a transcendental sensibility, in which
intuitions of given particulars and the concepts of the understanding
mutually inform each other. Thus, when he came to choose the title of his
well-deserved Readership, he chose to be a Reader in Transcendental Phi-
losophy. In The Problem of Genesis, Derrida makes much of the paral-
lelism in Husserl’s enquiries between phenomenological psychology and
transcendental phenomenology.22 The first explores the givenness of enti-
ties to consciousness, with attention to that which presents itself, thought
of as extraneous to the processes of registration, by contrast to the same
domain, thought from the stance of a transcendental phenomenology, in
which modes of presentation are shown to be necessitated by what there
is. In the latter, processes of registration, and that which is to be registered
are two intertwined processes of genesis, all to be articulated on a single
plane of immanence. It is this latter model of the transcendental, which
forms the basis of the transcendentalism, to be explored in Gary Ban-
ham’s reconstruction of Kantian critique and of Kantian conceptuality.
4. Marking Differences

In the essay ‘Touching the Opening of the World’ in Derrida Today, Gary
Banham provides a beautiful, lucid analysis of the critical tension between
Jean-Luc Nancy’s take on this opening and the reservations about it artic-
ulated by, and attributable to, Jacques Derrida. Derrida on a number of
occasions stated his puzzlement at Nancy’s willingness to adopt and write
under the title and terms of his monograph, The Sense of the World (Le
sens du monde).23 Banham concludes with the suggestion that a plurality
of ‘deconstructions’ complicates any question of what is meant by the
view that a ‘deconstruction of Christianity’ is itself a ‘Christian’ project.
For Banham, this tradition is above all important since it constitutes an
opening for a negotiation between philosophy and its Christian inherit-
ance. My relation to that inheritance is to be contrasted to his, as I sense
that all monotheisms have excluded me, from the start, from participa-
tion and have deprived me of an audible voice. In addition, the splitting
234 Joanna Hodge
of Mary the mother of God and Mary the Magdalen sets up quite distinct
dynamics of mis-identification and transformation from those provided
by the registers of Apollo, Dionysus and Christ the crucified. In this last
section, some of our differences may begin to emerge.
His essay is tantalisingly brief, but it provides an insight into the con-
nection between the interval at the origin of meaning, on which Nancy
insists, and Nancy’s analyses of appearing, as a birth to presence of what
arrives, as materialisation. Banham emphasises Nancy’s use of this term
‘birth to presence’ as the title for the collection in English of Nancy’s
writings, edited by Brian Holmes, The Birth to Presence.24 In a brief pref-
ace, Jean-Luc Nancy explores some of the implications of the term ‘birth
to presence’, by contrast to Heidegger, on being-towards death and on
a transmission of philosophy as a history of a thanatophilia, a tradition
exploring a certain fascination with deaths of various kinds. In this tradi-
tion, it may be noted, death in childbirth tends not to feature. The term
‘birth to presence’ also serves to disrupt figures of a metaphysics of pres-
ence, as discussed by Heidegger and by Derrida, in his responses to Hei-
degger’s critique of the suppression of pastness and futurity in a history
of the concept of time. This history of the concept is to be disrupted by
combinations of a genealogy of temporality and an attention to genesis
and to affects of various kinds of specific temporal sensitivities: bore-
dom and anxiety, suffering and dreaming. The emphasis on this ‘birth
to presence’ is a further contribution to a genealogy of temporality and
a marker of how Nancy inserts his thought into the margins of that of
Martin Heidegger and subtly shifts its centre of gravity. In his essay, ‘The
Being-With of the Being There’,25 Nancy deploys the under-thematised
second moment of Heidegger’s affirmation of Dasein (being-there) as
Mitsein (being-with), and this disrupts the foreclosure imposed in the
analytic of being-towards-death, in the third moment, and movement
of being as being towards an open futurity as Zu-sein (being-towards).
Heidegger’s being-towards-death is further supplemented and challenged
by Nancy’s invocation of Arendt’s discussion of natality and, where death
isolates, birth inserts the new born into a dynamic of shared meanings
and horizons.
This is the point at which I would claim Nancy’s enquiries for a diag-
nosis of the fate of phenomenology, for his analyses locate an arrival of
matter in a suspension of the processes of phenomenological describing
and not in their affirmation. Nancy’s focus on an excription, at the edge
of sense, disrupts the project of any cumulative program of phenomeno-
logical description; the theme of a declosion, dis-enclosure in English, in
a deconstruction of Christianity marks up a determination and delimita-
tion of the propagative capacities of religious invention as an eclosion.
For Nancy, Christianity has run out of re-inventive capacity. The relation
between eclosion and declosion also mirrors and disrupts the relation in
Heidegger’s Being and Time between an opening (Erschlossenheit) and
a determination (Entschlossenheit) of Dasein. In Corpus, the concordat
between phenomenology and Christianity is more directly addressed and
displaced,26 for Nancy marks a release of embodiment and corporeal-
ity from the Christian and Hegelian problematics of birth and death,
body and soul, female and male, and thus marks his exit from the shared
horizons of phenomenological descriptions and Church authority in their
mutual supplementations.
While the deconstruction of Christianity arrives as a re-affirmation of
the death of God, as announced by Nietzsche, and of a destruction of
onto-theology, as announced by Heidegger, Nancy responds to it, and
thereby navigates his way through a reading of both Heidegger and Hus-
serl, in a reconfiguration of a new materialism as either ontological or
transcendental, or both. This line of analysis is underway in The Experi-
ence of Freedom and Corpus and, increasingly, is thematised as techni-
cal and as an ecotechnics, especially marked in Being Singular Plural.27
The notion of ecotechnics opens up an account of how technical con-
figurations of sensibility are mirrored in and respond to the production
and information technologies constituting a world-wide system of com-
municativity and exchange. On my reading, Nancy thinks a deconstruc-
tion of Christianity in order to open the way to think a loss of meaning
and, literally, rubbishing (l’immonde) of the world in technical practices,
exemplified in trolling and plastic waste. This line of reading permits me
to explore a commitment to a materialism, which awaits a fuller specifi-
cation. This is not the route of Banham’s return, through the encounter
with Nancy and Derrida, to raising up again the Kantian critical project
into the context of twenty-first-century concerns.
For me, too, Noli me tangere is a code word for yet another avoidance
of the question of sexual difference, and for the carefully controlled pres-
ence of women and of women’s bodies in the history and practices of phi-
losophy, and in the corresponding history of Christianity in all its forms.
Hegel’s teleology is built on a naturalisation of women’s subordination
to child-birth, which simply declining to give birth does not address. Phi-
losophy in the name of the father is ghosted by the figure of women, in
The Phenomenology of Spirit, as the perpetual irony of the tribe.
Since the community only gets an existence through its interference

with the happiness of the Family, and by dissolving (individual)
self-consciousness into the universal, it creates for itself in what it
suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an internal
enemy: womankind in general. Woman kind—the everlasting irony
in the life of the community—changes by intrigue the universal end
of the government into a private end, transforms its universal activ-
ity into the work of some particular individual, and perverts the
universal property of the state into a possession and ornament of
the Family.28
236 Joanna Hodge
Jean-Luc Nancy will hypothesise: ‘we see that we should no longer be
able to say in such a context “man” in the generic sense, but only “man”
or “woman” ’,29 for that tribal unity presupposes what it cannot recog-
nise: the availability of women’s bodies. Current focus on Arendt’s dis-
cussion of natality may end up revealing that, by recognising birth as a
moment of inception, philosophers still fail to recognise the body, pla-
centa and blood of maternal origins.
Reading one of Gary Banham’s essays is always illuminating, and in
this one, again, the lines of his analysis and of conceptual differentiation
emerge with such clarity and deliberation. I regret not having his develop-
ing analyses of Nancy and of Kant, of deconstruction and of the critical
programme. I also regret the fact that he had more recently turned away
from the project of a close reading of Husserl to return once again to
the engagement with Kant, while I much appreciated his respectful read-
ing of Rose. I regret all the more no longer having his always carefully
considered objections to my work, having no more of his always stimu-
lating contributions to discussion, clearly thought out, lucidly expressed
and always contestatory. These characteristics marked the strength of his
commitment to the programme of renewing philosophy and made him
such a lively and appreciated participant in the pursuit of scholarship.
His mode was that of critical retrieval, not embalming commemorations,
and this essay should sign off with a memory of his appreciation of just
how jubilant Jacques Derrida contrives to be in his magical reading of
Hegel, with Jean Genet, in Glas: The Death Knell, or What Remains of
Absolute Knowing (1974). ‘What remains of absolute knowing’ would
make a good title for Banham’s overarching philosophical focus.
Notes
1 Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah
Clift, Pascale Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2008[2003]), 25/13, cited by Gary Banham, ‘Touching the Opening
of the World’, special issue on Jean-Luc Nancy and the ‘Deconstruction of
Christianity’, in Derrida Today, 6 (1), 2013, 64. The preface, 1–10, locates
the terms of a disagreement between Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida,
and his own essay appears at pp. 58–77.
2 Gary Banham, ‘Touching the Opening of the World’, Derrida Today, 6 (1),
2013.
3 Gospels John 20.17.
4 Gary Banham, special issue on ‘Aesthetics and the Ends of Art’, Angelaki:
Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 7 (1), 2002.
5 Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press, 1981); Gary
Banham, Preface to the Jean-Luc Nancy and the ‘Deconstruction of Christi-
anity’ Special Issue, 5.
6 See Gary Banham, ‘The Terror of the Law: Judaism and International Institu-
tions’, in Applying: to Derrida, ed. John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins and Julian
Wolfreys (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 96–106.
7 Gary Banham, ‘Touching the Opening of the World’, 75.
8 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Ear: Of Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV)’,
in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1993) and Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Meta-
physics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000).
9 A shorter version of this paper was initially presented at the Memorial Panel
for Gary Banham, initiated by Professor Simon Glendinning, London School
of Economics, and with Professor Howard Caygill, Kingston University, at
the joint conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum
for European Philosophy in 2013, at Kingston University, London, UK.
10 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New
York: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1994[1993]).
11 G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George
Allen and Unwin 1969[1812]).
12 Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures
on Transcendental Logic (HUE 9), trans. Anthony J Steinbock (Dordrecht,
Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).
13 Gary Banham, Kant’s Transcendental Imagination (London: Palgrave, 2006).
14 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard
Taft, 5th enlarged ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997[1929]);
Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans.
Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997[1928]).
15 Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans.
Marion Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002[1953–4]).
16 Edmund Husserl, Ideas One: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology,
trans. W. Boyce -Gibson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931[1913]).
17 Joaquim Siles i Borras, Ethics in Husserl’s Phenomenology (London: Blooms-
bury, 2009).
18 See Gary Banham, ‘Mereology, Intentional Contents and Intentional Objects’,
in Husserl and the Logic of Experience, ed. Gary Banham (London: Palgrave,
2005).
19 See Gary Banham, ‘Apocalyptic Imagination’, in Kant after Derrida, ed.
Philip Rothfield (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), 66–89.
20 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian
McLeod (Chicago: Chicago University Press 1987[1978]).
21 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Rob-
inson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962[1927]).
22 Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy (1953–4)
translated by Marion Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
23 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey Librett (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997[1993]).
24 See Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Introduction: The Birth to Presence’, in Jean-Luc

Nancy: The Birth to Presence, ed. and trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1993), 1–6: ‘If death has fascinated Western thought,
it is to the degree that Western thought believed itself capable of constructing
upon death its dialectical paradigm of pure presence and absence. Death is
the absolute signified, the sealing off of sense. It is the name, but “to be born”
is the verb.’ (3)
25 See Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Being with of the Being There’ translated by Marie-
Eve Morin’, Continental Philosophy Review, 41 (1) (2008), 1–15.
26 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A Rand (New York: Fordham Uni-
versity Press, 2008).
238 Joanna Hodge
27 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993[1988]); Being Singular Plural,
trans. Robert E. Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2000[1996]).
28 See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by AV Miller

(Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977[1807]), 288.
29 Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, 158.
Contributors
Roxana Baiasu is Associate Member of the Faculty of Philosophy of the

University of Oxford.
Sorin Baiasu is Professor of Philosophy at Keele University.
Keith Crome is Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan
University.
Nicola J. Grayson has recently completed a PhD in philosophy at Man-
chester Metropolitan University.
Joanna Hodge is Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan
University.
Rachel Jones is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy of
George Mason University.
Dermot Moran is Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy at Boston College
and Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin.
Christian Onof is Honorary Research Fellow in Philosophy at Birkbeck
College, University of London.
Andrea Rehberg is Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University.
Dennis Schulting is former Assistant Professor of Metaphysics and Its
History at the University of Amsterdam.
Alberto Vanzo is an independent scholar.
Index
adieu 196, 202 – 203, 207, 209 – 214, 219 127n35, 128n43, 144n1, 147 – 150,
analogy(ies) 7 – 9, 13 – 14, 18, 49, 156, 158, 161, 166, 166n1,
56n34, 57n46, 104 – 106, 107 – 109, 167n14, 168n21, 176, 181 – 182,
111, 116, 122, 128n42, 151 – 153, 186 – 188, 190n4, 191n14, 192,
173 – 174, 176 – 178, 180 – 190, 214n1, 225 – 229, 232 – 236, 236n1,
191n13 236n2, 236n4, 236n5, 236n6,
analytic 35, 64, 78n30, 139, 234; 236n7, 237n9, 237n13, 237n18,
Transcendental Analytic 6, 16, 23, 237n19
36, 39, 51, 53, 60n124, 63, 101, Battersby, Christine 153, 168n24,
103 – 105, 111, 125n8, 138 – 139, 168n29, 168n34
232; Transcendental Analytic of the Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 25,
Beautiful 83 – 84, 89, 97n31, 191n6; 29, 30, 32, 36, 46, 56n33, 56n41,
Transcendental Analytic of the 56n43
Sublime 95, 95n1, 144n1 Bernasconi, Robert 168n24
antinomies 6, 101, 124n4, 135 – 138 birth 146 – 147, 150, 152 – 154,
apocalypticity 205; see also 160 – 162, 164, 166, 169n54,
apocaliptics 169n55, 234 – 236; Nancy’s Birth to
apocalyptics 195, 203, 205 – 207, 213 Presence 234, 237n24; Nietzsche’s
appearance 9, 12, 14, 19, 24, 26, Birth of Tragedy 227, 230 – 231
30 – 31, 34 – 35, 37, 42 – 43, 46, body(ies) 5, 13, 26, 28 – 31, 55n27,
49 – 50, 52, 54n2, 54n4, 54n8, 79 – 80, 153, 158 – 166, 170n63,
55n19, 63, 65, 69, 72 – 73, 76n19, 176, 225 – 226, 235, 236n1; female,
78n30, 93, 106, 110 – 111, maternal 146 – 148, 150, 152,
113 – 114, 118 – 119, 121 – 122, 154 – 155, 161 – 162, 170n65, 235 – 236
126n22, 127n36, 137, 140, 146, Bordo, Susan 167n15
175, 198, 216n10 Burbidge, John 156 – 157, 167n1,
Arendt, Hannah 3 – 5, 11, 79 – 80, 167n8, 167n13
90 – 92, 95n1, 97n39, 97n42,
98n43, 98n49, 98n60, 234, 236 Caird, Edward 36 – 37, 57n62
chemical 146 – 149, 156 – 161,
Baiasu, Sorin 20n1 165 – 166, 168n21
Banham, Gary 4, 6, 16 – 19, 20n8, chemism 7, 13, 17, 20n13, 146 – 150,
20n9, 20n11, 20n12, 20n13, 24, 156, 157 – 161, 164 – 166, 166n1,
53n1, 61, 65 – 67, 73, 76n17, 167n13, 168n21
77n21, 78n40, 81 – 82, 84, 95, Christ 7, 9, 13 – 14, 18, 56 – 57n46,
95n1, 95n6, 96n11, 97n26, 174, 182 – 186, 188 – 190, 226, 231,
98n58, 101, 103 – 105, 108, 234; see also exemplar; Jesus
116 – 117, 125n2, 125n9, 125n12, cognition 16, 23, 26, 33, 35 – 36, 38,
125nn14 – 15, 125n20, 127n32, 41, 44 – 46, 55n26, 56n36, 57n51,
Index 241
57nn55 – 56, 58n87, 79, 83, 85 – 87, Descartes, René (and Cartesian) 25,
90 – 91, 93 – 94, 96n8, 96n15, 28 – 30, 35, 45 – 46, 48, 55nn27 – 29,
96n21, 96n23, 102 – 104, 106, 77n29, 147, 149
108 – 109, 111 – 112, 116, 118 – 119, de Vries, Hent 204, 209, 217n23, 217n32,
122, 125n8, 125 – 126n20, 127n38, 219n46, 219n55, 220n78, 221n84
130, 137 – 139, 141, 143, 178, dialectic 135, 166, 169n53, 209,
183 – 184, 186, 198 – 199, 202 – 207, 227, 232, 237n24; transcendental
211, 218n35, 218n40, 219n44 5 – 6, 16, 101, 103 – 105, 107, 109,
concept 5, 7 – 8, 10 – 11, 15, 18, 117 – 118, 123, 124n4, 126n22,
26 – 41, 43 – 48, 50 – 53, 54n5, 127n33, 129, 135, 138 – 139
54n8, 63, 65 – 68, 70, 76n9, DiCenso, James 188 – 189,
76n16, 76n19, 77n20, 77n23, 83, 191nn21 – 22, 192
85 – 90, 92 – 94, 96n15, 96n21, différance 201, 206, 208 –2
13, 215n9, 230
97n36, 101 – 103, 105 – 116, différend 4, 6 – 7, 12, 131, 145n4,
119 – 122, 125n6, 125n8, 126n21, 145n10, 145n21
126n22, 127n26, 127nn28 – 29, direct exhibition/presentation 5, 7 – 8,
127n36, 127 – 128n41, 130n1, 33, 173 – 179, 182, 186 – 187, 189;
135, 141, 143, 147, 150 – 152, see also schema
154 – 155, 159 – 160, 163, dogmatism 23, 28, 133 – 134, 136,
173 – 177, 179, 183 – 188, 194, 195 – 196, 219n62
203, 209, 216n10, 218n35, dynamical 6 – 7, 16, 45, 101,
218n40, 219n44, 226 – 230, 233 104 – 108, 137, 178, 231, 234
Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 39, 45,
58n73 Eberhard, Johann August 5, 31 – 32,
conflict 6, 11 – 12, 91, 131, 135 – 137, 35, 56n37, 56n44
195, 200, 202, 227 Edelman, Lee 169n54
constitutive 6, 12, 16, 45, 63, 67, elemental 7, 13, 17, 147 – 149, 158,
76n13, 80, 82, 104 – 109, 114 – 115, 160 – 161, 163 – 166, 169n55,
138, 141, 143, 147 – 148, 151, 198, 170n56, 170n66
202, 206 Enlightenment 91, 138, 168n24,
continental: philosophy 3, 4, 19, 194 – 195, 205, 212, 219n64
144n1, 209; tradition 3, 4, 11, enthusiasm 144n1, 215n7, 216n10,
20n1 216n21, 226, 229
critical philosophy 16, 19, 23, 28, epigenesis 20n13, 147, 153, 166n1,
33, 57n62, 75n2, 81 – 82, 84, 168n21
95, 114 – 115, 125n17, 128n51, exaltation 195, 203, 205, 209, 215n7,
130n1, 132, 137, 139, 144n1, 216n17, 216n20
178, 194, 196, 207, 213, 218n35, example 7, 52, 116, 127n40, 132,
219n62, 236 174 – 178, 180, 183 – 186, 188, 190,
190n5; see also exemplar
Derrida, Jacques 3 – 4, 8, 13 – 15, exemplar 88, 183, 188, 191n21
18 – 19, 96n11, 144n1, 194 – 198, exhibition 7 – 8, 19, 33, 54n5,
200 – 214, 214n1, 215n4, 215n6, 173 – 178, 180 – 182, 185 – 190,
215n9, 217n28, 217n30, 217n32, 191n8; see also hypotyposis
218n34, 218nn36 – 37, 218n40, Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi 168n24
219n43, 219n46, 219nn50 – 51,
219n54, 219nn56 – 58, faculty 6, 25, 27 – 28, 31 – 32, 34, 37,
219nn60 – 62, 219 – 220n66, 42, 63, 68, 80, 82, 85, 90, 95n5,
220nn67 – 68, 220n71, 220n74, 96n8, 101 – 102, 117, 119, 122,
220n77, 221n82, 221n84, 221n86, 128n50, 129 – 130, 136, 142
225 – 230, 232 – 236, 236nn1 – 2, fanatic(al) 8, 201 – 204, 207, 209, 213,
236n6, 237n8, 237n10, 237n15, 220 – 221n8; see also fanaticism
237nn19 – 20, 237n22 (Schwärmerei)
242 Index
fanaticism (Schwärmerei) 195, 199, 75nn6 – 8, 76nn9 – 10, 76nn12 – 13,
209, 215n7, 216n17, 216n20, 76n15, 76n19, 77n25, 77nn28 – 29,
219 – 220n66; see also fanatic(al) 80nn30 – 33, 80n35, 80, 219n46,
Fanon, Frantz 153, 168n25 226, 230, 232 – 235, 237n8,
feeling 79 – 80, 83, 87 – 89, 93, 237n14, 237n21
96 – 97n23, 97n26, 142, 177 – 178, Hesiod 170n6
183, 185 – 187, 189, 198 – 199, 206, higher symbol 177 – 178
214n2, 216n10, 216n17, 218n40 highest good 18, 174, 182, 184 – 186,
Ferrini, Cinzia 157, 167n12 188 – 190, 194
figure 9, 56 – 57n46, 131, 173, Hintikka, Jaakko 10, 46 – 48, 52,
182 – 185, 188, 190 54n13, 56n45, 59nn103 – 104,
final end 18, 176, 181 – 182, 186 – 188 59n108, 59n112, 114 – 115
form 5, 10, 12 – 13, 17, 24 – 27, 31, Houlgate, Stephen 156, 167n8,
33, 38, 41, 44, 47, 49 – 51, 53, 167nn12 – 13
54n11, 57n61, 65, 68 – 72, 84 – 87, human 7, 11, 13, 23 – 24, 28, 32,
90, 93, 95n7, 106, 108, 110, 114, 35 – 36, 38, 46, 50, 53, 62, 71,
118, 124n4, 142 – 143, 147 – 148, 75n6, 79 – 80, 83, 91 – 92, 94,
150 – 152, 154, 157, 159 – 166, 98n43, 110, 117, 121, 133, 135,
167n9, 168nn31 – 32, 173 – 174, 141, 147, 149, 151 – 153, 156,
179 – 181, 197 – 198, 200 – 201, 163, 165 – 166, 174, 182 – 184,
204, 206 – 207, 209 – 214, 218n35, 186 – 188, 190, 191n16, 196, 202,
220n73 205, 218n35
forma dat esse rei 197, 211 Husserl, Edmund 4, 15, 19, 20n8, 27,
Frege, Gottlob 57n50 32, 43, 47, 53, 59n92, 61, 75n4,
228 – 229, 231 – 232, 235 – 236,
givenness 10, 24, 34, 39 – 40, 42, 237n12, 237n16, 237n18
47 – 48, 53, 232, 233 hylomorphism 7, 147 – 150, 154, 156,
Goclenius, Rudolph 57n56 160, 163
God 8, 13 – 14, 19, 23, 33, 48, hypotyposis 7 – 8, 56n46, 173 – 174,
101 – 102, 107, 115 – 116, 129, 188 – 190; see also exhibition
174, 182 – 188, 190, 191n16, 199,
216n10, 225 – 226, 234 – 235; see idea 7 – 8, 12 – 14, 18, 25, 86, 88 – 90,
also transcendental ideal 92 – 94, 96n21, 102, 107 – 108,
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 156, 115 – 116, 119, 136, 141, 150, 160,
169n42 173 – 174, 176 – 183, 186 – 190,
Graves, Robert 167n3, 170n79 200, 202
impression 12, 24 – 26, 28, 31, 37,
Haas, Andrew 169n37, 169n41, 39 – 41, 43, 48, 50, 140, 177
169nn43 – 44, 169nn47 – 49, indirect exhibition 177 – 178, 185;
169n53, 225 – 226, 236, 236n5, see also analogy
237n11, 238n28 intuition 3 – 5 , 8 – 1 0, 12, 15, 18,
Hegel 4, 12 – 13, 17, 38, 40, 55n24, 24 – 2 6, 28 – 2 9, 31 – 4 1, 43 – 4 8,
139, 145n13, 146 – 149, 152, 50 – 5 3, 54n2, 54n10, 54n13,
154 – 158, 160 – 161, 163 – 166, 56n46, 57n50, 63, 76n9, 83, 92,
166n1, 167n8, 167n10, 167n12, 92n4, 96n21, 139, 143; formal 5,
168n21, 168n32; “Encyclopaedia” 52; form of 5, 25, 27, 38, 48 – 5 1,
145n13; “Phenomenology”: 53, 54n11, 57n61, 65 – 6 7;
235, 238n28; “Philosophy of intellectual 29, 32, 34, 57n49,
Nature” 146, 166n1, 168nn32 – 33, 57n61, 198, 200, 201, 218n35;
169n35; “Philosophy of Right” original (intuitus originarius)
157; “Science of Logic” 167n10, 23; pure 5, 24, 26, 27, 41, 47,
169n41, 169nn43 – 44, 169n47, 50 – 5 1, 54n11, 63, 67 – 6 8,
169n49, 237n11 71 – 7 2, 76n9
Heidegger, Martin 3 – 4, 9 – 11, 15 – 16, Irigaray, Luce 3, 4, 17, 146 – 149,
19, 61 – 74, 74n1, 75n2, 75n4, 158, 160 – 166, 167n5, 167n11,
Index 243
169n39, 169n50, 169n55, 170n56, 192, 194, 200, 216n14, 217n32,
170nn58 – 60, 170nn64 – 68, 219n48, 219n65, 221n89;
170nn71 – 72, 170nn74 – 78 “Determination of the Concept of
Isis 154, 203, 206, 211, 219n44 a Human Race” 168n23, 168n26;
“Dreams of a Spirit Seer” 194;
Jacobi, Friedrich 55n24, 195 “Groundwork” 124n5, 191n9;
Jacobs, Amber 167n5 “Inaugural Dissertation” 26 – 28,
Jesus 191n21, 212; see also Christ; 31, 33, 36 – 37, 41, 48 – 50; “Of
exemplar the Different Races of Human
judgement 6, 11 – 12, 35, 40, 43, Beings” 168n23; “On a Recently
47, 80 – 82, 84 – 89, 91, 95n5, Prominent Tone of Superiority in
96n15, 96n20, 97n35, 101, 117, Philosophy” 8, 168n34, 195 – 197,
119, 122 – 123, 126n20, 128n50, 201 – 205, 208 – 209, 212 – 213,
130 – 131, 133 – 135, 138 – 139, 141, 215n4, 215n8, 215nn11 – 12,
144n1, 152, 157, 173, 176 – 179, 215nn17 – 19, 215nn25 – 29,
187, 192, 211; aesthetic 81, 215nn31 – 33, 215n35,
84 – 87, 92 – 95, 96nn11 – 12, 98n46; 215nn37 – 42, 215nn44 – 45,
determinant 134; determinative 215n59, 215n65, 219 – 220n66,
151; reflective 6, 16, 82 – 89, 91, 93, 220 – 221n81, 221n87; “On the
97n26, 101, 117 – 118, 123 – 124, Use of Teleological Principles
134, 181; teleological 150 – 151, in Philosophy” 154, 168n23,
153 – 154 168n27, 168n30; “Opus
Postumum” 9, 48, 60n117; other
Kant, Immanuel: “An Answer to the lectures 59n111; “Perpetual
Question: What is Enlightenment” Peace” 91, 193; “Prolegomena”
91; “Anthropology from a 40 – 41, 47, 58n80, 145n7, 145n9;
Pragmatic Point of View” 37, “Reflexionen” 27, 42, 55n16,
45, 59n101, 153, 168n28; “The 55n22, 44n25, 56nn35 – 36,
Conflict of the Faculties” 91; 58n87; “Religion” 8 – 9, 20n7,
“Critique of Judgement” 5 – 7, 174, 182 – 185, 188 – 189, 191n21,
9, 11 – 12, 16, 20n5, 33, 40, 192n28, 192, 195, 215n3,
56n46, 57n47, 59n97, 80 – 86, 218n37, 218n40, 220 – 221n81;
88, 91 – 92, 95n1, 95nn3 – 7, “What Does It Mean to Orient
96n12, 96nn14 – 15, 96nn17 – 23, Oneself in Thinking?” 194, 197,
96nn24 – 31, 96nn33 – 38, 96n41, 199, 216n10, 216n20, 217n22,
98n45, 101, 117, 119, 120 – 124, 219n47; writings on logic
124n1, 124n3, 127n41, 128n46, 37 – 39, 55n16, 55n23, 58n67,
141, 144n1, 150 – 154, 166n1, 58nn71 – 72, 59n110
167n18, 168nn20 – 21, 173 – 174, Kitcher, Patricia 50, 60n121
176, 177, 188, 190, 192, 194,
216n20, 219n49; “Critique of Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 25, 27,
Practical Reason” 8, 20n6, 82, 29 – 32, 45, 55nn30 – 31, 56n32,
141, 178 – 182, 189, 192, 194; 56n36, 56n42, 193
“Critique of Pure Reason” 5 – 6, life 4 – 5, 7, 13, 80, 83, 87, 97n25,
9, 12, 15 – 16, 20n10, 23, 26, 31, 146 – 147, 149 – 150, 152, 155 – 159,
36, 38 – 39, 41 – 42, 44 – 52, 55n21, 161, 163, 165 – 166, 168n21,
55n30, 55 – 56n31, 58nn84 – 85, 169n55, 180
61 – 62, 69 – 73, 74n1, 77n28, linguistic symbols 176 – 178, 189
78n33, 82 – 83, 93, 95n1, 96n8, litigation 131, 138
96n10, 101, 102 – 105, 107, Lloyd, Genevieve 167n16, 169n39
109, 111, 114 – 115, 124n1, Lyotard, Jean-François 3 – 7, 11 – 12,
124nn3 – 4, 125n6, 125n8, 16 – 17, 80 – 82, 90, 92 – 94, 95n1,
126n22, 129, 132 – 133, 135, 98nn50 – 51, 98nn53 – 54, 98n60,
137 – 139, 141, 144n1, 168n31, 131 – 135, 137 – 144, 144nn1 – 3,
173 – 175, 182, 184, 186, 189, 145n4, 145n8, 145n11
244 Index
materiality 17, 146 – 149, 152, 154, Plato 147, 201, 217n27
158 – 166, 169n55, 213 practical ideas 7, 18, 174, 178 – 184,
mathematical 32, 41, 65 – 67, 76n19, 187 – 188, 190
77n20, 104 – 106, 123, 124n4, profane symbols 176 – 178, 189
125n19, 137, 217n26 purposive 6, 97n26, 102,
matter 12, 25 – 26, 36, 38, 41, 43 – 44, 112, 114 – 116, 118, 124n4,
49 – 51, 84, 86, 106, 136, 140, 143, 127nn37 – 38, 152 – 153, 157,
146 – 147, 149 – 152, 154, 155, 168n21, 181, 185
159 – 166, 167n9, 168n31, 169n39,
169 – 170n55, 212, 232, 234 quasi-transcendental 196, 204 – 207
mechanism 7, 13, 17, 147 – 152, 156,
158, 160, 165, 170n57, 232 race 153, 169n35
Meissner, Heinrich A. 35, 57n51 rational faith 201, 216n10, 217n22, 28
Mendelssohn, Moses 194 reason 6 – 10, 13 – 14, 16, 18, 29, 35,
metaphysics 4, 24, 61 – 64, 69, 71, 56n46, 57n51, 79 – 80, 84, 90,
74, 78n32, 79, 115, 120, 132 – 136, 101 – 105, 109 – 111, 113 – 119, 123,
148 – 149, 159, 219n62, 220n72, 124n4, 128n50, 129 – 130, 132 – 136,
226, 229, 234 138 – 139, 141 – 142, 149 – 150,
Metis 146 – 147, 152, 154, 160, 162, 152 – 154, 165, 173, 176 – 180,
164 – 166, 167n5, 170n79 182 – 184, 188 – 189, 194, 197, 199,
Miller, Elaine 160, 167n9, 168n26, 216n10, 217n28, 217n33, 218n40,
169nn51 – 52 219 – 220n66, 227, 231
Minerva 146 – 147, 158, 160, 162, receptivity 24, 27, 31 – 32, 37, 39 – 42,
164 – 166 49, 65, 139, 143, 177
monogram 18, 175 –1 76, 179, 182, 190n2 reflection/reflective 6, 13 – 14, 16, 46,
76n9, 82, 91, 93, 96n17, 97n26,
nature 4 – 7, 9, 11, 14, 16 – 17, 101, 117 – 118, 123 – 124, 134,
83, 101, 103, 107 – 108, 112, 150 – 151, 153, 160, 173, 176 – 177,
114 – 123, 124n4, 126n22, 127n28, 181, 187 – 188, 196, 208 – 214,
127nn37 – 38, 127 – 128n41, 221n89
128n46, 132, 134, 137 – 138, regulative 6 – 7, 12, 16, 18, 66, 101 – 120,
140 – 143, 146 – 155, 159 – 160, 165, 122 – 123, 127n36, 128n43, 132, 141,
167n9, 168n26, 168nn31 – 32, 174, 151 – 152, 176, 178
178 – 183, 187, 191n11, 232 religion 3 – 4, 7 – 9, 13 – 14, 19, 136,
194 – 195, 198, 200 – 201, 204 – 205,
objective 12, 16, 25, 30, 37, 40, 43, 209 – 210, 212 – 214, 217n28
56n36, 58n87, 64, 67, 84 – 85, 88, representation [Vorstellung], 3, 5, 9,
93, 103 – 104, 106 – 107, 109, 111, 15, 24 – 25, 27, 29 – 31, 33, 38 – 40,
113 – 116, 119, 125n17, 151, 176, 42 – 43, 45 – 50, 52, 55n30, 56n36,
182, 192n28, 195 – 196, 199 – 200, 65 – 66, 68 – 69, 106, 126n24, 140,
211, 216n17, 220n73 142, 147, 175 – 176, 178, 181, 184,
organic 147, 149 – 153, 156 – 159, 161, 188 – 189, 200, 202
163, 165, 168n21, 185, 228; see also reproduction 13, 126n22, 150,
organism 152 – 155, 157 – 161
organism 147 – 148, 150 – 153, 157,
163; see also organic schema 13, 15, 18, 52, 65 – 68, 71, 73,
76n19, 77n20, 148, 153, 158 – 159,
paralogism 101, 138 174 – 176, 178 – 182, 184 – 188,
Parsons, Charles 46 – 48, 52, 54n10, 190n3, 191n8; recollective 175; see
57n59, 59n108, 59n110, 59n115, also direct exhibition
60n119 schematism, the 4, 8 – 11, 15 – 16,
passivity 24, 34, 139 61 – 71, 73 – 74, 75n6, 76n9, 76n11,
perception 24, 27, 29 – 30, 32, 37, 77n20, 77nn23 – 25, 77n29, 78n39,
40 – 42, 45, 51, 54n13, 65, 78n32, 173 – 174
105, 109, 122 Schlosser, Johann Georg 203
Index 245
Scotus, John Duns 35 teleology 4, 7, 13, 17, 19, 147 – 150,
self-legislation 130, 196 – 200, 202, 156, 170n57, 227, 232, 235
208, 216n15 theoretical ideas 7, 18, 173, 175 – 176,
Sellars, Wilfrid 24, 37, 40 – 41, 48, 50, 178, 182, 186 – 187
54n6, 58nn65 – 66, 58n74, 58n76, time 4 – 5, 10 – 11, 15 – 16, 18,
58n81, 58n86, 59n107, 60n122 24 – 25, 36, 39, 42, 48, 50 – 52,
sensation 24 – 30, 32, 34 – 35, 37 – 38, 57n60, 61 – 64, 67 – 74, 76n12,
41 – 45, 49 – 52, 55n27, 56n36, 58n87, 77n23, 77n29, 78n30, 78n32,
60n124, 86 – 87, 89, 140, 142 – 143, 177 78n39, 83, 106, 109, 114, 124n4,
sensibility [Sinnlichkeit, Sensualitas], 140, 152, 158, 162 – 164, 175,
3 – 5, 9 – 11, 14 – 15, 24, 25 – 28, 230 – 231, 234
31, 34 – 35, 38, 40 – 42, 46, 48 – 52, tonality 7, 18, 173, 175 – 176, 178,
54n2, 55n24, 57n50, 59n99, 68, 182, 186 – 187; see also tone
83, 109, 139 – 140, 143, 175, 179, tone 84, 195, 200, 203, 205 – 208,
213, 227, 229, 231, 233, 235 210, 213, 215n7, 217n32, 221n87;
sensuous/ness 23, 25, 28, 40, 53 see also tonality
sexual difference 7, 148 – 149, 158, transcendental ideal 183, 190
164 – 166, 235 transcendental schema 68, 175;
space 4 – 5, 10 – 11, 16, 23 – 25, 36, see also schema
39 – 40, 42 – 44, 48, 50 – 52, 57n60, typic 18, 179, 181 – 182, 185, 189,
59n114, 60n124, 61, 63, 72 – 74, 191n11
78n39, 83, 124n4, 125n19, 140,
162 – 164, 175, 225; play-space 63, 69 understanding [Verstand], 6 – 8, 15,
Stengers, Isabelle 169n42 18, 26 – 28, 31, 33 – 38, 40 – 42, 46,
Stone, Alison 146 – 147, 150, 52, 55n24, 63 – 65, 67 – 71, 76n11,
154 – 156, 159 – 160, 163, 166, 77n23, 83, 85, 87, 90, 93, 96n8,
166n1, 169n39, 170n63 101 – 111, 116 – 119, 121, 123, 129,
subjective 6, 12, 30, 32, 37, 42, 44, 50, 130n1, 135, 138 – 139, 141, 143,
56n36, 58n87, 84 – 90, 93, 96n23, 168n31, 173, 175 – 176, 178, 181,
97n31, 110, 119, 120 – 122, 124, 185 – 186, 189, 21, 213, 218n35,
151, 198 – 200, 217n28, 218n40 218n40, 219n44, 233
sublime 81, 95n2, 132, 141 – 143 unity 3, 5 – 6, 9 – 13, 16, 27 – 28,
super-sensible 32, 35, 96n21, 39, 63, 66, 76 – 77n19, 81, 93,
183 – 187, 191n11, 198 – 199, 202, 101 – 103, 106 – 109, 11 – 113,
216n10, 218n40, 219n57 115 – 123, 124n3, 125n7,
superstition 199, 201, 216n10, 217n28 126nn21 – 22, 126n24, 127n38,
symbol 3, 5, 8 – 9, 13, 32 – 33, 129, 141, 155 – 156, 161,
56n45, 56 – 57n46, 146, 154 – 155, 175 – 178, 182, 211, 200n73, 228,
173 – 174, 176 – 178, 180 – 182, 230 – 232; of experience 6, 16, 63,
186 – 190, 190n3, 191n11, 191n13, 101, 141
192n28; see also indirect exhibition
Synthetic Unity of Apperception Wolff, Christian 24 – 25, 28, 35,
(SUA) 69, 77n29, 93, 106, 126n22, 57n51, 193
175, 220n73 wrong 131 – 132, 135, 138 – 139,
Systematic Unity of Nature (SUN) 145n8
6 – 7, 11 – 12, 16, 103 – 104, 107 – 109,
111 – 119, 121 – 123, 124n4, 127n28, Zammito, John 150, 152, 167n19,
127n38, 128n45, 130 168n22

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Kant and the Continental

Immanuel Kant’s work continues to be a main focus of attention in almost

Sorin Baiasu is Professor of Philosophy at Keele University, Director of

Alberto Vanzo is an independent scholar. He has published a monograph

Kant and the Reorientation of Aesthetics

Hume’s Science of Human Nature

Hume’s Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Psychology

Kant and the Problem of Self-Knowledge

Hume on Art, Emotions, and Superstition

A Guide to Kant’s Psychologism

Kant and the Continental Tradition

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Edited by Sorin Baiasu and

1 Kant and the Continental Tradition 3

3 Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant’s Transcendental

4 On Affective Universality: Kant, Arendt and Lyotard on

5 The Role of Regulative Principles and Their Relation to

7 Kant, Hegel and Irigaray: From ‘Chemism’ to the Elemental 146

8 The Schematism of Analogy and the Figure of Christ:

9 The ‘Proper’ Tone of Critical Philosophy: Kant and

10 Remembering Gary Banham: Genealogy, Teleology,

Some of the chapters in this volume have been specially commissioned.

2. The Volume’s Structural Unity

3. The Volume’s Thematic Unity

4. A Further Unifying Element

In memory of Gary Banham

It is well known to the point of being commonplace that, for Immanuel

• First, how are we to understand the defining characteristics of intui-

We do not propose to resolve all issues but simply to articulate clearly

1. Kant and His Sources: The Different Senses of

The simplest interpretation is to suppose that Kant is speaking at the

In support of the view of sensations as pure experiences, we might cite

The appearances might, indeed, constitute intuition without thought

Even as modifications of our sensibility, the sensations must be ordered

Thus there belong to sensory cognition [sensualis cognitio] both mat-

The form of intuition provides a minimum organization, ‘an accidental

The manifold of representations can be given in an intuition which

In agreement with Aristotle (and against Husserl, for whom there is

2. Revisiting Kant’s Distinction Between Intuitions

3. The Break With Rationalism and the Rejection of

By intuition I do not mean the fluctuating testimony of the senses,

Leibniz, by and large, follows Descartes’s account of sensation and intel-

A distinct notion on this account is an insight into essence, similar to

The relation between representation and the world seems to be direct.

Representation is an inner determination of the mind, which refers to

Kant, however, rejects the Leibnizian-Wolffian account whereby all

The concept of sensibility and of appearance would be falsified and

The representation of a body in intuition [. . .] contains nothing that

Kant repeats this criticism of Leibniz in the Amphibolies (A270/B326):

There is (for man) no intuition of what belongs to the understand-

The notion of symbolic knowledge is still thoroughly Leibnizian, but the

Notwithstanding the adoption of the word symbolic by modern logi-

Concepts, according to Kant in the Critique of Judgment, are exhibited

• intuitions and concepts are two species of representation;

Kant’s mature position is the view that:

• sensibility and understanding are two distinct faculties;

4. What About Putative Intellectual Intuition?

An understanding in which through self-consciousness all the mani-

In fact, then, givenness and immediacy have to be understood as ulti-

Intuitive cognitions are intellectual representations or representa-

5. Intuition in the Inaugural Dissertation: On

In short, he [Kant] seems in the Aesthetic only to revive the view of

This is taken to be a claim that there can be no observation statements

1 Kant and the Continental Tradition 3

7 Kant, Hegel and Irigaray: From ‘Chemism’ to the Elemental 146

1. Kant and His Sources: The Different Senses of

2. Revisiting Kant’s Distinction Between Intuitions

3. The Break With Rationalism and the Rejection of

5. Intuition in the Inaugural Dissertation: On

9. Another Way of Slicing Intuitions: Form and

1. Kant on Aesthetic Reflective Judgement

2. Arendt’s Discovery: Sensus Communis and

1. The Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic:

3. Does Experience Require the Systematic

5. The Different Transcendental Principles of the