Kant, Fichte, and the Legacy of Transcendental Idealism by Halla Kim & Steven Hoeltzel

Author:Halla Kim & Steven Hoeltzel [Kim, Halla & Hoeltzel, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Metaphysical
ISBN: 9780739182369
Amazon: 0739182358
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The Unity of Reason in Kant and Fichte

Steven Hoeltzel

Kant’s philosophy is organized around a number of crucial dualisms: the cognizable versus the real, empirical manifestation versus intelligible form, the constitutive function of the understanding versus the regulative role of reason, the ordering principles of nature versus the ends of reason and morality, and so forth. I will not here presume to judge just how laudable or lamentable is Kant’s commitment to this dualism or that one. I do, however, propose to explore one of them in some detail: the putative dualism of theoretical and practical reason. This dualism can be distinctly puzzling, in that Kant himself insists on its ultimate untenability but seems to be unable to move beyond it, or even to offer any very meaningful mitigation of it. Granted, he exhibits deep and important affinities between reason’s theoretical and practical operations and pursues the principled integration of the distinct explanatory and ethical frameworks that those operations articulate. Still, if we are thinking here of some capacity or capacities of the mind—as Kant himself seems to be, in maintaining that “there can, in the end, be only one and the same reason, which must be distinguished merely in its application”1—then the rich and important connections that Kant draws between theoretical and practical reason nonetheless leave their basic dualism intact.

Proceeding along lines laid out in Kant’s Critiques, this essay will gradually home in on one way of understanding what the ultimate unity of pure reason might consist in. On this model, (i) pure reason, as such, is the power to originate and instate pure organizing forms—including, originally and preeminently, a self-legislated ultimate aim of complete (unmitigated, absolute) rational ordering—but (ii) this originally undifferentiated commitment to the untrammeled implementation of self-originated ordering forms is contingently confronted and qualified by empirical givens that belong to two importantly distinct sorts (roughly: the sensory and the affective), and (iii) it is this duality in the given, arational phenomena that accounts for reason’s resulting ‘double specialization’ in theoretical explanation and practical orientation. Thus there is really only a single pure reason, with a single pure-rational project, but it has what can appear to be two distinct manifestations and implementations, as the result of the basic qualitative duality in the arational phenomena with which it is contingently confronted and which it has always already appointed itself to organize aright.

I will argue that this conception of the ultimate unity of reason (i) is importantly underwritten by Kant’s Critiques—although not of course entailed by them, let alone explicitly articulated in them, and (ii) is key to Fichte’s post-Kantian theory of subjectivity, as a largely implicit but systematically central commitment. The supporting discussion will proceed more by exploring deep conceptual connections than via close textual exegesis, but in this case that should be unobjectionable. Concerning Kant, the goal here is not really to pinpoint his own final position, but rather to descry some unspoken ideas which a sympathetic reader might take his writings to imply. And as for

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