Reading Kant's Geography by unknow

Reading Kant's Geography by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438436050
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2011-07-16T05:00:00+00:00


IV

Kant's Geography of Reason

Reason and Its Spatiality

11

Kant's Geography of Reason1

Jeff Malpas and Karsten Thiel

Kant's interest in geography marks him out as unusual among philosophers. Few have engaged with geographical concerns in any significant way, yet not only did Kant lecture extensively on the subject, but the lectures he gave every year between 1756 (only two years after his inauguration) and 1796, and which were published in 1801 under the title Physische Geographie, represent the very first lectures on the subject within a modern university setting.2 From the perspective of the history of geography, Kant thus occupies a founding role in the development of geography as an academic discipline. From a purely philosophical perspective, however, Kant's geographical engagement is also significant, since it directly connects with and informs key elements in his own philosophical project. In this respect, Kant can be construed as one of the pioneers, perhaps the very first, in the project of a “philosophical topography”—a project that aims to explore the manner in which space, and also place, figure in human knowledge and experience as both the object of such knowledge and experience, and as part of its very structure.3 This is especially so in that most famous of his works, the Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781, which inaugurates a trilogy of critical investigations dealing with pure, practical, and judgmental reason—with metaphysics, morals, and aesthetics. While the first Critique takes metaphysics, and not geography, as its focus, it does so in ways that nevertheless constantly invoke the geographical and direct us towards the topographical, and that establishes the critical project itself as “geographical” in character.

As the prefaces to both the first and second editions of Kant's great work make clear, the concern of the Critique of Pure Reason is with the reform and possible revival of metaphysics. The two prefaces disagree, however, over exactly how this is to be achieved. According to the preface to the first edition, the task of the Critique is to relocate metaphysics in its proper place—to achieve an appropriate “placing” of metaphysics. Mislocated, improperly placed, metaphysics becomes itself a place of strife—“the battlefield of endless controversies.”4 The battle that is waged here is one between, on the one side, those who aim to “rebuild [metaphysics], though never according to a plan unanimously accepted among themselves,” and, on the other, those “nomads who abhor all permanent cultivation of the soil.”5 As Kant explains later, in “The Transcendental Doctrine of Method,” the philosophical nomadism at issue here provides a “resting-place [Ruheplatz],” but “not a dwelling-place for permanent residence [Wohnplatz],”6 and this Kant clearly views as an inadequacy, while the attempt to engage in philosophical building can achieve nothing without an agreed plan. The result is that metaphysics is left unsettled, unplaced, and uncertain.

The preface to the second edition seems more modest in the ambitions it sets out—and, at first glance, those ambitions no longer seem to be expressed in geographical terms. Rather than looking to establish a proper “dwelling-place” for metaphysics—somewhere it



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