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four Transcendental Reflection: Interpreting the Amphiboly via§76 of the Critique of Judgment I. Transcendental Reflection Having demonstrated the need for an explanation of the conception of experience with which Kant’s analysis begins, we must now pursue such a question within the confines of the Critique of Pure Reason if we are to avoid claiming that Kant was initially blind to the presuppositions of the critical enterprise. In§76 of the Critique of Judgment, Kant announces the possibility of addressing the critical conception of possible experience, but it is not clear that such an account can be located in the epistemological structure of the first Critique. Those who have interpreted the Critique of Judgment as initiating great changes in the critical project argue that such a search is pointless.1 They appear to have support in that the only section that develops the claim that critical epistemology depends upon something beyond its finite limits is the Refutation of Idealism; and the ambiguity of its conclusion seems to raise the possibility that even in 1787, with the inclusion of this section in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, and certainly in 1781, with the work’s original publication, Kant did not conceive of the regulative dependence of the critical analysis of cognition. However, concluding the Transcendental Analytic already in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason is an appendix in which Kant addresses the designation of the terrain of critical experience. In this appendix, titled On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection, Kant raises what he terms a transcendental reflection (Reflexion), or deliberation (Überlegung), a reflection back over the completed analysis of cognition, as a necessary counterpoint to this analysis. To interpret this claim, we will begin by returning to §76 of the Critique of Judgment and, following Heidegger’s suggestions, we will map the discussion of the regulative dependence of the analysis of finite experience back onto the first Critique. Heidegger’s late essay “Kant’s Thesis about Being”2 reaffirms Schelling’s statement, in reference to §76 of the Critique of Judgment, that “[p]erhaps there 86฀฀฀•฀฀฀KANT AND THE SUBJECT OF CRITIQUE have never been so many deep thoughts [tiefe Gedanken] compressed [zusammengedr ängt] into so few pages.”3 Unfortunately, in this early work, Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy; or, On the Unconditioned in Human Knowledge (Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie oder Über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen), Schelling does not go on to explicate what precisely these “deep thoughts” are; he refers to them in a footnote after the following criticism of Spinoza: “he could never make comprehensible why it is that teleological unity in the finite intelligence can be determined only by the ontological unity in the nonfinite thinking of the absolute substance.”4 By determining the absolute as an object, Spinoza could never explain the connection between the finite, as it aims at the absolute, and the absolute itself. Schelling continues by claiming that Kant recognized this limitation in Spinoza, and then he moves on to the passage concerning the density and profundity of §76 of the third Critique. But Schelling does not further interpret this passage. This is particularly frustrating because, for Schelling, the absolute directs the finite I: “to strive [streben] to elicit in the world that which is actuality in the nonfinite, and which is man’s highest vocation [höchste Beruf]—to turn the unity of aims in the world into mechanism, and to turn mechanism into a unity of aims.”5 For Schelling, to search for a “first principle of philosophy” is to court the death of philosophy; “true philosophy can start only from free actions,”6 from the action of the I striving to attain the infinite. Free action drives this progression to immanence, from the finite to the infinite, without, for Schelling, the necessity of distinguishing how one could come to conceive of the two sides of the process. This is because, for Schelling, what the Critique of Judgment initiates, and what is particularly evident in §76, is that the faculty of understanding that underlies Kant’s earlier examination of finite cognition has been surpassed; the Critique of Judgment points toward the unity of mechanism and teleology, and hence to the unity of the finite and the infinite, in the speculative philosophical accomplishment of the self positing I. For Schelling, §76 not only argues for the importance of the pursuit of metaphysics for the establishment of regulative...

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