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Chapter Two: Transcendence, “Spin,” and the Jamesian Open Space
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C T Transcendence,“Spin,” and the Jamesian Open Space . S One could doubtless find more inviting or compelling ways to begin an essay than to announce in the opening sentence that it is going to be concerned mainly with questions of “method,” a term likely to give the impression of something dry, pedantic, and uninspiring, or concerned primarily with technicalities. While I beg the reader’s indulgence for a certain amount of pedantry in the next paragraphs, I hope the balance of the essay will, despite the underlying methodological focus, show itself to be addressing matters of both pertinent interest and importance. At any rate, it is not merely a characteristic of our own intellectual milieu that, as readers or researchers, we find our interests inclining more naturally to “substantive” questions, concerned with the illumination of content in inquiry, than to the drier questions of method, which are concerned merely with ensuring that the procedures by which such illumination is claimed are themselves sound and correct. As Kant remarks in the opening sentences of the Transcendental Doctrine of Method (the second 39 of the two major divisions of the first Critique, largely ignored in favor of the first, much larger Doctrine of the Elements), the basic propensity of the human mind, or specifically of human inquiry, is toward the expansion of knowledge, to push positively into new territories of interpretation, discovery, and innovation. Attention to method in inquiry, by contrast, runs counter to this natural inclination or drive, inasmuch as judgments about method are entirely negative and as such offer no satisfaction whatsoever to “humanity’s general lust for knowledge,” which is why they “do not stand in high regard.”1 Kant himself pushes this even further. With his archenemy, dogmatism, clearly the target, Kant deliberately overplays the case in a rare flourish of hyperbole to make his point, saying,“One regards [the negative judgments proper to method] as jealous enemies of our unremitting drive straining for the expansion of our cognition,and it takes almost an apology to earn toleration for them, let alone favor and esteem.”2 But the point having been taken, and Kant’s hyperbole notwithstanding , it is nevertheless also accurate to say that, with the notable exception of contemporary analytic philosophy, questions of method in intellectual discourse are today often not given the same priority of attention that they have received in the past.3 Perhaps an important part of the reason for this is that a prioritization of method can tend to be associated with its prominent place in the prolegomena of the great foundationalist works of early modern or Enlightenment philosophy,especially from seventeenth-century rationalism onward, where methodological structures are integral to setting the basic parameters of grand narratives that want to pronounce generally on “the nature of things” and are seen as indispensable for defining and justifying the “starting point” of such narratives. Of course, a prioritization of attention to method need not be seen as leading automatically to the totalizing excesses of Enlightenment foundationalism . Indeed, for Kant himself, who stands at that ambivalent point of being viewed as both the quintessential philosopher of the Enlightenment and, at the same time, the inaugurator of its decline or demise, the question of method does not appear as a feature in a general prolegomenon, at the starting point of the first Critique,but rather at the end,where it is dealt with “critically” simply as an integral feature of any sort of organized discourse or inquiry at all. And what makes methodological questioning integral to any inquiry, as Kant goes on to specify more exactly, is that it is concerned first and foremost with the “discipline of reason,” by which is 40 P A U L D . J A N Z meant more exactly the disciplining of the use of reason according to principles , for the sole purpose of “guarding against error” in judgment with respect to any particular field of inquiry. From this emerges something important. For, when one analyzes more carefully what is at issue here, it quickly becomes evident that all of what are often called the intellectual virtues,in the epistemological sense— e.g., inferential rigor, consistency, coherence, circumspect attentiveness to subject matter or modesty, clarity, transparent accountability in demonstration , and so on—are fundamentally characteristics of method or of principled procedure and not features of any ampliative knowledge gained about the content per se (although of course the particular content or subject matter in question will in...