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3 The Force of Example: Kant's Symbols
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3 THE FORCE OF EXAMPLE Kant's Symbols Recent literarytheory has raised objections to what appears to be an overexclusivcconcern with "language" in poststructuralist literary criticism. While literary texts are linguistic constructs, so critics have argued, language itself must be seen in a historical and social context. Literary criticism must therefore turn to fields in the social sciences, such as sociology and history, to provide an understanding of the nonlinguistic elements that surround and in part determine the language of the texts that literary criticism studies. Otherwise it will be at risk of wrongly imperializingthe nonlinguistic world with what happens to be its particular object of interest, and consequently limiting the understanding of its own object as well.1 This objection is important because it raises a question that was at one time not limited to literary criticism but pertained to the nonmathematical sciences in general, that is, whether and in what way they give access to a knowledge of the empirical world. The form in which the recent objections concerning literary criticism are raised, however, locates the problem, implicitly, in the object of study; the error is seen to be contingent upon the linguistic makeup of the objects with which literary criticism is concerned. If we turn to the philosophical texts in which the question of discursive theoretical knowledge was originally posed, however, the problem does THE FORCE OF EXAMPLE: KANT'S SYMBOLS / 59 not begin with the nature of the object but with the nature of the theory itself.Indeed, the entire project of Kant's criticalphilosophy could be considered an attempt to discover whether a philosophy based on principles not simply derived from either mathematics or empirical evidence could provide any systematic knowledge whatsoever. In order to provide any knowledge of objects, philosophy had to be able to systematize itself, as rigorously as mathematics. Whether discursive theory could say something about the world depended on what it could say about itself. If we are to remember the questions raised again today in the field of literary theory we must first ask, not "What can a theory of literature know?" but "What can theory know?" Kant is a good place to examinethis question not only because he first asked it in this form, but because his criticalphilosophy has seemed particularlydependent upon nondiscursive science, specifically Newtonian physics.2 Kant's answer to what philosophy can know, that is, has seemed to be closely linked to what Newtonian physics knows, and hence it appears itself circumscribed by an empirical/historical determinant. But it turns out that in Kant the particular concept that will eventually allow theory to know is the concept of self-limitation, which is best thought of in terms of symbolic language. To some extent, then, an examination of the relation between critical philosophy and nondiscursive science will reveal that in order for philosophy to systematize itself it will first have to symbolize itself in its own self-knowledge. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of PureReason , Kant describes the dilemma of a metaphysics fallen into disrepute in the face of the successes of mathematics and natural science. The success of the mathematical sciences, Kant suggests , is that they base their method on an act of rational selfreflection in which the object is recognized as a representation of reason.3 The structure of scientific method is one of selfrecognition ; what reason sees in nature is precisely itself. Reason thus makes progress in mathematics and physics because [34.229.223.223] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:37 GMT) EMPIRICAL TRUTHS AND CRITICAL FICTIONS / 6O through their objects—number and empirical nature—rational thought learns more and more about itself. In this context, the failure of metaphysics contains a peculiar irony, since it is the science concerned most directly with what would seem purely rational objects, that is, "mere concepts." In the one science in which reason would seem to have the best chance of confronting itself directly, it is the least successful; reason is somehow furthest from itself when it is potentially nearest.4 It has thus come to recognize itself first of all in the sciences in which it must detour through sensible intuition, through an "application " of concepts to objects, and hence through something exterior to the concept as such. The successes of the sciences that Kant describes in the second preface are more than a point of comparison for metaphysical failure; in the context in which he is writing, they would...