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13. The Unstable Temporal Landscape of Critique
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289 13 The Unstable Temporal Landscape of Critique The Political Nature of Critique The argument of this book has from the outset viewed Kant as a thinker whose critical philosophy has opened a wide and complex space for political thought and endeavor. It takes seriously the claim that practical reason is the lynchpin to the whole enterprise , rising to primary importance over theoretical reason in Kant’s own estimation of critiques and humanity’s purpose. As such, this book has given crucial weight to the role of Rousseau in the formation of Kant’s critical project as the founding moral and political spirit of his critical universe. The analytical tradition of concerning oneself with the epistemological and theoretical aspects of the first critique and discarding the philosophically vague aspects of the rest as unrelated is considered an unbalanced travesty of Kant’s intentions. To ignore the overarching political drive of this philosophy is to misconstrue its ultimate directive and be blind to one of the major tensions to have nourished generations of political thinkers. We should never forget that Kant’s desire to define the precincts of theoretical reason begins its life as a political choice to alienate dogmatists and enthusiasts from the discussion of knowledge and morality. Theoretical and practical reason are linked in a strange concoction of limitation and lim- 290 Kant and Kafka itlessness. Their relationship surveys both critique’s own province and the illegal provinces outside it. It also then adjudicates those instances where reason must transcend the provinces it has carefully mapped. In attempting to legislate for the margins and limits of the various faculties, critique is always at the same time defining itself. The question is always how critique can define itself within the same process of defining reason. Does reason exist prior to critique, or vice versa? As a twin process, the Kantian dualism is thus circumscribed within the elastic circularity of critique itself. As critique and reason are legislating for the world, they are at the same time discovering themselves, their rights, and their limits . It is within the confines of this circular activity of the critique of reason that a difficult and contradictory political universe can thrive. Kant radically reformulated the dualistic problematic of nature and freedom, science and morality, phenomena and noumena. But one term of the dualism is never contemplated without the specter of the other haunting it. Theoretical reason is tempted at all times by the ideas and ideals of reason, empirically disqualified figments that nevertheless regulate the function of knowing. Knowing is directed and limited by the limitlessness that defines doing and hoping. It wishes to soar with its clipped wings. At the same time, doing and hoping struggle constantly to give knowledgeable form to their limitless origins. Moral law is a ground that cannot be understood; it is simply an imperative striving with no conclusive phenomenal evidence of its successful operation. Practical reason soars majestically without a place to land. Kantian critique is beset by this twin need to ruthlessly police the border between nature and reason and act as that frontier runner who morally traverses our limits in search of a better world. It must obdurately uphold the regulations in one instance and be a conscientious objector in the other. Kantian critique is the borderland of the modern political imagination, and its divided loyalties between its two homelands are the options upon which that imagination sways. Like a frontier town, Kantian critique can accommodate a wide range of differing characters in a lawless conversation. It is Kant’s confusion with the competing demands of the real and the ideal that makes critique the fertile bed of political interpretation that it is. Critique will always be a frustrated, but striving entity, where its political logic is unstable, swinging between its triumphant ideality and its thwarted reality. [3.227.0.245] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:45 GMT) The Landscape of Critique 291 In asserting the innately uncertain nature of Kantian critique, this conclusion ostensibly agrees with the view and analysis put forward by Kimberly Hutchings in her book Kant, Critique and Politics. Hutchings surveys the unresolvable Kantian aporias that have sustained some of the twentieth century’s leading political theorists, and in so doing reveals the ambiguous directions critique has taken as a potent political energy. This potency, Hutchings claims, is the result of the challenge that critique offers to its advocates in attempting to overcome critique’s intrinsic divisions. Exponents of critique are ultimately...