The Gathering of Reason: Second Edition

CHAPTER VI. REASON, IMAGINATION, MADNESS

1. INVERSION A new space is now to be prepared: the space of inversion. Eventually, I shall undertake to unleash within this space a play of inverse imaging by which a concealed stratum of the Transcendental Dialectic can be exposed. But, first of all, the phases of the projective interpretation need to be consolidated in such a way as to bring clearly into focus the structures that will be at issue once the play of inversion is unleashed. By assembling the horizon from Kant’s text and especially by projecting the textual commentary upon that horizon, I have sought in the projective interpretation to recover the issue of gathering in the Transcendental Dialectic. It is a matter of the gathering of reason, of the movement in which reason would gather into unity the manifoldness that remains at the level of understanding. This gathering of reason forms the final phase of that movement of gathering that constitutes the inner dynamics of human knowing as such, the movement by which the fragmentary beginnings of human knowing would be gathered into a unity akin to that of divine knowing. But the Transcendental Dialectic puts this matter at issue: It is a critical re-enactment of the gathering1 —that is, it unfolds the structures of that gathering in order to undertake a critical determination of its very possibility. Or rather, since the fact of such gathering (i.e., the history of metaphysics) establishes the possibility of its being in some sense carried out, critique determines whether this sense fulfills what CHAPTER VI Reason, Imagination, Madness 143 metaphysics intends; in short, it determines whether the metaphysical gathering of reason succeeds or fails. The determination is that the gathering of reason fails, that it cannot be fulfilled. The fragmentation which it would repair thus proves irreparable. Consider the paralogisms. As in all cases, reason posits an unconditioned unity: By extending the concept of the apperceptive I up to the level of the unconditioned, reason posits the idea of the soul. The other moment within the structure of the paralogistic gathering is, then, the determination of the soul (as substance, as simple, etc.)—or, more precisely, the transposition of these determinations from their basis, transcendental apperception, to the idea of the soul. With this second moment the actual gathering would be accomplished, the gathering would be fulfilled. The fragmentation within man, the separation from self constituted by self-ignorance, by nonpresence to self, would be repaired—not by installing an impossible presence to self (original self-intuition), but by providing a surrogate: rational knowledge of self, conceptually mediated, rationally reconstructed presence to self. But the gathering fails: Because of the emptiness of the basis from which they are detached, the determinations remain empty and thus fail to measure up to, to fulfill, that unity posited for the gathering. The gathering structure of the antinomies lies almost on the surface of Kant’s text, and little more than an allusion to the assembled horizon was required in order to draw it to the surface. Again, reason posits the unity for the gathering: Extending the appropriate categories up to the level of absolute totality of the series of conditions for a given conditioned, reason posits the cosmological idea. The other moment within the structure of the cosmological gathering is, then, the actual gathering of the manifold, of the series of conditions, into this unity— a gathering executed by time-bound thought, by a thought which, linked to appearances and their mode of givenness, would build up from the fragmented appearances that unity merely posited by reason, thus gathering them into that unity. Unlike the other gatherings of reason , the cosmological moves within the domain of appearances, of the intuitively present, and thus would provide something more than a mere surrogate for the presence that is lacking. It would repair the fragmentation within appearances—repair it through reason yet without completely transcending the domain of appearances. This very 144 THE GATHERING OF REASON ambivalence makes conflict, antinomy, inevitable: The thought that would gather the series of appearances into the idea posited by reason is intrinsically bound to the fragmentation wrought by time, to the “spreading-out” of appearances in time, to articulation in a fundamental sense, to articulated presence. The gathering of the articulated manifold into presence cannot measure up to the unity posited by reason; between the two sides of the gathering there ensues a radical breach...