The Gathering of Reason: Second Edition

CHAPTER I. INTERPRETIVE HORIZONS

1. THE PROBLEM OF METAPHYSICS . . . we begin from the point at which the common root of our power of knowledge divides and throws out two stems, one of which is reason. By reason I here understand the whole higher faculty of knowledge and am therefore contrasting the rational with the empirical (A 835/B 863). This point marks also the beginning of metaphysics: The division gets retraced through that movement in which, turning away from the immediately present, one comes to have recourse to reason; thereby the division gets established in a certain overtness and the immediately present differentiated, retrospectively, as the (merely) empirical. Because it marks the beginning of metaphysics, Kant can, near the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, begin from this point “to project the architectonic of all knowledge arising from pure reason”— that is, to project the architectonic of that metaphysics for which that entire Critique is the requisite preparation, that metaphysics in which the cultivation of human reason would be consummated (A 850/B 878). And it is from this same point, strategically engraved at the end of the Introduction (“. . . there are two stems of human knowledge, namely, sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from a common , but to us unknown root”—A 15/B 29), that the entire critical propaedeutic begins. From this point, which thus punctuates the Kantian text, one can invoke, perhaps most directly, with fewest strokes, the horizon explicitly governing that text. This same horizon is to govern the duplex interpretation to be made of a major segment of that text. CHAPTER I INTERPRETIVE HORIZONS 13 From this point of division arises the traditional distinction between historical knowledge and rational knowledge.1 Kant formulates this distinction in terms of the origin of knowledge: “Historical knowledge is cognitio ex datis; rational knowledge is cognitio ex principiis” (A 836/ B 864). Even at this level of mere appropriative reformation, a peculiar shift is already in play (one which will eventually prove decisive for placing Kant’s text within the history of metaphysics): Delimiting historical knowledge as that kind which is given from “elsewhere” (anderw ärts), he thus shifts the locus of the immediately present; what was originally a turn away from the immediately present has become a turn to something present in a more profound and no less immediate sense; it has become a turn from the presence of objects (an imperfect presence because of the very difference separating objects from the subject) to reason’s presence to itself, a turn from presence to self-presence. But what is more decisive in the present connection is the problematic generated by the concept of purely rational knowledge and confirmed by a cursory glance at the history of metaphysics. The problem is one which Kant never ceased to reiterate: If metaphysics consists of purely rational knowledge, knowledge ex principiis, knowledge purely through concepts (in distinction from historical, i.e., empirical knowledge , but also from mathematical knowledge which, though not empirical , involves construction in intuition), then how is it possible for metaphysics to be legitimated as a knowledge of things, as synthetic knowledge? How can there be knowledge of something that is “elsewhere ” (outside the mere thought, the concept) without that knowledge having come from “elsewhere”? How is purely rational synthetic knowledge possible? Only if this problem is resolved in a rigorous, binding way can metaphysics, that “battlefield of…endless controversies” (A viii), be placed upon the secure path of science. Hence, the problem of metaphysics: How is metaphysics as science possible? If this problem is regarded with sufficient generality, if it is formulated in terms not only of theoretical knowledge (determining of objects) but also of practical knowledge (self-determination), then it may be deemed the horizon of critique as such, of the entire enterprise to which the three critiques are devoted. By resolving this problem, critique is to prepare the ground for metaphysics (as science), for a system of pure reason: For if such a system is one day to be completed under the general name of metaphysics (which it is possible to achieve quite completely and 14 THE GATHERING OF REASON which is of highest importance for the use of reason in every connection), the ground for the edifice must be explored by critique as deep down as the foundation of the faculty of principles independent of experience, in order that it may sink in no part, for this would...