The Philosopher's Voice: Philosophy, Politics, and Language in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 3. The Politics of Pure Reason

C H A P T E R 3
The Politics of Pure Reason The field of philosophy, in this context of world citizenship, allows for the following questions to be brought: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? What is the human being? —Kant, Logic1 The title of this chapter appears to be an oxymoron. Pure reason should be that which transcends the political realm. It would thus seem that there could be no “politics of pure reason.” However, philosophers are political beings. They are human beings who consider the essential questions of being human: knowledge, ethics, hope, and indeed the very definition of human being all within the context of the political question of world citizenship. The philosopher’s voice is a human voice that speaks to other human beings. As such it is a form of political activity. Even Kant, the philosopher of pure reason, inevitably addressed a politically located audience. In the present chapter I will argue that self-consciousness of the political location of philosophical speech is built right into Kant’s critical method. I will examine Kant’s use of political metaphors in the Critique of Pure Reason. I will discuss the methodology of the Critique and Kant’s republican ideal of free unanimity among his readers, an ideal that should produce the conditions for certainty about the truth of the Critique. I will consider Kant’s encounters with the Prussian political authorities who controlled the publication of Kant’s philosophical texts. Finally, I will consider the linguistic “metacritique” of Kant’s critical project and will consider Kant’s own recognition of the question of linguistic expression. My thesis in the present chapter is that Kant was aware of the political ground of his critical project: self-consciousness of the political location of philosophical speech is built right into the Kantian critical method.2 Human Reason and the Critical Project Reason must in all its undertakings subject itself to criticism; should it limit freedom of criticism by any prohibitions, it must harm itself, drawing upon itself a damaging suspicion. Nothing is 47 48 The Philosopher’s Voice so important through its usefulness, nothing so sacred, that it may be exempted from this searching examination, which knows no respect for persons. Reason depends on this freedom for its very existence. For reason has no dictatorial authority; its verdict is always simply the agreement of free citizens, of whom each one must be permitted to express, without let or hindrance, his objections or even his veto. —Kant, Critique of Pure Reason3 Reason is human activity. It is a ruthless practice of freedom that is itself only possible within a political life in which freedom of expression has been vouchsafed. It is the human capacity for law-governed freedom, the spontaneity of imagination brought under epistemological, moral, aesthetic, or political laws. While such a faculty is ours by nature, it can only flourish under certain forms of social and political life, i.e., those forms of life in which spontaneity can come to recognize that seemingly external laws are actually the result of self-legislation. Reason, Kant further explains, is the “faculty of principles”4 : it is that ability of human beings to infer a unity, a principle, which grounds the rules of the understanding. The problem of human reason is that it seeks ultimate grounds—such as God, immortality, and freedom of the will—without recognizing its own limitations. Pre-Critical metaphysics results from a lack of self-consciousness about the limits of human reason. The Critique of Pure Reason is Kant’s attempt to turn the faculty of reason upon itself in order to discover those limits and thus to infer those principles which necessarily ground the human quest for those ultimate grounds. It is not by accident that I use the adjective “human” in this discussion, for Kant repeatedly states that reason is a human faculty. Indeed, he speaks of human reason as being “impelled by an inward need (durch eigenes Bedürfniß getrieben)” that leads us “irresistably” to ask metaphysical questions.5 The crucial question that Kant asks in the introduction to the Critique is “how is metaphysics, as natural disposition possible? That is, how from the nature of universal human reason do those questions arise which pure reason propounds to itself and which it is impelled by its own need to answer as best it can?”6 In the Critique, Kant leaves this issue undeveloped in order...