The Thought of John Sallis: Phenomenology, Plato, Imagination

9. The Gathering of Reason

229 9 The Gathering of Reason Introduction In one sense, The Gathering of Reason1 primarily concerns itself with the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.2 Readers seeking a guide through that long and most challenging section could scarcely do better than employ what Sallis calls his “duplex interpretations ” of its various sections. In still another sense,The Gathering of Reason reinterprets Kant by his “projective interpretations,”3 in which Kantian “reason” is projected back onto its Greek origin as logos, which for Sallis has its primary sense as gathering, a sense it must have before it can acquire linguistic significance. The chapters unfold first by providing the duplex interpretation, then by providing the projective interpretation. However, in another sense, the interpretations of Kant are subordinated to another more radical task. We are faced with the occlusion of the distinction between sensible and intelligible, upon which metaphysics rests. The task—for Sallis and for us—is to think through our own crisis of reason, in which reason itself has been deformed, and in which metaphysics , the science of being through reason, has grown most questionable . This crisis opens up the possibility of nihilism, a word and a view which, Sallis notes, is most complex and varied. Perhaps the best philosophical characterization is Nietzsche’s, according to which humanity and the world are divested of meaning and purpose. (Nietzsche himself was no nihilist, and ascribed nihilism to all extra-worldly beliefs and systems.) In distinction to any and all forms of nihilism to Nietzsche’s own, Sallis initiates a way of his own: Nevertheless, the leap beyond the tradition, from man to overman, even if an alternative, is not the only one. There is another way—a way which turns back into the tradition, without, however, becoming either a mere resumption of that tradition or, at the other extreme, a deferent turning of the tradition against itself. To adumbrate this other way let me use the title archaic reflection. (6) Thus, the interpretations are, at the very least, subordinated to a reflection directed toward the archē of the Kantian problematic as such. This reflection occurs almost immediately. 230 S A L L I S A N D O T H E R T H I N K E R S On one hand, Kant seeks what Sallis calls “metaphysical security,” the securing of reason from anything that might endanger its unity, its transparency, and its right. He insists upon these requirements and expressly claims success in accomplishing these goals in his preface and introductions. Sallis writes: In this connection one can only be astounded at how consistently Kant’s texts invoke, defend, and circumscribe such self-concealment: most notably in the theories of inner sense and of freedom. The discontinuity is obtrusive . . . the very condition of critique is withdrawn by critique. (9) Far from being a flaw, Sallis calls the issue of self-presence “the hinge connecting two conflicting strata of Kant’s discourse. . . . There is a turning on this hinge: a turning back into crisis” (9). As he does in all of his works involving our tradition, Sallis draws us back into it in such a way that it releases those hidden resources that are needed to nurture our thought today. Kant’s crisis of reason, in Sallis’s thought, offers itself to our own. Chapter 1, “Interpretive Horizons” As presented in the chronologically later Delimitations (1986), “horizon” hearkens back to the Greek horismos, meaning “limit.” In that context, it also suggested the darkness that is not followed by a dawn, a region within which Sallis’s thought always playfully dwells. Here, the horizons, at least at first, are drawn up in relation to the aforementioned requirement of full self-presence. One and all, these horizons are enactments within the Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic of gathering. These enactments occur against what I’ll call a ruling image in which no gathering is needed, the image of divine knowing: In divine knowing—whether regarded as original intuition or as intuitive understanding—intuition and thought are not merely correlative, not merely two “stems,” but rather are fused into an essential unity. Divine knowing is anterior to the point at which the common root divides . (25) The “common root” in Kant refers to the “unknown” root from which the two stems of knowledge, understanding and sensibility, emerge and divide. 231 T H E G A T H E...