Debajyoti Mondal
“Always quantify writing.”
– Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
This essay is a mad enterprise in dismantling Kant’s philosophy, particularly his project of ‘transcendental critique’, developed as the trial of reason’s own capacity to enquire after its limits and expected to lay the ground for philosophical cognition itself, along and around the idea that there was a more originary drive in the said ground-laying that estimated an augmentative rather than limitative outcome. The fancy goes that this will amount to an awakening or reawakening of Kant, this time not from the dogmatic slumber but an all-too-skeptical reality, which means this would be a reawakening to the dream, or softly, to some dream. In travestying the Cartesian shudder, the effort will be made to look into what is still living and adventurous in Kantian philosophy.
We may begin by asking a rather vague question: What does a literature-lover have to learn from Kant? The figures of the beautiful and the sublime are what immediately comes to one’s mind. People are indeed, to some extent, interested in the Third Critique. But what about the critical project as such? What about the First Critique? Should one not try to understand, while reading about aesthetic judgment, how it is related to the project of an immanent critique of reason? Literature departments would not encourage such questions and will in all probability relegate the task to the discipline of philosophy. What’s more, they will find Kant himself standing on their side, endorsing the avoidance. He would like to keep philosophy innocent of the murky business called “writing”.
Such a divisive denomination is no doubt intended and instituted by the critique. Kant steadfastly guards against what he terms “subreption”, by which we are to understand any confusion of the transcendental with the empirical. Such confusions, as evidenced in the Critique of Pure Reason, results, moreover, from the rhetorical situation of speech. Subreption, in Kant’s own words, is a sophisma figurae dictionis. However, Kant cannot simply correlate this form of sophism (a transcendental condition) with the bad intent of the sophist (empirical), because that would be reinstating the subreption itself, the algorithm whereof is inherent to discourse. Philosophy, if it must avert this danger, has to withdraw from the figurative resource of language and thus observe to its “discipline”, i.e. fashion for its use a model of scrupulously literal presentation.
The self-disciplining of philosophy apparently rules out any possible correspondence with literature and its stylized diction. It will have certain consequences for the critical project itself. This time we will have to frame the questions from an obverse orientation: Why did Kant have to humble the project after beginning with a superlative ambition? Why did he arrive at the point of noumenal inaccessibility? Would we still have to see the declaration (of non-access) as absolutely necessary? If so, then, indeed, what efficacy is left to the critique, which was conceived with the aim of augmenting knowledge and was justified, originally, by this claim?
Perhaps, in order to save the critique, one will have to read it a little lightly? Let’s say, a little figuratively? Or one may take what it says with grave seriousness, maybe only to discover, who knows, that at the end the critique reveals itself to have all along been literary. Which one is the case for what follows is left to the readers’ discretion.
I. The Surreptitious Supplement
There is an unbending tendency in the Critical project, arising from its dream of legislation, that can be correlated with a thoroughgoing distrust of the oblique. Much of the validity of the cognitive processes, and of the critique consequently, depends on their straightness, understood in both the senses of rectitude and literality. Kant’s temperament is such that only the upright and literal is taken for the lawful: whatever moves straight follows the path of truth, everything else is just metaphor, false ascription, unfortunate suggestio falsi. To falsities of such type he gives the name of “subreption”, as we know well by now. One might verily wonder, although, if that naming is not sullied with a metaphorical residue. Subreption (Subreption), compounded with quite the suggestive qualifier “surreptitious” (Erschleicht) [1], points to the movements of creeping and crawling, maybe in direct contrast to the stride of homo erectus. The question has been appropriately raised by Paul de Man: cannot the arbiter who judges on and prohibits subreption be found himself guilty of first having committed it?[2] One need not even rely on a rhetorical device to corroborate the point; the weakness is betrayed in what constitutes the veritative strength of the critique: the transcendental.
It is the transcendental which desists the pure concepts of understanding from falling victim to incautious use. Standing at the divide between “canon” and “organon”, the transcendental is the self-reflexive awareness of limit on part of a-priori forms in general and of the faculty of logical explication in particular. Of course, the word “transcendental” was not new to philosophy. What Kant did was turn it into the differentiator between the empirical and the pure reflexive (alias conceptual) elements of knowledge. In short, it was cleverly devised in order to guard against the various internal errors of reason that issued from the confusion of the conceptual with the empirical. As Malabou recapitulates in her book on Kant, the transcendental has since been handed down to the philosophical posterity as an indispensable critical advance. However (and this she also points out), one must have to be able to see that the methodological nuance added by the transcendental thrives on the a-priori separation of the logical from the empirical, of pure thought from experience, to question which would be the condition enough to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the transcendental. What happens if we come to see that there is no such systematic separation between thought and experience? Wouldn’t it expose the transcendental itself as the site of a prior subreption?
If a false ascription can results from the error of discounting (the transcendental), it might be born of overcounting as well (in which case it is the transcendental, again, that carries the burden of the overcount) – and this, moreover, is where philosophy’s strained partnership with mathematics begs prompt elucidation.
The assertion has been made in one of the introductions, but the “Doctrine of Method” puts it in unwavering terms: “Philosophical cognition is rational cognition from concepts, mathematical cognition is that from the construction of concepts.” (CPR, A713/B741) Such is the difference between philosophy and mathematics.
At first it appears, from the language of the presentation, that philosophical cognition is somewhat direct or immediate, whereas the mathematical cognition needs to go through a mediatory act, since the concepts it provides are subject to construction. In a closer scrutiny only the contrary is revealed. For both the fields, the concepts have no use other than application to intuition. This intuition has to be non-empirical for the cognition to be rational, i.e. independent of experience. Mathematics can provide such pure, non-empirical or a-priori intuition upon which to reflect the concept, but philosophy, in Kant’s view, cannot. Rather the philosophical cognition needs a mediatory structure in order to yield rational knowledge, which it could produce only in the “pure synthesis of the manifold of experience”. The gap is clear – philosophy cannot intuitively abstract the manifold, for this lies within the power of mathematics alone.
What is typical here is that this conception of mathematics is in the most part influenced and informed by the practice of the geometer. The concrete examples Kant has in stock rely more on diagram than discourse (note that latter is a verbal and/or logical enterprise in the Critical ordinance). Take the concept of the triangle – the pure sensible intuition which it imparts is either purely imaginative (the pure schema) or imagination qua adumbration, “constructed” in pen and paper. Construction is almost like a scenographical instruction: intuit and operate.
The immediately intuited mathematical concept, as we come to know, is at once universal and individual. An intuition of the triangle envelops all possible representation of similar intuitions and brings them necessarily to the tally of the concept. Thus the isosceles triangle and the right angle triangle, though potentially different, participate in the basic intuition of the triangle at a simpler level. The purported difference between the philosophical and the mathematical already seems convincing with such concrete demonstrations, but Kant would hardly stop till it is not recaptured in the most distilled manner:
Philosophical cognition thus considers the particular only in the universal, but mathematical cognition considers the universal in the particular, indeed even the individual, yet nonetheless a-priori and by means of reason, so that just as this individual is determined under certain general conditions of construction, the object of the concept, to which this individual corresponds only as its schema, must likewise be thought as universally determined. (CPR, A714/B742)
We will come to the encoded core of this passage in a while, but before that, if it means anything regarding the structuration of the Critique of Pure Reason, this would be the following: the “Transcendental Aesthetics”, with which the main text begins, does not offer us any concrete determination but the pretext thereof, as it serves only to having an idea of time and space as physical determinants. The properly philosophical movement of philosophy, which is pure thought itself, therefore does not take off from the plane of intuition but one of generalities. This explains why philosophical reasoning takes on the grammatical form of “judgments”, comprising in the simplest case a subject, a copula and a predicate. What is at stake here is language, or rather, the difference between the two languages that characterize philosophical discourse and mathematical demonstration.
We can mention in the passing, now again reverting to the “Doctrine of Method”, that the philosophical judgment in its canonical form is called dogmata, or better still, theorem, which Kant defines in direct contrast to the structure of mathematical reasoning, known as mathemata (likewise, matheme?). Philosophy would do good to not confuse the theorem with the matheme, but even then, it tries in vain to achieve a degree of precision characteristic of the matheme. Hence the fear of sophism, and the limits posed to discourse.
The transcendental appears in the motion of thought inasmuch as the theorems could be demonstrated as either veridical or limitative knowledge but never augmentative. The notion of an absolute discursive limit is what the transcendental uniquely invents and applies to logic as it sets out to establish the table of judgments. From thereon, and depending on this invention, logic (which is the “canon” or the rulebook for composing propositionally valid judgments) will be permanently split into the dual aspects – general and transcendental.
One may try to resuscitate the difference between these two types of logic, and thus the function of the transcendental deduction, with a thought-experiment. Suppose there is a faculty of the mind that deals only with linguistic expression, and yet the task has befallen it of having to separate expressions of reality from purely nominal ones. Could it, while remaining entirely within the purview of discourse, accomplish such a task? Transcendental logic apparently seems to share the same impossibility. Kant, of course, tries to find out a way. While general logic – which is the immanent system of judgments in the sense that it presides over the internal consistency of the judgments – is unable to answer for verity (according to Kant), the transcendental fills the gap by resorting to an apprehension of quantity attached obscurely to the terms of the judgment.
However, the complaint has repeatedly been made that never once in the CPR had Kant tried to demonstrate how or by what power the transcendental deduction is able to gain such awareness of reality, or, from another perspective, how it may actually come to distinguish the pure concepts of thought from mingled, hybrid, empirical concepts. It thus remains equally open to doubt if the separation is not “surreptitiously” created by the transcendental itself. One might even go so far as to accuse the transcendental of arising from and nurturing as its proper ground the moment that Kant so warily calls dialexis (namely, circular reasoning). Kant himself notes that in the quadruple chart of judgments every tertiary term from each column comes up as the dialectical synthesis of the preceding two. The curious point is that these tertiary frames are created, at the same time, by the transcendental check alone. Given this, doesn’t it seem quite plausible that the transcendental first stipulates numerous and multifarious differences into sharp dialectical opposition and then emerges with the pretense of offering the cure?
Now, there is some genuine insight in the idea that the material side of formal intuitions like space and time is to be encountered in the determination of quantity. On this crucial foundation Kant would be able to conceive of a mediatory track between the pure concepts of thought and the empirical manifold of experience, namely, in the operation of “transcendental schematism”. Problem occurs, however, with the unguarded claim that the apprehension of quantity is the privilege alone of the transcendental lookout, for one can see easily that what the transcendental at best gets to offer are not quite a vast range of quantities themselves but a handful of their concepts like allness (or totality), unity, infinity etc. Since these entities themselves are pure concepts rather than pure intuitive determinations, it remains unclear how they – and the transcendental with them – are better suited to get hold of the empirical without confusing the latter with the general or the purely logical.
This acute problem, which amounts to a deadlock, interests us not because it shows philosophy’s ever hesitant relationship with mathematics but the undecidable within philosophy itself, in the face of which we must decide. Here we will put forward two critical notes in undermining the transcendental, but also to suggest a way beyond the deadlock.
- The transcendental fails to gauge the supplementary insistence of the subreption. In “confusion” there operates the prodigious force of fusion (or the same thing, generalization), which proves that its ramifications are not always negative. Indeed, confusion can be sometimes an aide-in-disguise for thought. This does not mean that thought will rather allow every confusion liberally but that it cannot avert the latter by simply adopting a defensive (as in “limitative”) attitude.
- The medial structure that the transcendental thus opens up loses tout court on the prospect of pure intuition, a loss that runs through the heart of critical synthesis and even undercuts the labor of schematism.
To reprise, the program of schematism is founded on the cue that the immediate and a-priori aspect of intuition resides in the apprehension of quantity (quanta). However, and this Kant himself ascertains, quantity can fledge out in two different directions – one is of quanta itself [quantorum] and the other quantitas [genitive: quantitatis] (CPR, A142/B182). While quantitas stands in direct opposition to the word qualitas and could indicate quantity, it is sometimes also used as a synonym to magnitudo, meaning greatness or extent. What is suggested by these Latinic declensions (quanta – neuter plural; quantitas – singular, with the suffix “–itas” signposting the formation of abstract noun) is that the pure schema of quantity (quanta) is basic to both an actual multiplicity and a unitary representation of the multiple. To act on actual multiplicity is to operate on quantity qua quantity – it is quantification. To develop a unitary representation of the multiple is to carve quality (the paradigmatic example is “shape”) out of quantity. The work of the schematism in the threefold syntheses of sense, imagination and apperception finally avoids the trail of matter as it leads to what we might call successive qualitization. Which his why Kant’s table of pure ancestral concepts – categories – have such fewer members and which seem, moreover, to be abruptly, randomly handpicked.
This monocular vision that puts its premium on quality alone is reinstated in the “Doctrine of Method”, where philosophy is defined as a qualitative science and mathematics a quantitative one. (CPR, A724/B752) Let us now get back to the message stalled above: philosophical cognition considers the particular in the universal whereas mathematical cognition considers the universal in the particular. What does it mean to consider the particular in the universal and the opposite? It means many a thing, to be precise; but most apparently the expression captures two different ways of conjugating the universal with the particular. First is where the particular is both an instance and a part of the universal. In the second case it is the particular that envelops an entire possibility. The particular (suppose a predicate) does not completely fall under the concept-extension of the universal object (the subject of judgment), with the added complexity that the other (possible) components of the concept-universal do not completely coincide with each other’s domain either. To cognize the particular in the universal is to cognize the species in relation to the genus; to consider the universal in the particular is to anticipate the singular-universal.
It would be massively important to note that what we call by the name of “the particular” is nothing else but a material entity – an empirical manifold. The concern of the singular-universal therefore implies an ontological synthesis, which should be understood as the immediate synthesis of matter, and without which the formal syntheses of reason are simply beside the point. Time and again we will have to see the diverse contexts in which Kant uses the term “synthesis”, but for now kindly allow us to be content with just one, and this is exhibitio, which suggests “putting together in concrete demonstration”. We will conclude this sub-section with the argument that Philosophy’s alleged inability to perform such feat is rooted in Kant’s approach of thinking quality and quantity as diametrically opposed terms. Yet, was it not a formidable vision that both quantification and qualitization were grounded on the pursuit of count? Two ineluctable deliberations follow:
- Qualitization and quantification happens together, simultaneously.
- Even then, quantity enjoys a certain priority over quality, as new qualities emerge out of relentless quantification.
Count is the fundamental proclivity of matter. Indeed, from this former comes the basic notions of proliferation, generation, change and even, of transcendence.
II. The Figure(s) of the “Elsewhere”
It is the transcendental, we maintain, that stands in the way of the critique’s augmentative program and transforms it, furtively, into a delimitative one. Thought’s metaphysical labor was already accomplished with the resource of logic. As we are inclined to reenvisage the matter, the transcendental came along as the self-reflexivity of logic, which is to say, as both a floodgate and a lookout. It bore the logic of being a mark or a remarque on the body of the logical. Scraping the transcendental would then empower logic again, but here we must be cautious: to what end?
The question discerns a split between the actual discourse and the projected aim of the “Analytic of Concepts”. From demonstration of what Kant calls the “general logic”, it does not appear that the operation so termed is totally divorced from the sensible. Yet, the declared program of the Analytic is to strip the process of all intuitive back-formation on the presumed ground that its concerns are merely propositional. As we suggested earlier, a separation is forced here between the sensual-real and the denotative-nominal. Yet even this characterization is not strictly prohibitive until the transcendental is brought into the scene to form the “table of judgments” (and later, categories). Kant reminds us that logic is the art of forming concepts by the facility of judging – the problem of nominality surges up there, but what makes up for it is an already visible capacity to combine, the combinatorics of concepts through possible judgments, an ars combinatoria.
Thinking is cognition through concepts. Concepts, however, as predicates of possible judgments, are related to some representations of a still undetermined object. The concept of body thus signifies something, e.g., metal, which can be cognized through the concept. It is therefore only a concept because other representations are contained in it by means of which it can be related to objects. It is therefore the predicate for a possible judgment, e.g. “Every metal is a body.” (CPR, A69/B94)
In the gap between the two objects that he fondly plays with (one clearly named here, the other unnamed but alluded to by “cognition”), i.e. the undetermined object of sensibility and its complementary, the object to be determined in thought – between theGegenstand and the Objecte – there spring up a thousand hydra-heads of attribution. Every concept, itself a representation, is related to myriad other representations. If concepts are so loose and superfluous that is because, Kant holds on to the right perspective, there is a blockade which the concept cannot overcome to directly approach its object. As a result they reach out for other representations – whether attributions qua properties or themselves concepts. Yet this is also a limited perspective so long as it incites the feeling that the concepts for this reason are devoid of sense.
The combinatorial prospect flows into the way Kant moved the term “body” in a previous instance: from “all bodies are divisible” to “every metal is a body”. This relocation is plain enough to argue for the case that what is a predicate in one judgment can become subject in another. Ad eundem, every attribute amounts to a concept, which means on the one hand that every concept is accompanied by a cluster of sense, and on the other, attribution is basically denotation. One might even want to say with Wilfried Sellars that concepts are basically words.
But are there not concepts of a most general type or, indeed, as Kant puts it, of an “ancestral” registry? In other words, from the statement that every attribution is a concept, does the opposite quite follow? Are there in logic no such things called “the categories”? At this opportune moment we would like to point out that even categories or ancestral concepts differ, from instant to instant, in respect to the quanta of sense available to them, this being the guiding sermon of the transcendental. (CPR, A71-72/B96-97)
That a concept carries a cluster of sense or is first a particular does not impede it from having a universal purchase. As Kant himself admits in referring to previous logicians, logic has its way of tying together the universal with the singular, which is barred only with the advent of the transcendental. Indeed, if there is one single fact about the transcendental that we are diligently trying to show then it is that the transcendental is congenital to the image of the “logical universal” (more of a homological universal, since there does not operate in logic a single and all-pervasive rule of equivalence), which it poses so vehemently to ward against.
As suggested, the point is not so much to deride the transcendental but to see it as already belonging to (general) logic, for the latter is much aware that every concept attains to a varying degree of sensibility and generality. Thus, in (the so called general) logic, a unit can become an infinity and infinity itself can be subject to affirmation, and so is because the language of logic is a language first, even if highly ordered. This needs to repeat the statement that the concepts of philosophy are denotations and nothing other than denotations at a basic functional level.
However, one must return to the question of determinate cognition, if only to seize the moment to show that the gap between Gegenstand and Objecte is neither met nor mitigated by the vision of a language that exists forever in a fully developed state. There are new emergencies at the level of sense-experience to which existing concepts could be found unsuited. These are occasions where new concepts or denotations form, either by cleaving through the already existing or totally anew, but nevertheless, augmenting the combinatorial radii. Such a denotative and operative profile of logic can be made sense of as both a force of poetization and a catalog of quantification. What gets going in both cases is also fundamentally linguistic: a living and evolving language creates new lexical terms along with new rules and relations. Isn’t this the self-picture embraced by the experimental sciences as well? As for Kant himself and the Critique, what else could be more appropriate to the founding notion of the “synthetic a-priori”, than this creative auto-flexion?
The word has no decisive conceptual history whatever and could be ignored as something clearly peripheral had it not made its reappearance, again, in the beginning (the second introduction, to be precise) of the Third Critique. This time the term is directly linked to the faculty of understanding: the concepts of understanding are the “concepts given from elsewhere” (CJ, 20:202). How does an insignificant and unexplained term endure in such obstinate a manner? Is there really no element in the text that might sit well with this obstinacy? It seems that there is, and what a way of being there, it seems to have been trampled under the famous edict of the Copernican revolution. After fruitless efforts in trying to follow and explain celestial motion down the conventional path, “the first thoughts” that might have occurred to the astronomer, Kant reminds himself, was of reversing the perspective. Now, this allusion to the shift from geocentric to heliocentric model also comes with a specific (and quite problematic) thesis on the relation between thought and nature, but this specificity must be ignored, to be sure, so as to uncover the brilliance of the underlying precept: that sometimes thought could advance only by dodging a dead end. Thinking is often all about imagining, changing the given perspective, giving more freedom to creative intuition, thinking “otherwise”. This is the precept of “the elsewhere”. Der anderweit is the space from where such creative otherness comes.
One might object, and rightfully so, that Kant is not concerned with the “elsewhere” of imagination. Rather, he relates it emphatically, in both the Critical volumes, to the faculty of reasoning – to understanding. That his “elsewhere”, unlike the one we are secretly poaching into it, is the providence for determinate knowledge. While not dismissing the objection, let us, however, stall it for the moment and probe a little further, as there is more to be revealed about Kant’s use of the word. For all its elliptical presence, the “else” of the elsewhere appears to weave a thread of several beginnings. Thus in the opening passage of the first “Introduction” to CPR we find this statement about the limitation of empirical knowledge: “It tells us, to be sure, what is, but never that it must necessarily be thus and not otherwise [Sie sagt uns zwar, was da sei, aber nicht, daß es notwendiger Weise, so und nicht anders, sein müsse].” (CPR/KrV, A1) What he means by this is that empirical knowledge tells us only of what exists as quid facti and not as quid juris, but let us also follow his exact wordings. Here the vector of alterity (anders) is contraposed to those of necessity (notwendiger) and universality (Allgemeinheit). Determinate cognition must get rid of the contingent aspects of the knowable; it must be able to antedate the structural stability of things, or see what is persistently there. To determine is to be able to tell what cannot be otherwise. What cannot be otherwise, what is the most certain. And yet, would there at all be the need of a rational enquiry if this “the most certain” were not quite uncertain by the order of the day? The illustrious rank of savants who seem to have lent to the critique its spirit – Copernicus, Torricelli, Galileo – are they not truthtellers also in the prophetic sense of the term, that is, discoverers, wanderers, messengers of the future? One must not take this argument as simply historical. To cognize determinately is partly to determine the future configurations, the novelties and quirks of the structure itself, it is to discover the point up unto which the essence can allow or suffer the accidents. Cognition a-priori is what we are very much tempted to call prolepsis or anticipative determination.
The possibility of “not being otherwise” therefore must encounter and traverse the “otherwise”. The essential, to be essential, must keep intimate knowledge of the utterly improbable. Here we might be stretching Kant a little too far, but on its own the argument already means that even chance can be determined within a given horizon of stability. Or it might mean a qualitatively different thing: that the unchanging can likewise be recast onto the balance sheet of chance. Both the possibilities are thinkable in Kant, not just in relation to the aesthetic judgment but also as they are brought to bear on a certain logic of literature.
The logical necessity that the “elsewhere” not be thought solely with reference to the faculty of understanding, that the uncertainty which plays out in this figure and marks its very nomenclature is the uncertainty of a “this here”, of this impure, unsure, sensible world, is already betrayed in at least one place of the First Critique. Thus Kant, in the ending of the introduction to CPR: “there are two stems of human cognition, which may perhaps arise from a common but to us unknown root, namely sensibility and understanding, through the first of which objects are given to us, but through the second of which they are thought.” (Emphasis added; CPR, A15/B29). If we, on the face of this careful observation, still maintain a strong barrier between the world of sensibility and that of understanding, we see that the common source is also a divided source, that the Ursprung of determinate cognition immediately turns into a shadow, a Vorsprung, and that, as a result, the “elsewhere” of understanding has disclosed itself as a dreamwork, as pure simulacra.
Now this explanation which is but a manner of writing, itself conditioned by the rules of language, what does it tell us about writing, about language, and about the thought housed in language? What does it tell us… let’s say… about literature? Several things, we suppose. First, that literature may generate knowledge and take part in the production of determinate knowledge (though not in the sense of the sciences). The figure of the “elsewhere”, which is also a figure of subreption, of transcendental courage, makes us see that logic is literary and that literature could be as much an exercise in logic. Also, it betrays a strange affinity between the literary and the empirical, which is no less because logic is always already immanent to the empirical.
[1] Immanuel Kant, CPR/KRV, B10
[2] Paul de Man, The Aesthetic Ideology, p. 76
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Debajyoti Mondal has published two collections of poems. He likes to read philosophy and modernist literature. He has also taught briefly at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi.
