The Necessity and Limits of Kant’s Transcendental Logic, with Reference to Nietzsche and Hegel

TLDR: In this article, a systematic account of the problem Unger highlights by demonstrating the necessity of Kant's transcendental logic is given, and the discussion to which his book has given rise demonstrates that Unger's account provides an important impulse to question some hitherto unexamined basic premises regarding the interrelation of logical form and actuality.

Abstract: A RECENT CRITIQUE of analytic philosophy undertaken by one of its leading representatives, Peter Unger, (1) highlights the problem of whether or not the most common approaches in analytic philosophy--in ontology, epistemology, and ethics--are merely mental exercises that cannot truly claim objective validity. The discussion to which his book has given rise demonstrates that Unger's account provides an important impulse to question some hitherto unexamined basic premises regarding the interrelation of logical form and actuality. In this essay I seek to contribute to this discussion by taking it up at the point at which Unger eventually left it, and by proceeding two steps further. The first step is to give a systematic account of the problem Unger highlights by demonstrating the necessity of Kant's transcendental logic. Kant was in fact the first to show that any ontology that endeavors to undertake an immediate translation of formal logic into a doctrine of being exercises--in Kant's terms--the determining power of judgment, but without restricting its use to the spatiotemporal manifold provided by intuition, which produces nothing but empty thoughts. My second step will be to open up a perspective that lies beyond Kant's standpoint with reference to Nietzsche and eventually to Hegel. This may provide an idea of the limits of transcendental logic and of the objectivity justified by it. I Kant's status as a seminal philosopher is commonly regarded as rooted in the Copernican turn. But it is scarcely understood that the very center of this turn itself is a revolution within logic. We know that Kant no longer undertakes the inquiry into being and its determinations, but more fundamentally asks about the conditions of the possibility of knowledge of objects in general. Instead of immediately seeking knowledge of objects, we seek to comprehend knowledge itself. In a popularized maimer this is often described as follows. In Kant, we turn from the inquiry into the nature of true being ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), substance, to inquire instead about the "subject." Now, the latter would be misunderstood if we were to interpret this as if Kant had undertaken a descriptive inquiry into the given constitution of the human capacity for cognition, which would not be revolutionary, for we find such reflections in Descartes, Locke, Hume, and of course in later epistemologies. If Kant would have thought in such a naive way that we have to figure out the given constitution of the human faculty of knowledge in order to grasp what we can know and cannot know, the whole Critique of Pure Reason would instantly succumb to skepticism, the very skepticism which Kant wants to overcome. As is well known, Kant did encounter misinterpretations like this, which led him to emphasize the difference between mere subjective idealism and transcendental philosophy in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. (2) It would indeed be an underestimation of the significance of the Critique of Pure Reason to regard it as mere epistemological reflection. Why? The answer is that Kant's fundamental question is, at its core, at the same time logical and epistemological. This is nothing less than a revolutionary new account of logical form which can be, in the context of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, described as a shift from the consciousness of the logical form in its first immediacy (formal logic) to immediate self-consciousness of the logical form (transcendental logic). (3) I shall now explain the necessity of the emergence of Kant's transcendental logic and its revolutionary basic question. (1) If we dare to take a complete overview of the history of Western philosophy from Parmenides up to the critical Kant, the question arises: what has been its most fundamental presupposition (with the exception of Heraclitus and the later Plato)? This presupposition consists in a specific conception of the identity of thinking and being--namely, a naive confidence in the ontological relevance of formal logic. …