Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Note on the Text and Acknowledgements
- Note on Sources and Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Problem of Immanence – Kant, Hegel and Spinozism
- Chapter One Critique and the Ends of Reason
- Chapter Two The Metaphysical Origins of Kantianism
- Chapter Three Kant and the Structure of Cognition
- Chapter Four Deleuze and the Vertigo of Immanence
- Appendix: Francis Warrain's Diagram of Wronski's Law of Creation
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Three - Kant and the Structure of Cognition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Note on the Text and Acknowledgements
- Note on Sources and Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Problem of Immanence – Kant, Hegel and Spinozism
- Chapter One Critique and the Ends of Reason
- Chapter Two The Metaphysical Origins of Kantianism
- Chapter Three Kant and the Structure of Cognition
- Chapter Four Deleuze and the Vertigo of Immanence
- Appendix: Francis Warrain's Diagram of Wronski's Law of Creation
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Discovery of the Object = x
The breakthrough in the critical project is usually taken to be outlined in Kant's letter of 21 February 1772 to Marcus Herz, where Kant realises that he has no justification for assuming that the pure concepts of the understanding used by the intellect have any relation at all to the given in sensibility.
‘Our understanding, through its representations, is neither the cause of the object (save in the case of moral ends), nor is the object the cause of our intellectual representations in the real sense (in sensu reali) … [But] if such intellectual representations depend on our inner activity, whence comes the agreement that they are supposed to have with objects?
(C 133, Ak. 10:130)He concludes that ‘the key to the whole secret of hitherto still obscure metaphysics’ is the answer to the question ‘what is the ground of the relation of that in us which we call “representation” to the object [Gegenstand]?’ (ibid.). The purely passive reception of appearances does not account for the a priori intellectual elements of knowledge, nor can the intellect delve behind the sensible curtain of the object in an act of intellectual intuition, and identify the thought of noumenal substance with its appearance. Hence the pure understanding and the object cannot be causally related to each other, or more simply, cannot affect each other. Here the stage for the transcendental deduction is clearly being set.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Immanence and the Vertigo of PhilosophyFrom Kant to Deleuze, pp. 167 - 209Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009