KANT’S “TRANSCENDENTAL ANALYTIC” (CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON)—A POLITICAL INTERPRETATION
In commenting on Kant’s “Transcendental Analytic,” I will limit myself to a few crucial passages that give the flavor of its political subtext. By “flavor” I mean, on the one hand, the language of sovereignty, authority, crowd control, but also of difference and pluralism, used to talk about the categories and cognition as a whole, and, on the other, the ideas, whether loosely conservative or progressive, sustaining the a priori character of mental faculties. If I choose to focus on a relatively small selection from the first Critique in these concluding pages, it is because I have already sketched in outline the work’s political presuppositions in my discussion of the transtranscendental a priori. All that remains now is to put some finishing touches on the not-so-idealist constitution of the categories.
Underneath the a priori synthesis of understanding, Kant detects nothing short of anarchy. Here, experience is simply impossible: “if representations reproduced one another without distinction, just as they fell together, there would in turn be no determinate connection [kein bestimmter Zusammenhang] but mere unruly hordes [bloß regelose Haufen] of them and no cognition would arise at all” (CPR A121). Haufen are the masses, the hoards that are intuitions not yet gathered in aesthetic and categorial forms. Considered in light of numeric categories, they are a plurality that has failed to appear under the aspect of unity in a totality. Qualitatively, they stand for a reality not negated into a limit and, through the negation, rendered determinate. The category of relationality is inapplicable to a haphazard heap of elements neither subordinate to nor interordinated (reciprocally communal) with one another. Falling together as though in an undifferentiated pile is not the same thing as joining one another via “determinate connections.” Modality is restricted to a pure possibility of synthesis lacking necessity and actuality. Needless to say, these four categorial depictions coincide with the demonization of anarchy along the history of political thought.
Not only does experience break down when confronted with “mere unruly hordes” but the table of categories shatters into a series of disjointed moments shorn of a necessary inner unity within each of the four groups. If the categories are arranged in clusters and if they converge as the transcendental forms of pure understanding through which any single object is intelligible, it is because they are inherently social, sociable, communal, prone to being together: “The category … already presupposes combination [Die Kategorie setzt … schon Verbindung voraus]” (CPR B132). Conversely, like matter dissociated from form, the masses (of stimuli or of people) are the nonprinciple of infinite division. The nonsynthetic accrual of its after-effects results in a disorderly piling up of multiplicities, a category extracted from its combinatory background, and so nullified, decategorized.
The way Kant contends with the mereness of the unruly hordes is in keeping with the philosophical tradition that, extending back to Plato, seeks analogies between the proper governance of the mind and political authority or that, in its modern versions, overlays the mind-body split with the gap between the rulers and the ruled. When the ruled acknowledge this gap as (1) inevitable and (2) external to themselves, they legitimize the arbitrary power the rulers wield over them. In the present study, we’ve come across the idea Erasmus expresses in Institutio that “the prince’s imperium over the populus is none other than that of the mind over the body.” To a significant extent, Kant subscribes to Erasmus’s insight when he insists on the sovereignty of understanding, distilled to “the faculty of rules,” das Vermögen der Regeln, “the highest [höherer] of which come from the understanding itself apriori” (CPR A126). On this vertical axis of understanding, the lowest point would be haphazardly heaped multiplicities. He goes still further in characterizing the unity of apperception in terms of “the supreme principle [das oberste Prinzip] of all the use of understanding” (CPR B136). The a priori laws of understanding supply the unruly hordes with what the hordes lack (the unity of a rule) and do so in a sovereign manner befitting a prince/principle. They defy all “mereness.” Nature itself, Kant intimates, obeys the supreme authority of transcendental cognitive legislation, in the absence of which it does not exist (CPR A126).
What are the hallmarks of the sovereignty of understanding as Kant conceives of it? In contrast to the premodern parallelisms between the personal, essentially regal clout of the mind over the body and the prince over the masses, in the first Critique sovereignty lies with the law, rather than persons: the a priori unity of apperception is the rule of law active in the cognitive arena. Another stark difference between Kant’s transcendental sovereignty and the imperium of the mind we find in the writings of his predecessors is the structure of self-rule germinating in the relation between I think and I intuit. (More on this shortly.) So, while Kant adheres to the metaphysical form of dealing with the multitudes, he fine-tunes it enough to modernize it and make it consistent with the Enlightenment values he champions.
Despite the ostensibly impersonal nature of cognitive authority Kant upholds in his work, the combination (conjunctio, Verbindung) of the manifold, the bridling of the anarchic hordes, happens by virtue of “an act of the spontaneity of the power of representation [ein Actus der Spontaneität der Vorstellungskraft]” (CPR B130). In the act’s spontaneity, which—as a locus of imagination and freedom—is beyond the opposition between lawful and unlawful behaviors, the capricious, personalist, transcendentally unjustifiable version of sovereignty survives. The bitter criticism we have already seen Schmitt launch against the rule of law and its ideology is to the point: whenever one asserts that the laws rule, rather than people, the assertion provides an ideological cover for the uninterrupted reliance on personal authority in all matters political.
In Kant’s defense, we might say that the spontaneity of representation ordering the chaotic manifold of intuitions is a power (Kraft), an act at the threshold of the transcendental domain. By the time the unity of apperception is crowned a “supreme principle,” however, it is no longer a seat of power but of sovereignty! In a roundabout way, Kant avows this development in the modal differentiation between rules and laws, the former naming what “can be posited [gesetzt werden kann],” the latter “what must be so posited [gesetzt werden muß]” (CPR A113). When something can occur, it veers on the side of possibility and, therefore, of potentiality, potency, and power, with force and arbitrariness following suit. But when something must take place as dictated by necessity, the supremacy of the principle it expresses is beyond power and powerlessness, Aristotle’s dunamis and adunamia; this principle is sovereign. (Hence, also, the semantic distinction between the highest, höherer, rules and the supreme, oberste, principle.) The beginnings of an act that aims to unify the jumbled masses and the becoming-rule of a rule are subject to the vicissitudes of a spontaneous will, to force and arbitrariness, if not to arbitrary force. In turn, the a priori law of unity is imbued with the necessity of sovereignty over and above the highest power.
If the hordes are said to be “unruly,” regelose, if they are bereft of an inner rule their association could obey, then, in and of themselves, they are excluded from the possibility of being posited (predicated, asserted, categorized). They are at the antipodes of the sovereign law of understanding, according to which anything that is posited must be so posited. As a result, we are in need of revising the categorial analysis of the Kantian masses as “restricted to a pure possibility,” unless we add the disclaimer that the content of this restriction severed from actuality and necessity, torn out of the table of categories, is purely impossible. Insofar as they are possible, the “mere unruly hordes” have their possibility outside of them, notably in the associative power of cognition. But they also fall outside the scope of this power, incapable of crafting an experience out of them and representing them as they are in their scatter. In the context of transcendental cognition, they are a bizarre object that does not conform to the notion of objectivity corresponding to the subjective unity of apperception. Be this as it may, Kant’s project ontologically-transcendentally disempowers the hordes, whose sense is external to them, their “mereness” still less than empirical.
The masses devoid of a rule are poles apart from the self-governing subject combining the transcendental I think and the empirical I intuit. Its principle internal to it, the Kantian subject consolidates itself by appropriating that which it receives from the world and by appropriating this appropriation, by attributing it to the identity of consciousness. The yield of the double appropriation is experience. “For the manifold of representations that are given in a certain intuition would not all together be my representations if they did not all together belong to a self-consciousness.… It is possible for me to represent the identity of the consciousness [die Identität des Bewußtseins] in these representations” (CPR B133). Read in this vein, Kant’s concept of experience is not so different from Hegel’s.
The nuances of the Aristotelian having have melted away, so that to have no longer changes depending on the objects that are had: dispositions, body parts, property, or whatever else. There are but two general types of appropriation implicit in Kant’s thought: one can have the representations of objects and one can have oneself—the identity of one’s consciousness—in having these representations. In the first Critique, the appropriation of representations, the possibility of saying about all of them that they belong to me, is a vehicle toward my self-appropriation. I cobble my identity together not in the course of assembling a mosaic of experiences indexed to the exteriority but through leveling down and labeling each diverse piece of cognition Mine! From the transcendental standpoint, the appropriation of what comes my way from the world presupposes my self-appropriation, the sovereign self-rule whereby regardless of what is experienced I grant myself the possibility of experience. The radical emancipation that the transition from mere givenness to self-givenness promises is likewise something Kant and Hegel share, and it is this thoroughly political chunk of the German Enlightenment that critics all too quickly brush aside as “idealism.”
Critical theorists of the Frankfurt School attribute to Kant’s cognitive sovereignty the role of the groundwork for bourgeois subjectivity. But it is highly doubtful, to say the least, that there is an “identity of consciousness” in capitalism. The only subject that could be endowed with such an identity is the Subject, that is, Capital. Not only is the moment of self-appropriation and closure absent from bourgeois subjectivity, but also its relatively recent, “multicultural” version is altogether alien to the spirit of Kant’s text. Were the manifold of representations not traceable to me, to I think capable of accompanying all of them, he writes, “I would have as multicolored, diverse a self [vielfärbiges verschiedenes Selbst] as I have representations, of which I am conscious” (CPR B134). Isn’t that the self of the multicultural variation on capitalism? And isn’t this spectacle played out due to the arrest of the movement from givenness to self-givenness and a disconnect between appropriation and self-appropriation? After all, the subjective experience or the nonexperience of late capitalism resembles the dispersion of the unruly hordes who have their principle outside themselves (in the production-consumption of capital) rather than the identity of consciousness in the transcendental unity of apperception.
Since every development in the subject corresponds to the same development in the object, both would be equally multicolored and diverse. Advocating the anarchic freedom of interpretations, hermeneutic pluralism attests to the diversity and multicoloredness of any given object. Phenomenologists by and large concur: givenness by adumbrations allows what is given to be approached from an infinity of angles or perspectives. Unruly, the hordes are back with the vengeance in the object, which is never one.
The loadbearing question, then, is: What is the fate of the categories amid these celebrations of plurality? That was our springboard for these brief reflections: the categories are discombobulated and fall apart. They do so at the microlevel, with respect to a single object shorn of unity, and at the macrolevel of the entire table of categories. Gone with them are the possibilities of solidarity, community, and possibility as such, let alone the apparatus by means of which a plurality could relate to itself with some degree of understanding. I accept the necessity of rethinking (and reliving) these and other categories for the sake of better (communal, sustainable, nonviolent) thinking and living. Yet, plucking one of the terms at the expense of the others is a particularly poor strategy to pursue. The totalizing power of the concept is as much to blame for our predicament of not knowing a thing about political things as is the unconscious, or un-self-conscious, categorial selectivism. The action of the concept and the ideological counteraction of “radical difference” are the sharpest blades in the arsenal of categorial reduction.
We have seen Kant walk a fine line between sameness and difference in his formulations of synthesis. The unity of apperception is a laboratory where the German philosopher tests the explosive concoction even more daringly, turning unity inside out into an ineluctable dis-unity. “A representation,” he writes, “that is to be thought of as common to several must be regarded as belonging to those that in addition to it also have something different in themselves [etwas Verschiedenes an sich haben]; consequently, they must antecedently be conceived in synthetic unity with other (even if only possible) representations.… And thus the synthetic unity of apperception is the highest point to which one must affix all use of the understanding” (CPR B133–34).
For Kant, there is no commonality without difference among the representations that have something in common, just as there is no difference without at least a possibility of synthetic unity. This transtranscendental axiom insinuates diversity and disunity into synthetic unity in general and into the synthetic unity of apperception in particular. The gauges of difference are the categories together with the aesthetic forms of experience, their combinations never exactly the same across several representations. But they are the gauges of commonality as well, which means that the categories straddle the sameness-difference divide without erasing it.
True pluralism doesn’t shy away from the totality and it is not a multiplicity splintered from other quantitative categories and from categorial thinking as such. Refusing any and all mediations with unity and totality, plurality is immediately a unity and a totality. This implies that the “politics of radical difference,” substantively indistinguishable from the formal liberal or neoliberal pluralism, is bound to end up in the trap of unconscious totalitarianism. The becoming-absolute of disunity by way of its extraction from the synthetic complex where it inheres bars political solidarity. Unlike the limitless reality of the masses, absolute disunity is a negation divorced from the real, something that makes it, too, qualitatively indeterminate. Furthermore, it is incongruent with relationality, unless the subcategory of community is thought of as reciprocal indifference, and with modality, save for the negations of possibility and actuality.
So, what is Kant’s political alternative to unbridled pluralism? My suggestion is that we pay attention to the affinity—a positive articulation of unity’s disunity—in the “provisional explanation of the possibility of the categories”: “The ground of the possibility of the association of the manifold, insofar as it lies in the object, is called the affinity of the manifold [die Affinität des Mannigfaltigen]” (CPR A113). Unsurprisingly, Kant will proceed to claim that empirical affinity is a consequence of the transcendental affinity organized according to necessary laws compiled in the subject. Let us suspend this transition in midair for now and put affinity itself under a political-categorial microscope.
Retrieving a Latinate word, Kant could not have been in the dark concerning its etymology. Affinity literally says “to the border,” ad + finis. It is, therefore, an association that is political to the core, the many assembled by touching at the borders of each, or, at minimum, by striving to their borders where each may encounter the others. How Kant defines Affinität is also important: he relies on a range of categories, from the qualitative plurality of the manifold, through the modality of possibility, to the relational association evocative of community. He seems to skim quality, but what is a striving to the border if not reality negated into a limit—the categorial kernel of quality, which is, at the same time, political? In its capacity of “the ground of possibility for the association of the manifold,” affinity is the ground of possibility for politics, for the constitution of a res publica. It stands at the confluence of politics and the categories, between the opposing margins of a disorderly plurality and a totality.
In this precise sense, transcendental affinity (we are on the verge of resuming the movement we have just frozen in midair) exceeds the scope of rules and laws. What it signals in the last instance is the far-from-triumphant march of human reason to its finite borders in a realization that serves as the main impetus behind the work of reason’s self-critique. The delicious irony of transcendental affinity is that it entrusts the subject with a mode of gathering that “lies in the object,” thereby pushing the envelope of transcendental critique: the subject becomes an object for itself. Which brings us to Kant’s “pure” and “applied” ideas of autonomy, or self-legislation. In affinity to others, as well as to myself as other to myself (the affinity between I think and I intuit), the gap between the ruling and the ruled does not disappear but is internalized, since—Kant remarks—the ground of possible association lies in the object. At the borders, toward which members of a multiplicity strive, war may rage or peace may reign. Still, these possibilities remain theirs, conferring on hostilities the status of a civil war, including within the subject.
By contrast, there is not a shred of affinity in the unruly hordes that, though lumped together, do not border on one another. There is neither war nor peace between them (in fact, there is no between), but also no perception and no cognition—in sum, no experience. With the transfer of the associative power of cognition to affinity following the trajectory “to the border,” all experience is necessarily of what takes place at that border: all experience is of war and peace, of war or peace. Neutrality is, for its part, not an experience.
Affinity is primarily a spatial term, describing the adjacency, vicinity, or neighborhood of things lying to both sides of the border. And yet, we should not underestimate its temporal connotations pertaining, above all, to categorial schematism. Here, Kant’s configuration of experience is prima facie exceptionally conservative, so much so that it precludes the emergence of newness. Experiencing, whether in the present or in the future, is a having-experienced: “at issue are the appearances in the field of experience, the unity [Einheit] of which would never be possible if we were to allow new things (as far as their substance is concerned) to arise” (CPR A186). A conservative political attitude suffuses the structure of cognition. “Arising and perishing [Entstehen und Vergehen] per se cannot be a possible perception” (CPR A188); however alterable, only the middle lends itself to the time of experience that knows no discontinuities. There is no such thing as a Kantian experience of revolution, of extreme political upheaval, of the birth of a new world. While the spatiality of experience tends toward the edge, its temporality clings to the middle of the now that, below the threshold of the perceivable, transfers the past into the future.
Nonetheless, experience is not the whole story in Kant’s philosophy with its “transcendental idealist” distinction between appearances and things in themselves. The substantively new belongs in the noumenal realm, disquieting me not with the representations of the arising and the perishing but with the intuited absence thereof. Trauma is the persistence and growing insistence of such disquietude, of my obsession with the insurmountable difference between what I can know, discern, perceive and what transpires outside the conservative, experientially digestible possibilities of knowing, discerning, perceiving. Enclosed in its proper boundaries, cognitive sovereignty vibrates with the nonidentity of consciousness the moment a traumatic thought of nonexperience strikes it from the outside.
Aside from traumatic disturbances, I would like to highlight three indications of how transcendental conservatism undermines itself in Kant’s text. First, even at the level of experience, unity harbors a disunity, comprising as it does multiple representations arranged according to relations of affinity or in causal sequences. Substance, which Kant purges of novelty, is a subcategory of causality, unrelated to what is new in quantitative, qualitative, and modal terms. The interdiction of new things “as far as their substance is concerned” would have been the definitive end of newness for Spinoza, albeit not for Kant, who puts this category in its place on a par with the other eleven.
Then, we stumble upon temporal affinities that fracture the continuity of actual cognition and flip transcendental conservatism over into an intrinsically revolutionary experience. In the process of a transition from one state to another, Kant explains, the initial and the final instants are not abrupt beginnings and ends but “boundaries of the time of an alteration [Grenzen der Zeit einer Veränderung]” (CPR A208). Every moment goes to its end, to the border, to the edge, and, in this affinity in time, war and peace are equally possible at the expense of cold indifference. A geometrical line gives off the appearance of continuity when, in fact, it is the affinity of an infinite number of points interspersed with unbridgeable intervals. Temporal affinities are similar: the transcendental illusion of continuity overlays a reality where each moment is—imperceptibly, for the most part—a discrete beginning and end. Each is a revolution-in-the-waiting, or a messianic gateway, as Walter Benjamin puts it politically-theologically.
Finally, mitigating the conservative structure of Kantian experience is the idea of understanding as productive. (Lest we forget, the categories are the pure concepts of understanding and, as such, along with the faculty of imagination, the pinnacles of transcendental productivism.) “The understanding,” according to Kant, “does not find some sort of combination of the manifold [Verbindung des Mannigfaltigen] already in inner sense, but produces it, by affecting inner sense [sondern bringt sie hervor, indem er in affiziert]” (CPR B155). What could be more anticonservative than the creative, shaping, powerful activity of understanding, imaginatively making for oneself that which is to be understood (recall Kant’s example: drawing a line in one’s mind in order to think a line)? The usual solution reconciling the extremes of cognitive activity and passivity hinges on the argument that Kant balances the receptivity of some mental faculties with the practical engagement of others. But conventional readings take the bite out of the transcendental project that at times breathes with the kind of negativity Hegel finds unmanageable. Frictions and even an intrasubjective civil war endure in the relation between I think and I intuit; the manifold and its binding together in understanding are rife with objectively irresolvable contradictions that must be negotiated each time anew whenever the categories actively deal with what is given. It is not at all certain, in this regard, that arising “cannot be a possible perception.” Making is a seeing arise and seeing to it that something does arise. Understanding is an intervention, a practice that is already political in that it fashions a combinatory form, a relational matrix, for the manifold.
It turns out that the ostensibly random detours we have taken from the strange case of the unruly hordes onward have been slowly but surely building up to the appreciation of a patently political formulation of the categories: The “grounds of the recognition of the manifold [Rekognition des Mannigfaltigen], so far as they concern merely the form of an experience in general, are now those categories” (CPR A125). The hordes are unrecognized and unrecognizable, in the first place by and for themselves. And exactly how can one recognize a manifold as manifold while taking care not to negate it by this very recognition? That is the formidable dilemma of a pluralism eager ceaselessly to interrogate its own conditions of possibility. Cognitive sovereignty devoid of power, spatiotemporal affinities, and the conservative-progressive paradox of experience deliver partial answers to the question. But the veritable grounds for the recognition of the manifold, as Kant himself argues, are the categories. Themselves irreducibly plural and populating border regions, the categories are uniquely equipped for the delicate act of such recognition. Could the form of experience still discernable in them salvage our experience of politics?