Sensibility and Organic Unity: Kant, Goethe, and the Plasticity of Cognition

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Funding

The research and writing of this article was made possible through the support of the Australian Research Council DECRA Grant [DE120102402].

Notes

1. Schillers Werke vol. 20, 427.

2. All references to Goethe's works will be made in the body of the text and are as follows:

• MA: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens (Münchner Ausgabe).

• HA: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Werke (Hamburger Ausgabe).

• FA: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche (Frankfurter Ausgabe).

• LA: Goethe, Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft.

• WA: Goethes Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe).

3. Fichte, Gesamtausgabe 1/2, 364.

4. See also MA 17, 805.

5. See note 12 below. In the following, I will be working with the view – espoused by Henry Allison – that the categories are necessary for all experience, such that experience is necessarily cognitive. I agree with Allison because, as I see it, this is the only way that the B Deduction can succeed. Allison argues that the categories are necessary to provide structural unity to sensations – and it is precisely in doing this that they gain their objective validity, and the Deduction is successful. See Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, 193ff. More recently, Michael Olson has persuasively argued for a similarly strong interpretation of the B Deduction, disagreeing with the contrasting interpretation given by Beatrice Longuenesse's Kant and the Capacity to Judge. See Olson, “Kant's Transcendental and Metaphysical Idealism.”

6. See Ameriks, Interpreting Kant's Critiques and “Kant's Transcendental Deduction as a Regressive Argument.”

7. The exact status of sensibility in the Critique of Pure Reason has long been a topic of debate, and already a point of contention during Kant's time. Reinhold in 1798 argued that the dualism that underlies Kant's distinction between sensibility (as passive and receptive) and understanding (as active and spontaneous) is deeply problematic and a unified conception of the faculties must replace Kant's heterogeneous conception. For a good summary of the recent debates on sensibility in the first Critique, see Manning, “The Necessity of Receptivity: Exploring a Unified Account of Kantian Sensibility and Understanding.”

8. Thus Kant writes that “the manifold in a given intuition is necessarily subject to the categories” (B143).

9. All references to the Critique of Judgment will be made in the body of the text and are as follows:

• AA: Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften.

• Reference to the Critique of Pure Reason will adhere to the A/B pagination.

10. See for instance Dreams of a spirit-seer elucidated by dreams of metaphysics, AA 2: 322.

11. See also Volckmann Metaphysics in Lectures on Metaphysics, AA 28: 441. I am grateful to Michael Olson for pointing out these passages to me.

12. Kant identifies cognition and experience in the first Critique, such that all experience must be cognitive, i.e., depends on the synthesis of the understanding and the employment of the categories. Thus, when we speak of something being beyond the limits of experience, we also mean that it is falls outside of the parameter of the categories, and vice versa, when we speak of something as being incognizable, we imply that it is outside of the limits of experience. The identification of experience and cognition in this sense is made clear in the second edition of the Transcendental Deduction, where Kant writes that “everything that may ever come before our senses must stand under all laws that arise a priori from the understanding alone” (B 160) and “all synthesis, through which even perception itself becomes possible, stands under the categories” (B 162) and “all possible perception, hence everything that can ever reach empirical consciousness, i.e., all appearances of nature [ … ] stand under the categories” (B 164–5).

13. Ginsborg, “Kant on Understanding Organisms as Natural Purpose.” Elsewhere Ginsborg argues that purposiveness must be understood as “conformity to normative law,” which is to say that teleological judgment is a judgment of what something ought to be, in accordance with a normative standard. See Ginsborg, “Kant on Aesthetic and Biological Purposiveness.” This conception of purposiveness, however, does not adequately account for the significant difference that Kant draws between natural organisms (which are purposive) and geometrical figures or other means-ends relations which would indeed fit under the rubric of “conforming to normative law” but which Kant does not designate as purposive. See my discussion of these differences above.

14. McLaughlin, Kant's Critique of Teleology in Biological Explanation, 46.

15. My view is that purposiveness specifically implies final causality (and not formal causality) and must therefore be understood as concerning the extent to which the effect or end determines the cause, such that an object or an event can be thought of as purposive only when the effect (end) fully determines the cause.

16. That temporality plays a significant role in the third Critique and is a key distinguishing mark of organisms has not been adequately noted in the literature. Zuckert is an important exception to this, and has made a very strong case for the significance of temporal structures in both parts of the Critique of Judgment. She has, moreover, made the important argument that “objective time” as presented in the first Critique cannot adequately account for the processes that are at the heart of teleological judgments (Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology, 15–16 and 136–138). However, she does not consider how this claim affects the relationship between the concept of purposiveness and the character or structure of our experience – i.e., she does not consider the fact that organisms, although they do not fit within the matrix of objective time, nevertheless make their “appearances” within our experience – and thus does not draw the (to my mind) necessary conclusion that the third Critique furnishes a significant challenge to the notion of experience elaborated in the first Critique. If the temporal structures explicated in the first Critique can only establish mechanical and efficient causality, and are not adequate to account for the temporal structures that underlie teleological processes, then we must consider how it is possible for us to have any experience or occasion to experience non-mechanical beings. This leads to the question regarding the relation between sensibility and the understanding. As noted above, in the first Critique, the spatio-temporal structures are determined by the successive synthesis of apprehension, which implies that sensibility is determined by the operations of the understanding. The account of temporality given in the third Critique however implies that sensibility may be more independent of the operations of the understanding­ – and may even itself play a formative role in these operations than previously thought.

17. In the B Deduction Kant argues that the receptivity of intuition on its own cannot account for the unity of the temporal structure of intuition since unification “presupposes a synthesis which does not belong to the senses but through which all concepts of space and time become possible” (B 161n). In other words, the spatio-temporal unity that is necessary for any perception is not provided by the receptivity of intuition, but rather by the synthesizing activity of the understanding through the synthesis of apprehension.

18. The relation between the categories and sensation – a topic which Kant discusses in Section 26 of the second part of the B Deduction (the “transcendental deduction”) – is complex and controversial. It revolves around the question of whether the objects of sensation are necessarily (i.e., automatically) structured by the categories, or whether the human intellect must exercise some intentionality in order to provide them with structural unity. See note 5 above.

19. See note 12 above.

20. While I largely follow Eckart Förster's interpretation of Goethe's epistemology (see note 21 below), I emphasize two aspects of Goethe's relation to (interpretation of) Kant and transcendental philosophy, which Förster does not discuss. First, Goethe recognizes that the problem with grasping organisms as elaborated (albeit only implicitly) by Kant specifically concerns the temporal structure of natural ends and thus concerns the relationship between sensibility and the understanding. This, in turn, directly relates to Goethe's critique of German philosophy as having not yet produced an adequate critique of sensibility. What Goethe realized is that Kant had himself transgressed the limits of transcendental philosophy – as elaborated in the first Critique­ – by articulating a causal structure that is neither reducible to physical-mechanical explanation or knowable by the discursive intellect. Second, Goethe thematized Kant's “transgression” by elaborating the plasticity or malleability of experience, such that what appears to be unknowable within the framework of the first Critique, is “given” in experience in the third Critique.

21. Eckart Förster emphasizes that in order to perceive the idea of the plant, it is necessary not only to grasp the transitions between the parts, but also to grasp these transitions at once, and only then does the perception become an idea. See Die 25 Jahre der Philosophie, 263.

22. See also FA 1/24, 102.

23. Frederick Amrine offers a detailed account of the transformation of the scientist through observing and knowing nature. See “The Metamorphosis of the Scientist.”