The Linguistic Condition

Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action

Claudia Brodsky

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350144392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Providing a unique interpretation of Kant's theory of judgement as integral to his overall project, Claudia Brodsky explores his continued relevance to contemporary theoretical concerns. The Linguistic Condition traces how Kant combined sensus communis, or common sense with the communicative nature of judgement to reveal that, for him, acts of judgement are dependent on their linguistic articulation, so that in Kantian philosophy language and judgement are inextricably linked. In this first in-depth analysis of language in the Critique of Judgement, Brodsky forms creative connections between literature and philosophy.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION:
BEFORE JUDGMENT: DOING WITHOUT KNOWING
IN KANT AND DIDEROT

The double participial phrase, “doing without knowing,” can be understood in at least two principal ways. First and most obviously, doing without knowing means doing something without actively knowing it or without knowing what it is one is doing. However, when the second of the present participles, “knowing,” is understood as a substantive rather than an active verb, then “doing without knowing” means doing without the thing, state or capability we call knowing while knowing one is doing so, acting, carrying on, in spite of and in the face of this lack. In proverbial English, “doing without” may, of course, also be used alone, or without object, to mean “making do without,” in the sense of faire suffire, or “getting on with it,” persevering in whatever one is doing, even while knowing that one is missing a key ingredient, an otherwise essential part of the process involved.

In the case of “doing without,” then, “getting on with it” means “getting along” without something. Understood as action undertaken in the face of partial deprivation and real uncertainty as to its outcome, the expression, “doing without,” carries with it the implication of something more: the ability to substitute something else for the elemental something one is missing. To do without is, in other words, to act effectively but to do so through indirection, to bring something about, to accomplish or arrive at, rather than directly cause a result by putting something to work in the place of something else one does not possess. In short, it is to act in the presence, and on the basis, of a representation: not a representation already ready to hand, whose use value, previously determined by past usage, is part of the practical, cognitive repertoire upon which the mind unreflectively relies, but a representation made to stand for something excluded from – unavailable or lost to – that repertoire, the knowledge, whether primary and empirical, or secondary, i.e., symbolic or semiotic, that one is missing.

Thus to do without knowing is not simply to continue on in the same course but rather to continue on in a course that we ourselves have altered by adding something extra and previously external to it. In that it causes us to “figure out” – determine or shape and bring to bear – the extra means that the act of “doing without” can do the most with, the mode of indirection whose natural ground is deprivation and whose product is a representation may provide us with our own grounds for reflection, for arriving at an understanding of the acquisition of knowledge itself. For what we do when we do without knowing produces knowledge that, rather than directly reflecting a foregone conclusion, comes about unforeseeably, without causal or conventional determination, and with the presence of something that effectively negates the negation or absence of something, a representation.

Thus, “doing without knowing” may mean living ignorance, pure and simple, an ongoing practice of accidental hit or miss, or, it may mean, in a purposeful, constructive sense, acting so as to achieve an aim or bring something about despite the absence of the direct knowledge, means, or data, that would facilitate, if not predetermine action in the first place. “Doing without knowing” may be as commonplace as ignoring what one does – as most of us, unconsciously or consciously, gracefully or catastrophically, do most of the time – but it may also be doing something different from the norm, something that, in its precise contours, cannot have been done before in that it requires, among other things, the real absence of positive information, whether apprehended by the senses in the present or passed along by an already mediated tradition (or “prejudice”), an absence that alone enables the real presence of ignorance, as well as its positively negative effects. Uncertain not only as to what he or she knows, but as to what one can know, and in possession of no “fall-back” position or perceptible path forward, the subject contrives another way of proceeding by putting another sensible form or object in position: the subject, any subject, in other words, represents.

Such uncertainty should be sharply distinguished from the all-too-handy refrain of self-exculpation, “Had I known then what I know now.” This disclaimer of disastrous, typically vainglorious action implies that empirical ignorance, rather than personal interest and duplicity, at once causes our acts and exonerates us from all future responsibility for their consequences. Yet knowing this – that one can always plead former ignorance at a later date – is not to know nothing but, indeed, to know something, something of not only personal and calculable but historical and incalculable consequences, and to proceed or to continue to act, on the basis of it, is to shadow, if not eclipse the content of such an alibi with the conscious foreknowledge of its future rhetorical, exculpatory effect. Acting on the knowledge that one can always claim one acted out of ignorance is to clothe one’s acts in the costume of a Bildungsroman, a ready-to-wear trope of self-serving de-indemnification passing itself off as innocence after the fact. Oriented instead, in their distinctive approaches to knowledge, toward our response to and responsibility for what we do with experience, as partial or limited as that experience may be, Kant and Diderot – distinct theorists of doing without knowing in their own right – refuse equally to confuse ignorance with innocence and the pursuit of self-interest with uncertainty, to tailor morality to the limits of cognition.

Before Kant theorized judgment as a specifically noncognitive activity directly dependent (as described in Part One of this study) upon our ability to communicate and be understood by others, and thus to speak, in effect, not merely for oneself but for “any” and “everyone” (“jedermann”), both Kant and Diderot related cognitive impasses to purposeful acts of representation. And while both Kant and Diderot divide such representations into markedly different kinds, each with its own referential title and mode, and while the two-sided (or, as Diderot might say, amphibological) subject matter of this introduction to a study of the internal relations linking judgment with poetics and action, could likewise bear such bilateral subtitles as, “the Blind and the Deaf,” “Metaphor and Gesture,” “Hypothesis and Image,” and “‘Whatever-His-Name-Is’ and ‘Saunderson’” as well, any individual analysis of doing without knowing must begin with the frankly – because necessarily – figurative account in Kant’s own prefatory description of all just such activity, his distinctly non-causal narrative, in the Second Preface to his First Critique [“Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage,” Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1787]). of the impasses and blind “gropings” (“herumtappen”) that, extending over millenia of scientific and mathematical ignorance, could only be interrupted by being radically disrupted, all then operative presumptions overturned, in the unforeseeable, because unprecedented intellectual actions that Kant calls “revolution[s] in mode of thinking” (“Revolution der Denkart”)¹ To do without knowing in any of the senses that knowing has had before is what Kant repeatedly calls not a blunder or blindspot but, on the contrary, the necessary condition of each of the irreversible “revolution[s]” in our most fundamental powers of conception represented by Kant in the, by turns, retrospective and prospective narration of the history of ignorance and knowledge, from ancient thought onwards, with which his “Preface” begins. As Kant recounts it, the initial step undertaken in the first of these “revolution[s],” from recursively self-reinforcing ignorance into a practically constructive doing without knowing, was the turning of reason outward from its own internally formulated rules, the “formal,” autonomous laws of “logic,” or “rules of all thinking” (“die formaln Regeln alles Denkens.”²) “Validated” as it is “bound” by “its limitation” to “abstract[ing] from all objects of knowledge and their differences” (“ihrer Eingeschränkung …, dadurch sie berechtigt, ja verbunden ist, von allen Objekten der Erkenntnis und ihrem Unterschiede zu abstrahieren”), logic is “understanding having to do with nothing more than itself and its form” (“…der Logik, wo der Verstand es mit nichts weiter, als sich selbst und seiner Form zu tun hat”).³ The “revolution in mode of thinking” Kant first describes itself first turns outward, in an act neither logical nor illogical in basis, toward precisely those heteronomous, empirical objects with which logically coherent understanding not only has “nothing to do,” but knows that to be so in a positively negative (i.e., self-critical) sense. Yet, the orientation of reason toward the empirical world would have constituted a mere change of direction rather than “revolution,” if it had not taken the further step of turning its outward trajectory – inflecting or angling it, so to speak – back toward the mind. Rather than merely reversing its own autonomous course, reason ,submitted to what Kant calls “critique” turns back upon itself in conjunction with or relation to something else. What returns to the purview of logic is not more, but something different from, logic, the content of which is specifically not the absence of content, or “abstraction from objects,” that is the binding (negative) condition of logical positivism, but rather something positive that is also something negative, or positive only in part: something whose own “limited” relation to that which is outside and otherwise unrelated to the mind allows it to come under the purview of logic in the first place. Critically limited to “representations” (of experiential objects) that can be submitted to logic – even as the absence of any relation between things as such (or “in themselves”) and the purely “formal rules of logic” remains intact – investigations of the empirical can begin to produce what Kant specifically calls “scientific” “knowledge,” rather than an “inevitable” skepticism toward all epistemogical claims: a new “mode of thinking” according to which “reason,” now “occupied not merely with itself, but also with objects” (“wenn [die Vernunft] nicht bloss mit sich selbst, sondern auch mit Objekten zu schaffen hat”), finally “forge[s] for itself the sure path of science” (“den sicheren Weg der Wissenschaft einzuschlagen”).⁴

Perhaps most significantly, such “revolution[s] in mode of thinking” are both concrete and conceptual for Kant. They seamlessly join mind and world by laws both rational and sensuously perceptible, describing an actual revolution (or upending) of “method,” by moving in two opposing trajectories at once.⁵ Yet what is remarkable about the first of the individual “revolution[s]” whose story Kant tells, is that Kant knows he doesn’t really know, and makes clear he doesn’t really care to know, whom it is he is writing about: the actual name, historical circumstances and identity of the single subject (“eines einzigen Mannes”) who carried this “endlessly extensive” (“in unendliche Weiten”), irreversible or “transhistorical” (“für alle Zeiten”) movement out.⁶ Well known for describing “genius” in the Critique of Judgment in terms directly reflecting those he reserves for poets, as the revolutionary ability to change the “rules” by which one’s own and future work is judged, all Kant has to say about the first individual to “forge the sure path” of mathematical and scientific knowledge, and so to change forever the rel...