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On Being Neither Post- Nor Anti-Kantian: A Reply to Breazeale and Larmore Concerning The Fate of Autonomy
Karl Ameriks a a University of Notre Dame. Online Publication Date: 01 June 2003

To cite this Article Ameriks, Karl(2003)'On Being Neither Post- Nor Anti-Kantian: A Reply to Breazeale and Larmore Concerning The

Fate of Autonomy',Inquiry,46:2,272 292

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00201740310001236 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201740310001236

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Inquiry, 46, 272292

On Being Neither Post- Nor Anti-Kantian: A Reply to Breazeale and Larmore Concerning The Fate of Autonomy
Karl Ameriks
University of Notre Dame

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Daniel Breazeale and Charles Larmore offer readings of my Kant and the Fate of Autonomy that implicitly agree on several exegetical points but differ strikingly in their basic systematic perspectives. They both contend that historically Kant deserves to be linked more closely to his Idealist successors, especially Fichte, than on my interpretation. Larmore makes this claim as part of a plea that the whole Idealist tradition, so construed, should be rejected because of a too subjective conception of autonomy. Breazeale, in contrast, argues that appreciating closer connections between Kant and Fichte and consciousness centered German Idealism in general is the best way to nd grounds for praising rather than deserting the Critical philosophy. Breazeale and Larmore thus instantiate two long-standing traditions of reaction to Kant. The rst is attracted to him because of a supposed broadly Cartesian Idealist connection, while the second is repelled by it whereas my aim is to explore ways that Kant can be understood, and to some extent saved, precisely by freeing his thought from the supposition common to both these traditions.

I
Before replying to specic points, it may help to review some of the most basic themes of my treatment of Kant and his successors. On my reading, the structural kernel of Kants Critical philosophy consists in four fundamental features: (1) A starting point in common experience (E); (2) A transcendental derivation (TD) from this of various categories and pure principles; (3) An ultimate metaphysical account of all this in turn as making sense only on the basis of transcendental idealism (TI); and, nally, (4) A guiding idea that these rst three steps are the essential theoretical prerequisites for vindicating the ultimate goal of our autonomy (AUT), in
DOI 10.1080/00201740310001236 # 2003 Taylor & Francis

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various key practical and methodological as well as theoretical senses. (In schematic form: E only if TD, and this only if TI; and then, given E and TD, AUT also only if TI.) In most general terms, this means that I read Kant as offering a metaphysics of experience, but one in which both key terms of this well-known phrase need to be properly understood. First, Kantian experience is dened not in terms of private so-called Cartesian representations, but instead designates a cognitive situation occurring, roughly speaking, at a level no lower than that of the core perceptual judgments of common sense. Second, the Critical metaphysics, even while it criticizes its scholastic predecessors, remains fundamentally rationalist in its epistemology, insofar as it requires certain and pure principles for empirical knowledge that take us beyond a completely naturalistic framework, and also in its transcendental idealist ontology, insofar as this implies a kind of immaterialism, i.e., an insistence on a non-spatio-temporal character for things in themselves. Kants versions of rationalism and immaterialism are relatively modest doctrines that can be overlooked because sometimes it is assumed that the only options to empiricism and materialism are the more radical alternatives of a dogmatic rationalism, i.e., an epistemology relying on an inated presumption that theoretical reason can positively determine substantive features of things all on its own, entirely apart from sensible considerations, and a spiritualistic immaterialism, i.e., an ontology that ascribes all sorts of specic and independent powers to what is non-material. For these reasons and others, including an explicit self-characterization of his philosophy in these terms in one of Kants metaphysics lectures, I have characterized his kind of rationalist system in general as a relatively moderate or modest one (p. 37). By this term I do not at all mean to deny that Kant is extremely interested in what would seem to us nowadays to be a much too ambitious and elaborate system; obviously, like many traditional philosophers, Kant is notorious for all sorts of bold claims to have solved philosophys basic problems in a certain and complete way. My point has been simply that, despite these claims, the system that Kant actually sets out can be easily read as having several very signicant limitations that distinguish it as relatively modest in comparison to that of most of his major predecessors and successors. Looking back, there are many obvious ways in which Kants epistemology and ontology is not as radical as that of earlier philosophers such as Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Quite clearly, he does not, as they do, contrast our manifest image with a system of alleged sure and detailed purely theological, mechanistic, psychologistic, spiritualistic, monistic, or monadological theoretical claims about ultimate reality. But, even more importantly for us, I believe Kant just as surely does not make the kind of incredibly strong methodological and

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274 Karl Ameriks metaphysical claims found in his immediate Idealist successors: Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. He is of course responsible for suggesting to them the very idea of a fundamentally autonomous rational system one that would put autonomy at the heart of its notion of reality in general, as well as at the ground of its view of philosophical methodology and of the role that philosophy should play in culture in general. But there is an awful lot that depends on exactly how the notion of autonomy is developed in detail and once the details are attended to, I believe it can be shown that there are many specic ways in which Kants conception of our autonomous rationality is both more modest and more appealing than that of the later Idealists, even if it no doubt has aws of its own. This modesty can be specied by comparing the nature of the rst three basic components in Kants system with that of his successors, that is to say, its (1) basis (E), (2) its development (TD), and (3) its scope (TI). First, since the Kantian basis is experience in the sense of putative empirical knowledge Erfahrung it has what I would call a relative rather than an absolute certainty, that is, it does not have the kind of certainty that a Cartesian skeptic nds in the mere existence of representations. Second, since Kants arguments from this basis to the specic categories and pure principles depend on given claims that require pure forms of intuition and judgment that are not themselves deduced from an absolute basis, such as the mere notion of representation, the development of his system inherits the merely relative certainty of its basis as well as a dependence on the irreducible posits of the additional given presumptions just noted. Third, the scope of Kants metaphysical claims is sharply limited by his doctrine of transcendental idealism; what reality is specically like in itself theoretical philosophy is largely forbidden to say in any positive way, although one thing we supposedly can assert with certainty is that it is not spatio-temporal as such. I have argued that the base, development, and scope of later Idealist systems differ strikingly from Kants: they all insist on a much less relative basis, a much more tightly connected and unied development of principles, and an in principle denial that the scope of their system leaves any major features of reality undetermined. Thus Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel each insist on an absolute basis (that no rational being at all can consistently deny); they each insist on a tightly structured deduction from this basis that does not allow independent Kantian presuppositions about specic forms of intuition and understanding, and they each develop a complete system that in one way or the other leaves no sense, as Kants transcendental idealism does, in entertaining anything wholly beyond the spatio-temporal realm of experience. Given the extremely strong resistance that has been offered to the especially strong claims that these Idealists made about the base, development, and scope of each of their systems, I take it to be obvious that Kants more modest approach has at least an initial advantage. (Whereas I do not see

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anything in Breazeales remarks that gives support to what I have called the specic especially strong claims of the later idealists whatever other virtues they may have on his account.) Hence, if they all got into trouble by claiming too much, it seems worthwhile to explore the possibility that, in going back to Kants less ambitious claims, we may save ourselves at least some trouble without giving up on autonomy altogether. Moreover, this is not at all to say that Kants own claims are modest to the point of triviality, that they are so limited that they themselves say nothing very signicant or controversial.

II
It is remarkable how often the moderate but still signicant nature of Kants approach in the rst two steps of his system tends to this day to be missed by readers of the Critique of Pure Reason, and of my reconstruction of it, simply because they presume that there are only two basic alternatives for the Kantian transcendental arguer. These are: either to pursue a strongly progressive program, i.e., one that begins with a so-called Cartesian foundation of pre-judgmental states such as sense data, unclear ideas, or what Breazeale calls mere private representations in order then to ascend to a proof that there is objectivity and an external world at all; or, in a direct reversal, to pursue a strongly regressive program, i.e., one that simply assumes the specic principles of the Newtonian science of Kants day and then merely adds to this an abstract account of the faculties involved in this knowledge and an explanation of how the ultimate metaphysical ground of such science requires the doctrine of transcendental idealism. I am driven to suppose that there is some kind of fatal attraction to think simply in terms of these two extremes, for otherwise I cannot understand how it is that so often when I write that Kant should be read as assuming experience in a relatively thick rather than thin, or so-called Cartesian sense, it still happens that some readers immediately assume that this must be tantamount to saying that Kant is always already starting with something much more than the mere fact that there is commonsense experience, i.e., putatively warranted judgments about distinct objects in a common spatiotemporal domain. Despite using the term regressive ever since my initial characterization of Kants basic argument structure, I have never maintained that the regression in the Critique starts originally from any higher-level strong and contentious premises such as the truth of objective a priori principles or presumptions about any specic physical system. Nonetheless, Breazeale claims, for example, that on my reconstruction Kants argument must from the very start presuppose the objective validity of natural science (p. 246), the reality of synthetic judgments a priori, and the

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276 Karl Ameriks necessity of universal and necessary objective judgments of experience (p. 246). In fact, however, all that is presupposed with my view of Kants commonsense starting point is that there is some objectivity to our experience, that we have something that allows us to provide some sort of justication for saying that some of our states are true rather than false. (I point out that this informal use of common sense, or common knowledge, is not meant to be equivalent to any sympathy for the methodology of the popular philosophy of Kants day or similar movements; the common or ordinary is an admittedly vague notion, but starting from it does not imply abdicating systematic philosophys distinctive reective duties and critical capabilities.) Note that this is obviously still a long way from even trying to argue as Kant does later that we need specic pure principles (going far beyond mere common sense) to ll out and give a substantive, informative backing to our common presumption of objectivity, to argue, rather than presuppose, for example, that the common notion that there are objective and not merely subjective time sequences ultimately does require an appeal to universal principles such as a general law of causality. To be sure, the Transcendental Analytics arguments for such principles are not entirely disconnected from Kants interest in Newtonianism, but they do not themselves presuppose any specic scientic principles and are instead explicitly aimed at defending various much more general principles that any developed physics of spatiotemporal experience would have to use, be it like Newtons or not. And this means that there is after all, right in the overt structure of the Critique, a distinct and highly relevant moderate alternative to the strongly progressive and the strongly regressive approaches. Note also that this moderate alternative is consistent with my view that Kant is not aiming to defeat radical skepticism as such. Such an interpretation is often met with incredulity by those who suppose, as Breazeale may (p. 246), that the Critique must be concerned with an answer to radical Humean skepticism. This supposition fails to note that one can as I believe Kant obviously does bracket radical Humean doubts about whether there are sensible objects at all, or even any substantive validity to pure mathematics, while still working out a position that is very much a response to worries specically about the necessary objective claims of our higher faculties and of pure reason which is after all the topic of the title of Kants book. The moderate regressive interpretation still leaves plenty of room to see the Critique as trying to respond to numerous higher level skeptical worries, generated by Hume among others, about what pure thought can establish; these worries are precisely what is addressed by the Transcendental Deduction and the arguments for specic pure principles in the second or main development part of Kants system. (Here it is, of course, also possible to note, as some have, following on Maimons lead, that even once Kants

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system is charitably understood in these sections, a host of serious skeptical problems may remain concerning how it can be applied to particular cases and how it can account for itself in general.1) Sometimes the tendency to overlook Kants moderate regressive approach may arise from a more general presumption that if philosophers are not making a strong theoretical argument, something that would directly defeat skepticism from an extremely thin or so-called Cartesian foundation, then their whole project is not very interesting anyway, not genuinely foundational or idealistic in a good sense, and so it doesnt matter much what else is going on. The desire to defeat skepticism in this way from the ground up is remarkably widespread; it recurs not only in Breazeales pro-Fichtean remarks but also in broad strands of both English and German philosophy, and in our own time it has been reinforced by inuential reconstructions such as Strawsons and Rortys.2 Whatever its immediate sources, I have tried to rebut the presumptions of the strong reading in a number of ways. In addition to repeating that a moderately regressive form of argument clearly matches the headings of Kants own Transcendental Deduction, which explicitly center on establishing not objectivity as such but rather the objectivity of the categories, given that there is experience (see 26), I have tried to explain how there are a number of understandable reasons why readers could nonetheless have been confused on this basic point. The sources of confusion here are at once deeply textual, systematic, and historical. One basic confusion has to do with idea, central also to Breazeales interpretation, that Kant is starting simply from private representations (p. 245). There is no doubt that Kant speaks about representation as basic in some sense, simply as the most general term for all components of mental life (A320/B376),3 and that his extremely inuential immediate successor Reinhold made this notion the explicit and supposedly sufcient foundation for his best known and most ambitious system (the theory of the Vorstellungsvermogen). The term also plays a central and very different role in some of Kants expressions of transcendental idealism, as when he says that all we know are representations but here the term is meant to contrast in a global way with thing in themselves and does not mean anything like individual Cartesian sense data. Unfortunately, interpreters from the eighteenth through the twentieth century have often conated Kants transcendental use of the term representation, i.e., its use as an abbreviation for what the whole sphere of our theoretical knowledge can reach, with an empirical use, i.e., as standing for a set of primitive psychological acts. When Kant himself attempts to characterize the popular notion of representation (A320/B376) he makes quite clear that it is such a rudimentary term, possibly signifying something as simple as either a bare sensation or idea on its own, that it is immediately evident from the most basic and best-

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278 Karl Ameriks known principles of his epistemology (intuitions without concepts are blind, A51/B75, and the only use which the understanding can make of these concepts is to judge by them, A68/B93) that, strictly speaking, representation by itself cannot mean a genuine cognitive state. For Kant a state can become a cognition, something that can be justied or unjustied, true or false, only once it has passed beyond the situation of being a mere psychological representation to that of being a cognitive aspect of something that has the logical form of a judgment, i.e., the complex and distinctive epistemic synthesis that Kant believes cannot be found in the many other species of representing beings that are lower than us. All this is a reason, I believe, for also not saying simply that Kants starting point is mere self-consciousness or even the unity of our self-consciousness. The problem here is that there are many non-cognitive ways of taking these terms, for example, as designating a collection of mere states of passive inner sense, or reexivity, or, in English, of indeterminate social unease, or, in German, an attitude of immediate condence, and in none of these cases does there have to be any judgment or claim that such and such is the case. From such a meagre basis, Kant neither can nor does make a transcendental argument. On the other hand, there surely can exist thick states of selfconsciousness that happen to include a specic kind of cognitive representation, a claiming to know that something is true about ones self and from such states Kant can and does go on to make arguments, for example, that this may require categories or pure principles. Note that in that event, however, the focus specically on the self does not do the essential work; the conclusions can follow simply from the general conditions of the cognitive unity of an act. Nonetheless, it might be asked, what about the indisputable fact that Kant does frequently discuss self-consciousness, especially near the beginning of the Deduction; doesnt that mean that some kind of Cartesian basis is present after all? I would argue in just an opposite way that Kants discussion of self-consciousness there is most naturally understood as rather a key step precisely in his anti-Cartesian strategy, which is strongly emphasized throughout the B edition (think of the wholesale revision of the Paralogisms), and which consists in arguing that self-knowledge is not privileged but is subject to the same basic structures as knowledge in general (see B 160, thus the unity of the synthesis of the manifold, without or within us). What the B Deduction is repeatedly saying unlike what Descartes, and Leibniz, and even the pre-Critical Kant argue is that even the self really knows (as opposed to merely senses or intuits or has a general concept of) itself only via the general rules of synthesis that govern all experience, all putative knowledge claims.4 The crucial feature of Kants starting point of experience is that it is not a completely inner or Cartesian episode but rather a state that makes some kind

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of genuine cognitive claim. This is what constitutes the bare meaning of the experience at the Kantian basis, in contrast to the buzzing confusion of mere impressions or ideas that other philosophers start from. The mere meaning of a thick representation that is something for me, and hence can be part of an apperceptive experience, is not as specic as a claim about physical or spatial or non-solipsistic objects, although instances of such representations might well still involve such claims. But, whether or not they do, they are still quite distinguishable from the mere existence of a fuzzy Cartesian image or a bare Humean idea, or any merely claried or associated concatenation of these. That we also in fact (supposedly) must have knowledge of outer spatial things, and never of merely pure inner things, is something Kant is eventually very concerned with, but the key argument for this in the Critique does not come until long after the Deduction, in the B edition Refutation of Idealism. Confusion may arise here simply because, even though neither of the mere terms representation and apperception means specically spatio-temporal putative knowledge, Kant can and does go on eventually to argue that we have no actual states of apperception or even representation, that we can examine that do not already bring with them this kind of knowledge in some way. I turn now to some points about how these features of the rst steps of Kants system are related to his third step, his transcendental idealism, and to the immediate reception of his work that I have summarized under the heading of the short argument to idealism. The lack of an absolute Cartesian basis for the Kantian system is precisely what rst came to bother Kants immediate successor, Reinhold. Reinholds Cartesian move to found philosophy explicitly on a principle of representation (or Satz des Bewusstseins) was extremely inuential, but, as I note in my book, important historical work has shown that there was a signicant alternative to Reinholds highly inuential Cartesian project that was developed even in his own time. Followers of Kant in the Jena Herbert/Niethammer circle explicitly demanded a return to the standpoint of experience, which they directly linked to a commonsense hypothetical orientation, one that explores what happens if we allow, as we in fact do, that there is experience in Kants thick sense.5 In view of this sensible alternative, I have described Reinholds original Cartesian demands as resulting not from an irreversible insight but from an understandable but mistaken extreme conception of autonomy and its cultural prerequisites: Reinhold was so interested in preserving the Critical philosophy as a secure foundation for the Enlightenment in general, that he wanted its effectiveness guaranteed by an irreversible basis that could be found in the simplest circumstance imaginable, namely, the having of a representation at all. When Reinholds program encountered problems, the history of philosophy entered a moment when in both its interpretative and its systematic work it might have (but unfortunately did not, in its main line)

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280 Karl Ameriks turned back away from methodological Cartesianism in order to reconsider the more moderate Kantian manner of defending a rationalist philosophy of autonomy. Instead, the most inuential idealist philosophers went on to contend that there were other and better ways than Reinholds to try to realize imperial rather than not merely moderate autonomous aspirations of reason. A crucial and very understandable tactic along this line was Fichtes shift to speaking of apperception not as a fact of experience or as a Tatsache des Bewusstseins, but as a Tathandlung, a unique absolutely free act whereby I recognize myself as responsible for taking my representations as mine. Here a kind of self-determination is worked right into the content of the rst truth of the rationalist system. Put extremely briey, the weakness of Fichtes approach, from a Kantian perspective, is that it seems much too dogmatically to assert an absolute freedom of consciousness that Kant had taken great pains to show that we cannot ever theoretically warrant for how can we ever with certainty exclude hidden external causes? This is an issue that Kant was very familiar with, since until shortly before the Critique he himself was inclined to afrm the old rationalist thesis that the mere representation of the I does prove our absolute spontaneity and this is why it is so striking that the Critique itself dramatically backs off from any such proof.6 My own hypothesis is that Fichte himself came to appreciate this problem over time, and that this is precisely why, in very perceptive works such as the Vocation of Man, he was willing to stress that it is not as a theoretical insight but fundamentally as a pure practical voice of conscience that as Breazeale also says we rst come into supposedly certain contact with our absolute freedom. Without a moral perspective, we might still worry that, in the realm of theoretical possibilities not refutable from a traditional Cartesian basis, no matter how much it seems that ones thoughts literally issue from the absolute activity of ones I, there might ultimately be neither any such activity nor any such I (in this way the remarkable beginning of the third part of the Vocation of Man constitutes nothing less than a dramatic deconstruction of the classical cogito). From the perspective of traditional theory alone there could be, as Hume and Jacobi suggested earlier, nothing but a stream of representations passively owing along. Consistently enough, to hold on to a strong sense of autonomy, Fichte then went on as Breazeale reminds us to argue that all the content that was traditionally wanted from theoretical philosophy could be derived after all once the demands of the conscientious I are granted as legitimate. To accept that there is a genuine moral I, an I that has genuine oughts and therefore genuine cans, is at the same time to accept after all the external world that seems needed to fulll that I and also, Fichte contends in his Divine Government essay, to reject as meaningless anything beyond the world so disclosed. In this way, the base, development, and scope of the Fichtean system might seem to construct a fully autonomous home for our rationality.

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But precisely in calling for an absolute basis while turning ultimately to a practical ground for the claim of our activity, Fichte still leaves himself open to deep problems known since Hobbes and Hume and not only the Critical Kant. (For this reason to anticipate an objection of Larmores there is a sense in which the problem of dualism seems to me more of a difculty for the post-Kantians than for Kant.) Rather than truly unifying all knowledge and philosophy and life, Fichte introduces claims of absolute freedom that threaten to sunder philosophy in two; we are called on at rst to ignore the apparent ultimacy of the determinist empirical patterns of ordinary life, modern science, and philosophical arguments such as Kants Second Analogy which I take to be the core of his theoretical philosophy, the core that it still seems (even after Breazeales defense) that Fichte neglects. Sensing this problem from the very beginning, the third step of Kants system built in a metaphysics of transcendental idealism that would preserve the crucial claim of autonomy in its fourth and nal step by creating some theoretical room for at least the possibility of the moralists assertion of our absolute freedom (which is only one part of Kants notion of autonomy, but an indispensable one). It is true that Kants arguments here are highly controversial, but it is very signicant that he at least appreciated the kind of difcult argument that would be needed to reconcile our conicting modern longings for freedom as well as theoretical and scientic responsibility. Rather than shore up anything like these arguments, Fichtes position, following Jacobi, appears too quickly to assume that Kants own idealist metaphysics is not only lacking in evidence but is straightforwardly contradictory, and so he seems to leave no room for any argument that would give any purely theoretical warrant for the space of possibility needed to preserve the rationality of an insistence on absolute freedom. The weakness of this Fichtean approach is that, on its own admission, it claims autonomy in behalf of a libertarian-moralistic absolutism that can y in the face of all our merely theoretical impressions. For this reason, even though Fichtes system was clearly constructed in a sincere attempt to deliver the most rigorous form of autonomy, in the end it can look like a presumption of self-determination that evades complete rationality; the determinist voice within the self is squelched all too abruptly. To appreciate the signicance of this point, it may help to return to some basic issues that come up in Breazeales remarks. In contrast to my reading, Breazeale holds not only that Fichte is not to be criticized here, but also that I have misread Kants position on freedom. Breazeale reads a crucial passage I refer to in the B Preface (Bxxix)7 as saying merely that Kant thinks that his Critical philosophy is the only way to avoid a contradiction between freedomoriented Sittenlehre (doctrine of ethics) and determinism-oriented Naturlehre (doctrine of nature). On this reading, theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy are in a balanced, mutually canceling situation, and our actual,

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282 Karl Ameriks practical belief in freedom stands in no need of any theoretical justication or propaedeutic whatsoever (p. 247). In contrast, I see asymmetry rather than balance in this text, for what Kant clearly goes on to say here is that without his Critical philosophy, morality would have to yield to the mechanism of nature (Bxxix). Moreover, on my reading Kant is saying that this is a condition not merely of philosophy about morality but of morality itself, because he says that it is a condition not only of Sittenlehre but also of what he repeatedly calls morality itself, die Moral. Surely it is Kants view that it is not merely philosophers but rather ordinary rational persons as such who presume that morality requires genuine freedom. Hence it is no wonder that, given Kants view that nothing other than the standpoint of his Critical metaphysics can allow this freedom to be thought consistently, he insists that we must have previously established our unavoidable ignorance of things in themselves and limited all that we can theoretically know to mere appearances (Bxxix). We do after all need a theoretical argument for transcendental idealism rst, and thus a rst Critique of theoretical reason as a propaedeutic to defend the very possibility of the moral life systematized in the second Critique. Breazeale suggests that Kant believes this point is relevant only to philosophers, not ordinary persons, since their actual belief in freedom will continue in any case. This may or may not be true at a psychological level, but I take it to be clear from Kants remarks that he thinks that anybody now relying simply on that belief would not be proceeding rationally (even if the freedom they believe in is truly there). For better or worse, Kant clearly presumed that by his era any rational person would have to be prepared to acknowledge a mechanistic understanding of all empirical nature, and so any such person could properly hold on to an attachment to freedom only by following Kants lead in restricting the determinism of mechanism to a doctrine of appearances, a doctrine dened by a contrast with the place left open for absolute freedom by and only by the Critiques theoretical argument for things in themselves that are not to be identied with appearances. Hence, even though I certainly agree with Breazeale that it is often very important to keep distinct what may be demanded at the immediate and the reective levels of experience, in the end the main question in this case cannot be simply divided into two separate issues, what ordinary people may assert and what philosophers may assert. The crucial issue is what anyone can any longer say rationally, and here Kants own position appears clear enough: without his specic doctrine of transcendental idealism, there is no longer any responsible way to hold on to asserting absolute freedom and the morality that presupposes it. For this reason alone, ones understanding of transcendental idealism is crucial to interpreting Kants project and the innovations of his successors. On this issue as well there are deep differences between my interpretation and

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the position Breazeale reiterates. Put most simply, I see Kants idealism as essentially dened by his long and complex treatment of our specic forms of intuition: space and time. Kant argues that space and time must be ideal, and then he argues that, since all our specic theoretical knowledge is determined by space and time, all that knowledge must also be ideal. Understanding the essential relation between ideality and space and time is crucial for understanding not only the logic of Kants argument but also the content of its conclusion: since ideality follows not from representation or sense or thought as such, but only from the specic features of our forms of intuition, there is a realm of the non-spatio-temporal left over that Kant can and does exploit as meaningful in contexts that go beyond specic theoretical determinations. In contrast, if one sets out what I have called a short argument to idealism (because of a remark by Reinhold about how his argument takes a shorter way) that abstracts from these specic forms, then one will have not only a method that directly contrasts with Kants own texts but also a content for idealism that is not restricted by claims about the forms of space and time and what follows from our reliance on them. Following this shorter way, one can end up with an idealism of the kind that Breazeale nds in Kants immediate followers, i.e., one that I take it is no longer Kants own transcendental idealism, insofar as this is an ontological thesis rooted in specic claims about space and time, but is instead, in Breazeales words, simply a general project of proceeding without appealing [in order to ground experience] to anything transcending consciousness (p. 248). In seeing this generic Cartesian project as at the heart of the post-Kantian enterprise, and in agreeing that it differs from the space-time specic argument in Kant, Breazeale, despite all else, seems to be agreeing at the interpretive level with one of my most basic points. At the systematic level, however, he still nds himself very attracted to the Cartesian project, whereas I see it is as a questionable detour that needs to be diagnosed rather than propped up. Breazeale also remains unconvinced by one of my key interpretative claims, namely that Reinhold was chiey responsible for a Cartesian turn away from Kant because of his very inuential and unfortunate attachment to an extreme ideal of autonomy, an absolute demand for a philosophy that would have a wholly self-evident foundation. Breazeale disputes my claim that Reinhold ever held the thesis that a strict form of philosophical autonomy is a condition of autonomy in ordinary life. Here I can only reiterate that I give several references to Reinholds having actually linked moral and political autonomy to prior autonomy established at a philosophical level, and the historical details offered about the social orientation of Reinholds early writings are meant to be one of the main points of my study.8 We might agree that the tight linkage Reinhold insists on can sound absurd, but for me it at least ts in very smoothly with Reinholds extensive popular enlightenment

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284 Karl Ameriks activities, his extraordinarily strong demands for a self-determining system within philosophy, and his clear belief that properly understood philosophy is not an ancillary discipline but has become a necessary basis for all truly rational life. Reinholds philosophical enthusiasm is important, I believe, because it was carried over into many inuential features of philosophies such as Fichtes, which also insist on a strongly unied systematic philosophy and a basis in a very strong claim about freedom that is not clearly ontologically grounded. On Fichte, I do agree at the interpretive level with Breazeales main points that no theoretical argument could establish the truth of Fichtes rst principle (p. 253), and that this is consistent with allowing that there is a theoretical series of arguments worked out on its own within Fichtes system, once the ultimate practical basis is set out. I may also agree with Breazeales proposal that Fichtes system is most defensible (if defensible at all) when understood as a kind of experiment, as the thought that if we start with a practical posit of our absolute freedom and can derive all we want theoretically after all, as conditions of this very freedom, then in the end this might give us enough to feel entitled to our original starting point. This intriguing interpretive proposal reminds me very much of the main tactic of Reinholds second Jena system (and a similar idea is picked up in Larmores remarks), and it certainly sounds less foundational and Cartesian than the Fichte I was criticizing. However, like the work of the later Reinhold, this is also an approach that at the time had much less main line inuence (Hegel despised it) and, as far as I can tell, it has left us with hardly any specic arguments taken up directly by well-known philosophers. Instead of pursuing that proposal further here, I will conclude this section by simply reviewing my response to the three main claims Breazeale made against my interpretation of Kant (pp. 245246). His rst claim was that Kant should be read as beginning with subjective representations. Whereas Breazeale gives no extensive textual support for this claim, I have argued against it (while also acknowledging and giving an explanation for its earlier widespread inuence) not only in my books but also in detailed studies elsewhere.9 This is a matter of Kant scholarship that seems to be one of the few positions shared by myself and such different interpreters as Paul Guyer, Henry Allison, and Michael Friedman. Breazeale claimed, second, that Kant should not be read as assuming the judgments of common sense or specic objective sciences. But he does not distinguish these two very different levels, and takes my interpretation to presume the second, higher level, whereas it really presupposes only the rst, much lower level. Breazeale claimed, third, that Kant must be read as responding to Humean skepticism, but here he does not distinguish two very different issues, radical skepticism about objectivity at all, and a mere skepticism of reason about universal and necessary judgments. The point of my interpretation is to stress how Kants main

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arguments are a response to the second, not the rst kind of skepticism. Once all these distinctions are made, I believe the core of the original Kantian project remains clearly more viable than the very different kinds of interesting, but overly ambitious, projects of the post-Kantians.

III
Charles Larmore elegantly recapitulates the main points of my work and then forcefully draws attention to some very difcult problems that I can only begin to address here. Larmores main challenge comes from his belief that Kants notion of autonomy remains too subjective to do justice to our fundamentally realistic experience of value. Ironically, my own still largely undeveloped views on value overlap considerably with Larmores realism. A background motivation of my book was precisely to make room for a view of Kant that would reveal how genuine autonomy can be consistent with a sensible form of value realism so that we are not forced to make a choice between the two notions, as Larmore and many others have presumed. It is for this reason that I still aim to nd a place for both Larmore and myself within a camp of fans of autonomy but only once the term is liberated from the subjectivistic distortions that popular (mis)readings of Kant have imposed upon it. Before focusing on this fundamental problem of practical philosophy, some other issues should be claried rst. Larmore suggests that I may not have done justice to the concern for unity that can be found in Kants own system, and that underlies the therefore excusable attacks on Kantian dualism that motivate much of post-Kantianism. The passage he cites to bolster his case has a long history of inuence, but I believe it points in quite another direction than his remark implies. Kant does mention the idea that sensibility and understanding spring from a common, but to us unknown root (A 15/ B 29; p. 264), but whereas Larmore says that the idea here is that there must be such a root, Kants statement is only that perhaps (vielleicht) there is one. Moreover, ever since Dieter Henrichs work,10 there have been good reasons for believing contra Heidegger and others that the main point of the passage is precisely to indicate that the root remains unknown to us. Rationalist and empiricist reductions of sensibility to understanding or vice versa are all left behind with the Critical turn, and with good reason. All sorts of underlying roots can still be imagined, of course, and one might even think that God is there as the ultimate source of unity but for the Kantian all this remains nothing that should be straightforwardly asserted or assumed at the outset. Similarly, Larmore suggests that the post-Kantians were correct to say Kant did not have his own key dualisms under rm control (p. 264), and he

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286 Karl Ameriks reiterates Jacobis charge that the categories of the understanding, especially causality, cannot consistently concern both things in themselves and also action upon our sensibility. But this inuential charge cannot be sustained. Nothing in Kants distinction of the realms of understanding and sensibility, or (a different distinction) of things in themselves and appearances rules out the possibility of terms holding in common for both realms (for example, each may be considered singular, or plural), and even our having true and basic beliefs about them. Kants Critical turn inhibits only claims of theoretical knowledge here. Therefore, although Larmore is certainly right to note that Niethammer and others believed Kants system was in trouble and some kind of new systematic method should still be sought for achieving its aims, I have yet to see any signicant inconsistencies that they truly perceived in the Critique. A milder objection that Larmore offers is that it is wrong to for me to suggest that the original post-Kantian project was driven simply by a quest for certainty. But although this quest may have been the rst point that I stressed, I did not mean it to be the main one; on the contrary, I thought it very important also to stress the goal that the idealists were striving after, the project of achieving and securing autonomy. According to my reading, it just happened that for a while this goal seemed to some to require a certain base. A related consideration that Larmore raises is that my reading does not say enough about Kants own thought that reason has a natural tendency to go beyond experience and, in particular, to seek the Unconditioned. This is denitely an important theme about which more could have been said. But I do not read the passage that Larmore cites about reason demanding a system on the basis of one principle (A645/B673) as in tension with my interpretation. Among other things, there is evidence that this principle is nothing other than the notion of judgment and its forms, which guides all of Kants Critical investigations (see Axx, on the common principle). A passage that Larmore himself cites says reason must itself show the way with principles of judgment (Bxiii), and this perfectly ts the passage I cite in which Kant calls for a modest system.11 Moreover, I believe this issue is not exactly the same one that Kant has in view when he speaks in the Dialectic about the demand of reason (A332/ B389). Kant is perfectly willing to stress that in some contexts there are ambitious demands of Reason in a capital R sense that a Critical thinker should precisely not expect to nd satised (just as in the search for one root of our faculties) and should regard as the unrealistic demands of an abstract faculty. Matters are complicated by the fact that sometimes Kant speaks generically about how we should follow reasons own devising (Bxiii), but in that case there is no ground to believe he does or should mean Reason in the strong Idealist sense that contrasts sharply with the (pure) Understanding. A more complicated consideration that Larmore raises concerns the issue of considering theoretical reason to be

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self-legislative. Larmore argues that within his own Critical system (by his own lights, p. 268), Kant should have allowed absolute theoretical, and not only practical, claims of self-legislation, since in its theoretical activity too, the mind is bound by categorical norms by the rules of logic, for example (p. 268), and, supposedly, the only possible Kantian account of categorical norms must be in terms of self-legislation. Larmore takes such an account to be absurd, on the ground that ultimate norms cannot ever be explained as a matter of our creativity but Larmore thinks Kant had no other internally consistent alternative to pursue, despite the reservations that the second Critiques doctrine of the fact of reason expressed about proving our freedom theoretically. There are a number of different issues to be sorted out here. I also emphasize that ultimately Kant restricts himself to practical and not theoretical arguments for our absolute activity; and, like Larmore, I see this as an unstable position that calls out for attempts at a stronger backing. However, I believe that this restriction has to do with whether we can have theoretical certainty about being absolutely free in individual acts in an efcient causal sense, and this issue should be distinguished from that of justiably claiming that reason as a formal justicatory ground can be in some sense self-legislative.12 (Readers can miss this point, since Kant thinks that we in fact have and need both efcient and formal self-determination, and so he does not always clearly stress the distinction between these two components of the selfs absolute activity.) One might question efcient self-determination while not at the same time disputing formal selfdetermination (or vice-versa). Larmore seems to believe that self-legislation always must mean something like mere imposition, as in arbitrary reexive and efcient causality, a matter of making something authoritative merely by taking it to be authoritative. But from my perspective this is precisely not the way to understand genuine Kantian self-legislation in its formal sense. Kant repeatedly distinguishes the concepts of legislative and executive determination,13 making it obvious that the self that is acting in pure legislation is nothing like the arbitrary imposing individual who is the villain of countless contemporary tracts against autonomy worship.14 Kant thus can regard the principle of contradiction, for example (or the table of the forms of judgment), as a categorical principle of transcendental theoretical reason without in any way implying that its validity as opposed to its application is a matter of any of our empirical impositions. In other words, I agree with Larmore that if autonomy means anything it means self-legislation, (p. 269), but I do not believe that for Kant any of these terms has to be understood as a matter of giving principles validity simply by imposing them on ourselves in any ordinary sense as an efcient cause. Larmores way of speaking about autonomy and I would certainly grant that, given the very history of post-Kantian inuence that I have charted, this

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288 Karl Ameriks has become its most popular meaning uses paradigms such as voting procedures, which are clearly settled by individuals working together in ordinary empirical self-legislative ways. And his critical point is that this is an activity that takes place against a background of reasons that we must antecedently recognize (p. 269). Suppose we grant this point. What follows, I think, is simply that mere efcient self-legislation cannot account for categorical norms fully or all the way down. This still leaves open the idea that there might be a kind of self-legislation in a formal sense that is a source of such norms and it is precisely this kind of autonomy that I believe is Kants prime concern (even if he is also very interested in autonomy in many of its empirical, e.g., political, dimensions). Just as in general with Kant we must distinguish the transcendental work of the necessary forms of judgmental representation (which determines the necessary conditions for all particular empirical cognitive claims) from an individual selfs empirical theoretical acts, so too in Kantian practical philosophy we must distinguish the legislative work of pure practical reason, and the necessary rules it reveals for proper willing, from questions about particular acts of will. Larmore contends that the most one might get along this line is self-governance, which is a matter of seeing and doing what is right regardless of the threats and rewards that others might offer (p. 270). But, as he also notes, I have proposed that we understand self-legislation for Kant as a matter of following the sheer rationality in our essential nature. I take this to be a positive notion that goes beyond mere self-governance, since one might be selfgoverned, as dened so far, and simply go off on a whim.15 The rst crucial point about Kants notion of reason as self-legislative is that it involves laws in a strong sense. His moral rules are not simply generalized intentions but principles whose generalization is supported by reason in general (e.g., the principle respect rational agency has an inherent positive ground that makes it unlike the general but pointless maxim dont anybody whistle while you eat). This makes them self-legislated in the strong sense that that for each rational being they are from and for its own reason as such, and not merely in fact in accord with it. Note that the self here is obviously tied to the nature or structure of reason itself. It is not a self in any mere empirical or psychological or physical sense, although such an empirical self might live in actual accord with the laws of pure practical reason, just as individual physical objects may act in accord with pure concepts that have a meaning that transcends merely empirical contexts. The self-legislation of reason is literally reasons determination of itself; it is what the idea of reason determines should be done in order to realize reason. This might sound like a mysterious hypostatization, but it need not be understood in any mystical way because the determining here, although it is reexive, is originally formal rather than efcient. The claim is not that reason literally does something, as a person

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might cross a street, but simply that the nature of reason itself primarily determines (as a matter of essence) what is for reason (after all, wouldnt it be the most appropriate determinant for such a thing?). In theoretical contexts, this is no more mysterious than saying that consistency is required by reason itself which of course leaves open the empirical issue of whether particular empirical beings will assert consistent sentences. In practical contexts, Kants notion does get more controversial because it is the thought that pure practical reason can generate norms ultimately out of itself, and also that these are norms that otherwise rational beings can understandably disobey. This notion might be a non-starter for a skeptic or radical empiricist, but it should be at least a possibility for Larmore, who allows the notion of categorical practical norms. Another way to put this interpretation is to say that it takes the autonomy issue to be literally what Kant says it fundamentally is, namely a matter of the autonomy of reason; we might not immediately catch this simply because he calls it Wille (IV, p. 433), but for Kant this just is equivalent to pure practical reason. This is nothing like the willful autonomy of me in the me generation sense of our times (a derogatory sense with predecessors even in Greece, where the Sophoclean chorus chastized Antigone for being autonomous16). At the same time, Kants libertarianism and other features of his thought insure that, unlike other universalistic theories such as utilitarianism, his theory does not ignore the common belief in the ultimate reality and signicance of the individual human agent. Just as in his discussion of the transcendental features of knowledge, there is no reason to presume that Kants discussion of pure practical reason does not apply to, express, and fulll concrete individuals, even if it is no way built up from an investigation of their mere natural and empirical peculiarities. A major stumbling block for many interpreters here has no doubt been Kants talk in the Groundwork about a moral being as subject only to a law given by himself (IV, p. 432). But Kant immediately makes clear that the self of this being is generic and its lawgiving must be universal in a transcendental rather than merely empirical sense, for it has to do with the reference of all action by which alone a kingdom of ends is possible (IV, p. 434). There is nothing in the notion of this kingdom that forces a contingent and arbitrary active as opposed to realistic and appreciative reading of the moral rules, since they are dictated by the general conditions of what necessarily makes a universal harmony of wills possible. They do involve activity but in a harmless way insofar as they entail principles that every rational will is actually supposed to approve and act from in order to fulll rational activity in general. Readers may also be misled by the fact that Kant speaks of maxims as being imposed (IV, p. 434), but this can be literally true at an individual level (since the incorporation of a maxim in ones life is a matter of contingent self-imposition) even while the laws that the

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290 Karl Ameriks maxims observe are not themselves imposed in any troublesome empirical sense.17 There obviously remain many questions here, such as whether the idea of pure practical reason is rich enough to be norm generating in anything like the way that logic and mathematics may be. Also, once reason is understood, as it is here, as something more like a pure and general faculty than an individual act or orientation, one can wonder how particular sensible agents can come to have an interest, let alone a sense of overriding obligation, in respect to it. After all, an underground man might well say, yes, I understand now that that is what the faculty of reason (even the voice of reason in me) says but I am not going to follow that voice, I am going to follow my own natural, egocentric voice! Not surprisingly, this brings us back to some of the most basic problems of Kantian ethics how can pure practical reason provide content, and how can it motivate?18 These are challenging questions, but they are not the same as the question that has been our main topic, namely, whether there is a so far at least intelligible notion of autonomy that is truly close to Kants own texts (especially his rejections of all empiricist ethics) and yet does not have the self-defeating characteristics that Larmore fears. To the extent that my considerations point to a way that such a notion can make sense after all, autonomy can have not only a fate but also a future.19

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NOTES 1 See Paul Franks, Does Post-Kantian Skepticism Exist? Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus International Yearbook of German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks and Jurgen Stolzenberg, vol. 1, 2003 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter), pp. 14163. 2 See my Problems from Van Cleves Kant: Experience and Objects, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66(2003), pp. 196202; and Idealism from Kant to Berkeley, in S. Gersh and D. Moran (eds), Eriugena, Berkeley and the Idealist Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), pp. 00*. 3 In referring to Kants Critique of Pure Reason I use the standard references to the A (1781) and B (1787) editions, and the Norman Kemp Smith translation (New York: St. Martins Press, 1965). References to Kants Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals will be to the volume (IV) and page of the Akademie Ausgabe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900 ) and the Mary Gregor translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 4 This is a major theme throughout my Kants Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982; second, revised ed., Oxford University Press, 2000). 5 For more background on this point, see my Introduction: Interpreting German Idealism, in K. Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 117. 6 This point is argued in my Kants Theory of Mind and Kant and Short Arguments to Humility, in P. Cicovacki (ed.) Kants Legacy: Essays in Honor of L. W. Beck (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2001), pp. 16794; and supported by new data in Lectures on Metaphysics/ Immanuel Kant, ed. and tr. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 7 Breazeale (n. 6) helpfully points out that when I refer to this passage a printers error gives an incorrect reference to Bxix. A very similar passage can be found in Groundwork, IV, p. 456.

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8 See Kant and the Fate of Autonomy, p. 123 (e.g., rights can be recognized by states only when philosophers are clear about them), and my Reinholds Challenge: Systematic Philosophy for the Public, in M. Bondeli and A. Lazzari (eds), Fichte-Studien Supplementa (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 88113; and Reinhold uber Systematik, Popularitat und die Historische Wende , Philosophie ohne Beinamen, ed. M. Bondeli and A. Lazzari (Basel: Schwalbe, 2003), pp. 30336. 9 See e.g., my Kants Transcendental Deduction as a Regressive Argument, Kant-Studien 69 (1978), pp. 27385; Recent Work on Kants Theoretical Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1982), pp. 124; Kant and Guyer on Apperception, Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie 65 (1983), pp. 17486; Contemporary German Epistemology, Inquiry 25 (1982), pp. 12538; The First Edition Paralogisms of Pure Reason, in G. Mohr and M. Willaschek (eds), Immanuel Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft, (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998), pp. 36988. 10 See especially Henrich, Uber die Einheit der Subjektivitat, Philosophische Rundschau 3(1955), pp. 2869; English version, On the Unity of Subjectivity, tr. G. Zoeller, in R. Velkley (ed.), The Unity of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 1754. 11 See Kant and the Fate of Autonomy, p. 37, which cites Lectures on Metaphysics/ Immanuel Kant, p. 111. 12 See my Zu Kants Argumentation am Anfang des Dritten Abschnitts der Grundlegung, in Systematische Ethik mit Kant, ed. Hans-Ulrich Baumgarten and Carsten Held (Freiburg: Alber, 2001), pp. 2454; and Pure Reason of Itself Alone Sufces to Determine the Will, in O. Hoffe (ed.) Immanuel Kant: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), pp. 99114. 13 See my On Schneewind and Kants Method in Ethics, Ideas y Valores 102 (1996), pp. 28 53; as well as John Hare, Review of Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, and The Sources of Normativity, Faith and Philosophy 17 (2000), pp. 37183, and Kant on Recognizing our Duties as Gods Commands, ibid., pp. 45978; and Patrick Kain, Kants Moral Constructivism and his Conception of Legislation, in The Paideia Project Online: Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. 1999= http://www.bu.edu/wcp/ Papers/Teth/TethKan.htm; and cf. Clemens Schwaiger, Kategorische und andere Imperative: zur Entwicklung von Kants praktischer Philosophie bis 1785 (Stuttgart: FrommannHolzboog, 1999). 14 This tendency is effectively criticized in several works by Larmore and also in Donald H. Regan, The Value of Rational Nature, Ethics 112 (2002), pp. 26791. 15 Hence I agree with much of Regans analysis but not his presumption that the Kantian agent must either choose on the basis of empirical desire or else must launch herself arbitrarily (ibid., p. 281). This perspective too quickly forecloses the possibility that a rational being can have an understandable attachment to its own rational nature that is neither arbitrary nor rooted in a prior empirical interest. 16 I am indebted to Ido Geiger for drawing my attention to the striking use of this term in the play. 17 For this reason and many other considerations given in the material cited above, note 13, I believe that even these passages t a Kantian value theory that is consistent with taking moral ends to be fully real, although not in the absurd sense of stretching to a realm that is beyond reason altogether. Here again it is important to keep in mind the point that Kants transcendental idealism is specically a doctrine of what is ideal because of space and time, and it in no way implies a non-realism about values. On Kantian value realism and respect as the acknowledgement of objective value, cf. Allen Wood, Kants Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 46f. and 157f. 18 I believe Kant does have an answer here about how reason can appropriately provide an interest in acting morally, but I am not so sure he has a non-question-begging answer to the question of why we must choose always to let the voice of reason override that of nature. See my Kant on the Good Will, in O. Hoffe (ed.), Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989), pp. 4565; and Kant and the Fate of Autonomy, Ch. 7. The deepest problem here may be that the general capacity to set ends may not be of clear moral worth (since all the ends that a free being might actually set could be evil and compatible

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with an externally harmonious world of agents), whereas the capacity to set good ends may turn out to have value only on question-begging grounds or insofar as something external to rational nature is given moral priority after all. 19 I wish to express my indebtedness to my co-symposiasts very helpful essays as well as their seminal earlier work on related themes, especially Breazeales Fichtes Aenesidemus Review and the Transformation of German Idealism, Review of Metaphysics 34 (1981), pp. 54568; and Between Kant and Fichte: Karl Leonhard Reinholds Elementary Philosophy , Review of Metaphysics 35 (1982), pp. 785821; and Larmores The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and his recent philosophy reviews in The New Republic. I am also indebted to discussants at two APA symposia on the volume, and especially to Eric Watkins, Marcelo Stamm, Fred Beiser, Patrick Kain, and Paul Franks. Received 14 August 2002 Karl Ameriks, Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, 100 Malloy Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA. E-mail: Karl.P.Ameriks.2@nd.edu

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