Immanuel Kant

German philosopher (1724-1804), author of the three Critiques. In Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, Kant represents both the paradigm of transcendental thinking and its fundamental limitation: Kant grasps the necessity of the transcendental turn but misexecutes it by postulating "world-transcending subjective a priori structures" that contradict our perceptually attested immersion in the world.

Key Points

  • Merleau-Ponty grants the "soundness of the basic movement of reflection" leading to Kantian idealism but rejects Kant's postulation of extra-mundane yet world-determining grounds within the subject (PP, pp. lxxii-lxxvi; V&I, pp. 29-37)
  • Kant's error according to Merleau-Ponty: mis-specifying the transcendental problem by (1) detaching the possibility of a world from its actuality, and (2) conflating the possibility of a world with the thinking of a world, endowing it with the character of a hypothesis (V&I, p. 34)
  • The cost of absorbing the Transcendental Aesthetic into the Analytic "would be to turn man into God" — sensibility must not be collapsed into understanding (PP, pp. 228, 317-318)

Details

The Third Critique as Pivot

Gardner argues that the Critique of the Power of Judgement (CPJ, 1790) is the crucial text for understanding Merleau-Ponty's relationship to Kant. In the PP Preface, Merleau-Ponty identifies three key discoveries in the CPJ:

  1. A unity of imagination and understanding prior to the object
  2. A unity of subjects prior to the object (in the experience of beauty)
  3. A "hidden art of the imagination" that conditions categorial activity — "it is no longer merely aesthetic judgment that rests upon this hidden art, but also knowledge" (PP, p. lxxxi)

If the subject has a "nature" — if it discovers itself "as a nature spontaneously conforming to the law of the understanding" — then the hidden art of imagination must ground not only aesthetic judgement but all knowledge. This commits Kant to a pre-conceptual order that Merleau-Ponty claims as his own starting point.

Reflective vs. Determinative Judgement

The CPJ distinguishes reflective judgement (which seeks a universal for a given particular) from determinative judgement (which subsumes a particular under a given universal). Reflective judgement is "absolutely indispensable for empirical knowledge as such" (Gardner, §2). Its exercise is correlated with the assumption that nature is "purposive for our cognition." What Merleau-Ponty calls crystallization — the lateral becoming of objects within the perceptual field — takes the place of this Kantian purposivity.

The Pre-Critical Beweisgrund (1763)

Gardner (Thought's Indebtedness) argues that Kant's Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes contains a proto-transcendental insight: thought is anchored in being through the ineliminability of possibility. Thinking manifests the reality of possibility immediately — not through inference or the PSR but through a recognition that "we cannot think away the situation of thinking's being possible." This pre-predicative necessity anticipates the Critical concept of transcendental proof; the impossibility of thinking away the material conditions for thought parallels the irremovability of space and time in the Transcendental Aesthetic. Schelling will later identify exactly this structure as unvordenklich being.

Crucially, the Beweisgrund's insight does not come to light when read through Spinoza's eyes (contra Boehm). Kant works along a new dimension distinct from both the PSR and PNC: "compatibility with and grounding of the possibility of anything being thought at all." At fn. 15 of Gardner's paper, Kant is quoted as unifying formal and material possibility around the same root: "through the cancellation [Aufhebung] of the law of contradiction, the ultimate logical ground of all that can be thought, all possibility vanishes, and there is nothing left to think [nichts dabei mehr zu denken sei]" (Beweisgrund 2:82). What makes a thought thinkable is that there is something zu Denken — and this is what the thinking-away test locates.

Kant also distinguishes in the Beweisgrund two ways possibility can be grounded: as Bestimmungen (determinations, direct inherence in the Necessary Being) or as Folgen (consequences, indirect supervenience). The distinction provides Kant's anti-Spinozist resource — it permits "slack" between the Necessary Being and the Realitäten supervening on it. Real oppositions (opposing forces, pain), negations, and defects must be Folgen rather than Bestimmungen, since predicating them of the Necessary Being directly would yield contradictory predicates or defectiveness. Kant: "all reality is, in one way or another, embraced by the ultimate real ground" (2:87) — but not as determinations of it.

The "absolute position" ambiguity (fn. 16)

Gardner identifies a crucial unresolved ambiguity in Kant's proto-technical term for existence, "absolute position/positing" (absolute Setzung). Kant is "poised between" two readings:

  • (a) Strong metaphysical: existence consists in nothing but occupation of absolute position. This ties existence logically to thought — "position" denotes a role within the content of thought, "positing" implies an act of thinking.
  • (b) Weak: absolute position is merely the marker or criterion of satisfaction of the concept of existence.

Kant does not recognize this ambiguity. On Gardner's reading, Schelling's Quelle is the resolution of it, in favour of (b). The Daß of God (pure thatness, actus purus — see dass-was-distinction) occupies the conceptual space (b) but which Kant left underdetermined: existence as what is not reducible to occupation of a role within the content of thought.

This makes the Kant-Schelling arc run not only through the proof's method but through a specific unresolved tension in Kant's own concept of existence that the Quelle (1850) resolves.

Schelling's late philosophy returns to and expands the Beweisgrund's insight. Schelling's verdict: "with his concept of the Ideal of Pure Reason, Kant did arrive at (and even mastered) the standpoint which Schelling has set forth; on the other hand, he did so 'just barely', and 'did not progress beyond it'" (SW XI: 585).

As Read by Merleau-Ponty (Nature Lectures, 1956-57)

In 1956-57, Merleau-Ponty returns to the CPJ, which he now suggests "blurs the correlation of subject and object" and "at least recognizes the possibility that organic form provides an epistemological alternative to object-construction" (Gardner, §3, fn. 30). This Schellingian reading of Kant aligns with Merleau-Ponty's broader trajectory from the transcendentalism of PP toward the ontology of V&I.

Connections

  • is criticized by maurice-merleau-ponty — Kant misexecutes the transcendental turn by imposing world-transcending structures
  • but validates pre-objectivity via the Third Critique — Kant's "hidden art of the imagination" commits him to what Merleau-Ponty asserts
  • is surpassed by friedrich-schelling's Real-Idealismus — Schelling converts Kant's "merely subjective" assumptions into a fully realistic metaphysics of nature
  • anticipates Schelling's positive philosophy via the Beweisgrund — the proto-transcendental insight that possibility presupposes actuality is expanded in Schelling's Quelle into the thesis that thought is indebted to being (unvordenklich)
  • bequeaths an unresolved ambiguity to Schelling's Daß/Was distinction — fn. 16 of Gardner's paper: Kant's "absolute position/positing" is poised between strong-metaphysical and weak readings; Schelling's Daß (pure thatness, actus purus) occupies the weak-reading space
  • is radicalized by Merleau-Ponty's chiasm — chiasmic form does for V&I what reflective judgement does for the CPJ, but without Kant's subjective restriction
  • contrasts with edmund-husserl's transcendentalism — Husserl takes up the CPJ "when he speaks of a teleology of consciousness" (PP, p. lxxxi)

Open Questions

  • Does Gardner's transcendental reading of PP do justice to the role of embodiment, which seems to exceed any transcendental framework?
  • What would a fuller account of Merleau-Ponty's engagement with the Opus postumum look like (Gardner notes comparison with flesh as "ether" — V&I pp. 140, 147)?

Sources