Kant and the Speculative End(s) of Human History

Wesley Phillips Translation, far from clouding the original text, may shed new light upon it. Foreign words make evident a concept that was not self-evident from the original, according to a comprehension of the text as a constellation of concepts. A translation of Kant’s ‘Mutmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte’ (1786) will be a case in point in what follows – taking ‘text’ in the expanded sense of Kant’s corpus of writings.1 In a footnote to his 1983 translation of the essay, Ted Humphrey explained his decision to render Kant’s title as ‘Speculative Beginning of Human History’. At the time, the Anglophone literature on Kant possessed H. B. Nisbet’s ‘Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History’ (1970).2 We may assume, therefore, that Humphrey had Nisbet in mind when he complained that, ‘conjectural … does not seem coherent with Kant’s other writings’. A twin motivation lies behind Humphrey’s departure from Nisbet. In the first instance, ‘conjectural’ remains too weak for what is required. Conjecture is mere guesswork (con-jecture = ‘thrown together’). Second, Humphrey seeks to connect the mutmasslich to the speculativ, the latter of which weighs heavier in the Kantian lexicon. Although speculation has revealingly become synonymous with conjecture in more general usage, philosophical speculation ought not be mere guesswork, as we shall see. And yet, at no point does Kant write ‘speculativer Anfang’. Humphrey’s choice of ‘Speculative Beginning’ is instead based upon a claim that the mutmasslich of the 1786 essay fits precisely with the definition of the Latinate speculativ in the (more-or-less) contemporaneous Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87):

Theoretical knowledge is speculative if it concerns an object, or those concepts of an object, which cannot be reached in any experience. It is so named to distinguish it from the knowledge of nature, which concerns only those

1 Immanuel Kant, Akademie-Ausgabe (AA), VIII: 107-124. 2 Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 221.

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objects or predicates of objects which can be given in a possible experience (A634-5/B662-3).

Humphrey concludes: ‘In the main in this essay, Kant’s use of mutmasslich conforms with this definition’ (of the speculative).3 But reference to this passage from the ‘Critique of speculative theology’, towards the end of the Critique, is not of itself sufficient to show why mutmasslich must be speculative and not merely conjectural. This, in part, is because Humphrey actually mistranslates Erkenntnis as ‘knowledge’ when it should be ‘cognition’ – in order to reserve ‘knowledge’ for Kenntnis, conceptual or discursive knowledge. Theoretical cognition is speculative insofar as its object cannot be given in experience. But cognition is very far from being nothing. The ‘objects’ of such cognition thus resemble Kant’s ideas of reason, and speculation seems to occupy a parallel position to that of metaphysics in the critique of pure reason. However, judging from the Prolegomena to any future metaphysics (1783), speculative philosophy cannot become a critique of pure reason, since it remains bound to the old, dogmatic metaphysics. There can be no future speculative philosophy. On the contrary, ‘the endeavors of all speculative philosophy now stand at the point of total dissolution’.4 The position of speculative philosophy in the Critique is, in contrast to the Prolegomena, fundamentally ambivalent. In one sense, Kant reserves his definition of the speculativ for the highest point of the Critique, at the end of the Doctrine of Elements. But in another sense, it comes too late, after everything has already happened. We cannot but help feel that Kant is going over old ground in these reflections upon arguments for the existence of an absolute being. This ambivalent status of speculation can be extended to the Kantian corpus. For, if speculative philosophy is dead then why does Kant continue to deploy the term positively in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason and in the two subsequent Critiques? Prompted by Humphrey’s fortuitous translation, an attempt will be made to redeem speculative philosophy within Kant’s 3 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 60. 4 Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy After 1781, ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath, trans. Gary Hatfield and Michael Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 167, AA IV: 380.

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work by determining speculation as the historical task of human reason itself. Rather then being inconsistent, the Critique and the anthropological essays can (up to a point) be shown to be mutually supporting. Where the former receives a critique of idealism from the latter, the latter becomes metaphysically substantial through the former. For it is not clear from the essay alone – based as it seemingly is upon an interpretation of the book of Genesis – how the ‘Mutmasslicher Anfang’ essay remains speculative and not merely conjectural. Speculative history: Kant or Hegel? The reason that this question is important is that, taken together with ‘Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Intent’ (1784), the ‘Speculative Beginning’ anticipates Hegelian critiques of both Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophies of history. What is the nature of this anticipation? Is Kant’s anthropology simply moving in the direction of Hegel’s philosophy of history? Is there anything, in that case, within Kant’s philosophy of history that cannot already be gleaned, in a more worked out manner, from that of Hegel? Can Kant offer an ironic corrective to Hegel’s concept of the speculative – that which was intended to correct and ultimately cancel the ‘Kantian philosophy’? In his Differenzschrift (1801) Hegel attributes the breakthrough of speculative philosophy to Fichte and expressly not to Kant: ‘As philosophy, [Fichte’s] is the most thorough and profound speculation, all the more remarkable because at the time when it appeared even the Kantian philosophy had proved unable to awaken Reason to the lost concept of genuine speculation’.5 Hegel has two traits in mind when he speaks of speculation. The first, as the term suggests, comprises a vision of the whole, or a unifying vision. Hegel sees in Fichte’s and Schelling’s ideas of intellectual intuition and absolute identity two failed attempts to overcome a set of dualisms that cripple the Kantian project – all of which can be reduced to a basic dualism of finitude and infinitude (but also, as popularised by Reinhold: intuition and concept). From a Kantian perspective, speculation thus stated lapses into dogmatic metaphysics (namely, 5 G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. Walter Cerf (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 118.

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Spinozism), since such a vision is mere conjecture about a whole that cannot possibly be seen. Nevertheless, Hegel’s sense of speculation remains critical to the extent that it now becomes the activity, not contemplation, of human reason itself. The difference between Kant’s adjectival use of ‘speculative’ (almost always preceding the nouns ‘reason’ and ‘philosophy’) and Hegel’s ‘speculate/speculation’ will be of fundamental importance in what follows. For Kant, the queen of the sciences is concerned with looking at the bounds of knowledge. For Hegel, science as such (Wissenschaft) must also go beyond these bounds, since Hegel understands knowledge in a different way to Kant. In both Kant and his idealist critics, a moment of contingency must be constitutive of speculative philosophising. Speculation includes the as yet unseen as well as the seen, however clear the vision might be – as if through a glass darkly. A suspicion remains, of course, about the space for contingency within Hegel’s specific concept of the speculative. From the standpoint of our flawed historical present – one that Kant knew about – we actually want something contingent in our philosophical system, since this opens up the possibility of a different future. Such possibility is negated (as impossibility) when the totality of knowledge, the end of history, has already been seen by the philosopher in advance of that end. This concept of the speculative vision of the whole then risks a form of panlogicism that negates speculation from the outset. Critical theorists from Theodor W. Adorno to Jürgen Habermas (and after) have identified in Kant resources for a response to Hegelian panlogicism, without relinquishing a concept of history. Adorno found in Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic a proto- negative dialectics – an advance upon Hegel insofar as the antagonistic movement of the ‘logic of semblance [Schein]’ resists the stasis implicit to panlogicism.6 The end (or beginning?) of history is now quietly determined either as an infinite task of critique or as an event that comes at an infinitely unknowable time. As Gillian Rose was acutely aware, Adorno’s dialectic pays the price of lapsing into a set of Kantian antinomies that Hegel has, at the very least, shown to be problematic. If the infinite task never gets a hold on the finite, 6 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990), 393.

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historical world, then either it ceases to have been a human task or it becomes a ‘critical’ methodology that cannot confront its own norms for critique. The latter issue has appeared, in a more narrowly epistemological context, within recent scholarship on Kant and German idealism.7 In Hegel Contra Sociology (1981), Rose suggested that this problem within contemporary philosophy and theory was a consequence of its genesis in neo-Kantianism, specifically in the latter’s rigid demarcation between the problems of value and validity.8 And in her essay ‘From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking – Hegel and Adorno’ (1987), she claimed that Adorno’s negative dialectic misapprehends and precludes genuine speculation.9 Its textual basis is a letter of 1812, in which Hegel sharply distinguishes between the abstract, dialectical and speculative moments of philosophising:

The second stage or form is the dialectical … The [Kantian] antinomies contain deep fundamentals of the antinomical [content] of reason. Yet these fundamentals lie concealed and are recognized in the antinomies so to speak unthinkingly and insufficiently in their truth. On the other hand, the antinomies really constitute all too poor a dialectic. Nothing beyond tortuous antitheses … The third form is the truly speculative form, i.e., knowledge of what is opposed in its very oneness, more precisely the knowledge that the opposites are in truth one. Only this speculative stage is truly philosophical.10

Dialectics, so often attributed to Hegel is, Rose points out, Kantian. Hegel is more interested in speculation, since it transcends the ‘fixed determinateness’ of permanent (infinite) opposition.11 As to the charge of panlogicism, Rose attempts to 7 In an unsatisfactory manner, for some: cf. Frederick Beiser, ‘Normativity in Neo-Kantianism: Its Rise and Fall,’ International Journal of Philosophical Studies 17, no. 1 (2009). 8 Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone, 1981), chap. 1. 9 Gillian Rose, ‘From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking – Hegel and Adorno’, in Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 53-63. 10 G. W. F. Hegel, The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christine Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 281-2. 11 Ibid., 280.

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maintain a moment of ‘non-identity’, and hence contingency, in her speculative vision. For, ‘[t]o read a proposition “speculatively” means that the identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a lack of identity between subject and predicate’.12 But her attempt is cut short by a failure to interrogate this non-identity (furthermore, what if the ‘proposition’ is either meaningless or true?). This is an acute issue for Rose, given that the concept of non-identity, often associated with Adorno, seems to come out of a philosophy of reflection that, in Hegelian terms, remains Kantian. Can an alternative concept of the speculative be found in an alternative reading of Kant – one that Hegel did not, after all, grasp? This alternative reading would have to include the essays ‘Speculative Beginning’ and ‘Idea for a Universal History’, each contained in Humphrey’s Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. The foregoing question was not in fact alien to the translator’s interests.13 Speculative history and the philosophical novel The composition of ‘Speculative Beginning’ was prompted by J. G. Herder’s ruminations on the same subject, and was published in the Berliner Monatschrift. Kant refers to the piece as a ‘flight of fancy [Luftreise]’. In the difficult opening paragraph, the most important of the entire essay, Kant remarks,

to produce a history entirely from speculations [Mutmassungen] alone seems no better than to sketch a romance [Roman]. Thus it could not go by the name of speculative history but rather only that of fiction [Erdichtung].14

This statement appears to confirm the status of the piece: a flight of fancy. But this appearance is deceptive. If we read more 12 Rose, Hegel, 48-9. 13 Humphrey dedicated the book to the memory of Adorno’s Frankfurt School colleague, Herbert Marcuse. This is significant because Hegel Contra Sociology is the alternative ‘critical’ interpretation of Hegel to Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution. Rose sought to question the means of the transition ‘from philosophy to social theory’, as Marcuse confidently put it. It is possible that Humphrey did not share Rose’s concern about the neo-Kantianism in contemporary philosophy. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1991), pt. II. 14 Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, 49. AA VIII: 109.

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closely, Kant draws a subtle yet crucial distinction between Erdichtung (Humphrey has ‘fiction’, but also: fabrication) and Roman (‘romance’, also: novel). ‘Speculations alone … could not go by the name of speculative history’, but only Erdichtung. What are the conditions for the possibility of the production of history, from ‘reports’ – whether we understand the ‘report’ as a fable or as a collection of historical data? There is a quasi-transcendental critique of the art and science of history here. The addition of ‘history’ elevates the speculative above the purely fictional. Conversely, the science of history becomes philosophical only through being speculative. Where historiography conjectures about the intervening stages of history, from the appearances of those stages in reports, philosophers of history speculate about the ‘first beginnings, as far as these are made by nature’. Despite opting for ‘conjectural’ over ‘speculative’ in the most recent English translation, Allan W. Wood actually follows Humphrey in picking up on the reciprocal relationship between mutmasslich and Anfang: hence, ‘Conjectural beginning of human history’.15 The beginning is conjectural (or speculative) just as the conjectural (or speculative) is a beginning. This first beginning or principle arises (as a problem) from knowledge of human history, but does not comprise conceptual knowledge in itself. This constitutive necessity of the speculative is confirmed in the opening lines of ‘Idea for a Universal History’: ‘History’,

which concerns itself with providing a narrative of these appearances [of human actions], regardless of how deeply hidden their causes may be – allows us to hope that if we examine the play of the human will’s freedom in the large, we can discover its course to conform to rules as well as to hope that what strikes us as uncomplicated and unpredictable in the single individual may in the history of an entire species be discovered to be the steady progress and slow development of its original capacities.16

The two essays under consideration are connected by their shared

15 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 160-75. 16 Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, 29. AA VIII: 17.

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search for a first principle of universal history’s development – a principle that cannot, in principle, appear in the particular actions of human history, but can nevertheless be ascertained through (narrative) abstraction from those actions. Revealingly, Kant refers to each of these essays as a ‘Roman’. Universal history with a cosmopolitan intent is not mere conjecture. Nor is it merely given, as something already achieved. Rather, universal history is speculative. The two philosophical novels give the two ends of the principle of human history as a whole – its ‘first beginning’ and its ‘unknown natural end, as if following a guiding thread’.17 The latter, ‘universal cosmopolitan state’ is not yet upon us. Kant is particularly horrified by the continuation of warfare in Europe. But there was enough to suppose that such a state ‘will at last come to be realised’.18 Unfortunately, the catastrophes and crises of modernity force us to lean upon Kant’s erstwhile rational account of practical reason, as modelled upon the lawfulness of nature and not history.19 Nevertheless, Kant at least attempts to acknowledge the contingency of history through his construction of the Roman as a philosophical genre. ‘Speculative Beginning’ and ‘Idea for a Universal History’ jointly constitute a new attempt to determine reason pragmatically rather than solely rationally, as the historical task of human-rational being. They attempt to ‘finitise’ the whole as history in a manner that certainly anticipates Hegel. For Kant’s essays can be understood as a meta-critique of the antinomy of regulative reason (upon which practical reason relies in an under-examined manner), as set out in the Dialectic. And since what is at stake is a task, the ‘Speculative Beginning’ can be read in terms of the speculative end(s) of human history. As Hannah Arendt stated in her lectures on Kant’s essays post-1781, ‘Kant is never interested in the past; what interests him is the future of the species.’20 In ‘Speculative Beginning’, Kant himself warns of the ‘nihilism of [the] wish to return’ to some golden age.21 One explanation for Kant’s focus upon the ‘beginning’ is that the future end (or ends) is in fact a new beginning of something else – something utopian, of course.

17 Ibid. AA VIII: 17. 18 Ibid., 38, AA VIII: 28. 19 Ibid., 29, AA VIII: 17. 20 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, trans. Ronald Beiner (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 8. 21 Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, 59, AA VIII: 122.

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There is, however, a great tension between the concepts of an end and ends of human history – ends, in terms of the structural-individual realisation of ‘original capacities’, and end, in terms of the historical-collective realisation of the ‘universal cosmopolitan state’, which would presumably embody or guarantee those individual capacities. Within Kant’s practical philosophy, ends tend to be understood structurally rather than historically. The ‘kingdom of ends’ has an admittedly utopian resonance. But ends are ultimately already there before each of us within a community of rational souls. Zwecken are regulative ideals – human relations that we repeatedly try and fail to meet. Rose thus contends, ‘Reason, full of surprises, is not Kantian self-limiting reason, nor is it the endless task of Kantian moral rationality, according to which duty ever fails wholly to prevail over inclination’.22 The perpetuation of this moral subject is coextensive with the individualistic nature of Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole. No matter how good I am, I cannot pass on my goodness to the next person or the next generation. This suggests a cyclical rather than liner history, as if modelled upon the cycles of life and death in the world of nature. How can there be historical change if each generation must begin anew? According to Arendt, Kant is compelled to shift from the moral to the political subject, and, on this reading, from ‘ends’ to ‘end’. This tension is certainly evident from the ‘Speculative Beginning’, which risks regressive circularity. Kant’s simpler of two concerns in this essay involves mapping the structure of human experience onto collective human history, or ‘ends’ on to ‘end’ – ‘if one presupposes that in their first beginnings these actions were no better or worse than we now find them to be’. The second concern goes beyond that one, since it arises from the speculative nature of both the structural-individual and historical-collective accounts of human experience: ‘A history of freedom’s first development, from its original capacities in the nature of man, is … something different from the history of freedom’s progression, which can only be based upon reports’. The original capacities do not appear, but can nevertheless be deduced from their products. Philosophy can identify the faculties of the understanding, imagination, the will, and so on. In an analogous manner, the first beginnings of humanity remain unknown to us, yet we are surrounded by their present-day effects – effects that 22 Rose, Judaism and Modernity, 9.

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require us as rational beings to speculate as to their (our) first beginnings. Kant is not attempting a transcendental deduction of the genetically or even evolutionary first beginning of the human species, since that would be impossible (a rational deduction of the biological?). Matters stand the other way around: Kant seeks to empirically confirm his transcendental and moral accounts of rational being in an anthropological account of human being (hence the shadow of anthropocentrism). This might, Kant hopes, allow for some reconciliation with Herder’s form of humanism. The circularity cannot be avoided – assuming that the latter argument is not intended to function post facto. This problem is sidestepped by Kant, in his grounding of both accounts of ‘man’ in a conception of purposive nature, familiar both to the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). A teleological concept of nature resolves the opposition between necessity and freedom, since nature can be understood either as causal mechanism or as purposive organism. ‘Nature does nothing unnecessary and is not prodigal in the use of means to her ends [Zwecken]’ (incidentally, ‘with a Cosmopolitan Intent’ translates ‘in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’, not Zweck, but Kant employs the concepts of Zweck and zweckmässigkeit within the text itself).23 What we find in the ‘Speculative Beginning’ and in the ‘Idea for a Universal History’ is, at one level, a conflation of a natural history of the human species, as a part of nature, with a progressive history of civilization, as ‘second nature’.24 Lawful-purposive nature is re-described in terms of the ‘hidden plan’ of universal history.

One can regard the history of the human species, in the large, as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about internally, and for this purpose, also an externally perfect national constitution, as the sole state in which all of humanity’s natural capacities can be developed.25

That which resembles a philosophy of history turns out to be an extended philosophy of purposive (rational) nature. Fortunately, the philosophy of second nature is not what is most interesting

23 Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, 31, AA VIII: 19. 24 Ibid., 55, AA VIII: 118. 25 Ibid., 36, AA VIII: 27.

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about the essays. Rather, it is the very failure of Kant’s efforts to map history onto rational nature that opens up a possible critique of idealism. The issue revolves around the relationship between human generation and human generations. Generations and the conditions of human reason Kant is troubled by the notion of a first generation of the human species because this generation is different in principle from all subsequent generations. The book of Genesis provides a mythical report, handed down through the generations. One commentator has suggested that the entire tone of ‘Speculative Beginning’ is ironic, in contrast to Herder’s more earnest theological hermeneutics.26 Kant is not dismissively ironic, however, because he gives generous consideration to the pragmatic-anthropological implications of this mythic-anthropological self-reflection of humanity. We cannot dismiss the fact of creation myths. There must be a first development – this is not, as a question, open to conjecture. However far back we go, the problem of a first development – of the genesis of self-consciousness – does not go away. Arendt, a student of Heidegger, put the problem of the beginning as follows: ‘with or without a bang’.27 This is not to say that the contemporary natural sciences do not have serious implications for Kant’s transcendental idealism, but rather that the principle of the first development endures in spite of those contributions. What the beginning is does not coincide with that the beginning is. Genesis overlays the two beginnings: Adam and Eve being at once the first generation and the first free, having gained knowledge of good and evil. Kant follows this overlaying of the beginnings: ‘[Man] discovered in himself an ability to choose his own way of life and thus not to be bound like other animals to only a single one’.28 The problem of generations is thus simultaneously treated as the problem of each generation, or freedom as such and individual freedom – echoing the above distinction between the historical and moral subjects. The connection of the ‘Speculative Beginning’ to Kant’s 26 H. S. Reiss, Introduction to Reviews of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind and Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, in Kant, Political Writings, 196. 27 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 12. 28 Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, 51, AA VIII: 112.

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philosophy proper arises from the affinity between this problem of human generation(s) and his critique of the principle of sufficient reason in the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Critique: ‘if the conditioned is given then the whole sum of conditions, and hence the absolutely unconditioned, is also given, through which alone the conditioned was possible’ (A409/B436).29 The unconditioned is either the whole of conditions, since the whole of conditions cannot of itself be conditioned, or it is the first condition – depending upon Kant’s dual sense of ‘condition’, arising from the different ‘species’ of unconditioned unities that constitute the particular ideas of reason. Each of the ideas corresponds to the three branches of traditional metaphysics: psychology, cosmology and theology (A334/B391). The two senses of condition that need to be briefly differentiated are (1) logical, and (2) genetic (or, serial). The whole of conditions for the thinking subject corresponds to (1). We are talking about ‘condition’ in the sense of transcendentally logical ‘conditions of possibility’ (space, time and the categories, though it is true that Kant does not explicitly connect the idea of the thinking subject to transcendental apperception). ‘Conditions’ here translates Gründe or Grundsätze – grounds – rather than Bedingungen, genetic conditions. The transcendentally logical sense of conditionality is reinforced by Kant’s modelling of the ideas of reason upon the relational categories, privileged over the others because prosyllogistic reason relates – or, infers – concepts of the understanding (syllogisms and judgments). The inferential use of reason, which is cognitive and never discursive, ascends from the particular to the general. Premises are opened up to the scrutiny of reason. The whole of conditions for a given inference then corresponds to the exhaustive scrutiny of its premises. Conversely, the idea of the world corresponds to (2). This genetic condition has less to do with logic and more to do with causation – less Aristotle and more Newton. Kant attempts to blend (1) and (2) into a general concept of pure reason that is to be criticised. Hence, the question of the unity of manifoldness – the coherence of world experience – is at stake in both accounts. Transcendentally logical and genetic conditionality retain fundamental differences, however. Notably, it is not clear how 29 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 461.

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the logical whole of conditions applies to the cosmological idea of the world, under a post-Aristotelian and Newtonian worldview, since causation in nature does not obviously imply abstraction. Our claim is that the cosmological rather than the psychological or theological ideas provide the basis for the question of the exhaustiveness of reason in the Dialectic – taken as a whole or a unity. The System of Cosmological Ideas is accordingly the first section of The Antinomy of Pure Reason. And the last two antinomies, not cosmological but psychological and theological respectively, are also constructed according to the genetic paradigm. All of the antinomies are then ‘cosmological’ in an ultimately expanded sense of the – speculative? – whole. The four antinomies can be read as variations upon a single theme: the problem of finitude and infinitude. For, the genetic determination of reason leads to anxiety about its limits. Seriality implies an unconditioned first condition, just as the concept of generations implies an unreportable first development. In principle, a first condition can be equally well considered finite or infinite, since we can know the unconditioned no better in either case. The unconditioned can be the first condition for all possible series (the first antinomy of space and time) or the first condition of a series within already conditioned series (the third antinomy of freedom). Considered in terms of the problem of human generations, the first generation corresponds to the former and the freedom of subsequent generations to the latter. Of course, even the pre-Darwinian Kant did not conceive of humanity as having existed for infinity. Self-consciousness both has and had a beginning (not literally in the Garden of Eden, but it was somewhere, or perhaps a plurality of somewheres). What makes the parallel between ‘Speculative Beginning’ and the antinomy compelling, apart from the fact that Kant himself suggests it, is the manner by which the antinomy in each case generates a regulative task of reason. In light of the essays, the task becomes futural and concerns the question of an historical whole. The cosmological whole becomes the idea of human (-natural) history.

If space and time are infinite, macroscopically or microscopically, if there is a free will and if there is an absolute being, then there is in each case a contradiction of the principle of sufficient reason. The genetic paradigm of reason melts away.

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We are left either with chaotic, atomised infinity or with, what amounts to the same thing, nothing (bedingt is related to Dinge, thing; unbedingt is un-thingly). If, on the other hand, space and time are finite, there is no free will, and there is no unmoved mover in the world, then reason is entirely conditioned – fatalistically so. There can be no transcendental idealism and no philosophical Aufklärung. The problem is that reason must accept both the theses and the antitheses taken on their own terms. Kant’s strategic response to the antinomy is twofold: deflationary and inflationary – the first, leaning on the results of the Aesthetic and Analytic, and the second, regarding those results as conditional upon the outcome of the Dialectic. The first response tends to belittle the premises of the antinomies in order to dissolve rather than solve the antinomy as a whole (see, for instance, ‘Critical decision of the cosmological conflict of reason with itself’, A497-502/B525-30). The deflationary approach views the antinomy as the mere confirmation of an already deduced transcendental idealism. This is the ‘true utility’ of the antinomy (A506/B534). Kant now characterises the principle of sufficient reason as a ‘sophistical argument’, because, according to transcendental idealism, ‘I can by no means infer the absolute totality of the series of these conditions’ (A499/B527). Since we can only know conditioned appearances, we can say nothing of a cosmic totality. But Kant here repeats arguments already contained within the antinomies themselves. For he suppresses his previously ambiguous deployment of the term ‘given’. A whole series of conditions is given purely, as an idea, where the conditioned is given empirically, as an appearance. Kant now worries that we might over-hastily infer some cosmic totality – whether natural or historical – from the synthetic unity of a particular; a Leibnizian monad. The criticism that inference might be empirical does not thereby constitute a new criticism. The tension between the deflationary and inflationary approaches to the antinomy is revealed on the same page just cited (A506/B534). Kant now gives a radically alternative sense of the ‘true utility’ of the antinomy. The former, negative utility involved reflection upon its faulty construction, whereas the positive utility relies upon its sound construction. The ‘dialectic’ (as Adorno noticed) is now ‘an example of the great utility of letting the arguments of reason confront one another in the most

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complete freedom’ (A507/B535).30 The antinomies are not just examples, but are exemplary of the critique of pure reason. This is why the ideas and antinomies are, like the categories, limited in number. Kant’s account of ‘the regulative principle of pure reason’, which begins in the following section, can only follow from an acceptance of the antinomical construction. Dissolution is not an option. If its opposing premises were mistaken then the ideas of reason would cease to be ‘given as a problem’, as Kant repeatedly writes – both ‘Problem’ and, more commonly, ‘aufgegeben’, from Aufgabe, task. Henry Allison thus writes of an ‘intellectual categorical imperative’ arising from the Dialectic.31 The inflationary account alone sets up the climax of the Critique: the ‘regulative use of reason’ as the ‘ideal of reason’. It is important to take into account the deflationary account, however, as a symptom of doubt over the regulative one. We can regard the twin response as a continuation of, not ultimate answer to the antinomy. Where the deflationary model tends to follow the empirical side (the antitheses), the inflationary model tends to follow the rational side (the theses) – the latter, because the acknowledgement of the antinomy ‘given as a problem’ involves an unwittingly partisan approach to the antinomy itself, as we shall now indicate. Infinity and world historical coherence Kant himself sees that the determination of reason as regulative does not negate, but rather carries-over the question of a regressive infinity. This is despite the fact that Kant does not explicitly acknowledge the possibility that reason might slip back into the thetic position of the antinomy, siding with infinity after all. Rather, Kant is drawn in to a new discussion of infinity. He attempts a distinction between two kinds of infinities, as a possible resolution.

Mathematicians speak solely of a progressus in infinitum. But those who study concepts (philosophers) want, in place of this, to make the expression progressus in indefinitum the only valid one … If the whole was

30 Ibid., 519. 31 Henry E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 312.

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given in empirical intuition, then the regress in the series of its inner conditions goes to infinity. But if only one member of the series is given, from which the regress to an absolute totality is first of all to proceed, then only an indeterminate regress (in indefinitum) takes place (A510-11/B538-9).32

We could characterise Kant’s distinction as one of ‘infinity versus non-finitude’. This indeterminate non-finitude is the necessary consequence of the finite nature of each conditioned t. The conditioned appearance is accompanied by a not-t – the idea of a whole of its conditions, but certainly not the whole of conditioned ts. If Kant can make this distinction hold then the regulative role of reason will be to instruct the understanding to go beyond each conditioned t: intellectual categorical imperative as negative dialectics. Kant’s suggestion of an indefinite infinity is terminally threatened on two sides, however: from the macrocosmic infinity of the first antinomy and the microcosmic infinity of the second antinomy (as two sides of the same problem). In the first case, Kant requires an unconditioned whole to appear as a question in order to generate the regulative task as a task (towards an ideal). Without the question of the whole, reason cannot instruct the understanding to go beyond the conditioned in the first place. The determination of infinity as an indeterminate regress threatens to pre-empt the question and thus remove its own imperative to regress productively through the conditions. In the second, microscopic instance, we have the problem of the given-ness of the condition as such. What is a condition qua conditions? What is a generation qua generations? The question of infinitude was, in the Analytic, already at stake in the question of synthesis, and hence of possible world experience, by way of the synthetic unity of the manifold (which is to ask, how manyfold?). Kant acknowledges this problem in his ‘Resolution of the cosmological idea of the totality of division of a given whole in intuition’ (A523-7/B551-5), the second of his prospective solutions to the antinomy. The fact that it draws upon the discussion of different kinds of infinity is critical, because that discussion bears upon all of the antinomies, not just the second (divisibility). Kant now relates the antinomy back to the 32 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 521-2.

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first sections of the Critique. His rather obscure response involves thinking about infinity spatially, and then making a distinction between a continuous and discrete spatial quantity.33 But the important point is that the question of infinity in the antinomy of reason now bears upon the possibility of the conditions for the possibility of experience, Erfahrung, in the Transcendental Analytic. Kant states that the ‘transcendental idea’ of freedom is ‘a universal law – even of the possibility of all experience’ (A533/B561).34 The unity of the manifold is transcendentally idealist and not realist. But such synthesis is only possible because subject and nature are similarly spatiotemporally constituted. On account of this similarity, the problem of infinity applies to the subject as much as to the object. The parallel under consideration is not so far-fetched: Kant introduces the problem of human generations into his discussion of infinity. Kant’s example offers a surprisingly human perspective amidst what is otherwise a pure critique of metaphysics. And it makes sense once we remember that the genetic paradigm of reason is simultaneously a temporal-historical one. Conditionality implies a before and (more problematically) an after. Kant’s initial remark in this section of the Critique (vii, the Antinomy of Pure Reason, A511-3/B539-41) concerns the future of human generations, not its first beginnings. Kant applies his distinction between the indeterminate regress, back through the series of conditions, and infinite progress ‘from the condition to the conditioned’ – which, barring catastrophe, will in turn become another condition, another generation, and so on. Kant optimistically concludes that this progressive continuation of the human species constitutes a definite infinity.

From one pair of parents you could progress in a descending line of generation without end, and you could also think that it might actually progress in the world. For here reason never needs an absolute totality in the series, because it is not presupposed as a condition as given (datum), but it is only added on as something conditioned, which is capable of being given (dabile),

33 Ibid., 530. 34 Ibid., 533.

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and this without end (A511-12/B539-40).35 Conversely, when we go back through the generations regressively, we may only speak of an indeterminate regress. For each generation we identify – whether ‘from human beings now living’ or through ‘reports’ of a past generation – we may only infer the parents of that particular generation, and go no further. Kant’s example has not aged well in our Darwinian world. Neither does it actually address his antinomy. It is supposed rather to flesh-out the distinction between the two kinds of infinity. And yet, in light of the two essays under consideration, this passage takes on a new significance. The generational progress to infinity corresponds to a natural history of the human species – ‘natural historical’ in the sense that the species reproduces in a genetic and thereby cosmological manner. And yet, Kant’s idea that the human species ‘could progress in a descending line of generation without end’ feeds in to the suspicion that he is unable to set out an actually regulative use of reason; a task that historically produces (self-) knowledge – the very thing that Kant wants to set out in the anthropological-political essays. The task of bringing about a universal cosmopolitan state, or an alternative utopia, is an eminently historical and political, not solely moral undertaking. What is more, if nature changes through the technology of humanity then it can no longer provide the stable model of lawful purposiveness. What is important and distinctive about the ‘Speculative Beginning’ therefore, in relation to the passage on human generations in the Critique, is that a social historical paradigm of generations is maintained alongside the natural historical one. The task of reason migrates from the intra-generational to the trans-generational, or from the structural to the historical – ‘ends’ to ‘end’. The experience of present and past generations gives rise to an idea of universal history as a futural task. This task is the first principle of universal human history itself. Again, in order to secure this move, Kant must shift from moral cognition to pragmatic historical knowledge, because it is only the latter (techne) that can change the world in a manner that can be passed on to the future generations. According to Arendt, Kant was ‘awakened … from his political slumber’ by 35 Ibid., 522.

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the revolutions of America and France.36 The philosopher recognises that moral sociality cannot account for change in and on the world. But Arendt does not recognise that, in order for this political turn to make sense, we must re-examine the antinomy of reason in order to ground the first principle of a universal history (or rather, to see the two as somehow mutually grounding). Conversely, the antinomy must draw upon the anthropology. If the antinomy itself sides with infinity then there can be no historical task. The introduction of history attempts to offset that problem by connecting reason back to the production of knowledge of and upon the world. Does Kant succeed in addressing his ‘bad infinity’ (Hegel)? And if so, can it actually go beyond what Hegel has to offer in his concept of speculation? Practical cognition and practical knowledge In the post-1781 essays, Kant introduces concepts of the historical present and of historical change – most notably: enlightenment, perpetual peace and the universal cosmopolitan state – that his philosophy proper cannot immediately provide for. And it is no coincidence that this problem goes back to Kant’s determination of speculation in the Critique and the Prolegomena. Pure or speculative reason must remain at the level of cognition, not knowledge. Reason directs the understanding from afar. But it is too far: reason does not get involved with the specific contents of the understanding, conceptual knowledge. This is a problem for Kant because the understanding deals in conditions, and it is the question of conditionality that gives rise to the regulative use of reason in the first place. Reason cannot pursue conditions as such. It cannot produce new, future conditions, thus changing the whole in the process. Reason proceeds antecedently (regressively) – which makes the example of future generations all the more striking. On the above reading, Kant does allow for an active concept of reason that conditions its historical world, and hence the whole. The attraction of Kant over Hegel lies in the fact that this task appears as incomplete and yet necessary. For the anti-philosophers such a task is impossible. For Hegel, such a task is already complete. Neither do justice to the genuinely speculative. But is not Kant’s historical task, his first principle of 36 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 16.

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universal history, just as panlogical and rational as Hegel’s? Again, Kant must rely upon a quasi-rationally purposive idea of nature – including natural human history: the biological reproduction of the human species as a necessarily material enterprise (eating, reproducing, dying). The worry is that the appearance of contingency in Kant’s putative concept of the speculative – the gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ – only follows from a new dualism of natural history and social history. What is more, this might be a form of the problem of methodologism. Universal history so understood cannot provide the normative stance of ethics and politics that is to be applied to and from the flawed historical present, because this conception of universal history must borrow from the flawed historical present in order to remain an historical and not infinite task. Of course, the present is not totally flawed. Kant remarks in ‘Universal History’ that ‘experience can uncover … a little of’ the ‘Naturabsicht’. But why must we ‘justifiably conclude’ that this ‘small part’, and not the regressive parts, shall win out?37 This problem would seem to arise from Kant’s difficulty (one that he shares with Hegel) over the problem of evil. As a critical observer of human history and culture, Kant goes beyond the bounds of his philosophy proper. He is compelled to do so. For, something of the first principle of universal history’s development must not only be found but also produced within human experience. Kant sees the beginnings of Enlightenment and speculates as to its continuation. But Kant cannot quite mediate the rational and the actual in a manner that makes this continuation teleologically possible. He cannot quite show the means of his historical task because pure reason cannot produce knowledge, including practical knowledge. Where Kant is unable or unwilling to rescue the concept of speculation from dogmatic metaphysics, Hegel finds in speculation the very mediation of the rational and the actual, concept and intuition. Speculative reason is not only conceptual, it is the labour of the concept. The concept, Begriff, grasps, begreift. To recall Hegel’s letter: ‘What is philosophical in the form of the concept is exclusively what has been grasped conceptually, the speculative proceeding out of the dialectic.’38 In another instance of fortuitous English translation, of the preface to the 37 Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, 36-7. AA VIII: 27. 38 Hegel, The Letters, 282.

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Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), A. V. Miller renders ‘begreifende Denken’ as ‘speculative thinking’.39 The problem with Hegel is that the concept has too often completed its grasping – is the already grasped object, thus undoing the task of speculation as activity. In Kant, we find a non-identity of cognition and the concept, the pure and the empirical, infinite and finite. This is mistaken for contingency in the sphere of the concept. In answer to our overall question, therefore, we must conclude that Kant cannot ultimately offer the corrective to Hegel that some critical theorists and contemporary philosophers have identified. Such a corrective must be found elsewhere. But contra Rose, it is Kant’s attempted politico-historical turn that begins to make possible the idea of history as a speculative task in the first place. Kant unwittingly inaugurated the faltering redemption of speculation, in a manner that remains pertinent to the present generation. Coventry, 2010 wesleyjphillips@hotmail.com 39 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998), 36.

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