Book Review of:

Diane Morgan, Kant Trouble: The obscurities of the enlightened. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

and

Nicholas Rescher, Kant and the Reach of Reason: Studies in Kant's theory of rational systemization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Hodgepodge. Other than ‘Kant’, this one word best describes how these two books can be united under a common theme.

Morgan, a young female scholar virtually unknown to the world of Kant-studies, writes a series of closely interconnected chapters that together form part of a series (the Warwick Studies in European Philosophy), while Rescher, a seasoned male scholar highly respected in Kant-studies, collects a loosely connected set of previously published essays under the umbrella of a free-standing monograph. The two books adopt vastly different starting-points (the relationship between Kant and Egyptian architecture vs. understanding the role of the infamous ‘thing in itself’), employ conflicting methodologies (new-fangled deconstructionism vs. old-style pragmatism), and draw divergent conclusions about the validity of Kant’s system (as containing ‘blind spots’ undoing its truth from within vs. profoundly true within rationally definable limits).

In the midst of such differences, the two books share the characteristic of throwing together apparently unrelated themes in seemingly haphazard ways. Morgan weds the unlikely bedfellows of Egyptian architecture, Freemasonry (a theme that remains underdeveloped), landscape gardening, affinity, community-building, and evil. Rescher examines the less eccentric, but still diverse, themes of noumenal causality, cognitive anthropomorphism, teleological theology, and the unity and rationale of the categorical imperative. Yet even this similarity is deceptive: for Morgan employs her anti-systematic strategy with systematic rigour, presenting a consistently uneven terrain that mixes the themes in every chapter, while Rescher carefully separates his themes into discrete chapters, each appearing to stand on its own.

If Kant were to read and assess these two books himself, I believe the focus of his criticism would be the same in both cases: both authors adopt the ‘aggregate’ approach to doing philosophy that Kant explicitly denounces as being doomed to failure, the very opposite of the reason-governed approach Kant calls ‘architectonic’ and makes the backbone of his own systematic methodology. An interpretation that does not follow Kant in this crucial respect cannot hope to assess Kant’s project fairly.

Morgan conveniently blinds herself to the fact that Kant acknowledged and made room for many (if not most) of her alleged ‘blind spots’ when constructing his System. What she sees as causing Kant the greatest of all ‘trouble’, the presence of radical evil in human nature, Kant himself uses as the architectonic justification for the necessity of religion; yet Morgan almost entirely ignores this systematic connection, limiting her treatment of Kantian religion to two highly inadequate passing comments on prayer and some concluding reflections on revelation that show little if any awareness of Kant’s own perspectival views on the subject. Instead, she focuses on the ‘trouble’ evil causes to the project of building an ideal community, never recognising that Kant employs evil as an intentionally troubling device that cannot be understood apart from the role it plays in making religion necessary.

Rescher, though managing to portray Kant more authentically than Morgan, also fails to acknowledge the rootedness of Kant’s thinking in a rationally predetermined system of interconnected standpoints and perspectives. He provides numerous lengthy quotations from Kant’s writings, yet these are usually annoyingly long and supported by inadequately brief commentary. This strategy enables Rescher to defend some theses that misrepresent Kant’s original meaning, such as that Kant’s God is ‘little more than a fiction fabricated ... by one sector of mind’ (p.124) when in fact this applies to our idea of God rather than to God as such, and that Kant’s use of the term Glaube has nothing to do with religious faith (p.134) when in fact the supporting quote (from the first Critique, Bxxx) makes direct reference to religious ideas such as God.

Fortunately, Rescher acknowledges that his main goal, to paint a picture of a ‘purified Kantianism’ that refuses to go beyond the ‘reach’ of the human mind even through regulative or moral principles (as Kant did), has more affinity with Peirce than Kant (pp.128-9). Rescher thus portrays Kant as ‘a protopragmatist’ (p.113), the first Critique’s Dialectic as developing ‘purposive pragmatics’ (p.131), and the first two Critiques as constituting a ‘pragmatic metaphysics’ (p.181). Yet this attempt to supply what Kant calls an ‘idea of the whole’ ultimately fails, for instead of defining ‘pragmatic’, Rescher assumes we already know. Or worse yet, he merely identifies it with Kant’s term ‘practical’ (p.161).

Despite their radical differences, these two books are not entirely unsuited for a common review, for to a large extent the numerous genuine insights of each complement those of the other--not explicitly, but in the sense of filling in each other’s ‘blind spots’. Neither book, however, comes close to plumbing the true depths of Kant’s System, which, when interpreted with proper attention to its perspectival structuring, is anything but a hodgepodge.

Stephen Palmquist, Hong Kong

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