Beiser on Restoring the Transcendental Subject
From German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781-1801Cognitive scientists have claimed that Kant can only make claims about the subject through the categories (e.g. existence), and anything under the categories is not transcendental, so Kant ought to have abandoned the notion of a transcendental subject. However, Kant is not claiming
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Who obliges me to believe in the transcendental subject when I try to make sense of my sensations? This seems like a very strange claim to me. I'd say the vast majority of people I know who try to make sense of their sensations do not do this.
There are many ways to play chess. Sometimes, if playing chess against a vastly inferior opponent, you might try to throw the game in order to not discourage them. I've played a chess variant where checkmate was impossible because turn order was determined probabilistically. And so on.
We are able to transcend the rules of chess very easily. It seems that, rather, playing chess involves some kind of intersubjective agreement on the rules or motivations of chess in play at the time it is being played.
I think there is value to the 'regulatory idea' idea that you are proposing, but it raises the question of what, when thinking philosophically, could possibly impose a regulation that why can't just capriciously ignore.
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Who obliges me to believe in the transcendental subject when I try to make sense of my sensations?
You are obliged by your own commitment to be coherent, since the momentum of this unification (i.e. seeking conditions by continuously asking 'why') aims at the unconditioned, as when the search for causes leads to the idea of an uncaused cause or freedom (the transcendental subject) though neither freedom nor any unconditioned idea can occur in the empirical field of conditioned knowledge.
There are many ways to play chess.
Not at once, and unity is the relevant character of coherence, so this refutation of the immutability of the transcendental conditions of experience exceeds the proper use of the analogy.
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I think there is a lot of power to that argument. But I don't think that's the only way to achieve coherence/unification.
What if the approach to unification isn't by seeking conditions but by seeking consequences by negotiating apparent contradictions?
And what if coherence isn't such an important goal anywho. It seems like unified conditions do not make it easy to account for difference in reality--such differences become mere contingency, not meaningful in their own right. Hence, I'd say, the skepticism of those invested in identity politics towards this kind of transcendent Kantian logic.
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What do you mean?
And what if coherence isn't such an important goal anywho. It seems like unified conditions do not make it easy to account for difference in reality--such differences become mere contingency, not meaningful in their own right.
Is winning chess such an important goal for playing chess? Is it not constitutive of playing chess at all (though in an indeterminately bounded way) since the inventor of chess needed this goal to make chess? And is this goal not regulatory of distinguishing between good and bad moves (in a determinately bounded way)? What is contingent about the judgment that it is a bad chess strategy to permit your king to be checkmated?
Now I hope that gives your thought the momentum to follow this track: Assume that everything is explainable by the laws of nature. Consider the natural principle 'everything has a cause.' Now in this case every cause would suppose a prior cause, and so there would be no first cause, but then the principle 'everything has a cause' extended to everything (i.e. including itself) contradicts itself. There must therefore be some uncaused cause which itself stands outside the sequence of caused causes, viz. freedom, though this could never appear to us (i.e. inside the sequence of caused causes). Thus the search for causes does not aim at a first cause (sequentially), but at freedom (dynamically), and so it is freedom that regulates the search for causes, not a first cause. Now since the search for causes allows us to account for difference in reality, accounting for difference in reality is regulated by an ideal of unity (i.e. freedom), and so it is not the case that "unified conditions do not make it easy to account for difference in reality."
I say as much in my post on the Psychological Interpretation of the Categories:
To give a chess example, some people happen to play chess without thinking about a checkmate, and so a checkmate is merely one regulatory norm of playing style among others, but a checkmate, as a win-designating move in the rule book, is a constitutive rule of chess (and a prudent guide for winning). To close the analogy, some people happen to think without trying to be coherent, and so unity is merely one regulatory idea for thinking, but unity, as the satisfaction of the drive of the understanding, is constitutive of experience (and a prudent guide for being coherent).
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