Rationalist Empiricism. Nathan Brown

      INTRODUCTION: THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONJUNCTURE

      Speculative thinking is the soul of philosophy. But insofar as speculation is opposed to critique, it can only give rise to dogmatism. This has recently been made clear, once again, by the fortunes of “the speculative turn” in twenty-first century philosophy. Its most zealous promoters, converting the venerable legacy of speculative thought into the cultural capital of ersatz theoretical movements, have merely repeated the forms of dogmatism Kant and Marx rightly delimited while pretending to move beyond these critical delimitations.¹ The lesson to be drawn from this waning episode of intellectual history is that although philosophy cannot allow critical reflection to cancel its speculative powers, speculation can only move forward in concert with critique. The claim of this book is that the mutually reinforcing relationship between speculation and critique, without which philosophy devolves into incoherence or common sense, depends upon sustaining the methodological tension between rationalism and empiricism.

      One aim of Kantian critique was to displace the opposition between rationalist and empiricist orientations through the invention of transcendental philosophy. Delimiting pure reason and refuting the immediacy of experience, Kant’s philosophy aimed to ground any possible experience in transcendental conditions while invalidating the direct application of reason to knowledge of objects beyond possible experience. The competing claims of rationalist and empiricist thinkers to the priority of either reason or experience would be countered by the priority of the transcendental, which would ground the legitimate extension of both philosophical and scientific knowledge within critical limits.

      In this sense, we could say it was the problem of ground that motivated Kant’s transcendental critique and that formed its horizon. Yet the figure of the transcendental subject could only be grounded by its own spontaneity, and this reflexive limit of cognitive conditions would pose an enduring problem for Kantian critique, since the unity of the subject (of the “I think”) could not itself become subject to critical interrogation. From a methodological perspective, we could say that the transcendental could only displace the opposition of rationalism and empiricism by ungrounding the subject of reason and experience whose knowledge it grounded. Or better: the transcendental deduction exposed, beyond its grounding of knowledge in conditions, the unconditional groundlessness of the subject of knowledge, which had already implicitly afflicted both rationalism and empiricism. Thus Heidegger could show that the internal structure of the transcendental schematism constitutes as temporal the very subject whose atemporal unity (the transcendental unity apperception) would delimit the ontological scope of reflection upon time by treating it as a form of intuition.²