Rationalist Empiricism. Nathan Brown

latter in accordance with a principle of purposiveness for our faculty of cognition, which is then expressed in the maxims of the power of judgment given above. Now this transcendental concept of a purposiveness of nature is neither a concept of nature nor of freedom, since it attributes nothing at all to the object (of nature), but rather represents the unique way in which we must proceed in reflection on the objects of nature with the aim of a thoroughly interconnected experience, consequently it is a subjective principle (maxim) of the power of judgment.⁴⁷

      Kant not only claims to deduce the reflective concept of the purposiveness of nature but also, as he adds following this passage, “the necessity of assuming it as a transcendental principle of cognition” (my emphasis).⁴⁸ He says his principle “represents the unique way in which we must proceed in reflection on the objects of nature” (my emphasis). This “is neither a concept of nature nor a concept of freedom,” because reflective judgment suspends the application of both understanding and reason and thus suspends the determination of both the realm of nature and the realm of morality. However, what is determined is that the unity of nature “must still necessarily be presupposed and assumed, for otherwise no thoroughgoing interconnection of empirical cognitions into a whole of experience would take place” (my emphasis). Kant stipulates that the necessity of this unity of nature must be thought beyond the determination of nature through the categories of the understanding:

      The understanding is of course in possession a priori of universal laws of nature, without which nature could not be an object of experience at all; but still it requires in addition a certain order of nature in its particular laws, which can only be known to it empirically and which from its point of view are contingent. These rules, without which there would be no progress from the general analogy of a possible experience in general to the particular, it must think as laws (i.e., as necessary), because otherwise they would not constitute an order of nature, even though it does not and never can cognize their necessity.⁴⁹

      In addition to the universal laws of nature provided by the categories, we must think a unified order of particular laws of nature (beyond the determinations of the understanding), and we must think these laws as necessary, even if we can never cognize them as such (they are only known to the understanding empirically, and from its point of view are contingent).

      What is in evidence here is a dogmatism of subjective rather than objective determination. Again, the transcendental concept of the purposiveness of nature “represents the unique way in which we must proceed in reflection on the objects of nature.” Kant presents this as a “deduction,”⁵⁰ but in fact the reasoning is covertly inductive: because we know from experience there is a unity of experience, there must be a unity of nature. Because our experience of nature has been unified, nature must necessarily be ordered by laws that unify its order. Because the a priori laws of nature provided by our understanding cannot, on their own, account for the unified interconnection of their determinations, there must be an order of particular laws beyond them, and these must be necessary. The Critique of Pure Reason had set out to resolve the problem of induction by deducing universal, a priori laws of nature belonging to the faculty of understanding, which accounted, on transcendental grounds, for the attribution of constant conjunction to relations of cause and effect that Hume had found wanting on either rational or empirical grounds. But in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, we find that Kant’s purported resolution to the problem of induction requires a supplement, stipulating the reflective necessity of assuming necessary laws (beyond those of the understanding) securing an order of nature which enables a transition from possible experience in general to particular experience. There must be necessary laws ordering the unity of experience because there is a unity of experience. But the ground of such an induction—for it is a disguised induction—is exactly what Hume had demanded. Far from solving the problem Hume had formulated, Kant ends up reproducing its aporia as a “merely reflecting” judgment that is not objectively but subjectively dogmatic.

      We must be attentive to what, according to Kant, has to be thought. Kant deploys reason not determine the in-itself directly, but to determine the reflective necessity of thinking the laws of the in-itself as necessary, though we can only experience them as contingent. Kant must say that this has to be thought, because otherwise the problem of induction would be unresolved; we would not have a subjective principle securing the unified order of nature for reflective judgment. But the grounds for the rational judgment producing this principle are empirical grounds (x is and has been the case; y is necessary for x to be the case; so y must be the case), which are acknowledged as insufficient for the judgment of necessity. Kant ignores the speculative problem of whether it is in fact necessary to think that the unified order of nature we experience is secured by necessary laws. The persistence of the unified order of nature we experience could be contingent; it may be contingent that a unity of laws has obtained—which is exactly the judgment our experience could ground. That is, we do not have to think what Kant says we must think. In fact, there is no reason to think it. And this is exactly what “that acute man,” David Hume, had pointed out in the first place.

      SPECULATIVE CRITIQUE

      Speculation enters into the terrain of what has to be thought and interrogates its determinations. Is it true that we have to think what Kant says we must think? How would the absolute idealist reply? How would the Kantian then have to reply to the absolute idealist? How does the history of thought—the rigorous articulation of its movement between systematic determinations—impose new constraints upon what we have to think? The rationalism of speculative thought implies a critical vocation, which it should not abjure. Hegel refers to his speculative method in the Science of Logic as a “true critique” because it investigates the determinations of reflection on their own ground, in the medium of their self-interrogating movement, thus producing an immanent rather than transcendental method of criticism. Such critique involves a rational reflection upon the experience of thinking, and thus also an empirical investigation of the determinations of reason—observing, cancelling, and developing these as they unfold. In Chapter 3, I develop a rationalist empiricist interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic, positioning it as a form of speculative critique. But in Chapter 4, I also attend to the dereliction of Hegel’s own critical method at pivotal moments in the Phenomenology and the Logic, showing how the violation of imminent critique is due to a certain treatment of the relation between time and the whole in Hegel’s philosophy. The critical delimitation of Hegel’s speculative ontology thus requires a transition from speculative idealism to speculative materialism, and I argue that producing precisely this critical delimitation is the burden of Meillassoux’s doctoral dissertation. Here we will see, as in Chapter 2, that the defense of materialism against idealism depends upon an alignment of the relationship between rationalism and empiricism that can preserve the critical function of speculation, rather than sever speculation from critique.

      The difficulty with Kant’s principle of reflective judgment (the purposiveness of nature) is that he wants to ground philosophical reflection concerning the empirical interconnection of nature upon a rational principle that is supposedly required as a subjective maxim. Thus reflective judgment rationally subordinates the contingency of experience to the necessity of laws that we can never experience but that we must think. When Meillassoux shows, through his Cantorian treatment of the statistical resolution of the problem of induction, that it is rationally feasible to sustain a thesis of unsubordinated contingency (to think that the necessity of laws is not required to account for the empirical unity and regularity of laws) he unburdens philosophy of grounding the relation between the empirical and the rational. The rational thesis of absolute contingency does not ground reflection upon the empirical regularity of nature; rather, it distinguishes the ontological order of absolute contingency (thought by philosophy) from the ontic order of empirical regularities (explored by science). The speculative has a critical function, insofar as it preserves the autonomy of science