The Invention of Kant

by Louis Guerpillon
, 20 December 2024

Experience can only lead to knowledge if it is organized by concepts that are not derived from experience. This is the paradox at the heart of Kant’s metaphysics, which Antoine Grandjean gives an entirely new interpretation.

A book that does justice to the Kantian notion of experience was long overdue. Certainly, all specialists in the field are well acquainted with Hermann Cohen’s essay Kant’s Theory of Experience, in which he shaped the so-called “neo-Kantian” interpretation as early as 1871. But the experience Cohen had in mind was first and foremost a scientific experience. This led to a reduction of philosophy to a simple theory of knowledge based on a specific state of science (Newton). Antoine Grandjean’s book, admirable in all respects, counters this interpretation, holding that the experience of which Kant speaks is primarily ordinary experience. More than that, however, he shows that experience understood in this way is not just a principle for the destruction of ontology: it is a metaphysical issue in its own right. He performs this task magnificently, combining qualities that are often at odds with one other: conceptual rigor and speculative depth, clarity of presentation and density of style.

The misinterpretation of empiricism: the constitution of experience and ontology

The commentary’s relative lack of interest in such a central notion can be explained by one observation: Kant is interested in experience only from the point of view of its conditions of possibility; in short, in what he calls the “transcendental”, removed from experience insofar as it underpins it. But the author sets out to challenge the assumptions underlying this observation, and to make the diagnosis more complex. This is a delicate undertaking, as the aim is not to diminish the specificity of the transcendental by deriving it from certain specific experiences—which is what happens with all interpretations inclined toward a psychologizing reading. Indeed, this book should be read as a continuation of the first, Critique et réflexion (Paris, Vrin, 2009), in which the author fully assumed that the transcendental is a fact that is both unsurpassable and impossible to constitute as an object of knowledge. Nor is the transcendental produced by experience, in which every object is also the effect of a given cause.

For Kant, then, discourse on experience need not be empiricist. But to confine ourselves to this rejection is to miss the point. This is why the first part of Antoine Grandjean’s new book focuses on how Kant determines the empiricist position. Initially, it may come as a surprise that authors such as Locke, Hutcheson, Hume, Condillac and Rousseau do not feature prominently in the book: this is because empiricism is considered here not as an actual tradition, but, according to its concept, as a Kantian invention—an invention that may shed new light on what this Kantian point of view then constitutes, after the fact and by virtue of a certain tour de force, as a coherent historical current. If Kant maintains that our concepts have no use except within the horizon of possible experience, then empiricism, by starting from this same observation, misinterprets him. To be an empiricist is to argue that, since our concepts have meaning only for experience (the use theory, to which Kant adheres), they must all be derived from experience (the genetic empiricist theory).

Kant’s criticism of such bias is threefold, and the fact that a given empiricist is found to be free of it is less a credit to them than an indication of their inconsistency or lack of radicalism. First, empiricism as defined fails to be a reliable philosophy of experience: it is incapable of establishing the minimal ordering that enables something like the appearance of a phenomenon to a subject. Empiricism ultimately dissolves the fact of experience and leads to scepticism. Second, empiricism provides useful rules for exploring natural phenomena, disqualifying any reference to metaphysical realities that would short-circuit this exploration (an immortal soul, an act of freedom, the existence of God, whose invocation is in every case a form of laziness and a refusal to understand nature); however, it also tends of its own accord to convert this healthy restraint into a positive decision about what is: empiricism conveys a materialistic, fatalistic and atheistic metaphysics. Third, this drift is intrinsic to empiricism, insofar as it shares with classical rationalism the conviction that makes both of them a form of dogmatism: that all thought is an idea of and geared toward that of which it is the idea, and geared toward being. Hence Kant’s persistent use of the vocabulary of representation (indissociable from the horizon of a presence in being) must not conceal the fact that it is surpassed in the theory that all thought is conceptual: it is the act of proceeding to the unification of a given diversity, which is thus constituted as an object, and which is certainly not an object independently of it. Lacking this critical turn, the empiricist denunciation of rationalist metaphysics remains the expression of an underlying ontology. Kant makes an unreserved break with ontology, but this rupture is not limited to a “modest analysis of understanding”; it also consists of an emancipation of metaphysics, which is no longer a metaphysics of being.

The treasure of empiricism: the occurrence of the transcendental and anthropology

Once Grandjean’s critique of empiricism is complete, he may well retain only the seminal intuition that the use of concepts is exhausted in the field of experience. However, the main originality of the book consists, in its second part, in taking seriously the shift that empiricism makes from the plane of use to the plane of genesis, not to validate the theory of an empirical origin of all our concepts, but to defend the idea of an occurrence of the transcendental in the very experience it constitutes.

If the transcendental, with its a priori structures, is not derived from experience, this is not in the sense that it always precedes it. Although it does not come from experience, it only happens to experience. This is the meaning of the assertion that the a priori is not innate, but acquired, in the sense of what Kant calls an original acquisition. On the theoretical level, this is true both of forms of intuition and of categories; but the same can be said, on the practical level, of the factum of moral law: although it occurs in a certain configuration of experience without deriving from it, it does so in the mode of an immediate attestation of one’s duty that challenges all ratiocination, but this occurrence is nonetheless inseparable from a whole prior moral pedagogy. In his previous work, Grandjean spoke of a “factuality” of the transcendental, which then takes on the more determined form of an “eventalism”: the fact of the transcendental does not precede its effective implementation, and this implementation is impossible within the context of our taking charge of a phenomenal given that we constitute as an object of experience. The rejection of any derivation of the transcendental based on experience should not, therefore, lead us to assume that it could somehow exist independently of it.

However, it is necessary to further refine this thesis, which, in general, no commentator on Kant would dream of disputing. Empiricality, while not a productive cause of transcendental structures, is not a mere indeterminate pretext for them either: it is in a precise empirical context that the transcendental is likely to occur in experience. The author speaks of it as an occasional cause of the transcendental, its foundation, or its condition. In fact, the choice of vocabulary is problematic: it would be easy to pass experience off as the condition of possibility of the transcendental, which is nothing more than the condition of possibility of all experience. At the same time, the legitimate desire to preserve the purity of the transcendental must not lead us to disregard the empirical underpinning of the effective performance in which it exhausts itself. Grandjean’s interpretive conviction is not merely a doctrinal subtlety. Its purpose is to address, from the point of view of transcendental philosophy, the plane of anthropological discourse, which would otherwise appear, within the Kantian corpus, as a mere sideline, diversion or relapse. This book’s principal merit, of which there are many, lies in its ability to walk a fine line: it does not reduce the transcendental to anthropology, but neither does it ignore the ways in which the transcendental point of view is, as such, relevant to anthropology. For this reason, and not because Kant sacrificed himself to the spirit of the age, the transcendental philosopher cannot fail to also be a diligent reader of the empiricist tradition.

The result is a powerful and illuminating re-reading of neglected passages, often disconcerting or even disturbing for the commentator, in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View in particular. We know that all experience refers back to an original apperception; yet is there really nothing to say about the fact that consciousness can be altered in the dream state, in drunkenness, or in madness? We know that there is no effective experience except through the categorical shaping of a given diversity in sensation, and transcendental questioning stops there; but if this is sufficient for the legal question, namely that of the conditions of possibility of experience in general, should we consider absolutely insignificant the de facto structuring of our sensory capacity into five well-defined senses that cannot be superimposed in their respective performances? For not only is there no experience in which sensation is not an ingredient, but also we must take on board Kant’s explicit statements that we would never have access to experiences if our senses did not include touch (by which we learn to relate through our perceptions to objects that are distinct from the perceiving subject), or indeed if we were all deprived of our sense of hearing (by which we learn to relate to the sign as sign, which enables the formation of concepts).

We know that it is impossible for determined forms of social existence (the difference between cultures, or even between races in the context of the influence of climate) to deliver the meaning of moral experience, which would be tantamount to assuming its relativization. And yet, are we to believe that they have no bearing on our chances of accessing this moral experience in all its purity?

The evidence is convincing: at every level, we find the paradox of an empirical condition that enables access to something whose meaning is, however, irreducibly in excess of that which provides access to it, whether the empiricist likes it or not. From this point of view, the two analyses that A. Grandjean devotes (pp. 258-267, then pp. 297-303) to the first paragraph of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View are exemplary, taking as their specific object the maturing of experience in early childhood and the way in which thought and language are intertwined, but at the same time establishing a fertile, and henceforth essential, interpretative line for the book as a whole and for a considerable part of the Kantian corpus.

Antoine Grandjean, Métaphysiques de l’expérience. Empirisme et philosophie transcendantale selon Kant, Paris, Vrin, 2022, 446 p., 39 €.