Richard L. Velkley, Being after Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in Question (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)

This volume contains the reprint of six papers published by Velkley between 1985 and 1997 and three previously unpublished papers. All papers refer to a common issue, the relation of philosophy to culture, which Velkley investigates in a penetrating, scrupolous, and sympathetic way. Velkley asks, „Who is the being called the ‚philosopher‘? What is the relation of the philosopher to something called ‚culture‘?“ (p. 1). His nine essays pursue these questions through examination of writings by Rousseau (p. 12-48), Kant (p. 49-109), Schelling (p. 110-137), and Heidegger (p. 138-150). For the purpose of the present review, however, I shall concentrate on Velkley's four essays on Kant. The point of view chosen by Velkley for his discussion is classical and modern at the same time. He sees culture as a tension between „spirited self-assertion“ and „erotic openness to nature and Being“ (p. 7), whereby „[t]he essence of the effort of Rousseau and later ‚culture‘ is to reconcile modern, metaphysically emancipated science with the attainment of wholeness, which effort gives birth to various speculative theories — the term ‚metaphysics‘ is now used only with reservation or simply refused — of freedom’s self realization“ (p. 4). In the essay on „Freedom, Teleology, and Justification of Reason: On the Philosophical Importance of Kant’s Rousseauian Turn“ (p. 49-61), Velkley starts from the occurrence in the Bemerkungen zu den Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen of the phrase „Wissenschaft der Grenzen der menschlichen Vernunft“ (Ak.-Ausgabe, vol. 20, p. 181), and shows that upon discovering Rousseau's new moral principle of self-legislative autonomy „Kant arrives at the most basic concepts of his moral philosophy well before he formulates the arguments for the theoretical critique“ (p. 49 f.) More precisely, writes Velkley, the Rousseauin structure of critical thought is already emerging in Kant’s writings of the late 1760s. In fact, „(1) the account of metaphsyical eros, or projective spontaneity, of reason as the sources of the ills of dialectic and the disproportion between reason’s goals and its powers; (2) the turn to a self-correction of reason in order to discover a truly livable condition of humanity within self-imposed limitations; (3) the resulting insight of the falsity of dogmatic efforts to locate the good in something beyond the will itself, which insight, in the terms of critical philosophy, means the replacemente of precritical theoretical totality with the projects of practical reason. Only the practical form of the unconditioned can satisfy the erotic need for totality without generating dialectic“ (p. 59). In the paper „On Kant’s Socratism“ (p. 65-80), Velkley concentrates on that area of Kant’s philosophy „where ‚belief‘ or ‚faith,‘ rationally purified by ,criticism‘ is given equal rigths with or even a certain priority to knowledge“ (p. 66). Velkley reminds that the core of Kant’s critique to traditional metaphysics lies in the fact that its questions and answers „are not established with the help of something called ‚experience‘“ (p. 66). Consequently, argues Velkley, „Kant’s transcendental logic relates not to inquiry and the soul’s fulfillment therein, but to something called ‚experience.‘ It shares with ‚general logic‘ the characters of autonomy, formality, and completability. Unlike ‚general logic,‘ which we employ for analysis of concepts, transcendental logic is presupposed in all our experience of objects“ (p. 70 f.). In fact, Kant's „transcendental logic‘ appears to combine the uncombinable: a ‚logic‘ of unconscious processes involved in forming ‚experience‘ (the ‚transcendental synthesis‘) and a philosophical inquiry which determines the possibility of metaphysics as science“ (p. 72). Actually, what Velkley calls ‚logic of experience‘ was not elaborated on by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, and this is why Velkley does not give a textual reference for this phrase. As a matter of fact, though, Kant delves into the relation between logic and experience in the Reflection 1628 (dated by Erich Adickes to the phase psi, 1780-1789): „However, given that the objects are diverse, there must also diverse rules of thinking, for instance for the object of experience different rules from those for the object of mere reason (virtue), for the object of outer experience different rules from those for that of inner experience. Every science has its particular rules“ (Ak.-Ausgabe, vol. 16, p. 44). In the Reflexion 1596 (dated by Adickes to the phases kappa-lambda, 1769 to autumn 1770) he goes as far as to state that “[t]he principles of logic are either em¬pirical or rational. As a propedeutical philosophical science logic…must originate from the analysis of common reason“ (Ak.-Ausgabe, vol. 16, p. 29). These passages do not coincide exactly with what Velkley’s interpretation of transcendental logic, they nonetheless point out to Kant’s awareness of the issue. In „Kant on the Primacy and Limits of Logic“ (p. 81-89), Velkley starts from the too often forgotten fact that the Critique of Pure Reason is „a treatise on Logic as much as on Metaphysics,“ and „that it develops a notion of metaphysics which incorporates ontology into logic“ (p. 81). As regards the question of the primacy of logic over metaphysics or of general over transcendental logic, Velkley favors both the primacy of metaphysics and of transcendental logic, „logic itself, as dependent upon the possibility of conceiving in general, while as ‚formal,‘ independent of the actual content of our concepts, is conditioned by the transcendental ‚I think‘“ (p. 88). Finally, in „Moral Finality and the Unity of Homo Sapiens: On Teleology in Kant“ (p. 93-109), Velkley sums up his endeavor of re-examining Kant’s assessment of the problem of metaphysics in terms of Plato’s philosophical eros. Kant presents his doctrine of the ‚natural disposition to metaphysics‘ by assuming that „human reason is characterized by a permanent and irresistible striving to uncover the ground of the totality of things, including itself, in an unconditioned and hence absolutely necessary ground“ (p. 95). Indeed, Velkley suggests „the entire critical philosophy as elaborated chiefly in the three critiques is an effort to justify that erotic striving“ (p. 95). The width and originality of Velkley's interpretation provides an outstanding contribution to Kant scholarship. One should not forget, however, that Velkley's main object is to place Kant within the history of the question about the relation of culture to being, i.e., of the ontological background of intellectual creation. For Velkley, the essence of the effort of Rousseau, Kant, Schelling, and later philosophers of culture consists in reconciling modern, metaphysically emancipated science with the attainment of the wholeness of being. Various speculative theories of freedom's self-realization find indeed their origin in this effort.