The Paradox of Transcendental Reflection

I first read the Critique of Pure Reason seriously over four decades ago. Like many novices reading Kant, I was impressed by the epistemological distinction between the a priori and a posteriori and the semantic distinction between synthetic and analytic judgments. Kant’s question intrigued me: By what right do we claim truth in synthetic a priori judgments? What justifies the assertion that deep reflection allows for an advancement of knowledge about the ultimate features of reality?

Kant claimed that a true analytical judgment is one where the meaning of the predicate is included in the meaning of the subject, while a true synthetic judgment is one wherein the meaning of the predicate is not so included. A synthetic judgment is thus “ampliative,” that is, to say that “all bachelors are happy” is to make an assertion that cannot be known to be true simply by thinking deeply about what the word ‘batchelor’ means.

As is well-known, Kant criticized traditional metaphysics by showing that its claim to extend knowledge “beyond the realm of possible experience” was chimerical. In the absence of intuition – that which is “given” through sensation – concepts simply relate to other concepts analytically or semantically. Since no intuitions “fall under” the concept ‘God’, we cannot know that ‘God loves human beings’, unless, of course, we are able to claim this to be merely an analytical truth, that is, that the concept of ‘God’ includes as part of its very meaning ‘loving human beings’. Putative metaphysical judgments that turn out to be analytical in this way are, for Kant, “regulative judgments.” While incapable of miming the ontological contour of the supersensible world, they are useful in ordering our supersensible concepts, and thus our thinking about the supersensible world. Kant thought his analytic/synthetic distinction exhaustive. Either judgments are analytic or synthetic; tertium non datur.

In reading the metaphysical and transcendental deductions of the Critique, I was struck by the oddity of what Kant was writing and what I was doing in reading. Kant was offering arguments about how it is that knowledge consists in the application of concepts to intuitions such that there is a “synthesis of the manifold of sensation.” I thought that what he wrote was plausible and was even able to grant that what he said was likely true. But with this an uncomfortable argument seems to emerge.

Let us regard as true the Kantian statement, ‘an object is that by concept of which the manifold of sensation is united’. If this statement is true, it must be true either analytically or synthetically. But clearly it is not an analytic truth for no amount of simple reflection upon ‘object’ allows one to conclude by meaning alone the concept ‘that by concept of which the manifold of sensation is united’. Therefore, it must be true synthetically.

But now the discomfort becomes acute because it is unclear what sensible intuitions must be united to make true the judgment ‘an object is that by concept of which the manifold of sensation is united’. Synthetic judgments for Kant are true a posteriori except for arithmetic and geometry which make direct appeal to the pure forms of sensibility. But neither sensibility nor its pure forms are synthesized in judging true the proposition, ‘an object is that by concept of which the manifold of sensation is united’. Accordingly, the sentence seems to be left without justification, and with it a great many of the statements Kant employs in his discussion of the transcendental unity of apperception.

Clearly, I had stumbled upon the paradox of transcendental reflection. Kant asks his readers in the Critique of Pure Reason, “What are the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such?” After claiming that all propositions are either analytic or synthetic and that synthetic a priori metaphysical judgments are problematic in extending knowledge beyond the realm of possible experience, he writes hundreds of pages in which he is seemingly using synthetic a priori judgments justifying these claims. Kant’s transcendental reflection apparently did not have to follow the same justificatory practices with respect to knowledge and truth that our reflections on the nature of things must follow. When reflecting upon the conditions of our knowledge of the nature of things, we no longer need to play by the same rules as we do when reflecting simply upon the nature of things.

Transcendental reflection, our thinking about how we think things, is exempt from the rules it prescribes to our thinking of things. Kant had perhaps “done away with knowledge of God to make room for faith,” but in doing so he created a cottage industry for philosophers. They who could not with justification lay out the truth conditions of ‘God created the universe’ -- there are no intuitions united either under the concept ‘God’ or the concept ‘created the universe -- could now claim truly this statement: ‘The judgment that ‘God created the universe’ cannot be regarded as true because there are no sensations falling under ‘God’ and ‘creating of the universe’. While clearly this proposition is a priori, we need no longer worry if it is synthetic or analytic. It is a statement within the field of transcendental reflection after all, and while such reflection sets the rules for meaning and truth for other provinces, like the Politburo of the old Soviet Union, it is wholly exempt from the rules that it prescribes for others.

The problem of transcendental reflection is a problem of grounds: What legitimates claims of transcendental truth? Why can we not ask with sense whether the statement ‘truths divide exhaustively between the analytic and synthetic’ is itself an analytic or synthetic statement? After noticing that true judgments are both “clear and distinct,” Descartes argued that clarity and distinctness form the very criteria of truth. Analogously, we might argue that reflections that philosophers regard as true that do not meet the truth criteria of what they prescribe are transcendental. Accordingly, the claim that we can say truly that there are conditions that do not apply to what is said truly actually constitutes the very criteria of the transcendental.

The problem of the transcendental standpoint and the truths discerned in occupying it has often been overlooked or ignored. The verificationist criterion of meaning asserted that only those propositions are meaningful that are comprised of tautologies or can be checked up upon in experience. But clearly, the statement that ‘only those propositions are meaningful that are comprised of tautologies or can be checked up upon in experience’ is neither a tautology nor can it be checked up upon in experience. Faced with the inability to say with truth the material conclusion of their argument, some retreated to regarding the statement as neither true nor false, but merely a proposal. Of course, this begs the questions of why one would be motivated to adopt the proposal in the first place.

The twentieth century, though often increasingly wary of transcendental reflection, has nonetheless had difficulty avoiding it. After laying out the conditions making possible propositions of sense, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus points out that none of the propositions he has written can be regarded as either true or false. They are like a ladder one climbs that can be thrown away upon reaching the summit. Such propositions might be elucidations, but they themselves have no truth conditions. Wittgenstein famously says that while saying what cannot be said, he nonetheless hopes in this saying that something might be shown. While one cannot state the conditions for the meaningfulness of propositions meaningfully, one can nonetheless show in one’s saying how to use propositions meaningfully. Wittgenstein notes sadly that the most important things of life cannot be said.

Wittgenstein knew that Russell’s paradox had spelled doom to Frege’s logicist program. That program depended upon the unrestricted use of the axiom of comprehension within set theory, the notion that any set of conditions clearly demarcate and distinguish sets from one another. Set theorists make extensive use of sets that have sets as their own members. Given the axiom of comprehension, this condition should uniquely determine sets, that is, for all sets, either they have sets as members of themselves or they don’t have sets as members of themselves: tertium non datur.

Russell then asked us to consider those everyday sets that don’t have sets as members of themselves, e.g., the set of elephants has as its members elephants, not sets of elephants. He directs us to consider the collection or set of all of sets that are not members of themselves. Now since we can ask with sense whether a set is a member of itself or not a member of itself, and tertium non datur, we can ask with sense whether the set of sets that are not members of themselves is itself a member of itself or is itself not a member of itself. A little reflection shows that if the set of all sets is a member of itself, that is, is a member of the set of all sets that is not a member of itself, then it itself must not be a member of itself. Conversely, if the set of all sets that are not a member of themselves is not a member of itself, then it must be a member of itself. That this paradox was not allowed in logic shows that somehow logic was not going to be regarded as a case of transcendental reflection, for it itself must obey its own rules!

That logic must obey its own rules is assumed in the celebrated Incompleteness proof of Gödel. He showed that paradox arises on the assertion that all known mathematical truths (tautologies) can be derived from a finite set of axioms. By ingeniously semantically encoding information into the syntax of arithmetic, it can be proven that there will always be a provable true proposition G from some axiom set that states that it itself cannot be proven on the basis of that axiom set. Adding a new axiom will not solve this problem because a statement can be proved stating that it cannot be proved on the basis of the new axiom set. While logicians carefully distinguish their metalanguage from the object languages about which the metalanguage speaks, they do not countenance theorems in the metalanguage contradicting those of their object languages.

Paradox dooms logic, but not transcendental reflection! How else can we explain the rise of phenomenology with all its fanfare and hopes? Reading the texts of Husserl, Heidegger and others brings us again into the orbit of the transcendentality that Kant had birthed, and Fichte, Shelling, Hegel and others so effectively exploited.

The phenomenological tradition of such reflection differs from the Neo-Kantian tradition in that while the latter is engaged with the principles by which knowledge is legitimately had, the former utilizes evidence.  Husserl realized that truth is itself not something that can be accounted for on naturalistic assumptions, and thus argued that so-called natural truths must rest upon non-natural grounds. Accordingly, the very grounds of the truth of metaphysical truths must be non-metaphysically investigated. One must go zu den Sachen selbst and bracket questions of metaphysics and the natural world in order to apprehend those grounds upon which the natural world and metaphysics rests. These grounds, thought Husserl, were to be found in the direct apperception of that which is immediately given to consciousness.

But phenomenological reflection proved to be no easy task, and reflection on “the things themselves” was soon seen to involve reflecting upon many other things, some of which were not so unambiguously evidence. In fact, the criterion by which to evaluate the nature and strength of evidence was not clearly something one could simply “see” evidentially. Marshaling evidence and relating that evidence to philosophical problems seems to involve principled transcendental reflection. Husserl knew this, and by the publication of Ideas in 1913 adopted the position of transcendental idealism that he once wished to bracket. Transcendental reflection demonstrated the necessity of a transcendental ego related noetically to the Sinn-world of noematic content. This transcendental ego could not be examined phenomenologically without presupposing that very ego under investigation. The problem was that transcendental reflection seemed to require a transcendental ego that was, by definition, not amenable to phenomenological investigation.

It is at this stage that Heidegger enters our story, penning Sein und Zeit and striving mightily therein to avoid the paradoxes to which Husserl’s hidden transcendental ego fell prey. By re- thinking what a transcendental ego really is, Heidegger was able to avert the problem of how the transcendental ego can direct itself upon its world. For Heidegger, the occult ego of Husserl became Being-in-the-world, Dasein. The ego is already embedded in its world and it is this embeddedness. With this step Heidegger would try to do something nobody had yet succeeded in accomplishing. Heidegger wanted phenomenologically not only to access those beings in the world that constitutes the basic experience and structure of Dasein, but he wanted to examine the conditions for the intelligibility of phenomenologically accessible beings in the world; he wanted to coax out of hiding those worldly conditions making possible beings in the world. His interest was in the be-ing (“to-beness”) resident within the horizon of the world itself. He claimed that his investigation was ontological, that it had to do with be-ing, that is, it concerned not primarily beings, but those conditions of intelligibility that made possible the intelligibility of beings as such. 

But Heidegger’s work in Sein und Zeit was beset by transcendental paradox as well. His pointing out of different ways of being seems at times to leave out the very possibility of a way of being doing the pointing. Take, for instance, his distinction between Vorhandensein (present-at-hand be-ing) and Zuhandensein (ready-to-hand be-ing). This distinction is fundamental for Heidegger. Objects appear to us either as “present-at-hand” or “ready-to-hand”, either as objects having properties or as equipment to be used in our everyday pragmatic concerns. But what is the being of the one who distinguishes be-ing-present-at-hand from be-ing-ready-to-hand? Is the distinction between the objective and pragmatic an objective or pragmatic distinction? If neither, then should Heidegger not have distinguished some other category beyond the objective and pragmatic?

Heidegger’s detailed analysis of the be-ing of Dasein in Sein und Zeit seems to push towards theoretical comprehension, a present-at-hand description of those fundamental structures that are not in themselves present-at-hand. But this is exactly what transcendental reflection does: It attempts a theoretical description of a province of being that cannot be theoretically described.  Transcendental phenomenology perhaps has made the most valiant attempt to grant explicit truth conditions for statements of the transcendental. Clearly, Husserl was attempting in his formal ontology to escape the paradox of transcendental reflection.  But as mentioned before, the hope that there could be a stable province of being impassible to its own investigation was quickly extinguished by Heidegger's insight that knowing being is itself an activity of being, that at the foundation of being, there is be-ing, and that there is be-ing all the way down, as it were.  

The paradox of transcendental reflection are encountered by a being, who in its be-ing, has be-ing at issue for it. Such reflection and paradox can sometimes be brought to the surface by the Geisteswissenschaften, who realize profoundly that the Naturwissenschaften proceed so successfully because they exclude what to the human spirit is central: We are not who we are and can never not be who we are.  Difference rules the first set of disciplines and identity the second. 

So what is deeper in human experience, the geistliche paradoci of transcendental reflection, or the tidy coherency of  natural science? 

Transcendental Reflection and the Divine Other

I

Transcendental reflection investigates those conditions necessary for there to be the kind of experience that we have. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) famously inquired into the "transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such," finding that pure priori forms of sensibility and pure a priori concepts of the understanding are both necessary to deliver the world as it is: one filled with objects having properties causally related to one another. Without these, the universality and necessity of Newtonian physics could not obtain.  

Kant inaugurated a type of thinking that has in many respects dominated theology for the last couple of hundred years.  Kant argued that in order to have a unity to experience there must be a transcendental unity of apperception, a unifying activity that is itself possible to reflect upon. In writing the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant was thinking about his own thinking, about the way that thinking grants unity to experience.  His thinking about thinking was neither an empirical thinking, a thinking of mathematics or geometry, nor a thinking about the ultimate nature of things as Leibniz and Wolff would have thought.  It was a reflective thinking that offered insight into how the unity of experience is possible, a thinking that sought the truth of this unity of experience.  It was not a metaphysical thinking of the transcendent, but a transcendental thinking that brought into the light of day those structures employed but not noticed, a thinking that sought a hermeneutical retrieval of that which is closest to us but remains unnoticed. 

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were convinced of the profundity of Kant's project which reflected upon, and ultimately coaxed into the open, those transcendental structures making experience possible. A transcendental unity of apperception did not commit one to Descartes' "thinking substance'; such a unity of thinking that did not entail old school metaphysics. Fichte and followers followed Kant's lead after pointing out that the good philosopher could not sustain his famous distinction between things as they are in themselves and things as they appear for us. 

If thinking is that which unites our experience, then why must such thinking be turned back by a putative thing-in-itself? This too could be thought, and thinking this actually dissolves problematic dualisms. Of course, there is something one bumps up against in experience (Anstoss), but such a bumping does not entail that that what is bumped is of a wholly disparate ontological lineage.  Perhaps nature which, as Kant pointed out, is already the result of the synthesizing activity of the transcendental unity of apperception, is not a joint product of something out there and our synthesis.  Perhaps it simply is the result of our synthesis, a synthesis that does not have to hook to the disparate, but can simply connect to itself in appropriate ways.  And so it is that the I posits the very world with which it must deal, the world that it can know, the world that serves as the backdrop to the moral life and all the loftiest of the human heart.  

Transcendental reflection is born in the security of the transcendental unity of apperception, a security that finally cannot admit the Other, for to admit that is to destroy the very grounds upon which transcendental reflection is based.  To posit the Other is to return to the problematic between things as they appear and things in themselves; it is to bark up the Kantian tree and return to an aporia once thought solved and vanquished.  Thinkers in the Kantian tradition knew that this could not be progress.  After the Kantian critique of old-style metaphysics, the security of the transcendental provided a felicitous place for the narrative of God and His incursion into history to took place.  

II

At the risk of oversimplification, I claim that in the days prior to Kant, the days running from the Old Testament prophets through Plato and Aristotle to the steppes of the Enlightenment, the alterity or otherness of God was simply taken for granted by the Church and society generally. Although one could not know the nature of God, the regnant assumption was that God did have a nature that was not dependent upon human awareness, perception, conception or language.  God's being did not depend upon human being, particularly not upon human thinking.  

The story of how Neoplatonic thought forms gradually gave way to Aristotelian categories is important to tell, however, for our present purposes, I will just remark that both types of thinking generally assumed that the Being of God is externally related to human being.  Whether God is regarded as being itself or as the highest being, the tradition acknowledged that God is causally related to the universe.  God's creation of the universe is a causing of the universe to be. Without God's act of creation, the universe would not have being.  Divine power is needed to bring being out of non-being.  Accordingly, the theological tradition was generally committed to the reality of God apart from human being -- the thesis of theological realism -- and the possibility of causal connections between God and the universe -- the thesis of theophysical causation.  

At the dawn of the Reformation, there were a number of differing theological schools that read Augustine, Plato and especially Aristotle in different ways, ways that reflected differing philosophical positions on the ontology of universals and the relationship of these universals to particulars.  While it is an oversimplification to say that Aristotle had become the philosopher of the Christian tradition, many theological traditions assumed with him that there were basic things in the world (substances) and that these substances had properties, some of which were necessary for the substance itself, and some which were accidental to the substance, that is, some of which could either be had by the substance or not possessed by it  without changing the being of the substance. God's creation was a creation of substances with properties.  These substances were the effects of God's creativity activity.  Adam and Eve were individual substances bearing the kind-identifying properties of being both rational and animal. The contour of Adam and Eve's particularity was due to the contingent properties each possessed.  

All of this is important for Christology. That God is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself meant that the particular entity Christ had both divine and human properties and that Christ had causal power.  The miracle stories suggest all of this, of course.  The being (or substance) Jesus caused it to be the case that 5,000 men (plus women and children) were fed with two fish and five loaves of bread. This being caused it to be true that the man Lazereth was no longer dead.  

Christ was the God-man, He is the second person of the Trinity that had assumed human flesh.  The Second Person eternally existed; there was never a time when Christ was not.  This means inter alia that Christ is simply other than any human who might think, love or trust in Him.  Christ is not a category of human thinking, but a name for a being that exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception or language.  To say that Christ is externally related to anybody ether accepting or rejecting him is to assume that Christ is other that anybody either accepting or rejecting Him.  

When it came time for Enlightenment rationalists to do theology, it was very natural to do it in a metaphysical key. God who is other than worldly being or human thinking must ultimately be seen as the sine qua non of the created order. The principle of sufficient reason claiming that for anything that is there must be some reason why it is, when applied to the universe seemed to point univocally to God.  

One might claim that the time before Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was a "pre-critical" time where the primary objects of religious thought and experience were not yet dissolved into the fog of rational doubt.  Reason, properly applied in discovering many truths fully consonant with the Bible, attested to the same reality as the Holy Scriptures themselves.  

While Kant himself seemed to leave room for there to be a God that is other than human thinking, this God could not be known, and accordingly, the enterprise of rational theology had to be profoundly rethought. The idealist tradition following Kant wished to think God within the security of transcendental subjectivity. Reason had found a place for God that could protect God from the contingencies of the other.  When one thinks about it, the post-Kantian theological tradition can be read in part as an attempt to rescue theology from Lessing's "broad ugly ditch."  Clearly, this theological tradition could insulate the "necessary truths of reason" from the "accidental truths of history."  

III

Martin Heidegger knew the tradition well, understood Kant, and had read Martin Luther.  In the Freiburg lectures from 1919-23, Heidegger shows himself increasingly dissatisfied with a thinking in theology that leaves out the life of the one thinking.  Heidegger's early attraction to Martin Luther (and fueled by Kierkegaard) was his attempt to find a way out from the security of the transcendental project.  For Luther, death was part of the very life of the theologian, an experienced life.  Luther famously uttered "experiential macht die Theologum".  There is nothing secure about finitude, about the life of the believer beset with "sin, death and the power of the devil."  The reality of all three is part of the experience out of which and in which theology is done.  Theological thinking must always be tied to the Otherness of God and the divine project of the salvation of the sinner.  It is a bold thinking of infinite things done by flesh-and-blood finite human beings whose thinking always happens under the Cross.  

Human thinking can never be wholly secure, because the otherness of sin, death and devil is always already besetting it. Such thinking is ecstatic, it is a thinking that is "outside oneself" because it is a thinking in the light of the Cross, a thinking that is a trusting in a Savior that is not a projection of one's own being, not an aspect of the nobility of human being with its cultivated intellectual and moral virtues, not a thinking that is grounded in reason.  Luther, who lived 250 years prior to the heyday of transcendental reflection, already knew that such reflection, if possible, could not end in human salvation.  To be saved is to be saved by that which is other than oneself.  Salvation happens in a world of flesh-and-blood believers dying and sinning.  Thirty-year old Martin Heidegger understood that if theology is to be a serious discourse, this discourse must not hide what is basic to the theologian: The theologian in her now is always already running ahead of herself in encountering that possibility of their being no more possibilities.  The theologian in her now is always already living death, sin and the power of the devil.  This triumvirate does not allow for calm, calculating thinking on the wonders of the grace-filled life.  Life is filled with death.  Our lives, like Christ's life, are lived in the shadow of our crucifixion.  We are now the not that we shall once be when we are no longer being the one for whom the not of the future is no longer.  

Heidegger wanted to bring reflection upon ultimate things back to the phenomenological-ontological-existential ground from which all metaphysical reflection arises. He wanted to call us back from the forgetfulness of this ground, a forgetfulness of being which gives rise both to our absorption in the world and our flights into metaphysical abstraction.  Heidegger's reading of Luther buttressed his conviction that it was time for philosophy to rediscover again the one for whom philosophy means, the one who in its being, has be-ing at issue for it.  With Heidegger, the spector of the Other comes into sight.  We are in our be-ing, beings for whom and by whom the question of being and meaning arise.  This questioning of be-ing by that being who cares about be-ing, is a questioning that opens to the Other of being, a questioning done over the pit of non-being, a questioning that itself is the conduit of the presencing of the absence of being.  Death, after all, cannot be taken up into the life of being; it is the boundary of being that establishes the conditions of being itself.  

IV

But the early Heidegger did not get to the Other.  His project remained curiously within the province of transcendental thinking and subjectivity.  Laying out (interpreting) the existential-phenomenological-ontological roots of our reflection upon being is at some level a continuation of transcendental subjectivity. In our thinking, we think Dasein which is open to its Other, but we can only think this alterity as part of the transcendental existential-ontological conditions for the possibility of ontic engagement with an Other, an Other that may for Dasein have profound existentiell significance.  No longer does the transcendental thinker lay out the unity of the categories of human thinking by which the world is known, now this thinker is engaged in highlighting the unity of the existential structures themselves by which and through which the unity of care is possible, a caring that grounds any thinking in the first place.  

The problem is clearly seen in Heidegger's treatment of other Daseins.  They are Mitsein for Dasein who can have Fuersorge for them, but they themselves in their otherness from Dasein cannot be be in themselves other.  The early Heidegger is simply unable to bring the world into focus.  He can and does get to the world from a certain position in the world, but cannot get to the world itself.  Being cannot ultimately be refracted by considering profoundly being as it is da (there).  What gets thought when considering Da-sein is Dasein, not Sein.  Ironically, Heidegger finds himself in the position of Leibniz.  One has a take on the world within any monad, but monads are windowless, and the world itself can only be reconstructed as describable above the fray of the monadic descriptions themselves.  To get to that world, one needs theological commitments not presenting themselves within the metaphysics of the monad.  

So wither comes the Other?  Can it be brought into focus beyond the security of the transcendental project?  Did Levinas accomplish its encounter with the face? Can phenomenological encounter ground the Other?  Can it give a basis for a radical theological of the Cross where one finds oneself living without metaphysical and ontological nets, as it were?  Can alterity be thought of ontically in the way of those of the Reformation, as an otherness of being toward being?  Must we finally admit that it can only be shown and never said, but that in its showing that we discern the real ontological position of human beings eviscerated by sin, death and the power of the devil as they live their lives in the shadows of the hidden divine.  The Theology of the Cross is about showing, but not about a metaphysics of presence.  Showing here cannot be said without the said Showing turning into such a presence. Wittgenstein knew that showing happens in words, but not in truth-claims. To say what can only be shown is to turn preaching into a dogmatics that must always miss the glimpse of Divine alterity.  

Bringing this Other into the open will demand an overturning of the very identity that has grounded the security of our theology of glory project of transcendental reflection.  At the end of the day, human beings cannot save themselves.  Salvation demands an overturning of the ontological of identity, an identity that has closed the clearing of the divine other, a clearing that finds in God's traces its own footsteps. At stake is the fundamental question: Can otherness show itself as what it is, or must if always show itself as what it is for us.  At stake is the fundamental question of the Garden: Did God really say?