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2 - Spinozism, Freedom, and Transcendental Dynamics in Kant's Final System of Transcendental Idealism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2009

Sally Sedgwick
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
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Summary

In the final fascicles of the Opus postumum, Kant intends to work out a plan for a comprehensive system of transcendental idealism. It is a system that includes the cardinal principles of both our experience of sensible nature and our experience of freedom. One of the most intriguing aspects of Kant's thinking regarding this system is his increasingly affirmative view of Spinoza and Spinozism. Kant repeatedly attributes to Spinoza the idea that we “intuit everything in God.” He treats this idea as something that either itself furnishes, or else is necessarily connected with, a formal principle of unity. This Spinozistic principle is what governs the investigation of the formal determinacy of cognition (das Formale der Erkenntnis), and Kant clearly weighs the option of making it a, if not the, founding principle of his transcendental theory. Moreover, he explores the possibility of making Spinoza a representative of transcendental idealism and even goes so far as to identify this idealism as a form of Spinozism. These passages from Fascicle VII and Fascicle I give a fair sense of this line of reflection:

Spinoza: that we intuit everything in God and, indeed, according to the formal principle of unity.

(22:61.2–3)

Transcendental idealism is the Spinozism of positing the object in the total complex [in dem Inbegriff] of its own representations.

Of Spinoza's idea of intuiting all objects in God. That means as much as comprehending all concepts constituting the formal determinacy of cognition, i.e., the elementary concepts, under one principle.

(22:64.6–11)

The transcendental idealism of that of which our understanding is itself the author. Spinoza. – To intuit everything in God.

(21:15.6–7)
Type
Chapter
Information
The Reception of Kant's Critical Philosophy
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel
, pp. 54 - 77
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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