Madness in the Organic Order of Space.
Kant and the Imagination
Marco Costantini·
Roma Tre University, Italy
Tor Vergata University of Rome, Italy
Abstract
In this paper, I first examine the
classification of mental derangements contained in Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, in order to highlight
the role played by imagination in their pathogenesis. Later, on the basis of
this examination, I reflect on the origins of critical philosophy, which can be
seen as an attempt to construct a control device for the imagination structured
as a systematic, organic space.
Key
words
Critical
Philosophy; Imagination; Kant; Mental Disorders; Mental Illness; Space; System.
«Courage,
gentlemen, land is in sight!»
I. Kant, Träume
eines Geistersehers
1.
The Role of Imagination in Mental Derangements
In the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,
34 years after the Essay on the Maladies
of the Head, Kant presents a second classification of psychopathologies,
considered, in general, as «defects of the cognitive faculty» (Fehler des Erkenntnißvermögens) (Anth
202; 2006: 96)[1].
If comparaed to that of the Essay,
the classification of the Anthropology,
which goes from § 45 to § 53, undergoes substantial changes in the number of
the featured entries, in the respective arrangement, and in certain
symptomatological descriptions[2]. It is
not, however, our aim to engage in a comparison that depicts, case by the case,
the differences between the two nosologies. We will rather try to highlight how
imagination plays a dominant role within those pathological conditions which
Kant gathers under the name of «mental derangements» (Gemüthsstörungen)[3].
Since
its pragmatic point of view removes the Anthropology
from the knowledge of the natural causes of human phenomena, it would be
useless to search through its pages for a proven aetiology of
psychopathologies. In the rare instances where Kant suggests a cause, he
ostensibly does so to subordinate its non-apodictic knowledge to pragmatic
purposes. Thus, when he describes mental derangements as «an arbitrary course
in the patient’s thoughts which has its own (subjective) rule, but which runs
contrary to the (objective) rule that is in agreement with laws of experience»
(Anth 202; 2006: 96), he does so to provide the general sign of identification—sensus privatus taking over sensus communis[4]—which, once detected in a person,
allows their reclusion in the Narrenhospital:
«[…] a place where human beings, despite the maturity and strength of their
ages, must still, with regard to the smallest matters of life, be kept orderly
through someone else’s reason» (Anth 202; 2006: 97). Likewise, when he claims
that madness is generally a hereditary disease which «develops together with
the germ of reproduction» (Anth 216; 2006: 111), once again he does so in view
of the praxis to which such knowledge is subordinated, that is avoiding to
«marry into families where even a single such individual [i.e. the lunatic] has
been met with» (ivi). The statements on the causes of madness, just like the Anthropology as a whole, are simple
observations, appearing in scattered annotations and comments on circumstantial
πράγματα[5]. Nevertheless, although Kant’s
description of individual mental derangements leaves us in the dark insofar as the remote causes of their onset are
concerned, it allows us, at
least, to retrace a portion of their pathogenesis and to recognize in a certain
behaviour of the imagination the way the disease emerges within the psyche.
When
Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason,
deals with error, that is illusion, he declares a principle which could be
applied also to madness: «No force of nature can of itself depart from its own
laws» (KrV B 350, A 294; 1998: 384). With this he meant that at the origin of
error there is an «influence» of sensibility, or imagination, on the
understanding, «through which it happens that the subjective grounds of
judgment join with the objective ones, and make the latter deviate [abweichen] from their destination» (KrV
B 350-351, A 294-295; 1998: 385). A «deviation» (Abweichung) can be equally found in mental derangements (Anth 216;
2006: 110), yet it is provoked by more than imagination exercising an
influence. In such cases, indeed, imagination assimilates the force with which
it blends and exerts it with exceptional intensity. In the madness typical of
derangements, it is the same error that is repeated each time, the error of
exceeding in the use of such and such cognitive faculty, of augmenting its
range by placing it under the deforming lens of imagination.
We will
thus analyse the four types of Gemüthsstörung
described in § 52 of the Anthropology,
nonsenseness (Unsinnigkeit),
deception (Wahnsinn), fabulation (Wahnwitz), and extravagance (Aberwitz), in order to highlight the
role of imagination in their pathogenesis and, at the same time, to identify,
where needed, the faculty that
has been deviated, since Kant makes that
explicit only in the cases of fabulation and extravagance: judgement and
reason, respectively.
We will
proceed in order, beginning from nonsenseness. Kant describes it as «the
inability to bring one’s representations into even the coherence necessary for
the possibility of experience», adding that «in lunatic asylum it is women who,
owing to their talkativeness, are most subject to this disease: that is, their
lively power of imagination inserts so much into what they are relating that no
one grasps what they actually wanted to say» (Anth 215; 2006: 109). Kant does
not specify here which faculty is the one affected by the disorder, but the reference
to the «coherence necessary for the possibility of experience» has led some
interpreters (cf. Meo 1982: 78-83;
Butts 1986: 301; Brandt 1999: 311, 313; Frierson 2009: 274-275, 288) to claim
it is the understanding, and that the distinctive feature of nonsenseness is
the inability to provide sensible representations with the synthetic unity
necessary to make an experience in general possible. The subject affected by
nonsenseness would dwell in a world that is rhapsodic, fragmented, devoid of
the «qualitative unity» of the concept that is like «the unity of the theme in
a play, a speech, or a fable» (KrV B 114; 1998: 217). There are, however, two
reasons to doubt this interpretation. The first is a textual evidence: although
Kant, in § 52, does not mention where nonsenseness strikes, in § 45 he claims
that such disorder concerns «sense representations» (Sinnenvorstellung) (Anth 202; 2006: 96). The second reason consists
in the emphasis given, in the symptomatology, to the vivacity of imagination,
which renders the failed connection of the manifold of intuition as a secondary
symptom, ascribable not so much to a deficit
in intellectual ability, but rather to a surplus in imaginative ability. The concept, in itself, wouldn’t
have any gaps, if only imagination, due to an excess of representative
material, were not that resistant to its grasp, and didn’t behave in a way that
strongly resembles that of aesthetic ideas when they are animated by an excess
of spirit. The Critique of the Power of
Judgement, indeed, tells us more on nonsenseness that the Anthropology, insofar as it recognizes
in it the danger looming over the artistic production of genius. The
imagination of a genius whose judgement, i.e. taste, does not shape his own
spirit, that is to say an imagination that does not adapt, even formally, to
the understanding, is an imagination whose «richness […] produces, in its
lawless freedom, nothing but nonsense [Unsinn]»
(KU 319; 2000: 197). We could thus conclude from this passage that nonsenseness
should not be considered a pathology of the understanding, since it implies, on
the contrary, that imagination escapes from it in order, apparently, to merge
entirely with sensibility, generating such a «richness» of content that the
understanding skips from unity to unity in the attempt to synthesize it. It is
significant, in that sense, that Kant would call this first type of disorder
«tumultuous» (Anth 215; 2006: 109), a further indication that it is not
characterized by a failed convergence of representations, but by their positive
divergence; not by the absence of a theme, but by the constant passage from one
theme to another.
Thus,
the faculty affected by nonsenseness is sensibility, and not the understanding,
which, for its part, is at risk of being the victim of another kind of
disorder: deception. In truth, even in regard to the latter, § 52 does not
state explicitly which specific faculty is affected and, by claiming it is the
understanding, we would be disrespectful towards the text which, in § 45,
includes deception, together with nonsenseness, among the Sinnenvorstellung disorders. We do believe, however, that it would
not be possible to depict the nosology of mental disorders following the same
systematic approach that Kant almost unwillingly adopts[6], if not
by admitting a point-by-point correspondence between the order of his entries
and the hierarchical order of the cognitive faculties established by
transcendental philosophy. Since the last two nosological entries, fabulation
and extravagance, concern respectively judgment and reason, it is appropriate
to believe that they are preceded by a disorder of the understanding. Thus, the
three higher cognitive faculties would be arranged in their proper order,
preceded, to complete the picture, by the lower cognitive faculty, sensibility.
In any event, in order to support such theory we will present evidences
retrieved from the text itself.
Psychiatrists
and historians of psychiatry identify what Kant calls Wahnsinn (deception) with what we refer to today as paranoid
personality disorder (cf. Kisker
1957: 23; Leibbrand, Wettley 1961: 366; Rauer 2007: 138). The identification is
legitimate, since Kant claims that those who suffer from deception «believe
that they are surrounded by enemies everywhere, who consider all glances,
words, and otherwise indifferent actions of others as aimed against them
personally and as traps set for them» (Anth 215; 2006: 109). However, the lines
immediately preceding this description are the most interesting for us: «[…]
everything that the insane person relates is to be sure in conformity with the
formal laws of thought that make an experience possible; but, owing to the
falsely inventive power of imagination, self-made representations are regarded
as perceptions» (ivi). If we were to interpret this passage literally,
deception should be regarded as a disorder of imagination[7], or even
of sensibility[8].
It would thus be a hallucinatory phenomenon: representations produced in
complete autonomy from imagination would substitute those coming from the outer
sense, whereas the understanding, for its part, would comprehend the
hallucinated objects as if they were sensible, in accordance to the formal laws
of thought. Nevertheless, Kant describes self-deceivers as those who «consider
[betrachten] all glances, words, and
otherwise indifferent actions of others as aimed against them personally and as
traps set for them» (ivi), that is as individuals who have representations of reality, but interpret them incorrectly,
transforming them into something they are not. The effects of deception do not
appear, then, immediately in the falsity of intuitive data, but in the
transformation that the data undergoes right after it was interpreted. Wahnsinn
is not hallucination but misrepresentation. Moreover, conformity to the formal
laws of thought, that is to logic, is not necessarily a sign of a healthy
understanding. We have seen how, in the case of nonsenseness, madness
materializes in a hyperfunction, rather than in a dysfunction, of the sensible
faculty (a restless synopsis) and, in principle, we could suppose the same
happens in all the other kinds of disorder. There are no objections to
Jalley-Crampe’s claim that «Kant has never confused the irrational with the
ineffectual» (1979: 10). Imagination intensifies the faculty with which it
merges; it becomes, so to speak, its accelerator. For Kant the madness that is
most dangerous, and thus most worthy of attention, is the one that bears the
sign of enormity, exaggeration, overkill[9]. In the
case of deception, such signs are easily recognizable in the propensity to
understand the particular manifoldness of experience—«glances, words, and
otherwise indifferent actions»—under the sole universal of conspiracy.
Self-deceivers, Kant writes, «in their unhappy delusion are often so acute [scharfsinnig] in interpreting that which
others do naturally as aimed against them that, if only the data were true, we
would have to pay due honour to their understanding» (Anth 215; 2006: 109,
translation modified). In this passage as well, apparently Kant seems to claim
that the understanding performs its function as per norm but its results are
invalidated by the falsity of the starting data. However, according to the Critique of Pure Reason, truth and
falsity of a sensible representation are not the result of an error of the
senses, but of an error of the understanding (cf. KrV B 349-351, A 293-295; 1998: 384-385)[10]. It is
thus possible to interpret deception as an excess of «acumen» (Scharfsinnigkeit), a quality that
belongs to the subject of knowledge in which Kant recognizes, after all, a
noxious potential: the «subtleties» that don’t expand knowledge should be
considered as a «useless employment of understanding» (Anth 201; 2006: 95). In
this perspective, what appear as «self-made representations» would consist of
the effects that a sick understanding elicits on sensibility, the exact
opposite of what happens in the case of nonsenseness, where it is a sick
sensibility that elicits effects on the understanding (constantly pushing it
beyond itself in search of a correct unity of synthesis of the manifold of
intuition)[11].
On the whole, it is true that deception refers to Sinnenvorstellung, yet it does so indirectly. Meo rightly observes
how the subject of deception does not reach false conclusions from data, but
shapes them on the basis of a «general definition of “conspiracy” which
pre-exists perception» (1982: 84-85). Even before it is received by
sensibility, the sensible in general is destined to be misinterpreted by the
light of imagination under which the understanding lucubrates.
Kant
defines fabulation, the third of the disorders discussed in the Anthropology, as a disorder of judgment
(cf. Anth 202; 2006: 96). By
judgment, intended as the faculty that has a priori principles, we mean
reflective judgment, employed in the research of the universal (genus and species) to organize the manifoldness of the particulars of the
experience. The Kantian Logic teaches
that to search for the universal means to conceive it, to elaborate it, and in
order to do so it is necessary to compare different sensible representations to
discern similarities and dissimilarities and abstract identity from the many
differences (cf. Log 93-95; 1992a:
591-593). Now, the elaboration of the universal, in general, does indeed depend
on judgment, but this latter can perform its task only insofar as it possesses
the natural talent of «wit» (Witz).
The Anthropology emphasizes this in §
44 and later again in § 54 where the power to «pair» or «assimilate»
«heterogeneous representations» is attributed to the «ingenium comparans» (Anth 220; 2006: 115). Thus, fabulation (Wahnwitz) alters judgment since it is a
faculty that possesses «wit» (Witz).
In fabulation,
the
mind is held in suspense by means of analogies that are confused with concepts
of similar things, and thus the power of imagination, in a play resembling
understanding [scil. judgment],
conjures up the connection of disparate things as universal, under which the
representations of the universal are contained. Mental patients of this kind
are for the most part very cheerful; they write insipid poetry and take
pleasure in the richness of what, in their opinion, is such an extensive
alliance of concepts all agreeing with each other (Anth 215; 2006: 109-110).
Here even more clearly
than in other cases, it can be noted how imagination takes possession of a
psychic function that does not belong to it and uses it improperly, with an
atypical exuberance: imagination is confused with judgment and substitutes the
painstaking task of comparing representations with the endless game of
analogies, resulting in a pseudo-concept, very close to contrivance and poetry,
that replaces the true, intellectual, concept. Imagination is, once again, at
the origin of a «richness» of content that the Kantian taste for sobriety
barely tolerates. In § 44 of the Anthropology,
such an imaginative wit, harbinger of intellectual «riches», is judged to be of
extremely poor quality and accuracy, and is associated with «game» and «luxury»
(Anth 201; 2006: 96).
Finally,
let us turn to the last kind of mental disorder, extravagance, the deranged
reason. Kant notes the following symptoms:
The
mental patient flies over the entire guidance of experience and chases after
principles that can be completely exempted from its touchstone, imagining that
he conceives the inconceivable. – The invention of the squaring of the circle,
of perpetual motion, the unveiling of the supersensible forces of nature, and
the comprehension of the mystery of the Trinity are in his power. He is the
calmest of all hospital patients and, because of his self-enclosed speculation,
the furthest removed from raving; for, with complete self-sufficiency, he shuts
his eyes to all the difficulties of inquiry (Anth 215-216; 2006: 110).
It is hard to deny that
the symptoms of extravagance can be found in the dogmatic philosopher, whose
speculations on the nature of the soul, the beginning of the world, and the
existence of God are well above the domain of sensible experience (cf. Brandt 1999: 317). The term
«Aberwitz» does not appear in any of the three Critiques, and its occurrences in the Kantian corpus are, indeed, so rare that the Kant-Lexikon does not include it among its entries. Nonetheless,
extravagance can be considered the most strictly theoretical element of Schwärmerei, of religious fanaticism,
which is, even more than superstition, the great threat of Kantian
Enlightenment (cf. Allouche-Pourcel
2010). Actually, besides the most specific meaning of religious fanaticism, the
concept of Schwärmerei in Kant’s
critical thought has a technical meaning: «Schwärmerei,
in the most general meaning is an overstepping of the bounds [Grenzen] of human reason undertaken
according to principles» (KpV 85; 2002a: 110), and the faculty that is most inclined
to go beyond the limits of reason is undoubtedly reason itself, driven by a
«dogmatish schwärmende Wißbegierde» (KrV A 10) whose oneiric, imaginative
substrate Kant had already noticed in the Dreams
of a Spirit-Seer. The Reflexion 1505 included
in the Collegenentwürfe shows how
extravagance is part of the concept of
Schwärmerei, that is how dogmatic metaphysics, with its intuitive knowledge
of the supersensible, constitutes the theoretical premise of practical
fanaticism: «In der Phantasterey ist Wahnsinn, im Aberglauben Wahnwitz, in der
Schwärmerey Aberwitz. […] Schwärmer scheuen Definition und Experiment wie als
Feuer. Metaphysik macht Schwärmer, weil sie ihren eignen Qvell und Grenzen
nicht zeigen kan» (HN 810)[12].
2. The Non-Place of Imagination
Each of the four types of
mental derangement implies the demolishment of a specific boundary, since the
contact with imagination presses one or the other cognitive faculty to an
abnormal functional activity. Jalley-Crampe has observed how, for Kant, it is not
«the sleep of reason that produces monsters; but, on the contrary, a
hyperactivity that reason unfolds when it dreams whilst being awake or, which
is the same thing, when it’s devoted to metaphysics» (1979: 12). Nevertheless,
if we look more closely and consider the monomaniacal aspect of deception and,
in particular, of extravagance, that is the impoverishment of psychic contents
that characterizes these two disorders, we should be talking of amplification
rather than «hyperactivity» or hyperfunctioning. The psychic conduct of those
affected by a disorder could be compared not so much to that of one who does
many things, or more things than necessary, but rather to that of one who goes
over the top. Although in the Anthropology
Kant suggests on several occasions that a «richness» of representations is
a particular attribute of imagination (cf.
Anth 180, 181, 201; 2006: 73, 75, 96), the disorders produced by it, once
madness takes place, seem to interest the intensity of the form instead of the
abundance of contents. Mental derangements have a qualitative rather than a
quantitative nature. Even the symptoms of nonsenseness and fabulation could be
reinterpreted from this perspective. In the first case, we would have a greater
space-time capacity of the comprehensio
æsthetica; in the second, the extension of a same analogical relation
(whatever that may be) to the totality of the representations of the universe.
After all, the classification of psychopathologies in the 1764 Essay was undertaken by observing the
qualities that madness manifests once it has reached a certain degree of
intensity (cf. VKK 260; 2007: 66).
But, eventually, the critical Kant has preferred the «Grenze», the limit of
space, to the «Limitation», the limit of reality, and to him madness, especially
that of reason, takes on the appearance of the overcoming of a line drawn
before one’s eye, since it is perceived within a precise geometry of the
psychic space. Such geometry has all the appearance of being designed for the
purpose of limiting imagination on multiple sides, thereby preventing it from
any form of excess—creating, de facto,
the conditions for an excess, in general, to occur[13]. In Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant wrote that
«the frontiers [Grenzen] between
folly and understanding are so poorly marked that one can scarcely proceed for
long in the one region without occasionally making a little sally into the
other» (TG 356; 1992b: 343), and the aim of the first Critique was precisely that of sharpening the gaze on our cognitive
faculty to better define these «so poorly marked» limits and block the areas of
the understanding, sensibility, judgment, and reason to prevent imagination
from enveloping them in its nebulous and exciting atmosphere. Isn’t what De
Quincey recounts curious, that in Königsberg, before 1770, Kant used to hold
private conferences for soldiers on the «art of fortification» (1873: 104)?
The
phenomenon of mental derangement has elicited in Kant the necessity to render
every faculty of the human mind a space with clear outlines, so that each kind
of representation has a specific place of belonging, with the tacit assumption
that imagination does not possess, in turn, a particular kind of
representations, but rather is the phantasmal place of their blending[14]. In Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant believed
that in order to prevent the illusions of madness it was necessary to «place
the concepts in the true position [wahre
Stelle] which they occupy relatively to the cognitive faculty of human
nature» (TG 349; 1992b: 336). And what in that work might have seemed like a
passing assertion later became, in the Critique
of Pure Reason, the principle of a real «doctrine», the «transcendental
topic», which, representing the faculties as «places» (Örter) (KrV B 325-325, A 268-269; 1998: 371), requires to examine
representations in relation to «their seat [Sitz]
in the mind» (KrV B 319; 1998: 368), since «it is this place [Stelle] in which they belong that
concerns how they ought to belong to each other» (KrV B 318; 1998: 367). Such
«topic», as it is known, is intended to distinguish, in particular, sensibility
from the understanding, since at the origin of every speculative extravagance
of reason there is a confusion between appearance and noumenon, caused,
precisely, by the failed demarcation of the places dedicated to one or the
other kind of representation. It seems that critical philosophy has delivered
to the subject the topographical chart of his mind. But what is left of
imagination in this drawing?
To make of each faculty a place has also
meant to give each faculty a place: a
necessity that emerges from the concept of system that inspires the
transcendental doctrine of elements. A system differs from an aggregate because
it is based on an idea of reason which, as a purpose, or an idea of the whole,
determines a priori «the domain of the manifold as well as the position [Stelle] of the parts with respect to
each other» (KrV B 860, A 832; 1998: 691). If the unity of the aggregate is a
relative unity, made up of a perpetually extendable series of parts that are
added extrinsically to one another, the unity of system is, instead, an
absolute unity, that allows «no contingent addition or undetermined magnitude
of perfection» (ivi), and that can only grow from within, «like an animal body,
whose growth does not add a limb but rather makes each limb stronger and fitter
for its end without any alteration of proportion» (KrV B 861, A 833; 1998:
691). The order of the system is organic, or, in the Kantian language,
«architectonic», since it arranges a space in which everything that appears is
localized, meaning it is located exactly where it should be. To systematize
does not mean to worry about where such and such a thing should go, but to know
what should be in such and such a place. This organic type of order affects the
faculties collectively as a macrosystem and each one of them taken individually
as a subsystem. For instance, in the opening lines of the Transcendental Analytic, Kant writes that it is possible to expose
the concept of the pure understanding «only by means of an idea of the whole of the a priori
cognition of the understanding, and through the division of concepts that such
an idea determines and that constitutes it, thus only through their connection
in a system» (KrV B 89, A 64-65;
1998: 201); later on, in § 10 of the Analytic
of Concepts, Kant claims that «the headings already exist; it is merely
necessary to fill them out, and a systematic topic, such as the present one,
will make it easy not to miss the place [Stelle]
where every concept properly belongs and at the same time will make it easy to
notice any that is still empty» (KrV B 109, A 83; 1998: 214); lastly, in
Chapter III of the Analytic of Principles,
Kant writes: «We have now not only travelled through the land of pure understanding,
and carefully inspected each part of it, but we have also surveyed it, and
determined the place [Stelle] for
each thing in it» (KrV B 294, A 235; 1998: 338-339). And what applies to the
understanding also applies to the other faculties, including reason, in its
paradoxical way of being part of a system designed by itself.
Now,
within this topographical organization of the mind, articulated on a large as
well as a small scale, it seems that everything has been given a place so that
imagination has none. Heidegger, in the Kant-Buch,
rightly states that «the transcendental imagination is homeless» (1962: 142),
since not only the Critique of Pure
Reason deprives it of a part intended for its dissertation, but, in B
Deduction, it also deprives it of the role of third fundamental faculty of
knowledge next to the understanding and sensibility. Yet does all of this
really depend, as Heidegger claims, on Kant’s recoiling from the transcendental
imagination as though in front of the «abyss» of an ontological knowledge of
man that he feared to face (Heidegger 1962: 166-176)? Or doesn’t it rather
depend on a strategy aimed at keeping imagination in check and framing it in a
hole, an absence delimited by the four faculties from which it was excluded? An
exclusion, of course, instrumental to its control, since Kant’s Enlightenment
reply to the «unbridled» and «ruleless» «inventions» of imagination (Anth 181;
2006: 74), the harbinger of madness, surely does not correspond to a rejection
but, rather, to an assimilation into a system that organizes the absence of
imagination on a structural level to make better use of its strength on a
functional level, in the synthesis of possible and intelligible; a system, that
is, designed to transform imagination into productive
imagination, reducing its «richness» to the simplicity of the geometric,
adimensional point from which each time it will have to restart in order to
(re)construct its contents. The banning of the Schwärmerei from the sphere of moral actions depends on a theoretically
disciplined imagination[15].
We reserve the detailed exposition of the capture of
imagination in the system of the faculties for another work. We
hope, at least, to have depicted the topographical structure that made it
possible[16].
3. Madness in the Organic Order of Space
The existence of such a
structure, after all, could explain why Kant adopts as a synonym for «mental
derangement» the term «Verrückung», which means literally «displacement».
Madness in the organic order of space appears as a displacement[17]. The
term «Verrückung» is part of Kant’s medical lexicon already in 1764, when he
writes the Essay, but his stance
within nosology changes: the «Verrückung» has no more the role of species, as a
disorder of sensibility (cf. VKK 270;
2007: 76), but of genus. It guides the arrangement of the entries that compose
the nosology itself. Nonsenseness, deception, fabulation, and extravagance are
different forms of the «Verrückung überhaupt» (Anth 214). In each of them there
is a displacement of a faculty from the place assigned to it by the system, a
shift, a dislocation that relocates it in the non-place of imagination. There
are as many types of disorder as there are types of displacement. But only
three of them have a negative connotation, as causes of «disorder» and
«deviation», since when reason is delirious its displacement has a positive
connotation: it does not concern something that was organized within a certain
order anymore, but the order itself in which things are organized. For
nonsenseness, deception, and fabulation the displacement is relative, while for
extravagance it is absolute: the whole mind is displaced, and with it all the
faculties that belong to it:
[…] in
this last kind of mental derangement there is not merely disorder and deviation
from the rule of the use of reason, but also positive unreason [positive
Unvernunft], that is, another rule, a totally different
standpoint into which the soul is transferred [versetzt], so to speak, and from which it sees all objects
differently. And from the Sensorio
communi that is required for the unity of life (of the animal), it finds itself transferred to a faraway
place (hence the word Verrückung) –
just as a mountainous landscape sketched from a bird’s-eyes view prompts a
completely different judgment about region than when it is viewed from level
ground (Anth 216; 2006: 110).
In truth, this passage
seems to be the legacy of a physiological hypothesis presented by Kant in his
winter semester lectures on anthropology in 1781-1782:
The
German word Verrückung indicates that
the soul is moved [gerückt] from its
appropriate place. The entire system of nerves is connected in the brain, where
one may think there is what doctors have only supposed, i.e. the sensorium commune, or corpus callosum, the callous cerebral
matter in the striated part of the brain, where the soul should be. This is the
part of the brain from which all nervous centres begin. The Verrückung (we do not call here Verrückung a delirium, i.e. when a man raves during a disease, but when it is a
usual madness) is perhaps a malady of the sensorio
communi (V-Anth/Mensch 1011-1012).
Although the Anthropology, in the Vorrede, openly distances itself from
physiology, which wouldn’t allow but to «speculate» (vernünfteln) about «cranial nerves and fibers» (Anth 119; 2006: 3),
it is undeniable that in the aforementioned passage Kant gives credit to the
theory of the corpus callosum, since
«in this way we explain, as best we can, the so-called Verrückung» (Anth 216; 2006: 110). Yet, it is also undeniable that
Kant couldn’t fully believe in this theory, which has as its object not the
mind (Gemüth) but the soul (Seele), unless one wishes to believe
that he intended to retract the Critique’s
chapter on the paralogisms of pure reason[18].
Moreover, already in the Dreams of a
Spirit-Seer, when dealing with
the thorny issue of the seat of the soul in the body, he would take shelter
behind a non-localist position as oppose to the localist one of Knutzen and
Crusius[19]. Thus,
in a certain way, the physiological explanation belongs to that kind of
provisional, non-apodictic knowledge subordinated to pragmatic purposes[20].
Nevertheless, if we wanted to bring the discourse on a
more strictly transcendental level, we could say that Kant has translated the sensorium commune of metaphysical physiologists
in the more purely transcendental concept of sensus communis (cf.
Manganaro 1983: 185-186), where instead of the nervous fibres of the body, it
is the cognitive faculties of the mind that are collected in a system and
topographically arranged so as to establish a mutual harmony and agreement.
Thus, the fourth type of Verrückung,
absolute displacement, can surely mean the failure of a topographical
arrangement of the faculties[21]. Once
all of them are decentralized, they all centralize in a non-place defined by
excitement and eccentricity[22]. The
thinker (the deranged) lifts off the ground to look at things «from a
bird’s-eyes view». This «totally different standpoint» on things brings
together the dogmatic philosophies of all times that were not able to
territorialize the mind while casting their weak gaze on it. Kant’s critical
philosophy, soaked in what Hohenegger calls the «terminology of spatiality»[23] was
born to solve an issue that was fundamentally logistical: to arrange a space
that would function as a structure for the world of representation, ordering it
to remove it from the dim light of imagination which confounds all. Such space
could take shape only under the powerful gaze of an eye that limits and
localizes, tracing dividing lines and putting each thing in its own place. But
how much is there of imagination in this gaze, how much of derangement?
4. Postscript. Remarks on Critical
Philosophy
From the descriptive,
empirical character of Kantian nosology—which is shared, incidentally, by every
nosology—it does not follow that it is located «on the edge of transcendental
philosophy» (Manganaro 1983: 178). Critical knowledge is implicit in the Anthropology, it constitutes its secret
texture, and the paragraphs concerning the classification of the faculties are
the most evident proof of such implication. And yet the Anthropology is not just a simple collection of critical
acquisitions:
[It]
maintains the division of the “faculties”—Vermögen—as
in the Critique. However, its
privileged domain is not that where the faculties and powers show off their
positive attributes but where they show their failings—or at least where they
face danger, where they risk being obliterated. […] In anthropological
investigation […] the pursuit of each faculty takes the path of all possible
deviation (Foucault 2006: 68-69).
The Anthropology is the «negative of the Critique» (ibid.: 66),
hence the negative of a negative, which is the set of limitations that critical
philosophy has given to the Gemüth. This
means that through the empirical description of the misuses and pathological
deviations of the cognitive faculty, confined by Kant within the range of what
is purely subjective in the subject, the Anthropology
allows us to grasp the original experience that Kant must have had of the Gemüth, away from categories such as
those of subjective and objective. The Gemüth
is the object the Kantian architectonic genius modelled with the
territorializing tool of critical philosophy. The fact that mental illness can
disrupt the system of the faculties is a sign of its contingency and factitious
character, and gives us a clue as to why it was fabricated. The anthropological
investigations of the 1760s have disclosed to Kant how the human mind is essentially
something insane, fantasizing, even when it reasons, especially when it
reasons. The Inquiry’s claim that «it
is perhaps during sleep that the soul exercises its greatest facility in
rational thought» (UD 290; 1992b: 263) will always be noteworthy. An awakening
is surely not enough for a reason that also daydreams and that only in sleep
has a way to fully rejoin its own essence. But is this what the critical
thought really was, an awakening? Didn’t reason, to distinguish itself from
dream, have to dream more, to dream better, employing all that «creative
poetic capacity» (schöpferische
Dichtungsfähigkeit) with which, as Kant claims, «the soul of every human
being […] completes some imperfect resemblance in the representation of present
things through one or another chimerical trait» (VKK 265; 2007: 70)?
The
Critique of Pure Reason could not
have been a «preventive measure [Präservativ]
against a malady [Krankheit] of
reason, which has its germ in our nature» (HN 79-80), without the resources
provided to it by a systematic, organic space. Kant was not the first, and will
not be the last—just think of Freud—, to take advantage of a spatial
representation in order to give a philosophical account of the mind. Indeed, it is well known that Hume’s idea of a mental geography
played a central role in the development of Kant’s critical thought:
It is
remarkable concerning the operations of the mind, that, though most intimately
present to us, yet, whenever they become the object of reflection, they seem
involved in obscurity; nor can the eye readily find those lines and boundaries,
which discriminate and distinguish them. The objects are too fine to remain
long in the same aspects or situation; and must be apprehended in an instant,
by a superior penetration, derived from nature, and improved by habit and
reflection. It becomes, therefore, no inconsiderable part of science barely to
know the different operations of the mind, to separate them from each other, to
class them under their proper heads, and to correct all that seeming disorder,
in which they lie involved, when made the object of reflection and enquiry. […]
And if we can go no farther than this mental geography, or delineation of the
distinct parts and powers of the mind, it is at least a satisfaction to go so
far… (Hume 2000: 10).
One wonders, however, if
this «superior penetration», fallible, uncertain, has not been replaced, in
Kant, by invention; if a fantasy has not drawn its «chimerical traits» where
the eye barely sees; if the ever-changing contours of a geography have not
given way to an immutable geometry, established once and for all. Hasn’t Kant
gone even further than Hume causing a force to turn against itself, pushing
imagination to imagine the system within which it could no longer freely imagine[24]?
Abbreviations for Kant’s Works
|
Anth |
Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, in Gesammelte
Schriften, Ab. I, Bd. VII, G. Reimer, Berlin 1973. |
|
Br |
Briefwechsel, in Gesammelte Schriften, Ab. II,
Bde. X-XIII, De Gruyter, Berlin 1969. |
|
GSM |
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der
Sitten, in Gesammelte Schriften, Ab. I,
Bd. IV, De Gruyter, Berlin 1963. |
|
HN |
Handschriftlicher Nachlass, in Gesammelte Schriften, Ab. III,
Bde. XIV-XXIII, De Gruyter, Berlin 1925-1938. |
|
KpV |
Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, in Gesammelte Schriften, Ab. I, Bd. V, De Gruyter, Berlin 1963. |
|
KrV |
Kritik der reinen Vernunft (2. Auf. 1787), in Gesammelte Schriften, Ab. I, Bd. III, De Gruyter, Berlin 1962; Kritik
der reinen Vernunft (1. Auf. 1781), in Gesammelte Schriften, Ab. I,
Bd. IV, De Gruyter, Berlin 1963. |
|
KU |
Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Gesammelte Schriften, Ab. I, Bd. V, De Gruyter, Berlin 1963. |
|
Prol |
Prolegomena
zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird
auftreten können, in Gesammelte Schriften, Ab. I, Bd. IV, De Gruyter, Berlin 1963. |
|
TG |
Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume
der Metaphysik in Gesammelte Schriften, Ab. I,
Bd. II, De Gruyter, Berlin 1969. |
|
UD |
Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze
der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral, in
Gesammelte Schriften, Ab. I,
Bd. II, De Gruyter, Berlin 1969. |
|
VKK |
Versuch über die Krankheiten des Kopfes, in
Gesammelte Schriften, Ab. I,
Bd. II, De Gruyter, Berlin 1969. |
|
V-Anth/Mensch |
Vorlesungen Wintersemester
1781/1782 Menschenkunde, Petersburg, in Gesammelte
Schriften, Ab. IV, Bd. XXV, De Gruyter, Berlin 1997. |
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