Anti-Kantian

Drawing on the work of CS Peirce, Giovanni Maddalena (The Philosophy of Gesture) argues that pragmatism must be understood as more than an anti-Cartesian movement in philosophy. To the critique of Descartes, it adds a critique of Kant.

He summarizes Peirce’s critique. Kant is a nominalist, which means here not the denial of universals as the elusiveness of universals: “Nominalism affirms an unbridgeable gap between reality and reason. In this view realism maintains that reason belongs to reality and in the long run of inquiry, it will (or would) know reality” (12). In contrast to Kant’s claim that Das Ich Denke (the “I think”) accompanies all ideas, Perice proposes that thought actually takes the social form of argument; not “I think” but “Don’t you think so?” (This is the best I can understand Peirce’s argument, pp 12-13). He also criticizes Kant for presuming to give the “I” an omnipotent power to unite thought and thing, to “unify a scattered reality” (13).

Maddalena offers his own critique of Kant as well. First, for Kant reason “encircles what we call experience so that nothing can escape it.” He attributes a kind of necessity to reason, and that leads Kant away from engagement with the real world as it is. He also finds Kant’s moral theory objectionable because it “abandons the complex view of reality held by the moral realist in favour of an intellectualist and self-centred conception of reality based on inner determination and effort.” Without grounding in the complex moral reality of life, Kant’s theory turns moralistic: Values are chosen, these values generate rules that must be obeyed, and the transformation of values into idols and ideologies generates tyranny. He writes, “Once the moral realist view of reality is abandoned, and also heteronomy with its typical balance between different values, the groundless tenacity of ideologies takes over and is fostered by steady guardians.” 

Finally, he objects to Kant’s separation of the disciples, especially the “notorious gap between sciences and humanities, which, he claims, is largely due to “the critical system that Kant proposed with enormous success” (6).