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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Kant's system of Transcendental Idealism may be regarded, in the contemporary philosophical perspective, as concerned with the problem whether any linguistic or conceptual system can be regarded as adequately explained in terms of the facts which the system organises. ‘Transcendental’ may be understood as what is ‘non-reducible’. Kant seems to hold that a linguistic scheme cannot be reduced to the facts which fall within the scheme, and thus it is transcendental to those facts. Formulated in such terms, the Kantian doctrine does not, apparently, propound anything which is new; that facts are tailored to a linguistic scheme is pretty much a well-known doctrine these days. But then, as we shall see, it does say something new; and when we extract that novel element in it, we shall discover also the positive import in the Kantian term, ‘Transcendental’.
1 I should clarify my use of the word ‘symbol’ here. The use of the word in the present context must not be understood as determined by any sort of convention which usually determines symbols. Rose, e.g., is the symbol of love in the sense that it is a convention to understand rose as the symbol of love. Language, however, cannot be understood as the symbol of the speaking subject in the sense that people conventionally understand it to be so. We use the word ‘Symbol’ in the present context in the sense of ‘figuration’ or ‘construction’: Kant's Transcendental Problem arises out of his insight that our language-system is a construction. It does not propound any such trivial doctrine that what we speak of is spoken of by a subject: the most important thesis of Transcendental Idealism is that the Subject itself is constructed or figurated in language, viz., in the word‘I’. That our entire language-system is a symbolization or construction cannot be appreciated except by understanding that the subject is incarnated in language. Far more, therefore, is expounded in the Kantian doctrine than the contemporary view that the world of our usual parlance is a linguistic-construct. The contemporary view does not at all approximate to Kant's revolutionary thesis that language is intrinsically construction, that the Subject is presented (in our experience) only as symbolized.
