Journal of the History of Philosophy

Book Reviews John Sallis, The Gathering of Reason. Series in Continental Thought, v. ~. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 198o. Pp. xxii + 196. $14.oo. This commentary on the "Transcendental Dialectic" in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is a long overdue complement to the abundant literature on the other parts of the Critique. Sallis provides a close reading of the text, sometimes a paraphrase, acknowledging his debt to the four-volume work in German by Heinz Heimsoeth. The various "interpretive horizons" he adopts are meant to expose Kantian ontology rather than what, one century after Kant, came to be called epistemology. He hinges this shift in perspective on the literal sense of legein, "to gather." Since Kant's critical metaphysics consists in establishing the limits of human reason so that we may learn what can legitimately be called "being" for us, any inquiry into the being of beings following this subjectivist revolution will have to start by asking: How does reason proceed in its many ways of "gathering"? Hence the title of the book, The Gathering of Reason. Legein, used in its original Homeric sense, collecting--fi)r instance, twigs for a fire or the armors of soldiers fallen befi)re Troy--is seen as underlying the Kantian "synthesizing." As such, however, it finds itself frustrated, as it were, in its native megalomania: reason sets out to collect fragments of experience into unity, it sets out in "a movement of ascent toward the level of divine knowing" (p.28). But "the gathering of reason fails.... The fragmentation which it would repair proves irreparable " (p. 152 ). The breach between a metaphysics of full presence and a critical metaphysics (in which objects can be said to be only inasmuch as "they are invested with their form by the knowing subject," p. 171) is thereby adumbrated; our finitude sealed; and all claims to some cognitive "unity akin to that of divine knowing" (p. 15 l) are unmasked as just so many illusions. So far so good. It would seem, however, that the many shapes of the subject's fragmentation need to be justified in reference to one basic hiatus in the transcendental apparatus. Sallis enumerates four "forms of disunity": of subject and object, of intuition, of thought, and of intuition and thought (pp.26 f.). But what is the more radical rupture which these four modes of disunity merely instantiate? Strangely enough, the question of being remains only a hermeneutical device. He does not carry it into his discussion of what he calls the fragmented subject, he does not 'treat that fragmentation itself as an ontological one. In several ways, The Gathering of Reason is a book that does not deliver on its promises. The opening line reads, "In this text I trace a way to the issue of imagination " (p.XI). But imagination becomes an issue only on the last pages of the book, [239] 24o HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY and there we get little more than declarations of the kind: "Let me free it once and for all!" (p. 175). More fundamentally, Sallis does not deliver on the promise, implied in the title as well as in his usage of legein, to account in ontological terms for the subject's dispossession of itself. His claim seems to be that imagination somehow "encroaches" upon reason (p. 166) and thereby "infuses [it] with indeterminacy, anarchy" (p. XI). Such a muddling of faculties, if it is indeed what Sallis's scant references to imagination are to suggest, not only lacks any reliable basis in both Kant's letter and spirit, it also dodges the issue of ontological fragmentation. Addressing that issue directly would not have been an insurmountable task. Indeed , Kant gives two answers to the old question, "What is being?"--one answer too many. His doctrinal answer is that being (Dasein) is a category. It is doctrinal since anything that can be demonstrated a priori is part of critical "doctrine." His subversive answer to the same question is that "being (Seth) is not a predicate." Since all categories function as predicates, Sein amounts to the simple givenness enunciated in the very first lines of the Aesthetic. It can be shown that these two being...