In Kant's wake : on John Sallis' Transfigurements

Kant's third Critique changed everything-at least for those who understood it. The horizons of knowing did not simply expand or contract along the same axis that had defined knowing over the centuries; rather, those horizons were fundamentally shifted, displaced, dislocated such that knowing-and the notion of truth that had defined the perfection of knowledge-had to be seen in a different light and measured by different standards. Cognition and the ideals of knowledge that culminate in the sciences lost the singular authority that such cognition had long claimed for itself The hegemony of the concept, which defined the mother tongue of philosophy since its inception, was challenged by a different relation to language, one that does not find the summit of its possibilities in the ideality of the concept, but in a different idiom. Above all, art, which had been exiled, or at least ghettoized, from any claim upon truth the very moment in which truth became a question at all-art returned and laid claim to having a relation to truth that is not replicated elsewhere. In all these ways, Kant's third Critique sets philosophy off in a genuinely new direction-one in which questions raised by both the production and the experience of art are the guiding impulse.