In Kant’s wake : on 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, 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 is the guiding impulse. This tradition that has walked the path first exposed by Kant sets out with Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin who together composed a programmatic text outlining the task of German idealism in which they said: “The philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy.” This tradition continues further with Nietzsche who suggested that, “We have art lest we perish of the truth.” By the time Heidegger argued in Being and Time that “cognition is a founded mode of knowing,” and then in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that art is an original form of truth whereas science is not, this tradition had begun to consolidate itself. What we— quite inappropriately I believe—call “Continental philosophy” names this tradition. (I say that this name is “inappropriate” because this tradition should not be defined geographically, but in terms of a readiness to investigate this different idiom of truth that is exposed by art and, more generally, by aesthetic experience.) It is a still new and young tradition— technological advances might well speed up the publication and dissemination of books, but they cannot speed up our understanding of what this new approach to philosophy means and where we need to develop it. This sense that we are still at a new beginning is something too often overlooked and so the need to think through elemental matters is too often neglected. Sallis’s work stands as a powerful reminder of how innovative philosophy can become when it does indeed stay close to these elements. His work has long been on the cutting edge of this tradition and has both clarified its history and marked out its future. Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art represents a significant step forward for those of us working in this tradition that, for want of a better name, we call “Continental philosophy.” That is why it seems fair to say that no one proves more definitively than Sallis that we are doing a poor job of naming our own tradition when we speak of “Continental” philosophy as if geography defined those who define this tradition. My intention in the following is to briefly outline what I take to be Sallis’s most important contributions inTransfigurements and then to pose some questions that Sallis will address in the final essay in this book. Let me say at the outset that this is a rich book and I do not pretend I will be able to even begin to summarize it. One finds here careful treatments of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger (among others), discussions of paintings and musical works, a discussion of comedy and of Shakespeare. In short, the range is wide, far wider than my remarks will admit. There are, however, three themes that I find especially significant for Sallis’s project in this book that I want to focus upon: the first concerns language, the second concerns nature (or earth), and the third is about the question of truth.