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Article Excerpt
Let me suggest provisionally that fiction (or at least literary fiction), in its traditional (philosophical) determination, always has to do with a certain beyond. (1) That it puts us in adventurous touch with something over the frontier, with other worlds, with ghosts (perhaps, as we shall see, with ghost ships). And that, reciprocally, any beyond always runs the risk of falling prey to fiction, so that as soon as philosophy ventures into it, it runs the risk of finding itself somewhere it never should be.
Jacques Derrida claims in Parages that it is on the frontier of philosophy and literature--or rather, where this frontier trembles--that philosophy is most called to thought (10). One imagines that such a frontier (especially if it were to turn out to be essentially unstable), has a complex structure that is difficult to pin down. My working hypothesis here, in what will be both rather elementary and rather dry (for which I apologize), is that this structure must have an at least analogical relation with the structure of the frontier as Kant presents it, and especially in the famous and obscure discussion in the Prolegomena of the distinction between limit and bound, bound and limit, border and boundary, perimeter and periphery, barrier and gate, Grenze and Schranke. Moreover, we shall see that analogy is also part of our problem and, as such, cannot solve the question of the frontier. (2)
I shall be trying to show, not that philosophy and literature are two domains with a frontier (even a vague or uncertain frontier) that separates them more or less successfully, but that where there is a frontier (even a sharp or distinct frontier), or perhaps where there is an effort to think the frontier, there is something like literature. This "literature" can (as tends to be the case in Kant) be something from which one suffers, of which one bears the passion (as one says the passion of Christ), while enjoying it more or less secretly. "Something like literature" would then be (as Jean-Luc Nancy has brilliantly shown from a quite different point of view) Kant's passion, or at least the passion of a Kant re-read after Derrida--re-read, then, with a view to subjecting the Kantian transcendental (or finding it already subjected) to the strange kind of twist we have got used to calling the quasi-transcendental.
And so, by way of an exergue, as an example of this double passion, this famous paragraph that I cite without commentary, in which the whole Critique of Pure Reason is at stake:
We have now traveled throughout the land of pure understanding and carefully inspected its every part, but have also surveyed it throughout, determining for each thing in this land its proper place. This land, however, is an island, and is enclosed by nature itself within unchangeable bounds. [Dieses Land aber ist eine Insel, une durch dir Natur selbst in unveranderliche Grenzen eingeschlossen]. It is the land of truth (a charming name), and is surrounded by a vast and stormy ocean, where illusion properly resides and many fog banks and much fast-melting ice feign new-found lands. This sea incessantly deludes the seafarer with empty hopes [den auf Entdeckungen herunschwarmenden Seefahrer] as he roves through his discoveries, and thus entangles him in adventures that he can never relinquish, nor ever bring to an end. But before we venture upon this sea, to search its latitudes for certainty as to whether there is in them anything to be hoped, it will be useful to begin by casting another glance on the map of the land that we are about to leave, and to ask two questions. We should ask, first, whether we might not perhaps be content with what this land contains, or even must be content with it from necessity [aus Not] if there is not other territory at all on which we could settle. And we should ask, second, by what title we possess even this land and can keep ourselves secure against all hostile claims. (Critique of Pure Reason, A235-6/B294-5) (3)
Kant not only makes a difference between these two terms Grenze et Schranke (an operative difference, as they used to say), but he makes that difference the object of an explicit reflection, and he does so from the first edition of the Critique (1781), and then, in the Prolegomena (1783), pushes this reflection to the point of making this distinction a key to the understanding of his entire thought, at least as far as pure speculative reason is concerned--and this leaves more than a trace in the second edition of the Critique (1787).
In Kant's discussions of the limits and boundaries of the understanding, which are of course legion, the dominant German term in general is Grenze. Thus, at the outset of the preface to the first edition of the first Critique, explaining how, on the basis of the principles reason cannot fail to employ in the sphere of experience, it finds itself impelled to go beyond experience and invokes principles that are of no use in that sphere:
By doing this, however, human reason plunges into darkness and contradictions; and although it can indeed gather form these that they must be based on errors lying hidden somewhere, it is unable to discover these errors. For the principles that it employs go beyond the boundary of all experience [da sie uber die Grenze aller Ehrfahrung hinausgehen], and hence no longer acknowledge any touchstone of experience. The combat arena of these endless conflicts is what we call metaphysics. (Aviii)
There would be dozens of examples of this usage that one could quote, as much in passages that remain unchanged from one edition to the next as in some additions that are found only in the second edition. (4)
It is true that one also finds uses of the word Schranke, notably in a passage from the "Discipline of Pure Reason", in which Kant proposes an extended analogy between our knowledge in general and our knowledge of the terrestrial globe. Kant wants to make a distinction between two forms or modalities of ignorance (an ignorance which, he recalls, should incite me to pursue my inquiry rather than abandon it), or rather two forms and two modalities of ignorance. I can first be ignorant either of things, or of the determination and the limits (Grenzen) of my knowledge. Each of these two forms of ignorance can have two modalities: the ignorance in question can be contingent: a contingent ignorance of things calls for a dogmatic inquiry into the things in question; a contingent ignorance of the limits of my knowledge calls for a critical inquiry into the limits (Grenzen, still) of my possible knowledge. But that my ignorance be necessary (second modality, then, and apparently of both forms at once, for Kant no longer talks of things, is already on the limit), that cannot be established empirically by observation (Beobachtung), but solely by critical means, by the deepening (Ergrundung) of the primary sources of knowledge.
We must therefore distinguish the determination of the limits (Grenzbestimmung) of our knowledge, which can only be done on the basis of a priori grounds, from a mere limitation (Einschrankung) due to what Kant calls "merely a cognition, although only indeterminate, of an ignorance that can never be removed completely" (A758/B786). The first ignorance, which is necessary, determined by a Grenze, gives rise to science, whereas the second, contingent and limited, only gives rise to a perception.
If I represent the earth as flat ("as a plate," says Kant), I can learn from my experience that however far I go there is always ahead of me more space into which I could still advance. In this way I know the Schranken of my own knowledge of the earth at a given moment (the circle closed by the horizon that represents the limit of my current perception, and even the sum of all I have seen in all the circles I have thus known as I went around the earth), but I do not know the Grenzen of all possible geo-graphy (Erdbeschreibung). But if I learn that the earth is a sphere, then, on the basis of a small part of that sphere, I can know it (without experience of what its surface may contain) in its scope (Umfange), its size, and its Schranken.
My knowledge, so long as I restrict myself to the data of immediate experience, is thus limited, it has Schranken that do not correspond to the Grenzen of what I could know if I set off from...
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