A CRITIQUE OF KANT'S NOTION OF TRANSCENDENCE

The disappointed reader may finally pose the bold question whether there is a real meaning ofKant. The answer to this question, it seems to me, is both yes and no. If we mean by a realmeaning, a unified understanding of Kant apparent to anyone who takes the time and effort tomake a careful study of the
Critique of Pure Reason,
then there is no real meaning. But if a realmeaning is an understanding of Kant's transcendental philosophy based on one or a few unifyingthemes or doctrines posited as central, then there is a real meaning of Kant, or more precisely,there are several meanings of Kant to several philosophers. Various thinkers who have studied
Kant’s transcendental ontology or philosophy have sought to unify what he accomplished by
reference to one or a few key notions operative in the
Critique of Pure Reason,
but none of these
readings of Kant has won general acceptance. Kant’s
transcendental philosophy made both positive and negative impacts in the minds and lives of readers. The negative influence was so pronounced in lives and works of Dooyeweerd, Moses Mendelssohn and Heinrich von Kleist to
mention but a few. For Dooyeweerd, Kant’s
sharp separation of the practical from thetheoretical, the noumenal from the phenomenal, shatters the coherence of reality and break thecosmos asunder into two spheres. To Moses Mendelssohn, Kant is the all-destroyer. Heinrichvon Kleist
moaned how Kant shattered his life; ‘w
e cannot determine whether that which we calltruth really is truth or only appears to be truth, my life-plan

had collapsed, my only

and highest

goal has sunk,
and I no longer have a goal.’
He turned from the Enlightenment emphasis onrationality to a preoccupation with feeling and the non-rational side of consciousness. But henever found full satisfaction, and in 1811 he finally took his own life
.
This paper is of the view
that Kant’s human transcendence had no critics but critiques because the lacuna they claim to
discover inspired a new line of philosophy. Most philosophers, who take a positive or approvingattitude toward Kant
’s notion of human transcendence,
tend to regard him as a forerunner of their own philosophical positions