our concepts must be treated as regulative ideas rather than constitutive ones:
One can only comprehend the mathematical completely (that is the formal view). In all else man stands before the unknown. In order to overcome this man invents concepts, which only gather together a sum of appearing characteristics, which, however, do not get hold of the thing. Therein belong force, matter, individual, law, organism, atom, final cause. These are not constitutive (constitutiven) but only reflective (reflektirende) judgements.84
Although Kant appeals to regulative maxims, their role as construed by him, according to Nietzsche, is parasitic on that of constitutive princi- ples, with the consequence that regulative principles are relegated to that
of mere ‘as if’ (als ob) principles devoid of objective status.85 However,
Nietzsche argues that if employed in a way that is non-parasitic on constitutive principles, regulative ideas provide an avenue by which to overcome the narrowly anthropocentric object of knowledge that stands between us and reality, without, however, collapsing into dogmatism and claiming a God’s Eye perspective on things. Understood non-parasit- ically, regulative principles, for Nietzsche, are no longer ‘transcendental’, extra-historical and extra-natural principles, and as non-constitutive the
objects of our knowledge are irreducible to them.86 Nietzsche is critical
of Kant’s claim that unless our concepts ‘constitute objects’ they are denied objective cognitive status. He contends that the status of regula- tive principles can be redeemed if we deny that our concepts constitute objects, allowing only that they frame the context and parameters of our naturalistic and interest-directed research into nature. Consequently, Nietzsche suggests that our beliefs can be justified regulatively rather than constitutively. In this way, he thinks that he can overcome the nar- rowly anthropocentric and mind-dependent character of the Kantian object of knowledge. This can be illustrated by briefly contrasting the status of human knowledge in Kant and Nietzsche.
We have seen that, according to Kant, the object of knowledge is composed of a priori concepts and intuitions. An intuition is the manner in which we immediately relate to objects as sensed. Concepts are said to relate mediately to objects through their application to intuitions. Appealing to these two sources, Kant contends that our knowledge is conditioned by the specifically human forms of our cognition. Moreover, objects that are knowable by us are conditioned and determined by these forms. Kant writes:
It is therefore, solely from the human standpoint that we can speak of space, of extended things, etc. If we depart from the subjective condition under
Nietzsche’s Appropriation of Kant 39
which alone we can have outer intuition, namely, liability to be affected by objects, the representation of space stands for nothing whatsoever.87
That such knowledge is merely human rather than properly objective is highlighted by Kant’s contrast between our mode of knowledge and other possible, non-human ways of knowing. Kant entertains the pos- sibility that there are other modes of knowing and other types of objects to be known than the human. Since our mode of knowing objects is restricted to the human standpoint, Kant maintains that ‘we cannot judge in regard to the intuitions of other thinking beings, whether they are bound by the same conditions as those which limit our intuition and
which for us are universally valid’.88 Nor can we explain why we must
think of objects in the specifically human way that we do:
This peculiarity of our understanding, that it can produce a priori unity of apperception solely by means of the categories, and only by such and so many, is as little capable of further explanation as why we have just these and no other functions of judgment, or why space and time are the only forms of our possible intuition.89
The difficulty is exacerbated by Kant’s reference to the thing-in-itself as an absolute, outside viewpoint which is unavailable to our human sensible mode of intuition and which renders our knowledge narrowly anthropocentric:
What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things which we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being, nor their relations . . . We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them . . .90
According to Nietzsche, Kant relativises the nature of objects knowable by us to the subjective forms of our cognition. In so doing, the objects that obtain relative to our specifically human point of view are radically different from those that obtain from an alternative, non-human point of view. Understood in this way, our knowledge, according to Nietzsche, is devoid of real objectivity. However, in claiming that Kant’s categories should be given regulative rather than constitutive status, Nietzsche dis- tinguishes between points of view and objects. He contends that although all our knowledge is directed by our points of view, they do not constitute objects. Objects knowable by us, according to him, are neither reducible to nor determined by our point of view. Moreover, Nietzsche contends that Kant paradoxically paves the way for such an undertaking.
Nietzsche argues that, viewed closely, we can see that Kant’s account of transcendental apperception takes a step towards the collapse of his