Abstract

Proceeding along lines laid out in Kant’s Critiques, this essay gradually homes in on one way of understanding what the ultimate unity of pure reason might consist in. On this model, (i) pure reason, as such, is the power to originate and instate pure organizing forms—including, originally and preeminently, a self-legislated ultimate aim of complete (unmitigated, absolute) rational ordering—but (ii) this originally undifferentiated commitment to the untrammeled implementation of self-originated ordering forms is contingently confronted and qualified by empirical givens that belong to two importantly distinct sorts (roughly: the sensory and the affective), and (iii) it is this duality in the given, arational phenomena that accounts for reason’s resulting ‘double specialization’ in theoretical explanation and practical orientation. Thus there is really only a single pure reason, with a single pure-rational project, but it has what can appear to be two distinct manifestations and implementations, as the result of the basic qualitative duality in the arational phenomena with which it is contingently confronted and which it has always already appointed itself to organize aright. I argue that this conception of the ultimate unity of reason (i) is importantly underwritten by Kant’s Critiques—although not of course entailed by them, let alone explicitly articulated in them, and (ii) is key to Fichte’s post-Kantian theory of subjectivity, as a largely implicit but systematically central commitment.