“Metaphysics about Metaphysics.” Kant on Theoretical, Practical and Practico-Theoretical Metaphysics

The essay investigates the relation between metaphysics and practical philosophy in Kant by reconstructing Kant‘s systematic typology of metaphysics as developed in his critical writings. Section 1 deals with Kant’s rigorous reduction of philosophy to metaphysics. The focus here is on the epistemological turn effectuated by Kant with regard to metaphysics (theoretical metaphysics). Section 2 is concerned with Kant’s reconceptualization of (pure) practical philosophy as a metaphysics sui generis. At the center stands here Kant’s supplementation of the metaphysics of nature through a metaphysics of morals based on moral freedom (practical metaphysics). Section 3 addresses the merging of theoretical and practical metaphysics in Kant. The focus here lies on Kant’s introduction of a novel, practically validated form of (quasi-)theoretical metaphysics (practico-theoretical metaphysics). Throughout the essay combines an analytic interest in the forms and functions of metaphysics in Kant with a systematic interest in the practical and practico-theoretical transformation of previously theoretical metaphysics in Kant, which morphs from a doctrine of the objects of nature through a doctrine of the laws of freedom to a doctrine of wisdom regarding the supersensible.

Afterword

The proposal that Hume woke Kant by challenging the principle of sufficient reason lets us understand why Kant saw Hume as an opponent of speculative theodicy, since speculative theodicy was grounded in that principle. It thereby also allows us to understand Kant’s turn to Rousseau, who “saved Providence,” and the turn from speculative to practical metaphysics that characterizes Kant’s critical philosophy. The difficulty people have had in understanding Kant’s account of how Hume roused him has to do with the fact that they wish to avoid his transcendental idealism, since that account implies that Hume woke him by putting him on the path to transcendental idealism. To understand the Critique, we must understand it as the “execution” of Hume’s problem understood as the problem of metaphysics.

Praxeology, Imperatives, and Shifts of View

Recent neo-Anscombean work in praxeology (aka ‘philosophy of practical reason’), salutarily, shifts focus from an alienated ‘third-person’ viewpoint on practical reason to an embedded ‘first-person’ view: for example, the ‘naive rationalizations’ of Michael Thompson, of form ‘I am A-ing because I am B-ing’, take up the agent’s view, in the thick of action. Less salutary, in its premature abandonment of the first-person view, is an interpretation of these naive rationalizations as asserting explanatory links between facts about organically structured agentive processes in progress, followed closely by an inflationary project in ‘practical metaphysics’. If, instead, praxeologists chase first-personalism all the way down, both fact and explanation vanish (and with them, the possibility of metaphysics): what is characteristically practical is endorsement of nonpropositional imperatival content, chained together not explanatorily, but through limits on intelligibility. A connection to agentive behavior must somehow be reestablished—but this can (and can only) be done ‘transcendentally’.

Pouring out Postsocialist Fears: Practical Metaphysics of a Therapy at a Distance

This paper examines the healing practice ofstrava, which translates as “great fear.” With a long oral history in Bosnia, it has become particularly popular since the end of socialism and the 1990s war. This postsocialist therapy, informed by gifting dispositions, is a bustling business that intervenes into disorders that people commonly relate to the new economy.Stravatreatment presupposes distance, since the therapist rarely touches the bodies at hand, and concerned intimates commonly arranged interventions in a patient's absence. Inspired by Bruno Latour's advice to expand our notion of agency in directions indicated by those we study, I depart from the earlier accounts ofstravaas a traditional and symbolic folk practice. Instead, I explore its claims to efficacy in competition with psycho-pharmaceutical treatments of anxiety and depression in contemporary Bosnia. Of particular interest is a commonplace therapeutic blunder—the accidental mixing of “fears” water and Coke, which therapists shrug off as inconsequential. This points to a model of action best explored outside the pragmatics of science studies, employing insights gained from a rereading of Mauss', Tylor's, and Frazer's classic theories of sympathetic magic. I examine what makesstravawater—carefully prepared with prayers and handled by the therapist's and patient's wishing breaths—ritually potent, while Coke remains ineffectual. I show that this therapy is the domain of wishing, which does not interrupt a sphere of new political economy, but nevertheless intervenes in the bodies that suffer from it, and effectively redraws the limits of the social.