HeyJ LVIII (2017), pp. 692–744
BOOK REVIEWS The Concept of World from Kant to Derrida. By Sean Gaston. Pp. xiv, 241, London, Rowman & Littlefield, 2013, £24.95.
Kant famously suggested that Western philosophy is built upon three indispensible concepts: God, the self, and the world. Sean Gaston expertly examines the fate of the third notion in post-Kantian, continental philosophy. Standing behind Kant was, of course, our Greek inheritance. Aristotle’s Physics was premised upon what Gaston calls ‘structures of containment’, the very foundation of the metaphysical world, which Christianity would subsume. There was ‘the universe (the uncontained that contains), the world (the contained that contains) and beings and things (the contained)’ (4). Kant’s contribution was to challenge the notion of world itself as either a purely rationalist or entirely empirical concept. It certainly cannot be the latter, because no one has empirically explicated the entire world. And how can it be the former, when the very act of positing the conditioned (contained) is always against the background of the truly transcendent (the unconditioned that contains)? One cannot confuse the transcendental idea of a container for the sum total of what is contained. A universal set is not identical to the totality of its members. ‘The problem with the world as an idea of pure reason is then apparent’ Gaston writes, ‘it is an idea that can produce illusions when it is taken as a whole by treating the unconditioned as a means of experiencing the totality of the conditioned series’ (10). Kant would solve this dilemma by calling the world a regulative concept, one required by reason but in no way actually known by us. Gaston characterizes the very concept of the world in modern thought ‘a profound disjunct between reason and experience’ (11). Hegel chafed at the world as only a regulative concept, but didn’t return to traditional metaphysics, instead, he moved Kantian consciousness inward, where reason, rising above the merely material, becomes self-constructive rather than correlative. ‘The actuality of the world is found when the objectivity of the concept of world expresses the unconditioned reality of the world itself’ (38). But this is what theology would call an eschatological realization of the world, when it is fully transfused by Spirit. In the meantime, the world is like
every other concept, ceaselessly spiraling as part of humanity’s spiritual self-construction. Husserl’s project began with a deliberate suspension, a bracketing, of the natural attitude towards the world. Individual impressions that enter consciousness are ever in flux, yet they represent an essential flow, one which allows for the construction of reality. Yet even here, subject-object discernment occurs against the backdrop of the world. ‘The actual, material and natural world is first and foremost for Husserl a spatio-temporal world.’ And, most importantly, ‘this definition of world will have an influence on both Heidegger and Derrida’(49). Their later worlds, like Husserl’s, will radiate from the body and its senses. Also important for Husserl is the existential surety that the world provides. The world is ‘not determined by the sum total of objects in the world. The stability and coherence of the world as a whole or “the horizon of all horizons” arises from our belief in the inexhaustibility of the given horizons of possible experiences. In his later work, Husserl will call this the “universal horizon”’(51). Here, world has long ceased its work as container of objects. Theologically, one would say that it is now call and confidence. It calls to us as the place of our self-completion and promises that its exploration will not be in vain. Heidegger summoned Western thought back to the search for being, which is not itself a being. Humanity is that part of the world that is conscious of being, not simply individual beings. At least it can be. ‘Because “we are” Dasein, in raising the question of being, what is ontically closest to us is also ontologically farthest away’ (68). Being must break into our worlds of care and concern. Note the plural. The world is no longer the existentially neutral backdrop that it was for Husserl. Note also that the corporeality of the human imposes the spatial metaphor upon our thoughts of the whole. Whatever surrounds these Heideggerian worlds is a place for the self-manifestation of being, but it never itself becomes an object of knowledge. ‘World now only registers the transcendent relation of Dasein to “beings as a whole” and to the
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