Claudi Brink

Kant famously claims that the understanding is a spontaneous power; he also distinguishes between relative and absolute spontaneity, and Kant scholars have debated whether the understanding is absolutely or relatively spontaneous. I argue that this debate has suffered from a faulty understanding of the absolute/relative spontaneity distinction. I identify and reject two problematic assumptions of the standard interpretation of the distinction, and I articulate an alternative account that dispenses with both. This new account identifies the relationship between understanding and reason, rather than understanding and sensibility, as the relationship that matters for determining the spontaneity of the understanding.

In Transparency and Reflection, Matthew Boyle offers a Sartrean account of prereflective self-awareness to explain the essential link between self-consciousness and rationality, moving away from standard Kantian interpretations that he claims presuppose rather than explain this connection. I argue that Boyle’s account provides useful tools for re-interpreting Kant’s claim that the “I think” must accompany all representations as a form of nonpositional consciousness. I also aim to show that Boyle’s model risks fragmenting the unity of the subject across different representational domains, and that Kant’s account (construed as a kind of prereflective consciousness) has the resources to address this challenge.

I offer an interpretation of Kant’s doctrine of cognitive spontaneity that explains how the understanding can function outside of the efficient-causal structure of nature, without being part of what McDowell calls ‘the domain of responsible freedom’. Contemporary literature is dominated by the ‘cognitive agency’ approach, which identifies cognitive spontaneity with a kind of freedom. Against this view, the ‘cognitive processing view’ banishes agential notions from its account but also reduces the understanding to mere mechanism. I argue that neither of these interpretations is obligatory, motivating a teleological but non-agential account that resists assimilation into either of the current approaches.

Kant famously claims that the understanding is a spontaneous power; he also distinguishes between relative and absolute spontaneity, and Kant scholars have debated whether the understanding is absolutely or relatively spontaneous. I argue that this debate has suffered from a faulty understanding of the absolute/relative spontaneity distinction. I identify and reject two problematic assumptions of the standard interpretation of the distinction, and I articulate an alternative account that dispenses with both. This new account identifies the relationship between understanding and reason, rather than understanding and sensibility, as the relationship that matters for determining the spontaneity of the understanding.