From Kant and Royce to Heidegger: Essays in Modern Philosophy (review)

Reviewed by: From Kant and Royce to Heidegger: Essays in Modern Philosophy Bruce W. Wilshire From Kant and Royce to Heidegger: Essays in Modern Philosophy. Charles M. Sherover . Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003. xvii + 232 pp. $59.95 h.c. 0-8132-1344-4. Thoughtful readers will find Charles Sherover's recent book of essays to be a refreshing and restorative reading experience. Now an octogenarian, Sherover is an eminent philosopher and scholar, best known perhaps for his depth of analyses as a political theorist. In this volume he surveys closely the milestones of thought we have passed through since Immanuel Kant; his careful leading allows us to catch our breath as we contemplate what has brought us to the troubled present. Sherover's reading of Kant reinvigorates for us and re-concretizes that pivotal philosopher in the history of philosophy. In unpacking what Kant meant by the priority of pure practical reason, Sherover realigns our sights on what is most stabilizing and most helpful in the major philosophers who followed him. Sherover's emphasis on the woefully ignored Josiah Royce, our own Royce, orients us well (though he presents only one essay explicitly on that thinker). For as maps are useful only when we can first locate our own position on them, so when Royce is placed to stand in for us, we better locate ourselves than if we were merely contemplating the Continental greats, such as Kant and Heidegger. Indeed, it is the Californian Royce who stands in for us. It is the Royce who grew up in Grass Valley in gold-crazed times, with the turbulence, newness, and disconcerting convulsions of cultural, economic, and outright military warfare that rang and shook all around him. When bullies attacked him in school, he felt Manifest Destiny directly; he gained knowledge by acquaintance, as William James would say, or in its shocking "secondness," as Charles Peirce would. Some seventy-five years before Royce was born, Kant had sounded for an anchor ledge to hold and stabilize some reliable knowledge. Himself a scientist in his earlier years, Kant believed, surely, that physics and cosmology give us some knowledge. Now, what are the conditions that make this knowledge possible? Kant's famous answer: the structure of the human mind. To outdo the culturally disruptive Copernican revolution with an even broader "Copernican one," one that matrixes and stabilizes the former! Things "out there" can get reliably known—at least insofar as they must appear—because to be perceived at all they must conform to the stable human mind that receives, registers, and [End Page 267] molds them: something like malleable matter that must conform to the mold into which it is pressed. Of course, this involves assumptions that began to rankle and disturb Kant even in the First Critique itself. Is any sensuous "content" merely passively received one instant at a time? Yes, sensuous "matter" must be formed by the categorizing mind, its synthesizing power of imagination, but all we get is physics-knowledge of a world that must be largely mechanically conceived. All we get is a mind-theater of generally predictable appearances or phenomena, but with their ground in reality left unknowable, and no knowledge of who and what we are really, and no knowledge of how we ought to live. No knowledge of what we should choose, purpose, aim at that is most fulfilling for the whole person. Kant's first answer to the existential predicament (in the Second Critique) is also well known, but, as Sherover insists, our understanding of it must be refreshed to continue to make sense of the philosopher's fertile but troubling legacy. Reason is not limited to discovering what is in the domain of physical phenomena, but can discover what ought to be. Reason can discover moral laws and imperatives directed to the will; these are summonses to the highest of high purposes and callings. In the face of these, the will responds in its spontaneity—as Kant tellingly calls it. Even if the moral impulse is overridden by amoral or immoral urges and desires, the moral impulse itself is a reality. Through it we catch a glimpse of at...