Schulting, D. (ed.), Kantian Nonconceptualism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
In the practical realm just as in the theoretical realm, everything comes down to human sensibility as an equally empirical and non-empirical primitive starting point that constitutively motivates, intentionally pervades, and intentionally structures our innately-specified yet also “human, all-too-human” capacities for theoretical and practical rationality, all the way up. Strong Kantian non-conceptualism says that according to Kant, the faculty of human intuition or Anschauung, that is, human inner and outer sense perception, together with the faculty of imagination or Einbildungskraft jointly constitute this sensible starting point for objective cognition and theoretical reason; and strong Kantian non-intellectualism says that according to Kant, human affect, desire, and moral emotion—in a word, the human heart—jointly constitute this sensible starting point for free agency and practical reason. If Robert Hanna is correct about strong Kantian non-conceptualism and strong Kantian non-intellectualism, then the result is a sharply non-classical and unorthodox, hence “shocking,” nevertheless fully unified and textually defensible Sensibility First approach to Kant’s proto-Critical philosophy (i.e., from 1768 to 1772), Critical philosophy (i.e., from 1781 to 1787) and post-Critical philosophy (i.e., from the late 1780s to the late 1790s) that encompasses the theoretical philosophy and the practical philosophy alike. Like Heidegger’s radical and equally “shocking” interpretation of the first Critique in the late 1920s, the Sensibility First approach thoroughly rejects a conceptualist and intellectualist reading of the Critical (or, for that matter either proto-Critical or post-Critical) philosophy. But unlike Heidegger’s interpretation, the Sensibility First approach does not, in Michael Friedman’s words, “seek to [turn] Kant’s original problematic entirely on its head.” On the contrary and instead, the Sensibility First approach seeks to turn classical, orthodox Kant-scholarship entirely on its head by establishing a new interpretation of the Critical philosophy as a whole that fully retains the fundamental distinction between sensibility and understanding—thereby fully retaining the irreducibility of both basic mental faculties or powers of the rational human mind either to one another or to any other faculty or power of the rational human mind—yet also asserts the theoretical and practical primacy and priority of the sensible and non-intellectual (and more generally, essentially embodied) powers over the discursive and intellectual (and more generally, embodiment-neutral) powers.
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