Maimon and Spinozistic Idealism

Abstract

The first four chapters of this book have looked at Jacobi’s and Herder’s different attempts to fuse Kantianism with Spinozism. Both these thinkers argue that the resources of Spinozism should be used to resolve problems in transcendental idealism: the problem of accounting for the being of reality (Jacobi), and the problem of explaining the diversity of nature (Herder). We have seen that both try to find a point of convergence between Kant and Spinozism by arguing for the immanent causation of the supersensible substrate, and that this is the point that Kant most strongly resists. We now turn to two more thinkers who appeal to immanent causation in their attempts to import Spinozism into transcendental idealism, but who do so in a more profound way. Both Solomon Maimon and Gilles Deleuze argue that Kant needs a concept of immanent genesis, not to address specific problems in ontology, epistemology, or philosophy of nature, but to make transcendental idealism what it should be: an exercise that is properly transcendental and appropriately idealistic.