The Doctrine of Self-positing and Receptivity in Kant's Late ...

cognition that carries a kind of necessity of which the subject can be conscious. 124 As a
result, Schulze finally raises the problematic of the theoretical contingency involved in
finding necessity in the mind or in the object. In either case, because things in
themselves are unknowable and the true modes of operations of either subjects or objects
remain inaccessible, the universality and necessity of cognition, according to Schulze,
ultimately remain equally incomprehensible. 125
While the Selbstsetzungslehre will not address the question of the ―origin‖ of the
necessity of synthetic a priori judgments in particular, it does speak considerably to the
role of outer sense in securing a basis from which to build a system of empirical
cognition that can give physics the legitimacy of a science. As shown below, outer sense
is not only understood in terms of space as being its pure form, but also as sensible,
which brings Schulze's interest in objects of sensation as a source of a kind of necessity
in the cognition of empirical objects into the fold. An important part of Kant's account in
the doctrine, moreover, concerns the need for the subject to posit itself not only as
sensible space, but also as in it, that is to say, as embodied. Considering the number of
times Kant makes indirect reference to Schulze through the name Aenesidemus, together
with the fact that when he references Theatät, the other skeptic that appears in the
124 It is not clear, however, why Schulze appears to emphasize that this potential source of
necessity resides in the objects and not in the faculty of sensibility, or at the very least, in
both simultaneously. The latter does appear to follow from his position, but in his
critique of Kant, it remains unthematized as such. This may be the result of the
inescapably problematic status of the body – source of outer impressions and outer object
among other objects.
125 Schulze, Gottlob Ernst. ―Aenesidemus.‖ In: Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the
Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, ed and trans. George Di Giovanni and H. S.
Harris. Revised Edition. Indianapolis/Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Co., 2000, 145.
92