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

upon Kant's earlier pre-critical and critical work, it is evident that the concept of setzen is
already a distinctive mark within the latter. It is also very much part of other important
technical terms in Kant's thought, the most obvious of which is ―zusammnesetzen‖ (to
compose)—related precisely to that which is carried out by the application of concepts
(understanding) over intuition (sensibility) in the cognition of an object. Because the
fruitful intersecting points between Beck's interpretation of Kant's critical philosophy and
the late Selbstsetzungslehre are multiple, the focus here will be only on methodology of
exposition.
In the third volume of his Erläuternder Auszug aus den Kritischen Schriften des
Herrn Prof. Kant auf Anraten desselben, subtitled welcher den Standpunkt darstellt, aus
welchem die Kritische Philosophie beurteilt werden muss, Beck argues for a standpoint
from which it is best to understand Kant's KrV. This is Beck's response to the general
confusion that had given rise to some of the criticisms against Kant, the origin of which
he blamed on the method of exposition of the KrV. Instead of starting with the
―Aesthetics‖ section, he thought Kant's position would be best understood by starting
directly with the ―Analytic‖ section. By reversing the order, Beck argued that it was
possible to bring to the fore what he identified as the ―ürsprungliche Vorstellen‖ 129 of the
categories and repair thus the apparent insurmountable gap between sensibility and
understanding, or, systematically speaking, between the Aesthetics and the Analytic
sections of the KrV.
The advantage of starting any exposition of Kant's critical philosophy with the
categories is that in their original activity of representing, they are always already related
129 One finds a reference to this Beckian concept of ―ursprüngliche Vorstellung‖ in
fascicle vii of the Op. Ak: 22:88.
94