Thinking for Oneself Is Thinking with Others: Enlightenment Reason and Gemeinschaftsgefühl

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It has been a perennial puzzle that Kant’s notion of reason, or thinking, must be taken as necessarily sui generis, and that construing it otherwise - say, as socially embedded and developmentally contingent - undermines the transcendental project: if thinking is historically contingent, it cannot be free. This might seem to reduce to the problem of the third antinomy, but I argue that it does not, and is not amenable to transcendental critique alone. Its solution requires its own existential analytic, an examination of reason’s prior structures. This can be accommodated by the Kantian architecture, in which the outlines of a constitutive intersubjective orientation are already to be found. In what follows, I re-examine the Kantian paradox of autonomy and spontaneity in light of psychoanalytic traditions and current research in cognitive science, to make the case that, even for Kant, “thinking” is not only “intersubjective” from the ground up; it is also as “affective” as it is “rational”. In addition to the a priori structures contributed by the understanding, imagination, and pure forms of intuition, there is a further a priori, implicit in the Third Critique, which can be considered “relational”. This ties in well with Alfred Adler’s notion of “Gemeinschaftsgefühl”, in which both affective and cognitive capacities converge in the idea of social feeling as a marker of psychological health. In this sense, Adler inherits the Kantian legacy but corrects practical reason of what has been construed as its rationalistic and solipsistic bias.