Reason As the Empty Ground of Intelligibility

Kant famously claims that the ‘I’ (the representation of reason, our capacity to know) is entirely empty. Some have understood this as the thought that reason stands opposed to all the manifold content of human sensibility, while others argue that reason is empty simply because it lacks content. I argue that reason is an empty capacity in virtue of its positive status as the ground (or “seed”) of all intelligibility. As such, it must be a self-determining ground, which is to say that all determinacy depends on a self-determining capacity. When this self-determination is understood properly as self-consciousness, then its emptiness can be understood as that of the self-conscious beginning of philosophy—a beginning which, because it has no temporal status, has no temporal end. As such, it is a perpetual emptiness which pervades and enables knowledge. This conception of reason’s emptiness explains why it is an inextricable part of Kant’s (positive) account of knowledge, not simply a (negative) account of reason’s limits.

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