Anticipating the Non-Anticipatable : Kant and the Anticipations of Perception

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines a principle that he himself terms "unusual" and "startling" : the so-called "Anticipations of Perception", contained in the System of the Principles of the Pure Understanding. The "Anticipations" determine the ability of the understanding to anticipate phaenomena in their matter, i.e. not in that which concerns their form, but in that which is empirical, in that which concems sensation. What is so startling here, is that precisely in sensation, where the subject seems to be passively subjected to the contingency of a material reality, there is a minimal form of anticipation, a form of a priori knowledge. Hereby, the standard 'Kantian' disctinction between a priori and a posteriori, between transcendental form and empirical matter, is, for a moment, collapsed. In the present paper, I hope to show how this principle accounts for the necessarily problematic status of the origin in transcendental philosophy.