Johann Nicolas Tetens’s Transcendental Reticence and Holistic Approach to the Grounds of Experience

Johann Nicolas Tetens is seen by some as a failed transcendentalist, and by others as an empiricist motivated by misgivings about certain aspects of Kant’s approach to grounding. More in the latter camp, I interpret his adherence to empirical methodology as deriving from a holist ethos that is motivated by problems he perceives as inherent in conceptual thinking about grounds, in the form of the risks of simplification, unsafe distinctions, and inventions, as well as the way that these problems contribute to sense that grounding ideas generate an order that is problematically divorced from experienced reality. These concerns are mirrored in a holistic approach, in which thinking and feeling are thoroughly interwoven, and experience happens in the form of wholes, the separation of which in analysis is difficult and potentially arbitrary. I argue that these concerns and alternative strategies explain why Tetens does not pursue a transcendental project, even if he himself remarks that the time is ripe for it.