Conatus and Feeling of Life: A Genetic Shift in Kant’s Faculty Doctrine?

Abstract

In his reconstruction of Kant’s critical philosophy as a whole, Deleuze argues that the cognitive and practical faculties are genetically grounded in the affective, enlivening dynamics of the reflecting power of judgment. In this paper I propose to take Kant’s account of self-organisation as model for understanding this genesis of the faculties in terms of a circular causality that is purposively animated from within by a self-productive and self-maintaining tendency. The key argument I develop is that this generative tendency may be understood as a conatus that is inherent to the power of judgment and comes to the fore in the subject’s feeling of life.