Marco Sgarbi’s monograph aims at providing a detailed study of one of the most central notions in Kant’s philosophy, the concept of spontaneity. While commentators have of course examined the role that this notion plays in various sub-fields of Kant’s philosophy, there has been no comprehensive study of Kant’s conception of spontaneity that compares how Kant conceives of it in different domains (logic, ethics, aesthetics, etc.). Thus Sgarbi’s study is designed to fill a significant gap in Kant scholarship. Unfortunately, although Sgarbi uncovers a number of interesting points, Kant on Spontaneity does not fully live up to its promise.

Sgarbi begins with an introductory chapter that helpfully sketches the views on Kant on spontaneity that have been put forward by major commentators such as Henry Allison, Karl Ameriks, Patricia Kitcher or Wilfrid Sellars. The second chapter provides a brief survey over the history of the concept of spontaneity from ancient Greek philosophy to Leibniz. Some of the connections that Sgarbi draws here are insightful (in particular, his evidence for a Leibnizian deference to the Aristotelian view on human action; p. 22), but on the whole I felt that this chapter tried to cover too much historical ground in too few pages to be very illuminating. Chapter 3 deals with the development of Kant’s views on spontaneity from the pre-Critical to the Critical period. The remaining chapters explore Kant’s conception of spontaneity in the major sub-fields of his philosophy: his logic or epistemology, his ethics, his aesthetics and biology, and his anthropology.

The most central thesis of Sgarbi’s study is that, in all these fields, Kant invokes both an ‘absolute’ and a ‘merely relative’ conception of spontaneity to account for various features of our experience or self-conception (p. 115). The notion of merely relative spontaneity, spontaneitas secundum quid, applies when something moves itself according to an inner principle while being conditioned by an external cause. An example would be a clock that has been set up to operate in a certain manner by its designer. Kant famously argues that this kind of spontaneity would be exhibited by us under the assumption that we lack transcendental freedom: we would possess the mere ‘freedom of a turnspit’ (5: 97). Absolute spontaneity, spontaneity without qualification (spontaneitas simpliciter talis), is the spontaneity exhibited by an agent whose inner principles are not given to her from without, and whose activities derive from her own unconditioned self-determination. Wilfrid Sellars famously suggests that Kant uses the absolute conception of spontaneity in his account of free moral agency but invokes the merely relative conception when he refers to the spontaneity of understanding in his epistemology, a point that has been widely (albeit not universally) accepted by commentators.Footnote ¹ Sgarbi argues that this is only half of the truth: on his view Kant’s conception of the understanding involves both the relative and the absolute notion of spontaneity, and he tries to show that the same twofold conception of spontaneity is also operative in other areas of Kant’s philosophy.

Focusing first on the spontaneity of understanding, Sgarbi’s view is that the understanding exhibits merely relative spontaneity in acts of empirical cognition, when it applies the categories to objects of empirical intuition, but exhibits absolute spontaneity in mere thought, when it considers objects in general, that is, independently of the conditions of human sensibility (pp. 48–9). The ‘mere’ spontaneity involved in cognition pertains to the phenomenal self while the absolute spontaneity exhibited in pure thought or apperception concerns the noumenal self (p. 59). Sgarbi’s point here is interesting in principle, for it raises the possibility that the understanding might exhibit different powers depending on the context of its use. However, there are two problems with Sgarbi’s reading. First, he does not even try to show that there is a significant context of use for the understanding apart from the conditions of sensibility. Kant famously asserts that the pure concepts of the understanding acquire a determinate meaning and content only by reference to sensible intuition; Sgarbi’s interpretation has the paradoxical implication that the understanding loses its absolute spontaneity precisely at the point where its concepts gain determinate meaning and content and where the understanding fulfils its aim of affording us genuine cognition. The problem is particularly acute with regard to Sgarbi’s claim that the understanding exhibits absolute spontaneity in pure apperception (pp. 55–60): I would have thought that the act of attaching the ‘I think’ to representations that affords us pure apperception is, for Kant, the act of bringing given intuitions to the objective unity of consciousness under the direction of the categories; but for Sgarbi the application of categories to empirical intuitions involves merely relative spontaneity. Thus one wonders what kind of absolutely spontaneous act affords us pure apperception, and what kind of mental content pure apperception relates to on Sgarbi’s reading.

This point raises a more fundamental difficulty. As explained above, the notion of merely relative spontaneity applies to a form of activity whose inner principle is conditioned by an external cause, or to an action that is conditioned by a chain of determining causes. Now Sgarbi’s reason for holding that the understanding in its acts of empirical cognition exhibits merely relative spontaneity is that the understanding here is constrained by the input of sensibility or receptivity. But for Kant this is a mere affection, rather than a causal determination, of the understanding by an external constraint: in receiving sensible data from without, the understanding is not determined by these data but ‘completely free’ in its cognitive response (4: 290). Moreover, for Kant the inner principles according to which a proper response to given data ought to be made are ‘self-thought first principles’ (B167) rather than representations received from without (namely, from a divine or a natural cause). To be sure, one could argue that the spontaneity of empirical cognition lacks purity due to its dependency on sensible data. But this verdict, if correct, would not imply that the spontaneity of the understanding is relative. Sgarbi is not alone in conflating the absence of pure spontaneity with the absence of absolute spontaneity, but the conflation does mar his central thesis.

The same worry afflicts his attempt to read the relative/absolute contrast into Kant’s account of ethical spontaneity. Sgarbi argues that practical reason exhibits absolute spontaneity when it autonomously legislates the moral law, but exhibits merely relative spontaneity in acts of choice that fight against empirical impulses (p. 79). Again, one could argue that practical legislation is ‘pure’ whereas practical choice is sensibly affected (although some commentators argue that, even in its practical legislation, reason operates under conditions of receptivity).Footnote ² But as before, sensible affection does not entail determination by sensible causes and hence does not preclude that an agent chooses to subordinate empirical desires to the moral law (or vice versa) and thereby functions as an unconditioned (transcendentally free) cause of a series of appearances.

Sgarbi equates practical freedom of choice with merely psychological freedom and hence with merely relative spontaneity (pp. 68–9, 73, 75). Many commentators have thought that some such equation is at work in Kant’s discussion of freedom in the Canon of Pure Reason, but few would hold that the equation is characteristic of Kant’s mature doctrine of freedom in (for instance) the second Critique. Sgarbi’s analysis does not display sufficient awareness of these and similar interpretative complications.

With regard to Kant’s aesthetics, Sgarbi nicely emphasizes the interesting fact that Kant’s notion of spontaneity in the third Critique seems to undergo an important transformation (pp. 84–5). Kant now seems to want to designate a kind of independence, not from sensible or external determinations, but from concepts: this is Kant’s conception of the peculiar spontaneity exhibited by the imagination in judgements of beauty. Even with regard to such aesthetic spontaneity, Sgarbi wants to insist that Kant’s conception draws on the relative/absolute distinction. But I did not get a clear sense of how he construes this contrast in the aesthetic field. He writes: ‘If it is true that the mind is completely free in judging beauty without any concepts, it is absolutely spontaneous only from the transcendental point of view, while it is relatively spontaneous as far as the possibility of judging an object according to purposiveness without purpose is concerned’ (pp. 89–90). Apparently, the relativity of spontaneity is due to a constraint placed by the object of judgement: ‘Kant is aware of how “relative spontaneity” is constrained by the object of experience, but he admits the possibility of an absolute spontaneity of imagination transcendentally as if this is how the understanding would be if it were not bound to its concepts and principles’ (pp. 90–1). These remarks invite two worries. First, they shift between two seemingly incompatible verdicts. (1) The imagination is absolutely spontaneous (‘from a transcendental point of view’ – a phrase that Sgarbi invokes repeatedly without clarification). (2) The absolute spontaneity of imagination is a mere (conceptual? metaphysical?) possibility. This fundamental unclarity about the metaphysical implications of Kant’s appeal to absolute spontaneity is quite characteristic of Sgarbi’s analysis (see especially pp. 59–60). Second, the suggested contrast between ‘judging beauty’ and ‘judging an object according to purposiveness without purpose’ is puzzling: I would have thought that for Kant judgements of beauty are, or at least involve, judgements of purposiveness without purpose. Sgarbi’s analysis would have benefited greatly here from clarifying how he conceives of the difference between the two types of aesthetic judgements to which he ascribes, respectively, absolute and merely relative spontaneity.

I have raised some philosophical and interpretative difficulties for Sgarbi’s central thesis regarding Kant’s conception of spontaneity. His book suffers from other problems. For one, while the structure and plan of the book on the whole is clear, the individual chapters are often hard to follow. This problem is especially glaring in the chapter on ethical spontaneity. One would have expected here a careful analysis of how Kant uses the concept of spontaneity in his ethical writings, in comparison and contrast to his conception of logical spontaneity (the topic of the preceding chapter). Instead, Sgarbi raises and (inconclusively) discusses all the major interpretative and philosophical problems raised by Kant’s doctrine of moral freedom (timeless agency, the relation between practical and transcendental freedom, or the relation between empirical and intelligible character); the chapter here has very much the character of an introductory survey over Kant’s theory of moral freedom (without exhibiting the clarity that one would expect from such a survey). Moreover, in the midst of the rather brief (seventeen pages) chapter, one finds a four-page discussion of the views of Robert Hanna (pp. 65–8), whose overall contribution to the chapter remains (at least to this reader) rather unclear.

A review on the back cover commends Sgarbi’s ‘encyclopedic treatment’ of Kant’s notion of spontaneity. The sheer number of texts and sources from the various stages of Kant’s development that Sgarbi presents and catalogues is indeed impressive. However, this study also exemplifies what I consider to be one of the most worrying trends in recent Kant scholarship: the tendency to put interpretative focus on unpublished Reflexionen or lecture notes from Kant’s students rather than attempting careful, sustained analysis of Kant’s published writings. But other readers may not share my philological qualms about this widespread interpretative practice.

Kant on Spontaneity is an interesting treatment of a neglected topic in Kant scholarship that can be commended for its breadth of scope and its attempt to connect various sub-fields of Kant’s philosophy. However, for the reasons given, the interpretation that Sgarbi proposes does not seem plausible, at least not without further clarifications whose absence hampered this reader’s attempt to fully profit from the potential of his study.