ChatGPT said:

Yes, let’s unpack that. The Kantian transcendental distinction refers to Kant’s separation between different faculties of cognition, particularly understanding (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft), which Arendt, adopts in her own way.

For Kant:

• Verstand (Understanding) is the faculty that organizes sensory experience into coherent knowledge using concepts. It deals with empirical truth, the structuring of perception, and the application of categories like causality, substance, and quantity.
• Vernunft (Reason) is higher-order; it deals not with knowledge but with ideas—it seeks meaning, coherence, and totality. It generates overarching questions (e.g., about freedom, morality, the soul) that cannot be resolved through empirical knowledge alone.

Arendt draws from this distinction but transforms it. For her, verstand is the faculty of knowing what is perceived—removing biases, refining common sense, and distinguishing fact from fiction—while vernunft is the faculty that seeks deeper meaning. As she says, reason is not inspired by truth but by meaning.

Now, Whitehead complicates this Kantian separation in a few ways:

1. Meaning is processual and immanent, not just transcendental. In Kant and Arendt, reason’s pursuit of meaning is somewhat detached from empirical knowledge—it belongs to a different order of thinking. Whitehead, by contrast, embeds meaning in the process of experience itself. Meaning is not simply a function of higher-order reasoning; it emerges in the way perception integrates causal efficacy (how the past affects the present) and symbolic reference (how present perceptions give structure to those causal feelings).

2. Symbolic reference dissolves the gap between experience and reason. For Kant (and by extension, Arendt), there’s a fundamental distinction between what can be known (verstand) and what can be meaningfully thought about (vernunft). Whitehead’s notion of symbolic reference suggests that meaning isn’t something reason separately seeks but something that emerges within perception itself—through the way causal efficacy is structured into intelligibility.

3. Cognition is deeply relational, not just representational. Kant sees cognition as representational—our faculties impose structure on the world. Whitehead, however, treats cognition as deeply relational. Causal vector-feelings transmit information from past events into the present, and meaning arises from the interplay between these inherited feelings and their symbolic structuring in perception. Instead of meaning being a separate pursuit of reason, meaning is already embedded in how experience unfolds.

In short:

• Arendt (following Kant) treats meaning as something that reason seeks, distinct from understanding’s grasp of empirical truth.
• Whitehead suggests that meaning is generated within perception, through the process of symbolic reference structuring causal efficacy.

This fundamentally challenges the Kantian transcendental distinction because Whitehead doesn’t separate knowing and meaning-seeking into two distinct faculties. Instead, meaning emerges as part of how experience structures itself.

Would you agree that Whitehead’s view makes meaning more dynamic and entangled with perception, whereas Arendt’s view remains more hierarchical and separate?