struggling with the world 149may lead to insoluble conundrums. What matters, however, for the de-
velopment of the doctrine of the two regimes is that the world is divided
into two parts, which are accessible to us in radically diff erent ways and
degrees and which conform to sharply diff erent rules.
Kant’s philosophy and its sequel represent the third coming of the
idea of the two regimes. Th is Kantian wave was the most important of
the four if we mea sure importance by infl uence on the subsequent tra-
jectory of academic philosophy. It was, however, less important than the
historicist wave that followed it if we take the hallmark of signifi cance
to be eff ect on the broader life of culture.
Th e core of this Kantian wave was the comprehensive development
of the program of a self- grounding of human experience. Th e program
was to be carried through by exploring the conditions that enable us to
undertake our characteristic activities of making sense of the world
and of connecting with other people. A crucial feature of this approach,
and a distinction between it and the subsequent historicist wave, is that
these activities and conditions were considered with regard to the ex-
perience of an individual, not located in any par tic u lar society, culture,
or historical moment.
Under this account, the second regime— the regime of human
experience— was circumscribed by the exigencies of a procedure that
went backward from human activities to their universal enabling re-
quirements or presuppositions: the transcendental method. What this
transcendental method produced by way of a second regime was expe-
rience described from what was supposed to be our universal, unavoid-
able point of view: the repre sen ta tion of reality by the human mind; the
ordering of our relations with one another; the supersession, in the
practice of judgment and of art, of divisions that theory was powerless
to overcome; and the reliance on a benevolent governance of the uni-
verse capable of saving us from death, natural necessity, and inescap-
able illusion. To the division between minds without extension and
extension without mind, there succeeded the division between our
experience— its conditions, its impulses, its structure— and the impen-
etrable non- human reality beyond our grasp.
In moral and po liti cal philosophy, this approach has resulted in an
attempt to develop our moral and po liti cal ideas on the basis of a con-
ception of freedom, disconnected from engagement with any specifi c