Against the fanaticism of forces: Kant's critique of Herder's Spinozism

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Notes

1. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, ed. Eckart Förster, trans. Förster and Michael Rosen (Cambridge: CUP, 1993). References will state the pagination in both the Akademie edition and the English translation. The Opus Postumum contains texts written between roughly 1796 and 1803, some of them notes and fragments, others coherent drafts towards what Kant apparently intended to be a ‘Transition from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to Physics’. For information on the dating of texts in the OP, see Förster's introduction.

2. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 21:229, p.76.

3. See Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. James Ellington, in Immanuel Kant, Philosophy of Material Nature, ed. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985).

4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), B145.

5. I have written on Kant's ether in Beth Lord, ‘The Virtual and the Ether: Transcendental Empiricism in Kant's Opus Postumum’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 39:2 (2008). For other positions see Eckart Förster, Kant's Final Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000); Jeffrey Edwards, Substance, Force, and the Possibility of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Paul Guyer, Kant's System of Nature and Freedom (Oxford: OUP, 2005); Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992); and Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).

6. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 22:547, p.85.

7. For more on the pantheism controversy and the intellectual climate in Germany in the 1780s, see Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), and John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). I have drawn on these books extensively in this paper.

8. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, in J.G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. and ed. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: CUP, 1969). References are to this edition.

9. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, p.283.

10. Johann Gottfried Herder, God: Some Conversations, trans. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Indianapolis: Bobbs‐Merrill, 1940). References are to this edition.

11. Johann Gottfried Herder, God: Some Conversations, pp.100–5.

12. See David Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the Age of Goethe (London: University of London Institute of Germanic Studies, 1984), pp.118–26.

13. Johann Gottfried Herder, God: Some Conversations, p.97.

14. Johann Gottfried Herder, God: Some Conversations, p.97.

15. Johann Gottfried Herder, God: Some Conversations, p.103.

16. Johann Gottfried Herder, God: Some Conversations, p.104.

17. See, Johann Gottfried Herder, God: Some Conversations, p.71, p.98, and p.113. Spinoza refers to St. Paul's phrase (Acts 17:28) as an illustration of his own doctrine of immanence in Letter 73: Benedict de Spinoza, Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), p.942. See also Kant's reference to this remark in: Opus Postumum 22:55, p.214.

18. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, Part I, Appendix, Complete Works, pp.238–43.

19. Johann Gottfried Herder, God: Some Conversations, pp.122–24.

20. For further discussion, see John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment, pp.178–247 and Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte, pp.127–64.

21. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn, in: The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1994), p.367.

22. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn, p.366.

23. Kant to Jacobi, 30 Aug. 1789, in: Immanuel Kant, Correspondence, ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), Ak. 11:75–6.

24. Kant's reviews of Parts I and II of Herder's Ideas were published anonymously in the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung of January 1785 and November 1785. They are now at Ak. 8:43–66, and translated as ‘Reviews of Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind’ in Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), pp.201–20. References are to this edition.

25. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, p.209.

26. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, p.210.

27. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, p.210.

28. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). References to this are followed by the Akademie pagination.

29. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:386–9.

30. See: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:411–12, and Pluhar's introduction: Critique of Judgment, pp.lxxxviii–xci.

31. J. D. McFarland, Kant's Concept of Teleology (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1970), p.120. See also John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment, pp.214–227.

32. John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment, pp.202–3, pp.246–7.

33. See: John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment, p.248, and Henry Allison, ‘Kant's Critique of Spinoza’, in Spinoza: Critical Assessments, vol. IV, ed. Genevieve Lloyd (London: Routledge, 2001), pp.188–212.

34. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:392.

35. This definition of life can be found in the Critique of Practial Reason (Ak. 5:9n); Metaphysics of Morals (Ak. 6:211); Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Ak. 4:544); and several places in the metaphysics lectures. See John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment, pp.189–92; Paul Guyer, Kant's System of Nature and Freedom, pp.96–8; and Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production, pp.19–84.

36. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:374–5.

37. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:394.

38. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:394.

39. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:393. For different interpretations of this material, see Henry Allison, ‘Kant's Critique of Spinoza’, pp.195–202; and John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment, pp.251–9.

40. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:394.

41. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:421.

42. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:436.

43. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:437.

44. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:440.

45. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:452.

46. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:452.

47. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 21:219, p.69.

48. Benedict de Spinoza, Letter 64, Complete Works, p.919.

49. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 21:586 and n, p.93.

50. Jeffrey Edwards, Substance, Force, and the Possibility of Knowledge, p.186.

51. Henry Allison, ‘Kant's Critique of Spinoza’, p.207.

52. Paul Guyer, Kant's System of Nature and Freedom, pp.278–9.

53. The suggestion that these writings are a product of Kant's senility is no longer credible. Förster has established that all but a few sheets of the OP were written by 1801, the year in which Kant's health started to decline (Opus Postumum, p.xxviii).

54. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 22:56, p.214.

55. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 21:12, p.220.

56. Henry Allison, ‘Kant's Critique of Spinoza’, p.207.

57. Jeffrey Edwards, Substance, Force, and the Possibility of Knowledge, p.186. On Spinozism in the Opus Postumum, see: Paul Guyer, Kant's System of Nature and Freedom, pp.277–313, Jeffrey Edwards, Substance, Force, and the Possibility of Knowledge, pp.182–92, and Jeffrey Edwards, ‘Spinozism, Freedom, and Transcendental Dynamics in Kant's Final System of Transcendental Idealism’ in Sally Sedgwick (ed.), The Reception of Kant's Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, 2000).

58. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 21:36–7, pp.238–9.

59. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 21:31, p.234.

60. See: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), Ak. 5:101–2.

61. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 21:87–8, p.251.

62. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 21:99, p.255.

63. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 21:22, p.228.

64. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 22:59, p.216.

65. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 21:87, p.251.

66. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 21:97, p.254.

67. On Schelling and Lichtenberg, see Förster's notes at Opus Postumum, pp.274–5 and pp.279–80.

68. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 22:547, p.85.