Kant in the Context of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy: Some Preliminary Reflections

1 Kant in Context?

It is almost commonplace for historians of philosophy to claim that the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason marks the beginning of a new philosophy that stands out decisively from the “dogmatic” approaches of its predecessors. Thus, to this day, it is natural to understand the mature systematics of Kant’s critical philosophy as the product of particularly thorough thinking uninfluenced by other ideas, and furthermore as the act of a truly philosophical genius. This understanding goes back to Kant’s contemporaries and immediate successors (e. g., Bouterwek 1805, 11 – 68; Schopenhauer 1819, 593 – 596) and was extended by Neo-Kantianism (e. g., Cohen 1871, VI–II; Vaihinger 1881, 3 – 11) and the historiography of “German” philosophy (e. g., Wundt 1945, 329, 339) to the great Kant commentaries of the twentieth century, in which, for example, the Critique of Pure Reason is understood as “opening up a world of altogether new ideas” (Paton 1936, I, 47) or as the “basic book [Grundbuch] of the newer philosophy” (Messer 1923, 3; Baumanns 1997, 10; Natterer 2003, 3).1 And to a certain extent it continues to have an effect today in the countless contributions to Kant scholarship that attempt to reconstruct Kant’s arguments without drawing on the historical context.

Despite its revolutionary novelty, however, Kant’s critical philosophy was significantly shaped by the development of eighteenth-century German philosophy. Of course, Kant’s philosophy is in many ways crucial to our understanding of this epoch; not least, the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason marks the beginning of a new philosophical epoch, a turning point in modern philosophy that probably no one would doubt today. So, if eighteenth-century German philosophy is still mainly viewed from Kant’s perspective, this is not least due to this fact. However, this approach becomes problematic if one focuses exclusively on the mature systematics of Kant’s critical philosophy and its further development by the early idealists. For Kant’s thought is in many ways anchored in the philosophical discourse of his time, which is why one must also take into account the necessary conditions for the development of Kant’s philosophy among his predecessors and contemporaries.

Although Kant assumed the role that is attributed to him today late in life, he had already engaged intensively with the approaches of his contemporaries and predecessors earlier on.2 Since his first publications, Kant’s thoughts had been motivated above all by questions that, in the broadest sense, originated in the circle of the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, even if many of the protagonists of these debates are today partly forgotten or known only through their mention by Kant. At the same time, Kant repeatedly proves to be an attentive observer of those philosophical reflections that reached the German-speaking world from England and Scotland from the middle of the eighteenth-century onwards and were received by the popular philosophers or the Göttingen empiricists.3 In contrast to Hegel, Kant seemed to have regarded German Enlightenment philosophy as more than “insubstantial, dull chatter” (Hegel 1836, 531).

In the last three decades, interest in Kant’s philosophical contemporaries has slowly but steadily increased. As a result, numerous anthologies and monographs have appeared in German and English that attempt to make Kant’s philosophy intelligible on the basis of his contemporary debates (see, for example, Schwaiger 1999; Zammito 2002; Heßbrüggen-Walter 2004; Watkins 2005; Wunderlich 2005; Hahmann 2009; Watkins 2009; Kitcher 2011; Dyck 2014; Buchenau 2015; Dyck/Wunderlich 2018; Dahlstrom 2018; de Boer 2020). This approach breaks with a dogma of Kant scholarship that has dominated the last decades, especially in Anglophone research. According to this old dogma, Kant’s philosophy should be understood solely from within itself (an exception is Beck 1969). This hermetic reading of Kant has also proved to be a rejection of a historicizing, hermeneutic approach to philosophy common on the European continent. In a sense, behind the Anglophone approach is the welcome and correct idea that philosophical thought and argument cannot be historicized; that is, that it cannot dissolve in its history like a lump of sugar in water. Whether this view has actually ever been held by anyone is admittedly questionable.4 It is undisputed, however, that the so-called Einflussforschung, which seeks to explain the author’s thoughts by embedding them in historical developments and contextualizing them through direct references to predecessors and contemporaries, had gained a considerable influence on the historiography of philosophy in post-war Germany (cf. the assessment in Nagl 1981, 2 – 5).

How difficult it can be in detail, however, to distinguish philosophically relevant contextual research from a conceptual-historical cabinet of rarities becomes clear, for example, when one traces the meaning of the terminology used by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is obvious that the terms used by Kant, such as “category,” “transcendental,” “canon,” “antinomy,” etc., deserve the greatest attention for a proper understanding of the critical project. This need not mean, however, that this understanding can be gained by tracing these terms back to their use in seventeenth-century Aristotelian school philosophy in Germany. In fact, a purely concept-historical tracing back to the use and understanding of these terms in seventeenth-century school philosophy does relatively little to illuminate the critical thoughts Kant associates with these terms. Instead, such conceptual-historical accounts, however illuminating they may be for a purely historical interest, tend to have a discouraging effect on philosophically interested readers, as they give the impression that one can only understand Kant if one has previously struggled through mountains of books by insignificant and mostly forgotten thinkers.5

In fact, a closer look at the context of the reception of critical philosophy by Kant’s contemporaries teaches us that they were in part as perplexed as modern readers in the face of the terminology used in the Critique of Pure Reason. Indeed, the novelty of these terms was also perceived by Kant’s contemporaries, as shown, for example, by the reaction of Garve: the latter was famously tasked with reviewing the Critique of Pure Reason and ultimately failed miserably at this task. Horrified by the result and the reaction to his work, he turned to Kant and described in a letter the difficulties he had encountered in reading the text, partly because of the unfamiliar terminology, so that both the subject matter and Kant’s approach to determining the limits of reason took him to the limits of his own capacity for understanding. However, a look at Garve also shows that Kant used these terms precisely to break with contemporary discussion, to indicate the novelty and otherness of his approach.6

In a contextualizing account, then, one must carefully distinguish between what can really be made more comprehensible by recourse to contemporary debates, and those points that rather satisfy a singular historical interest of experts. For of course not everything can and must be made historically comprehensible. But unfortunately, what was good and right about this approach, namely the insight that even a philosopher’s tools and motivation, that is, his conceptualizations and forms of argumentation as well as the problems that stimulated his thinking, did not emerge from within himself, has been buried under the shortcomings associated with this hermeneutic approach.

Ultimately, however, it is true that Kant’s ideas did not originate in a historical vacuum. Even if philosophical thoughts cannot be dissolved in history, they do have a history. While the history of their discovery and formulation is not synonymous with philosophical content, it is significant insofar as its uncovering helps to adequately grasp the philosophical thought itself. And in this respect, the effort to understand Kant in the context of the philosophy of his time is a necessary task of Kant studies.

2 The Contextualization of Philosophical Thoughts and its Usefulness

If one takes the concern of such contextualization seriously and asks about the specificity of an adequate record of the history of philosophical thought, at least three components can be distinguished:7

1. First of all, it is important to note that the articulation of theses and arguments takes place in specific argumentative contexts. Accordingly, they must be understood in terms of situations and discussions relevant to the philosophical questions at hand. Their meaning is very often decisively different from that which we associate with similar terms, theses, and arguments today.

2. ...