The purpose of the Cambridge Edition is to offer translations of the best modern German edition of Kant’s work in a uniform format suitable for Kant scholars. When complete (sixteen volumes are currently envisioned), the edition will include all of Kant’s published works and a generous selection of his unpublished writings, such as the Opus postumum, handschriftliche Nachlaß, lectures, and correspondence.
This volume provides the first-ever extensive translation of the notes and fragments that survived Kant’s death in 1804. These include marginalia, lecture notes, and sketches and drafts for his published works. They are important as an indispensable resource for understanding Kant’s intellectual development and published works, casting new light on Kant’s conception of his own philosophical methods and his relations to his predecessors, as well as on central doctrines of his work such as the theory of space, time, and categories; the refutations of skepticism and metaphysical dogmatism; the theory of the value of freedom and the possibility of free will; the conception of God; the theory of beauty, and much more.
Paul Guyer is Professor of Philosophy and Florence R. C. Murray Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.
Curtis Bowman has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and Haverford College.
Frederick Rauscher is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University.
General editors: Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
Advisory board: Henry Allison
Reinhard Brandt
Ralf Meerbote
Charles D. Parsons
Hoke Robinson
J. B. Schneewind
Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770
Critique of Pure Reason
Theoretical Philosophy after 1781
Practical Philosophy
Critique of the Power of Judgment
Religion and Rational Theology
Anthropology, History, and Education
Natural Science
Lectures on Logic
Lectures on Metaphysics
Lectures on Ethics
Opus postumum
Notes and Fragments
Correspondence
Lectures on Anthropology
Lectures and Drafts on Political Philosophy
EDITED BY
PAUL GUYER
University of Pennsylvania
TRANSLATED BY
CURTIS BOWMAN
PAUL GUYER
FREDERICK RAUSCHER
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Cambridge University Press
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521552486
© Cambridge University Press 2005
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2005
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804.
[Selections. English. 2005]
Notes and fragments : logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy, aesthetics / edited by Paul Guyer ; translated by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, Frederick Rauscher.
p. cm. – (The Cambridge edition of the works of Immanuel Kant in translation)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-521-55248-6
1. Philosophy. I. Guyer, Paul, 1948– II. Title.
B2758 2005
193 – dc22 2004051946
ISBN-13 978-0-521-55248-6 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-55248-6 hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for
the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or
third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this book
and does not guarantee that any content on such
Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
General Editors’ Preface | page ix | ||
Introduction | xiii | ||
Acknowledgments | xxix | ||
1 | Selections from the Notes on the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime | 1 | |
2 | Notes on Logic | 25 | |
1. | Notes on Meier’s Introduction | 26 | |
2. | Notes to the Body of Meier’s Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre | 34 | |
3 | Notes on Metaphysics | 68 | |
1. | Notes prior to 1773 | 74 | |
2. | Notes from 1773–1780 | 153 | |
3. | Notes from the 1780s | 258 | |
4. | Notes from the 1790s | 355 | |
4 | Notes on Moral Philosophy | 405 | |
1. | Notes from Anthropology, Logic, and Metaphysics | 406 | |
2. | Notes on Moral Philosophy from 1764–1770 | 417 | |
3. | Notes from 1770–1775 | 429 | |
4. | Notes from 1776–1778 | 437 | |
5. | Notes from the 1780s | 461 | |
6. | Notes from the 1790s | 477 | |
5 | Notes on Aesthetics | 479 | |
1. | Anthropology Notes from 1769–1778 | 481 | |
2. | Anthropology Notes from the 1780s | 519 | |
3. | Outlines for the Course on Anthropology, 1776–1784 | 523 | |
4. | Notes from the Reflections on Logic | 528 | |
Notes | 545 | ||
Glossary | 627 | ||
Index to Kant’s Texts | 655 |
Within a few years of the publication of his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the seminal philosophers of modern times – indeed as one of the great philosophers of all time. This renown soon spread beyond German-speaking lands, and translations of Kant’s work into English were published even before 1800. Since then, interpretations of Kant’s views have come and gone and loyalty to his positions has waxed and waned, but his importance has not diminished. Generations of scholars have devoted their efforts to producing reliable translations of Kant into English as well as into other languages.
There are four main reasons for the present edition of Kant’s writings:
1. Completeness. Although most of the works published in Kant’s lifetime have been translated before, the most important ones more than once, only fragments of Kant’s many important unpublished works have ever been translated. These include the Opus postumum, Kant’s unfinished magnum opus on the transition from philosophy to physics; transcriptions of his classroom lectures; his correspondence; and his marginalia and other notes. One aim of this edition is to make a comprehensive sampling of these materials available in English for the first time.
2. Availability. Many English translations of Kant’s works, especially those that have not individually played a large role in the subsequent development of philosophy, have long been inaccessible or out of print. Many of them, however, are crucial for the understanding of Kant’s philosophical development, and the absence of some from English-language bibliographies may be responsible for erroneous or blinkered traditional interpretations of his doctrines by English-speaking philosophers.
3. Organization. Another aim of the present edition is to make all Kant’s published work, both major and minor, available in comprehensive volumes organized both chronologically and topically, so as to facilitate the serious study of his philosophy by English-speaking readers.
4. Consistency of translation. Although many of Kant’s major works have been translated by the most distinguished scholars of their day, some of these translations are now dated, and there is considerable terminological disparity among them. Our aim has been to enlist some of the most accomplished Kant scholars and translators to produce new translations, freeing readers from both the philosophical and literary preconceptions of previous generations and allowing them to approach texts, as far as possible, with the same directness as present-day readers of the German or Latin originals.
In pursuit of these goals, our editors and translators attempt to follow several fundamental principles:
1. As far as seems advisable, the edition employs a single general glossary, especially for Kant’s technical terms. Although we have not attempted to restrict the prerogative of editors and translators in choice of terminology, we have maximized consistency by putting a single editor or editorial team in charge of each of the main groupings of Kant’s writings, such as his work in practical philosophy, philosophy of religion, or natural science, so that there will be a high degree of terminological consistency, at least in dealing with the same subject matter.
2. Our translators try to avoid sacrificing literalness to readability. We hope to produce translations that approximate the originals in the sense that they leave as much of the interpretive work as possible to the reader.
3. The paragraph, and even more the sentence, is often Kant’s unit of argument, and one can easily transform what Kant intends as a continuous argument into a mere series of assertions by breaking up a sentence so as to make it more readable. Therefore, we try to preserve Kant’s own divisions of sentences and paragraphs wherever possible.
4. Earlier editions often attempted to improve Kant’s texts on the basis of controversial conceptions about their proper interpretation. In our translations, emendation or improvement of the original edition is kept to the minimum necessary to correct obvious typographical errors.
5. Our editors and translators try to minimize interpretation in other ways as well, for example, by rigorously segregating Kant’s own footnotes, the editors’ purely linguistic notes, and their more explanatory or informational notes; notes in this last category are treated as endnotes rather than footnotes.
We have not attempted to standardize completely the format of individual volumes. Each, however, includes information about the context in which Kant wrote the translated works, a German–English glossary, an English–German glossary, an index, and other aids to comprehension. The general introduction to each volume includes an explanation of specific principles of translation and, where necessary, principles of selection of works included in that volume. The pagination of the standard German edition of Kant’s works, Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Royal Prussian (later German) Academy of Sciences ( Berlin: Georg Reimer, later Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1900– ), is indicated throughout by means of marginal numbers.
Our aim is to produce a comprehensive edition of Kant’s writings, embodying and displaying the high standards attained by Kant scholarship in the English-speaking world during the second half of the twentieth century, and serving as both an instrument and a stimulus for the further development of Kant studies by English-speaking readers in the century to come. Because of our emphasis on literalness of translation and on information rather than interpretation in editorial practices, we hope our edition will continue to be usable despite the inevitable evolution and occasional revolutions in Kant scholarship.
PAUL GUYER
ALLEN W. WOOD
Introduction
I.
THE CONTENTS OF THIS VOLUME
This volume offers a selection of Kant’s surviving notes and fragments on topics in logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and aesthetics, drawn almost entirely from the material presented in the third division of Akademie edition1 of his works as the handschriftliche Nachlaß, or “handwritten remains.” These materials supplement Kant’s published works, his surviving correspondence, and surviving transcriptions of his classroom lectures in providing evidence about Kant’s philosophical development through almost all of his career, from the 1750s through the 1790s. They are an unparalleled source for investigation of the genesis, development, and revision of Kant’s views and his published works. This is the first extensive selection of them to be translated from German.
The handschriftliche Nachlaß in the Akademie edition comprises ten volumes, divided into two main parts: volumes 14 through 19 contain notes and fragments organized into volumes representing the subjects of Kant’s main lecture courses, and in many cases coming from his annotations in his own copies of the textbooks he used for those courses, while volumes 20 through 23 contain drafts for published or planned works, mostly from Kant’s later years, as well as transcriptions from Kant’s notes in two of his own works, namely the early Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) and the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). In the first group, volume 14 contains notes on mathematics, physics and chemistry, and physical geography, all of which Kant lectured on at some point in his career; volume 15 contains notes on anthropology, on which Kant lectured regularly beginning in 1772–73, and forty pages of notes on medicine; volume 16 contains notes on logic, on which Kant lectured throughout his career; volumes 17 and 18 contain notes on metaphysics, on which Kant likewise lectured throughout his career; and volume 19 contains notes on moral philosophy and political and legal philosophy (Naturrecht or “natural right”), on the former of which Kant lectured regularly and on the latter of which he lectured at least occasionally, as well as some notes on religion. In the second group, volume 20 contains Kant’s notes in his copy of the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, his first draft of the introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, his drafts for a submission to an essay competition on the question What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Times of Leibniz and Wolff? which he never finished but which were published shortly after his death, as well as a few smaller items; volumes 21 and 22 contain the voluminous notes and drafts for a final work on the transition from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics, now referred to as the Opus postumum, on which he worked during his final five or so years of activity but never completed; and volume 23 contains Kant’s notes (Nachträge) in his own copy of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, some brief drafts (Vorarbeiten) for the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), the essay “On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory but it is of no use in practice” (1793), Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), and several other essays, and, finally, more than two hundred pages of drafts for the Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
The present volume begins, in Chapter 1, with Kant’s notes on the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, which are datable to 1764–65 and provide the earliest evidence of the outlines of Kant’s emerging moral philosophy.2 The selection here focuses on these early notes in moral philosophy rather than on the other matters that Kant also discusses, and while they could have been integrated into the chapter of “Notes on Moral Philosophy,” they are presented together at the outset of the volume both because they constitute such a distinct group from an early period in Kant’s career and because they are a reminder of the ultimately moral objective of Kant’s philosophizing throughout so much of his career. The translation here is not based on the text in volume 20, however, but on the more recent and more helpful edition by Marie Rischmüller.3 With a few small exceptions, that is all of the material from volumes 20 through 23 that is included here, for much of the material from these volumes has been or will be translated elsewhere in the Cambridge edition. From volume 20, a translation of the first draft of the introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment is included in the Cambridge edition of that work,4 and the other main item, the drafts for the essay on the Real Progress of metaphysics, has been translated in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781.5 Selections from volumes 21 and 22, the Opus postumum properly so called, have been translated in the Cambridge volume with that title.6 From volume 23, the Nachträge to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason have been included in situ in the Cambridge edition of the Critique,7 while selections from Kant’s extensive drafts for the “Doctrine of Right” in the Metaphysics of Morals as well as for several other of Kant’s political essays will be included in a newly planned volume of the Cambridge edition, Lectures and Drafts on Political Philosophy.8 Notes on political philosophy from volume 19 will also be included in Lectures and Drafts on Political Philosophy rather than in the present volume.
Chapters of the present volume, therefore, come primarily from the first division of the handschriftliche Nachlaß. Nothing from the scientific notes in volume 14 has been included here, because those notes are highly specialized as well as accompanied by lengthy annotations that could hardly have been included here. So it is largely material from volumes 15 through 19 that makes up these chapters. Chapter 2, “Notes on Logic,” draws its material from volume 16; Chapter 3, “Notes on Metaphysics,” draws largely from volumes 17 and 18; Chapter 4, “Notes on Moral Philosophy,” draws mostly from the first half of volume 19 but includes a few relevant passages from elsewhere among these volumes; and Chapter 5, “Notes on Aesthetics,” uses material from volumes 15 and 16, the Akademie edition volumes on anthropology and logic.
There were two main sorts of sources for the materials included in volumes 15 through 19: Kant’s annotations in his own copies of the textbooks on which he lectured, which Kant had often had bound with interleaved blank sheets in order to leave himself room for such annotations; and unbound papers, or “loose sheets” (lose Blätter), which survived his death and subsequently became known to posterity, especially through a collection formed in the Königsberg university library during the nineteenth century. The heading to each note translated in this volume indicates whether it came from one of Kant’s textbooks or from the lose Blätter (abbreviated “LBl ”). For his textbook in logic, Kant used Georg Friedrich Meier, Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre (Halle: Johann Justinus Gebauer, 1752); Kant’s notes on this book are thus included in Chapter 2. For his textbook in metaphysics, Kant used primarily Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica, fourth edition (Halle: Carl Hermann Hemmerde, 1757),9 and he also used the chapter on psychology in this volume as the basis for his lectures on anthropology, including a section on aesthetics; notes on this volume are thus included in volume 15 as well as volumes 17 and 18 of the Akademie edition, and are here included in both Chapter 3 and Chapter 5. Volume 18 of the Akademie edition also includes notes Kant made in his copy of Johann August Eberhard, Vorbereit- ung zur natürlichen Theologie (Halle: im Waisenhause, 1781), which he used for lectures on philosophy of religion in 1783–84 and 1785–86, and a selection of those notes is also included here in Chapter 3. For his lectures on moral philosophy, Kant used another book by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Initia philosophiae practicae primae (Halle: Carl Hermann Hemmerde, 1760), and Chapter 4 includes a selection of Kant’s notes in that volume. Kant also used a further book in ethics by Baumgarten, Ethica Philosophica (Halle: Carl Hermann Hemmerde, 1751), for the second half of his moral philosophy course, the part dealing with duties to God, self, and others rather than with the foundations of “universal practical philosophy,”10 but Kant’s copy of this book has not survived, so volume 19 includes no notes from it.11 Many other copies of textbooks that Kant did or may have used during his career have also not survived. The rest of the material translated in Chapters 2 comes from lose Blätter. We have aimed to be as inclusive as possible in the translation of the lose Blätter, which are often substantial, relatively self-contained sketches several pages in length, while being more selective in the choice of the marginalia from Kant’s textbooks, which are sometimes intelligible as well as important on their own, but sometimes too closely tied to the text to which they are attached to be separated from the latter, and sometimes, of course, not as interesting as Kant’s more free-floating sketches and reflections.
II.
THE HISTORY OF KANT’S HANDSCHRIFTLICHE NACHLAß
The present volume, as just explained, is based largely although not entirely on volumes 15 through 19 of the Akademie edition of Kant’s gesammelte Schriften. But the Akademie edition was not the first locus for the publication of Kant’s handwritten remains. The history of these materials prior to their inclusion in the Akademie edition and the history of the Akademie edition itself are complicated. What follows is a brief sketch of these histories.
When the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) formulated the plan for a complete and critical edition of Kant’s writings and presented it to the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1895, he conceived of the fourfold division of the edition into Kant’s published work, his correspondence, the surviving notes, sketches, and drafts in Kant’s own hand, and transcriptions of Kant’s lectures that was adopted and that has governed the effort to complete the edition that continues to this day. Dilthey’s decision to include whatever could be found of Kant’s unpublished materials was influenced by his own hermeneutical approach to philosophy, according to which any of a philosopher’s works could only be understood in the larger context of his intellectual career and indeed his life as a whole, to be understood through the psychological insight of the interpreter. Dilthey’s view was not universally shared: for example, Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), the founder of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism and an immensely accomplished interpreter of Kant in his own right, held that true works of genius are “unities that do not grow through additions” and are not made “more comprehensible by probing among putative parts, pieces, and attempts,”12 and was not in favor of the inclusion of posthumous materials in the edition. But Dilthey’s proposal was accepted by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and a “Kant Commission” headed by Dilthey was established to oversee publication of the edition. With the optimism that would seem to be essential to anyone who would undertake such a project, Dilthey thought the edition would be completed within a decade. Instead, in the remaining fifteen years of his life, Dilthey saw the partial publication only of the first two divisions of the edition, Kant’s published works (volumes 1 through 9) and his correspondence (volumes 10 through 13), and none of the handwritten remains or lectures that were so central to his own vision of the project. The edition remains incomplete more than a century after Dilthey first conceived it.13
Dilthey and the Kant Commission did not foresee any special problems in the editing of Kant’s published works; the bulk of Kant’s correspondence was thought to have already been collected at the university libraries of Königsberg and Dorpat, in the Courland (now Tartu, Estonia), and the initial plan for the publication of Kant’s lectures was modest, foreseeing chiefly the reprinting of transcriptions of lectures on metaphysics, theology, and anthropology that had been published during the first part of the nineteenth century. The greatest challenge from the outset was that of finding someone to edit Kant’s handwritten remains.
Kant did not save or organize his books and papers for posterity. He never had a personal secretary to copy and file his papers, although he would, at least in later years, hire a copyist to prepare a clean copy of a manuscript about to be sent to a publisher, and what we have of his correspondence was saved by its recipients rather than its author. If he ever received the manuscripts of his published works back from the publishers – which would not have been the usual practice at the time – he did not keep them. And in at least one will that he wrote, Kant directed that any papers that survived him be destroyed after his death, although in 1798 he seems to have superseded that with instructions that his books, his desk, and all the papers in it be given to his executor, Johann Friedrich Gensichen (1759–1807), to be used or distributed – but not sold at public auction – as Gensichen saw fit, and these were apparently the instructions that were followed upon Kant’s death on 12 February 1804.14 Subsequently, much of the material in that desk seems to have made its way into the Königsberg university library, although perhaps not all of it, since some was apparently distributed among Kant’s friends as souvenirs, and Kant had earlier given some books to his disciple Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842), who had edited Kant’s handbook on logic, the so-called Jäsche Logic,15 in 1800, and had then taken them with him when he went to teach at the newly established German-Russian university at Dorpat in 1802. These books included the two textbooks from which Kant had lectured on anthropology, logic, and metaphysics for much of his career, and which he had heavily annotated, namely Meier’s Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre and Baumgarten’s Metaphysica. These two volumes eventually made their way into the Dorpat university library.
In spite of Kant’s own indifference to the fate of his books and papers and their consequent dispersal after his death, there were several publications of materials from the Nachlaß during the course of the nineteenth century. In preparation for the first collected edition of Kant’s works, edited by the Königsberg historian Friedrich Wilhelm Schubert (1799–1868) and the Hegelian philosopher Karl Rosenkranz (1805–1879), and published in twelve volumes in Königsberg from 1838 to 1842, Schubert had organized the various unbound manuscripts in Kant’s hand (lose Blätter) in the Königsberg library into a series of thirteen folders, designated “A” through “N” (there was no folder “I”), but then included only a small number of them in the edition. Only later in the century were these lose Blätter published in their entirety by the university librarian, Rudolf Reicke (1825–1905), first in a series of articles in the Altpreussische Monatsschrift from 1882 to 1889 and then in three freestanding volumes, Lose Blätter aus Kants Nachlaß, in 1889, 1895, and 1898. Reicke preserved Schubert’s assignment of the papers to lettered folders and his numbering of the items within each folder, and those letters and numbers remained the designations for the lose Blätter from the Königsberg collection; they are the designations used in this volume as well. The folders were as follows:
A. 18 sheets on physics and mathematics.
B. 12 sheets on topics related to the Critique of Pure Reason.
C. 15 sheets on logic.
D. 33 sheets on metaphysics, including the “Refutation of Idealism.”
E. 78 sheets on moral philosophy and the “Doctrine of Right.”
F. 23 sheets on general matters of politics from 1785 to 1799.
G. 28 sheets on the philosophy of religion and the Conflict of the Faculties.
H. 59 sheets on anthropology.
J. 6 sheets on physical geography.
K. 15 pieces labelled “Little concepts from Kant’s hand purchased from the auction of the books of Prof. Gensichen.”
L. 61 pieces labelled “Little cards of thoughts from the final period of his life,” also purchased from the auction of Gensichen’s books, together with three memoir books from Professor Buck.
M. General biographical notices (36 pieces).
N. 63 letters to Kant, also from the Gensichen auction, and six other letters.16
Folders B through E provided much of the material from the lose Blätter that is included here, while E through G would provide much of the material that ultimately made its way into volume 23 of the Akademie edition. Folder N was obviously a major source for Kant’s correspondence.
Meanwhile, the young philosopher Benno Erdmann (1851–1921), professor at Kiel from 1878 (he would move to Halle in 1890 and to Bonn in 1898),17 had become interested in Kant’s philosophical development, first publishing critical editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Prolegomena, and the Critique of the Power of Judgment from 1878 to 1880, then a detailed transcription of Kant’s annotations in his own copy of the Critique of Pure Reason, preserved in the Königsberg university library, in 1881,18 and finally a first edition of Kant’s notes in his copy of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica, which, as noted above, had been taken to Dorpat by Jäsche and subsequently belonged to the university library there. As already noted, Kant used Baumgarten’s textbook as the basis for his lectures on anthropology as well as metaphysics, and Erdmann consequently published his edition of these notes in two volumes of Reflexionen Kants zur kritischen Philosophie, namely, Reflexionen Kants zur Anthropologie and Reflexionen Kants zur Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag, 1882 and 1884).19
But who would edit the handschriftliche Nachlaß for the Akademie edition? In spite of his advanced age, the librarian Reicke was assigned the task of editing Kant’s correspondence. Reicke had in fact begun working on an edition of the correspondence, his lifelong ambition, ten years before the Akademie edition was begun, and was ready to move quickly: the first volume of correspondence (volume 10) was in fact the first volume of the Akademie edition to be published, in 1900.20 But Reicke could not possibly also undertake the task of editing the notes and fragments, in spite of his familiarity with the materials in the Königs- berg library. Dilthey did approach Erdmann, but by 1895–96 Erdmann, although still in the prime of life, was more interested in his own philosophical work than in such a consuming task of scholarship as editing this material would necessarily be, and after some discussion he turned Dilthey down.21 (He did, however, edit the Critique of Pure Reason in volumes 3 and 4 of the Akademie edition.) Dilthey then approached Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933), also a professor at Halle, who had made his mark with an incredibly detailed commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason;22 but Vaihinger chose instead to devote his energies to getting the newly established journal Kant-Studien off the ground.23 However, Dilthey was not out of options, for by 1896 an extraordinary scholar even younger than Erdmann and Vaihinger had appeared on the scene. This was Erich Adickes (1866–1928), who earned his Ph.D. at Berlin at the age of twenty-one with a dissertation on nothing less than the systematic structure of Kant’s whole philosophy, at twenty-three published his own edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, and, most remarkably, between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty (1893–96), while employed as a high school teacher in Kiel, published, in the Philosophical Review and in English, a 622-page, exhaustive and extensively annotated bibliography of writings by and on Kant published in Germany through 1804 (although the title of the first installment promised it would be taken up through 1887!).24 This volume remains an unparalleled resource on the early reception of Kant. Although published only in the American journal, it had come to Dilthey’s attention, and after being turned down by Erdmann, Dilthey invited the young Adickes to undertake the task of editing the third division of the Akademie edition.25
Adickes – who would continue as a high school teacher until receiving a professorial appointment at the new Prussian state university at Münster in 190226 (he would become professor at Tübingen two years later, and remain there for the rest of his career) – quickly accepted Dilthey’s invitation and came up with a scheme for the organization of the handschriftliche Nachlaß. He made a number of key decisions that received the approval of Dilthey and his associates at the Academy of Sciences. First, he decided upon a rigorous separation between all of Kant’s notes, fragments, and freestanding sketches on the one hand and everything that could be securely classified as an actual draft (or Vorarbeit) of an eventually published work on the other hand, with the notes and fragments to comprise the first volumes of the section and the Vorarbeiten the final volumes – with the exception of drafts for the Critique of Pure Reason, which would be included with the notes on metaphysics.27 Thus, Adickes decided upon the division between the contents of volumes 14 through 19 on the one hand and what eventually became volumes 20 and 23 on the other. (The inclusion of the Opus postumum manuscripts in volumes 21 and 22 could not be foreseen in 1896, because it belonged to a private owner, the Krause family, who had inherited it through a line of succession going back to the son-in-law of Kant’s brother Johann Heinrich, and they were not willing to grant permission for its publication. They would agree to do so only under the pressure of the German financial crisis of 1922–23, when they finally sold the rights to de Gruyter, not the Academy of Sciences, for the sum of $750.)28 Second, he decided that the notes and fragments in the first section should be divided into volumes corresponding to Kant’s lectures on natural science and physical geography, anthropology, logic, metaphysics and natural theology, and moral and political philosophy, since a great deal of the material that would be published – the annotations in Kant’s textbooks – had presumably been intended for use as notes in those lectures. And third, he would publish all the material in chronological order: an easy task in the case of the Vorarbeiten, since they could be ordered in the chronological sequence of the published works,29 but a monumental challenge in the case of the almost entirely undated notes and sketches coming from the Königsberg and other collections of lose Blätter, from the two textbooks from Dorpat, one of which had previously been edited by Erdmann, and from two of Kant’s copies of his own books also in the Königsberg library, the copy of the first Critique already used by Erdmann and Kant’s extensively annotated copy of his much earlier work Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764).30 But Adickes was nevertheless confident that he could finish the work, which he originally foresaw as comprising six parts, in a decade. Inevitably, the work took him the rest of his life, and remained unfinished at the time of his death from cancer at the age of sixty-two.
Adickes’s intentions for the presentation of the notes and fragments in the first half of his division of the Akademie edition was altogether more ambitious than the earlier publications of the lose Blätter by Reicke and of the Reflexionen by Erdmann. First, of course, Erdmann had only published Kant’s notes in his own copy of the first edition of the first Critique and in his copy of Baumgarten, whereas Adickes’s edition would include those notes but also the notes in Kant’s copy of Meier’s Vernunft- lehre, as well as the notes in Kant’s own copy of the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, his notes in Eberhard’s Vorbereitung zur natürlichen Theologie, his notes in the textbook for his moral philosophy lectures, Baumgarten’s Initia philosophiae practicae primae, notes in a copy of the text that Kant used for his lectures on Naturrecht, namely Gottfried Achenwall, Juris naturalis pars posterior complectens jus familiae, jus publicum, et jus gentium, fifth edition (Göttingen: Victor Bossiegell, 1763) – and then all of this would be integrated with the Königsberg library papers previously edited by Reicke, as well as whatever else could be found. Second, while in his volume of “Reflections for the Critique of Pure Reason” Erdmann had arranged Kant’s notes in correspondence with the chapters and topics of the Critique, and then only within them in a chronological order based on his own conception of the four main periods of Kant’s philosophical development,31 and Reicke had not attempted to impose a chronological ordering on the lose Blätter at all, Adickes aimed at a far more detailed as well as in his view objective chronological ordering of all of Kant’s notes and fragments: in the end, he would divide Kant’s notes into no fewer than thirty-three strata, as he liked to think of them in geological fashion.
We will return to the matter of Adickes’s chronology in the next section; this section will conclude with an account of Adickes’s progress in the task.32 Having signed on in 1896, Adickes spent the next several years investigating the materials as well as many of the transcriptions of Kant’s lectures, which he would not be editing for the Akademie edition but which he would use for comparative dating of the notes and fragments. His progress was slowed by his relocations to the university at Münster in 1902 and then to Tübingen in the fall of 1904. He began the final editing of the manuscript for the first volume, volume 14, the notes on natural science, in the fall of 1906, and typesetting began the following summer; but between delays at the publisher and Adickes’s own desire to delay publication until he could also publish his own scholarly studies of the material,33 the volume did not actually appear until 1911. While Adickes spent much time in the next several years working on a new edition of Kant’s lectures on physical geography, which in the end was not published,34 he continued to make steady progress on the notes and fragments: volume 15, on anthropology, was completed in 1913 and published in 1914, and volume 16, on logic, was also completed in 1914. Adickes was also finished with the metaphysics material – his student Theodor Haering had been able to use the particularly important lose Blätter from 1775 known as the Duisburg Nachlaß for his doctoral dissertation as early as 1910,35 and typesetting for volume 17 began in 1914, but it was broken off in 1915 because of the war.36 Work on the volume would not resume until 1924, and it was only published in 1926. The delay was by no means due only to the war: in the meantime, Adickes had been able to spend time with the Opus postumum manuscripts owned by the Krause family, and he devoted much of his time between 1915 and 1924 to a book on that material, Kants Opus postumum dargestellt und beurtheilt (Kant-Studien Ergänzungsheft 50, Berlin, 1920), to his massive work on Kant and the natural sciences, Kant als Naturforscher (two volumes, Berlin, 1924–25), and his controversial work on “the thing in itself,” Kant und das Ding an sich (Berlin, 1924) – the works for which he remains best known apart from his edition of the Nachlaß itself. All this work done, Adickes returned to the Nachlaß and completed the work on volume 18, the second metaphysics volume, by the first of October, 1927 – the book was published in 1928 – and then turned to volume 19 on moral and political philosophy. He had apparently done much of the work necessary to prepare this volume for the press when he learned in April 1928 that what he had thought was arthritis was actually cancer of the spine and pelvis, and that he had only a few more months to live. He had indeed only a short time to live, and died on 8 July 1928.37 But even in his final months, he was able to devote attention to the Kant edition, and spent time preparing a Tübingen Privatdozent, Friedrich Berger, to complete volume 19. Berger was appointed to do so by the Kant Commission in November 1928,38 and was apparently finished with the work in 1929: as he states in the Preface to the volume, “The reflections were in their entirety already transcribed by Erich Adickes and also provisionally chronologically ordered” (19:vi). However, the publication of the volume was once again delayed at the publisher, de Gruyter, this time not due to military or financial exigency but rather apparently due to the intervention of the two de Gruyter employees, Arthur Buchenau and Gerhard Lehmann, who would from this time and, in the case of Lehmann, through 1979, take over the editing of the Akademie edition, and who may have made changes to Berger’s manuscript.39 Volume 19 finally appeared in 1934.
Thus Adickes did not live to complete the six volumes of the notes and fragments, let alone the two volumes of Vorarbeiten that he had planned, although he had apparently already done much work on them. Nor did he live to edit the two volumes of Opus postumum, although de Gruyter had finally acquired the rights to do so by the beginning of 1924,40 and Adickes had determined the chronology of that material. All of the Kantian materials that Adickes had as well as his own work toward the remaining volumes was turned over by his family to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and Buchenau and Lehmann would edit the two volumes of the Opus postumum, published in 1936 and 1938, on principles very different from those Adickes would have used,41 while Lehmann would edit the Vorarbeiten in volumes 20 and 23, finally published in 1942 and 1955. Finally, Adickes’s unexpected death meant that he was not able to write the extensive explanation and justification of his determination of the chronology of the materials that he had always planned to include in the final volume of the handschriftliche Nachlaß (see 14:xlii–xliv). Nevertheless, what Adickes did accomplish was, in the moving words of his successor Friederich Berger, a “grand accomplishment of the most self-abnegating detail work, to which for more than thirty years he sacrificed his finest energies. Ruthlessly hard on himself, he here completed a heroic life in the service of scholarship” (19:v).
The present volume, then, consisting in very large part of material from volumes 15 through 19 of the Akademie edition, is based on the work of Erich Adickes, Friedrich Berger, and, in the case of Chapter 1, Marie Rischmüller. The continuing controversy about the quality of the work done by Arthur Buchenau and Gerhard Lehmann on volumes 21 and 22, and then by Lehmann on volumes 20 and 23 as well as the lectures volumes 24, 27, 28, and 29 does not affect this volume.42
III.
CHRONOLOGY AND STYLE
Adickes did not live to produce the detailed justification of his chronological method that he always intended, but he explained the general principles as well as some of the factual bases for it in the Introduction to volume 14, the first of the volumes of the handschriftliche Nachlaß that he published. There were two main elements to his dating: first, ordering the materials into distinct strata (Schichten) – having long studied Kant’s physical geography, Adickes liked to use this geological metaphor – and second, attaching enough of these strata to specific dates or periods to allow for the dating of the intervening strata as well. The latter could be done when a clearly identifiable stratum could be conclusively assigned to a date or contained a datable item: for example, the notes in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime could only have been written after the publication of the book, and most give every indication of having been written at much the same time, so they can be assigned to the period 1764–68, or even more probably 1764 to 1765 or 1766 (14:xxxviii); one note in the Duisburg Nachlaß and another on page 432 of the Metaphysica explicitly refer to Kant’s intention to enter an essay competition that was announced in several journals in February and March 1770, so those notes and everything that can be securely associated with them can be dated to 1770 (14:xxxix); Kant makes related notes on four letters dated from 3 July 1773 to 20 May 1775, so those notes and everything securely related to them can be dated to the period 1773–75 (14:xl); and so on. With enough such fixable dates and clear enough strata to associate with them or place between them, the outlines of a chronology could be established.
But how did Adickes establish the separate strata themselves? Here he relied on visual evidence: similarities in handwriting, for while Kant’s Reinschrift, or handwriting for finished documents, did not undergo much change during his mature years, his style of taking notes did; changes in ink, because Kant mixed his own, and the mixture and thus the appearance of the ink changed over the years; and, an element on which Adickes placed great emphasis, the position of the notes on the page and relative to each other: a note placed right next to a paragraph in the textbook would clearly be earlier than one evidently concerning the same paragraph but written in a more remote location; a note surrounding another or written between its lines would clearly be later than the other, and so on (14:xxx–xxxi).
These considerations too sound reasonable. But on the basis of the two kinds of criteria mentioned, Adickes divided all of Kant’s handwritten remains into no fewer than thirty-two strata, identified with the letters of the Greek alphabet and the addition of numerical superscripts for some periods, especially “psi” (1780–89) and “omega” (from 1790 until Kant’s death). Although Adickes did not live to provide the detailed description of his method that he promised, he described the scheme itself, with some information about the visual criteria he used and references to the dated materials with which the strata could be associated, in the Introduction to volume 14 (14:xxxvi–xliii), and the original editions of the volumes came with a handy little card correlating the Greek letters with the dates so that the reader would not have to turn back to volume 14 until the scheme was memorized.43 Adickes emphasized that his thirty-two strata were not each distinct chronological periods, because sometimes two strata separated by his visual indices were nevertheless assigned to the same year or period of years or overlapping years or periods on the basis of their external correlations with dated material. So in the end Adickes recognized something like twenty-two distinct periods for Kant’s notes and fragments. But even twenty-two chronological periods are a great many, compared for example to the four that Erdmann proposed. Could Adickes really have had sufficient grounds for dividing the material up so finely?
The first thing that should be said is that Adickes did not always pretend that he could assign a note conclusively to a single stratum or associated chronological period. Where he was completely confident about the stratum and date of a note, he would print only a single Greek letter in its heading. But if he was uncertain, he would provide a sequence of Greek letters, using their sequence, question marks, and parentheses to indicate decreasing certainty about the date. This system works as follows. A single Greek letter or pair of letters connected by a dash, without any further modification, indicates an unequivocal assignment to a single stratum or range of strata. Two or more Greek letters each followed by a single question mark indicates equal probability for each stratum. There could then follow a pair of parentheses enclosing one or more Greek letters each followed by a question mark; this would indicate a lower level of probability than the unbracketed letters preceding. Further sets of parentheses would indicate decreasing probability that the note belongs to that period. Further Greek letters followed by two question marks would be even more unlikely, and so on. Adickes describes the system at 14:lx–lxi.
So Adickes was confident that some notes could be conclusively assigned to a single stratum and period, and was less certain about others. Nevertheless, he was confident about his chronological scheme as a whole. But how confident can we be about it? The simple answer is that in the absence of direct acquaintance with the originals from which he worked – many of which have not been found since the end of World War II – as well as in the absence of the years of study it would take to be able even to decipher Kant’s crowded and crabbed handwriting, full of abbreviations and signs, let alone to learn to recognize different strata in it, no one could have any particular basis for challenging Adickes’s system, as opposed to general skepticism about it (except where the content of a particular note might seem obviously incompatible with what we know about Kant’s views from a conclusively dated published work or letter). So there are really only two choices: make no pretense to date the fragments at all, except for those particular ones that were actually on a dated piece of paper or make direct reference to a precisely datable event; or accept Adickes’s scheme, even if with the general reservation that such an elaborate scheme for the transcription, enumeration, and dating of so much often barely legible material could hardly be correct in every detail. In this volume, Adickes’s proposed date or range of dates for each note will be reported in its heading. There will be one change, however: instead of out supplying Adickes’s Greek letters, they have been converted directly into dates. We trust this will make the volume easier to use for the great majority of its readers, while since we retain Adickes’s numberings for the fragments and also provide the Akademie edition pagination for every note drawn from that source, any reader who wants the sometimes even more fine-grained discrimination provided by Adickes’s system of Greek letters can readily locate the notes in the Akademie edition and retrieve that information.
Following the number of the note and the proposed date or dates for it, the third item in our heading of the notes will be a reference to its source. For those notes that were originally annotations in Kant’s textbooks, this reference will take the form of the abbreviation for the title of the book (the abbreviations are explained in the introductions to the chapters below), the roman or Arabic number of the page or pages on which the note was found, and, where Adickes provided one, the section or paragraph number (marked by “§”) with which the note was associated. Adickes added a prime to the page number to indicate that a note was on the side of an interleaved sheet facing the numbered page or a lowercase cursive letter (a, b, etc.) where several blank pages followed a numbered page; we have omitted those marks, since we have not had, nor do we expect readers of this volume to have, access to Kant’s original textbooks. (The two volumes originally from the Dorpat university library, which had been in Adickes’s possession since 1896, were returned to the Berlin academy after his death in 1928, but did not make their way back to Dorpat (now Tartu) for more than sixty years: in 1993, the copy of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica was in the Lower Saxon State Library in Göttingen, where it had been since 1949, while the copy of Meier’s Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre was in the collection of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin as of 1993.44 The volumes now appear in the Tartu university library catalogue, and so presumably have finally been returned. The location of the other volumes Adickes used is unreported and apparently unknown; they may have been among the papers that Gerhard Lehmann removed from Berlin toward the end of World War Ⅱ for safekeeping, but which were not found after the war.) For the lose Blätter, Adickes provided either the original folder and item number from the Königsberg library or another owner’s name and number for items that had not been part of that collection; we reproduce that. Where notes had previously been printed, either in Erdmann’s volumes or Reicke’s volumes, Adickes also provided those locations (using “E” for Erdmann and “R” for Reicke); we have not reproduced those references, although again they may easily be retrieved from the Akademie edition. (Adickes provided a table correlating the Akademie edition number for each of the 1,779 notes that had previously been published by Erdmann with Erdmann’s numbers at 18:x–xxiii, and Lehmann provided a catalogue of Reicke’s lose Blätter and their numbers as reprinted in the Akademie edition at 23:534–42. In an appendix to his volume, Werner Stark lists all the lose Blätter in the sequence of the original Königsberg folders or the other sources, and then correlates that list with their Akademie edition number and location.)45
As for the texts of the notes themselves, Adickes aimed to provide a diplomatic edition reproducing every aspect of the original text. He used Fraktur type to show what Kant had written in German handwriting and roman type to show what Kant had written in Latin letters, showing that he regarded the words as in a foreign language (typically Latin, occasionally French).46 Adickes used spaced type (Sperrdruck) to show Kant’s emphasis, and reserved cursive (italics) for his own editorial material. We have followed the model of the Cambridge editions of the first and third critiques, using normal roman type for Adickes’s Fraktur type, italics for his roman, and boldface for his Sperrdruck (which would have been set as Fettdruck or heavier type in the original editions of Kant’s published works). Adickes also used two typefaces in punctuation, “round” or ordinary roman type punctuation for punctuation Kant himself had provided, and “square” or Fraktur type punctuation for punctuation that Adickes added to the text. (Kant himself provided very little punctuation in these private notes.) We have not attempted to reproduce this distinction. In Adickes’s transcription, new sentences or sentence fragments do not always begin with a capital letter. We have started every sentence with a capital letter. Sometimes Kant appears to have written a clause, typically starting with “E.g.,” as a new sentence, but we have treated it as a dependent clause of the previous sentence.
Adickes also used a complicated system to show additions and deletions that Kant made in his notes. Where Kant himself used parentheses in his text, Adickes reproduces those without any special marking, and we likewise always reproduce Kant’s own parentheses. Where Kant made an addition or insertion that Adickes assigned to the same period as the original composition of the note, Adickes placed this material in parentheses prefixed with a superscript “g,” for gleichzeitig (simultaneous). We have integrated these additions into the text without any remark and without parentheses, except where the syntax requires parentheses. Where Kant made what Adickes determined to be a later addition to a note, Adickes placed that in parentheses prefixed with a superscript “s,” for später (later); we have retained Adickes’s parentheses for that material, and prefix the contents of the parentheses with the words “later addition.” Where Kant attached a separate footnote or other addendum to a passage, Adickes put the attached material in parentheses prefixed by one or more asterisks; we have reproduced both the asterisks and the parentheses. Finally, where Adickes could decipher words or passages that Kant had crossed out, he placed that material between square brackets and printed it in smaller type. Here we have exercised judgment: where Kant crossed out something simply because he changed his mind about the syntax of his sentence and used the same word a few words later, we have not reproduced it; but where he did not simply use the crossed-out word or phrase a few words later, but clearly changed his mind about what to write, then we have included the material he crossed out, enclosed in square brackets and prefixed with the words “crossed out.” Occasionally Adickes described crossed-out material in a footnote rather than presenting it in the text; we have generally followed our standard procedure for such material. Adickes also noted possible variant readings of Kant’s writing in his footnotes; with very few exceptions, we have not included that information. Again, the reader of our translation interested in that level of detail will in any case want to consult our sources in the Akademie edition.
We have left Latin words or phrases occurring in notes otherwise written in German in Latin, but provided translations in our footnotes where the meaning of the Latin is not self-evident to any reader of English; where Kant wrote a whole note in Latin, we have indicated that fact but translated the note in our main text. We have also used our footnotes to indicate the German words being translated where the translation departs from our general practice or masks something interesting about the terminology of the German original, but we have tried to keep those notes to a minimum. We have used endnotes for editorial material, including descriptions of the contents of the sections in Kant’s texts to which he appends his notes, cross-references among the notes, cross-references to relevant passages in Kant’s published works or sometimes lectures as well as to passages in other authors whom Kant mentions in his notes, biographical and bibliographical references, and so on.
We have tried to follow the glossaries of the rest of the Cambridge edition, especially those of the Critique of Pure Reason, Practical Philosophy, and the Critique of the Power of Judgment, but have made some changes. We have restricted the glossaries included at the end of this volume to philosophically significant terms.
Our principle throughout has been to try to provide the reader of the translation as much evidence about the development of Kant’s thought as would be available to the reader of Adickes’s edition, but not to burden the translation with information about the appearance or sources of Kant’s originals – from which we are in any case at one remove – that could not possibly bear on any hypothesis about that development.
This volume has been a long time in the making, and I have a number of debts to discharge.
First, I would like to thank Dieter Henrich for introducing me to the use and importance of Kant’s handschriftliche Nachlaß during a visit he made to Harvard during my final semester of graduate study in the spring of 1973 – as well as for his interest in and support of my work for many years later. Several scholars writing in English had made use of the Nachlaß shortly after its publication in the Akademie edition in the 1920s and 1930s, notably H. J. Paton in his Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience (two volumes, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936 ) and Paul Arthur Schilpp in his Kant’s Pre-Critical Ethics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1938); but their example did not become a model for subsequent British and American scholarship – the Nachlaß was definitely ignored in the exciting analytical work on Kant done during the 1960s by philosophers such as Graham Bird, Robert Paul Wolff, Peter Strawson, and Jonathan Bennett that was so formative for students of my vintage – and I doubt that I would have discovered the treasures in the Nachlaß as soon as I did had it not been for the example and tutelage of Henrich.
I would like to thank Allen Wood and Jonathan Sinclair-Wilson, then the philosophy editor in the New York office of Cambridge University Press, for inviting me to coedit the Cambridge Edition in 1986 and for entrusting me with the present volume. I would like to thank Terence Moore, who succeeded Sinclair-Wilson the following year, for his support of all my work and for his patience in waiting for the completion of this volume, which was inevitably delayed after the untimely death of Eva Schaper and the decision that I should replace her as the editor of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Every philosopher and student of philosophy in the English-speaking world owes Terry Moore gratitude for his energy and imagination in the creation and support of so many publishing projects ranging from the present edition to the Cambridge Companions to Philosophy. His premature death in 2004, while this volume was in press, was a personal loss for me as well as a professional loss throughout the philosophical community. I would like to thank Deans Samuel Preston and Rebecca Bushnell of the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania for their generosity with teaching relief, which has facilitated the completion of this volume. And I would like to thank Gertrud Grünkorn of Walter de Gruyter & Co. for her generous permission to use so much material from the Akademie edition.
But above all I would like to thank my collaborators, Curtis Bowman and Frederick Rauscher, who had both just completed their Ph.D.s at Penn almost a decade ago when this project got seriously under way. I made the initial selection of materials to be translated in 1995. Bowman did the first drafts of the initial selections on logic and part of the notes on metaphysics, while Rauscher did the first drafts of the initial selections on moral philosophy, as well as of some notes on political philosophy that we eventually decided would appear in the separate volume of Lectures and Drafts on Political Philosophy. I did the initial drafts of the notes on the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, of the remainder of the notes on metaphysics, and of the notes on aesthetics. Both Bowman and Rauscher made many suggestions about additions and deletions to my original selection of materials that were of great value in my final determination of the contents of the volume. Bowman had finished his drafts by 1999 and Rauscher finished his not much later, and both have been patient in waiting for me to complete the volume. I am responsible for the final selection of materials, the final form of all translations, and for the introductions to the volume and to each chapter as well as the annotations. So this is a case in which I can sincerely say that I alone am responsible for the errors that inevitably remain.
Frederick Rauscher would like to thank Eastern Illinois University for a Summer Research Award in 1997, Gary Aylesworth, Robert Louden, Mark Mikkelsen, and Hilde Nelson for advice on translation, and Joseph Slowik for his painstaking assistance with editing and proofreading his drafts.
December 2004 | PAUL GUYER |