Kant and the Schönen Wissenschaften: Contextualizing The Dreams of a Spirit-Seer1

John H. Zammito, Houston

Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, one of Kant's most ambiguous works, has generally been read as the statement of maximal epistemological skepticism in Kant's development. This essay attempts to situate Kant's text in its historical mo-ment by suggesting that the whole discipline of academic philosophy had come under question, that Kant himself was profoundly disaffected from that discipline in this moment, and that the immediate reception of his work, in the key reviews of Mendelssohn and Herder, suggests that it was taken as part of the dispute between Popularphilosopbie and Schulphilosophie, between belles lettres (schönen Wissenschaften) and academic pedantry (Schul-fuchserei). Kant's intellectual biography in the 1760s gains profile in light of the significant shift in the character of Aufklärung around mid-century. Wolffian Schulphilosophie seemed to be ceding leadership to whàt was com-ing to be called Popularphilosophie. Assimilation of ideas from France and England supplied considerable energy for this. A widening public began to contest the traditional Gelehrtenstand for cultural leadership. In Berlin, where since mid-century the Academy served to galvanize the cultural discourse of the Gelehrtenstand, independent writers led by Nicolai and Lessing were creating a context, via major literary journals, for the new reading public (Öffentlichkeit) to engage ideas from all Europe and create a "patriotic" German cultural identity. The prominence, as early as the 1760s, of three key notions - publicity, patriotism, and popular philosophy - warrants a con-ceptualization of "Aufklärung as politicization".

Popularphilosophie must not be underestimated as vulgar philosophy, conducted with insufficient intellectual rigor, but instead as the idea of phi-losophy for the people, i. e., intellectual advocacy of the self-constitution of the people, what Kant was eventually to advocate as "emergence from self-inflicted immaturity." (AA:8:35) This signified a redefinition of philosophy's mission, away from the professional preoccupation with theoretical knowl-edge and its certainty to a new ethical and socio-political agency for change

1 This is a much abridged version of an essay, "Rousseau - Kant - Herder and the Problem of Aufklärung in the 1760s," which was presented at the 1996 conference on the pre-critical Kant held at the Centre Les Trois Hiboux, Naucelle France, forthcoming in New Essays on the Pre-Criticai Kant, ed. Tom Rockmore (New York: Humanities, 2000) . In order to present the argument as fully as possible, the apparatus of reference has been scaled back in this version to a minimum; full bibliography can be found in the unabridged version of my essay.

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Kant and the Schönen Wissenschaften: Contextualizing The Dreams of a Spirit-Seer 7 9

and progress. How did Kant relate to all this? Richard Velkley argues in Freedom and the End of Reason that Kant experienced a revolutionary reorientation under the influence of Rousseau around 1764-1765, as docu-mented above all in Kant's Bemerkungen in den "Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen," which left him "constantly reflecting on how the ultimate end of reason, with its moral character, determines all uses of reason." In his Bemerkungen Kant acknowledged both the personal and the general significance of Rousseau's thought: "I am by disposition a scholar. I feel a complete thirst for knowledge and the gnawing restlessness to advance its frontiers ... There was a time when I believed this alone consti-tuted the honor of mankind and I felt contempt for the vulgar [Pöbel] who knew nothing. Rousseau set me right. This delusory preference vanishes, I learn to honor men . . ." (AA:20:44) In Velkley's view, when Kant acknowl-edged that Rousseau "set him right" about his intellectual arrogance, this occasioned a democratic turn of mind that would govern his social, political and moral attitudes thenceforth.

In Ursprünge der Ethik Kants, Josef Schmucker noted: "This new orien-tation to man and life naturally brought with it the necessity to sort out his relation to his own profession." How did it affect his conception of the profession of academic philosophy? There is evidence of a crisis in Kant's relation to his discipline, not just in his view of the foundational warrant of metaphysics. In Bemerkungen Kant set as the task of the scholar and in particular of the philosopher, to address "what it is the most important concern of man to know, how he is to comprehend and to fulfill his place in creation, what a person must be, in order to be a human being." (AA:20:41) Taking as his model for the teacher and scholar the ideal articulated in Rousseau's Emile, Kant pronounced "the scholarly estate the most superflu-ous of all, for mankind living in a state of simplicity, but the most indispen-sable in the condition of oppression by superstition and violence." (AA:20:10)

If we take Kant's redefinition of the task of philosophy on the basis of Rousseau's influence seriously, if a philosopher, just because men find them-selves oppressed by superstition and violence, must help them grasp how to be human, if indeed the task of enlightenment is what Kant himself would profess it to be in 1784, and if, further, we take him up on his paradoxical claim about the public and the private uses of reason (AA:8:36-40), how can it be that Kant restricted himself to a "private use" of his reason? Why do we have so little publication on ethics, on history, on culture, and on politics from Kant until so late? Why did he publish his Anthropology more than twenty-five years after he began teaching it? What difference intruded between teach-ing and writing? It is clear that Kant thought and taught about all these fields, but he did not publish. Even that does not state the case with sufficient force, for Kant meant to publish about these things. The strongest evidence we have of this is his letter to Lambert of 1765 (AA:10:56-57) in which he announced he was at work on two studies, including a "Metaphysical First Principles of Practical Philosophy." But when he set himself to composing these texts, what came out was Dreams of a Spirit-Seer.

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80 John H. Zammito

Dreams of a Spirit-Seer is bewildering. In Kant's Life and Thought Ernst Cassirer long ago posed the question as follows:

Which was the author's true face and which the mask he had assumed? Was the book just a passing by-blow of free humor, or was there concealed behind this satyr play of the mind something resembling a tragedy of metaphysics? None of Kant's friends and critics was ever able to answer this question with certainty.

As Alison Laywine puts it in Kant's Early Metaphysics and the Origins of the Critical Philosophy, "there is little doubt that Dreams of a Spirit-Seer is a distinctly strange production; the question is why." She maintains that "an adequate account ... [among other things] would have to explain how pas-sages in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer can be reconciled with related passages in other works of Kant or in his correspondence." My concern is how this text can be related to the transfiguration of Kant's philosophy announced in the Velkley view.

The exchange of letters with Lambert offers a clue to this conundrum. In his letter, Lambert made disparaging remarks about publishers and readers in Germany that take on salience in light of the meaning of Aufklärung in the 1760s. Lambert wrote:

If [my work] were a novel, I believe, it would already have found many publishers, since it is so clearly the case that booksellers and readers corrupt each other and back away from fundamental reflection [gründlichen Nachdenken], Around here the only thing one philosophizes about are the so-called beautiful sciences [schöne Wissenschaften}. ( A A : 1 0 : 5 2 )

That was written from Berlin, and it represents a rather jaundiced view of the intellectual culture underway there. It is the view, I would say, of the sort of intellectual elitist Kant claimed Rousseau had discredited for him. But consider Kant's answer:

You complain with reason, dear Sir, of the eternal trifling of punsters and the wearying chatter of today's reputed writers, with wh om the only evidence of taste is that they talk about taste. I think, though, that this is the euthanasia [Euthanasie] of false philosophy, that it is perishing amid these foolish pranks, and it would be far worse to have it carried to the grave ceremoniously, with serious but dishonest hair-splitting. Before true philosophy can come to life, the old one must destroy itself; and just as putrefaction signifies the total dissolution that always precedes the start of a new creation, so the current crisis [ Crisis] in learning magnifies my hopes that the great, long-awaited revolution [revolution] in the sciences is not too far off. For there is no shortage of good minds. ( A A : 1 0 : 5 6 - 5 7 )

Three foreign words add stunning force to this passage: Euthanasia, crisis, and revolution. These are words that suggest the depth of Kant's alienation from the prevailing culture of philosophy. And they are written in December 1765, just after Kant had completed the manuscript of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. It is clear is that Kant felt deep contempt for the prevailing intellectual culture, but what is not clear is who he included in it. Lambert, whom Kant hailed as a "genius", and with whom he commiserated and identified over

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Kant and the Schönen Wissenschaften: Contextualizing The Dreams of a Spirit-Seer 8 1

against these boneheads, cannot have been meant. Certainly not Mendelssohn. But, judging from the persons to whom he sent copies of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, not Sulzer either, or Formey or Siissmilch or Spalding - in short, none of the Academy crowd in Berlin. Who, then? The circle around Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend? Nicolai? Lessing? Abbt? Were these really per-sons deserving of Kant's contempt? He usually reserved his venom for pedan-tic university scholars. Why was he now lambasting those in the schönen Wissenschaften? Where were Kant's allegiances?

Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Laywine writes, can be read as an "exercise in satire." But that is, after all, a genre of belles lettres (schönen Wissenschaften). She goes on, "this is anything but the satire of Pope and Swift", for "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer is very badly written ... Second, the satire is out of character for the author ... [N]o one could have expected satire from Kant." What was Kant about? In the Bemerkungen Kant offers us two important insights. First, regarding the genre, Kant observed: "Satire never improves anything, so even if I had the talent, I would make no use of it." (AA:20:106) More revealing still is a second entry: "Among friends everyone can talk about himself, for the other always takes what is said as if it applied to himself. In society or among mere acquaintances [Freunden nach der Mode] one must never speak of oneself (not even in books) unless one wants to say something that will be laughed at." (AA:20:143) In any event, as Laywine notes, "the satirical per-sona [of the text] is perhaps as ready as Kant to criticize the standard meta-physics taught in the universities." The key text passage states: "The methodic fustian of the higher schools is often only a pact to evade a difficult question through the equivocal meanings of words, because the appropriate and in most cases the reasonable, Ί do not know, ' is not easily tolerated by academ-ics . . ." (AA:2:319)

It is certainly the case, as Laywine writes, that "by the time we have finished Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, we know for sure that Kant advocates an enquiry into the limits of human reason." The question is whether by that time there remains anything beyond "common sense" empiricism left for philosophy, and accordingly why Kant did not commit himself to such inquir-ies, reducing philosophy, as his former student Herder urged, to anthropol-ogy. Laywine believes that Kant still remained committed to a technical philosophical project: "Kant's point at the end of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer is surely that we must do more than construct a genealogy of concepts. Our task is to determine what is possible for the understanding and human sensibility." Yet she admits that the text does not undertake such an investigation; instead, she writes, "he wants to prove to learned, brilliant minds like Lambert and Mendelssohn that even the most responsible philosopher is bound to go wrong unless he first investigates the limits of human reason."

I suggest Dreams of a Spirit-Seer does not stand as proof oí anything, but rather as a confused provocation unwelcome on all sides. Mendelssohn made the point crisply in his little review of Dreams for the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek: "The jestful profundity [scherzende Tiefsinn] with which this little work is written leaves the reader in doubt as to whether Mr. Kant wanted to

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82 John H. Zammito

make metaphysics ridiculous [lächerlich] or spirit-seeing believable." The result for figures like Lambert and Mendelssohn, Cassirer noted and Laywine affirms, was "bewilderment." I would go further: it was consternation. Kant was offering a rather insulting mirror to his guild, and the guild took offense. Compare the shift in tone of Kant's two letters to Mendelssohn, one sending the text and the next apologizing for it: there is here something of a gambit gone awry. In the letter envoying the text to Mendelssohn, Kant notes that it "contains more a quick sketch of the manner in which one should judge such questions than the exposition itself." (AA:10:68) It is not entirely clear what "such questions" are, but it is clear that Kant shows no reticence about the work; indeed, his mailing list shows remarkable boldness. The persons in Berlin to whom Kant directed copies of the text read like a roster of those "learned, brilliant minds" Laywine writes of, the academic elite like Lambert and Mendelssohn, "geniuses" as Kant rather obsequiously flatters them in their respective letters. Copies go as well to Spalding, Süssmilch, Sulzer, Formey - men who took themselves for the scholarly elite and looked down on popularizers. Lambert had already given voice to his distaste for belles lettres, for merely "popular" writing.

Mendelssohn's (lost) letter to Kant must have been rather pointed, because Kant's reply showed a strikingly different tone: he noted Mendelssohn's Befremdung over the text, and he urged himself back into Mendelssohn's good graces by claiming that he was not serious in what he wrote. Besides, the way he wrote it was too disorganized for him to do it successfully anyway, Kant rationalized, since he was forced to write - as the text itself forewarned - by the pressure of "unrelenting pleas of known and unknown friends." (AA:2:318) In the text he chose to satirize himself to show that he was actually of two minds. Then he answered Mendelssohn's central concern:

As to my expressed opinion of the value of metaphysics in general, perhaps here again my words were not sufficiently careful and qualified. But I cannot conceal my repugnance, and even a certain hatred, toward the inflated arrogance of whole volumes full of what are passed off as insights; for I am fully convinced that the path that has been selected is completely wrong, that the methods now in vogue must infinitely increase the amount of folly and error in the world, and that even the total extermination of all these chimerical insights would be less harmful than the dream science itself, with its confounded contagion. ( A A : 1 0 : 7 0 )

That is as strong as anything Kant wrote, either in his letter to Lambert or in Dreams itself. But, famously, Kant then relented, proclaiming: "I am far from regarding metaphysics itself, objectively considered, to be trivial or dispensable; in fact I have been convinced for some time now that I under-stand its nature and its proper place in human knowledge and that the true and lasting welfare of the human race depends upon it." (AA:10:70) Thus, Kant renewed his vows to metaphysics in the name of the "good of the human race." This represents, in fact, Kant's rejoinder to the demands of the Aufklärung of the 1760s for more immediate engagement along the lines of Popularphilosophie. In effect, Kant returned to the problem of mind-body interaction which had been at the core of his metaphysical inquiry all along.

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Kant and the Schönen Wissenschaften: Contextualizing The Dreams of a Spirit-Seer 83

There is little evidence of any ethical, much less political orientation. Moreo-ver, this project kept him quite firmly in the guild of academic philosophy; the prospect of venturing forth into empirical or popular writing was from this moment foreclosed.

That was not the impression Dreams of a Spirit-Seer aroused in Herder. Kant sent him the text of Dreams urgently, as each section left the printer, suggesting at the very least his interest in Herder's reception, if not the stronger possibility that Herder represented a kind of "ideal reader" for his text. Herder responded with one of the most appreciative reviews of the work, in the Königsbergseben Gelehrten und Politischen Zeitungen, May 3, 1766, proclaiming it was evidence that Kant was pursuing "that worthwhile ana-lytic path of always philosophizing kat' anthropon." Recognizing it as a work oí schönen Wissenschaft, Herder praised the fit of style with theme in the text, comparing its "ingenuous good humor [treuherzige Laune]" to Sterne's Tristram Shandy, a favorite text of both authors. He lionized Kant as "one of the greatest philosophical observers of the pathology of our soul[s]", and found the concluding sections of the two parts full of promise that Kant could reform philosophy. It is, I think, striking that both the Mendelssohn review and the Herder review sought to understand Dreams of a Spirit-Seer as the harbinger of a major philosophical reform, though they were hoping for starkly different directions from Kant. That suggests the text's deep ambigu-ity. In Sensualistischer Idealismus, Marion Heinz argues that Herder and Kant were still very close up through this review of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. Herder remained a Kantian not only through 1765, as Haym had it, but into 1766. Yet the Kant in whom Herder believed was never entirely Kant himself. Herder misunderstood Kant's skepticism, Heinz argues, thinking it called for an all-out retreat to empiricism, while Kant was cultivating a more subtle agnosticism, carefully holding open at least the possibility of a spiritual realm. Missing this point, Herder leaned toward what Kant would pronounce "dog-matic empiricism" from the vantage of his fleshed-out transcendental philoso-phy.

The distance between Kant's and Herder's respective appreciations of the crisis of philosophy as a discipline over the 1760s emerges clearly in an exchange of letters between teacher and former student on the occasion of Herder's (anonymous) publication of his Fragmente. In May 1768, Kant wrote Herder a letter of congratulations laced with admonitions. He then described his own situation.

In my own regard, since I am bound to nothing and with a deep indifference towards my own opinions as well as those of others turn the whole edifice upside down and consider it from all possible vantages in order that in the end I might find the one from which I can hope to point towards the truth, I thus in the time since we parted have made room in many places for different insights and since my attention is focused primarily on grasping the true determination and the limits of human capacities and inclinations I do believe that I have pretty well succeeded at last, in the matter of morals, and I am at work now on a Metaphysic of Morals in which I imagine I shall be able to provide the self-evident and fruitful principles

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84 John H. Zammito

as well as the method according to which the to be sure very commonplace but largely fruitless efforts in this field of inquiry will need to be redirected if they are ever to accomplish anything. I hope to be finished with it this year ... (AA:10:74)

Kant's characterization of his own preoccupations and vacillations, but also of his steadfast desire to reformulate academic philosophy on "self-evident and fruitful principles" suggests that pivotal moment of openness at the close of the 1760s in which "great light" could occasion his Umwälzung.

Herder in his response (AA:10:75ff) took the opportunity to sound out Kant on what he esteemed the pressing issues of the day. While Kant had exhorted him to situate himself closer to Hume than to Montaigne in his style of personal essay writing, Herder argued that his esteem for Montaigne was higher, that Hume had been difficult for him to admire while under the influence of Rousseau, and most of all that Kant had left out a third great model of this genre of writing, the Earl of Shaftesbury, whom Herder ac-knowledged as his "favorite companion." Herder described his ideal writer so: "What a man that would be who could speak of Baumgarten's rich psychology with the spiritual experience [Seelenerfahrung] of Montaigne!" That Kant might be a candidate for this role emerges from Herder's very enthusiastic response to Kant's mention of his prospective publication on morals: "Provide for the cultivation of our century a work which will do for the question of the good what you have done on the question of the beautiful and the sublime ..." The most important passage of Herder's letter to Kant of 1768 goes as follows:

Doubts about some of your philosophical hypotheses and proofs, in particular where you concern yourself with the limits of the science of man, are more than speculations: and since there is no other reason why I took up my spiritual office than because I knew - and I am daily learning it more by experience - that it is in this way, under the circumstances of our civil constitution, that we can best introduce culture and human understanding into that admirable part of mankind that we call the people; such a human philosophy is likewise my most preferred occupation.

When we contrast Herder's agenda with the one Kant articulated in his letter to Mendelssohn, we can discern the accelerating distance between them.

The Kant of 1765 was not yet ready to propagate in a published work the principles which he derived from Rousseau and communicated to Herder. What we discern is that a brief interlude of "popular" publication was suc-ceeded by a return to a form of writing and thinking profoundly distant from popular audiences and equally remote from direct ethical-political engage-ment. Whatever Herder might have hoped from Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and from Kant's lectures and their personal conversations, Kant would never share Herder's closing, remarkable avowal in " Wie die Philosophie zum Besten des Volkes allgemeiner und nützlicher werden kann" (1765): "what new fruitful developments would not arise if only our whole philosophy would become anthropology." Herder called for and enacted this "reduction [Einziehung] of philosophy to anthropology."

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Kant and the Schönen Wissenschaften: Contextualizing The Dreams of a Spirit-Seer 85

That is, philosophy would dissolve into social science. Kant, by contrast, aimed for a universal, necessary (transcendental) grounding of human expe-rience; he remained in the established disciplinary order of philosophy.

The shift in Kant from theoretical to practical primacy, postulating that it occurred in the mid-1760s, did not carry with it a shift from academic to popular philosophy. While Kant toyed with that prospect, he turned away from it decisively by the end of the 1760s. Kant rededicated himself as an academic philosopher, after having briefly uttered some rather harsh judg-ments about his guild. Kant's sense - especially Kant's critical sense - of philosophy as rigorous science long kept him from acting upon the impetus of his encounter with Rousseau towards public articulation in ethics, politics, anthropology and history. Kant became "silent" for a decade, while the struggle for German enlightenment in political and cultural terms was at a very high tide, and when he published again in 1781, it was in a dauntingly esoteric form which by his own admission "could never be made suitable for popular consumption." (KrV, A XVIII)

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