Opus Postumum

by Immanuel Kant, Eckart Förster (Editor), Michael Rosen (Editor)

This volume is the first-ever English translation of Kant's last major work, the so-called Opus postumum, a work Kant himself described as his "chef d'oeuvre" and as the keystone of his entire philosophical system. It occupied him for more than the last decade of his life. Professor Förster's introduction places the text in the context of Kant's earlier writings and provides a comprehensive account of the remarkable history of the manuscript from Kant's death to its eventual publication in the 1930s. Also included are extensive explanatory notes and a helpful glossary.

Genres: Philosophy, German Literature

364 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1803

About the author

Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century philosopher from Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He's regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe & of the late Enlightenment. His most important work is The Critique of Pure Reason, an investigation of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics & epistemology, & highlights his own contribution to these areas. Other main works of his maturity are The Critique of Practical Reason, which is about ethics, & The Critique of Judgment, about esthetics & teleology.

Pursuing metaphysics involves asking questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Kant suggested that metaphysics can be reformed thru epistemology. He suggested that by understanding the sources & limits of human knowledge we can ask fruitful metaphysical questions. He asked if an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that object. He concluded that all objects that the mind can think about must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can think only in terms of causality–which he concluded that it does–then we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect. However, it follows from this that it's possible that there are objects of such a nature that the mind cannot think of them, & so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. So the grand questions of speculative metaphysics are off limits, but the sciences are firmly grounded in laws of the mind. Kant believed himself to be creating a compromise between the empiricists & the rationalists. The empiricists believed that knowledge is acquired thru experience alone, but the rationalists maintained that such knowledge is open to Cartesian doubt and that reason alone provides us with knowledge. Kant argues, however, that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to illusions, while experience will be purely subjective without first being subsumed under pure reason. Kant’s thought was very influential in Germany during his lifetime, moving philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists & empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer saw themselves as correcting and expanding Kant's system, thus bringing about various forms of German Idealism. Kant continues to be a major influence on philosophy to this day, influencing both Analytic and Continental philosophy.

Reviews

[Kexuan Yang]

The history of edition of this book is complicated. Opus postumum is a bundle of manuscripts Kant left unpublished. In Schelling's 1804 obituary of Kant, he mentioned that Kant had an unfinished project on the transition from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics, so the project was not unknown then. But most of its contents were not available to the public until Erich Adickes published the book Kants Opus postumum in 1920 with selections from Kant's original material. The Academy edition appeared in 1936 and 1938, and it spread for more than 1,300 pages. The current English edition is selected and rearranged by Förster himself and has only 256 pages, but there are already repetitions and signs that betray the instability of Kant's project itself.

The original project is a transition from the metaphysical foundations of nature science to physics. In Metaphysical Foundations of Nature Science Kant constructed matter from various determinations, but for Kant this construction gave only the elements for constructing physics, since it was still unclear how various elements in physics can exist in harmony at all in a system. Here Kants posted the central principle in those manuscripts, that there is only one experience. He then proved the existence of ether transcendentally. (He did not use this word in the way that, for instance, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz used this word. While Lorentz used the word as the seat of the electromagnetic field, Kant referred to an all-penetrating, weightless material with ultimate fluidity that guarantees that the system of physics is in unity and that we do not perceive empty space, or voidness in Democritus' sense, though Kant did make the transmission of light one phenomenal manifestation of his ether, it is not transcendentally essential. I agree with Kant's objections against the empty space, but his proof is implausible. For if something is given only through a second-level reflection that that very thing cannot be of the same ontological level as a kind of material in any ordinary sense. Kant would argue that its existence can be proved transcendentally, but it is still something given in senses (for instance, through the transmission of heat or light). But this does not save him either, since he needs to further prove the homogeneity that justifies the genus.)

Then Kant proceeded from that there is only one experience to that there is only one space and one time. This gave rise to Kant's transition to the doctrine of self-positing: he said that the subject must first posit oneself as an object (he was not clear in whether this precedence is an ontological, epistemological or temporal precedence) in appearance for an experience (but how, it is too bad that Kant gave up his earliest project of physical monadology in Metaphysical Foundations of Nature Science) and that space and time is that self-positing self. He then re-determined thing-in-itself as something the self posited to realise that what is within space and time is not ultimate. I do not agree with his subjective idealism, but here one can see how German idealists are different from modern entrepreneurial optimism that however distorts German idealism for its own sake: for even Kant here (Kant as the author of Opus postumum was, along with Fichte's Jena phase, in German idealism's most self-aggrandising phase) did say that what is sensible is posited by the subject, the positing subject is the space-time, something with rigid a priori principles that the empirical "I" can by no means determine or change at one's own will. The fact that appearances are constructed by "I" does not prove the strength of the empirical "I", but its very weakness (everything it sees is already somehow distorted) and its necessity to subject itself to duties. For Kant, it is the categorical imperative that is of strength and the dignity of the empirical ego lies in the striving to fulfil duties despite one's empirical strength and despite the empirical outcomes of the striving. Entrepreneurial optimism, however, shifted from that every sensible object is constituted by the self to the Pelagian doctrine that therefore the empirical ego can change whatever appears and that if the outcome is not satisfying, it is your own fault. I cannot fathom how vicious this doctrine is: it empties Reason and I daresay, empties the life itself.

Now Kant has gone very faraway from his original project and identified "transcendental philosophy" as something that can give the transition from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics. Here the incompleteness of Kant's project emerged to the surface: for in Critique of Judgement Kant distinguished critique of reason and metaphysics by stipulating metaphysics as studying the a priori aspects of objects given in experience and critique of reason as studying the very condition that makes experience and experiential objects possible. It is not clear that where the "transcendental philosophy" belongs in this map since Kant only mentioned his "critique of pure reason" once and said that it COMPOSED OF metaphysics and transcendental philosophy. Furthermore, he initially still tried to proceed from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to transcendental philosophy and then from transcendental philosophy to physics, and then he wrote something that one had to return from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to transcendental philosophy. So what this very "transcendental philosophy" is? Kant repeatedly wrote short proses beginning with "transcendental philosophy is" and gave a definition, in a very similar way that pop love song lyrics repeatedly began with "love is" and gave some obscure description of love. Roughly speaking, it is something that makes Kant's project a systematic unity instead of a mere aggregate, and sometimes in Kant's new terminologies, the act that the self realises oneself as self-positing. For Kant, there are three objects of transcendental philosophy, God, the world and the man as a mediate, each infinite in one's own way.

Kant said that observations and experiments cannot give the object in itself but can only approach reality "asymptotically". That is a very incomplete theory of science, for the concept of asymptotic involves the concept of a geometrical limit, and strictly speaking when we say that B is a limit of a series S indexed by a well-ordered set, we know where B is and where each element of S is, give the distance between elements by a norm and declare that for each arbitrarily small value, there exists a place in the indexes of the series, exceeding which each element with that very index within S has a distance from B that is ness than the arbitrarily small value. Now one has to ask Kant that if B itself cannot be known how one can know that one is approaching B with less distance. Neither can one say that science does not aim at the truth but aims at a "best model" and treats that model "as if" it is true for time's sake, for to know something is "as if" true one has to have an implicit idea of what is true in itself. Indeed before Mach and pragmatists I do not know who were so arrogant as to reduce scientific objects to something we can manipulate ourselves. In my comments on Duns Scotus I distinguished two senses of the word Nature: one denoting what a thing is for and the other denoting what a thing behaves statistically. While one cannot say that a thing can be reduced to what observations and experiments tells us, it is also implausible to say that observations and experiments say nothing about what a thing is. It seems to me to be better to establish a transcendental scheme of how a thing appears and hides itself in various aspects and understand scientific progresses as a process of determining an infinite object with more depth. I do not think that the problem of measuring the distance is an issue here because our cognitions are always finite and always have an infinite distance from fully grasping the object. But we do need a robust ontology of memory so that the past is not simply understood as erased and the knowledge is indeed accumulating. What might be a better vision of natural science? I may think of Wheeler's participatory universe corroborated by Yannaras' relational ontology and perhaps Bolzano and Kit Fine's ontology of grounding. But I am not sure, neither have I sufficient understandings of these authors that I am talking of.

[Josh]

A very strange unpublished text, the last big project Kant was working on before his death. In it, we find, among other things, Kant reformulating his philosophy in the language of the early post-Kantians: of positing, etc. There are several versions and attempts of him doing this, and it is perhaps the closest we get to post-Kantian Kant.

[N Perrin]

Perhaps Kant's greatest work is the one he never got to finish.

[Jason]

"Major work" of baloney if you ask me