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Back to Kant? No Way

In 1798 Kant was challenged to reveal his thoughts about the recent claims of Reinhold and Fichte that they had recast the true spirit of Kant’s philosophy in a more perspicuous and better-argued form. ‘There is an Italian proverb’, Kant replied, ‘May God protect us especially from our friends, for we shall manage to watch out for our enemies ourselves’. Karl Ameriks quotes this remark at the very beginning of his marvelous and provocative book, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy,* and there is no mistaking his fundamental agreement about the relationship between the Critical Philosophy and the various movements of the succeeding decades, usually labeled ‘German Idealism’, which claimed inspiration from Kant at the same time as they sought to go beyond him. Kant, of course, did not live long enough to become acquainted as well with the writings of Schelling and Hegel. Nor can it be said that these four post-Kantians marked out similar paths in their attempts to move beyond the inadequacies they perceived in Kant’s thinking. Nonetheless, Ameriks maintains that they were at one in failing to appreciate the complexities of Kant’s own transcendental idealism, and that their failure had a common source. It was Reinhold’s image of the Critical Philosophy, his conception of what Kant had been up to and of where he had fallen short, which set the agenda for the developments that came afterwards. Ameriks has written his ‘prolegomenon to a rehabilitation of orthodox Kantianism’ (p. 269) in order to rescue Kant from the massive distortions which Reinhold, in his view, bequeathed to his successors – Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. His point is not that German Idealism was simply a mistake. But the achievements of post-Kantian German philosophy are better measured, so he believes, by the new themes and ideas it introduced than by its criticisms of Kant (p. 339). Where Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel found fault with the master, they were largely in the wrong. Kant himself, by contrast, was on to the truth, or so it would appear from Ameriks’ deeply sympathetic account. His book adds a new and important strain to the century-old cry, ‘Back to Kant!’.