Did Kant become senile in 1796, rendering his work from this point until his death in 1804 unworthy of serious philosophical attention? This ‘senility thesis’ is the ‘popular thesis’ that Maja Schepelmann here seeks to refute. The book, Schepelmann’s second in two years, makes many original claims and vividly portrays the complex, polemical state of German philosophy in the immediate post-Critical period of 1796–1804. Schepelmann convincingly defends her main point, that Kant’s late writings should not be hastily dismissed as the product of senility, and, in doing so, she usefully unearths many little-read sources. However, in my view the book suffers from structural difficulties and, more problematically, it is debateable whether its central issue is a relevant one today. Even if one agrees that the ‘senility thesis’ continues to carry weight in contemporary Kant studies, one could question whether Schepelmann’s approach is the most effective way to disprove it. I will raise these critical questions at the end of this review; first, an overview of the book.
Chapter 1 assesses hypotheses about Kant’s mental state after 1796. Schepelmann vigorously criticizes the small medical-psychological literature on Kant’s final years, which has no interest in Kant’s philosophical writings, only in what can be reconstructed about Kant’s health from the 1804 biographies and Kant’s letters. Schepelmann questions the value of the ‘apologetic’ biographies of 1804 by Borowski, Jachmann and Wasianski, written in the context of Kant’s rapidly waning influence, which sought to contrast his late physical weakness with his earlier genius. Moreover, as Kant did not bare his soul in correspondence, she argues that his letters are unreliable sources for information about his health. Chapter 2 outlines a series of methodological challenges for historical research on Kant. These include the lack of sources, the question of Kant’s (dis)interest in the final preparation of his works for the printer and the difficulties that historians have had in appreciating the mocking and ironic tone that Schepelmann identifies in Kant’s works and letters. This is a mixed bag of a chapter, but Schepelmann’s main point is that historians should not assume linearity between the eighteenth century and the present, and the widespread lack of sensitivity to Kant’s irony is an issue to which the book returns. Chapter 3 discusses anonymously published early nineteenth-century biographical studies of Kant: Schepelmann makes new proposals about the authors of these works and argues that they offer livelier pictures of Kant than the more widely read 1804 biographies. The very short fourth chapter returns to a methodological issue, arguing that Kant is often misunderstood because he teaches philosophizing, not philosophy. I am very sympathetic to this idea, but it is defended far too briefly here, and Schepelmann too quickly labels Kant a thoroughgoing sceptic. It would be more convincing to show how Kant’s dynamic philosophizing is in tension with his attempts to defend the certainty of his architectonic system and its conceptual structures.
Chapters 5–8 discuss the Kampfplatz that was German philosophy in the last years of the eighteenth century. Schepelmann shows that, far from the state of perpetual peace that Kant might have hoped his Critique would introduce into philosophy, the period was marked by unprecedently aggressive polemics, a prevailing propagandistic, populist tone and a war between new systems, each claiming to have quickly and definitively replaced their predecessors. As A. W. Schlegel remarked, Germany had become a country containing almost only writers and barely any readers (p. 139). The figure here presented as primarily to blame for this degradation of philosophical discourse is J. G. Fichte, undoubtedly the villain of Schepelmann’s story. This section of the book gives a lively sense of the philosophical context of Kant’s final years, during which he was increasingly isolated, having been abandoned by many supporters for the Reinholdian and Fichtean camps. However, what should be the centrepiece of the section, chapter 6’s analysis of a selection of Kant’s late letters, is underwhelming. Schepelmann claims little more than that Kant’s references to his age and weakness are usually excuses for his tardiness in writing, and that his claims to be unable to understand things should be read as the adoption of an ironic ‘Dubitatio’ position, à la Socrates (i.e. where ‘I am unable to understand this’ implies: ‘this is incomprehensible’). The point is that these letters do not necessarily prove Kant’s senility, but there is not the conclusive evidence of biting irony that the reader might expect.
Finally, chapters 9–11 argue that two long anonymous works – Stimme eines Arktikers über Fichte und sein Verfahren gegen die Kantianer von D. K. (1798–9) and Sinnlichkeit und Verstand oder über die Principien des menschlichen Wissens. Eine Kritik über Herrn Herders Metakritik von einem Wahrheitsfreunde (1800) – as well as anonymous reviews of Feder and Schelling, and various (unidentified) contributions to the Berlinische Monatschrift, should all be ascribed to Kant’s authorship. The discussion of Stimme eines Arktikers provides very extended quotation from the work, which is useful as it is little known, but Schepelmann’s argument would be clearer if the passages had been relegated to an appendix. Schepelmann defends her substantial philological claims by dismissing various other candidates, usually on the grounds that they have not written anything else so rhetorically or philosophically sophisticated. If we accept that they are from Kant’s own hand, then these would be the kind of late works that Schepelmann insists we must take seriously, and she argues we can do so more easily when sensitive to the indirect, ironic mode of presentation that characterizes Kant’s late writings.
It will be evident that Schepelmann makes a range of provocative and unorthodox claims (and I have not been able to mention all of them). But it may also be apparent that the book presents these claims in a somewhat disorganized way. The narrative veers between claims about the significance of Kant’s late work, to polemics about historiographical methodology, to extracts from source materials (particularly Stimme eines Arktikers), to lists of potted biographies of Kant’s contemporaries, to accounts of the general historical context, such as the atheism controversy in which Fichte became embroiled. Given that the book fastidiously attends to little-read original sources, it is a shame that its overall argument feels hastily thrown together.
A more significant issue pertains to the ‘popular thesis’ about Kant’s senility, the primary target of the book. It is far from certain that this is still a popular view in Kant scholarship. Schepelmann’s examples of figures who defend the senility thesis are almost exclusively early twentieth-century scholars: Adickes, Lehmann, Vorländer, Warda (pp. 9, 31, 108). Today, it is much more common for scholars to argue against the allegedly ‘popular thesis’: see Eckart Förster’s work on Kant’s Opus postumum, for example (Kant Reference Kant, Förster, Förster and Rosen1993: pp. xviii–xxiii, xxviii–xxix; Förster Reference Förster2000). Schepelmann’s point may however apply on an implicit level: even if few contemporary scholars explicitly defend the senility thesis, it may explain the relative lack of attention to the developments of Kant’s thought in his later writings (p. 29). But in seeking to make the more provocative claim that she refutes a popular thesis, Schepelmann risks letting her claims appear outdated.
On the topic of Schepelmann’s attribution of anonymous works to Kant in chapters 9–11, I must defer to scholars with more expertise in these matters. Nevertheless, to hazard a judgement, I am unconvinced by Schepelmann’s arguments that Stimme eines Arktikers and Sinnlichkeit und Verstand were written by Kant. For various reasons it seems unlikely that Kant would have taken the time in 1798–1800 to write these long works – 150 and 350 pages respectively – only to publish them anonymously. First, the anonymous works reached few readers and were not widely reviewed (see p. 236): this would not have been the case had Kant put his name to them. Secondly, as Schepelmann notes, Kant was in the habit towards the end of his life of delegating work to others, perhaps in the hope that these young thinkers would consolidate and further develop his Critical philosophy (p. 55). An alternative, equally plausible conjecture might be that Kant asked others to write the two anonymous works, perhaps contributing ideas in now lost letter exchanges. Thirdly, Schepelmann argues that Kant avoided direct polemics with other thinkers, preferring indirect methods for bringing his readers to a self-critical view (pp. 18–19), yet it is difficult to see how these long, direct engagements with Fichte and Herder are consistent with this. Schepelmann does claim that, by writing anonymously, Kant counters the author-centric, ad hominem approach favoured by Fichte (p. 225); but this does not seem to me to sufficiently outweigh the factors that conspire against her claims. Fourthly, Schepelmann does not note that Kant was extremely busy with other projects in 1798–1800. This was the most productive period of Kant’s work on his Opus postumum: in these years, he moved from the attempted proofs of the ether, to the reflections on physics in fascicles X/XI, to explorations of ‘self-positing’, to rethinking the nature of transcendental philosophy. At the same time, he was likely involved in the new editions of his works that were being published (see p. 53). I cannot believe that Kant would have simultaneously managed to write 500 pages (anonymously) criticizing Fichte and Herder, nor that, had he done so, there would be no drafts of these works in the Opus postumum, given that the latter was, as Klaus Reich and Burkhard Tuschling put it, Kant’s daily ‘scientific diary’ (Tuschling Reference Tuschling1971: 13).
This latter point raises the issue of the inexplicable absence of Kant’s Opus postumum in Schepelmann’s book. It is ironic that Schepelmann’s central point is that Kant’s late writings are underappreciated but that she pays no attention to the Opus postumum, the main project of Kant’s final years. Kant’s Opus postumum makes only a brief appearance in the final pages of Schepelmann’s study, accompanied by what in my view is the bizarre claim that Kant intentionally did not finish the transition-project of his final drafts because he thought the public would consider it Fichtean (p. 230). I have not seen any other scholars make this claim, and it strikes me that there is good reason for this. Aside from this point, the Opus postumum is absent from the book: this is jarring given that, as mentioned above, it is within scholarship on the Opus postumum that the senility thesis is most enthusiastically rejected, and it is with reference to these drafts – unquestionably authored by Kant – that claims about the old Kant’s senility or lucidity must surely be substantiated.
These (significant) qualms aside, Schepelmann’s book is enjoyable and thought-provoking; it brings many long-overlooked documents to the attention of Kant scholars. The book should help convince anyone who, publicly or privately, still claims that Kant became senile in his last decade of life, and who therefore disregards his final writings, that this position is not tenable.
