2. First Perspective: Is §35 part of Kant’s Law of Defamation?

Let us start by looking first at the most intriguing aspect of §35 from a purely legal point of view before moving to the textual environment of this paragraph and its possible metaphysical implications. In my research I have hardly found any comment on the astonishing confirmation one finds in §35: Kant’s affirmation that every person is in principle entitled to a good reputation after his death simply because of his humanity and that this is ‘an innate external belonging’. When a human being has earned a good name, it belongs to this person, irrespective of whether he is alive or dead. Of course, as long as he is alive, he can still ruin this reputation, but once he has acquired it, it remains his after his death. This means that the well-known saying de mortuis nihil nisi bene is not correct, because a deceased person is only entitled to a good name if he has led an irreproachable life until the death that ends it.Footnote ⁴ But if a person acquires a good name by means of such an irreproachable life, it continues to belong to him even if he is no longer among the living. Because this person owns this good name but is after his death no longer able to defend it, everybody else can step in and defend the person’s good name in law when someone posthumously accuses the deceased, for example, of some crime, which puts him unjustifiably in a bad light, and can expose the accuser as a slanderer.

This is the well-known phenomenon of posthumous slander which is indeed criminalized in many legal systems. But Kant deviates from positive law in quite a few remarkable aspects, as we will see from a brief overview of some legal systems. The Dutch criminal code states in article 270: ‘any person who, with regard to a deceased person, commits an act that would constitute libel or slander if that person were still alive, shall be liable to a term of imprisonment not exceeding three months or a fine of the second category’ (Legislation Online 2019). The code specifies that such an offence can only be prosecuted if a complaint is filed either by direct relatives of the deceased or by the spouse. Article 270 is part of the section in the Dutch Criminal Code dedicated to ‘defamation’. The Dutch legislator considers, as would be expected, defamation of the living as the more severe offence. The fact that defamation of a deceased person can only be prosecuted if someone close to the dead person makes a complaint suggests that what really is at stake in posthumous defamation or slander is the harm such defamation could do to close relatives and not the reputation of the deceased person as such. Upholding the good name for the living relatives is the interest that motivates prosecuting posthumous slander. Without relatives and spouses or when these are themselves no longer alive, it would make little sense to prosecute such slander. It appears as if, with the death of a deceased person’s close relatives, his good name is no longer in need of legal protection. No one’s interest is then (any longer) at stake.

This understanding seems to be confirmed by German law. If we look at the famous Mephisto case (1971), we find that the German Constitutional Court ruled that the law protects not only the dignity of the living, but also that of the dead. This case was initiated in 1963 when the adoptive son of the famous actor Gustaf Gründgens sought an injunction against the republication of the novel Mephisto because of the defamatory portrayal of his father by the author Klaus Mann. The Court then had, in brief, to consider two things: first, whether the good name and the dignity of the deceased Gründgens was protected against posthumous slander, and second, whether such protection by prohibiting the republication of the novel would violate the constitutionally protected artistic freedom of the author. In the end, the injunction against the republication of the novel by a lower court was upheld by the Constitutional Court stating that ‘it would be inconsistent with the constitutional mandate of the inviolability of human dignity, which underlies all basic rights, if a person could be belittled and denigrated after his death. Accordingly, an individual’s death does not put an end to the state’s duty … to protect him from assaults on his human dignity.’Footnote ⁵

The answer to the obvious question as to how long the law needs to protect the human dignity of the deceased, is that the protection of his good name becomes less important with the passing of time as the interest of the relatives diminishes gradually. This too seems to be confirmed by German criminal law which carries a considerably smaller sanction when the memory of a deceased person is defamed than when this happens to a living person. The passing of time reduces the importance of the protection of the memory of the deceased.Footnote ⁶

One’s good name is also protected by European Convention of Human Rights, as one of the limiting grounds of the freedom of expression formulated in Article 10, section 2: ‘the protection of the reputation or rights of others’. Often this limiting ground is understood in connection with the Convention’s Article 8, according to which every person has the right to be respected in his or her private life. Because of this right to have one’s reputation protected against slander and untrue allegations, the court has been asked several times to resolve the conflict between the freedom of expression and the right to be protected in one’s reputation. The large majority of the cases in which the Court had to decide between these two values involved living persons or their representatives who requested protection against insults, defamation or unfair treatment in certain publications, often in the form of an injunction against these publications or in the form of compensation for the harm being done to them.Footnote ⁷ The motivating force in these cases before the court is the interest of living persons in protection against attacks on their reputation. In only a few cases was the Court asked to defend the reputation of a deceased person (Putistin v Ukraine 2013; Dzhugashvili v Russia 2014), and indeed it seems to hold that the reputation of the deceased might come within the scope of the Convention and thus deserve protection (Valeska Reference Valeska2016).

Already this superficial look at a few ways in which positive criminal law deals with the phenomenon of posthumous defamation suffices to clarify how extraordinary Kant’s views are. At least in two major ways Kant deviates from present-day criminal law. First of all, one could perhaps say that qua ratione personae and ratione temporis Kant’s position is different: he does not accept limitations on who can bring a legal case against posthumous defamation and on when. Not merely family members can initiate a legal proceeding to defend the reputation of the deceased, but ‘relatives and strangers’ can do so (§35, 6: 295). The reason for this is straightforwardly consequentialist: the danger of unproven charges after death applies to everyone. In other words, if strangers did not have the authority to save someone’s posthumous reputation, everyone’s reputation would run the risk of being tarnished after death. And this would be, as we will see later, a violation of one’s property. The importance of one’s posthumous reputation does not diminish in time either. It makes no difference whether false accusations are made immediately after someone’s death or a hundred years later: whoever ‘a hundred years from now, falsely repeats something evil about me, injures me right now’. This astonishing ‘abstraction from the physical condition of time’ (§35, 6: 296) suggests that for Kant the problem of posthumous slander is not so much the harm done to the descendants, but that of harming the deceased.

Things become even more strange, secondly, by looking at how Kant separates legally pre-mortem and post-mortem defamation. In our modern legal systems both pre-mortem and post-mortem defamation are part of the same criminal code, in which such harm done to the living is considered as more serious than the harm done to the deceased. But Kant radically separates the legal treatment of the two kinds of harm. Even though initially Kant does not distinguish between cases of posthumous and ante-mortem violation of reputation (‘whoever robs me of my honour is just as punishable as if he had done it during my lifetime’; §35, 6: 296), the legal route to restore the reputation differs. Someone who slanders me after my death, is punishable not by a criminal court but (only?) by public opinion. The reason must be that the violation of someone’s posthumous reputation is a wrong against someone’s posthumous property (and thus is matter of private law, as Kant conceives it), whereas pre-mortem defamation forms part of Kant’s substantive criminal law and is thus a matter of public law.

It is admittedly difficult to deduce from Kant’s scant remarks on criminal law the outlines of a Kantian substantive and procedural criminal code, but he does provide us with an indication of the most serious categories of criminal behaviour. Kant starts with distinguishing between private crime and public crime (6: 331). The former contains actions such as embezzlement and fraud and these have to be adjudicated before a civil court (we would probably consider these actions as ‘tort’); the latter concerns actions such as counterfeiting money, theft and robbery and these crimes have to be adjudicated before a public court because these do harm not only to a specific individual but to the commonwealth as well. These public crimes are crimes against property and against life, but also crimes against reputation (‘Verbalinjurie’, ‘Beleidiging’, as attacks on someone’s honour; 6: 333), presented – it seems – as the lowest form of harming others.Footnote ⁸

Thus, actual verbal injuries should be prosecuted before a public (criminal) court, but posthumous slander should be redressed by public opinion.Footnote ⁹ Despite the fact that both ante-mortem and post-mortem slander are legally wrong, they are not legally continuous, but lead to different ‘legal’ procedures. Whereas everybody can initiate the righting of a wrong of posthumous slander, prosecuting and punishing the crime of verbal injuries and insults is the prerogative of the sovereign.

In a sense therefore, posthumous defamation or slander is a legal category of its own, which is not surprising. It is a wrong one can commit to a dead person, which is not the case with theft or murder. Having posthumously a good reputation constitutes for Kant something special, which is clearly not the case in contemporary positive law, where wronging someone’s posthumous reputation is merely an extension to the general wrong of slander or insult. It is slander to a lower degree. For Kant, however, a good reputation is the only thing that a dead person can still ‘possess’. In order to understand what that might mean, one has to contextualize ‘posthumous reputation’ with other ‘things’ that one can acquire ‘ideally’.

3. Second Perspective: How is ‘Good Reputation’ a Form of Ideal Acquisition?

Since the difficulties of §35 cannot be solved by investigating the criminal law of defamation or slander, let me adopt a second approach which consists in looking carefully at the textual context in which Kant places this paragraph on bona fama. This issue is the third of three forms of what Kant calls ideal acquisition and together they constitute a rather small section of the Rechtslehre, titled ‘episodic chapter’.

This title may be of help. Both the Rechtslehre and the Tugendlehre contain such an episodic chapter. One commentator suggests that in both of these chapters the boundaries between the rational parts of Rechtslehre and Tugendlehre and the empirical parts are being overstepped (König Reference König and Höffe1999: 147). It is unclear what this might mean, since the episodic chapter in the Rechtslehre deals with a non-empirical manner of acquiring. Besides, both chapters discuss quite different issues. The episodic chapter in the Tugendlehre addresses a misunderstanding:Footnote ¹⁰ having a duty with regard to other beings such as nature, animals and God does not mean that one has a duty to those other beings.Footnote ¹¹ Perhaps the episodic chapter in the Rechtslehre discusses a misunderstanding as well, namely that an ideal acquiring of an external object, that is without causality in time, is not possible. Kant would then defend that such a remarkable way of acquiring – where the act of acquiring does not involve causality in time – is nonetheless possible. Until the episodic chapter, Kant had argued that acquiring rights to external things, rights against persons and rights to persons ‘akin to’ rights to things (§11, 6: 260)Footnote ¹² would require causality in time. The episodic chapter in the Rechtslehre would then argue that not only are forms of real acquisition possible but also forms of ideal acquisition, and that means without causality in time.Footnote ¹³

There are, as said, three such forms of non-real, non-empirical, but ideal acquisition: if one acquires from a person who does not yet exist or ceases to exist or no longer exists. These instances of ideal acquisition are prolonged possession, inheritance, and immortal merit (§32, 6: 291). Let us investigate the meaning of Kant’s affirmation of the possibility of bona fama and (by implication) post-mortem defamation by comparison with the two other forms of ideal acquisition.

The first instance of ideal acquisition is prolonged possession. Here Kant defends that a person acquires another’s property simply by virtue of a long possession of it. Even if someone shows up and claims to be the true owner, this person may be excluded from his presumed property. Kant probably uses here the distinction in Roman law between dominium and possessio (Zwalve and Sirks Reference Zwalve and Sirks2012: 217). In positive law, Kant writes, this phenomenon is known as ‘legal prescription’, but this is a misnomer: the reason why a person can acquire property in this ideal manner is not the passing of time (because that would presuppose ownership), but prolonged possession. Every proprietor must exercise a continuous possessory act through which he confirms that a particular thing (probably a piece of land) is indeed his. If a proprietor does not do so, he can legally be regarded as someone who does not yet exist as owner. The reason for this is rather simple: if a possessory act were not needed in order to exclude others, no acquisition would ever be certain, and all acquisition would then be provisional. Usucapio, as the property presumption because of prolonged possession, is therefore not merely permitted (rechtmäßig) but lawful (rechtlich). Therefore, prolonged possession belongs to natural law,Footnote ¹⁴ as a form of ideal, non-empirical acquisition, because the person acquires his possession from another who does not yet exist (although the possibility of his existence is admitted) (§33, 6: 291, 292).Footnote ¹⁵

The second instance of ideal acquisition concerns inheritance. Here too, transfer of property or acquisition is, says Kant, ideal and not empirical. The relationship between testator and heir cannot be real, because someone only becomes testator and the other person heir at the moment of the former’s death; inheritance is thus a form of acquiring whereby the person from whom one acquires no longer exists. The condition for ordinary, empirical acquisition is the promising will of one person and the accepting will of another person and the simultaneous will of both (see §34, 6: 294, line 11: gleichzeitig; see also §19, 6: 272, line 13: vereinigten Willen). This condition cannot be met here because one of the two parties is dead. The act of giving up property and the act of accepting the offer cannot meet in a particular moment of time.Footnote ¹⁶ Inheritance, again, deals with situations in which the person who gives up is no more; the heir acquires the property (or at least the decision to either accept or reject) instantaneously. Since no proper transfer takes place, one might think that the property of the deceased would become a res nullius. But this is not the case: it merely becomes a res vacua. Becoming an heir is being put in the favourable situation, even if the heir was not informed about being named by the testator as such. Every human being can tacitly be presumed to accept the right to accept or reject an inheritance because ‘he can always gain and never lose by it’ (§34, 6: 294). Therefore, acquiring by testament is, just like acquiring by prolonged possession, valid on the basis of natural law, although the precise terms of how to draft testaments and to inherit have to be specified in the civil condition.

The third instance of ideal acquisition concerns bona fama. In one sense, it could be argued that ‘acquiring a good reputation’ is similar to the two other instances of ideal (non-empirical) acquisition: prolonged possession when a possible other claimant is not yet there; inheritance even though the testator ceased to exist; a good reputation even though ‘the subject no longer exists’. But in another sense, the first two instances of ideal acquisition are quite dissimilar to ‘good reputation’. Both in prolonged possession and in inheritance, the person from whom the thing is acquired is distinct from the acquiring person. The latter acquires from the former, either the claimant (‘true’ owner who ‘does not yet exist’) or the testator (who ‘has ceased to exist’). The adoption of the legal fiction of ‘ideal acquisition’ makes perfect sense: conflicts with regard to who is the legal owner and who is the true heir regularly occur in life, especially when it concerns wealth, and need to be solved. Both usucapio and inheritance deal with relationships between two persons, between the acquirer and the one who claims to be owner, and the testator. Both usucapio and inheritance belong to natural law but need to be specified by positive law in the civil condition.Footnote ¹⁷

Immortal merit seems to be different from these other two forms of ideal acquisition, because here I do not acquire from someone else, but from myself. A good reputation is something I acquire through leading an irreproachable life until death ends my life. It is only after death that another person enters the scene, when this person disputes my good reputation when I am no longer around to defend myself. Immortal merit is also different in another respect. Through prolonged possession and inheritance the acquirer, so to speak, receives an object that belongs to the category of the external mine and thine, say goods such as land, real estate or wealth. In the third instance of ideal acquisition, Kant calls the ‘good’ that is acquired, ‘an innate external mine and thine, albeit it in an ideal manner’ (§35, 6: 295, lines 7–8; my translation). By calling bona fama ‘an innate external mine and thine’ Kant blurs the carefully crafted distinction between the innate mine and thine which can be called internal and the external mine and thine, which must always be acquired (6: 237, lines 24–6). This is connected with the division between the one innate right that belongs to everyone by nature and the acquired right for which an act is required (6: 237, lines 20–3). By referring to ‘an innate external mine and thine’ Kant even seems to contradict his own view that the division of the Rechtslehre itself can only refer to the external mine and thine (6: 238, lines 24–5). Therefore ‘good reputation’ seems very different from the two other instances of ideal acquisition, in that it is interpersonal only in second instance and that it is a very special good, both innate and external. That I acquire something from myself, on the basis of the life that I live, that persists after my death, raises a particular metaphysical problem: is there a posthumous entity that can be considered the bearer of this bona fama?

Kant brushes this difficulty aside. He acknowledges that it would be absurd to think that a dead person could still possess something if it was a thing, but having a good name is different. It clings to a person (provided he acquired it by living an irreproachable life) irrespective of whether this person ceases to exist ‘entirely’ at his death or whether he remains as a person. I can abstract from this question (§35, 6: 295, line 10). From the affirmation of posthumous bona fama nothing can be deduced concerning a future life or unseen relations between separate souls (§35, 6: 296, lines 18–19). This metaphysical issue need not concern us, argues Kant, because in the context of a legal relationship with others every person has to be considered in terms of his humanity, i.e. as intelligible beings so that one can abstract from everything physical which belongs to their existence in space and time (§34, 6: 294, line 11; §35, 6: 295, lines 21–3).

These words are meant to be reassuring, but are they? One should – in purely moral and legal relationships – abstract from everything physical without removing human beings from their nature and without letting them become spirits (§35, 6: 296, lines 23–4). Is this not contradictory? Is it possible at the same time (!) to abstract from the human existence in time and space and to respect their nature as ‘time beings’, as Kant calls them elsewhere (EAT, 8: 327)? Since §35 cannot be properly understood via the law of defamation or by its similarity to the other two forms of ideal acquisition, we now need to at least begin to address the metaphysical problem underlying it.

4. Third Perspective: Is it Possible to Harm the Dead?

Let us recapitulate: it would be absurd to hold that a dead person can still own something, but this is not true for one’s reputation because it is an ‘ideal’ acquisition (§35, 6: 296, line 8). We can remain agnostic as regards the question whether the dead bearer of this reputation exists or not. It is sufficient to distinguish between the homo noumenon and the homo phenomenon. As long as every person is considered morally and legally in the light of his humanity, his bona fama will survive even if he qua homo phenomenon no longer exists. He still must be respected because the a priori lawgiving reason extends its commands and prohibitions beyond the limits of life. This is, admittedly, writes Kant, a peculiar (sonderbar) manifestation of the lawgiving reason, but it is at the same time undeniable (§35, 6: 295, my translation). To this ‘peculiar but undeniable’ manifestation of reason, Kant adds in the final sentence of §35 that it is indeed indisputable that a human being has the right to have his reputation protected against those who survive him, even though no deduction of its possibility can be given.

This is remarkable indeed: Kant asserts that a human being is the bearer of a right after his death and that the tarnishing of someone’s posthumous good reputation is a violation of that right, which can be corrected before public opinion at the initiative of anyone at any given time. Is it possible for us to justify or at least further clarify this statement despite the fact that according to Kant there cannot be a justification for this possibility? On the one hand, it seems unlikely that we can do better than Kant, but there has been, on the other hand, in recent years an interesting debate concerning the possibility of posthumous harm. Having a look at this debate may help us understand Kant better.

The starting point of this contemporary debate on posthumous harm, to which I can only allude here, is something rather uncontroversial, namely that there are obligations to the dead. It is wrong, according to Kant and others both before and after him, to defame the death,Footnote ¹⁸ just like it is considered wrong, for example, to mutilate dead bodies, to deny the dead burial rites, to use their body parts without prior consent, to disregard promises made on deathbeds, etc. Even now that most moderns do not believe in a form of personal immortality, the conviction remains that the living have obligations to the dead. At least one good reason can be given for why it is wrong to defame the deceased. According to Kant’s Tugendlehre it is our moral duty ‘not to take malicious pleasure in exposing the faults of others’ (§43, 6: 466), irrespective of whether these others are alive or dead. But the argument of the Rechtslehre goes beyond this: slandering the deceased not only violates an ethical duty, but also the right of humanity, in the sense of not respecting the deceased person’s ‘ideal property’. Posthumous defamation is wrong because of the harm done to the deceased himself.

This brings us back to the problem: is it possible to harm a person who is dead? Is a dead person not beyond the reach of actions of the living, because he is dead? According to the so-called annihilation thesis this is not possible, because human beings are thoroughly mortal. They have no experiences or interests after their death. This thesis is often regarded as originating in Epicurus’ famous statement that ‘death is nothing to us for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; … Death, …, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not’ (Epicurus Reference Hicks1994). If the annihilation thesis is correct, then Kant’s view that posthumous slander is violating the right of the deceased must be wrong. Over the years, however, serious doubts have been raised regarding the implications of the annihilation thesis.

A first element in Epicurus’ letter is that the dead cannot experience harm and therefore harming them is impossible. In other words: harm presupposes experience and once dead a person lacks experiences. This experience requirement is surely not a definitive argument against posthumous harm. It can be rebutted relatively easily. Even those who consider death as the complete end of a person’s life would still consider it wrong to treat human remains in disrespectful manners (think of necrophilia) or deny forms of burial rites to the dead. The idea that we have obligations to the dead seems to be shared by all societies, ancient and modern (Wisnewski Reference Wisnewski2009: 54–5). If the annihilation thesis were true, these obligations would make little sense.

Furthermore, it is not true that persons cannot be harmed as long as they have no experience of this harm. The literature presents many convincing examples. They include a peeping Tom who monitors the activities of his neighbours, a naive spouse with an unfaithful husband, and a severely mentally handicapped person who leads a satisfied life after a terrible car accident (Belliotti Reference Belliotti2012: 11–15). One would in all three examples say that a person is harmed, by a peeping Tom, by an unfaithful husband and by the accident. It is the invasion of one’s privacy, the disloyalty in the marriage, the severely reduced quality of life which constitutes harm, even if the ‘victims’ are not aware of it.Footnote ¹⁹ It seems clearly possible to distinguish between the subjective experience of being hurt and being harmed in an objective sense. The former does not exhaust the latter. In a similar way, it could be argued that the dead can be harmed (for example, by not respecting their final wishes) even though they cannot possibly be aware of that harm.

Is the refutation of the so-called experience requirement in combination with the importance that most humans attach to what happens after the end of their lives sufficient to accept the possibility of ‘posthumous harm’? Most scholars argue that this is not the case. Harm may not necessarily presuppose experience, but there must at least be a subject or a person to whom the harm can be attributed. In the posthumous harm literature, this is called the existence requirement: there can only be harm if there is a person to whom the harm can be attributed. A peeping Tom and a disloyal husband can only harm neighbours and spouse when they exist, even if they are unaware of the harm done to them. We can only consider a severely handicapped person as harmed by an accident as long as he exists. If death means complete annihilation, it is impossible to harm the deceased, for example, by defaming them, because they do not exist. If posthumous harm exists, the deceased must somehow ‘exist’.

In the literature several interesting attempts are made to reconcile the possibility of posthumous harm with the existence requirement, such as by understanding ‘harm’ more broadly than what happens to a person in his life. Harm is more than pain or absence of pleasure, but it includes the frustrating of one’s important and meaningful desires too. These can often not be completed within a person’s life. Frustrating these desires after death is harming persons posthumously, because it matters to them whether their meaningful desires and life-projects are respected or realized.Footnote ²⁰ Others explain the obligations to the dead in the following manner: we accept the duty to treat human remains respectfully, to refrain from harvesting organs without prior consent, to respect testaments and promises made on a deathbed, to not slander posthumously, because this is how we, the living, want to be treated after our passing away.Footnote ²¹ Obligations to the dead should thus be understood as an extension of our general obligations to others. They exist, so to speak, because we exist.

It is interesting that Kant, albeit briefly and without much explanation, mentions both requirements. With regard to the experience requirement, Kant writes that someone who ‘falsely repeats something evil about me a hundred years from now, injures me right now’, and when a dead person’s reputation is defended, it ‘brings him satisfaction, even though he no longer exists’ (§35, 6: 296, line 1: widerfahre). This suggests that there is for Kant not much difference qua experience between pre-mortem and post-mortem slander and that the element of time plays no role, which is consistent with our findings in the first perspective.

This is obviously the result of how Kant deals with the existence requirement. Whereas the contemporary literature aims at solving this requirement by redefining harm or by broadening duties to others (as to include the ones to the dead) but not by invoking a post-mortem subject, this seems precisely the way in which Kant’s reasoning goes. This is true even though Kant affirms that the obligation not to defame the dead is (also) in the interest of the living. They would risk similar treatment when they die, if it is was not a right of the deceased to have their bona fama defended (§35, 6: 295, lines 23–5). But many of Kant’s other formulations strongly suggest that according to him the dead are still ‘there’: when someone acquires a good name, it continues to be ‘his’ after death. In order to understand how this is possible, Kant refers, as said, to the well-known distinction between homo phenomenon and homo noumenon. Slandering the reputation of a deceased person would then consist not so much in disrespecting a particular ‘phenomenal’ person, but in disrespecting this person’s humanity. Since it is our moral duty to respect humanity both in ourselves and in others at all times, posthumously defaming a person is a violation of duty.

However, this strategy to meet the existence requirement is problematic for at least two reasons. First, it may well be morally wrong to defame a dead person, but why would it be a violation of his innate, yet external mine and thine, as part of Kant’s Rechtslehre? Second, not every person is entitled – on the basis of his humanity – to a defence of his good name before a court of public opinion. Only the person who has acquired a good name through leading an irreproachable life is. The saying de mortuis nihil sine bene is incorrect. Therefore, the person whose good name must be defended after death, cannot be the homo noumenon or the abstract principle of humanity. The manner in which the homo phenomenon has lived his life is decisive for the defence of his or her bona fama: the defaming of good reputation is the violation of the right of a particular person.

Now that the duty to respect someone’s bona fama cannot be derived from the ‘existence’ of an abstract homo noumenon, only one solution for the existence requirement in Kant remains, namely the acceptance of some form of post-mortem ‘existence’.Footnote ²² According to me, it seems impossible to understand §35 without this presupposition, even if such understanding looks like the solving of a riddle by means of an enigma.