The Naturrecht Feyerabend is an only child. As the single surviving set of lecture notes on the topic of natural right it is the only source of Kant's views on some detailed topics in the natural right tradition.Footnote 1 More broadly, it provides another modality for accessing Kant's political philosophy beyond the published Doctrine of Right, Perpetual Peace and other works and, since the lecture was given at a time well before any of those works, in its initial stage. This alternative presentation on these important issues is its most important contribution to Kant studies. But perhaps its most intriguing use concerns its precise timing. Summer semester 1784 saw Kant lecturing on logic, physical geography and natural right.Footnote 2 Outside the classroom he was completing his first book on ethics, the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, which he sent to the publisher that September.Footnote 3 With the drafts for the Groundwork occupying his mind, Kant took the opportunity to begin his natural right course with a lengthy introduction – just under one-fifth of the whole – that illustrates exactly how the foundational work on the categorical imperative applies to issues of right. This introduction serves as the missing transitional text between the Groundwork and the Doctrine of Right as well as an insightful presentation of the main ideas of the Groundwork itself.

The new volume 30 of the extensive Kant-Index project overseen by Norbert Hinske and Lothar Kreimendahl provides the only critical edition of the Naturrecht Feyerabend. The first part, in the volume under review here, edited by Hinske along with Heinrich P. Delfosse and Gianluca Sadun Bordoni, includes the lecture's introduction; a second forthcoming part will provide the remainder of the lecture. The new edition is based on a thorough examination of the original manuscript and supersedes the uncritical presentation of Feyerabend in Kants gesammelte Schriften 27/2/2.

Why is a new edition necessary? The Feyerabend manuscript, which had been lost, was rediscovered in the Gdansk Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the former Danzig State Library, just as Gerhard Lehmann was completing his editor's work on volume 27 (lectures on moral philosophy) in the late 1970s.Footnote 4 Lehmann deemed Naturrecht Feyerabend and the simultaneously discovered Moral anonymous-Mrongovius student notes important enough for inclusion in the Academy Edition. Lacking the time to complete a critical edition, Lehmann included both sets of notes as appendices in 27/2/2 without annotations or discussion of variant readings of the manuscripts. The resulting Feyerabend text contains many reading errors. Individual words are misread, words are inserted to fill in lacunae in the manuscript and in one case an entire sentence in the manuscript does not appear in the Academy Edition. (I will discuss some of these problems below.) While useful, the Academy Edition text cannot be fully trusted.

The problematic state of the Academy Edition text has been previously recognized; indeed, it was never intended to be a critical text. In recent years projects to translate Feyerabend have appeared in the USA (mine), Italy (Bordoni) and Brazil (Fernando Costa Mattos).Footnote 5 Comparing the Academy Edition text with a microfilm copy of the manuscript, part of the collection in the Marburg Kant Archives, Bordoni and I independently found numerous errors. A new German text was undertaken by Hinske, Delfosse and Bordoni, who decided not only to produce this critical edition but also to incorporate it into the Kant-Index series. The critical edition shows Academy Edition as well as manuscript pagination in the margin so that previous citations to the text can be located, notes all variant readings of the manuscript and includes substantial annotations.

All this effort is worthwhile. The lecture provides an insight into Kant's thoughts on political philosophy a decade before his publications on the topic and also reveals how he saw the Groundwork as providing a basis for right as much as for ethics proper, or virtue. Most striking is his emphasis on the relation of right to human beings as ends in themselves. The Doctrine of Right of 1797 hardly mentions human beings as ends in themselves and stresses the universal applicability of law.Footnote 6 In the introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue he associates right with universality and virtue with an end, invoking shades of the distinction between two of the Groundwork's formulas of the categorical imperative: universal law and humanity as an end in itself.Footnote 7 One is left with the impression that Kant intended the categorical imperative to apply to right and virtue in different ways, through universality and through ends, respectively. The Feyerabend lecture wipes away any such impression with examples of legal relations that embody treating others as ends in themselves rather than merely means. The introduction emphasizes that freedom is expressed through treatment of human beings as ends in themselves. A particularly interesting example is of employment:

In this example employer and employee treat one another as means. The mutual agreement to exchange labour for money suffices to constitute treatment as an end as well. The example likely stems from Kant's own personal experience of contracting with workers to renovate his newly purchased house, described in a letter of 28 April 1784, to Johann Fetter, at the beginning of the Feyerabend semester. Kant discusses the money he agreed to pay the workers ‘so that the workers too will be completely satisfied’.Footnote 8

Kant strongly emphasizes the value of freedom itself in Feyerabend. In the Groundwork, Kant rarely mentions freedom as an ultimate value; rather his terminology invokes humanity as an end in itself, and claims that ‘rational nature exists as an end in itself’, leading to controversy about the meaning of the term ‘humanity’ and its relation to reason and to freedom (4: 428–9). In Feyerabend, in contrast, freedom rather than reason is clearly stated as the basis of treating human beings as ends in a passage worth quoting in full:

Freedom itself is the highest value, and freedom is the aim of the state. The specific topics that follow in the remainder of the lecture are united in the way that Kant sees each in relation to freedom. The introduction also discusses other themes from the Groundwork: the nature of imperatives, morality and happiness, moral feeling and respect, and the relations between legality and morality on the one hand and right (jus, Recht) and virtue (moral, Tugend) on the other.

In the material after the introduction, destined for the second part of the Kant-Index set, Kant turns more directly to explanation and criticism of his textbook, Jus Naturae by Gottfried Achenwall. Kant's Reflexionen on the philosophy of right in Academy Edition volume 19, a useful source of his thoughts on political philosophy, stem mainly from his notations in his copy of the textbook for this course. This textbook, however, was printed in two parts, and the first part of Kant's personal set was lost well before any transcription could be made for the Academy Edition. Thus even the notations Kant must have made in his text of the first part are unavailable to us. On topics such as the general nature of law, innate versus acquired rights, the nature and acquisition of property, contract, money and value, and individual, private coercive rights, Feyerabend is our only source of Kant's views prior to his published works of the 1790s. Kant devoted most of the lecture course to the first part of Achenwall's work, with 84 manuscript pages on the first part (not counting the introduction's 24 pages) compared to 24 manuscript pages devoted to the second part. One gets the sense that Kant, like today's professors, had to drop and condense material near the end of the course as he was running out of time. Regarding the law of peoples (jus gentium), the fourth of four major divisions of Achenwall's text, Kant simply refers his students to Emer de Vattel's Law of Nations, then quickly provides an outline of principles regarding the rights of war.

In the bulk of the lectures, which will appear in the second part of the Kant-Index, Kant closely follows the Achenwall text, so much of what is of interest to readers of Kantian Review comes with Kant's rejection or explicit affirmation of what ‘the author’ says. In the following example, which relates to concern for the welfare of others, Kant's give and take with Achenwall is well illustrated:

Kant's rejection of any legal duty to limit one's freedom for the preservation of others is based on the indeterminacy of any such duty as well as the priority of freedom. With no universal measure for requirements for self-preservation, no consistent law can be promulgated. And, as he declares earlier in the paragraph, ‘Right properly consists in the negative, in omission’, here specifically not resisting the freedom of another.Footnote 9

What is left out of Feyerabend is as important as what is put in. The general question of the foundation of property right is mostly left undeveloped as Kant focuses on specific issues such as acquisition, transfer and contract. He insists that these property relations are constituted by relations of wills as expressions of freedom but does not look in detail into the relation between a social contract and rightful property. Kant also loosely follows Achenwall in identifying a series of innate rights, including freedom in one's own person and freedom of action but also including rights to equality, a good reputation and declaring one's intentions (27: 1339–40). In the Doctrine of Right these rights are said to be already included in the sole innate right to freedom.

A few of the corrections the new edition makes to the Academy Edition show how important this new edition is.

1. 1. In the first paragraph, Kant-Index reads the manuscript as Es ist außer dem Menschen nichts achtungswerther gesetzt worden als das Recht der Menschen, which I translate as ‘There is nothing besides a human being that can be posited as more worthy of respect than the right of human beings.’ The Academy Edition reads achtungswerthes instead of achtungswerther, which would make the sentence ‘There is nothing besides a human being that can be posited as worthy of respect other than the right of human beings.’ The difference between the two sentences is that the correct version in Kant-Index allows there to be other things worthy of lesser degrees of respect than human beings themselves and the right of human beings. The Academy Edition version would limit things worthy of respect to only human beings and the right of human beings.

2. 2. One of the first examples of using another as a means Kant offers is related to using another's property: ‘I cannot take something from another's field in order that it serve my own; for then the other would be a mere means’ (29: 1320). Academy Edition reads düngen instead of dienen, with the result ‘take something from another's field in order to fertilize my own with it’. I actually prefer the Academy Edition version for its striking imagery but defer to the accurate manuscript reading in the Kant-Index.

3. 3. An example from the passage I quoted above about the value of freedom rather than reason: the word ‘discovers’ in the sentence ‘For we can see that nature produces through instinct in animals what reason first discovers only though a long process’. For ‘discovers’, the manuscript has hervorbringt (produces), likely a copying error, crossed out and replaced with another word by another hand. The Academy Edition text reads the inserted word as aussucht (selects) but does not note the crossing out and replacement at all. The new Kant-Index text reads the word as ausfindet (discovers), notes the crossing out and replacement, and notes the Academy Edition reading as well.

4. 4. Finally, an example from the forthcoming second part of Feyerabend: one entire sentence in the manuscript is missing from the Academy Edition version (27: 1330, lines 2–3). The sentence ‘An action whose necessitation is determined only from the consequences is of value only as much as the consequences are, or even less’ is followed by the sentence ‘But actions which are moral are more valuable than the consequences’ in the manuscript but not in the Academy Edition. The editors note that ‘One of the central contrasting pairs in Kant's ethics, seldom so concisely formulated as right here, thus is lost’ (p. xi, n. 12).

The decision to present this critical edition of Naturrecht Feyerabend as part of the Kant-Index series has benefits and detriments. The volume is essential for research libraries, who will now be able to provide this authoritative text. But many other libraries are less likely to invest in the Kant-Index series, and the cost of obtaining the text is too high for most individuals, particularly when considering that the division of the text into two parts requires acquisition of both books. The new text of Feyerabend might pass unnoticed since the Kant-Index does not normally include the texts it indexes. The importance of the new text, one hopes, will help to generate more notice about its availability.

Similarly the splitting of Feyerabend into two volumes is a double-edged sword. The length of the complete Feyerabend text, 75 pages in the Academy Edition, 132 pages in manuscript, would allow it to fit in one volume. The introduction itself (10 and 24 pages, respectively) takes up only 12 pages of the Kant-Index, with another 5 of annotations and 13 of introductory material directly relevant to Feyerabend (the remainder of the editor's introduction is common to the Kant-Index series). This material is extremely valuable, in particular the list of parallel passages in the lecture and the Groundwork. The rest of the volume consists of the kinds of tables and indices common to all volumes in the series and familiar to users of previous volumes of the Kant-Index. One justification for splitting Feyerabend into two parts is that the material after the introduction is heavily laden with Latin legal terminology missing from the introduction, since the bulk of Kant's lectures follow Achenwall's text quite closely. The split emphasizes the introduction as a self-standing resource for studying the Groundwork and the remainder of the lecture as valuable more directly for political philosophy. Nonetheless one unified volume would facilitate comprehension of the unity of the text, since Kant's general discussion of right and freedom spill past the introduction, and the introduction is crucial for understanding Kant's particular analyses of later topics such as property, contract and division of powers.

The extensive tables and indices that are the specialty of the Kant-Index enterprise comprise the majority of this book. The main index covers every word in the text, excepting a handful such as ist but including words like aber and kein, and indicates the number of times each word is used in the text. The precise textual location of each instance of all less common or philosophical words such as Imperativ and machen is given as well. A concordance then reproduces the entire line that contains each of these instances in the text. There are further versions of the index, actually subsets of the main index, that contain only the Latin and Germanicized Latin Kant employed; these indices will be much longer in the second part covering the main lecture topics. When the Kant-Index project was conceived this information was extremely valuable for those searching for specific words; today electronic texts and search capabilities render them nearly obsolete when an electronic text is available. They are still useful for comparing words in the aggregate and for capturing word form variations that search engines miss. And since there is no public electronic version of the new Feyerabend edition, at least for the time being these indices have a greater value than they later will when the inevitable electronic edition of the text is published.

Of more value are the indices to the persons, geographical references and fictional characters Kant mentions. The brevity of this lecture is matched by the brevity of these indices – the index of fictional characters contains precisely one entry (Robinson Crusoe). Another index compares the number of instances each word appears in Feyerabend, the Groundwork and Moral Mrongovius course lectures of 1784–5. It is interesting but not surprising to note that the word Recht appears four times more often in the Feyerabend introduction's dozen pages than the whole of the Groundwork. Of more interest is that Reich appears thirty-one times in the Groundwork, mainly in terms of the kingdom of ends, and zero times in the Feyerabend introduction; perhaps Kant wanted to avoid the term, with its relation to ‘empire’, until he discussed the state, where by my count it occurs several times yet never as Reich der Zwecke (kingdom of ends). Freiheit appears forty times in the 12-page introduction and sixty-five in the entire Groundwork.

This volume, then, contains not only the authoritative edition of Kant's lecture on natural right but also the tools to study it. It improves on one part of the Academy Edition. Many other parts are in need of similar reworking; some are receiving it. The notoriously problematic presentation of the Opus Postumum is being rectified by a team sponsored by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften for a new edition based on the manuscripts. This new edition of the Feyerabend natural right lecture notes is one of the first published revisions of faulty Academy Edition versions of Kant's Nachlaß and Lectures. For those interested in studying Kant's own summary of the Groundwork and his early views on matters in political philosophy, this new version is essential.