Kant and the End of the Enlightenment in Prussia

Abstract

and formalistic enterprise, detached from specific connections to its historical place and time; and if links are sought-as in Kant's supposed invocation of a Prussian sense of duty, or the subjective interiority of German Pietismthey reduce complex historical interactions to overly simple stereotypes. The foregoing analysis has argued, by contrast, that during the last decades of his career, Kant was intensely concerned that the multiple facets of his philosophy, and of his understanding of the as a social process, be applicable to, and actively help to shape, the cultural and institutional politics of late eighteenth-century Prussia and Germany. A more complex and challenging set of interpretations are therefore those that have focused on what may be termed a dialectic of enlightenment itself.148 Beginning with Fichte's and Hegel's speculative idealist systems, which claimed to correct and go beyond Kant and the Aufkliirung, to twentieth-century critics of German liberalism's failures, a central point has been to attribute part of the responsibility for the end of the Enlightenment to the inconsistencies or self-incurred shortcomings of that mode of thought, 146 The three simple rules sound similar to the Roman civil law principles of justice with which eighteenth-century German educated and ruling elites were quite familiar, in their study of Justinian's Institutes. Kant may have been implying a common ground of rationality between the common people and the elite. 147 There was, in addition, the danger of legitimizing Gentz's appeal to elite power, and to the facts of historical practices. 148 The classic statement is by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1972). However, similar implications can be found in authors otherwise as different as Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom (Chicago, 1957); Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der burgerlichen Welt (Stuttgart, 1973); and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, 1966). Kant and the End of the in Prussia 109 when taken as a whole. It is argued that it was insufficiently probing or comprehensive; that it accepted an impoverished language and a false clarity that strengthened the very forces or cultural processes it sought to resist. 149 Given the story outlined above, the historian may well be inclined to ask: by the time Frederick William III succeeded to the throne in 1797, and Woellner had been dismissed, had the Aufkliirung in Prussia been effectively marginalized and stigmatized by its critics? Had Kant's philosophic interpretation of rational faith, and his recognition of the limits of the public sphere, contributed their share to a partial legitimation of conservative, antiprogressive modes of thought in the post-1789 era? Full answers to questions about the effectiveness and consequences of Kant's strategy pose research problems that have only begun to be explored. I have argued that an important part of Kant's creativity and meaning as a publicist lay in his way of keeping his own critical questioning in play in the face of the diverse and changing sociopolitical and cultural issues of the late 1780s and 1790s. His stance was at once and mediating. It confronted some of the early forms of a dialectic of enlightenment and sought to answer them. Kant argued that the deep antagonism between different worldviews and forms of sociabilitythat between orthodox, or neopietist, religiosity on the one hand, and historical-critical scholarship or freemasonry on the other-could only be bridged if each side recognized the limitations, as well as potentially corrupting misuses to which each was subject. He posed to each the difficult challenge of accepting cultural and social pluralism: that is, recognition of the nature of forms of thought and practice that were radically other than one's own. Still, the strategy of arguing that his own systematic standpoint could understand and account for such radically opposed positions could contribute to a process of dialectical polarization. On the one hand, the suspicion could arise that Kant's own interpolations did not recognize or account for a possible radical otherness. And his strategy seemed to ask for the acceptance of Kant's own systematic norms as the most adequate understanding of human rationality or praxis. The radicality of Kant's a priori moral theory-his categorical imperative of a respect for the moral law in each individual's will-was designed to highlight the way in which only so powerful and specific a kind of human force could simultaneously stand outside of the array of merely pragmatic, naturally or socially determined behaviors his social theory and anthropology described, while also claiming to be potentially immanent within even the average human agent's self-understanding.'50 On the other hand, the paradoxical situation 149 The formulas are from Horkheimer and Adomo, p. xiv. 150 Wood (n. 51 above), pp. 336-38.