Goethe

Kant
and
He el

WaIter Kaufmann
With a new introduction by Ivan SolI
 Discovering the Mind

WaIter Kaufmann

with new introductory essays by Ivan SoIl

Volume I Goethe, Kant, and Hegel

Volume 11 Nietsche, Heidegger, and Buber
Volume III Freud vs. Adler and Jung
GOETHE, KANT, AND
HEGEL

Discovering the Mind

Volume 1

Waiter Kaufmann

with a new introduction by

Ivan SolI

"
Transaction Publishers
New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)
Sixth printing 2002
New material this edition copyright © 1991 by Transaction Publishers, New
Brunswick, New Jersey. Originally published in 1980 by McGraw-HiIl Book
Company, Copyright © 1980 by WaIter Kaufmann.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conven-
tions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or
any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in
writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction
Publishers, Rutgers-The State University, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, New
Jersey 08854-8042.
This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National
Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 90-11108
ISBN: 0-88738-370-X
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kaufmann, Walter Amold.
Goethe, Kanl, and Hegel/by Kaufmann; with a new introduction by Ivan Soil.
p. cm.
Reprint. Originally published: New York: McGraw-HiIl, 1980.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-88738-370-X (pbk.)
1. Philosophy of mind-History. 2. Self-knowledge, Theory of
History. 3. Philosophy, German. I. Title.

[BD418.3.K38 1990]
193--dc20 90-11108
[B) CIP
 Contents ~

Introduction to the Transaction Edition • xv

Prologue

1. "What 1 am concerned with is self-knowledge, meaning

knowledge both of our own minds and of the human
mind in general." The meaning of "mind." • 3
2. "Why is it that we have made so little progress in the
discovery of the mind?" Goethe and Kant . • 4
3. Three aims. • 7

I. Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind

4. Goethe at twenty-one. "Autonomous from tip to
toe." • 13
,5. "Goethe's first major contribution to the discovery of
the mind is that he provided a new model of
autonomy." • 15
6. Goethe's alienation from the compact majority . • 17
7. "A significant impact on human thought by virtue of his
character." • 20
8. The second point about Goethe's influence on the
discovery of the mind. "Man is his deeds." • 22
 9. "Goethe's greatest contribution to the discovery of the
mind was that, more than anyone else, he showed how
the mind can be understood only in terms of
development." ~ 25
10. "Both the ... new criticism and analytical philosophy
represent . .". revolts against this developmental
approach." Three Mephistopheles quotations. ~ 32
11. "Goethe's refusal to equate science with Newtonian
science represents his fourth major contribution." ~ 35
12. Why Goethe wrote so clearly and how he understood
science. "Ossification" and "hypotheses." ~ 42
13. "Goethe tended to disparage mathematics" ~ 46
14. "Hegel ... Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung were steeped in
Goethe's life and works." ~ 49
15. "In sum, Goethe made at least four crucial
contributions to the discovery of the mind." "Those
greatly influenced by Goethe found three patM open to
them." ~ 54

n. Influences: Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Fichte,

Schopenhauer
16. Herder. ~ 59
17. Lessing. ~ 65
18. Schiller. ~ 69
19. Fichte. ~ 72
20. Schopenhauer. ~ 75

m. Kant: The Structure of the Mind

21. The impact of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. ~ 83
22. "Kant himself felt that he had discovered the structure
of the mind." ~ 93
23. The short book on ethics which Kant published in 1785.
"Stick to words." ~ 103
24. Kant's attempt to lay the foundations for ethics. ~ 109
25. "The religious inspiration of his ethic is to be found in
Moses." ~ 117
26. The example of suicide and the problem of what a
maxim is. ~ 128
27. The other three examples. ~ 132

x. CONTENTS
 28. The irrational in history and psychology. Dichotomies.
"Interest" in Kant's ethics. ~ 138
29. Aesthetic judgments "devoid of aU interest." ~ 145
30. "His fundamental mistakes are essentially the same
everywhere." Kant's lack of interest in art. ~ 148

IV. Kant: Autonomy, Style, and Certainty

31. Kant's conception of autonomy. "Kant lived as he
taught." ~ 159
32. "Style is the mirror of a mind." ~ 166
33. Five ways in which Kant impeded the discovery of the
mind. The so-called patchwork theory. ~ 171
34. How the Critique of Pure Reason was written. "Hegel's
Phenomonology was written in very much the same
way," and so was Sartre's Critique. ~ 173
35. "Kant ... impressed this trinity of certainty,
completeness, and necessity on his successors." "If one
makes bold to lay down certainties for all time ... a
lack of clarity is all too understandable." Timidity and
boldness. Contrast with Lessing and Goethe. ~ 185
36. "Not hiding my emotions may make it easier for you to
discover your feelings and your mind." ~ 193

V. Hegel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology

37. "The fundamental conflict . .. is between Kant and
Goethe." ~ 199
38. "Initially, he put Kant's doctrines into Jesus' mouth .
. . . Then he read Goethe's image of humanity into
Christianity." "Like Kant, he associated science with
rigorous deduction, necessity, certainty, and
completeness; and the more he claimed to be rigorous
the more unreadable he became, as he veiled his
overwhelming lack of rigor behind extreme
obscurity." ~ 204
39. Non-Hegelian conceptions of phenomenology. "Hegel's
own ideas about what he was trying to accomplish in
his first book changed while he was writing it . . . and
the subtitle . .. [Phenomenology of the Mind] was an
afterthought." The genesis of the work. "Hegel used

CONTENTS ~ xi
 'phenomenology' in an altogether different way . .. in
1817." "The question about Heget's conception of
phenomenology . . . [is] usable as a key to the study of
his whole thought and development." Seven
questions. ~ 211
40. What did Hegel say about phenomenology in the
preface of 1807?" ~ 221
41. "How does the Introduction to the Phenomenology
illuminate Hegel's conception?" ~ 229
42. "What did Hegel actually do in his Phenomenology?"
~ 232
43.
"What did Hegel say about phenomenology between
1807 and l8l7?" "Necessity." ~ 236
44. "What conception of phenomenology do we find in the
Encyclopedia?" ~ 245
45. "How, in view of all this, can we sum up his
conception?" "A great deal of philosophy has been
utterly lacking in rigor, and what troubles me is not
that but the . . . affectation of a rigor that is not
there." Austin and Wittgenstein. ~ 254
46. "How did Hegel advance the discovery of the mind?"
Five points. ~ 260
Bibliography ~ 271
Acknowledgments ~ 287

xii ~ CONTENTS
 ILL USTRATION S

Goethe (1749-1832). Detail from a Painting by J.K.

Stieler, 1828 v
Kant (1724-1804). Detail from an engraving by S.F.
Bause after Veit Hans Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1791 vi

Hegel (1770-1831). Detail from a Painting by L. Sebbers vii

Title page of Part I of Faust, first edition 27
Goethe. Detail from a Painting by J.H.W. Tischbein,
1786-88 36
Title page of Doctrine of Colors, first edition 37
Pages from the preface of the preceding, quoted in
the text 40f
Title page of Lessing' s Duplik. first edition 64
Lessing (1729-81). Detail from a painting (by G.O. May?),
about 1767 66
Page from Duplik, quoted in the text 67
Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Detail from a photograph
by J. Schafer, 1859 79
Title page of Critique of Pure Reason, first edition 84
Title page of Kanf s short book on ethics, first edition 104
Title page of Critique of Judgment. first edition 144-
Kant mixing mustard. Drawing by F. Hageman 163
Title page of Hegei's Phenomenology, first edition 212
Title page of Hegers Encllclopaedia, first edition 242
Title page of Hegei's Encyclopaedia, second edition 243
Part of the Contents of Encllclopaedia, first edition 248f
Part of the Contents of Encyclopaedia, third edition 252f
 Introduction
to the
Transaction Edition

Ivan Sou

Toward the end of an unflaggingly vital and productive

life that was to be tragically truncated in an abrupt and un-
anticipated way, Walter Kaufmann wrote Discovering the Mind.
Erudite but animated, monumental but not at all ponderous,
it is, among other things, Kaufmann's final reconsideration of
an intellectual tradition that had been the abiding source and
focus of his own prolific writing.
The subject of the work is explicitly defined, not in terms
of a historical tradition, however, but of an enterprise, "dis-
covering the mind," which Kaufmann conceives broadly, us-
ing "mind" as "an inclusive term for feeling and intelligence,
reason and emotion, perception and will.") And Kaufmann's
avowed "central aim throughout" is "to contribute to the dis-
covery of the mind. "2 But he also claims that, "It should be
one of the compensations of this study that it leads to a new
and better understanding of a good deal of the intellectual
history of the past two hundred years. "3
What he in fact deals with historically is an intellectual
tradition developed principally by thinkers who wrote in Ger-
man. Since Kaufmann defines his subject matter in terms of
its intellectual aim rather than its historical period, we are
 confronted by his implicit suggestion that in the last two hundred
years most of the interesting developments in the discovery
of the mind have, in fact, taken place among those who have
written in German. Given the list of thinkers who are included
in his discussion, this provocative suggestion is not without
some plausibility.
The work is divided into three volumes. Each deals with
three major figures: the first with Goethe, Kant, and Hegel;
the second with Nietzsche. Heidegger, and Buber; the third
with Freud, Adler, and Jung. There are also a number of
other figures, such as Lessing, Schiller, Kierkegaard, and
Schopenhauer, who are treated far more briefly, often by way
of illuminating the writers receiving fuller analysis.
Each volume has a hero. A case is made that Goethe.
Nietzsche. and Freud were in Significant ways admirable hu-
man beings who made important contributions to the discov-
ery of the mind. The other six do not come off nearly as well.
Hegel and Buber receive mixed reviews. The rest are severely
criticized as being both of unadmirable character and as having
contributed little to the discovery of the mind, indeed, as
having seriously impeded it. We are presented with an in-
tellectual landscape in which what is not a help is usually a
hindrance, in which an author's character is usually relevant
to his contribution, and in which intellectual interventions are
rarely ever impersonal.
Kaufmann makes no attempt to depict this landscape in
muted tones, as he allows both his enthusiasms and distastes
full expression. Whether one always agrees with him is beside
the point. His judgments are generally supported with cogent
argumentation, and the passion with which he embraces and
rejects thinkers and their thought seems appropriate to the
importance of the issues at stake. Kaufmann's extremely frank
and personal expression of his passions and preferences is
unusual in academic writing. This should not be taken as a
ground for criticism, but rather as an essential part of his
unique contribution to the discussion of these matters.
Kaufmann closely links the process of discovering the

xvi ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 mind with the attainment of self-knowledge. He insists on this
linkage not only in the unexceptionable but special case of
our coming to know our own minds as individuals but also
where it less obviously obtains, in the process of discovering
the nature of the human mind in general. In closely con-
necting all knowledge of the mind with self-knowledge, Kauf-
mann is doing more than recalling Socrates's injunction, "Know
thyself1," and allying this enterprise with it. He is calling
attention to often overlooked or suppressed links between
knOWing one's own mind in particular and the human mind
in general, between self-deception and the misunderstand-
ing of others, between self-knowledge and the knowledge of
selves. Kaufmann argues with reference to a number of think-
ers, that flaws in one's understanding of oneself are usually
obstacles to one's understanding of others, that the failure of
a theory about the human mind often mirrors a failure of the
theorist to come to terms with himself.
This consideration of theories about the human mind in
conjunction with an examination of the mentality or character
of the theorist constitutes another salient feature of Kauf-
mann's method, and one which again puts him at odds with
standard academic practice. Kaufmann unabashedly breaches
the prevalent prohibition against any ad hominem approach
to philosophers, explicitly calling this taboo into question.
Starting with the reasonable but rather general assumption
that "the ideas of these men are not totally unrelated to their
mentalities," he repeatedly offers evidence and hypotheses
specifically linking their particular theories to their person-
alities. He thinks it imperative and enlightening to discover
the minds of those who discovered the mind.
In entering upon this terrain, Kaufmann is careful and
quick to distance himself from "reductionism," which he de-
fines with admirable and delightful concision as "the claim
that something is 'nothing but' something else. "4 In the con-
text of exploring the relation between the personalities and
theories of those who wrote about the mind, reductionism

Introduction to the Transaction Edition. xvii

 consists in the claim that conceptions of the human mind are
nothing but reflections of the personalities of their authors.
Although Kaufmann does not spell out the reasons for
rejecting reductionism, they are not difficult to locate. The
kind of reductionism here at issue is objectionable in that it
tends to have disastrous methodological consequences. If this
type of reduction ism were accepted, tracing the way in which
any conception of the human mind is anchored in the per-
sonality of its author would become the central or even the
sole question to be investigated. And it would tend to be
pursued to the neglect or even exclusion of other issues, par-
ticularly those concerning the intrinsic plausibility and merit
of the conceptions under investigation. I think that the wide-
spread and tenaciously rooted resistance to any analysis of
conceptions and theories as reflections of the character of their
authors stems from a fear that the legitimation of such inves-
tigations would undermine the traditional assessment of the
intrinsic value of the ideas.
Kaufmann does not, however, intend his analyses of the
relation between a writer's ideas and his personality as a re-
placement for traditional investigations of the intrinsic merit
of the ideas, but as a supplement to them. Having explicitly
rejected reductionism, he is not committed to replacing the
assessment of the ideas themselves by accounts oftheir genesis
out of the personalities of their authors. His program entails
only enriching the accounts and assessments of the works
themselves with considerations of the authors' personalities.
And indeed, such considerations do sometimes help to explain
cases of otherwise puzzling adherences to implausible ideas
and unpromising intellectual practices, to account for opinions
rigidly held and curiously impervious to the claims of com-
peting views, and to illuminate strong intellectual commit-
ments made in the absence of decisive evidence.
Discovering the Mind as a whole constitutes a plea as
well as a paradigm for the introduction of such considerations
into the standard repertoire of historians and interpreters of
philosophical and psychological theories. This program is cer-

xviii. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 tainly not without precedents, but they are not usually to be
found among professional philosophers, and even more rarely
among those of repute, like Kaufmann.
The most notable exception and the principal inspiration
of this and several other of the book's remarkable qualities is
Friedrich Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche who argued that a philo-
sophical theory was to be best understood as being primarily
the expression of the philosopher's basic personality, rather
than as the result of his impersonal consideration of data and
arguments. Though Nietzsche was not as careful as Kaufmann
to avoid the reefs of reductionism, his analyses of the relation
between the character of various thinkers and their thought
clearly constitute the model for Kaufmann's own excursions
into this area. Kaufmann, in venturing hypotheses about var-
ious ideas and theories as reflections of as well as reflections
by the minds that produced them, is reviving a promising
type of Nietzschean analysis, generally neglected and taboo.
Nietzsche's influence can also be discerned in Kauf-
mann's masterfully rapid but penetrating approach, his refusal
to get bogged down in the morass of his material, his delib-
erate decision not to attempt to offer an overly full account
of the material in which his major theses and insights would
lose a great deal of their force in a sea of related but not
directly relevant detail. This is a quality that Nietzsche had
himself displayed and singled out for discussion as the all-
important "tempo" of a work. Though Discovering the Mind,
like all of Kaufmann's work, is remarkably well informed and
informative, it aspires neither to be complete nor compen-
dious. In fact, it is one of Kaufmann's theses that the ideal of
offering complete accounts of intellectual developments owes
much of its influence to Hegel and has been in some ways an
unfortunate development, an unrealizable goal and require-
ment that creates pressure to mask the inevitable incomplete-
ness of the narratives of intellectual history by recourse to
obscurity.
The Nietzschean influence is also clear in Kaufmann's
deliberate rejection of a dispasSionate tone. Nietzsche was not

Introduction to the Transaction Edition ~ xix

 all contributed. We should not forget that psychology only
gradually emerged as a separate discipline in the course of
this period.
Though there has been some awareness and acknowl-
edgment of the organic cohesiveness and interdependence of
literature, philosophy, and psychology in this tradition, the
awareness remains for the most part superficial, undetailed,
and without consequence in our approach to the period.
Professional philosophers still tend to study the philosophical
texts in abstraction from those literary works, which often
inspired them or to which they are a response. Although some
literary critics do acknowledge the influence of philosophical
works upon literary ones, they rarely analyze the philosophic
texts in sufficient detail and almost never incorporate careful
philosophic assessment of these texts into their accounts. Among
psychologists, who are typically concerned with the legiti-
mation of their discipline as a "science" on the basis of its
similarities with the paradigmatic physical sciences, psychol-
ogy's common origin with philosophy and literature and its
long intermingling with them tend to be deemphasized, de-
preciated, and suppressed. Their enduring and intimate as-
sociation tends to be viewed as a primitive and unproductive
confusion, which we have fortunately now overcome by finally
separating out what are essentially distinct enterprises.
This tendency toward fragmentation is the reflection of
a general trend toward deeper and more numerous institu-
tional divisions among the disciplines. Without taking a stand
on the purported advantages and inevitability of this intellec-
tual Balkanization, one cannot help but see how our present
state of academic and disciplinary division tends to warp our
understanding of a tradition in which what is now dispersed
among different disciplines existed as an intermingled whole.
Kaufmann's Discovering the Mind has the merit of re-
focussing our attention upon the remarkable integration of
philosophical, literary, and psychological work in the tradition
of German letters from the Enlightenment to the Second
World War. In our recent treatment ofthis period, we have

xxii ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

tended to overlook or ignore its remarkably high degree of
organic unity, in part because this sort of integration has been
lost in our own literary culture. Discovering the Mind should
make it harder for us to continue approaching with good con-
science this literary-philosophical-psychological tradition from
the exclusive perspective of a particular discipline. It impedes
the facility and narrowness of approach that is the consequence
of our own cultural fragmentation. Kaufmann has achieved
with respect to our study of this period in German intellectual
history what Kierkegaard wanted to achieve with respect to
our embracing religious faith: He has made things more dif-
ficult for us-but also more rewarding. And we are in his
debt for this difficulty.
The philosophical dimension of Kaufmann's emphasis on
the integration of philosophy, literature, and psychology tran-
scends the question of the interpretation of a particular period
of intellectual history, or that of the appropriate methodology
for intellectual history in general. It also consists in the im-
plicit thesis, that this former integration of what is currently
separated furnishes the most fruitful context for discovering
the mind. It suggests that it is in the interplay of literature,
philosophy and psychology that the best insights concerning
mind have been, and will likely be, obtained. His historical
interpretation, in as much as the period interpreted is pre-
sented as exemplary, also furnishes the basis of an intellectual
program.
Discovering the mind is too important and central a hu-
man concern, Kaufmann implies, to be left exclusively to the
"psychologists," that is, to those who have come to carry this
institutionally and narrowly defined title of relatively recent
origin, the professional psychologists. The major insights into
the nature of the mind have often come, he argues, from
thinkers who were not psychologists so defined, and the great-
est of the professional psychologists have drawn heavily on
the insights of those who were not in the profession.
The refusal to abandon the discovery of the mind to the
guild of profeSSional psychologists is not just an insistence on

Introduction to the Transaction Edition. xxiii

 only the subject of Kaufmann's first book, Nietzsche: Philos-
opher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950), the philosopher much
of whose work Kaufmann translated into English, and one of
the three acknowledged heroes of Discovering the Mind. He
was also the major influence on Walter Kaufmann's philo-
sophic work, and his imprint on the conception and style of
Kaufmann's last book is unmistakable.
The tradition that Kaufmann reconsiders, that of "dis-
covering the mind" in German letters of the last two hundred
years, clearly crosses or ignores the boundaries among the
disciplines as they have come to be defined and established
in the academy. Some of the figures he discusses, such as
Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, have been clearly defined, by
themselves as well as the tradition, as philosophers. Others,
such as Goethe and Schiller, despite their historically influ-
ential and intrinSically valuable theoretical writings, have been
usually categorized as being essentially writers of "literature,"
that is, of "imaginative literature," whose works are studied
primarily in departments of literature and written about by
people who consider themselves literary critics and historians.
Others, such as Freud, Adler, and lung, find their niche in
our established order of the disciplines among the "psychol-
ogists," even though not all of their neighbors in this edifice
are particularly happy about the proximity.
Still others, like Nietzsche and Buber, have been harder
to place. Nietzsche, who preferred to identify himself as a
"good European" rather than as a German, led a life in which
he had no fixed abode in anyone country {or academic dis-
cipline)-a life in which he continually moved across borders,
both geographical and intellectual. His work has suffered and
enjoyed a similar fate. Because of its highly literary, meta-
phorical, and aphoristic style, its lack or avoidance of fully
spelled-out argumentation for its positions, its vehement and
personal tone, its unorthodox set of concerns; it was long
rejected by a majority of the philosophical establishment in
the English-speaking world-not as being bad philosophy,
but as not being philosophy at all. And not even Nietzsche's

][X ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 recent prominence has dissolved the problem of his margin-
ality. In the English-speaking world, his new popularity finds
its center of gravity somehow still on the periphery of the
discipline of philosophy or in other disciplines, in those, for
example, that concern themselves with the theory ofliterature
and art.
Buber's position in the world of academic philosophy is
surely even more marginal and obscure than Nietzsche's. As
in the case of Kierkegaard (who is also discussed, albeit briefly),
there remains uncertainty as to whether he belongs to phi-
losophy or theology.
WaIter Kaufmann's Discovering the Mind speaks in an
important way to these issues of disciplinary identity. As is
usually the case in Kaufmann's work, the discussion has both
a historical and a philosophical dimension. The historical di-
mension concerns the two-hundred-year tradition of Gennan
letters taken up for consideration in this book. The interde-
pendence of philosophy, literature, and psychology in this
tradition is so obvious and well documented, that one is tempted
to say that it cannot be ignored, except that it has been ig-
nored, particularly, though not exclusively, in the English-
speaking world.
In this German tradition, those who produced literary
works and those who produced philosophical works regularly
read each other and drew inspiration for their own work from
this cross-disciplinary reading. (Kant is perhaps the one no-
table exception: Though he was widely read by literary figures
in the tradition, he did not read them.) Some of the central
figures in the tradition, notably Goethe, Schiller, and Nietzsche,
produced both Significant theoretical and literary work. The
literary work of Goethe and Schiller, as well as their theo-
retical work, importantly influenced the development of Ger-
man philosophy. Most importantly, there was a strongly sensed
community of purpose that transcended the barriers of genre
and discipline. "Discovering the mind," Kaufmann argues,
was an important aspect of what was viewed as a common
enterprise, to which literature, philosophy, and psychology

Introduction to the Transaction Edition ~ xxi

 the rights of writers and philosophers to address themselves
to this task, justified by their traditional presence on this turf
and their considerable contributions. It is also a reminder to
philosophers and writers that involvement in this enterprise
has been and should remain a central aspect of their voca-
tion -a duty as well as a right. The lamentable tendency to
relinquish psychology to the psychologists is not just the result
of their presumptuous and aggressive appropriation of what
is by nature an intellectual and existential concern common
to all human beings. There has been complicity on the part
of philosophers and writers who wanted to rid themselves of
the burden of having to work at discovering the mind. In
addition to the effective pursuit of prerogatives by a guild,
there has been an all too willing retreat from this former
common ground by those who found it easier not to maintain
a presence there. We should chastise and lament the retreat
as well as the aggression.
In this first of three volumes, Kaufmann proVides a bold
historical hypothesis about the last two centuries of intellec-
tual life in the German speaking world: the development of
theories and conceptions of the mind and of philosophy in
general is presented as having taken place in an intellectual
space defined overwhelmingly by those two giants of German
letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Im-
manuel Kant (1724-1804). Other figures of the period are
discussed and, in some cases, even allowed to have had con-
siderable influence and intellectual virtue-Lessing, Schiller,
and Hegel, for example. But Kaufmann is unwavering in his
insistence that no other figure of the period even remotely
compares in influence to Kant or Goethe. Some who have
been put forward as major influences, like Herder, are argued
to have had less influence than has been supposed. Still others,
like Schiller and Hegel, are presented as themselves recipi-
ents and transmitters of the two major influences.
It is to be predicted that such a stark structuring of a
complex subject will generate the protest that these matters
cannot not be so simply viewed. No doubt the proponents of

xxiv • DISCOVERING THE MIND

 various figures in this tradition (particularly those scholars who
have written about other figures) will feel that the importance
of these figures has not been fully appreciated. Confronted
with these misgivings, one should not forget that Kaufmann's
picture of Goethe and Kant as by far the two most important
influences on subsequent intellectual life in Germany is not
created by presenting the other leading contenders as pyg-
mies. We should also keep in mind that the thesis concerns
subsequent influence, not intrinsic merit. Lessing, Schiller,
and Hegel are all treated with enormous respect. And Kant,
despite and because of his great influence, is severely criti-
cized and viewed as the source of much that went wrong in
German philosophy and intellectual life.
We should also not forget that the thesis is clearly offered
as a hypothesis, as an interesting proposal of considerable
plausibility, to be pushed as far as it will go. It is a hypothesis
of considerable synthetic power, supplying a well-defined per-
spective from which a bewildering amount of historical ma-
terial can be systematically viewed. Whatever one decides
about its ultimate adequacy, it furnishes a valuable focus for
the further study and debate of this rich chapter of intellectual
history. The thesis is certainly both arguable and debatable.
That it has been so forcefully argued by Kaufmann and will
be heatedly debated by others is all to the good.
To put Kaufmann's historical interpretations in this book
in perspective, we should consider some of his previous con-
tributions to the subject matter. For example, in Hegel: Rein-
terpretation, Texts and Commentary (1965), he argued for
Hegel's philosophical merit and historical importance to an
audience that needed some convincing. With this in mind,
his insistence that Kant and Goethe were still more influential
than Hegel is less likely to be seen as an advocacy that springs
from a failure to consider the alternatives seriously. In general,
it would be well to remember that this eagle's-eye view of an
extensive period in intellectual history was preceded by two
substantial studies of major figures in the period (Hegel and
Nietzsche) and a number of essays on related topics, partic-

Introduction to the Transaction Edition ~ xxv

ularly some of those in From Shakespeare to Existentialism
(1959). Only one acquainted with these earlier contributions
will fully appreciate the effort and power of synthesis, the
admirable abbreviation, the simplicity and austerity of presen-
tation arising from what had to be complex considerations and
hard choices. Kaufmann's last, long-ranging look at his cultural
heritage is a masterful distillation of an extensive erudition,
effectively brought to bear upon specific and important issues,
but never flaunted.
Kaufmann's conception of the place of Kant and Goethe
in German culture is remarkable and provocative, not only
because of the extraordinary influence he attributes to them,
but also because of his evaluation of their respective influ-
ences. That Goethe is praised, not only as an enormous, but
also as an enormously positive influence, is not at all unusual.
But that a substantial part of Goethe's importance and merit
is located in his having developed an alternative model for
science in his Theory ofColors, written as a critique of New-
ton, is a significant hypothesis.
Unlike the Newtonian conception of science, in which
quantification and measurement occupy a central position,
Goethe offers us an alternative model for "science" in which
these are not essential, and which Kaufmann finds to be pref-
erable in some contexts of inquiry, like that of discovering
the mind. Kaufmann is using the term "science" in the broad
German sense of "Wissenschaft," which includes humanistic
disciplines as well as the natural and social sciences, and which
applies to anything that is a rational inquiry. The crucial issue
raised by Kaufmann's championing of a Goethean model of
science is not, however, whether one should or should not
extend the word "science" to these other disciplines and in-
quiries. It is rather whether or not the discovery of the mind
(and by extension-the discovery of other human truths) is
best pursued by adhering to quantitative methods.
Kaufmann's dismissal of the results of q~antitative meth-
odology in psychology as insignificant is simply stated, not
argued. This dismissal and the accompanying lack of argument

xxvi ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

are sure to raise the hackles and voices of the proponents of
quantitative methods in psychology. Of course, the bold claim
that quantitative studies have not substantially contributed to
the discovery of the mind calls for a lot of further consideration
and argument. Kaufmann does not make any pretense of ar-
gument; he advances this as a radical hypothesis, worthy of
further consideration and argument, and worthy of enunci-
ating because it calls into question prevalent and largely un-
questioned beliefs. He devotes his energies rather to arguing
for the correlative thesis, that some of the greatest contri-
butions to the discovery of the mind have come from thinkers,
like Goethe, Nietzsche and Freud, who did not use quanti-
tative methods.
The convincingly argued claim, that Goethe's importance
and influence flowed as much from his person as from his
works, is put forward as being generally instructive. Kauf-
mann, citing other examples in the history of philosophy, such
as Socrates, J. L. Austin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, plausibly
makes the case that it is not uncommon in the history of
philosophy that one's influence often depends upon personal
charisma or in conveying the impression that one is in some
way an exemplary human being. Using the model of the ex-
emplary Goethe, Kaufmann wants to move us away from the
prevalent idea that the history of ideas is only the history of
ideas. It is also the history of individuals, whose manner of
living or being, at least as it is publicly perceived, is to a great
extent responsible for their influence.
This insistence upon the importance of the stature and
personal force of the writer, as perceived through and apart
from his writings, for determining his influence upon the his-
tory of thought contributes to a larger and more important
issue. It opens the way to a discussion of what constitutes not
just the influence of a thinker but his actual merit, contri-
bution, and greatness. It opens the way, moreover, to a dis-
cussion liberated from the narrowing constraints of the prev-
alent notion that philosophical exceUence is primarily, or even
exclusively, a matter of the excellence of the argumentation,

Introduction to the Transaction Edition • xxvii

of impeccable logic, and the marshalling of all the relevant
evidence.
By pointing out that Socrates and Wittgenstein do not
offer complete and rigorous demonstrations for their views,
Kaufmann is not suggesting that their reputation for greatness
is undeserved, but rather that excellence and greatness in
philosophy (and in discovering the mind) does not depend
exclusively upon the definitiveness of the demonstrations for
one's views. But neither is he suggesting that rigor and ad-
equacy of argumentation are irrelevant considerations. In call-
ing attention to what he argues to be an astounding lack of
rigor in both Kant and Hegel, he not only tries to correct
common misconceptions about them, but also to suggest that
they were great philosophers despite this lack of rigor, which
he clearly considers a serious flaw, though one not incom-
patible with philosophic greatness. Kaufmann does not at-
tempt to develop a positive and systematic account of what
constitutes excellence or greatness in philosophy, hut by re-
jecting an overly narrow conception of the matter that enjoys
some currency, he' implicitly encourages his readers to explore
the question from a richer and more varied perspective than
they might have othelWise adopted.
Kaufmann's treatment of Kant is far more startling than
his treatment of Goethe. Kant, who has enjoyed respect and
praise almost universally, and from the most diverse philo-
sophical directions, is here astonishingly and unqualifiedly
branded as a disastrous influence upon the subsequent de-
velopment of German thought. Though it has been common
enough to call attention to some of the obvious failings of
Kant's writing style and even, to some extent, the content of
his philosophy, this has generally occurred as a series of mar-
ginal comments in the context of an ovelWhelming reverence
for his achievement, in an atmosphere of overall admiration
that remains in no way challenged by the critical marginalia.
Kaufmann makes no bones about his opinion of Kant as having
been on the whole a catastrophe for German philosophy. His
critique of Kant is radical and unorthodox, yet another philo-

xxviii ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

sophical heresy from the author of The Faith of a Heretic
(1961), a book in which he locates the central virtue of our
philosophical tradition in its ever renewed criticism of what-
ever has become generally accepted as true, authoritative,
and canonical.
His case against Kant involves not so much new revela-
tions of hidden flaws, but a clear-eyed assessment of fairly
obvious failings and unfortunate influences, relatively unbur-
dened and unblurred by the conventional pie ties concerning
Kant's unquestionable overall greatness and positive contri-
bution to philosophy. Once again the value of Kaufmann's
thesis lies primarily in the raising of an important issue that
that has rarely, if ever, been raised, in the consideration of a
plausible hypothesis that has rarely, if ever, been seriously
considered.
Kant is blamed for a being the major source of at least
two disastrous traditions in German philosophy. First, he is
seen as the source of a continuing tradition of obscurity and
obscurantism. He is also faulted as the fountainhead of an
inappropriate insistence on certainty and necessity in our in-
vestigations and theories and, correspondingly, of unfounded
claims to have achieved such rigor. One of Kaufmann's most
intriguing ideas is that the two tendencies are actually con-
nected. Having accepted the unrealizable requirement of cer-
tainty and necessity, one naturally resorts to obscurity to con-
ceal from oneself and others that one has failed to fulfill it.
Kant is blamed for yet another misguided requirement:
that philosophy should endeavor to attain completeness. The
requirement of completeness, like the demand for certainty
and necessity, it is suggested, being gratuitous and unattain-
able, naturally produces a tradition characterized by the pre-
tentious counterfeit of the misguided ideal and the attempt
to conceal the failure and fakery by willful, though not nec-
essarily conscious, obscurantism.
Some will no doubt want to question whether Kant is
really the primary source of all these subsequent ills of Ger-
man intellectual life. The quest for certainty can be easily

Introduction to the Transaction Edition ~ xxix

traced back to Descartes and to Newton, and, despite some
foreshadowings in Kant, the ideal of completeness seems to
have emerged in full force only with Hegel's Phenomenology
of Spirit. But such disputes about the exact origins of these
false ideals for philosophy are much less important than the
crucial thesis that they have indeed proven to be counter-
productive requirements, that they have become pernicious
and enduring affiictions of our intellectual life.
With respect to these flaws, so fateful for the subsequent
course of German philosophy, Goethe is presented as Kant's
antipode. If Kant began the process of teaching the German
language to speak philosophically (his notable German pred-
ecessors had used Latin and French), he taught it to speak
badly-that is, obscurely. Goethe, on the contrary, used, and
indeed himself developed, a German in which one could ex-
press one's ideas clearly. While Kant carried on the unfor-
tunate tradition of Descartes, misguidedly seeking an abso-
lutely certain foundation for our knowledge, Goethe emphasized
that the true mark of a fruitful scientific procedure was the
formulation and testing of hypotheses that always remain open
to further questioning.
The subsequent development of German philosophy can
be viewed, argues Kaufmann, as largely determined by these
polar opposites and the tension between them. Hegel can be
understood as having acquired his notoriously obscure style
and his false claims to having achieved necessity and com-
pleteness in his "dialectical demonstrations" in imitation of
Kant. Hegel's developmental approach, which so influenced
the intellectual methodology of the nineteenth century, is
argued to have derived from Goethe. Heidegger's obscurity
and apodictic tone are also seen as part of the unfortunate
legacy of Kant. The admirable writing styles of Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche, as well as th~ latter's experimental spirit and
constant questioning of everything, is attributed to Goethe's
influence. Even if one finds this somewhat Manichean con-
ception of the development German thought problematic or
simplistiC, it is an original and not implausible hypothesis,

xxx ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

which, like a number of Kaufmann's central claims in this
work, is fruitful in the crucial sense, that critically considering
it, independently of whether we ultimately accept, reject, or
modifY it, will deepen our understanding of the subject matter
to which it pertains.
Although Kaufmann presents Kant as the primary source
of major ills in German thought, he constantly maintains that,
despite Kant's bad qualities and his disasterous influence on
subsequent philosophy, he was a great philosopher. Kauf-
mann does not himself make the case for Kant's greatness or
for the significance of his positive contributions. No doubt he
thought it unnecessary to convince our philosophical culture
of what it already believes-almost without question. But
after his devastating criticism and his rejection, not only of
some of Kant's ideas but of the whole manner in which Kant
philosophized, some of us will be curious as to what Kaufmann
took to be Kant's redeeming virtues.
He does make some scattered remarks, admiring Kant's
crushing criticisms of the proofs for God's existence and the
unsurpassed philosophic drama of Kant's "antinomies," a pre-
sentation on facing pages of what he claimed were perfectly
valid arguments for each of two opposing positions ("theses"
and "antitheses") on four classical problems in philosophy.
But these few and fragmentary admirations do not constitute
a counterpoise to the sweeping criticisms. How can ¥ ant have
had those particularly general vices, with which he is here
convincingly charged, and still have been a great philosopher?
Is he really the dark angel of German philosophy or simply
its devil?
Usually it is easier for us to explain and defend our neg-
ative judgments than our enthusiasms. But this does not seem
to be Kaufmann's problem. With respect to those figures he
thinks made major contributions to the discovery of the mind-
Goethe, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud {and obviously not
Kant)-he sticks his neck out, listing with admirable conci-
sion, clarity, and intellectual courage, point by point, what
he takes to be those contributions. These unusually unam-

Introduction to the Transaction Edition ~ xxxi

biguous prises de position, like much else in this work, will
form ideal foci for further discussion and debate.
Considerable space is devoted to a recounting of the story
of the composition and publication of Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Here, as else-
where in Kaufmann's work, the erudition and information is
not an end in itself. Although his account of these matters
appears at first to be overly detailed and even gratuitous (even
considering the fact that we are dealing with what is arguably
each philosopher's most important work), it actually turns out
to serve an important purpose. He presents ample evidence
that Kant's Critique and Hegel's Phenomenology were both,
though the products of long reflection, written in extreme
haste and published pretty much without revision. Kaufmann
thinks it important to emphasize that these works were hur-
riedly produced and never carefully vetted or reworked, for
he wants to overcome the awe in which these texts have
traditionally been treated. He wants to prepare us to accept
his appraisal of them as severely flawed masterpieces, rich in
ideas but very badly written and organized, and remarkably
lacking in rigor.
This is meant to be a liberating corrective to the prevalent
practice of approaching these (and other philosophical mas-
terpieces) as if the failure to find an interpretation that reveals
the rigor of the argumentation, the deep aptness of the or-
ganization, and truth in the conclusions, or at least an im-
pressive plausibility in these matters, must be a failure of the
reader and not of the text. It is an attempt to free us from
the oppressive tradition of haVing to treat what are admitted
to be great philosophical works as authoritative texts, that is,
as texts which, despite appearances to the contrary, are always
able to yield, given the appropriate interpretation, coherence,
significance, and truth.
It is meant to relieve us of the obligation to undertake
prodigious hermeneutic exertions, even when they promise
to be futile. These obligatory and often interminable efforts
at interpretation are aimed at revealing supposedly hidden

xxxii. DISCOVERING THE MIND

virtues of texts, virtues whose veiled presence is often as-
sumed in an act of unfounded and implausible faith. In de-
nying these two books some of their generally presumed vir-
tues Kaufmann is clearly not denying them all virtue or
greatness. Nor is he suggesting that they are not worth study-
ing. He is rather calling attention to the complexity and var-
iation of what makes philosophical works great and addreSSing
the related existential question of how we should approach
those texts that merit our attention and respect.
The question of style, particularly of the clarity of style,
is a central aspect of Kaufmann's program. Goethe is praised
for his clarity; Kant is criticized for his obscurity. Implicit in
the discussion of the writing styles of the various figures con-
sidered is the rejection of the idea that clarity or obscurity of
style is something with which one is blessed or cursed: some-
thing that is a given. Kaufmann approaches the style of a writer
as Freud approached dreams, parapraxes, and neurotic symp-
toms, with the fundamental suspicion that it is something
willed, that obscure writing is usually also intentionally, if
unconsciously, obscurantist.
He suspects obscure philosophical writers, such as Kant,
Hegel, and Heidegger, of wanting to hide something from
themselves as well as from others, in some cases, the un-
soundness of their positions; in others, their triviality. Ob-
scure writing, he suspects, is a tool of deception, the deception
of others and ourselves. And those who deceive themselves,
not knowing their own minds, are usually in a bad position
to know and write about the human mind in general. For
Kaufmann, there is an intrinsic connection between the failure
of style and the failure to know the mind. It is no mere co-
incidence that Kaufmann finds that those who write badly
usually do not have much of value to say. With the exception
of Hegel, he finds those who have written unclearly (Kant,
Heidegger, Adler, and Jung) not to have made significant
contributions to the discovery of the mind. Correspondingly,
those who, in his opinion, have made major contributions
(Goethe, Nietzsche, and Freud), were all masterful writers.

Introduction to the Transaction Edition ~ xxxiii

 This attack of obscure writing is particularly significant
with respect to a tradition, like that of German philosophy,
in which there is not only a great deal of obscure writing,
some of it extremely obscure, but also a remarkable toleration
of obscurity and even a perverse tendency to find some virtue
in it. How often complaints about the grotesque syntax and
seemingly insurmountable opacity of these authors is met with
lame excuses and hackneyed justifications: "The text may in-
deed be ferociously difficult, but the effort will be repaid by
the excellence of the ideas it contains." "Keep readingl If you
are tenacious and intelligent, you shall be rewarded. If you
are not rewarded by hard-won but important revelations, you
were obviously not tenacious and intelligent enough. " "Given
the complexity of the ideas, there is no simpler way to express
them." "Given the depth of the ideas, there is no way to
express them more clearly." "Considering the recondite con-
tent of the text, this is, despite appearances to the contrary,
the best of all possible prose."
Kaufmann is not buying any of this. What seems to be
bad writing, he suggests, is usually bad writing-and should
not be tolerated or justified. Convolutedness and obscurity
in writing are hardly ever the ineluctable reflections of cor-
responding complexities of content and of depths beyond the
reach of direct illumination. They are more often subterfuges.
Often the prolonged study of devilishly difficult texts does not
repay the effort. It is high time someone confronted, as Kauf-
mann does, the existential issues raised by this body of almost
impenetrable classics.
This concentration on writing style is a significant part of
an attempt to capture the overall style of the thinkers dis-
cussed, a unifying style that includes the way they wrote,
thought, and lived. To this admirable end, the analysis of
specific texts almost always serves to reveal more general
textures. The microscope is almost always a prelude to the
telescope. The aim is always the large view, in which the trees
do not obscure the forest. In this way, WaIter Kaufmann made
his last and grandest attempt to appropriate-and contribute

xxxiv .. DISCOVERING THE MIND

to-his cultural heritage. Discovering the Mind was for Kauf-
mann, though in a much more modem and modest manner,
what The Phenomenology of the Spirit had been for Hegel.
Following the advice of Goethe's Faust, he too "took what he
had inherited from his fathers and made it his own."

Ivan SolI
Bad Homburg

Notes
1. Discovering the Mind (New York: McGraw-HiU. 1980) p. 4.
2. Ibid. p. 7.
3. Ibid. pp. 6-7.
4. Ibid. p. 8.

Introduction to the Transaction Edition ~ xxxv

Prologue~
 1 ~ Few people know their own
minds. Many, though by no means all, would like to.
Many more would like to know the minds of others. And
philosophers and psychologists have long dreamed of
understanding how the human mind works generally.
The imperative "Know thyselfl" goes back to the
ancient Greeks, and several Greek philosophers alluded
to it. But the surviving evidence does not suggest that
they reached any great heights of self-knowledge. The
most profound exploration of this subject in antiquity
was written not by a philosopher but by Sophocles,
whose tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus suggests forcibly that
self-knowledge might be a scarcely endurable torment.
Oedipus is determined to find out who he is and how he
is really related to those closest to him, and when he
does he despairs.
What I am concerned with is self-knowledge,
meaning knowledge both of our own minds and of the
human mind in general. And when I speak of the mind I
am not contrasting it with the heart or soul, as do those
who associate the mind with the intellect and the heart
or soul with emotion. I use umind" as an inclusive term
for feeling and intelligence, reason and emotion, per-
ception and will, thought and the unconscious.
My usage, which is in accord with the best dic-
tionaries and encylopedias, does not commit me to the
belief that minds exist, any more than Freud's use of
"soul" committed him to a belief in souls. Pascal's Uthe
heart has its reasons" did not entail any belief that these
reasons were really situated in the heart. "Heart,"
"soul," and umind" are ways of speaking of aspects of
ourselves that seem to be mysterious and elusive.

2 ... Why is it that we have made

so little progress in the discovery of the mind when we
have done so much better in gaining knowledge of the
outside world? We have discovered laws to which dis-
tant stars and galaxies seem to conform, but we do not
understand the human mind nearly as well although it is
so much closer to home and we seem to have privileged
access to it.
The most obvious answer is that until recently the
mind has been the province of philosophers and other
humanists, and that the humanities are in a bad way
compared to the natural sciences, and quite especially to
astronomy and physics. Attending the Einstein Centen-
nial Symposium in Princeton, in March 1979, soon after
this book was finished, and going on from there to hear a
humanities seminar at which a historian presented a
paper, I could not help sharing this widespread feeling.
The difference in standards was frightening.
This sense of an appalling disparity between the
humanities and the natural sciences is nothing new.
Immanuel Kant shared it when in 1787, in the preface to
the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, he
spoke more than a dozen times of uthe secure stride of a
science," contrasting it with the groping and fumbling

4. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 that seemed to him to characterize much of the work in
his own discipline. Exactly twenty years later, Hegel
insisted in the preface to his first book that everything
depended on elevating philosophy to the rank of a
science.
Both Kant and Hegel were concerned specifically
with the discovery of the mind, but they fell pitifully
short of their avowed intentions. Why? I hope to show
that this was due in large measure to the fact that they
operated with a mistaken conception of science. As a
result, they provided models that were almost as harmful
as those which Kant cleared out of the way. We owe Kant
an immense debt for making a clean sweep of so many
fruitless speculations, and we can apply to him a remark
the young N ietzsche once jotted down without ever
publishing it himself: "The errors of great men are ven-
erable because they are more fruitful than the truths of
little men."! For all that, they do not cease to be errors,
and one shows little respect for a thinker if one does not
take his ideas seriously enough to ask whether they
stand up under criticism.
In many ways, Kant was, despite his virtues, a dis-
aster. The lack of progress we have made in the discov-
ery of the mind was due in several ways to his fateful
influence. That he was a great and brilliant man is no
sufficient reason for dealing at length with his
shortcomings. Is not this kind of antiquarianism one of
the curses that keep the humanities from getting any-
where? Entirely too much energy is devoted to clearing
up what happened long ago. Would it not be far better to
start right off with a more positive approach?
I shall do precisely that and begin my story not with
Kant, who is widely considered Germany's most re-
nowned philosopher, if not the greatest philosopher
since Plato and Aristotle, but with Goethe who is, by

1 Werke, I, p. 393. All translations from the German are mine.

Prologue~5
 common consent, Germany's greatest poet. And I aim to
show that Goethe did more than any man before him to
advance the discovery of the mind. I shall be specific
and spell out what I consider his major contributions.
But then I shall turn to Kant and present him not merely
as a dead philosopher who lived a long time ago but
rather as the best possible representative and embodi-
ment of ways of thinking that are still very much alive
today.
I shall not tarry over faults peculiar to him and of no
special relevance now. The major shortcomings on
which we shall concentrate still impede the discovery of
the mind today. And it is helpful to see how they existed
together in a single mind, and how this mind was in ever
so many ways the diametrical opposite of Go ethe's. Here
we have two ideal types, and if they had not actually
existed, I doubt that anyone could have invented a more
striking pair of opposite mentalities.
Goethe and Kant were contemporaries and wrote in
the same language. To be more precise, they both wrote
German but hardly the same language. Kant was
twenty-five years older, but Goethe became world fa-
mous several years before Kant did, and their contem-
poraries were troubled by these two divergent models.
Even before the end of the eighteenth century, Fried-
rich Schiller, the great poet who was Goethe's close
friend as well as a devoted admirer of Kant's philosophy,
tried to reconcile the irreconcilable. A great many
others, from Hegel to Sartre, have tried to do this too in
different ways. Thus Kant's disastrous influence was not
by any means confined to his out-and-out followers but
also marred the work of many important thinkers who
tried somehow to mediate between him and Goethe.
Once this is recognized clearly, ever so many
obscurities in the works oflater thinkers are illuminated.
It should be one of the fringe benefits of this study that it
leads to a new and better understanding of a good deal of

6 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

the intellectual history of the past two hundred years.
But my central aim throughout is to contribute to the
discovery of the mind.

3 ~ Insofar as many highly intel-

ligent people are still caught in fruitless approaches and
follow paths that get lost in the woods without ever
leading anywhere, it should be helpful to show what
specifically is wrong with these approaches. The mere
fact that they have not worked very well on quite a
number of occasions leaves open the possibility that per-
severance may pay after all. Hence it is essential to dem-
onstrate what is wrong in principle. To put it more
plainly and concretely, it needs to be shown how Kant's
ways are really quite opposed to the ways that have led
to the triumphs of modern science. It may sound almost
too neat to say that for Kant science was Newtonian sci-
ence while Goethe exerted himself to develop a non-
Newtonian science, but we shall see that this contrast is
indeed relevant though it does not explain everything by
any means.
One can also advance the discovery of the mind by
seeing as part of a single picture the major contributions
made by Goethe and Hegel, and then later on by
Nietzsche and Freud. Scholars have become such spe-
cialists that those who are experts on one of these men
rarely know the others very well. It should prove helpful
to show how their insights supplement each other.
Finally, the ideas of these men are not totally unre-
lated to their mentalities. The nature of this relationship
is a touchy issue. For a long time, philosophers not only
shied away from any study of it but actually branded
even the least concern with it as a fallacy. In this way
they set bounds to the inquiring mind. Some of the first
attempts to breach this taboo have been rather crude and
unilluminating, but the problem is of immense interest.

Prologue ~7
Why should students of the mind concern themselves
only either with neurotics and sick people or with the
run-of-the-mill perceptions of ordinary people, and not
at all with the minds of great philosophers, psy-
chologists, and poets? We should inquire into the
relationship ofKant and C. G. Jung or Martin Heidegger
and Martin Buber to their theories.
In attempting to do just that, I shall stay clear of
reductionism, by which I mean the claim that something
is "nothing but" something else. In the last volume of
this trilogy we shall have occasion to consider a letter in
which Jung said on February 28, 1943: "In the critical
philosophy of the future there will be a chapter on 'The
Psychopathology of Philosophy.''' What he went on to
call for was a reductionist science that would show how
various philosophies were, in his own words, "nothing
but" neurotic symptoms. Even when turning the tables
on him and showing that a psychopathology of
psychology-and of his psychology in particular-could
be every bit as interesting, I hope to avoid reductionism.
A poem that expresses the highly individual sensibility
and experience of a poet is not for that reason worthless,
and a mask can be a work of art while the face behind it
may be commonplace.
In short, we are embarking on a voyage of discovery.
And it may not be inappropriate to anticipate one major
point: Kanf s insistence that in the philosophy of mind
we cannot tolerate anything less than absolute certainty,
necessity, and completeness was disastrous. To make
discoveries one must not be too anxious about errors.
One must be willing to state a theory clearly and crisply
and say as the physicists do: I have worked on this for a
long time, and this is what I have come up with; now tell
me what, if anything, is wrong with it. And before one
ever gets that far, one has usually found many of one's
own attempts faulty and discarded them. What is most
needful is by no means certainty but rather, to quote

8 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

Nietzsche's happy phrase, "the courage for an attack on
one's convictions."2 There are few areas, if any, where
such courage is needed more than in the discovery of the
mind.

I Werke. XVI. p. 318.

Prologue ~9
 Goethe and the
Discovery of the Mind ~
 4 ~ We possess an account of
Goethe at twenty-one, before he became famous. It is
found in a draft for a letter written in May 1772 by
Johann Christian Kestner, who eleven months later mar-
ried Charlotte Buff, with whom Goethe was also in love.
Deeply upset by this marriage, Goethe wrote The Suf-
ferings of the Young Werther, which ends with
Werther's suicide. Once that novel appeared, if not a
year earlier, in 1773, when Gotz was published, people
who met the author had preconceptions based on his
writings. Kestner's description is invaluable because it is
based solely on his impression of the young Goethe him-
self.
In the spring a certain Goethe came here from Frankfurt,
by profession a doctor of laws, aged 23 [actually 21], the
only son of a very wealthy father, to look around here for
some practice-that was his father's purpose, but his own
was rather to study Homer, Pindar, etc., whatever his
genius, his way of thinking, and his heart might inspire
him to do ....
. . . I got to know Goethe only late and by chance. . . .
 You know that I do not fonn judgments hastily. I did find
that he had some genius and a vivid imagination, but I
did not consider that enough to esteem him highly.
Before I continue I must attempt some description of
him, as I later got to know him very well.
He has a great many talents, is a true genius and a man
of character. Possesses an extraordinarily vivid imagina-
tion and expresses himself for the most part in images
and metaphors ....
He is violent in all of his emotions but often has a great
deal of self-control. His way of thinking is noble; free of
prejudices, he acts as he feels without caring whether
others like it, whether it is the fashion, whether the way
one lives pennits it. All compulsion is hateful to him.
He loves children and can occupy himself with them
extremely well. He is bizarre, and some features of his
behavior and appearance could make him disagreeable;
but children, women, and many others think very well of
him.
The female sex he holds in very high esteem.
In principles he is not yet finn and is still striving for a
system of sorts.
To say something about that, he has a high opinion of
Rousseau but is not a blind admirer of him.
He is not what one calls orthodox. But not from pride or
caprice or to make an impression. About certain very
important issues he speaks to few and does not like to
disturb others in their calm ideas.
. . . He does not go to church, not even for the sacra-
ments, also prays rarely. For he says, for that I am not
enough of a liar....
I wanted to describe him, but it would become too
lengthy, for there is much that could be said about him.
He is, in one word, a very remarkable human being.}

What does all this have to do with the discovery of

the mind? One of Goethe's friends, F. H. Jacobi, whose

}Amelung, 11 24.

14. DISCOVERING THE MIND

book On the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785) provoked a
major controversy and altered the course of German
philosophy, answered that question in one line, in a let-
ter to a friend, August 10, 1774. He said of Goethe: "This
man is autonomous [selbstst(Jndig] from tip to toe."2

5 ... Goethe's first major contribu-

tion to the discovery of the mind is that he provided a
new model of autonomy or freedom. "Freedom" sounds
less technical but is less clear and invites needless con-
troversies; for example, about free will or politics. "Au-
tonomy" suggests, strictly speaking, that one gives or has
given laws to oneself; that one is self-governing; that in
essentials one obeys one's own imperatives. Kant made
"autonomy" the centerpiece of his philosophy and dis-
cussed the term at length in his first major work on
ethics, in 1785. Even his enthusiastic admirers, how-
ever, did not accept his conception of autonomy. Goethe
had refuted it not by argument but by his example; or, to
be more precise, without as much as mentioning Kant,
Goethe had exhibited the absurdity of Kant's notion of
autonomy. At the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy and
Freud's psychology we still find Goethe's version of au-
tonomy, not Kant's.
Kant's fundamental intention was to show how
human autonomy was possible in a deterministic, New-
tonian universe. His commitment to human freedom as
well as science had a great deal to do with the enormous
impact of his philosophy. Nevertheless, his conception
of autonomy was stillborn and largely ignored because
his readers felt that, knowing Goethe, they knew what it
really meant to be autonomous.
Philosophy students are taught the importance of
proofs and refutations, and these are indeed invaluable

I Amelung, 11 68.

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 15

 for the training of undisciplined minds. But crucial
philosophical claims have rarely been proved, nor do
they generally die by refutation. Kant's celebrated refu-
tations of the three traditional proofs of God's existence
may seem to be notable exceptions, but what he refuted
were supposedly rigorous proofs; he neither refuted nor
claimed to refute the belief that God exists.
Kant's notion of autonomy will be considered in
Chapter IV; Goethe's, here and now. Consider a remark
Goethe made in a conversation with Eckermann, May 2,
1831. It was not published by Eckermann until 1836,
but the point was implicit, if not explicit, throughout
Goethe's life, and not lost on his more intelligent ad-
mirers: "Thus one also finds in life a mass of people
who do not have enough character to stand alone; they
throw themselves at a party, and that makes them feel
stronger and allows them to be somebody."
This idea became central in Nietzsche's work and
has become familiar to many readers through Jean-Paul
Sartre's "Portrait of the Anti-Semite" and Eric Hoffer's
The True Believer. The other side of the coin is equally
well known. At the end of Ibsen's An Enemy of the
People the hero makes what he calls "a great discovery,"
namely "that the strongest man in the world is he that
stands most alone." In the same play we encounter "the
compact majority." Near the beginning of a brief au-
tobiography Sigmund Freud said: "Early in life I be-
came familiar with the lot of standing alone among the
opposition and being placed under a ban by the 'com-
pact majority.' This laid the foundation for a certain in-
dependence of judgment."
Ibsen knew that Kierkegaard in "That Individual"
(1859) had sounded the refrain "The crowd is untruth,"
and the demand to stand alone is one of the central
motifs of the work of both. When Kierkegaard spoke of
"becoming the individual" he in effect sided with
Goethe against Kant. He probably did not know that

16 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

Goethe had said (Sprache in Prosa, # 945):
Nothing is more revolting than the majority; for it con-
sists of few vigorous predecessors, of knaves who ac-
commodate themselves, of weak people who assimilate
themselves, and the mass that toddles after them without
knowing in the least what it wants.

It was Schiller, Goethe's close friend, who first popu-

larized the crucial idea in his most popular play, Wilhelm
Tell. Despite his admiration for Kant, he proclaimed in
the third scene of the first act: "Ver Starke ist am
miichtigsten allein." (The strong individual is most
powerful when standing alone.)
Kant himself was a loner and did not derive his
sense of identity from membership in any group; yet he
associated morality with universality, and autonomy
with universal laws that are binding for all rational be-
ings, not with individuality. Goethe taught by example
that autonomy involves going it alone.

6 ~ The extent of Goethe's alien-

ation from the compact majority has been obscured both
by historical distance and by the myth that pictures him
as a pillar of society, at least during his later years. That
the young author of Gotz, Werther, and the original ver-
sion ofFaust was a rebellious individualist is a point that
does not need laboring. But he never ceased to be the
passionate man who knows how to employ his passions
creatively instead of making war on them; he always
remained, as Nietzsche put it after calling Kant "the
antipode of Goethe," a human being "who might dare to
afford the whole range and wealth of being natural,
being strong enough for such freedom."3 His autonomy
did not consist, as Kant's did, of being governed at every

a Twilight of the Idols, sec. 49.

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 17

turn by some maxim and of always doing what one al-
ways does, thus making a virtue of routine and repetition
(See Section 31 below). On the contrary, Goethe kept
astonishing people by doing again and again what
neither he nor anyone else had done before. His works
were not extrapolations from his first major success, like
Kant's, nor did he keep imitating the style of his first
masterpiece, like Kant, nor did he have a horror of
change, like Kant. In all of these ways Goethe's au-
tonomy was the opposite of Kant's.
Of course, he was a cabinet minister in a grand
duchy and in many ways exceedingly respectable; and
in his later years he had a· title and was made a member
of the nobility: Herr Geheimrat von Goethe. But in what
mattered to him-love and works-he was his own law.
In 1788, the year Kant published his Critique of Practi-
cal Reason, his major work on ethics, Goethe wrote his
Roman Elegies, celebrating carnal love, and began his
affair with Christiane Vulpius, whom he married in 1806
when their son August was seventeen. Until then
Goethe and Christiane had lived together without the
benefit of the clergy. The day after the wedding the poet
took the new GeheimrAtin von Goethe to a reception,
"not one given by a member ofWeimar society, it is true,
for those ladies continue their resistance for a long time
yet, but by ... Frau Schopenhauer, mother of the
philosopher ... "4
In 1789 Goethe turned forty. During the following
year he published, among a great many other things,
Torquato Tasso (one of his best plays, which consum-
mates his "classicism," being composed in iambic pen-
tameter and confined to five dramatis personae), Faust:
A Fragment (which helped to launch German romanti-
cism), Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants,
and two volumes of Contributions to Optics. Also in

4 Friedenthal, Goethe, p. 263.

18 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

1790 he finished his Roman Elegies and composed his
Venetian Epigrams, heaping scorn on Christianity and
its founder, and he assumed the directorship of the
Weimar court theater. That he had the courage to pub-
lish the epigrams he did publish is more surprising than
that he should also have written the ones suppressed
until the twentieth century. Here are two he published:
Every enthusiast nail to the cross in his thirtieth year!
Once they see through the world, those taken in become knaves.
Much there is 1 can stand, and most things not easy to suffer
1 bear with quiet resolve, iust as a god commands it.
Only a few 1 find as repugnant as snakes and poison-
these four: tobacco smoke, bedbugs, garlic, and cross.
And here are two he did not publish:
What applies to the Christians is also true of the Stoics:
Free human beings could not choose to be Christian or Stoic.
You are deceived by statesmen, priests, and the teachers of morals;
and this cloverleaf, mob, how you like to adore it!
Even today there's, alas, little worth thinking and saying
that does not grievously flout mores, the state, and the gods. a
None of this may strike many modem readers as
especially bold. The best way of showing how all of it
bears on Goethe's autonomy may well be to recall how
the first translators of his Faust into English reacted to
that play, which has come to be regarded as the quintes-
sence of dignity. What is apt to shock readers today is not
one or another Venetian epigram but the prudery of
Goethe's contemporaries; and to understand his au-
tonomy we must form some conception of the world in
which he lived.
The first English version, Faustus from the Ger-
man, appeared in London in 1821. The translator re-
mained anonymous and informed the reader at the out-
I For these and many more examples see Kaufmann, Twenty-five
German Poets: A Bilingual Collection.

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 19

set that "some parts are omitted which, it was felt, would
be offensive to English readers." These parts, it turns
out, include the "Prologue in Heaven" because it "is
repugnant to notions of propriety such as are entertained
in this country."
Two years later, Lord Francis Leveson Gower also
omitted most of the Prologue from his version because
he found that in the' dialogue between Mephisto and the
Lord "there is a tone of familiarity on both sides which is
revolting in a sacred subject." Before I had read the
prefaces to these translations, I assumed that Shelley
translated the "Prologue in Heaven" merely because he
found it exceptionally beautiful. But the fact that he also
translated the Walpurgis Night leaves little doubt about
his reasons. It is doubly noteworthy that both the Pro-
logue and the Walpurgis Night were first published by
Goethe in 1808, just before he turned sixty.
It is also a measure of Goethe's alienation from soci-
ety as well as his autonomy that, having finished Faust:
The Second Part of the Tragedy at the age of eighty-two,
he tied it up in a parcel and refused to discuss the ending
even with friends who inquired about it. It was to be
published after his death. It was not that he was afraid of
anyone, nor was there anything to be afraid of. He sim-
ply did not write to please others, least of all the public.
He did not care to know how others might react to his
work. He was not heteronomous but autonomous.

7 ... That a human being could

have a significant impact on human thought by virtue of
his character or personality may seem strange to many
professors who assume that contributions must be made
in tenns of articles or books. Even those who do not
sacrifice character to scholarship are apt to feel that per-
sonality is something private that has no place in their

20 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

writings. It is assumed that science is impersonal and
that scholarly work ought to be scientific.
One might call this attitude positivistic, but it actu-
ally antedates the emergence of positivism, and Kant
embodied it as well as anybody. In this respect, too,
Goethe was Kant's antipode. Goethe was an exception-
ally strong personality, and in his works he made no
effort to hide his light under a bushel. Reversing the
practice of many others, he came to hide himself more
and more in social situations-behind the mask of the
Herr Geheimrat von Goethe-while he revealed his
character in his writings.
Of course, Goethe was not by any means the first
human being to have influenced human thought through
his character. Leaving aside religious figures, who pose
special problems, and characters in the Bible and in
Greek tragedy, such as Samson, Saul, and David, Aes-
chylus' Prometheus, and Sophocles' Oedipus, paradig-
matic individuals who have changed our perception of
what it means, or could mean, to be human include Soc-
rates and Caesar, Napoleon and Lincoln, Rembrandt and
Beethoven, Nietzsche and van Gogh. 6 Socrates may be
the most obvious example, and the pertinent points can
be summed up in a few words:
The ethics of Plato and Aristotle, the Cynics and the
Cyrenaics, the Stoics and the Epicureans was largely in-
spired by the personality, the life, and the death of Soc-
rates. The image of the proud, ironic sage who found in
wisdom and continual reflection that enduring happiness
that riches cannot buy and whose character had somehow
had such power that a despot, lacking self-control, seems
like a slave compared with him-this wonderful em-
bodiment of human dignity captivated all the later think-
ers of antiquity, became their ethical ideal, and led to a
new conception of man. Socrates' fearlessly questioning
iconoclasm and his defiant decision to die rather than to
• See my What Is Man?, Chapter V: "Ecce Homo."

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 21

 cease speaking freely had an equal impact on the modem
mind. His character and bearing have influenced the
history of philosophy as much as any system. '1

Socrates also provided a decidedly un-Kantian

paradigm of autonomy, but Goethe's version of au-
tonomy differed from Socrates'. Socrates did not write,
while Goethe was above all else a writer. What is more,
Goethe was a poet who excelled at finding words for
feelings, emotions, and passions, while Socrates in-
spired ever so many philosophers who believed as the
Stoics did, partly under his influence, that happiness
requires the subjugation of emotion and passion. To
quote Nietzsche once more, Goethe could "dare to af-
ford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being
strong enough for such freedom" because he knew "how
to use to his advantage even that from which the average
nature would perish.u 8 To enjoy and explore the pas-
sions without becoming their slave, to employ them cre-
atively instead of either being dominated by them or
trying to resist them, was of the essence of Goethe's au-
tonomy.

8 ••• The second point about

Goethe's influence on the discovery of the mind can be
made briefly. It can actually be summarized in a four-
word epigram: Man is his deeds. This formulation is
widely associated with existentialism and specifically
with Sartre's influential lecture L'Existentialism est un
humanisme (1946). In this lecture Sartre actually fell
back on Kant in his attempt to defend existentialism
against the charge of irresponsibility: "Nothing can be
7 This is the penultimate paragraph of "Goethe and the History of
Ideas." reprinted as Chapter IV in my From Shakespeare to Existen-
tialism.
• Twilight of the Idols, section 49.

22 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 better for us unless it is better for all," he said, and "in
choosing for himself he [man] chooses for all men."
Moreover, Sartre gave his last major philosophical work
a Kantian title: Critique de la raison dialectique (1960).
One might therefore be inclined to see Sartre as a
philosopher in the Kantian tradition. But his claim to
fame rests as much on his plays, short stories, and novels
as on his philosophical tomes, and the hero of what
Sartre himself considered his best play,9 Le Diable et le
Bon Dieu (1951), is Gotz, the hero of the play that made
Goethe famous. Sartre is clearly one of the many think-
ers who have tried-and failed-to reconcile Kant and
Goethe.
The idea that man is his deeds is not an existentialist
innovation but found in Goethe, who rejected the belief
that man has an essence along with Kant's and Plato's
doctrines of two worlds. Goethe repudiated Kant's no-
tion of a noumenal self that lies beyond or behind the
world of experience. Indeed, he went further and re-
jected any form of essentialism. In the fascinating pref-
ace to his Doctrine of Colors (1810) he put the point
concisely:
We really try in vain to express the essence of a thing. We
become aware of effects [Wirkungen], and a complete
history of these effects would seem to comprehend the
essence of the thing. We exert ourselves in vain to de-
scribe the character of a human being; but assemble his
actions, his deeds, and a picture of his character will
confront us.

As a dramatist and novelist Goethe naturally knew

that the way to depict or create a character is not to
enumerate qualities but to depict or create actions. But
Goethe does not claim in this passage that this is what
distinguishes human beings. On the contrary, he speaks

8 For Sartre's opinion of this play see "Sartre at Seventy," p. 14.

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 23

of things, and his very next sentence begins: "Colors are
the deeds of light." In effect, Goethe denies that there
are essences apart from appearances.
Kant considered the essence of a man unknowable
because it transcended all possible experience. The
same consideration applied to our ultimate motives, ac-
cording to Kant. This did not keep Kant from offering an
anatomy of the mind, based not on experience but on
what must be the case to make possible human experi-
ence and knowledge, including what Kant took to be
scientific and moral knowledge.
Goethe implicitly calls into question the existence
of the mind. Neither the Buddhist doctrine that there is
no mind nor WilIiam lames' essay "Does Consciousness
Exist?" (in Essays in Radical Empiricism) would have
startled him. To know Faust's mind, we observe what he
says and does; and to create Faust's mind, the poet in-
vents speeches and deeds for him. But that means that
we can dispense with the concept of mind as an entity.
Mind becomes an inclusive term for feeling and intelli-
gence, reason and emotion, perception and will, thought
and unconscious. Ifwe see things that way, does it make
any sense to speak of discovering the mind? It does, as a
kind of shorthand.
In this connection it is worth noting that the German
language lacks an equivalent for "mind." Kant, who tried
to give us an anatomy of the mind, lacked a term for that
of which sensibility, understanding, reason, the inclina-
tions, and the power of judgment were supposed to be
parts. Sometimes he called it Gemat, which sounds
quaint today and brings to mind very dated poetry;
rarely, Seele (soul). Some of the German philosophers
who followed him employed a word that Goethe and
Schiller used frequently: Geist (spirit). Freud, a century
later, used Seele (psyche in Greek) and developed
psychoanalysis. In an important sense, of course, Freud
did not believe that we have souls, yet he needed a word

24 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

for what he analyzed. Similarly, Goethe and Schiller did
not believe in spirits, but used "spirit" (Geist)
nevertheless, mindful that it was a poetic rather than a
scientific tenn.
This multiplicity of tenns has obscured the crucial
fact that all of these men shared a fundamental concern
that can be described as the discovery of the mind. But
the use of this term does not entail any Cartesian
dualism of mind and body. Most of these men opposed
any such dualism.
It is far from entirely accidental that Kant featured
reason and the power of judgment in the titles of his
three "critiques," while Freud, though opposed to reli-
gion, preferred to speak of the soul. Kant was interested
mainly in the rational part of the mind while Freud gave
us, in effect, a critique of unreason, concentrating on the
irrational and unconscious part of the mind. Unlike
either of them, we shall be concerned with the whole
mind.

9 ... Goethe's greatest contribu-

tion to the discovery of the mind was that, more than
anyone else, he showed how the mind can be under-
stood only in tenns of development. In Kant's concep-
tion of the mind, as we shall see, development has no
place. He claimed to describe the human mind as it al-
ways is, has been, and will be. There is no inkling that it
might change in the course of history, not to speak of
biological evolution or the course of a person's life.
Goethe did not prove the opposite view by argu-
ment, but he showed and made people see how the mind
develops and needs to be understood in tenns of de-
velopment. He was not a philosopher and did not claim
to be one. But the question whether showing something
is inherently inferior to proving it or deducing it from
pure concepts is part of Goethe's legacy.

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 23

 Goethe, who was born in 1749, commanded the atten-
tion of his contemporaries from 1773, when his Gotz
appeared, until his death in 1832, over a period of almost
sixty years. As soon as Schiller and Fichte, Hegel,
Schelling, and Schopenhauer became aware ofliterature
in their youth, they began to follow Goethe's develop-
ment; and there was no blinking the fact that Goethe did
develop. Nobody could see his more recent works as
extrapolations from his earlier writings, as could be done
in Kant's case. Goethe's style kept changing, but the
changes were not gratuitous. He was no chameleon, no
weathervane, and did not bow to fashion. His develop-
ment gave every appearance of being organic, and his
contemporaries witnessed it with their own eyes, with
growing fascination. Every new work by Germany's
greatest poet and writer was read as soon as it appeared
and was totally unpredictable.
Having consummated first the so-called Storm and
Stress and then German classicism, Goethe all but
created German romanticism by publishing Faust: A
Fragment and then following it with a novel, published
in installments in the 1790s, Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre. This novel dealt, as the title declares, with
the hero's years of learning or apprenticeship. Ever
since, most of the major German novels down to the
best-known works of Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse
have been so-called Bildungsromane, which relate the
development of the hero or, to cite the subtitle of
Nietzsche's Ecce Homo: "How One Becomes What One
Is."
It is not enough to note that in the 1790s the bud-
ding German romantic movement developed a taste for
fragments, though Goethe himself was not satisfied until
he finally succeeded in completing his Faust. The play
itself came to be understood more and more as a cele-
bration of ceaseless striving, and what Goethe stimulated

26 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 u' f t.

• • ft

Q)o.ttc.
','

"

®. t 6 ; • ..··'8~e I.
In 'fr. 9. G. I.' t A' (dlln lIu ......u....
.
'. ,

.- 1 10'"
..
' ,
- .
,
..'. '
." :.
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'.'
. "
 was an overwhelming interest in becoming rather than
being, in processes rather than results.
Carrying Goethe's suggestions a step further, we
might say: There is no mind, and the way to discover the
mind is to study feelings and emotions, thoughts and
desires, dreams and acts. Or we could dispense with the
paradox and say that mind is no substance or thing but a
name for all of these phenomena, and that the way to
comprehend them is to consider their sequence in time.
The sequence or development is essential.
Apart from his Wilhelm Meister, Goethe impressed
these ideas upon his contemporaries in three major
ways: through his Faust, his life, and his autobiography.
The impact of Goethe' s F aust on German thought has no
parallel in French, British, or American literature.
Had Goethe seen fit to publish the original version
in 1775, its effect would have been overwhelming.
Goethe's reasons for not doing this and publishing
Faust: A Fragment in 1790 and The First Part of the
Tragedy in 1808 were as honorable as could be and il-
lustrate his autonomy. He did not publish what did not
come up to his own standards. As he developed, he was
no longer satisfied with the style of the original, which
seemed too close to the period of Storm and Stress. But
by initially publishing a fragment, it being known that
there was more even then, and by letting people hope
that eventually the sequel would appear, Goethe com-
pelled his public to see a literary masterpiece not as a
finished product, perfect and complete, but as some-
thing that was developing. Moreover, the hero, Faust,
changed even in the fragment, and the reader was led to
wonder how he would develop-not merely what might
still happen to him, but what kind of a person he would
become.
After eighteen years in which Faust had come to be
acknowledged as the most fascinating and representa-
tive character in German literature, the whole First Part

28. DISCOVERING THE MIND

finally appeared with its overpowering conclusion, but it
left this riddle unsolved. The work and the hero were
still evolving, and that was how matters still stood when
Hegel died in 1831.
At the beginning of the drama, Faust in his study
seems stunted and incomplete, stuck in a static exis-
tence, a travesty of a man as long as he remains only a
scholar. He has long ceased to develop, and his life is a
mockery of life. Could Goethe have been thinking of
Kant when he wrote the original version in the early
1770s? Kant was not yet widely known at that time, and
yet Johann Gottfried Herder, who had been one of
Kant's students in KOnigsberg, could have told Goethe
about him in Strassburg in the early seventies. It is un-
likely that Goethe's picture of Faust was inspired by
Herder's reports because Herder's later account of Kant
in the 1760s is quite differentl° But if Goethe had
known of Kant, how could he have done better? Faust's
first monologue begins with a curse on Kant's kind of
existence-a life without development, a life of routine,
a death in life. Faust is a great scholar who lives in books
and concepts without knowing anything of love and
women.
"That is your worldl A world indeedl" (line 409).
What Faust craves is what Kant sought at all costs to
avoid: change. The reader is made to feel that without
development, without living dangerously in the world
and risking love and the unforeseen, the great scholar is
a human failure if not a caricature of a man. No attempt at
a philosophical refutation of Kant could have approxi-
mated the impact of Faust.
The inexhaustible richness of the play has given rise
to an immense secondary literature, and one could easily

10 Briefezur Bef(jrderung der Humanitdt, Werke, ed. Suphan, XVIII,

p. 324£. Quoted in Kantzenbach (1970), p. 18£., and Schultz (1965). p.
30.

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 29

go on and on about points that have left a mark on sub-
sequent thought and contributed to the discovery of the
mind. Above all, Goethe's Mephistopheles is a keen
psychologist, a forerunner of Nietzsche, Freud, and
Gide, who sees through Faust's constant self-deceptions
and punctures them mercilessly with his deadly wit.
That is a large part of his function in the play; he helped
to sensitize generations of readers to self-deception.
Hegel already spoke of Mephistopheles as generally a
good authority and liked to quote him. Moreover, there
is the conception of Mephistopheles that is spelled out
by the Lord in the Prologue in Heaven:
I never hated those who were like you:
Of all the spirits thatnegate
The knavish iester gives me least to do.
For man's activity can easily abate,
He soon prefers uninterrupted rest;
To give him this companion hence seems best
Who roils and must as Devil help create (lines 337ff.).

And in his first dialogue with Faust, Mephistopheles

calls himself
Part of that force which would
Do evil evermore, and yet creates the good.

I am the spirit that negates (1335ff.).

In Goethe's profoundly anti-Manichaean conception,

evil and the evil one are integrated in a vast cosmic de-
sign and contribute to development-and without that
there would be uninterrupted rest, which is dismissed
with contempt. What is wanted is development.
Goethe cannot be identified with Faust. Clearly, he
is Mephistopheles as well as Faust, which is to say that
he is unlike both. Neither Faust nor Mephistopheles
could have written Faust. But the insistence on the need
for development is very much Goethe's own and was

30 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

impressed on his contemporaries and on later genera-
tions by his life as well as his work.
Internationally famous at twenty-five, Goethe never
copied past successes, never got stuck in a rut, but al-
ways kept developing. We have noted some of the high
points of his artistic development through the publica-
tion of Faust: A Fragment in 1790 and his great Bil-
dungsroman of the nineties, Wilhelm Meister. It was
also in 1790 that he began to introduce his conception of
development into the natural sciences, in his Attempt to
Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants, followed by his
Contributions to Optics and eventually his Doctrine of
Colors. But none of his works ever rivaled the impact of
Faust, except his poems. He was far and away the
greatest German poet, and many of his poems achieved
enormous popularity. As a poet, too, he kept developing,
and at the age of seventy he revolutionized German po-
etry once more with the publication of his West-Eastern
Divan, a collection of his most recent poems in which he
imitated Persian and other Near Eastern models, thus
contributing to a lively concern with what he himself
called, coining this term, "world literature."
In 1823, at seventy-four, he fell in love with the
daughter of a woman whom he had loved in his youth,
and he would have liked to marry her. But he parted
from her and in desperation wrote his "Marienbad
Elegy," expressing the hopeless love of an old man for a
young woman. As an epigraph he used two lines from his
Tasso:

And when man in his agony grows mute,

A god gave me to utter what I suffer.

Two years before his death, Goethe said in a conversa-

tion with Frederic Jacob Soret, a scientist from Geneva
who translated Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants into
French:

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 31

 I have never affected anything in my poetry. What I did
not live and what did not well up from inside me [was
ml,. nlcht auI die N4gel b,.annte und zu schaIIen machte]
I did not express in poetry. Love poems I wrote only
when I loved. How then could I have written hate poems
when I did not hatel And between us, I did not hate the
French ...

The relationship of some of Goethe's works to his

life and loves was so striking that a hundred years after
his death boys like myself were still taught the names of
the women he had loved along with the works they had
helped to inspire. Nor was Goethe himself innocent of
this development. In 1811 he began to publish his au-
tobiography, Out of My Life: Poetry and Truth. The
German subtitle, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which is usu-
ally cited as if it were the main title, is ambiguous.
Dichtung could mean fiction as well as poetry. The sec-
ond volume appeared in 1812, the third in 1814-and
eventually the sixth and last in 1822. The impact of this
work was immense. It pointed the way for subsequent
studies not only of Goethe but also of other poets and
artists, and eventually of every human being.

10 ... In 1899 Otto Pniower assem-

bled in a book materials bearing on the Entstehungsge-
schichte (the history of the genesis) of Goethe's Faust and
used as an epigraph, which he placed on the title page, a
quotation from a letter Goethe had written to his friend
Zelter, a composer, August 4, 1803: "Works of nature and
art one does not get to know when they are finished; one
must catch them in their genesis to comprehend them to
some extent."
Goethe himself had intended his correspondence
with Zelter for publication, and this striking quotation is
merely a particularly pithy and, I think, exaggerated

32 • DISCOVERING THE MIND

 formulation of a point implicit not only in his autobiog-
raphy but in ever so much of his work. Goethe's great
example persuaded generations of German scholars to
study not only Goethe and his works by paying attention
to his development but to use the same approach in
studying Plato and Aristotle, Michelangelo and Rem-
brandt, Mozart and Beethoven, Kant and Hegel,
Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. It became a commonplace
that great writers and artists could not be understood
well until one had determined the sequence of their
works and studied them as stages in a lifelong develop-
ment.
Is it true that unless we "catch them in their
genesis" we cannot understand works of art or nature
even "to some extent"? To me it seems quite sufficient
to insist that the genetic or developmental approach can
enrich our understanding enormously. I can understand
a poem or a painting, a novel, a sculpture, or a
philosophical book "to some extent" without knowing
its approximate date or its place in the artist's or writer's
development, but when I see it in its temporal context I
gain invaluable new perspectives. We shall return to this
problem in the Hegel chapter.
In the English-speaking world, both the so-called
new criticism and analytical philosophy represent
twentieth-century revolts against this developmental
approach. Neither of them can be comprehended when
this is overlooked. In other words, both have to be un-
derstood in the context of a historical development, as
protests against stupid excesses in which works were
drowned in their background. These revolts in turn led
to excesses that may seem to be specifically modem but
were actually mocked already in the 1770s by Goethe's
Mephistopheles in his conversation with a newly arrived
student:
The philosopher comes with analysis
And proves it had to be like this:

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 33

 The first was so, the second so,
And hence the third and fourth was so,
And were not the first and the second here,
Then the third and the fourth could never appear.
That is what all the students believe,
But they have never learned to weave.
Who would study and describe the living, starts
By driving the spirit out of the parts:
In the palm of his hand he holds all the sections,
Lacks nothing except the spirit's connections.
A few lines later, Mephistopheles adds, still giving ad-
vice to the student:
Yes, stick to words at any rate;
There never was a surer gate
Into the temple, Certainty.
The student replies:
Yet some idea there must be.
Mephisto retorts:
All right. But do not plague yourself too anxiously,
For iust where no ideas are
The proper word is never far.
With words a dispute can be won,
With words a system can be spun,
In words one can believe unshaken,
And from Cl word no tittle can be taken.
We shall have to see later to what extent these three
Mephistopheles quotations apply to Kant. They are cer-
tainly far from dated. Many philosophers still stick to
words and "creep" along "on the road of thought" as
slowly as if philosophy were a game of chess, albeit
without a queen. They come with analysis and try to
prove things but miss out on the spirit that develops and
defies certainty.
Microscopes are useful, but not for the discovery of
the mind or spirit. While we cannot dispense with close

34~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

attention to details, their meaning depends on the con-
text. And the context cannot be understood solely in
spatial terms; it is also temporal and developmental.
That is a lesson Goethe impressed on all who immersed
themselves in his work.

11 ... Goethe's opposition to New-

ton has not been appreciated sufficiently. Although
Goethe himself considered his scientific work as impor-
tant as anything he had done, his admirers are for the
most part embarrassed by his polemics against Newton
and either ignore them altogether or concede quickly
that Newton was right about colors, and then change the
subject. But even if we grant that Newton was right
about colors-for our purposes it does not matter who
was right-Goethe's refusal to equate science with
Newtonian science represents his fourth major contri-
bution to the discovery of the mind.
Kant equated science with Newtonian science, and
many philosophers still feel that in the late eighteenth
century this was reasonable. However that may be as
long as "science" means physics, Kant and many of his
successors wanted to make philosophy scientific and
applied themselves specifically to the discovery of the
mind; and that made the equation of science with New-
tonian science disastrous. Goethe's notion of a non-
Newtonian science was taken up in different ways by
Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud.
Hegel, like Schelling and Schopenhauer, admired
Goethe's anti-Newtonian Doctrine of Colors and said,
for example (in the Addition to Section 215 of his
Philosophy of Right): "The physicists were peeved by
Goethe's Doctrine of Colors because he did not belong
to the guild and was on top of that a poet."
Goethe's conception of science is enormously in-
teresting. It seems best to quote at length from Goethe's

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 35

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...
Preface to his Doctrine of Colors, cited once before
about essences and deeds. The quotation that follows is
long but also very beautiful, very important, and hardly
known at all today. It merits attention, and Goethe put
his points better than we could hope to put them if we
had recourse to paraphrase .
. . . It is surely an exceedingly strange demand that is
made sometimes but not fulfilled even by those who
make it: that one should present experiences without any
theoretical bond and leave it to the reader, the student, to
form any conviction he pleases. For merely looking at
something cannot get us anywhere. All seeing becomes
contemplation; all contemplation, musing rein Sinnen);
all musing, combination rein Verknilpfen); and so it can
be said that every attentive look into the world involves
theorizing. But to do this consciously, with self-
knowledge, freedom, and, to use a daring word, irony-
that skill is needed if the abstraction we are afraid of is to
be harmless and the experienced result for which we
hope is to be vital and useful.
In the second part we occupy ourselves with the expose
ofthe Newtonian theory which has so far obstructed with
force and prestige a free view of color phenomena; we
fight against a hypothesis [I] that, although it is no longer
found useful, still retains a traditional respect among
men ....
But since the second part of our work might seem dry in
content and perhaps too violent and passionate in execu-
tion, we may be permitted a cheerful parable to prepare
for this more serious material and to excuse to some ex-
tent this vivid treatment.
We compare the Newtonian color theory with an old
castle that was initially planned by its builder with
youthful haste, but by and by amplified by him and fur-
nished in accordance with the needs of the time and cir-
cumstances and, in the course of skirmishes and hos-
tilities, fortified and secured more and more.
His heirs and successors proceeded likewise. It was
considered necessary to enlarge the building, to build an

38 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

addition here, a wing there, an annex there, now because
one's own needs increased, now because external adver-
saries exerted pressure, or owing to other accidents.
All these alien parts and additions then had to be re-
lated to each other by means of the strangest galleries,
halls, and corridors. All damage. whether inflicted by
enemies or by the force of time, was quickly repaired. As
it became necessary, one dug deeper trenches, made the
walls higher. and added towers, bay windows, and bat-
tlements. This care and these efforts produced and pre-
served a prejudice that the fortress was extremely valu-
able, although the art of building and fortifying castles
had long developed much further, and people elsewhere
had learned to construct far superior places for living and
fighting. Above all, however, one venerated the old cas-
tle because it had never been conquered, because it had
repulsed so many attacks, frustrated so many enemies,
and retained its virginity. This claim, this reputation still
endures. Nobody notices that the old building has be-
come uninhabitable ....
This. then, is not a case of a long siege or a doubtful
battle. Rather we encounter this eighth wonder of the
world as an ancient relic that is already abandoned and
threatens to collapse. and so we begin right away, with-
out further ado, to reduce it, beginning with the roof. to
let the sun shine at long last into the old rats' and owls'
nest and reveal to the eyes of the surprised wanderer
how labyrinthine and disconnected the building style
was, how narrow and needy, accidental and artificial,
deliberately contrived and wretchedly patched up. To
show this, however, wall upon wall and vault upon vault
must fall, and the rubble must be removed as quickly as
possible.
To accomplish this and, if possible, to level the place
while ordering the materials in such a way that they can
be used again for a new building. that is the arduous task
we have set ourselves in this second part. If we should
succeed by the use of our utmost power and skill to re-
duce this bastille and to gain a free space, it is by no
means our intention to cover it up and molest it again

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind. 39

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 right away with a new building. We prefer to use it in
order to present a series of beautiful forms.
The third part is therefore devoted to historical investi-
gations and preliminaries. If we said above that the his-
tory of man shows us man, one could now claim that the
history of science is science itself. One cannot gain pure
recognition of what one possesses until one knows how
to recognize what others have possessed before us. One
will not truly and honestly enjoy the advantages of one's
own time if one does not know how to appreciate the
advantages of the past. But to write a history of the doc-
trine of color or even to do no more than to prepare the
ground for one was impossible as long as the Newtonian
doctrine held the field. For no aristocratic conceit has
ever looked down with as much intolerable arrogance
upon those who did not belong to the same guild as the
Newtonian school has always condemned everything
that was achieved before or beside it.

12 ~ This text requires no close

analysis. Goethe's style is not obscure. Unlike Kant, he
says what he means so well that it would be the height of
presumption to try to improve on it. There are mainly
two reasons why he wrote so much more clearly.
First, he thought more clearly than Kant. What he
wrote about he saw in concrete detail, and he was able to
find words to communicate to others what he saw. One
might call the approach he embodied visual and con-
crete, and Kant's conceptual and abstract. But my own
approach is visual and concrete, and I am inviting you to
see these two different approaches embodied in two
human beings.
Secondly, Goethe had the courage to reread what he
had written and to go over it again and again until it met
the highest standards. As long as it did not, he was in no
hurry to publish it. This was a crucial aspect of his au-
tonomy: he did not write to please others or to enhance

42 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

his status but to satisfy himself. The original version of
the First Part of Faust, culminating in the dungeon
scene whose power has never been equaled by any other
Gennan poet, was completed by 1775, but when Goethe
finally published Faust: A Fragment in 1790 he held it
back because he was not satisfied with it, and it did not
appear in print until 1808, when he had succeeded in
reworking it.
Many people suppose that poets and artists are im-
petuous and impatient while philosophers take their
time to consider and reconsider every idea they have
again and again. In fact, Kant was the fountainhead of a
philosophical tradition that belies this popular assump-
tion, and thinkers as diverse as Hegel and Buber fol-
lowed his example rather than Goethe's.
Even Goethe's first great success, Gotz, an exuber-
ant work of a youthful rebel, represented a reworking of
a complete draft, the so-called Ur-Gotz. The same was
true of lphigenie and Faust. "Prometheus," the great
poem first published by Jacobi in his book On the Doc-
trine of Spinoza in 1785, had been written in 1773 as
part of a play that Goethe had been unable to finish. His
creativity was as organic as Kant's was forced; he wrote
easily but was far from accepting all that he had written
as finished, even when it was far better than anything
anybody else had ever done in Gennan. In effect, he
treated what he wrote as so many hypotheses that
needed testing.
Having this perspective on his own work, he could
see, as Kant could not, that Newton, too, though certainly
a geni us if there ever was one, had offered us hypotheses
and by no means knowledge that was certain for all time.
Goethe noted further that a hypothesis-and it should be
noted that he used that word-can be "patched up" in-
definitely like an old castle, but that this does not prove
its truth. After a while it becomes "uninhabitable."
Much of what Goethe says in the long passage

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 43

quoted he,re has been widely discussed since Thomas
Kuhn restated it, without citing Goethe but with many
more examples, in The Structu,.e of Scientific Revolu-
tions (1962). Goethe clearly said-and said clearly-that
science does not furnish certainty but only hypotheses;
that it is not altogether continuous and cumulative but,
after a hypothesis has been patched up to the point of
becoming uninhabitable, requires a drastically new
start; and that this development does not involve either
conclusive proof or conclusive refutations.
As a "whole" human being, not divided against
himself Uke Kant, he assimilated science to poetry and
other creations of the mind and saw it in terms of de-
velopment. As "the history of man shows us man ... the
history of science is science itself." This thoroughly
anti-Kantian notion was accepted and taught systemat-
ically by Hegel, who applied it to what he himself called
science (Wissenschaft), namely philosophy.
One cannot know what one possesses, Goethe goes
on to say, "until one knows how to recognize what others
have possessed before us." Or as he put it in Faust:
What from your fathers you received as heir,
Acquire if you would possess it. (682(.)
This could be the epigraph of Hegel's Phenomenology as
well as his later philosophy. What Goethe himself has in
mind in his preface to the Fa,.benleh,.e is, of course,
above all his history of the doctrine of colors, which
forms part of his book. But to write that, he says ex-
pressly, "was impossible as long as the Newtonian doc-
trine held the field." It is tempting to add that Goethe
had to do away with know ledge to make room for history,
but actually he was not all that interested in history. He
was vitally interested in development and opposed to
"ossification" (Ve,.knDcherung). What he liked in Kant,
after Schiller had tried very hard to make him sym-
pathize with Kant, was that in the C,.itique ofJudgment

44 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 art and nature were taken up together. That he found
congenial. But in retrospect it seems hard to acquit Kant
of having been an apostle of ossification, not merely be-
cause he thought that Newton's doctrines were eternal
truths but also because he made similar claims for his
own doctrines.
A short essay Goethe wrote in 1829 is relevant here
though it was published only in 1833, in Volume 10 of
Goethe's posthumous works (that is, Volume 50 of the
Ausgabe letzter Hand). It bears the title Analyse und
8ynthese and begins: ccIn his third lecture this year
[1829] on the history of philosophy, M. Victor Cousin
praises the eighteenth century mainly because in its sci-
entific pursuits it concentrated on analysis while be-
waring of hasty syntheses, that is of hypotheses." Goethe
then goes on to say: "It is not enough to use the analytic
method in observing nature ... we also apply this same
analysis to the prevalent syntheses [that is, comprehen-
sive hypotheses] to find out whether people have
worked the right way in accordance with true method."
And a little further on: "We now turn to another more
general observation. A century that concentrates merely
on analysis and is, as it were, afraid of synthesis [that is,
of hypotheses] is not on the right road; for only both
.
sCIence.
.
together, like exhaling and inhaling, constitute the life of

Hegel had said very similarly that the true

philosophical method is "analytic and synthetic at the
same time,"11 and had also associated analysis with em-
piricism. 12 But what is most interesting is what Goethe
said next:
A false hypothesis is better than none at all [eine falsche
Hypothese ist besserals gar keine]; for that it is false does
no harm at all; but when it fortifies itself, when it is
11 Werke, ed. Glockner, vol. 8, p. 449.
11 Ibid., p. 119.

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 45

 accepted universally and becomes a kind of creed that
nobody may doubt, that nobody may investigate, that is
the disaster [Unheil] of which centuries suffer.

What could be more anti-Kantian? Kant had been

enamored by what he took for "the secure stride of sci-
ence"; he wanted to make philosophy equally secure; he
craved security and certainty or, in one word, had to be
sure; and he wanted to expel everything merely
hypothetical from philosophy. Goethe does not mention
Kant in this connection, but in the very next sentence he
indicts those who would not brook any contradiction
of Newton's doctrines and continues:

The French especially are to be blamed more than any-

one else for the spread and ossification of this doctrine.
They should therefore make up for this mistake by
favoring in the nineteenth century a fresh analysis of
this intricate and ossified [or frozen, or torpid: erstarrten]
hypothesis.
Goethe was a poet and Kant a philosopher. It does
not follow that Goethe, unlike Kant, should not be taken
seriously in matters of this sort. Both men were also sci-
entists, and Kant's name is still associated with a theory
in astronomy while Goethe made a biological discovery
and wrote extensively, in prose as well as poetry, on the
metamorphosis of plants. Goethe was basically right
about science and contributed a great deal to the discov-
ery of the mind.

13 ••• Werner Heisenberg, who

won the Nobel Prize for physics for his work on quantum
mechanics, has written a very sympathetic essay on
"Goethe's Image of Nature" (Das Naturbild Goethes).
What struck him as most important and revealing in the
preface to the F arbenlehre is a phrase in the first para-

46 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

graph of my long quotation: "the abstraction we are
afraid of." Heisenberg comments that these words make
clear "where Goethe's path must diverge from that of
modern natural science [der geltenden Naturwis-
senschaft]."
We can make the point of divergence even more
precise. The triumphs of modern physics, from Newton
to our time, depend on the ingenious use of mathemat-
ics, and Goethe tended to disparage mathematics. What
he always wanted, in science as in poetry, was
Anschauung. There is no exact English equivalent for
this German word, which Kant used in an entirely dif-
ferent sense (see Section 22). The verb anschauen means
to see or contemplate. Goethe's immense lucidity is in-
separable from his habit of seeing things instead of re-
lying on pure concepts alone. Kant was not a visual per-
son (see Section 30), while Goethe liked to draw and also
did delightful watercolors. 13 Although his verbal facility
and the power of his language were unsurpassed, he
unquestionably agreed with Mephistopheles' sarcastic
disparagement of words:
For just where no ideas are
The proper word is never far.
Goethe always could find words for what he saw and
felt. He mistrusted words that were not backed up by
any experience. And he had no need of mathematical
certainty. While those who feel most insecure often
crave that, Goethe was strong enough to spurn it. In a
conversation with F. von Muller, June 18, 1826, he said:
Mathematics has the altogether false reputation of fur-
nishing infallible inferences [Schlasse]. Its whole cer-
tainty is nothing more than identity. Two times two is not
four. but it is simply two times two, and this we call,
abbreviating it, four. Four is by no means something

11 See Goethe (1821) and (1806-07).

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 47

 new. And that is how it always is with its deductions
[Und so geht es immerfort bel ihren Folgerungen], only
in the higher fonnulas we lose sight of the identity.

Goethe failed to recognize the immense usefulness

of mathematics for the natural sciences and especially
physics and astronomy. This was a serious shortcoming
on his part, and in a book on the development of modem
physics he might not merit a great deal of attention. But
our concern is with the discovery of the mind, and here
the hankering for certainty and the model of mathemat-
ics have been extremely harmful, while Goethe's ap-
proach has proved to be very fruitful. What was needed
was attention to the actions and expressions of the mind
and the study of their development. And for those whose
interest in such a development was not purely theoreti-
cal but motivated in some measure by a quest for au-
tonomy, Goethe provided a rich model of that, too.
Newton mathematicized large areas of science.
Under his influence mathematical precision and abso-
lute certainty became more than ever part of the very
meaning of science. While this view is still dominant
among both scientists and laymen, many people, in-
cluding some scientists, are deeply disturbed by this de-
velopment, because in one way or another it is so often
accompanied by a downgrading of what cannot be mea-
sured and quantified. As Goethe's Mephistopheles says
in the second scene of the Second Part of Faust, speak-
ing to the Chancellor:
Whdt you cdn't cdlculdte, you think, Cdnnot be true;
Whdt you cdn't weigh, thdt hds no weight for you.

A large part of reality-the part which most engages our

feelings and emotions and which one might actually
consider the most valuable-is discounted as either in-
consequential or even as in some sense unreal.
Championing what cannot be measured or weighed

48~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

can be but need not be-and in Goethe's case was not-
obscurantist. Some people feel threatened by reason and
understanding and seek safety in a plea of incomprehen-
sibility. Goethe was not an apostle of feeling in this
sense, and he had no wish to downgrade reason or sci-
ence. On the contrary, he has his Mephistopheles say in
the short monologue that concludes the scene in which
he makes his pact with Faust-and Hegelliked to quote
this:
Have but contempt for reason and for science,
Man's noblest force spurn with defiance,
Subscribe to magic and illusion,
The Lord of Lies aids your confusion,
And, pact or no, I hold you tight.
Far from opposing reason and science, Goethe opposed
the notion that all science must be mathematical. For
him poetry was not the frosting on an essentially dry and
prosaic cake, a make-believe embellishment that covers
up the way things truly are. Although some poetry, like
some of Faust's effusions, may involve self-deception,
Goethe was unwilling to discount either emotion or rea-
son, and he felt that understanding cannot dispense with
feeling. I know of no better way to put this point than to
say that he pointed the way toward a poetic science. In
profoundly different ways, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud
tried to develop a poetic, non mathematical science.

14 ... In his own country the impact

of the greatest poet always exceeds that of any
philosopher. Homer, Vergil, Dante, and Shakespeare
have no philosophical counterparts; neither does
Goethe. He helped to shape the imagination of his
people, including millions who never read a line of
Kant's. Yet Goethe differs from most other poets in that

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 49

he also had an immense influence on philosophy and the
discovery of the mind.
One might suppose that this was obvious, yet hardly
anyone writing about Hegel, Nietzsche, or Freud in En-
glish seems to have noticed it. This is due in part to a
decline in the knowledge of German. Even philosophy
professors in the English-speaking world rarely have
enough German to read Goethe for pleasure. If his im-
pact were due to a few short texts, quite a number of
scholars would still be able to read those. But as we shall
see, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud,
and Jung were steeped in Goethe's life and works. That
kind of familiarity is no longer to be found in the
English-speaking world outside of departments of
German.
In translation, Goethe loses as much as Kant gains.
Kant becomes clearer in English. His tapeworm sen-
tences have to be broken up because in languages where
nouns have no genders one simply cannot pile up subor-
dinate sentences for one or two pages. In a letter to
Goethe, dated December 6, 1825, K. F. Zelter related
how one of Kant's old friends from his student days had
visited the great philosopher forty years later. Asked
whether he had ever felt like reading Kant's books, he
replied: "Oh yes, and I'd do it more often but lack
enough fingers." Kant did not understand and received
this explanation: "Yes, my dear friend, your way of
writing is so full of parentheses and conditionals on
which I have to keep an eye that I place one finger on
this word, and then the second, third, and fourth, and
even before I have to turn the page there is no finger
left."
People who read Kant in translation rarely realize
how badly he wrote and how obscure he is. The lucid
simplicity of much of Goethe's best verse, on the other
hand, loses in translation. Rilke's often very difficult
poems are easier to render into English than Goethe's

50 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 usually exceptionally clear lines. Those who cannot read
Goethe in the original have no way of knowing how
great he was.
The situation is made worse by the hypertrophy of
specialization. Books on philosophers and psychologists
are generally written by philosophers and psychologists
who know that it is not their business to write about
poets, like Goethe. A philosopher who forgets this or
simply does not care is apt to be told by his chairman,
without having asked, that while it is wonderful how
well his work has been received by highly competent
reviewers he ought to know-as I was told at one
point-that "your work on Goethe does not count." Al-
though this particular chairman was a renowned
humanist and historian of philosophy, he may not have
realized that the men who were perhaps the foremost
Kant scholars in Germany had written extensively about
Goethe; for example, Ernst Cassirer, Georg Simmel,
Hans Vaihinger, and Karl Vorlander (see the Bibliogra-
phy).
For a long time, it was unfashionable for English-
speaking philosophers to write about Hegel or
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Freud, and those who did
tried to assimilate them to more fashionable
philosophers. It certainly is not surprising that the pro-
fessors who wrote about these men did not immerse
themselves in Goethe as they had done. Yet this sort of
immersion is precisely what is needed to understand
these men better. Without it one simply cannot acquire
the necessary feeling for Hegel's, Nietzsche's, or
Freud's mentality and universe of discourse. Hegel
spoke the truth, not only for himself, when he wrote
Goethe on April 24, 1825: "When I survey the course of
my spiritual development, I see you woven into it ev-
erywhere and would like to call myself one of your sons;
my inner nature has ... set its course by your creations
as by signal fires."

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind. 51

 HegeI was then in his fifties and at the peak of his
career; he did not need anything from Goethe, and he
did not pay such extravagant compliments glibly. Yet in
the voluminous literature on Hegel this declaration has
been largely ignored, along with the abundant evidence
that bears it out. Professors trained in analytical
philosophy find it almost impossible to believe that
Goethe's impact on Gennan philosophy could be com-
parable to Kant's. After all, Kant had doctrines and of-
fered arguments while Goethe was a poet. It is assumed
that literature and philosophy are two totally separate
fields. Are they not taught in different departments?
To make matters worse, Goethe's life, though only
three years longer than Kant's, was incomparably richer
and more interesting, and the body of his writings and
letters-143 volumes in the most complete edition-plus
his published conversations is so vast that scholars in
other fields would much rather not get involved with
him. Given that situation, talk of immersion hardly
helps. What we need is a bill of particulars, which I shall
sum up after recalling how great Goethe's impact actually
was.
Lord Byron, who had no small opinion of himself,
dedicated his Sardanapalus in 1821 "To the Illustrious
Goethe" as "the homage of a literary vassal to his liege
lord, the first of existing writers, who has created the
literature of his own country." Like Hegel in his letter,
Byron summed up definitively what a whole generation
felt.
Shelley translated into English what were then con-
sidered the two most shocking parts of Goethe's Faust:
the Prologue in Heaven (we have seen how offen-
sive some of Shelley's contemporaries found that) and
the Walpurgis Night. Coleridge rendered into English
Schiller's Piccolomini and Death of Wallenstein and,
like Schiller, tried to synthesize Kant and Goethe.
George Henry Lewes wrote a two-volume Life and

52. DISCOVERING THE MIND

Works of Goethe (1855) while George Eliot, who lived
with him, translated into English the most important
work written by any of Hegers students, Ludwig Feuer-
bach's Essence of Christianity (1854). Earlier, she had
translated the vastly influential Life of Jesus Critically
Examined by David Friedrich Strauss, who had also
been one of Hegel's students (in three volumes, 1846).
George Eliot is now remembered as a major novelist, but
in those days people in Great Britain knew that German
philosophy and literature were not separate realms.
Until Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold died in the
1880s, the British educated public could hardly forget
that.
Goethe was not a prophet without honor in his own
country. Although he was born in 1749, and Kant in
1724, Goethe was admired as the greatest German poet
long before Kant established his reputation in 1781 with
the publication of his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant be-
came famous at the age of fifty-seven. Goethe, who was
twenty-five years younger, was acclaimed all over
Europe by the time he was twenty-five. His Storm and
Stress play, GlJtz von Berlichingen (1773) made him the
hero of the younger generation, and a year later his first
novel, Werther, inspired a wave of suicides not only in
Germany but also, for example, in France. When Goethe
was twenty-six, three different illicit editions of his col-
lected works appeared, and he had a greater reputation
than any German poet had ever had before him. Nor did
any other German approximate his fame until he died in
his eighties in 1832, or for that matter since then.
His unparalleled impact was due primarily to his
poetic genius, to the force of his personality, and to the
way he developed over a period of almost sixty years.
His influence on philosophy and on the discovery of the
mind was not based on a body of doctrines or, least of all,
arguments; it was a function of his character and life
which were highly visible both directly and in the mul-

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 53

ticolored reflection of his works. As Goethe's Faust says
in the first scene of the Second Part: "Am farbigen
Abglanz haben WiT das Leben" ("In many-hued reflec-
tion we have life").

15 ~ In sum, Goethe made at least

four crucial contributions to the discovery of the mind.
First, he provided a model of autonomy that kept his
contemporaries from taking seriously Kant's conception
of autonomy. Goethe's model may well have been as
influential as any since Socrates' and it had a decisive
impact not only on generations of writers and artists but
also, for example, on Nietzsche, Freud, and existen-
tialism. (Like Kant, Goethe did not consider Jesus a
model of autonomy.)
Secondly, Goethe opposed the essentialism of those
who considered the mind or soul a ghost in the machine
or a spirit that resides behind or above the phenomenal
self. Many learned from him that man is his deeds, that
mind is what it does, and that the way to discover the
mind is not through concept-mongering but through ex-
perience. His approach was unusual, and Nietzsche and
Freud followed in his footsteps when they taught us to
see better.
Thirdly, he saw that the best, if not the only, way to
understand the mind and everything spiritual is through
its development. He was not a structuralist but an
evolutionist.
Finally, he suggested the possibility of a non-
mathematical, non-Newtonian science. Whatever one
may think of that, the greatest advances in the discovery
of the mind were made by men who accepted this idea.
Those greatly influenced by Goethe found three
paths open to them. The first involved acceptance of his
disparagement of mathematics and an assimilation of
nature to mind. This was the path taken by Hegel. He

54 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

was, however, also deeply influenced by Kant, and felt
compelled to affect in all his works a rigor that while not
by any means mathematical, was supposed to involve
necessity and certainty.
The second path involved a sharp distinction be-
tween nature and mind. Wilhelm Dilthey distinguished
between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswis-
senschaften and labored his life long to develop some
sort of a methodology for the latter. The concept of the
"mental sciences" is not as clear as it might be. It cer-
tainly embraces the humanities, but one may wonder
how the social sciences fit this dichotomy. Yet the fun-
damental idea was clear enough. It was that mind, or
Geist, unlike nature, had to be studied in tenns of de-
velopment and history. History was an arch-
Geisteswissenschaft. In a way, Dilthey's project was
more modest than Hegel's; he let go of nature but still
tried to work out a method for all the "mental sciences."
The third path was still more modest and fitted in a
little better with the growing tendency toward spe-
cialization. This was the path chosen by Freud, who
concentrated on a single science, psychology. One could
also say that he sought to create a new science, a new
kind of psychology, namely psychoanalysis.That he ad-
vanced the discovery of the mind far more than either
Hegel or Dilthey is obvious; but how much all three
men owed to Goethe is certainly not a commonplace.
In conclusion, it is remarkable how greatly both
Kant and Goethe were influenced by their own type of
mind. I hope to show soon how Kant assumed in effect
that his mind, which was in many ways exceptional, was
the timeless paradigm of the mind. We shall see this in
his ethics and aesthetics. Moreover, being afraid of
change and guarding rigidly against it in his life, taking
heroic measures to prevent it, he naturally failed to note
how the mind of an individual, not to speak of the human
mind in general, develops. Goethe, on the other hand,

Goethe and the Discovery of the Mind ~ 33

was a man who developed more dramatically and
quickly than the common run; and seeing that his own
mind and his works could not be comprehended except
in tenns of development, he taught men that the key to
comprehension of everything-nature as well as
mind-was development.
If one had pointed out to Goethe that this was what
he had done, it would hardly have distressed him. He
thought that other minds were more or less like his at
least in this respect, and that he and the rest were part of
nature and not basically different from it. Kant, on the
other hand, could not have taken this point in his smde.
The extreme obscurity of some philosophers, including
Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, was due in part to an
attempt-not conscious, to be sure-to hide something
from themselves. They were afraid of something that
kept them-even Kierkegaard, who had a wealth of
insights-from contributing as much as they might have
done to the discovery of the mind. What they were afraid
of was the discovery of their own minds.

56 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 PART~

Influences:
Herder, Lessing, Schiller,
Fichte, Schopenhauer ~
 16 ... In all the years Kant taught at
the University ofKl)nigsberg, he had only one student of
genius, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). But when
Herder published the first volume of his major work on
the philosophy of history in 1784, Kant reviewed it very
disparagingly. And in 1799 Herder published a two-
volume attack on Kant which he called "A Metacritique
on the Critique of Pure Reason." The following year he
published a three-volume attack on Kant's aesthetics:
Kalligone. In Germany, Herder's name is familiar to
most educated people, but few are even aware of these
polemics, nor are any of Herder's works read widely.
What people tend to know about Herder is that he took a
pioneering interest in folk poetry and published a col-
lection of his own translations, "Peoples' Voices in
Songs" (Stimmen der VDlker in Liedern); also that in the
early 1770s, when he was in his late twenties and
Goethe in his early twenties, he made a great impression
on Goethe.
None of this would make it necessary to consider
Herder in this book, if it had not been suggested in re-
 cent years, notably by Isaiah Berlin, that he was the
seminal figure who, more than anyone else, brought
about some of the changes that I have credited to
Goethe's influence. As one reads Sir Isaiah's character-
istically erudite study of "Herder and the Enlighten-
ment," one is struck by many interesting quotations from
one or another of Herder's essays. But Berlin never con-
siders the case for Goethe, nor does he discuss the atti-
tudes of the German romantics, or of Hegel,
Schopenhauer, N ietzsche, or Freud toward either Her-
der or Goethe. Whoever does that will find that all of
them paid overwhelming tribute to Goethe, none of
them to Herder. Near the end of his essay Sir Isaiah
admits: "The consequences of Herder's doctrines did
not make themselves felt immediately" (p. 212). He goes
on to say that .. the full effect" was not felt until very
much later; really only with .. the rise of modem an-
tirationalist movements-nationalism, fascism, existen-
tialism, emotivism, and the wars and revolutions made
in the name of two among them; that is to say, not until
our own time, and perhaps not altogether even today." It
is not shown that fascists, existentialists, or emotivists
actually were influenced by Herder, or how a force
might suddenly act at a distance after the lapse of more
than a hundred years.
Charles Taylor made matters worse when he
claimed repeatedly in his Hegel that Herder had greatly
influenced Hegel, without as much as considering any of
the rather few passages in Hegel that deal with Herder.1
As it happens, Hegel was interested in, though probably
not much influenced by, Herder's mentor, Johann Georg
Hamann, and he disparaged Herder as not being in the
same class. He was also interested in Fritz Jacobi, to
whom he referred often, and seems to have considered

1 See also my review article in the London Times Literary Supple-

ment.

60 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

him far superior to Herder2 and the most representative
figure of what Berlin calls ccantirationalist movements."
That Herder influenced Hegel would need to be shown,
but Taylor produces no evidence at all, and Berlin does
not even claim it.
Of Schopenhauer's few passing references to Her-
der only one is of sufficient interest to be quoted here:
Yet nothing has true value except what one has thought at
first solely for oneself For one can divide thinkers into
those who think at first for themselves and those who
immediately think for others. The former are the
genuine ones, self-thinkers in both senses of that term;
they are the real philosophers. For they alone are serious
about what is at stake. Moreover, the enjoyment and
happiness of their existence consists in thinking. The
others are sophists: they want to shine and seek their
happiness in what they hope to gain from others in this
way: that is what they are serious about. To which class a
person belongs is easily seen from his whole manner.
Lichtenberg is a model of the first type; Herder already
belongs to the second.3
Nietzsche devoted a section (#118) in The Wan-
derer and His Shadow to Herder. It begins: "Herder is
none of all the things that he led others to believe about
him (and wished to believe himself): no great thinker
and inventor ... " And in Section 125 Nietzsche re-
marked: "For the subtler and stronger minds (like
Lichtenberg) even Herder's main work, for example, his
Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, was
dated even when it appeared." There is only one other
substantive reference to Herder in Nietzsche's books, in
section 3 of The Case ofWagner:
One knows Goethe's fate in moraline-sour, old-maidish
Germany. He always seemed offensive to Germans ....
• See also Heget's letter to Mehrnel, Aug. 26, 1801.
• Parerga & Paralipomena, vol. 11, chap. XXII, sec. 270.

Inftuences: Herder, Lessing, Scbiller, Flcbte, Schopenhauer.61

 What did they hold against Goethe? The "mount of
Venus"; and that he had written Venetian Epigrams.
Klopstock already felt called upon to deliver a moral
sermon to him; there was a time when Herder liked to
use the word "Priapus" whenever he spoke of Goethe.

To be sure, Herder sought to oppose Kant's influ-

ence, but Goethe, Hegel, and Schopenhauer all found
his Metacritique of Pure Reason embarrassingly bad,
and Hegel compared it very unfavorably with Hamann's
earlier short essay with the same title. 4 By the time Her-
der's work appeared in 1799, the leading spirits in Ger-
many no longer needed to be convinced that something
was wrong with Kant, and they agreed that Herder's at-
tempt was utterly inadequate.
Freud cited or discussed Goethe more than a
hundred times in his works, and Herder not even once.
Goethe's crucial importance for Freud's thought will be
taken up in the last volume of this trilogy.
That it was Goethe and not Herder who exerted the
decisive anti-Kantian influence on subsequent German
thinkers is, I think, undeniable. But that leaves open the
question whether Goethe himself was decisively influ-
enced by Herder. Berlin never addresses this question.
In 1812, Goethe himself described at length in his au-
tobiography how strongly he had been affected by his
encounter with Herder in Strassburg, when he himself
was barely over twenty. Ever since, it has been a com-
monplace of the vast Goethe literature that Herder, who
was five years older, opened Goethe's eyes to Gothic
architecture and to Shakespeare, and that he stimulated
Goethe to collect folk songs. The first major fruit of this
encounter, Goethe's GDtz, thrown into the world imme-
diately afterwards with all the force of an eruption,

4Werke, ed. Glockner, vol. xx. pp. 248. Schopenhauer called it "a
bad book" (World as Will and Idea, vol. I, sec. 9).

62 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

leaves no doubt that it would be exceedingly generous to
call Herder a midwife.
Sir Isaiah notes very perceptively that "Herder
pleaded for that which he himself conspicuously-
lacked," that is, "the unity of the human personality."
One could say that what he called for was what Goethe
had and was. Herder made the young Goethe aware of
what was in him and wanted out: that was the secret of
Herder's impact on Goethe. But what made history was
much less Herder's preaching than Goethe's personality
as embodied both in his life and in his work.
Regarding Herder's "magnum opus, The Ideas for a
Philosophy of the History of Mankind," it is interesting
to note that "in August 1783 Herder and Goethe had
come to be on good terms again, and this proved benefi-
cial for the work on the Ideas. Herder conceived them in
close collaboration and intellectual association with
Goethe, though he never allowed himself to become di-
rectly dependent on Goethe. "5 By the time his main
work appeared in four volumes (1784-91), the age dif-
ference between the two men had become immaterial
and Herder was no longer the mentor but almost totally
overshadowed by Goethe.
Goethe's major creations are nothing if not organic.
They do not bear the marks of outside influences, are not
forced or fabricated, but convey the feeling that Goethe
formulated in Faust's words to Wagner, written when
the poet was in his early twenties and found already in
the Urfaust:
What you don't feel, you will not grasp by art,
Unless it wells out of your soul
And with sheer pleasure takes control,
Compelling every listener's heart.
But sit-and sit, and patch and knead,
Cook a ragout, reheat your hashes,
Kantzenbach (1970), p. 95. For a full discussion of Goethe's influ-
11
ence on Herder see Haym's Herder, vol. 11, pp. 197-207.

InRuences: Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Fichte, Schopenhauer ~ 63

 Blow at the sparks and try to breed
A fire out of piles of ashes!
Children and apes may think it great.
If that should titillate your gum.
But from heart to heart you will never create
If from your heart it does not come (lines 534 -45).

17~~ Yet Goethe did have one

great predecessor, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
(1729-81), who may even have exerted a decisive influ-
ence on Faust. In one of Lessing's polemics, Duplik
("Rejoinder," 1778), we encounter a famous passage that
had an incalculable impact:
Not the truth in whose possession some human being is
or thinks he is, but the honest trouble he has taken to get
behind the truth is what constitutes the worth of a human
being. For it is not through the possession but through
the search for truth that his powers expand, and in this
alone consists his ever growing perfection. Possession
makes tranquil, indolent, and proud.
If God held in his closed right hand all truth and in his
left hand only the ever live drive for truth, albeit with the
addition that I should always and evermore err, and he
said to me, Choose! I should humbly grab his left hand,
saying: Father, give! Pure truth is after all for you alonel

When this passage first appeared in print, the Ur-

faust was finished, but it did not yet contain the Pro-
logue in Heaven, the pact between Faust and Mephis-
topheles, or the scene in which Faust is saved in the end.
Lessing's magnificent words are taken up in the Pro-
logue when the Lord says, "Man errs as long as he
strives," and in the final scene of Part Two in which the
angels sing:
Who always strives with all his power
We are allowed to save.

1i18uences: Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Fichte, Schopenhauer. 65

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.,rohgc6,n "'r~etcn ~Atte,:' ',. "
- '1 ',r. ~, "enll' .,Ie 'onn . mon auc() '''Oft tin er ..,elt-
., lauftilm' luftmmCIIgcre,t,n 'J17l"fcOlae, &erm
'f
.. ... I,. .:' .~\',
." .. I.'" •
. . ' "
fte,'" .

;
1\
. (
....

.•. ~ .
~.
..',,' -" ;.
, . ..
Moreover, the central notion that tranquility is not desir-
able is the heart of the pact scene:
If ever tranquil I lie on a bed of sloth,
I shall be done for then and there!
Actually, Lessing himself had begun to write a Faust
play, and Goethe probably knew something about it be-
fore he even finished his own Urfaust. Here is a con-
temporary report about Lessing's project:
The scene begins with a conference of the spirits of hell,
in which the subalterns give an account to the supreme
devil of the work they have undertaken and ac-
complished on earth. . . . The last of the under-devils
who comes in reports that he found at least one man on
earth at whom one simply cannot get; he has no passion,
no weakness ... only one drive, one inclination, an in-
satiable thirst for science and knowledge. Hahl cries the
supreme devil, then he is mine, forever mine, and more
securely mine than if he had any other passion I ... Now
Mephistopheles receives the task and instructions how to
go about catching poor Faust. . . . Enough, the hellish
hosts think they have accomplished their work; they sing
songs of triumph in the fifth act-when an apparition
from the higher world interrupts them in the most unex-
pected and yet most natural ... way: "Don't be trium-
phantl" the angel shouts at them; "you have not van-
quished humanity and science; the deity did not give
man the noblest of all drives in order to make him eter-
nally unhappy; what you saw and think you possess now
was nothing but a phantom."

This report by Captain von Blankenburg, dated

Leipzig, May 14, 1784, was published in volume 5 of
Litteratur und VDlkerkunde (Dessau and Leipzig, 1784,
pages 82-84), and it must have come to the attention of
Goethe, who was wondering how he might complete his
own Faust. That Lessing had been working on a Faust
drama was known widely ever since the publication of

68 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

his seventeenth Letter Concerning the Most Recent Lit-
erature, February 16, 1759. At that time many men of
letters still considered the subject unsuitable for serious
literature, and in a letter to Lessing dated November 19,
1755, Moses Mendelssohn had remarked that the audi-
ence was likely to burst into laughter if they heard some-
one declaim from the stage: "Faustus! Faustus!"
The report of 1784 may well have left its mark on
Goethe's conception, and it is doubly noteworthy be-
cause Lessing was the first major writer who proposed to
save Faust in the end. But in following Lessing, Goethe
followed his own genius. It would have been unthink-
able for him to consign Faust to hell, and the feeling for
striving, becoming, and process was of the essence of the
young Goethe and not an alien element that needs to be
traced to some outside influence.

18 ~ Goethe's younger contem-

poraries could hardly fail to follow his development with
the keenest interest and excitement. Let us see very
briefly how some of them responded. Friedrich Schiller
(1759-1805) was the first to try to reconcile Kant and
Goethe. He has always been most popular as a dramatist
and poet-if possible, even more so than Goethe. He
was also a professor of history at the University of Jena,
where Fichte was for a while his slightly younger col-
league, and his philosophical publications were enor-
mously influential.
Superficially considered, they are contributions to
aesthetics. The titles show that: "On Chann and Dig-
nity," "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of the Human
Being," "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry," and "On
the Sublime." But twentieth-century complaints about
"the dreariness of aesthetics" do not apply to Schiller's
work. Although the influence of Kant is writ large in his
thought, Schiller was no scholastic. He did not deal with

Inftuences: Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Fichte, Schopenhauer ~ 69

aesthetics as one of the accepted branches of philosophy,
but wrote about art because it was his life. He felt, to
quote from his fifteenth "letter," that a human being "is
wholly human only where he plays:'
His central concern was with being "wholly
human," with freedom and autonomy, and he consid-
ered art in this context. When he temporarily "aban-
doned poetry and drama" from 1789 to 1795, it was, as
Julius Elias put it in his article on Schiller in The Ency-
clopedia of Philosophy (1967), to "resolve these prob-
lems of the artist's-especially his own vocation:' As
Elias said directly before that, the problem that was
"most crucial for his own development" and had to be
resolved most urgently was "the profound inadequacy
he felt in himself compared with the effortless felicity of
Goethe's Olympian presence."
In Germany it has always been a commonplace both
that Schiller was a Kantian of sorts who kept referring to
Kant, and that in his aesthetic essays he tried to come to
terms with Goethe, who became his close friend in the
nineties. What has not been seen so clearly is that
Schiller' s problem was shared in a way by Schelling,
Hegel, and Schopenhauer, as well as many later think-
ers, especially in Germany. If one thought about
philosophical problems, one could not ignore Kant; but
neither could one ignore Goethe if one wished to deal
with art, the vocation of man, or autonomy.
Elias concludes his article by saying that Schiller's
insights have proved "fruitful in the philosophies of
thinkers as diverse as Hegel ... Nietzsche, Dilthey,
James, Jung ... , Marx," and others. In my Hegel (1965) I
devoted a whole section (7) of more than a dozen pages
to an attempt to demonstrate the formative influence of
Schiller's "On the Aesthetic Education of Man" on
Hegel, who called it "a masterpiece" as soon as it ap-
peared. In a comprehensive study of the discovery of the
mind one might well include a chapter on Schiller. Yet

70. DISCOVERING THE l\llND

 the key figures, from Hegel to N ietzsche and Freud,
have always felt rightly that, great as Schiller was,
Goethe was incomparably greater. And while some of
them, notably Hegel, did take much from Schiller, his
importance as a theorist was not least that he showed
how Goethe was relevant to some of Kant's problems.
In one of his early letters to Goethe, Schiller wrote
(January 7, 1795): "So much, however, is certain: the
poet is the only true human being, and the best
philosopher is only a caricature compared to him."
When he wrote this, Schiller did not feel conceited. The
poet par excellence was to his mind Goethe, and the best
philosopher Kant. A remark about Kant in Schiller's let-
ter to Goethe, December 22, 1798, helps to explain what
repelled Schiller: "There is still something about him
that, as in Luther's case, brings to mind a monk who, to
be sure, has opened his monastery but could not wholly
eliminate its traces."
Schiller responded enthusiastically to the most an-
timonastic and anti-Christian elements in Goethe.
Schiller has often been disparaged for being too
moralistic, but as soon as he had formed a friendship
with Goethe in 1794 he published Goethe's most con-
troversial poems: Roman Elegies in 1795, in Horen, the
journal he edited, and Venetian Epigrams in his
Musenalmanach auf das Jahr 1796. Both of these collec-
tions had been finished when Goethe wrote Carl Lud-
wig von Knebel on January 1, 1791, that he "was not
disinclined to publish the former. Herder advised
against it ... " When the old Goethe published a com-
prehensive edition of his works, he included both the
Elegies and the Epigrams in the first volume, in 1827. By
then he was seventy-eight and far from being the stuffed
shirt that many people suppose he became in his final
period.
In a letter about Schiller's "Aesthetic Education"
Goethe wrote (to Wilhelm von Humboldt, December 3,

InRuences: Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Fichte, Schopenhauer~ 71

1795): "He has very felicitous ideas that, once they have
been stated, will gain acceptance by and by, however
much they will be resisted in the beginning. I fear that
first one will contradict him vehemently and in a few
years one will copy him without mentioning him."
After Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, not to speak of
their epigones and the whole philosophical tradition that
developed in their wake, Schiller's prose strikes us as
relatively clear and vivid. But his opponents lavished
contempt on his lack of clarity. In the lengthy introduc-
tion to their bilingual edition of the "Aesthetic Educa-
tion" (with the original text and a new English version
on facing pages, followed by a commentary and other
apparatus) E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby deal at
length with its "Reception and Repercussions" (p.
cxxxiii fT.). In a rather typical long review Schiller was
taken to task for his obscurity which had held up the
reviewer on every page, his use of technical tenns, and
the strain involved in adapting his own style to Kant's. In
the end the reviewer expressed the hope that someone
might "render some piece, whether by Mr. Schiller or
his friend Mr. Fichte ... into German" (p. cxxxv).
Shakespeare makes us sympathize with Coriolanus
by giving him such inferior opponents and leads us to
feel, as we listen to his detractors, that his faults are
hardly faults. Similarly, the shallowness and obtuseness
of Schiller's detractors did its share to persuade Hegel
and many lesser men that clarity was for dolts. The
champions of clarity unfortunately were not in the same
league with Kant or Schiller, and in the nineties the lines
were drawn, disastrously.

19 ... When this review of Schil-

ler's essay appeared, Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762-1814) was no longer "his friend." But they had
been friends, their concerns were in many ways similar,

72 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 and the development of German idealism has to be un-
derstood against the background of Goethe's work and
Schiller's attempt to reconcile Goethe and Kant.
Fichte, though no longer read much today, was for a
long time regarded as Kant's most important successor. It
was customary to consider Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel as the great German "Idealists" who had to be
studied in this order, and Hegel's death in 1832 was seen
as the end of classical German philosophy. One of the
disadvantages of this approach was that it made Hegel
even more inaccessible than he had to be on account of
his difficult style. For Fichte's and Schelling's writings
were voluminous and almost equally difficult. Each of
these philosophers almost seems to have felt compelled
to outdo his predecessors, beginning with Kant-also in
obscurity.
That Fichte modeled his philosophical style on
Kant's is undeniable. He had been so impressed by
Kant's works that he walked to KOnigsberg to meet his
mentor and to show him the manuscript of his first book:
Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation. Kant persuaded
his own publisher to bring it out; the publisher, to
Fichte's chagrin, omitted the author's name and preface;
and the book was immediately hailed as Kant's own
philosophy of religion. When it was revealed that the
book was not by Kant but by Fichte, Fichte became fa-
mous instantly. Obviously, the book could never have
been attributed to Kant by practically everybody, if the
style had not been so similar to Kant's.
Three years later, in 1795, Fichte sent Schiller a
contribution for the journal Schiller edited, in which the
"Aesthetic Education" had begun to appear, and in a
letter dated June 24 Schiller turned it down, criticizing
not only some of the ideas but also, at some length, the
style. Three days later, Fichte replied and first defended
his ideas, then attacked Schiller's style-all of this with
the most profound respect for Schiller. His own images,

InRuences: Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Fichte, Schopenhauer. 73

he said, came never "in place of a concept but before or
after the concept," while Schiller's style struck him "as
entirely novel. ... You enthral the imagination, which
can only be free, and want to compel it to think. That it
cannot do. This is what causes, I think, the exhausting
exertion that your philosophical writings impose on me
and have imposed on several other people. I first have
to translate everything you write before I understand it;
and others have the same experience." As for his own
long and intricate periods, the trouble is "that the reader
does not know how to declaim. If you would hear me
read some of my periods .... But you are right, our pub-
lic does not know how to declaim, and one is better
advised to proceed accordingly, as Lessing did." Would
that he and others had done that I
The tone of Fichte's letter does him credit, but he
reaped a very harsh reply. Schiller wrote back:
... I really should have told myself that precisely be-
cause you write in this manner and because you think of
it as you do, because you are that kind of an individual,
you cannot be reached by any reasons that have their
source in me as an individual; for man's aesthetic drive is
the result of his nature, and reasoning may succeed in
changing a few kinds of ideas but can never reverse na-
ture .... We feel differently, we are different, extremely
different natures, and I don't know what can be done
about that.

As for Fichte's criticism of Schiller's style and Fichte's

claim that the public, while buying and admiring Schil-
ler's philosophical writings, had not yet cited "any
opinion, any passage, any result," SchilIer replied:

There is nothing cruder than the taste of the present

German public, and to work at changing this wretched
taste-not to derive my models from it-is the serious
plan of my life.

74 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 SchilIer's letter was long, but one more passage is
extremely relevant here:
... The appealllou suggest, Goethe, would really please
you least of all. But Goethe really cannot do you justice,
and his judgment cannot prove anything against you. He
is too much of a stranger in the regions of philosophy and
hence could not be reconciled to the aesthetic transgres-
sions that he would hold against you. It is odd enough
that you have to find out from me how little Goethe is fit
to take your side.

And how, Schiller continues, could Fichte fail to know

that in aesthetics Goethe deferred to Schiller's judgment
even "in his own manuscripts and writings."
Three years later, in 1798, Fichte was charged with
atheism and eventually resigned from the University of
Jena rather than apologize for his part in the first issue of
Volume 8 of the Philosophisches Journal, of which he
was one of the two editors. Two articles gave offense, the
first of them by Fichte himself. The conclusion of
Fichte's article is relevant here. "Two excellent poets
have expressed this confession of faith of a reasonable
and good human being in an inimitably beautiful way."
The article ended with a very long quotation from
Goethe's Faust: A Fragment (1790) and five lines from
Schiller's poem, "Words of Faith." Fichte did not name
the poets. He did not have to. Everybody knew who they
were.
Like Schiller, Fichte sought to reconcile Kant and
Goethe. So did Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860).

20 ~ Of Schopenhauer's opinion
of Fichte one might say that it was unprintable, if
Schopenhauer himself had not expressed it in his books
again and again and again. Actually, he considered
Hegel even worse than Fichte and Schelling, and his

In8uences: Herder, Lessing, Scbiller, Fichte, Schopenhauer ~ 73

comments on Hegel are occasionally as grotesque and
downright funny as his notorious diatribe "Ueber die
Weiber" (On Women) in his Parerga und Paralipomena
(1851). Like Martin Luther, Schopenhauer was a vir-
tuoso of vituperation. But he was not so coarse and
scatological. He was witty, vitriolic, and-in contrast to
his ethic-bursting with resentment.
Schopenhauer saw Hegel as the absolute climax of a
development that had begun with Fichte and been car-
ried further by Schelling. In the "Critique of the Kantian
Philosophy" that Schopenhauer appended to the first
volume of his magnum opus in 1819 he said of Fichte:
"He counted quite rightly on the lack of judgment and
the niaiserie [inanity] of the public, which accepted bad
sophisms, mere hocus-pocus, and nonsensical wishy-
washy [Wischiwaschi] for proof." In the first chapter of
the second volume, added to the second edition (1844),
"Fichte is the father of pseudophilosophy {Schein-
PhilosophieJ, of dishonest method."
In the second volume of the Parerga and
Paralipomena, finally-to summarize material that could
easily fill a long chapter-two specific criticisms are of
interest:

Something surreptitious that was introduced by Fichte

and has been habilitated since may be found in the ex-
pression the [ or ego [das [ch]. Here the noun and the
article in front of it transform that which is essentially
and simply subjective into an object; it is the knower as
opposed to, and as the condition of, everything known.
The wisdom of all languages has expressed this by not
treating [ as a noun, and Fichte therefore had to do vio-
lence to language to make his intent prevail. Something
still more impudently surreptitious in this same Fichte is
his impudent abuse of the word posit that, instead of
having been reproached and exploded, is still in frequent
use to this day among all philosophists [Philosophastern] ,
following his example and relying on his authority as a con-

76. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 stant aid to sophisms and deceptive doctrines. Posit, po-
nere, from which propositio is derived, has been a purely
logical expression ever since ancient times and means
that in the logical context of a disputation or some other
discussion one supposes, presupposes, or affirms some-
thing to begin with, granting it logical validity and formal
truth for the present, while its reality, material truth, and
actuality remain altogether untouched and undecided.
Fichte, however, gradually gained surreptitiously a real
but of course obscure and foggy meaning for this posit-
ing, and the ninnies accepted that as valid, and the soph-
ists use it all the time; for since the ego first posited itself
and afterwards the non-ego, positing has come to mean
creating, producing, or in brief putting into the world,
one does not know how; and everything one wants to
assume as existing without any reasons and wants to put
over and impose on others, is simply posited, and there it
stands and is there, altogether real. That is the still prev-
alent method of so-called post-Kantian philosophy and
is Fichte's work. s

Although Parerga and Paralipomena was the work

that very belatedly established Schopenhauer's
reputation-before the failure of the revolutions of 1848
his pessimism had been exceedingly untimely, and he
was ignored-his incisive critique of positing was ig-
nored. One kept on "positing," and to this day the le-
gions who write on Hegel as well as Fichte and Schelling
are for the most part not bothered by the frequent use of
this device.
The ego, das Ich, is nowadays associated with
Freud, at least by nonphilosophers; but Freud's contrast
of ego and id, or Das Ich und das Es, to cite the title of
his classic of 1923, is not open to Schopenhauer's crit-
icism. What Schopenhauer did object to, on the other
hand, was not Fichte's innovation but goes back to Kant.
Schopenhauer revered Kant and, although he criticized
• End of sec. 28.

Inftuences: Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Fichte, Schopenhauer. 77

Kant at length, refused to see how Kant had been in
many ways a disaster. In some ways he himself was cor-
rupted by Kant, even stylistically. But for the fateful
notion of the ego and the proliferation of pseudodemon-
strations he held Fichte responsible instead of recogniz-
ing that it was Kant who had established the affectation
of a rigor that, on close inspection, turns out to be an
illusion that depends in large part on extreme obscurity.
That Kant's philosophy was his own point of depar-
ture, Schopenhauer himself never tired of saying. His
own greatest discovery was, as he saw it, that the
thing-in-itself was one, not many, and that it was will-
blind will. On the face of it-and not only on the face of
it-this is a bold anthropomorphism, a projection into
ultimate reality of what is first of all experienced as the
quintessence of man and, presumably, of the author
himself. I suspect that this image of humanity and of
himself was influenced by what Schopenhauer once re-
ferred to in his magnum opus as "the great Goethe" and
"his immortal masterpiece, Faust."7 If there is one rep-
resentative figure in world literature whose quintes-
sence is striving it is surely Goethe's Faust. Incidentally,
while Schopenhauer discusses Kant at greater length
and in more detail than any other author, there is no
writer whom he mentions and quotes more often than
Goethe, and the range of the works he cites is most im-
pressive. For our purposes two quotations from Volume
2 of Parerga und Paralipomena should suffice.
The first is a critique of Kant in which Goethe is not
mentioned but nevertheless provides the countermodel.
Here Schopenhauer finds in Kant the source of some-
thing for which he often-and also in the continuation of
this passage-takes to task Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel:

SammtUche Werke. Grossherzog Wilhelm Emst Ausgabe, vol. I, p.

'7
515.

78 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

~'t~,
-
\.
 A strange and unworthy definition of philosophy that,
however, is found even in Kant, is that it is a science
based on mere concepts. After all, the whole possession
of concepts is nothing but what has been deposited in it
after having been borrowed and begged from intuited
knowledge [anschauUchen Erkenntnisj, this real and in-
exhaustible fount of all insight. Hence a true philosophy
cannot be spun from mere abstract concepts, but has to
be founded On observation and experience, internal as
well as external. 8

Here Schopenhauer speaks as Goethe's, not as

Kant's disciple, and the point at issue is obviously of the
first importance. Finally, my point that Schopenhauer,
like so many others, was in effect trying to reconcile
Goethe and Kant, is illustrated neatly by the last sen-
tence of Section 58: "Kant's weak side is that in which
Goethe is great; and vice versa."

8 Sec. 9. See also "The Will in Nature," Introduction: "Kant, after

theoretical reason is done, lets his categorical imperative, which has
been extrapolated [herausgeklaubten] out of mere concepts, appear
as deus ex machina with its absolute ought."

80
 Kant:
The Strucrure
of the Mind ~
 21 .... Kant was one of the greatest
and most influential philosophers of all time. The range
of his publications was exceptionally wide, but ifpressed
about the nature of his major contributions most philos-
ophers would point to his theory of knowledge and his
ethics. Both, as well as much of his comprehensive
vision, depend on his model of the human mind. Unfor-
tunately his model of the mind is quite implausible.
While few of his successors or admirers have accepted it,
many have accepted the need for an essentially un-
psychological, unempirical theory of the mind.
He was the first great philosopher since the Middle
Ages who was a university professor, and in ever so
many ways he is the most representative philosopher of
modern times. Few philosophers since Kant have ap-
proximated his genius, but many of his shortcomings are
widely shared even today, and to some extent at least
this is due to his phenomenal influence.
The impact of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was
almost incredible. The first edition appeared in 1781
when Kant was not yet known very widely; the second,
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 extensively revised, in 1787; the third, which like all
subsequent editions was a reprint of the second, fol-
lowed in 1790; a fourth edition in 1794; an unauthorized
reprint in four volumes a year later; and the fifth edition
in 1799. Within roughly ten years of its first appearance,
the book was discussed all over Germany, "at Protestant
as well as Catholic universities."1 Soon all of the major
German philosophers took their departure from Kant.
Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Fries, and Schopenhauer are
only the most famous examples. How are we to explain
this stunning success of a book that is so badly written
and so difficult to read?
At one blow, Kant had created philosophy in Ger-
man. There had been a few great German philosophers
before him, but none of comparable stature had written
in German. Leibniz (1646-1716) had written in French
and Latin, and there had been no other German
philosopher of even remotely comparable rank since
Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-64), who had also written in
Latin. So had Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), who taught
Thomas Aquinas. Master Eckhart, the great mystic, who
died in 1327, had sometimes written in German, but
Kant's first Critique was the first unquestionably major
philosophical book in German. Its appearance in 1781
was comparable to Luther's Reformation in 1517 and al-
most immediately recognized as the dawn of a new era
in German cultural history. By the time Hegel died,
exactly fifty years later, Germany could look with pride
upon one of the great philosophical traditions of all time,
comparable to the Greek and the British.
Neither of those, nor Indian or Chinese philosophy,
was ever dominated nearly so much by a single writer,
nor did any of them begin so palpably with the publica-
tion of a single book. German philosophy was born late
but caught up quickly. Descartes had published his Vis-

1 Schultz (1965), p. 112.

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 85

cours de la m~thode in French in 1637; Hobbes his
Leviathan in English in 1651. But it was only in 1781
that a Gennan book on philosophy appeared that was at
least as great as either. About that there is agreement,
but we must still ask what was so great about it.
Like Luther, Kant modified the traditional religious
picture of the world and created a new world view that
was adapted to the needs of modern man and had im-
mense appeal. David Hume had argued that we cannot
really know that every event has a cause. He seemed to
have deprived modern science of its foundation. Kant
saved human knowledge, including modern science,
while at the same time leaving room for God, immortal-
ity, and freedom.
What he really believed about God and immortality
is arguable, and I shall return to these questions later.
But whatever Kant's own feelings may have been, the
fact that he made room for belief in both while at the
same time accepting the scientific world picture helps to
account for the unprecedented impact of his work. Re-
garding free will, it is as plain as it could be from Kant's
writings that he fervently believed in that. This faith was
central in his world view, and it is not going too far to
suggest that his most basic problem was: How are au-
tonomy andfree will possible in a deterministic Newto-
nian universe? It was his ability to solve this problem
that persuaded him beyond the shadow of a doubt that
his world picture was no mere hypothesis but must be
right. At the same time this feat also did its share to
persuade others.
Kant's doctrine was designed to reconcile science
and religion. The religion in question was not that of
Thomas Aquinas, nor that of Luther, who had called rea-
son "the devil's bride" and a "beautiful whore." Here
are three more quotations from Luther: "Faith must
trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding,
and whatever it sees it must put out of sight, and wish to

86 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 know nothing but the word of God." "We learn to blind
reason when we reach the point where faith begins, and
we give her a vacation." "Reason must be deluded,
blinded, and destroyed."2
The religion Kant tried to reconcile with science
was, to cite the title of his book on religion (1793), "reli-
gion within the bounds of mere reason alone"-a reli-
gion that was cleansed of everything that contradicted
reason. In his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) Kant
offered three "postulates"-of God, free will, and im-
mortality. Under his influence, large numbers of people
came to believe that the existence of God, the freedom of
the will, and the immortality of the soul were the three
most crucial tenets of "religion." One rarely stopped to
ask whether the Buddha, the Jina, or Lao-tze had be-
lieved in God, whether Moses and the early Hebrew
prophets had believed in the immortality of the soul, or
whether Luther and Calvin had believed in free will.
Kant's doctrines quickly became immensely popular
among Protestants, not only in Germany, and became
the basis of liberal Protestantism, which is in many ways
closer to Kant than to either Luther or Calvin. Liberal
Judaism also owes a great deal to Kant.
Kant claimed to have accomplished a Copernican
revolution. Actually, his appeal is inseparable from the
fact that in his Critiqu.e of Pure Reason he brought off an
anti-Copernican revolution. He reversed Copernicus'
stunning blow to human self-esteem. Before Copernicus
the Western world had believed that man was at the
center of the universe and that the sun revolved around
our earth. Copernicus' doctrine involved what Freud
liked to call a "cosmological mortification" of man's
self-Iove.3 A generation earlier, Nietzsche had remarked:
I For the references and more quotations in the same vein see Kauf-
mann (1958), sec. 69; for a splendid account of Luther, see Manus
(1974).
aWerke, XII, p. 7 (1917). See also XI, p. 294, and XIV, p. 109.

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 87

 "Since Copemicus man seems to have got himself on an
inclined plane; now he is slipping faster and faster away
from the center into-what? into nothingness? into a
'penetrating sense of his nothingness'?"4 Students of
Kant are taught that he sought to counter David Hume's
skepticism or positivism~r nihilism. But Kant's im-
mense impact is inseparable from his success in also
countering the nihilism that had developed in the wake
of Copemicus. He restored man to the center of the
world and actually accorded even greater importance to
man than the Book of Genesis had done. He tried to
prove that it is the human mind that gives nature its
laws. s
As we shall see, this notion is not as mad as it may
sound initially. It depends on Kant's distinction between
the phenomenal world and another world that lies be-
yond it and is unknowable. The conception of two
worlds, of appearance and ultimate reality, was old and
extremely venerable and thus did not have the earmarks
of an ad hoc hypothesis. We can trace it back to Plato and
beyond him to the Upanishads in India. Plato, like the
sages of the Upanishads, denigrated the world of sense
experience for the greater glory of an ultimate reality
that could be known. Like the Indians before him, Plato
urged men to turn their back on appearance, to recognize
its relative worthlessness, and to strive for knowledge of
reality. Indeed, Plato taught that only the other world,
which was beyond all change and time, could be known,
while the realm of appearance, which kept changing, did
not permit knowledge but only opinions. The Upani-
shads had also claimed that time and change were
illusory, but unlike Plato they had considered plurality
an illusion, insisting that ultimate reality is One. Plato
peopled the other world with many timeless Forms or

.. Genealogy, third essay, sec. 25 (1887).

11 A 125-27 and Prolegomena, 36. (See footnote 9 below.)

88 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

Ideas. Schopenhauer was the first to make much of the
similarities between Kant, Plato, and Indian thought,
and it was under Kant's aegis that German scholars in the
nineteenth century discovered and explored Indian
philosophy.
Max Muller (1823-1900), born in Germany, became
a professor at Oxford University and published superb
English translations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
and the Buddhist Dhammapada (both 1881), the Upani-
shads (1884), and the Vedas (1891). He also conceived
and edited the pioneering and still invaluable fifty-
volume series of English translations, The Sacred Books
of the East.
Paul Deussen (1845-1919), Nietzsche's friend,
published a book on Kant's categorical imperative (1891)
as well as studies of the Vedanta that are still widely read.
His multi volume history of philosophy begins with In-
dian philosophy and ends with Schopenhauer. By the
end of the nineteenth century, Indian philosophers were
taking enthusiastically to Kant, to Hegel, and to F. H.
Bradley's Appearance and Reality (1893).
Kant did not denigrate this world and was intent on
providing a secure basis for science. Indeed, it seemed
to some of his successors that he made so little of the
thing-in-itself that one might just as well dispense with
that and have a full-fledged idealism. But to Kant it
seemed essential that there be another world that cannot
be known, for to his mind religion and morality de-
pended on that. His religion was quite anticlerical and
unorthodox,6 but he cared deeply about human au-
tonomy and dignity which, he thought, could not be
grounded in the Newtonian universe but only in another
world.
Kant offered something to almost any taste, and not
only philosophical Idealists and liberal Protestants as

8 See his Rellg.on W.th'n the Bounds of Mere Reason Alone (1793).

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 89

well as liberal Jews and Hindus found inspiration in his
work but also, for example, Ludwig Wittgenstein and
Moritz Schlick. A book on Wittgenstein published in
1973 tried to show that Wittgenstein's Tractatus'was not
as Kantian as some earlier interpreters had thought. 7 Yet
Kant was the fountainhead of the idea that while science
gives us certainty, what is most important lies beyond its
reach. The Tractatus hints at that near the end (in Sec-
tion 6.52): "We feel that even when all possible scien-
tific questions are answered, the problems of our life
have not even begun to be touched." We know from Paul
Engelmann's book, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein
with a Memoir (1967), how deeply Wittgenstein felt that
the most important issues are not touched by science. In
other words, Wittgenstein clearly meant what he said at
the end of his short preface. He considered
the truth of the ideas offered here unassailable and de-
finitive. I am thus of the opinion that I have solved the
problems in all essentials once and for all. And in am not
wrong about this, then the value of this work consists,
secondly, in the fact that it shows how little is ac-
complished now that these problems are solved.

Moritz Schlick, who was close to Wittgenstein and

founded the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, con-
trasted living experience (Erleben) with knowledge or
cognition (Erkennen) in an article in Kant-Studien
(1930) that was later reprinted as the first piece in his
collected essays (1938).
About their relative value one may think as one
pleases-for me personally it is self-evident that enrich-
ment of living experience always constitutes the higher
task, indeed the highest there is-only one should be-
ware of confounding these two sharply divided spheres:
if profound living experience is more valuable, this is not

., Bartley (1973), pp. 53f., 74f., 161, 170-73.

90 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 because it signifies a higher form of knowledge, for it has
nothing whatever to do with knowledge ... (p. 7).

This dubious thesis brings to mind Kant's two-world

docbine. Again, what is most important is held to lie
beyond the sphere of knowledge.
Kant himself, however, was as far from agreeing
with Schlick or Wittgenstein as he was from German
Idealism or Hinduism. He was not prepared to denigrate
this world or to give up the other world, and least of all
was he willing to surrender the most important problems
to unreason in any shape or form. His concept of practi-
cal reason is not as clear as it might be and has won few
adherents, but its intent is unmistakable. He did not ac-
cept the position ofWittgenstein's Tractatus that "Prop-
ositions cannot express anything higher. It is clear that
ethics cannot be pronounced [or: articulated] ... (Ethics
and aesthetics are one.)"s In the light of the famous con-
clusion of the Tractatus, "Of what one cannot speak, one
must remain silent," this meant that a philosopher has
nothing to say about ethics and that moral problems must
be resolved without the benefit of reason. Kant would
have rejected this position as decisively as Schlick's no-
tion that man's highest task is totally divorced from rea-
soning. Nor did Kant say: As far as we can see, our ac-
tions are determined, but I believe nevertheless that the
will is free, despite all appearances. He did not mean to
champion any license to believe what gives us pleasure
or what might have beneficial consequences. Kant never
ceased trying to be rational. He was a moral rationalist,
meaning that he believed that purely rational proce-
dures could show us what we ought to do, and he also
thought that reason can show us how we must act to
escape from determinism and to achieve freedom and
autonomy.

8 6.42 and 6.421.

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 91

 We shall deal with his Critique of Pure Reason first,
briefly, to gain some idea of what he was trying to do,
and then with his short book on ethics. One of the central
ideas of his aesthetics will be considered also because it
throws light on the relationship of Kant's mind and tem-
perament to his philosophy.
While the discussion of Kant will stress the ways in
which he impeded the discovery of the mind, he was
plainly one of the greatest philosophers of all time.
There is wide agreement on that point. Kant dealt with
many of the most important questions confronting hu-
manity, often with great insight though certainly much
more controversially than he himself realized. His man-
ner was usually "scholastic" and at times approximated a
parody of the academic style, but he also had a distinc-
tive and comprehensive vision that embraced
metaphysical views as well as a theory of knowledge,
ethics no less than aesthetics, philosophy of religion, of
right, and of science; he published books on anthropol-
ogy and logic; and he had an intricate theory about the
mind. He clearly felt that his views were coherent and
supported each other, and this was, in fact, one of the
main reasons why he felt that his philosophy must be
true. He did not merely sketch his vision in large strokes
but worked it out in stunning detail, providing ample
nourishment both for people in search of a reasoned
world view and for professional philosophers, who have
never tired of examining his arguments and of discussing
what appear to be some interesting inconsistencies.
On top of all that he also embodied ever so many
traits that are encountered on a lesser scale in many
others, including large numbers of twentieth-century
philosophers. Plato suggested near the beginning of his
Republic (368) that it would be helpful to study what
justice means in a state, instead of beginning with the
individual, because it is easier to read large characters.

92~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

For this reason also it is rewarding to deal at length with
Kant. Although he was a very small man physically, in
other ways he was more than life-size.

22 ... Kant himself felt that he had

discovered the structure of the mind, and that this was
the crux of his achievement. In the preface to the second
edition of his major work, the Critique of Pure Reason
(p. xvif.), he explained the nature of what ever since has
been called his Copernican Revolution:
It is just as it was with ... Coperntcu8 who, when one
could not get on with the explanation of the heavenly
motions as long as one supposed that the whole army of
stars revolved around the spectator, tried whether things
would not go better when he made the spectator revolve
while leaving the stars in peace. In metaphysics one can
try something similar regarding the intuition of objects.
If our intuition had to depend on the structure of the
objects, I do not see how one could have any a priori
knowledge of them; but if the object (as an object of the
senses) depends on the structure of our faculty of intu-
ition, then I can imagine this possibility very well.

Kant assumed that both Euclidean geometry and

Newtonian science offered us absolutely certain knowl-
edge, and he formulated his problem: "How is pure
mathematics possible? How is science possible ?"9 His
solution was that absolutely certain knowledge of the
world would be impossible if the world we know were
not constituted by the human mind. But if the world we
know derived its form from our mind, then the discovery
of the structure of our mind would allow us to make
apodictic claims about the world. In his Critique of Pure
8 B 20. (B identifies page references to the second edition ofCrltique
of Pure Reason; A, those to the first.)

Kant: The Structure of the Mind. 93

Reason Kant tried to show what the mind had to be like
to make the certainty of Euclidean geometry and New-
tonian science possible,
He called this search for necessary presuppositions
his "transcendental method," This is one of his many
unhappy coinages, He loved "transcendent" and "trans-
cendental," sometimes distinguishing them and some-
times not, and ever since "transcendental" has been
used by others in a multitude of different senses, and
more often than not those who use the term fail to
specify what precisely they mean,
"Transcendent" usually means "beyond experi-
ence" or "outside the world" and is contrasted with
"immanent." When Kant distinguished "transcendent"
and "transcendental" he said:
I call transcendental all knowledge that concerns itself
not with objects but with our way of knowing objects
insofar as such knowledge is supposed to be possible a
priori, A system of such concepts [note that grammati-
cally "such concepts" hangs in the air] would be called
transcendental philosophy (B 25),

"Transcendental," Kant says in his Prolegomena, in the

third footnote from the end, "does not refer to what tran-
scends all experience but to what precedes it (a priori)
without having any other function than to make possible
knowledge by experience, When these concepts
transcend knowledge, then their use is called transcen-
dent, , ,"
Kant frequently forgot the distinctions he made so
laboriously, and Norman Kemp Smith remarks in A
Commentary to Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" "that
Kant flatly contradicts himself in almost every chapter;
and that there is hardly a technical term which is not
employed by him in a variety of different and conflicting
senses, As a writer, he is the least exact of all the great
thinkers" (p, xx),

94 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 Although Norman Kemp Smith's translation of
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is by far the most widely
used English version, his commentary is more widely
respected than read, and the image of Kant as a model of
intellectual rigor and probity persists. Few philosophers
indeed would agree that "he is the least exact of all
the great thinkers," and some English-speaking
philosophers still seem to think that of all the major
German philosophers Kant was, except perhaps for
Leibniz, the most exact. The crucial point about Kant's
lack of rigor, however, is not whether he was more or
less exact than Fichte, Hegel, or Heidegger; it is rather
that he went to enonnous lengths to affect a rigor that
turns out on closer inspection to be mere pretense
(though he himself was evidently taken in), and that his
successors, including Fichte, Hegel, and Heidegger,
followed his example. Heidegger's distinction of exis-
tenzial and existenziell furnishes a close parallel to
Kant's distinction of tranzendent and tranzendental:
now it is made emphatically and serves as a shibboleth
that instantly reveals as outsiders those who fail to heed
it, and then Heidegger himself confuses the two.
When Norman Kemp Smith called Kant "the least
exact of all the great thinkers," many philosophers still
took for granted that N ietzsche was so inexact that he
could not be considered a great thinker at all. Having
tried to show in my studies of Nietzsche and in my
translations and commentaries that he was a very great
thinker indeed, I should not want to be misunderstood
about Kant's manner of writing. Unquestionably, careful
commentators can show, and have shown, how some in-
consistencies are merely superficial and how some ar-
guments that are faulty as they stand can be amended or
reconstructed. Often different commentators propose
different emendations and reconstructions, but that does
not go to show that Kant could not have been a great
philosopher. In fact, he was one of the greatest

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 95

 philosophers of all time-despite his spurious rigor. He
was not the first philosopher who made a great point of
being rigorous when he actually was not. Perhaps this is
a vice characteristic of scholastic philosophers, great as
well as small, and in this respect Spinoza in his Ethics
and Kant in one major work after another were scholas-
tics. My reason for stressing this aspect of Kant is that he
was the first great philosopher of modem times who was
a professor, while Nietzsche was almost the last great
philosopher who never was a philosophy professor (he
was a professor of classical philosophy but gave up his
chair before writing his major works)-and modern
philosophy has followed Kant's example, not
Nietzsche's, Spinoza's, Goethe's, or Plato's. Kant had a
comprehensive vision that he tried to spell out; he found
it difficult to do this step by step; and he never under-
stood the inadequacies of his presentation. Fichte and
Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer were unquestion-
ably corrupted by Kant, while many lesser men down to
our own time, including a great many who have no dis-
tinctive vision at all, have little in common with Kant
except for a spurious rigor. In their writings as in his, the
multiplication of unhelpful coinages and distinctions
serves mainly to obscure the fact that some of the most
crucial issues are evaded. It would be unfair to hold Kant
responsible for the shortcomings of many analytical
philosophers who in this way follow in his footsteps, but
it may be salutary to see such shortcomings on a large
scale in a major thinker-and we shall therefore return to
this theme.
Kant further distinguished a priori judgments which
are, by definition, universally and necessarily true and
not based on experience, from empirical or a posteriori
judgments which are based on experience and cannot be
said to be universally and necessarily true. He also dis-
tinguished analytical judgments, which are true by defi-
nition (for example, all circles are round), from synthetic

96 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

judgments, which are not (for example, some houses are
round). Then he claimed that mathematics and science
offer us synthetic judgments a priori, such as "five plus
seven is twelve" or "every event has a cause," and he
asked: "How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?"
(B 19).
To answer this question, Kant offered an anatomy of
the mind, distinguishing "sensibility," understanding,
and reason, and dealing at length with each of these.
Time and space, he argued, are the forms of the human
"sensibility" through which we experience or "intuit"
things.
Kant's word for what is virtually always translated as
"intuition" is Anschauung which, like the verb
anschauen ("intuit"), literally means "view." But Kant,
unlike Goethe, had very little sensitivity for words, and
his terms are frequently misleading. In this instance, the
visual image is as inappropriate as the English "intu-
ition." What Kant meant was neither vision nor hunches
but sense experience in which he included not only the
five senses but also what he called "the inner sense," by
which he meant something like introspection. But he
never bothered to spell out what precisely he meant
either by "the inner sense" or by Sinnlichkeit, rendered
as "sensibility" by virtually all of his translators and
commentators.
Actually, even some excellent German-English dic-
tionaries do not give "sensibility" as one of the mean-
ings of Sinnlichkeit. What the German word means is
either sensuality or sensuousness, and those who read
Kant in English can hardly have any idea of what it is
like to read him in German. While finishing my disser-
tation at Harvard, I assisted Professor C. I. Lewis in a
course in which I had to read more than fifty weekly
summaries of installments of Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason. All but one discussed "sensibility," but the
German-born son of the foremost living German play-

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 97

 wright kept referring to "sensuality." I wrote "sensibility"
on the margin and was informed in the next summary:
"If whoever read this knew any German, he would know
that Sinnlichkeit means sensuality." This is true, but in
Kant it does not. What Kant meant to suggest was that all
experience comes to us via the senses, and that its forms
are space and time, except that what comes to us through
the internal sense is in time but not in space. But Kant
does not enumerate the senses, nor does he discuss
proprioception or hard cases.
The twelve categories-three each of quantity,
quality, relation, and modality-are the forms of the
human understanding in terms of which we understand
things. Specifically, they are unity, plurality, and total-
ity; reality, negation, and limitation; substance and acci-
dent, cause and effect, and reciprocity between agent
and patient; and finally possibility/impossibility,
existence/nonexistence, and necessity/contingency. Un-
like Goethe, Kant was not in the least afraid of abstrac-
tions. On the contrary, he felt at home among concepts
and did not bother to define all of them, much less to
give concrete examples.
His Critique of Pure Reason is so complex that it
would be only too easy to lose the thread if we stopped
to substantiate these criticisms. It will be far better to
press them a little later on in connection with Kant's
short book on ethics and his enormously influential re-
marks about aesthetics. In fact, for our purposes we can
ignore Kant's intricate "deduction of the categories,"
which is different in the first edition (A 64-130) and the
second (B 89-169) and has probably been discussed
more in British and American seminars on Kant than any
other subject in his philosophy. People go into
philosophy for different reasons, and this "deduction"
has held an endless fascination for the many graduate
students and professors who love trying to solve puzzles.
Practically nobody accepts Kant's table of twelve

98~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 categories, and there is virtual agreement that his vari-
ous attempts to "deduce" these categories are not tena-
ble as they stand. Nevertheless many a course on Kant
bogs down in this swamp and never reaches the far more
compelling refutations of the traditional arguments for
God's existence (A 590-642, B 618-70). H. J. Paton's
scholarly and impressive two-volume work, Kant's
Metaphysics of Experience is aptly subtitled: A Com-
mentary on the First Half of the Kritik der reinen Ver-
nunft. More than 270 pages of the first volume are de-
voted to the deduction of the categories.
If our concern here were with puzzle-solving, we
might concentrate on the short but baffiing section "On
the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understand-
ing," which immediately follows the so-called "deduc-
tion" and is crucial for Kant's theory (A 137-47, B
176-87). We could then try to determine whether Nor-
man Kemp Smith is right when he says about Kant's
discussion (p. 334): "No such explanation can be ac-
cepted. For if category and sensuous intuition are really
heterogeneous, no subsumption is possible; and if they
are not really heterogeneous, no such problem as Kant
here refers to will exist." Or is Paton's sixty-page de-
fense of Kant's ten pages successful? We can dispense
with this intricate controversy. Our main concern here is
with the ways in which Kant impeded the discovery of
the mind. But before we criticize. him, we must try to
gain some understanding of what he tried to accomplish
in his Critique of Pure Reason. It is only too easy to lose
sight of that.
Since we are concerned with Kant's influence, we
must take note of a fateful comment he offered on his
own table of twelve categories: "Regarding this table of
categories one could bring forth some neat consid-
erations [arlige Betrachtungen] that could perhaps have
striking consequences for the scientific form of all ra-
tional knowledge," he said prophetically in the second

Kant: The Structure of the Mind. 99

edition (B 109); and the second of his neat points was
that there were three categories in each class and that
"the third category always comes into being through the
connection of the second with the first in its class."
This hint was not lost on his successors. Of course,
they also knew the footnote at the end of Kant's long
preface to his Critique of Judgment (1790), which most
modem writers on dialectic have ignored:
It has been considered odd that the way I divide things
up in pure philosophy is almost always tripartite. But that
is due to the nature of the material. If such a division is to
be a priori, it will either be analytical, in accordance
with the principle of contradiction, and in that case it will
always be dichotomous ... or it will be synthetic; and if
in the latter case it is to be derived from concepts a priori
(and not, as in mathematics, from intuition which corre-
sponds a priori to the concept), then the division must
necessarily be a trichotomy in line with what is needed
for a synthetic unity, namely (1) a condition, (2) some-
thing conditioned, and (3) the concept that issues from
the union of the conditioned with its condition.

There is no need here to analyze this difficult note

in detail, but its influence on Fichte, Schelling, Hegel,
and the whole development of modem dialectic meets
the eye. Although Kant himself used the term "dialectic"
for what he criticized in his Critique of Pure Reason and
not for what he himself taught, there is a sense in which
one could say that, like Plato before him, he led men to
turn their back on experience and to engage in dialectic
instead.
So far we have not come to grips with the title of the
book. What is the point of Kant's "Critique"?
In his discussion of time (A 35, B 52) Kant pointed
out that he taught the "empirical reality of time, that is
its objective validity regarding all objects that may ever
be given to our senses," while "we deny to time any

100 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 claim to absolute reality." In the same vein Kant's doc-
trine could be called empirical realism but transcen-
dental idealism, and the latter name for it is not uncom-
mon, although Kant said in his Prolegomena (1783)10 that
he rather regretted "that I myself have given my theory
the name of transcendental idealism" (notably A 490f.);
he now preferred to "withdraw" it in favor of "critical"
idealism. The name does not matter greatly, but the
point at issue is crucial. The things we know are really
spatiotemporal; and arithmetic, Euclidean geometry,
and Newtonian science give us absolutely certain
knowledge of them. We need have no fear whatsoever
that some experience or other tomorrow will suddenly
disprove Euclid or Newton. It will be noted that Kant
implicitly assumes-incidentally, without any argument
whatsoever-that the human mind cannot change in any
fundamental way. He does not only believe that his
model of it is right but also that the mind always has
been and will be the same. Yet he admits emphatically
that we cannot know what the world is like apart from
human experience or, as some might like to say, what it
is "really" like. We can have no knowledge about what
Kant calls the thing in itself (das Ding an sich). What we
know are phenomena.
The "critique of pure reason" consists in showing
how reason comes to grief when it tries to give us knowl-
edge that transcends the phenomenal world. In particu-
lar, Kant seeks to demolish what he calls rational psy-
chology, rational cosmology, and rational theology. No
claims to offer us rational know ledge of the soul, the
world as a whole, or God are tenable.
In an eye-catching manner he expounds four "an-
tinomies" on more than thirty facing pages, the four
"theses" and their "proofs" on left-hand pages, the four
"antitheses" and their "proofs" on the facing right-hand

10 Sec. 13, note 3.

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 101

pages. The theses assert: "The world has a beginning in
time" and is spatially finite; "Every compound sub-
stance in the world consists of simple parts, and nothing
exists anywhere but the simple, or what is composed of
it"; "Causality, according to the laws of nature, is not the
only causality from which all the phenomena of the
world can be deduced. In order to account for these
phenomena it is necessary also to admit another causal-
ity, that of freedom"; and finally "There exists an abso-
lutely necessary being belonging to the world, either as
a part or a cause of it." The antitheses assert: "The world
has no beginning and no limits in space" but is spatially
as well as temporally infinite; "No compound thing in
the world consists of simple parts, and there exists
nowhere in the world anything simple"; "There is no
freedom, but everything in the world takes place en-
tirely according to the laws of nature"; and "There
nowhere exists an absolutely necessary being, either
within or without the world, as the cause of it."
Perhaps there is nothing in the whole history of
philosophy between Plato and Nietzsche that matches
the drama of these pages which culminate in a section
entitled "Transcendental Idealism as the Key to the So-
lution of the Cosmological Dialectic" (A 490). In the
following section the solution is summed up concisely:
If the world is a whole existing by itself, it is either finite
or infinite. Now the fonner as well as the latter proposi-
tion is false, as has been shown by the proofs given in the
antithesis on one and in the thesis on the other side. It is
false, therefore, that the world (the sum total of all
phenomena) is a whole existing by itself. Hence it fol-
lows that phenomena in general are nothing outside our
representations, which was what we meant by their
transcendental ideality (A 506f.).

The antinomies and their resolution would seem to

be a hard act to follow, but Kant goes on to offer a de vas-

102 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

tating critique of the traditional proofs for God's exis-
tence, and this had quite as much to do with the impact
of the book as the antinomies. Yet in the Preface to the
second edition in 1787 (B xxx) Kant explained: "I had to
do away with knowledge to make room for faith." He had
left room for God and freedom beyond the world of ap-
pearance, in that realm of which no knowledge is pos-
sible.
A year later, in 1788, Kant argued rather uncon-
vincingly in his Critique of Practical Reason that practi-
cal reason--or as we might say, our moral sense, which
Kant considers rational-demands that God should exist,
that the soul should be immortal, and that the will
should be free in that other realm, beyond phenomena.
The arguments supporting these three "postulates," as
Kant himself called them, have never won wide accep-
tance, and the impact of Kant's second Critique has
never been comparable to that of the first.

23 ... The short book on ethics

which Kant published in 1785, three years before the
Critique of Practical Reason, occupies a unique place
among his works. It was here that he first developed his
conception of autonomy and his moral rationalism. Its
impact rivals that of the Critique of Pure Reason, and the
volume is second to none of Kant's major works in brev-
ity, elegance, and readability. It also illuminates the re-
lation of Kant's own mind to his philosophy and specifi-
cally to his influential doctrines about the human mind.
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten has been
translated under various titles, including "Foundation,"
"Fundamental Principles," and "Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals." The German word suggests an
activity on Kant's part and means literally "laying the
ground." "Laying the Foundations for the Metaphysics
of Morals" would be an accurate rendering.

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 103

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 The original Gennan edition comprised less than
150 small pages, Lewis Beck's scholarly translation
barely over eighty. To say that none of Kant's major
works is more readable is not to deny that the book bris-
tles with difficulties. At the lowest level, there is an
abundance of sentences that run on for nearly a whole
page. One beginning in the middle of the sixth para-
graph of the Preface actually continues for a page and a
half in the original edition and is immediately followed
by half a dozen competitors that do not quite equal that
record. The tenth paragraph of the second chapter con-
sists of a single sentence that almost fills two whole
pages. These serpentine sentences often cannot be con-
strued, and different Gennan editors have proposed
different emendations. One can hardly help wondering
at times whether a philosopher who writes that way
could possibly be motivated by some fear of clarity. An-
other problem contributes to this quandary.
Kant tries to work out his position in Gothic, not to
say, baroque, detail, using a highly intricate scholastic
tenninology. Among his key tenns are maxims and prin-
ciples, motives and inducements, and pathological and
practical interests. There is no good reason for not mak-
ing clear at the outset what precisely is meant by each of
these six tenns. The resultant gain in the clarity of the
whole argument would have been immense, and one
seems entitled to expect no less from a professor who
said repeatedly that he spurned literary elegance for the
sake of rigor.
In the preface to the second edition of the Critique
of Pure Reason, for example, Kant reassured the gov-
ernment that his critique "can never become popular,"
but
This is the only way to cut off the roots of materialism,
fatalism, atheism, free-spiriting unbelief, fanciful en-
thusiasm [SchwilrmereOi], and superstition, which can
become generally hannful, and finally also idealism and

Kant: The Structure of the Mind. 105

 skepticism which are more dangerous for the schools and
less likely to spread to the public. If governments con-
sider it a good idea to occupy themselves with the affairs
of scholars, it would be much more in keeping with their
wise concern for the sciences and for human beings to
favor the freedom of such a critique, which alone can
provide a firm footing for rational work, than to support
the ridiculous despotism of the schools which raise a
loud clamor about the public danger when one tears their
spider webs of which the public has never taken any
notice and whose loss therefore it can never feel (B
xxxivf.).

Kant went on to oppose "the garrulous shallowness

under the assumed name of popularity" and insisted that
he opposed skepticism: what he wanted must be done
"necessarily dogmatically and systematically according
to the most rigorous demands, and thus scholastically
[schulgerecht] (not popularly) ... " (xxxvi).
Demanding academic freedom for his enterprise,
Kant assured the government that his book could never
become popular; but at the same time he suggested-
and this is a theme that runs through his work-that so-
called popular philosophy was shallow while his own
was so extremely rigorous that for that reason it could not
hope to be readable by the general public. What I am
saying is that what makes Kant so difficult to read and
often so hopelessly obscure is not at all exemplary rigor
but rather his appalling lack of rigor.
Some philosophers meet any such criticism of the
Critique of Pure Reason by saying that what Kant tried to
do was so profound that it is Philistine to suppose that he
could have achieved clarity. After all, Kant struck out in
an entirely new direction. His short book on ethics,
however, makes it as clear as can be that Kant's lack of
rigor was not due to his profundity. Rather, it covers up
difficulties that he should have faced.
Against his will, Kant's towering example taught

106 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

Gennan philosophers the hollow affectation of a rigor
that on close examination is not there. In the
Grundlegung one certainly gets the feeling that Kant
wanted clarity-up to a point. He specifies that point,
attaching some importance to the mystery that begins
there. But the whole thrust of his argument is that there
is nothing mysterious about what human beings ought to
do. On the contrary, reason tells us clearly-so clearly
that even a highly sympathetic reader may be led to
wonder whether Kant must not be wrong because he
leaves no room for moral quandaries. However mad-
dening his style may be, one does not have the feeling
that Kant is an obscurantist. Yet the web he spins out of
concepts hangs in the air and is out of touch with life.
The word Prinzip (principle) is used by Kant
throughout the book on almost every other page without
ever being defined. But Section 1 of the Critique of
Practical Reason, published three years later, opens
with a definition of Praktische Grundsntze and of
maxims, and Section 2 begins: uAlle praktische Prinzi-
pien ..... It turns out that he uses Grundsntze and Prin-
zipien interchangeably and that his definition in Section
1 illuminates his earlier book.
Practical principles are propositions that contain a gen-
eral determination of the will that subsumes several
practical rules. They are subjective, or maxims, when the
subject considers the condition valid only for his own
will; they are objective, or practical laws, when it is rec-
ognized as objective, that is valid for the will of every
rational being.

Kant immediately adds in a note on Section 1: "If we

assume that pure reason can contain a practical ground
sufficient to detennine the will, then there are practical
laws; if not, then all practical principles will be mere
maxims." All of this is consistent with the Grundlegung
and helps us to understand Kant. In the Grondlegung

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 107

maxims are defined twice. In the first footnote of Chap-
ter 1 he says: "Maxim is the subjective principle of will-
ing." In the seventh footnote of Chapter 2: "Maxim is
the subjective principle to act." In the original edition,
these two definitions are thirty-six pages apart, and con-
sidering that Kant's whole argument revolves around
maxims and principles it is something of a scandal that
he does not state clearly what he means, giving a few
examples of maxims.
To be sure, very soon after the second footnote defi-
nition Kant does try to make his argument more concrete
by giving four examples, but they have elicited a large
literature because they seem to make nonsense of his
arguments. In The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary
on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals
(1973), Robert Paul Wolff, who is full of admiration for
Kant, says nevertheless: "Two of the examples are sim-
ply no good at all, a third fails, although in an interesting
manner, and only one ... can be salvaged by appropriate
alterations" (p. 161£.). I do not agree entirely with this
verdict and shall present my own view in Sections 26
and 27 where the four examples will be considered at some
length; but Wolffs painstaking commentary is over-
whelmingly sympathetic to Kant.
Kant was not the kind of thinker who begins by re-
flecting on concrete instances in the moral life and then
attempts to distil from them generalizations that even-
tually are tested by being applied to other concrete
cases. He felt at home among abstractions, and as soon
as he gave concrete examples it turned out that his con-
ceptual scheme did not fit them. At that point one would
expect a scientist to reconsider and perhaps revise his
theories. But Kant never even noticed that his scheme
did not fit the cases he adduced!
Actually, this way of putting the matter is still too
kind: Kant thought in terms of words, not concepts. He
lacked any clear concept of a maxim, and his definitions

108 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

("the subjective principle of willing" and "the subjec-
tive principle to act") cover up a lack of clarity and bring
to mind the words of Goethe's Mephistopheles cited
near the end of Section 10 above:
Yes, stick to words at any rate;
There never was a surer gate
Into the temple, Certainty . ...
For just where no ideas are
The proper word is never far.
With words a dispute can be won,
With words a system can be spun,
In words one can believe unshaken ...
Kant scholars are still debating what exactly a "schema"
might be, but there is no need here to stir up this hor-
nets' nest. We can leave the Critique of Pure Reason
with its endless complexities to the specialists and
concentrate on Kant"s little volume on ethics. Here
the whole argument-and indeed Kant's moral philos-
ophy~epends on "maxims," but Kant did not have any
very clear idea of what a maxim is. This should become
evident when we examine the four examples he gives,
but since he did not start out from concrete cases, we
first need to reconstruct his line of thought.

24 ... We noted earlier that Kant's

most fundamental problem was: How are autonomy and
free will possible in a deterministic Newtonian uni-
verse? The crux of Kant's attempt to lay the foundation
for ethics is his answer to this question. As long as our
actions are prompted by our inclinations, they are caus-
ally determined and we are not free. But Kant argued
that we escape from determinism when our actions are
not prompted by any inclination but solely by respect for
reason.
As long as we make it a rule, or for that matter a

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 109

habit, to follow our inclinations, sleep as long as we like,
smoke as much as we like, and do whatever we like,
curbed only by enlightened self-interest or, in one word,
prudence, our lives are governed by what Kant called
pathological interests and hypothetical imperatives.
("Pathological interests" will be discussed at length in
Section 28.) A hypothetical imperative commands: If you
want this, do that. When I obey it, I am the slave of my
inclination or, as Kant also says, of the object I desire.
The only way to escape from psychological determinism
is to adopt a maxim that is not tainted by any pathological
interest whatsoever and to obey an imperative that is not
hypothetical but categorical. There is, says Kant, only
one categorical imperative, but he goes on to show that
there are three widely different formulations of it, and
some commentators claim that there are really five. If
one accepts Kant's own count, one has to admit that the
first formulation has two variants which Kant offers on
the same page, between the footnote in which he defines
maxims, and the famous four examples.
The categorical imperative is thus only one, namely this:
Act onlll according to that maxim through which IIOU can
will at the same time that it should become a universal
law . ... Thus the universal imperative of duty could also
be formulated: Act as if the maxim of your action should
become through lIour will a universal natural law.

The primary idea of Kant's Grundlegung is that I am

free when I act without any irrational motive, solely out
of respect for reason. The question why and how one
would act if one had no motive in the phenomenal world
is secondary for Kant, and he insists again and again that
it involves an unfathomable mystery although his
Critique of Pure Reason has shown that it is not impos-
sible. In a way, every noumenal self performs miracles
as God did according to the tradition. The mystery, how-
ever, concerns only what we might call the metaphysical

HO ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

aspect of freedom. The content of the categorical im-
perative as the sole alternative to hypothetical impera-
tives is, according to Kant, as clear as can be. He himself
does not give the following example, but it might have
helped more to illuminate this point than the examples
he did give.
When I do mathematics and make no mistake, my
work is in no way vitiated by my irrational nature. I
obtain results that every rational being would reach.ll
My procedure is prompted solely by respect for
reason-and I am free. In the moral realm I must simi-
larly divest myself of all irrationality. As long as I desire
particular objects, I have failed to do this. But when I
discover maxims that can be universalized and contain
nothing personal or subjective, I may be assured that
when I act on them, prompted solely by respect for rea-
son, I am free. Kant assumes that universality is the mark
of rationality, while the particular and subjective are ir-
rational. As long as I have a will of my own, I am not free I
Thus freedom and autonomy it la Kant involve
emancipation from our individuality and subjectivity. At
this point the similarity to Martin Luther's Exegesis of
the Lord's Prayer for Simple Lay Folk (1519) is striking.
Here are some of Luther's observations on "Thy will be
done ... ";
People say: But God has given us a free will. Answer:
Indeed, he has given you a free will. Why then do you
want to make of it a will of your own instead of leaving it
free? When you do with it what you will, it is not free but
your own. But God gave neither you nor anyone else a
will of your own; for a will of one's own comes from the
devil and Adam, who received their free will from God

11 Mathematical discoveries need not concern us here. Suffice it to

mention that David Hilbert, the great German mathematician
(1862-1943), once said of a student who had given up mathematics to
become a novelist: "It is just as well. He did not have any imagina-
tion."

Kant: The Structure of the Mind. HI

 and made it their own. A truly free will is one that wills
nothing of its own but only sees to God's will and thus
also remains free, getting attached and stuck to nothing
[nirgend anhangend oder anklebend).

And a few pages earlier Luther says:

Man should train to have an overwill [Ueberwillen)
against his will and never to feel more insecure than
when he feels that only one will is in him instead of two
wills opposed to each other, and he should thus become
used to following the overwill against his will. For who-
ever has and does his own will is certainly against God's
Will. 12

At first glance, the only major difference between

Kant and the early Luther may seem to be that Kant does
not speak of a will of one's own but of the inclinations,
and not of an overwill but of reason. But Kant considered
fear of God incompatible with autonomy and actually a
prime example of "heteronomy," that is, obedience to a
law given by someone else. Autonomy means to Kant
that I obey a law I have given myself. This notion is
derived from Rousseau's Social Contract (1762); and it is
noteworthy that there were no pictures in Kant's house
except for a portrait of Rousseau in his living room. 13
Luther's conception of freedom, quoted above, is
likely to strike modern readers as paradoxical and utterly
implausible, if not as a piece of theological casuistry. As

12 Auslegung des Vater-Unsers fur die einfaltlgen Laten (1519) in

Stlmmtliche Schriften, ed. Johann Georg Walch, vol. 7, col. 1132 and
1126; in the St. Louis reprint of 1891, col. 786 and 781. For Luther's
later views on free will see De seroo arbitrlo (1526) and sammtliche
Werke, ed. J. K. Innischer, vol. 58 (Ti8chreden, vol. 2), pp. 214-39.
13 "Obedience to a law one has prescribed to oneself is freedom"
(Social Contract, bk. I, chap. VIII). For Kant's relation to Rousseau
see Cassirer (1918), pp. 92-95, VorlAnder (1924), I, pp. 148-51, Cas-
sirer (1945), and Beck (1969), pp. 489-91. More on the portrait in sec.
30 below.

112 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

long as I do what I wish I am not free; it is only when I
do not follow my own will that my will is free. Yet few
readers note how similar Kant's position is, and many
approach his notion of autonomy with credulous if
somewhat puzzled awe.
This is probably due in large part to the fact that
after giving his famous four examples, and before giving
his account of autonomy, Kant expounds another formu-
lation of the categorical imperative which is very impres-
sive indeed. "Act so that you treat humanity both in
your own person and in every other person always as an
end also and never as a means only." This formulation
establishes Kant as one of the greatest moral teachers of
mankind, but it is usually misquoted and reduced to
nonsense by the omission of two crucial words: also and
only. We cannot help using others as a means to various
ends, and there is nothing immoral in that, as Kant rec-
ognized. What Kant exhorted us not to do is to treat
human beings as mere things. It is in this context that he
then introduces autonomy before distinguishing be-
tween price and dignity, the point being that things have
a market price while human beings have no price but a
unique dignity.
All of this is very attractive and humane, and many a
reader comes away with the impression that Kant some-
how proves this ethic, even if it is difficult to follow or
reconstruct his argument. In fact, the argument can be
reconstructed and falls very far short of any proof. It is
merely an inveterate academic prejudice that obscurity
and density warrant a presumption of rigor.
The deduction of Kant's beautiful and concise for-
mulation of an ethic derived from Moses and the
prophets is actually contained in two sentences that total
a dozen lines, just two pages before the means/end for-
mulation of the categorical imperative.
Suppose, however, that there were something whose ex-
istence in itself had an absolute value, something that as

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 113

 an end in itself could be a ground of definite laws, then
the ground of a possible categorical imperative, that is
practical law, would lie in this and in this alone.
Now I say: Human beings and altogether all rational
beings exist as ends in themselves, not as a means only
for any arbitrary use by this or that will, and must be
considered in all their actions, whether directed toward
themselves or to other rational beings, always as ends
also.

Plainly, this is no proof. What Kant asserts in the

second paragraph is his faith-part of the faith on which
he was· raised. And he then proceeds to put his cards on
the table. If there were "nothing that had absolute
value" and "if all value were conditional," then all im-
peratives would be hypothetical and there would be no
categorical imperative. If there is to be an unconditional
imperative, something must have unconditional value,
and Kant says that humanity does or that all rational be-
ings do. It is doubtful whether in 1785 he thought that
there actually were rational beings besides man, but his
point is that human beings have absolute value and dig-
nity and must never be treated as means only, because
they are rational and not on account of any other prop-
erty.
This principle of humanity and every rational being in
general as an end in itself . .. is not derived from experi-
ence, first of all because of its universality, as it extends
to all rational beings in general, and no experience could
be sufficient to determine something about that; sec-
ondly, because humanity is here represented not as an
end for man (subjectively), that is as an object that one
really adopts as an end for oneself, but as an objective
end that, whatever ends we may choose to adopt, is sup-
posed to constitute as a law the supreme limiting condi-
tion of all subjective ends, thus must originate from pure
reason.

114. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 That Kant's principle is not derived from experience
and not based on psychology or any kind of empirical
generalization is obvious. He seems to conclude that his
principle therefore "must originate from pure reason,"
although this final clatise hangs in the air, syntactically,
and different Kant scholars have offered slightly differ-
ent conjectures as to how it might be integrated gram-
matically.14 But while a universal proposition about all
rational beings and a supreme law that restricts all ends
we might wish to adopt cannot be based on experience,
it clearly does not follow that they "must originate from
pure reason." After all, they might be derived from a
religious tradition, and they might not be well founded
at all. Yet by the end of that paragraph Kant offers us
what is sometimes considered his third formulation of
the categorical imperative, this time at the end of a long
and involved sentence and not at all in the form of an
imperative: "now from this follows the third practical
principle of the will as the supreme condition of the
agreement of the will with the universal practical reason,
the idea of the will of every rational being as a will that
legislates universally."
Essentially, Kant tells people what a great many of
them want to hear. He offers them a drastically
liberalized biblical ethic, stripped of all references to the
supernatural, and he manages to create the impression
that his procedure is rational and rigorous and that this
ethic is founded on reason or demanded by reason. Ac-
tually, Kant's procedure is not at all rigorous and his
ethic is neither founded on reason nor demanded by it.
Where he writes, "Now I say: human beings and al-
togethe:a' all rational beings exist as ends in themselves,
not as a means only," another philosopher might say:

14 See Karl Vorlander' 5 ed. of the Gnsndlegung (1906), p. 56. Proposals

for emendations abound throughout this little book.

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 115

 "All living beings are ends in themselves and not mere
means only." His ethic would encompass animals and
would presumably be vegetarian. Yet another philos-
opher might agree with Kant that a categorical impera-
tive depends on there being something that has ab-
solute value, and go on to say that hence at least one
being must have absolute value and-in the words
employed by Thomas Aquinas in his five proofs of God's
existence-"this everyone understands to be God." Still
another philosopher might agree that if there is to be an
unconditional imperative, something must have abso-
lute value, but conclude that nothing has absolute value
and there is no categorical imperative.
Kant's misguided transcendental method always begins
with what he wants to accept as absolutely certain-
Euclidean geometry, Newtonian science, the categorical
imperative, the notion that by virtue of their reason all
human beings have a unique dignity-and then he asks
what must be the case for these things to be absolutely
certain. Nietzsche had a point when he said in The Gay
Science (Section 193): "Kant wanted to prove, in a way
that would dumbfound the common man, that the com-
mon man was right." To put the point still more con-
cisely: Kant was a virtuoso of rationalization.
What makes him so unusual is that by the time he
published his magnum opus in 1781 he had a com-
prehensive vision in which everything fell into place. As
a corrective of a charge often raised against Nietzsche
and of the prejudice that density and opaqueness be-
speak rigor, I appreciate Robert Paul Wolfr s claim in his
commentary on the Grundlegung (p. 4): "Of all the great
philosophers, there is none so rich in insights and so
plagued by inconsistency as Kant." Actually, Nietzsche
was far richer in insights, but it is noteworthy that WolfI,
after analyzing closely first "Kant's Theory of Mental
Activity" (in a book with that title, in 1963) and then the
Grundlegung, should find so little substance in the myth

116 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

of Kant's scrupulous rigor. As we have seen, Nonnan
Kemp Smith, who translated Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason into English, voiced the same view in his com-
mentary a generation earlier. But what kept persuading
Kant that he must be right was not one or another sup-
posedly rigorous demonstration but rather the way in
which all the pieces seemed to him to fit together.

2 5 ~ To understand Kant's men-

tality as well as several crucial passages in his works we
must realize that the religious inspiration of his ethic is
to be found in Moses. In his Religion Within the Bounds
of Mere Reason (1793) Kant had counted himself among
the "rigorists"-"a name that is meant to be opprobrious
but actually is laudatory" (p. 9). Later in the same year
Friedrich Schiller published a remarkable essay "On
Chann and Dignity" (Ueber Anmut und Warde) in
which he included some reflections on "the immortal
author of the Critique," whose rigorism he found exces-
sive:
In Kant's moral philosophy the idea of duty is presented
with such harshness that all the graces are frightened
away and a poor intellect might easily be tempted to seek
moral perfection on the way of gloomy and monastic as-
ceticism. Although the great sage of the world has tried to
guard against any such misinterpretation, than which
nothing could be more outrageous for his cheerful and
free spirit, he himself has nevertheless, it seems to me,
provoked it ... 15

Schiller, who impressed upon his younger contem-

poraries the need to reconcile Kant with Goethe, made it
easy for Kant to mitigate his rigorism. In the second edi-
tion of his book on religion (1794) Kant added a very

la In the tenth paragraph before the subheading "Dignity."

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 117

gracious footnote about the criticism offered by "Herr
Prof. Schiller" in his essay, "written with a master's
hand"; but he refused to walk over the bridge Schiller
had built for him. He really had to refuse because ac-
cording to his view freedom depended on the absence of
any psychological motive, which would entangle us, of
necessity, in the web of psychological determinism. This
is overlooked, along with the passages at issue, by inter-
preters who still insist that Kant was not a rigorist.
It is noteworthy how Kant refused. He did not
merely reiterate what he had said in the text above and
in the Grundlegung but also said:
I confess gladly that I cannot allow charm to accompany
the concept of duty, precisely owing to its dignity. For it
contains unconditional necessitation which stands in flat
contradiction against charm. The majesty of the law (like
that on Sinai) evokes reverence ... which arouses the
respect of the subordinate for his commander, but in this
case, since the commander is to be found within our-
selves, a feeling of the sublimity of our own calling,
which enraptures us more than anything beautiful.

Schiller's discussion of feeling led Kant to reveal

something of his own feelings. The moral law within
him had for him all the majesty of the Mosaic law on
Sinai and enraptured him. The celebrated opening of the
"Conclusion" of the Critique of Practical Reason comes
to mind: "Two things fill the mind [Gem~t] with ever
new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more
often and continuously we reflect on them: the starry
heavens above me and the moral law within me."
There is reason to believe that he associated both
with his mother, who had died when he was thirteen. lS
In all of the three biographies of Kant that appeared in
1804, immediately after his death, much is made of

11 Beck (1960), p. 282, shares this view.

U8 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

Kant's deep feelings for his mother and her lasting influ·
ence on him.
"When the great man spoke of his mother his heart
was moved, his eyes shone, and every one of his words
expressed cordial and childlike reverence," says
Jachmann before going on to tell us "that Kant once did
not speak to his sisters for twenty·five years although he
lived in the same town with them" (p. 163). His mother
was a woman who had made something of herself, could
write and spell passably-"for her station and time that
was much and rare," according to Wasianski (p. 251)-
and while her own religious feeling was "genuine and
by no means effusive [schwllnnerischj" (ibid.), she de·
manded nothing less than "holiness" of her son.
Borowski, who stresses this point (p. 13), is worth quot·
ing at greater length:
The father demanded work and honesty, especially
avoidance of all lies; the mother also holiness. Thus K.
grew up before her eyes, and what I have just said of his
mother may have had the effect of establishing in his
ethic an inexorable strictness, as is quite proper, and to
raise up so high the principle of holiness that, on account
of its unattainability, assures us of the certainty of an-
other world. This demand of his pure practical reason to
be holy had been at a very early age the demand his good
mother had made on him.

Borowski adds in a footnote: "1 should emphasize

that K. did not change anything in this passage in my
manuscript, nor made any comment on it, and con·
sequently approved of it. It sheds a surely not insignifi·
cant light on the rigorism of his ethic."
Kant had indeed based his postulate of immortality,
in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) on the claim
that practical reason demands that the achievement of
holiness should be possible. Since it is not possible in
this life, "it therefore can be encountered only in a pro-

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 119

 gressus ad infinitum," and this "is possible only if we
presuppose an infinitely enduring existence and person-
ality of the same rational being (which one calls the im-
mortality of the soul)" (p. 219f.).
This argument clearly implies the separate exis-
tence of many different moral personalities beyond the
phenomenal world-one for each person encountered in
the phenomenal world. The objection that Kant is here
applying the categories of quantity (unity and plurality)
beyond the phenomenal world, in defiance of his own
teaching in the first Critique, he might have met by
saying that he is only offering a postulate and not certain
knowledge, and that the doctrine of the first Critique
does not rule out the possibility that there might be a
large number of moral selves in the beyond. The objec-
tion that the progressus ad infinitum presupposes the
reality of time beyond the phenomenal world might be
met in the same way. But over what transphenomenal
imperfections does the immortal soul continue to
triumph on and on and on? Is Kant also postulating
transphenomenal inclinations?
This postulate is clearly inspired neither by Moses
nor by Jesus-unless one should say that it represents an
attempt to bring the Christian faith in the immortality of
the soul as close as possible to Moses' categorical "You
shall be holy" and to his agnosticism about the hereafter.
Kant agrees that we can know nothing about the hereaf-
ter, and he allows no place at all for salvation through
faith or the sacraments. Some people would call this
a-or even the-Protestant ethic. Luther, a master of in-
vective, would have found it difficult to find words for
such a flagrant misnomer, and Calvin, who had Servetus
burnt for rejecting belief in the Trinity, would scarcely
have been satisfied with a milder punishment for Kant.
One of the last sections of Kant's book on religion
bears the title "The Moral Principle of [a] Religion That
Stands Opposed to the Religious Delusion" and begins:

120 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

"First I posit the following sentence as a principle that
requires no proof: Whatever man supposes he can do to
please God apart from leading a good life is mere reli-
gious delusion and a perverted service of God [After-
dienst Gottes]:' This principle is printed in large type
and elaborated at great length in the following pages.
Thus Kant says three pages later: "As soon as man de-
parts however slightly from the above maxim, the per-
verted service of God (superstition) no longer has any
bounds:' And another half a dozen pages later:
Between a Tungusic shaman and a European prelate . ..
between the entirely sensuous Mongol who in the
morning places the claw of a bear skin on his head with
the brief prayer, "Don't slay me'" to the sublimated puri-
tan and independent in Connecticut there is, to be sure,
a powerful difference in manners but not in the principle
of believing; for regarding that they all, without excep-
tion, belong to one and the same class-the class of those
whose service of God stresses what in itself does not
constitute a better human being, (like believing certain
statutory propositions or engaging in various arbitrary
observances).

Considering how often Kant has been linked with

pietism, which was his own religious background, it is
noteworthy that at the end of the last long footnote in
Section 3 he goes out of his way to identify pietism with
"a slavish bent of mind [Gematsart]." Obviously, Kant
did not care for the more than six hundred command-
ments and prohibitions in the Five Books of Moses, or
for the traditional Christian dogmas and articles of faith,
or for Paul's theology, or for the insistence on faith and
sacraments in the Gospels. He was much closer to
Micah's disparagement of sacrifices, which culminates
in the words:
You have been told, man, what is good,
and what does the Lord demand of you

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 121

 but to do justice and love kindness
and to walk humbly with your god? (6.8)
It is doubly remarkable that Kant nevertheless spoke of
"the majesty of the law (like that on Sinai)." Plainly, this
was the association that led him to use again and again
the term "law"-in spite of Paul and Luther, who had
filled their writings with polemics against "the law."
The three biographers who had known Kant well
did not only agree on the importance of his mother for
his moral education, they also related that she had occa-
sionally taken him outside the town to instill in him awe
for God's works, and it seems likely, though they do not
say so, that she directed his gaze to the starry heavens.
Whether Kant also associated the starry heavens with
Abraham and Genesis 15.5, we do not know, but the
archetype of the categorical imperative is certainly the
refrain of the Mosaic law: "You shall." And the com-
mandment "You shall be holy" is found in Leviticus 19,
directly before the commandment to revere mother and
father (in that order). The same chapter abounds in
categorical demands, including some of the Ten Com-
mandments as well as "You shall love your neighbor as
yourself' and "The stranger who sojourns with you shall
be to you as the native among you, and you shall love
him as yourself."
The commandment to be holy is found elsewhere,
too, in the Law of Moses: Leviticus 11.44-45,20.7, and
26. It is not found in the Gospels and really as distinc-
tively Mosaic as the challenge in Exodus 19, in the
chapter preceding the Ten Commandments: "You shall
be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy people." In the
ancient Near East only priests were literate and edu-
cated, and the demand that all should be as priests was
revolutionary .
What is called for is a transformation. We must cease
being as we are. We are summoned to rise to a higher
state. Instead of being content with, or resigned to, our

122 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 lot, we are told to make something of ourselves. This is
one of the most revolutionary ideas of the Five Books of
Moses.17
Actually, Jesus may have quoted the commandment
"You shall be holy," but Matthew (5.48) rendered it in
Greek "You shall be perfect," and Luke (6.36) "You shall
be mercifuI."18 For Kant's postulate of the immortality of
the soul, "perfect" would actually have been a little
more suitable than "holy," which makes it doubly re-
markable that Kant used the Mosaic word instead of al-
luding to the Sermon on the Mount. It clearly harks back
to his mother's demand.
There are two reasons why the impact of Moses on
Kant has not become a commonplace long ago. The pri-
mary reason is that Kant did not pay tribute to Moses or
J udaism. Like most of the great Germans of his time-
Lessing was the outstanding exception-Kant never en-
tirely overcame the prejudices on which he was raised.
He revered Moses Mendelssohn, with whom he had a
most interesting correspondence, and the friend whom
he favored with the most fascinating letters was his con-
fidant and former student Marcus Herz. His favorite stu-
dents included some other Jews as well, and after read-
ing Solomon Maimon's sympathetic critique of his
philosophy he wrote Herz (May 26, 1789), "none of my
opponents has understood me and the main question so
well." Kant could have said truthfully: "Some of my best
friends are Jews." Yet he did not think of them as Jews
even though it was common knowledge that they were.
They were enlightened human beings and did not fit the

17See sec. 22-26 in Kaufmann, What la Man?

18The Hebrew word is q'doshim, heilig in German, and the two
Greek words are tele.o. and o.1ct'nnones, voll1commen and barmher-
dg in German. Strack and Billerbeck (1922 and 1924) do not associate
the two verses in the Gospels with "You shall be holy," and there are
Hebrew equivalents for the two Greek adjectives: tam'm (or ,halem)
and rahum.
I
Kant: The Structme of the Mind ~ 123
 stereotype on which he had been raised and which he
never quite outgrew.
In the second volume of his lmmanuel Kant (1924),
which is the best intellectual biography we have of Kant,
Karl Vorlander, one of the leading Kant scholars of all
time, devoted a section of eight pages (73-80) to Kant's
attitudes toward Judaism and Jews. There are a few
contemporary reports of anti-Semitic remarks he is said
to have made in conversation. Those Vorlander sees no
reason to doubt include a scurrilous comment at a dinner
in his house, June 14, 1798, when Kant was seventy-four,
as well as a strange reaction to Lessing's great play,
Nathan de,. Weise, which Johann Georg Hamann related
in a letter to Herder, May 6, 1779. Hamann, though "in-
clined toward anti-Semitism" and hence, according to
Vorlander, reliable in this context, liked the play, while
Kant was, according to Hamann, "averse to any hero
coming from this people. That is how divinely strict our
philosophy is in its prejudices despite all its tolerance
and impartiality." The dinner remark, which Vorlander
quotes as the "strongest" or "most virulent" thing (Das
Sta,.kste) Kant said about the Jews, was reported by
"the thoroughly reliable" Abegg: "As long as the
Jews-are Jews and circumcised, they will never be-
come more useful than harmful in civil society. Now
they are vampires in society" (p. 73f.).
Vorlander says very reasonably that we should "not
attach any value to all these private reports if similarly
unfavorable judgments were not to be found also in his
writings"-albeit only in the 17905 when Kant was well
past his prime. In fact, it was only in 1798 when he was
seventy-four and his powers were failing that he pub-
lished some truly embarrassing and unworthy remarks in
his Anthropology, in a long footnote,19
18First ed. (Warda #195) at the end of sec. 36; second ed. (1800,
Warda 11 198), end of sec. 43; Akadem.e (allegedly based on second
edition), sec. 46.

124 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 The Palestinians living among us have acquired since
their exile ... the not unfounded reputation of deceit....
Now it seems strange to think of a nation of deceivers,
but after all it is just as strange to think of a nation of
nothing but merchants whose by far largest part is held
together by an ancient superstition that is recognized by
the state in which they live, seeks no civic honor but tries
to substitute for this loss the advantages of outwitting the
people among whom they find protection and even each
other. Now this cannot he any different, given a whole
nation of nothing but merchants as non producing mem-
bers of society (e.g., the Jews in Poland) .... Instead of
the vain plan to moralize this people regarding the point
of deceit and honesty, I would rather explain my surmise
regarding the origin of this peculiar constitution (namely,
of a people of nothing but merchants) .... Hence their
dispersion through the whole world with their religious
and linguistic ties should not be charged to a curse pro-
nounced over this nation but seen rather as a blessing,
the more so because their wealth, when one considers
individuals, probably exceeds that of every other nation
with the same number of members.
Like most of his contemporaries and many eminent
writers after him, Kant was simply unable to see any
continuity between the Jewish people of his time, of
whom he lacked firsthand knowledge and whom he
therefore saw through the glasses of prejudice, and
either the lofty passages in the Bible that had fo:med his
own moral sense or the Jews whom he knew personally
and cherished as friends. He applauded Moses Men-
delssohn's brilliant defense "of unconditional freedom
pf conscience" in Jerusalem (1783), which also made a
profound impression on Hegel a few years later, but
neither of them seems to have taken seriously Men-
delssohn's claim that this position was characteristic of
Judaism. Kant saw Judaism as a "mess of observances"
(in his book on religion he spoke of a Wust van Obser-
vanzen). Speaking more soberly, one might say that he
\
Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 125
 associated Judaism with statutory laws. Vorlnnder
suggests that Kant's "dislike of the Old Testament" was
due in part to his reaction to the pietism of his upbring-
ing. Nevertheless it seems important to note how some
elements of his moral education had come from the Old
Testament, left their mark on him, and became central in
his moral philosophy. That also helps to account for the
great attraction of his philosophy to so many Jews in his
own time and, much later, to Hennann Cohen who did
so much to renew interest in Kant during the last thirty
years of the nineteenth century. For Cohen, like Men-
delssohn, took his Judaism very seriously.
There is another reason why the importance of the
Old Testament for Kant's ethic has been insufficiently
appreciated. After his ethic had become part of the
common sense of Liberal Protestantism, Protestant
theologians began to argue that the morality of the 6ld
Testament was a morality of rewards (Lohnmoral) while
that of the New Testament, being far superior, was not.
Proceeding from their own unquestioned faith in the su-
periority of Kant's non prudential ethic, generations of
Protestant writers varied the theme that was finally car-
ried to the absurd by Reinhold Niebuhr when he spoke
of "the full rigorism and the non prudential character of
Jesus' ethic," ignoring the Gospels' constant appeal to
rewards and punishments. 2o But as long as one assimi-
lates Jesus to Kant and Kant to Jesus, while assuming
that Kant stands diametrically opposed to the law given
on Sinai, one bars any adequate understanding of Kant.
First of all, Kant had no use whatsoever for the cen-
tral eschatological concern that penneates the Gospels
as well as Paul's epistles. The recurring appeals to the
end of the world, the day of judgment, hellfire, wailing
and gnashing of teeth, and rewards in heaven are

20Niebuhr (1935, 1956), 55. For a detailed refutation see Kaufmann

(1958), sec. 68 and 55.

126 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

diametrically opposed to Kant's rigorous agnosticism
about all that lies beyond the world of science. Nor were
Paul's lengthy polemics against "the law" congenial to
Kant.
Then, Kant had no sooner offered his impressive
ends/means formulation of the categorical imperative
than he added a footnote that was clearly meant to dis-
parage Jesus' "Golden Rule."
Let no one suppose for a moment that the trivial quod
tibi non vis fuerl, etc. [what you do not want to happen to
you, do not do unto others], could here serve as a
guideline or principle. For it is merely derived from that
[the categorical imperative], albeit with various lim-
itations; it cannot be a universal law, for it does not con-
tain the ground of the duties toward oneself nor of the
duties of love toward others (for many a person would
gladly agree that others should not benefit him if only he
could be relieved of being their benefactor), nor of the
duties we owe each other; for a criminal might argue on
these grounds against the judges punishing him, etc.

To be sure, the Latin adage is negative, while the

"Golden Rule" has been extolled by many Christians as
far superior because it is positive and says: "Whatever
you wish men to do to you, do to them."21 Now it is
actually arguable that the positive version is greatly in-
ferior to the negative one,22 but here it is quite sufficient
to note that Kant's strictures apply to the Golden Rule as
well, if not more so, and this seems to have been his real
target. After Kant published his book on religion in 1793,
the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm 11, wrote him:
Our Most High Person has noted for a long time with
displeasure how you are misusing your philosophy to
distort and denigrate some of the main and fundamental

11Matthew 7.12; Luke 6.31.

n Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic, p. 212.

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 127

 doctrines of Holy Scripture and Christianity; how you
have done this especially in your book Religion Wtthin
the Bounds of Mere Reason and no less in other small
essays.

The king had gone on to warn Kant never to let this

happen again, and after quoting this letter in the preface
to his Quarrel among the Faculties (1798) Kant also
quoted his reply in which he promised never to do it
again, as well as his reasons for believing that now that
the king had died the promise no longer held because he
had given it "as your royal majesty's most faithful sub-
ject," and "this expression I chose with caution so that I
would not renounce the freedom of my judgment in this
religious matter forever but only as long as his majesty
might live."23
This passage in the preface of Kant' s last major work
shows how some of his contemporaries saw him, and it
also helps to illuminate his mentality. Kant made a point
of the fact that neither the king's letter nor his own reply
had ever reached the ears of the public, and there was no
need for him to publicize them now had he not felt the
urge to show his readers how clever he had been!

26 ... We are ready now to under-

stand Kant's notorious four examples in the
Grondlegung. At crucial points Moses holds the key to
them.
We noted earlier, in Section 24, that Kant offers two
slightly different formulations of-the categorical impera-
tive on a single page. It may be well to recall the second
version: "Act as if the maxim of your action should be-
come through your will a universal natural law." Kant
then goes on:
28This is doubly odd in view of the fact that the king was twenty
years younger than Kant. Had Kant really counted on outliving him?

128. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 Now let us enumerate a few duties, in accordance with
the customary division of duties into duties to ourselves
and duties to others, perfect and imperfect duties.
1. One who, on account of a series of ills that has grown
to the point of hopelessness, feels weary of life still has
sufficient command of his reason to be able to ask himself
whether it may not be contrary to his duty to himself to
take his own life. Now he makes the test whether the
maxim of his action could become a universal natural
law. His maxim, however, is: from self-love I adopt the
principle that when life, if prolonged, threatens more ills
than it promises agreeable things, I shall shorten it. [This
sentence is ungrammatical in the original and cannot be
construed though its meaning is clear.] The only ques-
tion that remains is whether this principle of self-love
could become a universal natural law . But then one sees
soon that a nature whose law it would be to destroy life
itself by means of the same feeling whose purpose [Be-
stimmung] it is to advance the promotion of life, would
contradict itself and thus could not persist as nature, and
thus this maxim could not possibly have a place as a
universal natural law and consequently is wholly at odds
with the supreme principle of all duty.

Here we have an example of a maxim. But it remains

unclear whether Kant is trying to show that suicide is
always immoral or only that this particular maxim is
morally unjustifiable. He seems to think that he is estab-
lishing the stronger claim, although in fact his argument
does not even establish the weaker claim.
Regarding the stronger claim, that suicide is always
immoral, Kant never stops to ask whether some maxims
that a person considering suicide might well adopt could
not perhaps be universalized. Life and literature are full
of pertinent examples, beginning at least with the first
suicide in the Bible: Samson's. The Bible does not cen-
sure his suicide any more than any of the other suicides
in the Bible, but comments admiringly: "The dead he
slew dying exceeded those he had slain living." Surely,

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 129

 Kant's introduction of self-love is gratuitous, and it is not
difficult to think of examples in which suicide is moti-
vated by love of others. One might be afraid that under
torture one would give away others, and hence might kill
oneself to protect them. Or one might prefer suicide to
becoming a wretched burden for others, physically,
emotionally, and financially.
Even the weaker claim, that the maxim of the person
he imagines cannot be universalized, Kant fails to prove.
The alleged contradiction depends on the gratuitous as-
sumption that self-love has been implanted in us for a
purpose (to advance the promotion of life). The suicide
Kant imagines is motivated by self-love in a way that
conflicts with this purpose. Without realizing what he is
doing, Kant is actually appealing to an assumed purpose
of nature that is derived from Moses' categorical de-
mand: "Choose lifel" (Deuteronomy 30.19). The whole
machinery of universalizing maxims is a smoke screen:
the suicide violates Moses' commandment, at least as
Kant understands it.
Now I have said earlier that Kant really lacked any
clear concept of a maxim. Kant's definitions no less than
the first example which we have just considered leave
open the question whether all of us have maxims
whenever we act, or at least when we act deliberately. If
it is the case-and I think it is-that many people and
perhaps even most people make choices and decisions
and act without entertaining any maxims, then Kant's
attempt to lay the foundations for ethics fails. But on one
understanding of the word "maxim" it is simply a fact
that many people much of the time, if not most people
most of the time, act without maxims-that is, without
invoking general, albeit subjective, principles or rules
that govern their conduct.
Now Kant might say, as in fact he does not, that we
ought to fonnulate maxims and submit them to his test.

130 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 But with a little ingenuity one should be able to formu-
late maxims that would pass the test-unless all particu-
lars drop away when the maxim becomes a universal
law. In that case, the introduction of self-love no less
than the references to ills and agreeable things are all
entirely beside the point, and what matters is simply that
suicide cannot be made a universal natural law because
nature (alias Moses) commands us to choose life. It re-
mains unclear what a maxim is, and Kant's conceptual
definitions do not help as concrete examples might. Kant
liked to eat a roast for dinner and evidently did not feel
that butchers were immoral ex officio. What would be a
butcher's maxim? Kill sheep, pigs, and steers? Surely,
not simply: Kill! And even when submitted to Kant's test
and universalized it would not become: Killl
Of course, there are people, notably including Kant
himself, who formulate a lot of maxims for themselves.
When we turn to Kant's biography (in Section 31) we
shall find no dearth of examples. And Kant evidently
assumed that the minds of other people were like his
own although in fact his was in ever so many ways quite
exceptional. When people who do not share this habit
want to find out whether an action they are considering
is moral and, having read Kant, wish to test their maxim,
how can they discover their maxim? Is it by introspec-
tion? Must they try to discover what really motivates
them? Or is the intellect free to devise a maxim-and if
that fails the test, to try again?
There is a sense in which it is clear enough what a
maxim is: a rule that we adopt for our conduct. In ordi-
nary discourse it might be overly fastidious to press for
greater precision. But when a philosopher spurns good,
clear prose, insisting repeatedly that he is so extremely
rigorous that for that reason he cannot make any conces-
sions to "popularity," and when he bases his whole
moral philosophy on the demand that we must univer-

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 131

salize our maxims, then it is worth pointing out that pro-
ceeding "scholastically (not popularly)" and being
"rigorous" are two very different things.
"With words a system can be spun," and, as a matter
of psychological fact, there may be no surer gate to cer-
tainty than reliance on words. But abstract nouns, in
which Kant revels, are no substitute for concrete exam-
ples. And just as the lucidity of Lessing, Goethe, Heine,
Nietzsche, and Freud was inseparable from their ability
to see what they wrote about, the extraordinary obscurity
of Kant and some other philosophers, notably including
Heidegger, is due to their excessive reliance on words
and their inability to deal with concrete instances. Kant
was neither the first nor the last philosopher to deceive
himself and his public about this crippling incapacity by
claiming that it was dictated by "the most rigorous de-
mands."

2 7 ~ In fairness to Kant, we still

have to consider his other three examples. The second is
the best of the lot, but most readers have failed to get its
point because Kant confused the issue. A man in distress
wants to borrow money, realizes that he will be unable
to pay it back, but also realizes that nobody will lend him
money unless he promises to pay it back. He wonders
whether it would be immoral to make a promise under
these circumstances.
Supposing that he decided to promise nevertheless, then
his maxim of action would run as follows: When I believe
myself to be in financial need, I will borrow money and
promise to pay it back even though I know that this will
never happen. Now this principle of self-love ... is
perhaps compatible with my whole future well-being,
but the question remains whether it is right. Hence, I
transform the demand of self-love into a universal law
and formulate the question thus: how would it be if my

132 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 maxim became a universal law? Then I see at once that it
could never be a valid universal natural law that agrees
with itself but must necessarily contradict itself. For the
universality of a law that everybody who believes him-
self to be in distress could promise whatever he pleases,
with the intention of not keeping it [the sentence is once
again ungrammatical, but the meaning is clear], would
make promising and its purpose impossible since nobody
would believe that something had been promised but
would laugh at all such utterances as vain pretense.
First, one may wonder again whether the man's
maxim would have to run like that or whether he might
not be able to formulate a better maxim. Secondly, one
should ask where self-love comes from so suddenly.
Kant introduced it also, even as part of the maxim, in his
first example. But just as one might commit suicide for
the sake of others, one might decide to borrow money
and make a promise that one knows one probably cannot
keep, not from self-love but, say, in order to buy
medicine for a child who without it would die. The de-
tails do not matter as long as it is understood that it might
well be impossible to obtain the medicine without dis-
honesty.
Self-love seems to be beside the point Kant wants to
make.24 His central point is clearly that a person who
breaks a promise is inconsistent. His action contradicts
his words. And ifhe says in his heart, I will not keep this
promise, even while his lips say that he will, then he
contradicts himself then and there. The machinery of
universalizing the maxim is merely designed to bring
out into the open this contradiction.
u In a short article "On a Supposed Right to Lie out of Love of
Humanity" (1797) Kant said, but certainly did not prove, that "It is a
holy commandment of reason that commands us unconditionally and
cannot be limited by any conveniences, to be truthful (honest) in all
declarations" (Akademte, vol. 8, p. 429). Kant insisted specifically
that if a murderer should ask me whether his intended victim is in my
house, I must not lie.

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 133

 Kant assumes that the essence of immorality is
making an exception in one's own behalf. When I make a
promise, I bank on the assumption that promises are
kept. That is part of the definition of "promise." When I
plan all along to break it, I say in effect: I depend on
promises being kept, but I am an exception. And when
Kant points out that this maxim cannot be universalized
because promises would disappear if it were understood
that they need not be kept, his point is not, as has often
been alleged, that he did not like this result because he
was fond of promises. He did not appeal to our likes,
dislikes, or inclinations.
The first example does not work as well as this one
unless it is assumed, and Kant does assume, that it is a
universally accepted law that we must choose life. As-
suming that, the man considering suicide would once
again make an exception in his own behalf.
The third example closely resembles the first. Here
Kant no longer bothers to formulate any maxim, but he
argues that we must develop our talents and capacities.
Kant admits that nature could exist
even though man (like the native of the South Seas) al-
lowed his talents to rust and concentrated only on lei-
sure, pleasure, procreation, or in one word enjoyment;
yet he cannot possibly will that this should become a
universal law of nature or should be implanted in us as
such by a natural instinct. For as a rational being he wills
necessarily that all his capacities should be developed
because after all they serve him [and are given to him] for
all sorts of purposes.

Again, this is quite unpersuasive, but it should be

noted that Kant's appeal is not to our inclinations, not to
whether we would like the consequences, but rather to
the purpose for which (as he puts it in the phrase I have
placed in brackets because it was added only in the sec-
ond edition) our talents were "given" to us. Kant's refer-

134 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

ence to the South Sea islanders might have suggested
even to him that his conception was culturally con-
ditioned. Some people speak of the Protestant ethic in
this connection, but it certainly comes from Sinai and
distinguished the Jews long before there was any Prot-
estantism. It was only when the Reformers acquainted
their followers with the Old Testament that the ancient
challenge to become holy and to make something of one-
self came to be heeded by large numbers of people in
Europe.
Kant's last example is probably the worst of the four.
He pictures a person who has no wish to help others.
What is it to me? Let everyone be as happy as it pleases
heaven or as he can make himself; I shall not take any-
thing away from him nor even envy him; only I do not
feel like contributing anything to his well-being or his
assistance in distress .... Although it is possible that ac-
cording to this maxim a universal law of nature could
exist, it is nevertheless impossible to will that such a
principle should be universally valid as a law of nature.
For a will resolving that would contradict itself [if Kant
could show that, he would be home free] since cases
could arise after all in which he would need the love and
concern of others and where by such a natural law that
owed its origin to his own will he would deprive himself
of all hope of the help that he desires for himself.

End of the examples.

Kant's fourth and last case depends on the assump-
tion that by virtue of our rationality we cannot help will-
ing that when we are in dire need others should help us.
Once that implausible premise is granted, it follows
once again that the person who makes the decision of
which Kant disapproves is making an exception in his
own favor. But picture an Asian ascetic in meditation
who is starving himself to death' Kant assumes through-
out that life and self-improvement ought to continue,

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 135

and it is revealing that two of his four examples, though
they do not fit well into their immediate context, deal
specifically with life (versus suicide) and self-
improvement (versus allowing one's talents to rust). And
the categorical commandments to choose life and make
something of oneself come from Moses no less than the
notion that we are obliged to help those in need.
That Kant was very selective in what he took from
the Old Testament as well as the New should be obvi-
ous. It would serve no purpose here to fill pages with
lists of ideas that he did not accept. But one general
point is worth making. Vorla.nder made it in three words
when he entitled a section of his Immanuel Kant 25
"Geringschiltzung des Geschichtlichen": Kant held the
historical in low esteem. In religion he associated it with
the compulsion to believe something on authority in-
stead of deferring only to one's own reason. In a note
found among his papers and published posthumously he
attributed to Jesus a "moral" and "soul-improving" reli-
gion of reason, contrasting it with the historical religion
that "consists of the worship of this Jesus" and is thus a
religion "received secondhand."26 In Kant's books Jesus
is scarcely mentioned, but Kant has recourse to a mul-
titude of circumlocutions, such as Heiliger des Evangelii
(the holy man of the evangel or gospel). In the notes that
he himself did not publish we find occasional references
to "Christ"; for example, "That Christ had and taught a
religion, is clear; but not that he should have wished to
be an object to religion. "2'1 Kant's antihistorical bias natu-
rally closed much of the Old Testament to him, too, and
may be considered a fatal flaw cfhis whole philosophy.
At this point it may seem as if Kant had after all
taken very little from the Old Testament. It may be well

Vol. 11. pp. 164-67.

III
Ibid., p. 174; cf. Akademie, vol. XV, p. 608f.
III
n Ibid., p. 173f.

136 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 to sum up the main points he accepted. First, it was from
"Sinai" that he derived his concept oflaw. Morality had
to his mind the form of a majestic law, and he kept stress-
ing this term, in spite of Paul's and Luther's polemics
against "the law."
Secondly, the content of the law was also derived
from Moses. The gist of it is that humanity has a unique
dignity that raises it above the rest of nature, and that no
human being may be treated as a mere thing. The First
Book of Moses suggests that man was created in the
image of God and that all human beings are descended
from a single couple, while Kant seeks the sanction for
man's dignity in his possession of reason and occasion-
ally speaks of all rational beings. In the 1750s Kant cov-
ered a book published in 1752 with marginal comments
for use in his lecture, and one of his comments was that
all angels are rational.28 Even his conception of rational
beings owed something to the Bible.
Thirdly, it is important to note that for Kant the
sanction of the moral law was not mere reason. Critics of
his Grundlegung and especially of the famous four
examples given by Kant have always come to grief when
they have overlooked this; they have simply been un-
able to make sense of Kant's examples. The examples
appeal to a purpose of nature, and this is not suddenly
pulled out of a hat but introduced early in the first chap-
ter of the book-in the fifth paragraph, to be precise.
Here Kant speaks expressly of the "purpose of nature,"
arguing that it cannot be man's happiness, as "instinct"
would be far better suited to bring that about, while hu-
manity has been endowed with reason and will. We are
called upon to will the good, and to will it not because
we happen to like it or it gives us pleasure but because it
is what we are commanded to do, our duty. It is our duty
to choose life and to become holy. Both the appeal to a

18 Ibid., p. 156.

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 137

purpose that transcends us and the content of the pur-
pose are inspired by Moses.
Kant translated the ancient historical drama of the
emergence from slavery into freedom under law into a
timeless morality play that each of us ought to enact. But
since he disliked the historical element in religion, he
failed to realize that this was what he was doing, and it
never occurred to him that his ethic as well as his theory
of knowledge and the rest of his philosophy might be a
product of history and bear the traces of cultural condi-
tioning. This gives his philosophy a certain flatness that
does not seem to bother philosophers who also lack a
historical sense and are open to the same charges.

28 ~~ What is lacking in Kant's

model of the mind and in his conception of autonomy is
by no means only a sense of history and some under-
standing of his own place in it and his own conditioning.
If history put him off because it was so irrational, he had
even less time for psychology. And to say that his model
of the mind and his conception of autonomy are there-
fore rather flat would be excessively polite.
Kant wrote an article entitled "Idea for a Universal
History with Cosmopolitan Intent" in which he made a
brilliant suggestion that helped to inspire Hegel's and
Marx's interpretations of history. Kant proposed that the
moving force of human history was what he called An-
tagonism and that eventually it would lead men to peace
on earth. The essay, published in 1784, a year before the
Grondlegung, begins with the "purpose of nature," and
in his "fourth axiom" Kant explains: "Man wants con-
cord; but nature knows better what is good for his
species; she wants discord." And in the seventh section
he elaborates:
Nature has used the unsociability of man, and even of ...
large states ... as a means ... by wars, by the over-

138 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 strained and unrelenting armament for these, by the
need which every state must thus feel in the end, even in
the midst of peace, she drives first to imperfect attempts
and eventually after many devastations ... to that which
their reason might have told them even without so many
sad experiences-namely to leave the lawless level of the
savages and to enter into a League of Nations [VDlker-
bund] in which every state, even the smallest one, may
expect its security and rights not from its own power ...
but alone from this great League of Nations.
Here is the idea that Hegellater called "the cunning
of reason" (die List der Vernunft). Reason, or nature,
employs the irrational to bring about rational aims in the
long run. The essay shows once again how deeply Kant
was influenced by Old Testament notions-history has a
purpose, and in the end "nation shall not lift up sword
against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."29
His belief in a purpose of nature was a crucial element of
his thought.
The demythologizing of the biblical idea of a divine
purpose is encountered eight years earlier in Adam
Smith's Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (1776). The individual, says Smith in
the ninth paragraph of Book IV, Chapter 11,
neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows
how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support
of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only
his own security; and by directing that industry in such a
manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he
intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many
other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end
which was no part of his intention.
Kant did not merely voice the same idea. The purpose he
finds in nature is biblical and messianic, and Hegel and
Marx followed him rather than Smith.
29 Isaiah 2.4 and Micah 4.3.

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 139

 In the psychological realm Kant showed no compa-
rable appreciation of the irrational. Here he was a
rigorist who believed that freedom depended on our
acting from respect for reason without being motivated
by any inclination. The absence of what he called
"pathological interest" seemed to him essential.
Kant thought in terms of sharp conceptual dichot-
omies of which he often thought quite mistakenly that
they represented exhaustive alternatives. The most
famous example is the contrast between phenomena and
noumena, or the things that appear to us and the un-
knowable things-in-themselves. Plainly, this is not an
exhaustive dichotomy. Different eyes and sense organs,
including those of different animals, perceive the same
scene differently, and a perspectivist might question
whether in the end it still makes any sense to ask what
something is "really" like without specifying a particular
perspective or universe of discourse.
Kant's ethic, his model of the moral mind, and his
conception of autonomy are based on a series of even
more dubious dichotomies. They can be arranged in
pairs, though Kant never noted this, and will then be
seen to correspond to the dichotomy of Kant's two
worlds, this world and the other world. The terms in
question are defined here and there, often with an ap-
pearance of scholastic exactitude, but then they are de-
fined again in a slightly different way, Kant having quite
evidently forgotten that he has already introduced the
distinction he needs. Everything would have been much
clearer if he had introduced nine pairs of terms near the
beginning.
phenomenal world noumenal world
determinism freedom
subjective principles objective principles
maXIms universal laws
motives (Triebfedem) inducements (Bewegungsgrande)
pathological interests practical or moral interest

140 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

inclinations reason
hypothetical imperatives categorical imperative
heteronomy autonomy

Everyone of these pairs merits critical reflection.

Does freedom really consist in the performance of ac-
tions that have no cause in the phenomenal world? Am I
free when my acts bear no relation to my phenomenal
self, my individuality?30 Is there not ample ground be-
tween maxims that are valid for me only and laws that
are applicable to all rational beings? And must an im-
perative appeal either to prudence, pleasure, and self-
love or be categorical?
Here it will suffice to take a closer look at two pairs
of terms: motives (Triebfeder means literally "driving
spring") and inducements (Bewegungsgrond is literally
ground of motion), and the two kinds of interest that Kant
distinguishes. Although Kant speaks of motives again and
again, he is not interested in motives but in the possibil-
ity of actions that are not caused by any motive. He is not
interested in psychology but in the possibility of actions
about which psychology would be unable to say any-
thing. He admits:
It is indeed altogether impossible to single out with
complete certainty by means of experience a single case
in which the- maxim of an otherwise dutiful action has
been based solely on moral grounds and on the repre-
sentation of one's duty. For although it is the case now
and then that in the course of the most severe self-
examination we encounter nothing apart from the moral
ground of duty that could have been powerful enough to
move one to this or that good action and such a great
sacrifice, we cannot infer from that with any certainty
that there really was no secret impulse [Antrleb] of self-

80For a contrary view see, for example, F. Bergmann, On Being Free

(1977).

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 141

 love that under the pretense of this idea was the really
detennining cause of the will. We like to flatter ourselves
with a false presumed nobler inducement, but in fact
even the most rigorous examination can never penetrate
completely behind our secret motives; for when it is the
moral value that is at stake, what matters are not the ac-
tions one sees but the inner principles one does not see.

This is the second paragraph of the second chapter

of the Grundlegung. But Kant adds in the next para-
graph:
... Even if there should never have been any actions that
sprang from such pure sources, what is at stake here is
not at all whether this or that happens, but reason should
command by itself and independently of all phenomena
what ought to happen, so that actions of which the world
has perhaps never yet given any example and whose
feasibility anyone who bases everything on experience
might doubt very much, should nevertheless be com-
manded relentlessly by reason, and that, for example,
pure honesty in friendship could be demanded of every
human being not one whit less even if up to this point
there should never have been any honest friend ....

Psychology is for Kant beside the point, and dis-

crimination among motives does not concern him. Mo-
tives are by definition "sensuous" and irrational, and
what reason demands, according to Kant, are actions
prompted solely by respect for the moral law . In the last
long footnote of Chapter I we are told: "Although re-
spect is a feeling, it is nevertheless not a feeling received
through some influence but one self-caused by a concept
of reason." And this footnote ends: "All moral so-called
interest consists solely of respect for the law."
A dozen pages later, in the third footnote of the sec-
.ond chapter., Kant returns to the subject of interest:

142 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 The dependence of the will on principles of reason is
called an interest . ... But even the human will can take
an interest in something without therefore acting out of
interest. The former signifies a practical interest in the
action, the second the pathological interest in the object
of the action. 31

For about twenty pages after that, Kant dispenses

with the conception of interest, and when he introduces
it again he has plainly forgotten the distinction between
two kinds of interest. He now rules out "any admixture
or any kind of interest as a motive"; he speaks of "the
renunciation of all interest when one wills from duty";
and "grounded in no interest" and "no interest what-
soever" become his refrain.
After that "interest" is referred to occasionally, al-
ways in the sense of "pathological" interest, until a sec-
tion early in the last chapter suddenly bears the title "On
the interest that adheres to the ideas of morality." Here
Kant says at one point: "I will concede that no interest
impels [treibt] me to do this, for this would not furnish a
categorical imperative; but I must nevertheless neces-
sarily take an interest in this."
Another dozen pages later, in the final footnote of
the book, Kant, having evidently forgotten his earlier
definition of interest as well as his distinction between
two kinds of interest, offers another definition and labors
hard to establish a similar distinction, without however
recalling the terms "practical" and "pathological." To
add to the confusion, "practical" interest is also some-
times referred to more felicitously as "moral interest."
In sum, Kant's remarks on interest in his short book
on ethics fall very far short of the rigor he opposed to

3\In the second edition of his Crmque of Pure Reason (1787) we find
this definition: "affected pathologically (moved by causes of the sen-
sibility [Bewegungsursachen der Sinnlichkeit)."

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 143

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"popular" writing. And if he had been a little more
rigorous he would also have been clearer. But that is not
all that needs to be said about Kant's comments on inter-
est. His lack of rigor and clarity concealed from him and
from his readers the absurdity of some of his views. To
show this it will be best to consider his immensely in-
fluential remarks about interest in his Critique of Judg-
ment (1790).

29 ~~~ In the second section of

Kant's Critique of Judgment interest is defined as "that
approbation [Wohlgefallen] which we connect with the
representation of the existence of an object." As such,
interest is necessarily connected with the faculty of de-
sire. "The judgment about beauty that is colored in the
least by interest is very partial and no pure aesthetic
judgment. One must not in the least favor the existence
of an object but must be entirely indifferent in this re-
spect to be the judge in matters of taste."
Now one might expect Kant to introduce, if only
eventually, a special kind of interest-say, "aesthetic"
interest-either to establish a parallel to "practical" or
"moral" interest or to escape from the apparent absur-
dity of his position. But he insists emphatically that ap-
probation of the beautiful occurs without interest of any
kind-ohne alles Interesse; he labors the point for sev-
eral pages and eventually repeats this phrase, em-
phasizing it in print, at the end of Section 5. There are
three kinds of approbation that he recognizes: that of the
beautiful, which is marked by the absence of all interest,
that of the agreeable, which "is connected with inter-
est," and that of the good, which "is connected with
interest." In Section 2, moreover, Kant says expressly
that "there are no more kinds of interest than those
which shall now be named," and then goes on to discuss
in turn the interest in the agreeable and that in the good,

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 145

and in his discussion of the latter he refers not only to
pathological interest but also to moral interest, the
"highest interest" that we take in moral goodness.
Later in the book, Kant suddenly recognizes an
"empirical interest in the beautiful" (Section 41) and an
"intellectual interest in the beautiful" (Section 42), but
he still insists that the judgment of taste must not be
determined or colored by any interest. It is only after an
object has been judged to be beautiful that one may take
an empirical interest in it, which is not only pathological
but, according to Kant, restricted to the social sphere.
Isolated from society, nobody would take an empirical
interest in the beautiful! And this interest is "of no im-
portance to us here." Of the interest in beauty that
flourishes in solitude he had no inkling.
"Intellectual interest" in beauty has no affinity with
moral interest, is restricted to the beauty of nature,
comes only after totally disinterested approbation, and is
due to the fact that natural beauty supports our moral
sense by holding out the hope that it may have objective
validity. As for works of art, Kant recognizes only two
possibilities: "They are either such imitations of nature
that they achieve deception and then have the effect
of-supposed-natural beauty; or they are arts that in-
tentionally and visibly aim at our approbation." But art
"in itself can never arouse interest."
All this is really quite extraordinary. One may
applaud Kant's distinction between the agreeable and
the beautiful, but what is one to make of his outrageous
claim that the experience of beautiful works of art is
devoid of any interest? When I look at some Buddha
images, some Rembrandt self-portraits, or one of van
Gogh's paintings of his room, I am profoundly interested
in what I see, and my aesthetic judgments are and
should be informed by this interest. Nor is this interest
by any means merely a result of my value judgment and
something I would not feel if isolated from society. The

146 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

·interest might run every bit as deep in solitude, and
through this interest I may discover more and more that
will and should influence further aesthetic judgments.
Kant and the aestheticians who follow in his
footsteps fail to ask what actually happens when we en-
counter a work of art. In one of his Maxims and Reflec-
tions, written in 1821, Goethe offered a pertinent com-
ment:
It used to happen and still happens to me that a work of
art displeases me when I first see it because I am not up
to it. But if I sense that it has some merit, I try to get at it,
and there is no lack of the most delightful discoveries: I
become aware of new qualities in the objects and of new
capacities in myself.32

Those who find beautiful only what in their childhood

they were told to find beautiful are hardly fit to play "the
judge in matters of taste." To be a judge worth listening
to one must not only reconsider the aesthetic judgments
one accepted or absorbed as a child but also explore
what one was not trained to find beautiful and even what
one was taught to find ugly.
In A History of Fine Art in India and eel/Ion from
the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1911), Vincent A.
Smith, after quoting Goethe's maxim on page 3, says
later on (p. 252), speaking of a celebrated bronze:
If it could be freed from the horrible deformity of the
extra arms, it might receive almost unqualified praise,
but the monstrosity of the second left arm drawn across
the breast, and calling for the surgeon's amputating knife
to remove the diseased growth, spoils an otherwise ele-
gant and admirable work.

It never occurred to this distinguished art historian

that the wings of Simone Martini's or Fra Angelico's
aa Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 9, p. 514; Propy14en-AuBgabe, vol. 35, p.
109.

Kant: The Structure of the Mind. 147

angels or of the "Victory of Samothrace" in the Louvre
were monstrosities, and that paintings and sculptures of
this kind might be improved by the surgeon' s knife or by
painting over "the diseased growth." What is at stake
here is not so much iconographical research that might
detennine the symbolical meaning of the extra anns, al-
though that need not be irrelevant either, as it is suffi-
cient interest to look at a sculpture from many angles, to
imagine it without various parts, to compare it with other
sculptures, to inquire what people who do find it beau-
tiful like about it, and to see whether increased interest
leads us to find it more or less beautiful than we did at
first.

30 ~ Kant is plainly wrong about

interest in aesthetics, and he is also wrong, if not quite so
obviously, about interest in the moral sphere. His jun-
damental mistakes are essentially the same everywhere.
He relies on dichotomies and classifications that he takes
to be exhaustive; he plays with concepts and an elabo-
rate tenninology while spurning any close examination
of moral or aesthetic experience; and he takes his own
highly unusual mind as the model of the human mind
without asking whether his own mind might be
psychologically or historically conditioned and perhaps
only one type among many.
His own mind became for Kant the norm, and he
treated it as men usually treat what they endow with
authority: he did not ask how it had become the way it
was, and he did not compare it with alternative models.
Of course, his mind had developed like anyone else's;
indeed, much more than most men's minds. But he did
not care to know how it had changed and in what re-
spects it had remained relatively unchanged since his
boyhood. Near the beginning of his Prolegomena (1783,
p. 13) he said-and this phrase has often been quoted-

148. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 that David Hume had "many years ago first interrupted
my dogmatic slumber and given my investigations in the
field of speculative philosophy an altogether different
direction:' This is a very neat and memorable construc-
tion and in some ways the opposite of a developmental
approach. It is a way of dividing one's life into two
chapters: before and after. I was benighted, but then
I saw the light; I did not know, but now I do. Lewis
White Beck has contested this construction in a truly
delightful manner: "The dogmatic slumber from which
he was aroused by Hume was a nap which did not begin
until after 1766" (1969, p. 439). The details of Kant's
development need not concern us here. What is impor-
tant is that Kant did not care to know how his mind had
become the way it was, how it might have been influ-
enced by his upbringing or his situation in eighteenth
century KOnigsberg, or how it differed from the mind of,
say, Goethe.
While Kant's mind was in many ways unusual, his
extreme insensitivity to art probably was not as excep-
tional as I would like to believe. Many, if not most,
people, including professors in many fields and even
aestheticians, share this insensitivity. Even as Plato
taught philosophers that one could write about tragedy
without ever stopping to consider a single tragedy, Kant
gave writers on aesthetics a good conscience when
they disregarded the experiences of those who create as
well as those who are deeply moved by works of art.
Even today some aestheticians still echo Kant on
interest without asking what would prompt anyone to
create or pay much attention to works of art if not some
interest.
Kant's remarks on the lack of interest in aesthetic
experience are so implausible that one might be tempted
to reinterpret them if at all possible; but he clearly meant
what he said. Borowski reports in his memoir of 1804 (p.
81):

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 149

 To paintings and engravings, even if they were out-
standing, he never seemed to pay attention. I have never
seen him look at such things even in places where uni-
versally admired collections were displayed in halls or
rooms .... Apart from an engraving of J. J. Rousseau in
his living room, nothing of the sort was to be found in his
whole house-and even this was surely a present from a
friend, and he must have felt that he owed it to him as a
duty imposed on him to keep it.

In other words, the fact that there was one picture in

Kant's house required an explanation I The reason must
have been moral I
In a footnote, the biographer adds that a person to
whom he read this passage assured him that the engrav-
ing had indeed been a present from Ruffinann-"this
noble and splendid man whom all of his friends still
remember with emotion and longing."
In 1764, when Kant was hoping very much for a
professorship, the chair for poetry fell vacant and he was
asked whether he would like it, but he declined because
he felt that this would hardly be the right field for him (p.
19). Nevertheless, one may agree with R. B. Jachmann
when he says in the tenth letter of his memoir uf 1804
that Kant had more feeling for poetry and eloquence
than for any of the other arts; after all he himself wrote
some verses on departed colleagues, duly published in
the great Akademie edition. There is no need to com-
ment on these verses, but his views, as recorded by
Jachmann, are certainly worth quoting.
Easy versification was for him, next to the poetic con-
tents, a chief requirement ofa beautiful poem. Nor did he
consider anything a poem if it was not rhymed or at least
metrical. Rhymeless poetry he called prose gone mad
and could not find it at all to his taste.

As it happens, some of the most remarkable Gennan

poetry of the eighteenth century was unrhymed. The

150 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 most eminent German poet around the middle of the
century, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, who was born the
same year as Kant and died one year before him, at-
tracted a great deal of attention with his unrhymed epic,
The Messiah, which appeared in four volumes between
1751 and 1773. The impact of Johann Heinrich Voss'
unrhymed translation of Homer's Odyssey (1781) was
even greater, and the appropriation of Greek poetry,
which was unrhymed, was among the most significant
literary developments in Germany during the last quar-
ter of the eighteenth century.
In the 1770s Goethe emerged as the greatest Ger-
man poet and has never ceased to be regarded as such to
this day. Goethe's poems "Prometheus" and "Noble let
man be/helpful and good ... "-both written in free
verse-had been included by F. G. Jacobi in his book
On the Doctrine of Spinoza, in Letters to Herr Moses
Mendelssohn (1785), which created a storm of con-
troversy and came to Kant's attention, and it was partly in
response to various requests that he take a stand that
Kant published an article in 1786, "What Does It Mean:
To Orient Oneself in Thinking?" In 1789 jacobi's book
appeared in a second, expanded edition. The second
poem was duly credited and might have been expected
to appeal to Kant on account of its contents. The author
of "Prometheus" was not named, but it is arguable that
no better poem had ever been published in German up
to that time. But for Kant rhymeless verse was "prose
gone mad." He never took the least notice of Goethe in
his works or even in his letters. When one considers the
range ofGoethe's publications through, say, 1797, which
included Faust: A Fragment (1790), and their immense
impact throughout Germany, if not Europe, this is
scarcely credible.
Schiller fared no better as a poet, although we have
seen that Kant responded in a footnote to a criticism
Schiller had offered. Lessing's Nathan, whose en-

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 151

lightened attitudes one might have expected Kant to ap-
prove with some enthusiasm, he did not like, as we have
seen. Matthias Claudius he never mentioned. For
Homer he had little feeling. 33 In sum, he lived during
the greatest period of German literature but had no
organ for it whatsoever. It should be added that Kant was
a voracious reader who surprised visitors from other
countries by knowing their cities, solely from books,
better than they did.
Kant also lived through the greatest period of Ger-
man music if not the world's music. Bach died in 1750,
Handel in 1759, Mozart in 1791. Haydn was eight years
younger than Kant and died five years after him. (Bee-
thoven did not come into his own until the early nine-
teenth century.) Yet in Kant's works and letters none of
them is ever mentioned. Kant wrote two books on
aesthetics, but if ever there was a "man that hath no
music in himself' that man was Kant. Borowski reports:
Music he considered an innocent sensuous pleasure. He
very cordially admonished me when I was fifteen, and
also several other students at that time, not to get in-
volved in it, as it required much time to learn anything
and still more to practice before one could attain a pass-
able level-always at the expense of other more serious
sciences.

He also felt that "if one took the trouble to lend an

ear to this art, one could at least expect to be rewarded
by being cheered up and made glad." The phrasing here
is beautiful: wenn man schon sein Ohr dieser Kunst
hingebe ... (p. 81). Jachmann's report in his tenth letter
is very similar. Of all the arts Kant "had the least sense
for music, although he did occasionally attend concerts
by great masters." VorlAnder says (I, p. 388f.) that

33 Vorlander, vol. I, 372f. A whole chapter, pp. 370-405, deals with

"!Cant and Art."

152 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 "people in KOnigsberg had frequent opportunities to
hear good music. There were a large number of fine
virtuosos in the city." Operas were performed as well as
plays. But the only music Kant seems to have enjoyed
moderately was military marches.
Kant's lack of any organ for art cannot be explained
away by assuming that in KOnigsberg he simply had no
opportunity to see or hear great works. The Keyserlings,
in whose house Kant was "one of the most frequent and
preferred guests," had a large collection of paintings,
including a Rembrandt, and over a thousand engravings
of works of art;34 and another one of Kant's friends pos-
sessed several hundred paintings, including a Do.rer,
three Cranachs, and a Van Dyck. Yet another acquain-
tance had a collection of 250 paintings, including a por-
trait of an old man by Rembrandt as well as many other
Dutch masters.36 Nor will it do to admit that great men,
too, have their limitations, and that Kant's lack of any
sense for the visual arts, music, and poetry is simply a
personal shortcoming that has no bearing on his emi-
nence as a philosopher. Kant's Critique of Judgment,
one of his acknowledged masterpieces which many of
his admirers rank with his first Critique and his ethics,
was vitiated by an utterly untenable model of the mind
at which Kant had arrived by assuming that the human
mind was naturally and always like his own.
This is so obvious in relation to art, music, and po-
etry that it seemed best to consider them first; but now
the question arises whether the case is not essentially
similar regarding Kant's dichotomy of pathological
interest and moral interest, which consists of respect for
the moral law. Are there not interests that are never
dreamed of in Kant's philosophy?
Plato, whose attitude toward the arts also leaves

84 Vorllnder, vol. I, p. 198f.

U Ibid., p. 387.

Kant: The Structure of the Mind ~ 153

much to be desired, can help us at this point. For all his
censoriousness regarding music, poetry, and the visual
arts, he associated beauty with love, and love with a
longing for immortality. Here is an interest worth distin-
guishing from the narrowly hedonistic self-interest that
dominates Kant's conception of pathological interests.
To suppose that the only alternatives to that kind of
utilitarian interest are either moral interest or no interest
whatsoever is simply an egregious error.
John Dewey once noted that valuation is prompted
by "some need, lack, or privation."38 Many such needs,
lacks, and privations have been insufficiently ap-
preciated by other moralists and aestheticians besides
Kant; for example, our experience of sickness, old age,
and death, of infirmity and finitude, of cosmic solitude or
lostness, of falling short of our own ideals-or in brief
our sense of imperfection. For Kant, holiness repre-
sented a commandment. For many other human beings,
perfection is the object of a profound interest. In Plato's
Symposium (207) we read that "love is a longing for im-
mortality," but it would be better to say-and Plato
meant this also-that love is a longing for perfection.
That definition would encompass Aristophanes' great
myth in the Symposium where love is pictured as the
search for our other half. We were whole once but were
then divided and now long to become complete again.
My definition would also encompass both the serpent's
promise "You will be as God" and God's commandment
"You shall be holy." It would include the Buddha's
promise of a triumph over old age, suffering, and death.
And it illuminates, I think, both our moral experience
and our experience of beauty.
In some works of art we sense a perfection that is
lacking in our own existence. That is true in different
ways of some Buddha images and some Rembrandts, of

38 1939, p. 34.

154 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 Bach's music and Mozart's, of Sophocles and Shakes-
peare. (Lessing, incidentally, wrote a whole book on
Sophocles; Kant never even mentioned him.) The long-
ing for perfection is also central in the moral experience
of many people, and Kant's dichotomy of interests as
well as his whole analysis of the foundations of ethics
misses the mark as far as human beings of this type are
concerned. Kant analyzed only one particular type of
morality, which Hegel later called MoralitlJt and con-
trasted with Sittlichkeit.
Schopenhauer adopted and adapted Kant's insis-
tence that the aesthetic experience is devoid of all inter-
est. He helped this strange error to survive. But in other
respects he realized as clearly as any of Kant's major
successors that Kant's model of the mind simply would
not do, and Schopenhauer admired Goethe as much as
anybody did.
Surely, the interests Kant overlooked and implicitly
ruled out of court are far more important for an under-
standing of the human mind than his implausible divi-
sion of the mind into reason, understanding, sensibility,
and judgment, or his dichotomies of theoretical and
practical reason and of reason and inclination. His fun-
damental fault is that instead of starting from an explora-
tion of moral or aesthetic experience he always starts out
from abstractions, concepts, or rather, as we have seen,
words. One crucial example still needs to be added: the
notorious thesis that ought implies can, from which Kant
in his Philosophy of Right deduces the extraordinary
claim that "a collision of duties is therefore unthink-
able."
A philosopher who takes experience more seriously
than the web one can spin out of words might conclude
that any thesis entailing such an incredible conclusion
must be wrong. Indeed, such a philosopher might ask, if
only he felt committed to Kant's "transcendental method":
what must the human mind be like to experience again

Kant: The Structure of the Mind. 155

and again collisions of duties or, if you prefer, conflicts of
values? Hegel tried to reconcile Goethe and Kant at this
point, too, by allowing for collisions but only as rare
exceptions that occurred in periods of world historical
transitions from one era to another. Even Kierkegaard
was still sufficiently under the spell of Kant to consider
such conflicts extraordinary exceptions that could occur
when God addresses some individual directly as he did
Abraham. Nietzsche was sufficiently emancipated from
Kant to recognize that conflicts of values are of the very
essence of human life.
Finally, it is noteworthy that Kant's untenable model
of the human mind has no place at all for love, unless it is
assimilated to "pathological interests." Kant never showed
how much that passes as love is really no more than a
configuration of pathological interests. He simply failed
to consider love. The reason seems clear: In his own
adult experience he found no love, and he assumed that
his own mind was typical. But the discovery of the mind
requires some understanding of love and art.

156 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 Kant:
Autonomy,
Style, and Certainty ~
 31~~~ Kant's conception of au-
tonomy brings to mind George Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four: "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IG-
NORANCE IS STRENGTH." As long as I do what I feel like
doing, I am not free. One should suppose that following
one's inclinations was a necessary although not suffi-
cient condition of autonomy. But according to Kant it is
incompatible with autonomy because for him freedom
and autonomy meant escape from psychological deter-
minism, and he assumed that respect for "the moral law"
was not psychologically conditioned.
At this point his lack of historical sense and
psychological sophistication became crucial. It simply
did not occur to him that the type of mind he had was as
much the result of historical and psychological condi-
tioning as any other. This is most easily seen by looking
at Kant's self-interpretation-at the way he practiced his
own ethic.
In his sixth letter, Jachmann emphasized in print the
sentence: "Kant lived as he taught!" Jachmann, as Vor-
IAnder agrees, seems eminently trustworthy, and it is as
 clear as can be that Kant meant to live as he taught, that
this was a matter of pride and integrity for him. Hence
his moral life may be considered as a self-interpretation
of the greatest weight-a self-interpretation sustained
over many years that cannot be disposed of as a momen-
tary aberration.
The end ofJachmann's sixth letter is interesting, too.
In connection with Kant's immense regard for truth we
are told: "He himself never wanted to appear any differ-
ent from the way he was." He intensely disliked all af-
fectations in speech; and "he strictly adhered to the
orthography that had been customary and generally ac-
cepted during his youth and disapproved of all affected
changes in it as an unnecessary imposition on the
reader." What is revealing and characteristic is that Kant
considered the norms to which he had to conform in his
childhood as natural and right, feeling that everybody
should accept them. It did not occur to him that they, too,
were historically conditioned and the result of many
changes.
The seventh letter is the most important for our pur-
poses, for it is here that Jachmann aims to show "that
Kant was a man of maxims" who lived according to his
own ethic. Actually, the conclusion of the immediately
preceding paragraph sets the stage by showing us how
very much Kant was a child of his time, how sheltered a
life he lived-how remote from the realities of the twen-
tieth century. "With a calm and joyous heart I could al-
ways shout, 'Come in!' when someone knocked at my
door-the excellent man used to say often-for I could
be certain that no creditor stood outside." Thus he felt
that he had purchased total security simply by never
borrowing money. That a person who did not owe any-
body any money might nevertheless be overcome by ter-
ror at the sound of a knock at the door, simply did not
occur to him. His universe was Newtonian, governed by
rational law and order, and worlds removed from the

160 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

Inquisition or from Kaflca's universe and the horrors that
make Kaflca seem prophetic. To Kant himself his own
ethic was anything but eccentric; it was a way of living,
as the Stoics might have said, in accordance with nature,
approximating the lawfulness and regularity of nature.
Almost everything became for him "an occasion to
devise a maxim for himself which he henceforth fol-
lowed with the most unshakable finnness. In this way
his whole life had gradually become a chain of maxims
that eventually fonned a finn system of character." Two
of Jachmann's examples help to show what this meant.
Kant was chronically constipated. Jachmann relates
how for many years Kant took a daily pill to help him.
When the condition got worse, Jachmann's brother,.who
was a physician in KOnigsberg, persuaded him to double
the number of pills.
But no sooner had this happened than Kant reflected that
this increase would have no end, and he adopted the
maxim never to take, as long as he lived, more than two
pills a day; nor would he depart from this maxim even in
his last years when, according to his physicians' judg-
ment, an increased dosage would have been very benefi-
cial for him.

Here we have Kant's conception of autonomy in ac-

tion. The advice proffered by his doctors consisted only
of hypothetical imperatives and appealed to his inclina-
tions. As long as one heeds such appeals one is caught in
a web of cause and effect and not free. Jachmann con-
tinues:
In the same way he had fonnulated a maxim for himself
regarding the smoking of tobacco, which was perhaps his
supreme sensuous pleasure [poor manl], to smoke only
one full clay pipe a day because he did not see where he
should stop otherwise .... In this way he had eventually
tied his whole way of thinking and living to rules of rea-
son to which he remained as loyal in the smallest cir-

Kants Autonomy, Style, and Certaiaty ~ 161

 cum stances as in the most important matters. Since his
dominion over his inclinations and drives was uncondi-
tional, nothing in the world could lead him to depart from
his duty once he had recognized it. He did nothing that
he did not want to do, and his will was free, for it de-
pended on his law of reason. All attempts by others to
subdue his will and guide it differently were in vain; he
adhered firmly to what he had resolved after some ra-
tional reflection, and even when inclinations and per-
missible purposes counseled him to act differently, he
persisted in the duty that he had imposed on himself.

Socrates, in Plato's Symposium, could take or leave

alcohol. He was neither addicted to it, nor did he require
a maXim to stop after the second cup. When the wine and
above all the conversation were good, he went on talking
and drinking until the last person had passed out, left at
dawn, took a bath, and spent the day as if nothing had
happened. Although Socrates did not speak of autonomy,
the model of autonomy that he provided is incomparably
more plausible than Kant's. What little plausibility
Kant's model has depends entirely on the loaded alter-
native of the person who is unable to stop when he has
had enough. Kant assumes in effect that there are only
these two possibilities: the profligate and himself.
Kant would have left the symposium early, for he
had made it an iron rule for himself to be in bed from ten
to five. He was proud, and often asked his servant to bear
witness, that he had never failed to get up at five when
his servant entered the room, shouting: Es ist Zeitl (It is
timel) And he always retired early, even when he was
invited out, to make sure that he would be in his bed by
ten. His schedule was not subject to fleeting inclinations
or to hypothetical imperatives presented to him by other
people. He followed rules he had imposed on himself.
But one does not have to accept any particular theory
about the compulsive or obsessional type, let alone the
anal character, to feel that this kind of rigidity is not a

162. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 ,".,.
....
... ..
" '

..
• J •. ;

.:, ..
\
.......... .....:
~
 sign of freedom or autonomy. The contrast with Socrates
lends powerful confirmation to this feeling. And Kant's
contemporaries had no need to look that far back. They
associated autonomy with Goethe, and the development
of thought after Kant cannot be understood very well
without taking account of Goethe and his influence.
It would make good sense to speak of a Goethean im-
perative which is rather different from Kant's categorical
imperative and yet not hypothetical or prudential. Cre-
ative people ought not to take on so many obligations
that are not rooted in their heart or soul that they have
insufficient time or energy to do what only they can do.
To be sure, Goethe himself was so versatile and did so
many different things that a German cartoon once
showed one officer saying to another: "There's one thing
I don't understand about von Goethe: how can a minister
of state find time to write so many poems?" But on the
whole Goethe spent his life doing what he felt like
doing. More importantly, it is worth pointing out how
much of his time and energy Kant spent on doing what
only he could do, and how one of the four examples in
his short book on ethics involves the maxim that we
ought to develop our talents. Yet it is not only a historical
fact that the immense influence of Kant's ethics has been
inseparable from "duty" and from what is not personal or
individual, but Kant himself went to heroic lengths in
writing about ethics to dissociate it from inclination,
heart, and soul. It is not easy to put the decisive point
very precisely. Yet there are two words that bring out
why there is something so dead in Kant and in Kantian
ethics and in much academic philosophy and why
Goethe, like other major poets and artists, radiates alive-
ness: spontaneity and enthusiasm. To proscribe spon-
taneity and enthusiasm is to prescribe deadness.
The four dots in the last long quotation mark the
omission of a sentence about Kant's inflexible maxim "to
smoke only one full clay pipe a day because he did not

164 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 see where he should stop otherwise." The generally
rather worshipful Jachmann continues: "If there had
been some kind of clay pipe as large as several small
ones, he would surely have used that because this would
not have conflicted with his maxim; but he could not be
persuaded by any means to use a different pipe bowl."
To switch to a bowl not made of clay would have vio-
lated his maximl So much depended on the precise for-
mulationl So close was Kant to the religious mentality of
countless Jesuits, orthodox rabbis, and other casuists.
That the rules are made by oneself in the first place is
clearly not enough to guarantee that, when one's whole
life becomes "a chain of maxims," one does not become
a prisoner. As spontaneity is ruled out, freedom gradu-
ally becomes a function of casuistic ingenuity.
For Friedrich Schiller and the German philosophers
who were impressed by Goethe, this aspect of Kant's
philosophy proved unacceptable. But for some
twentieth-century philosophers to whom Goethe means
nothing, this element in Kant is attractive.
As philosophy becomes more and more scholastic
and prizes ingenuity while being deeply suspicious of
spontaneity and individuality, so-called rational recon-
structions of Kant's ethic have become popular. But what
is nowadays called a rational reconstruction sometimes
brings to mind the exegetical approaches of scholastics
of bygone ages. With a bland disregard for history and
context, not to speak of the original author's mentality,
one reads ideas of one's own into a celebrated text. This
is hardly a symptom of autonomy, but it is part of the
charm of Kant that he allows the heteronomous to feel
they are autonomous. "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY," and slavery
parades as freedom.
Kant, of course, was not merely a man who made a
point of being in bed from ten to five or of writing every
morning, even ifhe himself felt that these habits were of
the essence of his autonomy. A critic who feels that in

Kant: Autonomy, Style, and Certainty. 165

these respects he was unfree and a creature of routine
may feel nevertheless that Kant was a relatively free
spirit and demonstrated a measure of autonomy in what
he wrote within this compulsive framework. He was not
as free a spirit or as autonomous as Goethe, but obvi-
ously did display considerable independence. And some
of those who have greatly admired him have responded
to this quality.
Kant himself, to be sure, thought in terms of sharp
dichotomies: according to him, one is either autonomous
or heteronomous. My conception of autonomy, which is
developed in Without Guilt and Justice: From De-
cidophobia to Autonomy (1973), is different and admits
of degrees. Even as some are more courageous than
others and some have higher standards of honesty than
others, and it is simplistic to think merely in terms of
courage and cowardice, honesty and dishonesty, it is also
misleading to suppose that one either is or is not auton-
omous.

32 ... Style is the mirror of a mind.

Kant's is anything but a harmless eccentricity. It is a
contagious disease for which it would be hard to find a
more descriptive name than pernicious anemia. What is
pernicious about its bloodlessness, its lack of vitality and
spontaneity, is that it is the language of self-deception.
Needing nothing less than absolute certainty, the writer
foregoes the excitement of living dangerously with
probabilities or bold hypotheses; but his sense of cer-
tainty is spurious and depends on the obscurity of his
style, which does not allow him to see clearly.
Kant's is not the language oi a free spirit like Les-
sing, who preferred the ceaseless fight for truth to the
possession of it and who had the strength to live without

166. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 absolute truth. 1 Kant, too, was a man of courage, and 200
years later we are apt to overlook how much daring it
took to set limits to knowledge as he did, smashing the
"rational" psychology, cosmology, and theology of some
of his predecessors. Yet he depended heavily on equivo-
cation. He pictured himself as another Copernicus while
he tried to undo the damage that Copernicus had done to
human self-esteem. Kant did away with knowledge-to
make room for faith, a supposedly rational faith; he ar-
gued that practical reason demanded that the ideas on
which he had been raised in childhood must be true.
Kant's message was not either/or, aut aut in Latin, but et
et, both; you can eat your cake and have it, too.
Kant could not get himself to let go. His language is
the language of a constipated casuist who is afraid of
letting go of a sentence; he goes on and on, adding
clauses, often past the point where they can be con-
strued. This scandalous style was meant to be, and soon
became, the paradigm of serious philosophic writing.
Whatever was not written more or less like this was pre-
sumed not to be serious philosophy. Yet as soon as Kant
becomes a little clearer, as he does in the four examples
in his short book on ethics, it becomes apparent to ev-
eryone who makes a serious effort to follow him that
Kant's lack of rigor is staggering.
Kant himself suggested, and it has been widely be-
lieved, that his language was the price he paid for being
scientific, but in fact it cloaks a lack of rigor. It really is a
cloak, a veil of concepts that comes between the thinker
and experience and allows him to ignore experience.
The language is the language of scholasticism that
spurns any description or analysis of our experience,
looks down its nose at psychology and history, and jug-
gles concepts, setting up dichotomies and trichotomies

1 See sec. 17 above.

Kanb Autonomy, Style, and Certainty ~ 167

with the aid of curious terms, without stopping or
stooping to ask whether what is most important has not
been left out. Kant's language is a scandal not only
stylistically but also methodologically. It kept him and
others from seeing what he was doing.
In A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical
Reason (1960), Lewis White Beck, the foremost Ameri-
can Kant scholar, whose graciousness matches his erudi-
tion, offers a detailed analysis of Kant's postulate of the
immortality of the soul and asks in the end: "What, then,
is left of the postulate? Only a hope .... Kant has given
no very good reason why one should believe in it" (p.
270). That is an extraordinarily polite way of stating ~n
inescapable conclusion. And two pages earlier: "I hesi-
tate to suggest what seems to me to be the only reason, as
it is almost incredible that Kant could have made such a
mistake." But that is what we find at every step. The
forbidding language does not eliminate incredible mis-
takes; it keeps Kant as well as readers who do not read
him very, very closely from discovering them.
Kant's language has been as influential as any part of
his work. Few have accepted his postulates, and I
therefore have not even bothered to dissect his postulate
of God's existence; but in Germany and in most places
where philosophers are generally professors, Kant has
become a model philosopher: even if one could not ap-
proximate his genius one could at least try to write like
him.
Kant could write with some grace, and "The new
style emerges for the first time in his main work, the
Critique of Pure Reason."2 From that point on the style
of Kant's major works is scandalous. Yet admiration for
Kant has blinded some interpreters to the facts. Thus
Ernst Cassirer, whose reputation as a philosopher is
considerable, said in his German book on Kant's life and

I VorlAnder, vol. 11, p. W.

168. DISCOVERING THE MIND

doctrine (1918), speaking of Kant's Grondlegung;
In none of the major works expounding his critical
philosophy is Kant's personality so immediately present,
in none is the rigor of the deduction [I] so perfectly fused
with such a free agility of thought, and ethical strength
and greatness with a sense for psychological detail [I],
and sharpness in the definition of concepts [I] with the
noble matter-of-factness of a popular language that
abounds in felicitous images and examples (p. 253f.).

Cassirer's lack of incisiveness is often frustrating in

his other books, too, and VorlAnder's two-volume biog-
raphy of Kant is much richer in materials; but this pas-
sage defies belief. For Cassirer makes no attempt to
show how the notorious four examples can be defended
against the most obvious criticisms or why he considers
them "felicitous." Here is what Vorlllnder says about
Kant's mature style:
We have no wish to gloss over the weaknesses of Kant's
style any more than his other imperfections. They are to
be found in abundance not only in the three Critiques
but, taking their col or from them, also in other writings of
the "critical" period. Above all the piling up of three,
four, five, six, and at one point actually seven subordinate
sentences that are fitted into each other within a single
long sentence; but also pleonasms, displacements of
words that make for a lack of clarity, ponderous circum-
locutions, anacolutha, unnecessary repetitions of the
same expression or construction-for example, on a
single page, 262, of the Critique of Pure Reason
(Kehrbach [,s edition = A295f. = B35lf.]) we find no less
than eighteen relative clauses that have been squeezed
into a mere three sentences, and on p. xixf. of the second
preface we find five not especially disturbing genetives
one right after the other. And what is worse, he uses even
important philosophical concepts, like transcendental,
subjective, objective, etc., not always in the same sense.
Add to this the frequently confusing arrangement of the

Kant: Autonomy. Style, and Certainty ~ 169

 material in which one rarely senses anything resembling
symmetry. Just read the table of contents of the Critique
of Pure Reason with all its Parts, Sections, Divisions,
Books, Main Segments, General Notes, and
Appendices-what Schopenhauer called the Gothic
style. Or construct for yourself a table of contents for the
Critique of Practical Reason which was published with-
out one, and note how the first main part has 168 pages
and the second only 13, and the rest of the arrangement is
also as confusing and asymmetrical as possible. To all
this, finally, add the often wearisome verbosity, prolixity,
and obscurity of the presentation ... (p. 101£.).

Let nobody suppose that Kant's long sentences are

carefully crafted like the involved periods of classical
orators. Anacolutha are inconsistencies in logic and
syntax-sudden shifts from one construction to another,
which are common in ordinary speech and in streams of
consciousness. And the second edition of the Critique of
Pure Reason, revised to make things clearer, also lacked
a table of contents, just like the second Critique which
appeared a year later.
Oddly, the first edition of 1781 had a table of
contents-which was woefully brief and incredibly
asymmetrical. This is worth mentioning because one
might suppose that the whole structure was clear at least
to Kant's own mind, and that he had written his master-
piece on the basis of a detailed outline. But he obviously
had not.
Roman I comprises almost 700 pages, Roman 11,
which in the table of contents is divided only into four
Main Segments, 150. Roman I is divided into Part One,
which consists of two "Sections," and Part Two, which
consists of two "Divisions." That is all the breakdown
offered us for a book of almost 900 pages. The smallest
units range in length from eight pages to over four
hundredl One gets the impression that when Kant had
finished writing the book, he did not take the time to

170~ DISCOVERING THE ~UND

look back to see what exactly he had got and how it all
fitted together. And the third edition, like the second,
offered no table of contents at all.
Of course, all this may strike some readers as ir-
relevant, merely external, and of no inherent interest or
importance. In fact, it has a bearing on the question of
Kant's rigor, his method, and his mentality. He was not
half as rigorous and scientific as he thought he was, and
the model he provided was disastrous.

33 ... Kant impeded the discovery

of the mind by (1) establishing a misguided "transcen-
dental" method, by (2) providing an untenable model of
the mind as well as (3) a grotesque notion of autonomy,
by (4) persuading generations of philosophers that seri-
ous and important studies must be written like the
Critique of Pure Reason, and finally (5) by insisting that
in philosophical analyses of the mind hypotheses are
illegitimate and certainty and necessity are require-
ments. The last two points still require discussion, and
both need to be related to Kant's own mind or mentality.
The Critique of Pure Reason is such a stylistic
atrocity that one must ask-and scholars have long
asked-how it came to be written the way it was. Surely,
nobody could have decided deliberately that the book
ought to be written that wayl And yet it quickly became a
model for others.
One of the most eminent German Kant scholars,
Hans Vaihinger, proposed the so-called patchwork
theory, and Norman Kemp Smith propagated it in his
immensely interesting commentary. In brief, the theory
is that Kant accumulated many bits and pieces for more
than a decade and then patched them together, more or
less figuratively speaking, with scissors and paste. This
is held to account for the many inconsistencies in the
book and for its poor organization.

Kantl Autonomy, Style, and Certainty ~ 171

 This theory was developed when the so-called
Higher Criticism of the Bible was flourishing in Ger-
many, and it was widely believed-and some Bible
scholars still believe-that the five Books of Moses are
patchwork. The orthodox Mosaic theory was countered
with a mosaic theory that held quite literally that verses
and even half verses in Genesis, for example, could be
assigned confidently to one or another written source;
first, either the Jahvist or the Elohist or a "priestly au-
thor," and a little later on, as more people had to make
scholarly contributions, to J1> J2, El> E 2, PI' P 2, etc., etc.
Instead of playing on the word "Mosaic" one could also
speak of a materialistic theory of literary creation. It was
supposed that the greatest book ever written, Genesis,
was composed of particles that its creator had simply
fitted together.s
Kant's Critique, of course, differs from Genesis in a
multitude of ways and is assuredly not a masterpiece of
literature whose poetic beauty has never been sur-
passed. Those who are interested in the details of the con-
troversy about the patchwork theory have to read Vai-
hinger (1902), Smith's commentary, H. J. Paton (1930
and 1936, Volume I, p. 38ff.), and Beck (1969, p. 468f.).
Among the things that speak against the patchwork
theory are Kant's own words, which will be quoted soon.
But even as it is clear that the writer of Genesis drew on
more than one tradition, it is unquestionable that when
Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason he had accumu-
lated notes for more than ten years. The book did not
come into being all at once, out of nothing. In addition to
Kant's own words, the inconsistencies in the
Grundlegung are also highly relevant. Here is a short
book that the proponents of the patchwork theory do not
explain as a mosaic, and yet we encounter practically the

3 For a more detailed critique, see Kaufmann (1958), secs. 87-89.

172~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

same problems. Both books, as well as the Critique of
Practical Reason, are creations of the same singular
mind.

34 ~ When the Critique of Pure

Reason appeared, Kant was fifty-seven. Berkeley and
Hume published their masterpieces in their twenties;
Schopenhauer his at thirty-one. Kierkegaard died at
forty-two, Nietzsche stopped writing at forty-four,
Spinoza died at forty-five, and Hegel, who was a late
bloomer, published his first book at thirty-six and his last
at fifty-one. But if Kant had died at fifty-six, hardly any-
one would have heard of him. Actually, he had pub-
lished his first book in his twenties, and he had followed
it up with many other publications, not yet in his later
style. But in his fifties he felt that all he had published so
far was beneath comparison with "the system" that was
gradually taking shape in his head. And after his brief
inaugural dissertation of 1770, when he finally became a
professor, he published hardly anything until the
Critique appeared in 1781.
As early as June 7, 1771, Kant wrote Herz that he
was at work on a book with the title "The Limits of
Sensibility and Reason" and, after having gone over all
the materials and weighing and fitting together every-
thing, had recently finished the whole plan. The title,
Die Grenzen der Sinnlichkeit und der Vernunft, 4 was
probably inspired by Lessing's Laokoon oder aber die

• SinnUchkeit cannot mean sense in the sense of what is "intelligi-

ble" or not "empty of meaning," although readers ofP. F. Strawson's
preface to his book, The Bounds of Sense: An E886Y on Kan",
Critique of Pure Reason (1966) might be led to assume that Kant had
once considered a title of that sort.

Kantl Autonomy, Style, and Certainty. 173

Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766), "Laocoon or on
the Limits of Painting and Poetry."5
Eight and a half months later, Kant had forgotten
what he had written Herz and told him in another letter,
February 21, 1772, how he had planned a book that
"might perhaps have the title 'The Limits of Sensibility
and Reason: " The first part was to be "theoretical" and
was to have "two sections, (1) phenomenology in gen-
eral, and (2) metaphysics, but dealing only with its na-
ture and method. The second part would also be in two
sections, (1) general principles of feeling, taste, and sen-
suous desire, and (2) the first principles of morals." After
going into the details at some length, Kant reported that
he was "now in a position to bring out a 'Critique of Pure
Reason: dealing with the nature of theoretical as well as
practical knowledge, insofar as the latter is purely intel-
lectual," that the first part would "deal with the sources
of metaphysics, its methods and limits"-and that he
would "publish the first part within about three
months"l That was nine years before the Critique actu-
ally appeared. But even then Kant knew that "after that I
will work out the pure principles of ethics."
More than three months had passed, indeed almost
two years, when Kant wrote Herz late in 1773 that he
was "still hoping sometimes to have the book published
by Easter 1774:' and "Even when I take into account the
frequent indispositions that always cause interruptions,
I can still almost certainly promise to have it ready a
little after Easter" I He was greatly looking forward to
getting his "transcendental philosophy" out of the way,
as that would enable him to turn "to metaphysics, which

a Emil Amoldt's laborious attempt to refute this suggestion in his

very erudite and long-winded essay on "The external genesis and the
time it took to write the Cntique of Pure Reason" (1894), pp. 111-13,
is quite unconvincing. I accept Vaihinger's suggestion, the more so
because Amoldt himself argues for Kant's knowledge of Laokoon (p.
193f.).

174~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 has only two parts; the metaphysics of nature and the
metaphysics of morals, of which I shall publish the latter
first."
It is not excessively unkind to charge Kant with
self-deception. For almost ten years he kept thinking
that he would publish his magnum opus in roughly three
months' time and felt so sure of this that he could prom-
ise it "almost certainly"-and perhaps said so in writ-
ing to increase the pressure on himself. In retrospect
these expectations seem incredible unless we assume
that in those days Kant pictured the Critique as a far
shorter book than it turned out to be.
More than three and a half years after the Easter
promise and the reference to "frequent indispositions,"
Kant wrote Herz on August 20, 1777, both about his
physical problems and about what was holding up the
book. He singled out one of his chronic indispositions
that interfered with his work, hoping that Herz, as a
physician, might be able to help with a prescription.
"Although I am not really plagued by obstructions, I
nevertheless have every morning such laborious and
generally inadequate exoneration that the feces which
remains behind and accumulates becomes, as far as I can
judge, the cause of a foggy head as well as flatulence."
As for the book, "What I am calling the Critique of Pure
Reason lies in the way of the completion of all other
works like a stone, and I am now occupied solely with its
removal and hope to be finished with it entirely this
winter," which would have meant publication by Easter
1778. The only remaining problem was, he claimed, to
present "everything in it with total clarity."
Emil Arnoldt relates that when Kant wrote this let-
ter, and indeed throughout 1777, he definitely was not
yet ready to prepare any final version. In addition to the
problems mentioned, he had not yet "overcome all the
difficulties of the transcendental dialectic," and
moreover J. N. Tetens published a two-volume work that

Kant: Autonomy, Style, and Certainty .175

year which, no doubt, delayed Kant's project. Tetens'
Philosophical Attempts Concerning Human Nature and
Its Development comprised more than 1,600 pages, and
Arnoldt (p. 147f.) agrees with Hermann Cohen that it
greatly influenced Kant in a number of ways, although
Kant never once referred to Tetens either in his Critique
or in any of his other books. Yet Kant complained in
several letters after the publication of his book that Te-
tens had disappointed him by not doing anything to
promote the Critique!
In April 1778 Kant wrote Herz that the rumor then
circulating in Berlin to the effect that parts of his book
had by now come off the printer's presses
has been spread too hastily. Since I do not want to exact
anything from myself by force (because I would like to go
on working in the world a little longer), many other proj-
ects are coming in between. But it is progressing and, I
hope, will be finished this summer. The causes for this
delay of an essay that, as far as length goes, won't amount
to much [I], you will grant some day, I hope, to have been
valid, considering the nature of the case a{ld of the proj-
ect itself. Tetens, in his lengthy work on human nature,
has said much that is acute; but, without a doubt, he let it
be printed, or at least stand, just as he wrote it.

Kant went on to say that ifhis health should be tolerable

during the summer he hoped to be able then "to com-
municate the promised little work [Werkchen] to the
public."
There is no adequate English word for Werkchen.
The diminutive suffix suggests the Latin opusculum and
a minor as well as small work. Yet there are few works in
the whole history of philosophy that one would be less
inclined to call a Werkchen than Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason, and it is plain that he was not being humorous.
After all, he had said only a few lines before that the
work would not amount to much in length (die an

176. DISCOVEmNG THE l\UND

Bogenzahl nicht viel austragen wird), which makes it as
clear as can be that as late as 1778 Kant's whole concep-
tion of his Critique was still utterly different from the
work of almost 900 pages that he finally published in
1781.
The actual writing of the book we know remains
shrouded in mystery. Emil Arnoldt's lengthy investiga-
tion of it sometimes reads like a parody of Kant and of
Teutonic scholarship. It comprises about ninety pages,
followed by an "Appendix" of 462 pages, which is di-
vided into six parts, of which "No. 4 & No. 5" form one
part with subdivisions down to 3.c.delta, while No. 6
comprises a single page, described in the Table of Con-
tents as "Explanation about the exclusion of the an-
nounced No. 6 of the Appendix from the series of the
discussions presented here." Regarding the actual writ-
ing of the Critique we read on page 169: "Hence, I be-
lieve, the assertion can almost be risked: Around the
middle of December 1778 Kant had begun to attack the
task of writing down for the printer the, or some version
of the, Critique of Pure Reason." Again the English can-
not match the flavor of the German: die oder eine
Niederschrift der Kritik der reinen Vernunft far den
Druck in Angriff genommen. But while "assertion" is
emphasized in print, this claim can only be risked "al-
most." And there is the question of how much weight
should be given to Hamann's letter to Herder, May 17,
1779, in which we read: Kant arbeitet frisch darauf los
an seiner Moral der reinen Vernunft, which means that
"Kant is working briskly on his Morality [I] of Pure Rea-
son."
Arnoldt thinks that Kant composed a detailed draft
of his Critique between April or May and August or
September 1779, including a great many concrete exam-
ples and explications that he eliminated when he pre-
pared the book for the printer from about December
1779 to October or November 1780. But this is certainly

Kants Autonomy, Style, and Certainty ~ 177

dubious and would seem to call into question Kant's
honesty in his fascinating letters to Christian Carve on
August 7, 1783, and to Moses Mendelssohn on August
16, 1783. The way he put it to Mendelssohn has often
been quoted rather freely. Here is a literal translation:
... For the product of reflection extending over a period
of at least twelve years I had set afoot [zu Stande ge-
b,.acht] within four to five months, in flight as it were [I], to
be sure with the greatest attention to the contents but
with less industry regarding the presentation and fur-
therance of easy understanding by the reader-a resolve
that I still do not regret because without that and given a
longer delay for the sake of introducing popularity, the
work would probably have remained undone altogether
because the latter fault can be remedied by and by, once
the product is there in a rough version.

Kant is here trying to explain why the book appar-

ently did not appeal to Mendelssohn, and in context the
suggestion is clearly that the exposition might still be
improved-which is what Kant actually tried to ac-
complish in the second edition, in 1787. What he is say-
ing is certainly not that it took between four and five
months to write a first draft with lots of examples that
were designed to make things easier for a larger public,
and that he then had allowed the draft to rest three
months before he returned to it and spent almost another
year to revise it for the printer.
I should not attach much weight to Hamann's re-
mark about the "Morality of Pure Reason" but find
Kant's own account of the actual writing of the Critique
fascinating because it is so utterly at odds with the re-
ceived image of Kant. Who would ever have supposed
that the book was written "in flight as it were" by an
author who never took the time to look back at what he
had written?
How different prejudices are from facts I Many pro-

178 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

fessors think that N ietzsche wrote that way, and that there
is no difference to speak of between Nietzsche's notes,
published posthumously, and the so-called aphorisms in
his books. But on December 8, 1888, less than a month
before his final breakdown, N ietzsche wrote Heinrich
Koselitz (alias Peter Gast) that he had returned the
manuscript of Ecce Homo to the printer "after laying it
once more on the gold scales from the first to the last
word to set my conscience finally at rest." The beauty
of Nietzsche's style is due in no small measure to the
fact that he usually weighed every word. Professors
who write badly often think that serious books that are
written well must have been written with great ease and
little care and therefore are not truly serious. Kant's style
became the model of serious philosophy. Actually, good
writing is usually the result of rigorous self-criticism and
repeated rewriting, and it is arguable that the lack of
such self-criticism is deeply unscientific.
Kant wrote Christian Garve:
... I set it afoot in about four to five months, fearing that
such a complicated business would eventually become,
if I delayed it any longer, a burden for me and my in-
creasing years (as I am already in my sixtieth) and might
in the end make it impossible for me, while right now I
still have the whole system in my head.

One gets the sense that after such long obstruction

Kant had come to feel frightened of waiting any longer
and could see no other solution than to get it all out at
once in a single tremendous explosion. And if he told
Mendelssohn and Garve the truth, he must have written
his Critique quite literally almost as fast as it would
take anyone to copy it.
From Wasianski's memoir of 1804 and above all
from Jachmann's fifteenth letter, we know Kant's daily
schedule, which does not seem to have varied even
slightly during his productive years. After rising at five,

K8Dt: AutoDomy, Style, 8Dd Certainty ~ 179

Kant had breakfast, which consisted of two cups of very
weak tea and one pipe, and then worked on his lectures
until seven. From seven to nine he lectured, and from
nine to 12:45 he wrote, in his bathrobe and slippers,
wearing a nightcap. Many professors feel exhausted after
two consecutive lectures, and very few get up at five. But
Kant did his writing after two hours of teaching, devoting
three hours and forty-five minutes to this task, day after
day. (Wasianski related [po 239] that Kant loved his watch
so much "that he said now and then: if he were in dire
distress, it would be the last thing he would sell.")
At this point it is interesting to digress briefly to see
how Kant arranged the rest of his day. From one to four
he had luncheon, which could last until six when he had
many guests. He ate only once a day and never ate or
drank anything after lunch except water. He liked the
smell of coffee and at parties felt tempted by it but never
drank coffee because he considered the oil harmful. The
luncheons took so long because Kant relished conversa-
tion. This is actually an instance of Jachmann's dictum
that Kant lived as he taught. In 1798 Kant himself pub-
lished his lectures on anthropology, which show how
gracefully he could write and lecture, and in the final
section (78) of the First Part he dealt at length with
meals, saying among other things:

Eating alone (solipsimus convictorii) is unhealthy for a

philosophizing scholar and is not restoration but (espe-
cially when it amounts to solitary gluttony) exhaustion,
fatiguing work and not animating play of ideas .... At a
festive table, when the multitude of courses is designed
solely to keep the guests together for a long time (coenam
ducere), the conversation usually moves through three
stages: 1. narration, 2. argumentation, and 3.joking.-A.
The news of the day, first domestic and then also foreign,
that have come in through private letters and
newspapers.-B. When this first appetite has been satis-
fied, the company becomes more vivacious; for in the

ISO ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 course of reasoning, differences of judgment about one
and the same subject that has been started can scarcely
be avoided, and nobody has the worst opinion of his own;
and this gives rise to a dispute that stimulates the appe-
tite for the main dish and bottle and, according to the
intensity of the dispute and the participation in it, also
aids the digestion.-C. But because reasoning always is a
kind of work and ... this eventually becomes burden-
some, the conversation naturally moves on to the mere
play of wit, partly also in order to please the woman who
is present ... and thus the meal ends with laughter . ...

The transition from 1, 2, 3 to A, B, C is a typical incon-

sistency, but what is more striking is the lack of spon-
taneity even in conversation.
At Kant's house the first course was soup with some
meat in it and usually also noodles, and the second was
dried fruit or fish, cod being Kant's favorite. The third
course was a roast, which Kant ate with mustard; he
sucked the juice from the meat and then put the rest back
on his plate. Everybody had a quarter of a bottle of wine
in front of his place, usually Medoc, with no seconds.
The fourth course was bread and cheese, which Kant ate
with lots of butter; and when there were many guests the
meal ended with cake. Afterwards, Kant would not sit
lest he fall asleep, and he soon went for a walk for at least
an hour--a little longer when the weather was good. He
walked alone, slowly to avoid sweating, and took notes.
On his return home he either read or received visitors
but did not write, and by ten he was in bed.
To return to the Critique, if he wrote it in four
months, working five days a week, he averaged ten
printed pages a day; if it took him five months and he
worked six days a week, he would have averaged a little
more than six and a half printed pages a day. It seems
reasonable to assume that he averaged about eight. And
he had to provide clean copy for the printer without the
help of a typewriter or a secretary. In other words, the

Kant: Autonomy, Style. and Certainty ~ 181

Critique of Pure Reason was written so fast that there
was no time to weigh words or to reconsider long and
involved sentences or arguments.
This accounts for an otherwise puzzling phrase at
the end of Kant's preface to the second edition:
Even apparent contradictions can be picked out of any
written work, especially if it proceeds as free speech, if
one compares individual passages that have been tom
from their context; and in the eyes of those who rely on
the judgment of others they cast a disadvantageous light
on the work, but anyone who has mastered the idea of the
whole finds it very easy to dissolve them.

Of course, it is precisely the commentators and scholars

who do not rely on secondary sources but wrestle with
the text who are bothered by Kant's frequent contradic·
tions. As Lewis Beck once put it (1969, p. 468), "The
difficulties a reader experiences tend to increase with
the number of readings he gives it:' But what at first
glance seems almost incomprehensible is Kant's claim
that the style of the book is that of free speech (vor·
nehmUch ala freye Rede fortgehenden Schrift). It may
be objected: Surely, we have never met anyone who
talks the way Kant writes! Yet Kant knew that what he
had put on paper and not taken the time to revise care·
fully was his stream of consciousness. And the many
sentences that cannot be construed invite comparison
with the transcription of a tape. Kant did not prevaricate
when he claimed that the book was "set afoot within four
to five months, in flight as it were."
Kant had published one book in the 1740s and sev·
eral in the fifties and sixties, but almost nothing in the
seventies. With the publication of his magnum opus,
however, it was as if a dike had broken. Two years later,
in 1783, .Kant published his Prolegomena, a book of over
200 pages in which he tried to present the ideas of his
Critique in more accessible form. Another two years

182. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 later, he published his short book on ethics, the
Grondlegung, which also gives the impression of having
been written "in flight as it were." The following year he
published his Metaphysical First Principles of Natural
Science, and in 1787 the second edition, very exten-
sively revised, of his Critique of Pure Reason, now well
over 900 pages long. In 1788 his Critique of Practical
Reason appeared, in 1790 his Critique of Judgment, in
1793 Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason, in
1795 his essay "On Eternal Peace," another two years
later a two-volume work entitled The Metaphysics of
Ethics, and in 1798 his Anthropology. These are merely
the highlights of a vast productivity that includes quite a
number of other books as well as many essays and arti-
cles.
Kant occasionally wrote almost with some grace, but
his major works, and especially the second and the third
Critiques, were modeled on the first Critique. The
Critiques became the model without peer of rigorous
German philosophy. One could write an occasional
essay in a more popular style, but works that aspired to
the significance of Kant's three Critiques had better be
written in that stylel
This may sound like an exaggeration, but we have
already seen how Fichte's first book was stylistically,
too, so close to Kant that it was actually taken to be
Kant's. Fichte occasionally tried to write in a more
popular vein, but these efforts only added to the
spreading sense that really important "scientific" works
had to be written in the style of Kant's Critique, or at
least not in ordinary German. It was widely felt that
something was extremely odd about Kant's style, but he
somehow persuaded the Germans that philosophy re-
quired a special language.
In time, Hegel and then, roughly a hundred years
later, Heidegger tried purposefully to create such a lan-
guage. Descartes had provided a very different model for

Kant: Autonomy, Style, and Certainty ~ 183

 French philosophers, and Bacon and Hobbes for the
British. Nevertheless, some twentieth-century French
philosophers succumbed to the fatal example of Kant,
Hegel, and Heidegger, to the point of translating Kant's,
Hegel's, or Heidegger's terms into French.
We shall see later how Hegel's Phenomenology was
written in very much the same way as Kant's Critique of
Pure Reason. Sartre's often beautifully written literary
works are the product of continual revisions, while his
"philosophical manuscripts are written in longhand,
with almost no crossings out or erasures"-and very
much the worse for that-and his Critique de la raison
dialectique, which he considers his philosophical mag-
num opus, was written like Kant's Critique, as fast as the
author could write. "I worked on it ten hours a day, tak-
ing Corydrane [that is, "Speed"]-in the end I was tak-
ing twenty pills a day-and I really felt that this book had
to be finished. The amphetamines gave me a quickness
of thought and writing that was at least three times my
normal rhythm, and I wanted to go fast." Not only has
Simone de Beauvoir recorded in her autobiography
(1963) how Sartre almost killed himself in the process,
but he himself has related how he reached the point
where he "was scribbling illegibly rather than writing: I
wrote sentences absolutely devoid of meaning, without
relation to the play [Altona], which frightened Simone
de Beauvoir."8 In the case of the play, of course, Sartre
caught himself because he kept going over his literary
creations. But writing his Critique during the same pe-
riod was another matter, for here it was evidently a vir-
tue if the result resembled Kant's Critique and was
scarcely readable.
Among the great German philosophers Scho-

8 "Sartre at Seventy: An Interview [with Michel Contat)" in The New

York Review, Aug. 7,1975. Reprinted with minor stylistic differences
in Sartre, Life/Situations (1977), pp. 7, 18, 19.

184 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

penhauer was plainly influenced as much by Goethe
as by Kant, even in his style, while Nietzsche was
the only major figure who resolutely refused to fol-
low Kant's example. The price he had to pay for that was
that some philosophy professors thought for a while that
he could not really be a serious philosopher. Actually, he
broke not only with Kant's impossible style but also with
his misguided method, his untenable model of the mind,
and his grotesque notion of autonomy.? And no
philosopher contributed more than Nietzsche to the dis-
covery of the mind.

35 ~ In the preface to the first edi-

tion of the Critique oJ Pure Reason Kant said:
Regarding certainty I have pronounced this sentence on
myself: in this kind of consideration it is in no way per-
missible to opine and everything that as much as resem-
bles a hypothesis is forbidden goods that may not be
offered even for the least price, but as soon as it is dis-
covered it must be confiscated (A ix).

No doubt, he recalled Newton's celebrated dictum, in

the General Scholium to Principia: Hypotheses non
Jingo (I do not invent hypotheses). But we should also
recall Goethe's polemics against the Newtonians: "A
false hypothesis is better than none at all" (Section 12,
above).
In addition to absolute certainty Kant also demands
and claims to have attained "completeness" and neces-
sity. He actually says:
The perfect unity of knowledge of this kind that consists
of nothing but pure concepts so that no element of expe-

7Wilcox (1974), chap. IV, "!Cant, the Thing-in-Itself, and Nietzsche's

Skepticism," has shown how even Nietzsche was influenced a little
by !Cant.

Kanb Autonomy, Style, and Certainty .185

 rience ... can have any influence on it and expand or
augment it makes this unconditional completeness not
only feasible but also necessary (A xiv).

To be sure, the dream of absolute certainty is older than

Kant and can be traced back to Descartes, to Plato, and
even to Pannenides, but it was Kant who impressed this
trinity of certainty, completeness, and necessity on his
successors, especially in Germany.
It is astonishing that a philosopher with Kant's deep
need for certainty who also had the conviction as well
as the reputation that he had attained certainty should
actually be so elusive regarding some, if not most,
of his fundamental ideas. Or is it astonishing? A conjec-
ture can be formulated crisply; a hypothesis is of no use
if it is not stated clearly; but if one makes bold to lay
down certainties for all time without admitting even
the possibility that in the light of further develop-
ments-if only one's own development-one may be led
to change one's mind, a lack of clarity is all too under-
standable.
Take Kant's doctrine of the thing-in-itself. This is
the cornerstone of the whole system and the point where
Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer attempted
revisions of the master's philosophy. There is no need
here to survey all the controversies about this doctrine; it
will suffice to mention the basic problem that almost any
student of Kant is bound to notice. Kant insists that tra-
ditional metaphYSicians have made the egregious mis-
take of applying the twelve categories to what lies
beyond all possible experience. But "In numerous pas-
sages Kant applies the categories (such as unity, plural-
ity, reality, causality, existence) to the things in them-
selves" and he often "claims that our ego is affected by
the things in themselves, thus turning them into the ul-

186 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

timate cause of our representations; in this capacity they
are altogether indispensable in the 'critical' system."s
Our concern here is preeminently with the discov-
ery of the mind, and the problem just mentioned has a
direct bearing on Kant's conception of the mind. What is
the status of the mind or spirit, self or soul? Is it a
phenomenon or not? Erich Adickes, one of the greatest
German Kant scholars, whom I have just quoted, comes
to the conclusion that according to Kant "one and the
same ego is on the one hand in and for itself timeless and
hence unknowable, while on the other hand it is experi-
enced and known by me, which is to say by itself, in my
empirical consciousness in the form of time and thus as
an appearance" (p. 156f.). In our discussion of Kant's
postulate of the immortality of the soul we saw that Kant
postulated the immortality of one soul per person, that
he applied the categories to these souls, and that the
whole point of the postulate was that each soul would
continue eternally to become holier and holier-which
would seem to mean that each of them prevails more and
ever more over transphenomenal inclinations.
Kant's agnosticism, his insistence that we cannot
know anything at all about the soul, is easy enough to
understand and sympathize with, but when he claims
that the point of doing away with knowledge is to make
room for faith, and when he argues that the faith in
question is not irrational but on the contrary what reason
demands, it does not seem unreasonable to inquire what
precisely it is that reason demands.
Friedrich Nicolovius, who published Kant's books
during the 1790s, remarked in 1798 that Kant's recent
books had led "many Kantians" to "suppose that he did
not agree with himself." His students in KOnigsberg
thought that he did not really believe in immortality.
8 Adickes (1924), p. 157.

Kmll Autonomy, Style, md Certainty .187

Johann Brahl, who often dined with Kant, said: "Al-
though he postulates a god, he himself does not believe
in it, and he also pays no heed to the future insofar as it
can grant a continued existence."& Jachmann, whose re-
liability is beyond question and whom Kant himself had
asked to write his biography, promising to furnish the
necessary materials, relates in the eleventh letter of his
beautiful memoir what Kant had said to him about im-
mortality. Kant began by asking him
what a rational person ... should choose if before the
end of life an angel from heaven ... appeared to him and
presented him with the irrevocable choice ... whether
he wished to exist for all eternity or to cease altogether to
exist when his life ended. And he [Kant] was of the
opinion that it would be rather foolhardy to opt for a
totally unknown state that would last eternally, thus sur-
rendering freely to an uncertain fate that, regardless of all
remorse over one's choice, regardless of all disgust with
the endless monotony, and regardless of all longing for a
change, would still be inexorable and eternal.

Jachmann goes on to point out that these remarks do

not contradict Kant's postulate, for Kant could have be-
lieved that practical reason demanded something that
was not at all desirable from the point of view of our
inclinations. One might add that the immortality he
postulated was characterized by ceaseless self-
improvement-a singularly strenuous kind of monotony.
My prime concern here" is not with the immortality
of the soul but with Kant's conception of scientific
philosophy. If he had simply taken either the line that
there is much that we can never know or the line that an
honest man must sometimes allow, as Socrates did at the
end of the Apology, that more than one hypothesis is
available and that we have no way of telling which is

e Vorliinder, vol. 11, p. 181.

188~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

best, I should be satisfied. But Kant insisted on exclud-
ing from his "critical" philosophy all mere hypotheses;
he aimed and claimed to provide certainty, and he con-
cealed his own uncertainties, confusions, and changes
of mind behind an absurd way of writing-and this
practice no less than his style was soon copied widely,
and still is to this day.
We have seen how in 1778 Kant still thought of his
Critique of Pure Reason as a Werkchen that "would not
amount to much in length," which means that much of
the argument of the book of almost 900 pages published
three years later must have come to Kant more or less at
the last moment if not actually while writing the work
"in flight as it were." In the same vein, some of the
arguments of the Critique of Practical Reason can be
shown to have occurred to Kant only as he was writing
that book. In his commentary on it (p. 267), Lewis Beck
cites a passage written just a little earlier and says:
This seems to be an intimation of the moral argument
that is to follow in a few months; but it is so much an
obiter dictum . .. that it may not be justified to see more
than an obscure germ of the later argument in it.

And what, it might be asked, is wrong with that?

Absolutely nothing. But a writer who publishes ideas
and arguments as they come to him should offer them
tentatively as attempts, suggestions, or hypotheses. I
venture the conjecture that Kant's insistence on his cer-
tainty is related closely to his obscurity. What is stated
clearly and concisely invites objections and alternative
hypotheses. To preclude both, Kant avoids being clear
and concise. tO Deliberately? Of course not. What is at
work here is the same timidity that demands certainty in
the rust place.
In German, there is a single word that can mean

10 Cf. Kaufmann (1958). sec. 51: "The ambiguity of dogma."

Kantl Autonomy, Style, and Certainty ~ 189

 certainty or security: Sicherheit. It is revealing that the
adjective, sicher, is encountered in the very first sen-
tence of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Rea-
son where Kant speaks of den sicheren Gang einer Wis-
senschaft, and this same phrase is repeated a dozen
times in his preface. The phrase has been translated as
"the secure stride of a science," and Kant himself con-
trasts it with groping or fumbling about. Kant wants to be
sure and is afraid of uncertainty as well as insecurity.
When Kant was offered a professorship in Erlangen
in 1769, while he was still waiting for a chair in
K()nigsberg, he turned it down. Some writers suppose
that he did this because the move might have interfered
with his work on the Critique of Pure Reason which, as
we have seen, he did not start writing until ten years
later. But Kant's letter to Erlangen voices his great
timidity, his fear of "changes that would seem small to
others." This timidity contrasts with the boldness of his
attack on traditional metaphysics and theology, but even
that daring had drastic limits, and I have tried to show
how Kant sought security in obscurity and equivoca-
tions.
The paradox of Kant's boldness and timidity might
be put this way: Kant was afraid of recognizing his own
courage. As a soldier may risk his life, feeling that he has
no choice at all and is merely doing his duty, Kant felt
that his audacious hypotheses were not the creations of
his intrepid imagination but pieces of secure know ledge.
He did not allow himself to think that he risked being
wrong, and he concealed his daring from himself by as-
suring himself and his readers again and again that he
was emulating "the secure stride of a science." One of
the boldest thinkers of all time kept deceiving himself
about his own audacity, as Hegel did after him. Kant was
like a man who walks a ridge, totally unaware of the
precipices on both sides, feeling sure that he is perfectly
safe.

190. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 Kant's admirers have often stressed his high regard
for truth and honesty, and he unquestionably went to
heroic extremes in denying the "supposed right to lie" to
prevent a murder (see footnote 24 above). Yet we have
seen how he boasted a year later, in 1798, how he had
outwitted the King of Prussia (text for footnote 23). In a
letter to Mendelssohn, April 8, 1766, Kant said: "To be
sure, there is much I think with the clearest conviction
possible and to my own great satisfaction that I shall
never have the courage to say; but I shall never say any-
thing I do not think." We have seen that his students
were no longer sure during the last decade of his life,
thirty years later, that he had not said things in print that
he did not actually believe. And his opus postumum
lends support to their suspicions. Here we find Kant
saying: "God is not a being outside me but merely a
thought within me."l1
Even if Kant had never deviated from the declara-
tion in his letter, that alone-coupled with his own re-
port of how he outwitted the King of Prussia with a mis-
leading promise-would lead us to expect that Kant
sometimes did not mean what he seemed to mean. We
should also ask what sort of thing Kant lacked the cour-
age to say-and whether this kind of silence may not
poison the whole system. l !
Kant's admirers, from the biographers of 1804 to Karl
Jaspers, have stressed again and again that Kant aimed
not so much to teach philosophy as philosophizing or, in
the current English idiom, doing philosophy. I have
tried to show that in this respect Kant was a disaster. One
of his contemporaries, on the other hand, really did make
an all-out attempt to make his readers think, to the point
of frequently not stating his own views, especially in his

11Vorlinder, 11, p. 293.

11See Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, the chapter "Idols of the Market
Place."

Kant: Autonomy. Style. and Certainty ~ 191

abundant theological or antitheological polemics. It was
because so many people were unsure about Lessing's
beliefs that F. H. Jacobi's aforementioned book on the
doctrine of Spinoza (1785) met with so much interest and
created such a sensation, as Jacobi reported that Lessing
was a Spinozist, which was then widely taken to mean an
atheist. But in Lessing's case it was not timidity that kept
him from stating his convictions; he clearly felt that
stating them would not serve his primary purpose of
getting his readers to think seriously and strenuously
about important questions. The classical statement he
published in 1778 is worth recalling because it furnishes
such a contrast to Kant's "critical philosophy":

Not the truth in whose possession some human being is

or thinks he is, but the honest trouble he has taken to get
behind the truth is what constitutes the worth of a human
being....
If God held in his closed right hand all truth and in his
left hand only the ever live drive for truth, albeit with the
addition that I should always and evermore err, and he
said to me: Choosel I should humbly grab his left hand,
saying: Father, give! Pure truth is after all for you
alone!13

Lessing cherished development as much as Kant

feared change, and he did not assume, like Kant, that the
human mind is immutable. He even wrote a short essay
on the theme that man's mind might change: "That There
Could Be More Than Five Senses for Man." To him,
change was exhilarating.
Lessing's untimely death in 1781 was one of the
greatest misfortunes ever to befall German literature and
thought. If only he had lived a few years longer to pub-
lish his reactions to Kant's "critical philosophy"l But at
least his legacy was not ignored. Goethe developed it
11 See sec. 17 above.

192. DISCOVERING THE MIND

not only in Faust but also in his polemics against New-
tonian science.
Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript
begins with reflections on something Lessing said, and it
would be nice if one could claim that in existentialism
Lessing's heritage gained philosophical expression. But
Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger were never able to
emancipate themselves from Kant. They never even rec-
ognized that Kant was in important ways the antithesis of
Lessing. And gradually it became a cliche that existen-
tialism represented a revolt against Hegel. It is impor-
tant to see the whole development of philosophy after
Kant in a different light, and to that end it was necessary
to make a beginning by seeing Kant as he has not been
seen before. Actually, there is one short passage in
which Kant is seen as here, a few words near the end of
Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols (1889). Section 49 is
entitled Goethe:

... He did not retire from life but put himself into the
midst of it; he was not fainthearted but took as much as
possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What
he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extrane-
ousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will (preached
with the most abhorrent scholasticism by Kant, the anti-
pode of Goethe); he disciplined himself into wholeness,
he created himself.
. . . Goethe conceived of a human being who would be
strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters,
self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might
dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natu-
ral, being strong enough for such freedom ....

Nietzsche was not the first to see Goethe that way.

Schiller's and Hegel's images of him had been similar,
and nineteenth-century German philosophy cannot be
understood without him, any more than it can be under-

iCantl Autonomy, Style, and Certainty ~ 193

stood without Kant. And Kant was, for all his virtues, in
many ways a disaster.

36 ~ Looking back upon my ac-

count of Kant, I feel like quoting the conclusion of Les-
sing's Duplik, the polemic in which the image of the two
hands of God is found:
I had meant to let the reader gather casually the reasons
for this judgment, and yet I have often literally pro-
nounced the judgment myself. What shall I do?
Apologize? Ask for forgiveness with the silly mien of an
incompetent hypocrite? Promise that next time I'll be
more careful?
Can I do that? Promise? Yes, yes, I promise-never
even to resolve to remain cold and indifferent in certain
matters. If a human being is not permitted to generate
warmth and take sides when he recognizes clearly that
reason and scripture have been abused, when and where
is it permitted?

In my juxtaposition of Goethe and Kant I might have

taken the time and trouble to conceal my feelings better,
but decided against that, not only for the reasons stated
by Lessing. It would be perverse to try to discover the
minds of several dead writers while taking pains not to
discover one's own. By seeing how we react emotionally
to Goethe and Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, Heidegger
and Buber, Freud and lung, we can find out a great deal
about ourselves. While I see no need to burden my dis-
cussion of these men with the discoveries I have made
about myself in the course of writing about them, I be-
lieve that not hiding my emotions may make it easier for
you to discover your feelings and your mind.
Disapproval, of course, can be based on intellectual
considerations, but a little observation of ourselves and
others shows quickly that the emotion accompanying it

194 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

is not always proportionate to our reasons. Whenever
this is the case, the question arises why we have such
strong feelings about some faults and not about others.
Usually, though not always, powerful negative feelings
are an indication that we sense the same faults in our-
selves and have taken some trouble not to give in to
them. When this is not the case, we generally associate
these faults with someone else or with a group of people
whom we dislike intensely, possibly for very good rea-
sons.
I am far from hating Kant and if, contrary to my pro-
nounced opposition to Manichaeism, I were to divide
writers into good and evil people, I should certainly in-
clude Kant among the good. Why, then, does a certain
animus against him come through here and there? And
why do I bother to discuss him at such length when I
think that in important respects he was a disaster?
I love philosophy and have given much of my life to
it, but it seems to me to be in very poor health, and this,
as I have tried to show, is due in no small measure to
Kant who, with the best intentions, came close to ruining
it. To restore its health, we need to understand what has
gone wrong.
Actually, I doubt that mainstream philosophy will
ever become strong enough to be of much help in the
discovery of the mind. Nor do I think, upon reflection,
that it was strong enough before Kant came along. In
many ways he is an embodiment on a large scale of what
is wrong with philosophy, but he also had an enormous
influence, and its very enormity makes one wonder what
might have happened if he had pushed philosophy in a
different direction. Suppose he had not insisted on cer-
tainty, necessity, and completeness I This, it seems to
me, was his most fateful error, and his obscure style may
be considered a mere corollary of that. Suppose he had
been more like Lessingl Such questions are obviously
unanswerable. If one thing had been different, ever so

Kanta Autonomy, Style, and Certainty. 195

many others might have been different as well; for
example, all the professors of philosophy who took to
Kant like fish to water might in that case have found Kant
much less attractive. At the very least they might not
have followed his example in this respect. One only
needs to compare the Nietzsche literature with
Nietzsche to appreciate that point, or the Kierkegaard
literature with Kierkegaard.
One might well consider reflections of what might
have happened if only Kant had done things differently
so futile that they are not even worth mentioning if it
were not for the fact that reading Hegel makes such
questions almost inescapable. For the bizarreness of
Heger s philosophy is due largely to his misguided at-
tempt to reconcile Goethe and Kant, and it is fruitful to
separate out these two strains and see what remains
when the Kantian elements are eliminated.

196 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 \\\./"
~'\'
.'-."....., ""'\-.?
\'
,

'

PART~ \)..

Hegel's
Three Conceptions
of Phenomenology ~
 3 7 ~ Schopenhauer, who was prob-
ably, next to Hegel, the greatest philosopher of his
time, called Hegel "this Caliban of the spirit."1 He also
spoke of "Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense (3/4
of it empty and 114 in [sic] insane notions."2 Aberwitzig
(insane) is a word that recurs often in Schopenhauer's
remarks about Hegel, along with the assurance that
Hegel had no Getst at all. Schopenhauer's attacks are
very repetitive, and a single long sentence gives a good
idea of their tenor:
SchelUng was now followed by a philosopher created by
the ministry who, with political intent that, moreover,
went askew, was certified as a great philosopher from up
high-Hegel, a flat, witless, disgusting-revolting, igno-
rant charlatan who, with unexampled impudence, kept
scribbling insanity and nonsense that was trumpeted as
immortal wisdom by his venal adherents and actually

I "Diesen geistlgen Kaliban," in the Preface to the second ed. of Die

Welt als Wtlle und Vorstellung.
J In the Introduction to Ober den Willen in der Natur.
 taken for that by dolts, which gave rise to such a complete
chorus of admiration as had never been heard before. a

Few detractors of Hegel have gone so far, but while

it is widely considered bad form to speak irreverently
about Kant, disrespect for Hegel is still good form. Many
writers and lecturers enjoy making scurrilous remarks
about Hegel, while others-and sometimes actually the
very same people-make use of his ideas without giving
credit to him. Most Hegel scholars, however, ignore
these facts and write about the master without as much
as allowing for the possibility that he might have made
important mistakes. The transitions in his books from
one concept or stage to another are presumed to be nec-
essary in some obscure way, and vast amounts of time
are spent on discovering what does not meet the eye. As
a result of this, much Hegel scholarship seems as mind-
less as Schopenhauer's total failure to grasp Hegel's
genius. It is almost as if we were asked upon entering
the world of Hegel scholarship to take leave of our un-
derstanding and to walk for once, to borrow one of
Hegel's metaphors, on our heads.
Having exerted myself to rehabilitate Hegel and to
reawaken interest in his philosophy after World War 11, I
am not quoting Schopenhauer by way of agreeing with
him. But it seems to me that as we approach Hegel we
should begin by facing the fact that there is something
bizarre and almost incredible about his books. I aim to
'This incredible passage is worth quoting in the original, too: "Auf
Schellingjolgtejetzt schon etne phtlosophtsche Mtntsterkreatur, der,
in politischer, obendrein mit einem FehlgrijJ bedienter Absicht, von
oben herunter zum grossen Philosophen gestempelte Hegel, etn plat-
ter, geistloser, ekelhaft-widerlicher, unwissender Scharlatan, der, mit
belspielloser Frechheit, Aberwitz und Unsinn zuaammenachmierte,
welche von aeinen fellen Anhiingem als unsterbliche Weisheit aus-
posaunt und von Dummkopjen "chtig dafur genommen wurde,
wodurch ein so vollstandiger Chorus der Bewunderung entstand, wie
man thn nle zuvor vemommen hatte." Parerga und Paralpomena
(1851), vol. I, sec. 13, p. 91£.

200 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

show that this grotesque quality was due in large mea-
sure to his attempt to reconcile Kant and Goethe. Spe-
cifically, Hegers Phenomenology of the Mind-orofthe
Spirit-might have become one of the greatest contri-
butions ever made to the discovery of the mind, if it had
not been for Kant's disastrous influence. In many ways it
is a bold, almost foolhardy book, and the conception un-
derlying it was a work of genius inspired by Goethe. But
Hegel was determined to produce a major philosophical
treatise and felt that the only way of doing that was to
follow in Kant's footsteps.
That the book is deeply at odds with itself and that
the author is continually pulled in different directions
was noted as long ago as 1857 by Rudolf Haym: "To say
everything: the Phenomenology is psychology reduced
to confusion and disorder by history, and history de-
ranged by psychology" (p. 243). I tried to show in 1965
how "instead of mixing only history and psychology,
Hegel offers us what Richard Wagner was later to call a
Gesamtkunstwerk, leaving out little but music" (Section
30). But Haym was right in sensing an underlying
dichotomy, though wrong in assuming that the basic du-
ality was that of history and psychology. The fundamen-
tal conflict is between Kant and Goethe.
This conflict existed in Heger s mind, and apart from
it we cannot begin to understand his mentality. But the
conflict did not exist in an inaccessible realm beyond the
phenomenal world, behind Heger s thought and books. I
aim to discover Hegel's mind in his work and hope to
show how his books and his thought are misconstrued as
long as we fail to understand his mentality. This demon-
stration will take up the bulk ofthis chapter, and Hegel's
major contributions to the discovery of the mind will be
considered only in the final section.
The conflict between Kant and Goethe can be traced
back to Hegers earliest philosophical manuscripts, his
so-called Theologische Jugendschrlften, the theological,

Hegel's Three Conceptions of PhenomenololY ~ 201

 or rather antitheological pieces he wrote when he was in
his twenties, in the 1790s. They were published only in
1907 by one of Wilhelm Dilthey's students, Hermann
Nohl, after Dilthey himself had published a major work
on this material, "The History of Hegel's Youth," the
year before. Since the claim that the Phenomenology
represents an attempt to reconcile Kant and Goethe
might seem farfetched, I shall try first to show very
briefly how these two divergent influences operated in
the early manuscripts.
Goethe said, as we have seen, "Works of nature and
art one does not get to know when they are finished; one
must catch them in their genesis in order to comprehend
them to some extent"; and in 1899 Otto Pniower in-
scribed this epigram on the title page of his book on
Goethe's Faust. Dilthey might just as well have in-
scribed it on the title page of his Jugendgeschichte
Hegels seven years later.
On the eve of World War 11, in 1938, Theodor
Haering published the second and last volume of his
history of Hegel's development in which he required
1,300 pages to get to Hegel's first book, the Phenomenol-
ogy, and stopped after devoting a few pages to it. Two
years later, Hermann Glockner, the editor of a widely
used edition of Hegel's works in twenty volumes, pub-
lished the second and last volume of his supplementary
work on Hegel, in the same binding and designed to go
with the set; and it took him 1,000 pages to get as far as
the end of the Phenomenology, and he devoted only a
few pages to Hegel's later writings. Since the war, a ver-
itable industry has developed around Hegel's early
writings, not only those of the 1790s but also the abun-
dant manuscripts of the immediately following years.
One is sometimes led to wonder if these German schol-
ars are determined to lead Goethe's dictum ad absur-
dum. But they have long departed from its spirit and are
for the most part no longer interested in understanding

202. DISCOVERING THE MIND

the whole phenomenon of Hegel by way of his de-
velopment; many of them could say with the scholar
whom Nietzsche mocks in Part Four ofZarathustra that
the motto of their conscientiousness is "Rather know
nothing than half-know much!" Zarathustra asks this
man whether his aim is to "pursue the leech to its ulti-
mate grounds," and he retorts: "That would be an im-
mensity; how could I presume so much! That of which I
am the master and expert is the brain of the leech: that is
my world. And it really is a world, too." Here Nietzsche
echoes Goethe's mockery: "That is your world! A world
indeed!" (Faust, 409).
Goethe's pointer about genesis and development
has been taken up with a vengeance; but scholastics are
after all scholastics, and from whatever motto they may
start they sooner or later become microscopists. Hence it
would not be fair to say that no major philosopher has
suffered as much from Goethe's suggestion as Hegel. To
be sure, Hegel's works have often been forgotten over
the studious concern with their genesis and the study of
his early manuscripts, but what is at fault is not the con-
cern with development; it is rather the myopia that, not
at all in Goethe' s spirit, loses sight of the development to
get bogged down in relatively trivial details.
Hegel himself saw fit to publish only four works: the
Phenomenology (1807), the Science of Logic, which ap-
peared in three volumes (1812, 1813, and 1816), the En-
cyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), and the
Philosophy of Right (1821). During the last ten years of
his life he did not publish another book but thoroughly
revised the Encyclopedia (second edition, 1827; third,
1830). All four works are of considerable interest, but the
first two are unquestionably Hegel's masterpieces, and
only the Phenomenology needs to be considered at
length in connection with the discovery of the mind. The
Encyclopedia, which contains Hegel's entire system in
outline form, covers some of the same ground as the

Helel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 203

Phenomenology, but only very briefly, and that part of it
needs to be taken into account.
I shall also introduce a few passages from Heger s
introductory lectures on the philosophy of history, but
there is no need here to try to deal with the whole sys-
tem. It seems possible to illuminate both Hegers role in
the discovery of the mind and Heger s own mentality
and thus his philosophy as a whole by concentrating
mainly on a single question: What was Hegel's concep-
tion of phenomenology?

38 ... Even so, something will be

gained by first dealing very briefly with the starting
point of Hegel's philosophical reflections, as this was
different from what many people still suppose. The
point is important but I have dealt with it in detail
elsewhere. 4 Here we can concentrate on the most crucial
points.
It has been remarked that every philosopher comes
to philosophy either from science or from religion,
which would seem to be false, as many have come to
philosophy from both directions simultaneously, or
rather from the conflict of religion and science, like Kant.
But Hegel, although the word "science" is found in the
titles of all his books,S came to philosophy from religion
and, all his life long, sought in it a substitute for religion
or, as he himself might have put it, that which transcends
religion, that which is even higher and comes after it.
Many philosophers after World War 11 are more in-
terested in epistemology or the philosophy of language

• Kaufmann (1954); greatly enlarged version in Kaufmann (1959), chap.

8, also reprinted in Maclntyre (1972), chap. 3. See also my Begel
(1965) for a full-length portrait.
I For the Phenomenology, see below. The Philosophy of Right had two
facing title page!! of which the first read: Naturrecht und Staatswis-
senschaft im Grundriss.

204 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 and, when they deal with Hegel, are prone to project
into him their own concerns. Others do the same with
their own interest in politics and social questions. Yet
Hegel's writings of the nineties, whether we call them
theological or antitheological, leave no doubt what-
soever that his first concern was with religion and mor-
ality.
It is a commonplace that Hegel started out from
Kant, which is true. But it needs to be added that he did
not start from the Critique of Pure Reason. His starting
point was Kant's Religion Within the Bounds of Mere
Reason Alone (1793), and next to that his ethics. This was
natural enough considering that Hegel was a student at
the Tabinger Stift at that time, studying theology. Nor is
it surprising that the publication of Schiller's reflections
on "aesthetic education" in 1795, which dealt with some
of Hegel's central problems, left a permanent mark on
his thought. 8
Like SchiDer, Hegel had not been satisfied with
Kant's book on religion. He was convinced by it that
religion must not contain anything that goes against rea-
son, but he wanted something more full-blooded than
Kant's purely rational religion. His imagination was
nourished on the Greeks, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller,
and he felt that morality was a matter of humanity, of
being humane, and could not be divorced from feeling,
art, and literature.
His earliest fragments deal with the possibility of a
folk religion that would contain nothing offending rea-
son. Under the influence of Goethe's and Schiller's clas-
sicism and his own enthusiasm for the Greeks, Hegel
looked to ancient Greece for inspiration. His next ex-
periment and first complete essay took the form of a life
of Jesus in which everything miraculous and super-
natural is stripped away and Jesus preaches Kant's mor-

• Kaufmann (1965), sec. 7.

Relel'l Three Conceptions of PhenomenololY ~ 205

ality. This was a sustained attempt to write a scripture for
his folk religion. Two brief quotations suffice to show its
tenor. Jesus says, for example:
What you can will to be a universal law among men, valid
also against yourselves, according to that maxim act; this
is the basic law of ethics, the content of all legislation and
of the sacred books of all peoples.
What I teach I do not offer as my ideas or property. I do
not demand that anyone should accept it on my author-
ity.... I subject it to the judgment of universal reason.7

This is rather grotesque; we should remember that

Hegel himself did not publish his early manuscripts;
and T. M. Knox omitted "The Life of Jesus" in his
English version of Hegel's Early Theological Writings.
But if a touch of the grotesque adheres to most of Hegel's
writings, very much including his Phenomenology, we
ought to ask whether this was not often due to his ill-
advised attempt to follow Kant. To be sure, in the books
Hegel published he criticized Kant's doctrines, includ-
ing his moral philosophy, and Kant's influence is no
longer so obvious.
No sooner had Hegel finished this tour de force than
he wrote "The Positivity of the Christian Religion," also
in 1795. This is an essay of considerable originality, a
hundred years ahead of its time in its insistence that
some of the flaws of Christianity, notably its au-
thoritarianism, go back to Jesus himself. More than any
of his other works, excepting only his humorous short
article "Who Thinks Abstractly?"8 the essay on the
positivity shows us Hegel's native ability to write viv-
idly, powerfully, and sardonically. Why, then, did he
stop writing that way? Obviously, because he became
convinced that serious philosophy had to be written in
Kant's manner.
T Hegel (1907), pp. 87, 89.
B Included, complete, in Kaufmann (1965).

206. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 The basic philosophical stance in the essay on the
positivity is still Kantian, but in his next major effort,
which Nohl as editor entitled "The Spirit of Christianity
and Its Fate," Hegel turned against Kant, projecting his
own dissatisfaction with Kant's rigid moral law into
Jesus' alleged dissatisfaction with the rigid Jewish law of
his time. Instead of voicing Kant's moral doctrines, Jesus
is now identified with Goethe's image of humanity. After
picturing the spirit of Judaism in New Testament times
in the darkest colors, with a brush steeped in Christian
anti-Semitism, Hegel says, in words that come close to
Nietzsche's formulations in Twilight o/the Idols:
A man who wished to restore the human being again in
his totality could not possibly choose such a path [as
Kant's] which only adds a rigid conceit to the human
being's division against himself. Acting in the spirit of
the laws could not mean for him acting from respect for
duty and in contradiction to the inclinations; for in that
case both parts of the spirit (of this division of the mind
against itself one cannot speak in any other way) would
no longer act in the spirit of the laws but against it ...

Two pages later (p. 268) Hegel says in his discussion of

the Sermon on the Mount: 'The agreement of inclination
with the law is of such a nature that law and inclination
are no longer different; and the expression 'agreement of
inclination and law' therefore becomes quite unsuit-
able."
The turn against Kant is palpable, and so is the desire
for harmony and integration. But it might be thought that
at this point Hegel discovered true Christianity or the
original and un defiled spirit of Christianity. Actually,
however, Kant's division of man against himself, like his
belief in the "radical evil" of human nature, was derived
from the New Testament. It was Paul who had written the
Romans (7.15 ff): "I do not do what I want, but I do the
thing I hate .... I know that nothing good dwells within

Hegel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology. 207

 me, that is, in my flesh .... For I do not do the good I want,
but the evil I do not want is what I do." And according to
the Gospels, Jesus had said: "The spirit is willing, but the
flesh is weak."9 This conception of man divided against
himself can be traced back to Plato and beyond him to the
Orphics; it is part and parcel of the notion of two worlds,
which Kant revived. The world of the flesh and the incli-
nations is pitted against the realm of the spirit. What is
usually called for is a triumph over this world and the
flesh, or the inclinations.
In Paul there is a notion of harmony attained through
faith, but his denigration of this world is emphatic and
usually explained, no doubt correctly, in terms of his own
confidence that this world was about to come to an end, or
as the Revised Standard Version puts it, "the form of this
world is passing away."lO In his essay on the spirit of
Christianity Hegel speaks of faith, but his conception of it
is totally opposed to Paul's, and to the Lutheran and
Calvinist traditions as much as to the Roman Catholic.
Jesus, according to the young Hegel, "recognized
kindred spirits" in those who had faith; for "with such
complete trust in another human being, with such devo-
tion to him, with such love which holds back nothing,
only a pure or purified soul can throw itself into the arms
of one equally pure .... Faith is the spirit's recognition of
spirit; and only equal spirits can recognize and under-
stand each other."
This is faith without transcendence, faith without
another world, faith that precludes any notion that I am
impotent filth while God alone is good and omnipotent.
What Hegel here calls faith is love and trust between free
spirits who are convinced of their essential equality. As I
tried to show in 1954, it was Goethe's lphigenia (1787)
that inspired Hegel at this point.

• Mark 14.38, Matthew 26.41.

10I Corinthians 7.31.

208. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 In the last part of his essay on the spirit of Christianity
Hegel dealt rather opaquely with fate and its reconcilia-
tion through love, and these pages, which are strikingly
similar to parts of his later Phenomenology, read like
reflections on the motto that Goethe later gave his play:
Every fCliling thClt is humCln
pure humClnity Cltones.
The central theme of Goethe' s play is that Orestes can be
reconciled with fate and liberated from the furies with-
out any divine intervention, simply by the humanity of
his sister, Iphigenia.
It is a commonplace among Hegel scholars that the
highly implausible discussion of brother and sister in
Hegel's Phenomenology is based on Sophocles' Antig-
one, and the allusions are indeed unmistakable; but
most scholars have not been as scandalized as they ought
to have been that Hegel should have based such wild
generalizations on one play. It hardly lessens this scan-
dal, but it helps to explain Hegel, that he clearly also had
in mind Goethe's lphigenia and his own relationship to
his sister who never married-and later committed
suicide less than three months after Hegel's death. He
may also have thought of Goethe's sister, Comelia, who
had married "under pressure, and against her will," and
died at twenty-six, while giving birth to her second
child; for it was no secret that "Her love of her brother
was the only love vouchsafed her. "11
In 1865 J. H. Stirling published a vast two-volume
work under the title The Secret of Hegel. It was soon
remarked that he had managed to keep the secret.
Among scholars, however, it is still a well-kept secret
that Hegel drew on his experience of life, on what he
saw and what Goethe might have called Anschauung.
Many scholars still proceed as if Hegel' s Phenomenology

11 Friedenthal. p. 27f.

HeBe1'1 Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 209

 had been developed out of pure concepts, although in
the first decade of this century some editors began to
point out in foomotes allusions to texts, like Antigone.
But to have called attention to the fact that Hegel himself
had a sister would have been considered most indelicate
and unphilosophical. Why do Hegel scholars think that it
is better to base sweeping generalizations about the re-
lation of brother and sister on one ancient play than it is
to base them on at least two plays as well as some per-
sonal experience?
Two points about the early manuscripts on religion
should be kept in mind. First, it has often been remarked
that Marxism functions in many ways like a religion. It
has not been remarked that Marx unconsciously brought
off the feat that Hegel had attempted unsuccessfully. In
his earliest manuscripts Hegel sought to develop a folk
religion that might supphmt Christianity. In his mature
work he gave up any hope of reaching ordinary folk but
never ceased trying to develop a philosophy that would
serve him as a surrogate for religion.
Secondly, Hegel found himself right from the start
somewhere between Kant and Goethe. Initially, he put
Kant's doctrines into Jesus' mouth and must have
noticed how bizarre that was. Then he read Goethe's
image of humanity into Christianity, and that did not
seem so grotesque. But as he became a professional
philosopher like Kant, he turned his back on the vigor-
ous style of his early years and began more and more to
emulate not only Kant's impossible style but also Kant's
affectation of rigor. For although he agreed with Goethe
that the history of science is science itself, he agreed
with Kant that philosophy must emulate science and that
this precluded formulation of likely hypotheses or bold
conjectures and then weighing these against alterna-
tives. Like Kant, he associated science with rigorous de-
duction, necessity, certainty, and completeness; and the
more he claimed to be rigorous the more unreadable he

210 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

became, as he veiled his overwhelming lack of rigor be-
hind extreme obscurity.

39 ~~~ We are now ready to ask

about Hegel's conception of phenomenology. Today the
term brings to mind Hegel no less than Edmund Husserl
and his followers, and one may well wonder how similar
Hegel's conception was to twentieth-century
phenomenology. The early Husserl shared the determi-
nation of the early Hegel, expressed prominently in
Hegel's preface to his Phenomenology, to make
philosophy a rigorous science. Nevertheless, the simi-
larity almost ends there, and one may hazard the guess
that if Hegel' s Phenomenology had been better known at
the time, Husserl would not have used this word to des-
ignate his program and his school. For Hegel's
Phenomenology is anything but scientific and not at all
close to what Husserl had in mind.
Actually, the term "phenomenology" had been used
before Hegel by J. H. Lambert, Kant, Herder, Fichte,
and Novalis; and it was used after him, not in his sense,
by Sir WilIiam Hamilton, Moritz Lazarus, and Ernst
Mach, before Husserl used it. 12 But there is no need here
to distinguish all the many meanings that have been as-
sociated with it. Hegel was the first to use the term in the
title~r rather the subtitle~f a book. The original title
page called the work System der Wissenschaft (system of
science) in large print, followed by the author's name,
which in turn was followed by three lines identifying
Hegel, and it was only below all this that the words
appeared in small print: "First Part: the Phenomenology
of the Spirit," or "of the Mind"-die Phllnomenologie
12 See J. Hoffmeister·s introduction to his edition of Hegel's
Phllnomenologie (1952), pp. vii-xxviii; also Hoffmeister (1955), pp.
463-65, R. Eisler (1913), p. 486, and H. Spiegelberg (1971), vol. I, pp.
7-19.

HeJel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 211

 -,

., '.
,
"
.
,

"f 0 ti.'
'.

, '.
" '
 des Geistes. The book is usually cited as Hegel's
Phenomenology, and I shall follow that practice.
None of Hegel's predecessors had established a
single clear meaning for the tenn. Hegel, as I hope to
show, wavered between at least three different concep-
tions of phenomenology; moreover, his Phenomenology
attracted relatively little attention during the nineteenth
century, and most of the writers who used the tenn after
him did not associate it with him. Moritz Lazarus' crisp
definition shows this at a glance, and Lazarus and H.
Steinthal should at least be mentioned in a book on the
discovery of the mind as they were cofounders of what
they called VlJlkerpsychologie, the psychology of
peoples. Lazarus' definition is offered in the second vol-
ume of his book Das Leben der Seele (1857: The Life of
the Soul), p. 219: "Phenomenology is a descriptive por-
trayal [eine darstellende Schilderung], psychology an
analytic explanation of the appearances of the life of
the soul [or of psychic life: des Seelenlebens]." Phenom-
enology, Lazarus went on to say, "looks for the facts,"
psychology "for their causes and conditions." Husserl's
later usage is much closer to Lazarus than it is to Hegel.
During the century when Hegel's Phenomenology
was all but forgotten-and he himself was partly to
blame for that, as we shall see-Eduard von Hartmann
tried to accomplish in his own philosophy a synthesis of
Hegel and Schopenhauer and called one of his own
books Phltnomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins
(1879: Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness). But on
the whole those who were interested in Hegel during
the nineteenth century paid attention only to the later
Hegel, not to his first book.
One might still suppose that the question about
Hegel's conception of phenomenology must have arisen
as soon as Husserl began to use the tenn for his new
direction in philosophy. B~t initially Husserl's whole
enterprise seemed to be so obviously antithetical to

Hegel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 213

Hegel's that people were interested in one or the other,
if either, but not in both. Husserl had come from mathe-
matics, and his conception of "Philosophy as a Strict Sci-
ence" (in 1910 he published an important essay with the
title, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft) was opposed
as strongly as could be to metaphysics as well as to any
attempt to approximate philosophy to psychology or
history, religion or literature, or an analysis of culture.
Like Kant, and almost totally uninfluenced by Goethe,
Husserl craved apodictic certainty. (Initially he had
thought of phenomenology as "descriptive psychology,"
but in 1910 he distinguished phenomenology from psy-
chology, though he still insisted on being purely descrip-
tive; he hoped to describe timeless essences.) If Husserl
had been aware of Hegel's Phenomenology, he might not
have chosen this term for his own philosophy. His discus-
sions of "the transcendental ego" were certainly meantto
bring to mind Kant.
Sartre created a new perspective when he entitled a
long section of his first major philosophic work in 1943:
"Husserl, Hegel, Heidegger." He had been deeply in-
fluenced by all three and thus made it necessary for stu-
dents of the phenomenological movement that had been
founded by Husserl to take note of Hegel because the
French phenomenologists could not be understood
without reference to Hegel. 13 Heidegger's essay on
"Hegel's Concept of Experience," which deals with the
beginning of Hegel's Phenomenology, is of no compara-
ble importance and in any case did not appear until
seven years later, in 1950.
Now it might still be assumed that once Hegel was
considered in the context of Husserl's school, scholars
must surely have dealt with his conception of
phenomenology. But although Hegel himself was a

la See Spiegelberg.

214. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 generalist if there ever was one, generalism has fallen
out of favor even among Hegel scholars, and professors
who write about Hegel generally prefer questions of
detail. They keep arguing about this section or that of the
Phenomenology and scrutinize some argument or other
but rarely ask what the book is all about or what Hegel
meant by phenomenology.
To make matters worse, Hegel's own ideas about
what he was trying to accomplish in his first book
changed while he was writing it; he did not have any
clear conception of phenomenology at the time; and the
subtitle of the book was an afterthought. The half title
on page 1 of the original edition still reads: "First Part.
Science of the Experience of Consciousness." The in-
teresting and important Introduction to the book was
still tailored to this subtitle and did not contain any
mention of phenomenology. Nor is that word mentioned
or explained anywhere in the book, except for about
three references to "the" or "this Phenomenology of the
Spirit." That phrase puts in a rather belated appearance
four pages from the end of the volume (on p. 762 of the
original edition), and then also twice (on pages xxxii and
xliv) in the ninety-one-page Preface which Hegel wrote
in January 1807 after most of the book, which had been
finished in October, had already been printed. In the
six-page Table of Contents, which was added last of all,
the Preface is divided into nineteen unnumbered sec-
tions with various headings that do not appear in the
text, and here "The Phenomenology of the Spirit" ap-
pears twice. But this table obviously represents an at-
tempt to impose on the unwieldy text an order that
Hegel had not had in mind while writing it.
According to Goethe's dictum, we must consider the
genesis of the work in order to comprehend it better (or,
as he said, "to some extent"), and the story of the writing
of the book is fascinating indeed. But I have recounted it

Relel's Three Conceptions of PhenomenololY ~ 215

 elsewhere, making use of Haering's and Hoffmeister's
lengthier treatments. 14 The most important point to note
here is that the work was written in very much the same
way as was Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, "in flight, as
it were," without time enough for the author to reread
what he was writing.
We may not feel that writing one's first book at
thirty-six is rather late in life, but Hegel did. Schelling,
his friend, was five years younger but had already pub-
lished ten books and had won a place in the history of
philosophy; Holderlin, Hegel's closest friend during his
early years, had become insane and his life's work was
done; while Hegel, full of ideas, had merely published
some articles that did not begin to give anyone a notion
of what he really had to contribute. In the winter of
1805/06 he signed a contract with a publisher, and it was
agreed that the first half of the book was to be printed by
Easter 1806.
The similarities to Kant are striking. Again a much
shorter book was contemplated at the outset, and the
Phenomenology actually was meant to be the first half
that Hegel committed himself to write in a few weeks.
But Easter came around and Hegel still had no manu-
script to send to the publisher who, never having been
eager to publish the work in the first place, made very
clear how he felt about this. Under enormous pressure,
Hegel finally mailed him the first half of the
Phenomenology from Jena on October 8. By that time,
Hegel's most loyal friend, F. I. Niethammer-who had
been the coeditor of Fichte's journal eight years
earlier-had signed a commitment that he would pay for
the entire printed edition if Hegel did not furnish the
whole manuscript by October 18. Hegel barely managed
to get off at least a few hundred pages ten days before the

14 Kaufinann (1965), sec. 22-23. Further references, also to other au-

thors, are given there.

216 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 final deadline and five days before Napoleon entered
Jena, having just put an end to the Holy Roman Empire,
founded in 800 by Charlemagne. When the eighteenth
came around, Hegel wrote Niethammer that he had been
advised "that such circumstances set aside all obliga-
tions" but that he would send the balance of the manu-
script as soon as the mails left again; and he did. The
long Preface was added in January. On February 5 a
woman whom Hegel did not love in the least gave birth
to his illegitimate son, who made Heger s life even more
difficult. In sum, the book was written under an im-
mense strain; Hegel wrote it about as fast as anyone
could copy it; and the conception of the book changed
utterly while he was writing it.
Obviously, this is relevant to the question about
Hegel's conception of phenomenology and also to more
detailed problems about Hegel's arguments. Something
written carefully and reconsidered again and again
needs to be read very differently from something written
at breakneck speed without any time out for self-
criticism. And it is noteworthy that Kant and Hegel, who
claimed to emulate science and promised their readers
nothing less than certainty, wrote in the latter fashion.
Philosophers, however, continue on the whole to
discount information about how these books were writ-
ten as merely of biographical interest and obviously not
philosophical. And the way in which such information is
usually handled tends unfortunately to confirm this
harmful and myopic prejudice. Otto Poggeler, one of the
two editors of Hegel Studien, published an informative
article of more than sixty pages on the composition of the
Phenomenology that is a case in point. 15 He says:
It cannot be denied either that, independent of
philological research, an immediate understanding [I] of
great works takes place, an understanding that is not

11 Poggeler (1966), reprinted in Fulda and Henrich (1973), pp. 329-90.

Hellers Three Conceptions of PhenomenolollY ~ 217

 wrong in despising the disintegrating [I] spirit of philol-
ogy (it is through an understanding of this sort that think-
ers like Marx and Heidegger have appropriated [I] the
idea of the Phenomenology in a creative manner).

Actually, Hegel's Phenomenology, like his later

works, represents a sustained attempt to show that im-
mediate understanding is an oxymoron, like wooden
iron. Hegel insisted that understanding cannot be intui-
tive but by its nature involves "mediation," study, and
concepts. Poggeler follows up his parenthesis with a
cascade of questions-a rhetorical device borrowed from
Heidegger-and one of them reads in part: "Couldn't
there also be a philology that does not disintegrate"-die
nicht zersetzt, that is not destructive? (p. 338).
The dichotomy of an immediate understanding and
a destructive philology is spurious and at first glance
simply does not make sense. One has to recall that this
whole Heideggerian hermeneutic is theological in
origin-a point that will be taken up in the chapters on
Heidegger and Buber-and that both horns of this spuri-
ous dilemma are derived from the interpretation of the
Bible. In that context it was widely felt that philology
was destructive because it destroyed faith and, as prac-
ticed by the so-called Higher Critics, dissolved the texts
into a mosaic assembled from different sources. Many of
the pious therefore condemned any philological ap-
proach, as even Kierkegaard did, and claimed to have an
immediate understanding of the text, without the benefit
of scholarship or of even being able to read the Bible in
the original. Martin Buber, of course, translated the
Hebrew Bible into German and was a scholar, but his I
and Thou offers what may well be the most popular and
influential celebration of some sort of immediate under-
standing. It seems reasonable to postpone a detailed dis-
cussion of this whole complex of ideas until we get to
Buber.

218 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 The danger of lengthy inquiries about the composi-
tion of Hegel's first book is certainly not that they de-
stroy something. On the contrary, they get bogged down
in such a wealth of minute detail that those interested in
Hegel's conception of phenomenology are almost bound
to dismiss them as irrelevant, the more so because
Poggeler, after another Heideggerian cascade of ques-
tions, says very modestly on the last page, in words that
sound like an involuntary parody of Heidegger: "Thus
we have at most clarified a few preliminary questions
that relate to the question about the composition of the
Phenomenology." Philosophers can hardly be blamed
for feeling that while philologists are still arguing about
all sorts of small preliminary questions, it is best to ig-
nore them and to seek immediate understanding. But
that is a pipe dream. Goethe and Hegel were right that
the genesis of a work and its place in the author's de-
velopment help us to understand it, provided that we do
not get mired down in details and miss the connecting
principle, the spirit.
It is interesting how little attention most scholars
have paid to Hegel's Table of Contents although he is
reputed to have been a master builder with considerable
architectural skill. The Phenomenology is divided into
eight parts, each headed by a Roman number and a title,
beginning with "I. Sense Certainty; or the This and
Opinion," and ending with "VIII. Absolute Knowledge."
But the Table of Contents, unlike the text, lumps to-
gether I, 11, and III under "(A) Consciousness," then
inserts "(B) Self-consciousness" before IV, and finally
lumps together the last four parts under "(C)" without
any title. This last portion without a title comprises
pages 162-7651 For no good reason, it is subdivided into
"(AA) Reason," "(BB) Spirit," "(CC) Religion," and
"(DD) Absolute Knowledge," a series of headings that is
totally pointless and redundant because they are simply
inserted above, respectively, "V. Certainty and Truth of

Regel's Three Conceptions or Phenomenology. 219

Reason," "VI. Spirit," "VII. Religion," and "VIII. Abso-
lute Knowledge." Moreover, these four headings are ob-
viously not commensurate either with each other or with
the preceding four headings. Art appears only under
"(CC) Religion," "VII. Religion," "B: The Art Religion,"
which refers to the religion of the Greeks, and this is
surely an eccentric way of dealing with art-or rather of
not dealing with art very much. Nor are we offered any
reasons why one of the eight chapters of the
Phenomenology of the Spirit should be distinguished
from the other seven by the heading "Spirit."
The Table of Contents was plainly a product of haste
but casts some doubt on the author's claim that he had
reached nothing less than absolute knowledge. The
internal evidence suggests forcibly that the author
finished the book in a state of confusion, that his con-
ception of his own enterprise changed rather drastically
in the course of writing, and then again after the whole
manuscript, except for the title page, Contents, and Pref-
ace had been sent off to the printer. The idea of using the
term "phenomenology" was an afterthought that came to
Hegel only when the book. was almost finished and
much of it already in the printer's hands.
To add to the confusion, Hegel used "phenomenol-
ogy" in an altogether different way when he published
his system in outline form in his Encyclopedia in 1817,
although he never repudiated his first book. In the
second and third editions of the Encyclopedia "Phenom-
enology of the Spirit" even appears in the Table of
Contents, as it did not in 1817, as one very small subpart
of the system. Yet when Hegel died in 1831, he was
working on a new edition of his first book and, as far
as he got, made no substantial changes whatsoever. le
Thus the question about Hegel's conception of

It The least unimportant changes (all of them are microscopic) are

indicated in Kaufmann (1965).

220 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

phenomenology turns out to be big and complex enough
to be usable as a key to the study of his whole thought
and development. But for our purposes it will be quite
sufficient to deal briefly with seven questions.
1. What did Hegel say about phenomenology in the Pref-
ace of 1807?
2. How does the Introduction to the book illuminate his
conception?
3. What did Hegel actually do in his Phenomenology?
4. What did Hegel say about phenomenology between
1807 and 1817?
5. What conception of phenomenology do we find in the
Encyclopedia?
6. How, in view of all this, can we sum up his concep-
tion?
7. How did Hegel advance the discovery of the mind?

Some scholars may feel that each of these questions

calls for a monograph. Yet such monographs must always
stop short of telling us what really was Hegel's concep-
tion of phenomenology. It is amazing how remote the
Hegel scholastics are from Hegel's spirit, and how little
they have learned from him that what is philosophically
fruitful is seeing quite a number of problems together.

40 ~ What did Hegel say about

phenomenology in the Preface of IB07? In the Table of
Contents, as remarked earlier, the Preface is divided into
nineteen unnumbered sections with subtitles. Each is
followed by a page number, but they run on without
break. The seventh is called "The Element of Knowl-
edge," the eighth "The Ascent into This Is the
Phenomenology of the Spirit," and the eleventh "In
What Way the Phenomenology of the Spirit is Negative

Hegel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 221

or Contains What Is False." In the text, the tenn is intro-
duced in the first sentence of section 8.17
It has often been claimed that Heget's famous for-
mulation of 1821, "What is rational, is actual; and what is
actual is rational,"18 was designed expressly to please
the King of Prussia. Yet this idea is central in the Preface
of 1807, long before Hegel took any special interest in
Prussia-indeed, a few weeks after he had referred to
Napoleon in a letter as "this world soul."19 In sections 6
and 7 Hegel claims that
The spiritual alone is the actual. . . . The spirit that, so
developed, knows itself as spirit is science .... Pure
self-recognition in absolute othemess ... is the ground
and basis of science or knowledge in general. The begin-
ning of philosophy presupposes or demands that con-
sciousness dwell in this sphere. But this sphere itself
receives its perfection and transparence only through the
movement of its becoming.

What Hegel is suggesting is that philosophy really

begins only with Part Two, whereas the Phenomenology
of the Spirit is merely Part One of the System of Science
and no more than "the movement of its becoming" or, as
we might say, the development that leads to it. Yet-and
the last quoted sentence is Heget's way of making much
the same point Goethe made in the letter to Zelter-it is
only by studying the genesis or development that we can
comprehend the result.
Section 8 begins: "This becoming of science in gen-
eral or of knowledge is what this Phenomenology of the
Spirit represents as the first part of the same," which
obviously refers to the fact that the Phenomenology was
published as Part One of the System of Science. When
lTThe headings are listed in Kaufmann (1965), p. 367, and also in-
serted in the text at the proper places.
18 Philosophy of Right, Preface.
"To Niethammer, Oct. 13, 1806. See Kaufmann (1965), chap. 7.

222~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 Hegel prepared the second edition, he deleted "as the
first part of the same," clearly because Part Two had
never appeared.
On the one hand, Hegel keeps insisting again and
again that the beginning of philosophy presupposes the
point of view reached only at the end of the
Phenomenology; on the other, he would have us look at
the Phenomenology as itself scientific and Part One of
the System of Science, not merely as an introduction.
The conception of the Phenomenology as an introduc-
tion is stated clearly in an unforgettable image in Section
7: While science (that is, Hegel's philosophy!) "demands
of self-consciousness that it should have elevated itself
into this ether," meaning "self-recognition in absolute
otherness" or, in other words, the recognition that what-
ever is actual is spirit, "the individual has the right to
demand that science should at least furnish him with the
ladder to this standpoint." The Phenomenology is thus
presented as a ladder on which the reader can climb up
from the most unsophisticated "sense certainty" to the
"ether" of "absolute knowledge." Yet Georg Lasson
warned the readers of his excellent edition of the book in
1907, in his splendid hundred-page Introduction, that
"it is a complete misunderstanding to see in the
Phenomenology something like a propaedeutic for
philosophy" (p. xcvii).
Obviously, the book fails as an introduction or pro-
paedeutic, as it is one of the most difficult and puzzling
works in the whole history of philosophy, and one may
be tempted to feel that Hegel began by conceiving of the
book as an introduction but then changed his mind as he
wrote it and stuffed into it more and more of his
philosophy. This is clearly what happened, but in Sec-
tion 10 Hegel gives a reason for considering the
Phenomenology itself as part of science and not merely
an introduction. This passage is important and repre-
sents one of his three conceptions of phenomenology,

Begel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 2~3

which I propose to call the scientific conception: "The
way in which the Concept of knowledge is reached thus
also becomes a necessary and complete becoming.
Hence this preparation ceases to be a fortuitous bit of
philosophizing ... "20
What is supposed to make the Phenomenology sci-
entific and the first part of science is the alleged neces-
sity of the steps that lead from the first stage to the last,
and the account is moreover said to be complete. If it
were not for these two points, Hegel himself would not
consider the Phenomenology more than "a fortuitous bit
of philosophizing" and an inept propaedeutic. The first
section of the Preface bears the title "On Scientific
Knowledge," and the second section begins:
The true form in which truth exists can only be the
scientific system of it. To contribute to this end, that
philosophy might come closer to the form of science-the
goal being that it might be able to relinquish the name of
love of knowledge [in fact, "philosophy" means the love
ofWisdom] and be actual knowledge-that is what I have
resolved to try.

Alas, Hegel always associated science (Wissenschaft

in Gennan) with knowledge (Wissen), and with certainty
and necessity as well as system and completeness. That
the Latin scientia (science) is also derived from a verb
that means "to know" is by no means the most important
point to be made on Hegel's side. The Preface is one of
the greatest essays in the whole history of philosophy,
and I have introduced my own translation of the whole
of it, with a commentary on facing pages, with the tes-
timonies of Rudolf Haym, Hennann Glockner, Herbert
Marcuse, J. N. Findlay, and G. E. Mnller who, for all
their differences, seem to agree on that. Among the
things that make it so interesting is Hegel's polemic
IOKaufmann (1965), p. 410 = (1966), pp. 52-54.

224. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 against romantic notions of philosophy as a matter of
intuitions, brainstorms, aphorisms, fragments, or in one
word as "fortuitous" (zufllllig). Hegel's polemic is bril-
liant in places, and his plea for what used to be called
holism and what is now called a systems approach is as
worthy of consideration as it ever was. It is as opposed to
the microscopism of ever so many analytic philosophers
as it is to the romantics of Hegel's time, to Kierkegaard,
and to many so-called existentialists. Nor is that all there
is to HegeJ's Preface.
The other main theme in it is the crucial importance
of development, which is also voiced at the outset, in the
first section: "For the subject matter is not exhausted by
any aim, but only by the way in which things are worked
out in detail; nor is the result the actual whole, but only
the result together with its becoming."
A few sentences earlier, Hegel suggested that the
difference between philosophies must be com-
prehended "in terms of the progressive development of
the truth" and, very much in Goethe's spirit, employed a
botanical metaphor, or rather example. The bud gives
way to the blossom, and the blossom to the fruit, yet the
plant is not to be identified with the result; it is "the
result together with its becoming" or, in other words, the
whole development. As Hegel put it, bud, blossom, and
fruit-and different philosophical systems-are "ele-
ments of an organic unity in which they not only do not
conflict, but in which one is as necessary as the other;
and it is only this equal necessity that constitutes the life
of the whole."
The point is very close to Goethe's dictum, pub-
lished three years later in 1810, that "the history of sci-
ence is science itself." We cannot here resolve the ques-
tion of influence, but it should be kept in mind that
Goethe often did not publish things until years after he
had written them, that he was very free with his ideas in
conversation, and that I have always tried to quote the

Hegel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 225

best formulations without regard for their dates.
Moreover, his memorable formulations are often ways of
summing up in an epigram what he had previously dem-
onstrated at length not only in his writings but also in his
life.
It was from Goethe that his contemporaries, in-
cluding Hegel, learned that Storm and Stress, classicism,
and romanticism were not simply alternative styles but
rather, like bud, blossom, and fruit, stages in a develop-
ment, and that if you wanted to know Goethe it would
never do to read only one of his masterpieces as that
would only show you the poet at one stage in his de-
velopment; to know Goethe, one had to study the whole
development.
What is derived from Kant rather than Goethe is
Hegel's insistence on necessity and certainty ("absolute
knowledge," no less!); and in explaining why the
Phenomenology was itself scientific he included for
good measure the claim of completeness, suggesting that
he covered all of the stages in the development and
demonstrated their necessary sequence, instead of
merely dealing "fortuitously" with stages of special
interest to him. These are the claims that define the sci-
entific conception of phenomenology; if they are unten-
able, then the scientific conception is untenable; and
they are, and it is.
That Hegel could have made those three claims
about necessity, absolute certainty, and completeness, in
the Preface to the Phenomenology, instead of pleading
extenuating circumstances for this book and explaining
how it had actually come to be, remains astonishing even
if we take into account mitigating circumstances that
were still prevailing when he wrote this Preface. Hegel
put up a brave front or, to use one of Nietzsche's favorite
metaphors, donned a mask; and it remains amazing that
many of his readers and nonreaders to this day still take
the mask for his real face and think that the author slowly

226 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

and painstakingly excogitated one after another neces-
sary transition from stage to stage. In defense of Hegel
one can only say that in the Preface he spoke more about
what in his view needed to be done than about what he
had in fact accomplished.
This interpretation makes his claims a little less
grotesque, but it leaves them still untenable. A complete
account of Goethe's development may be possible, but if
the biographer limits himself to a single volume of the
length of Heger s Phenomenology he has to be selective
and omit a great deal. Indeed, all comprehension de-
pends on selectivity and discrimination. In Goethe's
case, one could hardly omit the Urfaust, Faust: A Frag-
ment, Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy, and finally
Part Two; nor Gotz and Werther, lphigenia and Tasso,
and the other major works mentioned above. But even in
a volume of 800 pages one would have to leave out most
of the material in the 143-volume edition of his writings;
and one would construct a series of stages that, if one
shared Hegers bias, would give an impression of a
single development that in retrospect seems purposive.
But when the subject is no longer Goethe but Geist and
one tries to write the Bildungsroman of the human spirit,
the notion of completeness is grotesque.
It is understandable that in Heger s time an edu-
cated person in the West should still have thought of
human history as a single story leading, more or less,
from the beginnings of humanity in the Near East
(Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Old Testament) to the
Greeks, the Romans, and the Holy Roman Empire of the
German Nation, which Napoleon vanquished the day
Hegel finished his book. Again we can plead extenuat-
ing circumstances for a man of that time, though it stands
to reason that any attempt to reduce that story to an ac-
count of something like 800 pages must involve relent-
less selectivity and a bold consbuction that makes non-
sense of the claim of completeness. And today the very

Heger. Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 227

 notion of reducing human history to some such single
story no longer makes sense. A construction of that sort
might still be fruitful in a certain context, but nobody in
his right mind would think of offering it with the claim of
completeness. What, for example, of Asia, Africa, and
pre-Columbian America?
The same considerations apply to necessity and
certainty. To begin with the latter, a construction of this
sort cannot hope to be certain; at best it will be fruitful,
suggestive, and illuminating. It may lead to new in-
sights, new lines of research, and interesting compari-
sons. But it cannot claim to be certainly true. Here Hegel
followed Kant (and, of course, Spinoza and Descartes,
Aristotle and Plato).
It was also Kant who, probably more than anyone
else, impressed on him the notion that what is scientific
m ust be necessary, and that the business of philosophy is
with the necessary. Again one can plead extenuating cir-
cumstances. Hegel was by no means the only writer after
Kant to use "necessary" loosely as an inclusive antonym
of "capricious," or "fortuitous," or "arbitrary." This bad
habit is deeply ingrained among Germans. That makes it
no less important to realize that Hegel systematically
ignored the difference between demonstrating that an
event was necessary and merely giving a reason for it
that suggests that it was not completely fortuitous. 21
Hegel's explicit and exoteric conception of
phenomenology was what I have called the scientific
conception of it, and this is untenable. It obstructed
Hegel's discovery of the mind by keeping him from
contributing as much as he might have done. Had it not
been for Kant, Hegel might have emancipated himself
from an unfortunate philosophical tradition. He might
have revolutionized philosophy even more than he did.
He might have regenerated it by taking his cue from

11 See Kaufmann (1960), p. 158f., and (1965), sec. 17 and p. 371.

228~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

Lessing and Goethe while bringing to their legacy his
solid training in philosophy. Of course, every such
"might" invites ridicule: if the moon were made of blue
cheese, everything might be different. But it is il-
luminating to see how in Hegel's writings two traditions
are at war with each other and how he keeps trying to
reconcile the irreconcilable-specifically, Kant and
Goethe. Hegel had many brilliant ideas, to be consid-
ered in due course, but it was only long after Freud had
published his Interpretation of Dreams that Hegel's
Phenomenology began to attract much attention, and by
then Hegel had missed the boat. People had ignored the
book partly because it was so manifestly bizarre, and it is
odd that most of its admirers today simply fail to see this
grotesque aspect of the work. When I first studied it in
1942, perforce by myself, there was said to be only one
professor in the United States who was interested in it 0.
Loewenberg). Now that it has become fashionable, it is
highly unfashionable to face up to this side of the
Phenomenology though it really meets the eye.
The reasons for this are obvious. Those who find a
major philosopher very implausible rarely bother to
study him in depth, and those who specialize in his work
almost invariably deny that he is really implausible in
important ways. They are protecting their investment of
time, energy, and effort.

41 ... How does the Introduction to

the Phenomenology illuminate Hegel's conception?
Here the word "phenomenology" is not mentioned be-
cause Hegel had not yet thought of this label when he
wrote the Introduction. But he did say a few things that
help us to understand why he liked the subtitle of the
book when it did occur to him.
In a rather poetic passage he called "the path of the
natural consciousness to true knowledge ... the way of

Helel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 229

 the soul that migrates through the series of its forms as so
many stages prescribed to it by its nature so that it may
purify itself and become spirit by attaining through its
complete experience of itself the knowledge of what it is
in itself:'22
This is one of the loveliest images in the book; the
metaphor of the transmigration of the soul is wonderfully
apt; and the suggestion of a gradual refinement and
growth of self-knowledge seems plausible. The idea that
the soul becomes spirit is partially explained by the
gloss that it gains "knowledge of what it is in itself,"
which means knowledge of what it is implicitly but, to
begin with, not yet for itself or for its own consciousness.
It is only at the end of the development that the soul
comprehends what it was all along.
Hegel continues:
The natural consciousness will show itself as merely
the Concept of knowledge or not real knowledge. But
insofar as it immediately takes itself for real knowledge,
this path has a negative significance for it, and it takes for
a loss of itself what is [in fact] the realization of the Con-
cept [or a step forward toward eventual knowledge]; for
on this path it loses its own truth [or finds that what it
took for real knowledge was not real knowledge]. This
path may therefore be viewed as the way of doubt
[ZweiJel] or really as the way of despair [Verzweijlung].

What happens at the first stage, to which Hegel al-

ludes in this passage, happens again and again, or rather
would happen at every stage if Hegel always succeeded
in showing how the soul cannot gain the satisfaction it
expected because in one way or another it deceived it-
self and is hence propelled onward to the next stage. The
play on words which defies translation suggests that the
recurring disappointment is not purely theoretical
(doubt) but involves the whole human being (despair). A
IS (1807), p. 9, end of 5th para.

230 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

few lines later Hegel adds: "The series of its forms
[Gestaltungen] that consciousness passes through on
this way is nothing less than the detailed history of the
education [Bildung] of consciousness itself for science."
What he proposed to write really was the Bildungsro-
man of the human spirit-a grandiose poetic conception
that invites comparison with Goethe's Faust. This com-
parison would be worth spelling out at length here if I
had not included a whole section on it in my Hegel. 23
Suffice it to say that we here confront Hegel's second
conception of the phenomenology of the spirit, which I
shall call the poetic one. As the scientific conception is
derived from Kant, the poetic one was inspired by
Goethe.
Near the end of the Introduction, Hegel says once
more: "By virtue of this necessity this path to science is
itself already science [a point we have discusse"d at
length], and regarding its contents it is the science of the
experience of consciousness." We recall that this was
what Hegel was then still planning to call this part of his
work, and that the half title that immediately precedes
the Introduction in the original edition reads: "Science
of the Experience of Consciousness."
Now this title and "The Phenomenology of the
Spirit" are not synonymous. The former suggests a study
of the contents of consciousness at each stage, while the
latter suggests a study of the manifestations of the spirit.
From the point of view reached in the end both labels
are appropriate, but the justification of "The Phe-
nomenology of the Spirit" becomes apparent only in
the end when consciousness comes to realize that what-
ever is actual is spirit. Why did Hegel change the title, or
rather the subtitle, at the last moment? Since he changed
it only when he came to the end of the book, we must
now turn to our third question.

lI3 (1965), sec. 28.

Hegel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 231

 42 ... What did Hegel actually do in
his Phenomenology? In the original edition, Chapter I
comprises about fifteen pages, Chapter 11, twenty, and
Chapter Ill, forty. In this part of the book, which the
Table of Contents subsumes under the heading of "Con-
sciousness," Hegel's approach is reminiscent of tradi-
tional theory of knowledge and constantly harks back to
Plato and Aristotle.24 Chapter IV, which the Contents
subsumes under "Self-Consciousness," comprises sixty
pages and is altogether different. In the first part we
encounter Hegel's famous and influential reflections on
master and slave, while the second part (B) deals in turn
with stoicism, skepticism, and what Hegel calls the un-
happy consciousness. None of this is very close to previ-
ous books of philosophy. The sketch of master and slave
is very dense and compact, but as HegeI's illustrations
gain a life of their own, like the characters of a novelist or
dramatist, the presentation becomes more and more
prolix, and soon Hegel becomes so absorbed in his con-
stant allusions to the allegedly unhappy spirituality of
medieval Christianity that one is led to wonder whether
he has lost the thread.
It will have been noted that every chapter is longer
than the preceding chapter (fifteen, twenty, forty, sixty
pages). If the chapters had averaged about twenty pages
each, then the whole first part of the system, even if it
had comprised eight chapters, as the Phenomenology fi-
nally did, could easily have been printed in the same
volume with the second part, as had been Hegel's plan
when he started writing the book. But in Chapter V he
got carried away entirely and dealt with "Certainty and
truth of reason" in more than 210 pages, including, for
example, twenty-eight pages on phrenology. Hegel's
claims of scientific rigor and necessity become more and
Z4 w. Purpus (1908) has dealt at length with Hegel's debts here to Plato
and Aristotle.

232 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

more astounding as one reads on. One might compli-
ment the author for being so full of surprises, so utterly
unpredictable, so richly imaginative and irrepressibly
ge~streich, or ingenious, but hardly for the qualities on
which, according to the Preface, everything depends.
Some scholars find the break between Chapters V
and VI even greater than that between IV and V. Chapter
VI, "Spirit," runs on for about 250 pages and deals at
length with Greek ethical notions, largely in terms of
rather fanciful allusions to Antigone but without at-
tempting any analysis of that play or of Plato's or Aristo-
tle's ethics. It deals at greater length with the alienation
involved in modern life, with the Enlightenment, and
with "the absolute freedom and the terror" of the French
Revolution, before finally proceeding to a critique of
modern MoralitlJt and specifically of Kant's ethic.
When Hegel had reached this point (p. 624), any
notion that all this might merely be the first half of a
one-volume system in which Hegel's Logic would fol-
low upon his Science of the Experience of Conscious-
ness had become absurd. Indeed, the remaining two
chapters simply could not become as long as V and VI, or
any thought of publishing at least Part One, without the
Logic, in a single volume had to be abandoned. One can
imagine Hegel's own terror when he thought of his pub-
lisher's reactions. He managed to keep Chapter VII
down to 115 pages, and the last chapter, "Absolute
Knowledge," comprises just under twenty-five pages, if
only because time ran out. But the book ends with a bang
and not a whimper.
"The goal, absolute knowledge. or spirit that knows
itself as spirit, is reached by way of the memory of the
spirits as they are in themselves ... " Hegel then con-
trasts history, whose domain includes the accidental,
with his own "science" and concludes: "Both together,
history comprehended, form the memory and the Gol-
gotha [SchlJdelstlJtte] of the absolute spirit, the actuality,

Hegel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 233

truth, and certainty of his throne, without which he [the
absolute spirit] would be something lifeless and lone-
some; only
from the goblet of this realm of spints
his infinity foams up for him."
Looking back, all the forms of the spirit that have
suffered shipwreck are suddenly seen as so many dead
spirits whose skulls form the throne of the absolute
spirit. But then this theistic image is turned around; the
absolute spirit has no independent existence and would
be lifeless without these spirits; their life is all the life he
has, and it is only in the realm of so-called finite spirits
that the absolute spirit possesses its own infinity. One
could say very safely that the book ends with a poetic
vision, even if the last two lines were not an adaptation
of the last two lines of Schiller's early poem
"Friendship" (Die Freundschaft).
Actually, Schiller had not included this poem in his
own selection of his poems in two volumes (1800-03),
but his brief introduction to the second volume shows
how much the whole conception of the Phenomenology
owed to him and Goethe and their whole way of think-
ing. Thus Schiller said,
Even what is faulty signifies at least a stage in the educa-
tion of the spirit [eine Stufe in der Geistesbildung] of the
poet. The author of these poems has formed himself be-
fore the eyes of the nation and together with the nation,
like all his fellow artists, nor does he know of anyone
who ever was perfect when he entered. Thus he has no
qualms about presenting himself to the public all at once
in the form in which he has already bit by bit appeared
before, it.

The poem, too, is full of images and phrases that

show how wrong it is to trace Hegel's ancestry only to
other philosophers. But the powerful "only" that Hegel

234. DISCOVERING THE MIND

placed before his quotation was Hegers own and not
simply part of the quotation. The last stanza ofSchiller's
celebration of friendship says, if one may strip it of its
rhymes (a,a,b,c,c,b) and meter:

Friendless was the great master of worlds,

Felt a lack-and therefore created spirits,
Blessed mirrors of his bliss I
Though the supreme being found no equal,
From the goblet of the whole realm of souls
infinity foams for him.
That the absolute spirit has its life only in the realm of
spirits is a point introduced by Hegel. While Schiller
spoke here of a realm of souls. he did have "spirits" in
the second line, and "realm of spirits" in the first stanza.
Indeed, spirits are mentioned repeatedly in this poem,
and Geist and Gelster were words constantly used by
Goethe, Schiller, and Holderlin. Goethe, of course, was
the oldest and came first.
Since the term "phenomenology" occurs in Hegers
book only as part of the phrase "phenomenology of the
spirit," and this was introduced only three pages before
this finale, we need not hesitate to say that the change of
the title from "Science of the Experience of Conscious-
ness" to "Phenomenology of the Spirit" meant a move
from Kant to Goethe and Schiller. "Science," "experi-
ence," and "consciousness" are terms that bring to mind
Kant, while Gelst is a poetic word with religious over-
tones that do not commit one to any religion, and
"phenomenology" has a saving vagueness, particularly if
one is as careful as Hegel was not to define it.
It would fit my theme in this book better in spoke of
"the phenomenology of mind," and since this is also the
title of the English translation by J. B. Baillie I could
easily get away with that. But ever since my first article
on Hegel in 1951-indeed, since my book on Nietzsche
the year before-I have insisted that the best rendering

Helers Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 235

is "spirit" because the religious and poetic overtones are
so strong in Hegel, and in ever so many passages even
Baillie has to have recourse to "spirit." "Phenomenology
of the spirit" is the study of the appearances or manifes-
tations of the spirit-and is thus closer to Goethe's Faust
than to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

43 ~ What did Hegel say about

phenomenology between 1807 and 1817? Before anyone
claims to understand Hegel better than he understood
himself, he should consider how Hegel himself viewed
his first book once he had finished it and saw it in print.
Reading the proofs, he wrote N iethammer on
January 16, 1807: "I often wished, of course, that I might
be able to clear the ship here and there of ballast to make
it fleeter.-In the second edition, which is to follow
soon-8i diis placet? !--everything shall become better;
this comfort I shall commend to myself and others." But
it did not please the gods, and when Hegel finally began
to prepare a second edition shortly before his death, two
dozen years later, the revisions he made were, without
exception, microscopic and in many instances anything
but improvements.
A week later, Hegel wrote a former student, C. G.
Zellmann:
. . . Science alone is theodicy: it keeps one both from
looking at events with animal amazement or ascribing
them more cleverly to accidents of the moment or of the
talents of one individual-as if the destinies of empires
depended on an occupied or not occupied hill-and from
lamenting the triumph of injustice and the defeat of right.

Heger s insistence on demonstrating some necessity

in his work was not inspired solely by a dubious con-
ception of rigor; it was also born of deep suffering. 2S
SI See Kaufmann (1965), secs. 12 and 60-62.

236. DISCOVERING THE MIND

When he spoke of elevating philosophy to the status of a
science what he had in mind was by no means least of all
a surrogate religion or, as he put it in this letter, a theod-
icy. Literally, it was not a question of justifying God, at
least not a transcendent deity that dwells above the
world; but what Hegel sought in philosophy, and in his
Phenomenology, was a view, a demonstration that would
reconcile him to the misery of humanity by showing that
all the suffering had not been pointless. As he put it later
in his introductory lectures on the philosophy of history:
But even as we contemplate history as this slaughter
bench on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of
states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed,
our thoughts cannot avoid the question for whom, for
what final aim these monstrous sacrifices have been
made. 2s

A manuscript written half a dozen years before the

Phenomenology is also relevant. In 1800 Hegel had at-
tempted to rewrite his essay on the positivity of the
Christian religion but had not got beyond drafting a new
preface. Here he condemned such demonstrations as his
own in his earlier draft, which had traced positive or
authoritarian doctrines and commandments in Chris-
tianity, as "horrible blabbering" that has become "bor-
ing and has altogether lost interest-so much so that it
would rather be a need of our time to hear a proof of the
opposite .... Of course, the proof of the opposite must
not be conducted with the principles and methods" of
what Hegel called
the old dogmatics. Rather, one would have to deduce this
now repudiated dogmatics out of what we now consider
the needs of human nature and thus show its naturalness
and its necessity [even then Hegel operated with the
spurious dichotomy of the totally fortuitous and the nec-

28 HofFmeister's ed. (1955), p. 79f.; Kaufmann (1965), p. 256.

Begel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 237

 essaryl). Such an attempt would presuppose the faith that
the convictions of many centuries-that which the mil-
lions, who during these centuries lived by them and died
for them, considered their duty and holy truth-were not
bare nonsense or immoraiity.27

Hegel was never very clear about what precisely he

meant by dialectic. He did not use that term nearly as
often as most people suppose, and he did not claim to
have a dialectical method. 28 When he used the adjective
"dialectical"' it was usually followed by the word
"movement." Roughly, a dialectical movement leads
from one extreme to another or, as the matter is usually
put, from one thing to its opposite. (Hegel never once
construed what he did in terms of thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis, but he did sometimes speak of "the oppo-
site.") Here we have a crucial instance in his own de-
velopment where he moved from one position to its op-
posite, and it is palpable that the movement involved a
spurious dichotomy. Obviously, something can be
neither "bare nonsense or immorality" nor necessary.
What I am trying to show is that Heger s views are
not bare nonsense, that an effort at sympathetic under-
standing can succeed, that one can discover what he was
driving at and what influences were at work in his mind;
but it does not follow that I have any wish to prove the
"naturalness and necessity" of his views. Nobody could
do thatl Of course, one could try to show that it "was only
natural" or that "it figures" that a man influenced by
Kant and Goethe should come up with what we find in
Hegel, or that a man who has written a long manuscript
criticizing Christianity should get bored with that and
feel that what was really needed now was just the oppo-
site, a reinterpretation of Christianity. In Berlin is' ja
logisch, "it's logical," is an idiom like "it figures." But in
17 Nohl's ed. p. 143; Kaufmann (1960), p. 158.
28 Kaufmann (1965), sec. 37.

238 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

a philosophical analysis one ought to keep in mind that
this is an exaggeration. There is no necessity. Hegel's
confusion about necessity is rooted in a psychological
confusion, in a troubled and confused state of mind, in
his need for what in his letter to his former student he
calls a th!todicy.
One other psychological factor is at work here that
helps to account for the wide appeal of Hegel' s confused
use of "necessity." Why, we must ask, does this simple
error cast such a powerful spell? Why are most Hegel
scholars so reluctant to face up to Hegel's error and be
done with it? And why has it captivated millions by way
of Karl Marx? Elsewhere (1973) I have given a detailed
analysis of men's dread of fateful decisions, which I call
decidophobia, and have distinguished ten typical
strategies, including moral rationalism and the faith that
one is riding the wave of the future. Hegel furnishes a
typical example of a man filled with anxiety by the no-
tion of the fortuitous and accidental. In his more rational
moments he realized that all he could hope to show was
that various developments were not totally capricious,
that there were some reasons for them, and that one
could construe them as organic. But his central stance
called for much more. "Science alone is theodicy"!
Nothing less than necessity would do. Ultimately,
Hegel's insistence on a rigor that he himself failed ut-
terly to exemplify and his affectation of deductions that
he obviously came nowhere near accomplishing were
rooted in decidophobia. Like Kant, Hegel was afraid of
uncertainty and insecurity (Unsicherheit).
Any study of the Phenomenology ought to begin
with the admission that the book is grotesque and that
the author, who could write a life ofJesus in which Jesus
spouts Kant's formulas, had a flair for the grotesque but
lacked the courage to develop his natural talents and
tried to force himself into a mold that did not fit. One
only needs to read his essay on positivity and "Who

Helel'. Three Conceptions of PhenomenololY ~ 239

 Thinks Abstractly?" to realize that the style he affected
in his philosophical works was neither natural nor nec-
essary for him--except as a defense mechanism, a mask,
a device born of fear of himself.
A mask? Does that mean that the style is a cloak that
could be removed, as if content and form were entirely
separate? No, the masks men use are not altogether inor-
ganic and cannot be exchanged easily for other masks.
The concept of the mask is so important for the discovery
of the mind that it will have to be considered at length in
connection with the writer who first gave it a central
place in his philosophy-Nietzsche. Here it must suffice
to note that Hegel with another mask would not have
been the Hegel we know. This does not involve any
retraction on my part: Hegel liberated from his fear of
himself would not have been the Hegel we know. He
would not only have written better, he would also have
thought differently!
To Hegel scholars this may sound like sacrilege, and
other philosophers are apt to be apprehensive about
such an approach, too. Where would it leave them? But
one of Hegel's and Holderlin's friends, Isaak von
Sinclair (whose last name Hermann Hesse used as a
pseudonym when he first published Demian in 1919),
wrote Hegel frankly that, trying to read the Phenomenol-
ogy, he had got lost in Chapter IV. "You seemed to me to
be diverted into a point of view that is too historical and
even, if I may express myself this way, too pathological,
where you were guided more by your gift of combination
than by the calm observation that prevailed in the be-
ginning."29 That is surely a very tactful and kind way of
putting it. When Hegel wrote Schelling about the book,
May 1, 1807, he was full of apologies and spoke of the
"unfortunate confusion ... that has affected the whole
process of publishing and printing, and in part even the

18 Poggeler (1966), p. 336f.

240 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

composition itself.... Getting into the details has dam-
aged, as I feel, the synopsis of the whole," and more in
the same vein.
On October 28, 1807, Hegel's advertisement for
himself appeared in the lena cultural supplement. Such
Selbstanzeigen usually appeared before the book, but
Hegel's one-page description of the Phenomenology was
delayed.
. . . The Phenomenology of the Spirit is to replace
psychological explanations [Hegel was to change his
mind about this] as well as the more abstract discussions
of the foundation of knowledge (presumably meaning
Kant and Fichte]. It considers the preparation for science
from a point of view which makes it anew, an interesting,
and the fust science of philosophy. It includes the vari-
ous fonns of the spirit as stations on the way on which it
becomes pure knowledge or absolute spirit.... The
wealth of the appearances of the spirit, which at first
glance seems chaotic. is brought into a scientific order
which presents them according to their necessity .... A
second volume will contain the system of Logic as
speculative philosophy, and of the other two parts of
philosophy. the sciences of nature and the spirit. so

Every advanced student of Hegel knows that the

second volume never appeared and that the Science of
Logic alone took up three volumes when it finally ap-
peared in 1812, 1813, and 1816. Yet it is noteworthy how
the Encyclopedia, published in 1817, fits the description
of Volume 2 and how easily it could have been pre-
sented that way, The fact that Hegel chose not to do this
suggests that he no longer felt comfortable with the
Phenomenology, and he actually called one small part of
the Encyclopedia "phenomenology" and placed it
below, not above, psychology, which it was obviously no
longer intended to "replace,"
so Complete translation in Kaufmann (1965), p. 366.

Hegel'. Three Conception. of Phenomenology ~ 241

 hr. I

Im C!Jrun .".rrr-
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t 8 2 7.
 Hegers frequent changes in sequences that are
supposed to be "necessary" make a mockery of the way
he has all too often been read. Comparisons of the
Phenomenology with the Philosophy of Right or of the
Science of Logic with the corresponding portion of the
Encyclopedia or even of the second edition of Volume I
of the Science of Logic with the first or, finally, of the
three editions of the Encyclopedia show how Hegel kept
changing his sequences. Of course, there is not the
slightest objection to that. On the contrary, it does him
credit that he kept thinking about his ideas after he had
published them and that he was never satisfied with his
work. But every sequence was presented by him as if it
were necessary, and he did not consider it necessary to
explain why he had changed the sequence. Obviously,
all the talk about necessity cannot be taken seriously,
and all Hegel really tried to offer each time was an espe-
cially plausible construction. Certainty and necessity
were out of the picture, nor was what he offered very
rigorous. It was more like a series of thought experi-
ments, but unfortunately conjectures and constructions,
hypotheses and experiments, had no place in his con-
ception of science.
It was actually a very peculiar experiment that led
Hegel to revise his conception of phenomenology be-
tween 1801 and 1811. In 1808 he had moved to Nurem-
berg to become the headmaster of a boys' secondary
school (Gymnasium), and he decided to teach the boys
some philosophy. During his first year there "he wanted
to teach pneumatology or doctrine of the spirit together
with logic as a kind of introduction to philosophy; he
divided this pneumatology into ... phenomenology and
psychology. A surviving disposition shows that initially
he meant to present his whole Phenomenology, but he
subsequently broke off at some point in the chapter on
Reason-evidently because [surprise I] the students
were not able to follow him. During the following years

244 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

he limited Phenomenology to" the first five s1 of the eight
chapters, finishing with Reason and omitting Spirit as
well as Religion and Absolute Knowledge.
Obviously, the unsuitability of the Phenomenology
for teenage students need not have changed Hegel's
mind about the book. But in fact it did prove to be a
turning point, and it helped to precipitate the birth of the
third conception of phenomenology, which we encoun-
ter in the Encyclopedia in 1817.

44 ~ What conception of phen-

omenology do we find in the Encyclopedia? The
Encyclopedia, though published by Hegel himself, is
not a full-fledged book in the same sense as the
Phenomenology and Science of Logic. It is, like The
Philosophy of Right, essentially an elaborate syllabus
that was intended to meet the requirement of the minis-
try of education that every course must be based on a
textbook. Naturally, Hegel did not want to use a text
written by someone else. When he finally obtained a
professorship at Heidelberg, he therefore quickly wrote
the Encyclopedia as a text that could be used in any
course he would give. It contained his whole system in
outline form, arranged in 477 consecutively numbered
sections on 288 uncrowded pages. Many sections begin
with a brief statement that is then elaborated in an in-
dented paragraph that far exceeds the opening statement
in length. The whole was designed, as is stated clearly but
not very elegantly on the title page-also of the second
and third editions-"For the Use of His Lectures" (Zum
Gebrauch seiner Vorlesungen). The Philosophy of Right
has a similar notation on the title page. The point was
that his students could in this way gain a general idea of
I1 Poggeler (1966). p. 330£. slips in spealcing of "the 6rst three chap-
ters." so strong is the hold of triads on the minds of Hegel's interpret-
ersl

Hegel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology. 245

 what Hegel was up to, an overview that would keep at
least some of them from getting lost in details, while
Hegel himself could use the book by asking his students
to turn to such and such a section and then discuss it at
length.
Hegel used the Encyclopedia in this way for ten
years, then issued a radically revised edition, comprising
574 sections on 534 pages, in 1827, and a third edition,
again radically revised, in 1830, a year before he died. It
is to Hegel's credit that he kept revising his system and
made as many changes as he did. It is also understand-
able that, having once published his system in outline
form, he did feel some commibnent to it and hence did
not make more changes, nor called attention to the
changes by producing arguments to back them up. Hegel
scholars have for the most part ignored what his son said
when he edited the second posthumous edition of his
father's lectures on the philosophy of history. Rebuking
..those who identify the rigor of thought with a formal
schematism," Karl Hegel pointed out .. that Hegel clung
so little to the subdivisions he had once made that he
changed them every time he gave a course. "32 Of course,
that does leave the question where the vaunted rigor is
to be found and what precisely is supposed to be neces-
sary when the transitions from one subdivision to the
next obviously are not.
The reasons for the new place of phenomenology
in Hegel's system were plainly pragmatic. The
Phenomenology had been intended as an introduction to
the system and a ladder on which one could climb up to
the point of view from which the Logic was to be
studied, but when teaching teenage boys Hegel discov-
ered that it did not work very well as an introduction. Of
course, it might still have been a good introduction for
more advanced students, but Hegel evidently no longer

a Kaufmann (1965), sec. 53. For the quotation see p. 234. Italics added.

246 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

felt that it was. If he had called the Encyclopedia Part
Two, he would have implied that one could not very
well tackle it until one had read the Phenomenology
first. On the other hand, Hegel had found it worthwhile
to teach parts of the first chapters of the Phenomenology
and hence wished to include these in outline form in his
syllabus and hence had to find a place for them. But the
best place, not to say the most logical place, was not at
the beginning, before the brief outline of the Logic, nor
obviously in the Philosophy of Nature that followed; it
had to be somewhere in the last part, the Philosophy of
Spirit.
Omitting a few subheads, this is the way Hegel sub-
divided his Philosophy of Spirit in the edition of 1817:
First Part. Subjective spirit
A. Soul
B. Consciousness
a. Consciousness as such
h. Self-consciousness
c. Reason
C. Spirit
a. Theoretical spirit
h. Practical spirit
Second Part. Objective spirit
A. Right [or Law: Das Recht]
B. Morality [a la Kant: Die Moralit4t]
C. Ethics [a la Goethe and Schiller: Die Sittlichkeit]
Third Part. Absolute spirit
a. Religion of art [Greek religion; art was still
omitted I]
h. Revealed religion
c. Philosophy

Such little incongruities as using small a, b, and c in the

final part, where symmetry would call for capitals, are
not only found in the original Table of Contents as well
as the text but were never caught by Hegel even in the
third edition. But as of the second edition the title and

Helel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology. 247

SIV

E.iI,.
B. 2),. eftl"tlltQri(cf)t ,,~ •., 1i f
· 152, 1f13

a. C!ltm.ntoci fdJ • .!itp." • S5)

h. (!lrm.nC. 159
c. UlcauntarU4n "ottJ 161

C. Die i 1\ b i " i b lit H, !f). ~ fi t 164, HI!)

a. CB,jlart 16;J
b. l8.fo.tanG 11ft' .I11J"
c. tpeo tt' IIn IBndlf.11WIf
· .70
J74

~fitttr ~rir. ~i, ~ ~ " f' r bel I) r ! 4 n i f et) tn

s80,204
A. !nit gUCo-!Ji ,.«, Olaurt 181 S81

B. ~it t)f9trdH'f~t .11n&r' 1831185.

C, ~crt. i cri fcb cC ega "if fill.f 18~, 204

c.
!)h g)~i(orop~h tt' @hHh'
,.,5 Ill. ~~

• 209.256

4. ~ic euce 209

•• 9taturb.fllaunft,1t er, eUI. 21 i

b. QJre.nfa, IIne"r, 8f8.a*,
Gubltalltlalit't 215
c. IDhrll4ftlt Ne SuI•• • 221
 xv
e,lr,.
•• 1)". m,,,,u8rfcIJn
18,,,,u,tf.,n .1. fotll),.
1l:!3

223
••
b. etlllpb.lll1ptr,,1I • 22!1

c. IJlCftunft 234

C. 2)tr 0t ill • • 235

•• s • to re tI f "er a.dlt .38

I) (1,,41a1. I) It.IIt,lIant
I),nftn 141, 143.149

151

S) ,,,'tlrdl.' .,ra,t. I) I:rlt'

lall R,18un,. 3) 1114dr,lIg"lt
251, 1154- U6.

a",r!)!tr ~6'if. ~tr 0 6j re r i VI (Brill • 2!it

A. t)d mrd,t 160

B. 2)ir \m 0 ra rit ti t . 26~

C. !Die e i It ( i ell r cit 210

I. .,•••'nlflD. IDol! 275

I. IltlWen. etoof.rr4r .'o'of.
a. IlIlelltia' g, lte'f4,,,r. 1'&
contents of a was changed to Art, and that part of Hegel' s
system, particularly in the fonn of his lectures on aes-
thetics, is still widely regarded as one of its strongest
points. The subdivisions ofSittlichkeit, which should be
preceded by a, b, and c, are actually preceded in the last
edition by AA, BB, and CC, suggesting that Hegel kept
trying out different arrangements without a perfectly
clear view of the whole.
The Phenomenology of 1807, of course, had repre-
sented an attempt to cover the whole Philosophy of
Spirit. In the system of 1817, however, the opening
paragraph of "Subjective spirit," which precedes ceA.
Soul," suggests how phenomenology can be fitted into
the system:
Subjective spirit is a) the immediate spirit or spirit of
nature-the subject of what is usually called athropology
[sic] or the soul; b) spirit as identical reflection into itself
and into what is other, relation or specification; con-
sciousness, the subject of the phenomenology of the
spirit; c) the spirit that is for itself or spirit as subject; the
subject of what is usually called psychology.

It is easy to imagine Hegellecturing on this section

(307), trying to explain it to his students; but it remains a
dreadful muddle for all that. We are asked to believe that
the study of the soul is usually called anthropology,
while the study of the spirit as subject is usually called
psychology, and the phenomenology of the spirit is said
to deal with consciousness. Since he had written a whole
book on the phenomenology of the spirit, one might
have expected Hegel to explain at least briefly why he
had changed his mind about it and now meant some-
thing altogether different when he used this tenn. But
while Hegel remained open-minded enough to keep
changing his mind, he wore the mask of absolute knowl-
edge and -refused to mention that he had changed his
mind, let alone explain why. And his students obviously

250. DISCOVERING THE MIND

 did not dare to point out to him even the most trivial
slips, not to speak of what looked like major contradic-
tions.
Down through the reflection on master and slave,
the highly condensed paragraphs on Consciousness in
the Encyclopedia of 1817 bear some relation to the
Phenomenology of 1807; but stoicism, skepticism, and
the unhappy consciousness are no longer mentioned and
Reason, to which Hegel had devoted almost 250 pages
in 1807-almost twice as much space as he had allotted
to the preceding four chapters taken together-is now
covered in half a page. Reason, moreover, is thus
taken up before, and in some sense below, psychology!
Another ten years later, in the second edition of
1827, a great deal is changed in the Encyclopedia. But in
the outline given above, Hegel made only two changes.
He substituted Art for the Religion of Art, and the three
divisions of Subjective Spirit are now A. Anthropology,
B. Phenomenology, and C. Psychology. In the third edi-
tion, in 1830, he made one further change. Psychology,
which in the second edition still had only two subdivi-
sions, is finally promoted to equality with all the other
subheads of the Philosophy of Spirit by the addition of
c. The free spirit after theoretical and practical spirit.
Thus Hegel's final conception of phenomenology
needs to be distinguished from both the scientific and
the poetic conception. One might call this one the re-
stricted or the Encyclopedia conception, but it repre-
sents a terrible anticlimax and can safely be ignored, as
indeed it has been. My reason for calling attention to it at
some length is that while it contributes nothing to the
discovery of the mind, this episode helps greatly to il-
luminate Hegel's mind, and one of the central themes of
this study is the attempt to discover the minds of the
major figures we consider here. Hegel's mind was
clearly very different from what has been generally as-
sumed.

Hegel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 251

LIV
••1...
.. I).r ...um. t. 257. .• ebd.
b. I)le Selt.. §. 25'7. 238
Co'
I)cr Ore un.
'"~ m.II.,an,. t. 260. 243

B. SOle aneaterie uab 0eauegung. §. 262. 247

a. 1)1. trlg. mllt.rle. §. 263. 2'9
b. I)er erD,. t. 265. 251
C. I).r tlU. §. 26'7. 25~

c. SDle ~&fofu,emlec(Jeanir. §. 269. 261

SlUfite ..&t~rUuns. . ').I
e 9) 09 fl r.
§. 27~ - 336 • • 272
A. Jl)ie 'Ol)P' ber eallaemeinen ~nbitti.
bueafitAt. §. 274. 273
•
a. $DI. fr,'en ,',Pfeten .l6rperr 275. ebd.
b. I)r. il.meht•. §. 281 282
c. SDn dementllrlfcft. 'J)rocc8. §. 286. 284
B. I)le 930t)pr ber &efonbrrn !Sabi1M~
bualitc1t. §. 290. • • 289
a. SDle fp.cI"fc6' e«Jlltr.. §. 293. 291
b. 1)1. (o,Ipon. §. 295. 295
c. 5I)cr .I1an9 ,. 300. 296
d. 1)(. S8J4rme. §. 303. • 300

c. SOle ~OlJpr ber totaren 3nbittibuea.

(Udt. §. 306.· • • 306
It. 1)1. lJefla(t. too 810. • 301
b. I)lf mcfonberung ••• In.bl"lbucll.n
.l6rp.r.. t. 316. • 312
o. I)" ',.mlf'" IJ)rou,. §. 326. 330
 Lv
etllf.
I)rlt~e Q{6rOtU. I)it Organi'. §.336-3i6 :H'J
A. SDi, 9ro(o9Ir~r mature §. 338~ 3j 1
B. 1)1, bt9tta&UifcfJe mature §. 343. 354
C. SOn ~itrir~' Organi.mu.. §. 350. 360
.. SDle QJello(t. §. 3'53. • 361
b. SDlc 1CflltnlloUon. §. 35'7. .1r.:.
c. ~er ®"ttun8.'~rocc'. §. 367. 3i,j

i' r i. t t t r X J; t i f.
~., 9>OHorop~ft be. @hiflt.
§. 377 - §. 5i7.
I2lnleUuftg. §. 377 3S9

~rflt "&f~tUun9. t) er fU &j t Ct i \) t

@Sti~. §. 387. - §. 482. 397
A. I)ie Q{!1t~ropor09It. §. 388.. 398
a. SDle nQtdrllcf)e etd,. §. '391. ..O~
b. SDlc fii~lfnbe eledt. §. 4.03. 41.1
c. ~Ie '1UIrru~e eule. §. 4.11. 4:'3
B. SDir 9)~anOmtnO(09ir ~t' @)tlflr. §. 413. 43'.
~ ~OII Sl)cmugtr'vn. §: 413. ".1G
b. SDa. eel&fl&cmufitrtvl1. §. 424. .. ,:!
c. ~Ie f8ctnlll1rt. §. 438. ""$
C. SDi, 9)r"cfJO(09if. • 450
a. ~tr t'eoreUfc6e QJelfl. §.•US. • 4,;!i
b. SDtr "rartlr~c Q5elll. §. 469. 4'"
 45 ~ How, in view of all this, can
we sum up his conception? If Hegel had really been the
systematic philosopher he is widely supposed to have
been, the way in which he worked phenomenology into
his system should obviously take precedence over the
book of 1807. Yet scarcely anybody today would con-
sider that a reasonable suggestion. For phenomenology,
about which he had thought so long, was obviously in-
corporated into his system in an ill-considered and arbi-
trary fashion that requires explanation in pragmatic
terms and cannot be justified in terms of any conceptual
necessity.
In sum, not only the scientific conception of
phenomenology maintained by Hegel in his first book
but also the scientific conception of Hegel that is still
popular is utterly untenable. In 1951 I published an arti-
cle, "The Hegel Myth and Its Method," attacking
Hegel's detractors in general and Karl Popper's carica-
ture of Hegel in particular. That attack met with rare
success and, along with my subsequent work on Hegel,
helped to bring about what is now sometimes called the
American Hegel renaissance. J. N. Findlay"s Hegel.
published in England in 1958, played an important role
in this development, too. But what proved most impor-
tant was the explosion of interest in Marx and the paucity
of philosophical material in Marx, which forced those
with philosophical interests to concentrate on Marx" s
early manuscripts, which were written when he was still
very much preoccupied with Hegel and which were not
rich enough philosophically for philosophers to stay
with them. Now the renewed interest in Hegel is an
international phenomenon and keeps being fed by
interest in Marx.
Here I am in effect attacking another Hegel myth,
the notion that he was a rigorous or scientific
philosopher. The present chapter is of a piece with my

254 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 book on Hegel, but that was not designed to prove or
disprove some one thesis. It was an attempt at a full-
length study. Now I am trying to drive home some
striking conclusions.
The first of these concerns much Hegel scholarship.
After Hegel's death his students interlarded selections
from their lecture notes into the third edition of the En-
cyclopedia and thus transformed it into a three-volume
work that few people could ever be expected to read
through. More recently a very erudite English translator
has taken the second and shortest of the three major parts
of the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of Nature-less than
eighty pages in the original edition and 160 in the third
edition-and by adding notes and commentaries has
made of that alone three volumes. It is easy to appreciate
so much devotion as well as the additions to our knowl-
edge; but it has become more and more difficult and
hence unusual for anyone to recall th~ fluidity of Hegel' s
thought and to experience his ideas as he experienced
them.
The trouble with much recent scholarly and edito-
rial work is not that such work is destructive and dis-
solves what was whole, as Poggeler has suggested, but
rather that it freezes what was fluid. Fleeting thoughts
and doubtful notions that pass through a great mind and
are put on paper to be reexamined in the light of day
(Nietzsche's case), or words once spoken in a lecture and
perhaps not even recalled by the speaker afterwards, or
even phrases that were heard wrong find their way into
volumes in which they do not look any different from
ideas that were carefully considered (Hegel's case).
This process began with Hegel himself. He wrote
his Phenomenology, and later also his Encyclopedia,
under circumstances and pressures that did not allow for
much weighing of words or reexamining whole passages
and indeed the overall arrangement, and especially in
his first book he came to write at such a pace that he put

Retel'. Three Conception. of Phenomenology ~ 255

fleeting thoughts and doubtful notions down on paper
and then had to send them to the printer without any
opportunity to rethink what he had written.
This makes a mockery of the scientific conception of
phenomenology. It may be objected that although
Hegel's book falls far short of that, the conception re-
mains noble and superior to the book he actually wrote.
But any such claim depends on one's ability to show that
any single series of stages leading from sense certainty
to absolute knowledge could be shown to be complete
and necessary. I have tried to show why no such series
could possibly be necessary and complete.
That leaves us with the poetic conception. Oppo-
nents of this conception may plead that it is not
"philosophical" and rigorous enough. sa Before I offer
my own reply to that, it may be of some interest to note
that Friedrich Engeis offered some brilliant formu-
lations that go very well' with my view. I am under no
illusions that his agreement could prove me right, but he
put the matter so well that it would be a shame to ignore
his formulations.
First having read that William Thomson had called a
book by a French mathematician a mathematical poem,
Engels jotted down, in English: "Hegel a dialectical
poem."34 "Science," in other words, can be poetic
(shades of Goethe)-and on the facing page Engels vil-
ified Newton. Three of Engels' letters to Conrad
Schmidt are also pertinent. Speaking of one of Hegel's
critics, he writes:
To suppose that he is criticizing Hegel when he tracks
down one of the false leaps that H, like any other system-
atic thinker, has to use to construe his system! The colos-
sal discovery that H sometimes confounds contrary and

laSee, e.g., Klaus Hartmann (197.2), p. 399.

84Werke, vol . .20, p. 477 (Dialektik der Natur: Notiz.en und Frag-
mente).

256 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 contradictory opposition I I could show him far worse
tricks if that were worth the trouble t He is, as we say in
the Rhineland, a raisin-shitter; he transforms everything
into minutiae; and as long as he does not get over this
habit he will, to speak with Hegel, "come from nothing
through nothing to nothing."3I

The second letter, dated November 1, 1891, is simi-

lar:
Under no circumstances should you read Hegel the way
Herr Barth has read him, namely in order to discover the
paralogisms and rotten tricks that serve him as levers of
construction. That is work for schoolboys. What is much
more important is to discover under the incorrect form
and in the artificial context what is correct and bears the
marks of genius. Thus the transitions from one category
or one opposite to the next are almost always arbitrary-
and often accomplished by means of a joke, as when
positive and negative in section 120 zugrunde gehn
[perish] to enable Hegel to reach the category of the
Grund [ground]. To subtilize about that is a waste of
time.

The third letter, February 4, 1892, makes much the

same point and concludes: "In every language one
would have to do this differently. Just try to translate the
sequence in the Doctrine of Essence into another lan-
guage, and most of the transitions become impossible."
All this is indeed a scandal, but one cannot diminish
it by claiming that Hegel really was rigorous after all. At
first glance, of course, the poetic conception seems soft
compared to the tougher scientific conception. It is
widely felt nowadays that a philosopher should be satis-
fied with nothing less than solid arguments. But anyone
who knows what a rigorous argument about Antigone or

:IS July I, 1891, Werke, vol. 38, p. 129. The Rhenish word is Korln-
thenscheisser.

HeJel's Three Conceptions of PhenomenololY • 257

Sittlichkeit would look like must retort that no "scien-
tific" interpretation of the Phenomenology could possi-
bly be tough or rigorous. On the contrary, any such
reading must depend on an extremely feeble conception
of "science," rigor, and argument. One simply has to put
on blinders and immerse oneself in carefully selected
details to avoid the discovery that the book is utterly
unscientific and lacking in rigor.
It does not follow that the book is therefore not
philosophical. I have a tough conception of rigor and
solid arguments but not of philosophy. A great deal of
philosophy has been utterly lacking in rigor, and what
troubles me is not that but the widespread failure of
philosophers, including Kant as well as Hegel, to realize
this and their affectation of a rigor that is not there.
Consider three memoirs, inspired by great love and
admiration for two very remarkable recent philosophers
who might almost be called patron saints of analytical
philosophy. George Pitcher observes in his memoir of
J. L. Austin, to whom he had dedicated his first book,
which was on Wittgenstein:
I was ready to follow him to the moon. There were
others, too, just as willing. Ideally, perhaps, this effect
should have been brought about by means of over-
whelming philosophical arguments, but in fact it was not,
for Austin produced none. Indeed, I cannot recall any-
thing I ever heard, or read, of Austin's that contained a
straightforward, old-fashioned philosophical argument .
. . . It is certain that we would not have reacted ... as we
did but for the quite extraordinary . . . authority that
seemed uncannily to still all critical doubts while he
spoke ...36

Wittgenstein's Tractatu8 is a stunning example of an

affectation of rigor. The wealth of symbols and the way
38 EssalJs on]. L. Austin by Sir Isaiah Berlin et. al. (Oxford, 1973), p.
20£.

258~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

the propositions are numbered to indicate their precise
weight gives the unwary reader the impression that ev-
erything is proved beyond a doubt, although in fact we
are offered an often capricious sequence of aphorisms.
Despite Wittgenstein's towering reputation for integrity,
it is hard to escape the conclusion that he and Austin
used the immense authority of their personalities and
their very superior intellects to "still all critical doubts."
One did not dare; one was intimidated. Austin's manner
was different from Wittgenstein's, and both men were
very different from various German professorial types,
but what they had in common with many German pro-
fessors was that certain questions-including many of
the most important critical questions-simply could not
be asked.
Norman Malcolm, who knew the later Wittgenstein,
says in his beautiful memoir: "one had to attend [his
lectures] for quite a long time (at least three terms, I
should say) before one could begin to get any grasp of
what he was doing."37 Surely that is a way of saying that
Wittgenstein did not offer rigorous arguments in which
conclusions were derived from stated premises. And in
the "Biographical Sketch" that appears in the same vol-
ume, Georg Henrick von Wright, one of Wittgenstein's
literary executors, says of him: "He once said that he felt
as though he were writing for people who would think in
a quite different way, breathe a different air of life, from
that of present-day men."38
Hegel did not think along those lines. He operated
with a Kantian conception of philosophy and felt that he
ought to be rigorous in a way in which he obviously did
not manage to be rigorous. But for all that he was de-
veloping a new way of thinking that owed a great deal to
Goethe. He did not do this very well by any standards,

37 (1958), p. 28.
38 Ibid., p. 2.

Helel's Three Conceptions of PhenomenololY ~ 259

certainly not by his own; but that may be generally true
of philosophers who try as much.

46 ... How did Hegel advance the

discovery of the mind? By accepting all of the four points
discussed in connection with Goethe (they will be re-
capitulated in a moment) and developing them in a most
fruitful way. This was a stupendous achievement, and
Hegel would confront us as an even far greater man than
he was ifhe had not also accepted three of the five points
discussed in connection with Kant. Although Hegel re-
jected Kant's model of the mind and his grotesque notion
of autonomy, he was corrupted by Kant's impossible
style, his misguided method, and his insistence on cer-
tainty, completeness, and necessity. We have seen the
disastrous results.
It is only fair to add that Kant was not Hegel's only
model, that he helped H. E. G. Paulus prepare a schol-
arly edition of Spinoza before he wrote the Phenomenol-
ogy, and that he was steeped in Plato, including such
late dialogues as the Parmenides and Sophist, and above
all in Aristotle. But it was Kant who had begun the at-
tempt to create a special brand of German for serious
philosophy. Hegel wrote J. H. Voss, the great translator,
in May 1805, shortly before he wrote the Phenomenol-
ogy:
Luther has made the Bible speak German; you,
Homer-the greatest present that can be given to a
people-I should like to say of my aspirations that I shall
try to teach philosophy to speak German. Once that is
accomplished, it will be infinitely more difficult to give
shallowness the appearance of profound speech.

Hegel worked hard on this letter. Three drafts have

survived although the letter itself is lost, and this quota-

260 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 tion comes from the final draft. But the last sentence is
certainly a howler. Hegel's misguided accomplishment
certainly made it easier for shallow people to affect pro-
fundity, and Heidegger's similar attempt has had still
worse results. In details, Hegel, like Heidegger after
him, was often translating from the Greek, with Aristotle
as the great source; but the notion that philosophy re-
quires a special brand of German came from Kant.
Yet Hegel also accepted Goethe's model of au-
tonomy; his idea that man is his deeds and that a history
of the deeds gives us the essence; the all-important point
that the mind can be understood only in terms of de-
velopment; the opposition to Newtonian science and the
bold notion that "the history of science is science itself' ;
and finaliy also the disparagement of mathematical cer-
tainty, which turns up in the Preface to the Phenomenol-
ogy. In some cases the Goethean formulations I have
cited were published after 1807, but I assume, knowing
something of both men and taking into account the fact
that Goethe became world famous when Hegel was four
years old, that Goethe did not take these ideas from
Hegel. If he had, I do not doubt that Hegel would have
called attention to it, with great pride, as he did when he
said in his lectures on the philosophy of history: "For a
valet there are no heroes, says a familiar proverb. I have
added [in the Phenomenology]39-an d Goethe repeated
this two years later [in Ottilie's diary in Elective
Afflnities]-not because there are no heroes but because
he is a valet."40
Although I believe that Goethe's influence on
Hegel was overwhelming, it would not matter greatly if
at one point it would be more appropriate to speak of an
elective affinity rather than influence. What we are deal-
ing with is after all not four independent points but an

311 About five pages before the end of chap. VI: Spirit.
40 Hoffineister's edition, p. 102f.

Begel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 261

 organic syndrome, and what is remarkable is how these
ideas function together in Hegel.
Again I shall concentrate on five points, but they can
all be stated summarily, and in view of what has already
been shown they require no lengthy elaboration at all.
After the charges preferred against Hegel, it may be felt
that his contribution would have to be immense to justify
our prolonged discussion of him, and the time has come
to show briefly that it was.
First, although Hegel's systems approach has come
in for a good deal of ridicule, beginning with Kier-
kegaard, it was a stroke of genius. Hegel maintained that
views and positions have to be seen as a whole, that the
theoretical and moral belong together as aspects of a
single standpoint, and that, in effect, atomism and mi-
croscopism miss the spirit that holds everything together.
Contemporary philosophers could still learn a great
deal from Hegel in this respect. Too often, the history of
philosophy that is taught in our colleges and universities
is merely the history of epistemology; and ethics, politi-
cal philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion are
left out, to be taken up, if at all, in various systematic
courses. It is not at all unusual for courses on Kant to get
approximately halfway through the Critique of Pure
Reason and stop short of the refutation of the traditional
proofs of God's existence, not to speak of Kant's other
works. What is stressed is more often than not the dis-
cussion of single arguments that do not seem to be tena-
ble as they stand but that can be reconstructed in a
number of ways. At that point philosophy becomes sim-
ilar to chess: if we made this move, then, ten moves
later, we would get into trouble in this way or that;
hence we must try to find a better move; and when that
also does .not work, we make yet another attempt. Ac-
cording to ever so many contemporary philosophers,
that, written out with so many numbers and letters (such
as F and a and y) that the text becomes unreadable and

262 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 has to be puzzled out, is the way to "do philosophy." As
Mephistopheles said to the newly arrived student, it
"lacks nothing except the spirit's connections" (see sec-
tion 10 above). Hegel was supremely interested in "the
spirit's connections" or, as we might say, in the way
Kant's theory of knowledge, his ethics, his aesthetics,
and his philosophy of religion hang together and are
products of the same mind.
Obviously, Hegel himself did not explore these
connections or Kant's mind in anything like the way at-
tempted in the present book. But in principle he was, I
think, on the right track and we can still learn from him.
Secondly, Hegel tried to show in his Phenomenol-
ogy how each view must be seen in relation to the per-
son holding it. What he had in mind was, of course, not a
reductionist psychology; it was more nearly a way of
transcending the split between subject and object. In-
stead of concentrating exclusively either on views and
positions, as most philosophers still do, or on the human
being who holds these views, Hegel, at least in princi-
ple, tried to see at every stage a whole that included
subject and object, thinker and thought.
Here Hegel was hampered not only by his lack of
psychological sophistication but also by his failure to
reach any clarity about the place of psychology in his
system. As we have seen, he said in his own advertise-
ment for the Phenomenology that it was intended to "re-
place psychological explanations," but then placed psy-
chology above phenomenology in his Encyclopedia. His
brilliant idea that each view or position must be seen
together with the person holding it remains at the level
of a fascinating suggestion or program but is never
worked out well in detail.
Third, Hegel suggested that every position should
be seen as a stage in a development-the development
of mind or spirit. That should mean first of all the de-
velopment of the mind of the individual who maintained

HeBel's Three Conceptions of PhenomenoloB)' ~ 263

 this position, and here once again Hegel was not at his
best. But it also means the development of the human
spirit or mind through history. Each position has to be
seen not only as a whole but also as a part of a still larger
whole-in relation to what came before it and after it.
Short of that, we do not fully understand its meaning and
are still blinded by myopia. A position derives its
meaning in part from its developmental context.
Hegel did succeed quite remarkably in impressing
this lesson on those who followed after him, and in the
course of the nineteenth century this idea gradually
came to dominate the study of philosophy and religion,
literature and art-to such an extent that the so-called
"new criticism" and "analytical philosophy" may be
seen as protests, if not revolts, against the excesses
committed by scholars who drowned works or ideas in
their developmental context. While this suggestion con-
cedes that these revolts were justified in some measure,
it is nevertheless essentially Hegelian: the "new crit-
icism" and "analytical philosophy" have to be under-
stood as stages in a development.
Fourth, a position needs to be seen in relation to
opposing views that help us to see not only its motiva-
tion but also the partiality and inadequacy of both sides.
While a little of this insight has rubbed off on later pro-
ponents of "dialectic," most members of philosophical
schools have never absorbed the whole lesson. School
philosophers, whether they are Thomists or Marxists,
phenomenologists or analytical philosophers, usually
match their wits against other members of their own
school, relying on an unquestioned consensus and con-
centrating on relatively minute differences.
Hegel's philosophy spawned its share of scholastics,
in keeping with Schiller's distich on "Kant and His In-
terpreters" :
One who is opulent offers
legions of famishing beggars

264 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 food. When the kings construct,
teamsters find plenty of work.

Yet Hegel himself was really a quintessential anti-

scholastic. He recognized clearly that what is most im-
portant is not the minutiae on which people who belong
to the same school happen to disagree but rather the
relation of fundamentally different positions to each
other. Perhaps Hegel still has as much to contribute to
the discovery of the mind as he has contributed already.
Fifth and last, he himself applied these insights not
only in his Phenomenology but also in his vastly in-
fluentiallectures on the philosophy of history, aesthetics,
religion, and the history of philosophy. These lectures
were published posthumously by his students on the
basis of students' lecture notes, and one can raise no end
of objections to the ways in which they were edited; yet
Hegel revolutionized the study of all of these fields. His
most important contribution was the same in all of these
areas. He taught people to see history and art history as
well as the history of religion and of philosophy as disci-
plines through which we can try to discover the human
mind or spirit or, in one word, man.
Here Hegelleft his mark on the whole nineteenth
century, by no means only on German scholarship or on
scholars only but also on the way educated people gen-
erally came to think. In fact, he left a pennanent mark on
all of these disciplines down to our own time. There has
been no dearth of anti-Hegelians, and it is fruitful to see
much intellectual history since Hegel as a series of re-
volts against him, from Kierkegaard and Marx to the new
criticism and analytical philosophy, which G. E. Moore,
who spearheaded analytical philosophy, saw as a revolt
against Hegelianism. Many of Hegel's critics absorbed
easily as much of Hegel as they disowned, and the con-
tinual resurgence of revolts bears testimony to the vital-
ity of his influence.

Begel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 265

 Of course, what his critics as well as his admirers
took from him was by no means always what was best in
him. What happens to all great spirits is that their worst
qualities are easiest to imitate and hence aped most fre-
quently. All kinds of mannerisms are copied and in
Hegel's case also his extraordinarily obscure style and
his spurious deductions, but many followers are quite
blind to the major contributions of their master, and few,
if any, approximate his originality or have any deep in-
sights of their own.
In sum, Hegel was far more successful in advancing
the discovery of the human mind through historical
studies than he was in advancing the discovery of the
individual human mind. He did not manage to apply his
stupendous insights to the individual, as he might have
done in the Phenomenology, because he was held back
at every turn by his Kantian heritage. He thought he
knew how a major philosophical work must be written,
and he felt that he had to be scientific in a way that was
really absurd, aspiring to certainty, necessity, and com-
pleteness. At every transition from one stage to another
he tried to approximate a deduction, but his deductions
were not logically compelling. His admirers have often
called them" dialectical." Hegel himself was never clear
about what they were nor did he ever give a clear ac-
count of "dialectic," a failing shared by almost all who
have used that term since. It is still, or once again, a
fashionable word and used by all kinds of people who do
not feel called upon to specify their meaning. In Hegel's
defense it must be said that he himself did not often
speak of dialectic. In most of the relatively few passages
in which this concept appears, Hegel used the adjective
"dialectical" and did not speak of arguments but rather
spoke of a "dialectical movement." Yet he, too, did not
consider it necessary to state precisely what he meant by
that.
In the present context, however, it is much more

266 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 important to recall that it is widely agreed that Heget's
lectures on the philosophy of history, which are proba-
bly his most popular and perhaps also his most influen-
tial book, and his lectures on aesthetics, the philosophy
of religion, and the history of philosophy are much easier
to read than the books he himself published. Moreover,
some of the best of Hegel is found in these lectures and
in the "additions" to the paragraphs of his Encyclopedia
and Philosophy of Right that his students compiled from
his lectures and inserted in the posthumous editions of
these books. Why should this be so? Nothing like this is
true of Kant or Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or any of the
major French or British philosophers. Has anyone even
asked this question before? Once we do pose it, the an-
swer seems clear enough.
When he wrote his books, Hegel was hampered by
Kant's legacy, wrote as Kant had written, and aspired to
certainty, completeness, and necessity. He affected a
rigor that was spurious. But when he lectured he man-
aged to get away from this heritage and frequently de-
veloped his insights in ways that were really much more
congenial to him.
He still provides plenty of work for teamsters, and
since the 1960s more scholars than ever before are turn-
ing out articles and books on him. But Hegel also had
insights that are still waiting to be developed and
applied. A quotation from his lectures on the philosophy
of history is downright Freudian. For once I shall trans-
late Geist as mind: "The stages that the mind seems to
have left behind it also possesses in its present depth. As
it has run through its stages in history, it has to run
through them in the present ... "41
A scholastic might read his own discoveries or those
of later thinkers into Hegel and appear not to go beyond
him even when he did. But it seems far better to ac-

41 Hoffmeister's ed., p. 183.

Helel'. Three Conception. of PhenomenololY. 267

 knowledge that Nietzsche and Freud went far beyond
Hegel and made contributions to the discovery of the
mind that he had not dreamed o£ N ietzsche will be con-
sidered, along with Heidegger and Buber, in the second
volume of this trilogy; Freud, along with Adler and J ung,
in the last.
Goethe and Hegel advanced the discovery of the
mind immensely, and yet one feels that when they died in
1831 and 1832 psychology had not yet been born. Hegel
was held back by his Kantian heritage, and his
Phenomenology is often as grotesque as the early essay in
which he placed his paraphrases of Kant's ethics in the
mouth of Jesus. What was needed was a thinker who
would develop Goethe's legacy without trying to recon-
cile it with Kant's. This is what Nietzsche did and, after
him, Freud.
It may seem that, if this is so, one might just as well
begin Discovering the Mind with Nietzsche and skip
Goethe, Kant, and Hegel. But if Goethe and Hegel were
right when they insisted that what is of the mind must be
caught in its genesis to be comprehended, then it makes
sense to go back to the beginnings. And if Hegel was
right, that a position needs to be seen in relation to op-
posing views, then our juxtaposition of Goethe and Kant
makes sense, the more so because the faults I have found
in Kant are encountered again and again in contemporary
reflections on the mind.
Finally, we may have advanced the understanding of
the minds of three very remarkable individuals. Kant and
Hegel did more than anyone else to create the image and
model of the modern philosopher, who is a professor and
takes pride in being academic and writing for his profes-
sional colleagues rather than popularly. Yet we have seen
how their works are the creations of very human writers
and reflect their character no less than their genius. Far
from standing above their fellow men and seeing the
human mind from the vantage point of gods, they were

268 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

resolving their own personal problems in their books.
And we can still learn from Goethe's insistence on the
crucial importance of development and from his concep-
tion of science. Being a poet as well as a scientist, he knew
that poetry and science are not totally different but cre-
ations of the same mind. Those who would discover the
mind cannot afford to ignore poetry and art.

Regel's Three Conceptions of Phenomenology ~ 269

Bibliography ~
Bibliographies for Goethe,
Kant, and Hegel could easily fill one volume each. The
first item in the Bibliography shows how large the sec-
ondary literature on Kant was even in the nineteenth
century. A two-volume Goethe-Bibliographie is listed
under Goethe. My own Hegel contains an eighteen-page
Hegel bibliography, divided into Hegel bibliographies,
Hegel's writings (including English translations), and
writings about Hegel; but since this book appeared in
1965 there has been a veritable explosion of interest in
Hegel, and well over a thousand books and articles on
Hegel were published in 1970-75. Hegel-Studien,
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flood.
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- - , ed. Kant Studies Today. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court,
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- - , trans. Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant.
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- - , trans. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals by
Immanuel Kant. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959.

272 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

- - , ed. and trans. with others. On History by Immanuel
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Byron, Lord. Sardanapalus. London: J. Murray, 1821.
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Deussen, Paul. Die Geheimlehre des Veda. Leipzig: F. A.
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- - . Der Kategorische Imperatlv. Kiel: Universitiitsbuch-
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Dewey, John. Theory of Valuation. Chicago: University of
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Dilthey, Wilhelm. }udendgeschichte Hegels. Berlin, 1906.
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278 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

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Acknowledgments ...
Some of these ideas were
worked out and presented at the Research School of So-
cial Sciences, Australian National University, in the fall
of 1974. I am grateful to Eugene Kamenka, who invited
me there, and to those who attended my seminars and
participated in the discussion. A brief preliminary ver-
sion of the Hegel chapter appeared in Phenomenology
and Philosophical Understanding, edited by Edo Piv-
~evic (Cambridge University Press, 1975). A first draft of
the entire trilogy was completed in 1976 but laid aside to
permit me to complete Man's Lot. When I returned to
the task of revising this draft for publication, which in-
volved extensive changes, I was helped by the detailed
comments of several friends. lill Anderson commented
on the Goethe chapter, Moshe Barasch and Lewis Beck
on Kant, Raymond Geuss on Goethe and Kant, David
Hoy on Hegel, 10 Kaufmann on the Prologue and the
Goethe chapter, and Alexandros Nehemas on the whole
manuscript. Professor Nehemas' comments were espe-
cially extensive, and our long discussions were an utter
delight.
 Lewis Beck's reaction to my treatment of Kant calls for
a special word of thanks. When I mailed my manuscript to
him, I asked myself how I would feel if somebody sent me
an essay of such length in which he tried to show how Nietzsche
had been "a disaster." When one has given much of one's life
to translating a man's work and writing studies and commen-
taries, one can hardly be expected to be very sympathetic to
such an effort. But it is one of the beauties of the academic
scene, which is bleak in many ways, that it favors the growth
of affectionate criticism of the work of others, and when such
criticism is truly friendly it constitutes one of the most de-
lightful forms of human intercourse. This applies to all of those
to whom I have just stated my indebtedness, but in Lewis
Beck's case it went far beyond anything I could have expected.
In fact, his very kind comments helped to restore my faith in
a book in which, after such a long interruption, I had begun
to lose interest. Nobody could have hoped for such encour-
agement from the leading American Kant scholar.
Once again, it is a pleasure to express my gratitude to
Princeton University for granting me leaves and working con-
ditions that have allowed me to proceed with my research and
writing.

* * *
This posthumous edition would not have been possible
without the help of Prof. Saul Goldwasser and Prof. Irving
Louis Horowitz.

288 ~ DISCOVERING THE MIND

 COl
"I"IIJ'ODOlOV
GOETHE. KANT, AND BEGEL
Volume One: D1scovering the Mind
Waiter K,aufmann
With a new tntroduc11on by lvan SoU
Tbla lDunen.ee1y readable and abeorbtna book- the 8rat of • three-volume
aedes on understandJne the human m1Dd - concentnltetl on three major
ftgures who have changed our amaae of human beinga. Kaufmann drut1ca1Jy
~ tradltional conceptiona ofOoethe, Rant. and Hetel. showtng how their
ideas about the m1Dd were shaped by their own d1It1nctive mentalities.
Kaufmann's version of psycboblatory stays clear of IOUlp and 18 carefully
documented. He offers us a ~ new understandJne of two centurSea of
Intellectual bJ.atDry. but bJ.a primary focus 18 on aeJ(-Imowledae. He 18 in a
unique pollitlon tD perform thI8 task by virtue of beIn&. ucordtnl tD Stephen
Spender. "the best tranal.tor of Faust. - and. In Sldney Hook's view.
"unquestionably the most Interestln& and informative W11ter of Hegel In
EnglI8b.-
The fOreJD.o st Interpreter of Rant, Lew1a WhIte Beck. called this book
"faaclnatlng"-a work that "WtlI sttr up a good many people by telling them
th1nga they have never beard. and providing an alternative to what 18 the
accepted reading of that part of the b1atory of phUoeophy. The story of how
pel'llOna1ity affects phlloeoph;y has never been better tDld.-
We are shown bow Goethe advanced the dI8covery of the mtnd more than
anyone before him, wb1Ie Kant waa in manyways. dl8uter. liegel. like others
between 1790 and 1990. b1ed to recondJe Kant and Goethe. Kaufioann ahowa
th1e 18 ImpoAIble. He pa1nta a large picture. but he la a1waya ~ speclftc
and detada the major contributions of Goethe and HeaeJ as well as the ways
la wb1ch Kant"s lmmen.ee Infiuence prowd catastrophic,

Aboat tU Aatbon
waJter Ka14/inann wu profeaaor of phUoaophy at Prlnceton University from
1947 until bJ.a death In 1980. He a1so held v1a1t1nC appolntmenta at Columbia.
CorneD. the Australian National UnlYeraIty. and the UnlYeraIties ofMlchlgan.
WaahIngton. He1delberg. and Jerusalem. Among b1a other books are The
Fatth of a Herftfc, Tragedy and PhIJosophy. and wrthout QuIlt and JWJt.fce.
luan SoU. who provides the opening introduction, wu a student ofKaufmann
and 18 now profeuor of phUo80ph;y at the UnIvers1t¥ of WIacona1n. He baa
Wdtten Widely on Reget and German phlloaopblcal thought.

Ubruy of Congreaa: 90·11108

Printed In the U.SA
Cover design by Joeeph J. Bertuccl

,Ill II
,
lS BH o-unS-HO-'

180887 383700
'OD OO>

ISBN: 0-88738-370-X