278 Kant: A Biographylectures."^5 What he hoped to finish was the first moral part of this text¬
book, but, as so often happened, this work developed along different lines.
One of the reasons for this was the publication of Garve's Philosophical
Remarks and Essays on Cicero's Books on Duties in 1783.^6 This book brought
home to Kant not only the importance of Cicero, but also his continuing
effect on Kant's German contemporaries. Kant knew Cicero well, of course.
During his last two years of high school at the Collegium Fridericianum, he
had read most of his Epistolae ad familiäres, many of his speeches, and also
De officiis.^1 He had always appreciated Cicero's style, arguing that "true
popularity" in philosophy could only be achieved by reading and imitat¬
ing Cicero.^8 Even if he had not come close to this ideal in the first Critique,
Kant still hoped to accomplish it in his moral writings. Garve was impor¬
tant. He had dared to criticize Kant's first Critique in a review, and Kant
had been moved to criticize Garve in turn. Thus Hamann reported early
in 1784 that Kant was working on a "counter-critique" of Garve. Though
the title of the work was not determined yet, it was intended to be an attack
not on Garve's review but on Garve's Cicero - and it was an attack that would
constitute a kind of revenge.^9
Hamann, who took great interest in literary feuds, was initially excited.
But he was soon disappointed. For six weeks later he had to report that "the
counter-critique of Garve's Cicero had changed into a preliminary treatise
on morals," and that what he had wanted to call first "counter-critique"
had become a predecessor (prodrome) to morals, although it was to have
(still, perhaps?) "a relation to Garve."^10 The final version did not explicitly
deal with Garve. Only much later, in his 1793 essay "On the Old Saw 'That
May Be Right in Theory, but It Won't Work in Practice'," did Kant pub¬
licly respond to Garve. It is significant, however, that he read Cicero in
Garve's translation, and that he carefully looked at Garve's commentary
while writing the Groundwork. Though he may have been more interested
in Garve than in Cicero, the latter had a definite effect on his views con¬
cerning the foundations of moral philosophy.^11 What was to be a mere text¬
book treatment of well-rehearsed issues became a much more programmatic
treatise. It is therefore no accident that the terminology of the Groundwork
is so similar to that of Cicero - "will," "dignity," "autonomy," "duty,"
"virtue," "freedom," and several other central concepts play similar foun-
dational roles in Cicero and in Kant.^12
There are large areas of agreement between Kant and Cicero. They both
thought that ethics is based on reason and is opposed to impulse, and they
both rejected hedonism. Cicero used such phrases as "conquered by pleas-