Notes to Pages 234—240 479- The story is not quite as simple as these remarks suggest. Whereas Kant simply
speaks of an opposition between "rational" and "sensitive" in the dissertation, he
distinguishes two "rational" faculties in 1781, namely the "understanding" and
"reason." The separation of these two faculties is a significant part of the story. - Ak 18, p. 69 (emphasis supplied).
- Die philosophischen Hauptvorlesungen Immanuel Kants, ed. Arnold Kowalewski
(Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), p. 505 (Ak 24.2 [Logic Dohna-Wundlacken], pp. 783^
Kant, Lectures on Logic, pp. 515f.). The student was impressed by this confession,
for he noted "NB. This happened in the repetitorium on Saturday, for the col¬
legium had already finished on Friday." - The most decisive change appears to have happened before February 1772. What
Kant calls "decisive" in the letter to Herz is just what most radically differenti¬
ates the Inaugural Dissertation from the first Critique, namely the emphasis on
the necessary interdependence of rational cognition and sensible intuition. The
"all-important rule" that we must "carefully prevent the principles proper to sensitive
cognition from passing their boundaries and affecting the intellectual" for which he
argued in 1770 had to be radically reformulated as a result of his meditations dur¬
ing the seventies. He ultimately transformed this rule into two principles. He
called the first one "Hume's principle," that is, the prescription to consider knowl¬
edge as restricted to experience, and the second one the boundary principle, or
the claim that experience does not exhaust reality. His "essential point" involves
both these principles. It is what defines the essential outlook of the first Critique.
See pp. 254-269, this volume. - Kant, Ak 12, p. 361 (emphasis supplied).
- For all this see Hamilton Beck, The Elusive T in the Novel: Hippel, Sterne, Diderot,
and Kant (Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 99-126, and his "Kant and
the Novel: A Study of the Examination Scene in Hippel's 'Lebensläufe nach
aufsteigender Linie,'" Kant-Studien 74 (1983), pp. 27if. See also Anke Linde¬
mann-Stark, "Kants Vorlesungen zur Anthropologie in Hippeis Lebensläufen"
(Magisterarbeit Marburg, 1990), and her "Leben und Lebensläufe des Theodor
Gottlieb von Hippel" (Dissertation, Phillips Universität Marburg, 1998). - See Hippel, Sämtliche Werke, II, pp. 148-167. Compare Beck, "Kant and the
Novel," p. 287. The scene is also of interest for Kant's philosophy.
Chapter 6: "All-Crushing" Critic of Metaphysics (1780-1784)- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in his Writings, igo2-igio
(New York: Library of America, 1987), pp. i83f. See also Erik H. Erikson, Young
Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1962),
pp. 4if. - Hamann, Briefwechsel, V, p. 36.
- Ak 10, pp. 2I2f.
- The former is claimed by the Böhme brothers in Das Andere der Vernunft; the
latter is claimed by Shell in The Embodiment of Reason. - Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, p. 326 (Ak 7, p. 115).
- Hamann, Briefwechsel, IV, p. 196.