178 Kant: A Biographyand to what extent. Not all have accepted Adickes' emphasis on "rational¬
ism," and some have argued that empiricism was of greater importance for
the early Kant.^133 Furthermore, depending on whether they took as the
guiding thread of their discussions the problem of the method of meta¬
physics, the problem of space, the nature of the self, the problem of causal¬
ity, the concept of existence, the problem of God, or that of moral (and
aesthetic) judgment, different scholars conceived of different periods
and considered different influences as important. Whereas those more in¬
terested in metaphysical topics have tended to emphasize the importance
of Leibniz and Wolff on the one hand, and that of Crusius and Hume on
the other, those more concerned with morals have stressed the supposedly
Pietistic background of the early Kant, or the influence of the "moral
sense" school on Kant during the early sixties, and the lasting effects of
Rousseau on Kant that began around 1764. Accordingly, there are almost
as many different conceptions of the specifics of Kant's early development
as there are philosophical scholars discussing it. The changes ascribed to
Kant are often more the expression of the wishes of the scholar in question
than a conclusion determined by the evidence. Herman-J. de Vleeschauwer
was certainly correct when he observed:
Praise for the superhuman genius of Kant conjoined with the claim that he changed his
mind every decade like a dizzy fool who cannot master the direction of his own thought
is surely evidence of a fundamental contradiction. The majority of biographies devoted
to him, however, appear content to accept a contradiction of this nature.^134
The lack of agreement on the specifics of Kant's "development" before 1769
and the contradictory character of the many accounts suggest that none of
the accounts offered so far is entirely correct.
One of the reasons for the lack of agreement is an uncritical and unre-
flective use of the terms "rationalism" and "empiricism." Though these
labels make some historical sense when used to refer to the broad outlines
of the philosophical discussion in the seventeenth century, they are not
precise enough to provide a useful characterization of most of the impor¬
tant thinkers even ofthat period.^135 Was Berkeley a "British empiricist" or,
as has been argued, an "Irish Cartesian?" In what sense was Locke an "em¬
piricist"? Recent discussions have shown that, if he was an empiricist, he
was not one in the sense in which it is usually assumed - and Wolff was
hardly the model of a "rationalist" either. It is probably not quite fair to
say that "Wolff's philosophy is ... a confused mixture of rationalistic and
empiricistic elements," but it is certainly true that "it is impossible to clas-