"All-Crushing" Critic of Metaphysics 251He was eager to hear Mendelssohn's judgment about it. When he heard
from Herz that Mendelssohn had put the book away and was not going to
get back to it, he was "very uncomfortable," hoping it would "not be for¬
ever." Mendelssohn was, he thought, "the most important of all the people
who could explain this theory to the world; it was on him, on Mr. Tetens
and you [Herz], dearest man, that I counted most."^17 He also hoped to
enlist Garve "to use [his] position and influence to encourage... the en¬
emies of [his] book... to consider the work in its proper order" and to make
his problem understood. "Garve, Mendelssohn, and Tetens, are the only
men I know through whose co-operation this subject could have been
brought to a successful conclusion before too long, even though centuries
before this one have not seen it done."^18 In the same vein he wrote to Men¬
delssohn "to encourage an examination of [his] theses," because in this
way "the critical philosophy would gain acceptability and become a prom¬
enade through a labyrinth, but with a reliable guide book to help us find
our way out as often as we get lost."^19 At the same time, Kant was begin¬
ning to suspect that it would not happen, and that "Mendelssohn, Garve
and Tetens have apparently declined to occupy themselves with work of
this sort, and where else can anyone of sufficient talent and good will be
found?"^20 Mendelssohn himself claimed that a nervous disability had made
it impossible for him to analyze and think through the works of "Lambert,
Tetens, Platner, and even those of the all-crushing Kant." He claimed to
know them only through reviews and from reports of his friends, and he
said that philosophy for him "still stands at the point at which it stood in
approximately 1775."^21
One of the first reviews of the Critique appeared on January 19, 1782,
in the Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen. It characterized Kant's work as be¬
longing to the British tradition of idealism and skepticism. Indeed, the
only philosophers the reviewer explicitly mentioned were Berkeley and
Hume. He found it most interesting that Kant wanted to offer a "system
of higher, or ... transcendental idealism," and he suggested that it was
"based upon our concepts of sensations as mere modifications of ourselves
(upon which Berkeley also primarily built his idealism) and upon those of
space and time." He also called attention to the fact that Kant's objection
to a substantial self had already been used by Hume and others before him.
Kant did not seem to have chosen the middle way between exaggerated
skepticism and dogmatism, and he did not lead his readers back to the most
natural way of thinking. Rather, Kant's arguments are those of a "Raison-
neur" who wants to leave common sense behind