330 Kant: A Biographyof the History. Kraus received even more "help" from Kant with this book
review than he did with the first. On March 28, Kraus wrote to the editor
that he was sending him two reviews, one by him (which concerned a book
in comparative linguistics) and one that was "«of entirely his," namely that
of the Eleutherology. Kant had sent him some materials, and Kraus had
used them.
Ulrich advocated a kind of compatibilism. Kraus criticized him for fail¬
ing to show that determinism (or "natural necessity," as he called it) and
morality are indeed compatible. He examined especially one claim by Ul¬
rich, namely, that a human being "ought to become other or better, and he
can become so; however no human being as of now can be other or better than
he is."^3 For Kraus, this did not make sense. We could not say "now, after
the end of a year, the citizens of Jena's conduct during the preceding year
absolutely had to be just as it was, whereas before the beginning of the year
it did not have to be as it turned out to be."^4 In general, if all actions were
necessary or completely determined in the past, then they must also be de¬
termined in the present. Ulrich, Kraus maintained, should not have tried
to make freedom comprehensible. Rather, he should have admitted that free¬
dom is incomprehensible - as Kant had done. Indeed, Kantian philoso¬
phy is "worthy of a genuine philosopher, who insists upon scientific evidence
where it is to be had... but also frankly acknowledges ignorance where it
cannot be remedied."^5 Ulrich's objections to Kant — at least according to
Kraus — were based on the erroneous assumption that we know not only
that freedom is real but also "how it is constituted."^6 We do not know the
latter, because we do not have nonsensible intuitions.
The next project for which Kant enlisted Kraus was a review of the third
part of Herder's Ideas. Kant himself was busy with other things, for dur¬
ing the summer semester of 1788 he was again rector. The review never came
to fruition. Though Kraus had committed himself to it in 1787, he only
began to work on it early in 1788. Kraus was still working on the review
in July, reporting he had pushed off this "ugly labor" and then taken it up
again "only from duty" at least ten times; and then,
All that I am writing now I could have written two months ago, if Kant had not always
kept me from doing it. He even gave me some of his thoughts on pantheism in order
to clarify the main point of my review. But this made things more difficult; for I have
lost my own way, and I cannot see myself following Kant's ways.^7
This is one of the reasons why Kraus never finished the review, but there
was another reason as well. Hamann died on June 21, and Kraus, devastated,