## 1. Childhood: "The Starry Sky Above Me and the Moral Law Within Me"


Immanuel Kant was born April 22, 1724 in Konigsberg, East Prussia
(now Kaliningrad, Russia), as the eldest son of Anna Regina Kant, nee
Reuter, (1697-1737) and Johann Georg Kant (1683-1746). The
Reuters were shoe- and harness-makers; the Kants were harness-makers
(*Riemer*, a guild similar to saddlers). Originally, the
Reuters were from Nuremberg in Bavaria; the Kants were from
not-too-distant Tilsit (now Sovietsk, Oblast Kaliningrad; Russia).
The union of Kants and Reuters provided an initial economic, emotional
and religious stability for Kant during his early years. His
grandfather and father were competent businessmen, initially
flourishing and respected in their strata of society. Anna was
Lutheran fit well into the like-minded Konigsberg culture.


Immanuel's early childhood seems to have been idyllic. The family
was rather well off. The parents got along and loved their son. Johann
Kant appears to have been a gentle and hardworking man. Anna Kant, who
took care of the family's paperwork, was well educated. Little
Immanuel was her constant company, and her influence on him was
considerable.


After "Manelchen" could walk, Anna Kant took him out
for walks in the meadows and fields. She taught him what she could, of
the seasons, the plants and animals, and the sky. Her little son
responded eagerly with questions; and the mother encouraged his
outdoor curiosity with praise, patience, and more information
(Wasianski 1804: 247).


These details of nature provided a formative background for Kant's
interest in natural philosophy, and the child grew up in an
encouraging environment for early explorations. Konigsberg enjoys a
cool and gentle climate; typical of high latitudes, the flat Baltic
terrain has not much biological diversity, and its
biomes--meadows, moors, deciduous and conifer forests--are
not hostile. At Kant's time, bears and wolves were common along with
other local fauna, but these posed no serious threat to Kant's
earliest encounters with nature. Walks, as the ones he enjoyed at the
edge of town, were fun and perfectly safe. For Prussians at the time,
excursions into nature also had a spiritual subtext. Like Japanese
Shinto, German tradition invests natural places with meaning. The late
and superficial conversion of the Baltic lands to Christianity, after
the fourteenth century, coupled with the fact that persecution drove
pagan faiths temporarily underground instead of eliminating them
altogether, allowed the ancient nature-worship to prevail in forms
inoffensive to the clergy, as in the guise of outdoor walks. Thus
people used to attend Sunday service--before heading out for
their *Sonntagsspaziergang*.


During Kant's earliest years, the local influence of Pietism grew.
This Christian movement, founded by Jakob Spener (1635-1705) and
promoted by August Hermann Francke (1663-1727), had spread north
from Dresden, Leipzig, and Halle. It reached Konigsberg at the turn of
the century, making inroads with the creation of schools and
orphanages. As Luther's Reformation had been the effort to return
Roman Catholicism to a purer faith, Pietism tried to purify
Lutheranism, stripping it of dogma and detail. The Protestant Church
avoided a schism in Prussia, but at the price of friction between the
Lutheran mainstream, orthodoxy, and the Pietist firebrands. Pietism
stressed literal exegesis, quiet humility, and charitable deeds. It
allowed believers to practice a spirituality of mystical
intensity--but as the purge of Halle University (1723)
illustrates, it had a totalitarian streak.


The local authorities frowned on the movement, but the Pietists
enjoyed protection of King Friedrich Wilhelm I (reign 1713-40)
and thus persisted. In 1731, the field chaplain Franz Albert Schulz
came to town, rising to become the local leader of the movement. He
was appointed to director of the Pietist high school
(the *Collegium Fridericianum*) and later to professor of
theology. One of his early converts was Immanuel's mother, who brought
her children to his bible sessions.


Schulz's brand of Pietism differed from either Spener's or
Francke's and "was fraught with deep ambiguities, having a
component that was seen elsewhere as contrary to the basic tenets of
true faith"(Kuehn 2001a: 39). Schulz's Pietism straddled the
line between Wolffian, rationalistic philosophy and enthusiastic,
Halle religious sentiment. It stood for the equality of all to
interpret the Bible and a practical faith through charitable acts,
while at the same time endorsing the political ambitions of Frederick
I. It was a grassroots movement that the emphasized the personal
nature of religion in contrast to establishment orthodoxy;
politically, it allied itself with the common citizen over the
nobility. In Konigsberg it was a divisive influence that was in
constant struggle with local authorities. In Kant's formative years,
Konigsberg was a place of religious upheaval, Pietists vs Orthodox
Lutheranism, and this marked conflict was to inform his position of
religious toleration and a separation of religion and philosophy.


According to Kant's later judgment (Wasianski 1804: 246; tr. Kuehn
2001a: 31), his mother lived out a positive form of Pietism, blending
love, tolerance, and spirituality into a faith that was
"genuine" and "not in the least enthusiastic"
('enthusiasm' or *Schwarmerei* means
fundamentalism). The child's formation was apparently not hurt by
Anna's piety; instead of turning into an intolerant zealot, as many
Pietist's "enthusiasm" did, she instilled a reverence for
nature and spiritualism, a plausible sense of right and wrong, and
always respected him as a person.


Kant is said to have claimed,



> I will never forget my mother, for she implanted
> and nurtured in me the first germ of goodness; she opened my heart to
> the impressions of nature; she awakened and furthered my concepts, and
> her doctrines have had a continual and beneficial influence in my
> life. (Jachmann 1804: 169; tr. Kuehn 2001a: 31)
> 
> 


Later, he would develop a metaphysics whose claims would anticipate
scientific discoveries, and an ethics that culminated in the
Categorical Imperative. His friends chose the dictum from
the *Critique of Practical Reason* (1788) for his
tombstone:



> Two things fill the mind with ever new and
> increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect
> upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within
> me. (5:161.33-6; tr. Guyer 1992: 1)
> 
> 


Had it not been for his sensitive and intelligent mother, his life
might well have taken an entirely different course.


## 2. Youth: "In the Servitude of Fanatics"


As Immanuel grew older, hardships befell the family. After the
death of his maternal grandfather (1729), the Kants suffered from a
series of events that would eventually ruin the family. The death
left the harness-shop downtown without leadership and Anna's mother
without a provider. To compensate, the Kant's moved into the home of
Anna's mother on the outskirts of the city, in
the *Sattlerstrasse*, the saddler-street, a less prosperous
part of the city. The saddlers, a guild distinct from harness-makers
while producing similar goods, did not welcome the
competition. Johann Kant became the target of the saddle-makers'
hostility, and the business failed to prosper in the new
location. Income steadily declined, and further hardship occurred
with the death of Anna Regina (1737). Just thirteen years old,
Immanuel must have keenly felt the loss of his first tutor regarding
nature and religious 
sentiment.[7]


When Immanuel was six or seven, he went to
the *Hospitalschule*, a grammar school at the local clinic,
whose teacher was a Pietist candidate in theology. In 1732, Pastor
Schulz, who knew the child through Anna, arranged for Immanuel, now
eight, to continue his education at the *Collegium
Fridericianum*. For a child of working-class parents, such as Kant,this was a
fortunate opportunity. Instead of the traditional path,
apprenticeship at his father's shop and the eventual inheritance of
the workshop, Immanuel was given the opportunity for higher education,
under the assumption he would pursue a religious or civil
vocation. Practically speaking, this would raise Kant in the eyes of
society and offer him the opportunity to raise himself above the rank
and economics into which he was born. One might conjecture that the
sensitive and bright Kant would look forward to the possibility of
advancement. Unfortunately, the tutelage he received there was a
rather more stringent form of Pietism than the one he found at home
under the instruction of his mother.


Kant would later judge the time of youth as the hardest years of
life, ruled by discipline, loneliness, and lack of freedom
(*Lectures on Pedagogy*, w. 1776-87, p. 1803;
9:485.13-17). School, at the *Collegium*, was held six
days a week. Sundays were spent with homework and prayer. Primary
subjects of instruction were Latin and religion. Only male pupils were
admitted; there was no way to meet girls or socialize, and, as the son
of a harness-maker, Kant was already at a significant social
disadvantage. The later stages of his primary education (what we 
would call high school) definitely changed his life for the
worse. Immanuel was to attend high school until 1740, when he was
sixteen.


Moreover, the education was not even of great quality. Only rather
elementary math was offered, and natural philosophy (biology,
chemistry, geology, physics, and astronomy) was not taught at all.
Pupils were groomed for administrative and clerical careers, so
science was considered a luxury not to be indulged. The sciences were
also suspect from the theological perspectives of his instructors.
Pietist indifference to inquiry and fundamentalist denial of facts
resulted in contemptuous hostility
toward science. As late as the 1750s, the clergy rejected the
heliocentric system and frowned on Newton's celestial mechanics as
fiction. Pietist theologians such as Franz Budde (1667-1729),
Joachim Lange (1670-1744), and Andreas Rudiger
(1673-1731) argued that the Bible teaches everything worth
knowing of nature. The later Pietist thinker Christian August Crusius
(1715-75) essentially concurred. For Pietism, particularly in
its Saxon center, Halle, education was for practical management of
life's affairs, not an endeavor with intrinsic worth. Mathematics was
useful for bookkeeping but worthless for describing reality. Physics
was acceptable as long as its findings did not undermine the
Bible. As independent research programs, however, the sciences were
deemed wellsprings of 
heresy.[8]
 Standard curriculum included a heavy dose
of theology, catechism memorization and biblical stories. Although
the school did offer a variety of topics: Latin, Greek, Hebrew,
logic, history (both church and philosophy) and geography, the
primary use of this instruction was in preparation for further
theological study at the university. Education at
the *Collegium* was always in the service of the Pietist
programmatic, conversion and salvation of souls.


In Halle, Pietism found its epicenter and religious temperament. In
Konigsberg, however, Pietism--at the extent of its influence in
the 1730s--was moderated by the task to proselytize to the
mainstream. Under Schulz's guidance, ideological fervor was reined in
by the need for flexibility when making converts. Thus in Konigsberg,
it was not as monolithic as further south. With his earliest
education at the *Collegium*, Kant was to suffer from the more
severe form of pedagogical ideals. During his university years, he
would enjoy more moderate educational ideals, as Kant's later
university teacher, Martin Knutzen (1713-51), illustrates. A
passionate Pietist, Knutzen studied Newton and discussed the ideas of
Leibniz and Wolff--possible for Pietists in East Prussia, but
impossible for Pietists in Central Prussia and Saxony.


During high school this moderation was not felt. The instructors at
the *Collegium* were stern. Pietist schooling involved a
rigorous schedule, strict adherence to religious dogma, and
instruction by repetitive drills. The school's goals were two-fold, to
save it's pupils from "religious corruption" and to
improve their "worldly well-being" (Kuehn 2001a:
46). Strict adherence to regimen, dogma and practical applications
were essential to these two goals. A former classmate, David Ruhnken,
criticized the "discipline of the fanatics" (letter to
Kant 10 Mar. 1771; 10:117.15); another classmate and life-long friend,
Theodor Hippel (1741-96), spoke of Kant's "terror and
fear" whenever Kant would later recall the "slavery of his
youth" (Malter 1992: 95; tr. Kuehn 2001a: 45).


Typical penalties for infractions, next to physical punishment,
were what would be called "guilt trips" today. In contrast
to Catholicism (where sins are forgiven in confession), Protestant
salvation depends on grace. The faithful cannot rely on a ritual for
exoneration; non-Catholic Christians steadily collect sins. They can
only do their best and better their odds for deliverance by remorseful
introspection. Pietism honed remorse into a fine art. Essential to
salvation is a sense of guilt--more an emotion, actually, than a
sense (*Schuldgefuhl*). God's grace will wipe the slate clean,
but grace is neither predictable nor verifiable. The only measure, if
there is any, is the intensity of shame--the stronger the
cultivated feelings of guilt, the better the chances for
salvation. The education at the *Collegium* institutionalized
this guilt and sought to properly instruct its charges with a contrite
spirit and sense of conservative propriety. One should feel an
enthusiastic guilt and sense of turpitude in an effort to become a
better citizen, both spiritually and practically.


With the exception of a certain Heydenreich, a friendly Latinist
who introduced Kant to Lucretius's *De rerum natura* (Borowski
1804: 38-9), high school stunted Kant's growth. He excelled at
Latin, an emphasis at the school, and Greek, but struggled with
theology and arithmetic. He appears to have enjoyed classic authors
under the guidance of Heydenreich and many thought he would take up
classics at university.


The lack of scientific training would hamper his later explorations
of nature. He tried to make up for it at the university in 1740, but
his mathematics instructor, *Privatdozent* Christian Ammon
(1696-1742) was ignorant of the calculus (Kuehn 2001b:
13-16)--an essential tool for understanding the
cutting-edge physical research of the day. Kant's quantitative skills
were to remain substandard; when he calculated, the results usually
came out all wrong (Adickes 1924a: 73-83; 1924b:
1:38-9). This lack in mathematical training played into his
belated comprehension of Newton's work, yet did not harm Kant's
appreciation for him. Such a substandard education in arithmetic,
philosophy and the sciences were the norm at the *Collegium
Fridericianum*, and Kant would have to continually work to make up
for this early deficit.


Hence Kant's later contributions to natural science would have to
remain of a conceptual sort. They amounted to brilliant
apercus--but it was later physicists, not Kant, who articulated
them rigorously and substantiated them empirically.


High school may have also affected the development of Kant's
ethics. In the absence of data, this effect is conjectural. Still,
common sense suggests that his later interest in dignity and the value
of autonomy might have been influenced by the treatment he suffered
and witnessed in school. It makes sense that a thinker who recalls the
"slavery of his youth" with "terror and fear"
would insist that treating humanity as an end, instead of a means
only, is a Categorical Imperative.


Moreover, these experiences may also explain Kant's exclusion of
emotion from ethics; a curious exclusion, given his emphasis of the
importance of the good will (*Foundations of the Metaphysics of
Morals* 1785; 4:393-5). Anna Kant died in 1737, when
Immanuel was thirteen. From then on, the sensitive teenager associated
"morality under the guidance of feeling" only negatively.
This may be due, in part, to the daily exposure to the guilt
associated with the doctrines of morality to which Immanuel was
exposed at the *Collegium*. And without a mother as an
affectionate and sane counterweight, the oppressiveness and negative
associations of guilt and morality must have taken its toll. He
suffered the pious whim of teachers, eager to instill feelings of
guilt for the sake of salvation. His later contempt for emotion is
arguably unjustified, but his upbringing suggests an explanation.


## 3. Student Years: "Marking Out the Path to Be Taken"


When Kant entered the University of Konigsberg in 1740, he was
sixteen. Financial considerations at home left much to be
desired. His widowed father filed his taxes as a pauper. But, a
maternal uncle, shoemaker Richter, supported Immanuel's studies. In
addition, Immanuel supplemented his uncle's beneficence by working as
a tutor to fellow students. Often he did so for free, but, on
occasion, Kant would accept luxuries to supplement his modest
means. He was a sober and quiet student, not engaging in the
frivolous activities common to university
students.[9] Yet
Kant was no drudge either. He enjoyed playing billiards, and did so
with such skill that he and his companions often won small sums of
money to help defray the cost of living. As a member of the
university, Kant had risen to a new rank within society. In so doing,
he enjoyed privileges of this class and exemptions from duties e.g.,
military service/conscription, to which the lower classes were
susceptible. For a person of slight build and fragile constitution,
Kant's upward social status concomitant exemptions very likely saved
his life.


Pastor Schulz had hoped the university student Kant would pursue a
church career, but instead he took courses in logic, ethics,
metaphysics, natural law, and mathematics. Martin Knutzen
(1713-1751), Kant's advisor, introduced him to
the *Principia* (1687) and the *Optics* (1704), and
probably led him to think about natural philosophy. Additionally, Kant
attended classes with Johann Gottfried Teske (1704-1772), whose
courses on electricity and experimental physics would inspire Kant's
doctoral dissertation *De Igne* or *Meditations on Fire*
(1755).


Four years into his university education, the Kant family suffered
another set-back. In 1744, Kant's father, Johann, suffered a
stroke. Immanuel, twenty years old and now the head of the family,
attended to his father's health and stopped attending classes the
following year. He started writing on natural philosophy around this
time, trying to determine the properties of force, a theme much in
currency at the time. In 1746, he buried his father, wrote the bulk of
his first work, submitted it to the censor, and secured a publisher. A
year later, in 1747, he completed the *Thoughts on the True
Estimation of Living Forces*, settled the family's affairs, found
homes for his younger brother and three sisters, and moved in with
another student. The *Living Forces* is his first known text,
first publication, and first book.


But when Kant completed it, he withdrew from the university. In
1748, he left town, without a degree, to work as a tutor for a noble
family in the countryside.


It is tempting to explain Kant's academic failure with financial
reasons--his parents were deceased and the children had no
savings. Ostensibly Kant was responsible for not merely himself, but
for his siblings as well. Finances were tight, at the very best.
However, the Kant family did have a benefactor, their uncle Richter,
who paid his course fees when Kant was enrolled and financed his
publication after Kant had left (Borowski 1804: 46; Lasswitz 1902:
521). Richter would keep supporting him and paid the printer for his
second book (1755), too. Poverty was thus not likely the reason for
his withdrawing. Nor was it the lack of a thesis. The *Living
Forces* is a technical tract, 256 pages in the 1749-edition, more
than enough for a *Magister*-degree.


Yet Kant wrote the book in German, not in the Latin required for
academic theses, although high school had provided him with excellent
philological skills. Apparently he had not intended to submit
the *Living Forces* as his Master's thesis. Why?


The contents supply the key. He declares that he shall criticize
Leibniz and Wolff (ii, 1:7). He rejects the doctrine of
pre-established harmony according to which substances do not interact,
rejecting Leibniz's claim (*Monadology* 1714: sec. 7) that
substances have no "windows". For Kant, they do. Following
Knutzen (who had earned his doctorate with a similar critique in 1735)
he says that substances change each other's states by their mutual
actions (#4, 1:19). He also rejects Wolff's notion of a "moving
force". Kant argues (#3, 1:18) that force and motion have
little to do with one another. Force is not so much about motion and
more about being. So a "moving force" is a misnomer. For
Kant, living forces are better described as the dynamic source for
nature, an "active force" or a *vis activa*.


That Kant criticized Leibniz and Wolff should have improved his
chances at graduation. Knutzen questioned their views, too. And
critically evaluating Leibniz and Wolff was the righteous thing to do,
even in the moderate Pietist atmosphere of Kant's university. The
theologian Lange in Halle had orchestrated Wolff's expulsion from
Prussia (1723) and triggered a furious row over Wolff's Leibnizian
leanings (1723-40). Other Pietists followed suit and rejected
Wolff because his support of Leibnizian harmony. This, combined with
his view of the world as a network of uniform substances, smelled of
heresy. Wolff was considered a dangerous radical. But Kant's reasons
for criticizing Wolff were different--Wolff was not radical
enough.


Kant lays out his view in the first ten sections. Everything begins
with force. It is even prior to extension, as Leibniz had already said
(#1; 1:17). Here Leibniz is right, Kant thinks, and praises him for
having shed light on the Aristotelian concept of the entelechy, and
Leibniz's recovery of the basis for substantial forms. Yet Leibniz
does not go far enough. Nature's units are active forces (#1-3;
1:17-18). Their action is constructive; they make and sustain
the fabric of nature. The world is a tapestry of energy
concentrations. Forces rule everything, not only bodily motions (#2;
1:18.6-8), but all activities (#3; 1:18.27-36). This
includes mind-body interaction--materially produced ideas and
mentally intended actions (#6; 1:20.35-21.1;
21.14-16).


Dynamic action is absolutely fundamental. Force has effects by
acting externally (*ausser sich wirken*; #4; 1:19.5), and, in
the full sense of the word, external action *locates* force
(#6; 1:20.36-1:21.1). A force acts by radiating its action; it
spreads its effects out (*ihre Wirkungen von sich ausbreiten*;
#10; 1:24.23), and this spread determines its source as being inside
it, locating force in virtue of its action. With action comes location
(*Ort*), with location space (*Raum*), and with space
the universe (*Welt*)--and none of this would be without
force. Localized forces weave the world (#8) such that their
interaction forms networks (#7), braiding relation, order, and space
(#9, 1:23.5-9). Force is the *primum*, knitting space and
everything within.


As one source acts on what is outside of it, multiple sources act
on one another. They do so when their fields meet. For example, throw
two pebbles into a pond and watch the interfering ripples: first,
point sources encounter each other's activities at the boundary of
their expanding radiations; next, these pulses, when striking each
other, are modified when struck. External modifications of a radiation
affect its internal makeup. Since force is an active pulse, and since
activity, for Kant, describes force better than anything else, a
collision with another field has constitutive effects on the original
activity. (Consider weather--when air masses collide, they
affect each other's dew point, temperature, or pressure.) Hence Kant
concludes that the action of force-points amounts to mutual changes of
their internal states (#4; 1:19.4-6).


Dynamic expansion and interaction through location makes space, and
reciprocal action creates structure. Force-points stretch, grip, and
take hold, and the mutually modifying engagements constitute their
connections (#7; 1:21.30-33). This has consequences. That force,
in virtue of its action, is put "somewhere" suggests a
bond of force and space. This interactive bond is constitutive of
reality.


These bold ideas doomed the text. A Christian advisor, even an
open-minded one, could never approve it. The dynamic ontology in
chapter 1 contradicts the genesis account found in the
Bible. According to the Bible, God is the creator of everything. But
Kant suggests that force creates everything--force, not God, is
the creator of nature. Worse, force can be modeled mathematically, as
he argues in chapter 2, and it can be jointly determined by two
quantities, as he argues in chapter 3. "God" is merely a
placeholder for the cause of force itself.


Now Kant speaks of God as possible maker of multiple universes (#8;
1:22), as engineer of dimensions (#11; 1:25), and as sealing off this
world from improbable others (ibid.). But in the same breath
(#7-10), he makes force responsible for these tasks. And he
already showed his hand in his praise for the entelechy. Entelechies
are programs of the self-organization and sustenance of
things--in Aristotle's words, a *dynamis* put *en
ergon* or put in action; i.e., *energeia*.


Kant's waffling over God and force permits only two readings.
Neither of them would be palatable to any Christian worth his salt:
either God is creative force, or God created creative force. By Kant's
account, the former would mean that God is describable as a physical
quantity. The latter would imply that force, not God, created the
universe. Whoever suggests either is not a believer and does not
deserve to graduate under a Pietist advisor, not even a liberal
one.


So Kant was passed over. Knutzen never recommended him, and in
Knutzen's letters to Leonard Euler (1707-83), he is not on the
list of excellent students (Waschkies 1987: 20). The professor had
more regular favorites, such as Johann Weitenkampf (b. 1726) and
Friedrich Buck (1722-86), who succeeded to Knutzen's chair
(Pozzo 1993: 283-322; Kuehn 2001b: 23).


Kant took resort to irony (#4; 1:21.3-8) and avenged himself
by not mentioning his teacher--ever. Many years later (1770),
after Knutzen's death, when Kant finally enjoyed some public
recognition, he would secure his long-desired professorship by
striking a deal with the administration to snatch Knutzen's chair from
Buck, pushing the pet student to another post without even asking.


A word by Seneca sets the tune for Kant's
debut--"Nothing is more important than to go where one
ought to go, instead of following the herd, like cattle, and go where
they went".[10]
 Kant expresses the hope that "the
freedom I take of contradicting great men won't be construed as a
crime" (1:7.6-9). He needed hope because he had made up
his mind. He knew what he was doing, and he was defiant. "My
basis is as follows," he writes (1:10.25-7), "I
have already marked out the path that I shall take. I shall set out
on my course, and nothing shall stop me from proceeding along
it".


## 4. Dynamic Debut: "Radiation in the Inverse Square"


Kant's own intent was to understand the powers of nature and he set
out to solve the puzzle of force. The *Thoughts on the True
Estimation of Living Forces* was a contribution to the
so-called *vis-viva*-controversy; its goal was to settle the
issue once and for all. The issue was as simple as it is profound:
what is force, and how can it be measured?


The controversy had begun in the previous century and was rife
through the entirety of the modern period. Following the implications
of his mechanical description of physical substances, Descartes
argued that force is reducible to the mathematical quantity of motion
observable in matter. Descartes contended that this quantity is
conserved in the universe. Nature is matter in motion, and motion is
the explanatory principle. "Force" is the product of mass
and velocity (*mv*), a quantity called "quantity of
motion" or "dead pressure" then and momentum
now.[11] Beyond
this, for Descartes, "force" has no further
meaning. Cartesian essence can be isolated to physical and mental
substances and force is neither of these. Force is not a dynamic
essence, nor an essence at all. It is merely a quantity of motion
calculable in another substance. By his rendering, Descartes reduced
physics to kinematics.


Leibniz rejected the Cartesian formulation. When examining rising
and falling bodies, he recognized that their behavior reveals a
different quantity, derived from Galileo's law of fall, which is the
product of mass and velocity squared (*mv2*). Leibniz
thought this implied Descartes's quantity to be false and that
only *mv2*, not *mv*, is conserved. Leibniz called
this new quantity "living force" (*vis viva*); we
call it kinetic energy now. Force is real, he argued, and it is more
than a quantity (*mv* of Decartes)-- it is the basic
quality of nature and its activity can be observed in nature. Leibniz
expanded physics to a dynamics.


Leibniz was correct about rising and falling bodies, but the
Cartesians (Descartes had died in 1650) pointed to other experiments
in support of the *mv*-formula. Unfortunately for the early
debate, the issue could not be decided--because both sides had
been right; there is both momentum and kinetic energy. So the
arguments continued for decades. After Leibniz's death (1716), the
controversy continued through his followers, who quarreled with the
current crop of French Cartesians. Newtonians were split over *vis
viva*; Newton and his British fans rejected it, while continental
Newtonians accepted it. After Newton's death (1727), in the 1740s,
the issue was settled--in Newton's favor. D'Alembert proved that
there is a place for both quantities in physics (1743). Before that,
Euler (1737) had already found out that Descartes's momentum is
Newton's force acting over time, and Leibniz's kinetic energy is
Newton's force acting through space. It did take, however, a while
before this information spread and became generally accepted. The
debate died down around the time Kant published the *Living
Forces* (1749).


Kant's debut was one of the many attempts at settling the dispute,
but for all practical purposes, it was a failure. The *Living
Forces* appeared too late to make any difference, and Kant was
unaware of d'Alembert's and Euler's research. But what doomed the book
in the public eye was that Kant seemed to have bet on the wrong team
of horses. He argued for a synthesis of Cartesian kinematics and
Leibnizian dynamics, and did so at the expense of Newtonian mechanics.
At the time he grasped Newton's ideas only partially. He did not yet
understand that motion, like rest, is a state (something Galileo had
discovered) and that force is needed only for changing, not for
keeping a state (which is Newton's first law of motion). He not only
implicitly rejected Newton through such mistakes, but also explicitly
questions his authority (preface, 1:7). Later in the book, he
criticizes the first law of motion (#50-51, #97-8),
suggests an alternative to Newtonian inertia (#124-5,
#132-3), and dismisses as a "desperate excuse"
Newton's view that loss of motion reveals nature's entropic tendency
(#50; 1:59). He tried to determine force without even mentioning the
second law of motion that defines it as the product of mass and
acceleration. For Kant, Newtonian mechanics was irrelevant. While
there are hundreds of references to Descartes and Leibniz in the book,
the references to Newton can be counted on the fingers of one
hand.


In fact, however, Kant was not as mistaken as it seemed at the
time. For one thing, he arrived essentially at the same conclusion as
d'Alembert and Euler: both *mv* and *mv2* are
legitimate, determinable quantities. More importantly, he proposed a
deep connection. While showing in chapter 2 that Descartes's quantity
is empirically well supported, he argued in chapter 3 that Leibniz's
quantity must be factored in to arrive at a full qualitative
understanding of force. "Active force" is jointly
measurable as "dead pressure" and "living
force"--the full account of force requires a synthesis of
Cartesian kinematics and Leibnizian dynamics, notwithstanding their
conflicts.


That is, Kant not only regarded momentum and energy as relevant
quantities, as d'Alembert had done, but he grasped that their union
points to the universal nature of force. This was sharper than even
Euler's insight. Euler had discovered that these quantities are
derivable from Newtonian force and that there is accordingly a
quantitative connection among them. But Kant invested this connection
with qualitative meaning, arguing that the structure of nature must
be understood in dynamic terms, and that Newton really misses the
point. The title of the book, "Thoughts on the True Estimation
of Living Forces" is no idle boast, for Kant's "true
estimation" is the insight that "living force" and
"dead pressure" are two sides of the same
coin. Throughout the book, he wrestles with the harmony of opposites,
Cartesian kinematics and Leibnizian dynamics, trying to marry
momentum and energy--while having the audacity to criticize
Newton. This is the thrust of the work. Taken as a prediction, it is
superb. With his first publication, Kant intuited not only that
matter is ultimately energetic, but also that its dynamic measure is
momentum-energy.[12]


This apercu was no lucky guess. Kant understood what force
involves. He argues that force is the essence of action (#4). This
action is a pulse that "broadens out"
(#9-10). Out-broadening of force (*ausbreiten*; 1:24.23)
is an out-stretching of space (*Ausdehnung*; 1:24.6). Force
makes the continuum, being governed, in turn, by the created
structure (#10). This shift in understanding the nature of force
correspondingly alters the nature one must think of material objects
and dynamic interaction. The origin and source is force, and not
substance, as the Cartesians had insisted. Force is responsible for
substance, quantification and laws of nature--not the other way
around. In this bold thesis Kant anticipates his more famous
"Copernican turn"--an inversion of the way we view
nature--but in this context he is still working in the field of
natural philosophy of his day. Dynamic interaction turns force into a
field and the void into a plenum. Kant anticipated that
momentum-energy is the substantial correlate of spacetime. Bypassing
Newton, he caught up with 
Einstein.[13]


Connected with this apercu is the proposed bond of force and
space--"force" understood as momentum-energy, Kant's
active essence of substance, and "space" defined as Kant's
dimensional continuum. For Kant, force grips the void, holding it as a
dimensional presence that localizes the original pulse. Force extends
space, ordering it, and space places force, governing it. Space
dynamically expands; force structurally acts. Each needs the other.
Without force, space would lack structure (*Abmessungen*
or *Dimensionen*, #9-10) and could not place a world
(#7-9, 11). Without space, force could not be a field
(#10). Force is spaced and space is forced. This is their bond
(1:23-4). Indeed: mass stretches spacetime, and spacetime grips
mass.


In fact, Kant caught up with modern physics in several regards.
Another of his insights is so basic that it is easy to miss. He
defended force as the interactive matrix of nature and insisted on the
importance of dynamics. The dynamic ontology of the *Living
Forces* was ridiculed in its day, for Newton's mechanics had
digested Kepler's celestial dynamics and marginalized Leibniz's
physical dynamics. Yet Kant's stance would mark out the future course
of science. We do not regard nature as a collection of particles and
forces in empty space anymore, but instead as a system of
energy-pulses interacting in fields. Dynamics has turned out to be
fundamental.


When examining the force-space bond in detail (#10), Kant
discovered the law of free point source radiation (1:24.19-23),
historically the first generalization of the individual inverse-square
laws in natural philosophy:


The pressure of any point-source radiation in a free field drops at
a rate that is inversely proportional to the square of the propagated
distance.[14]


Kant's generalization unites Kepler's law of photo measurement
(1604), Newton's law of universal gravitation (1697), and Coulomb's
later law of electrostatic force (1785) as instantiations of the
spread of energy.[15]
 Kant's law governs multiple forms of
free radiation, not just light, gravity, and electrostatic force, but
also radioactivity, radio waves, and sound. Its most famous
application, in its first, Keplerian, instantiation, was Hubble's
measure of the luminosity of distant variable stars
(1924)--which led to the discoveries of cosmic expansion and the
Big Bang.


In the concluding reflection of the pivotal tenth section of
the *Living Forces*, Kant recognized the contingency of the
pressure-propagation ratio (1:24.26-8), inferred that other
ratios would generate continua with other dimensions
(1:24.28-30), and surmised that a science in command of the
dimensional range would be the highest geometry achievable
(1:24.31-3). In light of quantum geometry and its modern
guises--superstring and M-theories--this last remark might
well have been Kant's most far-sighted prediction. Despite suffering
from insufficient scientific training, the rejection by his advisor,
the academic failure, and the catastrophe in his family, Kant's
philosophical debut in 1749 reveals the mark of genius.


## 5. Newtonian Stargazing: "The Splendor of a Single Universal Rule"


For the next seven years, Kant's life would be quiet. He was now
teaching children in the Baltic countryside. As a *Hofmeister*
(private teacher), he educated the sons of Pastor Andersch, from 1748
to 1751, in the French settlement Judtschen, half a day's walk from
Konigsberg. Next he taught the sons of Knight von Hulsen at his
Arnsberg estate until about 1753, a two-day day ride from
Konigsberg. Finally he worked as a tutor for Count Keyserlingk until
1754. This in Kant's life is marked by social engagements, dinners and
convivial living. During this time Kant's finances improved, which
left him more time to attend to his tutoring and his own research.


When Kant left town, the main influence on his thought had been
Georg Bernhard Bilfinger[16]
 (1693-1750), Wolff's former
assistant at Halle. Bilfinger's heuristic method had inspired the
project of *Living Forces*. This rule for finding truth is to
identify an intermediate position when experts advance contrary
views, provided ulterior motives are absent
(1:32.7-13). Bilfinger's rule had guided Kant to reconcile
Leibniz and Descartes over force. This method was to characterize
nearly all of his critical writings as well.


In the countryside, Kant realized that his debut had met with no
success, despite its inspiration. His middle way of synthesizing
Leibniz and Descartes was ignored. Having criticized Newton, Kant now
reconsidered his stance on Newtonian physics. When Kant published his
second work, the *Spin-Cycle* essay (1754), his misgivings had
turned into admiration. As its title states, it is an



> 
> investigation of the question whether the earth in its axial
> rotation, whereby it causes the change of day and night, has
> experienced any change since the earliest times of its origin, and how
> one could answer this question, announced for the current year's
> prize, by the Royal Academy of Sciences in
> Berlin. (1:183.1-12)
> 
> 


Kant describes gravitational attraction there as "nature's
universal engine" (*das allgemeine Triebwerk der Natur*),
which allowed Newton to reveal the secrets of nature in a manner that
is "as clear as it is indubitable" (1:186.35-7). In
the essay, he also announces his next book (1755) with the working
title,



>  Cosmogony, or attempt to deduce the origin of the
> cosmos, the constitution of celestial bodies, and the causes of their
> motions, from the general laws of motion of matter according to
> Newton's theory. (1:191.4-8)
> 
> 


Kant's Newtonian conversion would be completed while working on
the *Spin-Cycle* essay. The early drafts still involve
discussions of Huygens's dynamics (23:5-7). But published
argument is sharpened to a Newtonian point--no other natural
philosopher is even mentioned. Newton had become Kant's authority and
his sole scientific point of reference.


Little is known of Kant's actual conversion. Only start and
finish--*Living Forces* and *Spin-Cycle*--are
present. But it does not take much imagination to fill in the blanks.
In 1749, Kant promoted his book and waited for a reaction. When
keeping track of the relevant journals, it could not have escaped him
that Newton was the winner, nor that Leibnizian dynamics was on the
wane and that support for Cartesian kinematics had all but
collapsed. Force was Newtonian force. Newtonian physics had become the
new paradigm of natural philosophy.


By his own account, Kant was not enthusiastic about his employment,
but he did not hate it either. Some of his charges affectionately
stayed in touch and later sought him out in the city. He was on good
terms with Andersch and Hulsen, and the work for the Keyserlingks was
the start of lifelong friendships. So his tutoring responsibilities
were not too great a burden. Afterwards, he would churn out
publications at breath-taking speed--two tracts, one book, a
Master's thesis, and a dissertation; each of them on a different
topic, and all of them in little more than one year (from June 1754 to
September 1755). The timing suggests that he had written some of it
already in the countryside.


This means he had leisure. He taught, but also pursued his own
interests. Remarkable about his Newtonian conversion is not the change
of heart, but the change in competence. His first publication, despite
its brilliance, reveals his confusions over basic mechanics and a
remedial grasp of the mathematics needed to understand Newton. His
next group of works displays a firm grasp of celestial mechanics and a
growing appreciation of the *Principia*. Digesting its
contents, particularly in the given form (in fluxion instead of normal
calculus) could have taken months, if not years.


The context in which Kant found himself may have lent itself to a
more holistic engagement with Newton. Rural life is life in daylight.
Kant had to adapt to his employers and attended to his charges during
the day. Because his leisure would have been after dinner (sundown) or
before breakfast (sunrise), he probably read the *Principia* at
night. Nights before the industrial revolution were different than
they are now. Nights were dark, and when there was neither clouds nor
a full moon, stars would blaze with intensity unfamiliar to us
today. The starry skies must have been awe-inspiring. We can
conjecture that Kant, studying the *Principia*, would
occasionally step outside and look up. He was reading about celestial
mechanics--and then he would see it. Kant's subsequent
publications reveal his exuberance about the stars and the laws they
display; just as they reveal his grasp of the planetary dance and his
recognition of Newton's achievement. Kant's employment in the
countryside can certainly be understood as a boon to his study of
Newton.


Kant's earlier work had sensitized him to the dynamics of nature,
and this would have made it all the easier to marvel over celestial
mechanics while stargazing. Thinkers with a dynamic bent, from
Pythagoras to Kepler, listened to the music of the spheres. As
Kepler's *Harmonice Mundi* (1619) shows, the music of the
spheres is not a poetic delusion but a heuristic
device.[17] It
turns one's attention on cosmic patterns, the harmonies and beats
that point to laws. As the *Spin-Cycle* essay illustrates,
Kant followed in the footsteps of such thinkers. Listening to the
music of the spheres would generate the astonishing discoveries of
the 1750s.


On the face of it, it seems inexplicable how Kant could apply
Newton's theory of the tides to the fate of Earth's axial
rotation. But in the *Spin-Cycle* essay (1754), Kant arrived at
the right result for the right reasons. Newton showed that the
primarily lunar gravity acts on ocean tides. This action, Kant argues,
constitutes a retarding moment on the Earth's surface (1:187); this
retardation, he infers, slows down the Earth's rotation (1:188); and
the lunar brake only lets go, he concludes, when days are as long as
lunar months (1:190). He found the solution despite multiple
handicaps: minimal data, unimpressive formal skills, and no
instruments.


But if the planet's rotational fate is modeled as music, the
solution will be loud and clear. The gravitational pulls beat out
different rhythms. Daily terrestrial rotation and monthly lunar
revolution are not in sync. The resonance of their two spheres rattles
with a noise--drumming a syncopated beat, the lows and highs of
oceanic tides. This tidal noise distracts from the rotating
rhythm. The tidal taps, every six hours, weaken the Earth's
beat. Syncopates are dissonant; they are mechanical wobbles, and they
will eventually cease. Undermining the cosmic beat, the dynamic
opposites slow the Earth's spin down until they dissolve in
harmony. When, in the far future the Moon always shines over the same
spot, the Earth will have found its rhythm, *sans* tidal
cacophony, and be in sonic step with its celestial neighborhood, and
the rotation of the Earth will be slowed. Thus Kant's astrophysical
essay was possible.


In retrospect, Newton had clarified to Kant the force-space bond of
the *Living Forces*. In its new guise, the bond is so useful
that its implications go beyond the Earth-Moon system. Its pulse, the
pulls and pushes, is the rhythm of the cosmos. The lesson of
the *Living Forces* is that matter is energy, and that forces
act and interact with space. Aristotle's entelechy reveals that an
initial dynamic push produces material order when put into
action. This action involves Bilfinger's dialectical harmony of
opposites, but it is Newton who reveals its actual and precise
mechanics.


Cosmic action turns on gravitation, the reciprocal attraction of
masses. When drawn together, masses collide, crash, and are laterally
deflected. The angular momentum of deflections generates a
counterforce to centripetal gravitation--centrifugal
repulsion. Applying Newton to the bond, in his second
book *Universal Natural History and Theory of the Sky* (1755),
Kant sees that the dynamics of force, its push and pull, are
attraction and repulsion. Matter is then all you need, he says, and
you can start building a world (1:229.10-11).


This is far more radical--and more consistent--than
Newton's approach. Gravity will not do the trick of world building.
However, the cosmic harmony of dynamic opposites, attraction and
repulsion, can do the conceptual work, provided one assumes a random
distribution of particles. This proviso marks a step beyond
the *Living Forces*. There, in the first book, Kant had
explained space by the outward action of force, but had glossed over
the individuation of multiple dynamic presences, necessary for cosmic
evolution. Here, in the second book, he assumes an initial material
chaos and explains its growth into ordered complexity by the
interaction of forces.


Kant's two cosmological starting points--dynamic stretch into
the void in the 1740s, and homogeneous material chaos in the
1750s--are not contradictory. The reflections in his first book
begin with the very beginning, with existence prior to extension. The
reflections in his second book proceed from the next stage, existence
in extension. Kant's initial cosmogony starts with force stretching
out into a void, creating a field. His next theory begins with the
extended field sedimenting into a scattering of particles. He does not
replace a dynamic by an atomistic theory, or switch from active forces
to inert matter. Matter always remains the guise and result of
energetic interactions. As he would stress in his professorial thesis,
the *Physical Monadology* (1756), particles are force
concentrations, whose solidity is due to dynamic interplay.


In light of present knowledge, his reflections were largely
correct, and the gap in his cosmic history--the interval from
dynamic extension to material particles--remains subject to
debate today. Cosmologists are not unanimous on what happened in this
period. Nonetheless, they have substantiated that force came first
and that material chaos followed next. The universe did start
dynamically as a singularity, whose first outward-bound and energetic
action--the Big Bang--wove a dimensional structure in its
wake. The continuum (the disentangling of space and time) emerged
10[?]51 years and the chaos (the formation of atomic
nuclei) 10[?]5 years after the Big Bang--followed
by the creation of atoms, of stars, the Sun, and the Earth. Within the
expanding bubble of the Bang is the universe today.


As soon as material chaos is assumed, everything happens on its
own. Kant contends in the *Universal Natural History* that
nature's flourishing toward well-ordered complexity is explicable
through an "essential striving" (1:226.8-12). No
Newtonian "hand of God" needs to stave off perceived loss
of motion (1:222-225); he had already stated earlier that
appealing to lost motion is a "desperate excuse"
(*Living Forces* #50; 1:59). As he explains now--taking
nothing back from the stance that cost him his graduation--God
does not function in nature's development because creation is
self-organization. Fully convinced of this, he warns fundamentalists
against opposing science; if they did, they would be defeated
(1:222.32-35; 225.2-5).


The push and pull of the bond explains cosmic self-organization,
and in the *Universal Natural History* Kant shows how the chaos
evolved to the starry skies visible now. It should be possible to do
the same for organisms, but science at the time did not explain the
formation of life. How life unfolds we do not know
(1:230.14-20); we only know that it does. Kant believes (science
agrees) that star birth is easier to determine than the creation of
life (1:230.20-26).


With his famous nebular hypothesis, Kant discerned how planets,
stars, and galaxies form. Their birth is a process of titanic power.
Attractive forces contract particles into clouds, but repulsive
forces deflect them up close. Continued accretion increases
deflection, imparting angular momentum on the ever quicker rotating
cloud. Rotation generates centrifugal forces, pulling the cloud's
equators outwards, crushing the poles, until the out-bulging yet
in-falling sphere, revolving ever faster around its center, flattens
into a disc. The bond, in Newton's model of universal gravitation,
continues coalescing in momentum and spin, until the center of the
cosmic disc is so energized that it combusts. Increased energy
translates into increased structure, organizing the ecliptic plane
into lumpy coalescence. When the disc plane sediments into spinning
bands, the lumps grow massive, while caroming along their orbits. The
moving masses vacuum their paths and grow into planets strung along
an ecliptic plane, orbiting a sun in now empty space--or, on a
higher order of magnitude, into suns majestically revolving around a
brightly lit galactic center. Whether suns in spiral galaxies, or
planets in solar systems, the orbiting satellites sweep out equal
areas in equal times, with their periods in sync with their distances
from the gravitational 
centers.[18]


With this essay, Kant synthesize Newton with his own theory of
forces, leading Kant to the cutting edge of current knowledge. Nature,
in the *Universal Natural History*, streams outward in a
wavefront of organization (1:314.1-2), generating worlds
(1:314.8), biospheres and sentience (1:317.5-13, 352-3),
and finally reason, human and otherwise (1:351-66). Organization
is fragile, and spontaneity, pushed far enough, invites chaos. Mature
cosmic regions decay, chaos sets in, and entropy follows in the wake
of complexity. But entropy provides the very conditions that allow the
cosmic pulse to bounce material points back to order. Thus the
expanding chaos coalesces at its center into order, followed by chaos,
by order, by chaos. Like a rising and burning phoenix, nature cycles
between life and death (1:312.13).


For creatures, the cosmic phoenix is a problem. Humans are just
feathers on its wings. Humans grow only to burn to ashes; they are not
exempt from the cosmic law (1:318.17-18). As the pulsing cosmic
vector governs everything, order emerges on all orders of magnitude,
from the repetitive birth of the phoenix to the elements to life and
to inevitable collapse--only to begin anew again. The force-space
bond unfolds in the interactive harmony of dynamic opposites, an
interaction governed by Newton's universal gravitation, churning out
galaxies, suns, planets, life, and minds. Thus, as Kant writes, a
"single universal rule" guides natural evolution in an
absolutely glorious way (1:306.18-23).


## 6. Systematic Cosmology: "All Things in the Universe Interactively Connect"


When Kant returned to Konigsberg in early autumn 1754, his
prospects had improved. King Friedrich II (Frederick the Great, reign
1740-86), like Kant a victim of a fundamentalist education, had
instituted liberal policies in Prussia that were making themselves
felt in the province. Kant's former advisor Knutzen had died (1751),
and a freer atmosphere now pervaded the university. Kant had saved
some money, supplemented his formal education with his own studies,
and was prepared to return to school. He would now complete his
studies and start his academic career.


He dedicated the *Universal Natural History* to Frederick
the Great and published it in spring 1755. With this publication, Kant
cautiously published anonymously. The problem was not risking
religious opposition by endorsing Newton. Rather, it was that Kant had
sharpened celestial mechanics to a secular and dynamic cosmology,
while replacing Newton's Christian view of natural design with a
non-anthropocentric and naturalistic teleology. He supported Newtonian
mechanics and cosmology, but to the detriment of biblical creation
stories.


Newton had thought that cosmic organization required the hand of
God, but Kant eliminated any need for divine interference. Newton had
supposed that God regularly infuses nature with new motion to keep
the world machine from running down due to entropy; he had accepted
the notion of final causes as ways in which God makes himself known;
and he had appealed to God's miraculous adjustments whenever physical
explanations failed him, as in the case of the ecliptic
plane.[19]
Newton could not explain the coplanar orbits of planets and surmised,
"such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be
allowed the effect of choice" (1979 [1730]: 402).


Kant discovered in the *Universal Natural History* that the
planetary arrangement on the ecliptic plane results from forces acting
on particles that accrete in a spinning cloud. Hence there was no need
to follow Newton and appeal to God. Nor was there any compelling
metaphysical reason to do so. Force is goal-directed and its energy
unfolds the cosmos. The term Kant employs for this
unfolding, *Auswicklung der Natur* (1:226.8), is the
"out-wrapping" of nature, from primal force to complex
structure. "Out-wrapping" is both process and purpose.
Purpose is not imposed by a supernatural God, but, instead, woven into
the natural fabric. Teleological ends and means are natural in the
development of forces, location, space and particles; the interplay of
forces is the vehicle of final causes, and the *telos* of
nature is its own fulfillment. (1:223, 263, 332). Even in its simplest
state, matter has the urge to develop itself. (1:228, 262-3,
314). The rise of order and abundance--or biological diversity,
in our terms--marks nature's quest toward fulfillment, and this
process, fueled by the incessant pulse of attraction and repulsion,
generates harmony and beauty.


Following this cosmic model, in which Kant rejects extrinsic
teleology for an immanent version, everything is connected. Taking
his cue from Pope's "chain of being", Kant likens the
universe to a *Kette der Natur*, the "chain of
nature" (1: 308, 
365).[20]
 Humans are merely links in the greater
chain of being. Dismissing the anthropocentric teleology of Wolff,
Derham, and the physico-theologians, Kant finds the claim that the
universe was created for human purposes exaggerated--and
provincial.[21]
An intelligent louse, he says, might as well imagine that the scalp
it lives on and the forest of hair that surrounds it were created
just for the sake of its happiness; from a louse's point of view,
things surely look that way (1:353-4). In the chain of nature,
all beings are equal. Nature does not play favorites, none of the
organic links, whether it be an insect or a rational being, is more
important than another (1:354). As the goal of force is complexity,
the goal of nature (commonly understood) is biodiversity, the goal of
planets is to sustain biospheres, the goal of terrestrial existence
is to increase biota--the *telos* of nature is life
(1:353), at least until it reaches maximum density and begins to
fracture in cosmic collapse.


What kind of life? Ultimately, Kant argues, planets aim to sustain
intelligent life. Inspired by Fontenelle's vision of inhabited
worlds, he conjectures that there may well be extraterrestrial
life.[22]
Nothing, however, guarantees that humans are the crowns of creation
nor even atop the chain of being. Humans, Kant conjectures, occupy a
"middle rung" on the ladder of creatures
(1:359.29)--and are possibly infinitely distant from the top
tier of intelligent beings (1:353.35-6). A sober look at
ourselves shows that we are on a risky course (*gefahrliche
Mittelstrasse*, 1:366.7) halfway between wisdom and
irrationality. We are cosmically mediocre.


A theme of Kant's thought, dominant in the pre-critical period,
integral to the critical period, and to which he returns in old age,
is that humans are part of nature. He was too familiar with the
philosophy of Descartes and its problems to subscribe to a mind-body
dualism of distinct substances, the one thinking, the other
extended. Instead he followed Bilfinger's heuristic, and already in
the *Living Forces* he had solved Descartes's puzzle of
mind-body interaction by arguing that minds are spatially located
within their bodies, and that both are energetic structures that
influence each other (1:20-21). In the later *Prize
Essay* (1764), he would judge the Christian notion of immaterial
souls as indemonstrable (2:293), an argument he re-echoes in his
critical writings as well (A339/B397-A405/B432). Although minds
are not necessarily matter in a literal sense, he would argue there
that they are probably some kind of energy-bundles commensurate with
the material framework of nature. Here in the *Universal Natural
History*, he describes humans as material beings; the makeup of
rationality is linked to the constitution of matter as a product of
dynamic force (1:335).


All things interactively connect, and as minds shape matter, matter
shapes minds. Coarse matter makes mental fibers inflexible
(1:356). The IQ-constraining coarseness is proportional to density. In
cosmic terms, this means that rational force depends on spatial
location. In the stellar nebula (the embryonic solar system), matter,
consisting of elements with varying density, was randomly
distributed. But as soon as an interactive forces pulls the material
cloud in and sets it spinning, denser particles will not be as easily
pushed around as lighter ones; when unequal bits collide, lighter ones
bounce off while denser ones remain on track. Denser elements,
deflected later, cruise on lower orbits; lighter elements, deflected
sooner, orbit higher up. Orbital height is inversely proportional to
material density (1:270); hence orbital bands form denser planets the
closer they are to the Sun (1:277; Kant's "static
law"). Kant speculates that really superior intelligence will
only emerge in the rarefied matter of outer planets (1:359). The
denser a planet is (as Earth, close to the Sun) the denser,
unfortunately, are its inhabitants.


The anonymous publication of the *Universal Natural History*
was prudent but not without risk. The dedication indicates Konigsberg
as place of composition; the publisher Petersen was a local company,
and eventually the identity of the author would have come
out.[23]
Petersen went bankrupt just when copies of the *Universal Natural
History* were off the press and in a warehouse. The warehouse was
sealed--and then mysteriously burned down, which allowed
Petersen to collect insurance and pay off creditors. Bankruptcy and
fire prevented the book's distribution (Rahts 1902: 545-6;
Krafft 1971: 193). But this was not necessarily a bad turn for
Kant. As the fates of Spinoza, Tschirnhaus, or Toland illustrate, you
cannot be a dynamic freethinker and a professor in the conservative
university system at the same time. Considering Kant's goals, the
misfortune over the book was a blessing in disguise.


Undaunted, he set out to write his Master's thesis. According to
the ideas articulated so far, Kant envisioned a radiating essence
that organizes itself in cosmic expansion. The core stretches out as
interactive complexity, emerging in biospheres populated by
organisms, while eventually pulling back into itself, like a phoenix
of nature, burning up only to rise from the ashes. The cyclic
"out-wrapping of nature" generates structures, some of
them animated, a few of them intelligent. By their harmonic
development, the natural structures will eventually allocate force
without lateral boundaries, setting the cosmic vector free. When this
is a universal condition, the energy flow is uniform in reiterative
patterns across magnitudes. It is then entropic. Overcoming the last
boundary, the vertical order of magnitudes, force rushes into itself,
concentrating its pulse once more to a singularity before the next
cosmic upsurge.[24]


In order to understand the dynamics of force at the inception of
cosmoi, the pulse of the bond, flaring out structure, may be
visualized as fire. Fire is an exemplar of the interplay of forces. It
is no surprise that the author of *Living Forces*
and *Universal Natural History* would want to investigate it,
for doing so might lead to more insights about the cosmic matrix. He
chose Johann Gottfried Teske (1704-72), a professor of physics
interested in electricity and lightning, as his advisor and graduated
with *A Succinct Outline of Some Meditations on Fire*.


Hence Kant, who would later soar to the heights of
the *Critiques* and the Categorical Imperative, earned his
philosophy degree with a Master's thesis on the structure of fire
(1755).


*On Fire* is an elaboration of the energetic model of
matter. Kant argues there that all bodies, solid, liquid, and gaseous
types, consist of dynamic particles or molecules (*moleculae*,
1:372.24 and passim). He contends that the particles cohere in an
elastic medium. This medium, the ether, permeates the molecular
interstices of bodies (prop. 3, 1: 372). He calls this ether
"fire-matter" and identifies it as the carrier of warmth
and light. Heat results from wave-like vibrations of this *materia
ignis* among the molecules (prop. 8, 1:377). As it is known today,
heat is a symptom of molecular vibration, which in turn depends on the
energy-state of a body.


After being awarded with Master's degree, Kant wrote his
dissertation, the *New Elucidation of the First Principles of
Metaphysical Cognition* (1755). At first glance, this work has
little to do with his previous research on force, cosmos, and fire. It
is about the principles of ontology, specifically the conceptual tools
for metaphysical investigations. In fact, however, it was only a
matter of time until he would write such a work. Now he would explore
the cognitive access to dynamic interactivity and the causal structure
of human integration into nature. Quite naturally, Kant moved from
cosmic origins to nebulae to solar systems to planets and biota, and
then to rational life. With his doctoral dissertation, Kant hoped to
get to the bottom of the things that interested him most.


Commonsensically understood, humans are parts of nature. Their
actions are free, yet natural processes are mechanical and
predictable. One pressing question then becomes: How do human actions
and natural processes relate? If nature is the out-wrapping of force,
and intelligent beings are products of the cosmos, how is their free
action possible in a lawful natural matrix? In the *New
Elucidation*, Kant argues for a compatibilist view--both
human freedom and natural necessity are real, and neither is reducible
to the other. As Kant's thematic continued to develop, their seeming
conflict finds a dynamic resolution. Everything in nature happens for
a prior reason (1:396.8-9), and this rule applies to both
necessary events and free actions. Both process-types share the fact
of causal connectivity, but they connect to causes in different ways
(1:400.30-7). Causation types concern the degree of power by
which they are influenced, and this is what distinguishes between the
two. The opposites, free acts and mechanical events harmonize over
force. A free will is not something being pushed around, but is
instead a "determining power" (*determinandi
potestas*; 1:404.8). By its power, a will can withstand impulses
(*motivi*) without being always forced by them
(1:404.10-14, 34-9). Those events that do not have
sufficient power to withstand force are seen as natural and necessary
consequents, those events that possess sufficient ability to withstand
forces are seen as free acts. Thus freedom/ spontaneity is naturally
possible.


Later, in the *Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals*
(1785), Kant would distinguish between "things" and
"persons" (4:428), describing the former as natural means
and the latter as rational ends. Persons are free; what distinguishes
them is their will, a faculty of determining oneself to action
(4:427). Self-determination is the basis of freedom; necessitation is
the mark of nature. The *New Elucidation* supplies the unified
ground for this dichotomy. Autonomy and heteronomy are a matter of
dynamic degree. Persons and things alike are energetic bundles of
collocated forces, but the superior rational force of persons can
resist others and is capable of autonomy.


As the title of the *New Elucidation of the Principles of
Metaphysical Cognition* indicates, it is a new attempt to clarify
the cognitive principles needed for understanding the structure of
reality. The force-space bond in Kant's first book, as well as the
attractive-repulsive interplay in his second, reveal that dynamic
interactivity is the generative matrix of nature. Interaction is not
"one" thing but involves at least two poles that engage
with one another. Because the dynamic
"between"--their link--is fundamental, the
cognitive tool for capturing the ultimate reality cannot be
"one" principle. It cannot even be a basic principle of
identity (*a* = *a*). Interaction is a relation of distinct
items that grip one another--if they were not distinct, the event
would be an action, not interaction. But it is dynamic interactivity
that is the thing in itself.


Hence the *New Elucidation* does not begin with the
principle of identity, like other ontological templates. Kant states
that "there is no unique, absolutely first, universal principle
of all truths" (prop. 1, 1:388.11-12). Instead, the
identity-pair of opposites is absolutely primary (*absolute
prima*): "whatever is, is, and whatever is not, is
not" (prop. 2, 1:389.3-6). Affirmative and negative
identity, when juxtaposed, suggest contradiction. This means that
contradiction is a derivative of the primary
identity-pair.[25]
 It also means that contradiction is
governed by a prior (*prae*) identity (prop. 3,
1:390.30-2). Just consider any real knowledge: truth rests on
an intuition of its ground (*intuiti niti*, 1:394.3-4),
and if one wants to go beyond tautological transformations, ground of
truth will differ from truth grounded. Analogously, actual states of
affairs are grounded in other events (prop. 6,
1:394.10-11). Hence distinct antecedent reasons determine
truths; distinct prior grounds determine things. At the same time,
the truths determined give meaning to the antecedent as their reason,
and the things determined give context to the prior as their
ground. Reality emerges as soon as the dynamic center patterns
alterity, while being placed and defined by the patterned alterity
when doing so. The resulting interaction is essential. And it is
accessible. Metaphysical cognition begins with communal identity
(*communiter principium identitatis*) governing contradiction
(prop. 2, 1:389.3-6).


As the communal identity of opposites is the universal grounded,
the ultimate ground must be identity as such. Now the simple unit
appears. It is outside our grasp but absolutely necessary (prop. 7,
1:395.4-6). The necessary existing unit is called
"God" (ibid.). From it everything follows (prop. 8,
1:396.8-9). Specifically, what follows, and now once more within
cognitive reach, is change (*mutatio*, 1:410.18). Kant's
Principle of Succession makes change intelligible: change occurs
because of substantial connections ([*substantiae*] *cum
aliis connexae sunt*); the mutual dependency of substances
determines mutual alterations (prop. 12, 1:411.18-200). A bond
governs change and thus reality. This dynamic-structural bond is a
reciprocal, harmonious dependency. Metaphysical cognition ends with
reciprocal *commercium* or interactivity, Kant's Principle of
Coexistence (prop. 13, 1:412-13).


That such a dynamic harmony can exist is so amazing that it has to
be divinely sustained (1:413.10-15). Thus the *New
Elucidation* ends with the marvel over interaction. He writes:



> 
> ... Since we find all things in the universe to be
> interactively connected ... we must admit that this relation
> depends on a joint cause, on God, the universal principle of beings.
> ...The same pattern of the divine understanding, which generates
> existence, also establishes the relations of things to each other, by
> conceiving their existences as correlated with each other. From this
> it is evident that the universal interaction of all things must be due
> to this ... divine idea. (1:413.13-20)
> 
> 
> 


Kant confidently concludes that his system of universal interaction
is certainly (*certe*) better than the pedestrian theory of
physical influence. The reason, he explains, is that universal
interactivity (*systema universalis substantiarum commercium*,
1:415.40) reveals the origin of the connection governing things, an
origin that completely escapes ordinary physical influence because
this theory looks at substances in isolation (1:416)--ignoring
what happens among them, the dynamic "between".


Kant was on a roll. He turned to writing his professorial thesis
or *habilitationsschrift*, the *Physical Monadology*
(1756). Have established the fundamentality of "the
between" for both free events and mechanical causality (and
their compatibility), Kant then turns to discuss what the
"between" means with regard to the structure of
matter--the physical manifestation of forces. Material things are
extended--they take up space. The terminal units of nature must
be point-entities, for if they weren't, they would be further
divisible and not be the final constituents. Ontology suggests that
spatial objects consist of final elements. Logic requires that final
elements are indivisible, hence points. Geometry warns that points
never fill a volume, regardless how many are used. So how can points
make up the spatial things in nature? On the matrix-level, what
happens "between" the points?


Building on his earlier works, Kant continues to expound that force
is prior to extension; everything comes about through the dynamics of
force, pushes and pulls; and even on the smallest scale the
attractive-repulsive interplay must structure space (*determinata
volumina*, 1:484.10-12). Bodies are coherent webs of
force-points. The dynamic point-entities are intelligible as
mathematical centers, but dynamically, they are centers of active
radiation fields that mutually confine each other. Physical monads are
thus elementary energy spheres (*sphaera activatis*
or *ambitum activitatis*; 1:481.9-10, 37). They are
points and, as such, indivisible--but they radiate and in doing
so create extension. Hence non-extended points constitute extended
composites. We must think in dynamic terms, because corpuscular
interpretations of nature do not work, not even for the ether
(1:486.5-35). As he writes at the end of the *Physical
Monadology*, the ether is energetically structured space or
"fire matter" (*aether seu materia ignis*;
1:487.18), woven by elastic bonds (*iunctae elasticitates*;
1:487.12).


The professorial thesis has the full title, "the use in
natural philosophy of the synthesis of metaphysics and geometry, whose
first sample contains the physical monadology". Kant argues that
the combination of metaphysics and geometry can produce good
philosophy (1:473). According to him, it seems easier to mate griffins
with horses than to join exact science and conjecture
(1:473.22-4), but truth is found in pursing just his course, the
"physical monadology" is a case in point.


The ultimate units, Kant's *sphaera activatis*, are terminal
concentrations of energy that stretch out as active dimensional
spheres. This insight matches current theoretical physics. In current
particle physics, string theory conceives of force-points as closed
vibrating loops that whip their exteriors into dimensional
shape. Force generates extension--even on the level of
elements. From what science can tell today, the resulting dynamic
spacelets, so-called Calabi-Yau spaces, are the smallest extension
units of reality.


Geometry and conjecture lead to the origin of physical extension.
Calabi-Yau spaces, the modern-day correlates to Kant's spheres, are
approximated through quantum geometry. The units, superstrings (the
branes of M-theory seen on edge), are smaller than the empirical
threshold, the Planck length. Kant contended that the units are beyond
the measure of the sensible. Modern cosmologists would agree, both in
that investigating the absolutely large, the cosmos, necessarily leads
to the investigation of the absolutely small, and in that this path
leads from the empirical to the rational. The quest has become formal,
and its physical pioneers are mathematicians. Beyond the scope of
experiments, the explorers of strings and branes today do conceptual
work. And like Kant, they stress the intelligible beauty of
nature.


This conceptual work is guided by logical and aesthetic criteria,
by elegance and simplicity. By Kant's own testimony, the contemplation
of nature was for him an intensely aesthetic encounter. In
the *Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the
Sublime* (1764), his greatest public success before
the *Critiques*, he would develop a phenomenology of
beauty. Depending on the intensity of the experience, an aesthetic
encounter can be either with beauty, exciting pleasure--or with
the sublime, striking awe, sensual overload, even terror
(2:208-9). Later, in the *Critique of Judgment* (1790),
he would argue for the heuristic value of aesthetic notions such as
design and unity.


When Kant was still working on the *Physical Monadology*, a
tsunami shattered the coastal city Lisbon (1 November 1755). Fires
broke out in the chaos that merged into a firestorm incinerating the
rubble. It was the worst earthquake recorded up to this point in
Western history; 70,000 people died. It struck on Sunday, which
happened to be a holiday (All Saints Day, *Allerheiligen* for
Kant). The twelve-meter (40 ft) high waves slammed at the city
churches just when the flocks had gathered. The impact destabilized
the towers, which collapsed backwards for static reasons, crashing
through roofs and crushing whoever prayed below. The brothels, located
further up in the hills, were spared. The faithful died, and the
sinners survived. This posed a theological challenge.


Kant wrote three papers on the catastrophe. The first, *On the
Causes of the Terrestrial Convulsions* (1756), was an essay on the
physical dynamics of earthquakes; Kant speculated that there are giant
caves underneath mountain ridges (1:419-20). Sometimes gases in
the caves form combustible mixtures. When the gases release, the caves
collapse, shaking the earth (1:422). Although Kant's conjecture is
false (quakes are usually due to plate tectonics), it is
methodologically beyond reproach, employing known data (mining
explosions) to formulate a testable hypothesis. The second
tract, *History and Natural Description of the Most Curious
Occurrences associated with the Quake* (1756), is a report on what
happened in Lisbon. The third, *Further Observation on the
Terrestrial Convulsions* (1756), is a refutation of superstitious
causes such as invidious astrological conjunctions.


In all three essays, Kant insists on secular explanations.
Earthquakes are terrible, but they are merely events in nature
(1:420). We do not know what they mean in the larger frame of things,
and to interpret the Lisbon earthquake as a divine punishment is naive
anthropocentrism.


Kant was interested in earthquakes not only because of the singular
event in Portugal, but also for the reason he wrote on winds,
the *Theory of Winds* (1756), and the *West-Wind* essay
(1757). The most dramatic human encounters with natural forces are
fire, storms, and earthquakes. Anyone intrigued by force would want to
study these phenomena. Fire is pure energy. Earthquakes are the brutal
action of force. And winds are the best examples of force moving
through space. Meteorological phenomena in particular were an
opportunity to apply the hypothesis of the force-space bond, the idea
that active, dynamic forces modify each other and that external
modifications of a radiation will affect the internal constitution of
them. Air masses can be modeled as these fluctuations, and weather
involves a clear instantiation of dynamic interactivity.


Kant discovered that the direction-patterns of coastal winds are
the result of rhythmic thermal expansions and contractions of air
columns over coastal and marine surfaces (1:223-4;
1:492-4). But weather is not only due to the push and pull of
energies, the interaction of force (thermal radiation) and space (air
columns over surface). As winds are motions in space, other motions
may drive them on. Rotational forces--investigated in the
earlier *Spin-Cycle* essay--are especially important. They
were Kant's key for his discoveries, later confirmed, of the dynamic
weather cycles responsible for trade winds, equatorial winds, and the
monsoon.


After a hiatus of several years, in which high teaching loads
permitted him to write only little, Kant turned to what would be the
culmination of his systematic cosmology. As the *New
Elucidation* had already shown, the analysis of the interactive
natural community points to an absolute and transcendent ground. The
contemplation of nature inexorably leads to a reflection over the
absolute. Kant examined the perfection of dynamic interactivity and
its sustaining divine unit in the *Essay on Optimism* (1759),
arguing that relative natural perfection amounts to the harmony of a
manifold with a rule, and that absolute divine perfection is such that
its manifold contains within itself the ground of reality
(2:30-31note). Their difference, in terms of reality or
perfection, is just a matter of degree (2:31.16)--the thrust and
limit of the cosmic vector. In 1762, now pushing forty, Kant resumed
this line of inquiry and wrote what would be his third book, *Only
Possible Ground of a Demonstration of God's Existence*
(1763). Kant explores there the divine limit of the natural vector.
"God" is defined as the necessary, unified, and constant
being.


The first part of the *Only Possible Ground* contains an
ontological argument of the divine bond. Instead of regarding
existence as a predicate (2:70-4), Kant derives necessary
existence from possibility
(2:77-84)[26]
 The bond governing nature is derivable from
its intelligible possibility, and not from any anthropological story
nor from the notion of a necessary being. The bond Kant describes is
considered divine, but should not be confused with standard
anthropological descriptions. One may employ and ontological argument,
but one should be clear on just what one is describing as a necessary
bond.


The second part contains a teleological argument. Here Kant
restates parts of the *Universal Natural History*
(2:93-100, 123-51). Since few copies of that book had
survived the publisher's bankruptcy, he wanted to repeat once more its
salient points--while toning down, or omitting altogether, its
more provocative insights. Relevant for the topic was the immanent
teleology of nature found in the *Universal Natural
History*. In virtue of its own forces acting on matter, nature
emerges as a uniform system that evolves to ever increasing order,
diversity, and complexity. The divine and active bond is the cosmic
vector, and we can observe its design in nature's evolution. And since
the design derives from the "inner possibility" of objects
(2:91-2), both conceptual and teleological arguments share the
same ground.


The divine bond is the unified and indispensable *dynamis*.
The corresponding traits of cosmic structure--unity and
harmony--make Kant's argument from design possible. The third and
final part of the *Only Possible Ground* contains his
assessment of the ontological and teleological arguments. Only the
former qualifies, strictly speaking, as a proof (2:161-1). A
comparison reveals their differences. The one is a rigorous and
conceptual demonstration, while the other is its probabilistic and
empirical application. But truth is to be found in their harmony; both
are rooted in the same key notion, possibility. Since empirical design
is built into the intelligible *dynamis* of objects, both
arguments harmonize over the essence of the bond. This is why the book
has its peculiar structure: two arguments (*Beweise*) but one
ground (*Beweisgrund*), which is possibility,
Kant's *Moglichkeit* or Aristotle's *dynamis*.


## 7. Crisis and Critique: "Groping Among Mere Concepts"


But when Kant was reflecting on the divine ground of nature, he was
assailed by doubts. Studying force in nature is one thing, but
deducing God's existence is quite another. Can one identify God in the
rigorous and comprehensive way suggested in his third book? Here the
ultimate task clashes with ultimate method. Determining the absolute
by means of formal demonstration and empirical evidence is too
bold. How could Kant be certain that he was not kidding himself?


The preface of the *Only Possible Ground* reveals his inner
torment. Providence, he writes there, already imparted to common sense
the notion that God exists, hence the project of a demonstration is
redundant (2:65). The insight that God exists does not need "the
sophistry of subtle inferences" (ibid.). In theory, such a
demonstration might illuminate much else in this object, but "to
achieve this purpose, however, one must venture into the bottomless
abyss of metaphysics" (2:65.25-66.1). And what is
metaphysics? A dark ocean without shore and lighthouse, Kant says, on
which it is all too easy to lose one's way (2:66.1-6).


This is followed by a startling retraction: he writes that his
ontological proof, of all things, should not be mistaken for a
demonstration (2:66.12-13). But if it were not a demonstration,
what else could it be? What he wanted to do, he says, was to supply
"just an argument *in support* of a demonstration";
a construction kit (*Baugerat*) for a future proof
(2:66.9-10). This kit has been assembled with "great
difficulty" (ibidz.), and even so, he owes the reader an
apology, for the kit is incomplete--frankly, it is bad
(*schlecht*; 2:66.28).


Two years before Kant's loss of heart, in 1761, the Prussian
Academy had announced a question for the public competition of
1763. The question was whether metaphysical principles, specifically
the principles of natural theology and morals, could be proven with
the same clarity and precision as the truths of geometry. King
Frederick II had invited foreign intellectuals and scientists, such as
Maupertuis, d'Alembert, La Mettrie, Voltaire, Lagrange, and Euler to
the academy, and they had little patience with their speculative
German colleagues. Newton's star kept rising, and the tough-minded
foreigners put the metaphysicians in Berlin on the spot. The prize
question was the result.


While Kant was writing the *Only Possible Ground*, he
prepared a submission to the contest, the *Inquiry Concerning the
Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals*
(1764). The treatise is known as the *Prize Essay*, although
Kant only received second prize, behind Mendelssohn. Work on
the *Prize Essay* put Kant in a stressful situation, not only
because he had to meet the contest deadline, but also because he
forced himself to engage with metaphysics on two levels--in the
book, he pursued a first-order question on God's existence, and in the
essay, he examined the second-order question of whether such a pursuit
is actually feasible. This forced Kant to question himself and the
project of his book.


The *Prize Essay* was a step toward the issue that would
later acquire obsessive importance for Kant, the problem of the
possibility of metaphysics as a system of conceptual (*a
priori*) judgments that are synthetic--that really generate
true knowledge claims, instead of just paraphrasing what is
"known" through common sense. But, in contrast to
the *Critique of Pure Reason* (1781), the *Prize Essay*
contains still a modicum of hope. Its concern was not whether,
but *how* metaphysics can be possible. Asking "how"
suggests that metaphysics is feasible, and that the task is only a
matter of determining its right method.


As a model of method, the *Principia* suggested itself. No
other work in recent history had had such an impact on knowledge; no
other book had revolutionized the understanding of nature as much as
Newton's masterpiece; and no other book contained so many discoveries
in such rigorous form. Such rigor, it appeared, was the key to the
extraordinary quality of its contents. Kant, who had studied Newton's
insights a decade earlier, now studied his guidelines, spelled out not
only in the "Rules of Philosophy" of
the *Principia* but also in the queries of
the *Opticks*. In the final query (1979 [1730]: 404-5),
Newton suggests the research strategy of an analysis of wholes into
parts, followed by a synthesis of the identified causes into
explanatory principles.


Accordingly, Kant's methodological proposal in the *Prize
Essay* is a case for a conceptual analysis as the starting point
of metaphysics. Synthetic reasoning is premature as long as the
concepts involved are ambiguous. Eventually metaphysics should turn
into a synthetic discipline, but its current limitations require a
mandatory analytic phase first (2:290).


This proposal allowed Kant to present himself as a thinker with
exacting standards, and his *Prize Essay* was a reality-check
on the overly optimistic winner, Mendelssohn's *Treatise on the
Evidence in the Metaphysical Sciences* (1764). The *Prize
Essay* was a critique: metaphysics can be salvaged, but only by
rebuilding it from scratch.


By drawing this conclusion Kant sawed off the branch he had been
sitting on since 1745. Is conceptual philosophical inquiry into
reality capable of certainty? Kant's answer was "not
yet". But conceptual inquiry had been his work to date, from
the *Living Forces* to the *Only Possible Ground*. Hence
everything he had done suddenly appeared to him as terribly
premature. Suddenly, Kant was in a crisis.


Things came to a head a year later, in 1765, when he, now
forty-one, read the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg
(1688-1772). In *Heavenly Secrets* (8 vol.,
1749-56), Swedenborg relates his visions of angels, describing
their spiritual world in detail. Kant had been intrigued by the
hearsay of the clairvoyant's exploits, but when he read the work, he
recognized it as a fraud.


Kant wrote a scathing satire, the *Dreams of a Spirit-Seer*
(1766). In it he denounces Swedenborg as the "arch-spirit-seer
of all spirit-seers" (2:354.20), whose works are
"fantasies" (2:363.36), "wild figments of the
imagination" (2:366.11), "eight tomes of nonsense"
(2:360.15), and the results of "hypochondrial winds" that
result in effluence when raging in the guts, and in heavenly visions
when raging in the mind (2:348.25-9).


What disturbed Kant was that he saw in the farting mystic a parody
of himself (Laywine 1993: 71). The visionary's world of angels is
the *reductio* of dynamic cosmology--the absurd final
consequence of Kant's own contentions. He had always assumed that
reality is radically coherent. Science and metaphysics join hands in
its investigation because the cosmos involves an intelligible as well
as an empirical side: humans are unqualified parts of nature; mind and
body are energetic interacting presences; rationality depends on
matter; freedom in nature is just a question of resisting force; and
so forth. There is only force, and its product, nature. Kant's ideas
had amounted to a dynamic parallelism of the corporeal and the
mental--just like Swedenborg's philosophy of heaven.


The *Dreams of the Spirit-Seer* was thus also a
self-critique. He wrote Mendelssohn that to preempt mockery by others,
he found it wisest to mock himself, which was honest and something he
had to do because his mind "is really in conflict on this
issue" (10:70.2-5). The problem, he explains, is the
presence of the mind in the material world, and that analogies between
spiritual and material substances are flights of fancy unhindered by
data (10:71-2). With this admission, in the letter on April 8,
1766, before his forty-second birthday, the entire pre-critical
project Kant had worked on since he was twenty had come to a crashing
halt.


Kant's first response to this devastating outcome was to overreact.
When a position as a professor at Konigsberg University was available,
he had to write yet another thesis for the application
portfolio, *On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the
Intelligible World* (1770), the so-called *Inaugural
Dissertation*. Since the problem handed to him by the mystic had
been the dynamic unity of a jointly sensible and intelligible reality,
the solution must be, according to Kant, their divorce. In
the *Inaugural Dissertation*, he slashed through the Gordian
knot by cutting nature into two halves, the *mundus
intelligibilis* of metaphysics and the *mundus sensibilis*
of science.


His second response was more considered and very courageous. He
confronted his long-held convictions and examined them on possible
flaws, by which meant to determine which of the claims previously
advanced hold up and those that do not. This soul-searching amounted
to a second-order investigation--not an examination of the
conceptual contentions as such, but an examination of their
knowability. This turned out to be an intense task that consumed more
than a decade of his life, and which resulted in his greatest work,
the *Critique of Pure Reason* (1781).


Among its findings, which historically changed the face of
philosophy, are that traditional metaphysics is over (Aviii-x,
Axix-xx, Bxiv-xv), and that proofs for God's existence are
done with (A631-42/B659-70). Discoveries later made in
neuroscience confirm Kant's insights and affirm that perception
results from interaction, whereby pathways organize affecting data
(B1, A15/B29, A50-51/B74-5, B113, B148-9), and that
the subject of organized experience--the synthetic unity of
apperception--poses the hard problem of consciousness
(B154-9).


At the same time, Kant qualified there his previous split of the
sensible from the intelligible; and it was good that he did, because
as his early insights illustrate, his dynamic ontology, albeit
premature, had always been on the right track. Thus interactivity
entered the *Critique* as a cognitive device for ordering data
(the disjunctive relation or community; A70/B95 and A80/B106) and for
perceiving spatial objects (the principle of coexistence;
A211/B256-A215/B262). The energy field (force stretched out as
space) returns there as well, as the only exception to Kant's critical
rule not to talk about the intelligible features of mind-independent
nature. But the rule had to be broken, he realized, because the
energy-field sustains the interactive experience of spatial things
(A211/B257-A213/B260).


Later, there would be even more qualifications of the split, and
Kant's return to his original themes with the *Opus Postumum*
would turn the former divorce of intelligible and sensible into a
merely episodic division to be overcome. But by 1781, he had found his
way: the continued quest for the big questions, but now tempered by
critical caution.