Schonfeld, Martin. The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project.

Thomson, Iain

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xv + 348 pp. Cloth, $55.00 -- When Kant finished the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, he was 56 years old and had already published more than 25 essays and monographs. In this precritical oeuvre the young Kant unabashedly answered some of the most difficult questions of theoretical physics, physical geography, cosmology, theology, and moral theory, advancing ambitious theories about the origin and history of the universe, the nature of space, the age of the earth and the stability of its rotation, the causes of earthquakes, winds, and fire, the ultimate components of reality, the soundness of optimism, the legitimate domain of logic, the character of the beautiful and the sublime, the first principles of theology and morality, the possibility of proving God's existence, and--tellingly, at the end--the connection between metaphysics and madness. Since this dizzying speculative array appears to be unified only by the young Kant's "metaphysical exuberance" (p. 178), his precritical thought is often dismissed as the work of an unfocused dilettante.

Through a careful reassessment of the first two decades of Kant's philosophical career (1746-66), Schonfeld overturns this outmoded caricature by demonstrating that Kant's pursuit of an ambitious "precritical project" provided his early work with an overarching unity. The young Kant presciently confronted what would become one of the deepest problems of modernity; he sought to develop a "philosophy of nature" which would bridge the emerging gulf between physics and metaphysics--the very gulf which, ironically, his own later critical work helped widen into an abyss. Long before the critical Kant insisted on the dualism of the sensible and the intelligible realms, the young Kant struggled to fuse the empirical-quantitative approach of Newton and the mechanists with the rational-qualitative perspective of Leibniz and the Wolffians. His aim was to secure a place for the central tenets of German metaphysics within the emerging empirical perspective, reconciling "the metaphysical assumptions of a uniform structure of nature, of a purpose to the world, and of the possibility of freedom" with "a modern mechanical model of physical nature" (p. 9).

The young Kant sought to bring peace to three major fronts on the battlefield between physics and metaphysics by showing that an empirically coherent, mechanistic worldview need not reject the uniformity of nature, the purposiveness of history, or the reality of human freedom. Understanding the telos of nature as self-organization into a state of perfection (p. 110), Kant was the first correctly to explain the seasonal occurrences of monsoons (p. 77), the deceleration of the earth's rotation (p. 83), and he advanced a "nebular hypothesis" about the formation of the solar system which was confirmed two centuries later (pp. 113-17). Yet Kant's speculative fusion of physics and metaphysics did not always yield such edifying conclusions. His extension of Newton's law of universal gravitation led to outlandish ideas about extraterrestrial intelligence; since "the farther intelligent life-forms are from the sun, the less matter inhibits the unfolding of rationality," humans must occupy a "middle rung" on the "cosmic ladder" of intelligence, between "the small, sun-blackened, and heat-frazzled Mercurians crazily dashing about" and "the ponderous and somber sages of Saturn" (pp. 117-21). Worse, Kant's Newtonian suppositions propped up his opprobrious racist belief that skin tone correlates with intelligence, with black skin being a "distinct proof" of "stupidity" (pp. 121-4). Schonfeld nicely avoids hagiography (indeed, his rhetorical ethos occasionally swings a bit far in the other direction, and some of his rather quick dismissals will no doubt be contested), but on the issue of "Kant's Alleged Racism," Kant is let off the hook a bit easily: "Kant's racist opinions reveal the deficiencies of the man, but not the failings of his philosophy" (p. 124). As Schonfeld documents, however, Kant's personal prejudices led to philosophical contradictions as well.

Predictably, Kant's struggle to reconcile a noncompatibilist notion of freedom with a mechanistic worldview was no more successful than his attempts to "reconcile physics with a divinely inspired purpose" (p. 98). To account for libertarian freedom and a purposeful creator God, Kant introduces "two incompatible types of causation in one and the same world" (p. 99). He invokes a mysterious "physical influx" reminiscent of the vitalistic notion of an empirically efficacious yet naturalistically irreducible "living force" (p. 54) he had proposed in his earliest publication, a "debacle" mercilessly lampooned by Lessing (p. 37). Kant never solved this antinomy of freedom and determinism, but the very idea that there was no solution to such antinomies became a positive insight for his critical philosophy. Where the precritical project sought to marry the perspectives of physics and metaphysics, the critical philosophy made their divorce axiomatic, separating "a `sensible world' described by science" from "an `intelligible world' explored by metaphysics" (pp. 184, 246).

Schonfeld's grasp of the history of science is impressive, and his reconstructions of the young Kant's historical context are meticulous and instructive. By persuasively illustrating the inner logic of Kant's early development, Schonfeld's clear, well-organized, and copiously annotated book makes an important contribution to Kant scholarship.--Iain Thomson, University of New Mexico.