Fenves - Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth

Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, who later became the first mayor of Knigsberg, wrote a one-act comedy in 1765 entitled Der Mann nach der Uhr; oder, Der ordentliche Mann (The man by the clock; or the orderly man). Heines depiction of Kants later punctuality is among the most famous portraits of his double-sided character, which remains loyal to a strict daily regiment while at the same time executing a revolution in thought:

He lived a mechanically ordered, almost abstract bachelor-life in a quiet, out of the way little street in Knigsberg, an old city at the northeastern border of Germany. I do not think that the great clock of the local cathedral performed its daily routine less passionately and more regularly than its countryman Immanuel Kant.

Strange contrast between the outer life of the man and his destructive, world-crushing thought! Indeed, had the citizen of Knigsberg suspected the full significance of this thought, they would have felt a far more ghastly aversion for this man than for a hangman, since a hangman executes only human beings. But the good people saw in him nothing more than a professor of philosophy, and when, at the appointed hour, he walked by, they gave him a friendly greeting and adjusted their watches accordingly.

Yet, despite all the legends of punctuality that formed around him, Kant could be extraordinarily unreliable in at least one respect: he would announce the near completion of his manuscripts but would then, for whatever reason, fail to deliver them to the press as promised. This is true of every aspect of the philosophical project to which he devoted the last half of his life. In a famous letter to Marcus Herz of February 1772, which first elaborates the idea of critique, Kant writes:

I am now in a position to bring forward a critique of pure reason, which contains the nature of theoretical as well as practical knowledge insofar as it is merely intellectual; of this [critique] I will first elaborate the first part, which contains the sources of metaphysics, its method and limits, and thereafter I will elaborate the pure principles of morality; as far as the first part is concerned, I will publish it within around three months.

(10: 132)

The first Critique appeared nine years later. And as far as the second part of the original plan for a critical enterprise is concerned, the delay is much longer: as early as 1765 Kant had told Johann Heinrich Lambert that he had already elaborated the contents of a few projects that he soon intended to publish, including one entitled Metaphysical Foundations of Practical Philosophy (10: 56). Such promises of prompt publication are not limited to private correspondence, moreover. At the close of the Preface to the Critique of Judgment Kant makes a similar announcement to the public at large: Thus with this I bring my entire critical enterprise to an end. I shall proceed without fail to the doctrinal element in order, wherever possible, still to snatch from my increasing age a modicum of time favorable for that purpose (5: 170). Some seven years later, more than a generation after the original letter to Lambert, the