Specters of Reason: Kantian Things and the Fragile Terrors of Philosophy

The initiate has already accustomed the untutored understanding, which clings to the outer sense, to higher concepts of an abstract character. He is now able to see spirit-forms, stripped of their corporeal shell, in the half-light with which the dim torch of metaphysics reveals the realm of shades. Let us now, therefore, having completed our difficult preparation, embark on our perilous journey.

—Immanuel Kant, Träume eines Geistersehers, 1766¹

Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik (Dreams of a spirit-seer, illustrated by dreams of metaphysics) is an oddity in Immanuel Kant’s oeuvre and has often been an embarrassment for scholars. If one is accustomed to the dry prose of Kant’s more famous works, the text’s tone will seem downright strange. Stylistically it is playful—vacillating between hints at occult knowledge (as above), typically abstract philosophical reflections, and occasional outbursts of sarcasm. As far as I know it also includes Kant’s only attempt at a flatulence joke: “If a hypochondriacal wind should rage in the guts, what matters is the direction it takes: if downwards, then the result is a f[art]; if upwards, an apparition or a heavenly inspiration” (Kant 2002, 336). Try that one out the next time someone you know claims to be divinely inspired.

But the tone is not the only thing unusual about Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. Its subject matter has also disconcerted many of Kant’s acolytes. It is a sustained discussion of ghosts and the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Swedenborg had come to Kant’s attention because of his celebrated clairvoyant visions and spirit communications. Today scholars argue about whether the text demonstrates a Swedenborgian influence on Kant or whether the whole thing is essentially an elaborate joke at the mystic’s expense.² It is relevant to our purposes because in this short essay I would like to do two things—gesture at the centrality of spirits to post-Kantian philosophy and expose some of the roots of a tension between reason’s overwhelming power and fragility that many of us may still find hauntingly familiar.

Let me put this in a different way: “monster theory,” insofar as there is anything that merits such a title, has crystalized around a handful of seminal observations: that fear is entangled with desire (the erotic grotesque); that the horrific is often a hybrid operating at the boundaries or intersections of cultural categories; and the clear corollary that rendering something monstrous is often part of a process of othering by which various politically inflected categories (e.g., race, gender, class) are policed.³ Scholars and artists working through monstrosity have repeated a handful of reflections so frequently that they approach platitudes—that humans are the real monsters, that monstrosity is difference, that horror is bodily or embodying. To these we might add the unstated (but often implied) intuition that anything can be rendered monstrous.⁴ These insights are useful because investigating the horrific doppelgangers of a concept can reveal its significant contradictions and resonances. In this essay, I’d like to bring the lens of monster theory to focus on the cultural history of reason.

Kant as Necromancer and the Ghosts of the Cosmic Night

The more the world is emptied of an objective meaning and the more it becomes thoroughly absorbed by our own categories and thus becomes our world, then the more we find meaning eradicated from the world; and the more we find ourselves immersed in something like a cosmic night—to express it in a modern way. The demystification (Entmagisierung) or disenchantment of the world—to use an expression borrowed from Max Weber—is identical with a consciousness of being barred out, of a darkness in which we all move.

—Theodor Adorno, Kants ‘Kritik der reinen Vernunft,’ 1959⁵

Beliefs about the possibility of contact with dead spirits were not new in the nineteenth century. There were plenty of earlier precedents in the works of Swedenborg and others. The mid-nineteenth century did, however, mark a resurgence of interest in...