Is There "A Gap" in Kant's Critical System?

Is There "A Gap" in Kant's Critical System? ECKART FORSTER For Alan Montefiore on the occasion of his 6oth birthday KANT DID NOT MAKE IT easy for his interpreters; yet few problems in his work have left the sympathetic reader quite as puzzled as his remark, made repeatedly in 1798, that there is "a gap" in his critical system. In a letter to Garve of September ~x of that year, for instance, Kant reports "a pain like that of Tantalus" of seeing before him "the unpaid bill of my uncompleted philosophy." There still remains "a gap" in the system of critical philosophy, he writes, which reason demands be filled. 1Of this "gap" in his system Kant also writes a month later to Kiesewetter; informing his former pupil of the work he is currently engaged in, Kant explains: "With that work the task of the critical philosophy will be completed and a gap that now stands open will be filled.''2 These remarks have puzzled commentators ever since. For Kant had completed the 'critical system' eight years earlier, with the publication of the Critique of Judgment. And he had completed it to his own satisfaction, as seems clear from the Preface to this work where he announced: "With this, then, ! bring my entire critical undertaking to a close. I shall hasten to the doctrinal part. ''3 This doctrinal part is, of course, the often promised system of metaphysics in accordance with the critical standards, for which the three Critiques, or the transcendental investigation of the conditions of the possibil1 Kant to Christian Garve, Sept. 2l, 1798, Kant's gesammelte Schriflen, ed. K6nigliche Preuflische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin/Leipzig: de Gruyter, a9ox et seq.), a2:257 (hereafter cited as Ak., volume and page). Trans. in A. Zweig, ed., Kant's Philosophical Correspondence z759-99 (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), 251. Kant toJ. G. C. C. Kiesewetter, Oct. 19, 1798, Ak., x2:258 (Zweig, 252). 3 Ak., 5:17o. Trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford University Press 1952), 7. [533] 534 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~5:4 OCT I987 ity of metaphysics, had merely been the groundwork, the "propaedeutic" (A841/B869). 4 But Kant's remarks in his letters to Garve and Kiesewetter become even more puzzling when we notice the special nature of the project on which he was working, and from which he expected the completion of his critical work. This project, he explained, consists in "the transition from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics.''5 Now Kant had written a Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science twelve years earlier, in 1786, yet there is no mention, in this work, of a required further 'transition' from it to physics. In fact, the possibility of additional philosophical achievement in this field seems to have been ruled out explicitly by Kant when he wrote in the Preface: "I believe that I have completely exhausted this metaphysical doctrine of body, as far as such a doctrine ever extends .... There is no more to do in the way of discovery or addition. ''6 Where, then, is the gap? It is no exaggeration to say that Kant scholars have as yet failed to come to terms with this paradoxical situation, and consequently have failed to fully understand the nature of Kant's last work. Early generations have assumed an onset of senility on Kant's part, and a failure of memory regarding what he had written a decade earlier. Kuno Fischer, most notorious of them all, complained that we get to see "neither the ditch nor the bridge ''7 and suggested that "one may doubt the value of [Kant's last] work.., without previous inspection if one considers both, the frail state in which Kant was at the time, and the completion to which he himself had brought the philosophy which he had founded. ''8 Yet we were deprived of this easy solution to our problem when the Opus postumum became completely available for inspection in 1936 and 1938. It does not bear the marks of senility. And, of course, neither do Kant's other productions from the same period. In the same year, 1798, Kant published his Anthropology and...