The events surrounding its appearance at the Tübingen seminary in the 1780s and 90s tell us most of what is important to know about Kantian philosophy as an historical phenomenon. When Kantianism first surfaced, it was in the form of a series of intellectual disturbances among the serious-minded young men who were in training to become Lutheran clergy and teachers.
Some of them are known to us today as star philosophers, most notably Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel. Others, Süskind, Conz, Johann and Carl Flatt, and the director of the seminary, Gottlob Christian Storr, have fallen out the bottom of current philosophical histories owing to their classification as theologians. But this retrospective division of the field makes it almost impossible to obtain an historical view of Kantian philosophy. For, in disturbing the intellectual formation of the Tübingen seminarians, Kantianism had stumbled into a cultural space that knew no clear distinction between philosophy and theology or philosophy and religion, except, as we shall see, such distinctions as arose from the disturbances themselves.
Many of the central questions that would form the stock-in-trade for modern Kantian philosophy were already circulating among the young Tübingers: Could God be an object of theoretical knowledge, given Kant’s strictures on the limits of human understanding? Could morality consist in determining the will solely by thinking the idea of the moral law with no concern for happiness? Could religion consist in teachings and liturgies revealed in the Bible, or was it only a way of respecting the moral law grounded in human reason? For the Tübingers, however, these were not simply philosophical problems to be resolved through discursive arguments leading to correct propositional answers. That is because they concerned how the apprentice intellectuals should attend to and act on their spiritual selves.
In the case of morality, for example, the question that split the seminarians was not the philosophical one of whether Kant had finally discovered the true principle of morality in the idea of the moral law. What divided them rather was the “ascetic” question of whether they could govern their “sensuous inclinations” purely by thinking this idea, unmotivated by any happiness that might flow from their satisfaction. There was no correct philosophical answer to this latter question because its posing formed part of an exercise in which the seminarians attended to and acted on themselves with a view to crafting a higher self. It did not matter that some (Schelling, Hölderlin, Hegel, Diez) declared that they could govern themselves purely by thinking the idea of the moral law, while others (Süskind, Conz, the Flatt brothers) insisted that governing the sensible inclinations was impossible without the promise of happiness coming from the love of God and the redemptive sacrifice of his son. Such differences reflected ungrounded life choices to attend to and shape a higher self in accordance with models transmitted in the spiritual hothouse of the seminary itself.
Kantian philosophy supplied one of these models. During the 1770s, Kant had elaborated the architecture for an ascetic model of man as a double-natured “sensibly affected rational being” consisting of two fundamental natures or faculties. He thus ascribed to man a passive “sensibility” that gives rise to unintelligible sensations and ungoverned desires. And he partnered this sensibility with an active “understanding” or “reason” whose a priori operations render chaotic sensations intelligible and sensuous desires governable.
The ascetic role of the model can be readily discerned. In the epistemic domain, it was how apprentice philosophers came to attend to themselves as swept by a “rhapsody” of sensations, compelling them to seek the intelligibility of experience in the “synthetic” a priori operations of their own minds. In the domain of morality, it supplied the exercise in which the apprentices came to view their wills as at the mercy of their sensuous desire for empirical happiness. This was designed to incite them to seek moral self-determination or “autonomy” purely by thinking the idea or “form” of the moral law that lay within “pure practical reason”.
It is striking that no sooner had he invented it than Kant immediately declared that there could be no rational justification for the model itself. This was because all reasoning supposedly took place within it. From an historical viewpoint, however, this supremacist claim reflects the circumstantial decision to shape a self via the exercises programmed by the model. As for the figure of double-natured humanity itself, it was deeply rooted in an even more profound figuration of double-natured personhood. This was the model of Christ’s two natures, human and divine, that sat at the center of familial, ecclesial, and academic life for all the Tübingen apprentices
In turning this Christology into a philosophy, Kant single-handedly created a splinter form of Lutheran spirituality, initially in the form of the twin Kantian practices of transcendental self-clarification and moral self-determination. Despite their proclaimed universality, the theoretical complexity and ascetic demands of these practices meant that they were suited only to a tiny elite of intellectual athletes found in academic seminaries and philosophy and theology faculties. Outside of those initiated into the philosophical ascesis, nobody would or could be interested in looking for the transcendental principles of experience and morality.
Now we can see the source of the intellectual disturbances that Kantian philosophy unleashed at Tübingen. On the one hand, in his model of double-natured man as a “sensibly affected rational being”, Kant offered the most spiritually ambitious seminarians a philosophical gymnastic through which they could achieve spiritual self-clarity and moral autonomy, apparently independently of all (ecclesial) instruction or liturgy. On the other hand, since this model was a repurposing and refunctioning of the Eucharistic double-natured Christ, the two models remained in close pedagogical proximity. They were optional and alternative means of attaining spiritual self-clarification and moral regeneration
This explains why many seminarians—all of whom had to swear faith in Christ’s “two natures and one person” to qualify for clerical and teaching offices—found themselves oscillating between two figurations of their spiritual formation. One was provided by the figure of the Eucharistic Christ as the means of their communal ecclesial redemption, the other by Kant’s double-natured man as the means of their individual philosophical self-elevation. It also explains why, having identified Kantianism as an elite spiritual splinter movement, the seminary’s director and Lutheranism’s leading theologian, Gottlob Storr, mounted a formidable defense of the ecclesial liturgy of the Eucharist against the philosophical liturgy of Kantianism.
The clashes between Kantianism and its Lutheran progenitor cannot be historically understood as a conflict between philosophy and religion or “reason” and “faith” because these conceptual oppositions were a product of those clashes. In characterizing “philosophy” as the a priori retrieval of timeless universal principles from the “human mind”, Kant ensured its primacy over “religion”. For this meant that religion would be understood contrastively, as the inculcation of positive doctrine for local purposes. This in turn made biblical ecclesiastical religion it into the mere “vehicle” in which a timeless Kantian “pure moral religion” or “pure religion of reason” had been carried into the historical world and by which it would be supplanted there. If, however, the retrieval of universal principles from the mind was an ascetic exercise that depended on the local inculcation of a positive doctrine—in places like the Tübingen seminary—then the Kantian opposition between philosophy and religion would be confined to its local historical context and cultural-political purpose.
Yet, the exercise in Kantian transcendental self-reflection did indeed depend on the inculcation of a positive historical doctrine, namely the doctrine of Kant’s double-natured man. Absent their existential acceptance of this model, Tübingen’s serious young spiritual athletes would not consider themselves swept by chaotic sensations, hence compelled to search their minds for transcendental synthetic principles of knowledge. Neither would they worry about being distracted by sensuous desires and inclinations, hence driven to determine their wills by thinking the idea of an archetypal moral law without any concern for personal happiness.
Kant might well declare that since all reasoning took place within it, the model of double-natured man could not be rationally justified and hence simply had to be accepted. But this turned out to be an extravagant ambit-bid. It found currency only among Kantians, for whom it was a conversion portal through which they entered the transcendental exercises. If during the 1780s Kant had criticized Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy for having a single cognitive faculty then, by the turn of the century, he was being mocked for having two. It was particularly galling for Kant that his new opponents had been among his leading disciples at Tübingen: F.W.J Schelling and G.W.F Hegel.
By 1800, Schelling was teaching that since the subject and object were both brought into reciprocal existence through a fundamental act of absolute intellection or intellectual intuition, it was erroneous of Kant to posit a sensibility as the source of rhapsodic impressions and an understanding as the synthetic source of their intelligibility. It typifies the ruthless reputation mongering of the German idealists that a few years later Hegel would deride both Kant and Schelling: Kant for failing to “mediate” sensibility and understanding and Schelling for collapsing them—allowing Hegel to jeer that Schelling located understanding in nature in the form of electricity! Hegel was of course spruiking his own model. This was centred in a self-developing “spirit” for whom objects were its externalised form. Self-externalization in turn drove the “dialectic” in which the spirit negated the object, turning “substance into subject”, with this simultaneously objectifying the subject into a new object, thence triggering further stages of the spirit’s self-development.
As Kant and Schelling had claimed for theirs, so Hegel declared that there could be no methodological justification for his model. Since it was the form in which the spirit attained self-consciousness, it simply had to be accepted by the apprentices seeking to become conscious of themselves. But like the parallel claims in Kant and Schelling this was a strategy to convert young intellectuals to a particular philosophical ascesis. In Hegel’s case, this was by inciting them to view ambient objects and institutions as the alienated forms of their own consciousness. For the historian, since these models are optional and equivalent ways of attending to, acting on, and exalting a philosophical self, there is nothing to choose between Hegel’s conception of objects as self-alienated consciousness, Kant’s conception of them as transcendental constructs, and Schelling’s view of them as devolved forms of Absolute intellection. And yet philosophers and philosophical historians continue to insist on choosing.
Rather than being symptomatic of a clash between transcendental reason and historical religious teachings, the Tübingen disturbances were in fact indicative of divergent historical configurations of “reason”. These included different ways of relating philosophy to religion and to the historical and natural sciences. Rather than being based in religion or “faith”, the Lutheran opposition to Kantianism arose from a different cultural configuration of knowledge or form of intellectual life: the culture of post-Renaissance humanism. In this, knowledge was understood in terms of the decipherment of historical texts and the recovery of the arts, practices, and forms of knowledge transmitted in them. For the humanists, knowledge thus could not be based in a priori principles retrieved from the mind through transcendental self-reflection. For them, it was nothing more than a name for various historical cognitive arts and practices that had been textually recorded and had to be deciphered using the philological and historical methods transmitted in humanist gymnasia and universities.
Kant’s and Schelling’s Tübingen opponents—figures such as G. F. Seiler and Storr’s collaborator F. G. Süskind—did indeed object to idealist philosophy on theological grounds, but these objections were embedded in a humanist culture of learning and scholarship. The theological objections of the Lutheran humanists to Kantian and absolute idealism were straightforward enough. If the world consisted of appearances internal to the human mind, then how could it be an external reality that God created and governed and in which his Son had been incarnated as the condition of human redemption? It was, however, the humanist culture in which these objections were embedded that would prove decisive and durable. The Bible was indeed cited as the source of these fundamental truths, but it was the Bible as approached via humanist methods that had been developed for the reading of Greek and Roman literature. Like classical literature, the Bible was a trove of precious teachings, but teachings which could only be unlocked using philological and historical methods that treated it as a human artefact.
In the first instance, this meant that Lutheran theology that Storr elaborated at Tübingen was biblical and historical rather than theoretical and transcendental, since the authority of Christ’s gospel teachings was grounded in their historical authenticity as validated by philological and historical investigations—even if this left a grey area where some parts of the Jesus story (his resurrection and heavenly ascent) were treated as Judaic interpolations. At the same time, however, this also meant that the Bible was less the foundation of Lutheran humanism than an important relay for its operations that stretched into the historical and natural sciences more broadly.
Drawing on the accumulated philological and historical scholarship that was concentrated at the university of Göttingen, Lutheran humanists gave short shrift to Kant’s disclosure of a “pure moral religion” concealed within historical biblical Christianity, treating this as a fraudulent interpolation of his own moral philosophy. At the same time, true to their methods, they treated Kantian philosophy like all other forms of learning. They approached it as a body of positive teachings transmitted and learned through scholastic instruction and the reading of books, hence denying the epistemic privilege that flowed from its claim to be the retrieval of a priori principles from the mind.
The humanists took the same approach to Kant’s and Schelling’s (variant) claims to have philosophical knowledge of the natural sciences and the natural world. If the physical world existed independently of the human mind, and if knowledge of it depended on methods that were transmitted through technical books and positive instruction, then the claim that this knowledge had philosophical foundations was groundless. In the case of mathematical physics, for example, the humanists approved Leonhard Euler’s arguments that when combined with experimental method, the mathematical equations that he developed for analytical mechanics and fluid dynamics had resulted in a fully autonomous knowledge of the motion of bodies in the physical world.
There was thus no need for Kantian transcendental laws of experience since, like philological and historical scholarship, mathematical experimental method operated independently of Kantian conceptions of sensible impressions and their a priori synthesis as “experience”. Neither was there any room left for Leibnizian metaphysical substances or “spiritual atoms” (the “monads”), since algebra and geometry divided space to infinity. The notion that all forms of knowledge have transcendental conditions should thus be treated as philosophical propaganda.
As they ramified into the surrounding culture, the Kantian disturbances at Tübingen would not be settled through the discovery of transcendental conditions of experience that applied to all knowledge and a philosophical ethical principle that grounded all morality and religion. Here, the important thing was not that reputation mongers like Schelling and Hegel would seek to wreck the Kantian principles to scavenge parts for their own. Even though their contrivances would provide the focus for the philosophical histories written by their modern apologists, the true source and significance of the Tübingen disturbances lay elsewhere. In Lutheran humanism, Kantianism encountered a configuration of knowledge that gave biblical ecclesiastical Christianity an historical grounding that was independent of the Kantian moral law and that allowed the historical and natural sciences technical grounds autonomous of Kantian transcendental principles of experience.
Since they were only variations on the Kantian philosophical ascesis, Schelling’s absolute idealism and Hegel’s historical dialectic were incapable of resolving the conflict between philosophical and humanist configurations of knowledge or forms of life. It has subsequently become increasingly clear that there was no higher rational or philosophical-historical ground on which this conflict might find resolution. It is thus striking but not surprizing that the disruptions unleashed by the Kant troubles at Tübingen should continue to disturb the waking dreams of the modern academic humanities. This happens whenever post-Kantian philosophers claim to have discovered the transcendental foundations of the historical and natural sciences, while humanist historians treat this claim as something learned from books as a device for the fashioning of post-Kantian philosophers.
