It is worth noting again the dates of Kant's early works: the first Critique appeared in 1781, and the new, and in some places radically reworked edition, in 1787. In 1785, he had published the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which was followed by the Critique of Practical Reason in 1788. However, as Kant was forging ahead with his work with the German reading public somewhat anxiously following each new intellectual explosion coming out of Königsberg, another event took place that was just as important both to the reception of Kant's thought and to development of post-Kantian philosophy as the intellectual currents circulating in the universities and journals: the French Revolution of 1789.

Kant's own philosophy in some ways helped to prepare people for a certain type of reception of the Revolution. The dual consciousness that characterized so many reflective Germans during the pre-Revolutionary period had been reformulated by Kant in a manner that quite surprisingly had made philosophy the inheritor of the energies that Werther had unleashed. In Kant's own distinctions between the phenomenal world and the world of things-in-themselves – and thus between ourselves as pushed around by nature and society, and ourselves as noumenal, autonomous agents – people found both an explanation of their condition and (something that Werther did not give them) an inkling of a way out of that condition.