THE BRILLIANT IMMODESTY OF KANT

Before turning to the popular philosophers and explaining why they have as visible a part in this study as they do, it is important to elaborate on a theme we only began to develop in the previous chapter. If one failed to understand where the novelty of Kant's Critique of Reason truly lay, it was easy to denigrate its originality or to reabsorb it into more traditional molds of thought. The popular philosophers, as we shall now see, did both. There was, however, inherent in the nature of that Critique, a conceptually even more significant reason for its vulnerability to reabsorption. The fact is that the Critique needed both the Leibnizian model of experience, the kind that the popular philosophers instinctively presupposed, and the kind of phenomenology of experience that the same popular philosophers were pioneering – provided, of course, that both (the model and the phenomenology) were played in a critical key. How to hit this new key was precisely the problem. This last point is the more important and will emerge only at the end of the present chapter. But first, to the Critique of Reason itself.

The opposition between ‘critique’ and ‘metaphysics’ can easily be overplayed. Even Kant saw himself as opposed not to metaphysics as such, but to what he called ‘dogmatic metaphysics.’ His goal was not to abolish the science but to reestablish it on a critical, therefore more secure, foundation.