"Nachschrift eines Freundes":

Kant on Language, Friendship and the Concept of a People

Susan Shell
Boston College
Kant's brief "Postscript of a Friend" serves as a peculiar coda to his life work.
The last of Kant's writing to be published during his lifetime, it is both a friendly
endorsement of Christian Gottlieb Mielcke's newly competed Lithuanian-German and
German-Lithuanian Dictionary, 1 and a plea in Kant's own name for the preservation of
minority languages, Lithuanian in particular. This support for minority languages has no
visible precedent in his earlier writings, in which national, civic and linguistic identities
and associated loyalties tend to overlap. Indeed, Kant's understanding of the
commonwealth as nation-state seems predicated on the fact or myth of ethnic and
linguistic unity and homogeneity. The same apparent lack of precedent also applies to
the Nachschrift's singling out as a people of peculiar civic merit of the Lithuanians, who
are not otherwise mentioned in any of Kant's published or unpublished writings. The
work thus raises an obvious question: why does Kant devote his last published work (and
declining powers) to a topic and cause in which he does not seem to have taken much
earlier interest?
1

I am indebted to Jenks Library, Gordon College, and to Randall M. Gowman, Assistant

Library Director, for generously providing access to their rare original copy of Mielcke's
dictionary [Littauisch-deutsches und deutsch-littauisches Wrterbuch/worinn das vom
Pfarrer Ruhig...ehemals herous gegeben zwar zum Grunde gelegt, aber mit sehr vielen
Wrten, Redens, Arten und Sprchwrten zur hlfte vermehret und verbessert worden
von Christian Gottlieb Mielcke....]. My treatment of the work's three prefaces are based
upon the Gordon College text. So far as I know, they have not been preprinted.
1

1. Prussian Lithuania
Prussian Lithuania (Lithuania Minor) was a region of East Prussia bordering on
Poland, Russia, and other Baltic states. Lithuania Minor (as distinguished from
"Lithuania Major" or the Duchy of Poland-Lithuania) was mainly inhabited by
Lithuanians descended from the Lithuanian population that had settled in East Prussia
following the 1422 Treaty of Melmo. When Duke Albert of Prussia (last Master of the
Teutonic Order) converted to Protestantism in 1525, the Prussian Lithuanians also
became Protestant. (Lithuanians occupying "Lithuania Major," part of the Duchy of
Poland-Lithuania, were mainly Catholic.) Although the original Prussian Lutheran
settlers were farmers, they were joined in the sixteenth century by an influx of educated
Lithuanians. Several of these immigrants made up part of the original core faculty of the
University of Knigsberg (The Albertina). In accordance with Duke Albert's will,
religious services were regularly offered in Lithuanian.
Knigsberg was important early center for the literary flourishing of Lithuanian
and other Baltic languages. The first Lithuanian book -- a Protestant catechism -- was
published there in 1547, and the first Lithuanian grammar in 1653. 2 Believing that pious
subjects made the best soldiers, Frederick William I set up a special Lithuanian Seminar
at the university in the second decade of the 18th century to ensure reliable religious
instruction of the many Lithuanian peasants and farmers who resided in the countryside.
(A Polish Seminar later followed.) 3 According to a report report of 1744 (the year of the

Algirdas Sabaliauskas, We, the Balts [Mes Baltai], Milda Bakyt-Richardson (trans.),
R. E. Richardson (ed.), Science and Encyclopedia Publishers, Vilnius, 1993, 136; quoted
in J. D. Mininger, "Nachschrift eines Freundes: Kant, Lithuania, and the Praxis of
Enlightenment," Studies in East European Thought (vol. 57, no. 1, March 2005), 4-5.
3
Mary Fulbrook, Piety and Politics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983],168.
2

university's 200th anniversary) there were 63 Lithuanian students out of a total of around
1000. As a student at the University, Kant himself had a number of friends of Lithuanian
origin, including Heilsberg, author of one of the three prefaces to Mielcke's dictionary,
and another, whose room he sometimes shared.
If literary Lithuanian was in a period of ascendance during Kant's lifetime, the
political and economic conditions of the rural Prussian Lithuanians was more clouded.
With the establishment of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1702 and an accompanying transfer
of the capital from Knigsberg to Berlin, the legal and economic status of the PrussianLithuanians declined, and many formerly independent farmers were reduced to serfdom.
Prussian-Lithuanian populations seems to have suffered from an unusually high death
rate during the plague of 1709--11 -- a likely sign of their comparative deprivation. At

the same time, Prussian Lithuanians with the opportunity to acquire an education
seem to have experienced few obstacles to their professional advancement.
The Third Partition of Poland-[Greater] Lithuania in 1795 increased by
some 40% the population of Prussia, whose formal boundaries now included a
large number of Poles, East European Jews, and (Catholic) Lithuanians. 4
Prussia suddenly found itself forced to assimilate these widely divergent
population groups within a single economic and legal framework, a circumstance
one might expect to heighten pressures toward political centralization and
instructional uniformity. Indeed, only a few years after publication of Mielke's

In his preface, Mielcke estimates the total number of Lithuanian subjects in all of
Prussia, following the final partition of Poland, to be as many as 200,000
3

dictionary, a serious effort was mounted to abolish the Lithuanian and Polish
seminars entirely. 5
Mielke's dictionary, then, was not only intended to facilitate linguistic
intercourse between two of East Prussia's major population groups (who often
lived side by side but separately). It was also a polemical intervention in broader
political debates about the future of Prussian civic integration and education.
Additionally, the dictionary was part of a growing movement to preserve "archaic"
languages. Lithuanian in particular, with its complex grammatical structure, was
held to be especially close both to the original language of the region and to
ancient Greek, as is strongly urged by David Jenisch, author of the second preface.
Lithuanian is also praised by Mielcke, in his own preface, for its unusual "poetic"
qualities of melody and suppleness -- features likewise linked to the language's
perceived antiquity.
2. Mielcke, Jenisch and Heilsberg
Kant's "postscript of a friend" was, among other things, a visible boost of support
by a renounced philosopher for a project publicly supported by two men with whom Kant
had warm relations extending over many years.
Christian Gottlieb Mielcke, a small town cantor, skilled philologist and
accomplished author and poet in the Lithuanian language, was in several ways an
exemplary product of the university's Lithuanian seminar and the literary, civic and
religious skills it tended at its best to foster. His father, Peter Gottlieb Mielcke,

Mininger, 6.
4

participated and taught briefly in the seminar, which was also attended by two sons, who,
like their father, composed popular hymns in the Lithuanian language. Christian attended
the University of Konigsberg in the early 1760's and subsequently was appointed cantor
in the small Lithuanian town of Pillkallen ("Pilkainis" in Lithuanian).
Mielcke's major literary work, "Pilkainis," is generally regarded as the first
historical poem composed in the Lithuanian language. Its chronicle of that town's history
from Pagan times charts difficulties of political and religious reform under a variety of
challenging conditions, including the plague of 1709-11, in which two thirds of the
Lithuanian population is estimated to have lost their lives, leaving many abandoned
properties that were subsequently filled by German-speaking "colonists." Mielcke's own
somewhat impoverished career as underpaid cantor in a bilingual "colonial" setting no
doubt enabled him to experience some of these challenges first hand.
Mielcke was also an early champion of Krisijonas Donelaitis, another important
Lithuanian author.
Mielcke's dictionary expanded upon the earlier Prussian-Lithuanian dictionary
compiled by Philipp Ruhig and published in 1747. (Ruhig was also a small town pastor
and product of the Lithuanian seminar.) The linguistic inadequacies of Ruhig's work are
noted in Mielcke's preface, which also includes a brief discussion of differences among
various Lithuanian dialects and a very brief appendix on Lithuanian poetry.
Mielcke's dictionary included additional prefaces by Daniel Jenisch (1762-1804)
and by Christoph Friedrich Heilsberg (1726 or 1727-1804), each of whom had a strong
personal connection with Kant.

Jenisch, a Berlin preacher and deacon, had studied with Kant in the early 1780's.
He must have pleased his teacher, for he was a regular diner at Kant's table prior to
leaving Konigsberg in 1786 (with Kant's recommendation to Biester in tow). 6 Jenisch
later published a German translation of George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric, in
which Jenisch went out of his way to praise Kant's thought, at the same time emphasizing
its similarities with the Scottish enlightenment. 7 His enthusiasm for Kant's work is also
reflected in several admiring letters that Jenisch sent Kant in the mid to late 1790's. 8
Jenisch's preface 9 stresses the philosophic and "anthropological" importance of
Lithuanian, which he takes to be closely related to the language of that area's "Urvolk," as
well as to ancient Greek -- a claim on his part that he regards as so novel that it is likely
to provoke "laughter." (Within a few years, such assertions, along with similar claims as
to the connection between of Lithuanian and Sanskrit, would become the conventional
wisdom.) Indeed, the affinities and dis-affinities of languages furnishes the historian with
a "guiding thread through the darkness of antiquity" and the "labyrinth" of ancient
migrations and the early minglings of populations -- themes that Kant's postscript will
echo.

See Johann Erich Biester's letter to Kant of June 11, 1786 [10: 453].
Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001,
275. On relations between Kant and Jenisch, See also Kant's letter of [10: 486]; Jenisch
had done Kant the favor of revealing the name of an anonymous reviewer of the Critique
of Practical Reason. Jenisch was also the author of a 1796 defense of Kant's
metaphysical, moral an aesthetic thought. For a somewhat more negative assessment of
Jenisch's character, see the "Biographic Sketch" in the Cambridge University Press
edition of Kant's correspondence [586-588].
8
See his letters of April 20 and May 22, 1796 ([12: 72-81] and [12: 83] respectively).
The dating of Heilsberg's letter to Kant of May 22, 1796 is presumably coincidental.
9
See note 1 above. The pages of the prefaces in Mielcke's dictionary are not numbered
in the text.
7

Jenisch also praises the Lithuanian character, especially the chastity of Lithuanian
women, as witnessed by the absence (as he insists) of a native word for "adultery"(!).
Other virtues include self-sufficiency, compassion for the unfortunate, and a strong sense
of hospitality. Among their few vices, Jenisch lists tendencies toward superstition and
toward drunkenness. And he urges the preservation of all languages, "however crude," as
the site in which "the spirit of human beings" develops intellectually:
Every single language is in the same way a true expression of the way of thinking
and feeling of the people who speak it. Just as language is the most artful and
multi-colored portrait of the human spirit in all its inner motions. With every
dead language there is lost...an invaluable piece of the portrait of the human
race....In every language, however crude and unformed, the spirit of man develops
a measure of wit, a gift for observation, judgment and acuity that is very
important and useful to the linguist, psychologist and philosophic observer of
human beings. 10
Especially noteworthy is the way in which civic and scientific goals here work together:
preservation of native languages in their purity not only enlightens and refines the
popular mind, in Jenisch's view; it also brings out what is most peculiar -- a point we will
return to when we take up the Nachschrift directly.
Heilsberg , who was at the time Counselor of War and Regional Administration
(Krieges= und Domainen=Raths),was apparently of Lithuanian origin. 11 Heilsberg had

10

Jenisch's emphasis here on sketching a "portrait" of the human race, and on

"philosophic observation" is reminiscent of Kant's own very early Observations on the
Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime.
11
See Nerija Putinait, "Kant und Donelaitis: ber den litauischen Volkscharakter,"
Pdagogische Universitt Vilnius, Lehrstuhl fr Ethik: "Als Kant in den ersten
7

known Kant since their student days, when they were close companions who often played
billiards together. Kant evidently tutored Heilsberg for free, and Heilsberg seems to have
done Kant a number of favors in return. 12 That warm relations persisted is suggested both
by Kant's much later solicitation of medical help from Marcus Herz (Kant's former
student and close associate) on Heilsberg's behalf, and by an inconsequential (but in its
own way intimate) extant letter of the mid 1790's. 13
Heilsberg's preface weighs the state's various interests in preserving multiple
languages among its various provinces, rather than opting (like Austria) for linguistic
Studienjahren/im ersten Studienjahr bei Dr. Schulz Theologie studierte, hatte er zwei sehr
enge Freunde, die als Litauer bezeichnet wurden: Christoph Friedrich Heilsberg und
Johann Heinrich Wlmer. In seiner Gedchtnisrede nach dem Tode Kants erinnerte sich
Professor Samuel Gottlieb Wald:"Lietuvi atvilgiu jis turjo ypating palankum,
kadangi jo pirmieji akademiniai draugai, Wlmeris ir Heilsbergas buvo kil i Lietuvos,
ir jis yra pareiks, kad kiekvienas lietuvis turi polink satyrai, taiau retai juokiasi"[
Wald's Gedchtnisrede auf Kant", in: Kantiana. Beitrge zu Immanuel Kants Leben und
Schriften, Hrsg. Dr. R. Reicke, 1860, S. 11.]. Diese Information erhielt Wald neben
anderen Quellen von Heilsberg persnlich. Nach dem Tode Kants beantwortet dieser als
alter Freund des Philosophen die Fragen Walds. Zu dieser Zeit war Heilsberg wohl der
einzige Mensch, der Auskunft zum Wesen Kants in dessen Studienjahren erteilen konnte.
Heilsberg und Wlmer waren Kants Partner beim Billiard. Zusammen gewannen sie
betrchtliche Geldsummen, doch bald wollte niemand mehr gegen sie spielen.
Ohne Zweifel waren die zwei besten Jugendfreunde Kants Litauer. Gewiss knnte heute
die Frage diskutiert werden, was Litauer im damaligen Kontext bedeutete. Zweifellos
verwies die Bezeichnung in erster Linie auf den Ort der Abstammung. Heilsberg
(1726/1727 1804) wurde in Ragaine Ragnitt geboren, studierte an der Knigsberger
Universitt und war spter in Knigsberg als Rat fr Kriegs- und domenu (Domnen-?)
Angelegenheiten ttig. Als Leiter einer speziellen Kommission fr kirchliche und
schulische Fragen hatte er auch einen nicht geringen Einfluss auf die Belange der
Volksbildung in Ostpreuen. Er war es, der Christian Gottlieb Mielcke eindringlich
zuredete, sein deutsch-litauisches und litauisch-deutsches Wrterbuch
zusammenzustellen, fr das Heilsberg spter das Vorwort verfasste. Wlmer (oder
Wlner) (1726-1797) wurde in Pilkainiai geboren, einem fast ausnahmslos von Litauern
bewohnten Ort. Nach dem Universittsstudium zog er nach Berlin, wo er als Kriegsrat
und spter als einer der hchsten und einflussreichsten Gerichtsbeamten Preuens
arbeitete. Beide Freunde hielten bis zum Lebensende sehr engen Kontakt zu Kant.
12
Kuehn, 63. These favors may have included, for example, lending the impecunious
Kant clothing while his were being repaired.
13
See the letter from Heilsberg dated May 22, 1796 [12: 82-83].
8

uniformity. His discussion places special emphasis on the requirements of civic and
military obedience (which tends to be more reliable when orders are delivered in a
people's native language). At the same time, his accompanying praise for the Lithuanian
character -- and, especially, their loyalty and obedience -- is not without certain
hesitations stemming from an alleged standoffishness on their part, along with a general
suspicion of foreigners (e.g., their own colonial German neighbors).
It is difficult to say what Heilsberg might have written in his preface had he been
less encumbered by official duty. In any event, he was evidently a strong supporter of
Mielcke's dictionary effort. Indeed, Mielcke describes that support in his own preface as
having been crucial to his decision to take on the arduous labor of completing it.
3. Friendship in Kant's Late Writings
Kant's Nachschrift is not only his first and only published "postscript," but also
the only publication containing an explicit declaration of friendship on his part. Related
events and writings of the late 1790's suggest that he did not take such public
proclamations lightly and that his self-description as a "friend" here deserves more
attention than one might otherwise be inclined to pay it.
The theme of friendship figures especially strongly in Kant's last years, beginning
with Kant's most unfriendly public exchange with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whom he had
earlier counted, along with Carl Leonhard Reinhold, as philosophic allies. "May God
protect us from our friends," he had declared in his famous public letter to Fichte, for "we
shall manage to deal with our enemies ourselves" [12: 370-371] 14

14

"Declaration concerning Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre," August 7, 1799. [12: 370-371].

The Declaration specifically warns of "so-called" friends who "think one thing and say
another." For an insightful discussion of the implications of Kant's "open letter" to Fichte,
9

Two essays soon followed in which the issue of false friendship (especially
among philosophers) looms large. As Kant's Announcement of the Immanent Conclusion
of a Treaty for Eternal Peace in Philosophy concludes:
The lie ("from the father of lies, from which all evil has come into the world") is
properly speaking [eigentlich] the only rotten spot in human nature; however
much the tone of truthfulness [Ton der Wahrhaftigkeit] (according to the example
of many chinese grocers who place above their shops the inscription [Ausschrift]
in golden letters "here no one is deceived") is the common tone, especially in
matters that concern the supersensible. -- The command: You ought not lie (even
if it were with the most pious intentions), taken up most inwardly in philosophy as
a grounding principle is that alone which would not only bring about eternal
peace but also secure it for the entire future. [8:422]
It seems likely that in penning these lines that Kant had partly in mind recent public
betrayals (as he evidently saw it) by his erstwhile philosophic friends. But he was also no
doubt drawing on deeper argumentative currents developed in major writings of the
period (such as Religion within the Boundaries of Bare Reason) in which the struggle to
overcome the "inner lie" immerges as morally and politically crucial. 15
Kant takes up the issue of honest friendship in the section that concludes the
"Elements of Ethics" (Part One of the Doctine of Virtue) -- "On the most inward union of
love and respect in friendship." According to that discussion, ideal friendship presents

see Peter Fenves, Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth [New York and London:
Routledge, 2003], 115-116. As Fenves notes, Kant had privately addressed Fichte only
two years earlier as his "treasured friend."[12: 221]
15
For a fuller discussion, see Shell, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy, Chapter Five.
10

itself, in the first instance, as a point of equilibrium between the attractive forces of love
and repulsive forces of respect.[6: 469]
That ideal is shaded, however, by the near impossibility of complete
openheartedness even among friends: "We wisely hesitate to criticize a friend, even when
the duty of benevolence so dictates, for fear of arousing the latter's fear that he has lost
our respect."[6: 470]
This difficulty is partly answered, according to the Doctrine of Virtue, by
replacing "aesthetic" friendship (or friendship based merely on feeling, which is always
unstable) with "moral" friendship -- i.e., "the complete confidence [Vertrauen] of two
persons in reciprocally opening up [Erffnung] their secret judgments and feelings to the
extent that this is consistent with their mutual respect for one another." [6: 471]
In most situations such candor would violate the dictates of prudence, given the security
dilemma in which our social dealings ordinarily place us. Still, should one find someone
"with understanding, " from whom one need not be anxious about such a danger, and
who shares one's way of judging things:
one could open up with complete confidence and air one's thoughts: [in such a
case] one is not completely alone with one's thoughts, as in a prison, and one
enjoys a freedom lacking in great crowds, where one must shut oneself up within
oneself.[6: 472]
Such a person, who combines discretion with a noble way of thinking, is rare, especially
since "with the closest friendship" what is required is that this "intelligent and trusted"
friend also be bound "not to communicate these secrets to others, however reliable he
might think them." Moral friendship of this sort is to be distinguished from "pragmatic"

11

friendship, which mainly concerns itself "with another's ends," and is rooted in perception
of another's neediness. Friendship of the latter sort, Kant says, has "neither the purity
[Lauterkeit] nor the required completeness that is demanded for an exactly determining
maxim." Accordingly, it is merely a "wishful ideal" that "has no limit in rational
concepts" and that must also "be very limited in experience." [6: 472]
Pragmatic friendship, which takes its bearings from the neediness of others (and
hence the (false) presumption of one's own superiority, is an illusory goal of the sort Kant
elsewhere labels "berschwinglich," congruent with neither the demands of nature nor the
limits of human reason. Moral friendship, by way of contrast, is rooted in a trust that
takes equality for granted, being "the complete confidence of two persons in revealing
their secret judgments and feelings to each other, insofar as such disclosures are
consistent with mutual respect."[6: 472] At the same time, friendship, so conceived,
substitutes mutual confidence, consistent with respect, for Kant's earlier rational formula
(love and respect in equilibrium).
Friendship so conceived is not just the "hobby horse of novelists" (as Kant had
earlier in the text implied [6: 470]); it is not merely a [wishful] ideal, but, as Kant now
insists, "actually exists here and there in its perfection." Contrary Kant's own frequently
quoted proverb -- "friend, there are not friends" -- perfect friendship is indeed achievable
in the shape of a reciprocal trust and confidence which, though necessarily rare, is not
impossible.
To be sure, the idea of friendship (as a maximum of good disposition toward one
another) is a duty set by reason that remains unattainable in practice, presupposing as it
does the mutual possession of a morally good will.[6: 469] Still, moral friendship of the

12

sort here described -- one in which one can open up one's thoughts completely to another
-- represents a determinate rational goal that is unique in Kant's late corpus: achievable
perfection of a kind.
It is difficult to know precisely what Kant intended to convey by declaring
himself a "friend" in the title of his Nachschrift. Kant was relatively sparing in his use of
the term "friend," even in private letters. And while Kant held professions of friendship
out of politesse may be permissible (especially since no one is deceived by it), 16 it seems
unlikely that Kant meant his profession here to be taken for an empty courtesy.
Certainly, Kant was friendly to the cause of Lithuanian enlightenment. And
certainly, too, he could call himself the friend of Jenisch and Hielsberg without being
guilty of social deception. At the same time, there is something in the content of his
treatment of the Lithuanian character that recalls his late treatment of moral friendship
proper: namely, an emphasis (missing in the praises of the Lithuanians offered by Jenisch
and Heilsberg) upon Lithuanian truthfulness and candor. Lithuanians are characterized, in
other words, by the very qualities that mark the "moral friend" -- the sole practical ideal
Kant deems fully achievable-- and whose absence proves unusually and perhaps uniquely
threatening to the possibility of genuine "friendship for the human race"
[Menschenfreundlichkeit].
4. Kant on the Lithuanian Character
Kant's Nachschrift begins as follows:
One can see from the preceding description that the Prussian Lituanian is very
deserving of being maintained in the pecularity of his character -- and, since
16

Pragmatic Anthropology from a Cosmopolitan Intention, "On Permissible Moral

Semblance." [7: 152].
13

language is a preeminent means of guiding the formation [Bildung] and

preserving of this peculiarity -- he is also very deserving of being preserved in the
purity of his language in instruction both in school and from the pulpit. To this I
yet add the following: that farther from slavish obsequiousness [Kriecherei] than
the neighboring peoples, he is used to speaking to those above him in a tone of
equality and trusting openheartedness, [a tone] that those superiors do not take
amiss nor standoffishly refuse a handshake, because they find him willing to go
along with all that is fair [allem Billigen]. A pride that is entirely distinct from all
arrogance [Hochmuch] of a certain neighboring nation when someone among
them is more noble, or rather [it is] a feeling for his value which indicates courage
and at once guarantees his loyalty [Treue].[8: 445]
Kant's statement takes its initial bearings from the preface by Heilsberg that immediately
precedes it. That the peculiarities of the Lithuanian people and their language "deserve"
protection follows, in the first instance, from the state's interest in maintaining both their
courage and their loyalty -- key features of good soldiers. One might well think (in
keeping with Heilsberg's own emphasis) that this exhausted the Prussian state's primary
interest in the matter. (Such, at least, are the main concerns of the warlike and revolutionfearing government to which the major political writings of the late 1790's -- Perpetual
Peace, the Conflict of the Faculties, and The Metaphysics of Morals -- had all centrally
addressed themselves.) And Kant could hardly have been unaware that that original
establishment of the Lithuanian and Polish seminars had had a predominantly military
purpose.

14

The civic qualities at stake, however, exceed what Machiavellian statecraft (or
Kant's "political moralist") sees fit to value. The Lithuanian rises above neighboring
peoples in his ability to communicate to his [social] superiors his own equality without
their taking offense. That facility arises, in part, from his readiness to agree what is
"fair." But it also arises from an open-heartedness and trusting candor that encourage his
social superior to extend his hand in what one is almost tempted to call civic friendship.
That candor resembles, even as it morally surpasses, the sense of honor that is valued by
the aristocracy. Lithuanians are men with whom those "above them" are willing to do
business on the basis of mutual trust, and with it, genuine respect. At the very least,
Lithuanians do nothing to forfeit such respect, and their demeanor and tone are
themselves object lessons in how social superiors and inferiors ought to conduct
themselves.
Lithuanians so characterized (as courageous, loyal, fair, trusting and honest) are
superior in their equality -- both better than their neighbors and able to find common
ground with those among themselves who are more noble. Their avoidance of all slavish
servility speaks to the primary defect of moral character to which Christianity wrongly
understood makes men vulnerable -- a theme that Religion within the Boundaries of Bare
Reason had much emphasized. Their trust gives them a leg up in humanity's struggle to
put an end to war, a battle that will be won only if and when trust overwhelms human
suspicion, as On Perpetual Peace made clear. Even their loyalty and courage might, if
rightly used, advance the cause of "moral politics" that Machiavellian rulers betray.
The primary meaning of courage in a moral sense, is not martial, after all, but resides
rather (as Kant puts it in the Anthropology) in a willingness "to venture something " in

15

the name of duty "even at risk of being ridiculed by others." Precisely because love of
honor is the constant companion of virtue, such willingness represents a higher level of
courage than does steadfastness upon the battlefield. [7: 257] Lithuanian courage
expresses itself in a similar sort of warranted self-confidence.
5. Lithuanians and Poles
The "neighboring nation" to which Lithuanians are here pointedly compared
would seem almost certainly to be the Poles, whose "arrogance" and general desire for
"mastery" Kant elsewhere notes. "Arrogance," moreover, goes together with
"obsequiousness" -- the other vice that Kant attributes to this neighboring people.
Arrogance, or the inclination "to always be on top," according to the Doctrine of Virtue:
is a kind of desire for honor [Ehrbegierde], in which we demand that others little
esteem themselves in comparison with us, and is thus a vice opposed to the
respect that every human being may lawfully claim.[6: 465]
As such it differs from that proper "pride" [Stolz] which consists in "love of honor"
(animus elatus), i.e., in a concern, rightly called "noble," to yield "nothing of one's human
dignity in comparison with others." [6: 465] Arrogance, by way of contrast, reveals an
inner "meanness" inasmuch as it a betrays a knowledge that were one's fortunes to
reverse, one would not find it difficult to "grovel" [kreichen].[6: 466]
Arrogance, according to Kant's unpublished notes, is not the only Polish fault.
Like the Russians (to whom the Lithuanians are also later advantageously compared),
Poles exhibit a related disproportion between force [Gewalt], law and freedom. Kant's
own copy of the Anthropology [1798, 1800], for example, contains the following

16

handwritten remark: 17 "Russians and Poles are not capable of any autonomy. The
former because they want to be without absolute masters; the latter, because they all want
to be masters." These comments are consistent with a series of similar notes dating back
many years which raise similar doubts as to the civic aptitude of these two peoples. The
Poles enjoy law and freedom without force, or, alternatively, they suffer from a lack of
"rightful force" to make law effective -- a state that Kant ironically calls "Polish
freedom." (The Russians display "stiffness" and a general refusal to be "commanded" or
"instructed"). 18 As Kant puts it in another reflection:
Freedom, Force [Gewalt], and Law.
1. Freedom without law, that is without rightful force, is wildness (anarchy). 2.
Freedom and law without force is Polish freedom. Unthing. 3. Force without
freedom and law is barbarism. 4. Force and law without freedom is despotism."
Another early note links proportional relations between force, freedom and law with a
state allowing for the full development of human talents:
"If in the case of people freedom under law with little force first emerges, and
force increases only in proportion to freedom and law, the common good rises to
the greatest level of perfection. Natural right is realized. The development of all
talents." (#1501 [15:790]).
That the republican condition continues, in Kant's late view, to be developmentally
privileged is suggested by the Idea for a Universal History, where that condition is
17

."[7:316n.; CUP 411n.] On the likely significance of such notes, see the helpful
introduction by Gnter Zller in Kant, Anthropology, History and Education, ed. by
Gnter Zller and Robert Louden [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 228229.
18
See Reflections on Anthropology #1497 [15:774]: "Poles are weak. Arrogant and
obsequious. Russians difficult to instruct and command. Stiff sensibility."
17

represented as the "womb" in which (alone) all human predispositions can be expected to
develop to their fullest. [8: 28; cf. 27, 22, 20] As that essay also makes clear, this
republican womb (unlike its merely natural counterpart) is one for which mankind can
itself take credit -- a central point in Kant's ongoing dispute with Johann Gottlieb Herder,
and one to which we shall return.
In another early reflection, Kant also comments disparagingly on the Poles' and
Russians' "half-Oriental" character, a feature that he associates with their lack of
"concepts." A use of concepts first arises, it would seem, among the ancient Greeks (as
demonstrated by their skill in mathematics and in law-giving) before appearing
throughout the rest of Europe. 19 However Kant may come to view the question of
European/Asiatic difference (and there are signs that he continued in his later years to
regard Asians as both intellectually and morally deficient), the civic formula of force,
freedom, and law in due proportion persists.
As he puts it in a relatively late reflection:
Because law (of freedom) requires much reason, the ...first governments are
(either) barbaric. Law and force without freedom or: freedom and law wthout
...force. The first remains crude: Mexicans, Orient. The second [cultivates itself
very much but is very lacking in peace [Unruhen] Greece] destroys itself and is
swallowed up by others. Polish freedom.[15: 893] 20

19

See the early reflection # 1370 [15: 596], describing the Greeks as the first people to
arrive at concepts, as appears through mathematical demonstration and through lawgiving. See also Reflection # 1497 [15: 772] to similar effect. And compare [15: 773]:
"Poles and Russia are half-oriental peoples. That, namely, [do not think] according to
concepts but [breaks off]."
20
See also Reflection #1468 [15: 647].
18

The formula is again repeated in the Anthropology, were Kant uses it to sketch the "main
features" of "the human species' character." [7: 330-331] "One can think," he says, it,
"four combinations of force with freedom and law":
A. Law and freedom without force (anarchy)
B. Law and force without freedom (despotism).
C. Force without freedom and law (barbarism)
D. Force with freedom and law (republic).
Man's character is revealed in his difficulty in achieving possibility "D" -- the only
combination that constitutes a true civil "state" [7: 331] -- a difficulty deriving from a
lack of "frankness" that betrays, in turn, his "propensity for malice." [7: 332] 21
Accordingly, mankind is a rational being of such a sort that the principle of
cosmopolitan society by which he ought rationally to live is merely "regulative" rather
than "constitutive." [7: 332]Read in this light, Kant's emphasis on Lithuanian "frankness"
and "sincerity" -- qualities not mentioned in the preceding prefaces -- becomes newly
pertinent, calling to mind what he elsewhere calls "the uprightness" that is "originally
natural to humanity." [5: 335] Nor is this the only indication of the Lithuanians' peculiar
civic aptitude.
6. The Greek Connection
The Lithuanian's "feeling for his value" even in the face of his social superiors not
only indicates the pride that Kant associates with true "love of honor"; it also echoes a
similar description, published ten years earlier, of the ancient Greeks and Romans:

21

Or, alternatively, his "propensity for lying. " Otherwise put, his character consists in
"the attempt not to allow his character to become visible."[7: 331n.] (See here the note
added to Kant's handwritten version of the Anthropology.
19

The age and peoples whose strong drive toward lawful sociability through which
a people constitutes an enduring commonwealth, wrestled with the great
difficulties that surround the difficult task of uniting freedom (and hence also
equality) with a compulsion (more respect and submission from duty than from
fear): such a people had first to discover the art of reciprocal communication
between the most educated [ausgebildetesten] part [Theil] with the crudest,
discover, that is to say, the attuning [Abstimmung] of the enlargement and
refinement of the former with the simplicity and originality of the latter, and in
this way that mean, between the highest culture and a sufficient [genugsam]
nature, that also constitutes the right standard, given by no universal rule, for taste
as universal human sense.
A later age will not easily make these models dispensable: for it will be
ever further from nature so that finally without having any lingering examples of
it, they will be in a position in which they can hardly form the concept of the
happy union in one and the same people of the lawful compulsion of the highest
culture with the force and correctness of a free nature that feels its own value. [5:
356; emphasis added]
In this crucial passage from the Critique of Judgment Kant traces the establishment of the
ancient republics to an intimate communication that combined the lawful refinement of
the nobility (on the one hand) with the originality and freedom of the popular classes (on
the other). The progressive decay of this "natural" originality and freedom seems to
make the ancient models (and the classical literature [and language] that preserves their
spirit) indispensable for purposes of modern civic education. To be sure, there are

20

suggestions scattered throughout the Critique of Judgment of related hopes on Kant's part
for the French Revolution. Had that revolution succeeded in lawfully enacting a
constitutional monarchy conducted on republican principles (as still seemed possible in
1789, the year in which the Critique of Judgment was published), reliance upon the
classical "humaniora" would no longer have been necessary: one would then be able to
form the "concept" of "the happy union in one and the same people" of "lawful
compulsion" and "a free nature that feels its own value" on the basis of a contemporary
model. 22
By the late 1790's, and following upon the Terror and Napoleonic conquest, any
such expectations on Kant's part have faded. It is now the disinterested reception of the
storming of the Bastille -- not the event itself -- that Kant links with the entrance of the
"idea" [of right] into human history. The French may be a people "rich in spirit," but their
"spirit of freedom" is also now described as being infectiously excessive, provoking "an
enthusiasm that shakes everything and goes beyond all bounds."[7: 313-14]. The "true
[civic] standard " that unites refinement with simplicity and law with nature must find its
contemporary model elsewhere, if any, indeed, exists to be found.
Read in this light, Kant's late encomium to the Lithuanians leaps out. Thanks to
an isolation that has kept them confined to a small space for many centuries -- an
isolation to which their "unmixed" language testifies -- the Lithuanians continue to
display a "natural freedom" that other European peoples have lost owing either to
admixture or to the effects of civilization. What makes the peculiarities of the
Lithuanians "deserving of preservation," from Kant's perspective, is not only their
22

On this point, see Shell, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy [Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2009], "Introduction to Part Two."
21

immediate civic utility, then, but also the rare example that they furnish of man's benign
originality -- the free nature that must be educated, to be sure, but that high culture alone
cannot replace.
Jenisch's hypothesis as to the proximity of the Lithuanian language both to
ancient Greek and to the lost language of the original Baltic Urvolk lends further support
to such a reading. One need not presume that Kant embraced Jenisch's argument in its
entirety to conclude that Kant might have been influenced by it, or at least reconfirmed in
an opinion he had already formed as to the possible link between the Lithuanians and the
(ancient) Greeks, whose own native civic gifts (as Kant argues in the nearly
contemporaneous Anthropology) are no longer evident.
The second, and final, paragraph of the Nachtschrift certainly draws attention to
Jenisch's Preface, which had expanded at some length upon the utility of the Lithuanian
language for purposes of anthropological science. Kant's concluding paragraph echoes
that concern, while also drawing it in novel directions:
...even apart from the utility that the state can draw from the assistance of a people
of such character: one should not hold for little the advantage that the sciences-especially the ancient history of the migration of peoples -- might draw from the
still unmixed language of a folk lineage that is ancient and confined to a narrow
region and as it were isolated, and therefore preserving its peculiarity is already of
great value. Bsching much lamented on this account the early death of the
learned Professor Thunmann in Halle, who had expended his forces upon these
investigations with somewhat too much strain. -- In general, even if so great a
yield were not to be expected from every language, it is still important for the

22

formation/education of every small people [Volklein] in a country -- for example,

in Prussian Poland -- to teach it through instruction in schools and from the pulpit
according to the model [Muster] of the purest (Polish) language, even if this
should only be spoken outside the country, and gradually bring it more and more
into circulation [nach und nach gangbar zu machen]: because through this the
language becomes more suited to the peculiarity of the people, and their
concept/the concept of the same thereby becomes more enlightened/clarified." [8:
445]
The preservation of Lithuanian (and other minority languages), then, serves both the
interests of science and those of practical popular instruction. Consideration of pertinent
sections of the Anthropology brings out in a striking way the deeper connection between
these seemingly unrelated goals.
7. "Peoples" and "Nations" in the Anthropology
According to the Anthropology, 23 the term "people" designates " the multitude of
human beings united in a region, insofar as they constitute a whole." The term "nation"
(gens) designates that popular " multitude, or even the part of it, which recognizes itself
as united into a civic whole through common descent, is called nation (gens)."
Nationhood thus implies a kind of civic self-consciousness that peoplehood as such does
not (necessarily) involve. Indeed, those elements of the "people" who "exempt
themselves" from civic laws, become a "rabble" or "mob" that excludes them from
enjoying the quality of national "citizenship" [7: 310]

23

The dates of the two editions of the Anthropology (1798 and 1800 respectively) suggest
that this material was very much on Kant's mind when composing the Nachschrift.
23

The wholeness of a nation is thus a function, at least in part, of the reciprocal

identification of its members as fellow citizens who are in some conscious sense "codescended." The wholeness of a people, on the other hand, is more difficult to parse,
making the characterization of "peoples" problematic in a way that characterizing races
(or species) is not.
"Characterization," in any scientifically meaningful or useful sense, requires a
"concept,", i.e., a representation through which a collection of individuals is grasped as a
whole. A concept adequate to this demand involves a determinate principle of unity.
Such a principle enables one to distinguish those individuals that belong from those that
do not. In the case of species (and races) the required principle is furnished by the
observable propensity of parents to produce fertile offspring with the same characteristics
(Buffon's definition), owing to the unchanging "predispositions" that they pass along to
them. Biological classification by species and race is possible because of the inheritance
of such predispositions -- e.g., in the case of human races, unvarying skin color. 24
The classification of peoples cannot draw upon such unambiguous indications.
Peoples are more like "varieties," in which features change from generation to generation
within certain limits and according to a certain family pattern. To make matters even
more difficult, most modern peoples are the result of "inter-minglings" that may suppress
some original native features while giving rise to new ones. What predispositions may
continue to exist beneath the surface and in potentia, as it were, is difficult to establish.
The anthropological observer's task is further complicated by the effects of institutions in
shaping the innate predispositions of human beings in this or that direction. In sum: given

24

See for example On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy [8: 167].
24

the lack of evidence concerning the innate character of the original stock from which
modern peoples descend, and given the ease with which innate predispositions can be
"masked" by institutions and other circumstantial forces, differentiation of humanity into
separate "peoples" almost necessarily falls short of scientific rigor.
To be sure, for purposes of a "pragmatic" anthropology, such rigor is not required:
It suffices to describe peoples "as systematically as possible" with a view to
understanding "what people might expect from one another" and "how they might use
one another for their own advantage." Moreover, where nations are concerned -especially those that count as "the most civilized" -- conscious civic unity furnishes a
convenient substitute for our missing scientific knowledge of men's inherent volkisch
qualities. This is true for two main reasons. First, as we have seen, living under civilized
conditions encourages the emergence of inherent volkisch qualities that might otherwise
remain submerged and thus invisible to the contemporary observer. Second, related civic
institutions can themselves provide a principle of unity where common biological
features are lacking. Kant is therefore able to provide ample sketches of the main nations
of Europe -- France, England, Germany, Italy and Spain -- as he had indeed done for
many decades. England is a prime example of external civic factors giving rise to the
necessary national principle, while France is a prime example of the civil state
encouraging the emergence of inherent volkisch qualities, differences specifically
revealed by their respective languages.[7: 314] 25
At the same time, Kant adds the following disclaimer: to the extent that such
characterizations proceed "merely empirically," and in the manner of "geographers,"
25

Note especially the profusion of French synonyms for "spirit" -- terms, Kant says, "that
cannot easily be translated into other languages."
25

rather than "according to rational principles, in the manner of philosophers," they

represent only so many "risky attempts." [7: 312]. The risk is all the greater in the case of
nations that are no longer are or are not yet fully civilized: "Since Russia is not yet what
is required for a determinate concept of the natural predispositions that lie ready to
develop, since Poland is no longer so, and since the nations of European Turkey have
never and never will attain what is necessary for a determinate Volkscharacter," one must
be hesitant in drawing any definitive conclusions, as a consideration of contemporary
Greece brings home.
In the character of the Greeks under the harsh yoke of the Turks and the not much
gentler one of their own Caloyers [i.e., religious priests], their way of sensing
[Sinnesart] (liveliness and carelessness) has no more been lost than has their
physical shape and physiognomy; to the contrary, these properties would
presumably indeed be reestablished should their religious and political forms,
through a fortunate occurrence, procure them the freedom to reestablish
themselves. [7:320-21]
This speculation is supported by the example of the Armenians ("another Christian
people"). Armenians reside in European Turkey but have also wandered freely
throughout Asia without intermingling. As a result (as Kant here argues) their inherent,
and intrinsically benign, volkisch qualities continue to express themselves:
Among the Armenians...there rules a certain commercial spirit of a peculiar sort;
namely, of wandering on foot from the borders of China to the coast of Guinea in
order to buy and sell, which indicates the peculiar descent [Abstamm] of this
reasonable and industrious people, who in a line from northeast to southwest

26

travel through almost the entire extent of the ancient continent and know how to
obtain a peaceful reception from all the peoples they encounter, which proves the
superiority of their character to the fickle and groveling character of the
contemporary Greeks, whose first form can no longer be ascertained. [7: 320]
This much, at least, Kant is willing to judge "probable," namely:
That the admixture of tribes [Stmme] (by extensive conquests), which gradually
extinguishes character, is not wholesome [zutrglich] for the human race, all
pretended philanthropy not withstanding.[7: 320]
If so, in Kant's methodological modesty throughout the section -- his reluctance, that is to
say, to press his characterization of peoples further than the facts will bear -- proves an
exception to his own national rule, i.e., a characteristically German "mania for method"
and related obsession with class distinctions that itself borders upon servility.
[With the German] there is a certain mania for method [Methodensucht] that
allows him to classify other citizens punctiliously not, for example, according to a
principle of approximation to equality, but according to levels of superiority and
orders of rank, and...to be servile in this out of mere pedantry. ...This
punctiliousness and need for methodical division, in order for a whole to be
grasped under one concept, reveals the limitation of the German's innate talent.
[emphasis added] [7:319]
What the German mainly lacks-- both "originality" [7: 318] and a principled awareness of
"equality" -- the Lithuanian possesses in abundance. Did Kant harbor hopes that rightly

27

educated, the Lithuanians could provide German Prussia with a needed civic supplement?
Perhaps. 26
The main point for present purposes is this: like the Armenians, Lithuanians,
seem to exhibit their early form despite the passage of many centuries (due both to their
isolation and to their relative freedom from civil oppression). And as with the Armenians
that form expresses a predisposition that is favorable to civic freedom and harmony. One
is lead, indeed, to wonder whether all (European) peoples might not, in Kant's unstated
view, possess dispositions similarly favorable to the republican condition (albeit with
"spirit" and "discipline" in differing proportions). 27 If so, it a position he might not wish
to emphasize in public, given immediate practical stakes.
In the Lithuanian case this natural civic aptitude is especially expressed, on Kant's
account, through language -- including the "tone of equality" with which they speak.
That tone contrasts with the "newly uplifted noble tone" among would-be philosophers of
which Kant had recently complained. 28 And it suggests that Lithuanians too (in common
with the ancient Greeks) know something of the "art of reciprocal communication
between the crudest and the most refined" -- i.e., that "attunement" between refinement
and originality that constitutes "the right standard" for taste "as universal human sense."

26

See also in this regard Metaphysics of Morals (on the [German] propensity to servility)
[6: 437].
27
See, for example, Kant's late unpublished reflection at [15: 888] (Reflections on
Anthropology, # 1520): " Latin language is dominant in Spain, France, Italy; German in
the remaining cultivated countries. Slovonic is still Asiatic. All are innoculated with
German blood. In England, it is the foundation. Spirit (Roman) and discipline (German).
Way of ruling."
28
Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie [1796]. A sequel
(roughly contemporary with Kant's open letter to Fichte) appeared shortly thereafter on
the dangers of dishonesty among philosophers. See On an Immanent Near-Treaty of
Peace in Philosophy, [8: 421-422].
28

The Lithuanian gift goes beyond the realm of the aesthetic, however. The
Lithuanian not only freely speaks his mind; he also consents to all that's "fair." As such,
his tone recalls Kant's earlier discussion, in the Critique of Pure Reason, of the attributes
of critical reason itself: namely, a willingness to give every voice a veto [A 738=B 766],
so long as it is willing to give fair audience to the rest. It also calls to mind the newly
"uplifted tone" of certain false philosophers and opponents of republican equality which
Kant had more recently complained. 29
At a time in which Kantian enlightenment found itself under increasing political
and intellectual pressure -- not least from former philosophic allies -- Mielcke's
Wrterbuch, and the Lithuanian cause to which it drew attention, must have struck Kant
as something of a relief, a small yet sweet potential sign of providential wisdom at a
moment of peculiar global and personal stress. Whatever the difficulties of political
anthropology -- and with all its attendant complications for the study of human history -this much, at least, is clear: civic originality of a sort that lends itself to lawful refinement
is alive and well among one small people of the Baltic region.
The transformation of a people into a "nation," whose members "recognize
themselves as united into a civic whole through common descent" is, after all, itself a
moment of "conception," in which the republican idea penetrates and is received into a
people's way of thinking. 30 The very effort to bring individuals together "under a single

29

See On a Newly Uplifted Noble Tone in Philosophy (1796) [8: 394]; see also his
Announcement of a Near Treaty of Perpetual Peace in Philosophy (1796), which
particularly stresses the theme of philosophic honesty and dishonesty.
30
According to Grimm and Grimm's Wrterbuch, the German "Conzept" still captured
the double meaning of the Latin conceptus, which denotes conception in both the
intellectual and the reproductive senses. As Kant's extended civic "rebirth" metaphor
29

[national] concept" is thus both a necessary political act (for any successful founder or
ruler) and potential symptom, where that attempt is ill-advised, of what might be thought
to limit Kant's own native German talent.[7: 319] 31 Read in this light, the Nachschrift's
concluding clause -- the last he ever published -- bears special scrutiny. The entire
sentence begins:
-- In general, even if one should not expect so great a [scientific] yield from every
language, it is still important for the formation [Bildung] of every small people
[Volklein] in a country to be instructed in school and from the pulpit according to
the model of the purest...language, and to gradually bring it into ever wider
currency:
and it concludes:
weil dadurch die Sprache der Eigenthmlichkeit des Volks angemessener und
hiemit der Begriff desselben aufgeklrter wird.
which has conventionally been translated as follows:
because thereby the language becomes more suited to the peculiarity of the people
and the latter's comprehension becomes more enlightened.
It is also possible, however, to translate the passage as follows:

suggests, the "concept" through which a people becomes a civically self-conscious nation
is an example of "conception" in both senses of the term.
31
Kant's views as to his own partly Scottish origins may here also be pertinent. Some
contemporary scholars speculate that Kant's paternal ancestors may actually have been
Lithuanian. They base their argument, in part, on the fact that his father came from Tilset,
which had a large Lithuanian population.
30

because through this the language becomes more suited to the peculiarity of the
people, and the concept of that people thereby becomes more clear.[emphasis
added] 32
Indeed, consideration of Kant's contemporaneous attention to the anthropological
"concept of a people," makes the latter reading all the more natural. Popular instruction
according to the model of the purest volkisch language not only enlightens a people's
understanding; it also clarifies the underlying principle of unity that allows them to be
grasped in their volkisch peculiarity. In this, Kant's final published sentence, theory and
practice come together with singular economy and in a manner that speaks to the vexed
question of the relation between understanding and sensibility.

7. Ghost of a (former) Friendship: Kant and Herder.

The Nachschrift is haunted by its conspicuous silence concerning Kant's famous
former friend and early student, Johann Gottlieb Herder, whose own insistence on the
theoretical and practical importance of languages in all their variety is legion. 33 Surely no

32

I am indebted to Michael Resler for help in parsing Kant's text.

Another area of conspicuous silence concerns a third Volklein recently admitted to
Prussia in large numbers, namely the Jews. Revival of Hebrew as a spoken, "modern"
language, was then flourishing in Knigsberg, which was home of the first "enlightened"
Hebrew journal, which was edited by Isaac Euchel, a former student of Kant.
Modernized Hebrew, which was intended as a substitute for Yiddish, a Jewish-GermanSlavic dialect frequently associated by enlightened Jews with Jewish religious
backwardness. Modernized Hebrew as a dual vehicle of both popular progress and return
to a (presumably) purer popular-civic origin was thus in several ways a prototype for the
treatment of Lithuanian (and Polish) that Kant urges here. Kant could hardly have been
unaware of such parallel developments concerning Hebrew. Tellingly perhaps, the
Anthropology describes the Jews as "a nation of cheaters," a fact that he attributes to their
all being "merchants" and therefore "unproductive."[7: 206n.] Why this does not equally
apply to the Armenians (another mainly commercial nation) is not entirely clear. On
33

31

one did more than Herder to put the study of national languages on the intellectual map of
Germany. Kant, by way of contrast, was remarkably sparing in his treatment of the
subject. Given his general emphasis on universality as the mark of enlightened discourse,
this reticence on Kant's part is not altogether surprising. To be sure, Kant counts
language and religion as the two human practices that guarantee the persistence of
national differences. 34 And his anthropological investigations are scattered with
reflections as to the ways in which a nation's character is reflected in its language. 35 Still,
Kant had never before committed to print any serious treatment of the subject -- one with
which Herder was especially identified.
And yet if Kant in his final work makes certain claims that are more often
associated with Herder, his concluding emphasis on "concepts" points to a series of issues
that had long divided them both intellectually and personally, and is perhaps nowhere
clearer than in the exchange provoked by Kant's review more than a decade earlier of
Herder's Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity [1785].
The review opened with (muted) praise for Herder's ingenious "spirit" and
"freedom of thought," while taking him to task for the "imprecision" of his concepts and

Kant's complex and troubled relationship to Jews and Judaism during this period, see
Shell, The Autonomy of Reason, Chapter Nine.
34
Perpetual Peace [8: 367].
35
Compare, however: If writings lose almost everything in translation,
then it was an accidental play of fantasy dependant on Nationalausdrken but not
self-subsistent beauty. Time sifts all writings, though for many of them one can
immediately
establish their nativity. [15: #917] For Kant, it would seem, that which is truly "poetic,"
and thus "universally communicable," loses nothing essential in being translated from
one language into another. Indeed, this is so much the case that translatability is itself a
mark of poetic quality. (I am indebted to Corey Dyck for bringing this passage to my
attention.)

32

a related failure of "communication."[8:45] Herder responded in the second volume of

Ideas with a no less pointed attack on what he called "the ready but wicked proposition"
that "man is an animal that needs a master and that expects the happiness of its final
destiny from that master of from a connection with him" [368-369]-- a phrase that echoes
Kant's own description of the human problem in his Idea for a Universal History from a
Cosmopolitan Intention, published a year earlier. 36 As Kant there famously put it:
The greatest problem for the human species, to which nature compels him, is the
achievement of a civil society that universally administers right....This problem is
at the same time the most difficult for the human species and the last to be solved.
The difficulty, which the mere idea of this task already lays before our eyes, is
this: Man is an animal which, when lives among others of its kind, has need of a
master. For he certainly misuses his freedom in regard to others of his
kind....Thus he needs a master, who breaks his own will and necessitates him to
obey a universally valid will so that each can be free. But where will he get this
master? Nowhere else but from the human species....This task is therefore the
most difficult of all, and its perfect resolution is, indeed, impossible; from such
crooked wood as man is made of nothing perfectly straight can be constructed. [8:
22-23]
Kant adds that (however it may be with the [rational] inhabitants of other planets) in man
only the species can hope to fully attain the human destiny [Bestimmung][8: 23n.] -- a
claim to which Herder issues the emphatic counter claim that man's destiny is happiness,
which nature generously bestows upon the individual wherever his place in history. [36736

Herder's comment recalls the famous dispute between Diderot and Rousseau, prompted
by a similar accusation of "wickedness" (as the latter saw it).
33

368] For Kant, the inability of the individual to attain his full destiny goes together with
man being able to take credit for his own perfection. For Herder, man need not and
should not take such credit. Even language -- about whose origins Kant pointedly refuses
to speculate -- is, on Herder's account, (to be construed as) the gift of some external
(natural) source rather than human effort, just as progress is largely a function of
"tradition" for which no one may be held accountable.
These differences over what man can and should take credit for are related, in
turn, to their dispute about the use and meaning of concepts understood as "universals."
For Herder (to whom the boundaries between the active and the passive, the conceptual
and the sensual, are porous), such concepts are at best distorting approximations of nature
in its individuality; for Kant, they are the foundations of rational discourse, setting
absolute limits to what can and cannot be collapsed into one. For Herder the very term
"species" is a rough class marker blurred about the edges, and "living force," to take one
example, as potent an explanatory tool as any. For Kant, the conceptual boundary
between matter and spirit cannot be thus breached without doing violence to reason itself.
Observable differences among the species -- even when they are so small that they
approach zero -- does not threaten this principle. "Only an affinity among them, where
either one species would have arisen from another and all from a single original species,
or even from a single procreative womb," would do so; but "this would lead to ideas so
monstrous that reason recoils from them"[8: 54], for (as he later qualifies) "reason
properly recoils "from an idea in which nothing at all allows itself to be thought." [8:57]
Kant may have been taken aback by Herder's offended reaction -- a response that
would confirm Kant's later warning, in the Metaphysics of Morals, that friends criticize

34

friends at peril to their friendship. In any event, Kant sought in the review's second
installment to reinforce the measured praise that had accompanied his earlier criticism of
Herder's lack of conceptual determinacy. In extolling Herder's "freedom of thinking" he
had had in mind, as he now claimed:
that inner freedom, namely, from the shackles of concepts and ways of thinking
[Denkungsarten] that are habitual and fortified by universal [allgemeine] opinion - a freedom that is not at all common [gemein], so that even those who merely
follow the confession of philosophy have only seldom been able to work
themselves up to it.[8: 57-58]
If Kant expected this conciliatory gesture to be returned in kind, he was much
disappointed. In the next volume of his Idea Herder not only implicitly accused Kant of
"wickedness," as indicated above. He also took Kant to task for a false conceptual
rigorism that itself breached the boundaries of intelligible discourse. To say that
mankind's destiny/determination is to be realized only by the species is itself an abuse of
understanding that also constitutes a failure, or refusal, to communicate:
If someone said that not the individual human being but humankind is to be
educated, then he speaks in a way that is unintelligible [unverstndlich] for me,
since kind and species are only universal concepts except insofar as they exist in
individual beings. -- As if I spoke of animality, minerality, and metality in the
universal and adorned them with masterful attributes which however contradicted
one another in the individuals! -- On this Averroistic philosophic path our
philosophy of history shall not wander." [cited by Kant at 8: 65]

35

To this Kant responds, in the third and final installment of his review, that if the term
"human species"
signifies the totality [Ganze] of series of generations running into the infinite (the
indeterminable) (a meaning that is entirely customary), and it assumed that this
series ceaselessly approximates the line of its destiny/determination that runs
along its side, it is no contradiction to say...that only the species will fully reach
its destiny/determination.[8: 65]
Like the asymptote of an infinite mathematical series, mankind's complete
determination is merely an idea, albeit "one very useful in all respects." Yet Kant is
willing to disregard this "polemical" point as trivial, if only Herder, who has found
"everything previously given out as philosophy" to be "displeasing," would provide the
world, not with a fruitless definition of words, but a "model of the genuine way of
philosophizing." [8: 66] Still, Kant's later identification of the specific German limitation
with an unreasonable "need" for "grasping the whole under a single concept" [7: 319]
suggests that Herder's criticism may never have fully lost its philosophic sting.
Kant would take up man's problematic need for a master who must himself be
human once again, in the section of the Anthropology devoted to the characterization of
man as a species[7: 325] A letter dated July 8, 1800 to Johann Kiesewetter addressing
him as "dearest old friend" and thanking him for his two volume critique of Herder's

36

Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft 37 suggests that Kant's dispute with Herder, on
this point as well as others, had not been forgotten 38 :
Man must be educated [erzogen] to the good; he who is to educate him, however,
is himself a human being, who still lies in the crudity of nature and is supposed to
bring about what he himself requires. Hence the constant deviation from his
destiny/determination and always repeated returns to it.[7: 325]
Only Kant now adds what his earlier treatment of the problem of man's need for human
mastery did not include: namely, the peculiar way in which human honesty and
dishonesty bear on a determination of human character and with it the possibility of
genuine "friendship for the human race" (Menschenfreundlichkeit).
Given the stated importance of this question to "pragmatic anthropology with
regard to the destiny/determination of the human being" [7: 324], the work ends, it must
be said, on a troubling final note: while Frederick the Great publicly declared himself the
first servant of the state, his privately confessed misanthropy suggests the opposite.[7:
332-333n.] 39

37

The part that Keisewetter had most recently reviewed was entitled "Reason and
Language."
38
See also Opus Postumum [21: 225]: "[to say that understanding] is derived from
experience...is an explanation in a circle....Pure understanding is the faculty of a priori
knowledge -- but unreason and intentional deception are Herder's trademark."
39
Kant's highly condensed note is, indeed, even more complicated. On the one hand,
Fredrick's duplicity reveals his own unwillingness to put morality before religion, an
ordering on which human progress, as Kant elsewhere argues, ultimately depends. If even
the "enlightened" Frederick cannot be counted on in this regard, the outlook for human
progress would seem to be grim indeed. On the other hand, Friedrich's private "sighs"
over his misanthropic conclusions about the human race betray his refusal to include
himself in this general negative judgment. Frederick's bad faith in this regard is also an
implicit acknowledgement of the claims that morality continues to make on us. It is thus
a "confession" that bears witness, willy nilly, to a "moral predisposition within us" to
work against our propensity to evil.[7: 333 and 7: 33n.]
37

Seen in this light, Kant's Nachschrift eines Freundes can not only be read as a
declaration of Kant's own friendship for the human race and hence as a kind of
"postscript" to the Anthropology; it also represents a final settling of accounts with a
critic whose youthful efforts as a student to set Kant's philosophic thought to verse had
once given him no small delight. 40 In this way, too, Kant's final publication is the
postscript of a friend.

In sum: Kant's Nachtschrift addresses with extraordinary economy a number of

Kant's deepest concerns: the treachery, as he saw it, of former philosophic friends and
allies; the relation between a priori understanding and experience occupies most of Kant's
attention in the Opus Postumum); and prospects for human progress necessarily
predicated, in his last works, on the possibility of a kind of (pan-European) national-civic
rebirth. (That both Fichte and Herder had recently and prominently broached similar
concerns made the issues in question all the more pressing.) The "concept of a people" as
here intended thus bears multiple related meanings that express as clearly as any of his
late writings his own judgment as a "rational world-being" and "citizen of the world"
exercised in situ. 41 The opportunity thereby offered to return the favors of Kant's youth in
the face of his own impending infirmity might well have provided an additional
inducement for this final public act of friendship.

40

See the "Biographic Sketch" in the Cambridge University Press edition of Kant's
correspondence [580].
41
Compare Opus Postumum [21: 27] and Anthropology [7: 120].
38