Early responses: 1781–1793
The Critique of Pure Reason was the first of Kant's works to become famous.[72] According to the philosopher Frederick C. Beiser, it helped to discredit rationalist metaphysics of the kind associated with Leibniz and Wolff which had appeared to provide a priori knowledge of the existence of God, although Beiser notes that this school of thought was already in decline by the time the Critique of Pure Reason was published. In his view, Kant's philosophy became successful in the early 1790s partly because Kant's doctrine of "practical faith" seemed to provide a justification for moral, religious, and political beliefs without an a priori knowledge of God.[73] However, the Critique of Pure Reason received little attention when it was first published. Kant did not expect reviews from anyone qualified to appraise the work, and initially heard only complaints about its obscurity. The theologian and philosopher Johann Friedrich Schultz wrote that the public saw the work as "a sealed book" consisting in nothing but "hieroglyphics". The first review appeared in the Zugaben zu den Göttinger gelehrte Anzeigen in 1782. The review, which denied that there is any distinction between Kant's idealism and that of Berkeley, was anonymous and became notorious. Kant reformulated his views because of it, redefining his transcendental idealism in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) and the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. The review was denounced by Kant, but defended by Kant's empiricist critics, and the resulting controversy drew attention to the Critique of Pure Reason.[74]
Kant believed that the anonymous review was biased and deliberately misunderstood his views. He discussed it in an appendix of the Prolegomena, accusing its author of failing to understand or even address the main issue addressed in the Critique of Pure Reason, the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments, and insisting on the distinction between transcendental idealism and the idealism of Berkeley. In a letter to Kant, the philosopher Christian Garve admitted to having written the review, which he disowned due to editorial changes outside his control. Though Garve did not inform Kant of this, the changes were made by J. G. Feder. Following the controversy over Garve's review, there were no more reviews of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1782 except for a brief notice. The work received greater attention only in 1784, when Shultz's commentary was published and a review by the philosopher and historian of philosophy Dietrich Tiedemann was published in the Hessische Beyträge zur Gelehrsamkeit und Kunst. Tiedemann attacked the possibility of the synthetic a priori and defended the possibility of metaphysics. He denied the synthetic status of mathematical judgments, maintaining that they can be shown to be analytic if the subject term is analyzed in full detail, and criticized Kant's theory of the a priori nature of space, asking how it was possible to distinguish one place from another when the parts of absolute space are identical in themselves. Kant issued a hostile reaction. He maintained that Tiedemann did not understand the problems facing the critical philosophy.[75]
Christian Gottlieb Selle, an empiricist critic of Kant influenced by Locke to whom Kant had sent one of the complimentary copies of the Critique of Pure Reason, was disappointed by the work, considering it a reversion to rationalism and scholasticism, and began a polemical campaign against Kant, arguing against the possibility of all a priori knowledge. His writings received widespread attention and created controversy. Though Kant was unable to write a reply to Selle, he did engage in a public dispute with Feder, after learning of Feder's role in the review published in Zugaben zu den Göttinger Gelehrten Anzeigen. In 1788, Feder published Ueber Raum und Causalität: Zur Prüfung der kantischen Philosophie, a polemic against the Critique of Pure Reason in which he argued that Kant employed a "dogmatic method" and was still employing the methodology of rationalist metaphysics, and that Kant's transcendental philosophy transcends the limits of possible experience. Feder believed that Kant's fundamental error was his contempt for "empirical philosophy", which explains the faculty of knowledge according to the laws of nature. With Christian Meiners, he edited a journal, the Philosophische Bibliothek, opposed to Kantianism.[76]
Feder's campaign against Kant was unsuccessful and the Philosophische Bibliothek ceased publication after only a few issues. Other critics of Kant continued to argue against the Critique of Pure Reason, with Gottlob August Tittel, who was influenced by Locke, publishing several polemics against Kant, who, although worried by some of Tittel's criticisms, addressed him only in a footnote in the preface to the Critique of Practical Reason. Tittel was one of the first to make criticisms of Kant, such as those concerning Kant's table of categories, the categorical imperative, and the problem of applying the categories to experience, that have continued to be influential. The philosopher Adam Weishaupt, founder and leader of the secret society the Illuminati, and an ally of Feder, also published several polemics against Kant, which attracted controversy and generated excitement. Weishaupt charged that Kant's philosophy leads to complete subjectivism and the denial of all reality independent of passing states of consciousness, a view he considered self-refuting. Herman Andreas Pistorius was another empiricist critic of Kant. Kant took Pistorius more seriously than his other critics and believed that he had made some of the most important objections to the Critique of Pure Reason. Beiser writes that many sections of the Critique of Practical Reason are "disguised polemics against Pistorius". Pistorius argued that, if Kant were consistent, his form of idealism would not be an improvement over that of Berkeley, and that Kant's philosophy contains internal contradictions.[77]
Though the followers of Wolff, such as J. G. E. Maass, J. F. Flatt, and J. A. Ulrich, initially ignored the Critique of Pure Reason, they began to publish polemics against Kant in 1788. The theologian Johann Augustus Eberhard began to publish the Philosophisches Magazin, which was dedicated to defending Wolff's philosophy. The Wolffian critics argued that Kant's philosophy inevitably ends in skepticism and the impossibility of knowledge, defending the possibility of rational knowledge of the supersensible world as the only way of avoiding solipsism. They maintained that the criterion Kant proposed to distinguish between analytic and synthetic judgments had been known to Leibniz and was useless, since it was too vague to determine which judgments are analytic or synthetic in specific cases. These arguments led to a controversy between the Wolffians and Kant's followers over the originality and adequacy of Kant's criterion. The Wolffian campaign against Kant was ultimately unsuccessful. Beiser argues that the decisive reason for Kant's victory over the Wolffians was the French Revolution, writing that, "The political revolution in France seemed to find its abstract formulation with the philosophical revolution in Germany." Specifically, he concludes that the principle of autonomy, which has an important role in Kant's ethics, appeared to express and justify the egalitarian demands behind the French Revolution.[78]
Later responses
The Critique of Pure Reason has exerted an enduring influence on Western philosophy.[79] The constructive aspect of the work, Kant's attempt to ground the conditions for the possibility of objects in the conditions of experience, helped bring about the development of German idealism. The work also influenced Young Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, and also, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy has been seen as a form of "radical Kantianism" by Howard Caygill. Other interpretations of the Critique by philosophers and historians of philosophy have stressed different aspects of the work. The late 19th-century neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Heinrich Rickert focused on its philosophical justification of science, Martin Heidegger and Heinz Heimsoeth on aspects of ontology, and Peter Strawson on the limits of reason within the boundaries of sensory experience. Hannah Arendt and Jean-François Lyotard dealt with its work of orientation of a limited understanding in the field of world history.[80] According to Homer W. Smith,
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is important because it threw the philosophy of the nineteenth century into a state of temporary confusion. That it failed to prove its cardinal point, the existence of a priori truths, rapidly became clear. If there were no promises the fulfillment of which was to be expected, 'lying' would indeed be a universal law of action, and by Kant's own criterion lying would now be moral, and it would be truth that would be immoral.[81]
Legacy
Many titles have been used by different authors in reference or as a tribute to Kant's main Critique, or his other, less famous books using the same basic concept, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment. Since the 18th century, books using "critique" in their title became common. Also, when "reason" is added after an adjective which qualifies this reason, this is usually a reference to Kant's most famous book. A few examples:
- "Critique of the Kantian Philosophy" (1818), as an appendix of The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer;
- Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), by Jean-Paul Sartre;
- Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), by Peter Sloterdijk;
- Critique of Impure Reason (2021), by Steven James Bartlett
