BEISER'S IDEALISM (4): Opus Postumum

Beiser adds another distinctive point by shifting to something that, for a long time, sat at the edges of Kant scholarship and so at the edges of standard stories about German idealism. This is Kant’s last, unfinished work, usually called the Opus Postumum. Beiser insists that if we are serious about understanding how German idealism develops between Kant and his successors, we cannot treat this unfinished text as an odd appendix or as a curiosity produced by an ageing philosopher. We have to bring it into the centre of the story.

Opus Postumum is the name now given to several hundred pages of notes that Kant wrote in the last decade of his life, roughly from the mid 1790s until his death in 1804. The text was not published in his lifetime. It appeared in fragments and scholarly editions long afterwards, which meant that for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was easy to overlook or dismiss. Quite a few commentators regarded it as the product of a failing mind. Some early reviewers spoke of signs of senility and even used phrases like “marks of decrepitude” when describing the Akademie edition that finally appeared in the 1930s. Yet at the same time, the text has always attracted those who thought there was something unfinished about Kant’s critical project. The three Critiques seemed to leave gaps, especially in the way they connected the a priori framework of experience with the actual world described by physics and with the concept of a unified system of nature. The Opus Postumum appears to be Kant’s attempt to complete a “transition” from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics itself, which is why recent scholars often treat it as a kind of fourth, post critical phase of his philosophy. 

Beiser’s decision to integrate this material into the history of German idealism has several layers. At the simplest level, he is making a historical claim. Kant’s thinking did not stop in 1787 with the second edition of the first Critique, nor in 1790 with the Critique of Judgement. It continued to evolve, and that late evolution mattered for those who came after him. The young Fichte, Schelling and the Romantics were operating in a world where Kant was still alive, still writing, still revising his views. It is easy in hindsight to freeze Kant at some earlier, clearer stage and treat his later work as an unimportant coda. Beiser argues that this is bad history. Kant’s late work helps to shape the intellectual environment that the post Kantian idealists inhabit, and so any honest account of that environment must take it into account. There is also a deeper philosophical point. The central theme of Beiser’s book, as he keeps stressing, is the struggle against subjectivism and the attempt to secure a robust realism. His view is that German idealism is driven by the need to show that an external world exists with at least the same certainty as self knowledge, and that this world is not a mere projection of the individual mind. The Opus Postumum is precisely a text in which Kant tries to tighten the connection between the structures of thought and the structure of nature. He is seeking what later commentators call a “final synthesis”, a unifying principle that shows how our system of a priori concepts and our empirical knowledge of a physical world fit together. 

From this perspective, the late Kant is not weakening or drifting. He is still engaged in the same struggle that animates the whole period. He is trying to show that the world of experience is necessarily law governed, that there is a single order of nature, and that the subject who knows this order stands within it rather than above it. Some recent interpreters even argue that the Opus Postumum represents the culmination of Kant’s critical philosophy, since in it he attempts to resolve tensions that remained unresolved in the published Critiques. By emphasising this, Beiser blocks a standard temptation. It is often convenient to treat Kant as a fixed point and then measure his successors against that point. If you freeze Kant at the first Critique, Fichte’s and Schelling’s moves can be presented as more radical and perhaps more reckless. If you acknowledge that Kant himself continues to push his system in new directions, some of the sharp lines between “Kantian” and “post Kantian” theories begin to blur. There is movement on both sides. The whole field looks more fluid, less like a static starting point followed by a series of reactions. A further reason why the Opus Postumum matters for Beiser is that it reinforces his general claim about the realist impulse in German idealism. In that late work Kant is deeply concerned with how to ground our conception of an objective world of nature. He explores the idea of an all pervading medium, sometimes called ether, as a way of thinking about the continuity and law governed unity of physical reality. Although the details of this theory are very controversial and often obscure, the direction of travel is clear. Kant is preoccupied with how the world must be if it is to be knowable at all. This is another way of saying that he is trying to articulate the conditions under which realism about nature can be justified, given his prior insights into the role of the subject. That project obviously resonates with Beiser’s larger theme.

Once Beiser has made this point about Opus Postumum, he turns to describe his methodology, and the two topics are connected. His decision to integrate the late Kant arises from a broader commitment to treat these thinkers historically and hermeneutically, that is, to reconstruct their positions in their own terms and contexts, rather than through later lenses. He says explicitly that his aim is to reconstruct an author’s work “in its individuality according to his original intention and context”. That phrasing matters. It signals a rejection of hindsight driven narratives, such as the Hegelian one, which treat earlier positions mainly as steps toward a later system. Because he wants to avoid importing foreign frameworks, Beiser announces that he has set aside contemporary philosophical problems and vocabulary as far as possible. He knows that modern philosophy is full of debates about realism, anti realism, relativism, physicalism and so on. His book is philosophically motivated by those debates, but he does not want to read them directly back into the eighteenth century texts. He thinks that to do so would risk anachronism, in other words, the projection of later concerns into a different period. Instead, he gives priority to textual exegesis, that is, to careful reading and interpretation of what the authors themselves wrote, on their own terms. He has two reasons for this priority. One is that the texts in question are extraordinarily controversial. Almost every major claim about Kant, Fichte or Schelling has been disputed by historians and philosophers. In such a context, hasty criticism that relies on a quick sketch of what the author supposedly meant is irresponsible. Fair criticism, he argues, must rest on the most sympathetic and detailed understanding possible. The other reason is that he believes the philosophical content of these works is still too unsettled for safe cultural or political readings.

Here he takes a fairly strong stance against certain trends in the humanities. In some fields it has become common to leap quickly from philosophical texts to their social, political or ideological implications. Beiser does not deny that such work is important. His own earlier books on the German Enlightenment and Romanticism include rich contextual studies of how philosophy and politics interact. In the case of German idealism, however, he thinks that the basic interpretive work has not yet been completed. The texts are still too indeterminate and contested. As an example, he notes that anyone who has not carefully worked out exactly what status Fichte gives to the “absolute ego” simply cannot responsibly discuss its political or cultural significance. If you are not sure whether the absolute ego is a metaphor, a logical structure, a real substance or something else again, any claim about its impact on nationalism, religion or state theory is likely to be built on sand. For this reason, he says explicitly that his study is not meant as a contribution to what German scholars call Konstellationsforschung, that is, detailed research into the personal and intellectual networks in which these thinkers moved, or the intricate connections between their philosophies and contemporary events in Jena, Berlin or elsewhere. Beiser admits that such research is invaluable and that he relies heavily on the work of others who have done it. He names scholars in the German tradition whose historical studies have been crucial for his own understanding. But he does not try to reproduce that kind of detailed contextual mapping himself. Instead he tries to make some of that specialist work accessible to an English speaking audience that often lacks both the background and the interest to follow all the intricacies of late eighteenth century German intellectual life. 

The picture that emerges is of a historian of philosophy who stands in a particular lineage. Beiser locates himself explicitly in the German historical tradition represented by figures such as Dilthey, Cassirer, Erdmann and others, rather than in the dominant Anglo American analytic style of writing about the history of philosophy. That older German tradition treats the history of philosophy as an autonomous subject that demands serious philological and historical training, not just cleverness with arguments. It regards philosophical texts as complex cultural artefacts that require patient interpretation before they can be turned into partners in present day debates. Beiser sees that tradition as providing a more adequate paradigm for doing the history of philosophy than the more argumentative, problem driven approach typical of analytic philosophy. He is candid about his debts to contemporary scholars as well. In Kant studies he mentions Paul Guyer and Henry Allison. In the study of post Kantian philosophy he points to Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank. Even where he disagrees with them, he treats his disagreements as a measure of his dependence. This is another way of saying that his book is not an attempt to sweep away existing scholarship and replace it with a wholly new picture. It is an effort to organise, clarify and sometimes reinterpret a large body of work, especially for readers who do not have the time, languages or institutional support to engage with it directly. All of this has consequences for how we, as non specialists, should read his narrative. Because he integrates Opus Postumum into the story, we are encouraged to see Kant as a moving target, not as a static monument. Because he privileges internal, textual reconstruction over quick contextual or ideological readings, we are invited to spend time with the arguments themselves, trying to see what problem they are addressing from within. Because he explicitly distances himself from teleological histories and from the Hegelian legacy, we are urged to resist the urge to tidy everything up into a single line of development. The point about Kant’s late work and the methodological remarks that follow also reinforce Beiser’s central thesis about German idealism as a struggle against subjectivism. If Kant is still revising his account of the relation between mind and nature in the 1790s and early 1800s, it is because he recognises that his earlier formulations have not fully solved the problem. That problem, in Beiser’s framing, is how to reconcile the mind’s contribution to experience with the mind’s dependence on an independent world. To integrate the Opus Postumum is to bring that ongoing effort into view. It shows that even within Kant’s own lifetime the question of realism remained open and pressing. For contemporary readers, this has a significant effect. It complicates any crude division between “Kantian” and “Hegelian” approaches to realism. Some analytic philosophers, for example, have tended to treat Kant as the patron saint of constructivism or anti realism, and Hegel as the arch metaphysician. Once you see Kant wrestling with the transition to physics in his last years, and once you see how his successors try in different ways to shore up realism, the situation looks less polarised. There are constructivist and realist strands on both sides of the supposed divide. The problem that Beiser identifies, the problem of breaking the egocentric predicament while acknowledging the structuring role of the subject, is not resolved once and for all on either side. It continues. And Beiser will not cherry pick the parts of Kant that fit a neat narrative. He will try to follow the twists and turns of Kant’s own development, even where they create new puzzles. Substantively, it underlines that the struggle against subjectivism is not something that begins only after Kant, with Fichte and Schelling. It is already present, with full force, in Kant’s own later attempts to rethink the relation between the framework of experience and the reality of nature.

If we keep these points in mind, the rest of Beiser’s history appears less as the story of a clean break from Kant and more as the story of a series of intensifications and reworkings in which Kant himself participates. The late manuscripts collected under the title Opus Postumum are one of the places where that participation is most visible. They show a philosopher who knows that his work is unfinished and who is still searching for a way to articulate the unity of mind and world without collapsing either into the other. That search is precisely what Beiser takes to be the engine of German idealism.