Kant the All-Destroyer
by Fred Seddon
Since this name has been bandied about recently by Michelle and Peter, I thought I would look into it and see what Moses Mendelssohn meant by calling Kant the "all-destroyer." A look at Hicks’ book on Postmodernism (highly recommended) indicates that he got the quote not from the man himself, but rather from Beck’s work Early German Philosophy, p. 337.
Beck writes as follows: “Mendelssohn complains in his preface (to Morning Hours) that illness has prevented him from keeping up with the advances in philosophy made by ‘Lambert, Tetens, Platner, and the all-destroying Kant’ and confesses that his philosophical thoughts stopped developing about 1765.”
Beck then proceeds to discuss some of Mendelssohn ideas, but Kant’s name is not mentioned in the rest of the chapter. So no help there.
So what did he mean? I tried to obtain the original work from interlibrary loan, but failed. They would not release the book. Next I contacted two specialists in 18th century philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. The first was Nicholas Rescher, author of over 100 books on philosophy, and several on Kant. He was unable to offer anything but speculation. Since the book is on natural theology, he thinks maybe Mendelssohn was bashing Kant because he destroyed the possibility of proving the existence of God by reason alone. He then suggested I contact Stephen Engstrom, also at Pitt. Engstrom wrote the introduction to the new Pluhar translation to the Critique of Practical Reason.
Stephen confessed he hadn’t read Mendelssohn in years, decades perhaps. All he could offer was a very guarded speculation. He thinks it refers to the Transcendental Dialectic where Kant “destroys” the possibilities of Rationalist (esp. Leibniz/Wolff) metaphysics. Then he added that perhaps it also refers to Kant’s bashing of the skeptics (i.e., the empiricists) as well, who claim to know enough metaphysics to be sure that we could not have freedom of the will. But in the end, he remained tentative.
I wish I could say more, but if you don’t have the data, you shouldn’t make claims.
From an Objectivist point of view, i.e., my point of view, I don’t read this as such bad news. Rand certainly disagreed with both the rationalists (who gave up the world for reason) and the empiricists (who gave up reason for the world). She wrote against both. So did Kant. Of course, he went on to develop the Critical philosophy, whereas she founded Objectivism.
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