Kant’s Novel Interpretation of History

Seán M. Williams

Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Volume 49, Number 2, May2013, pp. 171-190 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

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Kant’s Novel Interpretation of History

seán m. williams University of Oxford

In Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht (1784), Im-manuel Kant philosophizes about a type of story that would have world-historicconsequences.1 A forerunner of modern philosophies of history, the essay isrenowned for two claims. First, Kant suggests that if we abstract the free actionsof individual human subjects and examine them as a whole, we can hope to dis-cover a universally applicable, regular progression toward our ultimate moralgoal: freedom. Second, he contends that if a natural, linear plan were revealed,contingent on agentive will, such a plan would accelerate humankind’s develop-ment since it is in our character to attempt improvements for future generations.This desire for our advancement is also the reason why it is worthwhile to writephilosophical history in the first place, and why reading it should positivelyaffect our sensibilities, as well as effect our actions, as an audience.

Kant circumscribes his Idea essay by remarking on a third issue that has notyet received extensive scholarly attention: namely, how such a teleologicalmodel manifests itself in textual form, the intermediary between thought andaction. Already in the second sentence of the essay, Kant defines history as a dis-cipline that recounts the tale of the realizations of freedom of the will: “dieGeschichte, welche sich mit der Erzählung dieser Erscheinungen beschäftigt”(8: 17). From the outset, Kant’s philosophical history is necessarily a narrativeproject. To be sure, narration is a nebulous concept that can connote both truthfulknowledge and spurious fiction. To avoid doubt about the status of his ownintended philosophical-historical narrative, Kant again considers the question ofform in the essay’s conclusion. In just one sentence, he addresses the subject ofprose and the novel in particular. This framing of an overarching narrative argu-ment might seem flimsy to those of us who take Kant’s words at face value. Con-textualized within late eighteenth-century literary debates, however, his briefcomments can be read as especially substantive. That is to say, we need to histor-icize Kant’s essay in order to properly understand its contention and structure. Indoing so, we will find that Kant thematizes written form in a way that was farfrom novel in the period – neither uniquely, nor as the most fashionable genre ofthe age.

1 I am indebted to Karen Feldman, who stimulated my interest in the topic. I should also like tothank Kevin Hilliard for critical discussion. Matt Erlin and Sean Franzel offered helpful feed-back. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) awarded me financial support.

seminar 49:2 (May 2013)

The novel, we should note, became an ever more salient prose form for liter-ary consumption in Kant’s time. Statistics for novels appearing in German overthe course of the period vary, but all clearly present a burgeoning trend.M. Beaujean, for example, counts 73 new novels published between 1750 and1760; from 1791 to 1800, the number surged to 1,623 (Cited in Schön, 43–44).The boom continued. Thomas Carlyle sums up the German situation for anEnglish-speaking audience in 1827: “the number of Novelists at present aliveand active is to be reckoned not in units, but in thousands” (vi). The genre held areputation for pedagogical service as well as delightful imaginative speculation.Increasingly, the novel was also promoted on account of its philosophical con-jecture. Whereas Sulzer equates the original, trivial meaning of the word “Ro-manze” with that “was wir izt durch Roman verstehen” (988) in 1774, threeyears later Adelung notes the existence of satirical and political as wells as, cru-cially, historical, moral and philosophical novels in his dictionary definition ofthe “Roman” (1475).

One response among representatives of academic philosophy proper was theperception that the novel now posed a threat to their own existence and to theirdiscipline, or at least its serious dissemination and the subsequent expansion of apublic sphere informed and guided by scholars. But was this Kant’s reaction?On 13 November 1765, the philosopher Johann Heinrich Lambert exclaimed ina letter to his valued colleague: “Wenn die Architectonik ein Roman wäre, soglaube ich, sie würde bereits viele Verleger gefunden haben, so sehr ist es wahr,daß Buchhändler und Leser einander verderben, und vom gründlichen Nachden-ken abhalten” (10: 52). Kant was thus confronted with a perceived bias of thepublishing industry toward the novel, a bias in which the critics were complicit.Lessing writes in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–9) of Wieland’sGeschichte des Agathon (1766–7), for example: “Es ist der erste und einzigeRoman für den denkenden Kopf, von klassischem Geschmacke. Roman? Wirwollen ihm diesen Titel nur geben, vielleicht, daß es einige Leser mehr dadurchbekömmt” (555). Our question becomes whether we can connect this popularphenomenon to Kant’s intellectual thought through both a close reading andbird’s-eye view of his Idea essay.

In the following, therefore, I ask what the portrayal of human reason overthe course of time would look like from Kant’s perspective – as a text. Kant of-fers us a clear and concise, albeit negative answer. The cardinal line for myinvestigation comes at the end of the essay. In the Ninth Proposition, Kant com-ments on the prose form that, spuriously, we might think expresses his idea: “esscheint, in einer solchen Absicht könnte nur ein Roman zu Stande kommen”(29). Yet what does “Roman” mean in this context: a form that approximatesSulzer’s dismissal, or Adelung’s broader definition? Moreover, to what extentdoes Kant seriously and definitively reject the “Roman”? In the first part of thepresent article, I show how commonplaces of the late eighteenth century frameKant’s narrative argument; in the second, I examine Kant’s notion of the novelin relation to his philosophical system. Through these sections, I consider and

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complicate two conflicting interpretations of Kant’s assertion advanced by thesecondary literature. I then conjoin these readings in order to offer a third expla-nation that further exposes the highly charged discursive space within whichKant conceived philosophical history. I argue that the novel, as it was increas-ingly theorized throughout the eighteenth century, was tacitly acknowledged byKant as competition to philosophical writing, a discipline that was now toassume narrative form in presenting historical content. Hence Kant denies the“Roman” the capacity to narrate universal history.

In section three, I demonstrate that Kant substantiates his rejection of thenovel in the very terms through which the contemporary form was justified. Histhematization of narrative in the essay’s Ninth Proposition is informed by a pas-sage from Aristotle’s Poetics that was widely appropriated in the long eighteenthcentury, by novelists and philosophers alike. Early trans-European theories ofthe “Roman” until the middle of the period applied and revised the Poetics, andits ninth chapter in particular, which famously distinguishes among the disci-plines of history, poetry and philosophy. For Aristotle, poetry’s concern withprobable and necessary events rather than with actual and particular facts meansthat it represents more generalizable truths than history, and in this respect it isthe more philosophical, more ethical discipline (58–63). My secondary argu-ment, then, is that the end of the Idea essay alludes to and reconfigures Aristote-lian commonplaces pertaining to the proximity of narrative disciplines in acomplex and agonistic fashion. In its unique reapplication of a stock, tripartitehierarchy, Kant’s essay of 1784 can be understood as not just a personal but alsoa formal struggle between philosophy and neighbouring disciplines, not leastnovel writing, for superior legitimacy.

In closing, I present a vista out upon Romantic-era conceptions of the novelwhich move beyond Kant’s distrust of the form. This final point may not seemnew, for numerous literary scholars have already emphasized that Kant’s philo-sophical history conditioned the canonical, historical fiction – not least novels –of German writers, and of the Romantics in particular (see Saul and Bräutigam).Historical-philosophical reflections of the sort pioneered by Kant encouragedmore sustained consideration of narrativity – which inevitably brought into ques-tion history’s and philosophy’s connections to literary narrative.2 However, onthe whole criticism has assumed that Kant criticizes the relationship between lit-erature generally and philosophical history in 1784; and it has rightly shown thatsubsequent and particularly Romantic thinkers integrated philosophical historyinto literature. Even Johannes Süssmann, whose monograph thematizes the ques-tion “Geschichtsschreibung oder Roman?,” focuses not on the novel specifically,

2 As Matt Erlin explains, “one of the consequences of the new conception of historical writing isa convergence of history and literary narrative.” In a gesture towards the fact that this transfertook place within the discursive frame of Aristotle’s Poetics, he continues: “historians begin topay greater attention to questions of narrative coherence as well as to the relationship betweenthe general and the particular” (38).

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but on the more expansive category of the fable. Accordingly, he writes that inKant’s essay: “die Einheit der Fabel stiftet nun das Erkenntnisinteresse des His-torikers, seine historiographische Frage [. . .] Es sollte nicht lange dauern, bisjemand diese Möglichkeiten erkannte und daraus eine neue Art vonGeschichtsschreibung gewann” (73). (That person was Schiller, not Kant.) Suchinattention to Kant’s specific stance on the “Roman,” understood as the novel, inthe Idea essay has been due to the traditional assumption in scholarship that thephilosopher ignored the emergent form as a distinct entity.3 But Kant is in factremarkable precisely because in negatively evaluating the novel, he conceives aspecificity of the form rather than associating it with other types of literaryfancy, such as drama or verse. Especially the later Romantics, meanwhile, cele-brated the philosophical-historical novel as proxy for valuing the power of poetryin general, as poeisis, or “Poesie.”

Rejecting the “Roman”: A Commonplace ArgumentThe first interpretation of Kant’s admission in the Ninth Proposition that his ideamight seem to entail a “Roman” is the most immediately convincing: he dis-misses the inference. It is a rhetorical slight against some vaguely defined kindof popular prose. After all, the previous main clause supposes that the readermight consider the proposal “ein [. . .] dem Anscheine nach ungereimter An-schlag” (29): “ungereimt” here wittily has both senses of Kant’s idea beingabsurd and, formally, unrhymed, i.e., prosaic. Moreover, Kant conditions hisremark about the “Roman” with the word “indessen,” and goes on to further jus-tify his envisaged philosophical history. He likely does so, according to this ini-tial reading, in order to forestall criticism that the proposed narrative wouldresult in fancy, something of contemporary vulgar appeal.

Indeed, an opposition to market demand is suggested by the footnotes thatframe Kant’s Idea essay. According to the first, to the title of the essay, Kantpenned his idea because it had been announced in the press that a scholar withwhom he had conversed (Johann Schultz) intended to write a popular version ofit (15). In the footnote to his Ninth Proposition, Kant envisages that his story ofthe progression toward human freedom would be conceived, narrated and readonly by a learned community: “Nur ein gelehrtes Publicum [. . .] kann die alteGeschichte beglaubigen” (29). He thereby excludes those who do not engagewith scholarship from the mediation and reception of his idea. This claim com-plements the ideal reader of Kant’s essay Was ist Aufklärung?, published onemonth after his historiographical project, in December 1784. In this famous dis-cussion of Enlightenment, Kant criticizes the laziness that he believed was rifeamong so many people, typified by the attitude: “Habe ich ein Buch, das für

3 Marshall Brown is representative of the view that, for most eighteenth-century thinkers, “in writ-ing about literature generally, it remained easiest simply to ignore the novel, as Kant did, and asHerder, Schiller and Hegel almost did as well” (254).

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mich Verstand hat, [. . .] so brauche ich mich ja nicht selbst zu bemühen”(8: 35). The reading public should instead apply reasoned thought that is freelygiven to it by “jemand als Gelehrter” (37). In Kant’s comment about the“Roman” in the Ninth Proposition of his essay on universal history, then, thephilosopher imagines a form that would cause readers and men of letters neitherto think fancifully nor to accept a version of critical thought that was watereddown for consumer taste.

Nicholas Saul calls this central focus of our investigation “a jocular asideabout the novel or romance” (footnote 6, 69). If Kant is joking, he is not alone:Hippel quips as an aside toward the end of the first volume of Lebensläufe in auf-steigender Linie (1778), for example, about “die verkehrte Welt, daß Geschichtein vielen Fällen Roman, und Roman Geschichte geworden” (320).4 However,Saul’s contention becomes more complex if we examine its two parts moreclosely. One problem concerns the exact translation of “Roman”: does it denoteany entity that implies fanciful speculation (the novel or romance, perhaps thefable or alternatively the fairy-tale, etc.), or is it meant as a term for a specificform, the “novel or romance”? Bernd Bräutigam, for instance, glosses Kant’schoice of the word “Roman” as the expression of a mode of writing that is sim-ply “wirklichkeitsenthoben” (200). The next issue at stake is the extent to whichKant’s statement can be read beyond a merely casual, even funny comment, andinstead as a more strategic and wide-reaching reference.

William Richardson and Thomas De Quincey render the essay’s use of“Roman” a “romance” in their English translations of 1798 and 1824 respec-tively (429; 215); the tendency to employ the word “novel” in this context is farmore recent (Wood, 118). But the two English terms were often interchangeableduring and shortly after Kant’s lifetime, including in the reception of Germanprose.5 In German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors (1827), ThomasCarlyle published extracts from German novels and prose writings, and he refersto “German Novelwriters” specifically, despite the title. In this age, there wasthus something that was coming to be understood across Europe as a distinctform – the romance or novel – even if it was not defined by a single term.Indeed, Friedrich von Blanckenburg takes as his object of analysis for Versuchüber den Roman (1774) “eine Gattung von Schriften [. . .], die so mancherleyGestalten annehmen können” (4). Despite its ambiguous manifestation, Blanck-enburg is still able to theorize the novel as an (ideal) entity – and Wieland wasits prophet.

In the abstract, the contemporary German novel was frequently met withprejudice, even by those who disseminated particular, worthy examples. In thepreface to the first volume of German Romance, Carlyle writes that although the

4 On the influence of Kant’s earlier philosophical lectures on this novel, see Beck.5 For a general survey of the romance and the novel in eighteenth-century English theory, see

Williams, 5-7.

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quality of the form is as variable as in any other national literature, the Germannovel is the worst of the language’s literary forms: “as in other countries, the No-velists are a mixed, innumerable and most productive race [. . .] the strength ofGerman literature does not lie in its Novelwriters” (vii). At worst, novels canmislead the reader: Carlyle’s task was to “discover a grain of truth amongst thisfalsehood” (vi). Given this disparaging comment, we might conclude that Kantwanted to distinguish his idea of 1784 from the fanciful prose generated by theoverheated imaginations of contemporary authors. Such an interpretation findsadditional support in Kant’s effort to sketch the beginning of human progress inMuthmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte (1786). Here again Kant con-cedes that his attempt “scheint nicht viel besser, als den Entwurf zu einemRoman zu machen” (8: 109). He then proceeds to refute the expectation, but firstspecifies that if this impression were valid (which it is apparently not), such anarrative could not be called “eine[] muthmaßliche Geschichte.” It would insteadtake “den Namen [. . .] einer bloßen Erdichtung.” The novel is thus equated,quite conventionally, with mere fabrication, though once more this line is per-haps also intended as a jocular aside. For across Europe, prefaces to fiction, espe-cially novels, often wittily laid claim to historical fact. Daniel Defoe’s RobinsonCrusoe (1719) is paradigmatic, prefaced by the remark that it is “a just Historyof Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it” (iii). In 1790, Kantglosses “Romanschreiber” as “Dichter der Robinsonaden” in his third Critique(5: 276).

However, the observation that Kant’s bias against the novel occurs in both1784 and 1786, and that it twice appears to be an off-hand remark, begs thequestion whether his casual dismissal is actually part of a more deliberatestrategy. It certainly emerges as a pattern, and wider reading shows Kant’srecurring comment to be an appropriation of a popular jibe of his age. More-over, contemporaries extended the trans-European joke to encompass not onlyhistorical, but also conceptual thinking. For example, the fourteenth letter ofVoltaire’s Lettres philosophiques or Letters Concerning the English Nation(1734) reveals a common thread regarding philosophy and fancy that continuesinto Kant’s essay. Voltaire compares Descartes and Newton, and while on thewhole he portrays Descartes fairly positively, challenging the poor reputationthe metaphysician had gained on Newton’s home turf, Voltaire nonetheless cri-ticizes the hypothetical nature of Descartes’ philosophical work. For Descartes’speculation apparently led to mistaken notions of the soul, flawed proofs of theexistence of God, and, in the context of Newton, a disprovable theory of plane-tary motion. In Voltaire’s words, Descartes’ “philosophy was no more than aningenious romance (French roman), fit only to amuse the ignorant [. . .]. Hemade man according to his own fancy” (97). This was a subversion of Des-cartes’ own treatise on reasoning, since Descartes presented his Discourse onMethod as a “history – or, if you prefer, a fable” (5). Further, Voltaire’s rhetori-cal manoeuvre intended to discredit the rigour of a particular philosopher islater appropriated in George Lyttleton’s and Elizabeth Montagu’s Dialogues of

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the Dead (1760).6 In the twenty-fourth fictional dialogue, the character of Bayleasserts that his own philosophy was deeper than Locke’s. A debate ensues, andLocke humorously asks Bayle whether he can seriously contend “that becausethe Hypothesis of Descartes, your Countryman, which was nothing but an inge-nious, well-imagined Romance (French roman), has been largely exploded, theSystem of Newton, which is built on Experiments and Geometry, the two surestMethods of discovering Truth, will ever fail?” (264).

Such mockery was not merely limited to the stock characters of the spuriousDescartes and Newton the hero, but was predicated on an opposition between anapparently rigorous philosophy and wild fabrication. Indeed, Frederick the Greatapplies this means of deriding erroneous philosophical metaphysics in his 1780treatise De la littérature allemande. He imagines a university professor’s sylla-bus, mentioning Descartes and Newton, among others. Before proceeding topraise Locke, Frederick imagines in a jocular spirit the professor’s reception ofLeibniz and the idea of pre-established harmony. In the words of the official Ger-man translation by Christian W. von Dohm: “das System der vorherbestimmtenHarmonie wird unser Weltweise als den Roman eines Mannes von vielem Geistevorstellen” (85). There was thus a strand of reasoning across eighteenth-centurythought that too much hypothetical conjecture renders a philosophical work fic-tional. This commonplace is recounted here at length, because in at least oneGerman manifestation its reference to literary form attains an unusual specificity,referring indisputably to the novel as a discrete entity. Herder uses the typicalsimile to deride two contemporary French authors, concluding his Abhandlungüben den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) with the rhetorical question: “und wiepflegt man, was die Form einer Hypothese hat, zu betrachten als wie philoso-phischen Roman – Rousseaus, Condillacs und andrer?” (810).7 Instead of offer-ing a hypothesis, Herder claims to prove a philosophical truth.8

This opposition of speculative and especially post-Newtonian philosophyand the novel is a key point of contrast in the Idea essay. Kant writes in the intro-duction that nature will bring forth the man who is capable of writing universalhistory; the man for the task will follow in the footsteps of Kepler and, above all,Newton (18). Yet approaching Kant’s rejection of the “Roman” against thisbackground complicates our opening reading of Kant’s line from 1784. His

6 I owe a debt to Kevin Hilliard for directing me to these two sources, and suggesting a connec-tion between them.

7 Avi Lifschitz interprets this line as a response to a critical review of Herder’s earlier fragmentson German literature, in which Christian Garve draws comparison between conjectural historiesof language and mind on the one hand, and philosophical novels on the other (see Lifschitz,176 & 186).

8 Ironically, Kant disputes precisely the rigour of Herder’s style of argumentation in his two-part1785 review of Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Kant accuses Herder ofpoetic indulgence (but not of having written a novel), since he wonders: ‘ob nicht statt nachbar-licher Übergänge aus dem Gebiete der philosophischen in den Bezirk der poetischen Sprachezuweilen die Grenzen und Besitzungen von beiden völlig verrückt seien’ (8: 60).

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assertion is indeed “jocular,” but it is also part of a ready-made frame that struc-tures the presentation of the entire idea. The commonplace polarity between thethought of men such as Newton and the novel is set up in the introduction toKant’s essay, and completed only in the concluding proposition. By stretchingthis topos over the course of his argument, and in adding such brief comment,Kant assumes that the topic of narrative form and the novel is substantiated byits contemporary resonance.

In fact, the first and concluding propositions of Kant’s essay gesture towarda further commonplace of the age – a cornerstone of contemporary novel theory.Kant attributes a higher aim to his idea than mere instruction, and it aspires to amore sensitive affect than crass entertainment. His essay is instructive because itis ethical; it plays to the sensibility of a reader’s character. In the First Proposi-tion, Kant opposes “das trostlose Ungefähr” and “[der] Leitfaden der Vernunft”(18). And in the Ninth Proposition, he explicitly envisages the historical guidingthread as consoling. Its discovery would give rise to both narrative coherence aswell as “eine tröstende Aussicht in die Zukunft” (30). Kant’s proposed narrativethereby trumps the twofold function of the novel expounded in theories of themid-eighteenth century, expressed as the Horatian maxim prodesse et delectare,or to instruct and please.9

At this time, historical form and content was generally held to give rise topleasure, whereas the concepts and style of moral teachings or philosophy werethought to render a work instructive. If both of these became manifest in thesame work, as was so often proclaimed, Kant’s idea of universal history had anobvious competitor: the novel. Kant’s conception of philosophical history wastherefore an effort to disentangle that which theorists such as Gottsched hadbegun to conflate. For according to Gottsched’s theory of the novel, which wasincluded in an appendix to the fourth edition of Versuch einer critischen Dicht-kunst in 1751, the form of history is crucial in order for the “Roman” to engagewith the affects and thus please readers with narrative beauty. He writes: “jenäher also die Schreibart in Romanen der historischen kömmt, desto schöner istsie” (474). Although Gottsched considers the novel the lowest of literary genres,it is defended because of its rational style, which most obviously comes fromphilosophy. He praises the historical novels of Braunschweig, among others, buthe criticizes their form; instead, novels should be written in such a way that is“der Vernunft und Wahrheit gemäßer” (476). However, Gottsched also terms hisproposed narrative form historical and writes that it is characterized not just bysimplicity, but also chronological progression. He here appears to conflate philo-sophical style and written historical narrative.10 This subversive conflation of the

9 For a short summary of eighteenth-century theories of the novel, see Baldwin, 14-26.10 This follows Karen Feldman’s observation in her discussion of the first version of Gottsched’s

critical treatise of 1730. In a section on periodic style, “Gottsched comes to a moment of infre-quent criticism of Aristotle”: in the twenty-second chapter of Poetics, the historian’s objectionthat the tragic poets place prepositions after grammatical objects is dismissed by Aristotle, who

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historian’s and poet’s ideal style is of particular significance for Gottsched’s con-ception of the contiguity between the novel and historical as well as philosophi-cal prose. As Karen Feldman argues, Gottsched in fact “seems to harborambivalence about the proximity of the historian to the poet – specifically, theepic or narrative poet.”

Moreover, Kant’s essay indirectly competes with Blanckenburg’s theory onthe novel, a work that gives us a clearer understanding of the type of novel thatKant sought to displace. Blanckenburg’s Versuch über den Roman (1774) ar-gues, like Gottsched, that the use of historical material effectively appeals to areader: “bey der historischen Behandlung eines Romans hat der Dichter nochetwas, um den Leser zu reizen” (375). But although for Blanckenburg delight re-sults from historical content in a narrative, this is not the primary function of thenovel. That is to say, at the same time as philosophers attempted to discreditthose of their discipline whom they considered less rigorous through allusion tothe “Roman,” theorists of the novel were equally disparaging of trivial examplesof their prose form on account of philosophical vacuity. In the opening footnoteto the second part of his treatise, Blanckenburg adopts a simile of Lessing’s inorder to offer advice to “zukünftige Romanendichter” (529). The author whowrites without employing philosophy is like the daredevil tailor who makesclothes for a man he has not measured. The result may be fashionable, but it willnot fit. Accordingly, although novels might be read “zu einem sehr angenehmen,und sehr lehrreichen Zeitvertreibe,” they also become appropriate for “d[er] den-kende[] Kopf” (7). By explicitly incorporating philosophy, novels could nowdepict and lead to the perfection (“Vervollkommung”) of man as a human being,irrespective of an individual’s citizenship (15). In this regard, novels implicitlyassume a third function: dealing with the essential truth conducive to a clearmind and pure heart, novels, for Blanckenburg, should approximate the Greekepic. The strong implication is that the form’s betterment of man is consoling,and its ultimate aim is not dissimilar from that of Kant’s universal history,though it is not formulated as freedom. While Kant’s rejection of the “Roman”in his 1784 essay may appear as an aside on first reading, then, it is actually ofoverarching significance to his Idea essay – and it is an especially loaded turn ofphrase.

Rejecting the “Roman”: A Pseudo-Philosophical ArgumentA second interpretation of Kant’s comparison of philosophical history and the“Roman” attributes greater significance to Kant’s narratological problem, andembeds it within a wider discussion of Kant’s philosophical system. For ChadWellmon, Kant is aware that philosophical history will be likely understood interms of a novel, but it is a relationship about which the philosopher feels

celebrates the style of the poets as less prosaic. Gottsched, by contrast, demands a natural wordorder for the poets and historians alike. See Feldman’s footnote 12.

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uneasy. That is to say, Kant presents the novel as the inevitable but unfortunaterealization of his idea. Wellmon acknowledges that Kant thinks it strange andabsurd that philosophical history would be expressed as a novel, yet Kant never-theless “suggests that the history of the world could only take the form of anovel (Roman)” (37). The comparison is legitimate because, “as Kant writes, his-tory is narrated; it is written; and above all, it is a story, a Geschichte – that is,like a novel it is aware of its own made-ness” (167). The two textual phenomenaof history and a fictional story are alike in their temporalization of historicalprogress, too. And in addition to form, there is a similarity of content: philoso-phical history offers a possible future for humans, whereas the novel creates apossible world for its characters.

Such contiguity of the “Roman” and historical narrative is so plausiblebecause it has long been recognized by theorists; indeed, it underpinned earlytheories of the novel. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian notes in Book Ten ofThe Orator’s Education that history is close to poetry, and claims: “in a sense itis a prose poem, and it is written to tell a story, not to prove a point” (269). Thissurely influenced Sigmund von Birken’s 1669 preface to a novel by Braunsch-weig, Die durchleuchtige Syrerin Aramena, in which he coins the terms“GeschichtGedichte” and “GedichtGeschichten.” Whereas the first group re-counts true history, the second comprises either empirical accounts under a fic-tive name, plausible tales, or entirely fictitious stories. More obviously, Birken’sdistinction can also be aligned with Aristotle’s division between empirical his-tory on the one hand, and probable poetry on the other. In the following years,Pierre Daniel Huët’s 1670 treatise Traité de l’origine des romans, translated intoGerman in 1682, defended the novel precisely through recourse to Aristotle’sassertion in his ninth chapter that the poet is not primarily a maker of verses, butof plots.

According to Wellmon, then, there is ambivalence in Kant’s line: the novelis reluctantly admitted as textual representation through an ideal – but unrealistic– dismissal. The greatest merit of Wellmon’s analysis inheres in its subsequentdiagnosis of a Kantian “fear” to which the philosopher appears to be resigned.Philosophical history “might be susceptible to such distractions and digressions”as those which the novel was popularly thought to cause (167). Thus we caninfer that if Kant’s line is humorous, it was penned with anxious laughter and re-cognized a home truth, in a sort of anxiety of influence.11 Such a tension resultedfrom the real proximity of philosophy and the novel.

Though amusing, it is important to take Kant’s comment on the “Roman”seriously, and to contextualize it within his published thought as a whole, asWellmon does. In his letters, Kant did not complain about the contemporary

11 The latter phrase gestures towards David C. Hensley’s analysis. He writes of Richardson’simpact on Kant thus: “in Harold Bloom’s terms, Richardson must have haunted the edges ofKant’s thinking as a peculiarly vexing kind of precursor” (188); hence Kant was “an anxiousand wilful anti-Richardsonian reader” (192).

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boom in novels. He instead responded to the trend through consistently explicit,if brief, disparaging remarks about this narrative form within his philosophicalworks. His lines from 1784 and 1786 are but two examples; he again remarks onthe “Roman” in the context of pure reason and moral judgement in 1787. AsWellmon briefly notes (167), in the second version of Kritik der reinen Vernunft,Kant states that any realization of the ideal, such as through a wise man in anovel, is inadequate because of the inherent, natural limits of embodied subjec-tivity. By contrast, monograms can better approximate the ideal because theyconstitute more of “eine im Mittel verschiedener Erfahrungen gleichsam schwe-bende Zeichnung, als ein bestimmtes Bild” (3: 384–85). As sensuous symbols,they contain the boundless loosely, rather than within a definite picture; and as aconsequence, they are unintelligible. The indeterminability of these forms appar-ently does not produce an entity which serves as a standard pattern for empiricalobservation and critical reflection; it instead invites unbiased appreciation. More-over, monograms are a clear counter-example to other realizations of the idealsuch as the novel because they are content-less: they are sketches without shad-ing or colour. Indeed, Kant writes that creations of the imagination such asmonograms do not have an explicable concept.

In Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), Kant develops this potential of art. Here heclaims that dynamic representations of the imagination through painting as wellas “Dichtkunst” can result in an “ästhetische Idee,” the pendant to the “Vernunf-tidee.” The former approaches the exposition of intellectual thought because of astructural analogy: it has aesthetic rather than logical attributes. It facilitatesexpression of the ideal, though it is still inadequate (5: 312–16). Significantlyand most surprisingly, Kant includes a certain type of prose narrative in this aes-thetic function: “eine Geschichte” that may be “genau und ordentlich,” and isauthored by genius. Could this be the form for universal history – a story, butnot necessarily a novel? It is difficult to say. As plausible as it sounds, in the Se-venth Proposition of his 1784 essay, Kant uses a grammatical and semantic con-struction similar to the one he employs in his rejection of the novel. He writes:“so schwärmerisch diese Idee auch zu sein scheint” – and he then negates thisapparent quality (24). In the subsequent proposition, he also repudiates theassumption that his proposal for an effective history might be “nichts wenigerals schwärmerisch” (27). Thus, if the “Geschichte” Kant imagines in his thirdCritique can express the ideal of his philosophical history, it must be morerestrained in its poetic enthusiasm.

If we read Kant’s philosophy systematically, the novel is consistently under-stood as irreconcilable with Kant’s various projects. But it seems as if the rea-sons he gives can each be refuted with respect to the type of novel that we mightourselves conceive for narrating philosophical history. In Kritik der praktischenVernunft (1788), Kant implies that vacuous and unattainable desires characterizethe protagonists of novels (5: 155). This problem surely would be overcome by anarrative based on historical truth and intended to advance the end goal of man.In Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), meanwhile, Kant criticizes

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the narrative and hence cognitive path that we follow while reading a novel: “derGedankengang wird fragmentarisch, so daß man die Vorstellungen eines unddesselben Objects zerstreut (sparsim), nicht verbunden (conjunctim) nach Ver-standeseinheit im Gemüthe spielen läßt” (7: 208). However, in his earlier essayon philosophical history, Kant suggests a way in which a story in prose couldenable a reader response within a mental structure that he understands as leadingto a proper judgement, whereby the reader is not distracted and does not digress.Formally, Kant proposes that readers are kept on route to reason by his conceptof a guiding thread, or “Leitfaden” of reason, which he first presents, and thenworks out in more detail, in the two versions of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft(1781, 1787). In 1784, the “Leitfaden” becomes the metaphor for regular histori-cal progression, connecting discontinuous historical events and weaving theminto a narrative.

However, although we might plausibly think that the adoption of a “Leitfa-den” could save a novel’s structure from its bad reputation and permit the formthe worthy task of narrating universal history, Kant appears to undercut this pos-sibility for literary writers in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). Here, he admiresthe novelist Wieland as a genius, but differentiates him from thinkers such asNewton because the latter can clearly show the steps he took toward his complexdiscoveries. By contrast, he claims that “kein Homer oder Wieland anzeigenkann, wie sich seine phantasiereichen und doch zugleich gedankenvollen Ideenin seinem Kopfe hervor und zusammen finden, darum weil er selbst nicht weißund es also keinen anderen lehren kann” (5: 309). Wieland is an especially sig-nificant example: in Chapter Nine of Poetics, Aristotle cites Agathon as anexample of an effective writer superior to the historian, and this historical charac-ter of the poet becomes Wieland’s protagonist in Geschichte des Agathon, whichsucceeded not only as a literary work but in Lessing’s opinion, let us we recall,as the only novel for an intellectual mind. Moreover, in this passage of the thirdCritique, post-Newtonian philosophy is once again contrasted with the processof writing a novel – even the act of writing a legitimate novel. This argument isone reason why the “ästhetische Idee” can approach and assist the presentationof intellectual inquiry, but cannot perform it alone. If Kant’s philosophical his-tory would allow or perhaps necessiate the inclusion of aesthetic attributes inorder to realize the ideal, these could hardly be written by a novelist, for inKant’s view the novel writer would not be able to make his guiding thread visi-ble to the reader.

A synoptic view of Kant’s thought therefore suggests that, providing anovel is written by a philosopher, this narrative form can only be as inadequatefor philosophical history as any other practical manifestation of the ideal, sinceno phenomenal representation can give shape to a regulative idea such that itwould satisfactorily result in the recognition of pure truth or, indeed, morality. Itfurther turns out that there are no other satisfactory philosophical reasons forKant’s dismissal of the novel, so long as it is written by a man such as Newton,not Wieland. But can we imagine such a thing as a novel that is not written by a

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novelist? This seems absurd. Nevertheless, the question is useful in its sugges-tion that Kant’s objection does not necessarily concern narrative form or contentper se. Kant’s formal objection instead has to do with the relative positions ofintellectual disciplines, traditionally distinguished by different types of narrative,and with who may represent them.

Rather than resigning himself to the novel in his Idea essay, then, Kant en-gages agonistically with contemporary novel writers. I agree with Wellmon thatKant’s Ninth Proposition is marked by anxiety; it is an anxiety predicated on per-ceived proximity of disciplines, but it does not concede defeat. After all, whenKant began to sketch his philosophical history in 1786, he again denied that itsresult resembled a novel. My alternative, third explanation for Kant’s seminalassertion runs thus: rejection of the novel is a witty topos of Kant’s maturethought. His negation of the contemporary novel as a possible form for his pro-posed philosophically historical narrative is best read rhetorically. Otherwise itdoes not make sense, since admittedly, critical, systematic examination of Kant’sthought has opened up the possibility that the novel may be reconcilable with thetenets of his 1784 essay, after all – providing the form is created by a philoso-pher, not a novelist. And finally, Kant’s categorical, rhetorical resistance to thenovel is fortified by the structure of his essay. While I evoked jocular anti-novelcommonplaces of the eighteenth century in section one in order to evidenceKant’s traditional exclusion of the form, I now turn to further stock ideas withwhich Kant opposed the novel in a more subversive way.

Rewriting Aristotelian CommonplacesKant substantiates his dismissal of the novel through playfully reorganizingAristotelian commonplaces at the end of his Idea essay. The discursive contextfor Kant’s manipulation of Aristotle was well established by previous criticalwriting on the novel. Both Gottsched’s and Blanckenburg’s theories of thenovel, for example, more or less conform to the conceptual framework of Aristo-tle’s classical hierarchy, with history below poetry and poetry legitimizedbecause of its philosophical import. Gottsched elevates novels above history andabove other prose works if they are moral, but also above contemporary novelsif they include genuine historical content, because they thereby become moreprobable since the material is factually real (475). The substance of actual his-tory, together with moral integrity, makes good that which is otherwise mere“Erdichtungen.” Blanckenburg ranks a new category of novels, written byauthors such as Wieland, above history and an older type of historical novel. Hepresents “die Richardsonschen Romane” as inferior to Wieland’s Agathon,because the latter sort of novel portrays and historicizes the inner developmentof man and is thus indicative of deeper reflection. It is “ein dichterisches Pro-dukt” (381). Consequently, especially Blanckenburg does not subvert ChapterNine of Poetics in any particularly interesting way: the novel simply spans thedisciplines of history and poetry, with the lesser examples attributed to the for-mer category and the better (i.e., the more philosophical) to the latter.

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Intriguingly, philosophy proper remained intact as a separate conceptualdomain. Theorists such as Blanckenburg promoted the novel through recourse tophilosophy, and Blanckenburg suggests that improvement to the literary formwould hopefully further the philosopher’s cause of general betterment to society.However, authors of novels and philosophy continue to be different: “Für diese[. . .] Philosophen [. . .] können unmöglich Romane und Heldengedichte ges-chrieben werden; und sie selbst schreiben auch, als Philosophen, keine Romane”(74). A broader public simply receives (watered-down) philosophy through read-ing novels. Kant’s Ninth Proposition upholds Blanckenburg’s distinction, thoughKant is dismissive of any halfway measure to enlighten everyday readers. In hisIdea essay, he rejects the novel as the proper narrative form for the philosophicalhistorian, making a structural allusion to Aristotle’s ninth chapter that creativelyengages with arguments concerning the probability of plot, narrative continuity,and disciplinary hierarchy.12

Aristotle contends that poetic plots can be empirically and historically trueand still be classed as poetry. If an actual event has, by virtue of having occurred,been proven possible, it thus remains a probability for a new and different con-text. Kant’s idea for a narrative of universal history proposes something similar:a past cause in a developed society might equal a probable, contemporary causalfactor in a less developed society. That is to say, progressive improvementtoward a state constitution in one part of the world would probably –

“wahrscheinlicher Weise” – spread to all others (29). However, Kant also sug-gests in his Ninth Proposition that his history would extend beyond singular ap-plications of political prophecy, since it would otherwise constitute a use “denman schon sonst aus der Geschichte der Menschen, wenn man sie gleich als un-zusammenhängende Wirkung einer regellosen Freiheit ansah, gezogen hat!”(30). He is more concerned with the revelation of a more global, hidden naturalplan – but the attainment of this plan is similarly uncertain. Kant reiterates thathis conception of a regular historical progression is a priori only to a certainextent; as he writes in his introduction, a narrative of universal history depictsthat for which we can (only) hope. The natural plan of historical revelation relieson the participation of man, who is imperfect: Kant describes him in the SixthProposition as being made “aus so krummem Holze” that cannot be entirelystraightened out (23). Nevertheless, Kant argues that his probable narrative atleast advances the aim of discovering freedom more than if it were not known ornarrated.

The narrative continuity of the idea of Kant’s 1784 essay arises from theaggregation of events separated by time and space: individual and unconnectedfree actions that seemingly do not adhere to a general principle. In Chapter Nine

12 Joachim Scharloth offers a nuanced description of the affinities between German conceptions ofprobability in poetics of the novel and historiography respectively, during the second half of theeighteenth century. He historicizes their common heritage from the tradition of classical rheto-ric. However, Scharloth does not refer to Kant. See especially 259-269.

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of the Poetics, Aristotle considers episodic plots and actions to be the worst ofthe simple kind, because they do not give rise to sequential probability or neces-sity. He supposes that episodic plays are either composed by bad poets throughtheir own fault, or by good poets for their actors, in order to stage spectacle. Inhis Ninth Proposition, however, Kant writes that his probable and philosophicalhistory, which both seeks and furthers continuity, is discovered specificallywhen histories of foreign states are added gradually and episodically – “episo-disch” – to the histories of enlightened nations (29). These episodes should thenbe connected through the concept of the “Leitfaden” in order to represent a prob-able truth and be told in a coherent way. This point demonstrates that Kant buildsupon Aristotle’s passage conceptually: the worst plots of poets are improved bythe philosopher, because he can recognize and reveal a probable and consolingtruth in them that poets – or here, novelists – cannot.

Kant’s most notable reconfiguration of a commonplace from Aristotle’sninth chapter is that he changes the interdisciplinary hierarchy to the disadvan-tage of the “Roman,” defending philosophy by promoting history (though not tothe head of the class), and by demoting the novel specifically. Aristotle’s modeldescends from philosophy, to poetry, to history on the bottom rung; whereasKant’s progresses from the “Roman,” to history, to philosophy as the superiordiscipline. However, Kant also uses this ranking to allude to two eighteenth-century poles of debate on the topic of historiography and literature. On the onehand, in the footnote to his Ninth Proposition Kant writes: “Das erste Blatt imThucydides (sagt Hume) ist der einzige Anfang aller wahren Geschichte” (29).David Hume asserts in his 1742 essay On the Populousness of Ancient Nationsthat all narrations of history prior to Thucydides are worthless because they aretainted by fable; philosophers ought to abandon them “to the embellishment ofpoets and orators” (252). On the other hand, in the proposition itself Kant alludesto Leibniz’ Theodicy (1710), since he doubts that history could be of any help tosociety if it only leads to a hope for “eine vollendete vernünftige Absicht” (30)in another world. He thereby implies agreement with Leibniz’ thesis that ours isthe best of all possible worlds and suggests that history should give us practicalcause for hope within it. But Leibniz, unlike Hume, argues that poetic extrava-gance moves and persuades, an efficacy that does not necessarily apply to thetelling of correct fact. Kant calls for a narrative that is in a sense in the middle ofthese two views: his story would be historical, and it would also move readers,consoling them – yet it would absolutely not do so as a literary form, the novel.Kant’s understanding of historical-philosophical consolation is shaped by, butalso subverts Aristotle’s ninth chapter, which ranks history below philosophy –

as well as poetry – because it lacks an ethical dimension.Although Kant claims that to read his idea of a universal history as an

attempt to suppress “die Bearbeitung der eigentlichen bloß empirisch abgefas-sten Historie” (30) would be to misunderstand his intention, he does indeedplace history below philosophy – the use of “bloß” here is pejorative. In the finalparagraph of the Ninth Proposition, Kant skirmishes with the empirical historians

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and goes further than to claim that his history only concerns the contribution of aphilosophical mind, one that offers a different perspective from the historian’s.His task is apparently more crucial to humankind: the topic of the philosophicalhistorian is more relevant to future generations than that of the empiricist one,since Kant considers the intricacies of contemporary histories (which, by impli-cation, are empirical) superfluous for readers of tomorrow. We should insteadnarrate in a succinct and natural way so that “unsere späten Nachkommen anfan-gen werden, die Last von Geschichte, die wir ihnen nach einigen Jahrhundertenhinterlassen möchten, zu fassen” (30–31). Kant argues that these readers willonly be interested in what people with a cosmopolitan view have achieved orhindered over time – the very topic of philosophical history. This narrativewould still require some recourse to fact, but details are of lesser importance.Indeed, Kant contends that universal history would still be effective, albeit lessso, without empirical accuracy. He writes in his Eighth Proposition that “selbstdie schwachen Spuren” (27) are significant in order to realize his idea. Here Kantmakes an analogy with astronomers: from the general premise that the universeis systematically composed and from the little knowledge that astronomers havealready established, astronomers can still make some assertions. So too can wemake historical assumptions that are sufficiently reliable to be probable. Kant ad-vances a similar point in his Muthmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte(1786), in which he emphasizes the conjectural nature of the work. Although hesuggests that it would be secondary to a more detailed and accurate study, henevertheless asserts that his attempt can be of benefit. Consequently, the philoso-pher is the superior thinker, the historian follows suit in support, and the novelistis excluded from Kant’s philosophical-historical enterprise.

Contesting KantAt the dawn of the nineteenth century, reading universal history as a type ofnovel was common. Such interpretation may have been innocent, or fundamentalto an apology for poetry. On 31 July 1800, Friedrich August Hahnrieder some-what naively wrote to Kant to say that he had first encountered the philosopher’sworks while incarcerated, and that they were his great fortune: “denn ohne die-sen Leitfaden wäre ich ein bloßer fragmentarischer Mensch geblieben, und niedas geworden was ich schon geworden bin und insonderheit noch werden kann”(12: 319). Hahnrieder attributes to Kant’s writing in general an effect similar tothat of universal history, though the whole – human progress – here becomes theindividual self. Significantly, he presents a single biography, the structure thatenables a person’s narrative coherence, as akin to the novel: “Mein Leben gleichteinem Roman, wo ich mir zum Theil viele Szenen selbst schuf, zum Theil auchin welche wider mein Wißen und Willen versetzt wurde.” Hahnrieder’s letter de-monstrates how easy it was to apply Kant’s philosophy, and his proposal for uni-versal history in particular, to the concept of the novel in the period. Kant didnot respond to this claim – we can only suppose why.

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If the value of the novel for telling the history of man was wilfully disre-garded by Kant, it was seized by Schiller and, above all, the later German Ro-mantics. This is well known. In the last lines of the preface to Geschichte desAbfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung (1788), forexample, Schiller hopes that at least some of his readers will consider his proseas historically accurate without it trying their patience, and that they might alsoagree, “daß die Geschichte von einer verwandten Kunst etwas borgen kann,ohne deßwegen nothwendig zum Roman zu werden” (31). Nicholas Saul ob-serves the parallel with Kant’s Idea essay and expresses the difference thus:“what for Kant is a jocular aside about the novel or romance is for Schiller a seri-ous contribution of poetry to truth” (footnote 6, 69). While I hope to have shownthat Kant’s remark about the “Roman” is more than just a “jocular aside,” Saul isof course right that Schiller embraced the potential of poetry – and the qualitiesof the novel specifically. He offers a model of interdisciplinary borrowing,though the boundaries between history and the novel are here kept distinct. Simi-larly, in a letter to Caroline von Beulwitz of 10 December 1788, Schiller con-cedes that historical prose has the advantage of greater factual truth over the“Roman,” but he suggests to his addressee that there is also an “innere Wahr-heit,” which he terms “die philosophische und Kunstwahrheit” (25: 154). Thehistorian is sometimes too pedantic, whereas the novelist can present a truerimage of man. This letter has been contextualized within Schiller’s own thought(Saul 41); but it also contains an important, if unoriginal interpretation of a clas-sical reference. Historical precision is ranked alongside and then below thenovel, because the “Roman” as a form can offer additional philosophical valueto factual truth. This positive categorization of the novel is thus conceived withinthe very Aristotelian paradigm that was so constitutive for Kant’s thought.

What is worth emphasizing for my present argument, however, is that, forKant (as for Schiller’s 1788 preface), the “Roman” constituted a specific entityof formal opposition, whereas Romantic authors celebrated the novel as a way topraise the formative power of poetry more broadly, understood as poeisis or“Poesie,” and to assert its relationship to history and philosophy. Friedrich Schle-gel quips in Brief über den Roman (1800) that he detests the novel “insofern ereine besondre Gattung sein will” (3: 335). He instead proposes an amorphousdefinition. This admission of the ambiguity of a novel’s form is in Schlegel’stheory – unlike in Blanckenburg’s – apologetic, inasmuch as it allows for con-ceptual blending of disciplines that operates outside of Kant’s (and Schiller’s)hierarchical, Aristotelian frame of debate. Indeed, Schlegel writes in an apho-rism: “Historie ist zugleich Universalphilosophie, Romanpoesie und Rhetorik”(18: 114; see Süssmann, 200). Novalis likewise elevates literature generallyabove history in Heinrich von Ofterdingen, published in 1802. For the historiandoes not have that special something “was erst die Geschichte zur Geschichtemacht, und die mancherley Zufälle zu einem angenehmen und lehrreichen Gan-zen verbindet” (259). Let us recall that the formulation prodesse et delectaregoverned the novel for theorists of the previous century. Novalis is less genre-

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specific: he proposes that the “Geschichtschreiber” should also be a “Dichter” –a poet, a term that now includes, but is not limited to, the novelist.

The relationship between Kant’s philosophy and the novel can be character-ized as an agon, but Kant also presented his contention with an air of humour, asSaul notes. In a late prefatory 1825 “Entschuldigung” to Die unsichtbare Loge,Jean Paul responds in such a vein, with a witty slight at the expense of Kant’sidea and in favour of the novel. Jean Paul is ostensibly apologizing for the unfin-ished aspects of his own novel, and writes: “so tröste man sich damit, daß derMensch rund herum in seiner Gegenwart nichts sieht als Knoten, – und erst hinterseinem Grabe liegen die Auflösungen; – und die ganze Weltgeschichte ist ihmein unvollendeter Roman” (13). Kant’s 1784 essay presents the narrative of uni-versal history – the amalgamation of discontinuous episodes – as consoling forthe reader, because it is both ideal and practical. Since man is made from crooked,gnarled wood, the completion of the path toward freedom may not be realistic,but its achievement can still be narrated and approached. As a probable story con-tingent on human actions that are not entirely predictable, the story will likelyneed to be continually redrafted – indeed, Kant introduces his attempt to write thebeginning of it in 1786 as provisional conjecture. But the proper form of Kant’suniversal history would emphatically not constitute a novel, though readers mightpresume it would. Is Kant actually the butt of Jean Paul’s joke, and thus mockedby one of the most popular novelists around 1800? It would be appropriate if so.For Kant’s dismissive lines regarding the “Roman” in 1784 and again in 1786can be understood as the perspective of a philosopher concerned about the everincreasing predominance of the novel in the literary market, and its apparentthreat to Enlightenment, or the progression of human freedom.

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