The Review of Metaphysics

One might have the following unfounded worry about Palmquist's Kant and Mysticism: "Of course Kant will have some features of his thought that can be construed as mystical. Are not all great philosophers mystics in a sense, who redirect a conversation by their seeming access to another realm? There are, of course, the literal mystical visions of a Plato or a Hildegard, but consider also the skeptical ascent in Hume's Treatise, or the otherworldly presence of David Lewis. Even Russell had his mathematical revelations. Is not Kant bound to come off as a bit of a mystic, as the one who saw the power of the 'moral law within,' as the voice of reason itself, to redirect metaphysics and rein in its speculative demands?"

However, this worry is not a reason to avoid Kant and Mysticism. It is a reason why books like it need to be written, particularly for figures like Kant, whom we so often think of as dry and austere. To that end, Kant and Mysticism does a good job of capturing what is mystical in Kant, pushing some key Kantian themes toward the mystical while seemingly preserving their spirit: "'Reason' is Kant's name for the ultimately unknowable mystery that generates all our human capacities for knowledge and [End Page 854] goodness"; or: "Surely Kant's moral philosophy is grounded on what might well be called a mystical intuition of the unity of human personhood"; or again: "The core message of Kant's Critical mysticism is that anyone who experiences Critique, by allowing the light of reason to lay bare all of the dark recesses of human ignorance, will recognize that we cannot, and therefore should not, ask for more." Palmquist thus helps us to see a Kant whose concern with the limits of knowledge goes beyond developing a metaphysics, and whose concern with religion goes beyond grafting doctrines onto morality.

Palmquist is quick to note that he is not offering a Kant who approves of schwärmerei—a term Kant associates with his criticism of many mystics, and which is often translated as "enthusiasm" but which Palmquist offers is best rendered in contemporary English as "delirium." For Palmquist, Kantian critical mysticism is (naturally) first negative—clearing out whatever goes beyond reason's limits or against the moral—and only within this cleared space does it take shape. In one of the most interesting parts of the book, Palmquist argues that even as Kant critiqued Swedenborg in his early Dreams of a Spirit Seer, he was beginning to develop a mystical idea of the moral community—literally, a corpus mysticum—out of the shell of Swedenborg's spirit-world (A808/B836). Palmquist may overstate his case here, in saying that Dreams of a Spirit Seer is where Kant finds the "seed" that "eventually matured into the tree of Critical philosophy," but the connections he draws are worth exploring nonetheless.

Palmquist argues that once the tree of the critical philosophy was fully grown from the seed of Dreams of a Spirit Seer, it was finally able to bear long-intended fruit, its own "mystical seed," the unfortunately unfinished Opus postumum. One key textual question here arises due to Palmquist's basing his reading of the latter text on one account Kant gives of three transitions that will structure it. This is crucial because Kant also gives a different, seemingly irreconcilable account of these transitions elsewhere in the text; further, much of Palmquist's argument about Opus postumum's significance for Kant may ride on the claim that this passage, 21:17, in the "first" fascicle of Kant's papers was written early on in Opus postumum—and much of that fascicle was certainly not (see Opus postumum, ed. Eckart Förster, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen, p. xxviii).

Does the book establish its ambitious main thesis, that Kant's goal in his corpus...