The division of a critique into a doctrine of elements and a doctrine of method that precedes the science cannot be applied to the critique of taste, because there cannot be any science of the beautiful and the judgment of taste is not determinable by principles. For as far as the scientific element in any art is concerned, which concerns truth in the presentation of its object, this is to be sure the indispensable condition (conditio sine qua non) of beautiful art, but not the art itself. For beautiful art there is thus only a manner (modus), not a way of teaching it (methodus). The master must demonstrate what the student is to do and how he should accomplish it; and the universal rules under which he ultimately brings his procedure can serve rather to bring its principal elements to mind as occasion requires than to prescribe them to him. Nevertheless, in so doing there must be regard for a certain ideal that art must have before its eyes, even though in practice it is never fully attained.

Dear Herr Privy Councillor,

Esteemed and learned Herr Professor,

The unexpectedly prompt result of your kind efforts on my behalf have filled me with both consternation and gratitude. In thinking about your kind proposal, which would involve a change at your university which His Highness, at first thought might take place sometime in the future, I found myself moved not to reject too hastily the opportunity to gain a small but secure amount of prosperity; but I am also put into a state of perplexity by this immediate and kind offer of an opportunity which I coveted just a little while ago. My resolution, I beg you to forgive me, has in the meantime vacillated.

Renewed and much stronger assurances, the growing likelihood of a possibly imminent vacancy here, attachment to my native city and a rather extended circle of acquaintances and friends, above all however my weak physical constitution – these suddenly present themselves as such strong counter-arguments, that my peace of mind seems possible to me only where I have heretofore always found it, even if only in burdensome circumstances. And since it appears that a definite answer is required right away, I make it now with most earnest apologies for the trouble that I may have occasioned: I hereby decline the honor and the appointment intended for me.

Esteemed Sir,

Herr Nicolovius who has the honor of delivering this letter to you, is a former auditor of mine and a very fine young man. He would like to make the acquaintance of some of the people in your circle of friends during his brief stay in Eutin. Getting to know such people is often impossible in large cities, yet so good for one's heart and mind. His modest demeanor ensures that his request will cause you no trouble.

The penetrating observations you made in your letter will give me much food for thought. For the present, since I have not found the time to give sustained thought to your suggestions, I must beg you to be contented with my still unripe judgments.

First, concerning the analogy between colors and tones, you certainly bring into focus the issue of their relation to judgments of taste (which aim to be more than mere sensory judgments about what pleases or displeases). Your graduated scale of vowel sounds, the only sounds, you maintain, that can produce a distinct tone by themselves, seems to me to be unnecessary here. For no one can think music that he is not able, however clumsily, to sing – and this at the same time shows clearly the difference between colors and tones, since the former do not presuppose any such productive power of the imagination.

Dearest friend,

What do you think of my negligence in corresponding? What does your mentor, Herr Mendelssohn and what does Professor Lambert think of it? These brave people must certainly imagine me to be a very rude person for reciprocating so badly the trouble they have taken in their letters. I could hardly blame them if they decided never again to allow themselves to be coaxed into troubling to answer a letter from me. But if only the inner difficulty one personally feels could be as perspicuous to other eyes, I hope that they would sooner take anything in the world to be the cause of my silence, rather than indifference or lack of respect. I beg you therefore to forestall or disabuse these worthy men of any such suspicion; for even now I feel the same hindrance that kept me from answering them for so long. My delay however really has two causes, not counting the bad habit of thinking that tomorrow is always a more convenient day to post a letter than today. The sort of letters with which these two scholars have honored me always lead me to a long series of investigations. You know very well that I am inclined not only to try to refute intelligent criticisms but that I always weave them together with my judgments and give them the right to overthrow all my previously cherished opinions.

Many thanks to Herr Nicolovius for the 16 Göttingen sausages, which arrived yesterday and therefore must have been shipped immediately. My household will be amply supplied for a whole year with these wares.

I. Kant

Dearest old friend,

Your gift, the two-volume Refutation of Herder's Metacritique (it does equal honor to your heart and your head), revives my memory of those pleasant days we used to enjoy together, days enlivened by what is true and good and imperishable to both of us. Now, in my 77th year, plagued by physical weaknesses (which do not however point to an imminent farewell) that make my final project more difficult but not, I hope, null and void, these memories are no small tonic for me, in my condition – your gift is thus doubly pleasing.

Your concern lest the carrots you sent last autumn might have been damaged by the long and early frost that took place then has turned out to be unwarranted. For I consumed the last of them only the day before yesterday at Sunday dinner, as usual with two friends, and the carrots tasted fine.

Be happy, and continue your affection for your eternal friend. Let me hear something now and then of your situation and literary happenings.

With greatest devotion and friendship and respect I remain always your unwaveringly loyal friend and servant.

You have given me great pleasure with your letter, so full of information, dearest friend. I take joy in your good prospects, praise your industriousness, and worry about your preserving your health; but I hope that those worries will be removed by your soon receiving a well paying position or an appointment as chaplain which will not require you to expend your energies so much.

I did not overlook that spot in the “Letters of a Minister” and I noticed at whom it was directed. But it didn't trouble me.

I noticed a certain animosity in Herr Reinhold's letter as well; he is vexed that I have not read his Theory [of the Power of Representation]. I answered him and I hope he will be reconciled to my postponing a complete reading of his book because of my pressing projects. The proof that you give of his proposition concerning the material of representation is comprehensible and correct. If, when I refer to the “material” of a representation, I mean that whereby the object is given, then, if I leave out synthetic unity (combination), which can never be given but only thought, what remains must be the manifold of intuition (for intuition in space and time contains nothing simple).

Your proof of the ideality of space as the form of outer sense is entirely correct; only the beginning is questionable.

In a letter dated Greifswald, May 11, 1797, a letter recently made public, which is distinguished by its singular tone, Herr Johann August Schlettwein demands that I engage in an exchange of letters with him on the critical philosophy. He indicates that he already has various letters prepared on the subject and adds that he believes himself to be in a position to overthrow completely my whole philosophical system, both its theoretical and its practical parts, an event that should be pleasing to every friend of philosophy. But as for the proposed method whereby this refutation is to be carried out, namely, in an exchange of letters, either handwritten or printed, I must answer curtly: Absolutely not. For it is absurd to ask a man in his seventy-fourth year (when “packing one's bags” [sarcinas colligere] is really of the highest importance) to engage in a project that would take many years, just to make even tolerable progress with the criticisms and rejoinders. But the reason why I am making public this declaration (which I have already sent to him) is that his letter clearly had publicity as its object, and since his attack may be broadcast by word of mouth, those people who are interested in such a controversy would otherwise be left waiting empty-handed. Since Herr Schlettwein will not let this difficulty halt his projected overthrow of my system.

Dearest brother,

My wife was delighted by the book you sent, The Housewife in All Her Tasks, for she had gotten it into her head that you were offended by her bold request and that you would henceforth disregard her. She intends to use this book to teach herself how to become a truly competent farmer. That is a new subject for me as well, since Providence has seen fit to transfer me from schoolroom to plough. I am now a preacher in a loamy diocese that covers a lot of territory. A considerable number of Protestants who live in the adjoining part of Lithuania belong to my congregation and this requires that I make frequent excursions for sick visits. This part of my office is very tiring but I am strong and healthy enough not to pay attention to my fatigue. In other respects my new situation is much more pleasant than my previous teaching position whose depressingly massive work and minimal pay made it hard to make ends meet and support my family. I endured that burden for six years; thank God for letting me rest from it. Now I enjoy contentment and my prospects will be even better when I get out from under the debts I have had to incur as a budding farmer – for cattle, horses, wagon, and a thousand other necessities.

Esteemed Sir,

I am always delighted to know and engage in literary discussions with such a talented and learned man as you, my dearest friend. I received the plan for a periodical that you sent me last summer and also the two first monthly issues. I found your Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind splendid, and I shall study them so as to be able to give you my thoughts about them. The paper on sexual differences in organic nature, in the second issue, is impossible for me to decipher, even though the author seems to be an intelligent fellow. There was once a severely critical discussion in the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung about the ideas expressed in the letters of Herr Hube of Thorn concerning a similar relationship extending throughout nature. The ideas were attacked as romantic twaddle. To be sure, we sometimes find something like that running through our heads, without knowing what to make of it. The organization of nature has always struck me as amazing and as a sort of chasm of thought; I mean, the idea that fertilization, in both realms of nature, always needs two sexes in order for the species to be propagated. After all, we don't want to believe that providence has chosen this arrangement, almost playfully, for the sake of variety. On the contrary, we have reason to believe that propagation is not possible in any other way.

I have had the pleasure of discovering by way of the Berlin newspaper that my essay, with the motto “Verum animo satis haec, etc”. from Lucretius, an essay that was delivered to you, dear sir, by the merchant Abraham Gottlieb Ficker and a receipt for which, signed by you, sir, and dated Berlin, 31 October, 1762, was transmitted to me, was pronounced worthy of Second Place after the winning Prize Essay by the Royal Academy of Sciences assembly.

I am all the more moved by this favorable judgment in view of how little care in preparing its appearance and ornamentation went into the work, since a somewhat too lengthy delay left me with hardly enough time to present some of the most important arguments on this subject on which I have been reflecting for several years and the goal of which reflections, I flatter myself, I am near to reaching.

I take the liberty of inquiring, dear sir, whether my work will be published by the Academy along with the winning Prize Essay and whether in that case the inclusion of a supplement containing considerable elaboration and a more precise explication might be acceptable to your excellent society. Leaving aside any motive of vanity, publication seems to me to be the best means of encouraging scholars to inspect a method from which alone, I am convinced, a happy outcome for abstract philosophy can be awaited, if that inspection be supported to some extent by the authority of a highly esteemed learned society.

Dear Sir,

… Let me inform you at least in general terms of the state of the critical philosophy in Catholic Germany. I continue to expound both theoretical and practical philosophy according to your principles, without any opposition. Professor Andres is teaching your aesthetics. Almost all the professors of theology and jurisprudence are modeling at least their approaches if not the content of their teachings on your principles, and even in religious instruction these principles are used to teach catechism and sermons. Many foreigners come here just to hear my lectures on the Kantian philosophy, and my prince relieved me of all my other duties so that I could devote myself to philosophy.

The prospects are not quite so bright in colleges in Bamberg, Heidelberg, and other Catholic schools, and the situation is even more bleak in Bavaria, Swabia, and the Catholic part of Switzerland. I traveled through these three countries, and I hope I did some good. Since their schools are largely run by monks who are strictly forbidden to use a German textbook and certainly not a Protestant one, I wrote a textbook of theoretical philosophy in Latin for the sake of these schools. However, it has not been printed yet. In the Italian and French parts of Switzerland, they also want a Latin exposition of Kant's philosophy. Professor Ith in Bern asked me to give him one.

Dear Sir,

I have the honor of sending you herewith the receipts for the business matters that I have transacted, together with the letters from Herr Hamann and Herr Brahl. I would have responded sooner if these letters had been delivered to me earlier; they arrived only the day before yesterday. I wanted to advise you, concerning the monies to be transferred, of course with great fastidiousness, by Herr John, that all care should be taken in the future to see that these monies are also paid out very punctually and correctly from this end.

Sincerest thanks for your Osiris. For reasons already largely anticipated by Herr Meiners, I cannot agree with your judgment concerning the great wisdom and insight of the ancient Egyptians, but I am more inclined to share your ingenious conjecture that Socrates intended nothing less than a political revolution with his attempted transformation of religion. There is much that is new and well thought out in this book, but I think that a certain diffuseness and repetitiousness (caused, it seems, by a lack of appropriate prior planning), making the book bloated and more expensive, might work to its disadvantage and to that of your publisher. But I leave this to your judgment of the reading public's taste.

I cannot guess the source from which mysticism and ignorance again threaten to break out; it must be certain lodges but the danger there seems to me not especially great.

Noble Sir,

Esteemed friend,

You do me no injustice if you become resentful at my total failure to reply to your letters; but lest you draw any disagreeable conclusions from it, let me appeal to your understanding of my turn of mind. Instead of excuses, I shall give you a brief account of the sorts of things that have occupied my thoughts and that cause me to put off letter-writing in my leisure hours. After your departure from Königsberg I examined once more, in the intervals between my professional duties and my sorely needed relaxation, the project that we had debated, in order to adapt it to the whole of philosophy and the rest of knowledge and in order to understand its extent and limits. I had already previously made considerable progress in the effort to distinguish the sensible from the intellectual in the field of morals and the principles that spring therefrom. I had also long ago outlined, to my tolerable satisfaction, the principles of feeling, taste, and power of judgment, with their effects – the pleasant, the beautiful, and the good – and was then making plans for a work that might perhaps have the title, The Limits of Sensibility and Reason. I planned to have it consist of two parts, a theoretical and a practical. The first part would have two sections, (1) general phenomenology and (2) metaphysics, but this only with regard to its nature and method.

Noble Sir,

Learned and renowned Herr Professor,

Esteemed Sir,

The universal indebtedness to you of all the world for your great accomplishments may excuse my boldness in asking for your illuminating evaluation of these modest Thoughts on the [True] Estimation of Living Forces. The same audacity that prompted me to seek out the true quantity of natural force and to pursue the reward of truth, not-withstanding the laudable efforts of the followers of Herr von Leibnitz and of des Cartes [sic], prompts me to submit this work to the judgment of a man whose discernment qualifies him better than anyone to carry forward the efforts I have begun in these wretched essays and to reach a final and fall resolution of the division among such great scholars. The world sees in you, esteemed sir, the individual who better than others is in a position to rescue the human understanding from its protracted error and perplexity concerning the most intricate points of Mechanics, and it is just this that moves me to solicit most respectfully your precise and gracious appraisal of these poor thoughts. I shall be honored to send you, sir, a short appendix to this book which will soon be ready as well, an appendix in which I develop the necessary explanations and certain ideas that belong to the theory but which I could not include in the work itself without rendering the system too disjointed.

Kant's century cultivated letter-writing as an art form. In an age long before telephones, letters were often a necessity even for casual communication with friends and neighbors. But many supposedly private letters were clearly intended for the reading public, and many writers – scientists, philosophers, biographers, novelists – used the medium of letters to present their work. Lessing and Lichtenberg published “letters” on art, Euler and Lambert on physics, Reinhold and Schiller on philosophy and literature. Goethe, F. H. Jacobi, and Rousseau composed Briefromanen, novels in the form of letters, and one of Kant's first biographers, R. B. Jachmann, employed the format of “letters to a friend” to depict Kant's life and personality. Important literary feuds and exchanges such as the so-called pantheism controversy between Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi were carried on, at least in part, in the style of personal correspondence.

One might therefore expect Kant too to have written his letters with an eye to posterity, composing them with polished elegance and precision. But that was not the case. Kant's private letters were indeed private. Most of them were written hastily, often after much procrastination, and usually in response to some specific question, obligation, or business – a recommendation for a student, a letter of introduction for some traveler, instructions to a publisher, sometimes simply a polite acknowledgment of someone else's letter a year earlier or an expression of thanks for a shipment of his favorite carrots and sausages.

Most esteemed Herr Professor,

You can't believe how I have been longing to have the time to answer your priceless letter. The various matters of business connected with starting up the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung have kept me from writing.

You have probably seen a copy of your review of Herder by now. Everyone who has read it with impartial eyes thinks it a masterpiece of precision and – are you surprised? – many readers recognized that you must be the author. I can tell you that this review, since it came out in the trial issue of the journal, has certainly accounted for much of the favorable response to the A.L.Z.

They say that Herr Herder is very sensitive to the review. A young convert by the name of Reinhold who is staying in Wieland's house in Weimar and who has already sounded an abominable fanfare in the Merkur about Herder's piece intends to publish a refutation of your review in the February issue of that journal. I will send you the sheet as soon as I receive it. The directors of our journal would be delighted if you would undertake an answer to it right away. If it seems to you not worth the effort, I will try to find someone else to reply.

Good Heavens – it boggles my mind that you can write that you “would relinquish the honorarium, in case etc.,” that you could believe that a review like yours might not be acceptable! When I was reading what you said I could not keep the tears from coming to my eyes.

In the current Easter book fair there will appear a book of mine, entitled Critique of Pure Reason. It is being published by Hartknoch's firm, printed in Halle by Grunert, and distributed under the direction of Herr Spener, the Berlin book dealer. This book contains the result of all the varied investigations, which start from the concepts we debated together under the heading “the sensible world and the intelligible world” [mundi sensibilis und intelligibilis], I am anxious to hand over the summation of my efforts to the same insightful man who deigned to cultivate my ideas, so discerning a man that he penetrated those ideas more deeply than anyone else.

With this in mind I beg you to deliver the enclosed letter in person to Herr Carl Spener and to arrange the following matters with him; after you talk with him, please send me news with the earliest possible mail, if my demands are not too extravagant.

1. Find out how far along the printing is and on which day of the fair the book will appear in Leipzig.

2. Since I intended that four copies go to Berlin – a dedicatory copy to His Excellency, Minister von Zedlitz, one for you, one for Herr Mendelssohn, and one for Dr. Sell, which last should please be delivered to the music master, Herr Reichard (who recently sent me a copy of Sell's Philosophische Gespräche), I beg that you ask Herr Spener to write to Halle immediately and see to it that these four copies be sent to Berlin, at my expense, as soon as the printing is done and that they be delivered to you.

3. […]

Honored Herr Magister

I do not hold it against you that you are my rival or that you have enjoyed your new friend for weeks during all of which I only saw him for a few scattered hours, like a phantom or even more like a clever scout. I shall however bear this grudge against your friend, that he ventured to import you even into my seclusion; and that he not only tempted me to let you see my sensitivity, wrath, and jealousy but even exposed you to the danger of getting quite close to a man whom the disease of his passions has given an intensity of thinking and of feeling that a healthy person does not possess. This is what I wanted to say to your sweetheart right into his face when I was thanking you for the honor of your first visit.

If you are Socrates and your friend wants to be Alcibiades, then for your instruction you need the voice of a daimon. And that role is one I was born for; nor can I be suspected of pride in saying this – an actor lays aside his royal mask, no longer walks and speaks on stilts, as soon as he leaves the stage – allow me therefore to be called “daimon” and to speak to you as a daimon out of the clouds, for as long as I have to write this letter.