This chapter discusses Herder’s engagement with the French Revolution and his continuing debate with Kant, specifying the ways in which Herder sought to balance humanitarian and patriotic concerns in his political vision in the 1790s and early 1800s. Herder celebrated the French Revolution as an attempt to restore a ‘living constitution’ based on natural order in France. He initially also welcomed Kant’s ideas on human dignity, but soon came to reject his more specific conception of self-determination. His worries about the outbreak of the Revolutionary wars were reflected in his concern that Kant’s philosophy of history might unwittingly exacerbate republican moral absolutism and imperialism. In his view, Kant could not adequately resolve the gap between professed principles and action, law and ethics. Herder’s own understanding of a truly humanitarian philosophy of history was grounded in his Stoic-vitalist account of human self-determination. He further elaborated on the ways in which humans could cultivate their ‘sensus humanitatis’ through reflective engagement with history, criticising various instances of European colonial imperialism. His primary concern, however, was to guide European nations—above all, the German—in cultivating a new ethic to enable the simultaneous pursuit of domestic reforms and international cooperation.

Moving beyond Hegel's critique of Kantian general logic and the logic of the Aristotelian tradition, this chapter considers his critique of Kant's transcendental logic: specifically, the Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. It offers an account of Hegel's famed swimming objection, going beyond previous ones by arguing that the objection has a more specific target than is often realized: the Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories. It further explains Hegel's dissatisfaction of the efforts of two of Kant's successors (Reinhold and Fichte) to overcome the dilemma the swimming objection presents. Some attention is given here to Fichte's project of deriving the categories from a version of the cogito, that is post-Kantian rather than the one familiar from Cartesian rational psychology. In my view, it is Jacobi and Romanticism who furnish Hegel with the possibility of deriving the categories from a post-Kantian version of the ontological proof – though he rejects their irrationalism. This explains Hegel's provocative claim that the ontological argument, and its rigorous distinction between the modes of thinking appropriate to finite and infinite entities, constitutes the true self-critique of reason.

Chapter 1, ‘Of Scholars and Miners’, introduces the discipline of subterranean geometry from the point of view of Renaissance scholars. Early modern humanists were fascinated by the underground world of metal mines. The richness of the geometrical thinking contained in Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica (1556) or Erasmus Reinhold’s On Surveying (1574) is presented. By comparing them with actual productions of contemporary mine surveyors, I further show that these books, despite their lifelike descriptions and illustrations, did not limit themselves to straightforward, faithful depictions of actual practices. Early modern readers were presented with rational reconstructions and pseudo-technical procedures. In spite of a thorough knowledge and a genuine interest for the underground world, scholars mainly used their writings on mines in a patronage context, or to display their interpretation of Euclidean geometry.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte addresses Creuzer’s skeptical concerns in this highly critical review published in 1793. Fichte specifically considers Creuzer’s assertion that the capacity to determine oneself to moral and immoral action violates the principle of sufficient reason. Fichte dismisses the objection as having already been refuted by Reinhold in the second volume of the latter’s Letters on the Kantian Philosophy. In that work Reinhold argues that it is absurd to inquire after an objective ground through which the free will determined itself to a given action because it is supposedly intrinsic to the freedom of our will that it have the capacity to determine itself independently of objective grounds. Furthermore, Fichte affirms Reinhold’s claim that the (logical variant) of the principle of sufficient reason demands not that all existents have an external cause, but only that nothing be thought without a ground. Although Fichte agrees with Reinhold that reason has a very real ground to think of freedom as an absolute cause, he criticizes Reinhold for supposedly naturalizing the will’s supersensible capacity of self-determination.

In his “General Overview of the Most Recent Philosophical Literature” (1797), Schelling considers Reinhold’s claim that the will must be separate from practical reason in light of Kant’s treatment of the distinction between the will and the power of choice. By divorcing the will from reason, Reinhold supposedly cannot account for our obligation under the moral law. Schelling observes that the discrepancy between Kant’s claim that the will is neither free nor unfree and Reinhold’s assertion that the will is free only insofar as it has the capacity to be good or evil is rooted in the nature of the will itself. Kant’s and Reinhold’s variance is, as it were, the result of a partial perspective of an issue properly conceived of only through a unified standpoint. Kant considers the will insofar as it is not an object of consciousness, Reinhold insofar as it occurs in consciousness. For Schelling, these seemingly disparate perspectives are integrated in the recognition that the power of choice is the appearance of an absolute will and, as such, indicates the action through which what is intellectual becomes empirical, the absolute becomes an object, and the infinite becomes finite.

In his 1794 volume Contributions to the Correction of Previous Misunderstandings of Philosophers, Karl Leonhard Reinhold outlines his theory of free will, which emphasizes the agent’s capacity to choose in conformity with and in opposition to the moral law. Reinhold’s account can largely be seen as a response to Schmid’s conception. Thus, Reinhold considers the Schmidian notion that freedom consists in the self-activity of reason and that reason’s failure to effectively determine the will is due to intelligible obstacles. According to Reinhold, such a conception of free will abolishes moral imputation since merit or blame would be reducible to the absence or presence of those obstacles. Furthermore, Reinhold emphasizes the necessary independence of the will from both the faculty of desire, which supplies the matter of volition, and reason, which supplies the form by means of a formal normative standard, the moral law. As independent from these two faculties, the will is free to choose for or against the moral law. Reinhold maintains that only then can the normative necessity of that law be absolute.

In his “Some Remarks on the Concept of the Freedom of the Will, posed by I. Kant in the Introduction to the Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Right” (1797), K.L. Reinhold is incredulous that Kant could restrict free will to moral action after having previously emphasized the applicability of freedom to immoral action for the sake of moral imputation. Reinhold takes issue with Kant’s distinction between the will and the power of choice. According to Reinhold, the distinction is incoherent insofar as Kant defines freedom of the power of choice as the ability of pure reason to be practical, which seems to pertain to the legislative will rather than the executive power of choice. Reinhold interprets Kant’s conception of this freedom as precluding immoral action and claims that this would abolish the moral law’s normativity. Furthermore, Reinhold treats Kant’s denial that freedom of the power of choice can be defined as the capacity to choose for or against the moral law and Kant’s apparent declaration that the possibility of deviating from the moral law is an incapacity. If the possibility of deviating from the moral law were an incapacity, then, Reinhold maintains, the moral law would be impossible.

In his Skeptical Reflections on Freedom of the Will with Respect to the Most Recent Theories of the Same (1793), Leonhard Creuzer avows his skepticism with respect to freedom of the will. His skepticism applies equally to our moral psychology and to proper philosophical treatments of free will. According to Creuzer, philosophy has fared no better than common sense in adjudicating the dispute on free will. He discusses the purported inadequacy of pre-Critical treatments of free will by thinkers such as Crusius, Leibniz, and Spinoza, and maintains that the Critical philosophy has not succeeded in resolving this perennial dilemma but has merely determined the problem more precisely.

By closely connecting “free” and “dutiful” action, Kant appeared to some of his contemporaries to have a serious problem with the imputability of immoral actions. K. L. Reinhold attempted to avoid this problem by introducing a sharp distinction between freedom of choice (Willkür) and practical reason (as expressed through Wille), such that any free action must involve a choice between “selfish” and “unselfish” drives. After Kant rejected Reinhold’s proposed distinction, Fichte defended it by introducing a new distinction between the original, purely “formal” freedom of every spontaneously self-positing I and the “material” freedom that every I strives to achieve.Whereas formal freedom concerns the choice of means to predetermined ends, material freedom determines the ends as well as the means of acting.Fichte provides a detailed account of how a formally free individual might acquire material freedom through a series of “reflections” upon formal freedom, at which point freedom of choice is supposed to coincide with the categorical demands of the moral law—and Willkür with Wille.Fichte’s distinction between kinds and degrees of freedom was introduced in order to resolve the conflict between Kant and Reinhold, but it raises new questions concerning how one might “freely” acquire material freedom.