Introduction: Man as a Creator

Summary

There is no better account of the rise of German philosophy, from its humble beginnings to its magnificent peaks at the end of the eighteenth century, than that written by Lewis White Beck. His Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors is a superb synthesis of systematic scholarship, deep insight, and clear presentation. Beck initially planned to extend his account to the entire history of German philosophy. While preparing the second volume, he realized how powerfully attracted he was to Kant’s legacy and abandoned the completion of the project to immerse himself even more deeply in the study of Kant.

What attracted Beck so powerfully to Kant? What did he see as the most significant element of Kant’s rich, complex, and controversial legacy? Perhaps more than anything else, it was the concern with what Kant considered the ultimate philosophical question: What is man? While the significance of this question is all too clear, Kant never framed his response in a direct and unambiguous manner. It is far clearer that Beck takes Kant’s most important answer to this question to be that Man is a creator. This answer has a double edge. On the one hand, it dignifies man and elevates him high above the blind mechanical forces of nature. Man is not a mere spectator, nor a puppet on the stage set by a god. Man is a legislator and actor; he is a free designer of his own life and the world-scene. On the other hand, the role of a creator imposes a difficult burden on the shoulders of man, the task of providing a unitary world-view and an immanently grounded system of values and norms. Just two centuries after Kant, that burden may appear too heavy. Our “post-modern” age has witnessed the collapse of confidence in human thought in general and the fragmentation—even disappearance—of a unitary world-view with established values and norms.

However controversial this aspect of Kant’s philosophy may be, Beck found his conception of man as a creator most important and fascinating, whether he was writing on Kant’s theoretical or practical philosophy. Most of the contributors to this volume, no doubt under Beck’s influence, also consider this theme to be of central significance for the proper understanding and evaluation of Kant’s legacy.