Introduction

Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) was a publisher, satirical novelist, and popular enlightenment philosopher of empiricist sympathies who attacked Kant and his philosophy for its forbidding style of writing and its use of abstruse terminology (see Metaphysics of Morals, editorial note 8.) In 1796, after Nicolai had ridiculed Schiller for his use of Kantian jargon, Kant alluded to Nicolai's criticisms in Metaphysics of Morals (6:208-209), insisting that they do not apply to the critical philosophy itself. Shortly thereafter, in his novel Leben und Meinungen Sempronius Gundiberts (1798), Nicolai responded by explicitly directing his satires at Kant himself. On the title page appeared the phrase “The ridiculous despotism,” drawn from Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxxv) but now directed back at him. In the novel the terminology of a priori and a posteriori was employed both playfully and contemptuously, and variants of it were devised for purposes of ridicule.

In the same year, Nicolai also published a posthumous volume of Vermischten Schriften by the conservative writer Justus Möser (1720–1794), containing an uncompleted fragment of an essay on “Theory and Practice,” directed polemically against Kant's essay on the same topic. When Kant condemns as unjust some existing social and political arrangements (in particular, the political privileges of the hereditary nobility), Möser dismisses this as the irresponsible work of a ridiculous “theorist” who is out of touch with “practical” reality. This too angered Kant, and the philosopher held Nicolai as well as Möser responsible for the attempt to make a laughingstock of him.