It is one of the most unusual books in the history of philosophy: in 1766, twenty-eight years before his death, Immanuel Kant in Königsberg published an anonymous book entitled Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. It deals – over one hundred and eight pages – exclusively with Emanuel Swedenborg and the question of what human reason can methodologically do with reports of contact with the "spiritual world". Three years earlier, on 10 August 1763, Kant had set out his position for the first time in a detailed letter to the young noblewoman Charlotte von Knobloch – including the fact that he personally had the Stockholm fire incident investigated by an English merchant sent to Sweden. This article reconstructs the whole line: the Knobloch letter, the field inquiry, the book and the long-term effect on critical philosophy.
Who is Kant in 1763?
In the summer of 1763 Immanuel Kant is thirty-nine years old, has been Magister legens (private lecturer) at the University of Königsberg for twelve years, and is one of the better-known natural philosophers in the German-speaking world. He published in 1755 the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (with the famous nebular hypothesis later known as the Kant–Laplace theory), has worked for years on Newton, on mathematical physics and on the theory of negative magnitudes. The "critical" Kant – the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgement – does not yet exist. Those works only begin to emerge after 1770, and their printed form appears between 1781 and 1790. Kant scholarship calls the period between 1755 and 1770 the pre-critical period.
What is so remarkable about Kant's position towards Swedenborg, then: it is not the mature critical philosopher who judges him. It is the still-searching, scientifically oriented mid-career Kant, who is dissatisfied with the philosophical standards of his time (Wolffian school philosophy, the beginning Hume reception) – and who sees in Swedenborg a case in which precisely these philosophical standards fail.
The Knobloch letter, 10 August 1763
Charlotte Amalia von Knobloch (1740–1810) was a young East Prussian noblewoman, about 23 years old, who had asked Kant in writing at the beginning of 1763 what he thought of the reports about the Swedish visionary. Kant's reply of 10 August 1763 is one of the most unusual private statements by a major philosopher on a mediumistic case. The text is edited in the Academy edition of Kant's works (Volume 10, pages 43–48).
Kant describes three points:
- Methodological preface: for a long time he had rejected reports of extraordinary phenomena on principle, since they contradicted ordinary experience. But the frequency and consistency of the reports about Swedenborg had eventually moved him to examine the matter seriously rather than dismiss it reflexively.
- Own field inquiry: he had asked an English merchant whom he knew personally, and who was travelling to Stockholm, to investigate the Stockholm fire incident (19 July 1759) on site – questioning witnesses, examining the Gothenburg protocols, verifying the addresses. The merchant returned with full confirmation: all the details that Swedenborg had given on Sunday evening in Gothenburg had occurred exactly as described.
- The two further incidents (Queen Louisa Ulrika 1761, Madame de Marteville 1761) are also mentioned by Kant, along with his sources – including correspondence from the Swedish court environment and letters from Berlin.
The tone of the letter is cautiously impressed. Kant does not say: "Swedenborg is a real medium." But he also does not say: "The reports are nonsense." He says: the factual situation is of a quality he had not expected; a convenient philosophical response is not available to him at the moment. It is precisely this perplexity that leads, in 1766, to the book Dreams of a Spirit-Seer.
The Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, 1766
The book appeared in the spring of 1766, anonymously in Königsberg from Johann Jakob Kanter. The title page does not name Kant; in Königsberg and in the Berlin Enlightenment scene, however, the authorship was immediately known. Full title: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. The construction is literary: two parts, each with an ironically double-edged title ("The dogmatic part" and "The historical part"), and a concluding reflection. At just over one hundred printed pages, the length is unusually short for a work of this philosophical ambition.
Three movements run simultaneously in the book:
- Satirical: Kant makes fun of Swedenborg's metaphysical speculations. Angels who reside in differently bright "spheres", spirits who hold heavenly occupations, cosmological architectures of the afterlife – Kant quotes with recognisably dry humour and pushes the school-metaphysical constructions of his German contemporaries into the same drawer. The sharpest point of the book: "I have never understood why the spirit-seeing of enthusiasts should be better documented than the metaphysical spirit-seeing of the school philosophers."
- Methodological: out of precisely this comparison Kant develops the basic epistemological question: What may reason say about objects that lie beyond all possible sensory experience? This question is the direct precursor of what will be systematically answered in 1781 in the Critique of Pure Reason.
- Empirically reticent: what is striking is what Kant does not do. He does not explain the three documented incidents (Stockholm fire, Queen Louisa Ulrika, Marteville) as fraud. He also does not explain them as pathological in the modern sense. He says they cannot be decided under the available empirical standards – and that, not the phenomena themselves, is his topic.
Today's differentiated reading
In the reception history of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer was largely read as a wholesale dismissal of Swedenborg – along the lines of: "Kant refuted Swedenborg, and that settled the matter." This reading has lost ground in today's Kant scholarship. Three main works should be named:
- Friedemann Stengel, Aufklärung bis zum Himmel: Emanuel Swedenborg im Kontext der Theologie und Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts, Mohr Siebeck 2011 – the German-language standard work. Stengel shows in detail that the anti-Swedenborg reading from the 19th century is not supported by the book itself; the satire is directed at least as sharply at German school philosophy as it is at Swedenborg.
- Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography, Cambridge University Press 2001 – the authoritative modern English-language Kant biography. Kuehn calls the Dreams a "turning point" in Kant's thinking, where the critical question of the limits of reason is for the first time formulated in full sharpness.
- Gregory R. Johnson (ed.), Kant on Swedenborg: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings, Swedenborg Foundation 2002 – an annotated collection of all of Kant's writings on Swedenborg in English translation. Johnson's extensive introduction argues for the thesis of a "lasting reference" of Kant to Swedenborg that did not cease even after 1781.
What all three show: Kant's relation to Swedenborg was not that of an enlightened sceptic exposing a fraud. It was that of a philosophically responsible observer who had a concrete file on hand which could not be conclusively judged by the means of contemporary reason – and who, precisely out of this perplexity, raised the question of the limits of reason itself.
From the Knobloch letter to the Critique of Pure Reason
The inner line between the Dreams and the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is one of the most interesting topics of Kant scholarship. Kant himself was largely silent for fifteen years after 1766 – the famous "silent decade" 1770–1781 –, during which critical philosophy was worked out. Swedenborg is no longer named in the Critique of Pure Reason. But in several places the same step of thought appears:
- The question whether reason can make statements about the afterlife, the immortal soul and God is answered negatively in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique – with the same justificatory structure that already appeared in the Dreams: such statements have no sensory–intuitive givenness, and therefore theoretical reason can neither support nor refute them.
- The famous "Antinomy of Pure Reason" – Kant's theory that reason inescapably contradicts itself on basic metaphysical questions when it tries to answer them without sensory intuition – takes structurally exactly the form in which Kant in 1766 had placed school-metaphysical and Swedenborgian constructions side by side.
- The shift of the important questions (God, freedom, immortality) from theoretical to practical philosophy – a main feature of the critical turn – is the long-term answer to what had remained as perplexity in 1766: if theoretical reason cannot decide such questions, then another kind of reason must take responsibility for them.
This is not the claim that critical philosophy "arose out of Swedenborg". But the claim that the Swedenborg case was irrelevant to Kant's thinking can no longer be maintained after Stengel and Kuehn. The concrete empirical case of a seriously to-be-examined but metaphysically undecidable statement led Kant to the right philosophical question – and this question has occupied the next two and a half centuries.
What remains
Kant's position in the history of mediumship research is singular. Before him and after him, no philosopher of comparable rank has had a mediumistic case personally investigated through an agent on site and written his own book about the resulting epistemological problem. The Dreams of a Spirit-Seer are, depending on reading:
- The first philosophical engagement with mediumship at a methodological level that meets today's standards – no rapid judgement, but a question about the status of the reports.
- The biographical–philosophical turning point at which the question of the limits of reason is first fully formulated in Kant's thinking.
- A so far insufficiently appreciated pre-1906 point: a leading philosopher publicly, factually and in his own book took a stand on mediumistic reports. After 1906 this would have become institutionally inconceivable – see our pattern synthesis.
Anyone who wants to judge the case today has an unusually good source picture: the Knobloch letter in the original, the book itself in several modern editions, Stengel's standard work and Johnson's English collection are all available online. The simple story "Kant settled Swedenborg" can no longer be maintained against this material. What remains is the harder question that Kant first raised in 1766 in its full sharpness: What may reason say about such reports – and what must it leave open?
Sources: Immanuel Kant, letter to Charlotte von Knobloch, 10 August 1763, in: Akademie edition of Kant's works, Volume 10, pp. 43–48 (Berlin/Leipzig 1922, reprint de Gruyter). Immanuel Kant, Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik, Königsberg 1766 (Johann Jakob Kanter); modern critical edition in the Akademie edition, Volume 2, pp. 315–373. Friedemann Stengel, Aufklärung bis zum Himmel: Emanuel Swedenborg im Kontext der Theologie und Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2011. Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography, Cambridge University Press 2001 (the chapter on the pre-critical period). Gregory R. Johnson (ed.), Kant on Swedenborg: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings, Swedenborg Foundation, West Chester PA 2002 (English translations of all of Kant's writings on Swedenborg with an extensive introduction). Karl Ameriks, Kant's Theory of Mind, Oxford University Press 2000. Ernst Cassirer, Kants Leben und Lehre, Berlin 1918 (classic exposition).