The Discipline of Pious Reason: Goethe, Herder, Kant Daniel ...

human/God relation in the Metaphysik der Sitten and ‘ethical neo-Spinozism’. Kant
too attacks the prevalent self-destructive piety preserved in neoplatonic thought in
favour of an alternative based on friendship. What is more, Kant stresses that the
disinterested quality of this alternative; he insists that his new form of piety keeps its
distance from God.
Indeed, the parallels between Herder and Kant’s alternative become even more
noteworthy if one bears in mind, what Blumenberg has dubbed, the ‘late anti-
Platonism’ of Kant’s thought (1987, p. 56). Kant’s 1796 essay, On a Recently
Prominent Tone of Superiority in Philosophy, is evidence of this. It responds to the
ever more prominent neoplatonic renaissance of late eighteenth century Germany, and
berates ‘the new Platonists’ and their ‘latest mystico-Platonic idiom’ (2002, 8:399). 19
Directly, Kant is reacting to J.G. Schlosser and F.L. Stolberg, yet, more generally, this
work is a ‘polemic against a contemporary neoplatonism’ (Blumenberg, 1987, p. 53),
a reaction against the neoplatonic renaissance in general. Like Herder and Goethe
before him, Kant is uneasy with his era’s increasing use of neoplatonic philosophy
and turns on it.
While the concerns of On a Recently Prominent Tone are for the most part
epistemological, this turn away from Plato is also prevalent (if implicit) in the
Metaphysik der Sitten and other late ethical writings. It results in an obsessive
concern for limits—especially limits on love and piety. Moreover, it also results in an
alternative model for ethics based on friendship.
[B] The Trouble with Love