Theological Origins of Modernity

354 notes to pages 257–259
2. Th e term ‘Enlightenment’ was apparently fi rst used in English in 1865 by James
Hutchinson Stirling in his Secret of Hegel (London: Longmans, 1865), xxvii, attributing
deism, atheism, pantheism, and all manner of isms to the Enlightenment.
Ibid., xxviii. It was, however, only in 1889 that Edward Caird referred to
the age of the Enlightenment. Th e Critical Philosophy of Kant, 2 vols. (New York:
Macmillan, 1889), 1:69.
3. Milton, Paradise Lost, 11.113–15.
4. Addison, Spectator, no. 419, July 1, 1712, paragraph 5.
5. Francis Bacon, Th e New Organon and Related Writings, ed. F. H. Anderson (New
York: Macmillan, 1960), 5–6.
6. Th omas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 26 .
7. G. W. F. Hegel, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel,
20 vols. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), 12:521.
8. Jean d’Alembert, Mélanges de Littérature, d’Histoire, et de Philosophie, 6 vols.
(Amsterdam: Zacharie Chatelain et fi ls, 1759), 4:3.
9. Immanuel Kant, Was heisst Aufk lärung?, in Gesammelte Schrift en, ed. Königliche
Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaft en (Berlin: Reimer, 1900–),8:3.
10. Ibid., 8:36.
11. Ibid., 8:40.
12. Kant, Gesammelte Schrift en, 12:257–58. His letter to Marcus Herz, aft er May 11,
1781, is also illuminating: “Above all the entirety of this sort of knowledge had to
be placed before the eye in all of its articulation; otherwise I might have begun
with that which I discussed under the title of the antinomy of p[ure] r[eason],
which could have occurred in very fl orid discussions and would have made it a
joy for the reader to investigate behind the sources of this confl ict.” Ibid., 10:252.
Kant’s footnote in the Prolegomena reemphasizes this point: “I wish that the critical
reader would concern himself primarily with this antinomy, because nature
itself seems to have established it in order to make reason in its most audacious
presumptions perplexed and to require of it a self-examination.” Prolegomena
zu einer jeden künft igen Metaphysik, in Gesammelte Schrift en, 4:341n; see also
ibid., 338; Kant’s Refl ections 5015 and 5016, ibid., 18:60–62; and Feist’s discussion
of Kant’s own estimation of the antinomy in Hans Feist, Der Antinomiegedanke
bei Kant und seine Entwicklung in den vorkritischen Schrift en (Borna-Leipzig:
Noske, 1932; dissertation, Berlin, 1932), esp. 3–17. In his pre-Critical writing, Kant
also uses the word ‘labyrinth’ in place of ‘antinomy.’ See Norbert Hinske, “Kants
Begriff der Antinomie und die Etappen seiner Ausarbeitung,” Kant Studien 56
(1965): 486. Kant does not begin, as is oft en claimed, with the epistemological
problem of the Transcendental Aesthetic. For a comprehensive examination of
the origins of Kant’s thought that points to the importance of the antinomy, see
Immanuel Kant, Kants Prolegomena, ed. Benno Erdmann (Leipzig: L. Voss, 1878).
Th is point has oft en been reiterated; see Carl Siegel, “Kants Antinomielehre im
Lichte der Inaugural Dissertation,” Kant Studien 30 (1925); Hinske, “Kants Begriff
der Antinomie”; and Heinz Heimsoeth, “Zum Kosmotheologischen Ursprung
der Kantischen Freiheitsantinomie,” Kant Studien 57 (1966), and his Atom, Seele,