An English Translation of the Third Part of Kant's Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens
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Appendix An English Translation of the Third Part of Kant's Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens Stanley L. Jaki Seton Hall University Introductory Remarks In reading about Kant one is almost inevitably exposed to the claim that he was a potentially great scientist, a philosopher imbued with the spirit of Newton, a remarkably original cosmologist, and the like.(l) All these claims are ultimately based on Kant's Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels,(2) a cos mology which he published in 1755, at the age of thirty-one. 1 The publication on which he staked his academic hopes reached only a few hands as the pub lisher went bankrupt and his holdings were impounded and scattered. The first two Parts of the book have been available in English since 1900 in the transla tion by W. Hastie, professor of divinity at the University of Glasgow. (3 ) Hastie certainly shared the late nineteenth-century admiration for Kant; with his trans lation and especially with his introduction to it, he wanted to give further impe tus to the cause of neo-Kantianism in the English-speaking world. An avowed admirer of Kant's philosophy and personality, Hastie chose not to translate the Third Part of Kant's cosmology. This choice was retained when his translation was republished in recent years with new introductions.(4, 5), 2 Thus, while the French have been able to read for almost a hundred years the 1 According to its subtitle the book was "an essay on the constitution and mechanical origin of the whole universe treated according to Newtonian principles." Consisting of 200 small octavo pages, the book was published by Johann Friederich Petersen in Konigsberg and Leipzig. 2 Ley's introduction is considerably shorter than Whitrow's. 387 388 Stanley L. Jaki full text of Kant's cosmology(6), 3 -to say nothing of the Germans, who have it now available in a paperback edition,(7) in addition to many other editions of Kant's collected works-the English-speaking public is still deprived of that TIrird Part. It is, of course, available to anyone who had mastered German to the extent of being able to read Kant, whose style appeared even to his eighteenth century countrymen a hard nut to break. The tacit excuse for omitting the Third Part is that its topic has, on a cursory look at least, nothing in common with the hierarchical organization of galaxies and with the evolution of the planetary system, the topics of the first two Parts. Clearly, it can be made to appear plausible that planetary denizens cavorting from Mercury to Saturn, as described in the Third Part, form no integral part of scientific cosmology. Indeed, until about a few years ago speculations about in telligent beings on other planets were carefully kept out of respectable scientific literature published since the early part of the nineteenth century. Now that Mars has been found as desolate as the Moon, and Venus as uninhabitable as a cauldron, curiosity has shifted to planetarians inhabiting other solar systems. In view of recent efforts to establish radio contact with civilizations around some nearby stars and in view of the equipping of the space probe Pioneer X with a hieroglyphic plaque containing information about us earthlings,4 there would have been enough extrinsic reasons to give the English-speaking world an accu rate and full glimpse of Kant's own speculations on denizens of other planets. Moreover, there would have been some intrinsic reasons as well. These reasons, unlike the foregoing ones, are not rooted in the fleeting fashions of the day. They should rather seem to be of permanent importance to anyone interested in the true history of cosmology and in the correct mental physiognomy of Kant, the philosopher, who, as it is usually claimed, was not only deeply imbued with the spirit of Newtonian science, but might even have become, given better cir cumstances, a truly great scientist. The critical sense of a reader, not specialized in physical science and its his tory, can easily be disarmed by the glowing introductions to the incomplete English text of Kant's cosmology. By the time he begins to read Kant's own discourse, he most likely will have no second thoughts on fmding that Kant presents himself as a second Newton. By then he was already told in those introductions that Kant, although never a professional student of physics and mathematics, had taught himself through reading books lent to him by Martin Knutzen, a sympathetic and progressive professor at the University of Konigs berg. Although Knutzen's tenuous connections with physics had been revealed (though somewhat indirectly) a hundred years ago, (9 ),5 the myth still lingers on that Kant learned enough about Newton and physics from Knutzen, who 3 See pp. 237-255 for the translation of the Third Part. 4 For the diagram, explanation, and justification of that plaque, see Sagan and Drake.(8) sThe fourth and filth chapters of this work deal with Knutzen's philosophical works, the sixth with his theological publications, and the seventh with his scientific writings, of which Erdmann found worth mentioning only one, a little treatise of the famous comet of 1744. Kant's Universal Natural History 389 (and this is what is invariably ignored) did not lecture and write on physics, let alone on Newton's Principia, but on a wide variety of topics relating to Wolffian metaphysics. In Kant's own evaluation of his cosmology, it offered the defmitive physical part of a topic of which the definitive mathematical part had already been created by Newton. To this he added that to furnish the physics of cosmology was actually the easier task, and that he could without great effort furnish its specific mathematics, if so requested (Ref 3, pp. 36 and 73). An extraordinary boast indeed on the part of one whose writings and school record do not suggest that he had mastered even the elements of differential and integral calculus either in its geometrical or Newtonian form, or in its more recent Eulerian or algebraic formalism. In particular, Kant claimed that his cosmology dispensed with the need of resorting, a la Newton, to the Creator's arm to explain the or biting of planets in their almost circular paths around the sun (Ref. 3, p. 72). Let it suffice to remark here that the solution of this problem, closely tied to the distribution of angular momentum in the solar system, is still awaiting, if not the Creator's arm, at least a purely scientific explanation, recent claims about its having been achieved notwithstanding.6 Concerning Kant's inconsistency in recognizing the impossibility of having an absolute center in Euclidean infinite space and then reintroducing that center through the back door, even the non specialist reader might recognize something which is hardly the hallmark of a genuinely Newtonian or of a potentially and rigorously critical philosopher. To a careful reader of Kant's cosmology it should be clear that apart from his explanation of the visual appearance of the Milky Way-the first correct one to appear in print7 -each and every step in Kant's explanation of the evolu tion of the planetary system is patently a priori and invariably wrong. C. V. L. Charlier, himself an enthusiastic advocate, like Kant, of a hierarchical organiza tion of galaxies, but also a first-rate mathematical phYSicist, became a lonely voice when about half a century ago he boldly challenged what he called "the high place" which Kant's cosmology "has obtained in the popular treatises on astronomy," a place which "it not at all deserves." As Charlier explained him self in his Hitchcock Lectures at the University of California in April 1924: "I mean that the 'Naturgeschichte des Himmels' is, scientifically, of very small value; that the comparison of it with the planetary cosmogony of Laplace is highly unjust and misleading; also that it cannot be used as a working hypothe sis, which, however, may be the case with the atom-theory of Democritus. As a popular treatise on cosmogony I consider the 'Naturgeschichte' of Kant unsuitable and even dangerous as inviting feeble minds to vain and fruitless speculations."(12) 6 For a detailed discussion of this point, see Ref. 10. 7 For details, see Ref. II. 8This point has been argued, and with specific reference to Kant's scientific publications postdating the Critique, in the eighth of the fust series of my Gifford Lectures given under the general title, "The Road of Science and the Ways to God," at the University of Edin burgh in 1974-75 and 1975-76 (to be published by the University of Chicago Press). 390 Stanley L. Jaki This devastating judgment will not appear too extreme to those familiar with the age-old connection between a priorism and falsehood. This connection should for any student of Kant's cosmology make its Third Part appear an in structive piece indeed. Kant's speculations on planetarians are based on the very same a priori principles on which he based his dicta on the evolution of planets. While the obscurantism of the latter might remain hidden to a nonspecialist, the obscurantism of the former should be strikingly obvious. Once this obscurantism is seen for what it is, it will not sound too harsh to learn that as far as science is concerned, Kant never transcended his precritical stage.8 When his ill-fated book on cosmology was republished half a dozen times in the 1790'S,9 admirers of Kant were eager to show that the celebrated spokesman of a critical, or Copernican, tum in philosophy, had even anticipated with the 'eyes of his mind' what the famous Herschel saw through his telescopes.