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The Digital Archive of Kant's Opus Postumum Firenze University Press Aisthesis www.fupress.com/aisthesis Gebäude auf Abbruch? The digital archive of Kant’s Opus postumum Citation: D. K. Helbig (2020) Gebäude auf Abbruch? The digital archive of Kant’s Opus postumum. Aisthesis 13(2): 59-77. doi: 10.13128/Aisthesis-11869 Daniela K. Helbig Copyright: © 2020 D. K. Helbig. This is The University of Sydney (Australia) an open access, peer-reviewed article [email protected] published by Firenze University Press (http://www.fupress.com/aisthesis) and distributed under the terms of the Abstract. Over two hundred years after Immanuel Kant’s death, the first full, critical, Creative Commons Attribution License, and digital edition of his last manuscript is currently being completed by the Berlin- which permits unrestricted use, distri- Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. This edition stands in institutional bution, and reproduction in any medi- continuity with Wilhelm Dilthey’s monumental Akademieausgabe of Kant’s writings um, provided the original author and that was grounded in Dilthey’s lastingly influential concept of the national, literary- source are credited. philosophical archive. The new edition showcases Kant’s dynamic writing process as a matter of investigation in its own right. As I argue here, it brings into view the Data Availability Statement: All rel- evant data are within the paper and its constitutive role of the archive for both texts and interpretative practices. A histori- Supporting Information files. cal perspective that links the legacy of the Akademieausgabe with the digital edition of the Opus postumum highlights the changing role of the archive in emphasising or Competing Interests: The authors de-emphasising the manuscript’s resistance to certain appropriations and stylisations of have declared that no competing inter- Kant as a thinker. ests exist. Keywords. Immanuel Kant, Opus postumum, Wilhelm Dilthey, digital edition, philo- sophical archive. The shock is palpable when Julius von Pflugk-Harttung, a his- torian known above all as an expert on medieval papal documents, has before him the manuscript on which Immanuel Kant was work- ing during the last years of his life. The papers were in a state of dis- array, but this much was to be expected when von Pflugk-Harttung visited Pastor Albrecht Krause in Hamburg to inspect the auto- graph that Krause had purchased in 1884, eighty years after Kant’s death. The thirteen bundles of mostly folio-size sheets and some octavo inlays that had covered Kant’s desk in 1804 disappeared ini- tially, were found again in the 1840s and went through many differ- ent hands before they ended up with Krause – hands that ordered and reordered them, removed some pages and misplaced others. The paleographer von Pflugk-Harttung was trained to restore order to papers that had been assembled and reassembled, or fallen apart through the centuries. But when he analyses Kant’s autograph in 1887, the trouble isn’t just that he finds a draft rather than a complete Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell'estetico 13(2): 59-77, 2020 ISSN 2035-8466 (online) | DOI: 10.13128/Aisthesis-11869 60 Daniela K. Helbig manuscript in these these disorderly pages. Rather, ter3. As markers of a process of genesis of thought, the clearly «unfinished manuscript» is testimony he clearly distinguishes the folio sheets covered of an «overwhelming» process of being worked in handwriting from an imagined end result that and reworked all over again. Instead of «carrying Kant did not live to complete and sanction – his thoughts to maturity in his head», Kant wrote thereby leaving intact, reassuringly, the image of them down in preliminary fashion. And this «writ- Kant’s systematic œuvre as a building meant to ten record, the first text, gradually took the shape last, be it understood as foundational or as a doc- of a building in the process of demolition [Gebäu- ument to a system overcome by subsequent ones. de auf Abbruch], a building he reconsidered later And yet, the sheets von Pflugk-Harttung ana- to tear down some pieces, and leave others stand- lysed in the late nineteenth century are among the ing» (Pflugk-Harttung [1889]: 37)1. few surviving manuscripts of Kant’s, and the most It was a striking metaphor to reach as the extensive among those (see Förster [1993]: XXV; result of this early investigation of Kant’s working Stark [1988]: 13). The Berlin-Brandenburgische process. In von Pflugk-Harttung’s paleographic Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW), succes- analysis, Kant’s writing appears as a perpetual con- sor institution to the Prussian Academy of Sci- struction site, constantly being built and rebuilt. ences, has been working on a digital edition of the If the metaphor were to slide from the descrip- manuscript of the Opus postumum, or O.p., since tion of Kant’s autograph to that of his philosophi- 2001. Part of a major revision of the entire Akad- cal endeavour, it might suggest the potential for emieausgabe initiated a century earlier by Wilhelm destruction within the architectural imagery that Dilthey, the digital reproduction and transcrip- is so central to his work in the Critiques, and that tion of Kant’s last manuscript invites us to return, corresponds to his pivotal notion of systematicity. with regard to one of the archetypical «great While some present-day readings of Kant’s archi- white men», to some of the long-standing ques- tectural metaphors stress precisely this dynamic tions connecting manuscripts and archives: ques- aspect of strain, demolition or collapse, and recon- tions regarding the status of the handwritten text struction (see Purdy [2011]: 65)2, a rather differ- between both carrier of semantic meaning and ent public image of Kant’s philosophical system graphic material trace, the stability of the bound- had come to dominate by the late nineteenth ary between the genesis of a work and its final sta- century, and through yet another slide of archi- tus, and the institutional role of the archive in the tectural metaphors. To the extent that his critical «transform[ation] of documents into monuments» system could be portrayed as a building, it took (Weigel [2005]: 5). on the shape of a national monument, culminat- The new, digital edition opens up access to ing in the complete edition of Kant’s works by the Kant’s working manuscript to those unfamiliar Prussian Royal Academy of the Sciences begun in with his hand, and without the time, skills, and 1894 as both research resource and monument, patience to decipher multiple layers of writing Denkmal. And accordingly, von Pflugk-Harttung often crossed out or overwritten, wrapped around takes great care to keep separate the image that page corners and connected by a complex hierar- emerged from his analysis of Kant’s writing pro- chy of symbols and markers. As far as digital edi- cess from his published works. Throughout this first textual-material analysis of what has come to 3 The title choice is problematic but it has stuck, brief be known as Kant’s Opus postumum, von Pflugk- and memorable as it is. Further confusion has arisen Harttung emphasises the autograph’s draft charac- from the fact that the papers in Krause’s possession also contain notes that are unrelated to the drafts of what has come to be known as the Opus postumum, and from a 1 All translations are the author’s. frequent lack of distinction between the term’s referent 2 See also Eichberger (1999), Brodsky (1988), Morgan of either manuscript or the «work» it is taken to contain (2000). (see Brandt [1991]: 5, 9). Gebäude auf Abbruch? The digital archive of Kant’s Opus postumum 61 tions go, it is very much a conservative project in In contrast to the extensive problematisation the sense that it uses the digital medium to dis- of the archival constitution of historical «sources», play the results of traditional philological research or of the museal constitution of «cultural heritage» rather than aiming for new research methods both arising largely out of the investigation of colo- associated with the digital humanities such as nial disciplinary pasts, much of academic philoso- corpus building and data mining. But this con- phy has not followed the push by Derrida and oth- servative digital approach nevertheless provokes ers to question the «exteriority» of the sign to the new reflections on Kant’s work, and on the inter- signified (Giuriato, Kammer [2006]: 9)4. The default pretative practices associated with editorial and working assumption is that of the disembodied idea archival practices. As Jacqueline Karl, head of the «that is an idea, even if no writing tool succeeds in BBAW’s Kant-Arbeitsstelle in Potsdam, has dem- gouging the skull it is born in»; consequently, the onstrated, the edition gives unique insights into material text is taken to reflect such ideality more Kant’s working procedure (Karl [2007]). These or less unproblematically (Stingelin [2004]: 14)5. The insights have produced new perspectives also on philosophical archive is associated more firmly with Kant’s earlier work, such as Stephen Howard’s the philological tradition of restoring such ideal compelling observation that the formal differ- content where required than with the constitutive ences between a completed canonical work like role that the process of collecting itself, and the pro- the First Critique, and the preliminary character cess of selecting and editing material for publication of the Opus postumum mask previously under- have for philosophical texts. In the case of Kant’s appreciated similarities in their dynamic material O.p., its publication in the Akademieausgabe (AA) is form and open-ended «process of philosophising» very much part of an edition project that is, in turn, (Howard [2018]: 86). «intricately connected with the political develop- And as I argue in what follows, the BBAW edi- ments of the German state» (Stark [1993]: 4).
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