CATEGORICAL REVOLUTION

Why Kant still has more to teach us.

- BY ADAM KIRSCH

Kant's life was famously dull, but he was less of a hermit than is often supposed.

In April, 1745, God appeared to a Swedish civil servant named Emanuel Swedenborg in a London tavern. Swedenborg was no wild-eyed prophet but, rather, a fifty-seven-year-old scientist and engineer who had worked for years for the Swedish crown as an administrator of mines. However, travelling around Europe while on leave, he had begun to have intense dreams about Jesus Christ, in which everyday details were shot through with mystical bliss. In one, Jesus borrowed a five-pound note from someone, and, Swedenborg recalled, “I was sorry he had not borrowed it from me.” Finally, God showed himself while Swedenborg was at dinner, taking the form of a man who told him not to eat too much.

From that night until his death, twenty-seven years later, Swedenborg devoted himself to conversing with “spirits and angels” and writing down the mystical truths that they told him. As Swedenborg’s fame spread across Europe, in the seventeen-sixties, he came to the attention of a junior professor of philosophy at the University of Königsberg, in eastern Prussia, named Immanuel Kant. Then in his late thirties, Kant considered himself, as he wrote to a friend, free of “any trace of a way of thinking inclined to the miraculous.” Yet he admitted to being interested in Swedenborg, especially because the man's powers of clairvoyance seemed to have been vouched for by credible witnesses.