Adam Jurkiewicz

In this paper, I discuss the role played by descriptions of the first-person experience of embodiment in Immanuel Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. This text has proven difficult to interpret. It is not clear whether Kant is expressing skepticism towards metaphysics as such, whether he is simply attacking the metaphysics of his day, or whether he is taking steps towards a new approach to metaphysical questions. Furthermore, Kant’s tone in this text is frequently derisive and sarcastic and it is not always clear whether he is writing in his own voice. I show that Kant provides a consistent phenomenology of embodiment in this text, which he takes to have deflationary value with respect to four metaphysical theses concerning how mind and body are related. I examine these theses that Kant discusses and demonstrate how for each, he provides a first-person description of embodied awareness which is meant to aid the reader in grasping its implausibility. I argue that this shows that Kant takes embodied awareness to have epistemic authority that cannot be ignored in any attempt to do metaphysics.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense is an enigmatic text that has proven difficult to interpret. I argue that Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View influences and sheds light on this early essay. I demonstrate that Kant’s discussion of the transition from infancy to adulthood is present in Nietzsche’s discussion of the origin of the truth drive. Having established a textual connection, I argue that Nietzsche inverts Kant’s account of cognitive development and aims to shear it of teleology by arguing that the choice to privilege the rational over the aesthetic is grounded in pragmatic criteria and not in any essential structure of the individual. Seen in this light, the essay is shown to be a pragmatic anthropology (in Kant’s sense of the term) which aims to provide individuals with a life-affirming orientation grounded in creative self-expression.