Abstract
New bottle, old wine?
As the Leibnizeans saw it, that upstart from Königsberg, having surreptitiously decanted their proprietary vintage, had proceeded to vend the Château Gottfried, done up with eye-popping appeal, as Mouton Immanuel. Shaken by the flocking to the Kantian brand, the guardians of the Leibnizean label delegated one of their domain, Johann August Eberhard, to found a philosophical magazine with the express raison d'être of exposing the “critical” potation's derivativeness. (The philosophical magazine bore the appellation “Philosophisches Magazin”. Evidently, their glutted cellars notwithstanding, about marketing the Leibnizean sellers came away empty from the encounter.) The bouquet of Kant's response to the charge of repackaging is captured by a joke retailed in the Critique of Judgement. Empty in hand, a customer arrives at the off-license for a refill. “What kind of fool do you take me for?” quoth he, gesticulating at the cask from which the tapster has come back to the counter with the now-brimming container. “You cannot get wine of that shape into a flask of this shape.” Just so, Kant insisted that the two positions differ irreducibly. Stung by the accusation, he did so in very rebarbative terms, as attests the title of his extended reply to Eberhard – about which title his publisher, pointing to the available paper stock, might easily have reacted with a leaf from the dissatisfied bibber. “How do you expect me to get a title of that size onto a page of this size?” The title? “On a discovery according to which any new critique of pure reason has been made superfluous by an earlier one”.
© Walter de Gruyter
