Kant’s View of Physiological Anthropology in Light of Johann Gottlob Krüger’s Träume

Michael J. OlsonMacquarie University

[draft; please do not cite]

John Zammito has argued that the philosophical physician

“became crucial in Europe around the middle of the

eighteenth century” for articulating a new approach to

understanding human nature, a new approach that

determined the outlines of the newly emerging field of

anthropology.1 “The special project of the ‘philosophical

physicians,” Zammito explains, is grounded in the

commitment that “even ‘the most impalpable and spiritual

functions of man were to reveal themselves empirically,

to exhibit sensible signs, and to permit an empirical

analysis.’”2 The philosophical physician finds his origin

in France but quickly found a wider influence through the

success of the novel “vital materialist” ideas of

Maupertuis, Buffon, Diderot, and La Mettrie. By

illustrating how a synthesis of elements developed by the

1 John H. Zammito, “Médicin-philosoph: Persona for Radical Enlightenment,” Intellectual History Review, vol. 18, no. 3 (2008), 427-440,427.2 Zammito, 427-428.

more moderate philosophical physicians—Haller, Bonnet,

Buffon—leads to a full-blooded materialism, La Mettrie

stands, according to Zammito, at the apogee of the

development of the philosophical physician and indicates

that “the médicin-philosoph takes an unequivocal stance for

radical Enlightenment.”3

One might expect that the more moderate brand of

enlightenment dominant in Germany would prevent the

philosophical physician from taking root in intellectual

life across the Rhine. Quite the contrary. The médicin-

philosoph quite comfortably became the vernünftiger Arzt.

Zammito assures us that “While this indigenous tradition

of the ‘vernünftiger Arzt’ (rational physician) might seem

less ‘radical’ than that of the French médicin-philosoph […

the] defining characteristics of German philosophical

medicine correlate closely with those of the broader

European and even with the specifically radical-French

form.”4 Thus, Ernst Platner, Johann August Unzer, and,

Karl Philipp Moritz populate the German wing of an

3 Zammito, 437.4 Zammito, 440.

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intellectual tradition whose stakes were laid bare by La

Mettrie’s gluttonous materialism.

The first of these German philosophical physicians,

Ernst Platner, published his Anthropology for Physicians and

Scholars (1772) in the same year Kant began his

anthropology lectures in Königsberg. The opening lines

of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) in

fact frame Kant’s approach to the subject in relation to

the physiological anthropology advocated by Platner.

Although Platner plays a similar role in the context of

the German vernünftige Ärzte that La Mettrie plays among the

French médicins-philosohes,5 this does not mean that the 5 The structure if not the letter of Zammito’s analysis encourages this comparison. A significant difference in Le Mettrie’s and Platner’s analysis turns on their consideration of the order of priority of medicine and philosophy in the analysis of the human being. Platner writes:

Indessen glaube ich, daß die Moralphilosophen mehr von demmenschlichen Körper wissen, als die Aerzte von der Seele;denn man rechnet noch immer die Erkenntnis des menschlichenKörpers eher zu Philosophie, als die Erforschung der Seelezum System der Arzneykunst. (Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise[Leipzig 1772] iv)

On the other hand, La Mettrie writes:Physicians have explored and thrown light on the labyrinthof man; they alone have revealed the springs hidden undercoverings which keep so many marvels from our gaze. Theyalone, calmly contemplating our soul, have caught it athousand times unawares, in its misery and its grandeur,without either despising it in own state or admiring it inthe other. Once again, these are the only naturalphilosophers who have the right to speak on this subject.(Julien Ofray de La Mettrie, Machine Man and other Writings,trans. and ed. Ann Thompson [Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996] 4-5)

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former shared the materialist commitments of the latter.

On the contrary, Platner’s substance dualism is essential

to his understanding of the field of anthropology. He

explains, “The human being is neither body nor soul

alone; it is the harmony of both, and the physician may,

I think, as little constrain herself to the former as the

moralist may to the latter.”6 The dual nature of the

human being gives rise to three distinct human sciences.

Platner continues:

One can, first, study the parts and behaviors ofthe machine on its own, without looking at theconstraints the soul places on these movements orwhich the soul in its turn receives from it. Thisis anatomy or physiology. Second, one caninvestigate in the same way the powers andproperties of the soul, without ever consideringthe effects of the body or the changes that occurin the machine. That would be psychology, or whatis the same, logic, aesthetics, and a large partof moral philosophy. […] Finally, one canconsider body and soul in their reciprocalrelations and constraints. That is what I callanthropology.7

6 Platner, iv: “Der Mensch ist weder Körper, noch Seele allein; er ist die Harmonie von beyden, und der Arzt darf sich, wie mir dünkt, eben so wenig auf jede einschränken, als der Moralist auf diese.”7 Platner, xv-xvii. The original reads:

Die Erkenntnis der Menschen wäre, wie mir dünkt, in dreyWissenschaften abzutheilen. Man kann erstlich die Theileund Geschäffte der Maschine allein betrachten, ohne dabeyauf die Einschränkungen zu sehen, welche diese Bewegungenvon der Seele empfangen, oder welche die Seele wiederum vonder Maschine leidet; das ist Anatomie und Physiologie.Zweytens kann man auf eben diese Art die Kräfte undEigenschaften der Seele untersuchen, ohne allezeit die

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Kant places his own understanding of anthropology in

direct opposition to Platner’s claim that the specific

remit of this new science is the physiological study of

the reciprocal influence of the body and the soul.

In a letter to Herz, who had warmly if not

uncritically reviewed Platner’s Anthropology in the

Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek,8 Kant explains that his own

“quite unique”9 approach to anthropology is largely

opposed to the physiological anthropology of Platner and

the vernünftige Ärzte. Kant explains that his lectures on

anthropology, which are just about to begin their second

year, “seek to discuss phenomena and their laws rather

that the foundations of the possibility of human thinking

in general. Hence the subtle and, to my view, eternally

futile inquiries as to the manner in which bodily organs

Mitwirkung des Körpers oder die daraus in der Maschineerfolgenden Veränderungen in Betrachtung zu ziehen; das wärePsychologie, oder welche einerley ist, Logik, Aesthetik undein großer theil der Moralphilosophie. […] Endlich kannman Körper und Seele in ihren gegenseitigen Verhältnissen,Einschränkungen und Beziehungen zusammen betrachten, und dasist es, was ich Anthropologie nenne.

8 Markus Herz, Review of Ernst Platner, Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltsweise, Allgemeine deutsche Bibiothek, vol. 20, no. 1 (1773) 20-21, 25-51. For a helpful summary of Herz’s (and similar) criticisms of Platner, see Thomas Sturm, “Why did Kant reject physiological explanations in his anthropology?,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 39 (2008), 495-505, 497-499.9 Kant to Herz, late 1773, AA 10:145.

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are connected with thought I omit entirely.”10 Kant

reiterates his distaste for physiological anthropology

fifteen years later in the Preface to the published

version of his anthropology lectures:

He who ponders natural phenomena, for example whatthe causes of the faculty of memory may rest on,can speculate back and forth (like Descartes) overthe traces of impressions remaining in the brain,but in doing so he must admit that in this play ofthis his representations he is a mere observer andmust let nature run its course, for he does notknow the cranial nerves and fibers, nor does heunderstand how to put them to use for hispurposes.11

Kant’s distaste for the philosophical physicians’

physiological approach to understanding the human being

is clear. What is less clear is the source of this

distaste..

Kant’s remarks about the ‘subtlety’ and ‘eternal

futility’ of explanations of how anatomy and physiology

contribute to mental jibe well with his long-time anti-

materialism,12 as well as his later, critical conception

10 Ibid. 146.11 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. Robert Louden (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 3; AA 7:119. These themes are already discernable in notes from Kant’s first lectures on anthropology. See Anthropology Collins, AA 25:7-15.12Kant’s discussions of anti-materialist arguments in the metaphysics lectures from across the decades are found, for example, at AA 28:281-283, 440-442, 680-682, 753-756; 29:904-906, 913-914, 929, 1025-1026. In the Critique, see, for example, Bxxxiv and A379.

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of the soul or the unity of consciousness as a logical or

transcendental feature of cognition rather than a real

entity in the world. Indeed, Kant explicitly dismisses

Thomas Soemmerring’s attempt at a physiological reduction

of the unity of consciousness just three years before

publishing the Anthropology.13 Throughout his career, Kant

rejects the possibility of a material or physiological

explanation of the relation of the body and the soul.

Thomas Sturm has argued convincingly, however, that

Kant’s reason for rejecting physiological anthropology

rest more importantly on the irrelevance of physiology to

his genuinely new understanding than it does on its

explanatory failures. Criticisms of the limitations of

physiological analyses of mind-body interactions—whether

de facto or de jure—were commonplace during this period.

Kant’s “original point,”14 according to Sturm—a point he

takes to “[pose] interesting challenges even to current

debates about the foundations and peculiarities of some

of the human sciences”15—is that physiological

explanations of the reciprocal relations of mind and body

13 Kant to Soemmerring (10 August 1795), AA 12:30-35.14 Sturm 496.15 Sturm 504.

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are irrelevant for the task of cultivating and improving

human life.16 Sturm explains:

human nature, although it possesses constantfeatures, also shows essentially inconstantfeatures, largely owing to our ability to reflectour mental states rationally, and to develop newrules and forms of action self-critically. Thephysiological idiom has no place for such a viewof human nature and action, and is this irrelevantfor a pragmatic anthropology.17

In other words, if the pragmatic purpose of Kant’s

anthropology is to improve how individuals lead their

lives by spurring them to consider how and why they

choose to act as they do, the physiological mechanisms

and mediations detailed by a physical investigation of

the human being indeed are irrelevant. Thus, Kant

explains, “Physiological knowledge of the human being

16 This is surprising given how philosophical engagements with medicine at least since Descartes explicitly highlight the utility oftheir studies. In the Description of the Human Body, for example, Descartes writes,

There is no more fruitful occupation than to try to knowoneself. And the benefit that one expects from this knowledgedoes not just extend to morals, as many may initiallysuppose, but also to medicine in particular. I believe onecan find very many reliable precepts in medicine, as much forcuring illness as for preventing it, and even also to slowthe course of ageing, so long as one has studied sufficientlyto know the nature of our body, not attributing to the soulfunctions which depend only on the body and on thedisposition of its organs. (René Descartes, The World and OtherWritings, trans. and ed. Stephen Gaukroger [Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2004] 170.)

[Add more here about how Kant doesn’t take physiology to beuseless tout court]17 Sturm 504.

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concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the

human being; pragmatic [anthropology], the investigation

of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or

can and should make of himself.”18

It is useful, I think, to consider German

anthropology during this period as a series of attempts

to develop intellectual tools for producing a genuinely

holistic understanding of the human being. Platner

advocates anthropology as science that does not just

address the human body—as the anatomist does—or the human

mind—as the moral philosopher does—but the more global

problem of the relation of the two. From Kant’s

perspective, however, this anthropological expansion of

scope is still too one-sided. The physiological

anthropologist thinks of humanity as an object determined

by static laws of nature rather than a subject involved

in the development and improvement of its nature.19 In

order to provide a more complete account of the human

being, then, a “quite unique” approach is needed to

18 Kant, Anthropology 3; AA 7:119.19 This is consistent with Kant’s consistent interest in socio-political questions of the historical development of the human as a moral being.

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complement the physiological approach. Physiological

anthropology describes the human being insofar as she is

determined by nature and Kant’s new pragmatic account

describes the human being insofar as she determines

herself. Kant’s anthropology, in short, introduces a

Protagorean, humane rejoinder to an already established

anthropological tradition that treats the human being as

just another natural object.

Although Kant’s conception of pragmatic anthropology may

be unique, his claim that physiological analyses of the

reciprocal determinations of the body and the mind are

not useful when trying to produce a more humane

understanding of the human being as an integrated whole

is not as original. In fact, the same claims are made by

one of the early driving forces of German physiological

anthropology, Johann Gottlob Krüger. It is to him that I

now turn.

Krüger (1715-1759), who was professor in the medical

faculty at Halle and later in the philosophical faculty

at Helmstadt, was a seminal figure in the German

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tradition of philosophical physicians that emerged from

Halle in the middle of the eighteenth century. His

medical and scientific reputation earned him membership

in the Prussian Academy and his articulation of an

experimental psychology distinct from Wolffian

introspective empirical psychology placed him at the

heart of debates about the borders between natural

science and metaphysics.20 Rather than address the

details of Krüger’s psychology and anthropology, I’m

going to talk about his literary writing.

Krüger’s Träume, published first in 1754, saw four

editions (1754, 1758, 1765, 1785), the last one edited

and introduced by Johann August Eberhard. This ranks

among Krüger’s most popular works: his three-volume

Naturlehre (1740, 1744, 1750, 1663, 1771) went through five

editions and his more practical Diät two (1751, 1763).

The Dreams contains between 139 and 168 (the number

varied by edition) short parables styled as dreams

addressing a dizzying array of controversial topics,

20 On the latter point, see Carsten Zelle, “Experiment, Experience andObservation in Eighteenth-Century Anthropology—the Examples of Krüger’s Experimentalseelenlehre and Moritz’ Erfahrungsseelenkunde,” Orbis Litterarum, vol. 56 (2001) 93-105.

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ranging from religious toleration, the metaphysics of the

soul, the comparative savagery of east Indian cannibalism

and European religious wars, and the varieties of natural

philosophy likely to be accepted by inhabitants of other

planets (for the record, people who live on the moon are

neither Newtownians nor Cartesians). Most of the dreams

are quite honestly tedious at best. Some, though, are

both entertaining and instructive. I’ll try to focus on

the latter group.

Krüger’s Träume are laden with interpretive

difficulties. At some points he encourages us to take

the oneiric conceit of the text as some kind of political

cover, as a device that keeps him one step removed from

controversial positions that he does in fact hold. So,

for example, he writes, “Truth and dream are so closely

related to each other that nothing is easier that to mix

the two up.”21 But elsewhere he undermines our tendency

too quickly to take the content of these dreams to

express his own positions. This is the case in one dream

in particular in which Krüger awakes in an almost

21 Krüger, 138: “Die Wahrheit und der Traum sind so nah mit einander verwandt, daß sich nichts leichter zuträgt, als daß beyde mit einander verwechselt werden.”

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Borgesian library. The divine librarians in this library

have crossed out every line of every book that is not

true. When Krüger asks what they’ve done with his

Träume, a librarian explains that every line in it has

been crossed out and suggests that Lügen [Lies] would have

been a better title than Träume.22 With caution

appropriate when dealing with a Cretan, then, I will now

briefly discuss four of Krüger’s dreams.

1. Leibniz’s Mill Revisited

The first dream I’ll mention portrays the attempts of

three sons to make good on their father’s dying wish.

The father, a medical doctor, instructs his sons to

forsake his career and to use their inheritance to become

millers, since, the father explains, “I have noticed

throughout my life that this is a very profitable

profession.”23

The oldest son—a spiritual disciple of Boerhaave—

worked hard to build a mechanically perfect mill: he read

mathematical books, consulted engineers, and constructed

a precise machine. When he mill didn’t work, he figured

22 Ibid. 214.23 Ibid., 249.

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the problem was mechanical. “Since the mill is a

machine,” he said, “the problem must necessarily lie in

its structure.”24 He didn’t notice that the stream over

which he built his mill was too shallow to drive the

mechanism. After replacing many parts and fine tuning

his mill, one day he put a nail in the wall of the mill

so that he could hang up his coat. On that same day, the

mill started to work. Who would have guessed that all I

needed to do was put a nail in the wall, the oldest son

exclaimed!

The second son quite enjoyed his brother’s mistake.

It wasn’t the nail, of course, that made the mill run,

but the melting snow coming down from the mountains and

increased the flow of the stream. The second son was,

you see, a follower of Stahl: the structure of the mill

alone is insufficient—it’s the water that is the “soul of

the mill.”25 He was so focused on maximizing the flow of

water through the mill that he did not notice that his

water wheel was damaged. With a steady flow of water

through the mill, the second son was very puzzled about

24 Ibid., 250.25 Ibid., 251.

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why his mill wasn’t working. During the night, the

oldest son, who had noticed his brother’s broken water

wheel, fixed it. When he returned in the morning to

explain to his brother why the mill was now working, the

Stahlian son refused to accept the mechanical

explanation. The mill didn’t start to work because of

the mechanical repair, he responded, but because of the

heavy rain last night, which finally made the stream

sufficiently strong to drive the mill. This

disagreement, as you might expect tore the family apart.

The third son, whose mill worked quite well

eventually grew weary of his brothers’ feud and called

them together. “Do as I do,” he said, “pay attention to

the water and the mill. […] You both studied—you

mechanistic medicine, he said to the older brother, and,

you, Stahlian medicine, he said to the second brother. I

haven’t studied at all,” which means that I follow common

sense rather than great men, and my mill runs great.26

In the end, Krüger concludes, the older sons took their

little brother’s advice and—and this is the final line of

26 Ibid., 256.

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the fable—“The benefit of this was that their mills broke

down far less often.”27

2. The optimist and the atheist

The second dream I’ll mention picks up the idea that

academic debates and rivalries can blind us to what is

right in front of us and connects that idea with

practical or moral philsoophy. In this dream a

philosopher, an avowed follower of Leibniz, explains to a

number of people that they all live in the best of all

possible worlds. Some are slow to accept this and

suggest that a world without snakes and scorpions would

be better than the world we have. Suddenly one of the

philosopher’s interlocutors draws a knife and explains

that he means to rob them all. Once the thief has made

off with their valuables, the philosopher consoles the

others by reminding them that they live in the best

possible world and that this crime would serve to remind

them of what is genuinely important in life. Upon

hearing this, the thief again appeared, now explaining

that he is not a thief at all, but a philosopher (indeed

27 Ibid., 253.

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a Leibnizian philosopher). No one, the philosopher-thief

explains, denies that we live in the best possible world:

believers are committed to the perfection of the creator,

so they accept the claim; and atheists accept the claim

for the simple reason that the world there is is

determined by causal necessity and so there is only one

possible world, which is ipso facto the best possible world.

Pretending to be a thief was necessary, he explains, to

make clear “how important it is to connect practical

philosophy with theoretical and to come to know the

unfathomable recesses of the human heart.”28

3. Four machines, three dogs

The third dream returns to the mind-body problem. In

this dream a series of artisans present machines designed

to replicate a human being. Just as Vaucanson might have

done, each of these artisans built a machine out of

pulleys, cords, and springs. One machine, which looked

very much like a person, had a dog inside it and was

arranged so that the dog could control the movements of

the machine and make it do whatever the dog liked.

28 Ibid., 240.

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Another machine also had a dog in it, but this dog could

not control the machine. Instead, the artisan who made

the machine paid careful attention to what the dog wanted

to do and moved the machine accordingly through a series

of strings. This artisan was something of an

occasionalist. A third machine had a drive spring within

it so that it could move under its own power. It also

had a dog in it, though, and its creator asks us to

imagine that the machine would move exactly as it does

regardless of whether in fact it had a dog in it. The

final machine was also driven by its internal springs

alone. This machine was said to be capable of thinking

and so needed no dog to move it. The machine’s spring,

the artisan explained, was irritated by the tension it

felt and did everything in its power to relieve that

tension.

A wise old man who had inspected this wondrous

menagerie was asked to determine which of these machines

best captured the nature of the human beings after whom

they were modelled. The old man responds in verse:

Ihr irret allesamt, nur irret anderst.

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Ins innere der Natur dringt kein erschaffener Geist,Zu glücklich, wem sie noch die äussere Schaale weist.

You are all mistaken, though in different ways. No created spirit can penetrate the core of nature. Those are lucky who can at least know its outer

skin.

In other words, we ought to accept the limitations of

human knowledge and be happy that we can get as far as we

can. This moral becomes more interesting, though, when

we realize that the poetic conclusion of the dream is

stolen from one of Albrecht von Haller’s poems. In the

original, which is about religious conflict, Haller

explains that “Wir irren allesamt, nur irren anderst.”

That is, where Haller says of religion that we’re all

mistaken in one way or another, Krüger’s sage explains

that all physical models of mind-body interaction are

mistaken. Krüger transforms the great anatomist’s poetic

discussion of the limits of religious knowledge into an

admonition concerning the limits of physiological

knowledge.

4. The Dream of an Ox-Soul Seer

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In the final dream, Krüger finds himself standing before

a transparent ox. The skin and all the organs of the ox

are entirely transparent such that he can see the tangle

of fibers that comprise the ox’s nervous system. As well

as seeing the blood and fluids of the ox’s organs

circulate throughout the animal’s body, Krüger can see

very quick bursts of light running through its nerves.

This light is concentrated in its brain, but travels

throughout its body. After recognizing that he was in

fact having a dream about an ox’s soul, a butcher

appears. After being stunned, the ox is slaughtered and

butchered. During this process, the light that had

previously pinged through the ox’s nerves fades and

eventually dies out entirely. At the beginning of the

dream, Krüger is surprised to report that he was able to

perceive the ox’s soul so distinctly in the animal’s

nervous system. The souls of animals, he concludes, lie

entirely in their neurophysiology.

The closing lines of the dream, however, foreclose

of any attempt to draw an analogous conclusion about

human souls. Krüger writes, “Never has anyone made such

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an ox-ish representation of the soul of an ox, and I

admit that one could not dream of a more fanstastical

one.”29 This conclusion should be read on two levels.

First, the physiological understanding of the ox’s soul

presented in this dream is an ochsenmäßige Vorstellung, a

representation appropriate to an ox, and so by

implication not appropriate to a human. Second, Krüger’s

physiological vision of the ox’s soul is ochsenmäßig in

the sense of being ochsig, ‘like and ox’ or ‘oafish.’

Even the most fantastic physiological understanding the

soul—even the ox’s soul—is a bit inept, too coarse.30

Physiology, even when it’s most successful, in other

words, leaves something to be desired.

Quickly to summarize, these four dreams each

illustrate an important element of Krüger’s reflections

on the emerging field of physiological anthropology. The

first dream indicates a preference for popular philosophy

and a general scepticism regarding metaphysical debates. 29 Krüger, 227: “Niemals hat sich wohl jemand eine so ochsenmäßige Vorstellung von der Seele eines Ochsens gemacht, und ich gestehe, daßman nicht wunderlicher hätte träumen können.”30 Carsten Zelle, who is the most careful reader of the Träume, missesthe significance of the final line of this dream. See Carsten Zelle,“Modellbildende Metaphorik im Leib-Seele-Diskurs der ‘vernünftigen Ärzte,’” in Tropen und Metaphern im Diskurs der Geisteswissenschaften des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Elena Agazzi (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2011) 209-223.

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The second reinforces this sceptical attitude toward

metaphysics and emphasizes the importance of practical or

moral concerns. The third dream—the dream about the dog-

driven machines—extends metaphysical scepticism into the

realm of physiology. And the final dream highlights the

inhumanity of physiologically-reductive analyses of the

soul. The more distinctly we come to know the physical

structures and processes that undergird human life, the

more acutely are felt the limitations of the

physiological approach in capturing what is specifically

human about the human being.

This two-fold reservation about the value of a

physiological approach to the study of the human being as

a whole prefigures the same reservations expressed in a

more familiar philosophical register by Kant two decades

later. Reading Krüger’s Träume alongside Kant’s

programmatic remarks about the distinction between his

own pragmatic anthropology and the already-established

physiological anthropology urges us to recognize two

things. First, we ought to understand Kant’s anthropology

as complementary rather than antagonistic to the

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physiological study of humanity. Kant’s reservations

about the adequacy of physiological analysis to the

social and moral dimensions of human life are internal

features of the German physiological tradition itself.

Krüger never took anatomy and physiology to exhaust the

methods available for studying the human being. For

Kant’s part, although he denies the possibility of a

material ground of the transcendental unity of

consciousness, his is in priciple amenable to material

explanations of the ground of empirical apperception.31

That is, Kant accepts physiology as a component of the

study of the human being while seeking to flesh out the

more practical component who absence in the physicians’

accounts Krüger’s Träume registers. Second, we ought to

revisit Zammito’s claim that La Mettrie shocked

eighteenth-century philosophical physicians precisely

because he used their scientific ideas in ways that

challenged their metaphysical commitments. While he is

right to point out that many of the philosophical

physicians worked hard to foreclose the materialist

potential of their ideas, we should be wary of taking La 31 See Kant to Soemmerring, op. cit.

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Mettrie’s confident embrace of this materialist potential

as exemplary of the figure of the médicin-philosoph. As

Krüger’s Träume show, for all the successes of the new

vitalist approach to the life sciences, philosophical

physicians were also circumspect both with regard to the

philosophical or metaphysical implications of their work

as well as with regard to how fully a physiological

analysis of the interactions of the mind and the body

could represent the essential features of human life.

Together, these two points soften the harder edges

of the brash materialist manifestation of the figure of

the philosophical physician represented by La Mettrie and

support a less oppositional interpretation of Kant’s

description of his own anthropological method, an

interpretation that sees connections between Kant’s

project and that of the physiological anthropologists

rather than simple opposition.

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