Frederick Beiser is indisputably the best English historian of philosophy from the Kant to Hegel. This book is foundational for anyone interested in Kant, post-Kantian philosophy, and, more fundamentally, the modern world. It is well worth purchasing for at least three reasons.
First, Beiser is an extraordinary writer, capable of taking the most arid subject matter and accurately contextualizing it and describing so as to make its significance not only obvious but riveting. There are chapters in this book, like the one on Maimon, which deal with abstruse and difficult criticisms of Kant, yet Beiser never takes his eye of the central theme of the book: reason, and its fate, and thus his writing never loses its clarity or his subject its interest. Beiser's skill here is, as those who have studied his works know (I have read all of his books on German philosophy), in no small part a result of his historical method, which brings me to my second point.
Beiser's understanding of the history of philosophy is in the outstanding tradition of Dilthey, Haym, and others (who he mentions not infrequently in footnotes, prefaces, and introductions; perhaps the best overview of his historical method can be found in his responses to Terry Pinkard in the Hegel Bulletin) who take as a central task of the historian of philosophy the description of a thinker's context in such a way that we, the readers, understand what it was that motivated the thinker and what he was trying to accomplish. In this case, we see the significance, the potency and danger, of Kant's first Critique to his contemporary readers; we grasp what motivated such radically different critics as Jacobi or Hamann and Garve or Schulz to subject Kant's Critique to a blistering array of criticisms. Contrary to the interpretations purveyed by rigorous but woefully unhistorical analytic philosophers like Strawson, Kant's transcendental idealism was not an embarrassing blunder but an attempt to live in and reconcile the worlds of both Newton and the Enlightenment, of mechanistic nature and human autonomy. A nobler task could hardly be undertaken, for it manifested deep intellectual integrity and philosophical brilliance of world-historical force: reason hung in the balance, its fate subject to the success of Kant's system.
That is why, thirdly, this book is so important: the inherent interest, relevance, and power of its subject matter: the authority - and fate - of unaided human reason, a synecdoche of the Enlightenment project. For those who have never confronted head on the Enlightenment in its most intellectually powerful and rigorous representative - i.e. in Immanuel Kant - this book guides the careful reader to a historical precipice, from which they can, with Beiser's aid, survey with clarity and profundity the depth of the challenge posed by Kant and the momentous significance of his success or failure. If reason alone is the arbiter before which all authority must submit, what happens when reason turns on it itself, subjects itself and its own authority to its own radical criticism? Rational criticism turned against reason is devastating in its skeptical, atheistic, and fatalistic consequences, as Jacobi and the Pantheism Controversy so clearly show, but can a leap of faith (Jacobi) or orthodox Christianity (Hamann) save us from a step back into blind bondage to tradition? Such are the issues of this book; such are the issues of the modern world. In light of that debacle called post-modernism, I think it is safe to say these issues are unresolved. As ever, history may show us the light, illuminating and granting, if not solutions, at least the ability to avoid past blunders and to see with clarity and depth the nature of our situation.
Thus "The Fate of Reason" is no mere exercise in intellectual history or a survey of obscure thinkers; nor is it simply a primer on Enlightenment and its dangers, from within and without; it is a profound essay towards a more accurate understanding of ourselves and our world. Books of this nature and quality are rare and this makes "The Fate of Reason" all the more worthy of careful study and reflection.
