“Kant… impressed this trinity of certainty, completeness, and necessity on his successors.” “If one makes bold to lay down certainties for all time… a lack of clarity is all too understandable.” Timidity and boldness. Contrast with Lessing and Goethe

The dream of absolute certainty is older than Immanuel Kant and can be traced back to Descartes, to Plato, and even to Parmenides, but it was Kant who impressed this trinity of certainty, completeness, and necessity on his successors, especially in Germany. Kant insists that traditional metaphysicians have made the egregious mistake of applying the twelve categories to what lies beyond all possible experience. When Kant was offered a professorship in Erlangen in 1769, while he was waiting for a chair in Konigsberg, he turned it down. Some writers suppose that he did this because the move might have interfered with his work on the Critique of Pure Reason which, he did not start writing until ten years later. But Kant's letter to Erlangen voices his great timidity, his fear of "changes that would seem small to others." The paradox of Kant's boldness and timidity might be put this way: Kant was afraid of recognizing his own courage.