By Rev. Susannah Currie
In the October 27, 2025, issue of the New Yorker magazine, in Adam Kirsch’s article about the book, “Kant, A Revolution in Thinking,” (Harvard), by Marcus Willaschek, translated by Peter Lewis, the first four paragraphs are devoted to outlining Emanuel Swedenborg’s life and writing. Swedenborg and Kant were contemporaries in the eighteenth century, both scientists and philosophers, and they shared a curiosity about the human body and its relationship to the human mind, or in Swedenborg’s case, the soul.
Kirsch writes that Kant wrote to a friend that he was free of “any trace of a way of thinking inclined to the miraculous.” Yet he ordered Swedenborg’s books and told a friend he was waiting for them with longing. Kant admitted that he was interested in Swedenborg’s powers of clairvoyance, as they had been vouched for by credible witnesses. Upon reading Swedenborg’s claim that spirits could be perceived with the senses, Kant, in contrast, reached his conclusion that there are only two realms: what we know from experience, and what we can imagine and make stories about. Although he rejected contemplating the spiritual realms Swedenborg described, he found in Swedenborg’s writings the inspiration to counter with his own thoughts.
When Kant published his book about Swedenborg, Dreams of a Spirit-Seeker (1766), he outlined his impressions of Swedenborg with sarcasm. Kant wrote:
Metaphysics is the science of the boundaries of human reason.” In the age of the Enlightenment, when scientific advances were everywhere, scientists relied on the experience of finding ‘answers’ to the mysteries of life, and rejected the unseen ‘superstitions’ perceived in the faith of the religions of the day.
Kant’s work kept the scientists and philosophers of his day focused on the experiences of the five senses, with the human as the center of his thought. In contrast, Swedenborg challenged both the science and the religion of his day by opening his readers to the realms of Heaven, Hell, and the World of Spirits. In his book, Willaschek argues that Kant’s claim that to understand anything, it was necessary to understand ourselves. His three “Critiques” shared his ideas about the mind and shaped the development of “psychology, anthropology, and social science.”
These two eighteenth century “influencers,” provide us with two extremes: Kant with his boundary of human reason to the experiences of the senses, and Swedenborg with his openness to realms beyond the five senses. Scientists and religious persons alike were, then as now, given two paths to go in understanding life and themselves. These choices are how we identify ourselves.
It seems that Kant and Swedenborg did agree on a few things worth noting. Both believed that the definition of “good” is what is done with “good will.” Both encouraged the inner journey to both understand ourselves, and to grow in the “doing of good,” and both wrote about the possibility of life on other planets. Kant stressed individual autonomy and Swedenborg explored the meaning of community, and its reality in all realms: Earth, World of Spirits, Heaven, and Hell.
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Meet Susannah Currie
Rev. Susannah Currie is a retired minister and chaplain. She is a happy wife of fifty years, mother of three and grandmother of six wonderful humans.
