Abstract

Kant's brief ‘Postscript of a Friend’ serves as a peculiar coda to his life work. The last of Kant's writing to be published during his lifetime, it is both a friendly endorsement of Christian Gottlieb Mielcke's newly competed Lithuanian–German and German–Lithuanian Dictionary and a plea in Kant's own name for the preservation of minority languages, Lithuanian in particular. This support for minority languages has no visible precedent in his earlier writings, in which national, civic and linguistic identities and associated loyalties tend to overlap. Indeed, Kant's understanding of the commonwealth as nation-state seems predicated on the fact or myth of ethnic and linguistic unity and homogeneity. The same apparent lack of precedent also applies to the Nachschrift's singling out as a people of peculiar civic merit of the Lithuanians, who are not otherwise mentioned in any of Kant's published or unpublished writings. The work thus raises an obvious question: why does Kant devote his last published work to a topic and cause in which he does not seem to have taken much earlier interest?