Kant's answer provides release from one of the two oppressions which threaten modern man, nature and history. Both appear to stifle the free, self-possessed personality: the former, because its mechanicism subjects the soul to the same blind forces as the falling stone and the sprouting stalk; the latter, because it makes of the soul a mere point of intersection of social threads spinning through history and reduces its whole creativity to a matter of administering the inheritance of the race.

XREF: Connects to Isaiah Berlin's essay on Kant and the two forms of determinism, and to broader Enlightenment debates about free will vs. mechanism.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 163