Become a famous philosopher so your e-mail account can be hacked and published postmortem.

If we take away one thing from the reading of the Herz letters, it is that the only way to make Kant more absurd is to address him as "dearest Herr Professor" (Herz 278). Or make a super nerdy t-shirt about him, like this. 

In some kind of table-of-contents tomfoolery, three letters appear before the text of Herz's essay Observations from Speculative Philosophy (which is a gripping title indeed) and two after. The first, from Herz to Kant, is fairly pedestrian and almost editorial in nature, which is appropriate given that Herz was chosen by Kant to defend the work in public. This letter references some of the pair's contemporaries and their opinions on Kant's Dissertation. Here's a brief recap of the parts of the Dissertation that are referenced here:

     1. "...if the predicate of a proposition is sensible, it is only subjectively valid of the subject, while, on the hand, if the predicate is intellectual, etc'" (ibid). Recall the separate realms of the sensible and the intellectual, as well as the indistinct source of intellectual concepts. 

     2. "...in explaining the nature of space, one must use the words 'at the same time' [simul] and in explaining time the word 'after' [post]" (ibid). Recall the presuppositions of both the existence of time and space, as well as their subjective nature. 

The second, from the sincere and devoted Immanuel Kant, speaks first on the importance of his project. While it seems a little pompous (or arrogant, self-important, ridiculous, laughable, pretentious...) of him to describe the topic of his dissertation as crucial to "the most important ends of humanity in general," he is correct in this identification of the rather grandiose aspirations of what he is trying to do; namely, make a clear delineation between the subjective and the objective (Herz 279). This isn't exactly the Large Hadron Collider in practical importance here, but besides being one of the most fundamental questions of existence, man's relationship to the world, and philosophy, it is necessary for his next endeavor, which is even more ambitious in its topics of discussion (gasp).  Kant mentions that it will concern "the foundational principles and laws that determine the sensible world" as well as metaphysics and ethics (ibid). The plot thickens.

At this point in time we're all really tired of the terms of endearment between professor and student, but thankfully things perk up a bit in the third letter and get a little more interesting, philosophically. Herz fears that Kant has moved away from his fondness for metaphysics. This exchange details one of the discipline's more prickly questions concerning the practicality or even legitimacy of metaphysics versus the perhaps less esoteric and more useful discipline of moral philosophy. It is also a preview of what's up Kant's sleeve; we already know that in the first Critique he moves away from the kinds of unfettered intellectual formulations that have plagued philosophy. Kant is also now arguably more famous for his moral system, deontology, than for the work he does concerning epistemology. 

Herz passably parrots Kant for pages and pages and pages and pages...

and pages...

and we finally come to the last two letters, which demonstrate that people back then had a lot more patience for pen and ink than I have ever had in my entire life. In the fourth letter Kant goes into much greater detail on his aim in the work which he has thus far entitled The Limits of Sensibility and Reason. SPOILER ALERT: At the end of Titanic, the boat sinks, and we find out that The Limits of Sensibility and Reason will later be retitled Critique of Pure Reason (I think). So here's the sparknotes outline of the first Critique from Kant himself. 

     I. Theoretical

          A. General Phenomenology (I do not understand this term precisely as Kant uses it, only as philosophers in the 20th century and onward do. Perhaps they are similar? Kant's use of phenomena previously meant things as they appear)

          B. Metaphysics: "only in regard to its nature and method" (312)

     II. Practical 

          A. The universal principles of feeling, taste and sensuous desire (make your own joke)

          B. The first principles of morality. 

After laying out this handy dandy blueprint of one of the densest and most famous philosophical works of all time, he also poses a pretty timeless question, the problem of the relationship of an object with the mind's representation of that object, again reminiscent of the work he does in the Dissertation about the categorically separate relationships between subject and object, knower and known. 

The fifth letter is valuable only in that it reveals the phrase "pure reason" and his trademark a priori (317). These are crucial for his overarching goal to define the reach of knowledge outside of experience, as a foundation for all future hypotheses. 

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal jam.