Kant: A Biography

Student and Private Teacher 95

the house, the tools, and the equipment of his father, and to see to it that

his brothers and sisters were taken care of. No matter what motive Kant

might have had for leaving Königsberg, he could not have departed before

those matters were settled. During this period (in 1747) Kant also added

a number of emendations to the book and wrote the dedication to Johann

Christoph Bohlius, a professor of medicine at the University of Königs¬

berg. He lived at least part of the time with a fellow student who helped

him — as did his uncle. After his family affairs had been settled, however,

there was little to keep him in Königsberg — especially since he saw no pos¬

sibility of advancing at the university.

His book was noticed. There were some reviews.^152 Gotthold Ephraim

Lessing wrote a derisive epigram about it, saying:

Kant, commencing the hardest of courses,

is daring the world to educate,

and investigates the living forces.

But his own he fails to estimate.^153

In his anthropology, Kant observes the following:

The age at which we obtain the complete use of reason may be determined as follows:
[i] as far as the facility (to use it competently to achieve any goal) is concerned it is ap¬
proximately the twentieth year, [ii] as far as calculation (to use other human beings for
one's own purposes) is concerned, it is the fortieth year, and [iii] the age of wisdom be¬
gins around sixty. The latter age is entirely negative. We are finally able to recognize all
the foolish mistakes we made in the first two.1S4

This suggests that he felt he had the necessary maturity to deal with tech¬
nical questions of philosophy at age twenty-two or twenty-four, but that
he had no clear idea of what this would bring him. Lessing's epigram was
certainly false, if it is taken as a prediction of what Kant would do. Prop¬
erly, Lessing suppressed this epigram in later editions of his work.

Private Teacher: "There May Never

Have Been a Worse Hofmeister"

While Kant's student years were not easy - and not just for financial rea¬
sons - they must, on the whole, have been rewarding. They were years of
freedom and intellectual growth. In 1748, having concluded his formal
studies at the university and having lost his father, he was facing an un¬
certain future. He was entirely on his own at the age of twenty-four, and
his life changed fundamentally. Borowski claimed that "because of a lack