The Elegant Magister 107wish to enliven their talks and with which they drive good and well-raised youths from
their lecture halls.Kant eschewed "followers," saying: "You will not learn from me philosophy,
but philosophizing, not thoughts merely for repetition but thinking."^24 He
suggested that his students order their accumulated information under dif¬
ferent headings in thought and always ask themselves when they read or
heard something new, "Under which heading or in which order does this
belong — where do you put it?" He also advised his students to prepare a
commonplace book (Miszellaneen), ordered in accordance with the differ¬
ent sciences, to aid their perhaps deceptive memories.^25
Kant was a popular lecturer from the beginning; his lecture halls were
always full. In February 1757, Gottlieb Immanuel Lindner inquired in a
letter, "is Magister Kant still safe from the court of inquisition that inves¬
tigates wit?"^26 Hamann's brother writes to Lindner: "Magister Kant lives
happy and content. Quietly, he recruits those who attend the lectures of
the clamorous (marktschreierische) Watson, and he weakens with industry
and true learning the apparent applause of this youth."^27 The competition
and jealousy among the different young lecturers was intense. Even modest
financial success, which was necessary for survival, was hard to come by,
and it had to be fought for vigilantly and steadily.
Not everyone liked Kant. Scheffner, who was boarding with L'Estoq,
explicitly points out that he attended the lectures by Watson on Horace and
aesthetics, "but none by Kant, against whom the director of my studies had
an antipathy, and whom he never invited into his house."^28 Instead, he
attended most of the courses given by L'Estoq himself. These included
"among other things jus naturae, Hobbes' De cive, which he, as I learned to
see in later years, really did not understand quite correctly. Against Hobbes's
Leviathan he warned us most seriously, so that I dared to read him only
later."^29 In Kant's lectures he would not have heard such serious warnings.
What he would have heard instead could be gathered from Borowski, who
reported:
During the years in which I was one of his students Hutcheson and Hume were espe¬
cially estimated by him, the former in the discipline of ethics, the latter in deep philo¬
sophical enquiries. His power of thinking received a special new impetus especially
through Hume. He recommended these two thinkers to us for careful study. As always,
he was interested in travel books.... Why should I be more extensive here? In short,
Kant left nothing untried and unexamined that is contributed by good writers to the
store of human knowledge.
Only theological works, of whatever kind they may have been, but especially exegesis