A Palingenesis and Its
Consequences (1764-1769)
Kant at Forty: "When Does One Acquire One's Character?"O
N APRIL 22, 1764, Kant turned forty. This was a significant event,
at least in Kant's own view of his life. According to his psychological
or anthropological theory, the fortieth year is of the greatest importance.
We may be able to use reason satisfactorily when we are twenty, but "as far
as calculation (to use other human beings for one's own purposes)" is
concerned, "it is the fortieth year" in which we reach maturity.^1 Even more
significantly, Kant believed that it is in our fortieth year that we finally ac¬
quire a character.
No one who in his way of thinking is conscious of having character can have such
character by nature. Rather, it must always be acquired. We may also assume that the
foundation of this character and its beginning will be unforgettable. It is like a kind of
rebirth, like a certain solemn kind of promise to oneself. Education, examples, and
teaching cannot gradually bring about this firmness and constancy in principles, but
it comes about only through an explosion, as it were, which follows all at once upon
the dissatisfaction with the state of vacillation of instinct. There will perhaps only be
few who have tried to accomplish this revolution before their thirtieth year and even
fewer who have firmly founded it before they are forty. The attempt at becoming a bet¬
ter human being in fragments is a futile undertaking, for one impression disappears as
we work on another. The foundation of a character is indeed the absolute unity of the
internal principle of how to live in general.^2
Character is thus not something we are born with or something that might
happen to us. It is our own creation. We make or adopt our character, and
to have a good character is the ultimate moral achievement.
Only insofar as we have a character do we have moral worth. It is our
duty to form a character in the moral sense. Kant's moral psychology is
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