150 Kant: A Biographyhave been very different from the way in which we all experience it. There
was denial, there were feelings of guilt, and, most importantly, there were
sustained attempts at coming to terms with the loss and his own life. The
loss of his friend meant more to him than the deaths of most people be¬
fore and after. In any case, Funk's death provided him with ample occasion
for reflection on life, death, and "the true value of things," and such an
experience of human mortality could have been one of the reasons for the
"palingenesis," or "rebirth," or the "explosion... which follows all at
once upon the dissatisfaction with the state of vacillation of instinct." If
only because of the death of Funk, the period 1764-65 was very impor¬
tant for Kant, indeed.
The religious — even Pietistic — overtones in Kant's account of the ori¬
gin of character cannot be overlooked. In another account of the necessity
of our rebirth he draws a definite parallel to the religious conversion de¬
scribed by the Pietists. Unsurprisingly, this account reveals an intimate
understanding not only of the Pietistic doctrine of rebirth, but also of or¬
thodox Christianity. Differentiating between the Spener—Francke and the
Moravian-Zinzendorf Bekehrungslehren, both of which were mystical for
him, he claimed that both declare that what is supersensible is also super¬
natural. They maintain that a miracle is necessary either for becoming a
Christian or for achieving a Christian way of life.^14
It would be a mistake, however, to view Kant's conversion as a religious
one. For he advocated what was essentially a moral solution to the problem.
In fact, he claims that morality is "the genuine solution of that problem
(of the new man)."^15 He claims: "There is something in us that we can never
cease to wonder at once it has entered our sight, and this is what also ele¬
vates the idea of humanity to a dignity which one might not expect in man
as the object of experience."^16 The specific description of moral rebirth
and character that Kant offered later, in The Dispute of the Faculties, is per¬
haps couched in a language that was not available to Kant in 1764—65, but
its substance and its general characterization are quite compatible with his
earlier view. By acquiring a character one becomes a new person {neuer
Mensch). We recreate ourselves in accordance with maxims. Kant is thus
in this sense further away from Rousseau, who believed that virtue was a
gift of nature, and closer to Hume, who believed that we needed to "cul¬
tivate" our natural interest in morality.^17 For Kant, virtue is artificial, not
natural. We must create ourselves anew from the materials of our previous
lives—or so he suggests. Though Kant's theory of the "new man" may sound
Christian, it also has definite Stoic elements. Indeed, the triumph of the