Silent Years 211lingks, which paid him 200 Thalers just for supervising one of their rela¬
tives. During the years 1779 and 1780, Kraus took a trip to Berlin and Göt¬
tingen, becoming a Freemason on the way and making many important
friends and acquaintances. "One evening in Göttingen he was invited to a
garden party at which many professors, including Johann Georg Heinrich
Feder, were present. The conversation was steered to the philosophy of the
day. Kraus mentioned that Kant had a work in his desk (the Critique of
Pure Reason), which would most certainly cost philosophers anxiety and
sweat. The gentlemen laughed and said that from a dilettante in philosophy
something like this was hardly to be expected."^86 If only they could have
spoken to some of Kant's students.
Baczko, who later became a historian of Königsberg, studied at the Al-
bertina between 1772 and 1776. He also went to Kant's lectures. In his
autobiography he gives the following account:
Kant had then begun his brightest period. He lectured on metaphysics without pay¬
ment, when I entered the university. I attended his lectures right away and I did not
understand them. Given the estimation of Kant's name and the suspicions that I have
always entertained about my abilities, I came to believe that I had to put more time into
my studies. Therefore I asked everyone of my acquaintances whether they did not own
books on metaphysics or other philosophical disciplines. Soon I got the works of Wolff,
Meier and Baumgarten, but also some very poor books, which I read with great exer¬
tion. I worked through entire nights, labored uninterrupted for twenty hours and more
over a book and learned nothing.
As well as lacking the occasion, I was too proud and stubborn to confess my igno¬
rance to others and to ask them for help.... I began to believe that some of Kant's stu¬
dents knew even less than I did. I began to believe that they went to Kant's lectures in
order to gain a reputation. I began to tease some of them, declaring all of philosophy
useless.^87
Still, Baczko goes on to declare that Helvetius's On the Spirit of Man,
d'Argens's Philosophy of Bon Sens, Brucker's History of Philosophy, as well
as some things by Grotius, Hobbes, Gassendi, and philosophers like them,
did turn out to be useful after all.
Baczko's experience, which probably was not untypical, shows that Kant's
lecture style had changed. He no longer aimed at elegance and popularity,
but cultivated a certain kind of obscurity that made it very difficult for
students to understand him. He gained the reputation of being a difficult
philosopher. There were a number of students - not altogether untypical
at a German university — who were impressed by the depth or obscurity of
Kant. They went to his lectures just because they did not understand them.
Kant was not unaware of this. When he was asked in 1778 whether he could