Notes to Pages 34~35 43J
died in 1796. After her death, Kant continued regular payments to her four chil¬
dren, and he provided for them in his will. They also received a substantial dowry
from Kant when they married, and his physician treated them at Kant's expense.
His third sister (Anna Luisa, born in February 1730) died in 1774. He also gave a
pension to his youngest sister (Katharina Barbara, born September 15,1731), whose
husband died within a year of their marriage, and who was otherwise well taken
care of ("sonst gut versorgt") by Kant in a position at St. George's Hospital. His
younger brother Johann Heinrich (born November 28, 1735) was brought up in
the household of the well-to-do brother of Kant's mother. They went to the same
schools, and Johann Heinrich later also attended Kant's lectures. Though they
corresponded later in life, Kant remained rather cool and reserved toward the
more emotional advances of his brother, once writing on a page of a letter from Jo¬
hann Heinrich: "All morality consists in the derivation of an action from the idea
of the subject, not fromfeeling (Empfindung)." When his brother died in 1800, Kant
supported the family, though not on a regular basis and, it seems, somewhat re¬
luctantly. See Vorländer, Immanuel Kant, II, pp. 17-26. Again, the Böhmes, Das
Andere der Vernunft, p. 485, like others before them, claim that Kant's relation to
his closest relatives was significant, explaining his distance from them as the re¬
sult of Kant's fixation on the mother. The brothers and sisters did not count. He
had no relationship with them, and he simply "paid them off." This is unfair,
though Kant may have had in his adult life less social intercourse with his sisters
and his brother than some of his colleagues had with their relations — but not much
less. Even late in Kant's life, Königsberg society was divided by social rank. In¬
deed, rank alone presented barriers that neither his sisters nor Kant would have
wanted to transgress. That he took care of them is more significant than the ab¬
sence of close relations with them. (What would they have talked about?) There
may have been deeper reasons for his lack of a relationship with his brother, but he
was more than ten years younger and Kant probably did not know him very well.
Furthermore, the younger brother did nothing to support any of his relatives, and
even failed to provide sufficiently for his wife and children.
- Pietism also had significant effects outside of Germany. See F. E. Stoeffler, The
Rise of Evangelical Pietism, 2nded. (Leiden, 1971).
- Richard L. Gawthrop, Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Cam¬
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 141.
- For a useful introduction, see Albrecht Ritschi, Geschichte des Pietismus, 3 vols.
(Bonn: 1880-1896), and Emanuel Hirsch, Geschichte der neuen evangelischen Theolo¬
gie, 2nd ed. (Gütersloh, i960), vol. II, pp. 91-143. See also Max Weber, The Protes¬
tant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons, foreword by R. H. Tawney
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), pp. 128-139. For a short collection of
writings by Pietists, see Peter C. Erb, ed., Pietists: Selected Writings, with a Pref¬
ace by Ernest Stoeffler (New York: Paulist Press, 1983). For Francke and the Halle
School, see especially pp. 97—215.
- See Carl Friedrichs, Preußentum und Pietismus. Der Pietismus in Brandenburg-
Preußen als Religiös-Soziale Reformbewegung (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht,
1971). He deals with Königsberg specifically on pp. 231-300. See also Mary Ful-
brook, Piety and Politics: Religion and the Rise of Absolutism in England, Württemberg
