Childhood and Early Youth 39to Pietism. In pursuing the program of Frederick William I against the
wishes of the more orthodox clergy and their friends among the officials
and nobility, Schulz incurred the wrath of many. Indeed, he was so closely
identified with the king that he was very worried when the king suffered
a severe illness in 1734, writing to a friend that he had already been threat¬
ened and predicting that "his head would be cut off within three days of
the king's death." Some time later he reported: "Here the noise increases
daily. Now even the rabble begins to get involved. Thus for some weeks I
can hardly walk the street safely. In the evening I cannot leave the house at
all."^30 His opponents smashed his windows, made noisy protests in front
of his house as well as those of other Pietist professors, and carried signs
through the streets vilifying them. Still, the Pietists persisted, viewing their
opposition as the enemies of God himself, and continued to do what they
saw as God's work. While others saw in them nothing but puppets of Fred¬
erick William I, they insisted that they were doing what was right. By the
early thirties, the Pietists had gained the upper hand in their struggle with
orthodoxy, and Frederick William I had scored a number of victories against
the Königsberg local opposition to his centralist state.^51
The fact that Emanuel grew up in this religious environment certainly
had consequences for his intellectual development, though it is difficult to
determine how far these went. Emanuel's religious background was fraught
with deep ambiguities, having a component that was seen elsewhere as
contrary to the basic tenets of true faith. If Pietistic ideas had an influence
on Kant very early on, they were those mediated by Schulz. It was the
Pietism in Königsberg that confronted the young Kant, and not some
other kind. His mother's outlook, which was described by Kant himself as
"genuine religiosity that was not at all enthusiastic," has Schulzian traits.
Still, it is unlikely that Pietism had any fundamental and lasting influence
on Kant's philosophy.^52 It is even doubtful that the Pietism of his par¬
ents left any significant traces on Kant's intellectual outlook, even if Kant's
earliest biographers suggest that it did. They were in no better position to
make this claim than we would be today. Borowski claimed that Kant's
"father insisted on industriousness and thorough honesty in his son, while
the mother also demanded piety in him in accordance with the ideas
(Schema) she had formed of it. The father demanded work and sincerity —
the mother demanded holiness as well."^53 Borowski further observed that
Kant "enjoyed the supervision of his parents long enough to be able to judge
correctly about the entirety of their way of thinking (Denkart),''' and that
"the demand for holiness" found in Kant's second Critique was identical