54 Kant: A Biographyand 1740. If Pietism had any influence on Kant at all, then it was a negative
one. It may have been precisely because he was acquainted with Pietism
that he came to reject almost completely any role of feeling in morality. If
anything, Kant's moral and religious views betray a definite anti-Pietistic
bias. Kant's emphasis on autonomy as a key to morality is also a rejection
of the Pietistic emphasis on the necessity of a supernatural influence on
the human will. Kant's mature philosophy is characterized, at least in part,
by a struggle to legitimate an autonomous morality, based on freedom of
the will, and it must also be seen as a struggle against those who would en¬
slave us by breaking our wills. This struggle has its beginnings in Kant's
youth, even if it took him a very long time to formulate his arguments
against those bent on fostering a servile attitude and demeaning human
nature as essentially base. It is absurd to claim that Pietism was a major
influence on his moral philosophy.^110
Emanuel's will was not broken by the teachers at the Collegium Frideri-
cianum, but not for want of trying on their part. Emanuel resisted a pres¬
sure that was almost irresistible. We may be sure that he neither openly
converted nor put on an act, as so many of his fellow students did. The
"terror and fear" that would "overcome him as soon as he thought back to
the slavery of his youth" has more to do with the pressure to convert than
with any intellectual demands put upon him by his teachers. It is to this
period in life that we must trace his aversion to prayer and singing of
hymns and his resistance to any religion based on feeling and sentiment.
In this regard, Emanuel's education was not very different from that of
Frederick II, which was also described as "a chronicle of suffering."^111
Frederick's pious but brutal father, bent on making a man of what he per¬
ceived to be a womanish boy, used some of the same methods that the Pietists
used on their charges. Though the externals of Kant's youth are far less
dramatic, there is every indication that he became similarly resistant to con¬
version. Like the prince, twelve years his senior, Kant turned away from
the soul searching and self-condemnation of the Pietists and toward other
models. For Emanuel, these were to be found in the Latin classics; for the
young Frederick, they were to be found in contemporary French literature.
Both rejected the religious way of life of their parents.
This is one reason why Kant thought highly of Frederick and called his
period not only "the age of Enlightenment" but also "the century of Fred¬
erick." Like Frederick, he felt that he had been "treated like a slave" in his
youth, but like Frederick, he was not broken. To submit to the servitude
of his teachers would have meant "self-incurred tutelage" for life. We do