Kant: A Biography

A Palingenesis and Its Consequences 145

also a psychology of character. Indeed, it is this character that is the focus of

Kant's concern. Whatever happens at forty, it has deep moral implications:

That someone has a character can only be proved by his having adopted as his highest

maxim the principle to be truthful in his inner confession to himself as well as in his

dealings with anyone else.^3

Accordingly, the maxim relevant first and foremost for judging character
is that of truthfulness.
Kant offered many variations on this theme in his lectures on anthro¬
pology, claiming that only at forty can we begin to form a correct concep¬
tion of things because then we have lived through varied situations of life.
Before forty, hardly anyone is capable of correct judgments concerning the
true value of things.^4 He also emphasized that character is possible only if
our inclinations are still sufficiently strong to cause us to take interest in
things, but not so strong as to become passions. All this will probably hap¬
pen at the age of forty. Character requires a ripened understanding. Curi¬
ously, Kant also believed that forty marks the year in which the power of
memory begins to weaken. Accordingly, we must have collected all the ma¬
terials for thinking before that year. After forty, "we cannot learn anything
new, though we can expand our knowledge."^5 Whatever we will accomplish
after forty in intellectual matters is thus a function of the materials we have
collected before that time and of the characteristic judgment that develops
around forty. It will be the result of our knowledge and our character.
Character is built on maxims. Yet what are maxims? Kantian maxims
are for the most part really ordinary sorts of things - at least in the way he
described them in the context of anthropology. They are precepts or gen¬
eral policies that we have learned from others or from books, and that we
choose to adopt as principles to live by. They show us to be rational crea¬
tures, or creatures who are capable of guiding their actions by general prin¬
ciples and not just by impulse. Yet, and this is important, Kant did not
think that they originate simply from our own reasoning. They are not pri¬
marily private principles but subjects of public discourse. Indeed, Kant
insisted that conversations with friends about moral matters provide a very
good way of clarifying our moral ideas. Maxims, in a sense, are all around
us; the question is which we should adopt.

Maxims are not, moreover, restricted to moral contexts. Kant seems to
believe that it is good to have maxims in every situation. To live by maxims,
that is, to live in a principled way, is to live rationally. Maxims prevent us