Silent Years 207in 1780, he used another text, namely his colleague F. S. Bock's Textbook
of the Art of Education for Christian Parents and Future Teachers of the Youth.7Z
The register of academic courses had a note beside the title of the course:
"by Royal Decree."^73 In his lectures on anthropology Kant continued to
praise Basedow.^74
Some of the most important students who went to Kant's lectures dur¬
ing the seventies were Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792), Chris¬
tian Jakob Kraus (1753—1807), and Baczko. Lenz, who later became one
of the famous writers within the Sturm und Drangmovement, studied with
Kant between 1769 and 1771. He wrote one of the poems celebrating Kant's
promotion. Entitled "When His High and Noble Herr Professor Kant Dis¬
puted for the Honor of professor on August 21, 1770," it is well designed
to reveal the poetic genius of Lenz. It is interesting as a document of what
he and his contemporaries thought a professor should be, and what they saw
in Kant. Thus we find him emphasizing Kant as someone in whom both
virtue and wisdom can be found, one who lived and honored what he taught.
Lenz probably slept during the lectures on moral philosophy, because he
did not seem to realize that wisdom, at least according to the classical the¬
ory of the virtues, is a virtue itself. On the other hand, it may simply have
been a compromise necessary to make the poem rhyme. In any case, what
Lenz lacked in philosophical sophistication he made up for with enthusi¬
asm. He praised Kant as somenoe
Whose clear eye never was bedazzled by the ostentatious
Who, never crawling, never called the fool sagacious
Who many a time reduced to shred
The folly's mask, which we must dread.We may wonder whether "the fool" was Buck, and whether the folly to be
dreaded was a certain kind of religiosity. As if what he had said was not
enough, he ended the poem by saying:
You sons of France! Despise our Northern region
Ask if ever a genius has here arisen:
If Kant still lives, you will not hazard again
to ask this question.^75Lenz's intellectual outlook showed traces of Kantian influence. He knew
and appreciated Shaftesbury and Hume, and he believed that the source
of morality was the moral sense. Like Kant, Lenz thought the moral sense
should not be understood as a simple faculty, but as "a felt necessitating
{Nötigung) to agree with a universal will." Though the feelings of sympathy