Silent Years 221restaurant. Thus he wrote to an early biographer, who had claimed that he
was not well off financially during his early years as a Magister, that he was
even then capable of "paying for a very good table." Like many bachelors
in the eighteenth century, he ate his main meal in a restaurant or pub (öf¬
fentliches Speishaus). The main meal was, as customary in Germany until
fairly recently, at lunchtime. Borowski pointed out that "he always had an
agreement with the owner that he would find good and decent society
there." Once he left a house of this kind because a man, who otherwise was
quite reasonable, had gotten into the habit of speaking very slowly and with
some pathos about even the most insignificant matters. Kant disliked os-
tentatiousness. Especially at lunch, he preferred conversational tone with¬
out any artifice. Indeed, he himself never made a great effort at avoiding
"common expressions" and was even given to a certain "provincialism" in
his language.^125 In other words, he spoke like an East Prussian; and the
East Prussian dialect was deft. It struck people who spoke only High Ger¬
man as rather direct - and how direct Kant could be can be seen from his
Dreams.
Kant stopped going to another place when certain people "tried to join
in without being invited, expecting that he would lecture them at lunch
and answer their objections. He wanted ... to free himself from anything
that exerted the mind and, as he used to say, 'give honor to the body.' But
apart from those, anyone from any social class was welcome."^126 Those
who wanted to be special he disliked. He felt that "a philosopher might be
more at home in a farmer's pub than among distorted heads and hearts."
For years Kant took his lunch at Zornig in the Junker Street, with com¬
pletely uneducated and ignorant majors and colonels. When a judicial of¬
ficial came to this party, Kant declared that this man was "hammering his
head full," and he therefore left.^127 Later he went to Gerlach's, which was
"a billiard house in the Kneiphoff." It appears that Kant ate at Gerlach's
for most of the time between 1755 and 1770.^128 Zornig or Zornicht was a
"coffee and guest house," which was close to the Prinzessinenplatz, where
Kant later built his house; and it was also close to where Hippel lived. If the
descriptions are reliable, then Zornig was a somewhat more exclusive place
than Gerlach's. Still, for more than thirty years Kant ate lunch at a pub,
and during that time he mixed with a great variety of different people.
Kant thus did not always live the withdrawn life that many people associate
with a philosopher of his standing. Far from it: when he was not invited to
a dinner party, he ate in the company of men with very different back¬
grounds from his own, and he enjoyed it.