Kant: A Biographyhim say so, and we can discount it.^42 When Jachmann tries to downplay
Kant's enthusiasm for the French Revolution by showing that, all in all,
Kant was a good Prussian citizen, he is more worried about contemporary
politics than about giving a true characterization of Kant.^43 Even when
these intentions are not so obvious, they are always present.^44 The authors
were more interested in defending what they took to be the good name of
Kant (and Königsberg) than in giving an objective account. They give us
an ideologically slanted view of Kant that owes more to the stereotypes of
the age than to Kant's individual character. We get a caricature, not a por¬
trait painting — well-meaning, but unreflective and without even a hint of
irony.
It was ultimately because of this caricature that the German Romantics
came to believe in a man who was all thought and no life.^45 Heinrich Heine
summed up this view as follows:
The history of Kant's life is difficult to describe. For he neither had a life nor a history.
He lived a mechanically ordered, almost abstract, bachelor life in a quiet out-of-the-
way lane in Königsberg, an old city at the northeast border of Germany. I do not be¬
lieve that the large clock of the Cathedral there completed its task with less passion and
less regularity than its fellow citizen Immanuel Kant. Getting up, drinking coffee,
writing, giving lectures, eating, taking a walk, everything had its set time, and the
neighbors knew precisely that the time was 3:30 P.M. when Kant stepped outside his
door with his gray coat and the Spanish stick in his hand.... eight times he would
walk up and down the little alley lined by Linden trees - every season, no matter
whether the weather was cloudy or whether the clouds promised rain. One could see
his servant, the old Lampe, anxious and worried, walk behind him, with an umbrella
under his arm, like an image of destiny.^46
An interesting image, but more a caricature of a caricature. Kant's friends
in Königsberg preferred a Kant without history to a Kant with a ques¬
tionable history. Heine, like many of the Romantics, disliked Kant's phi¬
losophy for the same reason that he disliked his life. Both were much too
"ordinary" or "common" for him.^47 Simmel later spoke of the "incompa¬
rable personal trait of Kant's philosophy," which he saw in "its uniquely
impersonal nature." Kant was a "conceptual cripple," his thinking was the
"history of a mind {Kopf)" and not that of a real person.^48 Thus, when
Arsenij Gulyga, like Heine and many others before him, claims today that
"Kant has no other biography than the history of his doctrine," he joins a
chorus of voices going back to the Romantics.^49 If Gulyga and Heine are
right, then Kant constitutes an exception to Nietzsche's claim that "every
great philosophy has so far been the self-confession of its originator, a kind