Prologue 15of unintentional, unconscious memoires." Nietzsche should have made an
exception for Kant.^50 Since he had no life, he could not have written any
memoires either.
Kant, on this view, went one better than Descartes, who, according to a
story popular in the eighteenth century, was always accompanied on his
travels by a "mechanical life-sized female doll which ... he had himself
constructed 'to show that animals are only machines and have no souls....
Descartes and the doll were evidently inseparable, and he is said to have slept
with her encased in a trunk at his side."^51 Kant, it would seem, actually
succeeded in turning himself into a machine.
There is at least one recent psychoanalytic appraisal that aims to raise
serious questions about Kant's philosophy based on the accounts of Borow-
ski, Jachmann, and Wasianski. Hartmut and Gernot Böhme claim that
"the false innocence of Kant's biography and its idealization are both
equally symptoms of the kind of thinking, which has taken possession of his
life and which has been made to appear harmless."^52 The Böhme brothers
claim that neither Kant's life nor his thoughts were harmless or innocent.
His thinking was characterized by violent structures, by repressed fears,
anxiety, and strategies of repression. They declare these characteristics of
his thought to be the consequences of a deformed, "mechanized" life.
Though the Böhmes have argued this view forcefully, even if not always
on the basis of the facts, they are probably wrong. The life of Kant that
they are "analyzing" is not Kant's own but the life that others have made
up. If their views have any value - and I am not altogether convinced that
there is much of value in them - then their value consists more in the elu¬
cidation of the forces at work in Borowski's, Jachmann's, and Wasianski's
lives than any description of the forces at work in Kant. I would like to show
that there are differences of fundamental importance.^53 The Böhmes's at¬
tempt to make Kant more interesting appears to me to fail. Whatever else
his life may have been, it does not provide a good example of the "struc¬
tures of rationality" that characterize modern life.
Karl Vorländer, who has worked most extensively on Kant's life, em¬
phasized the "complementary" character of the three biographies. One
might speak of "complicity" and "compliment" instead.^54 Kant's "offi¬
cial" biographers did not really try to give a disinterested account. Their
sketches were designed to peddle a certain picture of Kant, the good and
upstanding citizen, who led the somewhat boring life of a stereotypical
professor. We may be sure that many of the things these biographers took
to be dangers to Kant's reputation would hardly be viewed as dangerous