22 Kant: A Biography
focus more on the younger philosopher, who first conceived the project of
a Critique of Pure Reason. I hope that a many-sided Kant will emerge, a
Kant that looks more like a real person than the "Mandarin" of Königsberg,
as Nietzsche saw him.^66
We can learn from Kant's life as much as we can from the lives of other
eighteenth-century figures — Benjamin Franklin, David Hume, Frederick
the Great, Catherine the Great — whose lives were intertwined with that
of Kant in intricate and sometimes not-so-intricate fashion. Indeed, we
can learn from Kant's biography at least as much as we can learn from the
biography of any well-known person. Perhaps we can learn even more from
it because, as will become clear, Kant's character was quite consciously
meant to be his own creation. He agreed with Montaigne and his Stoic
predecessors that "to compose character is our duty, not to compose books,
and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our
conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately."
Whether Kant lived his life "appropriately" is an open question; and this
makes his life fascinating for anyone who thinks philosophy has to make
an important contribution to the understanding of our lives.
I do not really know what makes biographies so fascinating to so many
readers. Is it simply curiosity about how the "famous" have lived? Is it
voyeurism, an unsavory desire to glimpse the dirty little secrets of the
"great"? Is it escapism, an attempt at vicarious living, a kind of romance for
the more intellectually inclined? Or is it a way of trying to find meaning in
our own lives? Many self-help books testify to a widely felt desire for a "suc¬
cessful" life. Successful people might be thought to have accomplished this
elusive goal — and successful philosophers, that is, people who have re¬
flected on what makes for success, might have more to offer than most.
As Virginia Woolf once observed, biographies are difficult, if not im¬
possible, to write, because "people are all over the place." Their lives have
no real narrative line. Yet such a line is precisely what biographers try to
establish. A biography has a beginning, middle, and end; and it usually at¬
tempts to make sense of, or give reasons for, events that may simply have
followed one another without being connected in any way. Some lives may
indeed make sense, while others seem to be spent senselessly. Whether or
not someone's life had meaning — whatever that may mean — is a question
that is at least as difficult to answer as the question of whether or not our
own lives have meaning. The two questions are ultimately one and the same.
Thus we need not be reticent about looking at the lives of those who have
gone before us in order to make sense of our own.