40 Kant: A Biography
to his own mother's demands during his earliest years. In a similar vein,
Rink quoted Kant as having said of his parents:
Even if the religious views ofthat time... and the concepts of what was called virtue
and piety were anything but clear and sufficient, the people actually were virtuous and
pious. One may say as many bad things about Pietism as one will. Enough already. The
people who took it seriously were characterized by a certain kind of dignity. They pos¬
sessed the highest qualities that a human being can possess, namely that calmness and
pleasantness, that inner peace that can be disturbed by no passion. No need, no per¬
secution, no dispute could make them angry or cause them to be enemies of anyone.^54
The comments attributed to Kant show that he respected his parents and
others who practiced Pietistic customs. They also show that Kant believed
that his mother positively influenced his moral outlook. Yet this is far from
showing that Kant's mature view was in any way close to Pietism. It may
indeed be true that Kant "enjoyed the supervision of his parents long
enough to be able to judge correctly about the entirety of their way of think¬
ing," but this does not mean that he himself learned their way of thinking
as a consciously formulated doctrine.^55 If anything, the passages make clear
that the mature Kant did not think that there was much of a doctrine at all
behind the conduct of these virtuous and pious people. He appreciated
them for their actions, not for their theological theories. To claim on the
basis of such slender evidence that a "vital key to understanding Kant's
views is the fact that his parents were both members of the Pietist church"
is consequently misleading.^36 Indeed, the two passages show that concep¬
tually Kant could have learned very little, if anything at all, from this ear¬
liest encounter with Pietism. His praise of the moral dignity of those who
were serious about their Pietism has, in fact, an underhanded quality, for
one may, after all, say many bad things about Pietism. Kant differentiates
between those who were serious about Pietism, who were living it without
necessarily being able to formulate clearly any of its concepts or doctrines,
and those who were not so serious about it, who did not live in accordance
with its precepts, but who could talk quite well about it. Finally, as we have
seen already, Borowski, himself a bishop in the Prussian Lutheran Church,
is intent on downplaying the differences between the various factions of
Lutheranism. His motives for connecting Kantian moral philosophy with
Pietism were at least in part political. He not only wished to minimize the
differences between Pietism and orthodoxy, but also wanted to show that
Kant's religious views were ultimately quite close to those of the church.
What Kant received from his parents was not a training in a certain kind