Student and Private Teacher 79surmising that "what unlocked Kant's genius under Knutzen and led him
to the original ideas that he put down in his natural history of the heavens
was the comet of 1744, on which Knutzen published a book."^80
When Kant entered the university, Knutzen was a relatively young as¬
sociate professor who taught logic and metaphysics. He had been a student
of both Ammon and Teske.^81 Most importantly, he was a Pietist in the
Schulzian fashion, that is, he followed the Wolffian method while engag¬
ing and criticizing many of the tenets of Wolffian philosophy in a serious
way. In 1734, at the age of twenty-one, he had defended his dissertation,
"Philosophical Comment on the Commercium of the Mind with the Body,
Explained by Physical Influx." In this work he criticized Wolffian philos¬
ophy, but also expressed his appreciation for the Wolffian approach. Ac¬
cordingly, he had some difficulties. Wolffian philosophy was still officially
prohibited, and so the public speech on this work (Redeaktus) was held up
for a year because of protests by the orthodox.^82 The orthodox faction was
delighted to be able to pay back the Pietists in this particular way.
Knutzen was not really a Wolffian. While his philosophical concerns were
to a large extent dictated by Wolff, his position was fundamentalist Chris¬
tian. Thus his dissertation dealt with the issue that was most contentious
between the Pietists and the Wolffians, namely, the question concerning the
relation of mind and body. Taking what was essentially an anti-Leibnizian,
and thus to a lesser extent an anti-Wolffian, position, he argued that the
theory of preestablished harmony was just as wrong as occasionalism, and
that the only reasonable theory was that of physical influx. At the same
time he accepted the view that bodies consisted of absolutely simple parts.
This meant that the interaction of mind and body was not the interaction
of radically different substances (a problematic idea) but the interaction of
simple elements with one another. Since the idea of physical influx was in
the minds of many scholars connected with Locke (and corpuscularianism),
it would not be entirely inaccurate to say that Knutzen defended the Lock-
ean position. In any case, he had developed a new theory, meant to be an
alternative to the Leibniz-Wolffian one. In his earlier dissertation for the
Magister degree, he had attacked another doctrine bound up with Wolffian
philosophy, namely, the view that the world may have existed from eter¬
nity.^83 For Knutzen, as for any Lutheran, the world was created and de¬
signed by God with a definite end in mind. It could not possibly be eter¬
nal.^84 To say that Knutzen was a "Wolffian" is therefore misleading. "His
pietism belongs in its basic outlook to the great Spener-Francke line."^85 His
thinking was at least as much influenced by British as by German sources.