A life in Königsberg

Kant was born in Königsberg on 22 April 1724 and baptised “Emanuel” (his birthday was St Emanuel's name day in the Prussian calendar); he later adopted the spelling “Immanuel”. His father, Johann Georg Kant, was a harness maker from Memel (today Klaipėda in Lithuania); his mother, Anna Regina Reuter, was born in Königsberg. Immanuel was the fourth of nine children, only some of whom reached adulthood.

The household was deeply shaped by Pietism, a Protestant reform movement that prized religious devotion, humility and a literal reading of the Bible. In 1732 the boy entered the Collegium Fridericianum, the city's Pietist model school directed by Franz Albert Schultz, from which he graduated in the summer of 1740.

In his later years Kant lived a strictly ordered life — so regular, the story goes, that Königsberg's citizens set their watches by his walks (see the punctuality legend below). He never married, although he apparently considered it twice — once with a widow, once with a girl from Westphalia — and on both occasions waited too long to decide. A hermit he was not: he kept a rewarding social life, was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author, and liked to gather friends around his dinner table.

The midday meal was the only full meal of Kant's day, and he took it seriously. Shortly before one the guests gathered in the visitors' room or the study; at one o'clock, by the castle bell, Martin Lampe announced: “The soup is on the table.” Kant chose his table companions from different age groups, all younger than himself, and with some he had favourite topics: with Johann Gottfried Hasse the origins of words, with Johann Friedrich Schultz politics, with the physician William Motherby health. The mayor, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, had a place of honour.

How a good conversation at table should go is something Kant wrote down in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). He takes the number of guests from Lord Chesterfield: no fewer than the three Graces, no more than the nine Muses; for a conversation among people of taste the party itself should be “not much above the number of the Graces” (own translation). The conversation at a full table, he says, usually passes through three stages: narrating, reasoning and jesting. He adds rules: a subject that concerns everyone; no deadly silence; no jumping from one subject to the next without need; no obstinacy; and in serious dispute so much respect for one another that nobody goes home angry.

After the inaugural dissertation of 1770 the new professor fell strangely silent. For roughly a decade Kant published next to nothing, isolated himself and resisted his friends' attempts to draw him out — he was working out an entirely new theory of knowledge. In 1781 the result appeared: the “Critique of Pure Reason”.

Then the dam broke. The “Prolegomena” followed in 1783, the famous essay answering the question “What is Enlightenment?” in 1784, the “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals” in 1785, the “Critique of Practical Reason” in 1788 and the “Critique of the Power of Judgment” in 1790 — a run of books that made Kant the dominant philosopher of his age.

He never travelled to enjoy his fame. Kant spent virtually his whole life in and around Königsberg; the world came to him instead, through the books, news and visitors that a busy Baltic trading port supplied in abundance.

Kant's health, poor for a long time, worsened in his final years, and he died in Königsberg on 12 February 1804, shortly before his eightieth birthday. His last words were “Es ist gut” — “It is good”. His unfinished final project was published much later as the Opus Postumum.

He was buried at Königsberg Cathedral. In 1880 his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel, and when that fell into disrepair, the architect Friedrich Lahrs built the mausoleum that was finished in 1924, in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. It still adjoins the northeast corner of the cathedral in today's Kaliningrad — one of the few artifacts of German times the Soviets preserved after taking the city. To this day newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum, and since 2010 the local university has borne the name Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University.