The clockwork philosopher
Heinrich Heine called Immanuel Kant the “Robespierre of philosophy” and described his most famous work, the Critique of pure reason as “the sword that slew deism in Germany”. Kant was the avant-garde humanist who, well before the French Revolution, paved the way for what he already called “human rights”. He was the radical thinker in the field of universal laws and the relentless enemy of intolerance; in short, a man of monumental intelligence, who built one of the most solidly grounded systems in the history of philosophy. But Kant was in fact a diminutive, puny individual who was inordinately concerned with his own state of health.
Precision and austerity
He was born in Königsberg (now called Kaliningrad) in 1724 and died there in 1804, having virtually never left his remote native town. He remained single and lived a life of austerity and monotony. Never leaving anything to chance, he disciplined himself throughout his life to a mode of existence governed by an absolute regularity, witnessed by all those who were close to him. His schedule was indeed so precise that, as his former secretary and biographer, Reinhold Bernhard Jachmann, observed, “he virtually served as a clock for all the people in his district.” As for those who actually owned a watch, they used to set it by the comings and goings of the philosopher. To take just one example, his daily routine was meticulously programmed and began at 4.55 a.m., when he was woken by his faithful servant, Lampe, a former military man who used to enter his room with the call “Mr Professor, it’s time.”
“This summons Kant invariably obeyed without one moment’s delay, as a soldier does the word of command — never, under any circumstances, allowing himself a respite, not even under the rare accident of having passed a sleepless night”, wrote Thomas de Quincey in The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, published in 1827. Five minutes later, the philosopher was seated at his breakfast table, where he drank a cup of tea and smoked a pipe-full of tobacco before setting to work at his desk. On days when he lectured at the local faculty of letters, he donned his hat at 7.50 a.m., was driven to the university, and at 8 a.m. opened the door of his carriage. Upon returning home, he was back at his desk from which he never rose until 12.45 when he called out “it has struck three quarters”, upon which his cook brought him a flask of tonic or Hungarian wine, which Kant took with him to the dining room. He poured himself a glass, “covered, however, with paper, to avoid it’s becoming vapid” and awaited the arrival of his guests (since he believed that eating alone disturbed digestion because one tended to become lost in personal thought).
Every afternoon at 2.30, Kant set out on a walk that lasted exactly one hour (alone in this case, because he believed that talking while walking obliged one to breathe in fresh air which could lead to rheuma- tism), taking a predetermined and invariable route consisting of eight round trips along the boulevard lined with linden trees. It is said that in 40 years, he made just two exceptions to this rule: once in 1762, when he had to read Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book, The Social Contract; and the other in 1789, when he went to listen to the announcement of the French Revolution.
Kant’s clockwork garters
While he had a distinct tendency to indulge in hypochondria and was less concerned with “enjoying life than with extending it” (he even kept a list of the oldest people in Königsberg and was delighted to be moving up within their ranks), he was nonetheless always smartly turned out in the latest fashion. But he was afraid that wearing stockings, which were tied with ribbons around the thighs, might be detrimental to his circulation. This led him to conceive an amazing device, doubtless also inspired by watchmaking. This system is described in detail by Thomas de Quincey, who in this account takes the place of Kant’s personal physician:
“... yet, as he found it difficult to keep up his stockings without them, he had invented for himself a most elaborate substitute, which I shall describe. In a little pocket, somewhat smaller than a watch- pocket, but occupying pretty nearly the same situation as a watch-pocket on each thigh, there was placed a small box, something like a watch- case, but smaller; into this box was introduced a watch-spring in a wheel, round about which wheel was wound an elastic cord, for regulating the force of which there was a separate contrivance. To the two ends of this cord were attached hooks, which hooks were carried through a small aperture in the pockets, and so passing down the inner and the outer side of the thigh, caught hold of two loops which were fixed on the off side and the near side of each stocking. As might be expected, so complex an apparatus was liable, like the Ptolemaic system of the heavens, to occasional derangements; however, by good luck, I was able to apply an easy remedy to these disorders which sometimes threatened to disturb the comfort, and even the serenity, of the great man.”
Wound up for love?
Entirely obsessed with his health, the great man was also convinced that bachelors lived longer than married men. History records only one hint of an amorous liaison (and even then one cannot be sure that love was the primary factor) which, strangely enough, also has a link to watchmaking. One day in 1762, Kant received a note written by a young married woman, Maria Charlotta Jacobi, which read: “I hope to see you tomorrow afternoon; ‘yes, yes I will come,’ I hear you say; so we will wait for you and my watch will be wound, forgive me this reminder...” A great deal of ink has been spilled about this phrase “my watch will be wound”. Was it a mischievous allusion to the complex system of watch springs holding up Kant’s stockings? Or was it a saucy expression drawn from Laurence Sterne’s novel, Tristram Shandy, a huge European-wide literary success that was first published in 1759, when Kant was 35 years old ? In an episode that amused the entire continent, Sterne’s hero described the regularity of his father’s marital duties. “My father, was, I believe, one of the most regular men in every thing he did, whether ’twas matter of business, or matter of amusement, that ever lived. As a small specimen of this extreme exactness of his, to which he was in truth a slave, he had made it a rule for many years of his life — on the first Sunday-night of every month — to wind up a large house-clock, which we had standing on the back-stairs head, with his own hands ...He had likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order to get them all out of the way at one time... . It so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up,— but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head — & vice versa.”
Whether or not his watch was “wound”, Kant himself stated that, even in poverty, the last thing he would sell would be his watch! And Thomas de Quincey confirms this by telling how, during the philosopher’s last days, when he was confined to his bedroom with windows “barricaded day and night”, he kept a repeater in his room: “...the sound was at first too loud, but, after muffling the hammer with cloth, both the ticking and the striking
became companionable sounds to him.” So Kant apparently felt the need to measure time right to his last breath. And yet this was the same man who, in his Critique of teleological judgement, took the opposite view from Descartes and went beyond the latter’s reasoning. In this work, Kant takes the example of the clock, the mechanism of which Descartes compares to the human body, and distinguishes between the machine and the organism. “In a machine or instrument,” explains Kant, “each part also exists for the others and because of the whole. ...in the case of a watch, each part is there for the sake of the others, but does not produce them ...nor does one watch produce another”. Indeed not. Machines, unlike organisms, do not reproduce themselves. There is no watch to make watches. But perhaps it was his strict timekeeper that, by curbing Kant’s fecundity and preventing him from reproducing, enabled this clockwork man to build up one of the most fruitful ever bodies of philosophical work.
Les derniers jours d’Emmanuel Kant, film directed by Philippe Collin, 1995, Les films du paradoxe.
