The Most Important Woman in Kant's Life

Suggestions of an Emotional Affair with Countess Caroline von Keyserlingk

“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been - namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part 1, §6).

Charles Édouard Le Prince. Julie and Saint Preux on Lake Geneva (after Part IV, Letter XVII of Julie, or The New Heloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau). 1824.

Introduction

The popular stereotype about Kant is that his life was disembodied and empty, as befits one of the most abstract and rigorous philosophers: he never married, never traveled, working in a famous clockwork routine for many decades with a very narrow social circle. He is the archetype of the lonely male genius manufacturing ideas in a vacuum. Heinrich Heine (1834) put it this way:

“The history of Immanuel Kant’s life is difficult to portray, for he had neither life nor history. He led a mechanical, regular, almost abstract bachelor existence in a little retired street of Königsberg, an old town on the north-eastern frontier of Germany. I do not believe that the great clock of the cathedral performed in a more passionless and methodical manner its daily routine than did its townsman, Immanuel Kant.”

But recent biography emphasizes that he was gallant and deeply sociable, a master of wit and conversation. The period of isolation begins in his forties, when he starts work on the three Critiques that would last over twenty-five years. There were only people he was close to in his decades of seclusion: there is Joseph Green, an English merchant known for his autistic rigidity, and then there is a woman that has been catastrophically underrated in the Kantian biographical literature, that I think can fairly be called Kant’s best friend: Caroline von Keyserlingk, a beautiful, philosophically inclined, aristically gifted noblewoman belonging to the richest family in Königsberg. She was obsessed with the radical French philosophy and literature of the time, and I attribute to her the French turn Kant underwent around 1760 in both his personal style and his philosophy, which went from technical metaphysics and natural philosophy to experimental work in the French salon tradition within just a few years.

This essay reconstructs the biographical facts of their relationship. How they met has never been securely established; I do primary source work that pins the date, with high confidence, to 1757, when Kant begins tutoring her son for university. From this I unfold informed speculation about what the inside of this arrangement would have looked like. A primary source never before read in this context attests that Caroline was very serious about education, pursuing an unusual approach rooted in French thought and Rousseau specifically. This provides a mechanism for the changes in Kant: she would have had to teach him in order to make him useful for her purposes. Both Caroline and Kant are then attested to have been involved in the lively Königsberg social scene during the Russian Occupation.

I also think a romantic relationship between the two is very possible. She was 30 and he 33 when they met. Both had been busy and geographically isolated in their twenties. Caroline seems to have been estranged from her much older husband, and the French literary culture she was entrenched in was very permissive of affairs. I conclude with textual excerpts from the years following Caroline’s second marriage in 1763 that show a Kant dwelling on marriage and love with what seems like some personal pathos. This puts Kant’s famous bachelorhood in a different light: it is well-documented that he had real opportunities to marry and apparently valued marriage in principle. He continued to see Caroline regularly for over thirty years while only halfheartedly pursuing other women. This narrative may even kill the famous assumption that Kant was a virgin, depending on how you read this – I personally now consider it more likely than not that he wasn’t.

Reviewing the Biographical Scholarship

Kant was not unattractive for the time. According to his contemporary and biographer Jachmann, visitors who expected a “gloomy, withdrawn thinker” in Kant were “pleasantly surprised” to meet “the most cheerful and cultivated companion” instead. In his younger years, he and his friends hustled at billiards and card games so effectively that people stopped wanting to play them. He usually ate at public taverns, deliberating mingling with ordinary townspeople; when he finally set up his own household in 1787, he hosted a lunch party nearly every single day, making it “a rule that his dinner company should never be fewer than three and never more than nine” (De Quincey, 1827). He viewed intense sociability as something close to a biological necessity; lively conversation was a tool to keep the mind from solitary rumination.

Kant was five foot two, slender, with a somewhat sunken chest that made breathing difficult; he was a hypochondriac, “freshly printed newspapers would make him sneeze”, and he could not endure heavy physical exertion. However, we should be careful not to apply contemporary standards of attractiveness. Kuehn (2001), the most reliable contemporary Kant biographer, calls him “a very attractive man”: blond hair, a fresh complexion, cheeks that kept a healthy blush even into old age. A contemporary admirer dwells on Kant’s eyes:

“From where do I take the words to describe to you his eye! Kant’s eye was as if it had been formed of heavenly ether from which the deep look of the mind, whose fiery beam was occluded by a light cloud, visibly shone forth. It is impossible to describe the bewitching effect of his look on my feeling when I sat across him and when he suddenly raised his lowered eyes to look at me. I always felt as if I looked through this blue ether-like fire into the most holy of Minerva.” (Jachmann, 1804)

He was also far from asocial. Borowski reports that Kant was “sought” at the tables of both the upper class and his circle of friends, and that he never declined a midday invitation.

Kant and Women

Mellin (1804) recounts:

“In general, he was a great admirer of educated women, and even preferred their company. … He knew the delicacy of women’s feelings too well, and was too much in harmony with them in this respect, not to seek out their company; and since he himself was unmarried, he must at least have made up for the lack of that tender exchange belonging to the highest friendship through the enjoyment of their sociable conversation.”

During his life Kant had multiple opportunities to wed, but each time he was inexplicably hesitant:

“Nevertheless, in his younger years he twice had both the opportunity and the inclination to marry. On one occasion, his affection settled on a young, beautiful, and gentle widow who had come to visit her relatives. On the second, he was moved by a charming Westphalian girl who came to Königsberg as the travelling companion of a noblewoman who owned estates in Prussia. Kant calculated receipts and expenditures, and put off making his proposals for so long that the widow had remarried in the Oberland and the Westphalian beauty had travelled home again with her lady.” (Wald, 1804)

Finding a partnership back then was closer to a default outcome of social life than something you had to go and hunt for; and indeed, the people around Kant were trying to set him up constantly, to the point of it seriously upsetting him:

“He did consider marriage a necessary human need, yet never married himself, and could not bear being encouraged to do so. He would leave a gathering in irritation if anyone so much as jokingly made such a suggestion to him.” (Wald, 1804)

There is even evidence that Kant had a somewhat serious relationship in the 1770s. In the same volume, Kraus recounts: “I know only of one person whom he wished to marry, as my friend Philippi told me around A. 1772; but she was, so far as I know, a Königsberg woman.” Bobrik (1877) says he has “reason to assume” that the Königsberg woman in question was Louise Rebecca Ballath, née Fritz; his source for this identification is a “very honorable lady,” specifically the widowed Frau Major Amalie von Katzler, in whose parents’ house Frau Ballath had been a regular visitor, where she “often and at length and always with proud boasting told the story that Kant had once loved her”. However, according to Kraus, Kant himself said of this relationship “that on closer inspection the glittering quality had very much faded; a female soul worthy of him he had not found there.” (Wald, 1804:12)

Another interesting case is Maria Charlotta Jacobi, a Königsberg socialite, rich, bold, fifteen years younger, and married to Kant’s close friend, who in 1762 writes a letter in which she is practically throwing herself at him:

“Aren’t you surprised that I am undertaking to write to you as a great philosopher? I believed to find you yesterday in my garden, but since my girlfriend and I sneaked through all the avenues and could not find you in this circle of the sky, I busied myself with making you a band for a sword, which is dedicated to you. I lay claim to your society tomorrow afternoon. “Yes, yes, I will be there,” I hear you say. Good, then, I will expect you, and then my clock will be wound as well. Please forgive this reminder. My girlfriend and I send to you a kiss by sympathy. The air in Kneiphoff is hopefully the same as here so that the kiss does not lose its sympathetic force.”

The remark about ‘sympathetic force’ seems to be a natural philosophy joke: sympathetic vibration, where one vibrating body makes another vibrate at the same frequency through a shared medium like air, was a well-known concept in the 18^th century. And the remark about winding a clock is thought to be a metaphor from Tristram Shandy, the hit novel of the time, where winding a clock is a euphemism for sex. Kuehn is generous about it, suggesting the letter was “literary playfulness,” but even he has to concede that “she appears to have been more interested in him than he was interested in her.” He notes that “Kant visited the house of the Jacobis frequently. Therefore, not too much should be made of the playful tone,” entirely ignoring that several years later this very same Maria Charlotta would cause a scandal by leaving her husband for another mutual friend of theirs.

Johann Gottlieb Becker. Immanuel Kant. 1768

Kant’s Longest-Lasting Friendship

Salewski (1986) notes:

“He held himself to exacting standards, and he expected the same of others, especially of women who might have been considered, in his eyes, as potential companions, or who were suggested to him as such. And yet he always had his feminine ideal before him: Countess Caroline von Keyserling, admired not only by Kant but by all his contemporaries.”

Any survey of Kant’s relationships with women is incomplete without one figure at its center: Caroline von Keyserlingk, a Countess from one of the great Baltic German noble families. From the evidence we have, they seem to have been something like best friends. Kuehn notes that his visits at the Keyserlingks’ lasted “many years and without interruption,” and Kant is recorded as attending dinner there as late as 1788. Elisa von der Recke (1804) confirms that “Kant was a thirty-year friend of this house,” adding that “Kant loved to interact with the late Countess, who was a highly intelligent woman.” Salewski (1986) speaks of “an affection of the heartfelt kind.” Kuehn calls Kant “the darling of the Countess Keyserlingk,” and Kraus notes that “Kant always sat at the Keyserlingk table in the seat of honor, directly beside the Countess; unless a complete stranger happened to be present, to whom the seat had to be yielded as a matter of propriety.” Think about what that means! She always wanted him within arm’s reach, and was not shy about singling him out for public favor; seating arrangements were a serious deal back then, as the catfights between King Frederick and Voltaire show.

So what was she like? Kraus, who tutored in the Keyserlingk household some twenty years later, describes a woman with a temperament very well matched to Kant:

“Over dinner the whole company falls silent, and she speaks with me alone, without pause, and guess about what? About the Eulerian and Newtonian systems of light, about the earth, about superstition and unbelief and which of the two is more harmful, and about new discoveries and recently published books... She subscribes to all the French journals and does nothing but read.” (Voigt, 1819)

Several sources note Caroline’s preference for French culture. She was a Francophile in the strongest sense, following King Frederick II in rejecting her provincial Prussian identity as well as the German language. She was active as a writer, having translated the philosophers Wolff and Gottsched into French, with the 1756 edition of Gottsched’s Weltweisheit being dedicated to her — Gottsched had spent his life trying to impose French neoclassical rules of taste on an underdeveloped German literary culture, a program that Caroline presumably endorsed. She is also said to have published pseudonymously in literary journals, though the details have not survived.

Besides philosophy, the Countess was deeply interested in the arts:

“This beautiful and spirited young lady lived entirely for the sciences and the arts. She had taken up the French literature, the only literature that really existed at the time, and the so-called philosophy of the French beaux esprits, with great enthusiasm, and she drew and painted and played the lute with much feeling and taste.” (Reichardt, 1805)

Her salon, funded by the wealth her second husband brought into the household, would in time become the cultural epicenter of Königsberg, hosting grand balls and concerts, but all of that was still years in the future when Kant first met her.

Caroline von Keyserlingk. Self Portrait. 1778

What Has Been Written on the Nature of Her Relationship with Kant?

Two out of three primary Kant biographies do not even mention the Countess, and there is barely any attention paid to her in later scholarship. To the extent that she appears, she is only credited with having polished Kant’s manners or eased his entry into refined society: “From the Countess Keyserlingk he had picked up a good deal in the way of refined social manner.” (Wald, 1804) Certainly none have taken seriously the possibility that she influenced Kant’s philosophy. What has been speculated about however, in a few instances, is whether the two were ever in a romantic relationship.

Vorländer (1911) notes that one ought not to engage in further ‘conjectural politics,’ lest one end up constructing a ‘tender relationship’ between the young Countess and Magister Kant. Arnoldt, one of the most reliable Kant biographers, also seems to have his suspicions, rather fully worked out for something he attributes to no one in particular:

“Considering all the notions that have recently been put on the market about Kant’s inner life and personal development, it would not surprise me, incidentally, if someone were to get the idea of inventing a romantic relationship between the young Kant and the young countess, a relationship which, in keeping with the honorable character of both, they might have conducted and brought to a close in a highly dignified way, though not without inner conflicts, the memory of which each of them, in later years, would have wished as much as possible to avoid reviving within themselves by mentioning their former outward relation to one another.” (Arnoldt, 1898:XXVI)

Gulyga (2004) is less coy, stating: “The young beauty was passionately interested in philosophy; rumour had it that she was no less passionately interested in the visiting philosopher. It was alleged that the feeling was returned.”

Still, there is zero hard evidence they were anything other than friends. Kuehn states plainly: “There was, of course, never any romantic involvement. The social distance between Kant and the countess was just too great for that thought even to arise. The countess presented to Kant, however, the type of woman he might have wanted to marry, if that had been at all possible.” But does the social impossibility of marriage preclude romantic feeling and involvement of every kind? I will review the facts of their interaction below and leave the reader to judge just how unthinkable it would have been.

Establishing the Facts Around When They Interacted

The question of when these two first met hasn’t really been answered conclusively, probably because it’s a minor biographical detail on its own. Yet by a close reading of several early sources, which have not been brought together in this context, I think it can be established with some certainty. Most of this paper’s argument unfolds naturally when we look very closely at those early circumstances.

After getting his doctorate (Magister Artium), Kant begins work as a Privatdozent, essentially an adjunct professor. He does not come from wealth and thus keeps side-work even during the semester break. One of these engagements brings him to an estate called Capustigall, about an hour’s carriage ride outside of the city:

“He gave private instruction in other settings during this period only with rare exceptions, and even then probably only during the university vacations. In such free weeks, during his first years as a lecturer, he would sometimes stay at the comital castle of Capustigall, two miles from Königsberg, in order to teach the young counts Friedrich Ludwig, Friedrich Karl, and Wilhelm Franz von Truchseß-Waldburg.” (Schubert, 1842:37)

Caroline was born a Truchseß-Waldburg, and these boys seem to have been her nephews. Kant was moving within her family’s domestic world well before either of them had become important presences in Königsberg society. In a town of about fifty thousand, and especially given their later relationship, that is not an insignificant coincidence.

Sticking with the evidence: Kraus, when reconstructing Kant’s early life, doesn’t mention this engagement, but instead recounts that Kant told him he had, in his time as a Magister, “in a count’s house, not far from Königsberg, taken a closer look at the upbringing which he helped to manage in part from Königsberg.” The word he uses is not Unterricht (instruction) but Erziehung (upbringing, formation), which already suggests whatever he was doing here went beyond routine lessons. Kraus adds that Kant “was regularly fetched, once or twice a week,” by carriage to this mystery estate, which he only names in a later letter, and even then only in anonymized form:

“As far as I remember, K. was regularly picked up every week, once or a couple of times, and taken to the Count T—’s estate (C—) in order to instruct the count, who is still alive, though I can no longer recall in what exactly.”

The blanks obviously complete to Truchseß and Capustigall, and we get the information that he was tutoring ‘the count, who is still alive.’ Could Kraus still be referring to one of the three Truchseß-Waldburg nephews? Kraus was writing in 1804, and at least one of the Truchseß-Waldburg boys mentioned did hold a comital title in that year. But Borowski’s biography, which Kant himself proofread and annotated on this very page, gives a different account of his tutoring positions:

“Because of the situation of his circumstances, K. was compelled to become a private tutor, first in the house of a clergyman outside Königsberg. Then he tutored a young man of the von Hülsen family from Arnsdorf, and also, for some time, a Count of Kaiserlingk.”

Unless you think he mentored two separate Counts in this time, and each source only mentions one of them, this is referring to the same boy. So the count Kant was supervising at the Truchseß-Waldburg estate was a Keyserlingk? That point has confused biographers, but in this context the evidence strongly suggests that Kant was involved in the education of Caroline’s son, Albrecht Johann Otto von Keyserling (1747-1809), who indeed was Count of Keyserlingk in 1804. Kraus’s phrasing, ‘the count who is still alive,’ also fits especially well if he had Otto in mind, since Kraus himself worked in the Keyserlingk household for many years.

Sidenote: Why do sources speak of only the single son?

Caroline had two sons, the elder of which, Carl Philipp Anton, was later forcibly expelled from university, then in 1775 removed from the military, stripped of his primogeniture, and confined to fortress at Pillau on grounds of “mental feebleness and inability to manage his property,” a phrasing that seems to be a polite euphemism for serious mental illness. (He apparently died there; fortress confinement could be a life sentence.) He and his younger brother are recorded as entering university at the same time, so whatever his difficulties were, they may well have been visible in childhood; if so, it’s possible the tutoring arrangement concentrated on the younger son from the beginning.

Cross-referencing with J.F. Reichardt’s autobiography: Caroline’s approach to education

The bare facts tell us very little as yet. A tutoring engagement at a comital estate could mean almost anything, from a few perfunctory hours with a bored child to deep involvement in the household. There is, fortunately, an inside view of Capustigall during exactly the years we care about, and it points towards the latter. This is the source that has never been read in relation to Kant’s early connection with Caroline.

In 1805, Johann Friedrich Reichardt published portions of an autobiographical account in the Berlinische Musikalische Zeitung. He was a prominent composer and a child prodigy, already giving public performances with his father at the age of ten, and by twenty one he had become conductor of the King’s chapel choir. Importantly, Reichardt was not some later visitor recalling the estate from the outside, but born at Capustigall itself, growing up there as the son of the Hausmusikus and a chambermaid. (Aristocratic families would employ musicians as part of the permanent domestic establishment since that was the only way to listen to music.) It was Reichardt’s father who apparently taught Caroline the lute to a high standard, and she often played music accompanied by the boy.

Close to the only thing Reichardt has to say about Caroline is that she was very, very serious about parenting:

“She took charge herself of the upbringing and instruction of her sons, and in doing so she followed the educational systems of strict pedagogues and French schoolmasters with … conviction.”

Specifically, the noble children were confined to sparsely furnished upstairs apartment, and given only simple foods:

“A natural consequence of this was that the lutenist’s children, brought up in near poverty in a small side house, were more cheerful and happier than the young counts in the great comital household, who were tormented with system and strict lessons. For their mother, even then, followed severe pedagogical notions that had been put into circulation in England and France through Locke and Rousseau, applying strict maxims even to their physical upbringing and diet.

(Apparently this was so bad the household staff would sneak the boys treats behind their mother’s back.)

So we can firmly establish that Caroline was quite a strict parent. And this fits remarkably well with another detail from Kraus, regarding what was on Kant’s mind on his carriage rides back from Capustigall: “On the return journey to Königsberg, a comparison between his own upbringing and that in the Count’s household would then so often occur to him, he told me.” And in an annotation, he adds that Kant “often, with deep emotion, thought of the far more splendid upbringing that he himself had enjoyed in his parents’ house, where, as he gratefully liked to say, he never heard or saw anything wrong or immoral.” This was surely referring to Caroline’s regimen; it must have deeply struck Kant if Kraus is bringing it up all these years later.¹

Reichardt doesn’t talk about Kant’s arrival at Capustigall, though the autobiography was interrupted by the journal shutting down and he never finished it; he probably would have gotten around to him. There is strong evidence they knew each other well: Kant is noted to have given Reichardt years of free lessons during his student years, and more than that, to have leaned on Reichardt’s illiterate father, in a friendly but forceful way, to let the boy receive a proper education (Reichardt, 1805). There are also affectionate letters between them from late in Kant’s life, in one of which Reichardt says that he wants to write a “complete critique of the fine arts” based on Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Reichardt, 1790). I think we can now see quite clearly how that later closeness would have begun.

Sidenote: The exact years Kant was there

Noble children of this period attended university very early. They were first taught basic skills in reading and arithmetic, and then around age ten a professional academic would be brought in to teach philosophy, mathematics, and science. And we know the exact dates the Keyserlingk boys were matriculated at the local university: both “Keyserling de Comes Joh. Albert. O.” and “Keyserling de Comes Car. Phil. Anton” matriculated on 23 August 1759. Otto was then 12 years old, and Anton almost 14; so I would suppose that the tutoring engagement started in the preceding years, around 1757.

Sidenote: On Caroline’s first husband

Caroline married her first husband at seventeen. Johann Gebhard von Keyserlingk, forty-five at the time of the wedding, had been entangled in courtly intrigues in St. Petersburg and was expelled from Russia under circumstances connected to the spectacular fall of the Duke of Biron. Within two years she had two sons. I think it goes without saying that this was a dynastic arrangement between families that had nothing to do with love, and we can indeed gather from Reichardt that they were mostly estranged. He introduces Caroline as “widowed with two sons,” and discusses all sorts of menial details, but the Count is not mentioned even in passing, not even upon his literal passing! Reichardt was nine years old when the Count died in 1761, surely old enough to remember. And why was a married woman with children not living at her husband’s family estate? Capustigall is described as Caroline’s household from the beginning.

Educating a Nobleman in an Age of Enlightenment

Capustigall was an hour’s carriage ride from Königsberg, and Kraus says Kant helped manage the boy’s education “partly from Königsberg itself.” That means between his regular visits Kant was also corresponding with someone at the estate, and that person surely was Caroline. The subject of those exchanges would have been far from trivial. Reichardt says plainly that she “took charge herself of the upbringing and instruction of her sons” and followed the methods of “strict pedagogues and French schoolmasters,” as well as Locke and Rousseau. Kant, then, was not entering a household that needed a teacher in the abstract, but one already governed by a definite educational ideal held by the mistress of the house.

That point fundamentally changes the likely shape of the relationship. Kant wasn’t brought in to implement his own program but to serve hers. He was already a seasoned tutor, and the kind of instruction he would naturally have given was the kind every Königsberg academic gave: Wolffian, systematic, preparatory, directed toward university study and the orderly acquisition of an ordered theoretical hierarchy. That was what all the universities were expecting. For Caroline, though, it would have been unacceptable. If you look into what she was actually reading, her concern was with resilience, character, and moral feeling rather than formal scholastic performance.

So she is facing a dilemma. She has found, in an unlikely place, a clearly exceptional philosopher, but he is useless for her purposes right now. If Caroline lets Kant do his job the way he knows how, he undoes years of careful work. Which means she needs to educate him before he can educate her son. And the main theoretical basis of this worldview she’d have wanted him to read was Rousseau, and the whole basin of French philosophy that Rousseau’s views on education emerged from.

Changing Pressures on the Nobility

To understand the philosophical extent of this project they would share, it helps to first step back and look at the larger pressures bearing on noble education. To understand why an aristocratic woman on an East Prussian estate would become so severely convinced that comfort and ordinary schooling would spoil a noble boy, you need to understand why a nobleman was being made to study and go to university at all, which is weird if you think about it. Rousseau only enters later, as a sharper and more radical articulation of these problems.

For centuries, a Prussian nobleman could live off his estate almost passively: peasants worked the land because they owed you labour by birthright, and you simply extracted the (constant) surplus. But now you had to actively raise the productivity of your lands, or you and your family might lose everything. The products of the nobility had to be competitive on European commodity markets; the soil on many estates had been exhausted by centuries of continuous cropping, although the new agronomic science coming out of England and the Low Countries was showing how it could be restored. To make such improvements one had to raise and allocate capital. Many noblemen branched out into different industries entirely: milling, brewing, forestry, simple textile factories. Caroline knew that her sons would inherit something close to the directorship of a mid-sized firm, with all the accounting, personnel management, and strategic planning that required.

As a consequence, in this period many Prussian noblemen began to treat their estates like office 9-to-5s, essentially turning themselves into bureaucrats to survive. The cameralist tradition, precisely the body of knowledge taught by Kant’s Königsberg colleagues, gave this new ideal its intellectual form. Kameralwissenschaft (from Kammer, meaning office) was a discipline of rational management, concerned with finance, accounting, resource use, and the ordered maintenance of land and population (Lindenfeld, 1998). What made this more than a merely practical problem was the way knowledge itself was still organized. The new demands placed on noble sons, administration, finance, law, population, improvement, did not yet belong to neatly separate modern disciplines. They were still understood as questions that required prior formation in philosophy, because philosophy was taken to clarify ends, order concepts, and supply the general principles under which the practical arts could be taught (cf. Kant, 1798). Any student of a practical university subject was required to first go through the “lower faculty” of philosophy.

Ramifications for Early-Childhood Education

As a result, the old forms of early childhood education also came under pressure. The default mode of raising a young nobleman in the early-to-mid 18^th century was essentially a left-over from the bizarro traditions of the middle-ages. The child was dressed in miniature adult clothing, ate rich food, drank wine (because water was unsafe), drilled in Latin, French, dancing, fencing, heraldry, equestrianism, and the ultra-specific body of manners you needed to move through court society without embarrassing yourself. The emphasis was on surface: deportment, the ability to make conversation, the ability to flatter. A lot of the actual instruction was done by rote, with physical punishment as the standard enforcement mechanism.

The child’s body was managed in ways that now seem insane. The child was handed off to servants and wet nurses from birth. Swaddling was universal: you wrapped the infant tightly in cloth so it couldn’t move its limbs, sometimes for months. Wealthy children were often kept in the warm indoors, away from anything rough or cold or physically demanding, because illness was terrifying and child mortality was enormous. The result, so the later criticism went, was that you produced children who were physically fragile, completely dependent on comfort, and had no resilience whatsoever.

Seen from that angle, the reform of noble education had to begin long before formal instruction. Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) is driven by the conviction that character is laid down early, in the management of the body and the training of habit, and that once those habits have set they are very difficult to undo. He wanted children physically toughened first (let them go outside, get cold, get their feet wet, wash in cold water) because a body that had been coddled into fragility would never have the stamina for anything difficult later, whether intellectual work or running an estate. He recommended loose clothing, simple food, lots of sleep, cold water for washing. Reichardt explicitly names Locke alongside Rousseau as a major influence on Caroline, and the most peculiar and cruel features of her regimen are clearly from Locke.

The overall idea would have been: A nobleman raised this way might actually be legitimate in a way that a nobleman raised in the old style never could be: he would deserve his position because he’d been formed into someone who could actually fulfill its responsibilities.

Ramifications for School Philosophy

On the side of school philosophy, Locke wanted rote memorization and beatings thrown out, because a child who learns to associate books with a birch rod will avoid learning for the rest of his life. What you do instead is follow the child’s curiosity, make things interesting, turn lessons into games when they’re young, and as they grow, reason with them, explain why things matter, treat them as a rational creature whose cooperation you need to earn rather than a container you’re filling by force.

The “French schoolmasters” Caroline was reading said much the same thing. Fénelon’s Télémaque (1699), written to educate the heir to the French throne, was arguably the most widely read French book of the eighteenth century. The whole thing is a novel about the son of Odysseus traveling the world with his tutor Mentor, learning through experience and mistakes to resist flattery, see through luxury, and govern wisely.² Rollin’s Traité des études (1726), a comprehensive educational program on cultivating virtuous citizens by the former rector of the University of Paris, had a comparable reach. He argues that ancient history should be first, because children love narratives about wars and heroes, and through those narratives you can introduce geography, chronology, and moral reasoning.

A Survey of French Political Thought

Rousseau was formed by these earlier pedagogical currents, but in his own work on education he takes a further and much more radical step. Locke and the French schoolmasters still assume, in one way or another, that the task is to produce a better sort of gentleman: harder, wiser, less vain, more capable. Rousseau asks a more fundamental question: What if the social world for which the child is being prepared is itself the source of the corruption? With him, education ceases to be a question of method alone and becomes inseparable from a broader diagnosis of modern society.

The eighteenth century was rapidly eroding the self-evident nature of the feudal order and the whole web of inherited rank and obligation that society had been organized around. The Bourgeoisie were now a formidable productive force, and for the first time the old way society had been arranged required justification. The French philosophical tradition this was being worked out in would culminate in the French Revolution.

Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748) had reframed political authority as something that needed to be justified by its fitness to particular conditions; Voltaire was popularizing the idea that rational inquiry should replace tradition as the basis for how societies organize themselves. And the most polarizing philosophical work of its time, Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1755), argued that inequality itself was a form of corruption, that the original condition of humanity was one of equality and self-sufficiency, and that the entire apparatus of property, rank, and inherited privilege was something that had been historically constructed and was making everyone miserable, rich and poor alike. While not explicitly spelled out, the application to education is obvious: children are born with a natural moral sensitivity; society is what corrupts it. So education should be carefully creating the conditions for the child’s own moral feeling to develop from within, through experience and guided contact with the world, before the social world can deform it.

Rousseau on Education

But Rousseau, despite being a political theorist by trade, soon made education a direct theme of his writing. Julie (1761) begins as a scandalous love affair but its final chapters describe an ideal, enlightened household where the heroine meticulously shapes her children’s moral character; Émile (1762) makes education its central subject outright, tracking a single fictional boy’s upbringing from infancy to adulthood. These books arrive at exactly the moment Caroline would have needed them most: Her sons were already teenagers by then, so the questions of how to raise an infant was behind her. But Rousseau’s most detailed and difficult material, especially Book IV of the Émile, covers roughly ages 15 to 20, which is the period he considered the most dangerous of the whole developmental sequence. It describes how the young person begins to feel passions, becomes aware of other people as beings with inner lives, and starts to care about how he stands in relation to them. This is the dangerous moment, the point where (in the Second Discourse’s terms) amour-propre kicks in and the person becomes vulnerable to vanity, envy, and the whole apparatus of social comparison.

Rousseau’s answer is to introduce the world to the adolescent gradually, and through reflection rather than immersion. History and literature come first, because for the first time the young person can imaginatively inhabit other people’s lives. Then moral and religious questions, which Rousseau thinks are meaningless to children but become urgent once you’ve started to feel the full weight of human existence (Book IV contains the famous and controversial Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, Rousseau’s natural theology). Then travel, exposure to other societies, so the young person can begin comparing ways of life and forming political judgment rather than simply absorbing the prejudices of the one society he knows. And finally romantic love, which Rousseau treats as one of the most consequential and treacherous challenges of the whole sequence, because it is where amour-propre and genuine feeling become almost impossible to tell apart.

Thus, Kant’s involvement in the household would hardly have ended with the first stage of the boys’ education. The most difficult questions still lay ahead. And perhaps this immediate, practical need to master Rousseau’s developmental theory alongside Caroline has something to do with why, as Borowski (1804) tells us that “the Émile, upon its first appearance, kept him from his usual walks for several days.”

On Francophilia

It’s worth noting that Caroline’s interest in French culture wasn’t genteel cultivation, like playing the harpsichord, nor was it like being into French cuisine and French manners, the way someone today might be an Anglophile. The French philosophy she was reading was more like Marx before there was Marx. For example, in the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau imagines private property beginning with an impostor and says that “the fruits of the earth belong to us all”. Certainly it was the foundation of all later revolutionary and anarchist thought. Robespierre practically worshipped Rousseau. For the first time, “philosopher” connoted someone who turns a critical eye on social arrangements specifically.

This was all happening completely outside of the French universities, where all teaching was done in Latin, Aristotle filtered through Catholic theology, and whose function was essentially to credential priests and lawyers. The people who ended up reshaping European history were mostly provincial nobodies who had drifted to Paris with no money and no connections, sleeping in garrets, picking up odd work tutoring or copying manuscripts, spending their days arguing in coffeehouses; their major works came out of the French salons, and was printed by underground press abroad. Soon it would spread uncontrollably across Europe. This wasn’t the tame, state-sanctioned rationalism of the cameralist tradition, where Enlightenment thought had been safely harnessed to help the king run his provinces more efficiently. The Parlement of Paris ordered Rousseau’s Émile burned in 1762. He had to flee the country overnight and spent years moving between Switzerland and England, constantly afraid of arrest. Voltaire had already spent time in the Bastille and lived most of his productive life in exile near the Swiss border, so he could run if he needed to. Diderot had also been locked up in the Tower of Vincennes.

With the philosophy came a whole French social world. The major salons of the period were hosted by women, almost without exception: famous names include Madame Geoffrin, Madame du Deffand, Julie de Lespinasse, Madame d’Épinay, Madame Necker. The tradition went back to the 17th century: a woman of rank would establish a regular day and time, curate the guest list, manage the flow of conversation, and enforce a certain civility: “Enlightenment salons were places where male egos were brought into harmony through the agency of female selflessness.” (Goodman, 1994) The philosophes needed these spaces as they had no university positions or any other kind of public forum; often the Salonnières directly patronized these men financially, and not seldom they slept with them.

This was a model of intellectual life that had no equivalent in East Prussian noble society, where a woman’s role was managerial and reproductive. In the context of East Prussian landed nobility specifically, serious Francophilia was something closer to what wearing eyeliner and listening to the wrong music would signal to your parents’ friends in the suburbs. Caroline’s neighbors were Junker families whose wealth came from land, whose daily reality was managing literal serfs. The intellectual atmosphere, to the extent there was one, was Lutheran orthodoxy and maybe some dry Wolffian philosophy if someone had been to Königsberg. If they had heard of Rousseau at all, it would have been as a dangerous French atheist, which was probably not even inaccurate.

“Learning, Letters, Libertinage”

Rousseau wrote his major works as novels, and the entire philosophical scene grew out of the French literary tradition. These novels contained exactly what you’d expect from the French. The French book trade in this period was a vast underground of works that were banned, censored, or officially condemned, and “philosophical books” was the trade euphemism that covered everything from Voltaire to outright pornography. Booksellers asked their Swiss and Dutch suppliers for works in the “philosophical line” and everyone understood what was meant (Darnton, 1995). Stuck alone on a rural estate, it’s safe to assume Caroline would have devoured French novels. Reichardt even says about her: “She had seized upon French Litteratur – the only one that truly existed at the time – … with zeal.” Indeed, there had not yet been a great work of literature written in the German language; Goethe and Schiller belonged to a later generation, writing in a world already deeply shaped by Kant.

The characteristic tone of the French novel was a kind of wry, conspiratorial acknowledgment that the structures of polite society were a slightly ridiculous fiction. Everyone knew that everyone else was compromised. The wit and humorous lightness that made this literature so distinctive came from that shared awareness, that bemused willingness to look what we all agree to pretend isn’t there. Accordingly it was defined by an intense preoccupation with the subtleties of emotional states and relationships, and how they conflicted with social institutions that negated them. Rousseau’s major theme of the human being’s natural virtue being suppressed by regular, rigid society was first explored in novels.

For example, La Princesse de Clèves (1678) is entirely about a woman whose inner life is legible to no one, crushed under the weight of what court society requires her to perform. In books like Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747) and Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721), the foreign observer could look back at French manners with a clarity native characters do not possess, making social custom seem suddenly arbitrary, coercive, and absurd. But the main stream of novels was first-person memoir fiction of social life, much of which was epistolary and intensely intimate. Authors like Marivaux, Crébillon fils and Prévost wrote books where plot was mostly a sequence of social encounters that provoked fine tremors of feeling, which the narrator would then dwell on at length:

“The novelists of the early eighteenth century posited that what prompts actions and reactions dwells in drives of more or less conscious origins, in passions of more or less controllable force. This internal life is the object of the novel, and its investigation is accompanied by an acute awareness of the obscurity in which this interiority is clad.” (Ganofsky, 1979:227)

Within that broader tradition, the most popular genre by far was the love story. The French novel in the eighteenth century was overwhelmingly about desire: who wanted whom, under what impossible circumstances, and what happened when they inevitably acted on it. Crébillon’s Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit (1736) follows a seventeen-year-old as he is systematically educated in desire by an experienced older woman. Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748) is about a sultan with a magic ring that makes women’s genitals speak aloud, confessing every sexual encounter their owners have tried to conceal. Rousseau’s Julie (1761), the bestselling novel of the entire century, opens with a tutor and his student already in the grip of a passionate love they know will destroy them.

The French Attitude Towards Love Affairs

Besides these literary themes, French books were also simply read for pleasure, especially by women stuck in the provinces, like Caroline. Welch (2011) describes how many novels functioned as a sort of escapism, offering to “seduce readers by promising to teach them about the worldly ways of the cosmopolitan capital of the world”, with reader self-inserts being common:

“By enjoying stories about the Parisian education of ‘outsider’ characters, the novels seem to suggest, readers too might learn to navigate the exotic city, imitate the sophisticated manners of its most elite denizens, and unlock its social codes.”

And of course many novels, such as the libertine stories, explicitly dealt with erotic themes:

“A large treasure trove of evidence … reveals that the literary world of the age of Enlightenment was teeming with novels ‘d’un certain genre’ (of a certain type): books neither meant to be read in serious studies nor expected to be displayed proudly on one’s console; texts to be enjoyed rather in a safe intimacy, under the cover of darkness, and perhaps ‘d’une seule main’ (one handed). These books tell stories revolving not around love, not around epic adventures either, but around the pleasures and temptations of the flesh.” (Ganosfky, 1979)

While the more explicit political conclusions that later emerged from this literary culture were condemned as dangerous, the social world these books described was not imaginary at all. French elite society already lived by many of the same assumptions the literature explored. Unlike England and Germany, Catholic France never had a Puritanism: ordinary laypeople, whose relationship to God was mediated by the Priest, weren’t expected to be saints. What Catholicism did emphasize was the institution and the community: you could essentially do whatever you wanted in private, as long as you didn’t embarrass your family or disrupt the social order in public.

French aristocratic culture literally institutionalized the love affair. Louis XIV had official mistresses with formal titles; at Versailles, hundreds of aristocrats lived on top of each other in cramped quarters with little to do, and the predictable result was that everyone was sleeping with everyone. Your reputation depended in part on your erotic sophistication. All of that came with a broader cultural understanding about marriage: In the French aristocratic world Caroline was reading her way into, it had nothing to do with love. Marriage was understood as a property arrangement between families. Love, companionship, and sexual attachment were to be sought elsewhere, with the only rule being that you were discrete about it. Chartier (1993) describes how the nobility fundamentally altered the architecture of their palaces, creating private chambers, hidden corridors, and secluded gardens specifically to accommodate illicit romance.

Microhistory: Making Reasonable Inferences

A Methodological Note

With that in mind, I want to ask what exactly would have happened when Kant walked into Caroline’s estate in 1757. Not what the primary sources say, because those are limited and most interesting things were not written down explicitly. Just what circumstances and hints make likely if you use basic common sense. Things that you have every reason to suspect.

This is a methodology used with great success in Natalie Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre (1983). She is doing constrained inference from silence. When there is a gap in the archive, she doesn’t take that as evidence of absence but asks what possibilities were actually open to the people involved, and what the context (the social rules, the legal record, the village setting, marriage customs, property pressures, and the bits of testimony that survive) make likely: “what I offer you here is in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past.” (p. 5)

A good example of this is Chapter 5, “The Invented Marriage”: Davis argues that Bertrande may not have known immediately, at the very first encounter, that the returned husband was an impostor; but once she had shared a bed with him she would certainly have known. This cannot be proven, but is that really a claim that requires evidence? From there Davis infers that, whether tacitly or explicitly, Bertrande cooperated in helping him become her husband, because this new arrangement gave her the kind of marriage she had wanted: peace, friendship, and passion.

When more empirically minded historians challenged Davis for attributing to the actors “secret designs and motivations that, by their very nature, cannot be substantiated by the sources” (Finlay, 1988, p. 562), Davis made the methodological issue explicit, asking: “In historical writing, where does reconstruction stop and invention begin?” (Davis, 1988, p. 572). Collingwood (1946) – borrowing language from Kant – describes this kind of inference as central to the method of history:

“Freed from its dependence on fixed points supplied from without, the historian’s picture of the past is thus in every detail an imaginary picture, and its necessity is at every point the necessity of the a priori imagination. Whatever goes into it, goes into it not because his imagination passively accepts it, but because it actively demands it. The resemblance between the historian and the novelist, to which I have already referred, here reaches its culmination. Each of them makes it his business to construct a picture which is partly a narrative of events, partly a description of situations, exibition of motives, analysis of characters.”

A Working Theory of the Situation

Most of what survives about Caroline von Keyserlingk comes from her later life, when she became the leading Salonnière of Königsberg. But that belongs to the period after 1763, more than six years after she and Kant likely first met; the woman he encountered at Capustigall seems to have been a lonely, intellectually ambitious thirty-year-old living in relative isolation on a remote estate. She had immersed herself in some of the most advanced intellectual culture of the age, yet seems to have had no one around her that would be interested in any of it. Her family members and neighbors belonged to a social world she did not identify with. She was married young to a much older man she was (probably) estranged from; her body and a decade of her young life were captured by the sexual, reproductive and domestic obligations of an old feudal order, an order which the literature she loved treated with irony and contempt.

Reichardt describes Königsberg before the Occupation as depleted by war, and in any case both the city and university (which women were banned from) were still shaped by a Pietist culture that may not have offered much that appealed to her. Even with servants, the work of raising two boys on a rural estate would have been substantial, especially for someone trying to educate them according to principles that nobody around her understood or cared about. What we glimpse of her life in these years suggests a woman trying to keep her mind alive however she could in an environment that offered her almost nothing: reading novels set in Paris, playing music accompanied by an illiterate man and a child, translating philosophy into French out of what I can only imagine was sheer boredom.

And then, into that very estate, well before the social changes brought by the Occupation, walks a man her own age (he was 33, she was 30) who, as it happens, would go on to become one of the greatest philosophers in history, the one Heinrich Heine would later call “that arch-destroyer in the realms of thought.” Like Caroline, he had what you might call an extended adolescence. He grew up in Pietist institutions and then spent six years as a live-in tutor in the countryside, and upon his return begun a pace of teaching and publication that would have left little space for anything else.

Would she have been hungry for connection that hadn’t been available to her? Not just intellectual connection, though certainly that, but the kind of connection she had been reading about, the kind that the novels talked about and that the culture she identified with treated as natural and legitimate?

Kant’s transformation into a much more French-aligned, “Rococo-style” gentleman-philosopher

Now I want to turn to the changes in Kant’s philosophy around the time he met Caroline. But to make sense of them, you first have to see that Kant himself underwent a marked personal transformation in the years around 1760, that in many ways is analogous to what happened to his philosophy. Earlier I discussed the meaning of galanterie in French literature, and that is exactly the word Böttger (1838) uses to describe Kant in his magisterial years: “Indeed, at that time Magister Kant was the most gallant man in the world, wore embroidered clothes, a postillion d’amour³, and attended all the social coteries.” Kuehn’s details point in the same direction, stating that during this time “he was more inclined to extravagance.” A maxim attributed to him around this time states that “it is better to be a fool in fashion than a fool out of fashion.” He starts doing things like matching a brown coat with a yellow waistcoat because the combination reproduces the harmonies of flowers:

“He already called it, even back then, a maxim that should be observed with exact care: among other things, in choosing the colors for coat and waistcoat one must follow the flowers closely. Nature, he said, produces nothing that does not please the eye; the colors she arranges next to one another always harmonize as well. Thus, for example, a brown outer coat calls for a yellow waistcoat; the auriculas show us this. K. also always dressed with propriety and taste. Later on he became especially fond of mottled colors. For a time he was seen in clothes whose hem was edged with a little golden cord.“ (Borowski, 1804)

What emerged here was not simply a more sociable Kant, but a Kant newly legible within a very specifically French and aristocratic code of sociability; in provincial Königsberg, it certainly would have read as such. All of this ran strictly against the grain of the Pietist milieu of pre-Occupation Könisgsberg, where plainness in dress was bound up with moral seriousness and distrust of worldly display: Kuehn even says that Kant “cut a figure quite different from his more clerically and Pietistically inclined Königsberg colleagues, who wore more modest black or, at most, gray.”

Yet early Kant would probably have been indistinguishable from those gray-clad academics. The son of a harness-maker, he was born into a working-class household that was intensely Pietist. He was sent to the Collegium Fridericianum, a Pietist boarding school with long hours of prayer, an emphasis on discipline, introspection and moral self-examination, and lots of Latin drill. Kant would later recall this period as “torment” and “slavery” (Malter, 1990). His mother had died when he was thirteen, and by the time Kant entered the University of Königsberg in 1740, his father was officially recorded as qualifying for tax discounts due to poverty. Nor would he have had much occasion to change after university, when he spent those six years alone in the countryside; and when he came back started work a punishing schedule, as this 1759 letter attests:

“For my part I sit daily at the anvil of my lectern and guide the heavy hammer of repetitious lectures, constantly beating out the same rhythm. Now and then I am stirred by some nobler inclination, a desire to extend myself beyond this narrow sphere; but the blustering voice of Need immediately attacks me and, always truthful in its threats, promptly drives me back to hard work.” (Kant to Lindner, 1759)

Indeed, Jachmann preserves a direct glimpse of the earlier man (at some point after 1755 since Kant is described as a Magister): “During Kant’s years as a Magister, his only coat had become so worn down that some wealthy friends, among them Privy Councillor J., thought it necessary to offer him money, very discreetly, for new clothes.” This is a young lecturer of modest means, still marked by the habits of his upbringing.

The Russian Occupation

It seems that nobody has even considered this change as something in need of explanation, but if somebody tried, I imagine they would probably point to the Russian Occupation of Königsberg. The letter already tells you he’s being drawn towards something “nobler,” which probably means participation in Königsberg society, which was undergoing a renewal at the time.

As part of a war between Russia and Prussia, the Russian army took Königsberg without resistance in January 1758. The Occupation was rather benign as far as the conduct of the gentleman-officers was concerned, who settled into a kind of long vacation in Königsberg. Europe back then resembled more an agricultural colony governed by a pan-European aristocratic class; the Russian officer corps was full of Baltic Germans, Scots, and other foreigners in Russian service. This was a time when opposing officers might still shake hands before a battle (as happened at Fontenoy in 1745) or keep up friendly correspondence and exchange gifts during sieges. They would have been more united by their mutual contempt for the ‘rabble’ they commanded: in 1761 British Officer Campbell Dalrymple described common soldiers as “the scum of every county, the refuse of mankind,” marched to their corps “loaded with vice, villainy, and chains.” They were kept under ferocious discipline and often flogged; in Königsberg, they were billeted out to the local population to be fed and housed, a few men per house, under the supervision of a corporal.

The officer corps ran the city’s administration competently, threw dinner parties, and engaged with the local intellectual scene. The region even experienced short-term economic growth during the occupation, supported by arms production for the Russian army and increased trade with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Kant himself saw his finances improve from lecturing to wealthy officers, as many were attending university lectures in their free time. The Russians were moreover big Francophiles: Peter the Great, just earlier that century, had forced Western European culture onto the Russian nobility by decree, mainly by imposing French cultural forms.⁴ So suddenly this sober Prussian university town, which was deserted due to the war, has an overlay of exactly the culture Caroline had been reading about in isolation on her estate. French-speaking officers are hosting dinners and masked balls with escalating toasts, punch (with a heavy base of hard liquor) is everywhere, and there is gallantry directed at women. I think it’s safe to say she would have been delighted by the change.

We actually get a colorful picture of what Caroline’s social world looked like during the Occupation, from the memoirs of Andrei Bolotov, a Russian junior officer stationed in Königsberg who later became the founder of Russian agronomy (Bolotov, 1931). The main thing he notes about the wartime administration is that Baron Korff, the Russian military governor, organized the entire city’s social calender around the massive crush he had on Caroline. (It’s unknown how Caroline felt about these advances, but it’s worth noting he was 61 at the time.) Bolotov describes that his infatuation with her intensified steadily, and because he needed pretexts to see her, he started manufacturing them at scale. No holiday could pass without a lavish feast, there was no visiting dignitary who didn’t get at least a dinner party, and eventually he established fixed weekly gatherings and balls that ran most of the night. The city, Bolotov writes, became a “dwelling place of pleasures and amusements.” When summer came and the big public events thinned out, Korff simply shifted to private outings: garden walks and smaller gatherings that Bolotov and his fellow junior officers were excluded from, always orbiting around his “favourite,” the Countess Keyserling.⁵

Kant’s Personal Transformation

The Occupation was certainly a facilitating backdrop for personal changes in Kant. But there is zero evidence of social polish in Kant before this. Does it seem likely a working-class philosopher walked into Francophone high society, learned the entire idiom of galanterie, started matching his coat colors to flowers, entirely on his own? I think accounts of Kant as an introvert are overblown, but not that overblown. He hated networking, which is why he kept getting passed over for professorships for so many years despite being Königsberg’s pre-eminent philosopher. I think someone, more than likely a person already entrenched in French culture and the nobility, pulled him into that world. And we now have good primary evidence placing just such a person next to Kant just a few years before; a person he ended up suspiciously close friends with after the 1760s. We have no primary sources about their relationship during this time, but what is that even evidence of, especially since neither one of them was particularly notable at the time?

Some of the senior officers were literate and cosmopolitan, but the majority, especially the ones that were Caroline’s own age, had very limited formal education; their main interest would have been drinking and chasing women. Would this very intelligent woman have missed, among this little impression of Paris in the East Prussian province, the aspect of the philosophe to complete the picture? Kuehn sums his period of personal change up as: “In many ways he embodied the ideal of an intellectual and man of letters fostered during the period of the Rococo in Germany and France”, and as I will discuss next his philosophical style also took on a serious French inflection. The model in question here is the French philosopher as a social figure, people like Voltaire or Diderot operating in the mixed company of Parisian drawing rooms. He was supposed to be responsive and present, much the opposite of the dusty scholastic. If it wasn’t obvious, Reichardt notes that Caroline was a fan of exactly this archetype, having “eagerly embraced the so-called philosophy of the French beaux esprits.”

In my opinion, personal transformation, especially of this magnitude, almost never happens in a vacuum, without a mediating figure. A well-developed aesthetic sense especially is not something you learn from drinking with Russian officers. You can’t choose to learn galanterie any more than you can learn French by wanting to speak it. You need someone who already speaks it, who you can imitate and whose reactions you’re reading closely enough to learn what lands and what doesn’t. I think the Occupation years are a time when their relationship started to really deepen, when the foundations to their lifelong friendship were laid. Did she perhaps even supplement Kant’s income by directing some of her wealthy Russian officer contacts to him?

And if there was ever a romantic phase in their relationship, these years are the likeliest place. Caroline was widowed in 1761, at exactly the moment when the occupation had opened around her a world of sociability, display, and pleasure unlike anything her earlier life seems to have offered; if Kant’s morals and sense of propriety had been stopping him, even that obstacle was now gone. (I will also note that 1762 stands out as unusually light in Kant’s early teaching career, because the surviving records show only two courses in summer 1762 and three in winter 1762/63, after several years in which he commonly announced four to six courses per semester.)

Analogous French inflection in His philosophy

The whole era of early Kantian philosophy ends with the Occupation. If you look at what he had actually published before this point, the contrast is impossible to overlook. From his teenage years into his early thirties, he was doing almost entirely what we would now call physics, and not philosophy of physics, but actual physics, astronomy, and mathematics. His very first publication (1747; at age 23) concerns a technical dispute about whether the force of a moving body should be measured as mv or mv², a debate that had been raging between the Cartesians and the Leibnizians for decades, and which had drawn in serious mathematicians like Émilie du Châtelet. Then come pieces on the rotation of the earth (1754), the age of the earth (1754), and in 1755 a full cosmogony: a mechanical theory of how the solar system condensed out of a dispersed cloud of particles under the action of Newtonian attraction and repulsion, which turns out to be roughly correct, and which Laplace arrived at independently decades later. His doctoral dissertation that same year is on the nature of fire and elastic matter, and the same year he publishes his first purely philosophical work, the New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition. In 1756 he writes three separate papers on earthquakes prompted by the Lisbon disaster, not on the problem of evil but attempting a causal physical explanation of seismic transmission. The same year he publishes a theory of winds, and a physical monadology, the purpose of which is to “solve an apparent incompatibility between fundamental insights from geometry and metaphysics” relating to the divisibility of substances (Hussein, 2024).

Then, starting around 1757, the same year he likely met Caroline, the torrent thins. In 1757, Kant publishes a short essay on why west winds are moist in Europe. In 1758, a brief paper on the relativity of motion and rest, a few pages long. In 1759, a tiny piece on the philosophy of optimism in a lecture advertisement leaflet, barely more than a pamphlet, but which shows a Kant in great spirits:

“I rejoice in realizing I am a citizen in a world which could not be better! . . . [although] I am a minor member, unworthy in myself, selected only for the sake of the Whole, I esteem my existence all the more because I have been elected to take a place in the best of plans. I call out to every créature that does not make itself unworthy to be called a créature: Blessed are we, because we exist! The Creator is well pleased with us!”

In 1760, he writes nothing philosophical: only a memorial address for a friend of his who’d passed away. In 1761, he writes nothing at all. In 1762 comes a dry twenty-page exercise in formal logic (The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures), which is essentially a tidying-up of Aristotelian syllogisms. He comes back with two larger metaphyiscal works in 1763, on proofs of God and negative quantities; and in 1764 come the Observations, representing a clean break from everything he had ever written.

The Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings (1764)

This book is basically Kant having discovered his mind can do something and he’s trying out that capacity for the first time. The book is a meandering discussion of all sorts of genuinely random topics, including but not limited to, why night is more sublime than day, why tragedy works and comedy doesn’t, whether women should study geometry, what makes the English melancholic and the French flirtatious, tall oaks versus flower beds, what goes wrong in a marriage when both people are sanguine, the look of a starry sky versus a bright afternoon, why the Spanish have honor but no gallantry, the moral difference between genuine virtue and mere good upbringing, and what makes a joke land. Specifically, this is a rationalist natural philosopher discovering that aesthetic perception gives you real, repeatable knowledge of an entirely different nature. Perhaps that is why, in dealing with everything and nothing, the book is named after the capacity he is exercising, which is the recognition of beauty: aesthetic judgment, the feeling that things inform each other in a way you can’t reduce into a rule.

The style is obviously borrowed from French Salons, the conversational tone of the primarily spoken Salon culture that all the French essayists emulated in their writing. In the salons, you would never do something like defend a position: “One had to be seductive and witty, and one was not allowed to contradict others.” (Lilti, 2009) A person who could only be rigorous about one subject was considered limited. The point was constant lateral movement across seemingly unrelated or even contradictory topics; the art was making them cohere together in a way that just made sense, even if you couldn’t necessarily explain why. It was about looking at something familiar from a different perspective by making unexpected comparisons. The intellectual culture that emerged from this relied, as a social epistemology, more on distributed knowledge emerging from discourse; it’s as far as you could possibly get away from the “numbered propositions” style of German rationalism.

I think it goes without saying who Kant would have practised this style of conversation with; in the Remarks (1765), Kant says that in nations with taste, women are made to govern and in fact do govern. He also asks why all-male gatherings are tasteless now, and answers that jokes have no life there and that “we must be among women.” Caroline herself, insofar as she had a career, would go on to become Königsberg pre-eminent Salonnière, hosting many of the most famous figures of 18^th century Prussian Enlightenment, as well as the future Prussian King and the future Emperor of Russia.

In Appendix 1, I discuss how traces of this French aesthetic sensibility still define the Critique of Judgment, a 1790 work that deals with beauty as a major subject. Kant breaks from German rationalism’s emphasis on explanation by decomposing the whole into parts, which had been applied to beauty, and essentially formalizes the French view he learned in this period. His theory of judgment bridges the First and Second Critiques as the concluding arc of the Critical project, and this aesthetic framework is load-bearing for the whole structure.

Rousseau’s Influence on Kant

The book also deals with themes of education, specifically following Rousseau: “Kant explicitly ends the work with a call for an educational breakthrough. Near the end of Section Four he laments that the “as yet undiscovered secret of education” needs to be rescued “in order early to elevate the moral feeling in the breast of every young world-citizen.” (Kant, 2011, p. 61; AA 2:251) He is thinking of education as the deliberate cultivation of moral sensitivity, not merely drilling Latin or polishing manners, a clearly Rousseian idea: The connection becomes fully explicit in the Remarks, where he turns to Émile itself: “Schools are therefore necessary. But in order for them to be possible, one must raise Emile. One would wish that Rousseau would show how schools can arise from this” (Kant, 2011, pp. 85-86; AA 20:29). He doesn’t ask whether Rousseau’s conception of education is correct, whether moral cultivation should be the aim of schooling, he’s past that. Rousseau has quite suddenly become a standard for Kant.

Indeed, much of the change in Kant’s philosophy during this period has been attributed to his reading of Rousseau: e.g., “It has become commonplace to assert that Rousseau instigated a ‘revolution’ in Kant’s philosophical outlook in the mid-1760s.” (Kryluk, 2023), or “The Remarks … reveals a revolution in Kant’s thinking, largely inspired by Rousseau.” (Shell & Vekley, 2012) Kant himself credits Rousseau as having put him onto the human world as a serious object of thought, saying he had once been an intellectual snob who “despised the common man who knows nothing,“ and that “Rousseau set me right. This blinding prejudice vanished. I learned to honor human beings.“ (Kant, 2011, p. 96; AA 20:44) A portrait of Rousseau, it is said, was the only decoration he ever had in his house. Yet the shape and motivation of his first engagement with Rousseau is poorly understood, and I think, keeping in mind everything we have so far discussed, that it would have been far more than a purely textual encounter.

Hamann as the Introducer?

The question of how Kant started reading Rousseau has actually been written about, with no clear result. One theory is that his friend Hamann introduced him, largely because him mentioning Rousseau in a 1759 letter to Kant is the earliest known textual connection between Kant and Rousseau. Since direct evidence for this period of Kant’s life is otherwise quite sparse, people have placed what seems to me like disproportionate weight on it. I think read closely it’s not a particularly strong theory.

The original source for this claim is Beiser (1977, p. 19–24); and it is occasionally repeated by further scholarship (Betz, 2013; Stern, 2019:144). But all Beiser actually documents is this: Sometime in 1759, in a now-lost letter, Kant approaches Hamann with the idea of writing a physics textbook for children (the Kinderphysik).⁶ Although this probably wasn’t what Kant wanted to talk about, the book would have treated nature in ordered chapters, and Hamann took issue with this. He was something of a mystic, and a very Christian one at that. (Goethe called him the brightest mind of his age, but also admitted he could barely understand him.) Hamann’s needling and sarcastic reply argues that Kant’s plan risks turning education into premature “adultifying”, using ideas about sticking to natural development that are recognizably Rousseauian. He encourages Kant to stick to the biblical creation story.

I think it goes without saying that this thin, sermonized version of Rousseau would not necessarily have put Kant into the most receptive mood. Indeed, Beiser notes: “Kant did not reply to Hamann’s letters, a silence which deeply insulted Hamann.” Nevertheless, he immediately claims “there was another more important consequence of Hamann’s letters: they introduced the young Kant to Rousseau. In 1759 Kant had still not read Rousseau …“ and speculates that “[p]erhaps it was indeed Hamann, then, who laid the ground for Kant’s later reception of Rousseau.”

But we now also know someone else reading Rousseau in Kant’s orbit around this time, and we now have a plausible narrative of Kant needing to engage with it to fulfil his tutoring commitment, which was based around Rousseauian ideas of moral cultivation, which I think is just on formal grounds a much stronger theory, and it doesn’t even require you to accept any particularly strong claims; that Kant tutored there, and that Caroline valued Rousseau, are both attested by primary evidence.

Epilogue

Caroline Gets Remarried

In February 1763, after a widowhood of seventeen months, Caroline marries Heinrich Christian von Keyserlingk, the son of a famous Russian ambassador to Saxony and Bach patron/superfan. He himself seems to have been cultivated, educated, and well-travelled, his father having brought him “a sense and taste for everything glittering and luxurious that the arts and the great world have to offer“ (Reichardt, 1804). He had studied law and undertaken a Grand Tour. While still a student he held the rank of Oberstleutnant and commanded a Saxon Leibjäger company, an aristocratic ceremonial guard that largely existed to accompany the prince on hunts. He had the full collection of titles that a well-connected Baltic German nobleman could hope for, and would surely have cut a fine figure in accordance with his background.

Indeed, when he married Caroline he was the richest man in Königsberg. Reichardt describes the changes he brought to Caroline’s (until then, humble for aristocratic standards) houeshold: “Six teams of the finest English and other horses in the rarest colors, and a host of riding horses and state coaches made their formal entry before him into the city and into the old family house,” which was promptly gutted and rebuilt in the French style (marking Caroline’s permanent move to Königsberg), and soon “gleamed with the most magnificent liveries, among which Moors and Cossacks in their national costume and colossal Heiducken perhaps for the first time delighted the inhabitants of Königsberg.” The rooms were richly hung with paintings, Caroline’s apartment became simultaneously a princely residence and “a magnificent artist’s studio,” and the house filled with “concerts, balls, and small theatrical performances” that made it, in Reichardt’s telling, “a rich source of joy for all of Königsberg.”

Pohl (2022) notes that Caroline’s salon did not look like a narrow, once-a-week Parisian salon. The Keyserling household became more like a permanent social court, a so-called Musenhof dedicated to fostering the arts. Vorländer (1924, I.5) describes further the impressive art collection the Palais acquired, probably in part spun up by Caroline:

“So the palace also possessed a special picture gallery with numerous originals and copies, especially by the younger Dieterich in Dresden and by a number of Dutch painters, among them Ruysdael, Teniers, and Wouverman, indeed even a Rembrandt. It also had a rich collection of more than a thousand engravings, in which the Medici Gallery, the Dresden Gallery, the Luxembourg, and the Palais Royal were represented. Thus Kant did not lack opportunities in the Keyserling Palace to cultivate his sense of art.“

As a result, Caroline was soon moving through the very highest strata of Prussian aristocratic society, in direct proximity to the Great King. Salewski describes how within a few years she was being presented to the Royal family in Berlin, where the court found her “very charming and her diamonds beautiful.”⁷ That same evening, at a masked ball hosted by her husband for the whole city, over two thousand guests appeared. Caroline wore a hat encrusted with brilliants and topped with a diamond bouquet valued at 40,000 Thaler. A decade later, when Kant was finally appointed full professor of logic and metaphysics, his annual salary was 166 Thaler.

Cryptic intimations on love and marriage in the Observations and Kant’s private commentaries

At the level of direct biographical evidence, the story ends here. I have not been able to find any source that brings us much closer to the inner texture of Kant’s relation with Caroline after her remarriage, and no record of his reaction to her death in 1790 appears to survive. But what we can get some insight to is Kant’s emotional state in the years following the mariage. The wedding is in February 1763, and Kant writes the Observations in autumn 1763 during the semester break at a forester’s house in Moditten. If Kant had grown close to her in the preceding years, that marriage would almost certainly have altered the terms of their intimacy and led to some distancing. And indeed the Observations contain many curious remarks about marriage and – broadly – wanting someone you can’t have, that I think read entirely different with this context in mind. From Frierson’s 2011 introduction to the Observations:

“During the 1760s Kant struggled with the issue of marriage, and one finds a personal pathos throughout these writings. Kant in Observations longs for a woman with whom to make a “united pair” that would “as it were constitute a single moral person” (2:242), a woman who could both “refine” (2:229) and “ennoble” him (2:242), and, most of all, a female friend who could unite beauty and nobility of soul and who “can never be valued enough” (2:235).”

Frierson continues: “While Kant longs for this ideal woman, though, he also recognizes a danger in his ideal.” He calls Kant’s discussion of marriage “partly autobiographical”, even noting that “the analysis in Observations seems a more likely explanation for Kant’s lifelong bachelorhood.” Kant also recognizes the pitfalls of such idealization: Nature, he says, wisely gives the early “niceties and delicacies” their full strength only in the beginning. Then familiarity dulls them, and the relationship degenerates into what he calls “familiar love.”

In one section, Kant describes “crude desire” as broad and undiscriminating, and though it gets you to nature’s “great end” quickly, it can slide into debauchery. He contrasts to this an “extremely refined taste”, which “commonly fails to attain the great final aim of nature” and results in “brooding.” In Kant’s words:

“On the other side, an extremely refined taste certainly serves to remove the wildness from an impetuous inclination and, by limiting it to only a very few objects, to make it modest and decorous; but it commonly fails to attain the great final aim of nature, and since it demands or expects more than the latter commonly accomplishes, it very rarely makes the person of such delicate sentiment happy.”

Kant’s official frame is a warning about idealization. The crude person’s problem is that his desire applies to everyone, so it has no shape, while the refined person’s desire is so specific it applies to no one real. The refined man is “occupied only with an object that the enamored inclination creates in thought,” a fantasy composite he has “adorned with all the noble and beautiful qualities that nature rarely unites in one person.” Fine, so don’t retreat into fantasy to a point where you can no longer stand real people with imperfections.

But he is ambiguous about whether such fantasies are sometimes fulfilled; he seems to think so, and this opens up an entirely different failure mode. As rare as nature assembling these perfect qualities is, it “even more rarely offers to one who can treasure her and who would perhaps be worthy of such a possession.“ His words! The refined man recognises a perfect woman he can’t have, falls madly in love, and then can never get over her, forever all too aware of what he is missing. Kant describes the consequences:

“From this arises the postponement and finally the complete renunciation of the marital bond, or, what is perhaps equally bad, a sullen regret of a choice that has already been made, which does not fulfill the great expectations that had been raised; for it is not uncommon for Aesop’s cock to find a pearl when a common barley corn would have suited him better.”

That last metaphor seems to be precisely about this event of encountering a real pearl but not being worthy of it, as the framing implies that the pearl caused the later sullenness. In the myth, Aesop’s cockerel scavenges for food and finds a valuable jewel which it cannot eat, and it says: “A fine thing you are, no doubt, and, had your owner found you, great would his joy have been.” (Vernon, 1912)

Ogilby (1665) already read the fable as a class-marked social allegory, in which the pearl signifies a higher kind of value and the cock figures those too bounded by appetite, labor, or station to make use of it; Hollar’s accompanying print contrasts the cock on its dunghill, with a Germanic castle on the neighboring hilltop, from which the pearl presumably originated. The class meaning seems built into the image.

Wenceslaus Hollar, The Cock and the Jewel. (n.d.)

Then he steps back and offers some practical advice: refine your standards for yourself as much as you want, but keep your expectations of others simple. If you expect only something average you’ll rarely be disappointed. He ends by slipping into a blatantly personal register:

“I would recommend to nobler souls that they refine their feeling as much as they can with regard to those qualities that pertain to themselves or those actions that they themselves perform, but that with regard to what they enjoy or expect from others they should preserve their taste in its simplicity: if only I understood how it is possible to bring this off.”

In Appendix 2, I discuss one last source: the Remarks, Kant’s private, handwritten notes on the Observations he took on pages interleaved in his personal copy. Those notes are unusually revealing because they were not written for publication, so they give a sense of what Kant’s mind naturally drifted towards. He keeps on returning to the same cluster of concerns: on the unique social power of women, the cooling emotional effects of marriage, and the elusive nature of affectionate love. The overall message seems to be that the one who doesn’t marry his lover has it better because his love is never tempered by ordinary domestic reality. In a remarkable passage he also compares himself to the rejected lover in Rousseau’s Julie, who can’t bring himself to forget her and so lives peacably alongside her and her husband. Perhaps this was Kant’s private justification for never marrying?

Discussion of the Lack of Primary Evidence

I want to be clear about the limits of the evidence here. There is no surviving primary text that even suggests anything intimate happened between Kant and the Countess. And moreover, if the relation had been so unusually close, would there not be some trace of it in letters? The thing is, there is so little evidence that it kind of crosses back over into being evidence. From a friendship that lasted thirty-five years, no correspondence between the two has survived at all, even though letters from both Kant and Caroline survive in other contexts. At the very least, neither side preserved letters from the other in the way you might expect from a long and important friendship. Given how commonly sensitive correspondence was destroyed in this period, especially where intimacy and the reputation of noble households were concerned, deliberate destruction can perhaps not be ruled out.

To show how common this was, we even have a recorded letter addressed to Kant, from Borowski, concerning a sensitive matter involving his noble pupil, that includes the request to destroy it (‘haben Sie die Gewogenheit für mich, selbst diesen Zettel zu cassiren’), which Kant apparently neglected to do. Of course, the practice was especially common in the correspondence of lovers and adulterous partners. Lady Grosvenor, for example, wrote to her lover the Duke of Cumberland that she would “always burn your letters immediately as safe as a thief in a mill,” [Weble, 1770], so the intention was widespread even where the execution was imperfect (in her case, enough letters survived to be used in court). Many historical figures are known to have destroyed evidence of affairs; surely many more were successful in erasing any trace for posterity.

Incentives to Find Evidence Among Later Family Members

The surviving papers were probably destroyed when Königsberg was razed to the ground in 1945, but the fact that nothing was found is all the more significant because Caroline’s descendants were researching her ties to Kant as early as the 19th century. He was already among the most famous philosophers who had ever lived, and the Keyserlingks were a family whose reputation rested in no small part on their history of patronizing extraordinary minds, including Bach. They had every reason to value any document that linked their house to so eminent a name. But even with full access to the intact family archives, they found nothing. Caroline’s great-grandson, Count Alexander Keyserling – apparently one of the founders of Russian geology – in a publication of his diaries says that he went through Caroline’s papers and the only thing relevant to Kant he found was the single remark, in a letter to her second husband, that “Kant dined with me” (von Taube, 1894).

(Interestingly, he also notes that he found some handwritten philosophical texts on the sciences, adding that he lacked the time to determine which were hers and which might be his, but that one manuscript particularly caught his attention, a discussion of various writers’ views on time and space that “began quite entertainingly.” We don’t know from when this would have been, so it’s not significant evidence, but time and space was certainly a topic central to what Kant was working on, both in his early physical work and the Critique of Pure Reason, whose main body opens with the sections ‘Of Space’ and ‘Of Time.’.)

These People Had Massive Respect for Aristocrats

But even if letters were destroyed, if it was an “open secret”, wouldn’t we expect at least somebody else to mention it at some point? Kraus, after all, is perfectly willing to repeat gossip about Kant’s attachment to the Ballath woman. Any story that requires deliberate suppression seems to be bordering on conspiracy thinking. Well, that is a strong point, and one that gave me pause; but reading these sources, it feels almost like talking about aristocrats behind their backs brought you bad luck. Kant, even in his final dedication to Caroline, doesn’t spell out her full name. Kraus, when referring to the estate to which Kant was regularly taken, doesn’t write down the name at all, saying instead that he will communicate it in person. It seems that you simply did not put a noble family’s name into writing casually. If this is how carefully people handled the mere mention of noble names in connection with entirely respectable arrangements, imagine the gravitational pull of discretion around anything that touched on a noblewoman’s honor!

Besides, the Königsberger ‘inner circle’ responsible for most of the primary sources overwhelmingly depended on noble patronage. If we’re talking about Kraus, it’s worth reading his non-mention in the context that he literally lived inside of the Keyserlingk household for 20 years. Their careers, incomes and social standing all ran through the same family they were writing about in the only sources we have. The biographies were also biased: they were written by Kant’s friends, and personally reviewed by him; Jachmann’s biography was even begun at Kant’s request, or comissioned if you will. Königsberg was not Paris, where gossip could acquire a life of its own. In a city of roughly fifty thousand people, where the social world surrounding Caroline’s salon was much smaller still, is it entirely impossible that knowledge of a delicate matter was confined to a small circle and disappeared with Kant’s generation?

Conclusion

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy opens its entry on Kant as follows: “Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is the central figure in modern philosophy.” The Critique of Pure Reason reworked the terms of metaphysics at their foundation, the Critique of Practical Reason did the same for moral philosophy. Kant established that we can’t prove God exists through theoretical reasoning and built a moral philosophy that runs entirely on rational duty. Heinrich Heine (1834) again:

“Strange contrast between the outer life of this man and his destructive, world-annihilating thoughts! Had the citizens of Königsberg suspected the full significance of those thoughts, they would have felt a far more terrible dread before him than before an executioner, an executioner who after all only executes men.”

Is it possible that the enormous weight of the Critiques was fueled by sublimated sexual desire in some sense? Kuehn describes that “around 1764 his circle of friends changed dramatically,” and he ties that change to Kant’s conscious withdrawal from the “whirlpool of societal diversions” that had carried him along earlier. During his decades of near-seclusion, the only people he was regularly seeing were a small social circle around his close friend Green, and Caroline von Keyserlingk at her Musenhof.

Green was a rigidly methodical English merchant and almost certainly autistic: In a story that seems apocryphal but was actually real, Green once left for a coach trip alone rather than wait for Kant, who was two minutes late.⁸ Jachmann’s testimony is that Kant did not write a single sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason without first submitting it to Green for approval. Meanwhile, Bernoulli describes meeting Kant when having lunch with the Keyserlingks in 1778: “Herr Kant had not published philosophical writings for a long time, but he promised that he would soon bring out a little volume.“ This was to be the Critique of Pure Reason, published four years later. Elise von der Recke said she saw him there frequently around 1784, and another visitor in 1787 saw him four times during a five-day stay.⁹ So as he was in the trenches working on the Critique, he was still having casual lunches with Caroline, meeting visitors passing through court, presumably coming to the parties she threw.

If one asks which personal relationships mattered most for Kant’s philosophical life, the list is not long. Green, though he was not a trained philosopher, seems to have contributed a model of exactness, discipline, and intellectual self-control that Kant greatly valued. Hamann belongs on the list as well, but their relation was characterized by irritation and deep-seated disagreements around theological and linguistic questions, acting more as an antagonist than a formative influence. (We already met him on the question of who introduced Rousseau to Kant.) There really aren’t any other candidates.¹⁰ Caroline alone seems to have been a more substantive influence in that she opened Kant’s mind to an entire French moral and literary world he might not have encountered otherwise.

As for the personal relationship angle, the lack of textual evidence for romantic intimacy, the lack of even written allusions to it by anyone, does still give me pause. Even if you can justify it in terms of discretion and destruction of evidence, to presuppose perfect deliberate suppression always feels like conspiracist thinking to me. When people try to do that it’s usually less than perfect. But the most likely version of this story, I think, is barely hurt by this: the one where there is no physical intimacy continuing past Caroline’s second wedding, which is certainly plausible (especially given the Saintpreux parallel, see Appendix 2). Everything scandalous would have occurred before either of them were notable figures. So perhaps the story can be reconciled along the lines Arnoldt already indicated: they once had a love affair, Caroline probably ended it, the way you might have a boyfriend in your twenties that is fun for a while but ultimately not quite right for the life you want (and that your social class requires of you). Kant probably still harboured quite a lot of feelings, but was happy to accept a bachelor’s life of nearness without possession, and justified this philosophically.

Kant’s status as a virgin seems to be one of the most durable philosophy factoids. For example, two recent New Yorker articles refer to Kant as “famously celibate” and claim that there is “no evidence” Kant ever had a love affair or sexual encounter. It’s one of those things you just sort of know if you’re into philosophy. But I think the evidence here calls it into serious question. If they were two young isolated people, neither of whom had ever had a close physical relationship before, what do you think happened? What tends to be all over the novels that young women actually read? I’ve already described how eighteenth-century French print culture was flooded with libertine fiction and outright pornography. And French Salonnières did not preside over abstract conversation like schoolmistresses; very often they flirted and slept with the men who frequented their salons. While it doesn’t prove Caroline did this, it was woven into the social texture of the role she dedicated her life to.

If the argument of this essay is right at all, Caroline belongs to Kant’s biography in a much, much deeper sense than biographers have allowed. In the very years when his writing changes tone and he starts getting into Rousseau, when he discovers for himself questions of taste and moral feeling, we find in his orbit a woman who seems to have been the living embodiment of these things. This does not seem likely to be unrelated. And what survived from that encounter, whatever it looked like, seems to have shaped Kant’s philosophy for the rest of his life: I like Kant for his willingness to treat the ‘soft’ parts of human life, like beauty and moral feeling, with the rigor of the technical metaphysician and natural philosopher he’d been in his formative years. I think that whole contradiction in his style might be inseparable from his encounter with Caroline.

Finally, I hope this essay puts pressure on a wider habit/cliché in the history of philosophy. We often talk about philosophers as if they existed in a vacuum, untouched by aesthetic formation, social aspiration, embodied experience, cultural-historical forces, and emotional entanglement with the people, very often women, who inhabited their daily world. I think that has never been how it works, and it seems significant that the this image fails even for the person you’d think it would apply to most.

Caroline Amalie von Keyserling. Drawing after an oil painting (unknown artist). Reproduced in Hermann Güttler: Königsbergs Musikkultur im 18. Jahrhundert. 1925.

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Appendix 1. The Third Critique

I want to give a sense for how important and durable this change in Kant’s thinking was, that this part of his biography may actually matter for understanding his philosophy. Specifically, by the time of the Critique of Judgment, written almost thirty years later, Kant is still relying on the way of thinking about beauty that first became visible in the Observations. That matters because eighteenth-century aesthetics contained a real fault line: On one side stood the German rationalist tradition, which tended to treat beauty as a confused perception of objective perfection, something the mind dimly grasped but could in principle analyze. On the other side stood a more French tradition, shaped by salon culture, literary criticism, and reflective conversation, in which beauty had more to do with relations, resonances, and forms of fit that resist reduction to explicit concepts. One way of looking at the Third Critique is that he essentially formalizes the loosely held French tradition in a German rationalist style.

So the German rationalist line on beauty, which runs through Leibniz and Wolff down to Baumgarten (who sort of coined the term ‘aesthetics’), held that when you find something beautiful, what’s actually happening is that you’re perceiving its rational perfection, but confusedly, because you couldn’t say why you liked it. In the Leibnizian framework, to cognize something distinctly is to be able to enumerate its Merkmale: the component features that make it what it is. So when you know gold distinctly, you can list its properties: weight, color, resistance to acid, whatever. It’s a reductive, scientistic view. When you only know it confusedly, you recognize it on sight, but you can’t state the criteria; a jeweler can spot fake gold instantly, while a poem might seem beautiful because you’re perceiving its supreme harmony, even if only God can reduce that into propositions.

But in the Third Critique, Kant has a problem with this. It means is that, for Baumgarten, beauty is still always about the object; you’re sensing its perfection according to some concept (e.g. “poem”). If you say a poem is perfect, you’re committed to there being some concept of what a poem should be, some rule that specifies what the parts should do (even if you can’t state it). He very explicitly calls out Baumgarten for this in the Third Critique, 30 years later (§ 15. The judgement of taste is quite independent of the concept of perfection). For Kant, the whole point of beauty is that there are no rules you could possibly state. When you see a circular clearing in the forest and find it beautiful, you aren’t applying any concept of what a clearing should be and then judging this one a particularly good instance. There is no “should be.” The form just pleases. And if you did supply a purpose (his example: oh, this clearing is perfectly suited for country dances), then you’d have perfection, but you’d have left the aesthetic behind.

Instead, Kant proposes an Idealist theory of beauty, meaning one that localizes beauty in the interaction between mind and world. At the most basic level he explains taste, a sensitivity to form, as unforced ‘play’ between two cognitive faculties. Usually when you perceive something, your faculty of Imagination organizes your sensory impressions, and Understanding (Verstand) subsumes it under a concept, and you get a determinative judgment like “That is a dog”. But Kant distinguishes a second operation called reflective judgment, where you have the particular and you’re still searching for a concept: you feel that things seem to belong together, like a greyhound’s body is perfectly attuned to running fast. That feeling, called purposiveness, comes from Imagination and Understanding working together seamlessly: whatever Imagination is serving up seems well-suited to the kind of order the Understanding is meant to find. Beauty happens when you have purposiveness without a concept: Imagination and Understanding work together without settling, but no concept is found because none exists. (For example, a wildflower would be beautiful even if you had no idea what a flower was.)

Human art can be beautiful too, but the mechanism is different from natural beauty. When a poet or painter sets to work, they begin with something only Reason can think: an idea too large and too abstract for any single image to capture. The artist’s imagination then strains to present that idea in sensory form, and in straining it overshoots, pulling in more associations, more sensory connections, than any concept could gather up, because your imagination couldn’t touch the image without touching everything attached to it. So the imagination’s offering exceeds what understanding can conceptualize, and that excess is what sets off that specific process he identified with beauty (free play between imagination and understanding).

As an example, he quotes a poem by Frederick the Great, comparing his own dignified death to the setting sun at the end of a summer day, scattering its last gentle light across the horizon as a final gift to the world:

“He quickens his rational Idea of a cosmopolitan disposition at the end of life by an attribute which the Imagination (in remembering all the pleasures of a beautiful summer day that are recalled at its close by a serene evening) associates with that representation, and which excites a number of sensations and secondary representations for which no expression is found.”

That comparison drags in everything your imagination associates with such evenings: the accumulated warmth, the softening light, the feeling of fullness rather than loss. All of that attaches to the original concept and enriches it beyond anything you could have said propositionally. And even if you could say it propositionally, it would lose exactly the act of judgment that made you see it in the first place. The beauty depends on the associations never being fully spoken, so that your faculties keep working through them, finding more, settling on nothing.

And that is exactly the logic of French aesthetics. Interestingly, we have evidence that Kant was reading Diderot - a famous and scandalous French man of letters, and the foremost practicioner of the French Salon style - in the leadup to the Observations. In 1759 there is a record of Kant asking his friend Hamann to translate from the Encyclopédie, namely two articles by Diderot: ‘Beau’ and ‘Art’ [Seerveld, 1978]. The SEP calls ‘Beau’ “one of the best summaries of French aesthetic thought in the eighteenth century”, and I think it matches Kant’s later conception of beauty quite well:

“His own definition of taste depends on what he calls “rapports”, or connections between various aspects of a work. … His prime example is a line from Horace, a 1640 tragedy by Corneille: “qu’il mourût” or “that he had died”. Diderot explains that these words in isolation are neither beautiful nor ugly. But if one knows the context within the plot of the play, that this is the answer that a father gives when asked what he would have his son do in battle, the listener finds more interest in the line. Diderot adds several other circumstances from the play, for instance, that this is the only surviving son, that he is alone against three enemies, and that he is fighting for the honor of his country, that create more rapports in the mind of the listener, until this ultra-concise line becomes an object of great beauty.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 18th Century French Aesthetics)

Appendix 2. Kant’s Remarks on the Observations

There is one unusually intimate source left to consider. After publishing the Observations, Kant filled the interleaved pages of his personal copy with handwritten notes. The form matters here: these are his personal notes, jagged, provisional, often broken off in mid-thought. Kant was probably aware his letters would be published, but I doubt he could have expected that Kant scholars would go through a book in his house and meticulously transcribe his handwritten notes. He clearly never expected this to be published, which is why this gives us a remarkably clear picture of what Kant was actually thinking about, ca. 1765 or so. What returns, again and again, is a cluster of concerns that becomes highly suggestive in the context of Caroline: women as the bearers of taste and social life, the difference between kinds of love, the cooling effects of marriage, and the possibility that the highest form of attachment might be preserved only at a certain distance. The fact that the pages are interleaved with his personal copy suggests he was revisiting his thoughts and seeing what else came to mind. And remember that the Observations dealt heavily with marriage, as argue above.

Early in these notes, Kant writes that a human being can affect another by “respect and love,” and that “a woman unites both.” He immediately adds that this “composite sentiment is the greatest impression that can ever befall the human heart.” A few pages later the same distinction is sharpened rather than dissolved. “Sexual love always presupposes lustful love,” he writes, but that lustful love may be “coarse or refined”; “affectionate love has a great mixture of respect”; and then, most importantly, “affectionate love is also different from marital love.” In the same cluster he remarks that “a tender love for women has the quality of developing other moral qualities, but a lustful one suppresses them.” What matters to him, then, is not desire in the crude sense, but a more elevated relation in which admiration, refinement, and moral animation are somehow bound up with feminine presence.

The notes also show Kant thinking about women less as passive objects of desire than as the medium through which cultivated life itself becomes possible. He says that women “study man” and that, because they understand how to work on male inclinations, “they are made to govern and actually govern in all nations that have taste.” Elsewhere he complains that gatherings without women have become “quite tasteless,” that among men alone “jokes have no proper life,” and that “we are soft and effeminate and must be among women.” He keeps associating women with conversation, taste, liveliness, and social intelligence, with the whole sphere in which thought becomes graceful rather than merely rigorous. If Caroline was on his mind at all – which, why wouldn’t she have been? – this describes a very particular role she would have played in Kant’s life: not merely as a possible beloved, but as a woman through whom taste, society, and a more French mode of intellectual life became real and compelling to him. I think the evidence we have so far matches that well.

Marriage, by contrast, is the subject of some rumination. Kant does not reject it in principle, saying that “the standard of happiness is the household,” and elsewhere he remarks that what a woman does in marriage contributes “much more to natural happiness” than what the man does. Yet when he tries to think through the emotional reality of marriage, the tone darkens: “The reason why marriages are so cold-minded,” he writes, is that both partners become entangled in “external, chimerical connection to dignity [and] daintiness”; each grows too dependent on opinion, then indifferent to the opinion of the other, and from that “arises disdain, finally hate.” In another note he observes that the wife possesses the skill of “always being a woman” more than the husband possesses that of being a man, and then asks whether she will not prefer to employ that skill “elsewhere than with her husband, who is insipid to her.” A little later the same thought reappears in a still harsher form: “The novel ends and the history begins. Henceforth the magical haze, through which the enamored madness had seen its idol, gradually disperses. The marriage-bed receives a human girl and the next morning, instead of being worshiped as a goddess, she, as a wife, suffocates the opposition of her slave.” (In the language of galanterie, the pursuing male was also called his lover’s slave. They were also partial to language of worship.) Marriage is depicted as fundamentally disenchanting, as the condition in which idealized feeling loses the very atmosphere that first gave it life.

Julie: “I would rather be the happy Saint-Preux than the one who courts a wife”

And this next part I found very interesting, particular with respect to Kant’s lifelong bachelorhood, and what his personal justification for that might have been. Exactly following this discussion, when Kant is trying to think through why marriage cools feeling without simply condemning marriage as such, a single literary reference seems to occur to him: Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse.¹¹ That matters because Julie is not just another novel about love, but a love that cannot end in marriage and must survive, if it survives at all, in some altered form after the obvious path has been closed. It’s about a low-born tutor falling in love with the lady of the house, but she marries someone else. In other words, it gives Kant a ready-made script for the problem his notes have already been circling: how can intense feeling persist once possession by marriage has become impossible?

In the book, Saint-Preux is a young man of no particular family, hired as a tutor in the household of a Baron d’Étanges. He is brilliant, sensitive, full of feeling. Julie is the Baron’s daughter: beautiful, intelligent, serious about ideas. They fall in love. The class gap is enormous and everyone knows it, including them. They have an affair anyway which is mutual, passionate, and physically consummated. She becomes pregnant, but her father finds out and beats her until she miscarries. The affair is over because the world will not permit it, but the feeling persists undeterred! Her father arranges a marriage with Wolmar, a man twenty years her senior, of all things a Russian nobleman. He is calm, rational, deeply decent, but not someone Julie loves the way she loved Saint-Preux. Nevertheless she comes to respect Wolmar profoundly. She marries him, becoming the lady of Clarens, a model estate run on enlightened principles. She raises her children thoughtfully and lives a life of exemplary dignity and order.

But Saint-Preux does not disappear. He suffers exquisitely and dramatically, tries to forget her but is unable to. Eventually Wolmar, who knows everything about the affair and bears no grudge, invites Saint-Preux to live near them. And the strangest part of the novel is that it works. He lives in proximity to the woman he loved and the man she married, and a kind of domestic peace settles over all three of them. The passion has been transmuted into a quiet simmering, something that Rousseau presents as a kind of philosophical achievement: the capacity to love without possessing, to remain close to someone whose life has taken a shape that excludes you, and to find something like happiness in this imperfect state of affairs:

“I am proud of the friendship which now subsists between us, as it is the fruit of an unparallel’d conquest over a fatal passion: a passion which may sometimes be overcome, but is very rarely refined into friendship. To relinquish that which was once dear to us when honour requires it, may be effected by the efforts of ordinary minds; but to have been what we once were to each other, and to become what we now are, this is a triumph indeed.” (Letter CLVI)

Wolmar does this because he believes that if you expose two former lovers to each other in a calm domestic setting, with no secrecy and no forbidden charge, the passion will simply evaporate. He watches them like a scientist observing an experiment. He does things like leaving them alone together on purpose, telling them he trusts them. There is a scene on a lake, where Saint-Preux is overwhelmed with memory and desire, and Julie redirects the conversation. There are moments of agonizing proximity, but Julie holds completely.

So it seems significant when, in those same interleaved notes, as Kant is sorting out the forces that bind husband and wife, he seems to be reminded of Wolmar, and drops a non-sequitor in which he explicitly compares himself to Saint-Preux:

“Thus, although understanding and merits have little effect on the woman outside of marriage, the most harmonious marriage is still the one where the man instills respect through understanding, even if the ages are different. Wolmar [space] I would rather be the happy Saint-Preux than the one who courts a wife.”

I don’t know to which degree this book parallels Kant’s life, or the way real love affairs tend to go. What exactly Kant meant by that notion is unclear, but the heart of it seems to be, loving a woman you deeply respect from medium-distance. And another big part of it would be: a woman you once loved, an affair that was never resolved, never wound down, but interrupted by circumstances. If that’s not what you were going far, why make the metaphor? And notice how he says ‘happy’; not anguished, but a comfortable, respectable, not-great-but-decent state of affairs. The English translations makes this sound like a hypothetical, but if you look at the German (“Ich möchte lieber der glückliche Saintpreux I als der um eine Ehefrau buhlende seyn”), he says ‘Ich möchte’, which in my personal opinion reads as: you have two actual, not hypothetical options, and you are choosing between one of them.

Whatever the case may be, this to me puts a different light on the biographical facts around his refusal to marry: the irritation whenever anyone tried to set him up, the matches where he somehow always hesitated too long, the eventual claim that he was simply too old, in a society where old men married young women constantly.¹² He valued marriage in principle, thought it was a genuine human need, and said so publicly. But the Remarks suggest that, in his own imagination, marriage had become inseparable from a certain loss of atmosphere, a cooling of feeling, perhaps even a degradation of it. What attracts him instead is a relation in which admiration, distance, and inward continuity survive without being consumed by everyday possession.

1. Indeed, why does Kraus know about this at all? Kant and Kraus only got to know each other in 1771, when he started attending Kant’s lectures, close to 15 years after these events. The whole phrasing is weird.

2. King Louis XIV actually despised Télémaque. While the book was ostensibly an educational novel about ancient Greece for his grandson, the King correctly interpreted it as a thinly veiled critique of his own absolute monarchy, endless wars, and lavish spending. The book’s publication ultimately got Fénelon banished from the royal court.

3. A postillon d’amour, meaning “love’s little messenger”, was a ribbon tied from hair drawn back and tucked into a little silk bag at the nape of the neck. From that bag hangs a wide black ribbon, falling along the sides of the face, brushing the cheeks, and disappearing into the ruffled cloth at the chest. It is an accessory meant draw the eye along the jaw and down the neck. Cf. Jugendleben und Wanderbilder von Johanna Schopenhauer, Ch. 2.

4. Before this Russia was recognizably Byzantine: bearded, kaftan-wearing, insular, with women sequestered and daily life governed by clan hierarchy and the Church. The Russian aristocracy is sometimes described as a “parvenu gentry”, almost fetishistically concerned with codes of proper behavior they had not developed themselves.

5. Bolotov writes that he “заразился тут страстию к одной прусской графине из фамилии Кейзерлинг” (caught a passion for a Prussian countess from the Keyserling family), that this passion “увеличивалась с часу на час” (increased hour by hour), and that it “побуждала его искать колико можно частейших случаев с нею к свиданию” (pushed him to seek as many chances as possible to meet with her). The result was a relentless calendar of feasts, balls, and weekly gatherings; Bolotov says the city became an “обиталищем утех и веселостей” (dwelling place of pleasures and amusements), with young men streaming in “власно как к некоему центру веселостей” (as if to some center of fun). In summer, when the big public events thinned out, Korff shifted to private garden outings, especially visiting “любимице своей графине Кайзерлингше” (his favourite, Countess Keyserling).

6. This also seems significant given what we now know about Kant’s relationship to educating children in this period.

7. She and the King, the most famous Francophile of the Age, would have had much in common; indeed, is it a coincidence that her musician’s boy, Reichardt, was made Frederick II’s choir master at just 21?

8. From Jachmann:

“By character, Green was a rare man, distinguished by strict honesty and by genuine nobility, but full of the strangest peculiarities, a true ‘whimsical man,’ whose days flowed according to an unchangeable, eccentric rule. Hippel modeled his ‘Man by the Clock’ on Green, from which you can get to know him better. I will add only one further trait. One evening Kant had promised Green that on the following morning he would accompany him on a drive at 8 o’clock. Green, who on such occasions would already be pacing around the room at quarter to the hour with his watch in his hand, put on his hat at the fiftieth minute, took his cane at the fifty-fifth, and at the first stroke of the bell opened the carriage and set off. On the way he saw Kant coming toward him, having been about two minutes late, but he did not stop, because that would have been against their agreement and against his rule.”

9. Johann Ludwig Schwarz writes: “Of the five days of my visit, I had the luck to sit across from Kant four times,” which is very strong evidence of how frequently Kant was dining there by that point.

10. I asked Claude who Kant’s biggest influences from his personal life were:

“The figure who mattered most, strangely, was Johann Georg Hamann, a mystic and Christian irrationalist who lived right there in Königsberg and thought the entire Enlightenment project of grounding knowledge in pure reason was comic hubris. He believed language was prior to thought, that you couldn’t strip reasoning clean of history and body and faith and find anything real underneath, and he said all this directly to Kant for years. You can feel Hamann’s pressure in the places where Kant hedges about what reason can and cannot reach, the care he takes to leave room for faith. Marcus Herz mattered differently. He’d been Kant’s student but became a genuine intellectual peer during the silent 1770s, when Kant was working out the critical philosophy and publishing almost nothing. Kant’s famous 1772 letter to Herz poses the question that drove the whole project, how a representation in my mind can correspond to an object outside it, in a rawer form than the finished Critique ever allows. Then there was Joseph Green, an English merchant, Kant’s closest daily companion for twenty years, who wasn’t a philosopher at all. Green was legendarily precise, orderly, a man who organized his life with mechanical regularity, and Kant visited him nearly every afternoon. Some suspect Green’s plain Protestant insistence on duty fed into the ethical thinking that became the Groundwork.”

Note the lack of Caroline.

11. Julie came out in 1761 and was the absolute publishing event of the decade. Supposedly Parisian booksellers rented out copies by the hour because they couldn’t keep up with demand. Darnton, in The Great Cat Massacre (another excellent work of microhistory), documents the response it provoked among readers: “The novel drove J.-F. Bastide to his bed and nearly drove him mad …while it produced the opposite effect on Daniel Roguin, who sobbed so violently that he cured himself of a severe cold.”

12. This is a quote attributed to him by Borowski: “When I could have needed a wife, I could not support one; and when I could have supported one, I no longer needed one.” It’s unknown when he said this, but Kuehn dates his “retreat from marriage” to around 1770, age fourty-six: barely older than Caroline’s first husband was when he married a 17-year old. Marrying at that age was certainly not unusual.